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You know...John Edwards began planning for his first presidential run when had served barely a SINGLE year representing North Carolina in the Senate. It was his first time in elected office. Making trips to Iowa, raising money. He was considered as a possible VP candidate by Al Gore in 2000-though he had only been serving in the Senate since January 1999. He had not quite completed his first term when he decided to leave the Senate after becoming Kerry's VP.
Edwards was attacked for his lack of experience but not like Obama. I highly doubt he would raise serious concerns with Democrats today...unless he was beating their preferred opponent. But then he's not an "inadequate black man".
People begin to identify with a candidate, often literally sensing some commonality between them and their preferred candidate. Their thinking is "candidate x is one of us" OR "I want to be like candidate x". This is an emotional (not particularly logical) connection. Thereafter attacks on their candidate raise their ire and seem "unfair", opposing candidates take on a sinister appearance and attacks on them seem wholly justified. And the media is always biased against our preferred candidates.
No major Democratic candidate for president has been accused of being "anti-woman" or "anti-feminist" as far as I can recall. The rhetoric and record of one candidate to the next rarely deviates substantially from the Democratic party platform, which can hardly be considered "anti-woman" and Obama is not the least bit exceptional in this regard. But because he ran against a woman and because he is black, these identity-politics (gender and race-based) emotional arguments have superseded rational discussion of the issues-of which there has been virtually none in these letters columns, largely because there just isn't much grounds for debate there and race and gender are far more emotionally powerful subjects.
If Senator Clinton is Obama's best overall VP choice he will surely ask her to consider the position. I think Kathleen Sebelius would be a far better choice, except she would be around 68 in 2016. There are other choices-they will be thoroughly vetted. He and his campaign staff would do a far better job of determining if Clinton is actually the best choice than a handful of self-described Clinton supporters on the internet who have repeatedly stated that they will almost certainly never vote for Obama anyway. I know plenty of people who voted for Clinton in the primaries who are enthusiastic supporters for Obama now. Not because they necessarily dislike Clinton-they just never seriously even considered voting for a continuation of the Bush-regime in the form of McCain, and they like Obama even if they didn't vote for him. And those are people who actually voted in the primaries. There are a lot more of them than either ardent Clinton OR Obama supporters.
