Letters to the Editor
-
Clinton's hand
This article is based on the assumption that Obama needs something from Hillary Clinton. I contend that such an argument is fundamentally falacious. Therefore, the conclusions drawn are also off the mark.
Hillary Clinton needs to campaign for Barrack Obama more than Obama needs Clinton to campaign for him. Obama doesn't need Clinton's endorsement to win in November. Clinton needs to make a BIG effort to show that staying in the race was about more than her ego or her political future is in danger.
The Robb/Wilder comparison is not really valid. Had Wilder chosen to stay in the race, Oliver North was likely to win, an unacceptable outcome. Robb NEEDED Wilder to win over the Black voters. Obama doesn't need Clinton. He hasn't offended the elderly or anyone else. All he has to do is prove to them that he is a better alternative than McCain, which is a fairly easy task. The latest polls, coming on the heels of the Wright fiasco still have Obama ahead of/statistically tied with McCain, despite fighting a two front war.
The race is over. It is not going to drag on to the convention, which would indeed be bad for Obama. Read what the undecided superdelegates, and even some of Hillary's biggest supporters, are saying. She isn't being given more time to come up with a winning strategy, she is being given time to bow out gracefully. These superdelegates are her peers and in many cases her friends. The next-to-last thing they want is to humiliate Clinton by coming out for Obama or defecting to Obama to force her out of the race. But this desire is over-ridden by the last thing they want, to allow this to drag on long enough to get McCain elected.
Her bluster now is just hot air and is actually pushing the superdelegates away. Their patience is growing thin and her time is growing short. She is not hurting Obama, she is hurting herself.
As to the conclusions in the article:
Debt Relief Ha. She has spent her money personally smearing Obama and running a racist campaign. He doesn't need her or owe her a dime.
A Major Platform Win Once again, he owes her nothing. He won the race on his platform. Why should he do something he doesn't support to get approval from someone he doesn't need?
VP Right of Frist Refusal Now we are firmly back in Salon fantasy land. Obama should NOT offer Hillary the VP slot. It would hurt him, not help him. And the idea that he would allow her to take the best potential VP choices off the table is ludicrous. She has already done incalculable damage to the party with her ruthless, racist campaign. It would be crazy for Obama to let her further hurt the party by hamstringing him in the fall. I have long thought that Kathleen Sebelius was the best match for Obama as VP, with Bill Richardson a distant second. The idea that Obama would let Clinton take either of these off the table is insane.
An Obama/Sebelius ticket, in addition to them being a good political match, would do more for Obama than a Hillary endorsement. The one factor in this race that Salon has repeatedly talked around is that a lot of middle aged and senior women are backing Clinton because they want to see a woman President. Not all of them, but the anecdotal evidence is there to suggest that this is common. Sebelius on the ticket would give these women motivation to come out in force for Obama. Obama would do more to break the glass ceiling than Clinton would anyway. If he had Sebelius or Richardson with him, Clinton would be totally irrelevant.
The bottom line on the VP is that Obama needs a VP that he is personally and politically comfortable with. Letting that be filtered through Clinton's vindictiveness would be bad for Obama and bad for the democrats in general. I wouldn't trust Clinton to not accidentally-on-purpose hurt Obama in the guise of campaigning for him just to give herself a shot at 2012. Clinton's "help" could easy prove to be as genuine as Wilder's ambassadorship.