“Change we can believe in — Experience we can count on”
Every day or so we read an article telling Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race, some of which accuse her of nasty and destructive intent. The obituary of her campaign has been written many times. It is certainly true that the numbers no longer seem to work in any obvious way for Senator Clinton to secure the nomination. As AP notes:
In the overall race for the nomination, Obama has 1,864.5 delegates and Clinton has 1,697, according to the latest AP tally. Obama is just 160.5 delegates shy of the 2,025 needed to secure the Democratic nomination…There are 217 pledged delegates at stake in the remaining six primaries. Obama is on track to secure a majority of the pledged delegates on May 20, when Kentucky and Oregon vote…
Obama has a 163-delegate lead among the pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses. That means Clinton would have to generate an identical lead among superdelegates to catch him…A little more than 200 superdelegates remain undecided, and about 40 others will be named by state parties at state conventions and meetings throughout the spring.
The numbers are a little dizzying, but they seem to say that Senator Clinton will be behind by about 150 or so pledged delegates at the end of the primary season, and the superdelegates are unlikely to change that result. So what’s the point of continuing, many ask. But that question assumes that Senator Clinton is still running for President, in which case her mission would appear to be futile or an option on a misstep by or damaging revelation about Senator Obama. Not much of a strategy.
But what if Senator Clinton is playing another game entirely? Senator Clinton’s dogged perseverance at this juncture makes perfect sense if she is running for Vice President, and wants to assure herself that she is in a position to demand that role in an Obama/Clinton “dream ticket.” Senator Clinton herself raised the idea in March.
It seems clear enough that Senator Obama does not want Hillary Clinton as his running mate. When she raised the idea of a joint ticket, he quickly ridiculed it. More recently it has been reported that Michelle Obama is dead set against the idea.
So if the Clintons have decided that the VP slot is the best attainable result in 2008, then the strategy would be to force Senator Obama to select Senator Clinton as his running mate. The path to doing so would appear to be to fight to the end, be only a handful of delegates behind the Illinois Senator, find some metrics if possible which show her as actually ahead of Obama, and hammer home the point that she delivers the demographics and the large states that not only complement the Obama coalition, but are critical to a successful Democratic strategy in the general election. A Democratic Party convention full of a visibly unhappy Clinton and Clinton delegates — after the choice of some unknown (or well known) VP candidate other than Clinton — could be a TV disaster. A unity ticket, hands joined and held high, would be precisely the opposite.
By the way, an Obama/Clinton ticket would appear to have some impressive additive strengths, based on the primary results to date. (The MSM will not look to add their weaknesses together, as we know from past electoral history and current practice.) “Change we can believe in — Experience we can count on” is not a bad positioning for the candidates, though it might be a tad long for a bumper sticker.
The Change/Experience ticket raises the issue of what John McCain will do with his VP selection. In our hypothetical scenario, McCain supplies the “Experience” checkmark versus the Democrats, but what about “Change”? A whitebread or older gentleman VP candidate, no matter how well credentialed, runs a certain risk: Democrats are to Republicans as iPods are to Victrolas. Then again, there’s that talk about McCain’s picking Bobby Jindal as a running mate, which would be a very interesting choice. Jindal was pretty impressive on Hugh Hewitt’s program the other day. We’ll have to see what happens. Not too much has conformed to the conventional wisdom so far.
UPDATE
We note that Carl Bernstein seems to agree with this thesis.
May 11th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
It occurs to me that you might have either forgiven or overlooked the Clinton’s “contributions” to the rapid advance of the Chinese military during the Clinton administration. With assistance from Loral, for example, the Chinese were able to refine their space capabilities, to improve greatly the accuracy of their ICBM fleet, and to increase substantially the reliability of their space launch assets. Further, the Chinese military was given regular “exchange” opportunities with our experts in the Pentagon, something that did not appeal to our military but did to the Clintons, who perceived the Chinese as a “strategic partner.” Now, we see the Chinese expanding their military, emerging as a strategic and military threat to the United States. With experience like that, I would submit that we can do without that type of exchange again.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:11 am
I would not like my life to separate Sen. Clinton and her ambitions.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
How many of those superdelegates are in those FBI files? There is a reason it’s not over.