What’s that old expression? Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a trend?
For the third time in the last four days, the Clinton camp is emphasizing, rather blatantly, the notion of a Clinton-Obama ticket. This time, it was the former president.
At a small town hall meeting in Pass Christian, Miss. this morning, the former president took questions from the crowd, something he hasn’t really done since the days of South Carolina. While a large portion of the questions focused on Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Pass Christian community, one resident asked if Hillary would pick Obama as her Vice President. It is a question that Clinton is very familiar with, having been asked it nearly once a day back in the days of Iowa and New Hampshire. Usually, President Clinton shies away from answering, explaining that his family is VERY superstitious when it comes to politics and they never go thinking they’ve won before they really have.
Today, however, the President seemed especially tickled by the answer, and chose to share with his personal thoughts on picking Obama as a VP. […]
“I know that she has always been open to it, because she believes that if you can unite the energy and the new people that he’s brought in and the people in these vast swaths of small town and rural America that she’s carried overwhelmingly, if you had those two things together she thinks it’d be hard to beat. I mean you look at the, you look at the, you look at the map of Texas and the map in Ohio. And the map in Missouri or — well Arkansas’s not a good case because they know her and she won every place there. But you look at most of these places, he would win the urban areas and the upscale voters, and she wins the traditional rural areas that we lost when President Reagan was president. If you put those two things together, you’d have an almost unstoppable force,” Clinton went on to say.
I think Team Clinton is starting to drop its subtleties.
For those keeping score at home, the first hint came Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton raised eyebrows by straying from the usual script. Asked on CBS about running with Obama, Clinton said, “That may be where this is headed, but of course we have to decide who is on the top of ticket. I think that the people of Ohio very clearly said that it should be me.”
Yesterday, the senator brought it up unprompted.
Speaking to voters in Mississippi, where Sen. Barack Obama is expected to do well in next week’s primary, Clinton said, “I’ve had people say, ‘Well I wish I could vote for both of you. Well, that might be possible some day. But first I need your vote on Tuesday.”
While Wednesday’s comment came in response to a specific question,comment, this one was unprompted — meaning Clinton specifically wanted to raise this point for emphasis.
To reiterate a point from the other day, I still think this talk is off-base, at least so long as Clinton is openly and publicly questioning Barack Obama’s fitness for office (she said this week that John McCain meets the “commander-in-chief threshold” and has the experience to do the job, while Obama’s qualifications remain unclear).
Hilzoy had a good item about this yesterday.
It’s not that I think one candidate can’t ever say this about a candidate in his or her own party. It could happen that some candidate in one’s own party was obviously unsuited to be President. (Jack the Ripper. Hitler. Pick your own imaginary nightmare candidate.) If that candidate seemed at all likely to win, I think one should say: listen, this would be a complete disaster. The reason I think Clinton’s comments are out of line is that Barack Obama is not, by any measure, that imaginary candidate. Moreover, I assume that she knows this.
However, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that she actually believes that Barack Obama cannot “cross the commander-in-chief threshold.” One of the most important jobs a President has is to defend the country. If she thinks that Barack Obama is not qualified to do that job, then she should not support him over anyone who can. Specifically, she should support McCain over Obama.
That’s why I think some enterprising reporter should ask her whether she would support Barack Obama if he were nominated. If she would, then she should be asked why she would be willing to support someone she does not believe is qualified to be commander in chief.
While the fitness-to-serve question remains an open matter to the Clinton campaign, any talk about a joint ticket seems misguided.