Hillary Clinton: The Big Dreamer

The Hillary Clinton campaign has been floating the trial balloon of her as presidential candidate for the Democrats, with Barack Obama as her running mate. She believes that this is the best path to unifying her party behind its ticket and retaking the White House this fall.

She, unlike Bill before her, must be inhaling some pretty potent weed.

Dream on, Hillary. The chances that Obama's young supporters will ever be persuaded to tick a ballot in support of Clinton as the next President of the United States of America are, to put it charitably, slim.

First of all, it's pretty rich to offer someone the job of second banana when (as it currently stands) Obama has a better chance of winning the big prize than she does. Unless she overtakes him in the popular vote her "narrative" story rooted in her victory in more big states than the senator from Illinois will not, in the end, overtake his "it's-all-about-results" story of having won more states, more delegates, and more votes. Some may believe otherwise, but in the end the Dems commit political suicide if they give the nomination to Clinton without a change in any of those three categories.

Secondly, she still has to convince voters in 11 states (including Mississippi tomorrow) that she's the best person to be the Democratic nominee. Both campaigns have learned at different point in this process not to pre-suppose anything. It's much too early to be talking about such things -- unless you've got nothing else to hammer your opponent with. Is Hillary's attack starting to run out of gas due to a lack of ammunition? Or has she begun the process of trying to "steal" the nomination by clouding people's minds with a lot of foolishness that doesn't make sense after deeper scrutiny (like the fact that her candidacy would reunify and re-energize the Republicans after, I dunno, three heartbeats of John McCain hearing the news)?

Finally, even if she is able to convince enough convention delegates that she should get the nod, why the HELL would Obama take the VP's job? As some have already mentioned, that job will be handled quite nicely by Bill, thank you very much. And after running his campaign on the theme of changing how things are done in Washington, how could he ever work for someone who he has spent over a year tarring with the same brush as George W. Bush and McCain? The disillusionment that the young would feel after such a move, I think, would destroy any hope he has of ever becoming a transformational leader in America. Plus, he can't stand Hillary anymore and would probably rather lick boots clean in Chicago than try to make her look better to his voters in November.

He'd be better off getting "experience" in the Senate for another term than work as Vice President in a(nother) Clinton White House. And I suspect that if it comes down to that, he'll do just that.

After all, he's got time on his hands, and Hillary's only possible time is now.