Why would Hillary Clinton be holding out for the VP spot? It's a terrible place for her to run from. If Obama's a success, she can run on his cottails in 2016; if he's a failure, she can mount a primary challenge in 2012 without the taint of a failed administration. She doesn't need the name recognition, or the "experience" waving at crowds in global backwaters. In the Senate, she can push for bills to build a record.
Besides, Hillary is not a good fit for the ticket. Obama doesn't want Bill around, but leave that aside. She just doesn't bring many new voters to the table. About all you can say is that she'll placate some of her Democratic supporters. But Obama needs a lot more than her primary voters to win.
She's the Manchurian Candidate, of course.
In the Senate, she can push for bills to build a record.
That's a bug, not a feature. Part of the reason Senators make bad Presidential candidates, at least in comparison to governors, is that being a Senator forces you, over and over again, to make de facto policy positions that risk alienating large swaths of the electorate. Governors in contrast can be much more subtle and vague about where they stand and often can afford to remain removed from the most controversial policy debates. I mean, reject one pork-laden military expenditures bill as a Senator, for whatever number of reasons, and you've got a black mark against you forever. Senators just have too much material to use against them.
But Obama needs a lot more than her primary voters to win.
True. But he does still need her primary voters.
My 2-cent prediction is that Obama promises that she'll have an unofficial position in his health care team. When he has a bill that's ready to be sent to Congress, she'll have the honor of introducing it in the Senate so that it will forever be known as the "Clinton Health Care Bill" in the same manner as the Roth IRA, the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Bill, or, ahem, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.
She clearly wants to keep Bill in her life, even if that means separate bedrooms in separate states. Maybe she's afraid Bill will dump her if she can't offer him a chance at power, even if it's the minute power of the VP.
I suspect that she'd try to rule from the VP's office, which would be everyone's worst nightmare.
Obama may have no other option but to take her as VP if she wants it. Of course, other than having him anonymously whacked, I don't see the upside for her. Her best option appears to be play nice, don't actively support Obama too much in the general election and hope he loses in November. Otherwise, she has no other legitimate path to the presidency, in my opinion.
"If Obama's a success, she can run on his cottails in 2016; if he's a failure, she can mount a primary challenge in 2012 without the taint of a failed administration."
Wrong on both counts. In recent history, successful two-term presidents have always been followed as their party's nominee by their vice president. See Clinton-Gore, Reagan-Bush, Ike-Nixon. You have to go back to Woodrow Wilson to find a counterexample, and his vice president wasn't even interested in running. Unless Obama picks a Cheney-type veep like Sam Nunn, his VP will be the favorite for the Democratic nomination in 2016. As for 2012, primary challenges to incumbent presidents never work. The last real one was in 1980 (Ted Kennedy vs. Jimmy Carter). Before that, Reagan in '76 against Ford. Reagan came really close, but today it's just hard to see it happening. On the other hand, if she runs with Obama and wins, she would be his natural successor in 2016 if he is a success; if he's a failure, she's tainted by that, somewhat, but is a natural frontruner in the Democratic primaries in 2016, just as Mondale, Carter's vice president, was in 1984.
My suspicion is that Sen. Obama will publicly offer the veep spot to Sen. Mrs. Clinton, to placate her supporters, but it will be done w/ the full understanding that she won't accept. The Democratic veep candidate absolutely has to be a square white male, so as not to interfere w/ 200+ yrs. of tradition. A black man & a white woman on the same major party ticket are still too much for the country to deal w/.
And we just might (maybe) see a woman, or a man of non-British Isles descent w/ McCain. Maybe.
Sorry, got a server error, didn't see the first posting until the second one posted as well. Feel free to delete one, so I don't appear as stupid/impatient as I am.
The only problem with Hilllary Clinton not accepting the VP slot is that Obama may decide to pick someone like Kathleen Sibelius or Janet Napolitano to be his Vice President.
If Hillary Clinton runs in 2016 for another shot at winning the Democratic nomination, she will have to contend with vice-president Sibelius or Napolitano for the nomination. The presence of another strong female candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination would deprive Hillary Clinton of the lock she currently enjoys on the white female vote. In addition, vice-president Sibelius or Napolitano would inherit Obama's campaign organization, network of large and small donors, and much of Obama's base voters.
A rival female candidate with White House experience, with Obama's organization, fundraising prowess, & constituencies, and with the ability to compete for the votes of white women might be too formidable a rival for Hillary Clinton to overcome. However, if Hillary Clinton takes the VP slot, she will deprive Sibelius or Napolitano of a springboard to leap ahead of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
I don't think she wants the VP slot, but Obama has to at least offer it to her. She got as many popular support as he did, give or take a little. He can't afford to entirely shut her out. She might be holding out for a high-level cabinet position like Secretary of State -- something that would put her in the news on a regular basis for the next four years.
Click the link on JBA below for the full text however I concur with Clive:
"Her performance last night was stunningly ill-judged, and speaks volumes about her fitness to lead—or lack of it. Under the circumstances, one can understand, maybe, a reluctance to concede. But to declare moral victory; to insist, knowing that she had lost, that she remains the stronger candidate; to start positioning herself to demand the VP slot as of right: all this was not just remarkably ungracious, it was also patently counter-productive from a strictly selfish point of view. Can’t she see that she has made it easier, not harder, for Obama to keep her off the ticket?"
dunno, anyone think that with her on as VP that people who really don't like her would be forced to stay home and not vote. The polarity just isn't good on that...
But Obama needs a lot more than her primary voters to win.
Huh? No he doesn't. He's tied with McCain right now - without many Hillary voters. If he gets the Hillary voters, Obama's a shoe-in.
JBA -- it was only "counter-productive from a strictly selfish point of view" if she wants the job. But she doesn't want the powerless VP spot. She wants to force Obama to give her the right to hand out some number of Administration slots to her cronies, to give her a power/influence base in the Executive Branch and favors she can trade in the Senate. That is, something to make her a powerful Senator despite her lack of seniority.
The means by which she can force these concessions out of Obama is by, basically, putting dynamite under his ambitions and threatening to detonate. A floor fight at the convention over the VP slot is win-win; either Hillary forces her way on the ticket against Obama's will (crippling Obama by making him look weak), or she loses and her supporters become even more alienated from Obama. Obama, then, has to buy her off to avoid the floor fight.
The normal buy-off would, actually, be the VP slot. It's prestigious but inherently impotent, and if Hillary declined, she could hardly go on to make a floor fight to take it. So Clinton has to make it so she can't be offered the VP slot.
Thus, her arrogance actually improves her position here. Without it — if she acted graciously — Obama could graciously offer her the VP slot, which she doesn't want. By being arrogant, by making demands, by claiming the slot by right, she's set it up so Obama looks weak if he gives her the slot. So Obama can't make the whole issue go away by giving her the powerless VP slot; he has to agree let her put cronies in positions of statutory power and actual influence instead.
It's a damn good bit of political machination.
People, people, people. Hillary still wants to be President. The whole Vice-President thing is a scam. Either she gets the job, which gives her a platform to stay in the news until the convention or she doesn't get the job, which gives her a reason to keep bitching about Obama until the convention.
What Bill and Hill are crossing their fingers for is for Obama to be 5 or 10 points behind McCain in August so they can sweep in and try and take the nomination away from him.
It's not that complicated.
Mike
Oildrilling Lunatic, you tell a good story but I think you overestimate the Clinton cunning. You might be right about how this plays out, but I haven't seen them think that many moves ahead. The simpler explanation is simple self-centeredness. She really believes that the whole primary contest was about her. She wasn't ready to concede. I think that proves her disqualification to lead. The phone rings at 3am and she isn't ready to be interrupted with some emergency because she is still busy riding out some other ego trip.
Obama is one of the most liberal Senators. McCain is going to use that voting record against him. Obama needs a more moderate VP to help him compete with McCain in the middle. Hillary is not moderate enough to fill that role. I'm afraid that the simple demographics require Obama to select a white male with foreign policy experience. Bill Richardson might be white enough.
If Hillary does really think this through she will probably demand that Obama choose a Cheney-like VP who she won't have to compete with in 8 years; rather than take the impotent position herself. She might simply demand that Obama not choose a woman VP, in order to protect her position in that regard (a moot gambit, see above). If I were Hillary I would be negotiating with all party leaders to push Nancy Pelosi out to a cabinet position and take the Senate leadership position. Nancy gets tons of good press there, and Hillary could treat Obama as more of an equal for the next 8 years.
If VP Hillary runs in 2016 she'll be 69 by Election Day and be the oldest first termer ever elected if she wins.
I don't think 69 year-old women when HDTV is ubiquitous have much chance.
If VP Hillary runs in 2016 she'll be 69 by Election Day and be the oldest first termer ever elected if she wins.
I don't think 69 year-old women when HDTV is ubiquitous have much chance.
If VP Hillary runs in 2016 she'll be 69 by Election Day and be the oldest first termer ever elected if she wins.
I don't think 69 year-old women when HDTV is ubiquitous have much chance.
All I know is if I were President and Hillary were my Vice President, I'd hire a food taster...
If VP Hillary runs in 2016 she'll be 69 by Election Day and be the oldest first termer ever elected if she wins.
I don't think 69 year-old women when HDTV is ubiquitous have much chance.
Hillary for Supreme Court Justice.
Hillary for Supreme Court Justice.
Hillary actually could gain a whole lot from this entire experience even if it eliminates here entirely and forever as a Presidential candicate.
She came to New York as a carpetbagger riding on her husband's name, frankly -- she'd never been elected to anything and her big past experience in working with the legislature to get her famous health plan enacted was something less than an endorsement. Who was she when she came to NYS?
But this whole program of running for president has gotten millions of people to vote for her, to donate money to her, and to invest in her emotionally. She has now developed a real national polticial power base of her own.
Even if she never is a serious presidential candidate again, she could work this into become an Ted Kennedy/Robert Byrd type-power among the Democrats for years to come. That's a lot more than she started out as.
I think this probably explains a lot about why she's taken things down to the end (apart from her obvious incentive to maximize the value of her endorsement so she can get something for it from Obama in the short run). If she wants to keep this base she's collected, she's got to pay as much respect to it as to Obama. She can't throw it overboard to happily embrace "the enemy" in the spirit of goods sportsmanship.
In fact, this base may be a lot more important to her in the long run than getting along with Obama will be. Think of how Ted Kennedy lost the presidental nomination to Jimmy Carter -- and of which one of them remained a major political force 30 years later, when the other was long-gone.
IOW, at this point Obama is playing a short game and Hillary is playing a long game. He's focused everything on the next five months. She's thinking of five months, four years, eight years, forever. But to do that she's got to play to consolidate her newfound base to keep it intact first, and she's going to make nice to Obama to the extent that objective permits.
Three "what if" counterfactuals for the day after Obama clinched:
1) Remembering (or Googling) way, way back to early 2000, one may recall a lot of speculation about whether Hillary would head in an unseemly rush while still First Lady out the White House to declare she was a lifelong Yankees fan and try to win the opening-up NY senate seat in a tough race against the seemingly healthy Guilianni, *or* decide between being a lifelong Cubs or Sox fan and return to her real home of Illinois to wait a bit to run for the senate seat from there then held by a crippled Republican (who in fact wouldn't even run again).
I suppose waiting isn't in her nature, but if she'd been true to her real home, who'd be holding hold that Illinois senate seat today?
2) Brannon Braga, popularly credited by Trekkies with destroying the Star Trek franchise, in the course of doing so hit on and had an affair with actess Jeri Ryan. This, um, entroubled her marriage to Jack Ryan, then a fully credible and deep-pocketed Republican candidate running for that same senate seat. There ensued nasty divorce filings, leaked stories about "sex clubs" and Jack dropping out of the race. The Democratic candidate ended up running against Alan Keyes,
Can we say Braga destroyed not only Star trek but Hillary? If Obama wins, proves a diplomatic/political naif, mishandles a crisis and drops his elbow on "the button", will we be able to say Braga destroyed both Star Trek and the world?
3) What if the comments here ever remembered my name and e-mail, so I didn't have to keep tying them in over and over?