That’s President Clinton the Second, with Obama as her running mate. Or would it be President Obama, with the former first lady assuming a subservient position at Barack’s side?
Talk of a Clinton/Obama pairing is wishful thinking at best. The only people who seriously think it will happen are those who really don’t understand the way the American electoral system works. When one thinks about it rationally, the idea is too ridiculous to contemplate.
Now I’m not saying that a president and vice president need to be best of buddies. History has seen pairings of people who could barely tolerate each other. It’s not like anyone in the Kennedy clan initially thought much of the long-time senator from Texas when John F. Kennedy tabbed Lyndon Johnson as his running mate in the 1960 elections.
There also was George Bush the elder’s choice of Dan Quayle as his running mate in 1988, which some political observers claim was motivated by Bush’s desire to have a second-in-command who would not outclass him. It was not because of any serious closeness on the part of the two men.
But JFK and LBJ ultimately developed a mutual respect, and Johnson made pursuit of Kennedy’s goals (including passage of the Civil Rights Act) a priority of his own presidency.
Presidents generally pick a running mate who has some characteristic that differs significantly from him self. The idea is that it allows the pair to appeal directly to a larger number of people.
For youthful Kennedy of Massachusetts, having a Texan like Johnson added a sense of geographic diversity as well as experience, since Johnson already had a historically-significant political career as the Senate’s majority leader.
The old-money, Ivy League Bush the elder gained a Midwesterner who also had family ties to Arizona (Quayle’s extended family owned daily newspapers in Indianapolis and Phoenix).
Even Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, gained from having Al Gore as his running mate in 1992. Although both on the surface were southern white men, Gore was a long-time senator from Tennessee whose father also served in Congress. The family had long-running ties to the Washington political establishment, which Clinton – a long-time Arkansas governor – was seriously lacking.
My point in rehashing this history is to show how a Clinton-Obama/Obama-Clinton ticket wouldn’t work. The two are so similar that the presence of the other adds nothing to the political diversity of the Democrats’ leadership.
What do they have in common?
Both have Chicago ties and are urban in nature. Hillary was raised in suburban Park Ridge, Ill., but now considers herself a New Yorker, while Obama is a Honolulu-raised kid who settled in Chicago after finishing his education. He has lived the bulk of his adult life in the Second City.
Both try to claim rural roots, although it doesn’t seem very legitimate. Obama’s grandparents on his mother’s side of the family were originally from Kansas, although they left that region decades ago and his surviving grandmother is settled in Hawaii. Hillary’s rural ties exist only because she fell so in love with fellow law school student Bill Clinton back in the early 1970s that she followed him to Arkansas, where attention was focused for many years on his political career.
Both of them left home to go east when it came time for college, and both turned to the Ivy League when it came time for law school Following a stint at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama finished a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University in New York and later went to Harvard Law School. Clinton did her undergraduate work at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, then studied at Yale Law School.
To Harvard and Yale alumni, there’s a serious difference between the two. But many of the rest of us see the schools as remarkably similar. For some of us Chicagoans, the names “Harvard,” “Yale” and “Columbia” bring to mind first and foremost a set of streets on the South Side, rather than the names of Ivy League colleges.
The bottom line is that both Obama and Clinton are products of “blue” America, the urban part that rural America remains suspicious of, even though Obama in his now-legendary speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention said he preferred to think, “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America.”
Barack and Hillary are just too similar. On paper, they ought to be best friends. But the fact that they are both members of the U.S. Senate from large cities (Chicago vs. New York) who appeal directly to the same kind of Democrat – liberal, urban and overly educated – means they are destined to be rivals.
On some level, Hillary Clinton probably hates the symbolic image that Barack Obama has become – even though she’ll never admit it.
She is the woman who is running the first credible campaign for U.S. president (no, I don’t take Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 bid that seriously). If she were to win, it would be a major advance in equality for women. She is the one woman in a field of men. Yet who gets all the attention?
It’s Barack, who is running the first credible presidential campaign by an African-American person (I take Jesse Jackson’s presidential bids just a bit more seriously than I take Chisholm’s). He has become the liberal darling in the eyes of the public whose campaign is seen as a major advance forward in terms of equality for racial minorities.
Hillary Clinton, who many social conservatives think of as the Queen of all Liberals, is turned into the candidate of the Democratic establishment. She’s the Ivy League lawyer who is forced to appeal to the working class, blue collar elements of the party’s membership because Barack has so clearly usurped her natural liberal constituency.
Instead of being the historic trailblazer, Clinton and Obama are at the center of a brawl these days between female and black Democrats as to which “First” (woman or African-American) is more important.
And if Hillary Clinton actually manages to win both the Democratic nomination for president and the November general election, the LAST thing she wants is to have the image of Obama hanging around.
With Obama present, there will be a faction of Democrats who will remain convinced that the wrong person won. They will merely count down the days until a Clinton presidency ended and Obama could rise to the top post. That totally undermines her authority, making it next to impossible for Clinton to accomplish anything of substance.
Likewise, Hillary Clinton as a running mate doesn’t work either. There’s no way she could ever remain in the “second-banana” position of vice president, a job that some say has only one real duty – to have a pulse on the off-chance that the president ceases to have one.
So lets put to rest the notion of an Obama/Clinton ticket to vote for on Nov. 4. It makes more sense to focus our attention on the brawl that will now take place state-by-state as the two fight using “Chicago rules” about who gets to take on the Republicans for president, and which one gets to return next year to the U.S. Senate.
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