Unity ticket my arse!

After refusing to gracefully spare the Democratic party two months of pain, Hillary "The Deranged Narcissist" Clinton was finally bumped from the presidential race by sheer weight of delegates. In typical Hilary fashion, she refused to concede defeat even after the matter was settled. Is she trying to blackmail Obama into making her the VP?

If so, that's only one of the reasons Obama should absolutely NOT choose Hillary as his veep. A rival who did her best to torpedo your general election chances is generally a bad ally to have standing at your side, especially if she wins her place through crass, rank blackmail. If there was a time for Hillary to bargain for the #2 spot, it was two months ago. Obama knows this. His staff knows this.

They also know that much of the Hillary vote in the later stages of the campaign was actually anti-Obama, not pro-Clinton. Democratic voters were either suspicious of a black candidate (especially after the Wright brouhaha), or worried that a black candidate couldn't win the general election. Hillary was the only non-Obama candidate in the race; that doesn't mean all those Pennsylvania and Ohio people like Hillary. It doesn't mean Hillary would be any more likely to entice the white working class back into the fold than another (white) VP candidate.

So why take Hillary? The truth is, her negatives have always been unusually high, and every pundit and their dog has at some point made the claim that her presence on the Democratic ticket would energize the Republican base. She's also a woman, which in the context of presidential politics makes her a minority, so Obama-Hillary would be an all-minority ticket; unacceptably risky even in this Democrat-friendly election cycle. Finally, Hillary brings no "home-state advantage," something veeps are traditionally expected to bring to the table; New York is already solidly blue, which makes her just another Senator from the North.

So, basically, besides the blunt, crude threat of blackmail, Hillary has zero appeal for the Democratic ticket. It would take an act of massive stupidity, from an Obama campaign now famous for its savvy, cool intelligence, to put Hillary Clinton back at the center of attention.

Update: Hillary finally sees the light. Guess she read my post and realized what little chance she has of becoming veep. Is she now just hoping for Obama to lose so that she can run in 2012? Man...hunger for power sounds comically evil when you read about it in kids' fantasy books, but in real life it's kind of chilling and pathetic at the same time...