This Will Bore You
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:38 pm by Chris
There certainly is quite a bit of renewed speculation about Clinton as Veep floating around today, and despite what Tweety assured me last night, it’s not all coming from one direction. While I would be opposed to Clinton, Edwards, Biden, or Dodd being selected as the Vice Presidential nominee for the same reason that I was opposed to them as President, nobody much gives a shit what I think. I think the best possible outcome of a Clinton selection is that it would give Obama an opportunity to co-opt the parts of her domestic agenda which are better then his. I’m thinking of healthcare, but parts of her education policy come to mind as well.
All of the shitty policies that these candidates have spent the last year pushing were cooked up by strategists and staffers long before any voting actually took place. As the hodge podge shitty nature of the plans gets exposed over the course of the campaign, they dare not fix the glaring holes for fear they might be accused of flip flopping. Our public policy debate is so reprehensibly stupid that changing your mind is a far worse offense then having a shitty plan. Selecting a primary rival does allow the rare opportunity to fix some of these problems.
Update: The inevitable walk back.
Except hillary’s healthcare plan which was drawn up by the insurance industry! Hillary thinks 20% of each dollar should keep going to paper pushers instead of physicians…that way they can keep funding her agenda!
Yes, it’s shitty. No argument from me. It’s marginally less shitty than Obama’s in that it covers more people. Why in god’s name anybody thinks that we should keep health insurance in the loop is beyond me, but we go into these elections with the shitty plans and shitty candidates we have, not the shitty plans and shitty candidates we’d like to have.
Except hillary’s healthcare plan which was drawn up by the insurance industry!
i agree completely. clinton’s health care plan is a mess and would be a huge windfall for the insurance industry as everyone is mandated to become their customer. but you know what’s worse than forcing everyone to become customers of the bloated wasteful health insurance industry? not having universal healthcare. obama’s plan is better than the status-quo, but it’s worse than clinton’s. and clinton’s plan, while probably the worst possible universal health plan in existence, at least could deliver close to universal health coverage.
the best thing would be if clinton and obama both recognized that the key to real health care reform is to ditch the wasteful health insurance companies entirely
chris,
one other benefit of a O-C ticket is that it might lead to some degree of reconciliation in the party. we really do need that. and while i’ve long held that obama is not himself responsible for all the stupid sexist shit the media and some of his supporters have done, he still should come out strongly against it and make some effort to acknowledge the validity of the clinton supporter’s concerns. it probably won’t move the hard core anti-obama clintonistas, but it definitely would make it easier for some democrats now telling pollsters they would pick mccain over obama to support the democratic ticket in november.
I think the best possible outcome of a Clinton selection is that it would give Obama an opportunity to co-opt the parts of her domestic agenda which are better then his. I’m thinking of healthcare, but parts of her education policy come to mind as well.
He can do that anyway; I would guess that that would be her price for conceding.
I think he needs to ask her to be VP, and I think she needs to turn it down (though only if she gets something in return, like Senate Majority Leader). She’d be too old to run for a first term in 2016, and she’d be far more effective in the Senate than she would as VP. The VP slot for him should go to someone who could fill in his gaps and who is on track for running in 2016.
The reverse is not true, though; I think if she gets the nom, he’d have to be the VP choice. He’d still be relatively young in 2016, he could get some solid experience in a particular policy area a la Al Gore, and he could run in 2016 as the VP rather than as a Senator.
Sam Nunn? (maniacal laughter) Perfect. Dick Cheney 2.0.
I’m betting, if he wins the nom, he’ll get Daschle as his vp.
Yes, well the rabbit hole of truly uninspiring and/or evil veep possibilities is quite deep.
she concedes and gets priority for first SCOTUS vacancy. she would be an awesome SC justice and restore a currently ruined clinton name.
What is up with Hill & Bill? They are gonna come out of this with something….too smart not to.
“A currently ruined Clinton name” ???
And how is the Clinton name “ruined”, except in the eyes of the sexist so-called “creative class” that is unhappy that some mere woman should interfere with the career aspirations of any man? Sheeesh, if I could “ruin” my family name by getting half the democratic party to vote for me while at the same pissing off a bunch of sexist coffee-house thugs, I’d be climbing over fences to get to the head of the line.
david - put down the kool-aid…pretty much having the AA bloc in your hands before SC and now pulling less than 10% is nothing to be proud of. everything can be blamed on sexism, huh? I guess she was so fragile that all it took was OB to say “periodically” and then poof…
I still believe Hillary will pull this one out(though how people respond to the latest manufactured media outrage could be determinative, and she certainly needs a win in Puerto Rico), and am opposed to playing the “who will Barack choose as VP game” and especially the “Hillary as VP” game since I see it as part of the effort to get Hillary and her supporters to quit.
I will say that *if* the superD’s give the nomination to Obama in spite of Hillary winning the popular vote, for there to be any chance of me even contemplating a vote for him in November, he would have to adopt Hillary’s energy strategies and be genuinely convincing that he was going to focus on solar and wind power as the future energy generators of this country, while somehow convincing me that he would *not* emphasize coal and had realized starting any new nuclear power plants was a bad idea that he would postpone until all the potential long term problems were solved. Oh, and he’d have to convince me he actually cared about women’s reproductive freedom and wasn’t a corporate shill running as a democrat.
Hopefully, Hillary will withstand the media onslaught and I won’t have to watch him not do any of those things.