The Bad Dream Ticket

Of all the media clichés about the current presidential race, perhaps the most absurd is describing a ticket headed by Sen. Barack Obama with Sen. Hillary Clinton as his running mate as “a dream ticket.”

Talk about your bad dreams.

If Clinton had won the nomination, as she and most party leaders expected, there would have been some logic in adding Obama as the vice presidential candidate. With all the awkward baggage Clinton lugs around with her, the addition of a bright, young star who excited new voters from coast-to-coast would have made political sense.

But now that the bright, young newcomer has come out of nowhere to upset the Democrats’ only successful political brand in the past quarter-century, the last thing Obama needs is to be weighed down by the negatives of the past.

Of course, in politics, it’s never smart to say never. The last time a charismatic, young, Democratic phenom knocked off a grizzled, old veteran, the political odd couple managed to bury their open contempt for each other and put together a winning ticket.

That was in 1960, when the upstart was Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy. The powerful politician who had to swallow his pride and accept the vice presidency was Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. But the historical setting was entirely different. The Republican candidate was Richard Nixon, who had served as vice president for eight years under war hero and extremely popular President Dwight Eisenhower.

As the outsiders, the Democrats were desperate to cover every possible bet, balancing a Northeastern candidate with a Southerner while also backing up their glamorous young candidate with an experienced political insider.

Today, President George Bush, the son of a former president, surrounded by his father’s old hack cronies, Vice President Dick Cheney and since-resigned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has succeeded in giving political insiders a bad name.

One of Obama’s multiple attractions is that he offers the promise of a fresh alternative to business as usual in Washington. Clinton never understood that. Her campaign was based on her long experience in Washington. How could she possibly lose to a first-term senator?

Easy. The public doesn’t like Washington politicians.

Turning a New Page

Obama is one of the best and brightest candidates, white or black, ever to run for the presidency. The experience he has had outside of Washington—teaching constitutional law, community organizing on the South Side of Chicago—is far more relevant to rehabilitating the disaster Bush has made of the presidency than sitting around the Senate year after year with a bunch of millionaires.

Obama has succeeded by promising to turn the page on the old politics. Why would he want to bring down the ticket with the most blatant example of the old politics in his own party?

It was Clinton who turned herself into such a liability. When the race for the Democratic nomination began, there were two bright, shining, nontraditional candidates who promised to remake political history. One was the first woman ever to be a serious candidate for the presidential nomination and the other was the first African American.

The problem was that when Clinton did not immediately win the nomination, which she considered her entitlement, she resorted to every sleazy tactic in the dirty book of old politics.

Clinton was handicapped from the beginning for having voted for the unpopular Bush war in Iraq to prove she could be just as war-like as any male politician. She compounded that problem recently by threatening to “obliterate” Iran. She repeatedly misspoke (the political euphemism for lying) about being greeted by sniper fire in Bosnia as first lady to burnish her macho credentials. That is, until someone embarrassingly resurrected a video showing she was actually greeted by a little girl with a nonlethal bouquet of flowers.

Clinton’s most offensive political tactic came last week as more of the so-called superdelegates began moving toward Obama after he won by a landslide in North Carolina and came within a hair of beating her in Indiana.

She made an openly racist appeal, claiming that the results in both states somehow showed Obama could not win because he’s black. In an interview with USA Today, Clinton said the Associated Press had reported “Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how the, you know, whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

In one sentence, Clinton managed to offend every black who works hard and every white without a college education who’s not a racist.

Many suspect Clinton wants Obama to lose to Republican John McCain so that she can run for the presidency again in four years.

Dream ticket? No presidential nominee dreams of choosing a vice president who would require round-the-clock surveillance by a special Secret Service detail to protect the presidential back.

What’s your take?

Write: editor@shepex.com