Bury Hillary [Updated…Repeatedly]
I’ll keep blogging about this until every silver bullet has been fired and every stake pounded. Obama-Clinton would not be a ‘team of rivals.’ Barack Obama is not, and can never be, on Hillary’s team. Nor does she have the psychological capacity to ever truly be on his. Nor is Obama the ‘rival’ of the Clintons. He is the antidote.
Letting Hillary crawl into the ticket to lay her egg sacs will enable the worst, cheapest, easiest, and most counterproductive strategies for election-year victory on the Right. And it will send thousands and thousands of cool-pragmatic-idealist-moderate-liberals running and screaming into the arms of McCain, whom they know they can turn into one of their own if they butter him up long enough.
PS and shouldn’t this should blow the head off any and all dream ticket talk?
MORE: Daniel; Reihan. I should take the time to whack at Daniel for this:
I think Reihan’s concluding statement also goes too far:
If Obama really does select Clinton as his running mate, he will have demonstrated that he doesn’t have the capacity for judgment we expect from a president.
Let’s test this proposition. It’s true that Clinton is unpopular, and that may be a good reason not to choose her, but for the role of VP nominee and then Vice President is she really “weak”? I think it is widely acknowledged even by people who loathe her (count me as one of those) that she consistently performs better in debates and demonstrates small-bore policy knowledge pretty effectively, and the two main roles of a VP nominee in a campaign are serving as the attack dog and facing off in debates against the other party’s VP nominee. She is almost ideally suited to the attack dog role, and she would probably handle the Republican VP nominee well enough.
I know, I know, I know. She is almost ideally suited to the attack robot role as well. During a Vice Presidential debate, no doubt, large long green claw-tipped tentacles would emerge from somewhere behind Clinton’s podium, curl around poor Mitt Romney with a sickening shlurrrp, and guide his dazed, poison-paralyzed body toward the huge bristling maw of teeth that viewers would suddenly discover had displaced Clinton’s human body onstage.
Ahem. The issue from which we can run but not hide is that Hillary Clinton is unsuitable — as a matter of judgment about her personality, her being, her character, her selfhood, her identity, her her — for high office. It’s pretty clear now that Bill Clinton is probably even worse. And of course with the Clintons it’s always a package deal. If Obama selected Hillary, it would show a great capacity for political judgment, assuming that politics is a filthy sinkhole into which anyone with the thinnest hope of serving their country must hurl themselves with maximum passion and in which they must wallow about with minimum compunction. In choosing a merciless mechanical animal with a penchant for correcting her lies only when forced, Obama paradoxically would be showing the kind of judgment we have come to expect from a President. But it seems to me quite plain that caving in to a Clinton on his ticket would reveal a fatal weakness in Obama’s whole rationale as a candidate. Actually, let me strengthen that point: it would be a negation of his purpose on planet Earth. If he doesn’t realize this, he’s defunct; if he does realize it but can’t or won’t do anything about it, ditto, my friendsch.
EVEN MORE: It’s a close one, but has Daniel just turned in his best blog reply ever? I report, you decide:
Not only would it liven up those Vice Presidential debates, but I think Clinton’s public image might really improve if people began to think of her as a bristling maw of teeth instead of the calculating wife of a former President that they take her to be right now. Her supporters often say that the public doesn’t know the real Hillary – this would be their chance to get to know her. […]
James entitled his post, “Bury Hillary,” but, as James understands only too well given his evident familiarity with the lore of the undead, burying the creature simply delays the inevitable until it re-emerges and works its revenge in the sequel. In that light, it may be best not to make her angry.
NOOOOOOooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!
>beholding spectacle of being ripped limb from limb<
(Image courtesy Flickrer Rudolf Tiberius Schultz Munro III.)