The ‘Dream Ticket’: Pondering Hillary as veep

last updated 8 January 2015

“I never thought I’d even consider it,” said Andrew Sullivan in the London Times, but like many supporters of Barack Obama, I’m gradually coming around to the idea of Hillary Clinton running as his vice president. This so-called Dream Ticket clearly presents certain problems: Obama has explicitly campaigned on a promise “to end the kind of politics the Clintons represent”—oh, and there’s the small matter of the two candidates now hating each other’s guts. But viewed solely through the lens of electoral strategy, there is a “powerful logic” to an Obama-Clinton ticket. Not only could Hillary help Obama capture the votes of all those “hardworking white Americans” he’s struggling to win over, the Clinton name might reassure voters worried that Obama lacks experience. Best of all, Obama’s picking Hillary for veep would powerfully demonstrate “the kind of reconciliation he wants to achieve at home and abroad.”

Sorry, but the Dream Ticket “doesn’t make sense,” said Gerald Pomper in Realclearpolitics.com. Hillary may have edged Obama among white working-class men during the primaries, but if he’s looking for a running mate to placate them during the general election, a smarter choice, surely, would be an actual white man—for instance, Sen. Jim Webb, the no-nonsense former Navy secretary from Virginia. For another thing, while there’s considerable excitement about the prospect of electing either the first black or the first female president, combining both those firsts into a single ticket might be too much change for the electorate to handle all at once. Besides, said Nicholas von Hoffman in the Toronto Star, would a President Obama really feel comfortable with two power-hungry Clintons pacing the halls of the vice president’s mansion? At a bare minimum, he’d have to insist “that Chelsea Clinton be installed in the White House as his official taster.”

Obama has a million reasons for not picking Clinton as his running mate, said Joan Walsh in Salon.com, and it’s by no means certain that Hillary even wants the job. But Obama needs to be extremely careful “not to alienate Clinton supporters” by rejecting her out of hand. The candidate himself has so far “done a great job being gracious,” but some of his supporters, among them Sen. Ted Kennedy, have been acidly dismissive of Clinton as a divisive force. Obama needs to have Democrats unified behind him in November, and that means, “as the battle winds down,” at least pretending he respects Clinton so much that she’s on his short list of potential running mates.