Democrats’ decision: First woman or first African-American?
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
If it’s Hillary Clinton, she will need Barack Obama like crazy in November.
If it’s Obama, he will need her like a hole in the head.
Hillary, a 1960s liberal with dicey credentials pretending to be a rebranded moderate, would have lots of reasons to court Obama for her running mate.
He’s young, energetic, apparently beloved by college kids and Independents and he sounds really good.
He’s an African-American and he’s from Illinois, a state rich in votes for November.
But what would she bring him?
Only tears.
Despite her apparent brilliance with SAT scores, Hillary has a string of scandals and loopy and/or Utopian policy initiatives – her failed 1990s crusade for socialized medicine for America being the most spectacular.
Hillary brings a women’s following, true. But she comes with so much baggage from her long association with, and having to cover for, husband Bill’s sexual encounters outside marriage as to make her not worth the gamble.
Maybe it’s just a center-right Republican bias, but she doesn’t come off as a person you’d want in your living room night after night as the nation’s commander-in-chief and leader of the Free World.
Also, there would be that increasingly prickly co-president, Bill. One look up that extended arm and pointed finger and “I never had sex with that woman” was quite enough!
Obama probably has had a belly full of the ex-president doing his spoiled brat number, first belittling Obama’s positions on Iraq and then attempting to paint him as a no-chance, black candidate a la Jesse Jackson.
It’s hard to imagine the analytical Obama figuring out how he would work it out with Bill, either from above or below the Oval office.
As first husband to Hillary, Clinton could inflict no end of indignities on Obama by rendering him even more powerless and gofer-like than was Al Gore in his two terms as second banana.
It might be even less palatable for a President Obama to wake up every morning guessing what outrage, embarrassment or both might be coming that day from Bill.
Clinton seems compelled to act out his peculiar strain of arrested sexual development or out of control personal pathology, in or out of power.
His long suit does not seem to be hanging about with nothing to do.
February 2008
