Presidential candidates always say in choosing a running mate that they will select the person “best qualified to assume the presidency” if fate so orders. But Hillary Clinton, in hinting that rival Barack Obama might be her choice, crassly contradicts herself.
She says he isn?t ready to sit in the Oval Office, where as vice president he could wind up if anything happened to her. The implication in that “ringing telephone” television ad was that she, and not he, is “ready from Day One” to assume the role of commander in chief in a crisis.
Alluding to that commercial, Obama asked her in remarks in Mississippi the other day: “If I?m not ready, how is it that you think I should be such a great vice president?”
In throwing cold water on the notion of a Clinton-Obama ticket, he accused the former first lady and her husband, who said the combination would be “an unstoppable force” in the November election, of “trying to hoodwink” voters. Obama noted he has won more states, convention delegates and popular votes than Clinton, so voters should forget about the idea that they “can get both” on one ticket.
History shows that in the last half-century at least, there has been no better stepping-stone to the presidency or to a presidential nomination than the vice presidency. But on the Democratic side, Barack Obama has no reason at this stage even to consider that course.
Circumstances could change, but with his delegate lead over Clinton, and repeatedly quoting Martin Luther King Jr. on “the fierce urgency of now,” Obama is treating Clinton?s “offer” to be her second banana with the derision it fully merits.
Jules Witcover is aBaltimore Examiner columnist. [email protected].
