Despite denials, Clinton camp increasingly eying VP spot

Hillary Clinton still professes to have her eye on the prize -- the presidential nomination. But her chances have faded irremediably, leading to the question of why she is staying in the race. One of the reasons that is advanced is that she is waging effort to secure the vice-presidential nomination. If the race between the two Democratic candidates had stayed tighter all the way to the June/July, Obama might have been forced to pick her in a last ditch effort to unify the party. But since the primary's competitive part ended on May 6th, Clinton could have quickly lost her strength, which would have given Obama no incentive to choose her as his running-mate.

As Clinton's fortunes have decreased, her surrogates have increasingly touted the possibility of her taking the vice-presidential spot. Ed Rendell for instance, explained back in March that he would be happier with Clinton at the top but that a joint ticket was the way to go. Now, Time and the New York Times are reporting that Bill Clinton is strongly in support of his wife's inclusion on the ticket and suggested that he and his surrogates are pushing the Obama campaign to engage in talks. It did not take long for both the Obama and Clinton campaigns to deny any such rumor, as both have no interest in such news being disseminated. The Obama campaign wants to keep the vice-presidential search under wraps while Clinton's would lose all credibility if they were seen as openly campaigning for the VP spot. Howard Wolfson insisted that these reports were "100% false," and both campaigns explained that there were absolutely no talk between them about a possible joint ticket.

There is no question, however, that Clinton's surrogates are pushing for her selection even while their candidate is professing to have no such desire whatsoever. Today, her top fundraising official, Hassan Nemazee, declared that "Time is not your friend. A dream ticket would be the best way to ensure both unity and full and active support, financially and politically, for the ticket to be in the strongest position to win in the fall." Senator Diane Feinstein, who does not directly speaks for the campaign but who is one of Hillary's most prominent supporters, added that "I am one that believes that if it works out that Senator Obama is the nominee, the strongest ticket would be Senator Clinton as vice president."

In justifying her stance, Feinstein voiced an argument that comes back often among proponents of a dream ticket: She referred to "the weight of the states he carried versus the states she carried. It's different. And, therefore, if you combine them both, you've got the best electoral path." In other words, a joint ticket would combine Clinton's strength in states she looks solid in (Florida, Arkansas, securing a lot of blue states) with Obama's in the states he typically fares better in (the Northwest, Virginia, Colorado). Merge the two candidates' electoral map and you get an electoral rout in the Democrats' favor.

The only problem, of course, is that vice-presidential boosts don't function quite like that. Clinton's inclusion on the ticket would not necessarily deliver to Obama the states in which she appears stronger than him, for vice-presidential candidates typically only marginally boost their ticket. While Clinton appeals to voters who are uncomfortable with Obama and Obama appeals to voters who are uncomfortable with Clinton, it is unlikely that Clinton is the best candidate Obama can choose who will make him more able to conquer blue-collar voters and Hispanics, just as Obama would not necessarily be Clinton's best choice to address her own vulnerabilities if she were to capture the nomination.

There is also the problem of the clashing nature of Obama's message of change with Clinton's persona, and whether contradictions that would emerge would put the Democratic campaign on the defensive, forced to continually explain itself. Finally, I am not sure that Clinton's selection would send a positive message to female voters, as it would show Hillary yet again stuck in a powerless position, subordinated to a male figure, just as she was in the 1990s. A lot of women who are supporting Clinton in the hope of having the first female president could regard her inclusion on the ticket as more problematic than if she was not included.

In other words, it is one thing to prefer Clinton over Obama; it is quite another to believe Clinton is the strongest nominee Obama could choose. And then there is the animosity between the two candidates, one that took quite a dramatic turn today as a controversy exploded on the New York Post, then on Drudge, then throughout the web, about Clinton's comments regarding RFK's assassination. Asked why she was not dropping out, Clinton explained that it was still too early: "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

Clinton had made similar comments in the past, and this time a controversy erupted as the Obama campaign responded that this had no place in the political discussion. All sorts of interpretations quickly surfaced -- Clinton's subconsceous is talking, she is being insensitive, especially given US history and the much-reported fears of black people that something might happen to Obama. Given the fact that Clinton was quite clearly addressing the timeline of previous nomination fights in which the nominee was not chosen in May (in 1980, for instance, the fight went to the convention floor but Jimmy Carter had a majority of delegates secured against Ted Kennedy; and Clinton could have named 1984 but the prolonged fight hurt Democrats then so that's not a parallel Clinton wants to make), this controversy does seem overblown to me but it is revealing of how tense both sides have become and how hard it could be to mend fences in the coming months.