I think that over the next three months, Hillary's speech last night will be seen as another major bungling of her campaign. She is not in the position to try to negotiate, as David Gergen said last night, a "coalition government", and that IS how she sounded last night. Let me say that again: reality does not put her in position to act as she did last night.
Saying she's going to take some time to decide what's next is absolutely fine. There's a political reality to this, though, and it is this - nobody else is going to wait. Obama is moving forward. McCain is moving forward. The news media is moving forward. It's over, regardless of when she wants to admit this on stage.
What isn't politically savvy is this notion that she's somehow representative of nearly 18 million voters now, and that she somehow is supposed to negotiate for them. She is not, no more than Obama is representative of nearly 18 million voters. They are now representative of delegates. Those delegates are representative of the voters. Delegates that want this wrapped up, delegates that want the strongest position in November, delegates that want to win. They know that Clinton won't be the candidate. There will be a swift and strong movement to prove that, and to take Clinton off the media pedestal of candidacy. There's no need for her muddying up the actual candidate's message.
She has to know that. She also has to know that last night's speech wasn't particularly diplomatic, or healing, to the entire Democratic Party. She has to know that it would tick off Obama supporters. She has to know that the oxygen for her publicity as a candidate has perhaps a few more days left before it starts to diminish to the layers now enjoyed by Biden and Kucinich and Dodd.
She has to know that if she tries one more speech like last night, she's going to get the royal shove up her backside publicly by the party leadership.
What she seems to not understand is how much the calendar is going to work against her now. There's no need for Obama to select a VP candidate right now, and in fact there's plenty of reason for him to hold off, as it is a process that generates free positive media coverage for his candidacy and he should hold that as a buildup to the convention. We're heading for a couple of months where Obama and McCain will have the stage, that cooler heads will prevail on the direction of the fall campaign, and most importantly, where Obama can appeal directly to those primary voters for Clinton and review polling data to see how he's doing. He can run trial balloons for VP and see how people react.
She's not in position to call the shots for her being VP now, and as time goes by, whatever strength she might have is going to disappear. Any effort for her to do so now should be resisted. If she doesn't understand the power dynamic right now, there's very little to suggest that she'd understand it from the position of Vice President.
Put another way - Vice President is NOT Co-President. And there's no way that Obama should select as a running mate someone who seems to think it could be. And there's quadruple no way that Obama should select a VP candidate that pretends there could be a co-presidency but would make no leadership effort to take such responsibility:
Though some might think her remarks self-delusional, Clinton wasn't kidding herself; earlier in the day, Clinton had told lawmakers privately that the race was over and she would consider being Obama's vice president. Her public defiance reflected a shift in the balance of power that came with Obama's victory. Now that he had won the race, he would need to woo Clinton if he wanted to prevail in November.
"Obama has work to do," the outspoken Clinton adviser Lanny Davis told reporters in the hallway outside the gymnasium here. "Senator Clinton can't do it for him."
Well, I already didn't think she was a leader. Thanks for confirming, Lanny.
