Please throw us into that briar patch.
A lot of Democrats continue to think that if Barack Obama picks
Hillary Clinton as his running mate (if, that is, he
actually gets the nomination at the convention, which I still think
is not entirely a done deal), their party will have a “dream
ticket” that will unite women, black voters in droves, the
chablis-and-brie set (i.e. “limousine liberals”) and white working
class voters in an unstoppable juggernaut.
If only conservatives could be so lucky. But maybe we can make
our own luck. Maybe we can express fear and trembling, beg the
liberals not to throw us into the Obama-Clinton briar patch, and
watch them fall for our faux fear.
But it’s hard to believe they would be so flat-out stupid.
It might even be easier to run against Billary at the bottom of
the ticket than it would be to beat them at the top. It was bizarre
enough to imagine Bill Clinton as “First Gentleman” (or First Lout:
“Better put some ice on that”). But trying to imagine him as the
Second Fiddle to a Second Fiddle is enough to make any sane voter
run away screaming. Not only would we have a frighteningly angry,
priapic narcissist trying to butt in on presidential
decision-making, but we would have a frighteningly angry priapic
narcissist trying to butt in past a vice president who herself is
trying to butt in on presidential decision-making. And all while
both of them will surely again be dodging real subpoenas and
imaginary sniper fire.
AND CAN YOU imagine how easy it would be for John McCain to
contrast himself with Obama-Billary? He’s already going to be
erasing Obama’s image as a change agent and replacing it with the
truth of Obama as a conventional liberal. With Billary beside
Obama, though, Obama’s whole slogan goes out the door: From “Change
you can believe in” to “Conventional liberalism you can’t trust.”
After all, an exit poll from one of the recent primaries showed
that just two-fifths of Democrats thought that Sen.
Clinton is trustworthy. (How even those two-fifths can be so
deluded is a matter for psychologists, not columnists, to
explore.)
Both Clintons’ trust deficits are well merited. Conservatives,
of course, need only focus on Mrs. Clinton’s history. Her boss on
the Watergate committee almost fired her for unethical behavior.
She used a $1,000 investment in “cattle futures” as a magnet for
the ethical equivalent of a $100,000 bribe. She intervened, for
purely political purposes, to help secure a pardon for Puerto Rican
terrorists. She told Burger King fibs (“home of the Whopper”) to
the special counsel investigating Travelgate. She gave a verbal
wink and nod (on a phone conversation video-recorded at the other
end) to a scheme to hide the donated costs of a huge Hollywood
campaign fund-raiser. In short, for her own political or pecuniary
advantage, she would willingly forget not just the meaning of “is,”
but even where to find it in the dictionary. (Maybe she might claim
Sir Edmund Hillary left the dictionary intended for her on the top
of Mount Everest when he was finally providing a name for her five
long years after she was born — a truly horrendously long time for
a little girl to wait for a name!)
If Obama is a blank screen on which Americans can project their
highest aspirations, Hillary Clinton is a blank conscience with
which she (and her husband) can justify any dishonesty, any
hypocrisy, any ruthlessness as long as it advances her political
well-being. (As conservatives would surely point out repeatedly, an
Obama-Hillary ticket would also be virtually blank in terms of
significant legislative accomplishments.)
THEY ALSO WOULD form the first ticket in history utterly permeated
by Radical Chic. Two disciples of Saul Alinsky, two people steeped
in the politics of protest, two Ivy Leaguers posing as
working-class heroes from Chicago: Oh, what a target-rich
environment for critics, and what a hideous turnoff to Middle
America! Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton are two peas in a pod when it
comes to sneering at “bourgeois” values, and two full months
together as a ticket, reinforcing each other’s prejudices, would
make their pea-pod-hood abundantly obvious. Combine that with their
mutual tendencies to associate with sleazy characters for financial
and political gain (note the Tony Rezko verdict yesterday), and
Obama-Clinton start looking like more elitist versions of Bonnie
and Clyde (minus the violence). Or has nobody noticed that both the
Clintons and the Obamas became far wealthier once in “public
service” than they ever had been before?
A word of warning to Obama, though: He would do well to remember
Merle Haggard’s song about the outlaw duo, a line of which noted
that “the legend made Bonnie the head of the game.”
