IMAGINE President Barack Obama is preparing his first State of the Union message. Would he want vice-president Hillary Rodham Clinton tut-tutting with edits or suggesting how she could write it better?
Would the poll-obsessed Clintons want to wake up in the White House residence in 2009 and read about vice-president Obama's sky-high popularity ratings, and how they make her look like his stern old lady?
For months, the Clinton and Obama campaig
ns have been hearing suggestions of a so-called dream ticket of Obama/Clinton or Clinton/Obama.
Now, some uncommitted superdelegates – the party leaders and elected officials whose votes may determine the nominee – see such a unity ticket as a way to short-circuit a fight for the nomination all the way to the Democratic convention in August, and to blend the voter bases of the two candidates.
"It would be great to see them on the same ticket. They had attracted so many new voters and so much excitement, it seems so obvious," said Sam Spencer, an uncommitted superdelegate from Maine. "Hillary would be the LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson] of 1960.
"Both served longer and had more experience, and LBJ was willing to take the vice-presidency. And Obama would come in to his own more as vice-president."
All that stands in the way are a few pesky details, such as Obama and Clinton already having had enough of each other. And the fact that Bill Clinton believes the Obama camp has portrayed him as a brutish and race-baiting campaigner, according to two of his associates. On top of that, Obama aides assert, Clinton's baggage would damage Obama's image.
"There's not a chance," Jon Ausman, an uncommitted superdelegate from Florida, said of the two campaigns getting together.
"This has turned into a battle of egos, and strong personal animosity has slipped into this. Not to mention the veep (vice-president] is usually a half-step or step in stature below the presidential candidate, and in both cases neither of them falls into that mould."
But history has shown that politicians are willing to put aside their animosities for the sake of victory. In 1960, John F Kennedy found his running mate in Johnson, the sitting senate majority leader and an unrivalled force in Democratic politics.
"All of the arguments about how rivals don't like each other would fall away if either thinks the other could help them win," said Doris Kearns Goodwin, the biographer of Johnson.
"And Obama and Clinton do fit in a jigsaw puzzle way. She brings women, older voters, blue-collar workers, Hispanics, and he brings elites, liberals, the young and the crucially necessary black vote."
The full article contains 456 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
