The Temptation of a Unity Ticket

by: psericks

Sat May 10, 2008 at 12:25:26 PM CDT

The question of the week: What exactly it will take for Clinton leave the primary?

There's talk of potentially helping pay off the Clintons' some $20 million worth of debt from running a national political campaign they could not afford and with little prospect of success.  Clinton would essentially be insisting Obama pay for months of negative advertisements run against him.

Then there's talk of promising to support a Clinton bid for Senate majority leader --- a position for which she isn't particularly qualified, having never served in the Senate leadership nor having served many years in the Senate.  In my opinion, there are also simply better candidates, such as the affable and progressive Sen. Dick Durbin, currently the Majority Whip. 

And anyway after months of Clinton following personal ambition and dividing the party, why would the party reward her with such a post?  How does that demonstrate the qualities the post would require?

Most of this spectulation arises from the sheer inability of journalists to understand why Clinton persists in campaigning at all when she has no conceivable path left to the nomination --- they assume she must have some agenda, she must be working to cement her status as a power broker in the party.  After all, the narrative goes, she can't still believe she can win, can she?

Like a poker player without any cards left in her hand but who still somehow expects to control the game, Clinton continues to try to stave off irrelevance by simply not leaving.  Her bargaining power though only continues to dwindle.

And then there's the most beloved media invention of them: the Unity Ticket.  There is an obvious appeal to simply joining forces, but leaving aside that Obama would be undermining his own brand by choosing a consummate insider like Clinton and that Clinton would be forced to walk back her many criticisms of Obama in recent months, there's been a lot of thoughtful criticism this week of the idea:

Ezra Klein of the American Prospect describes a potential power struggle in the White House that only wastes energy and distracts from pressing an agenda:

Imagine President Obama, with VP Hillary Clinton and shadow-VP Bill Clinton, wants to pursue a legislative strategy that the Clintons think is a bad idea. How will they feel when Obama ignores their 8 years of White House experience and goes his own way?

Will they be able to keep their sprawling universe of well-connected confidantes from leaking tales of their displeasure to the press? Will they want to?

What happens when the first Time magazine cover comes out with Obama staring down the Clintons, and the tagline is, "Who's Really Running the Country?"

It's such an obvious story that it can be predicted, with almost perfect certainty, right now. Will he sideline them? Will it sow seeds of mistrust? Running the executive bureaucracy is hard enough without trying to navigate between two competing power poles. 

My main criticism of the unity ticket is that I simply don't think they work.  John Kerry's choice of John Edwards in 2004 was notorious for the lack of chemistry between the two candidates.  Edwards, of course, wasn't able to deliver the South, let alone North Carolina --- vice-presidents rarely do --- and the power struggle between the two candidates led to a muted role for Edwards in the general election campaign. 

Part of the reason for this is practical.  Political candidates these days rarely control the kind of political machine capable of delivering a state.

Let's not even talk about Gore's choice of Sen. Joe Lieberman, partially chosen for his moralistic criticism of the Lewinsky affair.  

Obama should choose someone he can trust, with whom he can work, and who builds on and reinforces his image as a transformational candidate.  A

nd in the end, that's what vice-presidents are actually for.  Obama should also be choosing someone he wants to be a future leader of the party, someone who could pick up where he left off, were he to be incapacitated.

Clinton just doesn't fit the bill.