Answers for Mom

But first - breaking political news that is bound to shake up the race:

Bill Clinton: 'Screw It, I'm Running For President'

It's a headline from The Onion, a satirical newspaper here in the US. But it is by far one of the funniest articles I've read in a while. It's highly recommended reading.

Before we get to my mom's questions, I wanted to start with something Jean mentioned this morning:

I am finding Bill Clinton’s role in all of this more and more distasteful, he who wouldn’t lift a finger for Al Gore.

It's actually the other way around - the Gore campaign deliberately benched Clinton much to his own consternation. He saw Gore's election as the validation of his own legacy and he was extraordinarily frustrated in not being able to go out and campaign for Gore. In a post-mortem following the 2000 election, Gore's pollsters essentially said their numbers showed it to be a wash: every vote Bill Clinton got them by campaigning he offset by turning someone off because of his personal behavior. Whether or not that's actually the case - hard to tell. But I tend to believe a strategic use of Bill Clinton in 2000 would have saved us all the trouble of W. But running a presidential campaign is not that simple, so I'll refrain from further Monday morning (I guess really Friday afternoon at this stage) quarterbacking.

OK - on to the questions.

I would hate to be the Secretary of Whatever if I had to swear in advance that I would stick faithfully to Hillary's six point plan with seventeen point sub-plans already prepared by the campaign. I find those discussions endlessly tedious; Theo tells me they produce results. Why?

I think you misunderstood me, Mom. My point was that Barack has been tagged as the inspiration, while Hillary is trying to tag herself as the perspiration, so to speak. It's not that those twelve point plans will necessarily bind the Secretary of Whatever (although it's likely that M/M Secretary helped craft those plans during the campaign) but they fit within the narrative of Hillary as experienced candidate. Obama has been painted, unfairly I think, as the candidate who inspires people but may be a bit lacking in policy heft. I think this is largely a holdover from early in his campaign when he was still formulating policy, but you hear over and over again reports of undecided voters going to see him and coming away unimpressed by a lack of specifics in the speech. That's part of the reason I liked a lot of what happened at the debate, because apart from a few snarky asides, they largely got into it over policy specifics and records.

I know the tirades may do Hillary good in one primary or another but will they, overall, make her more electable or less? It's the election we need to win.

The day to day intra-party spats of this primary will be largely forgotten come November. Whoever wins, there will be a big coming together and patching over of differences. Many have tried in the past to use attacks from the primary against a general election opponent and it doesn't work very well. Voters seem to be able to make the distinction. For sure, if Hillary's the nominee there will be some work to be done by her and her husband in the African American community. But, as Senator of New York, Hillary has not generally taken African Americans and their votes for granted, and so I expect you'd see some real effort to heal that wound.

Regardless, I don't think it's fair to expect Bill Clinton to stay entirely out of the fray, as some have suggested. I think it's in his own interest to watch out for his legacy, but he has a right, and should be expected, to be a forceful advocate for his wife. Elizabeth Edwards is no wallflower and has made some pretty forceful comments towards Obama and Hillary, and has even gotten a fair amount of attention for it. Michelle Obama has the disadvantage of not being the established media figure that Elizabeth Edwards and Bill Clinton are, but she has also on occasion gone after the other candidates. So hold Bill Clinton to a higher standard - but not that much higher.

I'm no polling expert but I see in the polls a number of hints that Obama can draw in independents and moderate Republicans, as he did in Nevada. Am I right? Will the party leadership see that or is it so dangerous to buck the Clintons that no one can afford to?

And what about a combined ticket?

While I think that Obama may start out with an advantage in attracting independents, no one said she could attract independent votes in her New York senate races, and she did in near record numbers. Which brings up the idea of a Clinton/Obama ticket (I think Obama choosing Clinton as his running mate is highly unlikely). Under normal circumstances, Obama would be the obvious choice for VP were he to lost the nomination. He's clearly galvanizing large swathes of the party and independent voters. But I'd be concerned about trying to make too much history with one ticket. I fully believe that voters are ready for a woman or a black president - in fact electing our president is so much about the individual that I think that's kind of an irrelevant question. But are they ready for both in one ticket? That I'm less sure about. They also really seem to not like each other - but that didn't stop Kennedy and Johnson.

One final note: today is not a good press day for the Obama folks. Rezko seems to be Obama's Whitewater - it's murky and it seems he didn't do anything wrong - but it's going to get investigated and reported over and over again.