Campaign Notes: The Hillary option

By John Barron

(Image: Huffington Post)

For some Democrats anxious at the president's sagging approval rating — lingering in the low forties — there is a potential game-changer: Hillary Clinton.

The Secretary of State has made it clear she isn't interested in a second term as America's top diplomat. She has also said repeatedly she doesn't plan a second White House bid in 2016 following her bruising and dispiriting loss to Obama in the 2008 primaries.

But is she leaving a door open?

Could Clinton be brought in to replace Joe Biden as Obama's vice presidential running mate in 2012?

It would be a dream team. The reason Clinton and Obama duked it out for so many months through the caucuses and primaries is that they tend to appeal to different voters: his younger, urban and male; hers older, female and with a bluer hue to their collars.

But Hillary might offer something extra.

Obama wins votes where most Democrats win votes; California, Illinois and Washington. Clinton can win more votes in the rust belt, in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and maybe even down in Florida, where plenty of old New Yorkers still seem to go to retire.

At the moment the Obama administration has set Joe Biden — himself a kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania — the task of winning over the battler vote.

For sure, Biden is a great retail politician, but his two failed presidential bids suggest his verbose "hail fellow" affability doesn't play so well outside of Delaware.

So maybe it will be Hillary for VP if the economy is still on life support come the Democrats nomination convention next September.

After all, Biden has had health problems, including a near-fatal brain aneurism in the late '80s. Maybe he'd step aside?

Biden always wanted to be Secretary of State anyway.

Or, admittedly even less likely, could Obama do as LBJ did in 1968 and Harry Truman did in 1952 and step down in the interests of his party and his country?

Nominate Hillary for President?

Certainly some veteran Hillaryites like pollster Pat Caddell now think that's the best option. He and Doug Schoen argue that Obama’s only way to win is by running the sort of negative campaign that would make a second term impossibly partisan and bitter. (As opposed to the last three years?)

But, of course, when Truman declined to run, Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson went down to Eisenhower, just as Vice President Hubert Humphrey lost to Nixon in 1968.

In both cases there were primary challengers, and the fact that not even Dennis Kucinich or Howard Dean are challenging Obama for the nomination suggests a Ted Kennedy-esque Hillary run, or even a ticket-switch, is not likely.

But what about the 2012 campaign has been predictable so far?

29 November 2011