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Barack Obama lays groundrules for picking a Vice President

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"The next time you hear from me about the vice presidential selection process will be when I have selected a vice president," Obama said in a press conference aboard his campaign plane. "If you hear second-hand accounts, rumors, gossip about the selection process, you can take it from me that it is wrong, because we're not going to be talking about it in the press." He continued, "There's no decision that I'm going to make that's going to be more important before the November election. I intend to do it right, and I'm not going to do it in the press."..the Illinois senator instructed reporters to dismiss all speculation about running mates. He said he won't discuss the selection process, or parade prospects in public, as Sen. John McCain seemed to do last month when Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former opponent Mitt Romney visited his Arizona ranch. The McCain camp said the get-together was strictly social, but it sparked wild speculation that the presumptive GOP nominee was cons
idering all three as possible ticket mates.
A reporter jumped in with a follow-up question: Any chance Obama would pick Clinton for his No. 2? Obama stared back incredulously. "As I've said before, Sen. Clinton would be on any short list...but I am not going to discuss who is being considered." The full statement from Clinton spokesman Phil Singer, issued this afternoon, read as follows: "While Senator Clinton has made clear throughout this process that she will do whatever she can to elect a Democrat to the White House, she is not seeking the vice presidency, and no one speaks for her but her. The choice here is Senator Obama's and his alone."
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/06/05/obama_plans_to_keep_lid_on_vee.html
Obama's choice of a running mate will be the first important decision he makes with the whole country watching, so it will be a momentous act of self-definition. If he chooses her, it will be an act of self-diminishment, especially now that some of her acolytes are aggressively suggesting that some unwritten rule of American politics stipulates that anyone who finishes a strong second in the nomination contest is entitled to second place on the ticket. Behind the idea that Obama should run in harness with Clinton is this wobbly theory: Because the Republican Party is in such bad odor, if you unify the Democratic Party, that will suffice to win the election, and she is a necessary and sufficient catalyst of unity. But she is neither. She would be a potent unifier of John McCain's party, thereby setting the stage for exactly what the nation does not need, another angry campaign of mere mobilization rather than persuasion...the dotty idea that Barack Obama should choose to have Hillary Clinton down the hall in t
he West Wing, nursing her disappointments, her grievances and her future presidential ambitions while her excitable husband wanders...with his increasingly Vesuvian temper...verbal fender benders and his interesting business associates. That this idea survived her off-putting speech Tuesday night, after Obama won the right to choose a running mate, is evidence that many Democrats do not fathom the gratitude that less-blinkered Americans feel for Obama because he has closed the Clinton parenthesis in our presidential history...she obliquely but clearly identified herself as the person who would be "the strongest candidate and the strongest president" and, pointedly, the person most ready to "take charge as commander in chief." There is a fine line between admirable tenacity and delusional denial, and Clinton tiptoed across it.
Surely she, the most polarizing Democrat, is not the only Democrat who can help Obama appeal to the voters who rejected him in Kentucky and West Virginia. And as his running mate, she would nullify his narrative. The candidate embracing the "future" should not glue himself to Washington circa 1993. Someone promising to "turn the page" should not revert to an earlier chapter. Someone whose mantra is "change" should not embrace her theme of restoration -- that the 1990s were paradise and Democrats promise paradise regained.
She, whose experiences as First Spouse have not impressed Obama as acquisitions of national security expertise, would not help him deflect McCain's predictable attack on his thin curriculum vitae. And the more she seems to be pushing Obama to choose her, the more resolutely he must resist. Otherwise, at the beginning of a contest in which McCain will portray him as a flimsy figure, Obama will define himself as someone who can be pushed around.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/06/clinton_vp_pick_would_diminish.html

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