Archive for March 11th, 2008
Who’s going to be vice president?
There’s a lot of talk today about who the vice presidential nominees are and will be on both the democratic and republican sides. (By a lot of talk I mean a lot of talk for a day where the Governor of New York is mired in a prostitution scandal) Hendrick Hertzberg, as usual, provides an intriguing angle on the topic. He proposes McCain should choose Condoleeza Rice which, frankly, is probably the best choice the Republicans could make and is very dangerous for the Democrats, even if Obama and Clinton were on the same ticket. According to Hertzberg,
By choosing Rice, McCain would shackle himself anew to Bush’s Iraq war. But it’s hard to see how those chains could get much tighter than he has already made them. Rice would fit nicely into McCain’s view of the war as worth fighting but, until Donald Rumsfeld’s exit from the Pentagon, fought clumsily. And it would be fairly easy to establish a story line that would cast Rice as having been less Bush’s enabler than a loyal subordinate who nevertheless pushed gently from within for a more reasonable, more diplomatic approach.
Rice is already fourth in line for the Presidency, and getting bumped up three places would be a shorter leap than any of the three Presidential candidates propose to make. It’s true that her record in office has been one of failure, from downgrading terrorism as a priority before 9/11 to ignoring the Israel-Palestine problem until (almost certainly) too late. But this does not seem to have done much damage to her popularity.
Currently McCain has nobody in mind, officially. Rice would definitely give him a leg up and nullify any unspoken racial shortcomings on the right —which are definitely there.
On the Democratic side, things are a little spicier. As the video below indicates, it’s probably going to be either Obama or Clinton but not both.
