The John McCain for President, Hillary Clinton for Vice President War Party Fusion Ticket

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher

When it Comes to the Vice-Presidency, Should Hillary Run on a McCain Ticket?

It is the one inviolable rule of party politics; don't promote the other party's candidate at the expense of your own.

In the past couple of weeks, Senator Hillary Clinton has violated that cardinal rule again and again as she personally vouched for the readiness of John McCain to assume the presidency, while belittling Barack Obama as nothing more than a speech.

Here is perhaps the most devastating gift she gave to the Republicans as she patronizingly dismissed Obama:

"I think that since we now know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold.”

Clinton couldn't stop herself from praising McCain: "The pro-McCain comments were quickly and widely panned — so Clinton repeated them. James Fallows reported on Wednesday, 'In a live CNN interview just now, Sen. Clinton repeated, twice, the ‘Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience, I have a lifetime of experience, Sen. Obama has one speech in 2002? line. By what logic, exactly, does a member of the Democratic party include the ‘Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience’ part of that sentence?'"

Eric Zorn, a normally low-key columnist for the Chicago Tribune, reacted with uncharacteristic alarm: "Last week, I posted twice on a statement by Hillary Clinton that struck me as one of the lowest and most destructive things I've ever heard one candidate say about a rival candidate in the same party."

Former Senator Gary Hart was one of the many long-term party activists who was appalled by Clinton's pumping up of John McCain while patronizingly dismissing Barack Obama. He decried her comments: "By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party's nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her."

(See the graphic, here.)