Confronting Inconvenient Truths

6 p.m. CST--reporting from Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago

Barack Obama’s clinching of the nomination tonight is really not news. Since Super Tuesday, February 5, it has been virtually impossible for Hillary Clinton to win. Two things have kept this race alive:

1. Clinton Fear Factor. Superdelegates have been afraid to cross the Clintons and the evil (a word the ProConPundit does not use lightly), lying Clinton loyalists (i.e., Terry McAuliffe, Lanny Davis, Harold Ickes) have managed to let their ever-evolving, always dishonest arguments that she could pull it off sway media coverage of the primary. Face it. Once Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney could not win, they were asterisks. Hillary was known, for the most part, to be unable to win this primary since February.

This dishonesty has had some benefits. It has given the illusion that all of these primaries have really had an effect on the outcome. The great service to our country has been that states like Indiana and Kentucky–to say nothing of Puerto Rico, have felt that their participation in the primary process actually mattered. That has been an exciting part of this process. The trick will be, in the future, to make the process really include the voters of all states in a meaningful way. That won’t happen as long as Iowa and New Hampshire play such an inordinate and predominant role in our primary process.

2. The other advantage to the dishonesty of this process has been that Hillary Clinton has illustrated an important point by hanging on this long. That point, of course, is that Barack Obama is the most vulnerable general election candidate since George McGovern. In fairness, he is the most charismatic Democratic candidate since Bobby Kennedy. But get this: whatever you think of her (and I despise her)–Hillary Clinton is a brilliant political analyst and strategist. She truly believes that Obama is not electable in the fall. There are, of course, factors that could cause his election. Generally speaking, however, her instincts that he is unelectable are valid. They are born out by the lopsided defeats he has suffered to her in places like West Virginia and Kentucky. At a time when everyone knew he was the winner, she beat him 2 to 1. The fact that he is so rejected by lower income and working class Americans afflicted with the Caucasoid orientation should not be overlooked. It is huge. That demographic happens to vote Democrat in West Virginia and Kentucky. In huge chunks of the rest of the country, their instinct is to vote Republican.

Another inconvenient truth is that Hillary Clinton will never be asked to be Obama’s running mate. She knows that. Its just the media and her most zealous supporters who don’t. Take it to the bank: HE WILL NEVER ASK HER. HE CANNOT TRUST HER. The real issue isn’t about her being Vice-President. She is trying to leverage her significant vote totals for something. Whatever you think of Ted Kennedy, when he was defeated in the Democratic primary in 1980, he could return to the U.S. Senate well regarded by his colleagues. Her colleagues hate her. There are Republicans who have worked well with her but the Democrats fall into two categories:
1) Those who were intimated into supporting her for President and hate her and
2) Those who preferred Obama and hate her.
She has a handful of people who actually like her but the notion that she could ever be the official leader (i.e., Daschle, Dole) or the unofficial leader ( i.e., Kennedy) are inconceivable–unless she can leverage her perceived power now into something. I don’t know what it is, but its not vice-president. She doesn’t think he can win. She doesn’t want to be # 2 in a losing proposition. The only exception to this is that if she thinks she is the difference that could lead him to victory. It doesn’t matter. He will NEVER ask her.

Sidebar points:
1. It is immense hubris and in tremendous poor taste for the Clinton camp to even be talking about her interest in being VP on the night of Obama’s victory.
2. In the hard-to-imagine notion that the ProConPundit is wrong and Hillary really wants to be VP, Obama has a few Inconvenient Truths of his own to use: If Hillary is serious about wanting to be VP, watch for Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy (God willing), John Kerry & John Edwards to come out, possibly together, to say they think it’s a bad idea. Makes the ProCon one almost wish he was wrong!

PS-- Did I mention that althought I TOTALLY LOVE THE CHAOS of the Democratic primary, I reject the notion that it necessarily inures to their detriment in the fall. The spectacle of their Saturday rules committee meeting in Washington certainly argues for the generally weakening of Democrats in the fall. That aside, a lot of the excitement of their process keeps McCain forgotten.