From one dream ticket to another? “Clinton-Webb” in 2016?

I am convinced that Obama meant it before this campaign started that it was “too early” for him to be talking about running for President. I don’t think he intended to do so at that point. Clinton was so far in the lead that it would have seemed silly. He may have considered running as a vehicle for becoming Vice President, but he would have been candidate number one for that position in any case without running in the Presidential primaries. The groundswell for that would have been enormous: strong prospects for 16 years of Democratic Presidents, and two of the smartest, most capable Presidents in the history of the country at that.

What I think changed the picture was the high and apparently intractable negatives that continued to follow Clinton around, compounded by the mainstream media’s misplaced contempt for her. It’s all B.S. – what did she ever do to deserve it? – and I think Obama would have agreed it was B.S., but these were dangerous factors that created a serious cloud over the prospects of a Democratic victory in 2008. I believed that Clinton would have overcome much of that reaction, because a lot of it is soft, second-hand received wisdom that would have evaporated when people actually saw her in action, as they did in Upstate New York in her Senate races. What may have been some half-formed and then tentative thoughts -- that she would not be able to erode those negatives in time so he better run for the good of the party -- were solidified with his appearance on Oprah, which was by any standard a spectacular event. It was hard not to conclude that now is the time.

Clinton left herself open, too, by poor public relations concerning her Iraq vote. She would not have satisfied everyone with this answer, but it is correct: the Congressional resolution in October 2002 did not authorize the war that Bush launched, it only authorized war if Saddam Hussein continued to defy the UN resolutions. The second the UN inspection team announced not only that they had been allowed in the country – which had happened a few weeks previous – but that all restrictions and conditions on their inspections had been lifted, then the resolution had done exactly what it was intended to do. Bush was obligated to treat war as a last resort, as he had many times claimed he would, and to hold off on an invasion until the inspection team had completed its work.

The point here is that, just as I would have welcomed that order of a dream ticket, and think it would have won big, I would welcome the reverse, too, if the two could figure out that they could work together. The progressive blogosphere is full of comments on what a bad idea it would be – the impossibility of working together is one of the main reasons cited – but I thought Ted Kennedy’s remarks were way out of line (Kennedy said Obama should pick "somebody that is in tune with his appeal for the nobler aspirations of the American people").

Almost all of the negative press about the Clintons being willing to do anything to get elected, and the so-called racist cast that her campaign allegedly has taken on, has been a fabrication of the mainstream press following what Bob Somerby has trenchantly called, “The Cult of the Offhand Comment.” Another good term that’s closely related is “gotcha journalism.” The same was done to Obama at least with his “bitter” remark: something pulled out of context and reported in a way to give it a meaning the candidate clearly did not intend.

Then everyone reacts to the report of what she said, not what she actually said, and soon it is conventional wisdom that she is turning the campaign in an “ugly” direction. I saw the entire interview in which Bill Clinton (in response to a reporter’s highly obnoxious question) made his analogy of Obama’s South Carolina win to Jesse Jackson’s, and I feel I can virtually guarantee it meant nothing more than that winning South Carolina was no guarantee of the eventual nomination. The Martin Luther King "insult" was pure fabrication out of whole cloth. The most recent flap is another clear case of pulling words out of a humdrum observation and isolating them to beef them up into something divisive. As each of these episodes is debunked, one by one, people who want to believe the worst resort to the “where there’s smoke there’s fire,” argument, thereby falling sucker once again to the media’s “let’s you and him fight” inducements. (Or "if it bleeds it leads")

As far as I’m concerned, it’s still a “dream ticket.” The possibility of 16 years is not dead, either, because not only will this give Clinton many years to whittle down the negatives to the point where perhaps they can be drowned in the bathtub, but in 2016 she will be only 68 years old – as a woman, still a baby, with a very long life expectancy left, a whole lot longer than McCain's. Most of those millions of women hungering for the first woman President who have been loyal to Hillary will still be around. I don’t see that this is her last shot at all.