I recently received the following article from a listserve. I'm still chewing on the content of the article, including the underlying tone. Without fully coming to my own conclusions, I thought I'd offer this article to our shared space and gauge some healthy and safe discussion on peoples' thoughts.

Why Hillary Shouldn't Be Obama's VP

Of Whiners and Poor Losers

By DAVE LINDORFF

It’s kind of bizarre reading about supposed “feminists” who are reportedly claiming they’ll vote for McCain rather than Obama, now that “their” candidate, Hillary Clinton, is out of the running for the presidential nomination.

First
of all, John McCain is clearly the candidate of the anti-abortion
crowd, but that’s not the half of it. He’s also the candidate who says
Anthony Scalia, John Roberts and Sam Alito are his kind of judges.
We’re talking here about guys (yeah, guys) who think a woman’s place is
in the home, and who only recently ruled that if she’s discriminated
against on the job, and doesn’t learn about it for a decade or more, a
woman can’t do anything about it, because the original offense of
underpaying her happened more than 180 days ago. McCain is also the
guy who, after his wife suffered a serious car crash and became
disabled, dumped her for a younger, richer woman. A feminist’s dream,
this guy.

And how
about Hillary Clinton? When she was supposedly getting her “White
House experience”—you know, the “co-presidency” she was supposedly part
of during the eight years her husband was president and she was First
Lady—she and Bill oversaw the “end of welfare as we know it.” What
that fine piece of legislation did was limit people to five years on
the dole. That’s for life. It doesn’t matter what misfortune befalls
you later on.

Now
many single women left to raise kids by fathers who either ditch them
or who never stepped up to the plate as fathers in the first place,
have a hard time, between lack of adequate child care facilities and
discrimination on the job, keeping the rent paid and food on the table.
Many of them need government assistance well beyond that five years—a
period of time not long enough to even get one kid into full-time
school, much less two or three. That didn’t matter to Hillary, the
great champion of women. She and Bill were busy triangulating and
figuring out how to keep their White House position, and that meant
selling out poor people, and especially poor women with kids. Welfare
had to go.

Even on
abortion rights, Clinton has been a waffler. In 2000, running for
Senate in New York, she said she would be a staunch defender of the
right to choose. But by 2004, she was saying abortion was a “tragic”
choice, and was supporting parental notification laws for minors
seeking abortion—a position she continues to hold. But abortion isn’t
a “tragic choice” for everyone. For some women—rape and incest victims,
or women who are victims of abuse come readily to mind—abortion may be
a blessed relief. For some, it may be no more tragic than an
appendectomy—and it should be no harder to get, or to pay for than one
either. There is a reason why the National Abortion Rights Action
League (NARAL) voted unanimously to endorse Obama, who has said
abortion rights are about more than just women’s right to control their
own bodies, but are about basic issues of equality.

What
the cries of “McCain, McCain!” by disappointed Clinton backers really
represent is an example of sour grapes, as well as of a certain perhaps
hidden element of racism. It is as if blacks, had Obama been the loser
in this nomination battle, were to say, “That’s it, we’re voting for
McCain!”

Obviously, African-American candidates have had to endure this problem for years. When their candidate, whether it was Jesse Jackson,
or Shirley Chisolm, or Ted Kennedy, was defeated, they have had to look
to their broader interests and decide whether to vote Republican, sit
out the election, or just shrug and vote for the winning Democrat.
Consistently, they have chosen the third option, disappointment after
disappointment.

Blacks
are supposed to stick with the Democrats, no matter what. Clinton
backers, however, don’t feel handcuffed in this way. Some of them,
apparently, feel free to abandon all their liberal principles and vote
for a right-wing, anti-abortion, fundamentalist Christian-coddling
warmonger if they don’t get the candidate they want from the Democrats.

If
these grousers and poor losers in the Clinton camp thought honestly
about it for even a moment, they’d realize that had Clinton won the
most delegates, and if African-American and liberal, educated white
backers of Obama, in response, were to adopt their position and bolt to
McCain, Clinton would be a historical asterisk, with no chance of being
elected.

In the
end, I suspect that most of the whining and the threats to switch to
McCain represent only a small, if vocal, minority. The truth is, in the
course of 54 primaries, Obama won a majority of female voters—a point
rarely made in media reports on this contest. The same can be said of
those “white—hard working white” voters who supposedly went for Hillary
Clinton in states like West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. In fact,
numerically speaking, Obama won more of those white, working class
voters than did either John Kerry or Al Gore before him. Meanwhile,
many of those male voters who voted for Hillary Clinton are probably
people who were going to vote Republican in the fall anyhow. There was
an organized campaign, after all, by Republican activists, to throw the
election to Clinton, who was seen as being easier to defeat in the fall
than Obama. That effort almost certainly gave Clinton her narrow win in
Indiana, and padded her margins in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

As for
Clinton’s fallback position of trying to make herself the
vice-presidential candidate on a “dream” Obama-Clinton ticket, Obama
would have to be crazy to go for it. Clinton brings nothing but
disaster to the Obama campaign. He doesn’t need her to win New York,
New Jersey or California, all of which he will win by a landslide
without her in November. He doesn’t need her for Illinois (her home
state, whatever efforts she made to try to pretend she was a rural
Pennsylvanian during that state’s primary). She certainly doesn’t help
him in the south, with the possible exception of Florida. She doesn’t
bring any “balance” to the ticket, given that both senators have almost
identical voting records on domestic issues. And as for the swing
states—Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico, Missouri, Ohio,
Indiana, etc.—she may do more damage than good, given the number of
independents and Republicans who have been drawn to Obama, but who have
negative feelings about the Clintons. Moreover, with the right
vice-presidential candidate—and it’s not Clinton—Obama may even have a
shot at not just Virginia, but also North Carolina and even
Mississippi—states where the percentage of black voters is high enough
that, with an energized black voter turnout, the liberal Democratic vote could be enough to turn the trick.

The Hillary Clinton campaign
has all along been about entitlement. She began her race for the White
House acting as though it was a coronation—something she deserved after
enduring eight years in the White House as second fiddle to husband
Bill. Now, having been defeated, she’s acting like she deserves second
fiddle. But the truth is, Clinton, by her shabby appeals to racist
voters, by her resort to red-baiting of her opponent, and finally by
her refusal to denounce and apologize for her shameless and calculating
backing for the invasion of Iraq, has rendered her unfit for a spot on
the Democratic ticket.

Obama can do much better than that. Yes he can.

Dave Lindorff
is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for
Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press and now available in paperback
edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net