Obama's New Challenge: Clinton's Push for V.P.

Tuesday was supposed to be Barack Obama’s big day, and in many ways it was. Media outlets all over the world trumpeted his push past the magic number of 2,118 delegates and at long last he was able to declare – in the jam-packed St. Paul arena that will house this summer’s Republican National Convention – that the Democratic nomination was his.

And yet for much of the day and night, the airwaves were consumed with talk about his apparently vanquished opponent and her decision to tell a group of supporters via conference call that she’d be receptive to serving as Obama’s running-mate.

Clinton is an unusually disciplined politician, expert at the art of avoiding, sidestepping or ignoring questions that she’d prefer not to answer. She did not have to respond directly when the V.P. subject was raised on the conference call, and by answering as she did – telling her supporters that “I’d be open to it” – she was surely aware of what would happen next.

As soon as the call ended, word leaked to the news media. CNN interrupted its programming with a bulletin about Clinton’s sudden readiness to join forces with Obama. Clinton supporters – including those on the call, like Charlie Rangel and Jose Serrano – touted her statement and talked publicly of the incomparable value she’d supposedly bring to an Obama-led ticket. And pundits hashed over the subject of the “dream ticket” for hours, with more than a few wondering aloud whether Obama really has any choice but to offer the spot to Clinton.

The coverage underscored two realities as the Democratic race enters its Veepstakes phase.

One is the trouble Obama would be inviting for himself by handing the vice-presidency to Hillary (and Bill, for that matter). If they were to win election as a team, Obama may have witnessed on Tuesday a preview of his vice-president’s willingness to skillfully shift the spotlight away from him and to herself in pursuit of her own agenda. And this all came a day after Bill Clinton won international attention for his assault on a magazine writer. Would a President Barack Obama want to enable such distractions at the highest levels of his own administration?

More significantly, though, Clinton’s V.P. trial balloon suggested a revealing strategic calculation on her part. Not only does she apparently want the No. 2 spot – a matter of fierce debate these past few weeks – but she also doesn’t seem to think she can secure it by traditional means. That is to say, those who covet the V.P. spot typically engage in a familiar dance, showering the presidential nominee with praise and support and denying – at all times – that the vice-presidency is on their mind at all.

This ritual is even more important when the V.P. aspirant ran against the presidential candidate in the primary season. Just consider the dramatic shift in Mitt Romney’s tone toward John McCain since withdrawing from the Republican race. In many ways, the former Massachusetts governor waged a cutthroat campaign against McCain during the primaries – prompting several cutting and highly personal rebukes from McCain. But since leaving the race, Romney has not only endorsed McCain, he’s hit the road on his behalf, raising money for him, speaking on his behalf, defending him on television and even making a personal trip to his Arizona home just two weeks ago.

In the process, he has slowly built good will – or at least lessened some of the bad will -- with McCain and his team and has generated support among influential party leaders for his V.P. candidacy. Of course, anytime Romney is asked if he’s interested in being on the ticket, he laughs and pretends it’s a far-fetched question. In other words, he’s waging a textbook campaign for the V.P. slot.

It’s the same route that George H.W. Bush – the last primary season runner-up to win a spot on the fall ticket – took in 1980. In the primaries, he branded Ronald Reagan’s tax-cut plan “voodoo economics.” But as Reagan pulled away in the delegate race, Bush changed course. After scoring a surprise win in Michigan that May, Bush nonetheless withdrew from the race, advised by his campaign manager (Jim Baker) that it was time to start worrying about getting on Reagan’s good side. Two months later, Bush and Reagan were joining hands in Detroit.

But Clinton signaled on Tuesday that she doesn’t believe she can – or doesn’t believe she should have to – build up Obama’s comfort with the idea of her as his vice-president. Instead, she seems interested in winning the job through pressure. The media firestorm she created on Tuesday will only intensify, as long as she keeps skillfully fanning the flames. It will dominate the news for weeks. Her supporters, at least some of them, will shift the zeal they directed toward her presidential candidacy (and toward the Michigan-Florida fiasco, for that matter) into her push for Obama’s No. 2 slot.

This kind of heavy-handed strategy has been tried before, but never by someone who had a plausible chance of landing on the ticket in the first place. It was, for instance, the course that Jesse Jackson adopted in the spring and summer of 1988. Time and again, he told anyone who’d listen that he felt Michael Dukakis owed him by V.P. slot by virtue of Jackson’s second-place finish in that primary season. This posturing put Dukakis in an uncomfortable position. He never had any intention of putting Jackson on the ticket, but it couldn’t look this way, lest an irate Jackson lead a convention walk-out or – worse – urge his supporters to stay home in the fall.

But Hillary Clinton, obviously, isn’t Jesse Jackson. Dukakis managed to string Jackson along without much incident (although he bungled his final decision to pick Lloyd Bentsen, which a furious Jackson learned of from the press), but if Clinton persists in playing the V.P. card, we will be in uncharted territory. After a summer-long campaign for the spot, how would Clinton’s 1,900 or so delegates – not to mention her 18 million or so voters – react to a snub?

For Obama, it could be a nightmare calculation, trying to determine which would be worse: the problems caused by leaving Clinton off the ticket or the problems caused by having her looking over his shoulder as vice president.