Is She a Trojan Rabbit? By MAUREEN DOWD, NYT Op-Ed Columnist, May 11, 2008
If Hillary Clinton were to become Barack Obama’s vice president, would she take the back seat or would she just always be plotting, draining him of his magical powers?
My own two cents, not Ms. Dowd’s? Yes, she will. Hillary, if she accomplishes her electoral goal, would become the Ma Barker of American politics. She is about to rob the nation of Hope. If she could not win it outright, she wants to kill it in its crib.
Now Barack Obama faces a true dilemma: how best to punish Hillary Clinton.
After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual, mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been trying to do to him: putting her in her place.
Her last resort is to continue to press the “Psssst — he’s a black man” tactic. She insisted to USAToday, after the North Carolina and Indiana slide, that she has a broader base, citing an Associated Press article “that found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
So how does Obama repay Hillary for running a campaign designed both to unman him and brand him as an unelectable black? Is the most ingenious way to turn the screw by not choosing her as his running mate, or by choosing her?
It is, verily, a sticky wicket.
Leave a Reply