Jun 4, 2008 9:52 am US/Eastern
The Dance Continues
(CBS4)
The band may have stopped playing, but the dance between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continues. Last night Clinton refused to concede and allowed her surrogates to leak the news that she was open to being vice president.
On a night in which history was made, a night in which an African American for the first time became the standard bearer of his political party, the focus was on Clinton. She has effectively backed Obama into a corner. Either he offers her the number two spot on the ticket or he further alienates her supporters.
Before the polls closed Tuesday in South Dakota and Montana, I spoke to Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Broward Democrat who is one of the national co-chairs of Clinton's election campaign. She told me she had just spoken to Clinton about the possibility of being on the ticket with Obama.
"I actually urged her and told her I thought that it would be a phenomenal ticket, and that I thought that it was a ticket that would be unstoppable," Wasserman Schultz recalled, "and she sounded very comfortable with the idea."
Nothing in this process, however, feels comfortable.
The Clintons – and in this instance I am including both Bill and Hillary – are having a tough time coming to grips with the notion that this is no longer their party. For the last 16 years, the Clintons have dominated Democratic politics. And the idea of a young, upstart senator from Illinois wresting control of their party away from them is hard to accept.
This dance that is taking place today between Obama and Clinton – the conciliatory language from Obama, the defiance of Clinton – may well decide who wins in November. If Obama steps on Clinton's toes – to torture the dance metaphor for while longer – then he will likely lose in November.
In his speech last night, Republican nominee John McCain fawned over Clinton and her supporters, begging them to give his campaign a closer look. McCain's tone was both mean and dismissive of Obama. "Pundits and party elders have declared that Senator Obama will be my opponent," he declared.
Unless Clinton steps in herself, and aggressively starts defending Obama, McCain's efforts to woo her supporters may begin to take hold.
But what is Clinton's price for such support?
For Wasserman Schultz the answer is obvious – take Clinton as the VP.
"The strengths that these two candidates have would really balance out the ticket," she said of a dream ticket. "We have the strengths of their experience, the strengths that they both have demographically across the country; coming together would be an opportunity to put together an unstoppable ticket. It is so incredibly important that we not risk losing the general election in November. We cannot afford a third Bush term."
But has Clinton hurt Obama by refusing to concede? And if he is forced to choose Clinton to be his running mate, will he appear weak in his first major decision as the presumptive nominee? And can Obama afford the baggage that comes with Clinton, most noticeably Bill Clinton.
"The important thing for Senator Obama is to figure out the best way to unify the party and to unify all of the supporters that supported other presidential candidates," Wasserman Schultz said. "This was an extremely close race. The person who does not win the nomination in this primary season will have lost it by about one percent and it is incredibly important that we put aside our differences and come together very quickly. And the best way to do that in my opinion is to make sure we bring Senator Clinton onto the ticket."
And if he doesn't?
"There is no "if-then-statements' at this point," she said.
But the threat is implicit.
"If we are going to make sure that we keep Florida in play," Wasserman Schultz said, "then having Senator Clinton on the ticket would really make that possible."
Yesterday I also had the opportunity to speak to Jon Ausman, a member of the Democratic National Committee from Florida. It was Ausman's proposal to cut Florida's delegates in half that ultimately was accepted by the DNC's Rules Committee.
On a day when he knew Obama would be the nominee, Ausman yesterday endorsed Clinton. He said he did so to send a message to Obama to select Clinton as his running mate. Ausman, one of those fabled superdelegates, spent more than 20 minutes on the phone with Clinton yesterday discussing what she should do next.
"We need to pull together and unify," Ausman said. "If I was on the Barack Obama campaign, I would look at what happened in Ohio, and Florida and Pennsylvania, two out of three of which he has to win to be president, and say what can I do to win those states, and by golly look at Hillary Clinton, she is polling better in all three of those states than him."
Can Obama win Florida without Clinton?
"I think it would be tough," he said. "He has got to think about this very deeply."
And quickly. This cannot be allowed to fester for weeks. If he is going to take Clinton as his running mate, he should do so quickly. If not, he needs to make that clear as well and move on.
After all this is his party now, and he should get to call both the tune and the dance partner.
(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
