When Left and Right Come and Reason Together

You know that whatever progressives may merely suspect is a bad idea is indeed a genuinely bad idea when even right wingers of both sexes agree that, sure enough, it's a really bad idea.

Such is the case of Hillary Clinton as Barack Obama's running mate; and yesterday, two scribblers from the right -- George Will and Peggy Noonan, writers not infrequently way, way over there on the right -- acted as amici curiae to the progressive court in presenting outstanding briefs against it.

Before visiting parts of their unusually cogent arguments, I'll say this much on my own behalf about all the talk of late of what it is that Mr. Obama now owes Mrs. Clinton. And what he owes her is this: nothing.

Obama can't say that, but I can.

Had Hillary retreated at an appropriate time -- when, that is, Obama's nomination was mathematically certain; had she never so reprehensibly wielded a GOP-usable axe on videotape against Obama; and had she properly acknowledged the historic watershed of a major political party having, after 400 years of racial injustice, nominated a man of African descent for the nation's highest office on the night of that man's de facto nomination -- maybe, just maybe, Obama would have owed something to Clinton.

But not now. It's far too late, and any material offerings from Obama in the face of such personal abuse and disrespect would, in time, be correctly perceived by the general electorate as the worst sort of unmanly and desperate weakness -- scarcely the kind of image he can afford to project against a bona fide war hero.

But, I hear you cry, it's not about Hillary, it's about her loyalists and the harm they could do if left unplacated. Enter Ms. Noonan, whose counterargument is not only persuasive, but historically accurate:

As for reports of their rage, there are always dead-enders, and frantic lovers of this candidate or that. This goes under the larger heading "lonely people." But there's reason to think, and some Democratic insiders do think it, that a lot of the supposed pro-Clinton furor is ginned up on Web sites by the Clinton campaign, and even manufactured by the Clinton campaign, to prove Clinton loyalists are real and their demands must be met.

There are authentic "dead-enders" for sure, yet by definition there is nothing Obama could ever do to appease them. So let them be. Perhaps they lie in wait in significant numbers, perhaps they don't. There's no way to know with any absolute certainty. We'll learn that in November. That's just the way it is, and Obama must work around it -- but history suggests there are far fewer than what Hillary suggests.

And some who now fancy themselves as ultimate members of the loyal dead-end club undoubtedly will come around to realizing the insult implied in Noonan's other observation: Hillary "doesn't have 18 million voters, she got 18 million votes. It is telling the way she thinks of them, as if they are working-class automatons awaiting her command."

Mr. Will wrote a similarly devastating critique of the Hillary-as-veep idea, noting many of the by-now familiar objections. But two of them I thought he worded with exquisite poignancy, worthy of repetition here. First, with respect to the future, there is

the dotty idea that Barack Obama should choose to have Hillary Clinton down the hall in the West Wing, nursing her disappointments, her grievances and her future presidential ambitions while her excitable husband wanders in the wings of America's political theater with his increasingly Vesuvian temper, his proclivity for verbal fender benders and his interesting business associates.

And second, with respect to the present:

Behind the idea that Obama should run in harness with Clinton is this wobbly theory: Because the Republican Party is in such bad odor, if you unify the Democratic Party, that will suffice to win the election, and she is a necessary and sufficient catalyst of unity. But she is neither. She would be a potent unifier of John McCain's party, thereby setting the stage for exactly what the nation does not need: another angry campaign of mere mobilization rather than persuasion.

Put another way, voters don't vote for a vice presidential candidate, but in this case, some voters sure might vote against one.

Hillary can say what she likes in her wretchedly belated concession speech today, but I suspect what Obama recommended in their doublesupersecret meeting the other night was this: Please, just go away. Oh, you might pop your head out the door now and then and tell the press you like me lots and intend to vote for me, but other than that, just go away. Please. In the last five months you've done the party nothing but harm, your ego-easing sights in 2008 on the 2012 election could continue to do the party harm if left unchecked, and I can't afford your self-absorbed presence any longer -- particularly, God forbid, as my running mate. In short, I can't afford your use of my campaign as a vehicle to make amends with my base.

Shucks, Hillary, even some of the more disinterested and -- in this instance, I think -- honestly objective conservatives see the sense in that.