The idea of a Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton "unity ticket" has been floated quite a bit the last few days. But, seriously, is the idea any good? We asked a few friends of the magazine to weigh in. Here's Michael Tomasky, editor of Guardian America.

A part of me has lately warmed somewhat to the idea of Barack Obama asking Hillary Clinton to join him as his running mate. But on balance I still think he can do better in both substantive and symbolic terms.

The case for the unity ticket is pretty obvious and is implied in the adjective. Ed Kilgore made the case well here yesterday, and it's an argument worth taking seriously, which is why I've come around to it a little. And yet. ...

Actually there are several and yets. Number one: Substantively, something tells me that Vice President Clinton couldn't work very well with President Obama. She'd always be thinking, "Well, I'd have done it this way." She would demand, because of her stature, some kind of major portfolio. Her track record with major portfolios is other than encouraging.

And if Mr. Clinton as First Husband seemed problematic, what of him padding around the Naval Observatory? A former president married to a current president would at least mean that the two were working more or less as a team. A former president married to a current vice president who really thinks she should be president creates the potential for way too much mischief that could undermine the president.

Back around 1999 and 2000, when Rudy Giuliani's aides were floating the idea that he'd be a superb vice presidential choice for a GOP nominee, Al Sharpton was asked to comment on the prospect and said something like: Whoever hires Giuliani as his vice-president better also hire a food-taster. This wouldn't be that bad. But let me put it this way: If I were Obama, I'd try to avoid general anesthesia for the duration of my presidency.

Okay, back to politics. One problem is that I think a Clinton choice would be aimed solely at Democrats. It would be popular among them, but what about non-Democrats? Let's note something that's been little remarked upon so far this season. People keep talking about the stunning turnout in these primaries, and, for primaries, this has surely been the case. About 33 million people have voted.

But how many people voted in the last general election? Around 122 million. With interest seeming higher this year, and if Obama can indeed register many new voters, there is every reason to think that 100 million more people will vote on November 4 than have voted cumulatively over the last 18 weeks. Hillary on the ticket would clearly go down well among a large majority of the 33 million who've voted. But what about the other 100 million? How would putting Hillary Clinton on the ticket strike them?

It would depend of course on who they are. She has performed reasonably well among independents, especially more recently, so maybe this is a false alarm. But I suspect that by and large, her popularity is limited to Democrats. Which means I'm not sure she'd help in the traditional way vice presidential candidates are supposed to help.

And it's possible she could even hurt. If she'd been the nominee, or if she still somehow manages to become it, we can be certain that many millions of conservatives would come out to vote against her. They would not do so in anything like similar numbers if she were merely the bottom half of the ticket. But some number would. She could serve as a sort of "tipping-point" of negative motivation for conservatives. That is, Obama combined with X--Sam Nunn, say; and he's not my candidate, but I mean that kind of person--would be bad from the conservative point of view. But an Obama-Clinton ticket would be an out-and-out crisis. Obama has enough of his own problems.

--Michael Tomasky

Related
Alan Wolfe: Using identity politics to move beyond identity politics.
Ed Kilgore: Obama should ask her, and she should accept.
Mark Schmitt: The party doesn't need that much repairing. 

It's a good thing for Obama that he's pretty much got the nomination in the bag, because I don't think this video is going to get him that many votes (H/t T.P.):

--Jason Zengerle

The idea of a Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton "unity ticket" has been floated quite a bit the last few days. But, seriously, is the idea any good? We asked a few friends of the magazine to weigh in. Here's Mark Schmitt, senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

There are fights within the Democratic Party that reflect deep structural and ideological rifts that, in turn, are embodied by individual candidates: Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy vs. Hubert Humphrey in 1968, George McGovern vs. everyone else in 1972, Ted Kennedy vs. Jimmy Carter in 1980. These breaches, because they went so deep, took a long time to heal, and a "unity ticket" might have helped.

But then there are fights that really have much more to do with the personal qualities and appeals of the candidates.  Such a fight can seem similar to a real breach, because the candidates do divide the electorate sharply along lines of class, race, ethnic background, education, gender, and age. But that doesn't mean that the Democratic electorate is inherently divided along those lines, or divided by other issues. If the candidates disappeared, so would the divisions. These have been two strong, appealing candidates, each of them attracting votes rather than repelling them (the staggering turnouts in the Democratic primaries, often approaching or even surpassing the total votes received by John Kerry in 2004, are proof), and who happen to have a natural appeal to different demographic groups. As they split the electorate almost evenly, passions rose higher, and accusations of racial insensitivity, sexism, elitism, and pandering grew louder. Major figures in the Democratic establishment could see their careers ending, while others would emerge to replace them. All this makes for ugliness.

But in two months, I suspect that these things will all be the equivalent of political trivia questions: What did former BET President Bob Johnson accuse Barack Obama of? Which informal Obama advisor referred to Clinton as "a monster," and in what newspaper? Those of us who know the answer will be shocked to recall how deeply immersed we were in them.

And that's why the "unity ticket," while not necessarily a bad idea, is fundamentally unnecessary. The Obama-Clinton divide will heal naturally; it does not require radical surgery. Clinton should be considered as one might consider any other candidate for the vice presidency: in terms of what she brings to the ticket and to the eventual presidency.

**Experience. Certainly Obama would be helped by someone who could balance his relatively short period in national politics with either length or breadth of experience: A stronger background on foreign policy and security, some experience as a governor or in the executive branch, or just a few more years in office would be helpful. Clinton certainly has somewhat more experience: She's lived in the White House, she's served four years longer in the Senate, she's clearly mastered military matters. But there are many other candidates who have at least as much direct experience, from the successful governors Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, to Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, or Evan Bayh--who at 52 has 22 years in public office--or Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate who recently made his 11th trip to Iraq.

**Ideological contrast. One could argue that Obama's liberalism needs a contrast, in a running mate from the slightly more centrist or conservative wing of the party. In many primaries, Clinton did better with more conservative Democrats, and the fact that more of her voters seem to express an intent to vote for McCain suggests that they are more conservative. Obama is in many ways the most plain-spoken liberal to win the Democratic nomination since Walter Mondale. But while Clinton is probably inherently more cautious than Obama, her record marks her as more conservative on only one issue, and that's the one on which she is most out of step with the vast majority of Americans--the decision to go to war in Iraq.  And yet, she still suffers under the reputation, developed during the 1990s, that she is some sort of quasi-socialist. That's the worst possible combination: perceived as more liberal than she actually is, while being demonstrably more conservative only on less popular points. Voters are clearly more comfortable with actual liberal policies than they are with the idea of liberalism, which is why Republicans will go after Obama's misleading rating as the "most liberal" senator rather than his actual issue position. Clinton does nothing to balance that perception, though there are several politicians who would: All of the successful governors are perceived as pragmatists, not ideologues. Bayh, Senator Jim Webb, former Senator Sam Nunn, and several others would be perceived as more moderate.

**Region or character type. The primaries created the idea--which would have seemed implausible a year ago--that Clinton is the champion of the white working class, particularly the white working class of Scotch-Irish descent in the Appalachian belt. Obama, meanwhile, has been characterized as the candidate of the McGovern coalition of the upper-Midwest and New England, of affluent college graduates and African-Americans. One could argue that the dream ticket fuses these two regional and socio-economic factions. But if they were not fighting with one another, Obama and Clinton would look a lot more alike as cultural and regional archetypes than different. Despite her legendary grandparents from Scranton, Pennsylvania, (I've got those, too--maybe I could be a working-class hero!), Clinton is really, just like Obama, a pure product of the sensible, reformist political culture of Chicago and the upper-Midwest; Terry McAuliffe's claim that you'll find her at the bar downing shots and beer is as implausible as it is an undesirable trait in a president. Several other prospects, such as Webb, Reed, or Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, would legitimately be seen as fighters for the working class, offering a much more tangible balance to Obama's cool and slightly academic distance. 

There are some reasons that the "unity ticket" might be an actually bad idea, notably that a vice presidential candidate needs to be able to subsume his or her own ambitions and ideas for as many as eight years. Hillary Clinton subsumed her ambitions for the first 53 years of her life; there's no reason to expect that she should do so again. But even aside from that, the unity ticket is unnecessary, not only for the party and for Obama, but for Clinton herself. As one of the handful of senators who can automatically command national attention, she will be a central figure in the new era of liberal possibility that will begin in January.

--Mark Schmitt

Related
Alan Wolfe: Using identity politics to move beyond identity politics.
Ed Kilgore: Obama should ask her, and she should accept.

In general, I dig quirky scenes-from-the-trail color. But CNN has a snippet from Obama's press plane so weird and stupid it must be seen to be believed. Titled simply "Obama in jeans," it presumably aims to show us the famously dapper candidate in a dressed-down moment. But you can't see the jeans that well in the grainy footage, and at some point in the 1:01 video (the last quarter of which is a replay of the first quarter), it looks more like the unseen cameraman is trying to give us a good look at Obama's package.

No wonder the media keeps getting gigged for having a crush on the guy. 

--Michelle Cottle 

 Karl Rove, writing in today's Wall Street Journal:

This will be a very difficult year for Republicans. The economy's shaky state, an unpopular war, and the natural desire for partisan change after eight years of one party in the White House have helped tilt the balance to the Democrats.

Gee, Karl, any other factors you're leaving out here? Republican scandals and incompetence? The most unpopular president in the history of polling?

--Jonathan Chait

...always have, always will.

I saw the Tarantino-scripted, Tony-Scott-directed True Romance twice in theatres, but was one of the few to do so, as the movie made a paltry $11.5 million during its initial release. But it became a cult success on video, especially once Pulp Fiction made Tarantino a household name, and Maxim has gathered the cast and filmmakers for a 15th anniversary testimonial. As is usually the case with such exercises, half of it makes you like the movie less. But there are a handful of pretty entertaining anecdotes. A few highlights:

Quentin Tarantino (screenwriter): When you’re a nobody, it’s murder to get anyone to read your scripts. So my thing was making the first page fantastic, with dialogue that grabbed you right away. The original True Romance script started with a long discussion about cunnilingus. Most people said the script was racist and that the grotesque violence would make people sick. I told Tony, “Read the first three pages. If you don’t like it, throw it away.”

Scott: He gave me two scripts: True Romance, which was his first script, and Reservoir Dogs. I’m a terrible reader, but I read them both on a flight to Europe. By the time I landed, I wanted to make both of them into movies. When I told Quentin, he said, “You can only do one.” 

And this:

James Gandolfini (Virgil, Mob henchman): I was glad to just be observing Hopper and Walken. We were crowded into this little trailer when Hopper gets shot, so everyone was offered earplugs. I remember Walken didn’t ask for any, so, being very cool, I didn’t ask for any either. I couldn’t hear for three goddamn days.

[Dennis] Hopper: Tony has this special gun that you fire and flames come out the side. I said, “Tony, you’re not putting that gun right to my head.” He said, “It’s fine, do it to me.” So a crew guy shot him, and he started bleeding. He said, “OK, that won’t work.”

And this:

Clarence and Alabama’s plan to sell the stolen cocaine in L.A. allowed Tarantino to add a layer of Hollywood satire to the story. And Scott, whose Last Boy Scout was coproduced by fast-talking über-producer Joel Silver, was ready to inject his own observations....

Saul Rubinek (Lee Donowitz, Hollywood producer): I was auditioning and Tony said, “You got him exactly right. That’s Joel. You nailed him.” And I said, “Sorry, I’m confused—Joel?” “Joel Silver,” he said. I had no idea who that was.

Scott: The Hollywood satire is affectionate. But Joel didn’t talk to me for a while after that.

And this:

Michael Rapaport (Dick Ritchie, wannabe actor): I don’t like roller coasters. They had to con­vince me to ride it, and I threw up, so we had to reshoot it a week later. The second time, they sedated me. Some shots show me smiling because I’m drugged out of my mind, and some show me crying because I honestly thought I was going to crap.

Read the whole thing here. 

(via The House Next Door)

--Christopher Orr

The Federal Election Commission, you will recall, is currently unable to function because four of its six seats are vacant, thanks to a long-standing nomination dispute between the Bush administration and Senate Democrats. In what looked like a surprisingly conciliatory gesture, Bush agreed to send up a new slate of nominees. On closer inspection, though, what he's really done is send a big favor John McCain's way.

Democratic election-law guru Bob Bauer explains why this is the case. The primary objection Democrats had to Bush's old slate was that it included Hans von Spakovsky, a former Bush Justice Department official who turned the department's Civil Rights Division into a de facto arm of the RNC. Bush, displaying his characteristically sharp logic, attempted to resolve the situation by sending up a new slate of nominees that...still includes von Spakovsky. On the plus side, Republicans now appear willing to let the Senate vote separately on von Spakovsky (previously, Mitch McConnell had insisted all the nominees be voted on together), so Democrats will have a fair chance to vote down his nomination.

But here's what the GOP gets in return: Bush has dropped the re-nomination of Republican commissioner David Mason. It was Mason who had raised objections to McCain's sketchy, possibly illegal plan to opt out of public financing for the primaries despite initially accepting it and (sort of) using the public money to secure a bank loan to fund his campaign. Taking Mason out of the picture removes a major headache for McCain and lets him evade responsibility for the campaign's questionable financial maneuvering. It also clears his path to accept public financing for the general election, which requires a functioning FEC to approve. This likely explains why Bush is acting now--as Bauer points out, making sure the FEC can do its job is not normally a Republican priority.

Of course, the presumptive Democratic nominee has his own campaign finance conundrum, but I wouldn't be surprised if Obama ends up using McCain's flip-flopping here as an excuse for weaseling out of his own (now inconvenient) pledge to accept public financing for the fall campaign.

--Josh Patashnik 

 I just received an odd fund-raising plea from Bill Clinton. It begins:

Dear Friend,

I want to tell you about the day I had on Monday. I stopped in nine towns throughout North Carolina, starting the day at 7:30 a.m. in Elizabeth City and ending with a rally in Raleigh. That's the most stops I've ever done in a single day--for any campaign. And I couldn't be happier to work that hard for Hillary

I talked to a lot of people that day, and one thing was crystal clear--people want Hillary to stay in this race until every last voter has a say....

OK. So that's what Bill says he was seeing on Monday. Not to nitpick, but that was before Hillary suffered a major whoopin' in North Carolina and barely survived in Indiana. In campaign time, Monday is ancient history.

Then again, I suppose Bill is vastly less eager to tell us what all those superdelegates he and Hill have met with since Tuesday have been saying--even if they are the only people now with the power to give his wife the win.

--Michelle Cottle 

Mike asks, "if Hillary thinks white Americans won't elect a black president, is it so transgressive for her to say it out loud?" Matthw Yglesias agrees, "I think Clinton's meaning is perfectly clear -- she really does do better than Obama among white working class voters in Democratic primary elections."

The offensive part of Clinton's quote -- "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" -- isn't that Clinton is saying white Americans won't support Obama. It's that she's conflating hard-working Americans with white Americans, as if non-white Americans don't work hard also. That sentiment is often implied when somebody praises the hard work of small town residents or blue collar workers, but Clinton actually said it outright. I'll have more on this in a column soon.

--Jonathan Chait

Some excellent home news to report: Our very own Kate Marsh won an Edgar Award for her haunting children's novel, The Night Tourist. It's a prestigious piece of hardware, and huge congratulations are in order. ...

 --The Editors

Over at The Stump, Mike asks:

If Hillary thinks white Americans won't elect a black president, is it so transgressive for her to say it out loud?

Generally speaking, one should not get in trouble for stating what they believe to be the truth. But it's a matter of context. Clinton is saying this about the man who is going to be the Democratic nominee for President; these comments are not happening in a vaccum. And if she really cares about electing a Democrat in November, she probably should not be saying such things. 

--Isaac Chotiner 

The idea of a Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton "unity ticket" has been floated quite a bit the last few days. But, seriously, is the idea any good? We asked a few friends of the magazine to weigh in. Here's Ed Kilgore, managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online magazine.

There are a lot of obstacles to an Obama-Clinton "unity ticket." Maybe she doesn't want to be vice president. Maybe they or their staffs or their spouses can't get along. Maybe Clinton can't offer sufficient assurance of loyalty and subordination, or a practical plan to eat many unfortunate words she said about Obama during the primary competition. 

But if these obstacles can somehow be overcome, Obama should ask her to run with him, and she should accept. 

I know this is a deeply unpopular, even infuriating, suggestion to many Obama supporters who've watched the Clinton campaign savage their champion for many months. Indeed, some of them think the vanquishing of the Clintons from power in the Democratic Party is the whole point of the Obama "movement." Why, many ask, should Obama take on Hillary's "baggage" after finally defeating her at the cost of so much blood, sweat, tears, money, and approval-ratings points? 

The answer is simple, and for me at least, overwhelmingly compelling. Right now the Democratic Party is deeply divided, as evidenced by the steadily rising number of Democratic primary voters threatening to take a dive in November. Those divisions are, in fact, John McCain's most important political asset. Yet they are not about ideology, or about policy issues, really; they are about these two Democratic politicians, and all the symbolic freight each has assumed.  The easiest way, the fastest way, and the only sure way, to heal these divisions is to unite their sources on a single ticket. 

Sure, many, perhaps most, disgruntled Clinton voters will "come home" in any event, and Obama could appeal to some vulnerable constituencies through a different choice for running-mate. But nothing quite scratches the itch like a unity ticket. 

Would Hillary Clinton as a vice presidential candidate overshadow Obama? There's no reason to think that; his candidacy remains the big political story of the year. And let's have no illusions that if the Clintons are assigned a minor role in the fall campaign, they won't be a distraction. For one thing, the Democratic National Convention, no matter how well stage-managed it is, will be "about" Obama's narrow margin of victory and his and others' efforts to unite the party. A unity ticket will greatly enhance the positive side of that story. As for the much-cited idea that Hillary's presence on the ticket will "energize" conservatives, I think the events of the last few weeks have abundantly shown their willingness to whip themselves up in a hate frenzy towards Barack Obama as much as Clinton. 

Symbolism aside, Hillary Clinton would bring some tangible political assets to the Democratic ticket. Even if you dismiss her relative strength in the primaries among white working-class voters, older voters, Appalachians, or Catholics as ephemeral or irrelevant to a general election campaign, there is simply no denying her personal and positive appeal to professional women and Latinos, with whom she has generated as much excitement as Obama has among younger voters and African-Americans. She would also bring some national security street cred to the ticket, which is an Obama vulnerability that I suspect is being underappreciated at the moment. 

If the unity ticket is going to happen, it ought to happen as early as possible. We need to put the nomination contest behind us, and get on with the task of ending the Bush Era once and for all.

--Ed Kilgore

Related

Alan Wolfe: Using identity politics to move beyond identity politics.

Mark Schmitt: The party doesn't need that much repairing. 

Yesterday, Dick Morris wrote this in The Hill, dismissing the idea that Hillary would adopt the Mike Huckabee "play nice" strategy for the remainder of her campaign:

Hillary won’t avail herself of that option because it does not serve her long-term fallback position: a shot at the nomination in 2012. If Obama is elected this year, he will seek reelection in 2012 and Hillary would have to face taking on an incumbent in a primary in her own party if she wanted to run, a daunting task. But if McCain wins, the nomination in 2012 will be open. And it might be worth having. McCain will be 76 years old and the Republican Party will have been in power for 12 years. Not since FDR and Truman has a party lasted that long in power. When the Republicans tried to do so, in 1980 and 1992, they fell flat on their face.

Hillary is using white, blue-collar fears of Barack Obama to try to stop him from getting nominated or elected.

She is playing on his “elitism” by hammering him on blue-collar issues and is mincing no words in painting him as a stranger to blue-collar white America.

Hillary is attracting the votes of cops, firefighters, construction workers, union members. Are they in love with Hillary? They can’t stand her. But they are terrified of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers and the various influences to which Obama seems to be subject. By playing on those fears, Hillary is undermining Obama’s ability to get elected.

This is not a byproduct of her continued candidacy — it is the goal. She, the consummate realist, must know that she has no practical shot at the nomination herself after her numbing loss in North Carolina and her paper-thin margin in Indiana. But she welcomes the opportunity an ongoing candidacy offers to bash Obama and to drive a wedge between him and the voters he must have to beat McCain.

When I first read this, my initial response was that Dick Morris was full of it and that his hatred of the Clintons really knew no bounds. But, in light of this (which happened after Morris wrote his column), now I wonder if he really does know what he's talking about. Scary thought.

--Jason Zengerle 

The idea of a Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton "unity ticket" has been floated quite a bit the last few days. But, seriously, is the idea any good? We asked a few friends of the magazine to weigh in. Here's Alan Wolfe, a TNR contributing editor and professor of political science at Boston College.

I am for the dream ticket. This is the Democratic Party's year; why not take advantage of it by having the first African-American and the first woman as president and vice-president in our history? There was no more graphic illustration of the changing demographics of this country than those Republican debates: elderly white men with red ties, one droning on after the other. The oldest of those drones is now the Republican candidate for president. Obama and Clinton would not only beat him badly; they would attract future supporters to the Democratic Party in droves.

None of this ought to be said if Obama chose Clinton only because he is black and she is a woman. But these are the two most talented politicians the Democrats have, one, as it happens, adept at the high road, the other at the low. It is also the case that both have genuine leadership abilities. The Democrats could use identity politics to move beyond identity politics. The country would be better off for it.

The contest between Obama and Clinton created hundreds of thousands of new Democrats, raised huge sums of money from small donors, increased turnout in the primaries, and dominated the airwaves. It is energy that should be used, not wasted. And it would make Bill the equivalent of Lynne Cheney.

--Alan Wolfe

What's that coming over the horizon? Why, it's a general election!...

To prepare for landfall, we dug through our archival vaults--back to 1996--to bring you TNR's past coverage of John McCain and Barack Obama, the likely Democratic nominee.

Take a look through. Make sure you're equipped for November.

--Cara Parks & Barron YoungSmith