So, I vote for our keeping our eyes on the prize - POTUS, and despite all denials, I am happy that Obama is beginning to see the clear sky now that the fog has cleared. I don’t see another candidate that could help him win easily as Senator Hillary Rdoham Clinton could, and I vote for her as the vice-presidential candidate to Senator Barack Obama. It is a winning combination that is formidable.
Today, the media has been abuzz about the Senator Barack Obama’s vice-presidential candidate search, especially given that both Obama and Clinton traveled together in his plane, together with Caroline Kennedy, who is one of those Obama chose to vet his vice presidential candidate. I have always been very excited about the Obama/Clinton duo as candidate and running mate, which might run counter to some of the things I wrote during the primaries. And I believe there are quite a lot of people who would disagree with me. The primary wounds are still raw, and people are still angry on both sides. On Tuesday, Wall Street Journal reported that some big Clinton donors are refusing to contribute to the Obama campaign, and some even vowed they would rather stay home than vote. And today, the New York Times reported the same thing, but this time about Obama’s supporters saying they didn’t want their money to be used to aid Clinton, former President Clinton or Mark Penn, the former Clinton strategist.
But aren’t we forgetting something here? Aren’t we losing sight of why Barack Obama started this campaign? The prize is POTUS, President of the United States.
Some time ago, actually I believe on the 5th of June, two days after the primaries, I had Verison send a repair man to fix my phone. It had not been working after returning from my trip to Tanzania, where I noticed an unprecedented enthusiasm for Barack Obama. I had been warned that I might be charged $91 if the problem emanated from inside the house. Okay, let me cut this story short, the problem wasn’t from inside the house, but the man spent almost three hours trying to find and eventually he fixed the problem. I had just turned on MSNBC with Chris Matthews with the five o’clock program, and there was the usual speculation about whether Obama would choose Clinton as his running mate.
The repair man turned around and said, “no way, I hate that woman for what she did to Obama, she should be far away as possible from where Obama stands.” I looked at him with pity and at the same time with contempt.
I looked him in the eye, and said to him, “You see, that’s the problem with black people. We always forget to focus our attention on the prize, and that prize in this case, is POTUS.” He asked me, what is that, and I replied “The President of the United States of America.” He seem flustered and perplexed, and I said to him if Barack Obama wants to win the White House, he needs to have the best vice-presidential candidate who could help him get there, and that candidate to me should be Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.” I asked him whether he knew how many people voted for her during the just concluded primary, and he shook his head, and I said 18 million people voted for her, the same number that voted for Obama. He nodded his head and left.
As I noted earlier, there are some Obamites who have drawn a line in the sand, which under no circumstances would they extend a hand acrosss and reach out to the Clintonites to say welcome back to the fold. It is wrong, and it definitely is not helping the candidate. There is also the argument that the Clintons have a lot of barrage, and rather than be a asset to Obama, would on the other hand be a hindrance and tarnish his image as a change-agent. But, I know that Obama is not falling for this kind of foolish rhetoric. After all, look at the positions he has lately taken with regards to Supreme Court rulings on the issues of Americans being entitled to carry guns, no execution for children rapists, and just today on the issue of FISA.
There are those who still feel anger at the tone of Senaton Clinton’s attacks on Obama during the campaign, but I believe that as Obama has acknowledged himself, those attacks have made him a better candidate, especially with the drawn-out primary. Could you just imagine what would happen if the Rev. Jeremiah affair had been emblazoned on the news in the month of October, what that would have done for Obama’s prospect as a shoo-in for the presidency?
People forget easily how some of the past primary fights have been. For instance, let’s look at the Carter/Kennedy fight in 1980. Carter had 1,981 pledged delegates, enough to win the nomination, to Kennedy’s 1,225, with 122 uncommitted. Kennedy tried to out-maneuver Carter during the convention by advocating for “open convention”, whereby the pledged delegates would choose who to vote for at that time, since as he inferred, conditions had changed and the situation demanded somebody like him to be the nominee. The acrimonious debate was played out in front of the entire nation, but eventually Carter prevailed and went on to win the nomination as well as the presidency.
In the 2000 campaign, we saw the bitterness on the part of Senator Bill Bradley, who didn’t win even one primary but still had accumulated 400 delegates who he refused to release even after conceding to Vice President Al Gore. This is what the New York Times of March 10, 2000 had to say:
After an often bitter 14-month $30-million campaign in which he failed to win a single primary, former Senator Bill Bradley ended his quest for the presidency today, saying the time had come to unite the Democratic Party behind Vice President Al Gore.
But while Mr. Bradley pledged to work for Mr. Gore’s victory in the general election in November, he did not release his roughly 400 delegates, presumably to give him more influence at the Democratic National Convention in August.
Moreover, Mr. Bradley said he would not hesitate to criticize the vice president if he engaged in the same kind of negative campaigning against Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, the presumptive Republican nominee, that Mr. Bradley had accused Mr. Gore of using during the primary season.
‘’I hope that he’ll run a better campaign in the general election,’’ Mr. Bradley said of Mr. Gore.
Apart from this kind of bitterness, we have seen bitter opponents unite for the sake of winning the presidency. Look at 1960 when Senator Jack Kennedy decided to select his opponent in the primaries, Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, because he believed Johnson would help him win, and he did. Or that of the bitterest battle between Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr. in 1984, with accusations of voodoo economics. Yet, Reagan turned around and selected Bush as his running mate, and they won.
We can therefore see that what happened between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton is part of the political process, it has happened before. Those who wish to win have always found a way of eschewing the bitterness of the primaries, and coalesce around one another for the prize, the presidency of the United States. Those who say that the Clintons carry a lot of baggage, I say to them, yes, but the clintons have been tested and they have always won, and in this case they almost did. They could never be discounted as a major force in Democratic politics, and they bring a constituency which still have a lot of reservations to Obama’s candidacy, including blue collar workers and women.
Unlike Bradley, Senator Kennedy has started working seriously for elections election, whether it is emotionally or artificially, who cares, the fact is that she is vigorously involved. Could you imagine her recounting her bitter experiences as Bradley did to Gore, how she would have excoriated by the media?
So, I vote for our keeping our eyes on the prize - POTUS, and despite all denials, I am happy that Obama is beginning to see the clear sky now that the fog has cleared. I don’t see another candidate that could help him win easily as Senator Hillary Rdoham Clinton could, and I vote for her as the vice-presidential candidate to Senator Barack Obama. It is a winning combination that is formidable.
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