Got Stature?
16 June 2008 10:17 am by Taylor Marsh
BY TAYLOR MARSH
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You bet. This is a must
read post-primary article, written by John Heilemann.
On the veepstakes:
Naturally, the answer depends, first of all, on whether Obama decides to
offer her the VP slot. For all the talk of her trying to muscle her way onto
the ticket, one senses in her a genuine ambivalence about whether she wants
the job. If Obama does offer it, however, she will have no choice but to take
it. She is all too aware that if she turned it down and he lost this fall,
she would be blamed even more loudly than she will be already, even though
in her view his downfall is foreordained, and has nothing to do with her.
That seems correct. Going forward, Clinton will be the go to get.
If the call doesn’t come from Obama, Clinton will return to the Senate—where,
in many ways, she will instantly become the first among equals. “She’ll
be greatly, greatly enhanced,” says former senator Bob Kerrey. “She’ll
have the most valuable e-mail list in the Senate. She’ll be the most
heavily sought out person in the Congress as an endorser, a fund-raiser. Everybody
is gonna want to have her come and campaign for them. She’s gonna be
at the very top of everybody’s list.”Clinton tells me she has no qualms about returning to the Senate. “I
think I’m both more prepared and more impatient than I was before,”
she says. “And I’m even more committed to the agenda we laid out.”
At the top of that agenda, of course, is universal health care, an issue on
which Clinton would almost certainly take the lead if Obama is in the White
House…
This section jumped out:
Back in January, Clinton told me that she made “a fundamental miscalculation”
in fixating so obsessively on the commander-in-chief hurdle. “I frankly
made a wrong assumption about how to present myself to the country,”
she said. But looking back on it now, she has concluded that she had no other
choice. “This seemed to me to be looming over everything,” she
explains. “I knew if I couldn’t cross it, nothing else would matter.”
That Clinton clearly did cross that threshold is an enormous source of pride
for her, an accomplishment she expects will have lasting implications despite
her loss to Obama. “I believe that I’ve succeeded certainly in
diminishing if not eliminating the commander-in-chief barrier for women candidates
in the future,” she says.
I think she’s eliminated it.
In fact, Hillary’s stature and the excitement her presence added to the presidential
race is unquestioned. That’s why it’s such a bore right now. McCain v. Obama
just doesn’t do it for many of us. I’ll work against a McCain presidency, but
the pizazz in politics has gone out of this race like a slow leaking Obama victory
balloon.
Jerome concurs.
