COMMENTARY | With President Barack Obama's poll numbers foundering and the world sliding toward economic ruin, two Democratic pollsters, Pat Caddell and Douglas Schoen, believe it is time for Obama to pull a Lyndon Johnson and hand things over to Hillary Clinton.
The Clinton gambit has been proposed before, even by Republican Pete du Pont. One variant has been for Obama to dump Vice President Joe Biden and choose Secretary of State Clinton as his running mate. But Clinton nostalgia among the Democrats has gotten so intense that another serious suggestion that Obama be dumped and Clinton nominated in his place has been advanced.
There are a number of problems.
First, a man of Obama's considerable ego is not about to do the right thing and take one for the team, no matter how bad things get. Obama's view is and will always be that whatever problems the U.s. faces is someone else's fault, the Republicans mostly as Caddell and Schoen point out. In his mind, the president still feels he and he alone can save the country from calamity.
Second, it is by no means certain that Clinton will answer the call of destiny. She has been through the ringer of presidential politics once before and did not like it one bit. She seems to be looking forward to a quiet retirement.
Third, even if Clinton were to run, she would not be alone. Were Obama to do an LBJ and neither seek nor accept the nomination of his party, other players are likely to jump in, mainly to be the authentic liberal alternative to Clinton. Howard Dean, Russ Feingold and Dennis Kucinich come to mind. Such a campaign would pull Clinton to the left, away from the moderate, triangulation position that served her husband so well.
Finally, it is unclear Clinton would either run or govern as her husband did. She did, after all, develop a health care reform proposal in the first two years of her husband's term that was just as obnoxious to the American people as Obamacare has turned out to be. Clinton can be easily portrayed as a wild eyed lefty by whomever the Republicans nominate.
The bottom line is that the Democrats are stuck with Obama, for better or ill, likely the latter.
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