So Wrong, It's Gotta Be Right

While I wasn't paying much attention to the Internet, Robert Reich went and said something egregiously stupid:

So the Democratic ticket for 2012 is Obama-Clinton.

Why do I say this? Because Obama needs to stir the passions and enthusiasms of a Democratic base that’s been disillusioned with his cave-ins to regressive Republicans. Hillary Clinton on the ticket can do that.

My Political Prediction for 2012: It’s Obama-Clinton

There aren't a whole lot of things I know about politics, but one of them is surely this: I know, within a half percent of the electorate or so, how many voters who don't live or work in the Washington, DC area care about who the vice presidential nominee is on a ticket. That number is zero. No one cares. Face it, next to who is second in the American League's most walked category each year, there is nothing that matters less in our lives than who is the person who sits around for four years not quite daring to hope that something bad happens to the President.

Unless the Vice President is named Dick Cheney, the person occupying that position has almost no power to affect anything of importance. In fact, President Bush would have been within his rights to tell Cheney to shut the hell up and stay down at the Naval Observatory until he was needed, which would be about the same time that Hell froze over.

That's the first thing Reich got wrong.

The next is what we're upset about. It's not about Obama's "cave-ins" to the GOP. It's that this is what he wants to do, and that no one in the Democratic Party has been willing to tell the truth about that, let alone stand up for what the party should be about.

What they do instead is suggest things like changing Vice Presidents.

All that wrong in a few sentences.

The only thing he may not have gotten wrong is that Obama will make this change. It won't make any difference, but there are plenty of folks like Reich who think it will. One of the things you can count on from our leaders is that when the going gets tough, the tough change the org charts. If I thought Hillary Clinton still had her own ambitions about being President some day, I'd think it unlikely that she'd accept such an offer, but she's in her mid-sixties now. She may really be thinking about retiring soon.

Being associated with the failures of a second term of Barack Obama's presidency would be an excellent way to guarantee having nothing better to do than go home. I suppose that under those circumstances, being the first female Vice Presidential candidate who got to move into the Observatory would be achievement enough.

So it's possible that Reich could be wrong, and still be right. Sadly, that's how things are these days in our nation's capital. Often, doing something dramatic is more important than doing something that makes sense.