Running Mate

I’ve been busy with marking, so I haven’t had time to write much. The only thing that brings me out of the woodwork briefly is the Obama candidacy, now that it appear to be a lock.

Hillary has made it clear that she would like to be on the ticket, even if it is as second banana. This isn’t surprising since it’s a heartbeat away from the Presidency and everyone knows just how many hearts have stopped beating by being positioned to close to the Clintons.

However, regardless of the personal danger involved in choosing Hillary, I think there is really only one obvious choice for Obama. Not that I want the Democrats to win in November, but if I were one of the three VP pickers, I would be telling Barak that he needs John Edwards. He’s as liberal as Hillary – not that this really matters in a VP candidate – but he doesn’t have the baggage of high negatives.

He’s a Southerner to balance out Obama’s Indonesia/Hawaii/Illinois/Kansas mother and Kenyan father background. This is better than Hillary’s Illinois/Little Rock-but-never-really-Arkansan/New York residential trail. Obama may play well in Peoria, but he’s also got to win Plains, Pascagoula and Poteet.

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Hyperbole on the Stump

John Edwards campaigning in Iowa:

“We have so much good to do because we stand on the shoulders of our parents and grandparents and twenty generations who came before us who made absolutely certain that they gave us a better life.”

Twenty generations? John Edwards knows all of his ancestors back twenty generations? I do quite a bit of genealogy and I can trace back to a handful of ancestors as far as ten generations, and two back eleven which takes me back about 500 years. I know nothing of the character of most of these people beyond my great-great-grandparents. So everyone who came before Edwards and his audience, and by extrapolation all Americans he wants to elect him, going back 1000 years or so made absolutely certain they gave the present generation a better life?

I think he should stick with parents and grandparents, which while not universally true as there are certainly a number of these who have been scoundrels, at least makes a bit more sense.