From the NYT:
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign said Thursday that Mr. Clinton had not had private conversations in which he was pushing her for the vice presidency or arguing that she deserved it, and that he believed the choice of a running mate was a personal one for the nominee.
And "personal" for the Clintons means that one of them is not a part of the decision?
Pollster’s bottom line:
The net effect of some 16 years of public debate was a 10 point decline in opposition and a 12 point rise in support.
There is an obvious backlash moment in 2004, but it soon recedes and the trend continues. We will continue to have ups and downs. But we have changed consciousness for ever.
That’s, er, the Conservative candidate in the Crewe by-election in Britain – and now member of parliament. A massive 17 point swing to the Tories. The Anglo-American mood is restive.
A new ranking list of English-language sites from a big news aggregator in Europe, Wikio.
From al-Jazeera (via Kos), some raw reporting not widely aired in the US:
"I can tell you this. My goal is to have the best possible government. And that means me winning. So, I’m very practical in my thinking. I’m a practical guy. One of my heroes is Abraham Lincoln. Awhile back, there was a wonderful book written by Doris Kearns Goodwin called ‘Team of Rivals,’ in which she talked about how Lincoln basically pulled all the people he’d been running against into his Cabinet. Because whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was, ‘How can we get the country through this time of crisis?’ I think that has to be the approach one takes to the vice president and the Cabinet," – Barack Obama, in Boca Raton today, according to Andrew Romano.
My piece on Obama and the "Team Of Rivals" can be read here.
A video on Labour’s class warfare in the Crewe by-election tonight. Tame by Rove standards, of course. But too much for many British voters. The Tories are poised to win another crucial test. Brown’s government appears to be crumbling.
I have to say that I am heartened by the Texas court ruling. I found the forcible separation of so many children from their mothers to be a very unsettling act of government power. The "imminent danger" standard seems a fair one to me.
A reader writes:
I had the great honor of clerking at the United States Supreme Court (and before that, clerking for a judge on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals who was later appointed to the Supreme Court). It is a wonderful, wonderful place to be – if you like quiet, if you don’t mind having a staff of perhaps six or so people total, if you enjoy spending your days reading briefs, opinions, and memos by kids a year out of law school, and if you like keeping a low profile. (And if you don’t mind wading through the many cases that don’t make the headlines because — unless you are a law nerd — they are boring.)
In other words, even though it is a position of great power, it is one where daily life bears not the slightest resemblance to daily life for a person near the top of the Executive or Legislative branch.
Your decisions are made in private, then issued publicly in written opinions mired in legal precedent. You are not supposed to discuss publicly matters that are or may come before the court, and you are not supposed to elaborate much on your decisions after they are made. And, although people may argue about how well this standard has been maintained, you are expected to behave with greater decorum than is expected of our elected officials.
I cannot claim to understand HRC or her ambitions. But I suspect this kind of life would drive her crazy, and Bill even crazier.
But my fear is not that she will be offered this position and refuse it – there is no harm in that. My fear is that she will accept it, and then turn it into something hyper-politicized, where every opinion is announced from the bench, and accompanied by public speeches condemning a conservative ruling, urging the legislature to overturn a result, encouraging protests, etc. And what precedent might this set for the next time a Republican President gets a Supreme Court nomination?
I hope I am being far too pessimistic in my assessment of how HRC would behave as justice. I would be delighted to be proven wrong. Certainly I have no doubt at all that that she has the intellectual heft for the job. But I worry.
The Field can now confirm, based on multiple sources, something that both campaigns publicly deny: that Senator Clinton has directly told Senator Obama that she wants to be his vice presidential nominee, and that Senator Obama politely but straightforwardly and irrevocably said “no.” Obama is going to pick his own running mate based on his own criteria and vetting process.
