Hello again! And welcome to the (all-woman) Mother's Day edition of your 5 p.m. Pacific Daily Open Obama V.P. Thread.
I missed yesterday because of a family birthday party, but tonight's Mother's Day get-together for the four mothers in my immediate family is more subdued and conveniently scheduled for this speculation, so this is just Open Thread #2. (I already knew Mother's Day was coming up for a few weeks, but in case I hadn't, I've had three e-mails from the Clinton family to remind me!)
Now, of course, not all of the women listed in the poll are going to be great choices (and not all listed in the poll are mothers, though 100% are daughters), and you may have better ones to list: please list away!
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My favorites on the list, in order, would be Claire McCaskill (MO), Kathleen Sebelius (KS) and Sandra Day O'Connor (AZ), and I like them all about equally well, except I like McCaskill in the Senate more, and Sebelius, I think, could use some time in the Senate or the executive branch, so she might be better for Obama in '12 if he should switch up vice presidents then and go with O'Connor or Sam Nunn (GA) of my two favorite favorite choices (Nunn my favorite along with John Edwards (NC), though they clearly do not fit in the premises of this diary) for his '08 run. This makes her, by default, my top "realistic" woman prospect. I also like the idea of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, but am not as sure about it.
I haven't had anybody agree with me on O'Connor yet here on the Kos, but I just barely started mentioning her name twelve hours ago, so maybe there's somebody out there who likes the idea. However wrong she was on Bush v. Gore, and though she might be criticized for not being strong enough on abortion issues, she did also save Roe v. Wade in its currently attenuated form from a conservative onslaught on the Court, and she's a graceful lady, a historic figure and a courageous American writer, speaker and thinker who served in all three branches of Arizona's state government, as recently as '06 did good work in the Iraq Study Group and, rare among Republicans, has dared to criticize forcefully Bush Administration executive overreaching. She is a class act.
Which brings me to a larger point, which is dismissing candidates for one or two reasons and expecting everybody else to agree. I admit I'm guilty of that, as are most who post in these speculative diaries. One person's clear disqualifier is another person's barely mentionable insignificant side issue. And that's fine, because Barack Obama will take the only poll that matters all by himself with way too much advice, and our poor power to add or detract is much too poor to worry about.
So I encourage the most blatantly irresponsible and worthless type of speculation in this thread, because it's fun, and just discussion worth having for all of us political junkies who are done worrying about Hillary Clinton for the most part and are now itching for Obama to announce the strongest ticket possible to win in '08 in the next couple of months. (That's how Hillary Clinton made this edition's list, for example--the silliest kind of useless speculation, plus somebody asked for it in the last thread.)
Oh, and here's my Obama / O'Connor image, based, like my previous Obama / Nunn image, on Lincoln / Hamlin campaign art of old, because I like campaign art of old:
Please vote, and tell me what you think (all-woman edition, but don't limit yourselves)!
Thanks,
Alex
Choose Our President 2008