Bill Clinton was down in Mississipi yesterday, pushing the Obama-as-Hillary's-Veep meme hard, calling it an "unstoppable force" in the '08 election. Quotes and link after the flip.
Via TPM
Now Bill Clinton is saying it. Here he is, floating the idea of a joint Hillary-Obama ticket at a town-hall meeting today in Mississippi:
"She said yesterday and she said the day after her big wins in Texas and Ohio and Rhode Island that she was very open to that and I think she answered explicitly yes yesterday," Clinton began, referring to Hillary's own answers on the topic in recent days.
"I know that she has always been open to it, because she believes that if you can unite the energy and the new people that he’s brought in and the people in these vast swaths of small town and rural America that she’s carried overwhelmingly, if you had those two things together she thinks it’d be hard to beat. I mean you look at the, you look at the, you look at the map of Texas and the map in Ohio. And the map in Missouri or -- well Arkansas’s not a good case because they know her and she won every place there.
"But you look at most of these places, he would win the urban areas and the upscale voters, and she wins the traditional rural areas that we lost when President Reagan was president. If you put those two things together, you’d have an almost unstoppable force."
Via the Page. Note the extent to which he volunteered her thinking on this. This report suggests that he offered this in an answer to a question. But Hillary floated this yesterday, and, now, Bill today -- and it's hard to imagine that both Clintons would be talking this up in tandem by accident.
The Clinton's are trying to coopt potential Obama voters with the false-promise of a "two for the price of one" option. Barack needs to slap this one down in unequivocal terms, before it spreads any further. And by that I mean, drop the "premature" qualifier and stick to the simple, firm statement "I will not be a vice-presidential candidate."