Hillary and SCOTUS, Redux

Earlier this week, a small item in the New York Post went unnoticed by most people, this author included. And while the source is the Post, a newspaper of questionable journalistic value, the item is still worth commenting on.

Rupert Murdoch's NYC tabloid mouth-piece reported that the key reason for the continued frostiness between the Clintons and Obama is because Obama rebuffed the Clintons' demands that Obama promise to put Hillary on the Supreme Court in return for their strong campaign support. This is fascinating, particularly given our strong interest in this possible eventuality.

Is this story true? I do not know if I can say that I believe it 100 percent, but it is cerainly possible that such a thing happened. Indeed, as we have discussed, the Supreme Court may well be the only thing Hillary would be interested in getting from Obama, short of being his running mate (which obviously did not happen), or perhaps Secretary of State (which is still a big longshot, but not impossible; though I wonder if Hillary would covet this or if Obama would accept Hillary in his top cabinet slot if he wouldn't consider her for veep). In short, we have always believed that a SCOTUS appointment would be highly appealing to Senator Clinton, and certainly something that she would covet, much less accept if offered the opportunity.

Back when we first wrote about this issue, we believed that for purely political reasons, Obama should have strongly considered making such a guarantee to Hillary in return for her backing to help unite what was at the time a highly fractured Democratic Party. Pushing aside the negatives for the moment, such a move would have had many positives including getting the Clintons on board 110 percent (no small matter given their national popularity), as well as appealing to disenchanted women and liberals early in his administration.

At the time, we felt that getting Hillary on board was vital given the fractured Democratic base, and that given Obama's position of weakness at the time, he needed to give a lot to Hillary to get her support. This goes beyond the veep argument, which we discounted back in May and June (which differed from my position around August, when I believed that Obama should have tapped Clinton, for various reasons I won't get into), as it tapped into broader fears that an inability to get Clinton on board could have costed Obama the whole enchilada.

Well, as we have seen in recent months, especially since the Democratic convention, our fears at that time were not so much unfounded as they were probably a bit misstated. I guess that this shows why guys like David Axelrod are so smart and make the big bucks, and why I make nothing and give opinions that no one reads. Team Obama was right to stay calm and let the Democratic base -- particularly women -- ease back into the fold. Obama and Axelrod may have had had the same fears I expressed in June, but they were willing to wait them out.

More importantly, Obama smartly did not resort to selling the whole store to get Hillary's support. Assuming the Post blurb is accurate, Obama saw guaranteeing a SCOTUS appointment as too high a price to pay to get Billary's unconditional support. And you know what? In hindsight, he was absolutely right. This is clear when you consider not so much his present standing in the polls, but more specifically his strength among Democrats in the trendlines. Take the R2K/Daily Kos tracker from today, for example, where Obama now leads among Dems 88-to-8. Unquestionably, those voters came home, even after the Palin pick created enormous fears among jittery party loyalists.

Looking back at our discussions on HRC-SCOTUS, an argument could made that our underlying premise -- that Obama should have dangled a SCOTUS appointment as a means of locking up the Clintons, and thus Democratic support generally -- was dead wrong. I won't fully dispute that, though at the same time, as I have said many times, many of our posts are written to advance storylines that I find interesting and intriguing, whether or not they are totally right or smart (though, I like to think they are usually smart).

But let me point out that even today, the idea of putting Clinton on the Supreme Court should someone like John Paul Stevens or Ruth Bader Ginsburg retire in 2009 is not completely out of left field or stupid, politically or otherwise. It would have a lot of positives, as well a lot of negatives and inherent baggage.

I will add that what I perceived as one of the two biggest reasons that the appointment wouldn't ultimatley happen -- that nominating her would put too many conservative Senate Dems in an impossible (and dangerous) position -- is something I no longer view as an iron-clad rationale against the appointment. I think that while Clinton is still a polarizing figure, her favorable numbers are ironically higher now than they have ever been in her entire public life. I am sure that this fact is something that bothers her immensely, but in terms of a future appointment, she would likely not illicit the same high level of hatred and anger that she once engendered. I am not saying she would not encounter opposition or that she is beloved now; I am merely pointing out that she is not as hated as she once was. This might mean the difference for a handful of Senate votes that could determine her confirmation.

Still, even if all of that is accurate, and Democrats were to win 10 Senate seats in November, her age and the fact that an appointment could bog down a young Obama administration and come to define the new President heading forward would likely be enough to kill any chance of this happening, especially if a vacancy were to occur in 2010 with key midterms happening at the end of that year. Furthermore, the fact that the Clintons have been so unhelpful has probably only led Obama to dislike Billary even more, and it makes it even less likely that he would give such a plum to Hillary when he would not actually have to do such a thing. I guess time will tell, but there are a plethora of arguments 'for' and 'against'.

This is a fun issue to look at it, and maybe we will have the opportunity to revisit it once again in the next couple of years.