A reprint from the Chigago Tribune by Eric Zorn

I know, I know. More than 15 million Democrats have voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries and many of them are so invested in her candidacy that they’re threatening to stay home in November or vote for Republican in waiting John McCain in the very likely event that the Democrats nominate Barack Obama for presdient.
Obama should choose her as his running mate to honor and woo those Clinton supporters. He should choose her as his running mate to help soothe the still escalating intra-party hostilities. He should choose her as his running mate because she runs far stronger than he does among certain core Democratic constituencies.
And for those reasons he probably will offer her the No. 2 spot on the ticket.
Yet here are eight reasons it’s a bad idea:

1. Choosing Clinton would belie Obama’s message of change. Whether you admire her or not, you have to acknowledge that Clinton’s an old-style, legacy Democrat. Obama’s candidacy is premised on a break with the past.

2. Choosing Clinton would belie Obama’s repudiation of the old way of doing politics. Clinton and her surrogates are tough campaigners who have gone hard after Obama (see below) trying to draw him into the fight. And on those occasions where he and his team have responded in kind, Team Clinton has smirkingly asked whatever happened to the politics of hope?

3. Bill Clinton. He’s a brilliant man and an amazing politician, but he’s shown an inability to stay on message and keep his foot out of his mouth as he campaigns for his wife. Obama already has Rev. Jeremiah Wright to worry about — he doesn’t need another loose cannon out there ready to fire.

4. She’s polarizing. For all that she’s shown how popular she can be with certain groups of primary voters, Hillary Clinton also remains a controversial and unpopular figure. Here are her “unfavorable” ratings among all voters in a set of recent national polls, with Obama’s unfavorability ratings in parenthesis: 37 (30) ; 45 (37) 46 (38) 49 (40) 54 (39) 53 (37).

5. She’ll be the star of anti-Obama commercials: “It’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” she said on March 6. “I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy.”

6. She’s gone beyond the pale in attacking Obama: “I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. Sen. John McCain has a lifetime of experience that he’d bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002,” she said on March 4. Clinton delivered this insulting, dismissive, destructive critique several times, and it’s a bell she can’t unring.

7. She’s toting unpacked baggage. Clinton likes to claim that she’s been thoroughly vetted and withstood all the Republican attacks of the 1990s and now any bad news about her is simply old news. It’s not so. Obama hasn’t called her on this claim because he’s trying to preserve the image that he’s above the politics of scandal. And the Republican operatives are lying in the weeds, boosting Clinton’s candidacy and licking their chops, waiting to pounce.
Not only are there all the “–gate” scandals from her husband’s administration that were set aside rather than fully resolved in the public’s mind (travel, file, cattle and so on), but the issue of the pardons Bill Clinton granted on his way out of the door and the mysterious funding sources from the Clinton Presidential Library are still out there.

8. Picking a real teammate is better than picking a political counterweight. Bill Clinton of Arkansas himself surprised the pundits in 1992 when he chose as his No. 2 another young moderate Democrat from from the mid-South — Al Gore of Tennessee — and the two ran a vigorous, consistent campaign. Obama would do better to pick someone of his generation who shares his general outlook and who can speak passionately and convincingly to voters about why they should support Obama.