Hillary Rodham Clinton

John Heilemann made the case in August of 2010, but Bob Woodward really kicked it off by pretending a Biden-Clinton switch was “on the table” in October of 2010. That notion — supposedly — can be traced back to pollster grifter Mark Penn, which should have stopped anyone else from bringing it up ever again. But Jonathan Alter took another crack at it last October, and publishing speculation on the switch has become reliable Drudge-bait ever since.

Keller’s column frames the switch as something wished for, instead of predicting it based on the “chatter” of “insiders,” which helps make it merely stupid instead of inherently dishonest. But here are his arguments as to why it would be a good idea instead of a bizarre and desperate stunt:

One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.

One: What? Prove it, maybe? Two: Haha what, again? Congress will get ungridlocked if the president switches vice presidents? To a Clinton? Three: OK, but what if Obama/Clinton loses? And if Obama wins again wouldn’t any Democrat be at a disadvantage in 2016 due to historical trends anyway, making it a “safer” bet to not be his running mate, assuming she actually wants to be president still, which is not at all a given?

But we’re not dealing with observable reality here, as the bit about Clinton’s magical power to un-gridlock Congress demonstrates. We’re in the world of vague assertions about “warmth” and “voltage.” How many electoral votes would running mate Hillary Clinton be worth? Keller never bothers to attempt to make a quantitative guess. This is the closest we get:

Moreover, even if Obama can win without Hillary, there’s a lot to be said for running up the score. If she can do in 2012 what Obama did in 2008 — animate that feeling of historic possibility — the pair can lift some House and Senate candidates along with them. One reason Republicans did so well in the 2010 Congressional elections is that they overcame the gender gap and carried women voters 51 to 49. Those voters will flock back to Hillary, the more so if the Republican ticket is locked into a culture-war agenda. So, by the way, will Hispanic voters, securing such endangered states as Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.

Ooh, actual data! The Republicans won women in a midterm election. Hillary Clinton is a woman. So in a presidential general election, women will “flock back to Hillary.” Those women may be Republicans, voting in a Republican wave election, but they are women and so they will vote for Barack Obama if he is next to a woman on the ballot. (Though what about those Hispanics? Shouldn’t Obama replace Biden with a Hispanic woman, in this case? Or isn’t he in fact best off retaining Joe Biden, who is, after all, a white man? From Scranton? White men will “flock back” to Obama once they see that he is friends with a white person.)

The column isn’t just bad analysis — it’s also oddly condescending to Secretary Clinton! It complains that she owes “us” a vice-presidential run after she “raised our expectations” by running for president last time. It calls Clinton “the dutiful Methodist schoolgirl.”

Here’s the line that is secretly the worst:

But the idea that she should replace Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate in 2012 is something else. It has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction, mainly because it has been authoritatively, emphatically dismissed by Hillary, Biden and Team Obama.

Did you see that? “Kicking around on the blogs.” That’s Keller-speak for “not worth anyone’s time until a real journalist like New York Times opinion columnist Bill Keller brought it up.” The “bloggers” kicking this idea around, as I mentioned earlier, are New York magazine political writer John Heilemann, Washington Post living legend Bob Woodward, and former Newsweek senior editor and best-selling author Jonathan Alter. Those bloggers and their crazy notions!

As a blogger, I know that my silly opinion is not as carefully considered and well-informed as that of former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who is not at all simply talking out of his ass. But even if there were any hint at all that the switch was a possibility, which there isn’t, it would be a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton is already part of the president’s Cabinet, and she and her husband will already campaign for the president’s reelection. Running mates barely nudge the numbers in presidential elections, unless they’re historically awful, which Joe Biden isn’t. The Clintons are among the most divisive figures in American politics — Hillary Clinton’s recent high approval rating has come because she’s not running for anything — and relitigating every Clinton scandal would consume the national political press for weeks if she ended up on the ticket.

The running mate switch hasn’t been successful since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and the last time a president made a strategic switch to help win a tough reelection, it failed.

And I bet if Obama did make this stupid switch, Bill Keller would write some awful column about how desperate it made the president look. Unless he will have by then moved on to finally writing his “kids today sure are sexting each other a lot” piece.

Even though Mrs. Clinton has expressed no interest in running, and we have no information to suggest that she is running any sort of stealth campaign, it is clear that she commands majority support throughout the country.

Because she’s not running for anything.

So Hillary Clinton should be president instead of Barack Obama, because Obama is too partisan and divisive. America needs a bipartisan plan to attack the deficit and also create jobs, and it is Obama’s fault that that is a vague, magical fairy tale. Hillary Clinton will make this fairy tale real, thanks to the fact that, as we all know, Republicans love cheerfully working with the Clintons for the good of the nation. When a Clinton’s in the White House, partisan politics are always put aside!

This is self-evidently dumb on about ten different levels — Clinton won’t run, President Clinton wouldn’t have any more success negotiating with Congressional Republicans than President Obama, Clinton’s popularity is a result of her not being a partisan candidate for office anymore, if there was such a thing as a “bipartisan” plan to reduce the deficit while also stimulating job growth (and protecting entitlements!) we’d presumably have already decided to act on this fantastical plan, everything resembling such a plan is explicitly supported by the White House and rejected by Republicans, Republicans would not endorse said plans if President Obama promised to go away because then they’d simply want to wait for a Republican to take over for him, and Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are not, as they claim to be, Democrats — but the Journal published this regardless, as they always do with fresh tripe from Schoen and Caddell.

Schoen — who works for hypothetical future independent presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, though that fact is never, ever disclosed — is a simple hack, precisely as dumb and unprincipled as you’d expect anyone who was once Mark Penn’s right-hand man to be. Caddell angrily left the Democratic party 20 years ago, which is seldom mentioned when he’s trotted out to trash the president on behalf of the right-wing media outlets that pay his rent. But the fact that they’re classic “Fox Democrats” matters much less than the fact that all of their editorials are predictable, wrong, and patently stupid.

As I said, printing their editorials is an implicit admission that you think your audience is credulous and moronic. The people in charge of the Wall Street Journal are savvy enough about politics to know that all of this is bilge and bullshit. They know both that this will never happen and that it’d be a stupid suggestion even if it were within the realm of possibility. They just don’t care. They don’t care that they’re printing garbage, because they figure garbage will get some traffic from those engaged in the same game.

If I were a conservative American I’d be less outraged at the specter of liberal elites hypothetically disrespecting me from their coastal enclaves and much more pissed off that the people on my side are constantly peddling this bullshit.