An OPEN LETTER TO Barack Obama:

>>  Recent Press Reports say:  Obama ridicules notion of VP slot. It's premature, he said of accepting the second spot on the ticket.

Well not really!!  You are not ready for prime time yet!  A powerful VP slot would give you the exposure and maturity you need to EARN your right to hold down one of the most important jobs in the world.  You have had a spectacular rise, it is true . . . leap-frogging and eloquently talking your way to where you are now. 

Russian, Venezuelan, Iranian, Chinese, and Palestinian leaders will make mince meat out of you !!!   If ever you ever get past McCain (which is un likely). 

Just sit down and think about what the Republicans did to a true war hero in 2004, and what they did to a future Nobel Prize winner in 2000! 

Join an UNstoppable Dream Team!!!

Take a STEP BACK and look at the “big picture”!!!

Barack Obama, you must work out a VP deal with a commitment (written guarantees / detailed working papers) that your role will be MUCH MORE than that of the traditional VP, much more that that of key advisor, much more that just being a key influencer on staffing of Cabinet Slots and Supreme Court appointments.  You will be a truly powerful VP! 

Your hubris and wit might, at this critical juncture for the Democrats, causes you and your wildly enthusiastic team of supporters to be short sighted.  Just think, if it is change that you REALLY want … would not hooking up with Hillary, bringing a huge majority into BOTH houses of Congress on your joint coat tails be the way to do it???!!!???

It is now YOUR moment . . . either seize it in an intelligent way, as a path to the white house (in 4 or 8 years), or squander it away on a miasmic dream. 

For no matter who you choose for a running mate, you are doomed to failure!  And even if you miraculously get into the White House, with a split do nothing Congress to work with, you will be just like Jimmy Carter. (By the way . . . I admire Jimmy, and the wild enthusiasm he also generated . . . but Jimmy has been a much better former president then president).

Mr. Peters,

When Obama wins the Democratic nomination does that mean you'll be voting for McCain?

Dream on....

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Interesting online poll. It looks like some folks may choose to opt out of voting in November if Clinton is on the ticket.

In a November general election between Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton, I would vote for:

Hillary Clinton
49.6%
John McCain
50.4%
15819 total responses

In a November general election between Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama, I would vote for:

John McCain
27.9%
Barack Obama
72.1%
17529 total responses

TOP OF THE TICKET Blog Excerpts

Two sitting senators in a presidential election make U.S. history. But voters aren't fond of D.C. insiders. Also, will Arnold help McCain, Obama and the race issue and Clinton muddles Ohio history.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-...

Now, about Ohio . . .
Hillary Clinton's exuberance about Ohio is perfectly understandable; her convincing win there Tuesday put her back on her feet in the hunt for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Still, she's gotten a little carried away in touting the state's importance.

In her victory speech in Columbus, she rightly characterized it as "a bellwether state . . . a battleground state." Then she sent us scurrying to the history books with this claim: "And no candidate in recent history, Democrat or Republican, has won the White House without winning the Ohio primary."

Well, it depends on what your definition of "recent history" is.

In Ohio's 1960 primary (Clinton was 12 at the time), the man who won the White House later that year, John Kennedy, took a pass on the contest. The Democratic delegates initially were pledged to a favorite son, then-Gov. Michael DiSalle.
Similarly, favorite sons in both the Democratic and Republican primaries won in 1964 and 1968 (a timeline creeping ever closer to "recent history").

Since then, it appears Clinton was correct -- but in a very technical way. As Andrew Cayton, a history professor at Miami University in Ohio, noted, the state's primaries typically have been held when the likely nominee has surfaced in each party -- and not so long ago, most expected that would be the case this year.

Clinton, in her round of stops on TV shows, continued to promote Ohio as having outsize influence. "If you cannot win in Ohio, you cannot win the presidency," she said.
True enough for Republicans -- as virtually every political reporter knows by heart, since the GOP was founded in the 1850s, not one of its nominees has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio.

Among Democrats, however, Kennedy ended up taking the inaugural oath despite losing Ohio to Richard Nixon, and Franklin D. Roosevelt won his fourth -- and final -- term in 1944 despite losing the state to Thomas Dewey.

Fix Pick: A 'Knife Fight'? [BO vs HRC]
By Chris Cillizza
washingtonpost.com's Politics Blog
11-March-08
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2008/03/fix_pick_a_knife_fight.html

When Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president early in 2007, he pledged to do things very differently.

In that address -- delivered in Springfield, Ill., on Feb. 10, 2007 -- Obama decried the "smallness of our politics, the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and the trivial, our chronic preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle the big problems of America."

"The time for that politics is over," Obama added. "It is through. It's time to turn the page right here and right now."

At the time, and for much of the early months of the campaign, many neutral observers suspected that Obama's pledge to do things differently when it came to partisan politics had placed him squarely in a box.

When Hillary Rodham Clinton attacked Obama -- as inevitably happens in politics -- the senator from Illinois seemingly had only two options -- ignore the attack or respond. Ignoring the attack is a guaranteed death wish in politics, as campaign after campaign has shown that a negative charge unanswered persuades many voters. But if Obama chose to respond, he ran the risk of alienating the very people attracted to a campaign that promised to avoid the rancor of partisan politics.

As the campaign wore on, that supposition did not bear itself out. Clinton did attack, but when it happened Obama parried each and every thrust -- insisting that the American people wanted to move on from this sort of politics.

Time after time in debates and on the campaign trail, Obama would rebut a charge from Clinton by politely chiding her for engaging in an old style of politics that no longer resonated with the public. Obama's "I am a rubber you are glue" strategy paid off -- until the Ohio-Texas Two-Step.

In the lead-up to those critical primaries on March 4, Clinton's campaign questioned Obama's readiness to be commander-in-chief and his veracity on the issue of NAFTA. It appeared to work, as Clinton won both states -- thanks is no small part to wide margins over Obama among late deciding voters.

On the morning of March 5, an e-mail arrived in reporters' inboxes from the Obama campaign that called on Clinton to release her tax returns -- a sign that the Obama campaign was going to step up its aggressiveness.

That move is a major mistake, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks in a fascinating, must-read column that frames the dilemma Obama faces better than anything we've read since last Tuesday.

In "Playing by Clinton Rules," Brooks dissects Obama's decision to push back hard thusly: "These attacks are supposed to show that Obama can't be pushed around. But, of course, what it really suggests is that Obama's big theory is bankrupt. You can't really win with the new style of politics. Sooner or later, you have to play by the conventional rules.

"The Obama people seem to have persuaded themselves they can go on the attack, but in the right way. They can be tough and keep their virginity, too. But there are more than five long months between now and the convention."

Brooks adds that by getting down and dirty in a daily exchange of attacks with the Clinton campaign, Obama is, in fact, playing directly into Clinton's hands. "Clinton can't compete on personality but a knife fight is her only real hope of victory," writes Brooks."She has nothing to lose because she never promised to purify America. Her campaign doesn't depend on the enthusiasm of upper-middle-class goo-goos."

For Brooks, any attempt by Obama to play by rules that the Clintons all-but-wrote is a recipe for disaster. A prophet of new politics cannot be seen as playing old style politics, according to Brooks. "New politics is all he's got," he writes. "He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him."

Is Brooks right? Has the box so many people thought Obama trapped himself in at the start of the campaign started to become more and more confining? Or can Obama find a way to draw contrasts with Clinton without appearing to be just another politician?

This will be the debate of the next six weeks of the campaign. Offer your own thoughts in the comments section below.

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By Chris Cillizza |  March 11, 2008; 5:00 AM ET  | Category:  Eye on 2008

Click here to know the rest of the story: http://www.blogforamerica.com/view/24119