I don't have tremendously strong feelings on the vice-presidential pick. But the unity ticket stuff isn't convincing to me. Good arguments have been made against it across the blogosphere, but one I'd add is simply organizational. You don't want a toxic working relationship between the president and the vice-president. Imagine President Obama, with VP Hillary Clinton and shadow-VP Bill Clinton, wants to pursue a legislative strategy that the Clintons think is a bad idea. How will they feel when Obama ignores their 8 years of White House experience and goes his own way? Will they be able to keep their sprawling universe of well-connected confidantes from leaking tales of their displeasure to the press? Will they want to? What happens when the first Time magazine cover comes out with Obama staring down the Clintons, and the tagline is, "Who's Really Running the Country?" It's such an obvious story that it can be predicted, with almost perfect certainty, right now. Will he sideline them? Will it sow seeds of mistrust? Running the executive bureaucracy is hard enough without trying to navigate between two competing power poles. In the past, strong vice-presidents have, for that reason, been sidelined and marginalized, as Kennedy did to Johnson, and as Johnson did to Humphrey. It's not that their counsel wasn't potentially valuable, but that the top priority for the president was asserting the primacy of his own authority, and that meant going further than one might have wanted in locking away his vice-president. That sort of thing is not an effective use of White House resources or talent, and it's not a desirable dynamic in the executive branch. And though this doesn't often get a lot of attention, a smoothly functioning executive branch will be crucial to the success of the next president's agenda.
