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John Kerry for Vice President?

A top aide to U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) during her presidential run this year said Tuesday night that U.S. Sen. John Kerry has been vetted to be presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama's running mate.

Now there's an idea for how Barack can shake the "elitist" rap.

Howard Wolfson, who was the primary spokesman for Clinton's campaign, said that he has "heard some rumors" about Kerry (D-Boston) being vetted on Fox News Tuesday, where he has since become a political analyst.

Wolfson also said that Kerry would be a smart pick for Obama.

Howard must still be a little hot over Hillary's loss to Obama.

"Look, John Kerry has been vetted," Wolfson said. "He ran for president. I think he would be a strong choice. He'd be a good choice, especially in the context of foreign policy."

Bayh's War Record

Can Evan Bayh be seriously considered as Barack's running mate? Considering that Bayh voted in favor of war with Iraq, it would seem unlikely.

Mr. Bayh, a cautious Indiana Democrat, acknowledged it had not been an easy
decision. “There is reluctance in my heart, as I know there is in the other senators, to contemplate the use of force,” Mr. Bayh said, adding that he concluded “we were
simply left with no other credible alternative to protect the safety and
well-being of the American people.”

If Barack is to adequately feign being an honest politician, how can Bayh be in the running?

Bayh was a popular two-term governor who could make Indiana, typically rock-solid Republican in presidential contests, a competitive state and appeal to blue-collar Democrats who have been slow to embrace Mr. Obama.

Is that all it takes for Barack to betray his anti-war supporters once again?

Mr. Bayh’s support of authorizing force in Iraq stands in sharp contrast to Mr.
Obama’s oft-stated view that he showed the good judgment to oppose the conflict
from the start. After his vote, Mr. Bayh in early 2003 joined Mr. McCain as an
honorary co-chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which made
regime change in Iraq its central cause.

How will the anti-war crowd feel about taking it to the chin again from Barack?

Eli Pariser, the executive director of the antiwar group MoveOn.org, said that Mr. Obama had a variety of factors to weigh in making a choice and that he was not ready to say that Mr. Bayh should be ruled out because of his views at the start of the war.
“We are not going to get into which particular person is good or bad,” Mr. Pariser said.

Once again, it's 'win at any cost' for the good government crowd.

Barack admits he was talking about race

Barack now admits the obvious, as his campaign manager did before him, that he was referring to race when he said:

So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, `he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name,' you know, `he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.'

The powerful part of the statement has been ignored. It's the "what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," part that makes this explosive when combined with the issue of race.

"I am black!" he is shouting out - "You better watch out, because the racist Republicans are coming to get me!"

"I'm young. I'm new to the national scene," Obama said. "My name is Barack Obama. I am African-American. I was born in Hawaii. I spent time in Indonesia. I do not have the typical biography of a presidential candidate. What that means is that I'm sort of unfamiliar and people are still trying to get a fix on who I am."

This is Barack being cute on race - he wants to use it to his advantage by notifying voters of the danger, but he also wants to be the 'post-racial' candidate. If Barack is going to use race as a shield in this election, isn't it time to let go of the claims that he is transcendent?

Meanwhile, the mere inclusion of a blond female in a McCain ad on Barack is designed to stoke the latent racial angst in Americans, we're told, maliciously injecting race into the campaign.

Democrats accused McCain of cynically turning things on their head; by crying foul, they claimed, McCain managed to put race front and center just as he was stepping up his personal attacks on Obama.

Is Barack just trying to keep the minority vote stoked, or does this also work to create a 60's style paradigm in the election that keeps his suburban liberal affluent voters motivated?

Obama benefited in the Democratic presidential primary from anger stirred by suggestions that his rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, and her surrogates were using race to appeal to white voters. Although Obama never explicitly made that case -- and usually works to downplay his ethnicity -- he is thought to be counting on strong black support in November to win battleground states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, and to put Republican-leaning states such as North Carolina and perhaps even Georgia into play.