Would Kennedy Have Forgiven Lady Lyndon Baines Clinton?

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

OK, so maybe things seem "to just fester" under Hillary's "detached manager" style. And maybe she "delegated decisions large and small and deferred to advisers on critical questions" as her campaign was taking on water and swiftly sinking in the east, west, north and south.

And maybe she didn't "seem to know how to stop it" or even "want to stop it," as one authority on presidential management put it in this morning's New York Times.

And maybe, just maybe, those aren't exactly the most appetizing qualities in a prospective commander in chief -- removed, befuddled and careless -- but a lot of Democrats are eager to roll the dice. A few of them, however, are also beginning to hedge their bets, ever since Hillary -- or somebody -- decided the bad roll-of-the-dice Barack Obama would make a splendid vice president. Even though, as Hillary has alerted us, he's incapable of answering telephones with pluck and decisiveness at 3 A.M.

This immediately posed an executive dilemma that no one in the Clinton camp had thought of: If he's acceptable as veep, then that's a tacit admission that he's qualified as POTUS, right? Oh dear. Oh my. For heaven's sake. What, the Clintonites are now asking themselves, have we gone and done?

Well, they set themselves up for a lot of stuttering, stammering and backpedaling. That's what. And this was deliciously on display yesterday, as Clinton-booster Gov. Ed Rendell performed on "Meet the Press" some stunning cerebral backflips for Tim Russert; indeed, for all of us:

RUSSERT: So, if you believe he's acceptable as vice president, one heartbeat away from the presidency, you believe that Barack Obama is qualified to be commander in chief.

RENDELL: I think he's qualified.  I don't think he's as good a potential commander in chief right now as Hillary Clinton is. But I certainly think he's qualified. And I will work my heart out for him if he's our nominee....

RUSSERT: It--that seems to be in conflict with some things that you have said and what Hillary Clinton has said.... If Barack Obama's qualified to be vice president, he has crossed the commander in chief threshold. Correct?

RENDELL: Well, I, I think he's ready. He's not nearly as ready as Hillary Clinton is, there's no question about that. But, look, make no mistake about it, he's a talented, dynamic politician and, and a, and a good senator, and I think he would make a fine president. Again, is he as experienced and as ready as Hillary Clinton? Nobody is.... [Ed might want to rethink that particular line.]

RUSSERT: But if, in fact, there's a possibility Obama may be the Democratic nominee, would it be better, in the interest of the Democratic Party, that the Clintons not suggest that he hasn't passed the threshold to be commander in chief?

RENDELL: Well, sure. Look, there, there's rhetoric in a campaign on all, on all sides, and I, I think the, the issue should be framed as ready compared to Hillary Clinton. And, and that's the way I would frame the issue going forward. To me, there's no contest. I don't think -- it's not Barack Obama's fault. I think almost any of the other candidates would have fallen into the same category....

And that, as they say, was that: A rather indelicate, Emily Litella retreat from the campaign's principal offensive front. Never mind.

But what of this dicey coin's other side? -- the issue of Hillary as veep, which I raised yesterday as a party-mending salve.

The chief objection to this, of course, is that Clinton's savaging of a fellow Democratic candidate as unfit as commander in chief is not only inexcusable, but unprecedented. And while I won't -- can't -- differ with the inexcusable argument, her wretched behavior is, nonetheless, not entirely unprecedented.

See, for instance, Even Thomas' marvelous Bobby Kennedy: His Life, which I happen to have just read, for it contains an instructive reminder. To wit ...

When John Kennedy surprisingly secured the necessary delegates for a first-ballot nomination, competitor Lyndon Johnson, in a last-ditch effort to "stop Kennedy" before the vote, first instructed his surrogates to leak to the press that the party's impending nominee was suffering from a terminal disease (Addison's) -- that JFK was, in short, a dying man. But more than that, LBJ then staged a news conference in which he accused Joseph Kennedy Sr. as having been, in the 1930s, a "[Neville] Chamberlain umbrella man" -- in effect, a Nazi appeaser.

Read broadly, it was close to calling the old man's scion a closet quisling by familial association, but at the barest minimum, designed to call into question Kennedy's fitness as commander in chief.

Bobby, as Evan Thomas described him, was understandably "apoplectic" at this and threatened LBJ's organization in unambiguous terms: "You'll get yours." Meanwhile, however, John Kennedy "blithely" overlooked all the fuss -- Obama-like -- and chose Johnson as his running mate, even though other immensely powerful Democratic voices, such as the UAW's political operation, had warned the Kennedys: "If you do this, you're going to fuck everything up."

They didn't, and it didn't. The inexcusable was excused party-wide and soon forgotten. That's politics, and something Gov. Ed Rendell yesterday was, however painfully executed, reminding us.

That's not to say -- for this is politics, too -- that President Obama would not soon determine that the best possible use of Vice-President Clinton would be her investigating the effects of global warming in Antarctica, likely an eight-year mission. Welcome once again to the White House, Hillary, and a hearty goodbye. Dress warmly.

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THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter