Take oldie No. 1, for instance. Way back in 1956, forests were felled to provide newsprint for all the stories about how President Dwight Eisenhower was going to dump Richard Nixon from the reelection ticket. The same thing happened in 1972, amid rumors that President Nixon was going to dump Spiro Agnew. It happened again in 1992, when the first President Bush was supposedly set to dump Dan Quayle.
And, sure enough, now we're hearing that President Obama "may" replace Joe Biden with Hillary Clinton.
Actually, this one has been around for a while. Bob Woodward insisted on CNN last year that this scenario was "on the table." Politico and the Washington Post ran speculative stories in the summer of '10. Two months ago, columnist Jonathan Alter insisted that the scenario is "definitely not impossible," and, two weeks ago, Republican commentator Pete du Pont wrote in the Wall Street Journal that a Clinton ascent "seems possible," if only to stir the pot and tap her popularity among the older whites who have long been cool toward Obama. This kind of chatter is apparently too delicious to resist.
But Obama will not dump Biden. I say this despite a dearth of inside knowledge. I say this because it's obvious what would happen if he did. The dead-tree press, cable shows, blogosphere, and Twitterworld would spin Obama's move as a symptom of political weakness, as the act of a desperate cynic with no sense of loyalty. The Fox News blondes would spend entire afternoons assailing "an administration in turmoil."
Oh, one other thing: Ego is a key element in politics. With Hillary, you get Bill - and there's no way Obama would want to be perceived as needing Bill Clinton to help drag him across the 2012 finish line. There are many reasons why no veep has been dumped in midstream since 1944, but this iteration of the ego factor is surely another.
