Hillary Clinton VP Rumors: 10 Reasons Clinton Will Not Replace Biden

Impact

Coming off a series of embarrassing vice presidential gaffes that have delighted Republicans and mortified Democrats, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's name has been floated as a potential replacement for Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. Most of the suggestions have come from total outsiders to Democrat politics like Sarah Palin and Meghan McCain, and the fantasy is unlikely to come true.

The most notable of  "Way to go, Joe's" recent gaffes was his faux-Southern accented assertion to a Virginia audience that the Romney-Ryan campaign wanted to "put y'all back in chains." 

Republicans are right when they assert that had Romney or Ryan said this, they would immediately have been blasted as hypocritical race-baiting Neanderthals. The Romney campaign has been thrilled to feature the string of par-for-the-course Bidenisms as evidence of the incompetency of the Obama White House. Compared to Biden, Hillary Clinton does look like the smartest woman on earth.

Clinton may not be the very smartest woman on earth, but she's very bright. This is why it's unlikely that even though it's still technically possible for Biden to be asked to step aside in favor of Hillary Clinton, she would accept the role.

Here are ten reasons why Hillary Clinton won't make the Obama 2012 ticket into a superstar "Dream Team" campaign.

1) She wants to run for President in 2016 on her own. She came closer to the Democratic nomination in 2008 than most people recall. She won the California, New York and Florida Democratic primaries by wide margins, earning only .1% fewer votes than Obama overall.

2) She's already announced that she wants to take a break from government service and will step aside from her role as Secretary of State in January, 2013 in order to "find out how tired she really is" — and likely to begin laying groundwork for a successful 2016 presidential campaign.

3) Those predicting that Clinton will replace Biden on the Democrat ticket overlook the thought process that went into selecting Biden in the first place: the Obama camp wanted a running mate who would never outshine their candidate, as Clinton certainly would.

4) Joe Biden is a global affairs expert, and was also reportedly selected as Obama's running made to "shore up" Obama's credentials on foreign policy. Hillary Clinton is unlikely to forget that for the past four years while she's been carrying the foreign policy burden, Biden has been eating ice cream and donuts on Main Street.

5) An Obama-Clinton ticket is far from a certain win, despite media enthusiasm. If Clinton accepted the VP slot on the ticket and the ticket lost, her presidential aspirations would likely be finished.

6) A win for the Obama-Clinton ticket would also damage Hillary's prospects for a successful 2016 presidential campaign. When one party holds the White House for 8 years, they typically have a much harder uphill battle for another candidacy. George H.W. Bush was able to pull it off — but he was a one-term president.

7) Switching the vice presidential candidate at this late date, even for such a stellar candidate, would smack of poor planning and desperation — the last message the Obama campaign needs.

8) Both Hillary and Bill Clinton are experts at gauging the political climate in the country. Obama has been firmly associated with socialistic, left-leaning policies, which are unpopular among the majority of voters. Secretary Clinton hasn't joined in so far, and is unlikely to want to be associated with such unpopular policies.

9) It's unlikely the U.S. economy will improve dramatically, no matter who wins the presidency in November. Already stating openly that she is tired from four years of constant travel and work, Clinton knows she'd be in for another four years of even more exhausting work fighting an uphill economic battle.

10) There's still an Obama-Clinton rivalry. The "smartest woman in the world" isn't about to use her high popularity, great reputation, and admiration and respect among the majority of voters to help the man who crushed her presidential hopes four years ago, and who has struggled in office ever since.

Barack Obama has never run a re-election campaign, much less won re-election. He wasvery nearly beaten by none other than Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries in 2008. Moreover, he selected Joe Biden as vice president in the first place, hardly an example of "hope and change."

Why should Hillary Clinton ride in on her white horse to save him?