By AFP
Biloxi, Mississippi : Democrat Barack Obama Monday ridiculed talk by his White House rival Hillary Clinton that he could run as her vice presidential nominee, as their next clash loomed in Mississippi.
Obama, who is ahead in delegates after 45 Democratic contests, mocked verbal gymnastics by the Clinton camp arguing that he is unfit to be commander-in-chief, but could be the number two on a “dream ticket.” “If I’m not ready, how is it that you think I should be such a great vice president? Do you understand that?” he said, drawing laughter from supporters at a rally in Columbus, Mississippi on the eve of the state’s primary. The Illinois senator said the Clinton team was “trying to hoodwink you.”
“With all due respect, I’ve won twice as many states as Senator Clinton. I’ve won more of the popular vote than Senator Clinton. I have more delegates than Senator Clinton,” he said. “So I don’t know how somebody who is in second place is offering the vice presidency to the person who’s in first place.”
Heaping psychological pressure on Obama, Clinton surrogates are pushing the “dream ticket” scenario as a way of resolving a nailbiting race that risks going down to the wire at the party’s nominating convention in August.
Speaking here Saturday, former president Bill Clinton argued that a presidential ballot headed by his wife, with Obama in the junior role, would be an “almost unstoppable force.” But the former first lady has repeatedly sought to undermine Obama’s bid by casting doubt on his credentials to be supremo of the world’s most powerful military.
Clinton backers including General Wesley Clark, an ex-commander of NATO, went on a conference call Monday to belittle Obama’s ability to take on Republican John McCain, a senator and Vietnam war hero, in November’s election.
Obama’s campaign, stressing Clinton’s vote in 2002 authorizing military force in Iraq, hit back by parading former secretaries of the navy, army and air force at a Washington press conference in support of his White House bid.
“I’m not running for vice president,” Obama told his raucous supporters in Mississippi. “I’m running for president of the United States of America. I’m running to be commander-in-chief.”
Clinton aides turned defensive when pressed on how she could argue that Obama might be fit for vice president — and just a heartbeat from a promotion to the Oval Office — but incompetent for the top job.
“The answer to that is that Senator Clinton will not choose any candidate who has not at the time of choosing passed the national security threshold. Period,” spokesman Howard Wolfson said.
“But we have a long way to go between now and Denver, and it is not something that she would rule out at this point,” he said, while not spelling out how Obama might pass the commander test in time for the convention.
Clinton breathed new life into her faltering campaign with wins last week in Ohio and Texas, helped by an ominous television advertisement that questioned whether Obama was ready to deal with a crisis in the dead of the night.
Obama grabbed some momentum back on Saturday with a landslide win in Wyoming, but emerged from the caucuses with a net gain of only two delegates over Clinton.
Neither can reach the winning line of 2,025 delegates, even if Florida and Michigan go ahead with emerging plans to repeat their contests after running afoul of the national party for advancing their primaries into January.
So barring a backroom deal prior to the convention, the nomination will rest in the hands of nearly 800 “superdelegates,” Democratic luminaries who are under enormous pressure from the two campaigns to sway one way or another.
Obama is well ahead in polls in Mississippi, which is electing 33 delegates Tuesday.
Clinton headed to the much bigger battleground of Pennsylvania, a blue-collar state whose 158 delegates are up for grabs on April 22. The New York senator wooed Pennsylvania voters with a home movie of herself as a toddler on a family holiday in her father’s hometown of Scranton, the humdrum setting for the US remake of British comedy “The Office.”