“The Biggest F**K You Ever”

There are good and logical reasons why Barack Obama might have decided to hire Patti Solis Doyle as chief of staff to his (as yet unchosen) vice-presidential nominee. She is Hispanic and presumably will help pull in Hispanic voters. She and David Axelrod have known each other for years and reportedly are good friends.

But contrary to early speculation, Obama did not ask Solis Doyle to join his campaign as a hint to Clinton insiders that he might be offering Clinton the vice-presidency. If anything, it’s the opposite. You see, since Sen. Clinton fired Solis Doyle in a highly publicized blow-up after a 16-year friendship going back to the first years of the Clinton presidency, the two are not speaking anymore. And, as Claudia notes, “You don’t pick a hostile ex-employee to be the right hand person to your second in command.”

The New York Observer quotes an unnamed “former Clinton bundler” who puts it a bit more pungently:

A former bundler to Hillary Clinton just called in to tell me that Barack Obama’s selection of Patti Solis Doyle as chief of staff to the campaign’s eventual vice presidential nominee is the “biggest fuck you I have ever seen in politics.”

The donor, speaking on background, said that everyone in Clinton circles knows the two have hard feelings towards one another and haven’t spoken since Clinton removed Solis Doyle as campaign manager, and that Clinton loyalists view her with deep suspicion and believe that she is shopping around a book deal and acted as a background source for an extremely harsh Vanity Fair piece about Bill Clinton.

“Either one of two things happen,” said the bundler. “Hillary is selected as vice president and they fire Patti, or Hillary is not going to be the vice president.”

The bundler said that Clinton loyalists were livid over the pick.

Kevin Drum doesn’t understand why Obama would do this:

If this is true, it’s beyond bizarre. Obama has every incentive in the world to make nice with Hillary, and nothing in his past behavior suggests that he’s given to gratuitous insults like this. Either the conventional wisdom is wrong, or else there’s a much deeper game going on than anyone thinks.

I don’t think it’s bizarre at all. I think Obama is simply making it crystal clear that he is his own man, and that he will not be pressured or intimidated into picking any particular person as his running mate.

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