Opinion: Obama-Clinton smacks McCain-Romney
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Though some might have made peace with the idea that Hillary Clinton won’t be running for vice president on a ticket headed by Barack Obama, boosters of a Democratic ‘dream ticket’ got a shot in the arm Thursday.
A Fox News Poll showed voters preferring Barack-Hillary over John McCain and Mitt Romney by 48% to 41%, or just outside the poll’s margin of error. (The pairing of Republican McCain with the former Massachusetts governor, Romney, remains, of course, just as hypothetical as the Obama-Clinton combo.)
In the Fox survey -- and here’s the key for ‘dream ticket’ fans -- narrows when he’s matched mano a mano (without running mates) against McCain.
The poll shows Obama ahead in the ‘horse race’ over McCain by 4 percentage points (45% to 41%), a lead that drops to 3% when independent Ralph Nader and Libertarian Bob Barr are thrown into the mix.
But backers of an Obama-Clinton ticket should absorb this additional tidbit from the Fox poll: 33% of voters said they would rather see the New York senator on the Supreme Court or in an Obama cabinet; 28% picked her for the VP slot.
The Fox poll also found that two out of three voters say they don’t care whether a candidate sometimes eschews a flag lapel pin, as Obama used to. And Democrats are markedly more enthusiastic about their candidate than Republicans -- 78% of Dems say they are satisfied with Obama, 54% of Republicans say the same about McCain.
(While the Fox poll queried 900 voters in all, it reached only 379 Democrats and 315 Republicans, meaning that the margins of error for the Republican and Democratic samples are considerably larger. Meaning, don’t jump to conclusions.)
The poll hints at possible trouble areas for Obama: A slight plurality of registered voters say they trust McCain more. And a bare majority say they remain concerned that Obama for 20 years was a member of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church and listened to ‘controversial and unpatriotic’ comments before he distanced himself from the pastor.
-- James Rainey
