Hilary Needs a Veep

I got an email from Babe the Blue Ox recently, and he said:

I write about the fatal weakness in the hillary candidacy. My thinking is that people really will vote for a woman, and the opponent will be weak, and everybody in America wishes her husband was still president. But, there is one potentially insurmountable obstacle: she has to have a running mate, and the public is going to experience deep mental trauma at the prospect of a man, any man, playing #2 to a woman. The juvenile american mind will see them as a kind of "couple," and in that context she will be cemented as a ball-busting battle-axe, and the VP will carry a mantle of shame, and people will have a secret revulsion that will result in a last minute inability to pull the lever in the voting booth.

But I think the solution really is Obama. The reason is, his blackness, jackie robinson-ness, his "rock star-ness" (why does everyone say this "rock star" thing about him? Does it just mean he's hot? He does have a kind of balls, I mean really in a sexual sense, that we haven't seen since Kennedy. But mainly, I think there is a subtle displacement here, where "rock star" stands for the real referent "sports star." The concepts of "Tiger Woods" and "Barack Obama" have secretly become confused in the collective psyche.), these category memberships overwhelm and obscure his "maleness," so that hillary can get away with it.