The New Republic‘s Brian Beutler has suggested that Hillary Clinton‘s likability problem would evaporate overnight if she got Barack Obama to run as her Vice-President. If you ask me Beutler is on to something. From my perspective this would totally lift me out of my Hillary doldrums and change everything.
“There are three sections of the Constitution that prescribe limits on who can be president and vice president,” Beutler writes. “Article II, the Twelfth Amendment and the Twenty-Second Amendment. While the former two limit who is ‘eligible’ to serve—natural born citizens, 35 or older—the Twenty-Second Amendment begins ‘No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.’
“Whether its adopters intended it or not, the plain language of the Twenty-Second amendment doesn’t prohibit a former two-term president from succeeding a sitting president and serving out the remainder of her term. It merely prohibits him from running for a third. By using the term ‘elected’ instead of ‘eligible,’ its authors created a loophole large enough for a Clinton-Obama ticket to coast to victory through.”