Libertarians for Obama

In today’s Washington Post, George Will writes

Obama’s choice of a running mate will be the first important decision he makes with the whole country watching, so it will be a momentous act of self-definition. If he chooses her, it will be an act of self-diminishment, especially now that some of her acolytes are aggressively suggesting that some unwritten rule of American politics stipulates that anyone who finishes a strong second in the nomination contest is entitled to second place on the ticket.

Well, it’s kinda, sorta written:

In every case, after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice President.

It took less than twenty years to realize that’s a bad idea.  It doesn’t make much sense for the person taking over for the President should he or she leave office to represent an unelected shift in the executive (nor does it make much sense for the Vice President to break a tie in the Senate so that the President can veto the resulting bill), though.

Of course, Obama and Clinton’s views on government transparency wildly differ (as some have pointed out, the difficulty of vetting Bill rules out Hillary as the VP), so the fact that we abandoned the written rule is all the more for the better, and comports nicely to Obama picking someone with similar views for government transparency: something along the lines of what he did the day after clinching the nomination.