I’m not sure why everyone in the punditocracy is so stupefied when Sen. Hillary Clinton continues to suggest she would consider choosing rival Sen. Barack Obama as her vice president.

Former President Bill Clinton called a Clinton-Obama ticket “almost unstoppable,” while he was stumping in Mississippi before that state primary Tuesday. (He never went into any detail about what his role would be in a Hillary Clinton-Obama executive. One can only imagine Obama getting the same treatment as Al Gore: listened to politely, and excluded from most of the decision-making.)

Hillary Clinton also suggested a joint ticket for the second time in three days in Hattiesburg, Miss., on Friday.

“I’ve had people say, ‘Well I wish I could vote for both of you,’” she said. “Well, that might be possible some day. But first I need your vote on Tuesday.”

Maybe it is the so-called liberal bias of the media that has the mouths of Tim Russert, George Stephanopoulos and Wolf Blitzer watering, visions of a Democratic White House for the next sixteen years dancing in their heads.

Such a thought is a Bushian oversimplification. There’s a serious reveal behind this Clinton tack that has gone unspoken in the news media’s steel chambers.

Many in the punditocracy see it— as they do with pretty much everything else— as a shrewd tactical move. The Clintons aim to create a perception that Obama is in second-place in this nominating race. If she can keep Obama locked in a vice-presidential/second-place purgatory, her campaign could not only cash in on voters who have not yet made up their minds, but also win the media battle, which so often is instrumental in turning perception into reality.

Talk of a Clinton-Obama ticket from the Clinton campaign suggests a vote for Clinton is also a vote for Obama, akin to when a vote for John Kerry became a vote for John Edwards after Iowa in 2004.

Her attempt to position Obama as her vice president is an olive branch to his supporters, notably the young people, African Americans, and liberal Democrats who’ve been alienated by her campaign tactics.

Clinton’s 3 a.m. ad, and her new leadership litmus-test— the commander-in-chief threshold— are all lines that kick Obama to the curb at the cost of favoring John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee and Vietnam War veteran.

“We’ll be sitting over in Republican headquarters drunk and high-fiving each other, watching the Democratic establishment try to put the Barack Obama phenomenon back in the bottle and tell all those people, ‘Yes we can. No we can’t,’” Republican strategist Mike Murphy said on Meet the Press on March 2.

She will need Obama’s cooperation if there’s a perception she “stole” the nomination at the Denver convention.

If she can win the popular vote, Clinton’s campaign will have to persuade super delegates, the 796 party leaders, governors and congressmen who also cast votes, to present her with the nomination.

Already pressure is mounting on African-American superdelegates to commit to Obama or Clinton. For instance, Rep. John Lewis, a black civil rights hero, switched sides in February, succumbing to pressure from Obama supporters in the Congressional Black Caucus, according to the Washington Post.

Former Senator Bill Bradley, who lost to Al Gore in the 2000 Democratic primary and is now an Obama supporter, accused the Clinton camp of destroying the party to help her nomination-chances.

“The bigger the lie, the better the chance they think they’ve got,” Bradley told the Times of London. “She’s going to lose a whole generation of people who got involved in politics believing it could be something different.”

The post-boom youth who’s come of age in, well, to borrow from Alan Greenspan, the Age of Turbulence, and will likely stay home in a Clinton-McCain contest in November—unless worry about more strict constitutionalist justices appointments to the Supreme Court can get them to the polls. Otherwise, there’s not that much difference between the two outside the Iraq war withdrawal that would impact this blossoming generation.

The youth grew up in a period of unaccountability, fear-mongering, secrecy, outright deception and bitterly antagonizing electoral strategies (otherwise known as the 51 percent doctrine) employed by Bush administration and its GOP allies. Clinton’s campaign has utilized each of these tactics, much to the delight of McCain Republicans everywhere.

That’s precisely what the Obama-as-Vice President line is all about.

Despite Clintonian calls that caucuses are “undemocratic,” and little states don’t matter, the Clinton camp really wanted to win Wyoming— stumping by Chelsea, Bill, Hillary and two national security-related radio ads prove they thought they could not only contend, but also win. And they did neither. (Obama’s 61-38 win was buried on page 20 of the New York Times.)

But there’s a reason why almost 1,400 more people voted in Saturday in Wyoming’s largest county than did in 2004. There’s a reason why there were more than 2,000 newly registered voters in a state of 59,000 eligible voters and where “no one would admit to being a Democrat,” as one resident told the New York Times. The Age of Obama has democratized the electoral process as the nomination process has evolved from smoke-filled rooms to a national primary.

And here’s a fun fact: Wyoming hasn’t had this much attention since its’ 15 delegates pushed another inexperienced upstart named John Kennedy into the nomination in the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

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Max Zimbert is a contributing writer and a graduate student at the Annenberg School, USC.

Tags: clinton. obama, vice president