First, clearly, he should not pick Hillary Clinton. Together they would neutralize each other's strengths -- his ability to skillfully compromise with opponents and her ability to either intimidate or submit to them, his ability to inspire people by not being a puppet of lobbyists and her ability to raise money from lobbyists. And they would combine each other's weaknesses -- together they would lose the votes of people who would never vote for Obama because they're racist, and people who would never vote for Clinton because she's an ineffective senator, a poor manager, a foreign policy neocon, sabotaged health care reform, and stood by while Bill Clinton sold out America, because she hasn't been a liberal since 1993 when she hooked up with a creepy right wing religious group called The Family.

But Obama needs to win back the voters who supported Clinton in the primaries. It has been suggested that he could do this by picking someone big from the Clinton camp, like Pennsylvania's buffoon governor Ed Rendell. The problem is that every high level Clinton supporter has shown, by that support, their unworthiness. When congressman Jim Cooper said "I respect Hillary supporters because they haven't had the chance to get to know her like I have", he meant ordinary voters, who don't have the time for deep research and believe the TV news when it says she's progressive and would be a good president. Governors and senators have a responsibility to know better. Even if they haven't been on Clinton's bad side, they should know that Obama has built a more impressive Senate record in a third of the time, never mind his exceptional charisma and management skills. He is so clearly the superior candidate that every politician who supported Clinton showed either bad judgment, shady motives, or a lack of courage.

Anyway, in October, the real Democrats who voted for Clinton aren't going to remember or care who Obama's running mate supported in April. They didn't vote for Clinton because of her allies (and they wouldn't have if they had known about The Family or Monsanto). Mostly they voted for her because she is a woman, which is a perfectly good reason if you believe that she and her opponent are equally qualified -- an illusion the media dutifully created out of a Harrison Bergeron view of "equality".

A good woman getting elected president would be a valuable symbol and a great landmark for the women of the world. Unfortunately we didn't have one running this year. But Obama could enable the next best thing if he picked a good woman as vice president, especially if he was going against the pundits who said it would be expedient to pick a white guy. Anyway they would be wrong. A black man and a white woman running together would straddle four demographics -- black, white, male, and female -- and the absence of a white male would not alienate any real Democratic voters, only the Rush Limbaugh saboteurs and some rubes in West Virginia who are still voting for Democrats because they supported slavery in 1860.

Also, by picking a woman, Obama would block any attempt by the Clintons to force themselves on the ticket. Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare is having to compete against another woman, because without the feminist card, and the strange media myth that she's the only significant woman in the Democratic party, she would have to run on her weak record and character, and her remaining supporters would have to admit that they liked her not because she's a woman but because she's Joe Lieberman in a pantsuit.

And of course, there are plenty of great women in the Democratic party -- we just haven't heard about them because the big media, in stealthy sexism, has been focusing all its attention on the one woman who actually fits the feminist-hater's stereotype. But now that Obama is getting ready to pick a running mate, a few names have floated to the top: Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius, Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, and Missouri senator Claire McCaskill. All three proved their judgment and courage by supporting Obama early, and any of them would be a great vice president. And by picking one of them, or even better, saying he was going to pick a woman and then keeping us waiting, Obama would refocus America's attention on all the good women in politics, and on the possibility of a woman getting to the White House through effective public service instead of through marriage.