Flashback to.....

[Erin Elizabeth]

the veep pick with this passage from the Newsweek behind-the-scenes series and ask yourself, honestly, why in the world Hillary would be in the running for SoS:

In truth, Hillary Clinton was on better terms with John McCain than she was with Barack Obama. The former First Lady and the four-term senator from Arizona had downed shots together on Senate junkets; they regarded each other as grizzled veterans of the political wars and shared a certain disdain for Obama as flashy and callow. In early June, on the night she officially lost the Democratic nomination, Hillary had enjoyed a long and friendly phone conversation with McCain. When Hillary finally did meet with Obama at the home of Sen. Dianne Feinstein a few days later, she told Obama that she did not want to go through a full-scale vetting for vice president unless he was serious about choosing her. The vetting process was onerous, requiring very full financial disclosure, and even included questions about romantic and marital indiscretions. As the financial crisis deepened in the summer, Eric Holder, Obama's chief veep vetter, added more questions about mortgages and problematic financial deals.

Obama was not inclined to choose Hillary, not so much because she had been his sometime bitter rival on the campaign trail, but because of her husband. "You don't just get Hillary, you get Bill," said a top Obama adviser. The Obamaites had benefited from Bill Clinton as a loose cannon in the primary campaign. They did not want to be wounded by him in the general election. Still, from time to time, as Hillary's name came up in veep discussions, and Obama's advisers gave all the reasons she should be kept off the ticket, Obama would stop and ask, "Are we sure?" He needed to be convinced one more time that the Clintons would do more harm than good.