Nancy Pelosi Smoothes Over 'Impossible' Comments On Clinton-Obama Ticket 
  Monday, March 17th, 2008

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Last week, I saw a blurb of Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi on a local news station, and she said something that I recalled thinking was strange.  It was an off-the-cuff remark at the end of an interview, as Nancy was floating around giving cordialities--about how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would never be running mates.  I was on my way out the door but made a mental note to look it up later.  I was surprised at the way she'd said it - and then gave the utterance, "I didn't want to leave with any ambiguity," before smiling and exiting stage left.

In the days following, I looked for the comment she'd made, and had trouble finding it.  I scanned transcripts of the C-SPAN channels and all the major networks.  Where did it go?  Everyone was already tipped off that Pelosi was giving an exclusive to ABC--an interview taped two days ago, and pumped up until yesterday's airing.  By this morning, of course, that was the only thing people were talking about with regard to Pelosi.

Pelosi calls joint Clinton/Obama ticket "impossible"

It isn't exactly presumptuous to say that damage control had ensued:  three days after the comment, Pelosi is discussing the exact same thing, but now in a big-network sit-down broadcast and phrased more flowery, yet direct.

"If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what happened in the elections, it would be harmful to the Democratic Party," Pelosi warned yesterday on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."  "We will have a dream ticket.  And it will contain one of them."

This was a much lighter version of what she'd said before.  I finally found the source of the March 12th comment Pelosi made about how Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would not, in her opinion, share a joint ticket.  It was to NECN's Alison King after an environmental event in Waltham, Massachusetts.  Nancy Pelosi said:

"I think that ticket either way is impossible...I think that the Clinton administration has fairly ruled that out by proclaiming that Senator [John] McCain would be a better Commander in Chief than Obama."

I found the clip of it, too - but the volume on it hasn't worked all day.

Did Hillary Clinton ever even say that?  I've certainly never heard her say it outright.  She's compared her "lifetime of experience" to "John McCain's lifetime of experience," and followed it up with "and Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."  That was pretty funny, though.

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