the Obama/Clinton ticket reminds me too much of Abraham Lincoln/Johnson and Kennedy/Johnson. In each of those cases, the presidential candidate compromised too much in selecting the vice presidential candidate, and in case you don't remember what happened next.
Andrew Johnson became president after Lincoln's assassination:
As president he took charge of Presidential Reconstruction — the first phase of Reconstruction — which lasted until the Radical Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1866 elections. His conciliatory policies towards the South, his hurry to reincorporate the former Confederates back into the union, and his vetoes of civil rights bills embroiled him in a bitter dispute with the Radical Republicans.<3> The Radicals in the House of Representatives impeached him in 1868, but he was acquitted by a single vote in the Senate. He was the first U.S. President to be impeached.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_JohnsonAnd then there is Lyndon Johnson who succeeded Kennedy upon his assassination. LBJ owed his career to Brown & Root and repaid them by hiring them to pave large parts of Viet Nam.
One of its first large-scale projects, according to the book Cadillac Desert, was to build a dam on the Texas Colorado River near Austin during the Depression years. For assistance in federal payments, the company turned to the local Congressman, Lyndon B. Johnson. Brown & Root was the principal source of campaign funds for Johnson's initial run for Congress in 1937 in return for persuading the Bureau of Reclamation to change its rules against paying for a dam on land the federal government did not own, a decision that had to go all the way to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, according to Robert A. Caro's book The Path to Power. After other very profitable construction projects for the federal government, such as building the Corpus Christi Naval Station, Brown & Root gave massive sums of cash for Johnson's first run for the U.S. Senate in 1941. Brown and Root violated IRS rules over campaign contributions, largely in charging off its donations as deductible company expenses, again according to Robert Caro. A subsequent IRS investigation threatened to bring criminal charges of illegal campaign donations against Brown & Root as well as Johnson and others. It was not quashed until Roosevelt himself told the IRS to back off and allowed Brown and Root to settle for pennies on the dollar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellogg,_Brown_and_RootBoth Lincoln and Kennedy accepted running mates with their own agendas who owed political if not personal debts to powerful interests other than the president with whom they ran. I am not accusing either Johnson of complicity in the assassinations of the presidents with whom they served, but it is very possible that unprincipled interests wanted the Johnsons in and Lincoln and Kennedy out felt confident that the assassinations of the elected president and the succession of the vice president in each case.
More on Johnson and Brown & Root now Halliburton
All Things Considered, December 24, 2003 · . . . .
The story of Halliburton's ties to the White House dates back to the 1940s, when a Texas firm called Brown & Root constructed a massive dam project near Austin. The company's founders, Herman and George Brown, won the contract to build Mansfield Dam thanks to the efforts of Johnson, who was then a Texas congressman.
After Johnson took over the Oval Office, Brown & Root won contracts for huge construction projects for the federal government. By the mid-1960s, newspaper columnists and the Republican minority in Congress began to suggest that the company's good luck was tied to its sizable contributions to Johnson's political campaign.
More questions were raised when a consortium of which Brown & Root was a part won a $380 million contract to build airports, bases, hospitals and other facilities for the U.S. Navy in South Vietnam. By 1967, the General Accounting Office had faulted the "Vietnam builders" -- as they were known -- for massive accounting lapses and allowing thefts of materials.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1569483
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