In the Washington Post today, writer Sally Quinn argues that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden should switch jobs before the 2012 presidential race. Despite being derided on Gawker and the Huffington Post, the theory has a certain logic to it, in a political sense. Freed from her nonpartisan post, Hillary could be a boon to President Obama’s reelection campaign. Surely she would be a greater draw to the ticket than Biden, who was primarily picked in 2008 because he had 400 years of experience under his belt — and by 2012, Obama himself will have had four years of the best experience of all. Plus, if Clinton does still harbor dreams of the White House, this would set her up nicely for 2016. As for Biden, secretary of State is supposedly his “dream job.” Making the suggestion more intriguing is that, according to the story as it was initially posted online, “this plan is being discussed in administration circles.”
But the line, which was the only thing in the article pointing to the job swap being something actually under consideration and not just a personal fantasy of Quinn’s, was missing from the print version today, and then was removed from the online version. We wondered if this indicated that Quinn, or her editors, weren’t confident that “administration circles” (whatever that means) were actually discussing the idea. This would would make it all much less exciting.
On the contrary, though, Post communications director Kris Coratti tells us that, “Upon further review of the article, editors chose to remove that line because we were not going to name Sally’s sources,” and without attributing the information to someone, they didn’t feel comfortable with it in the piece. Quinn herself confirms that, whether or not the line is in there, the ol’ Clinton-Biden switch is indeed under consideration by “administration circles.” “It is. I’m going to say on television that it is being discussed — which is how I found out about it,” she tells us. “But they just felt that since I didn’t want to reveal my sources that they would just leave it out.” Does she mind that the line was removed, seeing as how its absence detracts from the legitimacy of her theory? “It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” she says.
