Centrist Dems Confab Draws Obama Veep Prospects

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Senator Obama passed on attending this year’s meeting of a centrist Democratic group, the Democratic Leadership Council, even though it was in his hometown of Chicago and he was in the city for most of the session. However, some key vice presidential prospects for Mr. Obama made the trek, such as Governor Richardson of New Mexico and Governor Sebelius of Kansas.

For more than a year, Mr. Obama and his main primary rival, Senator Clinton, have steered clear of the group, which is viewed with suspicion by some Democratic liberals and the so-called netroots. Ms. Sebelius showed no such reticence as she explicitly embraced both centrism and the Illinois senator in her speech to the DLC yesterday.

“The notion of how you win from the middle is a strategy in the heartland that comes from a common sense approach,” she said in a video feed the group offered on the Web. “The sensible, pragmatic, practical approach of coalition government — it is exactly what attracted me to Barack Obama in the first place. It’s the way he worked in the Illinois Legislature. It’s the way he worked in the United States Senate.”

Sitting on the same stage with Ms. Sebelius, Governor Joseph Manchin III of West Virginia seemed to favor giving the vice presidential nod to Mrs. Clinton. “I think it would be attractive. I know in our state she did so well,” Mr. Manchin said. He added that he did not think it would alienate voters if a woman other than Mrs. Clinton were chosen.

With that, Ms. Sebelius excused herself from the dais. The moderator said she had a previous commitment.

OBAMA, BILL CLINTON FINALLY SPEAK

Senator Obama and President Clinton ended their mutual silent treatment yesterday, with the Democratic presidential candidate reaching out and asking his former Democratic nemesis to help him win the White House.

The 20-minute conversation was the latest step in bringing together the two warring camps. While Senator Clinton has been publicly behind Mr. Obama, hard feelings remained between the former Democratic president and the candidate hoping to become the next one.

They hadn’t spoken until Mr. Obama called yesterday after landing in Missouri for a campaign stop. Both sides later issued statements about the conversation, an important public display of how Mr. Obama needs to have both Clintons on board moving into the general election.

Mr. Obama “has always believed that Bill Clinton is one of this nation’s great leaders and most brilliant minds, and looks forward to seeing him on the campaign trail and receiving his counsel in the months to come,” an Obama spokesman, William Burton, said.

A Clinton spokesman, Matt McKenna, said the former president renewed his offer — expressed in a one-sentence statement last week — to do whatever he can to ensure Mr. Obama wins the presidency.

McCAIN’S SHIFTING ENERGY POLICY

Crisscrossing the country over the last two weeks to promote his energy plans, Senator McCain promised a forceful national strategy to combat global warming and end American dependence on foreign oil.

“We must steer far clear of the errors and false assumptions that have marked the energy policies of nearly 20 Congresses and seven presidents,” the presumptive Republican nominee told a crowd of oil executives in Houston.

But Mr. McCain’s own record of tackling energy policy on Capitol Hill shows little of the clear direction he says would come from a McCain White House.

Instead, he has swerved from one position to another over the years, taking often contradictory stances on the federal government’s role in energy policy.

At times, he has backed measures to ease restrictions on oil drilling off America’s coasts and in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Other times, he has voted to keep them.

He has championed standards to require that automakers make vehicles more fuel-efficient, yet opposed standards to require that utilities use less fossil fuel by generating more power from renewable sources, like wind and solar.

Mr. McCain has rejected federal tax breaks for renewable energy producers, but backs billions of dollars in subsidies for the nuclear industry.

He has criticized corn-based ethanol for doing “nothing to increase our energy independence.” But while campaigning in 2006 in the Midwest corn belt, Mr. McCain called ethanol a “vital, vital alternative energy source.”


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