Obama weighed Hillary, worried 'bout Bill

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko also rattled the Obama campaign.

David Plouffe, left, manager of President Barack Obama's winning camapign, writes of some serious deliberations, and worries, during Obama's bid for the White House in a forthcoming book, The Audacity to Win, excerpted in Time magazine

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama gave serious consideration to picking Hillary Rodham Clinton as his running mate - surprising even his own campaign advisers with his seriousness - but worried about Bill Clinton.

"Obama was clearly thinking more seriously about picking Hillary Clinton than (adviser David) Axelrod and I had realized," David Plouffe, the manager of Obama's presidential campaign, writes in a forthcoming book. "He said if his central criterion measured who could be the best VP, she had to be included in that list."

Although Obama considered his erstwhile rival in the Democratic Party's primaries throughout the summer of 2008, he ultimately eliminated her name from the list in early August, fearing, according to an account in Plouffe's book appearing in excerpts in Time magazine, that there "were just too many complications outweighing the potential strengths."

"I think Bill may be too big a complication,'' Plouffe quotes Obama as saying. "If I picked her, my concern is that there would be more than two of us in the relationship."

Ultimately, the president-elect named the then-senator from New York as his secretary of state - a relationship which also has been complicated by former President Bill Clinton's continuing presence on the international stage, with his Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative.

In Plouffe's book, The Audacity to Win, the president's campaign manager also reports on the crisis that emerged with the incendiary remarks of Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, coupled with the controversy surrounding Chicago power broker Tony Rezko.

"The Wright story broke on a Wednesday and exploded across the media landscape the next day,'' Plouffe writes. "We decided Obama had to take questions about ( Wright) head-on on Friday, in a series of lengthy national cable interviews.

"There was one not-so-minor complication. He was already scheduled to do editorial boards that Friday afternoon with both Chicago papers about Tony Rezko, two hours each, no holds barred. Given no choice but to address Wright as soon as possible, we decided we would do a round of TV interviews on him directly after the Rezko boards,'' Plouffe recalls.

"It shaped into quite a day, like having your legs amputated in the morning and your arms at night. The question was whether we would still have a heartbeat at the end of the day.''