As Sen. Barack Obama starts to close in on the Democratic nomination for president, attention will naturally turn to who he will select as his running mate.

Democratic voters desperately want an Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Obama ticket to lead the party in November.

But it seems highly unlikely Sen. Hillary Clinton would accept the second position. It seems just as unlikely that any presidential candidate who would want such a lighting rod for attention as second fiddle. Instead, Obama is likely to want someone who can add foreign policy expertise to the ticket, or can help him with a key voter demographic or state.

Someone who could contribute national security heft is retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the former commander of NATO. Clark is fairly well-known, from Arkansas, and is a good public speaker. The downside is he did poorly as a 2004 candidate for president and is sometimes associated with the Clintons.

A long-shot possibility is U.S. Rep. Jane Harman of California. Having a ticket consisting of an African American and a woman would add to the sense of history in the making that surrounds Obama. Plus, Harman is a foreign policy and national security specialist, having served as the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee and as a subcommittee chairman on the Homeland Security Committee. She was in line to become chairman of the Intelligence Committee, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed over her. Harman has downsides, however. She is not well-known and comes from a state that is usually reliably Democratic, rather than a swing state Obama needs to pick up to win the election.

Forgetting Judy?

The city of Attleboro intends to name the former post office building on Park Street after the late Kai Shang, a former mayor.

Shang, however, is not the mayor who purchased the building from the postal service for the city.

He backed out of the deal because he thought the asking price of $500,000 was too high.

It was not until the next mayor, Judith Robbins, got Sen. Edward Kennedy and U.S. Rep. Joseph Moakley involved that the postal service lowered its price and the city bought the building, which is now a registry of deeds.

Robbins' key role seems to have been forgotten, as she was not even invited to a ribbon-cutting ceremony when the registry of deeds opened, just as she was not invited to the kickoff of a downtown beautification project she initiated.

Noted

In case you missed it:

When 81-year-old Fidel Castro handed over power to his kid brother Raúl Castro this week, the move was explained in some quarters as a passing of the torch to a younger generation. Raúl is 76. U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton told an audience in Texas this week that she opposes the No Child Left Behind Law because of its reliance on standardized tests as measuring sticks for academic process. It was enough to make you wonder why she voted for the law in the first place.

Mitt Romney spent $97 million on his failed presidential run, according to the most recent reports. More than $42 million of that total came out of his own pocket.

JIM HAND covers politics for The Sun Chronicle. His commentaries appear in this space on Saturdays. Contact him at 508-236-0399 or at jhand@thesunchronicle.com.