THE DEMOCRATIC VEEP RACE: HOW ABOUT A FEMALE TIM KAINE…OR A NAME OUT OF LEFT FIELD?

4/29/20

While yours truly would not normally be spending two posts on the much-overrated office of vice-president, I do so for two reasons.   First, the title of last week’s post, THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL VICE-PRESIDENTIAL PICK SINCE 1944, suggests all one needs to know about the importance of former Vice-President Joe Biden’s choice for a 2020 running mate.  Second, given that both nominees have been decided and yours truly does not like to engage in discussion of lurid charges of a personal nature that contain all the drama of a post-Supremes Diana Ross single, there is little more to talk about than who will figuratively hold Mr. Biden’s coat and perhaps inquire after his health for the next four or so years.

Summarizing the main points of the aforementioned last post, Mr. Biden faces both a governmental imperative and a political imperative in the selection of his running mate.   The governmental imperative, given Mr. Biden’s age, the demands of the White House, and the questions regarding his ability to handle the demands of the presidency, is that Mr. Biden select somebody capable of being president yesterday if need be.   I don’t know what that means in the context of today’s troubling world, in which some combination of celebrity, a largely concocted life story, and the ability to hire a competent team of spinmeisters seems to make one qualified, in the eyes of many voters, to be president.  Further, yours truly, who has increasingly come to believe that mere desire for public office should disqualify one for public office, is no one to decide who is qualified to be president.   However, one would be reasonably safe in concluding, as I did last week, that “this is not Geraldine Ferraro, Dan Quayle, John Edwards, or Sarah Palin time.”    How seriously Mr. Biden will take the gravity of his selection we don’t know, but, judging from his long experience in government and the consequent presumption that he has thus acquired a sense of the importance of the office he seeks, there is more than hope that Mr. Biden will take more than politics into consideration as he continues his Veep deliberations.   The necessity of selecting somebody who is ready to be president is made more difficult when one considers that obscurity, if not virtual anonymity, should be a paradoxically salient characteristic of a Biden running mate, which brings us to Mr. Biden’s political imperative.

The political imperative that Mr. Biden faces is to avoid, at all costs, his morphing from “not Donald Trump” into “Joe Biden.”   As others have put it, Mr. Biden has to keep this election a referendum on Donald Trump.  The Democrats have not selected their best candidate, but at least they have avoided selecting a disastrous candidate whom Mr. Trump had a decent chance of defeating.   Now they have to keep the focus on Mr. Trump rather than on their mediocre candidate himself.   Drawing attention to Mr. Biden, and away from Mr. Trump, by making a big splash of a pick can only transform this race from a virtual lock for the former Vice-President (See PRESIDENT TRUMP WILL NOT BE RE-ELECTED, 4/22/20) into a race that President Trump could conceivably win.

Nobody, least of all yours truly, is able to get into Mr. Biden’s head; hence I cannot predict what Mr. Biden will do regarding his Veep selection.   But here are some of the specific decisions that should follow from the above imperatives if Mr. Biden wants to maintain his sizeable lead in the race and leave the country in reasonably good hands should he not be able to serve out his term(s):

·         He shouldn’t pick someone from the leftmost wing of his already far to the left party.   This would only give people, largely in the suburbs, who really want to vote against Donald Trump a reason to vote against Joe Biden.   So no Elizabeth Warren.

·         Mr. Biden should unite the Democratic Party to the extent anybody can unite this herd of cats.  In this regard, he would do well to avoid selecting one of his erstwhile opponents in the race for the nomination.   During the circus that was the primary season, just about every candidate was situated, and usually not by himself or herself, into one of two camps:   the “progressive” camp (One strains to find how or where the quasi- or outright socialistic policies espoused by “progressives” ever resulted in much actual progress, but I digress and will, after these parentheses, refrain from using quotation marks around the misnomer “progressive” for the duration of this post.  Thank you.) and what passed for the moderate camp in that field.   Given the antipathy these two groups developed for each other, selecting a candidate from one of those camps runs the risk of antagonizing the other.  Why take the chance?   Adhering to this admonition excludes some good candidates and some, er, not so good candidate, but it does have the virtue, in addition to keeping the Party less fractious, of limiting the field to those with the good sense to stay out of what in retrospect looks like the pointless scrum that was the Democratic primary season.

·         Mr. Biden should not throw any “long balls;” why throw a Hail Mary when one is a yard from the opponent’s goal line with an already big lead?   Just put your head down, push the ball into the end zone, and get the damn game over with.   So none of this Michelle, or even Barack, Obama nonsense.  And no “co-presidency” and other such silliness.   Just pick somebody who can do the job and won’t draw much attention either to herself or to Mr. Biden.

·         Too bad Tim Kaine is a man; he would be perfect.  He was virtually unknown before Hillary Clinton selected him as her running mate and he remains virtually unknown today, which is a big plus in a race in which the Democratic ticket is striving for anonymity.  He hails from what could be considered, if one contorts one’s vision sufficiently, a swing state.  He is a senator and has been a mayor and a governor.   His selection would make the Democratic ticket the first major party all-Catholic ticket in the history of this country, and, leaving aside internecine arguments in my Church, the Catholic vote wins elections.  Alas, Mr. Kaine is a man.   As I said last week, while Mr. Biden’s pledge to limit his search to women was ill-advised, the consequences of breaking it would be, while probably not disastrous to a candidate who will have a hard time losing this election as long as he stays as far from the public eye as one possibly can while running for president (See, again , PRESIDENT TRUMP WILL NOT BE RE-ELECTED, 4/22/20), definitely not worth the problems that would ensue.

So how about naming a few names?   Here are three, two of whom are being mentioned often and doubtless are being seriously considered.   One is completely out of left field, but is at least as meritorious as the other two.  

·         Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.  She’s from the upper Midwestern battleground state.  She has both legislative and executive experience.   She is a good speaker and manages to exude the quality of “every-womanness,” at least to an easily manipulated electorate.   Further, the media love her because she misses no opportunity to grandstand during the COVID crisis and/or to beat up on President Trump.   Her ideology is non-descript to unknown, at least on the narrow continuum deemed permissible by the Democrats.  However, she’s only been governor for a little over a year and her legislative experience has been entirely at the state level.   So she comes up a bit short in the “ready to step in” category.

·         Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.  (I can hear many of my readers emitting various verbal manifestations of exasperation, but, remember, this has nothing to do with what yours truly wants; this is, instead, part of a “call ‘em as I see ‘em” analysis of what Mr. Biden should do.)   Senator Duckworth is not from a battleground state, but she is from a state that is very similar demographically to its neighboring states, most of which are indeed battleground states.  Her experience is limited…three years as a senator and four years in the U.S. House of Representatives, but, compared to Ms. Whitmer, Ms. Duckworth is an old-hand at national government and politics.   Ms. Duckworth’s personal story is compelling:  Iraq war veteran who lost both her legs in action, Asian-American, and the mother of a six-year-old and a two-year-old which, for reasons that would baffle H.L. Mencken and do baffle yours truly, makes one more qualified for high office in the eyes of legions of voters.  

·         Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago.    Yes, she’s “only” a mayor and will have only been a mayor for a year by the time the upcoming weekend gets here.   And before that, she was one of those civic-minded lawyers and business executives who seem to spend quite a bit of time being civic-minded and very little time being lawyers or business executives.    So she is nearly completely bereft of the “ready to step in” pre-requisite.   However, from what can be seen so far, she has done a beyond passable job at the nearly impossible task of running the at least formerly greatest city in the world.  Further, if Mr. Biden should somehow decide that Ms. Whitmer is qualified to be president, objective lack of qualifications should be no barrier to Ms. Lightfoot.  And the politics of picking Ms. LIghtfoot are compelling; as Ms. Lightfoot herself put it when she was running for mayor, she is a “three-fer:” a Black gay woman.   She also has an attractive family complete with a photogenic daughter, not quite as young as Ms. Duckworth’s kids, who proved to be quite an asset in Ms. Lightfoot’s mayoral campaign.  Despite her tendency to talk a big game before caving into her opponents’ demands, as she did with the Chicago Teachers’ Union during the strike it sent her as a gift during her first  year in office, Ms. Lightfoot has, with the help of a hosanna chorus of a media, managed to acquire a reputation for toughness.  And no one enjoys skewering Donald Trump as much as does Lori Lightfoot.   Selecting Ms. Lightfoot would indeed be a long ball that doesn’t need to be thrown, but Ms. Lightfoot’s being on the ticket might help Joe Biden maintain, and even stretch, his already big lead.  Given her reputation as something of a moderate, the Ocasio-Cortez/Sanders/Biden wing of the party might not like Ms. Lightfoot, but are they really going to vocally oppose the first gay Black woman to be nominated by a major party?   Come to think of it, they might, claiming that nothing about one’s race, gender, or sexual orientation necessarily makes one sufficiently woke. Thank God this decision is Joe Biden’s and not mine or yours.

Concluding with two thoughts, and another name…

First, despite her not complying with one of the above criteria, yours truly cannot help but think that the best candidate available is Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; see the first bullet point in PRESIDENT TRUMP CANNOT WIN, BUT THE DEMOCRATS CAN LOSE, IN 2020, 1/9/20.    She is a moderate, by Democratic standards, and has shown the ability to debate intelligently and steadfastly.   She’s been in the Senate for over thirteen years and, while perhaps not making as many friends among her staff as she would like, seems to get along, and get things done, with her fellow senators, the latter two of which were traits that made Mr. Biden attractive to Mr. Obama when the latter was selecting his running mate.   At 60 by the end of May, Ms. Klobuchar is no kid, but is young enough to assuage some of the fears surrounding Mr. Biden.   She is from the upper Midwest, with Minnesota being something of a battleground state and, more importantly, demographically and electorally similar to outright battleground states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio.   And I have heard from several people who are just dying to vote against Mr. Trump but who still harbor doubts about Mr. Biden that Ms. Klobuchar’s being on the ticket would make them sure votes for Mr. Biden.   Keep in mind that one of the advantages yours truly has in observing such matters is that I have a very wide circle of friends and acquaintances.

As I wrote in the aforementioned January piece, Ms. Klobuchar would have been a compelling, and I think the most compelling, Democratic presidential candidate; if she had won the nomination, this race would have been even further into the bag for the Democrats than it is.   But Ms. Klobuchar is an example of a public official, from either party, who would make a great general election candidate and maybe even a decent president, but who has little to no chance of getting his or her party’s nomination.  That’s a shame.

Second, Mr. Trump could provide a spark of hope to his all but doomed campaign for re-election by making an adjustment to his ticket.    But that is grist for another mill.

Since I have mentioned a Chicago mayor in this post, I will use the opportunity to promote my books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics.  Both provide illumination on how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.