4/24/20
More than eight years ago, I wrote about the silliness of
all the attention we pay to a party’s standard-bearer’s selection of a running
mate; see TIME
FOR THAT QUADRENNIAL PARLOR GAME “WHO GETS THE WARM BUCKET OF (SPIT)?”, Insightful
Pontificator, 3/20/12. John
Nance Garner, who held the Vice-Presidency for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s
first two terms, described the office as being “not worth a warm bucket of spit”
…only he didn’t use the noun “spit.” Mr.
Gardner was correct in this observation.
This office, as I argued back in 2012, holds no power, sways few votes
in the general election, and gives its holder far less of a leg up in the
nominating process for the real job than most people suppose. But in 2020, as in 1944, the Democratic
nominee’s selection of a vice-presidential candidate could hardly be more
important.
Yours truly will avoid characterizing the parallels between
the 2020 and 1944 Veep selections as “eerie,” but only because that adjective
is vastly overused in that context. I
will instead point out that the points of intersection between the two are
interesting and worth pondering.
In 1944, the Democrats, including FDR, knew that they were
in reality selecting not a running mate or a vice-president, but the next
president. FDR was very sick, sicker
than the general public had been allowed to know while we were still in the
thick of World War II, and would not serve out what would be his fourth
term. His vice-president was thus
certain to be his successor, and sooner than most people thought. And we would
likely still be in the War when the new guy became president.
FDR’s then vice-president, Henry Wallace, who had
succeeded the aforementioned Mr. Garner, was selected as FDR’s running mate in
1940 because the popular Mr. Garner had planned to run against FDR that year
before Mr. Roosevelt had decided he would run for an unprecedented third term,
and thus his loyalty came into question.
Further, Mr. Garner had grown tired of imbibing in that warm bucket of
(spit) and hence was no longer interested in the job. (It’s interesting that one of Mr. Garner’s
proteges, Lyndon Johnson, came to have the same regard for that office;
perhaps LBJ should have listened more carefully to the advice his mentor, but
things worked out for Mr. Johnson. But I
digress.) Mr. Wallace was selected by FDR to be his
running mate in 1940 because Mr. Wallace was a loyal New Dealer and, as
an Iowa native who was Agriculture Secretary at the time, could bring
rural votes to the ticket.
In 1944, however, when it was a sure bet that the
vice-president would become president, Mr. Wallace was completely unacceptable
to powerful elements of the party because he was, to put it pointedly, the Bernie
Sanders of his day, only more radical.
The southern segregationists, who were at best cool to Mr. Wallace in
1940, wanted no part of him in 1944.
They pushed for one of their own, former Senator from South Carolina and
former Supreme Court Justice Jimmy Byrnes. The party bosses in the big cities of the
north, most notably Ed Kelly in Chicago and Ed Flynn in New York,
who normally didn’t care much about ideology, feared that Wallace’s overt
radicalism would hurt the ticket but, more importantly, since FDR was a shoo-in
in 1944 and might not last past 1945, would not be good for the country or
their role in it. Roosevelt was no fan
of Byrnes, however, because of Byrnes’ segregationist image and his
unpopularity with organized labor.
While FDR would have preferred Wallace, he finally embraced the
compromise candidate, Harry Truman, a product of the Pendergast
Machine in Kansas City who had only recently emerged from obscurity in the
Senate with his chairmanship of what came to be called the Truman Committee. The Democrats thus settled on a relative
no-name and it worked out quite well for them, and for the country, not only in
1944 but also in 1948.
In 2020, the Democrats have as their candidate a man who
does not, as one of my readers might put it, have one foot in the grave and the
other on a banana peel, as did FDR in 1944.
However, Mr. Biden is 77 years old and, while sometimes showing signs of
vigor, often shows his age and not in a flattering way. Such occurrences, including an assortment of
non-sequiturs, bewildering proclamations, and other seeming senior moments,
have led to questions about his fitness for the rigors of the office. Fortunately for Mr. Biden, his opponent
evokes similar doubts about his fitness for office, though usually not because
of Mr. Trump’s age, leaving Mr. Biden with what yours truly considers a
commanding lead in the 2020 race; see 4/22/20’s PRESIDENT TRUMP WILL NOT BE RE-ELECTED.
Still, most observers do not share my confidence that Mr.
Biden will defeat President Trump in November, so politics becomes a
consideration. Plenty of voters who are
on the fence are concerned about Mr. Biden’s stamina or, more to the point,
capacity for office. And while 77 is no
longer considered by many to be too old to be president and Mr. Biden is in
good health, the chances of anybody who has attained the age of 77 being around
for the next four, let alone the next eight, years, especially when dealing
with the pressures of the White House, are far less than those of someone who
is, say, in her 50s. So for the sake of
keeping voters who are desperately seeking to vote against President Trump
(Again, see PRESIDENT
TRUMP WILL NOT BE RE-ELECTED.) but still worry about Mr. Biden’s capacity
for running this nation, Mr. Biden’s selection of a vice-president is as
important as was Mr. Roosevelt’s in 1944.
More importantly, for the sake of the future of the
country, Mr. Biden’s selection of his vice-president is nearly as important as
was Mr. Roosevelt’s in 1944; the person Mr. Biden selects is, while not as
likely as was Mr. Truman in 1944, highly likely to be our next president. And COVID-19, or at least its economic
ramifications, might still be with us when she becomes president. So she better have what it takes, whatever
that is in this discomfiting age in which anybody is considered capable of
running this country.
Like FDR in 1944, Mr. Biden is faced with a split in his
party, though the split is not nearly as wide as it was in 1944. The wings of the Democratic Party are not
nearly as wide as they were in 1944.
There are no more segregationists in the Democratic Party of the type
that backed Mr. Byrnes. There are no
more non-ideological big city bosses. There are no conservatives in the
Democratic Party. There are no moderates
in the Democratic Party; as Mr. Biden himself said just last month
“There will be no ‘moderate Democrat’ on the
ballot in 2020.”
What we have now in the Democratic Party is barely
varying shades of deeply “progressive blue.”
And even the most “progressive” elements of the Party, personified by
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, are arguably not as radical as was Mr. Wallace, except,
maybe for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Still, what
the split in the Democratic Party lacks in substance it compensates for in
rhetorical hysteria; from the sound of the various factions’ protestations,
you’d think there is as wide a gulf between, say, Bernie Sanders and Amy
Klobuchar as there was between Jimmy Byrnes and Henry Wallace. Mr. Biden thus is in a tough spot in making
this decision, and he has further limited his latitude by making a pledge to
select a woman as his running mate.
Mr. Biden could mollify the left-most extremes of his Party,
those who are popularly referred to as the Sandernistas, by selecting someone
who hails from that corner of the Party.
Though one never knows given the petulance of the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez
crowd, perhaps Elizabeth Warren, a Sandernista in all but name, would be
acceptable. But if Mr. Biden does make
such a selection, he risks losing plenty of the voters I described in my last
post who are dying to vote against Trump but can’t stomach someone as overtly
liberal as Ms. Warren and her comrades.
While yours truly doesn’t think there is much political danger for Mr.
Biden since he would have a hard time losing in 2020 almost no matter what he
does, smarter people than I do not agree with that assessment and political
considerations must always be taken into account, as they were in 1944 when
nobody, least of all Thomas Dewey, was going to beat FDR.
On the other hand, Mr. Biden could pick a perceived
moderate, like Senator Amy Klobuchar or, if he were willing to break his
“I’ll pick a woman” pledge, which would be ill-advised, New York Governor Andrew
Cuomo, who is getting plenty of publicity, and much praise from certain
quarters, for his performance during the COVID-19 crisis. Such a move would not scare away the moderate
to conservative suburbanites who are desperate to vote for anybody but Trump
but don’t want to turn the country over to a crowd who thinks socialism is an
idea whose time has come. However, if Mr.
Biden makes such a move, he risks antagonizing the lunatic elements of his
Party, who might stay home or launch some kind of quixotic third party or
write-in campaign, as did Henry Wallace in 1948.
While the Democratic Party is not seeking advice from the
likes of yours truly, I feel compelled to outline how Mr. Biden should proceed
in this very important deliberation:
·
As hard as this might be, Mr. Biden must come to
terms with his own mortality and realize that he is, in all likelihood,
selecting his successor and thus should pick someone fully capable of running
this country, or at least its executive branch. This is not Geraldine Ferraro, Dan
Quayle, John Edwards, or Sarah Palin time.
·
Mr. Biden should NOT break his pledge to select
a woman. While the pledge itself was
ill-advised and not necessary to win the nomination, breaking it would be more
ill-advised. From a purely Machiavellian
point of view, where are the voters pining for a woman on the ticket for the
sake of a woman being on the ticket going to go? To Donald Trump? On the other hand, why incur ill-will when
there are plenty of women around who are at least as qualified as the potential
candidates of the male variety?
· Mr. Biden should avoid picking one of his
opponents in the primary elections.
This would only infuriate the faction from which Mr. Biden did not
pick. Besides, there are plenty of
equally qualified, or unqualified, people who had the good sense not to get
involved in the circus that was the 2020 primary season. So no Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar.
·
As tempting as it might be to throw the long
ball and do something unprecedented, selecting Michelle Obama would not
be a good move. Yes, it will help Mr.
Biden’s chances on election day because nobody would unify the Party like
Michelle Obama, except her husband, who also could legally accept the
nomination, but such a move is so crazy as to be beyond the pale. However, Mr. Biden doesn’t need to throw the
long ball; he only needs three yards and a cloud of dust, which is to his
benefit since the election will be decided in Big 10 country. And, as much as the die-hard Obama crowd
does not want to hear it, Michelle Obama has no (zero) qualifications to be
president. While that has not stopped a
lot of people from seeking the office, and some from actually winning it, Mr.
Biden wants to play a careful, inside game right now.
·
What Mr. Biden needs is a nobody, a largely
unknown high office-holder who can unite the Party, largely by not offending
anybody, and who has shown at least an inkling of capacity for the big
job. He needs someone who can, as I
said in my last post, keep Joe Biden from morphing from “not Donald Trump” into
“Joe Biden” and who could step into the Oval Office on virtually no notice,
if need be. He needs a competent nobody
who has made plenty of friends and few enemies. The Democrats stumbled upon such a candidate
in 1944 and it worked out well for them and for the country; they need to do so again 76 years later. But this time, they don’t have big city party bosses
like Ed Kelly and Ed Flynn to help in this effort, which is not the unmitigated
positive the enlightened types seem to think.
Again, the above points are opinions regarding what Mr. Biden
and his Democrats should do. Yours
truly is not prepared at this point to predict what they will do. Given the Democrats’ longstanding tendency
toward self-sabotage, such speculation at this point is just that.
In the course of this post, I mentioned Ed Kelly and Ed
Flynn. These two are the types of
characters I will write about if I write a prequel to my two books, The
Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The
Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics,
both available at Amazon and a variety of online book sellers.
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