Presidential Veepstakes!

Yesterday I watched as one of the hosts on MSNBC reassured her audience over and over again that the choice of a vice-presidential running mate doesn’t matter. I was a little dismayed at how she kept hammering home the point, especially when it seems clear that she is completely wrong. Earlier in the nation’s history, this was certainly true. In fact, Franklin D. Roosevelt went through several vice presidents during his four elections before Harry Truman just happened to be in the office when the president died. John F. Kennedy was keenly aware that he needed not just a southern Democrat on the ticket, but one who had a lot of charisma and political power. But I would argue that ever since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, that the vice-presidential pick has been instrumental in the election or defeat of presidential hopefuls. Certainly not the sole factor, but decidedly in the top two or three. This is a belief I have held for many years now, based on historical precedent, and one that has led to an adage that a presidential hopeful has the best chance of winning when they “pick from the podium.” That is, when choosing from among the strongest contenders in the presidential primaries, a nominee is not only adding their rival’s followers to his or her own, but unifying the party after what are usually contentious contests for the nomination. Presidential hopefuls who have failed to do this, usually lose.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan stunned most political pundits by selecting George H.W. Bush as his running mate, because Bush had been one of Reagan’s harshest critics on the debate stage during the Republican primaries. It was the first real choice of this kind in U.S. history, but it set the tone for future presidential success. Typically, the opposing party is able to use attacks against the eventual nominee of the opposing party by adopting those made in the primaries. But this sort of neutralizes those attacks and, even more crucially, can unify the party AS a party, rather than around a personality. Reagan was going to win against Carter regardless, but he had an even easier time four years later when Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in 1984. She was a brilliant choice, but a disaster in terms of being the first woman on a presidential ticket. It wasn’t the only reason Mondale lost, as he was essentially Carter lite, but it hurt his even minimal chances further, resulting in the most lopsided landslide in U.S. presidential history, losing 525 to 13 in the electoral college. George H.W. Bush, unlike his predecessor, made a colossal blunder in choosing Dan Quayle, an absolute dolt who couldn’t spell the word “potato.” The only reason Bush won, however, is because Michael Dukakis was such a poor candidate on the Democratic side that even the excellent selection of Lloyd Bentson couldn’t resuscitate his doomed campaign.

Four years later, after the country was much more familiar with just how dumb Dan Quayle was, he became more of an albatross. Bush lost the 1988 election primarily due to third-party candidate Ross Perot, who siphoned off far more Republican votes than he did Democratic ones for Bill Clinton. But make no mistake, in a solid second place for why he was defeated, was his vice-presidential train wreck. The reason Clinton skated by with the uninspired Al Gore, was because not only was Quayle a drag on the Republican ticket, but Ross Perot made easily the worst vice-presidential selection in U.S. history with Admiral James Stockdale. To paraphrase a podcaster on the disastrous Republican response to Biden’s most recent State of the Union address by the wacked-out Katie Britt, “You do not want to be the cold open on Saturday Night Live. If you are, then you’ve done something terribly wrong.” James Stockdale was that in spades. No one who remembers that year can forget Phil Hartman’s brutal portrayal of Stockdale as a demented senior citizen who had no idea where he was or what he was doing. And so next to those two, the super-stiff and stilted Gore looked positively charismatic. Fortunately for Clinton, Gore was also no dummy, and so while he didn’t necessarily add anything to the ticket, he didn’t drag it down, either. Bob Dole, in the 1996 campaign, did the wise thing by choosing Jack Kemp, who had run against him in the primaries, but Dole, like Dukakis before him, was an inherently weak candidate and his selection of Kemp was unable to compensate for his deficiencies.

All of which brings us to the 2000 presidential campaign. I can remember exactly where I was when I knew Al Gore was going to lose the race. I was riding in a car from Wyoming to the Denver airport, and on NPR they made the announcement that Gore had selected Joe Lieberman as his running mate. George W. Bush had Darth Vader as his potential vice-president, and so Gore decided to go with . . . Droopy Dog? It wasn’t James Stockdale, but it was in the same zip code. Almost precisely like Mondale’s selection of Ferraro: the reason why it was done was clear, but attempts to be progressive before their time are doomed to failure. And still, Gore nearly won, which emphasizes even further that it was his vice-presidential pick that actually lost him the election. Lieberman wasn’t even a Democrat, he was an Independent. And with Ralph Nader siphoning off Democratic votes in the same way Perot did to the first Bush, the VP choice was even more crucial. Gore made the wrong choice, and it cost him the presidency. Bush won again in 2004 because of his unjustified war in Iraq, but even with that John Kerry’s choice of John Edwards wasn’t exactly inspired. Sure, he was young and energetic and from the south, but with his white-guy nineteen-seventies haircut, he always seemed kind of smarmy. And sure enough, it eventually came out that he had cheated on his wife and took campaign money for personal use during the affair. At the time, it did not seem surprising, and I think voters could sense it.

2008, however, is the real shining example of this argument in action, two choices that went in completely opposite directions. First, Barak Obama. During a hard-fought campaign Obama began really challenging Hillary Clinton for the nomination. Joe Biden, who also ran, was an early casualty, dropping out after his loss in Iowa. At the end of the day Obama had won the nomination, and his selection of a VP was genius. The big knock against him at the time was that he had no foreign policy experience. But Joe Bided did, as a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. None of this long outmoded “southern strategy” like the Edwards pick for Kerry. Obama didn’t need the crucial Delaware vote. Biden was serious, engaging, intelligent, and the most knowledgeable Senator on foreign policy. His selection made sense not only in terms of his ethnicity, but also Biden’s ability to strengthen the overall ticket through his age and experience. John McCain, on the other hand? Well . . . he decided to go in a different direction. McCain obviously couldn’t pick another white guy and seriously challenge Obama. Picking a black man was too on the nose, so that meant going with a woman. It had been nearly thirty years since Geraldine Ferraro, so his people plucked from obscurity a completely unknown governor from Alaska—apparently with no vetting whatsoever—and forced McCain to take her. John McCain never liked Sara Palin, for obvious reasons. She was equal parts ignorant, inexperienced, and insincere, and wound up being a perfect storm of political poison that led to a landslide defeat.

Mitt Romney did little better with his vice-presidential selection four years later. In 2012 he failed to pick from the podium, as had McCain, and fatally selected Congressman Paul Ryan. There was a reason that McCain hadn’t gone with another white guy, because even the Republican voters had moved in a more progressive direction by this point, and his retro-selection just seemed to be more of the same white-guy hubris. It wasn’t as bad a blowout as 2008, but Barak and Biden cruised easily to another four years in the White House. In a fair world, Biden would have picked up the mantle and used his vice-presidential experience to crush failed businessman and would-be fascist Donald Trump in 2016, but when his son Beau died of cancer Biden chose not to run. This series of events finally elevated Hillary Clinton to the Democratic nomination, after a tough-fought campaign against Bernie Sanders. There were several factors that led to Clinton’s loss, the first being her seemingly tone-deaf responses to the Black Lives Matter movement, the lead in the drinking water in Michigan, and working people in general. The second was Bernie Sanders’ petulant attitude after his loss, which suggested to his supporters that they NOT vote for Clinton in the general election. But what finally clinched her loss to Trump was her VP selection.

A young black male politician would have been the perfect choice, unfortunately there were none who had run for the Democratic nomination, just old white guys and Hillary. Certainly, Bernie was the obvious choice, as he was hugely popular, but even had she asked him—and she might have—there is no way he would have accepted. So, with the selection process wide open, who did she pick? Tim Kaine. I had the same reaction I had to Gore’s Lieberman pick. I knew she had lost as soon as it was announced. Kaine was an utterly boring, entirely uninteresting senator from Virginia. He brought absolutely nothing to the table, but worse than that, he was a complete drag on the ticket. The guy was ten years younger than Clinton, but onscreen and in interviews he looked ten years older. This was the equally idiotic VP wisdom that says the pick needs to be someone who doesn’t outshine the candidate, after all, it had worked for her husband. But Al Gore was neutral overall, while Kaine was a decided negative. Ultimately Clinton lost by a tiny number of votes in battleground states, and yet still won the popular vote by nearly three million votes. It’s not unrealistic to suggest that, even with the primary reasons for her defeat, she might have pulled off a victory had she chosen much more dynamic running mate, rather than losing to yet another Republican white-guy duo.

Having learned from Hillary’s mistake, when Biden came out of retirement to run in 2020 after a disastrous Trump administration—in which the failed president killed a million of his citizens, emboldened foreign dictatorships, and tanked the economy—he announced up front that he was going to choose a woman as a running mate—end of discussion. And did he ever. Not only was Kamala Harris an outstanding intellect, a former prosecutor, state attorney general, and Senator, but she was a pick from the podium! Who can forget Biden telling her in an aside at the second debate, with a wink and a smile, “Take it easy on me, kid.” The choice harkened back to Reagan in 1980. Not only was Harris in the race with Biden, she was one of his toughest critics. The selection in one stroke added diversity to the ticket, signaled a genuine progressive achievement in the form of the first female vice-president, and unified the party. Up against THAT, the two white-guys ticket on the other side didn’t have a chance. It also didn’t hurt that the entire world, not just the U.S. hated Trump. Bells rang out all over the countries of the world when the citizens of the United States decided to dump Trump.

It’s difficult to believe that Trump could have made an even worse choice for vice-president than Mike Pence, a lapdog who followed his leader around and could only look up after taking his nose out of Trump’s ass. But Pence wasn’t going to break the law, which infuriated the failed president, and led to his disastrous—though good for the rest of us—pick in the 2024 race, J.D. (Shady) Vance. Trump finally has a lackey with no personality, who’s as dumb as he is, and who will certainly do anything—including breaking the law—that Trump asks him. Based on this pick alone, Trump should lose. By far his best choice would have been Nikki Haley, but Trump is far too stupid to do something smart, and she is far too smart to do something that stupid. So the only variable at the moment is who Kamala Harris’s choice will be. Wisely, Gretchen Whitmer has taken herself out of the running, as two women are unlikely to overcome still rampant sexism on the right and in the middle. For the same reason Pete Buttigieg is not a good choice. Though he is one of the party’s best and brightest communicators, this pick at this time would be on the order of Ferraro or Lieberman. Andy Beshear lacks the necessary charisma, and having two blacks on the ticket eliminates Cedric Richmond. Tim Walz, Roy Cooper and J.B. Pritzker are also poor choices simply because of the optics: they look old, and set the wrong tone for Harris’s campaign. Tim Kaine all over again.

That leaves just two solid choices, Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. Shapiro is a young and experienced governor and seems a very commanding presence that could aid Harris tremendously on the campaign trail—not to mention delivering the incredibly important swing state of Pennsylvania. And he also sounds just like Obama! Kelly is an equally good choice for different reasons, a veteran, an astronaut, and a strong personality himself, he has the gravitas of an older presence on the ticket, much as Biden did for Obama, and he is poised to deliver a swing state as well. My choice, if it were up to me, actually would be Beto O’Rourke. I don’t know anyone who is a more passionate advocate for gun control, and would be solid on domestic issues while Kamala further refines her foreign policy credentials. Unfortunately, he has taken on the cast of a loser recently in his unsuccessful bid to become governor of Texas. Between Shapiro and Kelley, I would probably go with Shapiro, simply because he’s younger and can deliver many more electoral votes. With either him or Kelly, it puts the vice-president on a solid path to victory. Choosing someone other than those two, however, makes the prospect a lot more difficult than it should be in an already critical time for the country. It’s not certain that her early momentum will carry Kamala all the way to election day, so her choice now is every bit as important as the one we will make in November.