Why Clinton’s choice of a running mate really matters
There’s no more Joe Biden hovering on the periphery, waiting. Bernie Sanders is already a memory. And now the specter of a federal indictment, always remote but potentially catastrophic nonetheless, has finally, if noisily, been put to rest.
Sure, a race of zombie aliens could still beam down to Earth and inhabit the bodies of Democratic delegates in Philadelphia, and I guess there’s a small chance we’d actually notice. But if you’re Hillary Clinton, you woke up yesterday and realized that, at long last, no earthly obstacle remains between you and the nomination.
Followed closely by a second thought: I’ve really got to figure out who’s running with me.
The first announcement about a running mate, of course, will come from Clinton’s opponent. Donald Trump’s convention commences in about 10 days, which by my rough calculation gives him a pretty tight schedule:
Three days to settle on a top few choices, two more days to get rejected by them and find a suitable fallback (two senators, Bob Corker and Joni Ernst, took themselves out of contention just yesterday), one day to introduce his pick at a rally at which Trump does all the talking, one more day to totally insult that person in a thoughtless, late-night tweet, two days to walk back the tweet in a barrage of free publicity, and one additional day to blame the media for the whole thing and revoke the credentials of a few more serious news outlets.
Clinton, though, still has a few weeks to name her running mate, and the choice will test her steel as a potential president.
She’s under enormous pressure to go in one direction. She really should choose the other.
If you took any classes in political history, you were probably taught that running mates are chosen for the sake of regional balance, or to reunify a party riven along ideological lines. Times have changed.
Nobody really cares much about regional pride anymore; we all drink the same overpriced coffee and shop at the same Target. Most candidates can’t even count on delivering their home states. Ideological factions tend to cohere, since the ideology is so muddled anyway.
These days, nominees are more likely to choose their mates based on the signal they want to send about themselves.
Sometimes the pick is meant to reinforce the candidate’s core strength. The classic case here is Bill Clinton, who chose Al Gore because he was as close to a mirror image of youth and centrism as Clinton could get.
Other times, a nominee looks to reassure voters about some lingering liability. Gore, for instance, chose the upright and pious Joe Lieberman to help put some distance between himself and a scandalized president. George W. Bush’s partnership with Dick Cheney was seen as a counterbalance to his own lack of gravitas.
It’s a good bet that Clinton will use her own pick to help compensate for some of the doubts about her candidacy. The question is which ones.
The narrative on the left is that Clinton’s only real liability — the one existential threat to her candidacy — is the enthusiasm gap in her own party. The thinking here is that Democrats already enjoy a huge demographic advantage, as younger and nonwhite voters supplant older white guys, and Trump’s candidacy only adds to the imbalance, since he can’t seem to exhale without offending women or Latinos.
The only way Clinton loses, in this view, is if Democratic constituencies don’t vote. And what the surprisingly robust Bernie Sanders rebellion tells you is that younger and more progressive Democrats are uninspired by her, at best.
And so the left is pushing hard for Elizabeth Warren, who’s suddenly at Clinton’s side so much it’s like they’re remaking “Thelma and Louise.” There’s also a lot of talk about a Latino candidate like Julian Castro or Tom Perez, both Cabinet secretaries with unusually light résumés for the nation’s second-highest office.
The left has it half right. Clinton does, in fact, have a vulnerability that could sink her. It’s just not the one they’re talking about.
Democrats aren’t going to stay home in November. The party isn’t going to be short of door knockers or yard signs. Clinton could show up to debate in one of those plastic Reagan masks they sell at Halloween, and she’d still turn out all the reliably Democratic votes any nominee can expect.
That’s because all politics is adversarial these days, and even if Clinton couldn’t unify her own party, believe me, Trump would. All those Sanders voters aren’t going to sit out an election where some kind of Muslim ban — exactly which kind depends on the week — is on the ballot.
But that doesn’t mean there will be enough of them to guarantee Clinton a victory. And herein lies her more pressing problem. Independent voters, and white men in general, really don’t trust her.
Oh, I know, nobody needs a bunch of old, whiny white guys to vote for them anymore. Obama lost independents by 5 points in 2012, and men by 20, and he did fine. I’ve heard the argument.
Except that Obama is a singular, electrifying figure who brought out unprecedented numbers of black and young voters in both of his elections; no other Democrat can count on that, no matter who’s on the ticket. And Clinton could well do worse among white and independent voters than Obama did.
In the latest national polls, Clinton leads Trump by several points, at what could well be his nadir as a candidate. If I’m Trump, that’s the best news I’ve heard since they actually found a buyer for the Taj Mahal.
For Clinton, the smarter move — and, I think, the one closest to where she really is politically, once you strip away all the artifice of the primaries — is to choose a more conventional running mate with a younger, more comfortable vibe. A swing-state senator like Virginia’s Tim Kaine or Colorado’s Michael Bennet could help reassure independents and maybe even draw some anti-Trump Republicans, too.
Or Clinton could do what she’s pretty good at, which is to split the difference. She might gravitate toward Sherrod Brown, the populist Ohio senator, who’s every bit the class warrior that Warren is, but with a less condescending touch and a proven ability to win working-class votes.
The larger point is that Clinton’s choice isn’t just about winning in November. It’s also a window into how she intends to govern.
The same liberals pushing her toward Warren now are the ones who, in the days after the lopsided 2008 election, insisted to Obama and anyone who would listen that Republicans had been washed away by history’s tide, that Democrats would control Congress for the next 40 years, that now was the time to press their considerable advantage.
Two years later, and not coincidentally, they watched Republicans storm back into Congress and paralyze a presidency.
You can look at governing as an exercise in rallying your own raucous forces and writing off the rest, trying to get to 51 percent, imposing the will of a narrow majority because you don’t believe in your own ability to make the case convincingly.
Or it can be about making pragmatic choices, trying to persuade some significant number of people you might be right, and building as broad a coalition as you can, in order to enact reform that lasts longer than the next election cycle.
The question is which way Clinton might go, now that she’s finally in control of the party. Clinton’s not just choosing a running mate. She’s choosing a path.
