With the Gore endorsement of Dean pretty much sealing the nomination for Dean, it is now time for me to predict who Dean will choose as his running mate.
As Dean’s campaign has basiclly been “I hate everythijng about Bush and I was against the war,” it is time to run to the center. They are not going to pick a southern veep- politically the world has changed and a southern candidate simpy is not as important anymore, particularly to the Dems. They need someone young, dynamic, and centrist. They need someone who was in favor of the war to blunt the charges that Dean is McGovern, and they need someone who has not made a bunch of idiotic public proclamations in the last two years. They need someone who has not been bloodied by the nomination process, so the 8 other has-beens are out. They could use someone from the industrial midwest, and if they choose someone from the Senate, it needs to be someone who could be easily replaced by another Democrat, particularly a state with a Democratic governor. The answer is rather clear:
Dean’s running mate is going to be Evan Bayh.
This would also explain his well-timed and rather hawkish Q&A last week.
*** Update ***
And before people start claiming he is not centrist, lemme ask you this- how many other Democrats have pictures of themselves with Colin Powell, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and Rick Santorum on their official Senate website? The question is, will he go the way of Lieberman in 2000 and throw out all of his principles to make sure Sheila Jackson lee and Maxine Waters are happy with the ticket? Of course, Bayh is not Jewish, so that solves part of the problem with the CBC.
*** Update #2 ***
I see the name Bill Richardson being floated. A good choice, but didn’t he JUST get elected, with his first action a drastic tac cut package? And Graham has become a nutter, not to mention the age issue.
Dodd
I disagree. I think it’ll be Wesley Clark.
George Kelly
None of the CBC’s Lieberman beef was about his being Jewish. (If it was, perhaps we’d’ve seen him earn less than the 90 percent of blacks’ votes in ’00.) It was his less-than-full support of affirmative action.
John Cole
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,63370,00.html
http://www.newsavanna.com/meanderings/me106/me10606.html
http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0994/9409018.htm
The CBC/JEwish tensions exist, whether you want to admit it or not.
George
Hilliard and McKinney’s reactions to defeat are not representative of CBC sentiment as a whole, and the Fox News article’s hearsay quotes from Walters and the Hastings aide don’t make it so.
There are no CBC/NOI ties of substance now, if there ever were; having to go back to ’94 undermines your assertion of tension.
You’re determined to paint the CBC unfairly and with a broad brush? So be it.
Kimmitt
Bayh’s name has been going around. I agree with your analysis of the dynamics, but I think that there are several people who are good fits within those dynamics.
Ricky
Bayh would be a good pick, but how does he choose someone who disagrees with his #1 item? The entire concept of a veep is someone who’ll closely mirror your stances (you don’t vote for a Prez on issues & then get the opposite if he dies), hence the pro-life switch for Bush 41 in ’80 & the switches for Kemp in ’96 to Dole’s platform. The entire campaign would be filled with Bayh either disavowing his pro-war stance (which a 9/11 America simply won’t accept as anything other than bullshit) or non-stop questions about Dean answering *MORE* questions about how he’s out of step with America – this time even his veep nominee.
Any chance it’ll be Gore? It’s not like he’s busy.
Ricky
Er, I worded my comment awfully, but the concept is still there (if wrapped up in constant uses of the word “questions”). Sorry.
mark
Bayh would be good, but I do not see him accepting. Ricky is right, Bayh is too much of a centrist and a hawk to agree to run with Dean.
I look for it to be someone not really considered a candidate right now to get the nod, sort of like Cheney in 2000. My darkhorse choice: Governor Mark Warner of Virginia. Of course, my thinking is cloudy right now because damn Holcomb just threw his second interception. Put me on your list of depressed people cause their NFL team sucks…
john young
Evan Bayh? Would you think W would choose Lincoln Chafee, George Pataki, Olympia Snowe, or John McCain to balance his ticket, absent Mr. Cheney? I doubt it. I think Senator Lugar would be a much better fit for Dean, party labels aside. Bayh has Santorum(!)’s picture up because Bayh is from a markedly Republican state.
I don’t know these folks well at all, but how ’bout Sen. Levin, ex-Sen. Nunn, Sen. Durbin, Gov. Rendell, Gephardt, ANYbody from Ohio? He could pull a Dukakis and get old man Graham, just the same. Let’s see. Richardson? Matsui? Zell? Richard Lamm? Gray Davis also may be free.
Am I wasting anybody’s time?
Dana
I dunno, John, I think Dean will have to choose someone who agrees with his stance on the war, since that will be his main campaigning point, and the VP’al candidate will have to stump for him. Don’t know who it’ll be… Kerry, maybe.
Dodd
Which gets back to why I think it will be Clark. He claims to agree with Dean’s stance on the war and gives the ticket some *much* needed showing up on the national security front. Of course, Clark has his downside – not least of which is that none of us really knows what he thinks about anything, including, so it seems sometimes, Clark and he wasn’t even a Democrat until after he announced his run.
Still, of the probably-available options, he’s Dean’s best choice. Kerry would actually be better on pure resume value, but after the utterly pathetic campaign he’s run, well….
Kimmitt
“not least of which is that none of us really knows what he thinks about anything,”
I’m not sure this is a downside, electorally.
Dean Esmay
Historically, whoever is ahead in the national Gallup poll going into New Hampshire wins the nomination.
Let me be clear to repeat that, because most people don’t get it: whoever is ahead in the NATIONAL poll, no matter HOW he’s doing in the New Hampshire poll or any other state poll, wins the nomination.
Right now, Dean is so far out ahead of the pack in the national polls, he looks unbeatable.
The other Dems in the race were stupid. They were handling the guy with kid gloves. Fools. They should have savaged him.
Ah well. I happen to agree with Dodd. The best choice for Dean is to choose Clark as his running mate, and Clark will almost certainly take the job.
Clark gives him a shot at winning Arkansas and maybe, maybe, Florida. If Dean hoves hard to the right after sewing up the nomination–and he very well might, and has ample ways to do so–Clark can help bolster his image as a serious-minded hawk.
All this chitter chatter about Clark not really standing for anything? Won’t matter a fig to the vast majority of voters, who are paying no attention at all right now, and will be even less receptive 10, 11 months from now to digs about how “he doesn’t really stand for anything” or “he used to be a Republican” or any of that nonsense. It’ll just seem like noise to all but the political junkies and those who are voting for Bush anyway.
The more I look at it, too, the more I think that Dean is going to be able to give Bush a real run for his money. Dean is so far out ahead he may be able to cruise into the nomination and have it sewn up by Super Tuesday. That gives him literally months to hone his position, pull a Nixon, and move hard right.
How?
1) Say Bush is weak on national security at home. Propose spending increases and other reforms, and exploit any terrorist incidents (if there are any) as proof of Bush’s incompetence.
2) Say things like, “Yes, I opposed the war in Iraq, but now I realize we must win it, and Bush is screwing it up. We need more troops.”
3) Hit Bush hard for allowing deficits to increase, and promise to balance the budget.
4) Swerve on taxes and say that tax cuts on the middle class should stay, just all the other ones should be repealed.
5) Play hard for NRA endorsement. Whether he gets it or not, it’ll play well with those voters.
6) Pledge moderates on the courts and no litmus test on abortion.
Oh, and pick a general for a running mate.
Dean couldn’t possibly be in better shape, really. At this point, he may even be the ideal Democratic candidate. I didn’t think so at first, and I also have worried about him from day one.
Now I suspect that if he does all of the above, a lot of his critics on the right will decide he’s not so bad after all. You might even find yourself saying that, John.
Am I trying to talk you into it? No. But I will say this: in nine months, all this stuff about what he said in 2003 isn’t going to mean beans to most voters.
Steve Malynn
Jonah notes that the Gore endorsement is another move away from seriously taking on the war on terror, here. Money graf:
In other words, Al Gore not only thinks Howard Dean [with zero foreign policy ideas or experience] is more qualified to be president of the United States than Joe Lieberman [who drafted the Homeland Security legislation] was or is, he thinks that is especially the case now after 9/11. If you really let that sink in for a second, you can see what an amazingly mercenary and damn close to dishonorable position that is. Moreover, it shows how a vast swath of the Democratic Party really, fundamentally, doesn’t care that there’s a war on — except, that is, to the extent it wants to bug out from it.
[I’ve inserted the bracketed lines to paraphrase the two prior paragraphs in Jonah Goldberg’s “Corner” post. -ed]
Andrew Lazarus
In the last presidential cycle, almost as many voters picked a candidate with zero foreign policy ideas (disparaged “nation-building”) or experience (couldn’t even name ruler of Pakistan) than his opponent. What a dishonorable candidate for the Republican Party. Nearly traitors, they are.
Yeah, I know, nwo we have a war on. And the Dems are picking a candidate who’s going to say the Iraq front is a “sideshow” (VP Clark’s word) from the War on Terror, and that George Bush is fighting this war incompetently.
Reasoning like Steve’s is fuel for the suspicion that one benefit GWB saw in the Iraquagmire was the opportunity to split the Democratic Party. Of course, for Steve’s ilk, the window of opportunity to criticize Dear Leader has long since closed.
Elmo
Dean’s running mate? What difference does it make if a gasoline tanker truck crashes into a bridge abutment or goes off a cliff?
Moe Lane
Andrew, it’s not /our/ fault that the Republican Party enjoys an automatic assumption of moral superiority by the voting public when it comes to foreign policy. This is simply the way things are: it’s not fair, yes, but whoever said that the universe was fair? Whining about it won’t help your side, either – and yes, there was a definite whine audible in your last post.
IOW, suck it up and work around it.
Steve Malynn
Andrew, I’m an ilk!?! Or do I have ilk that I don’t know about?
For the Record, I thought Bush 41 was wrong on foreign policy, and I also disagreed when Bush 43 ran as a conservative WRT “nation building,” that is he was against it. I’ve long been irritated by Kissingerian “real politic,” and felt that “nation building” could be performed that helps US interests (as opposed to Somalia and Haiti, ooo see Granada and Panama). So except for the fact that I’m not jewish, and have always been conservative, you might call me a neo-con (as BS a label as ‘ilk’).
So Bush actually had ideas that fit into the context of the times, 2000. Interestingly, Bush has adjusted post 9/11, and Dean has taken up the Buchannanite isolationist position. Is that not rather remarkable that the hard left has abandoned “nation building” just when that measure is called for to help the US?
Jonah calls Gore on his flip-flop, from interventionist during Clinton-Gore, and during his run for election, to isolationist today. It appears to me that Dean and Gore take a partisan position nearly devoid of even a fig-leaf of responsible policy ideas (do you really think ceeding our defense to the UN, France, Germany or Russia is a responsible policy?).
Steve Malynn
Great President. Check out Hobbsonline to find out why.
Sorry, John, I guess Andrew is right, I’m an ilk.
Kirby Stone
Does Jonah Goldberg actually know any Democrats? He seems to get his ideas third-hand from whoever is hanging out at the Weekly Standard water cooler.
Steve Malynn
Kirby,
Are you saying that one of the candidates has more credibility on defense than Goldberg allows? Who? As much as it pains me to say it, I’d vote for Hillary over the ten dwarves (Gore being one of the ghosts of dwarves past). In fact, Hillary is actually “good” on the war on terror, and if Bush goes wobbly I will vote for an alternative that is not wobbly.
The country can afford a liberal president, it cannot afford losing the war on terror. Dean, Gore, Kerry, xGrahamx, Clark, Edwards, Scharpton, Mosely-Braun, Kusinich, do not inspire confidence. Lieberman has been the sole voice or reason on this front among the current Dem candidates, IMHO.
But Hillary would probably really fight the fight the toughest, my only concern on this regard is her past ties with Arafat, but I think that was a matter of liberal convenience which she’d give up in a New York minute.
oceanguy
Bayh may upstage Dean.
Watch too for Florida’s Bill Nelson…. someone who appeals to the center in Florida and could help the Dems win there… and a win in Florida might mean more than a possible loss of a senate seat.
Dean Esmay
The more I read this thread, and other threads, and op-eds, on the Gore endorsement and several other things, the more convinced I am that Howard Dean is very likely to be the next President of the United States.
His opportunity to pivot hard away from his lunatic fringe base is huge. Some of them will wind up disillusioned and angry, but since their support for Dean is mostly emotional and not rational, most of them will barely notice, or care.
He’s going to try to outflank Bush on the right. Watch for it. Bush will be all but helpless before it. If the Bushies don’t see this and aren’t already planning for it, they’re fools.
The President’s critics have increasingly proven themselves to (with some honorable exceptions) to be irrational people who have no firm convictions, and to prefer pettifoggery to honest discussion. That being the case, Dean can take almost any position once the nomination is sewn up, and it won’t matter to them. He could practically offer to cut taxes across the board, promote a culture of life, be a uniter not a divider, to endorse social security privatization and school cohie, and avoid nation-building, and his base will vote for him regardless.
He owns them, and the vast majority of voters will neither remember nor care that Dean’s contradicting himself from the things he was saying during 2003.
Dean Esmay
Choice. School choice. Stupid internet!