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Joe Biden is getting a lot of unsolicited advice about a running mate. Here’s mine: Find yourself another Joe Biden.
When Barack Obama was cruising to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008, he chose someone who buttressed his political weakness. Obama’s overriding political weakness wasn’t hard to pinpoint: He was a mixed-race intellectual whose father was from Kenya.
In the midst of economic collapse presided over by a Republican incumbent, any generic Democrat was poised to win in 2008. But there was nothing generic about Obama.
Enter Regular Joe. Obama aides have said that the final choice came down to Indiana Senator Evan Bayh or Biden. Bayh was white, Midwestern, cautious, reserved, moderate. Regular Joe was better. Obama’s evident comfort with Biden, and Biden’s with Obama, helped white voters find their own comfort with an unprecedented nominee. Bayh, a senator’s son, lacked the middle-class emoting gene, and hard-times sheen, that Biden has in abundance.
Biden’s more hazily defined weaknesses will come into better focus after Republicans work through their arsenal and find a few attacks that stick, more or less. He starts out with not-so-great favourable/unfavourable ratings — typically net negative by a couple points. Meantime, Republicans are already attacking his age, 77, and in the primaries young Democratic voters invariably preferred other candidates.
Despite Biden’s support among older black voters, both Russians and Republicans are likely to repeat their 2016 efforts to suppress black voter turnout; a black vote surge is far from guaranteed. Finally, Biden has a wobbly left flank, the residue of rekindled left-wing ambition and Senator Bernie Sanders’ persistent campaign against the party whose nomination he sought. Which women — Biden has committed to pick a woman — help here?
Senator Elizabeth Warren might help close the enthusiasm gap on the left, and would make a vice president for the ages. But she soon turns 71, and would thus elevate the age issue and raise uncomfortable questions about the future. A double-septuagenarian ticket might be pushing its luck.
Younger white contenders, such as 60-year-old Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota or 48-year-old Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, are often pitched as regional firepower to win the upper Midwest. Maybe. Each is popular in her home state. But neither provides the kind of cultural outreach that Biden provided for Obama. They reinforce his strength with white moderates rather than buttressing his vulnerabilities. And in the upper Midwest, victory may well come down to black turnout in such places as Milwaukee and Detroit.
Senator Kamala Harris of California and former Georgia legislator Stacey Abrams are more appealing in that vein. But Abrams, who was minority leader in the state House of Representatives, doesn’t meet the credential test. On a strictly comparative basis, of course, that statement is absurd. The incumbent president shows no interest in the workings of government or issues of public policy, and never will.
—Bloomberg