Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Memo to Al: Never mind what everyone's trying to tell you. Your ideal running mate is Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.
Jul 20, 2000 | Forget everything you've heard about whom Al Gore should pick for veep. It's not Dick Gephardt, the would-be speaker of the House who took himself out of the running this week, even though his appearance on the ticket might help lock in labor support. It's not Sen. Bob Graham, the avuncular Floridian who might play with Dubya's mind by making him work hard for the Sunshine State, where his brother Jeb is supposed to run the show. It's not Dick Durbin, who could help in Illinois. And it's not Evan Bayh who might help in ... well, just where would he help? Forget the lot of them.
The best person for Gore to pick for veep is Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.
Kerry isn't exactly a household name. You might even be confusing him with Bob Kerrey, the notoriously anti-Gore Nebraska senator, who's been shooting spitballs at the vice president for a year now. John Kerry is the junior senator from Massachusetts, a Democratic stronghold that would require Gore's running through several White House interns to lose.
So why Kerry? Gore should pick Kerry, in part, because Clinton picked Gore. When Clinton chose Gore in 1992 he broke with almost every rule of vice-presidential selection. Gore offered no regional balance: He came from a neighboring state, Tennessee. He offered no ideological balance: He was close to a carbon copy of Clinton, a border-state New Democrat. At best, he gave Clinton some Washington credibility he lacked. But Gore was a great pick.
What Clinton did was do away with the notion that the vice presidency is a cardboard prop a presidential candidate uses to cover up his own deficiencies. And that was a good thing, because it was outdated thinking from a bygone era when the vice presidency was one of the more inconsequential of government posts.
For better or worse, Bush seems to be sticking very closely to this old-fashioned logic. Almost every possible veep choice the Bush people have mentioned is intended to balance the ticket in one fashion or another. Ticket balancing made more sense in the old-old days when the veep slot was used to appeal to party activists and functionaries more than to voters. In the modern, more image-driven presidential game the balancing model can sometimes leave the nominee telling voters, in essence, "Hey, if you like me, you're just gonna love this guy who's nothing like me." How does that work exactly?
Pundits often note that George Bush was the first sitting vice president to win the White House since 1836. What they seldom mention is that few of them even tried. For most of our history the vice presidency was filled by stand-ins and mediocrities. So long as the president didn't die in office the vice president simply walked off into obscurity when his time was through. Today a veep is a likely successor, or at least a future party nominee. Voters know that, and they see the candidate in that light.
The bottom line is that the nominee and the veep should be a unified team. The veep choice shouldn't balance the message the top guy (or gal) conveys: He or she should reinforce it. That's what made picking Gore a masterstroke: his very similarity to Clinton. It gave the Democratic ticket a coherent and unified message, and it signaled on Clinton's part a confidence about who and what he was. That's exactly what a modern vice-presidential pick should do. And Gore fit the bill.
Here's why Kerry does the same for Gore.
