I doubt that Hillary Clinton really wants to run with Elizabeth Warren — I doubt that she fully trusts her — but if that’s her calculated decision: mazel tov. They sure were fiery together last week, two blue devils raring to bedevil Donald Trump.
Tim Kaine is totally sensible, mostly safe and a bit of a snooze: the aspirin of aspirants. But if Clinton is tugged in the Virginia senator’s direction, she should head there. I could certainly see him as the vice-president. Then again I’ve seen Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the job, in HBO’s Veep. Clinton might as well pick her for all the difference it would make.
Here’s what we journalists don’t like to tell you or even admit to ourselves as we furiously stir the speculation, breathlessly thicken the suspense and whet Americans’ appetites for the big reveal of who will round out the Democratic and Republican tickets: Its impact on the election is close to non-existent.
That’s particularly true this time around, and especially so with Clinton.
She can veer to the left, tack to the centre, go for sizzle, settle for steadiness. She has all the wiggle room in the world. Seldom in a modern presidential campaign has the selection of a running mate mattered as little as it does for her.
She has been on Americans’ TV screens and in their brains for so long now that she’s like email or ATMs: It’s hard to remember daily life before her. Opinions of her are fixed. Emotions are ossified. Her running mate won’t be some fresh lens through which voters notice new shadings and dimensions of her. There’s no sudden swoon for her around the bend, no fresh disenchantment in the offing.
She has no gaping holes in her resume to fill. “By any measure, Clinton has every credential needed to be president,” said Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic political consultant who was the deputy manager of President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election effort. “So a vice president isn’t going to add to that.”
And there are strong signs in recent surveys that the progressives who supported Bernie Sanders are coming around to her even before they find out which partner she teams with. These polls suggest that Democratic voters are happier with her than Republican voters are with Trump; that many more Sanders supporters view her positively than negatively; and that more than three in four of them are already behind her.
So for all of the excited talk about Clinton and Warren, Warren probably isn’t necessary for Clinton — and could be a nuisance in any Clinton White House.
“Every bit of evidence about Elizabeth Warren is that she’ll go indie when she feels she needs to,” said Doug Schoen, a pollster and strategist who has advised Bill Clinton and Mike Bloomberg, referring to Warren’s carefully maintained identity as someone who doesn’t back down. If Clinton ran with her and won, “The day that Warren says, ‘I cannot support this trade deal’ that Clinton has decided to endorse, the administration is over.”
But the most compelling reason that Clinton can pick whom she pleases is the ineffably large, epically polarising presence of Trump. Any wavering voters who might be lured his way will be making a decision about him — whether he’s a protest vote with too high a price, whether a real leader can bloom where a peevish child still stomps and preens — and not about the appeal of Clinton’s No. 2.
“The Trump card overwhelms it,” said Doug Sosnik, a Democratic strategist who worked in Bill Clinton’s White House, adding that if either candidate’s vice presidential pick matters at all, it’s Trump’s. “He might be able to reassure people that there’s an adult on site.”
Not that he has many options, and that’s another facet of these veepstakes that makes them different from any other. In elections past, strivers in both parties deflected questions about the vice-presidency with a coyness designed to make clear that, yes, they’d run a lawn mower over beloved relatives if those haplessly positioned kinfolk stood in the way of the assignment.
In this election, young Republican stars and seasoned party veterans alike have dispensed with any coyness to stress that they’d rather do yard work than stand beside the gaudy topiary that is Trump. Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, John Kasich, Scott Walker and more said, “No, thanks,” before Trump could even say, “Please.”
And it’s not just that they reject positions Trump has taken, flinch at words he has spoken and worry that he’s more taint than gilt. They also fear how exposed they’d be.
Normally, before a candidate and his or her aides choose a running mate, “They develop an operation to defend and support the vice-presidential nominee,” said Dan Senor, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign who helped do precisely that for Paul Ryan. “The minute that nominee is announced, there are 800 reporters breathing down your throat and the other side is going to war to shred the running mate’s reputation.”
Nothing about the crude infrastructure and chaotic staff turnover of Trump’s political organisation would give his running mate much hope for protection from that savaging. “Operationally, you could be destroyed,” Senor said. “The only resource the campaign has to defend you is Trump’s Twitter account. What a disaster.”
Trump’s slim pickings are more an embarrassment than a curse. As Sosnik wrote in The Washington Post last week, “The last time a vice-presidential selection may have altered the outcome was in 1960, when John F. Kennedy’s choice of Lyndon B. Johnson assured Democrats of carrying Texas.”
Since then, the notion that a running mate should put a teetering state in the victory column has been repeatedly rejected or rebutted. Dick Cheney was from Wyoming, which George W. Bush was going to win anyway. Joe Lieberman was from Connecticut, where Al Gore was already destined to prevail.
John Edwards was from North Carolina, which John Kerry proceeded to lose. Ryan was from Wisconsin, whose voters nonetheless chose Obama over Romney.
I pushed back at various political strategists: Surely the veep pick is a consequential moment?
“To the media, yes,” said Schoen. “To the voters, no. Remember Dan Quayle? Spiro Agnew?” They were the ankle weights on, respectively, the first President Bush and the only President Nixon, both of whom loped to victory regardless.
We’re about to ignore that. We have paragraphs to write, airtime to fill. And like chefs talking up the momentousness of a meal, we’ll present Clinton’s and Trump’s running mates as crucially palate-priming appetisers, perfectly complementary side dishes, make-or-break desserts.
Really they’re just garnishes — in Clinton’s case, a mere sprig of parsley.
— New York Times News Service
Frank Bruni is a writer and author of Born Round and Ambling into History.
