#6 Ironically, I can't think of a catchy title for a post about the significance of choosing the right vice presidential candidate...

…perhaps, because, in the last century the VP candidate has been a kind of afterthought, an attempt to balance the ticket at least geographically and occasionally politically: FDR and Truman, Stevenson and Kefauver, JFK and LBJ, etc. That changed with Clinton/Gore, both southerners, though one was a governor, the other a senator.

This year, the choice for Vice President on the Democratic ticket will be essential for victory in November.

If we assume that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic presidential nominee by the end of the summer, the next question is, How can the Democrats persuade the 20% of the American public that isn’t automatically voting Democratic or Republican to swing to the left?

One way is for the Democrats to find a vice-presidential candidate to provide some political balance, not a far right conservative, but a legitimate centrist, who can (one hopes) prevent the Republicans from seizing the center of the political spectrum, as dubya was allowed to do. There has been nothing centrist about dubya’s policies, but he was allowed in 2000 to appear to be, and to claim to be, “in the middle.” Given the mess he’s made of EVERY aspect of his presidency, “in the muddle” is more appropriate.

The Democratic VP nominee also has to be from, or at least influential in, a narrowly-won blue state, or a red state with a significant electoral college number, or a few smaller red states whose total electoral votes are enough to tilt the election blue. The VP candidate has to appeal to a broad spectrum of voters, and has to deliver his home state and additional states. And, yes, I wrote “his”: whether Obama or Clinton gets the nomination, the VP will probably be a male.

The best known political figures tend to come from the national stage, likely the Senate (rather than the House of Representatives, whose numbers dilute the possibility of any but the Speaker and Minority Leader from achieving much national attention). While governors may be more well known in their own states than on the national scene--except perhaps for actors from California, and the occasional charismatic if sexual-predatory personality--governors have been more successful in seeking the presidency than have sitting senators.

JFK was the last sitting senator to be elected president, and Warren G. Harding was the only other sitting senator to be elected president. James Garfield was elected to both the senate and the presidency in 1880, but declined the senate position to become president. By contrast, in the last seventy-five years FDR, Carter, Clinton, and dubya have all moved from the statehouse to the White House.

It is from these two groups, governors and senators, that the Democrats should look for a Vice Presidential candidate who will add strength to the fall ticket. John Edwards (yes, I realize that some of you liked him for this year’s presidential run) added nothing to the 2004 ticket. The personality he showed during 2007-2008’s early campaigning was yet undeveloped or, worse, missing in action in 2004, and he was unable to carry either his birth state (SC) or his elected state (NC). Together, those two states would have won the election for John Kerry. However, Kerry lost SC by seventeen percentage points, and NC by twelve and a half, so it may not have been possible for Edwards, even had he a stronger public persona at the time, to have affected those extreme results.

The Democrats in 2004 needed to have focused on a swing state, preferably a narrowly red state from 2000, to find a VP candidate who might have helped swing the election. In 2000, dubya won Missouri by fewer than 79,000 votes, putting Missouri in play for the Democrats in 2004. But in 2004, against the Kerry/Edwards ticket, dubya won Missouri by nearly 200,000 votes. I don’t know if Missouri’s own Dick Gephardt could have altered results, but he had national exposure (as former Speaker of the House and then minority leader), he had a lot of congressional experience, and he probably would have inspired more confidence in voters than John Edwards did at the time. Missouri alone would not have changed the outcome of the 2004 election, but Gephardt might have had a coattail effect. Edwards certainly didn’t. Gephardt should have been the Democrats’ VP candidate four years ago.

Next post: a look at Democratic governors, as we begin to examine specifically who might be an electable VP choice on the Democratic ticket.