Ranting On...Biden/Abrams

Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE)

History is littered with gimmicks when it comes to picking vice presidents.  Most of the time, they don't work, and honestly don't see the light of day until years later when someone includes in their memoir how history was almost changed.  Look at the 1980 Republican nomination, when Ronald Reagan briefly toyed with the idea of picking Gerald Ford as his running-mate.  Ford was certainly qualified, and keep in mind at that point Carter seemed a lot more likely to win the presidential election than the eventual results of 1980 would bare out.  However, Ford wanted to essentially take over foreign policy, which was a no go for the Reagan camp, who picked the more conventional choice of George HW Bush, who ran second place in the primaries in the months prior.

There are more ridiculous gimmicks than Reagan/Ford, which most historians agree was a plausible idea.  John Kerry thought about creating a bipartisan ticket with John McCain in 2004, though ultimately both men decided it was not going to work, particularly considering their divergent views on foreign policy.  Four years later McCain wanted to do the bipartisan ticket with Joe Lieberman, but his advisers went against it, with Lieberman's pro-choice stance being a big reason that McCain went with Sarah Palin instead (McCain, to his credit, admitted in his memoirs a decade later that he still regretted the decision not to pick Lieberman).

Perhaps the best anecdote of randomly-floated vice presidential gimmicks happened in 1988.  George HW Bush was way behind in the polls (something the fall election would not recall), and apparently considered adding then-Mayor of Carmel Clint Eastwood to his ticket, as the Dirty Harry star was a GOP politician in public office at the time.  It's not clear how seriously Bush considered Eastwood, but keep in mind he'd already ran with one actor-turned-politician, so it's not implausible he would have gone with another.

These are all amusing anecdotes-history is less kind to the candidates that actually went through with the gimmicks.  Sarah Palin is arguably the biggest blunder of John McCain's career, picking an inexperienced governor who had no concept of what it would be like to be president instead of a more serious candidate like Mitt Romney, and the presidential results bare out the stupidity of that decision.  Geraldine Ferraro is well-remembered today for her position as the first woman nominated for the vice presidency by a major party, but at the time this was a Hail Mary pass that Walter Mondale was throwing (he also considered Dianne Feinstein, Tom Bradley, and Henry Cisneros, all of whom would have been "firsts" similar to Ferraro), and it didn't pay off.  Mondale lost all but his home state and Ferraro, who had only been in Congress for a trio of terms was criticized for a lack of experience, and considering how her husband's taxes showed up seemingly out of nowhere, wasn't properly vetted.  A lack of vetting also hurt George McGovern when he picked Thomas Eagleton, seemingly as a third resort, and just weeks later it was revealed that Eagleton had been treated for depression, a potentially election-losing revelation that never came up in a shoddy background check (in 1972, this was a campaign death knell).  McGovern then chose a man who was most famous for being John F. Kennedy's brother-in-law and lost all but Massachusetts in the fall as a result.

But perhaps the most damning vice presidential runs were by two people who weren't even the nominees of their party.  In 1976, trailing Gerald Ford in the primaries, perhaps by a large enough amount that he wasn't going to be able to get to even a second ballot at the convention, Ronald Reagan decided to throw a bone to the liberal wing of his party by selecting Sen. Richard Schweiker as his running-mate before the convention.  Reagan's decision was unprecedented, as he wasn't the nominee, and common sense dictated that he wasn't likely to be, so why would he pick a VP candidate when he had no chance of being the nominee?  This has been lost to history because Reagan lost the nomination, but it was largely viewed as a last resort for a desperate campaign.

Forty years later, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz tried a similar tactic.  Coming off a series of primary losses in the Northeast to Donald Trump, Cruz needed to figure out a way to enliven his campaign, but the only way he could see to distract the media from their Trump obsession was by picking a running-mate, and after briefly hoping for Marco Rubio, he went with another of his opponents, Carly Fiorina.  The entire affair was seen as odd, and a desperate ploy to gain some traction headed into the Indiana primary, which Cruz saw as pivotal to his campaign.  After the primary, Cruz dropped out, with Fiorina getting the bizarre title for shortest VP campaign in American history.

State House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams (D-GA)

Which brings us to Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams.  While there have been no indications from the Biden camp other than a meeting with Abrams (and to be fair, Abrams has met with other campaigns, and their meeting could have been anything from gauging Abrams for an endorsement to persuading her not to run for POTUS & instead go for the Senate), there has been a cavalcade of rumors that Joe Biden will forego tradition, and pick Stacey Abrams as his running-mate right out of the gate.

If the above isn't any indication, know that this is an idiotic move, and this is coming from someone who literally had a picture of Joe Biden hanging on his wall as a teenager-he's that much my personal hero.  Biden, at age 76, is going to be dogged in a primary featuring a diverse group of candidates for being "too old, too yesterday, too white/straight/male" and so I get the impulse here.  Announcing with Abrams could defer some of that criticism, as she's a young, African-American woman who lit the campaign trail on fire last year and nearly won an office thought unwinnable.  If Biden already had the nomination and it was next May, I'd think this was a very smart choice, and he should consider her for his shortlist, no doubt.

But announcing here basically concedes that Joe Biden can't win the presidential primary.  For starters, no one votes based on the VP, certainly not this early in the race.  Picking Abrams would just underline all of Biden's deficits, and would make him easy fodder against his opponents, who would say "if you like Stacey Abrams, why not vote for her instead?".  It'd also stop him from gaining ground late in the race, either for media attention (the VP pick is a great way to stack a couple months worth of attention toward your campaign, and since he's taking on an incumbent, its attention Donald Trump can't replicate), or for leverage.  What if the race comes down to, say, Kamala Harris, Beto O'Rourke and Joe Biden, a very real possibility?  Biden is in the lead but the convention looks locked, and suddenly there are rumors that Harris & O'Rourke will join forces to take out Biden with their own ticket.  We don't think about that often in this modern era where most conventions are de facto coronations, but with nearly twenty candidates running at this point, it's not inconceivable that Biden would be throwing his negotiating power by running with Abrams when there would be a more tangible chip to cash in later.

This also costs Abrams.  Not only does she give up the option of winning the nomination on her own or taking a shot at the US Senate, but she's now stuck on the Biden train for the rest of the contest.  Abrams would be on most of the candidates shortlists, but if they beat Biden, they also beat Abrams, and why would they go with someone who has already proven to have no lift to her ticket?  Yes, if Biden were to somehow win the nomination, it'd look like genius, but history doesn't bare out that he'd gain anything here or that this will work, and let's not forget that Joe Biden has twice lost the presidential primary, and probably would have lost the primary four years ago against Hillary Clinton.  And with that, Abrams' promising career gets benched, with her looking like an historical footnote like Fiorina.

I genuinely want what's best for Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams-I have a lot of personal admiration for both of them.  But I don't see a way this ends well, and other than chaos or desperation (neither of which are a good start to a campaign), I can't fathom a good reason that they would do this.  If Biden is just going to get Abrams endorsement, I say "bravo, well done"-it'd be a coup in this race.  If they have a secret agreement that she's his running-mate that never makes the light of day, I'm fine with it, though it's hard to imagine that would hold for a full year.  But I personally couldn't endorse such a candidacy in the primary, and as I'm about as much of a "target audience" for a Biden/Abrams ticket as you can get, you're doing something wrong if I'd rule you out for such a move.  Biden/Abrams in June 2020 is a great idea-March of 2019, it's political suicide.