Maybe We're Thinking About the Veepstakes All Wrong

Here comes Harris-Walz

I have a confession to make that may cost me my Political Nerd Card.

When I saw this tweet by CBS’s Ed O’Keefe, my first reaction was, “Wow, I forgot that Dick Gephardt was John Kerry’s running mate.”

I forgot, because it never happened; the story was wrong. It was John Edwards. And you know what? The choice didn’t make any difference at all. There’s a pattern here: Sarah Palin was not a game changer in 2008; Jack Kemp didn’t matter in 1996; Joe Lieberman didn’t make a difference in 2000; ditto Paul Ryan in 2012, or Tim Kaine in 2016. (I could go on, but you get the point.)

So, when you’re done dunking on my memory lapse, consider this as a cautionary tale: Despite all the hype, heavy-breathing, second-guessing and rank punditry, the number-two on the ticket usually doesn’t matter all that much, and is often quickly memory-holed.

Quick: What’s your best memory of Vice President Charles Dawes?

Or the unforgettable Vice President Charles Curtis?

The obscurity of the vice presidency is usually well-deserved. The nation’s first VP, John Adams, called the office "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." Somewhat more colorfully, one of FDR’s veeps, John Nance Garner, described the vice presidency as "not worth a bucket of warm piss.” (A quote often cleaned up as “a bucket of warm spit.”)

But sometimes the choice is consequential: Theodore Roosevelt in 1900; Calvin Coolidge in 1920; Harry Truman in 1944; LBJ in 1960; George H.W. Bush in 1980.

So, as you might have guessed, I have some thoughts about today’s news. And, because epistemic humility is the order of the day, let me be the first to admit: I. May. Be. Wrong. Again.

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It’s Harris-Walz

Full disclosure here: I was surprised and disappointed by the news that Kamala Harris passed over Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro to pick Minnesota’s Tim Walz.

As a popular, moderate governor of a must-win swing state, Shapiro was an easy layup, while Walz is very much TBD. I agreed with my former colleague Bill Kristol, who said that bypassing Shapiro would be “an unforced error.” At this point, Harris has two great challenges: (1) countering the perception that she is too left-wing, and (2) winning the electoral college vote. Shapiro would have checked both those boxes. As Bill wrote Monday:

Consider the following:

• Pennsylvania is the key state. Gov. Shapiro won it by more than 14 points less than two years ago, and has a 61 percent approval rating.

• One of Harris’s greatest vulnerabilities is the multitude of leftist positions she foolishly took in the 2019 campaign. A Shapiro selection unambiguously moves the ticket to the center.

• Shapiro has shown political and governing talent, most recently in his remarks after the assassination attempt against former president Trump, and in his rebuilding of I-95.

• And if Harris pulls back from Shapiro after the campaign against him from the left, it will look weak.

In the end, though, Harris had a choice between a centrist and a progressive and chose the more left-wing candidate. His selection reflects the progressive belief that the key to electoral success is not to appeal to swing voters, but to mobilize their own base. As Jonathan Chait notes, this is highly problematic.

Rather than being one of the most moderate governors in America, he is one of the most liberal, and possibly the most liberal, which is why he became a hero to the far left in recent days. Walz is not a leftist, but he has adopted some unpopular positions, like providing free health care to unauthorized immigrants.

There’s a lot more (including his handling of the post-George Floyd riots) that the Trump campaign will use to cast Walz as an out-of-the-mainstream radical. But they would have done the same for any Democrat Harris chose.

The selection process, however, also raised other troubling questions.

Maybe Harris simply had more rapport with Walz than Shapiro, writes Chris Cillizza, but it’s also possible that she was overly influenced “by what the very online left thought of her two VP finalists.” In the final days of the process, Shapiro was subjected to a vicious (and often malicious) attack by the left because of his stand on Israel and the student protests that disrupted campuses. Even though all the other Veep candidates also had solid records supporting Israel, only Shapiro — who is Jewish — was singled out as “Genocide Josh.” Wrote The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg:

It has become hard to escape the conclusion that some of the activists imposing this inquisition have a problem not just with Israel or Zionism but with Jews, who they assume are serving a foreign power, no matter what they’ve actually said or done. Historically, this is nothing new. The white-nationalist right has long sought to stigmatize American Jews as subversive and exclude them from political life, arguing that Jews are loyal only to their own kind. In this case, however, some on the progressive left are the ones treating Jewish identity as inherently suspect and holding Jewish political actors to a different standard than their non-Jewish counterparts.”

Was Harris worried that she had to mollify the angry left by bypassing Shapiro? Politico’s reporting seems to support that concern:

“Lots [of Democrats] believe it’s Walz based on the progressive campaign to end Shapiro,” said one House lawmaker echoing a common explanation we heard. The theory here is that the pressure from pro-Palestinian groups and labor bloodied up Shapiro enough to give Harris pause, making Walz what a senior administration official argued would be the “path of least resistance.”

But…

It’s possible that none of this will matter. As one observer noted. “For a few, this election is about specific progressive vs conservative values. For most, this is about personality and perception.”

In other words, maybe we’re thinking about this all wrong.

Despite his (quite) progressive record, Walz reads as a moderate. As the Dispatch’s David Drucker writes: “Walz exudes moderate sensibilities.”

He enlisted in the National Guard at the age of 17, and in 1999, he helped lead the Mankato West High School football team to a state championship as the team’s defensive coordinator.* He is an avid outdoorsman and does not use the modern political lexicon of liberal activists when contrasting Democratic policies with those of the GOP. Indeed, it was Walz earlier this summer who first coined the messaging, later adopted by others on the left, that Republicans are “weird.”

It’s quite possible that Walz’s impressive biography, communication skills, raw likeability, and normality will overshadow his ideological predilections. For many Democrats, notes the NYT, “his rural background, liberal leanings and merry sense of humor have turned him into the hottest Minnesota export since Scotch tape.”

In choosing Walz, Harris has calculated that, in a hypersonic political campaign, Democrats need fellow feeling — and fun! — more than they need a conventional political advantage. Walz, perhaps more than any other contender on Harris’s shortlist, was the vibes pick for a vibes election.

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Another possibility: By buttoning down her progressive base, Harris may have made it easier for her to pivot to the center. Like me, the Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio thought that Shapiro was the obvious choice. But he also speculated about the “balance” Walz would bring to the ticket:

Because he’s the closest thing on the menu to Bernie Sanders, choosing Walz could also provide left-wing cover for Harris to tack toward the center aggressively on policy. Her flip-flopping so far has been low-key and conducted through campaign statements; once she starts doing debates and interviews, progressives will pay closer attention to her reversals and grow irritated at seeing her abandon the hard-left positions she took as a candidate in 2019.

Throwing them a bone by picking Walz will ease that irritation and sustain the sense of unity in the party that’s prevailed since she replaced Joe Biden as nominee. No matter how Harris positions herself on policy thereafter, leftists will have the consolation that one of their own is on the ticket and poised to be a credible presidential candidate himself in 2028 or 2032.

For the moment, though, none of us know how this will play out. And we ought to admit as much.

Meanwhile, Trump gets weirder.

My latest at MSNBC:

In picking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris has doubled down on his critique that the Republican ticket is “weird.”

Trump, in the meantime, has doubled down on being weird. (And lazier.)

As the Harris-Walz team plans a blitz of swing states, Trump is not scheduled to visit a single battleground state this week. Instead, he’s relying on the uber-weird Ohio Sen. JD Vance to shadow their rivals’ campaign.

Trump himself spent part of the day Monday chatting with Adin Ross, a controversial 22-year-old livestreamer.

“My sons told me about and, you know, they told me about how big,” Trump said, adding that his youngest son, Barron, told him: “'Dad, he’s really big.'”

Ross is also exceedingly weird, and not at all subtly racist.

He was banned by the livestream platform Twitch for displaying racist and anti-Jewish messages and for his use of homophobic slurs. His past guests have included white nationalist Nick Fuentes (who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022), and a gaggle of self-proclaimed neo-Nazis. Ross is also known to be a friend of notorious misogynist Andrew Tate, who was arrested in March on rape and human trafficking charges.

Last year, when Ross complained that celebrities wouldn’t go on his show, his manager bluntly told him: “Your reputation is just so toxic.”

That, apparently, was not a problem for Trump.

During the interview, Trump again displayed his fetish for strongmen when he praised Venezuela’s left-wing dictator Nicolas Maduro. Trump gave the thuggish Maduro, who is in the process of trying to steal that country’s presidential election, credit for making Venezuela's big cities safer than many American cities. (In fact, Venezuela has a violent death rate that’s several times higher than America’s and more than double the homicide rate in Mexico.)

During their chat, Ross also gave the former president a Rolex and a Tesla Cybertruck wrapped in an image of the flag and a picture of Trump after he was shot. Afterward, the former president made a TikTok video showing him dancing with the far-right streamer.

American voters are being introduced to the Democrats' new team today. Meanwhile, Team Trump continues to remind us what is really at stake in this election. 

Nota Bene

Some of the best hot takes:

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Your obligatory picture of baby Eli

Finally…