OPINION:
These suggestions regarding the selection of the Democratic vice presidential nominee come from what might be considered a suspicious source: A registered Republican. To be sure, I have been unable to vote for my party’s nominee in the last four presidential elections, in 2004, 2008 and 2012 because of perceived recklessness in foreign policy; in 2016 because I am a bookseller’s son for whom tweets are a foreign language.
But I do not stand alone in these eccentricities. A forgotten 4.4 million Americans like myself voted for Governors Johnson and Weld with the conscious and successful purpose to deny both unsatisfactory major party nominees a mandate from a popular majority. If Joe Biden is to obtain their votes, he will need a non-frightening vice president. Doubling down on identity politics seems inexcusable now that President Trump has shown that it is a game that any number can play.
Mr. Biden’s incautious pledge to select a woman would be more regrettable if there were an obvious male candidate. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has taken the most extreme possible position on abortion and who vetoed a bill allowing federal judges to perform marriage ceremonies because some of them were appointed by Mr. Trump, is not the man to bind up the nation’s wounds.
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The female candidates are problematic for different reasons.
Stacey Abrams has no background in foreign policy or congressional relations, and a past campaign largely spent in whining about unsupported claims of voter suppression does not give her broad appeal.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar appears rational and competent, but is not a leader of thought and would bring to the ticket all the excitement of the late Thomas E. Dewey.
Sen. Kamala Harris is affirmatively frightening. She wants “pre-clearance” of state abortion legislation by federal bureaucrats and federal superintendence of major city police departments. The idea of a Supreme Court policy veto over state legislation was three times rejected by the Constitutional Convention; pre-clearance in the voting rights context was an heroic measure to enfranchise an excluded race, not a device to disenfranchise state legislatures and those electing them.
The authors of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights wanted nothing resembling centrally-controlled law enforcement like that under Charles I in England.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren offers intelligence without integrity, personal or political. Her nomination would be a gift to President Trump. To be sure, her adventures with DNA testing might give her an invincible appeal to the white supremacist vote. It is not every nominee, male or female, who has scientifically established that like Ivory Soap, she is 99 and 44/100th percent pure.
Her initial reputation rested on a deeply flawed “study” with pre-determined results of so-called medical bankruptcies in which each case involving more than $1,000 in medical debt was counted as a medical bankruptcy irrespective of the amount of other debt.
What is wanted is a candidate who would truly be a backstop and if need be a worthy successor to a visibly aging Biden: A general practitioner, not an opthamalogist or dermatologist. Normally, choice of a vice president involves a quest for a mediocrity who will not overshadow the president, who can serve as a hatchet man or woman, and who can deliver a special and shrill constituency. This process has given us, among others, such political and intellectual giants as William Miller, Spiro Agnew, Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin. This is not what a polarized country needs now.
There are at least two possible female vice presidential nominees, either of whom would make a reassuring president: Former Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen and U.S. Supreme Court Justice and former Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan.
Both owe their positions to personal achievement, not to family relationships or identity politics. Both are noted for collegiality, civility and the careful measurement of words. Both are tolerant of differing views, an essential requirement for leadership in a democracy. Both have wide circles of acquaintance and would be able to organize the assembly of a competent administration.
Both have unsullied personal character, unmarred by alcohol, drugs, sex or financial scandals or indiscreet tweets, which differentiates them from our last four presidents. Neither is chargeable with detention without trial or drone assassination of American citizens, or the unregulated institution of new forms of cyberwarfare or drone warfare.
Justice Kagan is a liberal and a feminist of sorts, but one tolerant of conservatives and respectful of federalism since, as said by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “some play must be allowed for the joints of the machine.” Mrs. Yellen is a moderate on social issues with insights as a labor economist into the plight of constituencies that too many Democrats have recently chosen to ignore.
Mrs. Yellen might be reluctant to emerge from an active retirement and Justice Kagan to renounce a court seat, although Justices Charles Hughes, James Byrnes and Arthur Goldberg did so when they thought that the national interest required it, Hughes to return later. Whatever the desires of Sen. Majority Leader McConnell, it is likely that the Senate as presently constituted would make the confirmation of a successor abide the result of the 2020 election.
Both would be respectable and respected presidents if the need arose. Given Mr. Biden’s age and medical history, that, and not factional politics, is the only proper criterion for choice of a vice president. If Mr. Biden is to board the train of gender-identity politics, he should at least insist on travelling first class.
• George Liebmann, a Baltimore lawyer, is the author most recently of “America’s Political Inventors: The Lost Art of Legislation” (Bloomsbury, 2019).
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