This Has to be the Worst Veepstakes Ever, Right?

Sorry – I try to avoid the question as headline thing because it feels click baity. But this is a rhetorical question, so I hope it works. Because I’m not actually asking you whether or not it’s the worst Veepstakes, I’m outright SAYING it’s the worst Veepstakes. Before we begin, a quick note on nomenclature: the Veepstakes is the term given by political science nerds like myself to the crazy shadow campaign to immediately and overnight boost someone from the relative obscurity of, say, being HUD Secretary, or maybe the first-term governor of Alaska, and then vaulting them to the national stage. Now, obviously there are a variety of types of VPs, from the advisory role of a Joe Biden to the puppet master shenanigans of Dick Cheney. With both party nominees virtually set, the newest parlor game is figuring out who will be the respective VP nominees and why. Typically it has to do with stature on the national scene, complimentary experience, or demographic reasons. But the truth is this year, no one has a fucking clue! But more importantly, who would actually want that job – and I mean on either side. Let’s look at why.

Both candidates running for the Presidency (fine, fine, all three) are old and white. Typically this would mean casting someone a bit younger, preferably a minority, someone who feels fresh and connects with young people. To that end, let’s start with who I definitely think won’t be the Democratic VP: Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.

Look, don’t get me wrong, it would be bold as fuck for the Democrats to follow up a Kenyan Muslim President with TWO WOMEN ON A TICKET. But Hillary Clinton is already an old, white, Ivy League educated woman. Adding another one (Warren, despite being a first-term senator, is in her 60s) would just make life so easy for Trump to chide them as the liberal elites who don’t care about average Americans, rawr. Also they’re both “from” the Northeast (Clinton has claimed Chicago, Arkansas, and NY as her home state, so it’s a little murky). Further, would Warren be more effectual in the White House than in the Senate? Maybe? She would probably get to influence some of Clinton’s policies, but the VP is generally a pretty subservient role. She’s definitely not getting viral videos every other week. I think Warren stays in the Senate. Plus, if she has any Presidential ambitions, tying herself to Clinton could be a disaster. Either she loses on the ticket (2016 or reelection in 2020) or Hillary serves two terms. Literally the only way for Warren to run in the next eight years would be to lose as the VP nominee this year. She couldn’t primary Clinton as her sitting VP (there might be precedent for this, but it’s pretty uncommon).

I also don’t think Sanders joins up as part of a unity ticket. Because that means endorsing Clinton after spending a year ravaging her on every single issue (despite his “We have so much in common!” rhetoric). Again, old, white, an avowed (Democratic) Socialist… yeah, that wouldn’t play well. I honestly don’t know if Clinton is going to use the VP pick to make a play for the left wing of the Democratic Party. Obviously Sanders and Warren have brought in a ton of first-time voters and the Democrats need them moving forward (especially in midterms) but both of these people run the risk of being the more attractive part of the ticket, and Clinton probably wants to keep that spotlight all to herself.

So, where’s that leave us? The tea leaves are interesting. Julian Castro was considered the favorite for a long time but allegedly (per Politico) her camp has cooled on him. Castro was the part-time Mayor of San Antonio and is now the HUD secretary. He’s young, charming, Latino, and has a twin brother in the Senate. They are allegedly a political party unto themselves. He’d be a great pick because he’s young, charming, Latino, and has a twin brother in the Senate. One of the VP’s biggest roles is as the liaison to (and tiebreaker for) the Senate. Having a direct line into the Democratic Caucus would be huge. He’s also politically ambitious and has risen from relative obscurity to where he is now in pretty short order. I think he’d be much more of an asset if Clinton were running against Cruz or Rubio, but Trump has gone out of his way to alienate Latino voters.

But with Castro, we again have the question of why take it? If he thinks she wins, he’s setting himself up for…what, exactly? As above, if she loses in 2016, he’s out of a job and fighting to stay relevant. If she wins in 2016, he can’t primary her in 2020. If she loses in 2020, he’s out of a job. If she wins in 2020, he’s running in 2024 as the fifth consecutive term of a Democratic President. As discussed elsewhere, it’s damned near impossible to keep the White House for three terms. Five is virtually unprecedented.

So Hillary Clinton has to pick someone who almost by definition never at any point wants to be President. Those people definitely exist, but politics doesn’t exactly attract altruists. I’ve seen Al Franken mentioned as a deft way to throw Trump’s grenades back at him. He’s an outsized personality with experience in media and progressive bona fides. I kind of love this idea just to see Franken in a VP debate against literally anyone. Tim Kaine is another name who would be fine, Sherrod Brown (except he’d vacate his Senate seat and John Kasich would appoint a Republican to fill it). Corey Booker has the same issues as Julian Castro…all of that said, my money is on one Tom Perez. Perez is in his 50s (old enough to not want to run for POTUS, young enough to be young enough), he actually speaks Spanish natively (Castro was raised in an English-only household, great for assimilation, bad for political ambition), he has progressive bona fides and the labor unions love him, and he wouldn’t overshadow Clinton. He could very easily be her Joe Biden. Good enough without being too good, content to ride out a sweet gig without undermining her too often.

But again, the main point is this is a job no one should want. In the current climate, at least. Now let’s turn to the Grand Old Fucking Clown Car Formerly Known as a Political Party.

Who will Donald Trump select as his VP?

….

I honestly couldn’t begin to tell you. I’ve joked about Omarosa, I’ve joked about Ivanka. He’s such an unknown quality, the Teflon Don who defies gravity, that it’s impossible to know where his head is at. Should it be a young Latino to counterbalance being old and white and soften up his image to all the “rapists and murderers”? I mean, probably? But does he give a single fuck? He does not. Chris Christie jumped on the Trump Train as it sped out of New Jersey (where his approval ratings have cratered), but as much as he talked shit about Parliamentary procedure in the debates, he can’t want that job, right? He would make a…decent Attorney General. Even a great one if we’re going down the list of Trump nominees. Newt Gingrich’s name has been floated – career politician, DC insider, all that stuff Trump publicly decries – and it makes sense insofar as it doesn’t not make sense. Ben Carson is heading up the selection committee and there is precedent (one Dick Cheney) for the head of the committee selecting themselves. Jeff Sessions from Alabama headed up his foreign policy advisory council.

But unless you think Trump is definitely going to win, this is throwing your political career into a blender, right? None of the last 5 Presidential nominees are even attending this convention. Trump is reviled by the party elders. They’re making peace with him now because they literally can’t steal the nomination from him without inciting actual riots in Cleveland. So if you’re a young aspiring politician, what good does this do? Even in success you might be frozen out of the party hierarchy for years to come. Maybe his eventual VP is a Newt Gingrich type. Paul Manafort, his new campaign manager (I don’t care what his actual title is), is that kind of guy: a career insider who took a lot of time off but wants one more shot at the big prize. There are probably enough people on the outside looking in who would jump at the chance. I just don’t know who they are.

As a quick aside – why doesn’t Rubio take this? There’s an old joke that the VP has two responsibilities: to break ties in the Senate and to inquire daily about the health of the President. Rubio apparently hates politics and wants to quit – dude, take the sweet gig. Free place to live? Check. Official title? Check. A salary bump? Check. Virtually no responsibilities? Check and mate.

So on both sides for drastically different reasons, it feels like a really bad cycle to get nominated as VP. Either way it’s a setback to longer term ambitions. I think it’ll be Tom Perez on the Democratic side and Omarosa on the Republican side. Because Trump is just that much of an unknown figure, I don’t know where he’ll zig when I expect him to zag.

I CANNOT WAIT FOR THE CONVENTIONS.

How the F#&K Did We Get Here?

Let me start with a story. We’re in an election year, following 8 years of a Democrat in the White House and a GOP-run Congress. The presumptive Democratic nominee is an intellectual, elite, policy wonk who served under the incumbent President. The other is a rich elite who talks at an 8^th grade level and seems honest and trustworthy, the kind of guy who looks out for the common people, the kind you could grab a beer with. He’s not great on policy, but he tells it like it is and isn’t in the pocket of the Washington Establishment. Despite his deficiencies, he surrounds himself with some of the best political minds around. These political operatives realize a shifting base within their party and activate the base with fearmongering and demonizing the opposition. He promises to undo the horrible things the Democrat has done and to restore some of America’s lost swagger.

I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about George W Bush. While the parallels aren’t perfect – Bush actually had won elected office before, and he was the scion of a political dynasty, not a real estate one – there are enough parallels that Trump’s rise should definitely concern you. Honestly, I’ll probably make a whole separate entry about electoral math and why – despite being one of the first to proclaim Trump would lose to Hillary Clinton by historic margins – I’m starting to think it’ll be a close general election. But here I want to talk about W, about Karl Rove, and about Trump.

What we need to understand is how the fuck we got here.

Donald Trump looks and acts a bit like Frankenstein’s monster – the fake hair, the spray tan, his sort of larger-than-life physical presence, the fact that his suits don’t fit quite right, and his generally ghoulish appearance. But on a fundamental level, he is Frankenstein’s political monster, and Karl Rove is the mad scientist who created him. Karl Rove isn’t well-known outside of political circles, but it’s borderline comical to assume George W Bush got anywhere near the White House on his own merits. No, it was the genius of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. My guess is they saw in Bush the antithesis to Al Gore and they also saw the things that America loved about Bill Clinton. George was folksy, he was aw-shucks, he spoke the plain language the people understood.

The 2000 election makes a lot of sense – family name, running against a 3^rd term of Democratic leadership, etc. But the real genius of Rove came in 2004’s reelection campaign. Bush’s popularity wasn’t super high, Iraq was already starting to feel like a mistake. Rove was helped immeasurably by the Democrats (who hadn’t learned their lesson) nominating a boring stiff policy wonk who was married into a ketchup fortune and seemed “electable” at the risk of being, you know, Presidential. Ironically, the GOP would make the same mistake in 2012.

But Rove also decided the typical voters that determine a Presidential election – those swing state independents – weren’t his primary concern. He realized without activating the base of the GOP, he didn’t stand a chance. So the goal was, instead of getting that swing six percent, he needed to make sure he got 90% of those registered Republicans. So how did he do it?

He made Bush go out there and propose the 28^th Amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. God, I love the promise of Constitutional amendments. I’m actually shocked that more Presidential candidates don’t use them. Here’s why: it’s fucking impossible to pass an amendment to the Constitution. That’s why we’ve only done it 27 times (and one was to repeal another). Plus the first ten were passed in unison with the actual constitution! So REALLY we’ve done it like 17 times. They have to be reserved for the big “Oh God we fucked that one up” moments in politics: making black people citizens (oops), allowing women to vote (come on guys), limiting terms of the President (hadn’t been an issue for the first two centuries), banning alcohol (what a weird one), repealing the alcohol ban (duh), lowering the voting age to the age at which you could be drafted into getting shot for your country (makes sense). That kind of shit.

Even as anti-marriage equality (I promised myself after the SCOTUS decision that I would refrain from the term “gay marriage”) as we were as a country, this was never ever ever getting passed. Which is why Rove proposed it. To activate the GOP base. To remind them what the stakes were. That if they didn’t vote for W, the gays and lesbians were going to take everything we held dear as a country. It’s basically the same argument with Iraq: don’t change horses in the middle of the race. Except our horse was drowning in quicksand, but we decided to just ride it all the way down.

So from 2004 specifically, we have this activated GOP base. The problem is that for years there has been a disconnect between the people who run the party – the ideological leaders, the elected officials, and the people who donate money to get them elected – and the base itself. Immigration is a great example. The corporate interests of the GOP love cheap immigrant labor. They have zero desire to close the border. But the politicians always run on it because their voting base desperately wants the border closed. Another weird one is tax cuts and entitlements. A lot of GOP voters are small business owners, but a lot of them are middle class people who consistently vote in people who slash taxes for the wealthy. There’s a great quote that every man considers himself an unlucky millionaire. I think that’s the GOP. They all want to ensure that tax rates for the wealthy stay low (ignoring that the wealthy stash their money overseas anyway) because they’re a day away from joining those ranks. It’s the greatest shell game in history! The intelligentsia of the GOP convinced their voters (typically though not exclusively less well-educated) to elect people who promise to help them via lower taxes, sealing the border, etc. And then the elected officials just do all the things that benefit the donor class.

And Karl Rove miscalculated how long the base would continue to be played for fools. They finally got some sense that they were being sold bullshit, and they got angry. They realized he lied to them again and again. That he promised small government and delivered Medicare Part D and expanded the Department of Education all while slashing taxes and driving up the deficit.

So they elected the Tea Party in 2010. Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, even fresh-faced boy-Senator Marco Rubio! Go to Washington, they said. Fix it, they said. Take it back from the Washington cartel, they said.

The problem is the Tea Party didn’t have actual ideals – at least not realistic ones. We can’t actually abolish the IRS, or reduce government drastically. As is half our roads and bridges are in disrepair. So they got to DC and basically created the most obstructionist Congress of all time. So even the Tea Party seems impotent and unable to get anything done. Whatever should this angry, activated, pissed-off, base of the party do?

Find an outsider. Someone not beholden to corporate interests. Someone who will shoot straight. Someone who deliver on his promises.

When you look at Rove’s election strategy in 2000 and his reelection strategy in 2004, it’s hard not to realize that Trump is just furiously copying Rove’s playbook. He’s capitalizing on fear and anger, he’s painting what was frankly a pretty decent Obama presidency as the end of times, and he’s promising to restore America’s place in the world. I used to think Rove would make Trump truly unstoppable, but the reality is Trump doesn’t even need Karl Rove.

The GOP for a long time has enjoyed the fruits of Rove’s labor – a pissed-off, activated, engaged base that has delivered majorities in both houses, that has elected governors across the country, that has dominated the Democrats in midterm elections throughout Obama’s presidency. But, to quote The Dark Knight – they got desperate, and in their desperation they turned to a force they didn’t fully understand.

That force was Donald Trump. And now they’re realizing that whether or not Trump has any ideological bearing, he’s now won more primary votes than any candidate in the GOP’s history. He might not be winning traditional Republican voters, but he’s winning voters hand over fist. And maybe he’s just a friendly face to be controlled and manipulated by the party’s elite while making America think it’s their guy in the White House.

God knows they’ve done that before. So, I would posit that you can draw a more-or-less straight line from Rove’s 2000 strategy, and his 2004 strategy, to the 2010 advent of the Tea Party, to the 2016 nomination of Donald J Trump. The monster has become self-aware. But the GOP is delusional if they truly believe they didn’t start the tinkering in the lab a long time ago. They played a shell game with their electorate, and the electorate’s finally figured it out that it’s rigged against them.

Paul Ryan and the Power of Denial

Paul Ryan has to be over the moon with this Trump nonsense, right? I know that’s counterintuitive. Paul Ryan is the highest elected official in the Republican Party currently, and he’s the chairperson (assuming Trump allows it) at the RNC convention in Cleveland this summer. Paul Ryan is a policy wonk like Hillary Clinton; now he’s watching Trump burn down conservative orthodoxy with an arsonist’s zeal. Trump is going to cost Paul Ryan the majority in the house and probably his speakership. This feels like a worst-case scenario. It feels like life couldn’t get worse for Paul Ryan. It’s important to remember we’re talking about a guy who took over as speaker of the house from John Boehner, who was literally singing a song as he gave up the gavel. So let’s start with a series of assumptions and see if we can’t figure out how this is absolutely Future President Paul Ryan’s best-case scenario.

Let’s start there. Paul Ryan is definitely not our next President (since he’s not, you know, running). But he is definitely my too-early favorite for our next next President. First, some quick background on Paul Ryan. He is a young Congressman from Minnesota, famous for his love of the Constitution and his hatred of entitlements and the people who use them. In 2012, he was chosen as Mitt Romney’s running mate. Romney was a centrist Republican, Ryan was there to lock up the base. It’s like what McCain did with Palin, except Paul Ryan isn’t an absolutely insane person. Then, as mentioned above, he was dragged kicking and screaming into the Speakership. Yes, you read that right. Paul Ryan fought like hell to not get the single highest elected office inside his party currently. Why didn’t he just turn it down, you might wonder? Or why fight so hard to eventually take it? Because it was for the good of the party. And given the dumpster fire consuming the GOP, what is and isn’t “for the good of the party” is going to be very important.

Despite his comments to the contrary, Paul Ryan has to think this is a good career move for him. He’s only 46 and he’s already been in the House for 17 years, been a national VP candidate, and been Speaker of the House. I don’t see how this stage of the Speakership doesn’t further his political career. Otherwise, he’d turn it down. This is the worst job in Congress. The Freedom Caucus is holding him hostage over the budget, the Democrats are ideologically opposed, and he’s trying to pretend everything is fine in the era of Donald Trump, presumptive nominee.

So let’s assume, first, that Paul Ryan wants to be President. And let’s furter assume that taking the Speakership (kicking and screaming) is designed to help him achieve that end. Otherwise he’s quite simply a masochist. Now he’s the leader of the party, widely considered the ideological leader, and he’s staring down the barrel of Donald Trump, Presumptive Nominee. A guy who has taken virtually every position on every issue (a personal favorite headline of mine read “Trump takes five positions on abortion in three hours”). Trump has openly talked about protecting entitlements, raising taxes on the rich, and protecting women’s reproductive health. He’s a disaster to conservative orthodoxy.

But Trump won’t win.

I’ll be honest – and I’ll get into this later – I’m starting to doubt this claim. For a long time I felt Americans were better than this, but Trump is getting the party in line and Hillary Clinton would be the most disliked candidate ever nominated…if Trump weren’t running. We will get to the specter of Trump’s apocalyptic Presidency a bit later on. But first, let’s assume America actually votes for someone who is qualified to be President (either of the Democrats, though it’s going to be Hillary Clinton).

Where does this leave Future President Paul Ryan? With a Democrat in the White House, a Democratic Senate, and (maybe!) still the Speakership. Understand, this will be the worst three years of Paul Ryan’s life. The Freedom Caucus will continue to undermine him from the right, the Senate and the White House will bully him from the left, and he will spend every waking second trying to get literally anything passed with bipartisan support. You want to know what we got passed this month? The bison as the American mammal. Ryan can’t even get a budget approved. Yeah, we currently aren’t running our country with any sort of annual budget. That’s the level of gridlock.

But in four years, when Paul Ryan runs for President, how great does he look? He can blame the Freedom Caucus to pull left-leaning independents and capitalize on Hillary Clinton’s sky-high unfavorable ratings. He will unite a party reeling from the hangover of actually nominating Donald Trump and desperate for anything that resembles competency. He can play the right against the left and portray himself as a hamstrung leader trying to bring bipartisanship back to DC, beset on all sides. Will any of that be true? Maybe? But rule number one in politics (if it isn’t, it fucking should be): don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Now, there are a couple of other points that back up the idea that the GOP will win the White House in 2020. Nothing is certain in politics, but political scientists rely on three metrics to determine who has the best shot in a Presidential election. In no particular order, they are: state of the economy, job approval rating of the incumbent, and length of the party’s incumbency. Basically if the economy is strong, incumbents have a better shot. Obviously if the incumbent is popular, they have a better shot at re-election. But it’s the last point that I want to focus on: length of incumbent party. In the past half-century or so, we rarely see one party elected to more than 2 consecutive terms. We had Reagan/Reagan/Bush 1, and it looks like we’re heading for Obama/Obama/Clinton. But typically, our politics are cyclical. The longer a party is in charge, the less likely they are to stay in charge. So, barring an incredible economic spurt (with rising wages, not just job creation) and a total overhaul of her favorability/approval numbers, it feels like Hillary will lose in 2020.

Which means it’s in Paul Ryan’s best interest that she wins in 2016. Because if she wins, the GOP loses (possibly in historic margins) and the Trump movement is lessened significantly. Ryan gets to run in 4 years as the reasonable centrist Republican – he’s already revising some of his more hardline positions to set this up – who just wants to break Washington gridlock. And he has a ready-made villain in an historically unlikable candidate/President in Hillary Clinton. If she presides over another recession (which, based on boom and bust cycles, I would bet she does), he’s in even better shape.

So while it’s terrible for his party – and ostensibly for his politics – to see a Trump vs Clinton matchup, not only does he not have a choice, but it’s actually great for his ambitions in four years. So why doesn’t he just endorse Trump already? The same reason he didn’t jump at the Speakership. Paul Ryan’s playing a long game and admitting to the long game makes it go up in smoke. Of course he wants Trump to win. But as the intellectual standard-bearer of the party, he can’t gleefully endorse the guy burning the party to the ground. He has to be reserved, intellectual, and eventually come to the conclusion that it’s “for the good of the party” for them to listen to the American people and back the nominee who won the nomination. Plus now there won’t be riots in Cleveland. I wonder what Cleveland PD is going to do with all that riot gear they ordered…

Lastly, let’s examine the absolutely terrifying prospect of Donald Trump becoming our next President. I can’t see it. I think Trump runs a campaign rooted in bigotry and anti-intellectualism. I think his is the campaign of not having answers and people are drawn to his seemingly lack of intellect. And I hope that eventually we take a smart, capable, disliked candidate over this actual circus act. If Trump wins the general election, what happens to my dude Paul Ryan? I…don’t know. I mean, my guess is he just submits Articles of Impeachment sometime around January 25^th 2017? But it would throw a wrench in his ambitions.

In my opinion, Ryan’s best case remains Trump winning the nomination and then losing the general election. The odds against Hillary winning in 2020 are astronomical in the best case scenario. Ryan has a platform that establishes him as the intellectual leader and the highest elected official of the party. He can’t bear hug a guy who disagrees with every piece of the party. He has to be reticent, he has to be reluctant, but somewhere behind those dead gray eyes Paul Ryan is doing his happy dance.

Get ready for President Paul Ryan. Because it’s not as scary as President Trump.

Some upcoming topics:

The poison pill Veepstakes!

Is Sanders actually stronger in the general?

Donald Trump isn’t a white supremacist, but his policies are!

Should Trump’s hire of Dark Lord Paul Manafort scare you? Yes, yes it should.