Not a Big Truck

The speculative chatter about whom McCain and Obama will pick as their vice presidential running mates has reached a fever pitch in recent days, as McCain has announced the date (August 29) on which he will reveal his selection, and the Obama campaign is running out of time to announce their pick before the Democratic convention begins.  The political sphere is especially focused on guessing who Obama’s pick will be, since he will have to announce his first.  Will it be Biden?  Kaine?  Bayh?  Sebelius?  Reed?  Someone else?

Though engaging in such speculation is fun — I certainly have done my share — it is mostly a waste of time.  Not just because knowing what is going on inside the candidates’ minds is impossible (think of the VP choices just in recent years who have been dark horses, for example, Cheney and Lieberman), but also because the eventual selection of a vice presidential candidate simply isn’t likely to have much of an impact on the election.

For one, the conventional wisdom that a VP pick can deliver certain states or geographic areas in the general election is, these days, questionable at best.  In the past, when the U.S. was more divided along regional lines, this was more true.  John Kennedy’s pick of Lyndon Johnson in 1960 is a classic example of this; LBJ brought most of the South with him to the Democratic ticket.

But regional consciousness has declined significantly since then.  Going from Mississippi to New York in 2008 is a far cry from what it must have been like to go from Mississippi to New York in 1958.  Differences between distant parts of the country simply aren’t as great as they used to be.  The South has urbanized and industrialized.  The Southwest has experienced a population explosion.  Heck, Microsoft has a huge facility in Fargo, North Dakota.  Suburbia with its big box stores and chain restaurants seems about the same whether it is in Nashville or Pittsburgh or Phoenix.  Amazon.com and UPS have brought many of the benefits of urban life — unlimited books, niche food products, you name it — to tiny towns in Wyoming.  Communication and social networking with people in far-flung locales is inexpensive and easy, thanks to the Internet.  Air travel, even with current high fuel prices, is cheaper than it has ever been and Americans travel more and more.

In her August 15 column called “The End of Placeness,” Peggy Noonan suggests that McCain and Obama themselves are representative of this “flattening” trend of recent decades.

OK, quick, close your eyes. Where is Barack Obama from?

He’s from Young. He’s from the town of Smooth in the state of Well Educated. He’s from TV.

John McCain? He’s from Military. He’s from Vietnam Township in the Sunbelt state.

Chicago? That’s where Mr. Obama wound up. Modern but Midwestern: a perfect place to begin what might become a national career. Arizona? That’s where Mr. McCain settled, a perfect place from which to launch a more or less conservative career in the 1980s.

Neither man has or gives a strong sense of place in the sense that American politicians almost always have, since Mr. Jefferson of Virginia, and Abe Lincoln of Illinois, and FDR of New York, and JFK of Massachusetts.

“Placeness” just doesn’t exist the way it used to.  The urban-rural divide is far more significant these days than the divisions between New England, Midwest, Deep South, Pacific Northwest, etc.  In light of this trend, picking a VP in order to deliver certain states or geographic regions just doesn’t make sense the way it once did.  Consider recent VP nominees: Cheney from Wyoming, Edwards from North Carolina, Lieberman from Connecticut, Jack Kemp from New York, Al Gore from Tennessee.  None of those men, with the possible exception of Gore, was chosen because he would deliver a state to the party ticket.

Another way in which the choice of a running mate is supposedly important is that it can assuage voters’ concerns about the presidential nominee, on the grounds of either cultural differences or experience.  A nominee relatively inexperienced in, say, foreign affairs might want to choose a running mate with plenty of experience in foreign affairs to “balance” the ticket.  This is a plausible argument in the case of the 2000 election, when George W. Bush’s selection of Dick Cheney seemed to reassure a lot of people that Bush, though he might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, was going to surround himself with competent people as president and would have a managerial type of presidency.

In most other cases I don’t think the idea of trying to balance the ticket works.  Gore won himself a few old Jewish voters in Florida by picking Lieberman, but picking Lieberman did not help Gore make himself seem less wooden, which more than anything else (except perhaps for his decision to run apart from Bill Clinton rather than on the Clinton record) cost him the election.  (Well, if you say that he actually lost, which he didn’t, but that’s another story.)  Jack Kemp’s knowledge of economic issues didn’t help Dole pull off an upset against Clinton in 1996 in the midst of a strong economy.  John Kerry in 2004 didn’t win himself very many votes from cultural conservatives by picking the affable, sweet-talking country boy John Edwards as his running mate.

And let’s take the current election, where the popular idea is that Obama needs someone with foreign policy credentials and McCain needs a wizard on the economy.  I wouldn’t say that that would be a bad thing in either case, but I also can’t imagine someone who says, “Gee, I don’t trust Barack Obama with foreign affairs and national security” taking a look at his vice presidential choice — perhaps someone like Biden or Reed — and then deciding, well, okay, I trust him now.

In reality, it’s even pretty hard to screw up the ticket by making a bad vice presidential choice.  Assuming the VP pick doesn’t have any skeletons in the closet — a la Thomas Eagleton in ‘72 having received electroshock therapy — nobody really cares so much about who the VP is that they will cast their votes on that basis.  I mean, Dan Quayle in ‘88?  Dan Quayle???  And George H.W. Bush still won that election.

So, enough already with the VP chatter!  It just isn’t that important.

In a future post I will write about what I think is the most important factor in determining the outcome of the election in November.

In today’s Washington Post, Ruth Marcus rightly skewers John Edwards for his ridiculous statement that, with regard to his affair with Rielle Hunter, “Being 99% honest is no longer enough.”  Marcus doesn’t think that Edwards is being even close to 99% honest even now, and for her, it is his hypocrisy that is particularly galling: “[H]e was the one who told us that character counted.”

Right on.  John Edwards deserves this kind of criticism.  But Ruth Marcus reserves some strong shots for Elizabeth Edwards, too:

… [W]hat was she thinking when she supported his running? She knew about his affair, she knew that everything about a presidential candidate’s life is at risk of exposure, and she encouraged him? If she cared about shielding her family from this terrible intrusion, what did she think was going to happen if he won the nomination — or the presidency?

Marcus goes after Elizabeth for saying things like this to Katie Couric in a March 2007 interview:

“It’s important that the American people have the opportunity to have a president like him,” Elizabeth Edwards explained. “I didn’t want it [her cancer] to take this away, not just from me but from those people who depend on our having the kind of president he would be.”

To Marcus, this is “excruciating” and “creepy.”  Marcus is making Elizabeth Edwards into almost as bad a character as her husband.

Sure, Marcus has a point.  Elizabeth Edwards should not have made herself complicit in her husband’s deception of the public, and should not have helped him wage such a sanctimonious and moralistic campaign, a major component of which was John Edwards’s supposedly upstanding family values and rock-solid marriage.  For the benefit of American voters, she should not have supported her husband so vigorously and should not have spoken so favorably about him in public forums when she knew the opposite of what she was saying was true.

Easy to say she should not have done those things.  But what would you have done if you were in Elizabeth Edwards’s position?  Through no fault of your own, you find yourself with cancer, two small children, and a husband, to whom you have been married for almost thirty years, who has been cheating on you.  I think it is really difficult in a situation like that even to acknowledge the reality of what has happened (to say nothing of walking away, separating, etc.).  Betrayal is tough to deal with and the easiest option is often to pretend that once the other person has apologized, everything is okay.  All you want in a situation like that is for things to go back to being the way they were.  Many times that isn’t ultimately the best option for the relationship, but it is a natural response to the situation, I think.  It is really asking a lot to expect Elizabeth Edwards, with cancer, children, and a 30-year marriage, not only to not take the easy road and pretend privately like everything is okay in their relationship, but also to go public and broadcast your marital problems to the world.  (Which is what she would’ve done even had she simply kept quiet on the points for which Marcus criticized her — it would have been interpreted as a rebuke of her husband.)

Perhaps the right thing to do would have been not to pretend to the world that everything was fine.  So, Elizabeth Edwards is no saint.  But let’s try to be a bit more sympathetic and cut the woman a bit of slack.

In the name of needless speculation, I’ll make a prediction: his protestations to the contrary, John Edwards is indeed the father of Rielle Hunter’s baby.  To hear the man say such classless things as that he had been “99% honest” in answering questions about the affair and that he was involved with Ms. Hunter only when his wife’s cancer was in remission, I don’t get the impression that he has truly learned his lesson.  I see no reason to believe that he is now telling the truth, especially when Ms. Hunter’s family is challenging him to take a DNA test.

Update: We’ll never know for sure, as Rielle Hunter has ruled out the possibility of participating in a paternity test.  Wonder how much Edwards’s associates are paying her to take that position?