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.