US Vice-President Kamala Harris. (Photo: Chris duMond / Getty Images) 
Former president Donald Trump is the challenger to become America’s president for a second time — bracketing Joe Biden’s single term of office. At the Republicans’ nominating convention, Trump picked Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate just days after an assassination attempt on Trump.
But, now, with the withdrawal of incumbent President Biden as his party’s candidate, attention has shifted to who Vice-President Kamala Harris will choose as her own running mate.
Actually, in speaking of the almost certain Democratic nominee – we should not remove those qualifiers until the party’s nominating convention does its job formally in mid-August. But we should also take close cognisance of Harris’s near-meteoric ascent as the party’s consensus candidate and the way her rise has flipped the storyline of this year’s election.
Now the old geezer in the race with an allergy to English language syntax, grammar and logical thinking – and with some growing anger issues – is Republican nominee Donald Trump. This is in place of an increasingly frail incumbent president, Joe Biden, who was the old man of the contest. Wisely, Biden decided to spend the rest of his tenure in office concentrating on the job of being president, instead of trying to secure a second term, thus securing the trophy for putting party and country ahead of person.
Consequently, in trying to figure out how to do battle with Kamala Harris, the Republicans, so far, are floundering, testing attack lines that could conceivably draw attention to weaknesses in the Harris résumé. So far at least, though, the Republican attacks (especially those emanating from vice-presidential nominee Vance), are making their party resemble a herd of panicked wildebeest confronting a pack of hungry lions. Not a good image for them — and not likely to be an image of a disciplined, coherent party ready to take up the reins of governing again.
Imposing options
And so, as Harris continues to build up her architecture of support groups and consolidate her often-fractious party, her first big challenge is picking her running mate. Until Harris became the de facto candidate once Biden stepped aside, various commentators had urged a kind of beauty pageant from among a clutch of entirely presentable Democratic office holders.
At that time, the lists put about by the “great mentioners” among the media and veteran politicians and political operatives not running for office comprised, among others, Governors Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, JB Pritzker of Illinois, Andy Basher of Kentucky, Wes Moore of Maryland, Tim Walz of Minnesota and Roy Cooper of North Carolina; Senators like Amy Klobuchar and Mark Kelly, and current cabinet secretaries Gina Raimondo and Pete Buttigieg were also in the mix.
Several of these, like Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear and Roy Cooper, shared work experiences as attorneys general with Kamala Harris and have crafted bonds with her on that basis.
Using a sports metaphor, that roster of possible vice-presidential picks is a rather imposing bench of reserves, in addition to the vice-president. Now that she is the almost certain nominee for president, the first, most immediate challenge for Harris is to decide who would be the best person to complete her ticket.
She and her advisers are cogitating about the right choice in terms of skills, experience, and identity, and in drawing support from one or more of those swing states crucial for a Harris victory. A number of would-be nominees have been asked to supply the masses of documentation needed to fully vet a candidate so that there are no skeletons in the closets.
Of course there is also the intangible but critically important question for her to pick someone who fits with her own views on the big, contentious issues — and will neither be the kind of running mate who will upstage her nor embarrass her with weird comments and awkward public interviews and speeches. (Inevitably we are thinking about how JD Vance has, in just a few days, managed to do just those things – especially when some of his earlier statements have come to light on his beliefs that childless, cat-loving women are ruining the nation. The internet never forgets or loses anything, it seems.)
Over the weekend, several of the potential picks have had significant public exposure such as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Senator Mark Kelly. Walz appeared on Sunday morning political talk television, while Kelly was the subject of nearly reverent treatment in an article in The New York Times.
In Walz’s interview on CNN, he successfully managed to introduce himself to the nation (and the world) as a genial, affable, a solid citizen, military veteran, union supporter, former school teacher and a politician who has the ability to reach beyond his party. These are attributes that would be valuable in connecting with undecided (or never-Trumper) voters in crucial swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
He also came across as ingratiating with his ability to deflect efforts to get him to admit he would be delighted to be the vice-presidential candidate, without it looking like he was evading the question, even as he did just that. As he told the global television audience, “Well, I’m not speaking on anything personal on this. I think being mentioned is certainly an honour.”
The likely pick
Meanwhile, in the Times report on Kelly, Jonathan Weisman and Jazmine Ulloa described one of Kelly’s most strategic strengths — his effectiveness in supporting small, but important border management improvements, something “…even the state’s Republicans acknowledge. Donald Huish, the G.O.P. mayor of Douglas, recounted a phone call with Mr. Kelly two weeks ago, when the two men talked through progress on making the small city an official, expanded port of entry into the United States. The senator has pushed hard for the move, and Mr. Huish has embraced it. Both of them see the plan as a way to inject economic stability into the region and possibly defang the coyotes and cartels prowling the passes.”
Further, Senator Kelly brings a résumé a political consultant would die for. The Times added, “He is the working-class son of New Jersey police officers, a Navy pilot who flew 39 combat missions off the U.S.S. Midway in Operation Desert Storm, and a NASA astronaut and engineer who collected debris from the Columbia disaster, commanded a shuttle as the United States returned to space and flew the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s final mission.
“… [A]nd he is married to Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona representative whose near-fatal brain injury in a mass shooting made her a symbol against gun violence, in her battleground state and beyond….
“All of these things would be immensely helpful as Kamala Harris as presidential candidate hopes to reignite a sense of momentum among working class voters in his home state as well as other swing states. But Mr. Kelly’s special appeal, beyond what other potential running mates from swing states could provide, is his expertise on the technical issues and politics of the U.S.-Mexico border, perhaps Ms. Harris’s biggest vulnerability, his backers say.”
The authors, looking at that list of all those other potential vice-presidential contenders, also note that “Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, have made their reputations by winning over Republican voters. Two other governors in the mix, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, hail from states that are perhaps more crucial to Democratic fortunes than Arizona, which, while President Biden carried it narrowly in 2020, was more of a capstone to his victory than a linchpin.”
But in the intangible qualifications category, before he died, Kelly had bonded with the late Senator John McCain (and former Republican presidential candidate). As Cindy McCain, Senator McCain’s widow said about Kelly, “He’s smart, he’s charismatic, he has a vision. You look at his record and who he is as a person, he’s a very lovely man, and of course he brings Arizona.” His former navy comrades have even more effusive things to say about him and his leadership qualities.
Perhaps the biggest handicap to his being picked as Harris’s running mate, though, is that if their ticket won, the Republican governor of Arizona would be able to appoint Kelly’s replacement to that newly vacant senate seat, until the next electoral cycle in 2026. In a tightly balanced Senate, that eventuality might be the strongest mark against Kelly’s candidacy.
Consolidating support
Meanwhile, while the incumbent vice-president contemplates the calculus of determining who should be her running mate, she is continuing on her path of consolidating support among the various elements of the Democratic Party’s usually fissiparous constituencies, raising campaign funds from supporters and becoming something of a meme queen.
In a counter to that, the drumbeat from Republicans and others on the right is revving up charges that Harris is simply the DEI candidate — diversity, equity and inclusivity — who had been picked to be vice-president in 2020 in order to appeal to certain identitarian tendencies among Democratic Party supporters, rather than competence and experience. (A question to be asked, of course, is whether JD Vance is better prepared.) This line of attack may gain purchase or fade away, depending on how she handles the run-up to the convention in mid-August. These contradictory stories deserve further evaluation in this space.
For Democrats, the storyline in the race for the presidency is beginning to be positioned into a contest between the “future” and the “past” — with Harris positioning herself as the candidate facing forward to deal with new challenges while Donald Trump is replaying all his old war horses, moans and complaints about the millions and millions of despicable immigrants intent on destroying the nation. DM