“Politically Inconvenient Truths”: Gingrich Shows How Far He’ll Go To Be Vice President
One month ago today, Newt Gingrich was asked to comment on Donald Trump’s racist remarks about Judge Gonzalo Curiel, and the former House Speaker was surprisingly candid. “This is one of the worst mistakes Trump has made,” Gingrich said, adding that the presidential hopeful’s comments were “inexcusable.”
A few days later, however, the Georgia Republican remembered that he might be a top contender to become Trump’s running mate – which led Gingrich to walk back everything he’d just said. The former Speaker told CNN that Trump is “learning very, very fast” and taking the necessary steps “to win the presidency.”
What about Trump’s “inexcusable” mistake? “Any effort to take one or two phrases out of the 90-minute dialogue and say, ‘Gee, Gingrich was anti-Trump,’ is just nonsense,” he said.
Late last week, as Politico noted, we saw a related shift.
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, under consideration as Donald Trump’s running mate, is dropping his decades-long support of free trade deals and picking up Trump’s strongly protectionist position.
“I basically agree with Trump’s speech on trade,” Gingrich said in an email to POLITICO on Friday.
Gingrich wasn’t just a passive proponent of modern trade agreements; he championed many of the trade deals Trump is now running against. Trump, for example, has repeatedly condemned NAFTA, which Gingrich not only voted, he also literally stood alongside then-President Bill Clinton when it was signed into law.
Slate’s Josh Voorhees added that Gingrich continued to voice support for trade agreements after he was driven from Congress, including having been “a vocal cheerleader of permanent trade relations with China.”
That is, until Gingrich decided he had a shot at the VP slot, at which point he discovered he “basically agrees” with the presidential candidate he’s eager to impress.
So, here’s my question: if the vice presidential nomination goes to someone else, will Gingrich go back to his previous beliefs or stick with these politically convenient new ones?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 5, 2016
“Most Would Join His Ticket Only If He Kidnapped Their Children”: How Badly Will Trump Hurt Himself With His Choice Of A Running Mate?
When Donald Trump was asked by a local television station about his potential choice of a running mate, he responded, “Everybody wants it, that I can tell you.” Like many of the things Trump says, it was a laughably transparent lie; there are any number of Republicans who have said that they wouldn’t run with Trump, and that only counts the ones who have been asked by reporters. The number of prominent politicians interested in that job is pretty small, and you can’t blame them; while it’s possible to run on a losing ticket and emerge with your reputation intact (as Paul Ryan did), spending a few months going around the country talking about what a great president Donald Trump would be is unlikely to be a career booster. To emphasize the point, today Trump tweeted, “The only people who are not interested in being the V.P. pick are the people who have not been asked!” Which is actually much closer to the truth, since there are lots of people he hasn’t asked (he may not have actually asked anyone yet), and most of them would join his ticket only if Trump kidnapped their children.
Nevertheless, there are some willing to take that plunge into the unknown with Trump, and he’s been meeting with them as he gets closer to a decision. On Saturday he got together with Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, and today he’s meeting Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst. The other names we’ve heard mentioned most often are former House speaker Newt Gingrich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (who is managing Trump’s transition planning), and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, whose relationship with Trump seems based on their shared anger about immigration.
Of course, as a successful businessman who has hired many people, Trump will give this decision all the care and deliberation it deserves, arriving at a choice that nearly all Americans will praise for its wisdom and foresight.
Or maybe not. In fact, there are multiple forces pushing Trump to make a choice that will hurt him, not help him.
He wouldn’t be the first nominee to do so. The truth is that running mates almost never help the nominee win the election; at best, their selection provides a few days of positive news coverage that gives a small bump in the polls, which soon settle right back down to where they were before. The only times where a running mate had an appreciable impact on the race were those where they hurt their nominee, as Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin did.
So the best strategy is for the nominee to choose someone who would actually make a good vice president. Judging by what he’s said to this point, Trump might have a hard time determining who could perform well in the job, since he seems to have virtually no idea what the federal government does or how it works. But the most important factors are that the VP have a strong relationship with the president (vice presidents can’t be effective unless everyone knows they can speak for the president) and that he have a detailed knowledge of government. The ones who have been effective, such as Joe Biden and Dick Cheney (in George W. Bush’s first term, though less so in his second) are those with long experience in Washington that enabled them to navigate the federal government’s complexities to accomplish the tasks the president set out for them.
Trump has seemed to acknowledge this by saying that he wants someone with Washington experience as a running mate, an insider who can make up for what Trump himself lacks. But many of the people on his list don’t really qualify. Christie hasn’t served in Washington, and Ernst has been there only a year and a half, during which time she’s just been a backbench senator in a Congress that does almost nothing. Sessions has been in Washington for almost two decades, but he’s not exactly known as a legislative wizard, not to mention the fact that when people are calling your campaign racist, choosing the guy who once said that he thought members of the KKK were “were OK until I found out they smoked pot” might not be a great idea. Pence spent a decade in Congress, so he’d have a case to make, as would Gingrich, who engineered the GOP takeover of 1994, then went down in flames just a few years later after he oversaw the impeachment of Bill Clinton while simultaneously carrying on his own extramarital affair.
If those are the only options, one might think Pence is the obvious choice. He’s colorless, bland, uncharismatic and has the appropriate résumé. But is it really plausible that Donald Trump would make that kind of choice? Wouldn’t he want someone with a little more pizazz?
Now add in the fact that Trump is trailing in the polls, which increases the incentive to try to do something dramatic to dominate the news and shake up the race — which Trump is inclined to do anyway. Of course, that’s the same impulse that led John McCain to pick Palin.
The internal dynamics of the Trump campaign are opaque, but one can’t help but picture the candidate leaning back in his chair and saying, “I gotta tell ya, I really think Newt would be great,” at which everyone else in the room grinds their teeth and looks around nervously at one another, until someone finally speaks up and says, “Sir, the problem with Newt is that, well, everyone hates him. Republicans, Democrats, independents — nobody can stand the guy.” On the other hand, Newt is such a self-important, pretentious blowhard that he and Trump must get along great. He’s a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like, which might make him irresistible to Trump.
On the other hand, Trump might surprise us and choose a running mate who hasn’t been publicly discussed. He might be persuaded by his staff to choose someone sober and responsible. But given what has happened up until this point, the real surprise would be if Trump didn’t make a decision that looked bad on first glance, then revealed itself to be even worse than anyone had imagined.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 4, 2016
“What Actually Matters”: Joe Biden Was A Good Vice President. The Democratic Candidates Should Learn From This
It won’t be long now before the political world begins the quadrennial festival of pointless yet momentarily diverting speculation on whom the presidential nominees will choose to be their running mates. So let me suggest a radical idea before that process gets underway: The candidates should choose someone who would actually — are you ready? — do a good job as vice president.
Sounds crazy, I know. But it’s something almost no one talks about when debating this decision. And the guy who has the job now is a good example, believe it or not.
Before we discuss Joe Biden, there’s something important to understand about the “veepstakes”: Almost everything you’ll hear about how the nominees should make their decision is wrong. (I should mention that more detail on what I’m discussing here can be found in an article I wrote for the latest print edition of the American Prospect; the article isn’t online yet, so you should immediately head down to your local newsstand to procure a copy.)
It’s wrong because the choice of a running mate makes little or no difference to the outcome of the election. Should the candidate pick someone who comes from a swing state? No, because it won’t matter — while the nominee might get a boost of a couple of points in their own home state (above what a generic nominee from their party would get), vice presidential nominees don’t bring in any home-state votes.
Should the candidate pick someone who’ll help them unify the party after a contentious primary season? No, because in most cases the party is going to unify no matter what. We live in an era of negative partisanship in which voters’ dislike for the other side is a more powerful motivating factor than their affection for their own party. Republicans are unusually fractured this year, but if they come back together it will be over their shared hatred of Hillary Clinton, not because of a vice presidential nominee. Democrats, on the other hand, will be unified by Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Don’t believe the Bernie Sanders supporters who are saying they’ll never vote for Clinton — almost all of them will, just as the Clinton supporters who said they’d never vote for Barack Obama in 2008 did in the end.
Should the candidate pick someone with an interesting demographic profile? No, because as with all the other considerations we’re discussing, in the end the difference that could make will be minuscule next to how voters feel about the person at the top of the ticket. That isn’t to say it would have zero effect if, say, Clinton picked a Latino as her running mate, but the effect in persuading more Latinos that they should vote for the Democratic ticket will be so small as to be barely worth considering.
All of this is why political scientists who have studied this question have been almost completely unable to locate a significant effect of vice presidential choices on the final outcome of the race. The outlying case is Sarah Palin, who likely cost John McCain a point or two. The other running mate who might have made a small difference is Dan Quayle in 1988. But both of those were picks that went horribly wrong; what you won’t find is a running mate who actually helped the candidate at the top of the ticket in any meaningful way.
So if you’re Hillary Clinton or Ted Cruz (I won’t pretend to know what bizarre calculations might be whirring through Donald Trump’s mind), that means you should just pick someone who would actually be good at being vice president, and as long as the person isn’t a political disaster during the campaign, you’ll have done yourself a favor. Which brings us to Joe Biden.
John Harwood (who has really been killing it with these) has an interview with Biden out today, and from Biden’s answers, it’s obvious that he still hasn’t quite made peace with the idea that he’s never going to be president. When asked about his “Goofy Uncle Joe” persona, he said: “if you notice, I beat every Republican in every poll when they thought I was running. You notice that my favorability was higher than anybody that’s running for office in either party.” He also vigorously defended not only his record as a senator but the administration’s accomplishments. Which you’d expect, but what most people don’t realize is that Biden has been an extremely effective vice president.
Thanks to his decades in the Senate, Biden came to the job with a deep understanding of the way the federal government operates, which enabled him to oversee projects that spanned different agencies and different branches. Most importantly, he was in charge of implementing the Recovery Act, which was one of the administration’s great unsung successes. It involved a huge amount of work and coordination, and by every account Biden performed exceptionally well at it. Just the fact that they managed to distribute over three-quarters of a trillion dollars without any major scandals of graft or theft was an extraordinary accomplishment.
And perhaps most critically for a vice president, Biden has kept a strong relationship with the president throughout the last seven years, which many VPs can’t say (most notably, Dick Cheney was hugely powerful in George W. Bush’s first term, but lost favor in the second term). That isn’t to say he hasn’t had some Bidenesque screwups along the way, but he seems to have done about as good a job as President Obama could have hoped.
To what degree Obama knew that would happen when he picked Biden isn’t clear — though as someone from Delaware who had run a couple of weak runs for the White House, Biden didn’t look like electoral gold at the time, so Obama couldn’t have been worrying too much about getting a boost to the ticket. And it can be hard to predict how someone will do in a job they haven’t done before. But if the 2016 candidates take a good look at history, they’ll realize that there’s little to be gained by worrying too much about how their running mate will affect the election’s outcome. Pollsters will tell you that after a running mate gets picked, the candidate will get a bump in the polls for a few days based on all the positive news about the choice, and then the race settles right back down to where it was before.
I realize that means the millions of words that will be spilled on the veepstakes will all be for nought. I’m not telling anyone to stop speculating and musing. Go right ahead; I might do some of it myself. But we shouldn’t forget what actually matters about the choice.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, April 19, 2016
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