And the Candidate Is: Part II

Sifting through the list of the 37 mentioned and identified potential Democratic presidential candidates in Part I, who should we think are real and could move from being mentioned to significant candidacy, if only at the start?

It’s all guess-work. But first let’s rule out those who — no matter their day dreams or their being mentioned — are hardly likely to run or to fall flat if they try. That’s not to say that some being ruled out here might not move toward candidacy or even announce. It’s to say they have no likely chance to be nominated for president by the Democratic Party.

That includes all on the business list, something Anthony Yang will find out soon enough. It  also includes all on the House list, except John Delaney because he is already running.

Still, one of the others on the House list, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, is an interesting case. Until reading her name here it is likely you’d never heard of her and are scratching your head and asking, sensibly, “Why would an obscure congresswoman I’ve never heard about think she has the least chance to be nominated for president?”

And the answer may be that the three-term congresswoman — with a claim to Samoan American parentage, who is a professed Hindu, a military veteran and Sanders convert and acolyte (when it suited her three years ago)  knows she won’t be nominated for the top spot. She could in fact be running for the second spot on the 2020 Democratic ticket,  and/or to position herself for future presidential elections given that she is just 37.

Her possible candidacy, and she recently made strong sounds that she will run, underscores four important points that factor into the Democratic contest.

First it is hard to see a Democratic national ticket in two years without a woman in one of the two spots.

Second it is likely there will be tremendous impetus for that ticket to include a minority person.

Third unless there is a candidate in either spot who embodies both of those qualities, must there still be a white man on the ticket?

Fourth, following from the third point, there have been 57 presidential elections and in only three of them has a party offered a woman as a national candidate; twice as vice presidential candidates, Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Sara Palin in 2008, and then Hilary Clinton for president two years ago.

Otherwise all major party tickets have offered two men as the candidates for president and vice president and no women, until the candidacy and election of Barrack Obama, only white men and until the 1928 candidacy of Al Smith, a Catholic, only Protestant white men.

Why then is it unreasonable to think that  Democrats could nominate a woman for president and vice president? It isn’t unreasonable at all. It’s about time after more than 200 years of almost only white Protestant men running for the two highest offices for a two-woman ticket.  Democrats would be best served starting the 2020 campaign understanding two women could well be the gender composition of a winning ticket.

Who else, what white men, even if they announce candidacies for president, are hardly likely to get very far except perhaps later to give gender balance to a ticket led by a woman?  Three on the Senate list, Senators Merkley, Brown and Murphy. Three from the present governors list, Inslee, Hickenlooper and Bullock and one from the former governor list, McAuliffe. Any one or all of them may test the waters but they are very likely to find them shallow.

Among present or former mayors only Bloomberg and Landrieu could become serious candidates and there is no prospect for the one former state official, Jason Kandar, who if a sensible man would no doubt agree.

More problematic is the list of former big federal office holders, the luminaries who held high posts in the national government. Two get special mention here, so let’s get to them first.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder has never been a candidate and lately demonstrated how unsuited he is for retail politics and how much his political ear is made of tin with his ill-advised comment about going low. He has no geographic base, in fact is from the District of Columbia, a place not well-loved by voters — against which candidates run but don’t proudly proclaim they are from. He shouldn’t run. If he does, he is likely a failed candidate from the get go.

Why is Hilary Clinton on the list? Because as she has demonstrated during the mid-term campaign she will not go away, will not accept or understand she is a problem for Democrats, that she has twice had her chance  — and twice been largely responsible for her ruined chances because she is a terrible and autocratic candidate, who can’t be given and does not take advice – James Comey and all that notwithstanding.

Still it is clear she still harbors overweening presidential ambition. Is she/has she been signaling she wants to run again? Seemingly. Will Hilary Clinton still be running for president 1,000 years from now? Could be, but she should take a pass this time. It will do neither her, her party or its eventual nominee any good.

John Kerry has had a distinguished public career in the House and Senate and during four noble years as secretary of state with such notable achievements as our opening to Cuba and negotiating the Iran agreement now so stupidly, ignorantly discarded by Trump and Michael Pompeo. Kerry, like Clinton, had his chance to grab the golden ring of the presidency, a chance lost in the last analysis in Ohio in 2004 owing to shrewd Republican fear-mongering about gay marriage. He should put thoughts of another run out of his head. His time too is past.

Separately, a necessary detour to talk about Michael Avenatti because always he wants to be talked about. He drives race cars. Bet you didn’t know that.  More significantly, whatever scam Avenatti is up to with his purported interest in running, given his penchant for lurid publicity, he is a distraction, and  a poisonous one though he might  get a few percent of the votes in early contests.

Avenatti has a messy past career, a messy present, at present getting messier, and who ever heard of him until last March when he showed up with Stormy Daniels? He is the freak in the show and the Democratic Party would be best served finding debate rules that keep him offstage. If you want to know more about Avenatti’s checkered history start with his  Wikipedia article. It is not a pretty story.

All of that does not mean that some of those discussed above will not announce for the presidency. It simply means they shouldn’t waste our time and theirs because it is hard to conceive of any circumstances in which any of them could win the nomination.

Then who does that leave? Who seem most likely to go from being mentioned to being candidates? In alphabetical order:

Joe Biden: There is nothing you don’t already know about him. A recent poll had Democrats preferring him for 2020, putting him in the number one spot with 33%. He is the front-runner. He may stay in that position for a while, poll well at first. But is being front-runner now a good place to be in a big wide, fluid field? He has an enormous positive record in public life and distinguished himself as vice president. Yet, when you have 50 years in politics to be picked over, including the Clarence Thomas hearing and that 1988 blowup about plagiarism there can be problems. Trump and Republicans would turn the latter into a capital crime 30 years later. You can look at the pros, look at the cons and still you get to one place. Will he run? Certainly he looks to be ready. He has the heart of millions of Democrats but should he? No. He’s too old, he will be 79 come Inauguration Day.

Michael Bloomberg: Again what else do you need to know that you don’t already about the former New York mayor said by some reports to be the 8th richest in the world with a net worth of $50 billion. He’s tough, no-nonsense, a technocrat who is great on some issues like climate change, gay rights and fiscal administration and wanting on others like race — and the latter of course is a matter that sears the heart of the Democratic Party, a party which gets and must get 90% of the African-American vote.

Liberals and progressives dislike Bloomberg or worse. He returned to the Democratic Party in October and showered $100 million on its 2018 congressional campaign. But would he, after years as a Republican and then lately as an independent, cleave the Democratic Party? He would cleave, even splinter the party because of his mayoral record on race – read that stop and frisk.

Secretary of the Treasury? Perhaps though Bloomberg would likely deem that beneath him. Will he run. Of course he will. He has $50 billion and no one can stop a man with $50 billion from doing whatever he wants. But should he? No. He’s too wrong on race and, like the former vice president, too old.

Cory Booker:   Though Newark’s former mayor did rush into a burning buildings once to save women and children (just ask him about it) in two words, he is not Spartacus. No, Booker is more the Elmer Gantry, the Father Divine of the Democratic Party, using the talent of a crude preacher to evangelize and excite. But is anyone there? Is there substance, are there more than slogans and are there any real convictions beyond towering ambition?

He will run. He has to because he is 50 years old now with an unlimited horizon in the Senate but not in presidential politics. Booker is a money-raising machine. Is it too soon after Barack Obama — given the race hatred Trump and so much of his arch-white party has emboldened — for the Democratic Party to nominate an African-American or minority person again? Or is it precisely the right time because of that? If it is the right time, should it be Booker? Deval Patrick or Kamala Harris?

Andrew Cuomo: Wait, didn’t he say during his primary campaign this year for nomination for a third term as New York State governor that he would not run for president, that he would serve that third term in Albany? Yes, he said it. So? So he can unsay it. What other reason except setting himself up to run for president does Cuomo have for running for a third term in Albany, for making good and sure he clobbered his foolish primary challenger, Cynthia Nixon, and for engineering decisive reelection?

What other reason but to run for president. You really think he wants to be governor for four more years, spend another term in Albany? Would you?

The governor is as transactional as all smart politicians are. If he chooses to find exigent circumstances that cause him to transact reversal of the pledge, which itself was transactional in the moment it was made, he will. The presidency clearly has been his goal from the get-go of his public life, especially given the fact that his father passed it up in 1992. Unlike his father this Cuomo is no Hamlet on the Hudson. Like Henry V he is decisive in battle and chooses the time of his battles.

Besides being transactional, politics is momentary. This is a moment for Cuomo and he knows he can’t be sure another will come. So carpe diem Andrew: But perhaps not until late 2019 when there will be several months space between his candidacy and taking the oath for a third term, or even after New Hampshire when some dust has settled. In 2019 Cuomo will  be at the peak of his political career and power, the unchallenged and unchallengeable boss of New York State and its powerful Democratic Party, with a huge campaign fund and the ability as governor to raise whatever he needs. Why would he not run? If not now, when?

Julian Castro: He is an even-tempered, thoughtful but terribly uninteresting man. When he appears on television for an interview he recites down the middle liberal programmatic pabulum. He is one of twin brothers all the rage ten years ago when they were in their early 30s and seemed to present great hope among Democrats that two attractive young Hispanic candidates would help turn Texas from crimson red to purple on the way to blue one day. They haven’t. Beto O’Rourke might, but the Castro brothers have not.

Julian Castro served as mayor of San Antonio, a Democratic urban stronghold, and then as secretary of housing and urban affairs under President Obama (his brother Joaquin has been in the House since 2013).  Castro has all but made it clear he will run for president, has written the obligatory “this is what I believe book” and goes forward as an ostensible Hispanic hope for the presidency. His prospects are slim and if there were to be a place for him on the Democratic ticket it would be second spot.

John Delaney: Well, he’s announced. So he’s running. He isn’t gong to be nominated. He isn’t going to be president. If you want to know more about him, do a search (if he wins the nomination, I will  breakfast on crow avec d’oeufs en visage).

Kirsten Gillibrand: Chosen by then Gov. Paterson of New York in 2009 to fill the Senate seat vacated by Hilary Clinton when she became secretary of state, Gillibrand had been in the House for one-term, positioning herself as a blue dog Democrat to fit the mold of her upstate New York district. Elected easily in 2006 and 2012 to the Senate in her own right in blue New York, Gillibrand is on her way to blowout reelection and is all but certain to run for president coming off a landslide this year. Like Booker, this may be her one and only shot in a field that will be crowded with sitting senators on the way to becoming presidential candidates very soon.

In the Senate, representing all of New York State with its overwhelming downstate Democratic majorities in Westchester County and New York City (Long Island is not nearly so much a Democratic stronghold though it does provide Democrats bushels-full of votes), Gillibrand has been much more a liberal than she was or could be representing a conservative upstate district in the House.

Gillibrand has made confronting and legislating to deal with sex and spousal abuse her signature issue, notably in confronting the military leadership about its prevalence in the ranks. Then, lo and behold, the #MeToo movement erupted, putting her issue at the forefront of the national conversation.

Gillibrand therefore is a woman most identified with a critical women’s issue just as  suburban college educated white women depart the GOP in droves. They will find in her a sister both in appearance and voice. Nonetheless, at least two women senators are likely to overshadow her in the presidential contest, Harris and Klobuchar. If a man becomes the candidate then one of the woman senators is a likely, perhaps a certain prospect for the second spot on the ticket.

Kamala Harris:  If you follow politics you have been aware of California’s junior senator for more than a decade. She served two terms in Sacramento as attorney general of California, a platform that enabled her to press in the courts a wide range of liberal battles on the political and governmental landscape. From that springboard she won election to the Senate in 2016 so she will only have completed one-third of a Senate term when she announces for president n 2019. Every indication is that she will.

Like others this year including Booker, Sanders, Warren and Biden, she has weighted her late-stage mid-year election campaigning toward Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Carolina and other early-voting 2020 primary and caucus states. She made a mark in the Senate Judiciary Committee during the past two years and no more so than in the recent Kavanaugh confirmation spectacle where she demonstrated her abilities as an incisive prosecutor.

Harris is of Caribbean and Asian heritage, giving her, in addition to gender, a dual claim on minority person status. She is the only person in the potential Democratic Party field who is both a woman and a minority. As noted in Part I, she seemingly must win her state’s enormously important primary on March 3, 2020. If she does, she could go on to be the nominee. If she doesn’t, she becomes perhaps the perfect pick for Vice President – not a bad consolation prize and one that would set her up to be the Democratic nominee in 2024 or 2028 depending on what happens in the 2020 election.

Amy Klobuchar: It is not an endorsement to say that if the United States wants the president imagined in films and TV shows like “The American President”, “West Wing”  or “Designated Survivor”,  her name is probably Amy Klobuchar. Minnesota’s senior senator has a personal up from the bootstraps story involving an alcoholic father, who left the family causing turmoil and setbacks that she overcame to attend Yale College and then go on to receive a law degree from Chicago University. The senator returned home to Minnesota, where Slovenian forebears had labored in the harsh territory and climate of the state’s northern Iron Range. She became a corporate attorney, who entered politics when she was elected county attorney — chief prosecutor — of Hennepin County, home to the Twin Cities and so the largest county in the state.

Klobuchar won her first term in the senate in 2006 and reelection by a landslide in 2012. She is headed for equally substantial reelection this year as candidate of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, Minnesota’s historic liberal political amalgamation that counts among its most honored Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, the latter of whom is one of her political mentors. In 2016 Klobuchar was identified as the member of the Senate who had passed the most legislation (having nothing to do with naming post offices), which speaks to that mythical ability to reach across the aisle.

In the recent mess of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Klobuchar, not a household name in the nation, became one. She more than any other member of the committee in either party conducted herself with the even-tempered, forthright common sense  and dignity that is her brand and apparently is very much her. When Kavanaugh turned on her with vitriol, she remained calm and waited out his tirade, answering it calmly and sensibly noting her own family’s story. The stark comparison between his and her demeanor later required him to make a personal public apology to her during the hearing.

Klobuchar is mentioned by others, not by herself as a possible candidate. It is hard to know her thinking about seeking the presidency, which might be a good thing. At this very tormented moment in American life she could well be, she likely would be an important and interesting choice if chosen by Democrats to run for president. As a candidate she would present a truth-telling, straightforward, dignified alternative to the degeneracy of Donald Trump and his probably criminal maladministration of the United States. Klobuchar is exactly the kind of down to earth, straight talking person early voters in Iowa and New Hampshire adore.

Mitch Landrieu: The former mayor of New Orleans is, as they say, the scion of a political dynasty in Louisiana. His father Moon Landrieu was a legendary figure in Louisiana politics who served as secretary of HUD under President Clinton and his sister, Mary Landrieu, served two terms as a U.S senator from the state.

An attorney, he served 16 years in the Louisiana House of Representatives before being elected to the first of two terms as lieutenant governor of the state in 2003. Having failed to win the mayoralty in New Orleans in 1994 and again in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina,  Landrieu succeeded the third time around in 2010 and again in 2014 with landslide victories.  As mayor he presided over the bulk of the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. He has written the obligatory book giving us his thoughts on how to move America forward (don’t all rush out to buy it).

Landrieu’s chief appeal would be that he is a southerner, sounds like a southerner, is a centrist and is that rare Democrat to win public office in the south, albeit in a Democratic city. But if Louisiana is perhaps among the last states of the Confederacy to don blood-red sheets — one of its senators is a blue dog Democrat — New Orleans is not Louisiana and Landrieu’s appeal is limited as is his name recognition. The political cognoscenti have heard of him and know his political lineage; but have you have heard of him before reading this, has anyone you know who is not much into politics heard of him? Probably not. It’s highly likely he will do well in debates and have his moment, but not do well in polls or at the polling booths.

Deval Patrick: He won election as governor of Massachusetts in 2006 and 2010, serving eight mostly successful years but not without controversies and not without leaving the a few of the usual sorts of messes behind like questions of conflict and misuse of public funds. Nothing enormous, but more than enough grist for the grindstone of negative campaign advertising.

Patrick is an up from the bootstraps man. A graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School his legal career includes being Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Civil Rights under President Clinton, wide-ranging involvement in civil rights law and high-ranking positions in business including as chief counsel at Texaco and executive vice president/chief counsel at Coca Cola, Inc. He is reported by some to have the encouragement of President Obama to enter the contest.

Since leaving office Patrick has worked at Bain Capital, the Boston-based investment firm  built by Mitt Romney with a reputation for over-eager acquisitiveness. Some see that as a problem for Patrick in a party, heavily influenced by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, that distrusts, mis-trusts and detest the financial services industry. Patrick is a polished, experienced, conventionally liberal politician with some baggage from his career and his years in the Boston State House. He gives every indication that he will run. If he does, he is likely to be formidable in all ways including debate because he is an accomplished communicator.

Bernie Sanders: Is there anything you need to know about Sanders except that he is not a Democrat? He is, he says, a Democratic Socialist. He has fed on Democrats’ political tolerance of him for decades in the House and Senate because his vote was needed, bartering it for committee positions and seniority. Those who know or come from the old left know what he is in reality and that is a Trotskyite, an advocate of permanent revolution. But American democracy is about evolution, not revolution and the party that has been at the forefront of progressive evolution for 90 years, notwithstanding its own struggles with its Dixiecrats and northern and urban community and race divisions, is the Democratic Party — the party to which Sanders does not belong. Not incidentally, his wife has very serious, messy public ethics issues that would not escape exploitation by the opposition if he gains the nomination.

If you examine what Sanders says closely you discover he knows his beliefs because he has them but he does not know or have the historical or policy knowledge to support what he espouses. It’s easy to say we should have a single payer health coverage system, it’s a lot harder to answer even the basics?

How do you transition from private insurers to a government entity? What is that entity? What happens to all the private sector insurance jobs? What will be the relationship between the single payer system and healthcare providers? How do you transition from private to public administration of voluminous health plans and then the really big one, what’s the federal levy needed to supplant all private premium payments and how do you do that over what time period and what is the federal tax code treatment of it all both in transition and final form? All that and tons and tons and tons of questions for which there has at least to be an outline of answers. One doubts Sanders has thought much of it through or that he has people who can.

As he says, he is not a Democrat. That’s a telling point as to his actual ability to be president. A president has to appoint over 4,000 people to run and operate the executive branch and then also nominates hundreds of judges or, perhaps, redesign American health coverage and care. Republican presidents, except this one, and Democratic presidents, typically draw from a deep bench of talent from among those with prior government service and experience, from think tanks, academia, the ranks of party faithful. There aren’t 4,000 Democratic Socialists, probably aren’t 400, probably aren’t 40 in the country with that kind of knowledge and experience and Sanders doesn’t know the Democrats, who don’t trust him anyway. So how would he put together a government, as we witness with Trump what happens when you can’t and don’t know how.

Elizabeth Warren: Like the others her age, she is disqualified by it. Not much to say here that you don’t know. Her moment likely came in the heat of 2016 but she let it go, probably wary of what it would do to her reelection chances this year when she is on the way to easy reelection. Warren, a Republican much of her adult life who started voting for Democrats only in 1995, has made consumer finance and financial market reform her signature issues but they are not top of mind these days.

As to the rest, she is no more schooled or directed than Sanders. More importantly right now her foolish mid-campaign DNA mis-adventure demonstrated she is politically tone-deaf and not ready for prime time. For a day she diverted everyone’s attention from the mid-term campaign, from her party’s determined effort to win back the House and try for the Senate to that – to that DNA nonsense. And that nonsense played right into Trump’s wheelhouse. So the whole episode demonstrated  Warren is not really ready for prime time and wasted valuable time and attention to the business at hand needed by her party in her pursuit of what? In pursuit of a losing headline.

These then are at late October 2018 13 potential candidates of some measure and seriousness, more than enough to make up a full field but no doubt to be joined by others with less chance. Among them are six — count them, six — U.S. Senators.

And then there is Beto O’Rourke. He will either be elected senator from Texas or experience the gravitation pull of a movement to draft him into the presidential race. He may or not come out of the mid-term campaign a senator-elect but he does come out of it a political rock star.

Whoever emerges with the nomination, however she or he chooses to balance the ticket they will be up against a vicious, demagogue and race-baiter, who has demonstrated he respects no rules, is indecent in everything he does; who cannot stand to share the spotlight or say anything that is not a lie’ who denigrates anyone and everyone and will do so with vitriolic hate aimed at his Democratic Party opponent.

Who would be best to take that on in 2020? A take-no-prisoners, kill-the-wounded campaigner like Cuomo? A 70-something year-old who offers no younger, fresh appeal than the 74-year-old incumbent?  Someone significantly younger? Perhaps, someone who radiates calm, even-handedness, fairness and intelligence? A man? A woman? A minority person? A white man, a white woman?

Is there a candidate among them who Trump will not turn into a meal he dines on before his spitting, ranting rally mobs? Is there someone who can stand on a debate stage, give better than he or she gets and unmask Trump for the raging, ignorant, lying degenerate he is?

There has to be in this critical time. But it will be a test to emerge  the Democratic nominee to head a party that must to win and to govern make itself one party rather than the sum of its many regional, idealogical, gender and community parts.

What is certain is that very soon after Nov. 6 it will be presidential game on for Democrats.