Assuming that Hillary is the Dem nominee and a man is the Pub nominee, what should they do to balance the ticket?
I think a woman as the Pub nominee for VP is a no brainer.
What characteristics of HRC need to be balanced?
If Hillary’s the candidate for President, Barack should be the VP candidate.
I don’t know enough about the Republicans.
But it’s sad that so much of the presidential race has become advertising.
ISTM ticket-balancing is obsolete as a useful campaign strategy, due to the level of homogenization and mass communication in the US today, and has been since Clinton picked Gore. The vice-presidency is no longer an afterthought, whose duties are to go to funerals and to keep breathing; it’s now a senior administration policy post, outranking even the Chief of Staff, and even the President if he’s lazy and disengaged enough.
And the electorate seems to understand and approve of that, as well they should - ticket-balancing was always essentially pandering, and ISTM it was generally seen as such too. The running mate should therefore be someone who reinforces rather than contrasts with the Presidential candidate, who has largely the same attitudes and agendas and style, who is qualified to take charge with no adjustment/growth period. If geographic and cultural balance is important at all anymore, it isn’t North/South but inside/outside the Betway, or legislative/executive.
So if HRC is the candidate, she’d be best off picking another cautious, determined centrist, probably a Governor to get those modern balance issues checked off, and likely another senior veteran of the successful previous administration for unspoken emphasis, one with a good resume of his own. That adds up to Richardson, AFAICT.
“Ticket-balancing” is usually based on regional considerations. If HRC, raised in Chicago and currently a New Yorker, is the Dem nominee, her running mate should probably be a Southerner, e.g., Edwards. Unless they decide the West is now more politically important, and tap Richardson.
In a similar vein to the executive/legislative balance, what about balancing foreign policy experience? It seems like military experience in a VP could be particularly useful if the race is Giuliani v. Clinton. What about someone like Wesley Clark? Or do you think that would just serve to emphasize Clinton’s relative lack of foreign policy experience?
Assuming Hillary gets the nod she should go with someone like Richardson as a ticket balance.
-XT
I have to disagree with the OP about the Republicans picking a woman VP to balance the Democrats nominating Clinton. It would be a huge mistake for the Republicans. They’d look like they were pandering to women voters and doing a bad job of it. All the Democrats would have to do would be to point out their female candidate is running for the top job not stuck in the number two spot.
I recently said that the Republicans might try a longshot tactic by picking Keyes as a VP. For the reasons I mentioned above, this won’t happen if Obama is on the Democrat ticket. But if he isn’t, a Republican candidate like Guiliani or Romney might decide to firm up his conservative credentials and try to split off some black voters from the Democrats by choosing Keyes. Even if they can’t convince black voters to vote for them, they might succeed in convincing them to stay home rather than vote against them.
As for the Democrats, I don’t see a Clinton-Obama ticket regardless of who’s on top. Leaving aside the ego issues of whether either of them would accept the VP spot, having a woman candidate or a black candidate is already pushing the envelope. The Democrats aren’t going to have both on the same ticket. Clinton or Obama is going to pick a white male VP. Biden or Clark would be conventional choices. Richardson would be a little edgier because he’s Hispanic.
That would be a bad idea for two reasons:
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Even by right-wing standards, Keyes is batshit insane.
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He’s black. I recall a Boondocks strip from Keyes’ 2000 presidential bid. A TV reporter asks various conservative white voters about their opinions on Keyes. Each of them enthusiastically endorses everything Keyes says. “So you might vote for him?” “Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt! Are you crazy?!” Aaron McGruder is no polysci authority, but I think he’s got the right perception there. Keyes on the ticket would lose the Pubs more white votes than it would win them black votes.
If it ends up Clinton vs. Giuliani, then Rudy just might be crazy enough to tap a certain Dr. Rice. Which would be… interesting.
If Rudy gets the nod, he’s going to have to pick a veep candidate that is totally scandal free to counteract all the baggage he’s carrying. Who is currently Mr./Ms./Mrs. Clean when it comes to possible Republican candidates?
Rice is brilliant, and she has done nothing personally to move anyone on the left to demand her impeachment or resignation, AFAIK; but she has never held an elected office, all her government experience is with an utterly discredited administration, and she’s been up to her neck in the Iraq fiasco. Not much there to recommend her as presidential spare-part. Also, she’s . . . you know . . . (see above).
How does she display this brilliance? The way she adroitly let Rumsfeld run all over her and Powell when she was national security adviser and he the Secretary of State? The way she was the first to use the phrase, “we can’t let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud?” The way she cleverly got 88% of the State Department thinking that she doesn’t care a whit about them? Or is it the way she smartly buried that “Bin Laden Determined to Attack” memo when she had in her power to do something about it? Whatever personal attributes she may have, I think she’s the single most ineffective senior leader this country has had in my life, and that includes Bush. Cheney may be a villain, but he’s formidable. Brownie may have been a failure, but at least he has the excuse of being a dilettante. Rice is immersed in the study of foreign policy and she’s accomplished nothing.
(I don’t mean that as an attack on you, BG, it’s just such an oft-repeated phrase that riles me up because I don’t think Rice has achieved anything in her last six and half years in Washington. (At least Rumsfeld and Cheney got the war they wanted.)
Anyways, back to the OP: aside from this bizarre view of Rice, there is no A-list of Republican women to balance the ticket, so that isn’t going to happen. Depending on who the Republican nominee is, they’ll probably have to pick some red-meat conservative to try to get Republicans interested in voting for a weak candidate. Maybe someone like Senator Jim DeMint, maybe Mel Martinez, or a governor that I can’t name.
As far as the Democratic side, I think Jim Webb would be a good choice, though I thought I heard he announced that he doesn’t want to be VP.
I was referring to her general intelligence and academic credentials. Of course, Woodrow Wilson had both and still displayed astonishingly poor political judgment at times; at the Versailles peace conference he was a babe among wolves.
Mike Huckabee is a natural VP candidate for Giuliani…unless he’s the nominee himself.
Believe it or not, a commentator with The Nation agrees with you.
I don’t understand this, though. What would Edwards bring since he is a southerner? No way do the DEMS win North or South Carolina unless it is a complete rout (and then it doesn’t matter who was picked). And even so, the VP candidate doesn’t carry nearly the sway as the top ticket holder.
Even if it is Rudy v. Obama, he will have his hands full winning in NYS as a Republican.
I can’t recall the last time a VP candidate helped deliver even his home state, let alone his region for the ticket that he wouldn’t have OTHERWISE delivered (e.g. Connecticut in 2000 would have went DEM whether Lieberman was on the ticket or not)
Aren’t you forgetting the “brilliant” Ann Coulter? 
Clinton/Gore won Tennessee both times (and neighboring Georgia once). Probably no way of knowing if it was Gore’s presence on the ticket, but that probably at least helped
I’d trust Aaron McGruder’s views on race the same way I’d trust Bruce Tinsley’s views on politics or Jack Chick’s views on religion. Some people don’t just have an agenda; they embody an agenda.
Perhaps, but he’s right in this particular instance. The Republican Party includes too many registered voters who will not under any circumstances vote for an African-American. After LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act (declaring at the time, “We [the Democrats] have just lost the South for a generation.”), and after Nixon adopted the Southern Strategy, most white supremacist Dems migrated to the Republican Party (in some cases, by way of Wallace’s short-lived American Independent Party). Nowadays, the Pubs’ main electoral base is in the white South. The party of Abraham Lincoln is now the party of Jefferson Davis.