The one candidate that did win picking a young guy who was relatively unknown, his VP was never taken seriously. Most of these young, attractive candidates without much of a record wilt in the national spotlight. Clinton did win with Gore, but gore had already run a national campaign so wasn’t exactly an unknown quantity.
Not that Clinton can’t pick a younger candidate with an eye towards 2020 or 2024, but again, Booker fills that bill better than anyone else in the party. He’s actually plausible as a Presidential candidate right now had he chosen to run.
If she really wants to elevate the Castro brothers, then she should retain Julian at HUD, since he’ll only have served two years by then, and appoint Joaquin Secretary of education. Both graduated HArvard Law so either one or both could be federal judges and possibly on the Supreme Court before Clinton leaves office.
But as long as they live in Texas, their careers in electoral politics are pretty much a dead end. If either wants a path to the Presidency, that path looks a lot like George HW Bush’s. Bush also faced an electoral dead end in then Solid South Texas. He got into the House but anything more was just not going to happen. So he went from ambassador to the UN, to RNC chairman, to some important position in China, to CIA director, to to VP.
DNC chair is a great place for Joaquin to start him in national politics, and Julian can stay at HUD and later on in a Clinton Presidency move into foreign affairs as an Undersecretary of State or even UN ambassador.
Joaquin is a Congresscritter. People have run from that experience alone before. One even succeeded (Garfield).
Governor right now, as a stepping stone, a pretty unlikely event. But things do change over a few cycles. Remember that Anne Richards (D) was governor just two decades ago and before that Democratic governors had predominated in Texas.
He can try, but it’s unlikely that he’ll succeed from the House. But sure, if the Democrats want to make it possible, getting him to Minority Leader or getting him pushing major issues as Vice Chair of an important committee can’t hurt.
Yes, things do change, although I go back to my second point about Democrats winning statewide in Texas: What a Castro would have to do to win in Texas would disqualify him for the Presidency among the activist base. So that too, would represent a ceiling for his political career well short of the Presidency. In the next 20 years Texas would have to go liberal, or the Democratic Party would have to have lost the White House enough times that an attractive conservative governor from Texas could win the nomination as Bill Clinton did in 1992.
I think the Bush 41 path is probably more likely, although the most likely result is that Joaquin ends up being a distinguished long serving House member and Julian makes a career in the federal bureaucracy.
Why not? Considering Trump voters are generally low-income, economically marginalized people who are not necessarily heavily bound with the Republican Party, they can be won over with a proper mixture of populism and pragmatism on cultural issues.
Trump supporters can be won by anybody since most of them are just attacked to his personality and because they know him. Trump is the candidate of the disaffected. I don’t think Trump voters are particularly ideological and I’d bet that in the end most of them won’t even vote.
Personality is part of his attraction but so is his stated ideology-of sticking it to the pieties of the Wall Street-Washington-Silicon Valley axis. They may not have their ideology lined up in the neat little programmes of the Marxist or the Randian, but they do have definite views about how to make America great again.
Fears them? I don’t know anything about them other than that they have pretty portraits, are Democrats, and have positions in which they have failed to distinguish themselves so far.
On the other hand, I shouldn’t complain. If Democrats have learned from Obama that attractiveness and racial identity are Presidential qualities, then things are about to get pretty easy for the GOP.
Sure was easy for Romney, wasn’t it? All he had to do was wait for the first Friday of every month, and as soon as the unemployment numbers came out run to a microphone and act as though he gave a flying fuck about unemployed Americans. Yessir, that was easy.
I want her to select Bernie Sanders. I don’t know if that’s a good strategy or not as I’m no election pollster, and I don’t know how that would play out, but I do know I want the strongest two Dems with the most name recognition on the ticket.
That would be utterly disastrous and something neither individuals would want regardless of how it would play in the general election considering it would deprive Sanders of his Senate seat from which he can legislate and act as a loyal opposition from the left in a Clinton administration and instead shuffle him off into the dead end of the Vice Presidency and muzzle any sort of opportunity for him to provide his own voice.
How so? Of all of Clinton’s opponents in the Democratic primaries, Webb is in the best position to help her. Sanders is out for the reasons mentioned above while Chafee and O’Malley are both generic Blue Staters and utterly vanilla both literally and figuratively.
Because he’s a warmongering fool who chooses to try and appeal to racists, based on various recent statements, and this would significantly raise his profile and the likelihood we’d get another warmonger for a president (in addition to more pandering to racists).
Are we even talking about the same person here? Jim Webb opposed the Iraq War when Hillary Clinton supported it and long before Ferguson or BLM, was talking about incarceration reform when there was literally no incentive for him to do so. To call him a warmonger or a panderer to racists is not only wrong but quite literally the opposite of reality.
Based on recent statements opposing the Iran deal, he’s advocating for more war, whatever his past views on Iraq. Further, he’s explicitly pandered to confederate-flag waivers during the flap a few months ago.
