Editor's Note: This column is co-authored by Jim McCoy.
Having surmounted the seemingly inevitable socialist surge of Bernie Sanders, many Democrats are wondering about Hillary Clinton joining Joe Biden on the 2020 election ticket to beat Trump. We believe that Biden will be stuck between a rock and a very hard decision here.
The Democrat old guard reason that even though Hillary would be number two, she would be positioned to take the reigns when Biden becomes even more incoherent than he already is. They would gleefully tap the 25th Amendment to remove him from office and install another Clinton as president, and thereby reenacting the halcyon Clinton era.
Some Democrat insiders believe this would be the strong and most secure path to victory in 2020 and exact revenge on Republicans for “stealing” the victory from her in 2016. Such thinking is predicated on a combination of individual Clinton strengths while shedding the socialist weaknesses that were so obvious during the Democrat primaries. During the debates, it was apparent that each candidate supported a panoply of socialist ideas: Medicare for All, free college tuition, build a climate change economy, secure climate justice (whatever that means), do away with economic inequality, raise the income of and restore economic security for the middle class, and open America’s southern borders.
Sounds like a progressive dream come true, right? To understand why she won’t be invited to join the Joe Biden ticket is to understand Joe Biden himself. Biden may be sleepy and may have been born at night on November 20, 1942, at St. Mary's Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania, but it certainly wasn’t last night!
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Hillary Clinton, as Biden’s running mate, presents some palpable risks and rewards that will keep Joe wide-awake at night.
First, like Stacy Abrams, Mrs. Clinton has responded continuously, in her book and by celebrity tours, as a sore loser, not a winner; the Democrats definitely need a winner. Second, after the failure of the Russia collusion probe aimed at Trump, the shoe has now been placed on the foot of the Democrat-dominated Deep State. There may be further investigation into Clinton’s private server and her bleach-biting of hard drives and smashed cellphones. Third, her role in the Benghazi fiasco and the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens will also be reprised by Trump and the conservative media. Finally, Vince Foster is at the head of a list of 31 people who died unexpectedly, either by alleged suicide or under mysterious circumstances while the Clinton’s ruled Arkansas and later our country.
So maybe Joe Biden isn’t quite as sleepy as he is given credit for in these pages. It is obvious that having an ultra-ambitious Hillary Clinton waiting in the vice presidential wings may not be good for Biden’s continued physical or political health. His demise, of course, would not disappoint half of our nation including the #MeToo feminazis, mainstream media, labor unions, Planned Parenthood, The Clinton Foundation and other progressive organizations and causes.
This said, be assured that Biden and the DNC are currently being lobbied to put Hillary Clinton on his ticket. Hillary’s appeal is the result of one overwhelming positive: she has been blessed by the real brokers in the Democratic Party and financial forces like George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and big tech.
Also at play are the negatives of five other women waiting in the wings since the primaries ended. Amy Klobuchar’s élan has taken a big, recent hit because as the Hennepin County, Minnesota prosecutor, she declined to prosecute officer Derek Chauvin for a violent arrest incident in 2006; he has now fomented race riots and large-scale property destruction after killing George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Senator Kamala Harris from California slammed Biden so much during the primary debates that there is no love lost between the two and her support for open borders is a loser with the vast majority of labor unions and middle class Americans who would support Biden. While Harris plays well in liberal states like California, Hawaii, New York and Illinois, her appeal and support are tepid throughout the rest of the nation.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is history after the national exposure of her Nazi-like closure tactics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even the mainstream media and labor unions who helped get her elected have been overwhelmingly critical of her continued heavy-handed actions in Michigan.
Stacy Abrams lost a close gubernatorial race in Georgia to an old male, Republican candidate. Her bona fides include being a black woman, a charismatic debater and serving as the former minority leader of the Georgia State House. Her regional loss to a white man and lack of national recognition work against her. As Rich Lowry of the New York Post opined, “The 46 year-old activist isn’t one to be constrained by standard political practice—or reality. She refused to concede her narrow but clear loss, instead alleging she’s been undone by a massive voter suppression scheme. As she put it at a recent event, ‘malfeasance and incompetence and my opponent, who was a cartoon villain, stole the voices of Georgians’.”
Elizabeth Warren has some appeal to Biden, but much less to Democrats. As Michael Durkheimer wrote in Forbes,“ At a recent fundraiser, Biden credited the success of his relationship with President Obama to their lack of policy differences: ‘The reason why it worked for Barack and me so well is we agreed substantively on every major issue….So it’s going to be important that whomever I pick [for VP] is completely comfortable with my policy prescriptions, as to how we move forward.’ The gulf between Warren and Biden, that has become more public within the last year, may cause Biden to rethink the choice for 2020.” Trump would love to get pugnacious with Pocahontas Warren.
These five women in contention to be Joe Biden’s running mate present real problems for him. The sixth, Hillary Clinton, represents a palpable risk to his longevity. Handicapping this confederacy of dunces is a fool’s errand since all represent a true handicap to Joe’s presidential ambitions. It is a formidable paradox Biden faces—in picking any one of these six candidates Biden is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. DJT will be at his best!
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