The Daily Background

Sorry for the wordy title (see the caveat below).

When it comes to Veep choices, I’ve been reading the various writeups and rebuttals from OpenLeft and MyDD over the last few weeks. It’s abundantly clear reading about them all that there are no perfect choices, but of the possible VP choices for Obama that have been bandied around for the last month or so (Kaine, Bayh, Biden, Sebelius), Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius my favorite at the moment.

From what I know about them, which granted isn’t a lot, Kaine and Bayh are simply too conservative (most of the arguments around Kaine is that he could help deliver his home state of VA, which I think Obama could do with or without him; I feel similarly about Bayh and IN, although I don’t know if Obama will carry it or not I don’t think his running-mate will make a difference).

Which leaves us with Biden. Now Biden is the sort of person I’d rather have either elsewhere in an Obama Administration (SecState?), or right where he is at the moment as the Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Plus Biden is the epitome of a Washington insider, and would undercut Obama’s message of change if he were on the other side of the ticket. I can just imagine the ads McCain’s campaign would run about Biden not being a candidate of “change.” Much of the argument for Biden is based on the idea that Obama needs somebody with foreign policy experience in order to “balance” the ticket out, which is just silly and would do more to highlight his perceived weakness in this area than it would to allay concerns about it.

Sebelius, a popular two-term governor, was an early Obama endorser, and I’ve got it on good authority that Obama was considering her as a VP since early on in the process, long before he even got the nomination.

She’s a Democrat with executive experience from a red state (Kansas- where Obama’s mother was from), and couldn’t plausibly be labeled as an insider. She’s got experience in the area of health care and credibility fighting insurance companies, and is pretty good on issues like the death penalty (she opposes it), the environment, firearms (which is not easy for a Dem in a red state like Kansas), and, surprisingly, abortion (which is especially surprising considering that the same people who elect her elect nutjobs like Sam Brownback).

On the latter, she describes herself as “personally pro-life” but has opposed efforts to criminalize or restrict access to abortions and has been endorsed and actively supported by Planned Parenthood. She’s also opposed a constitutional ban on gay marriage, saying that she supports her state’s current state law banning gay marriage, which is a little bit troubling, but I’m willing to overlook it considering that she managed to get almost 60% of Kansans’ vote when re-elected in 2006. It could be worse, after all, and Vice Presidential candidates are hardly in charge of crafting LGBT policy anyway. She also has zero record on Iraq, but that’s not really either good or bad, considering that Obama’s strong record on Iraq is enough for both of them.

As Chris Bowers of Open Left points out, it’s better to reinforce a candidate’s strengths with Vice Presidential picks, instead of try to shore up their weaknesses, because you only end up emphasizing them. Obama’s major electoral strength is that his politics and his person embody change at a time when Americans are desperate for change.

If he chooses somebody like Biden, he’ll be seen as trying to desperately shore up his biggest perceived electoral weakness (experience), and the media coverage will reflect this. But if he goes with somebody like Sebelius, another relatively fresh face who by her mere gender will give Obama look more like a candidate of change, and McCain (who will almost certainly be running with another white male) look more and more like a candidate of more of the same.

(Needless to say, I don’t buy the silly idea pushed by cable news pundits that if Obama chooses a female VP other than Clinton that he will be alienating her most ardent feminist supporters. Those supporters wouldn’t have supported Clinton if she wasn’t a woman and so to say that they wouldn’t support another woman because she’s not Hillary is a logical fallacy.)

The famous-to-the-point-of-being-cliche first rule of Veepstakes is do no harm. There’s evidence that Sebelius may be just the kind of VP the Obama campaign wants: the kind who won’t upstage him and knows how to maintain message discipline.

Who headlined a fundraiser for Obama in Michigan last night? Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

Were there any headlines coming out of Michigan today? No?

Any headlines from her in the last 4 weeks? No? 8 weeks? 12 weeks? No?

That’s kind of the way No Drama Obama likes it…

Caveat: This isn’t to say that the above mentioned (Biden, Kaine, Bayh, Sebelius) are the only four that are being considered, but they’re the only ones that have been pretty well confirmed as being vetted by the Obama campaign. There are probably other great choices, but these are the names that are making the rounds and are almost certainly being vetted.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog