Seeking the electable
Donald Trump couldn’t beat John or Jane Doe if John or Jane Doe was the Democratic presidential nominee for 2020.
But the challenge for Democrats is finding a real candidate better than the beautifully electable blank slate of John or Jane Doe.
Today, then, I will unveil a probably recurring feature—owing to fluidity—that ranks the major declared or possible Democratic presidential candidates, from best to worst. I deem those ranked one-through-six to be better than John or Jane Doe, and those ranked seven-through-11 to be fatally lesser.
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1. Joe Biden—He’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination twice and lost badly, in 1988 and 2008. Yet this may be Joe’s ironic late-in-life time. He is now beloved for his affable gaffeprone and seemingly genuine manner, his strength amid personal loss, and for his cultural connection to the kinds of working-class voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan who delivered the electoral tragedy to Trump.
2. Amy Klobuchar—The Minnesota senator got off to a strange start, announcing outdoors in a blizzard.
But she remains precisely what the Democrats need—a woman, a liberal with pragmatic centrist concessions and a Midwesterner of seeming solid values, even if reports in Washington are true that she is an overly demanding, overly critical terror to work for. She says the Green New Deal is a nice conversation advancer. She says Medicare for all is maybe where we someday can get. That’s perfect for the general election, if, alas, a hurdle in the primary.
3. Sherrod Brown—The scruffy, raspy Ohio senator with strong union and working-man connections and a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist wife might out-Biden Biden.
4. Michael Bloomberg—Rich and a mixture of independence and cultural progressivism, with a decent record as mayor of New York City, he probably would be destroyed in the liberalized primary. But he’d be stout running in the fall as the Democrats’ version of Trump—a billionaire outsider from Manhattan who is sane. He says he won’t run if Biden runs. If Biden doesn’t, Bloomberg becomes mildly serious.
5. Beto O’Rourke—He strikes me as a flake who hit a magic sweet spot in Texas last year and now has nowhere to go nationally but down. But I sense that my aversion might be entirely generational. He wears me out with his perpetual motion and sing-song cant. But then, it doesn’t take much to wear out an old white guy. As a millennial told me the other day, millennials are going to save the country from Trump.
6. Pete Buttigieg— Speaking of millennials saving the day … This guy is but 37 and the veteran mayor of South Bend, Ind., educated at Harvard and Oxford. He is a military veteran of Afghanistan. And he is gay. To those who say he is swell but unelectable currently because of his age, limited experience and sexual orientation, he replies that millennials are the ones who fight our wars, live on the eroding front line against climate change, carry the burden of student loans, and confront the prospect of a less-prosperous life than their parents’. Anyway, Trump shows that there are no real standards for the presidency anymore.
7. Kamala Harris—She’s the former prosecutor and tough cross-examiner who is a freshman senator from the biggest state, California, which happens to be advancing its primary in 2020. So she is not to be discounted. But to run on a platform including Medicare for all and then merely respond “let’s move on” to a town-hall question about putting the health insurance industry out of business— that was a classic lack of readiness for prime time.
8. Elizabeth Warren—This is a hard thing to support substantively, for it is merely an eye test: She seems to want it too much, like Ted Cruz. And the whole “Native American” issue, and her handling of it, fails to breed confidence.
9. Bernie Sanders—This guy is a tiresome one-note Alexandria OcasioCortez without charm. Get him off socialist economics and he has nothing. Second lightning strikes, second moments in the sun—the odds are long. Democrats griping he shouldn’t be allowed to run in their primary because he is an independent reveal the nonsense of modern hyperpartisanship. A political party ought to be inclusive, not exclusive, since electoral politics is a numbers game. And it’s better to have Sanders in your primary than re-electing Trump as a thirdparty general election candidate.
10. Cory Booker—He makes Elizabeth Warren seem hesitant to run. His endorsement of Frank Scott for mayor of Little Rock was … interesting, I guess.
11. Kristin Gillibrand—She is sorry she once was a member of the centrist “Blue Dogs” and she now believes Bill Clinton should have resigned back in the Monica Lewinsky days. A tad opportunistic and hollow? You think?
To conclude, for the moment: A Biden-Klobuchar ticket would rival John and Jane Doe.