Smallest state’s governor for VP?
The smallest state has the smallest governor. Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo is almost 5 feet 3 inches, about an inch shorter than James Madison. What was said of him is true of her: There is a high ratio of mind to mass. Unfortunately, a perversity of today’s political culture is that those with the most time and inclination for full-time self-promotion, such as U.S. senators, eclipse those, such as governors, who are preoccupied with serious responsibilities.
After Harvard (where she played rugby), Oxford (she was a Rhodes scholar) and Yale Law School, she was an early recruit to a venture capital company whose premise was, she says, that “you could find talent all over the country,” not just in hotbeds like Austin and Silicon Valley. Then she founded an affiliated fund specializing in health care. “My mother actually started crying” when in 2010 Raimondo ran to be treasurer of the state with the nation’s highest per capita unfunded pension debt.
Pensions, which soon would have swallowed 20% of state revenue, were threatening to starve social services. Including the Providence Public Library where her grandfather, who arriving from Italy at 14 with little education and less English, studied to improve his chances. As treasurer, she told “crowded, angry union halls” that cities and towns might go bankrupt and that promised pensions would disappear. Her reforms — pausing cost of living increases; raising the retirement age and the ratio of defined contribution to defined benefit plans — passed Rhode Island’s House 57-15 and the Senate 35-2.
When she ran for governor, Rhode Island had the nation’s highest unemployment rate. The state had been the nation’s — arguably, the world’s — jewelry workshop, until much of the manufacturing decamped to China. The exodus included the Bulova watch company, which had employed 1,000, including her father, who became unemployed at 56. She wears a Bulova on her wrist but says that the main reason she ran for governor was that previous administrations had not repositioned Rhode Island for a changed world. She has done this by entrepreneurial federalism — making the state attractive to business, including the nation’s first offshore wind farm.
Raimondo has cut taxes every year and removed 8,000 pages of regulations. Economic dynamism has enabled her to raise the state minimum wage to $11.50, create a sick leave entitlement and finance the largest infrastructure program in the state’s history. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, her father, the son of a meat cutter, became the first in the family to go to college, and his daughter has delivered tuitionfree community college.
Partnering with CVS, the nation’s largest pharmacy chain, headquartered in Woonsocket, her state has achieved one of the nation’s highest per capita level of testing for COVID-19. Her approval rating has soared during the pandemic.
There often is, however, a disproportion in the allocation of media attention to political figures: an inverse relationship between a political person’s substantive achievements and the froth of publicity surrounding her or him. The Senate, the incubator of presidential aspirations, is an arena for the gesture politics of virtue signaling. It encourages the misapprehension that striking poses solves problems, and it develops no skills germane to the executive tasks of managing vast organizations and applying aspirational statutes to recalcitrant reality.
Joe Biden’s choice of a running mate will matter to the electorate’s large moderate majority more than such choices usually do, for two reasons. Biden will be 78 on Jan. 20, 2021. And his choice will indicate whether the trajectory of the world’s oldest party will be determined by its leftwing minority that strenuously opposed his nomination, or by the party’s temperate majority that produced the Democrats’ 2018 success.
The Democratic left, with its addiction to indignation and its aversion to practical politics, might recoil from Raimondo because she understands the enormous financial sector of a nation now chin-deep in red ink. And because she had the impertinence to persuade crucial Democratic constituencies — public employees unions, including those of teachers — to support difficult choices. After defeating a leftwing primary challenger by 24 points, she was resoundingly reelected in one of the nation’s bluest states, and then became chair of the Democratic Governors Association.
A Biden-Raimondo ticket would achieve the left’s primary goal, the removal of Donald Trump. And the resulting administration would restore adult supervision in Washington.