Vice Presidential speculation is a lot of fun, mostly because it's so harmless, but we've got to remember the political role of the Vice Presidential nominee. All the discussion of ideological or geographical balance is a distraction from what we're really talking about, which is surrogacy. The Vice President's job -- aside from their Constitutional responsibility -- is to work as the President's number one cheerleader in whatever forum they're best suited. The hard part is picking the forum where you need help.
The President cannot be all things to all people and cannot be in more than one place at one time. They need help. They need surrogates to extend their presence and talk to certain audiences. They need surrogates to compliment and extend. A surrogate talks to specific audiences by specific mediums about specific topics. Vice President Cheney does Chris Wallace and Rush Limbaugh. In other words, he's the President's top surrogate for Southern White men (his base) and the GOP's corporatist wing. Al Gore took a different approach in 2000. He picked Joseph Lieberman to speak to moderate values voters that we're supposedly wobbly on the Democrats.
When we talk about the Democratic nominee for Vice President, we need to know whom they'll be expected to speak with. Simply picking someone because they're from the South or they're moderate doesn't make much sense if it isn't in the context of a political strategy. The strategy might mean shoring up and turning out your base. Or it might be peeling off a few thousand moderate voters in an obscure district in a crucial swing state.
Some say the first rule of picking a Vice President is trust. Others say it's to play foil as the attack dog. In my mind, those are obvious prerequisites that don't mean anything if they can't be translated into electoral politics. Dick Cheney isn't Vice President just because the President trusts him. It's because he plays the modest but critical role of keeping the base happy. The winner of the Veepstakes has to mean something in the context of the electorate and the Democratic coalition.
This all might be obvious, but it's worth saying. I'm not exactly sure why, for instance, John Edwards was the Vice Presidential nominee in 2004. He wasn't a surrogate for the stoutly anti-war wing of the party. He wasn't a surrogate for Southern white men (the campaign didn't even try in the South). It seems the logic was that he was charming and charismatic and inoffensive. His selection was based purely on tactics -- he would make the ticket more electable -- without actually making the ticket more electable.
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