One of the reasons I want to see a Clinton-Warren ticket is because to me, in a strange way, it has echoes of the 1992 Clinton-Gore ticket.
The parallels are by no means exact. Hillary Clinton is not the foreign policy tenderfoot her husband was in 1992; she doesn’t need a running mate to provide foreign policy bona fides in the way that Gore did back then. But just as Al Gore’s sterling reputation for personal and professional integrity made him a good choice to complement Bill Clinton, Elizabeth Warren’s unimpeachable ethics serve to reassure those fence-sitting persons who may have bought into the nonstop nonsense pushed against Hillary for the past twenty-five years.
The one argument against a Clinton-Warren ticket — that it would allow a Republican governor to select her replacement — is not as big a problem as it sounds. The Democratic Party controls the Massachusetts legislature, and just as they tweaked the laws to allow John Kerry to have a Democrat replace him as Senator in 2004, they can change the laws again if need be. Best yet, the person who would most likely replace Warren in Teddy Kennedy’s old seat would be none other than Warren’s former law school student, one Joseph Kennedy III. Who himself will be president some day.
Monday, Jul 4, 2016 · 7:49:57 PM +00:00
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Little Blue
Another reason I liked the 1992 Democratic ticket was that it showed that regional balance wasn’t necessary or even desirable as far as a presidential ticket was concerned. With this precedent to back her up, Hillary can feel safe in choosing Warren, a proven winner and an electrifying stump presence, and needn’t feel constrained to choose a far less compelling person.