From my point of view, it was the best night of the 1988 general election campaign. It was the night of the vice presidential debate. With a single comment, Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, the Democratic nominee for vice president, skewered Sen. Dan Quayle, his Republican counterpart. “I knew Jack Kennedy,” he said. “Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. And Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
The young senator, who had just compared himself to the late president, looked like a deer staring into the headlights.
I ran into Lee Atwater, the Bush campaign manager and my counterpart, as we were headed to the “spin” room. “A tie,” he said to me quickly. I laughed out loud, one of the very few good laughs I had in that campaign. It was not a tie. It was a blowout.
That night, we stayed up late in a bar across the street from the auditorium in Omaha, Nebraska, waiting for the overnight polling numbers. Crowded around the pay phone with our campaign chairman, Bill Clinton, we got the numbers. It was a blowout, all right. Upwards of 70% of the people watching (or who said they’d watched) thought Bentsen had won the debate. They favored him over Quayle overwhelmingly. As a matter of fact, they favored Bentsen over Bush overwhelmingly.
But Bentsen wasn’t running against Bush. Mike Dukakis was. And the ticket barely moved a point.
When you see or hear an ad asking you who you’d rather have a heartbeat away from the presidency, you know the top of the ticket is in trouble. The conventional wisdom in this case is right. People don’t vote for vice president.
Not that it doesn’t matter. Of course it does, in the unlikely event that something happens to the president which, thank God, doesn’t happen often.
What does matter, much more often, is what that decision says about the presidential candidate. It’s the biggest decision a candidate makes on his or her way to the general election. For a few days, at least, it commands the nation’s attention, and we try mightily to determine what it tells us about their judgment, which should matter, even though it doesn’t always seem that way. Did they put politics first (usually), and if so, how? I’ve been involved in that decision-making process a number of times, and I’ve seen it from both sides. Personally, I was very proud of the selection of Lloyd Bentsen, which I used to say, not in jest, was the last fight with Dukakis that I won (that and giving Ann Richards the keynote of the convention that year) because he was a terrific choice, and not just because of the debate. But in the end, it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. And neither, most likely, will the selection of Tim Walz.
If Harris ends up losing Pennsylvania by a sliver, and for that reason, losing the election, her selection will be viewed in retrospect as an existential mistake. Otherwise, the only question that matters is what it says about her. And the answer to that is very reassuring.
I’ll admit, I was rooting for Josh Shapiro, although not for existential reasons. I find him one of the most exciting stars in the Democratic firmament. But that isn’t what Harris necessarily needed. She needed someone safe and solid, someone liked by literally everyone in her growing coalition, someone who would offend no one. Shapiro had edges: Teachers opposed him because of his support of school choice vouchers for non-public schools, and the pro-Palestinian protesters would have been out in force. So did Sen. Mark Kelly, from Arizona, who had labor opponents. No one was running a campaign against Walz. There was no issue of latent antisemitism, as there would be with putting a Jew on the ticket, running with a woman married to a Jew. Walz was the safe pick, and in this context, that made him the solid and smart choice for a woman who is trying to break a concrete ceiling. Now on to the convention, where he is on his way to being a folk hero.
