Who should be on the Democratic ticket?

I had an anxiety related stomachache before last week’s presidential debate, and I was tearful after it (apparently, I wasn’t alone). Watching the CNN post game coverage, I felt very much in agreement with progressive commentator Van Jones who looked absolutely gutted and said: “I love Joe Biden. But that hurt.”

That’s a wild understatement of course. Biden has done so much for this country, but he turned in what must surely be the worst-ever presidential debate performance in modern history. In doing so, he confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions about his age, energy and cognitive decline.

As I predicted about ten minutes into the FT live blog of the debate, there are now resounding calls for Biden to step down. For the moment, he seems to be doubling down and refusing to go. But it would be the patriotic thing to do, as many commentators have laid out (see Mark Leibovich in the Atlantic, and the FT’s editorial board here).

Beyond that, there’s a case to be made that an old fashioned convention bake-off could end up being a really inspiring thing. It would bring a new energy to what has been a depressing race, even before the debate debacle. I would absolutely love to see democracy in action at the Democratic National Convention, and get the sense that, yes, the party has a future beyond Biden. It would offer something that the Republican party, in thrall to an individual demagogue and with no coherent direction or policy propositions outside of that, lacks.

What’s more, an open convention need not mean an end to Bidenomics (which has resulted in a robust US recovery) or to the best parts of his legacy, which for me include a new post-Robert Bork approach to competition policy, and a full throated endorsement of industrial strategy and market shaping.

Who would protect those things? Probably not the most likely contenders, which the FT lays out here. I think the two people most likely to lose against Donald Trump are Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom. It’s not that they aren’t decent politicians with talent and good ideas. But what’s needed for this moment isn’t a shiny corporate Californian. It’s a can-doer who relates to and resonates with working people. That’s what will carry the swing states. 

Could that be Gina Raimondo? I’m a huge fan of the commerce secretary. She’s an operational genius and tough as nails — I wouldn’t want to be in a knife fight with her. But she’s untested in the national political arena, and what’s more, she’s so darn good at her current job that I wouldn’t want to see her pulled away too soon. Any new Democratic president should keep her at the commerce department, and give her a bigger industrial policy implementation mandate — perhaps put her in charge of pulling the Defense and Energy departments into the wider strategy, too. She should spend time making policy work at the ground level, and burnishing her relationships with labour and working people in advance of a possible 2028 run.

Whitmer seems down with industrial policy and also has a strong story against the right, but is unproven at the national level, too. She could totally bomb on a debate stage, who knows? Certainly, there have been plenty of people who have done well politically before they decided to run for president — like Jeb, Beto, and Bloomberg. The larger point here is that I like the idea of an open convention in which we truly get to kick the tires on various candidates. With two hot wars and possibly a third on the way in the South China Sea if we aren’t careful — and lucky — I think it’s crucial.

The things I’d want to see from any new candidate would be a willingness to protect Biden’s political legacy, but also the intellectual legacy of people like Elizabeth Warren. She and Bernie Sanders laid the groundwork for this political landscape before 2020. On that score, I could imagine Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, both of whom are close to the president, and supportive of his antitrust and industrial policy ideas, being good choices for a new ticket. I also really like Connecticut senator Chris Murphy and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who has been tough on private equity abuses, and went after the Catholic Church for sexual abuse. 

What to do with Kamala, who isn’t well liked and wouldn’t be able to win? Give her a big job that plays to her strengths — like perhaps being the attorney-general with the power to go after Trump and anyone else who so richly deserves it. 

Peter, how do you like my war-gaming? Any thoughts of your own on that score?

Recommended reading

• The New York Times’ Sunday opinion section covered the waterfront on all the reasons that Biden should step down. Read the editorial board comment here, and Ezra Klein on why this isn’t Biden’s fault, but rather the Democratic Party’s.

• I took the pulse of CEOs in the age of anxiety in my most recent column, and they are hedging their bets, big time. We aren’t going back to any kind of 1995 status quo of globalisation, but rather are headed to a multipolar world where there will be many more international hubs of production and consumption.

• Peter Goodman had a good reported feature in the NYT on one of those new hubs: India.

• Claims of the World Economic Forum as a toxic workplace? As Captain Renault put it in Casablanca, “I’m shocked . . . shocked!”

Peter Spiegel responds

Rana, you, Ed Luce and I have done these US political liveblogs many times over the years, and they’ve usually been a lot of fun. But the one we did on Thursday night was just painful — a reaction I think most viewers felt, regardless of their political proclivities. 

It’s worth noting that both you and Ed broke from the rest of the political press corps to raise questions about Biden’s age months ago, and urged Democrats to think twice about renominating the octogenarian incumbent. 

You wrote about “who (or what) comes after Biden” back in February, and at the time I made the point that I’ll make again: this perception among the Biden team that he alone can beat Trump is a fallacy. The Democrats have an incredibly strong bench and they should take advantage of it, even at this late date.

Having started covering politics in the Democrats’ Clintonian heyday, I’ve always thought the party does best when it nominates a moderate southerner. In the pre-Obama era, it was mostly southern Democrats who won the White House, from Lyndon Johnson to Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton. They were able to hold the party’s traditional base in the north-east and Midwest while expanding into hostile territory in the Deep South and the Sunbelt. Two southern Democratic governors fit that bill today: Roy Cooper in North Carolina, and Andy Beshear in Kentucky.

The problem with Cooper and Beshear right now, however, is that neither has any national name recognition, something that would be necessary in a foreshortened campaign season. Harris and Newsom are probably the best known of the candidates, but I agree with you: both are too California for a polarised country. 

That’s why I would tap Whitmer, the charismatic governor of Michigan who has been able to win re-election handily in one of the country’s most important swing states. I happened to watch Whitmer at a business investment conference in Washington last week, where she appeared alongside fellow governors Glenn Youngkin, the Republican from Virginia, and JB Pritzker, the Democrat from Illinois. She charmed the crowd with her mastery of regional economic minutiae, delivered in an inland north accent that only enhanced her down-home likeability.

It’s not an event you show up at unless you have national political ambitions — both Youngkin and Pritzker are frequently mentioned as possible presidential timber themselves — and she more than held her own sandwiched between the two multimillionaires with far less political experience.

If anyone has any doubts about whether Whitmer has her eyes on the prize, I’d direct them to a profile of her in the New Yorker just about a year ago. That’s not something a sitting governor agrees to participate in unless they have half an eye on the White House.