Who Would McCain, Romney, or Huckabee Choose as Running Mate? (Part 1)

Unless Rudy Giuliani pulls off a Florida surprise in next Tuesday’s primary, there are now three Republicans with some chance of winning their party’s presidential nomination: John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee. Recently, I speculated on who might be the vice presidential running mates of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the event that one of them becomes the Democratic nominee for president. But what about the remaining Republican contenders?

Each would have their own particular needs when it came to selecting running mates. In this post, I want to address what and who McCain will likely need in a running mate.

McCain should, by all rights, be the clear frontrunner, given the usual orderly succession of Republican presidential politics. That he isn’t results in part, from the fact that neoconservatism, with its advocacy of Wilsonian intervention in foreign affairs, has at least temporarily changed the definition of conservatism. Additionally, on at least two major issues–immigration reform and campaign financing–McCain has departed from conservatism. Some will also mention his opposition to President Bush’s 2002 tax cuts. Others will excoriate his participation in the Gang of Fourteen, ignoring how the compromise struck by those US Senators in 2005, made it possible for the President’s conservative nominees for the US Supreme Court to be confirmed without controversy.

Be that as it may, McCain, an orthodox Goldwater-Reagan conservative who is an advocate of strong national defense, restrained government spending, Second Amendment rights, and an end to abortion, doesn’t have the luxury that Ronald Reagan had in selecting running mates in 1976 and 1980.

Reagan, of course, didn’t get the nomination in his 1976 challenge to President Gerald Ford. But he came close partly because he made a daring and unprecedented announcement that, if were nominated, his running mate would be moderately liberal Republican Senator Richard Schweiker. Reagan’s conservative backers forgave him for this shrewd maneuver and moderately-conservative to liberal Republicans gave Reagan a closer look, assured that he wasn’t the right wing Cro-Magnon they’d assumed he was. The ploy almost worked.

In 1980, Reagan announced to an electrified Republican convention immediately after he was nominated, on the night before he officially accepted the nomination, that his chief rival in the run-up to the convention, George H.W. Bush, had agreed to be his running mate. Before the elder Bush tapped the late strategist Lee Atwater to change his image to that of conservative fire-eater, he was regarded as a moderate to liberal wimp. Conservatives didn’t much care for him. But Bush’s frequent appearances on The Dick Cavett Show, especially when he was ambassador to the United Nations, would, Reagan undoubtedly reasoned, reassure moderates in the general electorate that he could be trusted in the White House.

Because McCain doesn’t enjoy the trust of his fellow conservative Republicans, he will be forced to select an authentic, card-carrying conservative to be his vice-presidential running mate. This will assuage the concerns of the Limbaugh wing of the party. But it will do him little good among a general electorate inclined to throw the Republicans in the Potomac because of the Bush war in Iraq and fears over the economy.

At present, Mike Huckabee, even though the neocon national security crowd and Wall Street conservatives made squeamish over his economic populism don’t much care for him, would seem the likeliest running mate for McCain. (And vice versa.) The two seem to genuinely admire one another and each represent not only different elements of the Republican base, but also different important segments of the general electorate.

But one has the feeling that Democrats would relish having Huckabee on the ticket. His religious pronouncements are easy to misconstrue, for one thing. He probably also wouldn’t soothe those Wall Street conservatives.

Whoever the seventy-one year old McCain chooses will have to be at least fifteen years his junior, which is to say someone in his or her fifties or younger. A governor or former governor would be good as well, offsetting concerns that McCain has spent too many years in Washington and has had no executive experience in politics.

A dash of drama for a ticket that would be entering the fall campaign as pronounced underdogs would also be helpful to McCain. Possibly the most interesting thing that McCain could do is announce that his running mate is a woman. And the Republicans may have a far larger stable of women qualified for the presidency and vice presidency than the Democrats have. But every potential running mate that McCain might consider must, for one reason or another, be dismissed: Elizabeth Dole and Kay Bailey Hutchinson are, like McCain, senators, the latter having sometimes been beclouded by ethical questions; Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, are both senators and more liberal than McCain needs to please critical neocons; and, maybe the woman most qualified to be President of the United States, former New Jersey governor and federal EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman is also deemed too liberal.

McCain may tell the neocons where to get off and instead, gambling that upset conservatives are unlikely to vote for the Democratic ticket, pick someone completely off everybody’s radar.

Or, he may roll the dice and select Joe Lieberman as his running mate. The 2000 Democratic nominee for vice president ostracized by the Move-On-wing of his party, forced to run as an independent in his most recent re-election bid in Connecticut, is currently campaigning for McCain anyway.

A McCain-Lieberman ticket would appeal to an electorate hungry for elected officials less vociferous in their partisanship and more oriented to seeking and implementing practical solutions to public policy. In Lieberman, McCain would have a running mate with proven vote-getting abilities in the northeast, a section of the country which Republicans have had to nearly write off in recent years.

Granted, Lieberman is more liberal than some of the potential Republican Veep candidates I’ve passed over above. But Lieberman’s firm pro-Iraq War stance has made him an acceptable liberal to many conservative Republicans.

I’ll examine Huckabee’s and Romney’s vice presidential imperatives in a post or two early next week.

[This has been cross-posted at my personal blog, Better Living: Thoughts from Mark Daniels.]