NEWSWEEK RUCKUS ASKS:”What would be the boldest Vice Presidential Choice John McCain and Barack Obama Could make?”

There are different sorts of boldness in politics, as in life.

Boldness can describe acts of folly. Selecting Senator Clinton as his vice presidential running mate would represent that kind of boldness on Senator Barack Obama’s part, for example. There are so many voters who regard Clinton negatively and many of the first-time voters who have been attracted to Obama would be so turned off, perceiving Clinton to represent “the politics of the past” they reject, that her appearance on the ticket could destroy his chances for what presently seems like certain victory.

But boldness can also be ascribed to the imaginative and to the positively daring. Some political acts of boldness make a person stand up and say, “Wow! Why didn’t I think of that?” “Why didn’t I think of going to China in the thick of two wars, the Cold one and Vietnam?” “Why didn’t I brand my campaign with CHANGE and use my biography to undergird the point?” “Why didn’t I have the stuff to label the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’?”

Boldness of the imaginative or positively daring sort is rooted in what scholar of the US presidency, Erwin C. Hargrove identifies as the proper meshing of moral vision and shrewd leadership. Rarely is the former expressed in presidential nominees’ selections of running mates and rarely do less than shrewd choices prove fatal. (George H.W. Bush’s choice of Dan Quayle and Dwight Eisenhower’s of Richard Nixon didn’t hurt them, though they still leave people scratching their heads.) But a bold pick for a running mate–actually, any kind of pick for a running mate–can prove either fortuitous or flawed, if for no other reason than that so many our Vice Presidents have succeeded, either directly or by-the-by, to the presidency itself.

The first task of presidents, Hargrove says, “is to ‘teach reality’ to publics and their fellow politicians…” Reality, he says, incorporates not only the objective facts on which sound public policy must in the end be based, but also the truth about the heritage and principles of the country, the vision of where a nation “dedicated and conceived” as the US was and is, should go, and the myths, both factual and otherwise, that the country believes about itself.

Hargrove specifically asserts that presidents must teach “reality” through rhetoric.

But there is also a rhetoric of decision and of action. It too communicates to the publics which a president must reach to be effective. And this can be as true of selecting a running mate as of whether or not to go to war.

For example, Bill Clinton’s pick of Al Gore, a fellow moderate Democrat who came from a southern state that neighbored his own, violated many of the conventions about geographic and ideological balance that have usually prevailed in choosing running mates. But, in choosing Gore, Clinton signaled that his 1992 race against World War Two-veteran George H.W. Bush was generational and that, in many ways, the Information Age in which we were just then entering, held the promise of a post-geographic era in US life. Most importantly, Clinton was making a statement about his party and his intentions as president: He would not be a stereotypical liberal ideologue like George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, or Michael Dukakis, the profusion of preceding Democratic candidates for president, one of them successful in one year, each of whom the Republicans had readily dispatched. He would campaign and govern from the DLC-center-left. It seems strange to say nearly two decades later, but Clinton’s selection of Gore was in itself an act of political triangulation, something for which he became famous. It was a bold move.

Actions do speak louder than words and particularly in an open election year when no member of the incumbent administration is vying for the presidency, the action of picking a running mate will, at least in the opening weeks of the fall campaign, communicate a lot. It will either be a notable example of a potential president teaching reality or a demonstration of their distance from that reality.

Obama has less need for boldness in the selection of a running mate. His very candidacy, I will admit as one who has always admired his talents but thought that he should wait to seek the presidency, has been an act of almost breathtaking boldness, of audacity. He needs, it seems to me, to make a reassuring choice for all those who want to vote for him, but look askance at his relative dearth of any appropriate experience, be it executive, legislative, or in the realm of foreign policy and national security issues.

Some bold choices he might make–Kansas governor Kathleen Sibelius, for example–could help him. Sibelius, a native of Ohio whose dad was once governor here, could boost Obama in the Buckeye State. It could also lure some disaffected Clinton supporters who feel that the New York senator was dissed by Obama for being a woman. But the polling now seems to support what I have long thought, that barring some extraordinary circumstance, Obama can expect to receive roughly the same amount of support from women and women’s rights believers, which includes men, this year as recent Democratic nominees have garnered, maybe more. The selection of Sibelius would be a bold act on Obama’s part. But it would not fulfill his most important needs in a running mate: national security bona fides. (By the way, look for Sibelius to be a force in national politics in the future.)

John McCain has the freedom of the underdog. When you’re down, you can take bigger chances. You can be bolder.

McCain is, by nature, a bold, risk-taker, in life as in politics. But in this campaign, while remaining undeniably tenacious, he has also been timid. Repeatedly, he has played to what currently passes for the conservative wing of his party. He and his passing parade of handlers seem afraid of alienating the Republican base.

Yet, Barack Obama gives John McCain all the cover he needs to be John McCain, a classic conservative Republican who values getting things done and thus hasn’t usually been subject to easy political pigeonholing. Few voters who identify themselves as conservative Republicans are going to vote for Barack Obama in November. Nor will they find the libertarian alternative of Bob Barr a compelling one. The Republican base is safe for McCain. To win, he needs to expand that base.

In a previous post, I’ve suggested that McCain might go with Christine Todd Whitman, the former EPA administrator and governor of New Jersey. She is a fiscal conservative and unlike McCain, is pro-choice. Her selection on McCain’s part would signal that his Republican Party and his administration intend to be a big tents.

Sixty-one year old Maine Senator Olympia Snowe and her fifty-four year old colleague from Maine, Susan Collins, would also be bold choices signaling similar intentions.

All three of these women have conveyed an ability to be both empathetic and tough, attributes which would help McCain as the campaign turns on the economy, an issue on which he is clearly vulnerable.

All three would also put the northeast in play in the fall campaign, something that hasn’t really happened for Republicans for a long time. (And they can do it in ways that Mitt Romney, who moved away from being interesting to the northeast as he moved toward campaigning for president this year, simply cannot do.)

Boldness should probably not be Senator Obama’s target in a veep choice. It most definitely should be for Senator McCain. Given the savvy that Obama has shown throughout this campaign, I don’t expect him to make a bold choice. Given the timidity thus far exhibited in the McCain campaign, I expect the Arizona senator to pick another boring, middle-aged white guy for his running mate. It won’t help.

[Mark Daniels regularly blogs here.]