It’s still 15 months before Obama’s second
round of midterm elections, 30 months before the Iowa Caucuses, 40 months
before the November 2016 elections and 42 months before the next inauguration.
But nevertheless, just as always, speculation in America’s press and political
bubble are well under way about who will seek to grasp the brass ring in 2016 –
indeed, it started as soon as the entitled look was wiped from Mitt Romney’s
insincere face last November. And just as always, I somehow find myself
infatuated by the speculation, despite its inherent absurdity. So, for British
readers, here’s a rundown on the potentially emerging field on the Democratic
side.
Hillary
- 65:
needing no surname, as most probably already know that Hillary is far and away
the presumptive Democratic frontrunner. She has a commanding lead in the early
primary polls, early polls also claim that she at least theoretically matches
Republican rivals even in some southern states (such as the emerging swing state
of Georgia and her former home state of Arkansas) and her favourability with the
American public remains high, even after dipping slightly from a combination of
Republican attacks about Benghazi and her regaining her partisan image slightly
since leaving her apolitical role at the State Department. Thus, the consensus
is that it’s hers to lose if she runs. However, I’m ever so tempted to warn
that that’s how it looked for her last time, and in contrast to the deference
to order and patronage that ensures that Republicans will always end up with
nominees like Romney, Democratic primary voters have a bit of streak of choosing
the plucky underdog over sometimes more empirically logical choices (hence Obama, Carter,
Kennedy, McGovern, Bill Clinton). “Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall in
love”, as the saying goes.
Some also raise her health or her age - she’ll
be 69 in 2016, the same as Reagan at the time of his election some would say,
but his health began to suffer in his second term and 50-something new
presidents have generally been the norm in the US. Another concern is that if
in 2008 Hillary was considered a bit of a 1990s throwback, how will it look if
she is the nominee in 2016, 24 years after she first burst onto the national
stage and over a decade since presidential speculation first started about her?
Also, in August 2008 when she lost the nomination to Obama, a funny thing
happened. The burden of insane, white-hot hatred projected onto her by what she
once termed the “vast right-wing conspiracy” was lifted from her shoulders and
passed to Obama. The American right complained about the way that Obama had
treated her (albeit mostly in a cynical and misguided play for the votes of her
supporters) and subsequently even appeared to develop genuine respect for her
during her tenure as Secretary of State. But rest assured, if she runs, the old
crazy will return and her favourability will drop further as she fully
re-enters the political fray. After shifting the “marmite politician” tag, does
she really want to risk getting it back?
Well, quite possibly – despite her current denials
most people, including supposed confidants according to the American press,
think she’ll run. She may be hard to beat if she does.
Biden –
70: Originally,
when Joe Biden agreed to VP it was said that he told Obama he wouldn’t be
running in 2016 on account of his age (he will be 73 by 2016), preventing the
second-term tensions that marred the Clinton-Gore administration and instead repeating
the rare backdrop to the 2008 US election, when for the first time since 1952
neither ticket included a sitting president or VP. Biden has since changed his
mind, however, as it is said that the White House has “reinvigorated” him, and
so he now talks openly about a bid. Nevertheless, he is still in a historically
odd position. Generally, the VP in a second-term administration with
presidential ambitions is his party’s frontrunner, as Gore was in 2000 and Bush
41 was in 1988 (although Bush 41 is in practice the only one to have won the
presidency from that position in recent American history and the only candidate
to secure his party a third consecutive term in the White House in the past 60
years, for that matter). Instead, although polls show he is the frontrunner if
Hillary doesn’t run, he is currently the
underdog if she does – she is instead the natural successor. And as little as
they may mean at this stage, the early polls also tend show him performing far
more weakly than her in hypothetical matchups with GOP opponents, especially
against their stronger picks such as Jeb Bush and Chris Christie.
Biden has also gained a reputation, in my
view unfairly, for being “gaffe-prone” – others argue that it is more that he
is a product of a time when American politicians spoke their minds, and that
his outbursts are in that way refreshing. He is Catholic and has a certain
blue-collar appeal, something that Team Obama has always stressed about him – in
the 2008 convention speech, Obama described Biden as “a man at ease with
everyone from world leaders to the conductors on the Amtrak train he still
takes home every night”. He is also a statesman, something that the clownish
caricature imposed on him in the last five years overlooks - he is a former
chairman of the US Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees, he has
regularly brokered behind-the-scenes compromises with Congress during the Obama
Administration and he advises Obama closely on foreign policy. I personally
will always respect him for this
speech
on Iraq, delivered on the Senate floor in 2007.
Ultimately though, on top of Hillary’s
superior position and his age, he may be too much a creature of Washington and
too much a product of the past – he will have served in elected federal office
for 44 uninterrupted years by 2016. If Hillary doesn’t run, he is the Democratic
frontrunner, but though I like him greatly, I think even then both Biden and
the Democrats are best-served by him sticking with his original plan from 2008
and letting the Democrats have a fresher face as their nominee.
Governor
Andrew Cuomo (New York) - 55: Cuomo (Quo-mo) was elected governor of New York state
in 2010, having previously served as the state’s Attorney General and as
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Bill Clinton’s cabinet. He
is also the son of Mario Cuomo, a legendary New York governor who led the state
from the early 80s to 1994, gave a well-regarded keynote speech at the 1984
Democratic convention and was widely tipped as a presidential contender, but
always wavered, earning him the nickname “the Hamlet of the Hudson”. In 1992,
Cuomo senior had even been the Democratic frontrunner and had a plane on the
tarmac ready to take him to New Hampshire to join Bill Clinton in the
primaries, but decided against at the last minute, likely because of Bush 41’s
then-high post-Desert Storm approval ratings – it’s still believed by some that
Cuomo could have become president if he, unlike Clinton, hadn’t of been scared
off. As chief executive of America’s third-largest state and the possessor of a
political pedigree, Andrew Cuomo has a semi-prominence few other Democrats can
match and tends to do best after Clinton and Biden in the early
matchup polls, and better still if one or both of them isn’t included in
the question, but observers may watch to see if the younger Cuomo will have his
father’s indecisiveness. In a respect, Cuomo has already distanced himself
somewhat from his father however, as while he was seen as a leader of the
Democratic Party’s liberal wing, the younger Cuomo has sought to position
himself in office as somewhat of as a business-friendly moderate - he has cut
spending, avoided tax rises and provoked the ire of Democratic allies in the
labour unions. He also passed same-sex marriage in New York with fairly
bipartisan support, earning him praise from liberals. As with most contenders,
Hillary’s decision process will likely influence Cuomo’s, but he is probably
one of the Democrats’ best prospects and is the frontrunner if both of the big
two choose to forgo the race.
Senator Elizabeth
Warren (Massachusetts) - 64: elected in November 2012, taking back Ted Kennedy’s
former Senate for the Democrats after its shock loss to Republican Scott Brown,
Warren is well-known as the founder of Obama’s new Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau (CFPB) and as a crusader against irresponsibility on Wall
Street – for this very reason, the financial services lobby in the US heavily
funded Brown’s campaign against her and she is beloved among liberal Democratic
activists. In Senate, she has continued her fight, telling regulators that the
lack of any prosecutions of bankers made it seem as though “too big to fail’
has become ‘too big for trial”. She grew up in a working-class family in
Oklahoma, a story that worked well for her on the campaign trail, and was a
teacher and a lawyer before becoming a respected professor of finance and law,
including at Harvard in her now-home state. In a study she conducted in 2005,
she found that half of all bankruptcies in the US were caused by medical bills,
even though many of the families studied actually had insurance, showing how
broken American healthcare had become. She was once a Republican, but became a
Democrat in the 90s and is known to be good at explaining Democratic economic policies
in a way that has been praised as simple and non-academic, famously saying the following in 2011
(less eloquently reiterated as “you didn’t build that” by Obama last year):
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own…You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. …you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Because of her standing among Democrats,
Warren sits just behind Cuomo in initial polls. It’s also been found that after
only Hillary and Republican Chris Christie, she empirically inspires more passion than any other
American politician. However, Warren is thought to be disinterested in a run,
which is fine – being a good and noted public servant needn’t mean she is
expected to run for president, even if American political culture treats it as
such. She is also close in age to Hillary and as a liberal former professor
from Massachusetts, she in some ways represents the stereotype that Democrats
usually prefer to run from at the national level. Further, although Obama
bucked the trend in 2008, sitting US senators also have a poor track record of
capturing the presidency (only three ever have), while four of the last six
presidents have been former state governors (their executive credentials, the
fact that there are fewer of them compared to the amorphous mass of 100
legislators in the Senate and the tendency of senators to amass voting records
that can be used to attack them gives governors the edge). But in the meantime,
she is a fantastic asset to the Democratic Party and the US Senate, and could
maybe make a decent vice presidential candidate, depending on who the nominee
is.
Senator
Kirsten Gillibrand (New York) - 46: Gillibrand (Jill-uh-brand) was unexpectedly appointed in 2009 to the US Senate
seat Hillary Clinton vacated and was subsequently elected for the remainder of
the term in 2010 and to her own full term in 2012, both times with well over
60% of the vote. Prior to that, Gillibrand was a lawyer in both the private and
public sectors (she was legal advisor to then-Secretary Cuomo at HUD in the
1990s) and spent two years as Democratic congresswoman for a usually-Republican
district in rural upstate New York, having been narrowly elected in the 2006
Democratic midterm wave and then re-elected with an unexpected 62% of the vote
in November 2008 shortly before her appointment. Her promotion was not without
controversy, largely because as a representative of a conservative district she
had positioned herself as an anti-immigration and pro-gun Blue Dog Democrat,
but as a senator with a liberal-leaning statewide electorate she has moved left
and become an advocate for gun control, women’s rights, same-sex marriage and other
progressive causes, opening her up to charges of expediency. Actions such as
this allegedly earned her the nickname “Tracy Flick” among some colleagues
(after an ambitious and manipulative character Reese Witherspoon played in the
film Election). She is however an excellent
fundraiser, vital in American politics, and is thought to have close ties to
the Clintons, likely a reason she was chosen as Hillary’s successor – some have
even called her a “protégé”. Gillibrand sits on the Senate Armed Services
Committee, as Hillary did before her, where she has taken a lead role on the
repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and sexual assault prevention in the US military.
She also speaks Mandarin, having lived in China and Taiwan during university. Perhaps
of minor interest on this side of the pond, her husband Jonathan Gillibrand, a
venture capital consultant, is a British national. He originally moved to the
US for an MBA at Columbia University, but stayed there after meeting Kirsten (née Rutnik)
and married her in 2001. Senator Gillibrand has publicly urged Hillary to run, but if
she passes on the race and America still hungers for a female president,
America’s First Gentleman could be a Brit. Even when both Hillary and Biden are
disincluded from the early polls, Gillibrand is stuck at 5%, as she struggles
in the shadow of fellow New Yorker Cuomo
and fellow Senator Warren, but her star may be on the rise.
Governor
Martin O'Malley (Maryland) – 50: governor of liberal Maryland since 2006 and
term-limited in 2014, he is a favourite of the liberal wing, passing same-sex
marriage, higher education funding for undocumented immigrants, tough new gun
laws and a repeal of the death penalty in his state. He was previously a
political aide, an assistant prosecutor, state legislator and mayor of
Baltimore before being elected governor, and is claimed to have been one of a
number of inspirations for the ambitious Baltimore Mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire. He was regarded as a highly
effective mayor and a crime tracking tool, CitiStat, he introduced was the
subject of attention from the Home Office in the
Blair years.
Perhaps to raise his international profile slightly, O’Malley also served as
the quasi-representative for the US Democrats at this year’s Progressive Governance
Conference
in Copenhagen back in April, bringing him together with Danish Prime Minister
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Ed Miliband and the leaders of Labour’s social
democratic sister parties in Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands. He is one of
three Democrats, along with Biden and former 2004 candidate contender Howard
Dean, who has openly discussed running and is already said to building up his
national network. His performance in the early polls mirrors Gillibrand’s,
however – like her, he is overshadowed not only by the colossus that is Hillary
and the dwarf-star that is Biden, but also by Cuomo and Warren. And there are
other candidates who could bring more to the Democratic ticket than him,
perhaps – one rundown called him “a poor man’s Cuomo”, another commented that “O’Malley is not
a very charismatic politician” and that he may be a “Democratic Tim Pawlenty”, a
reference to the promising-but-dull governor who rapidly flopped at the outset
of the 2012 Republican primaries.
Former Governor
Brian Schweitzer (Montana) – 57: Schweitzer recently left his previous office
as governor of the sparsely populated, libertarian Western mountain state of
Montana (he was term-limited, and another Democrat was elected in November last
year to replace him). He has the sort of profile that Democrats sometimes lust
for in terms of national candidates – a folksy, gun-toting moderate Democrat
with a proven record of winning in territory inhospitable to liberals, fond of
phrases like “that dog don’t hunt”. This contrasts him
with the cast of potential candidates hailing from states Democrats win
automatically (Maryland, New York, Delaware, Massachusetts etc). Montana itself
only has three votes in the Electoral College, but his shtick could help Democrats
carry other nearby Western and Midwestern states. However, against-type for a
Democrat in a state like Montana, in 2011 he declared his support for a Canadian-style public
health insurance
system in Montana based on neighbouring Saskatchewan’s, a comparatively more socialised
health reform solution than the Dutch/Swiss-style universal private insurance approach
Obama’s national healthcare law partly envisages (Schweitzer’s successor as
governor may not be carrying out the plan, though the state of Vermont is doing
something like it). He also has an interesting background – working in
agriculture prior to politics (another part of his frontier populist image), he
spent seven years working on irrigation projects in Libya and Saudi Arabia and
speaks Arabic. He passed up an opportunity to run for an open seat in the US
Senate in 2014, apparently so that it will be easier to mount a 2016 bid if he
chooses to run. His starting position is probably to struggle alongside
Gillibrand and O’Malley, but he’s a very interesting figure and could at least
be a great Veep candidate.
Senator Mark
Warner (Virginia) -58:
Warner had previously been a reformist Democratic governor of
Virginia between 2002 and 2006, leaving office with approval ratings of over
70%. He was then elected in a landslide to the Senate in 2008, taking 65% of
the vote against another former governor and outrunning Obama’s 53% win in the
state on the same ballot. Last year Obama did well to carry the key state again
against Romney, but did so with a slightly reduced 51%, while Warner, having continued
to foster a moderate image in swingy Virginia and brokered bipartisan
agreements on issues like banking reform, is expected to waltz to re-election
in 2014. He also gave a keynote address at the 2008 Democratic convention and
before politics was a successful businessman, another thing often longed for in
American politics (hence the obsession with Romney’s time at Bain last year).
However, he will again struggle to break out of the O’Malley-Gillibrand tier
against the current big-name candidates. A brilliant politics professor of mine
at Southampton who came from Fairfax County, Virginia (and who voted for
Warner) also stressed that he is a very
boring speaker, and some commentators called his 2008 speech “bland” and
“meandering”
– judge for yourself.
Governor
Deval Patrick (Massachusetts) - 57: one of America’s most prominent black
politicians other than Obama, Patrick has been governor of Massachusetts since
2006. He has in past been speculated as a potential Attorney General nominee
for Obama’s cabinet. Again, like all non-Hillary/Biden candidates he lacks
nationwide recognition and early primary polls have him in single digits, a few
at least have him at the better end of that. However, Patrick has declined to
run for president or to run again for governor in 2014 even though Massachusetts
has no term limits, instead saying he wants to return to the private sector – however,
many a presidential candidate has changed their mind before after previously
issuing denials. He also had a difficult first term and struggled slightly to
win re-election in 2010 despite Massachusetts’ strongly Democratic bent,
getting back in on a 48% plurality and benefiting from a split opposition.
Further, in 2012 he appeared to defend the controversial practices of Mitt
Romney and Bain Capital (based in his state), in contradiction to the Obama
campaign’s position. Overall, not the best of the Democrats’ prospects, perhaps.
So there you go – vastly more than you ever
wanted to know about something that won’t be relevant for at least 2 or 3
years. But one day, one of these men and women might well be the most powerful
person in the world, unless of course a Republican wins in 2016 instead – if
so, may God have mercy on all of our souls. If I can be bothered, I also might
get round to writing one of these about the Republican contenders at some
point, so stay tuned…
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