Few vice presidential picks have been as consequential as Joe Biden’s surely will prove. If the de facto Democratic nominee does indeed win the presidency, he will be 78 years old on Inauguration Day, older than Ronald Reagan, the nation’s oldest president ever, was on his last day in office.
Despite more than a year of naysaying from a Democratic establishment in want of a newer, shinier, and more intersectional hero, Biden beat the odds. He handily won the nomination with blockbuster turnout in states he dominated, the unrelenting support of the black electorate, and most importantly, with a campaign that overwhelmingly refused to bend the knee to the Bernie Bros.
And now, with the coronavirus bringing his campaign to an anticlimactic, though victorious, end, Biden has around four months to settle upon a running mate, one who he promised would be a woman.
Running mates rarely help presidential hopefuls in meaningful ways, and they often hurt. The days of Lyndon B. Johnson clinching Texas for John F. Kennedy are long gone, and those of crapshoot candidates such as Sarah Palin often costing the top of the ticket. In fact, Biden himself was tapped by Barack Obama as a safe option, ironically enough, considered too old to ever be a viable presidential nominee and a safe and experienced statesman widely liked.
But Biden is in far closer a position to the John McCain of 2008 than to Obama, and the temptation to pick a noteworthy running mate is obviously strong. If the effective blinders from the too woke world of the “very online” have provided any indication, it’s likely that Biden isn’t going to jump at that instinct. The Left loves Stacey Abrams, but it’s hard to imagine Biden betting his candidacy on a former state representative who not only failed to win her only statewide election, but also allied with his former foe, Mike Bloomberg.
But there is a candidate that Biden is surely considering and one whom he absolutely ought not to. Tapping Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would likely cost his candidacy, and her handling of the coronavirus crisis has proven it.
Just a year into the job, Whitmer’s tenure as governor has already been a categorical disaster. While campaigning, she promised to “fix the damn roads,” only to propose doing so, once in office, by tripling the gas tax. Her budget negotiations fell into chaos, and ultimately, she broke her road promise and passed a deal full of concessions.
Now, Michigan has become a coronavirus hot spot, putting both Whitmer’s sheer incompetence and petty authoritarianism on full display.
The coronavirus didn’t arrive in Michigan until March 10, more than a month after the first confirmed case arrived at our shores. There have now been more than 22,000 confirmed cases in the state, with over 1,200 deaths at the time of this article’s publication.
Compare that to California, which saw its first coronavirus case on Jan. 26. It has had roughly 1,000 fewer confirmed cases and half as many deaths. This despite the fact that California has four times the population of Michigan and is home to San Francisco, the city with the second-highest population density in the United States.
Why? Because Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom knows how to be a leader, and Whitmer does not.
Unlike Newsom, Whitmer was late to the game in issuing a statewide stay-at-home order, and unlike Newsom, she’s proven herself an incompetent autocrat in an attempt to rectify her past failures ever since.
Republican governors such as Texas’s Greg Abbott have innovated by waiving laws forbidding alcohol delivery trucks from transporting groceries and allowing industries to repurpose their production, and even Democrats have embraced deregulatory measures. Newsom, for example, waived medical credentialing requirements so he can recruit medical students and retired professionals.
Yet, somehow, Whitmer has simply leaned into her tyrannical streak. Now, Michiganders are banned from traveling in between their own residences, and grocery stores cannot sell “nonessential items,” including lifesaving car seats that are legally required for children under 8 and gardening supplies that would allow people to grow their own food.
The state of Michigan is not Manhattan. It’s not even Los Angeles or San Francisco. Outside of its major cities, it’s a fairly spacious state with plenty of people capable of gardening on their own property or traveling to a vacation home by car without ever coming into remote contact with another human being. And yet, Whitmer is acting as if she’s governing Wuhan, China, itself. And still, the coronavirus is massacring her state as though it were an urban area that first got the coronavirus multiple months ago, not 30 days ago.
There’s no question that Whitmer thinks herself vice presidential material. The question is why anyone else would. She was untested prior to this crisis, and she’s unequivocally failed, digging publicly into a petty feud with our petty president, who once referred to her as “that woman from Michigan.” Choosing Whitmer as a running mate wouldn’t undercut Biden’s resistance to the awokening, but it would gamble on a figure with limited national appeal and bank on playing President Trump’s game of televised barbs.
There’s no reason to reward Whitmer for her loyalty over, say, Amy Klobuchar. Whereas the Minnesota senator bowed out of the 2020 race to endorse Biden before Super Tuesday, Whitmer didn’t back him until it was already clear he would win the nomination. And furthermore, Klobuchar, even more so than fellow former nominee California Sen. Kamala Harris, is a known and well-liked quantity with a specific Midwestern appeal.
Whitmer, in contrast, was nationally untested until a few weeks ago. And when given the opportunity to prove herself, she failed. Choosing her as a running mate would practically be a gift to the Trump campaign.
Whitmer can’t run Michigan. There’s no reason to believe she could run the rest of the country either.
