NYT ltte: Run a governor, not a Senator, for president in 2020

[CTyankee]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/opinion/letters/democrats-governor-senator-2020.html

Interesting article on why we have lost the presidency with Senators and won with Governors.

Sobering piece and something to think about. Time for a second look at Jay Inslee...

[lapfog_1]

1. I'm so glad we ran Gov. Obama

in 2008...

[CTyankee]

2. good point!

[dalton99a]

4. And Gov. Bush made a great president

[CTyankee]

6. He may have gotten elected due to his past governorship of Texas but he effed up royally

once in office. Sadly, just because someone was a governor doesn't make him/her a good president. Lots to pick away at with this article. I'm sure your point will be strongly made in rebuttals to this LTTE...

[marylandblue]

5. It's not an absolute, but since Carter, governors have done better than Senators.

And 2008, we had two Senators running against each other, one much more dynamic than the other. What if the Republicans had a run a young dynamic governor against our young dynamic Senator?

[CTyankee]

8. Who knows? I'm sure the author of this piece would say the the Republicans would then stand a

better chance at winning. I'm not so sure of that...

[lapfog_1]

12. sample size is too small

Presidents since 1948

Truman - Senator, VP
Eisenhower - General
Kennedy - House, Senate
Johnson - House, Senate, VP
Nixon - House, Senate, VP
Ford - House, VP (but never elected President)
Carter - Governor
Reagan - Governor
Bush - House, VP
Clinton - Governor
Bush - Governor
Obama - Senate
Trump - nothing

so 4 our of the last 13 have been Governors, 5 were VPs, 5 were previous Senators, 5 were in the House, 1 was commanding general, and 1 was nothing. In addition, 2 of the worst Presidents in history (and 2 out of the 4 worst in this list) were Governors. Nothing can really be determined about what the electorate will like can be predicted by the previously held job.

[marylandblue]

15. Good point, but nonetheless, there is a theme since Carter

Every winner ran as outsider who was going to fix Washington except for Bush Sr. It's easier for a governor to make that argument than a long time Senator. Obama was successful because he had been a Senator for only two years, so he still could retain an outsider aura. I think Obama's success influenced Harris' decision to run now rather than wait to get more Washington experience. This is another election where Washington appears more broken than ever and needs fixing. If you are there too long, you can't run against Washington.

[lapfog_1]

18. Reagan pushed the "Federal Government Bad" meme

and that was 40 years ago... I believe that is changing now. Yes, we live in a divided nation... but the concept that the executive branch is a bunch of evil bureaucrats is only held by one side... and that side is a minority.

They won the last election... there were many reasons why, not just the "federal government is bad".

last point, if the nation is so fed up with "washington insiders", why do Presidents get re-elected more often than not? After 4 years in the White House, the President is the ultimate Washington insider.

of the list I presented (last 13), only Ford, Carter, and Bush 1 were not elected President when they were already President. OK, make that 11 not 13, since Kennedy never got the chance and Trump isn't there yet.

[marylandblue]

20. For their second term, incumbent advantage usually takes over, plus

In 1984, 1996 and 2004 the opposing party ran people who had been in Washington even longer than the incumbent. In 2012, the opposition ran someone who was technically an outsider, but sounded like an insider, especially as he was running against his own health care plan.

So I'll make this prediction. Our candidate will not be one of the two old white men with the longest resumes. Which makes Harris the real front runner for now. But I recommend she really talk about her vision for the future in compelling terms, or someone will overtake her.

[Garrett78]

21. The key phrase is "long time."

Charisma, youthfulness and a shortage of baggage are all key. There isn't a great divide on issues. Maximizing turnout of POC and young people is what will win us the presidency. This nonsense about flipping Trump voters as being key to our success is just that, nonsense. To center a nomination or campaign around flipping those who have not yet abandoned Trump would be the height of lunacy.

2016 was unique in so many ways, including the fact that it matched 2 historically unpopular candidates, and we should be careful not to base our analysis on that 1 odd election. Clinton was our best option, but the fact of the matter is, people had been conditioned to hate her over a period of 25 years (turnout was down in key demographics, 3rd party voting was up). And she is much older with much more baggage than our nominees who have become president. So, there were some idiots who either didn't vote, voted 3rd party or decided they'd give the outsider a chance in spite of his bigotry. Trump isn't new anymore and we aren't going to nominate someone with a lot of baggage, I would hope. Trump is a known quantity and those who haven't yet abandoned him aren't going to do so based on who we nominate.

[crazycatlady]

36. (on paper) they ran a young dynamic governor for VP in 2008

Was she qualified for the office? No. But she was young, charismatic and dynamic.

[still_one]

10. LOL. Best governor Illinois ever had

[lapfog_1]

13. Governor Lincoln would beg to differ! - n/t

[still_one]

23. This could go on for a while I think. So much for the NY Times editorial

[Cha]

28. lol.. I forget.. was Obama Gov of Illinois

or Hawaii?

And, yes I immediately thought of him, too. Pres Obama is definitely the exception to any rule on that.

[Autumn]

3. We have a great governor running, Jay Inslee could take out Trump easy.

He's one of my top 5.

[CTyankee]

7. I think it is worth it to take another look at Inslee, which I will do.

We got time.

[BlueWI]

11. Plenty of room on the bandwagon.

I shifted to Inslee from Warren. A lot of viable candidates, but Inslee has the record of accomplishment and the vision to take it nationwide.

[CTyankee]

24. While I'm disappointed that ONCE AGAIN we have to say to women "Sorry, not your turn yet...

next time, we promise." It is downright embarrassing that we haven't had a woman president in this day and age..

[BlueWI]

27. Electing a female president is extremely important.

But it's not the only issue of relevance to this campaign.

All that being said, nothing wrong with voting your conscience. But just as we didn't solve racism by electing Obama, we won't solve sexism by electing Harris or Warren or Kloubuchar. I am a black man myself and I voted for Obama in the primaries, but it took a while for me to warm to him. It's good to have achieved the milestone of a non-white president and it means something to me, but I wasn't going to put race above nation in my choice of candidates.

Maybe in 2020 we will have the first female president, but I hope we look at the merits of all qualified candidates as we prepare for the primaries.

[CTyankee]

30. I think we have to be clear: just because I want to vote for a woman for president doesn't

mean I am going to vote for a LESS qualified candidate! I know you don't mean to imply that, but it seems to be implied in a way that you probably didn't mean. Obama was clearly qualified to be president. We have women candidates today who are clearly qualified to be president.

I do not want to vote for a woman to "solve sexism." While it may go a long way to do that, I assure you that is not my major goal here.

I thought all this was a settled question in the last election: HRC was hugely qualified and lost largely because of our Electoral College requirement (that's another thread entirely!). And now look what we've got!

In 2020, we will, for the first time in our country's history, have at least 3 highly qualified women running for President. I don't see how we cannot vote for a woman in such a circumstance!

[Hortensis]

33. All but a few agree with that. I am hoping Gov. Inslee

catches fire, but almost all are possibles for me at this point. At very least I'm hoping Gov. Inslee will add considerable expertise and emphasis to climate, water, energy, ag, environment discussion through the debates.

Another is tech executive Andrew Yang, who's running on "the robots are coming." I'm hoping he'll help more viable candidates put the critical issue about jobs and incomes front and center. He sees many millions with no job to go to in a very few years.

All our good candidates are very involved with these issues, but they need help, a synergy that will make them top issues.

“All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society,” Mr. Yang, 43, said over lunch at a Thai restaurant in Manhattan last month, in his first interview about his campaign. In just a few years, he said, “we’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college.”

“That one innovation,” he continued, “will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.”

Alarmist? Sure. But Mr. Yang’s doomsday prophecy echoes the concerns of a growing number of labor economists and tech experts who are worried about the coming economic consequences of automation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/technology/his-2020-campaign-message-the-robots-are-coming.html

No kidding. He "echoes" millions more worried people than those.

[doompatrol39]

9. We need to stop with any kind of conventional wisdom...

..have we not learned that these "What history tells us..." pieces and conventional wisdom takes are useless and meaningless? Part of the reason we lost in 2016 is because we were so focused on what we were told was likely and plausible and what conventional wisdom told us. And we paid the price. And yes I know there were a million factors contributing to that loss, but that's the point exactly. We can't waste any time trying to pinpoint what history, or especially not the very wise and learned dispatchers of CW in the media.

[marylandblue]

17. I think we can look at history, but we have to look at the right history.

The country is ripe for a transformative presidency, like it was in 1980 and 1932. Which means we are not looking for a governor or a senator, a white man or a black woman, but the one who has the clearest vision of what that transformation needs to be. In our particular case, we have a very dark vision threatening us unless we can replace it with something much brighter. Which is why my top three are Inslee, Buttigieg and O'Rourke. All three seem to have vision and are relatively new to the national scene.

[CTyankee]

25. i, for one, could not fathom why Trump won. I went to bed on that election night thinking HRC

had been elected the first woman president only to wake up to find Trump had been elected.

I have never been so depressed in my life.

[Squinch]

31. What's your plan, then?

[doompatrol39]

34. I'm not saying I have one...

...I don't have the answers. But the whole "History tells us we need to do this!" advice is pointless, and more often than not is being peddled by people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo or being used to stop us from taking chances and imploring us to play it safe.

If we listened to the Very Wise peddlers of conventional wisdom we never would have nominated a Senator, from a northern state, who was an African American named Barack Obama. And that was over 10 years ago. As we've seen the past 2 years conventional wisdom is even LESS valid and accurate.

It's yet another shackle which Democrats seem to feel compelled to bind themselves, while Republicans do not (see also, caring about the deficit, or any number of other rules that only seem to apply to our side and mostly because we allow such a double standard) and it costs us more than it gains us.

[Squinch]

35. So discard experience because things change and experience might not always give us the answer.

Ridiculous.

[doompatrol39]

39. What are you talking about?

Who the hell said anything about experience? The OP posted an article about how we need to run a Governor as our candidate due to a very narrow set of historical parameters, which is (I feel) outdated conventional wisdom that we were chained to for too many years.

I'm saying we shouldn't shackle ourselves to notions of what has worked in the past in terms of feeling that our candidate HAS to be a governor, or HAS to be southern, or CAN'T be a Senator or not a woman, or a person of color or whatever else. If our best candidate and the one that the most primary voters pick and feel strongly about happens to be anything then that's fine. I simply don't think there's any "Oh we have to nominate someone who fits this specific mold because that's what history tells us is the only thing that has worked in the past!!!" Up until we won in 2008 these very same wise men and women of DC would have told us we could never win with an African American Senator from a northern state. Needless to say that was proven wrong, and who knows where we would have been if we listened to any of them.

As someone who has the very qualified Senator Harris as their primary pick, I'm not sure which part of this you disagree with or why you feel compelled to argue that we need to adhere to a very specific set of rules that only seem to apply to Democrats?

[brooklynite]

14. Inslee, Hickenlooper, Bullock

[Freddie]

16. Look at recent history

Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. A nationally “somewhat unknown” Dem Governor can win. One of the reasons I’m supporting-

[BlueStater]

19. Inslee's a great candidate.

And he has a level of experience that most (key word being most before anyone jumps on me) of the others do not have.

Experience isn't everything, but it never hurts to have it.

[Awsi Dooger]

22. Decline in governorship numbers really damaged our bench

Our bench is touted here but it is not nearly as strong as it should be or needs to be. Naturally nobody will want to accept that. It is the same thing on sports sites where everybody cherishes their own players and has an inflated value of them. Above average players are touted as Pro Bowl caliber.

The reason Hillary was able to cruise from 2008 to 2016 and have few challengers in 2016 was that our bench had dwindled to such pathetic degree, due to losing so many governors. You could already see the weak bench in 2008, which is why I was arguing that if Hillary and Obama were going to be nominated back to back then Hillary had to go first and not second.

If our governorship numbers and prospects had been strong, I never would have assumed that the 2008 loser would automatically elevate in 2016. But given our realities it seemed inevitable.

Losing the Florida governorship so frequently has been the greatest jolt. That job should be ideal to groom a presidential nominee. The state is only 1-2 points red at instinct so a favorite son/daughter would easily put it over the top.

Given a choice I would prefer governor over senator far more often than not. The reference point among 100 is simply too easy for the opposition. The votes are identical, unlike governors from state to state. Video clips everywhere. If we nominate from among the most liberal among 100 then it's going to quickly enter the national dialog and stay there. When Beto is labeled a socialist by Cruz and Gillum/Nelson labeled socialists by DeSantis and Scott then you can just imagine how a "most liberal senator" will be twisted and placed on defense throughout.

Charisma tops job titles. When somebody stands well above there it is necessary to adjust. But that is rare. I love helpful strategic systems to provide a needed boost. The New York Times is correct to spotlight this one. Happy Adjusters who flaunt subjectivity everywhere and denounce systems will own the most inept record of all.

[CTyankee]

26. Maybe this LTTE will be discussed further in the NYT over the weekend and, hopefully, here

on DU!

[Rhiannon12866]

29. I like all of our incumbent senatorial candidates

My only issue is that right now we also desperately need their leadership in the Senate!

[McCamy Taylor]

32. Would love to see a political analysis about why this is true, but it is true.

Maybe I will do the political analysis later.

[UniteFightBack]

37. You could also run a Vice President and be done with it. nt

[CrossingTheRubicon]

38. I'm suprised no one has mentioned President Dukakis.

[CTyankee]

40. Excellent point!