Thinking Ted and Carly

This will be a fun piece.  I know I can be prone to stream-of-consciousness writing and, when I go back and edit myself, have to try not to change the apparent mentality that brought me to the opinion in the first place.

This one is different.  As I write this, I've no idea what I'm going to say, and think it fair to tell you that up front, before another word is committed to electronic paper.

On Wednesday, Ted Cruz, the U.S. senator whom former House Speaker John Boehner likened to the devil yesterday, and who is running for president regardless of what Boehner thinks, made an announcement.  In an unusual step, Cruz decided to declare that, if the Republicans select him as their candidate, he would want Carly Fiorina as his running mate.

Legions of reporters went scurrying off to look for analogies to the last prominent time something like that was done, which as it turns out was Ronald Reagan in 1976 declaring before the convention that his VP pick would be Richard Schweiker, the Pennsylvania senator.  Reagan didn't get the nomination, and it doesn't look that much like Cruz will, either, but it's worth thinking about in a sort of out-on-the-back-deck-with-a-Corona way.

I loved the idea.  Personally, I'm not sure that if Cruz had made this announcement two months ago, he might not be the front-runner today.  Perhaps Ted Cruz is thinking right now that he should have.

Carly Fiorina is the candidate for whom I would have voted in the Virginia primary, had she not run out of traction and left the presidential race before our primary.  My best girl clearly would have done the same and voted for her.

And here is the thing -- lots of presidential candidates say that their vice presidential running mate will be different, and that they will do this or that because of their great skills, blah, blah, blah, and then they all turn into Joe Biden.  [aside -- the notable exception is Dick Cheney.  It was pointed out to me by a friend who spent eight years in the Bush 43 administration (as a direct report to the president) that Cheney was given unusually great influence, not just because he had immense experience, but because he had no presidential aspirations for 2008 and would act in the best interests of the USA.]

Carly Fiorina would be an amazing vice president.  Anyone who paid attention to the debates, speeches and interviews she did could see that this was a person who studied her brains out on the issues and made logical inferences from what she learned.  We have a problem over here, and these people are involved, and when we have done this before it has worked, therefore ... well, you get the idea.  Rational thought based on facts and lessons.

Rational thought based on facts and lessons.  What a novel concept in leadership.

We all know we would have loved to have seen her debate Hillary Clinton.  Candidate Fiorina would have let her get away with absolutely nothing.  A skilled debater with command of the facts can dissect anything Hillary Clinton says seven ways to Sunday.  I'd have paid to have seen four or five of those debates, and then laughed at the press trying to make it sound like what we had witnessed had not actually happened -- much as they tried to excuse the execrable, funbling performance Barack Obama gave in the first 2012 debate against Mitt Romney.

A President Cruz could turn entire problem areas over to Mrs. Fiorina and trust that she would handle them with understanding, expertise, proper outside advice and the reliance on previously successful approaches to similar problems -- and not necessarily government types of approaches, either.  And I actually believe, no matter what John Boehner thinks in his nicotine-addled brain, that Cruz would be thrilled to have that kind of support -- remember, Carly Fiorina is 16 years older than Cruz.

I don't know what kind of VP choice Donald Trump would make -- I sincerely doubt it will get very close to Cleveland before he will have produced a name.  But I hope that he steps away from his public persona and thinks about why Cruz's choice of Mrs. Fiorina was such an excellent thing.  I hope Mr. Trump carefully combs through his immense Rolodex and makes as inspired a choice.  I hope he seriously considers his vision of the vice presidency and how unconstrained he should feel by the past.

John Nance Garner, who was FDR's first VP for a couple terms, famously is remembered for having said that the vice presidency wasn't worth a bucket of warm spit, or possibly some other warm liquid.  It remains for the person to make the job something else, and for an intelligent president to facilitate the value of the role.

Carly Fiorina is precisely the type of person by whom that "intelligent president" could be well-served.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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