http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/8174201.htmPosted on Sat, Mar. 13, 2004
The right Democratic running mate
BY WAYNE MADSEN
Political pundits will claim that it is too risky to place two sitting senators on the same presidential ticket. It may be uncommon for two senators to run together, but it is not risky.
The last team of senators who won the White House was that of John F. Kennedy, who, like John F. Kerry, was a junior senator from Massachusetts when he was elected in 1960 along with his vice-presidential running mate, the senior senator from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson. Kerry would be wise to emulate Kennedy and select the senior senator from North Carolina, John Edwards, as his running mate.
True, other dual senator teams have not fared as well as Kennedy-Johnson. In 1972, Sen. George McGovern selected Missouri Sen. Tom Eagleton as his running mate. Eagleton was forced off the ticket after he acknowledged that he had been treated for depression in the 1960s.
But a Kerry-Edwards ticket would provide a welcome contrast to Bush-Cheney. Kerry has the political experience to be president and the military background to consider carefully when it is proper to commit U.S. military men and women to combat.
Supporter of U.S. workers
Edwards, who tapped into the anti-Washington establishment fervor that Gov. Howard Dean brought to the campaign, would help energize young people, the working poor and the besieged middle class who are tired of the business-as-usual politics represented by the corporate-aligned Bush and Cheney. Edwards has continuously spoken out for the rights of people such as his father, a mill worker in North Carolina.
Kerry's past support for badly negotiated free-trade agreements that are now allowing U.S. companies to engage in the wholesale exporting of American jobs to places such as India and the Philippines would be largely negated by Edwards' enthusiastic support for the rights of the American worker.
Although Kerry has now recognized the problems wrought by free-trade agreements, it would be better to have a committed fair trader such as Edwards on the ticket than a Democratic governor who may have shared Kerry's past enthusiasm for allowing U.S. firms to have it their way all the time at the expense of U.S. workers.
It is because Edwards is a first-term senator that makes him much more attractive to face off in a debate against a scandal-tainted Cheney.
Ready for a change
Some pundits have mentioned New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as a potential running mate. His candidacy would entail digging up all those unsavory issues he was involved with: finding a job for Monica Lewinsky while he was Bill Clinton's U.N. ambassador and the Wen Ho Lee espionage episode at Los Alamos Laboratory while he was energy secretary. With that baggage, Richardson, unlike Edwards, would be too risky.
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell has been offered up as a potential candidate. This is the same Rendell, who, while serving as co-chair of the Democratic National Committee and before the Supreme Court's ''selection'' of Bush in December 2000, called on Al Gore to ``act now and concede.''
Considering that kind of loyalty to the Democratic Party, Rendell might be a better candidate to replace Cheney on the GOP ticket.
Some have mentioned that Edwards and Kerry have had too many sharp debate exchanges to make them compatible running mates. Considering that George H.W. Bush called Ronald Reagan's economic policies ''voodoo economics'' during their 1980 primary campaign and still wound up on the ticket makes that argument moot.
The country is ready for a change. Exit polls during the Democratic primaries showed that Democrats, independents and Republicans would support either Kerry or Edwards for the White House.
Why not both?
Wayne Madsen is co-author of America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II.
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