Biden must choose ‘the woman in Michigan’

Opinion by David A. Andelman
April 25, 2020

David A. Andelman, executive director of The Red Lines Project, is a contributor to CNN, where his columns won the Deadline Club Award for Best Opinion Writing. Author of “A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today,” and the forthcoming “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy and a History of Wars That Almost Happened,” he was formerly a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia. Follow him on Twitter @DavidAndelman. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)There’s only one winnable choice for Joe Biden’s vice president pick: “The woman in Michigan,” as our incumbent President calls Gretchen Whitmer.

What the American people — not to mention the world — want and need in these dangerous times is a person who, if necessary, can slip seamlessly into the job of president amidst a global crisis.

That has to mean a governor rather than a senator. No senator (with the possible exception of Mitt Romney), has the managerial chops to step in and assume control on a moment’s notice of the world’s largest corporation: the US government, currently careening toward utter disaster.

The staff budgets of a senator are pocket change compared to federal budgets. If a senator represents a state with a population larger than 28 million, their budget maxes out at $4.6 million for administrative, clerical and legislative staff, and less than $500,000 for rented offices. Moreover, with legislative staff salaries topping out at more than $170,000 a year, the size of senators’ offices are quite circumscribed.

The US budget, managed by the president, has risen to $4.8 trillion under President Trump’s fiscal 2021 budget request. And that’s before the $2 trillion more authorized by the recent coronavirus bailout bill. The workforce the President manages is estimated to be just about 4.3 million people. By contrast, America’s largest private employer, Walmart, has 1.5 million workers in the US, dwarfing number two, Amazon, with about 750,000.

In comparison, Michigan’s government totals than 46,000 workers with a budget in excess of $61.9 billion.

At the same time, this person must have an understanding of the world and America’s place in it. Last November, Gov. Whitmer deftly led a trade mission to Israel, signing an agreement to connect Israeli business to Michigan.

In the months before the current administration officially withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, she reformed her state’s own Department of Environmental Quality, clearly embracing a global vision for modern environmental practices. She’s not reluctant to unleash that power brandished so flagrantly and irresponsibly by Donald Trump.

Her first mission after the pandemic, and that of Joe Biden, must be to return America to the community of democratic nations, and the COP-21 world environmental treaty.

Certainly, any number of choices for vice president would serve more effectively than the incumbents occupying the presidency and vice presidency. But it must be a governor who represents the heartland and it must be a woman, as Biden himself has pledged. That leaves only three candidates: Whitmer, New Mexico’s Michelle Lujan Grisham and Laura Kelly of Kansas. My vote is for Whitmer.

While the Democratic party’s progressive base may need mobilizing with the withdrawal of the two senators, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, it’s clear that in the 2018 mid-term congressional elections it was the suburban soccer moms and minorities who came out in force to bring the House over to the Democrats and Nancy Pelosi to the speakership.

These suburban voters and industrial workers, especially in the Midwest heartland, are what the party needs to keep cultivating. Joe Biden must win Michigan. New York, Massachusetts and both coasts are a lock. Besides, any progressive worth his or her salt will recognize that sending Trump packing is essential at any cost.

Whitmer’s website describes her as “a lawyer, an educator, former prosecutor, State Representative and Senator. She was the first woman to lead a Senate caucus. But the most important title she boasts is MOM.” In other words, she checks all the boxes. The state she heads is the heartland of the American auto industry with a truly global reach and broader aspirations. And she’s served for 20 years — far more experienced than New Mexico’s Grisham, for instance, with three terms in Congress and 15 months as governor.

Finally, there’s her handling of the entire pandemic in her state, one of the several epicenters of the virus’s spread across America, the state with the third-highest number of deaths from Covid-19. Whitmer has inaugurated some of the toughest restrictions in the nation, from travel bans to vacation homes to the sale of paint, garden supplies and furniture.

And despite widespread demonstrations carefully orchestrated by national conservatives, she’s stood her ground.

No senator brings these chops to the party. Whitmer brings her skills as a governor and public official who has unfailingly seen from the get-go what her state needs in this, its most critical hour, and with laser-like precision has gone after it. With her leadership skills, she has also shown herself prepared to do so for the nation as well.

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Comments

popocat says

May 2, 2020 at 4:24 am

Should she indeed get the nod as Biden’s running mate, I’m not convinced that overseeing a state with the third highest Covid-19 cases is necessarily a “good look” that will inure to the Democrats’ benefit. The GOP will certainly cry “too much, too late” on her record.

As for Whitmer’s website boasting that she is an “educator”. . . stop! Just stop! As one who has taught for 21 years, it is insulting to hear someone who has not spend a day in the classroom nonetheless try to disingenuously manipulate themselves into people’s hearts. For shame! For all the heat that Devos has taken in her Education post, at least she never made false claims about her previous service in education.

Biden must choose ‘the woman in Michigan’

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