Showing posts with label Pete Buttigieg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pete Buttigieg. Show all posts

April 26, 2023

If for some reason Joe Biden isn't the 2024 candidate who would be the Democrat's Thomas Kirkman?

 

Hal Brown's Blog

This is a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and other subjects. My posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky. I'm a retired MSW clinical social worker/psychotherapist and mental health center director who was also a cranberry farmer. Scroll archives on bottom of page to see previous blog stories. There are new ones added almost every day, although if I don't have anything original to say I try not to say anything at all.


There is every indication that Joe Biden is what is referred to as a superager or super-ager:

A superager, also known as a super-ager, is a person who is at least eighty years of age and retains the memory skills and capacity of someone at least thirty years younger. This population falls well outside the "normal"  memory skill range for people their age. (Reference)

Full-discosure: I will be 80 next year. Do I have the cognitive capacity to be president? You can be the judge of that.

He is likely to live and remain capable of governing at a high level through a second term. Consider Harry Belafonte now being memorialized because he died at 96. In 2020, which would have made him 93 years old, "he spoke with pride about the racial protests that spread across the US in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd, writing that “we have never had so many White allies, wailing to stand together for freedom, for honor, for a justice that free us all in the end…” Reference.

How could I not click to read this on The Washington Post website (subscription):


I am rewatching "Designated Survivor" (read review) and this makes me wonder who would be a Thomas Kirkman? He becomes president when terrorists kill everyone attending the State of the Union addresss. He proves to be an excellent president. Although an independent in the TV show his views are most closely aligned with the Democrats. He's among the highest ranked TV presidents almost tied for number one with Josiah Bartlet from "The West Wing" on Ranker. Kirkman was a Cabinet member as HUD secretary, Pete Buttigieg is transportation secretary. Just a thought....

Below, in order of least likely to most likely:

10. Phil Murphy/J.B. Pritzker: governors of Illinois and New Jersey

9. Raphael G. Warnock: Georgia senator

8. Bernie Sanders: Vermont senator 

7. Amy Klobuchar: Minnesota senator

6. Josh Shapiro: Pennsylvania governor

5. Gavin Newsom: California governor

4. Gretchen Whitmer: Michigan governor (as I write this she's on Morning Joe (image here)

3. Jared Polis: The Colorado governor

1. Pete Buttigieg: transportation secretary

On the worth mentioning list (here) I think New Jersey senator Cory Booker, now on Morning Joe (image) belongs near the top list which even though the title says top 10 the list has 11 possibilities. 

As I think of what the winning ticket would be sans Joe Biden I lean towards Harris/Buttigieg. The more I see Kamala Harris, most recently at abortion rights rallies like this...

... the more I think she has the political chops to win the presidency.

She has been in the limelight ever since the Supreme Court ruled on abortion in the Dobbs case and even more so since the abortion pill brouhaha. This has worked to significantly up her national exposure and profile, far more than her handling the typical tasks assigned to a vice president like representing the United States at overseas meetings or going to sites of disasters or shaking hands foreign dignitaries like she did this morning prior to the president of South Korea meeting with President Biden:


It has also given her experience speaking forcefully to a large television audience. It makes sense to compare her to Hillary Clinton in this respect. There are many factors pundits have elaborated on to explain her loss  but it's impossible to determine whether factoring in all of them she would had won if she'd been a man. How many people didn't vote for her because of misogyny or because they didn't like how she came across? These aren't the kinds of questions people tend to answer honestly when a pollster asks them. Some, like this author, and like this author, say she did. Others, like this author, say this had nothing to do with her loss.

We can thank the anti-abortion forces for giving Harris a far bigger platform than just being a representative of the United States when the president doesn't do this.

It helps that support for abortion with one or another limitation is at a record high. Not only among Democrats, but  a third of Republicans also qualify themselves as mostly supporting abortion rights

Of course there isn't a male chauvinist bigot in the country who will vote for her... thankfully there aren't enough of them to swing a national election.

Were Buttigieg not a happily married gay father he might have something of an edge over Harris except that as heir apparent it would be awkward and poor optics to have her run for the position she already has. Joe Biden selected her to run with him for various reasons but one of them was that he thought she would be qualified to be president if something untoward happened to him.

As for Buttigieg, "No mayor has ever ascended directly to the American presidency, and only three presidents – Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland, and Calvin Coolidge – served as mayors before eventually taking the White House." (Reference)

John Lindsay is probably the best known mayor to run a credible campaign for president and he was the mayor of New York City. Buttigieg was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

Like Harris, Buttigieg got  unexpected national publicity. This happened after the East Palestine train wreck. 

Click above to read article 

Of course there's the matter of him being gay.

If it was up to residents of Portland, Oregon, where I live in the suburbs, the majority of people wouldn't give a tinker's damn about his sexual orientation. After all, these are two of the stories on local TV today:

Article one and two

Despite the ginned up focus on being anti-anything remotely LGBTQ+ which Ron DeSantis has made a major plank in his ludicrous anti-woke bridge to nowhere - I mean taking on Disney...


... the majority of straight Americans are totally accepting of members of the LGBTQ+ community and no doubt many of them have family members, friends, or acquaintances who fit into one of the categories in this list of letters.

For winning elections anywhere but in the most red of red places being a woke warrior is worthless. 

The same goes for someone running as a woman of color.

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