Romney floats first VP name trial balloon – Condi Rice

The rolling out of Vice Presidential nominees generally goes like this – a few names are floated as a trial balloon to allow the press to speculate and pre-vet the candidates.  Once that’s done, and it usually only takes a few weeks, the real nominee is announced, they give a speech at the convention, and everyone promptly stops caring.

The Romney campaign launched their first trial balloon last night, and it’s a name improbable enough to not really be credible: Condi Rice.  Matt Drudge has been running with the story over night, and the DC beltway media has picked up Drudge.  Drudge has long been a VP nominee exclusive chaser, and he’s always wrong.  Rice doesn’t fit the profile, nor does she balance the ticket or in any way enhance Romney’s candidacy.

While I think very highly of Condoleeza Rice and I feel she was one of the better Secretaries of State in recent history, she simply isn’t a credible Vice Presidential candidate.  As I have written before, there are two primary jobs a Vice Presidential candidate must be able to do: he or she must be ready to be President, and he or she must compliment the presidential nominee’s message and campaign.  While Rice is arguably prepared to be President – and even that’s a bit of a stretch – she doesn’t compliment Romney’s message and adds little that isn’t already there to his campaign.

Is she ready to be President?  Well, she’s certainly smart enough, and her experience as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor make her well prepared on the foreign policy side of things.  On the other hand, she has never held elective office, and has spent most of her career in academia, first as a professor, later as Provost at Stanford University.  Her private sector experience is scanty, having served on the Board of Directors for a number of large corporations, but never in an executive capacity.  Her governmental experience has solely been in appointed positions.  She’s never gone through a major campaign, and there’s nothing in her record that would support the idea that she understands the current domestic agenda.  She’s a foreign policy expert, to the exclusion of almost everything else.  Given the lack of elected office history, the lack of any significant private sector experience to make up for that, I think she’s vulnerable to the experience arguments we’ve made against the President when he ran last time, and she doesn’t even compare favorably in experience to Sarah Palin.  Palin, whatever her other problems may have been, had served many years in elective office, including being Governor of a state.  Rice has not.

She also doesn’t really complement Romney’s campaign or feed into his strengths.  He touts his private sector experience and how that makes him understand the economy and how government can aid the private sector in creating jobs.  She can’t do that.  He comes from the Northeast, a bastion of liberalism, and she hails from California…another bastion of liberalism.  He is viewed as kind of boring, lacking the same kind of star caliber charm the President has.  She makes Hillary Clinton look warm and fuzzy.  She also shares some of the same issues-based problems that have plagued Romney, not the least of which are her statements on the record that she’s pro-choice. Now while Sarah Palin has already defended her, saying her stance on abortion doesn’t bar her from being VP, it will hurt Romney, who is already damaged when it comes to social conservatives (just ask our own Shaun Kenney).  She doesn’t solve any real problems for Romney, she only makes problems that already exist worst.  And she can’t even provide any kind of electoral bump in a battleground state.

Finally, she has her own vulnerabilities.  The fact that she’s nearly 60 and single (her brief relationship with Jack Donaghy aside) will cause the inevitable – regardless of how dumb – questions about her sexual orientation.  That she’s never run for office before means she’s never really been vetted by the media in the same way someone like Joe Biden had been.  Given the vetting issues that arose with Sarah Palin, we can only expect Rice’s vetting to be worse, especially given her relationship with big oil.  While she has a compelling life story, that alone isn’t enough.  Crowning all, however, is her being front and center in the Bush Administration and it’s war policy, one of the lasting and still most controversial parts of the Bush Administration, and given the President’s successes in ending the Iraq war and overseeing the killing of Osama Bin Laden, having her on the ticket opens our ticket up to the inevitable comparisons and endless relitigating of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – which will suck Romney off-message.  Romney doesn’t want this campaign to be about foreign policy, as that is where the very few successes of this Administration can be found.

Rice simply isn’t credible, even as a trial balloon.  The smart money remains on Rob Portman, Paul Ryan or a southern Governor.  My best bet is Portman.  One thing is clear, though.  The decision as to who will be Mitt Romney’s Vice President will be coming very soon.

After that, we can all stop caring again.

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