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[MUSIC PLAYING]
From New York Times Opinion, I’m Michelle Cottle.
I’m Ross Douthat.
I’m Carlos Lozada.
And I’m Lydia Polgreen.
And this is “Matter of Opinion.”
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My friends, it is election go time. We are rolling into the last weekend before gaggles of Iowa Republicans gather at their caucus sites to kick off the actual voting in this year’s presidential race. It is time for real live voters to start having their say.
Real Americans.
Oh, wow.
As the resident political junkie, I am absurdly excited, despite not being a fan of the Iowa caucuses per se. But I need to know, has anyone else here spent them some quality time in Iowa?
I saw “Field of Dreams” a couple of times.
No, no, that is not the same!
Yeah. That’s about it. That’s as close as I’ve come to Iowa.
As careful listeners of this podcast know, I’m from Minnesota, but I have nothing to say about Iowa. I think I’ve been there once.
Oh, my God. Ross?
I have been to political conventions all over this fair country, but I have never been to the Iowa caucuses.
I am the only one to be lost in an Iowa cornfield?
So, Michelle, what’s it really like?
I am not a fan of the caucuses, I have to say. I have a loud critic of the process and of having one state be the first off the line every single year, it is a bizarre and fascinating experience. And I would love to sit here and pick it apart all day long. But we cannot. [LAUGHTER] We are going to look —
Oh, well.
No. No, I am not going to get bogged down in the “Field of Dreams.” I am going to look farther down the field. And we’re going to talk about vice presidential picks.
Oh, so the field of nightmares.
The field of horror.
The field of dreams you can barely remember.
Right.
Come on, no, do not roll your eyes at me. I love this whole selection hubbub because even though the job of Veep is so wretched and thankless that there was an entire HBO series devoted to it, who a nominee picks as their running mate is really important. It tells us a lot about their strategy and state of mind, where they think they have weaknesses, who they want to woo, on and on and on and on.
So first, we’re going to dig into this process, and then we’re going to make our cases for who the presumed Republican frontrunner, one Donald John Trump, ought to go with as his next running mate. And you will note that I said frontrunner, not nominee. Yes, it’s not over, but still. So to start us off, I want to know, what do each of you think a nominee should be looking for in a VP?
Three things — [LAUGHTER] someone that will help you win, someone that will help you govern, and someone that can do the job if you croak.
Oh, Professor Lozada. [LYDIA LAUGHS]
Like, that’s it. But no, but the thing is, I think candidates worry far too much about the first one, right, who will help you win, forget about the second one, who will help you govern, and don’t really care about the third one, someone that can do the job if you croak because they won’t be around anyway. [LAUGHTER]
And they don’t like to think about croaking?
You’re saying that our presidential contenders aren’t such civic-minded souls that they don’t imagine America going on after their passing?
No, they can’t imagine America without them. I think the last two factors, the someone who can help you govern and someone that can do the job if you’re incapacitated, are probably most important, but there is a logic to caring most about the someone that can help you win side, as kind of mercenary as it seems. I mean, it doesn’t matter if your V.P. is really good at running the country if you don’t win in the first place.
Well, Lydia, do you want to pick apart one of those pieces since Professor Lozada has gone abroad?
Yeah, I mean, I —
it’s funny. I was doing some reading and thinking before this episode, and I realized that all of my perceptions of the vice presidency have been so deeply influenced by the way the vice presidency is portrayed in popular culture. And when I was trying to think about, oh, do I have a favorite like historical vice president, I realized that I didn’t. But I do have —
Selena.
Yeah, well, no, but I mean, I obviously have favorites of the fictional portrayals. And basically the two sort of modes in which the vice president is portrayed in popular culture — and here, I’m talking about TV and movies, not books, because books, as we know, are Carlos’s thing, not any of the rest of us, so —
We’re not allowed to read.
So if there are literary references, you come back with them. But they’re basically either complete bumbling idiots in the mode of Selena Meyer from the show “Veep.” Or there are these absolutely Machiavellian schemers who want to bring down the main guy, you know? When I was thinking about what the vice presidency is for, for Hollywood, it seems to be for making the president look good. So maybe that’s ultimately what it is, right? You want somebody who’s going to make you look good.
Ross, Carlos, do you have a real life favorite V.P. you’d like to throw into the mix here?
I mean, I think that under Carlos’s rubrics, the most successful V.P. pick of recent years is probably the man who’s president now, Joe Biden. The evidence that any V.P. pick obviously helps you win is usually negligible. V.P. picks don’t seem to have a huge effect on the race, but Biden was a case where Obama was clearly choosing someone for sort of outreach purposes, the kind of white, moderate, Catholic, older —
Super well-known.
Super well-known guy, someone who would be presented as at least somewhat reassuring to various kinds of swing voters, in a way that a lot of V.P. picks haven’t really been. Like Dick Cheney was not an outreach pick.
Pence kind of was, right?
No, Pence was a “shore up your base” pick. Pence was a —
Yeah, I think Cheney and Pence both outreached to different kinds of people.
Well, I don’t think Cheney was an outreach pick at all.
He was supposed to be shoring up the Republican establishment’s comfort level with a governor who had no experience.
Those people were going to vote for Bush 100 percent, no matter what. I think Cheney was a pure governance pick. But even Pence, there were a bunch of Republican voters, especially evangelical voters, who were just not sold on Trump. And Pence was for them with a touch of, here’s a more normal politician for the swing voters. But if you were really going for swing voters, you would not pick someone as deep-dyed evangelical as Pence. I don’t think Kamala Harris was an outreach pick. Kamala Harris was a “your base demands an African-American woman at this moment of racial reckoning” pick.
So it’s actually unusual that Biden was an outreach pick. He was also a governance pick. And I think we have evidence from his own presidency, as well as from the Obama era, that he is better at legislative deal making than Obama ever was. So he was effective on that front. And whatever you think of his presidency, he has gone on to be president. Right? So he sort of —
He can conceivably govern, right.
He can conceivably be president and has been. So I think that’s the closest we get to the trifecta in modern American history. I don’t know. What do you guys think?
Weirdly, Obama kind of, I mean, went with him, in part, because he didn’t think he would run for president later. Right? He was like, he won’t be distracted by trying to run later on, you know? Yeah.
Well, no, that was —
Thought he was going to follow the Dick Cheney promise?
That was true, though —
It didn’t happen in 2016, right.
It’s true that he didn’t want the vice president to have a sort of separate political agenda. He didn’t want the Machiavellian schemer. And he got that. Biden did not plan and execute a presidential campaign while he was vice president the way everyone from Richard Nixon to Al Gore has had to do. He did it later.
Well, and I think him not running for president had a lot to do with his son’s death and things like that. I don’t think that it was a fait accompli —
That’s true. Yep.
— that he was never going to run for office after Obama’s two terms. The other thing that’s striking about the Biden pick in reference to the current situation and the probable Republican nominee is that Biden had said some not great things about Obama, right? And —
What do you mean? [LAUGHTER] He called him clean and articulate. What was wrong with that?
He complimented him!
I don’t understand the problem.
Having received many compliments of that type over the course of my life, I can tell you, they’re extremely flattering. That is sarcasm you’re detecting. But I think that that was clearly intentional, and I think that choosing someone who maybe sort of made a little stumble around race was a way of opening up the field. I’m just sort of furthering Ross’s point here. But I do — and we’ll talk about this later. I do wonder if that’s going to be a part of the strategy for the Republican nominee.
Well, picking somebody who tends to be unifying is one way that you can go. Other ways are traditionally — and this one has always seemed like a stretch to me — You pick somebody from a swing state. You pick geography so that maybe you can capture their state. Or as we’ve been talking about, you pick somebody who really appeals to one segment of your base, like Kamala Harris — Black women, or evangelicals — Mike Pence, and the traditionalists. Do any of those strike you as a better bet than others? Or are they just all pointless and we should just acknowledge that this is all a game?
They’re semi-pointless. I mean, I think it just depends on the presidential candidate. You can see why Biden, who backed into the nomination by being the safe moderate consensus choice when other candidates had been competing for the activist left, would feel like he needed something potentially base energizing.
Now, whether anyone was actually energized by Harris is a separate question, but you could see why a figure like Biden would worry about base energy, whereas you could see why a more ideological president would worry about outreach or safety. I mean, George H.W Bush, who Ronald Reagan picked in 1980, that, I think more than Cheney in 2000, that was the pick to reassure suburban, establishment, country club Republicans that this California right-winger was still going to have some of the old spirit of Nelson Rockefeller and Gerald Ford in his administration. And that made sense, I think.
I like it when they’re sending a generic vibe out there, or a specific vibe out there. You know, like with Al Gore on the ticket with Clinton in ‘92, they really wanted to telegraph new day, new generation, new excitement, whatever. And even to some degree, Al Gore, who was always slammed as extremely cautious, extremely boring, or whatever, he took a bit of a risk putting Joe Lieberman as the historic first Jewish guy on the ticket, trying to telegraph that I’m not as predictable as you think I am. Now I don’t know that Lieberman was necessarily going to excite anybody, but they try these things, or —
Joementum, come on. [LYDIA LAUGHS]
Joementum was fantastic.
I think the Lieberman pick was effective, and it also telegraphed specifically separation from Clinton because Lieberman had been a prominent —
A moralist.
A moralist and critic of Clinton. And yeah, the Clinton-Gore race, that was the rare double down choice. It would be if Trump had picked Newt Gingrich, which he was considering as his running mate. It’s like, you like me, you can have more of me all the way.
Let’s go.
Well, because there’s the partnership model, which is kind of this doubling down, and the balancing model. The scholar, Elaine Kamarck, has written about this. You can do balancing, right? Like Massachusetts, J.F.K. picks Southern L.B.J. Conservative southerner adds Midwestern liberal with Carter and Mondale. But then like Clinton-Gore, Cheney-Bush, Obama-Biden, those are much more in the partnership models where you actually gave your vice president more not just funerals [LAUGHTER] and trips to countries no one cares about, actually a partner in governing.
The geographical model also belongs to an era, I think, where America was less ideologically divided and more geographically divided. And as ideology has replaced geography, the idea that picking a southern politician gets you southern votes has diminished.
Well, talking about the real partnership model, I mean, that brings the question of, how has the job itself evolved or been redefined in recent decades? I mean, you can start with anyone. Like Dick Cheney, of course, is regarded as the strongest V.P. possibly ever, but Carlos, you have mentioned a little bit about how the job has changed. How do you see it?
The journalist, Jules Witcover, wrote a book about the vice presidency, something like “From Irrelevance to Power,” or something like that.
Scintillating. [LAUGHTER] [LAUGHS]
Story of my life.
He said —
I think you got that backwards. You got that backwards, Ross.
But he said, he pointed out, like the typical story is that with Gore, the role of the vice presidency became more substantive. And then Cheney took it up a notch, up several notches. It’s actually a great moment in, I think it’s something by Elaine Kamarck, where right after Bush and Cheney took office, Quayle came to visit Cheney to tell Cheney what the vice presidency is all about.
Oh, sweet Jesus.
Right? Dan Quayle, you know, George H.W. Bush’s vice president.
Potato fame.
And he’s like, lots of travel. He had been to a lot of countries didn’t matter that much. And Cheney just listened very politely and said, the president and I have a different conception of what this job is going to be.
Hah.
So, sorry, getting back to “Irrelevance to Power,” right, Jules Witcover said that the moment when V.P.s began to be taken more seriously was with Truman. After Truman came in and suddenly he was read in on all this stuff he had no idea about, including like the atomic bomb program and stuff where he had not been really up to speed, he realized —
The U.F.O., the U.F.O. recovery program.
Ross. Stop.
Really, he got — Yup.
There you go.
Stop.
There you go. And then he’s like, and since then, presidents have at least made an effort to keep their V.P.s far better informed. But you know what’s interesting to see, I think, is the kind of vice president that presidents who used to be vice presidents themselves select.
Oh, that’s the real — yeah.
And I think they also select kind of weaker V.P.s. George H.W. Bush picked Dan Quayle.
Oh, but wait, I want to jump in here.
Biden picked Harris, right?
Wait a minute.
I think that —
Richard Nixon picked Spiro Agnew.
Yeah, true.
I want to jump in here, though, and defend Dan Quayle, which like, who ever does that? At the time — and I remember where I was when my parents, staunch Republicans, were talking about how excited they were that George H.W. Bush, who was this boring weenie of an older kind of upper crusty guy, had picked this young, exciting heartland guy to be his number two.
No, this is kind of an object lesson in how things can go very badly wrong. But at the time, George H.W. really needed a jolt of excitement. And that’s what Dan was supposed to supply. He was not supposed to become the butt of jokes and not know how to spell potatoes or whatever. So I just want to stand up for Dan.
I mean, speaking as someone who literally suggested that John McCain should pick Sarah Palin in 2008 —
Oh, gosh.
I know.
Damn, brother, I don’t believe I’d admit that.
I know where — it was a jolt.
It was a jolt of excitement.
Listen, speaking of political conventions, I remember getting on the plane from the Republican convention the night after Palin gave her first big speech, which was a huge hit, and some nice liberal Democratic woman was on her cell phone in the row in front of me. And she was like, “I can’t believe they’re going to do it to us again!” There was 48 hours, maybe even 96 hours there, when Sarah Palin was the best vice presidential pick anyone had ever made. And —
Oh, my God. And on that note, I can’t think of a better way to say —
“I could see Russia from my house“?
No, but I mean —
That was Tina Fey.
The Palin nomination in hindsight is really, really significant in American politics, right? Like, it’s interesting. We’ve been talking about the vice presidents who won, right? About the winning tickets. Palin is perhaps — this is also recency bias, but Palin may be one of the most consequential losing vice-presidential picks in recent memory, in part because she legitimized a kind of like proto Trump style of politics that would come to dominate the right. Palin was like John the Baptist to Donald Trump’s orange Jesus, you know?
Oh, my God. No, do not bring God into this.
Wow.
That veep pick feels really, really consequential.
Oh, no. No, we are cutting this off because Carlos has brought the Bible into Sarah Palin discussion. We are going to take a break. We have to.
Sarah would do that herself, were she with us.
I know, and that does not make it right. On that sacrilegious note, when we come back, we’re going to take a look at the folks auditioning for that number two slot.
I had a whole thing about how Jimmy Carter picked Mondale. I brought his White House memoir.
You did not bring the book.
Jimmy Carter went through — you know what? I’m going to smuggle it in to the next segment.
Fine.
Jimmy Carter went through a fantastic process.
Right, save it, save it, save it, save it. [MUSIC PLAYING]
All righty. We’re back. We have chewed over what makes a good veep candidate and a not so good one. Now we’re going to start naming names. And here, I feel like I need to throw in the caveat that the Republican nominee has not been chosen. It ain’t over. The Fat Lady hadn’t sung. Yada, yada, yada. But the GOP base loves it some Trump, and he has been dominating the primary for months. So we have to prepare ourselves emotionally for the strong possibility that he is going to be on the top of the ticket. And for obvious reasons, he will not be bringing Mike Pence along with him this time as his dance partner.
So with the understanding that nothing is definite, we’re going to assume Trump is going to be the standard bearer. And we want to talk about who we think he’s going to tap as his understudy this time.
Boy, that was a heavy sigh from Carlos when you said we’re going to assume that —
No, I just —
Carlos.
No, no, no, I’m going to cheat. I’m going to cheat. Far be it from me to get into the head of Donald Trump. It’s a very turbulent place, but listen, all I can do — I’m going to lay out just a few of his tendencies, and then you can help me figure out who fits that bill, right? Like, I don’t think he’s going to pick someone who sees himself or herself as an obvious heir apparent as the next president. Maybe president someday, but not the next one. Trump sees himself as president for all eternity. I don’t think he wants anyone who’s already, as Ross mentioned, running the shadow campaign.
Second, I don’t think he wants anyone who’s like a really big personality. He has to be the alpha in the room. So I don’t see Marjorie Taylor Greene or Kari Lake. It’s got to be someone who was on board with Stop the Steal, someone completely, completely loyal about 2020 election fraud claims. He feels he got screwed with Pence. He doesn’t want that anymore. And his final thing, what’s the thing Trump always likes? Someone who looks the part.
Central casting.
Central casting. So an attractive woman or a strapping man, you know? I think that’s what he wants. So who’s that Venn diagram?
Your first thing has ruled out everybody. There is no person who could be picked by Donald Trump at this moment who would not see themselves as the president four years hence. That person does not exist.
Yeah, but they can less telegraph it than others.
Yeah, I think that’s fair.
Everybody looks in the mirror and sees themself as president, Ross.
Do you, Michelle?
Everyone who would be considered for a political ticket.
I don’t. I don’t. I wasn’t born here.
I mean, I think Ross is the only one among us who probably does.
He’s been mentioned. I’m sure he’s been mentioned.
Viceroy. I see myself as a viceroy.
That’s right. That’s right.
Catholic Imperium.
MAGA King not for Ross.
Viceroy of New Spain.
All right, stop. I need to hear what Lydia thinks.
So I think that Trump is in survival mode. And I think that his path to survival is through winning the presidency. So in this current political climate, winning the presidency will require something very different from what it required of him last time. He chose Mike Pence, who was shoring up the base and reassuring evangelicals. He doesn’t need to do that now. They’re all on his side. So if Trump were like a rational actor, who was like, I want to stay out of jail, and my way of staying out of jail is becoming president again, which —
That’s a big if.
It turns out, I think that actually might work for him, but that wouldn’t have been my sort of strategy to stay out of jail just in general, but let’s just go with that.
To each his own.
You start from where you are, Lydia.
Exactly, but if his goal is to actually win the presidency, then there’s really only one person he should pick. And that person is Nikki Haley. I don’t think that he necessarily will pick Nikki Haley, but the argument for it is, I think — and pardon the pun — unimpeachable. If he wins the nomination, what’s he going to need to do? He’s going to need to reassure people who are on the edges of his political coalition that he’s OK.
And I think Haley helps him telegraph like, I’m OK. Normal people want to be around me and want to be part of my administration, if you consider Nikki Haley normal. I think it could really help defuse abortion as an issue because I think the two of them together could say, look, we agree with the Supreme Court that this should be decided by the states. They could also change their minds later, and that would be fine because that’s the way that our politics works. There’s a question about whether she would actually take the role, but I think —
No, there isn’t.
Yeah, I mean, she’s like a craven opportunist.
There is 1,000 percent no question about whether she would take the role.
Doesn’t the base hate Nikki Haley?
I don’t think it matters. The base hates Nikki Haley.
You don’t need to shore up the base with this one.
But they love, love, love Donald Trump. They don’t matter.
Ross, I’m assuming that you do not agree with this.
No, no, I completely agree with Lydia.
Do you?
I mean, not. No, I don’t — well,
You think that’s who he’s going to go with, not who he should go with.
No, I think it’s an airtight argument. Thank you, Ross, for validating that.
I think it is a strong argument. I don’t think it’s, like, take it to the bank, but yes, Trump has always liked, one, getting people who have been his rivals to bend the knee. Now, this is like a complicated situation, where Haley bent the knee and then broke from him. And she’d be bending the knee again.
Up and down and up and down.
But that’s fine, right? Part of Trump always wants to be in the good graces of the mainstream media, even though that’s sort of hard to imagine from his actual behavior. That is still there in him. He definitely wants to win the election.
The fact that he picked Pence, as opposed to one of his flunkies and toadies and yes men, even though Pence sort of remade himself as a yes man, showed that he can think strategically about these picks. And there might be someone else in the kind of establishment moderate zone besides Haley. But Haley is the one who has brand recognition at this point, and also people, I would not be reassured by Trump picking Nikki Haley. I haven’t written my anti Nikki Haley piece yet, but I have —
Preview, Ross?
Give us a preview.
I mean, I think Nikki Haley is a dangerous warmonger who would bring some of the worst tendencies of George W. Bush’s presidency into an administration that she influenced.
Dick Cheney in heels, as they say?
I’m not going to —
You’re not going to parrot Vivek?
I’m just saying I would not want US foreign policy in Nikki Haley’s hands at this particular juncture in history. That is my concern. But of course —
None of that would keep Trump from naming her.
I endorse Lydia’s logic.
So this is the window into Trump’s thinking that I am fascinated by because I agree with all of that logic. That said, I’m also interested in how it butts up against Trump’s loyalty issues. And there is a difference between mildly annoying him and, say, running against him, as Ron DeSantis can tell you, who has become public enemy number one of sorts in Trump world. Also, there’s the possibility that she would outshine him on certain occasions, which he cannot abide.
Also, the Mike Pence pick may have convinced him that he should just tell everybody to sod off who wants him to go in the strategic direction because that was such a disappointment to him. He went with Mike Pence when he didn’t want to because it was the smart thing to do. And he wound up with somebody who wouldn’t overthrow the Constitution in his favor or an election. And I don’t know how, on balance, this all comes out. So while I completely think your logic is what the smart way to go is, I don’t know if Trump is just so confident in his glorious popularity that he’s going to say, screw it, and go with somebody he prefers, like Kristi Noem —
So Michelle —
— the governor of South Dakota.
So make that case.
Yeah, who’s on your list?
Yeah, I mean, if he doesn’t go with Nikki Haley, then I would think he would go with somebody more like South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who has been a hardcore early endorser, been lobbying for the job hard, attractive, media savvy woman. No loyalty questions there. You know, she once gave him a replica of Mount Rushmore with his face added in, for God’s sake. She knows how to stroke that ego.
Well, I think, I mean, the other question with Trump is, to what extent does he want to be engaged with the day to day of running his presidency in the second term? Because who he picked right now —
Did he want to be engaged in the first term?
No, well, exactly. He was clearly not super excited, super motivated by it. So it was helpful to him to have a kind of Heritage Foundation approved vice president. And in his second term, if there is one, he’s going to have a thinner bench of experienced people to draw from, to staff his administration. So who he picks as vice president is sort of going to be a big signal — in a way, it’ll be a signal to people who would be on the fence about taking a job in the administration in the first place, whether they should come in.
To me, the issue with a pick like Noem or Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kari Lake — you ran through, Michelle, in the piece you wrote about this, a number of MAGA-friendly female politicians. The issue with a lot of those figures, unlike Haley, is it’s not clear, like, who they’re bringing in to staff a second Trump term, whereas if Trump’s view was, I’m going full populist, full MAGA in the second term, but I want a vice president who will be focused on all the policy I don’t care about, I think the natural pick for him would be JD Vance. I think there are various reasons why that might not happen, but someone like that, there might be other figures like that who are — I mean —
There’s another one that we haven’t gone into, which is Elise Stefanik, who has been debasing herself pretty significantly to wipe away all of her kind of moderate sins from early in her term and is very Trump loyal and has a lot of establishment ties and a lot of experience with leadership on the Hill.
Exactly, no, that’s true. And Stefanik, unlike Vance, doesn’t have any kind of policy portfolio or vision, but she would be able to say to Trump, I can manage the Hill for you.
Yeah, and I don’t know that Trump wants a policy portfolio. I mean, he has his vision —
He may not.
— of whatever, and there’s no indication that he wants to be a policy president. So I’m not sure that Vance brings that much that Trump wants.
He seems to care so little about governance that I can’t even imagine that he would pick a vice president on those grounds. He would say, like, well, I’m not really that focused on governance. I’m more the figurehead. But I need someone to be worrying about how to pass this legislation. Like, I don’t think he sort of views the presidency that way.
Well, but if he thinks —
I think we’re giving him way too much credit here.
He thinks —
I think he cares cares about winning. I think he cares about winning.
He cares about winning, that’s true.
And he cares about winning —
That’s all he cares.
— because he’s always cared about winning, but he also, he sees winning — and he may be right about this — as a way to get out of — it’s his get out of jail free card. Like, I mean, this is a guy who’s got legal hounds at the door, at multiple doors into his many-doored mansion.
Now here’s a question off of that, though — who among these folks — I assume every one of them would take it, which means that on balance, they think even what happened — does the Mike Pence example not disturb any of these folks?
I mean, risk of death is part of being in politics, right? I mean, it’s a —
No, I mean, I’m talking specifically about getting hanged.
It is high risk in a way that, obviously, a more normal vice presidential role isn’t. But it’s also a rare case where you’d be joining a president who would be a lame duck, like, well, I know probably, there is the —
Well, you think he’d be a lame duck.
Trump is going to be a dictator and run for a third term and so on scenario, and I’m sure we’ll get to that in a future episode. Assuming for the sake of argument that Trump is, in fact, not going to be president three times, then as soon as he’s elected, we’ll be starting to talk about 2028. And yeah, whoever is his vice president —
He’ll love that.
— will have a unique — well, no, I mean, yeah, he may sabotage that person, but they will still have an opportunity. Most vice presents come in, and it’s like eight years to go till you can be your own person. That’s not going to be the scenario here at all.
I know, but I do wonder, like, he so hates the idea that he isn’t singular. He would legitimately sabotage, kneecap his own vice president, just to prove no one else could do it.
That is true. Very early in a second Trump administration, he will begin the drumbeat that he should be allowed to run for another term because his first term was sabotaged and torpedoed —
Oh, hell yes.
100 percent.
Absolutely.
— by the Mueller investigation, by all the rest, so the first term doesn’t count. And this is not — I’m not being funny. Like, this is the most predictable thing in the world.
But also, depending on how things go at the Supreme Court he could dispatch SEAL Team Six to assassinate his vice president if they got to him. No, I mean —
That was not at the Supreme Court.
No, I know. What I’m saying, that the needle eventually, that argument will eventually be made to the Supreme Court, which hopefully they’ll reject, but.
I think the SEAL Team Six scenario is best saved for a future episode.
All right, fine, fine, fine.
OK, you guys are better at predicting. I can’t imagine — Nikki doesn’t fit any of the qualifications that I laid out. I can’t imagine JD Vance.
But Carlos, then, who is he picking? If he picks —
Yeah, who do you want, Carlos?
I don’t know.
Who fits your qualifications?
Because you can’t —
You can’t just do that.
No, no, no —
You can’t shoot down Nikki, and then say, badada.
No, but here’s what Nikki — first of all, Nikki wants to be president, would be running for president immediately. Nikki does not pass the loyalty test. And if you read “The Divider” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser —
Oh, my God.
— he said that he didn’t want Nikki as Secretary of State because he didn’t like her complexion. She didn’t look the part. I don’t think he thinks she looks the part of a vice president. Like, all the petty Trump reasons go against Nikki Haley.
I agree, but the most petty Trump reason of all is survival and winning.
Brilliant.
That’s my QED.
If Nikki Haley wins New Hampshire and there is more of a live presidential campaign between her and Trump, that could dramatically change the calculus.
That could get [INAUDIBLE].
I think it’s worth just throwing that in.
It’s early. It’s early.
We can save this for a future episode, but I think some wild speculation on who Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis would choose as their vice president. Would they choose Trump?
Hey, I’m all about wild speculation. Bring it on, babies.
There’s a moment when I will share with you how Jimmy Carter picked Walter Mondale. I just — it just kills me.
Can’t wait.
It kills me.
Your day will come, Carlos. Your day will come. It is not going to be today. All right, we’re going to leave it there. And when we come back, we’re going to get hot and cold.
Oh, god. It’s really good. I should tell you sometime.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
All right, friends, it is that time of the week when one of us gets our temperature taken, which sounds way weirder than I meant it to.
Whoa. Not appropriate.
But who’s going to get the hot coal this week?
Forehead-based. I am a hot little potato this week.
Woohoohoo! See? Go with it, Carlos.
Yeah, with an E at the end.
Alternate spelling.
Potato.
Thank you, Dan Quayle.
So, first of all, I have to start with the question, what were you all doing Monday night of this past week?
Oh, god, I know where this is going.
You see, I, like a real American —
Oh, you were watching football.
— was sitting on my butt with Tostitos and salsa, watching the college football national championship.
Pulling for Michigan?
No, I was not pulling for Michigan. As a proud graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a devoted fan of the Fighting Irish, I officially hate Michigan, but I still congratulate them on their victory. Hail to the cheaters. So —
Go, blue.
Shots fired.
I used to teach a class for the Michigan in Washington program and have lots of former students who are Michigan alums and they’re terrific. But all that to say is that I’ve been a college football fan for about more than three decades now.
And in that span, I have been subjected to super weird and super random ways to determine who won the championship that year. When I first became a fan, we had the bowl system, and different conference champions would have to play in different bowls, which meant that sometimes the best teams wouldn’t play each other at the end of the year. And then the Associated Press poll told us who the winner was, right?
Wow.
Which struck me as a little absurd. Then it got worse. Then there was the Bowl Championship Series, which was this complicated formula that would spit out who were the top two teams that would have to play each other at the end of the year.
Wow.
Then it got slightly better, but still bad, when this secretive committee gathered, and every week, released a poll of the top 25 teams. And in the end, the top four teams would play in the semifinals and then the two winners in the final.
So I am cold on all of those prior systems, and I am reasonably hot on a new system that will begin next year, which is the four-team playoff is being expanded to a 12-team playoff that still involves the conference champions and still involves the rankings, but will give 12 teams a chance to compete for the championship at the end. This may be partially colored by the fact that Notre Dame has a better shot of getting in —
That’s OK.
— a 12-team playoff.
You still have your biases.
I will admit that. But with all these weird things happening in college athletics these days, I am actually somewhat cautiously optimistic hot on the 12-team playoff that will begin in college football next year. Ask me in a year if I still feel that way.
Can we ask them to out the way that we elect presidents? Because it sounds like — it sounds to me like —
Oh, oh, oh, no.
— the electoral college.
I’d love to see a 12-team playoff.
Stick to sports.
There you go. There you go.
Guys, I’ll see you on the other side of Iowa.
Oh, wow.
Don’t say — come on, people.
Watch out for those corn fields.
Was that a song by Creedence back in the day, or?
Let’s just say, I will be your vice president, Michelle, anytime.
I will eat meat on a stick anytime.
There should be more meat on sticks.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Many thanks for listening, folks. If you had a good time, give “Matter of Opinion” a follow on your favorite podcast app. And while you’re there, go ahead and leave us a nice review. Also, we love hearing what questions you want to hear discussed, so send your ideas along to matterofopinion@nytimes.com. Or leave us a voicemail by calling 212-556-7440.
“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alice Bruzek. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Carlos, you have been so patient. Would you like to give us your story about Jimmy Carter picking his VP?
So why, yes. I mean, thank you. I don’t know how you realized that. So I recently read — I’m holding it up now. I know this is audio, but —
Ooh, it’s such a pretty blue.
”— Keeping Faith,” Jimmy Carter’s presidential memoir. It’s the worst of his many memoirs. But anyway, Jimmy Carter explains in great detail how he picked Walter Mondale, hashtag #MinnesotaPride for Lydia.
Woo!
And it’s a really good process. So first of all, he was a governor. So he realized, I need someone with congressional experience. So he started going through Democrats on the Hill. He said if he had his druthers, he just would have gone with Senator Frank Church or Senator Scoop Jackson, because he was comfortable with them. But he wanted to cast a wider net, so he and his staff looked at like 20 different people. They ranked them, and I’m going to tell you how.
We ranked them by their leadership ability, their voting record, their attractiveness, not physical, their attractiveness to key constituency groups, among whom I needed help, their campaign effectiveness, their experience where my own was limited, their geographical strength. The overriding consideration was how a person could perform the duties of president. He came up with a bunch, like John Glenn, Ed Muskie, Adlai Stevenson, Pete Rodino, and Walter Mondale.
Eventually, it comes down to Muskie and Mondale. And he chose Mondale, in fact, because Mondale had a really good pitch. Mondale came down to Plains and said, here’s exactly how I want to make this job be useful to you and productive for the country. That whole thing struck me as just a very sensible, reasonable, wide ranging process. Didn’t go with his initial gut, looked around, found someone he was comfortable with.
Wait, Carlos, is that the story?
Ross!
I mean, I love you. I love you.
No, it’s not a story.
We’re like brothers.
It’s a process.
And as your brother, I’m going to say —
It’s a process.
— that story did not live up to —
He is a process person. Have you not been listening?
All you’re saying is that Jimmy Carter ran a really responsible vice presidential —
Yes!
That’s the story?
That’s what thrills Carlos!
Why is that wrong? Why is that wrong?
I thought he was gonna say, he got down on his knees, and the Lord Jesus appeared to him.
No, no, no.