Presidential nominees sometimes choose one of the candidates they defeated during primary/caucus season as their running mate for the general election. In that tradition, Washington Monthly blogger D.R. Tucker recommends that Hillary Clinton, assuming she’s the Democratic nominee, name Bernie Sanders to the ticket, adding that Hillary “would have to signal that [Sanders] would be something of a co-President, the progressive answer to Dick Cheney.”
Tucker sneered that “a Clinton-Sanders ticket would, of course, put the American right on suicide watch” and asserted that if the two were elected, it would “finally put the corpse of Reaganism into the ground once and for all. Sanders is the living refutation of Reaganism, and the Vice Presidency would provide an effective bully pulpit to push back against the false arguments made by those who still worship the false idol who was the 40th president of the United States.”
From Tucker’s Saturday post (bolding added):
If Clinton becomes the nominee, she will absolutely have to figure out a way to tap into the progressive energy Sanders generated during the course of the primary...
If Clinton did pick Sanders, she would have to signal that the Vermont Senator would be something of a co-President, the progressive answer to Dick Cheney…The prospect of a Vice President Sanders as an equal partner to a President Clinton would likely galvanize not only progressives, but moderates, centrists and even the conservatives who supported Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns in the 1990s (the ones who did so for economic as opposed to racial reasons, that is)…
A Clinton-Sanders ticket would, of course, put the American right on suicide watch. Think about it: after nearly a half-century of trying to crush economic progressivism in Washington, D.C., the American right would have to face the prospect of an undisputed economic progressive one heartbeat away from the presidency—an undisputed progressive whose views are well within the mainstream of American political thought. Roger Ailes and his pals at Fox News would find themselves reaching for the pills and booze.
You’d certainly see right-wing media entities do everything within their power to try to stop a Clinton-Sanders ticket from winning on November 8, 2016. Yet they’d likely fail—and their failure would finally put the corpse of Reaganism into the ground once and for all. Sanders is the living refutation of Reaganism, and the Vice Presidency would provide an effective bully pulpit to push back against the false arguments made by those who still worship the false idol who was the 40th president of the United States.
