I’ll go on record again- I think Josh Shapiro would have been a horrible pick to be Kamala Harris running mate. If they had selected him, they would have been swallowed whole with questions about Gaza and foreign policy. As with any VP pick, I find it questionable that he would have actually converted over any voters who didn’t vote for Harris, in Pennsylvania or elsewhere. This isn’t really a knock on Shapiro, I think we can say Tim Walz really didn’t add anything positive in the end either, and he was the selection. I find it questionable that J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, Joe Biden, or Dick Cheney really moved the needle for their bosses, and they were all winning VP’s. Honestly, the selection is basically an albatross around the nominee’s neck under almost any circumstances, and most of them don’t even carry their home state for the nominee unless they were going to win it anyway. Shapiro would have been the same, which probably makes him no better or worse than anyone else she could have picked. I think Harris was going to eat a shit sandwich no matter what.

I think it’s obvious that the pot-shots both Harris and Shapiro have taken over the selection process for VP is entirely about 2028 primary politics. Now I also think they may genuinely dislike each other, which isn’t shocking to me, but we shouldn’t put a lot of real stock in what either says. She wants people to view him as a self-absorbed, overly ambitious white man and he wants to paint her as anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli. Well, both probably succeeded with some people, though I find both kind of silly. If anything, both are making Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker look like good options.

I’ve said this for a long time, and I think Donald Trump has proven it- it’s easier to get nominated for President than for Vice-President. Voters can decide what they care about from your baggage, but when you are considered for Vice-President, one person gets to judge your baggage. That person’s team gets to comb through your life and probe anything they want- and often all they are trying to do is see how you’ll react to being exposed, attacked, and prodded. They asked Shapiro about his connections to Israel, they asked Walz about his connections to China, God only knows what they asked Mark Kelly about. In 2020, Karen Bass was called a communist sympathizer in the press during the selection process, for a job she didn’t end up getting, and didn’t even end up with a cabinet job as a consolation. Is that worth it? I would say no.

If Vice-Presidents were picked in some other way, it would actually be a pretty good job. Your entire job entails breaking ties in the Senate and going out in public and selling the administration’s initiatives. You live in a great house at the Naval Observatory, you have a motorcade everywhere, and you have the top clearance in the government. It’s a great job. Getting there sucks. Frankly, it’s not worth the trouble. If I were interested in running for office, I wouldn’t bother with the Vice-Presidency. Is it worth all of this noise? No, just run for President at that point. If you’re going to take the beating, you might as well take it with a much more forgiving audience where you can make your own case. But I’m not psychotic enough to run for either right now.