MICHAEL CLAYTON FOR VEEP
This presidential year, the vice-president matters. Kamala Harris has a chance to pick a partner who will thrill many – and enrage the ‘weirdos’
The doddering debate performance by Joe Biden, capped (literally) by the bloody ear of Donald John Trump, should have sealed an artless deal: another four years of the dangerous Dumpster.
The Republican National Convention that followed the worst Secret Service protection since John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan, Press Secretary Jim Brady, a police officer, and an agent guarding the President in 1981 was a giddy, self-adulatory, well-bandaged affair.
God saved Trump, Trump said. And the faithful rejoiced. Every tasteless one of them. (That includes a salivating wolf pack of billionaires, proving once again that money can’t buy class.)
But then God looked down and mused to an archangel: “What an asshole! Nobody decides who I’ve saved but me. Let’s make this interesting.”
And so Jehovah whispered in Biden’s good ear: “Time’s up, Joe. Do the right thing, and I’ll forget you used to be a waterboy for the credit card companies, you let that disgrace-to-his-roots Clarence Thomas take a seat on the Supreme Court, and you bollixed up the Afghanistan exit.”
Joe heard the words of the Lord, plus a lot of lesser voices, and shuffled out of the presidential race. (Nobody fears the afterlife like a Sunday Catholic who was taught by parochial school nuns.)
But that wasn’t the biggest surprise. With the speed and agility of a cobra, Joe’s do-nothing vice-president – a failed presidential candidate in 2020 – nailed down enough support from skeptical Democrats to bury the dread of a Biden nomination, rally multiple wings of the party, excite young voters, and strike fear into the completely unprepared-for-Kamala (UFKed) Trumpsters.
Sad, though, that the sudden euphoria that has Democrats floating in Cloud 47 will not be enough to beat Trump.
The Democratic Party has a pre-existing condition that Obamacare doesn’t cover: It is genetically predisposed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Last week on The PBS NewsHour (Judy, please come home!), pundit Tamara Keith of NPR repeated the Washington boilerplate that it doesn’t really matter who the vice-presidential candidates are.
Love you, Tam, but you could not be farther off the mark. Doesn’t the disgracefully concealed Biden deterioration (at the least, deterioration in presentation) and the bullet, ricochet, or whatever that took a hundredth off an ounce off the most porcine President since William Howard Taft tell you Veep insignificance is an outdated notion in 2024?
This year, the man or woman beside the nominees of the two major parties (sorry, Nicole Shanahan), could help decide who next sits behind the Resolute desk. That is if the Democrats don’t once again AR-15 themselves in the posterior, Al Gore- or Hillary Clinton-style.
Oh, sure, the Dems have rolled out a list of white male pols who could fill the shoes Kamala is slipping off – Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg among them – each with up- and down-sides. And there’s also Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has struck a chord by tagging Trump & Co. as “weird.” (More on the weirdos in a coming column.)
But another professional politician on the ticket entirely misses the message of 2016 when America said “Enough!” to rubber-mouthed hacks trying to be all things to all people and instead chose Barabbas. (And btw, the Clintons should do the Dems a solid by taking a vow of silence and isolating in their separate bedrooms until November 6.)
Harris has hit the ground with Olympic stride, true, yet she could – like Trump – fall victim to overconfidence in selecting a running mate.
What Harris and the Democratic Party need now to demoralize and petrify Trump, already said to be rethinking his Vance Chance, is an August Surprise. Someone who will make the shallow MAGA-in-chief, a sucker for brand names and central casting, shudder and explode.
That someone, my pie-in-the-sky-eating friends, is George Clooney.
Yes, Clooney has no executive experience other than heading a movie production company. But he is an Oscar-winning actor and producer with a brain – a human rights activist, a Democratic stalwart, and a prodigious fund-raiser whose op-ed in The New York Times may have influenced Biden’s decision to step aside.
What he is not is a former reality-TV star with a troubled business record and a felony conviction.
Trump’s boy, Vance, has a compelling story and a “brilliant” (JD’s word) Indian-American wife. But he ain’t George. And that will make Trump, who attacked Clooney after the op-ed, bat**** crazy. Maybe even wild enough to ditch the hillbilly Yalie and embrace Nikki NoShame (see The Constant Tribune of July 9th).
The pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party might not be thrilled with Clooney’s wife, Amal, a noted British human-rights lawyer who was part of an International Criminal Court panel that last spring voted to charge both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar with crimes against humanity.
However, if Harris were elected, her husband, Doug Emhoff would not only be the first First Gentleman, but the first Jewish First Gentleman. So that’s kind of a wash.
Would George Clooney accept if asked? Probably not. But he would be doing the Republic – and democracy – an enormous favor.
America needs Michael Clayton.
The fixer.
The closer.
My Book Report
Reviews of new fiction and random older works you may have missed
By Deidre Depke
Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song won the 2023 Booker, but it didn’t really get the attention it deserved. A dystopian tale set in an Ireland of the near future, the novel tracks the terrifying descent of a society into fascism, with a weaponized national police force serving as enforcers. The allusions to Nazi Germany are obvious, as are the lessons for an America dancing with the collapse of its own democratic institutions.
Eilish is the novel’s heroine—a mother trying to hold her family together after her trade unionist husband is disappeared into one of the country’s new internment camps. Economic collapse and a civil war consume Ireland. “They are calling it an insurgency on national news,” one character says. “But if you want to give war its proper name, call it entertainment, we are now TV for the rest of the world.”
Lynch is a beautiful writer, lyrical yet with prose so searing it’s often painful to read. He structures the book without paragraphs or quote marks—a decision that gives the story an almost dream-like quality. It may also explain why the Prophet Song hasn’t found the wider audience it so very much deserves.
Beach Reads!
It's book-sale season, the time when local libraries in faux small towns try to finance themselves one 25-cent softcover at a time. I picked up literally more than I could carry at my local library’s sale, including Goodbye, Vitamin a 2017 novel by Rachel Khong.
The story is familiar: Ruth, a 30-something woman, moves home from the big city after a breakup. But Khong’s writing is touching, sure-footed and often hilarious. Her meditations on Alzheimer’s disease rescues a plot line that could be, well, sort of trite.
“City workers are removing the [Christmas] lights from the trees and the decorative bows from the lampposts. One man unties a bow and tosses it to his partner on the ground. All the great bright fold bows are piled in the bed of an enormous pickup truck. In that same plaza, a frustrated man is saying to his dog, ‘why are you being this way?’ A baby in a stroller is wearing sunglasses.”
Khong has a new, very-well reviewed novel, Real Americans. I haven’t bought it yet, mostly because I spent way too much money last month in a single trip to my local INDEPENDENT BOOK STORE (local means driving 18 miles and if I can do it, you can, too). Maybe I’ll find it at the library’s end-of-season sale. Hardcovers are only $1.
Fun piece. But Clooney would need to be more thoroughly vetted, and his embarassing 1997 portal of Batman could sink his chances.