Jim Geraghty, who in my opinion is among the best political commentators, especially among those who churn out a column every day, has
a recent piece in which he recounts some of President Biden's liabilities, particularly, his lack of principles, and then engages in a fascinating bit of speculation about all that might have been save for one fateful 50/50 decision made back in 2008:
Back in the summer of 2008, Barack Obama and his top campaign staff had narrowed their options for Obama’s running mate down to two men: Biden and former Indiana governor and senator Evan Bayh. Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe quoted Obama as calling it a “coin toss” between the two men.
Geraghty goes on to say that,
Every now and then I think about how differently recent U.S. political history would have unfolded had Obama selected Bayh instead of Biden.
You figure this alternate history would have continued about the same as our reality until 2015 or so. A Vice President Evan Bayh, then age 61, would be likely to run for the presidency in 2016, and have a decent shot of knocking off then-69-year-old Hillary Clinton in the primary fight — an even-keeled moderate and reassuring Midwesterner riding Obama’s coattails, against all the Clinton baggage. It’s fair to wonder if Bernie Sanders becomes the phenomenon that he did in 2016 in this scenario.
It’s tough for one party to control the presidency for three consecutive terms, so perhaps the Republican nominee — maybe Donald Trump, maybe someone else — would have won the 2016 presidency. Wasn’t Republican fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency a major factor in the rise of Trump in the 2016 primaries? Without Obama picking Biden, we probably don’t get Hillary, and without Hillary, we might not have gotten Trump.
(We can probably assume that throughout the multiverse, there is no world in which Hillary Clinton won the presidency, at least not by running the way she did in our world in 2016. You can’t just refuse to visit Wisconsin for the final few months of a presidential campaign!)
Assuming Bayh hadn’t won the presidency in 2016, this means that in 2020, he would be in the top tier of candidates in that crowded Democratic field, although it’s possible Democrats would have dismissed him as the guy who lost to the GOP incumbent.
But in this scenario, Joe Biden probably retires from the Senate in 2014 or so. (Remember, Biden won his Senate reelection bid in 2008, while he was winning the vice presidency.) And no one would have been clamoring for a then-79-year-old retired senator to run for president in 2019.
If Obama had picked Bayh, Biden would probably have been an irrelevant afterthought on the political scene for the past decade, instead of the 46th president of the United States.
What’s more, without nominee Biden pledging to pick a woman as his running mate, we probably wouldn’t have ended up with Vice President Kamala Harris.
With different presidents in office since January 20, 2017, does the Covid pandemic turn out differently? Does the investigation into the origin get as forgotten as it has in our world?
Does Afghanistan turn out differently? Without the Afghanistan withdrawal proceeding as disastrously as it did . . . does Russia invade Ukraine in February 2022?
Does Hamas attack Israel the same way on October 7, 2023? Does inflation take off like a rocket starting in 2021? Do we see the same waves of migrants at the U.S. southern border?
The alternative is probably not utopia, just different problems . . . but it would be edifying to see if different choices in leadership would have resulted in better outcomes for the country and the world.
As we used to say, “Thanks, Obama.”
Geraghty's column led me to reflect on how much difference our seemingly insignificant choices make to the future of our families and our communities. We have no way of knowing, of course, but the fact that decisions which seem unimportant at the time can snowball into major consequences in the future should cause us to be a smidge more thoughtful when making them.