Veepstakes

The Meaningless Veepstakes

Why this season of speculation is the biggest waste of time in the election cycle.

By Jack Shafer

Like airline seats and hotel rooms, reporter man-hours are perishable inventory: If you don’t use them, you lose them.

This observation helps explain the surfeit of news coverage now falling on the veepstakes. The press—print, broadcast, online—bulked itself up with political reporters like never before to cover the 23 candidates who announced their White House intentions. In the opening months of the campaign, there was plenty of work to go around. But as the number of active candidates dwindled, editors needed to find assignments for their idle reporters. Now that we’re down to five legitimate candidates, what better low-stakes, make-work assignment is there in all of journalism than informed speculation on who the nominee (who has yet to be selected!) will pick as a running mate three months from now?

In recent days, the Boston Globe asked Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, who she might name as her running mate. “The best person to make the case to the American people,” said Podesta, always a sharp thinker. Women will be on the list, he said. CNN reported that Ted Cruz, who isn’t even leading the race for his party’s nomination, is vetting a number of candidates for the job, including Carly Fiorina. A Fiorina aide confirmed the story. Late last month, Politico ran a piece making the case for Vice President Al Franken. Bernie Sanders, who has about as much a chance winning his party’s nomination as Cruz does his, isn’t vetting anybody to serve as his running mate, as far as we know, but he has been happy to play the speculation game for Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin that Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who doesn’t appear to want the job, would make a fine vice president.

Of all the disposable news created during a presidential campaign, is there anything more disposable than the endless, tedious and hollow stories about who the candidates are considering to join them on the ticket? Yes, yes, the vice president is just a heartbeat away from the presidency, and that’s important. But coverage we devoted to the veepstakes resides more in the realm of gossip than it does news. Registering at almost the zero-information-content mark, veepstakes stories exist primarily to promote the self-interest of the candidates and their would-be running mates. There are phone books that provide more political nourishment than the name-slinging now masquerading as political journalism in your reading diet.

Just dip your toe in the recent coverage. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are saying “uh-uh” to the position. Meanwhile, a dozen are allowing their names to be “floated,” including Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), John Thune (R-S.D.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Govs. Terry McAuliffe (D-Va.), Nikki Halley (R-S.C.), Susana Martinez (R-N.M.), Brian Sandoval (R-Nev.), and Ben Carson, Janet Napolitano, Deval Patrick, and on and on.

Are you now or have you ever been in the Cabinet, in the U.S. Senate, served as a governor, or run for president yourself? Do you have a pulse? It’s a cinch that you’re already on some presidential candidate’s short list.

It is almost always advantageous to a presidential candidate to encourage early speculation about who his veep will be. For example, every story that begins with the words, “The names on Hillary Clinton’s short list for the vice presidency include … ” makes it sound more and more like she is her party’s presumptive nominee, burnishing her candidacy and diminishing her opponent’s. Sometimes it’s the short-lister and not the presidential campaign doing the name floating. Having your name in the mix makes you sound relevant and powerful within the party and encourages reporters to phone you for inside dope.

When properly floated, a veep short list flatters everybody named, making potential allies while alienating almost nobody. As long as campaigns color in between the lines, not naming anybody too ridiculous, the campaign gets a positive story. Meanwhile, the reporter gets a “scoop” that gets everybody talking but can’t be knocked down—like grocery lists, short lists are subject to constant revision. The minute it becomes politically worthwhile for a campaign to recast the list to include, say, a regional politician to attract the attention of a regional reporter, it can do so freely without suffering much in the way political consequences.

Short lists are also a great way for a candidate to play offense: The longer a campaign can persuade the press to run stories about their veep short list, the longer it can keep reporters playing fantasy politics instead of digging for hidden campaign dirt. Alas, the press is usually content to play along with the game, especially as primary season winds down and debates schedule expires. The hunger for news, even bogus, imagined news, must be fed. Count on reading these notional pieces about the next veep on a weekly basis until the conventions close up shop.

If you were to jot down all the bylines associated with veepstakes stories during the pre-convention period, you’d notice that many of them belong to either rookie reporters, who can’t find a meaty political story, or to lazy reporters, who can’t be bothered to look for a meaty one. Smart assignment editors tend not to throw their best reporters at the short lists for the same reason they don’t tend to waste them on other thin, superficial, meaningless and inconsequential stories. They are the confetti of political reporting, glorified listicles barely worth the keystrokes required to compose them. There’s no good reason to read a veepstakes story before July, when the conventions convene and the campaigns get serious about completing the ticket. Until then, you can safely take them off your own reading short list.