The most important Democratic VP nomination since 1944

C'mon, Biden-stanners.

Admit it. You're worried about Status Quo Joe's health. Trump makes "word salad having a stroke" simply because he's a babbling egotistical idiot with a high, solipsistic ego level for a career business CEO or a president.

Biden has recently made "word salad that sounds like it comes from having had a stroke, or at least a mini-stroke." And, we have a history of this in our chief execs. Woodrow Wilson, and his wife covering for him.

(Do you really think this is just a stutter, or his attempts to control one? If so, then why hasn't it been this bad before?)

FDR, of course, hadn't had a mini-stroke by summer 1944, as far as we know. But, FDR's health started going downhill after the late 1943 Tehran Conference. And everybody knew it.

And Dems claimed that FDR would lose with Henry Wallace as vice president again, and FDR accepted that James Farley and AFL labor leaders were correct. It's true that Wallace did turn out to be kind of naive about the USSR during early Cold War years. And? FDR was kind of naive during the war. It's also true that FDR had killed the Bureau for Economic Warfare in 1943, but that appears to be more a turf battle issue than Wallace mismanagement. It's also true that FDR did not pick him to run the War Production Board established in 1942. So, it's possible that Wallace wouldn't have been a good prez.

As for Truman being a boon on the ticket? The 1944 election results were little different from 1940. Roosevelt was down 17 electoral votes and just over 1 percentage point in 1940. How much Truman kept him from falling even further is unknown. What is known is that Dem bosses thought Truman a centrist and a safe pair of hands.

As for 1960? LBJ was important for JFK's election. But (other than doing far better on civil rights than Jack would ever have done), he wasn't important for US history, and certainly wasn't seen so at the time. Nobody expected Jack's assassination, of course, and how many top Dem insiders knew much of anything about the reality of Jack's Addison's Disease is an open question.

Elizabeth Warren would be the least bad of Biden's options, but I doubt he'll pick her. He's going to want to go younger, IMO, and also possibly minority. That means Kamala Harris. People who know know about her "cop" record as California AG and her playing footsie with a Mnuchin bank. Joaquin Castro is probably a bit of an unknown, and I think Biden wants a woman. Amy Klobuchar might be nice, but if it's not Harris, it's likely Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. I think she would be better than Harris. But that's a low bar. Whitmer will have the flip side of opponents to her tough stand on sheltering in place pushing themselves forward elsewhere.

And, while Barack Obama needed to show the general public a safe pair of hands as his Veep, since he was trying to be the first black president (and then fucked America by claiming to be the first post-racial one instead) 2008 wasn't as important as this year. For people who weren't racists, Obama had some level of competency, obviously, and plenty of good health.

Update, May 21: "Vetting" Klobuchar doesn't make her his choice, and we don't know who leaked this — her staff or his. But, if Biden really is leaning that way, he's a bigger idiot than Hillary Clinton over Tim Kaine.

Update, May 28: A note from the flames of Minneapolis. Amy Klobuchar is the former DA for the Twin Cities who batted 0-for-30 in trying to convict bad cops. From that link to the original story in the NYT, noting that in more than two dozen cases, she didn't use her discretion to file charges herself, and instead punted them to a grand jury. And more here. And here. Maybe, if she had done something, he wouldn't have engaged in more police brutality after she went to the Senate.

Update, June 12: Klobuchar put a black teen behind bars for life for a non-murder level killing in a case that is badly if not fatally flawed.

Sidebar: If you really need shaky claims by Tara / Whomever Reade to vote against Biden, you've got problems otherwise.