This trial ballon has been floated in a The Hill Op-Ed….
The ballon should be filled with lead…
There is simply NO WAY Joe Biden will put Bernie on his ticket and get away with it among the Democratic establishment and no way Bernie Sanders would accept this…
BY MARK Y. ROSENBERG…
….Fortunately, there is a solution that will leave seasoned analysts of U.S. politics aghast but seems perfectly natural to a comparative political scientist like me. The Democrats must form a coalition. The presidential ticket should be Biden-Bernie, or even Bernie-Biden. And together they can defeat Trump and the Trumpist GOP.
Isn’t Bernie a socialist with an unrealistic, left-wing policy agenda? Is Biden too emblematic of the party establishment? Perhaps so — but so what? Both agree that defeating Trump is the party’s overwhelming priority. Biden is strongest with African-Americans and suburban whites; Bernie with younger voters, both white and Latino. A joint ticket enables Democrats to maximize turnout and spend the next six months negotiating unity rather than exacerbating disunity. This was true after Iowa, and it is still true today.
Prominent Bernie supporter and leftist superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has already laid the groundwork for this political constellation, probably unintentionally. Ocasio-Cortez claimed that in another country – say, one governed by a parliamentary system – she and Biden would be in different political parties. That’s true; and that’s also the point. In a parliamentary system, moderate Democrats and Democratic socialists could, and almost certainly would, form an electoral coalition to displace Trump. The winner-take-all nature of the U.S. electoral system (including, somewhat uniquely, party primaries) mitigates against this outcome — but it does not have to. Given the overwhelming, mutually agreed prerogative of beating Trump, there is no reason why the Democrats should not unite in order to do so.
To be sure, U.S. presidents generally do not pursue a “team of rivals” approach to governance, especially before an election. And the bad blood between the party establishment and the Sanders camp is clear for all to see. But then the urgency of uniting to defeat Trump is even clearer.
Helpfully, this majority coalition already has a perfect name: The democrats. Just emphasize the lowercase “d.”….
image…Politico
The ticket would make perfect sense to me, if the two candidates didn’t share so many of the same demographic characteristics: two white men older than 75 from the Northeast who did not serve in the military and don’t speak Spanish. The only point of diversity outside politics is their respective religions (cf. Gore-Lieberman).
It’s also probably not the smartest choice to have another septuagenarian as your putative successor if you cannot complete your first term.
Were it not for that and for all those similarities (which make the two of them rather different from many groups of voters). a Biden-Sanders ticket would make a lot of sense.
FDR certainly had a team of rivals in his administration, and ran twice with someone of very different politics (vastly more different than Biden & Sanders): House Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas. Adlai Stevenson had to balance his tickets with two Southerners: John Sparkman in 1952 and Estes Kefauver in 1956.