The most remarkable thing about John Kerry's selection of John Edwards as his running mate is that Kerry was actually responding to the wishes of his party. Across the nation over the past several months, there was a groundswell of support among Democrats for adding Edwards to the ticket -- a groundswell unprompted by any organization or distinct constituency within the party. And this was something new under the sun.
Vice-presidential options don't engender groundswells. I cannot think of a single instance in 20th-century American politics -- certainly not since the first election of Franklin Roosevelt -- when ordinary members of one of the two major parties coalesced around a vice-presidential pick before the presidential candidate did.
Specific elites, to be sure, have had their preferences. In 1944, the Democratic Party bosses in major cities came together to urge Roosevelt to dump incumbent Vice-President Henry Wallace in favor of Harry Truman. But coming together to oppose an incumbent is quite different than uniting around a new candidate; in addition, the support for Truman was confined to a small number of organizational capos and businessmen. An even smaller number of New Deal insiders, led by Tommy Corcoran, were backing Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, while union leaders and the party's left wanted FDR to keep Wallace on the ticket. In the end, Truman prevailed, though a plurality of rank-and-filers supported Wallace.
In 1956, presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson threw open the vice-presidential contest on the final day of the national convention, stating he'd run with whomever the delegates selected. Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver defeated a young Massachusetts senator named John Kennedy, but in the one-day contest among delegates, the opinion of the rank-and-filers back home was impossible to ascertain and mattered not at all.
As a general rule, party regulars don't have a clear preference for upcoming vice-presidential picks. This year has proven the exception. Most party activists I've spoken to from across the country, regardless of their presidential preference in the primary process earlier this year, came around to Edwards at some point in the past three months. Polling on the topic revealed an overwhelming plurality for Edwards in a multi-candidate field. In an Associated Press-Ipsos Poll from mid-June, Edwards won the support of 43 percent of registered Democrats, followed by Dick Gephardt at 19 percent, Wesley Clark at 18 percent, and Tom Vilsack at 4 percent, with the remainder of the vote scattered among the other possibles.
My sense is that just as Democrats came together around John Kerry as the presidential candidate most likely to beat Bush, they came together around Edwards as the vice-presidential candidate most likely to help the ticket. Edwards was surely the most compelling campaigner in this year's presidential field; his deficiencies were those of biography, in which John Kerry had him beat by a mile. With Kerry heading the ticket, the Democrats had disposed of the gravitas gap and acquired their national-security bona fides. What they needed was populism, a common touch, and a candidate who felt at home on an Ohio farm. The drumbeat of support for Edwards at all levels of the party was constant and growing -- a fact of which John Kerry was perfectly aware. In the end, he picked Edwards, but the party got there first.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.
