Unity ticket: Choose Kinzinger for VP

In most election years the candidates for Vice President have little real effect on election outcomes. The most often cited exception to this is the presence on the long ago 1960 Democratic ticket of Senator Lyndon Johnson, who probably carried Johnson’s home state of Texas for the Kennedy – Johnson ticket. People now on Social Security were barely born in that year of JFK and LBJ. 

The rollicking politics of this year, however, may set the stage for a real and meaningful selection for Vice President.

The emergence of dynamic and charismatic Kamala Harris now provides the Democrats with a running chance to win. She is confronted by a veritable parade of conventional politicians clamoring to be her running mate. None of them offer anything of real substance to the country or to a winning Democratic ticket.

As the 2024 race was shaping up, Trump would have won. His cavalier VP selection of J.D. Vance from the safe state of Ohio does nothing for his electability. It does, however, manacle him to Vance’s medieval mindset on women’s issues.

The Democrats appear clearly more competitive now without Biden. For all the obvious reasons that identify her, Harris presents a dramatic break from the past. Depending on people’s internal instincts, it is one that breaks both ways.

I rarely have a political conversation in which there is not the sad lament that politics has become all negative. The unrelenting negative attacks drown out reasonable discourse. They magnify anger. They undermine our increasingly fragile democracy.   

I have yet to hear any serious proposal for building a bridge across America’s dangerous and potentially destructive divide.

Well, I offer one here. Kamala Harris’s running mate should be former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger. More moderate on the issues than his fellow Jan. 6 Committee veteran, Liz Cheney, Kinzinger’s integrity and courageous and principled recognition of the facts cost him his seat in Congress. He knew it would. He willingly placed principle above politics.

Kinzinger’s unflinching honor stands in vivid contrast to the outrageous record of hypocrisy and naked opportunism of Trump’s tainted VP pick, J.D. Vance. In addition, Vance’s medieval approach to women’s issues can serve only to deepen our national divide.

There is a clear opportunity for Harris to meaningfully reach out to a weary and discouraged American public by forming a unity ticket. Rather than a choice between two bad old choices, it would offer a clear and positive alternative for people to vote for.  

In doing so it would put the Democrats on the uplifting high road of openness and equality. It would leave the “Retrumplicans” on a low, narrow and dangerous blind-alley, leading away from what the people crave, and what they know their country needs. Division, after all, is what Trump runs on.

Team up against Trump. Plain and straight honesty, cemented by unity, is a combination that will beat him once and for all. Harrris and Kinzinger can do it.   

Bob Brown is a former Montana Secretary of State and state Senate President. He lives in Whitefish.