A Warm Bucket of Spit—The Tale of the American Vice Presidency— Part IV How We Got Here

2008 Democratic Presidential hopefuls at a debate early in the primary season.  They fell one after another until it was down to two.  Losers go on VP short lists.  Left to right--Senator Joe Biden, Sen. Christopher Todd, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, Sen. Barack Obama, former Sen. John Edwards, Representative Dennis Kucinich, Sen. Hillary Clinton, and former Sen. Mike Gravel.

Note—Bringing the story up to date.

The election of 2008 shaped up as a referendum on unceasingly unpopular George W. Bush presidency, Democrats were favored to take back the White House after already reclaiming majorities in the House and Senate two years earlier.  After Al Gore a gaggle of candidates entered the race, but conventional wisdom declared that the nomination was Hilary Clinton’s to lose.  Minor candidates quickly went by the wayside or remained in the race only symbolically.   Pretty boy Senator John Edwards of North Carolina and running mate of John Kerry in 2004 showed early strength running as a progressive populist but quickly faded. 

The race narrowed down to a contest between Clinton and the very junior Senator from Illinois, Barak Obama who had rocketed to the national spotlight on the basis of his memorable Keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention.  A long and sometimes bitter primary season see-sawed between the two leading candidates.  But by early summer the charismatic Obama, buoyed by heavy registration of young and minority voters surged ahead to what looked like an insurmountable lead.   But Clinton vowed to stay in the race to the convention and her supporters mocked calls for party unity. After Obama became inevitable there was a noisy flurry of Clintonistas—mostly women—vowing never to support Obama in November no matter the consequences.  But it turned out many of those stirring that pot were Republican plants and shills in a classic dirty tricks operation re-tooled for an era of bloggers.  Most resentful Democratic women quickly got over it and showed up in droves to support Obama in November.   

Joe Biden and Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Obama’s Vice Presidential choice surprised many.   Delaware Senator Joe Biden was a longtime Democratic fixture who had made an abortive run for the nomination way back in 1988 and was one of the tribe of contenders quickly eliminated twenty years later.  Avuncular and folksy he strongly connected to White ethnic working class voters whose security even then was being threatened by an out-migration of jobs from older industrial communities.  He had endured unimaginable loss when between his upset victory in his first Senate race and his swearing into office when his young wife Neilia and one year old daughter Naomi were killed and young sons Beau and Hunter were injured in an automobile accident in 1972.  A shaken Biden turned to his Catholic faith for support and became a dedicated single parent.    To maintain a stable life for his sons with a network of family support, he kept his full time residence in the Wilmington suburbs and commuted each day to Washington via a 1 ½ hour Amtrak ride.  

In 1977 Biden married teacher Jill Jacobs and began to build a new strong family as both pursued their careers.  Jill went on to get a Ph.D. in education while teaching in high schools, a psychiatric hospital, and at the college level.  In 1981 the Biden welcomed daughter Ashley.  The unusual attention given here to the Vice Presidential candidates wife is because she quickly became the fourth member of a tightly bonded team with her husband, Barack and Michelle Obama.  Their relationship on the campaign trail and continuing into office were even closer than that of the Clintons and Gore.  Michelle and Dr.  Jill, who became the first spouse of a President or Vice President to hold a paying job as an  adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA),  worked closely together in high profile support of children’s literacy and in support of veterans.  

Sarah Palin was more than outmatched by Joe Biden in the Vice Presidential debat

On the other side, Arizona Senator John McCain, the former Navy pilot and prisoner of war in North Vietnam, finally secured the Republican nomination despite the opposition of the parties growing ultra-right who regarded his occasional departures from conservative orthodoxy as a self-described maverick made him a traitor.   To shore up his shaky right wing and to appeal to those largely fictional feminists who would not support Obama shortly before the convention he made what looked like an impulsive, but dramatic choice of a running mate—Alaska Governor Sara Palin.  She certainly roused the red-meat right, but her bizarre   pronouncements, fractured syntax, and seemingly willful ignorance quickly made her a national laughing stock.   In the end McCain’s choice called into question the basic soundness of his judgement.   The rock-steady Biden, by contrast, did much to boost his Black running mate with the white working class.

Biden was an exceptional engaged and involved partner with President Obama especially on foreign policy.  In the Oval Office in 2013 meeting with Palestinian and Israeli negotiators.

In office, Biden maintained the close relationship.  As an experienced foreign policy expert he was included in all of the highest level national security discussions and was a close collaborator with the President and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Obama and Biden continued the recent tradition of regular meeting and easy access to the Oval Office.  The President entrusted him with numerous special projects and commissions, including as coordinator for a national push to cure cancer.   

In 2012 Biden was once again an energetic and effective campaigner in the successful re-election campaign against Mitt Romney and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, an architect of an unpopular government shutdown in a refusal to raise the debt limit.  Despite predictions of a close race the Obama/Biden ticket won 332 Electoral College votes to Romney/Ryan’s 206 and had a 51–47 percent edge in the nationwide popular vote.

Biden was often mentioned as a potential 2016 presidential candidate, especially if Hillary Clinton, who delayed tipping her hand well into 2015, decided not to run.  When his son Beau, then serving as Delaware Attorney General, was on his deathbed with cancer, he appealed to his father to run, and emotional Biden would later reveal.  In the end he declined to run and spoke kindly of both Clinton and Bernie Sanders.  But some Party leaders who became nervous that Clinton would falter or even be indicted in a minor but persistent e-mail server scandal, considered Biden a possible fall back to keep the nomination falling to left socialist/populist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.  He apparently did nothing to encourage the idea.

Clinton secured the nomination but faced an irreconcilable Sanders base.  Burdened by a bitterly divided party, Clinton lost, to everyone’s amazement, to a slimy real estate mogul and TV celebrity.  She won the popular vote but once again narrowly lost the Electoral College.

Before it all fell apart--Donald Trump and Mike Pence, the Whitest man in America.

Donald Trump tapped colorless in more ways than one Indian Governor Mike Pence as running mate to shore up his credentials with evangelical right and Christians not convinced that the twice divorced and sexually scandalous candidate was truly righteous.  Mission accomplished.  In office Pence became a point man against abortion rights, marriage equality, and the transgender.  He also was an effective Trump surrogate loyally supporting his boss through every new scandal or word hash eruption.  Although he preferred the guidance and confidence of his personal circle including daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner and his press secretary Hope Hicks over that of his official Cabinet, many of whom he distrusted, he did regularly meet with Pence and was happy enough to keep him on the ticket for his re-election campaign in 2020.

Former Veep Joe Biden finally eliminated his rivals and secured the Democratic nomination.  He  picked former California Attorney General and Senator Kamala Harris because he had promised to choose a woman, to shore up Black support, and because of her vigorous, prosecutorial examination of Trump officials and insiders in Congressional testimony. 

Despite an unwavering base, most voters were tired of his serial outrages and antics, and swept Trump out of office on narrow wins in a handful of contested states for a comfortable Electoral College majority.  Trump went into an unprecedented fit and began charging the election had been stolen and that he had been cheated.  He not only refused to concede defeat he had his associates, minions, and loyal dupes launch attempt after attempt to overturn the results in swing states and made increasingly desperate suggestions that his supporters might need to rise up, possibly violently, to prevent Biden from taking office.  Republicans in some states tried to avoid certifying their Electors and to substitute slates of hand-picked loyalists.  One by one state and Federal courts dismissed wild law suits.  Through it all Pence loyally stood by his boss until the game was almost up.

Congress was set to officially accept the December vote of lawful Electors on January 6, 2021.  Trump pressured Pence for days to refuse to sign-off on the certification vote.  Famously, that was a line the Vice President would not cross.  He announced that he would follow the law.  Trump went on the attack immediately.  At a Washington street rally that day, Trump excoriated Pence and the crowd took up the chant “Hang Mike Pence!”  They marched on the Capitol and laid siege to it, eventually breaking in sending Senators and Congressmen scattering to safety.  The mob had brought their own gallows outside the building supposedly to hang him.  Pence barely escaped to a “secure location.”

 

On January 6, 2021 supposedly spontaneous marchers besieging the Captiol brought a scaffold with them to hang Mike Pence.  Inside the Vice President had to be whisked to a "safe location" as mobs surged through the building.

The official certification was conducted that night.  Biden and Harris were inaugurated under tight security on January 20.

In office Harris did not enjoy the same close relationship that Biden had with Obama.  Although always in the loop, the President did not seem to rely on her for critical decisions.  She was given a more limited portfolio including the hot potato issues of border security and refugee rights.  She was used as a mostly ceremonial stand in for the President internationally.  She carved out her own space as the administration’s most fierce defender of reproductive rights and women’s equality.

Despite reservations by some in the Party, Harris remained on the ticket with Biden for his apparent rematch against Trump, a political vampire who wouldn’t stay dead.  Outside of a loyal, but perhaps unenthusiastic base  many voters were unhappy with the choices at the top of both tickets, especially as Biden’s health and fitness came increasingly into question.  After a disastrous debate, the pressure built ever stronger among powerful Democrats and the public for Biden to withdraw from the race.  Which he reluctantly did endorsing Harris.  

Kamala Harris--Veep one day, presumptive Democratic Presidential  nominee the next already on the stump re-energizing voters.

Her emergence as the candidate has been met with great enthusiasm especially among women and African-Americans.  Record donations poured into the campaign from megadonors and in small individual gifts.  Voter registration has soared, and polls show a narrowing race with Harris showing momentum in critical swing states.

Now Harris turns to selecting her own running mate before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

 

 

A Fresh but Flawed Heidi Chronicles at Black Box Theater

There is something more than a little ironic seeing the iconic feminist set piece The Heidi Chronicles three days after the title heroine’s near contemporary unexpectedly lost the Presidency to a boorish lout and bully.  Perhaps especially because the character and the politician were products of such similar backgrounds as intelligent, highly accomplished women from an elite academic background and high professional ambitions.   Both grew up with the rise of the women’s movement and moved into adulthood in times of tumultuous cultural changes.

The play was mounted at McHenry County College’s more than ordinarily ambitious Black Box Theater under the expert guidance of veteran director and theater teacher Jay Geller who routinely mounts productions that stretch the limited expectations of community college productions.  In fact productions at the Black Box which mix student actors, graduates, and occasional professionals, are consistently among the best stage offerings in McHenry County.

The Heidi Chronicles came close to that standard but fell a bit short for reasons not entirely under the control of the director or the attractive young cast.

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein.

Wendy Wasserstein’s 1988 play was highly acclaimed and won both Tony and Pulitzer Prize honors.  Hailed as a feminist masterpiece it became a staple for community and college theaters and has been frequently mounted by urban companies, both professional and earnest small troops. 

It is sometimes compared to another acclaimed feminist play, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues which premiered just eight years later in 1996.  Heidi suffers by comparison.  The Vagina Monologues was a much grittier play and a braver one.  Wasserstein’s play seems frozen in amber by the 25 year time span it documents.  Ensler’s work is fresher for being ever evolving and regularly adding new monologues that reflect current events and taking an expansive world-wide view of women’s experiences.  Heidi’s elite world seems cramped and the conflicted angst of its denizens somewhat shallow as both of the major male characters—the smarmy sometime love/lust interest and the glib gay man best friend ironically point out.

In a lot of way the play represents the obsessions of many of the leaders and shaping thinkers of the Feminist movement, many of whom came out the same Seven Sister School backgrounds and the self-contained world of New York intellectuals.   Even the founders of MS Magazine at first seemed to be concerned mainly with establishing powerful careers, achieving autonomy from reliance on men for validation, and “having it all.”  The struggles of working class women, women of color, or even middleclass homemakers and mommy-trackers who were often cast enemies, seemed utterly alien to this brand of sisterhood.

That was certainly the problem that my deeply feminist wife Kathy had with the production.  She is a working class girl from Chicago, a last-minute high school dropout, young bride then struggling single mom of two who after working since she was 14 finally found a career path in mid-life, got her B.A. and Masters Degrees in years of night classes, and became a respected religious educator.  She found almost no common ground with the characters presented to her and hardly recognized their struggles as Feminist.  

Kathy was most deeply offended by Wasserstein’s portrayal of a consciousness raising rap group set in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1970, just as the women’s movement was making a sharp, militant turn and flirting with angry separatism.  Urban groups like that were an important part of Kathy’s development and a source of support and encourage.  Here the women are reduced to symbolic stereotypes—the recently empowered housewife, the high school girl victimized by her parents discovery of the sexual revolution, the cultural faddist, and the angry lesbian—in the play’s most comic scene.  The women in it, or variations on them, will show up through the rest of the play in the vignettes of Heidi’s life, all of them highly successful but profoundly disconnected and ambivalent.

So, ok, let’s take the play for what it is and not try and blame it for what it never set out to be.  The play stretches from a high school dance at a toney girl’s prep school in Chicago in 1965 to a New York loft apartment in 1989.  Wasserstein tracks the changes whirling through her episodic play with a heavy reliance on pop music—the kind of soundtrack-of-your-life trick borrowed from innumerable romantic comedies—and a slew of casual cultural references meant to set the audience’s head’s nodding with knowing understanding.

But in 2016, a couple of generations after the play’s blackout, director Geller recognized the inherit problem of staging it for a new audience.  His semi-clever answer was to include a five page glossary of the references in the program ranging from the esoteric Renaissance women painters that art historian Heidi references in her opening lecture, but such jaw-droppingly obvious ones as Richard Nixon and John Lennon whose resignation and memorial service were symbolically coincidental with scenes from Heidi’s life.

Try as they might, the earnest young cast can only glibly reel off the references without always seeming to understand their significance through no fault of their own. 

The Friday night audience was the sparsest I have ever seen at a Black Box production—only about 30 people leaving plenty of empty seats in the intimate performance space.  About half were, like Kathy and I, Heidi’s contemporaries.  The rest were student age or just past.  Judging from the reactions, a lot of those references went over the heads of the younger members but elicited knowing but subdued chuckles from us geezers. 

By the way, Kathy drew my attention to the absence of men in attendance.  Including myself there were just 5, another older man with his mate, and a young gay couple.  Most McHenry County Trump era men could apparently not be dragged to the theater for a Feminist show.  Friday night is date night, Kathy observed.  Presumably men dragged their women to the action-movie-of-the-moment instead.

The cast and the crew: Front row left to right: Matthew Torres, Samantha Catalano, Lara Bell, Jess Piekarski, Monica Hauschild.  Back row left to right: Sean Plotts, Sam Prather, Emily Piesens, Kacie Swanson, Celia Villacres, Vince Calucci.

Still, the play was not without its charms and rewards.  Emily Piesens was appealing as Heidi—beautiful, brainy, emotionally cut off, confused, and conflicted.  The two male leads were also powerful to the point of scene stealing, which worked most effectively when both show up on a morning TV panel and completely override Heidi. 

Sean Potts as best pal Peter Patrone has to overcome being written as too arch, but redeems himself and his character in what is play’s most potent emotional moment as he lashes out in anger and grief as a Gay man who has attended too many memorial services for AIDS victims and calls out Heidi for her blithe self-absorption.

Vince Calucci nailed Scoop Rosenbaum—swaggering, glib, charismatic, exuding unctuous charm with a sincerely thin veneer of idealism and a reservoir of ambition.  He is the bad boy Heidi falls for and can never quite get over although she knows every one of his many faults.  Meant to be a shameless cad, in Calucci’s hands Scoop is none-the-less more human and sympathetic than the parade of Heidi’s two-dimensionally drawn friends.

For me the epiphany of the night came in the first act closing scene where Heidi confronts Scoop at the wedding to the woman he is settling for to facilitate his career.  Heidi is clearly better off without him but can’t quite let go as the lights dim and the two dance as the bride awaits in the ballroom.  It occurred to me that Hillary Clinton—even more talented and ambitious than Heidi—married her Scoop Rosenbaum and stuck with him through triumphs and humiliating shenanigans that would have made Scoop himself blush.

The play ends with Heidi alone in her new nearly empty apartment rocking her newborn child to sleep.  Content?  Well maybe just for this one moment.

That ending proved to be an omen in Wasserstein’s own life.   In 1999, ten years after the closing scene, she gave birth to a daughter at age 48.  Six years later on January 30, 2006 she died lymphoma.  The lights of Broadway dimmed in her honor.