David M. Shribman
Sometimes — if you focus hard and squint at what is in front of your eyes — future years can be glimpsed in a week’s time.
The country experienced just such an occasion in recent days, for what happened in the first week of August 2024 — and what almost happened but merely was contemplated seriously — might be the most important American political developments of our time.
Some years in the future, historians might examine what happened (and what nearly happened) to Josh Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and J.D. Vance this past week and conclude that the seeds of a new American political culture were planted in a period when much of the country’s people were splashing at the lake, walking along the seashore or lingering among the mountains. Big changes were set in motion.
First, Shapiro. The governor of Pennsylvania came inches from being selected as the running mate for Democratic presidential candidate Harris, the party’s new shining star who, only a month ago, was regarded as perhaps the least formidable figure on the American political scene.
Consider for a moment what almost happened, beyond the astonishing phenomenon of the Democrats resting their electoral prospects in a politician from Pennsylvania, home of the party’s worst president (James Buchanan, 1857-1861) and a massive state that has not produced a single major national political figure since Benjamin Franklin (who died 234 years ago). An aside to Keystone State chauvinists girding to fill my inbox with complaints: Hugh Scott (senator, 1959-1977) doesn’t measure up; his principal accomplishment was persuading another man, Richard Nixon, to resign, and in that effort a half-century ago this month, he was but the wingman to Barry Goldwater.
Now consider the group picture of the governing couples had Vice President Kamala Harris selected Shapiro as her own vice-presidential candidate, and had the Democratic ticket prevailed: a Black woman and three Jews. Not exactly Franklin, Eleanor, Harry, and Bess. Black people and Jews have been major elements of the Democratic coalition since the 1932 election. But the fact that this was contemplated — in a period of rising antisemitism when the Republican ticket sometimes seems to be playing the race card against the Democratic nominee — is breathtaking.
Now, Pete Buttigieg. The transportation secretary and onetime mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was seriously considered as Harris’ running mate. The whole world knows that Mayor Pete, as he is still sometimes called, is a gay man who is married and who, with his husband, Chasten Buttigieg (nee Glezman), has two children.
Exactly 60 years ago, the decision to select Hubert Humphrey as Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 running mate was related to the Minnesota senator — the first, we now know, of three Gopher State Democrats to be the Democratic vice-presidential nominee — by de facto White House chief of staff Walter Jenkins.
It was Jenkins who explained to Humphrey the expectations President Johnson had for his understudy: that he was not to have any public disputes with the president, that he should not allow any distance to come between the president and himself, that his speeches were to be vetted by the White House, that he must support the president even if he disagrees with him — a requirement that eventually arguably cost Humphrey the White House as he struggled to express his differences with the president on his Vietnam policies.
There is great significance in this vital but little-remembered tete-a-tete that filled out the 1964 Democratic ticket, but as Election Day approached, Jenkins was arrested in the men’s room of a Washington, D.C., YMCA and charged with disorderly conduct. His real “crime” was having consensual sex with another man. The Johnson White House, reflecting the view of gay people then prevalent, strained to explain away the behavior of Jenkins, who was married with six children, as the result of overwork and fatigue. Jenkins, who was perhaps the president’s closest confidant, was forced to resign and was dispatched to a hospital while Johnson commissioned an FBI investigation and suggested his aide’s conduct might have been the result of being drugged at a party.
Though the Jenkins episode didn’t affect the outcome of the election — Johnson easily defeated Goldwater, who refused to exploit the incident and who for decades was an advocate for gay rights — it was indicative of the prevailing view six decades ago. Jenkins died in 1985, three months after a federal appeals court upheld the Texas sodomy law. It is intriguing to consider what Jenkins, the onetime gatekeeper to the vice-presidential nomination, would think of how close Buttigieg came to being selected as Harris’ running mate.
The eventual selection of Tim Walz for that position tells us that, with all the identity politics in American life and particularly among Democrats, there remains room for a real-life nephew of the New Deal.
Walz is the personification of what the Democrats once regarded as the center of their constituency — a figure with military experience (Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry) from a reliably Democratic power base (winning Minnesota in 14 of the past 15 presidential elections). He is, moreover, a scion of a state party with the evocative legal name of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, created in 1944 only months before Franklin Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term but with a whiff of prairie populism.
What does all this mean?
The Shapiro and Buttigieg candidacies fell short, but the very fact that they were seriously considered is a signpost for the future of the Democrats — and perhaps for the country more broadly.
The immediate effect of these events and of the reception that Harris has received in the first blush of her presidential candidacy is to put Trump and Vance on the defensive, or at least to render them defenders of a misty past at the time the Democrats are hurtling toward a murky future.
Trump is running as a near-incumbent and has a fiercely loyal set of supporters. Both Trump and Harris are engaged in huge political gambles. Trump is, for now, the favorite. But his risk is in his slogan: Make America Great Again. The word “again” looks backward, while Harris is gambling that America, which has been a future-oriented country throughout its history, is going to look forward.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
