So ... pick a Dem to take out Trump in 2020.
Joe Biden: The upsides are party elders would favor ol' Joe over HRC. He can call in favors, and he has a unique ability to get away with ambushing women from behind, mauling them while slurping their necks. The cons are voter hunger for somebody, anybody new, his long-windedness even by D.C. standards, and those handsy pictures of him on GOP hard drives.
Beto O'Rourke: Charismatic, but thin resume. Slot him to the VP role.
Bernie Sanders: In an era of investigations into Trump's flirtation with the Russians, has Bernie ever explained how he chose, for his honeymoon, Cold War-era Moscow? But the freebie voter still loves him; that unique nor'ester accent has cachet. He might also get support from revenge voters by calling out Debbie (Blabbermouth) Schultz and her DNC screw job in 2016 favoring Hillary.
Cory Booker: A comer, a rising star. Also a highly dramatic blowhard. But he showed in college he can be creative: In the campus weekly he wrote against sexual predation by describing himself groping another student while she was pushing his hands away and saying no.
Kamala Harris: She outdoes Elizabeth Warren in her ethnicity bona fides--Tamil Indian mother, Jamaican father--so to the hyper-PC segment of the Democratic Party, she is manna from heaven.
Elizabeth Warren: After the November '16 election disaster, she was the angelic icon for a post-Hillary woman. But her tone-deafness since has set her back.
Michael Bloomberg: Are we serious? Not even his billions could induce voters, after stomaching Trump, to go for another arrogant New Yorker.
Amy Klobuchar: She is pleasant and from a Rust Belt state that carried Trump to victory. But better to just reserve, say, head of HHS for her, thus saving irrelevant clutter on the campaign trail.
Hillary Clinton: Really, folks? Just because she thinks she is The Avatar, and is a Clinton? If HRC has a heartbeat, she'll be running. Party suicide, anyone?
Sherrod Brown: Though essentially unknown, he already has a campaign slogan: "The dignity of work". His pitch will be, "I'm the only serious candidate from the Rust Belt (Ohio); the rest are bicoastal and we must regain flyover country to win the White House."
Anyone else: One poll says a new unknown is the way to go. So Kirsten Gillibrand? Why not the good-looking 29-year-old bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? With her policy ideas she is an embarrassment to the economics department of her alma mater, Boston University, but already her version of "democratic socialism" is the darling of liberal lions, despite never having served a day in public service.
This is going to be fun for political animals. Definitely weird. And, hopefully, above the squalor of the Access Hollywood tape.
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Joe O'Brien of Little Rock is an international management consultant.
Editorial on 12/31/2018