Vacancy in the blue corner

Ignore, if you can, the bruiser in the red corner. He might be dominating the headlines with his tweets, his sulks, and his love of all things Russian, but common sense tells us that he’s a one-punch wonder: a heavyweight who rose to power with one lucky haymaker delivered at the right moment. Donald Trump will never be considered one of the Greats of the Ring and, if he survives the next four year, there’s no way that he’ll retain his crown in 2020….

Except politics, like boxing, is rarely a sport that’s easy to read before the first punch is thrown. Our job is made even more difficult when we turn our attention to the vacant blue corner and those lining up outside the ring to become the Democratic challenger. It might be too early to make big pronouncements but those looking for a red fight-back certainly have few reasons to feel optimistic. The Democratic party could well have something of a problem. They have no obvious challenger to Donald J. Trump.

2020 might be a long time away but “a long time” is the very definition of most presidential campaigns. The race for the Democratic nomination began the moment Hillary Clinton lost the election back in November. That doesn’t mean that we’re ready for a new round of jazzy logos and snappy campaign mottos. At this stage, contenders are simply trying to get noticed amid the noise of ordinary (or what now passes for ordinary) politics. To extend our boxing metaphor: it’s about looking sharp as the fighters jab the air; trying to prove they have the graft, grace, and guile as they shadow box their opponent’s moves.

Yet what we have seen, thus far, hardly amounts to competent ring craft. The minority leaders of the Senate and House, respectively, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, are doing a half-decent job of providing an opposition given their limited resources but the politics of Congress are not the politics that lead directly to the White House. It’s leadership on the national stage that is notably lacking.

Obama is out of the running, of course, but also, apparently, out of the conversation. He’s kept quiet since January, even as events presented him with ample opportunities to respond to the paranoid attacks emanating from the Mar-a-Lago penthouse suite. His erstwhile deputy, Joe Biden, remains on the periphery, regretting not running in 2016 but also dismissing a bid in 2020. Biden would be the obvious figure to galvanise Democracts. He has a personal warmth which is so rare in politics as well as a knack of stealing the headlines with a cleverly constructed quip. Yet Biden will be seventy-eight in 2020. We might be in an age of medical wonders when the years don’t always carry the same ominous warning but there’s a limit to what even science can achieve. That’s why we should probably look beyond the other obvious leader. Come 2020, Bernie Sanders will be another four years older, increasing the problem that blighted his previous campaign. Entering the White House, he would be seventy-nine – or older than any president by the time they left office.

The next obvious rallying point would be at the Clintons’ door but the defeat looks like it sent Hillary into an existential crisis from which she is only now emerging. It might seem ridiculous to consider another Clinton run but there are a couple of arguments that fall in her favour. First: she’s still only sixty-nine, meaning that by the time it comes to the 2020 election she’ll be seventy-three, which is still older than any president but younger than Bernie Sanders would have been had he won the nomination last year. She would still have the distinction of being America’s first female president, able to argue that the longevity of presidents has always been measured according to the shorter lifespan of men. The second reason a bid might be possible: those factors that made her such a terrible candidate in the past have been somewhat negated by her defeat. The theme of the Clinton narrative was previously that of hubris. She now become the hero cruelly denied her victory by Russian forces.

Yet if Clinton was thinking to run, then surely this would be the moment she would begin to signal her intent. If one were to write this as a Hollywood movie, ridden with the usual clichés, Clinton would have taken the moment of her defeat to prove herself the leader she always wanted to become. As a former Secretary of State, she is placed better than nearly anybody to comment on the decimation of the State Department under Trump and the peculiar approach that Rex Tillerson is taking to the job. It might be easy to scoff but sentimental clichés are part of American politics and Hillary Clinton as bulwark to Russian intrusion into American politics would have been a powerful narrative to take forward.

The fact that this hasn’t yet happened suggests that even Clinton thinks that 2020 is a dream too far. Which means that we’re already beyond the big beasts of the Democratic party and have to look towards a younger set of contenders, would-be contenders, and should-be contenders.

Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker are two most often cited favourites to run in any future race yet, in different ways, each have failed to lead the resistance. Warren briefly shone when Mitch McConnell did her the enormous favour of silencing her Senate speech but there’s some logic to the rumour/quip that it was the White House that wanted her silenced in order to raise her profile. Warren is reportedly the opponent most favoured by Trump and it’s easy to see why. She is earnest but often too earnest in that way that’s self-defeating. Her words are measured but she lacks the physical presence to deliver them. A rather weak voice means that her oratory falls flat. Perhaps that’s an unfair reason to dismiss her chances but politics has little to do with fairness. She lacks, for want of a better word, that gravity that voters look for in a president. Booker, meanwhile, shines on the talk show circuit but, if his has the physical presence to hold a crowd’s attention, his rhetoric can be third rate and hollow. His moment to stake his claim came at the beginning of the Jeff Sessons confirmation hearings and it was stunning to see how little of that stake he claimed.

There are other names that are routinely floated but few, thus far, have done anything to catch the eye. Candidates such as California’s Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Senator Kamala Harris, and Senator Tim Kaine, have a certain presence in the national picture but, really, one is left waiting for their much-lauded magic to begin.

Those that do catch the eye are those providing the greatest opposition to Trump. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island cuts a believable figure with his anti-corporate message. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has opposed all of Trump’s nominations. Not because I’m a betting man – or even because I’m inclined to trust people who display a sense of humour – but my pick would be Al Franken.

Al Franken? I find myself going back to Franken. He might not be the obvious choice but no other Democrat has proved as effective as Franken in the past two months. There’s already a SuperPAC operating called DraftFranken2020 which aims to persuade the Minnesota senator to run for the party’s nomination. He would be a strong pick. Franken has spent much of his time in the Senate trying to persuade his colleagues that he’s more than a former joke-writer from Saturday Night Live. Yet, somewhat perversely, it’s that very quality which could make him the ideal pick. Franken’s questions led Jeff Sessons into trouble at his confirmation hearings. Franken also provided one of the highlights when he embarrassed Betsy De Vos. Franken is smart and has a ready wit. More importantly, he a character that easily fills the national stage. If Democrats have sense, they’ll push Franken to the fore. However, very little about the Democrats have made much sense since November and, arguably, for a few years prior to that.

In truth, it’s all so very early to reach conclusions. Obama emerged quite late to burst through the field to take the Democratic nomination in August 2008. There is time for the same to happen again. Yet what’s surprising this far out is how few of the contenders are genuinely making any running. Despite the popular “resistance” to the Trump presidency, no single Democrat has harnessed that energy to take an early lead. All of which makes one wonder if the race to 2020 might not be defined by some other factor. Was Oprah really joking when she said she’d consider a bid? Was Kanye West? Trump hasn’t just redefined Republican politics. He might well have set a precedent to be emulated by those with egos as big as their bank balances. We might be looking towards 2020 hoping that it will make a return to normality when, in fact, it could be the start of a whole new style of crazy.