Presidential hopeful John Kerry, and Senator John McCain for the Democratic ticket this November?

Word out of Washington, D.C. this morning has Democratic party Presidential hopeful considering five candidates for the Vice-President’s slot on the ticket: John Edwards, retired General Wesley Clark, Richard Gephardt of St. Louis, Senator Bob Graham from Florida, and Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack.
All and all, a pretty lacklustre group of potential running mates for a Kerry campaign already dogged by allegations of unutterable dullness.
Although there’s been some blue sky speculation / hopeful thinking about a John Kerry / John McCain Democratic ticket come November, The New Republic’s senior editor, Andrew Sullivan, goes a bit further than previous commentators.

In office, McCain could be given real authority as a war-manager, providing a counterweight to Kerry’s penchant for U.N.-style non-solutions … Domestically, a Kerry-McCain ticket would also go a long way toward healing the Vietnam wound, now rubbed raw again by recent events in Iraq … The next president, whomever he is, may well have to encounter seismic shocks from new terrorist atrocities in America and the world. Under those circumstances, America cannot afford more polarization, partisan division, and acrimony. In parliamentary democracies, such crises sometimes provoke the formation of a ‘national government’ in which both major parties serve together.

A United States government of national reconciliation? With each passing day, and as the position of the United States only continues to worsen — with the continued publishing and broadcast of horrendous pictures and video from Iraq, with the Bush administration’s failed policies on the environment, with the potential for a privatized education system, and a thousand other issues of concern to working Americans — VanRamblings joins the call for the Kerry campaign to implore John McCain to run on the Democratic ticket, to heal the wounds of division that have torn Americans apart, so that order might once again be re-established in the U.S., and the lives of each and every one of us will not be imperiled to the degree that has become the case under Bush.

Raymond Tomlin

Raymond Tomlin is a veteran journalist and educator who has written frequently on the political realm — municipal, provincial and federal — as well as on cinema, mainstream popular culture, the arts, and technology.

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