#Barack Obama’s failures left a weak VP field for Joe Biden

A decline in Democratic wins for state and local seats during Barack Obama’s presidency means Joe Biden is compromised for choice when it comes to a running mate.
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Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama, really thinned out his party: Democrats in 2009 had controlled 59 percent of state legislatures and 29 governor’s offices, but by the end of Obama’s presidency they were down to fewer than a third of state legislatures and a rump of 16 governorships, while 63 Democratic House seats went Republican after Obama’s first midterm. Democrats were reduced to a status they had not endured since Warren G. Harding was in the White House.

Donald Trump has done a very fine job helping the Democrats to rebuild — a mad scientist in a laboratory couldn’t have created a more useful enemy — but their bench is still a little thin. Because Biden has been accused of creepy behavior, he’s promised to choose a woman as his vice-presidential pick, as though that would nullify his weirdness with women rather than highlight it. Because Biden is the author of an infamous crime bill very closely associated with mass incarceration — and very much objected to by Black Lives Matter and other left-wing activists, without whose support Biden will lose — he is under pressure to choose a woman who is not white.

The Democrats do not have an especially deep bench to begin with, and having written off all of the men and most of the white women (Elizabeth Warren, who has decided that she is not a woman of color, is still in the running), Biden is left with a relatively small pool from which to choose.

And so there is the very real possibility that Americans will have just “a heartbeat away from the presidency” someone such as Val Demings of Florida. Demings, currently serving in the House, was, until the day before yesterday, a cop down in Orlando, one who became chief of police a few years after her husband vacated the same job.

While chief, Mrs. Demings was censured for leaving her service weapon in an unlocked car, from which it was stolen, putting one more illegal gun on the streets when she should have been taking them off.

During her tenure, an Orlando cop broke the neck of an 84-year-old man by judo-flipping him over a car. Demings said the tactic was “within department guidelines.” That’ll be fun to defend on the trail.

She lost a House run in 2012 and abandoned a race for mayor of Orange County, Fla., in 2014 — that position is currently held by her husband — and had little success in politics until redistricting gave her a much more Democratic electorate and a win in 2016.

Demings is one of the best of those Biden is vetting.

Kamala Harris is a proven loser, having run a wildly incompetent primary campaign. Elizabeth Warren’s history of racial impersonation is not going to fly in 2020. Keisha Lance Bottoms is a mayor, and it is good to have that kind of executive experience, but she is the mayor of Atlanta, the municipal government of which is a sty of incompetence and corruption by her own estimate.

Former national security adviser to Obama, Susan Rice has never been elected to anything. She has a thick résumé, but what it is thick with is things like supporting the Iraq War.

Michelle Lujan Grisham is — have you ever heard of Michelle Lujan Grisham? She’s the governor of New Mexico, and has been since . .. last year. She was in the House before that and is chiefly remembered there for some unfortunate ethics shenanigans involving a junket to Baku with her fiancé that was secretly funded by the government of Azerbaijan, and being obliged to return some Azerbaijani gifts that were totally not a bribe. Shame about the rug.

I hate to be macabre about Joe Biden, and wish him the very best of health, but Americans will be looking especially closely at the understudy in November — President Biden would be 82 years old at the end of his first term. There’s nothing very wrong with Val Demings in the House or Michelle Lujan Grisham managing Texas’ summer home.

But, president?