For this election, if Barack Obama is the opponent, there’s an obvious choice who seems to fit virtually all of the Arizona senator’s political needs: former two-term Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge.
In fact, Ridge was considered something of the front-runner to become George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000, when Dick Cheney — who was leading that search for potential veep — somehow ended up persuading his boss that he was the best choice for the job. McCain is unlikely to choose anyone as divisive as our current second-in-command. To win against Obama, McCain has several campaign goals:
* He has to win more than his share of the rust-belt swing states — such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and even Michigan — that are likely to decide the election.
* He has to do this by appealing to a large number of working-class, often Catholic swing voters in industrial states — the so-called Reagan Democrats.
* He has to convince enough voters that Obama is too inexperienced to handle the foreign-policy and terrorism threats facing the nation.
* And he has to hold the Republican Party together by discouraging a far-right third-party candidacy while maintaining his appeal to Independents.
Ridge — a 62-year-old Vietnam vet and President Bush’s first Secretary of Homeland Security — would help him accomplish all these objectives. First, he’d be an enormous asset in Pennsylvania, which John Kerry carried by only three percentage points in 2004. The same would be true to a lesser extent in Ohio, Michigan, and other crucial northern swing states.
Equally important, Ridge would reinforce Reagan Democrats’ attraction to McCain — a demographic that Obama has had difficulty courting. Take for example a recent New Jersey poll, which had Clinton leading McCain in the Garden State by nine points in a hypothetical match-up, while Obama trailed McCain by a few points.
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