Hillary Clinton's running mate...you heard it here first

Schwing!!!

Oh, Samuel Locklear.

I’m not familiar with his work.

Was there a rumor in the news about this, I don’t see anything. Or just a guess?

It’s my guess. And I think it’s a good one if you look into his military record and his comments about climate change.

There hasn’t been a PEEP about him politically.

Would she go with someone that no one has ever heard of before? I don’t see it happening. Looking forward to seeing if your prediction comes to fruition though.

FAIL!

/ahem

Looks like Samuel Locklear’s the choice. Very smart move by Clinton.

(You’re welcome.)

? I haven’t seen this confirmed on any of the usual news sites. Where is this information coming from?

Mr_Peach wasn’t being serious (yet). Callback to the Palin days.

Hillary hasn’t done anything yet. She’s not going to pull a Ted Cruz. Although I would love to see her do it just to see the reaction of the hard core Bernie supporters.

Well, we know one person who isn’t making the list…

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe being investigated for campaign contributions. As Harry Enten put it on Twitter, maybe he’s the guy we thought he was, after all.

According to the views on this thread, who gives a shit?

I had hopes for Bernie. He’s a no-show. So now we get Shillary. Why not go through the phase? A black man, an idealist. Now, it’s a black man, a female Corporate Shrill. This board lasts forever, let’s return here in 4.

Democracy, coming to America in 20XX

We have a Shillary! I’m only disappointed it wasn’t spelled with a dollar sign, accompanied by calling us all “libcucks” or something else in Pants’s wheelhouse.

Well, it’s sounding like Gulf was sort of right. But it’s a different admiral.

What advantage does someone who is perceived to have strong foreign policy experience gain by selecting ex military as a VP?

Or is this due to the perception around Benghazi, or a female CiC being ‘weak’ or something similarly stupid?

I could see it as an attempt to appeal to Republican voters disgusted with Trump rather than trying to just strengthen the base.

There is no reason for Clinton to pick a military man for VP, since she has plenty of foreign policy cred and (more importantly) military matters are unlikely to play a big role in the campaign. What she really needs is someone good at campaigning.

So yeah, this is all for show and all about perception. There are those on the right who say, “The military hates Clinton and won’t follow her orders” (just as they said about Obama) and having a former NATO supreme commander on her VP list helps defuse that.

The military has typically voted Republican. There are also a lot of Republicans on the right who are looking for a reason not to vote for Trump. A well respected ex-general should shore up both of those voting blocks a bit for Hillary.

It’s smart. Most Vice Presidents tend to be picked from a state that can bring in a lot of votes. Clinton doesn’t really have a lot of purple states where a VP nom will win her that state. Instead she’s going after the military and military family votes in general.

She’s also picking someone who should be able to stand toe-to-toe with Newt in a debate.

But it’s not (and has never been for Hillary) about reality. It’s about perception. Even moderate Republicans today still trigger at the mention of “Benghazi” and could easily distrust her on all military and foreign policy matters regardless of the reality of her experience.

That Admiral seems like an interesting dude and I do see some crossover with his approach and Hillary’s:

Stavridis has long advocated the use of “smart power,” which he defines as the balance of hard and soft power taken together. In numerous articles[17] and speeches, he has advocated creating security in the 21st century by building bridges, not walls. Stavridis has stressed the need to connect international, inter-agency, and public-private actors to build security, lining all of them with effective strategic communications.

As dean, Stavridis has initiated a strategic planning process, invited several high level speakers to the campus, and is focusing thematically on the Arctic, the role of women in international relations, synthetic biology and its impact on foreign affairs, cyber, and the role of online media and social networks in public diplomacy.

I like that he’s a reader:

http://www.themillions.com/2015/04/the-admiral-in-the-library-the-millions-interviews-james-stavridis.html

Well, first of all, because reading is integral to my life. And I think, in the end, we solve global problems not by launching missiles, it’s by launching ideas. So as a tool for understanding the world and for understanding how you can change the world, I find fiction incredibly important.

MD: If you met Vladimir Putin, what would you suggest he read?
JS: I’d start — and I’m sure he’s read a lot of the — well, actually, no, he was a KGB Colonel, so maybe not. He’s certainly not from the intelligentsia, he’s from the thugocracy.
MD: Thugocracy.
JS: Thugocracy, absolutely. I think I’d start him on Dead Souls by Gogol because it’s such an absurdist novel and it’s about trying to grasp power and watching it slip through your fingers. I’d probably force him to read The Brothers Karamazov and focus on the Grand Inquisitor scene. But you know what he’d say back to me? He’d say, “Okay, I’ll read those, but, Stavridis, if you want to understand how tough Russians are and why your sanctions aren’t going to work, read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn. And so I think we could have a lively conversation about the motifs of Russian literature.

I like the guy based on what I’ve read about him, but I think it’s entirely possible that the Clinton team floated the name just because Trump was considering (at the time) a retired lieutenant general. In the limited set of apparent Trump VP finalists, that guy was probably the most credible.

I can see Trump saying “Well, if they are going to go with that guy, I can’t go with a lieutenant general. Their guy outranks my guy.”