is gretchen whitmer a reasonable choice?

let's hope this isn't creepy joe at play, here. listen - this is a potential problem that could develop with a number of people around him. i keep saying he's the mirror reflection of trump...

trump seems to have a kind of specific hate-on for her, as well, which could work to his advantage if he's subtle (which he never is.) but could backfire if he gets desperate, or just overwhelmed with misogyny. that's a real wildcard. my impression is that she's a strong campaigner, and might be able to push the right buttons so that he self-destructs. pence is more self-disciplined, and also more hateful to his core being, so that's a weird dynamic.

it would seem to me that a whitmer pick would put her at the front of the ticket, in the sense that she would be the media front for a biden-overseen background operation. she's relatively young, comfortable in front of the camera and fairly photogenic. the fact that she's still in contention suggests that, creepy joe or not, he is valuing these qualities rather highly.

her main strike against her would be a lack of meaningful executive experience, although she has a lot of legislative experience, and a feeling that she's kind of jumping the gun. she's a bit of a black box as to what she might actually do.

her pandemic rules appear to have deeply over-reacted to the scenario and had little effect on reducing the spread of the disease, but that's a problem with all democrats, who are not interested in following the science on the issue, even when they play political games about it. so, we know she has a fascistic streak to her, which is a downside - but to the party in general, not just her.

iirc, she ran on an infrastructure mandate, and all she's really had time to do since elected is focus on disaster relief. i remember some encouraging words to the effect that queer people actually have rights coming from the attorney general's office, but that's a separate election, right? it would be helpful from an analytical standpoint to have data from less chaotic times to get a chance to see how she might govern a few years from now; as it is, and from what i can tell, she seems to be about a middle-of-the-road centre-left democrat that should check all the boxes for most of the big single-issue voters but isn't going to be very appealing to leftists, who don't really matter, anyways.

so, it's electorally reasonable, and perhaps more so than it is a reasonable governing option. but, i'd assign a wide margin of error; what i'm saying is that we don't really have the data to know.

so, i'd need to focus on the campaign to determine whether i'd want to vote for her or abstain.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07/politics/gretchen-whitmer-joe-biden-meeting/index.html