How Vice President Kamala Harris’ Pick Contrasts with Trump’s

(LR) Minnesota Governor Tim Walz greets U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris upon her arrival at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in Saint Paul, Minnesota, March 14, 2024. Credit: STEPHEN MATUREN—AFP/ Getty Images

HIn studying leadership across sectors for nearly half a century, I’ve found that sharing power at the top is often harder than delegating and enforcing it down the chain of command. Cross-sector leadership partnerships that work well have a secret recipe—one that Kamala Harris seemed to understand but that Donald Trump apparently didn’t, given their recent choice of vice presidential candidate.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden were archrivals who became friends as president and vice president, with affection and mutual support. And historian Stephen Ambrose has documented how much Dwight Eisenhower disliked and distrusted his vice president, Richard Nixon, as president, creating a real mentor/protégé relationship after the election with Nixon’s rival JFK. FDR had no interest in vice presidents, naming three of them in office, with one of them, John Nance Garner, stating, “The vice presidency is not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Perhaps most chillingly, in the final days of his presidency, Donald Trump reportedly praised the January 6 rioters who threatened to lynch his loyal Vice President Mike Pence, telling his chief of staff Mark Meadows and deputy Cassidy Hutchinson that Pence deserved to be hanged, as Trump complained that Pence had been taken to a safe location.

Trump recently distanced himself again from his new running mate, J.D. Vance, when asked about Vance’s troubling stances attacking corporate America, his lack of interest in helping Ukraine, and Vance’s offensive statements that were perceived as misogynistic. With Vance considered the most unpopular vice presidential candidate in modern history, a choice condemned even by Wall Street JournalIn response to the editorial board, Trump declined to defend his running mate’s readiness to lead, saying the vice president doesn’t matter.

And the surprising revelations from Harris’s interviews with the vice presidential candidates over the weekend suggested that Walz’s warmth, authenticity, and competence set him apart from the pack. Sure, he has a homegrown sense of humor, effectively labeling the GOP/MAGA candidates as “weird” so effectively that it went viral. His party anchor is actually the Minnesota Democratic Farm Labor Party, the party of folk singer Woody Guthrie and former Vice President Humbert Humphrey (known as the “Happy Warrior”), and an anchor of the original grassroots “progressive” movement of the 1920s. As a father, a high school teacher for 15 years, a winning football coach and a sponsor of the LBGTQ club’s faculty, a military veteran, a five-term Democratic congressman in a historically Republican district, and an extremely popular, competent, two-term governor, Walz certainly provided voters with reassuring credentials. However, it was character and chemistry that seemed to trump those qualifications, given the strong resumes of his rivals.

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As CNN’s Jamie Gangel reported Sunday, “There were a lot of details about Minnesota Gov. Walz’s meeting with Vice President Harris’ vetting team before meeting with Kamala Harris. I was told they loved him — he was authentic, a team player, and even though he wasn’t from a battleground state, he was born and raised in Nebraska, he’s a natural, he’ll appeal to independent, undecided voters all over the Midwest — a happy warrior.”

Political scientist Richard Neustadt, in his classic 1960 work Presidential Power, advised that character is the most important quality in selecting a president to lead this nation. Similarly, presidential historian James David Barbour advised that a happy person with strong self-esteem and a positive disposition makes the most effective leaders.

While Democrat Jimmy Carter told me several times that he never used the term “malaise” to describe the dark period of his presidency, his pessimistic national address in July 1979 was dubbed the “malaise speech” because it spoke of American failure and a crisis of confidence. Not surprisingly, Carter lost in a landslide to Republican Ronald Reagan’s more optimistic, positive “Morning of America.” Harris seems to share that positive aura with Walz, but also the chemistry of working together. Egos need to go with understanding replacing showmanship.

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