Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia titillates the American public by suggesting that he run for president alongside Senator Mitt Romney of Utah. Romney says he’s not interested. No matter. The press love the idea. A Southern-Roman Catholic-Democrat ‘blue dog’, and a Northern (formerly Bay State)-Western-Mormon-Republican wet. Is there a better combination? For the USA of the late twentieth century, that is. Some of us with long memories may remember the election of 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt divided the Republican Party, firstly by breaking a promise to Senator Robert La Follette and then by going up against the sitting president and his successor in the office, William Howard Taft. The winner became the candidate few people had then heard of: the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who condemned his country to a century of moralising military interventions to make the world safe for democracy. A wise man said: ‘Vote for Roosevelt, pray for Taft, but bet on Wilson’. Today that would be, ‘Vote for Manchin, pray for Biden, but bet on Trump’. Another aspirant, Professor Cornel West, has said that electing Trump will cause ‘Civil War II’ whilst electing Biden will bring about ‘World War III’. What might electing Manchin (and maybe Romney) do? |