Building the perfect candidate By Stephen Kessler | Santa Cruz Sentinel November 30, 2019 at 5:00 am If I were a mad scientist, instead of just a distressed citizen, I would dismantle the field of Democratic presidential contenders into their component parts and reassemble them as the Perfect Candidate for 2020, someone who can reassure the old, soothe and seduce the undecided, inspire the young, mobilize the activists, reflect the identity-attached and reason with the elites. Such a composite character would have none of the weaknesses plaguing each candidate, and all the strengths of their collective values and experience—a candidate whose gender, color and ideology would be forgotten in the passion and illumination and enthusiasm of their unifying promise. A candidate born to win. If I had to pick just one, and boil down my selection by a process of elimination, I’d start by culling the white men: Joe Biden the punch-drunk veteran fighter too addled to know when to hang up his gloves; Bernie Sanders, whose delusions of “revolution” have led his true believers down a path to utopian disappointment; Tom Steyer, whose only qualification is that he’s rich; and Pete Buttigieg, just a touch too articulate and well rehearsed to be convincing as a seasoned leader, even though he has a certain Obama-ish intelligence. Don’t even get me started on Michael Bloomberg despite his reasonable call for gun control. No, none of these white guys will do when we have such a colorful and talented assortment of alternatives, imperfect as each may be: Elizabeth Warren with her sincerity and command of policy but an often agitated demeanor, ready to pick a fight with the plutocrats; Andrew Yang with his nerdy wit and entrepreneurial swagger; Cory Booker with his Newark street cred and sense of moral integrity; Julián Castro with his sunny Southwest Latino warmth; Amy Klobuchar with her witty cynicism and Midwestern earnestness; Kamala Harris with her California cool and prosecutorial self-confidence; Tulsi Gabbard with her good looks, stylish white suit and robotic aura of a Manchurian candidate. Have I left anyone out? Maybe the appealingly Obamaesque but too-late-to-the-gate Deval Patrick. Our dream candidate composed of these various elements would have Booker’s height, since the taller man usually wins; the analytical intelligence of Yang combined with the lucid rational speech of Warren dialed down to a slightly cooler tone of rhetorical attack; Harris and Castro’s multicultural brownness to appeal to the new minority-majority; Klobuchar’s toughness and suburban everywomanhood; and Gabbard’s and Buttigieg’s youth and military credentials. Oh, and Steyer’s money, which would inoculate our nominee against temptations of corruption by corporate campaign donors. Bernie and Biden should take their combined 155 years of experience and retire into post-career consultancy. Alas, my composite politician is just a wishful figment of my frustration at being unable to decide with confidence that any one of these real people can convince a broad enough swath of the electorate to overwhelm the emolumentally corrupt incumbent with an electoral blue tsunami. He, she or they must be quick enough on their feet to keep their composure and take no bait of the bullyboy-in-chief’s thuggish attacks in the media or on the debate stage. And they must have the stamina to endure the grueling Navy SEAL-worthy ordeal of the neverending campaign. Warren remains my top choice, for now, but she looked a little tired the other night and seemed a bit exasperated that fear of changing their insurance plan keeps a lot of people from embracing Medicare for all; and by their worry that the wealthy will figure out ways of evading her wealth tax, which means the revenues required for her plans will not materialize. The fact that even the number of moderate Democrats would make a lot of her proposed legislation unpassable in Congress doesn’t seem to reassure voters who find her “too far left.” If she wants to win, Warren will have to persuade the red-scared that she’s not the second coming of Hugo Chávez, and that she has backup plans for her more ambitious and unlikely-to-succeed proposals.