Dark Horse Tom Vilsack Down to the Wire in Clinton Veepstakes

DES MOINES, IA — Tom Vilsack’s climb to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential short list began nearly 30 years ago in a town hall in southeast Iowa. A disgruntled local citizen pulled out a gun as he approached the podium, shot and killed Mayor Edd King and wounded two city council members before calmly sitting down and waiting to be arrested

The shooting on Dec. 10, 1986, stunned the town in the middle of the country in a comparatively innocent time before mass shootings left Americans numb. Townspeople recognized the need for a strong leader, and King’s father recruited Vilsack, a lawyer at his father-in-law's small law firm, to fill the void.

Vilsack accepted the mantle of public service and led Mount Pleasant city government for five years before running for the Iowa Senate in 1992. In 1998, he ran for the first of two terms as Iowa’s governor, ending Republicans’ 32-year lock on the gubernatorial mansion in a race that no one expected him to win. In 2008, President Barack Obama appointed him secretary of agriculture.

The Competition

Vilsack, 65, is one of three people presumptive Democratic nominee Clinton is said to be vetting to join her on the ticket. She’s expected to announce her pick in advance of next week’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, perhaps as early as Friday, according to media reports.

Also under consideration, but viewed as a long-shot, is Ret. Adm. James G. Stavridis, 61, who lacks political experience but has experience overseeing NATO operations in some of the world’s hot spots, like Libya and Syria, where Clinton stumbled as secretary of state.

There are a few others lower on the list, including Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

But among the three rumored to be on Clinton’s short list, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia is said to be the favorite. Like Vilsack, Kaine is a former governor and mayor, and his experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee could help Clinton in the same way as Stavridis’ NATO experience.

Kaine told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that his main downfall is that he’s “boring,” but that’s a rap some people also hang on Vilsack, a self-acknowledged policy wonk who views public service as an avocation.

‘Vilsack the Pooh’

Iowa Democratic kingmaker, attorney and lobbyist Jerry Crawford told Patch that people who criticize Vilsack as beige and boring don’t know him, and that he keeps his wit and self-effacing charm under wraps.

He exposed it a few times as Iowa’s governor. He once famously put on a Winnie-the-Pooh costume to promote literacy, his wife, Christie’s, hallmark cause. In subsequent literary festivals at Terrace Hill, Iowa’s governor’s mansion, Vilsack also played Robin Hood’s sidekick, Friar Truck; the Mad Hatter from “Alice in Wonderland”; the scarecrow from the “Wizard of Oz”; the crocodile from “Peter Pan”; and Old King Cole from “Mother Goose Land.”

Asked by the Des Moines Business Record after the “Vilsack the Pooh” drubbing if dressing as a hapless storybook character who gets his head stuck in a honey jar cost him political capital, he smiled wryly and said, “I love my wife.”

Crawford thinks Vilsack would make a “sensational vice president” and said he has more executive experience than any of the candidates Clinton is said to be considering.

“He was mayor for five years, a state senator for six years, a governor for eight years and now secretary of ag for seven and a half years,” Crawford said. “He’s as well prepared as anyone could ever be.”

Additionally, those who know him say Vilsack is, despite an understated demeanor, a fierce, tenacious campaigner who can connect with crowds that Clinton hasn't always reached.

‘He Plucks the Right Strings’

David Yepsen, a retired Des Moines Register political columnist who covered Vilsack before, during and after his governorship, recalls the 1988 dark horse campaign that ended Republicans’ 32-year lock on the gubernatorial mansion as one that displayed Vilsack's skills as an orator.

“He’s a great speaker and does well on TV, but also with a crowd,” Yepsen, now the director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, told Patch.

“One of the best political speeches I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard a helluva lot of them, was his 1998 speech to the party at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner,” Yepsen said. “He had the delegates on their feet. He talks to an audience like a jury and knows how to pluck the right strings.”

Democrats were beginning to see that Vilsack might be able to defeat Jim Ross Lightfoot, a popular former congressman, and Yepsen credits that speech as one that motivated Democrats to vote in an election many had given up hope of winning.

Even Republicans Tout Vilsack’s Ethics

Vilsack’s administration in Iowa was also scandal-free, without even a “hint of any wrongdoing by him personally, or the people around him,” Yepsen said.

“In 1997, when he started running in the '98 campaign, it was apparent that this was a guy who was not into making money — he had no net worth — but was really into public service,” Yepsen said.

The only blemish of consequence on Vilsack’s record was his 2010 firing of Georgia State Director of Rural Development Shirley Sherrod over an out-of-context video that had been posted on a conservative website. It’s a largely forgotten episode in an otherwise smooth run as ag secretary, in large part because he quickly acknowledged he had mishandled the matter.

“This is a good woman,” he told reporters at the time. “She has been put through hell. I could have done and should have done a better job.

"I did not think before I acted, and for that reason this poor woman has gone through a very difficult time," he said. "This was my decision, and I made it in haste."

That was vintage Vilsack humility, according to Cynthia Eisenhauer, Vilsack’s chief of staff for his last to years as governor. She told Patch her former boss is “a man of integrity who earns the trust and confidence of everyone he meets.”

Before she joined the Vilsack administration, Eisenhauer worked for four governors, both Republican and Democratic, as the director of Iowa’s Department of Management and Budget. Among them, Vilsack was the most “hands-on with state government operations and with every single line item,” Eisenhauer said, adding:

“He earned my respect as a leader who cares about the impact of government on communities and families and spends time and effort to make sure his decisions have positive results.”

Even Republican stalwart Chuck Grassley, Iowa’s senior U.S. senator who is facing his first serious re-election challenge in decades after blocking Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, set aside partisan differences and acknowledged that Vilsack is “ethically very clean.”

That could help Clinton, who is dogged by questions about her honesty and trustworthiness. A July 13-16 CNN / ORC Poll said 65 percent of respondents didn’t see her as honest, up from 59 percent in May and 50 percent in March.

Could Swing Battleground States

A Clinton-Vilsack ticket could turn some battleground states blue, including Iowa, where Republican nominee Donald Trump has a 1-point lead over Clinton, according to a recent CBS News poll.

The Clinton-Vilsack connection goes way back to the 1970s, when Tom Bell, Christie Vilsack’s brother, worked with Clinton on a congressional Watergate committee. Clinton campaigned for Vilsack in his first gubernatorial campaign, and worked with him in the development of a program providing universal health insurance coverage for Iowa children, a crowning accomplishment of the former governor’s administration. As leaders of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council in 2005, they worked closely on a domestic policy agenda.

The Vilsacks endorsed Clinton’s candidacy in 2007 after Vilsack ended his own brief run for president, then helped deliver Iowa for Clinton in January’s first-in-the-nation precinct caucuses that started the nomination process that ends next week in Philadelphia.

Loyalty counts with Clinton, Yepsen said, and that could tip the scales toward Vilsack, especially with Iowa’s small handful of six electoral votes hanging in the balance in a general election that could be decided by thousands of votes.

“Where he comes up short would be on foreign policy,” Yepsen said, noting Kaine’s experience in that arena. “Where he comes up on the strong side is that he can help in rural America, and that isn’t just the Farm Belt. It’s also important in central Pennsylvania, Florida and every battleground state. Swing states all have a rural sector.”

Compelling Life Story

Beyond that, Vilsack has a compelling life story that began in a Pittsburgh orphanage. He was adopted and raised by an alcoholic mother, an experience that shaped and informed many of the issues that are important to him.

“When I was a kid, I judged my mom,” he told reporters in an emotional interview Thursday while attending discussions on the opioid epidemic in Missouri. “I thought she could just decide tomorrow to stop doing what she's doing. I had no idea it was a disease. I do now. As long as I live, I will regret not being able to say that to her.

“She passed away before I had that acknowledgment and recognition," he said. "I don't want other people to have to live with that kind of guilt for the rest of their lives."

Vilsack was initially prodded into public service after the mayor of Mount Pleasant was killed, but he had clearly been interested in politics since he and Christie Ann Bell began dating in 1968 when both were freshmen at Kirkland College in New York.

Vilsack took a $5 dare from his buddies to ask her out but was unsure about how to start the conversation.

“For five bucks, at that point in time in my life, I’d do just about anything,” Vilsack once told the Sioux City Journal. “So the best I could do was, ‘Are you a Humphrey or Nixon supporter?’ And she looked at me like I was half crazy, and she said, ‘Humphrey.’ ”

They had lived in Christie Vilsack’s hometown since their marriage in 1973 when tragedy started a political career that could reach a political zenith this weekend.

Vilsack so far hasn’t acknowledged that he’s being vetted, but he chafed in a recent interview with the Associated Press at the mention of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s repeated call to “make America great again.”

“I get really irritated when I hear Donald Trump say, 'Let's make America great again,’” Vilsack told the AP when he was back in Iowa last weekend for the re-dedication of a monument in Mount Pleasant to the slain mayor. “I look at it, and I think, wait a second, I started out life in an orphanage. I didn't have a last name. ... America gave me this opportunity to go from that beginning to sitting in the White House in the Cabinet Room with the president of the United States.”

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