Stacey Abrams wants to be VP. Does anyone else?

[Renew Deal]

[snowybirdie]

1. She has little

actual experience in government and hasn't won a statewide election. No one is providing information about her qualifications. Why is she being considered?

[Renew Deal]

5. That doesn't answer the question.

[marble falls]

7. Have you read anything she's done or anything about her yet? ....

She's not so raw as you think. Arguably she has at least as much experience and more education than Harry Truman did when he became VP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacey_Abrams

Stacey Yvonne Abrams (born December 9, 1973) is an American politician, lawyer, and author who served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017, and served as minority leader from 2011 to 2017.[1] A member of the Democratic Party, she was the party's nominee in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election. Abrams lost to Brian Kemp in an election where Kemp was widely accused of voter suppression. Abrams was the first African-American female major-party gubernatorial nominee in the United States.[2] In February 2019, she became the first African-American woman to deliver a response to the State of the Union address.

She attended Avondale High School, where she was selected for a Telluride Association Summer Program.[7] While in high school, she was hired as a typist for a congressional campaign and at age 17 she was hired as a speechwriter based on the edits she had made while typing.[7]

In 1995 Abrams earned a Bachelor of Arts in interdisciplinary studies (political science, economics and sociology) from Spelman College, magna cum laude.[1] While in college she worked in the youth services department in the office of Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson.[7] She later interned at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.[7] As a freshman in 1992, Abrams took part in a protest on the steps of the Georgia Capitol, during which she joined in burning the state flag. At that time Georgia's state flag incorporated the Confederate battle flag, which had been added to the state flag in 1956 as an anti-civil rights movement action. The flag was designed by Southern Democrat John Sammons Bell, an attorney and Chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia who was an outspoken supporter of segregation.[8][9]

As a Harry S. Truman Scholar, Abrams studied public policy at the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs, where she earned a Master of Public Affairs degree in 1998. In 1999 she earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.[1]
Legal and business career

After graduating from law school, Abrams worked as a tax attorney at the Sutherland Asbill & Brennan law firm in Atlanta, with a focus on tax-exempt organizations, health care, and public finance.[1] In 2010, while a member of the Georgia General Assembly, Abrams co-founded and served as the senior vice president of NOW Corp. (formerly NOWaccount Network Corporation), a financial services firm.[10][11]

Abrams also co-founded Nourish, Inc., a beverage company with a focus on infants and toddlers,[12] and is CEO of Sage Works, a legal consulting firm that has represented clients including the Atlanta Dream of the Women's National Basketball Association.[13]
Political career

In 2002, at age 29, Abrams was appointed the deputy city attorney for the City of Atlanta.[1][14]
Georgia General Assembly, 2007–2017

In 2006, Abrams ran from the 89th district for the Georgia House of Representatives, following JoAnn McClinton's announcement that she would not seek reelection. Abrams ran in the Democratic Party primary election against former state legislator George Maddox and political operative Dexter Porter. She outraised her two opponents and won the primary election with 51% of the vote, avoiding a runoff election.[15]
Abrams with John Lewis in 2017

Abrams represented House District 89, which includes portions of the City of Atlanta and unincorporated DeKalb County,[16] covering the communities of Candler Park, Cedar Grove, Columbia, Druid Hills, Edgewood, Highland Park, Kelley Lake, Kirkwood, Lake Claire, South DeKalb, Toney Valley, and Tilson.[17] She served on the Appropriations, Ethics, Judiciary Non-Civil, Rules and Ways & Means committees.[18]

In November 2010, the Democratic caucus elected Abrams to succeed DuBose Porter as minority leader over Virgil Fludd.[19] Abrams's first major action as minority leader was to cooperate with Republican governor Nathan Deal's administration to reform the HOPE Scholarship program. She co-sponsored the 2011 legislation that preserved the HOPE program by decreasing the scholarship amount paid to Georgia students and funded a 1% low-interest loan program for students.[20]

According to Time magazine, Abrams "can credibly boast of having single-handedly stopped the largest tax increase in Georgia history."[21] In 2011 Abrams argued that a Republican proposal to cut income taxes while increasing a tax on cable service would lead to a net increase in taxes paid by most people.[21] She performed an analysis of the bill that showed that 82% of Georgians would see net tax increases, and left a copy of the analysis on the desk of every house legislator.[21] The bill subsequently failed.[21]

Abrams also worked with Deal on criminal-justice reforms that reduced prison costs without increasing crime,[21] and with Republicans on the state's biggest-ever public transportation funding package.[21]

On August 25, 2017, Abrams resigned from the General Assembly to focus on her gubernatorial campaign.[22]
2018 gubernatorial campaign
Main article: 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election
Abrams campaigning in 2018
Wikinews has related news: Stacey Abrams becomes first black woman to gain major U.S. party nomination for governor of Georgia

Abrams ran for governor of Georgia in 2018.[23] In the Democratic primary she ran against Stacey Evans, another member of the Georgia House of Representatives,[23] in what some called "the battle of the Staceys". Abrams was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Our Revolution.[24][25] On May 22, she won the Democratic nomination, making her the first black woman in the U.S. to be a major party's nominee for governor.[26]

After winning the primary, Abrams secured a number of high-profile endorsements, including one from former President Barack Obama.[27][28]

Almost a week before election day, the Republican nominee, Brian Kemp, cancelled a debate scheduled seven weeks earlier in order to attend a Trump rally in Georgia. Kemp blamed Abrams for the cancellation, saying that she was unwilling to reschedule it. Abrams responded, “We refuse to callously take Georgians for granted and cancel on them. Just because Brian Kemp breaks his promises doesn’t mean anyone else should.”[29]

As Georgia's secretary of state, Kemp oversaw the election in which he was competing. Abrams lost the election by 50,000 votes. Abrams considered but ultimately did not mount a legal challenge to the election results.[30] In her speech ending her campaign,[31] she announced the creation of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights nonprofit organization that sued the Secretary of State and state election board in federal court for voter suppression.[32] As of March 2020, the lawsuit was still ongoing.[33]

Since losing the election, Abrams has repeatedly claimed that the election was not fairly conducted[34] and that Kemp is not the legitimate governor of Georgia.[35] Her position is that Kemp, who oversaw the election in his role as Secretary of State, had a conflict of interest and suppressed turnout by purging nearly 670,000 voter registrations in 2017, and that about 53,000 voter registrations were pending a month before the election.[34][36] She has said, "I have no empirical evidence that I would have achieved a higher number of votes. However, I have sufficient and I think legally sufficient doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election."[34]



Harry S. Truman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman

Truman grew up in Independence, Missouri, and during World War I was sent to France as a captain in the Field Artillery. Returning home, he opened a haberdashery in Kansas City, Missouri and was later elected as a Jackson County official in 1922. Truman was elected to the United States Senate from Missouri in 1934 and gained national prominence as chairman of the Truman Committee aimed at reducing waste and inefficiency in wartime contracts.

When Truman was six, his parents moved to Independence, Missouri, so he could attend the Presbyterian Church Sunday School. He did not attend a traditional school until he was eight.[12] While living in Independence, he served as a Shabbos goy for Jewish neighbors, doing tasks for them on Shabbat that their religion prevented them from doing on that day.[13][14][15]

Truman was interested in music, reading, and history, all encouraged by his mother, with whom he was very close. As president, he solicited political as well as personal advice from her.[16] He rose at five every morning to practice the piano, which he studied more than twice a week until he was fifteen, becoming quite a skilled player.[17] Truman worked as a page at the 1900 Democratic National Convention in Kansas City;[18] his father had many friends who were active in the Democratic Party and helped young Harry to gain his first political position.[19]

After graduating from Independence High School in 1901, Truman enrolled in Spalding's Commercial College, a Kansas City business school; he studied bookkeeping, shorthand, and typing, but left after a year.[20]
Working career

He made use of his business college experience to obtain a job as a timekeeper on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, sleeping in hobo camps near the rail lines.[21] He then took on a series of clerical jobs, and was employed briefly in the mail room of The Kansas City Star. Truman and his brother Vivian later worked as clerks at the National Bank of Commerce in Kansas City; one of their coworkers, who also lived in the same rooming house, was Arthur Eisenhower, the brother of Dwight and Milton.[22]

He returned to the Grandview farm in 1906, where he lived until entering the army in 1917 after the beginning of the Great War.[23] During this period, he courted Bess Wallace; he proposed in 1911, but she turned him down. Truman later said he intended to propose again, but he wanted to have a better income than that earned by a farmer.[24] To that end, during his years on the farm and immediately after World War I, he became active in several business ventures, including a lead and zinc mine near Commerce, Oklahoma,[25] a company that bought land and leased the oil drilling rights to prospectors,[26] and speculation in Kansas City real estate.[27] Truman occasionally derived some income from these enterprises, but none proved successful in the long term.[28]

Truman is the only president since William McKinley (elected in 1896) who did not earn a college degree.[29] In addition to having briefly attended business college, from 1923 to 1925 he took night courses toward an LL.B. at the Kansas City Law School (now the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law), but dropped out after losing reelection as county judge.[30] He was informed by attorneys in the Kansas City area that his education and experience were probably sufficient to receive a license to practice law. However, he did not pursue it, because he won election as presiding judge.[31]

While serving as president in 1947, Truman applied for a license to practice law.[32] A friend who was an attorney began working out the arrangements, and informed Truman that his application had to be notarized. By the time Truman received this information he had changed his mind, so he never sought notarization. After rediscovery of Truman's application, in 1996 the Missouri Supreme Court issued Truman a posthumous honorary law license.[33]

Jackson County judge
Wedding photo of Truman in gray suit and his wife in hat with white dress holding flowers
Harry and Bess Truman on their wedding day, June 28, 1919

After his wartime service, Truman returned to Independence, where he married Bess Wallace on June 28, 1919.[67] The couple had one child, Mary Margaret Truman.[68]

Shortly before the wedding, Truman and Jacobson opened a haberdashery together at 104 West 12th Street in downtown Kansas City. After brief initial success, the store went bankrupt during the recession of 1921.[16] Truman did not pay off the last of the debts from that venture until 1935, when he did so with the aid of banker William T. Kemper, who worked behind the scenes to enable Truman's brother Vivian to buy Truman's promissory note during the asset sale of a bank that had failed in the Great Depression.[69][70] The note had risen and fallen in value as it was bought and sold, interest accumulated and Truman made payments, so by the time the last bank to hold it failed, it was worth nearly $9,000.[71] Thanks to Kemper's efforts, Vivian Truman was able to buy it for $1,000.[70] Jacobson and Truman remained close friends even after their store failed, and Jacobson's advice to Truman on Zionism later played a role in the U.S. Government's decision to recognize Israel.[72]

With the help of the Kansas City Democratic machine led by Tom Pendergast, Truman was elected in 1922 as County Court judge of Jackson County's eastern district—Jackson County's three-judge court included judges from the western district (Kansas City), the eastern district (the county outside Kansas City), and a presiding judge elected countywide. This was an administrative rather than judicial court, similar to county commissioners in many other jurisdictions. Truman lost his 1924 reelection campaign in a Republican wave led by President Calvin Coolidge's landslide election to a full term. Two years selling automobile club memberships convinced him that a public service career was safer for a family man approaching middle age, and he planned a run for presiding judge in 1926.[73]

Truman won the job in 1926 with the support of the Pendergast machine, and he was re-elected in 1930. As presiding judge, Truman helped coordinate the Ten Year Plan, which transformed Jackson County and the Kansas City skyline with new public works projects, including an extensive series of roads and construction of a new Wight and Wight-designed County Court building. Also in 1926, he became president of the National Old Trails Road Association (NOTRA). He oversaw the dedication in the late 1920s of a series of 12 Madonna of the Trail monuments honoring pioneer women.[73][74]

In 1933, Truman was named Missouri's director for the Federal Re-Employment program (part of the Civil Works Administration) at the request of Postmaster General James Farley. This was payback to Pendergast for delivering the Kansas City vote to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. The appointment confirmed Pendergast's control over federal patronage jobs in Missouri and marked the zenith of his power. It also created a relationship between Truman and Roosevelt's aide Harry Hopkins and assured Truman's avid support for the New Deal.[75]
U.S. Senator from Missouri
Inside of wooden desk with several names carved into it
Drawer from the Senate desk used by Truman

After serving as a county judge, Truman wanted to run for Governor or Congress, but Pendergast rejected these ideas. Truman then thought he might serve out his career in some well-paying county sinecure; circumstances changed when Pendergast reluctantly backed him as the machine's fifth choice in the 1934 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate from Missouri.[76] In the primary, Truman defeated Congressmen John J. Cochran and Jacob L. Milligan with the solid support of Jackson County, which was crucial to his candidacy. Also critical were the contacts he had made statewide in his capacity as a county official, member of the Masons, military reservist, and member of the American Legion.[77] In the general election, Truman defeated incumbent Republican Roscoe C. Patterson by nearly 20 percentage points in a continuing wave of pro-New Deal Democrats elected following the Great Depression.[76][78][79]
Results of the 1934 U.S. Senate election in Missouri; Truman won the counties in blue

Truman assumed office with a reputation as "the Senator from Pendergast." He referred patronage decisions to Pendergast, but maintained that he voted with his own conscience. He later defended the patronage decisions by saying that "by offering a little to the machine, [he] saved a lot".[79][80] In his first term, Truman spoke out against corporate greed and the dangers of Wall Street speculators and other moneyed special interests attaining too much influence in national affairs.[81] Though he served on the high-profile Appropriations and Interstate Commerce Committees, he was largely ignored by Democratic President Roosevelt and had trouble getting calls returned from the White House.[79][82]

During the U.S. Senate election in 1940, United States Attorney Maurice Milligan (Jacob Milligan's brother) and former governor Lloyd Stark both challenged Truman in the Democratic primary. Truman was politically weakened by Pendergast's imprisonment for income tax evasion the previous year; the senator had remained loyal, having claimed that Republican judges (not the Roosevelt administration) were responsible for the boss's downfall.[83] St. Louis party leader Robert E. Hannegan's support of Truman proved crucial; he later brokered the deal that put Truman on the national ticket. In the end, Stark and Milligan split the anti-Pendergast vote in the Senate Democratic primary and Truman won by a total of 8,000 votes. In the November election, Truman defeated Republican Manvel H. Davis by 51–49 percent.[84] As Senator, Truman opposed both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. One week after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he said:

If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.[85]

Truman Committee
Further information: Truman Committee

In late 1940, Truman traveled to various military bases. The waste and profiteering he saw led him to use his chairmanship of the Committee on Military Affairs Subcommittee on War Mobilization to start investigations into abuses while the nation prepared for war. A new special committee was set up under Truman to conduct a formal investigation; the Roosevelt administration supported this plan rather than weather a more hostile probe by the House of Representatives. The main mission of the committee was to expose and fight waste and corruption in the gigantic government wartime contracts.

Truman's initiative convinced Senate leaders of the necessity for the committee, which reflected his demands for honest and efficient administration and his distrust of big business and Wall Street. Truman managed the committee "with extraordinary skill" and usually achieved consensus, generating heavy media publicity that gave him a national reputation.[86][87] Activities of the Truman Committee ranged from criticizing the "dollar-a-year men" hired by the government, many of whom proved ineffective, to investigating a shoddily built New Jersey housing project for war workers.[88][89]

The committee reportedly saved as much as $15 billion (equivalent to $210 billion in 2019),[90][91][92][93] and its activities put Truman on the cover of Time magazine.[94] According to the Senate's historical minutes, in leading the committee, "Truman erased his earlier public image as an errand-runner for Kansas City politicos", and "no senator ever gained greater political benefits from chairing a special investigating committee than did Missouri's Harry S. Truman."[95]


And Truman became a great VP and then POTUS.

[Trumpocalypse]

11. Experience doesn't matter in Presidential elections

If it did Trump wouldn’t be President.

What matters is can she help flip a swing state? Can she help energize the African American vote? Can she help attract progressive voters to the ticket? And does she perform In these criteria versus other possible candidates such as Kamala Harris or Val Demings or Elizabeth Warren?

[demmiblue]

2. Yes, and they have voiced that that are willing and able. n/t

[Renew Deal]

6. Who?

I've heard Elizabeth Warren

[marble falls]

3. Not my first choice, but she's got the smarts and the drive and the energy for it.

[bottomofthehill]

4. I love the energy and enthusiasm she brings to everything she does

But 10 years as a state representative is a bit thin to be Vice President.

I am sure there is someplace for her in a Democratic Administration.

Yale Law, State Rep, Deputy City Manager. There is someplace for talent like that.

[Renew Deal]

8. I can't find a clip of her talking about foreign affairs.

But does anyone else want the job?

[NewJeffCT]

9. No question she is smarter and would do far better

than Pence or Trump, or Nikki Haley if it came down to that.

[bottomofthehill]

10. Oh hell yes.

And in her mid 40’s, after she spends some time in a Democratic Administration, her resume would be enhanced. She is about 30 years younger than VP Biden and tRump and has the time, talent, intellectual curiosity to be a great candidate in the future.

[womanofthehills]

12. I love her and think she would be good

Both she and Kamala are so strong and intelligent. Stacy reminds me of a bulldozer who will really fight for what’s right.

[DrToast]

13. Of course. Most people just don't campaign openly for it