The Union Leader's Drew Cline mumbled the following story into his cellphone while weeping in a pool of blood:
Kelly Ayotte is running for re-election to the U.S. Senate, which is where she wants to be and where the Republican Party wants her to stay. She is not running for vice president, and both she and her staff wish people would stop mentioning her as a potential vice presidential pick. And yet, people keep doing that — a lot. Sometimes they can’t help themselves.
In an interview on Monday, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham was asked about the potential of a Graham-Ayotte ticket if he runs for President in 2016 and becomes the Republican nominee. As often happens when a Republican on the national level is asked about Ayotte, he immediately, almost reflexively, gushed.“They accuse her every 15 minutes of having national ambitions,” he said of Democrats. “She’ll be on the ticket one day. I hope she’s the first woman President (that means we’ve got to beat Hillary). The bottom line is, I think Kelly has an unlimited future, but she wants to be the senator from New Hampshire. She is not ambitious to a fault.”Saying “Senator Ayotte will always be mentioned as a vice presidential candidate until she gets out of politics,” Graham cautioned that “in 2016 it’s important we hold the Senate, and in 2016 I don’t see anyone more capable of holding the Senate than her.”On picking her as VP, he added: “A Graham-Ayotte ticket, in my view, she would be a great vice president, but quite frankly, probably a better President one day.”
One day. Ayotte is 46, the mother of two small children. She is older than likely 2016 presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal (both 43), and younger than Scott Walker (47), Chris Christie and Rand Paul (both 52), Graham (59), Jeb Bush (62) and Rick Perry (65). She has a long political future, and the evidence suggests that she is running for nothing but U.S. Senate next year.Republicans who want to get noticed among the party base attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where they can meet activists and wow them with a great speech. Ayotte did not attend CPAC this year or last year. She has attended only once, in 2013. That is not indicative of someone “auditioning” for VP, as Democrats constantly accuse her of doing.
What Ayotte has been doing is raising money for her re-election. At the end of 2014, her campaign had more than $2 million in cash-on-hand. At the same period in their re-election campaigns, Jeanne Shaheen had $375,297 cash on hand and John E. Sununu had $375,297.Ayotte’s out-of-state travel schedule is not unusual for a U.S. senator up for re-election. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen traveled repeatedly for fundraisers in New York and California, and no one accused her of auditioning for VP. What is unusual is Ayotte’s in-state travel. She has held more than 40 town hall meetings since taking office in 2011. Even in New Hampshire, that is remarkable for a U.S. senator. Despite Shaheen’s impressive electoral resume, she is never mentioned as administration material. The last U.S. senator from New Hampshire to be so mentioned was Judd Gregg, who turned down President Obama when asked to be Commerce Secretary in 2009.
The reason Ayotte keeps getting mentioned as VP material is the same reason she has been able to raise so much money for her re-election, and the same reason Elizabeth Warren keeps getting mentioned as a presidential candidate: her work in the Senate has impressed a lot of people.Graham says he and Sen. John McCain have been “astounded” at how quickly Ayotte became a force in the Senate on national security issues. “She has led on national security after four years in the Senate unlike anyone I’ve ever met,” he said.Others have noticed her short learning curve, too. A May 6, 2012, editorial in Foster’s Daily Democrat noted “how fast out of the gate Sen. Kelly Ayotte has been to speak up on behalf of Granite Staters and engage the issues important to them.” Even antagonists have praised her for being her own woman.
On Oct. 23, 2013, the liberal Concord Monitor editorial page called Ayotte “a senator whose opinion and vote can’t be taken for granted and who is interested in being a serious player in the key debates of the day.”Ayotte made herself into a serious player. For that, she has earned a tremendous amount of respect in Washington and back home, where talk of a primary challenge from the right has faded. The price for her hard work is to be mentioned, repeatedly, as vice presidential material.Part of that talk stems from the fact that Republican Party leaders would love to have a woman on the ticket in 2016. After the Palin drama, they want a serious woman. Ayotte is that.It would be a master stroke of political propaganda if the state Democratic Party turned the VP talk into a liability for Ayotte. She earned the buzz not by showboating, but by proving herself a formidable and influential U.S. senator in less than one term. Agree or disagree with her politics, that is an impressive feat.