I agree with most of your list, but who do you think Wallace could have picked that would have helped him more than LeMay?
LeMay may have been the perfect pick for Wallace. I am just asking, with each of these, what you guys think was in the mind of the Presidential nominee. Perhaps I should have stated the question more clearly.
What was Reagan thinking when he chose Bush? Was it party unification, regional balance, add a foreign policy wonk to the ticket, etc?
I don't know if any of these picks were right or wrong. I'm just trying to get at the rationale behind each pick. So sorry, everyone, if I are confuzing! :-) Thanks, Dead!
I always got the impression that the LeMay pick substantially hurt Wallace. Yes, it had the potential to give him some gravitas and give the Wallace campaign some more appeal than pure segregation...but I thought that LeMay was horrible on the campaign trail and managed to lose Wallace a good third of his support by advocating nuking North Vietnam...
As for some of the others...I can't really agree with J.J. on the Lucey pick. Of what he could get, it wasn't bad...but he was hardly prominent. His failure to get anyone better than Lucey said something about his campaign.
Bush in '80 may have been little more than a last-ditch fallback option after the proposed deal with Ford fell through. The fact that it worked out so well is rather incredible.
