Which Democratic VP possibility probably has the most compelling life story
in addition to being a popular two term Governor and a key appointee in the Obama administration?
And has been a strong ally and friend of Hillary Clinton's for several decades?
The Secretary of Agriculture so many people here have called "boring."
He completed his second term as Iowa Governor with a 69% popularity rating. That doesn't sound too boring to me.
From an article in 2008, when Tom Vilsack was campaigning for Hillary.
http://www.gq.com/story/trail-of-tears
Sitting in the kitchen, waiting for him to wake up, I can’t help but wonder why they never replaced this hideous linoleum floor. (Governors don’t get paid much, but Jesus.) This is so Vilsack. Tom and Christie spent eight years in one of the most glorious governor’s mansions in the country—18,000 square feet of splendor in Des Moines—but were happy (relieved, actually) to come back to the place they call home: This big old house filled with mismatched “antiques” that Christie inherited from her family, who generations ago picked up pieces on the sidewalk and restored them to make a living. The only relics from their time in the mansion are on a silver tray in the dining room: teacups commemorating each year that Tom was governor. (Christie’s idea.)
SNIP
It wasn’t until he ran for president that he knew much of anything about where he came from. Last winter, during a campaign stop, he gave an interview and mentioned that he was adopted and grew up in Pittsburgh. Soon after, he got a letter from a nun: She worked at the orphanage where he’d been born and enclosed pictures of the place and of the kids who’d lived there with him. Did he want to know more? He did. She told him that his birth mother had been 23 (not the desperate teenager he’d imagined), that she’d called herself Gloria (an alias), and that his birth name was Kenneth. When he was fifteen months old, a couple from Pittsburgh came to the orphanage and picked him out of the litter. “My mother used to make fun about this,” he says, “and I always thought she was kidding. She made it sound like she was shopping for a Thanksgiving turkey. She said, ‘We looked for the plumpest kid we could find,’ on the theory that I’d be the healthiest kid.”
His father was a real estate agent, “a truly great human being, a people person. But not a good business guy. When he died, he was virtually penniless.” Both parents drank, but his mother was an especially ugly alcoholic. His childhood memories are these: being afraid to come home from school because he never knew how drunk his mother would be and whether she would beat him. Waking up in the middle of the night and peeking out his bedroom door to see his father walking his mother up and down the hall, trying to keep her awake and alive till the ambulance came, because she had drunk too much or taken pills to try to kill herself. Hearing the clunk clunk of liquor bottles crashing. “She’d go up in the attic and lock herself up there for weeks, and all you’d hear would be the dropping of liquor bottles on the floor.”
By the time he was an adolescent, his mother had been in and out of hospitals, mental and otherwise, and was living on her own. On his thirteenth birthday, his father took him and his sister to Mom’s apartment—she wanted to make him a steak dinner for his birthday. When they arrived, she was blotto (as usual), staggering around, too drunk to cook. The birthday boy got up and walked out. “That’s it, I’m done,” he told himself. Two weeks later, on Christmas Day, his mother was on a train somewhere, drunk, when she decided she’d had enough. “She had a religious experience, a revelation, whatever you want to call it.” She never drank another drop.
In the years she had left (she died at 57 of cancer), they grew very close. He learned to love her in ways he never dreamed possible. “She taught me to never give up,” he says. “She taught me the capacity of the human spirit to overcome anything.” She also left him with the legacy of a son of an alcoholic, something his pal Bill Clinton shares: You always try to fix things, always try to please, and always, at some level, feel that whatever happens, it is probably your fault.
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