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Ezra Klein makes a strong point about long-term vs. short-term impact of vice-presidential choices. (Emphasis mine.)

[Candidate’s] supporters, who have a tendency to focus on this election, are talking about this much more in terms of who helps win the next election rather than who would be a good stand-in or successor. But the evidence is very weak that vice presidents ever help win elections, and very strong that vice presidents frequently go on to become presidents. Johnson succeeded Kennedy, Nixon (eventually) succeeded Eisenhower, Ford succeeded Nixon, Bush succeeded Reagan, and if there hadn’t been vote chicanery in Florida, Gore would have succeeded Clinton. Obviously, you can’t toss out political concerns entirely, but they really need to be paired with a discussion of who would actually make a good president.

He said it here.

Issac Chotiner, guest blogging for Matthew Yglesias says it even more clearly. (Emphasis again mine.)

Rather than obsessing over the short term political gain—which according to the available evidence may not even exist—candidates selecting running mates should focus on the fact that their choice will be closely identified with their party for decades to come.

He said it here.

Meanwhile this morning Dana Goldstein of TAPPED has been talking about the “generational” divisiveness in the Democratic primaries in a way, I think, that pulls in the same direction.

Jessica Valenti has a great essay in The Nation urging feminists not to run away from “infighting” over the Clinton-Obama race, but rather to “own the conflict. ... Instead of the group hug approach, let’s focus on tangible goals: fostering youth leadership, working from the margins in and using intersectionality as our lens — instead of just a talking point.”

She said it here.

And then earlier she said

...with Hillary Clinton’s probable exit from the race, organizations such as NOW and EMILY’s List, as well as the many second-wave leaders who’ve publicly questioned young women’s feminist credentials if they don’t support Clinton, will have to work to convince younger generations that they remain committed to their core missions more than they are committed to a specific candidate. The EMILY in EMILY’s List, for example, is actually an acronym meaning “Early Money is Like Yeast.” Supporting early and mid-career politicians has always been a better way to ensure we’ll someday have a female president than focusing solely on Hillary Clinton, who is in many ways an outlier as a female candidate. Ann Friedman will have much more on all this in TAP’s July print issue, so I’ll stop here.

She said it here.

In the final post I’m going to link to here, Goldstein makes a solid case for selecting popular, accomplished, and rising star Arizona governor Janet Napolitano to be Obama’s running mate.

I recently traveled to Phoenix to interview Janet Napolitano for an upcoming print profile. What struck me was how instructive her tenure is to those wondering what Obama’s compromise between “unity” and party-building would look like in practice. Napolitano has governed according to that exact model in Arizona, forming coalitions with business and moderate Republicans that have brought state Democrats to the point of possibly retaking the very conservative Arizona state legislature this November.

Goldstein further details why that Napolitano would be a good choice here.

If you just wanted to be cynical you could point out that Napolitano brings a lot of the credibility that “conservative” VP choices like Jim Webb or regional choices like New Mexico’s Bill Richardson bring without, um, some of the latter two’s histories.

It doesn’t have to be Napolitano as there are some other pretty interesting politicians, male and female, who’ll make a huge difference in the next generation and who could, if and only if tragedy dictated, rise to the occasion before 2016. But I agree with Goldstein and others that if one cared to support or promote the Democratic party (to be fair to other partisans not everyone does) she’d help balance the ticket as well as more superficially balancing the ticket.