Any discussion of Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, who is on Kamala Harris’s shortlist of vice-presidential picks, invariably includes the phrase “former NASA astronaut.” He flew four Space Shuttle missions — two as commander — the desideratum of a child’s imagining of a future career, and a killer résumé line for anyone running for public office.
For Ms. Harris, the spaceflight factor may be overestimated and underappreciated all at once: Mr. Kelly projects an image of masculinity and strength that could reassure any swing voters or others who may be reluctant to cast a vote for a female former senator from liberal California. Whether or not Mr. Kelly is the V.P. choice, the qualities he brings — sobriety, consistency and military experience — are welcome contributions to the future of Democratic politics.
Mr. Kelly’s strengths as a running mate and a potential governing partner go deeper than the NASA logo. What astronauts actually do on the job is more mundane than Han Solo derring-do, and serves as a better match for the tedious and often boring realities of governing than the passing florescence of politics.
“We looked for three main criteria,” said Chris Hadfield, a retired astronaut who helped write the selection guidelines at NASA. “Healthy life habits; the proven ability to learn complicated things quickly; and the ability to make good decisions of extremely high consequences.”
In his four years in the U.S. Senate, which he joined in 2020, Mr. Kelly has governed in the meticulous and quiet style that NASA favors. Though he has yet to score a major legislative accomplishment and has not sketched out a grand theory of governance, he consulted frequently with small-town mayors, learned the arcane protocols of military budgeting on the Armed Services Committee and helped save Tucson’s Davis-Monthan Air Force Base from decommissioning after the retirement of its signature A-10 aircraft.
Mindful of the shakiness of being a Democrat in traditionally red Arizona, Mr. Kelly also “ran to the right” whenever possible, according to the Republican consultant Stan Barnes, endorsing measures, for example, to bulk up dilapidated portions of the border fence and conspicuously opposing President Biden’s choice to ease asylum requirements during the pandemic. Such gestures helped blunt the reality of his voting record, which put him on Mr. Biden’s side 95 percent of the time.
“The left, such as it is in Arizona, thinks he’s too soft,” Mr. Barnes continued, “and the right thinks he’s not the conservative firebrand that they want. But the average voter in Arizona thinks he’s dignified and thoughtful. He’s not given to sophistry or flippant comments. That’s one reason his popularity is high here.”
Mr. Kelly has already served as a loyal vice president, of sorts, to strong female leaders. Whether choreographed or not, he habitually let Arizona’s more flamboyant senior senator, Kyrsten Sinema, take the lead and claim the spotlight on matters of statewide importance. If there were any cracks in the showhorse-workhorse facade they developed as Arizona’s two Democratic senators, they were kept invisible to the public. Both flew the flag of bipartisanship, but people around the state knew Mr. Kelly was the easier one to approach for a meeting.
His political education also came from a strong and successful woman: his wife, the former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot and gravely wounded in a 2011 assassination attempt outside a Tucson grocery store. In their years together before that, they mainly lived in separate cities — he in Houston, she in Tucson and Washington — and it appears he never sought to overshadow her, or interfere with her career.
His tenure in the Senate has at times seemed an extension of the centrist and pragmatic sensibilities that Ms. Giffords brought to the House of Representatives from 2007 to 2012: She cast more than half her votes against the Democratic grain and earned enough credibility even among rural conservatives to be seriously discussed as a Senate prospect. In taking the job himself, Mr. Kelly may have been letting her live out that dream.
His presence on the ticket would help defuse some of the baggage associated with the perceived negative aspects of the Democratic brand — weakness on crime and national defense, as well as unfair perceptions of radicalism on culture war issues, reassuring squeamish swing voters.
Mr. Kelly’s response to the 2011 shooting of his wife, during which a tight seal of control descended over information about her medical condition, gives a sense of how to govern in a crisis. The violence against a member of Congress — a seeming portent of a nation spiraling into politicized anger — generated intense media interest, and Mr. Kelly managed it as a mission commander, becoming the gatekeeper and public voice for Ms. Giffords through a cloud of personal grief. (As a disclosure here, I was friendly with both before the shooting, but have not been in touch with either in more than a decade). His commitment to Ms. Giffords has remained steadfast ever since.
The fundamentally technocratic and rules-oriented nature of spaceflight requires improvisation and spontaneity — the elusive quality that voters like to call “authenticity.” Neil Armstrong, for example, was always amused by the swashbuckling image admirers projected onto him as the first man to walk on the moon. “I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer,” he said of himself, “born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.” There is a touch of this STEM dryness to Mr. Kelly. Cueball-bald and approximately 5′8,” with a mild personal bearing and disarming New Jersey accent, he has been called “boring” by more than one Arizona political observer. You would hardly know you were talking to a combat aviator and astronaut if someone didn’t tell you beforehand. And he might not even bring it up himself.
But even in an organizational culture like NASA’s, rife with terms like “fault trees” and “malfunction processes,” commanders are expected to act with imagination in rare moments of uncertainty. “Your first instinct is not to go off on your own, it’s to follow the procedure,” said the retired astronaut Dr. David Hilmers, now a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “But there are lots of times where things happen that aren’t in the flight rules. No matter how much you think of what could happen, there will be things that you never dreamed of. And you just have to act. You don’t have time to call the ground and ask for help.” These are the qualities Ms. Harris will want in her vice president.
Mario Cuomo once said that politics is the art of being able to campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Mr. Kelly can reach into his spaceflight history for both modes of operation. He told ABC News shortly after his wife was shot that the view outside the windows of the Space Shuttle Endeavour provided him with a moral imperative. “Just to see our planet as this big blue marble floating in the blackness of space, you know, there aren’t borders between nations. And that’s the only place we have. I mean, we can’t go anywhere else. We need to be able to work together as a nation and a community.”
Tom Zoellner is a journalist and the author of “Rim to River: Looking Into the Heart of Arizona.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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