Hillary thought about Tim Cook and Bill Gates as her VP

Cook would have been historic, as the first openly gay nominee on a major party ticket

Hillary Clinton should be thanking the Republican party every day for giving her Donald Trump as an opponent. With his antics and just general ridiculousness (and that's putting a nice spin on it), he has been able to completely overshadow any of the major problems she would be facing against anyone else.

I speak, of course, of the nearly daily e-mails that have been coming out from WikiLeaks. From what I can tell, no bombshells have been dropped, but there has been some interesting information leaked about the internal operations of the Clinton campaign.

Take the e-mail, which was released on Tuesday, showing who Clinton had on her list of potential VP picks. 

There are the names you'd expect to see, like Elizabeth Warren, Claire Mckaskill, Julian Castro (who I had my money on to get the job), Cory Booker and, of course, Tim Kaine.

Then there are the people who you've probably never heard of like Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors; Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation; Bill McCraven, a US Navy Admiral; and Andrew Gillum, Mayor of Tallahassee, Florida.

In particular there are three names on the list that really peaked my interest, since they come from the tech world: Apple CEO Tim Cook; Microsoft founder Bill Gates; and his wife, Melinda Gates. 

Picking Melinda Gates would have given us our first ever all women ticket, and Cook would have been an even bolder move, considering that we've never had a major party presidential or vice presidential candidate who is openly gay before.

All three would have been intriguing, and they may have helped Clinton shore up support in Silicon Valley, which has been somewhat lacking this election cycle.

According to data from Crowdpac, Clinton has raised $7.7 million from the tech industry. While that's obviously good news for Clinton, it's also not great when compared to how much the tech world gave to President Obama's campaign.

Another report from Crowdpac back in August found that donations this election cycle were down 68 percent from where they had been in 2012. By August of that year President Obama had raised $8.8 million, a number Clinton still has not been able to reach, even two months later, and likely won't with less than a month left before the election ends.

Perhaps picking someone from tech would have helped juice those numbers.

Either way, it's doubtful that either candidate would have wanted the job. Gates even said so specifically in a Reddit AMA earlier this year.

“I like my current job at the Foundation better than I would being President,” he said. “Also I wouldn’t be good at doing what you need to do to get elected. I thought Michael Bloomberg was thoughtful about why it didn’t make sense for him to try and run even though he is a great executive.”

However, at least Gates might actually do well if he did decide to run.

A survey from Fidelum Partners earlier this year asked 1,012 adults to rate candidates, including politicians and other famous people and then asked how likely they would be to vote for them.

Gates came in third, with 28 percent, tied with Donald Trump, behind only Barack Obama, with 42 percent, and Clinton, with 33 percent. Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet got only 17 percent each, behind Ellen Degenerse, but above Bill Cosby, Vladmir Putin and Charlie Sheen (that's quite a group right there).

This was obviously a preliminary list for the Clinton campaign, and it's unclear how serious they were about actually vetting any of these candidates. 

Oh, I should also mention my favorite thing about this entire e-mail: at the very bottom of the list, all by himself, as if they forgot to include him and then remembered at the last moment: poor Bernie Sanders.

The Clinton campaign was apparently not feeling the Bern. 

(Image source: dailymail.co.uk)