The current debate over who should be Vice President Biden’s running mate this fall is likely to be settled in a week or so when Biden announces his choice. It is a remarkable feature of our ever evolving and largely unwritten constitutional system that this choice is left to him entirely alone, each of the contenders proclaiming that they will be satisfied to be spear carriers in his campaign if that is the role assigned to the. And yet the choice is likely to be very significant, given his age. His Vice President may well ascend to office either by death or because Biden does not run for a second term and his Vice President would therefore have an inside lane for the nomination in 2024. But the Vice Presidency has become something at the disposal of the nominee for over a very long time reaching back into the early Nineteenth Century and has, if anything, become even more so now that the Vice President, since Jimmy Carter was President, has significant responsibilities and so the President is likely to want someone with whom he feels comfortable and who shares his basic policy viewpoints.
Who the final list contains shows a lot about the dynamics of presidential politics in our time. The final three candidates according to most reports are Kamala Harris, the Senator from California; Susan Rice, the former Ambassador to the United Nations in the Obama Administration; and Karen Bass, a congresswoman from California. All three are black women. A woman is important so as to shore up the Democratic party with what is after all half the population. That all three are women and that so many black advocates claim that it is necessary to put a black person on the ticket may seem arrogant in that only some fourteen percent of the American population is African American, but the cause seems compelling because the long term failure to solve the problems of blacks in America calls out for some kind of at least symbolic acknowledgment that their lives do indeed matter. It should be remembered, of course, that Jews constitute just two to three percent of the American population and yet have a much greater influence than that on American culture, American professions and American politics, whether as legislators or as advisors to Presidents, and so percentage of population is not a good way to judge what degree of influence should be exercised by a minority group. It is just that Jews are quiet about their influence while Blacks are outspoken about their need to have representatives in the corridors of power.
The least known of the contenders is Karen Bass, the California Congresswoman who is also the chairperson of the Congressional Black Caucus. She is personable enough and takes the standard liberal positions on issues such as gun control and incarceration reform and any number of other matters where, in fact, the Congressional Black Caucus seems to be one of the more reasonable and circumspect of the groups extolling their views on Capital Hill. Nothing very inspiring in her story, but that should not count against her. What I do find troubling is that I do not know that she rises above the crowd so as to seem capable of being a statesman, which is what I want of Presidents, most people in Congress simply time servers more concerned about their re-election chances than anything else, busier raising money than studying the issues. My elitist point is that I want someone who has shown their abilities by attending a good college that they did not have to fake to get into and that they have been in Washington long enough to have looked at developing crises not from the outside but from the inside and so might be prepared to handle a new one from the inside, which is the way a President would, having access to classified information and the tumult of multiple advisors each providing a different and plausible point of view. That is why I was leery of BaracK Obama. He was clearly very smart and had the right educational credentials but he was not seasoned in national politics and it did take a few years for him to wake up to the fact that it was no use trying to negotiate with Republicans.
Karen Bass does not meet this test. She went to a rather undistinguished college and emerged out of her education with a Master’s Degree in Social Work, which I would not think of as a serious credential even if that is all Harry Hopkins had when he rose to prominence as one of FDR’s key advisors. Moreover, she has been in Congress only since 2013 and her time there does not make her a Henry Clay or a Nancy Pelosi who turned mastery of the House of Representatives into a place of national leadership. And I do wish she spoke not only pleasantly but incisively so as to display the keen intelligence which just about any of the successful Presidents manifests. No one doubts that Clinton and Obama were smart or that Reagan, most of the time, knew enough to stay out of the way of his excellent cabinet.
Another issue came up about her on “Meet the Press” this past weekend. She went to Cuba when she was nineteen to build houses for the poor. That shows a commendable activism in good causes, just as did Obama’s involvement as a community organizer, even if by that time Bass got to Cuba Castro had already embarked on show trials and so should have lost support among people who considered themselves liberals rather than radical. She returned to Cuba with a large Congressional delegation when Secretary of State John Kerry went to open the American Embassy in Havana as part of Obama’s outreach to Cuba in 2015, and now considers herself to simply have adopted Obama’s point of view on Cuba, which is mainstream enough. But she apparently sent felicitations on the death of Fidel Castro which set off vibrations in the Florida Cuban exile community because she had used an honorary title for him that rankles them though it is not known as such in California. So she has disowned that as a mistake in etiquette. But Florida is in play in the Electoral College, Biden ahead there over Trump in the polls, and so he might not want to endanger that state by giving the Republicans an issue. JFK may have owed his election to getting Texas because he had put LBJ on his ticket and Biden doesn’t want to make the mistake of losing Florida and perhaps the election because of Bass. Sounds cruel, but Presidential politics isn’t beanball.
Kamala Harris presents a different problem. She is a formidable debater even if her performances on the debate stage showed she led with her right and so wasn’t much good on defense. She is better at Congressional hearings where she can lay it into witnesses with a prosecutorial style and where they don’t have much time to respond. She is charming but I think lays it on a bit thick, and I do not know how well that will play with Republican women in the suburbs. Also, she is a former prosecutor and State Attorney General, and I am suspicious of people in law enforcement roles who would rise to the highest office. The last one who attempted to do so was Thomas Dewey of New York, who was known as a racket buster before becoming four time Governor of New York and twice the Republican candidate for President. We were better off with common sense Harry Truman rather than a point of view that looks at prosecution as the way to solve social problems.
Susan Rice is my favorite among the three contenders that seem to be still standing. She has the pedigree I am looking for. She had an excellent education at St. Alban’s, Stanford, and New College, Oxford, and has oodles of experience in government ever since she served in the State Department as Under Secretary for African Affairs in the Clinton Administration and supported initiative for economic development there. She is calm and statesmanlike and not easily rattled even if she has never campaigned for elective office. She and Biden have worked together before in the Obama Administration. Her blemish is the appearance on “Meet the Press” during the Obama era when she said that her latest information was that a video that went viral in Egypt might indeed have been part of what motivated those who attacked our consulate in Benghazi, but that might not have been the only reason. That sounds sufficient on its face though Republicans will go after her as they have before for having “lied” about Benghazi, though I don’t know what justifies their righteousness about the issue. Would it have been worse if there had been no video or if it had not been mentioned? Rice never said the video justified killing Americans. I don’t think Benghazi will play well except with those who would never have voted for Biden anyway, and no state’s electoral votes will hang on that. So she is the safest as well as the best choice for Vice President.
All this speculation will have run past its expiration date in a week or so, but it is a fun exercise and keeps those of us in the year round hot stove league of political fans entertained because there will be something new to speculate about soon enough, such as, I hope, who Joe Biden will choose for his cabinet. I, for one, would not give Elizabeth Warren Treasury. You want a Wall Street guy or gal for that because they know about money rather than about safeguarding the consumer of financial services. Not many from the campaign trail make it to Washington even though Clinton had picked his old friend from Arkansas, Mack McLarty, as his first chief of staff. Sentimental choices usually don’t work out. But all of that is another horse race.