Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Joe Biden and Susan Rice in the Oval Office, April 2015
As Joe Biden continues to ponder his vice-presidential pick, I think his primary criterion has to be electoral: whether that candidate will make it more or less likely that he will displace Donald Trump next January. Every other legitimate consideration pales alongside the need to oust Trump and install a government that is both democratic and Democratic.
By that standard, Susan Rice’s inclusion in the “Top Three” list Biden is reportedly considering is a complete mystery. It’s impossible even to imagine the existence of an American who’s either likely to vote for Biden or could be persuaded to vote for Biden who would decide to actually cast that vote because of Rice’s presence on the ticket. Alone among the possible candidates, she brings nothing to him electorally.
What, after all, does Rice represent? A reversion to Obama-era foreign policy? Biden has already checked that box himself. And on domestic and social and economic policy, Rice has no record whatever. If there’s a core Rice constituency, it’s Obama wonks and, perhaps, older African Americans—two groups already totally committed to cast their votes for Uncle Joe.
Would Rice do Biden any harm if selected? Republicans are sure to revive their baseless attacks that she lied about Benghazi, which may bring a small handful of right-wing Trumpians to the polls, though anyone who’s still vexed about the Benghazi myth is almost surely a Trump voter to begin with.
Rice’s chief electoral weakness, then, is that she doesn’t enlarge the political pond in which Biden is fishing for votes by a single drop. By contrast, both Elizabeth Warren and Karen Bass do enlarge that pond, though each has their drawbacks as well. The senator and the congresswoman would each provide ideological balance to the ticket, and the inclusion of either one of them would doubtless prompt some fence-sitting progressives to vote for Biden, and other already committed but unhappy progressives to actually work for the ticket.
As to her ability to communicate to the public, as to what she’d do on issues domestic and economic and social? Who knows?
Bass could bring one more asset to the ticket: a credibility to young African Americans who might not otherwise go to the polls. According to an American University poll of Black voters released July 29, only 47 percent of Blacks under the age of 30 say they plan to vote for Biden (among Black voters 30 to 59, that figure is 70 percent, and for those 60 and over, it’s 86 percent). Similarly, only 29 percent of Blacks under 30 say they’re definitely motivated to vote (in those other two age categories, the figures are 62 percent and 78 percent, respectively).
As a longtime movement activist who first organized against police abuse when she was 19 years old in 1973, and who has been organizing for racial, social, and economic justice causes ever since, Bass could bring a street cred to the Black Lives Matter activists and other young African Americans and under-30 leftists of all races that no other possible pick could even begin to match.
Like Warren, however, Bass would be subjected to accusations that she’d somehow loose the demons of socialism on an unsuspecting American public. I assume the Biden folks have polled white suburban women and other such swing constituencies to ascertain just how much damage such attacks would do. I also assume they’ve polled Florida to see whether Bass’s Venceremos Brigade trips to Cuba would revive Trump’s chances in that all-important state.
In that sense, there’s a downside risk to Biden going progressive with his pick. But there’s also an upside benefit, particularly with Bass. It was depressed African American turnout in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee that enabled Donald Trump to claim the White House in 2016, and Bass—more than former D.A. Kamala Harris and former police chief Val Demings—is the one possible addition to that ticket who could bring disenchanted Black youths to the polls.
Harris’s abysmal polling among Black voters during her short-lived presidential candidacy in 2019 strongly suggests she won’t boost Democratic African American turnout by much. That said, she’s been vetted and at least has a mainstream record on domestic and economic issues, which puts her one step ahead of Rice, who has none. Harris neither adds progressives to the Biden fold nor poses much of a risk that she’ll cost him swing white suburban voters. Biden might not like her all that much, but while she won’t expand his potential electorate, she likely won’t diminish it by very much, either.
And if we go beyond the how-do-they-help-or-hurt-the-ticket issue, what then? Warren would be ready from Day One to become president if something were to happen to Biden, bringing a clear progressive focus to the task. Harris, more than anyone else in this field, personifies the mushy center of the Democratic Party, clearly liberal on racial and cultural issues, but with ties to Big Tech and other monied interests that would make progressives queasy, and rightly so. Bass comes from a very different political universe than any of her fellow possible veeps, indeed, from a very different universe than the vast majority of pols from either party. But she’s shown a remarkable aptitude for leadership when it’s been presented her, as she did when, as Speaker of the California Assembly, she led the state’s Democrats through the catastrophic economic downturn of 2009-10, when they had to cut much-beloved programs but still managed to save them all. Also, more than her fellow candidates, she exudes the same kind of empathetic understanding and embodies the same healing instincts that Biden does, no small asset in a nation as wounded as ours.
And Rice? As to her ability to communicate to the public, as to what she’d do on issues domestic and economic and social? Who knows? For someone who could be a heartbeat away from the presidency, a CV that’s largely a tabula rasa doesn’t strike me as much of a recommendation.
