Joe Biden’s Vice-President

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Whom should Joe Biden pick for his vice-president? Here’s my analysis:

Biden has promised, twice, to pick a woman. He’s not a promise-breaker, let alone on something that important. So we can count on that. He’s also dropped strong hints about picking an African-American, but he’s not promised to do so. What should we make of that?

African-Americans are, by far, the demographic group most consistently loyal to Democrats. They helped put Obama in the White House, twice, by clear and incontestable electoral and popular-vote majorities, both times. They made the first decisive move in this year’s primaries, giving the nod to Biden on Super Tuesday. So the time to acknowledge their contributions in shaping the party and winning elections is long overdue.

Anyway, Joe is fair and loyal to a fault. He knows that he owes his rise from near-death in the Democratic primaries to Jim Clyburn and the African-Americans in South Carolina and Super-Tuesday states. For him to forget or ignore that debt would seem, to me at least, inconceivable. So I think we can comfortably expect Joe both to keep his promise and to actualize his strong hints by picking an African-American female as his vice-president.

Who might that be? Here, in tabular form, are what I see as the three leading candidates, along with their ages (at inauguration, if elected) and qualifications:

Leading Candidates for Biden’s VP
Candidate	Age*	Education	Public Service (years)	Executive Experience	Comments
Stacey Abrams	47	B.A. (magna) M.P.A.** J.D. (Yale)	Atlanta Dep'y City Atty (5) Georgia Statehouse (10) Voter Empowerment (2)	NOW Corp. (financial svcs) Nourish, Inc. (drinks for children) Sage Works (CEO, legal consulting)	Numerous awards for legislative achievement
Kamala Harris	56	B.A. J.D. (UC, Hastings)	Dep’y D.A., Alameda County, CA (4) CA Unemployment Appeals Board (0.5) CA Medical Assistance Commission (3) Assisting San Francisco D.A. (2) D.A., San Francisco (6), CA Attorney General (6), U.S. Senator from CA (4)	Some executive functions in listed legal and judicial positions	Created controversy (see below)
Susan Rice	56	B.A.(Stanford) Rhodes Scholarship Ph.D. (Oxford) in Int’l Relations	National Security Council (4) Special Assistant to President Obama (2) UN Ambassador (4.5)	Intellibridge (2) Brookings Institution (6) Advisory Board, Bush-Obama transition	Created controversy (see below)

* Age at inauguration, if elected
** Master of Public Administration

ERRATUM: An earlier version of this table omitted Kamala Harris’ six years as California’s Attorney General. I very much regret the inadvertent omission.

This table offers an embarrassment of riches. Every one of these three ladies could make an effective vice-president.

But we live in dangerous times, for two very specific reasons. First, our 1% and our oligarchy have rigged our national economy and made it so unhappy for tens of millions of workers that they elected Donald Trump. Second, we are facing a second Great Depression caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The first problem greatly exacerbates the second by depriving our economy of humanity and resilience and giving Trump the bully pulpit in the midst of global tragedy and chaos.

By themselves, each of these two problems presents an existential threat to our democracy. Together, they are likely the greatest threat our nation has faced so far. Joe Biden will be only two years shy of 80 on inauguration. So the person whom he chooses for vice-president must be able not only to augment his leadership at this perilous time, but to step right into his shoes if need be.

Under these special circumstances, I think Stacey Abrams would make the best choice. Here’s why:

Perhaps the simplest reason is political. Both Harris and Rice have generated significant controversy in their longer political careers. It comes across in detailed paragraphs in their Wikipedia biographies (see Harris’s here and Rice’s here).

Harris is controversial for: (1) having been a lover of a unique California power broker named Willie Brown; (2) having been appointed by him to two public commissions in California, in what looked like patronage; (3) the favor she curried with California’s economic elite in her bruising campaign against her former boss for the office of San Francisco’s District Attorney; (4) a campaign finance-law violation by her campaign in that race; and (5) her decision in a controversial death-penalty case. Harris thus has considerable political baggage which could be used to distract attention from the existential threats facing all of us.

Rice is controversial for her bluntness as a diplomat and for her minor role in the aftermath of terrorists killing our diplomats in Benghazi—which House Republicans investigated to death without ever making any formal charges. Benghazi itself might have ceased to exist had not Rice, Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton (as Secretary of State) teamed up to get the UN to authorize the intervention that saved Benghazi’s people from massacre by the late tyrant Gaddafi’s surrounding forces. But Rice ruffled diplomatic feathers later, and the GOP will have little trouble in digging up dirt on her.

In a Biden Administration, Rice might suffer yet another disadvantage. Her portfolio is foreign policy. So is Biden’s: he spent most of his time as vice-president working on foreign policy issues that President Obama assigned him while Obama was working on his domestic agenda. Another foreign-policy expert, one who doesn’t even have a J.D., might be a third wheel in a Biden White House, especially at a time when our most serious problems are domestic.

Rice writes for the New York Times on the subjects of national security, foreign affairs and diplomacy. But she’s broadened her portfolio recently, writing about making voting safer and easier and proposing a national service corps to get us through the pandemic. Apparently she has an interest in the vice-presidency and some good ideas; both are plusses her her.

But in contrast to Harris and Rice, Stacey Abrams has a biography free of controversy or scandal. While her innocence may be an artifact of her currently low national profile, it’s a good position from which to start building a national campaign.

More important, Abrams’ recent history dovetails precisely with our national needs in our current crisis. She lost her unprecedented 2018 bid to become Georgia’s governor by a tiny margin of 1.4%. [Erratum: A previous version of this post put this figure at 0.4%. The actual margin of Abrams’ loss was 54,723 votes out of 3,939,328 cast (there were more than two candidates). I regret the error, which has taught me to do my own arithmetic.] There was ample evidence, but no conclusive proof, of racially motivated voter suppression. Instead of whining about her loss, or running for an open U.S. Senate seat (which many think she could have won), Abrams founded and led the organization Fair Fight Action to fight voter suppression and assure fair elections. (Full disclosure: I contribute monthly to this cause.)

In other words, Abrams cut to the heart of the problem and sought to make things better, not make headlines. She and her organization have been working hard for that purpose, in an almost total news vacuum, ever since. Isn’t that just what we want, a vice-president who gets good things done quietly, without hogging the spotlight or creating yet another “reality” show?

The likelihood that Brian Kemp, her opponent, resorted to every cheap trick of voter suppression to beat Abrams makes it improbable that he or his campaign balked at digging up dirt on her. More likely, they tried and found none to dig.

More important still, Abrams seems to have a knack for going going straight to the jugular of intractable problems. A fine example is her work in killing a 2011 Republican ploy to cut taxes on the rich in Georgia. The bill was designed to cut income taxes but to raise taxes on cable service. Abrams analyzed its net effect and showed it would have raised net taxes on 82% of Georgians. She left her analysis on the desk of every Georgia legislator, and the bill failed. This led Time magazine to write that Abrams could “credibly boast of having single-handedly stopped the largest tax increase in Georgia history.”

Although confined to a single state, Abrams’ legislative triumph goes to the heart of what ails us and how best to fix it. For forty years, the Republicans have been a “reverse Robin Hood” party. They’ve taken from the poor to give to the rich. Their consistent ideology and tax policy are the principal reasons for our extreme economic inequality and the desperation of our working poor.

The machinery for their class robbery has been a combination of huge tax cuts for the rich, smaller ones for the middle class and the poor, and cutbacks in social services, including health care, for those near the bottom. Abrams’ saw that the proposed Georgia income-tax cuts would benefit the wealthy while being paid for by everyone with cable service—netting 82% of Georgians a loss. She stopped this particular reverse-Robin-Hood ploy in its tracks.

What’s more, Abrams did so without making waves. She didn’t characterize what she did as “socialism,” Democratic or otherwise. She didn’t proclaim a “revolution” and scare the moderates. She didn’t call for big structural change. She simply stopped the latest class theft and went about her business. Isn’t that precisely what we need at this time of maximum polarization: a pol who does what needs doing below the oligarchs’ radar?

Almost hidden in Abrams’ resume is something else about her. While most of her public service has been as a legislator, she has quietly operated in the private and nonprofit sectors. She founded and served as senior vice-president of NOW Corp. (formerly NOWaccount Network Corporation), a financial services firm. She co-founded Nourish, Inc., a beverage company with a focus on infants and toddlers, and is CEO of Sage Works, a legal consulting firm that has represented clients including the Atlanta Dream of the WNBA. Unlike many, if not most, modern pols, Abrams is a doer and a builder.

This is precisely the kind of leadership we need at this time of unprecedented crisis. We need builders who seek small solutions when big ones are deadlocked. We require leaders who can stymie the reverse-Robin-Hood Party without making waves or causing controversy. In today’s hyper-partisan environment, the kind of leader who can convince colleagues to do the right thing, by putting insightful analysis quietly on their desks, will be worth her weight in gold.

Yes, Kamala Harris is an attractive and sometimes flamboyant personality. Yes, she proved a skilled “attack dog” in the Dems’ Houston debate last year. Her skill in baiting Trump might well help Biden win the presidency. But she also baited Biden himself, making a close personal relationship problematic.

To meet today’s unprecedented challenges, we need a vice-president who can begin to heal our divisions and solve our problems quietly and without fuss, from day one. We also need one who can step into the Oval Office, if need be, without making waves or causing a break in policy. Most of all, we need someone who can put an end to two generations of reverse Robin Hood without causing unnecessary controversy or further division. That’s what Abrams offers as no one else does.

Coda: An Extraordinary Achievement

Before leaving the subject of our next VP, let’s consider just how extraordinary was the tiny margin of Abrams’ loss against Brian Kemp in Georgia’s 2018 race for governor.

Georgia was the Southern state most devastated by the Union’s final march to victory in our brutal Civil War. General William T. Sherman’s bloody, infamous “march to the sea” wrecked much of the state. As a result, Georgia has been the focus of Southern regional resentment for the century and a half since the Civil War ended.

After Texas and Florida, today’s Georgia is the third most populous state of what once was the Confederacy—the Southern states that provoked the Civil War by declaring their succession in order to preserve slavery as a legal institution. Georgia has never had an African-American governor. It has never had a female governor. Stacey Abrams is both African-American and female.

Even Barack Obama never carried Georgia. Although he won Florida in both 2008 and 2012, and North Carolina (barely) in 2008, Obama lost Georgia by 5% in 2008 and by 8% in 2012 [let cursor hover over state to see margin].

In Abrams’ run for governor in 2018, her opponent, Brian Kemp, was Georgia’s Secretary of State, with complete legal authority over Georgia’s election procedures and processes. He had been caught on record making negative comments about the Democrats’ attempt to register “minority voters,” and there was evidence of deliberate voter suppression in the election.

We all know that African-Americans and women—each separately—have to be smarter and work harder than others to win elections. Yet even with all these demographic, historic, regional and procedural handicaps working against her, Stacey Abrams came within 1.4% of making history.

True, she didn’t win. But by coming so close she made a very different future possible: a future in which everyone has a right to vote for real—even in the heart of the Deep South—and a future in which race and gender don’t matter as much as empathy, skill and competence. And if Abrams can help Biden carry Georgia, with its 16 electoral votes, then the 2016 “battleground” state of Michigan (16) or Wisconsin (10) won’t matter.

How did Abrams do it? The same way that Obama worked his own electoral miracle, with delicacy, diplomacy and understatement. Amidst our braying, bragging, taunting politics of today, Abrams is a throwback—in a very good way—to a kinder, gentler, more competent era. When set back, her very last instinct is to call a press conference, blame a problem on her opponent(s), and start a fight.

There is nothing flashy about Stacey Abrams. What you get with her is penetrating insight, genuine female empathy for the disadvantaged, careful understatement, and quiet competence. She does not share Kamala Harris’ propensity to pick fights.

To get a glimpse of Abrams’ power and skill as a politician for the people, review her response to Trump’s State of the Union speech last year. She opened with a powerful example of empathy, compassion and moral values, based on a story about her father. (When have we ever heard this president do that?) She described how GOP game-playing with government shutdowns, and its flirting with default, have made life harder for millions of working people. She made the vital points that “caging children” is wrong, and that “compassionate treatment at the border is not the same as open borders.” She noted her own commitment to making the right to vote universal, explaining that “the foundation of our moral leadership around the globe is free and fair elections.” Toward the end of her speech, she said she didn’t “want [Trump] to fail,” making a direct and devastating contrast with Rush, McConnell and the GOP, who laid down the treasonous goal of making Obama fail from the very first days of his presidency.

Now imagine Abrams at Biden’s side, and maybe some day in the Oval Office. If you do, you may come to the same conclusion that I have: she’s a worthy successor to President Obama, perhaps the most worthy in our national life today.

Endnote on Elizabeth Warren. Readers familiar with my writing may be surprised at my enthusiasm for Stacey Abrams as vice-president, after my avid support for Elizabeth Warren during the Democratic primary campaign. I still believe that Warren has a detailed and nuanced understanding of what ails us and the best plans to fix it. But the Democrats have spoken. They seem as uncomfortable with Warren’s call for big, structural change as with Sanders’ call for a political revolution and Democratic socialism.

This view is not without reason. For forty years we’ve all been under the spell of another big idea—that our own government is the problem, not the solution, so we ought to drown it in the bathtub. That big idea has left us deep in debt and without the virus tests, masks or other PPE that we need to fight Covid-19. It’s well on the way to destroying our democracy. It has burdened us with the grossest and most counterproductive economic inequality in our national history. So maybe it’s time to stop worshipping big ideas and start fixing things carefully and systematically, one by one.

Warren also has lots of littler ideas for fixing things. We desperately need her expertise in getting Wall Street to stick to its knitting—financing real businesses doing real things—rather than creating ever-bigger and riskier casinos. We also need her help (and the help of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that she created) to keep Wall Street and big banks from fleecing consumers.

Warren could promote and even implement her ideas and plans in the Cabinet, as Secretary of the Treasury, on the Fed, or as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. I fervently hope that a Biden Administration will find some way to put her keen insight, sense of justice, and deep thinking to work. But in choosing Biden, the Democrats have chosen step-by-step improvement over radical change, diplomacy over provocation, cooperation over fighting, and unity over division. All those approaches fit Abrams like a glove.

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