Earlier and more insistently than at any time in recent memory, Democratic Party leaders and factions are pressuring the party’s likely nominee, Joe Biden, to hew to their agendas through his choice as running mate. This is a singularly bad idea.
Mr. Biden’s primary campaign platform was progressive compared with recent Democratic nominees, but arrayed against one further to the left. The putative nominee isn’t obliged to adopt the programs backed by his vanquished rivals, yet a degree of compromise might be in order to broaden support for the ticket.
Mr. Biden has yielded some to Senator Bernie Sanders on health care, but Mr. Biden continues to feel pressure from forces to his left to adopt their more ambitious plans, as well as to choose a vice-presidential nominee to their liking.
But imposing a running mate for the purpose of pushing the nominee’s positions in a certain direction can lead to a tense and nearly dysfunctional White House. The role of the vice president has evolved considerably, and so the choice of the running mate involves much more than the conventional view that perhaps that person can help the nominee win the Electoral College — an unproven theory. Many presidential scholars think the only clear-cut case of a vice-presidential selection helping the nominee win was John F. Kennedy’s choice of Texas’ Lyndon Johnson in 1960.
As fate had it, Johnson fulfilled another requirement — or what should be a requirement — in a running mate: He was ready to step in immediately as president. Johnson’s experience as the Senate majority leader for over six years made him more prepared than most past or future vice presidents would have been when Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. With Mr. Biden, who is 77, sending signals that he might be a one-term president, and since the immediate past vice-presidential candidate usually has a jump on the next nomination, the qualifications of that person matter all the more.
But it’s a third factor that’s critical in the choice of a running mate that Biden would understand best: the chemistry between the two top figures in the White House. Forcing an arranged marriage at the pinnacle of the federal government invites continuing tensions between the president and the vice president and their respective staffs.
The chemistry between the candidates on the ticket didn’t used to matter much, because the vice president played little role in governing. After Johnson had done his job of helping elect Kennedy, the president didn’t have much use for him, and Kennedy’s younger brother Bobby, the president’s consiglieri as well as attorney general, hated L.B.J. If anything, the next pairing was even less functional: The bully in Johnson was so cruel to his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, that one day when I accompanied Mr. Humphrey to Detroit to see a jobs project, he actually cried — on the plane real tears rolled down his cheeks — about how miserable it was to be Johnson’s vice president.
The next Democratic pair, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, formed the first team in which the vice president played an across-the-board substantive role, as opposed to overseeing a (usually obscure) project. But Mr. Carter, a peanut farmer and ex-governor of Georgia, and the more experienced Mr. Mondale had a serious falling out over a speech the president gave during the 1979 oil crisis bemoaning America’s “crisis of the spirit,” the so-called malaise speech. Their governing partnership never recovered.
When Barack Obama considered a vice president he wanted someone with whom he felt that he and the American people would be comfortable; he believed that getting the voters accustomed to the idea of a black president was enough of a challenge. Moreover, then-Senator Biden, an easygoing man well liked in Washington, was strong where Mr. Obama was weak: on the legislative maneuverings of Congress and on foreign policy. Mr. Obama also wanted someone who was old enough that presumably he wouldn’t be using the vice presidency as a steppingstone to the presidency (a source of strain between Bill Clinton and Al Gore). During the nomination struggle, Mr. Obama sought to ascertain his own comfort level with Mr. Biden by calling him two or three times a week, ostensibly to discuss issues. Though few outside knew it and a couple of others were in the running, Mr. Biden was Mr. Obama’s first choice all along, and they had the most successful governing and personal relationship of perhaps any such partnership in history.
What’s so strange about the cascade of public advice that has been sent Mr. Biden’s way is that he’s particularly qualified to make his own decision. The ostentatious lobbying on the part of some possible candidates is an embarrassment. Women’s groups pressed Mr. Biden to pledge to select a woman, and on March 15, when the struggle with Mr. Sanders was still heated and two female candidates remained in the race, Mr. Biden promised to pick a woman as his running mate.
The pressure for this had been building. Within the last couple of years it came to be the accepted wisdom in Democratic circles that at least one of the candidates on the party’s 2020 ticket had to be a woman. What was concerning about this unofficial decree and Mr. Biden’s acquiescence was that he fairly early limited his own options. Also, having been lobbied hard, he evidently caved to a powerful force within his party.
Whatever happens in November, has the future of the party been kidnapped by this decision? Did Mr. Biden’s pledge to select a woman as a running mate set a precedent that a woman always has to be on the ticket? What if in some future election Hispanics demand that it is their turn? Or African-Americans? Where does such identity politics end?
There are now a large number of talented women in politics, and women voters, particularly older, educated ones, play a very large role in presidential finals. Six women ran for the 2020 Democratic nomination — and, the serious ones having had ample exposure to Democratic voters, all of them lost. (None even came in second.) There are also a few promising female Democratic governors — some in possibly strategically valuable states. Stacey Abrams, who came close to winning the governorship in Georgia in 2018, has propelled herself into contention, as well.
But why does a woman necessarily merit a head start on the next presidential nomination?
Mr. Biden understands what made his partnership with Mr. Obama work as well as it did, and he has many talented people, male and female, from among whom to choose as his running mate or cabinet officers. He knows what a personal decision it is, or should be, to pick a running mate and a governing partner. It’s now up to him to show who’s boss.
Elizabeth Drew, a political journalist who for many years covered Washington for The New Yorker, is the author of “Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall.”
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