Jill Biden got a root canal. Joe Biden got a new job. In the summer of 2008, the then senator answered his cell phone while waiting for his wife in a dentist’s office near their Wilmington, Delaware, home. When the Bidens returned to their car, Joe told Jill, “Barack called, and asked me to be the vice president.”
Very soon Joe Biden will be the one making a call to some lucky Democrat, offering the second spot on the 2020 ticket. Barack Obama won’t be on the line this time, but the former president is still very much in Biden’s ear. “They don’t just talk, like, every six months. They’re in regular contact, as are their teams,” says Jen Psaki, who was the traveling press secretary for Obama–Biden ’08 and then spent most of the next eight years working in senior positions in the Obama administration. “I don’t know that the president is going to tell him who to pick as much as guide him on what he thinks Biden should be looking for, if he’s asked. The two of them became personal friends, and Biden was a trusted team player. I think that’s the model.”
Biden’s history with Obama is one of his greatest political assets, particularly with Black voters. But those eight White House years also come with some insider baggage. Competing wings of the Obama alumni association are promoting their own vice presidential favorites. John Morgan, a Florida lawyer who was a major fundraiser for Obama’s campaigns and is a top donor to Biden, talks frequently with Biden’s senior advisers. “Everybody’s got an agenda,” he says, laughing and eagerly admitting to his own. Morgan has been lobbying for Congresswoman Val Demings, the former police chief in his hometown of Orlando. “I do think Obama will weigh in significantly on the V.P. choice. And Biden respects Obama’s opinion and instincts,” Morgan says. “What he’s got to be careful about is: You’ve got a whole group of people from Obamaworld, like Valerie Jarrett and Eric Holder, who are pushing Susan Rice.”
“That would not be true,” Jarrett tells me (Holder did not return a call for comment). “I have been candid in my assessment of many of the people, but I have not put my thumb on the scale. I have not advocated any individual candidate.” Jarrett is, however, effusive about Rice, who was the U.N. ambassador and then national security adviser under Obama. “The vice president is there to give counsel to the president. And that’s what Susan has always done. She wouldn’t just be a good fit—she’d be extraordinary,” Jarrett says. “I watched Susan closely in the most stressful, challenging moments of President Obama’s time in office, and she always handled her business. There is never any drama. There’s no self-pity. She’s organized, disciplined, smart as a whip, has excellent judgment, and can take a punch without blinking an eye.”
Morgan says he’d be fine with lots of the potential selections—except, that is, for Senator Kamala Harris. “She disqualified herself the night of that debate in Miami,” he says, referring to Harris’s attack on Biden over school busing during the Democratic primaries. “Joe Biden is genial, but I think that exchange is still a factor. And his wife said it was a punch to the gut. Jill Biden is his protector. And I think that what she has to say at the end will weigh heavily on him.”
Harris is still the conventional wisdom front-runner; Jarrett says the California senator would be a “superb choice. If he thinks that she’s the right person for the job, I assure you that minor skirmish isn’t going to get in the way.” One of Harris’s staunchest advocates points to another possible vulnerability, however. “Some of the Biden people,” the Democratic strategist says, “think that every day in a press conference he would be asked, ‘Are you going to support Kamala Harris for president in 2024?’”
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Inside the Final Days of Joe Biden’s V.P. Choice - Vanity Fair
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