One week ago, just as it was true one year ago, Amy Klobuchar was obviously the best bet to serve as Joe Biden’s running mate. A wildly popular swing state senator who had boosted her national profile with a respectable presidential run, Klobuchar clearly could cement Biden’s popularity with suburban women. Those women are the key cohort who sat out in 2016, handing the White House to President Trump but crucially delivering Democrats the House of Representatives just two years later. Klobuchar fulfilled the first rule of running mates — first, do no harm — and provided an obvious advantage with the Electoral College map.
But Klobuchar’s record as a prosecutor, long loathed by the further left lanes of the party, has fully come under fire thanks to the horrendous death of George Floyd after an incident with Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Years ago, Chauvin escaped prosecution in an investigation begun when Klobuchar was the overseeing prosecutor, so Klobuchar is taking a hit even though she already was a senator by the time the case was dismissed. Given the quality of her competitors, Klobuchar could have survived generalized anxiety about her record before the Floyd killing. But now seen as inadvertently responsible for failing to stop one of the most heartbreaking deaths during a pandemic, she is done.
Perhaps a President Biden can appoint her to his Cabinet eight months from now, but no political strategist with a paycheck and a brain could possibly recommend that he tap her as his second-in-command eight weeks from now.
This leaves Biden with no good answers. Kamala Harris, the senator seen as the front-runner in the race to become his running mate, posits all of the same prosecutorial problems as Klobuchar and then some. Not only was she arguably the more corrupt top cop of California, but she also has unsavory personal baggage relating to her politically expedient romantic relationship with San Francisco kingmaker Willie Brown. Sen. Elizabeth Warren may be widely beloved among the base, but there’s no pragmatic case for her electoral benefit, not to mention her crucial failure to appeal to black voters. Stacey Abrams, the failed gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, isn’t qualified to run a federal agency, let alone be put a heartbeat away from the presidency. Finally, everyone else in the running essentially has the name recognition of a C-list Instagrammer.
True, Val Demings, the congresswoman who served as an impeachment manager last year, is a fairly qualified and compelling black candidate for the vice presidency, but even she was the former chief of the Orlando Police Department, which in this atmosphere could hurt Biden among the young, left, activist wing of the Democratic Party. Plus, she is a legislator with just three years on the job.
Biden has no obvious option, and unluckily for him, the stakes for selecting a running mate have never, ever been higher.
