Why Do These Democratic Men Insist on Turning Biden’s Veepstakes Into a Catfight?
On March 16, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made an unprecedented promise mid-debate: to choose a woman as his running mate, no matter what. It maybe felt like a consolation prize to those who had hoped to see the first woman in the Oval Office this time around, but still, having the first female vice president would unquestionably be an exciting and long overdue moment in women’s history.
When the initial “yasss!” reactions died down, however, they gave way to what has felt like a painfully protracted and anticlimactic five months of the Veepstakes Hunger Games From Hell, in which extremely qualified women are pitted against each other to fight to the death as a few men sit back and contemplate things like…whether they’re too ambitious.
For instance, former Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd—who, oh yeah, has been accused of mortgage fraud and sexual assault and yet for some reason is still offering opinions on who should hold public office—reportedly told donors that Senator Kamala Harris would not be a good pick for VP because she had “no remorse” for attacking Biden in a primary debate. (Uh, reminder: This is exactly what candidates are supposed to do in debates.) He also said she has too much “ambition” to be Biden’s number two. Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell chimed in that Biden should pick Representative Karen Bass, mainly because she doesn’t seek attention and no one knows who she is, whereas Harris just “rubs people the wrong way.”
Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, too, was reported to have put people off by actively campaigning to be Biden’s running mate. Missouri Democrat Representative William Lacy Clay called Abrams’ public lobbying for the position “offensive” and “inappropriate.” It was as if, to some, it was shocking to see a woman—and particularly a woman of color—do anything but stumble into an important role, seem genuinely startled when she got there, and stop aspiring to anything else.
To be clear, no one would have ever made it to Congress or the vice presidency without massive amounts of ambition. Biden himself clearly had his eye on the presidency while serving next to Barack Obama. And it’s quite normal for politicians to actively seek the position: George W. Bush’s VP, Dick Cheney, literally chose himself as Bush’s running mate after Bush put him in charge of the selection committee, and he was vetted for less than a week.
It’s also normal to pit VP candidates against one another, to scrutinize their records, to consider how they would complement the nominee in terms of age or experience and weigh what new voting bloc they might bring to the ticket. But Biden’s Veepstakes is being portrayed as a catfight, with a cadre of shamelessly attention-seeking women clawing at each other for the role. When Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar pulled herself out of the running during the Black Lives Matter protests in June, noting that she thinks Biden should choose a woman of color to suit this historic moment, pundit Seth Abramson described the moment as “basically Klobuchar hitting Warren behind the knees with a metal rod on her way out the door.” But there is no reason to believe Klobuchar had Warren in mind at all when she made that comment; she was likely just trying to blunt the criticism of her own prosecutorial record by civil rights activists at the time.
It’s fair and reasonable to scrutinize Harris’s or Klobuchar’s prosecutorial records or Abrams’ relative lack of experience or Bass’s controversial comments about Cuba. But it’s the worst (not to mention extremely boring and rather tired) kind of sexist cliché to go after a woman’s “ambition” or her “likability” or her “brazenness” in being willing to campaign for herself. Nobody just winds up in an elected position by chance, but women—and especially women of color—would absolutely never get into political office without standing up and demanding attention, asking for money, and promoting the hell out of themselves.
Biden’s potential VP choices are an embarrassment of riches; it’s not revolutionary or even mildly difficult for him to find an eminently qualified and capable woman to join him in taking on Donald Trump. So why are the headlines comparing this to an episode of The Bachelor? Why did he drag out this announcement by declaring he would pick a woman so early on but not actually name her? It’s long past time to stop punishing successful women for their ambition and imagining fights among us where there are none. Just get a woman into the White House already—we’re hundreds of years late.
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