Biden’s Best Veep Pick Is Obvious
She,
more than anyone, can get under Trump’s skin.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
June 27, 2020, 2:30 p.m. ET
Whatever his wobbles, Joe Biden has,
from the start of his presidential campaign, got one thing exactly right: The
2020 election is a battle for the soul
of America. That’s not just a pretty slogan. It’s the stomach-knotting truth —
and it’s the frame he should use for choosing his running mate.
It’s why he should pick Senator Tammy
Duckworth of Illinois.
She’s a paragon of the values that
Donald Trump, for all his practice as a performer, can’t even pantomime. She’s
best described by words that are musty relics in his venal and vainglorious
circle: “sacrifice,” “honor,” “humility.” More than any of the many
extraordinary women on Biden’s list of potential vice-presidential
nominees, she’s the anti-Trump, the antidote to the ugliness he revels in and
the cynicism he stokes.
Americans can feel good — no, wonderful
— about voting for a ticket with Duckworth on it. And we’re beyond hungry for
that. We’re starving.
That
ache transcends all of the other variables that attend Biden’s deliberations as
he appraises Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Val Demings and others: race,
age, experience, exact position on the spectrum from progressive to moderate.
Duckworth, a former Army lieutenant
colonel who lost both of her legs during combat duty in Iraq, is a choice that
makes exquisite emotional and moral sense. Largely, but not entirely, because
of that, she makes strategic sense, too.
For the uninitiated: Duckworth, 52, is
in the fourth year of her first term in the Senate, before which she served two
terms in the House. So unlike several of the other vice-presidential
contenders, she has ascended to what is conventionally considered the right
political altitude for this next step.
But it’s her life story that really
makes her stand out. It’s the harrowing chapter in Iraq, yes, but also how she
rebounded from it, how she talks about it. It’s her attitude. Her grace.
As
my colleague Jennifer Steinhauer explained in a recent profile of Duckworth in The Times, she
didn’t just serve in the Army: She became a helicopter pilot, which isn’t a job
brimming with women. And as she flew near Baghdad one day in 2004, her
Blackhawk was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. The explosion left her near
death.
She later received a Purple Heart, but
she bristles when she’s called a hero. That designation, she has often said, belongs
to her co-pilot, Dan Milberg, and others who carried her from the wreckage and
got her to safety.
She put it this way when, as part of
a “Note to Self” feature
on “CBS This Morning,”
she read aloud a letter that she had written to the younger Tammy: “You’ll make
it out alive completely because of the grit, sacrifice and outright heroism
of others. You haven’t done
anything to be worthy of their sacrifices, but these heroes will give you a
second chance at life.” She paused there briefly, fighting back tears.
To Steinhauer she said, “I wake up
every day thinking, ‘I am never going to make Dan regret saving my life.’” Her
subsequent advocacy for veterans, her run for Congress, her election to the
Senate: She casts all of it in terms of gratitude and an obligation to give
back.
Tell me how Trump campaigns against
that. Tell me how he mocks her — which is the only way he knows how to engage
with opponents. Or, rather, tell me how he does so without seeming even more
obscene than he already does and turning off everyone beyond the cultish
segment of the electorate that will never abandon him. Duckworth on the
Democratic ticket is like some psy-ops masterstroke, all the more so because it
was she who nicknamed Trump “Cadet Bone Spurs.”
I
asked her about that on the phone on Thursday, remarking that it was uncharacteristically
acerbic of her. “This guy’s a bully,” she said. “And bullies need a taste of
their own medicine.”
Warren,
too, is terrific at giving Trump that. Her placement on the Democratic ticket
might fire up the progressives who regard Biden warily. And she could make an
excellent governing partner for him.
But mightn’t she also give moderate
voters pause? What about her age? She’s 71. Biden’s 77. Can the party of change
and modernity, whose last two presidents were both under 50 when first elected,
go with an all-septuagenarian ticket?
Governing partners don’t matter if you
don’t get to govern. The certain catastrophe of four more years of Trump
demands that Biden choose his running mate with November at the front, the
back, the top and the bottom of his mind.
Harris also ably prosecutes the case
against Trump. But many progressives have issues with her, and the idea that
she’d drive high turnout among black voters isn’t supported by her failed bid
for the Democratic nomination. She lacked support across the board, including
among African-Americans. And in a recent national poll conducted by The Times and
Siena College, more than four in five voters — including three in four black
voters — said that race shouldn’t be a factor in Biden’s vice-presidential
pick.
Duckworth is neither progressive idol
nor progressive enemy. That partly reflects a low policy profile that’s among
her flaws as a running mate but could actually work to her advantage, making
her difficult to pigeonhole and open to interpretation. Trump-weary voters can
read into her what they want. And in recent congressional elections, Democrats
have had success among swing voters with candidates who are veterans.
Duckworth
certainly can’t be dismissed as the same old same old. Her vice-presidential
candidacy would be a trailblazing one, emblematic of a more diverse and
inclusive America. Born in Bangkok to an American father and a Thai mother,
she’d be the first Asian-American and the first woman of color on the
presidential ticket of one of our two major parties.
She
was the first United States senator to give birth while in office and the first
to bring her baby onto the Senate floor. You want relatable? Duckworth has two
children under the age of 6. She’s a working mom.
She’s not the product of privilege: In
fact her family hit such hard times when she was growing up in Hawaii that at
one point she sold flowers by the side of the road. But she went on to get not
only a college degree but also a master’s in international affairs.
Cards on the table: I’m not at all sure
that running mates matter much on Election Day. There’s ample evidence that
they don’t.
But in any given election, they sure as
hell might. Biden would be a fool, given the stakes, not to consider his
running mate a victory clincher or deal breaker and to choose her accordingly.
Duckworth’s virtues include everything
that I’ve mentioned plus this: She projects a combination of confidence and
modesty, of toughness and warmth, that’s rare — and that’s a tonic in these
toxic times.
I asked her whether she deems Trump a
patriot. She said that he wraps himself in the American flag — a flag, she
noted, that will someday drape her coffin — for the wrong reasons.
“I would leap into a burning fire to pull
that flag to safety, but I will fight to the death for your right to burn it,”
she told me. “The most patriotic thing you can do is not necessarily putting on
the uniform but speaking truth to power, exercising your First Amendment rights
— that’s what created America, right?”
I asked her how it felt to have her
name floated as a possible vice-presidential nominee.
“It’s
surreal, right?” she said, recalling that she was once “a hungry kid who
fainted in class for lack of nutrition. It’s unbelievable I’m even a U.S.
senator.”
“But it’s one team, one fight,” she
added, referring to the Democratic quest to defeat Trump. “I will work as hard
as I can to get Joe Biden elected because the country needs it. It doesn’t
matter where I end up on that team.”
Yes, Senator Duckworth, it does. In the
right role, you could help guarantee the right outcome.
