Former President Barack Obama is weighing in on the 2020 general election — and he’s reportedly been giving his former Vice President, Joe Biden, advice on how to choose a running mate.
Biden will represent the Democratic Party against President Donald Trump this fall, the former vice president’s place on the general election ballot cemented by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ decision to end his campaign on Wednesday.
At a virtual fundraiser after the announcement, Biden told supporters that Obama told him to find the candidate that shores up his weaknesses.
“The ex-VP has publicly pledged to select a woman as his running mate, and has teased names such as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.),” The New York Post reported.
“And so I’m going to need a woman vice president who has the capacity, has strengths where I have weaknesses,” Biden told supporters.
In Biden and Trump, voters will choose between two men with dramatically different prescriptions for health care, climate change, foreign policy and leadership in an era of extreme partisanship.
At 77, Biden becomes the oldest major party presidential nominee in modern history. And having spent most of his life as an elected official in Washington, he represents the status quo to voters.
But in Trump, Biden is up against an adversary the likes of which he has never faced in his decades-long political career. The 73-year-old Republican president opens with a massive cash advantage and a well-established willingness to buck tradition and shake-up D.C.
Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said Biden will be portrayed as too liberal for most Americans, weighed down by questions about his son’s overseas business dealings and about questionable mental acuity at his age. Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, predicted Trump would “destroy” Biden no matter who the Democratic presidential candidate chooses as a running mate.
“President Trump is still disrupting Washington, D.C., while Biden represents the old, tired way and continuing to coddle the communist regime in China,” Parscale said.
Trump’s team also believes he can win over disaffected Sanders supporters who see Biden as a consummate insider. Shortly after Sanders’ announcement Wednesday, the president charged that Democratic leaders were plotting against Sanders.
The Republican National Committee has already assembled an extensive research book on Biden. The GOP has devoted 10 researchers to Biden and sent hundreds of Biden-related freedom of information and public records requests to gather additional damaging material.
Before Biden can shift his entire focus to Trump, the former vice president is tasked with winning over Sanders’ skeptical far-left supporters, who have trashed Biden’s record on trade, criminal justice, corporate America and foreign policy. The party’s most progressive wing also fears that Biden’s policies on health care and the environment, among others, don’t go far enough.
For example, Biden supports universal health care, but unlike Sanders, he would preserve the private insurance system and offer Americans a government-backed “public option” instead of Sanders’ signature “Medicare for All.”
Sanders suggested that any full-throated endorsement of Biden would come with strings attached. “We are talking to Joe, and we are talking to his team about how we can work together,” he told CBS “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert.
Trump tried to raise suspicion about why Obama hadn’t yet formally endorsed Biden, saying: “When is it going to happen? Why isn’t he? He knows something that you don’t know.”
The campaign’s general counsel, Dana Remus, and an outside adviser, Bob Bauer, are leading the running mate search process. Bauer served as White House counsel to Obama and is married to Anita Dunn, Biden’s top campaign strategist.
Meanwhile, both candidates are staring down the coronavirus pandemic, which has turned 2020 campaign logistics on their head. With peak infection rates still several weeks away for many parts of the country, the outbreak and related economic devastation will play a major role in shaping voter attitudes and campaign logistics.
For now, Biden and Trump are effectively stuck at home like much of America.
Biden’s team suggest that his empathy and experience are right for the moment, yet he has struggled to be heard from the makeshift television studio in the basement of his Delaware home. The campaign has committed to at least one virtual event each day.
Meanwhile, Trump has starred in widely viewed daily White House briefings about the coronavirus outbreak.
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The Associated Press contributed to this article