Joe Biden’s team is fine with a female VP, as long as they’re sure she’ll step out of the frame, rtraister writes
Photo: Getty Images You may have noticed a weird tic in some of the recent reporting about Representative Karen Bass of California, rumored to be on Joe Biden’s shortlist for vice-president. Several stories include mention of her aversion to having her photo taken.
Back in 2006, as Hillary Clinton geared up for her first run for the presidency, The Atlantic’s Joshua Green reported a remarkable story about the former First Lady’s tenure in the U.S. Senate.
That was then, but dismal public appraisals of women who might soon be America’s vice-president are happening now. There is certainly representational value in electing more women in a country that has been disgracefully underrepresented by anyone other than white men, and that’s what Biden’s pledge was trying to address. But the months that have passed, with no player yet named, have left only the hollowness of that value and … nothing else.
That dynamic was foregrounded by an earlier, inverted Kamala-versus-Stacey narrative in which Stacey Abrams, Georgia legislator and former gubernatorial candidate, who was refreshingly up-front about her eagerness to be Biden’s vice-president, was described in Bloomberg as “actively campaigning” for the job of the vice-presidency in contrast to Harris, who had “taken a subtler approach.”
This year, multiple stories have presented the women — and again, because of the nature of this process, only women — as “vying” for the gig. NBC described how some had “put their markers out,” and the New York Post reported on how Klobuchar, along with Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Warren, and Abrams, were making their cases in what the Post called “a fierce behind-the-scenes battle among some of the nation’s most high-profile female leaders for the potentially historic job.
All of this puts women in violation of old niceties — the kind of customs built around white male power. “In the so-called veepstakes, publicly vying for the job is considered impolitic and the wrong way to get picked,” according to a 2008 Boston Globe story — no surprise — about Hillary Clinton, who had met with her former primary competitor Barack Obama as part of what was depicted as an “aggressive push” from the Clinton camp for her to become his vice-president.
Bass has been dishonestly reduced to a white patriarchal fever dream of female pliability and then used cruelly as a cudgel against Harris. Without using the toxic phrase “unlikable,” coverage of the two women has managed to get the idea across: Where Bass is “universally liked,” CNN has quoted former DNC head Ed Rendell saying that “Kamala can rub some people the wrong way.
This strain of white-hot stupidity constitutes an open undermining of Harris, Warren, and every other woman who has had the apparent temerity to have already run for president ; it also is a dig at Abrams, who in other contexts has been — again, refreshingly — open about her desire to someday sit in the Oval Office.
What’s so sad right now is that the process of trying to change gender dynamics moving forward is being controlled by avatars of an unjust past. That doesn’t portend anything good about the near future or the aptitude of the Biden team. They have squandered the historic and electrifying opportunities here, drained this choice of its power. They have misread the possibilities and peril of this moment and what it requires of them.
Bass had to put out a statement clarifying her distaste for the “anti-Kamala” narrative, noting that Harris “has spent her entire life fighting for the people. I would never want to be labeled the ‘anti-Kamala Harris.’” Abrams has had to answer in interviews again and again for having asserted her desire for a job.
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