It Really Could Be Warren
The coronavirus has transformed Joe Biden's campaign, and his search for a running mate. And it has transformed Elizabeth Warren's chances of being picked for the job.
The Massachusetts senator and the former vice president don’t have much of a personal relationship. She was determined to run for president by swearing off big donors; the first event of his campaign was a high-dollar fundraiser at the home of a top executive at one of the country’s biggest corporations.
But this is now a world where the Dow Jones is staying high while the lines at food banks keep getting longer, a world that will be defined for years by the pandemic and its aftershocks. And the presumptive Democratic nominee needs to think seriously—and be seen as thinking seriously—about what comes next.
Suddenly, the senator with all the ideas about remaking the economy seems enticing to the Biden team and it is looking seriously at picking her, according to people familiar with the campaign’s thinking. And suddenly, the senator with all the ideas about remaking the economy is enticed, and thinking seriously about what the job would entail, according to people who described her own thinking on the subject—and according to Warren herself, in two conversations I had with her recently.
“Joe Biden describes this [election] as the battle for the soul of the nation. He’s right,” Warren told me, over the phone from her home in Boston. “But there’s more. It’s the battle for the survival of a nation that works for most of its people or only for a thin elite at the top.”
Put her on the ticket to generate the excitement Biden needs, people advocating for Warren’s selection say, and then prioritize the coronavirus recovery by putting her in charge of it. The candidate who made her whole brand “I have a plan for that” versus a government that seems constantly unprepared—what could be a better contrast?
It’s hard to remember how clearheaded Warren was about the pandemic. She put out her first COVID-19 plan at the end of January, a few days stimulus response (this was as Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, was claiming that the pandemic “sink the economy”; today, the stimulus is already north of $2 trillion). But that same week, she was beaten so soundly on Super Tuesday that she came in third in her home state. She quit the presidential race two days later.
