Susan Rice is throwing her hat into the ring for Joe Biden’s veep position.
The former national security adviser for President Barack Obama said she “certainly would say yes” if asked to be the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s running mate in the 2020 election.
“I’m humbled and honored to be among the extremely accomplished women who are reportedly being considered in that regard,” Rice told PBS Thursday. “I know Joe Biden well. I’ve worked with him very closely. I know he’ll be a great president of the United States.”
Rice, 55, said she’s “committed to doing all” she can to help Biden take the White House this fall, vowing to help the former vice president in “whatever capacity” needed.
Asked flatly if she would accept an invitation to be Biden’s potential vice president, she did not hesitate.
“I certainly would say yes,” Rice told PBS’ Margaret Hoover.
“Wow,” Hoover replied.
“Should I say no?” Rice continued. “You know, I think everybody who’s been asked that question has given the same answer. So that’s not a surprise.”
But Rice insisted she was “not campaigning for anything,” saying she wanted to help Biden win in any way possible.
“Because I believe that’s what is vitally important for the future of our country,” Rice said. “And it’s not about me. It’s not about my ambitions.”
Biden, 77, has promised to pick a woman as his running mate. Possible picks reportedly include Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, as well as former Rep. Stacey Abrams and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
GOP investigators in the Senate, meanwhile, are reportedly “now taking a closer look” at a January 2017 email that Rice wrote to herself documenting a meeting she previously had with Obama about Michael Flynn.
“President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book,'” Rice wrote herself in reference to Flynn’s calls to then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
“The president stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.”
(Susan Rice) says she would accept offer to be Joe Biden’s running mate.
Donald Trump told governors they could look like weak ‘jerks’ if they don’t “dominate” protesters, and called for ‘retribution.’
Joe Biden held an event with big-city mayors grappling with violent unrest to talk about their needs and pledged police reforms.
Monday’s split screen delivered a sharp contrast in temperament and style between the current president and the presumptive Democratic nominee — and it was by design.
For the former vice president, Monday served as an important moment — perhaps the most significant for Biden since the coronavirus lockdown started. As nationwide protests and vandalism blazed across America’s large cities, Biden sought to use the convergence of crises to shake off the image of him as being locked away in a Wilmington basement, project a different style of leadership and take on the mantle of leader of the Democratic opposition.
While Trump went to a secure bunker below the White House when protesters gathered outside over the weekend, Biden intentionally chose to take an opposite tack, meeting Sunday with demonstrators near his Delaware home. Biden’s campaign aides pledged to bail out jailed protesters; on Twitter, Trump warned protesters about the prospect of ‘ominous weapons’ and ‘the most vicious dogs.’
“That’s his whole purpose, to say, ‘here’s who I am and here’s the leadership the country needs right now,’” said Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Firefighters, and a longtime Biden ally. “It needs as much leadership and as much strength and as much compassion and understanding and recognition that we still have communities that do have to put up with elements of discrimination.”
In response to the violence and chaos that has erupted in many cities after last week’s killing of a black man under the knee of white Minneapolis police officer, Trump has largely adopted a defiant tone, repeatedly calling for harsh measures against protesters.
Biden, however, used the moment to leave his self-imposed coronavirus quarantine and call for reconciliation. On Sunday, he met with demonstrators on the streets of Wilmington. On Monday, he met with black leaders in a church there before holding a virtual roundtable with the mayors of Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, St. Paul and Minneapolis — some of whom have criticized the president for using inflammatory rhetoric.
“Donald Trump has made a mockery of America and of our democracy. When I look at Joe Biden, it is the antithesis of everything that Donald Trump represents each and every day,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told POLITICO Monday. “He is acknowledging our pain and he’s acknowledging that for as painful as it is to watch the death of George Floyd, there are layers to what we’re seeing play out in our streets right now. As he acknowledges it, he wants to hear from leaders across this country on what we can do better, how we can do it better together.”
The idea was to show a steady hand during a time of crisis, and that Biden could constructively engage with young protesters -- a purposeful contrast to Trump, whom Biden’s campaign has portrayed as injecting venom into already volatile circumstances.
“You gotta arrest these people and you gotta charge them … These are terrorists. They’re looking to do bad things to our country. They’re Antifa and they’re radical left,” Trump said in a call with governors Monday, according to a recording obtained by POLITICO. “We need law and order in our country. If we don’t have law and order, we don’t have a country.”
On that call, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker called out the president, saying his tough talk during the last several days of violence was only exacerbating the situation.
“I’ve been extraordinarily concerned about the rhetoric that’s used by you. It’s been inflammatory — and it’s not OK for that officer to choke George Floyd to death — but we have to call for calm,” Pritzker, a Democrat, said to Trump. “The rhetoric that’s coming out of the White House is making it worse. I feel that I need to say people are feeling real pain out there and we’ve got to have national leadership in calling for calm.”
“I don’t like your rhetoric much either,” Trump shot back. Then, referring to coronavirus, he told the Illinois governor, “I think you could have done a much better job, frankly.”
The clash was a dramatic departure from Biden’s virtual roundtable with mayors, where he listened patiently to the challenges they faced with protesters and the sensitivities around police violence.
“The country is crying out for leadership right now, what Joe Biden did today was not just talk but listen. He went to listen to people in his community and hear about how they’re grappling with what’s happening in this country. That’s meaningful leadership,” Biden Deputy Campaign Manager Kate Bedingfield said. “What we’ve seen Donald Trump do is sit in the White House and tweet.”
Biden, appearing Monday at Bethel AME Church near his Delaware home, told a small group of African-American leaders that he would establish a “police oversight board” in his first 100 days in office and said police needed to be re-trained to avoid brutality.
“There’s a lot of different things that could change. There’s a lot that could be done,” Biden said, noting that police brutality isn’t solely limited to white officers. “The culture has to be dealt with.”
The Trump campaign criticized Biden’s campaign staffers for announcing they were donating to a group that is paying bail for those arrested amid the protests in Minneapolis.
“If Joe Biden thinks that the looting and the rioting and the destruction in the streets across this country is something to be proud of, then that’s an interesting take,” campaign spokesman Rick Gorka said. “The protests to honor the memory of George Floyd have been hijacked. And for his campaign to be siding with the criminals that have hijacked this process is disgusting.”
At the same time, Trump believes that a strong response coupled with federal action like the one he announced Monday will give comfort to suburban voters — particularly white women whom he has been hemorrhaging — if they come to fear the spread of lawlessness, according to two advisors who have spoken with the president.
On Monday night in a Rose Garden speech, Trump boasted of invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act, warning of “anarchy” and promising “immediate presidential action to stop the violence and restore security and safety in America.” Just before the speech, law enforcement cleared the streets near the White House of demonstrators.
Still, there’s concern among top Trump supporters and advisers that the unrest and the president’s response to it has so far hurt more than it has helped, in part because it comes amid a pandemic that already appears to have given Biden a boost over Trump in recent national polls.
Biden’s public appearances on Sunday and Monday were a step toward addressing what has been a sensitive issue for his campaign — the “Biden in the basement” theme. Ron Klain, one of Biden’s top advisers, wrote Monday on social media: “Before one more person @ me over why @JoeBiden needs to be in public more, I beg you to tweet at @MSNBC and @CNN and ask them why they didn't carry his TWO public events today?”
Bedingfield said the criticism “completely misses the mark.”
“If you remember a couple of months ago, Donald Trump was giving Rose Garden briefings and people said that this was going to be the end of the Biden campaign because Donald Trump had the bully pulpit. Well, what happened? It ended up him doing more harm than good,” Bedingfield said. “He himself ended up stopping those briefings because it offered chaos and more turmoil and they didn’t want it.”
Biden is expected to gradually ramp up in-person events, and eventually out of state travel, as related restrictions are relaxed. According to his campaign, in the coming days the former vice president will hold more talks like the ones he did on Monday, reaching out to local leaders and discussing how to balance racial sensitivities and the importance of law enforcement. The campaign will also lean into the contrasts in upcoming days and aim to show Biden is “a stable and steady voice,” in contrast with the rhetoric emanating from the White House.
Nearly five years ago, Joseph R. Biden Jr. gathered his closest advisers to decide whether he would run for president in 2016. This was a “final judgment” meeting, as he would later describe it in his memoir, and around the room were Mr. Biden’s family and more than a half-dozen of his most trusted confidantes. Everyone was white.
Today, as Mr. Biden makes his third bid for the presidency, his campaign manager is white. His chief strategist is white. His three chiefs of staff as vice president (all still key advisers) and four of the five people who have been deputy campaign managers are white, as are the leaders of his economic team.
Mr. Biden won the 2020 Democratic primary on the strength of a multiracial political coalition anchored by black voters who overwhelmingly rallied behind him, and he has pledged to build a diverse administration as president. But while some black advisers have cracked Mr. Biden’s upper echelon and his team is racing to expand, the people setting strategy still skew heavily white, with limited Latino and even less Asian-American representation.
In recent days, as protests erupted over the death of George Floyd after being pinned down by Minneapolis police officers, Mr. Biden has moved to forge even stronger ties to black Americans, presenting himself as a healing force in the country’s searing debate over race. He has delivered two addresses acknowledging the pain and suffering of African-Americans, drawing a sharp contrast with President Trump’s belligerent response.
But the fear, even among allies, is that a lack of diverse viewpoints in Mr. Biden’s brain trust could come with a long-term cost: a misinterpretation that boiling anger at Mr. Trump among black and Latino voters equates to excitement for Mr. Biden; insufficient outreach to minority groups; and — perhaps most worrisome of all — the possibility that Mr. Biden’s team would take for granted that his strength with black voters in the primaries would repeat itself in November, a complaint lodged against Hillary Clinton four years ago.
“It matters who is doing the shaping of the campaign,” said LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund. She was one of a dozen black female leaders invited to a recent private call with Mr. Biden, during which she said representation came up. “We can’t keep going and asking black folks to show up and make sure the boogeyman doesn’t get you. If you think the fear of Trump is going to be enough to move black votes, that is going to be a critical error.”
Mr. Trump has regularly been accused of racism, including his recent threats to quell the unrest with vicious dogs and calling the protesters “thugs.” He has a long history of taking positions that demonized and denigrated minorities, including his false attacks on the Central Park Five, his birther lie against former President Barack Obama and his fear-mongering about the migrant caravan in 2018.
As for viewpoints he seeks, Mr. Trump has virtually no African-Americans or other people of color among his most trusted advisers, who include his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; his chief of staff, Mark Meadows; Hope Hicks, a longtime aide; and Dan Scavino, a deputy chief of staff for communications. In the photo op the president staged this week at a church across from the White House, the aides pictured beside him were all white. And Mr. Trump won only 8 percent of the black vote in 2016.
But for Mr. Biden, demonstrating differences with the president is not enough to drive minority voters to the polls, or a substitute for delivering an inspiring message to people of color, some activists argue. Black voters are a critical constituency for Mr. Biden and could make the difference in a razor-thin election. His recent off-key remark that black voters torn between him and Mr. Trump “ain’t black” only heightened the sense of urgency. The president’s re-election machine leapt to amplify the comment, the latest effort seeking to dissuade African-Americans from voting for Mr. Biden, or from voting at all.
So far, the strongest public pressure on Mr. Biden has been to select a woman of color as his running mate. But interviews with more than three dozen donors, activists and Democratic officials inside and out of the campaign found that many viewed the racial composition of the Biden brain trust just as significant in terms of how he can unite the broad spectrum of the Democratic Party in 2020 and, if elected, govern in 2021.
“It looks like it’s a work in progress,” said Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas, the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
“If you look at the traditional inner circle, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of voices of color around the table,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the No. 5 ranking Democrat in the House.
Mr. Jeffries, whose bill banning police chokeholds was embraced by Mr. Biden this week, credited the influence of key black members of Congress on the former vice president, who he said was “acting with an open heart.”
Privately, the Biden campaign leadership has emphasized to Democratic leaders that it is broadening its upper ranks, including two new senior advisers who are people of color and the formation of a new coalitions department. Mr. Biden himself has made a blitz of appearances to signal the significance of key ethnic groups, including private calls with clergy, lawmakers and civil-rights leaders.
More hires are coming: The campaign is sifting through a list of 100 Latinos recommended for jobs, and has been pinging black leaders for suggestions, according to people familiar with the plans. Biden officials have emphasized that the campaign was severely limited by its budget in the primary — and have asked for patience.
“The team is not built out yet. We won the primary with a skeleton crew,” said Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, Mr. Biden’s first national co-chairman. “We absolutely are cognizant of how it looks. We believe that optics show values and we’re going to continue to strive to get it right.”
Some nonwhite advisers have certainly advanced to the inner sanctum of the Biden campaign. Mr. Richmond has a standing invitation to strategy sessions, and Symone Sanders is an influential senior adviser with a wide-ranging portfolio, from progressive outreach to overall messaging; both are black. Outside the campaign, Mr. Biden deeply values the counsel of Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, and, of course, Mr. Obama.
“People of color have power here,” Ms. Sanders said. “When it comes to the purse strings, when it comes to access, when it comes to strategy, when it comes to messaging.”
“If you say top 10, we may not have hit the number we want,” Mr. Richmond said. “But two of the top 10 are Symone and I.”
As the Biden campaign adds new senior-level hires, the question is how much the new voices will be incorporated at the highest levels.
The previous highest-ranking Latina on the Biden campaign, Vanessa Cardenas, left as national coalitions director last fall. “They didn’t expand the circle of voices that are truly making decisions,” Ms. Cardenas said in her first public comments since her departure.
Years of fierce loyalty
Even before he entered the 2020 primary, Mr. Biden was aware of the need to diversify his senior staff and explicitly asked advisers to work toward a more diverse team, according to a person familiar with the request.
As a candidate, Mr. Biden has pledged to appoint a cabinet that looks like America, choose a female running mate and nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court.
Those who have worked with Mr. Biden over the years describe him as solicitous of an array of different perspectives. “Otherwise,” said Valerie Jarrett, a top White House adviser to Mr. Obama, “he wouldn’t have been the vice president for Barack Obama for two terms.”
At the same time, Mr. Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, has often retreated to a familiar set of faces for counsel at critical junctures. His operation is known for its fierce mutual loyalty, and many of his advisers of all backgrounds have remained close for years.
His three chiefs of staff as vice president — Bruce Reed, Steve Ricchetti and Ron Klain, but especially the latter two — remain outsize 2020 influences. Mike Donilon, his chief strategist, has been with him since the 1980s. Mr. Biden’s family, including his sister, Valerie, who managed his previous races, and his longtime Senate chief of staff, Ted Kaufman, are key outside confidantes. Anita Dunn, a senior adviser, and Kate Bedingfield, a deputy campaign manager, wield some of the widest influence over messaging. All are white.
Don Graves, who was Mr. Biden’s counselor as vice president and one of his highest-ranking black aides, said valuing diversity was “fundamental to who Joe Biden is.”
“The fact is that folks like Ricchetti and Ted Kaufman and Mike Donilon have been around the V.P. for a while,” said Mr. Graves, who remains close to Mr. Biden. “But he knows that it’s a different day and he gives a lot of credence to folks like Symone and Cedric and, in some ways, values their input more than the folks who’ve been around for a while.”
Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who took over as campaign manager in March, is said to be keenly focused on diversity, and the campaign recently hired two veteran strategists and Obama veterans, Julie Chavez Rodriguez and Karine Jean-Pierre, as senior advisers. (Mr. Biden had first recruited Ms. Jean-Pierre in early 2019.)
Black and Latino donors and strategists have said diversity concerns are not just about having people in the room, but making sure that those who are there are not expected to speak exclusively about race, or on behalf of black or Latino voters everywhere.
In an introductory call with her staff, Ms. O’Malley Dillon was frustrated with the public perception that the new hires were chiefly representatives of minority groups and explicitly pushed back on the idea that Ms. Rodriguez, who is Latino, and Ms. Jean-Pierre, who is black, were hired to focus on black and brown voters, according to two people on the call. She echoed that message on Twitter.
While she was announced as a senior adviser and the most senior Latina on the Biden team, Ms. Rodriguez will not actually be working full-time for Mr. Biden; she is a consultant and keeping one other client.
One of the other three people of color initially announced as a senior adviser in 2019, Brandon English, has been largely disempowered.
Mr. Jeffries, the New York Democrat, said the presence of respected black lawmakers in the Biden orbit — especially Mr. Clyburn and Mr. Richmond — has alleviated some concerns on Capitol Hill because they “hopefully will make up for any perceived deficit in his kitchen cabinet.”
Mr. Clyburn, who has a direct line to Mr. Biden but is not involved in the campaign’s day-to-day operations, has pressed the campaign to hire more black vendors and organizers and to “pay them like you pay white people who place TV ads,” he said in an interview this spring.
“That was my problem with the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Mr. Clyburn said of a lack of black-oriented outreach. “And I don’t want to see the same thing done again.”
Steve Phillips, a major Democratic donor and the author of the book “Brown Is the New White,” fears the Biden campaign is at risk of repeating the mistakes of Mrs. Clinton, who, like Mr. Biden, swept the black vote in the primary — and then failed to fully draw those same voters in November.
“How are they processing that? What are they doing to make it different this time?” asked Mr. Phillips, who is black. “This is about who’s in the decision-making positions, who’s in the room where it happens.’’
Latinos seek more influence
Concern is more acute among some Latino leaders. Polls showed that Mr. Biden began the 2020 primary as the leading choice of Latinos, who will make up a pivotal bloc of voters in November, but he ended up losing Hispanic voters badly in early states to Senator Bernie Sanders, who invested heavily in outreach. In California, Mr. Sanders carried 51 percent of the Hispanic vote to only 25 percent for Mr. Biden, according to an exit poll; in Nevada, the margin was 50 percent to 17 percent.
“He’s surrounding himself by an almost all-white inner circle of high-level staff that don’t reflect the diversity of America,” said Domingo Garcia, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, who spoke recently with Mr. Biden. “Our voices are just kind of muffled in the whole campaign structure.”
Cristóbal Alex, for instance, is regarded as the campaign’s top Latino strategist, a senior adviser with a portfolio beyond Latino outreach. But he is not seen as a member of the inner circle.
“I believe Cristóbal is trusted,” said Representative Tony Cárdenas of California, the chairman of the political arm of the Hispanic Caucus. “But I have yet to see he is empowered” to the same extent that Mr. Sanders granted authority to his top Latino adviser, Mr. Cárdenas said.
Mr. Cárdenas, who has helped arrange recent weekly calls between Mr. Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, and Hispanic lawmakers, said the Biden campaign was now “saying they understand what it’s going to take” to win those voters in November. (Jill Biden’s chief of staff, Anthony Bernal, is the lone Latino deputy campaign manager and is close to the family — he is one of two aides regularly at their home in Wilmington, Del., during the pandemic — though less involved in broader strategy.)
The Biden campaign is planning to significantly ramp up its Latino outreach as it seeks to stretch the Electoral College map to include Arizona, readying a plan with a hefty paid-media program, according to people familiar with the matter. A group of top Hispanic fund-raisers recently created a new internal Biden fund, code-named “Presidente,” with initial pledges of $2 million.
The Biden team has also had to field some disenchantment from Asian-American leaders. Some were upset when the campaign, in one of its first moves after Mr. Biden became the presumptive nominee, replaced Seema Nanda, the Democratic National Committee’s top Asian-American official, as chief executive officer.
Varun Nikore, president of the Asian-American and Pacific Islander Victory Fund, which recently hosted an event with Mr. Biden, said he “couldn’t point to one” Asian-American with significant political sway inside the Biden hierarchy.
While the campaign’s chief operating officer and the newly announced chief financial officer are Asian-American, lack of representation has been a concern for those who worry about anti-China messaging in 2020. In a recent call with Asian-American members of Congress, Mr. Biden said he would “work with our caucus on future messaging related to China,” said Representative Grace Meng of New York.
Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, who became the highest-ranking Latino in the Biden campaign as national co-chairman in January, rejected the notion that Mr. Biden does not seek diverse counsel. Citing the campaign’s lack of cash, Mr. Garcetti said he was surprised at the slimness of the operation when he joined.
“It’s not like, ‘Oh there’s no Latinos here’,” he said. “I looked at the campaign and said, ‘Oh there’s nobody here.’ Because we didn’t have the resources. It wasn’t like the closet was filled with a bunch of non-diverse faces. It wasn’t filled yet.”
Why Some Democrats Worry About the Whiteness
of Biden’s Inner Circle.
Pot, meet kettle.
so you deny that the GOP is obsessed with ientity politics??
Aryan Brotherhood feel quite comortable in the ladership
Joe Biden is suddenly a clear favorite in the general election battle against President Trump given rising poll numbers nationally and in key swing states, meaning he must now figure out how to run as a front-runner.
It's no easy task, especially against an opponent in Trump who is comfortable running as an underdog and who has the presidential bully pulpit and a healthy campaign war chest to throw at his opponent.
"If the election were held tomorrow, it would be a bloodbath. But there are about 150 tomorrows left," said Philippe Reines, a longtime adviser to Hillary Clinton, who knows what it's like to be on the losing side when you're a favorite against Trump.
The quandary for Biden and Democrats is how to win while ahead and retain the momentum Biden has won over the last few months - momentum that has come more from Trump's own problems and news events than actions by Biden.
Friday's positive jobs report underscored how there are twists and turns to come in the presidential race, and the White House immediately touted the strong numbers as an argument for why the country should stick with Trump.
"The great American comeback is underway after the economy was artificially interrupted by the global pandemic," Brad Parscale, Trump's campaign manager, said in a statement on Friday while blaming Democrats for keeping the economy from reopening. The jobless number fell to 13.3 percent in May from 14.7 percent in April, a surprise turnaround since most expected the number to rise.
Democrats warn Biden can't afford to just run out the clock without punching back against Trump. At the same time, they know they also must offer their own proposals on issues including the economy - especially since Trump will be on the attack against Biden.
"A prisoner circles their release date, keeps their head down and nose clean, X's off each day. A campaign can't," Reines said. "Especially against an opponent who's essentially a masochistic prison guard taunting them, baiting them, beating them."
William Galston, a senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution who served as a domestic policy adviser to Bill Clinton during his administration, said Biden needs to do more of what he did this week in Philadelphia when he spoke about systemic racism and police brutality.
"On the overall strategic issues front, he needs to meet the moment without losing his balance," Galston said, adding that Biden should "lean sensibly toward the pieces of the progressive agenda that make sense" politically and fiscally particularly on economic and social justice issues.
When it comes to tussling with Trump, Galston said he would "attack him when he does something egregiously wrong" while giving the public the space to make up their minds.
"What you can control is what people think you're going to do that's different and better," Galston said. "If you can give people an affirmative reason to vote for you in addition to the reasons against the other guy, why not?"
Democrats say Biden needs to continue to show the contrast between himself and Trump, as he has sought to dover Trump's handling of demonstrations protesting the system that led to the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer pinned him to the street, placing his knee on Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes.
Democrats say Trump has done damage to his path to reelection with his actions this week, which included the forcible removal of protesters in Lafayette Square so that the president could exit the White House to pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church.
An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll out on Friday showed that two-thirds of Americans say Trump has increased racial tensions in the country.
A CNN poll out on Friday also showed Biden ahead of Trump 51 percent to 42 percent. The poll showed a shift towards Biden since the last poll in April when the former vice president received 48 percent of support compared to Trump with 43 percent.
"I'm beginning to think that if Trump's advisers were smart, they'd put him in that White House bunker just to keep him out of the public eye," said former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who also served as the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "The more he's out there, the more his numbers drop.
"We're seeing in real time that the contrast between Biden's leadership and Trump's flailing is on full display," Israel said. "So Biden has to continue demonstrating that contrast by doing exactly what he's doing now: using his schedule strategically to connect to voters, conveying his empathy, messaging on Trump's failures, and letting Donald Trump speak for himself."
Nayyera Haq, a former White House senior director in the Obama White House who also served on the former president's 2012 campaign, said the moment facing the country - with the coronavirus coupled with the civil unrest- is perfectly suited to Biden.
"It's rare to have both a national security crisis and a domestic crisis at the same time but both uniquely play to his strengths," Haq said. "He has the ability to express empathy like no one else.
Asked what Biden should do to win the election, Haq replied, "Honestly, be Joe.
"Be empathetic, speak from the heart, talk about loss and challenge," she said. "He does all of those things so well."
Quote:(Susan Rice) says she would accept offer to be Joe Biden’s running mate.
Plenty of videos of her lying through her teeth. Go for it Joe!
Just how little self-respect does it take to call out someone for lying...
Susan Rice suggests that Russia is to blame for our street protests. Guess racism really has nothing to do with it. She’d be a great Vice President.
