Susan Rice, the former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, has extensive White House experience yet has never been elected to office. That may be a key reason she’s on the shortlist to be former Vice President Joe Biden’s No. 2 on the ticket.
The 77-year-old presumptive Democratic nominee has referred to himself as a “transition candidate” and, if he succeeded in unseating President Donald Trump, he would be the oldest first-term president in American history.
If Biden picks any of the elected politicians his team has vetted for VP – Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Rep. Val Demings (D-FA), or Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), to name a few – he’ll be establishing a favored candidate in the race to succeed him.
That’s why some pundits say Rice, the un-politician, is near the top of the pack – the choice of Rice would leave the field of future presidential candidates to sort things out with voters. It also would cement the idea many in the Biden campaign are trying to sell: Having Biden as president will be like a third Obama term.
Rice is there in many of the iconic photos taken by White House photographer Pete Souza and others, standing behind Obama as he speaks from the podium or sitting to his left in the Situation Room as he leans over to confer with her.
Her first job with the Obama administration was U.N. ambassador in New York, but she then moved back to Washington D.C., where she was born, to occupy a West Wing desk near the Oval Office as the president’s national security advisor who briefed him daily.
Rice is 55 years old – 22 years younger than Biden. She’s old enough to have a lengthy resume without worrying any voters about her age. She also would be the first Black woman on the presidential ticket of a major party.
“Whether I’m his running mate or I’m a door-knocker, I don’t mind,” Rice said on NBC’s Meet the Press last month. “I’m going to do everything I can to help get Joe Biden elected and to help him succeed as president.”
Rice, a former Rhodes Scholar who graduated from Stanford University, honed her skills in the Clinton White House during the 1990s, holding several jobs including the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and a position on the National Security Council. She has the foreign policy chops that would be needed to fulfill Biden’s oft-stated goal of rebuilding tattered alliances around the globe.
Plus, she checks off another box of Biden’s wish list: A VP who can be the friend and companion he was for Obama.
The two had desks near each other in the Obama White House, and Biden was known to poke his head into Rice’s office before leaving the West Wing to head home.
“My favorite unannounced visitor was Vice President Joe Biden,” Rice wrote in her 2019 book “Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For.” Sometimes the discussion involved a pressing foreign policy matter, and sometimes it was just to shoot the breeze, she said.
On Twitter, Rice’s pinned tweet is a 2017 picture of Biden hugging her after her mother died. She wrote: “There is no one kinder, more empathetic and caring than Joe Biden. He will lead America with the same deep compassion and decency.”
But, then there’s Benghazi, the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead. After one of the longest and costliest investigations in U.S. history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report in June 2016 that found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Rice had a minor role in the controversy, going on Sunday news shows shortly after the attacks to say that, based on the intelligence she had at the time, the attack was “spontaneous.” After more information emerged, the Obama White House corrected the record to say the attack was premeditated.
“Eight congressional committees over the next four years investigated every aspect of Benghazi and not one of them found that I had done anything wrong – not one of them found that I had deliberately misled the American people,” Rice said on ABC’s The View last week. “But I don’t doubt that the Republicans will use this, and they will attack whoever is Joe Biden’s choice to be his vice president, but it’s dishonest and it’s a distraction.”
Sen. Kamala Harris is the top choice for VP, based on a survey of Democratic voters, according to Vox on Tuesday. The poll conducted by SurveyUSA and sponsored by FairVote questioned Democratic and independent voters during the last two days of July. Harris got 31.9% of the votes, Warren received 26.8% and Rice was third at 16.7%.
Stacey Abrams was next, at 8.9%, Tammy Duckworth fifth, at 8.7%, Val Demings got 3.9%, and Karen Bass had 3.3%.
The expectations for the timing of Biden’s announcement for his VP pick keep changing.
The hard deadline he has is the Aug. 17 start of the Democratic National Convention. That means it will either be this week or next week.
Even if Biden doesn’t pick Rice to be his VP, she is likely to play some role if he wins the election. Some have suggested secretary of state, or she could go back to being the national security advisor, briefing Biden daily on threats across the globe.
