“Why don’t you define each one for me, and then I can tell you where I fit,” she responded. “If you want to say, for example, that believing that working people should receive a fair wage and be treated with dignity and that there is dignity in all work, well then, I don’t know what label do you give that one. If you believe that parents should have affordable child care? I’m not sure what the label is for that.”
“The labels are used as kind of proxies for kind of root-cause conversations,” I said. “Progressives believe that structural inequality is such that it has to be upended. Liberals are thinking more about working within a system.”
“Well, name the issue and then I’ll tell you,” she said.
“OK, inequality,” I proposed.
“Let’s just take the African American experience from slavery on. And we don’t have to even go back that far to to understand where the inequality came from,” she said, listing redlining, the Tulsa riots, the G.I. Bill. “There were issues that were about policy and practice that excluded, purposely, people based on their race.”
“But one of the quotes I most remember from your presidential run was you saying, when asked what you believe in, that you weren’t trying to restructure society. How do you solve those kind of deep systemic inequalities?”
“I think you have to be more specific,” she parried, “because I’m not really into labels.”
The words had barely left Joe Biden’s mouth before Representative Maxine Waters picked up the phone. “What are we going to do?” she asked Leah Daughtry, a longtime operative at the Democratic National Committee and, more important, one of the chief conveners of the party’s informal network of influential Black women. It was March 2020, during the final Democratic presidential debate between Biden and Bernie Sanders, in which Biden tried to wrap up the nomination with an explicit appeal to the party’s base. “Biden just said he was going to pick a woman to be his running mate,” Waters informed her, before repeating her question. “What are we going to do?”
The phone call was the origin point of a two-pronged plan, Daughtry told me, recounting their conversation for the first time for this article. They didn’t want just any woman — they wanted a Black woman — and they were determined to make the case on multiple fronts. To the Biden campaign directly, in the kind of back-room jockeying among political insiders that has long defined the vice-presidential sweepstakes, but also to the public, hoping to create a political environment in which the Biden campaign felt it had no other option.