Unlike Joe Biden in 2008, Kamala Harris had almost no negotiating leverage. But that may be beside the point.
Joe Biden is 77. Kamala Harris is 55. They come from different coasts and didn’t overlap in the Senate. There aren’t many people who know both of them well. Dylan Loewe is an exception. The 37-year-old speechwriter spent most of 2012 and 2013 sitting next to Biden on Air Force Two revising drafts of the vice president’s remarks. “For two years I spent more time with him than anyone in my life, including my wife,” Loewe said. “I had a very close experience with him in terms of observing him and understanding him and channeling him.” A few years later Kamala Harris asked him to help her write her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” which was released early last year before she ran for president. By Loewe’s estimation they spent some 200 hours together. “Working with someone on a memoir is different,” he said. “You are part staff, part therapist, part friend. You get to ask them questions you would never ask as a staffer. You’re interviewing them and pulling out the best stories.” He once spent a morning with the senator talking about the emotionally grueling ordeal of her mother’s death. For Loewe, who is still fond of both candidates, their political marriage has been exhilarating. “This is what it must feel like for children of divorce to see their parents get back together,” he said. “There are people who know Harris better than I do and people who know Biden better than I do, but there’s nobody who knows them both as well as I do.” His unique experience with Biden and Harris makes him a useful expert on one of the central questions raised by Biden’s choice: If they win, what would the Biden-Harris partnership look like in office? When John Kerry was looking for a running mate in 2004, he told an aide, who later relayed the story to me, that there were three options: “A Mr. August, a Mr. October or a Mr. January.” The August pick would be helpful if the nominee was down in the polls or needed to unite his party going into the convention (think Sarah Palin or George H. W. Bush). The October pick would be helpful in winning the general election (think Lyndon Johnson securing the South for John F. Kennedy). The January pick would be the best person to help govern, especially for an inexperienced president (think Dick Cheney and Joe Biden). Some candidates straddle the categories, and the ideal running mate would satisfy all three criteria. So where does Kamala Harris fall on Kerry’s calendar system? Most plugged-in Democrats I’ve talked to argue that in 2020, with an experienced person at the top of the ticket and the desperate imperative among Democrats to remove Trump from office, the Biden campaign was driven by more short-term considerations, making Harris more of an August-October pick. “When you pick your vice president you are trying to win an election first and foremost,” said a Biden adviser. “I think this is what he grappled with,” said a Democrat familiar with the selection process. “Kamala was a no-brainer on the political side. But his process was about figuring out what kind of a partner she would be on the governing side. And can he replicate the closeness he had with Obama in this selection, and will he be able to confide in her and trust her? Will she have my back at all costs.?” The loyalty question hung over the process. One way that Harris seemed to have answered it was to point to her record as attorney general in California. “Kamala has always been a better surrogate for others than a bragger on herself,” said a former Harris adviser. “During her California days she deferred to the governor on a number of things at times when she could have undercut him. She was loyal to Jerry Brown.” Biden’s insistence on loyalty and allergy to presidential ambition became such a driver of the process that some observers saw it as sexist. Did male candidates previously have to prostrate themselves this way? The former Harris adviser said, “Having worked for female candidates, sexism is kind of hard to see and point to, but it’s easy to feel how the sexism works in these campaigns. I’ve not walked in the shoes of an ambitious woman, but I’ve felt as an aide that some of the tropes are gendered at best and sexist at worst. But people did say the same thing” — regarding the perils of ambition and importance of loyalty — “about Al Gore and John Edwards and Sarah Palin.” But if that’s what Biden wanted from Harris, what did Harris want from Biden? Biden, who studied the history of the vice presidency before taking the job, was influenced by the advice of Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s No.
