There's Only One Thing Kamala Harris Should Care About in a VP

The ability to not screw it up.

At some point in the next 24 hours, Kamala Harris will probably announce her VP pick. It’s gonna be a white guy, as much as I wish it did not have to be a white guy. The list of finalists seems to have been whittled down to five, most of them men with midwestern or swing-state cred, and with varying levels of national recognition. Some, like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, seem to have come out of nowhere. Others, like transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, have been in the public eye since 2020. There’s one thing that we need from all of these men: We need to them to put country before their own personal ambitions. And that means we need them to disclose every skeleton in their closet to the Harris vetting team, even if it means they get axed from the shortlist.

And we need the Harris team to look not just at how these men may bring in this or that state, or how they might appeal to white male voters (although they need to do that, too), but we need them to do their damndest to evaluate these men’s characters: Are they honest to a fault with the vetting team? How much have they been vetted or investigated in past races? They’re all transparently ambitious — has that ambition ever led them into questionable decisions, or, more importantly, led them to hide questionable decisions?

Harris’s VP selection process has happened at lightning speed, and her team simply does not have the time it usual takes to do a thorough vetting — she’s barely had time to put her own team in place. We can guarantee with near-100% certainty that there are potential scandals and missteps and bad positions and damning comments that the vetting process is missing, because no vetting process is perfect (just ask the Trump team about JD Vance). And it’s unreasonable to expect that every VP nominee remembers every potentially controversial comment he’s ever made on a podcast or in a random interview. There are going to be some wild card comments and some unflattering stories; that’s unavoidable.

What is avoidable, though, is a major scandal — a John-Edwards-style wholesale meltdown that happens when a candidate behaves really, really badly but is arrogant enough to believe he will never get caught. This is admittedly a bit of a catch-22 for the Harris campaign: If one of the VP contenders is so narcissistic and arrogant he believes he will never get caught, he’s probably not going to disclose his bad acts. But the thing about potentially campaign-ending bad acts is that they aren’t all committed by arrogant narcissists; a lot of the time, they’re committed by politicians with industry-normal levels of narcissism and arrogance (still quite high) who may nevertheless decide to do the right thing, or at least something close to the right thing and disclose their secrets to the campaign.

That’s what we need from these five men.

Not to sound too cynical, but I really do believe that if you put five extremely ambitious male politicians in a room, you have close to a 100% chance of there being one campaign-ending scandal among them. The vetting team is certainly trying to sniff it out. But we also need these five men to believe their own claims — that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the country and must be defeated — and come clean about the things they’ve done, no matter how potentially damning.

It’s true that any secret among these five no doubt pales in comparison to the things we know Trump has done. But the reality for Democrats is that we exist in a moment of tremendous political asymmetry. Something that may not merit more than a day of news coverage for Trump could tank the Harris campaign. This is not fair, and there is much to criticize about both the media and the public, but it is never the less the case. And we need all of the VP candidates to make disclosure decisions with that reality in mind, and not the justification of “well it’s not as bad as what Trump has done.”

I don’t have a particularly strong opinion about who Harris should pick, and I can see pluses and minuses for each man on the shortlist. I think the campaign is probably best served by picking someone who can connect with white men and who has the skills to clearly articulate Harris’s agenda and push back where she can’t. Most of all, I think the campaign needs a guy who other white guys look at and think, he gets me. And I can tell you that I am among the least-capable political observers to assess who might inspire that sense of connection. But I know for sure that a boring, unobjectionable slice of Wonder bread is a much better running mate than a guy who says all the right things, but believes he can hide all his wrongdoings

xx Jill