Time for boldness
Dear Joe Biden - You are doing great. You are up in the polls. Money is starting to come in. You're even breaking through with some GOP figures - Carly Fiorina and Colin Powell are voting for you.
Now is the time for Fourth of July political fireworks to fight any complacency among your voters. So, here's my advice:
Before you name your pick for vice president, you should name three cabinet secretaries and your first Supreme Court nominee.
First, name Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as your Treasury Secretary.
Second, name Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) as your Attorney General.
Third, name Susan Rice your Secretary of State.
And finally, tell the world that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is your first pick for the Supreme Court. This strategy has high risk and high reward.
The risk comes with creating new targets for Trump to belittle with schoolyard nicknames.
But you're after the big reward.
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The announcements will tell everyone you are fired up, ready to govern. It will energize the voters you need to turn out in big numbers, especially Black Americans, suburban women and Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) fans on the party's left.
Putting Warren in your cabinet signals you are already taking action on income inequality - looking to address the urgent needs of students with college debt, financially squeezed middle-class workers and small businesses. The left will love this pick. The only problem with Warren is that she is an excellent choice for vice president. But this move will not take her out of the running.
There is no such complication with Klobuchar. She took herself out of the running for VP recently. Naming a hardworking Midwesterner with stellar credentials to fix the odor of corruption coming from President Trump's Justice Department will remind everyone what is at stake.
And since there is no vacancy on the Supreme Court at the moment, naming Harris as your future choice for the high court will not rule her out as a pick for vice president either.
Now, here comes the risk. Name Rice as your Secretary of State with the caveat that she, like Warren and Harris, is a contender to be your running mate - even if doing so sets off red lights and screams in the Trump media echo chamber. To my mind, she'd be a great vice president.
Rice provides you with a fierce tag-team partner for Trump's bareknuckle political wrestling. She has no problem saying the Trump administration is "racist to its core."
"We have a choice," Rice recently told HBO's Bill Maher.
That choice, she said, was between Trump remaining in office and Biden winning.
If the Democrat won, she added, Americans would have a president who "understands that…it's time to invest in health, in education, in housing and…in so many of the underlying conditions which have exacerbated the systemic racism in this country…I would urge those that are questioning how they might vote in this context to be very mindful of what the choice is. It couldn't be more stark."
Running mates are traditionally the "attack dogs" that allow the presidential nominee to keep clean while they handle the day-to-day combat. Spiro Agnew famously played that role for Richard Nixon in 1968. John Edwards did it for John Kerry in 2004. Sarah Palin tried her best for John McCain in the final weeks of the 2008 campaign.
Rice fits the role. Her sharp intellect also makes her a favorite in any debate against Vice President Pence. And she has already been battle-tested.
For years, Republican talk radio hosts vilified her over her response to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in 2012. They accused her of "lying" for saying the attack grew out of a spontaneous demonstration, prompted by an American antiMuslim video.
The truth was more complicated, but also exonerating of Rice. The CIA director at the time of the attacks, David Petraeus, later told Congress that the agency knew a terrorist group was involved in the attack - but that this classified information had been intentionally omitted from an unclassified memo given to Rice to prepare for TV interviews.
To this day, Republicans point to Benghazi to libel Rice even though she - and the Obama administration - was cleared of any wrongdoing by 10 separate investigations, many done by Republicans in Congress.