Could Rice run for office as Biden’s VP?
On an autumn Friday not long before the 2018 elections, Susan E. Rice was traveling through the Phoenix airport and watching from afar as Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh moved steadily toward confirmation. The convulsive Senate battle had reached a climax, and for Rice’s party an unhappy one: Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, had just announced her support for Kavanaugh, effectively sealing his victory.
When a former White House colleague tweeted plaintively, asking who might take down Collins in the 2020 election, Rice fired off a two-letter reply: “Me.”
The message excited Rice’s followers, startled her friends and puzzled Democratic Party leaders, most of whom were surprised to learn the former national security adviser had any interest in electoral politics. Party strategists were already in the process of recruiting a challenger for Collins, and Rice had not been on their radar as an option. Though she had family roots in Maine, she did not even live in the state.
In public, Rice did little to clarify her intentions, and she made no overtures to the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. When Rice announced several months later that she had decided against running for family reasons, most Democrats concluded she had never given it real consideration.
They were wrong: Before ruling out the race, Rice had quietly explored the idea of battling Collins for weeks, seeking advice from seasoned politicians in Maine, friendly operatives in Washington and top advisers to former President Barack Obama, including Valerie Jarrett and pollster Joel Benenson. Within her political circle, the sincerity of her interest was clear.
In the end, Rice did not run. But her exploration of the race represented an emphatic declaration of new political aspirations.
Rice, 55, is now among a handful of women under consideration to become Joe Biden’s running mate. It is the latest stage in a path to power that has seen Rice chosen to be a Rhodes scholar at 21, an assistant secretary of state at 32 and ambassador to the United Nations little more than a decade later.
In 2018, Jarrett said she believed Rice was “relishing the chance to actually run for office.”
“She loves a good battle,” said Jarrett, adding of Rice’s deliberations, “It wasn’t just talking to her friends and family. It was talking to people who would have advised her on the nuts and bolts of a campaign.”
Rice’s electoral inexperience is not the only possible mark against her in the vicepresidential process: In an election dominated by a public-health disaster and economic recession, it is unclear how much a candidate best known for her foreign policy credentials would improve Biden’s chances. And there are people close to Biden who fear that choosing her would force the campaign to spend precious days relitigating her role in responding to the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead and prompted months of Republicanled congressional hearings
While many conspiracy theories about the attack have been discredited, Rice ended up taking the political fall for appearing
on the Sunday shows to deliver a set of flawed administration talking points describing it as an outburst of spontaneous violence rather than organized terrorism. In her 2019 memoir, Rice wrote that the episode turned her “from being a respected if relatively low-profile Cabinet official to a nationally notorious villain or heroine, depending on one’s political perspective.”
She would bring clear strengths to a ticket and administration, reinforcing Biden’s message of sober and seasoned leadership and appealing further to Americans who pine for the Obama years. While she and Biden have had policy disagreements over the years, they share a deeply held view of the importance of diplomacy and international institutions, a concern for promoting democracy and human rights and a common pride in Obama-era achievements that they helped shape, such as the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal.
Should Biden become president, few other potential vice presidents might be dispatched as easily on important missions around the world.
But hanging over everything is the question of Rice’s abilities as a campaigner. She would be the first person chosen for vice president without prior elected experience since 1972, when the Democratic ticket included R. Sargent Shriver, the former Peace Corps director and John F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law — like Rice, a diplomat closely linked to a president sorely missed by his party.
Rice is up against multiple candidates who have run for president themselves, including Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, and others, such as Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who have endured grueling statewide campaigns.
In an interview, Rice said she was comfortable on the campaign trail, pointing to her activities for Obama. She left open the door to seeking a Senate seat in Washington, D.C., if the city were to achieve statehood.