Biden needs to choose wisely his running mate--which means taking a harder look at the negatives Warren would bring to the table

It still seems like ages away, but in a little over five months we will finally have that chance to vote out the Trump Era once and for all. That doesn’t mean that election day itself will end it all; Trump will still have another 10 weeks to cause a mighty amount of damage, and one suspects that Trump is the kind of breed of “human” that if he is going down, and he is going to do his best to take the country down with him. And Trump’s skunk spray on the country will takes years, if ever, to remove completely, and it is best to be done sooner rather later. 

In the meantime, there are still 19 more Democratic primaries and nearly 1300 more pledged delegates to go, although they are considered a mere formality on the road to Joe Biden’s eventual nomination. After that, there is still this business about Biden picking a running mate. That he has pledged to select a woman is no mystery; who he will choose is sort of one. The assumption is that it will be one of his primary opponents, and we are well aware that one of them has been megalomaniacal in her quest for the spot: Elizabeth Warren. When asked by her white elitist supporters in the media, she expressed an unseemly eagerness to “accept” such a nomination, as if  in her vast conceit she believes it is a fait accompli.

There may unfortunately be some truth to this. Those Warren supporters—that is to say those who support her for her alleged “progressive” views rather than simply support her as a “gendered” candidate—may be in for some disappointments as to what she is willing to give up in order to make herself more “palatable” to Biden. Politico recently reported that Warren has all but given up for good Medicare for All; a few weeks ago at an appearance at the University of Chicago, she informed students that she now “understands” that people are just looking for improvement in the Affordable Care Act, and she sympathizes with that view. Politico also observed that “Warren and Biden's policy teams have also been working closely together particularly on economic policy, according to sources in both camps. Her team has distinguished itself among his advisers on that front.” Good grief.

I suspect that most Democratic and independent voters don’t really want to see Warren on the ticket. This is a person who has lied, deceived and cheated to advance her career. What, you say? She lied about being a Native American, she deceived employers about being a “minority hire”—although they were apparently very willing to be deceived—and cheated those who were actually underrepresented minorities from being hired as such. Of course, Massachusetts voters were not fooled by Warren’s claims—being obviously white is why she was elected to the U.S. Senate. And of course Warren made up stories to advance her gender agenda, which didn’t help her, and all this deceiving will doubtless be used against her if she is on the ticket. She will very likely alienate more male voters than gain more female voters; Kerry Howley in New York Magazine may be one of those who  were “enthralled” by Warren’s brutish behavior during the primary debates, especially in regard to her attacks on Michael Bloomberg, but we may suspect that she merely disgusted other voters.

It is fascinating that the media never took a serious look into accusations of racism in the Warren camp; minority staffers reportedly quit her campaign after being made to feel like "tokens" and whose views and concerns were not taken seriously.  Given the fact that even in the South Carolina primary, Warren acted as if she didn’t know that the large majority of Democratic voters there are minorities, it is within the realm of possibility that she will be seen not only as some “old white” person not attuned to minority concerns (much as Bernie Sanders was wrongly accused of being), but if she goes the white privileged, entitled (yet “victimized”) “gendered” route, minority voters may wonder "What's in it for us?"

For now we can only hope that Biden chooses wisely; If he doesn’t, we may be asking why playing the gender card didn’t work any better in 2020 than it did in 2016.