Who will be Joe Biden’s co-president?

Biden doesn’t need a running mate with experience. He needs someone who can plausibly represent the future of the Democratic Party and who could be sworn in as president in January 2025—or earlier, if the country’s oldest president should die or become incapacitated in office. Biden has preemptively narrowed the search for his running mate and the Democrats’ 2024 nominee to women only. Was it wise to exclude half the population—including such diverse young Democrats as Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker—from any consideration in this far-reaching decision right from the start? Biden is only thinking about November, but his voters will have to think about the November election four years from now as well, when Biden will turn 82. Do even the 24 per cent of Democrats who are enthusiastic about Biden now imagine that he’ll be on the ballot in 2024? If not, what woman are they prepared to pre-elect today? She needs to have electoral credibility to help Biden here and now. But she also needs to have the focus and creativity to lead like Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman if this decade continues going the way it’s begun. And whomever the Democrats pick, even if victorious this year and in 2024, will have to face Republican populism for a long time. The Sanders wing of the party was confident it could do that. The Clinton-Biden, Schumer-Pelosi wing? Though it might yet win an election, it’s already losing the future.