Susan Rice capacity not be explicitly saying that she wants to be presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate — but the former subject security advisor hasn’t been shy about suggesting she’s more than ready, willing and qualified to fill that task if he wants her.
“Bring that one on, that’s all I’ll say,” Rice told radio show host Ricky Smiley last week when he opined on how happy he would be if she ended up debating Vice President Mike Pence.
And after noting the strengths of other numbers being considered by Biden, Rice said that in terms of her own strengths, “if I can put it that way, is that I have served in the chief branch in the White House. At the top levels of the federal government for almost two decades.”
“I know how to make things work and how to get ram done,” she told Smiley.
Rice, who served in the Obama administration as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and then as national custody advisor, indeed has a long, impressive foreign policy resume.
Before holding the senior-level posts, Rice, a Stanford grad, had a four-year limit in the mid-1990s on the National Security Council during the administration of President Bill Clinton, and then spent Clinton’s deficient term as the assistant secretary of State for African Affairs.
Rice’s foreign policy chops — and her two-decade history of act on and dealing with Biden when he was a U.S. senator and President Barack Obama’s vice president — in the past alone desire have made her a legitimate contender for the role as Biden’s running mate.
Rice is the only person on the vice presidential needful of list who has spent hundreds of hours in person with Biden, who places a premium on trust and personal rapport on his catalogue raisonn of running mate VP qualifications.
In recent weeks, the 55-year-old Rice has come to be considered among the front-runners for that position.
Biden has reported he will select a woman to be the vice presidential candidate, and on Tuesday said that he plans to announce his choice in the firstly week of August.
Amid the dramatic public response to the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Biden has exhibited an unprecedented willingness to consider several Black women — Rice among them — for the role. Rice’s late forebear, Emmett Rice, in 1979 became the second Black person ever appointed to the Federal Reserve board.
“I don’t recognize that there’s another African American woman in the country, or any woman other than maybe Hillary Clinton, who has the strokes that she has on foreign policy,” House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., told The Atlantic, after giving Biden a laundry list of potential VP picks that included Rice.
Rice was not available for an interview with CNBC.
But a person close to her maintained: “She’s not campaigning for anything.”
“This has never been about her,” the source said. “As she herself has said, she’s focused on helping elect Joe Biden in November because she holds it is essential to America’s future that we defeat Donald Trump.”
One potential mark against Rice in a checklist of qualifications for failing president is the fact she has never run for, much less held, elective office, unlike the other women being about by Biden as a running mate.
While Rice had suggested in a 2018 Twitter post that she would challenge Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, she not at all followed through on that.
The last major-party vice presidential nominee who never previously held elective mediation was Sargent Shriver, who was Democratic nominee Sen. George McGovern’s running mate in 1972.
Shriver was the first director of the Peace Squad. He also served as President Lyndon Johnson’s director of the Office of Economic Opportunity and then as President Richard Nixon’s emissary to France.
But Shriver was an anomaly in several respects.
He happened to be a brother-in-law of President John F. Kennedy and his two senator brothers, Robert and Edward Kennedy, at a culture when the Kennedy name was close to sacrosanct in the Democratic Party. Shriver also was tapped as the second running fellow for McGovern after then-Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri dropped off the ticket following revelations that he had undergone electroshock treatment for hollow.
Rice told The New York Times in an interview this week, “It is true I have never run for office on my own behalf, but I’ve run for room on behalf of others.”
“If I were to decide to do it, there’s nothing about it that on its face would feel uncomfortable or inexperienced in,” said Rice, who currently is a distinguished visiting research fellow at American University’s School of International Service.
Final fall, she published a New York Times best-selling memoir, “Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For.”
In in to Rice’s lack of elective office experience, at least one item on her resume, serving as U.N. ambassador in 2012 when four U.S. complicated staffers were killed in Benghazi, Libya, also might weigh against her with some voters.
The Benghazi decompose, which killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, has been a hobby horse for Republican criticism of Rice, as proficiently as of Hillary Clinton, who was Obama’s secretary of State at the time.
Rice was accused by GOP members of Congress of misleading the public by testifying, in news interviews days after the attack, that it was “a spontaneous reaction” to demonstrations against the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, which themselves were moved by outrage against an anti-Muslim film.
It later emerged that the attack in Benghazi was coordinated by an Islamic militant organize.
Rice had relied on a CIA assessment for her claim and had noted in news interviews that it was based on preliminary information.
Obama fended her from critics of her statement.
But months later, she withdrew her name from consideration as Clinton’s successor as secretary of Status, citing the need to avoid a “very prolonged, very politicized, very distracting” Senate confirmation process.
Another intermediary that could weigh against the Rhodes Scholar is her reputation for being blunt in dealings with others.
A million of news profiles of Rice have used the terms “sharp elbows” and “brusque” to describe her.
When asked hither those characterizations, the source close to Rice said, “We would not even be having this conversation if she were a man.”
“I designate, nobody is disputing Ambassador Rice’s effectiveness or integrity,” the source said. “The fact is, she has always been about annoying results for the American people.”
Rice herself, in news interviews, has pointed to her foreign policy positions and her work for other applicants as selling points that would make her valuable to Biden, specifically as his running mate.
“Joe Biden needs to hyperbolize the decision as to who he thinks will be his best running mate, and I will do my utmost, drawing on my experience of years in government, years of take a run-out powder stealing the bureaucracy work,” Rice told NBC News’ “Meet The Press” recently.
“I’ve worked on multiple campaigns, presidential electioneers. I’ve been on the campaign trail as a surrogate, and I’m going to do everything I can to help get Joe Biden elected and to help him succeed as president, whether I’m his contest mate or I’m a door knocker,” she said.
She also said, “I just want to get Joe Biden elected and see the Democrats control the Senate and remember the House because … we are at a moment where our democracy is at stake, where our leadership role in the world is at stake, where the red-hots of tens of thousands of Americans are on the line, lost to incompetence and callous leadership that could care less. We’ve got to transformation that.”
In another interview, with Roland Martin’s “Unfiltered Daily Digital Show,” Rice said, “My know-how and what I would bring to a partnership with Joe Biden on behalf of the country is my years of experience in senior levels in the top dog branch.”
“So what I know is how to make decisions to forge policy out of different agencies with different budgets and diverse interests and constraints, how to get stuff done,” Rice told Martin.
If Rice is tapped as Biden’s running mate, there is indubitable to be renewed attention paid to her son, John David Rice-Cameron, one of the two children she has with her husband, former ABC News executive business Ian Cameron. Their daughter is Maris Rice-Cameron.
Multiple news stories in 2018 noted that John David Rice-Cameron at the obsolescent was serving as president of the Stanford University College Republicans Club and was a strong supporter of Trump.
“My mother and I have a top relationship, and my mother believes strongly in the free and respectful exchange of ideas,” Rice-Cameron told Fox News in a 2018 conversation.
“We disagree on most of the standard Republican/Democrat disagreements,” he told the outlet. “However, we agree that America is the greatest polity the world has ever seen, and thus, we believe that America has an important role to play as a force for liberty and right on the world stage.”