Page 13 of 107 Days

My days now started with a fifteen-minute briefing on how the campaign was landing in the news.

But the big news of the day for my campaign wasn’t news to me. Barack and Michelle Obama had decided the time was right to endorse me. They’d wanted to make a film of them calling me, and it was now up on social media.

Netanyahu had flown down to Mar-a-Lago to see Trump. I learned that he was enraged by my remarks after our meeting. The briefing digressed to note that Trump had stopped wearing the bandage on his ear, almost two weeks after the bullet had nicked it.

Then there was a second briefing with my staffers Dean Lieberman and Ernie Apreza. Dean, a deputy national security adviser and skilled strategist, would update on international events, and Ernie, my press secretary, on domestic news.

There was a note before the next item on my schedule: “Hold for hearty breakfast.” It’s a reality of campaign life that a grown woman needs to be reminded to make time to eat.

But what followed would be a day of almost back-to-back calls with little pause for refueling.

There would be a DNC Finance Committee call with good news about the scale of donations large and small that were continuing to pour in.

There was a call in to the faith coalition hosted by my pastor, Reverend Brown.

And we had to keep moving on the search for the person who would join my ticket.

I had to find a vice presidential candidate, and I had to find one fast.

From the day I got Joe’s call I had sixteen days to do it, and now I had exactly eleven left.

When Joe picked me, he’d taken over nine weeks to thoroughly consider all his options.

My deadline was August 6, a day after the roll call that would formally nominate me.

Ohio’s ballot had an August 7 closing date, and they needed two names to print on the ballot.

It was an excruciatingly tight time frame.

My choice would impact not just the race but also the shape of my administration.

Being a vice presidential pick is an enormous gift, vaulting someone who might have local or state recognition onto the bigger, brighter national stage. But it can also mean taking a job that, as FDR’s VP John Nance Garner so memorably said, may not be “worth a bucket of warm piss.”

Jimmy Carter, having lived through the assassination of JFK and the resignation of Nixon, knew that the vice president had to be ready to take over.

He remade the role. His vice president, Walter Mondale, was the first to have an office in the West Wing.

Ronald Reagan also understood that the vice president needed to be prepared, as did Bill Clinton.

George W. Bush went further, ceding unprecedented power to Dick Cheney.

But it remains true that the vice president’s role will be as little or as much as the sitting president desires. That can be a hard pill to swallow.

A couple of likely candidates, such as Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, would preemptively withdraw from contention.

We’d put a poll in the field to determine who among the other possibilities had name recognition and, of those, who had the kinds of positives and negatives that might help or hurt us.

The results turned out to be useless. None of the names moved the needle either way.

So that put the onus on what would turn up during vetting and what my personal chemistry with each candidate was like.

I wanted someone who shared my vision and had the practical chops to implement our plans.

We narrowed it down to eight possible candidates and asked them to submit material such as financial disclosures, ads from previous political campaigns, and information about their personal lives that might not yet have found its way into the public record.

My vetting team was led by Jen O’Malley Dillon, my campaign chief of staff Sheila Nix, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and former White House counsel Dana Remus.

There’s a reason we had top cops and lawyers on the team.

It’s a prosecutorial process, as I had learned four years earlier when I sat across a table from the lawyer vetting me.

The final stage, after the investigation, was an interrogation that lasted nine hours.

The attorney took every aspect of my past, especially the sensitive or difficult moments, and pressed me on them.

Not because she didn’t know the answers, but to see how I would handle the pressure.

Did I get my back up? Could I pivot? Would my answers pass the smell test?

She would periodically ask me if I wanted to take a break.

I declined. We didn’t get up from that table until she had fine-tooth-combed my entire life.

Biden had won the nomination because Congressman Jim Clyburn, leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, had thrown his support behind him.

The Black vote in the South Carolina primary—especially Black women’s vote—had thrust him to victory.

The pressure was on him to pick a Black woman running mate.

The press knew I was on the short list, so they had our DC apartment building staked out. When Doug and I stepped out to go somewhere, they’d follow. Occasionally I’d save them the trouble. I’d wander over to their van and say, “Doug and I are just going for coffee, can I bring you something?”

Getting to my interview with Joe was choreographed like a spy movie.

Andy Vargas, my body person, drove me in our Audi to a strip mall, where I switched to an SUV and was instructed to duck as we approached a big house in northern Virginia.

I was led downstairs to the bottom level, to a room with closed drapes, where Jill and Joe would meet me.

It was the height of Covid, so we were all wearing masks.

Once you are chosen as VP candidate, you barely have time to blink before your life becomes unrecognizable.

Prior to getting the call from Joe to tell me he had picked me, I’d been visited by a friend, Carol, who has a remarkable garden.

She wanted to give me a box of her late-season tomatoes.

I was feeling stressed, knowing that Joe was about to decide and that the world was watching.

When I’m stressed, I like to cook. I greeted Carol in the lobby of my apartment building—both masked—and carried the box back upstairs, rolling up my sleeves to make a big batch of marinara for the freezer.

I never made that sauce. Right after Joe’s call at 2:00 p.m., cars started pulling up on the street outside, spilling out national campaign staffers with briefing books on every aspect of the campaign.

I took the binders and gave each staffer a handful of ripe tomatoes in return. I hate wasting food.

And now I was about to cause the same sudden swerve in someone else’s life.

Of the eight names on the list for vetting, I might as well say that Pete Buttigieg was my first choice.

Harvard grad, multilingual Rhodes Scholar, business consultant, naval intelligence officer, twice-elected Midwestern mayor, cabinet secretary, loving husband and father: he was well qualified in so many respects.

I love Pete. I love working with Pete. He and his husband, Chasten, are friends.

He is a sincere public servant with the rare talent of being able to frame liberal arguments in a way that makes it possible for conservatives to hear them.

He knows the importance of taking our case to people who aren’t usually exposed to it and is magnificent at sparring with opponents on Fox News.

He would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man. But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it . But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.

And I think Pete also knew that—to our mutual sadness.