Page 22 of 107 Days

The pack of reporters staking out the gate to the Naval Observatory that Sunday had no idea that Storm had secretly arranged to come and go through an alternate entrance that hadn’t been used for about twenty years.

Inside, I would be making one of the most difficult decisions of my life, against a background of international tension.

We had decided to hold a pre-brief before each interview and a debrief after. I knew all three men; we’d worked together. But this encounter was going to be very different. Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, arrived first.

Storm had picked him up from the parking lot of an elementary school in Glover Park.

At the last minute, Storm had traded her Jeep for a vehicle with tinted windows, since discretion in this process was so important to us.

Josh went to get in the front seat, but Storm instructed that he needed to be in the back, so he could duck and not been seen.

She thought he seemed a little disappointed by that.

When he learned she was the residence manager, he peppered her with questions about the house, from the number of bedrooms to how he might arrange to get Pennsylvania artists’ work on loan from the Smithsonian.

In our meeting he was, as always, poised, polished, and personable.

I told him how much I admired his work. He was great on the stump, a wonderful campaigner, very compelling and very bright.

Our careers synced in many places. While employed as a political adviser on Capitol Hill, he took night classes to get his law degree at Georgetown and then ran for the Pennsylvania statehouse.

He had been twice elected state attorney general.

I’d had a chance to see how his mind worked when we were both Rodel Fellows at the Aspen Institute in 2006, when he was a member of the Pennsylvania statehouse and I was San Francisco DA.

That two-year bipartisan program for young, elected leaders included seminars on the founding documents of democracy and ethics, as well as international trips exploring global issues.

Josh had been elected governor in 2022 and was popular in a state with nineteen electoral votes that we badly needed to win.

We talked about how to handle the attacks he’d confronted on Gaza and what effect it might have on the enthusiasm we were trying to build.

Big protests at the convention were a major concern.

As a student, he’d written an op-ed stating that peace with Palestinians was impossible, and this decades-old article had been dragged out to smear him as “Genocide Josh.” He said he felt he’d been able to deal with critics by stating clearly that his youthful opinion had been misguided and that he was fully committed to a two-state solution.

He had also publicly called Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time.”

I asked him if he understood the job of vice president. “Because if you do, you’ll be good at it and our administration will be strong.”

He peppered me with questions, trying to nail down, in detail, what role I saw for my VP.

At one point, he mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision.

I told him bluntly that was an unrealistic expectation.

A vice president is not a copresident. I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership.

I had to be able to completely trust the person in that role.

“Every day as president,” I said, “I’ll have ninety-nine problems, and my VP can’t be one.”

Apart from apprehensions for myself, I was also concerned for him.

I thought his frustrations with the job might impact his performance in the role.

And why take an effective Democratic governor out of a job he liked and was good at?

But could I afford to turn my back on such a talented political athlete in such a critical state?

Josh assured me he’d do everything to help me win Pennsylvania whether I chose him or not, “because this is the most important election we’ve faced. ”

I had time to hash out these thoughts in a debrief with my team.

Meanwhile, Storm returned Josh to the pickup location.

Storm instructed the state trooper who was arranging transport on an alternate route that would avoid driving by the vice president’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue.

She assumed that the press would notice official vehicles with Pennsylvania plates.

She was disappointed, ten minutes later, to see those very cars on CNN, cruising right by the residence.

That lack of discretion did not play well with her.

She picked up Minnesota Governor Tim Walz from a nearby dog park.

He was amused by the cloak-and-dagger shenanigans.

On the drive, they talked about her Norwegian background—his state has a large Norwegian community—and when he arrived, he seemed touched that Storm had his preferred beverage, Diet Mountain Dew, on the table ready for him.

It was quickly clear to me that Tim had walked into that room feeling he wouldn’t get the job. The first thing he said as he sat down—I don’t even know if the door had closed behind him—was: “Whether or not you pick me, I’m going to do everything I can to get you elected.”

He was immediately self-critical. “I’m not a good debater.

” “I’ve never used a teleprompter.” He was less polished than Josh.

But he had an appealing authenticity and was genuinely self-deprecating.

A lot of people in politics act self-deprecating, but it’s just that, an act.

If anything, Tim over-indexed his own liabilities.

On the face of it, we had nothing in common.

I’m West Coast; he’s Midwest. I was born in Oakland and grew up in a working-class urban neighborhood.

He’s from a rural town of four hundred on the Nebraska plains.

I worked at McDonald’s in the summer; he worked on his family’s farm.

Despite those differences, Tim reminded me of everyone I grew up with.

He was plainspoken, hardworking, strong, kind, and a fighter for what he believes is right. And he had a sense of humor.

Never mind the teleprompter, here was a guy who knew how to put an engine together. A guy who could talk knowledgeably to a farmer about hogs and soybeans. A guy who knew what it meant to hunt in fall to put food in the freezer to last through winter. None of it was shtick. It is just who he is.

He would make the case for the people who were not in the room. Even more valuable, Tim would notice who was not in the room and would know how to reach them. Of the three candidates, this quality was authentic and unique to him.

As a farmer, factory worker, Army National Guardsman, social studies teacher, football coach, and Democrat who had beaten a six-term Republican to win a congressional seat in 2006 and hold it through five elections, Tim had the most diverse life experience.

He and his wife, Gwen, had struggled with infertility and had their daughter, Hope, through intrauterine insemination.

Their son, Gus, still in high school, had special needs.

Tim had the empathy that came from living those experiences.

He knew what it meant to suffer as much as he knew what it meant to succeed.

His record as a two-term governor was impressive.

He’d pushed for and signed legislation codifying reproductive rights, providing free school meals, making college tuition free for low-income families, and requiring universal background checks for gun buyers.

Under his leadership, his state was designated one of the most business friendly in the nation.

These were issues that mattered to me. They were the kinds of achievements I wanted for my administration.

I felt like Tim knew how to help me get them done.

He said he had no ambition to be president, that his aim as vice president would be doing meaningful work to improve people’s lives.

It’s no bad thing for a vice president to want to be president, unless that ambition plays a corrosive role in the relationship and causes disloyalty.

That wouldn’t be an issue with Tim. He had no fixed ideas about what the role of vice president should be, saying he would do whatever I found was most useful for him to do.

Finally, Storm set off to collect Mark Kelly, senator from Arizona. As she drove up to the agreed meeting point, he texted her: I’m in the Tesla by the dumpsters. For an astronaut who had walked in space, it was a very down-to-earth location for a rendezvous.

By the time I sat down with Kelly, Shapiro and Walz had both impressed me in completely different ways.

There was very little weight on the scale favoring one over the other.

The choice between them was tough enough.

Now, an American hero had entered the room, a Navy baseball cap paired handsomely with his business suit.

Kelly served twenty-four years in the US Navy, retiring as a highly decorated captain with over five thousand flying hours and thirty-nine combat missions.

He and his twin brother, both astronauts, have dedicated their lives to our country in the most noble way.

Scott Kelly spent almost a year in space to study the effects of long-duration space travel on the human body.

Because they are identical twins, retired astronaut Mark, down here on Earth while Scott was in space, was the perfect control subject.

Mark Kelly had also been put to the test by personal tragedy when his wife, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head in an assassination attempt.

I had watched as he stood beside her every step of her long, difficult recovery and fought tirelessly for sensible gun reform.

We’d worked together on that issue in the Senate.

They had both been supportive friends ever since I was AG.

Since I was also in charge of overseeing the National Space Council, I’d sought Mark’s opinion on how to maintain a thriving aerospace industry for civilian and military ends.

He’d advised me on one of my proudest achievements, the Artemis Accords, which provide a forward-looking set of international principles for how humanity uses the resources of space, the moon, and Mars.

One of its most immediate concerns is creating a legal framework for how we deal with ever-proliferating “space junk,” as the number of satellites increase and older ones decay and fall to Earth.

When I took up my role at the Space Council, only nine nations had signed on to the accords.

After my meetings with Narendra Modi, Emmanuel Macron, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and many other world leaders, it’s now fifty-five.

Mark and I shared this passionate interest.

I was impressed that Mark had won his Senate seat in a traditionally red state, helping to turn it purple.

He was pro-business in a way that mattered to me and could be helpful in countering the Republican narrative that I wasn’t.

As a senator for a border state, he’d broken with our party’s preferred language on migration, calling the situation “a crisis.” I agreed with that characterization and had argued that the White House should also use that word.

Irregular migration was a crisis—a global one—to which we, America, always a beacon for the poor and the threatened, could not be, and were not, immune.

Politically, I rarely emphasized that point, because it could be mischaracterized as a lame excuse.

But Mark’s slowness to sign on to the PRO Act, protecting unions’ right to organize, had raised a red flag. He had come out in full-throated support as recently as July 24, aware, maybe, that I would only choose a running mate who was unquestionably pro-labor.

I admired Mark Kelly. He would be magnetic.

As I sat across from him, what I saw was our American ideal of selfless service.

Untarnished. He also hadn’t yet had an “oh shit” moment in his relatively short political career.

I wasn’t sure how he would cope with the kind of garbage Trump would throw at him.

Could a captain, used to deference and respect, adapt to an opponent’s national campaign specifically designed to disrespect him, to cut a hero down to something small?

John Kerry, a war hero, had been swiftboated—defamed in an untrue campaign about his military record that had unfairly damaged his reputation.

The guy who led that effort, Chris LaCivita, was now one of Trump’s top campaign aides.

I realized that I couldn’t afford to test Mark Kelly in that ugly grinder.

When Kelly left, I got on a Zoom call with the selection committee and my chosen committee of advisers: Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, former Congressman Cedric Richmond, and Tony West. We reviewed what we’d heard from each of these exceptional men and weighed the pros and cons.

Their concerns were how adeptly and passionately each of them would defend me.

In short, who would be most loyal and effective at the job.

The ambition must be for the job, not for the political future beyond.

To get a young person’s opinion, I called my godson, Alexander Hudlin, seventeen years old and very much a creature of the zeitgeist. He was for Walz. “Auntie, I like him.”

My senior staff, to a person, strongly favored Tim.

A confidential group within the campaign had already mocked up announcements pumping whichever of the three I chose, ready to press “send” once my decision could be announced. This helped me envision the narrative of our ticket.

It was late when I finally sat down in the family room.

Maya and Tony were staying with us. They both liked Walz.

Maya especially liked the fact that he was not trying to be anything but the best VP for her sister: “He’s loyal, he’ll have your back on the trail, and it’s clear that you like him,” she said.

Doug and I went back and forth. He had known Josh longer and leaned that way.

It was always going to have to be my decision. I told my staff and family that I didn’t want any more input, and I went to do something practical: I made a tasty rub and seasoned a pork roast.

By the time I went to bed, I’d decided on Walz.