Politico | Hillary Clinton endorses Joe Biden for US president in show of party unity
- Trump campaign welcomes move as chance to paint former vice-president as being part of Washington ‘swamp’
- Biden has already avoided one Clinton misstep: he made early peace with ex-rival Bernie Sanders
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Marc Caputo on politico.com on April 28, 2020.
Hillary Clinton endorsed Joe Biden for US president on Tuesday in another show of top Democratic leadership coalescing around the party’s de facto nominee.
Clinton foreshadowed her support earlier in the day on Twitter with a message that featured a picture of her, Biden and former President Obama in the Oval Office.
“A little hint about who the surprise guest will be for @JoeBiden's 3pm ET town hall today: (She's excited.)," her account tweeted.
Biden responded: “I'm with her.”
The endorsement of the Democratic Party’s 2016 nominee, who was defeated by Donald Trump in an upset, was welcomed by the president’s re-election campaign as a way to cast Biden as the consummate Washington insider.
“There is no greater concentration of Democrat establishment than Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton together,” Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, said in a written statement.
“Both of them carry the baggage of decades in the Washington swamp and both of them schemed to keep the Democrat nomination from Bernie Sanders. President Trump beat her once and now he’ll beat her chosen candidate.”
Clinton’s endorsement unfolds just as Biden embarks on a formal vetting process to pick a running mate. He has said his pick will be a woman, marking only the third time in US history that a major party’s vice-presidential candidate is not a man.
Biden’s running mate is likely to have an immediate impact as he faces accusations, which he denies, of sexually assaulting a woman who was a former staffer, Tara Reade, in the early 1990s.
A woman running mate could help defuse tensions over the allegations, although progressives fret it is an unfair burden placed upon a prospective vice-presidential nominee – just as Clinton was weighted down by similar allegations against her husband, former president Bill Clinton.
The legacy of Clinton’s vice-presidential selection also weighs on Biden. Her campaign decided to pick a centrist white male as a running mate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, who did little to excite progressives or black voters – two anchors of the party base.
Of the list of about a dozen candidates Biden is considering, nearly all of them neatly fall on either side of the Democratic fault line dividing white moderates from progressives and women of colour.
Biden has already avoided one Clinton misstep: he has made early peace with his former primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders.
Clinton’s show of support for Biden was timed to put enough distance between her endorsement and that of Sanders, who backed the former vice-president 15 days before in a surprise appearance on a webcast featuring the two.
