News

Hillary Clinton endorses Biden in show of party unity

Responded Biden: „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 reelection 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 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 just the third time in U.S. history that a major party’s vice presidential candidate is not a man.

The event was billed by the Biden campaign as a discussion of women’s issues during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Out of this terrible tragedy of the pandemic and the loss of life and loss of income and everything else that we’re suffering through, this is a moment of reckoning,” Clinton said.

Biden’s running mate will likely have an immediate impact as he faces accusations, which he denies, of sexually assaulting a former staffer, Tara Reade, in the early 1990s. A female running mate could help defuse tensions over the allegations, although progressives fret it’s 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 Sen. 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 color.

Biden has already avoided one Clinton misstep: He has made early peace with his former primary opponent, Sen. 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.

In between Sanders and Clinton, former President Barack Obama officially endorsed his former wingman, followed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, also a former 2020 rival.

Source: politico.com
See more here: news365.stream

loading...