J. Pharoah Doss: Reasons for running mates…Biden, Kaine and Harris

After President Barack Obama’s two terms, the next Democratic nominee for president wasn’t Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, but his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, whom Obama had defeated in the 2008 presidential primaries. According to 2008 public opinion surveys, the American people were so dissatisfied with the Republican Party, President George W. Bush’s alleged compassionate conservatism, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Republican presidential candidate was almost certain to lose the next election. That meant the winner of the 2008 Democratic primary would become the next president. 2008 public opinion polls also suggested that Americans wanted more than simply policy reforms. Americans believed that political leadership should reflect the diversity of the electorate and not be dominated by White males like in the previous Republican administration. The Democrats made certain that they did not squander a historic opportunity to demonstrate their diversity by electing the first woman or African American to the White House. During their campaigns, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama promised to make their administrations more diverse than the previous Republican administration, but when Obama became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, he did not prioritize diversity when he chose 65-year-old Senator Joe Biden as...