Why Joe Biden Should Run With Elizabeth Warren

If Vice President Joe Biden really wants to set himself apart from the extensive competition – on both sides of the aisle – he should get into the presidential race with a running mate right from the start.

This move, which would be unprecedented in modern U.S. elections, would not just be more impressive than Biden’s rumored plan to pledge a one-term presidency. It would also make that proposal viable by offering an heir-apparent to continue the work he begins.

The Vice President should announce as he jumps in that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren will be his teammate through the entire campaign. She is the obvious – and indeed perhaps the only logical – choice for the other half of a ticket led by Biden.

Senator Warren is people-oriented and progressive – even more so than Biden – and she is at least nearly as folksy. She is not a professional politician. Unlike Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ leader in the House of Representatives, she is not part of a politically connected family.

Warren’s story

Warren is from a working-class background, with a father who was a janitor and who, after suffering a heart attack, suffered financial distress from mounting medical bills.

Plus, as the campaign unfurls, many more aspects of Warren’s story would come in handy.

She taught children with special needs at a public school in New Jersey and later was a stay-at-home mom before enrolling in law school. These are the kinds of biographical details that connect with Republican-leaning women.

On policy, she would help offset the few serious progressive concerns about Biden’s domestic record — in the arenas of credit card reform, student debt reform and aggressive policing.

It was her vision and persistence that led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which continues to champion the interests of average consumers.

Her main issue — ensuring fair play for and safeguarding the financial soundness of the American middle class — can easily transcend party boundaries, and thus has bipartisan potential with regard to the electorate.

And Warren’s inexperience in matters of foreign and security policy? Outweighed by two considerations: People ultimately vote for the President, not Vice President anyway. Biden has experience aplenty in those fields.

Moreover, 2016 will mark a decade and a half of war. In a country tired from that, voters may be ready to focus more exclusively on what their leaders can do at home.

The perfect team

Together, a Biden-Warren ticket can give the lower-middle class reason to believe in such a thing as the American Dream. Those voters know these two care about them and that they have fought – and will fight – for their material interests ferociously.

Finally, picking any other woman, say from a different region of the country or with a national security background, would make that selection likely look like a quota pick, which would alienate the same base still fearful of affirmative action.

Unless Wonder Woman appears, such a ticket would lose a lot of the blue-collar appeal Biden-Warren naturally has. In the absence of such a superhero, the team-up of these two is likely the only thing that could make a game-changing Biden candidacy – and one-term presidency – possible.

It may also be the only plausible path to replacing Hillary Clinton if her campaign falls apart.