‘With urgency, she accepted him, fascinated by the power, and for a moment, she wavered, wondering if she was prepared. In the next second, she knew she could never be,’ Stacey Abrams wrote under the pen name ‘Selena Montgomery’ in 2006.
Abrams intended that passage to describe a romantic encounter in her saucy book Secrets and Lies, but it could perhaps just as easily apply to her White House ambitions. As Democrats constantly float her name as a potential vice presidential pick for Joe Biden, Cockburn can’t help but think that, while Abrams may be ‘fascinated by the power’, she simply isn’t qualified for the job. Erotic fiction is arguably her real calling.
The former Georgia gubernatorial candidate has made no secret of the fact that she believes she could be president one day and told the women of The View last month that ‘of course’ she would accept an offer to be the Democratic 2020 vice presidential candidate.
‘It would be doing a disservice to every woman of color, every woman of ambition, every child who wants to think beyond their known space for me to say no or to pretend, “Oh, no, I don’t want it,”’ Abrams said. If that isn’t arrogance masquerading as humility, Cockburn doesn’t know what is.
But why would anyone choose Abrams to be their running mate? She has demonstrated zero ability to win a significant election, has very little political experience, and is unlikely to expand the Democratic base in a general election.
Abrams’s sole political experience consists of serving for 10 years in the Georgia General Assembly, during which her biggest win was stopping a piece of legislation that would have unintentionally led to a net tax increase on most Georgians. She has never won national political office and doesn’t have any executive experience. Despite all the hype around her, she lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election to Brian Kemp.
Cockburn suspects Abrams can’t be very popular outside of the elite media bubble given her accolades consist only of being the first black woman to run for the governor’s seat in Georgia, which, again, she did not win. She then insisted that she lost that race due to voter suppression. Her refusal to concede to her opponent seemed like sour grapes to most rational viewers, especially since the supposedly suppressed votes may not even have been enough to have won the race. But the Democratic media lapped up her complaints nonetheless. Soon, she was delivering the Democratic rebuttal to the State of the Union, launching a nonprofit dedicated to fighting voter suppression, and dreaming of becoming president. Failing upwards, indeed.
One of the few advantages Abrams could bring to the table as a running mate is her skin color. There is still a rabid base within the Democratic party that feeds on identity politics more aggressively than hemp and pitaya smoothies. But even this is hardly a reason for Joe Biden to call on Abrams, as he already performs incredibly well among black voters and is almost sure to get the vote of the identitarian left because they will do anything to ensure Trump does not win reelection.
An Abrams vice presidency might please the media, which is keen to create new stars out of thin air (hello, Mayor Pete), but could prove to be a major strategic mistake in the general election — which is what really matters. Still, expect to hear Abrams mentioned in almost all Democratic Veep talk in the coming weeks.
