Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will consider women for vice president if she is the Democratic nominee, The Boston Globe reported Thursday.
Though the front runner’s focus is on winning the nomination, Clinton is searching for “the best person to make the case to the American people,” campaign chairman John Podesta said. “We’ll start with a broad list and then begin to narrow it. But there is no question that there will be women on that list.”
Several male names have been floated as Clinton’s vice presidential pick, including Housing Secretary Julian Castro and Sen. Tim Kaine from Virginia. But the most prominent potential female pick is Elizabeth Warren, the junior senator from Massachusetts who has become a leading progressive voice in the Democratic Party since she took office in 2013. A former Harvard professor, Warren has spoken out extensively on regulating Wall Street and bankruptcy reform, endearing her to many of the populist voters who have flocked to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
Warren, who resisted calls to run for president herself during the 2016 cycle, has stayed quiet on the Democratic presidential race. She has repeatedly declined to endorse either candidate, and dodged endorsing either when she appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” last month.
Sanders has posed a stronger-than-expected challenge to Clinton’s bid for the nomination, winning 16 of 35 states in the ongoing primary contests.
A Warren spokeswoman declined to comment to the Globe on the possibility of Warren’s selection, but the two have a history.
When Clinton was first lady, Warren advised her on a bankruptcy reform bill sitting before Congress. According to Warren in a 2004 television interview, Clinton heeded Warren’s arguments about how the bill could hurt women and children, and helped convince her husband to veto the bill in 2000.
But after Clinton became a senator from New York the next year, her position changed: she voted for another bankruptcy reform bill.
“As Sen. Clinton, the pressures are very different,” Warren recounted in 2004. “She has taken money from the [financial] groups and, more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency.