Stacey Abrams: 'I Don't Know Whether This Is the Moment for Me' [View all]

[Kind of Blue]

Rare is the politician who will say “I don’t know” about something and mean it, including her own future. That is one reason why I despise the question, “Are you running?” It generally wastes the time of journalists everywhere; candidates rarely say “yes,” even if they secretly intend to launch a campaign later on, with the proper pomp and circumstance.

I resisted asking Abrams that question, but she managed to answer it anyway. “I am thinking about it,” she voluntarily admitted, as she has before. When asked about being Joe Biden’s running mate, however, her answer was new.

“We talked about the presidency and what it means,” Abrams said of her recent lunch with Biden. “We talked about whether I was thinking about running. We talked about whether he was thinking about running. But we did not have that conversation. And everything else is pure speculation, made up by somebody else.”

I can understand why someone who had just endured what Abrams had wouldn’t want to immediately subject herself to a 2020 campaign. For that matter, why would she want to be president?

“The reason I want to be part of the conversation about running for president is that too many people dismiss the idea,” she said. “This is not to cast aspersions on anyone else, but with an identical set of skills and identical set of experiences, to be discounted because I don’t look the way we think you need to look, or I’m not from a space where we think I should be from, and that is the only determinant that differs between whether I am lifted up as a candidate or not. That’s wrong.

“Now, whether I run this time or run in the future,” Abrams continued, “I believe we need leaders who actually want to lead everyone. I believe we have to have leaders who care about foreign policy and domestic policy, but who care about the least of these, who care about poverty, who understand that climate change is real, that my body is mine, that gun safety does not diminish the Second Amendment, and that has to be someone willing to have that conversation in Montana and in Mississippi and in Michigan as well as on Manhattan Beach. You’ve got to be willing to have that conversation everywhere.

“And so I don’t know whether this is the moment for me, and that’s what I’m going to think about. But I think I am more than capable of leading a country that is contained of so many good people who want what’s right. I’m a good leader, I’m a good executive, I’ve been outside the U.S. a few times, and I’ve done a little bit of foreign policy. But most importantly, I’m smart enough to be in charge of this country.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/stacey-abrams-2020-813613/