Sturdevant: How a good No. 2 prepares to be No. 1

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I would have been eager to speak with former Lt. Gov. Marlene Johnson last week even if she wasn’t touting the release of her new book.

That book is “Rise to the Challenge: A Memoir of Politics, Leadership, and Love,” out this month at University of Minnesota Press. More about that in the endnote.

For now, here’s a refresher on Marlene Johnson: She was Minnesota’s first female lieutenant governor, elected in 1982 alongside DFL Gov. Rudy Perpich, who himself had been lieutenant governor a decade earlier.

If you detect a parallel to Kamala Harris, the nation’s first female vice president who served a president who himself had been vice president — well, so do I.

The parallel breaks in 1990. Unlike President Joe Biden this year, Perpich did not decide in 1990 to abandon his re-election bid (though he should have). Perpich did not position Johnson to succeed him (though he had once indicated to her that he would do just that). Perpich treated Johnson as a close adviser and governor-in-training during their first term together, but he pulled away from her during their second — to his detriment, I’d say.

After an unsuccessful bid for the St. Paul mayor’s office in 1993, Johnson left Minnesota politics and moved to Washington, D.C., becoming CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators. She held that post for nearly 20 years, retiring in 2017.

Despite that divergence in their stories, Johnson knows more than a little about the No. 2 role Harris has played in the White House in the past four years, and about how many Americans perceive her now.

“The job of the vice president is not to be in our faces every day. It’s to be prepared to be president,” Johnson said. Watching Harris campaign so far, Johnson said, “I think the evidence is clear: She did that job very well.”

A good vice president — like a good lieutenant governor — is engaged every day in learning the top job. She’s attending meetings, joining briefings, and representing the president to audiences at home and abroad. She’s becoming acquainted with other leaders and participating in political strategy sessions.

That work largely happens out of the public’s view, which can leave a false impression of inactivity or ineffectiveness with some observers, Johnson noted.

“It’s not the job of that position to be front and center with the press,” she said. “For many reasons, that’s appropriate. But it can be hard for people to understand.”

An indication of how well Harris mastered the lessons she learned as vice president has been the ease with which the Biden/Harris campaign morphed into the Harris/Walz campaign after Biden stepped aside on July 21, Johnson said. The change at the top provoked no staffing or policy upheavals.

“That’s because she was very involved in establishing the campaign structure for this year,” Johnson said. “There was clearly mutual trust with the team they had in place.”

Johnson finds it notable that the Democratic presidential campaign is not making much noise about the opportunity Harris affords the nation to elect its first female president. Johnson was the subject of plenty of “first woman” stories in 1982, and Harris was the subject of a fair share of them in 2020 when running for vice president.

This year’s Harris campaign is generating comparatively few such stories — and that’s a good thing, Johnson said. It’s a sign that the campaign believes Americans are increasingly accustomed to seeing women in leadership roles.

One reason for that change may be the shifting generational composition of the American electorate. Since Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, upwards of 40 million Generation Z Americans (born after 1997) have become eligible to vote. Meanwhile, the Grim Reaper has been dispatching us baby boomers at a pace of about 2.6 million per year.

“Those new voters have grown up in a very different world than we did with regard to women’s roles,” Johnson observed. “Family life today is different. The role of dads is different. Young people see women in leadership in virtually every aspect of life. It’s a really important development.”

She predicted that the “first woman” stories will be back if Harris wins the presidency on Nov. 5, but that they will subside quickly — and that too will be a good sign for women.

That sign can’t come soon enough for those of us who have waited a lifetime for an affirmative answer to the old question, “Is America ready for a woman president?”

Lori Sturdevant is a retired Star Tribune editorial writer. She and Marlene Johnson will discuss Johnson’s book at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 301 S. 19th Av., Minneapolis, at 7 p.m. on Sept. 30. A preview is available at z.umn.edu/ep86.