On Thursday, August 21st, 2008, Joe Biden sat in a dentist’s office while his wife had a root canal, and Barack Obama was choosing his running mate. For 2 months Obama had kept Hillary Clinton on his list, though his campaign manager and chief strategist wanted her off it. She had the smarts, discipline, and steadfastness he wanted, he told them, but Bill Clinton was a complication. If he picked her, he said, there would be more than 2 of us in the relationship. By December the former president had agreed to 9 rules on his foundation’s money so his wife could run the State Department.

He had 2 choices. Call Biden at the dentist’s office, or offer the job to Clinton. He called Biden, who said yes. Clinton used a private email server as secretary of state, and the FBI director wrote Congress about it 11 days before she lost Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Biden took the oath as the 46th president in January of 2021.

What if he’d offered it to Clinton?

This week we hit CTRL+Z on the call to the dentist’s office, and follow the ripple to today: Bill Clinton holding the Bible while Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg swears in his wife as vice president, Secretary of State John Kerry receiving the coffins from Benghazi, a woman’s victory speech under the glass ceiling of the Javits Center, Donald Trump convicted by a Manhattan jury as his own TV channel covers the trial, and children taking class in tents on high school football fields in the fall of 2020. In 2026 Marco Rubio is the 46th president, Joe Biden is retired in Wilmington, and every public school built with federal money has a classroom outside, because one Thursday in August the call went to the Clintons’ house in Chappaqua.