"Why Biden Is The Change Candidate," Nicholas Kristof

Joe Biden thanking supporters on Super Tuesday.Josh Haner/The New York Times

"Why Biden Is The Change Candidate"

By Nicholas Kristof Opinion Columnist

Like many voters, I don’t love Joe Biden. He’s plodding, uncharismatic and lacks grand plans for change. But if I don’t love him, I do like him. He’s one of the most decent people in politics, even quietly giving out his cellphone number to people who have suffered great loss and telling them to call him. Most of all, I think he is now the best chance to oust President Trump and help elect a Democratic Senate.

Bernie Sanders is authentic and does have grand plans, and I’m closer to some of Sanders’s positions than Biden’s. I think a wealth tax is a good idea, although there are genuine doubts about its constitutionality. But my column today notes that Sanders has passed very little legislation in the Senate: just seven bills, most of them insignificant such as name changes of post offices. For the Democrats to achieve change, they need to hold the House and win the Senate, and I think that is much more likely with Biden at the top of the ticket.

I write this with the caveat that electability is a great mystery, one that almost everybody got wrong in 2016. It sometimes seems ennobling to shout out slogans and defy political gravity. That led progressives to try to run liberal candidates in conservative districts in 2018, but they lost. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi recruited moderate candidates to run in swing districts and they did exceedingly well, flipping the House.

So here’s my argument for Biden as the change candidate. If Elizabeth Warren or anyone else had a good chance of beating Trump and helping elect a Democratic Senate, I’d feel differently. But like a lot of people my age, I’m still traumatized by McGovern’s loss to Nixon in 1972 — and I want a winner. Here’s my column!

Early Childhood Programs

One of the election results you probably haven’t heard of: Alameda County, Calif. appears to have passed a measure calling for a one-half percent sales tax increase to fund comprehensive early child care. This shouldn’t be done on a local level but on a national level, but the willingness of voters to raise their taxes suggests how important it is to many families.

I’m hugely in favor of such measures for two reasons: High quality child care enormously benefits young children, especially those coming from troubled homes; and makes it much easier for parents, especially single moms, to hold jobs. It is ridiculous that in America we have a highly inefficient system of expensive nannies for wealthy parents and crowded day care with children parked in front of televisions for low-income parents. The military has a day care program that should be a model for the entire country, and Alameda County is showing us that voters care about establishing such programs. I hope that the next president will push for such a national initiative.