WaPo : Why Joe Biden is the antidote to this virus [View all]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/13/why-joe-biden-is-antidote-this-virus/

Joe Biden isn’t inspiring. He fluttered some hearts when he first ran in 1987, but he is far less inspirational now, at 77, than he was in his prime. That’s part of the reason, despite his far-above-the-rest résumé, that Biden’s candidacy stumbled before it succeeded. Democrats were looking for something new and improved before they recognized it was time to settle for Biden.

This is all fine — better than fine, actually. If 1964 was a time for choosing, as Ronald Reagan put it when he went on TV to argue for Barry Goldwater, 2020 is a time for settling, in the multiple senses of that word. It is a time for settling on a candidate whom a broad majority of Democrats, and Americans, can agree. It’s a time for settling the country down, after three-plus years of ugliness and the divisiveness that both preceded and created the Trump phenomenon. It is a time for settling for Biden.

Biden is candidate as comfort food, calming and familiar. After flirtations with the new (Pete Buttigieg), the provocative (Bernie Sanders) and the planner (Elizabeth Warren), Biden is, it turns out, the one we’ve been waiting for. He is not the candidate, and would not be the president, of hope and change; he is the avatar of normalcy.

This was, even before the coronavirus, Biden’s fundamental argument: that his would be a restoration presidency — of American values, of America’s place in the world. And, perhaps even more, of a president who does not whip through three White House chiefs of staff and three national security advisers (Trump is on his fourth, in both cases); who does not tweet and attack incessantly; who can be counted on, if not for the “bold, persistent experimentation” of an FDR, then at least for capable governance. Biden’s campaign this summer and fall will not be a battle for adopting Medicare-for-all. It will be, as he said in announcing his candidacy, a “battle for the soul of this nation,” a rejection of an administration he described as “an aberrant moment in time.”

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