In the last Democratic debate, Joe Biden declared that he would nominate a woman as his vice-presidential running mate. That felt right at the time. But times have changed. Biden needs to go much, much further: At the Democratic convention he needs to name not just his vice president, but his entire cabinet. And it needs to be a totally different kind of cabinet — a national unity cabinet — from Democrats on the Bernie Sanders left to Republicans on the Mitt Romney right. Why?
Because while most people are playing nice right now managing this virus, the wreckage, pain and anger it will leave behind will require megadoses of solidarity and healing from the top.
And even if we get to the other side of this crisis by January, there are going to be a set of wrenching debates around who got bailed out and who didn’t and around how much civil liberty we should sacrifice to track and quarantine Covid-19 carriers until there is a vaccine. If handled on a partisan basis, those issues will rip our country apart.
In short, if this isn’t the time to leave behind the hyperpartisanship that has made it nearly impossible for us to do anything big and hard for two decades, then when?
Considering all the people who have come together in this crisis to tend to neighbors, contribute to hospitals, share scarce resources and learn from one another how to combat Covid-19, would it be asking too much for our political system to mirror the best in us rather than to continue to exacerbate the worst? Americans today deserve the government they need more than ever. It has literally become a matter of life and death.
Biden, because he doesn’t run anything right now, has had a hard time demonstrating leadership. The one giant contrast that he could draw with President Trump, though, is the approach he would take to governing.
Americans are not focused on this now — but they will be. And when they are, Biden needs to show that he isn’t running to be president of the 48 percent (or less), as Trump is; he’s not trying to suppress the vote, as Trump is; he’s not running to squeak by in the Electoral College, as Trump is. He needs to show he’s running to be a majority president, a unity president — but not just unity for unity’s sake, but unity of purpose based on a set of shared values for rebuilding America.
Biden should enlist people ready to embrace these values:
1) They have to believe in science — and not just around the coronavirus but around climate change, which is the next train coming at us.
2) If they were in power during this crisis, they have to have led their city, state or business in a way that took the science of this epidemic seriously from the start and cared for those under them.
3) They have to be open to taking extraordinary measures to help the poor, the unemployed and the bankrupted get back on their feet.
4) They have to believe that America thrives when there is a healthy balance between the public and private sectors, so anyone subscribing to the old idiot mantra of the G.O.P. thought policeman Grover Norquist — “my goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” — is not welcome.
5) They have to want to extend health care to every American, for starters by strengthening Obamacare and adding a public option.
With those criteria, Biden could name his team of rivals. (I proposed an earlier version of this when the race for the nomination looked deadlocked, but the world has completely changed since.) My recommendations:
For vice president, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala or Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island; for Treasury secretary, Mike Bloomberg; health and human services secretary, Bill Gates; secretary of oversight for the trillions of dollars in emergency coronavirus spending, to make sure it’s done fairly and productively, Elizabeth Warren.
Attorney general, Merrick Garland; homeland security secretary, Andrew Cuomo; secretary of state, Mitt Romney; defense secretary, Michèle Flournoy; labor secretary, Ro Khanna (who co-chaired Sanders’s campaign).
Secretary of national infrastructure rebuild, a new cabinet post, Walmart C.E.O. Doug McMillon; commerce secretary, former American Express C.E.O. Ken Chenault; O.M.B. director, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio; education secretary, Laurene Powell Jobs; U.N. ambassador, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
HUD secretary, Ford Foundation chief Darren Walker; Interior secretary, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico; energy secretary, Andy Karsner (a green Republican who led renewable energy for George W. Bush); E.P.A. administrator, Al Gore.
A fantasy, you say? No, no. I’ll give you fantasy. Fantasy is thinking we’ll be OK, post-Covid-19, with toxic politics as usual or, God forbid, four more years of Trump’s lying, dividing and impugning experts.
Can you imagine the fights that will break out, as this crisis abates, over whose company, restaurant, store, nonprofit or local government was saved by Washington’s trillions of dollars in rescue packages and whose went under? The societal stress is going to be enormous as people fully absorb their lost savings, businesses and jobs, while defaults mount and worker rehiring happens much slower than the layoffs did.
And that will happen in parallel with a debate about civil liberties. Just as every American after 9/11 wanted to know that the person in the next seat on an airplane was not carrying a bomb, until there is a vaccine everyone will want to know that the next passenger is not carrying Covid-19.
And that will require highly intrusive testing and digital tracking. As The Economist reported last month: Both China and South Korea “are using big data and social media to trace infections, alert people to hot spots and round up contacts. South Korea changed the law to allow the state to gain access to medical records and share them without a warrant.”
A U.S. national unity government with a strong foundation of expertise will be much better able to navigate these issues. As Gautam Mukunda, author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter,” pointed out to me, only three previous presidents have been dropped into a crisis in this way: Abraham Lincoln in 1861, Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and Barack Obama in 2009.
“All three saw that they needed a cabinet made of the very best people in the United States,” explained Mukunda. “Lincoln assembled his legendary ‘Team of Rivals,’ which eventually expanded to include Edwin Stanton as secretary of war, even though Stanton was a Democrat who had served as his predecessor’s attorney general. Roosevelt made Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet secretary, his secretary of labor because he thought she was the best person to lead the fight to create Social Security. Obama made Chuck Hagel, a Republican, his defense secretary.”
Such a national unity government might pay another dividend: fracture the Trump/McConnell/evangelical/Limbaugh/Fox/G.O.P. — a warped coalition dedicated to nothing but its own power and cutting taxes on the rich. Our country needs a healthy conservative party. Trump’s G.O.P. is not healthy.
If Biden seizes the moment to produce both a national unity government and a government that radically innovates — in ways we have not done for so many years — we might actually come out of this crisis stronger.
“Roosevelt,” noted Mukunda, “proclaimed that ‘the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. … If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something,’ and Roosevelt fulfilled that demand with the New Deal. Lincoln didn’t just win the Civil War, he proclaimed that ‘as our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew,’ and he fulfilled that promise through the Homestead Act and the creation of land grant colleges.”
That used to be us …
It has to be again. During the 2008 banking crisis, Warren Buffett said: “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” So it is with pandemics. You find out which countries have taken governance seriously and which didn’t. You find out which companies are living on credit and which have strong balance sheets. You find out who has a health care system that can manage a once-in-a-century crisis and who doesn’t. You find out which countries, cities and communities have a high degree of social trust and can pull together and which can’t. You find out who respects Mother Nature and who’s dumb enough to challenge her to a duel.
Well, by those indexes, with our bathing suit gone, we are not even remotely impressive. We are not who we think we are.
If we fail to use this crisis to get healthy again — as a people and a government — it will not only be remembered for the vast death and destruction it wrought, but it will be remembered as the moment America ceded its global leadership to China.
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