Biden Did What He Had to Do

In what’s likely be his final nomination debate, former Vice President Joe Biden started strong and ended strong when he talked about the coronavirus pandemic. And he did well enough in the rest of the two-hour event Sunday night with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Biden had given a solid speech on Thursday laying out a plan for how the government should be responding to the spread of Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus — for example, he’s urging use of the military to rapidly increase medical capacity — and he seemed ready to implement that plan when he talked about it in the opening segments of the debate. It wasn’t just the specifics. His process-based answers, which often compared what the Barack Obama administration had done during emergencies with what President Donald Trump has been doing, may not have been particularly exciting to listen to, but the truth is that it’s more important for a president to understand how to get things done quickly when necessary than to have ready a specific plan for a current crisis, given that future situations aren’t easy to predict.1 The contrast between Biden and Sanders, who reads every situation as an endorsement for his broad policy preferences, played well for Biden. More importantly, the contrast between both candidates and their thoughtful, coherent and reality-based discussion of the pandemic with the incoherent misinformation from Trump couldn’t have been stronger.