From hate to hope
THE ISSUE: Joe Biden wins the presidency while Donald Trump refuses to concede. THE STAKES: The work of unifying a deeply divided country can’t start soon enough.
Four days of waiting finally gave America a winner in the 2020 presidential election. What more it gave us, we can only hope.
Even before he was declared the victor, Joe Biden talked of getting to work. That’s heartening. There will be much to be done when he and Kamala Harris, the first woman and person of color to be vice president, are sworn in Jan. 20.
A pandemic that is heading for a second wave, bigger than the first. An economy struggling to stay afloat, in which millions are out of work and businesses are failing. A sometimes bitter and even brutal national debate on systemic racism. And more big issues that have not been addressed, at least not constructively, by the White House in the last four years: Climate change. Clean energy. Health care.
None of those challenges is so great that they can’t be tackled. Not if the nation is united in the quest to eradicate a deadly virus. Not if it truly wants to help the millions of people financially harmed by it. Not if it’s determined to harness the world’s largest economy and its vast reservoir of innovation and intellect, and willing to join with the rest of humanity in addressing the common threat of global warming. Not if it
wants to design if not a perfect health care system then at least a better one that helps protect all Americans’ health and financial security, and consequently the nation’s.
It’s encouraging that Mr. Biden touched on those and other issues Friday night, as he has throughout a campaign that was more about a vision for a shared future than the us-vs-them tribalism of his opponent. It was not the first time that he declared that he would be president for all Americans whether they voted for him or not. Americans could believe him when he said, “The purpose of our politics, the work of the nation, isn’t to fan the flames of conflict, but to solve problems, to guarantee justice, to give everybody a fair shot, to improve the lives of our people. We may be opponents — but we are not enemies. We are Americans.”
Yet even as Mr. Biden talked of getting to work, Donald Trump talked of going to court. Even as Mr. Biden was stressing that “the purpose of our politics isn’t total, unrelenting, unending warfare,” Mr. Trump was girding for legal battles, insisting it was he who had won. He issued such a stream of disinformation that Twitter put warning labels over his false, incendiary posts.
What a waste. There is still some good he could yet do before his time in office is up roughly 11 weeks from now. But it’s probably a thin hope to imagine that Mr. Trump, after building his political career on lies, bigotry and division, would prefer productivity to pugilism, the quiet rewards of real accomplishment to cheers of crowds at rallies, the kinder, gentler work of unity to whipping fans into an Orwellian frenzy of “two minutes hate.”
As Mr. Trump said once about a pandemic that has claimed more than 236,000 American lives, “It is what it is,” and so it will be with the waning days of his presidency. But Americans can choose a better path, including Republicans in the Senate, where the balance of power is still uncertain and may not be resolved for several months. Will they rise above being the party of “no” as they were in the last Democratic administration of President Barack Obama, and work with a Biden administration for the good of the country?
We can hope. For the moment, just to have hope is a refreshing change.