Next, we’ll need a national unity cabinet under Biden

In the last Democratic debate, Joe Biden declared that he’d choose a woman as his running mate. That felt right. But times have changed. Biden needs to go much further: At the Democratic convention he also needs to name 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.

There are going to be 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’s a vaccine. If handled on a partisan basis, those issues will rip our country apart.

In short, if this isn’t the time to drop the hyper-partisanship that’s made it nearly impossible for us to do anything big for two decades, then when?

Americans aren’t focused on this now — but they will be. And when they are, Biden needs to show he’ll be a majority president, a unity president, based on shared values for rebuilding America.

Biden should enlist people ready to embrace these values:

1. They must believe in science — around the coronavirus and around climate change, the next train coming at us.

2. If they were in power during this crisis, they must have taken the science of this epidemic seriously from the start and cared for those under them.

3. They must be open to taking extraordinary measures to help the poor, the unemployed and the bankrupted recover.

4. They must believe America thrives when there’s a healthy balance between the public and private sectors.

5. They must 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’ campaign).

Secretary of national infrastructure rebuild, a new Cabinet post, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon; commerce secretary, former American Express CEO Ken Chenault; OMB 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); EPA administrator, Al Gore.

A fantasy, you say? No, no. Fantasy is thinking we’ll be OK, postCOVID-19, with toxic politics as usual or, God forbid, four more years of Trump’s lying and dividing.

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.