Like some other liberal Democrats who resisted warnings in July that President Biden should end his re-election bid, I pushed back against the "It's time to go, Joe" messages that were coming from news stories and commentaries. If Biden could make it through re-election in November, I thought, he wouldn’t need to barnstorm the country again; he could continue working from the Oval Office to advance the experienced, wise decision-making that he’d delivered since 2021 (with a notable exception in the Middle East).

Even when he stepped down and endorsed Kamala Harris to succeed him, I wondered if his vice president was seasoned and wise enough to continue his best work. Brilliant campaigning isn’t the same as governing, and a disturbingly large swath of the electorate that’s racially obtuse and/or misogynous won’t vote for her, even though some of its members did vote for an African-American male in 2008 in the wake of the Bush administration’s Iraq War fiasco, emergency-management failures in Hurricane Katrina, and the financial meltdown of 2008 — the latter in complicity with neoliberal Democrats who thought that breaking glass ceilings excuses their breaking up the Glass-Steagall law of 1933, whose repeal Bill Clinton signed in 1999, thereby enabling the plunge into wild financing that helped bring on the meltdown.

Would a President Harris really continue Joe Biden’s efforts to build back better? Her initiatives as vice president have been muted, even mooted. Even now, we need to be sure of her professed commitment to strengthen the legal and economic foundations of working- and middle-class security and comity.

Fortunately, though, one of Harris' first truly independent, consequential decisions about governing – making Minnesota Gov.........

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