Why the USA Today Endorsement of Joe Biden is a Big Deal.
One of the things I loved the most about USA Today was the fierce independence of its editorial board. Throughout its history, including the years I served it as President and Publisher, USA Today never endorsed a political candidate.
Until today:
The logic for the long-standing “no endorsement” policy was much simpler than most people realized. In effect, we felt our role was to help people come to the best decision on which candidate to vote for based on their own unique circumstances. So we felt our job was to inform those decisions. It was quite possible, we believed, that the best president for a school teacher in Kansas might be different than the best president for a banker in New York City.
This reflected the way we felt about our role as a newspaper. We were, and are, America’s newspaper. And we enjoy a unique status all around the country. At a time when media coverage is polarized, and our divisions seem to impact everything we do, including deciding what media we consume, USA Today maintains a remarkable acceptance as an unbiased source of news and information, maintaining a reasonable level of trust by people across the spectrum.
So it would not be a surprise if USA Today continued its long held tradition of avoiding an endorsement of a presidential candidate. It had come close to breaking that tradition four years ago, but instead wrote an editorial that urged the public NOT to vote for Donald Trump, for a number of reasons. But it did not go so far as to tell the readers who they should vote for.
Now that Trump has been our president for four years, and the evidence of his danger to the future of the country is so much more obvious, USA Today has chosen today as the day to end it’s 38-year-old tradition and asked all of its readers to vote for Joe Biden.
It’s a sign that there are serious reasons for BOTH voting Donald Trump out of office AND voting Joe Biden into office. At the top of the list is the Coronavirus outbreak that has cost our nation so much, not the least of which has been nearly 220,000 lives (so far).
Had it not been for the pandemic that has scorched our country for the past 8 months, Donald Trump might at this moment still be sailing to the easy re-election he has worked so hard for. In fact, Donald Trump has spent so much time running for re-election since he was elected the first time, he has barely spent any time actually doing the job of a president. He has made no effort to represent the more than half the country that voted against him, in fact he has devoted his presidency to both benefiting those who voted for him, and punishing those who voted against him. It’s exactly what you would expect from someone who lives a totally life based entirely on transactions, and valued entirely for how well he closes them. And until now, solidifying his base might have provided enough support to keep him in office.
But the pandemic revealed his most serious shortcoming. While he was succeeding in playing the role of a President to his base, he was shockingly unable to actually be the president of this country. Unlike any other political issue, the pandemic could not be finessed or tricked. When it became obvious that he was not at all equipped in leading the country through the pandemic, he also could not find a way to convince many of his followers, that those people dying around them would have died no matter what he did.
In fact, what is now happening IS his fault, even though he has never assumed responsibility for anything that doesn’t further his own image. The fault lies not it what he did, but what he could not do. Lead.
So unlike four years ago when both candidates had significantly high negative scores, this time around the Democratic candidate actually seems uniquely qualified to start a healing process. This nation simply must return civility and to embracing the kind of compassion and empathy that help establish the United States as a world leader that could make a positive difference.
It’s not just a matter of pulling the plug on the partisan divisiveness that Trump has given us, it’s understanding what kind of effort it will take to rebuild both within our country — which has not been as close to civil war since the one we went through in the 1860’s — and around the world where other forces are marshalling the strength to take our place. It may be that Joe Biden has a background and temperament uniquely qualified to lead that process.
The same effort will be needed to repair our relationships around the world, where we have spit on our allies and praised autocrats and dictators who understood how they could curry the favor of our president — to their own benefit — by feeding his ego, and his pockets.
It will be a long road back. But this has to be the first step.
Well done USA Today, and thank you to editor Nicole Carroll, Publisher Maribel Perez Wadsworth, and most of all, Editorial Page Editor Bill Sternberg
