In his nominating acceptance speech on Thursday night, Joe Biden was wise to cast the election as a choice between someone who can get control of the COVID-19 viral outbreak and someone who obviously cannot. Of course, we have no proof that a Biden administration can return our lives to something approaching normal, but we already know that Trump is prolonging and exacerbating our misery. Most of this argument has already been made for the American people, so it’s not particularly heavy lifting to make it work politically.

Biden emphasized, correctly, that we have to control COVID-19 before we can get people fully back to work, but we’re going to need to do more. We’re going to need a lot of big infrastructure projects and investments in the green economy. The government is going to have create work, whether directly or indirectly, to help compensate for all the carnage to the job market. This was done during the Great Depression, and we need a 21st-Century version to deal with our current situation.

Biden’s main initial focus with therefore be the virus and employment, and this is precisely what the American people want. If they accept the linkage between the two, then any residual advantage Trump may have on the economy will vanish. It’s not that common for the politics to line up so neatly with what needs to be done and what people desperately want. As schools fail to reopen, or reopen only to quickly close, the people’s sense of disruption and discomfort is only going to rise. Biden has the message for the moment.

As a side note, there have been a couple of problems that have cropped up with the Progress Pond site due to updates to WordPress and certain plug-ins that didn’t integrate properly with the site’s architecture. Most of this is being experienced on the backend and impacts the people who are creating content for the site. But it has also made it so some people cannot comment or post videos in their comments. I’ve already conducted three interviews with programmers and it appears that fixing all of this is probably going to cost me more than $2,000, and perhaps substantially more.

I try not to nag people about getting subscriptions or making donations, but I could really use some help due to this unexpected expense. Unlike Steve Bannon, you can trust me to use the money to fix the problems and otherwise improve the site.

The subscriptions are super cheap and come with all the content you won’t see at Washington Monthly. My subscribers make it possible for me to continue to do what I do, and that’s especially true when unexpected things crop up that add substantial costs to running this site. So, please consider lending me a hand here, and I’ll do my best to make it worth your while. Thank you.