Conrad Black explains at National Review Online why one New York Times columnist misses the mark in his latest proposal for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Tom Friedman, the amiable but compulsively mistaken columnist of the New York Times, has produced a proposal for Joe Biden to nominate in advance a unity cabinet, composed of an ideological range of people from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Mitt Romney. This argument, and the reasoning given for it, are so preposterous that a cordial reply seems called for. …
… Having thus established the necessity of his proposal, Friedman counseled Biden to recruit those who would “believe in science,” so they could deal with climate change, along with people who in the present crisis “took the science of this epidemic seriously” and would be open to extraordinary measures to help the disadvantaged, support the public sector, and ensure universal health care (though not, to be fair, with the Sanders–Warren–Ocasio-Cortez single-payer Leviathan straitjacket). This great act of unification is necessary to prevent “four more years of lying, dividing, and impugning experts.” How Friedman expects to build unity by smearing and defaming the “basket of deplorables” half of the country that has steadily supported Trump isn’t clear. …
… Friedman’s candidate for State is Mitt Romney, which is nonsense. … Friedman doubtless likes him for his vote to convict Trump in the impeachment farce, but representing the nomination of Romney to any office as a gesture of national unity is absurd. And there is no reason to believe that Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine would accept the posts Friedman has allocated to them. Joe Biden could not remotely convene such a group and lead it anywhere; an attempt to announce any such concept at the nominating convention would be seen as an effort to prop up an implausible candidate. …
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