Why Biden May Be the Riskiest Choice of Them All

By Maria Behan — SPOTLIGHT

People of a certain hand-wringing persuasion will cluck their tongues no matter how I phrase this. And I’ll admit it: I’m trolling them with the title of this column. But let me try to forestall a bit of the clucking by saying this at the outset: Of course I’d vote for Joe Biden in a match up with Donald Trump.

I mean, if you get to weigh in on whether the monster bearing down on your city is Godzilla or Mothra, you go with Mothra, right? Your preference might be that no monsters were looming over the horizon at all, but if that’s how it’s got to be, you definitely know which one to pick.

My thinking is that at this stage in Trump’s presidency, everyone who’s paying even the slightest bit of attention knows what Trump stands for: attacks on minorities, women, the environment, democracy, science, truth, and the notion of America as a place of refuge. For his small but stubborn base, those attacks are a positive, a way to stick a thumb in the eye of the elites that sneer at them, and the minorities they fear are replacing them. For the rest of the country, Trump’s attacks on American norms are an outrage: an existential threat to the Constitution, humanity, and the planet itself.

Since there are more in the second camp than the first, I’m hopeful that just…