Craig Snyder writes:

Donald Trump’s current term as president ends at noon on January 20, 2021.

As strange as it may seem at this time of exclusive focus on our public health and economic emergencies, a vital national election is still coming.

I have been a Republican candidate for Congress, a GOP staffer in the Senate and a business partner of Roger Stone when he conceived of and managed Donald Trump‘s first campaign for President (seeking the nomination of the Reform Party, in 2000).

In spite of some of that, and because of some of it, in 2016 I became one of the earliest public “never Trumpers,” creating a SuperPAC, “Republicans for Her.“

Today, I stand ready, willing and able to do anything I can to help the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, win the upcoming election and replace our profoundly unfit chief executive.

Joe Biden is temperate, experienced, empathetic and profoundly decent. He has served our country more than well for decades, clearly embarking on this, his almost certainly last, campaign, out of duty, not vanity, out of a calling to do something good.

In recent days, however, as the rhythm and rhyme of this period of crisis have taken shape, I have come to think there may be an even wiser and more selfless way for the most honorable Joe Biden to serve.

At the Democratic National Convention, whether it happens conventionally or virtually, Vice President Biden could, and perhaps should, step aside, and ask his delegates to vote to nominate Governor Andrew Cuomo. This, despite the Governor’s declarations of non-candidacy.

As the epochal events through which we are all living — an epidemic likely to take a six figure count of American lives and put as high a percentage of Americans out of work as the Great Depression—continue to unfold, Governor Cuomo has already emerged as a singular voice.

He is showing capacities, intellectual, emotional and moral, and skills, managerial and as a communicator, which seem to me to make him the best standard bearer for his party in this election and a potential next president of great promise for our country, as it tries to heal and rebound from all it will by then have suffered.

The point here isn’t a comparison between the qualifications or the qualities of Biden and Cuomo, but rather a recognition that the current crisis has been a major blow to the Biden campaign because the reality of the situation has propelled the Governor into the position of being the major contrast to Trump being heard at a national level.

The presidential debates are in effect already occurring daily between the two of them. [Continue reading…]