One way I'm hoping to not spend the next year obsessing about the election is to come fully to realizations like the following. Friends keep asking me who I'm going to support for President. My answer — until such time as I come up with a better one and I doubt I will — is the person who's least like Donald Trump. If Trump's the Republican nominee then it would, by definition, not be him. It will be the person who can beat him.
At this moment, that would seem to be Joe Biden and I'm fine with that. I think others — Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, in that order of slight preference — might make better presidents but that's subject to change and of course there's plenty of time and there'll be plenty of reasons for it to change.
There are two considerations here and I don't like that I have to put "Who has the best chance of beating Trump?" ahead of "Who'd make the best president?" But this is a unique situation. Trump is so bad and he'll only get worse once he never has to stand for office again and takes his re-election as an absolute American endorsement of every single thing he's said and done. He may even say he has a mandate to fan the flames of racism.
I can't recall a time since I first registered to vote when I was so sure who I was going to vote against. When it was G.H.W. Bush versus Dukakis, I didn't decide until the day before I went to the polls. But this time's different and I have the feeling everyone who'll wind up voting for Trump already knows that, too. Can you imagine the difference between any two Democrats mattering to someone wearing a red MAGA hat? Someone chanting "Lock her up!" or "Send them back!" just because they don't like someone's politics and/or ethnicity?
So I hereby do not care which Democratic nominee would make the better Chief Exec as long as they become Chief Exec. Any one of them would be a whole lot better than what we have now.
This will save me endless hours of debating the candidates with myself and others…and we'll probably wind up with the exact same names on the ballot so I can vote for the Democrat. You might want to try it.