Perhaps I am more cautious at the age of seventy-one than I would have been at thirty-five, but timing is everything in politics as it is in life. I remember how passionately I believed in the peace and social reform messages of George McGovern in 1972 and then Jimmy Carter in 1980, and how resoundingly they were defeated, as the conservative revolution changed this country.  I was pretty sure then that we were going to hell in a hand basket. We didn’t actually get there.

So, while I am sympathetic to the goals of the Sanders revolution, I do not think its time has come.  Sanders associates with anger, indignation and take-it-or-leave-it politics, an understandable, but ill-timed gesture with the middle finger to those who have held sway in Washington for too long. For all his ardent labors for the downtrodden, Bernie Sanders has very little legislation to show for his decades of service in Congress.  He is not a team player.

Bernie Sanders does not condone reconciliation.  There are millions of voters who want nothing more than to soften the hard lines that now divide us and to find some common ground that we can occupy together. The take-no-prisoners style of politics has served its term in Washington for four years, and it has been found wanting. This is a campaign for reconciliation.

No one personifies reconciliation better than the lackluster, but personable Joe Biden. When he was Vice-President he once said, “Never once have I questioned another man’s or woman’s motive.”

I thought at the time, What? Aren’t we judged by our motives? Isn’t that how you sort out one politician from another?

In a speech at Yale in 2015, Biden argued for the high road in politics. He told a homely story of how he learned that lesson:

I said, that guy, [Jesse] Helms, he has no social redeeming value.  He doesn’t care — I really mean it — I was angry. He doesn’t care about people in need. He has a disregard for the disabled. Majority Leader Mansfield then proceeded to tell me that three years earlier, Jesse and Dot Helms, sitting in their living room in early December before Christmas, reading an ad in the Raleigh Observer, the picture of a young man, 14-years-old with braces on his legs up to both hips, saying, all I want is someone to love me and adopt me. He looked at me and he said, and they adopted him, Joe. 

I felt like a fool. He then went on to say, Joe, it’s always appropriate to question another man’s judgment, but never appropriate to question his motives because you simply don’t know his motives …   From that moment on, I tried to look past the caricatures of my colleagues and try to see the whole person. Never once have I questioned another man’s or woman’s motive.  http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/8-gems-joe-bidens-speech-yale-university

Most Democrats will remember Jesse Helms the same way as Biden did, a ruthless defender of segregation and states’ rights. But you did not have to adopt his politics to respect his character or to “give the devil his due,” as we say. Biden has shown this regard for his opponents for most of his career. He taught me a lesson in separating politics from human dignity.

Primary politics does not operate this way. If you want evidence, just replay the last two Democratic debates, which resembled a tank of piranhas more than an emerging school of fish. There has been no search for a consensus or a way to resolve the disunity of the party. A few moderates have pleaded for a unified voice to defeat Donald Trump, but the angry voices prevail in our memories. Hence the ascendancy of Bernie Sanders.

But the national election calls for a different tone. The voters in the middle are longing for fairness and decency. They are not primed for revolution. They are longing for constructive compromise.  They are the voters who will decide this election, the voters which the Democratic Party must now address.

For all his ardent and faithful labors for the under classes of society, Bernie Sanders is not the candidate for this job. He is spirited, but indignant, a divisive figure as always. He will never engage the middle. He wants to convince them they are his constituents and drag them into his revolution.

But the times call for reconciliation, not revolution. You don’t yank a battered and bruised electorate onto your platform. You give them a ramp toward unity. You model the kind of compromise that will get work done in Congress, that will bring change by consensus. We have missed that for the last decade, probably since the passage of the Affordable Healthcare Act, which has taken the most partisan name of “Obamacare.” It was a needed, but railroaded partisan legislation.

Joe Biden is the soul of reconciliation, and thus the man for the time. It would be visionary to nominate a woman or a gay man, but they could not bring the whole of America together as Joe Biden would. After decades of political struggle, Joe Biden’s time has come. And Democrats need to recognize it now, before the chaos of Convention politics. The Primary vote is for the soul of the nation, not the pride of the Party. Democrats should vote for reconciliation, not revolution.