The Atlantic in rare endorsement urges voting for Biden: ‘Vote for the decent man’

The Atlantic endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden Thursday in only its fourth ever presidential endorsement.

The magazine previously endorsed Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon B. Johnson and Hillary Clinton, but editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that the magazine considered the latter two a referendum on the fitness of their respective opponents.

Goldberg wrote that the same held true for the publication’s endorsement of Biden.

“Biden is a man of experience, maturity, and obvious humanity, but had the Republican Party put forward a credible candidate for president, we would have felt no compulsion to state a preference,” he wrote. “Donald Trump, however, is a clear and continuing danger to the United States, and it does not seem likely that our country would be able to emerge whole from four more years of his misrule.”

The editorial blasts the president as “the worst president this country has seen since Andrew Johnson, or perhaps James Buchanan, or perhaps ever.” It specifically excoriates the president on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, race relations and environmental issues, among others.

Goldberg cites the case of Air Force Major Harold Hering, who in 1973 asked an instructor “How can I know that an order I receive to launch [nuclear] missiles came from a sane president?”

“When contemplating their ballots, Americans should ask which candidate in a presidential contest is better equipped to guide the United States through a national-security crisis without triggering a nuclear exchange, and which candidate is better equipped to interpret—within five or seven minutes—the ambiguous, complicated, and contradictory signals that could suggest an imminent nuclear attack,” Goldberg wrote.

“Two men are running for president. One is a terrible man; the other is a decent man. Vote for the decent man,” it concludes.

The endorsement is Biden’s latest from several publications that have seldom or never endorsed presidential candidates before. Scientific American and the scientific journal Nature also endorsed the former vice president in recent months.