Mr. Yang has the most detailed and comprehensive set of policy proposals we have ever seen at this stage in the campaign. Democratic Party Leadership in Iowa

Andrew Yang is a serious candidate and he deserves our serious attention as hard and strange as that may seem. A couple of days ago, Michele was at a monthly local lady’s lunch and, when asked who she liked in the Democratic Primary, she answered “Yang”, everybody the table looked at her like she was kidding. Nobody took him for a serious candidate, dismissing him as another businessman who doesn’t know what he is doing. First, the implication is that Trump doesn’t know what he is doing and that is the problem; I think that is dangerously wrong. Trump knows what he is doing, he so knows what he is doing that he has been able to take over the entire Republican Party (he did not lose even one vote in the house on the question of impeachment). Yang may actually be the best Democratic candidate to beat Trump because he is one of the few candidates that actually understand why Trump is President in the first place. He is also better connected to the real world – both the problems and the solutions those problems suggest – than most of the professional politicians who are looking at the world from inside the Washington bubble.

Still, “He is better connected to the real world” is what I told myself when I voted for Bill Clinton and then, again, when I voted for Barack Obama. In both cases, their agenda of change ended up being co-opted: the newly elected Presidents were isolated and their new real-world filtered through Washington groupthink. Holding their ground and changing that Washington groupthink is very hard for anybody to do and it is necessary to make any real change. But it is possible, both Roosevelts did it. Still, it is my biggest worry with Yang. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are anomalies, insiders running as outsiders and they are probably best suited to resist Washington Group Think. But I have another concern about both Sanders and Warren.

What concerns me about Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders is that they are almost my age. Close enough to my age so that we have the same general world view and that results in 50s answers to today’s problems (and that is the only thing that bothers me, I want to quickly say, I would be thrilled to vote for either one). To give an example of what I mean, Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Facebook. She wants to use antitrust laws that were basically designed to break up Standard Oil in 1911. Yang thinks that is outdated thinking. He suggests an alternative, he wants us to be paid for being the product that Facebook is selling. It is an entirely different way of solving the problem. Sure, Facebook should be stripped of all its recent acquisitions, like Instagram, but that still leaves a huge company that monopolizes its econiche and isn’t practical to break up. Because Yang is 30 years younger, from a generation that much better understands today’s world, he doesn’t reflexively relate to an outdated concept.

An argument against Yang would be that he isn’t a politician, but he is a politician, of sorts. Yang has been around politicians and involved in politics while running Venture for America. Venture for America is a non-profit, founded by and originally run by Yang, to rejuvenating local economies through entrepreneurship training. He is a card-carrying capitalist and a Liberal (seeing the devastation in those local economies is what got him interested in running for President in the first place). To rejuvenate an economy one has to swim in political waters and he did a good job of it, to quote his Website: The Obama White House even named me a Champion of Change in 2012 and a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship in 2015.

What I most like about Yang is that he has thought about the issues and his answers match my answers which are, obviously, correct. The Policy section of the Yang2020 website is detailed and seems to financially balance. His first three issues are not Climate Change and that bothers me but when he does get to Climate Change, on the second line, it is obvious that he realizes the urgency of doing something…fast! He is a backer of the Green New Deal and is so serious about the climate that he starts his Climate Change Plan with Our planet is a mess...The past four years have been the four hottest on record, and July 2019 was the hottest month ever recorded. Greenland is expected to lose 440 billion tons of ice this year, a rate that was the “worst-case scenario” for 2070. The West is on fire, the middle of the country is flooded, and the Atlantic is seeing hurricanes of increasing frequency and intensity. In Alaska, salmon are dying because of the heat. All the while, the top 5 US oil and gas companies posted revenues over $760 billion (1), and the federal government subsidized the industry to the tune of $26 billion annually (2).

During the debates, Yang keeps saying versions of “The United States is run by the almighty dollar”, and that sums up his point of view on taking on climate change. Yang thinks money is a more powerful controller than regulation and his budget of $4.87 Trillion over twenty years is heavy on research – everything from $800 million invested in geoengineering research methods to 90 billion to establish and fund the Climate Change Adaptation Institute over 20 years, all the way to $5 billion invested in research for sustainable materials over 5 years – but the biggest item, by far, is $3 trillion to finance loans for household investments in renewable energy over 20 years. The last item really gets to the core of the Green New Deal in which the modernization and decentralization of the grid by Union workers is a central tenant.

As an aside, I first met, so to speak, AOC, a day after she joined the Sunrise Movement’s picket line in front of Nancy Pelosi’s office. It was a news conference or an interview, I forget which but I haven’t forgotten AOC, she was the most refreshing politician I heard in years. She talked about Climate Change and the Green New Deal, which I’d never heard of, and the Sunrise Movement, which I also had never heard of. When asked what her top priority was and she said “Global Climate Change”, and, when she was asked what to do about it, she said, “Fix the grid, harden it and decentralize it”. That was an odd answer to me, Fix the Grid just didn’t seem like a top priority. About a month ago, The US Army War College put out a report, Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army, and one of the major issues was The Grid. The War College said, The increased likelihood of more intense and longer duration drought in some areas, accompanied by greater atmospheric heating, will put an increased strain on the aging U.S. power grid and further spur large scale human migration elsewhere. Power generation in U.S. hydroelectric and nuclear facilities will be affected. This dual attack on both supply and demand could create more frequent, widespread and enduring power grid failures, handicapping the U.S. economy. Sitting in the dark last month, during two PSPS events, I’ve had time to think about The Grid but, obviously, Yang, along with AOC, the Sunrise Movement, and the U.S. Army, has been thinking about it for years. End aside.

I know Andrew Yang seems like a novelty candidate, but he isn’t. I’ll leave with a quote from the Yang2020 website, I urge you to join me. No one else is going to build a better world for us. We’re going to have to do it ourselves. Together.