Andrew Yang on Joe Biden's presidential campaign

Andrew Yang on Joe Biden/2020 Democratic Nominee | Rebuilding post-Coronavirus Crisis | GZERO World

What I'd want Joe to do, is that we have to let the American people know that this pandemic is going to cause damage that's going to be with us for years. And we need a new Marshall Plan scale initiative to rebuild the country. And to me, that should be the vision that Joe presents saying, it's not just enough that, look, I would in minister the government effectively through this kind of crisis, but to recognize the fact that there are going to be scars that are deep and wide from this economic, psychological, cultural, and that we need to have this massive rebuilding effort that is going to span years and years.

And this is what the rebuilding effort looks like. We're going to make investments in this. Some of the obvious ones are the things that we've needed for years or decades like greater environmental sustainability infrastructure, things that you could legitimately spend hundreds of billions of dollars on and create hundreds of thousands, even millions of jobs. That to me would be the vision that we should be presenting because the danger is that this becomes just pure referendum on Trump. And I think that Trump's done a terrible job managing the coronavirus crisis. But there is a natural propensity for people to rally around the flag and rally around the leader in a time of crisis. And Joe has to make a positive case and present a bigger vision than I'm not Trump, let's go back to normal.

Ian Bremmer: And when can he start doing that? Because I mean right now of course, I mean not only do we have these press conferences every day, but we're in the teeth of the crisis. We haven't turned the corner yet. People are still under lock down. Can Biden start to deliver that message now or I mean does he really realistically speaking have to wait until we at least have the immediacy, the urgency of all of these people dying in the rear view mirror?

Andrew Yang: That's a great question, Ian. I personally do not think it is too soon to start presenting a positive vision of what we can do after this crisis. Even in the depths of the crisis, even right now when, I agree with you, to me, priority number one is just getting PPE into the hands of healthcare providers in Louisiana. That's number one. And so focusing on that is 100% the right thing to do, but it's not too soon to start thinking about how we're going to actually rebuild after this crisis clears, whether that's weeks, months from now or even next year after hopefully a vaccine gets developed. To me that's one of the roles of the presidency is to present a vision to the country that people can get excited about and passionate about.

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