My biggest concern for this upcoming presidental election is two-fold: I want Trump and the GOP out, and I want the person who steps into the Oval Office to manage, unravel, and fix the multi-front crisis our 45th president has generated.

That second part is more important than any media attention to it would suggest. It’s why people like Yang, Steyer, Williamson, and even to some extent Bernie worry me. And it’s why the candidates I’m kind of “meh” on are acceptable; Biden, for example, is far from my first pick for President, but I think he’d manage the rebuilding of the U.S., and appoint people who are good at what they do to help him.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about what I want vs electability. And at this point, electability is a big topic, and people seem to focus on Biden a lot – a white, older, seemingly sensible and stable guy, with (perhaps a lot of) baggage.

I grit my teeth – I so very badly want someone with a very different perspective, a different kind of life experience in the White House. I am all for #VoteBlueNoMatterWho and all that, but I’m not a big fan of having yet another white guy in office. I want a person of color; I want a woman; I want both. I’m a huge fan of Harris, and think she’d be dynamic and effective in office.

But, being a white person, I know very well that Harris scares white people because she’s black, because she’s not white, not “them.” I think she also scares people because she’s effusive, not calm; passionate in her expression, not staid and monotone. That’s partly an anti-woman thing – a lot of people are perfectly fine with Bernie yelling, or Mayor Pete and Beto getting all dramatic in their delivery. But coming out of the mouth of a woman, especially a POC, it’s another thing altogether.

It’s fear of The Angry Black Woman, even though Harris is not being particularly angry in a lot of her delivery. This is definitely a problem in perception by a lot of white people, not a problem with how Harris handles her stump speeches and her interviews. She is passionate, she is demonstrative, she is very intense when she lays things out, point by goddam fucking point. I love it. A lot of people love it. But I have no doubt that it triggers white fear of black anger in a whole lotta folks.

I don’t think there’s a person of color out there who won’t trigger that shit. It pisses me off. I want things to be otherwise. I think they will be otherwise, down the road. And I will be very happy to vote for Kamala Harris, should she be on the ticket. I just have serious doubts, not about her, but about white people’s ability to fucking get over themselves.

That said, my other top picks are Warren and Klobuchar. Maybe Klobuchar will win through, and I think she probably has the best combination of skills and demeanor to actually do the job of being President, but she’s not looking strong right now. Warren, on the other hand, is gaining and gaining, and I think has an excellent chance to get the nomination in the end. Both have something in common, as it relates to electability: they are both white women who come off like Regular People, women who might be your neighbors in a working or middle class neighborhood, had they gone down a different path.

And that’s, unfortunately, the electability ticket. It should be about skills and policy; instead the race ends of having a lot to do with who people feel comfortable with, who triggers their gut “I can at least trust that one a little” response. It’s the Who Could You Have a Beer With crap. But it’s real.

Warren comes off like some wonderful quirky high school teacher, kind of a dork but fun to take classes from, knowledgeable and infectiously enthusiastic, unendingly optimistic. Remember this? Elizabeth Warren, on Nov 10th, right after the election.

We pick ourselves up and we fight back. Indeed. She had to have been devastated, and she admitted to it. But then, as she encouraged all of us to do, you pick your self up, dust off the debris, and figure out what the hell to do next. It certainly helped me

I think she’s electable – straightforward and energetic, smart and experienced; she understands bureaucracy and knows how to work with it. She has the appeal of the friendly neighbor lady, and while she’s almost overwhelmingly cheery, maybe that’s what we need right now. I think her whiteness, unfortunately, is part of what makes her electable, or more specifically, Not Scary. But her natural curiosity and Get To It attitude, open to ideas and wide perspectives grounded in reality, will mean she’d get people in place in her administration who have a wide range of experience and knowledge; she be a white person at the head of a diverse government. That’s maybe not enough, but it might be the best scenario that is actually attainable.

I have said I won’t pick just one, and I haven’t. But at this point Warren looks like the most capable person who could appeal to mass voters on the electability scale. I would be quite happy to call her Madame President.