A smart conservative website, The Bulwark, says that future Americans will look back at this dystopian era and marvel that “we picked the leader of the free world not because we believed he could manage the ship of state in crisis, but because he seemed very forceful when he fired Meat Loaf on his reality show…An era when no problems were addressed until they had spiraled out of control, and seriousness and expertise were viewed with suspicion and contempt. You can think of this era as America’s Golden Age of Anti-Knowledge.”

All the more reason why Joe Biden should pick Elizabeth Warren as his veep – because she, unique among the veep contenders, has the serious knowledge-based expertise to help govern us back to some semblance of normalcy.

Granted, I’d be fine with whomever Biden chooses. Any Democratic ticket would be better than the current tinpot authoritarianism; any ticket would be better than four more years for America’s Mortician, who tweeted last night that even though Covid deaths are projected to soar above 100,000 this month, he thinks that the deaths are “strongly trending downward.”

But my modest pitch for Warren hinges on the belief that she’s uniquely suited for the health and economic crisis that Trump has bequeathed us. If not for this crisis, perhaps a stronger case could be made for Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Susan Rice, Tammy Duckworth, or even Stacey Abrams (though she has no national experience). But Biden needs someone who has thought long and hard, over a span of many years, about how to cure a sclerotic economic system that screws the little person. With more than 35 million Americans now out of work, this is her moment.

I’m talking here about the advantages of a veep who can help govern effectively. Governing, not electioneering, is what matters most.

Contrary to one of our most overrated journalistic tropes, most running mates don’t help or hinder a ticket’s electoral prospects. The whole “geographic balance” argument is bogus; so is the argument that a running mate can swing his or her state. There was no geographic balance in 1992 when Clinton-Gore, an all-southern ticket, won with ease. There was lots of geographic balance in 1988 when Mike Dukakis of Massachusetts picked Lloyd Bentsen of Texas (Bentsen couldn’t swing Texas); ditto in 2004, when John Kerry of Massachusetts picked John Edwards of North Carolina (Edwards, pre-sex scandal, couldn’t swing North Carolina). In 2012, Mitt Romney thought he could put Wisconsin in play for the GOP by picking native son Paul Ryan; Romney lost the state by 7 points.

By contrast, George W. Bush and Barack Obama picked governing partners. Dick Cheney was from tiny Wyoming, which would’ve gone red anyway; Joe Biden was from tiny Delaware, which would’ve gone blue anyway. Regardless of whether Biden picks Warren, Massachusetts will go blue anyway.

The best argument for Warren starts with this policy paper, which warned that the coronavirus was at our doorstep: “Like so much else, Trump’s approach to keeping us safe from disease outbreaks is a mess. But when he’s gone, we can fix it.” The date of that paper was Jan. 28 – when there were only a handful of virus cases in America; when Trump was playing golf, holding rallies, ignoring his intelligence briefings, and telling us that the pandemic threat was “very well under control.”

Warren took a lot of ribbing on the primary trail for announcing that she had a plan for everything, but if you read that pandemic policy paper, you’ll see a detailed governing blueprint for the next four years. Biden’s best message in 2020 is that he and a substantive partner can promise Americans that the folks in charge respect science and competence.

On the economic front, yeah, some Trump-loathing Republicans might hesitate to back Biden if a lefty “radical” runs with him. But if I had to make one electioneering argument for Warren, it would be twofold: Her outreach to progressives that are tepid about Biden; and her proven ability to address, in plain language, the financial straits of the American family. Her communication skills didn’t translate into votes during primary season, but the economic crisis would broaden her audience. Most Americans don’t think in terms of ideological left or right; but given what’s going right now, they’d listen to a candidate who contends that an economic recovery should benefit the many, not just the few at the top.

She’s been talking about that since early March. And earlier this month, in a newspaper guest column, she rightly assailed the Trump-GOP stimulus package as basically “a slush fund for big business with minimal conditions – a fund Trump could use to reward his political friends and punish his political enemies…America’s faith in government is undermined when the price of helping everyone else is more giveaways for those at the top.”

And, at the top of the column, I couldn’t help noticing that Warren’s co-author was…Joe Biden. Perhaps that’s is not a harbinger of anything. On the other hand, these two paragraphs – citing their track records cleaning up the previous Republican recession – seems like a test drive:

“Both of us have served in Congress overseeing the executive branch. We have also both served in the executive branch and answered to independent oversight. Take it from us: Oversight is vital to an effective democracy and a fair economy, and it’s a threat only if you have something to hide.

“When Vice President Joe Biden ran implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, he invited relevant inspectors general to scrutinize his work. In 2010, they concluded that a remarkable 99.8% of awards were free of any hint of fraud, waste or abuse. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren not only led the oversight panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but she also set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010, where she maintained a strong working relationship with multiple inspectors general, who gave her high marks for her work.”

I’ve heard all the arguments against Warren (she’s weak with African Americans – but that’s a Biden strength anyway; she’d be replaced in the Senate by a Republican – but Massachusetts’ Republican governor knows that voters in the spring ’21 special election would likely tap a Democrat anyway), but the other veep prospects all have minuses as well.

Most importantly, the world has changed in 10 weeks. If Biden wins, he’ll be consumed throughout his tenure with the health and economic ramifications of the pandemic; he needs a big-picture partner who can sustain that vision were she to ascend to the presidency. So I hope he gives Warren every consideration. And reportedly, he is.