“Joe Biden never lies! He’s very nice!”

My son William, 6, started saying this a few weeks ago, a bit mysteriously. He wasn’t parroting me or his mom. We’re solidly blue parents in blue-bubble Brooklyn, but we haven’t been talking about the election at the dinner table with him or his sister Vivian, 8. This is probably a civic failing of us, but I’m sorry, it’s just too stressful. How do you explain the Trump presidency to young kids? As a resiliently popular exercise in criminality and power? How would we explain four more years of it?

Anyway, William’s little mantra came out of the blue, but in those pre-election weeks, I liked hearing it. Thank you kindergarten, I thought. Maybe his teacher taught him to say that, or a school friend with less bottled-up, anxious parents. William clearly believed what he was saying and in his ringing, upbeat voice I heard the clarity a six year old can bring to an election season like this one. “Joe Biden is a very nice man!” “Yes, he is, buddy!” I’d respond with feeling, but also hiding my dismay. Because what would I tell William if honest Joe, nice Joe, lost to Donald Trump? How could I explain the utter irrelevance of honesty and niceness in 2020 America to my tender-hearted six-year-old?

Now, I know that parents have no special claim on election-season distress. We’re all suffering. But with a Biden win in sight, within tantalizing grasp, I would like to define a special, singular brand of relief. What a joy it will be for parents of young children to be able to actually talk about the presidency at dinner. What a pleasure to speak about decency and honesty and niceness in the White House without treating those concepts as hypothetical. What a relief it will be to give voice to a few battered ideals, to engage in some semblance of actual patriotism, to moralize even! Yes, William, a president should be nice. No, William, a president does not lie. Yes, this country rewards character, decency, a capacity for empathy and selflessness.

To be clear, I don’t actually believe much of this. But one of the joys of parenting young children is the chance to give your cynicism a rest. To be a parent is to let some airy simplicity settle over your household. And also, don’t get me wrong. William and Vivian have seen what this country is going through. They have seen inequality and the lack of fairness in our system. And we have broached harder subjects with them: racism and police violence in particular. We marched with both this summer, amid a masked throng, and laid silently on the street for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. There has been the pandemic too, and the realities of sickness and death. The absence of their grandparents except as smiling faces on screens. And they have thrown temper tantrums when they demanded to know why this should all be so.

The kids were born during President Obama’s second term and though William was just a baby, he says he remembers him.  I like to think that is true and that those memories and all that has happened since, all these painful glimpses of American life, have inspired William’s vehemence. “Joe Biden is very nice!”

I would like goodness to matter to my son. I would like him to admire his president and want his president to be honest and kind. I believe William needs a corrective on that front as much as the rest of us do.

“Is Biden winning?” William chirps, over my shoulder as I sit hunched at my laptop, waiting for the votes to be counted, rooting for the good guy. We watch those electoral college totals—the blue line and the red line. The blue line is ever closer to 270. “Is Joe Biden going to be our president?” he asks. And it gives me profound happiness to drop all my doubts and fears and simply say yes, William, I think he is.