Today, the New Jersey Star-Ledger Editorial Board endorsed Congressman Andy Kim for reelection citing his “heroic work” leading the national response to the coronavirus. “Use the coronavirus as a litmus test for leadership. Ask yourself: In this race, who is responsible, and who is the radical?” they wrote, “Vote Andy Kim for Congress, by far the safest choice.”

Read the full editorial below:

New Jersey Star Ledger: What sober leadership looks like: Andy Kim for Congress | Editorial

By Star-Ledger Editorial Board

Faced with more than 200,000 deaths and counting, and over 7 million cases of a virus that recently infected the president himself, the Republican strategy is to scare voters with something else.

All they have left is the “radical” charge: An attempt to paint all Democrats as in cahoots with Bernie Sanders, AOC and the rioters in Portland and Kenosha.

But for the bespectacled, unassuming Rhodes scholar who represents the third district in South Jersey, it’s a particularly tough sell.

What Andy Kim personifies is the moderate, reasonable wing that dominates the Democratic party. He’s one of the newcomers elected in 2018 not for being a firebrand, but for trying to get practical things done – just as he once did in Afghanistan, as an advisor to General David Petraeus.

He is the classic well-intentioned public servant, and his opponent David Richter’s barb that he’s “spent his entire life living on a government paycheck” is just offensive. Is public service supposed to be a demerit?

Kim has spent his time in office fighting to keep McGuire Air Force base open, which supports as many as 65,000 jobs in the South Jersey region. He opposed his own party on a congressional pay raise, forcing it to be dropped from an appropriations bill. He’s voted to increase border security funding and was endorsed by the N.J. Fraternal Order of Police.

In fact, it was Kim’s work with local businesses and the Chamber of Commerce that led the group to back him over Richter, a businessman, even though it’s rare that it would endorse a Democrat.

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Kim has done heroic work on the virus, especially, as a member of a national coronavirus task force. He’s fought for more testing and protective equipment to prevent a second wave of outbreaks and lockdowns in his district.

Recall that it was Trump’s White House that refused his repeated requests, at the height of this pandemic in the Spring, to set up a testing site in South Jersey – at a time when Kim was being inundated with calls from sick and desperate constituents.

Trump later acknowledged at a rally in Tulsa that he’d ordered his people to “slow down” testing, because it drove up the numbers and made his stats look bad. It left Kim fuming.

“I was thinking about the long lines, and literally people waiting hours in their cars for tests at those two FEMA facilities, and the backlog we had,” he recounted.

Now, Kim continues to push for better solutions; like rapid home tests that might help you decide whether it’s safe to send your kid to daycare or visit an elderly parent. “I would like to see testing become much more part of our daily lives,” he says.

* * * * *

Contrast this with the fanaticism of Richter, who would open everything up right away, even giant concert venues, and leave safety precautions like wearing a mask to individual judgments.

He maintains that requiring masks would violate the Constitution, but when asked what clause, he can’t answer. It’s a purely reflexive right-wing response, as if defying medical advice is a way to demonstrate your independence – something patriotic that you can do for America.

Please. What it does is leave us helpless against this virus. Not only have studies found that wearing masks could avert hundreds of thousands of COVID cases; a Goldman Sachs report concluded it could help prevent new lockdowns: The economic benefit of mask-wearing could be “sizable,” it advised.

Yet like other countries and states that reopened too quickly, didn’t take precautions seriously, and suffered new waves of closures, Richter wants us to walk into the same buzz saw, over and over.

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Make no mistake, Richter would be a Trump loyalist, which he’s made clear throughout this campaign, even leading the Trump boat parade on Barnegat Bay.

No, it does not offend his sense of fairness that Trump paid only $750 in federal taxes, vastly less than regular people.

No, it does not concern him that the self-professed billionaire president is actually hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, and won’t say to whom. “I have a mortgage,” Richter shrugs.

And no, he has no quarrel with the inequality he sees all around him. “I don’t think inequality in and of itself is an issue,” he told us.

Richter says he does support the Affordable Care Act, even though he backs attempts to ruin it as well, like killing the individual mandate that requires everyone to get insurance.

His position on climate change is bizarre. Yes, it’s a big problem and human activity is at the root of it, he says. But no, we should not tax carbon, enact a cap-and-trade program, or build wind farms off New Jersey’s coast. Asked what we steps we should take, he offered a grand total of nothing.

Richter is a smart and accomplished man, with degrees in engineering and law. He’s built a family business managing construction projects into a global conglomerate.

But he hasn’t done the homework that a jump to public service demands. He wants us to believe his business success will automatically translate into political success, a pitch that would be more plausible if he could answer basic questions on the Constitution, on climate, on health care with some fluency. Instead, he mostly chirps White House talking points, even on the pandemic and Trump’s tax evasion.

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In 2018, voters in the Third District chose Kim mainly because the GOP incumbent, Tom MacArthur, had teamed up with Trump to kill Obamacare, and replace it with a fake plan that would have demolished protections for those with pre-existing conditions and left more than 20 million without coverage.

We are still facing that threat today. A week after the November election, Trump’s continued effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act will go to the Supreme Court, which deeply worries Kim.

If the law is struck down, will Richter – who says he’s not up to speed on this major lawsuit – ultimately stand by Trump’s efforts on health care, too?

Use the coronavirus as a litmus test for leadership. Ask yourself: In this race, who is responsible, and who is the radical?

Vote Andy Kim for Congress, by far the safest choice.