Passion over pragmatism. Charles Booker gets our endorsement in U.S. Senate primary.

The coronavirus currently devastating the United States and the world has drawn back the curtains on many of our most intractable problems: inadequate health care tied to lost jobs, low wages, underemployment, shaky safety nets in the richest nation on earth.

Our already fragile world is now rocked by protests and riots over police brutality, and the systemic racism and injustice it serves, from mass incarceration to murder.

And once again, our vulnerable Kentucky shudders from disproportionate losses, its largest city in upheaval over police violence, and its unemployment the highest per capita in the country because of our dependence on service jobs laid low by the pandemic. In national rankings, we are among the sickest, least educated and poorest.

These facts don’t speak well of three decades of leadership from U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, one of the most powerful politicians in the country who has used those years to grow his own power and corporate riches rather than improving the health and wealth of his constituents.

Kentucky is lucky to have a strong slate of candidates in the Democratic primary vying to take on the Senate Majority Leader in the November election. As they have shown in debates and in Zoom interviews with our editorial board, any one of them, state Rep. Charles Booker, Mike Broihier or Amy McGrath, is qualified and ready to serve. But because now is the time for bold and brave ideas, we endorse Charles Booker in the primary.

Broihier is a plain-spoken man of many good ideas, from universal basic income to Medicare for All. Like McGrath, he is a former Marine, but has spent recent years as an asparagus farmer, journalist and substitute teacher in Lincoln County and deeply understands the plight of rural Kentuckians. Despite not having political experience, he is also a savvy campaigner, quickly attaching himself to the remains of the Andrew Yang national apparatus, a group of young tech-savvy politicos who digitally mastered a pandemic primary.

McGrath, the former Marine fighter pilot, is the nationally anointed front-runner with a war chest of donations that might even rival McConnell’s usual corporate haul. An impressive candidate in her previous run against U.S. Rep Andy Barr, the former fighter pilot is playing it safe as a moderate Democrat. She urges fixes for the Affordable Care Act and a public option, rather than introducing single payer health care, and opposes the free college tuition that her opponents advocate. She says upping the minimum wage will be more effective than a universal basic income. In our interview, she said she shares the same basic values as her opponents.

“We agree that health care is a right, that it should be affordable and accessible to all Americans. We just disagree on how to get here,” she said. “Let’s make sure nobody goes bankrupt ... because let’s face it, if you don’t have your health care you don’t have anything.”

McGrath has put out sensible, middle-of-the-road positions aimed at Kentucky’s moderate voters, but they lack the boldness and vision that we believe is needed at this moment.

In addition, she sometimes seems over-coached and easily flustered, as seen in her early campaign missteps when she said she would have voted for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, then backtracked hours later amid the public furor. In addition, she hedges on any criticism of President Donald Trump, which is an understandable campaign tactic in a state that mostly admires him, but not one that impresses Democrats and not one that will serve her well in the Senate, one of the last bulwarks against his increasingly erratic leadership.

McGrath earned our endorsement in 2018; she is the favorite of national political groups and remains a formidable and compelling candidate who will be a worthy foe for McConnell if recent polls prove accurate.

But this moment in our fractious history seems to call beyond politics, and Charles Booker has risen to meet it in many different ways. He has never played it safe because he couldn’t, growing up in poverty on Louisville’s West End, a personal victim of street violence that claimed family members’ lives. As a Type-1 diabetic, he has had to ration his insulin to buy food for his family. He speaks eloquently about the similarities between his West End neighbors and residents of Eastern Kentucky, people who are often voiceless and left behind as more prosperous parts of Kentucky forge ahead.

As a progressive state representative in a red state, he’s not afraid to stand up for a Green New Deal to change our disastrous policy as we head toward a climate apocalypse. He’s fully in favor of universal basic income and Medicare for All. He wants to work to undo years of mass incarceration policies that put disproportionate numbers of minorities behind bars. He would vote to rescind the 2017 tax cuts that have further widened America’s economic inequities.

As he said in our interview with him, “Poverty is not a deficiency, it’s not a moral failure. It is a policy choice.”

Because of his progressive stances, he is often sidelined in the Kentucky House of Representatives, but has done important work on legislative issues such as repealing charter schools, raising the state’s minimum wage and tightening restrictions on Kentucky’s lax gun laws.

As he told us, his ideas “are not radical. If we don’t help those at the bottom, we’ll see what happens when the bottom drops out.”

In recent weeks, he has been on the front lines of the protests and unrest in Louisville over the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, standing against police brutality in black neighborhoods even as police turned tear gas on him as part of a peaceful protest. Earlier this year, Booker co-sponsored a bill to create a state review board for deadly shootings by police, a necessary improvement that went nowhere in Frankfort, but perhaps will have traction now. He spent last Monday less than a mile from his house at the site of the David McAtee killing. Instead of prepping for that night’s KET debate, he spoke at a press conference about the need to dismantle the systemic racism that brought Louisville to a tipping point. He has continued to press urgently for much-needed police reforms, seizing a moment of possibility for revolutionary change.

We understand that Booker is the underdog in this race; he has a steep climb to earn votes outside of his native Louisville, where he is well-known. But we believe this is a time for passion, not pragmatism. Charles Booker is the only one generating real excitement among young people and old. We believe he would move the state in the direction that Kentucky needs to go in the future so it can, at long last, move forward. He deserves your vote.