Norm Mineta

Opinion contributor

On Tuesday, the race for the presidency became a two-person race. Those two people are Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Bernie Sanders knows this, especially after resounding defeats in Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi and Missouri. He should move quickly to help Biden accomplish their primary goal — sending Trump packing.

I worked in Congress with Sen. Sanders. He is a determined, dedicated elected official, one who has never forgotten that being a public servant means you serve the public — not yourself or the privileged few. He has built a passionate base of small donors and supporters. All of us who did not support Bernie should nevertheless be listening to what his supporters are saying.

However, the trajectory of choice is now apparent. Bernie took a road that I believe is angrier than the one the majority of Democrats — indeed, a majority of Americans — want to travel.

If we take Bernie at his word, we must defeat Trump. To accomplish that, he should now transform his role to one that helps Biden beat Trump.

I believe the majority of Democrats are supporting former Vice President Biden for the same reason I am — his experience, his judgment, his intelligence and his basic decency foremost among them. Most of all, we admire Joe Biden’s sense of empathy. With Joe Biden as president no one, not one of us, will have to feel abandoned, alienated or unrepresented. He is what he appears to be — warm, generous, caring and inclusive.

Expect Trump, and perhaps some radical Democrats, to say the Democratic establishment somehow arranged for Biden to be selected — not elected. The record Democratic turnouts show that to be a lie.

I was a Cabinet secretary for two presidents, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a big city mayor and an officer in the U.S. Army. Today, some argue that makes me a member of “The Establishment.”

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However, I was definitely not a member of the establishment when my family and I were forced into a detention camp by the U.S. government in 1942, along with 127,000 other Americans of Japanese ancestry. The fact that we were loyal American citizens didn’t matter. Fear and prejudice meant being loaded onto railroad cars and put behind barbed wire with guard towers and machine guns.

Three decades later, I was elected mayor of my hometown, San Jose, California, becoming the first Asian American mayor of a major U.S. city. The next day someone painted J-A-P on my garage door. I sure didn’t feel like a member of the establishment when I was scrubbing that off my house.

I voted for Joe Biden because we need to repair the divisions in our country, end the derision and intolerance, and heal the fractured civic dialogue in our nation.

There is a long way to go, and a lot of work to do. I will do my part to help Joe because not to do so would be to leave my kids, my grandkids and their contemporaries with a broken country and an unhealthy world.

Norm Mineta was secretary of Commerce under President Bill Clinton and was secretary of Transportation under President George W. Bush. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush.