There comes a moment in every long-shot presidential campaign when the only remaining roadblock is disbelief. Victory is impossible because people tell themselves it’s impossible. If that barrier melts away — if, say, an African American with a short résumé beats a former first lady and his party’s previous nominee for vice president in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, or a reality TV star laps the GOP field in the 2016 New Hampshire primary — the long shot is transformed overnight into a force.

It’s purely a matter of getting that first group of voters to take the leap.

That moment has arrived for the most interesting candidate of 2019, Democratic dark horse Andrew Yang. Having started the year as a head-scratcher (Andrew Who? and Wha? and Why?), the 44-year-old lawyer-entrepreneur is one of seven candidates still clearing all of the necessary hurdles to appear in debates as the primary voting draws near. Neither an elected official nor a billionaire, the brainiac son of two immigrants from Taiwan has outlasted Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California, raised more money in the third quarter of this year than Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and matched Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota in the polls.
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Though he speaks far less during debates than the leading candidates, and at a much lower decibel level, Yang is responsible for the lion’s share of fresh insights. While others are talking about reviving labor-intensive manufacturing and labor unions, Yang understands that technology and artificial intelligence are chewing up jobs at an exponentially accelerating pace. His proposed response — a $1,000-per-month universal basic income for every household — may not prove to be the best answer. I don’t know. But it shows that he’s asking exactly the right question: How do we make the automated future serve human dignity, rather than debase it?
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/andrew-yang-is-just-a-long-shot--for-now/2019/12/20/aaf3e270-2363-11ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_story.html#click=https://t.co/VUWUnQHvaB