Tag: COVID

Biden’s Strategy Wins

By Ken Zino

Presidents Biden began his State of the Union speech to set this up: “The story of America is a story of progress and resilience … We are the only country that has emerged from every crisis stronger than when we entered it. That is what we are doing again.” The president too was stronger -- much stronger. He used the Republican politics of grievance and destructive posturing against them to promote another two years of progressive headway.

“We’re building an economy where no one is left behind. Jobs are coming back, pride is coming back because of the choices we made in the last two years. This is a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America and make a real difference in your lives,” Biden said. 

Then Biden out-foxed, the Republicans starting with a jab at Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). “I look forward to working with you,” he said, adding the caveat; “I don’t want to ruin your reputation.” Biden then loaded his speech with facts in the spirit of New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who in similar situations called on his political opponents to look at the record. 

Enter a tsunami of Administration triumphs: 

  • “Two years ago, our economy was reeling.”
  • “As I stand here tonight, we have created a record 12 million new jobs, more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years.”
  • “Two years ago, COVID had shut down our businesses, closed our schools, and robbed us of so much. Today, COVID no longer controls our lives.”
  • “And two years ago, our democracy faced its greatest threat since the Civil War. Today, though bruised, our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken.”
  • "As we gather here tonight, we are writing the next chapter in the great American story, a story of progress and resilience. I define our country in one word: Possibilities.”

Republicans face crossroads. Will sanity prevail and dump Trump and his losing, racist, sexist, fascist, insurrectionist ways? A party overhaul is needed. Biden Democrats did it: Look at the party’s stunning reversal of a global trade policy that had made the rich richer and harmed the middle class. Now the rest of the Democratic Party is firmly backing Biden’s policy of building and buying American. 

Biden’s jab at Republicans who wish to end Social Security was brilliant. When a witness heckler said that it wasn’t so, Biden offered to produce the document. Heckling ensued claiming it was only one individual’s position (Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who also was chair of the party’s midterm campaigns last year). 

Biden used an assumptive close that shut down the obstructionist noise. “So Medicare and Social Security are off the books in the next budget?” Biden stared them down, into silence. 

During his first State of the Union, Biden’s Unity Agenda sought areas where both parties could work together and make progress for We The People. These are now -- again -- populist policies that only heartless Republicans could oppose: a “moonshot” at finding a cure for cancer; delivering on obligations to veterans; tackling the mental health crisis; beating the opioid and overdose epidemic; immigration reform. 

I realize that many Republicans have a George Santos-like relationship to facts. However, Biden signed more than 300 bipartisan bills. And the positive effects of, say, his infrastructure bill are just beginning, including projects in Republican districts where Biden promised to attend the groundbreaking ceremonies. 

Biden Tuesday announced a new wave of plans toward more progress, with better results for families. Along the way, Biden had Republicans on the ropes with jab after jab and devastating left hooks. 

The president said he was proud to work with Democrats and Republicans to enact major legislation that delivers on all aspects of this agenda. This starts with the deficit. As I looked at the Republicans, I saw later-day Benedict Arnolds who spent too much on tax cuts for the rich. Now they want the middle class, the poor and retired to pay the price for their actions. 

Biden’s predecessor signed nearly $2 trillion worth of unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations. This Republican deficit went up every year under Trump’s mis-administration. Biden has cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion. Democratic reforms to take on Big Pharma, lower prescription costs, and make the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share will reduce the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars more.

Here’s the key to the winning strategy: Biden knows that the work to build an economy from the bottom up and middle out is far from done. “Let’s finish the job” is the rallying cry. Biden teased the budget he will send to Congress on March 9th, building on the historic economic progress of the past two years by continuing to invest in America and its people, continuing to lower costs for families; for child care, housing, college costs and health care, while protecting and strengthening Social Security and Medicare, and reducing the deficit through additional reforms.

Why abandon a winning strategy? 

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Overexaggerated Fright

By Henry Payne

When 2020 began, America’s elites claimed the biggest threat to the planet was global warming. They were caught flat-footed by a real threat, coronavirus, despite the obvious warnings of H1N1 and SARS before it.

But, like climate change, government elites have seen in COVID an opportunity to grab power while exempting themselves from their own rules.

Stoking fear and burying science, Democrats and their media allies pushed America into destructive shutdowns while ignoring the real threats coronavirus presented. 

Despite his usual bluster, President Trump and his party enabled American federalism – allowing states to manage the virus while providing critical federal support. Partisans have tried to spin a narrative that the Trump administration covered up the seriousness of the virus. 

The New York Times – fresh off its false narratives about Russian collusion and Kavanaugh sexual deviancy – claims knowledge of the White House downplaying the virus.

But while experts scrambled to understand the outbreak in the early months of 2020, the record shows the Trump administration aggressively pursued mitigation strategies from early shutdowns of U.S. borders, to mobilizing an “arsenal of democracy” to make medical devices, to the White House Task Force coordinating with states.

Like environmental scaremonger Al Gore flying in private jets, this COVID high-handedness played out nationwide. Speaker Nancy Pelosi flogged San Francisco rules mandating masks and closing beauty parlors. After insisting on a national mandate for masks, Joe Biden dropped his own.

This tyranny of the ruling class might have been national policy had Democrats been in the White House. For all his unwelcome bluster, however, President Trump and his party enabled American federalism.

Outside the New York/D.C. media bubble, states learned to live with the virus on their terms. They managed risk just as they have other public safety threats. I’ve visited multiple states. In Georgia, for example, businesses were open in October– free to determine how best to protect their clientele. Working on data showing young people are at low COVID risk, schools were open. 

As a result Georgia’s unemployment rate is 30 percent lower than Michigan while the Peach State suffers slightly fewer deaths per capita. 

Government elites can afford to impose edicts by Zoom. But the working middle class has to travel, has to educate its children, has to deliver food. They have listened to the medical experts at the New England Journal of Medicine, at Stanford and Harvard and Oxford – and to non-partisan journalists. 

They take heart from a great leader who once said: the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

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Biden Holds a Big Lead Over Trump, but How Reliable Are The Polls This Time?

By Todd Lassa

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden holds an 8.9-point lead over President Donald J. Trump (51.2 percent to 42.3 percent) according to an average of major political polls by Real Clear Politics. It is reasonable to ask whether the president’s Friday morning tweet slamming Sen. Susan Collins helps or hurts the Republican senator from Maine now fighting for her political life, who has said she will not vote in favor of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Collins faces a daunting challenge from Democrat Sara Gideon, Maine’s House speaker, in the Nov. 3 elections.

The president’s Friday tweet reads, “There is a nasty rumor out there that @Susan Collins of Maine will not be supporting our great United States Supreme Court Nominee. Well, she didn’t support Healthcare or my opening up 5000 square miles of Ocean to Maine, so why should this be any different. Not worth the work.”

Closing in on two weeks before the Nov. 3 national elections, the real threat of a Blue Wave accompanying a Biden win would entail a big swing from the GOP’s 53-47 Senate majority, and potentially has Democrats building on their 233-196 majority in the House. Even relatively secure Senate Republicans may be hedging their bets.

Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska, as a member of the Judiciary Committee handled Supreme Court nominee Barrett with kid gloves earlier this week but criticized President Trump’s Thursday night Town Hall on NBC in a conference call to constituents, the Washington Examiner reports. 

Trump “kisses dictators’ butts,” “sells out our allies” and “trash-talks evangelicals behind their backs,” Sasse reportedly said. He further slammed the president for “mistreating women” and initially “ignoring COVID.” Trump supporters will note that Sasse is considered an early contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, a race Donald Trump Jr. may fight if the GOP balance of power remains in his family’s orbit. 

While having brushed off polls showing a huge deficit to former Vice President Biden for many weeks, Trump himself has predicted a repeat of his 2016 campaign performance, which means he’s closing in, especially in the final week. Four years ago Trump gained on Hillary Clinton after the former secretary of state led many polls only by four or five points, often within statistical error of a tie. This year, Trump must overcome landslide-style deficits nationally as well as large margins in battleground states, and even in erstwhile Republican strangleholds like Arizona and North Carolina, where Sens. Martha McSally and Thom Tillis face potential losses to their Democratic challengers. 

Our right-column pundit thinks President Trump has a big chance of pulling off another upset, and our left-column pundit, having been gobsmacked by the 2016 election worries the argument holds many valid points.

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Trump, China, COVID and the Absence of Leadership

By Stephen Macaulay

Let’s say for the sake of argument that Donald Trump is right, that COVID-19 is the “China virus,” that it was a deliberate release into the world. It seems as though all the Administration has going for it as a reaction was that they “banned” travel from China into the U.S. Which isn’t entirely true. That is, according to the Associated Press, because there was no restriction from the more than 8,000 Chinese and foreign nationals came in to the U.S. during the first three months of the “ban” from the administrative zones of Macau and Hong Kong. In addition to which, more than 27,000 Americans who were in mainland China returned during the first month. So let’s not put too much stock in that claim’s effectiveness.

And it wasn’t until March 11 that Trump banned travel to the U.S. from Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland—a.k.a., the Schengen Area. In making that proclamation, Trump wrote, “The Schengen Area currently has the largest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases outside of the People’s Republic of China.” That’s right—more than a month after the alleged China travel “ban” there were still people coming in from an area where there was apparently the second-largest number of confirmed cases. In addition to which, you’ll note that the U.K. wasn’t on the list. Oops. It made the list on March 14. Diligence.

“[I]t's China's fault, it should have never happened,” Trump said during the presidential debate (and several other times).

But it did happen. And what is he doing about it? Making fanciful claims and maintaining it will go away. As recently as Oct. 10 Trump said from the balcony of the White House in an Evita-like moment, “but it’s going to disappear, it is disappearing.” There are 7.7-million confirmed cases in the U.S. Disappear.

According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, there have been 4,739 COVID-19 deaths in China. There are 1.393-billion people in China. Let’s say they’re lying. Let’s say there are 10 times as many deaths. 100 times as many deaths. What are we doing? Pretending.

There is the continuing myth of what a great business man Trump is. A myth that is beginning to dissolve as The New York Times reports on his massive losses and looming loans becoming due. According to the Congressional Budget Office, FY 2020 will have a U.S. deficit of $3.13 trillion. That means the U.S. debt is greater than the GDP. The last time this was the case was in 1946. The year after World War II ended.

Most Americans will lose a year of freedom in their lives. Freedom to do what they want. Sure, people cando it. But has been shown that unless people do things like distance and wear masks and practice good hygiene, they can die. But no one thinks they will die. It is someone else. Old people. Obese people. People with an underlying condition. Even though there are people of those characteristics in other countries, the U.S. level of death is dwarfing them. Why? Because the leaders of those countries are leaders.

Trump? 

Macaulay is a cultural commentator based in Detroit.

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