Opinion: Biden’s sharp rebuke of GOP governors should prompt a Democratic rethink
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
President Biden has now forcefully rebuked a handful of GOP governors who are actively hampering our national covid-19 response. This was a long time in coming, and it should prompt a deeper shift among Democrats, toward a more aggressive effort to hold Republicans publicly accountable for such malevolent, depraved displays of hostility toward the public good.
“Just two states, Florida and Texas, account for one-third of all new covid-19 cases in the entire country,” Biden told reporters late Tuesday. Without naming them, he called out those two states’ GOP governors — Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott — for new policies that allow children to attend school maskless and bar vaccine mandates by local governments and state agencies.
“I say to these governors, please help,” Biden continued. “But if you aren’t going to help, at least get out of the way.”
This is making news, but its deeper significance remains underappreciated. To contextualize this, recall that early on, Biden’s brain trust concluded that criticizing GOP governors over covid risked further polarizing masks and vaccines, potentially driving GOP voters away from them.
Back in March, a senior Biden adviser explained the thinking to Ezra Klein: If Biden minimized cultural and social conflict, it might depolarize the country and clear space to go bigger on policy, such as using government to fight covid, which would theoretically be popular across party lines.
Similarly, a top Biden adviser told me in December that Bidenworld saw a major opportunity to unite the country around the covid response. They could rebuild bipartisan trust in government public health expertise and restore a sense of social cooperation around battling covid, a shared national foe.
The true nature of this diagnosis, and its pitfalls, are now evident. At its core, the idea was that once former president Donald Trump — who ferociously stoked cultural conflict around covid at every opportunity — faded away and his grip on GOP voters weakened, consensus could emerge around the idea of working together toward the common good of defeating covid.
But Trump has not faded away. Worse, some Republicans have themselves escalated the Trumpist project of fomenting relentless conflict around covid.
This isn’t confined to fringe lawmakers who decry “Needle Nazis” and say the government’s covid response is a slippery slope to Bible confiscation. It also includes many mainstream Republicans, who superficially vouch for vaccines while simultaneously saying all kinds of insane things deliberately designed to undermine trust in the federal covid response.
And it includes GOP governors, such as DeSantis, who are actively blocking efforts to fight covid. As Paul Krugman writes, DeSantis is operating from a deranged vision of freedom from government public health directives that simultaneously seeks to constrain private businesses and local governments from vaccine and mask mandates — that is, constrain them from doing what they think best for their customers and constituents and for public health.
The bottom line is that these Republicans are actively trying to polarize the country around covid, for nakedly instrumental purposes. That’s because in midterm elections, the angrier the out-of-the-White House party’s voters are, the more likely it is that their torqued-up turnout will swamp the more complacent in-party’s voters.
This posture seems to require a new kind of response from Democrats. It obviously can’t pass largely unchallenged, if only because it’s highly irresponsible and dangerous. Hence Biden’s new criticism.
“It’s one thing to be covid-agnostic,” a White House adviser told me. “It’s another thing to be an impediment to public safety. Calling that out is just pointing to prudent health measures. It’s keeping focused on the science.”
Still, the thinking inside the White House is plainly that this is a tough balance to get right. Escalating political brawls around these arguments could conceivably make it harder to get more Republicans vaccinated.
And yet, it’s fair game politically to call out all this bad acting. Democrats should stand squarely on the right side of what will inevitably be a cultural battle: If Republicans are actively working to polarize the electorate, Democrats have a responsibility to level with their own voters about the public threat posed by cynically motivated GOP anti-vax and anti-mask derangement.
It’s not immediately clear how to strike this balance in a way that ultimately benefits public health most. But Democrats do seem to be tentatively trying to move in a more aggressive direction.
Indeed, according to a source, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is encouraging House candidates to hold events at which they highlight Republican falsehoods about the vaccine (and also about the insurrection).
Driving this, the source says, is some internal DCCC polling that finds 56 percent of likely voters in four dozen battleground districts have serious doubts about Republicans after hearing that they are spreading lies about vaccines to further conspiracy theories.
It’s not clear how far Democrats will take this. But they are clearly grappling with how aggressively to prosecute the case against escalating GOP radicalization on many fronts, including impairing our covid response, downplaying the insurrection, and encouraging bad actors to keep undermining faith in our electoral system.
As well Democrats should — for the good of the country.
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Texas and Florida together have 33% of the new U.S. cases?
But together they only have 15% of the US population.
So they are double the number of cases they should be statistically.
Meh, keep spinning liberals.
The 2022 mid terms are going to be a bloodbath for you guys no matter what and then you can really start whining again ......
It is pretty clear at this point that Abbott and DeSantis want everyone in their states to contract covid so they can get to herd immunity in that way.
Doubtful but it is certainly clear they both what their own citizens to make those decisions and not the Fed.
Some folks are always whiney little bitches . . .
We shall see where the bloodbath is. . . .
Time will tell ..... i'll gladly bet you right now if we can agree on what parameters to use to define what a bloodbath is.
You a Scotch drinker? How about a bottle of Dalmore Cigar Malt? A very nice Scotch .....
Yesterday Florida had 16,935 new covid cases and 140 deaths. The state's positivity rate is 18.1%.
And yes the kids and teens are getting hit especially hard.
Florida leads the nation in kids hospitalized for COVID
Oh fucking hell.
After the Democrats did everything they could to fuck up the Covid 19 response so they could blame Trump so he wouldn't win re-election; and are still blaming him for their fucked up muddled response at all levels of the Biden administration.
Remember the mighty mental midget Democrat governors that stuck people that tested positive for Covid 19 into retirement and nursing homes that couldn't take care of them? Caused an explosion of Covid 19 related deaths among the most vulnerable that were supposed to be protected.
Democrat governors also killed their economies with shut downs that were many times out of sheer vindictiveness.
But Gov Whitless is great at defy her own Covid 19 orders when it suits her needs.
Of course she isn't the only hypocritical Democrat violating their own Covid 19 rules.
Yet somehow the Democrats still blamed everything on Trump.
The pandemic is now Biden's problem; and he is royally fucking up the response at every level of his administration. Covid 19 responses change by the day; and vary by which part of his administration is speaking at the time.
Love Democrats shifting the blame to GOP governors and keeping it on Trump trying to cover for their own fuck ups.
People in Texas and Florida are dying. Pour the champaign and toot those party tooters. Democrats' crap is smelling rosy, or so they say.
Maybe if we paid more attention to people trying to live their lives during a pandemic instead of treating people as a statistic then the outcome would be different. Political bickering, political point scoring, and party tooters really ain't that important.