Biden’s sharp rebuke of GOP governors should prompt a Democratic rethink
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.”
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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.
Biden’s early bet
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.
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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.
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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.”
Democrats must take on GOP radicalization
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.
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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).
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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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