Yes. His whole presidential sale is based upon COVID response and basic competence. This and the impending infrastructure bill debacle should take care of that. McConnell is already giving speeches about how Biden fucked up the successful Republican vaccination campaign. Obvious nonsense, but it should give the well off white suburbanites who just need the smallest of fig leafs to vote Republican plenty of reason to do so.
Biden is obviously better than Trump, but he had no real plan to contain COVID on the campaign trail and that didnāt change when he entered office. His CDC is an incompetent disaster. So, yes, it is a fair criticism.
Think 2022 is going to be a slaughter and am back to half hoping Trump runs again because the GOP alternatives, while probably quite not as bad if elected, are going to be huge favorites without the Trump baggage. Hopefully Biden is too old to run for a second term and Dems at least will have a primary and a chance to put up someone besides Biden.
Tldr cliffs: hey we were a C- on COVID instead of an F probably not gonna work politically
In terms of actually fighting the virus, Iām not sure thereās much any president can do at this point other than beg a nation of selfish idiots to get vaxxed. vaccine supplies seem to be under control. Maybe he could pressure the FDA to approve this more quickly for children but thereās only so many corners they can cut. Of course his response is 1000x better than Trumpās policy of actively encouraging anti-vax idiocy.
Bigger issue is economic stuff like dealing with the rent crisis and getting more relief checks out to people. Which the Dems are failing at pretty badly, naturally.
I think this is right. It would be short term cathartic to have a President get up there and rant and rave about idiots that arenāt getting vaccinated but it wouldnāt actually make those people get vaxxed, we know the psychology here prevents that. He could use his voice to keep hammering the point that the anti-vaxxers are lying and none of their promises are coming true. This is the long, difficult road of getting people out of a cult. You have to keep going back to ābut the cult leaderās promises arenāt being realizedā over and over again until people start to opt out of the cult. Itās tedious and slow and difficult and frustrating but the evidence shows itās the only way that works.
As you say, a functional progressive party would lean right into the economics stuff and just say āyep, no choice but to ramp up increasingly bigger universal income initiatives, sorry conservatives but the economic fallout of all this vaccination denial forces our handsā. You could get all the Fox morons behind vaccination that way. But it would require helping real people so the eDems canāt do it.
I mean of course not. But that is far from the only lever he could pull. I guess my bigger question is at what point does Biden start taking political damage as this thing spirals out of control again? Iām not even really saying it would be fair but as this thing drags into 2022 with likely no end in sight at some point the President is going to start taking heat for that right?
Thatās not how evolution works. The larger the unvaccinated incubator for random mutations, the more likely a deadly strain that evades vaccinations emerges.
I donāt think this is exactly right, but youāre on the right track.
Most Democrats and Biden supporting independents realize that the fourth wave is entirely the fault of Republicans. So I donāt think heās directly going to lose any support for this recent flare up.
That said, Biden surely canāt claim this as a āvictoryā, even if it the failure isnāt his fault. Therefore, it will open peopleās eyes to what else he has done as president. And itās not good.
Weāre over a fourth of the way through this Democratic trifecta. What exactly are his accomplishments? I (as we all do) follow this shit way more closely than most others, and Iām struggling to think of any. If Democrats canāt claim COVID, what can they claim? Restarting evictions and student loans? Pretending that $2000=$1400? āNot Trumpā is getting stale, and going to be a completely ineffective message in 15 months.
Canāt follow all the word up above. Can we all just agree that itās insane to send unmasked unvaxxed elementary school kids to enclosed rooms in a few weeks?
Without testing and class bubbles, maybe. Otherwise, all other countries have managed to give their kids an education throughout Delta, without vaccinating them first (and most were unmasked)
I really could not disagree more. Biden could have and should have required all federal employees to be vaccinated months ago. Along with all employees of federal contractors and all students and staff at universities that receive public funding. Proof of vaccination should have been required to travel on airplanes or trains or across state lines. Nationwide mask mandates in public spaces. All could be done with the stroke of a pen, and thereās no actual excuse for not having done them. People will make hand-waving assertions that there would have been some sort of backlash, but itās honestly almost impossible for us to have ended up with more anti-vaxxers than we actually have. The worst antivaxxer states are vaccinated for measles (a much less dangerous disease that almost no one ever gets) at rates that are a bit higher than the adults-only COVID vaccination rate for the best vaccinated state.
The other thing weāre not doing is gearing up to export billions of doses of mRNA vaccine to everywhere. Fifty years ago, or even twenty years ago, the media would have been awash with excitement about how mRNA vaccines were going to cure all diseases, and the politicians would be falling over themselves to break ground on new tech campuses that promise to be the Silicon Valley of mRNA (Ribosome River? Uracil Uplands? Transcription Terrace?). Now society is dominated by Luddites who actively oppose progress and soi-disant progressives who have convinced themselves that any progress worth having can only come through dismantling the oppressive structures of white supremacy embedded in late capitalism, etc. At best, thereās a complacent optimism that somewhere off screen Top Men are working out the details but that itās all much too complicated for the average joe to worry about and we should just have Panglossian faith in the system.
Weāve got easy, massive wins lying around all over the place, but no one picks them up because the political actors have realized that they donāt need to deliver results to win elections anymore. I actually think we would be doing better on COVID right now if Trump was president. All of his policy decisions would be catastrophically worse, but his die-hards would mostly get vaccinated and there wouldnāt be much of a dropoff in vaccination among Dem constituencies. And the policy decisions that are helping are largely at the state/private/individual level anyways.
Iām a technical agree on this. My kid is starting Thursday, but thereās a mask mandate for kids. No mandatory vaccination among teachers and staff is another facet of the insanity.
Republicans seem to want the next election cycle to be a referendum on masks and lockdowns. The California governor recall will be interpreted as such if Newsom loses or even if itās close. I expect some Democratic politicians to lose the political will to hold fast on some COVID measures because they will be more worried about their re-election chances.
Wat. Delta wasnāt all that widespread until late April. I realize not everyone is on the US school schedule, but tons of kids have been out of school ever since the delta variant hit.
Youāre not necessarily wrong, but I think it is worth reminding people that in this scenario you would have an all out war between the Biden administration and the Federal employee unions, right out of the gate that would be a massive loss for the self proclaimed Great Uniterās presidency. Thereās just no way that Biden picks a fight like that, he wonāt even fight Mitch McConnell on stuff.
Iām not so sure thatās right. The unions have been all over the place, but some of the large ones have supported vaccine mandates, or at least, have not really fought them too hard. Right now itās more a matter of the unions trying to use them as negotiating tools for other benefits versus really trying to stop them.