Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I’m trying to keep an open mind — OK, semi-open — about what to think of Joe Biden’s Covid vaccination mandates. I have no problem with the president requiring federal employees to get the shot. I have no problem with businesses large or small requiring the same. Their houses, their rules.
But the civil libertarian in me doesn’t love the idea of this or any president using administrative powers to force vaccines on the people who refuse to get them. Your thoughts?
Gail Collins: Well, Bret, if Biden was rounding up the non-vaxxers, having them tied down and inoculated by force — the way many Republicans seem to be drawing the picture — I’d certainly have reservations. But in effect he’s saying that they shouldn’t be allowed in certain places where infection is relatively easy to spread, like workplaces or public buildings.
This is a serious, serious health crisis and I don’t think I’d want the president to content himself with giving pep talks.
And don’t I remember a previous conversation in which you suggested the non-vaccinated didn’t deserve to be allowed in hospitals if they got sick?
Bret: Not exactly, but close. The most elegant policy riposte to the anti-vaxxers — and I mean the willful ones, not the people who simply haven’t had access to the shot or have a compelling medical excuse — is to refuse to allow Medicare or Medicaid to pay their medical bills in the event they become seriously ill. Private health insurers might also follow suit. I accept that people don’t want the government or their employer telling them what to do with their bodies. But these same people shouldn’t expect someone else to bail them out of their terrible health decisions.
I have another reservation about what Biden’s doing. Right now, the vast majority of Covid-related hospitalizations are happening among the unvaccinated, which is further proof the shots work. I understand that puts doctors and nurses under a lot of strain, though Covid hospitalizations seem to be declining and the surgeries that are being put off are mainly elective. Otherwise, I don’t see the latest Covid spike as the same kind of issue it was a year or so ago. It’s gone from being a public-health crisis to a nincompoop-health crisis.
Gail: Imagining that as a new political slogan …
Bret: Is “nincompoop” too strong? How about “total geniuses if they do say so themselves,” instead? Anyway, as anti-vaxxers are mostly putting themselves at serious risk of getting seriously ill, I don’t see the need for a presidential directive, including the renewed mask mandates, which only diminish the incentive to get vaccinated. No doubt I’m missing a few things …
Gail: As someone who hates hates hates wearing a mask, I love the idea of getting rid of them. And there are a lot of public places now where I see signs basically saying: If you’re vaccinated, mask wearing is up to you.
But in my neighborhood, where most of the people I see on the streets are long since vaccinated, a lot of folks wear masks even when they’re just walking around. It’s more convenient if you’re popping in and out of stores or mass transit, but I like to think they also want to remind the world that we’re still fighting back a pandemic, which is easier if everybody works together.
Bret: There are people, particularly the immunocompromised, who have a solid medical or emotional need to take great precautions, including masks, and I totally respect them. The busybodies and virtue-signalers, not so much.
Gail: On another presidential matter, I noticed your last column was somewhat, um … negative on the Biden presidency. You really think it’s been that bad?
Bret: In hindsight, the headline, “Another Failed Presidency at Hand,” probably took the argument a step farther than the column itself. It’s too early to say that the Biden presidency has failed. But people who wish the president success — and that includes me — need to grasp the extent to which he’s in deep political trouble. It isn’t just the Afghan debacle, or worrisome inflation, or his predictions about the end of the pandemic when the virus had other ideas. I think he has misread his political mandate, which was to be a moderate, unifying leader in the mold of George Bush Sr., not a transformational one in the mold of Lyndon Johnson. And he’s trying to do this on the strength of Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote in the Senate. I think it’s a recipe for more social division and political failure.
Gail: As reviews go, that’s certainly a downer.
Bret: None of this is to commend the not-so-loyal opposition party. But they’re the ones who stand to gain most from a weak Biden presidency.
Gail: Looking at it from my end, we have a president who’s got to make the country feel it’s not trapped in an unhealthy, unhappy, overall-depressed state forever. I’m buying into big change, which requires more than a gentle hand at the wheel. But back to your Biden critique. You said you voted for him last time but now he has revealed himself to be “headstrong,” “shaky” and “inept.” What if Donald Trump runs against him?
Bret: One of the reasons I’m so dismayed by Biden’s performance is that it’s going to tempt Trump to run again. In which case, I’ll vote for whoever is most likely to beat Trump. Hell, I’d probably even vote for Bernie. I’d rather have a president who’s a danger to the economy and national security than one who’s a danger to democracy and national sanity.
Gail: I do like imagining you walking around town with a Bernie button.
Bret: Let’s not take this too far! Hopefully it will work out differently. Bill Clinton managed to straighten out his presidency after a terrible start that included the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia and the failure of Hillary Clinton’s health care plan. But that means tacking back toward the center. If I were Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, I’d be quietly pushing Nancy Pelosi to pass a “clean” $1 trillion infrastructure bill that gives the president the big bipartisan win that he really needs now.
Gail: And has all the stuff that you like.
Bret: As for his $3.5 trillion social-spending behemoth, he might consider breaking up the bill into separate items of legislation to bring the headline price tag down. If this stuff is as popular as progressives claim, they should be able to score some legislative victories piece by piece.
Gail: Sounds reasonable outside the reality of our modern-day Congress, in which the idea of passing more than one bill on anything seems way, way more difficult than firing a shuttle into space.
Bret: In the meantime, we’ve got a recall election coming up in California, for which polling shows Governor Newsom will likely survive. I’m not Newsom’s biggest fan, but the whole idea of recall elections seems … unsound.
Gail: Yeah, California makes it relatively easy to gather enough signatures for a recall vote, and this is a good example of why that’s bad. Newsom has been one of the strongest governors when it comes to pandemic-fighting, and while that’s great, the restrictions have been around for so long it’s left a lot of people feeling really cranky.
Bret: I’m making my quizzical face. Go on.
Gail: Then we had one of the worst political errors in recent American political history, when Newsom snuck off to a very fancy restaurant for a maskless birthday dinner for a lobbyist pal. Who wouldn’t have muttered “this guy has to go”?
Bret: It was also emblematic of out-of-touch California elites who live on a totally different planet from the one in which there’s a housing crisis, a homelessness crisis, an affordability crisis, an addiction crisis, a pension crisis, a schooling crisis, a power-outage crisis, a wildfires crisis, a water-shortage crisis and maybe even another Kardashian crisis — all in a state that’s under almost complete Democratic Party control.
Gail: But now recall reality is creeping in. People are looking at the conservative Republican who’d probably wind up as Newsom’s successor and realizing there are way worse things than a tone-deaf politician.
Bret: California could really benefit from breaking up the Democrats’ electoral monopoly. Too bad the state Republican Party did itself so much damage with its terrible anti-immigration stance in the 1990s.
Gail: Having two consistently competitive parties is good — when a party has hope of winning an election, it’s less likely to snap up a crazy person or a ridiculous person as a candidate. Which I’m afraid does get us over to Newson’s potential Republican successor, Larry Elder. Speaking of Republicans, anybody coming up now who’s winning your heart?
Bret: Liz Cheney: gutsy and principled. Adam Kinzinger: ditto. Ben Sasse: decent and smart. Larry Hogan: ditto. John McCain: historic, heroic, humane — but tragically deceased. Basically, all the folks whose chances of surviving in the current G.O.P. are about as great as a small herd of gazelles in a crocodile-infested river.
Gail: You’ve picked five Republicans, none of them stars on the rise and one long since passed away. Trump still has a grip on the heart of the party. Which is why I haven’t given up hope that we’ll lasso you back into voting Democratic in 2024.
But way, way more topics for discussion before that. Have a good week, Bret, and let’s make a date to discuss the results of the California recall next time. If Newsom wins, we’re all going to be watching avidly to see where he holds his victory party.
Bret: He should try holding it at an actual laundromat this time, not the French Laundry.
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