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Germany’s Handling of the Pandemic: A Model of Incompetence?
There is an unwritten rule in politics: If you are incompetent, at least you should not be corrupt. It seems nobody ever informed the German Christian Democrats that this was the way of things. How else to explain why Christian Democratic MPs thought it was perfectly fine to take advantage of Germany’s COVID-19 crisis to line their own pockets? In German, we have a word, “Raffzahn,” to refer to somebody who cannot get enough, never satisfied with what they have. In the concrete case, a member of the German Bundestag from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) pocketed €250,000 ($298,000) in commissions for brokering a deal involving the procurement of FFP2 face masks by the federal and the state governments.
Another member, who so happened to serve as deputy leader of the Christian Democratic parliamentary group, this time from the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, appears to have made similar deals. Both were exposed and were ultimately forced to resign from the parliamentary group and leave their parties. End of the story, or so the Christian Democrats hoped. But this Maskenaffäre (masks affair) continued to provoke strong emotions. In the process, it not only severely damaged the CDU/CSU’s image, but also caused a significant loss of trust in the party.
Beware! Populism Might be Bad for Your Health
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The mask affair is not the only scandal that has haunted the party. Another controversy has been smoldering for some time now, involving dubious business relations between CDU MPs and the quasi-dictatorial regime of Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s strongman. A few days ago, one of the MPs involved in the affair relinquished his mandate. Two other MPs are being investigated by the public prosecutor’s office in Munich on charges of corruption. Apparently, payments were made to the MPs in exchange for their keeping quiet about the dismal human rights record of the regime in Baku. Pecunia non olet, as they used to say in ancient Rome — money does not stink — not even in the offices of the Christian Democrats.
A Super Election Year
Unfortunately, this year is what in German is known as a Superwahljahr — a super election year. In September, Germans are called upon to elect a new federal parliament. In the meantime, a number of Germany’s Länder, the regional administrative units that constitute the federation, will elect their regional governments. The process started with elections in two southwestern regions, Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz, over the weekend. With a population of more than 11 million, Baden-Württemberg is the more important state; Rheinland-Pfalz’s population amounts to a mere 4 million.
In addition, Baden-Württemberg used to be a CDU stronghold. In the 1970s, the party routinely scored more than 50% of the vote, with a high point in the 1976 state election which saw the CDU gain over 56%. From then on, things started to go downhill. In the first election in the new century, the CDU still commanded roughly 45% of the vote; by 2016, it reached rock bottom, at 27%. It could not get any worse, or so it seemed. It did. The latest pre-election polls had the CDU at 24% of the vote. On Sunday, the party lost roughly 3% compared to the previous election, which left it with roughly what the polls had anticipated.
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The situation in Rheinland-Pfalz was similar. In the 1970s, the CDU gained on average around 50% of the vote. By the new century, its support stood at 35%; 15 years later, at 32%. Pre-election polls had the party at around 29%, with a downward tendency. And fall it did: With a loss of around 4% of the vote, it scored a historic low. At the same time, in both Länder, the radical populist-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) returned to parliament, even if significantly decimated. It should also be noted that a large number of people in both states voted by mail, in many cases weeks before the election and before the disastrous masks scandal. Otherwise, the CDU losses would probably have been even greater. Hardly surprising, the dominant issue in these elections was COVID-19 or, more precisely, the government’s handling of the pandemic, particularly after the second wave hit the country in late fall.
By now, the judgment is in, and it is devastating on many accounts. You know that something has gone terribly wrong when those who used to admire you, such as the British, now express either derision or, worse, pity; or when Germany’s leading news magazine Der Spiegel feels the need to ask why the United States — once jeered for its lack of preparedness during the Trump administration — “is so much better when it comes to vaccinating.”
A recent account of vaccination data collected and put online by Germany’s leading public television channel, ARD, proves the point. Germany is far, far behind countries such as Israel, Great Britain, the United States, Chile, Hungary and even Greece — the country Germans love to denigrate as mismanaged and corrupt. At the beginning of March, merely 3% of the population had received the vaccine in Germany, and this despite the fact that the first vaccine to be certified was a German co-production.
Appearance vs. Reality
The pandemic has brutally exposed the fundamental difference between appearance and reality. For long, Germany has promoted itself as a model to follow — the famed “Modell Deutschland” — or at least was promoted by outsiders as such. The perhaps most prominent promoter was Michel Albert, the former head of the French General Commission for the Modernization and Equipment Plan. In his 1991 book, “Capitalisme contre capitalisme” (“Capitalism Against Capitalism”), he postulated the superiority of “Rhenish capitalism” over the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. The book was translated into several languages and proved highly influential. One wonders whether Albert’s analysis would be the same today. I somehow doubt it.
Central to progress in any kind of capitalist system is innovation, what the prophet of innovation, Joseph Schumpeter, famously characterized as “creative destruction.” New technologies and particularly digitalization have advanced with dramatic speed over the past two decades, making innovation absolutely crucial for a country’s competitiveness. This is a painful lesson Germany has been forced to learn as the pandemic progressed. As an article in the country’s leading business newspaper, Handelsblatt, warned last year, Germany was falling farther and farther behind with respect to innovation. Among the reasons are, most prominently, a dearth of top research, high-tech investments and, last but not least, openness to the world. For Germany to regain its competitive edge, the author charged, politics had to wake up from its Dornröschenschlaf (Sleeping Beauty’s slumber) and provide necessary measures.
A year later, politics has still not completely woken up; or, perhaps, it has woken up but is fundamentally incapable of addressing the myriad of problems and challenges it confronts. Examples abound, some tragic, others bordering on the ridiculous and the grotesque. Take the case of inoculations. The program started a couple of weeks ago. It progressed at a snail’s pace. In the face of massive public attempts to secure an appointment, the server crashed and phone hotlines were overwhelmed for hours on end. In the meantime, letters designed to inform the over 80-year-olds could not be sent, among other things because authorities lacked the necessary information regarding age. As a result, in some cases, authorities guessed the age of potential recipients on the basis of their first names. Adolf and Adolfine — a sure bet the person is eligible for priority vaccination.
Angela Merkel: A Retrospective
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Take the case of COVID-19 tests as another example. Bavaria introduced them in the late summer of 2020, with suboptimal results, to put it kindly. Test results were supposed to be delivered within 48 hours. In reality, it took up to a week, the result of a technical glitch at the private server provider in charge of the tests. The experiment turned out to be a major debacle, with doctors having to cancel appointments and health authorities going incommunicado. In the new year, German authorities once again took up the question of testing in a lengthy debate that took several weeks. Finally, in early March, Germany’s health minister from the CDU, Jens Spahn, announced that the government had ordered hundreds of millions of test kits. Critics were quick to point out that Germany lacked the capacity to carry out the tests.
In an earlier article on Angela Merkel’s legacy (she leaves office in September), I have suggested that her place in history will be judged by the way she handles the pandemic. By now, it is apparent that the chancellor’s COVID-19 crisis management has been nothing short of disastrous. In early February, Merkel conceded mistakes but insisted that on the whole, the government’s cautious and hesitant approach had been justified. The fact is — and German media have pointed it out on numerous occasions — that many of the problems linked to the pandemic are the result of years of neglect during Merkel’s mandate, particularly when it comes to Germany’s digital infrastructure. Compared to other countries in the European Union, Germany is a “digital developing country,” an assessment recently made by the Boston Consulting Group and widely commented on in the media. In fact, it seems that over the past decade or so, Germany has fallen even more behind other countries, such as Estonia.
The pandemic has brutally exposed to what degree Germany was lagging behind its main competitors — at least five to 10 years, as one observer asserted last year. The impact is felt every day in offices, labs and particularly schools. Last year, an EU education report noted that in 2017-18, only 9% of Germany’s elementary students had access to a digitally well-equipped school. Once the pandemic forced schools to shut down and go online, the consequences of Germany’s digital divide became glaringly obvious, to the detriment of the youngest generation.
Don’t Expect Too Much
It is becoming increasingly clear that Angela Merkel’s time in office has been characterized by a degree of Panglossian complacency combined with a cautious and hesitant don’t-rock-the-boat mentality that left the country largely unprepared to deal with this pandemic in an efficient, effective and competent way. The most recent example is who gets to be part of the vaccination program. While family doctors and general practitioners have strongly expressed their desire to be part of the roll-out, the government continued to prefer public vaccination centers, thus ignoring viable options to accelerate the pace of immunization.
It was only after protracted negotiations between the federal government and the Länder that an agreement was reached to open the vaccination campaign to private practices starting in mid-April. At the same time, Spahn, himself heavily criticized for the test kit disaster, dampened expectations given the bottlenecks in the procurement of vaccines. As the health minister put it, “One has to be a bit cautious with regard to the management of expectations.” In other words, don’t expect too much — a perfect characterization of the government’s dealing with the pandemic over the past several months.
The result has been growing popular discontent. In early March, a large majority of respondents in a representative poll expressed dissatisfaction with the organization of the vaccination campaign, the supply of testing kits and the way the vaccines were procured. At the same time, in a second poll, almost half of respondents said they were dissatisfied with the work the Christian Democrats did in government (a bit more than 40% said they were satisfied). And as a result of the Maskenaffäre, trust in the Christian Democrats has plunged to record lows.
In German, we have the word, “richtungsweisend” — pointing to a direction or setting the trend. Ulli Hoeness, the iconic former president of Germany’s most successful soccer club, Bayern München, once proclaimed that “the trend is your friend.” This might be true for Germany’s premier soccer club, but it is certainly not true of the Christian Democrats. The results of the two elections last weekend portend ills for the federal vote later this year.
They also do not bode well for the reputation of Angela Merkel, who is likely to be remembered primarily for her (mis)handling of the coronavirus crisis, for failing to halt or reverse the Christian Democrats’ downward spiral at the polls and, last but not least, for being incapable of preventing the AfD from establishing itself in Germany’s party system. As the good book says, “You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting” (Daniel 5:27).
*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Covid cases fall over 80% among US nursing home staff and residents
Joan Phillips, a certified nursing assistant in a Florida nursing home, loved her job but dreaded the danger of going to work in the pandemic. When vaccines became available in December, she jumped at the chance to get one.Months later, it appears that danger has faded. After the rollout of Covid vaccines, the number of new Covid cases among nursing home staff fell 83% – from 28,802 for the week ending 20 December to 4,764 for the week ending 14 February, data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services shows.New Covid-19 infections among nursing home residents fell even more steeply, by 89%, in that period, compared with 58% in the general public, CMS and Johns Hopkins University data show.These numbers suggest that “the vaccine appears to be having a dramatic effect on reducing cases, which is extremely encouraging,” said Beth Martino, spokesperson for the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living, an industry group.“It’s a big relief for me,” said Phillips, who works at the North Beach Rehabilitation Center outside Miami. Now, she said, she’s urging hesitant co-workers and anyone else who can to “go out and take the vaccination”.After a brutal year in which the pandemic killed half a million Americans, despite unprecedented measures to curb its spread – including mask-wearing, physical distancing, school closures and economic shutdowns – the vaccines are giving hope that an end is in sight.National figures on healthcare worker infections in other settings are hard to come by.Research in other countries suggests that vaccines have led to big drops in infection. A study of publicly funded hospitals in England indicated that a first dose was 72% effective at preventing Covid-19 among workers after 21 days and 86% effective seven days after the second shot.Lost on the Frontline, a year-long data and reporting project by KHN and the Guardian, is investigating over 3,500 Covid deaths of US healthcare workers. The monthly number has been declining since December, but deaths often lag weeks or months behind infections.Along with other healthcare workers, nursing home staff and residents were first in line to get vaccines in December because elderly people in congregate settings are among the most vulnerable to infection: more than 125,000 residents have died of Covid, CMS data shows, while over 550,000 nursing home staff members have tested positive and more than 1,600 have died.Yet the vaccination rate among staffers is far lower than that of residents. When the first clinics ran from mid-December to mid-January, a median of 78% of nursing home residents took a dose, while the median for staff was only 38%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now several nursing home associations said the rate of staff vaccination has been climbing, based on informal surveys.Vaccine uptake by nursing home residents has been “very promising,” said Dr Morgan Katz, a specialist in infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University who is advising Covid responses in nursing homes. “I do think this is a huge contributing factor” to the drop in staff cases, she said.Having even one or two vaccinated people in a building can slow transmission.Another factor, Katz said, is that “many nursing homes have already experienced large outbreaks – so there are probably a significant proportion of residents and staff who are already immune.” Also, Covid rates have fallen nationally after a spike from holiday travel and gatherings in November and December, so staff members have less exposure in their communities.But “even though we’re seeing a really wonderful turn in the number of cases,” she said, “we need to remember that as long as the staff is 50 or 30% vaccinated, they remain vulnerable, and they’re also putting incredibly vulnerable long-term care residents at risk.”Vaccination efforts are racing against time as new Covid variants circulate and some states dramatically relax Covid restrictions, making it easier for the virus to spread.Distrust fuels vaccine hesitancyThe question of why some workers refuse the vaccine looms. The New Jersey Veterans Memorial Home at Menlo Park endured a major outbreak last year in which more than 100 workers contracted Covid and over 60 residents and a certified nurse assistant, Monemise Romelus, died. Shirley Lewis, a union president representing CNAs and other workers, said it was traumatizing. Still, only about half of workers there have taken the vaccine, Lewis said, and one is out sick with Covid.“A lot of my members are not too excited about taking this vaccine because they’re afraid,” Lewis said.Some workers want to wait a little longer to see how safe the vaccine is, she said. Others tell her they don’t trust the vaccines because they were developed so quickly, she said.Other staffers “feel like it’s an experimental drug,” Lewis said, “because as you know, Blacks, Latinos, other groups have been used for experiments” like the Tuskegee syphilis study, she said.Vaccine hesitancy is higher among 30- to 49-year-olds, rural residents and Black and Hispanic adults, according to KFF.A lot of my members are not too excited about taking this vaccineCertified nursing assistants, who make up the bulk of long-term care workers, have historically been less likely to get flu vaccines than other healthcare workers, noted Jasmine Travers, an assistant professor of nursing at New York University who studies vaccine hesitancy. Nursing homes typically don’t have nurse educators, who address worker concerns about vaccines in hospitals, she said, and CNAs also face structural barriers such as limited internet access.Nursing homes tend to be hierarchies commonly led by white staffers, while about 50% of CNAs, at the bottom of the power structure, are Black or Hispanic, she added.With the Covid vaccine, some are afraid theywill have to take sick time to miss work and don’t want to burden their co-workers, who are already short-staffed, Travers said.Deliberate misinformationLow vaccine uptake among long-term care workers has been a concern nationally – so much so that LeadingAge, a national group representing not-for-profit long-term care facilities, held a virtual town hall about vaccine safety on 4 March with the Black Coalition Against Covid-19.The event, which drew over 45,000 viewers, was geared toward Black long-term care workers.Dr Reed Tuckson, co-founder of the Black Coalition Against Covid-19, said viewers raised concerns about fertility, pregnancy and contraindications. He said the event also had “a lot of provocateurs” who insisted, “it’s all a myth, it’s all a lie.”His group plans to hold more public informational sessions aimed at Black audiences.“There is no question that the three vaccines that we now have available to us are extraordinarily safe and tremendously effective,” said Tuckson, a former public health commissioner in Washington.The nursing home industry has set a goal to have 75% of staff members vaccinated nationwide by the end of June.Hesitancy doesn’t mean refusalMost nursing homes have not mandated vaccinations, industry officials say, due to fear of losing staff. Because the vaccines were authorized on an emergency basis, liability is also a concern.Juniper Communities, which runs 22 long-term care facilities in four states and employs almost 1,300 people, had 30 workers leave the job after it mandated vaccines, according to Dr Lynne Katzmann, president and CEO.Even when staff are initially reluctant to take vaccines, “it doesn’t mean that this is a permanent refusal,” Travers said.In south-western Ohio, Kenn Daily runs two nursing homes run by Ayden Healthcare. About half of his staff and 85% of residents got vaccinated by mid-February, he said, and they haven’t had a case of Covid since. Still, he said, vaccine resistance persists among younger staffers who read misinformation online.“Facebook is the bane of my existence,” Daily said. Workers tell him they worry “they’re going to microchip me,” or that the vaccine will change their DNA.Now that time has passed since the initial rollout, Daily said, “I’m hoping to put a little pressure on my staff to step up and get vaccinated.”His message: “It’s working, guys. It’s working very well.”KHN data editor Elizabeth Lucas contributed to this report.KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation. More
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Bidenomics beats Reaganomics and I should know – I saw Clintonomics fail | Robert Reich
A quarter-century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and abiding poverty. But Clinton’s political advisers warned that unless he went along, he would jeopardize his reelection.That was the end of welfare as we knew it. As Clinton boasted in his State of the Union address to Congress that year: “The era of big government is over.”Until Thursday, that is. Joe Biden signed into law the biggest expansion of government assistance since the 1960s – a guaranteed income for most families with children, raising the maximum benefit by up to 80% per child.As Biden put it in his address to the nation, as if answering Clinton: “The government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us, all of us, we the people.”As a senator, Biden supported Clinton’s 1996 welfare restrictions, as did most Americans. What happened between then and now? Three big things.First, Covid. The pandemic has been a national wake-up call on the fragility of middle-class incomes. The deep Covid recession has revealed the harsh consequences of most Americans living paycheck to paycheck.For years, Republicans used welfare to drive a wedge between the white working middle class and the poor. Ronald Reagan portrayed black, inner-city mothers as freeloaders and con artists, repeatedly referring to “a woman in Chicago” as the “welfare queen”.Trump replaced economic Reaganism with narcissistic grievances, claims of voter fraud and cultural paranoiaStarting in the 1970s, women had streamed into paid work in order to prop up family incomes decimated by the decline in male factory jobs. These families were particularly susceptible to the Republican message. Why should “they” get help for not working when “we” get no help, and we work?By the time Clinton campaigned for president, “ending welfare as we knew it” had become a talisman of so-called New Democrats, even though there was little or no evidence that welfare benefits discouraged the unemployed from taking jobs. (In Britain, enlarged child benefits actually increased employment among single mothers.)Yet when Covid hit, a new reality became painfully clear: public assistance was no longer just for “them”. It was needed by all of “us”.The second big thing was Donald Trump. He exploited racism, to be sure, but also replaced economic Reaganism with narcissistic grievances, claims of voter fraud and cultural paranoia stretching from Dr Seuss to Mr Potato Head.Trump obliterated concerns about government give-aways. The Cares Act, which he signed into law at the end of March 2020, gave most Americans checks of $1,200 (to which he calculatedly attached his name). When this proved enormously popular, he demanded the next round of stimulus checks be $2,000.But Trump’s biggest give-away was the GOP’s $1.9tn 2018 tax cut, under which benefits went overwhelmingly to the top 20%. Despite promises of higher wages for everyone else, nothing trickled down. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, America’s 660 billionaires – major beneficiaries of the tax cut – became $1.3tn wealthier, enough to give every American a $3,900 check and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic.The third big thing is the breadth of Biden’s plan. Under it, more than 93% of the nation’s children – 69 million – receive benefits. Incomes of Americans in the lowest quintile will increase by 20%; those in the second-lowest, 9%; those in the middle, 6%.Rather than pit the working middle class against the poor, this unites them. Some 76% of Americans supported the bill, including 63% of low-income Republicans (a quarter of all Republican voters). Younger conservatives are particularly supportive, presumably because people under 50 have felt the brunt of the four-decade slowdown in real wage growth.Given all this, it’s amazing that zero Republican members of Congress voted for it, while 278 voted for Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and the rich.The political lesson is that today’s Democrats – who enjoy popular vote majorities in presidential elections (having won seven of the past eight) – can gain political majorities by raising the wages of both middle class and poor voters, while fighting Republican efforts to suppress the votes of likely Democrats.The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. For years, conservative economists argued that tax cuts for the rich create job-creating investments, while assistance to the poor creates dependency. Rubbish.Bidenomics is exactly the reverse: Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone. This is far more plausible. We’ll learn how much in coming months. More
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'Masking works': Austin fights back as Texas loosens Covid-19 restrictions
Months of hostility and infighting between Texas’s Republican and Democratic leaders reached a breaking point this week, when the state sued Austin and Travis county officials who were still requiring residents to wear masks in public.In a move decried as “reckless” around the United States, Texas ended almost all of its coronavirus-related restrictions on Wednesday, including a statewide mask mandate and capacity limits on businesses.But, bolstered by the formidable body of evidence that shows face coverings mitigate the spread of Covid-19, local jurisdictions such as Austin and Round Rock have decided to keep their safety protocols, drawing ire from state politicians.“I told Travis County & The City of Austin to comply with state mask law. They blew me off. So, once again, I’m dragging them to court,” the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, tweeted Thursday.Steve Adler, Austin’s mayor, said that he and Travis county judge Andy Brown would “fight to defend and enforce our local health officials’ rules for as long as possible using all the power and tools available to us”, though it wasn’t immediately clear how they planned to ensure compliance.“We promised to be guided by the doctors, science and data as concerns the pandemic and we do everything we can to keep that promise,” Adler said in a statement. “Wearing masks is perhaps the most important thing we can do to slow the spread of the virus.”Brown tweeted on Friday that “the requirement to wear masks in Travis county and Austin businesses remains in effect”, after a district judge didn’t block the local policy for the time being.“We return to court March 26,” Adler tweeted. “No matter what happens then, we will continue to be guided by doctors and data. Masking works.”At a press conference earlier this month Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, drew cheers as he announced it was time for his state to open “100%”, presenting the sudden shift in regulations as a gift to business owners and workers who have struggled because of a recession linked to the pandemic.But when Elizabeth Dixie Patrick, executive director of the Austin Independent Business Alliance, heard from local business owners about the policy change, they overwhelmingly expressed confusion, dismay and frustration.“The difference between encouraging mask wearing and mandating mask wearing is about who has to tell people, ‘no, you can’t endanger other people,’” Patrick said. “To place another burden on small business owners right now, when they’re already struggling just to stay afloat, creates all of this unnecessary anxiety.”Abbott has forced businesses into an unenviable catch-22, where owners must either go along with his no-restrictions strategy, knowingly putting staff in danger, or protect public health but “risk being harassed and attacked,” Patrick said.“The governor’s order is emboldening the people who are feeling like they have this right to put their own comfort above the safety of their fellow citizens,” she added.The state’s hasty return to pre-pandemic life comes even as only about 9% of Texans are fully vaccinated, and while a large swathe of the population remains ineligible for the jab. It marks yet another chapter in a seemingly endless saga where state and local officials battle it out, handicapping Texas’s coronavirus response in the process.During the summer, when Texas experienced a devastating spike in coronavirus cases, counties and cities trying desperately to enact and enforce regulations were thwarted by the state. Then, in the winter, Paxton sued almost immediately after Austin announced new restrictions trying to prevent further damage during another surge around the New Year’s holiday.Amid a series of court battles, brash reopenings and mask-related controversies, Texans have suffered more than 2.3 million confirmed infections and over 45,000 deaths from Covid-19.When Abbott announced his decision to sunset coronavirus-related protections earlier this month, other leaders in Texas’s large cities expressed fervent opposition, including Oscar Leeser, El Paso’s mayor, who recounted how his brother was infected and died from the virus after visiting their ailing mother without a face mask.“I share this very personal story not to seek sympathy,” he wrote, but “as someone who is deeply aware of the power and protection that wearing a face mask can provide an individual.” More
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Biden's make or break moment: president aims to build on success of relief bill
In the White House Rose Garden, where for four years Donald Trump raucously celebrated political wins with his allies, it was now the turn of Democrats to take a victory lap – masked and physically distanced, of course.Kamala Harris, the vice-president, heaped praise on Joe Biden for signing a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, the biggest expansion of the American welfare state in decades. “Your empathy has become a trademark of your presidency and can be found on each and every page of the American Rescue Plan,” Harris said.Democrats this week passed the plan into law; now they have to sell it. Friday’s event with members of Congress fired the starting gun for Biden, Harris and their spouses to mount an aggressive marketing campaign, travelling the country to tell Americans directly how the hard won legislation will improve their lives.Salesmanship was always seen as Trump’s forte but this is a golden opportunity for Biden, a once unlikely saviour. The oldest president ever elected – at age 78 – is riding high in opinion polls. His rescue plan is endorsed by three in four citizens. His opposition is in disarray with Republicans struggling to find a coherent counter- narrative, squabbling over Trump and obsessing over culture wars.But Biden’s long career will have taught him the laws of political gravity: presidents and prime ministers who start on the up inevitably take a fall. He has also spoken of the need to avoid the fate of Barack Obama who, having intervened to stave off financial disaster in 2009, was repaid with a “shellacking” for Democrats in the midterm elections.Politics is about momentum and, with vaccines coming fast, the economy set to roar back, and spring in the air, Biden has it for now. Ed Rogers, a political consultant and veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush administrations, said: “In politics, good gets better, bad gets worse. Biden is on something of a roll right now and so it’s good for him to be a little more aggressive and be seen out and about.“They do want to take credit and he should. The tides will turn; there’ll be periods when they look like they can’t do anything right.”In what the White House calls a Help is Here tour, first lady Jill Biden is set to travel to Burlington, New Jersey, on Monday, while the president will visit Delaware county, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will go to Las Vegas on Monday and Denver on Tuesday. Emhoff will remain out west and make a stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Wednesday.At the end of the week, Biden and Harris will make their first joint trip in office to Atlanta where Democrats’ victories in two Senate runoff elections in January were pivotal to getting the relief package passed against unyielding Republican opposition.The White House has acknowledged that the public relations offensive is an attempt to avoid a repeat of 2009, when the Obama administration did not do enough to explain and promote its own economic recovery plan. Biden, who was vice-president at the time, told colleagues last week that Obama was modest and did not want to take a victory lap. “We paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility,” he said.That price included a backlash in the form of the Tea Party movement and rise of rightwing populism. But there were important differences in substance as well as style. Obama’s $787bn bill, which followed the bailout of the banks, delivered a recovery that felt abstract and glacial. This time the impact is more immediate and tangible: some Americans will receive a $1,400 stimulus payment this weekend, with mass vaccinations and school reopenings on the way.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “I underestimated the extent to which the experience of 2009 has seared itself into the memory of senior Democrats: the interpretation of going too small and paying the price in a painfully slow recovery, spending too long at the beginning negotiating with members of the other party who were never going to agree and never going to compromise, not telling the American people what they had accomplished for them.“The list of lessons learned is a very long one and, to an extent that I find surprising, the administration is refighting and winning the past war.”Despite preventing financial meltdown, Democrats lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, the biggest shift since 1948. That fit a pattern in which the incumbent president’s party tends to fare badly in the first midterms, and so Republicans are upbeat about their chances of regaining both the House and Senate next year.Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Obama, argues that the Covid relief bill is the start of the battle for the 2022 midterms and warns that Democrats cannot take the credit for granted since Americans “currently have the long-term memory of a sea cucumber”.He wrote in the Message Box newsletter last week that despite Obama’s speeches and visits to factories, “it was nearly impossible to break through the avalanche of bad news”. But “this plan’s benefits are more specific, more easily understood, and likely to be broadly felt before too long”.Pfeiffer urged grassroots supporters to join Biden and Harris in the messaging effort via social media. “I spent much of 2009 and 2010 banging my head against the proverbial wall because not enough people knew about how Barack Obama had helped prevent the economy from tumbling into a second Great Depression,” he added. “Let’s not do that again.”The plan will also require strict oversight to ensure money is not misspent or wasted. Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “It is a massive bill with massive consequences but it requires not just the president and vice-president and cabinet but state and local governments to also work together to ensure that the vaccines are rolled out in an equitable way and ordinary citizens are able to take advantage of some of the wonderful initiatives that are in the bill.”There has been a striking contrast between Biden and Harris’s disciplined focus on passing historic legislation and Republicans’ fixation on “cancel culture”, from Dr Seuss, after the children’s author’s publishing house announced it was discontinuing several books that contained racist imagery, to confusion over whether the Mr Potato Head toy will still be a “Mr”.The issue, which often gets more coverage on conservative media than coronavirus relief, is seen as a way of animating the base in a way that attacks on Biden do not. The president is not Black like Obama, nor a woman like Hillary Clinton, nor a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders, all of which seem to have inoculated him against demonisation by the rightwing attack machine.And despite its popularity with the public, every Republican senator opposed the American Rescue Plan, offering Biden’s team a chance to score political points. Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “It’ll be interesting to see how much they make it about the benefits of the plan versus about Republicans not having voted for the plan.”Chen, policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, added: “The challenge for Democrats is going to be as elements of this come out that will be unpopular, is it going to be defined by the things that are unpopular or the things that would appear to be politically quite favourable?” The OECD predicts that the rescue plan will help the US economy grow at a 6.5% rate this year, which would be its fastest annual growth since the early 1980s. But as Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Tony Blair discovered, all political honeymoons come to an end.Republicans are already exploring a new line of attack by accusing the president of ignoring the burgeoning crisis of a surge in children and families trying to cross the southern border. The rare outbreak of unity among Democrats – in the Rose Garden, Biden thanked Sanders for his efforts – is not likely to endure. And the next major item on the legislative wishlist, infrastructure, is likely to be even tougher.But it is the American Rescue Plan, and the political battle to define it, that could make or break Biden’s presidency. Michael Steel, who was press secretary for former Republican House speaker John Boehner, said: “They’re making a bet on economic recovery and I hope they’re right because I want the US economy to recover swiftly.”But, he added, “I think that people will continue learning more about the things in this legislation that are not directly related to Covid relief or economic stimulus. There’s definitely a real risk of blowback.”Steel, now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a public affairs consulting firm, added: “We could be on the on the verge of a new Roaring Twenties with a booming economy and so much pent up demand for people to travel and live and spend money. We could also be priming the pump for a devastating wave of inflation. The economy is generally the number one issue going into an election and there’s a very real chance that we have a tremendous upside or some dangers ahead.” More
- in US Politics
Trump coronavirus coordinator, Deborah Birx, takes job at air purifier business
Dr Deborah Birx, the former Trump White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, is taking a private sector job, joining a Texas manufacturer that says its purifiers clean Covid-19 from the air within minutes and from surfaces within hours.Birx will join Dallas-based ActivePure as chief scientific and medical adviser, she and the company said on Friday.An expert in global health, Birx came to the White House in 2020 to help lead the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.But she was criticised for not standing up to former president Donald Trump as he played down the virus, predicted it would disappear, and questioned whether ingesting bleach could help cure infected Americans.[embedded content]While her friend and former mentor, Dr Anthony Fauci, was promoted to become a top medical adviser to Joe Biden, Birx did not get a job in the new administration.“The Biden administration wanted a clean slate,” she told Reuters in an interview. “I understand that completely.”Birx left government earlier this week.She and Fauci, she said, asked themselves regularly what could have been done differently over the last year.“When you have the 100,000 people we lost over the summer, and the 300,000 people we lost over the fall-winter surge, you have to ask yourself and have to know that it didn’t go as well as it should have,” she said.“All of us are responsible for that.”The coronavirus has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States, more than any other country.Birx said she was still processing regrets and steps she could have taken to do be more effective.“I’m trying to rank order them,” she said. “We have to be willing to step back and really analyse where we could have been and why we weren’t more effective.”Birx said she remained concerned about the level of testing in the country, but she praised the new administration for modelling mask-wearing and other behaviours that help to combat the virus.Trump, a Republican, eschewed masks.“I think the messaging has been very good, very consistent,” she said of the Biden team. “That’s really important when you’re asking people to change their behaviours.”In addition to her role at ActivePure, Birx has also joined the George W Bush Institute as a global health fellow and the biopharmaceutical company Innoviva as a board member, she said. More
