HOW NEWARK HONORED GEORGE FLOYD . . . AND SCHOOLED AMERICA

HOW NEWARK HONORED GEORGE FLOYD . . .
AND SCHOOLED AMERICA

George Floyd was killed on Monday evening a week ago.

When he died laid out on a street in Minneapolis with a knee on his neck and two on his back, Floyd was a forty-six year old father, grandfather, and restaurant security guard. He had lived in Minnesota for five years.  He was born in North Carolina and raised in Houston, where he had been a star high school athlete.  He was also a black man.  Among his last words were "I can't breathe," "my neck hurts," "everything hurts," "I'm about to die,"  and "Don't kill me."

None of them mattered.

At the time Floyd died, three cops were on top of him.  One, Derek Chauvin, had his knee on Floyd's neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. Two others were kneeling on Floyd's back and legs.  Another stood alongside Chauvin.  At some point, a bystander told the police to "get [Floyd] off the ground," and complained that "You could have put him in the car by now.  He's not resisting arrest or nothing."

Those words didn't matter either.

When EMS arrived, Floyd was non-responsive.  He was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead at 9:25 pm.  The four cops were fired the next day,  and three days after that, Chauvin was arrested on charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.  He now sits in a maximum security jail with bail set at $500,000 but apparently not met, and is scheduled to appear in court for the first time on June 8.  The other three are at large and have not been charged at this time.

A county medical examiner  ruled Floyd’s death a homicide and an autopsy performed by Dr. Michael Baden, the world renowned forensic pathologist and NYC's one-time chief medical examiner, concluded that Floyd's death was caused by the three policemen who held him down.

In the week since, protests have broken out in 141 American cities and a handful of foreign ones. The protests were multi-racial and bi-partisan.  In many cases, the police themelves either participated or were openly supportive.  And they should have been.  Floyd's death is only the latest in a long line of blue on black excessive force that stretches back over the decades and too frequently results in the deaths of black men.

Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Amadou Diallo, et al.

The list is long.

It's also part of a systemic problem that plagues law enforcement.  There's a reason for "the conversation" every black parent has with his or her child; the one warning the kids to keep their hands visible and their mouths shut whenever a cop approaches.

The alternative can be death.

Though large numbers of the protests -- and protesters -- were peaceful, a not insignificant number were not.

A Minneapolis police precinct was torched on Thursday and in cities throughout the country rioters  have overturned and set police cars and utility vehicles ablaze; in New York City, two lawyers  threw a molotov cocktail into a police car in Brooklyn.  Looting is commonplace, with property damage running into the millions, and as of Monday, four thousand had been arrested.  In twenty-one states, the National Guard has been called up.  At least five people have died and dozens of mayors have imposed curfews.

One city, however, did not burn.

Newark, New Jersey lies fifteen miles west of Manhattan as the crow flies and is home to 282,000, 84% of whom are black or Hispanic.  This past Saturday afternoon, 12,000 of them took to the streets to protest George Floyd's death at the hands of three of Minnesota's supposed finest.  Among the protesters was the poet's son and city's Mayor, Ras Baraka.

During the protest, no one was arrested, no police cars were torched, no looting occurred, and (save for a few slashed tires) no property was damaged.  The police chief, a white guy, decided that the cops monitoring the protesters' march would not be wearing SWAT or riot gear, and a citizen-manned, fifty person community street team created six years ago self-deployed to de-escalate any tension.

And de-escalate they did.

At one point, a white protester started smashing the window of a Dunkin Donuts.  At another, a group moved toward buildings owned by Prudential Financial, a business anchor that has been in Newark for over 145 years. The street team stopped both. Later that night, outside the First Precinct where riots had begun in the 1960s, an angry crowd of close to a thousand apparently bent on destroying or  trashing the place was faced down by a line of cops . . .

And the hundreds of citizens who stood with them.

By 10:30 pm, the crowd began to disperse as the street team told any who didn't actually live in the city to leave.

Newark's official historian, Junus Williams,  was a law student in the '60s when Newark burned.  Over the weekend, he praised the Mayor. Said Williams: "[T]he people . . . don't see [Baraka] as an obstacle to their righteous anger.  They know that he's angry, too."  Prudential's CEO was even more direct. "You can't underestimate [Baraka's] influence in this. It's . . . an overall image . . .  that we can do more together than we can do apart."  The best praise, however, came from the Rev. Louise Scott-Rountree, the head of Newark's Interfaith Alliance,  and was extended to her flock.  "You better not mess with my family," said the Reverend,  "That's Newark."

No kidding.

Call it Ghandi and Dr. King's non-violence . . .

On steroids.

Yesterday, a little more than two hundred miles south of Newark, the President of the United States had a different idea.

In a conference call, he told the nation's governors that they were "fools" who had "to get much tougher" with the protesters.  "You have to dominate," said Trump.  "If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time.  They're going to run all over you, you'll look like a bunch of jerks."

Attorney General Bill Barr and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper were also on the call and echoed the president. Barr told them they needed "adequate force" to "dominate" and "control" the protesters.  Esper war-gamed the whole problem, telling the governors that they had to "dominate the battle space."  Following the call, and driving his point home, the President then announced that, if the governors didn't get tougher, he would invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the military to do the job "for them."

As with all things Trump, it's not at all clear that he has the power to do what he is now threatening to do.

The Insurrection Act was passed in 1807 and empowers the President to use the military to quell insurrection, civil disorder and rebellion in any state; to enforce federal law and protect Constitutional rights where the state cannot or refuses to do so; or when requested by a state's governor. None of those conditions have been met here, nor are they likely to be.  And a later law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, expressly bars the use of the military to enforce any  president's domestic policies.

So, bluster aside, Trump either doesn't possess the power he so brazenly claims is his or that power has by no means been triggered.  Though he did order the military to  move a peaceful protest in DC's Lafayette Park yesterday so that he could walk across the street for a photo-op in front of St. John's church, he could do that only because DC is not a state.

From where I sit, if the governors want advice, they now have a choice.

They can call Cadet Bone Spurs -- the man-child  president who  never met a problem involving race that he didn't make worse (see, e.g., Charlottesville) -- and have him send in the marines . . . 

Or they can call Newark's Mayor Baraka.

I'd start with the Mayor.

His plan actually worked.

A MASQUE WITHOUT A MASK

A MASQUE WITHOUT A MASK

In Elizabethan England, masques were a common form of entertainment.

They usually involved costumed, dancing courtiers, even the kings and queens themselves, masked around elaborate sets, with professional actors performing the singing and spoken parts.  They usually (but not always) flattered the court itself and sometimes took the form of interludes in larger productions.  Elizabeth I expected them on her travels through her kingdom and was generally presented with a fawning version of the former.  Shakespeare's masque in The Tempest, however,  is a good example of the latter.  That masque, a play within the play,  celebrates authority while the play itself  highlights the vulnerability of those who exercise it.  His masque is thus metaphorically unmasked by the play itself.

And makes it more honest.

Something typical of the bard.

By the mid-17th century, however, masques were on the wane, most likely a victim of the English Civil War in which Puritans closed the theatres, one of their (and Cromwell's) many sins.  Though performed in eras thereafter, they were not as popular, and as theatre moved beyond the 19th and into the 20th century, their greatly reduced numbers became vehicles mostly to create change in the performing arts themselves.  In the 19th century, masques resurrected English musical composition; in the 20th, one tried to revolutionize dance.

The old masque, the lavish performance of disguised praise or of Shakespeare's not so disguised interlude of  unmasking, had died . . .

And then came Covid.

For the past two weeks. America has lived on a psychological knife edge, poised between the ennui of social distance and stay at home quarantines on the one hand and the hoped for return to some form of normal -- a job, a restaurant, a meeting other than on Zoom -- on the other.  Unfortunately for us, though he can monopolize the airwaves and social media, our Commander-in-Chief is no therapist in chief. 

Past presidents knew how to share our feelings, to empathize, to console.  Reagan would not let us forget "the crew of the space shuttle Challenger . . . as they waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'".  Clinton felt our pain, most acutely in the wake of the Oklahoma bombing.  W stood atop a pile of rubble and "heard" all of us as we sat stunned, almost emotionless, days after 9/11. And Obama cried after Sandy Hook  and sang "Amazing Grace" in Charleston.

Trump is . . .

Different.

And weirdly so.

He seems to have never met an anxiety in others he was not willing to exploit . . .

Or one in himself he was not willing to hide.

Early on, before the death toll approached 100,000, coronavirus was mocked.  It was a "hoax" that would magically evaporate as the mercury rose.  When magic failed, it became the fault of a mute WHO unwilling to sound the alarm . . . or of Obama, who supposedly left the cupboard bare of needed PPE and ventilators . . . or of "fake news", who never gave him credit but would gleefully hoist him on various  petards -- hydroxychloroquine, ingested disinfectant, more lies about testing than it was possible to count.  He sought to artificially depress the numbers by leaving sick people at sea.  His CDC drafted a plan with metrics to govern re-opening, but he deep-sixed the plan (apparently) because it was too austere.  The one he published in April set out phased re-opening periods linked to continuing two week declines in cases.

But it was promptly ignored by the states that wanted to re-open . . .

And then by Trump himself.

The doctors -- Fauci and Birx and Bright --  have either been demoted (Bright) or sidelined (Fauci) or ignored (Birx).   Dr. Bright, formerly the head of the federal government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), identified the equipment and shortage problems last year and long before the outbreak could have had the administration up to speed had it listened.  It didn't; so after he filed a 300-page whistle-blower complaint, it demoted him. Dr. Fauci went into self-quarantine after being exposed and has otherwise been scarce over much of the past three weeks; nevertheless, his virtual testimony at a mid-May Senate hearing warned that premature re-openings risked an enormous second wave. For her part, Dr. Birx keeps touting the need to take precautions, practice social distancing and wear a mask in public.  But this is advice . . .

Her boss and his more ardent fans ignore.

Maskless, Trump visited a Ford factory in Michigan last week.  Again maskless, he laid a Memorial Day wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington yesterday.  He travels hither and yon quite conspicuously unmasked, in part (he says) because he does not want to give the press "the pleasure of seeing it."  His supporters are even more obdurate.  Lake of the Ozarks, a Missouri vacation spot, was a maskless, sardine like crowd of bathers literally breathing on each other over the Memorial Day holiday.  The week before, protesters in Suffolk County on New York's eastern Long Island were lined up holding Trump 2020 signs and cursing out "fake news" as one accosted a reporter within inches of his face even after being asked to step away.

All this is Trump's play within the play.

The main event is a heart wrenchingly slow wrestle with an often lethal virus that spreads quickly and against which there is no known cure.  While researchers the world over work overtime to come up with a vaccine, dilution and seclusion are the only available antidotes.  That means staying apart (social distancing), keeping our germs to ourselves (wearing a mask in public), and avoiding large crowds (some form of quarantine or stay at home).  If those practices are consistent with re-opening, and sooner or later they will have to be lest we all go broke, the new normal will be nothing like the old.

Trump's performance, however, is an elaborately staged counterpoint, a steady stew of self-congratulation, denial and deceit.  

He praises himself and condemns his predecessor even as he creates an unmatched record of incompetence.  Intelligence back in December warned of the pandemic but was ignored.  BARDA knew of the equipment shortages at the same time but was sidelined. China was at best negligent and at worst complicit in the spread of the virus early on but had to first be  praised because our own Wizard of Oz thought that was the string that then needed to be pulled.  Thereafter, he closed the border but was too late . . . 

And in any case closed the wrong one.  

New York City had already become a host city thanks to some Italian tourists.

He flouts the mask, even re-tweeting a Fox news bit yesterday that mocked Joe Biden for having worn one in his own holiday visit to a war memorial.  The Ford plant he visited last week requires masks but he gave those workers the proverbial middle finger . . . 

Just to get even with the press.

He turbo-charges the non-compliant, either with false futures (his much ballyhooed Easter re-opening) . . .  or with LIBERATE tweets to camouflaged militants who the virus can overrun before they've even cocked their pistols . . .  or with lies that undermine science (it's all a "fake news" hoax) . . . and so makes it permissible to ignore -- as he does -- his own advisors.  

He's a modern day masque . . .

Without a mask.

Literally, he refuses to wear one, and figuratively, his phoniness unmasks his performance.  There is nothing great or perfect or even all that competent about it, all of his word salad and tweeted insults  to the contrary notwithstanding.  The death toll mounts,  the division grows, the denial remains, and the uncertainty continues. 

At the end . . .

And  as with the Elizabethans . . .

Only the courtiers are dancing.

TIME OUT

TIME OUT

Donald Trump is the worst president in my lifetime.

He is a pathological liar, over 18,000 during his presidency alone according to the data base maintained by  The Washington Post.

He is lazy, routinely showing up to work in the Oval Office at or after 11 a.m. because he spends most of his mornings, and large parts of his apparently inomniatic nights,  glued to the cable shows and his twitter feed.

He is immature, a man-child who thinks the puerile ripostes of a schoolyard bully deriding those who disagree render him clever or authentic.

And he is dangerous, the natural consequence of a narcissism that avoids hard study, expert input, or even facts that are at odds with whatever self-interest captures his (brief) attention span.

His wealth, never as great as his boasts, was generated in part through an estate tax evasion scheme that illegally shielded large amounts of his father's estate from federal tax, and as a businessman he regularly stiffed vendors and contractors, forcing lawsuits and delaying payments with bogus defenses.  After six bankruptcies, at which point New York banks would not touch him, he reportedly got in bed with Deutsche Bank and was thereafter funded in part by Russian oligarchs (which probably explains his love affair with Vladimir Putin).

And nothing changed after he was elected president.

Last year he tried to illegally bribe Ukraine's president by withholding appropriated military aid in exchange for a phony investigation of Joe Biden, and this year, he ignored early warnings of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the government he runs should have been testing, tracing and quarantining the recently infected back in February, moves that, had they occurred, could have mitigated the spread, he was instead telling all who would listen that it would go away "miraculously" when the weather warmed.  

Failing that, and once the pandemic took off, he disclaimed responsiblity, refused to wield the purchasing power he had under the Defense Production Act to commandeer business and industry into manufacturing needed protective gear, left it to the nation's governors to find supplies more or less on their own, and then speculated on cures, some of which lacked a sound medical basis (hyroxychloroquine) and others of which were just plain crazy (ingesting disinfectant) .  

Those state governors more like him, mini-Trumps as it were, have now decided to "re-open" their states without even meeting the standards set by the administration itself (14 days of declining cases), and the nation's economy is on life support as unemployment approaches Depression-era levels.  

Two stimulus packages have passed and been signed into law, but a third, which would help state and local governments whose balance sheets have been decimated, is on ice in McConnell's Senate as Republicans claim they are not willing to use pandemic relief to fund state pension plans.  In fact, however, no such demand is being made by the states; to the contrary,  their tax receipts have cratered and they need the federal cash merely to replace what the taxpayers, were they fully employed, would have provided.

Meanwhile, right-wing nut jobs are showing up armed and in cammo in Michigan, pretending their phallic accoutrement will cow state leaders into ignoring the science they themselves choose to disregard.  And on Friday, one of them shot a cop who ordered his sister to don a mask while in a Dollar Store in Flint.

This is America, circa May 2020.

Distraught. 

Divided.

And on edge.

Enough on its public policy plate to keep an army of competent government leaders busy on the one hand.

Bereft of such leadership at the top on the other.

Under the circumstances, this is not an ideal time for a sex scandal. 

But, mirabile dictu, one has emerged.

Joe Biden is now accused of having sexually assaulted an ex-aide, Tara Reade, in the halls of Washington, DC's capitol building sometime in 1993.  Last Friday, he calmly but expressly denied the allegation on MSNBC's Morning Joe in a seventeen minute interview with show host Mika Brzezinski.  

As we now know, any knee jerk dismissal of Reade's charge  given the passage of time is neither appropriate nor necessarily accurate.  For many reasons -- trauma,  fear of reprisal, embarassment, re-victimization -- victims often deep-six accounts of  assaults for years, or can't remember all the particular details once they decide to talk, and the fact that they have done so does not in itself render their reports false or malicious or vindictive or any of the other shibboleths routinely launched by those who shower them in disbelief.

It is, of course, a given that political partisans, myself included, are the last people who should be called upon to adjudicate claims involving politicians.  If we have learned anything on this subject over the past thirty years, it is this -- partisan bias pretty much predicts where you'll come down.  

No one I know who wanted Clarence Thomas or Brett Kavanaugh confirmed, or Donald Trump elected, was willing to fully believe Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford or the twenty-five victims of Donald Trump's apparently unbridled libido.  Some of the same people who defended Thomas later impeached Clinton for lying about a consensual but inappropriate relationship, others who defended Thomas or Sen. Packwood (himself forced to resign in the '90s from the Senate on account of sexual harassment) cheered for Paula Jones, and some of the same people who vilified Kavanaugh are now defending Biden.

It is also easy to predict the arguments that will be made.  

Those who favor Biden's accuser will embrace the claims made above regarding victim memory and delay, and saddle Joe's defenders with the charge of hypocrisy in view of how they went after Kavanaugh in 2018.  

Those who favor Biden will note the passage of time, the fact that his accuser has told different stories at different times regarding the nature of her claims against him, the fact that  her current late report is her second late report, the first having come in 2019 (without any of the incendiary sexual assault claims regarding digital penetration), and the fact that then staffers in Biden's Senate office have all denied that any claim was ever made against their boss.  Perhaps most importantly, his defenders will note that, in a public career spanning almost fifty years, Joe Biden has never been accused of sexual wandering, let alone sexual assault, of any kind.   

Biden's defenders will also contrast his calm demeanor and clean past with the defenses mounted by Thomas, Kavanaugh and Trump.  

The two justices more or less trademarked outrage in the hearings held to assess the claims against them.  Thomas claimed he was the victim of a "high-tech lynching" and Kavanaugh literally shouted his denials, insulting anyone who pondered the possibiity that his well-known penchant for beer might have clouded his memory as much as it loosened his shorts, while lying about the meaning of references to  "devil's triangle[s]" (i.e., threesomes) in his high school yearbook.  

For his part, Trump's defense is not remotely sophisticated.  He says everyone of his accusers, all twenty-five of them, are lying about allegations that run the gamut from groping to rape.  His current press secretary is now asserting that the claims against him were in effect litigated in his favor by the voters in 2016.  If so, it's the first jury where a minority of the votes determined a case's outcome.

What to do?

There is no good answer.  

Unlike Senate confirmations, there is no forum in which an investigation can be launched, even were we to assume it could be a fair one.  None, thusfar, have been.  Witnesses who might have corroborated Blasey Ford's story in 2018 were never contacted in the much ballyhooed follow-on FBI investigation after the initial Kavanaugh hearing, and Biden himself was roundly criticized for not having called a witness who could have corroborated Anita Hill's testimony in 1991.  And political campaigns seem uniquely unsuited to the task.  No one who talks to a reporter, including both victims and the accused, is under oath.  No one can be subpoenaed.  No one can be cross-examined.

There is also a greater  risk here.

This presidential campaign will be among the ugliest in our history.  Trump himself makes that ineluctable. He is incapable of living anywhere but the gutter and has turned every campaign he ran -- all of the 2016 primaries as well as the general election -- into mudbaths.  He will lie, insult, and troll his way to November 3, diverting attention from his latest outrage as he works to drive-up Biden hatred and hijack the election.

That's what he did with Hillary and her emails.  

It's what he tried to do last year with Ukraine.

And it's what he'll do with Reade's allegation. 

Demands for investigations that cannot happen, or sealed documents that have no relevant information, are already being made.  Trump will enlist those demands to create yet another shiny object designed to take all eyes off him -- his incompetence, his vulgarity, his idiocy, his sheer danger -- while training them on his parody of Biden.  If the media play to type, as they did in 2016, a commttment to phony balance will make them constantly repeat this single and as yet unproved charge against Biden while voters spin their heads in the blur created by Trump's two dozen plus victims and his constant but ever changing parade of disqualifying inanities, tantrums and lies. 

America needs a break from sex.  

A time out.

Tara Reade waited twenty-seven years to tell her story.

Maybe we should wait six months . . .

Before deciding to listen to it.

OUR PANDEMIC(S)

OUR PANDEMIC(S)

We are in the midst of a pandemic. 

As of today, on a worldwide basis, over 2.4 million people have been diagnosed with coronavirus or Covid-19.  Of those, approximately 636,000 have recovered, leaving about 1.6 million active cases. More than 166,000 people have died.  In the United States, there are approximately 764,000 cases, 652,000 of which remain active.  Over 40,000 people have died here.  The United States leads the world in diagnosed and active cases and in the number of deaths. In the most-infected state -- New York --  242,000 cases have been diagnosed and almost 14,000 have died.

In Europe as a whole, their number of diagnosed cases exceeds ours, as do their number of deaths. But Germany, which did early testing, a form of contact tracing and quarantining, has kept its death total (4,600) low relatively speaking and on average has also had far fewer cases than the worst states in Europe -- Spain and Italy.  For the same reason, South Korea had similar success, as has Singapore. The latter was truly effective, having turned testing and tracing into a  fatality rate of less than 1%.

In New York, the number of new cases appears to have flattened, as is the case in California and Washington state.  This does not mean there are no new infections or that the contagion has been contained.  It does mean that, barring resurgence, there will be enough hospital beds to take care of patients that emerge going forward.  And it also is evidence that social distancing and quarantining works.

There is a growing concern that the economic devastation from the pandemic will exceed the physical devastation.  Over 22 million Americans are now unemployed, the rate having gone from a low of 3.5% to estimates now putting it at levels of the Great Depression in the 1930s (or over 20%). The recently passed stimulus package provides up to $1200 to individuals; the amount declines as your annual income closes in on $100,000 and ends at that level.  The stimulus package also provides $350 billion in loans cum grants to small businesses as so-called paycheck protection; last Thursday, however, that fund was exhausted and no new applications could be accepted.  The package contains $150 billlion for state and local governments, $100 billion for hospitals, $58 billion for commercial airlines, over $400 billion for the Federal Reserve, and $20-30 billion each for farmers, ranchers, schools  and food programs.

Despite the enormity of the package, it is widely considered inadequate to the ultimate need.  Brandeis Prof. Robert Kuttner estimated that we would need a package on the order of 25% of GDP to get throught the crisis, which would require roughly quadrupling the current assistance.  He bases this on what it in fact took to catapault America out of the Great Depression. NY's Gov. Cuomo has already explained that the amount his state is getting under the current package is nowhere near what has been and will have to be spent.  And the jockeying on Capitol Hill has already begun around talk of additional legislation, with Republicans holding back and Democrats demanding more.

Part of the calculation, of course, is that the amount of ultimate government assistance necessary to the task will inevitably depend upon when America can get back to work and what that will look like whenever it happens.  The administration has proposed a set of guidelines that would implement re-opening in three phases, each tied to satisfying so-called "gating criteria" beforehand.

In Phase One, schools, daycare facilities, camps and bars would remain closed, as would visits to hospitals or senior living facilities, but  large venues like restaurants, movie theatres, sport venues and churches could operate with "strict distancing protocols", as could gyms. In Phase Two, the closed facilites (schools, daycare, camps, bars) reopen, the last with "diminished standing room occupancy", and the strict distancing protocols become "moderate" in the large venues.  And finally, in Phase Three, the distancing requirements become "limited" and employers regain full access to their worksites.

The gating criteria require that cases decline for continuous fourteen day periods prior to entering each phase.  Under the plan, states are responsible for testing and contact tracing of their populations,  sufficient equipment (ventilators, PPE, etc.), sufficient hospital capacity (defined as the ability to treat "without crisis care"), the "ability to surge ICU capacity", and "robust" testing for at-risk health care workers.  States must have  plans to protect workers in critical industries, those in high-risk facilities like nursing homes, and employees and users of mass transit.  They must also be able to "monitor conditions and immediately take steps to limit and mitigate any rebounds or outbreaks by restarting a phase or returning to an earlier phase."

None of the states hard hit by the pandemic have anywhere near the ability to do the testing and tracing required to determine on a continuous months long basis that cases have declined, that no new infections have emerged, and that no resurgent outbreak has occurred, the latter of which is almost certain in the event that any "phase" is entered into prematurely or the virus itself is seasonal.  In addition, and as has been demonstrated throughout the pandemic, the states hardest hit have regularly confronted shortages in needed protective equipment.  Though the predicted run on ventilators never materialized, that was only because governors imposed stay-at-home orders and social distancing protocols that flattened the curve of new cases and lessened the run.

The policy is quintessential Trump.  It is high on optics but otherwise shallow and insufficient if the goal is to actually solve the problem and re-open the country without renewing Covid-19's lease on life.  The key to implementing the policy is testing and contact tracing and Trump has decided that this must be the responsibility of the states.  The states, however, have told him they do not have the capacity to do the job. The result, therefore, will be a swiss-cheese approach where states decide to go forward (or not) based on incomplete data in the face of the apocalyptic twins of physical disease and/or economic depression.  To avoid the latter, they will risk the former, or vice versa.

The policy is also quintessential Trump in that it allows him to claim credit and apportion blame without accepting any responsibility.  If a state reopens and avoids a resurgence, he can claim his guidelines were the solution.  If, however, a state reopens and the coronavirus is resurgent, he can claim the state lacked the resources they should have had in place beforehand.  Similarly, if a state does not reopen or others reopen faster, he can claim that the resulting economic hit is also the responsibility of governors who did not adequately prepare.  None of his claims will be true because the lack of preparedness, and in particular the absence of sufficient testing capacity, was itself caused by Trump's early denial that there was any problem.

But truth never matters to him. 

Neither in his personal life.

Nor his professional one.

Meanwhile, his absurd show goes on.

Early last week he announced, czar-like, that he was the public offcial with the ultimate authority to determine if and when any state could relax its emergency protocols and return to work.  This was nonsense, essentially because it is not the law.  On Thursday, however, when he announced the guidelines, he reversed himself, telling the nation's governors that they "would call the shots" on  re-opening.  Unfortunately, he also made it clear that the states themselves would be responsible for insuring that there was adequate testing and then claimed, falsely, that such capacity in fact existed. 

Finally, on Friday, as far-right activists in recent weeks sponsored rallies in a half dozen states demanding an end to stay-at-home orders, Trump launched his all caps "liberate" tweets, seen by the protestors as a Presidential call to arms.  His "LIBERATE  MINNESOTA" tweet that morning was followed in the afternoon by a few hundred pro-Trump protestors packed tightly on the sidewalk outside the governor's residence yelling "USA". Underscoring their demand that the quarantine end, one protestor hoisted a sign that said "If ballots don't free us bullets will."

The call to violence was not unique. 

A QAnon conspiracy theorist with 50,000 twitter followers called for armed insurrection after Trump's liberate tweets, as did a thousand other tweets from a host of on-line extremists. A comment to Trump's "LIBERATE VIRGINIA" tweet said the time was now for insurrection to "earn our freedom . . . like our forefathers did in 1776."  And one of the organizers in Minnesota specifically predicted that "violence . . . will happen. People in our culture are not designed to obey these kind of orders."

It's not entirely clear what specific "orders" annoy them to the point of armed insurrection. The stay at home requirements incident to quarantining obviously qualify, but it is not clear that distancing, masks  and bans on group gatherings of more than ten are not equally offensive.  The Minnesota protestors who crowded onto the sidewalk outside the governor's house were more than happy to shout their epitaphs sardine-like from the street, their mouths unmasked,  and the "culture" whose "design" is  at odds with the orders they loathe includes baseball and football, where packed stadia will become petri dishes of death if opened too soon.

Trump knows he is validating these groups and that they are essentially advocating a return to the status quo ante either immediately or without regard to whatever science may tell them.  But they, like Trump, have no respect for government or science, and he is willing to feed them the red meat they need to remain loyal.  Apart from last week's "guidelines", his signature moves on Covid-19 thusfar have been to blame China (which deserves it), vilify the World Health Organization (WHO) (which doesn't), and attack Democratic governors for the testing and equipment  failures of the government Trump himself is supposed to be running. To that trilogy he has now added inciting/supporting the nut-job and violent far-right.

My college friend and long-time ABC television journalist John Donvan recently noted that, unlike past crises such as 9/11, Covid-19 was not uniting America.  He's right.  There's been no rally round the flag effect.  Trump's guidelines come across as buck passing, fourteen pages of putative instructions to individuals, employers and states that cannot be implemented absent testing capacity the federal government could and already should have put together but hasn't. His daily (and lengthy) press conferences are campaign performances where he routinely attacks journalists, disclaims responsibility, and lies. 

And the citizenry, not surprisingly,  has retreated to its respective red and blue silos.  

America is a nation of myths.

There's the founding myth in which We the People rose up as a whole to throw off the yoke of British colonialism.  There's the governing myth in which the people democratically determine their fate in a land where all are created equal.  There's the economic myth where rugged individuals get ahead in a free market whose only limitation is one's capacity for work. And there's the cultural myth of exceptionalism where we are uniquely moral beacons of progress and virtue.

Each of these myths has within it a kernel of truth. 

But only a kernel.

18th century colonists did declare independence and then wage a war of attrition where British exhaustion and the timely arrival of the French fleet in the Chesapeake Bay turned the world upside down  at Yorktown. But on the way there, and at any one time, somewhere between 40 and 70 per cent of those-to-be-liberated were either rooting for the other side or did not care who won.  Similarly, the famous Declaration did declare as "self-evident" the "truth"  that "all men are created equal". But its authors owned slaves or prospered in economies that relied on slavery at some level, and when it came time in 1787 to create a government, that corruption was more more than respected; it was accepted. 

Going forward, for every rugged individual who spawned the likes of Carnegie and  Rockefeller, Jobs and Gates, there was the pauper, the wage-slave, the unemployed and the uninsured.  And for every moral beacon, every Gettysburg, every moon shot,  there was an abject moral failure, a Cherokee Trail of Tears, a Klan, a coup, a casting couch.

Sometimes our myths are confirmed.

Sometimes they are are refuted.

Which, unfortunately,  is what we are doing now.

Because red and blue, the unbridgeable division in which we now live, the one which our President has decided to actively advance as his only available avenue to reelection,  the one that makes it impossible to act rationally because we are too busy arguing irrationally, is its own pandemic.  

And it's killing the founding myth of unity, the governing myth of equality, the economic myth of prosperity, and the cultural myth of moral exceptionalism.

There truly is no Republican or Democratic approach or solution to this Covid-19 crisis. The notion that we have to be guided by science and data, and that we have to hang together lest in Franklin's prescient warning we wind up doing so separately, is inarguable.  

Dumb and divided has never won a war.

And any effort to play regions or states off against each other, to force them into a price-gouging competition  for scarce resources, to fail to unleash and exploit the power of the federal government to provide the tools neeeded to manage and conquer the crisis, or to set things up so that the finger of blame can be pointed at one or the other party for any death or depression that may ensue . . .

Will not win this one.

HIDING BEHIND IGNORANCE

HIDING BEHIND IGNORANCE

Ignorance is bliss.

Or so the saying goes.

But for longer than I can remember, I have thought the precise opposite.

Knowledge is power. 

The truth shall set you free. 

Thanks to the scientific method, we have discovered more and learned more than any humans who came before.  From the wheel to the internet, travelling first the highways and by-ways of cleared paths and wooden planks, then of cobblestones and macadam, and ultimately of mere ether, we've been able to produce more and exchange more and communicate more and  know more . . . than any before.

Things that would, and in fact did, lay prior generations low have been discarded in the dustbin of history.  The microscope gave us germ theory and made soap and water, basic sanitation, our first and often most effective defense against disease.  The telescope gave us the laws of gravity and then of relativity, which more or less explains light and electromagnetism and, if that's too abstract for you, allows satellites to take us home. 

That's right.

The GPS in your car could not exist without Einstein.

Ignorance, the absence of knowledge, often the intention to never pursue it, is horror, the horror that stokes fear and  famine, abuse and neglect, suffering and pain . . . 

And death.

Yet it persists.

It has to be, it seems to me, more than an inherent disposition.  It's certainly not the case that we humans are omniscient, so arrogance in the wake of the accomplishments made possible by science is not the right attitude.  Even the scientific method abhors that.  In fact, it demands the precise opposite, a rational skepticism that makes all hypotheses testable and disprovable. The idea, in other words, is not to turn the Newtons and Einsteins . . . and Dr. Faucis . . . into modern day gods. If a claim is tested and rebutted, no PhD can make it true.

And people know this. 

Right?

So what is Donald doing?

Every day now, generally between the hours of 5 and 6 pm, the doors to the White House briefing room swing open and the President of the United States enters with a supporting cast and holds forth for upwards of two hours.  These press briefings are themselves the product of cornonavirus.  Before the pandemic, Trump's go to venue was the "rally", where a swarm of like-minded Trumpists were regaled for  hours by a stream of consciousness chest-thumping and litany of insults against all opponents, perceived and real; at his last two, on February 28 and March 2, Trump called coronavirus the new Democratic "hoax" during the first and falsely claimed he had always taken the disease "seriously" at the second.  Once the rallies became  impossible,  Trump took to the briefing room, where he has otherwise been more than scarce for the last three years.

At these briefings, all the usual Trump-tics are on display.  Questions he dislikes become vehicles for attacks, often vicious, on the press.  Pre-written statements are read, generally in a way (i) that makes it clear he is reading them for the first time and (ii) with odd pauses (and an allergy to punctuation) that allow him to insert random editorial comment. 

Sometimes what he says is accurate.  On Sunday, for example,  he reported that the available models suggested the next two weeks would be the worst. Other times, however, he is in a la-la land located somewhere between denial and displeasure.  The former is in evidence as he (falsely but repeatedly) proclaims the test shortage solved (today he even falsely claimed that anyone coming off a plane is being tested), the latter as he waffles from hyping the need to get back to work lest the cure be worse than the disease to admitting that we are in this for the long haul.  Easter has been mentioned so often as a target (or aspirational) re-open for business date that comedians now confess surprise he hasn't decided to just move the holiday and take it up with Jesus (or His Dad) later.

There's also a Wizard of Oz element to these events.  The strings in this case are members of his supporting cast, there to prop-up the man behind the curtain (or presidential seal).  A la Toto, however, the curtain/seal is often pulled back as various interlocutors reveal the reality behind it.  Often times, Dr. Fauci comes forward to either deliver hard scientific facts or take the edge off one of Trump's more ludicrous pronouncements (it was Fauci, for example, who turned Trump's Easter rising into a mere "aspiration", quelling the nerves of millions who thought April 12 might end the world as we know it). 

Last week, again lifitng the Oz-like curtain, Trump's guy Friday, Jared Kushner,  proclaimed that the  federal stockpile of medical equipment (ventilators, masks, gowns and drugs) was "our stockpile" and not "the states'" for them to "use".  And yesterday, after again suggesting the use of hydroxychloroquine to combat the virus, but no doubt wary of one behind-the-curtain scene too many, Trump himself refused to allow Dr. Fauci to be asked about the drug's efficacy.

Both Kushner's comment and Trump's suppression were astounding.

The former revealed a stunning lack of either knowlege of or appreciation for the purpose of any federal stockpile of medical supplies. Contra Jared, it is to be used precisely in situations like this, where states are confronted with a crisis, the scope and cause of which extends far beyond their borders and for which they lack sufficient capacity.  

Neither Trump nor Kushner have retracted the statement, all of which has convinced the commentariat that the President's politcal plan here is to blame the states for the country's overall lack of preparedness.

Good luck with that.

Especially when the virus hits the states that voted for him.

As it now has. 

In droves.

As to the silencing of Dr. Fauci, it is a warning light blinking red.

Had Dr. Fauci been allowed to speak, he undoubtedly would have repeated what he has often said in the past.  As an anti-viral treatment for this case, hydroxychloroquine has not been fully tested, has not been proven effective even against other viruses like the flu, is known to have potentially fatal side effects, especially for those with heart problems, and has to remain available to treat diseases against which it is efficacious.  The notion, as Trump puts it, that we "have nothing to lose" if the drug is used here is not remotely accurate.  There may be a lot to lose, especially if it is given to the wrong patient, and testing protocols are literally the only way that prospect can be avoided. 

This does not mean the drug should be side-lined until a years-long approval process is completed.  It does mean, however, that the President should shut up and let medical professionals do their job.  They can decide if and when to take the extraordinary step of recommending the drug for a coronavirus patient.

What Trump doesn't get, and has never gotten, is that -- whether they should or shouldn’t, even now, and even after three years experience -- his words matter.  This isn't a TV show.  It's real.  A lot of people (still) think they can rely on the President.  The couple in Arizona who self-administered an apparent variety of hydroxychloroquine certainly thought so; indeed, one of them said so.

The other is dead.

As are many who heard Trump tell them in January and February that this whole Covid-19 thing was much ado about nothing, a political "hoax". 

Back then, he said we'd all "be fine", that the virus could go away "miraculously" in April when the weather warmed a bit. 

Now, having failed to do the early testing, identifying and quarantining that could have contained the crisis in ways no longer possible,  we are living a latter-day version of Eliot's Waste Land, where hundeds of thousands are expected to die and April truly is "the cruelest month".

The notion that "ignorance is bliss" was actually borne from a poem by Thomas Gray, an 18th century English poet.  In his "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College", Gray recounts the innocent pleasures of childhood and contrasts them with the inevitable pain of much that lies ahead.  In that world, the child's world, where "ignorance is bliss/'Tis folly to be wise".

That is the world of Donald Trump, our man-child president.

And, ironically, it is also the  defense he and his seconds mount against attacks on his most outrageous nostrums. 

When asked why he persisted in painting a rosy picture of Covid-19 back in January and February, or why he constantly mentions the idea of an earlier return to normal, his recurring Easter-vision as it were, or even why he shut up Dr. Fauci yesterday, some version of Gray's bliss is always embraced. 

On the early comments, say his defenders, he was trying to convey optimism in the midst of uncertainty, a sort of  Alice-like move where saying so either makes it so or at least takes the edge off.  On the Easter re-opening, it "would be a beautiful thing", said Trump,  hundreds packed into churches scattered throughout the land living a veritable second resurrection in celebration of the first. And on silencing Fauci yesterday,  the President basically argued that -- in  answering the hydroxychloroquine question for, as Trump put it, "the fifteenth time"-- the doctor would have turned the bliss of  hoped-for cure into the  bane of uncertain reality.

The irony here  is that Trumpists would flirt with anything suggesting a juvenile disposition. Babies, afterall, do whine and kids often lie.  Nevertheless, in Trump's world, "ignorance" really "is bliss" and it really is "folly to be wise".  For the rest of us, who actually grew up, it's just folly.

One would have thought that the Founders, those illuminati who gave us the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and who otherwise had such a clear-eyed view of the foibles of human nature, would have created some sort of protection on this front. 

And in truth they tried. 

They required that anyone be at least thirty-five years old to qualify for the presidency.  Back then, when the life expectancy of an average male was forty-seven, this was a reasonably safe age to pick, old enough to be wise but young enough to last.  Most of the Founders, moreover, were pretty young  themselves.  The average age of the signers of the Declararion was forty-four and a dozen were younger than thirty-five.  And ten years later, when they wrote the Constitution, they hadn't turned into wizened gray heads (and any whose were had likely been powdered).

In Federalist No. 64, John Jay explained that the Founders wanted as President only those who "have become the most distinguished by their abilitites and virtue, and in whom the people perceive just grounds for confidence."  He claimed that "The Constitution manifests very particular attention to this object", and then explained that by "excluding men under the age of thirty-five . . .  it  confines the electors to men . . .  with respect to whom they will not be liable to be deceived by those brilliant appearances of genius and patriotism, which, like transient meteors, sometimes mislead as well as dazzle."

Oh well, no one in the 18th century could have known that their era's transient meteor would be  our era's television reality show host with an unbridled twitter feed.  In fairness, moreover, the Founders, according to Jay, also thought that limiting the presidency to those over thirty-five would insure that "the people have had time to form a judgment" about those running for President, that in having been given enough time to be  forewarned, they would necessarily be forearmed.  We, of course,  had more than twice the time they prescribed  to take in the Donald so . . .

Nothing's perfect.

And, by the same token, ignorance sometimes is bliss.  Children should be protected. At the expense of maturation or development or, worse yet, parental love, it is always folly to make them wise. 

Even for adults, ignorance can be, if not blissful, at least useful. The renowned Harvard philospher John Rawls suggested his famous "veil of ignorance" as a way for us to objectively think about distributional justice.  What would you suggest as a fair distribution of the world's goodies, Rawls asks,  if you couldn't assume you'd be who you are, born when you were, to whom and with whatever they had and could provide?  What kind of society would you create if you did not know, and could not assume,  your own place in it?

Maybe Trump should try that on.

Rawls's veil of ignorance.  

Something the President could use to think.

Rather than hide behind.

He'd at least have to tell Jared to cut out the "his" stockpile crap.

QUEEN OF CORONA

QUEEN OF CORONA

Meet Andrew Cuomo, New York's third-term Governor.

At sixty-two, this baby boomer is a former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a former Attorney General of the State of New York, and even a former Kennedy, divorced as he is from one of RFK's children with whom he has three of his own.

In the 1980s he earned a reputation for both sharp elbows as his father's campaign manager and foresight and compassion as the founder of WestHelp, a non-profit that created housing for the homeless.  As HUD Secretary, New York's Attorney General, and Governor since 2011, he has attracted  similarly schizophrenic reviews.

On the plus side, he was an early supporter of tax equity and gay marriage, spearheaded NY's landmark gun control legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook, and signed in 2019 the Reproductive Health Act that protects a woman's right to choose.  He courageously banned fracking, even though it was popular in western NY. As Attorney General, he  led the successful investigation into university preferred lender programs that rebated millions to students, shut down on-line child porn channeled through major internet service providers, and attacked non-profit abuse.

But there are also minuses.

As a candidate, he self-destructed in 2002 by condescendingly (and meanly) describing the  incumbent as someone who just "held the leader's coat" following 9/11.  Much later as Governor, his top aide went to jail for accepting bribes, he disbanded the Moreland Commission investigating political corruption, and he helped form the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) that until last year allowed Republicans to control the state Senate with less than half the seats. As HUD secretary, his Community Builders program was criticized by HUD's Inspector General as a de facto  political operation on behalf of the DNC. Even his divorce was messier than it had to be, mostly because he couldn't resist bad-mouthing his wife in the tabloids.

He's also an attitude guy.  That's a species of the male New Yorker who grew up in "the City" and spent a lot of time in schoolyards.  There are a number of "tells" when it comes to attitude guys. One is that they call New York City "the City",  expecting everyone else to know what they mean because . . . well, what other cities are there, really?  Another is an outer-borough accent of the Robert De Niro "you talkin' to me" variety, which is generally perceived more as an invitation to fight rather than converse.  Yet another is a self-assured swagger that comes from never having backed down in a street fight, apropos of which the important thing (and Trump -- who's probably never been in one --  doesn't get this) is not winning or losing . . .

It's being there.

So that's Andrew, warts and all.  Easy to love.  Perhaps even easier to hate.  And at the very least  . . .

Annoying. 

Until now.

Yesterday, veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield said we were about "two Andrew press conferences away" from a Draft Cuomo for President movement.  This was over the top. Drafts don't fly  in America, they fizzle, and if Cuomo is anything, he is politically savvy enough to know that.  He is also savvy enough  to know that he himself would be a tough sell outside "the City".  That's why, persistent rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, he took himself out of this year's presidential sweepstakes long ago.

But Greenfield's rapture does underscore something real.

Because, in this pandemic,  the Queen of Corona is  turning out to be New York's  Governor as much as it is the virus.

And for good reason.

Cuomo has now held more than a dozen press conferencs on the coronavirus pandemic.  They usually start at 11 a.m. and last about an hour. 

In them, power point in hand, Cuomo lays out the current state of the disease in NY and nationally. He reports the number of known cases, the number of deaths, the number of recoveries, and victim demographics.  He outlines the responses to date  and the deficiencies in those responses; the latter include a lack of sufficient testing and a shortage of needed equipment --  especially so-called personally protective equipment or PPEs for health care workers, ventilators, and sufficient hospital capacity to treat those likely to get sick.  He  then announces whatever new measures he is ordering or steps the state is or will be taking.  

Over the past week, he gradually banned in-person workforces throughout NY so as to close high-density venues where groups congregate, embarked on a worldwide search for more PPEs and ventilators, and ordered in-state hospitals to increase their capacity by 50%.  By Monday, the state had purchased about a million PPEs of one sort or another (masks, gowns or shields).  He is strenuously advocating  for federal intervention where needed, having been successful in getting Trump to order the Army Corps of Engineers to build temporary hospitals at four sites in the state but continuing to  demand that the President invoke his power under the Defense Production Act to require that private companies manufacture ventilators and more masks.  

And just in case you think he has left his attitude at home, he has had no patience for legislators who don't think they should be in Albany during the crisis, curtly telling them to do their job, and has repeatedly admonished millennials  to get real, stop congregating and  start distancing . . .

Lest they kill grandma.

Or themselves.

His briefings are factual, detailed, coherent and informative.  

If he doesn't know the answer to a question, he immediately checks with the available expert.  If together they don't know, he says they'll find out.  He also doesn't whine or bitch. At the end, he says he is going back to work.  

Unfortunately, and at a number of levels, the contrast between Cuomo's daily briefings and Trump's is too obvious to miss.  

The President accepts no responsibility for his early (and false) happy talk that delayed a unified national response or for having ignored intelligence briefings that warned of the possible pandemic months ago.  He routinely goes off on narcissistic rants against enemies real or imagined that have nothing to do with the disease, yesterday bemoaning the absence of appreciation for his willinghess to forego the  Presidential salary and even appearing happy that Mitt Romney is now in quarantine given potential  exposure from Sen. Rand Paul, the latter of whom has tested positive.  He continues his almost daily attacks on the press, even when they are asking soft-balls. And he gets the facts wrong, whether it's about the fatality rate on the flu (not even close to that of Covid-19) or when the government actually knew there was a possible crisis (it was no later than January; in fact, as a general rule, experts have been warning about the possibility of coronavirus pandemics for three years) or when a vaccine might be available ("rapidly" says Trump; 18 months says Dr. Fauci).

Cuomo, on the other hand, is basically inviting responsibiity. Both today and last week, he said that if anyone was annoyed at his executive orders, or their impact on our lives or on the economy, they could "blame" him.  

And they may.  

Cuomo is warning that the crisis may last for months and he presumably is willing to keep New York shuttered while it lasts.  Some experts, however, are warning that this may on the one hand be unnecessary and on the other economically fatal.  Just this morning, op-ed columnist Tom Friedman warned in the New York Times that a more tailored "vertical" approach to containment that focuses on high risk individuals while testing and clearing others to go back to work may be preferable to the "horizontal" stay-at-home orders that have ground the economy to a halt. Sensing the Hobson's choice presented, Cuomo today acknowledged that we "have to start to plan the pivot back to economic functionality.  You can't stop the economy forever."

No one knows when this will end or what shape we will be in once it does.

In the meantime, however, the tabloids are agog over Andrew's new-found popularity. 

A mom from Great Neck on Long Island called his 11 a.m. pressers her "morning fix."  A Staten Island blogger is "crushing" on him  . . . and so is her husband.  (For the record, Long Island and Staten Island were two of the many places that went for Trump in 2016.)

Why?

Because, like Trump, Andrew lives on the streets, attune to whatever is necessary to generate curbside appeal from Mr. and Mrs. Average.  

Both he and Trump are uncomfortable in their own skins, however tough those might be as products of shared outer-borough upbringings.  The "tell" here, apart from attitude, is that  neither of them is particularly funny.  Cuomo can't tell a joke (he's even tried at those press conferences, but you can't marry DeNiro and Colbert),  and Trump doesn't even recognize one.  

So, they can both appear forced, even artificial.

But that's where the similarity ends.  

For unlike Trump, Andrew is not the sum total of his resentments. In fact, if he's the sum total of anything, it's those four decades in and around government and the fact that he's his father's child. He inherited a faith in government, the big government of FDR and Lyndon Johnson and, of course, Mario Cuomo.  He believes in it, has studied it, knows it, and  knows how to make it work. And so, at the task of governing, Andrew Cuomo is . . . 

Competent.

It's what keeps the Dow from cratering when he talks.

And has Long Island crushing.

If we come out of this remotely whole, it will be on account of big government, not in spite of it.  If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are only Keynesians in depressions.  

Cuomo's strategy is to flatten the curve so that the health care system will be able to treat the influx of patients from the pandemic while a hoped for herd immunity ultimately ends it.  In the meantime and thereafter, a stimulus orders of magnitude higher than what is now on order will be needed to forestall widespread poverty and resurrect the economy.  In fact, Brandeis Professor Robert Kuttner calculates that  a stimulus on the order of those effectively created by World War II -- or somewhere between 25% and 35 % of annual GDP -- will be necessary to avoid unemployment rates above 20%.  In today's economy, that's about $8 trillion (assuming gross annual output of about $24 trillion).

My hope is that, while Andrew Cuomo tries to put out the fire . . .

Joe Biden is crunching the numbers.

HOW WILL ROGERS DEMOCRATS WENT ROGUE

HOW WILL ROGERS DEMOCRATS WENT ROGUE

"I am not a member of an organized political party.  I am a Democrat."

So said William Penn Adair Rogers . . .

a/k/a Will.

And until roughly two weeks ago, it looked as if he was right.

Before the South Carolina primary on February 29, eight Democrats were vying for their party's presidential nomination this year, with seven of them deemed sufficiently serious to participate in more or less regularly scheduled debates.  The group included former Vice-President Joe Biden, US Senators Bernie Sanders (Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, his fellow billionaire Tom Steyer, and US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii).  None had broken away, though Sanders seemed poised to do so, and overall it was a frustrating muddle.

The muddle was caused by a lack of clarity.  The frustration was on account of what was at stake.

In the first two contests, the leads or advances were spread among three of the candidates.  Buttigieg surprised in Iowa, beating Sanders with a combination of organizational strength and a seemingly preternatural ability to appear calm and brilliant all at the same time.  But for the Democratic Party's inability in that state to get the vote count correct on the night of the caucuses, a screw-up that deprived Mayor Pete of the almost guaranteed boost an Iowa winner gets as he or she moves on, Buttigieg might have won the New Hampshire primary a week later.  As it was, he came pretty close.  Sanders' 1.3% NH margin was viewed as either a draw or the unfair product of Pete's bad luck.  And it was complicated further by Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota's iron range Senator.  Channeling FDR and the "he knew me" working stiff who cried as Roosevelt's funeral train travelled north from Warm Springs to DC all those years ago, a "resilient" (her own word) Amy catapulted  out of single digits into a third place finish with almost 20% of the vote.

So there we were the day after New Hampshire.

A Brooklyn-born and raised democratic-socialist now housed in Vermont, a brilliant gay Mayor from a city a sixth the size of  Vermont (or one twenty-fifth the size of Brooklyn, pick your infinitesimal), and a moderate, successful legislator from the mid-west with some hitherto unkown (or unsung) eloquence. 

In the background was another brainwave, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who literally had plans for everything and could explain them, and the billionaires, Steyer and Bloomberg, who had bank accounts to fund any eternal campaigns.

That was the competitive field.

But not the whole field.

Back in the pack, having finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, in the latter case with so few votes he didn't even qualify to win any delegates, was Delaware's Joseph Robinette Biden.

Old Joe.

Reliable. Informed.

Endearing.

A heart (broken more than once) on his sleeve.

Two-term former Vice-President.

Six-term former Senator.

And . . . from all indications . . .

Yesterday's news. 

New Hampshire voted on February 11 and there followed a two-week interregnum until the Nevada caucuses on February 29.  

In that period, as Biden sought life support and strived for coherance, Steyer unleashed his war chest on Nevada and South Carolina, and Bloomberg unleashed his both nationally and on the fourteen Super Tuesday states set to vote on March 3.  Their money created movement. 

But not in Nevada (where Steyer but not Bloomberg was on the ballot). 

Though Steyer started to rise in the polls in South Carolina and Bloomberg did the same in the Super Tuesday states, crowding out their moderate (but decidedly poorer) competitors Buttigieg and Klobuchar, Bernie decisively won the Nevada caucuses, pasting Biden by more than 25 points and leaving everybody else even farther behind.  Warren, Klobuchar and Steyer didn't even qualify for delegates there and Mayor Pete got only four.

The day after Nevada, Nate Silver gave Sanders an even chance at becoming the Democratic nominee.

At which point all hell broke loose. 

Everyone now knows what happened after Nevada.  Biden romped in South Carolina, and then again on Super Tuesday and in last night's Super Tuesday 2.  As of this writing, he has 864 delegates to Sanders's 710. He has received overwhelming support from minority voters, winning more than 60% of their votes in primaries throughout the South and substantial margins outside it as well.  For the first time last night, he bested Sanders with non-college educated white voters and with white voters as a whole.  He wins decisively among voters who think their most important objective is defeating Trump.  Though Sanders still wins the youth vote, it's not by as much (nor is it showing up in the large numbers Sanders predicted or needs to win).  And in any case, all of Sanders's margins compared to his campaign in 2016 are way down, suggesting that the size of his 2016 vote may have had more to do with his then-opponent than with his much ballyhooed progressivism.

None of this, however, was caused by Biden.

Over the course of the last two plus weeks, there hasn't really been any Biden campaign, at least not one in the traditional sense of the term where money is raised, field offices are opened and staffed, ads are purchased and run, and voters are identified and turned out.  

Biden couldn't do any of that.  

He more or less ran out of real money, that is, money he could use to persuade voters rather than ferry himself and his staff from venue to venue,  sometime in February.  He was outspent by Sanders in all the Super Tuesday states. Sanders spent $14 million on ads in those contests, Bloomberg spent orders of magnitude more, and Biden was reduced to some minor six-figure buys.  Sanders' spending was substantial and critical in California, where over 400 delegates were up for grabs and where early voting created a bit of a fire wall for Bernie, much of whose vote had been sought and cast there before the loss in South Carolina.  

Biden had one field office in California (compared to Sanders' 23 and Bloomberg's 24), two in Virginia, one in North Carolina (staffed until days before the election by only a single aide), one in Massachusetts (with a staff member and a handfull of union volunteers available intermittently), and none that I could identify in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma,  Maine, Colorado or Utah.  He gave up in Vermont for obvious reasons.

What he had, more or less on a spontaneous basis, was . . .

Voters.

Who were afraid Trump would win the general election.

And endorsements.

On the same account.

Sanders' democratic-socialism scares people for one of two reasons.  

Either . . . 

(1) It scares Democrats who otherwise think the term innocuous but believe -- correctly --  that it alienates the vast majority of Americans and is thus either an electoral non-starter at worst or an unnecessary electoral ball and chain at best.

Or . . .

(2) It scares moderate Democrats, independents and swing voters who just don't want to get anywhere near state ownership of the means of production.  

In either case, and on first blush, it appeared that nothing but this fear could explain Biden's miraculous resurrection over the last two weeks. The endorsements were significant and in at least one case apparently critical.  Polls in South Carolina confirmed  that more than half the Biden voters in that state were influenced positively by Rep. Jim Clymer's endorsement, which came the Wednesday before the Saturday primary.  After Biden won in South Carolina, Buttigieg and Klobuchar withdrew from the race and immediately endorsed him.  Both had been explicit in their views that Sanders could not win the general election, and Klobuchar enlisted her Minnesota organization on Biden's behalf in that state's primary, which he then won. Following Super Tuesday, Bloomberg (another vocal critic of Sanders' electability) withdrew and that week both he and Steyer (who had departed after South Carolina) endorsed Biden too.

That said, I have been involved in political campaigns for over thirty years and endorsements, though important, are rarely determinative.  In this case, the data establishes that Clymer's may have been, but the others -- Klobuchar excluded, because she forwarded her Minnesota organization along with her endorsement -- were less important than the actual candidate departures from the race.  The endorsements were fine -- and Biden's un-funded, non-organization needed all the help it could get --  but the real benefit was in clearing the moderate lane so that one and only one  candidate in the moderate group could compete with Sanders (and Warren).

So, that was it, right?

Fear?

Not quite.

It was still the voters.

On their own.  

For two reasons.  

The first is that, as noted, the Biden campaign did not have the resources to identify and turn out much if any vote at all.  It certainly could not compete with the organizations and ground game  of Sanders or Bloomberg, and given both the scope of the job (fourteen states on Super Tuesday and six a week later) and the absence of resources, the campaign's actual impact was minimal to non-existent.  Nevertheless, in the face of this non-campaign, and this is the second reason, turnout on both Super Tuesday and yesterday was enormous.  It exceeded the turnout in the primaries in 2016 and approached those of 2008 when Obama was blowing up standard turnout models with his audacity of hope.  On MSNBC last  night, Nicole Wallace (erstwhile Republican, senior advisor to the McCain campaign, and Bush II's communications director) said it was as if a "Bat-signal" went out to all the Obama voters and "they showed up".

It did.

The Bat-signal was Donald Trump.

Nutty, narcissistic, immoral, uninformed, loud-mouthed, dishonest and, in the world of coronavirus . . .

Dangerous Donald Trump.

But the actual vote for Biden, the journey to the polls and the vote in the face of multiple alternatives and Old Joe's de facto non-campaign . . .

That was self-initiated.

No one told them to go for Joe.  No one pulled them for Joe.  No one bought them. No one conspired with them.

They did it on their own.   

There is a long way to go.  

But if Biden is sworn in on January 20, 2021, these two weeks will go down as the ones in which millions more than predicted showed up on their own initiative to vote in enormous numbers for a guy deemed dead a month ago but very much alive in the psychological super-ego of masses who have had it with the incumbent.

To organize, according to Webster, is to work on something together.  For the last few weeks, unbeknownst to the pundits and unexpected by the candidates, that's what Democratic voters have been doing.

We don't know yet, but they may have just saved the country.

What we do know is that . . .

Somewhere . . .

Will Rogers is laughing.