Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Does Donald Trump Want to Be Re-Elected?
The president’s inattention to the coronavirus doesn’t suggest someone desperate to win in November.
It’s becoming more and more obvious that President Donald Trump has simply stopped dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, and has no particular plan for confronting its economic fallout, either. In both cases, he’s pretty much substituted wishful thinking for action. The Atlantic’s David Graham had a good item about this disengagement earlier in the week, followed by one from Ezra Klein arguing that “the White House does not have a plan, it does not have a framework, it does not have a philosophy, and it does not have a goal.”
When you’re overwhelmed and incapable of understanding what’s happening in the country, you’re … … … Donald Trump.
Politico:
‘Manipulative, deceitful, user’: Tara Reade left a trail of aggrieved acquaintances
A number of those who crossed paths with Biden’s accuser say they remember two things: She spoke favorably about her time working for Biden, and she left them feeling duped.
As part of an investigation into Reade’s allegations against Biden — charges that are already shaping the contours of his campaign against a president who has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by multiple women — POLITICO interviewed more than a dozen people, many of whom interacted with Reade through her involvement in the animal-rescue community.
A number of those in close contact with Reade over the past 12 years, a period in which she went by the names Tara Reade, Tara McCabe or Alexandra McCabe, laid out a familiar pattern: Reade ingratiated herself, explained she was down on her luck and needed help, and eventually took advantage of their goodwill to extract money, skip rent payments or walk out on other bills….
Reade called Klett in 2019 after first publicly lodging allegations that Biden inappropriately touched her. At the time, Reade did not share details of an assault.
“I felt two things when she contacted me: that she was feeling me out to see if I would represent her pro bono. And there was a sense that she was trying to plant a story with me, so she could later say: ‘I told the story to this attorney I worked with,’” Klett said.
“I support women who have been assaulted. Unfortunately, I cannot support Tara Reade,” she said. “When she first contacted me regarding this issue, she could not provide enough credible information. And since that time the story has evolved in the media. I question her motives.”
Read it in full. It suggests a pattern, and needs to be taken into account with the rest of what we know.
PBS:
What 74 former Biden staffers think about Tara Reade’s allegations
Over his decades-long career in the Senate, former Vice President Joe Biden was known as a demanding but fair and family-oriented boss, devoted to his home life in Delaware and committed to gender equality in his office.
He was not on a list of “creepy” male senators that female staffers told each other to avoid in the elevators on Capitol Hill.
Yet Biden, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was also a toucher, seemingly oblivious to whether physical contact made some women uncomfortable. That behavior has persisted in recent years. Biden is now facing fresh scrutiny after a former aide in March charged that he sexually assaulted her when she worked in his Senate office in the early 1990s, an allegation Biden has categorically denied.
The PBS NewsHour spoke with 74 former Biden staffers, of whom 62 were women, in order to get a broader picture of his behavior toward women over the course of his career, how they see the new allegation, and whether there was evidence of a larger pattern.
None of the people interviewed said that they had experienced sexual harassment, assault or misconduct by Biden. All said they never heard any rumors or allegations of Biden engaging in sexual misconduct, until the recent assault allegation made by Tara Reade. Former staffers said they believed Reade should be heard, and acknowledged that their experiences do not disprove her accusation.
Nods, nods, nods. See also Jonathan Chait, same topic (New Reporting Increases Doubts on Tara Reade’s Allegation Against Joe Biden).
Health Affairs:
Strong Social Distancing Measures In The United States Reduced The COVID-19 Growth Rate
State and local governments imposed social distancing measures in March and April of 2020 to contain the spread of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). These included large event bans, school closures, closures of entertainment venues, gyms, bars, and restaurant dining areas, and shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs). We evaluated the impact of these measures on the growth rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases across US counties between March 1, 2020 and April 27, 2020. An event-study design allowed each policy’s impact on COVID-19 case growth to evolve over time. Adoption of government-imposed social distancing measures reduced the daily growth rate by 5.4 percentage points after 1–5 days, 6.8 after 6–10 days, 8.2 after 11–15 days, and 9.1 after 16–20 days. Holding the amount of voluntary social distancing constant, these results imply 10 times greater spread by April 27 without SIPOs (10 million cases) and more than 35 times greater spread without any of the four measures (35 million). Our paper illustrates the potential danger of exponential spread in the absence of interventions, providing relevant information to strategies for restarting economic activity.
Also, Rand Paul is an idiot for suggesting social distancing had no effect.
Bill Scher/Politico:
Why It Doesn’t Matter That Trump Is Beating Biden Online
Biden got the nomination because he won the argument. And better gadgetry didn’t save the candidates who lost it.
Trump has 80 million Twitter followers; Biden has 5 million. Trump’s Facebook page has 27.5 million likes; Biden’s has less than than 2 million. “From mid-March to mid-April,” Karl Rove noted in his Wall Street Journal column this week, “Mr. Trump had seven times the social-media interactions, 620 million to Mr. Biden’s 87 million.” Biden’s live-streamed events, such as his first “virtual rally” on Thursday, are often hampered by technical glitches. It’s bad enough that David Axelrod and David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign gurus, took to the New York Times to vent that Biden must “transform a campaign that lagged behind many of his Democratic competitors during the primary in its use of digital media.” To put it succinctly, as a New York Times headline declared last month, “Biden Is Losing The Internet.”
Biden won the presidential primary with an analog campaign while being outmatched online by his rivals’ much more sophisticated efforts. That should not be dismissed as a fluke event.
Ed Kilgore/New York:
The Coronavirus May Be Turning Generational Voting Patterns Upside Down
Ron Brownstein offers a strong argument that seniors have been negatively affected by the coronavirus in multiple ways — not just in terms of vulnerability to the infection itself:
The combined effect of employers culling older workers first as they reduce their payrolls and older workers hesitating about returning to their jobs seems certain to stall or even reverse one of the most powerful labor-market trends over the past several decades: the increasing share of older Americans who are staying on the job, either because they want to or need to.
Federal statistics show that the labor force participation rate over recent decades has been rising significantly for older adults, even as it falls for younger cohorts. The share of Americans aged 55-64 in the labor force, for instance, jumped from 58% to 64% from 1996 through 2016, while falling from 67% to 63% for all adults over that period, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found in a study last year.
This trend has blown through the traditional retirement age: The share of adults 65-74 in the labor force increased by almost exactly half in those years, from 18% to 27%; even Americans over 75 increased their labor market presence from 5% to 8%.
So it’s not just a matter of retirees hiding in their homes and feeling enough fear to alienate them from Trump. As Brownstein points out, over-65 Americans are experiencing higher unemployment levels — 15.6 percent, in last week’s federal jobs report — than younger cohorts of workers.
Jonathan Martin/NY Times:
Trump, Biden and the Myth of ‘But 2016’
There are members of both parties who believe the president has the ability to defy the normal rules of politics. That view ignores electoral trends of recent years.
Yet as the president struggles to respond to the coronavirus, some Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans believe too many voters are taking the wrong lessons from the 2016 election, ignoring what just took place in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and turning a blind eye to electoral trends of recent years.
In that period, Democrats enjoyed sustained voter enthusiasm, and 2018 brought the highest midterm turnout in over a century, thanks largely to voter backlash against the president — even in dozens of competitive and red-state congressional races.
The Lancet, editorial:
There is no doubt that the CDC has made mistakes, especially on testing in the early stages of the pandemic. The agency was so convinced that it had contained the virus that it retained control of all diagnostic testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, but this was followed by the admission on Feb 12 that the CDC had developed
faulty test kits. The USA is still nowhere near able to provide the basic surveillance or laboratory testing infrastructure needed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
But punishing the agency by marginalising and hobbling it is not the solution. The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear. But only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency. The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced and who has the technical capacity to lead today's complicated effort.
The Trump administration's further erosion of the CDC will harm global cooperation in science and public health, as it is trying to do by defunding WHO. A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic. Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.