Good morning, everyone!
There was a comment in the Sunday Pundit Round-up comments section, I believe, about the desire to read more fact-based articles as opposed to pure punditry.
I agree with that assessment; in fact, I have for a long time and it was something that I had already wanted to incorporate into the round-up.
Punditry will, of course, remain the bulk of the entries here (after all, this is called a pundit round-up!).
Speaking of the pundits...let’s get on with them!
Anne Applebaum writes for the The Atlantic that internationally, it is no longer a matter of the the Biden-Harris Administration effectively functioning as a reset to a “pre-Trump” era in foreign relations: the damage is done.
Since 2016, America’s international reputation has been transformed. No longer the world’s most admired democracy, our political system is more often perceived as uniquely dysfunctional, and our leaders as notably dangerous. Poll after poll shows that respect for America is not just plummeting, but also turning into something very different. Some 70 percent of South Koreans and more than 60 percent of Japanese—two nations whose friendship America needs in order to push back against Chinese influence in Asia—view the U.S. as a “major threat.” In Germany, our key ally in Europe, far more people fear Trump than fear Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
And no wonder: We live in a world where all news is accessible to everyone. Nothing that has happened over the past four years is a secret—not Trump’s ceaseless dishonesty; not his displays of ignorance; not his self-dealing and his nepotism; not his inject-disinfectants-to-knock-out-the-coronavirus moment, a story that appeared in hundreds of languages all over the world; not the grotesque spectacle of his refusal to acknowledge the election result. “Trump Supporters Head to the Streets as He Pushes False Election Claims,” declared a headline in the Gulf Times, a newspaper based in Qatar. The China Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s main English-language publication, solemnly reported that Republican senators are calling for Biden to get security briefings. The president of Poland—a nationalist who flew to Washington, D.C., to be photographed with Trump during his own campaign—appears genuinely confused about who has won, and keeps telling people that the U.S. election is not over yet.
Siri Hustvedt writes for
El País in English about the “long goodbye” to The Damn Fool (too long for me).
During elections, politics is mostly words, and words matter. They shape perception because they answer deep emotional needs in listeners. Trump performs the feelings of those who love him. He is at once fellow victim and anointed savior. His short, repetitive, hyperbolic phrases resonate with his followers as emotionally true. Whether the wall is built or not is less important than how he made them feel when they chanted, “Build the wall!” Trump mines an old strain of American anti-intellectualism, the idea that “elites” are looking down on you and making you feel inadequate and ashamed. In the small town in Minnesota where I grew up, this was a common theme among working people in the town and rural people outside it. City people, bankers (often code for Jew) and intellectuals of all kinds were suspect. Although he grew up poor on a farm, my father became a professor. Resentment of the highly educated was strong in my town.
Joseph McCarthy, with his imaginary Communists during the Red Scare, George Wallace, who fed racist fantasies to his white fans, Nixon, Reagan, and many others have played the anti-elitist tune. It is nothing new, but we have never seen the politics of shame dominate American culture as it does now. Shame is a powerful social emotion. Trump, a rich boy from Queens, never penetrated Manhattan’s moneyed, cultured elite. They dismissed him as a vulgar social climber. When I was a poor graduate student in the early 1980s in New York City, I remember that the people I knew, most of them also poor and struggling, regarded the real estate developer as an uncouth buffoon. It is not an accident that Donald Trump has become the vehicle that turns shame into pride for millions of my fellow citizens. “These eggheads that I watch on television… I have a nicer plane than they do, they’re not elite.” It is a grave error to underestimate the force of collective feelings of shame, resentment, and rage, feelings that are spreading around the globe and sending liberal democracies into crisis.
Eric Lutz writes for
Vanity Fair on Trump’s retreat into a physical and mental bunker and how even some Republicans are simply getting tired of his sh*t.
“It feels like bunker mentality,” an administration official told CNN on Tuesday. Indeed, the Trump White House these days has been more like Grey Gardens, with the reclusive president emerging only to play golf at his nearby Virginia club. Appearing to have largely abandoned his presidential duties, to the extent he ever sought to fulfill them, Trump’s only activities of late have been settling scores with insufficiently loyal officials—Chris Krebs, the top cybersecurity official in the Department of Homeland Security, became the latest purge victim after defending the integrity of the election—and wailing on and on about voter fraud on Twitter, which has slapped a warning label on a majority of his posts in recent days.
While his disinformation campaign may be paying off (half of Republicans in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday believe Trump won the election but that it was “rigged” against him), even some of his allies seem to be getting tired of the act and appear ready to give up the ghost. The Wall Street Journal editorial board on Tuesday demanded he either produce evidence to back up his claims of improprieties with voting machines or shut up. Republicans not named Lindsey Graham gradually seem to be acknowledging Biden as the president-elect, and Politico reported Wednesday that several GOP senators were spotted fist-bumping Kamala Harris in apparent recognition of her imminent ascension to the vice presidency. And even Fox & Friends appears ready to move on, with Brian Kilmeade urging Trump—a loyal viewer of the program—to let the Biden transition move forward. “It’s in the country’s best interest if he starts coordinating on the virus and starts coordinating on security with the Biden team,” Kilmeade said.
I decided to push fair use a bit on this article by the former
Director of the US Office of Government Ethics Walter M. Shaub Jr. for
The New York Review of Books because it covers distinct topics with some detail: the “sordid history” of GSA Administrator Emily Murphy and some history of presidential transitions.
Murphy has a sordid history in the Trump administration. As I recounted in my July 2 piece for the Review, she cancelled a long-planned relocation of the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Circumstances suggest she may have been satisfying a desire on the part of President Trump to avoid opening real estate near his Washington, D.C., hotel that a competing hotel could acquire. Trump leases the government’s Old Post Office building from Murphy’s agency for his hotel, which sits less than a block from the J. Edgar Hoover building that houses FBI headquarters.
Murphy has declined to discuss a meeting with President Trump at the White House shortly before the cancellation. She refused to answer questions about it posed by the GSA’s inspector general, who noted that her testimony in an April 2018 hearing before Congress may have “left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials in the decision-making process about the project.”
***
In 2020, President Trump trails by a wide margin in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Biden leads by over 50,000 votes in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania. Trump’s arguments about the illegitimacy of the election are a nonsensical muddle unsupported by evidence. He will lose his pending legal challenges. He has lost the election.
Two factors may help lessen the potentially devastating impact of Murphy’s assault on the republic. First, President-elect Biden possesses something President Trump lacks: faith in experts. Second, the government learned a hard lesson from the delayed 2000 transition. The delay in the GSA’s ascertainment made that transition a brutal experience. The memory of that experience has led the government to improve its transition processes since then. The time from election to inauguration is just a little over ten weeks, and the loss of thirty-seven days at the beginning of the transition as the candidates fought over the close Florida results was a costly setback. When I first joined the OGE, in October 2001, it was clear the experience of that transition had taken a toll on the OGE’s staff. It had taken a toll on the White House, too.
Former GSA Administrator Denise Turner Roth writes for CNN on what we are missing with the lack of a proper presidential transition.
...with the transition in limbo, the Biden team can't get to work on tackling the pandemic.
Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's plan to manufacture and distribute millions of vaccine doses, is reaching a critical stage. The Biden team needs to start having departmental briefings to be able to ensure a successful rollout of the vaccine.
The transition team also needs access to staff at the Health and Human Services Department who have direct lines to the local health agencies that will play a key role in vaccine distribution. It needs to consult with Treasury Department officials over the implementation of future Covid economic relief. There are countless problems that can emerge from a transition delay, but surely the most urgent and tragic one is a crippled government response to a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and sickened millions.
I thought that the David Priess article for Lawfare on some particulars about the President’s Daily Brief might be useful in this discussion.
5. Can Biden make up for lost time later in the transition, or upon taking office?
Yes. And on this point, regardless of what you might think of Biden personally or politically, it’s a good thing that he is the incoming commander in chief.
The president-elect’s learning curve may indeed be steep, especially if Trump delays his entry into the intelligence loop. But few presidential transitions in American history have seen a president-elect as well prepared as Biden to race up such a curve quickly. As vice president for eight years, he saw the President’s Daily Brief every working day. No accounts from the Obama administration suggest he was anything but a serious, solid consumer of the nation’s most exclusive intelligence. He’s not starting from scratch.
Compare his background as an eight-year vice president (and, before that, a decades-long consumer of intelligence while in the U.S. Senate) to the experiences of most other incoming presidents during the past 50 years. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump differed in many ways as they prepared to assume the powers and duties of the office, but not on one score: They all shared a lack of significant exposure to national-level intelligence until the transition.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker writes on the type of economy that president-elect Joe Biden might inherit.
...During an interview with the Brookings Institution’s Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy on Monday, Richard Clarida, a former Columbia University economist who is the vice-chair of the Federal Reserve Board, laid out an optimistic scenario, in which the lifting of restrictions on travel and other activities generates an outpouring of demand. “There is an enormous quantity of pent-up saving,” Clarida said, pointing to estimates that American households have built up more than a trillion dollars in extra savings. “That is the only time in my professional career when disposable income actually went up in a deep recession. And a lot of that has been saved, a lot of that has been forcibly saved, because people haven’t necessarily been able to go out and spend all of that.” In their latest public projections, Clarida and his colleagues on the Fed’s policymaking committee predicted that G.D.P. would expand by four per cent in 2021 and that the unemployment rate, which is currently at 6.9 per cent, would fall to 5.5 per cent by the fourth quarter of next year. That would represent a decent recovery. But, in his interview, Clarida pointed to the possibility of even stronger economic outcomes, including some “very, very attractive” ones. “And obviously,” he added, “the odds of that have gone up relative to where we were before the vaccine news.”
Clarida’s comments jibed with the arguments of other optimists, on Wall Street and elsewhere. In a recent note about the prospects for 2021, the economics team at Goldman Sachs said that mass immunization and the removal of coronavirus restrictions “should fuel a mid-year consumption boom as restored opportunities to spend allow households to substantially lower their saving rates and spend accumulated excess savings.” One of the most upbeat economists is Tim Duy, a University of Oregon professor and Bloomberg contributor. In his most recent column, Duy cited the vaccine and pent-up savings as positive factors, and he also mentioned several other things that could boost growth going forward, including favorable demographics. Biden, Duy wrote, is “stepping into a dream scenario for economic growth on the other side of the battle with the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Some of the economic forecasts in Cassidy’s piece seem exceptionally rosy to me, FWIW.
I’ll get to the reason that I am linking the Thomas B. Edsall column in the New York Times on the emerging fault lines in Democratic politics on the other side of the excerpt.
The intraparty dispute burst out full force on Nov. 5 during a three-hour House Democratic Caucus telephone meeting — a tape recording of which was put up on the Washington Post website.
Moderates angrily lashed out at liberals, accusing them of allowing divisive rhetoric such as “defund the police” and calls for socialism to go largely unchallenged. Those on the left pushed right back, accusing centrists of seeking to downgrade the demands of minorities, including those voiced at Black Lives Matter protests.
Abigail Spanberger, who represents the 7th Congressional District in Virginia — which runs from the suburbs of Richmond through the exurban and rural counties in the center of the state — voiced her instantly famous critique of the liberal wing of her party during the phone call: “We have to be pretty clear about the fact that Tuesday — Nov. 3 — from a congressional standpoint, was a failure,” she told her Democratic colleagues. “The number one concern that people brought to me” during the campaign “was defunding the police.”
Thomas Edsall is usually not my cup of tea, to be honest but:
To this point, I don’t think that I have ever linked to any article about these emerging (and long overdue) in Democratic circles in the pundit round-up. On balance, I think that Edsall does a pretty good job of illuminating what those fault lines are and I like his use of selective quotations from “both sides” of the fault lines.
I’m aware. I have some not fully formed opinions about it all. I’m sure I will be writing about some of the fault lines over the next few months and years.
I’m in no rush.
Lev Facher of STATnews writes on efforts of the Biden transition team to ramp up effective public messaging on COVID-19.
The question of who, if anyone, Biden can recruit to convince millions of Americans to heighten their pandemic precautions has taken on additional urgency in the two weeks since Election Day. The U.S. in recent days has repeatedly broken records for new Covid-19 cases in a single day. Several cities across the country have little or no remaining hospital capacity, and death rates have begun to climb in the wake of the increased infection levels.
Biden has warned that President Trump’s refusal to concede the result of the Nov. 3 election could have dire consequences for the federal government’s ability to distribute vaccines, treatments, and protective gear for medical workers once he takes office on Jan. 20.
Public messaging, however, is one of the few areas that Biden’s team can tackle head-on even without the Trump administration’s cooperation. Gounder, a veteran of the Ebola epidemic, said Biden’s advisers would likely lean on political figures, entertainers, and religious leaders to help convince individual communities to buy into basic public health measures like mask use and social distancing.
Leana S. Wen writes for the Washington Post that a “national lockdown” could well be impractical but also on why it is a not-so-great substitute for other mitigation methods that we already know.
An actual national lockdown is what a group of prominent American health professionals advocated in July, in an open letter calling for the government to “shut it down, start over, do it right.” And last week — with infections surging and hospitals reaching capacity across the country — a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s covid-19 advisory board advocated for a four- to six-week national lockdown. These experts are right that this dramatic measure would be the most efficient way of controlling the virus. In theory, it would stop the chains of transmission and could essentially eliminate covid-19 in the United States.
However, in practice, what are the chances this lockdown would succeed? It would require every governor to implement and enforce the policy, which I cannot imagine happening. It also requires the American people to abide by a strict stay-at-home order. A recent Gallup poll found that only 49 percent would likely be willing to stay home for a month, compared with 67 percent in late March/early April.
In fact, we’ve learned a lot since March about why we don’t need a blanket lockdown. For one thing, we’ve learned that ventilation is key to reducing transmission and that outdoor air diffuses virus particles. Closing outdoor spaces such as parks and beaches, as was done earlier in the pandemic, will only drive people indoors and increase infection. A better policy is to restrict indoor gatherings and urge those from different households to socialize outdoors only, while staying at least six feet apart.
Being outdoors in Washington D.C. at this time of year can be a bit much...and let’s not even talk about Chicago.
Jop de Vrieze of Science magazine writes on the emerging science about COVID-19 reinfection ad what it suggests about immunity from the coronavirus.
Reinfections hint that immunity against COVID-19 may be fragile and wane relatively quickly, with implications not just for the risks facing recovered patients, but also for how long future vaccines might protect people. “The question everybody wants to answer is: Is that second one going to be less severe most of the time or not?” says Derek Cummings, who studies infectious disease dynamics at the University of Florida. “And what do reinfections teach us about SARS-CoV-2 immunity in general?”
South Korean scientists reported the first suspected reinfections in April, but it took until 24 August before a case was officially confirmed: a 33-year-old man who was treated at a Hong Kong hospital for a mild case in March and who tested positive again at the Hong Kong airport on 15 August after returning from a trip to Spain. Since then, at least 24 other reinfections have been officially confirmed—but scientists say that is definitely an underestimate.
To count as a case of reinfection, a patient must have had a positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test twice with at least one symptom-free month in between. But virologist Chantal Reusken of the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) explains that a second test can also be positive because the patient has a residue of nonreplicating viral RNA from their original infection in their respiratory tract, because of an infection with two viruses at the same time or because they had suppressed but never fully cleared the virus. So most journals want to see two full virus sequences, from the first and second illnesses, that are sufficiently different, says Paul Moss, a hematologist at the University of Birmingham. “The bar is very high,” Moss says. “In many cases, the genetic material just isn’t there.”
Finally today, Terry Nguyen of Vox writes about the increasingly corrosive politics of...brunch.
The merits of brunch as a meal have long been debated, existing probably since the portmanteau was coined in 1895 by writer Guy Beringer, who advocated for a leisurely weekend occasion to incentivize sleeping in on Sundays and skipping church. In 2014, one writer angrily proclaimed in the New York Times that “brunch is for jerks,” while another retorted in New York magazine that “brunch has done nothing wrong” and that “it’s time to shut up” about a universally contentious meal. But what was traditionally missing from these arguments was the politics of brunch, not the validity of its existence.
During the Trump era, the politics of people who frequent brunch joints — typified through white gentrifiers and young professionals capable of splurging on a $20 cocktail and eggs Benedict — came under heavy scrutiny. Progressives’ distaste for the brunch crowd, specifically Brunch Democrats, can be summed up in one outdated slogan, originating from a Women’s March of yore: “If Hillary was president, we’d all be at brunch.”
Charged as tone-deaf, the slogan is a succinct display of privilege (it was usually espoused by a white woman), suggesting that political engagement and activism is reactive, and thus only necessary under certain conditions. Who is this “we” the slogan refers to? Not all Americans can afford to be at brunch — certainly not those without disposable income and weekends off.
Chile…(I’m all for brunch, by the way, loving, as I do, indulging in a 10:30 am BLT with waffle fries at a local breakfast/lunch place).
Everyone have a good morning!