The Abbreviated Pundit Round-up is a daily feature at Daily Kos.
We are in a difficult spot right now with coronavirus. Increased testing and increased reports of deaths mean increased awareness of cases we already have. It doesn’t mean things are exploding but it might mean this is coming closer to a place near you.
The response right now is crucial for keeping the public’s trust. So far, administration attempts to assert competence and control have been abysmal. They literally do everything wrong, starting with showing fealty and obeisance to Trump at every briefing. Pro tip: stop licking his boots. keep politics out of it, and let the health officials speak honestly.
This is a longish post, so let’s dig in.
Politico:
Azar in the crosshairs for delays in virus tests
HHS’ slow response was traced to the secretary’s distrust of aides and fear of offending Trump.
Numerous problems with the Trump administration’s testing regimen have come to light: Coronavirus tests developed by CDC were flawed, possibly because the lab itself was contaminated. The resulting lack of test capacity forced U.S. officials to screen a limited number of patients in January and February, with the CDC testing fewer than 500 Americans at the same time that China was likely testing at least 1 million of its own residents. Meanwhile, public health officials had no fallback testing option until the Food and Drug Administration granted approval for hospitals and other labs to develop their own homegrown tests on Saturday — more than six weeks after the first U.S. case of coronavirus was identified.
Aaron Blake/WaPo:
Trump’s baffling coronavirus vaccine event
As a private citizen and presidential candidate, Donald Trump was a proponent of vaccine skepticism — ignoring the scientific consensus on stuff like how vaccines don’t cause autism. As president, he is now surrounded by experts on the subject, including on Monday when he held a coronavirus roundtable with his task force and the heads of several pharmaceutical companies.
Yet despite the increasingly scary situation involving the disease and preparations having been underway for weeks, he still appears rather clueless on the subject.
At the event Monday, Trump peppered the drug companies with questions that were some variant of “How fast can you get it done?” But despite this having been a focal point in recent weeks, he still didn’t seem to process the fact that producing a vaccine means conducting months and months of trials before it can be deployed. He even at one point asked whether the flu vaccine could be used to combat coronavirus.
This is what we mean when we say “don’t normalize the president.”
NY Times:
Surfaces? Sneezes? Sex? How the Coronavirus Can and Cannot Spread
What you need to know about how the virus is transmitted.
You walk into a crowded grocery store. A shopper has coronavirus. What puts you most at risk of getting infected by that person?
Experts agree they have a great deal to learn, but four factors likely play some role: how close you get; how long you are near the person; whether that person projects viral droplets on you; and how much you touch your face. (Of course, your age and health are also major factors.)
I talk coronavirus and politics in this 35 min podcast with Virginia Heffernan on Slate’s Trumpcast. Give it a listen!
Tom Inglesby and Anita Cicero/NY Times:
How to Confront the Coronavirus at Every Level
Tests need to be readied, protection equipment needs to be produced, medication needs to be developed. All of this will take funding.
So the federal government, state and local governments, public health agencies, health care systems and industry should be preparing more actively to respond to a widespread outbreak of the virus.
Health care systems need plans to diagnose people rapidly, so those who are infected can be isolated before they spread Covid-19 to the hospital staff, or to other patients and family members. That will require setting up testing centers in clinics or in hospital locations well removed from crowded emergency departments and waiting rooms.
Up until this week, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been doing all the lab testing for Covid-19. Technical challenges have slowed the distribution of this test, but now public health labs around the country have the authority to use it in their cities and states. Once there is enough testing capacity, testing should be done for anyone with symptoms consistent with Covid-19, and priority should be given to the sickest hospitalized patients.
This piece lays out areas where we are not ready. And remember: testing severe cases only makes the fatality rate look higher than it really is:
And it was really, really stupid of Trump to imply we’d eliminate cases soon and easily.
On social media?
Jeremy Konyndyk/twitter:
Now seems highly likely that there has been undetected community transmission ongoing in parts of the upper West Coast for weeks, at least.
How did we end up with major surveillance failure on par with Italy and Iran?
Let's talk about how that happens.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
So… did we all have a Super Tuesday? Landslide Joe did. But let’s stop and congratulate Bernie’s Super Tuesday voters, and Elizabeth’s voters, who all worked so damn hard.
And Mike? Drop out and send your money to Democrats.
What yesterday’s results told us is that Democrats are desperate to beat Donald Trump, and my theory of the case is that once they decided who had the best shot they (historically) quickly migrated. 40% decided in the last few days, the vast majority to Joe.
And once black voters decided, the Democratic party coalesced. Jim Clyburn won this day for Joe. Suburban women voters broke heavily for Joe. My theory is coronavirus and volatile markets pushed folks to dock in a a safe harbor. Take that coalition and add young voters and Latinos and we win in November (no gloating over them, that will take work). Regardless of how this plays out, we’ll need everyone.
But, uhm, the one with the plurality of the delegates wins, right? 🤔 And what possible difference could those Fidel Castro remarks make with FL coming up? 🤔 Look, politics 101 still matters. You win by addition not subtraction. When we called out those two moves, we weren’t kidding. They matter.
I wonder if the markets will have a Biden bounce Wednesday?
Peter Hamby/Vanity Fair:
BIDEN’S BRANDING REBOOT: HERE COMES EMO JOE
He’s always had what Richard Ben Cramer called “the connect.” But now his campaign will focus on showing his emotional chops in a bid for “empathy moms,” the suburbanites who led 2018’s crushing Democratic victory.
One campaign strategist I spoke with recently described Biden’s potential with “empathy moms,” suburban white women who might share soldier-homecoming videos on Facebook and perhaps voted for John McCain or Mitt Romney, but find Donald Trump revolting. They’re Romney–Clinton voters, and even some Obama–Trump voters, who aren’t ideologues. They moved in Biden’s direction in the South Carolina primary last weekend, when he established a coalition of black voters and post-Trump suburban dwellers over the age of 30 who are plainly uncomfortable with the prospect of a socialist on top of the Democratic ticket. With Buttigieg and Klobuchar no longer slicing up the vote among college-educated whites, they seem poised to consolidate around Biden as the anti-Sanders candidate.
Dear fellow concerned citizens: you have to attract people who don't vote without alienating people that do vote.
Thank you for attending my TED talk.
Rachel Bitecofer/TNR:
Hate Is on the Ballot
The hidden dynamic that’s transformed our politics—and will loom large in the 2020 election
But turnout and demographics don’t win elections by themselves; variant outcomes also track to a striking degree to differences in strategy. Candidates who ran as liberal Democrats rather than more traditional “Blue Dog” campaigns outperformed their more moderate counterparts in terms of base turnout. This sharper partisan appeal has allowed them to come close to equalizing the partisan composition of the district. Like their more liberal counterparts, Blue Dog candidates still experienced large turnout surges among independents. But the winning margins they enjoyed proved to be tighter than those in districts featuring Democratic candidates who saw their party hit the same percentage level—in a larger pool of Democratic coalition voters—that Republican turnout had.
This suggests these candidates may have paid a penalty by not focusing more effort on increasing turnout among their own voters and concentrating instead on independent and even opposition-party voters. This strategic choice is framed, in part, by the idea that consciously downplaying signs of Democratic affiliation will avoid upsetting Trump voters, and thereby will not inflate GOP turnout. But the data shows that Republican turnout surged in these Blue Dog districts, while Democratic turnout lagged compared to levels in other districts. In other words, my research suggests that there may be no benefit, only cost, to such a strategy.
Fun times.
Politico:
‘The Worst Possible Scenario’: Never Trumpers Wonder What to Do About Bernie
“The worst possible scenario” were McMullin’s words. Wilson—a famously foul-mouthed GOP strategist—described a potential Sanders-Trump race as “the fucking apocalypse.”
On the mainstage and in the corridors, in their coffee klatches and huddles by the coat racks, these conservatives agonized over the democratic socialist from Vermont—how his policies endangered the country, how his politics imperiled the Democratic House majority, and how, unthinkably, patriotism might require them to vote for him.
“There’s a reasonable case to be made that one term of Bernie is less dangerous than a second term of Trump,” Kristol told me. “I’d want to make that decision on Oct. 30, not now. I won’t vote for Trump, I think—I know. I won’t vote for Trump.”
But not voting for the president is the easy part. Are you still a Principled Conservative if you vote for a socialist?
Michelle Goldberg/NY Times:
Bernie Sanders Can’t Count on New Voters
There’s little evidence a progressive candidate can remake the electorate.
As Bernie Sanders has taken the lead in the Democratic primary, those of us with doubts that America would elect a Jewish democratic socialist president have been able to comfort ourselves with polls showing him beating Donald Trump, often by larger margins than his competitors.
New political science research by David Broockman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Joshua Kalla of Yale erodes some of that comfort. Broockman and Kalla surveyed over 40,000 people — far more than a typical poll — about head-to-head presidential matchups. They found that when they weight their numbers to reflect the demographic makeup of the population rather than the likely electorate, as many polls do, Sanders beats Trump, often by more than other candidates.
But the demographics of people who actually vote are almost always different from the demographics of people who can vote. That’s where their analysis raises concerns about Sanders’s chances.
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
The real reason Chris Matthews had to go
Give Chris Matthews partial credit for his apology on his way out the door Monday night. In his abrupt and unexpected farewell, the MSNBC host acknowledged his history of what he called “compliments on a woman’s appearance.”
Such comments were “never okay,” he said, and he was sorry for making them. I appreciated this wasn’t one of those mealy-mouth “sorry if I offended you” apologies — though it still seemed to miss why it’s a problem when a powerful man emphasizes a woman’s sex appeal in a professional setting, the way it diminishes and objectifies.
But this casual sexism wasn’t at the heart of why he had to go. One of the most prominent and well-paid hosts in the cable-news game didn’t listen, didn’t do his homework, and treated politics as a game in which noisy confrontation was a necessity. The problem was less about greenroom boorishness and far more about what you could see and hear on the air — especially in recent weeks, but also going back a long way.