Apr. 17




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Trump Unveils Re-Opening Plan...

On Thursday, COVID-19 moved into position to become the United States' leading cause of death by the time the week is out. 12,626 people die of heart disease in an average week, and COVID-19 took 12,392 lives in the week that ended last Sunday. With a slight upward trend in the last couple of days, the COVID-19 mortality total is expected to surpass 13,000 for the week that ends this Sunday. And that is just the known total; it may be weeks, months, or years before we have something close to an actual total, assuming we ever do.

At the same time, the economy continues to struggle. The latest total for unemployment claims is in: 5.2 million in the last week, bringing the total in the past four weeks to 22 million. That is a particularly unpleasant benchmark, as the economy had added 21.5 million jobs since the end of the Great Recession. So, the jobs growth of the entire last decade is, at least for the moment, entirely wiped out. It is worth noting that the next time the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides a percentage of Americans that are unemployed, which they will do sometime in early May, that number is going to be...entirely meaningless.

The issue is that "unemployment rate" measures the percentage of Americans who are looking for a job, but don't have one. At the moment, however, most out-of-work people aren't actually looking, either because they expect/hope to return to their old jobs, or they fear for their health, or both. Absent COVID-19, there would be roughly 165 million Americans trying to participate in the job market. If we take the 22 million unemployment claims and add them to the 5 million or so people who were already on unemployment when this whole thing began, then the real unemployment rate is around 16%. If we add another 3 million people per week through the end of the month, then the real unemployment rate will be around 20%, which is approaching Great Depression levels. Worth keeping in mind when BLS announces a figure of 6% or so in a couple of weeks.

Anyhow, perhaps in response to grim news like all of this, or perhaps because the few grown-ups in the administration finally have the President's ear, or perhaps due to his conference call with all 50 governors, or perhaps for some other reason, Donald Trump was more grounded in reality on Thursday than he's been at any other point during this pandemic. Waving the white flag in one of the (many) power struggles he cannot win, he conceded that the authority here lies in the state governors, telling them "you are going to call your own shots." Hopefully your ears were not harmed by the sonic boom produced by such a rapid change of course.

On top of that, Trump laid out a three-part re-opening plan for the U.S. that is so reasonable that it could very well have been produced by the administration of Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton, or George H. W. Bush. The plan is basically flexible in terms of timeline, emphasizes that certain public-health benchmarks must be met during each step in the process (for example, the availability of adequate testing), and concedes that some states will get going more quickly than others and that some types of businesses will get going more quickly than others. In other words, the administration appears to have embraced Gov. Gavin Newsom's (D-CA) notion that this process is going to be like a dimmer, and not a light switch.

With that said, and as Trump himself is conceding, it really doesn't matter what the White House says. First, because the nature of the United States' federal system leaves the president with relatively little power in circumstances like these. Second, because his administration has squandered whatever credibility it had on this issue. We've pointed out before, and we surely will again, that the Donald is simply incapable of understanding that there are circumstances where spin is useless in the absence of public trust. The latest indication of his inability to accept that hard, cold truth is his appointment of loyalist Michael Caputo as spokesman for HHS late Wednesday, pushing aside Secretary Alex Azar. The Secretary committed the cardinal sins of telling the President things he didn't want to hear, and publicly saying things he didn't want said. The problem is that nobody outside the base is going to listen to reverse Chicken Littles who insist the sky isn't falling. And for the base, Trump has Kellyanne Conway and Kayleigh McEnany.

Also not helping, credibility-wise, is the administration's general philosophy of "do as I say, not as I do." There is a long history of presidents buckling down and sharing in the people's struggles, at least in some small way, to send the signal that we're all in this together. Abraham Lincoln, for example, hired a substitute to fight on his behalf in the Civil War, even though he (as a man in his fifties, and a government official) was under no obligation to serve. Woodrow Wilson replaced the White House's groundskeeping staff with a flock of sheep to save manpower for World War I, and then donated the money from selling the sheep's wool to the Red Cross. The Roosevelts served notoriously awful food at the White House—prune pudding, bread and butter sandwiches, spaghetti with boiled carrots—to inspire economy in food preparation, given the economic privations of the Great Depression and then the rationing of World War II.

Team Trump, by contrast, has zero interest in leading by example. The President, for his part, regularly fails to observe social distancing during his press briefings, and the next time he wears a mask will be the first time. First Daughter Ivanka and First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner got in on the act this weekend, disregarding the White House ban on discretionary travel in order to fly to New Jersey for their observation of Passover. Why is this night different from all other nights? It's not, if you're the Trump family. Nobody objects to people maintaining their religious customs, but it is most certainly not necessary to go to a luxury resort over 200 miles away to observe Passover. And they certainly didn't have to fly to New Jersey. It's not that far from D.C.

In short, Donald Trump is like the drunken guy with the lampshade. He may have made it to the party, eventually, but most people stopped paying attention long ago. (Z)

...and Governors Do Their Own Thing(s)

It is not just our guess that (most) state governors don't really care what the White House is saying, it's what's actually happening. At the moment, Donald Trump still has a soft grand re-opening date for the U.S., namely April 30. There is no way that's going to happen, and presumably he will soon move that date forward, or else will pretend he never said it. In any event, at least a dozen state governors, representing almost half the country's population, have already set dates that are beyond the one preferred by the President.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 consortiums are all the rage among the states these days. There was already a West Coast consortium (California, Oregon, Washington) and an East Coast consortium (New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts). And, as of Thursday, there's one in the Midwest as well (Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky). That's 17 states, with a fair bit more than half the country's population and economic might, where the governors will be taking their own counsel, that of their neighboring colleagues, and that of local leadership above what the White House has to say.

In addition, there are also cases of governors subverting the administration through...covert ops? Is there a better name? For example, Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) is sick of supplies headed for his state being commandeered by the federal government. And so, he's begun arranging secret flights from China to Chicago, so that he can acquire needed supplies. That's right, the governor of the nation's fifth-most-populous state has been reduced to smuggling in order to do his job. Undoubtedly, other governors will be inspired by his example, if they haven't already organized covert ops of their own.

Similarly, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced on Thursday that "I'm worried about catching COVID-19" will now be a valid excuse for New Yorkers to request an absentee ballot for that state's primary. At the very least, that consideration will undoubtedly be extended during the general election. At most, New York is going to switch to 100% vote-by-mail by November; a proposal is currently under consideration in the state legislature. There are five other states (Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah) that are already 100% vote-by-mail, and a sixth (California) that is much of the way there (some counties do it and some don't), and other states will presumably join the list. Further, a sizable number of the remaining states (heavy on blue ones) offer no-questions-asked vote-by-mail. A heavy dose of publicity for that option (perhaps funded by the Michael Bloombergs of the world) is surely coming. The upshot is that even if Congress does nothing, and even if some state legislatures don't want to play along, leaving current circumstances basically intact, much of November's voting is still going to be done via mail. And so, it's another example of states doing things in a manner other than how the President wants them done. (Z)

Intelligence Community to Probe Chinese Origins of COVID-19

The search for a scapegoat continues. On Thursday, it was announced U.S. intelligence and national security personnel will be examining the exact origins of COVID-19. Undoubtedly, this is at least in part at the prompting of Donald Trump, who continues to look for someone or something to point the finger at, so as to deflect blame from himself and his administration.

There are three possible lines of inquiry here. The first is: Was this a bioweapon deliberately engineered by the Chinese government? Trump would very much like for this to be the case, since it would make him and the country the victims of a nefarious plot by evil foreigners. That would certainly get the base's blood boiling, and would also motivate some percentage of those who are not the base. The problem for the President is that the theory has already been repeatedly debunked. There would be telltale signs of a deliberately engineered organism, and those telltale signs just aren't there. Further, and perhaps more importantly, scientists who have looked at the virus say that it has elements that are actually counterproductive and counterintiuitve if the goal is to infect as many people as is possible. So, the answer to question one is: No.

The second line of inquiry: Was the disease of natural origin, but transferred to human beings because it was accidentally released from the Chinese lab where it was being studied? There is a circumstantial case for this; there is a biolab (the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention) in the area where the disease appears to have originated, and that biolab has studied coronaviruses in the past. However, that is the end of the evidence; there's been no indication that the lab ever studied COVID-19, nor that any accidental release took place. So, the answer to question two is: Maybe, but not likely.

And finally, the third line of inquiry is: Did the Chinese play fast and loose with the data in the early days of the pandemic in hopes of saving face? They sure did; you don't need an intelligence community investigation to figure this out. All you need is Google. There, you can find centrist sources, right-leaning sources, left-leaning sources, international sources, and even Chinese sources that say as much. So, the answer to question three is: Yes, absolutely.

This means that there is actually not all that much to be discovered here. At best, from the vantage point of Donald Trump, the story goes from "the disease was the result of unfortunate mutations in one or more animal species in China" to "the disease was the result of an unfortunate accident in a Chinese lab." Does the latter give the President considerably more political cover than the former? We don't see it; preparing for all possibilities, including screw-ups by other countries, is part of the presidential job description. Our guess is that the folks tasked with exploring these questions will conclude they are barking up the wrong tree, and won't put much energy into them. And so, the search for a scapegoat will keep on keepin' on. (Z)

Small Business Funding Runs Out

It was only a matter of time, and now that time has come. The $350 billion in funds that Congress appropriated for loans to small businesses has run out. The full Congress won't be in Washington until the end of next week, so the availability of more funds is not imminent.

Quite clearly, the Democrats have been sticking to their guns, specifically their insistence that COVID-19 relief bill v4.0 contain more stuff than just money for small businesses. If they had backed down, the bill would already be signed, sealed, and delivered. With at least another week for pressure to grow, and with Donald Trump signaling that he's open to adding additional items to the small business funding, it's quite likely that the blue team is going to get some of the goodies they want.

What exactly might that mean, though? Well, Politico has an interesting piece about the five possibilities, as they see it. Here is the executive summary of their list:

1. More of the Same: The reason that Republicans are ready to give more money to small businesses right now is that small business owners are, more or less, a Republican constituency. Not as staunchly as, say, evangelicals, but there's definitely a strong partisan lean. With COVID-19 relief bill v3.0, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) & Co. let the Republicans figure out what presents they wanted to give to Republican-leaning interests, and then swooped in and added conditions to those presents, as well as a bunch of presents for Democratic-leaning interests (like the unemployed). The Democrats could take this approach again.
   
   
2. A Little More Than More of the Same: There are actually two versions of this. The first is that the Democrats go for more of the same, except also with fixes to the loopholes in COVID-19 relief bill v3.0 that have presented themselves in the past week. For example, they might exert more control over the panel that is overseeing the disbursement of funds. The second version is that Democrats just go for more money for "their" people than they got the first time, whether that's the base (unemployed, people on food stamps, minority business owners, etc.) or left-leaning special interests (like the Institute of Museum and Library Services, or the Kennedy Center).
   
   
3. Putting the First Thing First: Thus far, nearly all of the money the government has handed out has been directed at the symptoms (unemployment, business disruptions, food shortages) and not the disease (COVID-19). As Obama White House economic adviser and University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee observes: "The first rule of virus economics is that you gotta stop the virus before you can do anything about the economics." The Democrats could insist on massive funding for research, testing, and medical equipment, up to and including orders to American manufacturers to shift to production of needed supplies.
   
   
4. Protecting November: Another possibility is to insist on national vote-by-mail, which the Democrats want and the Republicans don't. As we note above, there's going to be a whole lot of vote-by-mail in November even if Congress does absolutely nothing, and it doesn't take an advanced degree in political science to figure that out. This could blunt the Democrats' sense that Congressional action on this front is a priority. On the other hand, it could also blunt the Republicans' resistance.
   
   
5. Thinking Big: In COVID-19 relief bill v3.0, the Republicans tucked in a $170 billion tax cut for Donald Trump and Jared Kushner...er, for wealthy real-estate investors. The connection between this and COVID-19 is tenuous, at best. The Republicans were just using the relief bill to sneak through one of their general priorities. The Democrats could do the same, going after something like infrastructure funding, or Green New Deal-type stuff.

Which one (or ones) will it be? Who knows? On one hand, the Democrats are considerably less willing than the Republicans to play hardball, generally speaking. On the other hand, they are holding firm at the moment, and they've had awfully good luck playing chicken when Donald Trump is involved. So, they might just swing for the fences. (Z)

Never Trump Republicans Rally

On Wednesday, George Conway, Reed Galen, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Rick Wilson, all of them longtime prominent Republicans (though Schmidt has left the Party), published an op-ed in The Washington Post headlined "We've never backed a Democrat for president. But Trump must be defeated." They write that:

[Donald] Trump is a photonegative of Joe Biden. While Trump has innumerable flaws and a lifetime of blaming others for them, Biden has long admitted his imperfections and in doing so has further illustrated his inherent goodness and his willingness to do the work necessary to help put the United States back on a path of health and prosperity.

Unlike Trump, Biden is not an international embarrassment, nor does he demonstrate malignant narcissism. A President Biden will steady the ship of state and begin binding up the wounds of a fractured country. We have faith that Biden will surround himself by advisers of competence, expertise and wisdom, not an endless parade of disposable lackeys.

Their fellow conservative (and disaffected Republican) Max Boot had a similar op-ed on the same day headlined "Republicans who don't like Trump have no excuses: Endorse Biden." He writes:

"When somebody is the president of the United States," President Trump said on Monday, "the authority is total."

It is hard to imagine a better one-sentence encapsulation of why he must be defeated. Trump's failures have made us the world capital of the coronavirus, with more than three times as many deaths in New York City (pop. 8.3 million) as in all of Germany (pop. 83 million). Having dodged responsibility for fighting the coronavirus ("I don't take responsibility at all"), Trump now claims dictatorial powers to determine when social distancing ends. If he wins another term, he is likely to put not only a lot of Americans but also American democracy itself into the ICU.

In 2016, the Never Trump Republicans played things pretty close to the vest, and many of them avoided taking too strong a stand on the election (recall, for example, how many members of the Bush family refused to vote Trump, but also refused to admit to that). This year, the Never Trump Republicans are clearly coming out loud and proud, and have no intention of keeping their votes to themselves.

The $64,000 question is: Will it matter? And our answer, which may be worth a shade less than $64,000, is: We just don't see how. As Jacob Heilbrunn observes in a thoughtful analysis for Washington Monthly headlined "Does the Never Trump Movement Matter?", the Republican Party of George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford (and even the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole) is basically dead. Most of the movers and shakers on the red team have hitched their wagon to Trumpism, and there won't be any going back once Trump exits the political stage.

In other words, most Republicans remain squarely on board the S.S. Elephant, even if it has undertaken an aggressive course change in the past few years. And much of the remainder—folks who voted happily for Reagan and Bush and Mitt Romney—have already figured out that they have been set adrift, and are prepping to grit their teeth and vote Biden. Or maybe there won't be any teeth-gritting at all, as some of these folks (e.g., suburban women) have already effectively joined the Democratic Party. So, there may be a few people out there who are waiting for a signal that it's ok to turn their backs on the GOP, or who are waiting for a good explanation of why they should do so. But the vast, vast majority of people who were Republicans in, say, 2010, have already made up their mind as to whether they still are. (Z)

What to Make of Tara Reade?

At this point, most readers of this site are presumably familiar with Tara Reade. She is the woman who claimed, about a month ago, that while she was working for then-senator Joe Biden in the 1980s, she was sexually assaulted by him. Biden denies this.

There appear to be only two elements to this allegation that everyone agrees upon:

• Reade really did work for Biden
• He was somewhat touchy-feely back then, in terms of hugs and shoulder touches and such. Unacceptable in the 2020s, but somewhere on the spectrum of "charming" to "kinda creepy" in the 1980s.

Beyond that, it is literally a case of "he said, she said."

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, who has written extensively on political figures and sexual misconduct, has a piece where she tries to evaluate Reade's claims in comparison to those made by Christine Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh. Her breakdown:

• Contemporaneous evidence: Reade says she told her mother about the assault, but her mother has since passed, and cannot confirm or deny. She says she also told her brother, who confirmed the non-assault elements of the story (touching hair) and then later said he remembered the assault elements. And finally, Reade says she told a friend, who came forward and confirmed the story, but only under condition of anonymity. Ford, by contrast, preferred to keep the incident to herself (common among sexual violence survivors) and so told nobody at the time (though there were a few partial witnesses, as it turns out). This means that from the vantage point of contemporaneous evidence, Reade's account actually has more support than Ford's, even if that support is something less than rock-solid.
  
  
• Evidence predating current allegation: Reade said that she told a therapist and a second friend about the Biden incident in the decades after it took place, but she's declined to identify the therapist or allow that person to confirm the claim. The friend has come forward (also anonymously) and confirmed only the non-violent elements of the story. Ford, by contrast, shared her story with various people over the years, including therapists. She allowed these folks to come forward, and they confirmed her account, while also making clear that Ford's story (unlike Reade's) remained consistent over time. And so, when it comes to evidence that exists in the timeframe between "original incident" and "became a major news story," Ford's account comes out well ahead.
  
  
• Credibility: There are significant questions about Reade's credibility. As noted, her accounting of the incident with Biden has changed over time, from accusing him of being touchy-feely to accusing him of a crime. Her public opinion of Biden has also changed over time; in years past she repeatedly praised him on Twitter, including his work combating sexual assault. Her views of him turned much more sour at roughly the same time she became an outspoken supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-VT) presidential campaign. In addition, Reade has been broadly erratic in her online behavior, including an on-again, off-again obsession with Vladimir Putin, making such observations as: "President Putin's obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports is intoxicating to American women." This piece has an extremely thorough accounting, if you are interested.
  
  By contrast, there is much less question about Ford's credibility. Yes, she is a Democrat. And yes, she did not want Kavanaugh to be seated on the Supreme Court. But she did not believe that she could somehow derail him in order to get a liberal seated on the Court and, in fact, she worried that if he was rejected, someone even more right-wing would replace him. In addition, Ford is a well-respected professional who has built a solid career over the decades. So, from vantage point #3, Ford is once again on a stronger footing than Reade.
  
  
• Pattern evidence: It is virtually unheard of for someone to commit one violent sexual assault, and then stop there, particularly if they thought that they had gotten away with it. Nobody else has accused Biden of anything like this, and a great many staffers have come forward and said it's inconceivable to them. Marcus does not specifically point this out, but Reade's account also outlines a conspiracy in which several Biden staffers maneuvered to get her into his presence, alone. None of those folks, if this is true, has come forward.
  
  As to Kavanaugh, the accusations against him were never properly investigated, what with the FBI spending a grand total of 48 hours looking into them, and declining to take calls from those who said they had information. However, there is at least some indication of a pattern of behavior, somewhat confirmed by his day planner (remember "boof," "the devil's triangle," and "Renate alumnus"?). So, here again, Ford's story holds up better than Reade's does.

We will never know for sure what the truth is when it comes to Reade and Biden. The alleged incident was too long ago, left behind too little evidence (if it did happen), and there's zero chance that either of the people involved is going to break down and declare: "Everything I said is a tissue of lies!" In fact, given how human memory works, it's entirely possible that both individuals believe they are being 100% truthful.

That said, it is Marcus' conclusion that while it's possible that the accusations against Biden are truthful, "My gut says that what Reade alleges did not happen." Further, in view of the comparisons that Marcus makes, she concludes it is not inherently hypocritical or partisan to believe Ford and to be skeptical of Reade. One of the two women, both of them, or neither of them could be speaking the truth about what happened to them. But there's no other way to slice it: Ford's account hangs together much better than Reade's does, overall.

As to the politics of all this, if the evidence of Biden's sexual misconduct is as the contents of a thimble, and the evidence of Brett Kavanaugh's sexual misconduct is as the contents of a coffee cup, then the evidence of Donald Trump's sexual misconduct is as the contents of Lake Michigan. And as the Post's Molly Roberts, who has generally been critical of Biden and his touchy-feely behavior, points out, the American political system will offer exactly two viable choices for president in 2020: Biden and Trump. If one believes Reade's allegations, that is certainly an argument for voting third-party or for staying home on Election Day. It is not an argument for voting Trump, though, and anyone who says otherwise is being willfully dishonest. (Z)

Warren Is Angling for VP Slot

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) appeared on MSNBC on Wednesday night and, in response to Rachel Maddow's question, said she is absolutely willing to be Joe Biden's running mate. In that context, anything less than the full Sherman is equivalent to saying: "Yes, I want to be your running mate, Joe. Pick me! Pick me!" Further evidence of this comes from the Warren campaign itself, which hustled to send out an effusive pro-Biden message as soon as was practicable on Wednesday:

Political campaigns generally treat their e-mail lists like gold (which they kinda are), and so for Warren to turn hers over so quickly and so fully is instructive.

There are certainly a fair number of Democrats who see a Biden-Warren ticket as a dream pairing. That would, in theory, give the ticket a centrist-progressive balance. It would also pair two people who are pragmatists with experience in getting things done. Further, if anything were to happen to Biden, Warren is clearly capable of taking over. On the other hand, they are both septuagenarians, they are both white, and Warren offers little in terms of geography and/or electoral votes. Massachusetts is going blue in 2020, and so is most or all of New England, with the possible exception of New Hampshire and one EV in Maine.

There is also another possible problem with Warren: Some "progressives" don't like her. Either they are angry about her disputes with Bernie Sanders or they think the Senator is too willing to compromise in order to get things done.

You probably noticed that we put quotation marks around the word "progressives" in the previous paragraph. That is because we were thinking about it, and we wonder if the use of that word hasn't gotten a little sloppy. It is true that the original Progressive movement of the early 20th century challenged the status quo, looked askance at big business, and pushed for a more egalitarian society. It is equally true, however, that they were pragmatists whose motto might well have been "don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough." To take an example, when the movement took up the cause of women's suffrage, they focused on a smallish state (Washington), then a medium-sized state (California, which was far less populous back then), then a few more states, and didn't take the whole thing national for more than a decade.

In other words, at least some "progressives" today don't actually bear all that much resemblance to their ostensible historical predecessors. Beyond that, Warren is a progressive and has endorsed Biden. Sanders is a progressive and has endorsed Biden. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is a progressive and has endorsed Biden. Those are, almost without question, the three most prominent progressive leaders in the nation. If voters who call themselves "progressive" hear what that trio has to say, and respond with "I'm never voting for Biden" or, even more significantly, "I'm voting Trump," then how can one possibly consider them to be part of the same movement or political faction as Warren/Sanders/AOC?

This is not to cast aspersions on left-wing folks who don't support Biden, but merely to point out that they may not be best described as "progressives," because that label may have been stretched beyond the point of being meaningful. Perhaps we should be thinking in terms of the centrist, progressive, and populist wings of the Democratic Party, and we should say that Warren can probably help deliver the progressives, but she's not going to do anything when it comes to the left-wing populists. (Z)

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