When it comes to the pandemic, the ‘adults’ in charge of the White House have failed miserably.
When it comes to the pandemic, the ‘adults’ in charge of the White House have failed miserably.
P resident Biden hasn’t the slightest clue what he should do or say on the topic of COVID-19. He is profoundly out of his depth, he is hopelessly hamstrung, and, as is richly deserved, he is beginning to pay a steep political price for the mountain of cheap, glib, opportunistic nonsense in which he indulged during his campaign. Rarely in American history has a disapproval rating been so assiduously well-earned.
It is not President Biden’s fault that COVID-19 remains with us. The virus does not care if a given government is run by Democrats or Republicans. But while it is not political, it has been politicized, and now the bill for that politicization is coming due. On the trail, Biden promised that he would “shut down the virus, not the country”; he vowed to follow the data and listen to the scientists; and he described his predecessor’s decision to limit travel from certain African and Middle Eastern countries as “hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.” As president, he has presided over more COVID-related deaths than his predecessor; he has allowed himself to be captured by monomaniacal, neurotic, agoraphobic pantywaists; and, in a particularly delicious turn of fate, he has been left relying on precisely the blunt instruments that he once insisted would do nothing to stop the spread of pandemic. Fools rush in, says the song. And Joe Biden is nothing if not a fool.
A common refrain of Biden’s partisans is that his administration has signaled a return to government by “adults.” In truth, it has done no such thing. Adults are capable of determining what they can, and cannot, control. Adults are capable of weighing competing priorities, sorting through the different advice offered by their staffers, and settling on a course of action. Adults are capable of learning their briefs in full, so that they do not end up stammering stupidly in front of a carefully watching world. Adults don’t sow the seeds of doubt if they anticipate that they, themselves, will eventually be responsible for the flowers. And, above all else, adults are capable of remembering that, if societies are not careful, they can grow so hysterically obsessed with a given threat that they forget what it is they were worried about in the first place.
President Biden is not an adult.
Like so many of the people with whom he spends his time, President Biden has turned COVID-19 into a Maguffin, transmuting the virus from a dangerous disease to which Americans are obliged to respond in a judicious manner into a proverbial white whale that, irrespective of the context or the cost, must be wiped from the face of the earth. Speaking to reporters today, Biden declined to say categorically that further lockdowns were “off the table,” in an astonishing statement that must lead one to wonder whether he is aware how much has changed over the last 18 months. At one point — before we knew what we now know, before we saw the horrific social and economic costs that our draconian measures carried, before we had COVID vaccines — our endless array of restrictions and inconveniences was defensible on the grounds of prudence. Today, it is not.
Writing in the Atlantic earlier this month, Alexis C. Madrigal, of the COVID Tracking Project, seemed as if he was about to acknowledge that for millions of Americans, the cure has become considerably worse than the disease, but he then inexplicably whiffed at the last moment. Instead, Madrigal — who, despite having been “ultracareful for 18” months, ended up contracting COVID himself — lamented that, nearly two years after the virus first arrived, “most policies appear designed to make life seem normal,” and he warned his readers not to “be fooled” into letting down their guard. “The world’s normal,” he cautioned, “only until you test positive.”
And yet, tellingly, the inconveniences to which Madrigal was referring were not virological, but man-made. The “vaccines are amazing. I was and am fine,” he confirmed. But his positive result meant that his “kids had to come out of school and isolate with my wife,” that “a raft of tests had to be taken by everyone I’d had even limited contact with,” and that his terrified “8-year-old could barely look at” him. Thus, the problem with contracting COVID was not that he’d gotten particularly ill, but that his being positive had triggered all sorts of draconian rules. “I haven’t hugged my kids for 10 days,” he wrote. “They missed a whole week of school, and my wife’s work life got turned upside down — even though they never tested positive or got sick.”
There’s a lesson there, if you can see it. Madrigal cannot. Joe Biden can’t, either.