The president’s progressive base is poised to prevent him from using the pandemic as an effective cudgel with which to hit Trump.
The president’s progressive base is poised to prevent him from using the pandemic as an effective cudgel with which to hit Trump.
J oe Biden’s reelection campaign has struggled to overcome voters’ nostalgia for the material conditions that typified the first three years of Donald Trump’s administration. The campaign’s preferred solution to this conundrum is reportedly to remind voters of Trump’s fourth year in office — a period dominated by Covid-19 and the restrictions on social and economic life that it prompted. Biden’s team will encounter two obstacles if that is their approach: voters’ desire to avoid recalling the pandemic and the fact that the Democratic Party’s progressive base will not allow the president to advance the arguments he needs to make. After all, if most voters hated that time in American public life, Biden’s tormentors in the progressive movement did not.
“The renewed focus on the crisis’ earliest days represents a conscious choice,” Politico reported on Wednesday. The report notes the extent to which Biden’s advisers are conflicted over this strategy. They once recognized that memories from 2020 are simply “too painful” and the public-policy arguments over pandemic-mitigation strategies “too divisive” to yield political benefits. “But as former President Donald Trump seeks to portray his time in office as a long-lost Golden Age, the calculus inside the Biden camp has shifted,” the dispatch reads.
Biden has begun musing on the trail about the old times. “Remember when he said, ‘Inject bleach’?” the president recently asked a friendly crowd. Biden has also sought to remind voters that Trump told the journalist Bob Woodward that, when it came to the pandemic, he intended to “play it down.” One of the Trump administration’s unambiguous achievements in that period — the rapid development, approval, and preliminary dissemination of mRNA vaccines — has become a source of controversy on the right, a fissure that prevents Trump from claiming too much credit for an achievement upon which voters still look fondly. As one unnamed Democrat “close to the campaign” disclosed, the president’s strategy is risky, but it is designed “to reinforce the message more broadly that [Trump] isn’t going to bring you stability. He’s a f***ing nut.”
There’s a logic to this approach, risky though it might be. But it depends on the forbearance of Biden’s left flank, and his administration’s exquisite sensitivity to even the mildest progressive discomfort suggests he won’t be able to pull it off.
As Biden’s remarks suggest, his efforts to resurrect the pandemic as a political issue are predicated on the assumption that the United States was too lax in its effort to implement mitigation strategies. It’s far from obvious that voters share that outlook. And if Biden did fully commit to relitigating the pandemic, it could easily backfire.
Republicans would eagerly remind voters of the degree to which the Left and its media allies lobbied against loosening Covid restrictions “until all of us get that two-dose regimen.” They would note the extent to which a hagiographical cult sprung up around public-health officials like Anthony Fauci, who spent the early Biden years advocating the indefinite perpetuation of pandemic-related restrictions in federally regulated jurisdictions, like government-run facilities and airplanes.
Even today, masking in public, indoors or out, remains a totem among a hypochondriacal sort, many of whom are concentrated in America’s progressive urban bastions. The first sign of the virus’s resurgence still reliably gives way to hyperbolic demands on the public to once again submit to an involuntary masking regimen. Republicans would do well to remind voters that Biden’s public-health officials tried unsuccessfully to condition the public into making masking an act of essential hygiene. “Masks also help protect from other illnesses like common cold and flu,” former CDC director Rochele Walensky leadingly observed. After all, “we still don’t want these other viruses spread around,” Dr. Emily Lutterloh of the New York State Department of Health scolded as late as December 2021. “It is still prudent to stay home, and the same mitigation measures that will help Covid from spreading are likely to help stop these.”
Republicans would be similarly obliged to refresh the public on the sequence of events that finally dispensed with the states of emergency that pertained from 2020 to 2023. It wasn’t Joe Biden’s good graces that put an end to emergency measures. For example, one House bill designed to force the president to sunset the emergency passed last year on a party-line vote, with 210 Democrats in opposition. Those Democrats were only following Biden’s lead. The president let everyone know that he “strongly opposes” efforts to put an end to the Covid emergency, which, in the winter of 2023, was already over for anyone but the pandemic-mitigation regime’s most committed observers.
It wasn’t Joe Biden’s political acumen that led him to take that lethargic course. He ran successfully for the White House on the premise that voters wanted a pathway out of the mid-pandemic status quo as fast as possible, but his instinct to defer to the loudest progressives in the room soon took over. Indeed, that instinct has guided him and his advisors reliably throughout his presidency. If Biden couldn’t help but apologize for extemporaneously calling Laken Reily’s killer an “illegal” despite the near-universal apathy his remark produced among Democratic voters, he will not be able to buck the progressives for whom the pathologizing of public health is a cherished policy goal.
“We’re still in a pandemic,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, the interim director of the World Health Organization’s epidemic-preparedness department. She made those remarks just last month even though her institution declared an end to the worldwide public-health emergency almost one year ago. “The virus is rampant,” she added. That may be a fringe outlook, but it is a fringe to which this White House is wedded. Absent a public divorce, Biden won’t be able to transform the pandemic into a negative for Trump alone.