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| Both Democrats and Republicans share in the failure to manage the Covid-19 pandemic. |
Both Democrats and Republicans have argued that the United States isn't handling the pandemic well. It's easy to blame the Trump administration for their failures because the man in charge is a man who has no idea of how run anything but his mouth. But Congress was always in a position to do something. From where I sit they have devoted most of their energy to posturing and trading insults and injuries.
As political leaders Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are well-matched opponents. Both are obstructionists who have used their leadership positions to undermine and oppose the initiatives of whoever was in the White House simply because the person holding that office wasn't a member of their party.
Before Mitch McConnell refused to allow Merrick Garland to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court for purely political reasons, Nancy Pelosi took every opportunity to define the Bush administration's policies as failures that should be opposed from the start. Neither political party has demonstrated any good faith bipartisanship in over 20 years.
When it became clear that the SARS-Covid-19 virus threatened the entire world, everyone in the White House and Congress should have dropped everything from economic fights with China to the stupefying policy of "leave no [judicial] vacancy unfilled" (the only significant accomplishment of the Republican Party since 2017) to come up with a coherent plan for dealing with the medical and economic needs of the country.
A blind fly on a wall in China could have told you that the United States was going to shutdown as the only way to stop the virus from spreading. And given that personal finance experts and bloggers have been saying for years that 40% of Americans can't even scrounge together $400 for an emergency, you didn't need to be a holy prophet to foresee a year of dearth and suffering.
As soon as China told the rest of the world in January that the virus was worse than their medical system could handle, the White House should have said mea culpa, we were wrong to dismantle the pandemic response team. They should have recalled the team and dusted off the playbook right away.
Congress should have stopped fooling around with a doomed impeachment process and started working on legislation to protect our health care system and the economy. That is, after all, what our elected officials are supposed to be doing.
However justified the call to impeach Trump may have been, Pelosi's House of Representatives only threw one stone while hanging on to a bag filled with rocks. And McConnell's Senate was determined to close their eyes and ears to any truth that would impair their ability to justify their support for the Trump administration in the eyes of the voters.
Everyone was focused on November 2020, trying to position themselves with their bases for the usual round of political nattering and gromishing. Neither party stopped to consider the fact that a wholly new virus was circulating in the population. Even after the first cases entered the United States no one considered the possibility that our ignorance of the virus was the biggest red flag in history.
If the Japanese had given a month's advance notice of their attack on Pearl Harbor, and President Roosevelt had done nothing, the lack of response to the coronavirus would still have been a worse dereliction of duty. A generation only gets one chance to deal with a new disease. How many lives are lost or ruined depends on the early decisions that are made.
2020's pandemic is unique in history because we live in a time when the world enjoys instant communications between nations. If a doctor in China needs to consult with a doctor in New York City, they can be looking eye to eye over the Internet in a matter of seconds. That wasn't the case with the 1918 influenza pandemic.
1918 is especially significant because historians attribute the spread of the flu to a decision by the Woodrow Wilson administration to not tell the public about it. The United States had just entered the First World War and Wilson needed to ship more than 1,000,000 troops overseas to Europe. He felt he couldn't risk giving the Army time to contain the disease that was starting to ravage its ranks in training camps.
Wilson's willful decision was worse than the abdication of responsibility by the Trump administration but only because the Internet and television didn't exist in 1918. The public had no way of looking over the government's shoulder to see what was really happening. In 2020 we were able to watch in horror as the U.S. government pretended there was no problem that couldn't be handled by quarantining a few ships and airplanes.
People were sounding the alarm klaxons outside the government. Both the White House and Congress failed to act because they were putting politics first. Their strategies were focused on the November election and not on serving the people.
As long as American voters put their faith in two faithless political parties we can expect a similar failure of responsibility when the next disaster occurs.
