By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, February
01, 2022
Joe Biden was the candidate of
normality who hasn’t been able to deliver it, particularly on the pandemic.
This is not entirely his fault, obviously.
He didn’t create the Delta and Omicron surges. Neither did he — or most
anyone else — foresee that the vaccines wouldn’t prevent infections as
advertised.
On Covid, though, as on much else, he has
been trapped by a commitment to his political base and by a reflexive
opposition to everything associated with Donald Trump into an endless emergency
posture that isn’t wearing well with time.
Everyone agrees now — after the flameouts
of initial efforts to pass Build Back Better and of the attempt to trash the
Senate filibuster — that Biden needs a political reset. His looming Supreme
Court pick will presumably provide a much-needed win but is unlikely to move
the needle much. It’s on the pandemic that Biden has, in theory, an opportunity
to change course in a significant way.
By more fully embracing an approach geared
to living with Covid and returning to normality, Biden could usefully play
against type, align himself with shifting public opinion, and acknowledge the
reality of the third year of the pandemic when vaccines and boosters are easily
available to anyone who wants them.
Even the thought of such a tack would,
once upon a time, have elicited charges of intolerable recklessness. In certain
quarters, it still does. But the public is moving in this direction. A new
Monmouth poll found that 70 percent of the public agrees with the statement
that “it’s time we accept that Covid is here to stay, and we just need to get
on with our lives.”
Unsurprisingly, 89 percent of Republicans
agree with that view. But so do 71 percent of independents and nearly half of
Democrats.
An NBC News poll on the schools found the
same kind of partisan splits. According to the survey, 65 percent of people
were most worried about kids falling behind academically, and only 30 percent
were most worried about the spread of Covid. Again, Republicans and
independents were strongly on one side — 87 percent and 66 percent were most
worried about lost learning — and Democrats divided, with 43 percent worried
about kids losing academic ground.
In a big Kaiser Family Foundation survey,
51 percent of Democrats described the pandemic as the biggest problem facing
the country, whereas only 28 percent of independents and 19 percent of
Republicans did.
This suggests that the response to Covid
is beginning to become a wedge issue — Democrats can play to their base, which
is most invested in maintaining restrictions, only at the risk of alienating
the broader electorate.
Biden, whose handling of Covid is less and
less popular, shows signs of being conflicted. The White House counseled
against panic at the outset of the Omicron surge and even talked of a
declaration of independence from the virus last summer. But the president
hasn’t been able to make it unmistakable that he thinks we’ve entered a new
phase in the pandemic. As the heterodox center-left writer Matthew Yglesias
points out, the Biden administration may believe that it has embraced
normality, but what it has really done is only make “the most extreme
public-health people mad at them.”
If the administration wants to make a
statement, it could decisively turn against the teachers’ unions on the issue
of keeping schools open, siding with parents and kids over a Democratic interest
group. It could relax its indefensibly sweeping guidance on school masking and
instantly pave the way for local school districts to lift their mandates. It
could end the federal mask mandates on travel.
But any of these measures would mean
crossing progressives, enduring the scolding of one-dimensional public-health
experts, and courting comparisons to Donald Trump, or even worse, Glenn
Youngkin and Ron DeSantis.
And so President Biden, as conditions
change, can’t change with them, putting normality on indefinite hold.
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