About That Revolution

There’s that old song from long ago:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out…

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re doing what we can…

But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow
Don’t you know it’s gonna be
All right, all right, all right

Bernie Sanders was twenty-seven when the Beatles released that song in 1968 so that song wasn’t about him, but it was, or it is now. So let’s get Tuesday evening out of the way.

It’s over, because the Democrats decided to get on with it. Joe Biden would be their man. Everyone had an analysis of what had just happened. Andrew Romano and David Knowles just stuck to the facts:

Joe Biden maintained his momentum over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential race Tuesday, winning state primaries, building his delegate lead and solidifying his status as the clear favorite to win his party’s nomination.

As soon as polls closed at 8 p.m. ET, the Associated Press declared Biden the winner in Mississippi, which awards 36 delegates on a proportional basis, and then in Missouri, where 68 delegates were at stake. When polls closed an hour later in Michigan, with its 125 delegates the biggest prize of the night, the AP gave Sanders more demoralizing news, calling the state for Biden.

Heading into Tuesday’s contests, Biden held a 652-573 delegate lead over Sanders and it quickly became apparent that the former vice president would add to that lead. In the six states voting on Tuesday, 352 delegates were at stake that were crucial to Sanders if he was to have any chance at the Democratic convention in Milwaukee.

Instead, Biden routed Sanders in Mississippi and beat him handily in Missouri, all but ensuring that the Vermont senator would not be able to take advantage of what might have been his best remaining opportunity to regain the delegate lead.

And that was that:

No modern presidential candidate has ever mounted a successful comeback after Super Tuesday (or the equivalent point in the race). The reasons are simple: Winning begets winning, and fewer and fewer delegates are available for the lagging candidate to close the gap with.

Twelve years ago – post-Super Tuesday – Barack Obama’s lead in the national polls was a third the size of Biden’s today. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton’s lead was half the size of Biden’s. Neither of their challengers – Clinton in 2008 and Sanders in 2016 – was able to catch up.

Democrats had decided. Bernie is cool, but the revolution will have to wait. Solve the immediate problem – Donald Trump. Biden’s task was clear enough. Blend in a lot of Sanders’ ideas, stripped of his angry hectoring about just about everything, but solve the immediate problem. And thus things changed. There would be no more tales of Democrats going after each other. They had moved on. Political junkies would have to move on.

Politico previewed what comes next:

President Donald Trump stood before about 500 of the Republican Party’s biggest patrons at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Friday and raised a topic few in the audience expected: Joe Biden’s mental capacity.

Trump walked the donors through a list of Biden’s recent verbal stumbles, such as his recent declaration that he was running for Senate and his assertion that 150 million Americans had been killed by gun violence since 2007. Trump questioned whether the former vice president had the mental stamina to sustain the rigors of a general election campaign.

Then, the president appeared to give donors permission to leak his remarks about Biden to the media.

“I would hope you not repeat that,” Trump said sarcastically according to an attendee.

And that too was that:

With Biden emerging as the likely Democratic nominee, Trump has launched a concerted, near-daily campaign to raise doubts about the 77-year-old’s mental acuity. The president has been bolstered by a conservative echo chamber flooding social media with video clips highlighting Biden’s gaffes.

And no one was surprised:

It’s similar to the tack Trump used in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, whom he tagged as “low energy.” He also suggested she “doesn’t have the stamina” to be president.

Former Clinton advisers see a replay of that campaign, and warn that Biden needs to take the attacks seriously.

“He’s not responding to the threat strong enough, because it is absolutely a problem now and is going to be a problem” going forward, said Philippe Reines, a former top Hillary Clinton adviser who prepped her for the debates with Trump. “You have to defend yourself, because that stuff absolutely sticks.”

Trump has long branded Biden as “Sleepy Joe.” But in the week following Biden’s win in the South Carolina Democratic primary, Trump has taken it a step further by questioning the former vice president’s mental faculties. The president took to Twitter to say that Biden “doesn’t know where he is, or what he’s doing,” and said Biden would destroy entitlement programs “and he won’t even know he’s doing it!”

And so on and so forth:

The president went at Biden again during a rally in Charlotte, N.C. last week, saying that once elected, Biden would be put “into a home and other people are going to be running the country.”

Some of the president’s conservative allies are taking the attack even further. During a Saturday appearance on Fox News, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said Biden is showing “obvious signs of dementia.” Fox News host Sean Hannity, meanwhile, devoted an entire segment of his show to documenting how Biden has “a very questionable grip on reality.”

Tucker Carlson, another Trump-friendly Fox News host, said Biden is “clearly losing it.”

But then there’s something about that pot calling that kettle black:

Biden has laughed off the attacks. During a recent appearance on Fox News Sunday, the former vice president was asked to respond to a clip of Trump saying that he would “be sitting in a home someplace” if elected.

“Is that the stable genius saying that?” Biden shot back.

This could be interesting. Imagine the debate. “You’re SENILE!” Biden simply smiles. “You’re SENILE!” Biden raises one eyebrow – “Didn’t Kim, the man you say you love and who, you say, loves you, call you a dotard?” Trump pulls out a gun and shouts “Fifth Avenue!”

That would be a hoot, and that won’t happen – maybe – but there’s this:

Jennifer Palmieri, who served as communications director on Clinton’s campaign, pointed out that Trump has been savaging Biden for months with questionable results. Democratic and independent voters, she said, were tuning out the attacks.

“The Trump campaign has been hitting Biden and his family for over a year and the attacks don’t seem to weaken him with voters,” Palmieri said. “He just gets stronger.”

And then it will be November and things will work out one way or the other, but as the Washington Post reported, Donald Trump has a more immediate problem:

Publicly, Trump has accused the media of hyping coronavirus to damage his political standing. Privately, he brooded throughout the weekend about news stories that detailed the ways his administration squandered precious weeks and bungled its handling of the crisis, with much of the blame falling on the president.

“He sees the stories as everyone just being out to get him,” said one administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the president’s mind-set…

Trump has spent much of the past four days tending to campaign benefactors and preoccupied with his own political future. He has used those settings to complain about what he considers to be coronavirus hysteria in the media and overreaction by financial markets.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” Trump said at one of the events, according to people who heard the comments.

That’s his position. That’s Fox News’ position. This virus isn’t even the flu. It’s not much more than the common cold, if that. It’s not that big of a deal, but then the markets crashed. The Dow dropped more than two thousand points on Monday, gained back a thousand or more points on Tuesday, and then that evening the Democrats decided on Biden and the Dow futures dropped five hundred points.

The coronavirus might not be that big a deal, but this was, so he tried this:

President Trump told GOP senators Tuesday he wants to dramatically reduce the payroll tax through at least the end of the year, a plan that could deliver a massive – but expensive – boost to many businesses and voters as he heads into the November presidential election.

But his proposal was not warmly received by Republicans, and it was also panned by Democrats, leaving policymakers searching for any common ground as the coronavirus’s outbreak continues to take its toll on the economy. One area of consensus, though, could be around the issue of paid sick leave for employees, an idea Democrats support and in which Trump has shown some interest. But in the past the two sides have taken different approaches, and it’s not clear whether agreement can be reached.

But the real issue here was how to deal with a senile dotard not named Joe Biden. Slate’s Jordan Weissmann explains it all:

Nobody seems to like President Donald Trump’s plan to save the economy from the novel coronavirus. Not Democrats in Congress. Not Republicans. Not even advisers in his own administration. And, as has often been the case during this crisis, the president’s doubters and haters have a point.

The concept is the problem:

With COVID-19 threatening to slow economic growth to a halt, Trump has argued that Congress should try to stimulate the economy with a large payroll tax cut, in order to boost consumer spending. At a meeting Tuesday with Senate Republicans, Trump reportedly suggested a cut worth $40 billion per month that would last all the way past the November elections. But GOP lawmakers have been “cool on the idea,” according to the Washington Post, which reports that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “has privately told several allies in recent days he personally opposes” the plan. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman told reporters that he thought “a more targeted approach would be more effective,” while House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he wanted to find a “surgical way” to help hourly workers.

Democrats, who have been putting together their own rescue package, have been more bluntly dismissive. “The administration seems to believe that the answer to any problem is another tax cut,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer didn’t mince words either: “I don’t think we think that the payroll tax cut is what we need right now,” he said Monday. “What the economy needs right now is some stability, and some confidence, that we are addressing the issue that is undermining the economy.”

Weissmann sees that as the main problem here:

A payroll tax cut is probably a bad way to try and help the economy in the face of a pandemic. There are some who’ve suggested that any kind of large-scale stimulus would be useless because it wouldn’t directly address the core problems created by the coronavirus. That’s a bit misguided. Dumping money into the economy won’t get more people to fly if they’re afraid of getting sick, or reopen theme parks that have to close. But putting money in people’s pockets would help keep consumer demand from completely cratering.

But it wouldn’t help that much:

The most obvious problem is that it simply helps the wrong workers. Some Americans are going to be kept away from their jobs when they get sick or their employer closes down for business. Others are going to earn less as business slows (with fewer people traveling and going out, hotel staffers and bartenders are going to earn less in tips). A well-designed stimulus would put money in those people’s pockets, because they need it and are more likely to spend. But a payroll tax cut does the opposite: It lets people who are still working take home a bit more of their paychecks, which they might just save.

And there are alternatives:

Instead of making sure the least affected families have extra income to spend, the government would be better off making sure people had access to paid sick leave or expanding unemployment benefits (ideas Democrats are pushing). You could even expand unemployment insurance to people who haven’t technically lost their jobs but are only furloughed. Economists Jared Bernstein and Jesse Rothstein have suggested an especially interesting plan where the government would pay businesses to keep employing their workers even when they’ve shut down. If the president wants to give every family some spending money, then he could just cut each of them a check for a flat amount, which would channel proportionately more help to low-income households who’ll spend, rather than the upper-middle class that would benefit most from the payroll cut.

Trump doesn’t see any of that, but Kevin Drum sees this:

Barack Obama initiated a payroll tax cut as part of his follow-up stimulus package in 2010. His reasoning was simple: payroll taxes are paid mostly by the poor and middle class, so when you cut those taxes you’re putting money directly into the hands of people who need it and will spend it right away. It was a good idea.

But is cutting payroll taxes still a good idea today? Let me put it this way: it’s certainly not the worst idea the Trump administration could have come up with. The problem is that a tax cut is only effective as stimulus if the problem is that people lack money. In 2009 that was indeed the case. Today it’s not. Consumers have plenty of money, but the coronavirus will (probably) make them reluctant to spend it. It will also make them afraid to leave the house. A payroll tax wouldn’t change either of those things: if consumers get more money, most of it is likely to go straight to savings.

So what would be better than a payroll tax cut? That’s not easy to say for a short and temporary shock that’s going to hit both the supply side and the demand side.

My guess, however, is that we need to do our best to target it toward those who are going to be most affected by the coronavirus. For example, the feds could promise to pay 100 percent of all testing and hospitalization due to COVID-19. That would be a sizeable sum and would precisely help those who need it most. Since a lot of people are likely to lose their jobs thanks to coronavirus fears (think cruise ship workers, convention organizers, airline workers, etc.), a temporary increase in unemployment benefits would probably be useful. And since the elderly are the hardest hit by the coronavirus, it might be wise to come up with something that benefits them. Maybe a temporary reduction in Medicare copays and hospitalization limits?

There are alternatives, but Trump thought of this:

The White House is strongly considering pushing federal assistance for oil and natural gas producers hit by plummeting oil prices amid the coronavirus outbreak, as industry officials close to the administration clamor for help, according to four people familiar with internal deliberations.

President Trump has touted the growth of oil and natural gas production under his administration, celebrating their rise in politically crucial swing states such as Pennsylvania. But many oil and gas firms were hammered Monday by the price war that broke out between Saudi Arabia and Russia, driving oil prices down in their steepest one-day drop in almost 30 years.

White House officials are alarmed at the prospect that numerous shale companies, many of them deep in debt, could be driven out of business if the downturn in oil prices turns into a prolonged crisis for the industry. The federal assistance is likely to take the form of low-interest government loans to the shale companies, whose lines of credit to major financial institutions have been choked off, three people said.

And there are those votes in Pennsylvania, and there are old friends:

One of the companies hardest hit was Continental Resources, founded by Harold Hamm, a Trump supporter and an adviser to the president on energy issues. It lost more than half of its market value Monday, though it recovered about 8 percent by midday Tuesday. Hamm’s 77 percent personal stake in the company lost $2 billion of its value Monday.

Hamm said in an interview Tuesday he had reached out to the administration but had not made “direct” contact… “I don’t want to prescribe what the president would or shouldn’t do. He’s very capable of handling this situation,” he said.

But he is sure that the president will do the right thing, although “the right thing” is a matter of opinion:

Some economists oppose providing assistance to companies rather than ensuring it goes to workers hit by a downturn. Liberal economists, such as former Obama administration official Jason Furman, have said the administration should provide a tax rebate that goes out to millions of workers.

“We are in the midst of a crisis where people are literally having to skip work and may miss paychecks or face medical debt” because of coronavirus, said Robert Hockett, a professor at Cornell University who has advised Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on economic policy. “The idea you would look to help out shale companies now is like something out of a satire or a bad movie. It’s absurd.”

You say you want a revolution? That may be why, and Dahlia Lithwick enlarges that argument:

What if we’re already sick? Not with the new coronavirus, though that is proving far more serious and widespread today as compared just with yesterday. But what if the preconditions that have allowed the viral spread of this near pandemic are uniquely American, and frighteningly contagious, even as they are largely psychological and social? I’m referring not simply to a health care system and a health insurance and labor structure that are fundamentally inadequate to respond to a massive public health crisis, but to a larger set of ideas and beliefs that make even admitting that the virus is real, or dangerous, or larger than politics, is worse than death.

These are freakishly dangerous ideas and beliefs that have made large segments of the country unwilling to trust in science, media, and truth most of the time, yes, but certainly whenever it seems the information being delivered isn’t what they want to hear.

This is what is actually absurd:

This goes beyond the disgraceful, sneering contempt of Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is now self-quarantining after coming into contact with the virus, or the president’s frankly horrific suggestion that he didn’t want the number of infected passengers on a cruise ship to be tallied on his watch because it would make him look bad. (It’s only “politicizing” the crisis when Democrats, scientists, epidemiologists, Italians, and the World Health Organization say anything about it, remember.) It also goes beyond the catastrophic set of decisions made by this administration to do away with the National Security Council’s global pandemic director, make cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and lie outright to the country about the number and availability of test kits in a concerted effort to downplay the risk of the virus.

That’s all awful, but still, the real spadework done by this administration to ensure that this pandemic wreaks maximal havoc in this country has been achieved by a preexisting illness: the erosion of public trust in institutions and, more dangerously, in one another, in ways that make rational safety precautions partisan. This epidemic will rise or fall on our collective capacity to behave selflessly in the short run, to exhibit empathy to vulnerable communities that have been senselessly vilified in recent years, including the poor, immigrants, and the elderly. And yet the notion that we could come together to behave selflessly – even to save our own selves – now feels remote.

Polls show that by a two-to-one margin, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe that the coronavirus represents an imminent threat, and that Democrats are more likely to take the public health precautions that would limit its spread. That’s not because Democrats are better people than Republicans. It’s because the conservative media has squandered precious time and public trust downplaying the risks of the virus and constructing a narrative in which any steps taken to mitigate the harms mean giving in to a liberal hoax. If awareness of and attention to the pandemic is politically bad for Donald Trump, goes the logic, then denial and minimizing the risk is good – whatever the cost.

And of course that leaves everyone frozen in place:

Debates about whether to panic or mock those who panic are wholly beside the point; the point is that we know how to mitigate both spread and lethality, and can do so or fail to do so, but that needs to start immediately.

Virtually every thoughtful epidemiologist I have read on this says that the absolute worst thing to be done right now is hoarding surgical masks and putting yourself first. Conversely, the decision to put altruism before panic would redound not just to our own benefit, but to the actual benefit of the entire herd. The choice to stay home, to care for the elderly and the sick (and help them stay home), to figure out systems to look after children whose parents cannot take time off – all of that would be good for everyone.

Yet it comes after years, if not decades, of being told constantly that vaccines cause autism, poverty should be punished and criminalized, and every government system is “rigged” to harm you and help others. Tell people that everyone’s a criminal and grifter long enough and it’s awfully hard to get them to look out for each other.

You say you want a revolution? Okay, try this:

The paradox of this moment is that we’ve trained ourselves to be maximally selfish and catastrophically distrustful in the very eye of a health crisis that will be exponentially worse for all of us unless we can reinstate norms, reflexive selflessness, trust in science, and facts. This will be a strange kind of natural experiment in whether altruism and compassion are in fact irretrievably dead in America.

That’s what the election will be about. Joe has his work cut out for him.