Given that too much time has passed since 2016, I don’t want to put a lot of preconditions on this one… like “assume everything is the same, but HRC is now President in 2019” (because if she were President, things wouldn’t be the same)… but how do you think things would be going on this date if HRC won the 2016 election and were still President?
HRC, for all her faults, was a highly competent bureaucrat. She would not have been caught flat footed, tweeting inanities from the shitter at 3am, because she had spent the previous 3 years dismantling the necessary infrastructures and experts necessary to deal with a pandemic.
There hasn’t been a global pandemic like this for a 102 years. She won’t do any better.
Still lots of sick and dead, but there is actually a coordinated federal response and the eventual medical and economic toll less than what we’ll actually see. I envision something closer to what Germany or Denmark has done rather than the UK. Not perfect but a darned sight better than what we currently have.
The Senate still led by McConnell so more or less the same stimulus fight we’re seeing now.
ETA: Because this seems important to the current incumbent, I also don’t see the stock market tanking every time she gives a public address and reminding people how competent she is.
How easily the HIV pandemic is forgotten.
I think the biggest unknown would be how long it would take right wingers to get on board with the social distancing and quarantine directives. It took them long enough to do this with the guy they voted for in charge. Imagine how they’d react to President Hillary telling them to stay inside.
I’m from West Virginia, and until this week, lots of my high school classmates were joking on Facebook that “the virus is afraid of Jesus, John Denver, and guns”. Back in 1995, these same people were claiming the Oklahoma City bombing was an inside job. “The government is blowing up its own buildings! All the high-ranking federal employees were off work that day!”
This article (behind a paywall) describes the ordeal of long-suffering heath care workers to help the residents of a small WV town.
I think the biggest factor that would have made a difference is that she would not have disassembled the pandemic response team. Therefore, this group would have jumped up to respond as soon as this thing was happening in China to say “Hey, we need to be prepared!” All the legislation being argued about now could have been settled with springing legislation already in place, before it got here.
Also, she would not have messed with the affordable care act, unless it were to replace it with something substantially better, such as Tricare for all.
Don’t get me wrong,** this would still be a huge problem**, but we’d have *better people *dealing with it. Mike Pence would not be the pandemic czar, for example.
Also, she wouldn’t have been such an asshole about immigration, so we wouldn’t be wondering who the hell is going to plant and harvest when the country remains shut down through the summer and fall.
Yup. This. +1
At the very least, she wouldn’t be calling it the Chinese Virus.
On the other hand, I wonder if there would be more pushback towards all the social isolation orders if Hillary were the president, especially in red states. I think to some people, Trump taking the coronavirus seriously was sort of a “Nixon going to China” moment.
There’s little doubt a Clinton presidency would have:
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Reacted sooner. Probably not a LOT sooner though. Most governments, even the ones not being run by the Grand Idiot, reacted too slowly. Of course, even a reaction difference of a day or three would have saved some lives.
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Done a much better job coordinating efforts regarding medical information, testing and supplies, largely because there’d be a pandemic response team, and
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Would not be running the most bizarre, contradictory, and confidence-sapping press conferences of all time on a daily basis.
Weak points: her press conferences would leave some people feeling less than adequately convinced that she was dealing with it well. She’d also be accused of trying to spin the news to make her administration look good, and if some of her Democratic Party cohort were caught dumping stocks after being briefed, she’d be accused of helping that to happen and of being unconcerned with the general public’s health.
Strong points: she’d know everyone to several tiers down the organizational charts in every health care sector in the country and would be centralizing a response and formulationg a nationwide policy. She’d be taking aggressive action based on the best info available. I don’t know if it would be enough.
- Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, would not have to waste much of his valuable time delicately correcting a string of misstatements, falsehoods, and racist conspiranoia coming direct from The White House.
Of course, Breitbart, Alex Jones, and Sean Hannity would be shilling and screeching about the “Hillaryvirus” being a pretext to martial law and doing everything they could do to whip people into a frenzy and impede effective response because they live for that kind of shit. But at least there would be adults making decisions at the top, and coordination with state and local governments and medical officials in how to best deal with local outbreaks and shortfalls in medical supplies and protective equipment rather than just throwing it back on the states and saying, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”
Stranger
Trump was warned this could happen back in January. Hillary would have started ramping up, so that we would have far more test kits available.
It’s hard to imagine someone doing a worse job.
Watching Gov Andrew Cuomo address his constituents and then seeing Trump speak is like night and day. Cuomo sounds like a leader. Trump sounds like a yammering idiot giving a school presentation he spent 20 minutes preparing before class.
According to Politifact, funding for funding for emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases at the CDC has increased every year. But that is in spite of Trump, not thanks to him.
Indeed it is: Foreign Policy: “Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response”
Stranger
the woman who outspent trump 2 to 1 and then tried to rig the election with a phony report. She’s an idiot.
Tell that to those dozens of people she coolly murdered back in Arkansas. :rolleyes:
Whoever is president, it is still a union of 50 somewhat sovereign stats, a hurdle that must be gotten over before there any unified response. And quite a few of the governors are the same incompetents as their federal counterparts, working with the same tools toward the same goals of political survival.
I’m sure under President Hillary this would all have never have happened and everything would all blue skies and roses.
All the left wing press would make sure of it.
lol. So you couldn’t come up with a serious answer… because your teams handling of this has been both sociopathic and psychopathic… and that’s the response, UR? “The Press would’ve lied about the market crashing and people dying and states shutting down and America would’ve believed it”? Seriously? That’s the best you can do?
Perhaps you would’ve done better to avoid this thread altogether.