I will attempt to frame the debate as I go here. I am starting to feel like politicians in general should be left out of handling things like a pandemic. All the wrong incentives are in place and can be used by either side. I have been accused of being a Trump fan so just for the record I am not at all a Trump fan. I feel Trump has handled this miserably by his lack of coherent communication to the citizens as well as failing to secure or grasp the talking points the public needs to base decisions on. He has no valued arguments for anything he might be proposing rather right or wrong. When and if he forces things to open up a lot of deaths will certainly follow and everyone will say you opened up too soon. If he does stay closed down and the entire economy crashes everyone will be back out by necessity and the virus will re surge with a vengeance and blame will happen on both sides again. I think the bottom line is that the people need to be prepared for what to expect both financially and with the virus, advised on what they can best do based on their own situations, volunteer groups assembled and educated on how to assist the vulnerable. Both sides need to agree on this and both sides need to present it to their bases. Too many of the decisions being made have political ramifications so I guess my debate would be should politicians have less authority in pandemics but only in the sense that they would be relieved of some responsibility because it was understood that objectives would be established by predetermined panels of experts in various fields that might apply.
I think politicians have a role to play, and Cuomo in particular illustrates that role. He takes the medical information and humanizes it, puts it in terms the general public can understand.
What politicians need is humility, the ability to know what they don’t know and to not pretend that whatever they read and misunderstood last is the truth. That’s where Trump is such a failure.
It’s not a D or R thing - in 2008 Bush supported what the financial experts told him about what needed to be done, and didn’t second guess them. Things could have been done better, sure, but they could have been done a whole lot worse.
To the extent that various activities in response to any sort of emergency need legislation to be financed and put into effect, you can’t avoid politicians. Plus, of course, they’re necessary on the wider front of communicating to the public why they need, as good citizens, to do whatever it might be. Experts in the technicalities of a pandemic or any other emergency aren’t necessarily experts in encouraging community cohesion or public-spiritedness.
Specific questions related to medicine, e.g. “Should we fast-track Phase X trials for vaccine candidates A, B or C?”, are best handled by appropriate experts in pharmacology or epidemiology.
Specific questions related to economics, e.g. “Should we give money to states, corporations or individuals?”, need input from experts in finance and economics.
Specific questions related to logistics, e.g. “How do we get PPE to hospitals that need it?”, might be handled by logistics experts at Amazon.
BUT, the BIG questions involved in the response to this pandemic are NOT suitable for any specific expertise. They are precisely the sort of questions that political leaders need to address. Heaven help the country that has incompetent or selfish political leaders.
Questions like:[ul]
[li]Some experts predict 200,000 deaths tops; other experts worry there will be 3 million deaths or more? Should we hope the lower figure is correct, or plan for the worst-case?[/li][li] Meat-packing is a weak-link in contagion-prevention. Should Potus speak? “Ask not what meat products your country can provide you. Ask what vegan substitutes you can eat for your country.”[/li][li] Or should political leaders keep the meat industry thriving with protective equipment, and hazardous-duty pay?[/li]
And of course the big one:
[li] Which is less undesirable? A severe depression that bankrupts a huge number of businesses and impoverishes millions? Or a half-million extra deaths, mostly of old people?[/li][/ul]
If these questions should be answered by “scientists,” which branch of science is it? If these are not the questions that we ask political leaders to answer, what is the purpose of political leaders anyway?
The problem we have had with this crisis is not politics. It’s been a bad politician.
One of the main reasons, perhaps at the top of the list, of why we have a President is to have somebody who has the clear authority to lead in a time of crisis. That’s what we needed; somebody who would have been making the right decisions six months ago.
If we had some system where nobody was in charge, we still wouldn’t have had those vital decisions being made at the time they were needed. Anarchy or libertarianism is not the answer. I’ll grant that we screwed up. But the problem wasn’t our political system; it was the individual who was in charge.
Remember 9/11? I’m no fan of George W. Bush but he provided the leadership he was supposed to during that crisis. But Donald Trump failed to do his job.
Yes.
The suggestion that the OP is making was actually the status quo.
The CDC in the past took a leadership role, with frequent reports and suggestions to the public. The pandemic response team has been vigilant even during “peace time” to ensure we are ready, and have adequate resources when various threats sprung up around the world e.g. Ebola.
This time, there was no pandemic response team (maybe not Trump’s decision, but whoever disbanded it, it was a bad move) and the CDC has been sidelined vs jokers like Jared Kushner. Let alone the president’s own suggestions and opinions.
The CDC also dropped the ball in some ways, but nevertheless, we’d be in better shape if they were leading this instead of Trump and that horrible (or should that be nasty) spokeswoman.
If the president has a role, it’s in reassuring the public and bringing us all together, something the current incumbent has spectacularly failed to do.
The president should also show compassion for the many lives lost and encourage actual effective steps to be taken – show people how to wear a mask, be seen in public with a mask on (take it off when giving a speech, I guess), and don’t tell people to take unproven medications or household cleaners. Don’t tell people to revolt against their own governors.
Step back, let the experts do their jobs, follow their advice, and lead by example with proven solutions.
OP, I disagree with you completely. A good politician (FDR, Churchill, Lincoln, even Hitler, I guess) can get people united (for good or ill) and working towards a common cause.
I’ll go with the crowd and disagree. Politicians are exactly who should be making the final call.
We elect them to do that exact job, listen to the experts, listen to the people, make a decision that balances the various impacts. As much as I want the CDC to be in the lead… they’re not economists, they can’t be trusted to shut down the economy, to understand how big an impact social distancing will have on people. The politician is supposed to have enough understanding of all the topics to make a good decision after listening to all the relevant experts.
Which is why electing a buffoon is a bad idea even if he touts policies you like.
The problem is not Donald Trump, he is a distraction from the problem.
When doctors in Seattle tried to test people for coronavirus they were forbidden. The initial test approved by the CDC was faulty. When the approved masks were unavailable practically identical masks were forbidden to doctors. Millions of masks were delayed by contracting rules. Testing at home kits were stopped because they did not have the right permissions. Nursing homes in New York state were forbidden from refusing coronavirus patients. Trump did not make any of those decisions and it is unlikely he knew any of them were being made. The people involved were following the laws and rules laid out over the last 60 years.
Our regulatory systems are designed to slow everything down so no one makes a mistake. So when time is of the essence the system works against solutions.
Remember Katrina? An expert in public infrastructure said that if Bush had guessed that a hurricane was going to hit New Orleans sometime in his tenure and made shoring up the system his number 1 priority his first day in office. Five years later when Katrina hit the engineers would just have been reviewing the responses to the environmental impact review.
This regulatory kludge is why the response to coronavirus was so slow, why it is impossible to build high speed rail, why building low cost housing in LA costs a million dollars a unit, why law enforcement couldn’t search a 9-11 terrorist’s computer, why it costs 2 billion to develop a medicine.
If the reckless and unwise would only kill themselves, they would actually take care of the problem for us through Natural Selection. Unfortunately, that is not the case. This problem is part of a greater problem, and that is the radical agenda that relentlessly promotes freedom without responsibility. We see it here with COVID-19, and we see it in the unbridled proliferation of deadly firearms. It was summed up nicely in one photo that showed a man screaming at the police about his freedom to do what he wants while he was spraying them with germ infested mist from his mouth.
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I strongly suspect that any answer to “How do we get PPE to hospitals that need it?” which is produced by logistic experts at Amazon is going to amount to ‘by ordering most or all of that PPE through Amazon.’
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Lovely either-or choice. You’re forgetting, of course, option 3, which is the one that some people seem to be choosing: A half-million or possibly more extra deaths plus additional cases of long-term damage PLUS a severe depression that bankrupts a huge number of business and impoverishes millions; because people who are afraid that they themselves and/or their loved ones will be among that half-million won’t patronize businesses at which they don’t feel safe, and also because of the severe illness and sometimes deaths of those who did patronize and/or worked at such businesses, who will therefore be unable to work at/patronize them.
And that right there is the key. What you need in a crisis is a good leader. A good leader will tend to be a politician, but a politician isn’t necessarily a good leader.
Politics is ultimately knowing who to talk to, and how to talk to them, to achieve a goal. What the goal is, is dependent on other things, which is where leadership comes in. A leader would have recognized that preventing, or at least limiting, the pandemic and the associated economic problems was the goal, and acted accordingly, as discussed above.
What Trump did was decide it was all about him him him, and ducked every bit of responsibility he could. I mean, literally, “I take no responsibility”. He whined that the states should be doing it all for themselves, “The Federal government isn’t a shipping clerk!”, he whined that China didn’t do enough, he whined that the Democrats didn’t do enough, he whined that Obama didn’t do enough, he whined that Biden didn’t do enough, he whined that women reporters were being nasty to him, he whined that he wasn’t getting enough praise.
That’s literally the exact opposite of leadership.
For me, it is important to separate out the concept of Government from Politics. Many of the discussions here, to me, should really be about the role of Government, both Federal and State.
The unfortunate aspect is that Governments are run by elected officials, which introduces Politics into the equation.
To me, the best case is that elected Government officials recognize their role at times, and set aside Politics as much as they can in dealing with issues that are within the Government’s arena.
Implicit in my statements is that a poor Politician does not separate Politics from their actions of Governing. And here we are.
You feel all politicians should be left out, or only Trump? If the former, I disagree. If the later I agree with provisions. In a nut shell though, politicians have a role to play as important as virologists or scientists do. You have to understand that people in vertical disciplines tend to have tunnel vision when it comes to their specialties. Many would have a lock down until the risk levels fell to what they consider acceptable…which would be many more months, if not a year or more. The politicians role is to take into account all of the many impacts, including those of the voters, and decide what is the best course for everyone. The best course might mean more risk to people’s lives on one side but a working economy on the other. Or it might mean a bigger hit to the economy (which will piss off the economist experts) because the risk to health is too great. Basically, any course taken is going to impact something, somewhere. And that impact will cost lives, no matter what. So, it’s a balancing act. But relying on a vertical specialist to decide, regardless of all the other factors is a bad idea, IMHO. It’s why politicians have advisors.
JMHO. As to a panel of different specialists, I’m not sure if you’ve ever worked with such a body but I have…that’s an INCREDIBLY bad idea, if they are the decision makers. Because they will basically fight to see who has the biggest ego and brain, and they will vacillate endlessly. You have to understand that such advisors would have in many cases contradictory aims or goals, and they wouldn’t want to concede anything, thinking that they know best.
I swear: Half of you have me set to Ignore …
… The other half know how to ignore the entire thrust of my post and focus on misplaced commas:
You couldn’t even figure out that the ENTIRE point I was making was
“BUT, the BIG questions involved in the response to this pandemic are NOT suitable for any specific expertise. They are precisely the sort of questions that political leaders need to address. Heaven help the country that has incompetent or selfish political leaders.”
and that all the rest — whether expert specialty or policy questions — were just hypothetical “throw-away” examples for clarity?? I thoughtlessly throw in a mention of Amazon just to increase the number of examples, and you focus on profiteering??
“Great Debates,” indeed! :smack: What a joke.
Just for the sake of an opposing view. If the death rate ends up being .02, did he fail, was it overblown, or are you going to say that it was success in spite of him?
I don’t think you can have it both ways.
He failed to lead, however this continues to play out. He failed to listen to experts, he failed to encourage people to wear masks, he failed to discourage people from waving rifles around in state houses (in fact, he encouraged that). He spent his time blaming others, pitting the states against each other, fighting with governors who didn’t praise him sufficiently. He failed to set up a system to get help where it was needed; instead, he presided over a situation where the feds were outbidding the states for critical equipment.
That’s all off the top of my head. I’m sure I missed other failures on his part.
So, if the rate happens to be 0.02, he still failed at all those things. The guy who trips over a crack in the sidewalk and stumbles, flips, and happens to fall on his feet doesn’t really get to say “I meant to do that.” If he’s right about the deadliness, it’s by happenstance, because he doesn’t know shit about diseases.
We already know that we’d have tens of thousands of fewer deaths if we had shut down a week earlier, and, as the leader of the nation, it was his job to get that right. Instead, he resisted calls for shutdown.
He was contradictory and chaotic. Sometimes he listened to experts, but then turned around and SAID something exactly the opposite. His actions were often different than his words. That was and is his biggest failure. He is treating being president like it’s a game show, where putting in chaos and acting erratic gets you ratings. During a crisis like this one, it’s the worst possible thing that could be done.
The CDC definitely made mistakes, as I alluded in my post.
But it’s not a matter of the problem. Multiple things have gone wrong in the US handling of this crisis, and I would still lay most of them at the feet of the current administration in general, and Trump in particular.
In most countries right now you have leaders rallying their people together, keeping them well informed and pulling out all the stops to deliver all the resources required.
Meanwhile Trump is having a fight with his own brain as well as the rest of the universe.
Almost everything he says is divisive. Even when journalists tee him up for an inspiring message, he instead encourages people to disobey local governers and stage armed protests.
In place of detailed scientific information we have him talking about HCQ and injecting bleach, and discouraging mask use.
And instead of trying to deliver the resources required, he’s suggested that only governers that kowtow to him will receive what they require, and has possibly been involved in redirecting goods on this basis. And still insufficient testing, despite lies to the contrary.
Too much stuff to list in fact.
It’s hard to think of how this could have been handled worse.
Why just pandemics? Should this standard be applied when fighting wars, establishing education policies, elder care rights, consumer protections, etc. etc.
My point is that the problem we are currently experiencing isn’t that a pandemic is unique. It’s that the media and the politicians aren’t about to waste a good crisis to further their own agendas.