President Biden finds himself in a difficult position: he advocated the ideas that he had the team to deal with a pandemic and that his five-decade long career as a deal maker in Washington was just the thing to reverse political polarization of the land to overcome.
That doesn’t happen, not even a little.
Not only are Republicans resisting Mr Biden’s push to end the pandemic, some of them are actively obstructing it. The Republican governors have slowly pushed ahead with vaccination efforts and lifted the mask requirement early. In Washington, GOP leaders like Steve Scalise, the second-tier Republican in the House of Representatives – who was vaccinated only about two weeks ago – mocked public health guidelines that even vaccinated people should wear masks indoors as “government control”.
There is little Mr. Biden can do. Nearly a year and a half of living in a pandemic has shown exactly who will and will not adhere to public health guidelines.
It was only last week in my Washington neighborhood, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the city and who voted 92 percent for Mr. Biden, started masking themselves again in supermarkets and even outdoors in parks.
In places like Arkansas, hospitals are overloaded with Covid patients and vaccination rates remain persistently low. The anti-mask sentiment is so strong that the General Assembly of the state has passed a law banning any mandate that requires it. On Thursday, Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, announced a special session of lawmakers to amend the anti-mandate bill he signed in April to allow schools to require masks for students who are too young to receive a vaccine. Good luck with that, replied his Republicans in the legislature.
That leaves the President at a loss. With the Delta variant proving to be far more contagious and dangerous than previous iterations of the virus, the people he needs most to hear his message about vaccines and masks are the rarest.
Six years of Donald J. Trump largely hiding all other voices in his party left Republicans without a credible messenger to push vaccines forward, even if they wanted to. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, may use his campaign money to advertise vaccinations in his home, Kentucky, but he is barely a popular figure within the party and is viewed by its grassroots as just another member of the Washington establishment.
There are certainly other communities of vaccine resistance out there, including the demographics of people who have been mistreated by the federal government in the past (and also a small but noisy minority of professional athletes and Olympians), but it is Republicans and Republican-led states that are considered biggest hurdle in American vaccination efforts.
Without the ability to convince the vaccination hesitation and the party he had pledged to work with, Mr Biden and the federal government were left with a step that he had been resisting for weeks: making the lives of the unvaccinated more difficult to try to force them to change their minds.
That brings us to the President’s press conference on Thursday. Mr Biden said that for the first time all federal employees would be required to provide evidence that they have been vaccinated (or wear a mask at work), undergo weekly tests, and maintain social distance.
He stopped short of a vaccine mandate, saying such a requirement was a choice for local governments, school districts and businesses. He said if things get worse and those who oppose vaccines are denied access to workplaces and public spaces, maybe things would get better.
“I suspect if we don’t make further progress, a lot of companies and lots of companies will need proof in order to attend,” said Mr Biden.
This maneuver – essentially a shift of responsibility away from the federal government – is in line with the way Mr Biden often tries to project a tone of hope while airbrushing the reality of a highly divided nation.
Updated
July 30, 2021, 7:36 p.m. ET
The disinformation market in America is bigger than ever with Mr Trump despite starting the program that resulted in the full vaccination of 164 million Americans, leading to charges of discrediting the same program during the Biden administration.
But it wasn’t Mr Trump and the Republicans running to end the pandemic last year – it was Mr Biden and the Democrats who successfully turned the election into a referendum on how to tackle a unique global public health crisis.
Now, just weeks after celebrating the great strides made against the pandemic, Mr Biden is facing a new wave. And it probably won’t be long before Republicans, who did everything in their power to resist counter-measures, blame the president for failing to get the country out of the crisis he promised to resolve .
“SO EXCITED. SO PROUD,” Marathon County board member Ka Lo wrote on Thursday in a series of cheering text messages, “IT’S SOOOOOO GOOD !!!”
It remains to be seen how much Ms. Lee’s triumph will give a boost to local efforts to gain recognition for the Hmong in Wisconsin. Both the district marathon and the city council of Wausau have rejected the resolutions “community for all”, which led to the spreading of “community for all” labels and a further attempt to pass the measure in the district executive committee.
The next vote of the executive committee of the district board is planned for August 12th.
… Seriously
Sometimes even presidents get a little dirt on their chins.
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