President Barack Obama promised unity. In his 2008 campaign, he said he would heal the nation's political divides and end more than a decade of partisan rancor.
To keep this promise, Obama needed allies, or at least partners, in the Republican Party. But they said no. If they could block Obama - if they could withhold support on anything significant he planned to do - then they could make him break his promise. Republicans would obstruct and Obama would get the blame. Which, you might remember, is what happened. By the 2010 midterm elections, Obama was a divisive president.
Joe Biden, in his 2020 campaign for president, promised to get the coronavirus pandemic under control. With additional aid to working families and free distribution of multiple effective vaccines, he would lead the United States out of its ongoing public health crisis.
I think you can see where this is going.
Rather than work with him to vaccinate the country, Biden's Republican opposition has, with only a few exceptions, done everything in its power to politicize the vaccine and make refusal to cooperate a test of partisan loyalty. The party is, for all practical purposes, pro-COVID. If it's sincere, it is monstrous. And if it's not, it is an unbelievably cynical and nihilistic strategy. Unfortunately for both Biden and the country, it appears to be working.
Republican rhetoric in Washington, however, is a sideshow to the real fight over COVID, in states like Florida and Texas.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis rejected vaccine passports and launched an aggressive campaign against mandatory mask-wearing in schools, suspended city and county emergency orders, put limits on future mitigation efforts, and signed a law that shields nursing homes, hospitals and businesses from legal liability if employees and patrons contract the virus on their premises.
All of this, even as the state has been ravaged by the delta variant of the virus. Florida has been reporting more than 20,000 new infections a day and has averaged 262 COVID deaths - the most of any state, at least in absolute numbers. Who does DeSantis blame for these outcomes? Biden.
"You know, he said he was going to end COVID. He hasn't done that," the Florida governor recently Fox News host Jesse Watters. "At the end of the day, he is trying to find a way to distract from the failures of his presidency."
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has banned mask mandates, signed legislation that would deny state contracts or licenses to businesses that require proof of vaccination, and - after recovering from a breakthrough COVID infection himself - banned local governments from requiring the vaccine for any public agency or private institution.
The effect is a pandemic that won't die. The effect of it for the Republican Party is a substantial part of its base that won't take the vaccine. According to data collected by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Republicans lag most of the rest of the country in vaccine uptake; 54% said they had received at least one dose at the time of the survey, compared with 67% of all adults. And the effect of this for Biden is a sharp drop to his approval rating.
What amounts to a Republican effort to prolong the pandemic shows no sign of abating. It may even get worse, as powerful conservative media personalities spread vaccine skepticism and embrace dubious miracle cures like ivermectin, a deworming drug.
If Biden does not want the kind of backlash that his Democratic predecessor faced, he needs to act aggressively to push the United States off its vaccination plateau. Republicans might be setting him up to break his promise to stop COVID, but the president should understand that he's not actually at their mercy.
The New York Times