One of the lasting aspects of the coronavirus pandemic will be watching President Donald Trump standing in the White House Briefing Room holding two hour press conferences in which he delivers a mixture of buffoonery, wrong information, platitudes, and self serving rhetoric while yielding to health experts who then contradict what he has just said and can get away with it however polite they are being, keeping up the fiction and the reality of demural to the commander in chief. Fauci says weeks ago that what the President said about opening up the country by Easter was “aspirational”, while what Fauci said himself had to be based on science, and the President apparently liked that formulation, saying he was indeed aspirational and more that he was a “cheerleader” for the nation and so not a person who emphasized bad news, and so admitting out of his own mouth what he really thinks, which he is prone to do, which is that he lies to the American people. Hardly Churchillian. This practice of the experts diverting from what the President standing behind them had just said may be why the Wall Street Journal asks him to leave the press conferences in the hands of the experts because the press conferences are not winning him any votes, but the President is a showman and so unlikely to voluntarily leave the stage.
The more important takeaway from the press conferences is that to some extent the experts have taken over in that they form their own judgments and relay them to the public and that leading political figures do the same thing as well as manage their own bureaucracies as best they can, important examples of that being Cuomo in New York, Hogan in Maryland, and Newsom in California, and De Wine in Ohio. The states have to do their jobs wheedling what they can from the federal government because the federal government whose activities of distribution seem to be led by Kutchner, who has no background in doing so,and has proven incompetent in managing that role, if that indeed is what his role is.
And so the key distinction is not between Democrats and Republicans. It is between competent and incompetent people and that may remind the American people that competence is a characteristic to be required of a politician. Bush ‘41, Clinton and Obama were competent people, while Reagan left running the country to his very capable cabinet and Bush ‘43 did the same, though why they went off the deep end and invaded Iraq without sufficient reason is something yet to be uncovered.
There is, though, a difference between a Reublican and a Democratic way to manage a pandemic, and so there is something beyond the issue of competence. Democrats want direct governmental action. They want the Defense Production Act implemented early and often while Republicans are wary of government, don't want the cure to be worse than the problem, and rely on the free market system to produce what is needed, however much special conditions may mean market forces do not work as they usually do but will result in panic buying that drives up prices for government purchase of goods, which is alright for Republicans who never avoid an opportunity to feather the nests of the rich. You either trust the government or you don’t trust the government and that is a very basic ideological cleavage and we will see if the present crisis results in a shift in the public sentiment about that issue.
There is another political issue that lies a bit further ahead of us than the current fight about the availability of supplies and the right way to approach government. I echo Paul Krugman in saying that the pandemic constitutes a threat to democracy in that non-democratic forces are trying to take advantage of the situation. Remember what happened in Wisconsin last week. An election that was a primary and also a selection for local officials was held because the state legislature and the UnitedStates Supreme Court insisted upon it even though the number of polling places were considerably reduced and absentee ballots had not been sent out and people who wanted to vote had to stand in line for hours, risking their health. What is to happen in the November elections? Will large numbers of people simply not show up to vote? The obvious solution is to institute large scale mail in balloting. The President and the Majority Leader in the Senate refuse to back that because, the President says, mail in ballots are fraudulent, even if there is no evidence to support his view. As usual, the President cannot help but say what is really on his mind, and so he says that Republicans will never again win an election if there are mail in ballots. So, to his mind, this is a result oriented issue: which party will benefit by the use of mail in ballots?
To me, however, the question goes deeper than that. It has to do with the procedural legitimacy of the election, an election always the last refuge of a democracy, and the only alternative yet invented to autocracy, in that the people, in their wisdom or lack of wisdom, select those who lead them and so the matter is not settled by tanks in the streets or, as in Germany in 1933, by a cabal of politicians who thought they could control Hitler if they put him into power. Democratic Party leaders did not challenge the legitimacy of the election of 2000 or 2016 despite the shenanigans that may have gone on in 2000 and certainly went on in 2016. The Electoral College had spoken, whatever was the popular vote, and that was that. Only Trump said that if he did not win the election it would have been because the election had been rigged, which is not the sort of thing a democratic leader is supposed to say.
Well, what happens after the 2020 election? If Trump is defeated, he will say the election was rigged, even if the attempt at rigging had been by his own people who drop voters from the rolls because they haven’t voted in a few elections, or in the present circumstances simply follow the Wisconsin example and open few polling stations and tamp down on mail balloting. And what will the Democratic leadership say if Trump wins under such circumstances? Will they be as forebearent as Al Gore was when he presided over the Senate to certify George W. Bush’s victory and refused to consider any motion that would bring that victory into question? He was being noble and scrupulous and thinking that the Constitution came before his own ambitions. He did not want to go down in history as a spoilsport much less a Brutus, stabbing the procedural regularity that has dominated the transfer of power in this nation for more than 200 years. Democrats may be less charitable if they are this time deprived of the Presidency not by the fact that the Electoral College rather than the popular vote is the legitimate determiner of the outcome but because the election was conducted so unfairly. They may regard a second term for Trump as an affront to the Constitution and I don’t know what will follow from that.
There is another way than mail balloting to insure a fair election during the age of the coronavirus.My son, who is something of an expert on managing large amounts of data, thinks people should be able to vote on their computers. He thinks that Amazon and Facebook have sufficient technical proficiency to carry that off, including providing a paper trail so that what they do can be audited, and that they can build firewalls sufficiently sophisticated to rule out Russian hackers messing up the election. I am not so sure. Let’s not open the election up to those kinds of challenges when mail-in ballot systems are less subject to hacking and while we do not know what kinds of agreements have been reached between the Pentagon and the Russian military on the limits of our mutual hacking. The Russians can, I assume, destroy our infrastructure of electrical grids and water management systems and who knows what else and I assume we can do the same to them. Have we warned them that a major attack on our electoral system, not just robocalls to Black voters sowing distrust of Hillary Clinton, will result in retaliation? That decision would ordinarily be taken by a President, but in the present circumstances the Pentagon may think it has sufficient authority to negotiate an agreement so as to ensure that the stasis created by mutually assured destruction, this time by hacking rather than nuclear weapons, prevails.
There is a way to avoid that problem of a corrupted election and it is likely to be settled in a few weeks time. Chuck Schumer wants to include in the new pandemic recovery bill money so that all states can put in all mail balloting systems, an idea I had once opposed because I wanted all voters to vote on the same day so that they were provided with all the information available on election day, not having committed themselves a week or two before. Well, the pandemic changed that. Schumer had wanted to include such funds in the last coronavirus recovery bill but it was turned down by McConnell. Will Schumer insist that there will be no more money for small and large businesses at all unless the mail balloting provision is included? That is the kind of argument McConnell understands. It is a question of how tough Schumer will hang. We will see soon enough. It might determine whether the United States survives as a democracy.