House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Monday issued a strong defense of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) amid Republicans’ outcry over the House Financial Services chair’s remarks urging protesters against police brutality to “get more confrontational.”
When asked whether Waters need to apologize for her comments, Pelosi denied the notion, according to a Hill pool report on Monday.
“No she doesn’t,” Pelosi said. “That woman on the floor should be apologizing for what she said.”
“I don’t know but she was attributing some murder — some incident that happened after that to Maxine’s statement,” Pelosi said, according to the Hill pool report. “No, Maxine talked about confrontation in the manner of the Civil Rights movement.”
The House speaker continued that she personally believes that lawmakers should follow the lead set by George Floyd’s family, who Pelosi said handled the protests in the wake of his death with “great dignity, and no ambiguity.” Waters shouldn’t feel obligated to apologize, she said.
Asked by a reporter whether Waters’ comments incited violence, Pelosi replied: “No, absolutely not.”
Pelosi’s defense of Waters was issued shortly after Waters herself pushed back against her GOP colleagues’ who claimed that her comments on Saturday could incite violence. Waters had spoken Saturday at a protest against the killing of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.
Speaking with the Grio, Waters decried GOP outrage over her comment. “Republicans will jump on any word, any line and try to make it fit their message and their cause for denouncing us and denying us, basically calling us violent,” she said.
“I am not worried that they’re going to continue to distort what I say,” the congresswoman continued. “This is who they are and this is how they act. And I’m not going to be bullied by them.”
The idea that Maxine Waters has “tainted” the jury pool and incited violence is ridiculous. The entire world protested the murder of George Floyd all last summer! It’s been front page news since it happened. And everyone knows that.
This is just their lame attempt at “whataboutism” tryin to compare Waters to Trump inciting the January 6th insurrection. It’s so dumb I feel stupider just reading about it.
The prospects for a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection are looking increasingly grim. Republicans are pretending they have substantive objections to the makeup of the committee, and a lot of people are pretending to believe them.
Yet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) continues to hope for a compromise on the commission’s structure that Republicans will accept.
If this must continue, here’s how Democrats should proceed. In a broad sense, they should commit to an approach that embodies three basic premises:
— The assault on the Capitol happened because then-President Donald Trump incited it.
— The mob was inspired by Trump’s months of effort to overturn the results, which he unambiguously intended to do, and by months of lies about the outcome’s legitimacy amplified not just by Trump but also by large swaths of the GOP.
— The single greatest threat posed by political radicalization in this country comes from violent right-wing extremism.
Republicans are eager to obscure these fundamental truths, which have been widely documented. As long as that continues, Republicans cannot credibly participate in any genuine accounting into what happened.
The Post sums up the standoff:Congress’s pursuit of an independent investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection is facing long odds, as bipartisan resolve to hold the perpetrators and instigators accountable erodes, and Republicans face sustained pressure to disavow that it was supporters of former president Donald Trump who attacked the U.S. Capitol.
What’s crucial is that this “sustained pressure” Republicans feel to whitewash the role of Trump and his supporters is shaping their demands on the commission’s structure.
Early on, Pelosi proposed that the commission should examine everything that led up to the attack and to the effort to disrupt the election’s conclusion and the peaceful transfer of power. Her initial suggestion noted that lies about the election inspired what happened.
But Republicans balked. If the commission looks at the role of right-wing extremism in the attack, they said, it must also look at all forms of domestic extremism, including the left-wing type.
Republicans have also objected to a Democratic proposal to give four commission appointments to each party’s congressional leadership, plus three to President Biden, instead demanding equal representation. But Democrats note that the Republican president incited the attack, giving Republicans an incentive to use equal representation to gum up the works.
Now Pelosi is declaring that she has developed another compromise, without saying what it is. And Republicans are expressing skepticism that their objections will be met.
But their objections cannot be met in a way that’s compatible with conducting a full accounting.
The GOP’s deranged anti-leftism
To grasp the full import of this, let’s look at the GOP demand for an investigation into left-wing violent extremism in its larger context. The ongoing claim of a dire left-wing threat has been central to the story Republicans have told about the election and the assault for months. It continues to serve as justification for their ongoing attack on democracy in multiple states.
After the attack, Trump and his allies — including senior Republicans in Congress — falsely claimed in various ways that antifa was behind the attack, and others dismissed it as a false-flag operation. The hyped leftist threat has inspired endorsements of political violence from the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), which Republicans largely declined to punish.
In reality, FBI director Christopher A. Wray recently clarified that antifa was not in the ranks of the rioters, and that the attack was indeed carried out by Trump supporters. And an independent study recently confirmed far-right groups are behind most recent domestic terrorist attacks.
The extreme left is making us do it
Meanwhile, the right-wing narrative has metastasized into the even-more-pernicious idea that if Republicans must resort to all manner of anti-democratic tactics and abuses of power, it’s because the extreme left made them do it.
A recent Tucker Carlson segment suggested that virtuous conservatives might be pushed by leftist extremism into fascism. And over the weekend, Florida’s GOP governor, Ron DeSantis, insisted Republicans might justifiably use legislative power to punish private companies for protesting GOP voter suppression, because they’re executing the agenda of the “extreme left.”
On still another front, Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) notes that Trump himself has begun to downplay the attack. Trump recently insisted rioters were “hugging and kissing the police.” Raskin asks whether Republicans might feel even more pressure to keep whitewashing the event.
“The Big Lie continues and grows with Trump’s claim that these violent insurrectionists are the victims of persecution,” Raskin told me. “That’s sharply inconsistent with any fact based investigation of the Jan. 6 attacks.”
In the end, you cannot disentangle the GOP’s ongoing radicalization from their continued flirtation with the lie about the stolen election and the refusal to acknowledge its central role in inspiring the attack, or from the hallucinatory depiction of the leftist terror threat that’s coursing though all of it.
The battle over the commission is constantly portrayed as devolving into “partisan” politics. But only one side actually wants a real accounting. This wildly lopsided imbalance will remain until Republicans are prepared to fully renounce all those pathologies. And Democrats shouldn’t hesitate to say so, clearly and forcefully.
There will be some criminal charges and a few of them will be convicted, just for symbolic purposes. It’s probably not a great idea to try to overthrow the government, even if your Dear Leader clearly wants you to. I’m sure they’ve learned their lesson.
But as for the higher ups who created the environment in which this behavior seemed acceptable. No biggie. This is how these things go in America. It’s always the “bad apples” who pay the price.
Mike Lindell, the man best known for his internet pillow company My Pillow, as well as for his fierce allegiance to Donald Trump, is set to launch a new free speech platform this week that he thinks will put YouTube and Twitter out of business. But it turns out it will limit what users can say – by stopping them from, among other things, taking the Lord’s name in vain.
“Everyone is going to be able to talk freely,” said Mike Lindell about the platform, called Frank, which is set to roll out on 19 April, in an interview with the conservative host Graham Ledger on the Ledger Report podcast. “When you come over now you are going to be able to speak out and have opinions.”
“You don’t get to use the four swear words: the c-word, the n-word, the f-word, or God’s name in vain,” Lindell explained in a video on the Frank landing page.
In an attempt to differentiate itself from other “anything goes” conservative-leaning social networking platforms, Lindell, a Christian, has laid out the type of speech his users will not be able to freely use, including profanity, sexual content, and blasphemous language.
Lindell, the, let us say, creatively minded political theorist, who was banned from Twitter earlier this year for his persistent lies about how Trump actually won the 2020 election, met with the former president in January apparently urging him to consider martial law to defend that claim, and has recently said he’s hired private investigators to look into why Fox News won’t book him any more, has framed the social media venture as a mix between Twitter and YouTube.
Democrats keep showing they don’t care about norms and institutions, only power. The latest example: a bill to pack the Supreme Court and destroy its legitimacy to guarantee the rulings liberals want.
If you had any doubts that the Republican Party had a full-blown white nationalist faction ready and willing to let their freak flags fly, the last few weeks have to have disabused you of them. From Fox News’ highest rated prime time host Tucker Carlson endorsing the far-right “great replacement” theory on national television to Kevin Williamson of the National Review, following in the tradition of its founder William F. Buckley, theorizing that we need fewer but “higher quality” voters, it seems as if right-wing extremism is getting a whole lot of airtime.
Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene put the white icing on Republican’s racist cake last week when she floated the idea of the new Trump-supporting American First Caucus, which caused even House Minority Leader Kevin Mccarthy to issue a mild rebuke for its obvious references to white power. Among those who said they were part of the project were far-right Reps. Paul Gosar of Arizona, Matt Gaetz of Florida and Louis Gohmert of Texas. The rock has been turned over and all the white supremacists are crawling out, eyes squinting, ready to seize their rightful place in the Republican Party.
Greene’s plan was reported by Punchbowl News last Friday as a new group dedicated to following in “President Trump’s footsteps, and potentially step on some toes and sacrifice sacred cows for the good of the American nation.” This is defined as preserving “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” with a goal of limiting legal immigration “to those that can contribute not only economically, but have demonstrated respect for this nation’s culture and rule of law.” It’s unclear exactly how such “respect” can be demonstrated but it’s not too hard to imagine. Being a huge Trump supporter certainly wouldn’t hurt. It’s also interesting that they have moved on from the “Judeo-Christian ethic” trope they used for the last few decades to this weird colonial throwback term “Anglo-Saxon culture” but it’s no mystery as to why they would have done that, is it?
One aspect of the agenda that got a lot of attention was its support for infrastructure “that reflects the architectural, engineering and aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture.” There were plenty of chuckles over that one imagining what Greene and Gohmert would consider appropriate architecture. After wondering for a bit who they would consider to be their Albert Speer, I realized it was right in front of our nose: the great builder and designer of ostentatious, gold-plated kitsch himself: Donald Trump.
But really, it’s less hilarious than it sounds. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the Third Reich knows how much importance they attached to the “classical aesthetic” and in recent years there has been a movement among various alt-right types, including Neo-Nazis and Identity Europa, to take up a new aesthetic as the perfect expression of white culture. Hettie O’Brien of The New Statesman wrote about the trend in 2018:
While the Nazis thought neoclassical architecture an authentic expression of German identity, today’s far right updates this doctrine for the social media age. As Stephan Trüby, an architectural historian at the University of Stuttgart, told me, right-wing populists have begun to sharpen their focus on architecture. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland party has spawned a revivalist movement of far-right isolationists who revere folk mythology and Saxon castles. Trüby writes that, “Filled with disgust at any kind of metropolitan multicultural way of life,” these settlers retreat to rural Germany to rehearse the “preservation of the German Volk“. […]
As Trüby noted, in Germany certain terms camouflage far-right identity politics. “Words like ‘tradition’ and ‘beauty’ are used to establish ideas of a unified people and nation, which excludes migrants and many parts of the population.” Beauty is infused with connotations of blood, soil and a Volk.
It’s not just a European thing. You may recall the marchers in Charlottesville in 2017 were chanting “blood and soil.”
Within 24 hours, Greene and Gosar had backtracked on their caucus plan, suddenly claiming that it wasn’t really their thing and that a staffer was responsible for an early draft they hadn’t approved of. Greene went hysterical on Twitter over the controversy:
Greene’s spokesman, Nick Dyer, had issued a statement on Friday saying to “be on the look out for the release of the America First Caucus platform when it’s announced to the public very soon.” By Saturday he was saying Greene would not be launching anything. In the interim, some members of the most far-right caucus in the House, the Freedom Caucus, which counts Greene and the others as members, had publicly expressed their disapproval.
It’s tempting to see that as a sign they were truly appalled by Greene’s overt white nationalism. But that’s unlikely. This is actually an old strategy by right-wingers that inexorably mainstreams their beliefs in a way that allows many of them to escape responsibility. They do it every few years. Some rump right-wing group organizes itself within the party, attracts some attention for its extremism and then ends up being the tail that wags the dog — at least until another even more right-wing rump group organizes itself and does the same thing, moving the previous group into the mainstream. They usually tend to gain steam when the Democrats are in power.
This goes way back but, as with so much else, it has accelerated since the early 1990s when Newt Gingrich and his backbench wrecking crew took over the GOP after rabble-rousing through the previous decade. They were once the loudmouthed extremists and then suddenly were the mainstream and elected their rabble-rousing leader to be the Speaker of the House. (Listening to former Speaker John Boehner bemoan the rightward surge of the GOP is laughable. He was among those original Gingrich revolutionaries.) Later came the Freedom Caucus, a group known for its obstructionism and “burn the house” down purity. Trump raised them up into the corridors of real power, spawning such GOP superstars as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Devin Nunes, R-CA, Jim Jordan, R-OH, and Matt Gaetz, R-FL all of whom are current or former Freedom Caucus members.
With the help of Fox News, Marjorie Taylor Greene is taking that same strategy to the next level. It works out well for all concerned. By parroting the emergent white nationalist rhetoric being mainstreamed by Tucker Carlson, she manages to raise a lot of money. And by delicately distancing themselves from her, the Freedom Caucus get to appear to be safe to establishment Republicans (just like John Boehner was when he became speaker) who can in turn appeal to the suburban voters who abandoned the party.
I think you can see the problem here.
This latest iteration of far-right wingnuttia is going in a very dangerous direction. I don’t think we’ll see Marjorie Taylor Greene elected speaker of the House but there’s every chance that at some point someone with her toxic ideology will be seen as such a mainstream Republican that he or she is a perfectly viable candidate. Trump already came very close. I honestly don’t know how much lower they can go from there.
Greg Sargent does a Twitter head shake over a New York Times analysis of “political sectarianism.”
Sectarians, authoritarians, demagogues, oh my. Ireland, the Middle East, South Asia. What intractable problems. “As often, it’s the story of a minority that can’t accept being ruled by its enemy,” writes Nate Cohn.
Gosh, all these things pose a really terrible threat to democracy. Which of the two parties is doing them again? pic.twitter.com/Mlo92xiuUe
Sectarianism has been so powerful among Republicans in part because they believe they’re at risk of being consigned to minority status. The party has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, and conservatives fear that demographic changes promise to further erode their support. And while defeat is part of the game in democracy, it is a lot harder to accept in a sectarian society.
It is not easy to accept being ruled by a hostile, alien rival. It can make “political losses feel like existential threats,” as the authors of the study published in Science put it.
As a result, the minority often poses a challenge to democracy in a sectarian society. It’s the minority who bears the costs, whether material or psychological, of accepting majority rule in a democracy. In the extreme, rule by a hostile, alien group might not feel much different than being subjugated by another nation.
A lot of descriptive and very little prescriptive. It’s not even clear what the purpose of the piece is beside filling column inches.
Come on down to North Carolina and this hostile, alien rival will tell you all about accepting majority rule in a democracy. From experience. Under constant political assault. Without jettisoning democracy. Or the rule of law. Or resorting to violence. During a deadly pandemic.
A conservative movement post-Trump might as well require a powder or pill sold at night on Fox News. Republicans don’t move. They are the blockage. But like their leader in Palm Beach, they are hell at posturing.
E.J. Dionne waxes nostalgic about his time covering the New York state legislature when political posturing was a step toward achieving a policy goal. Not with today’s Republicans. Blockage is the goal:
The problem with Washington in 2021 might be described as posturing without a purpose — beyond scoring points against the White House. The Republican dance around President Biden’s infrastructure proposal almost makes me nostalgic for the sincerity of cynicism.
Republican posturing on infrastructure is not about building things but about not building them. Donald Trump sold himself as a risk-taking real estate developer, a man who built things. But before stumbling into the Oval Office, Trump had long since ceased building. He found he could make more money with less risk by licensing his name to others to slap on things they built at their expense and risk. Then he could point to his name and take the credit.
Republicans in Congress, too, are happy to slap their names on others’ successes. They will strike poses back home about benefits from the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion relief package that their constituents will enjoy but that they themselves voted to kill.
Democrats learned that efforts at bipartisanship with such cosplayers need an expiration date.
But the history of the Obama years has taught Democrats that Republicans aren’t, well, posturing in good faith. They are not staking out one position today to lay the groundwork for reaching a mutually agreeable compromise tomorrow. Rather, many Democrats figure their opponents will string them along, and then, at the end, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) will still have to get the bill done with only Democratic votes.
The real question before Senate Democrats is whether it’s worth seeing if enough Republicans would allow some significant share of infrastructure spending to pass in a bipartisan way. A leading advocate of what you might call the Big Test is Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.). He says it might be worth dividing Biden’s plan into two, with one winning GOP votes and the other passing through reconciliation. But he doesn’t want to give the GOP forever.
Republicans have until Memorial Day.
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is “agnostic” about passing the infrastructure package in pieces. He’s looking to avoid a fight over a third bill.
Brown is right to be skeptical: Wagers on GOP goodwill have lately been suckers’ bets. But Coons is also right that there are worse things than being caught trying bipartisanship — with a deadline. Better to know quickly how serious Republicans are about infrastructure. Let the burden be on them to show what brand of posturing they’re engaged in.
The Trump brand, clearly. But Democrats are willing to spend a few weeks doing some bipartisanship posturing as a prelude to achieving their real goal. They’ll be able to tell voters they tried to clear the blockage through negotiation before flushing it out via reconciliation.
I mean, kinda fits with the retro & performative nature of the GOP. Since the 80s, their voters have elected Cooter from Dukes of Hazard, Gopher from The Love Boat, the star of Bedtime for Bonzo, The Terminator, The Apprentice guy and Clint Eastwood, who later talked to a chair. https://t.co/Q9HMD6DGxJ
However, the film actor and political newcomer could hit potholes in either major party’s primary if he enters next year’s governor’s race, the poll found.
For months, McConaughey has teased political pundits and TV talk show hosts with musings that he might enter politics in his home state.
If he were to take the plunge and run for governor, the poll found, 45% of Texas registered voters would vote for McConaughey, 33% would vote for Abbott and 22% would vote for someone else.
McConaughey’s double-digit lead over the two-term Republican incumbent is significant. The poll, conducted April 6-13, surveyed 1,126 registered voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.92 percentage points.
But 56% of Republican voters said they’d vote for Abbott, compared with only 30% for McConaughey.
While Democrats broke 66% to 8% for McConaughey, and independents 44% to 28%, more than twice as many Democratic primary voters — 51% — said they wanted a progressive candidate for governor than wanted a centrist — 25%.
That could pose a problem. McConaughey, who has criticized both major parties, has suggested he’s more of a moderate.
And in the GOP gubernatorial primary, that’s also not obviously a ticket to success. Solid majorities of poll respondents who described themselves as conservative, evangelical or retirement-age Republican primary voters said they’d vote for Abbott.
Only 20% of GOP primary voters preferred a more centrist Republican, and 18% wanted someone more like former President Donald Trump. Fourteen percent preferred someone more conservative than Abbott, who has been avidly courting the right wing of his party in recent weeks after several staunch conservatives, including former state Sen. Don Huffines of Dallas, were mentioned as possible challengers to him in the primary.
Reagan and Schwarzenegger both had been seriously involved in politics before they ran for Governor. What has McConaughey done except tweet?
On the other hand, they loved that Orange TV idiot and his claim to fame was being famous and ignorantly pontificating on TV, so why not?
I’m sure you recall the fact that Lindsey Graham just spent the last four years sucking up to the most incompetent president this country’s ever produced and man he calls “consequential” mainly because he fucked everything up so badly that it will take years to fix. Donald Trump never listened to anyone who wasn’t eagerly licking his boots at the same time and even then he mostly ignored them
Trump never listened to Graham either. But he did invite him to the golf course making him feel very special which Biden evidently isn’t doing. This isn’t surprising since Graham’s full of shit. Even Trump understood that much.
DeSantis’s career has been a distillation of this Florida-Republican adaptability. Born in Jacksonville, he went from being a double-Ivy Leaguer (Yale and Harvard Law) to a Tea Party congressman to a zealous Trump defender who won the president’s endorsement for his gubernatorial campaign. A steady march rightward, it would seem — except that after winning an extremely narrow victory over Andrew Gillum in 2018, DeSantis then swung back to the center, with educational and environmental initiatives and African-American outreach that earned him 60 percent approval ratings in his first year in office.
Combine that moderate swing with the combative persona DeSantis has developed during the pandemic, and you can see a model for post-Trump Republicanism that might — might — be able to hold the party’s base while broadening the G.O.P.’s appeal. You can think of it as a series of careful two-steps. Raise teacher’s salaries while denouncing critical race theory and left-wing indoctrination. Spend money on conservation and climate change mitigation through a program that carefully doesn’t mention climate change itself. Choose a Latina running mate while backing E-Verify laws. Welcome conflict with the press, but try to make sure you’re on favorable ground.
This is not exactly the kind of Republicanism that the party’s donor class wanted back in 2012: DeSantis is to their right on immigration and social issues, and arguably to their left on spending. But the trauma of Trumpism has taught the G.O.P. elite that some compromise with base politics is inevitable, and right now DeSantis seems like the safest version of that compromise — Trump-y when necessary, but not Trump-y all the time.
Of course all of this means that he may soon attract the ire of a certain former president, who has zero interest in someone besides himself being the party front-runner for 2024. And the idea that a non-Trump front-runner could be anointed early and actually win seems at odds with everything we’ve seen from the G.O.P. recently.
Then, too, having the press as your constant foil and enemy isn’t necessarily a plus if they manage to come up with something genuinely damaging. There is a resemblance between DeSantis and Chris Christie, who looked like a 2016 front-runner before certain difficulties involving a bridge intervened.
Still, if you were betting on someone who could theoretically run against Trump, mano a mano, and not simply get squashed, I would put DeSantis ahead of both the defeated Trump rivals (meaning Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz) and the loyal Trump subordinates (meaning Mike Pence or Nikki Haley). Not least because in a party that values performative masculinity, the Florida governor’s odd jock-nerd energy and prickly aggression are qualities Trump hasn’t faced before.
The donor-class hope that Trump will simply fade away still seems naïve. But the donors circling DeSantis at least seem to have learned one important lesson from 2016: If you want voters to say no to Donald Trump, you need to figure out, in a clear and early way, the candidate to whom you want them to say yes.
Apparently donors want a t hug for president who will bend them to his will. Very impressive. And being a total asshole while making some small unnoticed gestures to human decency is abound to appeal to all those suburban women who apparently are going to think he’s just dreamy.
Douthat pushes the increasingly insupportable myth that he has performed super well during the pandemic, particularly compared to those awful blue state Governors.
Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, must have magic at his fingertips.
We’re not talking about his purported skill at fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re talking about his ability to snow the press into taking at face value the claim that his refusal to impose stringent anti-virus rules and regulations has been an unalloyed success.
The latest publication to fall into line is Politico, which on Thursday posted an article headlined, “How Ron DeSantis won the pandemic.” A companion piece observed that he has “survived the pandemic,” and that “Florida has fared no worse, and in some ways better, than many other states — including its big-state peers.”
We’ve succeeded, and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, last May
Leaving aside that this sort of coverage treats the coronavirus battle as if it’s a sporting contest deserving of up-to-the-minute color commentary, the best that could be said about these judgments is that they’re premature.
The struggle against the pandemic is still going on — in Florida and globally — so why the rush to declare DeSantis the “winner” of a war that could yet be lost?
Politico isn’t alone in anointing DeSantis the victor. So too has the Associated Press, which on March 13 posted an article stating, inadequately, that “despite their differing approaches, California and Florida have experienced almost identical outcomes in COVID-19 case rates.”
CNN came to a similar conclusion. “DeSantis’ gamble to take a laissez faire approach appears to be paying off,” it reported — though it was careful enough to qualify that its judgment applied “at least politically, at least for now.”
Indeed, DeSantis’ record on COVID-19 is attracting attention strictly because of politics. He’s being touted as a leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, as silly as it is to speculate today on such a distant a horse race. DeSantis’ COVID record is presented as Exhibit 1 for his front-runner status.
Yet it’s important to recognize that a state’s success or failure in combating COVID-19 depends on a multitude of factors, many of which are outside a governor’s control. Those who claim credit for good-looking statistics may be setting themselves up for a boatload of blame if the numbers turn ugly.
As we’ve remarked before, one thing that sets DeSantis apart from most other governors, red or blue, is his tendency to present himself as the victim of anti-conservative coverage.
He grouses unceasingly about being overlooked by the unsympathetic news media: “We’ve succeeded,” he said truculently on May 20, “and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative.”
Assertions about DeSantis’ success rest on several pillars. One is the claim that Florida hasn’t done quite as badly as experts predicted last year, when DeSantis refused to shut down his state and enforce social hygiene measures such as mask wearing. Another is that the differences in outcomes between Florida and other states, particularly in COVID-related deaths, are supposedly minimal.
The judgment also depends on treating every state as a homogeneous entity, eliding variations of urban vs. rural, rich neighborhoods vs. poor, Black vs. white, and so on. And on treating every state as a hermetically sealed fortress unto itself, as though policies in one state have no impact beyond its borders.
All those factors demand close scrutiny. Since that seldom happens, it falls to us to dive into the details. We’ll match Florida’s experience against California’s, since California is among the more frequent punching bags for DeSantis and his fan base.
Florida’s per-capita death rate has exceeded California’s throughout the pandemic.
Let’s take it from the top. It’s arguably true that Florida’s record on the pandemic hasn’t been as bad as was forecast. That’s not the same as saying it’s good. Florida’s COVID death rate is about 155 per 100,000 population, according to data from Johns Hopkins University reported by the Washington Post. California’s is about 141.
The difference isn’t trivial. As my colleagues Soumya Karlamangla and Rong-Gong Lin II observed earlier this month, “If California had Florida’s death rate, roughly 6,000 more Californians would be dead from COVID-19 …. And if Florida had California’s death rate, roughly 3,000 fewer Floridians would be dead from COVID-19.”
As of Friday, Johns Hopkins counts 33,219 COVID deaths in Florida, which has a population of about 21.5 million, compared with 55,795 in California, which has a population of about 40 million. Those figures are a reproach to anyone who tries to assert that the war on COVID-19 has been “won,” in either state.
Yet statewide statistics tell a partial story at best. It’s especially misleading to apply a broad brush to California, one of the most geographically and demographically diverse states in the union. So let’s break the numbers down by county.
By far the worst death rate among large California counties is Los Angeles, at a total of 224.5 deaths per 100,000 residents through the pandemic thus far. As Karlamangla and Lin have explained, L.A. County was uniquely vulnerable to the pandemic, given its high levels of poverty and homelessness and its preponderance of densely packed neighborhoods and multigenerational housing.
L.A. also has a large population of immigrants, many of whom may have been discouraged from seeking COVID testing or treatment during 2020 by the Trump administration’s “public charge” policy, which threatened immigrants with deportation if they sought public services.
The county also has a large population of essential workers — those with little choice but to travel outside their homes to work, heightening their potential for exposure and for passing infection to others.
At the other end of the scale from Los Angeles, however, is San Francisco, which has one of the lowest COVID death rates among major metropolitan areas in the country — 51.4 per 100,000 population.
The Bay Area’s record testifies to the efficacy of stringent anti-pandemic measures: Its counties locked down early and firmly, observe mask wearing and social distancing rules fairly well, and have been cautious about reopening.
No major county in Florida has a death rate anywhere as low as San Francisco’s. The lowest rate is that of Monroe County (the Florida Keys) at 65 per 100,000 population. County authorities shut down tourist businesses on the Keys at the end of March, even erecting roadblocks on U.S. 1, the only highway into or out of the Keys, to prevent non-residents from coming in; the roadblocks came down June 1 but a stringent mask requirement remains in effect in Key West.
The death rates in most of Florida’s major population centers resemble that of Los Angeles: Miami-Dade, the largest, has a rate of 210 deaths per 100,000, Palm Beach 173, Pinellas County (St. Petersburg) 156.
In granular terms, in other words, Florida hasn’t done better than California. Both states are mosaics of rules and regulations, and in both states local conditions and local measures trump those of state governments.
Miami and the Tampa Bay metroplex both have tried to encourage mask wearing and social distancing because their leaders recognize that they face different conditions from rural and less dense regions that have followed DeSantis’ policies; California also has placed pandemic policies in the hands of county officials, with uneven effects.
Florida hasn’t done better than California despite different policies — in the parts of each state that resemble each other demographically, the challenge is similar, and so is the weaponry. And when you put it all together, Florida still does worse overall than California.
Some of DeSantis’ defenders argue that Florida has done better than should have been expected, given that its population is among the oldest, on average, in the country and therefore its residents are especially susceptible to COVID-19.
This is a curious argument, since DeSantis and his sycophants have asserted that the key to his success in combating the pandemic has been taking special care of his state’s seniors. But he can’t have things both ways—either the state’s record has suffered because of its demographics, or he has triumphed over the demographics. Which is it?
One issue that gets consistently glossed over in reporting on DeSantis’ “win” is the degree to which Florida may be exporting its pandemic problem. The state’s beaches and coastal entertainment zones were wide open during last year’s college spring break, and are again this year.
DeSantis loves to boast about the tourism boom in South Florida, but his braggadocio should be a warning for other states. That’s because there are signs that the spring break carousers simply brought their infections and their consequences home with them last year.
Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Ball State University found that COVID case rates in counties with universities that scheduled breaks early in the spring last year rose within a week of students returning to campus, compared to rates in counties with few college students. Mortality rates began to rise in those locations three to five weeks after students returned, suggesting that students transmitted their infections to higher-risk (that is, older) people.
They also found that universities with students more likely to travel by air, to New York City and to Florida “contribute[d] more to COVID-19 spread than … universities with less of this travel.”
To put it another way, Florida may welcome spring tourists with open arms, knowing they’ll be someone else’s problem when they become sick and spread their illness far and wide. The virus knows no geographic boundaries, and it’s perfectly content to hitch a ride.
Finally, what about Florida’s economic “boom”? Here’s DeSantis, in full gloat, courtesy of CNN: “If you look at what’s happening in South Florida right now, I mean this place is booming. It would not be booming if it was shut down. Los Angeles isn’t booming. New York City’s not booming. It’s booming here because you can live like a human being.”
The breadth of this boom is open to question. The news articles painting DeSantis as a political winner often feature quotes from contented business owners, but they tend to be bar and restaurant owners and other petty merchants happy that their establishments have remained open.
Politico observed that California’s Disneyland has remained closed while Orlando’s Walt Disney World is open, but fails to mention that Disney World imposes strict social hygiene measures, including mask wearing and social distancing that aren’t part of the DeSantis playbook.
Economic booms are relative. Compared to California, Florida’s economy is a popgun. Its per capita gross domestic product is about $51,200; California’s is $77,500. Florida’s median household income was about $59,200 in 2019; California’s was about $80,440.
Of more pressing significance, Florida’s state budget faced a shortfall of more than $2 billion (at least before Congress enacted a pandemic relief bill with billions of dollars in help for states”). California has recorded a windfall of some $15.5 billion.
The discrepancy isn’t due to differences in civic virtue, but to the states’ divergent tax structures. Florida has no income tax, but California depends heavily on its income tax, which is sensitive to the sort of investment gains seen during 2020. California’s windfall isn’t expected to last beyond this year.
The media’s rush to crown Ron DeSantis as having vanquished COVID-19 looks more like a rush to get in front of a parade every day. But it’s a mug’s game. A lot can happen between now and the next presidential election, and as we’ve seen, the coronavirus is ready and willing to prove everybody wrong.
But I’m afraid “DeSantis the contrarian hero” starting to take on the whiff of received wisdom and he will benefit from it no matter what the statistics say. The media just wants to believe it. It’s fun.
Trump must be starting to get a little bit grumpy about this. Will he be willing to fade into obscurity as his top Florida henchman becomes the star of the party? Stay tuned.
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