The statistic has been hanging around for a few days already. One in 500 Americans has died of Covid with no sign of the virus disappearing anytime soon. Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda hangs on a few votes.* Biden’s poll numbers have dropped. So did the stock market last week. His approval “now hovers at that of Gerald Ford at this point in his Presidency,” writes Susan Glasser at The New Yorker. Just above Donald Trump’s.
The greater contrast between Biden and his party and his predecessor and his is that Biden still bets on America, as he regularly reminds us. He wants to do good by the country and by its people. His adversaries just want to rule them. And to ruin him or die trying. Literally.
They will kill themselves to ruin him, too, the Guardian’s review of Bob Woodward’s new book notes:
Deep red Mississippi leads in Covid deaths per capita. Florida’s death toll has risen above 50,000. This week alone, the Sunshine State lost more than 2,500. Then again, a century and a half ago, about 258,000 men died for the Confederacy rather than end slavery. “Freedom?” Whatever.
Liberals complaining that conservatives vote against their best interests reveals a profound misunderstanding of what the right considers its best interests. They would die to preserve slavery. They will die to preserve the imagined nation they believe God Himself bequeathed them. Dying of Covid proves their commitment to that cause. They are not dying. They are martyring themselves.
Glasser writes:
It is not an accident or an immutable fact of American political life; it’s a fire built and stoked by Trump and his supporters. Among the top stories on Fox News’ home page on Thursday, I could not find a single reference to the pandemic, and little sense that covid even existed, beyond a link to a video headlined “Liberal host torched for labeling GOP ‘COVID-loving death cult’ in bizarre rant.” As I was writing this column, I received an e-mail from one Donald J. Trump. The subject was “Biden’s vaccine mandate.” “I totally OPPOSE this liberal overreach that requires Americans to be vaccinated,” Trump wrote. “The Left is working overtime to CONTROL you, Friend,” he warned. Biden, he added, “doesn’t care about you or your freedoms.”
[Insert Rebel yell here.]
Gavin Newsom’s victory in the California recall election last week may point the way to an effective 2022 strategy for Democrats. Playing offense against Republicans based on Covid worked the way Covid cost Trump in 2020.
But in a kind of Obi Wan v. Darth Vader way, political survival may no longer be conservatives’ strategy. The South was doomed the moment it went to war with the better-resourced and more-industrialized North. Yet go to war the South did, giving the Union the finger even as it bled out. And afterwards, post-Reconstruction for another hundred years-plus.
Glasser concludes:
The G.O.P.’s desire to see Biden fail has become a willingness to let the country fail. Nine months into Biden’s Presidency, the bottom line is that the Republican war on Biden’s legitimacy and the war on Biden’s covid policies are now inextricably linked. The consequences of this are so hard to contemplate that we often do not do so: a politics so broken that it is now killing Americans on an industrial scale.
Pickett’s Charge failed the first time. May it fail again and again. Not until they learn. They won’t.
*With his last name, Biden might have considered dialing back the aliterative branding.