March 2, 2020

Mar 03, 2020

America now has 6 COVID-19 fatalities, and today, a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) abruptly canceled a press briefing about the coronavirus. A White House spokesperson later said the CDC would brief Vice President Mike Pence on the coronavirus response. Today information about how many people in the U.S. had been tested for the virus was taken down from the CDC website, presumably because it is such a scandal that we have tested so few people when other countries have tested widely. The website now lists only the number of confirmed cases (43, as of this afternoon).

Trump met with the leaders of ten pharmaceutical companies today to see how they could speed up production of a vaccine. Unfortunately, the tests needed to make sure vaccines work and are safe cannot be rushed, and experts say we’re still 12-18 months away from one (which is actually remarkably fast—usually they take at least two years). Trump’s understanding of vaccines seems shaky: he asked the attendees if the flu vaccine would work on the novel coronavirus.

In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, both Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar have dropped out and endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden. While tempers are running high over the contest, this sort of jockeying before a nomination is entirely normal, and is usually quite a good way for voters to test out candidates and for candidates to test out new ideas for their party. The way to look at this current struggle is as a contest between candidates perceived to be moderate—Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar-- and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who is perceived to be radical and who is not, after all, a Democrat.

Buttigieg is young—only 38-- and now well-positioned for a job in a Biden administration where he can get more experience; Klobuchar is already a powerful senator. It made sense for them to drop out and endorse Biden, who falls closer to their political leanings than Sanders. The delegates already pledged to them at the Democratic National Convention are generally bound to vote for them in the first ballot, but are then released. They might switch to Biden, as their candidate asks, but they are not obligated to.

Businessman and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren remain in the race.

What will happen tomorrow, on Super Tuesday, will give us a better sense of how the nomination will take shape. For all the attention the early states get, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada offer only about 4% of the delegates at stake, so performing well in them is more about momentum than about final delegate tallies. Fourteen states vote in Super Tuesday, and most of those states are far more diverse than Iowa and New Hampshire, so they look more like the actual demographic that represents the Democratic Party and might hand in very different results than earlier contests.

By the end of the day, about a third of the delegate total will be allocated. Bloomberg has poured money into ads for Super Tuesday; they might pay off. Warren got a huge bump from her debate performance against Bloomberg just before the Nevada caucuses. Biden and Sanders both have strengths and weaknesses. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Will any of this matter? Intelligence officers from Special Counsel Robert Mueller to Russia expert Fiona Hill have warned us that Russia would disrupt this election, and we know they are already disrupting the Democratic presidential nomination process, trying to affect the way voters perceive the Democratic candidates.

This attack seems likely to go unchallenged by the administration. Trump has installed as our acting Director of National Intelligence the current Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who has made clear he does not believe Russia interfered in our 2016 election or that it is attacking us in 2020, either. Trump’s recent nomination of Representative John Ratcliffe (R-TX), one of the key defenders of the president during the impeachment hearings, seems designed to guarantee an end to any investigation of Russian attacks. Ratcliffe’s previous run at the office stalled because senators of both parties thought he was unqualified. But if they refuse to confirm him now, Trump gets to keep Grenell, who is even more unqualified, and more in the president’s corner. Since Ratcliffe has endorsed the conspiracy theory that the Russia investigation was the project of “a secret society” in the Justice Department and the FBI determined to prevent Trump’s election, Trump has a friend at the head of Intelligence no matter whether he gets Ratcliffe or keeps Grenell, and it seems likely there will be little effort to keep foreign governments out of our election.

Indeed, Republican leaders are actively doing their part to sway the way voters think about candidates, just as they did with their constant drumbeat about Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016. Trump's reluctance to run against Biden was at the heart of the Ukraine Scandal, and yesterday, Senate Republican Ron Johnson (R-WI), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, took up the cause. He told his colleagues that he is planning to force a vote on subpoenaing the first witness in his investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden for wrongdoing with regard to the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma. The investigation had gone quiet as Biden’s candidacy appeared to sink, but after his strong showing in South Carolina on Saturday, the investigation heated up again.

For his part, Trump simply tweeted: “They are staging a coup against Bernie!”

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Notes:

COVID-19: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/02/cdc-postpones-coronavirus-briefing-118815

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/03/02/us/ap-virus-outbreak-the-latest.html

Trump on vaccines: