Sandara Park: On Politics: Biden, Republicans and the pandemic blame game

July 31, 2021

By Reid J. Epstein

Hi. We're sending you one last Saturday edition of On Politics, courtesy of our national politics reporter Reid Epstein, before the newsletter shifts to a weekly schedule of Tuesday and Thursday evenings. You can continue to read Lisa Lerer's political coverage on our site, and you can follow her on Twitter.

President Biden began wearing a mask again at the White House this week.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

President Biden is in a tough spot: He campaigned on the ideas that he had the team to manage a pandemic and that his five-decade career as a Washington deal maker was just the ticket to overcome the country's political polarization.

That's not happening, not even a little.

Not only are Republicans resisting Biden's push to end the pandemic, some of them are actively hampering it. Republican governors slow-walked vaccination efforts and lifted mask mandates early. In Washington, G.O.P. leaders like Steve Scalise, the second-ranking House Republican — who himself didn't get vaccinated until about two weeks ago — mocked public health guidance that even vaccinated people should wear masks indoors as "government control."

There's little Biden can do. Nearly a year and a half of pandemic living has revealed precisely who will and won't abide by public health guidelines.

Just in the last week, in my Washington neighborhood, which has among the highest vaccination rates in the city and voted 92 percent for Biden, people began re-masking at supermarkets and even outdoors in parks.

In places like Arkansas, hospitals are over capacity with Covid patients and vaccination rates remain stubbornly low. The anti-mask sentiment is so strong that the state's General Assembly passed legislation forbidding any mandate requiring them. On Thursday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, declared a special session of the legislature to amend that anti-mandate law he signed in April so that schools would be allowed to require masks for students too young to receive a vaccine. Good luck with that, his fellow Republicans in the legislature replied.

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That leaves the president in a pickle. As the Delta variant shows itself to be far more contagious and dangerous than previous iterations of the virus, the people he most needs to hear his message on vaccines and masks are least likely to.

Six years of Donald J. Trump largely blocking out all other voices in his party have left Republicans without a credible messenger to push vaccines, even if they wanted to. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, may be using his campaign money to air pro-vaccine ads in his native Kentucky, but he is hardly a beloved figure within the party and is viewed by its base as just another member of the Washington establishment.

There are certainly other communities of vaccine resisters, including demographics of people who have historically been mistreated by the federal government (and also a small-but-vocal minority of professional athletes and Olympians), but it is Republicans and Republican-run states that have emerged as the biggest hurdle in America's vaccination efforts.

With little ability to persuade the vaccine-hesitant and little help from the party he had pledged to work with, Biden and the federal government were left with a move he had resisted for weeks: make life more difficult for the unvaccinated, to try to force them to change their minds.

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Which brings us to the president's news conference on Thursday. Biden said that, for the first time, all federal employees would have to show proof that they've been vaccinated (or else wear a mask at work), submit to weekly testing and maintain social distance.

He stopped short of a vaccine mandate, saying such a requirement was a decision for local governments, school districts and companies. He said that if things got worse, and those resisting vaccines were denied entry from jobs and public spaces, maybe then things would get better.

"My guess is, if we don't start to make more progress, a lot of businesses and a lot of enterprises are going to require proof for you to be able to participate," Biden said.

This maneuver — essentially a shifting of responsibility away from the federal government — is consistent with the way that Biden often tries to project a hopeful tone while airbrushing the reality of a starkly divided nation.

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The market for disinformation in America is larger than ever, with Trump, despite starting the program that has led to the full vaccination of 164 million Americans, leading the charge to discredit the same program during the Biden administration.

But it wasn't Trump and Republicans who ran last year on ending the pandemic — it was Biden and Democrats who successfully made the election a referendum on managing a once-in-a-century global public health crisis.

Now, just weeks after he celebrated the great progress made against the pandemic, Biden faces a new wave. And it probably won't be long before Republicans who have done all they could to resist measures to combat it start to blame the president for not getting the country out of the crisis he pledged to solve.

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Sunisa Lee's Olympic gold is a triumph for Hmong Americans

When I traveled to Wisconsin in May to write about a dispute over whether Marathon County should declare itself "A Community for All," the overwhelming sentiment from members of the Hmong community at the center of the dispute was whether they were accepted and seen as equal citizens.

So this week when Sunisa Lee, a Hmong gymnast from nearby St. Paul, Minn., won the gold medal in the women's gymnastics all-around competition, she not only became America's latest Olympic hero but also catapulted herself to become the country's most famous Hmong person.

"SO EXCITED. SO PROUD," Ka Lo, a Marathon County Board member, wrote in a series of jubilant text messages on Thursday. "IT'S SOOOOOO GOOD!!!"

How much of a boost Lee's triumph gives to local efforts for Hmong recognition in Wisconsin remains to be seen. Both Marathon County and Wausau's City Council have rejected "Community for All" resolutions, leading to a proliferation of "Community for All" yard signs and yet another effort to pass the measure at the county board.

The next vote of the county board's executive committee is scheduled for Aug. 12.

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