Here's What Biden's First Move Would Be as President - It's Worrying
Here’s a fun media thought experiment for you: Do a search on “Joe Biden unity.”
I know, you’ve probably been force-fed that narrative so much over the past few days you’re about to retch, but indulge me here.
There are a few results from the Bernie Sanders-Joe Biden Unity Task Force, which was designed, as the primary season wound down to a halt, to gather the party’s far-left wing into the Biden fold. (He’d probably rather you forgot about that one.)
There are some results for the scattered occasions Biden would call for unity on the campaign trail, which were rather undercut by the fact he’d often call President Trump and his supporters intolerant in practically the same breath.
By and large, however, you’ll get plenty of unearned praise for Biden’s speech on Saturday night, hours after the media reported him as the victor of the 2020 presidential race.
“President-elect Joe Biden declares a ‘clear victory’ and calls for unity in speech” (CBS News). “Joe Biden Offers Message of Unity as Hollywood Responds With Relief: ‘I Clapped'” (The Hollywood Reporter). “San Diego Catholics Respond to Joe Biden’s Call For Unity” (KNSD-TV).
Hollywood clapped and five San Diego Mass-goers at one parish the local NBC affiliate visited approved.
Thank the empyrean, because I was beginning to think it would be nearly impossible after a speech crafted with fighter-plane precision to appeal to unity, harmony, consensus, accord, comity and pretty much every other synonym of that word you could wring out of the thesaurus to find, in a state where Joe Biden won 65 percent of the vote, a few people who supported the speech among Biden’s co-Catholics and in an industry where open support of President Trump would get you drummed out.
Good work.
But, yes, you get the point: His speech was covered, without exception, at face value by a media that pretended the last two years didn’t happen or that Biden didn’t launch his campaign by repeating the same tired calumny about President Trump’s “very fine people” remark regarding Charlottesville and managed to, on not infrequent occasions, find his way lower.
He’s now going to unify us and, if he has his way, all the little children in America will clap their hands in unison.
Now, do another search: “mask yelling.”
Again, you knew what you’d find, but consider the breadth of it. Videos of masked people starting arguments with unmasked people. Videos of unmasked people starting arguments with masked people.
Articles like this one from Fatherly Magazine: “When to Yell at Someone For Not Wearing a Mask.” Or The Conversation: “Philosophy and psychology agree – yelling at people who aren’t wearing masks won’t work,” which cites John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant.
Or you can wade into the racial morass, as The San Jose Mercury News did: “White woman caught on video yelling obscenities at a Black California Starbucks barista over face mask.”
Joe Biden wants unity. And he’s going to achieve this unity, in one of his first moves, by pressuring state and local governments to implement a mask mandate — because what better place to start unifying America?
On Monday, NBC News reported that Biden would, “in the coming days … begin calling governors and the mayors of major cities from both parties to encourage them to institute mask mandates as the coronavirus pandemic enters a potentially deadlier phase with winter arriving, according to a senior Biden adviser.”
“If a governor declines, he’ll go to the mayors in the state and ask them to lead,” the Biden adviser said. “In many states, there is the capacity of mayors to institute mandates.”
According to a count by non-profit group Masks4All, 33 states currently have some statewide requirements to wear masks in public. (NBC News cites a superannuated July NPR number of “[r]oughly 20” states, which shows rigorous exactitude from a media we’re supposed to give the same trust accorded to science.)
The expectation by the Biden administration is that this will save lives this winter — up to 100,000 in a worst-case scenario, a study published in Nature Medicine in October claimed. That’s if this works, though.
Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel doesn’t believe it will. That’s not because of flawed science, but because of the flawed public policy assumptions behind the mask mandate.
“I think masks are quite useful, but they have a place and they’re not the be-all and end-all,” Siegel said. “I’m worried that mandating this with fines and such may actually lead to more of a rebellion against it.”
Siegel also warned that masks are only “the icing on the physical distancing cake,” especially when people need to be in close quarters with one another, there isn’t a situation where it would be the primary mover in lower COVID-19 numbers.
Siegel also took issue with this part of Biden’s COVID-19 plan, as posted on the former Vice President’s website: “Social distancing is not a lightswitch. It is a dial. Joe Biden will direct the CDC to provide specific evidence-based guidance for how to turn the dial up or down relative to the level of risk and degree of viral spread in a community, including when to open or close certain businesses, bars, restaurants, and other spaces; when to open or close schools, and what steps they need to take to make classrooms and facilities safe; appropriate restrictions on size of gatherings; when to issue stay-at-home restrictions.”
“I think physical distancing is more important than masks,” Siegel said. “If you’re 10 feet away from someone, you’re not going to get the virus. If you’re one foot away with a mask, you might.”
Fox News made clear the context on this one: “Siegel’s comments come just a day after crowds flooded the street across major cities to celebrate Biden’s projected win. While the majority of Americans supporting Biden have worn masks, many of the celebrations over the weekend had an absence of social distancing, which the president-elect has appeared silent on.”
But again, have fun convincing Biden it’s time to figure out a way to get religious services back up and running.
I digress, however, because here’s the key takeaway: For all of his talk about unity, not just as a nation but with Republicans, one of the first acts Joe Biden would take from the Oval Office would be to twist the arms of states with mostly Republican governors to acquiesce to his wishes on mask mandates. (Only one of the states currently without a statewide mask mandate — Kansas — has a Democratic governor.)
Failing that, Biden would go over the head of the governor and encourage as many jurisdictions as he could within the state to implement a mask mandate. If that doesn’t work, it’s unclear what a potential Biden administration would do.
Biden himself has given mixed messages on a national mask mandate — first supporting an executive order to that effect, then saying there were constitutional issues, before saying he didn’t think there were. A paper by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, an in-house think-tank for Congress, found this approach unpromising.
And once further mask mandates are implemented, disunity will stop there. Everyone in these states will listen to their governor, that governor’s arm having been duly twisted by the president. Even though they didn’t vote for that president, they’ll put on a mask — because unity, right?
Unity isn’t achieved through sloganeering. It’s earned through tone and through actions. It’s capital Joe Biden has yet to acquire — and which he would need to expend for any sort of mask initiative to succeed.
He had the opportunity to do this time and again on the campaign trail (such as it was) over the past year. He chose not too because, one assumes, he found it politically disadvantageous.
He seems to have magically discovered the spirit of unity once campaigning was over and he realized that whatever victory was his was a great deal thinner than expected.
This isn’t to disparage mask-wearing or the science behind it. It’s questioning whether or not states individual states — particularly less-populous ones — know how to handle their own affairs and whether or not this is an effective way to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
It’s also to cast serious doubt on how this would “lower the temperature” in America, as Joe Biden said he wanted to on Saturday.
In one of the most quoted lines from his unity-fest speech on Saturday, Biden said he was “a proud Democrat, but I will govern as an American president. I’ll work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did.”
No one saw the dichotomy between that kind of rhetoric and what Joe Biden is proposing to do on mask mandates. Then again, no one was looking.
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