Monday Subscriber Thread
Vaccinations for all; Georgia's voting law is bad. Period; a further defense of Deborah Birx; March Madness; and some U2 for a Monday morning.
Good morning … and it’s good to be back from vacation! Since I’ve only done one post for non-subscribers over the past week - and missed writing to all of you — I decided to open up the Monday subscriber thread to everyone. So what stories are you most interested in this week? What questions do you have for me? What should we be discussing? What should I be writing on? Leave your comments/questions/suggestions below! I will make every effort to respond to each comment.
For a few weeks now, I’ve been debating doing a morning round-up of the news. I messed around with this idea last week, and I’m going to try it out here in longer form, see how it works, and decide if I want to make it permanent. Today’s version is going to combine links to stories with some analysis. It will also be a bit longer since there’s a week of news to catch up on. For the rest of the week, I might try this out in different forms until I find something I like. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
Today, the White House will be holding a virtual Easter Egg Hunt, and President Biden will give remarks about the meaning of Easter. So no anthropomorphized bunny rabbits looking shocked and appalled that the guy in the middle of the photo above is president.
The pace of COVID-19 vaccinations in the United States is extraordinary and a true public health success story.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, as of April 4th, more than 106 million Americans will have received at least one vaccine shot. That’s 32% of the US population. Sixty-one million, or 18.5 percent of Americans, are fully vaccinated. Three-quarters of those over the age of 65 have received one shot. More than 3 million Americans are getting vaccinated every day, and over the weekend, the number topped 4 million. By May 1, it is expected that nearly every state will allow anyone over the age of 16 to get their shot in the arm. This chart from the New York Times shows just how tantalizingly close we are to mass vaccination and returning to normalcy.
There was an interesting article in Stat News last week about the debate in public health circles over whether the Biden Administration should delay second shots on the vaccine (for as much as 12 weeks) to get as many single shots in the arms of Americans.
“Risk of infection, according to a recent study, falls by 80% two weeks after an initial shot. The figure increases to 90% two weeks after a second dose.
“A growing number of public health experts have used the new data to argue that the strategy is clear-cut. In the short term, they contend, giving twice as many people 80% protection against the virus would do dramatically more to stop the spread than giving the current number 90% protection.”
The efficacy of saving lives is obvious, but I wonder if changing the messaging around vaccines will confuse Americans and potentially dissuade them from getting a second shot.
The Washington Post has a smart look at the Biden Administration’s efforts to win over progressive activists. I first noted this last summer when Biden took the unusual step of moving more to the left during the general election campaign. Usually, Democratic politicians move to the center after sewing up the nomination - Biden went in the opposite direction. Substantive outreach to the party’s liberal wing was one of the smartest moves of the Biden campaign and now the new administration.
Nieman Lab ran a piece last week arguing that switching the focus of opinion pages from national to local politics actually reduced polarization among readers. The impact was small, and it’s only one study, so take it with a grain of salt, but it still makes for a compelling argument.
More than a year after the Trump administration tried to cut food stamp benefits for 700,000 unemployed Americans, the Biden administration is undertaking one of the most ambitious campaigns in modern American history to combat hunger.
This Sunday New York Times article about how the Trump campaign roped its supporters into making automatic donations to the campaign is further confirmation that truly terrible people worked for the Trump campaign.
Political Twitter was abuzz over the weekend about this New York Times piece by Nate Cohn on the new Georgia voting law. Cohn writes:
There’s a real — and bipartisan — misunderstanding about whether making it easier or harder to vote, especially by mail, has a significant effect on turnout or electoral outcomes. The evidence suggests it does not.
The fight over the new Georgia election law is only the latest example. That law, passed last week, has been condemned by Democrats as voter suppression, or even as tantamount to Jim Crow.
Democrats are understandably concerned about a provision that empowers the Republican-controlled State Legislature to play a larger role in election administration. That provision has uncertain but potentially substantial effects, depending on what the Legislature might do in the future. And it’s possible the law is intended to do exactly what progressives fear: reshape the electorate to the advantage of Republicans, soon after an electoral defeat, by making it harder to vote.
And yet the law’s voting provisions are unlikely to significantly affect turnout or Democratic chances. It could plausibly even increase turnout. In the final account, it will probably be hard to say whether it had any effect on turnout at all.
This is, to put it mildly, a problematic argument. Though Cohn bases his read of the law on political science literature, the academic community's verdict is not quite as clear-cut as Cohn makes it out to be. As Elliott Morris notes in his excellent dissection of Cohn’s argument, it’s difficult to extrapolate from one state’s voting laws to another. For example, there is, Morris writes, a strong relationship between mail-ballot usage and turnout, but Georgia’s new law makes it more difficult to request a mail ballot, now requires voters to include a form of identification, and limits the number of drop boxes to return a ballot. We have less data on whether such restrictions place a ceiling on that higher turnout. In other words, mail-in balloting may lead more people to vote .. but the numbers could be even higher without the kind of restrictions that Georgia has enacted.
I also found it highly dubious that Cohn focused on studies that looked at the impact of no-excuse mail voting on the 2020 election. For starters, it’s a small sample size. In addition, 2020 has the feel of a sui generis election in which voter enthusiasm and engagement were sky-high. Will that same enthusiasm and engagement be seen in future elections?
Also, in an article devoted to clarifying the impact of Georgia’s voting law, Cohn argues that the statute may not have a “significant effect on turnout or electoral outcomes.” Considering the narrow margin of victory in several states in the last two elections (0.2. percent in Georgia), a less than “significant” effect could still make the difference between who wins or who loses.
But the much bigger problem is the lack of context in Cohn’s analysis. The Georgia law's intent is crystal clear: to disadvantage Democrats and, in particular, by seeking to limit Black voting. It’s possible, as Cohn writes that the Georgia law will not affect turnout and could even lead to a backlash against Republicans. But here’s what we do know: that is precisely the intent of the law.
Indeed, one of Cohn’s strangest arguments comes in his discussion of the law’s removal of Georgia’s secretary of state as chair as the state board of election and empowering of the State Legislature (which is controlled by Republicans) to take over from county boards of elections. This is one of the more problematic aspects of the bill because it could give the legislature the power to overrule the decisions and voting counts made by Democratic counties. Cohn writes:
These might prove to be very important. But for the purposes of this article, we are not considering them “voter suppression” provisions. They do not inherently make it harder for people to vote by restricting whether or how they can vote.
If we leave aside the administrative provisions and the question of intent, the core question on voter suppression is to what extent does reducing voting options — like early voting in the runoffs or mail voting in general — reduce turnout and Democratic chances?
Huh? Yes, these provisions don’t make it harder for Georgians to vote. They, however, do increase the potential for Georgia Republicans to steal elections. They just can’t be waved away, particularly because they demonstrate the clear intent of the law - to prevent a replay of 2020 in which Democrats won the presidential contest there and two subsequent Senate runoffs.
I don’t have a problem with journalists analyzing the practical impact of voting laws. I do have a problem with such analysis when it ignores the largest context of why these laws are being enacted.
Last Monday, I wrote that I thought Dr. Deborah Birx was getting a bum rap for failing to speak out against President Trump’s lies about the coronavirus pandemic. In Slate, William Saletan put flesh on the bone of that argument.
Birx was in an impossible position. Unlike Dr. Anthony Fauci, a civil servant who Trump could not fire, Birx served at the president's pleasure. One negative word about him or public contradiction of White House talking points would have likely cost Birx her job. So she kept quiet, offered praise for Trump in media interviews, and tried to work the problem from the inside. And to an underappreciated extent, it worked. Her behind-the-scenes lobbying, along with that of Fauci, helped convince Trump to publicly endorse shutdowns in March and April that helped, temporarily, to slow the spread of COVID-19. After Trump tired of her advice, she took her show on the road and traveled from state-to-state pushing governors, mayors, and local health officials to impose mask mandates and put in place tougher public health restrictions. Had she spoken up in the Spring of 2020 and subsequently been fired, she would have been a hero to the Trump haters who now attack her. But at what cost? Birx’s travels and local media appearances likely saved lives.
The derision dumped on Birx pales next to the encomiums heaped on Fauci. Yet, as Saletan notes, Fauci and other top public health officials got two early issues about COVID-19 very wrong. They underestimated the possibility of asymptomatic spread, even though there was evidence, cited by CDC director Robert Redfield, in January 2020 that this was happening in China. Second, Fauci publicly discouraged mask use to “protect the mask supply for health care workers.” But doing so actually put more Americans at risk. I understand why Fauci decided to, in effect, lie to the American people, but he’s hardly immune from criticism. Yet, he has received very little outside conservative media.
Many of those criticizing Birx are, it seems, placing political purity above public health outcomes. Maybe if Birx had spoken up, it would have saved lives, but I seriously doubt it. Trump would have bashed her, the right would have dismissed her claims as fake news, and few minds would have been changed. Instead, Birx stayed in the belly of the beast and, as Saletan puts it, “tried to appease the mad king.” For that, she deserves praise, not broadsides.
WHAT. A. GAME
For those of you who stayed up Saturday night to watch Gonzaga vs. UCLA in the NCAA’s second national semifinal game, you were treated to one of the greatest college basketball games in recent memory. The Washington Post has a fantastic write-up of the game here, but don’t think for a moment I’m not going to link to the video of that final shot!
Here are the Gonzaga radio announcers with the game-winning call.
For all the insanity of that final shot, it shouldn't obscure the fact that this was a game of unusually high quality. UCLA made so many tough, well-defended, mid-range jumpers I lost count. The follow-up bucket by Johnny Juzang, which tied the game before Suggs’s heroics, was a clutch, highlight-reel play. Gonzaga kept finding ways to score, from Suggs brilliant passing and Drew Timme’s McHale-like moves in the paint to opportunistic three-point shooting from Corey Kispert and Andrew Nembhard. Gonzaga has been a juggernaut all season and UCLA took them to the brink in a game that, truly, no one deserved to lose. This was the kind of game that explains why we watch sports!
Also, welcome back baseball. I’m not sure what’s better about this clip - the crack of the bat or hearing fans cheering again!
Long Live The King
Sunday marked 53 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. His murder came a mere four days after President Lyndon Johnson stunned the nation by announcing his intention not to seek reelection as president. As I noted in my book on the 1968 election, American Malestrom, Johnson’s abdication gave the country a temporary respite from the extraordinary melodrama of that political year to date - the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, rising crime rates, Eugene McCarthy’s near-victory in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire, and Bobby Kennedy’s entry into the presidential race. King’s death shattered the country’s 96-hours of hope. Here’s how I wrote about it in my book:
Four days after Johnson’s speech, at approximately 6:01 PM, a forty-year old drifter and petty criminal peered out from behind a window of a rooming house in Memphis, Tennessee. He carefully aimed a Remington-Peters .30-06 Gamemaster slide action rifle, loaded with metal-jacketed bullets, at a figure chatting with colleagues on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He fired a single bullet. It entered the slightly-built man’s right cheek, severed numerous vital arteries, fractured his shoulder, and lodged in the left side of his back. An hour later Martin Luther King, Jr, died in an emergency room in Memphis’s Saint Joseph’s Hospital – and the momentary optimism spawned by Johnson’s withdrawal died along with him.
If the most transformative political event of 1968 was the Tet Offensive, the most traumatic would be King’s murder by a white racist. Dozens of American cities exploded in violence. While New York avoided unrest (due in part to the personal intervention of Mayor John Lindsay), Chicago took a major hit. So many young black men ended up in city jails that many went more than 24 hours without food. Within a day of the killing, federal troops deployed to Baltimore and Pittsburgh. Tens of thousands of soldier would end up patrolling America’s streets in the aftermath of King’s assassination.
The greatest brunt of black fury would be directed at Washington, DC. On the night of April 4, the U Street corridor -- the heart of the city’s black cultural, commercial, and political establishment -- bustled. When news of King’s death began to spread, the streets swelled with mourners. Grief and anger soon spiraled out of control unleashing a spasm of violence that lasted for twelve days. Looting and rioting raged across the city. Aerial pictures showed large plumes of smoke alongside images of the White House and the major monuments as the nation’s capital virtually shut down.
King’s murder brought to the fore the growing internal political strife within the civil rights movement. Ascendant Black Power figures saw in his death confirmation of the nation’s inherent racism as well as the ineffectiveness of asking for, rather than demanding, full civil rights. Their harsh, increasingly violent rhetoric alienated even sympathetic whites. While the media focused on the repercussions of black disengagement from the political process and a potentially irreparable lack of trust between the races, whites responded in different ways. In the first weeks of April, pistol sales in Washington nearly doubled. In what the New York Times dubbed a “domestic arms race,” residents of affluent, white areas such as the DC suburbs of Montgomery County quickly became newly minted gun owners. Ironically, polls showed perceptible spikes in white support for integration measures (particularly among northern whites) — anything to forestall another summer of rioting. For all of the multiracial public memorials in the wake of King’s death, many Americans, both black and white, wondered whether the nation’s tenuous experiment with a nonviolent civil rights movement had come to an end.
Here’s an except from Dr. King’s final speech in Memphis, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”
Musical Interlude
Here’s U2' performing “Pride (In The Name of Love),” a song written about Dr. King.
Since I’m playing one live U2 song, here’s another. This is probably my favorite U2 song and one of my favorite songs, period - “Bad.”