The Washington Post - 05.03.2020

THURSDAy, MARCH 5 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST eZ re A23

THURSDAY Opinion

T

he elitist, establishment pundit class has done it again. It drummed former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg out of the Democratic presidential race because he spent half a billion dollars and “only” won American Samoa. Bloomberg “did not collect on his grand bet, winning only American Sa- moa,” reported the failing New York Times. “Mike Bloomberg spent $500 million to win nothing but American Sa- moa,” Vox jeered. To them, I say: What a bunch of atolls! You belittle Pago Pago at your peril. We’ll never know for sure, but I am confident that with the bounce Bloomberg was sure to get out of the American Samoa caucus Tuesday, he was well positioned to sweep the terri- tories. He was on course to clean up at the Northern Marianas Democratic con- vention on March 14, then move on to a resounding victory in the Puerto Rico primary on March 29. Guam, with its primary on May 2, would have pad- ded his delegate count, while the Dis- trict of Columbia primary on June 2 (I think that’s when it is — the local au- thorities sent out the wrong date) and the Virgin Islands caucuses on June 6 would have taken him over the top. By this point, the Bloomberg tsuna- mi would be causing ripples in the U.S. Minor Outlying Islands. In the words of the old proverb: As American Samoa goes, so goes the nation. But Bloomberg apparently accepted the criticism that he had wasted his money, because he dropped out of the race Wednesday morning and en- dorsed Joe Biden. “Did Michael Bloomberg end up spending more than the GDP of American Samoa to win American Samoa?” asked NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald. (Answer: Almost.) But a better interpretation of Bloomberg’s anything-but-super Tues- day is that he spent too little. His $500 million netted him about 53 dele- gates, or about $9.4 million per delegate, which means that he would be on his way to locking up the Democratic nomination now if he had spent just a little more — say, $22.5 billion. (Also, he maybe should have skipped the de- bates and not licked his fingers.) The Samoan model shows how this would have worked. Bloomberg report- edly had seven full-time staffers in the South Pacific territory, where he also ran “television ads, targeted radio ads and targeted digital and print ads” (that’s a lot of targeting for a popula- tion of 55,000). Bloomberg triumphed with 49.9 percent of the vote, or 175 actual votes. The runner-up, Tulsi Gabbard, lagged badly with 103 votes, followed by Bernie Sanders (37 votes), Biden (31 votes) and Elizabeth Warren (5 votes). If Bloomberg needed seven full-time staffers to win 175 votes, that voter-to- staff ratio of 25:1 means he only needed to hire about 2 .6 million staffers to secure the presidency. (Bloomberg had also publicly announced the key en- dorsement of Samoan Chief Fa’alagiga Nina Tua’au-Glaude.) At Bloomberg headquarters in West Palm Beach, Fla., Tuesday night, sup- porters recognized the significance of American Samoa. A crowd of about 1,500 (about four times the Super Tuesday electorate of American Sa- moa) r eportedly “erupted into cheers” when results came in from the South Pacific. The political elites, by contrast, re- acted to the American Samoa news with jokes on Twitter about caramel Girl Scout cookies. This is no way to treat a beautiful collection of islands and atolls in Poly- nesia that has been American for more than a century. It is home to the rare tooth-billed pigeon and flying fox, and it sends countless cans of tuna our way. It’s just the latest indignity for American Samoa, which, like other ter- ritories — and D.C. — gets no vote in Congress. Samoa has it worse than others, for its residents are U.S. nation- als but not citizens — the subject of a court dispute. The 5-foot-8 Bloomberg intuitively understood the plight of the little islands — “Mini Mike,” as Trump called him, often joked about being little himself — and was rewarded with Sa- moan turnout towering 50 percent over 2016’s. The rest of us, sadly, failed to appreciate what could have been the beginning of Bloomberg’s boom. The mayor fought the good fight: He entered the race when it appeared no- body would emerge to take on the socialist Sanders, and he departed when it became clear Biden would play that role. On Wednesday, he pledged his vast resources to help Biden. Now Bloomberg, loyal to the anti- Trump cause, has earned himself a va- cation. May I point out that it’s cur- rently in the 80s and sunny in Pago Pago? Twitter: @Milbank

DANA MILBANK WasHIngton sKetcH

Bloomberg’s

problem is he

spent too little

T

he scale of former vice president Joe Biden’s achievement on Su- per Tuesday was astonishing, but it should not have been surprising. The sprawling Democratic debate had been strangely disconnected from the core question of 2020: Will President Trump serve four more years? This was Biden’s question, and it finally landed on the day that mattered most. Of course, what Biden did was unprec- edented. With little time or money, a weak “ground game” and virtually no ads, he marched through the South, won a surprise victory in Te xas, and took Minnesota and Massachusetts. The latter is the home of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but she was pushed into third place by voters who decided that the race was now a binary choice. Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg acknowl- edged this on Wednesday, ending his campaign and endorsing Biden. There have been hints of this from the beginning. In a ll the early-voting states, a substantial majority of Democratic voters told pollsters that what mattered most to them were not the issues con- suming so much debate time — single- payer health care, above all — b ut ousting Trump. With the 77-year-old Biden looking less in command than he did when he served with President Barack Obama, these voters searched desperately for an alternative. In Iowa, many gravitated to former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg. In New Hampshire, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) surged into third place after a commanding debate perfor- mance. Then states that are not overwhelm- ingly white started voting. Biden pushed himself into a weak but important sec- ond place in the Nevada caucuses, setting the stage for his South Carolina land- slide, thanks to African American voters urged on by Rep. James E. Clyburn, the powerful veteran congressman from the state’s capital. That broke the dam. The searching was over. Yes, Biden won timely endorsements that got him free media time he desperately needed. But he was powered to victory not by “the establishment” but by a pragmatic coalition of rank-and-file Democrats who came to life to stop Sanders. They feared that the proud democratic socialist would destroy the party’s chances of defeating Trump, maintaining control of the House of Representatives and winning the Senate. Three groups of Democrats were key to this alliance, African Americans above all. On Tuesday, Biden showed South Carolina was no fluke by winning roughly 60 to 70 percent of black voters across Virginia, North Carolina, Te nnessee, Ala- bama and Te xas. The suburban middle class that helped the Democrats win one House seat after another in 2018 also massed behind Biden, evident, for example, in his victo- ries in Fairfax and Loudoun counties in Virginia. And the outcome was a reminder that the Democratic Party is a coalition of the center and the left — and that the left, while important and growing, is still a minority. In state after state, Sanders appealed to voters who told the Edison Media Research exit poll that they were “very liberal.” But these voters accounted for only about a quarter of Tuesday’s turnout overall. Biden won those calling them- selves “somewhat liberal” in all but three states, and carried moderate and conser- vative Democrats in every state but Sanders’s Vermont. Sanders, technically an independent, seemed suddenly to grasp that he needs a broader constituency, and that he is running in Democratic primaries. In a speech Tuesday night, he replaced at- tacks on “the Democratic establishment” with a rebuke of a vaguer “political establishment.” He also aired a remark- able ad overlaid with praise from Obama, whom Sanders has criticized in the past. For Biden, the challenge is to avoid playing into Trump’s game of dividing Democrats from the outside. Biden’s c ore weakness, and it’s a big one, is with younger voters, who backed Sanders in droves. Trump renewed his faux sympathy for Sanders on Wednesday, tweeting that he had been “crushed” by the “Dem- ocrat establishment.” More efforts to demobilize the young and the left are coming. Biden hasn’t won yet, and he needs to sharpen his debating skills for the Sand- ers onslaught to come. But the last moderate standing must also pivot quickly to become a party unifier who would work with those to his left. Sanders, who regularly calls out Trump’s “greed, corruption and lies,” must decide far earlier than he did in 2016 if his main goal is to defeat the president, or to build an opposition movement that has the Democratic Party itself in its sights. He needs to remember that the party’s voters — as they made clear in an impressive turnout wave on Tuesday — see ending the Trump presidency as a matter of national urgency. Twitter: @EJDionne

E.J. DIONNE JR.

The Biden

surge was all

about Trump

O

ver the weekend, the Mona Lisa covered up her famous smile with an N95 face mask. Paris’s Louvre Museum, home to the enigmatic lady, briefly closed after the staff voted that the spread of covid-19 made it too dangerous for one of the world’s premiere cultural insti- tutions to stay open. The Louvre is back in business. But the image of the wildly popular Mona Lisa sitting alone in an empty gallery offers a vivid illustration of what coronavirus could cost us. At a moment when we badly need common cultural experiences and references to remind us what we share, the covid-19 epidemic is isolating us instead. The cultural pall cast by the out- break is already widespread. Chinese moviegoers spent a mere $4.2 million on movie tickets during the 2020 Lunar New Year holiday, a sliver of the $1.76 billion shelled out a year ago. The Hollywood Reporter has suggested that the international film industry could lose $5 billion due to the epidemic. The latest James Bond movie, “No Time to Die,” on Wednes- day saw its release date pushed back six months in hopes the virus will subside. Meanwhile, Venice’s Carnival was canceled and Milan’s La Scala opera house is closed. In Italy and Japan, soccer and baseball games have played to empty stadiums; future matchups face cancellation. Seiko Hashimoto, the Japanese politician overseeing To - kyo’s preparations to host the Summer Olympics, said on Tuesday that the games could be postponed. Big cultural events and activities can’t bridge all of our divides, of course. You know that if you’ve ever argued with a friend about “Game of Thrones” or waded into Twitter com-

bat about the latest Star Wars movie. If we can’t agree on whether To ny Sopra- no is dead, there is no superhero team- up powerful enough to end political polarization or reduce income inequal- ity. But culture can get us talking, give us a set of reference points and help us realize, if only for a couple of hours, what we all value. Ta ke the Olympics: Sure, it’s a bit silly that every two years, when the torch is lit, many of us pretend, in the name of national pride, to be experts on dressage or the gymnastics point systems. Still, at a time when patrio- tism in America is at best attenuated and at worst deformed, rooting for Te am USA is an old-fashioned delight. And even as we maintain our home- country loyalties, the games provide an opportunity for viewers to encounter athletes from other nations — and to draw our collective attention to the conditions under which they compete. Pollution in Beijing or Brazil may seem comfortably distant, but seeing athletes struggle for excellence through dirty air demonstrates that the world’s biggest problems know no borders. The Olympics aren’t t he only cultural event capable of spurring this kind of transnational sympathy. “Mulan,” Disney’s latest live-action remake of an animated hit, was set to be one of a few American movies to get a wide release in Chinese movie theaters — before Disney canceled its Chinese premiere in the face of covid-19. Attempts by a giant corporation to convert its intellectual property library into an even more valuable cash cow might not be the most obvious basis for an international dialogue. But Holly- wood movies that are released in China often either are cut to appease the country’s censors or include extra mate-

rial intended to appeal (or advertise) to Chinese audiences. The “Mulan” remake was trying to thread that needle to better effect, giving audiences in both countries a top-quality production in- formed by C hinese history and culture. American audiences will still get to see “Mulan.” At a moment when the president frequently paints China as an enemy and covid-19 has provoked disturbing incidents of anti-Asian rac- ism, any counterprogramming is valuable. But it’s still a shame that Ameri- can and Chinese audiences, so often separated by censorship, won’t get to see and debate “Mulan” across borders at roughly the same time. If American movie theaters close or audiences choose to Netflix and chill their way through the epidemic, Amer- icans could lose out, too. Staying home and bingeing a television show is no substitute for the joint experience of seeing a major movie, in a theater, at the same time as millions of other eager viewers. Simply choosing to sit with strangers in a dark room and share your reactions to a piece of art is an expression of communal trust, the quality most imperiled by the novel coronavirus. That the Mona Lisa is receiving visitors again is a rare bright spot in this confusing, isolating moment. However vexing the crush of camera- wielding tourists around her can be, the enthusiasm for da Vinci’s portrait is a touching reminder that so many of us — no matter our nation, race, reli- gion or gender — have a profound hunger to be in the presence of tran- scendent art. Beating the coronavirus will take time. And even when we do, we’ll need culture as a vaccine for isolation and division. Twitter: @AlyssaRosenberg

ALYSSA ROSENBERG

We can’t let coronavirus isolate us

from our cultural experiences

WasHIngton Post IllustratIon; PHotos by IstocK and getty Images

BY KIMBERLY CHERNOBY AND NICOLAS TERRY

A

t any time of the day or night, Indiana’s first responders may be seen delivering opioid overdose victims to hospital emergency departments. Often those patients are still alive only because someone — an emergency medical technician, a police officer, a loved one or a bystander — restored their breathing by administer- ing the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. Ye t in central Indiana’s Hancock Coun- ty, saving a life could also involve criminal repercussions: A new policy makes the reversing of a drug overdose with naloxone sufficient reason for a police investigation that could lead to felony drug-possession charges. Ta inting naloxone with criminality will almost certainly discourage people from carrying naloxone or seeking help in overdose cases, leading to an increase in deaths. Surely that would be the opposite of the effect intended by the policy developed by the county prosecu- tor, working with local law enforcement. It w ould be a tragedy if other areas across the country followed Hancock County’s lead. The punitive approach recalls a time when minors, fearing prosecution, would not seek medical help in alcohol-related emergencies. Then a 2006 study at Cor- nell University, published in the Interna- tional Journal of Drug Policy, found that when the threat of prosecution was re- moved through immunity laws, minors became more likely to seek help in the event of medical emergencies. To day, 43 states and the District have adopted lifeline laws that hold individuals harm- less from alcohol-related criminal charges if they call for help in a medical emergency. In 2015, Indiana expanded its lifeline law to include opioid overdoses. The state has been among the hardest hit by

the epidemic, with 1,600 residents dying annually from overdoses and more than 1,000 of those deaths tied to opioids. Things would have been far worse absent the broad availability of naloxone. From a high of almost 1,200 in 2017, opioid overdose deaths have shown a small but gradual decline in the past two years. This decline was the first change in the epidemic’s trajectory since it began about two decades ago. The drop was attributable largely to policies adopted at the local and state level, including over- the-counter access to naloxone through a statewide “standing” prescription writ- ten by the health commissioner, mobile treatment units, provisions for safe hous- ing, increased treatment beds and an emergency phone number (211) connect- ing those needing help to resources. No doubt the new policy in Hancock County reflects a sincere intention to help those suffering from substance-use disorder. But making it more likely that they will end up in prison is not the answer. Nationally, nearly 65 percent of inmates meet the diagnostic criteria of substance-use disorder, a disease like any other. Ye t in most cases jails are not places where treatment can be obtained. Times have changed: To day, we can get patients into the recovery system without criminalizing conduct or starting them out in overcrowded jails. Marion County, which includes India- napolis, started a program in 2016 called Project POINT (Planned Outreach, Inter- vention, Naloxone and Treatment). Through grants, the project offers to any patient who presents to the county hospital after an opioid overdose a home naloxone kit to treat recurrent overdoses. In i ts first year, 89 percent of the project’s patients were interested in a referral to treatment, and at six months, 50 percent of patients had completed three or more follow-up appointments. As t he science of treatment progresses, hospital emergency departments have begun initiating medical treatment for

substance-use disorder by starting bu- prenorphine therapy. That, too, has increased patients’ engagement in treatment — and decreased illicit opioid use. It’s another way to get patients started in the recovery process without criminal- ization. U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who served as Indiana state health commissioner from 20 14 to 2017, released an advisory on naloxone in 2018. He called on “more individuals, including family, friends and those who are personally at risk for an opioid overdose,” to “keep the drug on hand.” And no wonder: It is hard to overstate the value of naloxone, which can be administered as a nasal mist or by injection, in decreasing opioid deaths. A quick glance at Indiana’s Naloxone Ad- ministration Heatmap shows how emergency medical services are using the drug to save lives across the state. Indiana has made big strides against the opioid overdose epidemic. In 2018, the rate of drug-related deaths fell 12.9 percent, a reduction more than three times greater than the national average. Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) and his health- care and public health agencies have taken the innovative, evidence-based steps necessary to continue the improve- ment. No one suffering an overdose, and no loved one or bystander, should fear calling for medical help because the person whose life could be saved by naloxone might end up jailed because of it. Increas- ingly, there are positive steps Hancock County law enforcement can take to link patients to recovery without the use of the jail, as demonstrated by other com- munities in Indiana.

Kimberly chernoby, an emergency medicine physician and attorney, is a trustee of the Indiana state medical association. nicolas te rry is a law professor and executive director of the Hall center for law and Health at Indiana university robert H. mcKinney school of law.

Don’t taint naloxone with criminality

The Washington Post - 05.03.2020

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