THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, February 29 - March 1, 2020 |A
OPINION
Bentonville, Ark.‘R
acist Mike, go take a
hike! Racist Mike, go
take a hike!” There
are no more than a
couple of dozen
(mostly white) protesters outside
Michael Bloomberg’s speech here
Thursday, some carrying Bernie
Sanders paraphernalia. But they
chant loudly enough to turn heads
inside the noisy event hall.
Mr. Bloomberg and Joe Biden
are the two most credible alterna-
tives to a socialist takeover of the
Democratic Party. Ideological pas-
sions are running high in the party
as a young new left asserts itself.
But you wouldn’t know it from lis-
tening to Mr. Bloomberg’s stump
speeches.
Watching the former New York
mayor campaign in three Super
Tuesday states, I think of sociolo-
gist Daniel Bell’s 1960 book, “The
End of Ideology.” Bell, who died
in 2011, argued that “we have
witnessed an exhaustion of the
nineteenth-century ideologies,”
which would give way to a poli-
tics focused on gradually improv-
ing lives through more-effective
administration.
Bell’s thesis amounts to the ra-
tionale for Mr. Bloomberg’s candi-
dacy. In his Oklahoma City speech,
Mr. Bloomberg distinguishes him-
self from “extremists on both
sides.” In Bentonville, he asserts
that unlike President Trump, he
would “follow facts” and “respect
data.” He emphasizes this refrain
when speaking of the novel corona-
virus outbreak. Contrasting himself
with Mr. Trump, Mr. Bloomberg
says he “believes in science” and
“listens to experts.” He says he’d
assemble teams and delegate re-
sponsibility, echoing his closing ar-
gument in his first Democratic
presidential debate: the presidency
“is a management job.”
Mr. Bloomberg’s performance on
the stump varies but he keeps in
check the self-regard that some-
times characterized his mayoralty
and his 1997 memoir, “Bloomberg
by Bloomberg.” He says he’s run-
ning “a campaign for change, a
campaign for sanity, for honesty, a
campaign for inclusion and a cam-
paign for human decency.” He
swats aside his underwhelming de-
bate performances, saying the U.S.
is electing a “commander in chief,
not college debate chief.” In Ben-
tonville he takes a rare off-script
swipe at the left by saying that for
the teachers unions, “enough is
never enough.”
Whether support for Mr.
Bloomberg is broad enough to
make him a viable candidate will
be tested Tuesday as 14 states
hold primaries. But it’s clear at his
campaign stops that he has real
support. James Hammons, a re-
tired University of Arkansas edu-
cation professor, raves about the
candidate’s management abilities
and adds that a President
Bloomberg would be able to “at-
tract the best minds” to serve in
his administration.
Paul Garrett, a financial adviser
in Oklahoma City who leans to-
ward Mr. Bloomberg, says he’s
looking for a candidate who can
“right the ship”—which he is at
pains to distinguish from “political
rightness or leftness or whatever.”
But an anti-ideological attitude can
easily entail affronts to ideologues.
Mr. Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk leg-
acy has badly damaged him in the
past two weeks. Videos from his
time as mayor show him justifying
the New York City Police Depart-
ment’s aggressive policy exactly as
he promises to govern as presi-
dent—by respecting data.
Addressing complaints that the
anticrime policy disproportionately
burdened New York’s ethnic minor-
ities, Mr. Bloomberg said in 2013:
“That may be. But it’s not a dispro-
portionate percentage of those
who witnesses and victims de-
scribe as committing the murders.
In that case, incidentally, I think
we disproportionately stop whites
too much and minorities too little.”
The left is making a moral claim
about injustice, and Mr. Bloomberg
tried to answer it with math.
Mr. Bloomberg has apologized
for stop-and-frisk, and some votersaccept his change of heart. Hous-
ton corporate banker Michael
Hood, who is black, says he had
second thoughts about his early
vote for Mr. Bloomberg as the is-
sue surfaced and “the black press
gave him a hard time.” But he sees
the candidate’s January speech in
Oklahoma addressing the 1921
Tulsa race massacre as evidence he
is “paying attention to the black
economic agenda.” Mr. Hood also
has practical reasons for support-
ing Mr. Bloomberg: He worries Mr.
Trump would be able to cast Mr.
Biden—who is expected to win a
large share of black voters in
South Carolina—as “feeble, old, in-
articulate” in a general election.M
r. Bloomberg is also getting
a hearing from voters fur-
ther left—at least older
ones. Nancy Cain describes herself
as a “socialist at heart” who
worked on water pollution for the
state of Oklahoma for 35 years.
Even though Mr. Bloomberg “was a
Republican,” she says, a lot of her
friends—“all social-justice peo-
ple”—are impressed by him, and
she prefers his “demeanor” to Mr.
Sanders’s: “I don’t like the scream-
ing and yelling.”
Other voters are alarmed by the
Democratic Party’s radical turn. “I
could go for a few changes, but I
don’t want no revolution,” says Da-
vid Trevino, a part-time trucker in
Oklahoma City who is politically
independent. “If I was ever to vote
Democrat, the only way I would do
it would be for Mike.” He allowsthat “Bernie’s not that insane” but
thinks the Vermont senator’s sup-
porters—“the Bernie Bros”—are
extreme. Suneeta Mahagaokar, an
Indian immigrant in Houston with
a doctorate in toxicology, says
America is great because of its
“engine of ingenuity,” which she
believes Mr. Sanders’s socialism
threatens.
The issue on which Mr.
Bloomberg has most credibility
with progressives is gun control—
but this also underscores the ten-
sion between his technocratic ap-
proach and their ideological one.
He spent $60 million on the issue
in the 2018 midterm elections, and
gun violence features heavily in his
2020 advertising bombardment.
Progressives tend to emphasize
mass shootings. So does Mr.
Bloomberg, but many of his cam-
paigns ads also highlight less spec-
tacular forms of gun violence—in-
cluding one about a man whose
mother committed suicide with a
firearm, and several featuring Afri-
can-Americans mothers who lost
sons to small-scale shootings.
Preventing that kind of violence
by targeting illegal gun possession
was the objective of stop-and-
frisk—but suchenforcementof gun
control in urban areas is increas-
ingly anathema to progressives.
Theyseeguncontrolasmoreofa
cultural issue to wield against red
states.
Mr. Bloomberg practices what
he preaches: His campaign is a
model of nimble management. The
candidate was in four states in asingle day—Texas, Arkansas, Okla-
homa and Tennessee—with teams
of 20-somethings, dozens strong,
readying each event area. His staff-
ers efficiently whisked Mr.
Bloomberg in and out, then back to
his chartered jet along with report-
ers, with whom he declined to
speak on the record.
A well-managed campaign isn’t
cheap, and the vast sums Mr.
Bloomberg is spending point to an-
other center-vs.-left divide. Many
Democrats see his personal wealth
as a distortion of the political sys-
tem—Elizabeth Warren accuses
him of trying to “buy a nomina-
tion.” It’s a tempting criticism. Yet
watching his mostly older, profes-
sional-class supporters assemble
by the hundreds is a reminder that
money can’t buy loyalty. Even the
biggest advertising juggernaut has
no effect if the “product” is with-
out appeal.
Supporters see Mr. Bloomberg’s
fortune as an advantage: It means,
they say, he “doesn’t have to an-
swer to big-money politics,” as the
Houston businessman Mr. Hood
puts it. Similarly, Mr. Trump some-
times suggested that his 2016 pri-
mary rivals, who had to do more
fundraising than he did, were
bought off.W
ith his eponymous trading
terminals, Mr. Bloomberg
made his billions acceler-
ating the delivery of data to finan-
cial markets. Political information,
too, moves faster than it once did;
previously radical ideas can
quickly colonize the mainstream.
The question for Mr. Bloomberg
and his opponents is whether the
boring promise of competent gov-
ernance can compete with the ex-
citing ideological certainties of
Marxist economics and identity
politics.
Polls are close in many Super
Tuesday states. It will be the first
time Mr. Bloomberg faces voters
outside New York City. A weak per-
formance would end his political
career. A strong one could leave
him as the last man standing
against Mr. Sanders. That would
produce the most intense battle in
decades for the soul of one of
America’s major political parties.Mr. Willick is an editorial page
writer at the Journal.What Kind of Voter Supports Mike Bloomberg?
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGESHis campaign events draw
a ‘socialist at heart’ and a
truck driver in Oklahoma
whosayshewon’tvote
for any other Democrat.
By Jason Willick
Protesters outside Bloomberg’s campaign event in Bentonville, Ark., Thursday.Minnesota Bids to Segregate Its Child-Welfare Agencies
Should the law re-
quire state child-
welfare authorities
to treat black chil-
dren differently
from white children?
Lawmakers in Min-
nesota may soon
vote on a bill to do
just that. The Min-
nesota African
American Family
Preservation Act’s sponsors say it
will address racial disparities in the
state’s foster-care system. African-
American and mixed-race children
are substantially more likely than
white children to be reported to
child-protective services.
Minnesota legislators modeled
their bill on the 1978 federal Indian
Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. At the
time ICWA was passed, powerful
state child-welfare agencies, often
answerable only to themselves, were
removing as many as 3 in 10 children
from Indian homes. These children
tended to be placed with white fami-
lies even if nonabusive homes with
relatives were available. The ICWA
took the power to place a child away
from the states and gave it to the
tribes. It also made it harder to ter-
minate Indian parental rights and
prescribed that Indian children
should be placed in Indian homes
whenever possible.
The ICWA is the subject of a con-
stitutional challenge in the Fifth U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals. The chal-
lengers in that case are a white adop-
tive couple from Texas who contend
the ICWA denies children and families
equal protection of the law by treat-
ing them differently because of their
race. Several Indian tribes, 21 state
attorneys general, and the Native
American Rights Fund counter that
the ICWA doesn’t hand out rights on
the basis of race, color or lineage—
categories that would trigger strict
scrutiny under the Constitution’s
Equal Protection Clause—but instead
based on membership or eligibility
for membership in an Indian tribe, a
political classification that may heav-
ily overlap with race but isn’t identi-
caltoit.
The Minnesota bill’s provisions,
which apply only to African-Ameri-cans, would require state agencies
to make active efforts to place black
children with relatives, and prevent
the termination of parental rights
based solely on failure to comply
with a previous plan. A new Afri-
can-American Child Well-Being De-
partment would be staffed by full-
time state employees who “shall be
of African-American heritage.”These proposals are unconstitu-
tional. They would draw blunt lines
between Americans based on race,
which the Equal Protection Clause
explicitly forbids.
The bill proposes to define an “Af-
rican American child” as a “child of
African descent or heritage, including
a child of two or more races who has
at least one parent of African descentor heritage.” It isn’t clear from this
wording whether that would estab-
lish a rule triggered by a 50% match
in genetic testing, a “one drop” rule,
or something in between.
Explicit racial classifications of this
sort aren’t truly remedial. While a
black family treated unfairly last year
may deserve redress, bestowing le-
gally favored status on an entirely dif-
ferent black family this year isn’t the
way to do that. Since the 1930s, courts
applying the “strict scrutiny” test have
nearly always struck down such racial
classifications in the law. Among the
questions courts ask in these cases is
whether a law could have been written
to address the problem in a less dis-
criminatory way.
Which brings us to the most puz-
zling thing about the Minnesota Afri-
can American Family Preservation
Act: If state child-services agencies
wield too much power to break up
families—and maybe they do—why
not revamp the law to protect all
parents and children, of whatever
race, from government interventions
of this sort? If it’s good practice not
to put children into foster care with-out checking out the possibility of an
extended-family placement, or to
“strictly limit” the termination of pa-
rental rights, why wouldn’t that also
be a good idea for American children
of Vietnamese, Guatemalan, Syrian
or Irish descent?
This has always been one of the
mysteries of the ICWA. Groups like
the Child Welfare League of America
laud the ICWA’s restrictions on child
removal as embodying the “gold
standard” of family protection. If
that’s their view, and not simply a
reflection of their wish to be on the
right side of a social-justice issue,
they should be keen to extend those
same protections to families of other
ethnicities.
Segregating child-welfare institu-
tions by race would not be constitu-
tional. Perhaps the sponsors of the
Minnesota bill will consider rescuing
the constitutionality of their ideas by
making them universal.Mr. Olson is a senior fellow at the
Cato Institute, which has filed briefs
challenging the constitutionality of
the Indian Child Welfare Act.No matter what problems
they solve, laws granting
different rights to different
races are unconstitutional.CROSS
COUNTRY
By Walter
Olson
Fear Itself Is the Biggest Coronavirus Danger
A fascinating story
in the New York
Times almost 20
years ago featured
the headline “Nuns
Offer Clues to Alz-
heimer’s and Ag-
ing.” Key evidence
consisted of essays
written by the
nuns when they
were young, which
suggested that “ ‘idea density,’
many thoughts woven into a small
number of words, [was] a trait cor-
relating closely with nuns who later
escaped Alzheimer’s.”
That study has come back to me
often. Columnists nowadays who
fasten their well-worn anti-Trump
talking points to every news event
in our ever-interesting world are
not bringing value to their readers.
They banalize our world, empty it of
interest and meaning. If the nun
story is correct, they should worry
about Alzheimer’s.
The world may be embarked on
an experiment. A global economy in
which millions are employed and
sustained by trade and travel is
threatened with lockdown. The U.S.
is headed toward a presidential
election in which the usual crowd-
ing together for debates, meetings
and conventions may be discour-
aged.
Donald Trump’s successful 2016
campaign consisted largely of rau-
cous rallies. Bernie Sanders is be-
coming no slouch at the same. If
that’s off the table now, does it
mean Mike Bloomberg’s ad-heavy
approach gets a second life? Even
more so if management skills are
suddenly in demand among voters
amid coronavirus-spawned chaos?
And what if none of this disorder
is even warranted?
“Once widely criticized, the Wu-
han quarantine bought the world
time to prepare for Covid-19” says a
headline in the medical publication
Statnews. Read further, though, for
the piling up of doubts about
whether the costs were worth the
benefit of slowing the spread of a
disease that may be no worse than
the flu.
In the U.S., influenza infects up-
ward of 29 million a year, yet less
than half of us bother to get a flu
vaccine. We don’t wash our hands
or take other precautions reli-
giously, though we may do so now
under bombardment of coronaviruswarnings.
When President Trump said at
his press conference Wednesday
that the disease might or might not
become a big deal, he was faithfully
encompassing the scientific possi-
bilities. The press shrieked that he
was misleading the public, never
mind that New York Mayor Bill deBlasio was saying exactly the same
thing. “We can really keep this thing
contained,” he said at his own press
briefing on Wednesday, and if a se-
rious outbreak should occur, “we’ve
got a long time to ramp up if we
ever had anything like that.”
Ditto the governor of California,
also a Democrat, whose state may
have identified the first truly do-
mestic case. He said one day after
the president spoke: “This is not our
first great challenge as it relates to
public health....These protocolshave been perfected.”
Note the following carefully: To
optimize the outcome of this diffi-
cult situation—neither overkill nor
underkill—the crux will be giving
the American people an accurate
picture of the risks so they can ac-
curately judge the costs they should
be willing to bear to reduce those
risks.
Just how deadly is Covid-19 com-
pared with the flu, which kills about
0.16% of its victims (including 125
children so far this season)? On
Tuesday, the World Health Organi-
zation’s Bruce Aylward, having re-
turned from a painstakingly negoti-
ated visit to Wuhan, seemed to
argue for accepting the Chinese fig-
ure of roughly 2%. But remember
Stalin’s quip about the pope’s army:
The WHO is dependent on China’s
goodwill, has little power to coerce
China, and understands how readily
Beijing might cut off cooperation in
a fit of neo-Maoism.
Mr. Aylward’s view is strongly
disputed by many other experts. In
the chaos of Wuhan, they suspect
China missed thousands of mild
cases while also letting dozens die
who would have lived with proper
advice and care. Numerous havebeen the press reports of elderly
victims expiring at home after being
turned away from hospitals.
Here’s my guess (and it’s just a
guess): Once authorities in the U.S.
start looking seriously for domestic
Covid-19, they are bound to find it.
The pillorying of California for not
detecting its case sooner is really
just evidence of how slow the media
has been to grasp the Covid-19 chal-
lenge. Which of the million-plus
people who come down with flu
symptoms each week should be
given the expensive, hard-to-obtain
test? Which of the thousands who
check into hospitals with generic
breathing difficulties?
At the same time, America is en-
tering the final month of peak flu
season. This year’s has already been
only about two-thirds as deadly as
the 2017-18 season, in which 79,
died. Americans may actually end
up having a safer flu season overall.
Heightened precautions taken
against Covid-19 will also inhibit the
spread of more familiar flu and cor-
onavirus strains.
And once America has Covid-
in perspective, scientists can turn
their attention back to those urgent
Alzheimer’s studies.Trump is vilified for
singing from the same
hymnal as Democrats in
New York and California.BUSINESS
WORLD
By Holman W.
Jenkins, Jr.