New York Post - USA (2020-12-03)

New York Post, Thursday, December 3, 2020

nypost.com

J

OE Biden wants rural Ameri-

cans to know he intends to

treat them with “dignity.” And

he delivered his message in

the one forum that resonates most

deeply with such people —

Thomas Friedman’s column in The

New York Times, of course.

It was an exciting change of pace

for Friedman’s readers, who have

come to expect turgid transcrip-

tions of his tiresome discussions

with Mideast taxi drivers or slav-

ish stenography of Mideast satraps

proffering “peace plans.”

“I think they just feel forgotten,”

the president-elect said of the

people who didn’t vote for him.

And to make them feel remem-

bered, he’s going to build “on Ob-

amaCare, assuming it survives at

all, with a public option [and] au-

tomatically enroll people eligible

for Medicaid.”

So what Biden is saying is he is

going to provide them with bene-

fits they need and thereby respect

their “dignity.” Another way of

looking at it is that he is going to

shower them and the rest of Amer-

ica with benefits it’s far from clear

they want and support.

Only a decade ago, the threat of

ObamaCare and the “public op-

tion” — code for introducing a top-

down, government-run health sys-

tem — was the accelerant in the

Obama-Biden party’s calamitous

2010 midterm election loss that

brought the activist phase of that

presidency to an end.

We are told that a lot has

changed, that the public likes Ob-

amaCare now. Does it, though?

The astonishing unreliability of

polling over the past decade — its

manifest inability to measure the

opinions of exactly those Ameri-

cans Biden believes he can reach

by expanding government in this

fashion — may be providing the

president-elect with a false under-

standing of the interests of the

very people he acknowledges his

party has failed to reach.

Without question, Dems have

moved left on every question

over that time, including health

care. From their vantage point,

ObamaCare remains an admirable

first step, if a bit quaint, on the

road to a single-payer system.

Biden says he is opposed to sin-

gle-payer but largely as a matter of

cost, it would seem: If his objec-

tions to single-payer were philo-

sophical, then he would oppose a

“public option,” as well.

For those who opposed it,

Obama Care represented the great-

est government intrusion in our

time into the private economy —

and something that was going to

reduce an already messy health

system into a horrible kludge.

Moreover, it was laden with lib-

eral social engineering of a new

sort — the sort that allowed Wash-

ington bureaucrats to order nuns

to contravene the teachings of

their own faith and mandate that

they provide contraception to sec-

ular employees as part of their

health-care plans.

This was big government vs.

smaller government. And liberal

culture war against religion.

Biden thinks they feel he’s “forgot-

ten” them. But people who believe

in limited government and conserv-

ative social values don’t think they

were being forgotten. Quite the op-

posite. Their worldview was being

openly challenged.

Here’s what many millions of

them know: They know that

Biden’s party doesn’t like them,

that Dems believe the working

classes “cling to guns or religion”

(Obama) or are “deplorables”

(Hillary Clinton). Spending $20

billion on broadband so rural hos-

pitals can do better telemedicine

isn’t going to fix that.

Nor will Biden’s classic list of

top-down economic solutions — in

Friedman’s words, Biden cited “en-

ergy, biotech, advanced materials

and artificial intelligence as areas

ripe for large-scale government in-

vestment in research.”

What may make a real difference

is if the Biden administration dis-

plays real competence and assur-

ance in handling the coronavirus

vaccinations in such a way that the

crisis is ameliorated and then

ended — at which point Team

Biden may benefit from a surge in

positive emotions and the release

of animal spirits that lead to a post-

COVID economic boom and a 21st-

century “era of good feelings.”

If Biden wants to do right by ru-

ral Americans, he can only do so

by resisting the temptation to try

to force them to move left.

[email protected]

Wrong Answer, Joe

The voters Dems lost don’t want what you think

JOHN

PODHORETZ

How Not To Enforce

Lockdown Rules

POSTOPINION

A

CrOSS the nation, businesses are defying governors, such as Califor-

nia’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Andrew Cuomo, and refusing to

shut down. The owners of Mac’s Public House on Staten Island, for ex-

ample, declared the place an “autonomous zone.” When sheriffs ar-

rested them Tuesday night, crowds cheered the owners.

This pandemic isn’t the time to glorify civil disobedience. People need

to wear masks and follow safety rules, and the sheriffs were doing their

job. Even so, owners resisting lockdowns are giving voice to a powerful

message that shouldn’t be lost. If government and public-health officials

want to maintain public trust, they need to enforce rational rules con-

sistently and obey the rules themselves.

The Staten Island “autonomous zone” was a playful reminder of the

kind of protest activity blue-state

governors and mayors too often

tolerated and encouraged through

the summer and into the fall —

even as they cracked down on anti-

lockdown protests, religious servi-

ces and assorted activities often

thought of as “conservative.”

Most recently, the likes of Sen.

Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Chic-

ago Mayor Lori Lightfoot partied it

up with liberals in their cities cele-

brating Joe Biden’s apparent victory

in the November election. Then

there was House Speaker Nancy

Pelosi’s visit to her hairstylist in San

Francisco, Gavin Newsom’s fine

dining with lobbyists in close quar-

ters and Austin Mayor Steve Adler’s

Cabo vacation — even as he urged

people to stay home.

Public hypocrisy fuels public

rage and undermines the rules.

There also has to be some scien-

tific basis for the rules, something

sorely lacking in the case of re-

strictions on restaurants.

Since last March, governors have

shuttered restaurants, gyms and

other businesses, destroying what

owners have built and putting em-

ployees out of work. As Mike

Coughlin, owner of the Village

Tavern and Grill in Illinois insisted

when he defied Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s

suspension of indoor dining, “I’m

not going to be the guy with the

boarded-up building because I fol-

low somebody else’s science.”

He had a point: Some of the sci-

ence is flimsy.

Scientists disagree on whether

restaurants are dangerous. Stan-

ford researchers identified them as

superspreaders based on mobile-

phone data from last March to

May. But Johns Hopkins’ Amesh

Adalja suggests most restaurants

have installed more safety meas-

ures now. “If you went to a restau-

rant in early March, it’s a very dif-

ferent experience from going to a

restaurant” now.

Amazingly, most cities spending

millions on contact tracing are fail-

ing to use the data to identify res-

taurants causing superspreading to

notify the public. That’s more sci-

entific than shutting them all

down, but in most places, officials

don’t care about destroying busi-

nesses. They’re getting a paycheck

no matter what.

Forcing businesses to close arbi-

trarily violates the Constitution’s

Fifth Amendment, which bars gov-

ernment from “taking” your prop-

erty without just compensation.

Yet Sunday, New Jersey’s Gov. Phil

Murphy announced that a shut-

down “has to stay on the table.”

Murphy should have to explain

why, when thousands of health

experts recently signed a declara-

tion to alert the public that lock-

downs don’t work — though, they

do put people out of work.

Five of the six states with the low-

est unemployment rates, according

to the Associated Press, have the

fewest COVID restrictions. That’s a

compelling argument for getting

state legislators involved in pan-

demic decision-making, instead of

allowing governors to continue to

wield emergency powers by decree.

Legislators, after all, have to an-

swer to the local constituents they

force out of business. They will have

to balance competing priorities, in-

cluding controlling the pandemic

and local business survival, not to

mention other concerns associated

with prolonged lockdowns.

In March, the New York state

Legislature gave Cuomo vast emer-

gency powers. It was appropriate

then, but not any longer. Unfortu-

nately, the Democratic majority is

MIA, content to collect their pay-

checks and defer to Cuomo.

In Michigan and Wisconsin, state

lawmakers sued to force their gov-

ernors to work with the legislature.

Wisconsin’s chief justice warned

that “in the case of a pandemic,

which lasts month after month, the

governor cannot rely on emer-

gency powers indefinitely.”

Listen up, Cuomo. Listen up, too,

Albany Democrats.

Betsy McCaughey is a former

lieutenant governor of New York.

BETSY

McCAUGHEY

‘

Public hypocrisy fuels public rage

and undermines the rules.

’