What America learned in intensive care
Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor turned presidential manservant, recently emerged from the intensive care unit where he waged a weeklong battle with the coronavirus to tell the world what he had learned: The virus, which has killed nearly as many people in Christie’s relatively small state as it has in California, is “something to take very seriously.”
A few weeks after he was seen Rose Garden partying like it was 2019 at the superspreading debut of nowJustice Amy Coney Barrett, Christie solemnly informed his fellow Americans that they really should keep distance, wear masks and otherwise follow the advice of the scientists employed by the government nominally run by the people whose flesh he was pressing.
Imagine possessing access to the upper echelons of knowledge and power and still failing to grasp such basic information without the blunt instrument of personal experience. What’s more astonishing is that Christie is no anomaly.
Reasonably accurate information about the virus abounds, and yet the country teems with people unwilling to attempt the minimal level of abstract thought required to understand that what has befallen others can befall them, too.
This pathogen thriving on the stale air of willful ignorance is a metaphor for the nation it continues to devastate. Only a similarly widespread refusal to appreciate the obvious could have saddled us with the vacuous leadership that so thoroughly squandered our vast advantages over most of the world as to leave us at the nonexistent mercy of a microbe.
It’s no wonder under the circumstances that polls suggest the president is losing the national vote that will soon conclude by four or five times the margin of his popular deficit four years ago. Even if the pollsters are off by as much as they were in Hillary Clinton’s direction in 2016, Joe Biden will win; if they’re off by as much as they were in Mitt Romney’s favor in 2012, it will be a landslide.
And yet this is in many respects the same election we endured four years ago. Trump once again faces a centrist Democrat with decades of experience in Washington, including eight years in another White House, and no particular talent for oratory or inspiration. Biden’s main advantage over Clinton as a candidate is an intangible ability to appear genuine with more regularity and, more important, a Y chromosome.
While gender appears to be playing a regrettably significant role in Biden’s outperforming of Clinton, the former vice president is doing better than the 2016 nominee among women as well as men. Much of the rest of the former vice president’s advantage can likely be explained by his opponent: Clinton ran against Donald Trump, but Biden is running against President Trump.
Incumbency is normally a benefit in presidential elections. Even George W. Bush, the preceding popularvote loser, and Bill Clinton, who squeaked into office with the lowest vote share in 80 years, won reelection with relative ease.
Experience has been no such boon for Trump. The share of Americans approving of his performance fell below that disapproving within weeks of his inauguration — and stayed there. He heads into Election Day with detractors outnumbering supporters by about 10 percentage points.
That’s not remarkable, considering his record. What is remarkable is that the future wasn’t clear enough to enough Americans four years ago.
Trump was only the second majorparty nominee with no experience in elected or military office, and he was the first such novice to become president. His record in business, his supposed qualification in lieu of public service, had already left a welldocumented trail of ruin and fraud despite his best efforts to conceal it. And unlike many politicians, he ran much as he would rule — on a platform of bigotry, ignorance and deception. Not just in the campaign but over his lifetime, Trump betrayed no hint of the most important prerequisite for the presidency: the capacity to competently manage an unforeseen crisis such as the one still consuming us.
And yet we have come to our tentative epiphany about this only after four years of ruinous experience. It’s the national political equivalent of an avoidable encounter with intensive care that could well end either way. Here’s hoping enough of us absorbed the all too costly lesson that the presidency, to paraphrase a belatedly enlightened governor, is something to take very seriously.