Hard-eyed truths left to governors, mayors
President Harry Truman, born into a racist society in 1884, desegregated the U.S. military. President John F. Kennedy, a product of the Ivy League because of wealth and legacy, provided federal protection for black students who desegregated public universities in the Deep South.
Neither man had been a champion of civil rights throughout his life. But as president each established a moral standard and looked out for oppressed people in times of upheaval.
Kennedy’s stand for desegregation brought ugly, even deadly, confrontations abetted by powerful members of his own political party.
Democratic Govs. Ross Barnett of Mississippi and George Wallace of Alabama tried to block the schoolhouse doors, either literally or in an orchestrated show for the television cameras. They wanted to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s desegregation order in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education.
Kennedy wouldn’t let them win. The country would regress if the president capitulated.
Now contrast the work of Truman and Kennedy with that of Republican President Donald Trump during the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump on Jan. 22 dismissed the disease as no threat to the health of people or the economy.
“We have it totally under control,” he said, a quote that ought to chill him.
Still trying to appear oblivious to medicine and reality, Trump last week talked of churches being packed on Easter Sunday, April 12. That might be a fine time for a national rebirth, he said in another display of weak leadership.
Trump spoke of reopening businesses while the mayor of New York City said he has 20,000 hospital beds but might need three times that many when the novel coronavirus peaks.
New York’s governor said his state needs 30,000 lifesaving ventilators, a number Trump has questioned as inflated.
Instead of the president being the voice of honesty, no matter how painful the message, he wavers.
Governors and mayors have had to take responsibility for being truthful about the pandemic. Like the rest of us, they know Trump might veer from straight talk and dignify talkshow babbler Sean Hannity as an authority on the coronavirus.
And so a turnabout is underway. Unlike Kennedy’s time in office, real leadership on a national problem is coming from state and city governments.
In New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham was decisive while Trump vacillated.
She didn’t want to close schools. She had to, in the interest of public health.
Lujan Grisham didn’t want to see restaurants, theaters, hotels and many retail stores shut their doors because of the coronavirus outbreak. She acted on the best intelligence available, that of public health experts.
Still, Trump’s mixed messages can resonate in some circles.
Many people have phoned me to paraphrase the president’s quote that, “We can’t have the cure be worse than the problem.”
They say restarting the economy now is essential, even if people die from the spreading coronavirus.
This also is an about-face on public policy.
These same people under normal circumstances would be making abortion an issue for the coming election, saying all life is sacred and must be protected.
Now the lives of elderly and frail people aren’t all that important to those clamoring for an end to business closures.
But even they know the pews won’t be filled on Easter. Good sense says they can’t be.
Trump’s idea of a timeline for normal life to resume is without historical parallel. An equivalent would have been President Franklin Roosevelt announcing that World War II would be won by Dec. 7, 1942, one year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Speculating about a deadline to challenge a disease for which there is no vaccine isn’t smart policy. Yet Trump wanders into this world of fantasy.
He leaves governors and mayors to deal with the hard truths: Governments cannot blunt the coronavirus without a coherent strategy that includes the painful slowing of commerce, the shuttering of schools and enormous spikes in unemployment.
Everyone with an investment account is poorer now. High school seniors in all likelihood won’t walk across a stage on a crowded field to pick up their diploma this spring.
Life as we knew it has vanished. It was that way after Pearl Harbor and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
This is worse in many ways. Most kids went to school the day after the terrorists hijacked planes and crashed them into landmark buildings.
No one knows how long the coronavirus will sicken many people, kill some of them, and strangle the economy.
If there’s anything to take heart in, it’s the role reversal of politicians.
Governors such as Lujan Grisham and Andrew Cuomo of New York have led the way in trying to stunt the disease.
They need help from Trump. Happy talk won’t produce ventilators or reopen businesses.