When leaders fail, the people must lead. Wear the masks

In closing his inaugural address on a frozen January morning in 1961, President John F. Kennedy proclaimed “a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”

Then he famously spoke the words, “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

What that calls for today, with our country wracked by a terrible disease, is the simplest of practicalities.

Wear the damn mask. Practice social distancing. Don’t let anyone who doesn’t wear one get near you.

Most of us do. Current polls find three out of four Americans and nearly eight of every 10 Floridians are in favor of mandatory masking.

But for so many others to still scorn that life-saving imperative signifies more than their own selfishness and ignorance. It reflects the most catastrophic collective failures of political leadership in our nation’s history.

Government is the “omnipresent teacher,” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted in 1928. “For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.”

The examples set by President Trump, and by Ron DeSantis, his acolyte in the Florida governor’s office, could hardly have been worse.

For six wasted months, Trump treated the pandemic more as a threat to his reelection than to the lives of 313 million Americans. He craved booming stock prices and low unemployment, failing to comprehend what booming deaths could do to his campaign.

He kept insisting that he had the virus “totally under control” and that it would simply “go away.” He even applied one of his favorite words, “hoax,” to Democratic criticisms of his crisis management. He wanted businesses and schools to reopen before it was safe.

So DeSantis wanted that in Florida, too, allowing businesses to reopen too soon and refusing to this day to mandate mask-wearing statewide.

The record death toll of 173 that Florida posted Thursday compared to only 3 in Germany, which stayed locked down until it was safe to begin reopening.

Whatever countermeasures America’s president ordered were too little and too late. A critical shortage of testing kits has morphed into critical delays in getting test results. That frustrates effective contact tracing, which is necessary to counter any epidemic.

From April forward, according to the New York Times, daily meetings conducted by his new chief of staff, Mark Meadows, were devoted primarily to shifting the burden from the White House to the states.

Finally confronting reality last week — along with cratering poll numbers in Florida — Trump conceded that everyone should be masked in public, admitted that the virus will get worse before it gets better, and called off the bizarre scheme to accept his party’s renomination at a mass event in Jacksonville. Yet he promised once again that the virus “will disappear.”

But he did not admonish holdout governors to order masking and social distancing in their jurisdictions.

Only 33 states and the District of Columbia have done so. Governors in Texas and Georgia have actually forbidden local governments to defend their people. If Georgia’s Brian Kemp gets away with that, it will make the world’s busiest airport, Atlanta’s, the most dangerous.

In Florida, DeSantis is letting city and county leaders take the heat from those people who think it’s their constitutional right to risk the lives of others. Florida needs him to make mask-wearing and social distancing mandatory statewide — now.

The once-popular governor deserves to be forfeiting the people’s respect. The Quinnipiac poll that found overwhelming approval of mask-wearing in Florida showed 57 percent of voters disapproving of his handling of the coronavirus and 62 percent believing it will be unsafe to send public school students back to classrooms in the fall.

Pandemics don’t respect state or county lines. But for lack of a national strategy and a coordinated campaign, this one has now infected some 4 million Americans and killed nearly 150,000. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, we have 25 percent of the world’s confirmed COVID-19 cases, nearly that share of the deaths, and one of the world’s highest death rates as a percentage of population.

It’s classic irony and hypocrisy that a state government which won’t allow local governments to make decisions about plastic bags expects them to take the lead on defeating a deadly virus.

Owing his election to Trump’s sponsorship, DeSantis seems unwilling to do or say anything to disparage Trump’s bad examples.

That extends to pressuring schools to resume in-person learning despite the well-founded fears of teachers and parents. A nine-year old died in Florida of the virus last week. Even if most children don’t suffer from it to the extent that their grandparents do, all are capable of unwittingly bringing it home.

To hear DeSantis, the virus is less to fear than fear itself.

“Fear doesn’t help us combat the virus,” he said in a televised message.

Yes, it does, Governor.

Fear can have the salutary effect of making people take essential precautions such as mask-wearing, social distancing, and hand-washing. As many as 4 of every 10 infected people show no symptoms but can still infect others.

True leadership is measured by deeds, not words — by tough decisions, not tough talk. It calls for the integrity and ability to recognize when something isn’t working and to change course. With a critical election approaching, Americans have learned the value of leadership by its conspicuous absence.

Speaking of her uncle, the President, Mary Trump writes in her best-selling book about him that he grew up as an emotional cripple, unable to feel empathy or to admit a mistake, even to himself, lest it reveal weakness.

This should be asked of every candidate in every election: What is the worst mistake you have made and what did you learn from it?

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.