South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Lovers try to find hope on bleak Valentine’s Day
Florists, restaurants busy even as toll of COVID-19 climbs
The notecards poking from bouquets rushing out of a Chicago florist all carry similar messages: “looking forward to celebrating in person.”
“The notes aren’t sad,” said Kate Prince, a co-owner of Flora Chicago on the city’s North Side. “They’re hopeful.”
On this Valentine’s Day, Americans are searching for ways to celebrate love amid so much heartache and isolation as the coronavirus pandemic stretches past its year anniversary. Some are clinging to hope, seen in the most vulnerable and frontline workers getting vaccinated, in loosening restrictions on restaurants in the hardest hit places, in case numbers starting to wane. But the death toll is still climbing toward 500,000 dead in the United States and many remain shuttered in their homes.
Prince said florists are scrambling to keep up with the onslaught of orders from people trying to send their love from a safe distance.
“We are crushed,” she said.
Phones are ringing off the hook at restaurants in cities that have loosened restrictions on indoor dining just in time for Valentine’s Day, one of the busiest days of the year for many eateries that have been devastated by shutdowns designed to slow the spread of the virus.
In Chicago, the mayor loosened up indoor dining restrictions last week. After limiting restaurants to 25% capacity and 25 people per room, restaurants now must remain at 25% but they can serve as many as 50 per room.
The Darling restaurant is fully booked for this weekend and has been for weeks.
Sophie Huterstein, the restaurant’s owner, said
COVID-19 has allowed the
2-year-old eatery to accomplish the impossible: make people happy to agree to a 4 p.m. reservation.
“People are being very flexible,” she said.
They are also this Valentine’s Day willing to do something else over a weekend where the high temperature will reach the teens and the low will plummet well below zero.
“We have 14 greenhouses and people are coming out in full ski gear,” she said.
In New York City, the America Bar restaurant in the West Village is also fully booked for Valentine’s Day with a long waiting list and high demand for the newly allowed 25% capacity for indoor tables, said David Rabin, a partner in the eatery. More seats, along with the governor’s decision to allow closing times to move from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m., has allowed him to give more shifts to his workers.
“For us, it’s a welcome gift,” he said. “It’s been great.”
T Bar NYC Steak and Lounge on the Upper East Side is also fully booked. Owner Tony Fortuna says some of his customers won’t dine indoors and he understands, but for those that have been clamoring to get back to restaurant dining, 25% is a good start. It gives people a glimmer of normalcy at a heartbreaking time.
“It gets everybody motivated, we see a little bit of hope,” he said. “It’s all about perception: you see people going out and moving around it makes everybody feel in a different mood.”
In Portland, a couple married 55 years has special Valentine’s Day plans.
Gil and Mercy Galicia
have barely left their home in almost a year since lockdowns began, said their daughter, Cris Charbonneau. They had seen their close-knit family, three children and six grandchildren spread across the country.
Like many seniors, the year has been especially hard on them. They immigrated from the Philippines in the 1960s and have lived in their home on a half-acre plot for more than 40 years. Mercy, 80, is a cancer survivor and has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Gil, 88, used to go
on daily walks at the mall to stay active, but he hasn’t for a year. He is fearful that the isolation has set them back, and he doesn’t know how much longer they can manage living on their own.
“We’re losing years, COVID has stolen this time that’s so precious,” Charbonneau said.
They don’t have a computer. When the vaccine became available, Gil called everywhere and couldn’t get through. Charbonneau was on a video call with them Thursday and saw a tweet
from a local news station that the grocery store near their home had opened appointments online.
She was scrambling to get two appointments. She wasn’t paying attention to the date. She told them she’d booked them for Sunday, Feb. 14.
“That’s Valentine’s Day!” her father exclaimed and smiled at his wife.
“What a great way to celebrate my love for you.”
They hung up. Their daughter wept.
“That’s what we needed,” she said, “some hope.”
WASHINGTON — When President Joe Biden swore in a batch of recruits for his new administration in a teleconferenced ceremony last month, it looked like the country’s biggest Zoom call.
Biden was installing roughly 1,000 high-level officials in about a quarter of all of the available political appointee jobs in the federal government.
At the same time, a far less visible transition was taking place: the quiet dismissal of holdovers from the Trump administration, who have been asked to clean out their offices immediately, whatever the eventual legal consequences.
If there has been a single defining feature of the first week of the Biden administration, it has been the blistering pace at which the new president has put his mark on what President Donald Trump dismissed as the hostile “Deep State” and tried so hard to dismantle.
From the Pentagon, where 20 senior officials were ready to move in days before the Senate confirmed Lloyd Austin as defense secretary, to the Voice of America, where the Trump-appointed leadership was replaced hours after the inauguration, the Biden team arrived in Washington not only with plans for each department and agency, but the spreadsheets detailing who would carry them out.
A replacement was even in the works for the president’s doctor: Dr. Sean P. Conley, who admitted to providing a rosy, no-bigdeal description of Trump’s COVID-19 symptoms last year, was told to pack his medical kit. While all presidents eventually bring in their own doctor, Biden
wasted no time bringing back a retired Army colonel, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, who was his doctor when he was vice president.
Biden had named nearly all of his Cabinet secretaries and their immediate deputies before he took office Jan. 20, most of them familiar faces from the Obama administration. But the president’s real grasp on the levers of power has come several layers down.
The National Security Council, for example, where U.S. foreign policy comes together, already has staff members in place for jobs that sometimes take months to fill. There is an Asia czar (Kurt Campbell, who served in President Barack Obama’s State Department), a China director and directors for other regions. There is a full homeland security staff and a new, expanded White House operation to oversee cyberoffense and defense.
The contrast with the
Trump administration at a similar point in time is striking.
Trump had no experience in government — which he made a selling point in his 2016 campaign — and mistrusted those who did. He made it clear that he planned to shrink or starve some agencies, often before determining how to align their missions with the right number of personnel.
Many of Trump’s appointees — except at the Defense Department and at the Department of Veterans Affairs — arrived with instructions to cut, and it became a point of pride among Trump administration officials to leave jobs open. In the end, Trump did not shrink the federal workforce by much — except in places like the Education Department — but his determination to do so meant that many posts went unfilled for the first two years.
No place was that mission
clearer than at the State Department, which Trump delighted in calling the “Deep State Department.”
The first secretary to arrive, Rex Tillerson, recalled last year that he spent months examining what he called the “lines of authority” inside the building and creating strategies to cut the department’s staff by 30% — time that might have been spent thinking about ways to develop policy toward China or Russia or anywhere else.
Congress blocked most of the cuts.
Today, the State Department is being run by Foreign Service officers and career officials who greeted the new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, when he arrived for his first full day of work Wednesday after being confirmed by the Senate.
Blinken grew up inside the department — he joined in 1993 — and served at the end of the Obama administration
as its deputy secretary.
So far, there have been few appointments at State; Foreign and Civil Service officers have filled in. But Blinken plans to make some of those appointments permanent, going back to a previous era when career officials or retired foreign service officers take posts that in more recent times have been filled with political appointees.
At the National Security Council, the White House said in a statement, Biden has “nearly doubled the number of staff ready to start and onboarded than either Trump did in 2017 or Obama in 2009.”
The White House offered no specific numbers but said they reflected “the urgent need to build — in some cases rebuild — capabilities like climate, cyber, global health security and biodefense, and democracy from the ground up.”
The new staff members will have their work cut out for them.
“In making appointments as a new president, Biden has a much tougher job than Trump,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, who has written about many transitions. “It’s harder to rebuild a government than it is to ransack, demoralize and hollow a government out.”
But there has also been a lot of rooting out.
The tone was set before Biden was sworn in.
On the Saturday before the inauguration, Michael Ellis, a Trump loyalist, was installed as general counsel of the National Security Agency on the orders of Trump’s acting defense secretary. It was a classic case of “burrowing” a political appointee into the bureaucracy in a new, nonpolitical job classification that would make it hard to fire him.
But after Biden became president, Ellis was placed on administrative leave while the National Security Agency’s inspector general examined the circumstances of how he was chosen. Now it is unclear if Ellis will ever serve in the job.
At the Department of Health and Human Services, largely ignored by Trump, at least 18 new political appointees have taken up position, still a fraction of a department that is typically run by more than 100.
But one or two wellplaced allies can mean a decisive change of direction.
One key appointment is Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a Harvard University health economist and an alumnus of the department. He took a top role in the agency’s research office, which had been hijacked under Trump by political appointees who warped reports, webpages and planning documents, rooting out flattering references to the Affordable Care Act and inserting anti-abortion language.