Trump is supposed to address the nation tonight, 9 pm eastern time. I’m sure I can find something else to watch on Netflix. Let us know if you watch and he says anything significant.

The Dow officially entered a bear market today, and coronavirus officially became a pandemic.  The New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade may or may not be cancelled; there are contradicting reports. This may be getting serious.

Jordan Weissman writes at Slate that nobody likes Trump’s ideas for dealing with the financial meltdown being caused by the pandemic. For example, Trump is pushing for a payroll tax cut that would last past the November election. Lawmakers of both parties shot that down, although for different reasons. Republicans want something more “surgical.” Democrats slammed Republicans for thinking tax cuts fix everything.

Senate Democrats put forward a bill to require employers pay up to fourteen days of sick leave during the pandemic. Republicans shot that down because, you know, it’s not fair to employers. So the food service workers will show up to work sick.

Complicating matters, the toddler-in-chief is throwing tantrums over having to work with Nancy Pelosi.

President Donald Trump can’t stand the idea of negotiating one-on-one with his chief counterpart, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, he suspects that she would use the moment to try to humiliate him.

She doesn’t need to humiliate him; he’s doing that job just fine, all by himself.

Two senior Trump administration officials described a president who, out of an intense bitterness toward the House Speaker, has shuddered at the prospect of being in the same room with her during the ongoing public-health crisis and economic reverberations.

So juvenile.

Reuters is reporting that

The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials.

Did they think no one would notice the pandemic?

The officials said that dozens of classified discussions about such topics as the scope of infections, quarantines and travel restrictions have been held since mid-January in a high-security meeting room at the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), a key player in the fight against the coronavirus.

Staffers without security clearances, including government experts, were excluded from the interagency meetings, which included video conference calls, the sources said.

“We had some very critical people who did not have security clearances who could not go,” one official said. “These should not be classified meetings. It was unnecessary.”

See also Max Boot, The right-wing media’s contempt for truth has never been more dangerous. Yeah, tell us about it, Max.

My favorite headline today is at the Atlantic: There Are No Libertarians in an Epidemic. Peter Nicholas writes, “In the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s aim is to brand his opponent an avatar of socialism, whether it’s Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. But the COVID-19 outbreak demonstrates the emptiness of these sorts of ideological labels. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, in a national emergency, there’s no truly laissez-faire government.”

Trump is only concerned about the economy, of course, and he is thrashing around trying to come up with a big-government economic response. The Holy Free Market (blessed be It) isn’t going to do the job. CNBC:

The White House is not ready to roll out specific economic proposals in its response to the widening impact of the coronavirus outbreak, administration officials told CNBC.

The revelation comes as U.S. stock futures pointed toward a sharp rebound at the open Tuesday following the Dow’s 2,013-point drop Monday and President Donald Trump’s suggestion that a payroll tax cut and other stimulus measures may be in the works to mitigate economic damage from the virus’ spread. Trump has also invited Wall Street executives to meet at the White House on Wednesday to discuss the response.

However, inside the administration, some officials were stunned by Trump’s claim Monday that he would hold a press conference Tuesday to announce an economic plan. “That was news to everyone on the inside,” one official said.

Trump did meet with Republican senators today and tossed out some proposals, but I take it nothing was agreed upon. Trump wants to use emergency funds to goose the economy. Obviously, he worries that a weakening economy will hurt his re-election chances. He seems less concerned for what is likely to happen if the virus starts spreading through more nursing homes.

And the Trumpers might consider using emergency funds to goose our virus testing capabilities. To review:

A February 28 ProPublica report describes how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track [the coronavirus’s] possible spread in the United States,” because the agency insisted on developing its own tests for the virus instead of adopting those provided by the World Health Organization.

Then the CDC-developed tests proved to be unreliable, setting the agency back in its effort to enable widespread testing and squandering precious time needed to prepare for the virus’s arrival. On top of that, early federal guidance provided only for testing of people returning from international travel—and even after those restrictions were loosened, story after story surfaced of potential COVID-19 patients who had been denied testing despite their symptoms. Private labs and companies have only recently been allowed to run tests. As a result, only about 4,300 people in the United States had been tested for the virus as of March 9. Compare this with South Korea’s numbers, which total as many as 10,000 people tested a day.

See also The Dangerous Delays in U.S. Coronavirus Testing Haven’t Stopped and True number of U.S. coronavirus cases is far above official tally, scientists say. We really have no bleeping idea how many Americans have this disease already and how far it has spread.

Other countries are doing a much better job dealing with the crisis. See, for example, Taiwan has millions of visitors from China and only 45 coronavirus cases. Here’s how. In brief, that had an epidemic crisis management task force already in place, and it began to respond to the spread of the virus in December. Taiwan began testing on December 31. It has had only one death so far.

Oh, and The Intercept reports that the Health and Human Services department just requested bids on contracts for manufacturing 500 million face marks, since there’s a shortage. The bids are due March 18.

And I still haven’t seen anything like a comprehensive plan for enabling the uninsured to get tested, assuming we ever get our testing capabilities up to standards. See 5 million Texans lack health insurance. Here’s how that complicates the coronavirus response in today’s Texas Tribune.

The good news is that this virus seems not to be dangerous to healthy children and adults under age 60. The fatality rate for elderly Covid-19 patients in China was over 20 percent, however. If you have any health issues such as heart disease or diabetes, take great care.

I just voted for Bernie Sanders in the Missouri primary, so he’ll get one vote, at least.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that if Joe Biden sweeps today’s primaires as predicted, Bernie Sanders will not stay in the race much longer. He’ll stick around for the last debate on March 15, but if there isn’t some sign that voting patterns can turn around, there’s not much point in going on. And the rest of the March primaries are not in friendly territory for him.

Of course, there’s always a chance Sanders will do better than expected today and the rest of March. He might decide to keep going to the end of April, as some big northeastern states (New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut) are voting then, but he lost those states in 2016 (Connecticut only by a hair, but it was still a loss). If the young folks continue to not bother to vote, however, for all practical purposes the nomination will be decided very soon, and the nominee will be Joe Biden, like it or not. I am not at all happy about that, but it has to be said that so far Biden is showing deep strength with African American and suburban voters, which are the two most critical groups for a Dem victory in November. And as long as Gen Z and younger millennial voters can’t be counted on to show up, they don’t get a say.

In 2016 Sanders wasn’t completely out of it mathematically (not counting superdelegates) until after the California primary in June. After losing California he knew he had no shot at the nomination, but he wanted his people to have a say in the party platform and waited to concede until after the first ballot. If the Democrats offer Sanders a role in the convention and a say in the platform, he might not hang on to the end this time but shift to campaigning against Trump on Biden’s behalf. Sanders’s devotees will go nuts, but Sanders himself is, shall we say, more mature.

This year the superdelegates won’t be voting on the first ballot, which theoretically could make a difference if nobody gets the 1,991 pledged delegates needed to win the nomination outright. But unless voting patterns change, Biden’s going to have those delegates before the convention, and the superdelegates won’t vote.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Elise Amendola/AP/Shutterstock (10551224k)
Former Vice President Joe Biden, left, embraces Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during a Democratic presidential primary debate, hosted by ABC News, Apple News, and WMUR-TV at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H
Election 2020 Debate, Manchester, USA – 07 Feb 2020

Larry Kudlow is still talking happy talk about Covid-19.

Kudlow, who in the past has mischaracterized the position of the World Health Organization in an attempt to reassure the financial markets, put out yet more misinformation on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Friday morning.

“We don’t know what the magnitude of the economy might be in terms of a slowdown,” Kudlow said. “We don’t actually know what the magnitude of the virus is going to be, although frankly, so far it looks relatively contained, and we don’t think most people — I mean the vast majority of Americans are not at risk from this virus.”

I’m not sure why anyone still bothers to interview Kudlow, except for amusement. There is absolutely nothing that’s going to stop Covid-19 from sweeping the country. A lot of us are going to get it. Those of you who are elderly or have other health problems, please take care. The response to the virus has revealed that Trump and his administration are unfit to be in charge of anything more complicated than a can opener.

We’ve known for at least two months — probably longer — that the virus would very likely be introduced to the United States. (See the timeline.) Yet the Trumpers continue to be caught flatfooted by the spread of the disease. Note:

WHO had been alerted to a new disease spreading rapidly in Wuhan, China in December.

On January 7, China announced that a new coronavirus had been identified.

On January 13, WHO announced a case in Thailand, the first outside China.

The first case in the U.S. was diagnosed on January 20; the patient was a man who had recently visited Wuhan.  He had been sympomatic for about four days before he was tested.

Eleven days later, on January 31, the Trump Administration finally announced restrictions on travel to and from China.

By early February the virus had been found in several countries. On February 5, more than 3,600 passengers, some infected and some not, were quarantined on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, anchored off Yokahama, Japan.

On Friday, February 21, stocks closed sharply lower on fears of the disruptions caused by the spreading virus.

On Monday, February 24, the Trump Administration began to prepare for the virus to spread in the United States. The administration requested Congress to allocate $1.25 billion in new emergency funds and also called for taking $1.25 billion from other federal programs and using them for whatever it was they planned to do to slow down the virus. Some members of Congress warned the administration that wasn’t nearly enough.

On February 24, when the Trump Administration began to stir itself and pay more attention to the virus, there were 34 confirmed cases in the U.S. As of March 6,  the CDC is reporting a total of 164 cases in the U.S., in 19 states, with 11 deaths. But there are almost certainly many more Americans infected with the virus, since we are way behind where we should be in testing. And that brings us to the woeful saga of the test kits.

The first test kits issued by the CDC, and I’m not sure when that was, were flawed. And we’ve been playing catch up ever since. Do read Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal, The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing.

On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.

Notice that “Monday” was March 2, which was already late.

But the number of tests performed across the country has fallen far short of those projections, despite extraordinarily high demand, The Atlantic has found. …

… Through interviews with dozens of public-health officials and a survey of local data from across the country, The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive. And while the American capacity to test for the coronavirus has ramped up significantly over the past few days, local officials can still test only several thousand people a day, not the tens or hundreds of thousands indicated by the White House’s promises.  …

… In South Korea, more than 66,650 people were tested within a week of its first case of community transmission, and it quickly became able to test 10,000 people a day. The United Kingdom, which has only 115 positive cases, has so far tested 18,083 people for the virus.

In typical Trump Administration fashion, the various spokespeople have made conflicting statements about what’s happening with the test kits. As the Atlantic article says, there is no official information available anywhere about how many kits will eventually be delivered where. And the CDC announced this week it would stop publishing testing results, as it normally does during an epidemic, leaving us further in the dark.

According to Politico, most other countries have been using tests supplied by WHO that appear to work and have been distributed quickly. But not the United States.

Why the United States declined to use the WHO test, even temporarily as a bridge until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could produce its own test, remains a perplexing question and the key to the Trump administration’s failure to provide enough tests to identify the coronavirus infections before they could be passed on, according to POLITICO interviews with dozens of viral-disease experts, former officials and some officials within the administration’s health agencies.

The slowness of the testing regimen — which, administration officials acknowledged this week, is still not producing enough tests to meet the national demand — was the first, and most sweeping, of many failures. So far there have been confirmed cases in at least 23 states, and at least 15 deaths, while the stock market plunged and an otherwise healthy economy braced for a major disruption.

But neither the CDC nor the coronavirus task force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence would say who made the decision to forgo the WHO test and instead begin a protracted process of producing an American test, one that got delayed by manufacturing problems, possible lab contamination and logistical delays.

The CDC itself had already been compromised by Trump’s decisions to gut much of it: You’ve probably heard that in 2018 Trump eliminated the U.S. pandemic response team to save money. And there’s more. See Trump spent the past 2 years slashing the government agencies responsible for handling the coronavirus outbreak in Business Insider. The next administration will have to do some work to restore the CDC to its former level of competence.

It doesn’t help that the head of the CDC, Dr. Robert Redfield, came into the job in 2018 with dubious qualifications. CNN at the time of Redfield’s appointment:

Redfield’s early engagement with the AIDS epidemic in the US in the 1980s and 90s was controversial. As an Army major at Walter Reed Medical Institute, he designed policies for controlling the disease within the US military that involved placing infected personnel in quarantine and investigating their pasts to identify and track possible sexual partners. Soldiers were routinely discharged and left to die of AIDS, humiliated and jobless, often abandoned by their families.

In the 1980s Redfield worked closely with W. Shepherd Smith, Jr. and his Christian organization, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy, or ASAP. The group maintained that AIDS was “God’s judgment” against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and loss of family values.

Redfield wrote the introduction to a 1990 book, “Christians in the Age of AIDS,” co-written by Smith, in which he denounced distribution of sterile needles to drug users and condoms to sexually active adults, and described anti-discrimination programs as the efforts of “false prophets.”

In the early 1990’s, ASAP and Redfield also backed H.R. 2788, a House bill sponsored by deeply conservative Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-California). It would have subjected people with HIV to testing, loss of professional licenses and would have effectively quarantined them. (The bill died in Congress.) In the 2000s, Redfield was a top advocate for the so-called “ABCs of AIDS” in Africa, pressing to prevent HIV infection through sexual abstinence, monogamy and the use of condoms only as a last resort.

There’s more; it goes on and on. The clowns are running the circus.

Speaking of clowns, you’ve probably read about The Creature’s surreal visit to CDC yesterday.

… during the press conference, Trump urged people to stay calm and dismissed any criticism against the government’s handling of the virus, stressing in particular the availability of Covid-19 tests.

“As of right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test [can have one], that’s the important thing, and the tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect, the transcription was perfect,” Trump said, referring to the White House transcript of his call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in which he requests an investigation into his political rivals.

Yeah, perfect.

In fact, perhaps the most concerning aspect of the CDC conference was how it gave us a glimpse into Trump’s view of the coronavirus as a political rather than health-based issue.

During his remarks, Trump said he would rather have the passengers of the Grand Princess, a cruise ship docked in San Francisco with 21 confirmed cases onboard, stay on the ship than move to the land — all because doing so would raise the number of total Covid-19 cases in the US.

“I would rather because I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault. And it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship either, okay? It wasn’t their fault either and they’re mostly Americans. So, I can live either way with it. I’d rather have them stay on, personally.”

Such a mensch. He takes his responsibilities to we, the people, so seriously. (/sarcasm)

This has been a terribly gut-wrenching week, with disappointing Super Tuesday results and Liz Warren dropping out. See Amanda Terkel, Elizabeth Warren Could Never Escape The Baggage Of Being A ‘Female Candidate’.

And once again, we’re seeing that younger people just don’t turn out to vote in the same numbers as older people, and this killed Sanders’s momentum. See Jack Holmes, The Bernie Sanders Youth Revolution Was Nowhere to Be Found on Super Tuesday.

Next Tuesday there will be primaries in Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, and Washington state. In 2016 Sanders won the primaries in Idaho, Michigan, North Dakota, and Washington. If he doesn’t win at least a couple of those, especially the critical state of Michigan, it’s going to be really hard to argue he’s got a path to the nomination or a claim to being the best person to take on Trump.

So that leaves us with Joe Biden. Paul Waldman wrote,

There’s a lot going on in that “seems,” however. As I argued repeatedly (to no avail), making your primary choice on electability is a fool’s errand, because you’re almost certainly wrong about what makes someone electable; again and again in recent history, we’ve seen electable candidates like Mitt Romney or John F. Kerry lose, and supposedly unelectable candidates like Barack Obama or Donald Trump win.

I’m waiting to see more voter demographic information, and for the final results in California and Maine, before writing much about the Super Tuesday primaries. I have seen commentary saying that where Biden won big, he did so with a combination of suburban and black votes, which certainly is a combination that Democrats need. It’s also the case that, in at least some of yesterday’s primaries, the young folks just didn’t show up. That hurt Sanders. But I don’t know if that’s true everywhere.

Mike Bloomberg has dropped out, at least. He spent more than $500 million on his campaign and earned 12 whole delegates, last I saw. Money can’t buy you love. Liz Warren’s campaign seems to be going nowhere also, and I wonder what she’s going to do.

I’m annoyed with the coverage of California. The Associated Press called California for Sanders as soon as the polls closed. The Los Angeles Times has called California for Sanders. Sanders has a significant lead with 86 percent of precincts reporting. He’s ahead of Biden by 260,856 votes. Yet most major news outlets — WaPo, the New York Times, CNN, NBC, etc. — haven’t called California, and most of its 415 delegates remain unallocated. And I’m wondering if that’s to give more time for Joe Biden to claim to be the front runner, since he might still be behind Bernie in delegates once the matter is settled. But maybe I’m just getting overheated.

Of course Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar were persuaded to drop out before Super Tuesday so that Joe Biden could get more votes. Polls suggest it is working, and that there has been a considerable swing to Biden in the Super Tuesday states over the past couple of days. It appears that the not-Sanders voters are moving rapidly to Biden. If that appearance holds up in today’s results, we’re probably looking at a Biden nomination. Damn.

This could very well be a replay of 2016. Biden is supposed to be the “safe,” establishment choice, so the sheeple dutifully vote for him. I’m saying right now that if Biden is the nominee and he loses to Trump, we all go to Washington and absolutely trash the DNC headquarters on South Capitol St SE. And then we march on the MSNBC studios in Rockefeller Center. I’ll stop short of calling for tar and feathers, for now. See also Paul Waldman, Sanders is a terribly risky nominee. But so is Biden.

Young folks, you’d damn well better get your butts out to vote today. It may be your last chance.

I was looking forward to the Super Tuesday returns, thinking it should be a good night for Sanders, and now I am bummed. At least we don’t have to listen to Chris “Tweety” Matthews any more. See Margaret Sullivan on the real reason Matthews had to go.

Assuming we had a competent federal government, what would it be doing now to prepare for the spread of Covid-19? Julia Belluz of Vox interviewed an actual expert, Dr. Bruce Aylward, who is a veteran epidemiologist and also an assistant director general of the World Health Organization. He has been in China to observe and study what the Chinese are doing. China must be doing something right, because the number of new cases has dropped dramatically. Aylward believes from his own observations that this decrease in cases is real and not just Chinese government propaganda.

So what did the Chinese do that we ought to be doing? Dr. Aylward said that the first most important thing is to identify new cases, isolate them, and trace who they’ve been incontact with. This must be done quickly. Dr. Aylward said,

So, No. 1, if you want to get speed of response, your population has to know this disease. You find any population in the West and ask them what are the two presenting signs you have to be alert to. What would you say?

It turns out the two presenting signs are dry cough and fever. I didn’t know that either.

Your population is your surveillance system. Everybody has got a smartphone, everybody can get a thermometer. That is your surveillance system. Don’t rely on this hitting your health system, because then it’s going to infect it. You’ve got this great surveillance system out there — make sure the surveillance system is primed. Make sure you’re ready to act on the signals that come in from that surveillance system. You’ve got to be set up to rapidly assess whether or not they really have those symptoms, test those people, and, if necessary, isolate and trace their contacts.

In other words, everyone needs to know that if they develop a fever and dry cough, get yourself tested immediately. But Dr. Aylward doesn’t think it’s a good idea to have everyone go to their GPs for this, especially since infected people are likely to infect everyone else in the waiting room.

China set up a separate health network that dealt only with testing and treating infected patients.

In China, they have set up a giant network of fever hospitals. In some areas, a team can go to you and swab you and have an answer for you in four to seven hours. But you’ve got to be set up — speed is everything.

So make sure your people know [about the virus]. Make sure you have mechanisms for working with them very quickly through your health system. Then enough public health infrastructure to investigate cases, identify the close contacts, and then make sure they remain under surveillance. That’s 90 percent of the Chinese response.

Yeah, not gonna happen here. What are we doing, in fact?

Our so-called Covid-19 point man, Mike Pence, has announced more travel restrictions affecting Iran, Italy and South Korea. Okay, but what are we doing about the growing number of cases here? Pence also said that large numbers of test kits are being mailed to state and local clinics. Okay, but which clinics? Some of the kits are going to state public health labs, but I don’t know where my state public health lab is, either.

Say I’m an average citizen and I develop a fever and dry cough. Or I develop a rash and stomach ache; nobody is telling me what signs to look for. Anyway, if I think I should be tested, where do I go? We’re not getting any directions. And will it cost me anything? What if I don’t have insurance? What if I’m in the country illegally?

The only advice I’ve seen so far is that if you are worried you have the coronavirus, call your health care provider. So we’re not following the Chinese protocols explained by Dr. Aylward.

It may be that some states will step in and create an effective response apparatus for their citizens, but since I’m living in Missouri, there’s no hope that’s going to happen here.

Health and Human Services Officials respond to the Covid-19 virus.

Stuff to Read

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar appears to have orchestrated many of the government’s early screwups regarding Covid-19. See Azar in the crosshairs for delays in virus tests.

Paul Waldman writes that If coronavirus hurts the economy, Trump will go nuts.

Last summer I would not have guessed that the race for the nomination would come down to a contest between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Yet here we are.

The nerds at Five Thirty Eight have either Biden or Sanders winning all of the Super Tuesday states with the exception of Minnesota, which is expected to go to Amy Klobuchar. (Sanders is polling second in Minnesota.) The Super Tuesday states represent 40 percent of the U.S. population, I have read. Note that all of these states divide up delegates proportionately, so that second- and third- and sometimes fourth-place winners can pick up some delegates. Just not as many.

It’s interesting, though, that Sanders is winning in blue states and Biden in red ones, with a couple of exceptions. Who is ahead in the Super Tuesday polling (other than Minnesota) —

Sanders is currently polling ahead of Biden in these states (or territory):

• American Samoa (caucus)
• California
• Colorado
• Maine
• Massachusetts (Warren polling second)
• Texas (but within the margin of error; this one is a coin toss)
• Utah (Warren polling second)
• Vermont (Buttigieg and Warren are close to a tie for second)

Biden is currently polling ahead of Sanders in these states:

• Alabama
• Arkansas
• North Carolina
• Oklahoma (Bloomberg polling second)
• Tennessee
• Virginia

If the voting matches the polls, Sanders still will be ahead in delegates after Super Tuesday. There will be several more primaries on May 10, and the polling follows the same pattern — Sanders is ahead in bluer states; Biden in redder ones; no one else looks to be a major factor.

Side notes: Bloomberg was counting on winning some Super Tuesday states to make a claim for the nomination, and it doesn’t appear he will win any of them. He may pick up only a handful of delegates.

Indiana doesn’t vote until May, but poor Pete Buttigieg currently is trailing both Sanders (in first place) and Biden (in second) in his own state. Buttigieg is not doing well anywhere, as far as I can see. He may pick up one delegate in California this week. It occurs to me that Buttigieg has been running to appeal to older voters with policy ideas that are barely distinguishable from Biden’s. But the old folks are much less likely to vote for a young, gay man than younger ones. He might have done a lot better with much more progressive positions.

(Update: Buttigieg just announced he is ending his presidential bid.)

Back to Biden-Sanders: The most notable thing about a Biden-Sanders contest is that it amounts to a contest between generations, even though the candidates themselves are both septuagenarians. I wrote last November about the Democratic voter generation gap that put Biden way ahead with voters over 45 and Sanders way ahead with voters under 45. That hasn’t changed. Perry Bacon of FiveThirtyEight wrote last week that “In fact, age might be the most important fault line in the 2020 Democratic primary.” In Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, the percentage of under-45 voters who voted for Biden was in single digits. But in Iowa and Nevada, at least, Biden came in first among over-45 voters. Sanders did slightly better with the old folks than Biden did with the young ones, but he slaughtered the rest of the field with under-45 voters.

Bacon continues,

Indeed, the Democratic Party appears to be in the midst of a generational fight that started in 2016 and is continuing now. For example, the left-leaning but gray-haired commentators on MSNBC have been deeply frustrated by the rise of Sanders. Conversely, it’s hard to find much Biden support on Twitter, which tends to be used by younger people and more liberal Democrats. Buttigieg and Warren, while not as liberal or as anti-establishment as Sanders, are also to the left of Biden, which in part explains why the ex-vice president isn’t the clear second-favorite of younger Democrats either.

It’s significant to me that Biden isn’t even trying to win younger voters:

In 2019, the former vice president and his team seemed to deeply internalize the conventional wisdom among many establishment and center-left figures: that “Twitter is not real life” and that Democrats should not be too “woke.” Biden has seemed very frustrated at times with young liberal activists who have confronted him at rallies and argued that he was too conservative on some issues. He was fairly dismissive of criticisms of his handling of the Clarence Thomas hearings and his touching of women in ways that some of them considered inappropriate. He suggested the views of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t represent those of many other Democrats. His campaign aides downplayed the power of “Pod Save America” and did little to court the “black left.”

This all looked fairly savvy (or at least somewhat harmless) … until voting started. And you wonder now whether the Biden campaign could have at least competed for young voters by taking a different approach.

This is the same kind of tunnel vision that killed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016. She, and now Biden, are weirdly blind and deaf to younger voters and can’t address their concerns without sounding condescending. And it’s also the case, Bacon continues, that younger voters are not at all interested in a replay of the Obama Administration, so Biden’s appeal to Obama nostalgia just doesn’t work with them.

My sympathies are with the young folks, who are facing obstacles us geezers didn’t have to deal with. The “revolution” they seek is not a violent one, but one in which the resources and priorities of government are significantly realigned. They want major changes to long-standing policies — on climate change, health care, student loans, economic inequality, the cost of housing. Most of the people running for the nominations have instead brushed off the possibility of big change with the usual platitudes about practicality and what’s “do-able” and real solutions to real problems. The exceptions are Sanders and Warren, and for some reason the young voters appear to have abandoned Warren and are standing with Sanders. I am not sure why that happened, but there it is.

And of course, as soon as Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary, he was all over television talk shows with the line “I think people aren’t looking for revolution. They’re looking for results.” And we all know that “results” mean “tweaks to the status quo so minor you may not even notice them.”

For older Americans, for whom the old status quo worked reasonably well, big change may seem frightening. For younger people, it’s the status quo that is frightening. Because it’s not working for them.

But that status quo is awfully entrenched. And it really, really wants Biden to win the nomination.

Last week Paul Waldman wrote,

This is turning into a contest between the past versus the future.

It seems clear to me that the old political order that emerged from the chaos of the 1960s has run its course and is not sustainable. It is time for it to give way to something new. Only the Democratic Party in a position to lean into that change and benefit from it, while the Republicans have painted themselves into a corrupt, backward, xenophobic corner. The Democratic Party rejected change in 2016, and lost. Will it do so again?

Oh, and young folks? Please vote. Biden won big in South Carolina because two-thirds of the people who showed up to vote were over 45. If you stay home from primaries, don’t gripe because the geezer who gets the nomination isn’t the one you wanted.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Elise Amendola/AP/Shutterstock (10551224k)
Former Vice President Joe Biden, left, embraces Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during a Democratic presidential primary debate, hosted by ABC News, Apple News, and WMUR-TV at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H
Election 2020 Debate, Manchester, USA – 07 Feb 2020

The stock market fell another gazillion points today. I take it that putting Mike “prayer is the answer” Pence in charge of the Covid-19 response didn’t soothe anyone’s nerves. See Let’s Revisit Coronavirus Czar Mike Pence’s History on Public Health Initiatives to be further not soothed.

Pence famously does not believe in science. But never fear; Pence is merely in charge of the messaging about the coronavirus. “The White House moved on Thursday to tighten control of coronavirus messaging by government health officials and scientists, directing them to coordinate all statements and public appearance with the office of Vice President Mike Pence, according to several officials familiar with the new approach.” So Pence will be in charge of being sure no one will know what’s going on. Public health officials will no longer be able to speak without being censored. It’s not clear if anyone is in charge of the science.

I know I don’t feel better already.

It’s possible the pandemic will not be as severe as feared. But even if the spread of the disease is contained in the U.S., it’s likely we’re going to feel some effects. See Matt Stoller in Wired — Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics.

As Jon Stokes notes, we will, in all likelihood, be locking down travel in some areas of the US for several weeks, as they did in China. People may be advised against gathering in large groups. It’s not clear what any of this will mean for campaigning or primary voting, whether most of us will vote by mail or have our votes delayed.

Moreover, the coronavirus is going to introduce economic conditions with which few people in modern America are familiar: the prospect of shortages. After 25 years of offshoring and consolidation, we now rely on overseas production for just about everything. Now in the wake of the coronavirus, China has shut down much of its production; South Korea and Italy will shut down as well. Once the final imports from these countries have worked their way through the supply chains and hit our shores, it could be a while before we get more. This coronavirus will reveal, in other words, a crisis of production—and one that’s coming just in time for a presidential election.

The supply of pharmaceuticals is especially vulnerable, I understand, so if there is a drug you really need to live and function, you might want to be very careful with your existing supply.

It might have occurred to someone that it was really stupid of the U.S. to become dependent on another country for our medicines. But of course, nobody is really in charge of these things but the glorious Free Market, which doesn’t give a fig about who lives and who dies.

Again, it’s possible the effects of the virus won’t be that severe. But if they aren’t, it sure as hell won’t be because the government was on the ball about it. Trump really did fire the pandemic response team and cut much of the CDC’s budget for responding to global disease outbreaks. We are grotesquely unprepared for whatever is about to hit us. See also U.S. workers without protective gear assisted coronavirus evacuees, HHS whistleblower says.

Our lack of a national health care system also makes us more vulnerable. Helaine Olen writes in WaPo about a concerned citizen who came down with flu-like symptoms after returning from a trip to China. So the man went to a hospital to be tested. It appears the tests were negative, but he got slapped with a $3,000 invoice for a blood test and nasal swab.

It’s very possible there are people among us already carrying the virus but staying away from doctors because they are uninsured. “We don’t want people to be wondering whether they can afford to visit the doctor if they think they’ve got this contagious and possibly deadly disease,” Olen writes. “But by happenstance, ideology and shortsighted, penny-wise-pound-foolish thinking, we’ve set up a situation that will force many to do just that.”

Don’t forget to reflect on all the food service and other service workers who don’t get paid sick days.

Stoller writes that the pandemic could put an end to the politics of affluence.

Affluence politics is not the politics of being wealthy, though, but rather the politics of not paying attention to what creates wealth in the first place. That is to say, it’s the politics of ignoring our ability to make and distribute the things people need.

This is something we’ve been doing more and more badly, I think. Somehow, our economy is not responding to the desperate need for lower-cost homes in urban areas. It is not providing affordable insulin. It is not giving us safe drinking water. On the other hand, Vox reported in 2018 that millions of dollars worth of unsold merchandise is destroyed every year to be sure a surplus doesn’t erode the value of brands. Something is deeply and fundamentally screwy.

Stoller compares the potential disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic to the Great Depression.

Congress held hearings, but businessmen, academics, and bankers proffered only belt-tightening. Within the Republican establishment, President Herbert Hoover worked 18-hour days, exhorting confidence while refusing to take even basic steps such as having the government guarantee bank deposits. Instead, his administration’s army attacked hungry protesters in Washington, DC, a move that prompted an angry Republican congressman, Fiorello La Guardia of New York, to remind the president: “Soup is cheaper than tear gas bombs.”

For the record, I don’t believe Hoover ordered the attacks on the bonus marchers. I understand that was done on the initiative of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Meanwhile on the Democratic side, conservatives and progressives in the party were locked in a bitter battle for the nomination. Many Democrats agreed with Hoover. Maryland governor and presidential candidate Albert Ritchie, for instance, argued that we should rely “less on politics, less on laws, less on government.” Another candidate, Speaker of the House John Nance Garner, claimed the greatest threat was the “tendency toward socialism and communism” and pledged a massive cut in government spending, as well as a sales tax increase. Others turned to extreme racism and xenophobia. Only Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who went on to win a contested convention, campaigned on aggressive government involvement in the economy—or as he put it, a “workable program of reconstruction,” which later became the New Deal.

It does look as if we’re setting ourselves up for a replay of these arguments in 2020. But again, it’s possible this situation will blow over in a month or two and be forgotten. Until  next time.