It’s hard to pinpoint the most incompetently handled part of Biden’s presidency so far. Is it the flailing foreign policy that led to the Afghanistan disaster? Is it the border crisis? Is it the economic malaise and inflation?
Or perhaps it’s the administration’s handling of COVID-19? That’s certainly up there given the number of contradictions that have flowed from the White House and its bureaucracies over the last year. Masks are not needed, but now they are needed. Natural immunity doesn’t exist, but now it exists. Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work, but now it does work in some situations. Over and over, the administration has put out conflicting information that did nothing but prolong and worsen the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, with cases crashing, the White House is rushing to take credit, proclaiming the “crisis” over.
If you look at case numbers, they are still 3-4x higher today than they were last summer when the crisis was still on. The seven-day average of deaths in the United States is also still at around 2300. Statistically, things are above levels that had the administration screaming “crisis” in prior times.
Don’t get me wrong, I personally don’t think COVID-19 is still a crisis, but the inconsistency of the White House is the point. Why now as far as finally crying uncle and trying to shift public perception? The “science” hasn’t changed.
So what has actually changed? The political science has changed. As RedState recently reported (see here and here), the latest polling data is all doom for the Democrat Party. There’s a reason blue-state governors have been rushing to lift mandates over the last two weeks. They see the writing on the wall and they are throwing paint on it to try to cover it up. In response to those state-wide moves, the White House is now catching up at the federal level, shifting its messaging to hopefully salvage some political capital before the red wave arrives in November.
The damage is done, though. The businesses that were shuttered are gone forever. The children who have had their childhoods stolen by selfish adults will never get that time back. Those that perished from COVID-19 because the administration refused to prioritize treatments for purely political reasons will remain dead.
The American people are not going to forget what happened here. No amount of Dr. Anthony Fauci proclaiming victory on a live stream based on completely inconsistent measures (Fauci once said that less than 10,000 cases a day nationally was the threshold) will change the government abuse that was divvied out to innocent people.
With three COVID waves behind them, Americans know that Biden’s actions have nothing to do with Omicron now receding. Nature took its course as far as this latest variant burning itself out. But Americans do know what Biden’s actions caused them and their communities a lot of pain. If Democrats think they can turn on a dime and pretend the last year didn’t happen, they are sadly mistaken. Retribution is coming at the ballot box, and it’s going to be brutal for the left.