Passing the Buck: The Crisis of American Political Leadership in Time of COVID-19

I want to take note of a few facts as I begin here —

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) resigned from the House after being accused of sexual misconduct in July, 2017.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D-NV) both resigned from the House after being accused of sexual misconduct in December, 2017. Al Franken (D-MN) also resigned from the Senate in December, 2017, and Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) announced in the same month he would not run for re-election following allegations of sexual misconduct.

Most of us are old enough to remember when South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford resigned his office in 2009 when he was found to be having an affair, and when Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office before his criminal conviction because he had sought to sell a seat in the U.S. Senate to the highest bidder.

Note that these cases above include an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, while they all concern cases where no one actually got hurt.

Now, let us consider the case of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who has resisted issuing a shelter-in-place order for several weeks. On April 2, 2020, Gov. Kemp announced that he only had learned in “the last 24 hours” that apparently-healthy people can be vectors of COVID-19 transmission.

This is remarkable.

It is remarkable because media reports have told us how apparently-healthy people can transmit the disease since at least January 24, and it also is remarkable that the Centers for Disease Control, whose guidance Gov. Kemp claims to have followed, is headquartered only a 15-minute drive from where this Atlanta press conference was held.

This is remarkable, wild, deadly incompetence that costs lives and livelihoods.

But it also is characteristic of our moment.

The Guardian offered this concise and damning timeline of how Donald Trump ignored the warnings of public health experts and bullied the Department of Health and Human Services into silence for six weeks while testing could have been scaled up, equipment staged, and the virus surveilled. We still would have faced this disease. Whether we needed to face a depression and widespread social distancing measures anymore than we needed to face them when SARS, H1N1, or other pathogens threatened us is something historians will debate. Whether those six weeks might have been used profitably to mitigate this disaster is something no one can debate.

Yet, what has Donald Trump said?

On March 13, when he was asked about the 2018 dissolution of the National Security Council’s directorate for global health and security — a unit concerned with preventing pandemic events — he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” and went on to blame the Obama Administration for something-or-other.

More incredibly, during the same exchange he deflected blame as if his Administration belonged to someone else —

I could ask perhaps — my administration — but I could perhaps ask Tony about that because I don’t know anything about it. I mean, you say — you say we did that. I don’t know anything about it….It’s the — it’s the administration. Perhaps they do that. You know, people let people go. You used to be with a different newspaper than you are now. You know, things like that happen.

Things like that happen.

“The buck stops here.”

Once there was a time when Americans had a different expectation of leadership.

Then again, once there was a time when political leaders felt sure that the voters would hold them accountable for bad acts. Political leaders knew it was time to go when they had been caught out. Given the facts we began with above, that time ended somewhere around 2017.

Today, the leadership of Brian Kemp and Donald Trump seems more than ever to lie in passing the buck as quickly as possible. Blame the CDC that did not correct Kemp earlier. Blame whoever it is in the Trump Administration that does things. Don’t blame the man on top.

Indeed, Trump all but admitted to being a bystander in his own Administration. Others govern. Others are responsible. He is just the star of the show.

The evidence says that there are plenty of voters who will accept all of this simply because Trump and Kemp have an R after their names.

Even today, amid reports that Trump’s approval rating has ‘cratered,’ with 55% disapproving of how he is handling the pandemic, somehow 45% do not disapprove. The percentage corresponds closely to the number of Americans have stood with him since the day when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters.

There are many things about our way of life we will need to re-examine as we all move forward from where we are today — how our labor market values essential workers, our healthcare system, our preparedness for pandemic events and other catastrophes.

But certainly, we need to examine this. We need to ask about the purpose of politics and what we expect from political leaders. A public official cannot be excused from incredible malfeasance simply because I like his team, I don’t like the other team.

We will find a vaccine for COVID-19. We are still searching for the cure to this sickening, dangerous partisanship.