In political coverage, and especially on cable news, it seems that every issue has been polarized to the ninth degree.
Either you argue that Donald Trump has done incredible work and Joe Biden is doing a horrible job, or you maintain that the opposite is true. Taking a more nuanced position is often dismissed as a desirability.
I’ve been saying for weeks that President Biden is aggressively pushing up the inflammatory program, but President Trump deserves credit for creating Operation Warp Speed - and rarely gets anything from the press.
Apparently I was right, at least according to the New York Times.
Yep, the newspaper that Trump has been investigating and regularly cracking down on for four years, looked at the progress made with vaccines and delivered a fair and balanced report. The story yesterday by Sharon LaFraniere describes “a more mixed picture, in which the new government expanded and expanded an attempt at vaccine production whose key elements were in place” when Biden took over from Trump. “Both administrations deserve credit, though neither wants to give one to the other.”
Biden’s most important step was to help the Defense Production Act help Pfizer acquire the necessary heavy machinery to expand a factory; Johnson & Johnson to press “to force a major subcontractor to turn the clock into operations”, and get rival company Merck to partner with Pfizer. The president announced yesterday that the government will receive another 100 million doses of J&J by the end of the year.
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But the Times also acknowledges that “Biden has benefited greatly from the waves of vaccine production set in motion by the Trump administration. As both Pfizer and Moderna found their production base, they were able to double and triple the output from their factories. . “
And then there is the predictable snip as officials from both administrations shoot each other over the development of the shots. In fact, when I completed this column, Trump issued a statement: ‘I hope everyone remembers when they get the Covid-10 vaccine (often called the China Virus), that if I were not president, you would not does not get such a nice ‘shot’ at best, and will probably not get it at all. ‘It’s this.
While the public is also polarized, I believe there is more common sense in the country than in the Beltway closet.
The House yesterday gave final approval to Biden’s $ 1.9 billion Covid aid package. Recent polls show broad support for the legislation, including about a third of Republicans, as well as for the president’s handling of the pandemic. But not one Congressional Republican voted for the bill – and that’s what dominated the coverage.
Biden plans to give a speech for the first time tonight to address his legislative victory – and a president who missed the opportunity will be guilty of political malpractice. But what Biden has not done much this week – or actually a week – has to do with journalists. Politico says it is planning a ‘media blitz’ to sell the benefits of the massive package. There will be ‘fewer text events and private negotiations with legislators, more interaction with the press and public appearances’.
But is it true? That would mean more than holding the overdue news conference that, according to Jen Psaki, arrives sometime this month. That would mean a round of interviews with journalists, not just one or two with sympathetic opinion hosts.
What markets the benefits of this long and complicated measure makes sense. As the IDP is downloaded on questionable programs that satisfy left-wing groups, Biden and his team are well advised to make sure Americans know how the money will help their bank accounts, schools and vaccination programs.
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The cover will play the partisan warfare; this is how Washington works. What you will not emphasize is that Biden adds $ 1,400 stimulus checks to the $ 600 approved by Trump – and the larger total is exactly what the former president, late in the game, insisted he wanted.