Saturday, December 4, 2021

"Gimme That Vaccine, Maxine!"

I'm a poet, and I know it.
Here's something else to wax poetic about: While President Biden fights COVID, the Republican Party is fighting his fight against it by opposing vaccine mandates, testing and PPE requirements, yet they keep blaming him for the rise in COVID cases. 
Why do the Republicans fight policies designed to alleviate and solve problems and then deflect the blame to the Democrats?  Mainly because it works.  Ronald Reagan blamed unemployment and failed foreign-policy initiatives on his watch on Jimmy Carter, Newt Gingrich blamed runaway spending on Bill Clinton despite being a strong proponent of increased military spending, right-wing talk radio hosts blamed 9/11 on Bill Clinton despite George W. Bush's lack of engagement with efforts to stop bin Laden, and John Boehner blamed a sluggish economy on Obama after blocking his efforts to improve it.  And look what happened: Reagan and Bush the Younger were both elected to second terms as President and Gingrich and Boehner became Speaker Of the House.
By blocking Biden from fighting the pandemic and dodging the blame for blocking him and thus not paying a price politically, Republicans think they can win back Congress in the 2022 midterms - especially if they can also keep concentrating on immigration (except that Biden went ahead and kept a Trump policy in place to have Mexico keep migrants bound for America for processing) and inflation (though the economy is still strong and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will likely raise interest rates gradually to reverse it).  If inflation does ease and immigration becomes less of an issue by November 2022, well, a perpetual pandemic is the GOP's magic bullet.
But get this: Thanks to the omicron variant - the omicorona, I call it - vaccination rates in America are spiking now.  More people are taking this seriously.  And Biden has wisely decided not to offer any happy talk about the future like he did when Delta first appeared here.  More and more people on the same page, and it's not one in the GOP's playbook.  Although the Republicans are pandering to their base, the fact is that over 71 percent of Americans 18 and over - that is, Americans of voting age - are fully vaccinated.  Not all vaccinated adults are Democrats, of course, but most unvaccinated adults are Republicans.  If Republicans think they can rely on the unvaccinated to people them to victory in the 2022 midterms while President Biden and the Democrats continue to work diligently at trying to get things done for the American people - with plenty of time for their efforts to bear meaningful fruit before November 2022 - they're going to have to play a better hand than that.
Although, voter suppression remains an ace up their sleeves.          
Try to hang on, Maxine. 

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