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Westneat: Politicization of everything makes us ill
By Danny Westneat
Published: March 8, 2020, 6:01am
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Nobody has the foggiest idea how much COVID-19 is ultimately going to affect our health, our economy and maybe, in the long run, our culture. But it has highlighted how America is suffering already from another crippling disease: the total politicization of everything.
That the first instinct of some of our political leaders when faced with a possible pandemic is to trade juvenile political insults is just the latest low point in our partisanship epidemic. And it might be the most dangerous yet.
It starts at the top, of course. President Trump’s impulse to portray himself as having defeated the virus, and then to excoriate those who disagreed as perpetrating “a hoax,” should go down in history on the list of all-time wrongheaded presidential hubris. “Within a couple days, (it is) going to be down to close to zero,” Trump confidently declared.
This is inexcusable behavior by a top public official. What’s most vital in a disease outbreak is solid, honest information. Our top public official bragging and insulting his way through it all, for partisan point-scoring, is an extreme example of what has become a national sickness.
This is no slag on politics generally. Partisan politics is incredibly useful as a frame for the public to make decisions about policy issues. But some things simply have to be beyond it, at least in the moment. Aren’t we all by definition on the same team when a virus invades?
Trump is by far our top tribal politicizer of absolutely everything, but he isn’t the only one. When Trump curtailed flights from China a month ago to try to stem the virus, he was lambasted by some on the left for xenophobia. Fine, that’s a policy disagreement, but it sure looks now like it was one that Trump got right.
It was likewise disappointing that Gov. Jay Inslee chose to kick off our state’s response to the crisis like this: “I just received a call from VP Mike Pence, thanking Washington state for our efforts to combat the coronavirus,” Inslee tweeted. “I told him our work would be more successful if the Trump administration stuck to the science and told the truth.”
So … the veep called to thank the governor, and instead of using this rare cease-fire to wrangle some coronavirus testing kits or have a frank conversation, the governor opted to dunk on him. Even though Inslee has a point — we desperately need more science and truth — it seems like no time for him to go to political war with the federal government.
I’ve instead taken to following the postings of scientists, especially the local blog by Trevor Bedford at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Monday, Bedford projected that once some testing is done, Seattle likely will be found to have around 600 infections. So our city will resemble Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak, back around Jan. 1.
“Three weeks later, Wuhan had thousands of infections and was put on large-scale lock-down,” Bedford wrote. “However, these large-scale non-pharmaceutical interventions to create social distancing had a huge (positive) impact on the resulting epidemic. China averted many millions of infections.”
Now that is bold transparency in real time, broaching hard data and provocative but constructive ideas without regard to political fallout. Imagine if our actual leaders displayed this sort of openness, curiosity and competency.
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