Thread by @ASlavitt

COVID Update July 20: COVID has proven a few things about government, at least to me.

And it bears on a lot of our next moves. 1/

1. When you elect a president, you elect a whole government.

The political staff touches 100 things the president never gets to see for every 1 he does. Unless the right people are in the job & their manager & well led, it’s far worse than one person.2/

A partial list during the pandemic.

Few A players
HHS & CDC at odds
Scientists largely ignored
Good people won’t work for certain people
Low confidence in FDA
Backbiting and blaming

3/

Dr. Birx getting it wrong as the @nytimes reported is more a problem with how the president picks his team, how he allows himself to be influenced & the signals he sends of what he wants than it is about 1 advisor. 4/

People gave Obama good & bad advice & were not always right. But @JoeBiden & @DenisMcDonough made sure the smartest people in the country were on hand, all views were sought, data was presented & the president had room to deliberate & measure the effect. 5/

2. Starve government or starve the country. Pick one.

I gave a speech last December at the @UMNews School of Public Health. I called for $100 billion immediate investment in public health.

It sounded like a lot then. It sounds paltry now. 6/

Cutting the estate tax & cutting corporate taxes from 35-21% engineering buybacks was a “small government” fantasy.

Wealthy people won at least 3 times: lower personal, lower estate, stock buybacks. And they would have lowered capital gains further.

7/

What was the cost of that besides piling on to the debt?

Starving our country of having a damn stockpile of working ventilators. Of masks. Of public health workers. Of testing apparatus.

Let alone: access to health care. And SNAP. And adequate housing. 8/

If we can’t recognize this as a huge mistake, we are missing a major point.

“Starve the government & it will get more efficient” has been & still is the classic rhetoric. Now we’re so starved that it will be $5 trillion of costs in direct $ and a lost economy at least. 9/

3. It brings me to my next point. Government is supposed to work for us. We hire. We fire.

Along with losing $5 trillion+ will come a massive loss of life. And lost jobs & insecurity it will take years to catch up to. 10/

Your elected representative doesn’t always think they work for you.

How many town halls do they have vs lobby meetings they take?

How often do they vote with their party against their constituents? Just take areas of public health alone: school gun safety? NIH cuts?

11/

One of my most frequently asked questions is what’s the one thing we can do to fix the health care system. That’s an easy one for me.

Electoral & lobbying reform.

Voting Rights Act, gerrymandering, electoral college, C-U overturn.12/

The Senate that we hired right now is in the middle of a no oversight-no support-no communication strategy that has people hanging on to their housing by a thread w no savings & not sure how they’ll put food on the table. 13/

There’s only one thing I’ve seen a politician fear more than a lobbyist. A fired up electorate. 14/

4. Political courage is worth its weight in gold & should be rewarded.

Look at Govs Baker, DeWine, Murphy, Inslee, Cooper, Abbott (belatedly), Hogan, Pritzker, Polis, Brown, Newsom, Lamont, Whitmer, Cuomo (on recovery). There are others.

None perfect. All showed guts. 15/

Think of this. Arkansas, Alabama, Montana & Texas have mask mandates. That is not poll tested.

That is putting people ahead of popularity.

Compare to the approaches of Kemp, of DeSantis, of Ducey. All the wrong instincts for a crisis. 16/

If your governor hasn’t mandated masks, closed the indoor bars or laid out a careful plan for schools, that’s an issue.

If your governor hasn’t been willing to stand up to political heat, they’re just trying to weasel a path to a presidential debate stage. 17/

People we hire must explain their thinking & shout down bullies.

Burgum and Reeves both had moments of where they stood up to people spreading nonsense.

This isn’t to invite comments on other aspects of all these governors just this one point. (Bye bye mentions) 18/

Whatever party you may be, I want to see a governor who would rather be fired than have people die. 19/

5. Being smart counts.

Since when did it become elitist to suggest maybe we want our politicians to be one of the smartest people in the room?

Prefer Kemp who didn’t know the virus spread asymptomatically or Baker who knows every element of the health care system? 20/

I’m not talking about “thinks they’re smart.”

Prefer a president who shuts down the task force on May 1, all of 2 months into a novel virus & a global pandemic because they know it all? 21/

Look, I’m not going to get into Trump. It’s well covered space on this website.

But to me smart means listens to smart people. Smart means makes & sticks to plans. Smart means understanding cause & effect. 22/

6. Division has a high price

We all have things we want from our candidate & our party. But when we have a winner take all mentality & don’t govern the people who voted for the other person, it is hard to move forward in tough times. 23/

In war times past, after 9/11 before it was squandered, the country was willing to support the leader who called them together.

We had absolutely nothing invested by our leaders in a common language or common ideals. Only rallies for the base & divisive language. 24/

In this I will take on Trump’s behavior.

Teaching people to hate immigrants, distrust each other, increase the racial divide, focus on the rural-urban differences & crudely talk about women & cultures was an election strategy that worked.

But it’s not a hovering strategy. 25/

Don’t elect someone who can’t speak to the whole state or country. Who won’t be able to or won’t be interested in unifying us. 26/

7. Governments that look more like the people do better at serving the people.

Women in New Zealand & Germany and Iceland. Deputy PM of Canada. Mayors & local leaders around the country. 27/

A government of privileged wealthy people who never struggled or anything & who aren’t at all in touch with how people live may not be the way to do.

It’s an argument not just for racial, gender, ability, and sexual orientation diversity. Which I think it is. 28/

It’s also an argument for people who’ve taken the train to work. People who are first and second generation college graduates. People in their first few generations in the country. People who can name the date & time & feeling when their ancestors touched our shores. 29/

We are trying the experiment with the billionaires in the cabinet who love the power & lack the commitment.

We can’t build our future with a Dept of Ed that cares nothing for kids, an EPA that cares nothing for the environment & an HHS that leaves out whole communities. 30/

It turns out our government matters after all. It’s how we do things when we need to work together. It’s how we decide to put our resources to work. And it turns out they’re not “all the same.”

A government that can manage a pandemic is not too much to ask. It’s the least. /end

One final point.

We do have leaders with the biography, the disposition & the traits we want in a leader. I talked to one of them today.

Smarturl.it/inthebubble

* governing