At the risk of stating the obvious, President Trump threatened and bullied over refusing to sign the COVID relief bill. In the end, he got nothing and signed it anyway. His statement included a slew of claims about how he made an important point and everyone got the message about how right he was. But in the end he folded. Because he always folds. It’s one of the most enduring patterns of his presidency. If he can’t get his way through threats, he folds.
In twenty years of doing this, one thing that strikes me again and again is the critical importance of naming things in politics. If the question is advocacy and persuasion few steps are more important than effectively and consistently naming the key developments, agenda items, threats and prizes and raising them in the public consciousness. There are few things – things that can be controlled by people involved in politics and campaigns, as opposed to the tides of historical change we are awash in – more important for Democrats to do a good job at in the next two yeas.
You know some examples of this. The ‘death tax’, for instance. Conservative operatives took the unglamorous and unsympathetic cause of trust fund kids and gave it a title with punch, ready understandability and even an edge of justice. In politics like everything else you simply must put your best foot forward. Just showing up or just doing a good job is never enough. You have to tell your story. You have to make sure people with a lot else on their plate know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and why it might be important to them that you succeed. That starts with naming things. That makes the thing visible and tells a story about it embedded in the name.
There’s a surreal confluence of events right now with President Trump’s push for $2,000 checks. In his effort to remain relevant, lash out and fuel the fantasy the election is still underway, President Trump glommed on to the Democrats’ proposal for $2,000 relief checks. Now it may end up both making $2,000 checks a reality and upending the Republicans in the Senate runoffs. It could be both, neither, a mix. But he’s now created a situation in which McConnell will really cut Loeffler and Perdue off at the knees if he doesn’t allow this vote to happen. They both say they support it. If McConnell, the guy who’s control of the senate is their election raison d’etre, opposes it where does that leave them? They’re both now endorsing it after consistently opposing it. And the Democrat Ossoff is the one who’s pushed them.
Since we spoke last the two Georgia Senators have endorsed $2,000 checks. Senate Democrats called for a vote and Mitch McConnell refused to allow a vote.
There it is. McConnell blocks motion to vote on Democrats' $2,000 relief checks bill. pic.twitter.com/iYceWbNxiU
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 29, 2020
I heard a very knowledgable hill reporter say that McConnell doesn’t care how unpopular this is in the country. He only cares about the majority and saving those two Senate Republicans. This doesn’t add up to me. I’ll say first that I don’t think these races will come down to stimulus checks. But the races are close enough that it could come down to anything and everything.
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There’s a fascinating and perhaps ominous article this morning in the LA Times about health care workers who are refusing to take or at least reluctant to take the COVID vaccine. There’s a range of reasons from reasons from things that might strike some of us as irrational to the general hesitancy of not wanting to be first to other things that have some logical basis. One nurse the reporters interviewed is six months pregnant and noted (which I believe is true) that the vaccine hasn’t yet been tested on pregnant women. I don’t know if there’s any clinical reason why this vaccine could operate differently in pregnant women. But I certainly know that many pregnant women and expectant fathers are highly cautious about anything that can disrupt a pregnancy.
I think we fool ourselves, are less than honest with ourselves, if we treat COVID vaccine hesitance or resistance as just a new version of the anti-vaccine activism we’ve seen for the last couple decades. It’s clearly connected to that phenomenon and is fueled by the climate of doubt it has created. But this is a new vaccine and (in the case of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines) uses a novel vaccine approach. Being wary of going first in such a case is simply not the same as refusing vaccines which have been administered literally billions of times and have track records of short term and long term safety going back decades.
JoinHere’s an installment from the 20 for 20 Anniversary series about TPM’s business history. It’s by Joe Ragazzo, TPM’s publisher. I’ve told you that all the other pieces I read for first time when they were published. This is the exception. I read a draft and suggested a few changes. But this remains an example of how histories are best told by those who weren’t the primary actors in them. Joe is the right person to tell you this story because of his centrality to the story and deep knowledge about the operation. I hired Joe as my assistant almost eight years ago and he became publisher last year.