Trump's Mass Negligent Homicide Doesn't Let Democratic Leaders Off the Hook
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
30 March 20
In the last few days, New York and Pennsylvania postponed voting in
presidential primaries from April until June. A dozen other states have also
rescheduled. Those wise decisions are in sharp contrast to a failure of
leadership from Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee.
Just two weeks ago, the party establishment was vehemently pushing back
against efforts to delay several mid-March primaries in response to the
coronavirus emergency. DNC Chair Tom Perez issued a statement that The Hill
newspaper summed up with the headline "DNC Calls on States Not to Postpone
Primaries." Perez put out the statement on the day that three states were
holding primary elections.
Ohio was also scheduled to have a presidential primary that day, but at the
eleventh hour it was postponed thanks to the state's Republican governor.
Incredibly, Perez quickly criticized the prudent delay of Ohio's election,
saying it "only bred more chaos and confusion."
In Illinois, with the DNC's encouragement, Governor J.B. Pritzker - a
billionaire whose billionaire sister Penny Pritzker was Barack Obama's 2008
national campaign finance chair and later became his Secretary of Commerce -
refused to reschedule the March 17 primary. Just three days later, he
announced a "stay-at-home" order for the whole state.
Think about it: On Tuesday, the governor enables an Illinois election that
draws about a million voters and thousands of election workers to voting
sites that day. On Friday, the same governor orders everyone in the state to
stay home.
Perez - who became DNC chair three years ago as the candidate of the party's
Clintonite so-called "moderate" (corporate) wing - is clearly aligned with
Biden, as Perez's appointments to key committees for the party's 2020
national convention have underscored. Postponing primary races in states
where Biden was way ahead in opinion polls, as in Illinois, would risk
slowing his momentum against Bernie Sanders.
Biden's interest in going ahead with the March 17 primaries - public health
be damned - was expressed by his campaign's spokeswoman Symone Sanders
during a March 15 interview on CNN. "I encourage people to get out there and
vote on Tuesday," she said. The spin included upbeat, patriotism-tinged
rationales like: "In times of war, in times of strife, our country has
always upheld our need to uphold our democracy. We have voted in war time;
votes were held many times in this country after times of strife."
In their zeal to boost the number of Biden delegates as fast as possible,
the Biden campaign and the DNC chair ignored or distorted the guidelines
that were in effect at the time from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. "Deeply disappointed that the DNC is willfully choosing not to
listen to scientists during one of the most critical moments in recent
history," biologist Dr. Lucky Tran tweeted on March 17, when voters in three
states were casting Democratic primary ballots.
By then, as CBS News noted, even the White House had "issued new guidelines
designed to slow the rapid spread of coronavirus, asking nearly every
American to stay home from work or school for the next 15 days."
(An excellent account of this egregious saga is Katie Halper's recent
article for the national media watch group FAIR: "Media Silent as Poll
Workers Contract Covid-19 at Primaries That DNC, Biden Campaign Claimed Were
Safe.")
Looking ahead, the postponements of primaries in some states may give enough
time to implement widespread voting by mail. As Charles Chamberlain, the
chair of Democracy for America, wrote over the weekend, "The public health
risks from gathering in large numbers are real and volunteer poll workers,
who are typically in the highest risk age group for getting the virus,
should not be expected to spend hours on end helping neighbors vote. We must
move immediately to establish automatic vote-by-mail procedures nationwide
so elections can go forward safely with minimal risk to the general public."
Trump bears the overwhelming responsibility for the deadly governmental
negligence as the Covid-19 pandemic has spread in the United States. But
that reality in no way made it okay for the Biden campaign and the DNC to
forcefully advocate for retaining a primary schedule that was certain to
expose people to the virus.
Even with the new heights of the coronavirus emergency in late March, mass
emails from the Biden campaign and the DNC have been stale pitches for
donations, often leaving the coronavirus unmentioned. At the same time,
Biden's TV interviews have ranged from uninspiringly passable to stumblingly
embarrassing.
Meanwhile, along with raising millions of dollars for care-giving charities,
the Sanders campaign has been energetic and creative online - with efforts
such as championing health protection for Amazon workers, calling for
comprehensive healthcare for everyone in the country during the pandemic,
fighting huge corporate rip-offs of the public, and providing strong
progressive populist messages during TV interviews.
The anemic response to the Covid-19 emergency from Biden and his allies is
another ominous sign that he is ill-equipped to rid the country of the vile
Trump presidency. Another straw in the wind is a new Washington Post / ABC
News national poll that shows an enormous voter-motivation gap - with Trump
supporters far more "enthusiastic" about their candidate than Biden
supporters are.
The political strategy of reliance on emphasizing how bad Donald Trump is -
without offering dynamic progressive leadership - was a catastrophic failure
four years ago. Providing feeble alternatives, while reminiscing about real
or imagined glory days of the Obama administration, is apt to prove woefully
inadequate in 2020.
