How about taking time now to subscribe to -- or make a donation to -- Wide World of News?
You read it daily – now please join others in helping to support my work.
You can subscribe at the monthly, annual, or Founding Member rates here:
Or make a smaller, one-time voluntary contribution (any amount welcome) to keep this newsletter alive.
Making a donation is easy!
Just reply to this email to learn how.
****
An online Town Hall meeting with Mark Halperin
Monday, November 16, 2020
7:00pm Eastern Time
PLEASE JOIN ME TOMORROW FOR A TOWN HALL MEETING
Hear my take -- and then I will take your questions.
To register for this FREE Zoom session, click here.
****
Meet Danny Rice, who is the anecdotal lead of an Associated Press essential read AND, come January, who is Joe Biden’s problem:
Surging virus cases get a shrug in many Midwestern towns
ELMWOOD, Neb. (AP) — Danny Rice has a good sense of how dangerous the coronavirus can be.
What puzzles him are the people who have curtailed so much of their lives to avoid being infected by the virus.
“I’m not going out and looking to catch it,” he said, sitting at a cluttered desk in his auto repair shop in the tiny eastern Nebraska community of Elmwood. “I don’t want to catch it. But if I get it, I get it. That’s just how I feel.”
Plenty of people agree with Rice, and health experts acknowledge those views are powering soaring COVID-19 infection rates, especially in parts of the rural Midwest where the disease is spreading unabated and threatening to overwhelm hospitals.
It’s not that people in Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa and elsewhere don’t realize their states are leading the nation in new cases per capita. It’s that many of them aren’t especially concerned.
Wayne County, home to 6,400 people in southern Iowa, has the state’s second-highest case rate, yet its public health administrator, Shelley Bickel, says mask-wearing is rare. She finds it particularly appalling when she sees older people, who are at high risk, shopping at a grocery store without one.
“I just want to get on the speaker and say, ‘Why don’t you have your mask on?’ It’s just amazing,” Bickel said.
Jenna Lovaas, public health director of Jones County, Iowa, said even now that her rural county has the state’s highest virus rate, people have opted not to make any changes, such as protecting themselves and others by wearing masks.
“They don’t think it’s real,” she said. “They don’t think it’s going to be that bad or they just don’t want to wear a mask because we’ve made it a whole political thing at this point.”
HALPERIN SAYS (to Anita Dunn): How about seating Rice, Bickel, and Lovaas, masked and side-by-side-by-physically-distanced-side with Jill Biden in the (virtual?) box at the upcoming address to a joint session of Congress?
****
Paul Kane’s masterful essential read on the Master of the Senate, JRB, contains this wowza yowza quote:
“The one most important ingredient a sitting president needs is the Senate of the same party. It is really, really important,” Biden said in early August 2016 in his West Wing office….”
HALPERIN SAYS:
* 30,000 feet – Washington 2021 depends entirely on the contours and trajectory of the Biden-McConnell relationship.
* 35,000 feet – Washington 2021 depends entirely on if Joe Biden is a Man for Our Times or a Man Out of Time.
****
Essential reading annotated passage from an essential reading Washington Post story about the Biden agenda:
HALPERIN SAYS: See above.
****
Research shows that nearly two-thirds of Wide World of News readers (64%) think constantly (as opposed to just quadrennially) about the relationships between issues, demographics, party brands, and the Electoral College.
Which means that for 32% of you (4% either “don’t know” or “have no opinion”), this Dan Balz piece on what the 2020 results say about 2024 and beyond will not be essential reading.
HALPERIN SAYS: JUST KIDDING! Essential reading for one and all!
****
The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin on his Friday ten-minute phone interview with Donald Trump:
Friday, [Trump] spoke to Geraldo Rivera of Fox News, a longtime friend, with Rivera saying on Twitter that the president admitted that winning was a “long shot” and that he would ultimately do “the right thing.”
I got a similar sense of the president’s mood, even as he resisted saying anything definitive. In our 10-minute phone interview, he spoke evenly, displaying no anger or even agitation. There was a matter-of-fact tone that suggested an understanding of the inevitable.
In different ways, I asked if he would accept the results if his court challenges fail.
“We’ll see how it turns out,” he said at one point.
When I asked if he could come to terms with defeat, he responded only that “it’s hard to come to terms when they won’t let your poll watchers in to observe” the counting.
A third time, he said, “Again, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen.”
HALPERIN SAYS: If the president himself calls a comeback win a “long shot,” someone should tell https://twitter.com/JennaEllisEsq
****
Give me 30 seconds, I will give you the world.
HALPERIN SAYS: If not the whole world, I will give you (A) a window into the unparalleled 2024 ambitions of Tom Cotton; (B) a sense of an important slice of the Georgia runoff; (C) an understanding of the current sharp iconography of the 2020 Republican Party in the South, including where the boundaries (such as they are) are on race; (D) enough dog whistles to help out this walker:
****
* Amazing:
* Caveated:
HALPERIN SAYS: Perhaps Joe Biden would have done even worse on this score without Kamala Harris on the ticket, which reminds me of Halperin’s Fourth Law of Election Returns and Exit Poll Analysis: assume nothing.
****
Want the latest analysis about what’s happened and the forecast about what happens next?
Have Mark Halperin speak by videoconference or in person to your organization.
Email inquiries to markhalperintalk@gmail.com