If you would like to participate in a focus group I will conduct by Zoom on Thursday at 5pm ET, please send an email to mhfg@walkingduck.com and express your interest.
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This…isn’t about ideology; it’s about competence. It’s not about meaningless labels; it’s about American values—old-fashioned values like accountability and responsibility and respect for the truth.
-- Michael Dukakis, 1988
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Specificity is the character issue.
-- George Stephanopoulos, 1992
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This is not a time to lessen our efforts. If we let our guard down now, we could see the virus getting worse, not better….The war against COVID-19 is far from won. This is deadly serious.
-- Joe Biden, Monday
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1. The Biden administration continues its remarkable job fighting the pandemic, doing exactly what it said it would during the campaign. Team Biden is executing a plan based on science; federal-state cooperation; clear, consistent, creative, and robust public messaging; efficient vaccine distribution; massive allocation of resources; and nimble learning from what works and what doesn’t.
2. So far, this is a triumph of fulfilling a campaign pledge, the hard work of many in the administration, and a relentless focus on the most important rule in government (and the second most important rule in life): the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
3. While many other balls are being kept in the air with Congress, the press, and the public, what the first two months+ of the Biden-Harris administration has been about is grappling with the numerous public policy and public health challenges of the pandemic. That part of governance has been the sprinting part; everything else is the gum chewing part.
4. The immigration challenge/crisis is the exception that proves the rule; someday there will be a history written about how craftily the members of Team Biden deferred and delayed on the myriad other domestic and foreign decisions they faced in order to use as much bandwidth as possible fighting COVID, knowing, as they have said publicly and rightly, that nothing else would really matter if they didn’t get the pandemic right.
5. There have been missteps and misstatements along the way, of course, but please read Monday’s speech by the president (one of his best since assuming office): it is a vivid illustration of how to find a perfect-pitch balance between optimism and realism, and a strong example of how to set achievable goals that the nation can rally around.
6. Yes, the progress is driven to a large degree by the deployment of vaccines developed during the Trump administration. But no one can look at how Joe Biden and his government are handling this phase of the pandemic and say with a straight face that this is how Donald Trump would have acted during this chapter in the existential struggle.
7. Government is rarely black and white, but if the pandemic is not largely brought under control by Halloween, the blame will almost certainly rest with lax governors, irresponsible citizens, and fierce virus variants – not the Biden administration. This could end up being one of the most remarkable achievements of governance in the last 50 years or longer.
8. There is a lot of credit to go around for this, but that same history book, if it is done correctly, is going to heavily feature the name Jeffrey Zients, a man of pronounced competence and specificity.
9. This list is not made up of opinions or even analysis. These are carefully curated facts.
10. Cue, somewhat prematurely, the music:
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ESSENTIAL READING
A. The Washington Post on the Biden-Harris-Klain judges strategy, undergirded by the judges tactics:
President Biden plans to announce his first slate of judicial nominees on Tuesday, elevating U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the influential appeals court in Washington to succeed Merrick Garland as part of the largest and earliest batch of court picks by a new administration in decades.
Jackson, often mentioned as someone who could become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, is among Biden’s 11 nominations that include three Black women for appeals court vacancies and the first Muslim American to serve on a District Court. The group is designed to send a message about the administration’s desire for more diversity on the federal bench and how rapidly the president wants to put his mark on it…
Top White House officials have said that judicial nominations are a priority. They are attempting to fill vacancies more quickly — in part responding to criticism that President Barack Obama acted slowly — and use them as a rallying cry for the party in a way that Republicans have done for decades.
By this point in his first term, Obama had made only one judicial nomination. Trump, known for his record-setting pace of nominations, had picked two.
President George H.W. Bush had made two appellate court picks and three district court picks by this point in his term, while Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan hadn’t announced any. President George W. Bush also hadn’t named anyone, although on May 9, 2001, he announced 11 for the appeals courts.
The Post reported last month that the Biden administration is also following a Trump practice to speed up the process, forgoing the American Bar Association review of candidates in advance of formal nominations. The Senate Judiciary Committee could hold hearings on the nominations by late April.
B. Also, the Washington Post with more details on Andrew Cuomo’s early Friends and Family COVID testing program, with more evidence (as if any were needed), via on-the-record quotes from Team Andrew and Team Chris, that the New York government and CNN are every bit as transparent, honest, and truthful as the Trump administration they both so derided from the highest of horses.
Accountability is a character issue, also.
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