Faced with a likely Republican Senate, Biden has dim prospects for “democracy reform,” filibuster reform, criminal-justice reform or court reform, not to mention other meaningful legislative action like a public health-care option or the $2 trillion climate plan around which Biden - surprisingly, laudably - actually built a blitz of closing-message ads. The tragedy is bigger than that, with Biden hamstrung to act not just in the months before Inauguration Day but, maddeningly, in the months immediately after, as well. It is not simply that his presidency will arrive too late to address the pandemic’s winter surge. But to a large degree the damage is already done. Especially in the rollout of vaccines and mass testing, better management will help us-indeed any management would help. And while the recent experience of once-admired Europe suggests no western governments are capable of truly suppressing the pandemic for long, any interventions implemented by the Biden administration, even on day one, will still take at least weeks, and likely months, to roll out-arriving only in the spring, when vaccines will be rolling out, too, and when warmer weather will mean the disease was likely abating, anyway. Those planes are going to keep taking off, and crashing, every day for months.īy the time Joe Biden takes office, in January, perhaps 100,000 more Americans will have died. More than a thousand people died-an average toll, these days, equivalent to two 747 crashes, but which may soon come to seem “light” in retrospect. On Wednesday, as vote totals grew slowly towards a likely Biden presidency, more than 100,000 new American coronavirus cases were reported-a new record for a country that has already experienced two devastating pandemic peaks.
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