In the blink of an eye, all of our current concerns and distractions, up to and including our presidential election, disappeared this month beneath a wave. That wave, the coronavirus, washed over so many great countries, and it left so little behind it intact.
President Trump has perhaps changed more than anyone. He went from being the one man in the world who was his own biggest problem to being one of a number of national leaders staring down a great threat. No longer the problem, he was one of the group who were trying to fix it. With that shift in perspective, his place in the whole scheme of things altered. The emphasis now was much less upon who and what he was as a person than on what he was trying to do.
“His team is on it,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, son of a prominent liberal dynasty, told us on Thursday. “They have been responsive late at night, early in the morning … thus far, they have been doing everything that they can do, and I want to say that I appreciate it.”
Like George W. Bush after Sept. 11, his opponents blamed him for not having foreseen an unprecedented calamity no one had imagined. But as with Bush, the public felt differently. A poll released recently seemed to confirm it with 55% approving of his handling of the coronavirus.
Someone else whose status was changed by the crisis was the Democrats’ all-but-sure nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden. He went from one of the country’s most visible national figures to invisible man. Since the crisis occurred, he has yielded the field and the microphone to people in Congress and Democratic state governors — most of all Cuomo, whose state has been by far the hardest hit. Cuomo’s updates, along with the ones given out by the White House, are carried full time by all of the networks and treated as major events.
Last week, the Associated Press reported that Biden and aides have closed all their offices and are working from home. “There’s little evidence that mass hiring is imminent” for the campaign, and “high dollar fundraising events are on hold.” Worse still, the great sudden shift in focus and in concentration that occurred in the wake of the crash and the virus has also shattered Biden’s stated reason for running. He was supposed to be the sane, civil person, running against a man who at many times seemed to be neither, who broke norms and commandments with gleeful abandon, and whom nothing and no one could shame.
Then came the plague, something bigger than Trump. Biden would now have to be not only nicer than Trump, but also more capable of seeming in control without melting down amidst a crisis. Of this there has never been any proof — in contrast, the executive Cuomo in his timely reports has quickly emerged as a modern Churchill.
Is there a Cuomo in all of our futures? Only time and the Biden can tell.
