Listen, as you walk along the street, to snatches of conversation from people who pass you by. In the past week, have you heard a single exchange that does not either touch on or dwell on the coronavirus? On the back stairs of the Washington Examiner’s offices in downtown D.C., I hear a couple of bankers from a floor above: “… but what if you only have a regular sore throat or cold? … I mean, does everything just shut down?” Out on the street, another couple of lunchtime office workers stroll by, and the words “infection” and “social distancing” float through the spring air. Despite the lack of a brown London fog, I’m reminded of T.S. Eliot’s line from The Waste Land, “… so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.”
Those conversations were overheard the day after Joe Biden all but secured the Democratic presidential nomination. Perhaps it’s because he is such an uninspiring candidate that no one was talking about it. But I suspect it is genuine fascination with the virus, something absolutely (if horrifyingly) new. A subject has to be utterly consuming if it is able, even in Washington, to displace the latest political gossip. We live and breathe elections here. The trouble is, we’re probably also breathing and, er, living with the coronavirus now.
The virus and its associated disease, COVID-19, lead our Washington Briefing section this week, and its devastating impact on markets is front and center of the Business section. Desmond Lachman, resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, also examines the threat the pandemic poses to the global and national economies, and he suggests that the credit bubble spawned by years of ultralow interest rates is about to burst.
But however dominant the virus is, we also have a full menu of political offerings, particularly election politics. In our cover story, “Back From the Dead,” James Antle unpacks perhaps the most extraordinary four days in the history of presidential primaries. Biden seemed all but finished and had certainly been written off by many a pundit. But from the Feb. 29 primary in South Carolina to Super Tuesday, on March 3, he effected a turnaround sufficient to give the political class whiplash. From dead to front-runner in one bound. In a companion piece, Joseph Simonson writes that the warning signs for Bernie Sanders were there from the beginning, and he mistook the protest votes he won in huge numbers against Hillary Clinton as genuine enthusiasm for radical left-wingery.
Elsewhere in the magazine, Daniel Ross Goodman reviews Harrison Ford’s new film, The Call of the Wild, Thomas Meaney is engrossed by the publication of Walter Kempowski’s Marrow And Bone in English, Eric Felten puts Brooks Brothers’s editing skills to the test, and Timothy Carney returns to the subject we started with, discovering that sneezing or coughing in public is about as welcome these days as shouting “Allahu akbar.”
