Joe Biden, believe it or not, is still running for president, and so at a moment when he can contribute precisely nothing, those close to him have apparently advised him that he should try making a bunch of noise and hope people will notice he’s still conscious.
Democrats and most of the national media have signaled that they feel perfectly at ease with an extended national economic shutdown, and the former vice president reminded us of that, saying in an interview Friday with Politico that he wants another multitrillion-dollar coronavirus response bill. This one, he said, would need to be “a hell of a lot bigger” than the $2 trillion relief bill that Congress passed last month.
Because Biden is quoted as saying “hell” and “son of a bitch,” Politico’s Michael Grunwald felt justified in describing the interview as “fiery,” but for those who read it, it would more accurately be characterized as “uncomfortable” or “unhelpful.”
Biden said in the interview he wants to print more money for unemployment benefits and to start up on various “green energy” projects, but he said nothing about the desperate and urgent need to move people in this country back to their jobs.
Biden, wrote Grunwald, “[S]ounded comfortable” talking about managing a massive stimulus spending bill, “[A]lthough there were a couple of typically hard-to-follow tangents, and one brief coughing interruption that [Biden] attributed to swallowing a peanut the wrong way.”
But, again, no word from the former vice president about people returning to their normal lives.
After having been shaken into a paralyzing fear, told to leave their jobs and lock themselves indoors at home to slow the spread of a deadly virus, the public is understandably nervous about venturing back to work and resuming normal life. That’s especially true for New York, New Jersey, some parts of California, and a few other cities elsewhere, considering those were the places hit hardest by COVID-19 infections.
It’s not their fault that they were told to give up their daily routines and burrow away without being given any clear sense of when they could go back, despite all indications that the new coronavirus is not a severe health threat to the overwhelming majority of people.
It’s good that developers are hastily searching for a vaccine and effective treatment against the virus because both are needed, but they’re fairly silent on one thing: that as a society, we may also have to face the possibility that most of us may have to contract the virus in order to begin developing some kind of resistance to it. That’s probably been well underway as it is, anyway, but it means we have to reopen for regular business.
Biden didn’t say anything useful in that “fiery” interview, though that’s been the case for months.
