Joe Biden, stripped of his ability to hold events or campaign traditionally and robbed of the usual spotlight afforded to presidential challengers, has tried to stay relevant. Typically, this has meant giving softball TV interviews from his basement, but even in these, he stumbles.
On Thursday, however, he attempted to inject himself into the national debate about reopening the economy with an utterly shallow and sanctimonious statement on Twitter. The former vice president declared: “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: No one is expendable. No life is worth losing to add one more point to the Dow.”
This sort of pandering is ridiculous and unbefitting of somebody who believes he should be the leader of the free world.
Every life is precious. But everybody, and particularly presidents, must make decisions that assess risk but cannot eliminate it. The notion that we cannot engage in any activity or pursue any policy that might result in one lost life is utterly unrealistic. Logically, it would mean nobody would ever get into an airplane or a car. It would mean shutting down Biden’s beloved Amtrak because of the hundreds of deaths that have resulted from train crashes in recent decades.
Widespread lockdowns were instituted not because of the risk that one person may die but because hundreds of thousands might be killed if its spread were not slowed. We wouldn’t discuss social distancing to save one life. Biden proudly served in the Obama administration that, appropriately, didn’t shut down the country when two people died of Ebola in 2014.
The second part of Biden’s contemptibly shallow statement, “to add one more point to the Dow,” dodges and denigrates the necessary and serious public policy debate about how the economy can be rekindled and a disastrous recession or depression avoided. It’s worth stating, first of all, that the Democratic nominee’s flippant dismissal of “the Dow” ignores the fact that stock market performance doesn’t matter only to Wall Street bankers. It’s important to the majority of people who own stocks and depend on a rising market to finance their retirements. It’s also important to those who don’t own stocks, for it is a measure of the health and strength of businesses upon which the entire workforce depends for income. Those calling for a reopening of the economy aren’t in any case focusing on the stock market, which incidentally rebounded considerably in April. Tens of millions of people have already lost their jobs, and many small businesses are on the brink of extinction.
As long as shutdowns remain in place and people are too afraid to go out, businesses that depend on social interaction are going to fail. There is also a tremendous cost to mental and physical health to maintaining closures of businesses, as well as of parks and other outdoor recreational spaces. Children, who are at extremely low risk for coming down with a severe case of COVID-19, have seen their schools and camps closed, which also places a greater burden on working parents.
Leaders at all levels, business owners, and individuals will have to make decisions about reopening and returning to some semblance of normal life. And we must do so with the clear understanding that the risk of lost life will never fall to zero. Even with all of the shelter-in-place orders and social distancing, by early May, there were still some 75,000 deaths from COVID-19.
As president, Biden would have to guide the nation through difficult decisions in which loss of life is a continuous risk. Pandering on social media with declarations about not losing a single life is deeply unserious and suggests the Democratic nominee would fail in that task were he elected to the White House.
