The Morning Dispatch: Bernie Endorses Biden

Happy Tuesday. To quote both President Trump discussing his administration’s coronavirus response in a press conference Monday evening and Declan and Andrew putting the finishing touches on this edition of the Morning Dispatch, “Everything we did was right!”

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• As of Monday night, there are now 581,918 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States (a 4.8 percent increase from yesterday) and 23,608 deaths (a 7 percent increase from yesterday), according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, leading to a mortality rate among confirmed cases of 4.1 percent (the true mortality rate is difficult to calculate due to incomplete testing regimens). Of 2,935,006 coronavirus tests conducted in the United States, 19.7 percent have come back positive, per the COVID Tracking Project, a separate dataset with slightly different topline numbers.

• The Supreme Court announced it will hear oral arguments for the upcoming term via teleconference due to coronavirus concerns.

• States are beginning to form regional coalitions to discuss how to begin reopening aspects of the economy once the coronavirus crisis has passed. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Delaware and Rhode Island make up one. California, Oregon, and Washington represent another.

• Nearly a week after Wisconsinites went to the polls in the midst of a pandemic, we have the final results. Joe Biden extended his delegate lead over the now-dormant Bernie Sanders campaign, and Judge Jill Karofsky—a liberal challenger—won a seat on the state’s Supreme Court.

Biden and Bernie Let Bygones Be Bygones

When Bernie Sanders ended his once-formidable presidential campaign last week, he wasn’t quite ready to endorse the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. But Sanders’ rhetoric toward Joe Biden at the time was—for the Vermont curmudgeon—remarkably warm and amicable. On Monday, Bernie made his intentions known.

“Today, I am asking all Americans … to come together in this campaign, to support your candidacy, which I endorse,” Sanders told Joe Biden shortly after sliding into the former VP’s virtual campaign event like an aged Cris Collinsworth in NBC’s Sunday Night Football booth. “We’ve gotta make Trump a one-term president, and we need you in the White House. I will do all that I can to see that that happens, Joe.”

Biden, for his part, appeared humbled by Sanders’ words, promising he would do all he could to reach out to the Vermont senator’s supporters, most of whom are more progressive and anti-establishment than his own. “I’m going to need you, not just to win the campaign, but to govern,” Biden told his onetime rival. “To your supporters: I see you, I hear you, I understand the urgency of what it is that we have to get done in this country. And I hope you’ll join us; the more the merrier. We need to come together. We need to defeat Donald Trump.”

We detailed in last Thursday’s Morning Dispatch how Biden needs to unify various Democratic coalitions if he is to unseat Donald Trump in November. Hillary Clinton blamed the so-called Bernie bros—and their preferred candidate, who, in 2016, did not endorse the Democratic nominee until July—for her Electoral College loss in 2016. Multiple polls have now found four in five Sanders supporters plan to pull the lever (or mail the ballot) for Biden in a little over six months, a figure that should only increase as news of Bernie’s endorsement spreads.

There will continue to be holdouts. The Sanders campaign’s former press secretary and one of its top surrogates, for example. “With the utmost respect for Bernie Sanders, who is an incredible human being and a genuine inspiration, I don’t endorse Joe Biden,” Briahna Joy Gray tweeted Monday. Shaun King outlined five steps Biden would have to take—including “admit[ting] that he’s the primary architect of modern day mass incarceration”—to earn his support. But these voices—while certainly among the loudest—don’t appear to represent the vast majority of Bernie’s base, for whom defeating Donald Trump is priority number one.

“I’m gonna vote for Biden, and you know why?” one Sanders supporter told The Daily Beast’s Sam Stein. “Because I’m not a dumbass. If Trump gets re-elected, there will be no more checks on the executive branch. Biden is nowhere near as progressive as I want, but we can figure that out when Trump is out of the White House.”

The Biden campaign has begun to roll out some modest concessions to the progressive wing of the Democratic party—lowering the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60 and forgiving public university student loan debt for low- and middle-income Americans—and more are likely on the way after the former vice president’s joint announcement with Sanders of six policy working groups focusing on the economy, education, criminal justice reform, immigration, climate change, and health care.

“This is further proof that even though Bernie Sanders won’t be on the ballot in November, his issues will be,” Brad Parscale—the campaign manager for Trump’s reelection bid—said in a statement. “Biden had to adopt most of Bernie’s agenda to be successful in the Democrat primaries.”

“The whole process of coming together should be uncomfortable for everyone involved,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Astead Herndon of the New York Times in an interview. “That’s how you know it’s working. And if Biden is only doing things he’s comfortable with, then it’s not enough.”

Will State Overreach Hurt the Coronavirus Effort?

In Monday’s Morning Dispatch, we talked about how the Swedish government is steering clear of many of the strict social distancing measures ongoing in many other countries, in an attempt to ensure that public buy-in for the government strategy “can be sustained over a longer period” of multiple months. They are betting, in effect, that while their virus situation looks grimmer compared to much of the rest of the world right now, they will be better off down the road if other countries’ overstifled populations simply refuse to abide by severe strictures any longer, and the virus is able to come roaring back.

It’s a risky strategy. But it does underscore a key point that all levels of our government should keep in mind: Social distancing measures are effective only if they are observed nearly universally. As such, state and local authorities should be very careful to issue only such restrictions as are directly intended to frustrate the spread of the coronavirus. People know and accept that mitigation measures will be obtrusive in a dire situation. But authorities should take pains to ensure they do not appear unduly or arbitrarily so.

In some parts of the country, unfortunately, authorities are failing to walk this tightrope, instead making policy and enforcement decisions that tip past aggressive prudence into what looks more like power-tripping.

Some of these decisions have involved overly ornate rules about what commerce and travel is considered “essential” and thus permissible under lockdown. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom Joe Biden is currently considering for his vice presidential pick, came under fire over the weekend for her new and expanded stay-at-home order, which prohibits practically all travel between residences and contains a plethora of new restrictions on what can and cannot be sold, including requirements for big-box stores to cordon off their furniture sections and…garden centers? The vaguely worded order has left businesses across the state bewildered about whether they can lawfully remain open: “There’s just confusion all over the place,” a spokesperson for the Michigan Retailers Association told state news nonprofit Bridge.

Other flash points centered around Easter services on Sunday. Last week, the mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, Greg Fischer, forbade churches from holding drive-in parking lot services to commemorate the holiday. “If you are a church or you are a churchgoing member and you do that, you’re in violation of the mandate from the governor, you’re in violation of the request from my office and city government not to do that,” Fischer said. “We’re saying no church worshiping, no drive-thrus.” Fischer further threatened to have police record the license plates of all people attending such services to track them down and order them into a still stricter quarantine. On Saturday, a federal judge slapped Fischer’s decision down, calling it “stunning” and “beyond all reason unconstitutional” and pointing out that if cars can still gather in parking lots for secular purposes, the state must permit them to do the same for religious ones.

Advocates of such policies argue that we must be willing temporarily to suspend constitutional rights like freedom of assembly if we’re to beat the threat of the coronavirus. But when authorities issue rulings that feel unduly heavy-handed, they risk falling into both bad outcomes at once: restricting peoples’ liberty until they lose trust that the restrictions are truly for their own good and stop sticking with the program. 

The Latest Task Force Briefing

You thought you were getting through this with nary a mention of President Trump’s latest press conference antics, didn’t you?

We’ll try to spare you as much as we can—the briefing ran nearly two-and-a-half grisly hours and made next to no news that will matter three days from now—but a visibly upset president repeatedly lashed out at the media and his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. Here are a few exchanges worth noting.

• Dr. Tony Fauci addressed an interview he did on Sunday in which he argued earlier mitigation efforts “could have saved lives” but that “there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.” Fauci reiterated his claim on Monday—saying “if mitigation works, and you initiate it earlier, you will probably have saved more lives”—but he added that President Trump has always heeded the advice he and Dr. Deborah Birx have given. “The first and only time that Dr. Birx and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the president to actually have a ‘shutdown’ … the president listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation.”

• Near the beginning of the press conference, Trump stepped away from the podium while TVs in the briefing room aired a campaign-style video montage critiquing media coverage of the coronavirus while touting his administration’s handling of the pandemic. The video, which Trump said was produced by White House staff “in a period of probably less than two hours,” cherrypicked news clips featuring reporters and medical experts downplaying the threat of the coronavirus back in January and early February while excluding Trump repeatedly doing the same well into March.

• Asked about his tweet earlier in the day arguing—incorrectly—the decision to “open up the states” rests with the president, not individual governors, Trump said: “When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s gotta be.” He added that he “let” states be the ones to order schools and restaurants close because he “preferred that,” but added that, “if I wanted to, I could have closed it up.”

• In response to those comments, GOP Rep. Liz Cheney was quick to point out “the federal government does not have absolute power.” Rep. Justin Amash, the libertarian-minded independent, argued “state governments are not local branches of the federal government; they have different powers and functions. Putting one government in charge of everything does not strengthen our system; it weakens our system and makes everyone more vulnerable to serious errors.”

Worth Your Time

• This NPR piece makes for a depressing read, but ignoring it doesn’t make the situation any better. A team of investigative reporters took a long look at each of the promises of swift federal action President Trump made when he declared a national emergency just over a month ago. “Rather than a sweeping national campaign of screening, drive-through sample collection and lab testing,” NPR found “a smattering of small side projects and aborted efforts. In some cases, no action was taken at all.”

• Several weeks ago, Tara Reade—a former senate staffer for Joe Biden—accused the presumptive Democratic nominee of sexually assaulting her back in 1993. A spokesperson for the Biden campaign denies the allegation. For a variety of reasons, the media has tiptoed around the story. Ben Smith, a media columnist for the New York Times, asked Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor, why the paper waited 19 days to address the story and addressed double-standards between the paper’s coverage of the Biden allegations and those against then-Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. Agree or disagree with his answers, the piece is an important — and revealing — read.

• In this excellent piece for Vox, Peter Kafka turns an eye of constructive criticism on how the press covered the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. “If you read the stories from that period, not just the headlines, you’ll find that most of the information holding the pieces together comes from authoritative sources you’d want reporters to turn to,” he writes. “The problem, in many cases, was that that information was wrong, or at least incomplete. Which raises the hard question for journalists scrutinizing our performance in recent months: How do we cover a story where neither we nor the experts we turn to know what isn’t yet known? And how do we warn Americans about the full range of potential risks in the world without ringing alarm bells so constantly that they’ll tune us out?” The whole thing is thoughtful and well worth reading.

• When the next major pandemic comes—hopefully a long, long time from now—will the people of that time look back at us to ground themselves historically, as many of us have done with the 1918 flu pandemic in recent weeks? Writing in Smithsonian Magazine, Meilan Solly has an interesting account of what we can learn from the private journals kept by ordinary people at that time—and why we all might want to leave a lasting record of our own thoughts and experiences at such a historic moment somewhere more lasting than social media. (Or even the comments section of The Morning Dispatch!)

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Something Fun

Is this video tacky or inspired? For us, it’s impossible to tell at this point—which might be the point.

Toeing the Company Line

• Yesterday, we led the website with the first part of our two-part look at the Islamic Revolution vs. Donald Trump, from noted Iran expert Reuel Marc Gerecht. Today brings the second installment, an analysis of how the Iranian regime misread the reaction of the Iranian populace to the killing of Qassem Suleimani as widespread enthusiasm for their “revolution” rather than support for a charismatic general, and how the U.S. might use such internal regime challenges to reduce the threat from Iran. “Barring an electoral defeat in 2020 or death by virus or just old age, Khamenei and Trump may well end the long-running, region-defining clash. It could end in war. Or rebellion in the streets. Or just the dismissive shrug of a declining superpower turning inward. For his part, Khamenei will certainly not go gentle into the night.”

• The latest episode of Advisory Opinions focuses on the sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden—and how to think about it—before Sarah and David shift gears to discuss the constitutional authority behind “opening up” the economy and a federal judge’s ruling against restrictions on a Kentucky church conducting Easter drive-in service. Tune in here!

• There has been a fair amount of ink spilled discussing China’s role in allowing the pandemic to spread and how it it has used its undue influence with the World Health Organization to downplay its missteps. On the website today, Danielle Pletka argues that the problem goes beyond the WHO and that, actually, organizations like NATO, the United Nations, and the IMF that resulted from and help maintain the post-WWII world order are stagnating and need to adapt.

Let Us Know

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Ted Cruz announced yesterday that they’re launching a social media challenge to encourage Americans across the country to “help each other and support their communities.” 

How it works:

1. Film yourself explaining how you’re going to help others in this time of need.

2. Challenge three or four friends to do the same.

3. Post the video on Twitter with #CombatCOVID19Challenge

And we’ll add a step No. 4: Let us know in the comments if you’ve been doing anything in your communities to ease the burden on those most affected by the crisis.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Alec Dent (@Alec_Dent), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph from JoeBiden.com via Getty Images.