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During these times of President Trump vs. Covid-19 shutdowns, the media’s derangement syndrome of turning every molehill into a mountain is at a new low, asserts Daniel Henninger in the WSJ.
During his basement campaign, Joe Biden’s has promised to return the U.S. to normalcy. Mr. Henninger wants to know, what will Mr. Biden’s normalcy look like?
First, normalcy, according to Mr. Biden, most likely means a White House sans Donald Trump.
Set aside that what then would inhabit the White House is not just Joe Biden but Bernie Sanders, who surely will appear to collect on Mr. Biden’s Faustian bargain with his party’s left-wing progressives. Their to-do list on taxes, climate, health care and race isn’t normal.
COVID, dominating life both political and private, cannot be voted out of office.
Events of the past week have confirmed that the still-mysterious coronavirus can still penetrate anything—college campuses, New York City neighborhoods and, most dramatically, the White House and Air Force One.
Some six months after the virus erupted here and with little cause to think it’s going away, the pertinent question demanding an answer from our presidential candidates (and governors and mayors) is: How should we live with this virus?
Virus First, Economy Later
At last week’s “nondebate,” Mr. Biden argued, “You can’t fix the economy until you fix the Covid crisis.”
Mr. Henninger takes Biden to mean that his coronavirus policy would be “to support reviving shutdowns if the virus-case metric goes up, and support governors who push back against openings.”
As such, (Biden’s) policy would reflect minimal adjustment of the Democratic party’s lockdown bias, no matter the country’s experience with the virus since March.
If, like Mr. Biden, one wants to criticize Mr. Trump’s early handling of the virus, feel free. But the nominee shouldn’t be allowed to duck answering what people want to know about his plans now for opening the country.
Will a country of more than 330 million people be obliged to suspend their lives indefinitely until a Biden scientist declares the coronavirus “fixed”?
As of Wednesday, some 3,700 medical and public-health scientists had signed the Great Barrington Declaration calling for a more balanced approach, which would allow “those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.”
Donald Trump and most Republican governors would sign that declaration. Joe Biden and the Democrats would not, ever.
If Mr. Biden wins—throwing in as well his intention to raise taxes amid the pandemic should Democrats gain control of the Senate—the return of the U.S. to economic and social normalcy is going to take a very, very long time.
