We all know blogging is dead, and everyone just tweets now, but there's so much going on that I felt the need to revive my dead blog and get this out of my before I explode. Without further ado, here are a few thoughts on:
The Democratic Primary
When we started the 2020 Democratic Primary, we had two frontrunners - Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden -- taking up all the oxygen, with Joe Biden whipping Sanders in a straight one on one fight. Then the campaign happened, Biden showed that he was a shadow of his former self, got owned by Kamala Harris, came in 4th in Iowa, entered into Super Tuesday with basically no money, and. . .ended up as the front runner. Right now, he's probably has a 99% chance of being the nominee.
The amazing thing about this race is that in the space of less than a month, the entire fucking campaign was wiped off the map. All of it. Every debate performance, every rally, every ad, every mail piece, everything that occurred between March 2019 and March 2020 got wiped off the map. Politically, it didn't exist. Biden is winning exactly where the polls showed him winning over a year ago, and Bernie is winning exactly where the polls showed he was winning a year ago. It's amazing.
And Biden looks to be the nominee despite getting outraised and outspent by a number of other candidates, including Mike Bloomberg who dropped $500 million in less than three months. This does happen. Like ever. And it's not like Biden was a dynamo on the campaign trail. If anything, Biden looked like a dinosaur compared to every else.
Nor was it the case that the Party coalesced around Biden causing everyone to drop out either. Typically, when the Party insiders decide on a candidate, nobody else jumps into the race unless they have something to prove. In 2016, everyone but Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley, and Jim Webb sat out of the race because it was Hillary Clinton's turn. In 2020, we had over twenty candidates, including candidates who are broadly known - Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, Elizabeth Warren, etc. That indicates that in the mind of Democratic Party insiders, this race was wide open. And then it wasn't.
As for Bernie Sanders, it's hard to look at the past year and think about how much he and his campaign fucked up this race. Sanders entered this race with a huge donor base (he's raised more money than anyone, and spent more than anyone but Bloomberg), 100% name ID, and voter data from 2016 covering all 50 states. ALL 50 STATES! Every other candidate in this race, including Joe Biden, would have killed for these advantages going in. All Bernie had to do was expand his base, which he had the money and time to do. He just didn't.
And the worst part, from a prospective of a progressive, is that Bernie absolutely could have. The talk of a revolution made Sanders' proposals seem more radical than they were. For instance, Medicare for All doesn't affect the health care of anyone over 65 because they ALREADY HAVE MEDICARE. Instead of talking revolution, he could've pointed out to older voters that, if anything, his proposals would strengthen Medicare, while continuing to be a radical online. Sanders could have also done a lot more to reach out to African American voters, voters who bombed out his campaign in 2016. He knew he was weak there, and didn't fix the problem despite running for President for the past four years. Unreal.
COVID-19: We're Fucked
While the election was going on, and the impeachment having been only a few months ago (seriously!), we now have a pandemic to deal with. Of all the Presidents, Trump is probably the worst one to deal with a pandemic like this. At the best of times, he's shakey, but literally every Democrat in the country believes he should be removed from office. (With good reason, by the way, he did everything his articles of impeachment said that he did.) Add to that his "mercurial" relationship with doctors and the truth, and we are not in a good place.
Even if Trump hadn't dismantled the CDC's ability to handle pandemics (he did), COVID-19 would be a nightmare. What we know is that COVID-19 is like the flu, but (a) has more severe symptoms, and (b) is unrelated to the flu in anyway. The end result is that no one has been exposed to COVID-19 or any of its sister viruses, and so no one has any immunities to it (yet). That' means that when we're exposed, we have a high risk of catching the disease.
Oh, but there's more, COVID-19 has an incubation period of 14 days, and people in the incubation period may be contagious even if they don't have any symptoms. And even though it's symptoms are similar to the flu, they are more severe. As a result, COVID-19 has a mortality rate of around 2%, while the flu has a mortality rate of 0.1%.
So, it's a highly contagious disease with a mortality rate 10-20 times higher than the flu. The current estimates by the Trump Administration is that somewhere between 75 million and 150 million people will get COVID-19. Not in the next year, but in the next six months. With a 1-2% mortality rate, that means we're looking at the deaths of anywhere from 750,000 to 3 million people. Additionally, and this is fun, COVID-19 also has a hospitalization rate of at least 10%, meaning that between 7.5 million and 15 million people will have to be hospitalized because of COVID-19. In the meantime, everyone else who gets COVID-19 has to stay home for at least 2 weeks.
These are not good numbers. For one, it's not clear if our hospitals can handle the influx of patients - especially when medical professionals start getting sick themselves. Second, even if everyone survived, we're all going to avoid hotels, restaurants, sporting events, and bars from now until this blows over. Not just for our own health, but for the health of those susceptible to the disease (seniors). As a result, tourism and other service industries, which already operate on a tight margin, are going to get hit hard. Airlines are going to be hit hard. Health insurance companies are going to get hit hard with claims.
As a result, we're probably going to get hit with a demand-side shock, resulting in a recession. Already, we're in the first bear market on Wall Street since 2009. That's just the beginning. The real question is how bad this will get over the next several months. What we do know is that already the economy is also getting hit with supply shocks because the world's second largest economy, China, has 930 million people under quarantine. Italy - the entire country - is under quarantine. Germany and France may be next. How long this goes creates uncertainty, which causes greater and greater problems.
In this context, I think the decision of many voters to go with a steady hand, Joe Biden, may make sense. We've lived through tumultuous times over the past several years, and the "return to normalcy" has a lot of appeal.
