Biden Shows the World that U.S. Government Can Work

I am still recovering from four years of a presidential administration filled with grifters and incompetent sycophants lead by a boorish, racist demagogue  on a mission to destroy the federal government and weaken America so as to further the interest of Vladimir Putin's Russia.  I feel like I have escaped an abusive relationship and still can't quite grasp that normalcy and decency are back in control at the White House.  I suspect many Americans - and many residents of American allied countries abused by the Trump regime - share the feeling. With Joe Biden in the White House not only are we spared from the diarrhea of the mouth that defined the Trump era but are also seeing once again that the U.S. government can function and provide essential services and guidance to the American public and the world. Stated another way, America is no longer the laughing stock of the world lead by a racist buffoon. Moreover, the Biden administration is showing that there are some things that only thr government can do, contrary to Republican dogma. An editorial in the Washington Post looks at this welcome new reality.  Here are excerpts:

The Biden presidency is still in its early days, but it is not too soon to point to its most impressive accomplishment, one that will have major implications for years to come. The covid-19 vaccination program has been transformed. The federal government has established or expanded more than 450 vaccination centers, and the country is carrying out 2 million vaccinations per day, more than double the rate when President Biden was inaugurated. The president says he has secured enough supply to vaccinate the entire adult population in the next three months, well ahead of every major country except Britain.

The Trump administration deserves credit for Operation Warp Speed, the program that helped to fund the vaccines, and the private sector deserves credit for the miraculous speed and effectiveness with which it developed the vaccines. But, for the most part, President Donald Trump left the rollout to the states. Last March, Ron Klain, now Biden’s chief of staff, observed that the Trump administration was approaching the pandemic, a massive national crisis, as if the country were still living “under the Articles of Confederation.”

Trump did this for two reasons. First, it was clear the pandemic was going to create big problems, and he didn’t want to bear responsibility for them. . . . . Second, Republicans have for years denigrated the federal government, arguing that it was incompetent and dysfunctional, that Washington was corrupt and that the private sector could handle everything better.

Biden came into office intent on reversing Trump’s approach. He owned the crisis, releasing a 200-page national strategy that outlined, for example, exactly how the government would use its powers and resources to ramp up vaccinations. That included ordering millions more vaccines; using the Defense Production Act to ensure that additional production could happen fast; enlisting the armed forces, National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies to support vaccination sites; and shipping vaccines directly to pharmacies, thus creating another network of vaccination centers across the country.

Government is hard. American government is harder still. It’s a political system designed to prevent tyranny, not facilitate speedy action. Power is checked, divided and shared. Making it work takes energy, ingenuity and, above all, a belief in government. Biden clearly learned from his experience running the stimulus program as President Barack Obama’s vice president. Klain, who coordinated the response to Ebola in 2014-2015, is impressively focused on execution. Biden’s covid-19 coordinator, Jeffrey Zients, is a talented executive who has excelled in the private and public sectors.

The contrast with Trump is easy to draw, because Trump didn’t really view his job as diligently administering the federal bureaucracy. For him, the presidency was a reality television show and politics was a series of symbolic acts. But there is a broader view of the federal government that grew out of the Vietnam War, Watergate and some of the excesses of the Great Society programs, one that President Ronald Reagan gave voice to when he said in his first inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Biden can show us that Reagan was wrong. It was the American government that put a man on the moon and created the Internet. And in today’s world, there are crucial challenges that only government, well led and administered, can solve.