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Politicizing the coronavirus is hazardous to our national health

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

"The president's policy says you can't start to reopen under his plan until you have declining numbers for 14 days," Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican and chairman of the National Governors Association, said on CNN's "State of the Union."

"So then to go encourage people to go protest the plan you just made recommendations on Thursday," Hogan added, "it just doesn't make any sense."

Ah, but this also is a presidential election year, which helps us make sense of a lot of White House surprises, once you put them into a timely context.

The seemingly random and organic grassroots protests, for example, resemble the rise of the tea party movement: a mix of angry individuals encouraged and summoned to public squares by activists on social networks, who also include some paid lobbyists.

Some of the largest Facebook groups stirring up the fight against the quarantine include three far-right, pro-gun provocateurs targeting Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, The Washington Post reports.

Ben Dorr, the political director of a group called Minnesota Gun Rights, and his siblings, Christopher and Aaron, had about 200,000 members combined by this past weekend, the Post reported, noting that they seek primarily to poke the National Rifle Association as being "too compromising." Lovely.

Yes, the pandemic is a calamity that any responsible and respectable politician should try to hold above politics as usual. But in these times and under this administration, social distancing and flattening the curve have been pulled into the culture wars, pitting the life-preserving policy of social distancing in some cases against the freedom of religion and assembly.

 

Is it working? Polls by last weekend were showing a slippage in approval ratings of the president's coronavirus response, compared with his initial rally-around-the-president bump. Only 36% of voters in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday said they generally trusted what President Trump says about the coronavirus. That's 10 points lower than their approval of his overall performance.

Still, Trump's approval ratings among Republicans remain high, although not as high as some of the numbers he recently has tweeted. More troubling for Trump should be the overwhelming majority of voters who tell pollsters they would rather continue the lockdown than end it too soon.

With our lives and those of our families and friends at risk, most of us Americans have been willing to make reasonable sacrifices, as past generations have done, for the common good, not for politics.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)


(c) 2020 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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