CHICAGO — Television cameras panning the crowd at the Democratic National Convention this week have caught more than a few delegates masked up against COVID-19.
From the stage, the message is decidedly different: President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have crushed the coronavirus.
Democrats have made a conscious choice to lean into the pandemic, figuring that the benefit of contrasting the Biden administration’s approach with that of President Trump is worth the risk of reminding voters of a time most would rather forget.
“Trump handled it so bad. And the way he intimidated all the experts by just standing over them every day, looking over their shoulders like he was going to smack them if they said the wrong thing,” said Barbara White, one of the convention’s masked attendees.
Some speakers seemed to implicate Mr. Trump in the deaths of their relatives.
Minnesota’s lieutenant governor said her brother was the second person to die of COVID in his state of Tennessee. Rep. Robert Garcia, California Democrat, said his mother and stepfather succumbed to the disease.
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“So when Donald Trump and his MAGA extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene downplay the horror of the pandemic, it should make us all furious,” Mr. Garcia said.
He contrasted that with the Biden administration’s response.
“They got people vaccinated. They got the virus under control. They safely reopened our schools,” Mr. Garcia said.
Political analysts said leaning so deeply into the pandemic response is a curious choice for Democrats.
“The pandemic was a good issue for the Democrats in 2020 when much of the public had a negative view of Trump’s leadership of that crisis. Four years later, the political heft of that issue has fallen off the charts,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. “People don’t want to think about it, and other issues are driving this election.”
Paul Mango, deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration, said Democrats are misinterpreting the facts.
He said the COVID death toll was 20% higher in the year after Mr. Biden took office than in the last year of Mr. Trump, even though Mr. Trump was dealing with a novel virus with no preparation, limited stockpiles and no vaccines.
By the time Mr. Biden took office, the virus was largely understood, the government had helped the private sector create several vaccines in record-shattering time and the stockpiles were built.
Mr. Mango said the national stockpile started in 2020 with 18 million N95 masks, 34 million nitrile gloves and 5 million gowns. By early 2021, it had 400 million masks, 4.5 billion gloves and 265 million gowns.
Mr. Mango has written a book detailing Operation Warp Speed, which developed three vaccines in less than a year, compared with the previous record of more than four years. As Mr. Trump left office, some 20 million doses had been administered.
“When this virus broke out, we didn’t know anything about the virus. We didn’t have testing capabilities, we didn’t have vaccines, we didn’t have therapeutics,” he said. “When the Biden folks took over, they had all this. They knew how the virus acted, they had vaccines, they had therapeutics.”
Convention delegates in Chicago said their issue with Mr. Trump was attitude.
“I feel like Trump didn’t believe that COVID was even real, and he gave really horrible, harmful guidelines like people should drink bleach,” said Oceana R. Gilliam, another mask wearer at the United Center in Chicago.
COVID is making a late-summer surge, with death rates ticking up.
The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which dates back to mid-July, showed 556 weekly deaths from COVID. The number was roughly the same in the same period last year, although it rose in the fall and peaked in January at nearly 2,600 weekly deaths.
Few are talking of a return to the broad mask mandates, vaccine requirements and shutdown orders Mr. Biden imposed in early 2021.
For some Democrats, focusing on the pandemic is less about the disease and more about comparing Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden in their approaches to government.
Sen. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats, said in a speech at the convention Tuesday that the pandemic response showed that big government could prop up the economy, pay people’s rent and arrange meals for hungry children.
“I say all of this not to relive that difficult moment but to make one simple point: When the political will is there, government can effectively deliver to the people of our country,” said Mr. Sanders. “And now we need to summon that will again because too many of our fellow Americans are struggling every day to just get by.”
He credited Democrats’ 2021 American Rescue Plan, which distributed relief checks, bailed out union pensions and poured hundreds of billions of dollars into state and local governments, which could use the money to plant trees or plug gaps in school budgets.
Republicans say the $1.9 trillion law was too much. They point to economists who blame the massive spending for overheating supply chains, leading to the runaway inflation that has sapped Americans’ paychecks and more than canceled out wage increases over the past three years.
• Mallory Wilson reported from Chicago.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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