cods wrote: ↑Sat Apr 11, 2020 8:54 am
my own personal opinion of amerikas handling of this pandemic..
its one big balls up...
sorry but it is....
the States all want to run their own agendas whilst pointing at the Fed to blame for everything...
two many chiefs and not enough indians....
stop concentrating on the worst State look for the BESt and follow their lead..
Well, I actually think Trump is smart to let the states call their own shots when it comes to coping with the virus.
For one thing, a president isn't a dictator and shouldn't attempt to rule 50 states from an office in Washington, D.C. Besides, it isn't practical -- how exactly can anybody in the nation's capital have a better idea of what to do in Alaska or Wyoming than the governor of the state or the mayors of the individual cities?
More than anything, though, it's a wise political move -- because in this highly politicized day and age, Trump would get blamed for anything and everything that went wrong if he tried to tell each individual state how to handle the outbreak.
That's what damaged George W. Bush in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Having lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, when it experienced the second-worst flood in its history in 1982, I can tell you that the federal government is never the first responder after a disaster. We were shocked and impressed when President Reagan dropped in to get a closer look, but nobody in Fort Wayne expected the feds to handle our flood response for us. Local high schools let out to allow kids to volunteer for sandbagging duty, and they responded by building a sandbag dike that saved an entire neighborhood.
But when the local response to Hurricane Katrina ineptly left New Orleans residents clinging to their roofs, the media blamed the slow response on Bush, even though the state and city governments had first responsibility for conducting rescue operations. Bush apparently thought a president should try to remain above it all instead of defending himself, but Trump would have been savvy enough to smirkingly tell the media, "Do you not understand that it's NEVER the federal government's responsibility to be the first responder? We only get involved after we're asked by the governor of the state. Got it now?"
I think Trump's doing much the same thing today: Avoiding the mistakes of Bush by not putting himself and his administration in a position to get blamed for everything that doesn't go perfectly. He's letting the governors and mayors handle their own turf, and especially in the case of Democrats, they can't lay it all on Trump if the virus ravages their states and cities.
