T2B50: Viden 4
Boring competence
The 50th update in this series. If you don’t mind, I am gonna
Ten more to go before we ride into the virtual sunset.
We are done with Trump for the moment and back to Biden. Who am I kidding: we are never done with Trump, but I am going to try ignoring him, like people who put their phones away in the other room but can’t help fishing for it in their empty pockets every five minutes.
Repeat after me: Biden is Boring
But that’s a strength, not a weakness. We will be again to policies being revealed by a press secretary in front of the press corps, not announced during a 3:00 AM Twitter storm.
Biden’s core team and cabinet - Klain, Kerry, Yellen, Burns etc are all career professionals with impressive credentials and a long resume starting with an Ivy League education. The message being sent - to me if not to you - is that we will solve problems with competence instead of 'politics.’
Will that work?
The Biden administration’s response to the Corona virus is going to be its first - and most important - test of its competence. One of the first decisions has been to shift from giving the chosen few two shots before vaccinating the next person in line to doubling the number of people who get a shot. Many reasons for doing so:
The disease is spreading fast and even the first shot will slow the spread.
They are more confident that production is ramping up fast enough that a second dose will be available within the period it needs to be.
Wild card: so many people are refusing the vaccine that the lines might not be as long as one might expect.
We will see how that pans out soon.