https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/joe-biden-blew-it-on-masks/
For months, it has been obvious to everyone except the president and his inner circle what people really think about Covid restrictions.
‘Biden confronts a host of problems he can’t do much to solve.” So determines John Harwood of CNN.
There’s some truth to this, of course — although my sympathy for opportunistic progressives who discover that they are not, actually, omnipotent, is as limited as one might expect. Still, you’d assume that any president who was facing a tidal wave of bad news would be looking to rack up as many little wins as possible. Inexplicably, with President Biden, that assumption seems to be wrong.
I have read the judicial decision that ended the CDC’s transportation-based mask mandate, and I find myself ambivalent about its reasoning. There is nothing wrong with the judge who issued it being 35 years old, or with her having been appointed by President Trump, or with her having failed to satisfy the American Bar Association, and nor is there is anything inherently wrong with judges deciding whether the government has broken the law. On the merits, however, I could have gone either way. Interpretively and semantically, this was a tricky one. Had Biden’s order been upheld, it would have been legitimate. That it was struck down is legitimate, too. Sometimes, judging can be tough.
The policy, by contrast, was not a tricky one. The policy was remarkably stupid, and that President Biden decided to renew it not once, but twice, after it had clearly run its course, was a testament to his near total lack of political guile. Back in November, I asked, “If, tomorrow, you told a plane full of Americans that they no longer needed to wear their masks, how many do you think would still have them on by the time you’d hung the intercom back on its hook? Twenty? Ten? Three?” Last night, we got an answer to this question. So thrilled by the judge’s decision were America’s beleaguered airlines that most of them chose to broadcast the news mid-flight, where it was met by a supermajority of passengers with the sort of glee that has usually been reserved for the end of a war. Had he been smart, Joe Biden could have owned that glee. Instead, it came in spite of him, courtesy of a Republican-appointed judge, from — of all places — Florida.