In any how-low-can-you-go contest, there’s no more eager aspirant than Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. About a year ago, Cruz insinuated in that suggest-without-saying-outright manner of his that COVID-19 was an election-year hoax.
“If it ends up that Biden wins in November. . . . I guarantee you, the week after the election suddenly all those Democratic governors, all those Democratic mayors, will say, ‘Everything is magically better. Go back to work, go back to school.’ Suddenly, the problems are solved,” Cruz said.
Ever in error but never in doubt, Cruz last week was again playing to the political cheap seats by blasting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why? Because the CDC has updated its guidance of a few months ago and is now saying that, in light of the highly contagious Delta variant, it’s advisable even for vaccinated people to wear masks in public indoor settings if they are in regions of substantial COVID transmission.
“The CDC issued a new proclamation,” Cruz snarked on the Senate floor. “Apparently, according to the CDC, ‘Vaccines don’t work anymore. That science thing? Inoperative.’ ”
Listening to Cruz, one would have thought the new CDC guidance was based on nothing more than politics or whimsy. With Cruz, of course, one question inevitably recurs: Does he really believe there is political advantage to be gained in feigning that kind of witlessness?
Cruz, mercifully, is in charge of little beyond his Senate office. But Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is like a Cruz with actual executive authority.
In his eagerness to claim the mantle of Trumpiest governor, DeSantis made much of his efforts to reopen Florida early. That brought him acclaim from the anti-science right and Fox News’s puerile prime-time polemicists, but the emergence of the more transmissible Delta variant has revealed the full folly of his approach.
DeSantis has been battling the cruise industry over its desire to require vaccinations for cruise passengers. And he has overridden efforts by various Florida municipal leaders to impose tougher local measures than he favored.
Now, even with the Delta variant raging through his state, the governor has issued an executive order declaring that it’s up to parents, not schools, to decide whether kids should be masked there — and threatening to withhold state funding to districts that impose mask mandates. There, he has made Republican Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, another anti-mandate pandemic panderer, look like a piker.
Contrast that with the action of Asa Hutchinson, Republican governor of Arkansas, who has responded to the Delta variant by pushing to amend a previous law he had signed, and thereby give local school officials the ability to require that students be masked in classrooms. (Remember when conservatives believed that the level of government closest to the situation should make the decisions, particularly if it was local?)
Hutchinson is thoughtful enough to fix mistakes. But for DeSantis, his contrarian course has become his political cause. Witness his fund-raising team’s marketing of merchandise deriding White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and mocking mask-wearing as well as his recent joke to a conservative gathering about the new CDC guidance on masking.
At a Tuesday press conference, DeSantis demonstrated yet again just how dug in he has become, minimizing the hospital-straining situation in Florida, accusing reporters of fear-mongering, insisting masks made no difference, and doing his disingenuous best to minimize and dodge the consequences of his approach.
Last summer, in an interview with Politico, DeSantis downplayed the controversy his alt-science governance had engendered, saying that what really mattered was “how do we look six months or a year from now?”
Well, let’s see: Florida has now broken its own previous single-day case and hospitalization records. COVID death counts and death rates are spiking. And though it has only about 6.5 percent of the US population, the Sunshine State accounts for 20 percent of new COVID cases in the country.
So DeSantis looks like a man who has charted a foolhardy course and then lashed his state to the mast even as he has sailed into a public-health hurricane.
Let’s hope his sorry example serves as an object lesson for others.
Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeScotLehigh.
