I’ve had an amazing sense of deja vu (all over again) over the last few weeks as the coronavirus situation has unfolded. I keep thinking back to the beginnings of the GFC. Then, there was a trickle of negative news — a mortgage lender went bankrupt, the market dropped 2-4% — that eventually turned into a deluge. I was on the phone pretty regularly with a good friend from New York and we would comment, “Can you believe that “X” happened?” The answer was no.
Starting in January, we started to hear news from China about the outbreak. At first, it was a trickle. Beginning with the complete quarantine of entire cities, the Chinese response ramped up pretty quickly. Then we started to hear about cases outside of China, which eventually led to the market dropping at the beginning of last week. That trend escalated mightily yesterday, officially becoming a news deluge.
I flashed back to how then-president Bush seemed to be overwhelmed by events. After Obama won the presidency, Bush thankfully opened the doors to the new administration so they could deal with the problem.
And then this happened (emphasis added):
On the night of Barack Obama’s inauguration, a group of top GOP luminaries quietly gathered in a Washington steakhouse to lick their wounds and ultimately create the outline of a plan for how to deal with the incoming administration.
“The room was filled. It was a who’s who of ranking members who had at one point been committee chairmen, or in the majority, who now wondered out loud whether they were in the permanent minority,” Frank Luntz, who organized the event, told FRONTLINE.
Among them were Senate power brokers Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl and Tom Coburn, and conservative congressmen Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan.
After three hours of strategizing, they decided they needed to fight Obama on everything. The new president had no idea what the Republicans were planning.
I’m especially haunted by this (emphasis added):
Vice President Biden told me that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any bipartisan cooperation on major votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators who said, ‘Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ ” he recalled. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was, ‘For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’ ” Biden said. The Vice President said he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along those lines.
At a time when the country needed complete unity to fight off the biggest economic challenge since the Great Depression, the Republicans decided to block everything.
It’s now increasingly likely that, should the Dems with the presidency, they’ll inherit an economy that, at best, is enfeebled. And I’m fully expecting the Republicans to once again become the party of no because deficits will suddenly matter again.