As President Biden wrapped up his first primetime performance Thursday night, his pronouncements served their predictable and short-term political ends, of course. More interesting, they dually serve as rhetorical choices, choices that feed into the natural process of historicization as COVID-19 loses its monopoly on our attention. What are the elements he stressed in his framing, and what lessons can we take away from the pandemic as the end potentially draws near? President Biden makes several mistakes in his first primetime performance that allow us to explore what these lessons are. They are worthy of note not because this speech will live long in our national memory, but because those officials who will update the pandemic playbook must heed them.
The first mistake was the heavy handedness. Biden illustrates this mistake with helpful clarity in deigning that we may be allowed to celebrate our nation’s Independence Day in small groups if we’re really good. This was not the inspiring benchmark those speechwriters thought it was. On the holiday on which we mark and celebrate our declaration of freedom from a foreign force in a distant land, we may receive guidance from Washington on whether we can barbeque. This is an easy path to criticize Biden in the here and now, in fifty days he’s only proven his limitations. What’s more interesting is how society performs next time. This year many Americans were given an up-front lesson in the arbitrariness that accompanies government decisions. This is not a criticism of government, it’s an inevitable accompaniment. As we riffed on state agitprop explaining the distinction between chicken tenders and chicken wings meal-worthiness, the lesson the state needs to take away is that this degree of meddling is ultimately counterproductive to society’s overall effort against the pandemic. When the state intervenes to this level of minutiae, it inevitably gets caught in a web of perverse incentives, clarifications of earlier clarifying statements, and public confusion that dulls our ability to confront the virus. Biden’s BBQ Declaration is a prime example showing we may have not yet learned this lesson.
That mistake is largely manifest in a second lesson we must draw, public messaging needs to not only mature, but the government specifically needs to cohere its effort. Biden told us to listen to Dr. Fauci, to science, also the scientists, and CDC guidance as it evolves like it did last week with respect to our seniors and will again shortly. So where do Americans turn to for answers? Which specific source of official information do they go to? Which website? Biden doesn’t make that clear, and that lack of clarity hurts the effort. The reason he doesn’t make it clear is because there isn’t an answer. Too much noise, very faint signal. Despite Obama’s valiant rhetorical efforts, by the time you’re resorting to phrases like “let me be clear” or Biden’s folksy “I’m gonna level with you” schtick, you’ve already lost. Just be clear, just level with us. The communications profession needs to begin an engineer-like postmortem on its exposed limitations during this crisis. You get only a few chances to make a big message stick. Who does that message come from? Who should it?
Similarly, we too often focused on the failures of CDC’s evolving consensus or of Dr. Fauci’s demonstrated arrogance in moving the vaccination goalposts per his individual whim. Those mistakes are endemic to bureaucracy and bureaucrats, but what we can improve upon is the what and the who of the messaging. The messaging should be centralized, they should be given a few days to age, and they should not be delivered by a public health professional. Let that sink in. In the next pandemic, the key speaker for the federal government should not be a public health professional. Why is that? They are not qualified to speak to the issue. Joe Biden last night told you to listen to Dr. Fauci, a man qualified to provide a public health opinion reliant on scientists and other experts but not qualified to speak to the complexity of this societal challenge.
That inclination on behalf of Biden leads us to a third major lesson: recognize the complexity of the crisis and address it as such. COVID-19 was a tripartite crisis: public health, economic, and civil liberties. We often hear it was a public health crisis that stressed the other two, but that take suggests a lack of interplay failing to match our experience. Each of the other two co-equal aspects of this crisis asserted themselves naturally but haphazardly, and that complicated the designs of the public health experts, for whom caution is a natural religion. The single voice in government who should be speaking to the American people should be an elected official, accountable to the citizenry, and more importantly that someone must be capable of sufficiently representing the health, economic, and civil liberties interests tested so severely. That single, elected voice should address the people after input from experts from all three fields, make clear to the people they have, and then chart a path forward.
Biden’s message to trust the science and the scientists is insufficient. Biden’s description of the vaccine as a scientific miracle, despite wide existing experimentation with messenger RNA technology, is misguided. If it was a miracle of any kind, it was a miracle of industry, and in some ways a validation of a free market economic system fashionable to deride. If you’re going to run death tolls on a ticker along the bottom of the news screen, also show us businesses closed, the increased number of deaths by suicide, the number of citizens who’s right to freedom of assembly was restricted, even the deadlines (or absence of) in emergency orders and laws passed by governors and mayors.
As they always do, historians will look to presidential pronouncements, in their second and third drafts of our major events. Let also the experts who update the pandemic playbook take note of the government’s ongoing mistakes prominently apparent in Biden’s speech and adjust accordingly for future generations.