A new month

I still remember when I went to my motel in Newport News after 11 pm on that first Tuesday night in November in 2016 after an exhausting 17-hour day being an inside poll observer in the poorest precinct in town.  The results were promising in this impoverished, largely African American part of the town, the votes were ten to one for Hillary Clinton for president over Donald Trump, with a smattering of wasted or unsophisticated votes for third party candidates like the stoned-out pothead from New Mexico or the Russian-plant woman who liked to attend dinners in Moscow.  Apparently there are no Democratic lawyers in the Hampton Roads area, as I and a half-dozen other Northern Virginia lawyers had to travel two hundred miles to be poll watchers.

As I turned on the motel room's TV to watch the election returns, I reflected wryly none of us Arlington area poll watchers had been invited to the victory-celebration in Virginia Beach at a fancy hotel downtown.  Thank you very much, have a safe journey back.  I was glad that my task was at an end, I have never liked Hillary Clinton and I couldn't wait to stop working for her.  She's so secretive and shady, but she's also smart, informed steady and advocates people-first policies.  There was no comparison between this former first-lady, senator and Secretary of State and the often bankrupted conman from Queens who was ignorant, inept and foul-mouthed, never held office, and was a misogynist and racist.  Clinton was always way ahead in the polls despite misinformation campaigns launched against her and James Comey's follies, but I always wanted to be able to look any of my children in the eye on the outlandish chance that the obviously unfit Trump should win the presidency and be able to say, "I did everything I could to prevent this catastrophe."

Clinton won handily of course and she backed down the Russians in Ukraine, using the hard-nosed skills she honed as Secretary of State.  She put American advisors in that beleaguered country under invasion from Russian proxies and also invited in other NATO advisors as well, keeping the European unity against the Russian Bear at a high level.  She warned Putin against continuing to attempt to dabble in our elections, pointing to the Western troops as Ukraine advisors to their army, and the electronic chatter from the Russian troll farms noticeably fell off.  The Obama economic boom continued under her stewardship, at double digit returns from the stock market for the first three years.  She installed two USSC liberal justices in their thirties to the highest court, easing the heretofore intolerable pressure by conservative old men to control the bodies and decisions of women.  Unions thrived, wages went up, tax rates were cut for the middle class and health care under the new and improved ACA reached even more uninsured people and out of pocket costs for it declined measuredly.  Then the coronavirus pandemic, the first global one in over a century, washed ashore on our shores in February of 2020.

President Clinton, having run the White House as First Lady, a senate office and then the State Department as Madame Secretary, was not surprised by it at that moment nor ignorant of its potentially devastating import.  The pandemic response office in the White House, set in place by Obama after the Ebola virus outbreak, had been expanded and enlarged and had been briefing her since December on the troubling occurrence odf a novel virus in China.  Clinton had set up a WH task force to study it and make recommendations, and in December she was informed that if or when the virus came to America there would be strains on the US medical supply lines, specifically in ventilators, swabs, antiseptics gowns, face masks and shields, gloves, testing chemicals and other necessary medical paraphernalia.  Noting that the 1918 Spanish Flu cost 670,000 Americans their lives due to lack of decisive national leadership under President Woodrow Wilson who was preoccupied with his vaunted Fourteen Points at the end of World War I, she appointed Bill Gates as the national Pandemic Czar in early January with full power, after she swiftly activated the Defense of America law, to order US manufacturers to shift production to these and other necessary equipment and supplies and build up a national stockpile of supplies in advance.  The Pandemic team expressed concern to her in January about the  CDC's coronavirus test as being too complicated, too self-centered to the agency and not taking full advantage American expertise and innovation in the medical field and she put in a standing order for millions of tests from the WHO and had the Pandemic Chief to contact leading educational institutions with requests for them to start working on tests for the virus and potential vaccinations, with attendant grants.

The first hotspot to emerge was in Seattle but in conjunction with the proactive governor of Washington, hundreds of thousands of tests were administered and the extent of the outbreak was learned and through contact tracing, contained.  The phrase, "Testing, testing, testing," was heard often in the public discourse, and President Clinton bragged that, "Anyone American who wants a test can get one."  And it was true, through foresight, preparation and production.

Italy went into a fortnight of house confinement due to being ravaged by the deadly virus and America maintained its customary role of being the leader of the developed world and sent medical personnel and necessary items from our full stockpiles to our valued and grateful ally.  When President Clinton said she was considering, and then undertook, a three-week national lockdown in early March, the stock market tanked one day, dropping two thousand points to 25,000, but it has bounced back to 27,000 since then, still down a thousand points but slowly recovering.  The prognosis for America weathering this pandemic with a minimal death toll is fair, naysayers claim that 100,00 to 220,000 lives might be lost ultimately instead of the 20,000 to 50,000 deaths the medical experts predict based on modeling.  They urged the national lockdown, and the president promptly got the 50 state governors to institute it, thus delivering a blow to the economy but undoubtedly saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

April Fools.  Trump got elected and we're all paying fully for this catastrophe during this catastrophe.