"Number one: Anybody who listened to the speech — I did not say that they were going to be a George Wallace or a Bull Connor."

"I said we’re going to have a decision in history that is going to be marked just like it was then. You either voted on the side — that didn’t make you a George Wallace or didn’t make you a Bull Connor. But if you did not vote for the Voting Rights Act back then, you were voting with those who agreed with Connor, those who agreed with — with — And so — and I think Mitch did a real good job of making it sound like I was attacking them. If you’ve noticed, I haven’t attacked anybody publicly — any senator, any — any congressman publicly. And my disagreements with them have been made to them — communicated to them privately or in person with them. My desire still is — look, I underestimated one very important thing: I never thought that the Republicans — like, for example, I said — they got very upset — I said there are 16 members of the present United States Senate who voted to extend the Voting Rights Act. Now, they got very offended by that. That wasn’t an accusation; I was just stating a fact. What has changed? What happened? What happened? Why is there not a single Republican — not one? That’s not the Republican Party. ... So, that’s not an attack.... Look, I still contend — and I know you’ll have a right to judge me by this — I still contend that unless you can reach consensus in a democracy, you cannot sustain the democracy....  I believe we’re going through one of those inflection points in history that occurs every several generations...."

From the transcript of Biden's press conference. Biden was responding to a question about his campaign promise that his “whole soul” was dedicated to “bringing America together, uniting our people.” Instead of reaffirming that dedication, he found a new basis for dividing people — the misinterpretation of his Georgia speech. "Mitch did a real good job of making it sound like" he was attacking his opponents. He was attacking his opponents, and really harshly — yelling at people who don't support the current voting rights legislation.

By the way, I've been noticing that the supporters of the Voting Rights Act rarely if ever mention any specific provisions of the text. They say "voting rights" but not which rights. I'll bet very few Americans have any idea what is in the bill, what rules states will actually need to follow if it is passed. The political discourse is woefully impoverished, abstractions and accusations of nefariousness.

"Trump got his ass kicked in these debates, so they want to change the rules. It’s like a football team that can’t pass, so they want to make it illegal to pass."

Said Stuart Stevens, "who was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in 2012 and who worked against Trump’s reelection in 2020," quoted in "Trump blows a hole in 2024 presidential debates/The RNC's move stamps former president’s imprint on future debates" (Politico). 

What is the rule change that is the equivalent of outlawing passing in football? What was Trump so bad at that it corresponds to "a football team that can’t pass"? 

What Trump opposed was the use of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which he accuses of bias, to set up the debates, so I think the analogy should be something more like a football team that believes the referees systematically favor their opponents.

Republicans have long complained that debates and their media moderators are biased against them — what Saul Anuzis, a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, called “a very serious frustration among Republicans in general, and many of the candidates in the campaigns, that we don’t necessarily get a fair deal.”

I pause my reading this long article and just search the page for "candy." Finding none, I decide not to plow through the entire text. 

ADDED: Stuart Stevens was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist when Romney suffered the most egregious display of moderator bias in the history of televised presidential debates, the thing that made me do the search for "candy." Speaking of getting your ass kicked in the debate! And now he turns around and trashes Trump for directly speaking out about the bias. I guess what Stevens wants is for Republican candidates to endure and just keep trying harder... or maybe enjoy the pleasures of serving in a party that is systematically in the minority.

"Maybe Democratic voters could hate Republicans if the media, including the Post and Waldman, were not always pointing the finger at 'Democrats' for not passing the things that people want."

"All Republican politician[s] are united in blocking any constructive things proposed by Democrats, and of course they are joined by Manchin and Sinema. Those people, not Biden or the majority of Democratic legislators, are why the program is not advancing. What if the Post and other papers ran true stories about how Republicans are preventing anything from getting done and encouraging Trumpism, instead of stories and columns about Democrats failing to remake the government without a real majority in the Senate?"

That's the top-rated comment on "Opinion: Democrats are being dragged down by their discontent" by Paul Waldman in The Washington Post.

Isn't that amazing — though, paradoxically, not surprising — that a WaPo reader perceives the newspaper as biased against Democrats and in need of a strong correction toward blaming Republicans? 

Only "true stories" are requested, so I presume the commenter feels centered on principles of good journalism.

The saddest part of the comment is the beginning: "Maybe Democratic voters could hate Republicans...." That seems to mean that the goal is hate. The Post needs to stop interfering with the flow of hatred. The commenter thinks that Democrats have a capacity for hate, but it's underdeveloped — underfed by The Washington Post.

""[Biden's Georgia speech] was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party..."

"... in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels.... If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—'In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time'—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges. By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center...."

Writes Peggy Noonan, in "Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point/He thought he was merely appealing to his base. He might have united the rest of the country against him" (Wall Street Journal).

Who wins and who loses if the political divide on Covid breaks down — as it seems to be breaking down because of Omicron?

I'm reading "Why More Americans Are Saying They’re ‘Vaxxed and Done’/COVID has always divided Americans. The Omicron wave is even dividing the vaccinated" (The Atlantic).

Some 2022 Democrats are sounding like 2020 Republicans. In spring 2020, many Republicans, including President Donald Trump, insisted that COVID was hardly worse than the flu; that its fatality risk was comparable to an everyday activity, like driving in a car; and that an obsessive focus on cases wouldn’t give an accurate picture of what was going on in the pandemic.

That's not exactly how I remember it (and I watched Trump's Covid show every day). I accept the use of "comparable" but not "hardly worse." But those who loathed Trump agonized over every comparison to the flu because it seemed he wasn't taking things seriously enough. I think he was trying to steel us for the fight and avert panic, but anti-Trump people were already in a panic over Trump and — in that election year — they wanted Trump to fail. So I see why people split politically over something that wasn't inherently political.

In the current Omicron wave, these Republican talking points seem to have mostly come true—for most vaccinated non-senior adults, who are disproportionately Democrats....

You can see right there that the Atlantic writer — Derek Thompson — is going to say that the Democrats have changed their beliefs because the facts have changed. But the political landscape also has changed: The Democrats are in power, they're in charge of the long hard fight, and they're the ones who stand to lose in elections coming up later in the year. That's reason to act like we'll be fine, we can make it. Keep calm and tough it out.

The messiness of Omicron data—record-high cases! but much milder illness!—has deepened our COVID Rashomon, in which different communities are telling themselves different stories about what’s going on, and coming to different conclusions about how to lead their lives. That’s true even within populations that, a year ago, were united in their desire to take the pandemic seriously and were outraged by those who refused to do so....

The article-writer doesn't go anywhere with the political analysis he sets up. He doesn't even see the political question I put in my post title, which I wrote when I was a quarter of the way through his piece. So let me try to answer my own question. 

Here's why the breakdown of the political divide could help Democrats. If fighting Omicron is a losing game, the perception that it's not a fight anymore keeps the Democrats, who are in charge, from looking like losers. If Omicron is accepted — relatively benign, unstoppably fast-moving — then there's less expectation that the government will take forcible actions and displace private decision-making. 

You might think, that's what Democrats do — take forcible actions and displace private decision-making — that's their brand. But they could take forcible actions and displace private decision-making about something other than Covid, something where their failures won't rack up so quickly and obviously.

Enough about politicians. What about ordinary people? What should you do about Omicron and should it have a damned thing to do with politics? Should you keep making demands of other people, or should you look to your own health and the health of your family? If the answer to that question is political — and I'm afraid it is! — then it's time for me to type the last word of this post and hit publish.

"So dogmatic was the dictate that we all stay at home that any attempt to question or even balance it... was deemed immoral."

"Those who questioned state-mandated lockdown and stay-at-home orders, let alone left their homes to actually protest against them, were condemned as sociopaths who were willing to sacrifice the lives of old people for economic prosperity or the trivial, troglodyte desire to go to Applebees. Oftentimes those protesting lockdowns were vilified as white nationalists or at least driven by white racialist sentiments.... How is it remotely within the scope of the expertise of epidemiologists to pick and choose which political protests should be permitted and/or encouraged and which ones banned and/or denounced? Those are plainly political judgments, not scientific ones, and the shoddy, glaring conflation of them is nothing less than a manipulation, an abuse, of public health credentials. For scientists to purport to dictate which citizens can and cannot safely choose to leave their house — based not on health judgments but on their political ideology — is repressive, and certain to erode the credibility of their profession. Yet this is exactly what they are doing: explicitly and shamelessly.... At the very least, it is vital that we have the same health and legal standards apply to all citizens and all political ideologies when it comes to the right to leave one’s home, protest or engage in other legal activities. And at least as importantly, we need to understand whether public health experts were too restrictive in their advocated measures at the start of the pandemic, are being too lax now, or somehow can reconcile the radical shift in their posture on scientific rather than political grounds."

From "The Abrupt, Radical Reversal in How Public Health Experts Now Speak About the Coronavirus and Mass Gatherings" by Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept).

"Red and Blue America Aren’t Experiencing the Same Pandemic/The disconnect is already shaping, even distorting, the nation’s response."

From the perspective of Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic:

A flurry of new national polls released this week reveals that while anxiety about the disease is rising on both sides of the partisan divide, Democrats consistently express much more concern about it than Republicans do, and they are much more likely to say they have changed their personal behavior as a result. A similar gap separates people who live in large metropolitan centers, which have become the foundation of the Democratic electoral coalition, from those who live in the small towns and rural areas that are the modern bedrock of the GOP.....

If the virus never becomes pervasive beyond big cities, that could reinforce the sense among many Republican voters and office-holders that the threat has been overstated...

“There’s a long history of conservatives demonizing the cities as sources of disease to threaten the ‘pure heartland,’” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, the director of political studies at the libertarian Niskanen Center and the author of Rule and Ruin, a history of the modern Republican Party.....

“This is something we’ve gone through a while here among Republicans,” Kabaservice says. “The feeling increasingly is that experts and the media are all part of this elite class that is self-dealing and is looking down on less-educated and less-fortunate people, and [that] they can’t be trusted to tell the truth.” He adds, “That dynamic … has been reinforced” by the emergence of the “conservative media ecosystem,” which unstintingly presents “elites” as a threat to viewers....