E.J. Dionne:
In an odd way, I’m a bit hopeful because the message is getting through, sadly, because of the deaths and the sickness, and people are starting to become very clear that, if you are not vaccinated, you are in trouble.
But it is profoundly political. The 20 states that have the highest vaccination rate, all those states voted for Joe Biden. You couldn’t be more political. The Biden counties are way more vaccinated than the Trump counties are.
And what gives me heart is, the Republican Party has been divided into three. There’s one part of the party that right from the start was saying, vaccination, you got to do it. Mitch McConnell, who had polio, is very sensitive to the vaccination issue. Governors like Asa Hutchinson and Mike DeWine have been there from the beginning.
Then you had the other group, the anti-group, where, if liberals are for masks and vaccination, then masks and vaccination got to be bad things. And that’s the profound dysfunction of our politics.
Where I take a little hope is, there’s a middle group that was afraid of the second group, really didn’t want to speak out. And they have started to say — you know, Steve Scalise, finally, the Republican leader in the House, a Republican leader in the House, finally gets vaccinated.
They’re starting to say, you know, this is bad for our states, and it’s bad for our people. It’s red counties and red states that are in the most trouble. And I’m sure a lot of businesspeople who support Republicans are saying, this is not good. You have got to get off this anti-vax stuff.
So, they have created space for companies and the National Football League, for example, to get much tougher and say, you have got to get vaccinated, as — with some compulsion. I don’t think compulsion would have worked two months ago. I think it can work now, because people realize we have got to get out of this.