Chalk it up to karma, fate or bad luck. Whatever you call it, the Ebola scare is proof that Bad Things Happen to Bad Presidents.
The morphing of what is a single case into near panic is, according to medical experts, unwarranted. They point out that, so far, one person from Liberia died in a Texas hospital and two nurses who treated him got sick. Period, end of panic.
In rational and medical terms, they may be right. But their calculations omit another factor. It’s the X factor.
In this case, X stands for trust.
President Obama has spent six years squandering it, and the administration’s confusion, contradictions and mistakes on Ebola fit the pattern. This is how he rolls.
Don’t worry, there’s no chance of an outbreak, they said. Then it was, Oops, we must rethink all procedures for handling cases. Then there was no worry about a “wide” outbreak, yet quarantines for lots of people.
The irrational fear of an alien pathogen is fueled by rational suspicion of an incompetent and dishonest government. How did the so-called experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention give Nurse No. 2 permission to travel by air, even though she had a mild fever?
That’s a great question — if only the CDC would answer it. “I have not seen the transcript of the conversation,” was Director Thomas Frieden’s lame answer.
Meanwhile, the most obvious move, a travel ban from affected countries, is rejected with unpersuasive claims about the need to get aid workers to Africa. It looks and smells like political correctness searching for logic.
There isn’t any logic, so bet your hazmat suit a ban will happen soon. It’ll be one way for the new Ebola czar to make a mark.
But it will take a miracle worker to restore Barack Obama’s credibility. While there are many things to say about his tenure, the one thing you cannot say is that the nation trusts him.
Poll after poll, on subject after subject, show a collapse. Consistently now, a majority of Americans say Obama is not trustworthy. Most think he’s a failure, many say he is incompetent and the vast bulk — 70 percent in some cases — says his key policies are wrong for America.
He is so unpopular that members of his own party don’t want to be seen with him, lest his failures spawn a political plague.
Against that backdrop, any emergency will cause the national yips. The rise of the Islamic State and its beheadings of two Americans did it, and now Ebola is doing it.
As “Ghostbusters” asked, who you gonna call? Certainly not this White House.
Credibility is like a reservoir or a bank account. You make deposits in good times so you can make withdrawals when you need them.
Obama never made the deposits. It’s been all downhill since Day One. He blames others for failures, and when cornered or ambitious, reaches for a lie. Routinely.
The claim that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” is a defining example, but hardly the only one. Don’t forget “shovel-ready jobs” to justify a trillion-dollar boondoggle. Or there’s “not a smidgen” of corruption at the IRS. And Benghazi was caused by an anti-Muslim video.
His lies are legion and now he’s like the boy who cried wolf. When he makes a national appeal on Ebola, the trust tank is empty.
If there’s one encouraging sign, it’s that Obama may sense he’s walking on thin ice. When Ebola started to dominate the news, he canceled two fundraising trips.
Talk about miracles.
Taking it to the ‘limits’
Finally, there’s a Big Idea in the New York governor’s race. It comes from challenger Rob Astorino, who believes term limits would help Albany put the “public” back in public service.
Blasting “incumbency protection” as the fuel for most corruption, the GOP nominee made his case in a compelling speech at NYU. It is the smartest argument made by any state candidate of either party this year.
“We have the resources we’ve always had,” he says. “We have the educated work force. We have the waterways and the rail lines. And we have access to capital.”
So, he asks, “how have we fallen so far?”
His answer is that “our leaders have enacted the most counterproductive policies in the nation, and they keep doing it.”
But he doesn’t let voters off the hook, chiding them for “electing the same people year after year after year.”
His proposal is sound: Eight is enough. Two four-year terms would be the max for statewide officials, and four two-year terms for lawmakers.
Citing George Washington’s voluntary decision to leave office after two terms, Astorino argues that the Founding Fathers understood that “power corrupts even the best of us.”
Albany is the living proof — a favor bank where every vote is a deal that’s good for those in power. On Wall Street, it’s called insider trading and it’s a crime.
In Albany, criminal conviction or death are about the only ways incumbents leave office. They rarely lose, a testament to the way they’ve gamed the system.
Astorino promises to make term limits a top priority of his first year, and says he’ll use legislation and a referendum. He notes that city voters repeatedly approved limits in landslide victories.
Now it’s Albany’s turn. Nothing else has the power to depose the crooked status quo.
It’s a gift from the art
There are lots of ways to say thank you, but Leonard Lauder found an extraordinary one. His gift of $1 billion worth of Cubist masters — yes, $1 billion — to the Metropolitan Museum of Art is, he told an opening-night crowd, “a gift to the people of New York.”
“Three generations of our family were educated here,” he said. “What better way to pay back our city?”
Oh, what a gift it is. Eighty-one works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger now grace the Met.
That’s three more pieces than planned. When he announced the gift last year, Lauder, head of the cosmetics firm that carries his family’s name, said he would keep adding to his collection, and did. It is considered one of the world’s most important.
And he gave it away to the city he loves. He finished his touching remarks with this gem: “The joy of living is the joy of giving.”
Hold your peace, John
John Kerry took another stupid pill. How else to explain our secretary of state’s idiotic comment that the failure of Israel and the Palestinians to make peace “was a cause of recruitment” for the Islamic State? He makes murder and carnage sound like righteous anger.
Before he opens his yap again, Kerry should learn this Israeli refrain: If Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be no more war. If Israelis laid down their arms, there would be no more Israel.
That’s truth, and everything else is nonsense.