Sometimes, even the great Washington Post buries the lede. Disguised in a terrific story with a bland headline that only a supply chain manager could love (“Desperate for medical equipment, states encounter a beleaguered national stockpile”) was this disturbing and fascinating pandemic response story: “Florida Is Only State to Receive Everything It Asked For”
That’s the salient nugget Political Wire chose to highlight from the Post story, even though it was buried in paragraph twelve of the Post’s 2,500 word tome. Political wire got the headline prioritization right.
While the Post’s headline and lede didn’t promote the most ethically troubling part of its reporting, the three reporters who worked on the article, Amy Goldstein, Lena H. Sen, and Beth Reinhard, certainly did great reporting about the differences in how various states say they are being treated by Team Trump during the pandemic response.
Beyond the widely publicized problems that hotspot states like New York and Washington have been having with the Trump Administration’s response, the Post piece documented how other states also are struggling due to lack of adequate federal help:
Democratic-leaning Massachusetts, which has had a serious outbreak in Boston, has received 17 percent of the protective gear it requested, according to state leaders. Maine requested a half-million N95 specialized protective masks and received 25,558 — about 5 percent of what it sought. The shipment delivered to Colorado — 49,000 N95 masks, 115,000 surgical masks and other supplies — would be “enough for only one full day of statewide operations,” Rep. Scott R. Tipton (R-Colo.) told the White House in a letter several days ago.
Florida has been an exception in its dealings with the stockpile: The state submitted a request on March 11 for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, 82,000 face shields and 238,000 gloves, among other supplies — and received a shipment with everything three days later, according to figures from the state’s Division of Emergency Management. It received an identical shipment on March 23, according to the division, and is awaiting a third.
“The governor has spoken to the president daily, and the entire congressional delegation has been working as one for the betterment of the state of Florida,” said Jared Moskowitz, the emergency management division’s director.”
“Florida has been an exception.” While my jaw dropped when I got to that part of the article, the Post shrugged it off: “Anecdotally, there are wide differences, and they do not appear to follow discernible political or geographic lines.”
How about this for a potential “political line?” Unlike the underserved New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Maine, the fully served Florida is one of the six states widely considered a “battleground state” that will determine the outcome of Trump’s 2020 reelection bid.
“Those will be the six most critical states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin),” Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean, told Newsweek.
“There will be others that’ll be important in varying degrees,” he said, “but those will be ones we’ll ultimately look back on and say, ‘How many of them did Democrats win back and were they able to win enough to win the presidency?'”
Given Florida’s undeniable status as a crucial swing state in Trump’s 2020 Electoral College calculus, it’s critically important for any news publication to pose this very legitimate question: Is lifesaving equipment being distributed based on patients’ needs or political needs?
I’m open to the possibility that there is an epidemiologically sound explanation for why Florida has been at the head of Team Trump’s pandemic response line, while bright blue hot-spot cities like Boston and New York City are not. Skeptical, but open. But to ignore the obvious political angle, not pose that legitimate question to Trump officials, and bury the Florida exception in paragraph twelve is baffling.
What’s even more puzzling to me is why people like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi apparently aren’t raising the same legitimate question. Because the reckless game Trump seems to be playing here is not just ethically untenable, it’s also politically perilous.