June 23rd, 2020 – Second Reading Podcast

[0:00:00 Speaker 0] welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party chart. Tell people on a regular basis there is still

[0:00:14 Speaker 1] a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the Constitution. They have become the norm.

[0:00:24 Speaker 0] At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room? Welcome back to the second reading podcast for the week of June 22nd. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m very happy to be joined today by my friend Ross Ramsey, who is executive editor in one of the founders of the Texas Tribune. Not how you sound, you know, overly old, which he is not. Ross is a long time observer. Texas politics has been on this podcast. An and many other productions of the Texas Politics Project has been very generous with us over the years, and he writes a column three times a week for the Texas Tribune, which is kind of and his column is really the the core of the the analysis content. I think that the that the Tribune puts out Not that there’s not a lot of other analytical content in there, but Ross is is kind of the front line of what we, I guess, used to call the op ed function hit at the Tribune. So thank you for being here, Russ.

[0:01:36 Speaker 1] You bet. Thanks for having me on.

[0:01:39 Speaker 0] Um, you know, I want to start since we’ve talked about your writing. Um, as we record this Texas, his is undeniably a hot spot of the code 19 pandemic in the US and and for that matter, Central Texas. Where we are right now is one of the hotter spots within that. That hot spot in your column is ah, is a good starting point for a discussion of what’s going on in the politics that fall out of that. This column, which was published in the Tribune on Monday morning, talked about the politics of masking and the policy around that and and how that’s shaping the debate s. So I’m wondering what the burr under the saddle for that column was. Ross. What? You know, you can write about basically anything you want. I’m wondering what moved you to write that and what you had to say.

[0:02:34 Speaker 1] You know, it seemed to be at we seem to be at an intersection of people demanding action in response to the Corona virus. New action in response to the Corona virus, sort of ah, rising. Ah, level of protest about reopening everything too early and also from, you know, the people who wanted everything to reopen a reluctance to do any of the things that make reopening possible or to do some of them. And, you know, the leading example of that is masks. You know, the governor has gone through this list of four things over and over. If you are at risk, you probably should stay in. If you go out, you should socially distance. You should wash your hands and you should wear a mask. And he can’t even get the lieutenant governor to wear a mask. And there’s been this this press from, you know, civil libertarians, you know, primarily on the conservative end of the pool from some legislators, definitely on the conservative end of the pool, saying that you know, the government shouldn’t order me to wear a mask. I should be able to do whatever I want. Ah ah! A friend of mine who’s even older than I am pointed out that a lot of these arguments with same arguments that met with the initial efforts to require seatbelts in cars. How dare you tell me what You know what I do in the privacy of my own car. But it struck me. As you know, we were at an intersection where the number of cases was rising. The number of deaths was rising. The hospitalization rate is rising. What the governor calls the can’t remember what he calls it. It’s the infection rate is rising that we’re not doing the simple things that would allow us to, you know, slow those increases and keep the economy going, which is what everybody seems to be wanting us to dio. I’d like to be safe and back at work,

[0:04:30 Speaker 0] and it’s interesting. I think, that it’s not unusual for people want toe want things in the political and policy realm that are intention, sometimes even mutually exclusive. And I think you know, we’re in a in a long discussion about trying to find you know, I was gonna call it the sweet spot, but it’s not really that, but, you know, the the ideal way of reconciling. You know, these competing goals, which are clearly intention. As you know, we as we watch the virus spread. I mean, I’m wondering how you know I want to get to the politics of this a little later. But, you know, it seems pretty clear to me that the symbolism that the mask that masking quote unquote is we know call it has taken on is powerfully shaped by the signals that we’re seeing from the national policy environment and particularly the president, right?

[0:05:27 Speaker 1] Yeah, it’s sort of the, you know, if you put a mask on your face, there’s something to see here. And there’s, you know, there’s why do you have a mask on your face? Well, because we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and this is the way to stop the disease. But if you’re kind of denying the disease or denying the spread of the disease or even arguing that the disease is getting better than a mask is an affront to that argument. And you know, the president seems to have taken that to an extreme and people follow their leaders. You know, in the beginning of this pandemic back in March. And I believe throughout April and into May, none of the States leaders were wearing masks. You didn’t see Greg Abbott or Dan Patrick. Or, you know, either of the senators from Texas wearing masks. Now you see them in masks. The lion has turned. The instructions from the medical experts are pretty clear on this. You know, Look, this helps. And if you want to get out and about like we all do and like you know, the people who want to boost the economy, do the people who just want to get out of their houses dio The way to do that is toe, you know, wash your hands, wear a mask and keep your distance.

[0:06:39 Speaker 0] So, yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot of political signaling going on at all levels. That’s the shapes, people’s responses, I think. And so we got another bundle of signals. Yesterday’s your column came out yesterday morning and then, uh, in the afternoon yesterday, the governor did a a press briefing, which he’s been doing semi regularly during the during the pandemic. Um, how did you read that press conference? In the context of what you what we’ve been talking about?

[0:07:14 Speaker 1] I thought he changed key. I thought he went from Major from major key to minor key. You know, this became an unacceptable rise in the number of cases. This is from a governor who said everything is under control. Cases are rising. They’re rising moderately. Everything’s okay. Here. Everything’s okay here. And that was how we ended last week. And we came into this week with the governor saying, This is an unacceptable increase in the number of cases, and I’m not going to do anything about it immediately. But we are watching this very carefully. And if it continues, we might have to close some of the things we have reopened and reconsider some of the things that we’re doing right now. And he, you know, reiterated his, You know, his message on masking and distancing in Washington, you

[0:07:58 Speaker 0] know? I mean, I want to pick up on something you said there. I mean, I think it was the contrast with last event, which was late last week, as I recall that the that the governor did was really striking because the message of the last event was to suggest that, you know, they had things under control, in a sense, as you say, and what most of that press conference was about was the fact that hospital capacity was there was that there was still plenty of hospital capacity in this state. And in fact, he had doctors. Er waas, former legislative member now with UT Health System, has been one of the point people on this in the governor’s task force. You know, a bunch of that that press event was was doctors, er, waas, showing a series of slides showing how much capacity there was in the in the major hospitals, in the in the areas. And I think, in a way, there was something embedded in that that really worked against the message that really came out more fully this week, which was were telling you not to worry because there’s a lot of room in the hospitals. Well, if we shouldn’t worry, why are we paying so much attention toe hospital capacity? Beyond the fact that hospital capacity early on, it was one of the metrics of containment. So you

[0:09:21 Speaker 1] know I was a messaging also has some ambiguity in it because if you say you know, don’t worry, we have room in the hospital. They’re saying, You know, you’re going to get sick, but we have a bed for you. Yeah, right. That’s exactly that’s another way to read that message. And you know, that’s not exactly comforting.

[0:09:36 Speaker 0] Yeah, and that. And I think that’s kind of was getting at Is that by the time Monday rolled around, you know, we have these sharp increases, and I think that embedded, you know, contradiction or attention really came out. So, you know, I want to talk a little bit about where they go from here because it seems to me that the approach in Texas has been to create a framework for responding to the pandemic, and either it’s spread or its containment that, in the that in the beginning was billed. As you know, this will be a controlled way of opening up, and if the opening you know, doesn’t go well, we will then reverse ourselves along this spectrum of various prohibitions in and and slow easing of restrictions. But your characterization of of how the governor’s press conference want yesterday and what his message waas, you know, was was interesting in the sense and that he, you know, he sort of vaguely signaled that if in a sense, people didn’t do better start, you know, wearing masks and washing their ends that it’s some vaguely defined point. I mean, you know, he was talking about It’s at one level of benchmark for a month from now that we will have to reverse ourselves, but he’s They’ve shown zero willingness to do that, right.

[0:11:07 Speaker 1] Don’t you make me pull this car over right? There’s ah, you know what they’re trying to do here, and I don’t think they would articulate it this way, but I will. They’re trying to figure out an acceptable level of infection from the Corona virus. And by that I mean, they can’t make that level zero. They know some people are gonna have this disease until we have a cure for it. And there’s a level beyond which we can’t handle the cases. You know, the hospitals can handle them. Um, you get too much of the population sick, everything goes haywire. So you try to keep this in an acceptable level and you control that by controlling the activities that help the Corona virus spread, and we were going okay, really? Until kind of the events leading up to immediately before and then through Memorial Day, when the governor took his foot off the brakes, he, you know, opened some of the restaurants and bars and hair salons and all of the other things that had been closed from the beginning and opened them faster than he had said he would and did it right before a three day weekend where you sort of released a population of people who had been, You know, we’ve all been cooped up. Everybody wants to get outside. The weather is great. We’ve got a three day weekend, the governor’s opening stores. This is going to be fantastic. Everybody goes out and immediately, if you were watching the other meter, you know, in the in the form of the medical community of the public health community, they were saying, Oh, this is gonna raise cases and I began to hear it at that point, as I think everybody did. Who was listening? Those guys were saying between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, we’re really going to see whether this Memorial Day thing had in effect. And then George Floyd was killed and we started nine or 10 days of pretty constant outside demonstrations. And there was another set of just from the public health standpoint. There was another set of crowds and, you know, there’s were still right at the point where we’re going to find out exactly what that did. But all of these things accelerated the number of cases, and we’ve gone clearly above the governor’s secret number of acceptable level of infection. And if we keep that up, he says, we’re gonna have to hit the brakes in some way. Ironically, there about toe announce all the details of opening schools, which is another accelerant. And if you’re talking about the communication of this disease from one person to another,

[0:13:46 Speaker 0] yeah, you know, and talk a little bit about that. I mean, the school, you know, the the subject of opening schools closing and then opening schools has been, you know, very sensitive one all along. Obviously, because of the importance of education, I think there’s a There’s a line in your column Monday that talks about the, you know, just the importance of trying to make up for lost time and just the substance of making sure that, you know, kids in the public school system get taught for lack of a better term.

[0:14:20 Speaker 1] Yeah, and it’s multifaceted. You know, you’ve got the education problems If you stop educating kids, you know at least that that age, you know, and it’s really important to keep the momentum going. You know, we’ve got these kids learning, you know, they’re halfway through the alphabet, this set over here, and this one’s, you know, switching to this kind of reader and that one switching to this kind of math and you want to keep that momentum going. And if you stop, you know, teachers have always said summer costs them some time. So they leave kids in May and then September. Or, you know, when they come back to school, they’ve got some remediation to do. For the lost months of the summer, we doubled the size of the summer in those terms. You know, there have not been very many success stories really about virtual learning, replacing actual in person learning, and they want to get the kids back in school. So educations. One thing. You’re gonna put 5.5 1,000,000 Texans back into circulation back into social circulation, and you’ve got to figure out how to get kids back in schools, you know, and maintain hand washing and masks and social distancing and all of that stuff. And they’re also going from, you know, maybe all the kids. Maybe it turns out that little kids are safe together in school and all of that’s great. But they come back home and then they go back to school and then they come back home and go back to school. In that communication between sort of the inside world that they’re in in the outside world is another opportunity for Corona virus. So in effect you’re doing by opening schools, you’re doing the same kind of thing you did by opening shopping malls and bars and all the other

[0:15:54 Speaker 0] Well, then the other piece of that is economic in that you know, kids that are not going to school, you know, wind up being defacto, having to be home schooled by their parents. The parents have to pay attention to that the parents, than whether they’re working at home or not, um have to figure out how to deal with the fact that their kids are not in school during the day. This has been, I think, a big issue all over the place. I know it’s an issue here at UT with younger faculty members that have young kids, you know, as you t talks about what they’re going to do in the in the fall and tries to execute some kind of Siris of contingency plans and preparation for that. The question of what kids you know, what ah faculty members and staff members with young school aged kids were going to do is a huge one and trying to figure out what works on that. So, you know I want

[0:16:54 Speaker 1] education. It is is that it’s daycare for 5.5 1,000,000 kids.

[0:16:58 Speaker 0] Yeah, exactly. And you know, in that sets aside even the question of daycare itself for preschool age kids, which is also looming very large out there is both a ah public health and economic factor. You know, we’ve talked about you know, the you know what the governor is going to do with the government. What state governments going to not going to do. And just you know what the plans are and who’s gonna execute has in itself been a significant policy problem. So, you know, we’re getting news now that you know, in the last I think week or so it’s hard for me to know exactly when this started. And then the governor, it said this. There’s been a use of some of the regulatory agencies to try toe tamp down some of the, you know, what should we say? Social excesses. So, for example, TBC that, uh, the sort of the off the alcohol enforcement arm of the state government licensing and enforcement arm of state government has been doing bar checks not to check the things they usually check like underage drinking And, you know, the, you know, pouring licensed liquor, but to see if bars are bars and and bar restaurants are complying with the guidelines that have been declared, Uh, you know how much you know how many tools kid does the state have to do that, do you think?

[0:18:27 Speaker 1] I think they have a lot of tools that the question is whether they want to use them. I mean, you very quickly get into the politics of it. You know, as a practical matter, you know, they can close bars all day. They can close, you know, all businesses. We did that. We saw that in March. You know, there’s a question about how long they could do it, but in terms of just there, the tools that are available to them, that’s one of the tools that are that’s available. But then you very quickly get to. At what point do you engender a bunch of civil disobedience? You know, whether it’s, you know, hair stylist named Shelly Luther, opening her shop in defiance of the governor’s order to stop haircuts for a while. At what point does the the income part and Greg Abbot’s in the position of balancing? You know how much, um, discipline. You can mete out against what people will take. It seems to very, really with, you know, people’s, um, perception about Corona virus and perception about the economy and perception about civil liberties, and you know where their attention is at any given moment, kind of determines what it is they’re going to dio. A great example is the people who went out in in really large numbers to protest police brutality and racial injustice in spite of the fact that there was a pandemic. You know, at that point, they, in their order of importance of things, clearly had the importance of demonstrating ranked above the danger of the pandemic in their minds. When they made that decision, when they went out and he did it one by one. But a large number of people did that. Ah, large number of people decided that these restrictions on everything from bars to haircuts toe you know, whatever really were more of an affront than the pandemic was a danger that they were really, really for opening the economy and for having their freedom. And, you know, damn the torpedoes to heck with the disease. As theme numbers have risen with the disease, you see that shifting back a little bit, you know primarily, I mean, the place where you see it is in Greg Abbott size right now. You know, the change from last week to this week was a significant one, and I think was driven by the increase in the strength of the Corona virus in Texas.

[0:20:53 Speaker 0] You know, somebody, uh, in the political world that I was talking to about the press conference yesterday commented that in political terms she thought that all the principles at the at the press conference had a bit of fear in their eyes, you know, and in their in their affect, Aziz, you watch them move through that press conference, you raise the politics of this and I want to talk about that for a few minutes. I mean, I think that, you know, in you and I have talked about this. And when we looked at the polling that we did in the April UT Texas Tribune Poll, the challenge to the political leadership I thought was was presented very clearly in those poll results. Because on one hand, if you looked at, for example, the item in which we asked whether people thought that anybody who had have been exposed to the virus, I think you know, should be quarantined for 14 days, um, you know, the the civil libertarian kind of impulses that the governor is wary of were really fairly muted in that response, and more than 80% supported that and a majority of Republicans, as I recall, the

[0:22:19 Speaker 1] majority of every single grew submarine. You’re welcome, right? Right. You know,

[0:22:25 Speaker 0] And you know, it seemed to me all along that that gave the state leadership something toe work with. Now, as well as we started to parse that out and we said, You know, we asked people what they thought were reasonable limitations. And how long the the the state at that time, what was the state home order, you know, would last you began to see ah, bit more. You know, in some ways, substance in some places, substantially more division among Republicans and conservatives. But the baseline of acceptance of that seemed to of the seriousness of the virus. Seemed to be there. And I think the big question is we’re moving forward is you know, to what degree is that eroded? And to what degree can that be restored by communication and and by the situation on the ground? And I don’t You know, I don’t know how to handicap that really other than by getting more data, which we hope to do soon.

[0:23:28 Speaker 1] Yeah, I think they’ve just got to kind of keep an eye on all of the you know, you’re basically controlling the responses to danger and if the corona viruses rising, then you increase the responses to that, you know, and you tell people to wear mask. You tell people that you might have toe slow things back down if the disease, when the disease appears to be in hand or control. You know, really as it did at the beginning of May, It looks like, you know, we have sort of figured out how to plateau this thing. We had flattened to the curve to use the language of that moment. And, you know, it seemed like everything was going OK and maybe we could reopen some things and get people out and try to take care of the economy, which is also an existential danger. People can’t work and can’t pay for their place to, you know, food, shelter, clothing and all of that. It’s, you know, is dangerous in some ways as the diseases. So I think these guys, you know, the problem is that they’ve got this very quickly moving situation with the pandemic. A very quickly moving situation with the economy and the tools that they’ve got are a little bit blunt, you know? So you you changed something and then you wait two weeks to see how it worked, where something goes bad and you have to make a change and you don’t get to see a change in direction for two weeks. It’s really hard to respond to this and it’s particularly hard if you haven’t got a steady stream of communication going. And I think this is ah place where a lot of the leadership has failed. You don’t have a steady line of communication that says, Look, we are in a dangerous circumstance. This is going to be very hard. We all have to throw in together and we all have to keep our eye on the ball and and instead we’ve let that waiver around. You know, for a while we were afraid of the pandemic and then we weren’t afraid of it all. We were worried about the economy and then all of a sudden we were worried about civil liberties and, you know, and then the pandemic came back. It’s hard to keep people’s eye on the ball, and it’s particularly hard to get the public to follow a leader who hasn’t been clear and concise and consistent.

[0:25:38 Speaker 0] I want to end on that point of leadership in a second. But I also want to, you know, I think I think the other thing it’s important to underline here is that is we’re talking about tools and and the threat of, you know, how you balance economic hardship and, you know, the inability to make a living or, you know, put food on the table is that we’re in Texas, but also because of the leadership at the national level. You know, we’ve also constrained our choices beforehand in in that regard in that, you know, I you know Greg Abbott is unlikely to announce a major economic support problem, you know, program for those that are unemployed or that are that are experiencing economic hardship, you know, in part because we don’t have the policy tools to do that in part because the policy environment is so limited and in fact, some of those economic measures we’ve already begun to reverse. Um, you know, the measures that were taken at the state level in the in the early period of the pandemic. And so, you know, I think the policy environment, as we find it, has also deprived the state of some tools there was no there. There have been stimulus measures passed at the federal level. But that’s also stalled out in Washington, which I think to some degree, is not just about the communication piece you’re talking about, but about no, the policy environment that is defined by politics.

[0:27:13 Speaker 1] You know, one of the answers to economic problems in Texas has always been get the get business revved up and get Let’s power out of this thing, you know, and the answer immediately when the state, you know, shut down was, you know, unemployment insurance gets stepped up. You have all of this social network that answers that in the short term, but they’re medium and long term answer was, We can’t keep doing this to your point. What we need to do is open the economy, make sure everybody’s working, and if they’re working, then they have the income to take care of these things that if they’re not working, we have to pay for with unemployment insurance. So I think the economic you know, the return to a fully open economy was their answer in some way to the social problem caused by pandemic and quarantine. But as I said. It’s an imperfect tool. You put everybody back out into the workplace or back out into the economy or back into the shopping malls, restaurants and all of those things, and you’ve given another fresh foothold to the pandemic. And you know, this is this is where consistent messaging would have helped them if they had stayed the course. Two things here early on, Greg Abbott came out and said, Look, the state is going to do these things to this point. If you feel like in your local area, you need mawr or you need to do something different. Go ahead and do that then that gave mayors and county judges and superintendents you know, a bunch of leeway to do things locally. And then he came in a few weeks later and said, You know, we’re gonna have one set of rules for the whole state and nobody can go beyond those rules which put him at odds with, in particular some of the big cities and big counties in the state where they had spot problems that they wanted to do where they wanted to take other actions that the state government was not taking and now he’s sort of going back into his early stance of, you know, the state’s going to do this set of rags. And if you need to do something local, you know, here are some ways where you might do that. The example here was, you know, you can’t fine or penalise people for not wearing masks, but you can find her penalize businesses that don’t require people to wear masks, which is another way to get the same thing and to try to skirt the objections from the political objections from civil libertarians. Um, I just think that they’re having a hard time controlling this because they’ve been inconsistent about talking about the real threat of this and what they were doing about it And why do you

[0:29:49 Speaker 0] you know, my read of this, That is, in the end, uh, the state leadership. And you have to say the governor and his team have been worried about the response from within their own party and from within certain corners of their own party. Um, I was willing, frankly, to see that as somewhat reasonable and some of the muddied and deliver it action leading up to this to the shutdown of the state. It seems to me it’s becoming a real constraint on their ability to respond effectively.

[0:30:31 Speaker 1] I think it was a good idea in the short term. I think you were right in the short term, and I think that’s what they were thinking, you know? You know, I think they’re all well intentioned. They’re not. They didn’t want it to go haywire. But you know the models on this, you know, this is going to seem overdramatic, but the models on this or people like Winston Churchill who you know, Britain’s getting bombed Germany is right there. America hasn’t got into this thing and he goes on the radio and he tells everybody, Look, this is we’re in for it and this is gonna be really, really tough. This is gonna be really, really hard. We might fail. In fact, the odds are against us, but we’re going to lean into it and fight this thing. And then, you know, they kept that message and that idea, and, you know, eventually things came around that worked. But that’s also a model of communication. Through a thing like this, you have to acknowledge the problem. You know, don’t talk it down. Don’t say it’s gonna be over in a minute. Don’t say it’s already gone, which is a problem mailing from the White House. And then you have to bear down and stick to your guns. You know, even when it’s uncomfortable. When you know people are hollering to get haircuts, you have to say, Just let your hair grow. This is more important.

[0:31:40 Speaker 0] I think that’s a good place. Toe Close it today, Ross. Thanks a lot. You haven’t had a hearing that have

[0:31:46 Speaker 1] it. I actually bought a pair of clippers and started cutting it myself. I figured I was old enough that I’d had four or 500 haircuts in my life and I should have learned something. And besides, I can’t see the back.

[0:31:59 Speaker 0] So who cares? Role model exports? Well, thanks a lot for the conversation and trenchant analysis. Ross, stay safe and thanks everybody for listening. Thanks to our crew in liberal arts, I ts and we will talk again next week. Take care off. Second reading Podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.