Every election season has an October surprise. Sneaky Democrats or cagey Republicans are the usual culprits.
But this time, the surprise has come out of west Africa – a left field if ever there was one.
The sudden appearance of the Ebola virus has sent members of Georgia’s political class stumbling to the right and left, struggling to wrap their tongues around the phrase “hemorrhagic fever.”
It would be easy enough to dismiss public concern as the result of cable-news generated hype, but with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control based in Atlanta, and with Emory University Hospital now treating its fourth victim – 29-year-old nurse Amber Joy Vinson, we have become Ground Zero for Ebola in the United States.
The Ebola debate will be with us through Nov. 4 and beyond. The volatility of the topic is hard to underestimate, but attendees at an Emory University law school forum held this week were given a taste.
“The message was clear among our team. We can fear or we can heal,” said a prideful Jane Jordan, chief counsel for Emory’s health care entities. With Jordan on the panel, according to the Daily Report, was Edward Shoemaker, a campus cop who noted that opinion elsewhere was more shaded.
“We had a couple of folks who offered to blow the place up for us,” Shoemaker said. Bomb-sniffing dogs were brought in.
That hospital in Dallas was full of pride, too, until the first health care worker contracted the virus. Now, according to one local report, the hospital “feels like a ghost town.”
Politicians don’t like volatility, especially when it comes two weeks before a critical election. Volatility, especially in voters, forces awkward shifts in position. Earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Tom Price, R-Roswell, a physician, referred to calls for a ban on travel to and from Liberia and other Ebola-ravaged nations as “naïve.” By Thursday, Price was talking quarantine.
Michelle Nunn, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, on Wednesday spoke of making decisions “based on science, not politics.” And science – along with the White House – was saying travel restrictions would send the disease underground.
On Thursday, Nunn endorsed a temporary travel ban. But in that, she was no different from U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson.
“Everyone in America should be aware that just to shut a flight off does not stop Ebola. What you have to do is stop the epidemic where it began,” he said Wednesday. The next day, he and U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss endorsed travel restrictions – with exceptions for essential U.S. personnel being sent to west Africa.
(Do not expect Isakson to join any movement that calls for the head of CDC chief Thomas Frieden, who was grilled by a House committee this week for his agency’s bobbling of the initial response to the Ebola death in Texas. “They are our best hope against any contagion in the world, and I support the CDC,” Isakson said Friday in a WGAU radio interview.)
Then there was Gov. Nathan Deal, who after a meeting with the head of the state Department of Public Health, asserted that “water kills the Ebola virus.” While it is true that an Ebola virus can’t survive in a Petri dish filled with water, water alone is no disinfectant when it comes to defeating the virus in infected humans.
“Idiot” was the harsh phrase that came from Libertarian rival Andrew Hunt. Democrat Jason Carter wasn’t much kinder. “It’s irresponsible to tell people not to worry about Ebola, as the governor did, because water cures it,” Carter said.
If the Ebola virus is to accompany us through the remainder of this election season, it is only fair – although more than a little crass – to ask who benefits from the discussion.
In the near term, the answer is Republicans. When Americans became security-conscious after 9/11, Republican stock rose. So there’s a precedent.
Moreover, CDC handling of the Texas case – approving flights to and from Cleveland for one nurse, and a cruise-ship vacation for another worker – feed the narrative of a White House detached from day-to-day policy decisions. Which is why President Barack Obama appointed an Ebola “czar” within 24 hours of Frieden’s congressional testimony.
But long-term, the Ebola debate may help Democrats more. Like terrorism, the virus scares the bejeezus out of people because there is no front. The fight is in both Sierra Leone and Decatur.
But unlike terrorism, the Ebola virus puts the security focus on hospitals and medical research centers, not armed troops and fences. In that sense, Democrats could benefit from a debate on the topic, because it quickly undercuts the argument that the federal government has no place in the American health care system.
On Thursday, 26-year-old Nina Pham, the first nurse who contracted the Ebola virus, was transferred to a National Institute of Health facility in Maryland at the request of her employer, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, a private institution. Overwhelmed, financially and otherwise, the Texas hospital had requested the move.
In that sense, the Ebola virus could become a Democratic antidote in the anti-Obamacare debate.
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