Gov. Huckabee: People aren’t looking for political jabs, they’re looking for sincere, transparent answers
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee reacts to the White House responding to the coronavirus outbreak.
The Democrats just can’t seem to help themselves. Even in the midst of a bona fide public health crisis involving the coronavirus, all they’re doing is second-guessing President Trump and trying to stoke hysteria in order to score political points.
The entire country should have found it reassuring when the president appointed Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday to coordinate the Trump administration's coronavirus response efforts.
Pence has direct experience with this type of work, having overseen Indiana’s public health system as governor in 2014 when the first U.S. case of the MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) virus emerged in that state. He’s also a proven leader who knows how to get people with different perspectives working together effectively.
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MERS is also a form of coronavirus, but far deadlier than the one we’re currently battling, which is called COVID-19. Fortunately, the MERS virus was effectively contained, just as COVID-19 will be.
Instead of calling for bipartisan cooperation in this life-or-death effort, liberals reacted with collective outrage, even going so far as to ridicule the vice president’s Christian faith as a way of suggesting that he’s not qualified for the role of coordinating America’s response to the new coronavirus.
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Numerous media outlets have also published and broadcast one-sided reports trashing Pence’s handling of an HIV outbreak as governor of Indiana, but such criticisms are both inaccurate and irrelevant.
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While liberal activists claim that the Pence administration in Indiana was too slow to implement needle exchange programs, the state health commissioner at the time had a very different assessment, praising Pence for deftly navigating the complicated politics of that issue while providing funding for HIV screening and substance abuse treatment.
Not only did Pence demonstrate an aptitude for bringing together diverse stakeholders during his time as governor, he also gained valuable experience in coordinating joint state-federal responses to disease outbreaks during the MERS scare. That experience will undoubtedly serve him well as he works to get a variety of federal agencies all rowing in the same direction to respond to the new coronavirus.
Unfortunately, the Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no interest in working with the Trump administration to protect Americans from the coronavirus. It seems that they are applying the well-known Democratic axiom to never let a good crisis go to waste.
When the White House requested $2.5 billion in emergency funding to respond to the coronavirus based on the assessments of public health experts, for instance, congressional Democrats countered with an arbitrarily inflated figure of $8.5 billion – solely so they could claim that the original request was “completely inadequate.”
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Nothing could be further from the truth, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t one to let the truth stop her from publicly venting her hatred of President Trump.
“She’s trying to create a panic and there is no reason to panic,” the president assured the American people Wednesday night. "All they are trying to is get a political advantage, but this shouldn’t be a political thing.”
That’s precisely the point. This shouldn’t be a political thing. President Trump didn’t even push back against the Democrats’ outlandish funding proposal, vowing to “spend whatever is appropriate” to ensure that the coronavirus does not become an epidemic in the United States.
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“I think [Pelosi] is not thinking about the country, and instead of making a statement like that … she should be saying, ‘we have to work together,’” the president pointed out.
It’s a good thing President Trump had the foresight to appoint Vice President Pence to coordinate the administration’s response to the coronavirus. With the leadership of our president and vice president, we can rest assured that federal agencies will be working together on this vital task. It’s just unfortunate that the Democrats have chosen to politicize this crisis instead of helping to solve it.
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