​While loss is not a prerequisite for the development of empathy, it is rare to find leaders who have suffered loss who are not empathetic. Empathy in itself is often indicative of a great leader.
 
Abraham Lincoln; Teddy Roosevelt; Franklin Roosevelt; Jack Kennedy. All four presidents suffered grievous loss in their lives that helped them develop this essential leadership trait.
 
Lincoln watched helplessly as two of his young sons died, one while he was president. TR lost his mother and wife on the same day in the same house. FDR lived most of his life paralyzed by polio. JFK lost two siblings and suffered from a host of severe health problems.
 
What they all took away from those tragic, life-altering experiences was a deep-seated empathy for their fellow human beings and a concern for humanity that transcended self-interest. Their public narratives resonated with their constituents in a deeply personal and connected way. Moreover, their suffering contributed to making them strong leaders, presidents whom the public looked to for guidance and comfort in times of national crisis.
 
Contrast their tremendous empathy with the current White House occupant, a man completely devoid of empathy (and many of the other qualities we associate with being human). Donald Trump has rarely suffered any pain other than financial loss due to his own incompetence and being outed for his scams and lies. His total lack of empathy—or even the ability to “fake” it—can probably be attributed to his narcissistic worldview.
 
Compare Trump to his opponent in the November election and you see the empathy gap—nay chasm—writ about as large as it is possible to be. Joe Biden’s life has been defined too often by brutal heart-rending loss—his first wife and 1-year old daughter to a car accident that also severely injured his two sons, and more recently a son to brain cancer—sorrow that matches anything experienced by Lincoln, the Roosevelts or JFK. When he talks about this painful history publicly, it is impossible not to feel his emotion, his pain, and his profound compassion for his fellow men and women. He sincerely relates to the people who tell him their personal stories of suffering. His story and the way he recounts it often leaves his audience in tears. His ability to connect to the real-world sufferings of ordinary people affirms both his and their humanity. He understands what people in pain need to hear from a real leader.
 
This is about as far removed from the way Donald Trump views the world as it is possible to be. Trump’s warped personality makes it impossible for him to relate on any level to the rest of humanity. His empathy deficit leads to the poor and more often than not disastrous choices he has made and likely will continue to make during the current health and economic crises.
 
Combine Biden’s basic humanity with his experience managing big projects—the federal stimulus bill and its implementation, especially of infrastructure projects, that helped bring the nation back from the brink of economic collapse and turned around the economy in 2009; fostering the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010; and overseeing the Obama administration’s manufacturing and retraining initiatives in the second term.
 
Empathy also impacts other leadership qualities. It is inconceivable to imagine Biden saying, as Trump did: “I take no responsibility.” It is unthinkable to picture Biden tweeting incitements to violence to his supporters. An empathetic leader does not suggest that people consider ingesting toxic substances. A person battered by tragedy and who has had occasion to grieve so deeply doesn’t behave like that. He understands suffering and moves forward, having learned from bitter experience what coping requires. He picks himself up, climbs out of the depths of despair, and develops a world view that aligns with the people he wants to lead toward a better future.
 
Biden’s challenging life experience makes him understand what people are going through. He realizes at an elemental level what they need. Trump is completely incapable of comprehending this. Biden’s empathy has also has made him an altruist, a word that is not part of the Trump vocabulary.
 
The time has come to get empathy back, an essential quality for any leader.
 
Dick Hermann
April 24, 2020

​“Government is not the solution to our problem.
Government is the problem.”
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language:
‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
--Ronald Reagan
 
What we are learning every day that we are under siege by the coronavirus is just the opposite: The only place we can turn for relief from this massive scourge is government. There is no other entity that can possibly help to the extent needed during an existential crisis. Only government can combat the greatest health calamity to strike us in a hundred years. Only government is the answer to the most dire economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. No other establishment can marshal the trillions of dollars needed in order for businesses and individuals to survive.
 
Set aside for the moment that the current composition of our government is mired in the chaos and controversy that informs every day of the Trump administration. That does not detract from the fundamental fact that we have never needed government as much as we do now.
 
For 40 years Republicans have disparaged and decimated the federal government at every opportunity. Now that wrongheaded, self-destructive policy has come home to roost and Americans in droves are getting sick and dying as a consequence while the survivors watch their jobs and savings disappear. This is the harvest we glean from four decades of ruinous assaults on the institutions established to keep us safe.
 
The combination of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, hostility to science, disdain for knowledge and expertise, penchant for fake news and denial of reality that are the other linchpins of the corruption of traditional conservatism that Republicans have hammered us with, has now put us in a terrible place. Whether we can emerge from this black hole is not guaranteed, given the Trump administration’s inability and even reluctance to get its ducks in order.
 
Despite having all of the levers of government in their hands, Donald Trump, the apotheosis of the Reagan Revolution, and his woeful administration and congressional allies cannot figure out how to pull them to make the machinery of government work at a time when the need to do so is desperate. This is what you get after decades of dismantling the very vehicle you are now attempting to drive.
 
In the absence of competent federal leadership, many state governors have moved into the breach and acquitted themselves well. It is worth noting that those who have not—at this writing five defiantly refuse to order their citizens to stay-at-home and self-isolate—are all Republicans. This is no accident. They spent their formative years and adult lives drinking the Reagan Kool-Aid.
 
It is remarkable that in a time when it is essential to set aside ideology in favor of practicality, Republicans cannot do what is demanded. Even though panic prompted the GOP’s congressional cohort to enact the most massive stimulus bill in history, they and the Trump administration cannot bring themselves to stop filtering relief through the now-discredited Reagan thesis. It is the current citizens of the United States who are paying for these 40 years of blind ignorance and unwarranted assaults on the very institutions established to safeguard our health and economic security.
 
These guardrails should never again be brought down in the service of ideological narrowmindedness. The Reagan Revolution must die with the demise of the coronavirus.
 
Dick Hermann
April 17, 2020

​Republicans have taken voter suppression to a new level. Wisconsin voters on April 7 had a Hobson’s choice: skip voting in the primary, or vote in person and risk dying.
 
Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over voting rights for years. Democrats keep trying to make it easier for people to vote — by expanding voting hours, allowing same-day registration, permitting early voting and vote-by-mail, reducing identification requirements and more — while Republicans have been making it harder to vote, mindful that a higher turnout might mean defeat for the GOP. Consequently, they raise the false specter of potential fraud every time a proposal to make the right to vote easier to exercise is proposed. Since voter fraud has been virtually non-existent, this Republican canard is on a par with all their others: trickle-down economics that benefit everyone; tax cuts that raise vast new revenues, etc.
 
The coronavirus crisis is taking this fight to another level.
 
What happened in Wisconsin makes clear that Republicans will stop at nothing to retain power. That state’s Republican legislature refused to postpone the primary to June, a decision upheld by Wisconsin’s Republican Supreme Court. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to extend the deadline for mailing in absentee ballots, its 5-4 Republican majority seeing no reason why voters shouldn’t go to the polls and vote in person despite the state’s lockdown stay-at-home order and the risk to voter health.
 
President Trump jumped on the bandwagon, spouting the absentee voting fraud myth despite the fact that he has voted absentee by mail in every election since he defiled the White House. The only known fraud associated with absentee voting in recent years was “ballot harvesting” perpetrated by Republicans in North Carolina in 2018, a tainted election that was overturned by the courts. Other than that, instances of absentee voting fraud are infinitesimal. In fact, five states, including staunchly Republican Utah, conduct all of their elections using mail-in ballots. They report only a handful of cases of possible fraud out of millions of votes cast. Trump’s own commission charged with investigating election fraud disbanded when it could not find any wrongdoing.
 
So here we are, on the cusp of the most important presidential election in American history. Republicans believe they would lose a mail-in ballot election. President Trump has said that, if mail-in voting were allowed, no Republican would ever be elected again. In their desperation, they are solidly lined up against any attempt to put in place a system whereby Americans could vote without risking their lives. Senate Majority Leader McConnell refuses to consider any alternative to showing up at the polls notwithstanding the coronavirus danger. And the veil surrounding the aura of the Supreme Court has now been pierced. Its GOP majority shows itself willing to go to any lengths to make sure Republicans are advantaged come November. If you read between the lines of its disgraceful decision in the Wisconsin case, it implies: “We don’t care if voters die by virtue of exercising their right to vote. And if they don’t want to risk their lives, that’s good for Republicans.”
 
I don’t want to hear any more about Chief Justice John Roberts being a swing vote on the Court. He and his Republican court colleagues appear prepared to do whatever it takes to keep Trump in office, including jeopardizing voters’ lives.
 
Roberts has been on a mission to ensure Republican hegemony for years. In the infamous Citizens United case, he and his majority colleagues decimated the campaign finance laws in order to tilt the playing field toward Republicans (who always have more money). In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts stripped the Voting Rights Act of its preclearance mandate, thus allowing Jim Crow to return and deny African-Americans, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, their voting rights. Last year, in Rucho v. Common Cause, he refused to involve the court in gerrymandering cases even when it was demonstrated that racism was a factor in how Republican legislatures drew district lines. All three cases, as with the Wisconsin case, were 5-4 decisions along ideological lines. So much for his dishonest claim that “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.” Too bad he exempted his own Court from his statement.
 
It is a given that Trump and McConnell will do whatever they can to steal the November election. It is shocking that they have such a firm ally in John Roberts.
 
Dick Hermann
April 10, 2020

Maximize Use of the DPA
 
The Strategic National Stockpile having been allowed to deteriorate under the Trump administration, the President needs to turn to his full authority under the Defense Production Act of 1950 (DPA). The Act gives the President the power to redirect the entire economy to produce the goods and materials necessary to fight the coronavirus. Trump has invoked it thousands of times to make sure vital war materials are available. His reluctance to use it to the full extent to combat the coronavirus has aggravated his two months of denial, lies and lassitude that has made America the world leader in Covid-19 cases, strained the healthcare system to the breaking point, and caused massive suffering and deaths that could have been avoided.
 
He has refused to fully employ the Act because of lobbying by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the heads of Fortune 500 companies. His grudging, selective invocations of the Act affect only seven companies at this writing and do not go nearly far enough to mobilize U.S. manufacturers to produce the items essential to combatting the coronavirus. The problem with this narrow approach is that there is no way these firms can possibly satisfy even a miniscule portion of the desperate demand for ventilators, personal protective equipment and test kits coming in from our 6,200 hospitals and hundreds of labs. Thousands of manufacturing firms with these production capabilities are not being asked to join in. This is irresponsible and is guaranteed to prompt doctors and nurses to ration these life-saving devices as we proceed to the apex of the crisis. What Sarah Palin falsely claimed about Obamacare death panels will now become a reality under “Trumpcare.”
 
Fortunately, some manufacturers have voluntarily retrofitted their production facilities to make ventilators and other items, but their efforts are scattershot and unevenly distributed. Moreover, they operate in a coordination vacuum caused by federal confusion and ineptitude. That means that down the line when they eventually produce ventilators, for example, it is likely that the disorganized allocation and distribution channels will cause some hospitals to get an oversupply while desperate medical facilities will not get any.
 
Instead of using the DPA, Trump’s lame strategy was to have the Department of Health and Human Services issue a “Request for Information” on March 21st in an attempt to find out who makes ventilators. Two months into the pandemic, the government had no idea. You would think this might have been a high priority.
 
Appoint the One Right Coordinator: DLA
 
Compounding Trump’s failure to use the DPA is his appointment of anti-trade negotiator Peter Navarro as his DPA coordinator. There is nothing in Navarro’s background to indicate that he has the managerial experience and manufacturing knowledge to do this job competently. Moreover, Trump has sent son-in-law Jared Kushner to FEMA to coordinate its delivery of personal protective equipment to healthcare facilities, a job for which both he and FEMA are ill-equipped. Kushner because of zero experience and a history of failure, and FEMA because, while it is very competent to respond to emergencies like floods and hurricanes (Katrina aside) that are limited in geographic scope, it has little experience with nationwide catastrophes. So, along with Mike Pence, who heads the coronavirus task force, we now have three coordinators destined to spoil the stew. When one top-flight manager is demanded, we get three inexperienced coordinators and one agency that has never done anything like this before.
 
The solution is to call upon the one government agency with the expertise, track record, resources and manpower that can do the job: the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). DLA’s 26,000 men and women have vast experience in directing and coordinating the production and delivery of massive supplies and equipment needed to successfully fight wars all over the world. They even have experience in past public health crises such as the 2014 Ebola outbreak. DLA could even help with the government’s woeful inability to get testing kits out to the places desperate for them. Not exploiting that competence in the present crisis is inexplicable and nothing short of scandalous.
 
It is possible that Donald Trump is unaware of this incredible resource he has at his disposal in DLA. Someone ought to tell him.
 
Full disclosure: I worked with DLA at the Pentagon on a variety of matters and always came away dazzled by its efficiency and expertise. I was also a FEMA legal consultant when the agency worked well.
 
Dick Hermann
April 3, 2020