We Need a COVID-19 Shadow Cabinet… Now
This week, few national leaders are inspiring confidence that adults are in charge.
Legislators are behind closed doors hammering out compromises, campaigns are finding their footing and tone after a devastating few weeks, and all wonder how much to criticize the WH in a crisis.
Here’s the thing: this isn’t like other crises that happen to us. This was a health crisis we could have avoided with more competent government, and a government-induced recession that said government is not showing they have an equitable plan out of.
This. The recession isn’t happening *to* us. We’re doing it. We have agency in the economy. Government showed it can shut the economy down, but they’re failing to show they have a plan to equitably turn it back on. https://twitter.com/HBoushey/status/1241745893642186758 …
The current economic crisis is literally — and by design and for good health reasons — an “inside job.” So how the insiders are managing the job is a legitimate and fair topic of daily criticism and attention.
But we’re not hearing that drum beat yet. An idea: all non-incumbent presidential campaigns should immediately designate 23 Shadow Cabinet Officers that are telegenic, trusted by the public, and who have public health cred that can make daily videos about how they would respond differently once in office in their area.
(H/t to @samseder for floating a version of this on @majorityfm this week.)
In parliamentary democracies — think Canada and the UK — this is totally normal. An MP from each opposition party gets a brief that corresponds to each Minister of the Government, and it’s their job to oversee and message to the public how they would be governing differently. Freed from the obligation to govern (that’s the job of the parliamentary majority), they can be nimble and aggressive in getting the party’s views out. And because they have a designated portfolio, not every MP has to worry about messaging on every issue. Division of labor!
In my hypothetical for the US, these should not be current Members of Congress. They will have to take some messy votes in the coming weeks and months, and the campaigns shouldn’t be tethered to necessary congressional compromises.
And it’s important they get the official title of, say, Shadow Secretary for Agriculture for X Campaign, or Shadow US Trade Representative for Y Campaign. This will force the media to use these titles, giving stature they don’t have to accord more generic “campaign surrogates.”
And it shouldn’t stop at the Cabinet Officer level. Have a Shadow Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biothreats, the pandemic response office that Trump/Bolton closed. There were lots of candidates on @lawfarepodcast this week. Put ’em on TV! (washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-h…)
The Shadow Agriculture Secretary can talk about how the food supply chain response could be better.
The Shadow Small Business Administration Administrator can hammer home what we should be doing for small businesses.
And so on.
The strong implication (though it need not be binding) would be that these Shadow Secretaries would be who the leader of said campaign would appoint to the actual position once in office. This will help the public think in terms of electing a governing “team,” which can help compensate for whatever perceived weaknesses or lack of deftness they fear from the candidates themselves. Squad Mind is what the public needs now, both amongst ourselves and our leaders.
Admittedly, naming 23 Shadow Secretaries and dozens of other Shadow Assistants is not normal for US campaigns, and many operators will be uncomfortable with the idea. The process of picking your actual Secretaries is normally the result of protracted bargaining behind closed doors over the general election, but especially in the transition period between the election and inauguration (and even well after). Who do you owe favors to? Who is owed something for service on the campaign or in the prior administration? Who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of something under Obama that now deserves to be Assistant Secretary?
The move’s boldness is what makes it worth doing at a moment like this. This is a year when people are talking about whether elections will even happen, whether we’ll be on lockdown for months, and what will happen to their job and loved ones.
We need confidence restored fast. This is even more so if the official response continues to lag. People will start to get desperate. Possible scenarios: mass anti-system social movements in the streets/Internets or deep social ennui. Neither is good for campaigns (especially highly cautious ones). You want to channel folks’ energies in a positive direction that fixes the problems and gives us something better to hope for. One way you do that is by having a big Squad. Folks can pick their favorite or favorites, without having to have a single candidate carry the burden of attracting all the different flavors of voter out there. The campaigns are starting to show what a Squad approach would look like: both by deploying surrogates to do explainers and through messaging and calls to action.
We need more of this, every day, on all platforms, podcasts, media. That’s how we get through this.
(Adapted from this thread.)
