Biden and the Red-State Renaissance

Maybe the era of pandemic panic really is over. Even Covid lockdowners are now opposed to lockdowns—or at least willing to take credit for the achievements of people who rejected them. Joe Biden, who promoted Covid restrictions in 2020, ran from his basement as the shutdown candidate, and then as president continued to categorize Covid as a public health emergency until just a few months ago—all the while running up trillions in new debt—now wants credit for the rare silver lining resulting from the lockdowns.

Yesterday this column noted the welcome surge in the creation of new businesses following the Covid shutdowns—a surge that fortunately continues to this day. Specifically, a study from Economic Innovation Group noted the remarkable surge in startups, especially in lightly governed parts of the country that rejected the stringent shutdowns so popular among blue-state politicians. Study author Daniel Newman wrote:

Business application growth for the first half of this year continues to be strongest in the South, home to seven of the top 10 states with the largest increases since 2019... Much of the Mountain West also stands out for its above average performance.

This is yet another in a series of recent reports showing the Covid-era shift in money, opportunity and economic dynamism away from the heavily taxed and regulated states run by shutdown enthusiasts and into states with more restrained governance. It’s essentially yet another rebuke of the Biden allies running places like California and New York with the heaviest of hands.

But now the lockdown cheerleaders of Team Biden are eager to claim credit for the red-state renaissance. At a Tuesday White House briefing press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre cited the Economic Innovation Group report and proclaimed:

That’s Bidenomics in action. And the American people are beginning to feel Bidenomics.

Can you feel it? “This is Bidenomics,” echoed White House chief of staff Jeff Zients on what used to be called Twitter and is now known as X.

Fortunately the study included handy maps showing where increases in new business applications have been especially robust—essentially the places in the country that vehemently rejected Biden Covid policy—and the entire blue-state governance model for that matter.

Perhaps the fact that Mr. Biden wants to jump in front of this parade should be counted as progress.

Also, maybe it’s his way of telling fellow Democrats that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.) would really not be a better option as the 2024 presidential nominee.

In a related story, a Journal editorial notes the results after Gov. Ron DeSantis

... Mr. DeSantis’s Covid strategy proved to be an economic boon. Between April 2020 and July 2022, 622,476 people moved to Florida from other states, including families who wanted children in school. Employment in Florida has grown by 7.4% since January 2020 versus 2.5% in California and a 1.2% decline in New York.

The lockdown damage continues, but progressives can’t admit they were wrong.

Instead, they’re trying to claim credit for the achievements of people who were right.

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Speaking of a Covid Reckoning
Matt Ridley and Alina Chan write in a Journal op-ed:

The controversy over the origins of Covid-19 refuses to die, despite efforts early in the pandemic to kill it. It was natural to doubt it was a coincidence that an outbreak caused by a SARS-like coronavirus from bats began in Wuhan, China, the only city where risky experiments were being done on diverse and novel SARS-like coronaviruses from bats. The Chinese Communist Party did its utmost to dismiss such suspicions, but so did a group of influential Western scientists.

On March 17, 2020, the journal Nature Medicine published a paper by five scientists, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that dismissed “any type of laboratory based scenario” for the origin of the pandemic. It was cited by thousands of news outlets to claim that the virus emerged naturally. But Slack messages and emails subpoenaed and released by the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic suggest that some of the authors didn’t believe their own conclusions. Before, during and even after the publication of their paper, they worried privately that Covid-19 was caused by a laboratory escape, perhaps even of a genetically engineered virus.

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival” and also the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi.”

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web.)

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