In a normal year and under normal circumstances, Dallas would greatly appreciate all the extra commerce a national political convention could bring to this city.
So when the president made noises in recent days about possibly pulling the Republican National Convention out of North Carolina in the midst of a political spat with the state’s Democratic governor and plopping it in Texas or another state, The Dallas Morning News admitted to cracking a smile. Of course, Texas should always be in the running for a business opportunity.
What’s sitting before the country, however, is more important than a business opportunity for a city in Texas or some other state.
The president’s comments stem from a divisive and increasingly politicized debate about how we should continue to respond to the coronavirus. And the manner in which that debate is playing out is particularly dangerous during a national crisis.
Lest we forget, we are now some three months into the pandemic rolling across the United States. More than 100,000 Americans have died from the virus, and it is clear that we don’t yet have a handle on how many people have actually contracted it. Only blood tests of a wide swath of the population will show us the true reach of the disease.
What we do know is that in facing the uncertainty of this new virus, we’ve embarked on a massive campaign to first shut down large sections of the economy and now slowly open up.
It was always going to be true that we would have passionate and even heated debates about what the proper approach to addressing the pandemic should be. After all, deciding on our next steps involves making decisions about people’s health and their ability to support themselves, all of which is why leadership is particularly crucial right now.
Americans need to see that decisions about their health and about their ability to return to work are being driven by nonpartisan analysis.
Capitalism often gets tagged with being driven by greed, but in fact a market economy is powered by trust. That’s often true for small things, such as whether the cashier has given us the correct change. And it’s true for larger things such as whether a company took proper steps to protect our health.
Regulations and general law enforcement exist to police bad actors, but our society has thrived because most Americans can rightly trust that most of the rest of us in this free society are acting in good faith.
If, instead, we devolve into political warfare about basic decisions about how we will deal with ongoing issues created by the coronavirus, that trust will evaporate. If the public comes to believe that where the president places his party’s convention during a pandemic has more to do with politics than health, the president will undercut the sense of trust we all need to beat this virus and rebuild the economy.
What we need most is good leadership that reasonable people see as acting in good faith, regardless of where the convention is conducted.
— The Dallas Morning News
