Lead or get out the way. That somewhat abbreviated version of the 18th century admonition coined by Thomas Paine comes to mind when thinking about Tate Reeves’ response to the latest surge of COVID-19.
The Mississippi governor has been neither leading nor getting out of the way.
It’s been a disappointing reversal of the approach Reeves took during much of the first year of the pandemic, when he seemed to accept his responsibility to make some tough decisions to keep the coronavirus from spreading uncontrollably. It’s as if he switched sides once Mississippi hit its vaccine plateau.
A year ago, Reeves was Mississippi’s point person in the fight against COVID-19, presiding over sometimes daily press conferences during which he issued a series of directives and repeatedly urged the public to follow the recommendations of the medical experts.
Lately, he has alternated between taking a laissez faire approach and an adversarial one.
He now seems content to let the virus run its course and has sided with those who have turned mandatory mask wearing into an assault on personal liberties.
During the first three surges of COVID-19, Reeves endorsed the science, even if he did not always follow it, that covering your nose and mouth in public was one of the small sacrifices people could make to reduce transmission of the coronavirus.
He ordered all the schools to mask up if they offered in-person instruction, and he kept that order in place for more than a year. He implemented a statewide mask mandate for a couple of months, then replaced it with a targeted approach, pegged to infection numbers, that eventually covered 75 of the state’s 82 counties.
Today, it’s hard to remember we are talking about the same person.
In late July, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised its guidelines and called for everyone, regardless of vaccination status, to again wear masks in virus hot spots, Reeves lashed out, calling the guidelines “foolish.”
He made matters worse when he told a TV reporter he had no intention of ordering schools to wear masks again and all but dared school officials to implement such mandates on their own.
“I don’t think you are going to see any school district mandate masks in schools,” Reeves said. “I think if you start seeing them do that, the parents will erupt, and they should, and I feel certain they will.”
Reeves was factually inaccurate. Some school districts, including in Greenwood and the capital city of Jackson, had already announced that masks would be mandatory this year. Many more have joined them in the past week, as the delta variant numbers have exploded.
Worse, the governor was encouraging the public to rise up against these local mandates.
The threat apparently didn’t intimidate too many school districts. Mississippi Today is reporting that more than half of them have opted to require masks. More are likely to follow.
Still, I wonder what Reeves would have been saying a year ago if anyone in public office had encouraged citizens to resist his mandates. He probably would have called them reckless and irresponsible, and justifiably so.
One of the biggest disappointments of Reeves’ entire career in public office is that he rarely does anything that is not politically calculated.
The Republican has repeatedly rebuffed Medicaid expansion, costing this state about a billion dollars a year in federal funds and leaving a couple hundred thousand folks needlessly uninsured, because the expansion was championed by a Democratic president.
He has let the state’s infrastructure crumble rather than raise a gas tax that hasn’t been increased in more than three decades because there are more votes to be had from holding the line on taxes than from repairing roads and bridges.
Now he has decided that anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers — most of whom are conservatives — represent a chunk of his base. He’d just as soon let COVID-19 spin out of control than aggravate them.
Mississippi, which could have avoided this latest surge if its vaccination numbers had not been so low, has become one of the major hot spots in the country for the virus. Reeves can take some credit for that.
Can he be maneuvered around before the situation gets too dire? It’s happened before.
During the debate last year about changing the state flag, Reeves largely stood on the sidelines, trying to gauge which way the political winds were blowing. The Legislature took the lead, listening to the education, business and religious communities, and retired the Confederate-themed banner that had been a racial albatross for decades for Mississippi.
Others may have to step into the leadership void on COVID-19, too. Some in the medical community, such as state health officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs and Dr. Lou Ann Woodward of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, are trying, but they need political reinforcement to get more buy-in from the public.
Who is willing to provide it?
- Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
