The Polticians Tackle Ebola

Ebola has arrived in the United States, and our nation’s leaders are wasting no time. They’re consulting experts, holding hearings, and demanding action. Politicians across the spectrum are united in a common goal: exploiting the crisis to win the next election.

William Saletan

Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate. He’s the author of Bearing Right.

It’s a tricky maneuver, because they don’t know much about Ebola. But they know their shticks, and that’s enough. With a tweak here and a twist there, they can shoehorn Ebola into their customary talking points. Here are the emerging favorites.

1. The war on Ebola is like the war on terror. After an ugly decade in Iraq, some Republicans took a break to dabble in civil libertarianism. Now they’re ready to get back to being the Daddy Party. President Obama is “not protecting our country and our families from Ebola,” says Rep. Tom Cotton, the Republican Senate candidate in Arkansas. Cotton promises to “rebuild our military and keep your family safe and secure, whether the threat is terrorism or disease.”

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2. Obama has no strategy. When Obama admitted he was thinking through his options against ISIS, Republicans turned his remark into a gaffe. Now they’re applying the same spin to Ebola. Rep. Cory Gardner, the Republican senatorial nominee in Colorado, says Obama has no “strategy to deal with the Ebola virus.” Thom Tillis, the GOP’s candidate for senator in North Carolina, says Obama has “no plan” to stop people who would “come to this nation and threaten our safety and security.” On Thursday, Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Tim Murphy convened a hearing on Ebola. He opened it by bashing Obama’s “failed policy” and the “demonstrated failures of the current strategy.”

3. Obama thinks Ebola is the JV. First he called ISIS the junior varsity of terrorism. Then he downplayed Ebola as a junior virus. Ed Gillespie, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Virginia, chides Obama for having discounted the risk of Ebola reaching the United States. So does Bobby Schilling, a Republican House candidate in Illinois. At Thursday’s hearing, Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton sarcastically applauded Obama for leaving the campaign trail “to finally focus on the crisis.”

Republicans are delivering the same precooked talking points they used for Iraq and Syria for the Ebola crisis.

4. We’re on the case. Having ignored Ebola until it reached the United States, elected officials are scrambling to look as though they’re on the ball. The first step is to say you’ve talked to an expert. The number of politicians who claim to have spoken in the last week with Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is almost mathematically impossible. But if you can’t get Frieden on the phone, go to Plan B. In a debate on Wednesday, Gardner told voters he had talked to a nurse. Wendy Davis, the Democratic nominee for governor of Texas, where the virus had arrived from Liberia, said she had talked to a county judge. Don’t worry, said Davis: Everything’s under control. That was two weeks ago. Oops.

5. Screen all passengers. If Ebola is just like terrorism, the solution is obvious: airport security. At Thursday’s hearing, Murphy portrayed Ebola carriers as infiltrators, noting that they could mask their fevers with ibuprofen to sneak through checkpoints. Republicans on the committee complained that screening 94 percent of passengers wasn’t good enough: Everyone had to be checked. Democrats don’t seem inclined to resist the GOP’s demands. “I don’t think any measure is too extreme,” says state Sen. Connie Johnson, the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Oklahoma.

6. Ban West Africans. Before the Ebola hearing, Republicans were clamoring for a ban on travel to the United States from the affected countries. Frieden and other health officials testified that this was a bad idea, in part because it could easily be circumvented (by stopping over in Europe), and it might force carriers to hide their symptoms. Republicans were unmoved. After the hearing, they went straight to the TV cameras and delivered precooked talking points they had imported from Iraq and Syria. With colleagues arrayed behind him, Upton called for a “no-fly zone from that region of the world.”