SIXTY-THREE
For Biden, the tallest pole remained Joe Manchin. Biden knew it, Klain knew it, and Manchin knew it.
The night of Tuesday, March 2, Klain stopped by Manchin’s 40-foot boat, Almost Heaven. Just the two of them for dinner. It was a nice but not super-fancy boat.
“Almost Heaven, West Virginia” is the first line of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver, one of the state’s anthems. The boat was the senator’s floating citadel. “I can untie the ropes and away I go” home, he once told a reporter for GQ magazine.
I can’t go home and explain to West Virginians, Manchin said, that if you stay unemployed one week longer, you’ll get another $400, in addition to the $1,400 checks we’re going to send their way.
The unemployment benefit was too much and for too long, Manchin argued. The $400 supplement had to be cut to $300 and the period shortened. That was his bottom line.
Klain knew that Manchin had promised President Biden that he would not let the bill fail, but Manchin was a genuine maverick who would not succumb to pressure. Klain left Almost Heaven that night after dinner believing that Manchin would somehow have to be accommodated.
Klain was not Manchin’s only suitor. Senator Portman, with encouragement from McConnell, had been talking to Manchin since early February, after it became clear that the Group of 10 Republicans was being left behind.
Manchin was still in play. Portman had an amendment to the rescue bill to reduce the supplemental $400 weekly benefit to $300 for a shorter period of time.
Manchin liked it. The $300 figure was as much a psychological, symbolic stand as it was a policy position. He had spoken with more centrist Democratic economists in recent weeks, such as former treasury secretary Larry Summers, who had written an op-ed in The Washington Post warning of inflation that could be triggered by too much government spending. He had also spoken with former Obama economist Jason Furman.
Those conversations highlighted for Manchin his gut instinct that the labor force had to be willing to go back sooner rather than later. The economy was going to improve, and extended unemployment benefits were too much of an incentive for people to stay home.
Manchin gave Portman his word he would support the $300 amendment.
Jeff Zients, Biden’s Covid coordinator, was giving the president daily reports. The Pentagon approved a request from FEMA for military assistance and would deploy more than 1,000 National Guard to help at vaccination sites. Community vaccination centers across the country were being set up. Biden had pledged to support 100 in his first month in office. They were at 441.
A pilot pharmacy program was being phased in to get retail pharmacies administering the vaccine. By using the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, retired nurses and doctors and other health care workers could now give vaccinations.
But there was still not nearly enough testing, particularly on asymptomatic people. The United States was 32nd in the world on genomic sequencing, the testing method used to detect new variants. Spotting new mutations was key to slowing the spread of the virus because often the new mutations were more contagious. And the most important time to test was early, when the presence of variants was still minimal. Zients found this lag absurd, and he asked Biden for more money to eliminate the handicap.
Biden approved it but continued to push him hard. “Can you do it?” he asked Zients, sounding a little skeptical.
Zients said they would have hundreds of community health centers operating across the country by late March, using a hub-and-spoke model to make sure there was fair and equitable distribution of the vaccines into vulnerable communities.
“Are we really going to be able to have thousands of these? How many people are we reaching?” Biden asked. “Where are they coming from?” He even asked, “What do they look like?”
“Where are we on mobile units?” Biden asked at four meetings, one of about 40 Biden had on the virus early on. Zients followed up with four memos updating the president on the progress made, with 950 of the 1,385 community health centers set to administer vaccines by the end of March, many using mobile vans and pop-up sites.
Zients reported that $4 billion of FEMA assistance had been given to the states.
Sonya Bernstein, meanwhile, was still operating out of her basement apartment.
“Every time I would walk up the two steps as I left my front door, it was almost hard to look at the light,” she joked with others. This was isolation. This was the operational end of the virus campaign, placing orders and giving directions across the federal government. Total mobilization.