@Donnie B.:
Finally figured out why they're not making the defense act official.
That would mean GOVERNMENT stepping in and FORCING private industry to do their bidding.
That could be deemed Socialism, or even worse, Communism by the base, who voted to get
government's hands out of their business.
By, "[I f]inally figured out why they're not making the defense act official" are you saying (and I ask this respectfully) ...are you saying, "I finally succeeded in
reading the minds of the decision-makers?"
I apologize; I genuinely don't mean that to sound snarky. But I worry that you're taking persons to whom you're already inclined (however mildly) to ascribe foolishness or ill-intent, and when you see a behavior that doesn't make sense to you, confirmation-bias nudges you towards settling on an explanation that contains (surprise!) foolishness and/or ill-intent.
This happens to me, too, and here's the only technique I've learned for avoiding: I do a bit of "method acting." I try to put myself in their shoes and give a couple of paragraph's defense/explanations, as if I were that person/group, of their actions. I jot this down as a sort of prediction, a hypothesis. And then I try to go looking for what they
actually said about their reasons. If my
prediction of their motives/self-justification matches the justification they
actually offered (and I have reason to believe they're not being dishonest about them), then my "model of their interior thought-life" has proven reliably predictive (at least in one test). If not, then there's a good chance that my model of their interior thought-life is faulty and needs revising.
Now that I've said this, I guess it's obvious that I regard mind-reading of this kind to be
a character flaw in me, when I do it. But, I guess it's also obvious that I think your interpretation of their motives is incorrect...and this implies that I, too, have some theory as to "what they're thinking." So, does that make me a hypocrite on this point? Yep, it
does. I'm a doofus about this. (But an honest and apologetic one, I hope.)
Anyway, now that I've admitted that, let me (in a friendly way) state how I think you could adjust your model of "what the administration is thinking" to make it more predictive of their words and actions:
#1 - I'm betting their decision are very strongly influenced by their understanding of the difference-in-roles of the states and the federal government. So long as state governors and local governments seem to be making the correct decisions for their states and localities (which differ wildly in how far-advanced COVID-19 is), the current administration sees its role as coordinating information and providing support. It wants New York as the Subject-Matter Expert (SME) for fixing New York (with whatever assistance New York requests). It regards Kansas as the SME for fixing Kansas (with whatever assistance Kansas requests). It thinks Germany is better at fixing Germany than France is; and France is better at fixing France than Germany is; and individual states in the U.S. are more comparable (in economic size and complexity) to full-size European nation-states than they are to, say, counties or shires in the U.K. Hence, in their view, New York governor Cuomo ought properly to be the face of handling and recovering from the crisis in New York (and ignored by Kansas, who should look instead to Laura Kelly), but Cuomo should feel twice as empowered as he usually does, because every request for federal assistance gets granted.
#2 - Also, I think they would describe regulatory direction of industry towards
the national good (as defined by legislation or executive fiat) as
fascism rather than
socialism, whereas
socialism would involve
national ownership of industry with
ideological advancement being the goal (rather than
the national good, which is often sacrificed in favor of the ideology). In the current crisis, the administration would (quite reasonably, I think) expect to be accused of
fascism if they exceeded their scope of authority by intruding on state or local governance. Thus, empowering states rather than directly governing them serves as a firewall against such accusations.
#3 - Although the administration's on-camera talkers are saying encouraging, optimistic, and even braggadocious things about how the various agencies handled the crisis, I think they (and we all) know that the CDC stumbled pretty badly at the outset, taking at least a month-and-a-half to get off the starting line. (Gee, just imagine how things might have been different if the Chinese government hadn't suppressed information for a month-and-a-half! ...but I digress.) I suspect, therefore, that the administration regards the current CDC as a somewhat shaky reed to lean on...and is using CDC more as an information clearinghouse than an organization for directing efforts.
@Donnie B., I might be wrong. Maybe they're not thinking of any of that. But keeping the 3 factors listed above in mind has, for me, been fairly predictive of what they would say or do next, and seems (looking backward) to match what they've said or done thus far.
What more can one ask, of such a theory?
