INDIANAPOLIS — Each daily briefing from Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and State Health Commissioner Dr. Kristina Box starts with numbers.
Each day, they grow.
One day last week, Box told the reporters gathered in the Statehouse atrium — carefully spaced apart from each other — that day’s new, tragic tally: 170 new cases of coronavirus overnight and a number of new deaths.
The first case was reported in Indiana on March 6. The first death came on March 16. A little over two weeks later, we are closing in on 2,000 cases and three dozen deaths statewide. The only thing anyone knows for sure is that those numbers will rise.
“I hope we’re not becoming numb to those updates,” Holcomb said. “I hope it’s more of a reminder that this isn’t just a marathon. This is a triathlon. This is something that will require us to not ease up, especially in this critical time.”
“We need to do more,” Holcomb said. “Not less.”
That has been the message of most of the nation’s governors, men and women from both political parties. It’s the message we need to hear. Cold, hard truths said with firmness. We don’t need fantasies about miracle cures materializing overnight any more than we need panic. We need our leaders to lay out the facts and tell us what they are doing about it and how we can help. And Holcomb, with Box and other state officials giving no-nonsense briefings about soaring unemployment numbers and the expectation of plunging revenue numbers, is doing just that.
Imagine Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his dog Fala at this feet, using his “Fireside Chats” to second-guess his generals; tell governors that if they wanted his help they had to be nice to him and saying news reports about the depth of the Depression or the state of the war were “fake news.”
That is what we are getting from President Trump at the White House daily briefings.
So thank goodness for the governors — from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine; from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan to, yes, Holcomb.
He can be criticized for perhaps being too slow to react. As coronavirus cases began to skyrocket in China and Italy, as the first cases began to appear in the United States, there was silence from Indiana. Trump, in contrast, was quite vocal — denouncing news accounts of a coming pandemic as a Democratic hoax and assuring Americans that the numbers of cases here would soon drop to zero. Now the cases are well into the six figures and more than 1,000 people have died. And with testing sparse, the numbers assuredly are far higher.
But in the past couple weeks, Holcomb has risen as a leader. He’s shut down K-12 schools until at least May 1 and issued a statewide stay-at-home order.
Holcomb answered critics in his March 19 remarks to Hoosiers, saying: “To those who argue these policies will be disruptive, my answer is simple: They better be.”
On March 23, he told Hoosiers: “You must be part of the solution, not the problem.”
It sounded like what a wartime president should say. Trump declared himself that wartime president — but has been in retreat ever since. With leaders in health and science, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, warning that the end is not near and the restrictions need to stay in place, Trump is pushing to lift restrictions by April 12, Easter.
“I just thought it was a beautiful time, a beautiful timeline,” Trump said.
Holcomb has set his stay-at-home order to tentatively expire April 7, with schools to reopen in May. But he isn’t touting a “beautiful timeline.”
Last week, asked how he would decide on extending or lifting restrictions, he pointed not to a gut feeling but to Box, the state’s health commissioner.
“I will be listening to doctors, physicians, scientists, law enforcement, the folks that are on the ground in the state of Indiana,” Holcomb said.
Note: Not pollsters. Not his own bank account. Not the regulars at the Columbia Club or the Republican State Central Committee.
With a couple thick-headed exceptions, it’s the message every governor in the nation is delivering: This is hard. We need to continue social distancing and other once-unthinkable steps. We all must help. It’s how we get through this.
It’s leadership.
Mary Beth Schneider is an editor at TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalists. She covered politics and the Statehouse for 20 years for The Indianapolis Star. Send comments to [email protected].
