Biden’s losing support for his COVID handling. Maybe he should stop politicizing it

President Biden is threatening legal action by the secretary of education against Republican governors to get them to OK school mask mandates. This follows his calling leaders in Texas and Florida “Neanderthals” and a White House speech this month highlighting those states’ high COVID-19 case numbers and imploring their governors to “get out of the way of the people who are trying to do the right thing.”

The president’s attack on his political rivals is more an attempt to distract from falling approval ratings of his handling of the pandemic in the wake of a two-month-long upswing in cases than a genuine effort to be helpful. Those approval numbers have dropped from 62 percent on July 1 to just 53 percent this week, according to FiveThirtyEight.

GOP Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have consistently encouraged vaccination, which provides the best protection against infection, serious illness and death from COVID-19. To label them as benighted obstructionists because they disagree with Biden on the effectiveness and propriety of mask mandates is way off base. The current surge of Delta variant cases in Florida and Texas was not caused by a lack of mandates and will likely abate without them.

Continue reading the article on New York Post.