Ebola crisis wades into election campaign

Barney Jopson in Washington

The Obama administration’s handling of Ebola has become an election issue as Republicans blame White House incompetence for the infection of two Texas healthcare workers with the deadly virus.

The White House is on the defensive as it faces a barrage of questions over how the workers were infected, why one later took two domestic flights, and why the US has not banned travellers from Ebola-hit parts of Africa.

Ahead of congressional elections on November 4, Republicans are using Ebola to reinforce the party’s accusation that President Barack Obama has pursued a weak foreign policy and failed to safeguard Americans in a dangerous world.

Tim Murphy, a Republican who chaired a House of Representatives hearing on Ebola on Thursday, said: “The trust and credibility of the administration and government are waning as the American public loses confidence each day with demonstrated failures of the current strategy.”

Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican in an election fight that could determine which party controls the Senate, said this week: “I call on the president to actually lead on this issue, take emergency action and protect American lives before we have an epidemic here at home.”

In response to the growing criticism, Mr Obama this week cancelled trips to election fundraising events in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island in order to deal with the Ebola crisis from the White House.

He said on Wednesday that the US would take a “much more aggressive” approach to containing existing Ebola cases in the US and ensuring hospitals knew how to deal with new ones.

The president also called European leaders to discuss better co-ordination in the fight against Ebola in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea and to issue a call for more money and personnel “to bend the curve of the epidemic”.

Nobody of sound mind can view the US midterm elections, now less than three weeks away, with anything approaching equanimity. Almost without exception, the campaigns have been dispiriting and the content absent, yet the mindless money continues to flow. There is no evidence that the voting public, beyond the blindly partisan, is in the slightest bit engaged. Turnout could well hit historic lows.

Yet in every dark cloud there is a silver lining, though this one is hardly encouraging. 

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This year’s US electoral battles have not been united by a single national theme and the Obama administration is striving to prevent the question of Ebola-related competence from filling the void.

On Thursday, a hospital close to Yale University said it had admitted a patient with Ebola-like symptoms. US authorities, meanwhile, continued to trace 132 people who shared a flight with the second infected health worker who cared for Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died of Ebola last week in Dallas.

Some Democratic groups have sought to turn the tables on Republicans by accusing them of voting to cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency leading the response, which has come under fire.

According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken before the second diagnosis, only 56 per cent of Americans thought the US was prepared for an Ebola outbreak.

Stephen Myrow, a former official in the Bush administration, said Ebola had reinforced impressions of the president’s weaknesses that underlaid criticism that he initially played down the threat from the Islamist militants Isis.

“You have this perception of the president as the professor-in-chief. The idea that Obama moves slowly, he tends to be passive, he holds the seminar and gets everyone’s opinion,” he said.

“Even if the media is hyping Ebola up, it plays into that view of the president as not being sufficiently aggressive.”

Thom Tillis, the Republican Senate candidate in North Carolina, another swing state, has linked Ebola to the need to “seal the border”, a rallying cry for conservatives indignant about immigration.

John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, this week called on the White House to consider a ban on travel to the US from countries afflicted with Ebola.

Erikka Knuti, a Democratic strategist, said: “We’re in the last month of a campaign when both Democrats and Republicans have struggled to come up with an overarching narrative. So when something like Ebola drops out of the political sky it makes sense people would attach themselves to it. But I don’t know how successful it’s been.”

Mr Obama sought to reassure Americans that Ebola could not spread like flu and that the dangers of them contracting it were “extraordinarily low”.

Using himself as an example, he said he had no concerns after he “shook hands with, hugged, and kissed” a couple of nurses who had treated Ebola patients at a specialist hospital, because he knew they had followed the safety protocols.

As he spoke, the second infected health worker was being transferred to the same hospital in Atlanta. 

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014.