Ebola, a disease that has only spread to two people in the country, has somehow become a major issue in the upcoming midterm elections. No surprise, the GOP is using something only 0.000000625 percent of the American population has contracted to try as a way to try and score political points.
“Using Ebola is part of an attempt to turn this into a national election and tie it to President Obama’s performance, said Steven Schier, a politics professor at Carleton College, to Raw Story. “If the Republicans can make this a national election, that makes it more dangerous for Democrats and could have a real effect up and down the ballot.”
Republican politicians and pundits alike have been doing their best to whip their base into a frenzy over Ebola as a microcosm for the entire Obama presidency. The GOP’s argument is basically, “If Obama can’t keep ebola out, how is he supposed to keep out ISIS/terrorists/any other thing they’re afraid of?”
If there is one thing the Republican party is good at, it is fear mongering. From WMDs to the War on Terror to Death Panels and now to Ebola, the Right capitalizes on the tendency of a portion of its members to be irrationally afraid of anything it can’t understand (which is most things).
And as Republicans need six seats to take back the majority in the Senate, this Ebola scare couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. The self-created hysteria allows them to dictate the political conversation.
“One way for the Democrats to keep the Senate was to control the narrative of the election,” said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “Clearly they do not control the narrative, which is essentially now is one crisis.”
Democrats are trying to paint the Ebola non-crisis as a result of GOP spending cuts which “deprived agencies of funds needed to fight” the disease, Raw Story reported.
While this argument is valid, Republican economics can be traced back to every problem that America is facing right now. And yet, they still keep winning elections. Obviously the “Republicans are ruining the economy” argument hasn’t set in over the past 14 years, and it’s unlikely it will here either.
Their increasingly-old, increasingly-white members don’t care about that; they are too afraid of everything else to see the big picture of what their party has done to the country. And as long as the GOP keeps making elections about things like Ebola and not the actual issues, it’s not likely they will change their strategy any time soon.