Raimondo’s Really Bad Week

Raimondo’s Really Bad Week

For Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo it may only be Thursday, but it has already been a bad week. Maybe her worst ever.

The dream is dead. U.S. Senator Kamala Harris was selected as Joe Biden’s running mate, dashing the hopes of front runners ranging from U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren to U.S. Congresswoman Val Demings to long shots like Raimondo that they would get the Zoom call.

The efforts by Raimondo’s cadre of public relations staffers to position Raimondo as the technocrat choice have failed. Raimondo made the DC press list of top prospects for VP.

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The spinners worked the national press and she scored some big DC and NYC press hits in July on her performance in managing the coronavirus, but Biden did not bite on Raimondo.

Raimondo’s team landed some big PR placements in Politico, Forbes, Bloomberg, and other national press claiming that she was the best governor at managing the pandemic.

The articles rolled out, however, just as the reality of the coronavirus numbers failed her. The virus simply doesn't care if you went to Oxford or about your VP aspirations. If you open up bars, no one wears a mask and people have big parties, then the virus wins. The virus is like the house at a casino - it always wins, regardless of how much spin.

Headlines:

And the littlest state shall lead the way on COVID-19 - Bloomberg

How the Smallest State Engineered a Big COVID Comeback - Politico

She told Politico, “I had this moment of clarity very early on, at 2 a.m. when I was working in my home alone. There’s no way you can outrun this thing. You have to stay a step ahead. That’s when we said we need aggressive testing, very aggressive contact tracing and social distancing. We came to the realization earlier than some other places, because it seemed like the only way to keep a lid on the virus.”

The only problem was Raimondo’s Politico claims did not quite match with the reality of the disease in Rhode Island, where testing unraveled, and contract tracing couldn’t function because the test results were not 24-36 hours old, they were five, seven, even ten days old. 

Joe Nocera, a former Rhode Islander who is now a columnist for Bloomberg — Raimondo endorsed Micheal Bloomberg for President — wrote, "The governor of Rhode Island has been instrumental in developing a piece of software that is going to play a vital role in helping the U.S. get back on its feet. And you wonder why I imagine where we would be now if she had been the country’s lead pandemic-fighter?”

Nocera's narrative and Raimondo’s dream have now died --  the victim of the reality of the coronavirus.

What Politico and Bloomberg failed to dig into was that Raimondo’s strategies were not consistent with the commentary. Her lack of enforcement, little public education, and the 5th highest death rate in the United States were real problems.

Just two weeks after her national ink, the numbers and testing failures caught up with the Raimondo administration. Rhode Island cases were doubling and tripling from the early July 4th weekend lows.

The 3-day average of cases increased from July 5th’s 27 to August 5th's 110.

August brought embarrassing quarantines from neighboring states (some have been reversed) and the New York Times featuring Rhode Island as one of the states with the highest percentage of increased cases.

Now that the Veep-stakes are over, Raimondo surrendered her firm demand for a return to the classroom and has now delayed schools atlas two weeks and there is still no clear indication if students will be in the classroom or online.

Get ready for the race for a campaign for a cabinet position — Commerce?

Fire up the PR machine.