[GeneralMayhem]

Performance is in fact divergent by party; see e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/hso3sf/oc_.... Blue counties are doing worse than red in both state cohorts due to population density, but counties of either party are doing worse in R states. Blue states were worse early on, mostly due to New York City being quickly overwhelmed, but now that's not the case, because D governors (e.g., Newsom) are generally leading responsibly, and R governors (e.g. Kemp) are... not.

>Obama failed to properly launch a simple website for his signature initiative

Healthcare.gov was a shitshow, but referring to it here is a very silly false equivalency. It was not time-sensitive in the same way that COVID-19 response is. It involved getting the federal government to exercise new competencies that it hadn't done at scale before; responding to national crises is kind of the number one job of the federal government, and PPE acquisition, distribution, and even manufacturing are not new. It failed for reasons having to do with mismanagement of timelines, not outright fraud; COVID PPE shipments have been hijacked and sold off to the president's cronies.

But sure, both sides technically did something wrong, so there's no difference between them.

[jdminhbg]

> Blue states were worse early on, mostly due to New York City being quickly overwhelmed, but now that's not the case, because D governors (e.g., Newsom) are generally leading responsibly, and R governors (e.g. Kemp) are... not.

The relevant metric is not "amount of time doing relatively better or worse." You can get all over with quickly like NY did, but they ended up with 8x the deaths of FL. NJ has 3x FL's. AFAICT, "leading responsibly" here means simply having (D) after their names, as these governors' policies were catastrophically bad.

[RestlessMind]

> responding to national crises is kind of the number one job of the federal government

I responded to your sibling comment about other examples about how D-dominated governments have failed spectacularly in areas which are supposed to be the core jobs of governments - public infrastructure. (ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875739).

> both sides technically did something wrong, so there's no difference between them.

I actually don't see much difference in the incompetence of the two sides. Presidents (or Governors) are simply impotent to get anything done in the US systems. At best (in terms of their powers), they can only stop something from happening.