Pete Buttigieg's exit interview—Braun on coronavirus—Latest on #IN05
Plus: The latest stats on COVID-19 in Indiana.
By Adam Wren and design by Kris Davidson
TOTAL HOOSIERS TESTED FOR CORONAVIRUS: 11,658
TOTAL POSITIVE CASES: *1,786
TOTAL DEATHS: 35
*Results from ISDH and results submitted by private laboratories.
Indianapolis is an “emerging hotspot” in the battle against the novel coronavirus, Surgeon General Jerome Adams said Sunday.
On a Zoom media briefing this morning from Jasper, Sen. Mike Braun said the city should take note of what's happened in a hot spot like New York City.
“That should put a scare factor in everyone in other municipalities without getting to the point where you panic over it,” Braun said.
Braun said Indiana had 3,700 hospital beds with ventilators, a figure Gov. Eric Holcomb and other state public health officials have not been willing to share with reporters. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington projects that Indiana will need 10,458 hospital beds, 1,582 of which need to be Intensive care unit beds.
Braun said he supported the president's extension of social distancing guidelines through April.
“We don’t want to backslide,” Braun said.
HAPPENING TODAY: Gov. Eric Holcomb, the Indiana State Department of Health and other state leaders will host a virtual media briefing in the Governor’s Office to provide updates on COVID-19 and its impact on Indiana.
Watch here.
Good Monday morning and welcome to IMPORTANTVILLE. After a quiet few weeks, Pete Buttigieg emerged back into the news cycle last week, sitting for interviews with Rolling Stone, Washington Post, New York and Indianapolis Monthly.
Highlights of my interview:
ON ENCOURAGING BIDEN TO CAMPAIGN AT DYNGUS DAY IN SOUTH BEND: “And you better believe I would have been lobbying hard for the Biden campaign to capture Indiana’s heart by having a phenomenal presence at Dyngus Day. Obviously Dyngus Day, as we know it, is very much not in the spirit of social distancing. So we’ll have to practice some form of remote Dyngus festivities. But yeah, unfortunately, I can’t allow for that in good faith, but maybe we can wire up something remote.”
ON CAMPAIGNING FOR BIDEN AHEAD OF INDIANA’S PRIMARY: “There hadn’t been a lot of shape to it, but it was certainly expected on both sides that I’d be enthusiastically campaigning for him here in Indiana (ahead of the state’s once-scheduled May 5 primary; Indiana has now pushed its primary to June 2). I still will [campaign on Biden’s behalf], we’re just going to have to think up a different way to do it.”
ON PROBLEMS HE’S INTERESTED IN WORKING ON NEXT: “I’m also really proud of the work we did on national security and foreign policy. I don’t think anyone was expecting the mayor to be a foreign policy guy, but it wound up being another area where I’m just really pleased with what we did. And drilling down a little more narrowly into issue sets, if there was one issue where I saw the biggest gap between how much it was on the minds of voters and how much it was on the minds of reporters, it’s mental health. I just couldn’t believe how often I got that question. And I’m sure you were at an event or two where I did the show of hands thing.”
Read the rest here.
FOCUS ON THE FIFTH
Republican Beth Henderson, the 5th Congressional District candidate and former nurse and entrepreneur, voted as a Democrat in Indiana’s May 2008 primary, according to state voter files. “My vote was part of Rush Limbaugh’s ‘2008 Operation Chaos,’” Henderson told me, through a spokeswoman. “The goal was to stop Barack Obama from winning the Democratic Presidential primary and instead nominate the weakest Democrat candidate so that Republican John McCain would win in November. Many Republicans worked together to execute this strategy, myself being one of them.”
Henderson had also donated money to former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh.
AROUND IMPORTANTVILLE
I asked the governor’s office about the 1.5 million expired N95 masks sitting in a warehouse in Indianapolis. “The Governor didn’t know about it until he heard about the article. He doesn’t know the location,” Holcomb’s press secretary said in an emailed statement.
Buttigieg began March with $10,299,464 in cash on hand, according to his latest finance report, which discloses activity through February.
IMPORTANTVILLE READS
Eli Saslow, The Washington Post: ‘Anything good I could say about this would be a lie.’
They held a press conference since she was the first to die in Indiana. They said we got to say goodbye over video. I guess it’s a nicer story. I don’t really blame them. I’d like to find a way to sugarcoat this thing, too, but I can’t. Anything good I could say about this would be a lie.
IMPORTANTVILLE TAKE: How did Indiana public officials get this story wrong?
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading and subscribing. Stay healthy.
