It Doesn't Take That Long To Catch Up With Key People's Backgrounds - Mitch McConnell and Gretchen Whitmer

If anyone asks you about specific reasons Senator McConnell shouldn't be reelected, this article in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer will give a long, long list.

"The costs of the Senate’s dysfunction stretch in all directions, and include America’s vulnerability in the face of the covid-19 outbreak. For seven years after Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, passed, in 2010, Republicans in Congress tried at least sixty times to repeal it. In 2017, McConnell, who called it “the worst bill in modern history,” led the charge again and, among other things, personally introduced a little-noticed amendment to eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which provided grants to states for detecting and responding to infectious-disease outbreaks, among other things. The fund received approximately a billion dollars a year and constituted more than twelve per cent of the C.D.C.’s annual budget. Almost two-thirds of the money went to state and local health departments, including a program called Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity for Prevention and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases, in Kentucky.
Hundreds of health organizations, including the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, sent a letter to McConnell and other congressional leaders, warning them of “dire consequences” if the Prevention Fund was eliminated. Public-health programs dealing with infectious-disease outbreaks had never been restored to the levels they were at before the 2008 crash and were “critically underfunded.” The letter concluded, “Eliminating the Prevention Fund would be disastrous.”
In a column in Forbes, Judy Stone, an infectious-disease specialist, asked, “Worried about bird flu coming from Asia? Ebola? Zika? You damn well should be. Monitoring and control will be slashed by the Senate proposal and outbreaks of illness (infectious and other) will undoubtedly worsen.” The cuts, she wrote, were 'unconscionable—particularly given that the savings will go to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than meeting the basic health needs of the public.'”

And if you hear the name Gretchen Whitmer and you're wondering why a first term governor is being considered by Biden for his number two spot, Politico had a long piece on Gretchen Whitmer.  Here's just a snippet:

"Whitmer’s journey to this office begins with her father, Richard, a Lansing legend who worked for Governors George Romney and William Milliken. Long before he became one of the state’s private sector heavyweights—president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan—Dick Whitmer was a trained lawyer who rose up the governmental ranks to eventually lead the Department of Commerce.
His wife, Sherry Whitmer, was a powerhouse in her own right, an assistant attorney general under Frank Kelley, Michigan’s longest-serving attorney general and a godfather figure to young Gretchen and her two siblings. Although Dick and Sherry Whitmer divorced when Gretchen was 10, they instilled in their children a shared love of public service and a shared set of values.
“Neither one of them were ideologues. My mom probably would have been described like a Reagan Democrat, and my dad was a Milliken Republican,” Whitmer says, leaning forward on a blue-cushioned chair. “In Michigan, that’s theoretically a Democrat and a Republican, but it’s pretty close on the scale.”
The eldest Whitmer child grew up harboring no political convictions, much less political aspirations. She dreamed of being a sportscaster for ESPN. This owed to no particular athletic prowess; her adolescent nickname was “Gretchen Gravity,” a nod to her frequent falls, and overall lack of coordination. (These days she goes strictly by “Gretchen”—or sometimes, in an exaggerated Midwestern twang, “Gee Dubya.”)"