MICHIGAN CITY – If ever there was a professional resume to match a political moment, it could be that of Dr. Woody Myers. The Indiana Democratic gubernatorial nominee is a medical doctor who spent his mid-career as a health official to corporations like Ford Motor Co. The campaign notes: Dr. Myers’ career intersects with many of the highest-profile medical stories of the last few decades, including teaching emergency medicine in San Francisco at the time of the emerging AIDS crisis. Myers served as Indiana health commissioner and championed the cause of Ryan White, a young boy infected with HIV who wished to attend public school. On his Twitter account, Myers acknowledged, “My life has led to this reckoning of a pandemic, an economic collapse, and a racial awakening. This election, we are fighting to put people over politics and fix this broken system.” But as he heads into the Labor Day milepost, the Myers campaign languishes in his challenge to Gov. Eric Holcomb. The pandemic has crimped Myers’ challenge financially from its beginning in March. But he began the year with just a $14,648 balance, even though Myers declared his candidacy the previous July. The Myers campaign posted $678,296 on its June 30 mid-year report and had just $72,310 cash on hand, which is by far the worst performing gubernatorial campaign for the two “major” parties in a generation. Holcomb began the year with $7.25 million and at the June 30 reporting deadline, had more than $8 million cash on hand. He has already spent “seven figures” on two statewide TV ads and has booked all the ads the campaign figures it needs through the Nov. 3 election, according to his campaign manager, Indiana Republican Chairman Kyle Hupfer. “We’re not going to take our foot off the gas,” Hupfer said.

BLOOMINGTON – Everyone, from Gov. Eric Holcomb to parents, teachers, students and employers, yearns to reopen schools and universities within the next three to four weeks. But parents are consumers, and most want schools to reopen when it is safe to do so. On Tuesday, President Trump injected politics into the equation that is being debated by thousands of school trustees, administrators, state and local health officials. “We hope that most schools are going to be open,” Trump said at the White House. “We don’t want people to make political statements or do it for political reasons. They think it’s going to be good for them politically so they keep the schools closed." He threatened to cut off federal aid to schools that don’t fully reopen. The problem these educators and trustees are facing is the resurgence of the first wave of COVID-19. Trump cited school reopenings in Germany, which posted 219 confirmed cases on Monday, compared to 192 in Italy and 57,186 in the U.S. On Friday, there were 68,226 new cases in the U.S. Indiana has seen its testing positivity rate increase to 5.9% this past week, a precursor to more trouble, which arrived on Friday when the Indiana State Department of Health announced 748 new cases, a spike of over 200 from the day before. It was the largest one-day increase since May 6, when cases increased by 837. Vice President Pence said at a now rare Coronavirus Task Force presser, “Well the president said today, we just don’t want the guidance to be too tough. That’s the reason why next week, the CDC is going to be issuing a new set of tools, five different documents that will be giving even more clarity on the guidance going forward.”

TRAFALGAR — I moved to a new condo in the early stages of this pandemic, and as I restored my personal library, I found a coverless paperback edition of Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock.” In his introduction for the 1970 landmark book, Toffler explained, “I coined the term ‘future shock’ to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short of time.” With this coronavirus pandemic, we have essentially come to another pivot point in American culture which has begun to unfold over the past six weeks, joining the American Revolution, the Civil War, the 1929 stock market crash that wrought the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor and World War II, the assassination of President Kennedy, and 9/11 as events that inextricably changed our lives. The dreary month of April ends with more than a quarter million Hoosiers out of work, at least a thousand dead, while our favorite stores, restaurants and bars are on the ropes.