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(The first paper money issued in Massachusetts, in 1690)

In this episode, we look at how further wars with Quebec combined with the introduction of paper money to create big political divisions in mid-18th century Massachusetts.

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Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 28: Take My Debts Away.

Over the last two episodes, we talked about the history of New England during the early 1700s, a period which was marked by inconclusive fighting with Quebec. Today, we’re going to talk about the next few decades of New England’s history, with a focus on how Massachusetts actually paid for these very expensive wars.

Massachusetts, and the American colonies in general, had always had problems with a shortage of cash, which made it difficult for the economy to function properly and difficult for the government to collect taxes. Without any money, you have to resort to barter, which is terribly inefficient and seriously hinders the functioning of markets, since it becomes prohibitively expensive to trade with anyone at all. And partly as a result of this shortage, the economy wasn’t actually growing that fast, at least in per capita terms.

They had solved -- or tried to solve -- this problem in various ways. Using crops as a commodity money, like tobacco in the Chesapeake, for instance, using foreign currencies, using the Indian currency of wampum, tolerating piracy in order to get some of that pirate gold. There were attempts to set up private banks that could issue money, but they failed.

Massachusetts had just started minting its own coins in 1652, but it wasn’t clear that they had the right to do so, and the practice was ended when their old charter was annulled. You see, Britain didn’t want to let its colonies mint their own coins. Following the mercantilist economic philosophy of the time, they wanted to hoard gold and silver within the mother country, rather than letting it flow out to the colonies, so they made sure that the movement of gold and silver was one way only. This policy hurt the colonies economically, but since they existed solely to serve British interests, who cared?

So when the wars with Quebec started, Massachusetts needed cash more than ever, but cash was in even shorter supply. So the government hit upon the idea of issuing “bills of credit”. That is, paper money. Paper money had been invented in China many centuries ago, but in the West in the 1600s it was still a novel idea. In fact, when the colony first issued paper money in 1690, the idea still hadn’t even been tried in England yet, though it would be in just a few years. So this was an early experiment, at least within the Western world.

The very first issue of paper money was due to that first failed invasion of Quebec. The government hadn’t made any plans to pay their soldiers, incorrectly assuming that they’d be paid out of the plunder they took. But since the expedition was a complete failure, the government suddenly had to scramble to figure out how to pay the near-mutinous troops. They decided on paper money -- basically an IOU. In order to increase confidence in these dubious-seeming IOUs, the government agreed to give a 5% tax break to anyone who paid their taxes with these bills. It worked, and the currency was accepted.

At first things went well enough, despite some initial doubts. The economy became more efficient and grew as a result. Connecticut also started issuing paper money in 1709, and Rhode Island in 1710. So did many of the other colonies further south.

This system was then expanded and fleshed out over the next three decades.

These days, when the government prints money, every $1 bill is equal in value to every other $1 bill no matter what, but back then it was a little more complicated. Back then, the government issued issued money in batches. So one issue of bills might be printed in 1733, and another in 1735. These bills were then lent to colonists, who would then spend that money and circulate it throughout the economy.

But the important thing is that these different issues of bills could each be redeemed at some point in the future by the government. The money had been given out as a loan, and eventually the government would call in that loan, with different issues of money being redeemed at different times. So really there were a bunch of slightly different currencies going around in the economy, rather than one, and they could sometimes vary in value relative to each other.

And because the government, in printing money, was acting as a lender, it could decide to postpone calling in its debts if it so chose. The government could basically say, “No, no, we’re not going to be collecting that money we issued in 1733 just yet, even though we said we were going to do it now.” This postponement meant that there was more money left in circulation, but it also lowered people’s confidence in the money supply, since they worried that they might not be able to use this money to pay their taxes in the future. Both of these effects meant that if you postponed collecting these bills, the value of the currency would depreciate. So, basically inflation. In effect, this is similar to how the government can cause inflation today, just through a different mechanism.

The ability for the government to inflate the currency meant that monetary policy quickly became a central political issue. If you inflate the value of money, if you make it so that a dollar is worth less than it was before, some groups will win while others will lose.

If you’re a debtor, if you owe someone $1000, then depreciation is good for you. That $1000 is now worth less than it was before, which means that in order to pay it back, you don’t have to give up as much. You effectively owe less money than you used to. If, on the other hand. I’m the creditor who loaned you $1000, then depreciation is bad news. The $1000 I was expecting from you is now worth less than it was before, so now I’m poorer than I expected. There are all sorts of other complications to this, of course, but that’s the essence of the idea.

And inflation, or at least high inflation, could cause problems beyond just making some people more or less wealthy than before. For instance, if you’re a debtor and you expect the currency to be worth less in the future, you might postpone payment of your debts until then. It was cheaper to default on your debt and have your creditor take you to court, since by the time the case was resolved, whatever money you owed would be worth so much less. Therefore, big fluctuations in the value of the currency could wreak havoc on all sorts of economic decisions, as well as clogging up the court system.

So that’s one aspect of monetary policy: how much money to print, and how long to keep it in circulation. But there was another complication on top of that: what should this paper money be backed by? Right now, the money was backed by the loans that had been taken out to get it, and by the fact that you could pay your taxes with the money. Some people wanted to expand this system through the creation of a bank which would issue even more money backed by silver and gold.

Another proposal was to create a land bank. That is, a bank which would offer paper money backed by land rather than by gold or silver. Basically, you as a landowner could take out a loan with the bank, secured against your land. In exchange, the bank would give you money which you could spend, and that money would then circulate through the economy, ultimately backed by the land that had been used to secure those loans. There was a lot of land in Massachusetts, and so a land bank would likely mean a huge expansion in the amount of money in the colony.

There were also disputes about who should run such a bank if it was created. Under some proposals it would be private, while in others, it would be run by the provincial government. If the government was in charge, then it would be easier for the colonists to get more money printed than if the bank were private, since governments are naturally more responsive to public pressure.

I know this might be confusing -- inflation, land banks, silver banks, private banks, public banks -- but the important thing is this: whether or not there’d be more money in circulation overall. If you supported printing a lot more money, then you probably supported creating a land bank. That was the political axis at the time: more paper money vs. less paper money. Everything else is just a particular instance of that bigger struggle.

So, which groups supported printing more money and which ones opposed it? Who supported the silver bank or the land bank, and who opposed both of them?

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know how or why people voted back then. Even today it can be really, really hard to figure out what it is that voters want from their politicians. You can multiply those problems a hundredfold when it comes to the past. There isn’t that much surviving data, and there were no formal parties, so figuring out which faction a politician belonged to -- if he belonged to one at all -- is often a matter of guesswork and interpretation. And on top of all that, politics was much more local back then, which makes generalizations even harder. Did a politician lose reelection because voters changed their mind on some issue? Because of a personal scandal? Because he didn’t do enough glad handing? Because the economy got worse? Because he neglected to get a local bridge repaired? It’s often simply impossible to say, and so we can only speak vaguely about how the political process actually worked. Outside of some exceptional periods, a lot of change seems to have been due to random local variation, rather than any grand ideas or interests that would seem important to us today.

So the most we can do is look for some general patterns that seem to mostly hold. To that end, we need to turn to a man named Thomas Hutchinson. Hutchinson was both a historian and a politician, who became governor of Massachusetts just before the Revolution. I’ll have more to say about him in a later episode, but for now all you need to know is that before he became governor, Hutchinson had begun working on a multivolume history of the colony, one of the more important sources for modern historians.

Anyway, Hutchinson identified three factions which developed in response to these debates over the currency. These three groups would persist in some form for decades, until the American Revolution itself. Not in any organized way, but still recognizable as the same thing.

The smallest faction (but still sizeable) was the one in favor of ending the experiment with paper money altogether and returning to a system of hard currency. There were always those who saw paper money as a dangerous innovation or some kind of scam, including Hutchinson himself. This faction, centered in Boston and some of the coastal towns, was led by big-time merchants and those who did a lot of business with Britain. They would lose money if inflation were higher. Conservatives like the Mather family were members as well. I’ll call this group the non-expansionists.

Another faction, much larger, favored a private bank which would issue currency. According to Hutchinson, "This party, generally, consisted of persons in difficult or involved circumstances in trade, or such as were possessed of real estates, but had little or no ready money at command, or men of no substance at all". So mostly people with assets who just lacked cash, basically. They wanted to make sure the economy had enough money for them to trade. I’ll call this group the moderates.

The third faction, also quite large, favored a public bank. This faction consisted of somewhat poorer farmers and Bostonians. Not the poorest of the poor, but not the comfortably well off either. Throughout the 1700s about 40% of the delegates from the rural areas came from this faction, which I’ll call the populists.

So the more rural you got, and the less rich you were, the more likely you were to favor loose money, which is not too surprising. It’s always been the case that farmers, whose livelihoods can be wrecked by a single bad harvest, are at great risk of falling into debt. And really, this is part of a very long tradition of farmers wanting debt relief. I mean, you can go all the way back 4000 years ago to ancient Mesopotamia, when kings periodically proclaimed jubilees in which all debts were invalidated, as a way of taking pressure off poor farmers. This was just a financially more sophisticated version of the same thing. And we’ll see similar concerns again in the late 1800s, with many farmers trying to move the United States away from a strict gold standard in order to cause inflation.

Merchants, who were often the guys loaning the money to these farmers, were naturally opposed to such debt relief.

However, although paper money was one of the most important issues faced by Massachusetts, it was by no means the only one. Modern historian Marc Egnal, in his book A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution, expands upon Hutchinson’s three factions. According to him, the two larger factions, the moderates and the populists, were both expansionists. That is, they didn’t just want to expand the money supply, they also wanted to expand the European presence in America in general, by growing the economy and moving westwards as fast as possible. They were optimists about America and they were more gung-ho about the wars with France, especially the moderates, since it meant further opportunities for expansion and inflation. When the War of Independence came, they were enthusiastic supporters.

The moderates and the populists had different economic interests, which meant that they didn’t always see eye to eye, but in their view of America’s future they were united.

On the other hand, the smaller faction, the non-expansionists, also tended to be more pessimistic about America’s prospects, at least relative to Europe. Thus, they favored policies which maintained their ties with the mother country, rather than desiring to go their own way. They were more skeptical about the wars with France and they often remained Loyalists to Britain during the Revolution.

That’s just one interpretation, but it seems plausible enough on the whole. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be all that much research on factionalism in colonial times, at least that I could find, so I’ve had to rely on fewer sources than I’d’ve liked, but hopefully nothing is too far off from the truth.

It might be more accurate to call these groups “interests” or even “dispositions” instead of “factions”, since they aren’t really stable coalitions. Instead, different political alliances will emerge out of these groups, depending on what the important issues of the day are. So the moderates and the non-expansionists might form an alliance for a while, before that disintegrates and the moderates instead ally with some of the populists.

Okay! So that’s the basic dynamic that will be playing out over the next few decades: various proposals to print more money, backed especially by rural farmers, and opposed especially by urban merchants.

However, for the first several decades after the introduction of paper money, inflation remained low and the currency was a minor political issue at best. The financial demands of King William’s War hadn’t been that great and so the government hadn’t had to issue that much paper money. It was only with Queen Anne’s War in the 1700s that monetary policy became an ongoing political concern. The government issued more and more money, which of course meant that the value of that currency kept dropping. In fact, Massachusetts often found itself in the weird position of both having an inflated currency and not having enough money to go around, which only lead to further demands to print money. Connecticut had similar problems as well.

As the war came to a close, a split opened up over what the colony should do. A number of colonists proposed that the government should create a land bank, in order to keep issuing more currency even though the war had ended. The idea for a land bank had been around for a few decades, but this was the first time that it gained serious traction. The current governor, Joseph Dudley, was opposed, while the supporters of the land bank controlled the lower house of the General Court.

Now, in addition to the people of Massachusetts, there were a few other groups which also had a say in whether or not to print more money. Obviously the colony’s government itself had an interest in causing inflation to help pay for the wars. You need more money? Just print more money! What could go wrong?

But the British government, which could veto colonial legislation remember, also had a say, and they opposed inflation. They represented the interests of British merchants, who were creditors and thus stood to lose out should the value of colonial currencies be lowered. So Britain not only opposed minting coins, they also opposed printing bills, even when that hurt the colonial economy. Massachusetts wasn’t represented in Britain and so they got the shaft. Britain could and did use its influence to block growth of the money supply, at least sometimes.

But in any case, thanks to local opposition, the land bank idea was not passed into law. Instead, the government just printed more money and kept older money in circulation. That was enough for now. With the temporary end of the wars, the currency fight died down for a while.

In 1715 Governor Dudley was removed from office and soon replaced by Colonel Samuel Shute, who served from 1716 to 1723. Shute, who had been chosen partly for his opposition to the land bank, was not a native New Englander, and his time in office was very contentious, though not because of the land bank or the currency.

Shute quarrelled with the General Court over appointments and over his salary. (Remember the governors didn’t have a permanent salary and so were at the mercy of the legislature if they wanted to get paid.) He tried to veto the lower house’s nominee for Speaker of the House. The lower house objected to this interference in their affairs and cut Shute’s salary by 200 pounds as punishment. The next year they insisted that Shute approve all their legislation before he be given a salary at all.

Shute left for England in 1723 to complain, but he never wound up returning. In his absence, the lieutenant governor, William Dummer, served as acting governor for most of the next 7 years. Under Dummer there was a small war with some Indians, but things mostly remained calm, and the currency remained a minor issue.

The biggest issue of the day was the so-called explanatory charter. Thanks to the disputes between the governors and the General Court over just how powerful the governor actually was, King George I issued an explanatory charter, which was basically an amendment to the Massachusetts charter which had been issued by William and Mary in 1691. This new document clarified certain provisions in the old charter and enhanced the governor’s powers, though it still didn’t give him a fixed salary.

In order to go into effect, the explanatory charter had to be passed by the General Court. This was a contentious issue. Both the moderates and the non-expansionists favored adopting the explanatory charter, but the populists were opposed. In any case, the charter was in fact adopted, though it didn’t change much, really.

The next governor was Jonathan Belcher, who served from 1730 to 1741. Before his appointment as governor he had been serving as the colony’s representative in London. While in England he apparently managed to convince the officials there that, as a native, he might have better luck in convincing the assembly to give the governor a permanent salary. However, he was no more successful than his predecessors had been.

Over the 1730s, the currency situation gradually worsened, thanks mostly to Governor Belcher.

Belcher had been given specific instructions by the Board of Trade about what to do with the money supply. They wanted him to phase out all paper money over an eleven year period and move Massachusetts back entirely to a gold and silver economy. This was an extremely ambitious policy, to say the least, and it would have led to a huge contraction in the money supply. However, the General Court resisted the plan. The Board of Trade may have been responding to the interests of English creditors, but the legislature was responding to the interests of Massachusetts debtors.

As a result of this standoff, much less money was issued for a few years. Instead, the bills that were already in circulation were kept in circulation for longer, which led to further economic problems.

Governor Belcher was in a difficult position. When he came to an agreement with the General Court to print more money, the Board of Trade threatened to remove him from office. They still wanted Belcher to get rid of paper money altogether. There simply seemed to be no position which would satisfy both the legislature and the Board of Trade.

He tried to come up with a compromise position, issuing a new government currency backed by silver and gold, while taking the old currency out of circulation. However, people just hoarded the new currency, since it was seen as more valuable, even as the old currency was being eliminated. Thus Massachusetts was left without much cash at all. (In economics, that’s known as Gresham’s law: bad money drives out good. If people have two currencies to choose from, they’ll all hoard the more valuable one and it may disappear from circulation altogether.)

As the money supply once again became an important issue, Massachusetts once again became divided over whether to create a bank to issue more currency. The populists supported the creation of a land bank, while the other two factions supported the creation of a bank which would be backed by silver.

However, neither proposal got enough support in the General Court to pass, and presumably the governor would’ve had to veto them anyway. So instead of a public bank run by the government, some of the colonists decided to form a private bank instead. Both a private land bank and a private silver bank were created. The silver bank was supported by merchants, who opposed the land bank. However, the land bank proved widely popular among everyone else. It soon had almost a thousand subscribers and its currency went into circulation. Even a few moderates decided to participate in the land bank.

However, the Board of Trade continued to oppose any measures which would lead to currency depreciation, even if it wasn’t being done by the government itself. So they put pressure on Governor Belcher to quash these banks, and he did what he could to stop them, by forbidding all lawyers and government employees from doing business with the land bank and firing all those who did.

That wasn’t enough to stop the land bank’s growth however, and in the elections of 1741, supporters of the land bank became a majority in the General Court, as well as winning many local elections. But whatever the people thought about it, they didn’t have the final say. Back in London, Parliament passed legislation which essentially banned the land bank. A firm reminder of who really controlled Massachusetts these days. And so the colony’s money supply continued to see-saw back and forth haphazardly. Not good for business.

Around this time, Belcher fell from power and was removed from office, although not really because of the currency dispute. Instead, it was because his patrons back in England had themselves fallen from power, so that when his enemies mobilized against him, there was no one in London to look after his interests. Again, politics in Massachusetts had become a function of petty disputes within the British government.

Belcher’s replacement was William Shirley, who would serve as governor for most of the next 15 years, during the entirety of King George’s War, and the beginning of the French and Indian War.

Shirley had been born in England, but he went to Massachusetts in 1731, not out of any Puritan conviction -- which would have been an anachronism at this point -- but as an ambitious lawyer looking to make his way in society. Upon arrival he soon joined the faction opposed to Governor Belcher, and after Belcher was removed managed to get himself appointed to the job, thanks to his connections back in England, which I guess proved superior to Belcher’s connections.

Shirley did his best to be cooperative with the General Court. He brought up the issue of a permanent salary, but only briefly and only once, just to get it out of the way.

He was conciliatory towards the populists and he managed to get some of them on his side, but as far as the land bank goes his hands were tied by Parliament. He had no choice but impose regulations on the land bank which caused it to swiftly collapse, which of course only led to further economic woes. For example, Samuel Adams, Sr., father of the famous revolutionary Samuel Adams, lost most of his wealth.

It was not a popular move. John Adams, the future president, who was a child at the time, said that the attack on the land bank was even more hated by the colonists than the hated Stamp Act would be.

Things seemed to be going from bad to worse, but before the economy could totally collapse or anything, something happened which interrupted all of these problems: another war with France.

So now it’s time to jump back to English politics, and catch up with the last few decades of events.

When we last left England, the War of the Spanish Succession had come to an end and Queen Anne had just died. Because she had no surviving children and because Catholics were now legally barred from becoming king or queen, the throne now passed to her second cousin, George I, of the House of Hanover. The Hanovers were a moderately important German dynasty, who, up until now, had basically nothing to do with Britain.

As a foreigner who didn’t speak the language that well and spent a lot of time in his native country, King George was naturally less involved in British politics than his predecessors had been, further strengthening Parliament’s control.

Anne had favored the conservative Tory party, but George was concerned by their connection to the Jacobites, the supporters of the Stuart dynasty’s claim to the throne and opponents of the Glorious Revolution. There weren’t that many Jacobites left, but they were still seen as a threat to King George’s legitimacy. So instead he favored the Whigs, who entered a period of political dominance which would last decades.

Under William and Anne, elections to Parliament had been held every three years, which led to a hothouse political atmosphere, where both the Whigs and the Tories fought it out in the press day after day. But in 1716 Parliament passed the Septennial Act, which meant that now elections only had to be held every seven years. This was partly just a power grab by the Whigs, designed to keep themselves in office longer, but it did have the effect of calming things down considerably.

It also helped that Europe was entering a period of relative peace. Louis XIV had died in 1715, after 72 years on the throne, so French ambitions were reduced for the time being. England and France even wound up as allies for a while.

The most important political development under George I was the creation of the office of prime minister. Previously, there had never been a single person in charge of government other than the king himself. Well, now there was, at least unofficially. That man was Robert Walpole. Walpole was a Whig who had joined Parliament in 1701 and gradually risen to prominence. Thanks in part to his deft handling of a financial crisis known as the South Sea Bubble, by 1721 he had become the leading figure in the cabinet, a position he held for the next two decades. There had been leaders in the cabinet before, but this was unprecedented.

This was a new way of doing things, a new center of power in which a member of Parliament was placed in charge of the government, permanently dependant on Parliamentary support to get anything done.

Walpole was very skillful at handling Parliament, he was cautious in his ambitions, and he had good luck in general, allowing him to stay in power for so long. The Tory party receded into near-irrelevance. The political scene was as calm as it had been for the better part of a century.

George I died in 1727 and was succeeded by his son George II. Nothing much changed. The new king continued his father’s policies and even kept Robert Walpole on as prime minister. Walpole continued his grip on power and Britain continued its headlong transformation into a commercial empire. Peace was maintained thanks to the temporary alliance with France.

Walpole’s rule was controversial, and he was subject to constant attacks in the press. Often he was accused of corruption. He was corrupt, though probably not more so than his predecessors. He just had such power that most of the corruption and patronage in the realm flowed through his hands, which made him a very obvious target. But despite the constant antagonism, Walpole’s skills were such that he managed to survive each crisis as it came up, keeping both Parliament and King on his side each time.

But they say that all political careers end in failure, and Walpole was no exception. After 30 years of relative peace, war returned. At first the conflict was small, just a trade dispute with Spain known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear. The impact on the American colonies was minimal.

However, the struggle went badly for Britain and Walpole took the blame. In the elections of 1741 he nearly lost his majority and it was clear that his support was continuing to erode. Soon, he would no longer be able to control Parliament. The writing was on the wall and so Walpole resigned. There were some attempts to prosecute him for corruption, but they came to nothing.

His two decades as Prime Minister had set a whole bunch of new precedents for British politics, not unlike the presidency of George Washington in America. A new form of government was being worked out on a practical level.

Anyway, I’m mentioning all this stuff about English politics partly just to point out that nothing similar was happening in America. There were powerful politicians in the colonies, of course, but none who could be called a prime minister, no one who relied on the support of the legislature in the same way. And neither were the same political factions present in America. By the time of the Glorious Revolution, the colonies and the mother country were set firmly on different political trajectories, even though they remained attached for the better part of a century afterwards.

Anyway, although Walpole was gone, the war continued. Actually, a much bigger war was brewing in Europe, one that would swallow up the war with Spain. This bigger war, the War of the Austrian Succession, was, as you probably guessed, fought over the question of who should rule Austria. The main claimant for the throne, the one backed by Britain, was Maria Theresa, mother of Marie Antoinette. France, however, hoping to weaken Austria, backed a different candidate. And so a new war was on, for the future of Central Europe. Once again Britain and France were at war.

But the colonists didn’t care about Central Europe. All that mattered to them was that they were at war with Quebec again. In America, the conflict was known as King George’s War, a name which made perfect sense at the time, but is a bit confusing these days given that there were three more King Georges in a row after the first one.

Anyway, because of the war, the Board of Trade reversed its opposition to paper money for the time being, since they needed Massachusetts to have a functioning economy in order to fight the French. The land bank was still dead, but the government was printing a whole lot more money, so the problems of the last decade temporarily vanished.

This had the effect of scrambling the alliances between the populists, moderates, and non-expansionists. Instead of paper money, they were now fighting over the war effort. Governor Shirley was taking aggressive action against Quebec, with the support of the moderates and many populists, while the non-expansionists and some populists opposed him.

Things had really changed since the Glorious Revolution. Now, New Englanders could be downright patriotic about their place in the British empire, at least when the British weren’t annoying them with bad policy decisions. So many Americans took to the war with gusto.

The English had captured the French fort at Port Royal in the last war, but the French had since built an even stronger fort, Louisbourg, a few hundred miles further up the coast. It had 250 cannons and walls 30 feet high. From this fort they could disrupt English shipping and fishing in the region. But the English had intelligence that the fort was undermanned and so Governor Shirley decided to launch an attack, with the assistance of the British and the other colonies.

Astonishingly, considering the colonists’ track record, the attack was a success. The force they sent struggled for the first month of the siege, but then they managed to capture an incoming French warship carrying supplies and weapons for the fort. The French surrendered soon after that.

France tried to send a force to retake Louisbourg, but in a surprising reversal of how things normally went, the French expedition turned out to be a disaster. The French didn’t even manage to reach their destination.

Other than the siege of Louisbourg, the war was mostly just normal raiding back and forth, as well as some privateering at sea. Thankfully, it was a brief war, lasting only 4 years, at least in the colonies.

Once again, I don’t think there’s any need to get into how the war went in Europe. The British-backed Maria Theresa became Empress of Austria, but it was just as inconclusive as the wars of the last generation. However, in the final peace treaty, the fort of Louisbourg was returned to the French, which must have severely stung the pride of the New Englanders.

But probably the most important impact of the war in Massachusetts was that the colony now had massive debt and a currency which was worth only like a tenth of what it had been worth a few decades ago. It’s not the worst example of hyperinflation in world history, but it wasn’t exactly a great track record either.

Governor Shirley, who had been the one inflating the currency to fund the war effort, now reversed course and tried to pull things back. This also meant a change in his allies. He shifted away from the populists and towards the non-expansionists. In fact, he shifted hard in the other direction.

The British government had agreed to reimburse Massachusetts for some of its war expenses, and it was proposed to use that money to buy back all the paper currency left in circulation and return Massachusetts to a hard money standard of just silver and gold.

Paper money was still popular with many of the colonists, but thanks to all of the problems that there had been, the plan won enough support to pass. And so in 1750 Massachusetts ended its experiment with paper money. Not only that, in 1751 the British Parliament passed an act which prohibited the colonies from printing any paper money that wasn’t backed up by gold or silver.

Now, that didn’t mean that the colonists had come up with another solution to replace paper money. Far from it. The switch back to silver and gold meant that once again there wasn’t nearly enough currency to go around and the economy suffered as a result. But for the time being, thanks mostly to British pressure, there was nothing to be done about it. Paper was dead.

It’s safe to say that this first experiment with paper currency was a failure, at least in Massachusetts. Though in some other colonies it went better. What accounts for this failure?

Well, firstly I think that Massachusetts was torn between two forces: popular support for inflation and British opposition to inflation. The back and forth between those two sides meant that the amount of money in circulation kept fluctuating, and the colonists faced an always uncertain economic future. How much would your money be worth in a year? How could you know? And in general, it’s going to be hard to have a paper currency if you’re a colony and your home government is against the idea. Massachusetts simply had limited sovereignty.

Secondly, the monetary system was much too open to popular pressure. These days, America’s monetary system is controlled by unelected officials at the Federal Reserve, while in Massachusetts the decision to print money was made by elected officials. Back then elected officials weren’t as responsive to public opinion as they are today, but officials certainly were aware of what their constituents wanted, and they acted accordingly.

And thirdly, paper money was a novel experiment and no one really knew what they were doing yet.

Taken together, all of this lead to a very unstable system, with periods of rapid expansion of the monetary supply matched by correspondingly rapid contractions, neither of which were good for the economy as a whole. Sometimes there was so little money in circulation that New Englanders had to resort to barter. Arguably, paper money was still better than having no currency at all, but it definitely didn’t work as intended.

Better luck next time.

Next episode, we’ll look at the history of Rhode Island during this period, and how a regional rivalry there led to a different sort of factionalism. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

If you like the podcast, please rate it on iTunes. You can also keep track of Early and Often on Twitter, at earlyoftenpod, or read transcripts of every episode at the blog, at earlyandoftenpodcast.wordpress.com. Thanks for listening.

Sources:

Revolutionary New England, 1691-1776 by James Truslow Adams

The History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Volume 3 by Thomas Williams Bicknell

Currency and Banking in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, Part II: Banking by Andrew McFarland Davis

A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution by Marc Egnal

Thomas Hutchinson and the Province Currency by Malcolm Freiberg

A Land of Liberty?: England, 1689–1727 by Julian Hoppit

The History of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay: From the Charter of King William and Queen Mary in 1691, Until the Year 1750 by Thomas Hutchinson

Colonial Rhode Island -- A History by Sydney V. James

Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies 1675-1715 by Richard R. Johnson

Colonial Massachusetts -- A History by Benjamin W. Labaree

A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 by Paul Langford

The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I by Herbert L. Osgood

The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II by Herbert L. Osgood

History of New England, Volume IV by John Gorham Palfrey

Currency Policies and Legal Development in Colonial New England by Claire Priest

Old Lights and New Money: A Note on Religion, Economics, and the Social Order in 1740 Boston by Rosalind Remer

Succession Politics in Massachusetts, 1730-1741 by John A. Schutz

Colonial Connecticut -- A History by Robert J. Taylor

The Land-Bank System in the American Colonies by Theodore Thayer

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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What Are The Chances Of The Republicans Winning The House

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-are-the-chances-of-the-republicans-winning-the-house/

What Are The Chances Of The Republicans Winning The House

Opinionhow Can Democrats Fight The Gop Power Grab On Congressional Seats You Won’t Like It

WATCH: Democrats ‘have a good chance of winning the White House, Sen. Lindsey Graham

Facing mounting pressure from within the party, Senate Democrats finally hinted Tuesday that an emboldened Schumer may bring the For the People Act back for a second attempt at passage. But with no hope of GOP support for any voting or redistricting reforms and Republicans Senate numbers strong enough to require any vote to cross the 60-vote filibuster threshold, Schumers effort will almost certainly fail.

Senate Democrats are running out of time to protect Americas blue cities, and the cost of inaction could be a permanent Democratic minority in the House. Without resorting to nuclear filibuster reform tactics, Biden, Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be presiding over a devastating loss of Democrats most reliable electoral fortresses.

Mcconnell: House Senate Gop Wins In 2022 Would Check Biden

Addison Mitchell McConnellHouse approves John Lewis voting rights measureThe Hill’s 12:30 Report – Presented by AT&T – Pelosi’s negotiates with centrists to keep Biden’s agenda afloatMcConnell urges Biden to ignore Aug. 31 Afghanistan deadlineMORE on Thursday pledged that if Republicans win back control of Congress next year they could be a check against the Biden administration, forcing it into the political center.

McConnell, speaking at an event in Kentucky, said that American voters have a “big decision” to make in 2022, when control of both the House and Senate are up for grabs.

“Do they really want a moderate administration or not? If the House and Senate were to return to Republican hands that doesn’t mean nothing happens,” McConnell said.

“What I want you to know is if I become the majority leader again it’s not for stopping everything. It’s for stopping the worst. It’s for stopping things that fundamentally push the country into a direction that at least my party feels is not a good idea for the country,” he added. “And I could make sure Biden makes his promise … to be a moderate.”

Democrats are trying to keep their majorities in both the House, where they have a nine-seat advantage, and the Senate, which is evenly split but where they have the majority since Vice President Harris is able to break ties.

The Cook Political Report rates both the Pennsylvania and North Carolina seats as toss-ups, and Johnson’s seat as “lean R.”

What To Know About The Gops Chances Of Regaining The House

This month, the National Republican Congressional Committee ran a poll regarding the most competitive seats up for grabs during next years congressional midterms. The findings were quite telling and spell bad news for Democrats maintaining their current and slim majority.

For starters, in districts categorized as Trump/Democratic, the unfavorable rating of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hits a whopping 60%. This comes on top of the revelation that 57% of U.S. voters believe that Bidens stimulus aid is failing to provide the necessary relief for themselves and their relatives.

With the American Jobs Plan, were going to bring quality, affordable high-speed internet to every single American no matter where they live.

President Biden

In regards to the U.S. economy and jobs in America, 46% of polled Americans stated that they favor Republicans more than Democrats. Just 41% claimed that they have more faith in Democrats than Republicans when it comes to U.S. jobs and the economy.

Finally, three-quarters of Americans described the ongoing Southern border crisis as a significant problem in the nation.

Don’t Miss: Which Region In General Supported The Democratic Republicans

Will Republicans Take The House In 2022

The odds that the Republicans will take the House of Representatives in 2022 are currently unknown, and sportsbooks haven’t posted lines to this effect just yet. As the races near, of course, the top Vegas election betting sites will have odds for every contested seat in the US House.

When betting, it’s important to weight various factors that will affect the GOP’s ability to win a majority in the House, such as the party affiliation of the sitting President, the laws that have been passed recently, and any scandals that might tarnish either side. The Republican party won all 27 US House seats graded as “toss-ups” in 2020, chipping away at the Democratic House majority, and should that trend continue, the GOP could easily flip the lower chamber.

Possible 2010 Or 2014 Midterm Repeat

Big bets on policy also don’t necessarily pay off at the ballot box, a lesson Democrats learned a decade ago when they passed the Affordable Care Act. President Barack Obama’s domestic policy achievement also helped decimate congressional Democratic majorities in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections.

It’s just one reason why Republicans feel good about their chances in 2022, along with structural advantages like the redistricting process, where House districts are redrawn every decade to reflect population changes. Republicans control the process in more states and are better positioned to gain seats.

“This deck is already stacked, because they’ve been gerrymandering these districts,” Maloney says. “And now they’re trying to do even more of it and add to that with these Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws throughout the country.”

He maintains that efforts among Republican-led state legislatures to enact more voting restrictions show the party has a losing policy hand for the midterm elections.

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National View: Republican Resurgence In 2022 Already On The Horizon

Reading the political tea leaves 18 months in advance is as tricky as making a weather forecast for the same timeframe. But every so often, circumstances combine to increase the odds in the forecasters favor. Looking ahead to next years midterms is one of them. Because if things continue on their current course, Nov. 8, 2022, will be a very good night for Republicans around the country.

For starters, history is on the GOPs side going into the campaign. Theres a long track record of the incumbent presidents party losing seats during a midterm election. In fact, since 1934, only two presidents have enjoyed an increase in their partys numbers in the House and Senate: Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 and George W. Bush in 2002.

Excluding those two exceptions, losses are big for the party that occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Especially for first-term presidents and particularly in the House. Consider Presidents Donald Trump , Barack Obama , Bill Clinton , Ronald Reagan , and Gerald Ford . All were shellacked at the ballot box, resulting in significantly fewer members of their party in the House of Representatives.

According to FiveThirtyEight, the GOP also has a turnout advantage in midterms. Under Republican presidents since 1978, the GOP has enjoyed a plus-one shift toward party identification for those who vote in midterm elections. That margin swells to plus-five under Democratic presidents.

Opinion: The House Looks Like A Gop Lock In 2022 But The Senate Will Be Much Harder

Redistricting will take place in almost every congressional district in the next 18 months. The party of first-term presidents usually loses seats in midterms following their inauguration President Barack Obamas Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010 and President Donald Trumps Republicans lost 40 in 2018 but the redistricting process throws a wrench into the gears of prediction models.

President George W. Bush saw his party add nine seats in the House in 2002. Many think this was a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America nearly 14 months earlier, but the GOP, through Republican-led state legislatures, controlled most of the redistricting in the two years before the vote, and thus gerrymandering provided a political benefit. Republicans will also have a firm grip on redistricting ahead of the 2022 midterms.

The Brennan Center has found that the GOP will enjoy complete control of drawing new boundaries for 181 congressional districts, compared with a maximum of 74 for Democrats, though the final numbers could fluctuate once the pandemic-delayed census is completed. Gerrymandering for political advantage has its critics, but both parties engage in it whenever they get the opportunity. In 2022, Republicans just have much better prospects. Democrats will draw districts in Illinois and Massachusetts to protect Democrats, while in Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Ohio and Texas, the GOP will bring the redistricting hammer down on Democrats.

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House Passes $35t Budget Framework After 10 Dem Moderates Cave To Pelosi

The House Democrat in charge of making;sure the party retains control of the chamber after next years midterm elections is warning that a course correction is needed or they could find themselves the minority again with current polling showing the Democrats would lose the majority if elections were held now.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told a closed-door lunch last week that if the midterms were held now, Republicans would win control of the House, Politico reported Tuesday.

Maloney advised the gathering that Democrats have to embrace and promote President Bidens agenda because it registers with swing voters.

We are not afraid of this data Were not trying to hide this, Tim Persico, executive director of the Maloney-chaired DCC,;told Politico;in an interview.

If use it, were going to hold the House. Thats what this data tells us, but we gotta get in action,;Persico said.

Maloney, in an interview with NPR, said issues like climate change, infrastructure, the expanded child tax credits, immigration policies and election reforms will;attract voters next fall.

Were making a bet on substance, Maloney said. Whats the old saying any jackass can kick down a barn, it takes a carpenter to build one. Its harder to build it than to kick it down. And so were the party thats going to build the future.

Maloneys dire warning failed to surprise some Democrats who have been sounding similar alarms.;

House And Senate Odds: Final Thoughts

Democrats have ‘good chance’ to win White House: Senior Republican

There is less than 1% equity on the notion that Democrats will win the House and lose the Senate, because while New Hampshire could move in a weird, contradictory manner, if Democrats win the House, the nation will be sufficiently blue that they hold all three of Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia, and they will gain Pennsylvania too.

Races are too nationalized and partisanship too entrenched for the Senate GOP to outrun a national environment blue enough to win the House, which means you can get a Democratic Congress for another term at $0.21. Its a better value than the House outright market for almost no extra risk, and thats the best kind of value.

Don’t Miss: What Are The Main Differences Between Democrats And Republicans

Big Odds For Republicans To Win Back The House Of Representatives Next Year

The internal consultation of the National Republican Congressional Committee revealed that their party has favorable conditions to retake the majority of seats in the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections to be held next year.;

Contributing to these good predictions is that voters prefer Republicans as their leaders, and the increased unfavorability of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to data provided by the NRCC website on April 26.;

Even the decennial census results are on the side of a Republican triumph because the data presented by the Census Bureau show that they gained seats in the new distribution, although it is not definitive.;

Likewise, throughout the 100 days of the Biden administration at the helm of the White House, Americans have become alerted to the convenience of changing the political course.;

In this regard, NRCC spokesman Mike Berg commented in a statement, The Democrats dangerous socialist agenda is providing the perfect roadmap for Republicans to regain the majority.

Among voters most pressing considerations are the border crisis and the rampant illegal immigration that the Biden and the Democrat open border policies have fostered.;

At least 75% of voters see the border situation as a crisis or significant problem, while 23% say the border is a minor problem or not a problem at all.

Thus, 57% of voters do not believe that the CCP Virus stimulus approved by Biden is helping them and their families.

Republicans Winning Money Race As They Seek To Take Over House In 2022

By Alex Rogers and Manu Raju, CNN

The National Republican Congressional Committee announced Wednesday that it had raised $45.4 million in the second quarter of 2021, the most it has ever raised in three months of a non-election year, as Republicans seek to take over the House in 2022.

This story has been updated with additional developments Wednesday.

Read Also: How Many Seats Do Republicans Hold In The House

Will 2022 Be A Good Year For Republicans

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Welcome to FiveThirtyEights politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah : Were still more than a year away from the 2022 midterm elections, which means it will be a while before we should take those general election polls too seriously. But with a number of elections underway in 2021, not to mention a number of special elections, its worth kicking off the conversation around what we do and dont know about Republicans and Democrats odds headed into the midterms.

Lets start big picture. The longstanding conventional wisdom is that midterm elections generally go well for the party thats not in the White House. Case in point: Since 1946, the presidents party has lost, on average, 27 House seats.

What are our initial thoughts? Is the starting assumption that Republicans should have a good year in 2022?

alex : Yes, and heres why: 2022 will be the first federal election after the House map are redrawn. And because Democrats fell short of their 2020 expectations in state legislative races, Republicans have the opportunity to redraw congressional maps that are much more clearly in their favor. On top of that, Republicans are already campaigning on the cost and magnitude of President Bidens policy plans to inspire a backlash from voters.

geoffrey.skelley :Simply put, as that chart above shows, the expectation is that Democrats, as the party in the White House, will lose seats in the House.;

nrakich : What they said!

Will Republicans Take The Senate In 2022

Right now, it’s too early to tell whether or not the GOP has the momentum to take the US Senate back from the Democrats, albeit their chances are good given the fact that the upper chamber is split 50-50 . However, Senate odds will be available once the 2022 Midterms get closer on the calendar.

Factors affecting the Republicans’ Senate chances are the same as those affecting their House odds, though it is difficult to accurately predict exactly what those chances are at this time. Nevertheless, you can be sure that the top Vegas political sportsbooks will have plenty of odds on the 2022 Senate races in due time.

Also Check: Did Republicans Lose Any Senate Seats

Democrats Odds Of Keeping The House Are Slimming Fast

The Democratic House majority emerged from the 2020 election so bruised and emaciated that experts gave it less than three years to live.

In defiance of polling and pundit expectations, Republicans netted 11 House seats in 2020, leaving Nancy Pelosis caucus perilously thin. Since World War II, the presidents party has lost an average of 27 House seats in midterm elections. If Democrats lose more than four in 2022, they will forfeit congressional control.

If the headwinds facing House Democrats have been clear since November, the preconditions for overcoming those headwinds have also been discernible: The party needed Joe Biden to stay popular, the Democratic base to stay mobilized and, above all, for Congressional Democrats to level the playing field by banning partisan redistricting.

A little over 100 days into Bidens presidency, Democrats are hitting only one of those three marks.

Historically, theres been a strong correlation between the sitting presidents approval rating and his partys midterm performance. Only twice in the last three decades has the presidents party gained seats in a midterm election; in both cases, their approval ratings exceeded 60 percent.

The party that controls the presidency tends to gets less popular as time goes on, and future declines are surprisingly correlated with first quarter polling.Many reasons that this cycle might be different, but so far public polling points to Dems getting 48% on election day.

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It didnt.

I Ultimately Decided Against Running For Congress In A Red District But My Research Found A Way For Democrats To Make Inroads In Such Places

Political pundits seem united in their belief that Democrats will struggle to hold the House of Representatives in 2022.

The historical precedent that the party out of power in the White House always gains in the midterms and the likely impact of partisan and racial gerrymandering has fostered a consensus that Democrats will lose seats.

Theyre wrong. Democrats have the opportunity to widen the playing field in 2022 with the right candidates, a message focused on economic growth anda surprise to somea clear pro-democracy appeal designed to woo the one-quarter to one-third of Trump voters who are Liz Cheney Republicans.

My opinion is based on nearly 40 years in government and politicsbut more importantly, it is based on the last eight months that I spent actively exploring a race for Tennessees 3rd congressional district.

I recently decided for personal and professional reasons that I cannot run in 2022. But through the testing the waters process, I discovered a path to possible victory in my east Tennessee district that should be replicable in many other similar districts around the nation.

The remainder of Hamilton County, suburban and rural areas outside of Chattanooga, accounts for another one-quarter of the district population: It is Republican turf and the home to the districts five-term incumbent, Chuck Fleischmann. And half of the district vote comes from all or parts of 10 other counties, the largest being Anderson County, home to Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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billyagogo · 3 years

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The Intervention

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2021/02/11/the-intervention/

The Intervention

The debate was only a few minutes old, and Barack Obama was already tanking. His opponent on this warm autumn night, a Massachusetts patrician with an impressive résumé, a chiseled jaw, and a staunch helmet of burnished hair, was an inferior political specimen by any conceivable measure. But with surprising fluency, verve, and even humor, Obama’s rival was putting points on the board. The president was not. Passive and passionless, he seemed barely present.

It was Sunday, October 14, 2012, and Obama was bunkered two levels below the lobby of the Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Virginia. In a blue blazer, khaki pants, and an open-necked shirt, he was squaring off in a mock debate against Massachusetts senator John Kerry, who was standing in for the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. The two men were in Williamsburg, along with the president’s team, to prepare Obama for his second televised confrontation with Romney, 48 hours away, at Hofstra University in New York. It was an event to which few had given much thought. Until the debacle in Denver, that is.

The debate in the Mile High City eleven days earlier had jolted a race that for many months had been hard fought but remarkably stable. From the moment in May that Romney emerged victorious from the most volatile and unpredictable Republican-nomination contest in many moons, Obama had held a narrow yet consistent lead. But after Romney mauled the president in Denver, the wind and weather of the campaign shifted in something like a heartbeat. The challenger was surging. The polls were tightening. Republicans were pulsating with renewed hope. Democrats were rending their garments and collapsing on their fainting couches.

Obama was nowhere in the vicinity of panic. “You ever known me to lose two in a row?” he said to friends to calm their nerves.

The president’s advisers were barely more rattled. Yes, Denver had been atrocious. Yes, it had been unnerving. But Obama was still ahead of Romney, the sky hadn’t fallen, and they would fix what went wrong in time for the town-hall debate at Hofstra. Their message to the nervous Nellies in their party was: Keep calm and carry on.

Williamsburg was where the repair job was supposed to take place. The Obamans had arrived at the resort, ready to work, on Saturday the 13th. The first day had gone well. The president seemed to be finding his form. He and Kerry had been doing mock debates since August, and the session on Saturday night was Obama’s best yet. Everyone exhaled.

But now, in Sunday night’s run-through, the president seemed to be relapsing: The disengaged and pedantic Obama of Denver was back. In the staff room, his two closest advisers, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, watched on video monitors with a mounting sense of unease—when, all of a sudden, a practice round that had started out looking merely desultory turned into the Mock From Hell.

The moment it happened could be pinpointed with precision: at the 39:35 mark on the clock. A question about home foreclosures had been put to potus; under the rules, he had two minutes to respond. Before the mock, Kerry had been instructed by one of the debate coaches to interrupt Obama at some juncture to see how he reacted. Striding across the bright-red carpet of the set that the president’s team had constructed as a precise replica of the Hofstra town-hall stage, Kerry invaded the president’s space and barged in during Obama’s answer.

The president’s eyes flashed with annoyance.

“Don’t interrupt me,” he snapped.

When Kerry persisted, Obama shot a death stare at the moderator—his adviser Anita Dunn, standing in for CNN’s Candy Crowley—and pleaded for an intercession.

The president’s coaches had long worried about the appearance of Nasty Obama on the debate stage: the variant who infamously, imperiously dismissed his main Democratic rival in 2008 with the withering phrase “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” His advisers saw glimpses of that side of him in their preparations for the first showdown—a manifestation of a personal antipathy for Romney that had grown visceral and intense. Now they were seeing it again, and worse. The admixture of Nasty Obama and Denver Obama was not a pretty picture.

Challenged by Kerry with multipronged attacks, the president rebutted them point by point, exhaustively and exhaustingly. Instead of driving a sharp message, he was explanatory and meandering. Instead of casting an eye to the future, he litigated the past. Instead of warmly establishing connections with the town-hall questioners, he pontificated airily, as if he were conducting a particularly tedious press conference. While Kerry was answering a query about immigration, Obama retaliated for the earlier interruption by abruptly cutting him off.

Excerpted from Double Down: Game Change 2012, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, to be published on November 5, 2013, by the Penguin Press.

Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

In the staff room, Axelrod and Plouffe were aghast. Sitting with them, Obama’s lead pollster, Joel Benenson, muttered, “This is unbelievable.”

Watching from the set, the renowned Democratic style coach Michael Sheehan scribbled furiously on a legal pad, each notation more alarmed than the last. Reflecting on Obama’s interplay with the questioners, Sheehan summed up his demeanor with a single word: “Creepy.”

After 90 excruciating minutes, the Mock From Hell was over. As Obama made his way to the door, he was intercepted by Axelrod, Plouffe, Benenson, and the lead debate coach, Ron Klain. Little was said. Little needed to be said. The ashen looks on the faces of the president’s men told the tale.

Obama left the building and returned to his sprawling quarters on the banks of the James River with his best friend from Chicago, Marty Nesbitt, to watch football and play cards. His advisers retreated to the president’s debate-prep holding room to have a collective coronary.

That the presidential debates were proving problematic for Obama came as no real surprise to the members of his team. Many of them—Axelrod, the mustachioed message maven and guardian of the Obama brand; Plouffe, the spindly senior White House adviser and enforcer of strategic rigor; Dunn, the media-savvy mother superior and former White House communications director; Benenson, the bearded and noodgy former Mario Cuomo hand; Jon Favreau, the dashing young speechwriter—had been with Obama from the start of his meteoric ascent. They knew that he detested televised debates. That he disdained political theater in every guise. That, on some level, he distrusted political performance itself, with its attendant emotional manipulations.

The paradox, of course, was that Obama had risen to prominence and power to a large extent on the basis of his preternatural performance skills—and his ability to summon them whenever the game was on the line. In late 2007, when he was trailing Hillary Clinton in the Democratic-nomination fight by 30 points. In the fall of 2008, when the global financial crisis hit during the crucial last weeks of the general election. In early 2010, when his signature health-care-reform proposal seemed destined for defeat. In every instance, under ungodly pressure, Obama had pulled up, set his feet, and drained a three-pointer at the buzzer.

The faith of the president’s people that he would do the same at Hofstra was what sustained them in the wake of Denver. For a year, the Obamans had fretted over everything under the sun: gas prices, unemployment, the European financial crisis, Iran, the Koch brothers, the lack of enthusiasm from the Democratic base, Hispanic turnout in the Orlando metroplex. The one thing they had never worried about was Barack Obama.

But given the spectacle they had just witnessed at Kingsmill, the Obamans were more than worried. After spending ten days pooh-poohing the widespread hysteria in their party about Denver, Obama’s debate team was now the most wigged-out collection of Democrats in the country, huddling in a hotel cubby that had become their secret panic room. Three hours had passed since the mock ended; it was almost 2 a.m. Obama’s team was still clustered in the work space, reading transcripts and waxing apocalyptic.

“Guys, what are we going to do?” Plouffe asked quietly, over and over. “That was a disaster.”

Among the Obamans, there was nobody more unflappable than Plouffe—and nobody less shaken by Denver. But while Plouffe believed the public would brush off a single bad debate showing, he was equally convinced that two in a row would not be so readily ignored. If Obama turned in a performance at Hofstra like the one they had seen that night, the consequences could be dire.

“If we don’t fix this,” Plouffe said emphatically, “we could lose the whole fucking election.”

Almost from the moment that Obama stepped off the debate stage in Denver, he had been bombarded with advice about how to remedy what had gone wrong. But the truth was that virtually no one on the planet could understand what he was going through or up against.

A rare exception was Bill Clinton. Before Denver, Clinton had watched in wonder as Obama caught break after break. Although the economy wasn’t roaring back, neither the European banking crisis nor the unrest in the Mideast had caused it to nosedive. Meanwhile, Romney’s ineptness staggered Clinton. After the release of the 47 percent video, he remarked to a friend that, while Mitt was a decent man, he was in the wrong line of work. (“He really shouldn’t be speaking to people in public.”) As for Obama, Clinton trotted out for his pals the same line again and again: “He’s luckier than a dog with two dicks.”

Obama confers with Ron Klain during debate prep with John Kerry, Henderson, Nevada, October 2, 2012.Photo: Pete Souza/The White House

Though the first debate brought the incumbent’s streak of good fortune to a crashing halt, Clinton was insistent that the Obamans not overreact. On the phone to Axelrod, 42 counseled restraint at Hofstra, warning that if 44 was too hot or negative in a town-hall debate, it would backfire. Four days after Denver, at a fund-raiser at the Beverly Hills home of Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, Clinton huddled with Obama and repeated the instructions.

Don’t try to make up the ground you lost, the Big Dog said. Just be yourself.

Obama faced a more immediate challenge, which was to arrest the metastasizing panic among his supporters. In 2008, Plouffe had airily dismissed Democrats who lost their minds in the midst of Palinmania as “bedwetters.” But now there was a similar drizzle as the public polls sharply narrowed—and worse. “Did Barack Obama just throw the entire election away?” blared the title of an Andrew Sullivan blog post.

Chicago’s internal polling strongly suggested that the answer was no—the race was back to where it had been following the party conventions, with Obama holding a three- or four-point lead.

Even so, as the full desultoriness of his Denver performance sank in, the president was consumed by a sense of responsibility—and shadowed by fears that his reelection was at risk. Outwardly, he took pains to project the opposite. When his staffers asked how he was doing, he replied, “I’m great.” To Plouffe, who had volunteered to soothe Sullivan, Obama joked, Someone’s gotta talk him off the ledge!

Obama returned from the West Coast and met with his debate team in the Roosevelt Room on the afternoon of October 10. He opened by saying he had read a memo drafted by Klain about what went awry in Denver and how to fix it before Hofstra, now six days away. He agreed with most of it but wanted everyone to know that they hadn’t failed him; he had failed them. “This is on me,” Obama said.

“I’m a naturally polite person,” he went on. Part of my problem is “erring on the side of being muted. We have to get me to a place where internally I’m not biting my tongue … It’s important for me to be fighting.”

The debate team received a boost 24 hours later from Obama’s second-in-command, when Joe Biden took on Paul Ryan in the vice-presidential debate in Danville, Kentucky. “You did a great job,” the president told the V.P. by phone. “And you picked me up.”

In 36 hours, Obama would set off for debate camp in Williamsburg. But watching his understudy had already provided him with one helpful insight.

“These are not debates,” Obama observed to Plouffe. “These are gladiatorial enterprises.”

The first lady worried about her Maximus and his return to the Colosseum. In truth, she had fretted over the debates even before Denver. In July, around the time her husband’s prep started, she met with Plouffe and expressed firm opinions. That Barack had to speak from the gut, in language that regular folks could understand. Had to avoid treating the debates like policy seminars. Had to keep his head out of the clouds. (Michelle’s advisers paraphrased her advice as “It’s not about David Brooks; it’s about my mother.”) FLOTUS loved POTUS like nobody’s business, but she knew his faults well.

In the wake of Denver, Michelle was unfailingly encouraging with her husband: Don’t worry, you’re going to win the next one, just remember who you’re talking to, she told him. Before a small group of female bundlers, she pronounced that Barack had lost only because “Romney is a really good liar.”

Privately, however, Michelle was unhappy about how her spouse’s prep had been handled. There had been a late arrival in Denver, a rushed dinner at a crappy hotel. Inexplicably, he had been unable to reach Sasha and Malia by phone. He seemed overscheduled, overcoached, and under-rested. At first, Michelle conveyed her displeasure via senior White House adviser and First Friend Valerie Jarrett, who flooded the in-boxes of the debate team with pointed e-mails, employing the royal “we.” But the day before debate camp in Williamsburg, Michelle delivered marching orders directly to Plouffe: If the president wants our chef there, he should be there; if he wants Marty Nesbitt there, he should be there. Barack’s food, downtime, exercise, sleep, lodging—all of it affects his frame of mind. All of it has to be right.

Plouffe saluted sharply and thought, I guess the First Lady understands the stakes here.

That same Friday, October 12, Obama’s debate team gathered again in the Roosevelt Room for a final pre-camp session. The president was presented with a piece of overarching advice and a memo, both of which would have been inconceivable before Denver. The advice was: Be more like Biden, whose combativeness, scripted moments, and bluff calls on Ryan (“Not true!”) the night before had all proved effective tactics. The memo was an alliterative flash card to remind Obama of what it called “the Six A’s”:

Advocate (don’t explain) Audience Animated Attacks Answers with principles and values Allow yourself to take advantage of openings

The first debate.Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Ron Klain had no shame about such contrivances—whatever worked. A Washington super-staffer, Klain had served on every Democratic presidential debate-prep team for twenty years and co-led Obama’s effort in 2008. But his relationship with the president was not straightforward or particularly close. Right after the Denver disaster, he offered to resign from the debate team, but Obama refused to let him. Klain’s ego, pride, and future ambitions were all wrapped up in correcting the miscues from the Mile High City and constructing a comeback at Hofstra.

Klain turned Obama’s prep regime upside down: new strategy, new tactics, new structure. In Williamsburg, there would be an intense concentration on performance, including speeding up Obama’s ponderous delivery. There would be less policy Q&A and more rehearsal of set pieces and lines that popped. Less emphasis on programmatic peas and spinach, more on anecdote and empathy. Contrary to Clinton’s advice, there would be plenty of punching to go along with the counterpunching.

Camp commenced on Saturday in Williamsburg. Two levels down from the lobby of the Kingsmill Resort Center, on the precisely built replica of the Hofstra town-hall set, the president spent most of the day sharpening his answers with Klain and Axelrod. That night, his mock went better than any of the six sessions prior to Denver. The members of the debate team weren’t ready to declare victory yet, but they were relieved. Obama’s friend Nesbitt was exultant.

“That’s some good shit!” he told the president, patting him on the back. “That’s my man! He’s back!”

In the Sunday daytime sessions, Obama showed still more improvement, honing a solid attack on the 47 percent and another on his rival’s economic agenda. (“Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan; he has a one-point plan, and that’s to make sure folks at the top play by a different set of rules.”) As the team took time off for dinner before Obama and Kerry went at it again, Klain thought, Okay, we’re getting to a better place. Plouffe thought, He’s locked in.

A little before 9 p.m., they returned to the Resort Center. Obama and Kerry grabbed their handheld microphones and took their places—and the president proceeded to deliver the Mock From Hell.

Even before Nasty Obama snarled at Kerry-as-Mitt and Anita Dunn as CNN’s Candy Crowley at the 39:35 mark, Klain was mortified. The president’s emotional flatness from Denver was back. He was making no connection with the voter stand-ins asking questions. He was wandering aimlessly, digressing compulsively, not merely chasing rabbits but stalking them to the ends of the Earth. His cadences were hesitant and maple-syrupy slow: phrase, pause, phrase, pause, phrase. His answers were verbose and utterly devoid of message.

In Klain’s career as a debate maestro, he had been involved in successes (Kerry over Bush three times in a row) and failures (Gore’s symphony of sighs in 2000). But he had never seen anything like this. After all the happy talk from Obama and his consistent, if small, steps forward, the president was regressing—with 48 hours and only one full day of prep between them and Hofstra.

At the Pettus House, a colonnaded red- brick mansion on the riverbank where Obama and Nesbitt were bunking, the two men stayed up late hashing out what hadn’t worked, how the president was still struggling to find the zone. “You can’t get mad” at Romney’s distortions, Nesbitt said. “You come off better when you just say, ‘Now, that’s fucking ridiculous.’ When you laugh, that shit works, man.”

In Obama’s hold room at the Resort Center, his staff was moving past puzzlement and panic toward practical considerations. The lesson that Plouffe had taken from Denver was that you could no longer count on fourth-quarter Obama; what you saw in practice was what you got on the debate stage. If he doesn’t have a good mock tomorrow, there’s no reason to believe that it’ll get fixed when he gets to New York, Plouffe said.

Two schools of thought quickly emerged within the team. The first, pushed by Washington super-lawyer Bob Barnett—who was also a longtime debate prepper and was there serving on Kerry’s staff—was that Obama needed to be shown video in the morning. “This is what we did with Clinton,” Barnett sagely noted. The other, advanced by Favreau, was that Obama should be given transcripts. He’s a writer, Favreau argued. Words on the page will make a deeper impression.

The full transcript was in hand within 45 minutes—and became a source of gallows humor. As the clock ticked well past midnight, Favreau stagily read aloud some of Obama’s most dreadful answers. Soon his colleagues joined in, with Axelrod, Benenson, and Plouffe offering recitations and laughing deliriously over the absurdity and horror of the circumstances.

Barnett and others believed that Obama’s playbook had to be stripped down more dramatically, to a series of simple and crisp bullet points on the most likely topics to come up in the debate. Klain agreed and wanted to go a step further. In 1996, Democratic strategist Mark Penn had devised something called “debate-on-a-page” for Gore in his V.P. face-off with Jack Kemp. Klain suggested they do the same for Obama: a sheet of paper with a handful of key principles, attacks, and counterattacks.

Axelrod and Plouffe thought something more radical was in order. For the past six years, they had watched Obama struggle with his disdain for the theatricality of politics—not just debates, but even the soaring speeches for which he was renowned. Obama’s distrust of emotional string-pulling and resistance to the practical necessities of the sound-bite culture: These were elements of his personality that they accepted, respected, and admired. But they had long harbored foreboding that those proclivities might also be a train wreck in the making. Time and again, Obama had averted the oncoming locomotive. Had embraced showmanship when it was necessary. Had picked his people up and carried them on his back to the promised land. But now, with a crucial debate less than two days away—one that could either put the election in the bag or turn it into a toss-up—Obama was faltering in a way his closest advisers had never witnessed. They needed to figure out what had gone haywire from the inside out. They needed, as someone in the staff room put it, to stage an “intervention.”

The next morning, October 15, Klain stumbled from his room to the Resort Center, eyes puffy and nerves jangled. He’d been up all night hammering together and e-mailing around his debate-on-a-page draft. In Obama’s hold room, the team members gathered and laid out their plan for the day. They would screen video for the boss. They would show him transcripts. They would present him with his cheat sheets. They would devote the day to topic-by-topic drills until he had his answers memorized.

Normally, the whole group would now meet with the president to critique the previous night’s mock. Instead, everyone except Axelrod, Klain, and Plouffe cleared the room just before 10 a.m. Obama was on his way. The intervention was at hand.

Where’s everybody else?” Obama asked as he ambled in across the speckled green carpet with his chief of staff, Jack Lew, at his side. “Where’s the rest of the team?”

We met this morning and decided we should have this smaller meeting first, one of the interventionists said.

Obama, in khakis and rolled-up shirtsleeves, looked nonplussed. Between his conversation with Nesbitt the night before and a morning national-security briefing with Lew, he was aware that his people were unhappy with the mock—but not fully clued in to the depth of their concern.

The president settled into a cushy black sofa at one end of the room. On settees to his left were Axelrod, Plouffe, and Lew; to his right, in a blue blazer, was Klain, now caffeinated and coherent.

“We’re here, Mr. President,” Klain began, “because we need to have a serious conversation about why this isn’t working and the fundamental transformation we need to achieve today to avoid a very bad result tomorrow night.” We’re not going to get there by continuing to grind away and marginally improve, Klain went on. This is not about changing the words in your debate book, because the difference between the answers that work and the answers that don’t work is just 15 or 20 percent. This is about style, engagement, speed, presentation, attitude. Candidly, we need to figure out why you’re not rising to and meeting the challenge—why you’re not really doing this, why you’re doing … something else.

Obama didn’t flinch. “Guys, I’m struggling,” he said somberly. “Last night wasn’t good, and I know that. Here’s why I think I’m having trouble. I’m having a hard time squaring up what I know I need to do, what you guys are telling me I need to do, with where my mind takes me, which is: I’m a lawyer, and I want to argue things out. I want to peel back layers.”

The ensuing presidential soliloquy went on for ten minutes—an eternity in Obama time. His tone was even and unemotional, but searching, introspective, diagnostic, vulnerable. Psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually, he was placing his cards face up on the table.

“When I get a question,” he said, “I go right to the logical.” You ask me a question about health care. There’s a problem, and there’s a response. Here’s what my opponent might say about it, so I’m going to counteract that. Okay, we’re gonna talk about immigration. Here’s what I’d like to say—but I can’t say that. Think about what that means. I know what I want to say, I know where my mind takes me, but I have to tell myself, No, no, don’t do that—do this other thing. It’s against my instincts just to perform. It’s easy for me to slip back into what I know, which is basically to dissect arguments. I think when I talk. It can be halting. I start slow. It’s hard for me to just go into my answer. I’m having to teach my brain to function differently. I’m left-handed; this is like you’re asking me to start writing right-handed.

Throughout the campaign, Obama had been criticized for the thin gruel of his second-term agenda. Now he acknowledged that it bothered him, too, and posed a challenge for the debates.

You keep telling me I can’t spend too much time defending my record, and that I should talk about my plans, he said. But my plans aren’t anything like the plans I ran on in 2008. I had a universal-health-care plan then. Now I’ve got … what? A manufacturing plan? What am I gonna do on education? What am I gonna do on energy? There’s not much there.

“I can’t tell you that ‘Okay, I woke up today, I knew I needed to do better, and I’ll do better,’ ” Obama said. “I am wired in a different way than this event requires.”

Obama paused.

“I just don’t know if I can do this,” he said.

Obama’s advisers sat silently at first, absorbing the extraordinary moment playing out in front of them. In October of an election year, on the eve of a pivotal debate, the president wasn’t talking about tactics or strategy, about this line or that zinger. He was talking about personal contradictions and ambivalences, about his discomfort with the campaign he was running, about his unease with the requirements of politics writ large, about matters that were fundamental, even existential. We are in uncharted territory here, thought Klain.

More striking was Obama’s candor and self-awareness. The most self-contained president in modern history (and, possibly, the most self-possessed human on the planet) was laying himself bare, deconstructing himself before their eyes—and admitting he was at a loss.

All through his career, Obama had played by his own rules. He had won the presidency as an outsider, without the succor of the Democratic Establishment. He owed it little, offered less. He had ignored the traditional social niceties of the office, and largely resisted the media freak show, swatting away its asininities. He had refused to stomp his feet or shed crocodile tears over the BP spill, because neither would plug the pipe spewing oil from the ocean floor. He had eschewed sloganeering to sell his health-care plan, although it meant the world to him.

Now he was faced with an event that demanded an astronomical degree of fakery, histrionics, and stagecraft—and while he was ready to capitulate, trying to capitulate, he found himself incapable of performing not just to his own exalted standards but to the bare minimum of competence. Acres of evidence and the illusions of his fans to the contrary, Barack Obama, it turned out, was all too human.

Axelrod was more intimate with Obama than anyone in the room. The president’s humanity and frailties were no secret to Axe—nor was 44’s capacity for self-doubt. Since Denver, Obama had been subjected to a hailstorm of criticism, a flood of panic, and a blizzard of psychoanalysis. Like every president, he claimed he was impervious to it. But Axelrod knew it was a lie. All this shit is in his head, the strategist thought.

Look, said Axelrod softly, we know that you find these debates frustrating, that they’re more performance than substance. It’s why you are a good president. It’s why all of us feel so strongly about your winning. But you have to find a way to get over the hump and stop fighting this game—to play this game, wrap your arms around this game.

For the next hour, the three Obamans tried to carry the president across the psychic chasm. Plouffe reminded him of the stakes. “We can’t have a repeat of Denver tomorrow night,” he warned. “Right now, we’re not losing any of our vote, but we’re on probation. If we have another performance that causes people to scratch their heads, we’re gonna start losing votes. We gotta stop this now.”

Over Obama’s despair about his lack of an agenda, Plouffe and Axelrod took him on. “You do have an agenda, goddammit!” Plouffe said. “This isn’t a bunch of b.s. you’re selling. This is an agenda the American people support and believe in. But they’re not gonna believe in it if you don’t treat it that way, by selling it with great fervor. If you sell your agenda and Romney sells his agenda with equal enthusiasm, we will win.

“Think about this,” Plouffe went on. “You have two debates left. So take out Romney, take out moderator questions: You’ve got basically 75 to 80 minutes left of doing this in your entire life. That’s less than the length of a movie! You can do this! I know it’s uncomfortable. I know it’s unnatural. But that’s all. That’s the finish line, you know?”

Klain employed a sports analogy. The Tennessee Titans lost the Super Bowl a couple of years ago because their guy got tackled on the one-yard line, he said—the one-yard line! That’s where we are. The hardest thing for any candidate in a debate is to know the substance. You have that down cold. All we need is a little more effort on performance. You need to go in there and talk as fast as you can. You need to add a little schmaltz, talk about stuff the way that people want to hear it. This isn’t about starting over, starting from scratch. We’ve got most of it right. The part we have left to get right is small. But as the Titans proved, small can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Obama’s aides couldn’t tell if their words were sinking in. “I understand where we are,” the president said finally. I’m either going to center myself and get this or I’m not. The debate’s tomorrow. There’s not much we can do. I just gotta fight my way through it.

As the meeting wound to a close, the Obamans felt relief mixed with trepidation. Oddly, for Klain, the president’s lack of confidence about his ability to turn himself around was comforting. After all the blithe I-got-its of his pre-Denver prep, Obama for the first time was acknowledging that a genuine and serious modification of his mind-set was necessary.

Plouffe felt less reassured. “It’s good news–bad news,” he told Favreau afterward. “The good news is, he recognizes the issue. The bad news is, I don’t know if we can fix it in time.”

The full team reconvened in Obama’s hold room. Klain ran through his memo of the previous night and explained to the president the new new format for his prep: For the rest of the day until his final mock, they were going to drill him incessantly on the ten or so topics they expected to come up in the debate, compelling him to repeat his bullet points over and over again. Klain also presented Obama with his debate-on-a-page:

MUST REMEMBER 1. (Your) Speed Kills (Romney) 2. Upbeat and Positive in Tone 3. Passion for People and Plans 4. OTR [Off the Record] Mind-set—Have Fun 5. Strong Sentences to Start and End 6. Engage the Audience 7. Don’t Chase Rabbits

BEST HITS 1. 47% 2. Romney + China Outsourcing 3. Heaven & Earth 4. 9/11 Girl 5. Sketchy Deal 6. Mass Taxes—Cradle to Grave 7. Preexisting and ER 8. Women’s Health 9. Borrow From Your Parents

REBUTTAL CHEAT SHEET 1. Jobs—The 1-point plan 2. Deficits—$7 trillion and The Sketchy Deal 3. Energy—Coal plant is a killer 4. Health—Preexisting fact check and the ER 5. Medicare—He wants to save Medicare … by ending it! 6. Bus Taxes—60 Mins in rebuttal (i.e., pivot to personal taxes) 7. Pers Taxes—Tax cuts for outsourcing (i.e., pivot to job creation) 8. Gridlock—Romney brings the lobbyist back 9. Benghazi—Taking offense 10. Education—Borrow from your parents and/or Size Doesn’t Matter

That the intervention had had some effect on Obama was immediately apparent, though how much was unclear. He brought a new energy and focus to his afternoon drills. When he delivered an imperfect answer, he stopped himself short: “Let’s do that again.” At his debate camp before Denver, outside Las Vegas, Obama had been so intent on escaping that he took off one day for a visit to the Hoover Dam. Now he refused even brief breaks for a walk by the river. As the afternoon went on, the debate team concocted cutesy catchphrases to cue him at the slightest hint of backsliding.

“Fast and hammy! Fast and hammy!” Klain would say when his delivery was lugubrious.

“Punch him in the face!” Karen Dunn, another team member, chipped in when he missed a chance to cream Kerry-as-Mitt.

For Klain, the turning point came that afternoon, during a session in which Obama was fielding questions from junior members of the team who were standing in as voters. Tony Carrk, a researcher, introduced himself as Vito, a barbershop proprietor from Long Island, and asked which tax plan—Obama’s or Romney’s—would be better for small-business owners like him. Without missing a beat, the president savaged Mitt’s plan with verve, precision, and bite, closing with some good-natured joshing about Vito’s shop.

The perfect town-hall answer, Klain thought.

That night, for the final mock, Kerry was instructed to bring his A-game. With the team on pins and needles, Obama earned a solid B-plus. The contrast with the previous night was so dramatic it called to Axelrod’s mind the triumphant scenes in Hoosiers. When it was over, the team rose in unison and gave Obama a standing ovation.

“All right, all right, all right,” the president said, waving them off, smiling abashedly.

The next morning, before setting off for Hofstra, the team gathered once again in Obama’s hold room to review the mock. No one was remotely certain they were out of the woods. The past three days had carried them too close to the abyss for firm convictions of any kind. But the president’s mood could not have been more buoyant. Running through the team’s critique, he reveled in their praise of a particularly strong answer.

“Oh, you guys liked that?” Obama said, grinning broadly. “That was fast and hammy, right?”

For all the progress Obama had made in his final practice session, his team was far from serene as the witching hour approached at Hofstra. Backstage, Klain was a nervous wreck. One pretty good mock, one disaster in the past 48 hours, Plouffe thought. So which Obama shows up?

Just then, the president emerged from his holding room a few minutes before heading onstage. He found Klain, Plouffe, Axelrod, and Jim Messina in the hallway.

“Guys, I’m going to be good tonight,” Obama said. “I finally figured this out.”

When the lights went up, it took all of one answer for the Obamans to realize that the president wasn’t kidding. Replying to the first questioner, a 20-year-old college student worried about finding work after graduation, Obama locked eyes with the young man and spoke crisply and pointedly. In the space of six sentences, the president plugged higher education and touted his job-creation record, his manufacturing agenda, and his rescue of the auto industry—plunging an ice pick into Romney by invoking “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” When Mitt cited his five-point economic plan in answer to a follow-up from Crowley, Obama let loose with his one-point-plan zinger. He was fast. He was hammy. He was gliding around the stage.

In the staff room, Obama’s increasingly giddy team kept track of his progress, using his debate-on-a-page as a scorecard, ticking off the hits one by one as he delivered them. On outsourcing to China, immigration (self-deportation), women’s issues (Planned Parenthood), and more, the president was not only proving himself an able student but making Romney pay for every rightward lunge he had taken during the nomination contest.

Romney responded aggressively but with visible annoyance as he found himself forced to keep doubling back to answer attacks from minutes earlier, which made him appear petty and threw him off rhythm. In Denver, Mitt’s propensity for gaffes had vanished as if by magic; at Hofstra, presto-change-o, it returned. Boasting of his commitment to gender equity in the Massachusetts statehouse, he referred to the résumés he reviewed for Cabinet posts as “binders full of women.”

About two thirds of the way through the 90 minutes, Romney tried to roll out a hit on Obama’s financial portfolio. “Mr. President, have you looked at your pension?” Romney asked.

“You know, I don’t look at my pension,” Obama said without missing a beat and with a mile-wide smile. “It’s not as big as yours, so it doesn’t take as long.”

The debate was now a little more than an hour old. The next question from the audience had to do with Benghazi. Obama explained the steps he had taken in the wake of the September 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission there—and then turned his attention to his opponent. “While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release trying to make political points,” the president said sternly.

Romney got in a jab about the inappropriateness of Obama having taken a political trip on September 12. But Romney went further. “There were many days that passed before we knew whether this was a spontaneous demonstration or actually whether it was a terrorist attack,” he said. “And there was no demonstration involved. It was a terrorist attack, and it took a long time for that to be told to the American people.”

Obama summoned his highest dudgeon and responded: “The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden, and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror. And I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime. And then a few days later, I was there greeting the caskets coming into Andrews Air Force Base and grieving with the families. And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of State, our U.N. ambassador—anybody on my team—would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive. That’s not what we do. That’s not what I do as president. That’s not what I do as commander-in-chief.”

Obama returned to his stool and took a sip of water. Romney, incredulous, began to splutter.

“You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration? Is that what you’re saying?”

With an icy stare, Obama set a trap: “Please proceed, Governor.”

“I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president fourteen days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror,” Romney insisted.

“Get the transcript,” Obama said—at which point Candy Crowley interceded.

“He did, in fact, sir,” Crowley said to Romney. “He did call it an act of terror.”

“Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” Obama said, twisting the knife in Romney’s back. The crowd burst into laughter and applause.

Minutes later, the debate was over. The Obamans were ebullient. The president’s performance hadn’t been perfect, but judged against the standards of Denver (or the Mock From Hell) it was pure genius. As he came off the stage, Obama thought he had done well. But having initially misjudged his performance the last time out, he was slightly tentative.

“That was good, right?” Obama asked.

The Intervention

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tarrytcwn · 4 years

Text

what i miss most is the spirit. there’s vitality - you hear it.

ichabod crane was born & raised in boston, massachusetts.

he’s 27!

he has a sister! older by two years.

he’s jewish!

he doesn’t drink alcohol. he appreciates the offer but will politely decline, thank you.

he’s a grade a scaredy cat. ghosts are bad! monsters are bad! do not scare this man, he will have nightmares for days! he hates that he’s a fraidy cat but it’s just how he was built,,

his family was rather well-off & he went to private school. he was a very good student, very smart. and he took up tutoring other students in his off time throughout high school.

tutoring made him feel useful. turned him on to teaching as a career. it was something he was good at, after all.

ichabod realized he was gay in sophomore year. one tutoring session in the library lead to a rough kiss over a frustrating textbook question which lead to a very panicked and very confused ichabod bolting out of the library and back to his dorm with nothing more than a shakily murmured “i have to go.”

ichabod’s never felt truly comfortable in his own skin and the realization just made it worse - it was a confusing time for him. scary, even. figuring yourself out isn’t always easy, especially when you didn’t know there was more of yourself to figure out. accepting himself was a slow process, but he got there with a little help (and perhaps a few more kisses. for experimental purposes, of course.) this is something he kept to himself, though. he wasn’t sure how his family would react and the thought of bringing it up terrified him.

after high school, ichabod got accepted to berklee college! because if there was one thing he truly enjoyed, it was music. and if he was going to teaching something for the rest of his life, shouldn’t it be something he enjoyed? his family was just as thrilled as he was.

college brought with it the freedom to experiment. people were far more open and accepting and, though it took him a little while to get out of his shell, so was ichabod. he worried less about keeping things hidden and even bought his first pride flag, hanging it up in his dorm. even attended his first pride. it was so Freeing, ichabod had never felt more himself than he did his first semester of college.

coming home during breaks soon became a chore because of how different he had to act around his family. putting up a Straight Man Front and trying to laugh off questions about Girlfriends and Gettin’ Some (which he Was, just. not in the way they thought.) it was tiring.

so in his second year of college, he decided that he was going to tell his family over winter break. he was fucking Terrified. so much so that he was sick to his stomach just thinking about it but. he couldn’t keep hiding who he was, it felt Wrong.

so one night over dinner, he announced very shakily that he had something he needed to tell everyone and then proceeded to come out at the dinner table, eyes never leaving his food and hands shaking.

his sister took it very well! she even took one of his hands in hers and gave a reassuring squeeze to try to calm his nerves.

his mother, however, was a different story entirely. she went off on him about “no son of mine-“ etc. etc. she was Pissed and ichabod was heartbroken.

his sister reassured him later, quietly over his muffled sobs into her sweater, that their mother would come around. that she had to. she was their mom. ichabod wasn’t so sure about that.

she didn’t. she cut him off & disowned him and ichabod was sure that her deafening silence the day that he left home for the last time hurt infinitely more than the sharp words she’d thrown at him at the dinner table.

he hasn’t spoken to his mom in eight years & he’s fine with that.

he still keeps in touch with his sister, they text almost daily.

he couldn’t afford college without his mother’s help, so he dropped out. took the money he’d had saved up and moved to new york city for a change of scene. he needed it desperately.

he landed himself a shitty office job with decent pay & a little apartment in manhattan & honestly? it felt good to be on his own for real.

he fell in love with the city - the bustling streets and the nightlife were incredible. ichabod found himself falling into a routine in the best of ways. it was a bit of an adventure at first but it was worth it.

he quickly realized, though, that making friends wasn’t easy outside of a classroom setting and loneliness crept in, as it so often does.

ichabod started going out to bars in the hopes of finding company with a bit of liquid courage to ease his nerves. which is a good plan in theory but it went terribly awry when he went back to a handsome fellow’s place and proceeded to take drugs with him to loosen up. it felt incredible, getting high like that. his nervousness faded away in the haze and he didn’t have to worry about stumbling over his words, they just came to him.

things just went downhill from there. one night of drug-induced fun turned into two and three and “just a few more”s.

it got to the point where he didn’t care what he took as long as he took something to keep the ache in his temples and the shake in his fingers from catching up with him.

one too many callouts (he always felt like utter shit in the mornings, some days dragging himself out of bed just wasn’t worth it) lost him his job. he didn’t care much, more time to fool around and less time worrying about his supervisor bitching him out for calling out “again? really? that’s the third time this month, ichabod. not to mention the two times you forgot to call-“ christ. good riddance.

the countless nights of blacked out memories & mornings waking up on grimy floors or in strange men’s beds should really have been the wake up call ichabod needed. unfortunately, it took getting evicted for everything to crash down on him.

where was he going to stay? his first thought was Family but if his mother hated him for being an upstanding gay citizen, there’s no way she’d take him back when he was like this and he couldn’t bear the thought of his sister seeing him in such a state. he spent his first of many nights out on the streets with a duffle bag full of clothes and little else.

he needed to get out of the city and he needed to get clean. he started to go to na meetings and spent days he was feeling Less Like Shit working odd jobs to save up for a one way ticket out of here.

ichabod settled on tarrytown as his goal location, it was a small quiet town not too far from the city and there was a music teacher position available at the high school. if everything went well (and they didn’t ask for his credentials) ichabod figured he could find an apartment there and be away from all of the temptations the city brought with it.

it was a perfect plan, really. start anew where nobody knew him. clean slate. he could be whatever he wanted to be in tarrytown… he could be sober and clean and happy and- hell, who knew! maybe he’d even fall in love…

he’s always been a romantic at heart, but it felt like a little much to ask for someone to love him. he’s always loved daydreaming about what it’d like for someone to take his hand and kiss him softly and tell him things will be alright when things absolutely don’t seem like they will be. he’s always Wanted that, a dull ache in his chest in the background. but a nagging at the back of his brain has always reminded him that he’s a mess, he always will be, and loving him is a lot to ask of any man.

ichabod was thrilled - more than thrilled! - when he got an interview and then a call telling him that the tarrytown high school wanted him for their music teacher position. this was it. this was his chance for a new life and a new home and friends…

with his duffel full of clothes, a pride flag, and toiletries, and the money he’d saved from odd jobs, ichabod boarded a bus to tarrytown. it was a nice little town, so close to the city and yet so different, and ichabod couldn’t help but feel like perhaps this would be where he belonged…

he kept up with na meetings while living there and exploring the town kept him busy until school started a week later.

on his first day, he met katrina who quickly became ichabod’s best friend there in tarrytown. she was bubbly and sweet and talkative. vibrant. she made ichabod feel welcome and she invited him to dinner the day they met. having nothing to lose, ichabod accepted. it was nice to have someone who wanted him around, even if they hadn’t known each other very long at all.

and that night he met katrina’s husband, brom. he wasn’t expecting brom but the man was a pleasant surprise and awfully easy on the eyes.

it was very easy to see the relationship between katrina and brom was Strained, even just hanging around for ten minutes. katrina asking for help cooking and brom brushing her off for the football game that was on tv. “typical straight man, really.” thanks, ichabod.

it was a lovely evening nonetheless and ichabod suggested they do it again sometime. it was nice to have friends… friends who liked him, who wanted him around, who made him feel included the way brom and katrina did when they asked him about the city.

all good things come to an end sometime, though, from ichabod’s personal experience, and this was no exception. katrina left brom and moved in with ichabod and. ichabod felt partially responsible, really. he didn’t tell her to leave brom but he didn’t dissuade her from the idea, either. it wasn’t really his fault, was it? her choice was her own to make.

brom wasn’t happy when he found out that ichabod had talked with katrina about leaving & ichabod, distressed over possibly losing his only other friend, tried convincing brom that it was ultimately katrina’s decision and he didn’t encourage her leaving him. it seemed to do the trick bc brom asked to stay friends, asked for ichabod to come over to watch football sometime to which ichabod ecstatically agreed. “just don’t tell katrina.” which seemed odd, but who was he to question it?

the time he didn’t spend on classes or at na meetings, he spent with katrina or brom. the latter of the two seemed far more warm and welcoming and… tactile now.

ichabod was hopeless when it came to football, no matter how many times brom tried to explain it to him, sports simply wasn’t his forte. but curled up on brom’s couch with brom’s arm around his shoulders, close enough to smell the heavy scent of brom’s cologne, close enough to- well.

brom asked about katrina every now and then but mostly it was lighthearted joking and, if ichabod wasn’t reading the situation wrong, some lighthearted flirting as well. which made his dumb gay heart pitter pat in the confines of his chest. he wondered, perhaps, if the attraction he felt was mutual. if perhaps brom presented straight because it was all he’d ever known and perhaps he was suppressing himself because he was afraid. ichabod knew that feeling all too well.

it was enough to get ichabod Thinking about brom in the romantic sense. brom didn’t know the side of him he’d left behind in manhattan, brom just knew ichabod as the dorky music teacher from the city that his wife brought home one night. his football buddy. an upstanding fellow. brom knew ichabod only as ichabod wanted to be known and something about that made ichabod yearn for him all the more. maybe someone Could love him. maybe Brom could love him.

but that was a lot of perhapses built high on false hopes and ichabod made a fool of himself one night, breaking his No Alcohol rule just once - it was only one beer, how much harm could it do? - and in the closeness of it all, in a lull in conversation, with a tipsy tongue, blurted that he loved brom. “even i can’t get over the shock that i love you– brom, i love you. i’m in love.” and god, he should’ve laughed it off as a joke when he saw the look on brom’s face- he looked almost disgusted and it shattered the tower of hopes and dreams and fantasies that he absolutely shouldn’t have gotten invested in. ichabod felt genuine fear course down his spine then, muttered a shaky “i’m so sorry, brom, i should go.” and hastily took his leave.

he managed to make it home before he broke down, katrina trying to get him to tell her what was wrong just made him cry harder before she pulled him close and assured him it didn’t matter, it was alright now. she had him. which just made him feel worse for falling for her husband. and he once he’d cried himself out, he fell asleep with her fingers carding through his hair.

the next morning he felt worse than he had since before moving to tarrytown and he made the executive decision to leave. he couldn’t stay here, not after he’d broken katrina’s trust and brom hated him. surely he hated him, the look on his face… brom was straight, ichabod had known that. it was nothing new. him holding out hope for anything else had been foolish and childish and- maybe the city was where he belonged.

so that night, after emailing the school about his departure - claiming it was a family emergency that was pulling him away. that he needed to live closer to family in these trying times - he said goodnight to katrina and packed a few bags and left without another word to either her or brom.

he misses katrina dearly. sure, she was a little flighty and drank too much but she was sweet and it had been so long since he’d been someone’s best friend…. it had felt nice to be needed. he misses that feeling immensely. he hopes she’s happy, she deserves to be.

he’ll be a year clean on august 13th and is 1 month & 13 days sober.

he’s hoping, someday, to go back to college and finish his degree but he’s sure he has enough musical knowledge to get him by. he did, after all, teach a stellar music class for a year.

he really loved teaching music. he’s hoping to get another teaching job somewhere soon or he’ll have to settle for whatever he can make money at.

right now, he’s staying at an airbnb until he can find a proper apartment that’s both in his price range and comfortable enough to live in.

he has a nervous tic of scratching at his inner arm/elbow.

he doesn’t like the spooky aspect of halloween but he loves the creative aspect of it. he carved pumpkins with brom and katrina on halloween last year and it was such a warm, fun, wholly autumn experience that he’d missed.

he has a noticeable scar on his wrist from trying to cut a frozen bagel with a steak knife in college. the blood ruined his favorite white sweater. yes he was more upset about the sweater than the gash in his wrist. “my wrist will heal, my sweater won’t!!”

he can play piano, violin, guitar, and ukulele.

he’s most comfortable in a buttondown or a sweater and a pair of slacks or really nice jeans, but he’s been known to be bold in his outfit choices on occasion.

he’s still not really sure of himself when it comes to making friends/interacting with people he doesn’t know and it’s very difficult without the crutch of getting high to loosen up but. he’s trying.

#drug mention #drug abuse mention #;; you just need to laugh through your own plot | hcs & writings

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theagencyrp · 6 years

Photo

[[LOADING FILE]]

>>:// [[ACCESS GRANTED]]

ALIAS: AGENT MONROE NAME: [[REDACTED]] POSITION: FIELD OPERATIVE ACCESS LEVEL: ONE

>>:// [[AGENT MONROE INTEL]]

>> Agent Monroe prefers to have blonde hair when possible, despite not being naturally blonde. >> Top Proficiencies: Stealth; Interpersonal Skills; Reconnaissance >> Peer Evaluation: Agent Monroe’s personality on missions has been compared to New England weather: If you don’t like it, wait five minutes; it’ll change. In the bunker, while not an unpleasant person, she is not as deliberately charming. >> Agent Monroe has been known to do impressions of founders and other agents with mixed responses.

>>:// [[AGENT MONROE IS TAKEN]]

Faceclaim: Samara Weaving

>>:// ATTEMPTING TO ACCESS CODENAME: MONROE >>:// DECRYPTING >>:// TEMPORARY ACCESS GRANTED

Character’s real name: Anna Daphne Miller

First choice FC: Samara Weaving

Second choice FC: Skyler Samuels

Character gender and pronouns: CisFemale, She/Her

Character age: 25

Please list at least two reasons why the Agency looked to recruit your character:

Drama Queen: Anna’s experience with theatre (and party crashing) taught her how to read people and situations and to have a very malleable outward persona. Not only can she shift her apparent personality drastically, she can do so rapidly, allowing her to blend into different environments as she moves through them and gain people’s trust as she goes. Studying theatre also required her to study movement, so even though she had no experience with hand-to-hand combat prior to being recruited, she was physically fit and flexible, leaving her in a good position to learn.

Behind the Scenes: Anna also learned valuable skills from her involvement in the technical theatre. Just as she knows how to bring attention to herself, she also knows how to send it away and direct it elsewhere. She is resourceful, attentive to detail, good at working within a team, and focused under pressure. Additionally, she has no trouble walking around oddly shaped spaces littered with obstacles in absolute darkness.

Anna Daphne Miller was born to Christine Miller, a museum curator, on December 21, 1992. Anna grew up as a latchkey kid in a nice suburb in Western Massachusetts. Christine always loved reading to Anna, who inherited her mother’s love of books and ended up spending a lot of her spare time at the local library. At school, she was focused and excited to learn and on weekends she loved going to the museum with her mother.

She had her first experience with theatre at the age of ten. Her fifth-grade class spent the spring preparing to put on (a significantly shortened version of) Peter Pan. Anna was assigned to play one of the extra lost boys her teacher had invented so there would be enough rolls for everyone, but despite having only half of one line, she was instantly hooked. When Anna started middle school, she quickly found more opportunities to participate, and it quickly became her primary extracurricular. In ninth grade, when she didn’t get into the fall play (it was a small cast and seniors got priority), she was crushed until Christine suggested she could still be involved by joining the crew. She loved it, and soon she was choosing to be backstage almost as often as she was on stage.

Anna did well enough in her other classes, with particularly strong marks in English, but her true passion was theatre. Still Christine insisted she go to college somewhere where she could study a range of subjects, wanting Anna to receive a well-rounded education. She was accepted to a liberal arts college in the Midwest with a good theatre program, satisfying both women. Everything seemed to be going perfectly.

Christine died in a car accident about a month after Anna graduated high-school. She was able to defer her enrollment a year, and took that year to get her mother’s affairs, and herself, back in order. When she did start college, she was fine. She made friends, got good grades, and quickly declared a major in theatre and a minor in literature. Still she did her best to avoid coming home, staying on campus or with friends whenever she could, and she began to lose touch with the people she’d grown up around.

Her junior year, she and her friends started crashing parties. Maybe it was spurred on by a need for adventure, maybe it was a lack of parental guidance, maybe she’d started to realize that theatre wasn’t enough for her any more, or maybe it was just a desire for something that wasn’t dining hall food, she couldn’t tell you. They started small, sneaking through the cocktail parties of on-campus weddings to grab hors d’oeuvres, but soon enough, they wanted more. They started going off campus, going thrift shopping to match dress codes. At the time, it seemed silly and harmless. Occasionally one of them would get caught, get sent out with a light scolding and a “kids these days,” since they weren’t actually causing any trouble. Sooner or later they each had a similar story.

Except for Anna. Anna never got caught. Her friends would tease that she’d called in advance, bribed the host for a real invite. She would just roll her eyes and tease back, “No. I’m just good at this.”

It was winter break her senior year when she broke her perfect record. She was staying with one of her friends, Megan, who lived on a street lined with houses that were practically mansions. Someone new had just moved in down the road, Megan explained, and they were throwing a big, fancy holiday party. “We should go,” said Megan, knowing Anna wouldn’t object. Then she added, “And we should take something, so that everyone believes us when we get back.”

Megan got spotted within fifteen minutes of getting there, cover blown by a mutual neighbor, but Anna stayed. Eventually, she found an opportunity to sneak further into the house unnoticed and was able to snatch a monogrammed hand towel and hide it in her purse. She returned to the party for a few minutes, and once it wouldn’t have been suspicious, left and made her way back to Megan’s house. She thought she’d pulled the whole adventure off unnoticed, and it was true, she hadn’t been noticed yet. However, she had failed to recognize the security cameras tucked into the sconces in the hallways.

The next day, the host of the party stopped by Megan’s house, but asked to see Anna. He was an older gentleman, polite and amused, and only requested that Anna return the hand towel, which Anna was more than happy to do. He didn’t tell Megan’s parents, and he didn’t call the police, he assured Anna. What he didn’t tell her, was that he’d made a different call entirely.

Anna thought that was the end of it. She went back to school and continued life as normal, not realizing she was being watched. It wasn’t until spring break that it came up again. She was reading in the campus library when someone she’d never seen before approached her. They knew all about her and about the holiday party too. Apparently, they were a friend, she could hear the italics in their speech, of the gracious host, they explained. Then they made her an offer.

She started training as soon as she graduated. At first, she felt out of place; her background felt so different from everyone else around her. She wasn’t a science genius or an experienced fighter. Still, she persisted, because she knew she wouldn’t get an opportunity so perfect again: it was everything she loved about theatre, and yet, so much more. She learned what she needed to, practiced as much as she could, and graduated training feeling like she’d found a new purpose and maybe a new family as well.

Character personality:

Pros: Determined, Passionate, Resourceful, Playful

Cons: Impatient, blunt, abrasive

Anna is happy and friendly, she’s just not always the best at expressing that. She spends her assignments constantly pretending to be people she isn’t, so when she’s back at the bunker, she prefers to be as honest as she can. It’s how she shows that she trusts people, but it can come off insensitive or critical sometimes. She doesn’t mean to hurt anyone; she cares a lot about those around her, considering the agency her family. She truly wants to be helpful, she just doesn’t have the patience to “sugar coat” anything; it feels like lying to her, and she does her best to leave the lies outside the bunker.

That being said, she loves to make people happy whenever possible, especially by making them laugh. She’ll do whatever she can: funny faces, bad puns, melodramatic responses. If it’s safe and she thinks it’ll make a friend’s day at all better, she’ll do it, no matter how ridiculous.

Anna is persistent. She’ll try to do whatever it takes to complete a mission or accomplish a goal, and she hates feeling like she’s being held back or unnecessarily made to wait.

OTHER:

Her favorite suit (she has a few for different situations/dress codes) is a midnight blue evening gown. The skirt is tear away, in case she has to fight, and makes a rather effective shield.

She has a solo room as she appreciates having a space where she can just get away from people. Besides her bed, its main features are a simple vanity (with plenty of drawers), a couple of bookshelves filled with her ever growing collection of books and movies, and a flat screen TV with a DVD/Blu-Ray player and a fancy sound system.

While she doesn’t have a favorite, the most important book in Anna’s collection is a copy of The Hobbit. It was one of the first books her mother read to her growing up, and they read it again together many times. This copy is particularly special: Her mother wrote a letter (equal parts heartfelt and cheesy) on the title page and gave it to Anna as a graduation gift (at the time, she teased that it was just because she didn’t want Anna stealing her copy to take to college). Anna keeps it in her bedside table, rather than on the shelf, because she likes to read the letter before she goes to sleep sometimes.

Her skin care routine isn’t insane, but she does have one.

She wears reading glasses when reading for extended periods of time.

She sings in the shower.

She likes tea (especially anything with jasmine).

She doesn’t bleach her own hair. She tried it once in high school, and it went badly. Really badly. There are photos. She won’t share them.

She picked up some ballroom dancing in college and is happy to teach anyone who want to learn, mostly because she wants someone to practice with.

She has a pretty serious sweet tooth, and a particular weakness for anything with dark chocolate.

She hates needles.

She’s very close to her mentor, as they provided the guidance and reassurance she’d been so sorely lacking since her mother died.

#monroe #field #one #taken

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faithfulnews · 4 years

Text

Reading Buttigieg

By James T. Kloppenberg

January 28, 2020

In 1972, I cast my first ballot in a presidential election, with pride and conviction, for George McGovern. To me and to many of his enthusiastic young supporters, McGovern embodied the once-vibrant progressive farm-labor tradition of the upper Midwest. His embrace of ideas championed by Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy four years earlier, his opposition to the war in Vietnam, and his support of proposals such as a guaranteed annual income and a dramatic increase in the estate tax endeared him to many student radicals—at least those who had not abandoned mainstream politics for other alternatives. McGovern of course was buried by Richard Nixon in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history, winning less than 38 percent of the popular vote and losing the Electoral College 520 to 17. The bumper stickers that appeared when the Watergate scandal broke—“Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts”—provided comic relief at a moment when American democracy seemed to many on the left mired in muck.

Like many members of my generation, I have been unable to forget the lesson I learned in 1972. In the eleven subsequent presidential elections, I have worried that no candidate I could support with pride and conviction could be elected to national office. I was anxious that even Barack Obama, whom many of us left-leaning Democrats admired for his character and his intelligence as much as for his political skills, might have trouble balancing his commitments to deliberation and compromise with the steps required to advance the core ideals of American democracy, autonomy, and equality. The same fears plague me now.

The contest for this year’s Democratic Party presidential nomination began promisingly enough. A raft of able and experienced candidates, including Obama’s vice president Joe Biden and U.S. senators Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Bernie Sanders, offered the prospect of a lively and unpredictable race for the nomination. Like many overeducated people toward the left end of the political spectrum, I consider Elizabeth Warren, from my own state of Massachusetts, one of the strongest candidates in my lifetime. My enthusiasm for her, predictably, makes me uneasy. Following the disaster of 2016, the Democratic Party came into this electoral cycle with a battle-tested first team and a deep bench of veterans. Surely one of them would emerge to unite the party and counter the forces that propelled the least qualified and most dishonest candidate in American history into the White House.

But it hasn’t happened. Instead the race has remained inchoate. Even the New York Times editorial board couldn’t decide: it endorsed both the more progressive Warren and the more moderate Klobuchar, an option that will not be available to any voters. Granted, American democracy is a mess. Sophisticated gerrymandering, a 24/7 news cycle in which echo chambers and confirmation bias undercut the very idea of nonpartisan fact-finding, the declining engagement of an increasingly cynical and poorly informed electorate, and the infusion of enormous amounts of invisible money into public life all endanger the lifeblood of popular government, the integrity of our electoral politics. The president’s likely acquittal in his impeachment trial, despite overwhelming evidence demonstrating his corruption and obstruction of justice, shows how low the Republican Party has sunk into the swamp of hyper-partisanship.

Of course character assassination, misdirection, and simple skullduggery are as old as the 1790s, when party politics emerged in the new nation. Yet the depth, scope, and sheer number of President Trump’s lies (currently approaching 16,000, according to the Washington Post) is without precedent in U.S. history. So is the bewildering fidelity of the president’s supporters, who seem to have become oddly immune to his deceit, self-dealing, vulgarity, and venality. All the Democratic frontrunners have scrambled to demonstrate that they can win the crucial states that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016—and to distance themselves from each other. So far, none has been able to separate herself or himself decisively from the pack. Instead, the big surprise has been the meteoric rise of a formerly unknown newcomer, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who seemed to come out of nowhere.

Except that he did not. I have known Buttigieg since he was an undergraduate at Harvard. I taught Peter, as he was known then, in two classes during his senior year, 2003–2004. He was a frequent visitor to office hours, and seeing him two or three times a week during nine months meant that we became pretty well acquainted. We stayed in touch after he graduated. Although his transcript showed that I was one of the few Harvard professors to give him anything less than an A grade, he asked me to write one of the letters of recommendation for the Rhodes scholarship that took him to Oxford. A few years after he returned from England, I met with him, and with a couple dozen of his politically active peers, to talk about my book Reading Obama at a gathering he helped organize. When Buttigieg was elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and he returned to Cambridge for conferences at the Kennedy School of Government, we got together to discuss everything from the details of smart sewers and street paving to the intractable, perennial challenges of urban renewal and race relations in a once-prosperous city struggling with deindustrialization.

Since Buttigieg launched his campaign for the presidency last year, I have read or reread much of what he has written, at Harvard and since. Most notable is his excellent memoir Shortest Way Home, with its lyrical evocations of the Indiana landscape, its vivid account of military life in Afghanistan, its rollicking tales of campaign stops featuring Deep Fried Turkey Testicles and peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches dusted with powdered sugar, and its incisive analysis of the rewards and frustrations of life as mayor of a small city. I have spoken with a number of his friends, former classmates, and people active in his campaign. I had a very good meeting with him, after one of his recent fundraising events in Boston, about the experiences that have shaped his sensibility. I wanted to discuss with him the ideas that had mattered most to him, and to find out more about the relation between his religious faith and his political convictions. This article profiles the college student I got to know at Harvard and the budding political insurgent who, like many of his friends, was troubled by the acquiescence of the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton and after in the so-called Reagan Revolution of tax cuts and deregulation. I pay less attention to Buttigieg the savvy and agile presidential candidate. Because he has made himself available to countless audiences, readers with access to YouTube can view hundreds of videos of Mayor Pete giving stump speeches or participating in debates, doing television or radio interviews, and meeting in town halls with the curious and the skeptical, with adoring fans and hate-filled hecklers. Of the people I have spoken with who knew Peter twenty years ago, few expected he would be running for president in 2020. Fewer are surprised to see him performing so well.

In high school, Buttigieg wrote a prize-winning essay on Bernie Sanders, whom he admired for the courage of his unconventional socialist convictions.

Both of Buttigieg’s parents taught at Notre Dame, so he grew up familiar with the strengths and the quirks of the academic world. Family friends say that as a boy Buttigieg was an articulate, pleasant conversationalist, as comfortable talking with grown-ups as playing with kids his own age. He excelled academically at St. Joseph High School in South Bend, graduating as senior class president and valedictorian. Along the way he wrote a prize-winning essay on Bernie Sanders, of all people, whom he admired for the courage of his unconventional socialist convictions and his willingness, at least at that stage of his career, to work with members of both major parties. The reward for that essay was a trip to Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library, where Buttigieg was introduced to Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Having grown up in the shadow of Notre Dame’s Golden Dome, Buttigieg was hardly overawed by the red-brick buildings of Harvard Yard or intimidated by Harvard’s professors. His parents, who moved from New Mexico State to Notre Dame before he was born, made sure he was immersed in books and ideas. His father, Joe Buttigieg, an ebullient Maltese immigrant, studied Joyce and Gramsci and taught English literature. His mother, Anne Montgomery, a native of southern Indiana, taught linguistics and nurtured her son’s fascination with languages. Given his family background, he entered Harvard just about as well prepared academically as classmates who had attended glossy prep schools.

Buttigieg never lacked confidence. After Ted Sorensen spoke at Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP) during Buttigieg’s freshman year, Buttigieg posed a challenging question to the man who had served as JFK’s chief speechwriter: If Kennedy had decided to bomb Cuba during the missile crisis, how would Sorensen have framed the speech necessary to explain that step? The topic of war became less abstract in Buttigieg’s sophomore year, when the 9/11 attacks brought Americans together—briefly, as it turned out—and George W. Bush took the nation to war in Afghanistan. Two years later, on the pretext that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction—a pretext that, it was later revealed, the Bush administration knew to be false—the United States went to war in Iraq.

By that time Buttigieg was already so deeply immersed in politics, both at the IOP and in the Harvard College Democrats, that his mother wondered if he was as committed to studying History and Literature, his declared concentration, as he was to the IOP. After Bush invaded Iraq, Buttigieg delivered a speech at a rally in front of Harvard’s Science Center explaining why he thought Americans should oppose the war. That speech persuaded more than a few of his fellow students, including Zachary Liscow, now a professor at Yale Law School, who remembers being impressed by Buttigieg’s sincerity as well as his eloquence. Like many of his fellow Harvard College Democrats, Buttigieg was troubled by the party’s apparent willingness to go along with Republican initiatives in domestic and foreign policy. When Sen. Ted Kennedy spoke at the IOP in 2003, Buttigieg challenged him by asking whether the Democrats had essentially become Republicans-lite or still offered a distinctive alternative to tax cuts and foreign wars. Kennedy’s evasive answer, coming as it did from one of the most progressive members of the party, could only have confirmed the premise of Buttigieg’s question.

In his junior and senior year, Buttigieg became more visible at Harvard, both because of articles he wrote for the student newspaper, the Crimson, and because he emerged as one of the central figures in the IOP. Together with his friends Previn Warren, now an attorney in New York and legal counsel in Buttigieg’s campaign, and Ganesh Sitaraman, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, formerly counsel in Warren’s Senate office, and now an adviser in Warren’s campaign, Buttigieg spearheaded a drive to increase student input into decision-making at the IOP. In his first, jointly written article for the Crimson, Buttigieg urged his fellow students to view not only community service but also political engagement as a valuable form of extracurricular activity. Buttigieg himself had worked briefly in a shelter for battered women during the summer after his freshman year. But as was happening elsewhere, a rift was opening at Harvard between students committed to such work, or to tutoring students or volunteering at homeless shelters, on the one hand, and those committed to political action on the other. In the Crimson article Buttigieg expressed alarm at how few young people were voting, working in campaigns, or participating in demonstrations. “In a nation where a lifetime of honorable work in direct service could be wiped out by a single stroke of poor policy from an elected official or legislature, the absence of our generation’s voice from the political process is a hazardous reality for anyone committed to social progress, and a red flag for democracy itself.”

That commitment brought Buttigieg to my classes in his senior year. The course he took in the fall semester, Social Thought in Modern America, was described by the Crimson as “the toughest humanities class at the College, combining soul-crushingly dense and difficult material with a will-breaking workload.” In other words, it was a class for people like Pete, Previn Warren, their friend and fellow IOP stalwart Ilan Graff, and fifty-two other smart, intellectually ambitious students keen to study the relation between ideas and politics in post–Civil War U.S. history. Because the course involved a great deal of class discussion, and student demand exceeded the number of names I could learn—and I believe teachers should know their students—I limited enrollment. Instead of choosing the class by lottery, as many professors do in such circumstances, I preferred to decide who should enroll.

To inform my judgments, I required interested students to write an essay explaining why the course was important to their studies at Harvard and, if possible, to their plans afterward. I also required interested students to meet with me, after I had read their essays, to discuss their reasons in greater detail. Because the course involved three discussions a week—twice a week for half of the ninety-minute lecture meetings, and once in the smaller discussion sections run by graduate students—I wanted to know which students were willing to stay on top of the readings, write the required three essays, and prepare for midterm and final examinations that involved identifying passages from the readings as well as writing synthetic essays.

Tempting as it is to contest the Crimson’s characterization, the course was, and has remained, demanding. The readings in 2003, which averaged 250 pages a week, included works of philosophy, social and political theory, religion, literature, and cultural criticism. Writers included the usual suspects for a course in American intellectual history: William James, John Dewey, and W.E.B. Du Bois; William Graham Sumner, Edward Bellamy, and Louis Brandeis; Chief Joseph, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Black Elk; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Jane Addams; Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and Walter Lippmann; Reinhold Niebuhr, John Courtney Murray, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X; Clement Greenberg, Allen Ginsburg, and Betty Friedan; Samuel Huntington, Daniel Bell, and Irving Kristol; Judith Butler, Robert Putnam, and Kwame Anthony Appiah; and others. Students wrote essays on topics such as the impact of science on post–Civil War culture; the role of ethnic diversity and racial differences in shaping twentieth-century American politics and ideas; varieties of American feminist thought; and the relation between pragmatist philosophy and democracy. In short, the course was not intended for those who, in the words of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (himself a survivor of the course), were looking to “skate through” Harvard.

Why did Buttigieg want to take such a course? He was busy enough that year. To the surprise of many, he had been elected to a time-consuming office, president of the IOP Student Advisory Board. The position often goes to an openly ambitious political animal, of which Harvard has its share, rather than a fresh-faced, bookish, fledgling policy wonk such as Buttigieg. In his IOP post he faced the challenge of trying to implement the plans that he and his friends Previn Warren and Ganesh Sitaraman had proposed the year before. Buttigieg had committed to writing a column, “Liberal Art,” every two weeks for the Crimson. He was in the midst of writing his senior thesis, a study of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and the enduring legacy—in Vietnam and, at least implicitly, in Iraq—of what the seventeenth-century New England Puritans had described as their “errand in the wilderness.” He was also trying to figure out where his future lay.

He had already volunteered in the unsuccessful campaigns of Al Gore in 2000 and, two years later, those of Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Robert Reich and Indiana congressional candidate Jill Thompson. But like many of his friends, Buttigieg was now looking for something beyond conventional, and increasingly tired, Democratic Party politics. The party needed to stand for something that could inspire commitment, something other than opposition to Reaganism. In the Crimson he observed how easy it was to criticize the bumbling, inarticulate Bush, but complained that none of the Democrats vying for the 2004 nomination had offered a “clearly articulated, positive vision for America.” Party leaders needed instead to emphasize the “sense of justice and mutual responsibility” offended by Republican tax cuts, not merely vent their outrage at the Bush administration.

In the essay explaining his reasons for wanting to take Social Thought, Buttigieg wrote that he had wanted to take the course as a sophomore but had been advised to wait. He now expected the course to “anchor” his interests in both history and literature and to help provide a framework for his senior thesis. In light of his career path, the final sentences of his essay are intriguing. “The importance of understanding American social thought also extends beyond my education itself and into my future plans. I seek to work in politics, and I am increasingly aware that part of my motivation to do so is the feeling that present political practice is at odds with the best American intellectual tradition.” While that awareness had “framed my thinking and arguments,” he wrote, “I need to develop a broader and more sophisticated understanding of the American theories that shaped, and were informed by,” our nation’s history. “Knowing the intellectual context of familiar events in political history is essential,” he concluded, “if I am to stand my ground convincingly and seriously in the political present.” My notes from my first conversation with him confirm my initial response to his essay: here was a student ready to think hard about links between yesterday and today. On the campaign trail, when Buttigieg differentiates positive freedom, or the freedom to act in order to realize one’s goals, from mere negative freedom, simple freedom from interference, he knows he is channeling the ideas of John Dewey.

Meeting with Buttigieg often through the semester, I was impressed by the depth of his commitment to politics. He was particularly interested in the ways in which progressive reform movements had been driven forward by people of deep religious faith. From the Social Gospel of the 1890s and 1900s through the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, many of the leaders and most of the foot soldiers had been inspired by their religious ideals. A central theme of the course was the rise—and perhaps, after 9/11, the fall—of what was frequently called “the culture of irony,” the late twentieth century’s postmodern skepticism about dogmas and distrust of eternal truths. In my lectures I emphasized the ways in which the founders of the American philosophy of pragmatism a century earlier had disclosed the contingency of ideas while continuing to embrace the ideals of democracy. The challenge of the twenty-first century, the challenge facing this generation of students, was to construct from the ashes left by the culture of irony, which seemed to disintegrate with the Twin Towers, their own democratic ideals.

That was the question that engaged Buttigieg more than any other. How could Americans unite politically when American culture was becoming increasingly polarized? Conservatives condemned ideas celebrated in university humanities departments. Radicals relished the triumph of perspectivalism over outdated forms of universalism, whether grounded in religious traditions or Enlightenment rationalism. How could that chasm be bridged?

As an undergraduate Buttigieg wanted to renew the early twentieth-century American progressives’ dual commitments to ending corruption and revitalizing popular government.

I knew Buttigieg had grown up in South Bend, and I knew his parents taught at Notre Dame. I do not remember whether we talked about Catholicism. None of the former Harvard students I have talked with in recent months remember him as being particularly religious while he was an undergraduate. His mother, although a practicing Catholic, was not particularly “churchy,” as he put it to me in our recent conversation. His father was an atheist. Although Buttigieg was raised Catholic and educated in a Catholic high school, by the time he left for college he was already questioning the church. He was still attracted to what he called the “social justice” dimension of Catholicism, the preferential option for the poor proclaimed by the Catholic bishops in 1971. That commitment had prompted him to join, and later become president of, the St. Joseph High School chapter of Amnesty International. But by the time he arrived at Harvard, the church’s unyielding adherence to theological dogma and doctrines he considered outdated had begun to make him uneasy. At Harvard he drifted away. Occasionally Buttigieg attended services at Memorial Church, if only to hear the extraordinary sermons preached by Peter Gomes, but he seems to have kept his changing religious views pretty much to himself.

Buttigieg’s interest in reestablishing the link between religion and progressive politics, however, had grown stronger as a result of serving as a research assistant on two projects, one for pollster John Della Volpe and another for David King of the Kennedy School. He learned that Midwestern independents of his generation often took their political bearings from the religious traditions in which they were raised, as he had done himself. He was troubled that the Democratic Party had relinquished religion to America’s conservative evangelicals. Not only was that a serious strategic error, but it also helped explain the party’s lack of a positive, unifying direction. Although Buttigieg no longer considered himself Catholic, he remained “curious,” to use his word, about varieties of theology and religious experience. He worried that the prospects for progressive political mobilization were dimmed by the lack of any orientation toward clear goals grounded on solid moral convictions.

Like his Harvard friends Warren and Sitaraman, as an undergraduate Buttigieg wanted to renew the early twentieth-century American progressives’ dual commitments to ending corruption and revitalizing popular government. Conjuring up a positive moral vision, a new form for the shared religious commitments that had animated earlier champions of democracy, was the challenge facing his generation. To that end, Buttigieg also enrolled in another course of mine in the spring of his senior year, Democracy in Europe and America. At the time I was working on the book that became Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, which has sparked controversy in part because of my emphasis on the role played by post-Reformation Christian ideals in the modern history of popular government. That was one of the central themes of my lectures. The readings in that class ranged even more broadly, from Thomas More, Montaigne, and the Puritans of England and New England through Locke and Rousseau, Jefferson and John Adams, Mary Wollstonecraft and Judith Sargent Murray, Kant and Burke, Madison and Tocqueville, Hegel and Marx, Grimké and Mill, Nietzsche and Jaurès, Weber and Dewey, and Schumpeter and Hayek, to works by more recent writers such as Fanon and Habermas. Although a number of undergraduates and graduate students, including Sitaraman, sat in on some of my lectures, Buttigieg was the only student that year to enroll in both courses. Either he was a glutton for punishment or he was genuinely committed to the study of politics and ideas.

In his 2003–04 Crimson columns, as uneven as the work of most undergraduate writers, Buttigieg’s running commentary on political developments eerily foreshadows our situation in 2019–20. He pointed out how Republicans since Newt Gingrich had shrewdly shanghaied the political vocabulary with terms such as “death tax” and “right to work” and how crucial was “the power of imagery,” the simplified, doctored, manufactured pictures, sound bites, and slogans fed to the public by visual and print media. After John Kerry had secured the Democratic nomination, Buttigieg observed that the Democrats so far had offered only “a complaint, not an argument.” They needed instead a compelling positive program to unite the nation. He listed several examples, including ways to end our dependence on fossil fuels, a national-service program, and a single-payer health-care system. Simply maligning the Bush administration would not suffice.

In his final column before commencement, Buttigieg implored Harvard students to cultivate compassion, “the human capacity to feel another’s suffering as one’s own”; strength, which he defined not as throwing your weight around as an individual or a nation but as “finishing what you start”; and morality, not confined to the domain of marital fidelity, as it had been redefined since the Clinton scandals, but in the broader sphere of civic and public life, where concern with it—as with compassion and strength—had all but vanished as a result of the Reagan revolution and the culture of greed it had encouraged.

By the end of their senior year, I had gotten to know Buttigieg, Warren, and Sitaraman well enough to join them and a couple of their friends for beers at Charlie’s, the IOP hangout across the street from Harvard’s Kennedy School. I do not remember exactly what topics we discussed. I do remember thinking that these students, smart, articulate, deeply committed to democratic politics and searching for new ideas, gave me reasons not to despair. In May of 2004, the Democratic Party remained torn between its fading progressives, such as Howard Dean, and its moderates, such as the eventual nominee Kerry. Democrats did seem committed only, as Buttigieg had put it to Ted Kennedy, “to being for whatever the Republicans are for, only less.” Given the party’s lack of a clear direction, the dispiriting prospect of George W. Bush’s reelection seemed a distinct possibility. Since I was impressed by these graduating seniors’ passion for politics, it is likely that we talked about what Max Weber called “politics as a vocation.” The very concept of a vocation, very much a part of growing up Catholic in the 1950s and ’60s, had gone out of fashion. I like to resurrect it whenever I can. When Buttigieg himself came back to Harvard in 2016 to talk with graduating seniors, he urged them to worry less about the titles they would hold in twenty years than about the roles they wanted to play. By the time he graduated, he recalled, he had already become aware that “fulfillment and purpose would come through service to others.”

The divided perceptions of Buttigieg between younger and older left-leaning voters illustrates some of the mistrust and animosity that he has identified as one of the Democratic Party’s deepest problems.

After commencement, Buttigieg went to work for the presidential campaign of John Kerry, which gave him experience with four candidates in a row who came up short. Following a stint working in Washington, D.C., he packed up for Tunisia to continue his study of Arabic. When he decided to apply for a Rhodes scholarship, he asked me to write a letter of recommendation. Although surprised, I was happy to endorse his application even though, as I noted in the letter, his performance in my courses placed him only “in the middle of the pack.” Instead I detailed his work outside the classroom. I noted that his immersion in the IOP and his column for the Crimson, valuable as they might have been, “represented a gamble” for anyone thinking about graduate school, and that such work “reflected the depth of his commitment to political action.”

I concluded the letter with a judgment that still rings true to me. I will reproduce it here, at some length, precisely because it contrasts so strikingly with the numerous put-downs and dismissals that have accumulated in recent months, particularly from commentators on the left who consider Buttigieg a careerist not only too moderate in his politics but too slick for their taste:

I admire his talent, his agility, and his devotion to public service. At a time when so many equally capable recent Harvard graduates are off feathering their own nests, Peter is doing the thankless work of political organizing, not because he expects a reward but because he believes it is important. Many would describe his choice as quixotic, but I respect it. Peter unquestionably has the capacity to excel at Oxford and afterwards. He thinks clearly and writes beautifully. Beyond his obvious talent, he has a backbone. It is his strength of character, the depth of his democratic convictions, that will make him a forceful presence in American public life.

Buttigieg followed a well-worn path of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. The tutorials in politics went smoothly enough, but the rigors of analytic logic, contemporary moral philosophy, and neoclassical economics taxed even his considerable brainpower. Of particular value, he told me recently, were his tutorials on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and moral philosophy more generally. He noted especially the impact of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. Rawls’s concept of the “arbitrariness of fortune” resonated especially with Buttigieg, as it did for Rawls himself, due to personal experience. In Rawls’s case it was the deaths of his two brothers from diseases they contracted from Rawls; in Buttigieg’s case the contrast between the misfortune endured by one of his childhood friends and the exceedingly good fortune he had enjoyed throughout his life. He was also drawn to the ideas of the philosophers Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, whose concept of moral luck invites us to acknowledge the difficulty of assessing blame for actions over which individuals have no control.

Reading Robert Nozick’s defense of libertarian principles, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, while studying economics illuminated for Buttigieg the reasons why conservatives trust the market and distrust government, a valuable lesson for anyone on the political left. As Buttigieg explains it in Shortest Way Home, his course of study at Oxford, which required him to “master the basics of supply and demand, utility, preferences, auction theory, and market equilibrium,” left him admiring “the theoretical elegance of the free market under perfect conditions,” but it also allowed him to see how and why those perfect conditions “get skewed in the real world.” In Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, he was trying to tie together theory and practice.

The other important development during his Oxford years was Buttigieg’s return to religion. He told me he was put off by the intolerant “hard-edged atheism” he encountered at Oxford. He could not square such doctrinaire atheism, which he found as rigid as the dogmas of Catholicism that had repelled him, with his own experience. Whether it was the convincing arguments in the tradition of phenomenology, arguments made by Nagel and others (from William James onward) about how to make sense of the puzzling fact of one’s own consciousness, or the equal impossibility of convincingly proving or disproving God’s existence, Buttigieg came to realize that his own faith was more deeply rooted than he had thought. Attending Anglican services at Oxford convinced him that he was “liturgically conservative,” for aesthetic as well as spiritual reasons, even as he remained convinced that the Gospel message enjoins us to attend to society’s outcasts rather than celebrate or defend the wealthy and prosperous. His choice to affiliate with Anglicanism thus predated by a decade his coming out as gay. He returned to the United States in 2007 a Christian seeking a home. He found it with Fr. Brian Grantz of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. James in South Bend. Buttigieg has worshiped there ever since his return to his hometown after three years living in Chicago, working for McKinsey and Company.

Nothing about Buttigieg’s glittering résumé incenses his many critics on the left as much as his time with McKinsey, which is presented as obvious, irrefutable evidence that he is an unprincipled technocrat. In the forty years I have been teaching, I have known plenty of humanities or social-science students who decided—in at least one case on the advice of a respected parish priest—to explore the private sector in order to develop skills they could then put to use as they saw fit. In his memoir, Buttigieg explains he had been prepared for a career “in public service, inquiry, and the arts, not business. But I knew that I would have to understand business if I wanted to make myself useful in practice.” Because he “felt ignorant about how the private sector really worked,” McKinsey provided “a good training ground.” A few students I’ve known have stuck with consulting after their first three years, but most have gone in other directions. Some now work for foundations, others in politics, the law, or other professions. One, whom I know particularly well, put his McKinsey experience to use by establishing a secondary school in a township outside Johannesburg. Although McKinsey plunged Buttigieg into unfamiliar worlds, including the mysteries of grocery pricing, “working not for a cause but a client” soon proved unsatisfying because, as he puts it bluntly in his memoir, “I didn’t care.”

Now that the details of Buttigieg’s work with McKinsey have been released, the utter lack of authority he exercised and the unsurprisingly banal nature of his research projects has become apparent. As a result, the furor seems to have died down, at least for most people. Buttigieg volunteered in our conversation that one of the most valuable things he had learned from my classes was the contrast between Max Weber’s account of instrumental rationality—the means-ends reasoning that was threatening to eclipse a focus on morality or tradition—and John Dewey’s insistence on the value-laden nature of all decision making. At McKinsey Buttigieg learned the techniques of data analysis, an important tool for anyone in public life. But to dismiss him as a “whiz kid” akin to the best and brightest who took the United States into Vietnam is to misunderstand him. The young man who has written for twenty years about the folly of U.S. foreign crusades, about our unwitting walk into the “jaws of a trap” set for us by Al-Qaeda, about our “self-defeating” approach to terrorism, and about the need for the Democratic Party to offer a positive, social-democratic program knows the difference between means and ends. Buttigieg understands that it was precisely the Bush administration’s blindness to that difference, and to what we should have learned from earlier episodes of adventurism, that has kept us mired in Afghanistan and Iraq for nineteen years and counting.

In one of the most powerful passages in Shortest Way Home, Buttigieg points out that there is no formula for resolving the tradeoffs required in government. Data cannot yield answers to questions about who should suffer, and how much, when competing policies are debated. Questions of efficiency must be weighed against considerations of mercy. Although Buttigieg concedes how tempting it is for officials to treat all issues as mere “technical problems,” as Robert McNamara did in Vietnam, Buttigieg insists that it is a mistake. “Elected officials earn our keep by settling moral questions, ones where there is no way to make someone better off without making someone else worse off.” William James observed that in any ethical dilemma, “some part of the ideal is butchered.” It is rare for elected officials even to admit that problem, let alone call attention to it, as Buttigieg does in his account of the promise of artificial intelligence to replace “the human function we call judgment.”

The next time I encountered Buttigieg was in February 2010, when my book Reading Obama was in press. He and fellow Rhodes scholar Sabeel Rahman, another brilliant young law professor who is currently serving as president of the think tank Demos, together with Previn Warren, Ganesh Sitaraman, and about twenty other like-minded scholars and activists, invited me to a conference at Harvard Law School. They wanted to discuss Obama, and what he might mean for the future of the Democratic Party. It was not the first meeting of the group, nor was I the first guest to meet with them. In previous years they had welcomed, among others, the distinguished Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, City Year founder Alan Khazei, and the young historian Angus Burgin, author of an outstanding book about the rise of the New Right, The Great Persuasion. I spent a fascinating morning with the group, explaining what I saw as the origins of Obama’s devotion to deliberation and bipartisanship. Those commitments were already under fire from the left; many around the table were unpersuaded by my argument. Obama seemed to them just another too-pliant Democrat, unable, as all Democrats in their lifetimes had been, to escape the neoliberal framework Reagan bequeathed to the nation. That afternoon, polymath Roberto Unger, back at Harvard Law School after serving in the government of his native Brazil, presented a riveting indictment of Obama and the Democratic Party. Buttigieg, and most of those in attendance, greeted Unger’s analysis with much greater enthusiasm.

Only a year later, having lost in his audacious bid to become Indiana State Treasurer in his first campaign for electoral office, Buttigieg became Mayor Pete. When he came back to Cambridge for meetings at the Kennedy School of Government, he was invigorated by the challenges he was wrestling with in South Bend. Formerly the home of powerhouses Studebaker and Bendix, as well as thriving businesses such as the Oliver Plow Company, the Folding Paper Box Company (the biggest in Indiana), and Birdsell Manufacturing, which proudly proclaimed itself the “largest makers of clover hullers in the world,” the city had fallen on very hard times. Now pothole repairs and snow removal, redesigning traffic patterns and building bicycle paths, were among the urgent issues for Mayor Pete. If those problems presented fewer intellectual challenges than philosophical debates about how we should understand freedom, they were problems he could tackle using the technocratic tools obtained at McKinsey. He seemed engaged, even energized, by such work.

But of course there were deeper, more intractable problems than fixing sewers and controlling floods. Within days of his inauguration he faced the crisis that has dogged him ever since. South Bend’s African American police chief was accused of tapping the phones of police officers. When the chief was under threat of indictment, Mayor Pete accepted his resignation. As he puts it in his memoir, in the circumstances “there was no good option,” and he has paid a price for the decision he made. Buttigieg’s major social initiative, rebuilding or restoring a thousand homes in a thousand days, received a lot of positive attention, but then it came under fire for failing to address the needs of the city’s poorest residents. Businesses returned to South Bend’s revived center, but they brought jobs for well-educated white-collar workers rather than the unemployed. All these criticisms are legitimate. Buttigieg has admitted that he made mistakes and did not accomplish everything he set out to do in his two terms as mayor. If he is to be held responsible for failing to solve the problems of race and poverty that have dogged the cities of America’s industrial heartland for decades, he should also be given credit for what he did accomplish. But if, as one of his predecessors told him, serving as mayor was the best job he ever had, one cannot help but wonder why Buttigieg decided to leave.

Unlike the most strident of his critics on the left, Buttigieg understands that hatred and intransigence are not the cure for what ails American politics. They are the disease.

While Buttigieg has attracted enough support among certain Democratic constituencies to flirt with the lead in some early Iowa and New Hampshire polls, he has also drawn sharp criticism from other candidates and their followers. Some of that criticism, as well as some of that support, seems to me based on misperceptions of who Buttigieg is and what he wants to do. In this article I have tried to show the depth of his commitment to policies considerably more progressive than those proposed by most Democratic candidates since George McGovern. He is the only candidate who has spoken frankly about the constraints imposed by the Reagan revolution, constraints both political and intellectual, that limited the horizons of the Clinton and Obama presidencies. He has said emphatically and repeatedly that he believes we have come to the end of that era and must return to the social-democratic ideals and policies put in place between the New Deal and the Reagan revolution, the years when the economy grew, inequality shrank, and a generation of Americans ascended into the middle class.

For that reason I would not draw quite as bright a line between him and, say, Elizabeth Warren as most commentators, and Warren herself, have tended to do. On most issues they agree more than they disagree. Buttigieg readily admits that one of his most ambitious ideas, his plan for expanding (not packing) the Supreme Court to address the problem of rampant partisanship in judicial appointments, comes from his Harvard friend—and Warren adviser—Ganesh Sitaraman. (He quipped to E. J. Dionne, and to me, that he was sorry to have “lost the Ganesh primary” to Warren.) Further illustrating their similarities, Warren has recently altered one of her most controversial plans, her call for the immediate implementation of Medicare for All rather than a gradual transition. That shift aligns her more closely with Buttigieg on this crucial issue. Differences do remain. Should public universities be free for everyone, as Warren argues, or is Buttigieg right that those with ample resources should pay their own way? Scholars have shown that means-tested programs have proven more politically vulnerable than universal programs, and that is an important consideration. But is it clear which of their plans is more egalitarian—or more politically viable?

Buttigieg is the first openly gay candidate for the presidential nomination of a major party in the United States. That fact seems to matter less to many voters than most people had expected. Yet there are clearly people who would not vote for him for just that reason; opposition to LBGTQ rights remains as persistent as racism. Buttigieg also supports protecting women’s right to abortion, the Green New Deal, and increasing taxes on the wealthy to make possible expanded child care and other social programs. With such plans, Buttigieg might be expected to attract many young voters on the left. Yet he has been the target of sustained, often hyperbolic attacks, for a number of reasons.

Perhaps most obviously, Buttigieg represents a threat to the candidacies of Sanders and Warren, so it is no surprise that their loyalists have lashed out at him. He earned a degree magna cum laude from Harvard, a coveted First from Oxford, and worked at McKinsey, all of which can be perceived as making him an elitist incapable of understanding or attracting working-class voters. He volunteered to serve in the military in Afghanistan, so he can be caricatured as a hawk despite his persistent criticism of America’s unwarranted and repeated interventions. He fired a black police chief and has not yet demonstrated that he can attract support from African Americans beyond South Bend. If, skeptics ask, he still believes in the social-democratic principles he has endorsed for two decades, why is he using the language of “free choice,” long a conservative talking point, to distinguish his health care and college plans from those of Sanders and Warren? His careful positioning of his campaign in the lane between the Warren/Sanders left and the Biden/Klobuchar center makes his younger critics wonder whether his commitment to the ideals of equality and justice is as solid as his political instincts are shrewd. Given the strong field of Democratic candidates, many young leftists wonder why he chose not to remain in South Bend. If he is as committed to reenergizing public life at the local and state level as he says he is in Shortest Way Home, why not remain Mayor Pete, gain more experience, and then run for statewide or national office later? Finally, Buttigieg’s refusal to participate in what he calls the “oppression sweepstakes” earns him the ire of those incensed by the persistence of racial and gender hierarchies and fiercely committed, sometimes above all, to identity politics.

Instead Buttigieg has emphasized his Midwestern roots and his empathy for white, small-town and rural voters, many of whom turned to the Tea Party, or perhaps voted for Trump even after having voted for Obama. He understands that the lives of millions of Americans, whites as well as people of color, have been upended in recent decades. They are justifiably fed up with both parties’ empty promises. He calls for uniting Americans, as Obama did, rather than slicing the electorate into pieces that can be combined into a brittle coalition of particular interest groups with little or nothing in common. Unless Democrats can bring Americans together, he argues, they will be unable to regain control of local and state governments. Unless they can do that, winning the White House will make far less difference than our obsessive focus on it might suggest. While many Democrats seem to be looking down on frustrated rural and Rust Belt voters with “condescension bordering on contempt,” Buttigieg remains convinced from his experience in South Bend that “bedrock Democratic values around economic fairness and racial inclusion could resonate very well in the industrial Midwest, but not if they were presented by messengers who looked down on working and lower-middle-class Americans.”

As he has been saying since he was an undergraduate at Harvard, Buttigieg believes that the challenge facing Democrats is to engage with people across the nation, people with very different cultural values, by connecting the aspirations of our politics with “the richness of everyday life.” Otherwise the party might be able to satisfy self-righteous coastal elites, but it will continue to fail to generate majorities in diverse communities across the nation. It is paradoxical that the sharpest criticism Buttigieg has received has come from just those coastal elites, particularly members of his generation and younger, while his greatest strength has come from older voters, many of whom are tired of the familiar contenders and ready to welcome this likeable newcomer. The divided perceptions of Buttigieg between younger and older left-leaning voters itself illustrates some of the mistrust and animosity that he has identified as one of the Democratic Party’s deepest problems.

One of the striking features of Buttigieg’s hundreds of campaign appearances has been their consistency. He does not appear to worry about tailoring his appeal to any particular group; his message has been the same wherever he goes. His consistent emphasis on bringing together different American voters around a common agenda does not depend on demonizing others. Instead, he lays out his own vision of a nation committed less to individual success and unregulated free enterprise than to the values of compassion, strength, and morality that he articulated almost two decades ago and continues to cherish. Residual dissatisfaction with Obama, the belief that he squandered the few opportunities he enjoyed by wasting too much time and energy on conciliation, also helps explain the uneasiness of many young people on the left when they hear Buttigieg use that language rather than Warren’s or Sanders’s calls to battle.

Buttigieg laughed when he admitted to me that he did not expect, when he declared his candidacy, to be the “the religion guy.” His frequent invocations of his Christian faith strike me as sincere rather than strategic. When he discusses climate change, he talks about our duty to be stewards of God’s creation. When he discusses immigration and poverty, he invokes the Beatitudes. When he discusses gender and sexuality, he says his own orientation is not his choice but that of his creator. Everyone I have talked with agrees that nobody—by his own account even including Buttigieg himself—was aware he was gay until shortly before he came out during his campaign for reelection as mayor of South Bend. The cultural and legal changes that made his marriage as well as his reelection possible have been so rapid that we can forget he would have been ostracized at St. Joseph High School had he come out as a teenager in the 1990s. As far as I can tell, no one who knew him at Harvard or Oxford, including his male friends Sitaraman, Warren, Rahman, and Liscow, and his female friends such as my students Roxie Myhrum and Sandhya Ramadas, had any inkling of Buttigieg’s orientation. I saw only one reference to the subject in his Crimson columns: “public morality includes acknowledging the humanity and rights of homosexuals, though peddlers of hate invoke it to do the opposite.” Obama, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren have also spoken frequently about the link between their Christian faith and their progressive politics, but no Democrat in recent decades has spoken about the connection more often, more forcefully, or in relation to as many particular issues as has Buttigieg.

The most durable goal of American democracy has always been the common good, not the rights of individuals or the good of particular segments of the population. Buttigieg shares that commitment. I find it odd that it infuriates so many Democrats, who do not share his belief in the possibility of constructing a shared public interest through democratic deliberation. Yet that ideal is deeply rooted in American history. When skeptics express their concern that a thirty-eight year old has the experience necessary for the presidency, I remind them that another champion of the idea of the common good, James Madison, was thirty-six years old in 1787, when he played a pivotal role at the Constitutional Convention and wrote his perennially influential essays in The Federalist. Youth does not necessarily mean immaturity, nor—as we see demonstrated every day by our president’s tweets, taunts, tantrums, boasts, and recklessness—does good judgment necessarily come with age.

Despite his considerable strengths, Buttigieg is of course highly unlikely to be elected president in 2020. But we could—and possibly will—do worse. Whatever the outcome, Buttigieg has shown sufficient strength to suggest that he will be a figure to reckon with for decades to come. As he is fond of pointing out, he will not reach the age of the current president (or, one might add, some of his rivals for the Democratic nomination), until well after 2050. Buttigieg’s intelligence, calm, quick wittedness, idealism, and hopefulness all remind me of Obama’s most notable characteristics. Unfortunately, any Democrat elected president in 2020 will almost certainly face a House of Representatives as polarized as the one that stymied Obama throughout his two terms in office and a Senate as stubbornly partisan as the one that now protects Donald Trump from the consequences of his corruption. Like Obama, though, and unlike the most strident of his critics on the left, who see Buttigieg as nothing more than a moderate who lacks convictions, he understands that hatred and intransigence are not the cure for what ails American politics. They are the disease.

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byakuyasbastardson · 4 years

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Some thoughts

Earlier I posted earlier that I felt very uncomfortable with a Christian prayer being said in the Senate chamber, even though I myself am Catholic. All day it has been eating at me as to why I was so uncomfortable, and really it was not the prayer but the invoking of Christ's name in that sacred hallowed hall. I want to share why.

America...as many, including friends, colleagues, family, across the country would argue otherwise is not a Christian nation. We are a nation founded on Christian ideals, beliefs, and notions. The founding fathers were very explicit that they wanted a secular state because this very country was founded on those fleeing religious persecution. From the Catholics in Massachusetts, Maryland and Rhode Island, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Jews in New Amsterdam (New York) and Rhode Island, and German Lutherans to Pennsylvania many fled persecutions to create a better life here. As such when this country was founded the very words were written into our Deceleration of Independence and later our Constitution. When they talked about the unalienable rights of man, they said those rights were bestowed upon man by their "Creator". They deliberately did not use the word "God" or "Jesus" though in this case as Islam had not reached the shores of America, the religions of the far East were only just being studied and attempted to be squashed, and those of the slaves and natives were being squashed, it really was meaning God. But they did not use his name because they knew of those that believed in other creators or no creators. Next in our Constitution in the very first Amendment they wrote the Freedom of religion, but they also meant Freedom from Religion. They meant that all men could practice any religion they see fit, and Congress nor any part of the government can create or pass a law that aids or harms a religion. It is why most states have laws that public scholarship funds cannot be used at religious schools due to that most private schools are Christian and thus it creates an appearance of favor. But the founders wrote this language because they saw what happens when a country ties itself to a religious institute. They saw it with Spain, Italy, France being Catholic and somewhat subservient to the whims and the Papal State they saw England and the Church of England, and they saw the Muslim countries of the Ottoman empire and Sunni states in Northern Africa. When a country links itself to a religion the needs and interests of the citizenry take a back seat.

What I have said does not mean that America cannot use Christian beliefs to help guide our path and policy makings on the contrary as stated we were founded on Christian ideals, beliefs, and notions. Those are that of Compassion, of Generosity, of Kindness, of Humility, of Love, and Forgiveness. It is why America has long been viewed as salvation to the world. It is why we were gifted the Statue of Liberty with those sacred words “Give us your tired, your sick, your poor”, it is why we have been called the greatest experiment in democracy, and why Reagan called us the “Shining City on the Hill”. But as we have continued as a country we have perverted and ravaged these ideals and changed them. We have perverted Compassion with Apathy, we have soiled Generosity with Selfishness, we have poisoned Kindness with Cruelty, swapped Humility with Boastfulness, tortured Love with Hate, and bludgeoned Forgiveness with Revenge. This has poisoned our country and our politics; it is why we are divided and there is so much hatred towards our brothers and sisters. Families are being destroyed because a father and son fall on different sides of the political aisle. Because a daughter has the courage to come out as gay to her religiously conservative family. In the past it was more of the same but also involved loving someone of a different race...who am I kidding it isn’t the past. Have you ever had a great aunt ask your own mother if she is “ok” with you dating a girl of African decent (half) and when you mother says yes and asks why, she responds with; “Oh honey down here we don’t mix”? I have. Everyone has heard stories like this, from my example, a friend who was disowned by their father for believing in something the other didn’t, or a friend who works up the courage to inform her parents she has a girlfriend but doesn’t know how they will react. From the earliest times of this country to up until recent past if a Black and a White wanted to marry it was called an Abomination before God, many souls lost their lives because they dared to marry a white woman. After that we still heard the same argument but this time involving homosexuals and others of that community, that their love for one another is an Abomination before God. When it was about race it was mostly the Democrats calling it this, now we add in homosexuals and it is the Republicans.

Democrats and Republicans, that’s where we are at now, one side is Right and Just and the other side is Evil. We have divided ourselves and will thus ruin ourselves, but how I see it one side wants to undo the damage to our Christian ideals we were founded on while keeping God and Jesus where they should be in the hearts and minds of people and not in our government, while the other side desires to keep it how it is while bring God more into the forefront of our nation. I’m not arguing that it’s all or none, but it’s the vocal minority that has made themselves the majority in our government. On the “Left” we have those representing us saying let us take in the tired, the sick, the poor. Let us work to give them and all people access to cheaper and free Medicare so they can live and work and create a better life, let us give young people easier opportunities like we had to go to school and learn, then go out and get better jobs. Let us tax those who have plenty a little more so that we can help those who have little. Let us broaden the availability for persons to participate in our most sacred duty of voting to keep this experiment alive. Let us allow people to love who they love and or change who they are so they can be happy. But in order to keep all people free we must put God in the background as our founders did when it comes to governing.

On the “Right” it is the exact opposite. They say “Let us bring in people, but only if they are smart enough, rich enough, healthy enough” They want the privatization of our medical system claiming it will be cheaper, but we see time and time again that it is not. We have diabetics skipping lifesaving insulin shots because they don’t know if they can afford the next one. We have people pushing off urgent medical care because they fear losing everything in medical costs. We have apathy to the young struggling to get by due to rising educational costs and when they cry out they are told to suck it up, that our fathers and mothers were able to pay for it on a part time job over summer, which is impossible when textbooks have risen 1000% since 1977, tuition has risen 260% since 1980 as of 2015, while the minimum wage (adjusted for inflation)is 31% less than it was in 1968. They have a President who implemented restrictions for green cards on those who use public services like Medicare and food stamps. A President who is putting travel restrictions on pregnant women coming to this country because he fears what…babies being born here thus allowing those Parents to live here and make a better life for themselves. This is a party that fears and seemingly hates those of other religions. Where their President puts forth a travel ban on Muslims trying to enter this country because he views them as dangerous, where he praises a fake story of a famous US General having his men shot Muslims with bullets dipped in Pigs blood, where when a Muslim man and vice-chair of his counties GOP had members attempt to oust him due to his religion. Where this President has had supporters torch synagogues and mosques in his name. We created this hatred and desire for revenge due to 18 individuals killing 3000 Americans, yet we never punished the country they came from, but seemingly all 1.8billion of them are bad Where a supporter of his and Pastor called the Impeachment a “Jew Coup”. This is a party that looks down on the poor, looks down on the sick, yet praises war and worships money all they while throwing Gods name around. They constantly want to cut programs designed to help the poor and sick all they while increasing the budget for war, a thing that only makes people por and sick except for a few that profit on it. They give massive tax cuts to the rich while increasing them on the poor claiming it will all work out, but it doesn’t. They worship the strength of our economy(money) yet 48% of Americans don’t benefit from it, and the 52% that do, only a fraction really does. They tell others to be thankful for what they have all the while they themselves own multiple houses and fancy cars, they ask if the poor are so poor why do they have fridges, cars, iphones. They refuse to increase the minimum wage which would help those being poor not be poor all the while increasing their own salaries. Where this party passes bills that will become laws trying to restrict Gays from getting married in the civil aspect because it is a perceived abomination against god. Bills that allow religious based orphanages to refuse LGBTQ+ families form adopting children there because they feel keeping them there is better than a loving functioning “Gay house”. Bills that will imprison doctors for offering medical services to transgender youth. All of this has happened only in the last handful of years, when the changes really became apparent. And yet, they do all of this while claiming every Presidential leader was chosen specifically by God to lead this nation yet when it’s a Democrat, they are mute.

I think that��s enough of that, I am not writing this to argue Republicans are evil, just that they and this nation has strayed away form the Christian ideal our forefathers set forth. I believe in this country and that means in Republicans, it’s a gross perverted minority that has risen confusing the word of Jesus with anything but. Growing up I only attended Christian schools, first a Catholic one, and then later a Lutheran one until High School. It was not until I went to the Lutheran school when I started to think and question my faith. Not because I lacked it, but I wanted to understand what I was being taught, what I believed in…what Jesus’ love meant to me. Being a Catholic at a Lutheran school meant for most of my time there I was the only Catholic in class, which meant, on occasion I was felt I was singled out for my faith, mostly positively. My brothers and sisters in Christ were curious about how a Catholic worships, when I traveled with some to Italy they bombarded me with Questions, in 6th grade we learned about the reformation and my teacher constantly asked me questions…not just to ensure I was paying attention, but mostly to ensure he got the information correct. But on some rare occasions I did feel the negativity of it. I was never bullied for it, but comments here and there and viewpoints that I wasn’t a true Christian because I held onto the “old ways”, or why I called myself a Catholic if my family didn’t follow the “rule” of no meat on Fridays during lent. So I started asking myself questions about this faith and reading into it not just the theological side but the historical side and I saw how this country has changed and fallen, then I realized we failed from the beginning. We call for the poor to come here but we hate the poor. First it was the Irish, then it was the Eastern Europeans, then it was the Chinese, then the Hispanics, then the Japanese, and now seemingly everyone. We hate everyone that isn’t us, we fear everyone that isn’t us, we horde materialistic things, and I am guilty of this too. It is not because we have taken “Jesus” out of schools, it is because we have twisted his words and used them for hate and selfish gains.

John 13:34-35 (NIV) “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Do we do this? No, we do not we hate one another and only love those who are like us.

Mark 12:41-44 “Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you; this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.” All too often you hear how much the rich have given to charity, but in the end, it is a small amount that they will take off their taxes thus paying less money. In my time alive I have seen it is the poor that are far more generous and willing to help because they know what it is like to be poor, yet those that were poor and are now rich are not as generous because they have the mentality of why they should help the poor? They were once poor and brought themselves out so surely anyone can do it.

Please do not think I am trying to lecture any of you on your faith. I am not, I am the last person to do that. My brother got married this past week, in a Catholic church, and that truly was the first time I had been in a church and sat down for a service in about 6 years. In my time thinking about what Jesus’ love means to me, I have found issues with my religion I do not agree with, which is why I have stayed away, but I do not falter in my faith, I do not falter in my pride and belief that I am Catholic. I do not fault you for asking “How…how can I still be Catholic if I do not think Homosexuality is a sin?” “How can I be Catholic or even Christian if I believe that a woman should have a right to an abortion?” There are many other questions that go with this and the answer is I have my faith and I am waiting. In my faith our leader the Holy Pope Francis is slowly changing the viewpoint on Catholicism, in recent years he said that you do not need to believe in Jesus to be granted access to God’s kingdom if you lived a good life. Which is a start.

So, to get back to why I felt so uncomfortable, it’s because 1. We are supposed to keep religion and government separate to properly work for all Americans, but more importantly 2. also because of how far I see we as a nation have strayed from these Christian beliefs (that are taught in all other religions). How we have perverted them, especially it seems one party. I love this country, I love my faith, and I pray that soon very very soon we can work to get back to these ideals. Only then can America be great.

#america #religion #thoughts #impeachment

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theliberaltony · 7 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Roy Moore, who has been accused by two women of initiating unwanted sexual contact with them when they were underaged, is back in the lead in the most recent polls of Alabama’s Senate race. Although it’s still anyone’s election — turnout is hard to model in special elections and Moore’s lead is narrow — he has to be considered at least a modest favorite.

If Moore wins, you’re liable to see a lot of commentary along the lines of what the notoriously corrupt Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards said when seeking to regain Louisiana’s governorship in 1983: “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” (Edwards won by 26 percentage points.) Or, if you prefer a more recent example, what President Trump said about his political base in 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” That is to say, a Moore win would be taken as a canonical example of how politicians can get away with almost anything — even allegedly molesting two teenage girls — and still win elections so long as their base remains loyal to them.

The truth is a little more complicated that that. Moore — even if he wins by a few points — will have vastly underperformed a typical Republican in Alabama. He’ll have benefitted from running in a highly partisan epoch in a deeply red state and from drawing an opponent in Democrat Doug Jones who has fairly liberal policy views, including on abortion. If Alabama were just slightly less red — say, if it were South Carolina or Texas instead — Jones would be on track to win, perhaps by a comfortable margin. In Alabama, he’s an underdog. Nonetheless, the marginal effect of the allegations and of Moore’s other controversies may be fairly large.

It’s really hard for a Democrat to win in Alabama

Alabama has been an extremely red state since the demise of the Solid South. Moreover, it’s been consistently red; unlike states such as West Virginia, where Democrats are sometimes viable in races for local office and for Congress, Alabama has been voting Republican for pretty much everything. There are currently no Democrats who hold statewide office in Alabama. With one exception, all members of the state’s Congressional delegation are Republicans. And in recent elections for president, Congress and governor, the Republican candidate has won by an average of about 30 percentage points.

Alabama is really, really red

Republican margin of victory or defeat in recent elections

STATE GOVERNOR HOUSE PRESIDENT SENATE AVERAGE Wyoming +37.4 +40.9 +43.6 +54.4 +44.1 Utah +37.0 +31.3 +32.9 +38.2 +34.8 Oklahoma +17.8 +41.9 +35.0 +40.5 +33.8 North Dakota +43.0 +25.2 +27.7 +30.3 +31.5 Tennessee +39.7 +24.8 +23.2 +32.2 +30.0 ➔ Alabama +21.5 +27.9 +25.0 +44.0 +29.6 Idaho +20.6 +30.9 +31.7 +34.5 +29.4 South Dakota +34.0 +25.4 +23.9 +32.3 +28.9 Nebraska +32.9 +30.2 +23.4 +24.2 +27.7 Kansas +17.4 +33.9 +21.0 +29.9 +25.6 Louisiana +17.8 +34.8 +18.4 +16.6 +21.9 Mississippi +28.1 +18.7 +14.6 +19.3 +20.2 Arkansas -8.4 +35.6 +25.3 +20.3 +18.2 Kentucky -5.9 +27.8 +26.3 +15.0 +15.8 South Carolina +9.5 +20.1 +12.4 +21.0 +15.7 Texas +16.5 +12.5 +12.4 +21.5 +15.7 Alaska +21.4 +19.9 +14.4 +2.1 +14.4 West Virginia -4.7 +21.8 +34.2 +1.8 +13.3 Georgia +9.0 +15.3 +6.4 +10.7 +10.4 Iowa +15.7 +4.7 +1.8 +16.4 +9.6 Ohio +16.3 +11.2 +2.5 +7.4 +9.4 Indiana +4.5 +14.2 +14.6 +2.0 +8.8 Montana -2.7 +13.7 +16.9 +7.0 +8.7 Arizona +11.8 +5.6 +6.3 +8.0 +7.9 Maine +11.9 -12.8 -9.1 +37.0 +6.7 Nevada +29.2 +1.5 -4.5 -0.6 +6.4 Missouri -3.3 +18.1 +13.9 -6.5 +5.6 North Carolina +5.6 +4.8 +2.8 +3.6 +4.2 Florida +1.1 +6.3 +0.2 -2.7 +1.2 Wisconsin +5.7 +0.2 -3.1 -1.1 +0.4 Pennsylvania -0.4 +4.8 -2.3 -3.8 -0.5 Colorado -3.3 +2.9 -5.1 -1.9 -1.9 Virginia -5.7 +5.1 -4.6 -3.4 -2.1 New Hampshire -5.6 -3.5 -3.0 -1.7 -3.4 Michigan +11.1 -3.3 -4.6 -17.0 -3.4 New Mexico +10.6 -7.5 -9.2 -8.4 -3.6 Minnesota -3.0 -7.0 -4.6 -22.5 -9.3 Illinois +1.5 -10.1 -16.9 -13.0 -9.6 New Jersey +4.0 -12.5 -15.9 -16.5 -10.2 Washington -5.9 -5.8 -15.2 -19.4 -11.6 Oregon -4.8 -13.7 -11.5 -21.1 -12.8 Connecticut -1.6 -25.9 -15.5 -20.2 -15.8 Rhode Island +3.0 -22.2 -21.5 -35.6 -19.1 Maryland -5.3 -24.5 -26.2 -27.4 -20.9 Massachusetts -2.3 -45.3 -25.2 -15.7 -22.1 Delaware -30.0 -22.7 -15.0 -25.5 -23.3 California -16.4 -21.6 -26.5 -42.5 -26.8 Vermont -3.6 -47.4 -31.0 -28.2 -27.6 New York -21.6 -26.7 -25.3 -44.6 -29.6 Hawaii -14.7 -41.0 -37.4 -39.5 -33.2

Based on an average of gubernatorial elections since 2010, and Senate, House and presidential elections since 2012. Races that were uncontested by one of the major parties are treated as 60-point victories. Races that were contested but where a third-party candidate finished first or second are not included in the average.

Source: Dave Leip’s U.S. Election Atlas, David Wasserman

And in some ways this understates the GOP advantage, because as The Upshot’s Nate Cohn points out, Alabama is not only a red state but also a highly inelastic state. What that means is there aren’t very many swing voters there: Around 50 percent of the state’s electorate are white evangelicals, the most reliable Republican voting bloc, while another 25 percent or so consists of black voters, the most reliable Democratic voting bloc. In elastic states, the identity of the candidates can matter a lot; for instance, while North Dakota (a relatively elastic state) is about as Republican as Alabama on average, its results vary a lot from election to election — so Democrat Heidi Heitkamp won the state’s U.S. Senate race by 1 percentage point in 2012, while Democrat John Hoeven won its 2016 Senate race by 62 points. Alabama isn’t like that; the results are usually about the same regardless of the candidates.

So the fact that Jones is running within a couple percentage points of Moore is itself pretty remarkable: Moore is performing around 25 points worse than Republicans ordinarily do in Alabama despite there being few swing voters in the state.

Not all of that can be attributed to the recent allegations against Moore, however. He was leading by an average of “only” about 10 points in polls conducted before the allegations surfaced, although there was a lot of variation from survey to survey. (And Moore won by just 4 points the last time he was on a general election ballot in Alabama, in a race to become the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2012.) Plus, the national political environment is good for Democrats and poor for Republicans. The allegations have had a fairly clear effect on the polls — even if some of it is fading now. But they might have had a larger effect if so many Alabamians who usually vote Republican weren’t already set against Moore for other reasons, such as his having been removed twice from the state’s supreme court.

Overall, the effects of the scandal seem to be of roughly the same magnitude as those identified in a 2011 paper by Nicholas Chad Long, who found that scandals involving “immoral behavior” hurt incumbent U.S. senators by a net of about 13 percentage points,1 controlling for their past margin of victory and other factors.

But shouldn’t the effects be larger than that, given that the conduct Moore is accused of is so egregious? Well, maybe, but the problem is that a lot of voters don’t believe the allegations. A poll this week from Change Research found that only a 42 percent plurality of Alabamians believed Moore’s accusers, compared with 38 percent who disbelieved them. And Trump voters disbelieved them by a 63-9 margin.

One needs to be careful here, because the line between “don’t believe the allegations” and “wouldn’t vote for a Democrat under any circumstances” can be blurry — voters may say they disbelieve the allegations as a way of rationalizing their vote for Moore. Nonetheless, if you’re someone who worries about what sort of precedent Moore’s election would set, the better reason for concern is that Moore seems to have successfully persuaded some Alabamians that the allegations against him are a conspiracy put together by liberals, gay people and the news media. In an era where trust in the news media is extremely low among Republicans, that’s a strategy that other scandal-plagued Republicans are liable to emulate — and, of course, it’s one borrowed from President Trump’s playbook.

In many other respects, though, this isn’t anything new. Long’s paper found that while scandals can have reasonably large effects at the margin, two-thirds of scandal-plagued incumbents nonetheless won re-election to the U.S. Senate between 1974 and 2008.

And candidates are more likely to survive scandals in extremely red or extremely blue states. Just ask Gov. Edwards, whose resilience in the face of scandal was partly a matter of his political talent — but perhaps had more to do with the fact that Louisiana had just one Republican governor in the 118-year period between 1877 and 1995. In the current political climate, a Democrat getting elected in Alabama may similarly be a once-a-century type of event.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

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georgepearkes · 5 years

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Another Rhyme, Not Another Repeat

On May 24, 1854, Anthony Burns was arrested by police officers on Court Street in Boston, Massachusetts. They were following instructions of a US Marshall, who in turn was responding to a warrant issued by US Commissioner Edward G. Loring. Burns' crime was to flee enslavement at the hands of Virginia's Charles F. Suttle in 1853. This was a high profile enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Given low barriers to proof of ownership of another human being, Loring remanded Burns to Suttle following a May 26 riot by abolitionist Bostonians attempting to free the man. On June 2nd, the date Burns was to be placed on a ship bound for the Chesapeake, Boston was effectively under martial law to prevent another riot. In total, the government expended about $40,000 (roughly $1.2mm in today's dollars) sending Burns back to slavery.

Massachusetts had a history of slavery, with thousands of slaves by the mid-18th century. However, for all sorts of economic, geographic, cultural, and religious reasons slavery was never particularly important to the state. Slavery was a feature of the colony almost from the beggining, possibly as early as 1624, though it was always a marginal practice when compared to other colonies. Slaves were roughly 2.2% of the population at peak in the mid-18th century, but even then free blacks were roughly 5x more numerous than enslaved blacks. By 1783, a series of legal challenges to enslavement culminated in a case where the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (that is, the state government) charged that a slaver named Jennison had assaulted and battered his slave. Jury instructions from Chief Justice William Cushing argued that finding in favor of the victim Quock Walker would mean slavery is "effectively abolished as it can be by the granting of rights and privileges wholly incompatible and repugnant to its existence." Jennison was found guilty. In other words, the government and courts decided that slavery required physical violence to be maintained and therefore was unacceptable under the law, ending slavery in the state (though an explicit ban was not present until the 13th Amendment's ratification in 1865). By 1790 there were no recorded instances of slavery in the Massachusetts.

The federal government had obviously taken a very different path. The writing of the US Constitution had to defer the question of slavery for fear it would destroy the fragile, hard-sought consensus between the 13 former colonies. Then-nascent abolotionists couldn't prevent the document from punting, insituting the three-fifths compromise on apportionment, including a clause (Article I, Section 9, Clause 1) that prohibited a national slavery ban until at least 1808, and prohibited free states from protecting escaped slaves via state law (Article IV, Section 2). Virginia was the superpower of the colonial period, and slave states were rapidly growing, in no small part thanks to the despicable plantation model. Over the next 50 or so years, a number of features of the United States' political organization (population distribution, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College) allowed for increasing entrenchment of slavery in national laws. While Prohibitionists didn't lose every battle, they were basically ineffective compared to the power of the South defending the bloody practice on its soil.

The Fugitive Slave Act allowing Burns' capture was signed into law by Millard Fillmore, a Whig from New York who sought to soothe the South in the Compromise of 1850; that bill did not even allow slaves to gain procedural rights related to their capture, as abolitionists sought. The President in June of 1854, Franklin Pierce, was a New Hampshire Democrat elected by a 254-42 Electoral College landslide victory over Whig Winfield Scott largely because he opposed radical abolitionists. Pierce was nominated by the Virginia delegation of the Democrats in the 1852 convention. He was a compromise candidate that the South could rely on to prevent attacks on slavery and he strongly supported Burns' recapture in Boston.

To summarize, Massachusetts had decided a practice was not acceptable. The federal government had a different set of imperatives. When these two clashed, the federal government's power was inescapable, regardless of local law, custom, practice, or preference. While sentiment against the government's policy was strong, one section was able to dominate. Sectional loyalty was rooted not just in economics or politics, but also culture and geography. Virginian planters and Bostonian abolotionists were not just representatives of different schools of thought on scripture, natural rights, and legal doctrine, but were also part of a geographic divide that naturally created separations of distance as well as ideas.

Today, there are similar conflicts, right down to the state in question. This week in Massachussets, state Judge Shelley Joseph and one of her court officials were charged with obstruction of justice for allowing an undocumented immigrant to escape detainment by a plainclothes ICE enforcer. The defendant was appearing on drug posession and fugitive charges, and after his hearing was permitted to use a sally port to avoid detention. US Attorney for Boston Andrew E. Lelling filed charges of obstruction of justice, saying "We cannot pick and choose the federal laws we follow."

Just as in 1854, the United States faces a deep rift on how to treat undocumented immigrants. "Sanctuary cities" often find themselves completely at odds with state or federal law, and we're now starting to see that divide trickle down to the actions of individuals like Judge Joseph or her court officer. The clear moral case (and one that is basically consistent with their obligations under state law) they feel is not consistent with federal law, and actions that under most circumstances would be viewed repugnantly (riots in 1854, alleged obstruction of justice in 2019) come under a different light. The failure of national efforts at compromise (remember the Gang of Eight?) is only making things worse, contributing to entrenched positions. That isn't to say that everything will be fine once a compromise can be reached. As we saw in the first half of the 19th century, agreements like the 1820 Missouri Compromise or Compromise of 1850 can't work without true agreement. Violations (the 1854 repeal of 1820 by Stephen Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Act is a prime example) will continue as long as either side of the issue has the political power to attempt further efforts.

There is, of course, lots of commentary on the prospects for a new civil war. Cosplaying pundits love the idea of rural America taking on urban America over any number of issues: abortion, voting rights, immigration, redistribution, commercial regulation, and so forth. In addition to being amateurish love of violent conflict with no regard for its litany of costs, these forecasts of a new violent clash are ridiculous.

The lead-up to the Civil War had many features of the current set of seemingly irreconcilable divides that are currently at issue, but importantly these divides were sectional. Support for enslavement of human beings was not generally split within states, just as abolition wasn't split within states.1 Today, the absolute opposite is the case. Values in metropolitan areas are far more similar across states than values are within a state's rural areas versus those metropolitan areas. There is no sectional conflict in today's America, even if the political vitriol and separation of points of view is just as stark today as it was in the 1850s. For all the talk of red and blue states, rural versus urban or suburban dwelling is a far stronger predictor of perspective on our social conflicts than first-past-the-post vote counting at the state level. The geography of our split contains it.

How these various conflicts evolve and resolve is beyond my ability to speculate, but a careful reading of the sectional history of the United States gives compelling evidence that we are not repeating a prior history. The national war over slavery featured riots long before Fort Sumter and the secession of the Deep South in order to protect its horrifying institutions of bondage; a single judge's contempt charges are not the same thing. History's fascinating lessons about prior events are easy to overlay today, but that same history shows today's resolutions will be different, and offers an opportunity to learn both about our own past and current present. The lessons we take away from that are diverse, but sound much more like rhymes than repetition.

There are some major exceptions; the Appalachian parts of committed seceding states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee were deeply opposed to secession. I discussed that dynamic on Twitter, but would note even then that the intra-state conflicts were sectional, with specific geographic areas rather than intra-geographic areas dividing opinion. ↩︎

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duanecbrooks · 7 years

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Gabby and Hodie: You're Number One You may recall that, in a past article, I laid out what are my all-time favorite literary creations. You my also recall that I said that the books that I picked as my all-time etc. are those once and for all categorically and for all time. Well, what's happened is, upon further reflection--and upon my dear, warm, sweet,loving cousin Emily's words to me (surely I don't have to tell you what they were) further coming to fruition--I've come to realize my real and true all-time favorite literary offering. And it's a tie between the women's-beach-volleyball sex boat Gabrielle Reece's ("with" Karen Karbo) life-lessons guide My Foot Is Too Big For The Glass Slipper: A Guide to the Less-Than-Perfect Life and the Today-show's-Fourth-Hour gal Hoda Kotb's ("with" Jane Lorenzini) personal/professional memoir Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer, and Kathie Lee. Allow me to say here that in coming to said realization, I had to dump quite a lot of weight. At first I thought that the former television-morning-show host Rene Syler's ("with" Karen Moline) parenting guide Good-Enough Mother: The Perfectly Imperfect Book of Parenting deserved to make the aforementioned list. However, further pondering has caused me to realize that, as humorous and as charming as Syler's tome is, in the final analysis it has to do with the doings of children and with the raising of children--and as much as I love kids and love reading/seeing what it is kids have to say, an entire book centering on them is simply not my aesthetic. For a while I sincerely believed that How to Lose Everything In Politics (Except Massachusetts), the then-journalist Kristi Witker's inside-the-1972-McGovern-presidential-try memoir, merited making the cut. Yet in time I remembered that, ever since 1976, when Carter won the White House and kicked Ford and all those other Nixon-era Republican third-raters out on their asses, my consistent interest in politics has majorly decreased--indeed, in the main I've come to sympathize with what the master TV interviewer Dick Cavett once told the 1960s/1970s far-left activist Jerry Rubin: "Politics bores the ass off me." Thus I've arrived at the conclusion that Witker's book, while it's chock-full of lively wit and penetrating insight, when all is said and done involves an area, namely politics, that on the whole has long stopped being my thing. OK. Now I'll go into why Reece's and Kotb's tomes have seized my heart. .The front and back covers of both books are damned enticing. Both the front and the back covers of Reece's tome picture her with her intensely attractive offspring, both times sporting an insanely appealing bathing suit and both times showing off an insanely appealing pair of bare feet (The back cover of Reece's book clearly shows that she has an equally alluring stepdaughter). The front cover of Kotb's tome displays her dressed in a quite stylish blue pullover blouse and adorned in the kind of slacks that fully exhibit what her Today cohort Kathie Lee called her "long Egyptian legs and toes." (The fact that Kotb is wearing red toenail polish slightly takes away from her dazzling visual appeal, but only slightly) And on both the front and back covers there are the sort of endorsements that easily pull you in. On the back cover of Reece's tome the former television Friend Courteney Cox is quoted as asserting: "I read My Foot Is Too Big For The Glass Slipper in one sitting...Everyone who is married--or thinking about getting married--should read this." On the front cover of Kotb's book there are words from People Magazine ("Bubbly and engaging, just like its author") and from the greatly-lauded novelist Adriana Trigiani ("This book is a manual for overcoming obstacles and living life with passion and purpose...Hoda is the working girl's Cleopatra. She rules!"). .The prose of both tomes is colorful and lively. Both Reece's and Kotb's books feature the kind of writing that, upon seeing it, immediately rivet your eyes to the page. Upon seeing any page, its wording has you absolutely hooked, positively pleased to be in the company of such charming, sprightly gals, gals who obviously love life and do not hesitate to embrace it entirely. And, again, that feeling comes no matter what page of theirs you're on (Kathie Lee in her super-bestselling compilation of essays Just When I Thought I'd Dropped My Last Egg at one point said: "I love my new co-host Hoda Kotb. She is an absolute doll and so much fun to work with." The writing style of Hoda causes you to fervently agree with KLG's every syllable). .Both women in their tomes have greatly witty and greatly incisive things to say. In both Glass Slipper and Hoda there's sparkling humor and eye-opening observations, whether Reece in her book is discoursing on how cathartic it can be for a parent to swear ("[A] little bit of cussing does wonders. The later in the day it is, or the earlier in the morning, the more important this is for your sanity, and to help you feel less like an underpaid servant and more like the sassy teenager that is still lurking somewhere inside your bill-paying, car seat-purchasing, sleep-deprived self") or her regular almost-all-women's exercise class ("Sometimes someone comes up to me after class and wants to pay me, or otherwise do something lavish to show her gratitude. I tell her, she's already doing it, by inspiring me with her commitment...When my women show up, day in, day out, with their great attitudes and their great energy, they don't realize that that's their gift to me") or her parenting style ("[Excessively spending time with electronic pleasures] messes with your head, and I don't want it for my kids...So I say no. A lot. And tell me I don't feel like a shit mom when little Brody, who's been cooperative all day, has a meltdown in the afternoon and sobs miserably, 'I. Just. Want. My. Electronics'") or whether it's Kotb in her tome telling of her lifelong struggle to establish her own identity (I will always be asked [as this one "older black woman" did while Kotb was in a phone booth making a call during her early days as a television journalist, taking Kotb's face in both hands and looking into her eyes] 'What is you?' And while I'll proudly explain I'm Egyptian...again, the answer in my head will always be: I'm just me") or acknowledging her refreshingly non-high-minded, purely self-serving motivation for going into and staying in TV news ("Procrastinating to me is simply a way to create a time crunch...After I phone in a takeout food order, I'll stay at work as long as possible, then race home to my apartment to meet up with the delivery guy...[T]elevision news is the perfect career for me. I need to know that my work day has a start and a fight to the finish. I'm competitive, persistent, and not afraid to risk being the hero or the goat when airtime hits") or the near-overwhelming thrill she felt when the Today show's Fourth Hour hosted the always-and-forever-bootylicious Queen Bey ("When Beyonce walked into the room, [Kathie Lee and I] were blown away by her beauty and her presence. She's about 5 feet 7, but her red heels added several inches. She wore a gorgeous short dress, designed in her favorite color, red. She was a knockout. Her frame is sexy and solid and she carries herself with confidence around every curve...Her words were laced with a touch of Texas twang (Beyonce was born and raised in Houston). As her people began touching up her hair and makeup, all I could think was, There's absolutely nothing wrong with her! Bring that stuff over here!"). After reading these books, you effortlessly feel invigorated because you spent quality time with two insightful, funny, considerably observant ladies who have, to quote a line from the classic 1960s song, "looked at life from both sides now" and are bright enough and centered enough to retain the lessons such observing has taught them. Also: Both Reece and Kotb conclude their tomes in grand style. The former closes by assuring her readers that should they choose to assume the role of "queens" of their household, "[y]ou will live interestingly ever after." And she ends her "Acknowledgements" section by lauding her hubby, the professional surfer Laird Hamilton: "I cherish the gift of knowing you, your love, and your partnership. Oh, and when our girls [their daughters] are difficult, I do blame you for those traits." The latter, for her part, ends her book with a forward that itself finishes with her naming her "special wooden box" inside of which is the "letter that lists the three most important traits in my man" and assures us readers that "there's a chance it will end up accidentally buried by books, an over-sized tote bag, a plaque, or other random crap." Kotb's own "Acknowledgements" portion winds up with a fond shout-out to her "co-author," Jane Lorenzini, "the most brilliant writer I have ever known...Your dad was right. It has been an adventure...Your name should be bigger on the [front] cover. Oh, well...next book." During the 1980s, it was Barbra Streisand who famously crooned, concerning creativity: "The art of making art is putting it together, bit by bit, Beat by beat, part by part, Sheet by sheet, chart by chart, Track by track, bit by bit, Reel by reel, pout by pout, Stack by stack, snit by snit, Meal by meal, shout by shout, Deal by deal, spat by spat, Spiel by spiel, doubt by doubt. And that is the state of the art." To read the books of Gabrielle Reece and Hoda Kotb is to bring about enormous gratitude that said authors--and their ghostwriters--took the time and the trouble to put them together, employing every "bit," "beat," "part," "sheet," "chart," "track," "bit," "reel," "pout," "stack," "snit," "meal," "shout," "deal," "spat," "spiel," and "doubt" so that "the state of their art" would make them such eminently satisfying reading experiences.

#Gabrielle Reece #my foot is too big for the glass slipper #hoda kotb #Hoda: How I Survived War Zones #Rene syler #good-enough mother #kristi witker #How to Lose Everything In Politics (Except Massachusetts)#dick cavett #jerry rubin #the 1980s #Barbra Striesand

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nothingman · 7 years

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Donald Trump has coasted into the White House on an Electoral College technicality, after losing the nationwide popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. He has the lowest approval rating for any incoming president since officials started tracking such things, and his first full day in office was greeted by what was likely the largest protest in American history.

Odds are that he and the Republicans will become even less popular as time goes on and their often terrifying policies are put into motion.

Under the circumstances, the safest political bet for Democrats — not to mention the high moral ground — is t0 simply oppose Trump in everything he does. That way, when he becomes the biggest presidential failure of all time, Democrats can honestly tell the public that they never cooperated with that monster.

And yet, in a move that seems designed to uphold every stereotype about quisling middle-road Democrats, many Democratic senators are already registering “yes” votes on some of Trump’s Cabinet nominees. It’s still a modest number, since we’re mostly talking about committee votes at this point, but even progressive senators like Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have voted to move forward with obnoxiously unqualified or downright despicable nominees.

These senators have reasonably coherent arguments to offer. Warren defended her committee vote for Ben Carson as the head of Housing and Urban Development by noting that Carson had made some promises to her, in response to tough questioning. “If President Trump goes to his second choice,” she said, “I don’t think we will get another HUD nominee who will even make these promises — much less follow through on them.”

Justifying his votes for James Mattis as defense secretary and John Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Security, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who remains an independent but caucuses with the Democrats, said he hopes these nominees “will have a moderating influence on some of the racist and xenophobic views that President Trump advocated throughout the campaign.”

These are nuanced, thoughtful arguments. Unfortunately, if there is one takeaway from Hillary Clinton’s agonizing electoral defeat, it is this: No one cares about your nuance.

In 2002 Clinton faced a very similar dilemma to what congressional Democrats are facing now. As the junior senator from New York, she was confronted with the decision whether to vote to grant president George W. Bush the authority to invade Iraq.

As foreign policy expert Fred Kaplan laid out in a Slate article in February 2016, it’s clear that Clinton was wary of invading Iraq and was one of the most outspoken senators against the invasion. But voting no would merely be symbolic, because the Republicans had the votes to o ahead without her. From her vantage point, it probably seemed easier to vote yes to fend off hysterical accusations from Republicans that she was weak on terrorism and willing to ignore the supposed threat from Saddam Hussein. Why waste political capital on meaningless symbolism, right?

Except, as history proved, that yes vote, although it had absolutely no impact on the decision to go to war or the disastrous outcome of that conflict, would be Clinton’s political destruction. If Clinton had sucked it up and spent her political capital on a symbolic no vote 14 years ago, she would almost certainly have become president — either in 2009 or right now.

That vote haunted Clinton through the tight 2008 Democratic primary campaign. There’s no way to roll back history and try out the experiment, but the fact that Clinton had voted to authorize war and Barack Obama had not (largely because he wasn’t in the Senate at the time) was clearly a key factor in his victory.

But where that 2002 vote really came back to haunt Clinton was in 2016. Both the WikiLeaks-driven, Clinton-hating left bros and the Trump propaganda machine hyped that vote so hard that the public could be forgiven for thinking that Clinton personally ordered the invasion of Iraq. That vote created an opening for Clinton haters of all stripes to caricature her endlessly as a warmonger and sellout, and helped justify the embittered Sanders delegates who booed every mention of Clinton’s name at the Democratic National Convention.

The effect of all this overblown bile wasn’t huge: Most of Sanders’ primary supporters ultimately voted for Clinton, and while the never-Clinton fauxialists have been a loud presence on social media, they are small in number. But in an election as tight as the 2016 one, even minor effects are enough to tip the balance. Clinton’s loss swung on a margin of 80,000 votes in three counties in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, about 0.06 percent of the total national vote.

Under the circumstances, it’s fair to say that if Clinton had sucked it up and voted no on the Iraq war authorization in 2002, she could have prevented the catastrophic outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Yes, her army of haters would still launch various random accusations, but the edge would have been considerably blunted if all along she had been able to say, “I voted no on George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.”

Instead, she was forced to go into a lengthy explanation whenever the question came up. You never want to do that in politics: Trying to explain yourself tends to come across as defensive, even when it’s not.

That’s how Democrats need to think about this: Do you want, years from now, to be forced into offering some long-winded justification for yourself when a political opponent accuses you of colluding with Trump? Or do you want to be able to say, “I opposed him from the beginning, and my record speaks for itself”?

There is no point in denying that ideological infighting is hobbling the left. Clinton’s defeat proved that yet again. Sometimes it’s unavoidable: There’s no way to please everyone, and some factions are demanding things that are impossible or simply a bad idea.

But that’s the beauty of the no-on-all-things-Trump plan. It unifies the various factions of the left at no real political cost. The votes are, after all, largely symbolic. Democrats can’t actually block any of Trump’s nominees, so there’s no real danger that Trump will punish them by filling those posts with even more odious people. Trump is loathed not just by purity leftists but by regular leftists, liberals and most moderates. It’s doubtful any of them will object if their senators and representatives obstinately oppose all things Trump. It buys goodwill, with very little real sacrifice.

The moral and policy debates over the votes can get complicated. But as a matter of pure politics, the answer is clear: No on all nominees. Learn from the lesson of Hillary Clinton, who was forced over and over to explain a 14-year-old vote by invoking a bunch of nuance no one cares about, especially years after the fact. “No” is simple and straightforward. It’s the vote that will still look good a decade from now, when Donald Trump has gone down in history as the worst president ever.

via Salon: in-depth news, politics, business, technology & culture Salon

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billyagogo · 3 years

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The Intervention

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2021/01/26/the-intervention/