1 winner and 1 loser from the last big 2022 primaries
Winner: National Democrats
National Democrats pushed weak Republican candidates over the finish line both in a congressional race and in the New Hampshire GOP Senate primary. Don Bolduc — a retired Army brigadier general who believes Donald Trump won the 2020 election, said that the election was rigged in New Hampshire, and has made false claims about Covid-19 vaccines — pulled off a victory over state Senate president Chuck Morse in a split field. Morse conceded early Wednesday.
Loser: Kevin McCarthy
The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a super PAC aligned with McCarthy, the House minority leader, spent $1.8 million in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District to boost Matt Mowers, a veteran political operative who had been the GOP nominee in that swing district in 2020. Mowers lost. Instead, Karoline Leavitt, a 25-year-old who would be the youngest female member of Congress in history if elected, won. Leavitt has recently refused to say whether she’d vote for McCarthy for speaker and made false claims about the 2020 election.
Democrats are doing great things
‘Keep talking’: How a simple philosophy helped lead to a White House celebration
Steve Ricchetti never stopped talking to Joe Manchin.
Even as the negotiations over President Joe Biden’s cornerstone economic and climate legislation came to be defined by high-profile meltdowns, there was simply too much at stake to allow a rupture in the relationship with the West Virginia senator.
The day after Manchin went on Fox and appeared to drive a stake into the heart of Biden’s sweeping proposal, Ricchetti – one of Biden’s closest and longest serving aides – was back on the phone with him.
When news hit in mid-July that appeared to show Manchin had pulled the plug on resuscitated talks over a pared back version of the proposal, Ricchetti was on the phone with him a few hours later.
After receiving word directly from Manchin that things weren’t nearly as dire as they’d been presented, the calls between the two would continue four of the next five days, as the secret negotiations between Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer continued.
The proposal that Washington forecasters had once again marked for dead would end in a deal – one that stunned many in the White House and some of Schumer’s closest allies.
“What gets lost in the kind of daily hyperventilation or scrutiny of the process, is that no matter what – good or bad – you always pick up the phone the next day and keep talking,” Ricchetti told CNN in an interview.
The prolonged negotiations underscored the reality of thread-bare majorities in the House and, most acutely, the Senate. For a White House that had an extensive to-do list in 2022 – including a confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee, a major spending agreement and a series of bipartisan bills that had momentum – alienating a single vote wasn’t a viable option.
The calls – and quiet persistence – are emblematic of an approach that helped pull a White House faced with cratering poll numbers and questions about Biden’s future to a moment in which Democrats feel an unlikely surge of momentum leading into the midterm elections.
Biden had a huge win for the USA with the railroad deal
Rail carriers and union leaders reached an agreement to avoid a national rail strike that would have badly tangled the supply chains that are just now starting to move efficiently again. That, in turn, would have affected everything from drinking water—the chlorine to purify urban systems is shipped by train—to consumer goods, costing up to $2 billion a day and likely sparking job losses and contributing to the inflation that has only recently begun to ease.
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Like many of the victories President Joe Biden has celebrated during his term, this deal was complicated, requiring the administration to bring together a number of moving pieces. In the 1980s and the 1990s, the U.S. railroad industry consolidated into seven main carriers, which are now making record profits. In 2021, profits for the two largest railroad corporations in the U.S.—the Union Pacific and BNSF—jumped 12% to $21.8 billion and 11.6% to $22.5 billion, respectively.
But those profits have come from cost-cutting measures that included job losses from an industry that had remained stable for the previous 25 years. Between November 2018 and December 2020, the industry lost 40,000 jobs, most of them among the people who actually operated the trains, as the railroads adopted a new system called Precision Schedule Railroading (PSR). This system made the trains far more efficient by keeping workers on very tight schedules that leave little time for anything but work. Any disruption in those schedules—a family emergency, for example—brought disciplinary action and possible job loss. Although workers got an average of 3 weeks’ vacation and holidays, the rest of their time, including weekends, was tightly controlled, while smaller crews meant more dangerous working conditions.
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Union leaders and railroad management have been negotiating for more than two and a half years for new contracts, and in July, Biden established a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to try to resolve the differences before the September 16 deadline by which the railway workers could legally strike.
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The administration put its weight behind negotiations, including not only three cabinet secretaries—Labor Secretary Marty Walsh (who is himself a former union official), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack—as well as Director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese, but also the president, who worked the phones and got mad that management would not loosen scheduling rules. The details of the deal are not yet published, but it appears to have accepted most of the PEB recommendations on pay, given workers a day of paid sick leave—union leaders wanted 15, up from none—and, apparently, removed the penalties for missing time for illness or medical emergencies, one of the workers’ key demands.
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The deal does, though, highlight that Biden is using the power of the presidency to protect the American people while trying to be fair to labor and management, a system pioneered by Republican president Theodore Roosevelt and adopted afterward by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower, among others. It’s a very different principle than the idea that workers should accept whatever conditions management imposes on them.
Yesterday, ABC News senior national correspondent Terry Moran pointed out that Biden and his team have “masterfully” handled “the greatest international security crisis since 9/11,” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They united NATO against Moscow and held the alliance together, wrecked the Russian economy, helped Europeans find energy from new sources, kept the U.S. and NATO out of the war, helped Ukraine with intelligence and weapons, all despite those at home working against him.
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Long term, this will advance U.S. interests not only by strengthening alliances, but also by demonstrating that America can be a force for good and by showing Putin’s brand of authoritarianism “as a con, a cheap costume donned by the thieves and gangsters in the Kremlin.”
Biden’s Ukraine policy may not win an election. But it matters anyway.
Ukraine’s remarkable territorial gains and the Russian military’s disorderly retreat are most important as a rebuke to a dictator’s unprovoked aggression. But they are also heartening news for the world’s democracies, which stood together, at considerable risk to their own economies, to say no to Vladimir Putin.
And it is a victory for President Biden’s approach to foreign policy.
He promised that his presidency would undo the damage Donald Trump did to the United States’ standing in the world. Check.
In June, the Pew Research Center found that after record lows in positive feelings toward the United States recorded in 2020, the median favorability rating of the United States across the 17 countries it surveyed stood at 61 percent this year.
Biden also argued that ending the post-9/11 forever wars by withdrawing from Afghanistan would allow Washington to focus on its vital interests. In Ukraine, the United States did just that, providing not only direct military aid but also crucial intelligence that made the recent breakthroughs possible.
Most People Are Good
In the hours after roughly 50 migrants touched down on Martha’s Vineyard in two planes sent by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the island’s community – still jarred by the unexpected arrival – rushed to help the newcomers.
“We received food, we received clothes, we received … different things, so much so that we’ve had to relocated that donation drop-off spot to the fire department,” Edgartown, Massachusetts, town administrator James Hagerty told CNN Wednesday.
Town officials even had to post on social media that they didn’t need more donations, Hagerty added, as items continued to pour in.
“I think that’s a testament to the community of the island and it’s a testament to the citizens of Edgartown, it’s a testament to everything that’s going on now,” he said.
Vineyard Community Rallies Relief Efforts to Assist Stranded Migrants
State and Island officials, faith-based groups, nonprofit agencies and volunteers rallied quickly to accommodate 50 mostly Venezuelan migrants who arrived unexpectedly at Martha’s Vineyard Airport Wednesday, part of a coordinated political campaign to divert migrants from border states.
Harbor Homes shelter manager Lisa Belcastro, who was overseeing the relief effort at St. Andrew’s, praised the community’s outpouring of support.
“We have literally everything we need right now,” she said
Go Ahead, Ask for Help. People Are Happy to Give It.
Many things can get in the way of asking others for help: Fear of rejection. Fear of imposing. The pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology so ingrained in American culture.
But new research suggests many of us underestimate how willing — even happy! — others are to lend a helping hand.
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science this month, included six small experiments involving more than 2,000 participants — all designed to compare the perspectives of those asking for help with the perspectives of helpers.
Across all of the experiments, those asking for help consistently underestimated how willing friends and strangers were to assist, as well as how good the helpers felt afterward.
Good News from Ukraine
‘The Russians are in trouble,’ U.S. official says of latest war analysis
A Ukrainian counteroffensive that has sent Russian forces into a hasty retreat could mark a turning point in the war and raise pressure on Moscow to call up additional forces if it hopes to prevent further Ukrainian advances, U.S. and Western officials said
“The Russians are in trouble,” one U.S. official said bluntly. “The question will be how the Russians will react, but their weaknesses have been exposed and they don’t have great manpower reserves or equipment reserves.”
Putin’s Allies Are Now Slamming the War Right to His Face
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Russian President Vladimir Putin in no unclear terms that he thinks Putin’s decision to wage war in Ukraine is a grave error.
Modi, who was speaking with Putin in Uzbekistan on the sidelines of a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, said now is not the time for war, and lambasted him for continuing to conduct attacks against Ukrainians nearly seven months into the war, according to Reuters.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is feeling pressure from all sides to pull back from the war in Ukraine. The public rebuke from Modi comes just a day after Putin held a key face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, during which Putin acknowledged publicly that Xi has “concerns” about the ongoing war in Ukraine.