Good morning, everyone!
Julia Azari of FiveThirtyEight speculates on whether President Joe Biden, unlike previous presidents, is not the face of his political party.
Now the president’s role is essentially to support the party’s cultural values and priorities. For Republican presidents like Reagan and George W. Bush, this has meant adopting the rhetoric and priorities of the evangelical conservative movement, an important faction of the GOP.1 For Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton and Obama, it was about identity. Both were younger — Clinton represented a generational shift in leadership — and Obama made history as the first Black president.
These connections spoke to the parties’ priorities, but they were also at least somewhat symbolic. Reagan, for example, was the preferred candidate of the religious right, but he advanced few legislative accomplishments that reflected its agenda and also appointed a moderate justice to the U.S. Supreme Court who supported abortion rights. Bush, in the meantime, was an evangelical, and although he delivered for Christian conservatives by successfully banning most stem-cell research and appointing two conservative justices to the Supreme Court, he fell short in his efforts to pass a constitutional amendment that prohibited same-sex marriage. It did set off a wave of similar bills on the state level — many of which were successful — but ultimately, this marked a defeat for the religious right, as the tides dramatically turned in favor of same-sex marriage. And although Clinton showed youthful irreverence by playing the saxophone on late-night television and answering questions about his underwear on MTV, these were campaign tactics with little connection to governing priorities. Obama spoke about his family background often but didn’t talk about race bluntly, and there’s disagreement as to how much his presidency helped Black Americans. Finally, Trump’s appeal was clearly rooted in symbolism. Despite being an unlikely mouthpiece for the religious right, he was popular with white evangelicals nonetheless. His rhetoric around immigrants and other minority groups also addressed a politics of grievance and racial resentment that has become increasingly salient among Republicans.
It’s worth noting, however, how these culturally symbolic presidents were often reactions to one another. Clinton was morally flexible and tough to pin down, while Bush was resolute and religious. At the same time, though, where Bush was incurious and parochial, Obama was intellectual and cosmopolitan. In contrast with those traits, Trump presented himself as straightforward and nationalistic.
But Biden isn’t really any of these. And that’s not an accident.
I think that I disagree with Ms. Azari, I think that President Biden is and will prove to be every bit as symbolic as Reagan, Clinton, and Obama...we simply don’t know what that symbolism entails at this time.
Renée Graham of the Boston Globe writes about the outrageous tendency of America’s right-wingers to elevating and glorifying white supremacist terrorists.
Six months after her death, there’s a right-wing effort to falsely recast Babbitt as a freedom fighter instead of a woman so radicalized by Fox News and social media that extremist conspiracy theories ultimately consumed her. Republican legislators don’t want a full investigation of the deadly insurrection, but are promoting a mendacious up-is-down narrative where terrorists are tourists, sedition is patriotism, and tyranny is democracy.
When Babbitt died, far-right extremists believed they had found their own George Floyd. As Floyd’s murder last year sparked worldwide protests against police violence and systemic racism, white supremacists saw an opportunity to exploit Babbitt’s name and image as a rallying cry for whatever violent reckoning they were trying to provoke. Such beliefs aren’t confined to the Web’s worst places; they also fester among GOP members of Congress.
“If this country can demand justice for someone like George Floyd, then we can certainly demand justice for Ashli Babbitt and everyone deserves to know who killed her. . . . We need to know who it is,” said Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia on Newsmax, a right-wing outlet.
“Someone like George Floyd,” Taylor Greene said, as if he’s undeserving of justice. This is no less offensive than Greene’s idiotic comparisons of COVID-19 protocols and vaccinations to Nazi Germany. Floyd was senselessly murdered by Derek Chauvin, then a Minneapolis police officer. Babbitt was shot as she attempted to climb through a shattered window leading to an area where some members of Congress and their staffs were barricaded — from people like Babbitt.
Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Matthew Guido, and Patricia Hong of STATnews write a perfectly sensible opinion (at least to me) that all health care workers should be mandated to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
One industry that has been strangely silent about mandates is health care, including hospitals, home health agencies, long-term care facilities, and others. Why aren’t all 17 million health care workers at hospitals, nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, home health care agencies, and outpatient care sites such as federally qualified health clinics, pharmacies, physician offices, physical therapy offices, and the like required to get vaccinated against Covid-19?
Since the start of June, there continue to be roughly 150 deaths per week among nursing home residents due to Covid-19. Nearly 80% of nursing home residents have already been vaccinated, well above the 70% or so threshold most experts cite for achieving herd immunity. The problem appears to be low vaccination rates among staff.
Nationwide, only 55% of these staffers have received the Covid-19 vaccine, and great variability exists from one nursing home to the next. In New York state, 85% of nursing home residents have been vaccinated, while in many facilities less than 40% of staff have been vaccinated, including one in Oneida County where only 16% of staff were vaccinated.
While every Covid-19 death is a tragedy, those in nursing homes are particularly so because most of them are avoidable. Many have been traced to unvaccinated workers who then infect other workers and vulnerable residents who cannot mount strong immune reactions to the vaccine.
Harris Meyer of
Kaiser Health News writes about an appellate court decision that grants hospital workers some expanded rights to speak to the media.
But a federal appellate court recently said Young’s firing violated the law and ordered that she be reinstated. The court’s decision could mean that hospitals and other employers will need to revise their policies barring workers from talking to the news media and posting on social media.
Those media policies have been a bitter source of conflict at hospitals over the past year, as physicians, nurses and other health care workers around the country have been fired or disciplined for publicly speaking or posting about what they saw as dangerously inadequate covid-19 safety precautions. These fights also reflect growing tension between health care workers, including physicians, and the increasingly large, profit-oriented companies that employ them.
On May 26, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a National Labor Relations Board decision issued last year that the hospital, now known as Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital, violated federal labor law by firing Young for engaging in protected “concerted activity.” The NLRB defines it as guaranteeing the right to act with co-workers to address work-related issues, such as circulating petitions for better hours or speaking up about safety issues. It also affirmed the board’s finding that the hospital’s media policy barring contact between employees and the media was illegal.
“It’s great news because I know all hospitals prefer we don’t speak with the media,” said Cokie Giles, president of the Maine State Nurses Association, a union. “We are careful about what we say and how we say it because we don’t want to bring the hammer down on us.”
Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review maintains that while it is important to get all of the madness of the Trump Administration on the record, such records are not particularly newsworthy at this time.
The Trump administration—and its denouement, in particular—was a crucial and unique moment in US history; it’s vital that writers document it in as much detail as possible, and these books (which, to be clear, I haven’t yet read, beyond the excerpts) will clearly bolster the ongoing construction of that historical record. Treating such books themselves as urgently newsworthy items in the present, however, is a different proposition that lacks the same inherent value. A big story is a big story, irrespective of whether it was reported in a book or on Twitter. But it’s unclear to me that the scoops that have thus far flowed from the new Trump tomes reach that threshold; those that I have seen seem either to be new but relatively unimportant (Trump throwing a newspaper at Pence hardly matches his supporters’ calls for Pence to be hanged), or relatively important but not really new, or at least not surprising. (To my knowledge, Trump has not previously been quoted as saying that a leaker should be “executed,” but he strongly implied it during his first impeachment.) It’s obvious that Trump is deranged, and those who don’t think so aren’t likely to be convinced otherwise by Michael Wolff. And, unlike with previous Trump-book news cycles, he is not the president of the United States, in the present tense.
I am simply excited to see
Patricia J. Williams write for
The Nation: here, Ms. Williams writes some personal thoughts on surviving the COVID-19 pandemic.
I make my living as a teacher. In a bricks-and-mortar classroom, I rely on the presence of students to read the room, on subtle expressions—a head tilted in questioning, a slouch of boredom, an excited buzzing among ones who’ve made an important connection… On Zoom, their tiny heads were lined up like figures on an Advent calendar. When they wished to speak, their little yellow hands, like cartoon Mickey Mouse mittens, went up and down. Their voices were muted and unmuted, on and off, like a sound faucet. When I divided students into problem-solving subgroups, there was no collegial hum. Using the chat feature, everyone just dropped out of sight, out of sound and existence, a timer at the bottom of the screen blipping down the seconds till they would reappear, bursting to the surface like divers from the deep. (I have a friend who, while his students disappeared into their 15-minute chat-worlds, would hop on his treadmill for a refreshing workout.)
I felt diminished by the disconnection. In order to perform myself, I had to stand within an exoskeleton of myself, a prosthetic, a platform, to translate myself, to project the three-dimensionality one takes for granted intra personas. I felt as though I were manipulating a marionette of myself, trying to get my limbs to work just right, to avoid getting tangled or lost in the strings and buttons, the lighting, the filters. Worst of all, the architecture of Zoom requires that in every encounter I had to watch my own face, sallow and flattened, in a constancy of self-regard. It was the material enactment of double consciousness: watching myself as I watched others watching me.
Yes, it was better than nothing, and we all made do. But a year of such mediation was disembodying in all those literal ways.
Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones talks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, about why she did not decide to teach at Duke University (!😂), the whiteness of new journalism startups, her “weight of obligation” to her profession and, more generally, how the UNC tenure “process” enabled her to find her power and to use it.
Jen Kirby of Vox writes about the range of policy decisions that the Biden Administration will, in all likelihood, have to make about Cuba.
Much of this comes down to timing. Biden promised during the 2020 campaign to undo some of Trump’s measures, which he said “have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” But even as some Democrats pushed Biden to reengage on Cuba, the administration hadn’t taken any steps to ease sanctions, and Cuba remained on the US list of state-terror sponsors as recently as May. Still, even then, officials told Reuters in May Biden was committed to rolling back Trump policies on Cuba, but didn’t offer a timeline.
But as is often the case, foreign policy crises rarely adhere to a president’s foreign policy to-do list. Now Biden has to deal with Cuba whether he likes it or not — in a much more politically fraught environment.
And of course, this isn’t just about foreign policy, but domestic policy, too. Since the protests Sunday, solidarity protests in US cities from Miami to Dallas to New Jersey have erupted. The Cuban-American community is not at all a monolith, and not everyone supports the US embargo, but there is support for Trump’s more hardline policies, which Trump really sold to Cuban Americans. In the 2020 presidential election, Trump won the Cuban-American vote in Miami. As Vox’s Nicole Narea wrote, in Florida, the Trump campaign cast Biden “as a socialist and capitaliz[ed] on the fears of Latinos from failed socialist regimes.”
Republicans may seize on that talking point again if Biden tries to pursue an opening at this particular political moment. “If Biden had come in and reversed Trump’s sanctions, he’d have taken a bit of a political hit from the right,” William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert at American University, said. “But nothing like what he would take now — and now the situation has gotten way worse.”
The Washington Post seems to have overkilled the number of news analyses and stories on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s final trip to Washington: Charles Lane best captures the entirety of Merkel’s legacy, including a few things some people easily forget.
Merkel, who has held office since 2005 but plans to retire after Germany’s Sept. 26 national elections, is coming to Washington on Thursday for a valedictory meeting with President Biden — and maybe a fond farewell to many American liberals who considered her, especially during Donald Trump’s ugly presidency, a “defender of democracy and human dignity who has stood by her beliefs,” as the president of Harvard’s alumni association put it in 2019.
Her record on marriage, though, typifies a political career more complicated than American fans may appreciate. In terms of German political thought, her lodestar has been Max Weber’s damage-limiting “ethic of responsibility,” not Immanuel Kant’s moralistic “categorical imperative.”
Steering a zigzag course through various crises, she has brought her country to a new position that is strong and consonant with what German voters want — but a bit more distant from the United States.
Merkel first ran for chancellor in 2005 on deregulation and tax cuts; U.S. conservatives saw her as a new Margaret Thatcher: “The ideal candidate,” the Weekly Standard gushed. That supply-side program faded after she accepted the chancellorship in a parliamentary coalition with the left-leaning Social Democrats.
Instead, Merkel pursued old-fashioned budget-balancing, both at home and abroad, imposing it on debt-strapped southern European nations — despite their complaints and Washington’s — in return for German aid during global financial crises.
Christoph Reuter of Spiegel Online International writes a comprehensive overview of the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan and the grave threat now posed by the Taliban.
For 20 years, the changing governments in Kabul told themselves confidently that the Americans would stay forever. For former President Hamid Karzai, in particular, that self-deception became a mantra: The U.S. would never, ever pull out of Afghanistan. They believe the U.S.’ secret interests in Afghanistan – its fabled mineral resources, geopolitical aspirations, or a host of other possible incentives – were just too great. This made it easy for them to disparage their American occupiers while also sending them every bill. Afghanistan was occupied, they would say, and Kabul wasn’t responsible for anything.
This feigned incapacity, combined with grand patriotic gestures, was nurtured in Kabul. Even when then-President Donald Trump announced his withdrawal deal with the Taliban leadership in 2020, many still reacted with disbelief. And when, after his election, President Joe Biden gave specific withdrawal dates in April, some still didn’t want to believe it. Even as Ashraf Ghani flew to Washington in late June, many in the Presidential Palace and the government ministries hoped that Biden, at the last second, would say: "OK, we’re going to stay."
But that didn’t happen. Instead, unit by unit, the U.S. military, intelligence and service providers said goodbye – and disappeared. The harsh awakening came early in the morning of July 2. Over two decades, the gigantic U.S. base at Bagram had grown into a kind of city with, at times, tens of thousands of residents, fast-food outlets, a hospital, a prison and a 3.6-kilometer (2.2-mile) runway big enough for a Boeing 747 aircraft to take off and land. Bagram was the heart of the American military machine in Afghanistan. But the place fell silent overnight. "We didn’t realize the Americans were gone until it was light," said General Mir Asadullah Kohistani, the Afghan who is now in charge of the compound. "No one told us anything.”
Finally today, J Oliver Conroy of the Guardian profiles New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz.
Shortz, who was born in Indiana in 1952 and raised on a horse farm, has made puzzles since he was eight or nine. His interest in wordplay and competition was influenced by his mother, a writer of children’s stories and articles with a knack for winning corporate writing prizes. By writing limericks, short stories and, on one occasion, the name for a new line of chewing gum, she won their family money, appliances and two cars.
At 14, Shortz sold his first puzzle. At 16, he began contributing to puzzle magazines. In college, where he did a self-designed major, he earned the world’s first degree in enigmatology, the study of puzzles. He also did a law degree, but never took the bar, because he went immediately into a career in puzzles.
In 1993, after a successful run as the editor of Games magazine, Shortz became the Times’s crossword editor. Today, the section has a staff of five; when Shortz started, it was just him. “The first couple of months were bumpy,” he says.
He quickly learned that you can’t please everyone. He got 25 to 50 letters a week, mostly from the displeased. In the documentary Wordplay, Shortz reads some hostile correspondence: “This is both idiotic and completely unfair …” “You should be hanged by your cojones …” “Frogs hop, sir, but toads do not. They waddle.”
Everyone have a good morning!