SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2016
.
IN COLLABORATION WITH
ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY
SPECIAL CONVENTION ISSUE
SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2016
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G R E A T W I N E. G R E A T F O O D. G R E A T F U N. It’s the largest gathering of wineries in the region, and the only professionally-judged wine event dedicated to wines produced in Chelan, Douglas, Grant and Okanogan counties. And this year it’s bigger than ever—more food, wine, beers, ciders, distilleries and eateries.
Saturday, August 27
6pm to 9pm
Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee
Tickets $45 each • A limited number of VIP tickets available for $75 each Presented by
Available online at wenatcheewineandfood.com Interested in having a booth at this event? E-mail us at info@wenatcheewineandfood.com
oothills
WENATCHEE ❆ LEAVENWORTH ❆ CHELAN AND ALL OF NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON
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THE FIX
Ted Cruz’s big gamble BY
C HRIS C ILLIZZA
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en. Ted Cruz risked his political career Wednesday night when he pointedly decided against endorsing Donald Trump from the stage of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. It was a stunning thing to witness. The man who finished second to Trump in the primary race, the man everyone expected to, eventually, fall in line behind Trump, the party’s nominee, steadfastly refusing to do so — with the biggest possible spotlight shining on him. Make no mistake: Cruz knew exactly what he was doing. And he almost certainly knew how much controversy it would cause. At the heart of Cruz’s gamble is, of course, the idea that Trump will lose the general election to Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. But that’s not all of it. Cruz is also banking on the idea that Trump will lose in such a way that it will cause a post-election reckoning by the Republican Party that supported him. That the GOP will wake from the fever dream of this election and ask itself, “What the heck were we thinking?” That, post-election, the thinness of Trump’s affiliation with the Republican Party and loose commitment to conservative principles will be exposed in a way it simply has not been in the campaign to date. And then — and this is very, very important to Cruz’s massive gamble — that the politicians who stood with Trump will be tainted by their association with Trump heading into 2020. That includes House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (RWis.), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) — all former Trump rivals who, eventually and in their own ways, found a way to get behind the real estate mogul. They will be on one side of the party. Cruz, he hopes, will be on the other, the one principled man left in the GOP. The man who stood
KLMNO CONVENTION 2016
CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) did not endorse GOP nominee Donald Trump in his convention speech.
up to the bully in the bully’s back yard. “This is about principles and ideals,” Cruz told the Texas delegation Thursday morning. “This is about standing for what we believe in.” Principle vs. politics. Standing firm vs. giving in. That is how Cruz has to hope people come to view what he did Wednesday night. The alternative — a selfish act by a man who has always cared more about himself than his party — is certain doom for Cruz’s political future on the national stage. When you take a big risk, there are only two options: Big reward or big, fat failure. The im-
This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 41
mediate after-action analysis suggests that failure is the more likely result for Cruz, as he has been pilloried from almost every side of the GOP for his non-endorsement. But Cruz did not make this play for the nearterm. He knew that his fate depends on what happens Nov. 8 and how the outcome of that day is interpreted by the Republican Party. Cruz is walking across a tightrope without a net, with someone — actually lots of people — shaking the wire as he walks. Even if you think, or want, him to fall, you sort of have to admire that he’s willing to step out on the wire at all. n
CONTENTS THE FIX 3 COVER STORY 4 DEMOCRATS 10 PHILADELPHIA 13 WOMEN & POLITICS15 BOOKS 18 OPINION 20 FIVE MYTHS 23
ON THE COVER Hillary Clinton is set to become the Democratic nominee for president at this week’s convention in Philadelphia. Photograph by MELINA MARA for The Washington Post
BEN KIRCHNER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
From Spouse to senator to glassceiling smasher: The evolution of Hillary Clinton BY KAREN TUMULTY
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n Feb. 22, 1999, the country’s attention was riveted on the U.S. Capitol. For only the second time in U.S. history, the Senate was set to vote on whether to remove an impeached president from office. But in the private residence on the second floor of the White House, the topic at hand was someone else’s political career. First lady Hillary Clinton had summoned longtime adviser Harold Ickes to discuss a delicate question: What would it take to become a senator herself — specifically, to win an open seat in New York, a state in which she had never lived? As the morning dragged into an unseasonably warm afternoon, Ickes gave her a crash course on the Empire State: its Democratic Party structure and rules, a list of 100 key leaders she would have to get to know, the different electoral rhythms of upstate and downstate, its minefield of multiethnic politics. Over lunch, Bill Clinton dropped by to hear how things were going, and to download what he knew of New York politics. “He literally remembered how many votes he had gotten in Herkimer County,” Ickes marvels. On the momentous day on which the 42nd president of the United States would be acquitted by the Senate, Bill Clinton later told an aide, “If anyone had seen us, they would have seen us laughing, but not about what they would think.” When Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) called Hillary Clinton later to tell her the good news, she and Ickes allowed themselves only a brief moment of celebration before getting back to the
business of her future. By that summer, the first lady was traveling New York on a “listening tour.” The following February, she formally announced her bid to replace the retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D). “Politics is the art of making possible what seems to be impossible,” she told a cheering crowd of more than 2,000. That also could be said of Clinton’s evolution into a politician in her own right, one who stands a single election away from becoming the nation’s first female president. In some ways, this historic juncture can seem as though it was inevitable, a part of the destiny that she began to write with the electrifying, subversive speech she delivered upon her graduation from Wellesley College in 1969. It landed her in Life magazine, as a voice of her generation. “We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living,” she declared. “And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue.” Civil rights leader Vernon Jordan had met her that year at a League of Women Voters conference in Fort Collins, Colo. “It was clear to me when I met her in June 1969 that she had a future,” he says. “I saw her as a young lady who was going somewhere.” Somewhere turned out to be Arkansas. Starting with her decision to follow her boyfriend Bill Clinton and his ambitions to Fayetteville, the next quarter-century of her life would be a push and pull between her desire to forge her own identity and put her continues on next page
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stamp on the causes she cared about, and the tight and traditional confines of being a political spouse. More than once, she would learn the hard way that stepping beyond those bounds carried a cost — both for herself and for her husband. And more than once, her performance in a supporting role would be crucial to his survival. She also would become a Rorschach test of how the country felt about the changing expectations of women, at home and at work. Was Hillary Clinton at the vanguard of the feminist movement, or had she betrayed it by marrying power, rather than earning it? The Clintons presented themselves to the country in 1992 as a new kind of partnership in politics. His charisma paired with her discipline; his gut with her spine. During his first presidential campaign, there was speculation about a possible Cabinet post for her. Instead, he put her in charge of a health-care overhaul, his boldest policy initiative. They quickly learned that the country did not want what they had called a “buy one, get one free” bargain. There was also a Lady Macbeth storyline to her controversy-filled White House years. She found herself at the center of a host of scandals and pseudo-scandals, from the intrigue around the Clintons’ failed Whitewater real estate deal to the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of her law firm records to her suspiciously lucrative trades in cattle futures. In 1996, because of Whitewater, Hillary Clinton earned the dubious distinction of being the only first lady in history ever compelled to testify before a federal grand jury. Not until Bill Clinton’s political career was ending had she been free to consider doing something that no first lady had ever done: put her name on a ballot for federal office. As it happened, her popularity in late 1998 and early 1999 was as high as it had ever been. The adulation, however, had not come for any achievement of her own — save the one of having endured the public humiliation of her husband’s affair with a White House intern. Top Democrats had begun urg-
RAY LUSTIG/THE WASHINGTON POST
ing her to run almost from the moment that Moynihan announced he was retiring. They would clear the field for her, leveraging her fame as their best hope of hanging on to a seat they had held for more than two decades. But it was expected to be an uphill race against the likely Republican nominee, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. “In a sense, I was a desperation choice — a well-known public figure who might be able to offset Giuliani’s national profile and his party’s deep pockets,” Clinton wrote in her memoir “Living History.” This was not a popular decision in the tight-knit East Wing circle known as Hillaryland. Clinton talked it over with her close friend and adviser Maggie Williams during a long walk in the spring of 1999. “I think it’s kooky,” Williams told her. “And anyone who cares about you will tell you the same thing.” Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s scheduler who would later manage her 2008 presidential campaign, flatly predicted that she
On Sept. 29, 1993, first lady Hillary Clinton prepares to testify before a Senate committee about the health-care plan she oversaw. The proposed overhaul became a polarizing problem for her.
would lose. That possibility also worried her longtime friend Vernon Jordan, who suggested that she consider making a bid for governor of Illinois instead. She had grown up there, and would not be considered a presumptuous carpetbagger, he argued — leaving unsaid his belief that a statehouse would be a better springboard to something bigger someday. “I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea,” Jordan recalls. But Clinton wouldn’t budge. “I’m going to run,” she told him.
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his was not the first time Hillary Clinton had considered elective office. In 1990, the Clintons were agonizing over whether Bill should run for a fifth term as governor of Arkansas, even though he was all but certain that he would be making a bid for the presidency two years later. As a governor, he would be making unpopular decisions, perhaps such as raising taxes, in the middle of a presidential campaign. But if he gave up that job and lost the White House — a
likely possibility — he might be washed up in politics. Maybe there was a way to get the best of both alternatives. The Clintons asked Dick Morris, their pollster at the time, to find out what people in Arkansas would think of Hillary running for governor. If she won and Bill lost in his White House bid, he would still have his power base in his home state. So the pollster did a survey, and “I came to the conclusion — it seems hard to believe now — that people didn’t see Hillary as a separate person, just as a part of Bill,” Morris says. Morris put it to the couple bluntly: Hillary running for governor would be viewed as “the Lurleen Wallace effect.” That stung. In 1966, George Wallace’s wife had been the first woman elected governor in the Deep South. But she was a littleeducated homebody, branded a “placeholder” for her husband, because Alabama law prevented him from running for reelection as governor while in office. The Clintons “almost jammed the poll down my throat. They
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so with any interest in a political future for herself. “No, none at all,” he says. “Quite the opposite. I got the impression that it was an imposition — that she had a nice legal career, and now she had to bail him out.” Part of the strategy was to retool her own image. In Arkansas, “I was an oddity because of my dress, my Northern ways and the use of my maiden name,” she wrote. After Bill Clinton’s reelection defeat, “for the first time, I came to realize how my personal choices could impact my husband’s political future,” she recalled. He made the official announcement that he was running for his old job on their daughter Chelsea’s second birthday, Feb. 27, 1982. And on that day, Hillary Rodham began referring to herself as Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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were screaming at me, going crazy. Bill especially. He was redfaced,” Morris recalls. Bill Clinton demanded that Morris take a new survey — this time, reminding people of Hillary’s accomplishments as a lawyer, her commitment to children’s causes and the work she had done leading a state education reform initiative in the early 1980s. The results came back the same. “I’ve always believed that was the moment when she realized that she had to have her own achievements,” Morris says. That Hillary Clinton would have to struggle to define her identity is something that would not have been predicted for the earnest high achiever from the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. But things changed when Hillary Rodham fell in love with a husky, bushy-haired young man she met in the student lounge at Yale Law School in the autumn of 1970. “He was tall and handsome somewhere beneath that reddish brown beard and curly mane of hair. He also had a vitality that seemed to shoot out of his pores,”
she later wrote. Her decision, four years later, to move to Arkansas had astounded her friends. “Are you out of your mind?” one of them, Sara Ehrman, asked her. “Why on Earth would you throw away your future?” Still, Ehrman agreed to drive her down to Fayetteville from Washington, where Rodham had been working on the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry of President Richard M. Nixon. “Every few miles, she asked me if I knew what I was doing, and I gave her the same answer every time: ‘No, but I’m going anyway,’ ” Clinton wrote. Bill Clinton was already teaching at the University of Arkansas Law School and she had an offer to do the same. “I just cried when I left her there,” Ehrman recalled in an interview 34 years after she dropped off her friend at the couple’s rented split-level. “I thought: She’s going to the end of the world. I told her, ‘You can’t even get Brie!’ ” Hillary probably thought the move was only temporary; Bill,
On Feb. 6, 2000, Hillary Clinton announces her candidacy for the Senate seat from New York, which she would win. On stage with her are, from left, retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan; her husband, President Bill Clinton; her daughter, Chelsea; and her mother, Dorothy Rodham. She won reelection in 2006.
28, was already running for Congress from Arkansas’s 3rd District. He lost. In 1976, a year after their wedding, he was elected the state’s attorney general and became governor two years after that. She began building a career of her own, making partner at Little Rock’s venerable Rose Law Firm in 1979, at age 32. She was also the young family’s primary breadwinner, given that the governor’s salary was only $35,000 a year. In the election of 1980, Bill Clinton suddenly went from being the youngest governor in the United States to the youngest former governor. After that reelection loss, he “seemed sometimes to be overtaken by self-pity,” his biographer David Maraniss wrote. Hillary Clinton sprang into action. One of her first acts in plotting the comeback was to recruit Morris, an abrasive, bareknuckled New York political consultant whom many in the Clintons’ orbit viewed with suspicion, in part because he worked for clients of both parties. Morris does not think she did
et Hillary Clinton did not fit anyone’s stereotype of a political spouse — as quickly became apparent when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992. “If I get elected president, it will be an unprecedented partnership, far more than Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor,” he told Vanity Fair. “They were two great people, but on different tracks. If I get elected, we’ll do things together like we always have.” Former president Nixon, whose wife had been the embodiment of mid-century meekness, offered a different perspective in February of that year: “If the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent, it makes the husband look like a wimp.” Hillary Clinton was a conundrum for her husband’s handlers. “They didn’t get her. The people who were organizing the campaign were a bunch of Washington types, and they didn’t quite get her,” her adviser Susan Thomases said in an oral history of the Clinton presidency collected by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “They pigeonholed her,” Thomases added. “It was really complicated. Some of it was the campaign’s decisions, some of it was her performance and some of it was the public’s perception of her. She was so strong a personality that there were people who felt continues on next page
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that when they were together, her strong personality made him seem weaker.” Still, when allegations about Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs exploded, they needed Hillary Clinton to be by his side for a post-Super Bowl “60 Minutes” interview as the ultimate validator. Interviewer Steve Kroft flatly asked them if theirs was an arrangement, not a marriage. “I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” she retorted. The reaction to her response was brutal, as it was when she later seemed to disparage homemakers with: “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas.” What got lost in the furor was the rest of her comment. “The work that I have done as a professional, a public advocate, has been aimed . . . to assure that women can make the choices,” she said, “whether it’s full-time career, full-time motherhood or some combination.” Once she arrived in the White House, her management of her husband’s health-care overhaul was a fiasco. The plan, hatched in secret by a 500-member task force whose identities she refused to reveal, never got a vote on the floor of either house of Congress. She became the most polarizing first lady in modern history, even burned in effigy by a group of tobacco farmers in Kentucky. Her health-care stumble also was a major reason that Democrats lost control of Congress in the 1994 midterm election. Bill Clinton’s reelection prospects looked iffy. Even before the midterms, Hillary Clinton was plotting her husband’s resurrection. In October, she once again turned to the controversial Dick Morris, whose tendency to see the underside of things she considered a counterbalance to her husband’s perpetual optimism. She phoned Morris, she wrote in her memoir, and said, “If I can get Bill to call you, will you help?” The Clintons agreed that Morris’s role would be secret — even from people in their own White House, where the consultant would leave phone messages under the code name “Charlie.” George Stephanopoulos, then a top White House adviser, later
THE WASHINGTON POST
referred to Morris as “the dark buddha whose belly Clinton rubbed in desperate times.” (Morris has since become a vocal critic of the Clintons, and just co-wrote a book called “Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary.”) Morris conducted a private poll. He found that one-third of the public viewed Bill Clinton as weak, and that his marriage was a major reason. Nixon had been right. The more these voters saw of Hillary Clinton, the more diminished her husband seemed to be. That slice of the population “had no conception of a win-win marriage. They thought it was zero-sum,” Morris recalls. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton had been seared by the healthcare experience. “Sometimes, I am saddened by her understandable loss of spontaneity,” Diane Blair, her close friend from Arkansas, told Ann Blackman of Time magazine. “It was one of her most endearing qualities,” said Blair, who died
Bill and Hillary Clinton appear on the campaign trail during his run for governor of Arkansas in 1978. Her support has often been crucial for his political survival, even as she explored the boundaries of what a political spouse could do and what the public would accept.
in 2000. “But in public now, she filters out her first response, and sometimes her second one, and that contributes to the sense that she is aloof and haughty. She has learned to be careful about what she says.” So it was in both their interests for Hillary Clinton to fade from view. Over the next few years, she rarely ventured into the West Wing; she stuck to safe issues, such as adoption and Gulf War syndrome; she wrote a bestselling book about raising children. Even her wardrobe underwent an overhaul under the guidance of Oscar de la Renta — from the power teals and reds she had favored to pastel suits, with pumps to match. In the role her campaign now touts, the 1997 expansion of health-care coverage to uninsured children (CHIP), Hillary Clinton operated largely behind the scenes and on the edges, as Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (DMass.) and Orrin G. Hatch (RUtah) did the heavy lifting on
Capitol Hill. In 1998, Bill Clinton needed to be rescued yet again, after his affair with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky became public and set him on the path to impeachment. Just six days into the scandal, the first lady appeared on NBC’s “Today” show, and pointed blame at “this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.” Not until much later, friends said, did she face up to the depth of his betrayal. In that year’s midterm elections, no Democrat running wanted to be seen with him, but she was in demand everywhere. And she went. During the last week before Election Day alone, she hit nine states — twice in Florida and New York. “I think she began realizing her political strengths — chops, however you want to put it — in that 1998 election,” said her longtime adviser Ann F. Lewis.
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RICHARD A. LIPSKI/THE WASHINGTON POST
Defying expectations, the Democrats picked up seats in the House, in large part because the Republicans had overplayed their hand on the Lewinsky scandal. And then, three days after the election, Moynihan announced he was retiring. That night, the White House operator patched through a call from Charles B. Rangel (D), a longtime congressman from Harlem. “I sure hope you’ll consider running,” he told the first lady, “because I think you could win.”
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everal weeks into Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign, Ickes received a phone call from her. “Harold, I never knew how good Bill is,” he recalls her telling him. “This is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.” The race had gotten off to a rocky start, in part because of her natural reserve, particularly with New York’s famously aggressive news media. Her campaign team
included people who had been hired for their expertise in that state’s politics, with whom she had not yet built up a reservoir of familiarity or trust. Their internal focus groups and polling also showed that she had a big problem among women, who should have been her base. Some were mad at her for not leaving an unfaithful husband; other viewed her decision as proof that this had always been a marriage of calculated ambition, not a joining of two hearts. So her advisers made her do the hardest thing imaginable: meet skeptical women face to face in living rooms in Westchester County, and Long Island, and upstate. “They were free to ask whatever they wanted to ask,” says one former campaign adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity. No reporters were invited, but in those pre-social media days, it “went viral in their communities,” the strategist recalls.
Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton prepares to concede the Democratic primary race in June 2008. “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time,” she said, “thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.”
Meanwhile, Giuliani withdrew from the race in the wake of revelations of his own marital infidelity and a diagnosis of prostate cancer. In his place, Republicans nominated Rick Lazio, a boyish four-term congressman from Long Island. Hillary Clinton won by 12 percentage points. She was reelected six years later by a staggering 36 points, carrying all but four of the state’s 62 counties. By then, she already was laying plans for a 2008 presidential run, where she was heavily favored to win the Democratic nomination. In a memo written shortly before the campaign began, Mark Penn, her chief strategist, identified former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher as her political role model. “We are more Thatcher than anyone else — top of the university, a high achiever throughout life, a lawyer who could absorb and analyze problems,” Penn advised in December 2006. “She represents the most successful elected woman leader in this cen-
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tury — and the adjectives that were used about her (Iron Lady) were not of good humor or warmth, they were of smart, tough leadership.” Clinton’s campaign, however, was a disaster from the beginning. She was a cautious frontrunner, exactly wrong for an electorate that was looking for someone fresh and exciting. She had voted in favor of the 2003 Iraq invasion, putting her on the opposite side of the Democratic base on the question that mattered most. Her campaign never mastered the rules of the various primary states, particularly underestimating those that held caucuses. And her fundraising operation was a relic of the 1990s. On the other hand, Barack Obama, a freshman senator from Illinois, was perfectly suited for the moment, and had built a nimble, modern campaign machine. Their primary battle stretched into June. When she withdrew, she supported Obama, but not without calling attention to what she had achieved and the number of votes she had received. “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it,” she said to a cheering crowd at the National Building Museum. “And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.” It has been. Hillary 2.0 is a far different campaign operation. She still struggles with campaigning. “This is not easy for me,” she said during a debate in March. “I am not a natural politician, in case you haven’t noticed, like my husband or President Obama. So I have a view that I just have to do the best I can.” But there’s one problem she has put behind her: Having served as a senator and then as Obama’s secretary of state, she has carved out an identity of her own — and Bill Clinton is the one in the supporting role. Now, the question is whether the plans that she and Ickes began laying more than 17 years ago in the White House will take her back there as the nation’s 45th president — and the first woman to sit in the Oval Office.n
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POLITICS
the Democratic Party has changed, AND the Clintons have endured BY DAVID MARANISS
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MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton attend a rally in Portsmouth, N.H., on July 12. The odd pairing reflect the party’s contradictions.
s the Democratic National Convention unfolds in Philly this week, the scene will be dominated once again by three familiar faces. Bill, Barack and Hillary are not exactly the Three Amigos, no love lost between them at various moments, but time and circumstance have entwined their stories and legacies tighter than ever. One valedictory address from Obama, one acceptance speech from Hillary Clinton, and who-knowswhat from the former president and potential first guy, who, for better or worse, often commands a political performance art category all to himself — even when instructed to stay mostly out of sight. Add Bernie Sanders to the mix and you have an odd quartet that evokes many of the hopes and frustrations, promises and contradictions of the oldest political party in the United States. A woman, an African American, a Jewish guy and a Southern white male for a party that is becoming ever more diverse. One former president with a preternatural need for people and another soon-to-be former president who might rather be by himself. One idealistic if prickly senator who disdains compromise and speaks of revolution, and another utterly pragmatic former senator who longs to cut cloakroom deals with old colleagues. Proponents of civil liberties and First Amendment rights who for different reasons share a disregard for the news media. Not exactly the youngest foursome, with Obama, the babe among them, about to turn double nickels, but political survivalists all, in various ways, overcoming
race, geography, ethnicity, impeachment, birtherism, congressional hearings, and Republican attempts to delegitimize them year after year, along with their own human failings. And despite differences in temperament, character and ideology, they seem to be cohering at least for the moment in a fashion that their Trumped GOP counterparts have been unable to realize. It has been nearly a quartercentury since Gov. Clinton strolled down Seventh Avenue from Macy’s to Madison Square Garden to accept the Democratic nomination for president. He was not yet 46, on his way to becoming the third youngest president in American history, his vitality earning him nicknames such as Elvis and the Big Dog. Now approaching 70, he appears as a shadow of his former self, his body zippered by open heart surgery, vegan thin and at times seeming so frail he could break, a once incomprehensible notion. Yet this convention stands in some sense as a testament to Clintonian longevity. What he started during those summer days in New York continues decades later. The Democratic Party has occupied the White House two-thirds of the time since then, with he and Obama winning a total of four presidential elections and Hillary Clinton now in line to try to lengthen the run. To comprehend the singularity of this long run from Clinton I to a possible Clinton II, consider these equivalents: It is the same distance as between FDR’s last wartime nomination in 1944 and the turbulence of the Democratic convention during the antiwar protests of 1968 — events that both
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took place in Chicago yet seem worlds apart. Or to translate the Hillary continuum into first lady terms, imagine Rosalynn Carter seeking to return to the White House in the year 2000 or Michelle Obama running for president in distant 2032. And there is yet another way to appreciate the enduring roles of the Clintons on the Democratic national stage. Contrast them with Sanders, the small-d democratic socialist who became a tactically tentative capital-D Democrat for the first time last November, if only as a means to an end, and will be attending his first party convention — Mr. Sanders Goes to Philadelphia — at the tender age of 74. The Clintons as a Tolstoyan
saga sprawling over 25 years; Sanders as a short story of less than a year’s vintage. And Obama in between, soon enough to literally tell his own story, penning a presidential memoir when he is out of office that might bring him the dreamiest advance in American publishing history. The more things stay the same, the more they change, or something like that. The Clintons are still here, but times have changed, national political dynamics have changed, and what Democrats say they believe in has also changed markedly since Bill Clinton’s first run, in 1992. Social issues were to be avoided then. “If you said guns, gays and abortion in a roomful of Democrats, most of them would start looking for silver chalices to
President Obama campaigns for Hillary Clinton at a rally in Charlotte on July 5. Many in the party will again look to him during the convention for answers to the questions roiling the nation.
ward off evil spirits. It was frightening. It portended defeat,” recalled David Axelrod, the Chicagobased Democratic operative who, before serving as Obama’s political adviser, worked on the edges of that 1992 Clinton effort and turned down an offer to become the campaign’s communications director. Then it was the centrist philosophy of the Democratic Leadership Conference on the rise, with Gov. Clinton in the lead. His mantra was of a third way, rejecting the trickle-down economics of the Reagan era while self-consciously separating from (if not outright divorcing) the old alliances and agendas that shaped the Democratic party from the New Deal through the Great Society and its
aftermath. It was going head-tohead with the GOP in search of big campaign money — whatever it took to win. It was sending signals to the white middle class by embracing welfare reform, forcing public school teachers to pass competence tests, rebuking the language of a black rapper, opposing the idea of gay marriage and leaving the campaign trail and returning to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally impaired death-row inmate. Most of those would be disqualifiers for the Democratic nominee today, with a party that opposes capital punishment, urges reform of a corrupt campaign finance system (that their candidates nonetheless consistently have taken continues on next page
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advantage of ), denounces police mishandling of African Americans, and ardently supports abortion rights, gun control, and full civil and legal rights for the LGBT community. Politics, like all history, has to be considered in the context of the times. When Clinton launched his first campaign, his party had been out of the White House for 20 of the previous 24 years and had just lost three presidential elections in a row. This presented a classic case of what political scholar Norman Ornstein calls the Rule of Three. Anyone can lose one election, the rationalization goes. If you lose two, blame it on the candidate. But if you lose three, you are jolted back to reality. Time to reassess the party’s core message. Clinton’s reassessment in 1991 was that the only way they could win was by reclaiming some of the middle ground and centering his rhetoric on what he called the “forgotten” middle class. That message, along with the fact that he came from Arkansas and had an ability to speak to Southern white males — one of his earliest nicknames, after all, was Bubba — helped Clinton attract enough white votes in 1992 to win in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri and West Virginia. Many of those states have been lost to the Democrats ever since he left office. By the time Obama came along 16 years later, the national voting demographics had changed in a way that made it possible for him to again rearrange the party’s winning combination with what Axelrod and other advisers call the Obama Coalition, drawing on women, highly educated populations in cities and inner suburbs, and African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities. On a campaign level, this was enough to push Obama over the 50 percent mark in both elections, and on a policy level it allowed many Democrats to feel secure moving leftward on social and economic issues, taking them to where they are today. For several years running, a trope among the political elite has been that the Democrats have a few superstars but not much of a bench. One of the missions in Philadelphia will be to prove otherwise. And there inevitably will be a certain end-of-an-era flavor
J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Clintons are still here, but times have changed. to a convention that features the Clintons and Sanders and Obama. Sanders is so old he does not even qualify as a baby boomer. Obama barely does, on the other end, and it is possible if not probable that Hillary Clinton will be the last boomer to represent the party as its nominee. Bill Clinton, in his final years in the White House, started to think of himself as a transitional presi-
President Clinton, first lady Hillary Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea, celebrate at the Democratic convention in 1996.
dent, reflecting his final campaign theme as a bridge to the 21st century. Hillary Clinton, all these years later, seems like yet another bridge. But some things seem less prone to change in the near term. Even as Sanders and his ardent legions have pushed Clinton from the center on many issues, including trade and economic inequality, she seems likely to govern from
the center-left like her husband and Obama if she reaches the White House. She is by nature deliberate and cautious, and her pragmatic streak has always been at least as strong as her husband’s. That was true in Arkansas, when she recruited Dick Morris, a practitioner of the art of raw political manipulation, to mastermind her husband’s comeback by triangulating and co-opting the opposition on its own issues after Bill lost his reelection bid in 1980. It was true even as far back as her modestly rebellious days at Yale Law School, when she chastised peers on an alternative law journal to “get down to earth” and stop with what she called their “mental masturbation” after they wrote a paper proposing that like-minded new-left young people should migrate to a single state and effect a peaceful takeover. That state, by the way, was Sanders’s lair — Vermont. It was only a dozen years ago that Obama propelled himself into the national consciousness with his 2004 keynote address in Boston. By his own standards, that was not only the first but the best speech he has delivered at a convention, as remote as the theme of a nation transcending its differences might seem today. In Charlotte four years ago, it was left to Bill Clinton to essentially save the day by making the case against the Republicans with a clarity that President Obama could not produce. The peculiarities of being a potential first man might preclude Clinton from doing that again. As competitive as he is, he cannot outshine his own wife at this point in their long and winding quest, can he? Sanders will do his forceful gesticulating thing, conducting his verbal attack on the status quo and the forces of retrogression. Hillary Clinton will try to reinvent herself rhetorically as much as possible, pointing toward the future rather than the past. But it might very well be Obama — with his work almost done, with many party faithful lapsing into a wistful sentimentalism, already missing him, with the nation embroiled once again in questions of what it means to be an American and how to deal with complicated issues of race — who will find the words to connect it all, the past and the present and the future of the Democratic Party. n
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POLITICS ESSAY
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
tHIS IS PHILLY, HON, SO RELAX! BY KAREN HELLER in Philadelphia
Jacob Douglas, 3, and sister Nyla, 6, play in pools on Tasker Street in South Philadelphia.
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his city is more complicated, more beautiful and verdant, more interesting, more more than outsiders believe it is. Philadelphia — where the Democratic National Convention is convening — is a secret of a big city, one that often acts like a small one. It’s perpetually underrated. It is Washington, D.C.’s opposite: friendly, passionate, muscular, a bit rough, huge of heart and frequently thin on ambition. If you melded my home town of Washington, with its drive and smarts, with my adopted town of Philadelphia, with all its character and texture and zeal, you would have the nation’s best city. But it would never happen. Philadelphia is a city of stoops and row homes and civic squares. Rittenhouse Square is our sump-
tuous shared living room and Washington Square our front garden. We’re all about the neighborhoods, fiercely championed, some of them very nice, indeed, and others so busted by poverty they will break your heart. You will be called hon, sometimes endearingly. Your name will be minced to a diminutive, even by the mayor and former governor. You will see grown men at work dressed like their children, sporting the Full Philly — shorts (even in winter), sneaks, possibly shower shoes with socks, swag showing allegiance to a team, possibly two, simultaneously (though not the dismal, expletive-inducing Sixers). This is a wonderful place to walk and not to drive, with many of the historic streets designed for horses rather than cars. In parts of
the city, parking is a birthright and prerogative, including smack dab in the middle of South Broad, a major artery. We tend to move slower — what’s the hurry? — and without the need to yammer constantly on our phones to show the world how important we are. Things don’t happen fast here, especially with a City Council whose members tend to think small, taking care of their own — as in getting reelected — before taking care of the city. There is no “downtown.” It is Center City, always. (Why? No idea.) Lots of people live there, more than 183,000, not all of them rich. In Philadelphia, jawn is a thing. Specifically, it means a thing — a place, an object, any jawn you want it to be. We don’t do smug. continues on next page
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POLITICS ESSAY from previous page
That’s a New York jawn. Don’t put down our sports teams. That’s our job. Despite the absence of automated fare cards (that ambition issue), our regional rail system works. Or rather it worked until early this month, when significant structural defects caused the system to go full Metro just in time for the Democratic convention. However, the squalid, smelly subway system, the Broad Street Line, which serves the Wells Fargo Center, home of the convention (and the aforementioned Sixers), operates just fine. “Philadelphia suffers because it’s smack dab in the middle of New York and Washington,” says former governor Ed Rendell, chairman of the Democratic National Convention host committee. “Generally, we have a little bit of an inferiority complex.” Outsiders tend to reduce the city to a cliche, invariably “Rocky” — seven sweaty variations on a single theme that makes Philadelphia appear relentlessly dark, dated and monosyllabic. “I’m over ‘Rocky,’ ” says Mayor Jim Kenney, who took office in January but not before dressing up as Buddy the Elf for a Christmas event. “I love it, but we’re so much more than that. It’s got a younger feel. The rising immigration levels have given it a different tone.” Like becoming the first major city to tax soda and other sugary beverages to fight obesity, diabetes and fund preschool, community schools and health centers. People think the city is all about the “Yo” — plenty of us never say it — and the working man, but meds and eds dominate. The University of Pennsylvania is the city’s largest employer. Its hospital and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia are on a building tear. Cranes dominate along the banks of the Schuylkill River. This is the city that had a contentious protracted legal battle over moving an art museum, the storied Barnes Foundation, from the Main Line to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. In some quarters, you can still launch a fight just by mentioning the move near the Philadelphia Museum of Art that Albert Barnes loathed as fervently as he adored Renoir, acquiring a record 181 of the artist’s paintings. The Barnes is one of Philadelphia’s most elegant new
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
buildings, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, whom President Obama recently tapped to create his presidential library in Chicago. After years of fretting about the “brain drain” — legions of college students leaving after graduation — the city has attracted a vital new core of young adults. In recent years, it has become — there is really no other word for it — hip, not through any government initiative and certainly not reduced taxes (ha!), but because Philadelphia is absurdly affordable, sandwiched between cities like Washington and New York that are so woefully not. Says Kenney, “You can rent a three-bedroom house with a basement for what a bathroom rents for in New York.” In Philadelphia, this constitutes bragging. Bike lanes, pop-up beer gardens and — I’m sorry to report this — man buns flourish here. This is a tremendous beer city. Because of the state’s antediluvian liquor laws, established four days before Prohibition’s repeal in 1933, it is a less-bibulous wine city. Then-Gov. Gifford Pinchot founded the control board to “discourage the purchase of alcoholic beverages by making it as inconvenient and expensive as possible,” a promise it has made good on to this day. The birthplace of cheesesteaks has become acclaimed for vegan cuisine. Philadelphia is a great food city, sophisticated and street. As Rendell notes, “We have great junk food. We have fun junk food.” True Philadelphia story: John
People play with their dogs at Drexel Park. Philadelphia is a city made for walking, not driving, but pace your stride: Philadelphians tend to move slower. Another tip: Don’t ask for Cheez Whiz if you’re ordering a cheesesteak at John’s Roast Pork.
Bucci Jr. owns the venerable John’s Roast Pork, deep in South Philly and heartburn close to the convention site. It’s a wooden shack, opened in 1930, that was later upgraded to brick. Fancy. Yes, they serve acclaimed cheesesteaks (no Cheez Whiz — Bucci understands it is not cheese), but only a fool would pass on the superior ambrosia of the best Philadelphia sandwich: roast pork with sharp (provolone) and greens (spinach). Ten years ago, Bucci got the call that he had won a coveted James Beard Award. “I’m sorry,” he says he informed the official, “but I don’t know what that is.” The city has racial parity among African Americans and whites — the Hispanic population is 14 percent, Asians constitute 7 percent — but poverty is the problem that Philadelphia owns: a quarter of its residents mired below the poverty line, the largest percentage of any major U.S. city, many of them in neighborhoods that resemble bombed war zones. The drug bazaar at Kensington and Allegheny under the Market-Frankford Elevated features some of the strongest heroin to be found anywhere. “Almost all of our problems are related to poverty, our educational system is really challenged and our prison population is way too high,” says Sister Mary Scullion, one of the city’s most beloved residents and co-founder of Project HOME, which serves the homeless. “But we’re not a silo city. There are plenty of places where people can work together, play
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together with all these public spaces that people share.” In Philadelphia, Democrats outnumber Republicans 7 to 1. To be Republican here is to feel like a political eunuch, an escapee from the GOP-controlled legislature in Harrisburg, which has no love for the state’s largest city or funding for the distressed public school system. Kenney, summing up the relationship, says: “We provide the lion’s share of the money, and we’re treated as if we’re a burden.” Even though the legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, Pennsylvania has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992. This is no Cleveland. Philadelphia is not getting wiggy about the convention the way it did about the papal visit in September, which was preceded by a full year of Lexapro-popping coverage that life would end as we know it, the city would shut down entirely and nothing else would get done. Which is sort of what happened. And then we got over it. Quickly — in a way that we’re still not over the 2004 Super Bowl. Please don’t bring this up, either. This is not Philadelphia’s first time to the political prom. Republicans convened in 2000 at the same soulless arena. That was several bank names ago, when it was known as the First Union Center — or, more fittingly, by its first two initials. “We fought hard in 2000 to get a convention to show the world what had happened in Philadelphia,” says Rendell, who was mayor at the time. “Since then, the city has continued to explode up and up.” Sure, they put up some banners, but we always do banners. Donkey sculptures graze around town. But the roads are as shredded as ever. The parkway, usually the city’s showcase, resembles a Parris Island obstacle course — a pity because it’s the gateway to one of our crown jewels: Boathouse Row. Plenty of folks are staying put and not high-tailing it down to the Shore. (It is always “the Shore” — never the beach, as in Jersey, specifically South Jersey.) “I think visitors are going to be surprised by the energy, the vitality and the creativity that is throughout our city,” Scullion says. “Philadelphia is a city that doesn’t give up.” n
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POLITICS
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The women who blazed a long, frustrating trail in politics BY LOIS ROMANO
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Of the 535 members of Congress, 104 are women
et us mark the moment: After 240 years, America will this week anoint the first woman to head a major party’s presidential ticket when Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic nomination. Now the cold reality: It’s been a long, slow slog. In 1917, there was one female member of Congress. One hundred years later, there are 104 (out of 535 seats), with no growth spurt in sight. “At this rate it will be another 300 years before women have parity in Congress,” says former representative Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.). “Man, are we behind.” Indeed, women make up half the workforce and more than half of college students, but remain woefully underrepresented in elective office. In recent years, the numbers have either plateaued or risen only minimally. Among the reasons: Old stereotypes die hard. Concerns persist that women are not tough enough on national security or the economy. And women are still often viewed through a lens of temperament and appearance. Supporters of Hillary Clinton were stunned when Donald Trump repeatedly assailed her for “shouting” at rallies. “I almost fell out of my chair,” said Ellen Malcolm, the founder of Emily’s List.
The nonpartisan Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which studied the role of likability in weighing female and male candidates, found that it can make or break a woman running for office. “People will say, ‘I don’t just like her,’ ” said Adrienne Kimmell, the foundation’s executive director. “But likability does not impact electability for men. They are judged by experience and competence.” The 2014 midterm elections brought an unprecedented number of women to Congress, but women still account for less than 20 percent of legislators in Washington. States hardly fare better. The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) reports that women average barely 25 percent of members of state legislatures. Schroeder was sure in 1984 that the floodgates would open when Geraldine Ferraro became the first female vice-presidential candidate: “I thought the barrier was broken — but it never happened.” Debbie Walsh, director of the CAWP at Rutgers University, believes that the old boys’ network is still very much alive and unintentionally acts as a deterrent. “It becomes self-perpetuating,” Walsh said. “More men are elected and enter politics, and they tend to recruit candidates like themselves.” Most troubling, Walsh says, is
how this affects the pipeline. Women tend to ease into politics at the state level when encouraged. “Women start from a place where they don’t think that they’re qualified to run — and then we found that they were less likely to get encouragement.” Malcolm has been on the front lines for 30 years and believes that women are inching forward. She points out that if Clinton is elected, a generation of middle school and high school students will see an America where a female president is the norm. In 1985, energized by Ferraro’s selection for a major-party ticket, Malcolm sought to create momentum. She didn’t think the Democrats had sufficiently taken advantage of the historical moment. In fact, a female Democratic senator had yet to be elected in her own right (without succeeding a dead husband). And a few years earlier, Arkansas lawyer Hillary Rodham felt compelled to assume her husband’s last name because keeping her maiden name contributed to his loss in his gubernatorial reelection race. So Malcolm gathered some friends in her basement and founded Emily’s List to help recruit, fund and give voice to female candidates who supported abortion rights. Since that mocontinues on next page
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POLITICS
Women are still often viewed through a lens of temperament and appearance. from previous page
ment, the organization has helped elect more than 130 governors and U.S. House and Senate members, as well as 700 women to state legislatures. “People didn’t even know what a female candidate looked like — never mind vote for one,” Malcolm says today. “They would get asked: ‘What does your husband think about you running? Who will do the laundry?’ We had to educate people. We had to change perceptions. If it was easy, we would have gotten here a long time ago.”
Jeannette Rankin
Nancy Pelosi
Jeannette Rankin was the first
woman to be elected to Congress, an impressive achievement in 1916 considering women in most states didn’t have the right to vote yet (although they did in her home state, Montana). In the House, Rankin immediately took up the fight to secure passage of the 19th Amendment. “How shall we answer the challenge, gentlemen?” she asked her colleagues during a floor debate. “How shall we explain . . . the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?” A committed pacifist, she failed in her effort to win a Senate seat in 1918, in part because she had voted against U.S. entry into World War I. She was elected to the House again in 1940 and promptly voted against declaring war on Japan — the only member of Congress to do so. She did not seek reelection.
Hattie Caraway
In 1984, Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, making her the first woman on a major party’s ticket. So anomalous was it to have a dualgender ticket that advisers were unsure how the candidates should interact. They were cautioned not to even touch each other on stage. Ferraro, a threeterm congresswoman from Queens, was considered a bold yet desperate choice — an attempt by Democrats to take advantage of a “gender gap” to offset Ronald Reagan’s immense popularity. “If we can do this, we can do anything,” Ferraro thundered to the convention. Though she generated ample excitement, it didn’t translate into support. She was immediately put on the defensive about her qualifications and soon found herself mired in questions about her husband’s finances. The Democrats lost in a landslide. It would be a quarter-century before another woman was asked to join a majorparty presidential ticket. Patricia
Geraldine Ferraro
Hattie Caraway was the first
woman to be elected to the Senate and serve a full term. Like most women who landed in the Senate at the time, Caraway was initially appointed to finish out her late husband’s term. She shocked Arkansas power brokers in 1932 when she decided to run for reelection — despite a crowded field of men. “The time has passed when a woman should be
Sarah Palin
placed in a position and kept there only while someone else is being groomed for the job,” she said. It would be more than 40 years before a woman was elected to the Senate without having first arrived because of her husband’s death. That distinction belongs to Nancy Kassebaum, a Republican from Kansas, who was elected in 1978.
Pat Schroeder
Carol Moseley Braun
Schroeder, a wellregarded Democratic congresswoman from Colorado, seriously considered a run for president in 1988, generating much excitement. But she ultimately opted against it, because she couldn’t raise money or assemble an organization quickly enough. On the day she announced her decision, she choked up — and was criticized by women’s groups for showing emotion. A Harvard Law School graduate, Schroeder entered the House as an antiwar candidate in 1972. Asked by a male colleague how a mother of two small children could also serve in Congress, she famously quipped, “I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both.” She was the first woman to win a seat on the House Armed Services Committee and rose to become one of its most powerful members. She retired from Congress in 1997 after 12 terms.
Nancy Pelosi was elected the
first female speaker of the House in 2007, becoming the highestranking female politician in American history to date. A wily strategist and tactician, Pelosi is credited with engineering her rise to speaker when she led the effort to take back the House after the 2004 elections, hiring outside marketers to fashion an anti-George W. Bush message and personally raising tens of millions of dollars. Pelosi grew up in a political family in Baltimore and became very active in Democratic politics while raising five children in California. She was first elected to the House at 47, after her children were grown. At 76, and currently the House minority leader, she hasn’t evidenced any hint of slowing down.
Sarah Palin became the second female vice-presidential nominee from a major party — and the first Republican — when Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) tapped her to be his running mate in 2008. It was a rough ride. Despite enormous excitement among conservatives when the first-term Alaska governor was named, voters eventually came to see her as unqualified. In addition, her eventful family drama, played out in public, became a running joke. After a damaging interview with Katie Couric, then with CBS News, Palin’s popularity plummeted, and many Republicans thought she was a drag on the ticket. Palin has maintained a strong following among conservatives and a voice on the national stage. Carol Moseley Braun in 1992 became the first African American woman elected to the Senate. A Democrat, she captured national attention in 1993 when she and Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland wore pants on the Senate floor in defiance of an arcane Senate rule prohibiting women from doing so. The rule was soon changed. Moseley Braun started her career as a prosecutor and was a legislator in the Illinois state House. Defeated in her reelection bid, she spent only one term in the Senate. After serving as ambassador to New Zealand, Moseley Braun decided to run for president in 2004. She dropped out of the race after the first primary. n
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POLITICS WORLD
The sisterhood of foreign leaders BY VANESSA WILLIAMS
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hertek Amyrbitovna Anchimaa-Toka is widely recognized as the first female leader of a nation who did not inherit the job from her husband or her father. She also was the last leader of the small Tuvan People’s Republic, from 1940 until 1944, when it became a part of the Soviet Union. At the time, its population was fewer than 100,000. If Hillary Clinton is victorious in November, the United States will finally join dozens of other countries — from tiny Mauritius to Germany to Chile — who are led by women. And Clinton’s path to the White House will reflect both Anchimaa-Toka’s trajectory and those of the female leaders who preceded her: Although Clinton will have won her post through an election, she also is married to a former U.S. president. A familial relationship “has really been one of the routes to power, especially when seeking the presidency,” said Farida Jalalzai, a professor of political science at Oklahoma State University. “With someone like Hillary Clinton, it’s hard to say she’s not qualified; she’s definitely accumulated the résumé to do this job. But why is it, yet again, that it is the wife of a former president who will possibly break the glass ceiling in the United States?” Also, what has taken the United States so long? Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor and scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said it could have to do with how the United States elects its leaders. “As of today, for example, we rank 96th in the world for women’s legislative representation. The structures of American campaigns and government” — a two-party system, for example — “as well as the lack of things like gender quotas, help to account for some of that gender difference,” she said. Countries with parliamentary systems and those that have proportional representation offer
better opportunities for women to ascend party ladders and move into top jobs without having to wage costly presidential elections. Nordic countries have among the highest proportion of women in parliament and at the ministerial level, as well as women who have been heads of government for long periods. Clinton’s election also would make her a member of a rare political sisterhood: “Less than 30 women have ever won a presidential election decided by the public’s vote,” Jalalzai notes. Here are some of the first women who were elected or appointed their nation’s leader: Golda Meir was the first and only
Golda Meir
Angela Merkel
woman to serve as prime minister of Israel, from 1969 to 1974. She was 71 when she assumed the post and had already spent 40 years in public service, including stints as foreign minister and labor minister. She was born in Ukraine and her family immigrated to the United States when she was a girl. In her early 20s, she heeded the call to move to Palestine to help establish the state of Israel. She died in 1978.
Indira Gandhi was appointed Indira Gandhi
Margaret Thatcher
Theresa May
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
Tsai Ing-wen
prime minister of India in 1966. She was elected in 1967 and reelected twice before being defeated in 1977 after a power struggle with opponents. She returned to power in 1980 and was assassinated in 1984 by her own security detail. She was the daughter of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who led India for 17 years after its independence from Britain in 1947. Before becoming prime minister, Gandhi had been president of the dominant Congress party.
Margaret Thatcher was the first
woman to lead a major Western country when she became prime minister of Britain. She rose through the ranks of the Conservative Party to become prime minister in 1979, holding the position for more than 11 years. She was dubbed the “Iron Lady” for her tough style — although the moniker was first used to describe the similarly strong style of Israel’s Meir. Economic pressures, as well as differences with other government leaders over Britain’s role in Europe, led to a drop in the Conservative Party — and Thatcher’s popularity. In 1990, she withdrew her bid to run
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again. She died in 2013. This month, Theresa May, also a Conservative, became only the second female prime minister of Britain. The home affairs secretary won the job by acclaim after other candidates dropped out of contention in the fallout from voters’ decision to leave the European Union. Angela Merkel became German
chancellor in 2005 when her party, the Christian Democratic Union, narrowly won Parliament. A chemist by training, she had held cabinet posts under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, including minister for the environment and nuclear safety. With Britain’s exit from the E.U., she is now considered the senior statesman on the continent.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elect-
ed president of Liberia in 2006, the first woman to head the government of an African nation. She was a government minister in the 1970s before being forced to flee after a coup. Johnson Sirleaf has been praised for pulling her country out of the ashes of civil war and, more recently, out of the Ebola crisis. She won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 and is serving the last year of her final term.
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
became the first woman elected president of Argentina in 2007. She succeeded her husband, Néstor Kirchner. In May, she was indicted on charges related to a currency manipulation scheme involving Argentina’s central bank. Isabel Perón became the first female president of Argentina — and, according to some sources, the first in the Western Hemisphere — when she took over the country after the death of her husband, Juan Perón. She was deposed in a coup in 1976. In February, Tsai Ing-wen was elected as the first female president of Taiwan. Tsai, a former professor and trade negotiator who holds degrees from Cornell University and the London School of Economics, won with more than 56 percent of the vote. In May, an opinion piece in a newspaper linked to China’s Communist Party derided the unmarried Tsai as “a single female politician” whose “political style and strategy often grows emotional, individualized and extreme.” n
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BOOKS
Obama through rose-colored glasses N ON-FICTION
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REVIEWED BY
R OSA B ROOKS
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THE LONG GAME How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World By Derek Chollet PublicAffairs. 262 pp. $26.99
ppalled by the trial and execution of his mentor Socrates in 399 B.C., the Greek philosopher Plato published his own remembered (or imagined) version of Socrates’ final speech to the citizens of Athens. Today, Plato’s “Apology of Socrates” stands as the most famous example of the literary form that came to be known as the apologia: a text that is not, in fact, an apology at all but rather an elaborate defense. Though it is wholly without literary pretensions, Derek Chollet’s “The Long Game” stands squarely in the tradition of Plato’s “Apology.” Chollet’s measured prose doesn’t hide his passionate conviction that President Obama has been as much a victim of demagogic politics as Socrates ever was — though in Chollet’s narrative, the villains are Beltway insiders, the news media and other assorted (though mostly unnamed) critics, rather than the Athenian authorities. Chollet, who served under Obama in several senior national security positions, is convinced that the president “has redefined the purpose and exercise of American power for a new era,” leaving “America stronger at home and abroad.” Yet his foreign policy has been “dismissed as a failure, not just by his political opponents, but also . . . by much of the Democratic foreign policy” establishment. “The Long Game” is an extended but not wholly persuasive effort to prove the critics wrong. Obama’s foreign policy, Chollet argues, reflects a far-sighted understanding of the limits and possibilities of America’s role in a complex world. Chollet distills Obama’s strategic approach into a checklist consisting of eight criteria for evaluating decisions: “balance, sustainability, restraint, precision, patience, fallibility, skepticism and [American] exceptionalism.” In Chollet’s sympathetic recounting, even many of Obama’s most seemingly glaring missteps take on the character of wise presidential efforts “to project global
ALIK KEPLICZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The foreign policy of President Obama, seen this month at a NATO summit in Poland, is criticized by many but lauded in a new book.
leadership in an era of seemingly infinite demands and finite resources.” Thus, Chollet devotes his first chapter to what many consider Obama’s worst foreign policy debacle: his 2012 declaration that the use of chemical weapons by Syria’s Assad regime would cross “a red line,” followed, when Assad’s forces used sarin nerve gas to attack a rebel-controlled area outside Damascus in August 2013, by a series of apparent volte-faces on whether, when and how the United States would respond. Ultimately, he argues, the president’s August 2013 decision to use limited, precision airstrikes to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles was the right move — but events soon took an odd twist. First, Obama developed a sudden determination to seek congressional approval before moving forward. But he accompanied his request with a statement that he planned to strike with or without it, which won him few allies on Capitol Hill. Indeed, it soon became apparent that Congress would probably vote against the planned airstrikes, putting the president in a bind: Was he truly prepared to launch unilateral U.S.
airstrikes in the face of a congressional “no” vote? Just when things looked most awkward, a deus ex machina arrived onstage in the surprising form of Russian President Vladimir Putin. To the White House’s astonishment, Putin’s government pushed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to agree to the destruction of his chemical weapons stockpiles. This led Obama to announce that U.S. airstrikes were no longer necessary, and the Syrian civil war soon reverted to the status quo ante: Assad’s chemical arsenal was destroyed, but conventional weapons continued to cause mass carnage on all sides. It is not easy to make lemonade out of this one, but Chollet does his best. Had Obama gone forward with his airstrikes, he declares, “the strikes would have only eliminated a small fraction” of Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal, Islamic State forces might have seized some of the remaining weapons, and “substantial numbers of American troops would have had to be deployed to Syria.” Instead, Syria was persuaded to give up its chemical weapons “without a bomb being dropped,” an “outcome that un-
questionably made America safer.” Readers may be less satisfied. After all, if military force could not have eliminated the threat of Syrian chemical weapons and might in fact have had catastrophic results, it’s hard to see much wisdom in Obama’s initial plan to use airstrikes. Regardless, it seems rather strange to credit Obama with a purely accidental happy ending. Chollet is an earnest and intelligent defender of the president he so clearly admires, but he doesn’t have much good material to work with. The ongoing Syrian war remains a “catastrophe,” and Afghanistan and Libya continue to unravel. Iraq is little better: While the White House “maintained a steady focus on events there,” the rapid rise of the Islamic State still “surprised” Obama’s team, as did “the rapid collapse of the Iraqi Army.” Chollet is on firmest ground when he turns to Obama’s progress on climate change, his initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region and his nuclear deal with Iran, all compelling examples of far-sighted diplomacy. Ultimately, however, “The Long Game” is unconvincing. Too often, it reads rather like a White House news release. Obama has made some mistakes, Chollet acknowledges, and his “conspicuously soaring rhetoric . . . sometimes left a gap between concept and action.” But Chollet never really grapples with the critiques of Obama’s foreign policy that come from within his own party: concerns about targeted killing, indefinite detention and the renewed drift toward U.S. military engagement in multiple Middle Eastern conflicts get virtually no mention. Chollet does his best to convince readers that Obama’s critics have gotten it all wrong — but much of the time, he seems most eager to convince himself. n Brooks is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a former Pentagon official.
SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2016
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BOOKS
KLMNO WEEKLY
A vision of U.S. on verge of collapse
The war between a first lady, mayor
F ICTION
N ON-FICTION
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REVIEWED BY
K EN K ALFUS
ontemporary fictions set in future dystopias tend to reflect liberal anxieties, such as climate change or the corporate takeover of our public institutions. Lionel Shriver’s 12th novel is something very different. “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047” approaches the imminent collapse of American society from the right side of the political spectrum. As it opens, entitlements have driven the national debt to unsustainable levels, making the dollar worthless. Expansionist Keynesian economists are proved to be a “gang of charlatans.” A desperate nation renounces its debts, foreign and domestic. To refill the Treasury, the federal government confiscates citizens’ gold, right down to their wedding rings. This would be refreshing, as dystopias go, if Shriver’s novel wasn’t so burdened with dialogue in which the characters repeatedly explain to each other the reasons for America’s calamitous fall. They’re really lecturing the reader, of course, their main themes being initiative-sapping big government and the frauds perpetuated by the Federal Reserve. The novel’s principal lecturers are members of the extended Mandible family who, as the crisis deepens, teach us the real-world consequences of easy money. One works in a homeless shelter; others include a writer, a therapist and a Georgetown economist. They’ve been waiting for their inheritances to trickle down from Great Grand Man Douglas Mandible, whose own grandfather made the family fortune manufacturing diesel engines. But at 97, Douglas is still playing tennis on the grounds of his fancy retirement home. After the 2029 crash, not only does the fortune vanish, the oncedashing, imperious Great Grand Man gets evicted. He and his dementia-impaired second wife, Luella, have to move in with his son in a rapidly de-gentrifying Brooklyn. Other Mandibles lose their homes, too. The family’s fortunes go from bad to worse to
indigent while they squabble, trapped in a country whose economy has shut down. The decline is steady and the novel can go hundreds of pages with hardly a plot turn — or a joke — but Shriver keeps the story moving by shifting its focus among the Mandibles. The Mandibles go hungry amid the ruins of an America that hasn’t been made great again, and it’s clear who the culprits are. Becoming bluntly partisan, the novel uses fantasy and name-checks to score points against Florence’s fellow liberals in her time and ours. The immigration amnesty of 2020 is followed by a constitutional amendment that allows for a foreign-born president: a pudgy, lisping Mexican, just one of the novel’s several racist characterizations. The criminally incompetent Fed chairman is named Krugman. Later, some very bad stuff goes down during the Chelsea Clinton administration. The grinding poverty at least strengthens the nation’s moral fiber: “They had now entered a hardassed era of American culture,” Shriver writes, “during which all that gutless guff about ADHD, gluten intolerance, and emotional support animals was out the window.” Even with their speechifying and the tediousness of the story, Shriver’s characters solicit your sympathy, much more than usual in genre science fiction. And also, as in good science fiction, you often have to look up from the page to remind yourself that you don’t live on the planet being described. You don’t and you won’t. True, some days the news intimates that we already live in a dystopic future, an apocalypse located in faroff 2016, but we’re still a nation that to a reasonable extent controls its destiny. Whether science fiction or not, literature set in the future suggests that we can still choose among our possible tomorrows. Some of these tomorrows will be happier than others. n Kalfus’s latest book is “Coup de Foudre: A Novella and Stories.”
I THE MANDIBLES A Family, 2029-2047 By Lionel Shriver Harper. 402 pp. $27.99
DEFENSELESS UNDER THE NIGHT The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security By Matthew Dallek Oxford. 340 pp. $29.95
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REVIEWED BY
D INA T EMPLE- R ASTON
f someone had asked me to choose figures in national security, dead or alive, to include in a small dinner party, Eleanor Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia probably wouldn’t have jumped to mind. To be sure, there are plenty of other reasons to include the two of them at the table, but before I picked up Matthew Dallek’s immensely readable “Defenseless Under the Night,” I wouldn’t have said that national security was one of them. “Defenseless” is a meticulous account of an epic battle that set Roosevelt, the first lady, against La Guardia, the mayor of New York, as the two created the country’s first Office of Civilian Defense (OCD), the precursor to what we know today as the Department of Homeland Security. Their differences were stark and revolved around the very meaning of civil defense in the run-up to World War II. Roosevelt was convinced that the best way to defend America was to ensure that a fifth column could never get a toehold. As she saw it, if citizens were housed, clothed and fed, they’d never consider embracing fascism. If Americans were willing to create a bulwark against Hitlerism, as she called it, then the government was duty bound to provide Americans with tangible evidence that confirmed why democracy was better. That meant not just equal rights for African Americans or equality for women — both of which she championed — but also the enactment of a broader social contract in which even the poor and working classes would feel that the government was caring for them. Roosevelt believed the solution lay in having Americans simply live their values. One of her most controversial proposals of 1940 was for Congress to pass New Deal-type legislation that mandated national service for all Americans. These social soldiers, Dallek writes, would acquire “new skills, doing work that benefited their communities.”
La Guardia, for his part, thought such an enterprise was too soft. From his perch inside New York’s City Hall, La Guardia saw civil defense as an extension of what cities — including like his — were already doing. By his reckoning, to fight the enemies goosestepping their way across Europe, America needed to create a government-civilian partnership that essentially militarized the lives of ordinary Americans. “He proposed training big city workers as volunteer firefighters and teaching them to handle a chemical weapons attack,” Dallek writes. “He also recommended distributing gas masks to 50 million civilians, putting a mobile water pump on every city block, and establishing five volunteer fire brigades for every city brigade.” Among other things, he wanted the head of the new office to have the authority to establish a national police force, something he thought could serve “as a fourth military branch.” La Guardia envisioned millions of civilians enlisted in a quasi-military army. Mayors and governors would need to adopt civil defense plans set out by the OCD. Eventually, it was less their competing visions for civil defense than good old-fashioned politics that led to the unraveling of the Roosevelt-La Guardia partnership. In 1942, the president relieved them both of their jobs at the OCD. While Roosevelt and La Guardia both lost their jobs, Dallek makes clear that the epic battle between them wasn’t without purpose: They ignited an important conversation about liberalism and its role in times of crisis. And while they never really found the perfect balance between civil liberties and national security, they made sure that people would discuss it for decades to come — perhaps even at dinner parties. n Temple-Raston is NPR’s counterterrorism correspondent and the author of four nonfiction books.
SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2016
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OPINIONS
It’s over for Roger Ailes at Fox News. But why now? MARGARET SULLIVAN is The Washington Post’s media columnist. Previously, she was the New York Times public editor and the chief editor of the Buffalo News, her hometown paper.
Two weeks. That’s all it took from Gretchen Carlson’s filing a sexual harassment suit against Fox News chief Roger Ailes to the demise of one of the most powerful figures in American media and politics. With Ailes’s departure on Thursday, it was an Icarus like fall from great heights. After all, it was Ailes — a former consultant to Richard Nixon and two other Republican presidents — who, from the network’s beginning in 1996, drove its skyhigh ratings and legendary profitability. (And who had an undeniable role in creating the political atmosphere in which Donald Trump has thrived enough to become the Republican nominee for president, happening, bizarrely enough, even as Ailes is forced out.) Is it possible that all it took, after decades of alleged sexual harassment of women, was for one of them to come forward and say, in the clearest possible terms, what so many had murmured in the shadows? It’s “stunning only that he survived so long,” said one former longtime network producer, Barbara Raab. Why did it take so long, if the claims against Ailes — many reported by Gabriel Sherman, author of the Ailes biography “The Loudest Voice in the Room” — are true? In his 2014 book and in recent reporting for New York magazine, Sherman has brought forth appalling charges from women, allegations that Ailes has denied. One reason is that the Fox News working environment seemed designed to make sure such stories never surfaced. When Carlson, a former Fox News host, filed her complaint, a hushed-up culture of nondisclosure agreements and arbitration clauses were exposed. (Those are far from rare in corporate America, but the Ailesled company seemed especially
aggressive in enforcing them.) But over the past two weeks, an internal investigation was launched by Fox News’s corporate parent, 21st Century Fox, and those restraints were brushed aside as a prominent law firm was empowered to find out the truth. So what has happened to change an entrenched culture, and show Ailes the door? I see three factors. First, Carlson made a gutsy move in filing suit. Those who say she had nothing to lose (the former Miss America and Stanford graduate had already lost her job as a Fox News host) are wrong. It takes courage to come forward; the suit opened her up to counterattacks, smears and blackballing. Second, reporting by Sherman and others of similar claims against Ailes backed up Carlson, making it impossible to dismiss
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, seen with his wife, Elizabeth Tilson, on July 19, has faced decades of allegations of sexual harassment.
her suit as simply retaliatory. (Ailes, through his attorney, certainly tried.) When Fox News star Megyn Kelly broke her silence this past week to say that she, too, had suffered Ailes’s come-ons, she may have delivered the final blow. There’s power in numbers. Third and, perhaps, most important, the times — and Fox executives — have changed. With the vastly increased power and presence of Rupert Murdoch’s sons, James and Lachlan, Fox seems intent on joining the modern era. That’s not about altruism but about responsible business practices — a workplace where sexual harassment claims are taken seriously is a place where expensive, reputation-killing lawsuits become far less likely. So the leadership has changed, but so has the cultural moment. We live in the postCosby era. It’s a long way from the 1990s, when Anita Hill’s credible claims against Clarence Thomas and Paula Jones’s against Bill Clinton gained plenty of traction but left the powerful men in their top-of-theworld perches. No longer. Ailes “has become Cosby,” conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck wrote on Facebook,
where he also nodded to Ailes’s accomplishments. Raab, the former NBC producer, told me that change is far from complete. The Ailes situation signals change in that “now he cannot survive.” But, until recently, and for years, “he left the landscape littered with other victims who either didn’t come forward or were ignored when they did.” Richard Tofel, president of ProPublica, the investigative news organization, and formerly the assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal, observes “a significant generational turnover — sexual harassment is seen as a big deal by many more people (men as well as women) than it once was.” Aberrant behavior that is deeply entrenched and covered up can seem normal, even acceptable. There’s little incentive to do anything except carry on and look out for your own paycheck and career. But entrenched doesn’t mean intractable. Things can change, if all the pieces come together, as they did in the past two weeks. In 2013, a behemoth media corporation began using the name 21st Century Fox. Now, the new millennium may have finally arrived there. n
SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2016
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OPINIONS
KLMNO WEEKLY
TOM TOLES
The lovely thing about America GARRISON KEILLOR is an author and radio personality.
July. Back home, the lightning bugs are out, flashing each other, then mating, and then the males die. After sex, what’s left for a firefly guy? Nothing. No long, gentle decline into old age, just wham, bam, goodbye Sam. A man thinks about this as he walks about New York on a summer weekend. Young females walk by, flashing their lights, their beautiful bare legs in shorts, their beautiful long arms, their beautiful whatever in halter tops, and the man takes it all in, walking along Orchard Street in the Lower East Side, and he keeps telling himself, “Stare at that woman and you will be struck by lightning and fall down sizzling on the sidewalk.” And in this way he avoids prison. The ordinary excitement of summer in the city. This is the neighborhood Harry Golden wrote about in “For Two Cents Plain,” his memoir of Jewish immigrant life, which I read with utter fascination long ago, a Protestant boy of the prairie. The narrow streets full of pushcart peddlers shouting in Yiddish, raggedy kids playing stickball in the streets, dads smoking on the steps, socialists hawking the Daily Worker, laundry hanging in tenement windows — and now there is high fashion in boutique windows and upscale ethnic restaurants and a lot of out-of-towners like me, checking our iPhones trying to get where we want to go. In my case, a Russian restaurant where I meet a friend for coffee. He is African American and,
like me, he grew up strict evangelical Christian and this is our common ground. He was saved when he was 12, and I was around the same age. We didn’t dance or play cards or go to movies. His parents believed in the literal meaning of the same Bible mine believed in the literal meaning of. He’s traveled a long way since and so have I. We each had teachers who changed our lives. He’s Episcopalian. Me, too. We get a kick out of tossing Scripture into the conversation. And using “fundy” words such as
“beseech” and “vouchsafe.” I don’t say that faith is a stronger bond than race, but it ought to be. We meet for coffee in a week when racial violence is on the front page and we mention this, shake our heads, and then we talk about family. Our friendship is not about race or politics, it is about affection and respect and trust. I trust him to tell me if my fly is open or if I say something stupid. I have much more in common with him than I do with the white males who support Il Duce this fall, but probably you knew that. This is a lovely true thing about America. It’s a holy mess and we’re melted together, stuck to each other, cheek to jowl, and the angry losers who want to straighten out this mess, build a wall, deport the alien, isolate ourselves from the world, are a minority. The gift of Harry Golden was to show the humanity of the Lower East Side immigrants. When his mother said, “The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work,” she was speaking for my mother. My friend is descended
It’s a holy mess and we’re melted together, stuck to each other.
from Yoruba people and I from Yorkshire peasants, but we have certain things in common, such as the fact that we are venturing into the Land of Old Men. The land with no border, from which there is no exile. You go in, you’re in for good. It’s not easy being old. You hear people talking about transcendental medication and wonder why you haven’t heard about it before. Your wife suggests the two of you go to a restaurant that offers ballet parking, and it’s disappointing when the parking attendants don’t leap out in black tights and pirouette on your hood. And your eyesight is poor and you drive into the Diary Queen and expect the girl behind the window to tell you what she dreamed about last night. And as you get old, you start to talk like an old man. You hear crotchety things come out of your mouth, such as “I cannot believe that this blowhard, this bully, with the temperament of a 13year-old, who argued that the president was born in Kenya, who is serious about barring Muslims and building a 2,000-mile wall, who is unable to talk coherently for more than three minutes . . . ” — and the other old man nods. Oh, well. So it goes. Interesting times. Have some pie with that coffee. Good to see you again. n
SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2016
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KLMNO WEEKLY
BY STANTIS FOR THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
What lessons are police teaching? TRACEY L. MEARES is a professor at Yale Law School.
In trying to find a way beyond a season of tragic violence, it may help to ask a basic question: What are police for? To many people, especially police officers, the answer may seem obvious: Police are a critical bulwark, keeping us safe and helping to reduce crime. Especially over the past few decades, with the advent of CompStat data analysis, highly localized “hot spot” policing and more sophisticated approaches to crime reduction that include police working with community economic development officials, we better understand the effect that police can and should have on crime. Crime has gone down substantially and steadily, and police can take some credit for that. But the emphasis on public safety as the raison d’être of policing has also set up the profession to be a victim of its own success. It is a problem when the state sees crime reduction as a selfjustifying warrant for aggressive police action. We should be much more skeptical than we now are about policing traffic violations, public-order violations and the like in the name of crime reduction. Police professionals define public safety primarily in terms of limiting the number of incidents of violence among citizens. Too often they glide over the fact that the public also desires security from government repression and violence. Recently, the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, on which I served, noted that
aggressive police action can have the counterproductive result of destroying the very reservoir of trust on which communities and policing agencies depend to function properly. It is shortsighted to credit the benefits that groups such as African Americans receive from plummeting crime rates without acknowledging the costs to them in terms of enforcement. Research is clear that how people are treated is central to how they view police and other legal authorities — even more than whether police are effective at reducing crime. That’s because people do not simply experience police interactions; they also learn from them. Just like a public school, the criminal-justice system offers
lessons about what it means to be a citizen. Some of these lessons are formal and explicitly convey concern for rights and protections of individual autonomy, privacy and bodily integrity against the unconstrained discretion of legal authorities. But this formal curriculum of rights is taught alongside a hidden curriculum. Again, the comparison to schools is instructive. We can find the hidden curriculum of schools in the choice of mascots, who sits next to whom in the cafeteria and whether boys and girls are encouraged equally to speak up in class. On the streets, the hidden curriculum of policing can be seen in how people are treated in interactions with law enforcement. Too often this hidden curriculum sends certain citizens signals that they are part of a dangerous and undesirable class, even when police say they are just doing their jobs. If real change in policing is to take hold, we must do more than promote a series of strategies and tactics for doing better in arrestrelated encounters. To achieve serious culture change, we will need to take the clash between the formal and hidden curriculums seriously and make an effort to eradicate the differences between them for all groups. This will
mean fundamental changes in police recruitment, training and regulation. We will not reform policing by prosecuting individual officers or even conducting civil rights investigations of every corrupt agency. Instead, we must start with a reorientation of the profession. Ask whether the Federal Aviation Administration would be satisfied by the statement that a plane crash that took a single life was the result of a “perfect storm” of circumstances. More likely, we would expect every aspect of the machine and those operating it to be examined, questioned and overhauled to ensure that the incident did not occur again. After all, safety is the cornerstone of the FAA’s mission — safety for everybody, not just pilots and other crew members. Of course, policing is not exactly like learning in school or flying an airplane. But paying attention to the hidden curriculum being taught on our streets and the regulatory approaches such as those that the FAA follows can teach a great deal to those who work in policing. A good place to start would be with the mission statement for those sworn to protect us from one another: not crime reduction above all else but, instead, protection of life — all life — equally. n
SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2016
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KLMNO WEEKLY
FIVE MYTHS
The European Union BY
R OSA B ALFOUR
AND
S UDHA D AVID- W ILP
Across Europe, populists were leading a rebellion against the establish ment for years before Brexit. Their parties come in different shapes, ideologies and languages, but one thing unites them: They hate the Eu ropean Union. The E.U. has always been a complex body run by elites, making it fertile ground for myths. MYTH NO. 1 It’s a dictatorship of technocrats and a bloated bureaucracy. The various E.U. institutions employ around 55,000 civil servants, a few thousand more than those working for the city of Paris. They carry out the tasks the E.U.’s member states have assigned to them, including negotiating international trade deals, managing the single market and coordinating matters of joint responsibility, such as dealing with immigration flows. By way of comparison, the U.S. government employs 2.6 million civilian civil servants. Given that the European Union represents nearly 200 million more people than Washington does, and that it contributes nearly a quarter of global GDP, the citizen-to-civilservant ratio of 10,000 to 1 really isn’t that bad. MYTH NO. 2 Germany calls the shots. The E.U. was meant to secure peace in Europe after the bloodshed of two world wars, with checks and balances so that no one country dominates — especially Germany. And Berlin has often been reluctant to lead precisely because of its historical baggage. Qualified majority voting in the European Council means that countries need allies to push for their national preferences. Horse-trading, consensus building and persuasion are all common tactics. Different leadership constellations emerge on different issues: The FrancoGerman axis has always been a
driver, but without the other four founding states it can do little; recent comers like the Central European countries are banding together to shape Europe’s migration policy; and other configurations (north-south, leftright) also influence decisions. CARL COURT/GETTY IMAGES
MYTH NO. 3 Brussels produces excessive and ridiculous regulation. Euroskeptics say the E.U. wants a rule banning bendy bananas and would like to rid London’s streets of the beloved double-decker bus. These are all supposedly signs that the Eurocrats interfere too much in daily life with superfluous rules. For one thing, these claims are often false: There is no ban on double-decker buses or funky banana shapes (though the highest grade of commercial banana, like the highest grade of USDA beef, cannot have certain flaws, including “abnormal curvature”). But some guidelines criticized as intrusive simply because they exist are boons for consumers; rules that make buses accessible for the disabled and set safety standards for food are written to protect the well-being of E.U. citizens. Sure, regulation can be burdensome for businesses, but it also helps create standards for consumer protection and can spur innovation. MYTH NO. 4 The E.U. wants to create an army. The dream of a European army does exist, as Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker recently said openly. Federalists
who take inspiration from U.S. history argue that Europe as a political union can exist only when Europeans are willing to die for Europe. But the realities of security and defense cooperation are sobering. E.U. member states do work together, but on strictly intergovernmental grounds where national capitals can veto any initiative. Constitutionally, some provisions do allow countries to move forward on joint defense, but they have never been used. European battle groups have been created by joining troops from volunteer countries, but they, too, have not been used. The E.U. global strategy document, the source of the supposedly hidden plans, merely recommends ways to improve this state of affairs. Creating a European army is not among them. MYTH NO. 5 The euro has brought prosperity. It’s true that the euro zone protected small countries with weak currencies from the shocks of the 2008 financial crisis, and that the common currency has boosted trade inside the E.U. But the design of the euro has not encouraged real economic convergence across the
continent. The economic and social disparities between the core and the periphery have remained at the heart of Europe’s troubles. Euro-zone rules were criticized from the very beginning. A former president of the European Commission famously said the Stability and Growth Pact governing the euro was “stupid,” and one of the architects of the currency recognized its original sins. The sovereign debt crisis partly vindicated them: When smaller economies such as Portugal and Greece faced enormous budget shortfalls and hovering creditors, the European Central Bank could have propped them up with a quick infusion of cash. But because it didn’t possess the lending power to do so, it stood by as creditor nations like Germany decided what to do, prolonging the crisis for years longer than necessary. This was not the “prosperity across Europe” that had been promised. And today, anger about the euro crisis is making it extremely difficult to change those problematic lending rules. n Balfour is a senior fellow for the German Marshall Fund’s Europe program. David-Wilp is a senior fellow and deputy director of its Berlin office.
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SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2016
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