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Edward-Isaac Dovere | The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/2020-08-08T11:33:55-04:00Copyright 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-615094
A few days before Donald Trump's inauguration, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice held a press briefing in her office to talk about the threats she saw on the horizon as Barack Obama's presidency drew to a close. "What keeps you up at night? one reporter asked toward the end of the meeting. Her answer: a pandemic that spirals out of control.

Yesterday afternoon, I asked Rice how the past five months have compared to what she'd been worried about in the early days of 2017. "This is about in the realm of my worst nightmare," she told me. That's why, Rice said, she worked to put together plans, and why she oversaw the creation of the pandemic-preparedness office that Trump famously closed. "We knew it was going to happen. We just couldn't know when."

Rice criticized the current administration's handling of the pandemic, saying there are "absolutely many more Americans dead because of Donald Trump's failed leadership." Our conversation can be heard in full on the latest episode of The Ticket.

These days, Rice isn't speaking just as a former national security adviser and a former United Nations ambassador, or an author whose memoir, Tough Love, just happens to have come out in paperback at the beginning of August. Rice is among the finalists under consideration to be Joe Biden's running mate, and an announcement is expected within the next few days. If she is picked, she'll be the first vice-presidential candidate since Henry Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt's third running mate, to have never run for office before.

She joked that no call from Biden had come in while we were talking.

[Read: Could it be Vice President Susan Rice?]

Listen to the interview here:

Subscribe to The Ticket on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or another podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript:

Edward-Isaac Dovere: You're a huge supporter of statehood for your native Washington, D.C. To some people, it is a ridiculous idea that Washington should ever be a state. To others, like Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, Washington, D.C., shouldn't be a state and Wyoming should because "Wyoming is a well-rounded, working-class state." What do you make of that?

Susan Rice: What are the demographics of Wyoming versus Washington, D.C.? I think it's an important priority, particularly when we have 700,000 disenfranchised Americans here who are, as you know, red-blooded, hardworking, decent, tax-paying as any others. And there's a large history to this, which is that the Constitution has established something called the federal enclave. But the Constitution doesn't require that that federal enclave be any larger than the federal buildings and territory within the city. So you could take the capital in the Mall and the White House and the Supreme Court and the Smithsonian and the federal entities and continue to reserve them as the federal enclave per the Constitution and allow the rest of the city, which is where the population is anyway, to have statehood. And if we had statehood, it would have been a lot harder for President Trump, for political purposes, to call out federal forces to club and beat and terrorize people in the District of Columbia who are peacefully protesting.

Dovere: You're known as someone who curses, and you write about being known as "direct" and being called a "hothead." Why do you think that's been a focus?

Rice: I am accused of using profanity. I cop guilty to that. I do occasionally use profanity. Not in my official functions. Not when the circumstances make it inappropriate. But it is the case that I have used the occasional profanity. Does anybody remember what Dick Cheney said on the Senate floor? Told [Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy] to go F himself. On the Senate floor. Does anybody talk about Dick Cheney's foul mouth? Or does that in any way define him as the vice president of the United States? I think it's sexist; that's what it is.

Dovere: The Sunday-show appearances around the Benghazi attack have become so much of your public identity. Your mother actually warned you not to do it, and thought Hillary Clinton should have instead. In the end, that became an issue getting in your way to be Obama's secretary of state, and continues to be an issue Republicans attack you over now.

Rice: She said, "Why you?" And I said, "The White House asked me to do it." And she's like, "Well, where's Hillary?" And I said that she'd been asked, but declined. And I presumed—I hadn't had this conversation with her—that she had had an extraordinarily draining week, having lost four Americans in an American overseas facility, and all the pain and trauma that that entails for the people of the State Department, for the families, for everybody. But I agreed, as a team player. And her instinct was, "I smell a rat. You shouldn't do it." And I said, "Mom, don't be ridiculous. I've done this many times before." She was absolutely right.

[Read: What happened the night of the Benghazi attack]

Dovere: What did that experience teach you about the way that politics, and at least cable news, political media work?

Rice: First of all, the core lesson is always: Listen to your mother. I think this was what she was getting at, and what I suspect in retrospect that Secretary Clinton and other senior officials understood is, when you have a tragedy, a crisis of the sort we had in Benghazi and the terrorist attack, particularly in the height of a presidential campaign, a hot electoral season—it's going to be politicized and the opposition is going to be looking to shoot the messenger as much as shoot at the message. And that's what happened.

I wasn't thinking about myself. I'm part of a team, a team that had a very hard week. We've lost our colleagues. Christopher Stevens, our ambassador in Libya, was somebody that I knew and worked with and respected and liked. It was painful for all of us and for me to think about myself, rather than think about the responsibility that the administration had to communicate to the American people, was not where my head was. And in retrospect, maybe it should have been. Maybe I should have been more self-centered in how I thought about it, because clearly it has not redounded to my benefit in right-wing circles. But if not that, I'm sure they would have found something else.

That was eight years ago, and it was sort of an early leading indicator of how ugly and dishonest our politics were going to get. Eight congressional committees investigated Benghazi ad nauseam through 2016, and not one of them found that I had done anything wrong or that I had deliberately misled the American people or anything else. The fact that really only one piece of that information later turned out to be inaccurate doesn't make me a liar for having shared it and caveated it as our best current information. That could change. But it shows you how the right wing latches on to a meme or a caricature and drives it relentlessly, and they do it to this day. This one is tired and overwrought, and there's no substance to it.

Frankly, for the Republicans to be harping on Benghazi in 2020, when under Donald Trump's watch, three Americans were killed on a U.S. military base in Pensacola, Florida, last year in a terrorist attack inspired by al-Qaeda—what appears to be the first foreign-directed terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11—because the Defense Department failed to adequately vet the Saudi military personnel who are being trained on that base. But no investigation, no outrage, not a boo out of congressional Republicans. Four American servicemen were killed in a terrorist attack in Niger in West Africa on Donald Trump's watch, and not a boo, not an investigation. Not an expression of concern. So this is all political distraction. And in a year when over 160,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 because of this president's ineptitude and incompetence and disregard for human life, putting his own political interests above the health and well-being and the economy of the United States and the ability to educate our kids … they're going to talk about Benghazi? I say fine, let them.

Dovere: You were the national security adviser when the office was set up in the National Security Council to deal with pandemic response under President Obama. That's the office that Trump famously disbanded. With your experiences and the awareness you had of the dangers of a pandemic, how does what has actually happened compare to the fears that you had?

Rice: This is about in the realm of my worst nightmare. The only thing that would be worse, potentially, is a very deadly flu virus that's as transmissible as COVID, but much more deadly. Some of the avian flus have a mortality rate of 50 percent. So think about that. Yeah. But in terms of the number of infections, the number of deaths, the economic implications, the complete disruption to our domestic and global economy, this is exactly what I worried about and wrote about in the book when it was published almost a year ago. So this is entirely foreseeable, which is why we tried to put in place plans, offices, equipment, preparatory briefings to help the incoming administration be ready for such a scenario, because we knew it was going to happen. We just couldn't know when.

Dovere: You write in the new afterword to the book, "I find it exhausting and difficult to remain hopeful in the face of such immoral and incompetent leadership." Is it strange to watch what's going on, having been on the inside?

Rice: Strange is to put it mildly. It's infuriating because it didn't need to be this bad.

Dovere: Are Americans dead because of Donald Trump?

Rice: I've said that repeatedly. There are absolutely many more Americans dead because of Donald Trump's failed leadership.

[Read: How the pandemic defeated America]

Dovere: Your son is an outspoken conservative, who's been identified as a Trump supporter. You are outspoken against Trump. How does that family dynamic work, and what does that tell you about the larger divisions in America right now?

Rice: You should not accept press characterizations of my son. You should read what I say about what his views are. And I write about them in the last chapter of the book. And he and I worked on that portion together to fairly reflect his views, and where we agree and where we disagree. He likes to characterize himself as a Reagan Republican. We have really fundamental disagreements on a lot of issues. And sometimes they get heated, as I write about in the book. But at the end of the day, it's so much more important to us to be united as a family, to recognize that we have a shared history. We have shared interests. We love each other. We want to stay together, and we fight not to let political differences or any other kind of differences divide us in any kind of irreparable way. As much as I disagree with Donald Trump and his policies, I can't write off or discount or fear or hate or dismiss those Americans who support him. If everybody did that, we would literally be irreparably divided as a nation. And I don't think we can afford to do that. I can't afford to do that in my family.

Dovere: You were a diplomat. You were a behind-the-scenes person. How has it been getting into the political fray yourself?

Rice: What I discovered the hard way was, even when I was serving in New York as our ambassador to the United Nations trying to be very much a policy maker in a policy role, and then went on to be national security adviser, I was sucked into the political fray. I didn't ask for that. But that's the nature of the way Washington has devolved. I was sucked in, and I know as long as I was a sitting U.S. official, I was responsible to the interest of the United States. I was speaking on behalf of the United States and on behalf of the president and our administration. Now that I'm a private citizen, I have the ability to speak in my own voice.

It's telling my own story in my own voice, and because of how governing has transpired under Donald Trump, I feel compelled not to be silent about the many ways in which I think he is disserving our nation. Americans are dying who didn't need to die because of failed leadership. And I refused to be silent about that, whether I'm a private citizen or not.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedAlex Wong / GettyThis Is Exactly What Susan Rice Feared2020-08-08T07:00:00-04:002020-08-08T11:33:55-04:00The Biden vice-presidential-nominee finalist discusses Trump's pandemic response, Benghazi, and her family's politics.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-614932
Will we have a coronavirus vaccine by Inauguration Day, or will it still be several months off? If we do have a vaccine, will it have been competently distributed, or will America be a haphazard patchwork of immunity? Will the spread of infection, and the deaths that follow, slow or quicken? Will the economy have stabilized, or will the country be careening into the worst hole in human memory?

Joe Biden does not know the answers to any of those questions—no one does. But the many uncertainties make it exceptionally hard for the presumptive Democratic nominee to plan what he'd do if he is elected president.

"When President Biden is sworn in, in January, who knows how many people will have died by then?" California Representative Karen Bass, a potential vice-presidential candidate, told me. "And then who knows what the economy would be? We could be in a depression."

By August of most presidential-election years, the candidates have offered policy blueprints for the four years ahead. This exercise always has a level of science fiction to it—the ideas are aspirational, based on generous assumptions about what Congress and the voters will actually support. This race is different: Donald Trump has repeatedly whiffed when asked what he'd do in his second term (even though the questions have been gently lobbed at him by friendly Fox News hosts), and the coronavirus has left Biden laying out broad guesses, not knowing how bad public health and the economy will be by the time he'd take over, if he wins.

[Read: The advantage of a Biden shadow cabinet]

What Biden faces will be familiar, on a smaller scale, to any American trying to plan for the future. Six months ago, few outside of China had ever heard of social distancing or the coronavirus. Six months from now, the situation could have changed multiple times.

The result, though, is that Biden is left hoping America elects him on a hunch about what he'd do—because it remains a mystery.

Jake Sullivan, the adviser managing coronavirus policy development for Biden, has been helping put together what the campaign calls the "Build Back Better" agenda, which includes proposals such as investing in manufacturing and small businesses and taking a more structural approach to thinking about racial equity and health care. It hasn't been easy.

"We're trying to set down road maps and guidelines that work and would be relevant under a range of different scenarios," Sullivan told me, "with enough specificity that we can show how the vice president would be different from the current incompetent response, but also with enough flexibility to accommodate a number of different realties that may present themselves with respect to what the economic and pandemic situation may be by January."

Biden and his team are more optimistic about the trajectory of the pandemic itself, believing that the infection and death rates will be more under control by January. They've seen evidence that real therapeutics are coming soon, and they are holding out hope for a vaccine.

[Read: A vaccine reality check]

That's where their hope runs out. Early in the pandemic, Biden's advisers were having private discussions that looked at a potentially fast, "V-shaped" economic recovery, I'm told. Into the summer, they were eyeing the turnarounds in some European countries, thinking that might be possible here. But with each day, they have gotten more worried about what would await Biden if he wins. "We don't know exactly what the unemployment number is going to be, or what the economic situation is going to be, but we know it's not going to be good," Sullivan told me.

Like any other major presidential nominee, Biden already has a transition team in place in the event that he wins. By law, that process needs to begin over the summer, with collaborations among agencies across the federal government, even if that means a lot of wasted effort should Biden lose. Ted Kaufman, Biden's close friend and former chief of staff, is running the campaign's transition process. This is the third transition Kaufman has been a part of, and when he served as a senator from Delaware after being appointed to the seat Biden gave up to be elected vice president, he wrote a law strengthening the transition process.

This transition is like nothing Kaufman has dealt with before, he told me.

Already, Kaufman said he has begun building a bigger team than normal to account for the different scenarios the transition will have to consider. "We have to plan what we call 'unconventional challenges' surrounding Trump, COVID-19, and the economy," he said. "Changing power for the most powerful country in the history of the world is always a challenge. Every four years, it gets exponentially harder, and that's even truer with today's unconventional challenges."

Take reopening schools—potentially the pandemic problem that will shape society and the economy the most over the next year. Trump has no plan to reopen schools, other than demanding that they open and claiming that they're not opening for "political" reasons, rather than because of the health and infrastructure worries that most parents and staff have. "My view is the schools should open. This thing's going away. It will go away like things go away," Trump said on Wednesday morning in an appearance on Fox News.

Biden, meanwhile, has issued a framework that calls to put health first and that proposes a $90 billion fund to help schools make changes. He can't do anything to implement it. And if he does win, he would be coming into office more than halfway through the school year. Biden's advisers are tossing around ideas internally, such as potentially proposing, once in office, a new school-year start date of March 1 or April 1, and then extending it into next summer, but they know that at the moment, this is all just wishful thinking. And that doesn't even account for the state-by-state negotiations with teachers' unions that any extension would entail, and that would likely require federal leadership, among all the other elements they'd need to make any of this workable.

Or imagine what would happen if promising developments are made on a coronavirus vaccine by the fall. Most expect that Trump would be pushing people to rush to get it, whereas Biden expects to urge careful safety testing first. Aside from the cognitive dissonance of Trump, who has courted anti-vaxxers, being pro-vaccine and Biden hesitating, there will almost certainly be huge problems in production and distribution of a vaccine. The Trump administration has taken no clear steps to prepare, and Biden can only issue statements about how more preparations are needed. Even if a vaccine is ready by Election Day, there's no way to know how many Americans would be vaccinated by Inauguration Day.

[Read: What Biden learned the last time the world stopped]

Meanwhile, ideas for how to spark economic growth, even those that Biden has proposed in campaign speeches, are all being trimmed. "If you want to do a big infrastructure bill, how much can you do?" Kaufman said. "I don't know what there's going to be when Trump gets through, in terms of our debt as a percent of the gross domestic product. We know it's not going to be good."

Biden's approach to the economy is to go big on spending—maybe not at the level of the $4 trillion in stimulus money spent so far, but probably not far behind. Campaign aides are assuming that he would have to pass a big spending bill next year, but cannot tell yet if that money would be more for relief or for recovery planning.

Advisers are carefully watching the current negotiations in Congress, anxious that they could create new problems if they result in a deal that expires at the end of January—assuming Congress is able to make a deal at all. There is some logic to that, given that Senate Republicans haven't approved any new funding since May, and that Congress expects to go on a long recess through the election and might not want to leave such big decisions to a lame-duck session in December. However, that means Biden could be immediately thrown into intense congressional negotiations if he's elected, likely after a transition made difficult by Trump's expected lack of cooperation and with other crises looming. Then again, polls suggest that Biden might be coming into office with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, which would redefine the negotiations to make a deal both more to his liking and easier to finalize.

Biden has been in regular contact with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Aides who have been told about these conversations say they're mostly check-ins from Biden, who is leaving the negotiations to congressional leadership. "Having been in a lot of those rooms, the vice president knows you can't run an operation like this by remote control," Sullivan told me. In speaking with other aides on the Hill, they describe a sense of relief in not having to worry about getting from Biden what Senate Republicans have been getting from Trump. In March, the Senate GOP waited on an approving tweet from him before voting on the last big relief bill. In the past week, Trump has called the new Senate Republican bill "semi-irrelevant," and had White House aides push for $1.75 billion to build a new FBI headquarters, to the annoyed surprise of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

[Peter Beinart: Biden goes big without sounding like it]

Local and state governments are also trying to sort out their long-term planning, not knowing what the situation will be, or what will be happening in the federal government.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, for example, has already extended his state's budget for three months over the summer, as he worked to get a handle on the state's outbreak and a sense of the finances in Trenton. Because Murphy is the only major Democratic leader who's kept up a good relationship with Trump during the pandemic—even getting an invitation to dinner at the president's Bedminster golf club in June—I asked Murphy what he might expect from a Biden presidency instead.

He answered carefully, trying to preserve his relationship with Trump, and to account for how hard it is to tell what Biden would do.

"It's probably more values based. You'd see consistent mask wearing by him. You'd probably see a pretty significant investment in manufacturing to replenish the strategic stockpile. I suspect a lot of the energies, which are largely private sector, being put into therapeutics and vaccines would be encouraged by his administration and by his folks," he told me. "There's no question I'm for Joe Biden for president. But if that were not to come to pass, you just hope, please, God, you'll get a continually more robust response by the current administration."
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedGettyJoe Biden Doesn't Have a Plan for That2020-08-06T09:07:15-04:002020-08-07T09:47:46-04:00The Democratic nominee, just like everyone else, doesn't know what might await him in January.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-614662
Karen Bass, the congresswoman from California, is in contention to become Joe Biden's running mate. There are good reasons for this. She is reliably liberal, she chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, and she shares a history of family loss with Biden. But she's also the only person on Biden's list who spent part of the 1970s working construction in Fidel Castro's Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, a group that has organized annual trips to Cuba for young, leftist Americans for half a century.

The Biden campaign knows about Bass's history with the Brigade, which began as a joint venture of the Castro government and Students for a Democratic Society, the leftist, antiwar organization that gave birth to the Weather Underground terrorist group. She told Biden's vetting committee weeks ago that this was probably going to come up. So far, it hasn't been a deal breaker—in fact, her potential to drive up African-American votes might help in Florida among voters who traditionally haven't been paid as much attention in the state.

[Read: Why Joe Biden Has His Eye on Karen Bass]

It's a reflection of the changing politics around Cuba that Biden would consider a running mate whose past might hurt his chances in Florida, where anti-Castro Cubans are still an important constituency. In 1992, being associated with the Venceremos Brigade was enough to prevent Johnnetta Cole, the then-president of Spelman College who was coordinating education policy for Bill Clinton's transition team, from being nominated to serve as secretary of education.

Bass recognizes that the issue still matters: When I called last week and told an aide I wanted to talk about her history in Communist Cuba, she quickly scheduled a time to talk. But Bass believes that, in the midst of a pandemic and an economic crisis, many Americans have more pressing concerns than what she did in Cuba 47 years ago. Florida State Senator Annette Taddeo, a Democrat who was born in Colombia but represents a swing district where many Latinos and Cubans live, agrees, but worries that Bass's spot on the ticket, given her history in Havana, "would be a game changer in Florida, certainly among the Hispanic community." There's no question that Democratic Party politics, the resonance of anti-Communism, and Americans' feelings about Cuba have all evolved since Bass first visited the island. The question now, as Biden makes his choice, is whether they've evolved enough to put Bass on the ticket.

"There has been a shift on how to engage with Cuba, but there hasn't been a shift in Castro's popularity," argues Fernand Amandi, a Florida-based Democratic consultant and pollster of Cuban heritage whose past clients include the Obama-Biden campaigns. Referring to comments Senator Bernie Sanders made in March that "it's unfair to simply say everything is bad" about Castro's government, Amandi added, "Fairly or unfairly, Karen Bass's history on this subject makes Bernie Sanders look like Ronald Reagan."

If Biden picks Bass, he'd be betting that Amandi, and people who agree with him, are overestimating how much voters still care about Castro—and communism.

Bass's high school in Los Angeles was the kind of place where students were always striking or boycotting something, she told me. Her Spanish teacher, like many of her teachers and other leftist radicals of the '60s and '70s, talked warmly about Cuba, where Castro's revolution was less than two decades old. This wasn't uncommon: Some Americans on the left, including some Black activists, celebrated the Cuban revolution and the toppling of the Batista government as the end of a racist system. Cuba is "a shining example of hope in our hemisphere," Stokely Carmichael, the founder of the Black Power movement, said in a 1967 speech in Havana. The best way to think of Bass's politics at the time—and now—is "as a Black activist who was deeply concerned about what the activists are raising today: systemic racism," she told me. "I was also deeply concerned on the international front about issues like apartheid in South Africa and supporting the independence movements in Africa. And a lot of times that did not align with U.S. policy."

It was in this atmosphere, and with Castro scrambling to fulfill a promise of a 10-million-ton sugarcane harvest, that Students for a Democratic Society organized the first Venceremos Brigade. The Cuban government was eager for the help—and especially for the opportunity to bring sympathetic Americans into the country. Venceremos translates to either "we shall overcome" or, perhaps more pointedly, "we shall triumph." The first group, which called itself an "anti-imperialist education project" to protest the U.S. blockade of Cuba and show solidarity with the revolution, headed to Havana in early 1970. The members of the group, mostly students, lived alongside Cubans, and initially focused on harvesting sugarcane.

[Read: How Did Fidel Castro Hold On to Cuba for So Long?]

Dick Cluster, who traveled to Cuba with the first group but has never met Bass, told me to think about the group in the context of the time, and especially the anti–Vietnam War movement. Young, leftist Americans were suspicious of what they saw as American imperialism. They believed they weren't being told the whole truth about the world. The impetus for going to Cuba was "let's go see what it really is," Cluster said. "And we're certainly interested in the idea of socialism, since capitalism might be part of the problem."

The Brigade immediately became a Cold War obsession in Washington, where opposition to Cuba was as much an issue for Democrats as Republicans. The year after the first group returned, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover included the Brigade in his annual report, writing: "Although some of the young people have rejected the communist propaganda and revolutionary philosophy directed against them in Cuba, many of the Brigade members enthusiastically have adopted the anti–United States stance promulgated in Cuba and have aligned themselves with the violence-prone Weathermen and other extremist groups." Bernardine Dohrn, who led the Weathermen, helped facilitate the first Brigade group's trip to Cuba. But when I read Hoover's quote to Bass, she said that she felt like the first part of it applied to her, but the second part didn't apply to anyone she'd met on her trips to the country.

In 1972, a House subcommittee published a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=rrklAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA7824&lpg=PA7824&dq=although+some+of+the+young+people+have+rejected+the+communist+propaganda+and+revolutionary+philosophy+directed+against+them+in+Cuba,+many+of+the+Brigade+members+enthusiastically+have+adopted+the+anti-United+States+stance+promulgated+in+Cuba&source=bl&ots=csp9s8Z5lc&sig=ACfU3U0nELi99a3P05CDX_TeWvqo3nGTnA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjzyq2Uw_DqAhW_mHIEHe0KCrQQ6AEwAHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=although%20some%20of%20the%20young%20people%20have%20rejected%20the%20communist%20propaganda%20and%20revolutionary%20philosophy%20directed%20against%20them%20in%20Cuba%2C%20many%20of%20the%20Brigade%20members%20enthusiastically%20have%20adopted%20the%20anti-United%20States%20stance%20promulgated%20in%20Cuba&f=false">report titled "The Theory and Practice of Communism in 1972 (Venceremos Brigade)." In a hearing leading up to the report, Richardson Preyer, a Democratic representative from North Carolina, said he hoped he would learn whether Brigade members were "idealistic, even though misguided, young people who wanted to go down to help with the crops with a regime which they are sympathetic for" or whether they were "interested in sharpening their revolutionary talents and perhaps exporting revolution." During the hearing, a sheriff's deputy from New Orleans told the subcommittee that he had infiltrated the group and been subject to extensive questioning and indoctrination sessions. "To be a member of the brigade, you had to be confirmed as a Marxist-Leninist," he said. The New York Times wrote up his testimony under the headline "Undercover Agent Tells of Cuba Trip With Red Youth Unit."

After Bass graduated high school, a classmate who had traveled to Cuba with the first Venceremos Brigade connected her with the program, and she decided to go. She was 19 the first time she landed in Havana, in 1973. She remembers spending her time in Cuba building houses—work she compared to that of Habitat for Humanity.

"We built houses during the day," Bass said, "and then we had what they called cultural activities and we called parties. There was great music, rum, dancing. And we toured the country." Going to Cuba was a way to meet other young activists, Bass told me. "Obviously, there were Cubans there doing construction work," she said. "But it was an opportunity for all of the various activists to get together." She wasn't the only future politician to join the Venceremos Brigade: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a longtime friend of hers, also went.

Bass went to see Castro speak in Revolution Square in Havana, joining "about a bazillion people" in the crowd, she said. Although she couldn't understand him, he was "extremely charismatic." She said she was aware then that Cuba under Castro wasn't the utopia that some of her friends believed it to be. "I know that the crowds cheered, but I have no idea what they were cheering about—and I'm not sure if they didn't cheer, that wouldn't have been a problem," she said. That was the contrast she saw between American activists and Cubans at the time. "I didn't have any illusions that the people in Cuba had the same freedoms I did. I came home and was protesting everything; I knew that the Cuban people didn't have the ability to do that." She didn't buy the Cuban government's propaganda, she insisted. I asked whether she knew any American activists who had gotten involved in espionage or violence, and she was firm in her response: "Let me say: Hell no. No, I did not know anybody like that."

Jeff Schatz, who met Bass on that first trip to Cuba and remains a friend, told me that he remembered her mediating between American volunteers who were getting on each other's nerves. "She just got in there and worked to say 'Hey, we're out here to learn stuff. We're out here to work and work together," said Schatz, who added that he fell in love with the construction work he did in Cuba and decided to make a career of it. He now runs a business that specializes in building luxury homes in Malibu.

Two years after Bass's first trip, the head of the Dade County, Florida, bomb squad testified to the Senate Internal Security Committee that interrogations of members of violent organizations in America had led his group to the Venceremos Brigade. In 1977, the FBI produced a report alleging that some members of the Venceremos Brigade received weapons training. Bass told me she has always rejected violence, and didn't associate with any militant groups.

"The Weathermen was a white group," she said. "White, tended to be relatively middle-class folks." Bass suggested that, for practical reasons rooted in her race, she steered clear of violent activities. "I always viewed that stuff as dangerous, because as a Black woman, I didn't feel like I could mess around like that. I mean, aside from the fact that I didn't believe that was going to get anywhere, understand that there was an element of the activism that was scary to me because I was African American and because I was watching all these Black people being killed. I would go to the protest, but when it got to the point of being arrested, that was when I departed. It would have been different if I had been older and in the South and in the civil-rights movement, where there were hundreds of people getting arrested that looked like me. That's not where I was."

Bass returned to Cuba without the Brigade in the years that followed, and saw Castro speak several times. She never met him, she said. She was there eight times in the 1970s, and has been back about as many times since. That's good evidence that she didn't lead her life focused on building a résumé or trying to rise in politics, she argued. She never hid her association with the Brigade—she gave a "Contemporary Cuban Society" lecture on Valentine's Day 1977 at UC Santa Barbara (tickets were $1 at the door), for which she was identified as part of the group.

The American government's interest in the Venceremos Brigade continued for years. In 1982, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing featuring a former member of Cuban intelligence who had defected to the United States. He testified that Cuban intelligence had connected with members of the Brigade while they were in the country, and that some Americans had become sources for the Cubans. Bass says she wasn't involved in anything like that, either.

But Bass was well enough known as a community activist, with a focus on protesting police brutality, that the local government tried to come after her because of her connections to the organization. In 1983, L.A. police chief Daryl Gates tried to link Bass to a gun-running operation, using police reports that said Bass had "returned from Cuba bringing back propaganda literature." She told police that she had not received any military training while in Cuba, and told me that the police had fixated on her learning to use a gun for target practice during a Brigade camping trip outside L.A. "I'm angry and I'm shocked that they would use [this allegation] to try to attempt to smear me personally and the brigade," she told the Associated Press at the time. Bass later learned that the person who taught her to use a gun during that camping trip was an undercover police officer. Looking back, she called her questioning by police "absolutely absurd," telling me, "I never, ever, ever came near a gun in Cuba, period. Never. And frankly, I think if any of that had been true, they would have brought us all in jail."

Bass's interest in Cuba kept up after she became a member of the California assembly. She went to the country again in 2005, on a trip organized by the California lobbyist Darius Anderson and paid for out of her campaign account, according to campaign-finance records kept by the California secretary of state. She's returned several times since being elected to the U.S. House in 2010. She visited Alan Gross, the USAID contractor whom Cuba accused of being a spy, during his five years in prison, and joined then–Secretary of State John Kerry when he went to Havana to raise the American flag over the reestablished U.S. embassy in 2015. President Barack Obama invited Bass—by then a key supporter of normalizing relations with Cuba—to join the presidential delegation during his historic trip in 2016. From there, she tweeted a sepia-toned photo of herself from her Venceremos Brigade trip, in sunglasses with a bandanna on her head.

[Read: Fidel: 'Cuban Model Doesn't Even Work for Us Anymore']

In Obama's speech to the Cuban people, he called on them to stop making America a scapegoat for their problems—and on Americans to admit that the embargo didn't work. Bass said she agrees with Obama's views. "How long can you have the same policy and not make a difference?" she said. "I thought things needed to change." She trained as a physician's assistant, and her interest in Cuba in recent years has focused on medical issues. She and several other members of Congress from underserved, heavily Black districts established a program to send students, particularly Black students, from Los Angeles to Cuba for medical training they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. She's also tried to get California regulations changed to allow Cuban doctors to do their residencies in the state. This, she said, is a natural point of collaboration.

Bass's affinity for Cuba grows out of a connection she has always seen between the histories of Black Americans and Black Cubans. "The other thing about Cuba, by the way, that has always interested me is that the Cuban people look like me," she noted.

Cuba has been the main issue that people who don't want Biden to pick Bass have focused on, mostly because of a statement she made after Castro died in 2016, when she referred to him as "comandante en jefe," which she says was a poor attempt to translate commander in chief. In Cuba, this was a phrase Castro's government often used to praise him. When I spoke with her in early July about that statement, she told me that she somehow hadn't fully realized how Cuba and Castro were seen in Florida, as opposed to California. She told me last week that she's since reached out to congressional colleagues from Florida, and to Cuban American leaders, to further her understanding of the issue.

"If I had to make that statement over again, I wouldn't use those words," she told me, repeating the practiced line she's been giving in response to questions about the gaffe.

"The idea that this issue is the foremost issue on the minds of people in Florida, when people are dying, when there aren't [enough] ICU beds—again, I would not make that same statement again," Bass said, but "it's hard for me to believe that that is what's going to be on people's minds in the next hundred days."

Bass is right that there are more important issues than what she was doing in Cuba nearly half a century ago, Taddeo, the Florida state senator, told me. "However, Florida is going to be decided by less than 1 percent, and this would be exactly the changing of the subject that we should not change thanks to this emergency that we're in, because of the leadership of the president and the governor," she said. "Now we're going to talk about Cuba? That's exactly where we do not want to go."

Roberto Rodriguez Tejera, a Cuban American who hosts a radio show popular with Cuban Americans in Florida, told me by text that he felt sure, given her history, that Bass would take the state off the table for Biden. "It's not only about Cuba. It's about the socialist narrative. She is the poster person for it. A dream come true for the Republicans," he wrote. "It's also about any independent voter, anywhere in the country, who may be afraid of a total takeover of the Biden presidency by the radical left."

The Venceremos Brigade, which still exists, and still sends young Americans to Cuba, declined to comment on the record. All told, about 8,000 Americans have traveled to Cuba with the group over the past half century. A trip had been scheduled for July, but was delayed because of the pandemic.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedArsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic / GettyWhen Karen Bass Went to Work in Castro's Cuba2020-07-31T07:00:00-04:002020-07-31T14:26:28-04:00In 1973, Bass, who's now a potential Biden VP pick, traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade. "I didn't have any illusions that the people in Cuba had the same freedoms I did," she said.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-614545
Donna Shalala has a new dog named Fauci. He's a rescue dog, maybe part Yorkie, she figures. The name seemed right: He was found running into an Italian restaurant in Miami, where she lives, so the animal-shelter staff suggested that she give him an Italian name. And like everyone else, she's been thinking a lot about Anthony Fauci for the past few months.

Shalala, a first-term congresswoman representing Florida, has been in politics for five decades, but she told me that watching how President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have been unable to stop the spread of the coronavirus—which is spiking in the state—has made her "terrified" for the first time in her career. DeSantis "is personally responsible for a number of unnecessary deaths and sickness in our state because he hasn't exerted strong leadership," she said in a conversation that can be heard on the latest episode of The Ticket.

Shalala, who served as the secretary of health and human services during Bill Clinton's presidency—with Fauci (the doctor) working for her—worries that whenever a coronavirus vaccine is developed, the government won't be able to adequately distribute it. So she has a suggestion born from her experience figuring out how to put the federal government into action: Start with a major campaign about flu shots in the fall, to give everyone what she calls "a dry run."

[Read: A vaccine reality check]

She's trying to persuade her colleagues in Congress to sign on to the idea, and she's sometimes bringing along her dog to help. When Shalala flies to Washington, D.C., she lets Fauci sit in the extra seat she buys to ensure that she's socially distanced. "Everybody laughs when I walk around the Capitol and I say 'Here, Fauci,'" she said.

Listen to the interview here:

Subscribe to The Ticket on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or another podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript:

Edward-Isaac Dovere: You're 79. You live in Florida. Are you scared day-to-day with what's going on?

Donna Shalala: I'm terrified for my community and for the country. I'm not personally scared, but I'm just terrified that we haven't gotten control of this virus because of the lack of leadership at the national level and state level. This balance between opening up and knocking out the virus is not a fair balance, because first you have to knock out the virus before you can open up. Miami Beach has 90,000 residents, and last year they had 10 million visitors. You can't sustain an economy on 90,000 residents.

Dovere: What do you make of your governor, Ron DeSantis, who downplayed the pandemic when it first hit? In the past few weeks, the numbers from Florida are just astounding.

Shalala: He just follows the president, and he's a weak governor. I said the other day, "Why do people run for office if they're not prepared to make tough decisions?" He's meek. He's just not prepared to do what's necessary. He is personally responsible for a number of unnecessary deaths and sickness in our state because he hasn't exerted strong leadership.

Dovere: You have had an extensive career in public service. Then in 2018, you decide that what you really want to do is be a member of Congress. Can you explain that decision?

Shalala: It was irrational. I just got pissed off at what was going on in Washington. It was March 2018. There were already five or six candidates in the race that had been in the race for a year. And I simply decided they could not flip the seat. We had a chance because my predecessor, a Republican, had stepped down after 30 years, and I didn't think they were going to be able to flip the seat. The chance of getting the House back depended a lot on people that were willing to step up and flip seats, so I decided to do it.

Dovere: And since you got to Washington, have you been encouraged by what's been going on there?

Shalala: I've been encouraged by my [Democratic] colleagues. I've been encouraged by our leadership. I'm not encouraged by the president or the Republicans who constantly do not have an independent voice. There was one day during the CARES Act [deliberation] in which we were ready to vote. But the Republicans wouldn't vote until they got a tweet from the president telling them that he would sign the bill. Well, he tweeted at midnight. We sat around until midnight. It was absolutely ridiculous. I must say, my Republican colleagues thought it was ridiculous as well.

Dovere: They were saying that to you at the time?

Shalala: Yes. They said so privately, that they were as frustrated as we were. We had done our job. We had the bill. We had the votes. As long as the president agreed to sign it. But the Republicans would not vote until they saw the president's thumbs-up in a tweet. They're fearful of the president. They're afraid the president will campaign against them and they'll lose their seats.

Dovere: What do you say to them?

Shalala: I said, 'You've got to be kidding. What is worth a seat? Life or death?' Because that's what we're facing now.

Dovere: When you were HHS secretary in the 1990s, were you thinking about preparing for a pandemic?

[Read: Joe Biden's invisible pandemic expert]

Shalala: We developed the stockpile [of medical equipment]. But it wasn't maintained by subsequent administrations. We also developed a strategy in which we never let political appointees talk about public health. In fact, Tony [Fauci] will tell you that I made [the government scientists] all put their white coats on for press conferences, because the public trusts docs in white coats, and they were the only people that spoke. I might introduce them, but I never said any substance.

Dovere: Did you ever think a pandemic would really hit?

Shalala: We did think, like everybody else, that it was going to be a flu pandemic. And I went around and saw all the appropriations chairs [in Congress] on the defense side before we left [in the Clinton administration], warning them that an outbreak could be bioterrorism as well. In fact, the only way we got any money was by suggesting that the pandemic would also be connected with bioterrorism, because otherwise their eyes would glaze over.

Dovere: If you got a call from current Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, looking for advice about vaccine distribution, what would you say?

Shalala: I would tell him that in September and October, we need to do a dry run with the flu vaccine. We now inoculate about 45 percent of the population. To really get control of the virus, this year, once you have a [coronavirus] vaccine, you need to inoculate probably 70 percent of the population. So I would tell him, get ready now for a huge effort to get everybody their flu shot … We need a dry run to make sure we have the infrastructure for distributing the new COVID-19 vaccine, because we know how we now distribute the flu vaccine. One of the reasons to get people their flu vaccines is that we don't want people dying from the flu and mixing them up with COVID-19 patients in the hospitals.

Dovere: You are the second-oldest freshman member of Congress ever elected. The presidential election is a choice between two men in their mid-to-late 70s. Should people be concerned about age?

Shalala: No. I think we just need a leader, and not just a leader that tells us how bad it is, but a leader that tells us what we can do.

Dovere: Both Joe Biden and Trump have thrown accusations at each other for not being fully there mentally. Trump especially has really pushed on accusing Biden of dementia. There is an age component of that, obviously. Is that offensive when you hear that?

Shalala: Sure. It's ageism. But it's offensive to me when people are dying in nursing homes unnecessarily because we haven't put the resources in to save a whole generation of people. It's offensive to me when the president beats up or tries to beat up Tony Fauci and is trying to destroy the Centers for Disease Control, the great public-health agency of the world.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedGettyThe Florida Democrat Who's Been Warning About a Pandemic for Decades2020-07-25T06:30:00-04:002020-07-25T14:18:29-04:00Long before Donna Shalala got to Congress, she was America's longest-serving secretary of health and human services—and Anthony Fauci's boss.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-614446
More than a month after New York's June 23 primary elections, state election officials are still counting votes. In some legislative districts, they haven't even started counting absentee votes. In the best-case scenario, election officials hope to declare winners by the first Tuesday in August—six weeks after Election Day. It might take a lot longer than that. Election officials in New York City have already invalidated upwards of 100,000 absentee ballots—about one of every five that were mailed in from the five boroughs. And furious candidates are already filing lawsuits charging discrimination and disenfranchisement.

The chaos in New York is a warning about November's elections: Voting is being transformed by the pandemic. But no state has built new election infrastructure. No state has the time or the money to make sure vote-counting will go smoothly in November. And just about every state is about to be hit with a massive surge of absentee ballots.

"This is what happens," a New York election official told me over the phone last week, "when you jury-rig a system that hasn't been designed or implemented or tested before."

In New York, the election infrastructure was overwhelmed by a massive increase in voters requesting absentee ballots rather than risking voting in person. Ballot-printing firms couldn't keep up with demand, and the already rickety U.S. Postal Service didn't move the ballots to and from voters quickly enough. Election officials, meanwhile, have seemed more interested in pointing fingers than in solving the problems.

"It's a nightmare in an age of political paranoia," says Ritchie Torres, a city councilman who is currently in the lead for an open congressional seat in the Bronx—the bluest district in the country—but who is still waiting on the final result.

Every election in the past few months has provided more evidence of a system that isn't able to keep up with the coronavirus. Wisconsinites waited to vote for hours in the rain wearing makeshift masks. A police officer in Washington, D.C., reportedly tried to disperse a crowd waiting to vote, because the people in line were breaking a curfew established in response to the George Floyd protests. More people than ever are voting by mail, and election officials are invalidating more votes than ever because of technical errors. In Georgia, 943,000 primary voters turned in absentee ballots, a 2,500 percent increase from the 2016 primary.

New York's June elections were primaries for local races—assembly and state Senate and Congress—with no partisan change in power at stake and a much smaller pool of voters than a general election. New York is a solidly Democratic state, with a Democratic governor, and all the officials who matter said they were committed to expanding voting by mail and other options. And it was a disaster.

Imagine what happens when the results matter more. Imagine it's December 5, a month after the national elections in the fall. Is President Donald Trump ahead, or Joe Biden? Who's ahead in close House races? Senate races? Local races for mayor or state legislature? Are votes still coming in? Are they being contested? Who's making the decisions? Which courts are getting involved? Recounts, if they're needed, would be in … January? February? When is the presidential election going to be called? When will every seat be filled for the next session of Congress?

[Read: ]Trump could still break democracy's biggest norm

Trump isn't likely to patiently and calmly wait as more votes are counted—especially if he's behind. In an interview on Fox News that aired on Sunday, he already refused to commit to accepting the results.

"In the world where the election tightens, if there are swing states for the Senate, or certainly the Electoral College, that have an absentee process that's as poor as what happened here in New York City, it could be catastrophically bad for the future of American democracy," says Brad Lander, a city councilman from Brooklyn who's been trying to call attention to the disproportionately high rate of absentee ballots officials have invalidated in his borough.

Elections in New York have always taken place against a backdrop of corruption and incompetence, patronage and piddling, whereby democracy runs up against bureaucracy and usually gets a concussion. The New York City Board of Elections has a central office, but also five borough offices that run semi-independently, overseen by 10 commissioners appointed by the Republican and Democratic Party chairs of each borough. Forget about administering elections—officials can't even place a letter of reprimand in an employee's file without at least six votes from the board.

And the mess goes far beyond the Board of Elections, which has figures showing that 767,000 people requested absentee ballots, and that 403,000 returned them. The state canceled its Democratic presidential primary in late April after the race effectively ended, but then the courts heard a lawsuit brought by the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang and ultimately reinstated the presidential primary. The state didn't start printing ballots until the decision came down, in mid-May. No information about when the ballots were mailed has been made public, but the two vendors the state hired to print and mail the ballots have told officials they couldn't keep up with the requests, because the demand was so much higher than normal. Thousands of ballots weren't returned in time, and thousands more arrived without any postmark; the board ruled that those votes couldn't be counted. The board also moved polling sites, which meant that tens of thousands of people were forced to use what's called an affidavit ballot, by filling out a form declaring that they're eligible to vote but weren't showing up in the official system.

Among the people who actually received their absentee ballot, thousands made mistakes like not signing in the right spot on the back of the envelope or mistakenly putting the voting instructions in the mail with their ballot. The people who got that far did better than many others. Plenty of New Yorkers never received the ballots they requested, or received them only on Election Day. The summer heat broke the glue on some sealed envelopes; post offices didn't postmark them properly.

The dysfunction is too inane to be called Kafka-esque.

"There are tens of thousands of New Yorkers, and unfortunately it may be hundreds of thousands, who genuinely believe that their vote has been counted—for reasons that are absolutely appalling and egregious," says Michael Blake, an assemblyman from the Bronx who is hoping to take the lead against Torres for an open congressional seat in the Bronx. As more ballots have been counted, Torres's lead of 4,516 votes on Election Day has grown to 7,803 votes, according to a readout Torres tweeted on Wednesday.

[Read: Jamaal Bowman is ready to join the squad]

About 19,000 absentee ballots were submitted in that race, but Blake says he can't get the Board of Elections to tell him how many of these votes are left to count, or how many have already been invalidated. He sent me photos of stacks of affidavit ballots that the Board of Elections isn't counting even though they've confirmed the voters as Democrats and residents of the district. The board tossed them because the voters didn't check a box noting the reason why they needed an affidavit ballot.

When elections go this wrong, suspicion takes root. Blake, for example, says that there have been intentional efforts to stand in his way as a Black man trying to represent the Bronx, and has filed a lawsuit alleging racism. "Suppression doesn't just happen in the South; it's happening in the South Bronx," he told me. (Torres identifies as Afro-Latino himself.)

Torres told me the problems and delays are "cause for concern when it can change the outcome of the election. If there is an election where a candidate is ahead by only a few votes, then the invalidated ballots should be examined with the highest possible scrutiny." But he's confident he'll hold his lead, so he's trying to be more patient. "I would rather the Board of Elections get it right than get it done hastily," he said, though on Wednesday morning he declared victory, tweeting, "The counting is all but over … Even if our nearest rival were to win every single [remaining vote], we would remain ahead by a wide margin."

There's not much guilt or regret at the Board of Elections. The country is in the middle of a pandemic, officials there reminded me. There were a lot of ballots to count. Taking two months to figure out who won an election is nothing to be ashamed of. The candidates and campaigns that are complaining, they argue, are just sore losers looking to blame the system instead of themselves. "We adhere to the rules set forth by the state board of elections and the legislature," the board's spokesperson, Valerie Vazquez, said.

Suraj Patel, who's hoping to take the lead against Representative Carolyn Maloney in a district that covers parts of Manhattan and Queens and a sliver of Brooklyn, would probably count as one of the candidates being dismissed as a sore loser. He agrees with the Board of Elections' general assessment of itself. "There's no malice in this three-week delay. It's just disorganization and incompetence," he told me. About 40,000 people voted in person in his district. About 65,000 people returned absentee ballots. There was a 648-vote difference between the two candidates on Election Day. The Board has already thrown out 13,000 absentee ballots. But the numbers I obtained show major disparities in the percentage of absentee ballots invalidated in each of the three boroughs.

[Read: ]How to fix our voting rules before November

Patel said his campaign is looking at thousands of other votes that seem to be missing postmarks entirely—a post-office error, but one that the Board of Elections can cite to throw out ballots—but which seem to have arrived on time. His campaign aides are objecting to all ballots like that being rejected, but he said they've been told by the Board of Elections that it has clear instructions from its lawyers not to count those votes, even if both campaigns were to agree to count them. He sent me a photo of a box of 3,000 absentee ballots from just one part of the district that have been ruled invalid because they lack a postmark. Last Friday, he sued the governor and the Board of Elections over the ballots being thrown out because of this. "This is election theft," he told me.

Rules are rules, is the counterargument. No one wants an unsecured election, right? If the people wanted their votes counted, they should have voted properly—requested the ballots, filled them out properly, returned them in time. That's basically the line Maloney took in a statement her campaign emailed to me. "While everyone wants the results to be certified, we can't sacrifice accuracy for speed when it comes to something as critical as people's vote," she said. "Elections workers who are putting everything they have into getting ballots processed as quickly and accurately as possible. Registered voters went to great lengths to participate in this primary, and we owe it to them to ensure that this process is handled with patience and integrity."

Maloney's argument doesn't hold up, counters Zohran Mamdani, who spent weeks waiting to hear if he'd won a primary for an assembly seat in Queens before his opponent conceded on Wednesday. Mamdani's district has a large South Asian population, with many residents who immigrated from countries where elections are farces—and this is now what they've seen of American elections.

"In many ways, it confirms the biggest fears of so many people who don't get engaged: How can I trust the results? How can I know if my voice means anything?" Mamdani told me. "I'm not here to say the Board of Elections is tampering with these votes, but three and a half weeks without results, it doesn't help build trust in elections."

On Wednesday, the New York state legislature passed bills extending the period in which absentee ballots can be accepted. But with 101 days until the general election, there's not enough time to make substantive, tested improvements to the voting process in New York—or anywhere else.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedThe AtlanticThe Chaos in New York Is a Warning2020-07-24T05:00:00-04:002020-07-24T11:54:38-04:00The first large-scale test of mail-in voting in the pandemic has left one in five New Yorkers with their votes tossed out.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-613597
Eliot Engel first won his seat in Congress in 1988, in a primary that helped end the old corrupt Bronx machine. Today, according to the official call by the Associated Press, he lost his June primary to newcomer Jamaal Bowman, in a race that became a national symbol of the rise of a new wave of progressives.

A lot is happening in Engel and Bowman's sliver of the Bronx and Westchester—and a lot is changing. The New York district was home to the state's first reported coronavirus case, in March, but it's also home to neighborhoods as different as Riverdale and Co-Op City, a long-standing Jewish community with a burgeoning population of color that has shown little interest in waiting for change. "You know what Donald Trump is more afraid of than anything else? A Black man with power," Bowman said during his primary-night speech. I asked him why when we spoke shortly after the primary. He told me Trump is "a racist, and a fascist, and he has benefited from white supremacy his entire life. And when you carry that ideology—white supremacy not just as skin color, but as mindset, as ideology—when you benefit from that, you can't tolerate a Black man or a person of color with power who is not afraid to speak up for themselves, to speak truth to power, to engage in the community in the way that might be undermining to you."

Bowman ran for more than a year in what had been a crowded field, slowly building off his reputation as a popular local middle-school principal to gain support. Engel had the backing of all the local Democratic forces. Then the race, like so much else, changed with the pandemic. In May, I rang the doorbell of Engel's house in a Washington, D.C., suburb a day after he advertised being part of a mask handout in his district, and he answered the door. It turned out that he hadn't been back to his district in months, though he told me, "I'm in both places."

By then, other issues were gaining prominence, accentuated by the pandemic—eventually exploding into the district's own Black Lives Matter protests. Bowman joined several marches, and said he would keep joining protesters when he's in office. And if he does get to Congress, as is now expected, he said he's ready to be part of a newer, more aggressive group of progressives. Should there be Tea Party–style shutdowns led by progressives, for example? "We'll see," he told me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Edward-Isaac Dovere: What does your win, and the others, tell us about where politics are in this country? Is this just a couple of results among a few thousand Democratic primary voters in New York, or do you think there is something else going on?

Jamaal Bowman: I think there's something else going on. I'm a first-time candidate running against a 31-year established corporate Democrat, if you will. That indicates a yearning and a passion for change and fresh voices and fresh ideas. People are starting to realize that the system has failed them—and people have known that for a long time the system has failed them and is failing them. And in order to change the system, we need to get the right people into office. Even the protests and the process across the country, it's a clear example that people want something new and different and fresh, and they are sick and tired. Enough's enough, and they're ready to hit the streets and risk their health during a pandemic to demand change.

Dovere: Was that tapping into the same frustration with the status quo as Donald Trump in 2016, or is it specific to progressive politics?

Bowman: We run on our values, our working-class roots and experiences, and on policies that the majority of Americans—whether they identify as progressive or liberal or not—agree with and care about: universal health care, fully funding our public schools, environmental justice, criminal-justice reform. Poll after poll shows that the majority of the American people care about these things. What's different—different between a candidate like me and a candidate like Trump—is that my experience is rooted in serving in the community for the last 20 years, a community that has been mostly ignored and disenfranchised by a political and economic system that Trump is a part of over the course of my lifetime. So that's the major difference. He ran as a reality-TV wealthy white man in this country. My background is: I'm a Black man in America, victim of police brutality, victim of institutional racism, working-class from working-class roots. That connection to the people in this district is what galvanized them to come out in pretty high numbers to support our campaign.

Dovere: The issue of Eliot Engel's residency became a big one during this race, particularly after I reported finding him at his home in Maryland when he said he was at events in his district. Why did that matter?

[Read: Why this Democrat won't go home]

Bowman: What you discovered just revealed and confirmed that he's not here. When you live in NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority], for example, and your front door has been broken and your mailboxes have been broken and the elevator has been broken for four years, and whenever it gets fixed, it gets broken again, and you can't get maintenance done in your apartment, and you can't find fresh organic food at the local supermarket, and your schools are underfunded, it makes it worse that your congressperson is not physically living in the district and not engaging and connecting and leading on the issues that impact your quality of life every day.

Dovere: How much do you think the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd changed your race?

Bowman: I shared personal stories of police brutality and police harassment throughout the campaign, prior to this. I was 11 years old when I was initially brutalized by the police, just for horse-playing with my friends and not responding to the police in the way they wanted me to. I was thrown against the wall, handcuffed, had my face dragged on the ground, had a nightstick to my back because of this incident, only to be let go without charge—as an 11-year-old. There were multiple times I was pulled over by the police, handcuffed, taken into custody, only to be released without charge. This happened at least two or three times in my life. I have been very transparent with those things prior to the George Floyd murder. After the murder, I did a direct-to-camera video and I was crying, I was sobbing. I just want to share my feelings in that moment. I had people in a district telling me, you know, how my voice was needed more now than ever at this moment in this country's history. I hate that it took for the world to see the murder of another Black man.

Dovere: But so far, we haven't seen many substantial results happen, and the protests have mostly faded. Would you call them a success?

Bowman: I don't know if I would agree that we haven't seen results. One could argue that our victory is a result. There were protests all throughout this district. I attended many of those. And I got a chance to speak at many of those. We still have the presidential election, and how are we going to organize in support of Joe Biden to help him get elected? And how are we going to continue to organize to work with President Joe Biden and also hold him accountable to what the American people are demanding at this moment?

Dovere: You said in your primary-night speech, "You know what Donald Trump is more afraid of than anything else? A Black man with power." What do you mean?

Bowman: Well, because he's a racist, and a fascist, and he has benefited from white supremacy his entire life. And when you carry that ideology—white supremacy not just as skin color, but as mindset, as ideology—when you benefit from that, you can't tolerate a Black man or a person of color with power who is not afraid to speak up for themselves, to speak truth to power, to engage in the community in the way that might be undermining to you. That's what it is. And when I say "Black man," I also mean Black people and people of color and white allies who are done with institutional racism. The collective power that we possess is what's going to ultimately defeat Trump both as a president, but also as an idea—the idea of Trump or someone else coming along at the end, trying to leverage reality-TV stardom and wealth based on a rigged system to win the presidency.

Dovere: You also said "the system is rotten" because of the people, like Jeff Bezos, who've been increasing their wealth while the pandemic economy has left so many others in need. What's the argument for trying to get into the system through Congress and not just tearing it down from the outside?

Bowman: It's about political imagination and a vision centered on the most vulnerable in our society. It's an inside-out strategy: You work within the system to change the system, while also engaging those outside the system more in the grass roots to craft the right policy and procedures and build the right coalitions to make transformative change throughout the entire system. I'm going to be the kind of congressperson where I'm going to be at rallies with the people, fighting for justice and being present and showing them that they have a fighter and a champion in Congress with them and for them.

[Read: The enormous scale of this movement]

Dovere: Would you want to see the progressives in Congress act more like the Freedom Caucus has, holding up compromises? Would you support shutdowns?

Bowman: I don't know. That's a bridge we cross when we get there, right? We'll see. Who knows what's going to happen? But in terms of the day-to-day work with my colleagues—that's the work. The work is dialogue. The work is listening. The work is learning. The work is rooted in our values and meeting the needs of our constituents. And right now we have a system that doesn't work for the majority of the country, and the country knows it.

Dovere: How different do you think the Democratic Party is from what Joe Biden thinks of it as?

Bowman: I don't know. Our country is best when every person in this country feels valued and is a part of our democracy. And the Democratic Party—that's the essence of what the Democratic Party should be. That's the Democratic Party of FDR, LBJ, you know, really fighting for the working class and the poor and really trying to move civil rights and human rights and economic rights forward. I think there are aspects of the party that lost its way, and now we have corporate interests who are dictating how politicians are supposed to behave.

Dovere: You've won a primary against an incumbent in a district where the Democratic nominee is certain to win—which means it's six months of the district being represented by a person who just lost. What are you going to do with that time?

Bowman: For me, that's six months of building relationships within the district and building coalitions within the district and making our district a strong voice for democracy, racial and economic justice, and uplifting the voices of those in the working class and the poor.

Dovere: Are you going to put in an application for membership in the Squad?

Bowman: Absolutely. I'm going to submit it right away.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedEduardo Munoz Alvarez / APJamaal Bowman Is Ready to Join the Squad2020-07-17T12:10:54-04:002020-07-17T13:57:59-04:00The middle-school principal who has ousted Representative Eliot Engel thinks politics can still be fixed—and he thinks he can do it from the inside.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-613975
Updated at 1:50 p.m. ET on July 15, 2020.

The first time Representative Karen Bass heard Joe Biden talk about the car crash that killed his wife and infant daughter, she dropped into her chair, overwhelmed.

It was 2008, and Bass was watching the Democratic National Convention video introducing Biden as the party's vice-presidential nominee. Less than two years earlier, Bass's daughter and son-in-law had died in a car crash on the 405. Bass, then in her 50s, had thrown herself into her job as the speaker of the California assembly and hoped to get past the pain. But there was Biden, 36 years after the tragedy that shattered his family, still talking about the magnitude of his loss. "I had this moment," Bass told me, "where I had to come to grips with the fact that losing my daughter and son-in-law was always going to be a part of the narrative of who I am."

Four years later, as Biden and Barack Obama were being reelected, Bass won a seat in the House, representing parts of Los Angeles. But she didn't tell Biden what he'd meant to her until this March, when she introduced him at a Super Tuesday chicken-and-waffles event. "We both just shared that you learn how to get up in the morning," she told me. "You learn how to live, but your life is fundamentally changed, dramatically changed."

Now, much to Bass's—and pretty much everyone else's—surprise, Biden's team is taking her seriously as a potential vice-presidential running mate. One theory is that she's being vetted to help Biden win favor with the Congressional Black Caucus, which she chairs. Another is that Biden is trying to use the process to elevate as many black women as he can. Yet another is that he's looking to distract people from speculating about some of the more likely choices. But inside the Biden campaign is another consideration: Over the next month, he's effectively going to decide whether there will be a competitive Democratic primary in 2024 (or maybe 2028, if he wins and tries to serve until he's 86 years old). He's the leader of the party now. Will he decide its future by anointing a successor, or pick someone, like Bass, who's less likely to run for president?

Biden has wanted to be president for almost 40 years. Now that the White House finally seems within reach, he does not want to be outshone, according to people who know him. He wants to win, but he wants the win to be about him, not his running mate.

[Read: What Americans don't know about Joe Biden]

I asked Bass whether she'd see the vice presidency as the culmination of her career or a stepping-stone to the presidency. She started with a long answer about wanting to focus on the work in front of her, and mentor the younger political generation, which has inspired her. "The vice president has considered himself like a transitional leader. That's how I view it, because I envision a next stage of my life, whenever that comes," she said.

I stopped her: If there were an open race for the presidency in 2024 or 2028 and she was Vice President Bass, would she run?

"I cannot envision that. That's the best I can say. I mean, I'm 66. I can't see that," she said.

"Joe Biden is going to be 78," I pointed out.

She paused. "Well. I don't know how much time I have."

When Barack Obama picked Biden as his running mate in 2008, Biden was also 66. Obama told Biden to think of the job like "the capstone of your career," and the assumption that Biden wouldn't be angling to run for president himself was part of the rationale for putting him on the ticket.

Bass came up as a community organizer in Los Angeles and worked as a physician assistant in emergency rooms during the AIDS crisis. She was at the infamous intersection of Florence and Normandie as the sun set in 1992 during the LA riots, and almost got hit by bricks. For the past month, she's been shepherding a policing-reform bill through the House without losing a single progressive or moderate vote.

She "was not high on the list that the team had initially proposed," a donor who's spoken with Biden about the deliberations told me. But she seems to have moved up as the vetting committee has looked at her record and considered her upsides against the little obvious baggage she'd have. In this case, being largely unknown nationally means that she wouldn't start out as polarizing. "He wants what he did for Obama," the donor told me. "He sees that as what that job is: You speak truth to power; you step out there on the edge when it's an existential issue. He sees her and her record as proven and time-tested—though she's not known among large voter blocs, and not lifted up with a strong media presence."

The donor is right about Bass's distinctive appeal: Probably no other person alive would be the subject of a column by the conservative columnist George Will calling for Biden to pick her as "transitional leadership to get the world's oldest party, and the world's oldest democracy, to calmer days," and also be described to me by Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota as not only "a colleague, but a dear friend."

At the end of May, Bass flew to Houston to attend George Floyd's funeral. She looked at the picture of him with the dates of his life underneath, and realized that the year Floyd was born, 1973, was when she'd first become active in her L.A. neighborhood, pushing for police reform. Now Floyd was dead, and she was in charge of a bill he inspired. She felt humbled. "And then, of course, it saddens you in the sense that, 47 years later, people discover, 'Gee, there's a problem.'"

Bass was from the south side. Antonio Villaraigosa, the future mayor of Los Angeles, was from the east side. She was organizing around police abuse. He was organizing around immigrant rights. "We were calling ourselves 'progressive' when nobody did," Villaraigosa told me last week. He said they realized early on that they'd be able to do more by fusing a Black-brown coalition, and they showed up for each other's issues, and for collaborative fights, such as pushing back on the proliferation of liquor stores. They became friends. "We had each other's phone number," Villaraigosa said. They still do. "She was someone who, back then, I took notice of because she was a worker bee. She didn't need to be in front of a camera all the time," he told me, which sounds like a line, but reflects a career in which Bass spent 30 years launching, then deliberately moving on from, a series of community organizations. She still doesn't like having her picture taken, and thinks it's silly. "If it's meaningful to somebody, then I'm okay with it. But it ain't my favorite thing."

This would not seem to be the best mindset for a political career in the 21st century—and certainly not, if she's picked, for a national campaign that will play out largely via socially distant camera shots. And Biden has privately expressed concerns about whether, given how underexposed Bass has been, she would be able to take or deliver a hit without stumbling under the pressure. Biden is risk-averse, and Bass does not have the cross-examiner's mentality of Harris, or the economic incisiveness of Elizabeth Warren, or the Situation Room experience of Susan Rice, or the Purple Heart heroism of Tammy Duckworth. She still takes the approach she did organizing on the sidewalks in the '70s, as displayed in her response to the massively disproportionate coronavirus rates among Black Americans. Treat and trace now, she argued, and grapple with systemic inequities when the hospital rooms aren't full of dying Black patients. "I always say, 'If the house is on fire, you send the fire department; you don't send a structural engineer to talk about the foundation of the house,' which is what everybody was doing," Bass told me. "Everybody was talking about 'Well, Black folks have all these underlying conditions.' Well, that's true. But right now, we've got to put the fire out."

[Adam Serwer: Trump is struggling to run against a white guy]

Biden's vetting team has been watching prospective candidates for the past few months. The conventional wisdom about the Floyd protests is that they suddenly boosted the chances of Harris and Val Demings, the two-term congresswoman from Florida who was previously the Orlando police chief. Bass has a low-key manner in place of Harris's searing speeches, and pointy glasses in place of Demings's dress blues, but she was the one House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put in charge when it came to actually writing the police-reform bill. "During this precarious, pivotal moment in America's history, our nation and the Congress are fortunate to be led by" Bass, Pelosi said in an uncharacteristically profuse emailed statement. Bass "has earned the esteem of all who know her for the grace, grit and gentility she brings to her work to make real the promise of a more just, equal and fair America."

This was a bill that could easily have collapsed in the usual Democratic infighting. Instead, every Democrat voted for it—all of the moderates, all of the progressives—and three Republican votes did, too. The bill would ban local police forces from using choke holds, limit municipalities' access to military equipment, increase police accountability and transparency, mandate body cameras, and take steps to end racial profiling.

I asked Representative Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, a member of the moderate No Labels group, how Bass was able to pass a bill that got his vote, and all of the others. "She was the right person at the right time," he replied. "Theologically, we say that God always has a ram in the bush." Omar—who is literally on the Justice Democrats poster, and who represents the Minnesota district where Floyd lived and died—said, "In everything she does, Karen is always prepared on the facts, the policy, and the strategy." She called Bass "a mentor and an example of someone who achieves big goals without compromising her values."

There are still plenty of reasons to doubt that Biden will pick Bass. She's supposed to get picked to be vice president because of a bill that the Senate probably won't pass and that President Donald Trump would never sign? She's supposed to convince undecided voters that she'd be ready to serve as president on day one, if necessary, because she's well liked in the House and she chaired the Africa subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee? American politics has been defined by larger-than-life characters, and Bass's greatest admirers admit that she isn't one. But "she can grow that profile even more as his running mate," Representative G. K. Butterfield of North Carolina told me.

The Biden campaign has been trying to decide whether to pick a running mate who satisfies the left or one who represents the racial and ethnic diversity of his party, since Biden himself does neither. Here's where another argument for Bass kicks in: She shows that Biden doesn't have to choose. Although Bass doesn't have much of a relationship with Bernie Sanders, she hasn't attracted the disdain of his most vocal and committed supporters. That helps explain the satisfaction among Bass's Sanders-aligned House colleagues when she was named the head of the Biden campaign's Biden-Sanders unity task force on the economy. Several top Sanders allies told me they were eager to see Bass picked—so much so that they wouldn't go on the record, out of fear that making her look too aligned with the senator from Vermont could backfire and hurt her chances.

As the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Bass also has deeper connections than Harris with institutional Black forces in the party. She's close with important voices in Biden's ear: Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, whose endorsement helped earn Biden the nomination; Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a co-chair of Biden's campaign who preceded Bass as chair of the CBC; and Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, who's one of the four members of Biden's VP-vetting committee. (She also has a long relationship with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, another member of the vetting committee.)

Reflecting how seriously some of Bass's competition is taking her is the sudden attention to her 2016 statement after the death of Fidel Castro. "The passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba," she wrote, seeming to have figured that the title was just the Google Translate equivalent of commander in chief, and not realizing it's a loaded term of praise for those who fled the revolution.

Bass told me she didn't know what she was saying, and didn't mean to offend. "I live in Los Angeles. It's easy to say certain things from that perspective and not think about how that comes across to people in other states," she said. Admitting ignorance about the sensitivities around Castro, an issue that could theoretically pull Florida, with its large Cuban population, out of contention for Democrats, isn't likely to calm those who say that Bass isn't prepared for the national stage.

But Bass insists she's prepared. "You know what? I'm ready for anything and everything. Let me just tell you something. This is really the way I view life. After having lost my kids, I can do anything. You understand what I mean?" she said. "I've always been clear about what I was doing and why I was doing it. And that has always been what has steadied me, allowed me to move forward in spite of really difficult odds."

Villaraigosa helped talk Bass into running for speaker of the California State Assembly instead of the state-Senate campaign she'd been planning. Pointing out to her that a Black woman had never held the job was part of what persuaded Bass to do it. While Bass was working her way up in Sacramento, she overlapped with Kevin McCarthy, who served as Republican leader of the California Assembly and is now his party's leader in the House of Representatives.* Bass was not as well regarded by Republicans in Sacramento as she and her fans like to assert. But nonetheless, of the 435 members in the U.S. House, Bass is the only one who has actual, personal relationships with both McCarthy and Pelosi. "Anybody who can maintain a relationship with both is an amazing, angelic person," Cleaver said.

The Biden campaign declined to comment on any of this, as it does with all running-mate speculation. But those who have been watching Bass over the years are reading tea leaves of their own. "She doesn't give him donors; she doesn't have a national profile; she tweets stuff and no one cares. The only reason you throw out Bass as a name is because you're really considering her," Michael Trujillo, a California-based Democratic strategist who has known Bass since her first assembly run, told me.

So much of any vice-presidential candidate's role in a campaign comes down to performing in a debate. Harris and Warren would shine in that format. For all her years marching in the streets and working on bills, Bass has never done anything like that. I asked her what she thought debating Vice President Mike Pence might be like.

"I don't know," she said. "I'm not sure how comfortable he is with women."

She seemed to be referencing the old story, which Pence aides deny, that he won't eat alone with women who aren't his wife.

"Yeah," Bass said. "Maybe she'd have to be there."

* This article previously misstated when Karen Bass and Kevin McCarthy overlapped in Sacramento.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedErin Schaff / The New York TimesWhy Joe Biden Has His Eye on Karen Bass2020-07-13T05:00:00-04:002020-07-15T14:00:55-04:00The California representative's low-key manner and progressive credentials could strengthen Biden's campaign when he needs it most.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-614008
Updated at 5:13 p.m. ET on July 14, 2020.

When Doug Jones invokes the civil-rights movement of the early 1960s, he knows the stakes. Twenty years before his upset win in a 2017 special election to represent Alabama in the Senate, Jones, a U.S. attorney, prosecuted Klansmen for the Birmingham church bombing—and insisted that the guilty verdict not be seen as the end of the movement's story.*

Jones understands why Americans might be cynical about the current civil-rights protests. He understands why people might look at all of the demonstrations since George Floyd's death and say that, so far, there's been more political back-and-forth over whether "Defund the police" is a good slogan than actual change.

"You only have to look back at what happened in this country in 1963, 1964, 1965," Jones told me. Those changes, he pointed out, took more than a few months. "I would encourage folks to just not give up, to not let this moment pass and not just sit back and say, 'Well, it's never gonna happen. There's going to be too much resistance, so let's just move on.'"

From his home in Birmingham, Jones has been trying to get Alabamans to listen to public-health guidelines about the coronavirus—while also trying to campaign to hold his seat in November. He's also been watching the South grapple again with its history, and urging people to be honest about what the Civil War and its aftermath meant. "You can honor individuals who fought, but we should not honor the Confederacy. Remember, this was not our country. This was the Confederate States of America," Jones said. "If you love freedom and you are a patriot, then you can't honor the Confederacy." But he warned against getting consumed entirely by the fight over monuments, despite supporting the removal of many himself. "Those are just symbols, and they're monuments; and they're not the barriers to racial [equality]," he told me.

The civil-rights movement began 60 years ago, and he says it's not over. I asked him how long he hopes the events of the past four months stay with America. "Well, to be honest with you," Jones said, "I hope we live with it for a long time."

Listen to the interview here:

Subscribe to The Ticket on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or another podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript:

Edward-Isaac Dovere: Senator, the last time I saw you was in March. We were in Selma, Alabama, for the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. You gave a speech warning against how people in Washington were trying to turn Americans against each other. How are we doing on that?

Doug Jones: Well, I think, as a whole, America is actually faring much better. I think America is coming together like never before.

Dovere: I've talked to people who say that we are being foolish to think that things are going to get better. You already feel hopeful.

Jones: Look, I can't help it. I understand the cynicism that people have. You only have to look back at what happened in this country in 1963, 1964, 1965—historic moments that created a number of changes, but they didn't finish the job. And as we went on, we tended to start backsliding. So I can understand that cynicism. I just want to look at a glass half full. And I would encourage folks to just not give up, to not let this moment pass and not just sit back and say, "Well, it's never gonna happen. There's going to be too much resistance. So let's just move on." We have this moment—with this pandemic, with an economic crisis, with the spotlight on racial disparities—the most unique time in modern history, I believe, to really do things in a way to get rid of the systemic problems that we've got in this country and build a stronger and more just America.

[Read: African American voters made Doug Jones a U.S. senator in Alabama]

Dovere: So many other parts of the world and even in the country have figured out how to keep cases low. Not Alabama. What's going on?

Jones: Well, most places in the country have not figured it out, or if they figured it out, they're just not following it. I think Alabama and our governor did their very dead-level best to try to open up the economy in a slow and methodical way. But there was a lot of pressure, I think, and I don't mean just pressure from the administration. I mean community pressure that we've got to get out of our households. We've got to start trying to live again. And so the governor and others started opening up. Alabama's governor's order went from a safe-at-home order, and almost a stay-at-home order, to a safer-at-home order.

But people just didn't listen to that as much. They heard: You can get out. You can go to restaurants. Just social distance. Wear a mask. But they didn't follow that advice.

Dovere: Do you feel like enough people in Alabama are wearing masks?

Jones: No, I don't. I think, more and more, you are seeing more local officials, more business leaders, saying, "Wear these masks. Please take these precautions."

Dovere: Do you think if it had been reversed, if the pandemic had started in more rural communities instead of hitting cities first, that the response might have been different?

Jones: My view is that it would have been much, much worse had it hit in our rural communities, in our underserved communities first. Because it is those communities that do not have access to good health care, that do not have the same quality of health care and first responders. Now, having said that, what's so disappointing is that because it did hit in their urban centers first—and I said this really early on to folks in rural Alabama, rural America: "Look, this is right now centered in our more populated areas. You folks in these rural areas, where the population is more sparse, have this opportunity to stop this in its tracks before it gets to you. But you've got to do what we're being told to do in Birmingham and in New York and other places, and that's: Start social distancing now. Start self-quarantining. Stay at home. Let's do these things now." And unfortunately, I don't think folks got that.

It's incredibly frustrating. But I will tell you that part of this is just the media messages—and when I say this, I'm not being critical of the media, because we've had to report things as we go. So let's think about this: The first thing we're hearing is "Well, this is really affecting senior citizens and people in nursing homes." That let everybody have their guard down a little bit, because that's all they heard. Then it's affecting the cities. So the people in the rural areas think, That doesn't affect me. Then there is even a racial component where it really affects African Americans and the Black community and Latino community more. So there was a sense of Okay, I'm probably not really at risk. There is just so much that we didn't know and that we were learning. And as we learn it, we say things, we do things, and it lulls people a little bit. And it is incredibly frustrating. Here we are in July, and to be in a situation in Alabama where every day we see a new record and every day we see more deaths. And it's just not acceptable.

Dovere: You've invoked the early '60s as sort of the model of the moment that we are in now. In 1997, you were put in charge of the prosecution of two Klansmen responsible for the Birmingham church bombing. At the time when that prosecution happened, it seemed to people in a way like it was closing a chapter in history.

Jones: It helps heal some wounds, but it didn't close a chapter. I said—and I've said for 20 years now—we should never close that chapter. We should always remember what happened in Birmingham and the changes that came from the events that occurred right here in our city, whether it was the fire hoses and the dogs, or the church bombing in the course of one year in 1963. And I think we are in a similar moment right now that we can't let pass.

Dovere: Where do you think we are in the story of the legacy of the South, slavery, and segregation?

Jones: I think we have taken tremendous strides in that story. There's no question. We have more Black elected officials now. We have more folks integrated into society and schools. But at the same time, we have also seen some slide-backs, rollbacks of efforts to give people the right to vote and make it harder to vote. And so I think we got a little complacent. Dr. King wrote about this in 1967 in his last book. It's really easy to pass legislation and, at the signing of the legislation, think everything is accomplished.

I think, to some extent, that's what happened in the '60s. Everybody patted themselves on the back. It was an incredible victory. And I don't mean at all to diminish those amazing victories. But doing things legally and statutorily is one thing. Doing it in a way that people change is a completely different story. And I think that there are so many times that we see an implicit bias that people don't even fully appreciate. And now we are in that moment where everything seems to have come full circle and we are back to where people are recognizing what is going on in this country. They're also recognizing that regardless of what happens in the future, we are becoming a more diverse America. There is no question about that. And people are seeing it. They're accepting it. They understand it.

[Stephanie McCurry: The Confederacy was an antidemocratic, centralized state]

Dovere: What do you say to the people who want to honor the Confederacy?

Jones: I say you can honor individuals who fought, but we should not honor the Confederacy. Remember, this was not our country. This was the Confederate States of America. It was a separate country that was taking up arms against the United States of America. If you love freedom and you are a patriot, then you can't honor the Confederacy. It was not just a so-called state-rights issue. That's just a fallacy and a revisionist history. It was states rights with regard to owning enslaved people.

Dovere: You talked about the '60s as a potential model for what we are going through now. We're still living with that. How long are we going to be living with the legacy of this period?

Jones: To be honest with you, I hope we live with it for a long time. I hope we live with the fact that we are reminded of the things that pull people together and the things that divided folks. I think that the legacy that we have witnessed now is going to last with us for generations. We should never forget how ill-prepared we were when this pandemic hit us. That is something that I hope will never happen to the United States or the world again. We were not prepared to do this. Schools were not prepared. Businesses were not prepared. Government was not prepared.

Dovere: The Republican primary runoff in Alabama is next week, and you'll find out whether your opponent will be Jeff Sessions or Tommy Tuberville. It is probably the weirdest Republican race in the country, given the dynamics between them and President Trump being so invested in hurting his former attorney general, despite how much Sessions keeps chasing him. What does that race tell you about the state of the Republican Party in Alabama?

Jones: I think it tells you something of what's happened to the Republican Party in Alabama, not what's going on in the state of Alabama, but just what's happened to the Republican Party. And I fault the Democratic Party a lot for this, because national Democrats ignored the southern Democrats for so long and we had to go it ourselves. And then all of a sudden, things got to a point in Alabama where our party was just not functioning properly. And so there was not another voice out there. And the Republican Party just became a party that you had to appeal to a small base in a primary—you know, 50 percent of an already-small base in a primary—in order to win a primary that was tantamount to an election, somewhat in the way Democrats did years and years ago.

Dovere: So, Tuberville or Sessions, which one would you rather face?

Jones: The answer to that is: I am ready to go. It doesn't matter to me. I think they both have serious flaws.

* This article previously misstated the date when Doug Jones prosecuted Klansmen for the Birmingham church bombing.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedAlyssa Schukar / ReduxThe Deep South's Only Democratic Senator Still Has Hope2020-07-11T07:00:00-04:002020-07-14T17:17:39-04:00The Alabama Democrat Doug Jones discusses the coronavirus outbreak in the South, new efforts to grapple with the region's Confederate legacy, and his hopes that this time of crisis leads to systemic change.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-613777
Democratic political consultants dream of issues like marijuana legalization. Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of it, polls show. So are independents. A majority of Republicans favor it now too. It motivates progressives, young people, and Black Americans to vote. Put it on the ballot, and it's proved a sure way to boost turnout for supportive politicians. It's popular in key presidential-election states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Florida, Arizona, and Virginia. There's no clear political downside—although marijuana legalization motivates its supporters, it doesn't motivate its opponents. For the Democratic presidential nominee, the upsides of supporting it would include energizing a very committed group of single-issue voters and making a major move toward criminal-justice reform and the Bernie Sanders agenda.

Joe Biden won't inhale.

Democrats eager for Biden to support legalization have theories about why he won't. His aides insist they're all wrong. It's not, they say, because he's from a generation scared by Reefer Madness. It's not, they say, because he spent a career in Washington pushing for mandatory minimum sentencing and other changes to drug laws. It's definitely not, according to people who have discussed the policy with him, because he's a teetotaler whose father battled alcoholism and whose son has fought addiction, and who's had gateway-drug anxieties drilled into him.

With legalization seeming such an obvious political win, all that's stopping Biden, current and former aides say, is public health. He's read the studies, or at least, summaries of the studies (campaign aides pointed me to this one). He wants to see more. He's looking for something definitive to assure him that legalizing won't lead to serious mental or physical problems, in teens or adults.

America appears to be moving on without him, and so are the future leaders of his party.

If Biden really has his eyes on public health, he should think about how many Black people end up in jail for marijuana sale and possession, argues Jackson, Mississippi, Mayor Chokwe Lumumba—a young Black progressive who oversaw local decriminalization in his city in 2018. Biden should also think about how an illicit, unregulated market is leading to the drug being laced with other chemicals, and the health effects of that, Lumumba told me. If Biden thinks marijuana is addictive, he said, then he should explain what makes it worse than alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine. Legalization is a necessary part of criminal-justice reform, Lumumba said. "I would encourage him and his campaign more broadly to do more research on some of the finer points," he added.

Alternatively, John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, says Biden should think about how legalization could raise tax revenue in the post-pandemic economy of state budget deficits. "What better time than now to have that conversation?" Fetterman told me. Before the coronavirus outbreak, Fetterman spent a year traveling his state, including areas that mostly voted for Trump in 2016, proselytizing "commonsense" legalization. There's even more reason to agree with him now, he said. "It's the ultimate policy and financial low-hanging fruit," he said. "If you're not moved by the gross racial disparities, what state doesn't need a couple hundred million more in revenue at this point?"

[Read: America's invisible pot addicts]

Amid the criticism that Biden hasn't taken a definitive stance on legalization, it's easy to lose track of how far ahead he is of any other major-party presidential nominee in history in terms of changing marijuana policy. He'd decriminalize use, which would mean fines instead of jail time, and move to expunge records for using. He'd remove federal enforcement in states that have legalized the drug. That's further, by far, than Donald Trump, or Barack Obama, has gone. Biden would move marijuana off as a Schedule 1 narcotic, the same category as heroin, but would not take it off the illegal-drugs schedule entirely, so that federal law would treat it the way it does alcohol or nicotine.

John Morgan, a Florida Biden donor and a major proponent of legalization in his state, is a proud user of marijuana, and told me he knows many Democrats and Republicans who are too. He's been able to get Ron DeSantis, his state's Republican governor and a big Trump ally, on board with legalization. Morgan said that when he broached the issue briefly with Biden last year ahead of hosting a fundraiser for him, the candidate responded, "'I know where you are on this.' I just took it to be as You know where I am on this."

Erik Altieri, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, a pro-legalization lobbying group, told me that although his organization heard from several of the other leading Democratic presidential campaigns last year, it never got a call from the Biden team.

Biden's resistance is particularly frustrating for those who remember how he was a pioneer in standing up for legalizing same-sex marriage, the biggest recent issue on which laws suddenly flipped to catch up to changing views. Maybe, one person who's spoken with Biden theorized, the difference is that he knew gay people, but believes—almost certainly falsely—that he doesn't know people who regularly use marijuana.

That's a bad guess too, Biden aides told me.

"As science ends up with more conclusive evidence regarding the impact of marijuana, I think he would look at that data. But he's being asked to make a decision right now. This is where the science guides him," Stef Feldman, Biden's policy director, explained to me. "When he looked to put down his position on marijuana in writing for the purposes of the campaign, he asked for an update on where science was today. He didn't ask for an update on what views and science said 20 years ago. He wanted to know what was the best information we know now. And that is what he made his decision on."

[Read: What Americans don't know about Joe Biden]

This can seem both perfectly reasonable and a ridiculous excuse. There isn't some conclusive study about health effects that Biden is ignoring, but one is also not likely to emerge anytime soon. And though they insist this is all about health, other ripples from legalization are on the minds of institutionalists like Biden and his close advisers: trade deals that require both sides to keep marijuana illegal would have to be rewritten, half a century of American pressure on other countries about their drug policies would be reversed, and hard-line police unions would have to be convinced that he wasn't just giving in to stoners.

Realistically, marijuana isn't a priority right now for the campaign. Legalization is at once too small an issue for Biden's tiny team to focus on and too large an issue to take a stand on without fuller vetting. And it comes with a frustration among people close to Biden, who point out that liberals talk about trusting science on everything from climate change to wearing masks—and, notably, wanted vaping restricted because the health effects were unclear—but are willing to let that standard slide here because they want marijuana to be legal.

Biden's compromise: going right to the edge of legalization, while appointing a criminal-justice task force for his campaign whose members have each supported at least some approach to legalization. But that sort of signaling doesn't get people to the polls. "Being cute is fine. Being bold is motivating," Ben Wessel, the director of NextGen America, a group focused on boosting political involvement among younger voters, told me.

"If Biden said he wants to legalize marijuana tomorrow, it would help him get reluctant young voters off the fence and come home to vote for Biden—especially Bernie [Sanders] supporters, especially young people of color who have been screwed by a criminal-justice system that treats them unfairly on marijuana issues," Wessel told me. Publicly supporting marijuana legalization would be an easy, attention-grabbing move, and might help many Sanders diehards get past the fact that he's not where they want him to be on the rest of their candidate's democratic-socialist agenda.

Altieri, the pro-marijuana lobbyist, said coming up with a legalization policy wouldn't take much work: Sanders had one, as did Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Andrew Yang. Or Biden could check in with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who wrote a legalization bill based on the argument that legalization is essential to the criminal-justice-reform conversation. Altieri is not impressed with how little Biden has moved so far. "Where he's at now would have been maybe a bold stance in 1988. It's not much of one in 2020," he told me.

In 2018, top Democrats credited a legalization ballot initiative in Michigan with boosting turnout and producing the biggest blue wave in the country—winning races for governor, Senate, attorney general, and secretary of state, along with flipping two congressional seats and multiple state-legislature seats. A ballot initiative is expected for the fall in Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota, and possibly Montana. Anyone who believes—hopefully, or out of cynical political calculation—that Biden will announce some big change in his thinking, aides told me, will be disappointed.

Just do it, Fetterman said: Do it, if only to secure Pennsylvania's electoral votes and get that much closer to the White House. "If Joe Biden's account tweeted out 'Legal. Weed.,' it would get a million likes in the first two hours. I guarantee it. And no one's going to accuse Uncle Joe of being a pothead," Fetterman told me. "If you think weed is the devil's tobacco, you ain't voting for Biden anyway."
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedAlex Wong / Getty / Katie Martin / The AtlanticThe Marijuana Superweapon Biden Refuses to Use2020-07-06T07:00:00-04:002020-07-06T10:02:55-04:00Legalizing marijuana is extremely popular. So why won't Joe Biden embrace the idea?tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-613753
Tammy Duckworth is up for a big promotion: Joe Biden's advisers are vetting her to be his running mate. In the meantime, she's focused on protecting the promotion of another lieutenant colonel.

The senator from Illinois, who lost both her legs as a helicopter pilot in Iraq and was awarded the Purple Heart, has placed a hold—Senate-speak for preventing a vote—on hundreds of military promotions, she told me. She'll maintain that hold until she gets written confirmation from President Donald Trump's defense secretary, Mark Esper, that he won't block the anticipated promotion of Alexander Vindman, the lieutenant colonel who testified in the House hearings that led to Trump's impeachment. The White House dismissed Vindman from his position on the National Security Council two days after Trump was acquitted in the subsequent Senate trial. (He's since been reassigned to the Pentagon.) But Duckworth worries that kicking Vindman out of 1600 Pennsylvania won't be enough for Trump, whose score-settling has been a running feature of his presidency. And she may be betting that attacking Trump as a failed commander in chief could win her some attention as Biden's running-mate search draws to a close.

[Read: Kamala Harris's very open secret]

Duckworth isn't seen as a likely Biden pick at the moment. She's not particularly well known, and doesn't have some politicians' natural smoothness in interviews and other appearances. That sort of camera readiness is more important than ever in a pandemic campaign, given how much of voters' exposure to the vice-presidential nominee will come via TV appearances on Zoom. Biden's running mate will also face a high-stakes debate with Mike Pence, whose years as a radio host and politician made him more agile in the 2016 VP debate than his political opponents like to claim.

Duckworth is working hard to boost her VP chances, helped along by events—starting on June 1, when law enforcement violently dispersed protesters so that Trump, escorted by Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could march across Lafayette Square and be photographed holding up a Bible outside St. John's Episcopal Church. She blasted that action as a "misuse" of the military, prompting Milley to call her a week later, ahead of a video statement in which he apologized for appearing in the photo op. "He did what military leaders were supposed to do and what this president does not do," Duckworth told me. "He took responsibility for the mistake that he made. He said it was his mistake and he should not have done it, and he regrets that he did that."

[Read: This is how Trump wants to be seen]

Now Duckworth says that Trump is proving "incompetent" in his response to Russia reportedly paying the Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers. When we spoke yesterday, she'd just come from a briefing about this in the Senate. I asked whether what she heard put her at ease. "Not at all," she said. The officials whom the administration sent to the Senate said that they hadn't been involved in briefing the president, leaving them unable to offer many answers. "I won't say there was blood on his hands, but I want to know why he stopped investigating this," Duckworth told me, referring to Trump's apparent failure to follow up on intelligence agencies' findings about the bounties. I asked her how she'd feel if she were deployed right now, and read this news. "I would be proud of my service for my country, but I would be absolutely appalled that my president was not watching out for me and my troops," she said.

Traditionally, active service members and veterans skew Republican. Trump clearly believes that's the natural order of the world, and earlier this week tweeted that any Republican who doesn't support him must not support "a new & powerful Military."

Duckworth is eager to counter the idea that the military is monolithic, and she jumped on Trump's announcement Tuesday night that he will veto the upcoming defense-authorization bill because it includes an amendment to rename military bases that honor Confederate officers.

[Read: It really could be Warren]

"He cares more about dead traitors than he does about money for training, than he does about money for military families, than he does about fixing the military housing issue, than he does about making sure that our troops have enough equipment to do their jobs?" Duckworth said. "He cares more about preserving the legacy of dead traitors than he does about making sure that our troops get a pay raise, while we have soldiers and marines in harm's way right now, downrange?"

Duckworth likely hopes these recent events might earn her a closer look as a potential vice president. Biden is clearly disturbed by the reports about the Russian bounties, accusing Trump of an "absolute dereliction of duty." On Tuesday, at a press conference he held in Wilmington, Delaware, he was visibly angry as he relayed a story about his wife asking him what he would do if he'd found about this when his late son, Beau, was still serving in the National Guard. "What are those parents thinking out there?" Biden said. "What are those sons and daughters, husbands and wives?"

Duckworth served in the National Guard before being elected to the House in 2012. In 2016, on the same night Trump won the presidency, she was elected to the Senate, flipping back the seat that had been Barack Obama's. Coincidences like that often resonate with Biden. And there are some obvious political upsides to picking a woman whose mother was a Thai immigrant and whose father can trace his roots to the Revolutionary War—not to mention a veteran who gave her legs in service to the country and is now the mother of two young daughters.

Duckworth insisted that her vocal critique of Trump has nothing to do with the VP selection process. She's always been outspoken: Back in January, a Republican congressman claimed that Democrats who criticized the strike that killed an Iranian general were "in love with terrorists." She responded: "I left parts of my body in Iraq fighting terrorists."

[Read: James Mattis denounces President Trump, describes him as a threat to the Constitution]

"I feel that I have a unique role to play, in terms of those who are in the Senate, to call out the president when he's not doing his job as commander in chief," Duckworth told me. She also has a duty, she said, to remind her colleagues that members of the armed services aren't all conservative old white men. As the Baby Boomers who have been in leadership roles retire, the military is undergoing important generational and demographic shifts.

"It's Gen Xers who are now flag officers. Millennials are now mid-career. They're now company commanders," she said. "They've only ever served with women serving to their left and to the right. They came of age after Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Today's members of the armed services look and think, Duckworth argued, much more like her than like Milley or James Mattis or John Kelly. And that's why she was especially upset about the involvement of the military in the response to protests last month. "Many of them have family members probably who were there, and they showed up and did their job anyway," she said, "which speaks to the professionalism of our military—something this president does not seem to exhibit himself in his personal conduct."

On Tuesday, Biden said his potential vice-presidential picks include "a number of women of color. There are Latino women. There are Asian." On Biden's list, only Duckworth and Harris, whose mother was Indian, fit the latter description. Biden also said to expect the process to keep going for a few more weeks. "I can't guarantee you August 1, but it will be in early August," he said. "Several weeks before the convention." That scaled-down convention is scheduled to start August 17.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedJoe Raedle / GettyThe Veteran Who Could Be VP2020-07-02T10:03:00-04:002020-07-02T11:00:20-04:00The Illinois senator and Purple Heart recipient is looking to leverage her military experience into a big promotion.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-613528
He's old. He worked with Barack Obama. He's generally seen as a decent guy.

If you know more than that about Joe Biden, you know more than many voters.

Growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, or having to move because his father lost his job? Writing the Violence Against Women Act? The tragedies he's lived through, his years as a single father, how he rode the train back to Delaware each night when he was a senator? Even his supposed vulnerabilities, like helping to write the 1994 crime bill, running the Anita Hill hearings, protecting Delaware's financial industry, or blundering on foreign policy?

Many Americans don't know any of that, according to data from focus groups and polls conducted by Biden allies.

For the past year, Biden's been repeating that people know him. "The good news is the bad news. The good news is that people know me," is his line. "And they know me warts and all," he added on The Daily Show a few weeks ago. "The bad news is, they know me. [President Donald Trump] is not going to be able to make things stick that aren't already real weaknesses on my part."

[Read: Trump is struggling to run against a white guy]

No other major-party presidential nominee has spent so long in politics. Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, before anyone currently serving in Congress. And no other major-party presidential nominee has led the polls despite basically coming off as a fuzzy white space.

"The Obama years, he was the vice president for the most famous person in the world," says Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil-rights group Color of Change, arguing that there was such attachment to Obama, no one focused on anything else. Like how Bon Jovi is not just the singer, but the name of the group. Biden, Robinson says, "was a band member."

Voters' vague sense of Biden doesn't seem to be hurting his poll numbers. But the polls are more a measure of how many Americans are rejecting Donald Trump. With a little over four months until the election, most voters don't know what Biden stands for—except for not Trump. Still, perpetually anxious top Biden supporters say that he is unprepared for another seismic event in a year that's already been full of them.

"There is some awareness that he is a longtime politician, but there is little substance or specificity behind the impressions," consultants associated with the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country warned in an April memo about swing-voter focus groups they had conducted.

When told a little bit about Biden, though, participants in the groups were inclined to support him, because they saw him as decent and his biography left an impression on them. "People feel good about Joe Biden, and it doesn't take a lot to make them feel really good about Joe Biden—but this is the time when voters need that information," says Lily Adams, Unite the Country's communications director.

Other focus groups have revealed similar data. The word young voters most associate with Biden is old, followed by good, and then roughly by creepy, Democrat, and smart, according to a focus group conducted over the past few weeks for NextGen America, a political organization that focuses on increasing youth turnout. Mixed in are leader, great, nice, experienced, okay, and cool, but also senile and dementia.

Guy Cecil, the chair of the officially designated Biden super PAC Priorities USA, said that the private polling his group has done also indicated how little some people know about Biden and how little that may matter. "I don't think it's a surprise that a lot of this election is about Donald Trump, and that people would be turning out on either side because of Trump," he said at a recent virtual briefing that the PAC held for reporters. "I don't find it particularly worrisome that you would have Democrats that are motivated by that."

Earlier this month in West Philadelphia, I watched Biden try to give voters some of that information Adams mentioned. He had delayed rolling out his economic plan to prioritize the George Floyd protests, but enough time had passed that the campaign felt ready to try to get back on track. So there he was, sitting in the studio where Dick Clark once hosted American Bandstand, attempting to show that he understands the country, and the economic impact of the pandemic. In a normal campaign, this would have been a big event, with a full audience picked from the area. Instead, it was just Biden and four people from the community, including the local congressman, for what the campaign called a roundtable, but was actually five long tables in a socially distanced U. It looked more like a city-council campaign event than one for the Democratic presidential nominee. A handful of people watched the live-stream on the campaign's website. Biden sat for 90 minutes, slipping his mask off to hang from one ear when he wanted to ask questions, and listened to concerns and suggestions from a local optometry-shop owner, a union worker, and the head of a community resource center. When it was done, he went back home to Wilmington, Delaware.

The Philadelphia event essentially vanished into the news maw. There wasn't even much to tweet about, aside from Biden joking about not being able to dance like the people who used to do the Twist and the Mashed Potato in that room. That's the routine at this point. Biden goes days at a time without public events, and weeks at a time without doing anything to generate press attention. Then aides and supporters take to Twitter to gripe about not getting more coverage. Biden hasn't held a press conference since April, and that was via Zoom, and didn't last long.

[Read: She wanted to be a Republican president. She's voting for Biden.]

Biden is stuck. The unofficial rule his campaign has set is that he won't participate in anything unless he and his aides can feel certain that no one will get sick as a result. Even walking into that event in Philadelphia, Biden made sure to announce to the four participants that he wouldn't take individual photos, but would stay at his seat for a group shot with everyone more than six feet apart. He's largely sitting out the race to define him while Trump's campaign tries to depict him as a corrupt puppet of China padding around in his basement like a shut-in. Biden's record, Trump said at his campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last weekend, is "four decades of betrayal, calamity, and failure. He never did anything. He was a senator, he was a vice president, he was before that … something."

But Trump kept with the schoolyard nickname he's been using for a year—"Sleepy Joe." Even supportive Republicans think he's going to have to do better if he wants to define his opponent, though the opportunity is still there. "The name 'Sleepy' Joe Biden should be retired. It's not working for Trump, and after 3 1/2 years of red hot Trump, and now the pandemic, many voters may welcome a quieter, sleepier era, thinking Biden is the right anecdote [sic], even if they think he's kind of old and lacks energy," tweeted former George W. Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer after the rally. "Instead, I'd call him 'weak' Joe Biden. He no longer stands by positions he once held, weakly caving to pressure, especially on crime and abortion. He's weak on China and won't stand up to them."

The catch here may be that although swing voters know the least about Biden, they always know the least about candidates. They decide late because they plug in late to campaigns. But in this race, most experts believe that the number of truly undecided voters is low. The Biden campaign certainly does. Biden advisers say that every election with an incumbent is a referendum on that incumbent, and considering how much everyone knows about Trump, the contrast goes a long way.

"Given what we've experienced the last three months with Trump," says the Biden-campaign pollster John Anzalone, Biden's "steadiness, his experience, his compassion, his relatability is really important. Whether [voters] can fill in the dots is less important than where voters begin." Biden, Anzalone added, "probably has a deeper unique connection with voters, because they feel like he's lived their life." But that only works for the voters who know anything about Biden's life.

The most pointed concern circulating among the top levels of the Biden campaign and allies like the Democratic National Committee: Even with the pandemic-wrecked economy, Americans still trust Trump more on economic issues than Biden. One reason is that Republicans usually lead Democrats on economic trust. Another is that Trump played a famous businessman on television. And some voters are buying Trump's argument that the downturn was like a meteor strike, and that he can bring back the strong economy he'd been overseeing before it hit.

Campaigns usually refer to that as an "enthusiasm gap," and the Biden orbit is tired of hearing about it.

"I would rather two dispassionate votes for me than one really passionate supporter who is for me," says Pennsylvania Representative Brendan Boyle, who's been a Biden supporter since the campaign's first fundraising event, in Philadelphia. "In terms of the election, it's almost always about the incumbent."

[Read: Joe Biden names his enemies]

It's better to be a mystery than to be like Hillary Clinton, who faced what amounted to a 25-year negative-advertising campaign that left even sympathetic voters suspicious. Her 2016 word cloud was dominated by liar, criminal, and untrustworthy, with strong registering a bit too. Biden's lack of definition is an opportunity, says the NextGen America director Ben Wessel, even with a group of voters who are well out of his base.

"Young people are giving Joe Biden a rare gift for a veteran politician: the opportunity to introduce himself," Wessel told me. "Luckily, once they hear about his working-class upbringing, about where he stands on the issues like climate change and Black Lives Matter, and about how he'll build a team of activists and experts that'll listen to young people—folks are much more motivated to vote for him."

That's not going to happen on its own, Wessel said. "If young people hear from Biden that he really is the working-class guy who will stand up to corporate interests and listen to young people, the potential is unlimited. But if Trump and the Republicans can define him on their own terms, I start getting 2016 flashbacks, where lies about the nominee start sticking."

Trump's word cloud, from those same NextGen America focus groups, has shifted a little since 2016. Racist has gotten a little smaller, though it still dominates. Stupid, arrogant, and idiot have all gotten bigger for the 2020 version.

Biden and his close advisers argue that if any of this were as problematic as the worriers on the outside say, he wouldn't have led almost every primary poll for a year, quickly wrapped up the nomination once voting started, or be leading Trump now by big margins. Most of the people telling them what they should do, they'll quietly point out, spent last year working with candidates whom Biden defeated.

And if Biden's going to win by default, then they'll take that, too.

"This election is going to get down to, at the end of the day, 'Who do you want to fly the 747?'" says John Morgan, a major early Biden donor. "You have two choices: Sully Sullenberger—steady, reliable Sully—or you have Steven Tyler, who has his shirt off, piercings everywhere, a snake around his neck, and has already been flying you for three and a half years doing donuts and loop-de-loops in the air."
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedGetty / The AtlanticWhat Americans Don't Know About Joe Biden2020-06-27T11:20:51-04:002020-06-27T12:38:17-04:00"People know me," the Democratic candidate for president likes to say. There's a catch.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-613225
A few weeks ago, an adviser to Kamala Harris called me to talk through some polling data. "We understand that Joe Biden's the nominee, but the party is so much different than a septuagenarian white male," the adviser said. "Kamala Harris is more symbolic of that changing America—America coming together—than some of the other potential candidates" for vice president.

The adviser spoke on the condition of anonymity because, officially, Harris is pretending that she's not campaigning to be Biden's running mate.

In public, Harris has repeatedly insisted that she's not talking about or thinking about her prospects of being picked. But judging from my conversations with people around Harris, she and her team use her prospects to book events and television hits that aim to show she's neither overeager nor overambitious. She and her team are avoiding situations that could create stumbles. They're hoping that her résumé, her background, and the force of her personality propel her. They're picking specific moments for her to grab attention on the Senate floor or send a calibrated tweet. They're tuning out political reporters who are stuck on their couches, looking to drum up content during the pandemic. They're trying to ease concerns in Biden's orbit that if she's picked and they win, she'll start running for president the morning after the inauguration. They want her on the ticket, and positioned to be the Democratic nominee in 2024.

"She's literally the antidote," says Stockton, California, Mayor Michael Tubbs, who endorsed Michael Bloomberg in the presidential race a few weeks after Harris dropped out. "She's the opposite of Trump. She's someone who believes in the rule of law; she's not afraid to confront bullies. She's not afraid to speak to where we need to be."

The careful campaign appears to be working. Biden advisers have said privately that they're impressed. Members of Congress who only a few weeks ago were grumbling that she's been showing up less for legislating and more for TV hits are now worried about getting caught doubting her.

"Not sure anyone who is in Congress would criticize Kamala, given such high odds she could be on the ticket," said one Democratic member of Congress who's hoping that Biden picks someone else. Naturally, this member of Congress requested anonymity to discuss how other members of Congress want to stay anonymous.

Harris declined several requests for an in-depth discussion about the state of the country and what specific ideas she has for change going forward, whether or not she's on the ticket. She likes to approach interviews as a prosecutor who's thoroughly reviewed a case file, mastering the topic in front of her and fully focused on it, aides who have seen her in action say. And she favors single-topic interviews on TV, where she feels more comfortable deflecting and knows that commercial breaks can help her run out the clock.

But Harris is leaving questions unanswered about what she'd actually aim to do as vice president or why she wants the job. This is typical. With those who know her, she can be thoughtful, funny, engaging, and pragmatic, with little patience for grand theories of governance. She's focused on what will make a real difference in people's lives. But the version of Harris the public knows often comes off scripted and indirect, appearing mostly in sound bites and viral videos. Her instinct to parry rather than expound helps her avoid awkward questions, such as during a segment on The View earlier this month, when Meghan McCain asked her if she was in favor of defunding the police. Instead of answering directly, Harris asked what McCain meant, and McCain eventually admitted that she didn't know herself. Harris successfully avoided taking a potentially controversial position. But she also reinforced her preexisting reputation for evasiveness: I heard from several high-level Democratic operatives that the exchange reminded them of Harris's habit of dodging critical questions during her presidential campaign.

[Read: She wanted to be a republican president. She's voting for Biden.]

Among those who'd like to know more about where she stands is Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil-rights group Color of Change. He's had a number of public and private conversations with Harris over the years—on podcasts, in Facebook chats, alone in her office. He's been impressed that she's talked with him without staff in the room to support her, and with the level of consideration she's brought to conversations about inequities in criminal justice. But when I asked him if he feels like Harris is more substantive than she sometimes appears, he said, "I don't know. It's hard, because I feel like I don't have enough."

People close to Harris believe that she's the victim of East Coast bias, unfairly high expectations that always hold her to a front-runner standard, and more subtle bias against her as a black woman. They think she's never gotten the credit she deserves—like when Twitter announced that it would be fact-checking and curating Donald Trump's tweets. In October, desperate for a Hail Mary pass to save her campaign, she proposed banning Trump from Twitter. She even got into a back-and-forth with Elizabeth Warren about it at the October debate. Liberal tastemakers sneered that her suggestion made no sense. But by last month, banning Trump had worked its way into the consciousness enough to be the subject of a Maureen Dowd column (which didn't mention Harris), and Harris defenders felt vindicated.

Harris has now been able to lean on her past as a prosecutor as a strength. During the primary, supporters of other candidates turned it into a liability in the name of progressivism. But these days she's stepping up as the national debate has turned to police reform, leading the Senate Democrats' fight against Republican legislation and helping write their own bill, delivering a searing speech on the Senate floor responding to Rand Paul's resistance to anti-lynching legislation. She's been firmer on and more expansive about her record than she ever was as a presidential candidate, to the point that the law professor Lara Bazelon told NPR this week, "Her record has been consistent, and it's been good." Bazelon wrote a New York Times op-ed in January 2019 with the headline "Kamala Harris Was Not a 'Progressive Prosecutor.'" But Harris "did champion progressive causes," Bazelon said on NPR.

Harris was chastened by the failure of her presidential run, which launched like a rocket and ended like a deflated blimp. For the running-mate process, according to several people who've spoken with her and her small circle of advisers, she's determined to seem steadier. She's also still atoning politically for what became her defining moment of the campaign: taking Biden's legs out from under him at the first debate. Biden took it personally—especially because Harris was friends with his late son, Beau—and a number of people close to him thought it showed that she wouldn't hold back. That moment has stuck with a lot of Biden supporters.

"I'm one of these Irish guys that forgives but does not forget. And I'm one of these Irish guys that holds a grudge," says John Morgan, a major Florida donor who hosted one of the first big fundraising events for Biden. "What she did to him in that debate was treacherous, and she didn't have to do it. He trusted her. He had helped her before. And she had a relationship with his son. It was, Et tu Kamala?"

"With that said," Morgan joked to me, "she'll probably be the vice president and I'll never be invited to the White House."

Even among those who are more sympathetic, the turnaround feels dizzying. In an interview with Harris last Wednesday, Stephen Colbert said he believed that she is sincerely behind Biden. She might be a good running mate, he said, but how would she get there after all the "haymakers" she landed onstage?

"It was a debate," Harris said.

"Not everyone landed punches like you did, though," Colbert said.

"It was a debate," Harris said, deploying the laugh she often uses to deflect during television interviews.

"So you don't mean it?"

"It was a debate," she said again.

Harris's hesitation in endorsing Biden earlier this year only reinforced some of his supporters' suspicions about her. Biden advisers called Harris multiple times, urging her to back him, insisting that she could help him consolidate support ahead of the California primary and others on Super Tuesday, people who were clued in to the conversations told me. She thought about how and when to endorse. Some on her side urged her to make a splash and regain Biden's goodwill. But she decided to wait, in part out of deference to the women who remained in the race, in part because she was hesitant about taking a chance that Biden would win. She finally endorsed Biden six days after California voted, when the primary race was all but over.

Biden has made clear in private conversations that have been relayed to me that he's focused on beating Trump, not payback, and that he'll pick whichever woman he believes will most help him win.

Look at what's happening in this country, Harris supporters say. To them, there's no way that Biden cannot pick a black woman as his running mate. Some of the Democratic intelligentsia have started swooning over the possibility of Warren as his vice president. But it's absurd to imagine that Biden would respond to this moment by putting forward two white people in their 70s, Harris backers argue. And if Biden is going to pick a black woman, these supporters say, he's got to pick Harris. Out of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Representative Val Demings of Florida, former Georgia Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice—all of whom have been floated as potential vice-president nominees—none has had the experience to understand the scrutiny and pressure of being part of a national campaign.

[Read: The VP choice everyone is missing]

Tubbs, the mayor of Stockton, isn't concerned that the Biden team is considering black women who aren't Harris. "It's part of the vetting process," he said. "Everyone should be vetted. But once the vetting plays out, you will see Kamala Harris emerge as the obvious choice."

Harris fans often compare her with Warren, generally seen as the other leading contender, and the Black Lives Matter protests in front of the White House gave them a direct juxtaposition. Harris arrived the day before Trump took his walk through tear gas to his Bible photo op, clapping and chanting along with the crowd (captured in a video quickly tweeted by her husband). Warren showed up three days later, bringing along her dog and speaking with reporters. The catch: Warren and Harris polled roughly the same among black voters when they were both still running for president. And in a CBS poll released at the beginning of May—before the police killing of George Floyd—72 percent of black voters said Biden should consider Warren for vice president. Just 60 percent said he should consider Harris.

"It would be incredible to have a woman of color," Mandela Barnes, the Democratic lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, told me. "That would speak volumes for the direction of this country and where our nominee intends to take us." But he said he's still drawn to Warren.

Barnes is black himself. In 2018, he helped Tony Evers, his older white running mate, beat an incumbent Republican, aided by high turnout in Milwaukee and among black voters. He's not convinced that Harris would do the same for Biden. "I don't know that Kamala's had the time to develop that familiarity," he said. "I don't know that [her being black] automatically translates. In fact, I'm not willing to say that at all. It's going to be important to corral the energy in the activist community in November—people who've made it clear that they don't have to vote for you."

If Harris is the pick, in retrospect this will probably seem like the longest, most drawn-out lead-up to an obvious conclusion in the history of modern presidential politics. But first, she'll have to convince Biden's top advisers that she would be able to deliver younger voters, women, and black voters in numbers that she never did during her own presidential campaign. To some who are talking with Biden, the arguments from people close to Harris that these failures were because Biden had a lock on those voters in the primary are effectively an argument that he doesn't need her to get them.

"Joe Biden is not going to pick a mythical-beam-of-light woman of color. He's going to pick an actual politician," says Sean McElwee, a progressive pollster who has put out surveys showing that liberals want Warren.

[Read: It really could be Warren]

Robinson, of Color of Change, said he's been encouraged by what he's seen from Harris so far. And he understands that she has spent her life pushing against attacks that come when you're the first woman, or woman of color, to do something. Harris was the first woman and the first person of color to be district attorney of San Francisco; the first woman and the first person of color to be attorney general of California; the first woman of color to be a senator from California (and only the second ever in the country); and the first woman of color to be a major presidential contender.

"Attacks can be gendered, and can be racialized. And there's ways we cannot give people the full advantage of their expertise," Robinson said. He added that he thought it was important to consider how much circumstances and politics have changed since the beginning of her career. "There was a time when Kamala Harris was a DA when she was probably considered a progressive DA," he said. "But she was a DA, and she chose to be a prosecutor."

Robinson added, "The moment and the time we're in is continuing to push her."

Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, another important voice in Biden's ear, who's been very public about wanting Biden's choice to be a woman of color, told me that he thinks Harris would be an "outstanding pick." As for Harris and Biden's history, Clyburn compared Harris being put on the ticket to Ronald Reagan picking George H. W. Bush after their bitter primary fight, or Bill Clinton picking Al Gore in 1992. Discounting her as an unexciting, obvious choice doesn't make sense, Clyburn said: "I don't think anything is inevitable."
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedSasha ArutyunovaKamala Harris's Very Open Secret2020-06-26T05:00:00-04:002020-06-26T13:43:24-04:00The senator from California seems like the obvious choice to be Joe Biden's running mate. So why is she keeping mum about her thinking?tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-613474
Republicans who say Donald Trump should lose in November but insist they won't vote for Joe Biden aren't being honest, Carly Fiorina argues.

Fiorina was a Republican candidate for president just four years ago, and was briefly Ted Cruz's prospective running mate. Trump needs to go, she says—and that means she's voting for Biden.

Fiorina is not going to keep quiet, write in another candidate, or vote third-party. "I've been very clear that I can't support Donald Trump," she told me, in an interview that can be heard in full on the latest episode of The Ticket. "And elections are binary choices." She struggled with the decision, and whether to go public. But she said that this struggle is one Republicans need to have—including those who have rationalized supporting Trump despite their disagreements, because of some of his policies or judicial appointments.

"As citizens, our vote is more than a check on a box. You know, it's a statement about where we want to go, and I think what we need now actually is real leadership that can unify the country," she said. "I am encouraged that Joe Biden is a person of humility and empathy and character. I think he's demonstrated that through his life. And I think we need humility and empathy everywhere in public life right now. And I think character counts."

Of course, Trump diehards will dismiss her. She has said over the years that Trump isn't a real businessman, that he lacks character, that he is the definition of an autocrat, that impeachment was "vital." But she's not the stereotype of a Republican squish: Before her 2016 run, she was a Tea Party–type candidate for Senate in 2010 and the CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Four years ago, she voted for Trump—even after he'd been caught saying about her, "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?"

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said she agrees with former Defense Secretary James Mattis that Trump is a threat to the Constitution, but is "struggling" with whether to vote for him, is putting politics over principle, Fiorina told me. John Bolton, who has said he hopes for America's sake that Trump loses but that he'll write in a conservative Republican, looks to Fiorina like he's "desperately trying to preserve some position in the Republican Party as a conservative Republican." As for Cruz, who's turned into an avid Trump defender—she said she hasn't spoken with him in years. And Trump, she told me, can tweet whatever he wants about her.

[Read: Kamala Harris's very open secret]

It hasn't been an easy journey to backing a Democrat, especially when she thinks about issues that she cares deeply about, such as limiting government spending and restricting abortion. But as she's been working with her Unlocking Potential Foundation, which focuses on increasing diversity among corporate leadership, she's also been watching how the coronavirus pandemic has exposed inequality in America. She needed to speak up, too. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are right, she said: The structures of power have been bent too far toward corporate control. But if conservatives really want to do anything about it, she said, they need to start by standing up for their principles.

Listen to the interview here:

Subscribe to The Ticket on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or another podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript:

Edward-Isaac Dovere: Tom Nichols, the professor and writer who's a Republican who's turned on Trump, tweeted a few weeks ago: "I'm not sure who my people are." With what's happened with the Republican Party over these past few years, do you know who your people are?

Carly Fiorina: I am a registered Republican. I don't believe I owe loyalty to a party. I believe I owe loyalty as a citizen to my community, to the Constitution, to other Americans. And I think we have witnessed, particularly in the era of Trump—but prior to that as well— what George Washington warned us about, which is that the trouble with political parties is people will come to care only about winning, and they'll forget about values and governing. So as I've said publicly before, I'm unconcerned about whether I'm a loyal Republican or not, and I'm unconcerned about where "my people" are in a party structure.

Dovere: When former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Trump was a threat to the Constitution, and Lisa Murkowski said she agreed with Mattis but is "struggling" with whether to support Trump, do you understand that struggle?

Fiorina: If you're a politician, I do. I mean, if you're a politician, you're focused on winning. And I think all politicians, elected politicians in the Republican Party, have struggled with the power of Trump's base. And so I don't understand the struggle from the point of view of principles or beliefs. But I do understand it from the point of view of a politician. I think it's why people are losing faith in politics and why too many people think all politicians are the same.

Dovere: Have you made up your mind about who you're going to vote for in November?

Fiorina: I've been very clear that I can't support Donald Trump. And, you know, elections are binary choices … I will say this: I think—I hope—that Biden understands that this moment in history calls for him to be a leader, not a politician.

Dovere: But so you are voting for Joe Biden?

Fiorina: Well, it's not 'til November. I'm not voting for Trump, but it's a binary choice. So if faced with a binary choice on a ballot: yes.

But I'm making, I think, just as important a point, which is: He will get a lot of pressure, as all politicians do, to be a politician. And yet I think what the nation is looking for is a leader. What's the difference? Well, politics is about win-lose. I'm right; you're wrong. It is, unfortunately, often about an argument between extremes. Leadership, on the other hand, is about problem-solving and making progress and changing the order of things for the better, which means it's about humility and empathy and collaboration. And I think this moment calls upon Joe Biden to be a leader. I am encouraged that Joe Biden is a person of humility and empathy and character. I think he's demonstrated that through his life.

Dovere: What about John Bolton, who says he'll write in a conservative Republican, even though he wants Trump to lose?

Fiorina: I don't really know what to make of that. I can't read John Bolton's mind, but I think John Bolton is desperately trying to preserve some position in the Republican Party as a conservative Republican. And maybe that's what causes him to say that.

Dovere: Why isn't it enough to say that the president got tax reform and all the judges, and that he'll hold off all the liberal policies that he says will come with Biden?

Fiorina: I applaud his Supreme Court justice picks and the justices that he's appointed into the lower courts. And I'm pro-life, and I didn't agree completely with his tax-reform package. I didn't agree with the bailout of big companies. I mean, I don't always agree with the positions the Republican Party has taken. But, yes, there are plenty of policy differences that I have with Joe Biden. And there are plenty of policy differences that I have with the more progressive wing of the Democrat Party. And yet, I think when Biden talks about the soul of the nation, I think what he's talking about is values and principles and character. Principles like coequal branches of government, principles like problem-solving should be a collaborative process, a bipartisan process. I think all those things matter.

[Read: What happened to Carly Fiorina?]

Dovere: Abortion is an important issue for you. Trump says he's been very committed to blocking abortion, and has appointed judges in favor of restrictions. Biden wouldn't be. How do you reconcile what you see as an issue of life and death?

Fiorina: The vast majority of Americans agree that abortion for any reason at all after five months is wrong. And yet we haven't made progress on that, despite having pieces of legislation in front of us. That's because playing politics on the extreme, you're either pro-choice and any abortion any time is okay, or you're pro-life and there is no middle ground, and we have to pass amendments on personhood. We're not making progress. And so let's focus on making progress where people agree and actually solving a problem of abortion after five months. Let's start there. And I've been public about that for a very, very long time. I would also say this, that if we care so deeply about unborn life—and I do, because I think every life has enormous potential and is gifted by God. And I think abortion is used discriminantly against poor people and people of color—but if we care about life that's unborn, we need to care about life that's in this world too. And that means we actually have to make progress on criminal-justice reform and police reform. And we have to stand up and recognize systemic racism and structural racism and make real progress on that, because too many lives that are here are being wasted and ignored and dismissed and overlooked. And sadly, murdered in broad daylight.

Dovere: Biden is a devout Catholic, and he's struggled with his own position. But he has moved toward fewer restrictions, not more.

Fiorina: I think this is a great example of an opportunity to lead rather than just playing politics. He could do that. He could lead. He could problem-solve. He could find common ground on a bipartisan basis.

Dovere: We're in a period of rethinking the economy. What's the fiscally conservative approach to rethinking the economy that you'd like to see?

Fiorina: What's happened over decades and decades is: Big companies have used the power of big government to make their businesses bigger and more powerful and profitable. That's just a fact. It's true in many, many industries. And so we have to start with the fundamental recognition. I believe, as our Founders told us, it's why they wrote the Constitution the way they did. Power concentrated [is] power abused. So you have big companies using big government. You have wealthy individuals using the complexity of the tax codes, all of those things—Washington, the way it's structured, favors the big, the powerful, the wealthy, the connected. And so that means, in my view, that wherever possible, we block-grant money to states instead of keeping it in Washington, D.C. I think we should have done that in the CARES Act and as we deal with the coronavirus. It means that we have to have reasonable regulation that holds big companies accountable. And that's true whether it's finance or energy or, frankly, technology. And it also means, I think, that we have to take extraordinary care to help small businesses survive, and to make sure that hourly workers have the opportunity to earn a living. I think all those things are required. Now, there are a lot of people who would listen to all that and say, "Boy, you don't sound like a Republican." Okay, fine. And maybe I don't sound like a Democrat either, but I think those are the things that would actually work. It is absurd. I mean, just take on one other issue: It's absurd what CEOs are paid now as compared to hourly workers. And the business community ought to take that on, because if they don't take it on, eventually, government is going to take it on. And that's not necessarily the right answer.

Dovere: Are you worried that we could come out of the pandemic with more inequality and structural problems, that the economy will get worse?

Fiorina: Look, I agree with Elizabeth Warren, for example, that the financial industry has concentrated too much power. I agree with Bernie Sanders that our health-care system does not work for everyone. Where I disagree with them profoundly is their answer is a big government program for all of that. And power concentrated is power abused. We know that. So if we continue to create vast government bureaucracies to control everything, guess what? The bigger are going to get bigger and the wealthy are going to get wealthier, because they know how to play the system. And meanwhile, the small get crushed and the disadvantaged are no better off. So, yes, I'm very concerned. And I'm also concerned—I mean, as I think many Americans are—this pandemic has exposed how inequitable our economy is. This isn't news. But I think people are becoming aware. It's not news that there hasn't been equal justice under the law, that it's not news if there hasn't been equal opportunities to succeed. It's not news that people don't have equal access to quality health care. All that's been around for a long time and politicians have argued about it for a long time. But it's not getting better. And so now we need problem-solving and leadership, not politics as usual.

Dovere: When you ran for office, your argument was to bring some of the business mentality to government. That was part of how Donald Trump positioned himself too. Has he proven that government doesn't need a business mentality?

Fiorina: Donald Trump is many things, but he's not a successful businessman. I understand government is different than business. But here's some things that government could learn from business: an emphasis on results, on facts, on data, on numbers. And when we look at the problems that we face as a nation, the facts and the data and the numbers have been crystal clear for a long time. Here's another thing that business discipline would bring to government: an emphasis on customers. Government's customers are who? Citizens, citizens. Here's another thing that comes from business: the ability to consistently ask your customers, survey your customers, use technology to serve your customers. I talked a lot about this during the campaign as well. We have the technology available that would literally allow citizens to weigh in—not politicians—citizens to weigh in on every pressing issue of the day. And yet politicians don't use it. Government doesn't use it. Here's one last one: Every dollar counts. In business, dollars matter. You don't get to print money, and therefore you spend a lot of time prioritizing how to spend money. We haven't prioritized how to spend money in Washington in a long time, which is why we just keep spending more and more of it, and the same problems that we're talking about now are the problems we talked about 40 years ago.

Dovere: You were Ted Cruz's running mate. When was the last time you talked to him?

Fiorina: Several years ago.

Dovere: What do you make of the way he's turned around on Trump and is now supporting him?

Fiorina: I don't excuse it. I don't. It disappoints me. I've been public in my disappointment about how few politicians have been willing to stand up and speak on values and principles. But I understand it if you're in politics, sadly. So I—people, I think, are tired of politics and politicians and whether they're Democrats or Republicans. If you're in politics, as Hillary Clinton used to say, you're in it to win it.

Dovere: What does a turnaround like his mean for the future of the GOP? If Trump loses, is it a party that continues to be defined by him, or is it a party that tries to forget about him?

Fiorina: Honestly, I don't know. I don't know. I think—I just don't know.

Dovere: You've had the experience of being a woman in politics. Biden will pick a woman as a running mate. What does she need to watch out for?

Fiorina: Well, you know, I would liken it honestly to the experience I had when I became the first woman to lead a Fortune 50 company: It's different when you're different. The scrutiny is different. The criticism is different. The expectations are different. Both much higher and much lower. There isn't the benefit of the doubt granted. There isn't the presumption of competence granted. The margin for error is far smaller. I remember as a presidential candidate being on national TV for an interview, and the interviewer said to me, "We have a viewer in Texas who asks: Don't a woman's hormones prevent her from serving in the Oval Office?" In other words, isn't a woman too emotional? And I paused on national television and I said, "Gee, can we think of a single instance in which a man's judgment was clouded by his hormones, including in the Oval Office?" Now, that's a funny example. But it's a very telling example, I think. Men are some of the most emotional creatures I have ever met, and they are driven in no small measure by their hormones. And yet we are always worried about women's emotions. It's different when you're different. I had people say to me, "You don't smile enough on the debate stage." No one would make that comment about any man, any man.

Dovere: What happens if President Trump tweets about you and this interview?

Fiorina: Honestly, let anybody tweet. I don't spend my life trying to upset people. I spend my life trying to have a positive impact by working with other people. And that means that when I'm wrong, I hope I can admit it. When someone teaches me something I needed to learn, I hope I incorporate it. But it also means that I have to be forthright about who I am and what I believe and what I have learned over a lifetime.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedJoe Raedle / GettyShe Wanted to Be a Republican President. She's Voting for Biden.2020-06-25T05:00:00-04:002020-07-10T13:19:50-04:00The former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina tells The Ticket that she plans to vote for Joe Biden.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-612454
In what appears to be a signal of intensifying political warfare ahead of the November election, One America News Network, the Trump-supporting cable channel that has been promoting anti-Biden conspiracies for several months, says it has obtained several hours of secret recordings of then–Vice President Biden's conversations with Ukrainian officials. If such recordings exist, they're likely linked to pro-Russian interests in Ukraine and a Russian intelligence operation, two former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine and a former ambassador to Russia told me. The OAN employee who claims to have the tapes would not say what was on them, other than suggesting that they will be revelatory.

In the audio that has been released elsewhere so far, Biden is heard dangling the promise of financial aid to Ukraine if its government ousted a prosecutor who was seen as corrupt—which Biden has previously said publicly was his goal, as part of a push for widespread reforms. Conspiracists have alleged that this was intended to help his son Hunter escape charges of corruption, but an audit by Ukraine's former top prosecutor released last week found no evidence of illegal activity by Hunter in his capacity as an energy-company board member.

What is most remarkable here is that none of this is particularly surprising. Russian interference in the 2016 election has been closely studied over the past four years, and America's vulnerabilities have only worsened in that time. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote recently, "Russia's interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020." That OAN is now a player in such interference suggests an escalation that the Biden campaign has been bracing for.

Indeed, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul—who has recalled being secretly recorded himself, among other forms of harassment, when he was posted in Moscow—told me, "There's never been a moment like this in American history."

[Read Putin is well on his way to stealing the next election]

That includes 2016. McFaul said what he's seeing now reminds him of tactics the Kremlin has used against its domestic political opponents. "It's not to convince you of a different point of view. It's to convince you that there is no truth," he said. "When it feels like nobody's telling the truth and there is no truth, the reaction to that is despondency and demobilization."

It's hard not to feel some déjà vu here. In 2016, Russian intelligence agents hacked the emails of Democratic National Committee staffers and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, and delivered them to WikiLeaks, as a way to get them into the American media. Some outlets learned a lesson from that episode, and have treated new Biden recordings out of Ukraine with care. Others have not. Andriy Derkach, who released the Biden tapes that have already come out, is a former member of a pro-Russian political party who graduated from a KGB-run academy in Moscow. OAN lends his efforts a veneer, however thin, of journalistic legitimacy.

The person now claiming to have more tapes is OAN's Chanel Rion, the on-air personality who went with Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, on his December trip to Ukraine in part to find information on Biden to help Trump. Rion, who has become famous for her conspiracy-inflected questions at White House briefings, emailed the Biden campaign May 29 claiming that she was working on an "in-depth report" about recordings that appear to be of Biden speaking with Petro Poroshenko, then the president of Ukraine. "We have over five hours of these recordings (beyond what has been posted online by Nabu Leaks)," she wrote, referencing a Ukrainian website suspected of Russian links.

Derkach, a politician known as the "Ukrainian Putin," has been a proponent of the conspiracy theory that Ukraine was really behind the interference in the 2016 election instead of Russia. And he has previously been eager to provide damaging material about Biden for Trump's sake. Derkach released a batch of recordings three weeks ago, claiming that they had been made by Poroshenko and given to him by "investigative journalists." (Poroshenko has said the audio is "fabricated.") Most mainstream-media outlets have decided that the recordings that have emerged so far offer "little new insight into Biden's actions in Ukraine," as The Washington Post's Carol Morello wrote after the recordings were first released.

Giuliani, reached by text, did not comment on suspicions that the recordings have ties to Russian interests or intelligence, or on whether he was involved in getting any of them to OAN.

Rion was until recently an illustrator. She has said she joined members of the Trump family in 2016 for the New Hampshire primary's victory party; she has also tweeted a drawing of Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein with the hashtag #spiritcooking, which is often associated with the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. On her website, she describes herself as "a fierce foe of anything Clinton, of everything Obama, and as a total and unrelenting enemy of academic left-liberalism and political correctness anywhere." In March, she cited a "monitored source" on air who'd said that the coronavirus had been linked to a lab in North Carolina; that source turned out to be a person who'd tweeted at her. She has asked wild questions at White House briefings, including one about whether Trump would pardon Barack Obama for unspecified crimes, and another about whether Trump's lawyers would like to depose Joe Scarborough, after Trump floated a baseless accusation that he'd murdered an aide.

Rion's email, which the Biden campaign forwarded to me, suggests that OAN is "producing an in-depth report on these recordings for OAN's Special Investigates series." In a phone call on Sunday, she told me that she now expects to acquire much more than the five hours of recordings she mentioned in her email. Rion said that Derkach was just one of the people who have been giving her material. She said she has verified, with the help of "a couple of sources on the ground," and with sources in the U.S. as well, that the recordings have no ties to Russian intelligence or interests. She would not explain her verification process, saying, "I don't want to tip off anybody."

It was once unusual for the public to gain access to top-secret government documents, let alone private conversations between the American vice president and a foreign leader. But as countries around the world increase their cyberwar capabilities and their willingness to interfere in one another's domestic politics, and as the democratization of publishing allows for the rapid spread of misinformation, media leaks of hard-to-verify and potentially doctored documents and recordings of government officials are becoming commonplace. "It is common practice for Russian intelligence to help put out information in skewed forms in Ukraine, and forensic experts have seen that this information is doctored," said John Herbst, a former career Foreign Service officer who served as the American ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006. "The Kremlin is a master at this sort of practice, and the sources in Ukraine providing this sort of information are known to be well connected in Moscow."

Herbst was one of seven former ambassadors to Ukraine who wrote an open letter to Ukrainians two weeks ago, prompted by the already-public recordings. They said they are "disheartened by efforts to involve Ukraine in America's domestic politics as the 2020 US presidential election approaches."

"This all just confirms what we knew," said Steven Pifer, another former ambassador to Ukraine, who signed the letter.

[David A. Graham: What happened in Ukraine?]

Russia would love to "somehow inject Ukraine back into American politics," Pifer said. "There will be people on the American side who play into it—OAN is one."

The Biden campaign says OAN's willingness to play along is exactly why the network received the recordings. "In 2016 and ever since, hostile foreign actors have perpetrated insidious efforts to disfigure and poison American democracy. Yesterday's hacked emails are today's bugged phones and deepfakes," Andrew Bates, a campaign spokesperson, told me.

An OAN spokesperson, Krista McClelland, did not respond to a request for comment about the suggestion that the recordings have links to Russian intelligence. Nor did she respond to the Biden campaign's charges.

Other countries are stepping up their own efforts to get involved in this year's elections; Iran and China, for example, have been linked to attempts to hack Biden and Trump campaign computers. But Russia continues to lead the misinformation game. The day after Rion reached out to Biden's team, Sputnik—the Kremlin-owned propaganda service, which American intelligence has accused of being involved in the 2016 misinformation efforts—ran an interview with a former Poroshenko aide who claimed that he was the one who'd made the recordings, and that he'd given them to his lawyers to give the Trump administration. "Because of the coronavirus," he said," they are waiting. But in September, closer to elections, they will begin to use them more."

There's no evidence to support this. But the Trump campaign doesn't seem to have much interest in dampening ideas like it: The communications director, Tim Murtaugh, didn't respond to multiple emails I sent about whether the campaign has more materials from Ukraine featuring Biden, and neither did White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley.

Election Day is in five months. And the people best positioned to knock down the Russian misinformation apparatus seem most interested instead in propping it up.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedAndrew Harnik / APOne America News's Chanel RionIs OAN the Leading Edge of Russian Misinformation?2020-06-11T15:35:12-04:002020-06-11T15:35:12-04:00The Biden campaign says Trump's favorite TV network is peddling the Kremlin's lies. tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-612646
Updated at 9:26 a.m. ET on June 4, 2020.

Barack Obama didn't want to outshine Joe Biden. He never wants to be seen as speaking for all black Americans.

But the former president was too worried about the condition of the country to stay silent about George Floyd's death and the protests that have followed. It was going to take more than the statement he put out on Friday, writing that Floyd's killing "shouldn't be 'normal' in America in 2020," for him to feel that he'd done his duty. The essay he published on Monday, urging reforms? One hundred and ninety-four thousand "claps" on Medium, for whatever that's worth. The tweet he sent as the sun went down on Monday night, a few minutes after Donald Trump returned from gassing protesters to make way for his Bible photo op, with a video of Floyd's brother saying, "Let's do this another way"? It has 650,000 likes and counting. He still had more to say, and his closest advisers believed that he needed to say it. Tuesday morning, the former president and his aides started scrambling to set up an event for him to host yesterday afternoon—and to arrange the sit-down Zoom speech that CNN and MSNBC carried live.

[Read: Obama on race, identity, and the way forward]

Speaking out about controversial political issues, even in the measured way he did yesterday, is extremely unusual for Obama. He went into his post-presidency reluctant to let Trump change him, or force him to abandon the presidential tradition, which he took seriously, of giving deference to one's successors. He knows that, as the first black president, his words on race carry extra weight and attract extra attention—and, often, harsher judgment. But watching a president attempt to turn the firepower of the federal government against the American people helped him overcome his reluctance to intervene.

"He's always said he's going to speak out when (a) American values are threatened and (b) he can have impact," an Obama adviser, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record, told me in an email. "This moment is both."

As the event began, another Washington, D.C., curfew notice went out from the mayor's office. Down the block from the White House, men with military equipment and military vehicles but no announced authority were massing on the streets. Obama was not looking to address that directly. He didn't mention Trump—not even in the not-so-subtle way he did a few weeks ago, when he slipped references to the government's incompetent response to the pandemic into his college-graduation speeches. He thanked the protesters, but he also praised the police who he said are committed to making policing better.

"I want you to know that you matter. I want you to know that your lives matter. That your dreams matter," Obama said yesterday, speaking to the young people of color watching. "You should be able to learn and make mistakes and live a life of joy without having to worry about what's going to happen when you walk to the store or go for a jog or are driving down the street or looking at some birds in a park."

And if Trump was watching, and if he's going to tweet about it, then Obama is done caring.

"It did not give him pause. We are in a political season, but our country that he loves is also at a critical inflection point," Valerie Jarrett, his close adviser, told me. "At this moment, we need as many constructive voices speaking up in support of the peaceful protesters and calling for the implementation of evidence-based strategies for policing reforms."

[Ta-Nehisi Coates: My president was black]

The speech wasn't everything that some Democrats had hoped for. When the Obama Foundation announced in the morning that Obama would speak, some committed supporters expected that he would finally let loose on Trump, and express the outrage that they were all feeling and hoped he was too. George W. Bush put out a statement calling for justice on Tuesday.* Bill Clinton said that Americans need to ask themselves hard questions about why black Americans keep getting killed by police. Jimmy Carter put out a statement yesterday demanding that the government do better. Even former Secretary of Defense James Mattis has now spoken up, writing about Trump making "a mockery of our Constitution."

But since the day Trump won the presidency, Obama has been cautious about speaking out against him. Beneath what has largely been silence in public is deep anxiety about where Trump's leadership was taking America—anxiety that has been heightened by the public-health and economic crises brought on by the pandemic. But even as Obama expressed his worries privately, he'd say the country doesn't need a second president, so he'd keep his objections mostly to himself. "Obviously, there's no more sacred democratic value than addressing injustice. And channeling today's outrage/anger/sadness/worry into action exemplifies the mission of his post-presidency's Foundation," the Obama adviser told me.

Obama's hesitance to speak out on issues of race goes back to his own time in the White House, when his every utterance on the subject became something for pundits to yell about, from when he said the police officer who'd arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his own home had been "acting stupidly" to when he said that if he had a son, "he'd look like Trayvon" Martin. In 2014, when another police killing prompted violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Obama took several days to respond. West Wing aides at the time defended the decision, bemoaning that everyone was turning to him because he was the first black president, insistent that he be able to just be the president—as in, the president for everyone. Obama was reluctant to let the polarization that followed everything he did make the situation worse. When he did speak, he denounced violence, spoke up for the police, and called for reforms. As he reminded those watching yesterday, he had a commission that studied police reforms.

Jarrett also reminded me of that commission when I asked her about what's happening on the streets of Washington, the city where Obama still lives and was speaking from by Zoom call: "When he was president, he stopped the routine practice of the federal government giving military-grade equipment to local law enforcement," she said. Since then, Trump has restarted the practice. During the current protests, Trump has been urging governors to come down hard on protesters, and has even considered invoking the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that would allow the military to be deployed as police on American streets.

[Adam Serwer: Trump gave police permission to be brutal]

In his comments, Obama also took care to remember that his foundation and the My Brother's Keeper mentoring initiative he started after yet another young black man was killed during his presidency are supposed to be nonpartisan. He's been speaking regularly with Biden—who gave his own speech denouncing Trump on Tuesday. He'll be headlining Biden-campaign events soon. But he wanted to avoid politicizing the protests and the Trump administration's crackdown.

"It's an issue he cares deeply about. It's an opportunity for him to speak to young people, which is fundamental for the Obama Foundation and to President Obama himself, and it's in keeping with what he said days before he left office, that he was going to speak out on important issues," Andrew Weinstein, a longtime Obama supporter and top fundraiser for his campaigns and his foundation, told me. This week was a "convergence of those factors," Weinstein added.

Obama was optimistic, as he always tries to be. He acknowledged that this moment "reminds people of the '60s and the chaos, discord, and distrust throughout the country," but pointed to polls showing how many people now support the protests, and how diverse the crowds at the protests are. "There is a change in mindset that's taking place, a greater recognition that we can do better," he said.

That said, he's also been rereading The Fire Next Time, the seminal 1963 book on race in America. "It's frightening," he said, "how James Baldwin can lay out a reality 50 years ago that sounds like it was written yesterday."

* This story originally misstated the date that George W. Bush issued a statement in response to the killing of George Floyd. It was Tuesday, not Wednesday.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedBill Pugliano / GettyWhy Obama Stepped In2020-06-04T06:00:00-04:002020-06-04T10:35:22-04:00As Americans continue to protest and Trump calls for "domination," the former president felt compelled to intervene.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-612550

Paul Spella / The Atlantic*

No other major-party nominee in history has called the political forces whipped up by a sitting president of the United States enemies of America. But that's what Joe Biden did today.

"My fellow Americans, we're facing formidable enemies. They include not only the coronavirus and the terrible impacts to the lives and livelihoods, but also the selfishness and fear that have loomed over our national life for the last three years," Biden said, speaking from inside Philadelphia's city hall. "I choose those words advisedly: selfishness and fear."

Biden has warned for almost three years, since Donald Trump equivocated about the Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, that Americans are in the middle of a battle for the nation's soul. That's been the theme of his presidential campaign too. In speaking with advisers after watching the protests across the country last night, Biden was shaken. This wasn't a metaphor anymore. This was a battle with batons and tanks and Molotov cocktails and hammers, going on in the streets.

[Read: This is how Trump wants to be seen]

He didn't get to today's speech easily. Biden is so much an institutionalist that he had to be pushed into supporting impeachment last fall. He's spent his whole campaign so far saying that he doesn't want to talk about Trump, that he wants to talk about America instead. That was before the president had peaceful protesters tear-gassed to make way for a photo op of him holding a Bible in front of a church.

Today, Biden said that Trump has declared war on his own country, that he "has turned this country into a battlefield driven by old resentments and fresh fears. He thinks division helps him. His narcissism has become more important than the nation's well-being that he leads."

Representative Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, an ally of Biden's, told me that as he watched the speech, he was reflecting on how much he "missed having a presidential address from a normal, empathetic person trying to bring us together."

"I wrote a piece over four years ago that I thought Donald Trump was unique in American history in that he was the first presidential nominee who was a clear and present danger to the country," said Boyle, who was one of only a handful of people who heard Biden speak in person today. "Unfortunately that has proven to be the case."

He added, "The longer we go and we don't have someone playing the role of head of state trying to bring us together, the harder it's going to be."

Or as Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky tweeted last night: "The President just declared war on millions of Americans and the 1st Amendment. He is the greatest threat to the American way of life in our history."

Biden's speech had the requisite Twitter-friendly zingers. Regarding the Bible the president held in his bizarre photo op, "I just wish he opened it once in a while instead of brandishing it." There were a few legislative proposals, like calling on Congress to pass a law banning chokeholds, plus a solid dose of feel-good Americana that name-checked, among others, Jonas Salk, Frederick Douglass, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Neil Armstrong, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks. But it was centered throughout on trying to portray this past week as a turning point for America.

In a country torn apart, Biden said, "this president today is part of the problem." Trump took an oath was to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," but Biden said that after last night's display, "we can be forgiven for believing the president is more interested in power than in principle, more interested in serving the passions of his base than the needs of the people in his care."

The response from the Republican National Committee was standard politics: It referred to Biden's "long record of bigoted comments and policies that have disproportionately hurt the black community." The response from the Trump campaign was standard Trumpian I'm rubber, you're glue tactics: "He has obviously made the crass political calculation that unrest in America is a benefit to his candidacy."

[Read: The Christians who loved Trump's stunt]

Meanwhile, the response from Republicans in Congress to Trump's crackdown suggests that most have taken their cues from the Westworld robots. "I didn't really see it," Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said of Trump's photo op. "I didn't watch it closely enough to know," said Utah Senator Mitt Romney. "Sorry, I'm late for lunch," Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi told NBC's Kasie Hunt.

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, meanwhile, said, that last night "was not the America that I know."

After the speech, I asked Cedric Richmond, the Louisiana congressman and a Biden-campaign co-chair, whether, with his candidate describing the president as at war with his own nation, there could be peace between the parties ahead.

"Normally you would get that leadership from a president," Richmond said. "It's clear as of yesterday that the president will not do it. So I think the country will do it on its own."

*Photo-collage images: Callaghan O'Hare / Bloomberg / Yasin Ozturk / Anadolu Agency / Getty / Shutterstock
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedPaul Spella / The Atlantic*Joe Biden Names His Enemies2020-06-02T18:34:45-04:002020-06-03T09:15:16-04:00In a speech today, the vice president portrayed this week's events as a turning point for America—and as a binary choice in visions for its future.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-612115
Updated at 10:30 a.m. ET on May 29, 2020

Joe Biden's concern about the national-security impact of the coronavirus has led him to weigh picking the Obama-administration national security adviser Susan Rice as his running mate, according to several people who've spoken privately with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in recent weeks.

Rice is well known in Washington, but has a much lower national profile than most of the other women being considered, and comes with few conventional political upsides. She isn't particularly likely to be selected, people inside the campaign say (some who have spoken about her with Biden see her as a more likely pick for secretary of defense or secretary of state), and Rice has told confidants that she knows that.

But the interest Biden has expressed in Rice reflects his concerns that the ongoing economic and public-health crisis the U.S. faces may require him to pick a strong national-security hand as his running mate.

That perceived need for someone with national-security experience is also why Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina congressman and majority whip in the House who made a powerful endorsement of the former vice president, included Rice on the list of suggestions he gave Biden, Clyburn told me.

"I just don't know how the country will look in the next several months, but it would seem to me that we have a lot to do in this country, not to just restore the confidence in the American people, but we've got to restore confidence around the world," Clyburn said. He told me he'd leave Biden to make a decision based on personal dynamics and polling, but "I don't know that there's another African American woman in the country, or any woman other than maybe Hillary Clinton, who has the stripes that she has on foreign policy."

Before Rice became national security adviser, she served as Obama's first United Nations ambassador. But although she has advised three presidential campaigns, she has never run for office herself. She's also the star of Republican fever dreams about a Benghazi cover-up, and now the "unmasking" of Michael Flynn, her successor as national security adviser who was caught making assurances to the Russian ambassador. Supporters of Donald Trump have seized on an email she wrote to herself on the day of his inauguration, detailing an Oval Office meeting several weeks earlier with Biden, Barack Obama, and then–FBI Director James Comey discussing concerns about Flynn's contact with Russians. Trump allies have insisted that the email, which appears to be purposefully memorializing the conversation for later reference, was part of a larger attempt to frame Flynn, though this is an idea that exists only in the ambiguous conspiracy of half-cooked allegations Trump calls Obamagate.

[Read: Susan Rice's careful dance on Trump surveillance]

Biden's usual instinct is to avoid antagonizing his political opponents, which picking Rice clearly would. His campaign has shown some willingness to ignore conspiracy theorists: Andrew Weissmann, the top deputy to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia investigation, was scheduled to headline a Biden fundraiser on June 2, for example. But the campaign canceled the event this morning after the Trump campaign criticized it.

Rice told me that she's ready to be picked, if that's where this process lands.

"I am honored, honestly, and I'm humbled that I might be being considered," she said, "and I really truly care only about doing all I can to get Joe Biden elected and Donald Trump retired, because I truly deeply believe that the fate of our country depends on it." She added, "I'll help in whatever way I can and if that's licking envelopes and raising money, that's fine, and if it's serving in a much more senior capacity, if that's what Vice President Biden thinks makes sense, that's fine, too."

She declined to comment when I asked her how Trump's "Obamagate" claims might factor into the running-mate selection process.

Biden has a variety of personal and professional connections to some of the other women his campaign is looking at, a group that includes several governors as well as Senator Elizabeth Warren, who set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before running to represent Massachusetts, and Senator Kamala Harris, who ran a huge office as attorney general of California. But Rice is the only one of these possibilities whom he's worked with every day, during the eight years they both spent in the Obama administration, and none of the others has Rice's level of experience in the executive branch, or in crisis management. Biden believed that reconstituting the gutted federal government after Trump was going to be a massive undertaking even before the coronavirus became a pandemic. In her own memoir released last year, Obama's second UN ambassador, Samantha Power, wrote, "Susan was said to have a 'black belt' in bureaucracy," and recounted early advice from her: "Act like you are the boss, or people will take advantage of you."

Rice is the rare government official who has gotten intense national political exposure without ever running for office. And she may be one of only two nonelected black women with that sort of experience, the other being the Republican Condoleezza Rice (who's of no relation). Susan Rice has earned respect, but also enemies, for her often impolitic, cut-the-crap demeanor. Still, the closest she's come to the kind of political barrage that any running mate would have to survive is her 2012 morning of five Sunday-show appearances a few days after a coordinated attack on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi. At the time, she said the violence had started with a "spontaneous" demonstration brought on by the reaction to what was seen as an anti-Muslim video; she has since said she was going off the American intelligence available at the time.

Rice has expressed regret for agreeing to the appearances in the place of then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then–National Security Adviser Tom Donilon. "I do believe that Hillary Clinton and Tom Donilon appreciated what I did not: The first person to tell the public about a highly political tragedy was likely to pay a price," she wrote in her book, Tough Love, which was released last year. That price may have included getting passed over a few months later when Obama was picking Clinton's replacement as secretary of state. She's since grimly joked privately that the experience has left her battle-hardened.

[Susan Rice: In Syria, America had no good options]

As the vetting process begins, Rice is getting to flex some of her crisis-management experience, co-chairing the Washington, D.C., advisory commission on reopening the district amid the pandemic. The group issued an 80-page report last week that includes several extremely stringent recommendations, such as that schools in the city not go back to full capacity and schedules until a vaccine is widely available.

That's all potentially helpful experience in an administration. But first, Biden has to beat Trump, and he has to think about whether picking Rice would win him any votes. Obama has advised him to pick a running mate whose strengths complement his own, and some of the people he discussed Rice with pressed him to remember that advice. Biden, like Rice, already has extensive foreign-relations, national-security, and institutional experience; he lacks some of the constituencies and skill sets that other potential running mates have.

"I want to make sure that wherever I speak to, whoever I have, has some qualities that I don't possess, as well as is willing to, in fact, tell me the truth, but also do it in a way that is between the two of us—between her and me—so that they can, in fact, be completely candid with me," Biden said at a fundraiser on Wednesday. "I want to have people around me that have strengths and capacities I don't."

Depending on how rough of a situation the country is likely to be in when and if he wins, and where Biden decides he wants to focus, doubling up may be appealing, Jim Clyburn told me.

"If Biden feels that he is the best person to restore the faith of the world community in the United States, then he may look to having a very strong domestic person as the VP," Clyburn said, noting that that person could be Rice.

Biden's campaign declined to comment on his running-mate search.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedSpencer Platt / GettyThe VP Choice Everyone Is Missing2020-05-29T05:00:00-04:002020-05-29T11:28:00-04:00Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice has a powerful backer and an array of experiences that complement Biden's.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-612100
Nearly three in five Americans don't have confidence in the honesty of our elections, a February Gallup poll found. Republicans, Democrats, state officials, grandmothers, first-time voters, the politically engaged, the anti-institutionalists—pretty much the only thing they could agree on was their doubts about the integrity of our democracy.

And that was before the pandemic made everything worse. Now, on top of questions from President Trump about the legitimacy of the election, Russian interference, persistent claims of supposed fraud, and a history of voter suppression, there are all sorts of new worries because of the coronavirus pandemic: long lines, unsafe sites, canceled elections and closed voting locations, absentee ballots faked or claimed to be faked, a collapse of a voting infrastructure that's being haphazardly reassembled on the fly.

Whoever your pick for president is, if the other guy wins, will you really believe it? Will you trust the margin? Will you trust the results of the lower-level races, with fewer voters and less public attention? When it takes hours or even days to get the results (as is already true in many states), will your faith in the system hold?

Many Americans' won't. Democratic officials are responding to that doubt by moving to expand voting as much as they can. Republican officials are responding by trying to shape who gets to vote and how.

"There are a lot of uncertainties in this time," Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state, told me a few weeks ago. "Democracy could be one of them."

[Read: New-voter registration is plummeting]

On May 20, Benson woke up to Donald Trump misinterpreting her decision to mail absentee-ballot applications to everyone in her state. He tweeted that she was mailing absentee ballots (which he later corrected), and that she was doing so "illegally and without authorization," which didn't make sense. Then he claimed that he was going to hold up funding to Michigan, though there's no funding for him to hold up, and that absentee ballots constituted voter fraud, though he'd used one himself earlier this year, to vote in Florida's presidential primary. He issued the same threat to Nevada, then seemed to back off, then struggled in an Oval Office appearance to explain what he was talking about. In the days since, the president, who has repeatedly claimed that the election he won was rigged against him, has tweeted several more accusations of fraud, and on Tuesday in the Rose Garden insisted that people who can't legally vote are going to be sent ballots in California, though they won't be.

That kind of thinking seeps in, even among Trump's opponents. Joe Walsh, the former congressman who briefly ran a primary challenge against Trump, said that he sees a strategy already in motion to "cause unrest and division."

"Just like we lacked the imagination to understand how big this virus was going to be, I worry that we lack the imagination to fully understand what this asshole is capable of doing," Walsh, who's never subtle about his feelings toward the president, told me.

But you don't have to buy into Trump's nonsense about voting by mail to worry about the integrity of the election. Americans are worried about all sorts of things that could affect the outcome in November: that they'll be risking infection to vote in a pandemic; that their absentee ballots won't be received; that others will submit fake absentee ballots; that there will be funny business in the counting process. Officials say there will be insufficient resources to pay for the staff and infrastructure needed to secure and tally the ballots.

And that's just voting by mail. People are also worried that polling places might not be adequately staffed in urban areas; that some voters may have to wait in line for hours, six feet apart, to vote in person; that dirty tricksters could advertise the wrong date for the election or stand, coughing, outside of polling places; that armed protesters will intimidate people trying to vote.

Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, is worried. "I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'm also not for pretending that voter suppression doesn't exist," she told me in an interview for The Ticket recently. "To the extent that there are those who are working to undermine that, they are creating the context in which people cannot have confidence in the election." Tom Fitton, the president of the right-wing Judicial Watch, is worried too. He told me he'd seen pictures of mailboxes overflowing with unsecured absentee ballots in New Jersey, and warned me that a study his group conducted several years ago found millions more registered names than there were eligible voters. "The elections weren't secure before the coronavirus, and now we have politicians of both parties taking advantage of panic to flood the system with bad proposals [to change the system]," Fitton said. "If the election contest is extremely close, you will have partisans of both sides raising doubts, depending on whose ox is being gored."

Elections officials have the Russians to worry about, too. That interference could be indirect, with strategic hacks of private information, or it could escalate to direct hacking of election systems. Other countries will probably try to interfere as well—and maybe even homegrown hackers with their own agenda.

We almost certainly won't know who won the presidency on Election Night. We definitely won't know who won many of the lower-level races. In 2018, a Senate race in Arizona didn't get settled for a week. Some House races were still being decided around Christmas. Inevitably, pockets of margin-shifting votes will pop up late, giving some people the false impression that they're suddenly appearing in convenient spots to change the results; a few House races like this in 2018 generated complaints from Trump and others that something funny must be happening. In 2009, Senator Al Franken wasn't sworn in until July because a court fight went on for months over the close election the previous November in Minnesota.

That's if the systems function correctly. If you haven't started thinking about a potential repeat of the 2000 election, when the margin was small enough and the stakes high enough that the Supreme Court unilaterally ended the vote count in Florida and picked a president, then you're behind many operatives and lawyers who are already gearing up for November.

"Folks on the left and the right generally have different ideas about who is cheating, but a lot of folks believe there's still cheating going on. Something like this, when people in general are more concerned and fears writ large are great, you bet it's going to be a real challenge. We have to get out in front of it," Brian Hughes, a Republican state senator from Texas, told me.

Hughes was leading the push against expanding voting by mail in his state before the pandemic, and continues to now. To explain why he's worried, he cited recent examples of hyper-local elections in Texas in which Democrats were accused of cheating, and the 2018 North Carolina House race in which Republicans used fraudulent mail-in ballots to try to steal the election.

[Read: A throwback way to win a pandemic election]

Democrats in Texas are pursuing a lawsuit to force the state to expand voting by mail. Hughes and others are fighting it. "As long as I can remember, the potential for fraud with mail ballots is higher. You bet that would be a concern. That's why there's going to be a resistance," he told me.

That resistance is strong in many places, including in Minnesota, where Democrats have been pushing for legislation that would establish universal voting by mail.

"The easier we make it for people to vote, the more people will vote. The more people who vote, the more the results reflect the will of the people. And isn't that democracy?" says Nick Frentz, a Democratic state senator in Minnesota who is pushing for an expansion of voting by mail. "If the question is does high voter turnout cut against one party, what kind of argument is that? That doesn't go to the spirit or letter of our Constitution."

The election is in 160 days. That's usually not enough time to pass new laws, let alone build new voting infrastructure, and it's certainly not enough time to test any of these systems before they are implemented. And most state legislatures are now working remotely, slowing them down even more.

Take Georgia, where bowling alleys have reopened, but the governor has delayed a scheduled election. Or think back to what happened in Wisconsin in April, right as the first wave of infections hit: the Republican state legislature refused to reschedule an election, Democrats sued to facilitate voting by mail, the Supreme Court intervened to cut back some of the allowances that had been made, and voters were left standing for hours in the rain wrapped in homemade personal protective equipment. The state assembly's speaker showed up wearing a mask, a gown, and gloves to do interviews about how "incredibly safe" it was to vote.

In the end, the election went better for the Democrats than they had dreamt; they won a state Supreme Court seat that had been considered a lost cause. But afterward, Democratic Representative Mark Pocan was still feeling shaken. I asked him whether he thought that the problems would be fixed by November, and whether he thought he'd have faith in the election then.

He sighed heavily.

"I can't say that yet," he said. "I'm worried."
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedThe AtlanticWhy Americans Might Not Trust the Election Results2020-05-28T05:00:00-04:002020-05-28T13:11:05-04:00Many are already worried about the integrity of November's vote.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-611497
The coronavirus has transformed Joe Biden's campaign, and his search for a running mate. And it has transformed Elizabeth Warren's chances of being picked for the job.

The Massachusetts senator and the former vice president don't have much of a personal relationship. She was determined to run for president by swearing off big donors; the first event of his campaign was a high-dollar fundraiser at the home of a top executive at one of the country's biggest corporations.

But this is now a world where the Dow Jones is staying high while the lines at food banks keep getting longer, a world that will be defined for years by the pandemic and its aftershocks. And the presumptive Democratic nominee needs to think seriously—and be seen as thinking seriously—about what comes next.

Suddenly, the senator with all the ideas about remaking the economy seems enticing to the Biden team and it is looking seriously at picking her, according to people familiar with the campaign's thinking. And suddenly, the senator with all the ideas about remaking the economy is enticed, and thinking seriously about what the job would entail, according to people who described her own thinking on the subject—and according to Warren herself, in two conversations I had with her recently.

"Joe Biden describes this [election] as the battle for the soul of the nation. He's right," Warren told me, over the phone from her home in Boston. "But there's more. It's the battle for the survival of a nation that works for most of its people or only for a thin elite at the top."

Put her on the ticket to generate the excitement Biden needs, people advocating for Warren's selection say, and then prioritize the coronavirus recovery by putting her in charge of it. The candidate who made her whole brand "I have a plan for that" versus a government that seems constantly unprepared—what could be a better contrast?

It's hard to remember how clearheaded Warren was about the pandemic. She put out her first COVID-19 plan at the end of January, a few days before the Iowa caucus. She was going to roll out more ideas for how to handle the approaching crisis a few weeks later, at the February 19 Las Vegas debate and a CNN town hall, but scrapped those plans in favor of going after Mike Bloomberg. Then, in the first week of March, she warned that the coronavirus would require a $400 billion stimulus response (this was as Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump's top economic adviser, was claiming that the pandemic wouldn't "sink the economy"; today, the stimulus is already north of $2 trillion). But that same week, she was beaten so soundly on Super Tuesday that she came in third in her home state. She quit the presidential race two days later.

[Read: What happened to Elizabeth Warren?]

When she headed back to the Senate to work on the COVID-19 relief bills, Warren was looking for a way to influence the process. But she didn't have any sway with Senate Republicans, or much of a relationship with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. So she started making calls—including to Joe Neguse, a not so well known House freshman who was elected by his fellow freshmen as their representative on the leadership team.

She called Neguse's cellphone and left a message with some thoughts on oversight for the money the federal government was shoveling out the door. He called her back and gave her some insight on the negotiations. They continued exchanging messages. That's how she proceeded: making lots of calls, strategically identifying power centers and sources of information. One phone call with Biden in March has since become a regular check-in.

Sometimes, she'd quietly mention that her older brother Don Reed Herring was alone in an Oklahoma intensive-care unit, dying of COVID-19.

As the political conversation shifted to who would be the right partner for the massive undertaking that would now define a Biden presidency, people in and around the Biden campaign thought of Warren. The Simpsons "predicted Donald Trump, and they predicted that Lisa Simpson was going to be left cleaning up the mess," said one Biden donor, referring to a 2000 episode in which Lisa sits in the Oval Office and tells viewers that her administration has "inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump." "If I look for someone to compare Lisa Simpson to, it's Elizabeth Warren," the donor added. "Now there's clamoring for her point of view and her personality being a part of the conversation."

Or take Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware. Warren and Carper aides worked together early in the pandemic on a plan to demand answers about Jared Kushner's shadow coronavirus taskforce and its Ferris wheel of conflicts of interests. But given his own politics and Delaware's industry of banks and tax shelters, Carper acknowledged that his partnership with Warren makes for "an unlikely coupling."

And yet: "If she can put up with me, they can work together," Carper said of a Warren-Biden ticket. Carper has known and served alongside Biden since they were local Delaware politicians in the 1970s. The two men are close. "He could do a lot worse" than Warren, Carper said. "I'm not sure he could do a lot better."

For all his campaign's announcements about a running-mate "search committee," everyone involved assumes Biden's final decision will come down to a conversation with one person: Barack Obama.

So what does Obama think? He's intrigued by the idea of Warren, multiple people who have spoken with him recently told me. Obama and Warren chatted a few times while she was running; she was one of several candidates he called periodically. But the relationship was never that deep or personal, and there was lingering tension from the idea, held by some in his circle, that she wasn't a team player while they were working to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If not for the coronavirus, people familiar with the calls say, they probably would have less to talk about now, but Obama has reached out a few times. He's interested in her ideas for the pandemic response, and he's impressed by how she's selling them. He hasn't made up his mind on the running-mate question, but a tweet at the beginning of April in which he praised Warren's summary of the issues facing lawmakers was meant as a stamp of approval.

"He thinks that her economic message is a strong one, and that there's real resonance right now," one of the people talking with Obama recently told me.

Valerie Jarrett, who's personally and professionally closer than anyone else to the former president, reminded me that she was one of the people who'd pushed Warren to run for the Senate initially, and that she'd always admired her, even though she knew that wasn't a common feeling within the Obama West Wing. "She was fearless—and I respected that fearlessness. Did she break some eggs sometimes? Yeah, but you don't usually hear that about men," Jarrett said. "She's done her homework; she clearly understands how to get her arms around a pandemic—as best one can."

Jarrett has made up her mind on whom she wants Biden to choose. She wouldn't tell me whether she'd landed on Warren, though she did say she had made her decision clear to Biden aides. Then, noting that I shouldn't take this as an endorsement, she added: "She's very competent. At a time like this, I think it's important for the American people to see what competence looks like, to give them confidence that there are people who do care about science and evidence and are humane."

[Ana Marie Cox: I really wanted you to love Warren]

Given how he got here, Biden has his own thoughts about what a running mate and a vice president should be like, and people who have spoken with him say he puts a premium on people who ran for president themselves.

But the political arguments against Warren stack up. First: She's 70, which might make her a risky choice for a 77-year-old nominee who'd be the oldest president in history. If she were picked, I asked Warren, would she be ready to run if Biden declines to in 2024, when she'll be 74? "We're getting waaaaaay ahead of ourselves—and that way has about six A's in it," she said.

Then there's her Senate seat: If Warren were elected vice president, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker would get to pick a temporary replacement, and he's a Republican—though the Democratic majority in the legislature would likely force him to pick a Democrat. Still, there'd be a special election a few months later, and it was this very Senate seat that Democrats managed to lose in a 2011 special election. Democrats obsessing over the Senate have nightmares about the Massachusetts seat costing them the majority.

Those in the very small circle around Biden working on the running-mate question are doing their own trigonometry about how each of the options (including Senators Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar) would cost the campaign supporters—or win new ones. Warren's fans, some Biden aides believe, are the most committed of Democrats, the kind of people who are presidents of their local Democratic clubs. Those people will vote for Biden no matter what, some figure. So would Warren attract a significant number of voters? Would they compensate for the voters she'd drive away, including some of the people otherwise willing to ditch Trump? Some of the voters considering Biden because he's a moderate or because they see him as a safer choice than Trump would see Warren as a polarizing radical. And what about all the voters who would be disappointed that he didn't pick a woman of color? Warren didn't show strength with people of color during her own run. And what about the white working-class voters she never connected with, either in her presidential race or during her two Senate campaigns?

The lesson for many Democrats from 2016 is obvious: If you don't give young people something to be excited about and you don't give progressives a sense of being heard, your candidate will end up hiking in the woods while Donald Trump goes to sleep in the White House. Biden has consistently struggled to attract younger voters and much trust from progressives; with the exception of the few hours leading up to his Super Tuesday romp, he hasn't generated much excitement.

[Read: Elizabeth Warren has momentum. Can she build a movement?]

With the coalition she built, Warren would seem to be able to help build enthusiasm—though, as a number of Democratic operatives pointed out to me, it hurts her case quite a bit that when the time came to vote, younger and progressive voters went overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders.

A group of particularly noisy Sanders supporters have helped inculcate the idea that Warren is a traitor to the left wing of the Democratic Party. They're frustrated that she ran at all, arguing that she divided the left. They blame her for a leak about a private conversation Sanders and Warren had in which, she claimed, he said that a woman couldn't beat Trump. And they're furious that she didn't endorse him after she dropped out—or back in 2016.

"If she'd endorsed Bernie in 2020, she'd have more legitimacy," a former Sanders-campaign official told me. If the goal is to bring the Sanders wing in, "she's not a unifying figure."

But Sanders isn't going to be Biden's running mate. Warren is the option who progressives, by a wide margin, say would make them more likely to vote for Biden, according to Sean McElwee, a liberal pollster with Data for Progress. She also tops the list for Democrats overall; in a May CBS poll, 36 percent of Democrats picked her, compared with 19 percent for Senator Kamala Harris, the second-most-popular choice. Polls of members of the Sanders-inspired groups Our Revolution and MoveOn show Warren as their top choice for Biden's running mate, and it's not even close: 62 percent of Our Revolution members picked Warren in an April email survey, followed by 22 percent for Stacey Abrams, 8 percent for Harris, 5 percent for Klobuchar, and 3 percent for Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Focus groups of younger voters conducted in recent weeks for NextGen America found that she was the name that came up most often as a running-mate choice.

McElwee thinks Warren is probably Biden's best chance to connect with progressives.

"The sentiment among people who supported Bernie who really want to see his agenda implemented, they think Elizabeth Warren is the best way to make that happen," he said. "For the people who supported Bernie for the sake of owning the wine moms, they're probably not happy. But who gives a shit?"

Among those still disappointed and frustrated that Warren didn't endorse Sanders is Sanders himself. Several people who have spoken with him told me he would have backed her if she'd been the one to emerge against Biden at the end of the primaries, and if she had backed him, he might be pushing for her in the conversations he's had with Biden about building unity. But he's not, at least so far.

Representative Ro Khanna of California, who was a national co-chair of Sanders's campaign, is more enthusiastic about the prospect of a Warren vice presidency. "It's a slam dunk for progressives that she should be vice president," he told me. As for the reservations other Sanders supporters have, "There would be a lot of people who would come [based] on the policy. Warren's policies overlap 90 percent."

[Read: What Biden learned the last time the world stopped]

Warren tends to know what she wants to say, and tends to say it directly. But when I asked her what she'd tell people who claim that what happened with Sanders proves she's not a true progressive, she paused to think about her answer. "I believe it was important that Bernie had the space he needed to make the decision about his campaign," she said, choosing each word carefully. As for any questions about where she stands, "I want to see our government move in a more progressive direction because I believe that's where America is and it's what will help us build a better future."

The current economic collapse is different from the last one—it was produced by an outside shock, not the system imploding on itself. But to Warren, that's like saying a heart attack brought on by stress didn't have anything to do with all the cheeseburgers and cigarettes. "For decades, resiliency has been squeezed out of our economic system, and that's true at the individual family level and true at the global corporate level," she told me. "When you squeeze out that resiliency, when the system tightens up, it produces short-term profits for investors and executives, but it means that when something goes wrong, it breaks hard. This recovery will take years—even with massive federal intervention. And without massive federal intervention, it will take even longer."

Warren ran around Iowa and New Hampshire talking "big, structural change," but when I asked her if she's thinking about radical or revolutionary change now, she said the world looks a little different when half of all small businesses might be closing and tens of millions of people don't know when they'll be able to pay rent again. "I think of it as organic change," she said. "It's change that grows out of our circumstances."

Warren is coming at the situation, as always, like a law professor, looking for a little crack in which she can build a whole new structure. Her Essential Workers Bill of Rights would establish basic workplace rules along with securing health care, whistleblower protections, and other rights. It started with another strategic call, to Khanna, whose progressive politics in a Silicon Valley district has made him a point person on ideas for tackling the enormous divide between the people who live in houses with olive groves next to their tennis courts and people who have been left out of the new economy entirely. "'How is that these billion-dollar companies have been so mismanaged that they can't make payroll?'" Khanna remembers her saying.

"If we can make this change for essential workers, then it opens the door to making change for all workers," Warren told me. "Why should any worker be in an unsafe workplace? Why should any worker not have whistleblower protection? Why should any worker have to show up at work where they could get sick and not have paid sick leave and medical coverage? Think about how our world changes around that. And that all comes from where we are today—the fact that we've lost a brother, a grandma, a friend." Her voice cracked on the word brother.

Ironically, what may be the biggest obstacle between Warren and a chance to change how the economy works is her history of doing just that. Several of the people who have Biden's ear are former Obama aides who felt like Warren was pursuing her own agenda during her days setting up the CFPB, or during the days when she was using her Senate perch for moves like torpedoing a pick for an undersecretary of the Treasury because of his Wall Street background. Some key people around Biden are on edge about the thought of having to constantly be looking over at the vice president's office, wondering what she's working on.

Warren has spoken privately about feeling chastened by the 2020 primaries. "She put it all out there. She knows she lost. She knows Biden won," someone close to Warren told me. "She knows we're in a time of crisis, and her priority moving forward is helping make him successful."

[Read: The story Elizabeth Warren isn't telling]

When I asked Warren about the ex-Obama aides' misgivings, she gave me a long answer that started with: "I'm a team player. I want to get things done." She ticked through her work setting up the CFPB as a success for Americans overall and for the Obama administration—and said that as a senator, she was doing her constitutional duty in a separate branch of government. "I know that can sometimes be a bumpy relationship," she said. "That is my job." She ended by repeating: "I am a team player because I want to get things done."

Warren couldn't go to her brother's funeral after he died in April. She couldn't do much beyond cry by herself, 1,600 miles away in Boston, holding the phone that she'd been calling Don on every day, twice a day, to check in. "To lose someone when you have to wonder what were their last days like? Were they afraid? Were they cold? Were they lonely? That is a kind of grief that is new to all of us. My brothers won't get over this. They just won't. None of us will."

About 36 hours after Don died, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts told me, Warren was on a Zoom call with her, Khanna, and Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico, strategizing about the Essential Workers Bill of Rights. Her brother didn't come up directly, though Pressley, who's also been working with her on racial-data collection, said he was clearly on her mind.

"She knows that her loss, that she deeply feels, is sad and tragic—but that there are millions of families that are grappling with that same loss," Pressley said. "Even when she deeply feels something, she's projecting that out."

It's a crass but real thought that has come up among some Democratic operatives in the past two weeks: Imagine Warren debating Mike Pence. The vice-presidential debate is currently scheduled for October 7, at which point it's possible that 200,000 or more Americans will have died of COVID-19. She would be in the position to look at the vice president, who was put in charge of the coronavirus response, and talk to him about families like hers that will never be whole again.

Warren told me about a call she received from Biden the morning after her brother died. Their conversation was "one person who'd lost loved ones trying to console another person who just lost her beloved brother," she said.

Connections formed in grief tend to stay with Biden. This one has certainly stayed with Warren.

After all their other phone calls, about everything from coronavirus testing to unemployment insurance, I asked Warren whether Biden now sees economic policy the way she does. Yes, she said, but that's only part of it.

Then she took a practice swing at the kind of line that you will hear coming out of whomever Biden picks, but that now means something different, and personal, to her: "We need a president with empathy, a president who understands that people in our families are sick and dying, a president who cares about the loss of every single person in this country. That's what Donald Trump can't manage. And that's what Joe Biden feels in his bones."
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedEthan Miller / Barcroft Media / Getty / The AtlanticIt Really Could Be Warren2020-05-15T05:00:00-04:002020-05-15T17:41:14-04:00After her swing and miss at the presidency, the Massachusetts senator is making a case for herself as Joe Biden's vice president.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-611611
Last Saturday afternoon, I drove out to a well-kept Washington suburb, where the coronavirus had closed the local farm stand but flower planters were on display outside the hardware store. Down the road is a modest brick house with a silver Chrysler in the driveway, New York plates, with a novelty THE BRONX license plate propped up in the back window.

Inside was Eliot Engel, the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He represents the Bronx and Westchester, including the town of New Rochelle, which was the epicenter of the original outbreak in New York.

A member of Congress since 1989, Engel is facing his first serious primary challenge in years, in a district next door to the one where Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated another longtime incumbent in a primary two years ago. Yet Engel hasn't been in his district since at least the end of March, according to his communications director, Bryant Daniels. The congressman himself told me that he has been in New York, after I covered my nose and mouth and rang his doorbell in Potomac, Maryland.

"I'm in both places," Engel said.

"You are?" I asked.

"I sure am," he said.

"You've been quarantined in both places?"

"Sure have."

Daniels later told me, "He's remained in Washington since passage of the CARES Act." The CARES Act passed on March 27. When I pressed for when Engel was last in the district, Daniels stopped responding.

Few congressional districts in America have seen more COVID-19 infections and deaths than Engel's, and outside of Washington State, no district has been dealing with the response for as long—Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on March 3 that a lawyer who lived in the suburbs of New Rochelle had become the state's first recorded case, and by then, the man was in a medically induced coma. A hotspot was declared. A containment zone was set up. Engel was not there.

The House has been in session for only a few hours since the pandemic hit—for the CARES Act vote on March 27, and another vote on April 23. It is expected to come back into session soon, though exactly when is not clear. And although many Americans are avoiding travel during the pandemic for health reasons, most members of Congress have been making brief visits to Washington—whether that has involved driving for hundreds of miles, or taking flights in face masks. Grace Meng, who represents a nearby district in Queens, told me in an interview for The Ticket in March that she'd reluctantly flown back and forth to Washington on the same day to vote on the last COVID-19 relief bill. Lawmakers shuttle back and forth between their districts and D.C. because they have responsibilities in both places—and because they know that during campaign season, residency issues can become liabilities. Even the powerhouse Republican Senator Richard Lugar lost his 2012 primary after news broke that he no longer had a home in Indiana.

[Read: Does Chuck Schumer have an AOC problem?]

So most of Engel's House colleagues have spent most of their time living among their constituents, experiencing the panic and confusion and boredom alongside the people they represent. Many of them, like other elected officials around the country, have transformed their offices into community help centers, and thrown themselves into makeshift social-work efforts. That includes several who are close in age to Engel, who is 73, and is therefore considered high-risk.

"We have done food giveaways, sanitizer giveaways, mask giveaways. We have been trying to deal with the needs of our community quite a bit. It's been good, as far as trying to help our constituents," says Michael Benedetto, a 72-year-old state assemblyman who represents part of Engel's district and has endorsed him for reelection. When I asked Benedetto about Engel's presence, he told me, "I can't say I've seen the congressman. I don't keep track of when I see all my representatives. When we see them, we see them."

Last week, Engel's office advertised that he would be part of two such events. He wasn't. I asked Engel about one notice I'd seen on his campaign's Twitter account: an announcement that "Congressman Engel will be joining" other officials for a face-mask giveaway at the city hall in Mount Vernon, New York, on the afternoon of May 8, the day before I showed up at his door.

"Which event?" he asked.

"They were handing out face masks in the district," I said.

"I was part of that," he said.

"But you weren't there?" I said.

"I was not there, no," he said.

Daniels suggested to me that other committee chairs stayed in D.C. after the CARES Act passed. But I checked, and Engel is the only committee chair in the New York delegation who has remained in Washington the entire time since that vote. Jerry Nadler, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, has been in his district, in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Carolyn Maloney, who chairs the Oversight Committee, has been in her district, in Manhattan and Queens. Nydia Velazquez, who chairs the Small Business Committee, has been in her Brooklyn district—and after recovering from COVID-19 herself, delivered personal protective equipment to others. Nita Lowey, who represents a district next to Engel's and chairs the Appropriations Committee, has been in Westchester and Rockland Counties. Other members of the New York delegation who are not chairs have been back home as well, doing their committee work remotely and abiding by social-distancing rules.

Engel has four primary challengers. The one who's attracted the most national attention, a local middle-school principal named Jamaal Bowman, has been appearing at some events in the district and calling in to others via videoconference, as he and other candidates across the state try to wage campaigns ahead of the June 23 vote.

Several local elected officials in New York privately expressed surprise that Engel has not been in the district.

[Read: Deep clean, then clean again]

Engel and his staff say that his reasons for staying in Potomac are all work-related. Daniels defended his decision to stay in the Maryland home where he has long spent most of his time—for years, he identified it as his "primary residence" for tax purposes, until the state told him to stop in 2013.

"Being in Washington," Daniels told me, "also allows him to have access to classified facilities and sign subpoenas, which require his actual signature." He said that the notices advertising Engel's participation in events were wrong, and he hadn't been scheduled to attend.

"There have been a lot of public Teams/Zoom/conference calls in addition to teleconferences with other elected officials, hospital workers, union members, etc. It's hard to list them all," Daniels said in an email. He added in a subsequent message, "There are shelter in place orders across the east coast; everyone should be doing what they can to stay indoors. Do you find it problematic that the chairman is not out taking photo-ops during a global pandemic?"

"The work being done on behalf of his constituents is what counts and to that end Mr. Engel has been very effective," Daniels said, noting that staff members were helping "hundreds of people with [Paycheck Protection Program] applications, stimulus checks, and unemployment benefits."

State Senator Jamaal Bailey, whose district also overlaps with the congressman's, tweeted last week that he had been "joined by" Engel at a food giveaway in New York's Co-Op City. When I pointed out that in fact Engel had not joined him, Bailey told me that he meant some of the congressman's aides had been there, and that he hadn't seen Engel in person since the pandemic hit. (Engel's office did not respond when I asked why he felt comfortable sending staff out to events that he didn't attend himself.)

Bailey said he appreciated the help that Engel has been providing remotely in helping understand what kind of resources are available from the federal government.

It wouldn't make a difference to have the congressman there in person? I asked.

"I can't say it doesn't make a difference," Bailey said, "but he's able to do his work on a Zoom, telephonically, where we're in a new age."
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedJ. Scott Applewhite / APWhy This Democrat Won't Go Home2020-05-14T05:00:00-04:002020-05-14T15:27:16-04:00Where should a member of Congress be right now?tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-610276
You'd have to be paying pretty close attention to know that one of Joe Biden's top advisers is the person who spearheaded America's response to the last major public-health crisis and ran the last major economic recovery.

The Democrats' presumptive presidential nominee complains about being stuck in his basement. Well before he faced Tara Reade's allegations that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s (which he denies), Biden supporters all over the country were anxiously texting and emailing each other, wondering why he's not taking on Donald Trump more directly over the pandemic. Even now, Ron Klain, Biden's former chief of staff and Barack Obama's former Ebola czar, remains on the outside.

Klain's main integration into Biden's public campaign strategy was via a video ripping into the Trump administration's initial response to the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of people watched. That was March 21. He appeared as Biden's first guest on the campaign's podcast. That was March 29.

A lot has happened since. Even as he has stayed close with Biden (so much so that some of Biden's other top advisers grumble occasionally about his direct line to the candidate) and been all over TV (so much so that some of those same aides also grumble about how often they see him on camera), there hasn't been anything official from Klain since that podcast appearance in March.

"You can't prove the counterfactual. But Ron Klain is a lot of the reason why we didn't have an Ebola epidemic here," Valerie Jarrett, Obama's closest adviser, told me. She recalled being impressed by the morning briefings he ran in the White House at the height of that panic, in 2014. "There is nobody I can imagine who's better situated to advise Vice President Biden on COVID-19 right now than Ron Klain."

Some people on the outside of the campaign are confused about why Biden isn't making more use of Klain. But Klain told me that he never wanted to be the shadow czar.

"I don't consider myself the shadow anything," he said. "I'm trying to offer my opinions about what it would take to do this better, based on my experience of having done it." He argued that governors around the country are the real shadow coronavirus czars, running the day-to-day response all day, every day, though he noted that, like Biden, several have been checking in with him. "I'm opining. Whatever that's worth, it's worth. I don't hold this out as any great task."

[Read: What exactly does a government 'czar' do?]

It's worth a lot, says Jake Sullivan, another outside Biden adviser, who has been the regular quarterback of the campaign's strategy on the pandemic. "He's the ultimate resource to the campaign for gut checks, for strategic guidance, for key moments, for briefing the VP before he does a town hall, and for being the person who we all look to for what to say on the critical decisions," Sullivan told me. Klain tells Biden and his aides where he thinks the crisis is headed next, and how he thinks the candidate needs to get ahead of it.

Of course, there is an actual shadow coronavirus czar, and he's working in the White House, crowdsourcing early advice from his brother's father-in-law, handing out government contracts to friends and campaign donors. Compare Klain to Jared Kushner, and the differences stack up: one man's main qualifications are being born into a rich family, then marrying into another. The other man's qualifications are being the former chief of staff to two vice presidents (Klain worked for Al Gore before Biden). Kushner went to law school after his family leased a building and donated a pile of cash to NYU, then spent a few years sinking millions into the most expensive real-estate deal in American history and a failed newspaper revival. Klain made his way from Supreme Court clerk to Senate Judiciary Committee counsel, shepherded Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg through her confirmation hearings, and worked in top positions in Congress and the White House.

Kushner, who declared more than 10,000 American deaths ago that the White House's response to the pandemic is "a great success story," would've been hard-pressed to land a job in any White House not run by his father-in-law; Klain is exactly the kind of person who'd land a job in the White House under any Democratic president.

When Obama picked Klain as his Ebola czar in 2014, it wasn't because he was a doctor or knew much about public health, but because he knew how government works. "There was a little skepticism from some corners at the selection of Ron to fulfill this function," Obama would say later, "but, the background noise notwithstanding, I chose Ron for a reason: I have known him to be nothing less than an effective, dedicated, and tireless manager and leader." Klain was in and out in six months, which was enough time for America to go from a full cable-news freak-out to Obama giving a nurse who'd gotten infected a hug in the Oval Office. Just one person, a Liberian who'd traveled to Texas, died in the United States during the outbreak. "He took on a challenge that many called insurmountable, and, in leading the team responsible for the tremendous progress, helped remind the world what makes America so exceptional," Obama said at the time. On his way out, Klain recommended the creation of a pandemic-response office within the National Security Council—the office the Trump White House later disbanded.

[Ronald Klain: Coronavirus is coming—and Trump isn't ready]

Klain has kept his day jobs, teaching what became an online class for Harvard Law School, and as the executive vice president and general counsel at Revolution, an investment firm for digital start-ups. He started his own podcast. (Epidemic, co-hosted with Dr. Celine Gounder, is up to 11 episodes.) And he's been running his own personal rapid-response operation, tweeting his frustration with Trump and every Trump ally who's claimed that no one could have seen the pandemic coming by citing news report after news report of … people seeing it coming. He's up to about 250 examples.

This is a comfortable space for him. He'd been such a frequent guest on cable over the past few years that he inspired a fan account, @Klainiac, by a Boston-based woman named Lisa Allen, who has never met him but uses a big-chinned caricature of him as her avatar. She told me she "was simply smitten by his smarts and biting wit at a time when I was thinking of starting a Twitter account."

He still isn't part of Biden's daily conference calls with staff or with his coronavirus advisers. But he remains one of the most important voices in Biden's ear, as he's been for decades. (In 2015, when he signed up early to run Hillary Clinton's debate prep, some of her campaign aides would cite Klain's involvement as proof that Biden was never serious about running against her. Other Biden loyalists were upset to see him leave the boss in that period of intense emotions and political frenzy.)

Klain does not tend to watch the president's briefings or other appearances, but he keeps up with what happens in them. He's not impressed. He's also tracking how his comments about the response have made him a target of both the president's fans on social media and the Republican National Committee. He's not impressed with what they've produced either. "They should worry a lot more about getting [the pandemic response] right than trying to make attack videos or whatever they're doing," Klain told me.

But Jason Miller, the former Trump-campaign communications director who's hosting his own pandemic podcast with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, told me he thinks Biden is lucky to have Klain. "He's a substantial player and he's well respected, even if we're coming at things from a different point of view." To Miller, Klain has been providing guidance when Biden hasn't been able to. "Klain is the one who has worked in the pandemic space and who's viewed as being a steady policy hand. He's trying to do everything he can do." Although Miller thinks Biden is lucky to have Klain around, he also thinks this is a case of the adviser accentuating what he says are the candidate's own shortcomings. "Ron Klain isn't on the ballot running for president. Joe Biden is."

Like the experienced aide that he is, Klain did his best to keep pulling our conversation back to the candidate, not himself. When I said that the pandemic seems to accentuate Biden's core pitch for a return to normalcy—because who wouldn't, at this point, be ready to turn back the clock to a time before face masks and constant panic?—Klain came back at me with one of the campaign's favorite talking points: No, Biden has always been focused on building a better future.

[Read: What Biden learned the last time the world stopped]

He reminisced about his own time in the Situation Room with Anthony Fauci, but stayed relatively diplomatic about Kushner. "The track record of some of the things he's done is questionable," Klain, who has never met Kushner, observed. He argued that Americans should pay less attention to the president's son-in-law as a person and more attention to what he said Kushner represents: political influence on the country's pandemic response. To the extent that Kushner is in control, Klain said, "the question is, how does he see the task? How has he been empowered to do the task?" He added, "One thing I understood from day one was I didn't try to tell Tony Fauci how to run clinical trials. I didn't try to use it to play politics. I used my authority to try to coordinate the various agencies of the federal executive branch, and our work with state and local government and our work with the Hill, and our work with our foreign partners, in the effort in a very straightforward way."

Kushner, in a rare television appearance, went on Fox News last week to say America is now on "the other side of the medical aspect of this," and that the White House's response is "a great success story." He made new claims about testing capacity that didn't match the facts. About 10,000 more Americans have died since then, on top of the 60,000 or so who had died already.

Biden has said he would have Klain in charge of the pandemic response—though no one knows what the pandemic, or the response, will look like in January. Long before the coronavirus, Klain was on the short list to be Biden's White House chief of staff. Klain told me he wouldn't speculate on what kind of role he'd want in Biden's administration. There's still a campaign to run, he said. A Biden spokesperson, meanwhile, declined to comment when asked why Klain hasn't been put in an official role, either on the campaign overall or since the coronavirus arrived.

Klain has no title. He never went to the campaign headquarters in Philadelphia. Klain's main role on the campaign had been running debate strategy—he's Democrats' most seasoned debate sensei, in the prep room for every Democratic nominee since Gore, and close enough with Biden that he was in the green room with the candidate each time before he walked out on stage in the primary showdowns. He's starting to formulate thoughts for the fall, though for now it's not even clear whether the two candidates will be able to be in the same studio for a debate, or whether Trump will find some reason to avoid participating. Regardless of the circumstances, the main point, Klain said, will be to contrast the two men as leaders, and as people—which is why he said he's one of the advisers comfortable with the quieter approach the candidate has been taking over the past two months. Keeping with the Biden campaign's thinking from the start, Klain said that there's a difference between online griping and reality—even now, when reality for a lot of people means sitting at home and griping online.

"The president has the podium and he certainly is much more visible than any other political figure. But the Twitter world is a little obsessed with the day-to-day measurement of this," Klain said. "What seems right to me is that the American people are forming a clear impression of the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump … Joe Biden may have a smaller megaphone right now, but I still think he's being heard."
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedPaul Morigi / Getty / Katie Martin / The AtlanticJoe Biden's Invisible Pandemic Expert2020-05-07T06:00:00-04:002020-05-07T11:59:48-04:00Ron Klain was a chief of staff to two vice presidents before leading the Obama administration's response to Ebola. Why isn't he a bigger figure in Biden's campaign?tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-610936
Updated at 10:30 a.m. ET on May 4, 2020.

Phil Murphy's cellphone rang and rang. He ignored the first two calls. Then an aide told the New Jersey governor that the caller had tried to reach him through his family. It was President Donald Trump. Murphy had to take it.

The coronavirus pandemic has turned many of America's governors into national figures. Andrew Cuomo's daily group-therapy sessions have become must-watch TV. Gavin Newsom's performance has persuaded even East Coast media to pay attention to California. Florida's Ron DeSantis took a hands-off approach in the first weeks of the outbreak, and has since struggled to show that he has the situation in his state under control. Gretchen Whitmer's handling of Michigan's crisis has prompted talk that she could become Joe Biden's running mate. Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has led an effective, depoliticized response that's won praise from members of both parties.

Then there's Murphy. New Jersey has the second-highest COVID-19 death toll in the United States, and as Murphy pointed out this week, the virus has killed more people from the state than were lost in World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, both Gulf Wars, the Afghan War, the Iraq War, Superstorm Sandy, and the September 11 attacks—combined.* But despite being a liberal Democrat who has for years railed against Trump, Murphy has kept both a lower profile and a better relationship with the White House than his neighbor in Albany has.

Murphy found out about New Jersey's first confirmed case of the virus on March 4, when he was in the hospital himself, lying in bed in the recovery room after having a tumor removed from his kidney—so he's high risk. Before he was governor, he made enough of a fortune working at Goldman Sachs to self-fund his 2017 campaign, and still has friends throughout the finance world either urging him to reopen the economy or warning him to keep people sheltering in place. He's a former finance chair of the Democratic National Committee, and is feeling stressed about bringing people together for a delayed convention in August—or possibly canceling the event. And he's a former ambassador to Germany, so he thinks often about the world order and how much it's changing.

Murphy's assessment of America's response so far: "I mean, we just were not ready. I'm not sure I understand all the reasons why we weren't ready, but I know we weren't ready."

We spoke for the latest episode of The Ticket podcast:

Subscribe to The Ticket: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts (How to Listen)

This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Edward-Isaac Dovere: You're high risk for infection. How does that perspective inform your thinking?

Phil Murphy: Each day we read out a few of the obituaries and memorialize some of the lives lost, [so] that it never becomes just a question of numbers, that it's always about specific human beings and lives lived. So I don't think it ever would have been abstract, but boy, I'll tell you, having lived through a challenging health crisis myself and now going through this, it certainly made it even more real and more tangible than it otherwise would have been. It's in the back of your mind. I don't dwell on it. It's just a reality that I accept.

Dovere: There have been protesters in New Jersey and other states demanding that the governments reopen businesses. What would you say to them, and others who say it's time to reopen?

Murphy: I appreciate folks' right to protest. I appreciate the fact that they may be fed up with cabin fever, all of that. Who doesn't want to get the economy back on its feet? We've been crushed with unemployment. Small businesses getting crushed completely. But we have to continue to make decisions based on the data, based on the science, based on the facts. We have to make sure we don't jump the gun and that we don't transpose the steps. It's health-care recovery first, then it's the economic recovery.

Dovere: You're a Democrat who's managed to get along with the president through this. How?

Murphy: I've spent an inordinate amount of time, as you can imagine, with the White House and a fair amount of time with the president himself. New Jersey is—with New York and Florida—one of the three states he knows the best. He's got family. He's got investments. He's got a place where he spends a lot of his warm-weather weekends in spring and summer. I've gone through painstakingly with the president, with the vice president, with their teams, exactly what the toll has been on our state, how it has unfolded. At least here, I believe he understands that we're not remotely near the end zone.

It's very much "We need you, Mr. President; can I get your help with the Army Corps?" A couple of weeks ago, ventilators. We talk about "How's it look out there?" Hospitalizations. "What are you seeing?" He knows that I've had health issues, so to his credit, he will almost every time ask me how I'm feeling, which obviously I'm grateful for.

The vice president is also very much involved in a lot of the very specific conversations. I would remind folks to distinguish between fact-based, getting installments of what we need, versus having everything we need. Those are two different realities. But the fact of the matter is, there's no call we've placed that has gone unanswered. Even if we don't like the answer, we get an answer.

Dovere: Why do you think that's so different from how the president acts in the briefings?

Murphy: I don't watch the briefings. … I watch news shows at night, and I watch highlights. I'm not denying that I know they exist. I don't have those sorts of conversations [like happens in the briefings] privately. Maybe they will happen, but they have not happened.

Dovere: When you see America leading the world in infections and deaths, what does that tell you?

Murphy: We weren't prepared as a country, as a testing matter. And we're going to need to do a 9/11 Commission-like postmortem on where we were, where we are, where we need to be. But a lot of the stuff that we're not going to be agreeing on is outside of the purview of the fact that the house is on fire right now. And I need help with the fire brigade.

[Read: What will happen when red states need help?]

Dovere: The White House has suggested that state aid might be tied to forcing states to reopen. What would that mean for your state?

Murphy: I want to open. I'll be the happiest guy in America, never mind New Jersey, when we open. But here's the problem with the state aid: We've got expenses which are through the roof. Revenues that have fallen off a cliff. And we're helping everybody from "You lost your job" to "You're in the hospital" to "You're a small business and you're going up on the rocks." I don't know that folks really think this through right now, but in particular, for folks who are on the fiscal year that we're on—we're [in] a mid-year, mid-calendar fiscal year, and a lot of states are—if we don't get state aid in big numbers, we'll have an Armageddon in terms of services that we can't provide, layoffs that will be widespread. It will bring us no joy to do any of that. But we'll have no choice. We can't print money. I've got a constitutional requirement to balance the budget. The state aid is desperately needed.

Dovere: If the president calls again and tells you he wants you to open the state, what do you tell him?

Murphy: So far that conversation has been respectful of the realities in New Jersey. It has not been associated with any financial aid coming at us out of Congress or elsewhere. … If we're putting lives explicitly at risk, I can't hit the "go" button. And nobody's told me to do that, by the way. And I hope it stays that way.

Dovere: If you were in your old life at Goldman Sachs, how would you be thinking about investment right now?

Murphy: Listen, I'm not going to give folks investment advice. First of all, I'd be working from home, which I'm not at the moment. … I'm not just saying this to be positive. Anybody looks at equities over multi-decade periods. In other words, you're not trying to buy or sell to make money quote-unquote this week or today. But you're looking at what life looks like over a long period of time. And you make that graph on as long-fused a timetable as possible. You're going to find that you were smart to hold equities. That's just always the case. And I know that's a long-term reality. I'm not suggesting I've got a good answer for you what you do from this week to the next. But we are going to get through this. It's just the wild cards here are truly wild cards. I just don't know when.

Dovere: What do you think an economic recovery here will look like?

Murphy: A hurricane, as bad as it is—and God knows we've paid a big price in New Jersey for things like Superstorm Sandy and other natural disasters—but they come, they go, you go through a rebuilding process. You try to get folks back on their feet. This is more complicated. This is a profound moment in our history as a nation. I mean, we just were not ready. I'm not sure I understand all the reasons why we weren't ready, but I know we weren't ready.

Dovere: You're a former Democratic National Committee finance chair. You've been to a lot of conventions. Should the convention happen this summer?

Murphy: It was postponed. Maybe that was a good interim step. You know, we've done some interim steps like that when you don't have all the facts that you want to have. I do look at the adjacencies, though. There aren't a lot of things with mass gatherings associated with them in the summer that have not been postponed. Baseball may be played. I hope it is played, but they've talked about even baseball being played with no fans. … I hope we're in a place where, based on the facts, the science, the data, that they can go ahead.

Dovere: There are people who are scared about what the future holds, given what we've seen the last two months. Are you?

Murphy: I am not scared. I would not use that word. And by the way, let's not forget that this is the United States of America. We truly are an exceptional nation. And when we seem to be up against it—forget how we got up against it—we have, time and time and time again, beaten back and found our way through to victory, whatever that may mean. I'm an optimist at the end of the day for, notwithstanding the toll, which is enormous in our state. Multiple wars added together, multiple 9/11s added together. So it is daunting. But I believe with all my heart, we get through this. What I can't tell you is when. I know we'll have casualties; we've already had thousands, and we'll have more. Sadly, I can't tell you when we, at the end of the day, "win." And it could be a lot longer than any of us want. But we will get through this. And we have no choice but to fight. And we will fight on, period. And we'll fight until we win it.

* A previous version of this story misstated that Governor Phil Murphy compared the number of coronavirus deaths in New Jersey to the number of residents killed during World War II.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedRon Antonelli / Bloomberg / GettyHow New Jersey's Governor Figured Out Trump2020-05-01T09:26:41-04:002020-05-04T11:21:10-04:00Phil Murphy discusses the state's efforts to mitigate its coronavirus infections and lower its death rate, the second-highest in the country.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-610747
We're going to get through this, the politicians say. We'll be stronger than ever, better than ever.

Except maybe we won't. More than 50,000 Americans are already dead of the coronavirus. That sinking feeling you've probably had at some point during the past few weeks? Andrew Yang's had that feeling for a while. He still sees the world through his cut-the-crap fatalism. ("We have to deal with the world as it is," he told me last summer, when the world didn't look this bad). His main mode is a sad but, to him, honest sense that the world isn't getting better right now, and that everyone needs to start dealing with the consequences. This belief was at the core of his weirdly successful presidential campaign.

Now, after a month and a half spent holed up in his house with his wife and two sons, Yang's hair has gotten floppy. He's watched people who need food wait on relief checks while major corporations score bailouts. He's been reading stories of people who feel the economy crashing on them, who feel like no one cares. He thinks about his mother and his wife's parents, and how they can't be with their grandchildren.

"It's inhuman," Yang told me. He's gotten dirty looks walking around in stores, he believes, because of racism sparked by the "Chinese virus" talk. He has struggled with how to respond. He's one of the most prominent Asian Americans in politics, and came under fire for arguing that the appropriate response is for Asian Americans to be more explicit in showing off their patriotism.

We spoke for an episode of The Ticket podcast.

Subscribe to The Ticket: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts (How to Listen)

Yang's key policy proposal—a universal basic income of $1,000 a month—went from an idea he was laughed at for pitching to one backed by a list of people that includes Pope Francis and President Donald Trump. But that doesn't give him much pleasure. I asked him whether he feels as if he won the presidential race in a way. "It's impossible to feel like a winner when people are suffering so much," he told me. He's glad that his campaign advanced the idea, but he's shocked by how quickly the situation became desperate. He can easily envision how more optimistic politicians could mess up the future by not realizing how bad things have gotten.

[Read: The pull of Andrew Yang's pessimism]

"One of the misconceptions that people have is that history is like a pendulum, and that if we go too far in one direction, we'll go the other direction—where because right now we're so isolated, we're going to come out of this more unified and together, and we'll be able to solve the biggest problems that have been bearing down on us, like climate change, like a dehumanizing economy, like [a] polarized political system," Yang told me. "That's not the way it works, really. We're being tested right now. And the evolution or progress is going to be a fight … just like it was before this crisis. And in some ways, the forces on both sides, I believe, are going to be stronger, because to me, dysfunction is one of the demons that we've been struggling with for years, where we have this epidemic of insecurity that is destroying people's lives and families and communities. But it's also destroyed any sensible cohesion or sense of common purpose. And this crisis has exacerbated that disintegration in many ways."

"There is," Yang said, "a very real chance that we make mistakes on the way out" of the crisis.

After Yang dropped out of the presidential race, he started fundraising to create his own universal basic income pilot program. He partnered with a group in the Bronx to work with 1,000 families in need. The program was overwhelmed by the demand, and adapted to add microloans to the work. Then the coronavirus hit. Even as he pursued new efforts to raise more money, there was still nowhere near enough coming in and far too many stories of people who couldn't buy food for him to keep to his original plan.

"We just started giving out $20 and sending nice messages saying like, 'Look, we can't do everything we want, but here's $20.' And we started doing that in part because when we did that little bit, people expressed just how grateful they were that anyone actually is trying to help them," Yang told me. "There's such a sense of isolation and hopelessness and despair among many Americans right now that even just getting 20 bucks via PayPal, and like, 'You'll be all right and we care about you,' actually seemed to really help people in a very meaningful way."

So although members of Congress may feel pleased with themselves for passing three relief bills, the ad hoc system they created along the way is making the crisis of divided, dysfunctional politics worse, Yang said. People he's heard from "do not think that our institutions are going to help them. They filed for unemployment and have not heard back. They have called day after day and just never gotten through. They've filed for a [tax] refund, but it went to their preparer ... or it got sent to an old address," he said. "There is this sense that … help is on this pedestal, and they're meant to jump up and try and get it."

[Read: What if Andrew Yang was right?]

That feeling of being left out was evident in the people who came to be known as the Yang Gang. Yang's challenge to the "morning in America" style of politics probably got the most exposure in a Democratic presidential-primary debate last July, when he said that his response to climate change would be to accept that it's here and tell coastal residents they need to move to higher ground. But most of his pessimism derives from a warning that ever-increasing automation will devastate many Americans' lives.

"We're experiencing 10 years' worth of transformation of our economy in 10 weeks. Because if you're a transportation company or a grocery store or a big company, you're scaling up your investments in robots and technology, because they don't get sick," Yang said. "What I was concerned about is coming true before my eyes in a compressed time frame. And that's very, very concerning."

Yang wants to do more to help. He's not sure how, though. He's thinking of writing another book (his previous two were already pretty dark). He'll launch a podcast on Monday, Yang Speaks, and says it's going to be part of his own search for answers and new ideas. He'll also be a guest on Joe Biden's podcast this week.

With all that has happened in the past few weeks, I asked him, does he see a future in politics and government now, or has this shown him that it's better to be on the outside?

"Does government have massive problems? Yes, it does. Is government necessary to solve the problems we're dealing with right now? Yes, it is. And you know, both those things are true. So it's very difficult," Yang said. For a nonpolitician, I told him, that's a very politician-type answer. He laughed. "I'm learning," he said.
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedDavid WilliamsThe Pessimism of Andrew Yang's Post-pandemic Politics2020-04-27T10:30:14-04:002020-05-01T15:46:15-04:00The former tech executive made a mark on the presidential campaign with his less-than-rosy view of the country's future, and he still thinks it's exactly what Americans need to hear.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-610441

Peyton Fulford / Guardian / eyevine / Redux

Stacey Abrams has a theory about how Joe Biden can beat Donald Trump: Pick her as his running mate.

"We have to win the election. And I would point out that I ran the most successful campaign to engage the communities we need to build the broadest coalition necessary in 2020, because what we are going to see on the ground is that this is going to be a campaign unlike anything that's been run before," Abrams told me.

The voting-accessibility advocate and former Georgia House minority leader called in to The Ticket from self-isolation in Atlanta. Listen to our full conversation here:

Subscribe to The Ticket: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts (How to Listen)

Abrams pointed to her run for governor of Georgia two years ago: "If you look at what we were able to accomplish in Georgia, the growth of the numbers and the composition of the voters, I would put my capacity to win an election as the VP running mate alongside anyone's."

This is an unusually direct statement from an aspiring vice-presidential pick.

Abrams would be an unusual pick for such a big promotion, especially in the new coronavirus era, when every big job in government just got bigger. So she's running an unusual campaign—strategic interviews with Pod Save America and Elle; fans talking her up in a New York Times op-ed and behind the scenes; an appearance on The View in which she said she thought Biden would be smart to pick a woman of color. Oh, and she also happens to have a conveniently timed and titled new book coming out in June: Our Time Is Now. "If and when questions come up about her ambition or her potential political future, she answers them honestly, which is something she's done her entire life," argued her spokesman Seth Bringman.

Abrams is a little more circumspect about a recent phone call with Biden. The personal dynamic Biden had with Barack Obama is clearly important to him. So what's Abrams's relationship with Biden like? "I can speak for me," she said, choosing her words carefully as she discussed how much she respects the presumptive Democratic nominee. The ticket didn't come up, she said. Biden's campaign confirmed that he called Abrams, but didn't say more. According to several people familiar with the campaign's running-mate selection process, Abrams is not currently a likely choice.

"Stacey" has become a one-name celebrity to some Democrats despite losing her 2018 bid for governor. She gave the official Democratic response to President Donald Trump's State of the Union in January 2019, and when she's included in events that feature governors, senators and other elected officials, she's often treated like the headliner. It's hard to ignore, though, that her most significant job in government to date was being the minority leader of the Georgia House, where Democrats dangle on the edge of a superminority. That's an especially important factor for the 78-year-old Biden, who, if he wins, would be the oldest person ever elected president.

[Read: Stacey Abrams is playing the long game]

But Abrams has a case to make. She tripled turnout among Latinos and Asian Americans in the Georgia governor's race. The 40 percent jump in African American turnout was the highest such bump in state history, she told me. Biden, she said, "is an extraordinary candidate, but I believe that campaigns require a broadening of capacity, simply because one person can't do everything in a campaign. That's why you have running mates."

People have been chattering about her prospects for so long that it's become an inside joke. At a Bloody Sunday anniversary commemoration in Selma, Alabama, at the beginning of March—when Abrams was given a central place of honor, on the pulpit of the famous Brown Chapel—the Reverend Al Sharpton looked over at her and Biden and joked that he was glad to see "our vice president. I'm talking about Stacey, not you, Joe." (Biden mouthed, "I know.") Sharpton is now planning to officially back her as his choice for Biden.

"Stacey's assets are that she can excite a lot of young people. She proved in Georgia that she can get white and black voters," Sharpton told me today. "I have not at this point endorsed, but I am very much impressed with her."

Abrams told me she knows people have questions about her qualifications. Her answer is that she's "spent the last 20 years thinking about international issues independently and been to 16 countries doing policy work ... as an inquisitive young person and then as a legislator." For foreign-policy experience, that's a stretch. Then again, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both took trips to Europe as presidential candidates to show that they knew how to meet with foreign leaders, and it's not like Mike Pence was or is known for his globe-trotting worldliness. "I'm the only person I know of that's in this conversation who has successfully run multimillion-dollar nonprofits, for-profits, and have led teams at the state and the local level," Abrams added.

Putting Abrams on the ticket would be so much easier for many people to wrap their head around if she'd won that governor's race in 2018 and become the first black woman in history to run a state. She says that what she's done since losing then qualifies her to be vice president. "It's not simply the title before your name. It's the work that you have done. And I would put my CV against anyone else's CV in terms of seeing not only what I was called to do, but what I accomplished and my ability to scale that. Because the reality is, until you've been vice president, no one has ever done a job that large."

Abrams's current job is leading several organizations: Fair Fight, which is focused on voter suppression, a factor she and many others believe contributed to her 2018 loss; Fair Count, which works to boost participation in the 2020 census; and the Southern Economic Advancement Project, whose mission is to address issues related to racial, sexual, and economic inequality. Fair Fight has set up voter-protection teams in 18 states and raised $20 million; all the major Democratic candidates met with Abrams about voter suppression.

Abrams has this line I've heard her use—that as a black southern Democrat, she always assumes the worst. She told me I had it wrong. "I'm an ameliorist. I think the glass is half full, but probably poisoned." That's how she explains what happened in Wisconsin at the beginning of the month, when state Republicans, supported by the president's rhetoric and a Supreme Court decision, denied full access to voting by mail, despite major public-health concerns. "That's the poison in our process," Abrams said. But she's optimistic about all the people who showed up to vote anyway, who stood in line wearing masks and helped create a backlash that gave a liberal candidate a surprise victory in the state Supreme Court race.

Abrams is pushing for a major vote-by-mail expansion, but she acknowledged that this won't help everyone. Her organizations are also adapting their efforts on voter education and ballot access to the new coronavirus reality. Safe voting during a pandemic "means you want to diminish the number of people who have to be in line," she told me, "but you have to recognize that there are going to be people who have to go inside; who have to go into a polling place for the disabled … There are some who are homeless, some who are housing-unstable. There are going to be people who have no choice but to be in line. There are those who have language barriers who need to be in the polling place."

"This is about making [voting] safe and accessible, because we live in a nation that is governed by the people," Abrams added. "And if the people cannot participate in their governance, we are shifting towards authoritarianism."

[Read: Stacey Abrams's new strategy for Democrats]

Every time Abrams speaks about voter suppression, she's invoking her own history. In 2018, her Republican opponent was Georgia's secretary of state. In that capacity, Brian Kemp oversaw a purge of 1.4 million voters because they hadn't shown up at the polls frequently enough. Kemp's margin over Abrams was a little less than 55,000 votes. She never conceded. "I acknowledged the legal sufficiency of the outcome, but I challenged the rules that permitted it to be conducted in the way it was conducted," she told me. It's a regular cheer line at Democratic events to say Abrams should really have been sworn in as governor. It's also a regular talking point for Republicans who say Democrats are sore losers.

"We live in a nation where trust is important, but we have always believed that trust is not an excuse for ignorance or for believing that everything was done the way it should be," Abrams said. "We can't simply presume that every actor is a good actor, especially for young people, especially for people of color. We have to do more."

Ironically, some of the whispered opposition to Abrams as Biden's potential running mate is coming from within the Congressional Black Caucus. Some say that her selection would amount to the candidate saying that he looked at their 54 members, half of whom are women, and decided none was good enough.

But, with the exception of Senator Kamala Harris, no female member of the Congressional Black Caucus has anywhere near the kind of national name recognition that Abrams has. And that's what this comes down to. When Jim Clyburn, the powerful representative from South Carolina—whose endorsement is widely credited with helping save Biden's candidacy—says that he thinks a black woman should be on the ticket with Biden, everyone knows that he is essentially talking about a choice between Abrams and Harris (though he has raised doubts about Abrams's experience and has also floated other possibilities, including Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms).

Over the past week, I've run Abrams's arguments for herself by a number of top Democratic politicians, aides, and other officials. I've gotten a lot of "huh"s and "okayyy"s, especially about what she cited to me as her foreign-policy credentials. They're struck by how aggressive a push Abrams is mounting, warning that her effort could backfire by making the Biden campaign feel pressured. But every one of those warnings came with some version of this thought: She would excite people in ways that many other potential candidates would not.

Don't expect Abrams to change her approach as Biden forms a running-mate selection committee and starts vetting potential picks.

"I know where I sit in the space, and it is disingenuous and a disservice to women, to people of color, and to women of color for me to be dismissive of or coy about where I would like to serve. It is my version of You can't be what you cannot see and People won't reach for things they don't believe are possible," Abrams told me. "But that's not the same as telling the VP who he should pick. My job is to do the work I know how to do."
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedPeyton Fulford / Guardian / eyevine / ReduxStacey Abrams's Remarkable Campaign for Vice President2020-04-24T16:00:28-04:002020-04-25T16:38:59-04:00Joe Biden has committed to choosing a woman as his running mate—and Stacey Abrams has a case to make for why she should be his pick.tag:theatlantic.com,2020:50-609844
It was getting late in the afternoon, but Gary Locke hadn't had time for breakfast or lunch. Too many emails, phone calls, and texts had been coming in from friends, family, former aides. The former Washington governor's friends were indignant. They wanted to know if he had seen President Donald Trump's campaign ad featuring him. He had. His reaction? "It's more anger," he said. He paused. He's a pretty mild guy, generally. "It's anger."

Locke endorsed Joe Biden for president last summer, but he hadn't expected to be featured in an attack ad. The Trump campaign probably never expected to feature him either. But there he is, in a brief clip included in a montage of the former vice president meeting with various Chinese officials. Locke is standing between two Chinese flags (and next to an American one). Biden is walking toward him, with his head bowed in a way that makes him look deferential.

It's a standard theatrical move that Biden often does when he sees old political allies. And Locke is an old Biden ally. But he isn't Chinese. He's Chinese American. And though the photo was taken at an event in Beijing, it was taken while Locke was serving in the same administration as Biden—as the American ambassador to China. Before that, he was the first Asian American governor of a state not called Hawaii. A section of the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle is devoted to him.

[Read: Meet Gary Locke, America's new ambassador to China]

In other words: Locke is not a Chinese official, as the Trump campaign made him out to be, apparently because of the way he looks and because he was standing next to a Chinese flag.

"It is racial stereotyping at its worst. Asian Americans—whether you're second-, third-, or fourth-generation, will always be viewed as foreigners," Locke told me today. "We don't say that about second- or third-generation Irish Americans or Polish Americans. No one would even think to include them in a picture when you're talking about foreign government officials."

Locke is justifiably bewildered by being thrown into the middle of the campaign. "For a lot of Asian Americans, it's not surprising, but it is disheartening," he said.

[Read: The other problematic outbreak]

Locke's father was part of the Normandy invasion, then was ordered along with the rest of the Fifth Armored Division to the Battle of the Bulge. When Locke watched Band of Brothers, he says, he recognized his father's story in it. He grew up in a housing project in Seattle, and went on to a long political career that took him through the state legislature, county government, two terms as governor, three years as Barack Obama's commerce secretary and then two years as Obama's ambassador to China, from 2011 to 2013. These days, he's back home, watching the coronavirus crisis unfold in his own state and using his down time in self-isolation to build a second-story deck on his house and finish up some gardening projects. His grown kids are worried he's going to fall and break his back, like he did 20 years ago, when he was in the middle of budget negotiations with the legislature in Olympia.

One of Locke's friends has already died of COVID-19. His first campaign treasurer is in the hospital. And now he's suddenly been pulled into the presidential campaign by an inadvertent cameo—which he said fits into a long history of racism against Asians in America, stretching from the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, to the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes as the president and his allies repeatedly refer to the pandemic as the "Chinese virus."

In a statement he scrambled to put out this afternoon, Locke said Trump was "fanning hatred." He said with hate crimes and discrimination on the rise across the country, "the Trump team is making it worse. Asian Americans are Americans. Period."

In what seems like both an obvious continuation of past behavior and a sign of what's to come, the Trump campaign responded by insisting that including Locke was intentional, serving a political purpose that would have been recognizable only to the president's super fans: that it was actually a subliminal nod to the conspiracy theory that Biden helped his son secure a business deal by bringing him on an official trip. (Hunter Biden did fly to China on Air Force Two and has said he did have a few business meetings while there, but aside from a brief handshake that the vice president shared with one of his son's business partners, no connection between Hunter's business dealings and his father's position has ever been shown.) "The shot with the flags specifically places Biden in Beijing in 2013. It's for a reason. That's the Hunter Biden trip. Memory Lane for ol' Joe," the Trump campaign's communications director, Tim Murtaugh, tweeted. Later, the Republican National Committee's rapid-response director defensively tweeted a screenshot of the clip that included only Biden and the Chinese flag, not Locke or the American flag that was onstage too.

Chris Lu, who became friends with Locke when they served together under Obama (Lu was the secretary of the Cabinet and, later, the deputy labor secretary), told me that his assessment of that defense was simple: "It's bullshit."

"It's sort of comical that they think all Chinese people look alike, but more broadly, it's part of an attack on Asian Americans as others," Lu said. And it's part of a pattern, Lu argued. Trump has attacked a Mexican American judge as "Mexican" and concluded that the judge was therefore biased against him, and he has suggested that Colonel Alexander Vindman, the Ukrainian-born former White House national-security official who testified as part of the impeachment hearings, held dual loyalties.

Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, whose parents immigrated to America from Taiwan, said on Twitter: "Goddamn this shit is infuriating. Gary Locke is as American as the day is long. Trump rewriting history as if he effectively responded to the virus is utter garbage. We lost 70 days and thousands of lives due to his incompetence and disregard for what was happening overseas."

The ad as a whole makes a confusing argument: that Biden is soft on China because of his own good relationships with Chinese President Xi Jinping and others, and that this makes him somehow culpable for decisions related to the pandemic. Trump has made overtures to Xi himself, including inviting the leader to Mar-a-Lago and having Ivanka Trump's daughter perform a song for him in Mandarin; tweeting that they'll "always be friends"; and taking his word on supposed efforts to contain the coronavirus—all mixed in with his trade-war rattling and posturing on currency manipulation. (The Locke appearance also isn't the only factual problem with this ad.)

When I asked Murtaugh to explain the ad, he sent me a statement that was a slightly longer version of what he'd tweeted last night. He provided no answers to specific questions, no explanation, and no response to Locke's concerns about stoking division, xenophobia, and potentially more hate crimes. There was certainly no apology.

"I don't expect an apology from them," Locke told me. "It is so characteristic of their view toward people of color."
Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedNg Han Guan / ReutersGary Locke Is Mad About That Trump Ad2020-04-10T21:36:40-04:002020-04-11T13:37:17-04:00The president's latest attack ad makes a reckless claim about the former governor of Washington.