Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 174

What Can Obama Accomplish in Flint?

The presidency carries some strange expectations—a fact that Barack Obama, nearing the home stretch of his tenure in the White House, surely knows well by now. The president holds great power and is called the leader of the free world, yet his power—even in this age of a strong executive—is constrained on all sides. Those limitations tend to be misunderstood by people who want his help, thanks to pervasive belief in what Brendan Nyhan calls the “Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency.”

President Obama is visiting Flint, Michigan, a city poisoned by lead and bacteria in its water, on Wednesday. During his visit, Obama will be briefed by officials on relief efforts, meet with community leaders—including 8-year-old “Little Miss Flint" Mari Copeny—and deliver remarks. He will meet with Governor Rick Snyder, who has come in for harsh criticism for his handling of the crisis.

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Obama's Visit to Flint

Nowhere is the tension between expectations and reality on display more prominently than in the disaster photo-op. When something goes wrong, the American people expect the president to be there. Sometimes, there’s a clear imperative to help morale: President George W. Bush’s appearance atop the rubble at Ground Zero was likely the finest moment of his presidency, a crucial speech that rallied a rattled nation. Other times, as Noah Gordon pointed out when politicians of both parties called for Obama to visit the border amid an influx of underage immigrants, the goal is not nearly as clear.

Throughout his term, Obama has been called on time and again to serve as “comforter-in-chief” to the nation. The role isn’t unique to him, though the many high-profile mass shootings during his term have offered him repeated unwanted opportunities to speak to the country. They’ve also been some of his most emotional moments, as the often detached, Spock-like Obama chokes up and sometimes weeps. Those appearances have also demonstrated some of the shortcomings of a presidential photo-op. When he went to Oregon following the shooting at Umpqua Community College, Obama was met with protests by some residents who didn’t want him there.

There are plenty of other risks in showing up. The president, with the huge entourage of security, press, and aides he brings, can get in the way. Or he risks an image like the photograph of George W. Bush—about as iconic as the 9/11 picture—surveying the damage of Hurricane Katrina, which came to symbolize accusations that he was aloof to the disaster.

Flint isn’t the same as the aftermath of a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake. Unlike them, it is a human-caused disaster: the result of economic crisis, perversion of democracy, sloppy management, and appalling unresponsive government officials. Unlike them, Flint is a long-running disaster—far too long. It runs from Flint’s emergency manager deciding to switch to the Flint River as a water source in 2013, through the actual switch in 2014, up until state and federal officials began to respond seriously to the crisis in late 2015.

For some Flint residents, having the president visit is clearly a validating moment—something that shows the city has the nation’s attention, and that the federal government is trying to help. NBC News spoke to some of them. “Obama could make us a priority,” said Laura MacIntyre.

There’s also a danger, however, that Obama’s visit could simply spotlight the many ways in which the president is powerless to act, and the ways in which he has failed to help places like Flint, a majority-black city.

Obama entered office bringing high hopes for African Americans. On many issues, he has won praise for speaking about issues of race with a sensitivity and understanding that no white president could have brought to bear. But in other cases, blacks still lag. The African American unemployment rate is still far above the national average, years after the recession ended. Polls show that most people think race relations have gotten worse. No one could fairly expect Obama to reverse centuries of institutionalized racism in American society, but the great travesty of environmental injustice in Flint stands as a reminder of how much work has not yet been done.

Obama also entered office with plans to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure. He was elected just 15 months after a bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, killing 13. Engineers offered dire analyses of the state of bridges, roads, and pipelines around the country. Despite the $150 billion spent on infrastructure in the 2009 stimulus package, the state of U.S infrastructure remains very poor.

Finally, Obama’s election seemed to offer a chance for progressives to rebuild faith in government, which had been badly undermined during the Bush years. Some analysts, such as Michael Grunwald, argue that in fact Obama has flexed government’s muscles to great effect, but public trust in the government has continued to slump over his time in office:

Trust in Government

Pew Research Center

The Flint crisis is a reminder of government’s shortcomings. Snyder has sought to portray the crisis as a failure of every level of government, from local to national. He seems to protest too much: As a panel he appointed to investigate it found, it was the state government that bears the brunt of the blame. Local government was effectively cut out of the loop by an emergency manager Snyder appointed. It is true that EPA did not cover itself in glory in Flint, though. One EPA regulator, Miguel del Toral, voiced concerns earlier, and badgered state and local officials for more information. But del Toral was effectively sidelined, apparently after state officials complained to his boss. (Del Toral lashed out at the agency.) Once the crisis broke into national news, EPA’s regional administrator was fired. EPA boss Gina McCarthy is traveling to Flint with Obama.

No matter how he wishes to fix Flint’s water problem, or the nation’s broader infrastructure challenges, Obama will run into one intractable problem: Congress. Fixing Flint’s lead pipes is estimated to cost $55 million. It could cost as much as $275 billion to deal with lead pipes elsewhere around the country, according to one estimate. While a bipartisan deal in Congress would have provided $250 million for lead mitigation, Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, put a hold on the bill, accusing lawmakers of using Flint “as an excuse to funnel taxpayer money to their own home states.”

With overall infrastructure issues, it’s the same story. Every year in his State of the Union, Obama has made a plea for major infrastructure spending. Every year, Congress shrugs and declines to act. Because the president is not the Green Lantern, there’s little else he can do except harangue, cajole, and plead with Congress.

The presidency affords its holder impressive symbolic power. By traveling to Flint, Obama will give the city new attention. The residents who he meets may take great comfort from his presence, and Mari Copeny will never forget her meeting with the president. It’s hard to imagine, however, that his visit will produce a vast material change for the beleaguered city.

The Largest Auto Safety Recall in U.S. History

In what U.S. officials are calling “the largest and most complex safety recall in U.S. history,” Japanese manufacturer Takata is recalling an additional 35 million to 40 million airbag inflators that have been linked to 10 deaths and more than 100 injuries.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced the recalls Wednesday, adding to the 28.8 million inflators that were recalled since 2008. The administration, which serves under the Department of Transportation, described in a statement the dangers posed by the airbags, which are installed in cars made by more than dozen car manufacturers around the world.

A combination of time, environmental moisture and fluctuating high temperatures contribute to the degradation of the ammonium nitrate propellant in the inflators. Such degradation can cause the propellant to burn too quickly, rupturing the inflator module and sending shrapnel through the air bag and into the vehicle occupants.

The recalls will take place in five phases between this month and December 2019. They will affect auto manufacturers like Volkswagen, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz.

In November, the U.S. fined Takata $70 million for failing to tell government regulators the airbags were defective. That fine could grow to $200 million, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Department of Justice has also opened a criminal investigation into the faulty airbags.

Russia’s Land Giveaway

The Russian government will give a free tract of land to any citizen who moves to a mostly unpopulated region of the country.

Earlier this week, President Vladimir Putin signed a law that would give each person around 2.5 acres if they moved to the Russian Far East. That land would remain tax-free for five years, after which the owners can rent or sell the property.

At around 3.9 million square miles, the Far East region takes up nearly a third of Russia. But barely 5 percent—7.4 million—of Russia’s 143 million people live in the area that stretches from Siberia to the Arctic region near Alaska, all the way down to the islands off Japan.

As The Washington Post explains:

The move is part of Moscow's desire to leverage the unexploited potential of a region that remains a kind of “Wild West” — a realm rich in natural resources but whose residents hail from scattered indigenous tribes, the descendants of political exiles and other forgotten schemes of the Soviet Union.

This plan, Russian officials say, could increase the Russian population there to 36 million people. It could also stem a Chinese influx to the region.

The Chinese, ABC News reports, could become the dominant ethnic group in the area in the next couple decades. One Russian official even said last July that in the previous 18 months, 1.5 million Chinese people had crossed the border into the Russian Far East illegally. Around 70 million people live in the northeast part of China, across the Russian border.

The American Casualties in the Fight Against ISIS

More than 4,000 American troops died in the eight-plus years of the Iraq War that ended in 2011. But over the past year or so, the U.S. has introduced small numbers of special-operations forces and others to advise and support Iraqi troops in their fight against the Islamic State. Three Americans have been killed in that effort since last October. The U.S. announced the latest death on Wednesday: a Navy SEAL killed in fighting near Irbil. A day later, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the fight against ISIS “is far from over.”

Carter identified the slain Navy SEAL as Petty Officer 1st Class Charles Keating, 31. Keating was the grandson of Charles Keating, the banker at the center of the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that Keating lived in Coronado, California, and was engaged to be married in November. He was a graduate of Arcadia High School in Phoenix where he was a standout runner. Keating was a student-athlete at Indiana University, which he attended from 2004 to 2006, according to the university. The Union-Tribune reported Keating then attended the Naval Academy and in 2008 passed the tryout process for the SEALs.

Here are the other Americans killed in Iraq since last October:

Marine Staff Sergeant Louis Cardin: Cardin, 27, was killed March 19, 2016, when ISIS militants fired rockets at a coalition base in Makhmur, Iraq. Eight other Marines were wounded in the attack on the base. Cardin was an artilleryman with Battalion Landing Team, 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines. The Marine Times reported Cardin that joined the Marines in 2006 after graduating from Chaparral High School in Temecula, California. He was based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and had deployed four times to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Army Master Sergeant Joshua Wheeler: Wheeler, 39, a member of the Army’s Delta Force, was killed on October 22, 2015, during a raid on an ISIS compound in Hawijah, Iraq, that included a prison. He was among a group of Delta Force operators who had accompanied Kurdish peshmerga fighters, ostensibly to offer support during the operation. When the Kurdish attack stalled, Wheeler responded, said Carter back then. “He ran to the sound of the guns,” he said, adding: “I’m immensely proud of this young man.” Wheeler was a highly decorated combat veteran who had been deployed 14 times to Iraq and Afghanistan. The father of four, Wheeler, who had grown up poor in rural Oklahoma, was thinking of retiring from the Army, The New York Times said in a profile. Wheeler’s military honors included four Bronze Stars for valor in combat and seven Bronze Stars for heroic or meritorious service in a combat zone. Wheeler, a 1994 graduate of Muldrow High School in Muldrow, Oklahoma, enlisted in 1995. In 1997, he joined the Army Rangers. From 2004, the Times profile said, he was assigned to Army Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Wheeler was the first American to die in combat in Iraq since 2011.

The End of the Road for John Kasich

John Kasich will end his bid for the presidency Wednesday afternoon in Columbus, according to multiple reports. Kasich had planned to hold a press conference at Dulles Aiport near Washington Wednesday morning, but he never took off—perhaps an apt metaphor—staying home and scheduling a press conference for 5 p.m., where he is expected to make his announcement.

The Ohio governor’s exit leaves Donald Trump as the last man standing in the Republican field. Though he’d already assumed the mantle of presumptive nominee with Senator Ted Cruz’s exit Tuesday night—after Trump trounced both of them in the Indiana primary—Kasich’s exit seals the deal. Kasich has been mentioned for weeks as a potential vice-presidential candidate for Trump, who will need to shore up his policy and political credentials ahead of the general election.

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While hardly anyone predicted Trump’s success in the Republican campaign, few expected Kasich would get this far either. In a crowd of young, charismatic GOP figures, Kasich was the odd man out, a somewhat more grizzled figure who had run abortively for president in 2000, and a comparatively moderate figure in a party trending increasingly to the right. Somehow, Kasich managed to hold on to the bitter end, the final challenger to Trump.

That’s not to say that his campaign was especially successful. Many observers felt Kasich was pursuing a replay of former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman’s failed 2012 bid for the Republican nomination. Huntsman and Kasich even shared a campaign architect, the heterodox GOP strategist John Weaver. The playbook may have gotten Kasich farther than it did Huntsman, but that still wasn’t enough to win the nomination, or even to come close. (As for Huntsman, he now backs Trump.)

For a time, before Trump’s ascendancy became inevitable, Kasich’s plan seemed plausible. In New Hampshire, the nation’s first primary and second nominating contest, he placed (a distant) second to Trump, and hoped to portray himself as the reasonable alternative to the entertainer. But having placed a huge bet on the Granite State, Kasich had little infrastructure in place for the rest of the campaign, and was a non-entity in the South Carolina primary. By the time the campaign reached his home state, Kasich was effectively out of the running. Ohio turned out to be the only state that he won. He closes out the campaign with fewer delegates than Senator Marco Rubio, who dropped out on March 15.

Kasich’s sell to voters was that amid a sea of volatile, unpredictable characters like Trump and wild-eyed radicals like Cruz, he was an old-style true conservative who could also win swing states like Ohio. To the extent that his campaign had a policy theme, it was his advocacy for a balanced-budget amendment—a vague promise, tethered to his work on balancing the national budget while in the U.S. House in the 1990s. (Opinions about just how central Kasich had been in that work differed widely.)

But some of his other policy stances were at odds with much of the Republican Party. As governor, he had circumvented the GOP-led Ohio legislature to accept Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. As though that were not bad enough, he compounded his offense in the eyes of conservatives by justifying his choice by faith. “Now, when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small,” he said. “But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.’”

Many of Kasich’s former colleagues viewed his image as a soft, cuddly, friendly politician with skepticism—they remembered a more irritable, angry Kasich—it seemed to take with many voters. The problem was that Republican primary voters didn’t want a sane, rational nominee in 2016. They wanted a Trump.

The Price of College-Football Concussions

A U.S. university has settled a lawsuit with a former football player who allegedly sustained permanent brain damage on the field, an increasingly visible problem in the sport.

Bowling Green University this week agreed to pay $712,000 to Cody Silk, a former offensive lineman for the school. Silk sued the university in 2013, alleging that after he suffered two concussions in 2010, coaches and team medical staff of the Ohio college didn’t take him out of practice.

The university maintains in the settlement “that it didn’t do anything to injure the former player,” the Associated Press reports. Silk was pulled from the team after a third concussion, and later dropped out of school.

In March, two football programs settled similar lawsuits. Portland State University settled a lawsuit with former football player Zachary Walen, as did Pennsylvania-based youth football program Pop Warner with the family of Joseph Chernach, who suffered from brain damage and killed himself in 2012.

In the lawsuit against Pop Warner, the family alleged:

At the time of his death, Joseph Chernach’s mental state had reached the point that he was no longer able to control the impulse to kill himself. Joseph Chernach’s suicide was the “natural and probable consequence” of the brain damage he suffered playing football.

Last year, a man who played college football in the 1980s sued his former Illinois school, Olivet Nazarene University, for making him play after suffering several concussions, which eventually led to traumatic brain injuries.

In January, a federal judge approved a settlement between the National Collegiate Athletic Association and former college athletes, who allege they sustained head injuries playing football in the league. While the agreement calls on the NCAA to set up a $70 million fund for former athletes to monitor signs of brain damage through neurological screenings, the agreement did not include a cash settlement for injuries that may have been sustained during their college careers.

CBS’s Star Trek Could Change the TV Broadcast Model

What’s the easiest way to tell that we’re in the midst of a television programming revolution? Just look at what the networks, the dinosaurs of the industry, are doing to keep up. On Tuesday, CBS detailed its plans for its prospective Netflix competitor “CBS All Access,” a monthly subscription-based online service that will use a new Star Trek show to try and reel in viewers. But where Netflix’s strategy is to become a vast repository of original content, dumping whole seasons of original shows at a time for people to sample at their leisure, CBS is trying to hold onto the weekly model that has defined broadcast strategy for decades. That compromise is currently untested, but it could be the future of the medium.

According to a conference call held with reporters by CBS’s president, Les Moonves, the new Star Trek series will debut in January 2017, with one episode released per week. It’s not much different from how CBS airs its programs now, except that “All Access” will cost an extra $6 a month. The news that Star Trek was returning to TV excited devoted fans of the franchise, but online chatter mostly focused on how quickly they’d be able to watch the season before unsubscribing from the service. The fan site TrekCore acknowledges, sadly, that such a “binge and bail” tactic won’t be possible—which is exactly what CBS wants. As cable cord-cutting grows more common among younger viewers, networks need to find a new way into their pockets, which is why the weekly cliffhanger may not be going anywhere anytime soon.

This Star Trek model already exists at the streaming network Hulu, which releases one episode a week of shows like Casual and The Path. But so far none of its original content has made the kind of splashy debut that Netflix secures for so many of its big shows, from House of Cards to Orange Is the New Black to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. That’s more because Hulu’s shows are a strange hodgepodge of small-scale comedies, European shows, and muted dramas, along with later seasons of network cast-offs like The Mindy Project. But there’s no question that the Netflix model, which gives viewers the chance to devote an entire weekend to the show they love and then rewatch as they see fit, leans more toward instant buzz and helps build brand recognition.

CBS is no Hulu—it has plenty of brand recognition, and in case that isn’t enough, Star Trek is about the most bankable streaming TV property imaginable. It has a built-in fanbase that goes back for generations and only continues to grow. Its rebooted film franchise has tapped a new wave of devotees, as has (ironically enough) the availability of the old Star Trek series on Netflix. Moonves knows that it could be big enough to attract millions of subscribers to a service that right now goes mostly unnoticed, but that might be a huge piece of the network’s profits sometime in the future.

“We could have cashed in for a lot of money, selling it to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu … they were all very interested in it,” Moonves told reporters. “We know that Star Trek is a high-priced, quality product …  there are a lot of very rabid Star Trek fans who are going to sign up for it.”

Indeed there are. But will they stay? Star Trek will probably only run for 13 episodes. Moonves has plans to debut “three or four” other original shows on the All Access service, though he’s offered no details of what they might be. Other than that, the app provides a basic service to TV viewers who’ve abandoned their cable subscriptions: You can watch any regular CBS show and thousands of archived episodes through it. At $6 a month, that might seem like good value, but it’s going to feel less and less so as more networks offer the same bundle of original content and back-catalog delights.

NBC is trying this approach with Seeso ($4 a month), which has both new comedies and a curated selection of classic TV works like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live. HBO Now ($15 a month) lets viewers watch the premium network without a cable box; its rivals Showtime and Starz are now pursuing similar services. As consumers abandon their cable bills (which can cost hundreds of dollars every month), a pick-and-choose approach will help save money in the online market, and a weekly dose of something like Star Trek will help make that choice easier for many subscribers. Les Moonves and CBS’s programmers may look like they’re behind the trend now—but they have their eye on the future.

How Donald Trump Speaks to—and About—Minorities

Celebrating his big win in Indiana—and his elevation to presumptive nominee of the Republican Party—Tuesday night, Donald Trump spoke at Trump Tower in New York City, where he delivered a promise to heal the deep fractures in his party.

“We want to bring unity to the Republican Party,” he said. “We have to bring unity. It's so much easier if we have it.”

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That will be a tall order. But as a general-election candidate, Trump will need to win over more than just Republicans. In his inimitable way, he pledged to bring together the rest of the nation as well.

“We're going to bring back our jobs, and we're going to save our jobs, and people are going to have great jobs again, and this country, which is very, very divided in so many different ways, is going to become one beautiful loving country, and we're going to love each other, we're going to cherish each other and take care of each other, and we're going to have great economic development and we're not going to let other countries take it away from us, because that's what's been happening for far too many years and we're not going to do it anymore,” he said. (That’s a single sentence, if you’re keeping track at home.)

Trump faces significant obstacles to achieving that unity, particular with blocs that are not white men. Seven in 10 women view him unfavorably. It’s even worse with minorities. A recent Gallup poll found that 77 of Hispanics view Trump unfavorably. A Washington Post poll pegged that number at eight in 10, seven of them “very unfavorable.” An NBC News/Survey Monkey poll found an astonishing 86 percent of African Americans had a negative view of Trump.

One reason for those atrocious ratings is the way Trump speaks to and about minorities, which was on display during his victory speech Tuesday.

“We're going to have great relationships with the Hispanics,” he said. “The Hispanics have been so incredible to me. They want jobs. Everybody wants jobs. The African Americans want jobs. If you look at what's going on, they want jobs.”

Part of Trump’s rhetorical power is his supercharged used of “we,” a method that persuades people across the country that they are part of a larger movement, and somehow share with Trump his aura of wealthy and luxury. (It’s the same technique he’s used to sell real estate for years.) In the midst of his spiel about all the ways “we” would make America great again, Trump tossed in this passage about minorities.

His phrasing is telling. First, it suggests that for Trump, blacks and Hispanics aren’t part of “we”—“they” constitute separate groups. Perhaps that’s an accidental, unthinking division, but subconscious racial division is no less dangerous. Second, it shows him assuming that minority concerns can be reduced to economics. That view is perhaps unsurprising for a man who has spent his career trying to accumulate wealth, but it is a two-dimensional view of black and Hispanic Americans.

The fact that his policies simply don’t line up with what most African Americans want in a president is one reason his numbers with black voters are so bad. Another factor is a presidential campaign driven in large parts by divisive appeals to racism and bigotry against Hispanics, Muslims, and other groups. Trump also has a long history of racially charged incidents, from alleged tenant discrimination to his strident reaction to the Central Park Five.

The entertainer has long spoken about minority groups with the outdated formulation involving a definite article: “I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks,” he said in 2011, using language that undermined his claim. He’s said similar things about “the Hispanics.”

Changing the way Trump speaks about African Americans and Hispanics won’t solve his problems with those groups, but if he wishes to unify the country, beginning to speak about them as though they are part of the American populace would be a good place to start.

Ted Cruz Drops His U.S. Presidential Bid—Until 2020

In the end, Republicans didn’t much like Ted Cruz.

The party establishment hated him from the start. He had nearly single-handedly destroyed their effort to govern in Congress in the age of Obama, and he insulted GOP leaders in a way that left party elders aghast. When former Speaker  John Boehner called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh,” what was most noteworthy wasn’t the barb itself but how little protest it generated in Washington. The establishment would have preferred almost anyone else as their standard-bearer in 2016. Really: Almost anyone else—including, for many of them, Donald Trump, a man who these same top Republicans viewed as a usurper, a phony who talked tough and learned just enough of the conservative language to hoodwink the party’s faithful in state after state.

And ultimately, it was the voters who chose Trump—and rejected Cruz. The first-term Texas senator came to that realization rather suddenly on Tuesday night, after a defeat in Indiana crushed his slim chances of denying Trump the Republican nomination in Cleveland. Earlier in the day, Cruz had denounced the GOP front-runner as a “pathological liar” and a “narcissist.” But when he ended his campaign later that evening in Indiana, he never uttered Trump’s name.

Surrounded by his family, Cruz reminded his supporters that he had always said he would continue his campaign as long as there was a path to victory. “Tonight, I’m sorry to say, it appears that path has been foreclosed,” he said. “Together we left it all on the field in Indiana. We gave it all we got. But the voters chose another path.”

Far from endorsing Trump, Cruz signaled that he was about to join, in spirit if not officially, the collection of conservatives who now believe the 2016 presidential election is a lost cause, that Hillary Clinton is not only the presumptive Democratic nominee but the presumptive 45th president of the United States. Cruz modeled his speech on Ronald Reagan’s address, as a runner-up, to the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City. What he didn’t need to say was that four years after that speech, Reagan ran again and defeated the embattled Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. Cruz, who is just 45 years old, didn’t need to lay it out explicitly, but he might as well have launched his 2020 campaign right then and there in Indiana. “Hear me now,” he said instead, “I am not suspending our fight for liberty. I am not suspending our fight to defend the Constitution.”

Republican voters gave Cruz a good long look in 2016. He ran as an uncompromising conservative from the outset, and it looked briefly as if he might stop the Trump train when he defeated the New York billionaire in Iowa in February. But although Cruz picked up a bucket of delegates by winning his home state of Texas, he underperformed throughout the South on Super Tuesday. Cruz was a strong debater and a better organizer, winning repeatedly in caucus states and outlasting Marco Rubio to become the final serious threat to Trump. But he was hamstrung by his awkwardness as a retail campaigner and never made a real effort to make peace with the Republican Party leaders who might have helped him unify the “Never Trump” movement.

Trump regained his footing with landslide wins in New York and then throughout the Northeast. All the while, he continued browbeating Cruz and playing dirty; Trump labeled him “Lyin’ Ted,” promoted reports that Cruz had affairs on the campaign trail, threatened to go after his wife, and finally, in the closing days of the campaign, suggested that Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination. Cruz, in turn, became increasingly desperate. He struck a non-aggression pact with John Kasich to increase his chances in Indiana, and then, just a week before he dropped out, announced that Carly Fiorina would be his running mate if he could only knock off Trump to win the nomination.

None of it worked.

Rather than close the gap with Trump, Cruz fell further. A lead in Indiana polling vanished, and Cruz was on pace to lose the state by more than 15 points. Perhaps most telling, however, was how Republicans seemed to sour on Cruz over time. In Gallup polling, more than half of GOP voters had a favorable image of Cruz when the year started. By late April, just 39 percent did, and 45 percent had an unfavorable view of him.

Republicans took a long look at Cruz, and the more they saw him, the less they liked him. Starting Tuesday night, he’ll have at least four more years to turn those hard feelings around.

The Debate Over Guns on Campus in Georgia

The Republican governor of Georgia has vetoed a bill that would have allowed anyone over the age of 21 to carry concealed handguns on public college campuses.

Nathan Deal said in a statement Tuesday that he had several concerns with allowing guns on campuses, including the presence of daycare centers and the gun-free history of public colleges in Georgia. He said:

From the early days of our nation and state, colleges have been treated as sanctuaries of learning where firearms have not been allowed. To depart from such time honored protections should require overwhelming justification. I do not find that such justification exists.

The Georgia Senate passed the bill in March. It would have allowed anyone over 21 to carry a gun on campuses, as long as they had a weapons license. However, guns would not be permitted inside dormitories, fraternities and sorority houses, and at athletic events. If enacted, the legislation would have made Georgia the ninth U.S. state to allow guns on campuses.

Proponents of the law said it could possibly prevent mass shootings. The University System of Georgia, however, had been vocal opponents of the law, concerned it would make campuses less safe.