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Swing Vote: What Would the Presidential Election Sound Like as Jazz?

What does Ben Carson sound like?

Not, what does his voice sound like?—the sleepy, husky tenor has become familiar to anyone who’s watched a Republican debate or three—but what would the essence of Carson’s character sound like if it were converted into song?

That’s a question that the pianist Marcus Roberts set out to answer in a new EP, Race for the White House, of four compositions devoted to the presidential election: one each for Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Carson. Roberts picked out the candidates who seemed most ripe for interpretation, two from each party. He’s been rolling the tracks out slowly, and you can hear the Carson song, “I Did Chop Down That Cherry Tree” for the first time below.

John Douglas

What’s the point of such a project? Some reticent musicians, asked to explain their work, like to retreat behind the old aphorism that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. But converting the endless talk of a presidential campaign into instrumental jazz? That seems even crazier.

Roberts, a pianist known for his association with Wynton Marsalis, told me had two motives. One was simple: Election coverage was everywhere around him when he wrote the tunes in November, and it started to seep into his creative process. “Like everyone, I’m sure that’s all you can hear about, even now in February,” he said. “Part of it was the diversity in the different temperaments of the each candidate. Some of them are very identifiable, and I wanted to try to musically describe a little bit about each personality.”

The other motive was a frustration at the sense that jazz is a museum piece, Roberts said. “No matter what you do with a lot of the great songs, you’re dated just by referencing that this song was written in 1938 or 1952,” he said, leading him to want to write new material. Roberts is disappointed that there haven’t been questions about the importance of safeguarding America’s cultural inheritance during the presidential debates so far, and he put forth jazz as perhaps an ideal art form for democracy—and perhaps a model of cooperation that would be well-taken in a polarized moment.

“Jazz music has that sense of inclusion that’s built into the music,” he said. “It’s democratic in nature—when we’re on the bandstand creating music, we get to celebrate our individual identity and function, but it’s always within a shared purpose.”

How well did it work? Here’s each song on the EP, a little about what Roberts was thinking, and my verdict as a jazzbro political reporter.

“I Did Chop Down That Cherry Tree” (Ben Carson)

What is Roberts trying to do? The tune kicks off with a series of beats by the drummer Jason Marsalis, and then Marsalis with the bassist Rodney Jordan. It’s meant to evoke a hacking axe. The title is an allusion to George Washington’s famous, apocryphal tree-felling. When Roberts was writing the tune, a surreal drama was playing out as Carson insisted he’d tried to stab a friend and classmate as a boy and once gone after his mother with a hammer—even as reporters tried and failed to find evidence of the incident.

How well does he do it? I rate this a pretty good likeness of the Carson experience. There’s a leisurely lope to it, and a light playfulness to the song that I think captures the doctor’s friendly, somewhat goofy demeanor. The somewhat knotty melody, turned around a taunting bass riff, and the way Marsalis solos under a bass vamp both seem to capture the unpredictability of a Carson speech or answer, which can veer from pleasant banality to terrifying innuendo with no warning—as does the abrupt finish. But is the song too energetic? “If we’re talking about Ben Carson the surgeon, it is, but if we’re talking about the 12-year-old kid running after you with a knife or hammer?” Roberts said. He deems this the most like its respective candidate, and I agree. A-.

“Making America Great Again (All By Myself)” (Donald Trump)

What is Roberts trying to do? The track centers around a rhythm section vamp reminiscent of Mingus’s “Boogie Stop Shuffle,” with its piano riff and horn arrangement, or perhaps the James Bond theme. “It has a little bit of superhero thing to it in that left hand, Batman or Superman,” Roberts said, which is meant to match Trump’s hubristic self-conception. There’s also a light swinging passage—very classy, very elegant, just like Trump. Alphonso Horne on trumpet takes a lead role, while Marsalis bookends the piece with a whistle on the start and a demonic laugh at the end—representing, said Roberts, the fact that Trump is in on the joke and laughing at himself.

How well does he do it? It’s fitting that the brassy sound of Horne’s trumpet steals the show on this one. Capturing the full scope of the Trump campaign—the humor, the shock, the horror—is practically impossible. Roberts says this one is his favorite and most captured the candidate, but listening now, with Trump poised to win the nomination, there’s not quite enough menace to it, even with the martial drum solo and even with the laugh. B-.

“Feel the Bern” (Bernie Sanders)

What’s Roberts trying to do? The track is built around a three-note motif from Boyce Griffith’s clarinet. Then it takes off into a fast swing section as the horns solo. During his brief solo, Roberts settles into a montuno groove, and then the band rejoins for a slow, New Orleans-flavored bridge. The thinking here is pretty straightforward: “Most of it is high energy. Kind of burning!” Roberts said.

How well does he do it? This track is the least metaphorical of the bunch. The various tempo changes and the shifting moods get at some of the cadence of a Sanders rally, and the hoarse clarinet trills echo Sanders’s gruff, occasionally grating elocutions. Really getting the feel of a Sanders rally would require about 70 minutes of music, an interpolation of “Rockin’ in the Free World,” and enthusiastic audience participation, though. B+.

“It’s My Turn” (Hillary Clinton)

What’s Roberts trying to do? An appealing post-bop composition, this tune kicks off in a minor key and in 9/4 time, then lands in standard 4/4, then back to 9/4. It also cycles through several key signatures. “Hillary’s been pretty much about change throughout her life,” Roberts said. “There are two parts of her life—the one is that she’s been under constant scrutiny and controversial. That’s what those key chances and harmonic changes represent. But she’s always managed to land on her feet. She stood up in there in front of that congressional committee for 11 hours, man, she answered every question and didn’t seem to be rattled by it. That’s represented by the cool stable nature of the rhythm.” (Roberts said he didn’t think anyone cared about his endorsement, but he didn’t hide his admiration for Clinton and said he planned to vote for her assuming she’s the Democratic nominee.)

How well does he do it? This is the most complex composition of the four, and the most musically interesting. But does it really capture what Clinton is like? One of the Clinton campaign’s biggest struggles has been defining her—Clinton is at once incredible well-known, a public figure since the early 1990s, and yet her friends and aides are always quick to insist that the public doesn’t know the real Hillary. Roberts said this track was the hardest to write. There’s some mystery and sadness from the minor key and the 9/4 rhythm, to be sure, but while the track gets high marks for the music, does it get any closer to the Real Hillary? C+.

Congress Tells Obama to Start Planning His Departure

President Obama may have nearly another 11 months in office, but under a new bill that passed Congress on Monday, his administration will have to begin preparing to turn over the keys as early as May.

The legislation, which the House approved by voice vote on Monday evening following passage by the Senate last year, requires the president to establish a pair of transition councils six months before the election. The goal is both to help the government withstand the departure of hundreds of political appointees before Obama’s term ends and to assist the major candidates with the Herculean task of staffing the government upon taking office. What it also means in practice is that the Obama administration could be meeting with advisers to both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—or Marco Rubio or Bernie Sanders—long before they formally accept their party’s nominations in July.

The bill is the outgrowth of a 15-year effort to improve the presidential transition process, and it builds upon a law enacted in 2010 that required the government, through the General Services Administration, to offer transition services to the major-party nominees before the election. “An outgoing administration, even under current law, is in essence required to do nothing to hand off in an effective way. This legislation changes that,” said Max Stier, founding president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, which last month established a Center for Presidential Transition to help candidates navigate the process.

Beyond the high-profile Cabinet selections that generate the most attention during the months between November and January, incoming administrations must hire some 4,000 political appointees—a process that takes months because so many of them either need security clearances or require Senate confirmation. Many political appointees leave weeks or months before the end of a president’s term, and the legislation requires agencies to designate career civil servants who can fill these positions temporarily beginning as early as September, to keep the government operating smoothly.

Historically, presidential candidates have been reluctant to prepare too overtly in advance of the election out of a fear that voters would punish them for “measuring the drapes.” The push to formalize the transition process is in part an effort to have Congress grant political cover for candidates to begin planning earlier. Four years ago, Mitt Romney designated former Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, who had served in President George W. Bush’s Cabinet, to build what became almost a shadow government in advance of the election, and despite the hard-fought race to unseat Obama, Leavitt was assisted by administration officials before the election.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re an establishment or an anti-establishment candidate, you still need to be ready on Day 1 to run our country.”

The 2016 race has become an even messier affair, and while Clinton appears poised to effectively lock up the Democratic nomination in the next several weeks, the Republican primary could drag on far longer. Even so, Stier said his organization is urging the remaining serious candidates to designate a transition leader by the beginning of April. Presidential candidates have already been able to get national security briefings once they become their party’s nominee, and this legislation doesn’t change that. It does, however, require the administration to submit an additional threat assessment to Congress.

An added wrinkle is that although the new bill requires the Obama administration to offer services and assistance to the campaigns, it doesn’t force the candidates to accept them. Would Donald Trump take help from a government whose officials he has routinely denounced as “stupid” and “incompetent”? “They can walk in and be unprepared and be ill-prepared if they so choose, but there’s no reason for them to do it because we’re making it real easy for them,” Stier said. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re an establishment or an anti-establishment candidate, you still need to be ready on Day 1 to run our country, and that’s what this is about.”

The Republican Party is now having fits as it confronts the surprising likelihood that Trump could be its nominee and, potentially, the next president. With this new law, the Obama administration must prepare for the same possibility much sooner than you’d think.

A Good Sign for Iran’s Moderates

The results from Iran’s parliamentary elections haven’t been released yet, but some triumphant language has accompanied the anticipated tallies, which indicate a surge for Iranian moderates.

Reform-minded and more moderate candidates swept all 30 parliamentary seats in Tehran, the country’s most heavily populated province, and won 15 of 16 seats on the influential Assembly of Experts, a council that will pick Iran’s next supreme leader, CNN reported. A record-high number of the women—some 20 seats out of a total 290—were also expected to join the legislature, according to The Guardian.

The election, held Friday, had been widely framed as a referendum on the country’s nuclear deal, a diplomatic effort that had been opposed by Iran’s more conservative contingents. The deal led by Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s more moderate president, brought an end to years of crippling international sanctions last month.

But despite the suggested results, celebrating a newer, friendlier Iran may be premature. Thomas Erdbrink’s rhetorical couching of the results in The New York Times reflects a more nuanced picture of post-election Iran.

“While the hard-liners still remain firmly in control of the judiciary, security forces and much of the economy, the success of the moderate, pragmatic and pro-government forces seemed to have lent new momentum to Mr. Rouhani’s efforts to chart a course of greater liberalization at home and accommodation abroad,” he writes.

But even as Iranians went to the polls, the democratic character of Iran, its robust support for the Assad regime in Syria, and the moderate nature of its leadership remain heavily scrutinized. Also writing in the Times on Monday was Azadeh Moaveni, a former Iranian journalist, who expounded on the meaning of the results with more skepticism:

But outside the capital, initial results indicate that the showing was not so buoyant, and we must remember that Iran has had a pro-reform Parliament and a moderate president before; that synergy did little in the face of the overwhelming structural and economic advantages the system affords hard-liners and their institutions. And now, they have had to make electoral deals with pragmatists, diluting the very notion of “reformist” as a political category.

Ahead of Friday’s vote, stories about Iran’s decidedly immoderate activities were easy to find. On Thursday, a number of outlets reported that Iran would offer $7,000 to the families of Palestinians killed while carrying out attacks against Israelis.

Meanwhile, a report by Iranian state media last week charged that a government crackdown on drugs had led to the execution of every single male inhabitant of a village in southern Iran. Details, like post-election analysis, remain murky.

A Good Sign for Iran's Moderates

The results from Iran’s parliamentary elections haven’t been released yet, but some triumphant language has accompanied the anticipated tallies, which indicate a surge for Iranian moderates.

Reform-minded and more moderate candidates swept all 30 parliamentary seats in Tehran, the country’s most heavily populated province, and won 15 of 16 seats on the influential Assembly of Experts, a council that will pick Iran’s next supreme leader, CNN reported. A record-high number of the women—some 20 seats out of a total 290—were also expected to join the legislature, according to The Guardian.

The election, held Friday, had been widely framed as a referendum on the country’s nuclear deal, a diplomatic effort that had been opposed by Iran’s more conservative contingents. The deal led by Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s more moderate president, brought an end to years of crippling international sanctions last month.

But despite the suggested results, celebrating a newer, friendlier Iran may be premature. Thomas Erdbrink’s rhetorical couching of the results in The New York Times reflects a more nuanced picture of post-election Iran.

“While the hard-liners still remain firmly in control of the judiciary, security forces and much of the economy, the success of the moderate, pragmatic and pro-government forces seemed to have lent new momentum to Mr. Rouhani’s efforts to chart a course of greater liberalization at home and accommodation abroad,” he writes.

But even as Iranians went to the polls, the democratic character of Iran, its robust support for the Assad regime in Syria, and the moderate nature of its leadership remain heavily scrutinized. Also writing in the Times on Monday was Azadeh Moaveni, a former Iranian journalist, who expounded on the meaning of the results with more skepticism:

But outside the capital, initial results indicate that the showing was not so buoyant, and we must remember that Iran has had a pro-reform Parliament and a moderate president before; that synergy did little in the face of the overwhelming structural and economic advantages the system affords hard-liners and their institutions. And now, they have had to make electoral deals with pragmatists, diluting the very notion of “reformist” as a political category.

Ahead of Friday’s vote, stories about Iran’s decidedly immoderate activities were easy to find. On Thursday, a number of outlets reported than Iran would offer $7,000 to the families of Palestinians killed while carrying out attacks against Israelis.

Meanwhile, a report by Iranian state media last week charged that a government crackdown on drugs had led to the execution of every single male inhabitant of a village in southern Iran. Details, like post-election analysis, remain murky.

The Dismantling of a European Migrant Camp

Part of a major refugee camp that housed thousands near the French city of Calais was dismantled Monday in accordance with a recent court order.

Last week, a French judge approved the demolition of the south zone of the camp, which is known as the “Jungle,” after denying nonprofit organizations’ appeal for the eviction to be overturned. The court allowed the destruction of makeshift homes but “the common areas, such as churches, mosques, schools and medical centers, must remain.”

The demolition was ordered by the Calais prefecture. French officials said the camp posed a large security risk to the city and created a drain on police forces who must be stationed near the camp. Many of the migrants hope to reach the United Kingdom. Migrant camps near Calais have been established and eventually shut down on government orders several times since 2002.

According to migrant nonprofit organizations, refugees were “scared” and “confused” when French officials entered the southern area of the camp at 7 a.m., informing occupants they had an hour to evacuate, or be arrested. Fabienne Buccio, head of the Calais prefecture, said about three-quarters of the homes in that area were already evacuated following earlier “encouragement” from French officials.

Video footage captured and posted on social media by on-site journalists and nonprofit organizations showed clashes between occupants and police. It remains unclear why French riot police began using tear-gas and water canons in the camp’s south zone, but there were also reports of refugees throwing stones back at police.

Volunteers and nonprofit workers were reportedly blocked from entering the camp, but were able to witness the demolition. According to The Guardian, on-site humanitarian worker Caroline Anning said that camp occupants were “really nervous.”

“They don’t know where they can go,” she said. “There is a lack of information. Children have already traveled to the Dunkirk camp, where conditions are far worse than here.”

Dunkirk, a camp of about 3,000 refugees located 40 kilometers west of the Calais camp, is prone to flooding and has been described by nonprofit workers as a “sanitation emergency,” according to The Independent, with about one to toilet for every 100 people.

Footage showed a worker moving through the Calais camp on a bulldozer on Monday, though French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said last week the “gradual process” of demolition “was never a question of evacuating the south zone in a brutal fashion using bulldozers.”

The nonprofit group Save the Children estimates there are about 400 unaccompanied children at the Calais camp. Estimates conflict for the camp’s population as a whole; one charity, Help Refugees, estimates about 3,500 migrants from parts of North and East Africa, and the Middle East. French officials want to preserve the northern half of the camp and decrease the population to about 2,000.

According to The Guardian, refugees were in a panic over where to go after the evacuation, following the court’s ruling. French officials say migrants can move into heated shipping containers in the northern part of the camp or one of the other refugee reception centers in France. Migrant groups and charities disagree, stating there is not adequate accommodation for all the displaced refugees.

Clare Moseley, the founder of Care4Calais, a British-based migrant organization, was at the south zone Monday morning to witness the demolition.

“History has shown that every time they have tried to disperse people it hasn’t worked,” she said. “Common sense tells you that they are just going to go back to sleeping in fields and smaller camps.”

Buongiorno, Starbucks

Though Starbucks may be a 45-year-old company that originally sprung like a caffeinated dappling out of the soil of West Coast coffee culture, according to the liturgy, the behemoth under CEO Howard Schultz owes its spirit and soul to Italy:

Thirty-three years ago, Schultz took his first business trip to Milan and Verona, a journey that changed his life forever. Inspired by the craftsmanship of the Milanese barista, the spirit of the Italian people, their passion for community, their friendliness and taste for quality, Schultz’s vision for Starbucks began to take root.

Sixty-seven countries and 22,000-plus stores later, Starbucks is finally setting its sights on its first outpost in Italy for 2017, which Schultz announced over the weekend during a Fashion Week visit to Milan.

“Now we’re going to try, with great humility and respect, to share what we’ve been doing and what we’ve learned through our first retail presence in Italy,” said Schultz.

This seems like a big deal for Starbucks. Coffee is intricately linked to local custom (particularly in Italy) and Starbucks is broadly associated with super-sized American ubiquity.

The company’s various gambits always garner attention and derision, be it housing assistance for employees in China and the United Kingdom or employee initiatives for higher education, to wittingly or unwittingly mediating racial and religious discourse in the United States.

In Italy, where coffee is religion, how Starbucks functions as a state seems like a sideshow. “I think young people will try it out, for curiosity,” the owner of a century-old coffee bar in central Milan told The New York Times, “but I doubt it will become a major player in Italy. We worship coffee in Italy, while Americans drink coffee on the go in large cups. It’s two extremely different cultures.”

There are plenty of reasons to think that the company will have a tough time making converts. Starbucks has struggled in Vietnam and notoriously failed in Israel, two countries with entrenched coffee cultures and markets. Nevertheless, after some stumbles, the company did manage to find some success in Europe, including in Austria, which many credit with birthing the world’s coffeehouse culture.

“The dream of the company always has been to sometime complete the circle and open in Italy, but we haven't been ready,” Schultz said.

In a nod to Italian custom, the first outlet in Milan will feature a coffee bar and, in a nod to tourist mania, wireless Internet.

Can Trump Divide and Conquer the Republican Establishment?

For months, Republicans hoped, prayed, and convinced themselves that this day would never come: the day they had to take an actual, honest-to-God stance on Donald Trump’s candidacy.

Now, with Trump looking more and more like the GOP nominee, high-profile Republicans are starting to take stands, and some of them have decided to swallow their pride and endorse Trump. The first, of course, was Chris Christie, whose backing of Trump reverberated widely on Friday. Friday afternoon, Maine Governor Paul LePage, a former Christie endorser, followed the New Jersey governor’s lead.

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On Sunday, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions backed Trump, too, ahead of the Yellowhammer State’s Super Tuesday primary. A Sessions-Trump alliance makes sense in many ways. Sessions is one of the hardest line members of the Senate on immigration, which is Trump’s signature issue, and an endorsement had been the subject of speculation since top Sessions aide Stephen Miller joined the Trump campaign a month ago. It’s also a blow to Ted Cruz, who has allied himself with Sessions in the Senate—one of the few colleagues he has a decent relationship with.

On the other hand, conservative Twitter lit up over the weekend with the hashtag #NeverTrump, as rank-and-file righties, pundits, and others vowed not to support the entertainment mogul even if he wins the nomination. On Sunday, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, a rising Republican star, enlisted in the Twitter movement, saying he’d back a third-party candidate over either Trump or Hillary Clinton if those are his options in a general election. Nor does he represent a small group. While these numbers are fluid and could change as the election nears, 35 percent of Republicans who don’t back Trump told CNN in a poll released Monday that they would definitely not support him as a general-election candidate. Another 13 said they probably wouldn’t.

The reason the Christie endorsement was viewed as so pivotal is not because Christie commands a huge bloc—he had to leave the presidential race because he was low on both money and voters—but because it creates a psychological shift, allowing “establishment” Republicans to back Trump.

The group endorsing Trump already doesn’t fit any easy profile. Although Christie toughened up some of his stands ahead of the election, he was perhaps the most moderate Republican in the race. Superficially, LePage and Christie share some similarities—northeasterners, quarantine aficionados, bullies—but LePage is more conservative, and won office in the 2010 Tea Party groundswell. Sessions is a Southerner, a fourth-term senator, and an (unsuccessful) Ronald Reagan appointee as a federal judge. That’s three Republicans of different generations—one from a blue state, one from a bluish-purple state (LePage has won two terms thanks to a three-partly split), and one from a very red state. If you’re trying to pigeonhole the establishment Republicans backing Trump, good luck. That suggests a steady and growing stream of Trump endorsements from this broadly defined “establishment,” especially if Trump does as well on Tuesday as is expected.

Like Marco Rubio’s recent turn to bashing Trump aggressively, there are some uncomfortable questions for the #NeverTrump gang. These aren’t Johnny-Come-Latelies—many of them have despised Trump all along—but Johnny-Speak-Up-Latelies. Is the charge too late to make any difference now? And if it’s not, why did they let things get so out of hand before they acted? Who knows what the long-term damage to the Republican Party will be, but even if it’s small, there’s no advantage to having a guy who won't disavow David Duke as the party’s most prominent politician.

It will be interesting to watch the fallout from Trump’s Duke comments. The whole sequence is bizarre. On Friday, during a press conference, he somewhat flippantly disavowed the support of the former KKK leader. On Sunday, he refused to do so. On Monday, he claimed, rather implausibly, that he didn’t understand the question because of earpiece malfunction. The fumble did at least earn Trump the condemnation of Joe Scarborough, who has been one of his best friends in the mainstream media. The whole incident is in keeping with Trump’s winking relationship with white supremacy and other fringe elements throughout the campaign. He has, for example, blithely retweeted white supremacist Twitter accounts. In disavowing Duke, then kinda, sorta embracing him, then once again disavowing him on Monday, Trump can send a winking signal to Duke and his followers: We can’t explicitly welcome you, but...

The reasons why the Republicans now coalescing around #NeverTrump didn’t want to act are clear enough. Many of them believed—along with vast swathes of liberal and moderate observers—that Trump couldn’t win and would burn himself out. Attacking him carried several risks: First, Trump might turn on them and attack them directly. Second, attacking Trump might be counterproductive, since his support is premised in part on his outsider status—and attacks might only reinforce his appeal. Third, and relatedly, it was clear that while Trump’s views were abhorrent to the Republican leaders themselves, there was a vast bloc of conservative voters who strongly agreed with Trump. Attacking him meant alienating his supporters, and would suggest that the GOP’s harsh rhetoric on issues like immigration might have been just that—rhetoric. As rational as each of these is on its own, however, the cost-benefit analysis didn’t account for what would happen if Trump actually triumphed.

Even now, there’s a split among the anti-Trump forces, echoing the split between Rubio, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich for the anti-Trump presidential slot. There are those like Sasse, who says he’ll vote for a third-party candidate, or Erick Erickson, who vows to sit out. Others, like Robert Kagan and Tom Nichols, both national-security conservatives, say they’ll affirmatively vote for Clinton over Trump if that’s the choice.

The first group is the one to watch. These leaders acknowledge that sitting out a Trump-Clinton race would mean handing the presidency to Clinton. But unlike Kagan and Nichols, they don’t see Clinton as acceptable on the key issues they care about. If Trump wins the nomination, how many of the #NeverTrump gang will be able to resist the temptation to back a Republican—even one they fear and despise as much as Trump—against Hillary Clinton? How many will look at the map, look at Antonin Scalia’s empty seat on the Supreme Court, swallow hard, and pull the level for the GOP nominee? It’s like Justin Bieber said: Never say never.

Participate or Protest? Chris Rock Makes His Case

Early in his monologue last night, Chris Rock asked a question: Why, this year of all years, were people freaking out about the whiteness of the Oscars nominees? This wasn’t the first time that there’d been no actors of color nominated, but, he argued, in other eras—“say, ’62 or ’63”—minorities had more pressing things to complain about.

“You know, when your grandmother’s swinging from a tree, it’s really hard to care about best documentary foreign short,” he said.

That’s a powerfully uncomfortable line, meant to remind people not only of what’s changed over years but also of the history of violence that underlies current inequality in America. Yet it probably should be noted that in 1962, people were protesting Hollywood racism. That’s when, as NPR’s Gene Demby recently recounted, the black actor Caleb Peterson formed the Hollywood Race Relations Board, which picketed the Oscars. Jesse Jackson and others have revived the cause at various times since then. And the reason for the furore in 2016 isn’t as mystifying as Rock made it sound. When last year’s Oscars had all-white acting nominees for the first time since 1997, it could have been seen as a fluke. But when this year’s slate also excluded people of color, it raised the specter of an uncomfortable pattern, of backsliding, of something truly amiss in the mythmaking industry of a country that’s becoming more diverse each year.

The fact that Rock didn’t mention previous efforts to protest the Oscars, though, is telling. His commentary throughout the night was often hilarious and very smart (with exceptions), but one of the more subtly striking things about his performance was his apparent anxiety about how best to effect change. Faced with the age-old question of whether to work with or work against systems that treat you as lesser, he’d chosen “with,” and wanted to show why.

Because, of course, there’s an alternate universe where Rock chose not to host the show. He alluded to this fact in his monologue, saying that some people encouraged him to back out of the gig in solidarity with the #OscarsSoWhite movement. His explanation amounted to jokes about unemployment—“No one with a job ever tells you to quit”—and being replaced by Kevin Hart. Then he made fun of folks who’d taken the opposite tactical route of him by refusing to participate: Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, probably the highest-profile boycotters of the ceremony, were the butt of a few jokes that lightly suggested they were out of touch and ineffectual. This was perhaps less graceful than the statement Kerry Washington gave on the red carpet about why she had shown up: “If you look at the history of movements, the history of change, a lot of voices are needed at the table. I really respect and, actually, admire some of the people who are not here tonight, I really get it. But for me I felt like my voice, and my heart—my voice is best used at the table.”

Never did he let the powerful and famous audience members forget that they had profited off of a system with exclusion built into it.

To be sure, Rock used the rest of the ceremony to show the power of being at the table. He brought up police shootings of black people. He pointed out which non-white awards presenters deserved to be nominated. He did a skit about how if The Martian were about a black astronaut, it would have been a movie about abandonment rather than rescue. And in the most quotable moment of the night, he compared Hollywood racism to sorority racism— “It’s like, ‘We like you Rhonda, but you’re not a Kappa.’” Never did he let the powerful and famous audience members forget that they had profited off of a system with exclusion built into it. Is that enough to bring about change—making the night so awkward for lack of diversity that the decision makers in the audience will change their thinking in the future?

It’s a question that’s not easily answered, a question that’s rooted in debates between reformists and would-be revolutionaries in political movements throughout history. What’s clear is that Rock’s position, however principled and savvy it may be, necessarily involves the appearance of compromise. Today, a lot of commentators have noted that while Rock was canvassing movie stars to buy Girl Scout cookies from his daughter, black entertainers like Hannibal Buress, Ava DuVernay (director of Selma, widely seen as snubbed last year), and Ryan Coogler (director of Creed, widely seen as snubbed this year) were holding a fundraiser for the majority-minority population of Flint, Michigan, which is facing a public-health crisis. And at the end of the Oscars, Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” played, to mixed reaction online. It’s a protest anthem closely associated with Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee, who, of course, boycotted this year’s ceremony.

The Leap-Day Baby’s Paradox

The night I turned 21, I swaggered into a college watering hole in Camden, New Jersey. No longer would I flash a doctored Connecticut license and pose as a haggard 42-year-old Stonington man named Kurt. At the stroke of midnight, I could buy a beer legally.

The barkeep slid my license back. “I can’t serve you,” he said. He thought my real ID was fake. Who, after all, has February 29 for their birthday? I protested, but it was no use. “Plus,” he said. “It’s February 28. Come back tomorrow.”

Here’s the thing about birthdays: They happen each year. That’s a birthday’s job: You turn a year older, whether you blow out the candles on the cake or not.

Unless you don’t have a birthday. For 187,000 of us in the U.S., that’s what happens three-quarters of the time. We leaplings, as we’re called, have defied 1-in-1,461 odds to have our birthdays fall on February 29. Some would figure that makes us special. It depends on how you look at it. News reports in secondary markets sometimes feature leap-day births or an octogenarian leaper’s 20th. Back in 2008, Martha Stewart hosted 200 leapers on her show. They wore frog-mouth name tags (frogs leap, get it?). “I think you’re all so lucky!” Stewart said, sort of sincerely. She gave them each state-of-the-art digital picture frames.

Leapsters keep two sets of ages, annual and quadrennial. We mark time between real birthdays in fourths and halves. Leap-year days serve a purpose, as we know: The extra day tacked onto the end of February every four years accounts for Earth’s spinning around the sun five hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds longer than 365 days. In 46 B.C., Julius Caesar noticed the calendar had fallen behind 90 days and tried to correct the difference, and added days here and there to months on the calendar for one year, adding a leap day every four years thereafter. This still needed tweaking: By 1582, with 11 minutes a year left unadjusted, the calendar had shifted 10 days. The Julian reform of the Gregorian calendar introduced an extra day to make up the difference, with leap years of centuries divisible by four skipped.

Whatever. The bottom line is, I turn 12 this year, and I have Pope Gregory XIII and my mother to thank for it.

Leaplings have formed clubs over the years, like The Order of 29’ers, set up by a newspaper editor in Pittsburg, Kansas, in the early part of the last century. Since 1988, Anthony, Texas, has championed itself as the Leap Year Capital of the World: In 2012, the town’s three-day celebration included a car show, an ice hockey game, and a golf tournament. At the website of the Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies (“spreading Leap Year day awareness” for 19 years), fellow leapsters and leapettes share tales of woe: children who thought their birthdays were taken away, parents begging and bribing doctors to fudge kids’ birth certificates to February 28 or March 1. The date seems to confound petty bureaucrats and government factotum alike. “When I moved to Oregon and went to get my driver’s license I was told there is no February 29,” Raenell Dawn, the co-founder of the Honor Society, who turns 14 (56) this year, tells me. “The DMV employee actually said to me ‘Are you sure it’s February 29?’ As if I wasn’t sure of my own birth date!”

Leapsters fall into two schools. There are those who think it’s a unique quirk, like having double-jointed thumbs or keeping an AOL account. And then there are those who think it’s no big deal. “All I do is spend time with my family and close friends,” Antonio Sabáto, Jr., the actor and former Calvin Klein model (born February 29, 1972), writes to me on Twitter. “Good enough for me.” I haven’t heard back from the rapper and actor Ja Rule (born February 29, 1976) or the motivational speaker Tony Robbins (born February 29, 1960), so I assume being an actual celebrity trumps leapster status.

The bottom line is I turn 12 this year, and I have Pope Gregory XIII and my mother to thank for it.

I can’t help but think about my life more deeply every four years. Thinking in four-year periods isn’t uncommon—we have summer Olympics and presidential elections on leap years, after all. But, each February 29, I pause to take a life inventory. 16 to 20 marked the time from high school to college. From 36 to 40, I became a father and moved out of New York City.

There isn’t much of a Leap Day birthday canon. It’s a good enough birth date for Superman, although who knows what calendar the planet Krypton uses. Leapsters do have children’s books (sample titles: It’s My Birthday ... Finally! and Mommy, Where’s My Birthday?) and a young adult title (Leap Day). Probability theorists have a famous exercise called the “Birthday Problem.” First proposed by the engineer and mathematician Richard von Mises in 1939, the Birthday Problem determines the probability of a match in birth date given any number of people in the same room. (The probability reaches one half at 23 people.) In the original set-up and others, however, Leap Day birthdays are excluded to keep things uniform. Perhaps the most famous leap-day plot device appears in the 1879 Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Pirates of Penzance. Frederic, enslaved to pirates until he turned 21, is convinced to stay until he turns 84 because of his February 29 birthday. “You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement,” goes the lyric for the opera’s leap-year song, “Paradox.”

And then there’s Facebook, which bugs users to wish a happy birthday to close friends, family, and the pharma sales rep they sat next to on a plane that one time. Facebook tells the world my birthday falls on February 28 by default. For leapsters who celebrate on March 1 (about half of my leapling brethren are not, like me, strict “Februarians”), this is enough to ruin a birthday. Unless, of course, you just change your birthday to March 1. But the clumsiness of the arrangement is often enough to make me want to throw a fit. Just like a 12-year-old.

A Tipping Point for Automatic Voter Registration?

The state-by-state push to enact automatic voter registration laws is nearing a tipping point.

Or so its supporters hope.

Oregon began proactively adding unregistered citizens to its rolls last month. California will soon follow suit under a state law signed last year. Serious efforts to enact similar proposals through legislative action or citizen ballot initiatives are underway in several other states, including Illinois, Maryland, and Ohio. The drive has won endorsements in the last year from President Obama and both Democrats running to succeed him in the White House.

Those are all indisputable signs of momentum for an idea now at the core of advocacy efforts to expand access to the ballot box—that state governments should make it easier to vote by simply registering their eligible citizens, rather than forcing them to do it themselves. Yet while the campaign has gained steam, it has also cleaved along party lines in a way that threatens to turn automatic registration into one more partisan flashpoint in the battle over voting laws.

“I have met many Democrats that are convinced that Republican are trying to keep their party from voting, and I’ve met many Republicans that are convinced that Democrats are cheating,” said Kim Wyman, the top elections official in Washington state. “And it’s really hard to convince either side otherwise.”

Wyman is Washington’s secretary of state and a rare Republican who has joined Democrats in pushing for a new automatic registration law. The proposal she supports passed the state House with some bipartisan support, but it is likely to get bottled up in the Republican-controlled Senate. “There are very, very long odds right now,” she said.

The automatic voter registration laws in Oregon and California passed on strict party-line votes, and while proposals in states run by Democrats stand the best chance of moving forward, the effort is running into complications in part because of another progressive priority: expanding rights for undocumented immigrants. Proposals modeled on the Oregon bill call for the state’s motor vehicle department to run the registration program by adding people to the rolls when then apply for a driver’s license. But in states like Maryland that have recently signed off on giving licenses to undocumented immigrants, new laws prohibit DMV officials from checking a person’s citizenship status and verifying whether they are actually eligible to vote.

“There is nothing that stops someone being registered to vote other than that person not wanting to be registered to vote.”

“It does present a very practical problem,” said Matt Clark, a spokesman for Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland. In December, Democrats in the state legislature introduced an automatic registration law, which Hogan, a Republican, has yet to take a position on. “He’s waiting to see what the condition of the bill is,” Clark said. Democrats have a veto-proof majority in Maryland, but party leaders have not said whether passage of the registration bill will be a priority in this year’s session. Republicans in the state believe Democrats are trying to bait Hogan into taking partisan stands on a host of issues, including the registration proposal. While Hogan’s stayed quiet so far, Clark cited concerns with the bill’s cost to local counties and its handling of eligibility verification. “It runs in stark contrast to another law,” he said. “It completely ignores the problem of checking eligibility for folks.”

The state Republican Party is strongly opposed to the automatic registration proposal, executive director Joe Cluster said. Calling the idea an example of “big government,” Cluster urged Hogan to follow his “mentor,” Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who vetoed a similar, Democrat-backed proposal last year. “It’s a waste of money, because we already have the mechanisms for people to vote and register to vote,” Cluster said. “There is nothing that stops someone being registered to vote other than that person not wanting to be registered to vote.” He also warned that automatic registration would eventually lead to compulsory voting and fining people who don't turn out, like in Australia. “Are we going to do that next?” Cluster asked.

Supporters of automatic registration note that all of the new laws and proposals give people the opportunity to opt out. Oregon began implementing its program through the state’s DMV at the beginning of the year, and through the first six weeks, 7 percent of people who received cards alerting them to their new registration returned the cards asking to be taken off the rolls. But the state registered more than 10,000 new voters over that same time period, dwarfing the monthly average of 2,000 new registrations it previously reported. Officials have projected that as many as 300,000 new voters could be added to the 2.2 million already signed up in Oregon.

The bipartisan legislation in neighboring Washington state is more limited, since lawmakers are proposing that only state agencies with the ability to screen for eligibility process the new registrations. So instead of all new applicants for driver’s licenses, only people applying for enhanced driver’s licenses and commercial licenses would be automatically registered, along with those who apply for certain benefits through state health programs. For people who the state determines to be clearly eligible to vote, Wyman said, “what’s the downside of adding them to the rolls?”

“This will become something that is commonplace and normal, but somebody needs to be trailblazers.”

Supporters like Wyman say that beyond the argument for making it easier to vote, automatic registration serve an administrative function that modernizes the running of elections and helps to give officials a better picture of the electorate. With 21st century technology, concerns about determining eligibility should be easy to overcome, said Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the democracy program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. “There is no dispute that the system needs to be well-designed to make sure that people who are not eligible don’t get on the rolls,” she said. “But this is a database-management and record collection problem, which we have tools in the 21st century to be able to address.”

While Oregon pioneered the push at the state level by passing its law a year ago, automatic voter registration has gone national as an issue with endorsements from President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders. Obama made a point of pressing Illinois lawmakers—and the state’s Republican governor, Bruce Rauner— to approve legislation when he spoke in the General Assembly chamber in Springfield earlier this month. “Let’s set the pace — encourage other states across the country to follow our lead, making automatic voter registration the new norm across America,” Obama said. A group called iVote led by alumni from his campaigns is now organizing in Illinois and several other states, including in Ohio, where they are trying to put a referendum on automatic voter registration on the ballot in November.

Pérez said she hoped the trajectory of automatic voter registration would mirror the push for states to allow citizens to register to vote online. As recently as 2010, just six states had online registration, while 33 do now. “I think we will see these other states come, and this will become something that is commonplace and normal, but somebody needs to be trailblazers,” she said. “We’re totally in the trailblazing phase.”