Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 351
September 9, 2015
Jeb Bush's Tax Plan Nods to Trump

It’s long been clear that Donald Trump’s rants against illegal immigration have pulled at least some of his Republican rivals to the right. But the GOP frontrunner’s recent populist turn might be dragging them back to the left—ever so slightly—on economic policy.
Just look at Jeb Bush’s tax plan, which he released on Tuesday evening. Overall, the proposal is fairly standard conservative fare: He tries to simplify the code by collapsing seven individual income brackets into three, slashing the top rate to 28 percent from nearly 40 percent and eliminating a bunch of popular deductions to pay for it. Bush also proposes to cut corporate taxes, on the grounds that a high rate on businesses encourages companies to invest and create jobs elsewhere. The basic outlines of the plan are not all that different from Mitt Romney's platform in 2012, or the benchmarks that Republicans in Congress have supported in their annual budget proposals for years.
But one part of the Bush—er, Jeb!—tax plan stands out: “We will treat all non-investment income the same, so unless you stake capital in an investment, you won’t be able to claim the capital-gains tax rate on your market gains,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday. Bush here is calling for the elimination of the so-called “carried-interest loophole,” a provision under which hedge-fund managers in particular can escape millions of dollars in taxes by claiming the lower capital-gains rate, which is capped at 20 percent, rather than the 39.6 percent at the top of the income brackets for their cut of money made for other people in the market. Democrats outside of New York have long demanded this change, but lawmakers in both parties who rely on campaign contributions from Wall Street have kept the loophole in place for years.
It just so happens, however, that Trump, the real-estate tycoon, has been hammering this provision for weeks. “They're paying nothing and it's ridiculous. I want to save the middle class,” Trump said last month on “Face the Nation.” “The hedge-fund guys didn't build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.” He also said they were “getting away with murder.”
So did Bush copy the man standing ahead of him in the polls? It’s not exactly clear. A campaign aide said Wednesday that the carried-interest proposal had been under discussion going back to at least March, but Bush hadn’t mentioned it publicly before Trump restarted the debate. And unlike some Republican proposals, he didn't bury it deep within a dense white paper as a way to make the numbers add up—he hasn't said how much his plan will cost, by the way. No, Bush made sure to highlight his hit on Wall Street, both in its hometown newspaper and in an appearance Wednesday with the business-friendly crew on CNBC’s “Squawkbox.”
“We’re rewarding Main Street,” he said.
We’re not penalizing Wall Street, but right now Wall Street’s done had a pretty good ride here engineering and using great creativity and great skills to be able to make American businesses the most competitive in the world. But we are not growing. We are not investing in our own country.
Bush even boasted that the wealthy would pay a higher portion of taxes under his plan than they do now under President Obama. Republican rhetoric on income inequality isn’t new, of course. But it’s still significant that the party establishment’s favorite candidate has put pen to paper to advance even a modestly populist proposal. Liberals can probably thank Donald Trump for that.









Apple's Cash Reserves Would Fill 93 Olympic Swimming Pools

Since it debuted eight years ago, what kind of wealth has been created by the iPhone?
There are lots of ways to measure this, obviously. The device has refashioned an entire industry and region, and it’s made Apple the most valuable company by market capitalization. But it’s also just made a lot of cash for Apple, which is just sitting in the company’s coffers. As of last month, Apple had $203 billion in cash reserves.
Back in 2012, Atlantic contributing editor Alexis Madrigal looked at how many Olympic swimming pools would hold all of Apple’s cash money. The answer? Fifty-one pools—though that final pool would only be filled up about a fifth of the way.
That was then. Back in April 2012, when Madrigal did his math, the company held $110 billion.
Now, its hoard exceeds $203 billion. By my own count, Apple’s current cash-on-hand hoard would now fill 93 Olympic swimming pools.
To arrive at this number, I adopted Madrigal’s math:
A dollar bill (according to Wolfram Alpha) has a volume of 0.06943 cubic inches. An Olympic-sized swimming pool has a volume of 152,064,000 cubic inches. Divide the pool by the money and you come up with 2,190,177,157 bills needed to fill a swimming pool.
And divide Apple’s $203 billion by that bills-per-pool count and you get 92.6.
There are more serious ways to talk about this number. It exceeds the market capitalization of Disney. CNBC reports that it’s as much as “the total net-worth of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Ma combined.” And from an investor standpoint, it’s let the company create one of the biggest capital-return programs, ever.
But it’s also just, you know, a lot of money. So as Tim Cook announces promising financial results today, or a 72-inch-wide iPhone, imagine him also doing the backstroke across a pool filled with cash. Because he totally could do that. Ninety-three times. Scrooge McDuck-style.









Stephen Colbert Isn't the New Letterman—He's the New Charlie Rose

On the debut of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Tuesday evening, the host dedicated a few minutes of his hour-long inauguration to giving his audience a tour of his new set. There was his Captain America shield, a nostalgic holdover from the set of The Colbert Report. There was “an ancient cursed amulet” that would, in due time, force Colbert to do on-air plugs for Sabra Roasted Red Pepper Hummus (“Scoop up the fun!”). But there was also, placed on a shelf, the pennant that his mother had gotten, Colbert said, while attending Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. The host gazed at the piece of his family’s—and his country’s—history, and took a beat. “Sadly, civil rights only won the pennant that year,” he said. “Racism won the World Series.”
Which: whoa. “Racism won,” right off the bat! This is not the typical stuff of formula-ridden late-night comedy. And while it’s silly to assess a show, especially a late-night comedy show, on its premiere—jokes and gags will be tweaked; hosts will adjust their deliveries; things will inevitably evolve—it’s notable, right off the bat, how much of a departure that little World Series line represented. It’s notable, too, how many other little lines did the same thing. If last night’s Late Show was indeed indicative of the Late Shows to come ... viewers, and late-night comedy, might be in for a shake-up.
On the surface, Colbert’s debut stayed (mostly) true to the established formula of The Late Night Talk Show: the be-suited host, the peppy band, the monologue featuring jokes both topical and less so (oh, hey, Ashley Madison punchline), the eager studio audience, the interviews with celebrity guests. Colbert tweaked the formula a bit—his suit was cobalt blue rather than the typical dark blue or black; his band was peppier than most; his desk more comically large than usual. Also, he danced! And he sang! And he ate Oreos!
But he also talked, explicitly, about politics. (The Oreo-eating was in fact part of a weirdly sophisticated joke comparing addictive junk food and Donald Trump.) He chatted with his brother, in the audience for the occasion, about their amiably differing political views. He had Jeb Bush as a guest, and asked him the kinds of questions that political reporters have traditionally asked—why he’s running, what he thinks his brother got wrong (“I think he should’ve brought the hammer down on the Republicans when they were spending way too much,” Bush replied). Colbert also got the presidential candidate to utter a phrase that may well go down in political lore: When he asked the Bush brother about his much-mocked “Jeb!” logo, Jeb explained, delightfully dryly: “It connotes excitement.”
He danced! And he sang! And he ate Oreos! But he also talked, explicitly, about politics.To an extent, of course, none of this is new or noteworthy. These weren’t deep policy questions. And politics and late-night comedy have long been happy, if occasionally awkward, bedfellows. Clinton, saxophoning with Arsenio. Bush, chatting with Leno. Obama, chatting with ferns. But Colbert was, in subtle but significant ways, different. He wasn’t treating Jeb as a celebrity, giving him an easy opportunity for free, and content-free, media; he was treating him as a person who is running for political office. He was actually interviewing him. He was trying to have a conversation with him about things that directly affect people’s lives. (Same, to some extent, with George Clooney, Colbert’s first guest: The two talked about acting and movie-making, but they also talked about Darfur.)
You could think of all that as a kind of mission creep, politics seeping into entertainment; you could also, though, think of it as entertainment making its way into politics. Productively. Part of Donald Trump’s popularity has to be explained by his refusal to acknowledge a distinction between the two. And part of why politics has become so polarized, while we’re at it, is likely that we’ve come to see the workings of government as things that exist separately from the rest of our lives. The sociologist Pablo Boczkowski talks about the reluctance many people have to talk about politics in a work environment, where such discussions can create unnecessary acrimony; instead, we silo ourselves, discussing the issues of the day, for the most part, with people we know will pretty much agree with us.
That’s not a good thing, for people or for democracy. And Colbert’s latest debut suggested that late-night comedy might actually play a role in fixing it. The guest list for Colbert’s upcoming shows includes—along with the actors and comics you’d expect—Stephen Breyer, Bernie Sanders, and Ban Ki-moon. Those guests, my colleague David Sims noted, are “surprisingly highbrow.” They are also surprisingly political. And intellectual. They are the guests not traditionally of Letterman and Kimmel and Fallon, but of Charlie Rose. And that may well be meaningful. The Colbert Report, after all, was notable not just for its satire, but for its intellectualism: It introduced its audience to authors and thinkers who might not get an airing on typical late-night, or for that matter typical news, shows. The Late Show’s debut suggested that Colbert might carry on that tradition, expanding it to a wider audience. It suggested a proposition that, until last night, seemed as absurd as it is simple: that late-night comedy, aired on a large network, can be funny and smart at the same time.









Prince Is Trying to Stop Time

Partway through the second song on Prince’s 2014 album Art Official Age, the British singer Lianne La Havas broke through a funk-romantic reverie to play sci-fi nurse. In a spoken-word segment, she told a certain
Hillary Clinton’s Bungled Reboot

It’s a bad sign when your presidential campaign needs a reboot. It’s a worse sign when your advisers announce that reboot publicly.
That’s exactly where Hillary Clinton finds herself this week. In an attempt to right what is universally seen as a listing campaign, the Democratic frontrunner is attempting to reassure her supporters, donors, and party—as well as prospective supporters and donors—that she has what it takes to run and win a race. But so far, the hamfisted execution of that reboot suggests that she hasn’t learned enough from the debacle of her 2008 campaign, and it’s hard to imagine that events of the last two days will do much to reassure major donors and party leaders.
The precipitating cause of all of this is the continuing drip-drip of Clinton’s State Department email scandal. Her supporters have wrung their hands in dismay that Clinton has not yet found a way to put concerns about the emails to rest (without ever considering that there may not be any especially good political answers). On Friday, in a first stab at turning things around, Clinton granted a rare interview to Andrea Mitchell, in which she refused to apologize for using a private email account and server, though she did offer a classic non-apology, expressing regret that “this has been confusing to people.” On Monday, she spoke to the Associated Press, which kicked off its story this way: “Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday she does not need to apologize for using a private email account and server while at the State Department because ‘what I did was allowed.’”
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Tuesday morning, however, The New York Times ran a big story based on “extensive interviews” with Clinton advisers, in which they “acknowledged missteps—such as their slow response to questions about her email practices—and promised that this fall the public would see the sides of Mrs. Clinton that are often obscured by the noise and distractions of modern campaigning.” The aides said they want Clinton to show humor and heart, and they said she was scrapping the slogan “everyday Americans,” which never seemed to catch on.
Then, during an interview Tuesday with ABC, Clinton actually apologized: “I should have used two accounts. One for personal, one for work-related emails. That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility.” She followed that with a post to Facebook and an email to supporters.
The reversal—two almost diametrically opposed answers to the same question in two days—does not suggest a campaign that is confident and has a plan. And the spectacle of Clinton’s aides speaking to the press about what they “want her” to do makes for uncomfortable recollections of the 2008 campaign, in which Clinton aides fought for control of the campaign (and with each other) via the media. Heading into this race, Clinton promised she had learned the lessons of the campaign, including the risk of failing to show emotion on the trail and the danger of allowing chaos among advisers, and wouldn’t make them again.
So far, the record is mixed. The tactical lessons seem to have stuck: Caught by surprise by Barack Obama’s wily delegate-gathering strategy seven years ago, she’s counting them more carefully. But she still struggles with organization, message, and emotion. It’s impossible to imagine more disciplined campaigns—like either Obama run, or either George W. Bush run—going through the public reboot of the last few days. (Those four campaigns also share something important that differentiates them from Clinton in 2008: They were able to win both the nomination and the White House.)
One additional problem with announcing that the candidate is going to show more emotion is that once she does, those displays start to seem, if not fake, at least forced. In the ABC interview Tuesday, Clinton got choked up while discussing her mother, Dorothy Rodham. There are many reasons to believe this is genuine: Losing a parent is a traumatic experience, and Clinton has repeatedly spoken passionately during this campaign about the influence of her mother, who led a truly harrowing early life and died in 2011 at 92. Yet because her by-all-indications-genuine display of emotion came the same day as the Times story, skeptical reporters questioned whether it was for real. (She also appeared Tuesday on Ellen, a venue intended to be more casual and authentic, where she kibbitzed with Amy Schumer and danced the nae nae.)
Clinton's struggles show the disadvantages of running as an incumbent, her strategy so far. (Clinton’s Wednesday morning speech making the case for President Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement is the latest instance of this strategy.) One is that the campaign can forget that it actually has to win voters over. A second is that the strategy assumes the candidate has already proven her competence. Clinton’s waffling over the emails, and her advisers’ public declaration of a broader change of course, do nothing to project competence.
Clinton isn't alone in struggling to show humor and heart. Jeb Bush’s somewhat wooden appearance with Stephen Colbert Tuesday night, and his inability to effectively respond to Donald Trump’s accusation that he is “low energy,” mirror Clinton’s own problems. But because Bush is no longer the frontrunner, at least for now, and because Bernie Sanders is running even or ahead of Clinton in several states, she cannot simply run against Bush, as she was doing a month ago. (Bush’s sinking poll numbers may offer her a cautionary tale.) It’s also important to put the troubles of the last few weeks in perspective: Clinton still has a solid advantage in the Democratic primary, whether Joe Biden runs or not.
But it doesn't matter how many times James Carville goes on TV to mock the press or warn his fellow Democrats against overreacting to Clinton’s troubles: His fellow Democrats are already alarmed—and her reboot, rather than assuaging their fears, may be making the problem worse.









September 8, 2015
Who Decides What Makes a Poem Great?

There’s an awkward paradox lurking in the bland title of The Best American Poetry 2015. On the one hand, the anthology claims to offer something summative, something definitive, something intentionally exclusive: The Best American Poetry. The best! Here are the poems, the volume promises, that are the most worthy and/or the most accomplished and/or the most moving and/or the most formally interesting and/or the most conceptually innovative of all of the poems that were published in a formal or semi-formal capacity in its stated calendar year! As the volume’s marketing literature assures its potential readers, “The Best American Poetry 2015 is a guide to who’s who and what’s happening in American poetry today.”
But then there’s the book’s qualified byline: “Edited by.” Which is followed, in this year’s edition, by the name of the poet and novelist Sherman Alexie, who did the work, this year, of deciding 1) how to define “best” and 2) which poems made that cut. Which in turns suggests that a more fitting title for this book of Bests might have been The Best American Poetry of 2015 According to This One Poet.
The subjectivity/objectivity awkwardness—which is of course baked in to the production process not just of BAP, but of The Best American Essays and The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Magazine Writing and every other anthology that taps a guest editor in the service of curating a canon—took center stage this weekend: It came to light that one of the 75 poems included in BAP’s 2015 collection was written by a poet who submitted his work under the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou. The given name of the poet in question is in fact Michael Derrick Hudson. And he is very much not, as his pseudonym would suggest, Chinese American. Nor is he Asian American. He is white. He lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he currently works, he says, at the Genealogy Center of the Allen County Public Library.
Black Mirror Is the Perfect Show for Netflix

The British sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror has always been a satirical look at technology folding in on itself, so it makes all the sense in the world that it would eventually become a Netflix show. The streaming network, after all, has a hint of dystopia about it, given the way it curates its original programing based on reams of viewer data. Netflix announced Monday that it will produce “multiple episodes” of Charlie Brooker’s drama, which has only aired seven episodes since it debuted on the UK’s Channel 4 in 2011, but which quickly became a cult sensation in the States when it started streaming online (on Netflix, naturally).
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Each Black Mirror episode offers a twisted tale of technology gone wrong, with some set in a radical future, and others in the screen-addicted present (the “black mirror” of the title refers to the blank screen of a smartphone or tablet). While the premise is satirical, the tone veers wildly, from the bleak political commentary of “The National Anthem” (where social-media pressure forces the Prime Minister to commit a live-streamed act of bestiality) to the melancholy “Be Right Back,” which sees a woman try to replace her deceased boyfriend with a virtual avatar constructed from his Internet history. Brooker hasn’t produced a full episode since February 2013, but did write a Christmas special last year containing three small stories starring Jon Hamm. That was, perhaps, an acknowledgement of the show’s popularity in America, which has surely brought about its return.
Black Mirror did air on American TV—on the obscure Audience Network, available only to DirecTV subscribers, but once it hit Netflix, it became a sensation, largely through word of mouth. It’s likely the episodes will still air in the U.K. on Channel 4, but this is the latest example of Netflix’s self-aware approach to its own power. Shows that couldn’t find a huge viewership in the more traditional network TV system, like Arrested Development, work perfectly on Netflix, and can find a large enough audience to be resurrected within its binge-friendly walls. AMC’s crime drama The Killing never got big ratings on TV, but Netflix identified it as a favorite of its subscribers, eventually hosting its final season after AMC cancelled it.
Unlike Arrested Development or The Killing, Black Mirror isn’t a serialized show, so its success online is perhaps more surprising. At the end of one of its emotionally grueling tales, it’s hard to imagine having much of an appetite to auto-play the next installment. But each Black Mirror episode has its own finely crafted world, and most feature a shocking Twilight Zone-esque twist, making them perfect to pass around among friends, like urban legends or scary stories traded over a campfire. No doubt Brooker’s already working on an episode about the mysterious appeal of the dark Internet parable, and the streaming giant that knows far too much about the habits of its customers.









What’s Next for Kim Davis?

A judge has ordered Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who was jailed last week for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, be released.
U.S. District Judge David Bunning wrote in a two-page order on Tuesday that five of Davis’s six deputy clerks in Rowan County have agreed to grant licenses to both gay and straight couples. Their office had not granted licenses since June 29—just days after a Supreme Court ruling made same-sex marriage the law of the land. Since the county is “fulfilling its obligation,” the order said, Davis could go free. Davis has said her beliefs as an Apostolic Christian prevented her from recognizing same-sex marriage.
Davis was released from the Carter County Detention Center just after 3 p.m. She will return to her job later this week, CNN reports. But Bunning made clear that she can’t get in the way of marriage licenses being issued to all couples.
“Davis shall not interfere in any way, directly or indirectly, with the efforts of her deputy clerks to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples,” the order states. “If Defendant Davis should interfere in any way with their issuance, that will be considered a violation of this Order and appropriate sanctions will be considered.”
In early July, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Davis and Rowan County. In August, Bunning issued an injunction ordering her to begin issuing licenses to all legally eligible couples. Davis appealed the ruling, but was denied a stay by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and, later, the Supreme Court. She was escorted to jail last Thursday after an order from Bunning.
Davis’s, attorney, Roger Gannam, said Tuesday that Davis has “never changed her mind” on this matter, Yahoo News reports.
Before Davis left jail, she met with two of her fans: Republican presidential candidates Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, and Ted Cruz, the Texas senator. Huckabee, a Baptist minister, was planning to hold a rally outside the facility in Grayson, Kentucky. He was by Davis’s side when she left the facility Tuesday afternoon, and spoke to reporters waiting for her outside.
Davis’s supporters gathered outside of the detention center Tuesday afternoon, waving signs backing her. Several local schools closed in anticipation of heavy traffic. The New York Times sets the scene:
Since Davis was jailed, both eligible straight and gay couples in Rowan County have received marriage licenses.Scores of people gathered outside the jail hours before Mr. Huckabee’s speech was scheduled to begin. Many people sat in lawn chairs they brought from their homes, while a man used a megaphone to urge people to repent. Streets were crowded as traffic slowed, and one entrepreneur offered parking spaces for $20 each.









Baltimore Will Pay Freddie Gray's Family $6.4 Million

The criminal trials of six officers implicated in the death of Freddie Gray haven’t come close to beginning, but the city of Baltimore has already agreed to pay Gray’s family $6.4 million to settle any civil claims in his death.
In April, the 25-year-old black man was fatally injured in police custody—after Gray was arrested under questionable circumstances, his spinal cord was severed as he rode in a police van, and he died a week later. It’s not unusual for a civil settlement to come separately from criminal trials, and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, whose office announced the agreement, said in a statement that the settlement aimed to avoid litigation that would be lengthy and painful for both the Gray family and the city, where longstanding racial tensions with the police were dramatically exposed in the days after Gray’s death.
"The proposed settlement agreement going before the Board of Estimates should not be interpreted as a judgment on the guilt or innocence of the officers facing trial," Rawlings-Blake said. "This settlement is being proposed solely because it is in the best interest of the city, and avoids costly and protracted litigation that would only make it more difficult for our city to heal and potentially cost taxpayers many millions more in damages."
The Baltimore Sun calls the payout “extraordinary,” noting that it is “larger than the total of the more than 120 other lawsuits brought against the police department for alleged brutality and misconduct since 2011.”
But it is only the scale that is remarkable. Baltimore taxpayers have repeatedly been forced to cover the cost of their police department’s unwarranted violence against civilians. The city paid $5.7 million in brutality settlements over that period. As my colleague Conor Friedersdorf remarked in April,
as huge as that figure is, the more staggering number in the article is this one: "Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil-rights violations." What tiny percentage of the unjustly beaten win formal legal judgments?
The settlement shouldn’t have much bearing on the outcome of the criminal case. Even setting aside Rawlings-Blake’s caution that there was no admission of guilt, the settlement would almost certainly be inadmissible in the trial, David Jaros, an associate professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, noted in an email.
Hearings over that case are ongoing. Last week, a judge rejected a request by defense attorneys to have State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby removed from the case, but he granted them a request to have the six officers tried separately, rather than in a pair and a group of four, as Mosby had intended. This Thursday, a hearing will be held on a defense request to move the trial from Baltimore, where the officers’ lawyers say their clients can’t get a fair hearing. Jaros said defense lawyers could conceivably argue in that hearing that the news of the civil settlement would further affect the jury pool.
The Gray family’s attorney has not commented on the settlement.
The size of the settlement reflects both the horror of Gray’s death and the magnitude of the problem for the city. No settlement can make a family whole after a death, but Gray's own life provides a cautionary tale about the intersection between entrenched poverty and payouts, as The Washington Post’s Terrence McCoy has demonstrated in detail. Gray was a victim of lead poisoning, a widespread problem in aging, poorly maintained buildings in poor neighborhoods in Baltimore. Lead is strongly connected to development and educational struggles and higher crime rates. Gray and his family received hundreds of thousands of dollars in a settlement. But financing companies scouted and convinced Gray and many other victims—some of whom are almost illiterate—to sell their stakes in exchange for an immediate but much smaller infusion of cash. “They sucker you in . . . They didn’t know they were giving up so much for so little,” Gray’s stepfather told the Post. In an environment of desperate poverty, huge infusions of cash can’t always offer stability.









So Much for That Veto Fight on Iran...

All summer long, the question in the congressional debate over the Iran deal has been whether opponents could muster a veto-proof majority to block the agreement from taking effect.
Now it looks like President Obama might not have to use his veto pen at all.
Within minutes of each other Tuesday, three more Senate Democrats—Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Gary Peters of Michigan, and Ron Wyden of Oregon—all came out in favor of the nuclear deal, bringing the total number of supporters in the Senate to 41. That means Democrats have enough votes to filibuster a resolution of disapproval and block it from coming to a final vote.
It doesn't quite guarantee the resolution won’t pass—it remains possible that some supporters would vote with Republicans on a procedural motion on the grounds that such an important matter of foreign policy deserves an up-or-down vote. Toward that end, Minority Leader Harry Reid has offered to forego a filibuster if Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agrees to raise the threshold for final passage to 60 votes. But that wouldn’t change the outcome if Democrats stick together.
For Obama, the announcements cap a successful summer of lobbying his own party to stand by him on a critical piece of his foreign-policy legacy. Aside from Senator Chuck Schumer, nearly every top Democrat in Congress will be supporting the agreement. The chairwoman of the Democratic Party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, announced her support over the weekend after weeks on the fence. And Obama has won a few noteworthy endorsements from Republicans outside the Capitol, including Colin Powell, Dick Lugar, and Brent Scowcroft. But the result is properly seen more as a loss prevented than a victory achieved. After all, when Congress votes on the deal over the next few weeks, a majority of lawmakers will still be voting against the Iran agreement—they just won’t be able to stop it.









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