Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 70

Peace At Last: The Deal that Ends Colombia's Long Conflict

NEWS BRIEF The war lasted nearly 60 years and killed a quarter-of-a million people. Thousands were kidnapped, and more were injured by landmines placed in the jungles controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). On Monday, the Marxist group’s rebel leader, Timochenko, used a pen made from a bullet to sign a peace deal with Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, which ends the last big Cold War-era conflict in Latin America.

The deal, signed in Cartagena, marks the end of four years of negotiations between the government and the rebels. Colombians will vote October 2 on whether to accept the deal—and it’s predicted they will—which would draw FARC soldiers out of the jungle and into designated disarmament zones set up by the United Nations. They will then form a political party recognized by the government and be given 10 seats in Colombia’s 268-member Congress. As part of the deal, FARC was removed from the European Union’s list of terrorist organizations.

Before the signing, Santos had elaborated on the significance of the pens by saying, “We are going to sign with a bullet-pen ... to illustrate the transition of bullets into education and future.”

To signify peace, some of the 2,500 foreign dignitaries and FARC guerrillas who attended the ceremony dressed in white. Here’s a photo of what that looked like:

Colombian, FARC leaders to sign historic peace deal to end a five-decade war https://t.co/f6mpEMX4mY pic.twitter.com/9icW1WG5FD

— AFP news agency (@AFP) September 26, 2016

Many FARC leaders voted Friday to approve the deal, which was just as significant as the signing itself. There was worry some rebel blocs would refuse the terms, but after FARC representatives deliberated for a week in the jungle, one leader by the name of Ivan Marquez declared the war over, saying, “Tell Mauricio Babilonia that he can let loose the yellow butterflies,” referring to a character in Gabriel Garcia Marqeuz’s 100 Years of Solitude.

But the deal was not without its critics.

Some Colombians say they believe FARC should be held more accountable for the many deaths and kidnappings that resulted from their war, started in 1964. One critic is former President Alvaro Uribe, who believes some FARC leaders should serve jail time. Instead of criminal courts, the peace deal establishes special tribunals to hear cases, but allows rebels who admit wrongdoing to receive lesser sentences that include “restorative” justice for the victims and their families.

FARC rebels have 180 days now to disarm. About 7,500 fighters are expected to leave the jungle and return to regular life, and this will not be easy.

One of the major questions that remains is who will fill FARC’s void. The group controlled 170,000 acres of coca plants, a crop that makes up much of the world’s cocaine. Part of the government’s responsibilities in the deal will include weaning poor farmers from the coca onto other lucrative crops. There are also several other militant groups fighting for control of Colombia’s jungle, including another Marxist guerrilla movement, the National Liberation Army.

But firstly, and most importantly, Colombia must make sure the peace deal sticks.

Paul LePage's Binders Full of White People

In August, Governor Paul LePage of Maine launched a diatribe at a man who’d asked him about a spate of drug problems in the state.

“I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison, but they come and I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ringed binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn,” he said.

But when reporters asked to see the binder, LePage refused. It turns out he may have been right to be wary: Its contents, released Monday after an open-records request, showed that the Republican badly misstated its contents, blaming people of color from out of state when most of those included are white Mainers.

LePage, a Republican who has become nationally notorious for his repeated racist comments, said earlier this year that his state’s burgeoning drug problem was caused by “guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty,” adding: “These type of guys that come from Connecticut and New York. They come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave.”

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Maine's Governor Insists the Problem Isn't His Racism—It's Being Called a Racist

LePage’s comments, which blamed people of color for Maine’s drug problem and included some old timey fearmongering about interracial relationships, were promptly and accurately labeled racist. As I noted at the time, there was little or no evidence to support his claim. He insisted it had nothing to do with race. But when he was asked about the claim in August, he changed course, saying that yes, it was about race, and it was people of color who were the problem.

That’s when he announced he had the binder in question. Reporters promptly asked to see the book. LePage refused. “Let me tell you something: Black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers. You ought to look into that!” he said, stomping away. “You make me so sick!” The American Civil Liberties Union of Maine and others filed a public-records request.

Now LePage’s binder full of (alleged) felons has been released. It’s a remarkable document for a variety of reasons. Reading the 148 pages, one gets a sense of the governor at work, gathering clips and messages that chronicle Maine’s drug epidemic, with a mix of mug shots, news clips, and bulletins about arrests. In several places, someone—presumably LePage—has annotated the notes in handwriting. On one page, for example, a note says, “why not federal charges US ATTORNEY.”

The most glaring takeaway, however, is the identities of those arrested. What they show is that LePage was almost entirely wrong in his characterization. It’s hard (and risky) to assign racial identities to every one of the people whose mugshots are included in the binder, but it’s clear that most of them are white. There are 93 people pictured. I counted slight more than 30 who appeared to be black or Hispanic; the Portland Press Herald calculated 37. That means at least 60 percent of them are white.

Nor does the idea that the drug trade is the fault of outsiders hold up. Setting aside the mugshots and tracking all of the arrests listed, there are more than 100 Mainers listed as being arrested for drug offenses, versus around 40 out-of-staters.

Unsurprisingly, Maine’s drug trade is mostly the product of Mainers, not people from Waterbury and the Bronx out to flood Vacationland with opioids. It is true that of the out-of-staters, a disproportionate number appear to be people of color, though it’s also unsurprising that in the whitest state in American, a higher proportion of non-residents would be non-white.

But even these numbers may very well overrepresent minorities. The names in the binder are generally people who were arrested, not convicted. And since people of color are arrested at higher rates for drug offenses than white people, even controlling for usage rates, the white share of the Maine drug trade is likely higher than LePage’s binder would suggest.

In summary, LePage not only vastly overestimated the portion of black and Hispanic faces in the collection, he incorrectly blamed people of color and out-of-staters for a problem that is largely created by white residents. Perhaps LePage simply misremembered and thought it was more black men, though given that he had ample time to check his figures, there would seem to be an subconscious tendency to blame black men. On the other hand, LePage’s list of greatest hits shows a consistent focus on race, including his assertion that President Obama hates white people and his refusal to attend Martin Luther King Day celebrations.

After LePage’s August outburst revealed the binder, a Democratic representative named Drew Gattine criticized the governor. LePage believed, apparently incorrectly, that Gattine had called him a racist, and called and left Gattine a profane and threatening voicemail. In the ensuing days, LePage mused aloud about resigning from office, and he offered a non-apology to Gattine, explaining that he was upset about being called a racist.

For the governor, being called a racist is worse than being a racist. But now that LePage’s attempt to pin culpability for Maine’s drug problems on black men from out of state have been debunked, will he apologize? Don't hold your breath. The Press Herald editorial board's apology to the rest of the United States for giving us LePage is likely to be the only mea culpa forthcoming.

Paul LePage's Binder of Drug Arrests (PDF)


Paul LePage's Binder of Drug Arrests (Text)

Funding for Body Cameras

NEWS BRIEF The U.S. Department of Justice awarded Monday more than 100 police departments across the country with money to help pay for body cameras.

The award totals $20 million, and is an effort to restore the public’s trust in law enforcement after high-profile instances of black men being shot by police. The winning agencies are in 32 states, Puerto Rico, and include some Native American tribal departments.

In a statement, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said:

As we strive to support local leaders and law enforcement officials in their work to protect their communities, we are mindful that effective public safety requires more than arrests and prosecutions. It also requires winning – and keeping – the trust and confidence of the citizens we serve.

Body cameras have been pointed to as a solution to growing mistrust of officers in some communities. An increasing number of more and more videos—sometimes captured by cell phones—show questionable tactics used by police to subdue people, often black men. The fight for transparency and what police say is the need to maintain integrity in their investigations often puts the public and police departments at odds. This was clear in the case of Chicago’s Laquan McDonald, killed in 2014. Police fought the release of the video for more than a year, but when the video finally became public it led to murder charges for the officer who shot and killed McDonald.

In North Carolina, just this past week, police released footage in the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, another black man killed after police stopped him. In Scott’s case, it still isn’t clear if he was armed or not. Police argue they repeatedly asked him to drop a gun, but Scott’s family say he was holding a book.

As Reuters pointed out, the government’s theory that body-camera footage will increase public trust has little scientific backing. A 2014 study by an Arizona State University professor found little change in the public’s perception of Phoenix police officers after its department implemented body cameras. The study did find, however, a shift in how officers behaved:

Our findings suggest that officer worn body cameras may increase officer productivity, reduce the number of complaints against officers, decrease the number of founded complaints against them, and increase the effectiveness in which criminal cases are processed in the courts.

In The West Wing’s Debate Episode, Politics Is a Game

The worst things you could say about The West Wing are also, as it happens, the best things you could say about The West Wing. The show’s politics were liberal, in the years right before that word took on the whiff of a slur; its morals revolved around the assumption that government is an effective agent of good in the world; it embraced the conviction that the American political system operates with a reassuring moral clarity. Partisanship, in the show’s framing, is not partisanship, but rather something of a geographical designation: Do you stand on the right, or the wrong, side of history? In that sense, the “West” in the show’s title is apt: This was a series that, despite its bureaucratic setting, reveled in the easy moral calculus of the old-school Western. The good, the bad, and the partisan.

Nowhere is that more clear than in “Game On,” the fourth-season episode—one of the last to be written by Aaron Sorkin—that finds President Bartlet, running for re-election, facing off against Florida’s Governor Ritchie. The two men aren’t simply opposing presidential candidates; they are also, according to the Sorkinian moral logic, opposing stereotypes (and, in that, opposing visions of the American experiment): On the one side is Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen), the smug, East Coast, liberal elite; on the other is Robert Ritchie (James Brolin), the aw-shucks advocate of states’ rights and small government. Here are the two men and the two ideas, pitted against each other, climactically, in the closest thing American politics has to a big-time sporting event: the debate that takes place right before the election.

Here’s a sample of their bout, as the candidates are invited to give their opening statements:

Ritchie: Well, first, let me say good evening and thank you. It’s a privilege to be here. My view of this is simple: We don’t need a Federal Department of Education telling us our children have to learn Esperanto, they have to learn Eskimo poetry. Let the states decide. Let the communities decide on health care, on education, on lower taxes, not higher taxes. Now, he's going to throw a big word at you: “unfunded mandate.” If Washington lets the states do it, it's an unfunded mandate. But what he doesn't like is the federal government losing power. But I call it the ingenuity of the American people.

Moderator: President Bartlet, you have 60 seconds for a question and an answer.

Bartlet: Well, first of all, let’s clear up a couple of things. “Unfunded mandate” is two words, not one big word.

There are times when we’re 50 states, and there are times when we're one country and have national needs. And the way I know this is that Florida didn't fight Germany in World War II or establish civil rights. You think states should do the governing wall-to-wall. That’s a perfectly valid opinion. But your state of Florida got $12.6 billion in federal money last year—from Nebraskans, and Virginians, and New Yorkers, and Alaskans, with their Eskimo poetry. 12.6 out of a state budget of $50 billion, and I’m supposed to be using this time for a question, so here it is: Can we have it back, please?

Josh Lyman, Bartlet’s deputy chief of staff (watching from backstage): Game on.

C.J. Cregg, Bartlet’s press secretary (also from backstage): Oh my God.

Sam Seaborn, Bartlet’s deputy communications director (backstage): Strike ‘em out, throw ‘em out! [He turns to reporters.] Anybody want spin?

This is good TV—an exchange that plays up the “politics as sports” idea to dramatic, if also vaguely ridiculous, effect. (Sam’s “strike ‘em out” line was joined, sports-metaphor-wise, by Josh’s earlier exhortation to Bartlet to throw “nothing but strikes,” and by the broader fact that “game on” runs as a refrain throughout the episode.)

What the debate also does, though, is to take The West Wing to Peak Partisan Porn. The episode is so convinced of its own moral clarity as to be blithely—and, really, absurdly—smug. The Bartlet/Ritchie matchup, after all, isn’t simply about progressive ideas pitted against conservative ones; it is also, as the show presents it, about intelligence pitted against ... the lack of it. Ritchie, here, is not merely folksy; he is actively, ridiculously stupid. (That reference to “Eskimo poetry”! And to Esperanto! And to “unfunded mandate” as “one big word”!) Those flubs aren’t a case of debate nerves getting the best of him: In an earlier episode, after Bartlet informed Ritchie that a member of his Secret Service detail had been gunned down during an armed robbery, the governor’s tepid response was “Crime—boy, I don’t know.” To which an indignant Bartlet responded: “In the future, if you’re wondering: ‘Crime—boy, I don’t know’ is when I decided to kick your ass.”

The two men are facing off in the closest thing American politics has to a big-time sporting event.

So “Game On” captures on the one hand the intellectual bloodlust that many such debates will involve: the partisan rancor, the high stakes, the anything-could-happen serendipities (and tragedies) of live TV. It also functions, though, as an hourlong ad hominem attack against an entire political philosophy. It assumes that conservatism can be fairly stereotyped as bumbling and word-tripping and uneducated. All of this by way of proving its broader argument: that one side is Right, and the other is Wrong. (The West Wing’s fourth season aired during the fall of 2002, halfway through George W. Bush’s first term; it does not require much imagination to see Ritchie as a grotesque version of the former Texas governor.)

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Bartlet for America, Forever

That is, all in all, a flaw. It’s a stance that is unnecessarily alienating; it’s one that makes the line C.J. utters, as part of her post-debate victory lap—“the President just reminded us that complexity isn’t a vice”—ring ironically hollow. “Smug,” whichever side you’re on, is very rarely a good look.

And yet. “Game On,” for all its easy stereotypes and all its smug equivalencies, also goes a long way toward explaining why The West Wing—now 10 years off the air—has remained such an enduring feature of American political life. In the decade since Bartlet left office, politics have on the one hand gotten even more partisan, and even more bitter. But they have also, at the same time, lost clarity. They have become even more epistemologically unmoored than they once were. The 2016 campaign, after all, features battles not just over opinion, but over facts themselves—with many of the stories about it taking for granted the notion that we have now entered the “post-fact” era of political discourse.

In that environment, the The West Wing, with all its blithe assumptions, offers the refreshment of certitude itself. “Game On,” in particular, treats politics not just as empty spectacle, but as something that actually matters. It rejects cynicism in favor of conviction. Many of the shows that have come in The West Wing’s wake—Designated Survivor, Veep, Madam Secretary, etc.—de-emphasize their characters’ political parties and convictions. Whether for purposes of broad audience appeal or (as in the case of Veep) a kind of #lolnothingmatters strain of satire, they downplay the combative elements of the American political system.

Not so The West Wing. It wants, for better or for worse, a fight, and a contest, and a game. It treats politics as a sport, and it revels in the moral promise that athletic events make to viewers: Sports, after all—like an election itself—feature clear winners, and clear losers. Whatever happens during their games, one team (or one person) will come away as the victor. There is no ambiguity. There is no uncertainty. There is no “post-fact” thinking. There is only right and wrong, only win and lose.

“I thought he was going to have to fall all over himself trying to be genial,” the speechwriter Will Bailey tells Sam Seaborn, after the debate concluded in Bartlet’s favor.

“So did we,” Sam replied. “But then we were convinced by polling that said he was going to be seen as arrogant no matter what performance he gave in the debate.” He paused. “If your guy’s seen that way, you might as well knock some bodies down with it.”

Why the Washington Monument Will Be Closed Indefinitely

NEWS BRIEF The Washington Monument will be closed indefinitely due to problems with its elevator, the National Park Services (NPS) announced Monday.

“Despite the continuing work on the Washington Monument elevator, we have not been able to determine the causes of the ongoing reliability issues,” NPS said in a statement on its Facebook page. “As a result, we have made the difficult decision not to reopen the Washington Monument until we can modernize the elevator control system.”

The 555-foot-tall obelisk has gone through dozens of temporary closures since 2014. Most recently, the monument was shuttered following an incident last month in which the elevator’s doors failed to open. The monument’s stairs, which total 897 steps, have been closed since the 1970s and are only used in emergency cases.

Though no set date was announced for the monument’s reopening, Mike Litterst, an NPS spokesman, told the Washington Post the closure would likely be “measured in months.” The monument’s sole elevator is 15 years old and NPS estimates it will cost between $2 million and 3 million to repair it.

The monument sustained extensive damage from a 5.8-magnitude earthquake in 2011 and was closed for repairs until 2014. NPS officials have not been able to confirm if the elevator problems are connected to the quake.

A North Carolina Law Will Soon Limit Who Can View Body-Camera Footage

Updated on September 26 at 3:15 p.m. ET

Authorities in Charlotte, North Carolina, lifted a curfew after the third-straight peaceful day of demonstrations against the killing of Keith Lamont Scott, a black man shot last week by police. The marches have been calm since protesters won a victory over the weekend: the release of body-camera footage that showed Scott’s death. But it may be the last time this happens in North Carolina, because of a new law that takes effect October 1 that extends police control over the release of body-camera footage and severely restricts who can view it.

The dashboard and body-camera footage released by police, combined with a video shot by Scott’s wife, Rakeyia Scott, have done little to answer what happened on September 20 when Scott was shot outside of an apartment complex as he waited for his child to come home from school. Officers were serving an outstanding warrant on another man when they say they found Scott walking to his truck with a gun. Police said Scott refused to put it down despite repeatedly being told to do so. But Scott’s family said he was reading a book in his truck. The footage offered few answers.

Last Tuesday, the first night of protests to mark Scott’s death, police fought with demonstrators as they marched downtown. Then on Wednesday, a man was shot by another protester during the protests and later died (the alleged shooter was arrested), police fired tear gas at the crowd, and North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency. The demonstrators demanded the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department release footage of the shooting. But after police released the tape Saturday, both sides said the footage supported their version of events.

In three versions—two from police, and one from Scott’s wife—there’s no clear view Scott, or of the gun police say he held.

Here’s the police dash-cam footage:

And here’s another angle, shot by Rakeyia Scott:

It’s unclear, however, if future calls for the release of police footage will be heeded. That’s because in June, North Carolina lawmakers overwhelmingly passed House Bill 972, which the governor signed into law the following month after saying dashboard and body-camera footage can “mislead and misinform.”

A spokesman from the governor’s office said: “North Carolina’s new body camera bill sets up for the first time a legal process for the release of law enforcement video. It takes the decision out of the hands of politicians and puts it in the hands of an independent court system, which has been given wide latitude to make its determination.”

The new law reclassifies dashboard and body-camera footage as a confidential personnel record, giving access only to those pictured or heard in footage, or their relatives. Starting next month, journalists or members of the public, who can view the footage because at present it’s classified as public record, will need a court order to view it.

The law also bars police departments from releasing footage independently, because all requests go through a state superior court judge. It  also gives police departments the right to refuse anyone access to footage if it could damage an officer’s reputation, jeopardize someone’s safety, or if it could harm an “active or inactive internal or criminal investigation.”

Critics say North Carolina’s law is at odds with the movement toward body cameras, because the footage is meant to hold police accountable to the public. This was certainly the case in Chicago, with the death of Laquan McDonald, when the government fought for a year to keep the video private, only to have politicians call it “chilling” after its release. That resulted in a murder charge for the officer accused of shooting McDonald.

How Trump Lowered Expectations for the First Debate

It’s well-established that Donald Trump’s campaign doesn’t do most of the things a traditional political team does. There’s scarcely any policy, weak fundraising, and no ground game. But in one classic area of political positioning, the Trump team has proven it is historically great at one classic tactic: expectations setting.

With a few hours to go before the first presidential debate, it’s hard to see what the Republican nominee could do to avoid the meeting being judged at least a tie. Through a combination of months of campaigning, leaks about his debate prep, and aggressive working of the referees, Trump has set expectations so low that it’s hard to imagine how he finishes the debate without getting positive reviews from mainstream commentators.

At The Washington Post, James Hohmann rounds up a few glaring examples: A Politico reporter saying, “If he does passably, we’ll all say he won”; The New York Times’ Yamiche Alcindor saying, “A lot of people are going to look at Donald Trump and think, ‘Hey, if he can even get out a good sentence and show off his experience, then he's doing well’”; NPR saddling Clinton with “the burden of high expectations.” Andrew Kaczynski spotted this moment on MSNBC:

this is real pic.twitter.com/2RVT6MoNMo

— andrew kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) September 26, 2016

The point here is not that any of these particular people or sources are sinning; it’s about the general picture.

And it’s a picture that the Trump campaign has carefully painted over the course of the last few weeks and months.

Beginning in August, Trump effectively threatened to skip the debates. He argued that it was improper that one of them was scheduled against an NFL game and claimed falsely that the NFL had asked him to get it changed. He also said he wanted to see who the moderators were and what the rules were. Industry insiders speculated that the final slate of moderators was chosen in part to placate Trump.

If so, it worked, sort of. Trump agreed to debate but kept up his attack. For example, he derided NBC’s Lester Holt, the moderator of Monday’s debate, in an interview with Bill O’Reilly. “Look, it's a phony system,” he said. “Lester is a Democrat. I mean, they are all Democrats. Okay? It's a very unfair system.”

Trump was wrong: Holt is a registered Republican. Asked about this on Monday, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway offered the novel defense that her boss wasn’t lying; he was simply shooting off at the mouth when he had no idea what he was talking about. “I don’t know that he knew what Lester Holt’s voter registration was,” she said. “He didn’t lie. A lie would mean that he knew the man’s party registration.”

After Matt Lauer failed, during a forum earlier this month, to point out that Trump was lying about opposing the Iraq War, progressives began pushing for debate moderators to fact-check in real time. Trump aides rallied against that idea, and on Sunday, Janet Brown, the executive director of the Commission on Presidential Debates, sided with them. “I don't think it's a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica,” she said on CNN’s Reliable Sources.

All of this has the effect of putting both the commission and Holt on the defensive. Once Trump had threatened to quit and preemptively convicted the moderator of bias, Holt is pressured to bend over backward to appear fair—which means less real-time accountability for Trump, and an effort to be even-handed, regardless of the material.

He’s not just working the refs, though—he’s also, to continue the metaphor, working the sportswriters. Last week, the Times ran likely the most detailed story on debate preparation to see publication. Relying on advisers, friends, and surrogates, the reporters heard this about Trump:

“He has paid only cursory attention to briefing materials.”
“He prefers spitballing ideas with his team rather than honing them into crisp, two-minute answers.”
“His advisers see it as a waste of time to try to fill his head with facts and figures.”
“Mr. Trump can get bored with both debate preparations and debates themselves.”
“His team has been emphasizing the best ways to win: Do not pick stupid fights with her or with the moderator; explain yourself rather than get defensive...”
“Some Trump advisers are concerned that he underestimates the difficulty of standing still, talking pointedly and listening sharply for 90 minutes.”
“[Vulnerabilities include his] tendency to lie on some issues (like his challenge to President Obama’s citizenship) or use incorrect information or advance conspiracy theories—all of which opens him to counterattack from Mrs. Clinton or rebukes from the moderator.”

This may or may not be an accurate depiction. Separately, aides told Politico that Trump’s team has constructed an elaborate psychological profile of Clinton that he’s using to prepare. It’s hard to tell what is a psych-out and what’s real, but the effect of the balance of these leaks is to present Trump as so bumbling that simply standing up straight is an achievement.

Meanwhile, Kellyanne Conway is working the same jujitsu on reporters that Trump did on Holt, warning that reporters are biased against her nominee. It’s a no-lose proposition: Either reporters self-police, or else Trump’s supporters will simply write off anything they say as biased, regardless of the content.

But viewing this as the work of just a few weeks overlooks how important Trump’s entire campaign has been to creating this situation. Even if the Trump campaign hadn’t attacked Holt, made their candidate seem indifferent, and policed reporters, Trump the candidate has set the stage through his statements over the past 16 months.

Political reporting is heavily centered around two conventions. One, much remarked-upon and derided as “false equivalence” is the practice of comparing two things as like and like, even when they are not. A pair of Politico stories over the weekend, fact-checks of each candidate, offer an opportunity to see how to handle this right and wrong. As Donald Monynihan pointed out, reporters chided Clinton for a statement about how Trump’s tax plan would affect him because, they said, she was relying on Trump’s own, likely false, estimate of his net worth. On the other hand, Politico also concluded, “Trump’s mishandling of facts and propensity for exaggeration so greatly exceed Clinton’s as to make the comparison almost ludicrous.”

A second, perhaps underrated convention is comparing a candidate to him- or herself. This is where Trump has truly excelled. Because he has said so man outlandish things—and because, as Salena Zito memorably put it recently, the press takes Trump literally but not seriously—reporters are ill-equipped to assess Trump against any sort of objective standard. It is certainly true that Trump is sui generis, and while that does not preclude detached analysis, it makes it very challenging.

An example of this dynamic was also on display over the weekend. After the Clinton campaign announced it was inviting billionaire Mark Cuban, a veteran Trump troll, to the debate, Trump announced that he had invited Gennifer Flowers, who had an affair with Bill Clinton decades ago. Flowers even confirmed that she was attending. It was then left to Conway and Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, to break the news that Flowers would not actually be there.

By the standards of almost any campaign, either of these moves would be bonkers: A presidential candidate inviting the former mistress of his rival’s husband to a debate, or the fact that he did so and then thought better of it and was forced to do a 180. By Trump standards, however, the whole episode elicited mostly weary shrugs: Seems about right.

The silver lining for the Clinton campaign in this is that the scrutiny on lowered expectations has produced a pervasive sense of panic among many Democrats—in turn lowering her own expectations, and perhaps helping to motivate them to turn out in her support.

What does this mean for a voter who wants to understand what goes on in the debate? There will be some strong analysis of the debate that doesn’t fall into these traps, but the important thing is to watch out for either candidate being graded on a curve, to spot it when it happens, and to account for it.

Remembering Arnold Palmer

NEWS BRIEF Arnold Palmer, one of the most renowned professional golfers of the 20th century, died on Sunday. He was 87 years old.

Nicknamed “the King,” Palmer’s exploits on the green in the postwar boom years helped transform golf from a patrician country-club hobby into a mass-marketable sport. Charming and aggressive, his unique play style won him legions of fans, a following he later harnessed to build a small business empire.

The New York Times has more:

From 1958 through 1964, Palmer was the charismatic face of professional golf and one of its dominant players. In those seven seasons, he won seven major titles: four Masters, one United States Open and two British Opens. With 62 victories on the PGA Tour, he ranks fifth, behind Sam Snead, Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Ben Hogan. He won 93 tournaments worldwide, including the 1954 United States Amateur.

But it was more than his scoring and shotmaking that captivated the sports world. It was how he played. He did not so much navigate a course as attack it. If his swing was not classic, it was ferocious: He seemed to throw all 185 pounds of his muscular 5-foot-10 body at the ball. If he did not win, he at least lost with flair.

In 2004, Palmer received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for his lifelong devotion to the sport he helped popularize. Congress also awarded him a Congressional Gold Medal in 2009.

“For more than 50 years, over thousands of miles of fairway, and in 92 professional championships, Arnold has given his all, playing with style and a daring that changed the game of golf,” President George W. Bush said at the 2004 ceremony. “He drew millions of fans, and every big crowd we see at a golf tournament today started with Arnie's Army.”

Remembering Jose Fernandez

NEWS BRIEF Jose Fernandez, the Miami Marlins pitcher who ranked among Major League Baseball’s best, died on Sunday in a boating accident. He was 24 years old.

A U.S. Coast Guard patrol discovered an overturned 33-foot-long boat with the bodies of Fernandez and two others early Sunday morning, the Coast Guard said in a statement.

“All of Baseball is shocked and saddened by the sudden passing of Miami Marlins pitcher Jose Fernandez,” Commissioner of Baseball Rob Manfred said in a statement. “He was one of our game's great young stars who made a dramatic impact on and off the field since his debut in 2013. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, the Miami Marlins organization and all of the people he touched in his life."

A joyous right-hander who quickly became a fan favorite, Fernandez’s life story seemed destined for baseball lore. Born in Cuba in 1992, he made three failed efforts as a teenager to cross the 70-mile stretch of water separating him from Florida and freedom. The Cuban government sentenced him to a few months in the country’s notorious prisons after one of the attempts when he was 14 years old.

Finally, in 2008, the 15-year-old Fernandez sailed with other attempted defectors from Cuba to Cancun, Mexico. Under U.S. law, Cuban asylum-seekers who set foot on American soil are generally allowed to stay, no matter where they land. Fernandez, along with his mother and sister, then crossed the border into Texas a few days later. He became a U.S. citizen in 2015.

The Marlins selected Fernandez in the first round of the 2011 draft, and he played his first game with the team in 2013. On the field, he soon became one of the best pitchers currently playing the sport. USA Today has more:

Known for his ebullient personality—which could occasionally rankle opponents—and a pitch repertoire that could stagger opponents with both his fastball and a devastating curve, Fernandez was the backbone of the Marlins pitching staff, posting a 2.86 earned-run average. He struck out at least 11 batters in nine of his 29 starts this season.

In the final start of his career, Wednesday night against the Washington Nationals, Fernandez shut out the Washington Nationals over eight innings, striking out 12 in a 1-0 victory. Marlins infielder Martin Prado said Fernandez told teammates he believed it was the greatest start of his career.

In a statement, the Marlins said they were “devastated” by Fernandez’s death and that Sunday’s game against the Atlanta Braves was cancelled. Their NFL counterpart, the Miami Dolphins, will pay tribute to Fernandez before their game against the Cleveland Browns on Sunday.

The Cold, Corporate Appeal of Football

The “Deflategate” scandal involving the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady—one that dominated NFL headlines for well over a year, involved multiple levels of the American legal system, instilled in every football fan a keen interest in air-pressure physics, and finally ended in a four-game suspension for Brady to start the 2016 season—has ended up having little effect on the field. The Patriots beat the Houston Texans Thursday night in Foxborough, Massachusetts, improving their record to 3-0 with only one game left before they get their starting QB back. The win against the Texans, a team that entered the game undefeated itself, was a 27-0 shellacking, New England besting them in every category of play.

For the football junkie, there has even been a kind of rare fun to seeing what this decorated team, one that has won four Super Bowls and reached two others over Brady’s 17-year career, can do without its best player. The backup quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo played ably in the first game and a half of the season, throwing touchdowns in bunches before a shoulder injury forced him out of the Week Two game against Miami. The third-string rookie Jacoby Brissett held on to the lead Garoppolo had built in that game, but against the Texans he would have to play from the start, and analysts wondered how ready even an excellent coach like Bill Belichick could make him. New England answered those doubts with a game plan that leaned on college-style plays familiar to Brissett, quick passes and quarterback runs, executed well enough to pick the Houston defense apart. The effect was like that of hearing an alternate take of a hit song, a glimpse of the tinkering behind the team’s usual Sunday sheen.

As interesting as the first few weeks of New England’s season have been, though, they have also served as a reminder of the basic set-up of professional football. The Patriots have been so successful for so long in large part because that success has not been founded on groups of specific players. They famously let fan favorites go when they’ve aged just past their primes. They turn replacements into stars and then, down the line, shuttle those stars off for another round of replacements. Even Brady, back in 2001, got his chance when the then-starting-quarterback Drew Bledsoe went down with an injury; Brady won the Super Bowl and Bledsoe never got his job back. The Patriots know that their brutal sport is designed to use players up, so they’ve built a system in which rotating casts of players are mere disposable units for a stable management group—ownership, front-office executives, Belichick. It’s an effective and unabashedly corporate approach fit for a cold game.

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After Thursday’s game, the talk from both locker rooms centered on that Patriot system, the organizational lockstep and allegiance to Belichick that has made them the NFL’s best and most consistent team for almost two decades. Belichick himself praised his players’ obedience: “They played the game exactly the way we asked them to play it ... They tried to do what we wanted them to do, and as a coach you can’t ask for any more than that.” Bill O’Brien, a former New England assistant coach now helming the Texans, seemed to get wistful about the professionalism of his former employer. “Their program has been in place for a long time,” he said. “They have what I think is the best head coach in the history of the league, and they do a great job.”

Newspaper headlines took similar tones. “Jacoby Brissett was good. But the Patriots’ win Thursday is Bill Belichick’s triumph,” said The Washington Post. “Jacoby Brissett, Patriots game plan the big winners,” said The Boston Globe (in a headline since changed). The Belichick-approved mantra of the Patriots has long been “do your job,” and the sports press confirmed that, yes, the jobs had been done. Players stayed the course and kept to their lanes, no brilliance necessary.

If the Patriots are not only the NFL’s most accomplished organization, lately, but also its most representative—that is, if they’ve achieved all they have because they recognize and embody football’s characteristics more fully than anybody else—then nights like Thursday, and the subsequent reaction to them, can make you think about the appeal of the game. The NFL’s detractors tend to focus on its violence, but it is also relentlessly hierarchical. A few people, the coaches and maybe the quarterback, get to strategize, and the rest recite what they’ve drilled over the week. Whereas other sports tend to celebrate the collaborative aspects, football teams hew to the corporate model—go out, do this, come back for further instruction—with their success largely dependent on the thoroughness of the directives. Players tend to meet the corporate end as well, laid off with the minimum allowable severance.

Why is America’s most popular sport the one that looks the most like work?

Why is America’s most popular sport the one that looks the most like work? The answer may be in the question. It is an increasingly busy and regimented country, a corporate country, and the game fits the times. (Baseball, by comparison, seems unaccountably idyllic, a trait that charms some and bores others). Football has a job-like clarity to its stakes, a task that needs accomplished, and obstacles in the way. In the way of the workplace TV show, individual struggle plays out against a backdrop of institutional order; Brissett’s crash-course in the New England offense, breathlessly reported on by national and local media outlets, resembled nothing so much as a courtroom drama A-plot involving a green lawyer. And as in those shows, characters can cycle through so long as the institution remains.

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Brissett’s first career touchdown, on Thursday night, came when he faked a handoff, darted around the edge, and ran 27 yards to the corner of the end zone. After he celebrated with his teammates, he returned to the sideline and handed the ball to Belichick. CBS, the network airing the game, didn’t miss the moment. Foreshadowing the analysis to come after the final whistle, the announcer Jim Nantz highlighted the Patriots’ famous structure. “His first touchdown, he gives the ball to the coach,” Nantz said, chuckling at the symbolic passing-along of credit.

On Friday, news broke that Brissett had also gotten injured, tearing a ligament in his thumb at some point the evening before and putting the Patriots in a still tougher spot. Even if they lose to the Buffalo Bills next Sunday in the last game before Brady’s return, though, their time without him will have proven an unqualified triumph. After Brady gets back, those first four weeks will take on the feeling of an overture to the New England season, a demonstration of the team’s tenets of responsibility and line-toeing. They will also have served as a reminder, though, of the bedrock of the NFL’s popularity. The players come and go. The work stays the same.