George Packer's Blog, page 119

On Health Care, We’ll Have What Congress Is Having

In the fall of 1994, the Clinton Administration’s much debated comprehensive, and complicated, health-insurance bill—known derisively as Hillarycare—died quietly on Capitol Hill. It was a moment that, the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr later argued, would “go down as one of the great lost political opportunities in American history.” But, before the end, talk of another approach kept bubbling up: to allow those Americans who couldn’t get insurance elsewhere to buy a policy that was just as good, and inexpensive, as what members of Congress got. When Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, said that Americans should get “exactly what we have,” he meant the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

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Suspending the Rules: How Congress Plans to Undermine Public Safety 
Could Obamacare Save the Democrats?
How to Stop a Trump Supreme Court Nominee

John Lewis, Donald Trump, and the Meaning of Legitimacy

John Lewis represents Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, one vote of four hundred and thirty-five. He is also the singular conscience of Capitol Hill. Lewis is a dismal institution’s griot, a historical actor and hero capable of telling the most complex and painful of American stories—the story of race. That is his job, his mission. With Dr. King and Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker long gone, Lewis remains nearly alone in his capacity to tell the story of that era as a direct witness and, because of all that he has seen and endured, to issue credible moral judgment.

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Karaoke Machine Backs Out of Performing at Inauguration
A Whirlwind Day in the Life of John Calipari
Lessons from Playing Golf with Trump

Crime in Chicago and America’s Policing Crisis

For at least three years, two stories about crime and police in Chicago have been unspooling, each only intermittently acknowledging the other. The primary one has been about escalating gun violence, which has spread across the city’s West and South Sides. Though the city has added hundreds of cops, launched intensive programs to improve the enforcement of gun laws, and experimented with predictive algorithms to identify who is most likely to commit acts of violence, the crime wave has proved alarmingly resistant to efforts to control it. Last year, seven hundred and sixty-two people were killed in Chicago—three hundred more than the previous year, representing the largest one-year increase in any of America’s biggest cities in the past quarter-century.

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Why Won’t Donald Trump Denounce Sandy Hook Deniers?

A Whirlwind Day in the Life of John Calipari

On a recent morning, John Calipari, the men’s basketball coach at the University of Kentucky, bounded out of the Omni Berkshire Place hotel, in midtown Manhattan, hoping to make a 7 A.M. Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. His graying hair was slicked impeccably back; he wore a navy suit. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” he said to the driver who was waiting for him in a black S.U.V.

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Related:
Lessons from Playing Golf with Trump
Walter Shaub’s Desperate Attempts to Make Trump Adhere to Government Ethics
Obama’s Last Big Cuba Move

Walter Shaub’s Desperate Attempts to Make Trump Adhere to Government Ethics

On Wednesday, Walter Shaub, Jr., a longtime government lawyer and the director of the Office of Government Ethics, contacted Norman Eisen, an old colleague and the first ethics czar in the Obama White House. Shaub had just finished watching Donald Trump’s press conference, and he told Eisen, now at the Brookings Institution, that he was ready to go public.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Lessons from Playing Golf with Trump
Obama’s Last Big Cuba Move
Trump, L. L. Bean, and the Peculiar Politics of Maine

Obama’s Last Big Cuba Move

On Thursday, President Obama announced that he was scrapping the long-standing policy by which Cuban migrants arriving at U.S. borders were granted automatic access to the country, and eventual permanent-resident status. The measure, which had immediate effect, was in keeping with a dramatic series of executive actions that Obama has taken to solidify as many of his policies as possible, or to at least hinder their reversal by Donald Trump. The end of open-door entry to the United States for Cubans, called “wet foot, dry foot,” is intended both as a buttress to Obama’s historic rapprochement with Cuba—which Trump has recently threatened to tear up—and as a brake on the surge of Cubans flooding into the United States since a restoration of diplomatic relations was announced, in December, 2014.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Lessons from Playing Golf with Trump
Walter Shaub’s Desperate Attempts to Make Trump Adhere to Government Ethics
Trump, L. L. Bean, and the Peculiar Politics of Maine

The Corruption Allegations Against Benjamin Netanyahu

In 2008, it emerged that Ehud Olmert, then Israel’s Prime Minister, was being investigated for having received cash-stuffed envelopes from an American businessman. I remember an acquaintance remarking, “Another kept man.” Like Ariel Sharon, Olmert’s predecessor, whose tenure had been dogged by allegations that he had accepted kickbacks from a South African executive, another Prime Minister was suspected of being beholden to moneyed interests.

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Trump, L. L. Bean, and the Peculiar Politics of Maine

The state of Maine has carved out a peculiar place in American political life in recent years. Governor Paul LePage, who has served since 2011, is a Republican known for making inflammatory remarks, denouncing Hillary Clinton, and blacklisting news organizations that anger him, tendencies that may currently sound familiar. But Maine overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama, twice, despite the highly unpromising demographics he faced there; the state has no large or even midsize cities to serve as Democratic bulwarks, and its population is about ninety-eight per cent white. Meanwhile, two of the last three people Maine has sent to the Senate have been women, and all three have often occupied Congress’s lonely middle ground. Maine does not adhere to the winner-take-all system when awarding electoral votes—another quirk—and in the 2016 Presidential election the state rendered a split decision: three electoral votes for Clinton, one for Donald Trump.

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Related:
Lessons from Playing Golf with Trump
Walter Shaub’s Desperate Attempts to Make Trump Adhere to Government Ethics
Obama’s Last Big Cuba Move

The Music Donald Trump Can’t Hear

One of the pleasures of music-streaming services is that, day after day, they remind you effortlessly of the almost incredible wealth and beauty of American popular music—from the blues and Tin Pan Alley to jazz, R. & B., country, rock and roll, and on to hip hop—and of its strange, snaking unity. The great critic Kenneth Tynan once wrote that, sometime in the nineteen-thirties, the “ ‘serious’ music tradition finally withered, curled up and died,” and what took its place was American song. It became the century’s sublime, achieved sound, and the beat, as the song says, goes on. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee’s duos bring one back to the jazz duets of Bobby Hackett and Jack Teagarden, whose choice of familiar tunes then leads one to the great singers of the first songbook of standards, Ella singing Gershwin, and on and on. In this context, Bob Dylan’s award for the Nobel Prize in Literature must seem, even to doubters, earned, especially if it’s seen, so to speak, as an award to Frank Loesser and Duke Ellington, as well—as a tribute to the entirety of those American words and music.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Lessons from Playing Golf with Trump
Walter Shaub’s Desperate Attempts to Make Trump Adhere to Government Ethics
Obama’s Last Big Cuba Move

What Trump’s Business Plan Fails to Do

“As you know, the business empire built by President-elect Trump over the years is massive, not dissimilar to the fortunes of Nelson Rockefeller when he became Vice-President,” Sheri Dillon, Trump’s longtime lawyer at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, said during the President-elect’s first press conference on Wednesday. “But at that time, no one was so concerned.”

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