George Packer's Blog, page 142

Clinton, Obama, Garland, and the G.O.P.

There’s plenty of uncertainty about the outcome of the election tomorrow, but if Hillary Clinton wins the White House and the Democrats take back the Senate, Republican senators face a crucial choice. In March, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, and Senate Republicans took the unprecedented position that Garland would not receive a vote or even a hearing. Garland, who is sixty-three, is older and more moderate than many potential Clinton appointees to the Court. If Democrats win a Senate majority, it is undoubtedly in the ideological interests of conservatives to allow Garland’s nomination to go forward in the lame-duck Senate that will convene in November.

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Related:
Looking for the National Purpose on Election Day
Latino Voters Show Trump What It Means to Be American
In Final Appeal to Voters, Clinton Changes Slogan to “Won’t Blow Up Planet”

Could James Comey Cost Democrats the Senate?

At midday on Sunday, the latest opinion polls and early-voting data were pointing to a victory for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. Then came the news that James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., had written yet another letter to Congress, this time to say that his agency had reviewed a cache of newly discovered e-mails connected to Clinton and was standing by the conclusion it reached, this summer, that no “reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges against the Democrat. (My colleague Amy Davidson has an excellent piece on the Comey letters, plural.)

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Latino Voters Show Trump What It Means to Be American
Trump TV Late-Night Packet
Bonus Cartoon: The James Comey Edition

James Comey Writes Again

On Sunday afternoon, with a day and a half left before the Presidential election, James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., sent a letter to congressional leaders to “supplement” a message he had sent them on October 28th. The earlier letter, as he put it on Sunday, had notified them that the bureau “would be taking additional investigative steps with respect to former Secretary of State Clinton’s use of a personal email server.” Almost immediately, the public learned, via leaks, that those steps had been occasioned by a new cache of e-mails from accounts belonging to Huma Abedin, Clinton’s longtime aide, which had been found on a device she shared with her estranged husband, the former congressman Anthony Weiner. Now at least one—and, although Comey didn’t say so, the most important—of those investigative steps had been accomplished: “We reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State.” This is what Donald Trump had hoped, earlier this week, might be the “motherlode” of raw scandal materials, and “bigger than Watergate.” But Comey’s next line was surely a profound disappointment to Trump and his campaign. “Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
F.B.I. Regretfully Announces That Hillary Committed No Crimes
Crocheting Hillary
How a One-Time Political Star in Mexico Ended Up Campaigning for Clinton

How a One-Time Political Star in Mexico Ended Up Campaigning for Clinton

Marcelo Ebrard was the mayor of Mexico City from 2006 to 2012, the time when that city gained a reputation as a dynamic, sophisticated world capital, even while the country’s image as a place of dark and ever deepening crisis, corruption, and violence steadily worsened. He implemented numerous urban quality-of-life initiatives—a wildly popular bike-sharing program, an expansion of the rights of sexual minorities, a reduction of crime, and an attack on the air-pollution problem (an initiative in which the Clinton Foundation was involved). As Guillermo Osorno, a writer and editor of the Mexican digital journal Horizontal, told me in an e-mail, Ebrard also “gave the city a unique narrative as a progressive city as opposed to the conservatism and political backwardness in other areas of the country.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
James Comey Writes Again
F.B.I. Regretfully Announces That Hillary Committed No Crimes
Crocheting Hillary

The Sexual-Assault Election

In a strange triumph for feminists, the election that may give us our first female President has brought extraordinary attention to women’s sexual victimization. The election turned in Hillary Clinton’s favor, perhaps decisively, when footage emerged of Donald Trump bragging about assaulting women. On October 7th, the Washington Post published a video, from an “Access Hollywood” shoot in 2005, in which Trump boasted, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” Apparently unaware that he was being recorded, he continued, “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” When Trump denied having actually done what he said he did, thirteen women, each claiming to have been assaulted by him at some point in the past three decades, came forward to contradict him. The overwhelming support for the women—and Trump’s plummeting poll numbers—are an indicator of how far our ideas about sexual assault have shifted since the Clintons were last in power.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Meet Maya Harris, Hillary Clinton’s Progressive Link
Putin Appears with Trump in Flurry of Swing-State Rallies
Why America Is Rich, at Least for Now

Meet Maya Harris, Hillary Clinton’s Progressive Link

In mid-September, while Hillary Clinton was recovering from pneumonia, Donald Trump took to the suburbs of Philadelphia to talk about American families. “Child care is such a big problem, and we’re going to solve that problem,” he said. Offering up his “Child Care Affordability Plan,” he condemned his rival for her failure to think of the needs of struggling parents. “My opponent has no child-care plan,” he said. “She never will.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Sexual-Assault Election
Closing Arguments: The Logic of Negative Campaigning
Trump and the Truth: Spinning the October Surprise

Why America Is Rich, at Least for Now

The monthly U.S. jobs report, released by the Labor Department on Friday morning, struck an oddly cheery note at the near end of this ugly election season. A hundred and sixty-one thousand new jobs were created in October, the unemployment rate fell to 4.9 per cent, and wages grew faster than at any point since the financial crisis. Combined with last week’s report of strong G.D.P. growth, this is evidence that our economy is healthy and growing—and that growth is being reasonably widely shared. While this doesn’t mean that America’s growth is as robust as we might wish, or that we don’t face deep challenges, these numbers are incompatible with a view that America is in a profound economic crisis. Yet many people believe it is.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Sexual-Assault Election
Putin Appears with Trump in Flurry of Swing-State Rallies
Closing Arguments: The Logic of Negative Campaigning

Closing Arguments: The Logic of Negative Campaigning

Going into its final few days, the 2016 Presidential campaign looks pretty similar to how it has looked for months. The Clinton forces are running a data-driven and carefully targeted campaign designed to turn out a slightly modified version of the Obama coalition: liberals, minorities, young people, highly educated voters, and suburban women. Hillary Clinton herself is doing what she has been doing all along: personally tearing into Donald Trump, depicting him as too inexperienced, divisive, and unhinged to be President. Speaking on Friday to a crowd in Detroit that included a lot of African-American voters, she reminded them that Trump’s father’s real-estate company was sued for discrimination during the nineteen seventies. “We can’t trust him with our Constitution,” Clinton said. “We can’t trust him to obey the rule of law. He has shown us who he is. Now we have to show him who we are.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Sexual-Assault Election
Meet Maya Harris, Hillary Clinton’s Progressive Link
Putin Appears with Trump in Flurry of Swing-State Rallies

Trump and the Truth: Spinning the October Surprise

This essay is part of a series The New Yorker will be running through the election titled “Trump and the Truth.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Sexual-Assault Election
Meet Maya Harris, Hillary Clinton’s Progressive Link
Putin Appears with Trump in Flurry of Swing-State Rallies

Mary Keitany and the Power of Not Knowing

Mary Keitany jogged across the Reservoir Bridge in Central Park early Thursday morning, three days before the New York City Marathon. A petite woman, she wore a black warm-up suit, bright purple shoes, and a black beanie pulled low to her eyebrows. “Good luck, Mary!” a passerby shouted.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Can Math Make a Better Marathon?
A Somewhat Accurate Guide to the Marathon
Are Smartphones Ruining Distance Running?