George Packer's Blog, page 184

Bill Clinton’s Not-Quite First Spouse Speech

Bill Clinton is in a remarkable historical position. He is a former President who has returned to the political arena because his wife is running for President—and he may return to the White House, in a role that no one has ever filled, if she wins. A situation like that raises all sorts of philosophical, political, and emotional questions—and, Clinton being Clinton, he has surely mulled some of them over. That wasn’t obvious, however, in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, on Tuesday night. His appearance, which lasted about forty-five minutes, was a disappointment, especially given the kind of speech that Clinton, at his best, is capable of giving. He didn’t embarrass Hillary or use the moment for a vindication of his own Presidency. Mostly, he ran through her career since the day he’d met her in a way that emphasized the continuity in her work—“She’s been around a long time, she sure has, and she’s sure been worth every single year she’s put into making people’s lives better,” he said. But his wife may be about to become President, and that is a change that is very different and new.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Joe Biden and the Democratic Family at the D.N.C.
Jill Stein’s Play to the Bernie-or-Bust Contingent
A Diehard Bernie Backer Considers What Comes Next

Why the D.N.C. E-Mails Aren’t Scandalous

The great e-mail-leak crisis of the Democratic National Convention may soon become yesterday’s news, but the story offers a useful window into what’s likely to be an increasingly common scenario.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Some of Bernie Sanders’s Supporters Are Angry
Daily Cartoon: Monday, July 25th
Bill Clinton’s Bad Judgment

The Vermont Delegation Mourns the Sanders Campaign

At times yesterday, the Democratic National Convention felt like it was as much about Bernie Sanders as it was about Hillary Clinton. The Sanders supporters were often more boisterous and unruly in their cheers and in their condemnations of the speakers. An observer in the Convention hall would find it easy to exaggerate their numbers and the depth of their disappointment, but over in the Vermont delegation the sense of defeat and ambivalence about Hillary Clinton runs deep. As the delegates gathered earlier this evening for the roll call of states, I spoke to three of Sanders’s home state’s twenty-six delegates, including Aster O’Leary, the eighteen-year-old Sanders supporter who was scheduled to announce Vermont’s tally during the roll call.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The D.N.C. on TV: Don’t Go, Michelle!
Bernie Sanders’s Struggle Continues
Elizabeth Warren Versus the Revolution

Bernie Sanders’s Struggle Continues

Bernie Sanders’s most admirable characteristic came to the fore last night, and it should not have surprised his most insistent supporters, some of whom chanted “Bernie!” so long and so loudly when he took the stage in Philadelphia that you wondered whether they’d allow the man himself to speak. In fact, his integrity should make them proud. Sanders is the rare politician who is not a schmoozer or a pleaser or a prevaricator. Throughout this campaign, and indeed throughout his career, he has said what he meant and stuck to it. And, all along in the Presidential contest, he has said that he would not be a spoiler. As he put it last July, in an interview aired on C-SPAN, when he was asked whether he would ever run as a third-party candidate, “I made the promise that I would not, and I will keep that promise. And the reason for that is I do not want to be responsible for electing some right-wing Republican to be President of the United States.” Sanders has kept that promise in letter, and in spirit, by endorsing Hillary Clinton. He’s doing what he said he’d do, and saying why. “Think about the Supreme Court Justices that Donald Trump would nominate and what that would mean to civil liberties, equal rights, and the future of our country,” Sanders said last night. He does not want to turn over the country to a racist demagogue who would irreparably damage it, when there is a candidate who agrees with him on many, if not all, issues and who is temperamentally and intellectually capable of doing the job.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Vermont Delegation Mourns the Sanders Campaign
The D.N.C. on TV: Don’t Go, Michelle!
Elizabeth Warren Versus the Revolution

Elizabeth Warren Versus the Revolution

“People get it,” Elizabeth Warren said at the Democratic National Convention last night. “The system is rigged.” That line was heard often yesterday, in the Wells Fargo Center and in the streets of Philadelphia, but in all the repetition it lost some of its specificity and power. What system, exactly, and rigged for whom? Warren’s version was narrow: the laws shaping the economy had been perverted so that the country was congenial for the rich and brutal for the poor. But the Bernie Sanders supporters, who by shouting kept control of the hall for much of the evening, had in mind a broader corruption, one that took in the Democratic Party, too. This left Warren in an ambiguous position: she was both an ally of the revolution and implicated by it. “My good friend,” Sanders would call Warren, with feeling, when he spoke later in the night—a reminder that, until his campaign for President, Warren had been regarded as the major progressive force in the Party, and that his movement and hers were not so easy to separate. But the Massachusetts senator maintained a studied neutrality in the primaries, declining to endorse until she backed Clinton after the outcome had been decided, and during her speech some Sanders supporters booed her, too. “We trusted you,” some shouted (as my colleague John Cassidy noted). Reporters took the shouting as a sign of the general unruliness of the Sanders faction, proof that its core members had turned on even their own natural allies. But it was also a measure of how specific and fast political change can be. The revolution that moved through the Sanders campaign no longer seemed to have much to do with Warren.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Vermont Delegation Mourns the Sanders Campaign
The D.N.C. on TV: Don’t Go, Michelle!
Bernie Sanders’s Struggle Continues

Michelle Obama’s Message: Trust Hillary, Like I Do

Michelle Obama’s speech on Monday, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, was not about her husband, or about herself. Instead, it was about two young women and a somewhat older one: Sasha and Malia Obama and Hillary Clinton. The Obama girls have appeared in all three of the Convention speeches that Michelle Obama has now given, but it was different this time. In 2008, speaking “as a mom whose girls are the heart of my heart and the center of my world,” she told a story about Barack Obama carefully, slowly driving them home from the hospital when they were born. In 2012, calling herself the “Mom-in-Chief,” she spoke about how, despite her fears that the Presidency would change her husband, he was still “the man who sits down with me and our girls for dinner nearly every night.” On Monday night, though, she talked about two almost grown daughters—Sasha is fifteen, Malia eighteen—whom she and her husband could no longer protect. But Hillary Clinton could make the difference in their lives.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Vermont Delegation Mourns the Sanders Campaign
The D.N.C. on TV: Don’t Go, Michelle!
Bernie Sanders’s Struggle Continues

Bernie Sanders Goes All In for Hillary Clinton

When Bernie Sanders walked out to address the Democratic National Convention, on Monday night, at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, which normally serves as home to the N.B.A.’s hapless 76ers, he was fully aware that many of his supporters were ready for a fight. Earlier in the day, when the Vermont senator had appeared for a pre-D.N.C. event at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, he had been roundly booed after suggesting that it was time for the Party to unite around Hillary Clinton. He had then texted an appeal to some of his supporters: “I ask you as a personal courtesy to me not to engage in any kind of protest on the floor. It’s of utmost importance you explain this to your delegations.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Vermont Delegation Mourns the Sanders Campaign
The D.N.C. on TV: Don’t Go, Michelle!
Bernie Sanders’s Struggle Continues

Why Some of Bernie Sanders’s Supporters Are Angry

As the Democratic Convention opened in Philadelphia on Monday, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the controversial former head of the Democratic National Committee, had virtually disappeared from the proceedings. But there was still a lot of antagonism between some of Bernie Sanders’s supporters and the Party establishment, and it was threatening to disrupt the Democrats’ effort to produce a carefully coördinated show of unity.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Democrats Schedule Three Straight Hours of Booing to Get It Out of System
Photos from the Democratic National Convention: Bernie or Bust
Daily Cartoon: Monday, July 25th

Thomas Sutherland, the Magnanimous Hostage

In 1984, I used to visit Tom Sutherland and his wife, Jean, after running on the track at the American University of Beirut. They had dared to join the faculty at a time when Lebanon was a rough place to live. The civil war was in its ninth year; the Israeli invasion was in its second year. Hezbollah, the emerging Shiite militia, was taking control of West Beirut, including the scenic seafront area around the university. Fighting disrupted daily life—you often didn’t know which war was playing out around you—and made sleep difficult. Electricity was erratic; shops often had food shortages. That was the year the American University president was assassinated and a professor taken hostage. The Sutherlands and I would sit on their terrace, sipping cool drinks in the Beirut heat, and ponder the latest chaos around us.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Steve Kerr and His Mother Talk About the Legacy of His Father’s Assassination
The Demise of Hezbollah’s Untraceable Ghost
The Fate of a Joke in Lebanon

Photos from the Democratic National Convention: Bernie or Bust

On Sunday afternoon, supporters of Bernie Sanders marched down Broad Street in South Philadelphia, demonstrating their continuing opposition to Hillary Clinton’s Presidential nomination. Philip Montgomery, who is covering the Democratic National Convention for The New Yorker, captured the scene.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Some of Bernie Sanders’s Supporters Are Angry
Democrats Schedule Three Straight Hours of Booing to Get It Out of System
Bernie Sanders’s Fulsome Endorsement of Hillary Clinton