George Packer's Blog, page 201

Getting Serious About Trumponomics

On Monday, as Hillary Clinton was preparing to fly to Ohio to give a speech portraying Donald Trump as a menace to the country’s financial well-being, Moody’s Analytics, the research firm, published a report on the presumptive Republican nominee’s economic program which claimed that his policies could plunge the U.S. economy into a deep recession.

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Related:
Why Hillary Clinton Needs Elizabeth Warren on the Democratic Ticket
Extreme Conventions: San Francisco, 1964, and Cleveland, 2016
Donald Trump’s Problem Isn’t Corey Lewandowski. It’s Donald Trump

How the N.R.A. Uses Fear to Sell Guns

Mike Weisser runs a blog called Mike the Gun Guy and describes himself as a “gun nut beyond all gun nuts.” He joined the N.R.A. when he was eleven years old, a budding sportsman with a rifle for sport shooting. He later worked in his uncle’s gun business building revolvers, sold guns wholesale to law enforcement, and eventually opened a retail shop. He has written six books about guns. He’s also an N.R.A.-certified firearms instructor, and was interviewed by the New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos for his recent story on the business and politics of selling guns. Osnos found that Weisser has an unusual position: while he’s in favor of gun rights, he also writes critically, on his blog, about the N.R.A. and how it works to create a climate of fear to advance its agenda. The two sat down to talk about how the N.R.A. has changed since it was founded as a hunting and sportsman’s club.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Republicans and Gun Control: A Sad Mantra
Americans Opposed to Being Shot Seek Representation in Washington
The Second Amendment Is a Gun-Control Amendment

Lessons from the Justice Department’s Orlando Transcript Bungling

On Monday morning, the Justice Department released a redacted transcript of a call to 911 that Omar Mateen, the shooter responsible for the deaths of forty-nine people at the Pulse night club, in Orlando, placed during the attack. (There was more than one call; a couple of others, apparently between Mateen and hostage negotiators, were vaguely described, but no transcripts were released.) By Monday afternoon, after a torrent of criticism, the Department decided to release the full transcript. The redactions in the first version would have been the stuff of farce had so many people not been in mourning. The key passage read like this:

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Related:
Forget Congress—The Gun Business Faces a Judge
Cover Story: “Love,” by Frank Viva
Terror Begins at Home

Net Neutrality Is Great, but It Won’t Make Broadband Cheaper

Say you’ve just rented an apartment in Manhattan. One of the first things you’ll likely want to do, after turning on the gas and electricity, is shop for broadband-Internet access. Depending on the location of your apartment, you’ll have two choices, Time Warner Cable and Verizon’s FiOS, or just one, Time Warner. Neither service will be cheap, both charging about sixty dollars a month for moderately fast (but not blazing fast) broadband service.

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Related:
From Lobbyist to Advocate: An Interview with F.C.C. Chairman Tom Wheeler
Why Companies Won’t Learn From the T-Mobile/Experian Hack
Did Laurence Tribe Sell Out?

Why Hillary Clinton Needs Elizabeth Warren on the Democratic Ticket

The latest word is that Elizabeth Warren is not likely to be the Democratic nominee for Vice-President. “Warren is a favorite of liberal Democrats, though an all-female ticket is unlikely,” the Times concluded on Sunday, in a report on Hillary Clinton’s Vice-Presidential search that names eight less-famous possibilities before the former Harvard law professor. (It was, to be fair to Warren’s prospects, an article that leaned on the observations of a body-language expert.) On Monday, Politico reported that unnamed Wall Street Democratic donors did not believe that Clinton would pick Warren, and might withhold their contributions if she did. Speculation like this is called Kremlinology, but at this stage of a Presidential campaign nothing so solid as a Kremlin surrounds a candidate, just a network of conditional relationships that may soon evaporate. What we do know is that a Washington lawyer has begun the archaic process of “vetting” ten candidates—as if some secrets from their past might be more important to their reception than the pose they strike in public. We also know that, for many people, Clinton is not really making ten important decisions but one: Warren or someone else.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Getting Serious About Trumponomics
Extreme Conventions: San Francisco, 1964, and Cleveland, 2016
Donald Trump’s Problem Isn’t Corey Lewandowski. It’s Donald Trump

Extreme Conventions: San Francisco, 1964, and Cleveland, 2016

In the aftermath of the 1964 Republican National Convention, in San Francisco, it wasn’t hard to assess the damage that the gathering had done to the Party and to its nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona. It had been an awful Convention, and its worst moments had been on television. One bad episode came when Governor Nelson Rockefeller, of New York, who was the runner-up in the primaries, tried to speak and faced a torrent of jeers and boos. Another involved a doomed effort to promote the candidacy of William Scranton, the widely admired governor of Pennsylvania, who was nominated by Milton Eisenhower, the former President’s brother. Goldwater easily won on the first ballot, but Scranton by then had written a furious open letter in which he attacked “Goldwaterism,” saying that it had “come to stand for a whole crazy-quilt collection of absurd and dangerous positions.” The worst moment, though, came when Goldwater delivered his acceptance speech. The term “Presidential” wasn’t in vogue, but Party leaders hoped that this champion of the Republican right would evolve into a mainstream candidate in time for the general election. Goldwater, though, had his own ideas, and in his acceptance speech uttered two sentences that, even fifty-some years later, are lovingly remembered by students of American politics: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump’s Problem Isn’t Corey Lewandowski. It’s Donald Trump
A Corporate “thankyou”? No, Thanks
More Fighting Words from Bernie Sanders

Donald Trump’s Problem Isn’t Corey Lewandowski. It’s Donald Trump

These days, American Presidential campaigns are ludicrously long, ludicrously bloated, and ludicrously costly—but the basic principles haven’t changed in decades. To win, you first have to put together a majority (or plurality) of primary voters, and then you have to appeal to the country at large.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Extreme Conventions: San Francisco, 1964, and Cleveland, 2016
A Corporate “thankyou”? No, Thanks
More Fighting Words from Bernie Sanders

LeBron James, King of Narrative

“I’m not promising a championship,” wrote LeBron James in the 2014 press release-cum-open letter in Sports Illustrated that heralded his return to the Cleveland Cavaliers. “I want to win next year, but I’m realistic.” Of course, nothing about James has ever been realistic. One crucial fact—the otherworldliness of his ability on the court—has occasioned a science-fictional life. His acquaintance with an absurd, ever-intensifying celebrity began in high school, and, in response to that fame, and to the varied fruits of his talent, he has been trailed ever since by an antiphony of hosannas and heckles, overstated in both directions. The Sports Illustrated essay was an admirable attempt to curb expectations, but the terms of the basketball-watching public’s engagement with James have been clear for far too long: we have seen nothing quite like him, and so we accept from him nothing less than the heretofore impossible. Nike notwithstanding, there are no mere “Witnesses” to James’s greatness. We have waited, worried, praised, parsed, criticized, kvelled, but never been content simply to watch. This—a kind of mutual activeness—is the real joy of fandom in the LeBron Era: James is a rich text, a better subject for exegesis, for a kind of participatory reading, than any player before him. (In this respect, at least, he bests Michael Jordan, comparisons with whom, in the coming weeks, are inevitable. Jordan was a great individual player who then became a “winner,” and an exceptionally “ruthless” competitor. But, while Jordan’s competitiveness has occasioned some retrospective psychological profiling, he was not, during his playing days, laid out on the Freudian couch the way James has been.)

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Related:
LeBron Feeds Entire City of Cleveland with Loaves and Fishes
The Unlikelihood of Rooting for LeBron James
The Conditional Cavaliers Face Elimination Again

The Unlikelihood of Rooting for LeBron James

What did it take for LeBron James, a man who is so blessed with the physical and mental gifts for playing basketball that he was nicknamed the Chosen One as a teen-ager, to finally become an underdog? It took a team as good as the Golden State Warriors, who beat the Cavaliers in last season’s Finals, and who, just a few days ago, seemed poised to do it again, when they went up 3­–1 in this year’s series. The Warriors won an unprecedented seventy-three games in the regular season, and featured a star, Stephen Curry, who many say represents the future of basketball. James has been stubbornly hard to love over the years, but the Warriors made it safe to root for him. They also let us forget that the Cavaliers themselves were a super-team, packed with stars assembled by James, with the express purpose of winning a title—the kind of basketball gerrymandering that many frowned upon when he did it during his years with the Miami Heat. The Warriors made basketball look easy all season, and on Sunday night, as James dragged his team across the finish line, winning the title-deciding Game 7 on the road, in Oakland, California, there was pleasure in watching him show that it is hard.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
LeBron Feeds Entire City of Cleveland with Loaves and Fishes
LeBron James, King of Narrative
The Conditional Cavaliers Face Elimination Again

Watching the Old-Timers’ Day Game with Jim Bouton, Who Wasn’t Invited

On a sunny day in mid-June, the New York Yankees celebrated Old-Timers’ Day for the seventieth time. A gaggle of ex-pinstripers, some famous, others less so, returned to the house that Ruth built, that Steinbrenner rebuilt, and that Jeter moved across the street. More than a hundred miles away, in western Massachusetts, on the property of his large, lushly landscaped home, the former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton threw a bucket of balls against a cinderblock wall that he built in his back yard, aiming each pitch at his hand-painted strike zone and hitting it more often than not. Fastballs and knucklers, mostly.

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Related:
Ali on the Aisle
The Mission of a Black Baseball Team
Curt Schilling, Internet Embarrassment