George Packer's Blog, page 225

Cruz and Kasich (and the G.O.P.) Give Up on the Northeast

You can hardly imagine John Kasich and Ted Cruz enduring a meal with each other—the earnest son of a postman in one seat, the snobby former Princeton debater in the other—let alone engaging in a high-stakes strategy session. So when their campaigns made a deal, over the weekend (that Kasich would not actively contest the crucial Indiana primary, so that the anti-Trump vote there could coalesce around Cruz, and that Cruz would return the favor in the less pivotal Oregon and New Mexico primaries), it made sense that the pact was brokered by their campaign managers, and that the two candidates did not themselves speak. Donald Trump pronounced the deal “desperate,” and it certainly seemed like it. But there was also irony in the deal’s timing and terms. On Tuesday, two days after the campaigns’ announcement, primaries will be held in five Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states—none of which are covered by the Cruz-Kasich agreement, and all of which are likely to be big Trump wins. The pact ignored territory (Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island) where Trump will rack up delegates. In this way, the deal between the two anti-Trump campaigns reflected a persistent Republican Party blind spot: voters living between Boston and Washington.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Koch for Clinton? Not a Chance
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, April 26th
Cruz and Kasich’s Sorry Plan to Stop Trump

Why Moscow Has Suddenly Been Filled with Tacky, Terrible Art

The center of Moscow changed gradually in the course of the past week. First, a few oddly shaped glass arches popped up along the central avenue, Tverskaya. They were vaguely reminiscent of eggs, or the outlines of eggs, with some decorative curlicues on top. Then pastel-colored eggs, slightly smaller than a person, began appearing, and then they sprouted rabbit ears. Across the street from Moscow city hall, tiny—but still huge—replicas of various churches, including Russian Orthodox and Armenian cathedrals, were plopped down. By Thursday, Moscow bloggers and journalists began asking questions. One checked the city’s official purchasing register and learned that the decorations were part of something called the Moscow Spring Festival, and that they had cost the city roughly three million dollars. By Friday, the entire center of the city was covered with sculptures and installations, most of them far larger than life size. These included a plastic reproduction of the classic Russian painting “Bogatyrs” (featuring three Russian-superhero horsemen), the size of a two-story house; the head of a woman—also roughly the size of a house—in faux topiary, with a twisted hand growing out of the ground next to it; and a cartoon Soviet policeman, which was the height of a small apartment building. It was as if the city had been invaded by a horde of aliens with flamboyantly bad taste. The Moscow intelligentsia recoiled in horror.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Walker Evans’s Typology of the American Worker
Our Underwear, Ourselves
A Young Artist Confronts the Sinking of the Titanic

The Ideological-Operational Divide in the G.O.P.

In the late nineteen-sixties, when Richard Nixon was practicing law on Wall Street but had his eye on bigger things, the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that Nixon’s advisers were studying a new book titled “The Political Beliefs of Americans,” with particular interest in its use of opinion polls to explain the nature and depth of conservatism in America. The book’s publication, in 1967, came three years after President Lyndon B. Johnson inflicted a bruising defeat on the Republican Presidential nominee, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who had run an unflinchingly right-leaning campaign. (Nixon, who had failed to win the White House in 1960, and then the California governorship two years later, found himself sitting that round out.) Excavations of the Goldwater-Johnson contest might still produce surprising new nuggets; even at the time, though, it was no surprise that most of Goldwater’s twenty-seven million votes were cast by white Protestants. The authors of “Political Beliefs,” Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, noted that nearly half of those voters were college educated, and asserted that “the impression that Goldwater supporters were ‘a bunch of ignorant kooks’ is ridiculous.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Banks Don’t Play It Safe, Even When It Costs Them
Mercy for a Terrorist in Norway
Cruz and Kasich’s Sorry Plan to Stop Trump

Why Banks Don’t Play It Safe, Even When It Costs Them

Better late than never. That’s one way of looking at the proposed new restrictions on banker compensation that U.S. regulators released last week. The rules will require top earners at big financial institutions to wait four years to receive a substantial portion of their incentive-based pay, and will force companies to claw back bonuses from employees whose decisions turn out to be responsible for big losses. The new regulations, which were mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill, were supposed to have been put in place soon after that legislation was passed, but it took five years for the six responsible agencies to put together a reasonable proposal. (And it will be months yet before the individual agencies approve the rules and put them into effect.)

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comment from the May 2, 2016, Issue
Curt Schilling, Internet Embarrassment
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, April 21st

Mercy for a Terrorist in Norway

Norway has tried to forget Anders Behring Breivik, the man responsible for the massacre of July 22, 2011, but he does not let us. He has been complaining about poor treatment since the day of his attack. It started just after his arrest, on the island of Utøya, where he shot sixty-nine Labor Party members, most of them teen-agers, after setting off a bomb outside the Prime Minister’s office, which killed eight others. When his bloodied shoes were put in a plastic bag and he was given slippers, he refused to wear them. “I don’t want to be seen in these; they are ridiculous,” he said. Breivik had a little cut on his finger, which he figured had come from a piece of a skull—he remembered something hitting his finger when he shot one teen-ager in the head at close range—and he demanded a bandage. “You’ll get no fucking plasters from me,” a policeman muttered. Breivik said that he would pass out if he did not get a Band-Aid, because he could not afford to lose blood, and refused to continue his interrogation until he received one. He got what he asked for.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Knausgaard’s Selflessness
Not Even Kabul Is Safe from the Taliban
Comment from the April 11, 2016, Issue

Cruz and Kasich’s Sorry Plan to Stop Trump

“It is sad,” Donald Trump said in a statement Sunday night, “that two grown politicians have to collude against one person who has only been a politician for ten months in order to try and stop that person from getting the Republican nomination.” It’s telling that Trump referred to Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich, who had made him sad by forming a tactical stop-Trump pact, as “grown politicians,” rather than “grownups”—no one is pretending that there are any of those left on the Republican side of the race—and to himself as a political toddler. He is always on the verge of a tantrum, and they, by announcing on Sunday that they would not compete with each other in three upcoming primary states, are desperately and belatedly trying to patch something together that is already badly broken. But the key word in the statement, which Trump repeated on Twitter and elsewhere, was “collusion”: it was his way of saying that Cruz and Kasich were not only pathetic but cheaters.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Anti-Moneyball Election
Trump Reassures Supporters That He Still Opposes Women Who Were Born Women
Hillary Clinton Should Be Allowed to Boast

Iran’s Javad Zarif on the Fraying Nuclear Deal, U.S. Relations, and Holocaust Cartoons

Three months after Iran dismantled large parts of its nuclear program, in compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the international nuclear deal—the country’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, declared last week in New York that the United States is falling seriously short of its commitments. Iran’s Central Bank chief, Valiollah Seif, delivered a similar message during his first meeting with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, on April 14th, and he told the Council on Foreign Relations, “Nothing has happened.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
An Iranian Opposition Leader Pushes to Be Put on Trial
The Bride Wore Green: What a Wedding Says about Iran’s Future
Iran’s Voters Sent a Message to the Hard-Liners

So Palpable a Stain: The Adams Family and Slavery in Washington, D.C.

Louisa Catherine Adams, John Quincy Adams’s wife, had gimlet eyes, a satirist’s wit, and a sharp pencil. To read her letters and diaries is to see the early Republic in vivid color. There is Aaron Burr, who would startle the noisy Senate into silence with “the little hammer in his graceful little hand.” There is John Randolph, of Roanoke, who “was to Congress what Shakespeare’s Fools were to a Court.” There is the wife of the Secretary of War, who clucks about her chickens back in Maine. Martin Van Buren is thinly disguised as “Lord Vandyke Maneuvre.” There are the Southern members of Congress, raging against her husband’s efforts as a representative to present petitions for the restriction of slavery in the eighteen-thirties and forties. “If you have ever seen a puppy in fits,” she wrote to her son, “it will give you some idea of the foaming violence of the Scene.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Telling the Story of Slavery
Angola Prison and the Shadow of Slavery
Keep Hamilton on the Ten. Put Tubman on the Twenty.

A Syrian Family Finds Refuge on a Swedish Island

The Swedish island of Gotland, in the Baltic Sea, between Western and Eastern Europe, was in medieval times a hub for commerce. Among the archeological evidence of that period on the island is an abundance of dirhams that were used as currency by caliphates in the Middle East and North Africa, indicating Gotland’s historical connection with the Islamic world.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Assad Files in Arabic
The Swimmer Who Fled Syria
The Pigeon Boy and Other Forgotten Fugitives from ISIS

Comment from the May 2, 2016, Issue

In “Money Trouble,” Amy Davidson examines the debate over the role of money in politics, and the clashes about the issue that have occurred between the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Hillary Clinton Should Be Allowed to Boast
What Sort of Foreign-Policy Hawk Is Hillary Clinton?
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, April 21st