George Packer's Blog, page 240

Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Sensible Supreme Court Choice

President Barack Obama has chosen to nominate Merrick B. Garland, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, to the Supreme Court. To understand why Garland is a wise choice for the nomination, read the judicial opinion he published last July upholding a federal ban on federal contractors making federal campaign contributions. It begins with this prologue:

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Bonus Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, March 16th
Donald Trump and the Super Tuesday II View from Mar-a-Lago
Hillary Clinton’s Ordeal Continues at the Democratic Debate

Donald Trump and the Super Tuesday II View from Mar-a-Lago

“Sit down, everybody, please,” Donald Trump said, midway through his victory speech on the night of Super Tuesday II. “I mean, this is Mar-a-Lago. We give you seats. You don’t have to stand.” And, indeed, the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, the private club in Palm Beach, Florida, where Trump lives part time, and which he markets constantly, was outfitted with a few hundred gold-colored chairs. An injunction to sit down calmly would be a rare thing at a Trump rally, where, lately, some people have seemed more prepared to throw furniture than to sit on it. But, while some candidates attract their most revved-up crowds on election nights, using the suspense and tension of waiting for the results to build energy, Trump has, for the past few races, been treating these events as post-game press conferences. On Tuesday, his son Eric played the role of a bizarro Riley Curry, laughing and clapping as his father spoke. Although the event was still billed as a press conference, Trump dispensed with the part in which the press gets to ask questions. Instead, he gave what amounted to a recap of the latest episode in a hit series about the collapse of the Republican Party.

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How Hillary Clinton Triumphed on Tuesday
John Kasich, Mainstream Republicans’ Last Hope
U.S. Becomes Laughingstock of World for Something Other Than Gun Laws

Hillary Clinton Versus Donald Trump: The Battle Ahead

At about eight-thirty last night, after the news came in that Donald Trump had trounced Marco Rubio in Florida, and that Hillary Clinton had won big victories over Bernie Sanders in Florida and North Carolina, Tony Fratto, who was a White House spokesman for George W. Bush’s Administration, tweeted, “What essentially happened today is @HillaryClinton was elected president. We have 8 months of hyperventilating before its official.”

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Who Sponsored the Hate?
Donald Trump, a Frightening Window Into the American Present
Abraham Lincoln Warned Us About Donald Trump

Who Sponsored the Hate?

The big donors in the Republican Party are reportedly flummoxed by the toxic rhetoric of Donald Trump. The billionaire political industrialist Charles Koch has warned that Trump’s proposed registry of Muslims in the U.S. would “destroy our free society.” After pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting their right-wing libertarian views over the past four decades, and budgeting some eight hundred and eighty-nine million dollars to spend in the 2016 election cycle, he and his brother David Koch, and their donor circle, are apparently disappointed that they have bought so little control over the Republican Presidential candidates. “You’d think we could have more influence,” he lamented to the Financial Times. But, in fact, the influence of the Kochs and their fellow big donors is manifest in Trump’s use of incendiary and irresponsibly divisive rhetoric. Only a few years ago, it was they who were sponsoring the hate.

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Hillary Clinton Versus Donald Trump: The Battle Ahead
Donald Trump, a Frightening Window Into the American Present
Abraham Lincoln Warned Us About Donald Trump

Donald Trump, a Frightening Window Into the American Present

The old adage holds that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but the candidacy of Donald Trump suggests an alternate possibility—that sometimes we repeat history precisely because we understood it the first time. Trump’s ascent to the top of the Republican field was initially amusing, then confounding, and has now reached its full flourish as a frightening window into the American present. Trump has not simply emerged suddenly as a representative of populist white anger—the G.O.P. has been tilling those fields for decades—he has stripped the old structure down to the studs and, in its place, offered a garish new architecture, a populism unrestrained by convention or code words. It is honest, or at least frank, in its intent. As Jill Lepore pointed out in The New Yorker, the lines between the crowds drawn to Bernie Sanders and those drawn to Donald Trump tend to blur, each defining themselves against establishment candidates whose positions were cemented by their familial ties to Presidencies past. Those lines became a bit more distinct last week after a multiracial group of protesters disrupted a scheduled Trump rally in Chicago. Believing the unrest was the work of the Sanders’s campaign, Trump tweeted, “Bernie is lying when he says disruptors aren’t told to go to my events. Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!” But, in a real sense, we are seeing in the Trump and Sanders phenomena not only the expression of frustrations in which the electorate has been steeped during the Obama years but also the clearest statement of the problems of populism since its inception.

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Related:
Hillary Clinton Versus Donald Trump: The Battle Ahead
Who Sponsored the Hate?
Abraham Lincoln Warned Us About Donald Trump

From Lobbyist to Advocate: An Interview with F.C.C. Chairman Tom Wheeler

On Friday, I sat down with Tom Wheeler, the head of the F.C.C, to talk about his new proposal to give people more control over their privacy online. If the idea is formally approved, Americans will be able to stop their Internet service providers—the companies, such as Comcast and Verizon, that provide the infrastructure over which the Internet flows—from giving information about their browsing habits to advertisers. The history of the Internet is one of the persistent loss of privacy, and the F.C.C.’s plan provides for a momentary reversal. Not surprisingly, the proposal is controversial; critics suggest that Wheeler may have overstepped the F.C.C.’s authority, and they add that the new rules do nothing to regulate Web sites, like Google and Facebook, that also have intimate data about what we do online. “This really is a power grab,” James Cicconi, a senior executive vice-president at A.T. & T., told me.

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Trevor Paglen Plumbs the Internet
Did Laurence Tribe Sell Out?
The Threat to Obama from the Courts

What Putin Has Done for Assad

On Monday evening in Syria, Bashar al-Assad answered a ringing phone at his palace overlooking Damascus. The caller was Vladimir Putin, to whom Assad owed his government’s strong position at the negotiating table in Geneva, where another fragile round of peace talks with the battered Syrian opposition had begun that morning. Syria’s foreign minister, Walid Muallem, had prefaced the Geneva meetings by threatening the opposition and the United Nations envoy to Syria; contrary to the text of a U.N. Security Council resolution, which Russia had agreed to, Muallem warned that any mention of Assad’s eventual replacement would cross “a red line” for negotiations. He added, “We will not talk with anyone who wants to discuss the Presidency.”

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Comment from the March 7, 2016, Issue
The Unaccountable Death of Boris Nemtsov
A Moment for Hope in Syria

Rahm Emanuel’s Lessons for Hillary Clinton

The office that Barack Obama once hoped to hold, at least according to legend, was that of mayor of Chicago. During most of the Obama years, it has been occupied instead by Rahm Emanuel, who was formerly the President’s consigliere and the aggressive, profane chief of his “team of rivals” Cabinet. Emanuel’s reputation was as a centrist, but he helped lend a political rationale to those who wanted a more aggressive response to the financial crisis, arguing that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” because “it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” By the time Emanuel left the White House, in 2010, to run for mayor of his home city, his reputation was both exact and universal. Every bookish American Jew knows the image of his cousin, real or imagined: louder, more physical, and more certain; supremely competent; a reality instructor. Emanuel played the role for a President whose party had experienced his election as the fulfillment of a dream. He was Obama’s tutor in how to fight in Washington; he was the Democratic Party’s instructor in reality.

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Hillary Clinton Versus Donald Trump: The Battle Ahead
Who Sponsored the Hate?
Donald Trump, a Frightening Window Into the American Present

Three Places Obama Could Teach

As President Obama enters his final months in office, speculation about what he and Michelle will do once they leave the White House is growing. Even Obama has seemed uncertain of what direction his post-Presidential life should take, gathering a team of advisers as early as last year to help him chart a suitable return course to civilian life. He is yet a young man, as former Presidents go, and there aren’t many options for someone of his stature. For the man who wrote two memoirs before becoming President, further installments of his ongoing autobiography are a given, but then what?

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How to Recognize a Constitutional Crisis
“Hamilton” and the Hip-Hop Case for Progressive Heroism
Hillary Clinton Is No Obama

The Primaries: The Story So Far

As voters go to the polls in the next round of primaries today—most importantly, in Ohio and Florida—a brief recap: almost a year ago, on April 12, 2015, Hillary Clinton announced that she was seeking the Democratic Presidential nomination and became the immediate favorite. She remained unopposed for about two weeks, at which point the Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said that he, too, was a candidate. In August, Sanders and Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, who had announced in late May, suggested that the Democratic National Committee was, to use one of Sanders’s favorite words, “rigging” the contest by limiting the number of debates to six (with four to be held before the early primaries), and in that way helping the better-known Clinton lock in her front-runner status.

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Sanders Sends Vegan Thugs to Attack Peace-Loving Nazis
Mega-Tuesday: Can Anyone Stop Trump? Can Sanders Surprise Again?
Talking About Donald Trump