George Packer's Blog, page 243

A Bloomberg Presidential Bid Was Always a Pipe Dream

We will never know which policies Michael Bloomberg would have emphasized had he jumped into the 2016 Presidential race. But one thing’s for sure: he’s in favor of full employment for political consultants and other operatives. According to the Times’s story on his decision not to run, the former mayor’s staff had “covertly assembled several dozen strategists and staff members, conducted polling in 22 states, drafted a website, produced television ads and set up campaign offices in Texas and North Carolina.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Crying Trump
Where Does Hillary Clinton Stand on Education Reform?
The Confusing, Anticlimactic Demise of Ben Carson

What Was Ronda Rousey Thinking?

On Saturday night, during the third round of a thrilling U.F.C. bout between Holly Holm, the bantamweight champion, and Miesha Tate, the challenger, one of the announcers broke an unwritten rule. Throughout the battle, which was broadcast on pay-per-view, the commentators had been trying to keep their focus on the two women in the cage, and trying to avoid talking about a certain absent star who cast a shadow over the event. But eventually Mike Goldberg, the play-by-play announcer, couldn’t help himself. As Holm and Tate circled and feinted, he asked, “What is going through the mind of Ronda Rousey right now?” And then both men went uncharacteristically silent for nearly ten seconds—enough time, perhaps, for them to try and fail to think of an answer, and to refocus on the matchup in front of them. Then they changed the subject.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Mixed Martial Arts Meets Khmer Boxing
Ronda Rousey on “S.N.L.”
Ronda Rousey, Routed

Maria Sharapova Plays the Long Game

Before Maria Sharapova, sleek in black, hair carefully tousled, stepped in front of the press in a Los Angeles hotel yesterday to make a “major announcement,” the rumor was that she was going to retire from tennis. After all, she is twenty-eight years old, and in the past few years has suffered several injuries that have kept her out of tennis for long periods. With five Grand Slam singles titles (including at least one of each of the four majors) and nearly thirty-seven million dollars in career prize money, and with no hope of reclaiming the top ranking as long as Serena Williams is playing (Sharapova has lost to Williams eighteen times in a row, including her last match, the quarter-finals of the Australian Open), Sharapova has little left to prove as a player. As a businesswoman, she is already established. She owns a line of candy, she co-owns a line of sunscreen; she has created, in Maria Sharapova, a peerless brand. Last year, she earned twenty-three million dollars of her $29.7 million estimated earnings off the court, and Forbes ranked her as the highest-paid female athlete for eleven straight years.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Twilight of Nadal
Serena’s Successor?
No Athlete Had a Better 2015 Than Novak Djokovic

Mitch McConnell’s Sensible Supreme Court Strategy

In February, 1984, early in the election year, the columnist Meg Greenfield noted the Democratic Party’s reputation as “the kind of gang that can’t shoot straight mainly because it’s unwilling to shoot at all, even in self-defense.” Greenfield was referring to foreign policy, specifically, but the caricature fit the fractious Party as a whole. Three decades later, the Democrats’ aim is far from perfect, but nobody really doubts that it’s the Republican Party, today, that can’t shoot straight, unless it’s shooting itself straight in the foot. Donald Trump’s serial triumphs, the flat-footedness of the “Never Trump” forces, and the hope, openly expressed by otherwise sober-minded adults, for a brokered bloodletting at the Republican National Convention, in July—it has all come to look like an elaborate, if unwitting, act of self-sabotage. The Republicans’ refusal to consider an Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, too, has the feel of a trap that the G.O.P. set and sprung for itself. As soon as they started it, some Republicans appeared to regret the timing, which followed the news of Antonin Scalia’s death as a foot on a gas pedal follows a green light. Even the instigators—the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the Senate leadership—have seemed eager to change the subject to something less contentious, like a bipartisan bill to address drug abuse. Within days, opinion polls suggested that the G.O.P. had miscalculated badly: according to the Pew Research Center, only thirty-eight per cent of Americans support the blockade.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 8th
Crying Trump
Where Does Hillary Clinton Stand on Education Reform?

A Refugee’s Journey to New York

Almost every day, about three hundred refugees set foot, for the first time, on American ground. Some come from towns with little to no electricity, others from overcrowded camps and cities. Last year, the greatest numbers came from Myanmar, Iraq, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. What unifies these refugees is the persecution they have endured, and their wait, often a decade or more, to call the United States home.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Bizarre Trial of a Poet in Myanmar
Daily Cartoon: Friday, February 19th
The Radical Meaning of Pope Francis’s Visit to Juárez

Crying Trump

To be fair, it’s not hard to understand why it took the G.O.P. and much of the press so long, too long, to take Donald Trump’s candidacy seriously. Many times before, he flirted with running, and, each time, he quit. His bids were stunts. Still, he learned something from those stunts, and the distance between his earlier bids and this one suggests that, while much in American politics has changed, Trump has not.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Bloomberg Presidential Bid Was Always a Pipe Dream
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 8th
Mitch McConnell’s Sensible Supreme Court Strategy

Where Does Hillary Clinton Stand on Education Reform?

One of the most intriguing moments in Sunday night’s Democratic debate came when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Hillary Clinton, “Do you think unions protect bad teachers?” In the Democratic Party, few subjects are as incendiary as education. On one side of the issue are the reformers, such as Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, who support charter schools, regular testing, and changing labor contracts to make it easier to fire underperforming teachers. On the other side are the defenders of public schools, such as Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, who are seeking to impose limits on the charter movement, modify testing requirements, and stand up for teachers.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Bloomberg Presidential Bid Was Always a Pipe Dream
Mitch McConnell’s Sensible Supreme Court Strategy
Crying Trump

The Confusing, Anticlimactic Demise of Ben Carson

This spring, as you may have noticed, there is a true outsider—a newcomer to electoral politics—who is leading the race to become the next Republican candidate for President. Even observers who have been paying close attention may find it hard to explain how, exactly, this situation came to pass. And many of them may find it surprisingly easy to forget that, just a few months ago, there were two of them: dual (but not quite duelling) political amateurs, both of them outpolling the professionals. From early September until early December, the Republican leaders in the RealClearPolitics polling average were Donald J. Trump and his unlikely counterpart, Dr. Ben Carson. But while Trump continued to defy pundits’ expectations, Carson fulfilled them: in the months leading up to the Iowa caucus, his poll numbers collapsed. And on Friday he said, “I am leaving the campaign trail”—although by then, the trail had long since left him.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Bloomberg Presidential Bid Was Always a Pipe Dream
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 8th
Mitch McConnell’s Sensible Supreme Court Strategy

Hillary Clinton’s Nineties Dance at the Flint Debate

“Well, once again, if we’re going to argue about the nineties, let’s try to get the facts straight,” Hillary Clinton said, on Sunday night, during the CNN Democratic Presidential debate, with Senator Bernie Sanders, in Flint, Michigan, two days before that state’s primary. One of the facts that needs straightening is why the nineties came up so often—at least half a dozen times—and as part of the debate’s most highly charged exchanges, on race and free trade. The decade was practically the third character onstage. At this particular juncture, Don Lemon, one of the moderators, had asked Clinton whether her use of the term “superpredators” in a January, 1996, speech praising Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill was “racial code.” She said that it was just a “poor choice of words,” which she had used just that once and never would again—a nineties thing. It was when Sanders tried to append a critique of the 1996 welfare-reform bill that she deployed her straight-fact conclusion. “If we are going to talk about the nineties, let’s talk about twenty-three million new jobs, incomes went up for everybody,” she said.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 8th
Mitch McConnell’s Sensible Supreme Court Strategy
Crying Trump

Darkness in Washington

Ryan Lizza’s excellent Daily Comment last week explained the lay of the American political landscape in the clearest possible terms, backed up by numbers: a faction of congressional Republicans, many, if not most, in the South, representing ideologically extreme, heavily white districts that were drawn by Republican-controlled state legislatures after the 2010 elections so as to keep those seats Republican in perpetuum, have their party in a chokehold—and with it, at the moment, the federal government. Eighty House members, Lizza wrote, barely a third of the Republican caucus, most of them new to Congress, forced Speaker John Boehner to reverse his public position and refuse to fund the government after September 30th unless Democrats agreed to gut the Affordable Care Act.

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