It was a beautiful North Carolina spring day in 2000 at the governor’s mansion in Raleigh, and Governor Jim Hunt was sprinting down the giant ruby-red stairs. I was his then-young press aide, and we were running late because he had been on the phone with President Bill Clinton.

Naively, I noted something about their discussing a state issue. Without missing a beat, the governor said of Clinton, his fellow Democrat, “I was telling him what he was doing wrong with the country and how to fix it!”

So began my real education in politics, which I was quickly learning had even more to do with human interactions than I realized.

Last week, Hunt died at 88, a historic figure in North Carolina politics who served 16 years as governor. Appointed governors from the Colonial Era served longer, but no one has yet matched Hunt’s tenure as governor from 1977 to 1985 and again from 1993 to 2001.

The obituaries are full of his accomplishments and his most notable defeat, a 1984 bid to unseat U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. Hunt once told me his TV ads were “all wrong,” which may be true, but that was a bad year to be a Democrat, especially in the South. Ronald Reagan carried the state with almost 62 percent of the vote. Helms got 51 percent.

But I’m drawn to the dynamic between Hunt and Clinton, southern Democratic moderate governors who had to find a policy and political path forward as the South became increasingly Republican in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. They weren’t alone. Democratic southern governors like Ray Mabus in Mississippi, Richard Riley in South Carolina, Roy Barnes in Georgia, and Reubin Askew in Florida had similar dilemmas. They had a common goal, but they were all rivals in a way, too.

Clinton had real indebtedness to Hunt, nine years his senior. Hunt’s advocacy led to him serving as chair of the Democratic Governors Association. Clinton recalled “[I]t was the first significant national position of any kind I had.”

Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory aligned with Hunt’s return to the governor’s seat. Together, they used their bully pulpits in Washington and Raleigh to advance policies that could push the progressive envelope in a conservative era.

In 1997, when Clinton spoke before a joint session of the North Carolina legislature, as part of his crusade for national education standards and a testing plan, he called Hunt a “mentor and friend,” whose work was influenced by Hunt’s labors to create national teaching standards. Indeed, Hunt’s wilderness years outside elective office were spent as founding chair of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which to date has certified over 141,000 teachers with the profession’s highest credential.

Hunt never missed an opportunity to promote this cause to Clinton, even if it meant being aggressive. A White House staffer once told me that Clinton always insisted on understanding how the federally supported teaching certification program was progressing because Hunt was sure to grill him about it.

Photos of Hunt and Clinton are like a time capsule from a bygone era. For instance, there was a joint announcement of a public-private partnership to bring Internet access to the state (and a bit of a tug-of-war over who should get credit).

There were their combined efforts to pass a “global settlement agreement” between tobacco companies and the feds, which faltered, and later a “master settlement agreement” with the states that was sealed. There was their mutual understanding that education had to start before kindergarten and that it was a winning issue with voters—something New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani latched onto over 30 years after Hunt.

The Clinton-Hunt friendship is a testament to the ideals of intergovernmental relations—that federal and state leaders should cooperate. One area that’s particularly telling about how things have changed is disaster funding. The Clinton years allowed Hunt to boast about securing federal dollars for North Carolina after devastating hurricanes; one wonders how Hunt would navigate President Donald Trump’s truculent withholding of disaster relief.

Just because both men were Democrats didn’t guarantee success. Hunt served as governor during Jimmy Carter’s administration, but that relationship was fraught, with fights over college funding and tobacco, the state’s cash crop.

January will mark a quarter-century since Clinton and Hunt last held elective office. North Carolinians should remember that their bond produced outcomes that benefited the Tar Heel State. So should the rest of us. Their relationship continues to serve as a national model during these divisive times.

The post What Bill Clinton Learned from Jim Hunt and Why It Still Matters appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Everyone who has ever used a dating app knows the disappointment when an online picture doesn’t match reality. Sometimes, economic reports suffer from a similar gap. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at a 3 percent annual rate in the second quarter. That sounds like good news, but the underlying data tell us that the U.S. economy is stumbling—and that’s before President Donald Trump doubled down last week on his destructive tariffs.

GDP captures everything the U.S. economy produces, whether it goes into consumption or savings and investment. The BEA data show that Americans’ private consumption grew in the second quarter at an anemic 1.4 percent rate—half the rate in 2024 and half the annual average since 1990. Business investment was also weak in the second quarter, increasing at a 1.9 percent rate, again barely half last year’s rate and one-third the average rate since 1990.

There’s more bad news from other economic fundamentals. Residential investments declined at a 4.6 percent annual rate, compared to 4.2 percent gains in 2024 and average annual gains of 2.5 percent since 1990. And government consumption and investment were nearly flat.

The latest jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also show a weak economy. So far this year, employment has increased an average of 85,000 jobs per month, falling to 32,000 jobs per month over the past three months, versus monthly increases averaging 216,000 jobs in 2023 and 168,000 jobs in 2024.

The official 3 percent growth report for the second quarter does not reflect the economy’s fundamentals. So, where did it come from?

I have an advantage here because I oversaw the BEA as Bill Clinton’s Under Secretary of Commerce and learned precisely how the Bureau builds the GDP measure. The answer is that the 3 percent growth number was an artifact of how it technically accounts for changes in imports, which fell dramatically in the second quarter.

Trump’s tariffs initially took effect on April 1, 2025, also the first day of the second quarter. Over the next three months, our imports fell at a virtually unheard-of 30.3 percent rate because markets worked as they were supposed to. As the tariffs began to raise import prices, as confirmed by the recent uptick in inflation, businesses and consumers pulled back sharply on those purchases—an important reason why overall consumption and investment weakened.

That’s what always happens when a country imposes high tariffs. Less well-known is that falling imports are counted as a positive for GDP growth under the BEA’s growth accounting. The approach here logically follows BEA’s larger framework for tracking GDP. Growth represents how much the value of domestic production—the DP in GDP—increases, whether it goes to private or public consumption or savings and investment. Imports present a special case because households, businesses, and the government use them without producing them. So, BEA subtracts imports from its measure of the value of output produced here, and when imports fall sharply, as they did in the second quarter, the decline is counted as a positive for growth. Similarly, when imports rise, the increase is counted as a negative for domestic production.

BEA’s treatment of exports follows the same logic. When we produce and export goods or services, they don’t appear as part of consumption or investment. Accordingly, when exports rise, the increase is seen as positive for growth; when they fall, the decrease is a negative for growth.

That’s how the dramatic decline in U.S. imports since Trump’s “Liberation Day” drove the 3 percent official growth rate for an economy that by every basic measure is weakening.

A simple comparison of past years and decades illustrates today’s economic weakness and how Trump’s tariffs have distorted our import and export flows. (I exclude the years of the financial crisis and pandemic here as Black Swan outliers.)

The weakness in the second quarter came after the economy’s substandard performance in the first quarter, when BEA found that GDP contracted at a 0.5 percent annual rate. Again, consumer spending was weak, and residential investment and government consumption and investment declined. Again, Trump’s tariff plans also played a role: U.S. businesses sharply increased their investments by stockpiling foreign-made equipment, technologies, and inputs before his tariffs raised prices. So, imports surged 38 percent in the first quarter, and under BEA’s accounting, that sharp increase turned sluggish growth into a technical quarterly contraction.

What happens next for Americans will depend on many unknowns, but the outlook seems bleak based on what we know today. Trump just announced higher tariffs on imports from 28 countries, including Canada, Brazil, Taiwan, India, and other important trading partners, and a new survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta confirms that most businesses plan to respond to the tariffs by raising prices. So as they take hold, inflation will accelerate, further slowing or contracting consumption and investment. This nexus between tariffs and inflation is the main reason the Federal Reserve hasn’t cut interest rates as the economy has weakened.

As conditions deteriorate later this year, the Fed will cut interest rates at least modestly, but that won’t boost growth much. The Fed directly controls only very short-term rates, while markets determine longer-term rates. As I noted recently in these pages, the most likely direction for those longer-term rates for business loans, mortgages, and most Treasury securities is up, not down. Our coming budget deficits under Trump’s ill-considered tax program are so large as a share of the economy that attracting domestic and foreign capital to fund them—and new private lending financing them—will require higher rates, especially with inflation rising.

Reversing Trump’s tariff and tax program is the only reasonable way to restore healthy growth for the United States. Since that won’t happen, our most likely prospects for 2026 are stagflation or recession.

The post The U.S. Economy Is Stumbling Badly appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Elon Musk’s still-hypothetical third party could become reality because, as I discussed yesterday, combining historically high debt levels with an economic downturn could stoke public frustration with both parties. We saw this in 1992 when independent billionaire Ross Perot exploited rising debt to garner nearly 20 percent of the presidential popular vote.  

But it’s not a given that a large faction of voters will blame both parties for today’s rising debt. With nearly every Republican in federal office having voted for the red-ink-laden budget reconciliation bill, Democrats have a political opportunity to exploit.  

Besides, the winning political party in the 1992 election was the Democratic Party. 

Bill Clinton didn’t position himself as an austerity-minded candidate in that year’s primaries. On the contrary, he savaged the fiscal scold in the race, former Senator Paul Tsongas, for his “cold-blooded” economics. And he touted a “middle-class tax cut,” breaking from past Democratic nominees Walter Mondale (who pledged to raise taxes to balance the budget) and Michael Dukakis (who said tax increases to balance the budget would be a “last resort.”) 

But in the general election campaign, feeling some heat from Perotistas and needing to woo Tsongas voters, Clinton nodded more toward deficit reduction. In his nomination acceptance address, delivered soon after Perot (temporarily) suspended his campaign, Clinton said: 

[President George H. W. Bush] has raised taxes on the people driving pickup trucks and lowered taxes on the people riding in limousines. We can do better. He promised to balance the budget, but he hasn’t even tried. In fact, the budgets he has submitted to Congress nearly doubled the debt. Even worse, he wasted billions and reduced our investments in education and jobs. We can do better. So if you are sick and tired of a government that doesn’t work to create jobs, if you’re sick and tired of a tax system that’s stacked against you, if you’re sick and tired of exploding debt and reduced investments in our future, or if, like the great civil rights pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer, you’re just plain old sick and tired of being sick and tired, then join us. 

Clinton’s rhetorical framework glossed over the tension between pursuing deficit reduction, lower middle-class taxes, and future-oriented investments. But once in office, Clinton prioritized deficit reduction with higher taxes on the wealthy (when Democrats ran Congress) and spending restraint (when Republicans ran Congress) while jettisoning the middle-class tax cut. While Clinton took initial political heat for the broken promise, a growing economy fueled by low Federal Reserve interest rates helped him get re-elected. He had a rare string of annual budget surpluses in his second term.  

In a 2008 debate with his Republican opponent John McCain, Obama weaponized the higher debt accumulated by the incumbent George W. Bush: 

When President Bush came into office, we had a budget surplus and the national debt was a little over $5 trillion. It has doubled over the last eight years. And we are now looking at a deficit of well over half a trillion dollars … And, frankly, Senator McCain voted for four out of five of President Bush’s budgets. 

Obama promised to run a tighter ship but steered clear of specifics, and also stressed the need to immediately pump money into the economy to deal with the “economic crisis,” while also arguing “we’re not going to be able to go back to our profligate ways” after the crisis is over. 

As president, Obama enacted an enormous economic stimulus package. But his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is a deficit reducer thanks to tax increases and cost efficiencies. Also, like Clinton, once Republicans claimed control of the House and the Great Recession subsided, Obama accepted more spending restraints. The annual deficit as a percent of GDP plummeted during his presidency from 9.8 percent in 2009 to 3.1 percent in 2016. 

While both Clinton and Obama narrowed or eliminated annual budget deficits throughout their presidencies, neither was succeeded by a Democrat, raising the question of whether budget balancing had any political benefit.  

During his one presidential term, Joe Biden was far more concerned about spending than saving. He enacted massive pandemic relief, vastly expanded the child tax credit (though the stingy Senator Joe Manchin blocked an effort to extend the costly expansion beyond one year), secured significant infrastructure investment, and implemented student loan forgiveness by executive order (though losses in court limited the total amount). Whether or not it’s fair to blame Biden’s spending for the period of high inflation on his watch, the high inflation was the main driver of Trump’s election victory and has given big spending a bad name.  

And now it’s Trump piling on the debt with massive tax cuts skewed to the wealthy, paired with, but not offset by, huge cuts to health care, food aid, and clean energy. And any relief for working stiffs from tax cuts may be undercut by Trump’s tariffs. The issue will be challenging to ignore with debt at historically high levels relative to the economy. Democrats will be sorely tempted to whack Republicans as fiscally irresponsible, and rightfully so.  

The electoral successes of Clinton and Obama remind us that it’s easier to level attacks on high debt in the campaign than produce a deficit reduction plan that squares with other party priorities and yields electoral victories. For example, Democrats will have no problem arguing for higher taxes on the wealthy. But how much will they want to commit additional tax revenue to deficit reduction when there is health coverage, food aid, and clean energy tax incentives to restore? What other big-ticket ideas will they fund, such as baby bonds or vocational and higher education support? Is it better to launch programs that deliver direct benefits, or indirectly improve the cost of living by reducing deficits and making it easier for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates? 

As the successful Clinton and Obama campaigns show, such tensions don’t need to be resolved until after Democrats regain power. But until then, the tension will percolate. 

The post Democrats Should Prepare for the Return of Debt Politics  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The quality of federal immigration enforcement policy should not be judged by quantity. You would only conclude more deportations equals more success if you believed immigration was bad, which it is not.  

However, President Donald Trump does believe immigration is bad and judges immigration enforcement success by numbers. So, I assume he is mortified that he has deported fewer people than any president in at least 35 years. 

Bill Clinton deported 12.3 million, George W. Bush 10.3 million, and Barack Obama 5.3 million in their eight-year administrations. Joe Biden racked up 4 million. Trump’s first term? 1.9 million, and another 207,000 so far this year. 

Of course, these immigration deportation numbers don’t tell the whole story of each president’s record. But they indicate that Trump’s indiscriminate cruelty and disinterest in human rights is not the best way to deport the masses that his MAGA base wants, nor what most everyone else wants—an immigration policy prioritizing the removal of criminals, not immigrants who came to work and have only committed a misdemeanor by being undocumented. 

The drop in deportations from Clinton and Bush to Obama obscures the strides made by Obama to reorient immigration enforcement towards the removal of criminals.  

The 44^th president made two big strategic decisions that strengthened enforcement policy. As the Migration Policy Institute explained, one was to move away from “voluntary” returns of unauthorized border crosses, in which border agents quickly and informally send migrants back “without any meaningful legal consequences.” Under Obama, “formal removal proceedings became far more common as did criminal charges for illegal entry or re-entry.” This greatly reduced the number of deportations overall, but “recidivism along the border fell from 29 percent in FY 2007 to 14 percent in FY 2014.” 

The other shifted from targeting workplaces to focusing on national security threats, border security, and public safety. In 2014, Obama issued an executive order that defined terrorists, criminal gang members, and convicted felons as the highest priority for deportation. In 2009, at the start of Obama’s presidency, 69 percent of deportees fell in this category. By 2016, it was 94 percent.  

The result was fewer deportations than his recent predecessors but a higher number of formally processed “removals” (3.1 million, up from 2 million by Bush) with a much higher concentration of serious criminals removed.  

Trump jettisoned this effective approach, rescinding Obama’s executive order and replacing it with one prioritizing the removal of criminals regardless of severity. In theory, casting a wider net should increase the total number of deportations, but in his first term, Trump was behind Obama’s pace, failing on his own metric of success. Trump’s first-term policies, such as family separation, were sensationalistic, misdirected, cruel—and ineffective at racking up big numbers.  

Furthermore, they were ineffective at protecting Americans from actual criminals. The Cato Institute’s David J. Bier did a deep data dive and concluded that Trump, in his first term, prioritized preventing border crossers from receiving asylum over capturing serious criminals. The family separation policy was the most glaring example, which didn’t last long because of the intense backlash. “The share of prosecuted individuals with prior convictions fell 63 percent from March 2018 to May 2018,” found Bier, “as family separations increased.”  

Shockingly, Trump had a relatively high rate of releasing undocumented immigrant criminals, particularly in 2018 and 2019. Bier wrote: 

 A big pre-pandemic reason for the releases under the Trump administration was that it was determined to detain as many asylum seekers as possible, prioritizing their detention and removal over that of convicted criminals. For instance, in 2019, ICE was using 68 percent of its detention space for individuals without any criminal convictions … In 2019, Trump’s ICE released more than twice the number of individuals convicted of crimes compared to any year during Biden’s presidency. 

Trump’s focus on deporting criminals appears to be withering in his second term as he pressures immigration officials for big numbers. In an article about a Wisconsin Trump voter whose wife was detained by ICE at San Juan, Puerto Rico’s airport as they were returning from their honeymoon, USA Today, noted, “The reality of immigration enforcement is that targeting convicted criminals requires time and manpower; it can take half a dozen agents to arrest a single person. An airport checkpoint … can quickly round up multiple people whose immigration status may be in limbo.” 

The reason why protests flared up in California is that Trump is ramping up workplace raids. Immigration restrictionist Mark Kirkorian explained to The New York Times, “Goosing the numbers is a big part of this because it’s so much more efficient in manpower to raid a warehouse and arrest 100 illegal aliens than it is to send five guys after one criminal.” But going after people who are working not only fails to make us safer, but it also undermines the economy.  

As a result of Trump’s blunderbuss approach, a far higher percentage of those detained by ICE are not criminals. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump reviewed the data this week and found that “on average, 7 percent of ICE arrests between early 2019 and the beginning of this year were non-criminals. The most recent data puts that figure at 23 percent.” 

Trump is tearing the country apart by targeting the undocumented at workplaces, airports, and college campuses. If he wanted to focus on criminals, he had a model that worked. But he junked it so he could abduct people randomly, viciously, and, in some cases, without any due process. And, of course, he chucked it because it was Obama’s immigration enforcement policy. Nothing about Trump’s immigration enforcement policy is making us safer.  

The post Why Obama’s Immigration Enforcement Policy Was Better Than Trump’s  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Trade policy has a way of dividing political parties. Shifts towards liberalized or protectionist trade measures have disparate impacts on industries and regions, scrambling the usual partisan fault lines.

For example, the last two Democratic presidents embraced freer trade over the concerns of party members. Bill Clinton helped get the North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress even though in both congressional chambers, most Democrats—sensitive to the threat of lost manufacturing jobs in blue-collar regions—opposed it. Clinton also backed Permanent Most Favored Nation trade status for China in 2000, which became law over the objections of two-thirds of House Democrats.

American sentiment toward trade with China soured by the next decade, especially in blue-collar communities. When Obama forged the Trans-Pacific Partnership, arguing it would contain China’s unfair trading practices, he ran into a phalanx of Democratic opposition. As the Democratic nominee in 2016, Hillary Clinton opposed the deal even though she had helped midwife it when she was Obama’s Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. Like other Democrats, she was worried about further erosion of support from working-class voters.

Today, President Donald Trump is unilaterally imposing a protectionist regime not just on the world but on Republican Party politicians, many of whom are free traders at heart and only lending support through gritted teeth. Financial markets cratered, as did public opinion of tariffs when the president rolled them out this month.

Yet, internal Democratic Party fault lines have not been entirely erased. Look at two Rust Belt governors weighing presidential bids. Josh Shapiro is governor of Pennsylvania, home of many pro-tariff steelworkers. Still, he has been a firm opponent of the Trump tariffs, saying, “The Trump administration is looking to screw over our farmers” and “drive up costs on consumers and businesses throughout Pennsylvania.” Meanwhile, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, whose Michigan is home to America’s largest automakers—General Motors and Ford–is trying harder to straddle the argument. In a Washington speech last week, she said, “I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and I can tell you, here’s where President Trump and I do agree. We do need to make more stuff in America. I’m not against tariffs outright, but it is a blunt tool. You can’t just pull out the tariff hammer to swing at every problem without a clear defined end goal.”

The House Democratic leadership, hungry to flip Republican-held swing districts, argued on its X account that “Trump’s trade policy has been a chaotic mess, but that tariffs—if done right and paired with strong pro-worker and industrial policies—can help supercharge manufacturing,” as it shared a video message from Representative Chris Deluzio from Trump-friendly western Pennsylvania. Soon after that post was up, Representative Ritchie Torres of the South Bronx seemingly shot back on X, “We as Democrats must speak out forcefully against Trump’s weaponization of tariffs to wreak havoc on the American economy. Muddled milquetoast messaging only emboldens Trump’s madness.”

The political logic of the nuanced approach is easy to grasp. To win back the House, the Senate, and the White House means clawing back support in “heartland” areas where skepticism of economic globalization fueled Trump’s rise and comeback. Therefore, don’t let knee-jerk hatred of Trump trap you into positions only embraced by coastal, white-collar MSNBC viewers.

Yet I suspect the I-like-tariffs-but-not-those-tariffs strategy is a misguided attempt to relitigate the trade battles of the past, not the one of the future.

Trade became a problematic subject for Democrats following NAFTA’s implementation in 1994. Democratic-backed policies designed to help working-class and rural voters transition from a manufacturing-based to a service-driven economy weren’t panaceas. Many displaced workers didn’t find new careers with stable pension plans. While unrelated to trade, cataclysms like the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t help bolster confidence in the idea of an interconnected world.

However, we’re now getting a crash course in the un-globalized economy.

We are subject to the whims of a president without a plan. Stability and certainty are elusive. Long-range personal and business financial planning is impossible. Prices are immediately higher without any immediate benefits.

Even before he signed NAFTA into law in 1993, Clinton recognized the potential for a rocky transition. He’d campaigned in 1992 on retraining, and in office, he touted “a reemployment and job retraining system for the 21st century.” Still, bitterness settled in among displaced workers when his assistance programs fell short of the goal of “higher wages and greater security for our people.”

Similarly, Trump is asking America to suck it up with a promise of better times ahead. “We are bringing back jobs and businesses like never before,” Trump promised on Truth Social soon after the tariffs kicked in, “THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN. HANG TOUGH, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic.” Having put far less thought than Clinton into how to manage a complex economic transition and having a rap sheet of false promises that could wrap the White House many times over, Trump does not deserve any benefit of the doubt.

Trump’s reset of the global economy has changed the trade debate. Whatever challenges were posed by an international trading regime imperfectly managed by the World Trade Organization pale compared to a worldwide trade war waged by an impulsive president who is even perplexing his aides.

The immediate question is: Should we have a trade war or peace?

A trade war is stupid. Economic stability gets nuked when leaders launch tariffs like they are firing missiles.

The Trump argument is that since we were getting “ripped off,” risking a recession is necessary to make trade policies fair. This argument misses any explanation of why Americans must suffer to make trade policies fair and how making them pay higher prices gives Washington leverage to forge better trade deals. Trump wants a return to the economic rules of the 19th century, but nostalgia for the pre-global economy past is devastating in the interconnected present. A global trade war destabilizes the economy without guaranteeing benefits, and there is a significant risk of long-term damage.

Trade peace is smart. We maximize economic stability when we forge global agreements that bind countries regardless of political shifts and avoid giving one person the power to break agreements on a whim. Under trade peace, businesses can function, investments can grow, and people can plan.

Under trade peace, America still has a defense—a range of policies, including strategic tariffs to address imbalances, and it can fight back when another country steps out of line. Nations may not always be in perfect trade harmony, but the global economy can weather sporadic trade skirmishes more easily than all-out war.

Democrats need not get all members to agree on every policy detail. Fresh internal debate about what specific trade policies would be beneficial in a post-Trump world would be a productive intellectual exercise. But such wonkery can occur off-camera.

The voting public should hear the simpler message: Democrats will end the global trade war and restore global trade peace. With a substantial number of congressional Republicans, they could vote to strip Trump of unilateral tariff powers to restore trade peace and override the inevitable veto. If Congressional Republicans refuse to break with Trump and end the war, then they will own the current chaos, and Democrats can offer voters calm when they return to power.

The post Divided Democrats Should Unify Behind Trade Peace Over Trade War appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A feeling of sadness accompanies reading Bill Clinton’s new book, Citizen: My Life After the White House. Although the former president wrote the book before Election Day, it is impossible to forget that Donald Trump is preparing for his second term. Reading Clinton’s recollections since 2001, when he became a citizen again—albeit with Secret Service protection, worldwide fame, and a wife who spent 16 of the 24 years since rising to the near pinnacle of American politics—one can’t help thinking of Trump’s long-shadow as he prepares to undo so much good work. Crystal balls are unreliable, but it doesn’t require clairvoyance to realize that the four years that Trump will spend as an octogenarian president in his second term will result in the dismantlement of progress toward shared prosperity, institutional efficacy, and social equality that Clinton achieved, and for which he has still not received rightful recognition. Despite the significant accomplishments of Barack Obama’s administration and the simultaneous enlargement of rights and opportunities for women, gay, and transgender Americans, our country’s life after Clinton’s residence in the White House is one of decline. 

The major events of the past 24 years make it difficult for even the most avid optimist to argue otherwise: The September 11 terrorist strike, the two wars that followed, the financial crash of 2008, the election of Donald Trump to the office of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, the catastrophic and divisive mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and finally, the second election of Trump, even after his countless offenses against decency, democracy, and truth. Globally, the Oslo Accords gave way to October 7, while tensions with China and Russia only grew. Most of these events inspire lengthy passages in Clinton’s second memoir; the first, My Life, covered his rise from Hope, Arkansas, through his presidency. The Rhodes Scholar offers his characteristically learned and insightful analysis, fusing his experience and ideas with the unparalleled ability to articulate complexity in simple terms. It is the latter gift that Obama cited when nicknaming Clinton, the “explainer-in-chief.” 

Citizen is a fascinating presentation of a productive post-presidency, cataloging the benevolence and importance of the Clinton Foundation and the necessity of Clinton’s centrist—but not bland—philosophy of governance, leadership, and politics. In the middle of the book, Clinton details criteria for evaluating the exercise of political power for civic health: 

Did government make a meaningful difference, positive or negative, with a change of policy? What was the purpose of a given action – was it to empower all our people or to consolidate power for one group at the expense of the rest of us? And how has politics changed for better or worse with new technologies, unlimited big money, shortened attention spans, the calculated effort to get guns, especially assault weapons, into as many hands as possible, the loss of locally owned newspapers, radio and television stations, and the growing economic, political, and psychological pressure on the mainstream political media to sell a simple storyline instead of telling the full story? 

As if returning to his early role as a law professor at the University of Arkansas, a job he held when making a failed bid for Congress in 1974, Clinton issues the above paragraph as a guide for readers to consult when considering the developments he describes. The answers to his questions are not good. 

Politics, always a human mix of the noble and profane, has, undoubtedly, become the Olympics of sewer diving. Slack-jawed “influencers” have more authority than intellectuals and experts, nuance is tantamount to treason, and the Republican Party, which will soon run the federal government, has become a cult of personality. Most of all, the belief and practice that Clinton employed as president and asserts throughout Citizen is on life support and seemingly a nostalgic souvenir from a bygone era. That is the simple commitment to using government as a force for the public good—enhancing freedom, opportunity, and happiness to the extent possible while trying to avoid or mitigate suffering and dysfunction. 

In the opening and closing passages of Citizen, Clinton references how everyone “keeps score.” (His scoreboard moves up or down, depending on whether “you left things better than when you started.”) Clinton agrees with Aristotle, who argued that politics is meant to improve “things related” to the community and give the most people a chance at “the good life.” It is still the only conception of politics that matters, but it has fallen out of fashion, as “owning the libs,” or other forms of petty and cruel condemnation dominate the political arena. One pines for Clinton’s 1996 presidential race that, fierce though it was, represented a choice between him and Bob Dole, sane candidates capable of leading the nation. 

In his riveting account of the Clinton presidency, The Clinton Wars, Sidney Blumenthal writes that the president was always fond of saying, “America doesn’t need a culture war.” 

Well, America disagreed. The consequence is that politics no longer serves the public interest, which, in turn, makes the electorate (and those who refuse to participate) even more cynical. Cynicism and rage fuel the culture war. It is an ironic loop. Few understand its circular motion and cost—and few have done more to try to end it—than Clinton. 

The first half of Citizen details his work as the United Nations’ special envoy for disaster relief and his tenure overseeing the Clinton Foundation. On behalf of the UN, Clinton traveled the planet, leading recovery management programs in India, Indonesia, Haiti, and New Orleans. He often enlisted the Bush family—first George H.W. Bush and later the 42^nd president, George W. Bush. 

On occasion, it is frustrating to read Clinton’s glowing praise for the younger President Bush. The author of Citizen gives his friend a pass on some of the most monumental failures in federal government history, namely the “pre-emptive” invasion of Iraq and the horrific mismanagement of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. While some pangs of irritation accompany the passages on Bush, there is a wistful longing for an era in American politics when cross-party collaborations and friendships were common. Fair enough, but the bipartisanship that led to the Iraq War doesn’t merit nostalgia. 

Still, to take Clinton’s point, not even Lewis Carroll could imagine circumstances in which Donald Trump would partner with Joe Biden or Barack Obama to raise funds for disaster relief. Donald in Wonderland has too many pathologies for that. 

The right-wing extremism that insists “Every Democrat is Satan” is responsible for the attempted demolition of the Clinton Foundation. Throughout the first half of his new book, Clinton explains precisely how his eponymous foundation is a force for humanitarian aid, sound policy, and self-determination worldwide. It is responsible for millions of people accessing low-cost drugs for HIV and treatable diseases. It has overseen billions of dollars to fight climate change, bringing sustainable energy and stable infrastructure to the global south, and it has also funded and staffed education programs in the poorest part of the world, most often focusing on empowering young women through literacy and job training. The foundation has received the highest ratings from organizations that evaluate the integrity of charitable organizations. Yet, millions of Americans believe that the former president administered a “pay to play” scam in which foreign despots bribed him to broker meetings with Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State in the Obama administration. This Oliver Stone-like delusion is one reason why Trump won in 2016. 

Clinton recalls, with outrage and bafflement all these years later, how The New York Times partnered with Peter Schweizer, a Steve Bannon-funded button man, by running excerpts of his slanderous hitjob, Clinton Cash—which alleged without evidence that the Clintons were akin to mafiosos shaking down donors. Schweizer’s so-called “reporting” was disproven by credible journalists, but it was too late by then. Bannon and The New York Times had already inflicted damage on Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. 

The story functions as a grim preview of what Clinton spends the second half of Citizen dissecting and lamenting—the poisoning influence of right-wing propaganda and populism on American society. The former president borrows the terminology of a Venezuelan journalist to delineate how the “three P’s”— “divisive populism, political polarization, post-fact information ecosystem”—are a dangerous combination that can “destroy any democracy.” “Nobody does it better, at least rhetorically, than Donald Trump,” Clinton adds. 

He labels the threat facing liberalism and democratic governance as an “old story in new clothes,” careful to note that while human beings have inherent tendencies toward cooperation and solidarity, we also have a dark side to our nature. We are hardwired to fear and often even hate those who are different (racially, religiously, sexually, or ideologically). We look for simple, recognizable patterns that frequently deceive us into accepting demagogic answers to complicated questions. 

“In a highly polarized time,” Clinton writes, “serious policymaking often takes a backseat to name-calling designed to distract voters from considering the actual consequences of what the candidates are proposing.” Republicans have mastered paranoid distraction by disguising conspiracy theories as entertainment and with what Clinton calls the “Always Say No” program. No matter how beneficial or reasonable a policy proposal is, if it has a Democratic sponsor, Republicans must oppose it. Compromise is heresy. 

Clinton forcefully argues that the reactionaries who have conquered the Republican Party, elevating Trump as their demigod, constitute the gravest threat to American democracy and stability. Still, leftists also have their own delusions to shed. He examines Berne Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton’s run for the Democratic nomination in 2016, showing exactly why even if the socialist senator’s ideas were appealing, they had little basis in reality. Sanders failed to explain how he would pass any of the pie-in-the-sky programs he proposes—a silence made worse by the mainstream media’s refusal to press him for an explanation. In the chapter “The Hazards of Rewriting History,” Clinton effectively dismantles the fashionable ridicule of his presidency as a corporate giveaway no different from Ronald Reagan. He details how a series of distortions about the crime bill he signed, the welfare reform that he championed, and his trade policies have erased the memory of many Americans, including Democrats, of the successes and achievements of his liberal, middle-class-based economics. For many on the left, Clinton’s presidency is merely the Defense of Marriage Act (something he enabled to slow the rush to an anti-same-sex-marriage Constitutional Amendment) and “neoliberal” backstabbing of the social compact. 

Were some Clinton policies naïve? Certainly, the financial industry reforms of his second term were not a great idea, and greater antitrust enforcement—although he can boast the Microsoft win—and other measures would have added to his successful legacy. The fact remains that during the Clinton years, wages grew for every income group, especially those in the middle and bottom, first-time home ownership and college graduation rates skyrocketed, and small business startups increased while unemployment, crime, teenage pregnancy, and foreclosures dropped. The Clinton administration also balanced the federal budget while enlarging the Earned Income Tax Credit, which lifted four million people out of poverty and created SCHIP. This health program insures millions of children and their mothers. When Clinton left office, it was an optimistic time. 

As we prepare for troubled times, it is instructive to read Clinton’s recollections and recommendations. Near his conclusion, he remembers feeling a bolt of inspiration when Robert Kennedy, running for president in 1968, while Clinton was a student at Georgetown, quoted Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” telling his young audience, “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”

Citizen is one important explorer’s cartography. It should inspire readers to commit to their own expeditions.   

The post The Clinton Post-Presidency and its Discontents appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The so-called welfare queen is among the most potent, persistent, and pernicious stereotypes ever deployed in modern politics. Popularized by Ronald Reagan, then weaponized by other conservatives, the welfare queen represents Americans’ ugliest assumptions about who receives public assistance. 

The woman first smeared by this dubious title was Linda Taylor of Chicago, who was indicted for welfare fraud in 1974. Reagan hyperbolically claimed during his 1976 presidential run that she collected $150,000 in government assistance a year, including welfare benefits and food stamps (the true total was about $40,000, spread over multiple years). The Chicago Tribune reported that she drove a Cadillac and vacationed in Hawaii, while a photo in The New York Times showed Taylor emerging from a court date, elegantly coiffed and draped in a fur-trimmed coat. But as criminal as she may have been, Taylor was no more “typical” of Americans on welfare than Bernie Madoff was “typical” of investment bankers. 

Nevertheless, the archetype of the welfare queen was powerful enough to elevate welfare reform to a national crisis and to help propel Reagan to the White House four years later. The welfare queen was “symbolically terrifying,” the historian Rick Perlstein told the Chicago Tribune in 2019. “There were a thousand Linda Taylors, waiting to bankrupt your city.” 

In fact, as the political scientist Anne M. Whitesell argues in a new book, Living Off the Government?, much of U.S. social policy in the post-Reagan era is a direct reaction to the welfare queen’s perceived moral defects. “The public identity of the welfare queen—the poor, single African American woman whose poverty was caused by her own laziness and promiscuity—is still the driving force in creating welfare policy,” she writes. The results, she argues, are public policies that calcify racial and gender stereotypes of people in poverty while failing to provide the help they actually need. 

Whitesell’s book provides a critical reminder of the extent to which U.S. social policy reflects value judgments about the poor, not the realities of their circumstances. These judgments, moreover, are untempered by the perspectives of the poor themselves, who Whitesell argues are utterly voiceless in the political and policy debates that often dictate the most intimate details of their lives. As a result, the myth of the welfare queen reigns largely unchallenged, to the detriment of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens. 

In her opening chapters, Whitesell charts the rise of the welfare queen as the apotheosis of a long and sorry history in the United States of treating poverty as a condition of moral deficit, not economic need. 

Beginning in colonial times, Whitesell writes, industrious Puritans who venerated work as a godly virtue saw poverty largely as the consequence of sloth, although they did make allowances for those who fell on hard times through no fault of their own. Thus rose the notion of the “deserving” poor, which Americans have embraced ever since. 

In Whitesell’s analysis, “deserving” has historically meant white women who were formerly married (that is, widows), while the Black welfare queen has become the epitome of undeserving poverty. As a case in point, Whitesell documents the evolution of public welfare programs beginning with the “mothers’ pensions” adopted by many states in the early 1900s, which were largely for the benefit of widows with young children. At the time, Whitesell writes, Progressive Era reformers “were concerned that women working outside the home would have an adverse effect on their children and lead to the disintegration of the family unit.” Public benefits would enable them to stay at home and tend to the domestic obligations of child-rearing. Similar sentiments animated the creation in 1935 of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the federal program intended to support state-level mothers’ pension programs. 

But this generosity persisted only so long as beneficiaries were white, Whitesell argues. In 1931, for instance, only about 4 percent of mothers’ pension recipients were minorities. When the demographics of welfare recipients shifted, as it did in the 1960s and ’70s, public perceptions of welfare changed as well. Thanks to incessant media coverage of urban slums and sensational scandals like that of Linda Taylor, many Americans came to believe that the “typical” welfare recipient was a single Black mom in the inner city—even though the overwhelming majority of recipients were, and still are, white. By the 1970s, opinion polls found that most Americans believed that welfare recipients were “on relief for dishonest reasons” and that the nation was spending too much on welfare. In 1986, a White House report Whitesell cites condemned AFDC as “an enabler—a program which enables women to live without a husband or a job.” 

Implicit in these condemnations, Whitesell argues, was that the women “enabled” to live in this way were undeserving of government help because they were Black. “Black mothers have always been expected to work, from slaves required to work in the field immediately before and after giving birth, to Black women serving as domestic help for white families,” Whitesell writes. To be a Black woman on welfare was automatically to be a welfare queen, living in violation of societal expectations and at society’s expense. 

Ultimately, these racialized resentments found expression in public policy, through welfare reform in 1996. This legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, eliminated the federal entitlement, AFDC, and replaced it with a time-limited program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Many of its provisions, Whitesell argues, aimed to punish the shortcomings of the welfare queens perceived to dominate the nation’s welfare rolls. Work requirements, for instance, were meant to counteract recipients’ presumed “laziness” by conditioning benefits on proof of activity. 

Meanwhile, provisions like the “family cap” targeted their alleged promiscuity. Under the family cap, states could set a maximum allowable benefit per family, regardless of the number of children in the household. Citing the fellow political scientist Gwendolyn Mink, Whitesell argues that this provision is “rooted in the stereotype of [welfare recipients as] ‘reckless breeders who bear children to avoid work.’ ” The family cap’s purpose, Whitesell writes, is “to stop ‘welfare queens’ from having more children to increase their benefits and the overt concern about the number of ‘out-of-wedlock’ births, which is largely viewed as a Black problem.” In fact, she finds, states “with a higher proportion of Blacks and Hispanics in the population” are more likely to implement family caps.

Whitesell’s book also addresses a central reason why the trope of the welfare queen carries such sway: because she is pure abstraction. While the idea of the welfare queen is omnipresent in policy making, poor people themselves have no representation in the halls of Congress or in state legislatures. The Americans most affected by welfare policy have little to no say in their own destinies and are often pawns in broader ideological disputes.

Although civil rights groups, unions, and other advocates can offer surrogate representation to some extent, Whitesell writes, their interests do not always align with those of poor Americans, nor are Americans on welfare necessarily their top priority. As a result, the lack of representation means that poor Americans are relatively defenseless in the face of interest groups advocating policies to their detriment. Business interests in need of low-wage labor, for instance, may favor shorter time limits and tighter work requirements, Whitesell argues. And indeed, she finds, research confirms that is the case in some states. 

The primary audience of Living Off the Government? is academic, but general readers will find its narrative on the history of welfare to be instructive and eye-opening. Students of poverty policy will also appreciate the detailed examinations of current welfare policy—such as work requirements and time limits—that Whitesell uses to introduce each chapter. And Whitesell’s reexamination of welfare policy through the lens of racial and gender bias should be enlightening even for experts. Her insights on the lack of political representation should also serve as a wake-up call to advocates who presume to lobby on poor Americans’ behalf. Whitesell falls short, however, in not providing a description of what adequate representation could look like and, more importantly, what policy changes she imagines such representation could effect.

Nevertheless, her book is a valuable addition to scholarship on the limitations of American social policy. Most crucially, it offers an important warning about the prejudices that can warp public policy and institutionalize them still further.

The post The Tyranny of the Welfare Queen appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A popular cliché in motivational seminars and creative writing classrooms is “The main thing is to keep the main thing.” The main thing of 2024 is the fight over the United States’ potential to continue evolving into a multiracial democracy.

The late historian Ronald Takaki understood and underscored the main thing of American history in his 1994 masterpiece, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Thirty years after its publication, Takaki’s disquisition on the American experiment functions not only, as its title suggests, as a mirror but also as a crystal ball.

The electoral contest between Vice President Kamala Harris, a black and Indian child of immigrants, and Donald Trump, who poet Martin Espada calls a “sock puppet for bigots,” captures the ideological collision that Takaki explores in A Different Mirror. I recently revisited this book because it remains vital as the country roils and remains an inscrutable contradiction. It’s still a land of opportunity; assimilation doesn’t mean the annihilation of one’s ethnic self. This grand experiment still works, and simultaneously, the gathering storm of a second Donald Trump presidency looms. In recent days, the 78-year-old’s rhetoric has turned darker, more malignant, and ethnically based. How else to explain his rants about the Congo? Or instead of seeing Venezuelans as refugees from socialist tyranny as miscreants emptied from Caracas jails? Or the constant jabs at China or trans-Americans?

Takaki, born and raised in pre-statehood Hawaii, the son of Japanese immigrants, was an unlikely figure to create one of the first ethnic studies programs in the United States. More interested in surfing than studying, he was called “Ten-Toes Tataki.” Only with a teacher’s encouragement did he end up at the tiny College of Wooster in Ohio. After earning his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley with a thesis on the effort to revive the slave trade banned in the Constitution, Takaki saw America as brimming with the promise of “diversity becoming manifest destiny.” He argued that it would have to overcome prejudice and paranoia to realize its potential. A nation of immigrants is also a nation of xenophobia.

He wrote that the U.S. was constantly struggling between the “master narrative”—the idea that “American means white” and the “different mirror,” a multicultural nation where a wide variety of peoples coalesce to contribute to the story of their national community. His take put him in the middle of warring factions, criticized from the left for seeing the country as moving toward the fulfillment of its ideals, albeit painfully slowly, and blasted by the right as a politically correct doomsayer dwelling too much on the nation’s history of oppression, discrimination, and xenophobia.

With A Different Mirror, he aimed to correct what he identified as a “shortsighted” tendency of scholars of which even he felt guilty—that is, to write about one racial or ethnic group in isolation and miss “the bigger picture” of how even if each group’s history is unique, all of the stories are connected. Through their connection, like puzzle pieces, they form the clearest picture of the United States.

Takaki opens A Different Mirror with a familiar anecdote, especially for those of Asian heritage. A cab driver in Norfolk, Virginia, asked him, “How long have you been in this country?” Takaki explained that his ancestors migrated from Japan in the 1880s and that he had never lived anywhere else. “I was wondering,” the cabbie replied, “Because your English is excellent.” 

Takaki wrote, “Questions like the one that my taxi driver asked me are always jarring. But it was not his fault that he did not see me as a fellow citizen: what had he learned about Asian Americans in courses called ‘U.S. history’? He saw me through a filter…”

Takaki uses the “filter” to introduce his concept of the “master narrative” and spends roughly 500 pages delineating Walt Whitman’s portrait of America: “A teeming nation of nations” and “a vast, surging hopeful army of workers.”

The stories that propel the book are varied: Black Union soldiers who helped to save the nation, Chinese railroad workers who built a prosperous country, and Jewish workers and intellectuals who helped to make business and academia, the Irish, the Italians, the Mexicans, and the Puerto Ricans – all part of the mosaic that is the United States. 

Takaki’s America is a country of brutality and beauty. Its hatred and oppression toward “strangers from different shores” is also a story of the once excluded and despised using the mechanisms of constitutional democracy, along with their talents and solidarity, to overcome systemic racism and more intimate forms of hostility. As Blacks, Jews, Latinos, Asians, and others advanced, the country became more vibrant. Political movements, when working in a “rainbow coalition,” to quote Jesse Jackson’s famous phrase, prove that democracy is expansive. The same insight is extractable from the heroic struggles of women, the disabled, and gay and transgender Americans. 

Revisiting Takaki 2024 is an intellectual whirlwind. Are we in the past, present, or future? Takaki quotes the New York Times editorial board in 1930 that it was “folly” to believe that Mexican migrants “can be absorbed and incorporated into the American race.” Three years earlier, many civic leaders, including the then president of Harvard, signed a petition warning against the “Mexicanization of the Southwest.” They cited the same demographic concerns currently prevalent in right-wing media: Mexicans and other immigrants would have more children than “traditional,” meaning white families, speeding the end of America rather than its renewal. 

Alarming numbers of Republicans in 2024 believe in the Great Replacement Theory, which casts “globalists” hell-bent on diluting white authority with mass migration and multiculturalism. Trump, who operates not only as the Republican presidential nominee but also as a reactionary cult leader, has openly discussed how immigrants “poison the blood” of our country. Similar delusions of hatred led his running mate, J.D. Vance, to claim that Haitian migrants were abducting and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. 

It is also striking to read A Different Mirror during a period of exploding antisemitism. Trump posits that Jews would “be to blame” if he lost the election, while his billionaire benefactor, Elon Musk, has repeatedly shared and liked posts on X about how Jews encourage the “hatred of whites.” Meanwhile, the far left has morphed “Zionist” into an antisemitic slur, going far beyond criticism of Israel’s prosecution of the Mideast war to celebrate Hamas and Hezbollah, depict the Jewish state as a font of “settler colonialism,” and harass Jewish students on college campuses. Jews, despite constituting only 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, are now the targets of 60 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes. 

Takaki foresaw the hate engulfing Jews. He describes how when Jewish immigrants peddled fruits on the streets of American cities, antisemites called them “dirty” and accused them of harboring communist sympathies. As they acquired success, Jews became the orchestrators of a capitalist conspiracy. 

Jews face the brunt of hate crimes in 2024. Still, it was only a few years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic, that assaults against Asian Americans were reaching frightening levels in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities. Takaki wrote stirringly about the contradiction of Hawaiian and Japanese-American school children learning about the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights only to go home to parents who were grinding out long hours on plantations with little protection or liberty. 

The prejudicial notion that Asians are “exotic,” “mysterious,” and, therefore, untrustworthy fueled the attacks against Chinese railroad workers in the early 20^th century. The internment of the Japanese during World War II echoes today. The belief that COVID-19 was a Chinese “bioweapon” gone wrong remains unproven, and even if it were, Chinese Americans obviously bear no fault.

As Takaki ushers readers closer to the present, the story becomes inspirational. The Civil Rights revolution that Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and thousands of foot soldiers made possible enabled all the previously exiled groups—Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, and others—to demand the fulfillment of the promise the founding documents articulated on their behalf. The United States has a democracy with an unlimited capacity for improvement and growth. Those with seemingly the least justification for believing in the American promise organized to bring it into reality. 

In the revised edition of A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Takaki writes that in June 1997, he was sitting in his home office when the phone rang. It was Doris Matsui, a member of President Bill Clinton’s staff and the spouse of the then Representative Robert Matsui. She explained that the president planned to give a major speech on race and would like Takaki to help him and his speechwriting team compose it. “He would like to take the national dialogue beyond the black/white binary,” she said. 

Takaki recalled how he and Clinton discussed how it wouldn’t be long before the U.S. population had no clear majority. At the time, just as it is now, many cities were becoming minority-majority. Then, there was a reaction against affirmative action and, perhaps, its sloppy application at times. California was banning racial considerations in admissions at state universities—a move that presaged the Supreme Court’s actions this year. Clinton was determined to find a “mend it, don’t end it” approach, recognizing the problem’s treacherous political shoals. The fight over political correctness presaged today’s angst over “woke.”

On June 14^th, 1997, President Clinton delivered the address, “One America in the Twenty-first Century: The President’s Initiative on Race,” to the graduating class of the University of California at San Diego. Incorporating Takaki’s analysis, Clinton told the graduates, “A half-century from now, when your own grandchildren are in college, there will be no majority race in America.” 

To conclude, Clinton asked the graduates to see the high-stakes decision of their future and the future facing their country: “More than 30 years ago, at the high tide of the civil rights movement, the Kerner Commission said we were becoming two Americans, one white, one black, separate but unequal. Today, we face a different choice: will we become not two but many Americas separate, unequal, and isolated? Or will we draw strength from all our people and the ancient faith in the quality of human dignity to become the world’s first truly multiracial democracy?”

Clinton posed the right question at the right time. Bifurcation was no longer a threat to America. Atomization was.

The same question is on the November ballot. As Americans become more interracial, Vice Harris’s candidacy is an opportunity for a multiracial democracy. Trump’s candidacy is an effort to pull the country back into a dark age of separation, inequality, and isolation. 

Harris herself has broadened her vision of race, moving from the narrow binary of her short-lived, failed 2020 campaign, during which she insinuated that Joe Biden was a racist for opposing school busing programs in the 1970s, and refused to question radical leftist slogans, like “Defund the Police.” 

In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris embraced her past as a compassionate prosecutor, celebrated the heroic work of black women activists who worked for decades to help make her nomination possible, and bragged about her Indian mother and Jewish husband. She described a country where people of “all races, religions, and creeds” must coalesce to realize their full potential and hailed America as a place where that happens.

Ronald Takaki died at 70 in 2008 by suicide after years of suffering from multiple sclerosis. His work illuminates 2024, and sadly, he never lived to see Barack Obama’s presidency or Harris’s, if there is one. He closed A Different Mirror with a well-known but appropriate quote from Langston Hughes, whose poetic command still reverberates in a country of division with hope for unity: “Let America be America again…Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed…where equality is in the air we breathe.” 

The post Can America Survive as a Multiracial Democracy? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s not unusual for vice presidents to become president. About a third of VPs in American history—15 out of 49, including Joe Biden—have risen to the highest office in the land. It is rare, however, for a sitting president to speak at a political convention where his vice president is the nominee. Only three have: Dwight Eisenhower in 1960, Ronald Reagan in 1988, and Bill Clinton in 2000. On Monday, Joe Biden will be the fourth.

It is a surprisingly awkward task, as I learned in 2000 when my boss in the White House speechwriting office, Terry Edmonds, asked me to work with him on the address Clinton would give at that year’s Democratic convention in Los Angeles. The problem, as Terry and I learned, is that the interests and sentiments of the president and vice president are, to put it mildly, not fully aligned.

An outgoing president approaches the convention with two goals. The first is to detail his administration’s achievements and solidify his legacy in front of the largest audience he is likely to have before leaving office. The second is to boost his vice president’s chances of winning, which helps ensure that his achievements will not be overturned in the next term. By contrast, vice presidents are eager to show their own personas and agendas. While they will want to be associated with the administration’s policy successes, they also need to distance themselves from its failures. Complicating matters are the almost inevitable hurt feelings that accumulate between presidents and vice presidents who have worked together over the years under immense pressure and stark power imbalances.

Terry and I got an inkling of these sorts of tensions when, in the summer of 2000, we sent a memo to Vice President Al Gore’s office with our thoughts about how the president’s speech should be organized. We knew, of course, as did much of the country, that the once-tight relationship between Clinton and Gore was severely strained because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But we also knew, from a conversation we’d had with the president in the Oval Office, that Clinton was eager to use his speech to help Gore by framing the terms of the upcoming election. So, in our memo, we suggested that a third of the address be devoted to the past (the Clinton-Gore record of accomplishment), a third to the present (the challenges the country faces), and a third to the future (how a Gore administration will meet those challenges). Our colleagues in the VP’s office responded with a different preference: that the president focus 90 percent of his speech on the past. Whoakay, we said to ourselves. Kinda odd, but if that’s what they want, that’s what we’ll give them.

As it turned out, the request wasn’t that odd. Previous speeches of this kind, we discovered, were also mostly backward-looking. Eisenhower’s address to the 1960 GOP convention, the first of the genre, told what would become the requisite story—of a nation that had emerged from the hellscape left by the previous administration to the near paradise engineered by the current one, achieved against the irrational resistance of the opposition party in Congress. It did so in the dull, managerial, passive-voice prose Ike was famous for (“The enthusiasm I find throughout this Convention evidences your support of the domestic and international leadership that has been provided by Republicans during the past seven and a half years.”) It was a style that fit his moderate Republican philosophy, with its focus on fiscal restraint, to which he pointedly credited the prosperity Americans enjoyed and contrasted with the “free spending” ways of the Democrats. But the speech also included a few biting words that conveyed Eisenhower’s pique at the accusation by John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, that his administration had underinvested in defense and created a “missile gap” with the Soviets. (“[J]ust as the Biblical Job had his boils, so we have a cult of professional pessimists who, taking counsel of their fears, continually mouth the allegation that America has become a second-rate military power.”)

Most telling of all was what Ike’s speech lacked: any mention of Vice President Richard Nixon. Eisenhower had not been Nixon’s biggest fan—when asked by a reporter that summer for an example of an idea the VP had contributed to the administration, the president famously replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” Nixon, too, nursed grievances, including about the president’s refusal to juice the economy with federal spending in the months before the election.

The president and vice president tried to get past the tensions but to no avail. Nixon, wanting to be his own man, initially resisted deploying Eisenhower on the campaign trail. Eventually, Nixon relented, and Eisenhower’s stump speeches were good enough to rattle Kennedy. But Eisenhower’s health was delicate, so his wife and doctor asked Nixon to keep him off the trail in the campaign’s final weeks, frustrating the candidate and potentially costing him the election.

Reagan did not make the same mistakes. His 1988 address to the GOP convention in New Orleans brimmed with praise of George H.W. Bush, crediting the vice president with heading up a task force that reduced regulations and persuading the Soviets to sign a nuclear arms reduction treaty. Still, Reagan devoted the vast bulk of the speech to a detailed, spirited, and (one must say) masterful recitation of the advances achieved under his administration—all of it, of course, attributed to the American people’s hard work and good sense. It was in that speech that Reagan deployed the John Adams quote “Facts are stubborn things” to describe the misery of high inflation and unemployment from which his policies had delivered the nation. Like Eisenhower, he attributed his administration’s success to the small government and free market philosophy that informed his policies. The Gipper cast that philosophy as new and different from the heavy-handed liberalism that had come before and as one George Bush would carry forward. “We are the change,” he said—cleverly framing the race in a way that robbed Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis, of a challenger’s greatest advantage.

Reagan also used the occasion to argue—defensively and unconvincingly—that the budget deficits that piled up on his watch weren’t his fault. Unsurprisingly, he did not reference the Iran-Contra scandal, which had sullied both his and Bush’s reputations. Nor did he mention the budget cuts and consequent rise in homelessness and farm foreclosures that led Bush, in his speech later at that convention, to try to put some distance between himself and Reagan by calling for a “kinder, gentler” nation. Reagan did not bristle and happily took to the trail for Bush in the fall.

In 2000, Vice President Gore was even more intent on separating himself from Clinton. Indeed, he would all but say so in the most quoted line of his convention speech: “I stand here tonight as my own man.” Gore’s speech would feature long passages about policy ideas for the future but only a handful of sentences about the Clinton-Gore record. His office had made clear that the job of telling that story fell to the president.

It was not an unwelcome assignment. Clinton was delighted to talk about his administration’s policy achievements. During speech prep sessions in L.A. (by this time, other senior White House officials and colleagues from the speechwriting office were involved), the president kept adding accomplishments and cutting other material to make room. Gore’s office had also requested that the president’s speech acknowledge the vice president’s role in specific policy wins; Clinton was happy to do that, too.

The vice president’s office put another condition on the speech: the president should not openly ask voters to cast their ballots for Gore and his running mate, Joe Lieberman. To accommodate that request, Clinton dictated language that framed the election as a choice the citizens must make between two futures. The president was convinced, he told us, that voters were “sleepwalking” into the election and that if they knew of how rightwing George W. Bush and Dick Cheney really were, they were more likely to choose Gore. He understood that it was not his role, as president, to be the attack dog making this case. But he was determined to make the point with a lighter touch.

Even if you don’t recall Clinton’s speech, you probably remember the video prelude—of the president walking, like a prize fighter, through a tunnel maze below the Staples Center towards a moving camera before emerging onstage to thunderous applause. The tone of his speech that night was triumphant but also playful. Like Eisenhower and Reagan, he reminded his audience of the sorry state of the country when he was elected—high unemployment and interest rates, rising crime and deficits, and widening income inequality. He blamed those conditions on his predecessors’ political philosophy. “Our government was part of the problem, not part of the solution,” he said, cleverly rephrasing Reagan’s own words to set up a discussion of his own “New Democratic” agenda. The centerpiece of that agenda was an economic plan to “get rid of the deficit to reduce interest rates, invest more in our people, sell more American products abroad.”

We sent our plan to Congress. It passed by a single vote in both Houses. In a deadlocked Senate, Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote. Now, not a single Republican supported it.

Here’s what their leaders said. Their leaders said our plan would increase the deficit, kill jobs, and give us a one-way ticket to a recession.

Time has not been kind to their predictions.

Now, remember, our Republican friends said then they would not be held responsible for our economic policies. I hope the American people take them at their word.

He followed up those tart lines with a machine gun-like recitation of statistics about the nation’s subsequent upward trajectory: 22 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, the lowest Hispanic and African American unemployment rate ever recorded, and the highest home ownership in history, the largest deficit in history turned into the largest surpluses in history. The list went on and on, punctuated with this line:

You know, Harry Truman’s old saying has never been more true: “If you want to live like a Republican, you better vote for the Democrats.”

Clinton ticked off America’s progress in other realms—from rising school test scores to military victories in Bosnia and Kosovo. He offered a more somber peroration about how a wrong choice in November could undo all that had been accomplished and a description of the Al Gore he knew—forthright, engaged in the big decisions, a “profoundly good man” who “loves his children more than life” and “understands the future.”

Ultimately, we felt the president had done everything he could in that speech to help Gore win. In the end, whether it was the Lewinsky scandal (as Gore thought) or the vice president’s refusal to run on his own administration’s records (as we all thought), he came up short (or so the Supreme Court dictated).

Unlike Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton, Biden is an outgoing president who served a single term. Yet he has a list of achievements that rival and arguably exceed what the other three presidents each accomplished in two. Like them, he can point not only to the upward trajectory of statistics—in Biden’s case, from GDP growth to the number of NATO alliance members—but also to the institution of a new philosophy of government. The big difference is that, at least on the economy, most voters don’t yet recognize the improvements or, to the extent they do, don’t give Biden much credit for them.

For that reason and others, Harris could be forgiven if she puts some daylight between her and the president she served, as did previous vice presidents who sought the top job. But so far, she seems to be building on rather than rejecting his agenda.

By all accounts, Biden was unwilling to withdraw from the presidential race until he finally relented under the weight of internal party pressure and deteriorating poll numbers. That has left him with emotional wounds that would be hard for anyone to manage. But he can take some comfort in knowing that he is not the first president to have worked on a convention speech while nursing a wounded ego.

News reports indicate he has still not spoken to some party leaders, like Nancy Pelosi, who pushed him to withdraw. Yet he appears to hold no grudge toward Harris, who never showed a hint of disloyalty to him during the miserable weeks after the Trump debate. Harris was comfortable, even ebullient, on Thursday when introducing “our president” at a Maryland rally this week, touting their latest accomplishment, dramatically lowering Medicare prices for some of the top prescription drugs. The baton pass from Biden at next week’s convention could be the smoothest a sitting president has ever handed to his vice president.

When he steps to the podium in Chicago on Monday evening, it would be surprising if Biden doesn’t have to repress the feeling that he is the one who should be accepting the nomination. The tragedy of his exit from the race is the mastery he has shown, and continues to show, at the actual job of governance. The fortunate fact about these particular speeches, however, is that they give presidents the license—indeed the responsibility—to brag about their accomplishments. That’s a task I hope he enjoys because he’s earned it.

The post How Will Biden Pass the Baton at the Democratic Convention? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When a party nominates a barrier-breaker for President of the United States, we instantly wonder: Are the American people ready? Barack Obama’s victory proved we were prepared for a Black president. Hillary Clinton’s defeat at least suggested we weren’t ready for a female president, though the argument can be made other factors were at play.

Now that Democrats have nominated a woman of color, the question looms large and can’t be definitively answered until the votes are counted.

Still, early polling is promising for Vice President Kamala Harris. As I noted in Tuesday’s Washington Monthly newsletter, if November results matched August’s two-way trial heat polling, Harris would narrowly win the national popular vote by about 1 or 2 points. She would win Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by equal or slightly higher margins—enough for an Electoral College majority. (Soon after, a series of swing state polls from The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter was released, including a one-point edge for Harris in North Carolina.)

The polls have spiked despite sexist and racist attacks from Donald Trump and other Republicans. The vice president has been demeaned as a “DEI hire.” Some have suggested California’s former attorney general and U.S. Senator slept her way to the top, calling attention to her mid-1990s relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Trump routinely diminishes her intelligence, calling her “low IQ,” “dumb,” “barely competent,” and “not smart enough.” He claims, “She can’t do an interview.”

These attacks have yet to work. But why? Is it because men have matured and aren’t falling for it? Or is it because women are repulsed and flocking to Harris?

Early data is conflicting.

But before we look at recent polls, we should understand the history of the gender gap in presidential elections.

Looking at exit poll data from 1972 to 2008 and post-election data analysis using voter files by the political data firm Catalist for the last three presidential elections, we can see the gender gap emerged in 1980.

For the 1972 and 1976 elections, the margin between the Democratic and Republican candidates is about the same among women and men. In 1980, the difference mushroomed to 17 points. In nearly every presidential election since, except for 1992, that gender gap has been in double digits.

Since 1992, women have consistently favored the Democratic candidate. Since 1996, except for 2004, the Democrat has won the female vote by a double-digit margin, typically between 11 and 13 points.

The Republican edge with men has been less consistent than the Democratic edge with women. Bill Clinton won with men in 1992 and lost them by a point in 1996. Similarly, Barack Obama won them by a point in 2008 and lost them by 4 in 2012. Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton each lost men by 11 points. Joe Biden kept the male deficit down to 6 points.

You will not be surprised to learn that two of the three widest gender gaps involve elections with Donald Trump—24 points in 2016 and 19 points in 2020. (The 2000 election between Gore and George W. Bush featured a 22-point gender gap.)

Hillary Clinton’s defeat is sometimes attributed to an abandonment by white women since the 2016 exit poll showed Trump winning white women by 9 points. (Catalist pegged the 2016 white women margin at 8 points.) But that conclusion was drawn without historical context. White women have firmly sided with the Republican nominee since 2004 (not counting George W. Bush’s one-point edge in 2000).

In fact, in 2016, Hillary Clinton narrowed the white women gap compared to four years prior by 5 points in the exit poll data and by one point in Catalist data. Moreover, one group of white women did rally around Hillary Clinton—college graduates. According to Catalist, Obama tied Mitt Romney with college-educated white women, while Hillary Clinton won them by nine. Unfortunately for her, she also shed support from non-college white women, losing them by 18 points, 4 points more than the prior election.

In 2020, Biden’s white women gap was held down to a manageable 5 points, boosted by a huge 16-point win among the college-educated. Compared to Hillary Clinton, his margin was a point worse among non-college women.

Women didn’t abandon Hillary Clinton. Men did. Obama in 2012 won 47 percent of the male vote, and Biden 46 percent. In between, Clinton took just 41 percent, losing men to Trump by 11 points. Non-college men drove the decline. Obama and Clinton each won 41 percent of male college grads. However, Obama won 36 percent of working-class males, and Clinton won only 28 percent.

No Democratic presidential candidate had done so poorly with men since Michael Dukakis in 1988. (Bill Clinton also won 41 percent of the male vote in 1992, but in what was effectively a three-candidate contest, that was a plurality.)

Is Harris’s support among women and men closer to that of Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton?

Different polls are telling us different stories.

For example, Harris leads by one in the most recent CBS News/YouGov poll and in NPR/PBS News/Marist by three. In both, Harris pulls 45 percent of the male vote while hitting the mid-50s among women. That’s roughly similar to Biden in 2020.

(Marist is a rare poll that offers subsample data for white college-educated women, with whom Harris obliterates Trump by 32 points. But we should treat subsample data with extreme caution since it comes with high margins of error.)

However, polls by Civiqs and SurveyUSA show Harris running up the score with women to offset a weak performance among men. Civiqs has Harris up by four, fueled by 58 percent support among women and just 39 percent among men. SurveyUSA’s gender gap is a bit less extreme, with Harris winning 56 percent of women and 40 percent of men en route to an overall three-point lead. In these polls, Harris’s support from men is less than what Hillary Clinton received. (However, polling levels typically lag final results since undecideds either decide or stay home, and many flirting with third parties eventually vote for a major party candidate.)

We don’t have a clear enough picture from initial poll data to be able to say confidently that Harris’s confident, energetic, and—to quote her wingman Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—”joyful” campaign style is inoculating her from Trump’s boorish misogyny, but it’s a plausible conclusion. With assistance from his running mate J.D. “Childless Cat Ladies” Vance, Trump may be driving more women than usual into the Harris camp. Or men are not as attracted to rank sexism as they were. Or both.

The converse may also be true. Maybe, as in 2016, today’s polling is illusory. Maybe Trump’s divisive rhetoric needs more time to do its dark work.

But Kamala Harris is not Hillary Clinton, who brought to the 2016 campaign three decades of political scars inflicted by sexist attacks and who suffered considerable damage to her reputation—quantifiable by the steep decline in her favorable ratings—throughout a contentious primary campaign. Harris began her 100-day sprint to the White House backed by a unified and euphoric Democratic base, propelling a sharp rise in her favorable ratings. The nomination came to Harris without her having to display the ambition that so many voters seemed to find distasteful in Clinton, even though the former Secretary of State was simply aspiring to what so many male politicians have.

Barack Obama didn’t end racism in America. But in his historic 2008 campaign he provided a road map for overcoming it in the presidential arena, with unifying rhetoric that showed how common struggles transcended race. Maybe, just maybe, Harris has figured out how to overcome misogyny.

The post Are Men Ready For Kamala? appeared first on Washington Monthly.