Elections

Some critics say the Democratic Party is struggling to respond to issues seized upon by conservative news media.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.When Republicans lost big in the 2012 election, the party commissioned a post-mortem analysis that arrived at a blunt conclusion about the way it communicated: “The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself,” said the report, informally known as “the autopsy.”After the elections last week, in which Democrats across the country lost races they expected to win or narrowly escaped defeat, some are asking whether the Democratic Party is suffering from a similar problem of insularity in its messaging.Critics and some prominent liberals like Ruy Teixeira, a left-of-center political scientist, have argued that Democrats are trying to explain major issues — such as inflation, crime and school curriculum — with answers that satisfy the party’s progressive base but are unpersuasive and off-putting to most other voters.The clearest example is in Virginia, where the Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe, lost his election after spending weeks trying to minimize and discredit his opponent’s criticisms of public school education, particularly the way that racism is talked about. Mr. McAuliffe accused the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, of campaigning on a “made-up” issue and of blowing a “racist dog whistle.”But about a quarter of Virginia voters said that the debate over teaching critical race theory, a graduate-level academic framework that has become a stand-in for a debate over what to teach about race and racism in schools, was the most important factor in their decision, and 72 percent of those voters cast ballots for Mr. Youngkin, according to a survey of more than 2,500 voters conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization.The nuances of critical race theory, which focuses on the ways that institutions perpetuate racism, and the hyperbolic tone of the coverage of the issue in conservative news media point to why Democrats have struggled to come up with an effective response. Mr. Teixeira calls the Democrats’ problem with critical race theory and other galvanizing issues the “Fox News Fallacy.”These issues are ripe for distortions and exaggeration by Republican politicians and their allies in the news media. But Mr. Teixeira says Democrats should not dismiss voters’ concerns as simply right-wing misinformation.“An issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it,” he said.In an interview, Mr. Teixeira said his logic applied to questions far beyond critical race theory. “I can’t tell you how many times I analyze a particular issue, saying this is a real concern,” he said. “And the first thing I hear is, ‘Hey, this is a right-wing talking point. You’re playing into the hands of the enemy.’”Fox News is not the only institution capable of producing this kind of reaction from some on the left — it was just the one Mr. Teixeira chose to make his point as vividly as possible..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The conservative news media is full of stories that can make it sound as if the country is living through a nightmare. Rising prices and supply chain difficulties are cast as economic threats on par with the “stagflation” crisis of the 1970s, a comparison that is oversimplified because neither inflation nor unemployment is as high now. Stories of violent crime in large cities are given prominent placement and frequent airing; the same is true of coverage about the record number of migrants being apprehended at the southern border.The Biden administration has struggled to address concerns about all of these issues. Critics pounced when the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, posted a tweet that cast inflation and supply chain disruptions as “high class problems,” seeming to dismiss the anxiety that Americans say they have about their own finances.And despite border crossings hitting the highest number on record since at least 1960, when the government began tracking them, the Biden administration has resisted referring to the issue as a “crisis.” President Biden has faced persistent questions about why he has not visited the border.Takeaways From the 2021 ElectionsCard 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. More

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.The Republican Party, you may have heard by now, has a lot of news to celebrate after last week’s elections. In Virginia, a state that President Biden won by 10 points last year, it took back the governor’s mansion, a feat it hadn’t managed in over a decade. Republicans also came within striking distance of doing the same in New Jersey, a more deeply blue state that Biden won by about 16 points. And in New York, Democrats lost ground in local races too.Needless to say, tonight’s results are consistent w/ a political environment in which Republicans would comfortably take back both the House and Senate in 2022.— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 3, 2021
What does the G.O.P.’s rebound tell us about how the electorate is changing, and what does it portend for the country’s political future in 2022 and beyond?The thermostat strikes backIn 1995, the political scientist Christopher Wlezien developed a theory known as the thermostatic model of American politics: The idea, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains, is “to think of the electorate as a person adjusting their thermostat: When the political environment gets ‘too hot’ for their liking, they turn the thermostat down. When it gets ‘too cold,’ they turn it back up.”In practice, the thermostatic nature of public opinion means that the president’s party tends to struggle in off-year elections. Such swings have been observed for decades:The effect occurs for two reasons, The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. explains. “First, there is often a turnout gap that favors the party that doesn’t control the White House,” he writes. “Off-year elections have much lower turnout than presidential ones, but typically more people from the party that doesn’t control the presidency are motivated to vote in opposition to whatever the incumbent president is doing.” A turnout gap was certainly in evidence last week.The second reason for thermostatic backlash is that some voters switch from the president’s party, which also appears to have happened last week: Exit polls suggested that 5 percent of 2020 Biden voters backed Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate, while just 2 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 supported Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat. “That only accounts for a few points,” Bacon notes, but given that Youngkin won by less than two percentage points, “those small shifts matter.”[“How shocking were New Jersey and Virginia, really?”]So why are voters cooling toward the Democrats?As Democrats make sense of their losses, “one fact stands out as one of the easiest explanations,” The Times’s Nate Cohn wrote. “Joe Biden has lower approval ratings at this stage of his presidency than nearly any president in the era of modern polling.”Why?Some argue that Biden is performing poorly because he has tacked too far left on policy. Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat, told The Times: “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”Others blame a more general political-cultural gestalt: “wokeness.” “Wokeness Derailed the Democrats,” the Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote last weekend. This line of argumentation has drawn criticism for being deliberately, even insidiously vague. But when it comes to last week’s elections, much of the “wokeness” debate, on both sides of the aisle, has revolved around the so-called critical race theory controversy in K-12 schools, which this newsletter explored at length in July.There are strong counterarguments to both of these explanations. As Beauchamp writes, while Youngkin did at one point vow to ban what has disingenuously been called critical race theory in public schools, his campaign wasn’t nearly as focused on the issue as some pundits made it out to be. Nor does the “critical race theory” controversy explain the election results in New Jersey, where there was a similar backlash against Democrats despite the race’s not being “particularly culture-war focused.”The Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argues that the real reason education was such an incendiary issue this election cycle “likely had less to do with critical race theory than with parent fury over the drawn-out nightmare of online school.” Zachary D. Carter agrees: “A lot of suburban parents lost faith in Virginia’s public schools over the past year, and as a result, they’re more open to conservative narratives about problems in public schools.”As for the idea that the Democrats’ underperformance owes to Biden’s leftward shift on policy, one could just as easily — if not more easily — take the opposite reading of events: During his campaign, Biden openly aspired to a presidency that would rival or even eclipse that of F.D.R.; in office, however, his legislative agenda, which remains broadly popular, has been stripped down and delayed by his own party. Couldn’t disappointment, not backlash, be to blame for his party’s low turnout?Some say that last week’s electoral shifts have even more general causes. Put simply, Americans are in a gloomy mood. A chief reason appears to be the pandemic, which has disrupted everyday life and the economy for longer than many expected.In the words of The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, Democrats are losing the “vibe wars”: “Despite many positive economic trends, Americans are feeling rotten about the state of things — and, understandably, they’re blaming the party in power.”3 trends worth watchingRepublicans can succeed — and are perhaps even stronger — without Trump. As the G.O.P. pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson notes, Youngkin was able to enjoy the advantages of Trump — who over the past five years turned many formerly disengaged voters into habitual Republican voters — without incurring any of his liabilities. He did so mainly by neither embracing nor disavowing the former president.“In the current political environment, the Trump coalition seems primed to turn out and stick it to the Democrats even if Trump isn’t on the ballot himself,” she writes. And that means that “trying to use the fear of Trump to hold on to swing voters doesn’t seem as viable a strategy for Democrats.”Democrats’ problem with white non-college-educated voters is getting worse. For decades now, left-wing parties around the world have been losing support among their traditional working-class base. The Democratic Party has also suffered from this phenomenon, as the white electorate has become less polarized by income and more polarized by educational attainment.That trend appeared to assert itself in Virginia’s election last week, according to FiveThirtyEight, as the divide between white voters with and without a college degree grew.It’s not just white voters. In recent years, Democrats have also lost ground among Latino voters and, to a smaller extent, Black and Asian American voters, with the sharpest drops among those who did not attend college.The writer and researcher Matthew Thomas argues that there are signs that the racial depolarization of the electorate may be accelerating: In New York’s mayoral election last week, he notes, Queens precincts that are more than 75 percent Asian swung 14 points toward Republicans from four years ago, while Queens precincts that are over 75 percent Hispanic swung 30 points toward Republicans.“There’s no easy solution to the decades-long demobilization of working-class voters,” he writes. “But the left can’t afford to chalk up all of our defeats to whitelash alone. This country is in the midst of a profound realignment along axes of culture and education that are about to make race and class seem like yesterday’s news.”[“Why Americans Don’t Vote Their Class Anymore”]So are Democrats — and free and fair elections — doomed?As Bacon notes, the results from last week suggest that the Republican Party will suffer few electoral consequences in 2022 for its recent anti-democratic turn. “In normal circumstances, I’d see that as a bad thing, since my policy views are closer to the Democrats,” he writes. “But in our current abnormal circumstance, with U.S. democracy on the precipice because of the extremism of the current G.O.P., everyone needs to understand that normal could well be catastrophic.”How should Democrats respond?Some argue that they should tack to the center: “Congress should focus on what is possible, not what would be possible if Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and — frankly — a host of lesser-known Democratic moderates who haven’t had to vote on policies they might oppose were not in office,” the Times editorial board writes.Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and law at Yale, thinks that’s precisely the wrong approach given the popularity of progressive economic policies: “Even if progressives were to secure a welfare package and retain influence in their party, Trump — or an even more popular Republican — could still win the presidency. But this outcome is a near certainty if the Democrats return to centrist form — as seems the likeliest outcome now.”In the end, as Moyn suggests, policy may not have the power to save Democrats from defeat. As The Times’s David Leonhardt noted last week, some political scientists believe that Democrats overweight the electoral importance of policy and don’t talk enough about values.And the values Biden ran on were, in effect, a liberal answer to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” creed, a promise to restore “the soul of America” to its former self. “Joe Biden promised normality, Americans got abnormality, and Democrats got punished at the polls for it,” Thompson writes in The Atlantic. “The path toward a more successful midterm election for Democrats in 2022 flows through the converse of this strategy. First, make things feel better. Then talk about it.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at [email protected]. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.READ MORE“What Moves Swing Voters” [The New York Times]“Why Virginia’s And New Jersey’s Elections Could Suggest A Red Wave In 2022” [FiveThirtyEight]“The Powerful G.O.P. Strategy Democrats Must Counter if They Want to Win” [The New York Times]“Bill Clinton Saved His Presidency. Here’s How Biden Can, Too.” [The New York Times]“How to Rebuild the Democratic Party” [The New Republic] More

Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and his chief of staff are among those accused of violating a law designed to prevent federal employees from abusing their power.WASHINGTON — Thirteen of President Donald J. Trump’s most senior aides — including his son-in-law and his chief of staff — campaigned illegally for Mr. Trump’s re-election in violation of a law designed to prevent federal employees from abusing the power of their offices on behalf of candidates, a government watchdog agency said Tuesday.Henry Kerner, who heads the Office of Special Counsel, made the assertion in a withering report that followed a nearly yearlong investigation into “myriad” violations of the law, known as the Hatch Act.“Senior Trump administration officials chose to use their official authority not for the legitimate functions of the government, but to promote the re-election of President Trump in violation of the law,” the report concluded.Investigators in Mr. Kerner’s office said Trump administration officials purposely violated the law prohibiting political activity during the final few weeks of the administration, when they knew that the Office of Special Counsel would not have time to investigate and issue findings before Election Day.“The administration’s willful disregard for the law was especially pernicious considering the timing of when many of these violations took place,” the report said.Violations of the Hatch Act are not uncommon for any presidential administration. In October, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, apologized after an outside group accused her of violating the law by commenting in the White House press room on the pending governor’s race in Virginia.But the Kerner report describes something more rare: a concerted, willful effort to violate the law by the most senior officials in the White House. The Washington Post disclosed the report’s release earlier on Tuesday.The people accused of breaking the law are a who’s who of Trump officials: Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette; Kellyanne Conway, counselor; Alyssa Farah, White House communications director; David Friedman, ambassador to Israel; Jared Kushner, senior adviser; Kayleigh McEnany, press secretary; Mark Meadows, chief of staff; Stephen Miller, senior adviser; Brian Morgenstern, deputy press secretary; Robert C. O’Brien, national security adviser; Marc Short, chief of staff to the vice president; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; and Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf.The report said that Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Wolf violated the law through their actions during the Republican National Convention, which took place at the White House because of the pandemic.It said Mr. Pompeo campaigned illegally “by changing U.S. Department of State (State Department) policy to allow himself to speak at the convention and then, when engaging in political activity by delivering that speech, using his official authority by repeatedly referencing the work of the State Department.”Mr. Wolf “violated the Hatch Act by presiding over a naturalization ceremony that was orchestrated for the purpose of creating content for the convention,” the report said.The rest of the officials broke the law by overtly campaigning “during official interviews or media appearances.”“The administration’s attitude toward Hatch Act compliance was succinctly captured by then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who said during an interview that ‘nobody outside of the Beltway really cares’ about Trump administration officials violating the Hatch Act,” the report said in its executive summary.Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington, which filed complaints about the actions of Trump administration officials, on Tuesday praised the report from the Office of Special Counsel.“This report confirms that there was nothing less than a systematic co-opting of the powers of the federal government to keep Donald Trump in office,” Mr. Bookbinder said in a statement. “Senior Trump administration officials showed an open contempt for the law meant to protect the American people from the use of taxpayer resources and government power for partisan politics.”Mr. Bookbinder called on Congress to toughen the laws prohibiting political activity by federal employees.The Office of Special Counsel report notes that none of the people named will face any punishment for their violations because it is up to the incumbent president to discipline his top employees.“President Trump not only failed to do so, but he publicly defended an employee OSC found to have repeatedly violated the Hatch Act,” the report said. “This failure to impose discipline created the conditions for what appeared to be a taxpayer-funded campaign apparatus within the upper echelons of the executive branch.”Emails to several representatives of Mr. Trump were not answered. More

He lost both legs and an arm in the war. Republicans impugned his patriotism by linking him to Osama bin Laden in an infamous TV spot.Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm during the Vietnam War and who became a Senator from Georgia, only to lose his seat after Republicans impugned his patriotism, died on Tuesday at his home in Atlanta. He was 79.The cause was congestive heart failure, said Jason D. Meininger, a close friend. After a grenade accident in Vietnam in 1968, Mr. Cleland spent 18 months recuperating. He served in local politics in his native Georgia and as head of the federal Veterans Administration, now the Department of Veterans Affairs, before he was elected in 1996 to the U.S. Senate.But it was his treatment at the hands of Republicans while he was seeking re-election in 2002 that made him a Democratic cause célèbre.Running for another term just a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he was the target of an infamous 30-second television spot that showed images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein while it questioned Mr. Cleland’s commitment to homeland security and implied that he was soft on the war on terror.It was the ad’s images in particular that created the uproar. Even prominent Republicans, including Senators John McCain and Chuck Hagel, both Vietnam veterans, were outraged.“I’ve never seen anything like that ad,” Mr. McCain told The Washington Post. “Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to a picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield — it’s worse than disgraceful, it’s reprehensible.” Mr. Hagel said he recoiled when he saw the ad, and it rankled many others, who noted that Mr. Cleland’s Republican opponent, Representative Saxby Chambliss, had avoided military service.When Mr. Cleland lost the election to Mr. Chambliss, 46 to 53 percent, which helped the Republicans narrowly recapture the Senate, the ad was perceived as having made a difference.In fact, Mr. Cleland had been losing ground in the polls before the ad was aired. He was already seen as too liberal and out of step with Georgia voters.But the ad was so explosive that Democrats seized on it and made the attacks on Mr. Cleland emblematic of the low road that they said the Republicans, led by Mr. Bush’s aggressive political operative, Karl Rove, would take to achieve their ends.At a veterans event, Mr. Cleland with Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. Both were Vietnam veterans and were targeted in political ads that questioned their patriotism.James Estrin/The New York TimesIn the fraught post-9/11 era, the ad was also a harbinger of things to come. Two years later, as Mr. Cleland predicted, a small group of veterans sought to undermine the wartime record of Senator John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran and the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee.At the Democratic convention in Boston, where Mr. Kerry was nominated, James Carville, the party strategist, introduced Mr. Cleland by saying he would go down in history for the injustice he suffered in 2002. Whipping up the crowd by recalling old slogans like “Remember the Alamo” and “Remember the Maine,” Mr. Carville declared: “We’re going to Remember Max.”“In some ways,” wrote The Los Angeles Times, “Cleland is more powerful as a symbol than he ever was as a senator.”Beyond what he came to symbolize, Mr. Cleland was crushed by losing the race, which plunged him into a deep depression.“It broke his heart,” Mr. Kerry recalled in a phone interview. “That ad was such a dastardly, disgraceful hit. And it set the template.”The loss of his seat and the start of the Iraq war in 2003 triggered a long-dormant case of post-traumatic stress disorder that sent Mr. Cleland back to Walter Reed hospital, outside Washington, where he had been treated after his injuries in Vietnam.“After I lost the Senate race in 2002, my life collapsed,” he told History.net. “I went down in every way you can go down. I lost my life as I knew it.”His anxiety was compounded, he said, because he had voted for the Iraq war, a stance he took, he said later, because if he had voted against it, he would have been “dead meat” in his re-election bid. He said it was the worst vote he had cast.As therapy, he wrote a book, “Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove” (with Ben Raines, 2009).“Through weekly counseling, medication for anxiety and depression, and weekly attendance at a spiritual Twelve Step recovery group, I began to heal,” he wrote, adding that he gained strength from being among veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. “My personal recovery and renewal have taken years.”Joseph Maxwell Cleland was born on Aug. 24, 1942, in Atlanta, Ga. His mother, Juanita Cleland, worked as a secretary for Standard Oil. His father, Hugh Cleland, was in the Navy at the time. After the war, he moved the family to Lithonia, Ga., outside Atlanta, where he worked in the granite quarries. He later became a traveling salesman.As a boy, Max, as he was called, became enthralled with cowboys, and for the rest of his life, he loved watching Westerns. Even as an adult he kept pictures of the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers on his wall, among those of other heroes like Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.Max was a top student and star athlete at Lithonia High School, excelling in baseball, basketball and tennis and graduating in 1960.At Stetson University in Florida, he majored in history before graduating in 1964. He later received a master’s degree in history from Emory University. It was during a summer semester at American University in Washington in 1963 that he resolved to become a senator.But first, he would enlist. His father and most of his male relatives had fought in World War II, and Max did not want to miss the war of his generation. He joined the Army in 1965 and volunteered for Vietnam in 1967.On April 8, 1968, just days before his tour was to end, Capt. Cleland was on a rescue mission in the village of Khe Sanh when he noticed a hand grenade on the ground. He picked it up and it detonated, instantly severing his right leg and right arm; his left leg was amputated within the hour. He was later awarded the Bronze Star and a Silver Star for meritorious service.After recuperating at Walter Reed, he moved back to Georgia and at 28, became the youngest person elected to the Georgia State Senate, where he helped make public facilities accessible to people with disabilities.Mr. Cleland and President Jimmy Carter, who had named him head of the Veterans Administration, at a Veteran’s Day celebration in 1977.Teresa Zabala/The New York TimesPresident Jimmy Carter, a fellow Georgian, named him head of the Veterans Administration in 1977, and Mr. Cleland soon instituted psychological counseling for vets. After Mr. Carter lost the presidency, Mr. Cleland returned to Georgia and wrote about the challenges of being a triple amputee in a memoir, “Strong at the Broken Places” (1980), taking his title from Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms.” He also was a consultant on the movie “Coming Home” (1978), starring Jane Fonda and Jon Voight as a disabled Vietnam veteran.Mr. Cleland was elected secretary of state in Georgia and served for 14 years, until 1996, when Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, a Democrat, announced his retirement. Mr. Cleland ran for the seat and narrowly defeated the businessman Guy Millner.In the Senate, Mr. Cleland was liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal matters. He was a reliable vote for increased military spending but was wary of committing troops overseas. In 2001, he broke with Democrats to vote for tax cuts proposed by Mr. Bush, but by and large he went along with the Democratic agenda.With the Senate race in 2002 drawing national attention, President Bush, who was popular in Georgia, visited the state multiple times on behalf of Mr. Chambliss. By Election Day, polls showed Mr. Cleland retaining a small lead. But they failed to predict a huge turnout by rural white men, many of them angry that Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, had removed the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag. Both Mr. Barnes and Mr. Cleland were tossed out of office.Mr. Cleland later taught at American University, in the same program that had inspired him as a youth. He served briefly on the 9/11 Commission before President Bush nominated him to a four-year term on the board of the Export-Import Bank.Through it all, Mr. Cleland commemorated the date of his accident, April 8, which he called his “Alive Day.”“He’d call me and say what he was grateful for,” Mr. Kerry said. “Usually it was his gratitude about his fellow vets.”Mr. Cleland left no immediate survivors but had maintained a circle of close friends. For the last three decades his caretaker was Linda Dean, who also managed his affairs.In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Mr. Cleland secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission, the federal agency that manages monuments and cemeteries in 17 countries honoring the tens of thousands of American servicemen and servicewomen buried overseas and the more than 95,000 troops missing in action in foreign wars.Mr. Cleland in Alabama in 2004, trying to build support for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry among veterans.Dave Martin/Associated PressMr. Cleland said in an interview with ABC News that he expected the job to give him “a sense of meaning and purpose.”He then quoted a line from a poem, “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak,” by Archibald MacLeish, in which the dead address the living: “We leave you our deaths: give them their meaning.”“It is really up to us, the living,” Mr. Cleland added, “to provide that meaning for those who have given their all for this country.” More

National Republicans had been trying to recruit Gov. Chris Sununu to compete for a Democratic-held seat that the G.O.P. believed could determine control of the Senate.Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican, surprised his party on Tuesday by announcing he would not run for U.S. Senate next year, rejecting a full-court press from national Republicans who tried to recruit him to compete for a Democratic-held seat that the G.O.P. believed could determine control of the Senate.Instead, Mr. Sununu announced at a press conference, he would seek a fourth two-year term as governor, a job that he said he could make more of a difference in than in Congress, where “too often doing nothing is considered a win.”“My responsibility is not to the gridlock and politics of Washington, it is to the citizens of New Hampshire,’’ he said. National Republicans had seen a Sununu challenge to Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, as one of their best shots to upend the Senate’s 50-50 partisan split, which gives Democrats control with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.At a Republican gathering in Las Vegas over the weekend, where Mr. Sununu spoke, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas urged attendees to lean on Mr. Sununu, who was also mulling whether to seek re-election as governor. “Every person here needs to come up to Chris and say, ‘Governor is great but you need to run for Senate,’” Mr. Cruz said. “Because this man could single-handedly retire Chuck Schumer as majority leader of the Senate.” Mr. Sununu, 47, was re-elected to a third two-year term in 2020 with 65 percent of the statewide vote. That was 20 percentage points better than what former President Donald J. Trump received in losing New Hampshire to President Biden. Unlike other Republican governors of blue states, such as Maryland or Massachusetts, Mr. Sununu supported Mr. Trump’s re-election, declaring at one point, “I’m a Trump guy through and through.” A University of New Hampshire poll in September found that support for Mr. Sununu was eroding, but still high. Fifty-seven percent of New Hampshire adults approved of the job the governor was doing, including his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. But the share of independents who approved of his performance as governor fell for the third consecutive month. This is a developing story. More

Austin Mitchell More

Donald TrumpTrump ‘throws sand’ in gears of Capitol attack inquiry amid legal setbacks Ex-president wages a court battle to thwart House committee from obtaining White House records for inquiry into the Capitol assaultPeter Stone in WashingtonTue 9 Nov 2021 06.00 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 06.03 ESTDonald Trump has suffered a series of legal setbacks and more loom, as he wages a court battle to thwart a House committee from obtaining White House records for its inquiry into the 6 January Capitol assault and a new grand jury begins hearing evidence about possible crimes by his real estate firm.Former justice officials and legal scholars say Trump’s long-standing penchant for using lawsuits to fend off investigations and opponents is looking weaker now that he’s out of the White House and facing legal threats on multiple fronts.The list of significant legal setbacks is lengthy for the former president and real estate mogul who has long had a reputation for threatening to sue his foes.Early this year, for example, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr won a lengthy legal fight to obtain Trump’s tax returns, and in July charged two Trump companies and the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer with a 15 year tax fraud scheme, which the companies and the CFO have denied in pleas.On 4 November, a second grand jury was convened by Vance to hear more evidence about the financial practices of the Trump Organization and possibly bring more charges, according to the Washington Post.Trump suffered another legal setback when a New York court ordered him to give a deposition in October that lasted more than four hours in an old lawsuit by men alleging they were attacked in 2015 by Trump security guards at a demonstration outside Trump Tower in Manhattan.Meanwhile, in his latest high stakes court fight, Trump’s attorneys have launched a legal blitz invoking executive privilege to block the House select committee from obtaining hundreds of pages of documents from the National Archives the committee seeks as it investigates the 6 January Capitol riot and what role Trump played in it.A federal judge at a hearing on Trump’s legal challenges on 4 November voiced strong scepticism about his lawyers’ executive privilege claims to keep the committee from getting most of the records it wants, noting that President Joe Biden approved turning them over.Trump’s many reverses in court and his efforts to blunt the bipartisan House committee’s inquiry, underscore the growing legal threats Trump is facing that pose new financial and political risks, say former justice department lawyers and legal scholars.Historically, Trump has relied on lawsuits as a delaying tactic to benefit his business interests, or to claim executive privilege or immunity to stymie congressional, state and other investigations when he was president, according to legal analysts.Likewise, after his loss to Joe Biden last year, Trump’s campaign and allies filed more than 60 lawsuits claiming widespread fraud that were rejected by various courts.To back his fights Trump boasts a legal arsenal with a shifting cast of lawyers, in part because Trump has been rebuffed by several high-profile attorneys this year, according to a CNN report and legal sources.“Trump is going pretty deep down the bench to find lawyers,” said one former DOJ prosecutor and GOP white collar attorney. “I think a lot of established lawyers would have trouble getting approval from their firms because of political blowback and risk of non-payment.”DoJ lawyers and experts say that Trump’s legal fortunes now look grimmer, and that his current battle royale to block the House inquiry into the Capitol riot by his allies seems quite weak, though it may delay the inquiry for months.“Trump’s current assertions of a privilege against the disclosures are almost identical to the baseless claims of an absolute immunity that he advanced repeatedly – and the supreme court rejected – when he was president,” said Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration, in a Guardian interview.Ayer added that “Trump is just blowing smoke and trying to throw sand in the gears of the select committee investigation. Congress, the administration, and the courts need to quickly and emphatically say no and press ahead with the investigation.”Other DoJ veterans agree that Trump’s legal case looks flimsy, but say it could stall the House inquiry.“The executive privilege claim against the National Archives is extremely weak,” said former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “The question is whether he can game the system to run out the clock and make the requests moot.”That may well be the point. Trump’s regular use of litigation to delay federal and state inquiries echo his modus operandi when he was president and in the business world, say experts.“Likelihood of success on Trump’s legal claims is not always or often the primary goal,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University. “The primary goal, at least for the farfetched claims, is delay. If there’s also a partial victory, so much the better.”More legal battles are pending for Trump, including claims by two women, ex- Apprentice candidate Summer Zervos and writer E Jean Carroll, who, respectively, have alleged they were sexually harassed or raped by Trump, charges he has denied.Zervos has sued Trump for defamation and Trump, who has threatened to counter sue, faces a court order to sit for a deposition by Christmas. Similarly, a New York judge in September denied a Trump lawyer’s request to pause a defamation lawsuit by Carroll against Trump.But Trump’s legal armada now seems focused on blocking White House records from the House committee investigating the deadly 6 January attack on Congress, which followed a Trump rally where he told a large crowd of loyalists to “fight like hell”, as Congress was poised to certify Biden’s win.Trump’s legal tactics fit his old playbook. “He is behaving now as he long behaved as a real estate investor and builder in the high stakes and often vicious world of New York commercial real estate,” Gillers said. “When the same tactics are employed in national politics, the victims are democracy and the nation.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

The latest batch of subpoenas from the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot also includes officials from former President Donald J. Trump’s re-election campaign.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued new subpoenas on Monday for a half-dozen allies of former President Donald J. Trump, including his former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, as it moved its focus to an orchestrated effort to overturn the 2020 election.The subpoenas reflect an effort to go beyond the events of the Capitol riot and delve deeper into what committee investigators believe gave rise to it: a concerted campaign by Mr. Trump and his network of advisers to promote false claims of voter fraud as a way to keep him in power. One of the people summoned on Monday was John Eastman, a lawyer who drafted a memo laying out how Mr. Trump could use the vice president and Congress to try to invalidate the election results.In demanding records and testimony from the six Trump allies, the House panel is widening its scrutiny of the mob attack to encompass the former president’s attempt to enlist his own government, state legislators around the country and Congress in his push to overturn the election.Mr. Flynn discussed seizing voting machines and invoking certain national security emergency powers after the election. Mr. Eastman wrote a memo to Mr. Trump suggesting that Vice President Mike Pence could reject electors from certain states during Congress’s count of Electoral College votes to deny Joseph R. Biden Jr. a majority. And Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who was also subpoenaed, participated in a planning meeting at the Willard Hotel in Washington on Jan. 5 after backing baseless litigation and “Stop the Steal” efforts around the country to push the lie of a stolen election.“In the days before the Jan. 6 attack, the former president’s closest allies and advisers drove a campaign of misinformation about the election and planned ways to stop the count of Electoral College votes,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee chairman, said in a statement. “The select committee needs to know every detail about their efforts to overturn the election, including who they were talking to in the White House and in Congress, what connections they had with rallies that escalated into a riot and who paid for it all.”The panel also issued subpoenas for Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, who supervised its conversion into a “Stop the Steal” operation; and Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign who participated at the Jan. 5 meeting at the Willard, where associates discussed pressuring Mr. Pence not to certify the Electoral College results.Also included in the group that received subpoenas on Monday was Angela McCallum, the Trump campaign’s national executive assistant, who left a voice message for an unknown Michigan state representative in which she said she wanted to know whether the campaign could “count on” the representative to help appoint an alternate slate of electors.The subpoenas — which bring to 25 the number issued by the committee — require that the witnesses turn over documents this month and sit for depositions in early December. More than 150 witnesses have testified in closed-door sessions with the committee’s investigators.In a statement on Monday evening, Mr. Kerik said his lawyer had accepted the committee’s subpoena, but he defended his actions. He said that Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, had brought him into the legal effort to investigate claims of voter fraud, but he argued that he had nothing to do with plans to try to sway Congress.“I was not hired to overturn the will of the people — only to look into the integrity of the process and ensure that the results accurately reflected the will of the people,” Mr. Kerik said. “As to the events of Jan. 6, I was not involved.”Mr. Flynn, Mr. Eastman, Mr. Stepien, Mr. Miller and Ms. McCallum did not immediately respond to requests for comment..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The panel’s latest move indicates that it is zeroing in on how — in the days and weeks before a throng of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol and disrupted Congress’s counting of votes — the former president’s closest associates were planning an effort stretching from the Oval Office, the House and Senate to state officials across the country.Critical to that push, investigators believe, was the meeting the day before the riot at the Willard Hotel. The Washington Post reported that Mr. Kerik paid for rooms and suites in Washington hotels as he worked with Mr. Giuliani on “Stop the Steal” efforts.“They are really honing in on this strategy at the Willard Hotel,” said Barbara L. McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and a law professor at the University of Michigan. “If it’s a campaign war room, that’s one thing. But the question is: To what extent are they looking at blocking the certification of the election? The Eastman memo is a real smoking gun. It really appears to be a concerted effort here.”Even as the committee ramps up its inquiry, it is facing stonewalling from Mr. Trump and many of his allies, whom he has directed to defy the panel based on a claim of executive privilege.Mr. Trump has filed suit against the committee to keep secret at least 770 pages of documents concerning handwritten notes, draft speeches and executive orders, and records of his calls, meetings and emails with state officials. But the Biden administration has declined to support his claim to executive privilege, arguing that there is no such prerogative for documents related to an attempt to undermine democracy and the presidency itself.The Justice Department is weighing whether to charge Stephen K. Bannon with criminal contempt of Congress after the House voted last month to recommend his prosecution for defying its subpoena. Another witness, Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who was involved in frenzied efforts to overturn the election, refused to cooperate on Friday.Mr. Flynn, who spent 33 years as an Army intelligence officer, has emerged as one of the most extreme voices in Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election.Mr. Flynn attended a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18 in which participants discussed seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency, invoking certain national security emergency powers and continuing to spread the false message that the 2020 election was tainted by widespread fraud, the committee said. That meeting came after Mr. Flynn gave an interview to the right-wing site Newsmax in which he talked about the purported precedent for deploying military troops and declaring martial law to “rerun” the election.Mr. Stepien helmed Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, which urged state and party officials to affect the outcome of the election by asking states to delay or deny the certification of electoral votes and by sending multiple slates of the votes to Congress to allow a challenge to the results, the committee said. In particular, Mr. Stepien supervised a fund-raising effort that sought to profit off the election challenges and promote lies about voting machines that campaign staff had determined to be false, the committee said.Mr. Trump and the Republican Party raised $255.4 million in the eight weeks after the election as he promoted unfounded accusations of fraud.Mr. Eastman has been the subject of intense scrutiny in recent weeks after it was revealed that he wrote a memo to Mr. Trump suggesting that Mr. Pence could reject electors from certain states. Mr. Eastman is also reported to have participated in a briefing for nearly 300 state legislators, during which he told the group that it was their duty to “fix this, this egregious conduct, and make sure that we’re not putting in the White House some guy that didn’t get elected,” the committee said.He met with Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence to push his arguments, participated in the meeting at the Willard and spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, before the Capitol assault. As violence broke out, he sent a message blaming Mr. Pence for not going along with his plan. More