US Politics

It became known as the “basement strategy”. As the coronavirus pandemic raged outside, presidential candidate Joe Biden addressed the nation from a makeshift studio under his Delaware home, avoiding off-the-cuff gaffes and allowing rival Donald Trump to self-destruct.But three years on, with lockdowns lifted and America mostly back to a new version of normal, Biden knows that speeches on glitchy Zoom calls or in empty auditoriums will not be enough. The president, who at 80 is the oldest in American history, is facing the final, most gruelling campaign of his life.On Saturday he kicks it off in earnest with the first rally of his 2024 re-election bid in Philadelphia, in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. Biden will address supporters in the trade union movement, a vital part of his coalition, and tout economic achievements, including a manufacturing revival and record jobs numbers.Speaking in the birthplace of American democracy, he can also make the case that he has been a human bulwark against the extremism of Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement while finding ways to do business with Republicans in Congress. But after the sheltered existence he enjoyed in the pandemic campaign of 2020, he will have to prove his fitness for office all over again.“The principal stumbling block to a second term for Joe Biden is the widespread perception that he is simply too old to serve effectively for a second term,” said Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton. “He has to run a vigorous campaign, and there’s no time like the present to be out and about, and to begin pushing back against the perception that he’s going to run another basement campaign because he doesn’t have the energy to do anything else.”Biden will have plenty of opportunity, and obligation, to meet voters on the campaign trail this time, generating spontaneous moments that can be both a blessing and a curse given his history of verbal blunders. In December 2019, when a man in Iowa suggested that he was too old and raised questions about his son’s overseas business dealings, Biden called him a “damned liar” and suggested a pushup contest.Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, added: “That goes with the territory and, all things considered, it’s a risk that the campaign has to take. Because if they keep him as guarded as they have up to now then he has no chance of rebutting the presumption that he’s too old. And that could prove fatal.”Biden was also at his weakest during in-person campaigning early in 2020. Despite joining the race as the perceived frontrunner, he lost the first three Democratic primary contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and only clinched his party’s nomination after the pandemic took hold.During the presidential election against Trump, Biden did resume in-person campaigning via physically distanced circles, drive-in rallies and other small events in battleground states. But he almost always returned each night to sleep at home in Delaware.As president, he has travelled far and wide, delivered countless speeches and answered doubters with a pugnacious State of the Union address in which he verbally sparred with Republicans and came out on top. But he has given no national newspaper interviews and far fewer solo press conferences than his predecessors – fuelling a perception that his inner circle is trying to shield him from exposure.Saturday’s public rally will start to address one confounding disconnect. Biden has presided over the strongest post-pandemic recovery of any major economy, including the creation of 13m jobs – more than any president has created in an entire four-year term – and the lowest unemployment for half a century.Yet an Associated Press-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research poll last month found that just 33% of American adults say they approve of his handling of the economy and only 24% say national economic conditions are in good shape. One explanation might be stubbornly high inflation driving rising prices for consumers. Another is that people are not yet feeling the benefits in their daily lives.Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist, said: “The poll numbers may not reflect the work that’s being done because we’ve done the legislation, now we have to move to education and implementation. Part of politics these days are about emotions and, while we’ve accomplished a lot, some of the things that we’ve accomplished Americans may not necessarily feel just yet and that’ll take some time.“Part of that is telling them when it’s coming, how it’s coming, but also highlighting the alternative and what’s on the other side and how in one election all the things that have been accomplished can be taken away.”Biden’s re-election campaign, led by Julie Chávez Rodríguez, granddaughter of the Latino labour activist Cesar Chavez, is convinced that it has a good story to tell. He has spent his presidency combating Covid, rallying western allies against Russia and pushing through major bills such as a bipartisan infrastructure package and legislation to promote hi-tech manufacturing and climate measures. When he formally announced his re-election campaign in an April video, he asked voters for time to “finish this job”.He is also fond of telling critics, “Don’t judge me against the Almighty, judge me against the alternative” – which looks set to be a far-right Republican such as Trump or the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis. Biden proved an effective campaigner for Democrats in last year’s midterm elections by picking his venues carefully and highlighting Maga extremism along with abortion rights.Chris Whipple, author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, said of the 2024 campaign: “He’ll probably take a page from the playbook of the 2022 midterms. At the time, Biden wanted to go everywhere and talk about everything. He wanted to brag about all of his accomplishments from the first two years and he had plenty to brag about.“But [then chief of staff] Ron Klain and some of his advisers sat him down and said, Mr President, look, you’re going to go to the places where we think you can make a positive difference and you’re going to talk about women’s reproductive rights and the threat to democracy represented by Maga. He followed that script and the rest is history.”Whipple added: “They defied the expectations in the midterms. I suspect he’s getting very similar advice right now: that’s a winning formula. In the 2022 midterms, normal beat crazy, and crazy is even crazier as we speak, given the latest indictment of Trump and the craven obedience of the GOP [Grand Old Party] to Trump.”Despite Trump facing federal criminal charges over his mishandling of classified documents, no one in the Biden campaign is taking victory for granted. Presidential elections are decided by a few percentage points in a few swing states. There are warning signs that Biden will find 2024 tougher going than 2020.The Associated Press-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that only 26% of Americans – and only about half of Democrats – said they wanted to see Biden run again. Among Black adults, only 41% said they want him to run and 55% said they were likely to support him in the general election.The sagging enthusiasm has been thrown into sharp relief by two fringe candidates making inroads into his support among Democrats. A Quinnipiac University poll released this week found that 70% of Democratic-leaning voters support Biden in a 2024 primary but environment lawyer Robert F Kennedy Jr is drawing 17% and self-help author Marianne Williamson has 8%.Biden has struggled to fulfill key promises to Black voters, perhaps the most loyal group in his political base. While he tapped Ketanji Brown Jackson to become the first Black woman on the supreme court, he has been unable to follow through on pledges to protect voting rights against a wave of Republican-backed restrictions or enact policing reform to help stop violence against people of colour at the hands of law enforcement.Although the Inflation Reduction Act made historic climate investments, critics point to Biden’s recent backsliding on the issue: this year he approved Willow, an $8bn oil drilling project on pristine federal land in Alaska, and agreed to fast-track the $6.6bn Mountain Valley pipeline (MVP) in West Virginia.Michele Weindling, electoral director of the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate advocacy group, criticised Biden for his recent “negative choices” and said: “It is the president’s duty to ensure that he is constantly grappling with the crisis at hand and I don’t think that he’s taking the crisis seriously when he negotiates around fossil fuels and continues to pass drilling permits even after promising not to.”Pushing climate to the margins could damage Biden’s re-election chances, Weindling warned. “There’s a risk of it making our jobs a lot harder in terms of mobilising young people to get out to vote. The proof is in the past two elections where young people turned out in record numbers to elect Democrats who were running on bold progressive platforms, on popular agendas.”Meanwhile, Biden’s toughest critics are calling for him to drop out of the race and make way for another Democrat. Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org, sponsor of the Step Aside Joe! campaign, argues that, whereas Trump was on the defensive in 2020, this time Biden will represent the status quo.“There are many reasons to believe that this Biden campaign is on a collision course with disaster. Nobody knows for sure but there are so many signs from the polling, from his public appearances, from the footage that is catnip for the Fox News world that, literally and figuratively, Biden is stumbling.“Instead of being in denial and being like the crowd in the story The Emperor’s New Clothes, Democrats, including members of Congress and movers and shakers at the Democratic National Committee, still have an opportunity to step up. But instead, with very few exceptions, they’re simply fawning at the president.”If there is one hallmark of the Biden presidency, however, it is that he is constantly underestimated. Ronald Reagan, then the oldest president in US history, had an approval rating of just 35% in early 1983 but went on to win re-election in a landslide the following year.Bob Shrum, a consultant on several Democratic presidential campaigns, said: “Lots of factors matter here. Does the economy continue to stay healthy and to get healthier? What happens overseas? All of those things are contingencies that you have to take into account but, looking at it right now, I not only think Biden wins, I think Republicans are going to get more and more uncomfortable with Trump.” More

Three zombies lurching your way is scary enough. Now imagine they’re Lenin, Stalin and Putin. This scene isn’t from a Kremlin-themed horror film, but rather a new graphic novel, Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think! by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa.Through their day job, as co-hosts of the Gaslit Nation podcast, the authors have long warned about the dangers of authoritarianism, whether discussing January 6 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now they are releasing a book, illustrated by the Polish artist Kasia Babic.It’s a tongue-in-cheek look at dictatorship, a how-to manual with lessons from Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Putin, Kim Jong-un and many others whose stories offer time-tested tips on how to seize and consolidate power.“We wanted to do a book on the dictator playbook to show people how unoriginal dictators are,” Chalupa says, “so they can better predict the next moves of an aspiring authoritarian.”Some such moves, such as stigmatizing minority groups or employing propaganda, are well-known from history class. Others may seem counterintuitive. According to Chalupa and Kendzior, dictators are fond of both elections and constitutions. It helps, of course, if they win the popular vote by an overwhelming margin and if constitutional rights are guaranteed on paper but not in real life.On the page, these tips and more are shared by an omniscient narrator who Chalupa says has Cary Grant’s looks and verve, Stephen Colbert’s snark and the devil’s ability to tempt.One relatively new development for dictators is the increasing usefulness of technology when it comes to keeping civilians under surveillance. Chalupa notes that when her Ukrainian grandfather was in one of Stalin’s prison camps, inmates were allowed to speak to each other relatively freely. Today, China uses technology to keep a constant eye on Uyghurs in its own camps. Chalupa and Kendzior fault companies like Apple, Facebook and Google for doing business with China.“When you have innovations in AI driven by companies in the west, it’s going to be used for authoritarian control,” Chalupa says.“It’s only a matter of time before it starts spreading everywhere. You think you live in a democracy? Every single democracy is vulnerable. Nobody is immune to the authoritarian virus. If all the surveillance technology tools go unregulated, if there’s no vocal outcry against them from the public or elected officials in the EU, North America and elsewhere, if there’s no pushback against them, it’s going to be game over.”When Chalupa and Kendzior conceived their book, they outlined it as if it were an infomercial, wondering what a Trump University course on dictatorship would look like, and proceeded accordingly. They also thought about Oscars-style awards for despots.In one sequence, the narrator becomes an Academy Awards host. He dons a tuxedo, strolls the red carpet and presents the Oscar for Best Purge to Kim Il-sung, founder of the dynasty that rules North Korea. According to the book, nowadays Kim Jong-un not only continues the tradition of purges, he has extended it to canine pets of the ruling class.As Chalupa points out, dictators can’t achieve power on their own. They require the help of “useful idiots”.“In terms of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, all the sort of people we highlight throughout the project, the larger theme of the book is useful idiots. People helped Hitler have power. Why? What did they get out of it, or think they were getting out of it?”The book looks at a Weimar Republic media baron, Alfred Hugenberg, who thought he could control Hitler and limit his danger to Germany: a fateful miscalculation. Meanwhile, Stalin’s brutality was whitewashed in the west thanks to figures including the celebrated playwright George Bernard Shaw and the New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, whose fawning coverage won a Pulitzer prize. One of Duranty’s contemporaries, the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who sought to expose Stalin’s atrocities, was the subject of Chalupa’s 2019 feature film, Mr Jones. Another voice of conscience spotlighted in Chalupa and Kendzior’s book is George Orwell, for his courageous opposition to Stalin and to authoritarianism in general.“I think Orwell wasn’t alone,” Chalupa says. “He had a community working with him side-by-side” including “his wife Eileen, a remarkable poet in her own right”.The rogues’ gallery wouldn’t be complete without Donald Trump. Recently indicted a second time, the 45th president plays a prominent role in the book. One aspect the authors emphasize is Trump’s dictatorial skill when it comes to inflaming supporters.They highlight his tweets on the campaign trail in 2016: “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell – I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.”Another sequence depicts Trump supporters drinking conspiracist Kool-Aid on January 6. A man wearing a red Maga cap downs a shot which makes his muscles expand and brain shrink. “Stop the steal!” he exclaims. Others, similarly addled, start threatening Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. Egged on by Trump, the mob attacks the Capitol. With the seat of government burning, Trump feigns innocence.The book also examines US support for dictatorships abroad. In the 1970s, such support often came about through the then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Whether it was the coup against Salvador Allende that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile or coziness toward dirty war dictators in Argentina, Kissinger was key to the embrace of despots worldwide.“He was like a ‘Where’s Waldo?’ during our research,” Chalupa recalls, noting “all the times he kept popping up – ‘there’s Kissinger again.’”With so much material to work with, the authors had to make decisions about what to include. Their treatment of Hitler spotlights Mein Kampf and his brief alliance with Stalin, but there is not much mention of his antisemitism and the Holocaust.“We sort of focused on the dictators themselves versus their atrocities,” says Chalupa, whose next project is a Holocaust-themed work about the American second world war reporter Dorothy Thompson. “It’s sort of like the Hitchcock method.”She adds that “the focus is so much on useful idiots. It’s really the theme of the book. We’re not trying to minimize any atrocities” or “eclipse the victims”.Chalupa noted that the book is geared toward younger readers, aiming to encourage them to learn more. Sadly, with things the way they are, it seems there will be no shortage of material should a sequel ever be planned. But Chalupa maintains a sense of hope.“We’ve got to keep fighting,” she says. “We have no choice. Every single one of us, wherever [we are], should not check out, should not say, ‘OK, it’s out of my hands.’ It’s not up to you alone to fix it, but what we have the power to do, the bandwidth to do, is incredibly powerful.”
Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think! is published in the US by First Second More

A US federal judge on Friday issued an order stopping an Indiana ban on puberty blockers and hormones for transgender minors from taking effect as scheduled 1 July.Indiana’s American Civil Liberties Union sought the temporary injunction in its legal challenge of the Republican-backed law, which was enacted this spring amid a national push by politically conservative legislatures to curb LGBTQ+ rights.The order from US district court judge James Patrick Hanlon will allow the law’s prohibition on gender-affirming surgeries to take effect. Hanlon’s order also blocks provisions that would prohibit Indiana doctors from communicating with out-of-state doctors about gender-affirming care for their patients younger than 18.The ACLU filed the lawsuit within hours after the Republican governor, Eric Holcomb, signed the bill on 5 April. The challenge, on behalf of four youths undergoing transgender treatments and an Indiana doctor who provides such care, argued the ban would violate the US constitution’s equal protection guarantees and trampled upon the rights of parents to decide medical treatment for their children.Indiana’s Republican-dominated legislature approved the ban after contentious hearings that primarily featured testimony from vocal opponents, with many arguing the gender-affirming care lessened the risk of depression and suicide among transgender youth. More

Trump supporters react to the Fox News banners | Fiona Katauskas | Opinion | The Guardian More

Daniel Ellsberg, a US government analyst who became one of the most famous whistleblowers in world politics when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US government knowledge of the futility of the Vietnam war, has died. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family on Friday.In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.“In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner …’“Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”Tributes were swift and many.Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said Ellsberg “was widely, and rightly, acclaimed as a great and significant figure. But not by Richard Nixon, who wanted him locked up. He’s why the national interest should never be confused with the interest of whoever’s in power.”The Pulitzer-winning journalist Wesley Lowery wrote: “It was an honor knowing Daniel … I’ll remain inspired by his commitment to a mission bigger than himself.”The writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: “One of the few really brave people on this earth has left it.”The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said: “Huge loss for this country. An inspiring, brave, and patriotic American. Rest in power, Dan, rest in power.”The Pentagon Papers covered US policy in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and showed that successive administrations were aware the US could not win.By the end of the war in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 304,000 were wounded. Nearly 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, as were about 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas and more than 2 million civilians in North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.The Pentagon Papers caused a sensation in 1971, when they were published – first by the New York Times and then by the Washington Post and other papers – after the supreme court overruled the Nixon administration on whether publication threatened national security.In 2017, the story was retold in The Post, an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in which Ellsberg was played by the British actor Matthew Rhys.Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps in the 1950s but went to Vietnam in the mid-60s as a civilian analyst for the defense department, conducting a study of counter-insurgency tactics. When he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was working for the Rand Corporation.In 2021, a half-century after he blew the whistle, he told the Guardian: “By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.”In 1973, Ellsberg was put on trial. Charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property adding up to a possible 115-year sentence were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, part of the gathering scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.Born in Chicago on 7 April 1931, Ellsberg was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, completing his PhD after serving as a marine. He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.After the end of the Vietnam war he became by his own description “a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing”.Ellsberg contributed to publications including the Guardian and published four books, among them an autobiography, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and most recently The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.In recent years, he publicly supported Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who leaked records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who published Manning’s leaks, and Edward Snowden, who leaked records concerning surveillance by the National Security Agency.On Friday, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the Guardian team which published the Snowden leaks in 2013, winning a Pulitzer prize, called Ellsberg “a true American hero” and “the most vocal defender” of Assange, Snowden, Manning and “others who followed in his brave footsteps”.Steven Donziger, an attorney who represented Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest against the oil giant Chevron, a case that led to his own house arrest, said: “Today the world lost a singularly brave voice who spoke truth about the US military machine in Vietnam and risked his life in the process. I drew deep inspiration from the courage of Daniel Ellsberg and was deeply honored to have his support.”In 2018, in a joint Guardian interview with Snowden, Ellsberg paid tribute to those who refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam.“I would not have thought of doing what I did,” he said, “which I knew would risk prison for life, without the public example of young Americans going to prison to make a strong statement that the Vietnam war was wrong and they would not participate, even at the cost of their own freedom.“Without them, there would have been no Pentagon Papers. Courage is contagious.”Three years later, in an interview to mark 50 years since the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he said he “never regretted for a moment” his decision to leak.His one regret, he said, was “that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, ‘Don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.’” More

Like Joe Biden’s ascent to the White House, Donald Trump’s indictment for unlawfully holding classified documents and obstructing justice offers a partial answer to one great question of American politics: can the country’s institutions contain his excesses?The backlash that the indictment has prompted highlights another: what happens when they do? When the Democrat defeated him, Mr Trump’s armed supporters stormed the Capitol to prevent the transfer of power, assaulting police officers and chanting “Hang Mike Pence”. Within minutes of his indictment last week, threats and even calls for civil war were surging on social media platforms used by his supporters.The violent rhetoric doesn’t just come from the grassroots. The Arizona Republican Kari Lake announced that “to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me … Most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA [National Rifle Association].” Mr Trump himself previously warned of “death and destruction” if he were indicted in a separate case, over hush money payments.His bluster at such times is intended to deter action against him – despite the extraordinary case put forward in the indictment, including the now-familiar photo of boxes stacked in a bathroom. It is critical to avoid hysteria or fatalism about the threats facing US democracy. It is true that the direst prognostications did not come to pass after the 2020 election.Nonetheless, last year, research found that more than two in five Americans think a civil war is at least somewhat likely within the next decade. The number who think violence would be justified to restore Mr Trump to the White House has fallen since last year, but still stands at 12 million. An increasingly divided country is also increasingly well armed, with almost 400m privately held guns; their owners are disproportionately white, male and Republican. According to one study, almost 3% of adults, or 7.5 million people, bought a firearm for the first time between January 2019 and April 2021.A slew of analysts have warned that the US could be heading towards widespread political violence. Prof Barbara Walter notes in her book How Civil Wars Start that two conditions are key: ethnic factionalism and anocracy – when a country is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. She believes that the US has the first, and remains close to the second, even if the short-term threat has ebbed somewhat since 2021. Others have pulled back from warnings of civil war, but think major civil disruption is entirely plausible.No one foresees a straight confrontation between forces as in the 1860s, let alone a geographic split. What some experts fear is a guerrilla-style asymmetric conflict waged by a decentralised movement, with small groups or lone attackers targeting minority targets such as synagogues or gay clubs, civilians more broadly, infrastructure, or figures such as Democratic politicians, judges and election officials. Trumpism would be best understood not as the animating principle of such a conflict, but as a catalyst. People would not be fighting for Mr Trump so much as fighting because they believed he spoke for them. And if not him, another figurehead might yet emerge.No violence broke out at the indictment hearing in Miami, as some had feared. Key figures on the extreme right are now locked up: more than 1,000 people have been charged with offences relating to January 6, and hundreds of those imprisoned. Others reportedly feel that Mr Trump has abandoned them. Nonetheless, the growth of threats and political violence in recent years is undeniable. That the language of Mr Trump and his enablers makes these more likely is surely, by now, beyond doubt.
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Barack Obama has criticized two Republican presidential hopefuls, the South Carolina senator Tim Scott and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, over their stances on race relations in America.In a podcast interview, Obama, who became the first Black US president when he was elected in 2008, said that while presenting a hopeful message on race relations was important, “that has to be undergirded with an honest accounting of our past and our present”.Scott is the only Black candidate in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race and Haley is Indian American.Asked about Scott’s messaging, Obama said there was sometimes a tendency among Republican candidates to gloss over the effects of racism, arguing that candidates need to address racial disparities to be taken seriously on the subject of American unity.“There’s a long history of African American or other minority candidates within the Republican party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can make it,’” Obama told the Democratic strategist David Axelrod on the CNN-hosted Axe Files. He added that he thought Nikki Haley “has a similar approach”.Obama said that approach does not include “a plan for how do we address crippling generational poverty that is a consequence of hundreds of years of racism in this society, and we need to do something about that.“If that candidate is not willing to acknowledge that, again and again, we’ve seen discrimination in everything from … getting a job to buying a house to how the criminal justice system operates,” he added.That prompted a pushback from Scott, a former insurance agent, who has said “Racism is real. It is alive,” but argues that his success as a Black man is not exceptional but representative of progress.Scott responded to Obama’s comments, telling the conservative radio host Mark Levin that the president had “missed a softball moving at slow speed with a big bat”.In a Twitter post later on Thursday, Scott said: “Let us not forget we are a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression. Democrats deny our progress to protect their power,” he wrote. “The left wants you to believe faith in America is a fraud and progress in our nation is a myth.“The truth of MY life disproves the lies of the radical left,” Scott continued. “We live in a country where little Black and brown boys and girls can be president of the United States. The truth is – we’ve had one and the good news is – we will have another,” he added.Separately, Nikki Haley took issue with Obama’s position.“Barack Obama set minorities back by singling them out as victims instead of empowering them,” Haley told the New York Post. “In America, hard work and personal responsibility matter. My parents didn’t raise me to think that I would forever be a victim. They raised me to know that I was responsible for my success.” More

Ending a walkout that held up key bills for six weeks, Republicans showed up for work in the Oregon senate on Thursday after wresting concessions from Democrats on measures covering abortion, transgender healthcare and gun rights.The lawmakers’ walkout – the longest in state history and the second-longest in the United States – came as several statehouses around the nation have become ideological battlegrounds, including in Montana and Tennessee.The Republican boycott, which prevented the state senate from reaching a two-thirds quorum needed to pass bills, was prompted by a sweeping measure on abortion and gender-affirming care that Republicans called too extreme. The measure would allow doctors to provide abortions regardless of a patient’s age, with medical providers not required to notify the parents of a minor in certain cases.As part of the deal to end the walkout, Democrats agreed to change language concerning parental notifications for abortion.Under the compromise, if an abortion provider believes notifying the parents of a patient under 15 years old would not be in that patient’s best interest, the physician would not have to notify the parents – but would need another provider to concur. However, no second opinion would be needed if involving a parent or guardian would lead to the abuse or neglect of the patient.Democrats said the measure will still ensure abortion access and protect caregivers from anti-abortion or gender-affirming care measures passed by other states. It will also require that health insurance covers medically necessary gender-affirming care.Democrats also agreed to drop several amendments on a bill that would punish the manufacturing or transferring of undetectable firearms. The now-removed clauses would have increased the purchasing age from 18 to 21 for semiautomatic rifles and placed more limits on concealed carry.Democrats immediately filed new versions of both measures reflecting the agreements, and the senate then passed them. Although the bills were approved earlier by the house, they now will go back to that chamber for a concurrence vote before going to the Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, for her signature.“I’m encouraged that we were able to come to an agreement that will allow us to finish the important work Oregonians sent us here to accomplish,” said the Democratic senate president, Rob Wagner, to reporters.Republicans, who are the minority party, considered it a victory.“Parental rights will not be ignored regarding minors seeking abortion and gender-affirming care,” said the Republican senator Lynn Findley. “Constitutional rights to own and bear arms will not be eviscerated, especially for citizens between 18 and 21 years old.”The senate Republican leader, Tim Knopp, had said the boycott that began on 3 May would end only on the session’s last day – 25 June – to pass “bipartisan” legislation and budget bills. But an optimistic mood settled over the Capitol this week as GOP and Democratic leaders met to negotiate compromises. On the senate floor on Thursday, Knopp said he looked forward to finishing the session in “an extraordinarily bipartisan way”.“We asked for lawful, we asked for constitutional, we asked for compromise, and I see that from your side,” Knopp said as he addressed Wagner following Thursday’s roll call. “We appreciate everyone who was involved.”The longest walkout in the Oregon legislature’s history happened despite voters passing a ballot measure in 2022 that disqualifies lawmakers with 10 or more unexcused absences from re-election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“A whole bunch of legislators aren’t going to be able to come back to this building,” Wagner said.But Republican senators are likely to sue over the measure if they are not allowed to register as candidates, starting in September, for the 2024 election. Republicans also walked out in 2019, 2020 and 2021.On 1 June, senate Democrats voted to fine senators $325 every time their absence denied a quorum.On Wednesday, more than 40 Oregon Democratic house and senate members sponsored a joint resolution proposing an amendment to the state constitution to require a majority of each chamber in the legislature to be present to conduct business. If passed by the legislature, it would go before Oregon voters in a ballot measure in the 2024 election. However, Wagner said on Thursday the measure was unlikely to pass this year with hundreds of other bills pendingThe Republicans had initially said they were boycotting because bill summaries did not meet a long-forgotten state law that required them to be written at a level an eighth-grader could understand.The walkout is the second-longest of any US state, after Rhode Island, according to a list by Ballotpedia. More