US Politics

Donald Trump never did much to hide his dangerous belief that the US justice department and the attorneys general who helmed it should serve as his own personal lawyers and follow his political orders, regardless of norms and the law.Former senior DoJ officials say the former president aggressively prodded his attorney generals to go after his enemies, protect his friends and his interests, and these moves succeeded with alarming results until Trump’s last few months in office.But now with Joe Biden sitting in the Oval Office, Merrick Garland as attorney general, and Democrats controlling Congress, more and more revelations are emerging about just how far Trump’s justice department went rogue. New inquiries have been set up to investigate the scale of wrongdoing.Trump’s disdain for legal principles and the constitution revealed itself repeatedly – especially during Bill Barr’s tenure as attorney general, during most of 2019 and 2020. During Barr’s term in office, Trump ignored the tradition of justice as a separate branch of government, and flouted the principle of the rule of law, say former top justice lawyers and congressional Democrats.In Barr, Trump appeared to find someone almost entirely aligned with the idea of doing his bidding. Barr sought to undermine the conclusions of Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, independent congressional oversight, and Trump critics in and out of government, while taking decisions that benefitted close Trump allies.But more political abuses have emerged, with revelations that – starting under attorney general Jeff Sessions in 2018 – subpoenas were issued in a classified leak inquiry to obtain communications records of top Democrats on the House intelligence committee. Targets were Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, who were investigating Kremlin election meddling, and also several committee staffers and journalists.Democrats in Congress, as well as Garland, have forcefully denounced these Trumpian tactics. Garland has asked the department’s inspector general to launch his own inquiry, and examine the subpoenas involving members of Congress and the media. Congressional committees are eyeing their own investigations into the department’s extraordinary behavior.“There was one thing after another where DoJ acted inappropriately and violated the fundamental principle that law enforcement must be even-handed. The DoJ must always make clear that no person is above the law,” said Donald Ayer, deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration.Ayer thinks there could be more revelations to come. “The latest disclosure of subpoenas issued almost three years ago shows we don’t yet know the full extent of the misconduct that was engaged in.”Similarly, ex-justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich said: “I think it’s pretty clear Trump had little respect for some of the true bedrock principles that define this country – judicial independence and separation of powers, among others. He also never showed any understanding or appreciation for norms that have historically gone unchallenged – the importance of free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power.”In a blistering Washington Post op-ed, Schiff summed up the latest disclosures about the DoJ subpoenas, and the broader politicization at the DoJ under Trump.“The rules established after Watergate to ensure the independence of the justice department served our nation well for half a century, until another president shattered them,” Schiff, now the head of the House intelligence committee, wrote. “Donald Trump had his own enemies list, which included members of the media, elected officials and congressional staff.”But Trump’s repeated strong-arming of his attorney generals were not complete successes, even with Barr.Trump’s desperate drive to overturn Joe Biden’s win reached a fruitless climax when Barr publicly disagreed with Trump’s baseless claims that he lost the election due to massive fraud. Acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, who succeeded Barr last December, also resisted Trump’s strong arm tactics to open conspiracy driven inquiries into election results in states Biden won.But the late resistance Trump met at the department was largely an exception, although Trump’s first attorney general Sessions incurred Trump’s wrath for recusing himself from the Russia investigations because of a conflict of interest. Trump’s pressure tactics were palpable when Sessions resigned in late 2018. Barr succeeded him in early 2019.Barr spun and distorted the some of the key findings of Mueller’s two-year inquiry into Russian meddling before it was officially released, to sway public opinion and undercut the report’s conclusion that Russia interfered in “sweeping and systematic” ways with an eye to helping Trump win in 2016.Barr publicly tapped Connecticut US attorney John Durham to investigate the origins of the FBI’s 2016 inquiry into Russian meddling, a move several ex DoJ officials criticized as redundant and politically driven, since a similar inquiry was already under way by the DoJ’s own inspector general, but that prompted Trump to exclaim: “I think it’s great.”Last year, Barr drew fire for sentencing decisions that were widely viewed as favoring two Trump associates: long-time Trump confidante and self styled “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, and ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn, both of whom had been convicted in the Russia investigations.In the case of Flynn, who twice admitted lying to the FBI, Barr opted to drop all charges on the grounds that the lies were not material, and Barr sharply reduced a sentence that Stone was supposed to serve. Trump commuted Stone’s sentence before he served any time, and later pardoned both men.“Barr may not have fully appreciated how far Trump was willing to go in turning the DoJ into a plaything for the White House, to protect the president’s friends and pursue his enemies,” said eBromwich. “But Barr proved a willing accomplice on issues ranging from distorting the Mueller report to taking insupportable positions in cases in which Trump took a personal interest.”Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a top Democrat on the chamber’s judiciary committee, said in a statement: “Barr played the role of Trump’s personal fixer, and degraded the Department of Justice – long a citadel of the law – to the role of Trump’s personal law firm. He stonewalled Congress at every turn.”He added: “He trashed Department rules and norms when inconvenient to the president. And he ran political errands for Trump, even if it meant a hit to the Department’s credibility. He left behind a colossal mess that will take lots of time and hard work to clean up.” More

Joe Biden’s far-reaching domestic agenda in the US is facing serious setbacks on a range of issues as the political quagmire of a tightly contested Senate is seeing Democratic ambitions sharply curtailed in the face of Republican obstruction.On a number of key fronts such as pushing election reform and voting rights, efforts to curb gun control and to moving forwards on LGBTQ civil rights, there has been an effective push back by Republicans – and a handful of conservative Democrats – that is forcing Biden and the wider Democratic party on to the back foot.The Senate, whom critics deride as an increasingly unrepresentative body that gives undue influence to smaller, less diverse Republican-run states, is scheduled to vote Tuesday on For the People Act, the voting rights bill that’s certain to be defeated having won no support from Republicans.Republicans are expected to run down the clock – a controversial tactical rule known as a filibuster – on the package that requires lawmakers to reach a 60-vote threshold.On Sunday, Ohio Republican senator Rob Portman shot down amendments proposed by West Virginia’s conservative Democrat Joe Manchin, whose rejection of the initial bill all-but scuttled the Democrats’ project. Portman described the planned legislation as a “federal takeover of our election system”.“The bottom line is we should make it easy to vote in this country. We should also make it hard to cheat,” Portman said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Again, I appreciate [Manchin is] trying to find that middle ground, and, who knows, maybe something can be done.”By forcing Republicans to carry out their filibuster and making their opposition clear and public to a law seen as defending the voting rights of communities of color. Democrats hope to embarrass the party. But – without destroying the filibuster, which Manchin also opposes – there is little chance of the bill passing.Senate Democrats will also test calls for unity on LGBTQ civil rights, and another bill – The Equality Act – that is in search of Republican support. Schumer said last month the upper house is “considering” a vote on the bill but has yet to schedule it. Again, Manchin is the lone Democrat hold-out.The proposed legislation would include sexual orientation and gender identity to the protected classes of the 1964 Civil Rights Act alongside bans on discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin.Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin, one of two openly gay senators in the 100-member chamber, has said that she is lobbying Republican colleagues but has achieved only “incremental progress”.Baldwin has said she believes the Senate should “hold off” on a vote while “negotiations are productive” and progress is being made. The Senate is split 50-50 and only in Democratic control thanks to the tie-breaking vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris.“There may be a time where there’s an impasse. I’m still trying to find 10 Republicans [to help pass the bill],” said Baldwin.Republicans resistance to the legislation is focused on protecting the rights of religious institutions that condemn homosexuality and opposition transgender rights in sports. Yet it comes against a backdrop of broad public, business and judicial support on the issue.Manchin, an anti-abortion Democrat , has said he is “not convinced that the Equality Act as written provides sufficient guidance to the local officials who will be responsible for implementing it”. But he has also said he’ll seek to “build broad bipartisan support and find a viable path forward for these critical protections”.Nor are Democrats currently likely to find broader opportunities for political unity on infrastructure spending where large-scale Democratic proposals are running into Republican counter-offers of a fraction of the size.Former Republican presidential adviser Karl Rove told This Week with George Stephanopoulos President Biden faces two paths on infrastructure and both are riddled with obstacles. “[It will be] a bipartisan deal small enough to get Republican support, but not big enough to keep Democrats united, or a go-it-alone and go-for-broke plan that progressives want, with a price tag as high as $6tn that’s likely too big to pass,” Rove said.Similarly, pending gun control legislation may also be resistant to winning enough support to pass.As it stands, two House-passed bills to expand background checks on gun buyers have all but stalled out in the Senate. But rather than push legislation that Republicans will reject, Democrats may instead push for a vote on increasing the number of online and gun show sales covered by FBI background checks – a significant retreat on the original proposals.Senator Chris Murphy, the Democrats’ point person to win Republican support for gun control, said he’s still talking with Republican leaders about “some ideas that would involve the expansion of background checks without getting all the way to universal”.Asked if a bill on gun show checks would be favored by Republicans, two senators involved in discussions, Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, offered a cool take on that likelihood.“We’ll see if it goes anywhere,” Graham told Politico.Toomey, who is set to retire next year, said: “Honestly, it’s unclear at this point.” More

It is hard to pick a favourite moment from the New York mayor’s race, entering its final stage of the primaries this week. It could be the episode in which two candidates – Shaun Donovan and Ray McGuire – were asked to guess the average house price in Brooklyn and answered $100,000, which would have been correct in 1985. (For those operating in 2021, the correct answer is $900,000).It could have been the implosion of the Dianne Morales campaign, the most progressive candidate by far, predictably destroyed from within when staffers complained she’d created a “hostile” environment and that the work, presumably stuffing envelopes, was “repetitive and unstructured”. Meanwhile, it is hard not to love the storyline still playing out around Eric Adams, Brooklyn borough president and current frontrunner in the primary and therefore the election: that he secretly lives in New Jersey.The mayoral race in the US’s biggest city has always been a weird combination of national and parish politics, a magnet for cranks and hustlers, as well as Bloomberg-style billionaires. Four of the last six mayors in New York have been Democrats – Republican voters are outnumbered six to one in the city – and the lion’s share of coverage goes on the Democratic field; this year, not even the rightwing New York Post bothered to endorse a candidate in the Republican primary.Still, even among Democrats it can be hard to get New Yorkers to pay attention to the race much in advance of the final election. A few months ago, the only candidate with name recognition and the early frontrunner was Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and CEO of assorted failed startups, running on the “visionary” ticket, and about whom it remains a mystery that he has ever sought election for anything.Yang’s lead took a hit during the pandemic, when it transpired that he had cleared out of the city to his second home upstate. For a hot second, Scott Stringer, the 61-year-old New York City comptroller and the most experienced politician in the field, glided into first place, until two accusations of sexual misconduct surfaced (he denies them) and that was the end of him.And so we arrive at the portion of the campaign represented by Eric Adams’ fridge. New Yorkers will tolerate, even celebrate, a certain amount of eccentricity in their mayor; look at the enduring affection for Ed Koch, the Democratic mayor of the late 70s and 80s whose theatrics made him loved even as the city slid into bankruptcy. Anthony Weiner, the disgraced candidate in the 2013 race, was given a second chance after his sexting shenanigans largely based on the force of his personality.Adams, 60 years old and a police officer before he went into politics, is not a showman in this style. The fact that the biggest of scandal of his run for office has been so entertaining, however, has probably helped his campaign more than it has hindered it. Two weeks ago, in a move worthy of Matt Hancock, Adams invited press to his apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, in an effort to shut down rumours that he actually lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Reporters scoured the scene, noting, despite Adams’ dietary preferences, the number of non-vegan items in his fridge (salmon, dairy), and the presence of sneakers that appeared to belong to Adams’ adult son, Jordan. If his judgment is off – the main takeaway from the episode was the foolishness of inviting a reporter to your home – Adams came out of it looking relatably shambolic.There has never been a female mayor of New York. By far the sanest candidate, endorsed by the New York Times and running just behind Adams in the polls, is Kathryn Garcia, the former head of the city’s sanitation department and popular on both left and right of the party. She hasn’t been involved in any scandals, save for her brilliantly amateurish campaign video in which, after uttering a few lines in an Ingmar Bergman-esque monotone, she broke through a sheet of glass stamped with In Case of Emergency Break Glass and stalked off in a leather jacket straight from an 80s Heart video.Garcia’s weakness is one that often dogs competent women outflanked in politics by flamboyant and incompetent men: her public persona is not “fun”. It is serious and impressive. In some inchoate way, someone who knows the sewers of New York – and the 10,000 public service workers who maintain them – would seem to know the city at an unparalleled level. And yet a quick glance at Bill de Blasio, the current mayor and a man the city unites in despising, reminds us that serious and impressive doesn’t always win the day. De Blasio popped up last week to illustrate how ranked choice voting works, by holding up a chart of his favourite pizza toppings. (Number one: green peppers. The man’s a disaster.) More

With Covid vaccination penetration in the US likely to fall short of Joe Biden’s 70% by Fourth of July target, pandemic analysts are warning that vaccine incentives are losing traction and that “two Americas” may emerge as the aggressive Delta variant becomes the dominant US strain.Efforts to boost vaccination rates have come through a variety of incentives, from free hamburgers to free beer, college scholarships and even million-dollar lottery prizes. But of the efforts to entice people to get their shots have lost their initial impact, or failed to land effectively at all.“It’s just not working,” Irwin Redlener at the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University, told Politico. “People aren’t buying it. The incentives don’t seem to be working – whether it’s a doughnut, a car or a million dollars.”In Ohio, a program offering five adults the chance to win $1m boosted vaccination rates 40% for over a week. A month later, the rate had dropped to below what it had been before the incentive was introduced, Politico found.Oregon followed Ohio’s cash-prize lead but saw a less dramatic uptick. Preliminary data from a similar lottery in North Carolina, launched last week, suggests the incentive is also not boosting vaccination rates there.Public officials are sounding alarms that the window between improving vaccination penetration and the threat from the more severe Delta variant, which accounts for around 10% of US cases, is beginning to close. The Delta variant appears to be much more contagious than the original strain of Covid-19 and has wreaked havoc in countries like India and the United Kingdom.“I certainly don’t see things getting any better if we don’t increase our vaccination rate,” Scott Allen of the county health unit in Webster, Missouri, told Politico. The state has seen daily infections and hospitalizations to nearly double over the last two weeks.Overall, new US Covid cases have plateaued to a daily average of around 15,000 for after falling off as the nation’s vaccination program ramped up. But the number of first dose vaccinations has dropped to 360,000 from 2m in mid-April. A quarter of those are newly eligible 12- to 15-year-olds.Separately, pandemic researchers are warning that a picture of “two Americas” is emerging – the vaccinated and unvaccinated – that in many ways might reflect red state and blue state political divides.Only 52% of Republicans said they were partially or fully vaccinated, and 29% said they have no intention of getting a vaccine, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll. 77% of Democrats said they were already vaccinated, with just 5% responding that were resisting the vaccine.“I call it two Covid nations,” Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told BuzzFeed News.Bette Korber, a computational biologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said she expected variant Delta to become the most common variant in the US within weeks. “It’s really moving quickly,” Korber told Buzzfeed.On Friday, President Biden issued a plea to Americans who have not yet received a vaccine to do so as soon as possible.“Even while we’re making incredible progress, it remains a serious and deadly threat,” Biden said in remarks from the White House, saying that the Delta variant leaves unvaccinated people “even more vulnerable than they were a month ago”.“We’re heading into, God willing, the summer of joy, the summer of freedom,” Biden said. “On July 4, we are going to celebrate our independence from the virus as we celebrate our independence of our nation. We want everyone to be able to do that.” More

Isabella Guzman is the new administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA). And she’s got a long-term problem.No, it’s not about pandemic loans or the bottleneck in disbursing grants under other stimulus initiatives. It’s not even about catching fraudsters or approving applications. She has these problems of course. But that’s not the long-term problem.Guzman’s long-term problem has to do with awareness.“The SBA has always been the best kept secret in government, and we don’t want to be that,” she told me in a recent podcast interview. “We want to be known.”Right now most small business owners I know are only aware of the SBA because of the media attention received – both positive and negative – by being the middleman for various stimulus programs. But those programs are going to end this year. So what happens after that? What’s next for the SBA?For years, the department has struggled to get the word out about its services. And there’s no question that the SBA has many services to offer small businesses well and beyond dolling out loans and grants.“We know that government can be hard to navigate, and we’re trying to simplify our processes,” Guzman says. “Our customers are small businesses owners who have to wear so many hats and have so many responsibilities and need a team behind them.”What kind of team? There are the Small Business Development Centers, a network of free consulting agencies generally tied to colleges and universities which use professors and grad students as resources to help small businesses create business plans, do market research and evaluate technology. Or there’s Score, a long time, SBA-linked association of “retired” small business experts and owners who provide wisdom and advice at no charge. The SBA also has a myriad of educational programs and customer assistance resources that can help small businesses get government contracts or just better manage cash flow.Then there are the many guaranteed loan programs the agency offers through its lender network that can provide millions of dollars of working capital and other financing opportunities to buy property and equipment for small businesses who otherwise would not be able to fulfill normal banking requirements.And yet, when I ask my clients – who are mostly established firms – about the SBA I usually get blank stares. These clients aren’t aware of these options. They don’t realize they can get free consulting from university professors and retired CEOs or bank loans from lenders that wouldn’t ordinarily lend to them. Even the business owners I know operating in low- to moderate-income areas aren’t aware of the special services and funding available specifically for them. Or the more than a hundred women’s business centers throughout the country specifically devoted to the needs of female entrepreneurs.Why not? It’s awareness. The SBA has an opportunity to leverage the enormous PR it received during the pandemic and use it to make more businesses aware of all that it does. So how does administrator Guzman plan to do this?“We’re going to be looking at all of our programs completely and trying to apply a customer-first and technology forward approach as well as an equitable approach,” she says. “We intend to make sure that we’re meeting businesses where they’re at in their current situations and providing products and services that can best help them grow.”Specifically, that means hiring better and brighter people for her organization (“like Nasa” she says), increasing their partnering outreach to government departments, local organizations and chambers of commerce, and focusing on issues that are top of mind for many business owners, such as exit strategies.“Our small business development centers in particular are training up on ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans) and other types of alternatives for exit strategies,” Guzman says. “We know that it’s a big challenge to sell or hand down a business and we don’t want those businesses to disappear.”Finally, Guzman plans a greater reach out to communities of color and other areas where discrimination and lack of education is holding back on their opportunities. Her goal is to prevent “barriers from limiting entrepreneurship” and “to make sure that every type of entrepreneur from all backgrounds have the opportunity to pursue their dream of small business ownership”.Will the SBA be able to leverage its notoriety from the pandemic into a message that enables more small business owners to take advantage of all the resources it provides? Other administrators have tried this in the past, with mediocre outcomes. But Guzman has a chance right now to increase capitalize on what her agency has done in the past and make more business owners aware of the services it can provide in the future. Let’s hope she succeeds. More

“Disbelief. Distraught and traumatized.”Just some of the words United Steelworkers Local 8-957 president Joe Gouzd used to describe how he and hundreds of other workers felt after their 56-year-old pharmaceutical plant in West Virginia was shut down, sending between 1,500 to 2,000 jobs to India and Australia.The Viatris plant at Chestnut Ridge, just outside Morgantown, has been in operation since 1965, providing well paid jobs in one of America’s poorer states. And the timing of the closure has workers furious.“This is the last generic pharmaceutical manufacturing giant in the US, and executives are offshoring our jobs to India for more profits. What is this going to do to us if we have another pandemic?” said Gouzd.It is also causing a political row, with Congress accused of inaction and workers denouncing profits before people.“When is this going to end, losing American jobs? Every politician you hear, part of their political platform is: jobs, domestic jobs, domestic manufacturing, bringing jobs and manufacturing back to America,” said Gouzd.The offshoring of jobs has taken on new political weight since Donald Trump was elected. But his record in office was just as poor as his predecessors’.While the US does not track all jobs lost to offshoring, the labor department does count the number of workers who petition for help under a federal law designed to aid those harmed by trade.According to Reuters, during the four years of Trump, those petitions covered 202,151 workers whose jobs moved overseas, only slightly less than the 209,735 workers covered under Obama.Biden has proposed taxing companies that offshore jobs, but it remains to be seen whether he will be successful. Viatris may prove his first big test.The union is fighting to prevent the plant closure, asking elected officials to repurpose the plant via the Defense Production Act of 1950. It also criticized elected officials in Congress from ignoring their pleas for assistance “for no other reason than stakeholder return on investment dollars,” said Gouzd, who has also worked at the plant for 22 years.The local union branch represents about 900 workers. “Families are going to be forced to relocate, probably sell their homes, and relocate from West Virginia. Here we’re going to rid ourselves of 2,000 high-paying jobs in north central West Virginia, taking out $150m to $200m out of the local economy from lost income.”Less than a month after Mylan merged with Pfizer’s Upjohn to form Viatris, the company informed the union of its plans to shut down the plant and send the work abroad, as part of a $1bn cost-cutting restructuring plan. Mylan reported $3.9bn in profits in 2019, and over $1bn in quarterly profits before the merger. The plant is scheduled to end manufacturing on 31 July when the majority of the workforce will be laid off, with closure operations planned to end by 31 March next year.Carla Shultz, 60, worked at the plant for 13 years and is worried about not being ready to retire, but too old to return to college or be able to find another job with comparable wages and benefits.Through her job, Shultz was able to receive chemotherapy tablets for her mother; the same medicine would have cost her family $7,000 a month without benefits for her job. During the pandemic, her mother caught coronavirus and is currently hospitalized, on oxygen, and requiring round-the-clock care.“It added a lot more stress to our already stressful situation caring for family. I also take care of my three grandchildren, two of whom are school-age. But they’ve been home a lot while schools were closed because of Covid,” said Shultz.“My sister and I take turns caring for my mom. I help in the daytime after I get off work catching a nap when I can and then keeping my midnight shift schedule. It’s not easy keeping up, but we do what we have to do for our families.”Chad McCormick, recording secretary of USW Local 8-957, has worked at the plant since 2001, but now expects to be forced to find a much lower paying job to remain in the area, where his family has lived for decades.“I’ve been here for over 20 years. I’ve since gotten married, had three children, and built a house,” said McCormick. “It’s just devastating, and a lot more people than I expected are now looking into relocating.”The West Virginia legislature passed a bill calling on governor Jim Justice and Joe Biden to save the jobs. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Marco Rubio introduced the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Review Act to conduct a study on the American over-reliance on foreign countries in pharmaceutical industry, but neither West Virginia senator has sponsored the bill.According to Gouzd, Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito has ignored pleas to work with Biden officials to save the plant, and Democrat Joe Manchin, whose daughter served as Mylan’s chief executive until she retired in 2020, has also ignored their requests to get involved and help.Viatris cited the plant closure as part of a global restructuring initiative, and said it is exploring alternatives outside the company network.“The phasing out of manufacturing operations in Morgantown was a decision the company did not take lightly and in no way reflects upon our genuine appreciation for the commitment and work ethic of the employees at Chestnut Ridge,” it said. More

New York City will effectively choose its next mayor in the coming days, drawing to a close a tumultuous election race marred by allegations of sexual misconduct, by the staff of one campaign launching a protest against their own candidate, and by accusations that at least one of the mayoral hopefuls doesn’t actually live in the city.The winner in Tuesday’s Democratic primary will, given the leftward political leanings of the city, almost certainly win the election proper in November, and immediately be tasked with leading New York through its darkest period in several decades.America’s largest city is still recovering from the death of more than 30,000 people from coronavirus, many of them during a harrowing two-month spell in early 2020. It is also engaged in a passionate debate about to rebuild from the pandemic in a way that tackles longstanding issues of inequality.A lack of affordable housing crisis, laid bare during Covid-19, looms over the city, while an election season that began with calls for partially defunding the New York’s police department has pivoted in recent weeks, as a spike in shootings swung the debate in the opposite direction and propelled a Black former police officer, Eric Adams, to the top of the polls.After eight years of Bill de Blasio, who was elected as a progressive mayor but whose time in charge has frequently disappointed both the left and right wings of the Democratic party, the signs are that New Yorkers are ready to swing to the center.But Adams, who would be the second Black man to be mayor of New York City, and his fellow centrist frontrunners Kathryn Garcia and Andrew Yang, have also been helped by the spectacular implosion of two of the most hotly-tipped left-leaning candidates over the past two months.Many supporters abandoned Scott Stringer, New York’s comptroller, after two women accused him of sexual misconduct, while followers of Dianne Morales, a former non-profit executive, were aghast when most of her campaign staff led an angry demonstration outside her office in May, accusing their candidate of union busting and inaction over allegations of racism.The lack of a serious Republican candidate has added to the certainty that it will be the winner of the Democratic primary who move into Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York City, come January.Despite that added importance of the looming ballot, early voting has so far been very low in a city, and country, that may be suffering from election burnout.Just 32,032 people voted on the first two days they were eligible to do so, which New York magazine pointed out is less than 1% of the city’s 3.7 million registered Democrats and 566,000 registered Republicans.This is the first mayoral election in the city that has featured early voting, however, and the candidates are hoping most voters turn out to the city’s 1,107 polling sites on the day.The polls so far suggest those voters, who are able to rank up to five candidates for the first time in a New York mayoral election, are struggling to make up their minds. Yang, a tech entrepreneur who ran a whimsical bid for president in 2020, led the polls for weeks before being caught by Adams and Garcia, a former New York sanitation commissioner who has been endorsed by the New York Times.Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney who is running as a progressive, has hoovered up the progressive endorsements lost by Stringer and Morales, however, and surged to second place in a survey last week, while another poll showed Yang, in particular, losing support.Wiley, like Garcia, would be New York’s first female mayor in history, a moment that struck home when she voted – for herself – on Monday.“To see my name on a ballot is very hard to describe,” Wiley said on Twitter. “It’s very moving. And I’m thinking about all of the little girls who I’ve met this year, who have looked into my eyes and seen themselves. I ranked myself #1 for them.”To see my name on a ballot is very hard to describe. It’s very moving. And I’m thinking about all of the little girls who I’ve met this year, who have looked into my eyes and seen themselves. I ranked myself #1 for them. pic.twitter.com/shm7YHeM8y— Maya Wiley (@mayawiley) June 14, 2021
For Adams, becoming the frontrunner has not been without its problems. In early June Politico reported there was “conflicting information” on whether Adams, the current Brooklyn borough president, actually lives in the neighboring state of New Jersey, where he co-owns a home with his partner.This led to the bizarre scene of Adams giving a tour of what he said was his garden-level Brooklyn apartment.As Adams showed reporters his “small modest bedroom” and “small modest bathroom”, however, internet sleuths noticed that a line of sneakers in what Adams said was his bedroom matched shoes his adult son was seen wearing in Instagram photos, while others noted that the fridge in the Brooklyn apartment was different to fridges Adams had previously shown off in photos on Twitter.Adams later released receipts from his EZpass – an electronic tag which automatically bills any tolls incurred on bridges and tunnels – which he said proved that while he did visit New Jersey, it was never for more than a few hours at a time.Yang, who himself was criticized earlier this year after it emerged he had moved his family out of the city as Covid-19 struck, has had no qualms about pouncing on the issue.“I want to reflect on the oddness and the bizarreness of where we are in this race right now, where Eric is literally trying to convince New Yorkers where he lives and that he lives in this basement,” Yang said at a debate last week.A more unsavory backdrop to the campaigns of both men, and a reality check for those who see New York City as a progressive spark, is the millions of dollars that groups supporting Adams and Yang have received from big money donors who normally save their money for Republican candidates.A brighter spot for many has been the introduction of ranked choice voting for the first time in New York City, although the roll out has not been without its problems. Some Black political leaders have criticized the system, suggesting voters of color were less likely to receive adequate information about how ranked choice works, and less likely to engage in ranking candidates.In a recent poll, 74% of white voters said they planned to pick more than one candidate, but only half of Black and Hispanic voters said they would do the same, an especially disappointing statistic in a race where four of the leading eight candidates are people of color.Climate change, meanwhile, has been largely absent from the televised Democratic debates, a glaring oversight for a coastal city that has an average elevation of 33ft – some areas are much lower – and was decimated by the tidal surge from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.Instead, in the final weeks crime has become a key issue. According to the New York police department’s public database there were 490 shootings in the city between 1 January and 16 May of this year, the highest number since 2002, while there have been 146 murders, a steep climb from 2019 and 2020 and a rise matched by some other large cities in the US.That figure is a long way from the dark days of the 1980s and 90s, when some years saw more than 2,000 people killed, but it has been enough to dominate the discussion.Last summer, as tens of thousands of people attended Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests in New York, many of the candidates appeared to embrace cutting the NYPD’s $6bn budget, but over the past months some have run the other way, with Yang recently calling for a “recruitment drive” to hire more police officers.Unless Wiley, who has stuck by her plan to cleave $1bn from the police budget, can pull off a win, an election that began with a lot of hope for progressives will likely end up in disappointment.But with New York City facing problems of a scale not seen in a generation, a job once dubbed the “second toughest job in America” is likely to live up to its name – whoever takes charge. More

George Packer’s incisive, deftly argued book about the moral and political quandary of the United States begins and ends with his declaration: “I am an American.” The statement is self-evident but also self-congratulatory: Americans regard their citizenship as a spiritual credential, a gesture of faith in the country that has always claimed to be the last, best hope of beleaguered mankind. Packer’s native land, however, no longer deserves to be quite so certain of its exceptional virtue or its automatic pre-eminence. Early in the pandemic it had to accept charitable handouts from Russia and Taiwan, and Packer sadly accepts a new, reduced reality by calling America “a beggar nation” and even “a failed state”. After this he twists his title from a boast into an abject plea: “No one is going to save us. We are our last best hope.”The need for salvation became urgent before the election last November when Packer, having moved his family from Brooklyn to a Covid-free rural retreat, noticed a sign beside the road on a neighbouring farm. His car headlights flashed across a red rectangle branded with five white capital letters. Even here, Packer realised with a shudder, he was not safe. He doesn’t need to say what the letters spelled out: they were as succinctly satanic as the number 666 – the mark of the beast in the Book of Revelation – which made Nancy Reagan alter the street address of a house where she and the retiring president were due to live in Los Angeles.Superstitiously refusing to name Trump when he reads the campaign sign, Packer eventually recognises his “reptilian genius” – a talent for sniffing out and then stoking up the grudges of voters in the “terra incognita” that lies between America’s shining seas. A self-accusing shock follows. As the election draws near, Packer sees shop owners fortifying their premises. “Millions of people were arming up,” says this impeccably liberal urban man. He then adds: “I wondered if I should do the same.” Of course he decides not to, but the damage is done: his panicked reaction testifies to the collapse of the trust in others that sustains democracy. The problem, Packer acknowledges, is “not who Trump was, but who we are”. The first verb in that sentence is happily in the past tense, but the second remains in the troubled present: the populace empowered the vicious populist in the first place, and may yet allow him to revive his lawless, larcenous, nepotistic sideshow.Packer – who as well as contributing to the New Yorker and the Atlantic has edited collections of George Orwell’s essays – goes on to attempt something close to the ideological fables in Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. He dramatises a “cold civil war” between four incompatible versions of the US: the Free America of libertarian Reagan, the Smart America of Clinton-era technocrats, the Real America of Trump the bottom-feeding demagogue, and the Just America of #MeToo and BLM. Each has its own narrative, abhors the others as existential enemies, and regards compromise as betrayal.The US has had many crises: a nation founded on a messianic idea can redeem itself by reaffirming first principles“I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them,” Packer concludes. He smirks about customers at Walgreen drugstores and members of Rotary clubs in the heartland, snidely notes Sarah Palin’s post-political career as an “autographed merchandise saleswoman”, and even derides the “sagging bellies” of the marauders who invaded the Capitol on 6 January, as if their obesity was the worst thing about them. But all these alien groups have to be included in democracy’s gathering of “We the people”: Packer’s sniffy attitude is a symptom of the problem he defines. An “epistemic rupture”, he says, has made Americans “profoundly unreal to one another”; lacking a shared reality, they have burrowed into partisan encampments or sealed themselves in digital ghettoes, echo chambers of angry prejudice.The relevance of this depressing analysis extends across the ocean. Disaffected American activists in red and blue states fantasise about secession; here a fraying union is much more likely to fall apart. Packer believes that his country’s dualistic political parties have in effect changed places, with the Democrats now “the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans… sound like populist insurgents”. Hasn’t the same switchover happened with Labour and the Tories? Packer calls Trump “an all-American flimflam man”; Boris Johnson is our homegrown equivalent, the embodiment of all that is bogus, smug and sloppily amateurish in this country – though at least Trump transmitted a sulphurous “dark energy”, whereas Johnson mainly gives vent to verbal flatulence. Trump, Packer says in passing, “levelled everyone down together”: that exposes Boris’s blather about “levelling up” as an empty, opportunistic play on words. Commenting on an American meritocracy whose sole merit is its luck on the stock market, Packer predicts: “As with any hereditary ruling class, political power will fall into the hands of increasingly inferior people.” To prove his point locally, I nominate slick Sunak, shifty Hancock, Patel the bully and Williamson the schoolroom dunce.Packer is still able to cheer himself up at the end by reiterating: “I am an American and there’s no escape.” After our own disastrous epistemic episode, what can we say? We’re no longer Europeans, and only foreigners call us Brits, which they generally do while rolling their eyes in exasperation. Belonging by birth to none of the UK’s four tribes, I sometimes feel like a stateless refugee holed up in the republic of my house. Although America suffered through what Packer calls “a near-death experience” with Trump, it has had many such crises and has recovered from them all: a nation founded on a messianic idea can always redeem itself by reaffirming first principles, as Joe Biden seems determined to do. The UK lacks an originating myth or mission, and thus has no sense of purpose, no means of renewal, and nothing to look forward to but pitiful decline. Despite imperial puffery, we may never have been the best, but we used to be better than this. Now we seem doomed to be last, and there’s no hope anywhere. More