US Politics

Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterJoe Biden will sign an executive order expanding voting rights on Sunday, the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when police brutally attacked a voting rights march in Selma, Alabama.Republicans have advanced more than 250 measures in state legislatures which aim to restrict voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.Biden referenced those measures in remarks delivered remotely to a unity breakfast in Selma on Sunday, saying: “We cannot let them succeed.”“If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide,” he said. “Let more people vote.”House Democrats last week passed HR1, a bill that contains some of the most sweeping measures to expand voting rights since the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Amid the increasing efforts to restrict voting rights, there are increasing calls for Democrats to get around the 60-vote filibuster in the US Senate in order to pass the measure.The US constitution gives the president little power over voting rights. The executive order Biden will sign will therefore implement relatively modest but potentially consequential changes.The most significant will instruct federal agencies to offer voter registration opportunities if a state requests so, under a 1993 federal law.Offering voter registration opportunities at agencies could boost registration rates among populations where it currently lags. Voter registration at the Indian Health Service, for example, could affect more than 1.9 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives, according to an estimate from the Brennan Center for Justice.Offering registration at the Veterans Association could reach almost 20 million voters and doing the same at immigration offices could affect more than 760,000 each year.Another provision in the order requires the Department of Justice to provide people in federal custody – including those on probation – with voter registration information and “to the extent practicable and appropriate” to facilitate voting by mail.States have widely different policies on when people with a felony conviction can vote and navigating such rules can be extremely difficult for people once they are released from prison.Biden’s order also directs the attorney general to establish procedures to help formerly incarcerated people get identification they can use to vote.The order also instructs the federal government to study how to improve voting access for people with disabilities and how each federal agency can improve voter registration opportunities.It directs officials to come up with a plan to improve vote.gov, the federal website for voting information. Biden will also establish a Native American voting rights steering group and instruct the Office of Personnel Management and Department of Defense to study how to improve voting access for federal employees and the military as well as Americans overseas. More

Donald Trump could arrive in New York City for his first visit since leaving the White House as soon as Sunday night, according to multiple reports.
The former president was born in Queens and rose to fame in Manhattan but changed his primary residence to Florida in 2019 and has been at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach since leaving Washington on 20 January.
After reports of a New York visit proliferated on Saturday, local station WABC-TV reported that police were preparing to increase security around Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The New York police department did not comment.
Trump’s New York home was the subject of protests and a heavy police presence from the start of his run for the White House in summer 2015 through to the end of his term in office in the acrid aftermath of the 6 January Capitol attack.
In July 2020, amid national protests for racial justice and policing reform, city authorities painted the words “Black Lives Matter” on the street outside Trump Tower. Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed to have “liberated” that stretch of Fifth Avenue. The mural was repeatedly vandalised.
Trump was impeached for a second time for inciting the Capitol insurrection, in which five people died, as part of his claim that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, a lie repeatedly thrown out of court. He was acquitted, when only seven Republican senators voted to convict.
He retains a grip on Republican politics, regularly topping polls of potential presidential nominees for 2024 but this week reportedly demanding the party stop fundraising using his name.
On Saturday the New York Daily News quoted former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen referring to a gold statue which made a splash at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida last week, when he said: “The human Donald must … be put on display for the multitude of NYC followers.”
In truth Trump remains a divisive figure in New York, a Democratic city, amid two investigations which have added to his considerable legal jeopardy since losing the protections of office. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr and state attorney general Letitia James are both looking into Trump’s financial affairs.

Cohen is under house arrest in the city, completing a sentence for offences including paying hush money to two women who claimed affairs with Trump, claims Trump denied though he admitted knowing of the payments.
Cohen has spoken to Vance. The Daily News said Trump’s visit would not be in connection with that investigation, which received a huge boost last month when the supreme court declined to block access to Trump’s tax returns and financial records.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner have also relocated to Florida since the end of their time in power, with Ivanka thought likely to mount a run for US Senate in the southern state.
Trump’s own future in Florida has been called into question. Though he owns the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, a 1993 agreement says he cannot live there permanently. Last month the former president won favourable comments from the town attorney, in a hearing involving residents who want to hold Trump to that deal. A decision is due in April. More

Ghazaal Habibyar’s trembling hand hovered over her mobile phone, unable to type the numbers. “I was afraid to hear bad news,” she recalls of that morning in Kabul when she heard there’d been an explosion close to her young son’s school.
“Why should we have to choose between educating or protecting our children?” asks the 38-year-old mother of two – a former Afghan deputy minister of mines and petroleum. That day, her six-year-old son was sitting safely in class.
This is how the day begins now in Kabul – the time of day in a time of war that is most worrying of all. Afghans call them “the danger hours”.
“There’ve been blasts before me, and blasts behind me,” says 22-year-olduniversity student Sadeq Alakozai. “Every day we wonder whose turn it will be.”
One morning, a magnetic “sticky” bomb slapped on a minibus took the life of a popular TV presenter at the same time Alakozai and his friends were driving to work on the same street. Another morning, a district security chief was assassinated in a blast so strong it flipped the police car upside down at a busy roundabout just before they reached the same corner.
Afghanistan – map
From 7.30am to 9.30am, when the diesel fume-soaked streets of the capital are choked with traffic as government employees go to work, is the time to avoid, if you can. Every day someone somewhere in Afghanistan is picked off: journalists and judges; civil servants and scholars; activists and academics.
Many of the victims came of age in the two decades since the Taliban were toppled from power in the US-led invasion after the 9/11 attacks; their lives are being cut short as the last of the US-led Nato forces deliberate over a departure date and the Taliban boast of victory.
The Taliban’s path back to power could either run through accelerating moves by President Joe Biden’s team to negotiate a political way out of war, or what many fear could be the most blistering of battles this summer in a country which has already lived through more than 40 years of pain.
No one takes responsibility for this wave of assassinations. The Afghan government blames the Taliban. The Taliban accuse the Afghan government, which is also under fire for not being able to protect its people. And, in a time of rising insecurity and impunity, anyone with a gun and a grudge can exploit the moment.
Many see a concerted campaign by Taliban supporters to kill off or frighten away what is described, in shorthand, as the “gains of the last 20 years”: educated, ambitious women; a vibrant media; an active civil society.
“They claim these realities were created under the US military occupation and are like foam on top of water, which goes away as soon as you touch the waters underneath,” says Tamim Asey, a former deputy defence minister who now chairs the Institute of War and Peace Studies in Kabul. More

One of the most powerful Democrats in Washington has issued a frank warning to members of his own party, saying they need to find a way to pass major voting rights legislation or they will lose control of Congress.The comments from Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, came days after the House of Representatives approved a sweeping voting rights bill that would enact some of the most dramatic expansions of the right to vote since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Even though Democrats also control the US Senate, the bill is unlikely to pass the chamber because of a procedural rule, the filibuster, that requires 60 votes to advance legislation.In an interview with the Guardian this week, Clyburn called out two moderate Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have opposed getting rid of the filibuster. Republicans across the country are advancing sweeping measures to curtail voting rights and letting expansive voting rights legislation die would harm Democrats, Clyburn said.“There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights. That just ain’t gonna happen. That would be catastrophic,” he said. “If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rights.”If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rightsClyburn issued that warning ahead of the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when law enforcement officers brutally beat voting rights activists in Selma, Alabama.Clyburn and other House Democrats have been hoping the early days of Joe Biden’s administration will be marked by passage of a bill named after the late congressman John Lewis of Georgia, a civil rights hero who was nearly killed on Bloody Sunday. That measure would restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, gutted by the supreme court in 2013, that required places with a history of voting discrimination to get election changes cleared by the federal government before they took effect.“Here we are talking about the Voting Rights Act he worked so hard for and that’s named in his honor and they’re going to filibuster it to death? That ain’t gonna happen,” Clyburn said.But the likelihood of that bill becoming law is doubtful under current procedures. Democrats expect Republicans to find a reason to filibuster it after its expected passage through the House of Representatives and consideration in the Senate. Thus Clyburn is calling for some kind of workaround of the filibuster in the current legislative climate, in which the Senate is split 50-50 and use of the legislative obstructing mechanism is all too common.“I’m not going to say that you must get rid of the filibuster. I would say you would do well to develop a Manchin-Sinema rule on getting around the filibuster as it relates to race and civil rights,” Clyburn said.Clyburn said he has not discussed changing the filibuster with Biden, who has expressed support for keeping the filibuster in place.The reality of their slim majority and the regularity of legislation dying through filibuster has caused Democrats to opt to pass the Biden administration’s Covid relief package through a budgetary process called reconciliation, which is not subject to the filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold. Clyburn wants to see the same thing with civil rights.“You can’t filibuster the budget,” Clyburn said. “That’s why we have reconciliation rules. We need to have civil and voting rights reconciliation. That should have had reconciliation permission a long, long time ago.”He noted: “If the headlines were to read that the John R Lewis Voting Rights Act was filibustered to death it would be catastrophic.”Clyburn’s comments underscore the difficulty the federal government has in moving any bill because of arcane legislative roadblocks. Broadly popular proposals like a minimum wage increase or a voting rights bill seem dead on arrival. And that has left veteran Senate Democrats skeptical that even a bill protecting Americans’ rights to vote has a chance. First, the filibuster would have to go, and that seems unlikely at the moment.“The short-term prospects of doing away with the filibuster seem remote just because there aren’t the votes to do that,” said Luke Albee, a former chief of staff to the Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Pat Leahy of Vermont. “My gut is it will take six months, eight months, a year of total obstructionism on the Republican side for senators who are skeptical now of getting rid of the filibuster to at least have a more open mind about it.”Albee also said it was possible that a Voting Rights Act could face strong Republican opposition, despite Clyburn’s confidence.“There’s no one that hopes it passes more than me but I just worry it’s a toxic environment,” Albee added. More

Molly Jong-Fast has known great success as a writer but over the last year on The New Abnormal, her podcast on politics in the time of Covid, she has become both half of a crackling double act and an interviewer with a habit of making news.The double act formed with Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist and the co-founder of the Lincoln Project who is now taking a spell off-air. The producer Jesse Cannon has stepped in but the interviews remain largely the realm of Jong-Fast.Years ago, Molly and her mother, the author Erica Jong, gave a joint interview of their own. Molly, the Guardian wrote, was “loud, arch and snappishly funny [with] the mien of a runaway train, words hurtling forth, helter-skelter.”It remains the case. Before the pandemic, she threw famous dinner parties which brought unlikely people together. Now a contributing editor for the Daily Beast, she throws politicians, scientists, policy wonks and comedians together on a podcast, a form of broadcasting well suited to pandemic life. Down the phone – or up it – from Wall Street to the Upper East Side, appropriately socially distanced, I appropriate one of her own ways to start any interview. A few introductory remarks, then …“Talk to me about that.”And she does.I had wanted to do a podcast. Everybody has a podcast. It’s a thing“As you know, as someone who lives in New York, our lockdown came fast, and it came very profoundly, and we were locked down. Actually, it was this time last year. I had just come back from [the Conservative Political Action Conference] in Washington DC. As I was coming home, I got an email that said, ‘If you were at CPAC, you may have been exposed to a super-spreader, and you need to quarantine.’ So I actually called the school nurses at all my kids’ schools and I said, ‘You guys, what I do?’“Since nobody really knew anything about the virus, they said, ‘Look, you can do whatever you want, but we would really appreciate if you would just keep your kids home for two weeks.’ I was like, ‘Absolutely. We don’t know anything.’ As someone who is not a doctor but who is completely obsessed with my own physical health in a totally deranged and neurotic way, I’m proud to say I’ve worried about every pandemic that comes. I was worried about H1N1 before.“And you could see this coming. I have friends in Milan … You saw these stories about Milan, and you knew we were a week behind or we were two weeks behind. I had a friend in London … her mother had a fancy private doctor and the fancy private doctor would send her these letters about who was going to get treatment in the hospital and who was going to be left at home to die.“So I had a sense that that stuff was coming, so I really made sure that everybody locked down way early in my house. Then I had nothing to do.“So I said, ‘Let’s start a podcast.’ I had sort of been the driver behind it because I had wanted to do a podcast. Everybody has a podcast. It’s a thing. But I’m always interested in what other people have to tell me. So … I get a lot from it.“Another thing about me is, besides being dyslexic and a horrible student, I have terrible, terrible ADHD, which has never been medicated. I don’t take medicine for it because I’m 23 years sober, so it just would be too complicated for me. And I’m a person who was, in my heyday, a terrible cocaine addict, so I would not trust myself for a minute with ADHD drugs.”I’m super ADHD, so I get very bored very easily. So we ge people and if they don’t say interesting stuff, I’m like, ‘Eh’Jong-Fast chronicled those wild years in two novels and a memoir about being the daughter of a writer who wrote a lot about sex. In the 1970s, her mum invented “the zipless fuck”. But I digress. As Jong-Fast likes to say to interviewees: “Continue.”“But I’m super ADHD, so I get very bored very easily. So we get these people, and if they don’t say interesting stuff, I’m like, ‘Eh.’ I’m like, ‘This is very boring.’ So I think that has made the pod good, because I do these interviews and I get very bored. Then I’m like, ‘Come on. Get going here, people.’”New Abnormal interviews are fascinating and often hilarious. That’s down to a mix of the ethics of podcasting, looser than for talk radio – as Cannon says, “FCC guidelines would never be able to handle what we do” – and the ethics of the Daily Beast, a New York tabloid in website form, pugilistic and intelligent, taking the fight to the man.Another Jong-Fast interview technique, very much in the vein of the podcast’s one beloved regular segment, Fuck That Guy, is to ask key questions in the bluntest way possible. Take two recent examples. To the White House Covid adviser Andy Slavitt: “Can you explain to me what’s happening with AstraZeneca, because that seems to me very much a clusterfuck.” To Ian Dunt of politics.co.uk, there to discuss Brexit: “What the fuck is wrong with your country?”What the fuck is that all about?“Well, as someone who was interviewed a lot when I was young and would sit through endless mother being interviewed, grandfather [the novelist Howard Fast, who wrote Spartacus] being interviewed, always watching, I always think that the worst questions are the questions where you tell the person what you want them to say.“Look, I get it. I write things all the time where I want people to say stuff, but you can’t really get them to say it anyway … Part of it is I always think you should make it so they’re comfortable enough to really tell you what’s going on and to let you in. Also, I think they know that I don’t have a malicious intent. I just want people to see who they are.”What they are, in many cases after a year of lockdown, is suffering.“I had Mary Trump on the pod again today,” Jong-Fast says, of the former president’s niece. “She’s a psychiatrist, so she and I always talk about mental health because I’m just a sober person, and when you’re sober you’re always in your head thinking about mental health. We were talking about how we really are in the middle of this terrible mental health crisis, and everyone is just in denial about it.”Donald Trump has left the White House. The Biden administration is flooding the zone with vaccines. But we are still in the new abnormal.“I’m always surprised no one sees that. So it’s like, ‘Well, I don’t understand why I have a terrible headache. It can’t be because hundreds of thousands of Americans have died.’ So it is weird.”‘I wish we could get more Republicans’The New Abnormal has featured Democrats – senators, representatives, candidates – and bureaucrats and technocrats too. But in both the very strange election year in which the pod was born and in the brave new world of Biden, few Republicans have followed.“I wish we could get more,” Jong-Fast says. “I think I got one Republican guy who was running for Congress, but it’s not so easy.”That was John Cowan, from Georgia, who ran against Marjorie Taylor Greene and her racially charged conspiracy theories – and lost.“Yes, and he’s going to run again. He’s a neurosurgeon. I was thrilled to get him. But they’re not so interested in coming on, even the sort of moderates.”She does the booking herself, so perhaps Congressman Adam Kinzinger or Senator Mitt Romney might one day pick up the phone to find Jong-Fast full blast.“‘You are a fucking genius. Why are you so brilliant?’ I’m very good at schnorring people into doing things for me. I’m very able to just endlessly schnorr people. I think that’s key to getting the guests.”I don’t know what schnorr means.“It means you sort of just put the arm on people to get them to come on the pod. The guests are the big thing because the people who want to come on are often not people you really want.”A lot of listeners want Wilson to return. Jong-Fast, formerly an unpaid adviser to the Lincoln Project, calls him “a very good friend” but is uncomfortable talking about his absence from the podcast – which was prompted by allegations of sexual harassment against another Lincoln Project co-founder and reporting on fundraising and internal politics.Cannon calls Wilson “one of the most politically astute people in America” and “a genius”. And he may well be back, one day, to reconstitute the double act, the Florida Republican and the Upper East Side liberal lobbing spiralling profanity at the extremity, inanity and insanity of Trumpism and life under Covid-19.But it’s not all about fighting back.“I wish there were a little bit more good-faith want for people to interact with the other side,” Jong-Fast says. “Look, there are people on the other side, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are not good-faith actors, and you can’t even try. But there are people like Mitt Romney who, while I don’t agree with him on a lot of things, he’s a very good-faith actor. So I think there’s a real chance.”If you’re reading, Mitt, if Molly calls … pick up the phone. More

A leading expert on racism in children’s literature has said the decision by the Dr Seuss Foundation to withdraw six books should be viewed as a “product recall” and not, as many claim, an example of cancel culture. Philip Nel, a professor of English at Kansas State University, is the author of Was The Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books. He told the Guardian the six titles by Theodor Geisel published between 1937 and 1976 that Dr Seuss Enterprises said it would cease printing contained stereotypes of a clearly racist nature.“Dr Seuss Enterprises has made a moral decision of choosing not to profit from work with racist caricature in it and they have taken responsibility for the art they are putting into the world and I would support that,” Nel said.The titles in question are And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super! and The Cat’s Quizzer. Dr Seuss books have sold some 700m copies globally.They’re not being banned. They’re not being cancelled. It’s just a decision to no longer sell themAfter this week’s announcement, amid uproar eagerly stoked by conservatives in the media and Congress, Dr Seuss books swiftly dominated sales charts. On Friday, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, went so far as to share a video of himself reading from Green Eggs and Ham, a perennial strong seller.“I still like Dr Seuss, so I decided to read Green Eggs and Ham,” McCarthy said, inviting viewers to respond “if you still like him too!”Geisel’s stepdaughter, Lark Grey Dimond-Cates, told the New York Post there “wasn’t a racist bone in that man’s body”, but also said suspending publication of the six titles was “a wise decision”. But the controversy left many perplexed, since the decision was made by Dr Seuss Enterprises and not as a result of public pressure that has preceded other such decisions.Nel said the decision to no longer publish titles including caricatures of people of African, Asian and Arab descent showed just one way to address problematic material.“[The books are] not going to disappear,” he said. “They’re not being banned. They’re not being cancelled. It’s just a decision to no longer sell them.”Geisel died in 1991. Later in life, he made efforts to tone down racial stereotypes in some of his books. Such revisions “were imperfect but will-intentioned efforts that softened but did not erase the stereotyping”, Nel said, noting that Geisel also made a joke of the changes, “which served only to trivialise the importance of the alterations”.Moves to correct dated or offensive cultural material take different forms. Turner Classic Movies, for example, has introduced Reframed: Classic Films in the Rearview Mirror, a series devoted to “problematic” films. TCM identified 17 films that five hosts will discuss, among them Gone With the Wind, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Tarzan, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Searchers and Psycho.“We are hearing more and more from audiences about moments they are really puzzling over, if not downright offended by, in light of all of the broader cultural and political conversations we are having,” the University of Chicago cinema studies professor Jacqueline Stewart, a Reframed host, told Variety.TCM’s decision to seek to contextualise the films but not alter or drop them may reflect the importance of the works and a more mature target audience. Nel said placing contentious work in a larger context and inviting discussion can be risky when the work is directed at a younger consumers.“Children understand more than they can articulate,” he said. “If you inflict racist images on them before they can express what they’re articulating they may endure a harm they cannot process.”In the case of Dr Seuss, Nel said, that “is itself a reason to withdraw the books or to bring in books or art that counter stereotypes with truth.”He pointed to statistics that show the publishing industry still has a way to go. According to a recent Diversity in Children’s Books study, only 22% of children’s books published in 2018 featured non-white characters.Nel pointed to The Indian in the Cupboard series by Lynne Reid Banks, Penguin Random House titles about a toy figure of a Native American that comes alive, first published in 1980, as an example of a book that remains in print without comment or apology.“There’s a lot of examples of contemporary as well as older work that the publishing industry should address,” he said, “and there are different ways to do that. There’s a debate on what the response should be but there should be a response.”Merely putting the question of what a child can or cannot see to parents would not be an adequate solution, Nel said.“Parents may not have training in anti-racist education,” he said, “or may not know how to have these conversations. So in the case of Dr Seuss it’s a way of addressing the gap in what one might hope a responsible adult would know and what we can expect a responsible adult to know.“Either way, children’s book publishing is facing a reckoning, as indeed it has been for some time. This decision, and all the attention it has received, I hope will create a broader reckoning in the publishing industry – the need for more diverse books and to address the problems in current books being published.” More

Seven million votes more was almost not enough. Had 45,000 gone the other way in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, Donald Trump would still be president. Calls to defund the police nearly cost Joe Biden victory and led to a more than a dozen-seat loss for House Democrats.
Biden had “separated himself from the orthodoxies of his party’s base” but “had no coattails” to spare, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write. As always, culture counts – even amid a pandemic.
But “Unwoke Joe”, as the authors call him, was the one Democrat whose empathy and instincts matched the demands of the times. Lucky is an apt title for Allen and Parnes’s third book.
“In 2016, Trump had needed everything to go wrong for Hillary Clinton to win,” they write. “This time, Biden caught every imaginable break.”
Their joint take on Biden is a prism and scorecard that gives added understanding to the seemingly never-ending war of 2020. Allen is a veteran political writer at NBC News digital, Parnes reports for the Hill. They deliver.
Subtitled How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, Lucky is the first full-length campaign postmortem. It makes the silent parts of the conversation audible and reminds the reader the past is always with us.
The authors convey the cultural dimensions of Biden’s win. He was an old-time north-eastern pol who repeatedly bore witness to personal tragedy. So long in the Senate, he prided himself on his capacity to compromise and reach across the aisle, a trait that Allen and Parnes report elicited scorn from Elizabeth Warren.
Biden also sought to maintain a “close relationship with the police and the civil rights community”, in his own words. It was no accident South Carolina emerged as Biden’s firewall in the primary, or that James Clyburn, a 15-term congressman and the most senior Black member of the House, was pivotal in digging Biden out of a deep hole.
In the election’s aftermath, Clyburn attributed Democratic underperformance to the move to defund the police and the mantras of the left.
“I’ve always said that these headlines can kill a political effort,” he told NBC. For good measure, Clyburn added: “Sometimes I have real problems trying to figure out what progressive means.”
On the other hand, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama come across as out of sync. We are told that Clinton, the “vampire in the bullpen”, harbored thoughts of another run – until late 2019.
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The fact Clinton lost in 2008 and 2016 had not totally dulled her capacity to believe she could unify party and country. Lucky captures Biden in 2016, calling the former secretary of state a “horrible candidate” who failed to communicate what she actually stood for.
Unlike Clinton, Biden understood that simply drawing a contrast with Trump would not be sufficient. Yet Clinton did see that the 2020 Democratic nominee, whoever it was, would be in a fight for “the very soul of the nation”. Charlottesville provided that epiphany to Biden.
Obama too does not fare too well, a fair-weather friend to his vice-president on several occasions, overly concerned with protecting his own legacy. He got some very important stuff wrong. Biden was more attractive and viable than the 44th president and his coterie thought.
In the authors’ telling, Obama was temporarily enamored with Beto O’Rourke. Like Kamala Harris, the former Texas congressman’s candidacy was over before the first primary. For both, stardom did not translate into staying power.
Then, at an event with Black corporate leaders in the fall of 2019, Obama amplified Warren’s chances and trash-talked Pete Buttigieg, then mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Obama reportedly said: “He’s the mayor of a small town. He’s gay, and he’s short.” Unlike Buttigieg, Warren never won a primary. She also finished third in Massachusetts – her own state.
As for Biden, one source describes Obama’s support as “tepid at best”. Obama tacitly backed Biden just days before Super Tuesday in March. Months later, he took his time congratulating Biden on his election win.
Biden’s so-called “brother” failed to call him “on election day, or the next day, or the next, or the next”, according to Allen and Parnes. Obama waited until Saturday 7 November, “the day the networks had finally called the election”. The audacity of caution. More

In 1963, when the newly sworn in Lyndon Baines Johnson was advised against using his limited political capital on the controversial issue of civil and voting rights for Black Americans, he responded: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”The US is again approaching a crucial decision point on the most fundamental right of all in a democracy: the right to vote. The result will either be the biggest advance since LBJ’s landmark civil rights and voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965, or the biggest setback since the end of Reconstruction and start of Jim Crow in the 1870s.The decisive factor will be President Joe Biden.On one side are Republicans, who control most state legislatures and are using false claims of election fraud to enact an avalanche of voting restrictions on everything from early voting and voting by mail to voter IDs. They also plan to gerrymander their way back to a US House of Representatives majority.After losing the Senate and the presidency, they’re determined to win back power by rigging the rules against Democrats, disproportionately Black and brown voters. As a lawyer for the Arizona Republican party put it baldly before the supreme court, without such restrictions Republicans are “at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats”.On the other side are congressional Democrats, advancing the most significant democracy reform legislation since LBJ – a sprawling 791-page For the People Act, establishing national standards for federal elections.The proposed law mandates automatic registration of new voters, voting by mail and at least 15 days of early voting. It bans restrictive voter ID laws and purges of voter rolls, changes studies suggest would increase voter participation, especially by racial minorities. It also requires that congressional redistricting be done by independent commissions and creates a system of public financing for congressional campaigns.The legislation sailed through the House last week, on a party line vote. The showdown will occur in the Senate, where Republicans are determined to kill it. Although Democrats possess a razor-thin majority, the bill doesn’t stand a chance unless Democrats can overcome two big obstacles.The first is the filibuster, requiring 60 votes to pass regular legislation. Notably, the filibuster is not in the constitution and not even in law. It’s a rule that has historically been used against civil rights and voting rights bills, as it was in the 1960s when LBJ narrowly overcame it.Democrats can – and must – finally end the filibuster now, with their 51-vote majority.But if they try, they face a second obstacle. Two Democrats – Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – have said they won’t vote to end the filibuster, presumably because they want to preserve their centrist image and appeal to Republicans in their states. A few other Democrats are lukewarm to the idea.Well, I’m sorry. The stakes are too high. If Democrats fail to enact the For the People Act, Republicans will send voting rights into retreat for decades. There’s no excuse for Manchin and Sinema or any other Senate Democrat letting Republicans pull America backwards towards Jim Crow.And no reason Biden should let them. It’s time for him to assert the kind of leadership LBJ asserted more than a half-century ago on civil and voting rights.Johnson used every tool at his disposal, described by the journalist Mary McGrory as “an incredible, potent mixture of persuasion, badgering, flattery, threats, reminders of past favors and future advantages”.He warned the Georgia senator Richard Russell, a dedicated segregationist: “Dick, I love you and I owe you. But … I’m going to run over you if you challenge me on this civil rights bill.” He demanded his allies join him in pressuring holdouts. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, later Johnson’s vice-president, recalled: “The president grabbed me by my shoulder and damn near broke my arm.”Historians say Johnson’s importuning, bribing and threatening may have shifted the votes of close to a dozen senators, breaking the longest filibuster in history and clearing the way for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.We are once again at a crucial juncture for civil rights and voting rights that could shape America for a half-century or more. Joe Biden is not LBJ, and the times are different from the mid-1960s. But the stakes are as high.Biden must wield the power of the presidency to make senators fall in line with the larger goals of the nation. Otherwise, as LBJ asked, “what the hell’s the presidency for?” More