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      The Imperial Presidency Comes Home to Roost

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      US President Joe Biden’s got a problem — and so do I. And so, in fact, do we. At 76 years old, you’d think I’d experienced it all when it comes to this country and its presidencies. Or most of it, anyway. I’ve been around since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. Born on July 20, 1944, I’m a little “young” to remember him, though I was a war baby in an era when Congress still sometimes declared war before America made it.

      As a boy, in my liberal Democratic household in New York, I can certainly remember singing (to the tune of “Whistle While You Work”) our version of the election-year ditty of 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower faced off against Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. The pro-Republican kicker to it went this way: “Eisenhower has the power, Stevenson’s a jerk.” We, however, sang, “Eisenhower has no power, Stevenson will work!” As it happened, we never found out if that was faintly true, since the former Illinois governor got clobbered in that election (just as he had in 1952).

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      I certainly watched at least some of the 1960 televised debates between Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy — I was 16 then — that helped make JFK, at 43, the youngest president ever to enter the Oval Office. I can also remember his ringing inaugural address. We youngsters had never heard anything like it:

      “[T]he torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage — and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world … Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

      While a college freshman at Yale, I saw Kennedy give a graduation speech in New Haven, Connecticut. From where I was standing, he was as small as one of the tiny toy soldiers I played with on the floor of my room in childhood. It was, nonetheless, a thrill. Yes, he was deeply involved in ramping up the war in Vietnam and America’s global imperial presence in a fiercely contested “Cold War.”

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      Most of us teens, however, were paying little attention to that, at least until October 1962, in what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he addressed us on the radio, telling us that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with “a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” As a generation that grew up ducking and covering under our school desks in nuclear-attack drills, young Americans everywhere, my 18-year-old self included, imagined that the moment might finally have arrived for the nuclear confrontation that could have left our country in ruins and us possibly obliterated. (I can also remember sitting in a tiny New Haven hamburger joint eating a 10-cent — no kidding! — burger just over a year later when someone suddenly stuck his head through the door and said, “The president’s been assassinated!”)

      And I can recall, in the summer of 1964, hitchhiking with a friend across parts of Europe and trying, rather defensively, to explain to puzzled and quizzical French, Italian and German drivers the candidacy of right-wing Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who was running against Kennedy’s vice-president and successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater was the Donald Trump of his moment and, had I been in the US, I wouldn’t have given him the time of day.

      Still, as an American in Europe, I felt strangely responsible for the weirder political aspects of my country and so found myself doing my damnedest to explain them away — perhaps to myself as much as to anyone else. In fact, maybe that was the secret starting point for TomDispatch, the website I would launch (or perhaps that would launch me) just after the 9/11 attacks so many years later.

      The Coming of a “Presidential Dictatorship”

      Although I never saw Johnson in person, I did march through clouds of tear gas in Washington, DC, to protest the bloody and disastrous conflict — the original “quagmire war” — that he continued to fight in Vietnam to the last Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian. By then, as I was growing up, presidencies already seemed to be growing down and starting to look ever grimmer to me. And of course, as we all now know, there was far worse to come. After all, Johnson at least had reasonably forward-looking domestic policies in an age in which economic inequality was so much less rampant and the president and Congress could still accomplish things that mattered domestically — and not just for the staggeringly richest of Americans.

      On the other hand, Nixon, like Goldwater, a “Southern strategy” guy who actually won the presidency on his second try, only ramped the Vietnam War up further. He also plunged his presidency into a corrupt and criminal netherworld so infamously linked to Watergate. And I once saw him, too, in person, campaigning in San Francisco when I was a young journalist. I sat just rows away from the stage on which he spoke and found myself eerily awed by the almost unimaginable awkwardness of his gestures, including his bizarrely unnatural version of a triumphant V-for-what-would-indeed-prove-to-be-victory against antiwar Democratic candidate George McGovern.

      For Nixon, the V-for-defeat would come a little later and I would spend endless hours watching it — that is, the Watergate hearings — on an old black-and-white TV, or rather watching his imperial presidency come down around his ears. Those were the years when the Pentagon Papers, that secret trove of internal government documents on Vietnam War-making by successive White Houses, were released to The New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg. (His psychiatrist’s office would later be burgled by Nixon’s “plumbers” and he would play a key role in the fall of the house of Nixon.)

      It was in those same years that former Kennedy aide and “court historian” Arthur Schlesinger wrote the book he classically titled “The Imperial Presidency.” And it was then, too, that Senator William Fulbright described the same phenomenon in his book “The Crippled Giant,” this way:

      “Out of a well-intended but misconceived notion of what patriotism and responsibility require in a time of world crisis, Congress has permitted the president to take over the two vital foreign policy powers which the Constitution vested in Congress: the power to initiate war and the Senate’s power to consent or withhold consent from significant foreign commitments. So completely have these two powers been taken over by the president that it is no exaggeration to say that, as far as foreign policy is concerned, the United States has joined the global mainstream; we have become, for purposes of foreign policy — and especially for purposes of making war — a presidential dictatorship.”

      Amen. And so it largely remains.

      The Executive Order

      Keep in mind that those were still the good old days before George W. Bush launched his own imperial war on significant parts of the planet with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, based only on an open-ended, post-9/11 congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). That first AUMF and a second one passed a year later would then be cited by the presidents to follow, whether to “surge” in Afghanistan or drone assassinate an Iranian leader at Baghdad International Airport. Congress declare war? You mean Congress have anything (other than endlessly funding the Pentagon) to do with the mess that an American world of warfare has created?

      Embed from Getty Images

      So, before Trump ever left “The Apprentice,” the presidency had already become an imperial one on the world stage. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House could still work together domestically, but just in Republican (or in the case of Bill Clinton, Republican-style) administrations largely to further the yawning gap between the 1% of wealthy Americans and everyone else.

      Otherwise, especially in the Obama years (when Mitch McConnell took control of the Senate in all his oppositional splendor), the imperial presidency began to gain a new domestic face thanks to executive orders. What little Barack Obama could do once the Republicans controlled Congress would largely be done through those executive orders, a habit that would be inherited big time by Trump. On entering office, he and his crew would promptly begin trying to wipe out Obama’s legacy (such as it was) by executive orders and similar actions.

      Trump’s presidency would certainly be the most bizarrely “imperial” of our time, as he and his team worked, executive act by executive act, to essentially burn the planet down, destroy the environment, lock Americans in and everyone else out, and dismantle the country’s global economic role. And in the end, in the most imperially incoherent way imaginable, with Republican congressional help, Trump would come at least reasonably close to rather literally destroying the American democratic system (“fake election”) in the name of his own reelection.

      It couldn’t have been more bizarre. Today, in a country experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic like no other and with a Congress so evenly split that you can almost guarantee it will get next to nothing done, any president who wanted to accomplish anything would have little choice but to be imperial. So, who could be surprised that Biden launched his presidency with a flurry of executive actions (30 of them in his first three days), mainly in the Trumpian style — that is, taken to reverse the previous executive actions of The Donald).

      Grandpa Joe

      I doubt it’s happenstantial that the vibrantly imperial, yet still domestically democratic, country that elected the young John F. Kennedy would, 60 years later, elect a 78-year-old to replace a 74-year-old in the White House. Biden will, in turn, join forces with the 80-year-old Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, while butting heads with the 78-year-old minority leader of the Senate to “run” a country that hasn’t been able to win a war since 1945, a pandemic nation of such staggering inequality as to be nothing short of historic.

      As a senator who arrived in Washington just as Watergate was unfolding, Biden presented himself as the opposite of the corrupt Nixon and so an opponent of an imperial presidency. And as he recently claimed in a phone conversation with PBS NewsHour’s David Brooks, he’s still evidently not a fan of it. And yet in a Congress unlikely to do much of anything, including convicting the previous president of incitement to insurrection, what choice does he have? The way has been paved and he’s already on that ever-wider imperial road to… well, history suggests that it’s probably hell.

      Biden may not believe in the imperial presidency, but it could be all he has. Congress is in disarray; the courts, stacked with McConnell conservatives, will be against much of whatever he does; and those wars launched by Bush and now spread disastrously across significant parts of the greater Middle East and Africa are anything but over.

      Yes, Trump was a nightmare. Still, as I wrote years ago, he was always the mosquito, not the virus. I think it tells you something, thinking back to the vibrant 43-year-old JFK in 1960, that Americans, with the worst outbreak of COVID-19 on the planet, would choose to elect a former vice-president who was an exceedingly familiar old man. In our moment of crisis, we have grandpa in the White House.

      Embed from Getty Images

      And yet what could be more striking than a country, not so long ago considered the planet’s “lone superpower,” its “indispensable nation,” that simply can’t stop fighting distant and disastrous wars, while supporting its military financially in a way that it supports nothing else? As it happens, of course, the “costs” of those wars have indeed come home and not just in terms of a “Green Zone” in Washington or veterans assaulting the Capitol. It’s come home imperially, believe it or not, in the very form of Grandpa Joe.

      Joe Biden is a decent man, acting in the early days of his presidency in decent ways. He’s anything but Donald Trump. Yet that may matter less than we imagine. The odds are, hesitant as I am to say it, that what we face may not prove to be an imperial presidency but an imperial-disaster presidency, something that could leave Johnson, Nixon and crew in the shade.

      At 76 — almost as old, that is, as our new president — I fear that Trump was just our (particularly bizarre) introduction to imperial disaster. We now live on a distinctly misused planet in a country that looks like it could be going to the dogs.

      As I said when I began this piece, Biden has a problem (what a problem!) and so do I. So do we all. We could be heading into American territory where no one of any age has been before.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      From A Very Stable Genius to After Trump: 2020 in US politics books

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      A long time ago, in 1883, a future president (Woodrow Wilson, a subject of this year’s reckonings) studied political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a classroom in which was inscribed the slogan “History is Past Politics, Politics is Present History”, attributed to Sir John Seeley, a Cambridge professor.That was before the era of the made-for-campaign book.Politics books in this election year fell into three broad categories. The ordinary, ranging from “meeting-and-tells” to campaign biographies that outlived their relevance. The interesting, those which made tentative starts at history or contained some important revelations. And the significant, those few whose value should live past this year because they actually changed the narrative – or are simply good or important reads.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the books also fell in descending categories numerically. Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post read 150 books on Donald Trump and the Trump era for his own book, What Were We Thinking. Virtually all readers, however, will be content with simply a “non-zero” number, to quote a Trump campaign lawyer.First, the ephemera and the expected offerings of any election year. Scandals in and out of government; tales of the extended Trump family; attempts at self-justification; books, some entertaining, by correspondents; how-to guides to politics meant to be read and applied before November.The permutations and penumbras of the 2016 campaign continued to produce new books: Peter Strozk’s Compromised is the story of the origin of the investigation into the Trump campaign from one FBI agent’s perspective, strong stuff and persuasive though omitting facts inconvenient to him. Rick Gates’ Wicked Game contains some new inside scoop, but the real stuff presumably went to the Mueller investigation of which Strzok was briefly a part. Donald Trump Jr’s Liberal Privilege had a double mission: to encourage votes for the father in 2020 and perhaps for the son in 2024. American Crisis, New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s early book on the coronavirus outbreak, highlighted his programmatic vision rather than soaring prose, a choice appropriate for the year but quickly forgotten as the pandemic rages on.Second come those books that made one sit up a bit to pay attention: a new insight, important facts revealed; “worth a detour”, in the language of the Michelin guides. Psychologist and presidential niece Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough explained the pain of the Trump family over two generations and how that pain has influenced our national life for ill. David Frum was among the first to predict Trump’s authoritarian dangers. This year, Trumpocalpyse, well-written and insightful as always, focused on the attacks on the rule of law and “white ethnic chauvinism” as hallmarks of Trumpism, whether its supporters are poor or elite. Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Pulitzer-winning Post reporters, chronicled Trump more deeply and successfully than most in A Very Stable Genius. Trump’s anger at the book showed they hit their target.Stuart Stevens’ It Was All a Lie takes Republican history back a few decades in a punchy mea culpa whose themes will be important in the debate over the future of the GOP. Among the Democrats, a rare good work by a politician, Stacey Abrams’ Our Time Is Now, as well as her triumph in political organizing in Georgia, marks her as an important force.For quality in financial journalism and the importance of its topic, not least to current and future investigations of Trump and the Trump Organization, Dark Towers by David Enrich on Deutsche Bank offers as full an analysis of the bank and its relation to Trump as is likely to be public absent a further court case in New York.Andrew Weissmann, a senior prosecutor with the Mueller investigation, wrote Where Law Ends, a strongly-written account in which he regrets his boss not having pursued further, notably in not issuing a subpoena to Trump and then in not making a formal determination as to whether the president would be charged with obstruction of justice. Weissmann’s frustration is understandable, but readers may judge for themselves how fair or not he is to the pressures and formal restrictions on Mueller himself.There is a subcategory here, of books on foreign and security policy. HR McMaster’s Battlegrounds attempts to explain his working theories (“strategic empathy”) modified for current realities and arguing against American retrenchment and isolation. In The Room Where It Happened, former national security adviser John Bolton told of Trump begging for China’s assistance and wrote that Trump was not “fit for office” – the tale would have been better told to the House impeachment committee. David Rohde’s In Deep demolished the theory of the “deep state”. Barry Gewen delivered a new biography of Henry Kissinger’s life and work. Traitor, by David Rothkopf, sought to chronicle the Trump administration while seeking to reverse its effects and giving a history of American traitors.Finally, the significant – those few books that contributed importantly to the year’s narrative, or that deserve a reading next year.There was another Bob Woodward book, Rage – with tapes. The big news was that Trump was aware of the dangers of Covid-19 yet chose not to publicize them and that Dan Coats, then director of national intelligence, thought Putin had something on Trump. Woodward got the stories others chased. Michael Schmidt’s Donald Trump v the United States is another serious book, with a strong argument of how deeply the attacks on the rule of law by the Trump administration, notably by Trump himself, threaten democracy. Schmidt’s recounting of efforts to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey are sobering, and his revelations on how the Mueller investigation was narrowed to focus on criminality rather than Russian influence in 2016 form a useful corrective to Weissmann.Politics meets history in a few volumes, notably Thomas Frank’s plea against populism, The People, No, contrasting Trump unfavorably with FDR. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser teamed for a masterpiece biography of former secretary of state James Baker, The Man Who Ran Washington, that reminds us what (and whom) the Republican party used to call leadership. It’s a serious book that recalls Baker, Gerald Ford’s campaign manager in 1976, did not challenge the election result because Ford lost the popular vote. It also shows the truth in Seeley’s aphorism about the relation of politics and history, with many insights into one of the best recent practitioners of politics, fondly remembered for his statesmanship at the end of the cold war.Molly Ball’s well-researched and enjoyable biography of Nancy Pelosi makes sense of the most powerful woman in American history. Thomas Rid’s Active Measures, on disinformation and political warfare – Clausewitz for the cyber era – finds fresh urgency in light of recent revelations about major cyberattacks on the US government.Two books merit a final mention. As the Trump administration comes to a close, Ruth Ben-Ghiat analysed Trump’s actions and personality from the comparative perspective of fascist leaders since Mussolini and chillingly noted not only the actions that pointed to authoritarianism, but how deep the danger of going down that path.Strongmen is a vital book and a warning. Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.” Dehumanizing rhetoric and actions against immigrants (and even members of Congress) and appointments of people whose motivation was loyalty rather than law has real cost to a political system whose fragility at points is evident. It takes both individual action and courageous will to preserve democracy.On a happier note, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith in After Trump offer a legal, sometimes quite technical roadmap to reform of many norms of government that have been eroded. Some are obvious, others will prove controversial, but let this urgent discussion begin with Congress and the Biden administration.Of which, this year also saw the publication of A Promised Land, the first volume of memoirs from Barack Obama, whom the new president served as vice-president. Well-written despite being policy heavy, at times deeply moving, at others not as detailed as many readers might wish (despite its length), Obama is reflective both about the nature of power and about himself. More, his book serves once again to remind the world of the contrast between him and his successor. He is rightly proud to have written it – and to have written it by hand, to encourage his own deep thoughts about his presidency and the country he was honored, and sometimes troubled, to lead.To learn more about the president to come, Evan Osnos’ Joe Biden: American Dreamer is an excellent place to start: his political skills, life tragedies and conviviality are here in equal measure. Osnos ends with a Biden speech about dispelling America’s “season of darkness” – a fervent hope for the new year ahead. More

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      Obama: Democrats need 'universal language' to appeal to moderate voters

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      Barack Obama has underlined his belief that Democrats should moderate campaign messaging in order to reach voters turned off by slogans including “Defund the Police”, telling a literary group: “If I spoke the language of James Baldwin as he speaks it on the campaign stump, I’m probably not gonna get a lot of votes in Iowa.”
      Baldwin, a leading 20th-century African American intellectual and the subject of the Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, “didn’t have to go out and get votes”, Obama said in interview extracts released by PEN America, which will give the former president its 2020 Voice of Influence award next week.
      Obama also said he thinks there is an opportunity for more expansive racial dialogue in the US. But his remarks may add to controversy which welled up this week when he said candidates using “snappy” slogans such as Defund the Police risked alienating voters otherwise broadly sympathetic to liberal aims.
      Defund the Police became a rallying cry on the left this summer, amid national protests for racial justice following the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, an African American man, and similar incidents in Atlanta, Kenosha and elsewhere.
      Some senior Democratic party figures, including South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, have claimed the call to Defund the Police contributed to disappointing results in Senate, House and state races.
      Obama is promoting A Promised Land, his memoir of his rise to the White House and first few years in office. Speaking to Snapchat this week, he added his voice to the chorus.
      “I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘Defund the Police’ but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it – which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” he said.
      “The key is deciding: do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?”
      In his remarks to PEN America, which will be streamed on Tuesday, Obama contrasted discussions of race in the context of “politics and getting votes” with “truth-telling and the prophetic voice”. Politicians, he said, often need to speak a “universal language” as a way to reach voters resistant to more pointed discourse about racial injustice.
      But he also allowed that the racial upheavals of 2020, coupled with generational change, may herald an era in which race can be discussed in the political realm in less nuanced terms.
      “What I think has changed – and we saw this this summer – is, because of people’s witness of George Floyd, because of what seems like a constant stream of irrefutable evidence of excessive force against unarmed Black folks, that I think white America has awakened to certain realities that even 20 years ago they were still resistant to.
      “That creates a new opening for a different kind of political conversation.”
      PEN America will also give an award, for courage, to Darnella Frazier, a young woman who filmed the killing of Floyd.

      A recent poll by political strategist Douglas Schoen, previously an adviser to Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, found that Democrats should drop references to Defund the Police if they want to be competitive in the next midterm elections, in 2022.
      “The data says to me that if the Democrats go the progressive route they can lose the House and the Senate overwhelmingly in 2022,” Schoen told the New York Post. “The incoming Biden administration has to understand that unless they take a moderate path, that is a likely potential outcome for the Democrats.”
      Asked if Biden’s victory was a “mandate” for centrist or progressive policies, 62% of respondents to Schoen’s poll said centrist. The survey also found that Defund the Police hurt the party in down-ballot races, as 35% of voters said the issue made them “less likely to vote for Democrats” while 23% said it made them more likely.
      Obama’s comments have not found support among leading progressives. Legislators including Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were quick to reject his comments to Snapchat.
      “It’s not a slogan,” tweeted Bush. “It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive.” More

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      Obama’s given the left a vital lesson in how to talk – and how not to | Jonathan Freedland

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      Let’s plunge into the gap between what people say and what other people hear. All kinds of things can grow in that space, many of them poisonous. In that gap, friendships, even marriages, have come apart; wars can start.This week, Barack Obama shone a light into that zone when he talked about the slogan that many Democrats believe cost the party seats in the House of Representatives and Senate last month, a phrase that took flight during the summer of protests against the killing of George Floyd: defund the police. The former president said he too wanted to reform the criminal justice system, ridding it of racial bias, but he feared that using that “snappy slogan” meant “you lost a big audience the minute you say it”. The very change activists wanted moved further out of reach.Far better, said Obama, to say that some of the resources now spent on militarised police should be diverted to other services. If a person, homeless and distressed, is causing disruption in the street, a mental health professional should be dispatched rather than “an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy”. Put it that way, said Obama, and people start listening.As it happens, plenty of campaigners insist that that’s exactly what they meant by “defund the police”. But what too many voters heard was “abolish the police”, by starving them of funds. And those voters didn’t like it, because they reckon that, every now and again, you need a police force. The word “defund” was sufficiently ambiguous – hazy on whether police budgets should be eliminated or merely reduced – that it opened up the gap, that space where distrust, confusion and eventually fear grow.The evidence supports Obama, and not only in the form of the assorted congressional Democrats who say the phrase cost them votes. One Democratic consultant ran a focus group of wavering voters who had considered backing Joe Biden but eventually plumped for Donald Trump. Intriguingly, 80% of these Americans – Trump voters, remember – agreed racism existed in the criminal justice system, and 60% had a favourable view of Black Lives Matter. When the policy was expressed the way Obama put it, 70% of them backed it. But they drew the line at “defund the police”. In other words, the slogan hurt the cause.Obama has been attacked on the Democratic left, criticised for failing to see the urgent necessity of police reform. But that is to miss the point. It’s because change is urgent and necessary that Democrats need to argue for it in a way that wins, rather than loses, support.None of this should be new. The centrality of language to politics is ancient and recurrent. In the 1990s, Republicans had an uphill battle fighting against an “estate tax” on inheritance bequeathed to the wealthy – until they rebranded it “the death tax”. Then they won. But it’s harder for the left which, by its nature, is asking for permission to change the status quo. For that reason, it has to craft language that reassures voters that it understands, and even shares, their starting assumptions – or, at the very least, does not play into their worst fears.The psychologist Drew Westen, whose book The Political Brain has become a classic in this field, counsels that the same voters who might reject “gun control” – fearing an over-mighty state trying to dominate them – often warm to “gun safety” laws. “Medicare for all” might sound wonderful to progressive ears, but what many Americans hear is a proposal to impose a one-size-fits-all system on everyone, even if that means stripping you of a coverage plan you already have and quite like: “Medicare for all who want it” has wider appeal. This has resonance in Britain too. There is nobody on even the mildest wing of the left who is not in favour of equality, and yet even that sacred word might not be quite as appealing as you think. James Morris, onetime pollster to Ed Miliband, has seen how many of the voters that Labour needs to win associate “equality” with levelling down. They think it means everyone getting the same, no matter how hard they work. Those voters don’t like that notion, believing it robs them of the opportunity to get on. And, says Morris, “they also have a moral objection”. They reckon your actions should have consequences, that if you work hard you deserve to be rewarded. For them, “equality” contradicts that. More effective is “fairness”, and the insistence that everyone deserves a fair shot.Keir Starmer might find such advice helpful, but the “defund the police” episode offers another lesson. It is that leaders of political parties don’t get to define their message alone. Biden never uttered the words “defund the police”. Indeed, very few Democratic politicians ever did. And yet, in several key contests that slogan played a crucial role. The Democratic party was held to account for a movement, and a wider cultural left, that went far beyond the precincts it could hope to control.Labour is all too familiar with that danger. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher ran against the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the women of Greenham Common, the miners, the universities and often obscure local councillors, as much as she did against Neil Kinnock. Even if he could control his own message, he couldn’t control theirs.In Beyond the Red Wall, another Labour pollster, Deborah Mattinson, reports how distant former Labour voters in Accrington, Stoke and Darlington felt from questions that often exercise the vocal left, whether it be statues, gender or the more outlandish antics of Extinction Rebellion. It’s not that they disagreed necessarily on the issues themselves, rather that they sensed that these were the concerns of people with whom they had nothing in common: “people who didn’t worry about paying for the supermarket shop on a Friday”. And if the left’s loudest voices, amplified by social media, cared so deeply about those other things, surely that meant they didn’t care about people like them.This is the challenge for Starmer and his party. As the row over US police reform illustrates, it doesn’t mean softening the policy, but rather selling it right – and knowing that if you don’t define yourself, somebody else will.Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
      Join Sarah Churchwell for a conversation with Joe Biden biographer Evan Osnos in a Guardian Live online event on Thursday 21 January at 7pm GMT, 2pm EST. Book tickets here More

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      Obama, Clinton and Bush pledge to take Covid vaccine on TV to show its safety

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      Former US presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton have pledged to get vaccinated for coronavirus on television to promote the safety of the vaccine.The trio’s effort comes as the Food and Drug Administration prepares to meet next week to decide whether to authorize a Covid-19 vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech.More than 3,100 people died from the coronavirus in America on Wednesday, a record single-day high and more than the number of people killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.Obama, Bush and Clinton’s willingness to address the seriousness of the pandemic is markedly different from the attitude of Donald Trump, who remained silent as the US passed 250,000 coronavirus deaths in November.In an interview with SiriusXM host Joe Madison, Obama said that he would trust Anthony Fauci if the infectious disease expert declares a coronavirus vaccine to be safe.“People like Anthony Fauci, who I know, and I’ve worked with, I trust completely,” Obama said. “So, if Anthony Fauci tells me this vaccine is safe, and can vaccinate, you know, immunize you from getting Covid, absolutely, I’m going to take it.”Many Americans say they will not agree to be vaccinated against Covid-19. A poll by Gallup, released in mid-November, showed that 42% of the country would not take the vaccine even if it was “available right now at no cost”.Obama said he would take the vaccine once it was available for people “who are less at risk”. The 44th president is 59 and is not known to suffer from any serious health problems.“I may end up taking it on TV or having it filmed, just so that people know that I trust this science, and what I don’t trust is getting Covid,” he added.Freddy Ford, Bush’s chief of staff, told CNN the former president is also willing to receive the vaccine on camera.“A few weeks ago, President Bush asked me to let Dr Fauci and Dr Birx know that, when the time is right, he wants to do what he can to help encourage his fellow citizens to get vaccinated,” Ford told CNN.“First, the vaccines need to be deemed safe and administered to the priority populations. Then, President Bush will get in line for his, and will gladly do so on camera.”Clinton’s press secretary told CNN that he too is prepared to be filmed as he takes the vaccine.“President Clinton will definitely take a vaccine as soon as available to him, based on the priorities determined by public health officials,” Angel Urena said. “And he will do it in a public setting if it will help urge all Americans to do the same.”The three presidents, along with Jimmy Carter and George H Bush, who died in 2018, previously teamed up to raise money for relief efforts for Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. More

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      'Defund the police' slogan risks turning voters away, says Obama – video

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      Former US president Barack Obama has criticised Democratic political candidates for using ‘snappy’ slogans such as ‘defund the police’, arguing they could turn voters away and defeat the original objective. In an interview with Good Luck America, a political show on social media platform Snapchat, Obama said the slogans can isolate potential voters. ‘You lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,’ he said. ‘The key is deciding, do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?’
      Barack Obama criticizes ‘Defund the Police’ slogan but faces backlash More

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      Barack Obama criticizes 'Defund the Police' slogan but faces backlash

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      [embedded content]
      Barack Obama chastised Democratic political candidates for using “snappy” slogans like “defund the police” that he argued could turn voters away, in an interview released this week.
      “You lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” the former president told show host Peter Hamby in an interview with Good Luck America, a Snapchat political show.
      “The key is deciding, do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?” Obama added.
      However, Obama also defended the place of young progressives as important “new blood” in the Democratic party, singling out Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – who has spoken out strongly on the phrase and the essence of defunding police departments to boost social spending.
      Former Obama campaign operative Ben LaBolt shared part of the president’s interview with Hamby online on Tuesday before the full interview went live on Snapchat on Wednesday.

      Ben LaBolt
      (@BenLaBolt)
      President Obama, about the best message architect there is, suggests a thoughtful alternative to “Defund.” Via @PeterHamby. https://t.co/ai64FDPgTI pic.twitter.com/UABXL5yLmr

      December 2, 2020

      The remarks drew immediate backlash from notable, Black progressive Democrats – including the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who stressed “defund the police” was not about mere words but a “demand for equitable investments and budgets for communities across the country”.

      Ilhan Omar
      (@IlhanMN)
      We lose people in the hands of police. It’s not a slogan but a policy demand. And centering the demand for equitable investments and budgets for communities across the country gets us progress and safety. https://t.co/Vu6inw4ms7

      December 2, 2020

      “We didn’t lose Breonna because of a ‘slogan’,” said Kentucky state representative Charles Booker, referencing Breonna Taylor, the Black, Louisville woman who was shot dead in her own apartment by police in March during a botched raid.
      Booker broke barriers in 2018 when he became the youngest Black lawmaker elected to the Kentucky state legislature in nearly a century. And he ran a close contest for the Democratic nomination to challenge – ultimately unsuccessfully – the Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s seat in the November election.

      Charles Booker
      (@Booker4KY)
      We didn’t lose Breonna because of a slogan. Instead of conceding this narrative, let’s shape our own. It’s time we listen to the people, organize and build coalitions around our own message, and cast a vision that inspires us all to lead for change at the ballot box and beyond. https://t.co/mBg7wanaR6

      December 2, 2020

      Cori Bush, who made history last month by becoming the first Black woman elected to represent Missouri in Congress shot back at Obama that “Defund the Police” was “not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping [Black] people alive.”
      “With all due respect, Mr President – let’s talk about losing people,” she said. “We lost Michael Brown Jr. We lost Breonna Taylor. We’re losing our loved ones to police violence.”
      The Black Lives Matter movement member’s rise in politics stemmed from her work as a community activist during protests against the shooting death of Mike Brown in Ferguson in 2014.
      Bush is also the only candidate to formally run on a platform of defunding the police – a point many analysts say make criticism of the movement unwarranted.
      Defund the Police has been a widely used phrase and policy initiative that gained traction over the summer as racial justice and anti-policing protests erupted in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May.
      As a policy initiative, defunding police departments involves the reallocation of local and state resources away from law enforcement into public services, designed to address issues of poverty, inequality and mental health – factors that contribute to crime.
      The former president’s comments echoed other moderate Democrats who have taken issue and consider the phrase polarizing, prompting criticism of a progressive movement led by what some have called radical messaging.

      Jamaal Bowman
      (@JamaalBowmanNY)
      Damn, Mr. President.Didn’t you say “Trayvon could’ve been my son?” In 2014, #BlackLivesMatter was too much.In 2016, Kaepernick was too much.Today, discussing police budgets is too much.The problem is America’s comfort with Black death — not discomfort with slogans. https://t.co/DJUSZebgW5

      December 2, 2020

      In South Carolina, where the Democratic base is largely composed of Black Americans who skew older and moderate, the Democratic incumbent Joe Cunningham lost his House seat to Republican Nancy Mace in the November election.
      In the days following, the South Carolina congressman and House minority whip James Clyburn, who was regarded as instrumental in turning around Joe Biden’s flagging campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination when the moderate was behind leftist champion Bernie Sanders, told NBC News the slogan hurt some Democratic candidates.
      “If you instead say ‘Let’s reform the police department so that everybody’s being treated fairly,’” Clyburn offered alternatively. “Not just in policing, but in sentencing, how can we divert young people from getting into crime?’”
      While Obama took issue with progressive slogans, he also criticized moderate leadership for failing to recognize the increasingly powerful influence of young, progressives such as Ocasio-Cortez.
      The former president chastised the Democratic National Committee for only briefly featuring such democratic socialists in their opening montage during their national convention in Milwaukee in August.
      “She speaks to a broad section of young people who are interested in what she has to say, even if they don’t agree with everything she says. You give her a platform,” he said, adding that across political ideologies “new blood is always good” for the party. More