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      Biden’s Response to Israel-Hamas War Meets Centrist Praise and Liberal Anger

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      A prime-time address to the nation on Thursday will be the president’s third major speech on the Mideast conflict as his Democratic coalition strains over his handling of the violence.When President Biden delivers a prime-time Oval Office address on Thursday about the wars in Israel and Ukraine, it will be his third major speech on the Mideast conflict as he grapples with a fragile Democratic coalition that is closely watching how he handles the outbreak of violence.In his remarks last week and again on Wednesday in Tel Aviv, Mr. Biden sought to put no daylight between the United States and Israel — though in his second speech, he warned the Israelis not to “be consumed” by their rage about the Hamas attack this month that killed more than 1,400 people. He pleaded with the Israelis not to overreact, as he said the United States did after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.The centrist Democrats who make up the core of Mr. Biden’s political base were nearly unanimous in their praise.“I am grateful to have @POTUS thoughtful leadership in this moment,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri wrote on social media. “As we continue working save the lives of hostages and hold Hamas accountable, I encourage him to continue using his platform to call for restraint and the protection of innocent Israelis and Palestinians alike.”Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland said Mr. Biden “speaks for me and speaks for all of America” on Israel. And Richard Haass, the former chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, called the Wednesday speech “nothing less than masterful.”And while Biden campaign officials insist they aren’t planning to use the Israel trip as campaign fodder, Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts forecast what could become the sort of contrast the president’s aides and allies make with former President Donald J. Trump should he win the Republican presidential nomination.“Joe Biden flew into a war zone to stand with Israel,” Mr. Auchincloss said late Wednesday. “Trump wouldn’t even visit a cemetery of American war dead.” (Mr. Trump, in 2018, canceled a planned trip to a French cemetery, and his aides cited the rainy weather.)Liberal Democrats who have been critical of how Mr. Biden has tethered the White House to Israel as the Israelis carry out attacks on the Gaza Strip focused their attention Wednesday on amplifying attention on antiwar demonstrators who marched around the Capitol and renewed their calls for a cease-fire.“We cannot bomb our way to peace,” wrote Representative Cori Bush of Missouri. “We need a cease-fire,” said Representative André Carson of Indiana. And several left-wing members of Congress reposted a message from Pope Francis in which he called the situation in Gaza “desperate” and pleaded that “the weapons be silenced; let the cry for peace be heard from the poor, from the people, from the children!”Some used especially heated language: Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, speaking outside the Capitol, said, “We are literally watching people commit genocide and killing a vast majority, just like this, and we still stand by and say nothing.”Some Democrats began attacking their party colleagues who are skeptical of the Israeli war effort. Representative Jerry Nadler of New York condemned the organization behind the Capitol protest, and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida told Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota that “you have been training your outrage on the wrong party” after Ms. Omar reiterated her call for Mr. Biden to seek a cease-fire.Progressive activists circulated a video of Dilawar Syed, a deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration, being booed while speaking at a vigil for Wadea Al-Fayoume, the 6-year-old Palestinian boy from the Chicago suburbs who was killed in what prosecutors said was an attack motivated by hate for Muslims amid the fighting in Israel and Gaza.Another meme circulating on left-wing social media showed a stylized Mr. Biden behind the wheel of a convertible with the caption “Genocidin’ with Biden.”And Josh Paul, a career State Department official, announced his resignation because of the Biden administration’s “blind support for one side,” which he said was leading to policy decisions that were “shortsighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values we publicly espouse.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Romney,’ by McKay Coppins

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      ROMNEY: A Reckoning, by McKay Coppins“For most of his life, he has nursed a morbid fascination with his own death, suspecting that it might assert itself one day suddenly and violently.” One doesn’t expect these opening words from an authorized biography of a handsome, wealthy, happily married and instinctively moderate man, but this is how McKay Coppins’s “Romney” begins. Perhaps Mitt Romney fears his severance from so many blessings, but as Coppins’s revealing new book demonstrates, this businessman-politician has often wondered if he deserved such an abundance of good fortune at all.Coppins conducted 45 interviews with Romney over two years and had access to hundreds of pages in private journals that the now 76-year-old senator has kept since 2011. “Romney” presents a man given to cycles of rationalization and guilt, to sometimes near-O.C.D. levels of repetitive thinking and self-recrimination. The biographer pronounces his “defining trait” to be a “meld of moral obligation and personal hubris.”Romney has, in fact, had two brushes with sudden death, the first in a terrible automobile accident in 1968 when he was a 21-year-old Mormon missionary in France. The second came a half-century later on a January afternoon in the besieged Senate chamber of the U.S. Capitol, to which the better angels of Romney’s conscience had led him after a long up-and-down political life.His father, George, was a progressive Republican governor of Michigan in the 1960s, marching with civil rights activists even as his own church banned Black members from the priesthood. His 1968 run for the presidency collapsed after he referred to the military cheerleading for the Vietnam War as “brainwashing.”Mitt grew up with predictable comforts but nothing like a sense of direction until, during his Mormon mission, sick with diarrhea, he knocked on doors in the French port city of Le Havre that might as well have been brick walls. It eventually “struck him with the force of something divine” that, however futile they seemed, his sacrifices were accepted by God.Once back home he was on his way, along a path both faithful and lucrative, into the expanding worlds of business consulting and private equity in the 1970s and ’80s. Straining to make time for both his church and the five sons he and his wife were raising in suburban Boston, Romney achieved big success at Bain Capital, the investment firm he helped found that guided the office-supply chain Staples toward explosive growth and cut jobs at Ampad, one of the stationery manufacturers that stocked Staples’ shelves.Romney was moving fast, and Coppins himself is a bit headlong in the book’s early going, which includes Romney’s ill-fated 1994 Senate run against Ted Kennedy. Romney’s later repair of Utah’s shambolic preparations for the 2002 Winter Olympics propelled him to a single term as governor of Massachusetts, during which he enacted the health-insurance plan that came to be seen as a state-level precursor of Obamacare. The governor was logical and naïve enough to believe that the program’s success might get him the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. But after running into Iowans’ suspicions of Mormonism, he limped toward an early withdrawal from the race.Four years later, he somehow succeeded with Republican primary voters newly jazzed by tea-partying and birtherism and not particularly craving a candidate who had to spend time convincing them that Romneycare was actually quite different from Obamacare. To overcome Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and the two Ricks (Perry and Santorum), Romney needed to dial his rationalization settings high enough to endure mad conversation with the conservative provocateur Glenn Beck.Securing the nomination proved only a prelude to what Coppins, with some justice, calls “one of the pettiest, most forgettable presidential elections in modern history” — no matter that it’s been all downhill since then. Romney was demagogued by Vice President Joe Biden, who told Black voters in one audience that the Republican candidate hoped to “put y’all back in chains,” and mocked by Obama for having observed that Russia would be our most dangerous long-term adversary. But he lost the election mostly on his own, with a gaffe worse than his father’s old brainwashing one: Romney was caught on tape dissing the “47 percent” of voters “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims.”Few moments of that year’s campaign will be more cringe-inducing to a reader than Romney’s acceptance of Donald Trump’s endorsement, in Las Vegas, for the Republican nomination. Throughout Coppins’s narrative Trump, the supposed billionaire, morphs from comic relief into devouring nemesis. As late as May 2012, Romney was confiding this description of Trump to his journal: “No veneer, the real deal. Got to love him. Makes me laugh and makes me feel good, both.” Four years later, having come to his senses, Romney refused Trump his own endorsement, earning the candidate’s fury.Romney also sent a blistering email to Chris Christie after the New Jersey governor came out for Trump: “He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic.” Even so, after Trump’s victory, thinking he could perhaps be a force for restraint, Romney allowed himself to be humiliated by Trump’s prolonged public dangling of the secretary of state job.It took two more years for him to arrive at his finest — and final — hours in politics. In 2018, as a handful of anti-Trump Republicans like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake left Congress, Romney jumped in. His becoming a freshman senator from Utah was made possible by his own humility and the Mormon state’s temperamental aversion to the president’s personality, which had helped depress Trump’s 2016 margin of victory in the state.Setting up shop in a lousy basement office, Romney abandoned his plan “to fight Trumpism while ignoring Trump,” at last realizing he had to face the man head-on. While should-have-known-better Republican colleagues waffled (Ben Sasse) or submissively swooned (Lindsey Graham), Romney kept his head above the fetid waters, eventually developing a particular contempt for J.D. Vance, the once anti-Trump hillbilly elegist who reached the Senate via what Romney’s father might have called self-brainwashing. Resistance to Trump’s election-fraud claims left Romney to be jeered by fellow passengers on a flight from Salt Lake City to Washington on Jan. 5, 2021. Even before his vote to convict Trump in a second impeachment, private security for his large family was costing him $5,000 a day.“Romney: A Reckoning” is in many ways a straightforward biography, but it has the intimacy of a small subgenre of political confessions: One remembers Monica Crowley’s “Nixon Off the Record” (1996) and Thomas M. DeFrank’s “Write It When I’m Gone” (2007), a collection of opinions that Gerald Ford wanted to make public, though not too soon.Romney has not waited until he’s dead to unleash his candor and surrender his journals, but he has announced his retirement from electoral politics, on the sensible grounds that it is already too geriatric an arena. Even so, a second Senate term was hardly guaranteed to him. Whatever remains of Mormon distaste for Trump’s vulgarity and meanness, 2024 will be a meaner year than 2018; in a poll taken in the spring, more than half of Utah’s Republicans did not want Romney to run again.Coppins, a fellow Mormon, is generally as polite as his subject, though the characterization of Romney’s “late-in-life attempt at political repentance” seems a bit stark. As this able book shows, Romney almost certainly has less to repent of than the average politician. Indeed, one believes Coppins when he says that “watching Trump complete his conquest of the G.O.P. was even more devastating to Romney than losing his own election in 2012.”The depicted “reckoning” is actually lifelong and, more important, something that has always been made from within. Romney’s moral vitality, for all its fitfulness and ambivalence, has kept him a free man. Only a morally dead one, whose self-worth comes entirely from without, will find that stone walls do indeed a prison make.ROMNEY: A Reckoning | By McKay Coppins | 403 pp. | Scribner | $32.50 More

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      Biden Walks a Tightrope on Israel-Gaza as Democratic Tensions Smolder

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      The president has won bipartisan plaudits for his response to the war, and his trip to Israel offers a chance to appear statesmanlike. But anger on the left is growing as Israeli strikes pound Gaza.As President Biden visits Tel Aviv on Wednesday to demonstrate American solidarity with Israel amid escalating violence after the deadliest attack it has faced in 50 years, Democratic rifts over the conflict are beginning to tear open, leaving him presiding over a party struggling to resolve where it stands.The president’s trip, and his broader handling of the war, have presented him with both political risks and a chance to pump energy into a re-election bid that Democratic voters have been slow to embrace.Mr. Biden’s steadfast support for Israel after the Hamas attack, by far the dominant position in Washington, has won him plaudits from some Republicans as well as Democrats. An international crisis, even with its grave geopolitical dangers, is relatively comfortable political terrain for a president with deep foreign policy experience.While international issues rarely drive American elections, Mr. Biden and his allies will see playing the role of statesman abroad — especially if he can help calm the soaring tensions — as a welcome change from a wide range of domestic challenges dragging down his approval ratings.In Tel Aviv, Mr. Biden again offered a full endorsement of Israel while making his most explicit warning yet to its leaders, telling them not to be “consumed” by rage after the Hamas attack. For the first time, the president offered money for displaced Palestinians and cautioned that the United States made mistakes responding to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that Israel should not repeat.At the same time, creeping anger within his party’s left is threatening to grow as Israel pummels Gaza with airstrikes and moves toward a potential ground invasion, with progressive Democrats accusing Mr. Biden of abetting a war that has already killed thousands of Palestinians.Those emotions flared on Tuesday after a deadly explosion at a Gaza City hospital, with Israeli and Gazan officials blaming each other for the blast. Protests erupted across the Middle East, a planned stop by Mr. Biden in Jordan was canceled and American politicians rushed to criticize the president even before the fog of war had settled.An Israeli soldier near Urim, Israel, on Tuesday. The country’s military is preparing for a potential ground invasion of Gaza.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThe anger and confusion made clear just how precarious of a tightrope Mr. Biden is walking.“This is delicate for him,” said Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas, a progressive Democrat who visited Israel with a congressional delegation this summer. “It’s a very fine line to walk and it’s one that a lot of us as members, especially progressive members, find ourselves having to try to balance.”While Republicans who have offered surprising praise for Mr. Biden’s response to the Hamas attack have largely cast the conflict as a black-and-white issue, things are more complicated among the progressive base of the Democratic Party.Large segments of Democratic voters, especially younger ones, are skeptical if not hostile to Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and are disinclined to support a war, even in response to a Hamas attack that killed more than 1,400 Israelis.The discontent has been evident in two documents in recent days. The first, a letter signed by 55 progressive members of Congress on Friday, called for the restoration of food, water, fuel and other supplies Israel had cut off to Gaza. Another, a House resolution with just 13 Democrats as co-authors, demanded “an immediate de-escalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.”Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, who signed the letter but not the cease-fire resolution, said he had received more calls from constituents in his Madison-based district who were worried about Israel’s expected military response to the Hamas attack than about the initial assault itself.Mr. Pocan said he had explained to people that Mr. Biden and his top aides, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, were privately pressing Israel to do more to spare Palestinian lives than they were expressing in public.“We ask people to kind of trust some of us who are saying and doing the right thing,” Mr. Pocan said in an interview on Tuesday. “I know how Joe Biden operates. He’s probably saying some things privately that are important and respectful of civilians. He may not broadcast everything on his sleeve. People just have to understand that that’s Joe Biden. He’s not encouraging the indiscriminate bombing.”But some Democrats warned that if Mr. Biden tethers himself too closely to Israel, he will get blamed if many of the party’s voters come to believe that Israel responded to Hamas with too much force.Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the only Palestinian American in Congress, who was one of the 13 Democrats who signed the cease-fire resolution, was among the first in her party to blame Mr. Biden directly for war deaths after the Gaza hospital explosion.“This is what happens when you refuse to facilitate a ceasefire & help de-escalate,” she wrote on social media Tuesday. “Your war and destruction only approach has opened my eyes and many Palestinian Americans and Muslims Americans like me. We will remember where you stood.”Mark Mellman, the founder and president of Democratic Majority for Israel, dismissed the idea that Mr. Biden was risking a crackup in his electoral coalition. If anything, Mr. Mellman said, Mr. Biden was demonstrating his dynamism to voters who have questioned his age and ability to serve in office.“It shows a level of vigor, it shows a level of engagement,” he said. “It demonstrates unparalleled diplomatic competence.”Polls show that Americans are more confident in Mr. Biden’s ability to lead the country through the Israel conflict than on domestic issues.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesWhile Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign has not yet sent fund-raising appeals based on his actions in response to the Israel conflict, the pageantry of his trip won’t be lost on officials at the operation’s headquarters in Delaware. After Mr. Biden visited Ukraine, his campaign produced a gauzy advertisement titled “War Zone.”The White House believes Mr. Biden is acting with broad support from the American people in defending Israel. Officials think that those protesting Mr. Biden’s position are not representative of much of the electorate — and that Democrats are hardly likely to abandon Mr. Biden if it means helping former President Donald J. Trump.While Mr. Biden, in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday, agreed with Israel’s aim of eradicating Hamas, he said the group was not representative of the Palestinian people. Mr. Blinken said on Tuesday that the United States and Israel had agreed to a plan to enable humanitarian aid to reach Gazan civilians.“It is critical that aid begin flowing into Gaza as soon as possible,” Mr. Blinken said.Among progressives, there is some hope that Mr. Biden’s trip to Israel will serve to de-escalate the conflict just as it appears poised to explode.Larry Cohen, the chairman of Our Revolution, a left-wing political organization that grew from Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, said he hoped the visit would do so.“In this moment, the U.S. role potentially helps Palestinians as well,” said Mr. Cohen, whose work in the region dates to a meeting with Yasir Arafat three decades ago to help support workers trying to organize a union in the West Bank. “I believe that Biden is going there in part to try to stop a slaughter in Gaza as well as to express horror at the Hamas murders.”Polls show Americans are more confident in Mr. Biden’s ability to lead the country through the Israel conflict than on domestic issues.A Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday found that 76 percent of voters thought supporting Israel was in the U.S. national interest. The survey found that 42 percent approved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the Israel conflict, compared with 37 percent who disapproved — an improvement on his overall approval rating, which the poll found was 38 percent.Younger and more activist progressive Democrats seem less inclined to give Mr. Biden the benefit of the doubt. Quinnipiac found that a majority of voters 18 to 34 years old were opposed to sending weapons and military equipment to Israel.Waleed Shahid, a strategist who used to work for Justice Democrats, a group that sponsored left-wing primary challenges to Democratic members of Congress, said Mr. Biden’s embrace of Israel might drive young Muslim and progressive voters away from Mr. Biden and toward Cornel West, the independent candidate for president who is running on a more explicitly antiwar platform.“I have heard from several people in my life, people who worked for Biden in 2020, Jews and Arabs, who just from an ethical perspective don’t feel great about returning to campaign for him,” Mr. Shahid said.On Tuesday in Arizona, Vice President Kamala Harris was greeted with jeers from college students after delivering the Biden administration’s talking points about how both Israelis and Palestinians “deserve peace, deserve self-determination and deserve safety.”One student yelled, “Stop making bombs.”Ruth Igielnik More

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      Here’s How Joe Biden Can Win Again

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      President Biden’s age is on the minds of American voters as they think about the 2024 election. It’s no wonder: In a poll I did last year, there was broad support (63 percent of Democrats, 55 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of independents) for establishing an upper age limit of 70 for any person to be sworn in as president. This past July, a Pew Research Center survey found that about half of respondents believed the best age range for a U.S. president was in the 50s — well below Mr. Biden’s 80 and Donald Trump’s 77.As a pollster and strategist who has been involved in four Democratic presidential campaigns, including Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, I don’t believe that age will determine this election. But it is a formidable reality that Mr. Biden and his team must deal with and transcend, just as Ronald Reagan did at age 73 in his 1984 re-election race. Mr. Reagan passed that test, removing age as a distraction for his campaign and voters and making the contest about “morning in America,” our economic turnaround and our leadership in the world. The 2024 election is going to hinge similarly on core issues and a vision that speaks directly to the lives and hopes of voters.Getting past the age question won’t be easy. It will involve persuading voters in memorable ways and will require a deft touch. But this is a winnable race for the president, even if it sometimes seems his team is shielding him from the public. The fact is, he’s old. A failure to confront the issue risks reinforcing that impression rather than overcoming it. Americans will be watching him closely in big moments, like his trip to Israel this week to deal with one of the most significant crises of his presidency. The Biden team needs to get the president out in front of the public more, finding opportunities for him to talk about age with a directness and confidence that convinces people it isn’t the core issue. Talk about it now so you aren’t talking about it next summer, then use the fall debates in 2024 to deliver a Reaganesque line that puts the topic to bed.If Mr. Trump becomes Mr. Biden’s opponent, this task is simpler. They’re both old, so I think the question of age will become moot for a lot of voters. Winning presidential candidates learn quickly not to launch attacks that can come back and bite them. Take Mitt Romney’s debate-stage effort in 2012 to cast Mr. Obama as unfit to be commander in chief over his handling of a deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. Mr. Obama’s stinging response won the president headlines praising his smackdown performance: “While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release, trying to make political points, and that’s not how a commander in chief operates,” Mr. Obama said.It’s likely that many independent and swing voters will be less concerned with Mr. Biden’s and Mr. Trump’s ages than about the preponderance of legal issues facing Mr. Trump, which would seem to give Democrats the edge. Despite his dominance in the Republican race, a poll my firm conducted shortly after he was indicted on criminal charges for the fourth time found that 24 percent of his party’s voters said his legal issues made them less likely to vote for him. That’s four times the 6 percent of Republicans who defected from him in 2020. Even worse for Mr. Trump, 61 percent of independent voters said his legal problems made them less likely to vote for him.The RealClearPolitics polling average currently shows Mr. Trump up by less than a point over Mr. Biden, 45.3 percent to 44.5 percent. A year ahead of the election, that’s meaningless information. The party of Hillary Clinton has learned the hard way not to take a slight polling edge for granted. I was Mrs. Clinton’s pollster in 2016, when public polling had her about two percentage points ahead of Mr. Trump. She won 48 percent of the vote to his 45.9 percent but, of course, lost the Electoral College by losing three battleground states that are crucial for Democrats in presidential campaigns. The campaign’s leadership had ordered a stop to most in-depth polls in those battlegrounds during October, which left us blind to the state of play.Our country has split down the middle in its politics for decades now. When I was on Bill Clinton’s polling team for his 1996 re-election campaign, he won with 49.2 percent of the vote. When I was the lead pollster on Mr. Obama’s team in 2008, he won with 52.9 percent of the vote; in 2012 he won with 51.1 percent of the vote, making him only the fourth president in over a century to be elected and re-elected with more than 50 percent.So what will it take for Mr. Biden to win? From both wins and losses, I’ve learned that there are three things every candidate needs to remember: Campaigns are about big things, not small things. Campaigns are about the future, not the past. And campaigns are about the voters’ lives, not the candidate’s.For Mr. Biden, following that mantra means making this election a forward-looking choice built on a contrast of economic vision and values. More important, it means leaning into his greatest asset: his long record of working across the aisle.He built his career on doing the hard work of compromising with the other side to get things done for the American people. Since he took office in 2021, he won passage of the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law to repair the nation’s roads, bridges and railways; bring high-speed internet to rural communities; and more, an achievement made possible by 32 Republicans who crossed the aisle (13 in the House and 19 in the Senate). He signed the most significant gun-safety legislation to pass Congress in nearly 30 years, with 29 votes from Republicans (14 in the House and 15 in the Senate).Those numbers may not sound like much, but in a country exhausted by political division and with him most likely up against a Republican opponent whose only game is to divide, it’s a critical advantage. By focusing on bipartisanship and doing less name calling about MAGA and the right, he would not just recite his accomplishments; he would bring focus to what government can do for the American people when both sides work together.Mr. Biden should also lean on his gifts of public empathy. Joe from Scranton is someone who understands that we can’t keep telling people that what they see and feel isn’t real. Month after month, the economic numbers of his presidency have provided evidence that our economy is recovering and our society is stable.But public opinion polling shows many Americans experiencing a sense of corrosive instability — worry that our rapidly changing economy and technological world may leave them behind, coupled with fears about crime and immigration. Connecting with those voters is about providing them with the tangible evidence that you’ve heard them, that you’re invested in improving their lives and that you have a vision for governing that addresses their fears and will create a better future for them and their families.During Mr. Obama’s 2012 campaign, we faced a similar disconnect. The country was still in the throes of an economic crisis that began before he took office in 2009. We knew we couldn’t overstate claims about the improving economy because people weren’t feeling it yet. The campaign needed to focus on the future and lift up working- and middle-class Americans in a way that Mr. Romney, with his private-equity background, could not effectively rebut.From our research, we developed key principles for the campaign: Talk about a country facing a make-or-break moment for the middle class and those striving to get there. Talk about the importance of building an economy from the middle out, not the top down. Talk about an economy in which hard work pays, responsibility is rewarded and everyone gets a fair shot and a fair shake.One thing Mr. Biden should stop talking about: Mr. Trump. It’s tempting. It’s the red meat his base wants. But it’s not the job. The months of Republican debates and headlines about court cases against the former president will inflict damage without Mr. Biden having to say a word.Come August — when most Americans start paying attention to a November presidential election — if Mr. Trump is indeed the G.O.P. candidate, he can be depended on to continue his campaign of doom, destruction and despair.But despite the aberration of the 2016 election, I believe Americans want to hear about the values and beliefs that bring us together, not the things that drive us apart. Mr. Biden is uniquely able to communicate a credible message of hope that we might again be a country that works together rather than a nation that is mired in perpetual division. He is a man I know to be an optimist by nature, and he believes unity trumps division. So do I.Joel Benenson is a veteran Democratic adviser who was the pollster on Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and chief strategist and pollster on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Oprah Floated a 2020 Presidential Ticket With Mitt Romney, Book Says

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      Ms. Winfrey wanted to form the independent ticket to stop Donald J. Trump, according to a forthcoming book. Mr. Romney listened to the pitch but passed on the idea, the biography says.Concerned that the Democratic field wasn’t up to the task of stopping President Donald J. Trump in 2020, Oprah Winfrey pitched Mitt Romney on the idea of running for president as an independent, with her as his running mate, according to a forthcoming biography of the Republican senator from Utah.Ms. Winfrey floated the unusual ticket in a phone call she placed to Mr. Romney’s wife, Ann Romney, in November 2019, according to an excerpt from the book, “Romney: A Reckoning,” that was shared with The New York Times.Mr. Romney at least listened to the idea. (It was Oprah calling, after all.) He “heard the pitch, and told her he was flattered, but that he’d have to pass,” the author, McKay Coppins of The Atlantic, writes.Liz Johnson, an aide to Mr. Romney, declined to comment on Monday. A spokeswoman for Ms. Winfrey said in a statement that she had urged Mr. Romney to run, but not with her.“In November 2019, Ms. Winfrey called Senator Romney to encourage him to run on an independent ticket,” the statement said. “She was not calling to be part of the ticket and was never considering running herself.”Mr. Coppins’s book was based on hours of interviews with Mr. Romney, as well as emails, texts and journals that the senator had been saving to potentially write a memoir. Realizing he could not be objective about himself, Mr. Romney has said he chose to have a journalist write about him instead.Ms. Winfrey’s interest in forming an independent ticket with Mr. Romney, which was reported on Monday by Axios, is among several dishy items from the book, which is to be released on Oct. 24.She has known the Romneys since 2012, when she interviewed them at their lakeside home in New Hampshire as Mr. Romney was running for president. Ms. Winfrey had also seen Ms. Romney at various social events, and was “especially fond” of her, according to the book.On the phone with Ms. Romney, Ms. Winfrey explained that Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, was preparing to enter the race and had approached her about joining his ticket. Before she decided, she wanted to gauge Mr. Romney’s interest.She doubted that Joseph R. Biden Jr. or Pete Buttigieg could beat Mr. Trump and was “certain” that Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts could not, according to the book.Ms. Romney responded that her husband would not run for president in 2020, either as a Republican or as an independent, Mr. Coppins writes. Mr. Romney also politely batted down the idea, according to the book.An aide to Mr. Bloomberg declined to comment.Ms. Winfrey has at times been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate herself.In 2018, after she delivered a rousing speech at the Golden Globes, some were clamoring for her to run. But she told “60 Minutes Overtime” that she would not become a candidate in 2020 even though “I had a lot of wealthy men calling, telling me that they would run my campaign and raise $1 billion for me.”“I am actually humbled by the fact that people think that I could be a leader of the free world, but it’s just not in my spirit,” she said. “It’s not in my DNA.”Mr. Romney, 76, recently announced that he would not seek re-election in 2024, saying he wanted to make way for a “new generation of leaders.” He strongly suggested that Mr. Trump and President Biden should also bow out, arguing that neither was effectively leading his party to confront the “critical challenges” the nation faces. More

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      Biden Will Get $80 Million Ad Boost From Climate Group

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      Climate Power says the lack of awareness and understanding of the president’s record on environmental issues is hurting him in the polls.Climate Power, a liberal advocacy group, plans to spend $80 million on advertising to lift President Biden’s standing on environmental issues and inform voters about the impact of legislation he signed last year.Polls show few voters are aware of the president’s record on climate issues, and there is a broad dissatisfaction with his stewardship of the issue, a dynamic that mirrors voters’ discontent with his handling of the economy and other concerns.This new effort also adds to the constellation of outside groups working to solve one of the Democratic Party’s most vexing problems: how to make a president widely seen by his own party as too old to seek re-election just popular enough to win a likely rematch with former President Donald J. Trump.Climate Power’s solution is to feed voters a steady stream of television and digital advertising highlighting Mr. Biden’s legislative accomplishments to protect the environment and contrasting them Mr. Trump, who mocked climate science, rolled back regulations aimed at cutting emissions and has promised to be a booster for the oil, gas and coal industries. “There is a huge swath of people who just don’t know anything. There’s also a segment of people that want him to do more. There’s also a swath that thinks he’s gone too far,” Lori Lodes, the executive director of Climate Power, said in an interview last week. “We need to make sure that the Biden coalition, the folks who got him into office in 2020, sees that he’s delivered on his promises. And he has.”As with so much of Mr. Biden’s agenda, his climate policies tend to poll well on their own but do worse when associated with the president. A Washington Post poll from July found that 70 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Republicans, would like the next president be someone who favors government action to address climate change. And Climate Power’s own research showed that 67 percent of voters believe climate to be a “kitchen table issue.”Yet even though Democratic majorities in Congress last year passed, and Mr. Biden signed, the Inflation Reduction Act — legislation that invests $370 billion in spending and tax credits in zero-emission forms of energy to fight climate change — there is little evidence that he has earned the political benefits from voters who share his climate goals.Last month, The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago found Mr. Biden’s approval on handling climate change was 42 percent, similar to his overall approval rating of 40 percent, and better than the 33 percent who approved of his handling of the economy.That poll found Mr. Biden’s climate approval ratings had dropped from 52 percent in September 2021, before he signed his landmark climate legislation, and 49 percent in September of 2022, weeks after her signed it.The 30-second advertisements Climate Power has run this year, which were paid for with help from Future Forward, the independent expenditure organization blessed by the Biden campaign, have focused on efforts to lower household energy costs and create jobs in factories manufacturing renewable energy products. The ads trumpet gains “thanks to Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.”The planned $80 million will come from so-called dark money, the donors of which are not required to be disclosed under federal law, Ms. Lodes said. An affiliated Climate Power super PAC, which can also accept unlimited contributions but is required to report its donors to the Federal Election Commission, is expected to advertise on Mr. Biden’s behalf next year.The Climate Power campaign also has the praise of Mr. Biden’s top aides at the White House.“President Biden has delivered on the most ambitious agenda to fight climate change, including signing into law the largest climate investment ever,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, the White House deputy chief of staff. “Climate Power is a critical partner to continue demonstrating to the American people that the president is building a clean energy economy that benefits all Americans.”Part of the challenge in selling Mr. Biden’s strides on climate is that young voters, who polls suggest care the most about the issue, tend to be the most skeptical of his record on it. There has been significant anger over Mr. Biden’s approval of Willow, an $8 billion oil drilling project on pristine federal land in Alaska, and a pipeline that would carry natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia that has been opposed by environmentalists.Ms. Lodes dismissed left-wing anger over Mr. Biden’s climate record and said that Climate Power would seek to appeal to a broader group of voters critical to his 2024 coalition.“There are activists and then there are voters,” she said. “Climate activists are going to push and push. And you know what? The Biden campaign, the Biden administration need to be pushed to do more and to go further. But at the end of the day, the reality is that he has done more than any other president in American history on climate.”Lisa Friedman More

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      in Elections

      The Plot Trump Lost

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      When was the last time you listened to Donald Trump for longer than 30 seconds? Longer than a clip sailing by in a tweet or a TikTok or packaged on the evening news? Lovers and haters alike seem filled to the brim with information about this man, unable to take in any more or alter their view of him.If you haven’t lately, he talks about the 2020 election a lot, still, but in ways that are a little different from before.Onstage, sometimes he refers to it with a certain subversive lightness, like another thing he’s not supposed to repeat but does, like a punchline. “You speak up a little bit about the election — ‘He’s an insurrectionist,’” he said in Waterloo, Iowa, this month, to laughs.But sometimes the 2020 election as Mr. Trump describes it sounds like a crisis he cannot move beyond. “Had the election not … turned out the way it did — I’ll try to be nice,” he began in Iowa. “Had it not turned out the way it did — you know when I say that, I mean,” he said, then with more emphasis, “had the election not been rigged.”What if, what if. He was in an open-air warehouse on a windy, 51-degree Saturday and would return to the hypothetical again that day — had the election not been rigged, if the election hadn’t been rigged. The enthused crowd sat; eight Secret Service agents stood, flanking an elevated Mr. Trump and staring off into crisscrossing directions under an arched ceiling. The overall effect of the event — standing security detail, a big American flag against a cinder-block wall, “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys playing and at least eight people in T-shirts with the Trump mug shot on them — was like a concentrate of a Trump rally. We’ve been doing this so long as a country, he and we have become more abstract, operating in shorthand and fragments of the past.Onstage, he seamlessly moved between prepared text to talking about whatever was on his mind, then back in disorienting intimations, suggestions, asides and loops. “Household incomes rose by a record $6,000 a year under Trump, right? I love that mug shot. I love that beautiful woman right there with the mug shot,” he said at another event that afternoon, in a hotel convention center in Cedar Rapids.He’ll talk about how the day he stopped calling Hillary Clinton “crooked” was a good one for her, she celebrated that night, now he calls her beautiful, because she’s a great beauty — then with no variation or substantive transition beyond the word “but,” he goes back to prepared stuff about how the 30-year mortgage rate recently hit a 23-year high. A long riff about what prosecutors aren’t doing to the radical left, straight back into “but we delivered record increases in real family income.”Amid these digressions and jokes and tales about negotiations with foreign leaders, he’ll bring back a menacing clarity of voice so that each precise word about the indictments against him is all you can hear or think: “People realize that they’re fake and phony and they’re political.”As he used to say, he once had a nice life, which he gave up for this. But Mr. Trump said it the other night in West Palm Beach with the added dimension that “instead, I sit it in courtrooms.” He talks about how all the cases against him are connected and how they’re really after you, the voter, and he’s just standing in the way — though each time he said this in Iowa, his heart didn’t seem quite in it.He brings a lot more emotion to tracing everything going wrong in the world back to: What if they hadn’t rigged the election? Then, in the dream sequences that pepper Mr. Trump’s speeches, there would be no inflation, no war in Ukraine, no bad Afghanistan withdrawal. Forget what we’ll do now or what we should have done then.The broad themes Mr. Trump is working with right now are that Mr. Biden picked economic policies that are crazy and because the Afghanistan withdrawal was so bad, the world has fallen apart — but with 2020 always lurking nearby. “All these things wouldn’t have happened if the election weren’t rigged,” he said in Cedar Rapids. “If the election weren’t rigged, you wouldn’t have Ukraine, you wouldn’t have had any of it. It’s so sad what they’ve done. There’s plenty of evidence. It’s all there. You know it.” In Florida last week, he added one to the mix: Hamas would never have attacked Israel. “You’re in a different world,” he said in West Palm Beach, “and it’s getting worse.”Being assigned to one of the juries in these pending Trump cases would change someone’s life — a dividing line between the past and future. “Don’t use your real names with each other,” the judge told jurors at the beginning of E. Jean Carroll’s defamation trial. “My advice to you is not to identify yourselves, not now and not for a long time,” he told them on the last day.“When I would get in my car, I was like, ‘I just left that, and I have to just go do my job now?’” one member of the Fulton County special grand jury told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I just know things that are hard to know.’”If people seem to be unable to take in more information about Mr. Trump and if the election is shaping up to be a familiar repeat, the year ahead will not be. He views the world as one of perception, to be worked over and over again until it bends. To serve as a juror in this random selected position of authority, tasked with assessing what happened, for it to be your responsibility to step outside yourself and whatever you think about Mr. Trump and make decisions about him and the law is a weight that only a few dozen people will know. The rest of us will be outside in the chaos of perception, trying to make sense of it.And he’ll be inside and outside, perhaps still revisiting the decisive moment of his defeat and linking it with anything that’s gone wrong. “We would have had a deal with Iran. We would have had no inflation. Russia would have never ever in a million years gone into Ukraine,” he said in Waterloo. His sense of what if, what if, can draw a listener back further, to think about how much “what if” still shapes politics.The entire Republican Party has, for nearly a decade now, operated on a dream sequence of the possibility of passive collapse. What if he just went away? When Joe Biden ran in 2020, his campaign looked to correct the decisive mistake of the past: Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. That was not, Mr. Biden often suggested, who we were. The implicit promise was the restoration of morality and normality. What if the 2020 election could be a reset?It’s easy to follow all these dream sequences into another: What if Mr. Trump could just return to New York, had never run for president, were no longer talking in loops? What if the country didn’t have to live through a remix of the 2020 election or change people’s lives by putting them on juries or live in the unknown we have not yet really reckoned with of what it will be like to live through the trials of our former president?This election seems like the one before only on the surface. Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden and the rest of us keep getting older; everything and everyone seems a little fried. Eight years in, there’s nothing that weird about seeing people wearing T-shirts with his mug shot staring back at him while a Backstreet Boys song from 1999 plays, the entire Republican field sounding like echoes of Mr. Trump as he talks about Mrs. Clinton, moving in and out of the present and back in time sonically.Mr. Trump remembers what things used to be like. “A normal politician gets indicted, and we’ve seen it hundreds of times over the years,” he said in Iowa, though he’s done versions of this elsewhere, too.He described that guy’s approach after getting “the pink slip” and dropped his voice into a washed monotone. “‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to announce that I am going home to my family. I will fight, I will fight, fight, fight for the rest of my life.’”“Do you understand? This is standard,” he said. “With me, it’s different.”Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More