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      in US Politics

      White people, black authors are not your medicine | Yaa Gyasi

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      In 2018, two other novelists and I were being driven back from a reception in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to our hotel in downtown Detroit, when we saw a black man getting arrested on the side of the road. The driver of our car, a white woman who had spent the earlier part of the drive ranting about how Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, had ruined the city, looked at the lone black man surrounded by police officers with their guns drawn and said: “It’s good they’ve got so many on him. You never know what they’ll do.”
      Two years before, I had published my first novel, Homegoing, a book that is, among other things, about the afterlife of the transatlantic slave trade. The book thrust me into a kind of recognition that is uncommon to fiction writers. I was on late-night shows and photographed for fashion magazines. I did countless interviews, very little writing. The bulk of my work life was spent touring the country giving various readings and lectures. I spent about 180 days of 2017 either at an event, or travelling to or from one. By the time that car ride in Michigan came around, I was exhausted, not just by the travel but by something that is more difficult to articulate – the dissonance of the black spotlight, of being revered in one way and reviled in another, a revulsion that makes clear the hollowness of the reverence.
      The next morning, I delivered my address to a room full of people who had gathered for a library fundraiser, an address where I insisted, as so many black writers, artists and academics have before me, that America has failed to contend with the legacy of slavery. This failure is evident all around us, from our prisons to our schools, our healthcare, our food and waterways. I gave my lecture. I accepted the applause and the thanks, and then I got into another car. It was a different driver, but it was the same world.
      I was thinking about that driver’s words again last summer as news poured in about the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. I was thinking about the way in which white people, in order to justify their own grotesque violence, so often engage in a kind of fiction, an utterly insidious denialism that creates the reality it claims to protest. By which I mean an unwillingness to see the violence that is actually happening before you because of a presumption of violence that might happen, is itself a kind of violence. What exactly can a man with a knee on his neck do, what can a sleeping woman do to deserve their own murder? To make room for that grotesqueness, that depraved thinking, to believe in any murder’s necessity, you must abandon reality. To see a man with several guns aimed at him, his hands on his head, as the problem, you must leave the present tense (“It’s good they’ve got so many on him”) and enter the future (“You never know what they will do”). A future, which is, of course, entirely imagined.

      I make my living off my imagination, but this summer, as I watched Homegoing climb back up the New York Times bestseller list in response to its appear­ance on anti-racist reading lists, I saw again, with no small amount of bile, that I make my living off the articulation of pain too. My own, my people’s. It is wrenching to know that the occasion for the renewed interest in your work is the murders of black people and the subsequent “listening and learning” of white people. I’d rather not know this feeling of experiencing career highs as you are flooded with a grief so old and worn that it seems unearthed, a fossil of other old and worn griefs.
      When an interviewer asks me what it’s like to see Homegoing on the bestseller list again, I say something short and vacuous like “it’s bittersweet”, because the idea of elaborating exhausts and offends me. What I should say is: why are we back here? Why am I being asked questions that James Baldwin answered in the 1960s, that Toni Morrison answered in the 80s? I read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for the first time when I was a teenager, and it was so crystalline, so beautifully and perfectly formed that it filled me with something close to terror. I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t fathom how a novel could pierce right through the heart of me and find the inarticulable wound. I learned absolutely nothing, but some minor adjustment was made within me, some imperceptible shift that occurs only when I encounter wonder and awe, the best art.
      To see my book on any list with that one should have, in a better world, filled me with uncomplicated pride, but instead I felt deflated. While I do devoutly believe in the power of literature to challenge, to deepen, to change, I also know that buying books by black authors is but a theoretical, grievously belated and utterly impoverished response to centuries of physical and emotional harm. The Bluest Eye was published 51 years ago. As Lauren Michelle Jackson wrote in her excellent Vulture essay “What is an anti-racist reading list for”, someone at some point has to get down to the business of reading.
      And it’s this question of “the business of reading”, of how we read, why we read, and what reading does for and to us, that I keep turning over in my mind. Years ago, I was at a festival with a friend, another black author, and we were trading stories. She said that the first time she did a panel with a white male author she was shocked to hear the questions he was asked. Craft questions. Character questions. Research questions. Questions about the novel itself, about the quality and the content of the pages themselves. I knew exactly what she meant. More

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      in US Politics

      This is the Fire review: Don Lemon's audacious study of racism – and love

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      Don Lemon’s new memoir is an audacious and improbable book by a remarkable man. “We must summon the courage to love people who infuriate us, because we love the world we share,” he writes, near the start.

      Relatively young, a short 20 years ago, the CNN anchor was almost unknown. How then, without seeming arrogant or pompous, does he place his life and his experience beside the best-known champions from the pantheon of Black freedom fighters? Invoking the zeal and courage of Dr King and Sojourner Truth, portraying even the proscribed accomplishments of Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen in the same light of heroic survival, his is a voice as essential for our time as Ta-Nehisi Coates and as compelling as Caroline Randall Williams.
      Lemon was initially a Republican, he tells us, from a time in his Louisiana homeland when Republicans were still pro-civil rights. He has taken a circuitous route to ardent Black activism. He revealed three sensational secrets in a 2011 memoir, Transparent, and seemed destined to become a media star akin to Oprah Winfrey. But his nightly broadcasts as the only African American anchor in prime time, his Zoom chats and podcast on racism have been calculated towards his rise. Affectingly, he appeals to a growing fanbase by relating that success notwithstanding, his was a life as troubled as their own.
      For one thing, his parents hadn’t been legally wed. His mother, working for his dad as a legal secretary, was married to another man, his father to another woman. His dad died when Lemon was nine and his divorced mom remarried. His family were loving and even his relationship with his stepfather was good. But he realized he was a “double negative” – gay and Black – living in the south, undoubtedly confused by childhood sexual assaults at the hands of a friend of his mother. He overcame all of this but one media instructor later told him: “I don’t know why you’re here. You’ll never be a newscaster.”
      But he was, and he took off. And then, around 2014, he seemed to change. Out of the blue, he was hectoring Black youth on air to “pull up their pants!” Denouncing a rebel fashion which endures on account of its effectiveness at pissing off old people, particularly old white authority figures? One wondered, was he embracing Bill Cosby’s “respectability” political stand? Admonishing youth about the importance of being married before starting a family, even endorsing the value of New York’s discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing, many reasoned Lemon must be trolling for ratings from the enemy. Some denounced him as an “Uncle Tom”.
      The change of Lemon’s disappointing trajectory began before Trump. Certainly the threat the former president posed helped to radicalize someone who often seems happiest finding and presenting both sides. Trump’s recurring slur of “stupid”, alternating with, “the stupidest!”, was consistently met with good-natured laughter and ever more incisive analysis. Trump was Lemon’s trial by fire. White-hot, through it he was refined. From a mere Black pundit he was transformed into a tested, un-cowed combatant in the struggle for civil rights.
      Beginning with a cautionary letter to his nephews and nieces with his white fiance, Tim Malone, Lemon purposefully emulates his hero, James Baldwin. Explaining the killing of George Floyd, Lemon deliberately imitates a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew in 1963. It is a preamble to a plea to learn all one can about the past. He warns of the omnipresence of patriarchal white supremacy, the west’s original sin.
      “Racism is a cancer that has been metastasizing throughout the land ever since Columbus showed up,” he states, making an excellent argument for replacing all memorials to Columbus with tributes to Frank Sinatra.
      Elucidating on the extent to which the wealth and might of America was derived from land appropriated from Native Americans and labor coerced from red, brown and especially enslaved Black Americans, he notes that even enterprises not directly involved in slavery benefited from the exploitative system. More

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      in US Politics

      Chaos Under Heaven: Trump as raging bull in a China policy shop

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      Covid-19 has left more than 530,000 Americans dead and China’s standing with the US at a historic low. Only Iran and North Korea fare worse. US opinion is no outlier. China’s reputation has taken a beating in Australia, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany. Images of tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square in summer 1989 have been supplanted by Beijing stonewalling on the origins of the plague.In Chaos Under Heaven, the Washington Post reporter Josh Rogin reminds us that under Xi Jinping, China halted the export of personal protective equipment made by US companies, sent defective PPE to the Netherlands and barred Australian beef exports after Canberra called for an inquiry into the genesis of Covid-19. In Rogin’s telling, China’s “mask diplomacy” was a blunt instrument, designed to still criticism abroad and sow fear at home.Rogin delivers a needed modicum of clarity. Under the subtitle Trump, Xi and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century, he lays out what the US and its allies got wrong about China over decades, strife within the Trump administration and personal financial conflicts that affected US policy. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump feature heavily. But Hunter and James Biden bear watching too.McConnell’s wealth is tethered to his wife’s family interest in Chinese shipping. Angela Chao, his sister-in-law, is chief executive of the business and sits on the board of the Bank of China. Most recently, the US transportation department inspector general reported that Elaine Chao, McConnell’s wife and Trump’s transportation secretary, escaped criminal investigation after the justice department weighed in.If the Chinese were to invade Taiwan, Trump said, ‘there isn’t a fucking thing we can do’. So much for US policyIn fall 2019, McConnell and Trump thwarted progress on the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy bill, which had cleared the Senate foreign relations committee, then controlled by Republicans. Back in 1992, McConnell backed legislation enacted in connection with the autonomy of Hong Kong. As late as summer 2019, he wrote an op-ed in support. Time – and perhaps marriage – can change perspective.Rogin has longtime interests in human rights and the far east. He spent the early days of his career at the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese daily, and more recently rubbed shoulders with an informal group of opponents to the Chinese regime, which he calls the “Bingo Club”. One member was Peter Mattis, a former CIA analyst and nephew of James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary. During the 2016 Republican convention, Rogin broke the story of the Trump campaign “gutting” the GOP’s anti-Russia platform on Ukraine.Chaos Under Heaven moves quickly, is well-written and draws the reader in. Rogin makes clear that tension between Beijing and Washington will probably remain for the foreseeable future. China’s economy and military continue to grow, America’s social chasms remain on display. Under Xi, don’t expect the Middle Kingdom to back down.One of Rogin’s central points is that Trump correctly identified the threat and challenge posed by China yet proved incapable of formulating a coherent strategy and sticking with it. Much of the time, he conflated personal relationships with the national interest. As his approach to North Korea showed, not everyone was buying what he was selling. His effort to draw China into that quagmire was a bust. The art of the deal is way harder than Trump trumpeted.On the ground, the food fights of 2016 carried over to the White House. The West Wing was riven with factions. Wall Street transplants, military veterans and diehard Maga-ites exchanged verbal blows. The former reality show host zigged and zagged, blowing hot and cold as TV and his moods took him.During the 2016 transition, Trump accepted a congratulatory phone call from Tsai Ing-wen, president of Taiwan. Not surprisingly, China was angered – it regards the island as its own. Ambiguity toward Taiwan was central to US rapprochement with China in the 1970s. Trump walked his words back, invited Xi to Mar-a-Lago and treated him to the “most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen”.As for Trump’s take on Taiwan, he told a senator it was “like two feet from China” and the US was “8,000 miles away”. Trump chillingly added that if the Chinese were to invade, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it”. So much for US policy.Trump’s inability to forge working alliances hampered US responses. Confronting China required playing well with others. Trump proved unable to set aside personal pique and drive a consensus forward. At times he caved on the technological threat China posed, for the sake of scoring an elusive trade deal.On the plus side of the ledger, the conduct of Beijing during the pandemic made governments realize “their dependence on China was a political vulnerability”. The UK reversed course and banned Huawei, the Chinese communications Goliath, from its networks.No book about Trump is complete without at least one salacious morsel. Chaos Under Heaven conveys that Trump came to believe an unfounded rumor that Gen HR McMaster, his second national security adviser, was conducting an extramarital affair. As expected, Trump could not keep the news to himself.At a crowded Oval Office staff meeting, the former president queried: “Have you heard who McMaster is fucking?” Ever the puritan, Trump warned: “He’s gonna get us all in trouble if he can’t keep his dick in his pants.” The Manhattan district attorney is still investigating all things Trump, including payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.Rogin observes that Trump was “great at flipping over the chess board but he couldn’t set the board back up again”. That said, he had “shifted the conversation about China in a way that cannot be undone”. More

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      in US Politics

      'It's a moral decision': Dr Seuss books are being 'recalled' not cancelled, expert says

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

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      in US Politics

      Lucky review: how Biden beat Trump – and doubters like Obama and Hillary

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

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      in Elections

      Key Biden aide said pandemic was 'best thing that ever happened to him', book says

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      A senior adviser to Democrat Joe Biden in his campaign for president believed “Covid is the best thing that ever happened to him”, a new book reports.It was, the authors add, a necessarily private comment that “campaign officials believed but would never say in public” as the US reeled from the impact of the pandemic amid hospitals stretched to breaking and with deaths mounting and the economy falling off a cliff.The remark, made to “an associate” by Anita Dunn, a Washington powerbroker who the Atlantic called “The Mastermind Behind Biden’s No-Drama Approach to Trump”, is reported in Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.The first major book on the 2020 election, a campaign indelibly marked by the coronavirus, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.This week, President Biden commemorated the 500,000th US Covid death with solemn ceremony and a request that Americans “remember those we lost and those we left behind”.Allen and Parnes, of NBC News and The Hill, also collaborated on Shattered, a similarly speedy history of Hillary Clinton’s White House run in 2016. In their new book they record Biden’s view of his predecessor in her defeat by Trump – he thought her a “terrible candidate” – and the views of Barack Obama, whom Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017, as the 2020 campaign unfolded.Obama first “seemed to be enamored with a former Texas congressman, Beto O’Rourke”, Allen and Parnes write, then later told Biden’s aides he feared his friend, aged 77 when the primary began, would only succeed in embarrassing himself and tarnishing a distinguished Washington career.But Dunn’s reported comment points to what became the dominant theme of the election. As the pandemic capsized Trump along with the economy Biden, through a much more cautious approach to campaigning and basic public health concerns, appealed to voters as the right man to manage a recovery.Trump sought to hammer Biden for “hiding in his basement” – a reference to Biden’s decision to rarely leave home in Wilmington, Delaware, instead campaigning virtually while the president held rallies and ignored public health guidelines. But such attacks did not hit home.Though “both Trump and Biden were comfortable with the stylistic and substantive contrasts of their … responses to the coronavirus”, Allen and Parnes write, “Trump led loudly, Biden calmly said Trump misled”.Like many members of his family and inner circle, Trump contracted the virus. He was reportedly more seriously ill than was publicly admitted. Biden stayed healthy and won the electoral college 306-232 and the popular vote by more than 7m.Dunn, 63, is a veteran of six Democratic campaigns and three winning ones, having worked for Obama in 2008 and 2012. She has not taken a role in the Biden administration and according to her own consulting firm, SKDK, is “currently on leave … expected to return later this year”.According to the profile published by the Atlantic in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s win in November, Dunn “came of age in the time when aides were neither seen nor heard … and still values discretion above almost all else”. More

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      in US Politics

      The Ten Year War review: Obamacare, Trump and Biden's battles yet to come

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      Once upon a time, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was unpopular, viewed by many as welfare redux. Barack Obama’s promise that “If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan”, didn’t exactly work out. By the middle of the 2010s, so-called Obamacare had cost the Democrats both houses of Congress.
      Yet one great recession and one raging pandemic later, the ACA is liked, if not necessarily loved, by a majority of Americans.
      The political process “doesn’t stop just because a bill becomes a law”, according to Jonathan Cohn.
      As if to prove Cohn’s point, the US awaits a ruling by the supreme court on another challenge to Obamacare, this one brought by the Trump administration and Republican state attorneys general. If they prevail, more than 20 million Americans may lose health coverage. Nearly a half-million have died from Covid. Markets don’t always deliver what is needed.
      The Ten Year War is a look back at the “crusade” for universal healthcare coverage, and a sequel to Cohen’s earlier book, Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Healthcare Crisis. Cohn is a senior correspondent at the Huffington Post. His take remains informed and nuanced, not breathless. The Ten Year War also captures acrid and tectonic shifts in US politics.
      Cohn persuasively argues that the combatants in the healthcare fight operated with less than perfect knowledge, and that preconceived convictions too often clouded their judgment. Cohn aims at both policy wonks and political junkies. Laced with interviews and quotes from both sides of the aisle, his book is definitely newsworthy.
      Obama and Tom Price, Donald Trump’s short-tenured health secretary, speak on the record. David Axelrod, Obama’s counselor, and Michael Carvin, a veteran conservative litigator who unsuccessfully argued against Obamacare’s constitutionality, also talk to the author. Years earlier, in the 2000 election, Carvin was on brief in George W Bush’s winning supreme court gambit.
      Obama admits his surprise over Republicans not moving on after the ACA passed, unlike Medicare in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson. “We got no take-up on any of that stuff,” he says. Left unsaid is that blue and red are more than just colors – they are tribes.
      By the same measure, Obama acknowledges “that there were those … who suggested that we shouldn’t do anything other than the economy”. That is an understatement.
      One of those “outsiders” was Chuck Schumer, now the Senate majority leader. Even then, Cohn writes, the New Yorker grasped the political consequences of going all-in on healthcare amid a meltdown in the jobs and housing markets.
      Indeed, after the Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, New York’s senior senator unloaded on Obama before the National Press Club: “After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle-class-oriented programs.” Said differently, the ACA highlighted the inherent instability of the Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition.
      Instead, in Schumer’s telling, “we took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem – healthcare reform.” Apparently, there are few things more gratifying in politics than telling a sitting president: “I told you so.”
      Of course, political myopia is not the sole province of any one party. Price admits that Republicans too operated in their own universe.
      “I think there was a lack of appreciation on the part of all of us in the administration about how difficult” repealing Obamacare would be, he says. Price is a physician as well as a former Georgia congressman.
      Price criticizes Trump for fashioning policy to comport with the last voice to whisper into his ear, and for a fundamental lack of understanding of healthcare and insurance.
      “We would make concrete decisions about what we were going to do,” he says, “get presidential sign-off, and then within 24 hours the decision would change.”
      For Price’s boss, pulling the rug out from under others was standard operating procedure. More

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      in US Politics

      Rush Limbaugh obituary

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      Rush Limbaugh, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, virtually created the style of political “shock jock” radio that made him so influential. His broadcasts, featuring attacks on opponents as purveyors of what we now call “fake news”, became the template for television’s Fox News, and at its peak played a huge part in Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” of 1994, which recaptured the House of Representatives from Bill Clinton’s Democrats.Limbaugh set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling women’s rights activists “feminazis”, referring to HIV/Aids as “Rock Hudson’s disease” and claiming “environmentalist wackos” were “a bunch of scientists organised around a political position”.He argued that the existence of gorillas disproved evolution, characterised both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019) as “false flag” operations organised by leftists, and accused the Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe of allowing the Charlottesville rioting in 2017 to worsen in order to boost his presidential ambitions. “Have you ever noticed how composite sketches of criminals always look like [the black activist] Jesse Jackson?” he asked his listeners.When he cut off callers on air, he would play a vacuum cleaner noise, shouting “caller abortion”. His listeners, whom he dubbed “ditto-heads” ate it up, while those who were offended often tuned in to express their disgust. In recent years the independent fact-checking site PolitiFact consistently rated Limbaugh high in terms of “pants on fire” untruths, and just as consistently at zero on truths.Limbaugh (pronounced “LIM baw”) was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, into a family of conservative judges that included his father, whose name was also Rush. His mother, Mildred (nee Armstrong), was the family clown, and encouraged “Rusty” in his love of radio. He did poorly at school, then quit Southeast Missouri State University after a year and found a job with a radio station in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, as “Bachelor Jeff Christie”, but was fired after he told a black caller he claimed to find difficult to understand to “take the bone out of your nose and call again”.He was then fired from a nighttime show in Pittsburgh when new management took over. In Kansas City his morning current affairs talk show on KUDL then an evening talk show on KFIX both ended in sackings for what he described as differences with management; at this point he considered himself a “moderate failure”.He married Roxy McNeely, a radio sales executive, in 1977; they divorced in 1980.By then Limbaugh was working with the Kansas City Royals baseball team in group ticket sales and special events, and in 1983 he married Michelle Sixta, an usherette in the Royals’ Stadium Club. That year he returned to radio with KMBZ in Kansas City, but again got fired for being controversial, in part about the local Chiefs football team. However, one consultant who had enjoyed his KMBZ style suggested him as a candidate to replace the equally controversial Morton Downey Jr on KRBK in Sacramento, California, to which Limbaugh moved in 1984. At KRBK Limbaugh began to attract attention. In 1987, during the Ronald Reagan era, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required users of the public airwaves to allow equal time if they broadcast political opinion. This opened the floodgates to the likes of Limbaugh, and in 1988 he moved to WABC in New York, which became the flagship for a 56-station network broadcast of his show, scheduled, unusually for talk, at midday. By 1990 he had five million listeners.Another godsend for his show was the election of Clinton in 1992, the year in which Limbaugh began a syndicated TV programme produced by the future Fox News boss Roger Ailes. Limbaugh’s deeply personal anti-Clinton campaigning was so effective that when Gingrich and the Republicans re-took the House, they made him an honorary member of the Republican caucus. He and Sixta had divorced in 1990, and in 1994 he married Marta Fitzgerald , an aerobics instructor. He told an interviewer he struggled with love because: “I am too much in love with myself.”The TV show ended in 1996, but on radio Limbaugh went from strength to strength. He now lived in Palm Beach, Florida, where he produced his radio show from his “southern command” centre. In 2003 the sports network ESPN hired him as an analyst on their Monday Night Football broadcast team, but a few weeks into the season he upset viewers by saying that the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated “because the media is very desirous that a black quarterback do well”.It was an especially odd remark given that one-third of the league’s starting quarterbacks were black; that year one of them, Tennessee’s Steve McNair, would be joint winner of the league’s Most Valuable Player award. Limbaugh resigned three days later. The following Monday he admitted to an addiction to prescription drugs, including OxyContin.He was divorced from Marta in 2004, and for the next two years was linked romantically to the CNN anchor Daryn Kagan. In 2006 Limbaugh was arrested on his return from a trip to the Dominican Republic, where he had bought viagra with a false prescription. Although charges were dropped, WBAL in Baltimore became the first station to ditch his show.The George W Bush years seemed to stretch him; he said the US torture of prisoners in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was “no worse than what happens at a Skull and Bones initiation”, perhaps forgetting that Bush and his father were both members of that Yale University secret society. But just as Clinton had been a godsend, so Barack Obama seemed to inspire Limbaugh to new heights of partisan venom. Apart from claiming that Obama was foreign-born, he accused the president of allowing ebola into the US in revenge for African slavery. When Republicans rallied in the 2010 midterm elections, Limbaugh again reaped much of the credit.In 2008 he had signed an eight-year $400m contract with the Cumulus broadcasting company, and in 2013 he moved his home station to New York’s WOR. After signing a four-year extension in 2018, his income that year totalled $84.5m, second only to one of the original, non-political, fellow shock jocks, Howard Stern. In 2010 he married for the fourth time, to Kathryn Rogers, a party planner. Elton John sang at their wedding reception for a reported $1m fee.In 1992 Limbaugh wrote, with John Fund, The Way Things Ought to Be. Both it and the 1993 sequel, See, I Told You So, were bestsellers. In 2013 he wrote the first in a series of six children’s books featuring a character called Rush Revere – named after the Americn patriot Paul Revere – who goes back in time to have adventures during the American revolution.In 2017, after the ascension to the presidency of his Palm Beach neighbour Donald Trump, Limbaugh joined Trump in suggesting that dire warnings about the possible impact of Hurricane Irma in Florida were fake news designed to push “a climate change agenda”. He quickly became an object of derision when he had to evacuate his home before the storm hit.In January 2020 he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer; he announced it on air the following month, the day before he received the presidential medal of freedom from Trump. Nevertheless he failed to throw his full backing to Trump’s attempts to overturn the election result; he accused the president’s lawyers of failing to support their claims of voter fraud with evidence.He is survived by Kathryn. • Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, broadcaster, born 12 January 1951; died 17 February 2021 More