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      James Abourezk, the First Arab American Senator, Dies at 92

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      A Democrat from South Dakota, he found the freedom to act on principle in the House and Senate by choosing not to seek re-election.James Abourezk, who was elected by South Dakotans as the first Arab American senator, and who used his prominence to support the causes of Palestinians and Native Americans while also pushing for friendlier relations with Cuba and Iran, died on Friday, his 92nd birthday, at his home in Sioux Falls, S.D. His daughter Alya James Abourezk confirmed the death.Mr. Abourezk (pronounced AB-ur-esk) was a double novelty for a senator. He was a left winger from a generally conservative rural state and a politician who gave up the chance for re-election to focus on pursuing the political objectives he believed in, rather than those supported by his party, his constituents or even, in some cases, most Americans.In 1970, when Mr. Abourezk won a race for South Dakota’s second district seat in the House, the state’s newly elected governor was a fellow Democrat, Richard F. Kneip, and its other senator was the progressive standard-bearer George McGovern. Mr. Abourezk’s victory came as a surprise nevertheless: A Democrat had not occupied that House seat since the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dominance in the 1930s.He was elected to the Senate in 1972. After he stepped down, Larry Pressler, a Republican, succeeded him and served for nearly 20 years.Mr. Abourezk attributed his success to his reputation as “more populist than liberal or leftist, a brand of politician that resonates with people from South Dakota,” he told The Capital Journal, a South Dakota newspaper, in 2013. “One comment I constantly heard from people was that, ‘I don’t agree much with Abourezk, but by God, he’s honest.’”Mr. Abourezk in his Sioux Falls, S.D., office in 2004. After leaving the Senate, he served as counsel for the Iranian Embassy and founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.Lloyd B. Cunningham/The Argus Leader, via Associated PressHis biggest achievements as a senator concerned support for Native Americans. He proposed the establishment of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, which studied legislative possibilities to address problems in that community. The laws that resulted included the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which granted tribes more autonomy in administering government programs, and the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which established controls on the adoption of Indigenous children by white families. That measure continues to draw praise, even from tribal representatives and legal advocates who say it did not go far enough.On some issues, Mr. Abourezk was content to oppose most other senators — or even the entire rest of the chamber. In 1977, he was a lone dissenter in an 85-to-1 vote on an amendment concerning child pornography. He questioned the legality of a ban on selling or distributing material that might not be considered obscene.The same year, he organized an almost comically unusual good-will trip to Cuba for a delegation of South Dakota college basketball players to compete against the Cuban national team. “Sports is noncontroversial, and this should do a lot for normalization of relations,” Mr. Abourezk told The New York Times in Havana. “It’s fitting South Dakota should be involved because we’re famous for pioneers of all kinds.”Traveling from 25-degree Sioux Falls to 85-degree Havana and being served frozen daiquiris upon arrival, the South Dakotans reacted to the trip with wonderment. “I’ve never even seen the sea before,” Bob Ashley, a 6‐foot‐10 center from the Sioux tribe, told The Times.Mr. Abourezk brought his dissident sensibility most vocally to issues involving the Middle East, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a 1975 article for The Times, he argued, “No settlement can come about and no peace can endure unless the Palestinians have been settled in a homeland of their own.”The next year provided another occasion for him to vote against the rest of the Senate. The issue was a measure to cut off foreign aid to nations that harbored international terrorists. Mr. Abourezk said that the amendment was aimed at Arab terrorists but had no provisions for what he termed terrorist acts by the Israeli military.Some opposed his appearance at a 1977 Democratic dinner in Denver on the grounds that he was too critical of Israel. He replied, “Just as we have seen U.S. Presidents wrap themselves in the American flag in efforts to stifle criticism of their policies, so do we see a foreign country wrapping itself in its state religion, so that criticism of the state or its policies is perceived as a form of racism.”After leaving the Senate, he became “Iran’s Man in Washington,” as The Times labeled him in 1979, serving as counsel for the Iranian Embassy and seeking to recoup money that the Islamic Republic said had been stolen by the Shah. He also founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, which drew attention to prejudicial treatment of Arabs by the government and in everyday life.James George Abourezk was born on Feb. 24, 1931, in Wood, S.D. He grew up there and in Mission, two tiny towns that were on the Rosebud Indian Reservation of southern South Dakota. His father, Charles, had moved to the United States from Lebanon as a peddler in 1898 and managed to open general stores in Wood and Mission. His mother, Lena (Mickel) Abourezk, a Lebanese Greek Orthodox immigrant like her husband, ran the family store in Wood, while Charles managed the one in Mission.Mr. Abourezk served for four years in the Navy. He got a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and in 1966 he earned a law degree from the University of South Dakota School of Law. Before entering politics, Mr. Abourezk worked as a farmhand, wholesale grocery salesman, car salesman, bartender and bar owner. He became passionate about politics after a family doctor lent him copies of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, The Nation and The New Republic.Mr. Abourezk’s marriages to Mary Ann Houlton and Margaret Bethea ended in divorce. He married Sanaa Dieb in 1991. She survives him, along with Alya, their daughter; two sons, Charlie and Paul, and a daughter, Nikki Pipe On Head, from his first marriage; a stepdaughter, Chesley Machado; more than 30 grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.Mr. Abourezk’s wife runs Sanaa’s Gourmet Mediterranean, a restaurant in Sioux Falls that The Times credited in 2014 with kicking off “an epicurean trend” in the city. In 2019, when he was 89, The Aberdeen News reported that Mr. Abourezk enjoyed holding court at the restaurant, telling stories of his colorful life and sharing his views on politics.He suggested to The Capital Journal a way to ensure more independent-minded legislators such as himself: term limits. “If a member of Congress is not worried about getting re-elected, he or she will more often than not vote in the public interest rather than in his or her own electoral interest, which is now what happens,” he said. More

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      Hazel McCallion, No-Nonsense Canadian Mayor for 36 Years, Dies at 101

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      Tough, pragmatic and brusque when she had to be, she helped transform Mississauga from a sleepy Toronto suburb into one of the country’s largest and most dynamic cities.Hazel McCallion, who as the longest-serving mayor in Canadian history transformed the sleepy Toronto suburb of Mississauga into a multicultural dynamo and the country’s sixth-largest city, died at her home there on Jan. 29, nine years after she ended her 36-year run. She was 101.Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario and a close friend of Mrs. McCallion’s, said she died from pancreatic cancer.When Mrs. McCallion first won office, in 1978, Mississauga was a sprawling centerless community of about 250,000 people, little more than an extension of Toronto, its much larger neighbor to the east. Today it has a dense downtown core of skyscrapers, robust arts institutions and 750,000 people.And while Mississauga in the 1970s was overwhelmingly white, the city is now one of Canada’s most diverse, drawing immigrants from East and South Asia.Mrs. McCallion did not just survive but thrive through 12 terms by blending thrifty pragmatism with open-armed populism.Though she leaned slightly to the political left, she did not hew to a party platform or ideology. Her singular goal was to bring prosperity to Mississauga, which she did by keeping budgets trim — the city rarely carried debt or raised property taxes — and being unafraid to assert her city’s interests against its neighbors or in the Ontario provincial government.A copy of The Streetsville Booster, a community newspaper founded by Hazel and Sam McCallion, from 1978, the first year she ran for mayor of Mississauga. She won that election and went on to serve 12 terms.Cole Burston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Hazel McCallion does not caution,” the magazine Toronto Life wrote in 2003. “She berates. She harangues. She, well, bites off people’s heads.”But if politicians and bureaucrats feared her, voters loved her.After she decided not to run for re-election in 2014, she picked her successor, Bonnie Crombie, who won handily. No one was surprised: Mrs. McCallion left office with an 85 percent approval rating. They called her Hurricane Hazel, a tribute to her brash style more than a reference to the weather disaster that killed 80 people in Toronto in 1954.Her reputation was cemented just months after she took office, when a train carrying tons of toxic and flammable chemicals overturned near the middle of Mississauga. She immediately ordered most of the town, some 220,000 residents, to evacuate. Over several days she was there alongside the police and firefighters, ushering people to safety, undeterred by an ankle sprained along the way.And when it was over, she was fierce in her demand for damages.“It will be an astronomical sum,” she told reporters, “and somebody is going to get the bill.”Mrs. McCallion played professional hockey in the 1930s, and she remained the picture of ruddy health through her time as mayor, a fact that endeared her to voters. Even into her 80s, she carried a hockey stick in her car trunk, in case she came across a game. She fished, hiked and once, when she was 87, biked five miles to work to promote alternatives to driving.Mrs. McCallion in an undated photo. She won re-election repeatedly without campaigning or fund-raising, and she never faced serious opposition. Tara Walton for The New York TimesShe had come to politics from a career with an engineering company, starting in 1964 as a candidate for a municipal office in Streetsville, a village within Mississauga’s borders. After the two entities, along with a few others, combined to create the city of Mississauga, she moved effortlessly into the mayor’s office after defeating the incumbent by just 3,000 votes in her 1978 race.She never faced another serious opponent, and in two of her elections she didn’t face one at all, winning by acclamation. She did this without campaigning or fund-raising; she encouraged supporters eager to open their wallets to give to charity instead.“I don’t run a campaign, as you know,” she told the Canadian Press news agency in 2010. “I’m there with them four years. I don’t wait for an election to come along to campaign.”She was Mississauga’s chief booster, promoting it as a dynamic place that welcomed the businesses and the influx of immigrants entering Canada in the 1970s and ’80s.She was not without critics, who considered her imperious and even dictatorial. And she conceded that she kept a tight grip on the Mississauga City Council, allowing little dissent, at least in public.In 1982 and again in 2009, she was accused of failing to disclose conflicts of interest: first when land she and her husband owned was included in a possible development project, and later when she lobbied for a hotel project in which one of her sons was an investor.The first instance was not illegal at the time, and the second, which did go to court, was thrown out by a judge in 2013. Taken together, it was a record her defenders considered remarkably clean for a political career that began before most of her voters were born.A selection of McCallion memorabilia at the 2022 exhibition. “Having time on my hands is not acceptable,” she once said when asked if she thought about leaving office.Tara Walton for The New York TimesHazel Journeaux was born on Feb. 14, 1921, in Port-Daniel, a small town on the Gaspé Peninsula in southeast Quebec. Her father, Herbert, ran a fishing and processing company, and her mother, Amanda (Travers) Journeaux, was a nurse.The family moved to Montreal when Hazel was still a child, and after high school she took secretarial and business classes before being hired by M.W. Kellogg, an engineering company.She spent several years as a professional hockey player in Montreal, cementing a lifelong love for the sport. She played center for a team sponsored by Kick, a cola brand, and made $5 a game, the equivalent of about $65 in U.S. dollars today. In 1987 the Women’s World Hockey Championship named its trophy the Hazel McCallion World Cup.Her hockey career ended in 1940, when Kellogg opened an office in Toronto and she was sent to manage it.She married Sam McCallion in 1951. He died in 1997. She is survived by her sons, Peter and Paul; her daughter, Linda Burgess; and a granddaughter.Mrs. McCallion spent more than two decades as a manager with Kellogg before leaving to work with her husband and his printing business, and to get involved in politics in Streetsville. After three years on the village council, she was elected mayor of Streetsville in 1970.After the creation of the city of Mississauga, she served on its council for four years before being elected mayor in 1978 at age 57.Before, during and after her time as mayor, she led a backbreaking workday, rising at 5:30 and starting meetings at 7. She swatted away questions about leaving office, even long after most people her age would have retired.“Having time on my hands is not acceptable,” she told The Toronto Star in 2001, when she was 80. “If I quit, I’d have to find something very challenging to do. And what could be more challenging than being mayor?”After she finally did end her run as mayor in 2014, at 93, she continued to work. She served as the first chancellor of the Hazel McCallion Campus of Sheridan College, a Toronto-area technical school; she advised Mr. Ford, the Ontario premier; and she oversaw the Greater Toronto Airport Authority, a job that in 2019 took her on a tour of the world’s busiest airports.In a 2022 interview with the newspaper The National Post, she summed up her philosophy by recalling something her mother would ask her when she was young: “What do you want to accomplish in life? Do you want to be a follower or do you want to take advantage of opportunities to be a leader?” More

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      Charlene Mitchell, 92, Dies; First Black Woman to Run for President

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      She was the Communist Party candidate in 1968 and later led the campaign to free Angela Davis. But she eventually split with the party.Charlene Mitchell, who as the Communist Party’s presidential nominee in 1968 became the first Black woman to run for the White House, died on Dec. 14 in Manhattan. She was 92.Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by her son, Steven Mitchell.Ms. Mitchell joined the Communist Party in 1946, when she was just 16, and over her long career worked at the intersection of issues that have come to define the left’s agenda for the last 50 years, including feminism, civil rights, police violence, economic inequality and anticolonialism.Her rise in the party leadership came at a moment of crisis. The Communists had been decimated by the repressive tactics of the McCarthy era, then by the exodus of members disaffected by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. By the late 1950s it counted barely 10,000 members, down from its height of about 75,000 in 1947.To find new recruits, the party drew on its roots in radical civil rights activism to appeal to a new generation of Black leaders. Ms. Mitchell joined the party’s national committee in 1958; she was its youngest member ever.In the 1960s, she founded an all-Black chapter in Los Angeles called the Che-Lumumba Club, which quickly became one of the most active in the country. The club’s choice of namesakes, the Argentine Marxist Che Guevara and the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, pointed to Ms. Mitchell’s abiding insistence that the American left had to be rooted in an international matrix of freedom struggles.She traveled widely, meeting fellow leftists in Europe, South America and Africa, and she was among the first Americans to highlight the plight of Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. By 1968 she was one of the best-known and most widely respected American Communist leaders.“I don’t know of anything that Charlene was involved in where she was not the leader,” Mildred Williamson, who met Ms. Mitchell at a 1973 anti-apartheid conference in Chicago, said in a phone interview.Ms. Mitchell became the Communist Party’s presidential nominee when she was just 38. At its convention in Manhattan, she accepted the nomination below a banner that read “Black and White Unite to Fight Racism — Poverty — War!”“We plan to put an open-occupancy sign on the White House lawn,” she declared and, taking a swipe at the pet project of the first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, added, “We propose to put a woman in that house to beautify not only our highways but to beautify ourselves.”Her run for office came four years before the New York congresswoman Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman to seek the nomination for president from a major party.Though she and her running mate, Michael Zagarell, appeared on just four state ballots and received just over 1,000 votes, her candidacy put a new face on the Communist Party at a time when the student-led New Left was gaining ground in left-wing politics and some party members had grown disillusioned with its uncritical support of the Soviet Union.The Communist Party ticket in 1968 included Michael Zagarell, left, for vice president, and Ms. Mitchell, right, for president. At center is the party’s general secretary, Gus Hall. Courtesy of the Communist Party USAIn contrast to the student movement, which was largely male, middle-class and white, she offered a vision of the left that was rooted in the experience of working-class women of color. Among her acolytes was an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, named Angela Davis.After Dr. Davis was arrested in 1970 for providing weapons used in the killing of a Marin County judge, Ms. Mitchell led her defense committee.Dr. Davis was acquitted in 1972, and Ms. Mitchell used the experience to create the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a group that, in its focus on police brutality and the legal system, foreshadowed later racial justice movements.“Black Lives Matter and modern Black feminism stand on the shoulders of Charlene Mitchell,” Erik S. McDuffie, a professor of African American studies at the University of Illinois, said in a phone interview.Among Ms. Mitchell’s many successful campaigns was the acquittal of Joan Little, a North Carolina inmate accused of murdering a prison guard who had sexually assaulted her. She also lobbied on behalf of the Wilmington 10, a group of nine Black men and one woman, also in North Carolina, who were convicted of arson and conspiracy in 1971 and later exonerated.“I don’t think I have ever known someone as consistent in her values, as collective in her outlook on life, as firm in her trajectory as a freedom fighter,” Dr. Davis said at a 2009 event honoring Ms. Mitchell.Charlene Alexander was born on June 8, 1930, in Cincinnati. Her parents were part of the Great Migration of Black Southerners who moved north in the first part of the 20th century — her father, Charles, came from Georgia and her mother, Naomi (Taylor) Alexander, from Tennessee.Her marriages to Bill Mitchell and Michael Welch both ended in divorce. Along with her son, she is survived by two brothers, Deacon Alexander and Mike Wolfson.When she was 9, Charlene, her parents and her seven siblings moved to Chicago, where her father worked as a Pullman porter and a hod carrier. He was also active in the labor movement and served as a precinct captain for Representative William L. Dawson, one of the few Black members of Congress.The family settled in Cabrini Homes, a mixed-race public-housing development on Chicago’s Near North Side, which was a center of left-wing politics. When she was 13, Charlene joined the local branch of American Youth for Democracy, the youth branch of the Communist Party.By the early 1940s she was already an activist, helping to lead a protest against a nearby theater, the Windsor, that required Black patrons to sit in the balcony. Black and white students, attending a matinee, simply switched places one day, and the theater dropped its segregation policy soon after.Ms. Mitchell studied briefly at Herzl Junior College in Chicago (now Malcolm X College). She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s and to New York City in 1968.Although Ms. Mitchell remained a committed socialist, she drifted from the Communist Party in the 1980s, especially after the death of Henry Winston, its most prominent Black leader, in 1986. The party, she came to believe, was becoming too focused on class issues at the expense of fighting racial and other injustices.“I am not suggesting that all of a sudden there was racism in the party, or that some people were mean, or anything like that,” she said in a 1993 interview. “You had a situation where attention to certain questions that African American comrades felt were important was downgraded.”After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ms. Mitchell joined more than 100 other party members in calling for the party to reject Leninism and take a more democratic socialist path. In retaliation, the party’s longtime general secretary, Gus Hall, froze them out of subsequent national committee meetings.Ms. Mitchell later left the party to help found the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, which sought to rebuild the left along more pluralistic lines.But she remained committed to the values of the far left, and of communism as she understood it.“The country’s rulers want to keep Black and white working people apart,” she said in a 1968 campaign speech. “The Communist Party is dedicated to the idea that — whatever the difficulties — they must be brought together, or neither can advance.” More

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      Frank Shakespeare, TV Executive Behind a New Nixon, Dies at 97

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      He helped dispel the candidate’s stiff image for the 1968 presidential campaign and then led U.S. government broadcasting efforts overseas under Nixon and Reagan.Frank Shakespeare, a self-described “conservative’s conservative” who used skills he had learned in the television industry to help elect Richard M. Nixon as president and then led the United States Information Agency, putting a hard edge on the Nixon administration’s message abroad, died on Wednesday in Deerfield, Wis. He was 97.His daughter Fredricka Shakespeare Manning confirmed the death, at her home, where Mr. Shakespeare had also been living. His death was also announced by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank, where he was chairman of its board of trustees in the 1980s. He also held ambassadorships in Portugal and at the Vatican.Mr. Shakespeare joined the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign while on leave as a CBS executive. As an adviser he was principally responsible for coming up with a novel way to present the candidate on television, in large part to make viewers forget Nixon’s stiff TV performances in 1960, when as vice president he was the Republican presidential standard-bearer.Mr. Shakespeare took on that task with Harry W. Treleaven Jr., an advertising executive who was credited with coming up with the slogan “Nixon’s the One!”; Leonard Garment, a lawyer who would become a Nixon White House counsel; and Roger E. Ailes, a television producer and the future Fox News president. They devised an approach in which panels of seemingly regular folks would ask Nixon questions and he would answer them conversationally.“We wanted a program concept of what Richard Nixon is in a way in which the public could make its own judgment,” Mr. Shakespeare told The New York Times in 1968. “We wanted to try to create electronically what would happen if five or six people sat in a living room with him and got to know him.”The four advisers “knew television as a weapon” that could be used to sell candidates in the manner of toothpaste, wrote Joe McGinniss in his 1969 book, “The Selling of the President 1968.”Mr. McGinniss said Mr. Shakespeare had been “more equal than the others,” ruling on matters as minute as whether Nixon’s daughters should sit in the first or second row at a telethon. (He overruled an aide who had assigned them to Row 2; he wanted Nixon to be able to greet them on his arrival easily.)Mr. Shakespeare helped plan Nixon’s inaugural pageantry before he was appointed director of the information agency, which had been created at the height of the Cold War to broadcast programming that would further American interests overseas.There he shifted its financing efforts from movies to television. He arranged U.S.I.A. coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, reaching 154 million people, and introduced television programs giving American views on issues in less developed countries.He also used his position to press his own anti-Communist thinking, sometimes to the ire of the State Department, which was negotiating treaties with the Soviet Union. He had a film made that argued that most Americans supported the Vietnam War, and he ordered that the works of conservative authors be placed in his agency’s libraries.Richard Nixon, as a presidential candidate, answered questions from a panel during a CBS television appearance in 1968.Associated PressMr. Shakespeare publicly clashed with Senator J. William Fulbright, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calling him “bad news for America” in an argument over the agency’s budget authorization.Mr. Fulbright countered that Mr. Shakespeare was “a very inadequate man for his job.”Francis Joseph Shakespeare Jr. was born in New York City on April 9, 1925, to Francis and Frances (Hughes) Shakespeare. He attended Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, graduating in 1946, and served in the Navy from 1945 to 1946. He worked briefly for the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and Procter & Gamble before becoming an advertising salesman for radio stations.In 1957, at 32, he was named general manager of WXIX-TV, a CBS affiliate in Milwaukee. Two years later, he was named vice president and general manager of WCBS-TV in New York. There he personally presented what was regarded as the first television editorial on local affairs, a critique of off-track betting. In another editorial, he examined how critics had treated a new CBS comedy show.He soon became a protégé of James T. Aubrey Jr., a top executive at CBS. In 1965, Mr. Shakespeare was appointed executive vice president, the second-highest post at the network.But after Mr. Aubrey was dismissed as president that same year, Mr. Shakespeare’s star waned. His last job at CBS was as head of its cable TV, syndication of programs and foreign investment. He said he volunteered for the Nixon campaign after being impressed by the candidate’s intellect when they met.Mr. Shakespeare left the Nixon administration in 1973 to become executive vice president of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, where he oversaw the company’s broadcasting operations. He went on to become president and vice chairman of RKO General, which owned radio and television stations.He was named chairman of the Heritage Foundation in the early 1980s as it pushed conservative positions like abolishing the Energy Department and cutting food stamps.In 1981, President Ronald Reagan named him chairman of the Board for International Broadcasting, overseeing Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. He served as ambassador to Portugal from 1985 to 1986 and to the Vatican from 1987 to 1989.Mr. Shakespeare’s wife, Deborah Anne (Spaeth) Shakespeare, with whom he had three children, died in 1998. In addition to his daughter Fredricka, he is survived by another daughter, Andrea Renna; a son, Mark; and 11 grandchildren.For all his skill in honing an image, Mr. Shakespeare knew his limitations in trying to mold Nixon, according to the McGinniss book. When other Nixon aides complained that the candidate had resisted their entreaties to stop repeating the phrase “Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” Mr. Shakespeare had the last word.Drop the subject, he said — it wasn’t going to happen.Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      Walter Dean Burnham, Who Traced Political Parties’ Shifts, Dies at 92

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      A noted political scientist, he saw parties periodically realigning themselves in stark fashion, presaging the rise of Donald Trump.Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist who theorized that political parties realign periodically in tectonic shifts that he called “America’s surrogate for revolution,” died on Oct. 4 in San Antonio. He was 92. The death was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Burnham.Professor Burnham, who taught most recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas, Austin, suggested that realignments of political parties had occurred roughly every three to four decades since 1896.With this in mind, he said, Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, while “shockingly unexpected” by the news media and professional pollsters, should not have been so surprising, coming as it did 36 years after the sharp turn to the right known as the Reagan revolution.“This was a ‘change’ election,” Professor Burnham wrote in the wake of it on the London School of Economics website. “Say what one wishes about Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency which he has now won, he was obviously the ‘change candidate,’ promising reactionary revitalization in response to a present deemed by himself to be intolerable.”Enough voters agreed with Mr. Trump to give him a majority in the Electoral College, though not in the popular vote. But turnout still sagged below 60 percent of voting age Americans, a benchmark that it last topped in 1968 after falling from highs of 80 percent in the 19th century.Professor Burnham long lamented declining turnout rates, acknowledging that while some people were undoubtedly discouraged by legal and bureaucratic hurdles to registration and voting, removing those hurdles did not necessarily improve turnout dramatically.Instead, he attributed the historic decline in participation rates to an expanding gulf between Americans and their government, to the withering of party loyalty, and to the absence of a European-type social democratic party representing the poor and blue-collar workers.“The growing political problem is found where the degeneration of political parties intersects with the rise of television advertising, continuous polling, media consultants and consent-massaging election operatives,” he wrote in 1988 in a letter to The New York Times.In the presidential race that year, he added, “non-Southern turnout levels fell to their lowest point in 164 years — since before the democratization of the presidency in the Andrew Jackson era. This, I think, is the fruit of the corruption, pollution and trivialization of the electoral process in our time.”He later found that by 2014, regional differences in turnout between the South and the rest of country had virtually vanished, for the first time since 1872.Professor Burnham explored his ideas on political realignment and declining voter turnout in his influential article “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” published in 1965 in The American Political Science Review.He expanded those themes into a book, “Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics” (1970), which held that party realignments are typically prompted by critical elections, wars and depressions.In this 1970 book, Professor Burnham argued that party realignments are typically prompted by critical elections, wars and depressions.After the 2014 midterm elections, when Republicans won their largest majority in nearly a century, Professor Burnham forecast the dynamics of the presidential campaign two years later.“Many are convinced that a few big interests control policy,” he and Thomas Ferguson of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, wrote of voters on AlterNet, a progressive website, weeks after the 2014 elections. “They crave effective action to reverse long term economic decline and runaway economic inequality, but nothing on the scale required will be offered to them by either of America’s money-driven major parties.”Richard H. Pildes, a professor at New York University School of Law, called Professor Burnham “one of the most influential political scientists of his generation on the role and nature of political parties in American democracy.”“Americans,” he added, “have gone through frequent eras of disdain for parties, including now, yet Burnham’s work still provides some of the most compelling rejoinders to that disdain and a powerful argument that insists on the centrality of strong parties to a healthy democratic politics. In particular, he asserted that weak parties creates weak, vulnerable legislators, which enables even greater domination of government by private interests.”Walter Dean Burnham was born on June 15, 1930, in Columbus, Ohio, to Alfred H. Burnham Jr., an engineer for General Electric, and Gertrude (Hamburger) Burnham, a homemaker.He received a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1951 and then served in the Army as a translator of intercepted communications in Russian. He went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate from Harvard, where his mentor was the historian V.O. Key Jr.He taught at Boston, Kenyon and Haverford Colleges and Washington University in St. Louis before joining the M.I.T. faculty in 1971 and the government department of the University of Texas in 1988. He became professor emeritus in 2004.In addition to his daughter Anne, he is also survived by a son, John, and four grandchildren. His wife, Patricia (Mullan) Burnham, died in 2018.Professor Burnham noted that political parties, for all their shortcomings, “are the only devices thus far invented which generate power on behalf of the many.”“I guess I would like to go back not to the smoke-filled room, but to the smoke-free room,” Professor Burnham told The Times in 1988. “After all, the first president of the United States was chosen by a search process. I don’t believe the open primary system is a democratic process. A few thousand activists push the Republican Party to the right and the Democratic Party to the left.”Alex Traub More

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      Jim Florio, New Jersey Governor Undone by Tax Hike, Dies at 85

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      A Democrat, he had successes on gun control, the environment and property-tax relief, but after raising income and sales taxes, he lost a bid for re-election.Jim Florio, who was elected governor of New Jersey in 1989 by persuading voters that he would not raise state taxes but who then pushed through a record increase shortly after taking office, incurring public wrath that led to his defeat in his bid for a second term, died on Sunday. He was 85.His law partner Douglas Steinhardt announced the death on Twitter on Monday but did not specify the cause or place of death.The nation was facing a worsening economy and New Jersey the prospect of a yawning budget deficit when Mr. Florio, then an eight-term Democratic congressman, insisted during his campaign that he would balance the budget only by cutting waste in state spending.But two months after taking office in January 1990 he proposed a budget that called for sharp increases in income and sales taxes totaling more than $2.5 billion, in addition to deep cuts in most state services.He had no choice, he said. On taking a close look at the state’s books after he took office, he said, it was plain that just cutting spending would not be enough to balance the budget. Mr. Florio said tax-revenue projections by the previous Republican administration of Gov. Thomas H. Kean Sr. had been grossly overstated, even “phony,” and made even the deep spending cuts he proposed insufficient by themselves.Public reaction was harsh. Many New Jerseyans felt betrayed, asserting that Mr. Florio had broken a firm pledge not to increase taxes. Many fellow Democratic politicians expressed shock at the extent of the proposed increases, and some budget experts said that Mr. Florio had ignored evidence during the campaign that tax increases would be unavoidable.Ultimately, however, the Democratic-controlled State Senate and Assembly approved his plan by slim margins.More popular were his successes in enacting auto-insurance reform aimed at lowering the steep premiums that the state’s residents had been paying; pushing for property-tax relief for many middle-income homeowners, a measure approved by the State Legislature; and appointing an environmental prosecutor to crack down on the state’s notoriously polluting industries.Mr. Florio also won legislation to ban semiautomatic assault weapons, then prevailed over intense efforts led by the National Rifle Association to have the law repealed. And he successfully pushed a bill that shifted a substantial amount of state aid from affluent public school districts to lower and moderate-income ones — a measure that proved widely divisive.But the tax increases were his undoing. Feeding off voters’ anger, Republicans for the first time in two decades gained control of both houses of the legislature in 1991, and in a close election two years later, Mr. Florio was denied a second term by Christine Todd Whitman, a former Somerset County freeholder and scion of a prominent New Jersey family who became the state’s first woman governor.To his supporters, Mr. Florio — who preferred to be called Jim, and the news media obliged — was a tough-minded liberal with an independent streak. The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation gave him its Profile in Courage Award in 1993. Mr. Florio, the foundation said, had shown “courageous political leadership in gun control, education and economic reform,” including having “risked political and public criticism when he swiftly and boldly restructured the state’s income tax system.”Detractors called Mr. Florio stiff-necked. He shrugged off that assessment in his speech accepting the Profile in Courage Award, saying: “The first thing I learned as governor is that you can’t please everybody. The second thing I learned is some days you can’t please anybody. So be it.”Mr. Florio had won the governorship after two previously unsuccessful races for the office during the 15 years he served in Congress, where he made a name nationally as an environmental protection advocate. Most prominently, he helped spearhead the 1980 Superfund legislation to clean up dangerous toxic waste dumps and chemical spills across the country.In Congress, representing the Camden area, he gained a reputation as a hard worker and a frugal one.“My philosophy has always been, I have one pair of shoes because I have one pair of feet,” he said at the time. “My father always worked, always worked very hard. It is just beyond comprehension that anyone would not.”James Joseph Florio was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 29, 1937. His father was a shipyard painter.Mr. Florio dropped out of high school to serve in the Navy, where he earned a high school equivalency diploma. He was also an amateur boxer, an avocation that left him with a permanently sunken left cheekbone. He later served in the Navy Reserve for 17 years, rising to lieutenant commander.Mr. Florio graduated from Trenton State College (today the College of New Jersey) in 1962 and from Rutgers Law School in 1967. While in college he married Maryanne Spaeth. The marriage ended in divorce, and in 1988 he married Lucinda Coleman.Information about Mr. Florio’s survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Florio began practicing law in Camden, became active in local politics and served in the State Assembly in the 1970s. He lost a race for Congress in 1972 to the Republican incumbent, John E. Hunt. But in a return match two years later he defeated Mr. Hunt and served in the House until he was elected governor in 1989.He first ran for governor in 1977 as one of nine Democrats seeking to unseat a fellow Democrat, Gov. Brendan T. Byrne. Mr. Byrne defeated them in the primary and then prevailed in the general election.Mr. Florio ran again in 1981, winning the Democratic nomination but losing the general election to Mr. Kean, a moderate Republican, by a hair — fewer than 2,000 votes out of 2.3 million cast.In 1989, Mr. Florio easily won the Democratic nomination and then handily defeated his Republican opponent, Rep. James A. Courter. As the highly conservative Mr. Courter took a hard line against big government and taxes, Mr. Florio called himself part of “the sensible center” who would pursue policies like fighting pollution and steep auto insurance rates while holding the line on taxes.In seeking re-election in 1993, Mr. Florio had no Democratic primary opponent, even as polls had long suggested that he was unlikely to win in the general election. But as the race with Ms. Whitman heated up, polls showed it had tightened in the weeks before Election Day.Mr. Florio charged that Ms. Whitman, who had not held an elected post above the county level, was too inexperienced to run the state and that, coming from one of its wealthiest families, was out of touch with the needs of most residents. “There are no blue bloods” where he grew up in Brooklyn, Mr. Florio said time and again.Ms. Whitman hammered away at the Florio tax increases, pledged to cut income taxes by 30 percent over three years and accused the incumbent of waging a campaign based on class warfare.In the end, she narrowly won, with 49 percent of the vote to his 48 percent, while more than a dozen independent candidates shared the rest.It was not Mr. Florio’s last hurrah. In 2000 he ran for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat being vacated by a fellow Democrat, Frank R. Lautenberg.Mr. Florio faced a Wall Street multimillionaire and novice politician, Jon S. Corzine, who maintained that Mr. Florio, with his sharp tax increases as the economy sank into a recession in 1990, “took a problem and made it a crisis.” Mr. Florio questioned his opponent’s qualifications for the office and accused him of sounding like a Republican.Mr. Corzine, who outspent Mr. Florio by 14 to 1 — $35 million to $2.5 million — won easily, and then won the general election. Mr. Corzine left the Senate in 2006 after being elected governor and served one term, defeated for re-election in 2009 by the Republican Chris Christie, a prosecutor at the time.After losing his bid for a second term as governor, Mr. Florio returned to private law practice. But he remained active in environmental matters. From 2002 to 2005 he served as chairman of the New Jersey Pinelands Commission, which works to preserve the state’s Pine Barrens, the 1.1 million acres of semi-wilderness spanning parts of seven counties. While in Congress, Mr. Florio had pressed for federal support of such efforts.Alex Traub More

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      Michael R. Long, N.Y. Conservative Party Stalwart, Dies at 82

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      His endorsement of George E. Pataki in 1994 helped elect the state’s only Republican governor in 50 years.Michael R. Long, the devout ideologue who for three decades headed New York State’s Conservative Party — which in 1994 provided the winning margin to elect the state’s only Republican governor in the last 50 years — died on Sunday at his home in Breezy Point, Queens. He was 82.The cause was kidney failure, his protégé and successor as the state party chairman, Gerard Kassar, said.Mr. Long was a fierce opponent of abortion rights, gay rights, same-sex marriages and higher taxes to pay for more spending by government, but he was generally respected and even liked by his political opponents as a man of principle who, by his consistency, had earned their trust.He was the longest-serving chairman of the state Conservative Party, from 1988 through early 2019, after heading the party’s organization in Brooklyn.He also served as an at-large city councilman from Brooklyn from 1981 to 1983, when the boroughwide position was abolished. He was the only Council member elected as a Conservative.In November 1994, George E. Pataki, a Republican state senator, toppled the liberal Democrat Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, who was seeking a fourth term, by drawing more than 300,000 votes on the Conservative Party’s ballot line.Its endorsement was a gamble: The party chose to paper over Mr. Pataki’s relatively permissive views on abortion and gay rights, but Mr. Pataki delivered on his vow to cut taxes and provided patronage appointments in state government to Conservatives, giving them greater influence over spending and other policies.“Without his support, I would never have been elected governor,” Mr. Pataki said Monday.Mr. Long stuck to his guns, a quality that even political opponents admired for its consistency.Marilynn K. Yee/The New York TimesMichael Robert Long was born on Feb. 1, 1940, in Brooklyn to Michael T. Long, who worked at different times for the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Stock Exchange, and Elmira (Nuetzel) Long, a supervisor for Blue Cross Blue Shield.He was raised in Queens, where he dropped out of Richmond Hill High School shortly before graduation in 1959 to join the Marines.“I just was that kind of a kid,” Mr. Long told The New York Times in 1999. “There were times when they were talking about throwing me out of school. And then I wound up on the honor roll.”“I was just contrary,” he added. “So I guess I’ve been contrary all my life.”He served in the Marines until 1961. In 1963, he married Eileen Dougherty. She survives him along with their sons, Michael, Matthew, James, Robert, Christopher, Francis and Edward; two daughters, Eileen Chelales and Maureen Hayes; 24 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.The Conservative Party in New York was founded in the 1960s by J. Daniel Mahoney and Kieran O’Doherty, Wall Street lawyers and brothers-in-law who sought to tilt the state’s Republicans to the right. In this they followed the pattern of the Liberal Party, which would leverage its endorsement of Democratic candidates — sometimes providing the margin of victory in close races — to nudge them to the left (and exact patronage once they were elected).Mr. Long, who ran a liquor store with his brother in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he lived, was of a different breed of political leader: He was politically savvy, able to hold his own in any debate, but unlike many a standard politician, he was passionately committed to causes and unwilling to make transactional endorsements.In 1964, he volunteered to work in Barry Goldwater’s Republican presidential campaign and enrolled as a Conservative voter.The New York party achieved a stunning and unparalleled success in 1970 when James L. Buckley, William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother, was elected United States senator in a tight three-way race. He remains the only Conservative candidate who won a statewide race without the Republican nomination.In 1980, Conservative support helped Alfonse M. D’Amato defeat an incumbent senator, Jacob K. Javits — the last of the original Rockefeller Republicans — in the Republican primary, leading to Mr. Javits’s unseating that November.Mr. Long was elected Conservative Party leader in his Brooklyn Assembly district in 1968 and Kings County chairman four years later, serving until 1988. In 1974, he was chosen as state vice chairman.Despite his endorsement of Mr. Pataki in 1994, in 1997 he refused to endorse Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign for re-election as mayor of New York City because of the mayor’s liberal positions on social issues. Instead, he left the Conservative ballot line vacant and said he did not vote in the election. (In 1989, when Mr. Giuliani barely lost the mayoralty to David N. Dinkins, and in 1993, when Mr. Giuliani narrowly defeated Mr. Dinkins, the Conservative Party fielded its own candidates.)When the State Legislature passed the Marriage Equality Act in 2010, Mr. Long declared that no candidate who supported same-sex marriage would be allowed to run on the Conservative Party line.His political counterparts vigorously contested his ideological arguments, but generally respect his consistency in an era of expedient waffling and pandering.“There’s something almost refreshing about it, though I profoundly disagree with him,” Judith Hope, the former chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, said in 1999. “It’s rare to see what appears to be a principled stand from a party.”In 1990, the Conservative Party came perilously close to becoming what Mr. Long considered a typical political party.When the Conservative candidate for governor, Herbert London, campaigned as aggressively against the Republican nominee, Pierre A. Rinfret, as he did against the incumbent Democrat, Mr. Cuomo, Mr. London drew more than 800,000 votes, or 20 percent of the total, nearly outpolling Mr. Rinfret.“That was a little scary,” Mr. Long said at the time. Had Mr. London beaten Mr. Rinfret, the Conservatives would have dislodged the Republican Party from second place on the state ballot for four years and, Mr. Long asserted, “there would have been an infusion of people changing their registration, and you would have seen other players trying to take over the party.”“It would have become totally a political party and lost its vision,” he said.He added, “We’ve always understood that the Conservative Party is a philosophical movement, more than a political party.” More

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      John R. Froines, Chemist and Member of the Chicago Seven, Dies at 83

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      After his acquittal for inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he became a leading environmental toxicologist, shaping government standards on lead and diesel exhaust.John R. Froines, a quiet but politically stalwart chemist who stood trial alongside six other antiwar activists — known collectively as the Chicago Seven — on charges of conspiring to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and who went on to become a pioneering advocate for environmental justice, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 83.His wife, Andrea Hricko, said the death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of Parkinson’s disease.A recently minted Yale Ph.D. on his way to teach chemistry at the University of Oregon, Dr. Froines found himself drawn into the swirl of antiwar activism building up to the Democratic convention, to be held in August 1968 at Chicago’s International Amphitheater.Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, two of the protest organizers, knew Dr. Froines through his work in Connecticut with the New Haven chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and they invited him to join their inner circle.During the convention, tens of thousands of protesters marched in the streets and hundreds were arrested during violent clashes with the Chicago Police Department. But only eight were indicted under federal charges of crossing state lines to incite a riot; they included Mr. Hayden, Mr. Davis and Dr. Froines, who was also charged with building an incendiary device, accused of having shown three women how to make a stink bomb.Police clashing with protesters during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 28, 1968. Associated PressSeveral of those charged were already famous as radical activists and counterculture provocateurs. Bobby Seale had co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966; Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, co-founders of the Youth International Party, or the Yippies, were renowned for antics like dropping wads of cash onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange from the visitors gallery.The defendants were originally known as the Chicago Eight, but became the Chicago Seven when the judge in the case, Julius Hoffman — no relation to Abbie — had Mr. Seale legally severed from the group to be tried separately. (In an extraordinary move, the judge had earlier ordered Mr. Seale bound and gagged for several days in the courtroom after Mr. Seale’s repeated protests over his treatment by the court. He was later jailed for contempt.)Though the men stood in solidarity, Dr. Froines stuck out as particularly straight-laced and earnest, especially in contrast to the likes of Mr. Hoffman, who treated the trial with comic disdain, putting his feet on a table and referring to Judge Hoffman as his illegitimate father.“John was straight,” Lee Weiner, one of the defendants, said in a phone interview. “I’m not going to say we didn’t get along, because that’s not true. But I never had an impulse to say to John, ‘Let’s go smoke some dope.’”Despite what many saw as clear bias against the defendants by Judge Hoffman, in 1970 the jury acquitted Dr. Froines and Mr. Weiner of all charges. An appeals court later dismissed most of the charges against the others.Dr. Froines, left, in 1969 with Tom Hayden during their high-profile trial.David Fenton/Getty ImagesDr. Froines eventually returned to academia, then worked for several years in Washington for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Under his direction, the agency wrote the first regulatory guidelines for non-carcinogenic toxins like lead and cotton dust, setting the stage for dramatic increases in workplace and public health.He did much the same at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he moved in 1981. He directed numerous university research centers and sat on the state’s scientific review panel for air quality.And he engaged with communities hit hard by industrial pollution and smog, tailoring his research to their needs and even accompanying neighborhood groups to meet with government and corporate officials.“When you walk into a room with an internationally recognized expert on an issue, it makes a difference,” Angelo Logan, co-founder of one such organization, the California-based East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, said in a phone interview. “John’s work was driven, driven to make real differences in people’s lives.”Dr. Froines addressing a crowd at the University of Washington in 1970. After his acquittal in the Chicago Seven trial, he continued his antiwar activism. UPIJohn Radford Froines was born on June 13, 1939, in Oakland, Calif. His father, George, a shipyard worker, was murdered when John was 3, leaving his mother, Katherine (Livingston) Froines, a teacher, to raise him and his brother, Robert, by herself.After graduating from high school, he joined the Air National Guard, then earned an associate degree from Contra Costa Community College. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1962.It was at Yale, where he pursued a doctorate, that he first became involved in politics. He started as a moderate, chairing the university chapter of Students for Johnson during the 1964 presidential campaign.But, like many young people, he soured on the president after Johnson followed his landslide victory that fall with a massive expansion of the war in Vietnam. Mr. Froines joined the local branch of S.D.S., helping to organize poor white and Black residents in the city’s Hill neighborhood.He met his first wife, Ann (Rubio) Froines, through the organization. They later divorced. In addition to his wife, Ms. Hricko, he is survived by his daughter, Rebecca Froines Stanley, and his son, Jonathan.After his acquittal, Dr. Froines resigned from his position at the University of Oregon to continue his antiwar activism. He went back to New Haven to support the Black Panther Party during a series of trials against Mr. Seale and others, and in 1971 he helped organize the May Day antiwar protests in Washington, D.C.The next year, he returned to academia as a professor at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vt. He later worked for Vermont’s department of occupational health for two years before moving to Washington.Dr. Froines in 2015 at U.C.L.A., where he directed numerous university research centers and was a pioneering advocate for air quality regulations.UCLA Fielding School of Public HealthDr. Froines’s death leaves just two surviving members of the Chicago Eight, Mr. Seale and Mr. Weiner.The trial of the Chicago Seven became a touchstone of the era, one repeatedly mined for its historical significance. Two movies have been made about the case, most recently “The Trial of the Chicago Seven” (2020), written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, with Danny Flaherty playing Dr. Froines.It was a personal legacy that left Dr. Froines with mixed feelings. He remained as committed to social justice as he had been in his youth, he said, but he had left his activist days behind and was eager to be known better for his work regulating lead than for standing in court beside Abbie Hoffman.“No one is the same now as then,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “We still need student protesters because many of the problems of the ’60s continue and new issues have emerged. But nobody’s a student activist at 50. You’d have to have your head examined.” More