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Beto O’Rourke to run for governor of Texas in 2022 election
Beto O’Rourke to run for governor of Texas in 2022 electionFormer congressman seeks to take on Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, following failed 2018 Senate run against Ted Cruz Beto O’Rourke, a former congressman, Senate candidate and contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, will run for governor in Texas next year.Steve Bannon surrenders over contempt charges for defying Capitol attack subpoena – liveRead moreO’Rourke, 49, is seeking to take on Greg Abbott, the Republican governor who is pursuing a third term.Abbott is seen as more vulnerable than previously, given demographic changes and events including the failure of much of the Texas power grid in very cold weather in February this year, which led to numerous deaths.“I’m running for governor,” O’Rourke announced on Monday. “Together, we can push past the small and divisive politics that we see in Texas today – and get back to the big, bold vision that used to define Texas. A Texas big enough for all of us.”Possible rivals include Matthew McConaughey, a Hollywood star who has flirted with a switch to politics.A recent poll by the University of Texas and the Austin American-Statesman gave Abbott 46% of the vote to 37% for O’Rourke but also put Abbott’s job disapproval rating at 48%. In September, Quinnipiac University found that 50% of Texas voters did not think O’Rourke would do a good job as governor; 49% said the same for McConaughey.In a statement, the Texas Democratic chair, Gilberto Hinojosa, said the party “welcomes Beto O’Rourke to the race for Texas governor. He has been a longtime champion for hard-working Texans and his announcement is another step towards driving out our failed governor.”Juan Carlos Huerta, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, told the Guardian Abbott was “a formidable candidate” who had already “shown he can win statewide office” and “knows how to wield power”.But Abbott has been slammed on both sides of the political divide over his management of Covid-19. Facing protests over public health measures from the right of his own party, he course-corrected by throwing Texas open to business and trying to ban mask mandates in schools – even though young children could not then be vaccinated.Abbott has also used the legislature to shore up his conservative bona fides on issues like voting rights and abortion – a political calculation that may isolate some voters, Huerta said.“Can he win?” Huerta said, of O’Rourke. “I think there are some issues that are out there that he can capitalise on.”O’Rourke, from the border city of El Paso, can also call on a proven ground game to get out younger voters who trend Democratic but often have low turnout.“Beto O’Rourke has shown he has an ability to mobilise voters and get people engaged in politics,” Huerta said. “That’s why I’m wondering, would he be able to find examples of things that Abbott did, actions he took, things he advocated for that he can make issues in the 2022 gubernatorial election?”Democratic hopes of turning Texas blue, or at least purple, based on demographic changes involving increased Latino representation and liberals moving into the state, have repeatedly run up against hard political reality. The 2022 midterm elections may represent an even tougher task than usual, as Democrats face pushback against the Biden administration‘s first two years in office.“If you go back, election after election, newspapers always write the headline, ‘Will this be the election that Texas turns blue?’ said Emily M Farris, an associate professor of political science at Texas Christian University. “And it hasn’t happened yet.”O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate run, against Ted Cruz, was a case in point. The former congressman ran strongly but still fell short against a relatively unpopular Republican.O’Rourke then ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, starting brightly but flaming out amid missteps over media coverage and, some analysts said, a strong position on gun control that was at odds with voters in his home state.O’Rourke’s presidential bid left questions about whether he still wanted to run in Texas, Farris said. But O’Rourke has re-established himself in Lone Star politics through work for voter registration and activism amid the winter storm. More recently, O’Rourke stood alongside Texas Democrats to oppose a restrictive voting law introduced by state Republicans.Long road to recovery: effects of devastating winter freeze to haunt Texas for yearsRead moreSpeaking to the Texas Tribune in an interview to accompany his announcement for governor, O’Rourke also highlighted Texas Republicans’ introduction of one of the strictest and most controversial anti-abortion laws.O’Rourke is also a strong fundraiser, one of few Democrats who may be able to compete with Abbott’s massive war chest, which stood at $55m earlier this year.Hinojosa pointed to the Senate campaign in 2018, when he said “Beto rallied Texans by the millions – and showed the entire world that the roots of change run through Texas”.Abbott and O’Rourke have effectively been campaigning against each other already, Farris said. From here, Farris said, Abbott would probably try to draw attention to O’Rourke’s controversial comments on guns while O’Rourke was likely to zero in on the power grid failure last February.“I think those are gonna be at least what the two campaigns try to focus on,” she said.In his announcement video, O’Rourke said Abbott “doesn’t trust women to make their healthcare decisions, doesn’t trust police chiefs when they tell him not to sign the permit-less carry bill into law, he doesn’t trust voters so he changes the rules of our elections, and he doesn’t trust local communities” to make their own rules on Covid.Speaking to the Tribune, he said: “I’m running to serve the people of Texas and I want to make sure that we have a governor that serves everyone, helps to bring this state together to do the really big things before us and get past the small, divisive politics and policies of Greg Abbott. It is time for change.”TopicsBeto O’RourkeUS SenateTexasUS politicsDemocratsGreg AbbottnewsReuse this content More
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Fox News edits video of Biden to make it seem he was being racially insensitive
Fox News edits video of Biden to make it seem he was being racially insensitiveFox & Friends host played edited clip before claiming the US president was ‘facing backlash’ for his remarks Fox News edited video of Joe Biden to remove context from remarks some could judge as racially insensitive.In Veterans Day comments at Arlington National Cemetery on Thursday, Biden told an anecdote that referenced the baseball player Satchel Paige, who pitched in the Negro Leagues before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball.Biden’s remarks were featured on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Thursday night, when the primetime host said the president had “one of his most disturbing, troubling moments to date”.Then, on the Fox & Friends morning show on Friday, host Rachel Campos Duffy said Biden was “facing backlash”.Biden said he had “adopted the attitude of the great Negro, at the time pitcher in the Negro Leagues, went on to become a great pitcher in the pros in Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson, his name was Satchel Paige”.But when Duffy played the clip, it was edited so Biden was heard saying he had “adopted the attitude of the great Negro at the time, pitcher, name was Satchel Paige”.Duffy said Biden’s remarks were “landing him in hot water”.While “Negro” was once a common way to refer to Black people and still appears in organization names, the terms “Black” and “African American” are more widely used.Philip Bump, national correspondent for the Washington Post, wrote: “The hashtag #RacistJoeBiden was trending on Twitter by early Friday afternoon.“Some commenters on social media described Biden’s speech as having used the ‘n-word’, suggesting that a term once commonly used to refer to Black Americans – a descriptor that was in use in the Census Bureau’s racial categories as recently as 2010 – was equivalent to a historically racist slur.“By pretending that Biden was calling Paige a ‘Negro’, though, they could pretend that Biden was revealing a secret bias against Black Americans, both for him and his party.”Bump also wrote that it was “useful to consider why [Fox News] and others on the right are investing in this particular narrative. It comes down to one of the central debates in politics at the moment, the interplay of partisanship and race”.“There is a sense among many conservatives that the political left is constantly attacking them as racist. The reasons for this are myriad and complicated, rooted to some extent in the overlap of race and partisanship (most Black Americans are Democrats) and in a sense that reevaluations of America’s history through the lens of race are implicitly (or explicitly) about criticizing White Americans.”Al Tompkins, a faculty member at Poynter Institute, a journalism thinktank, told the Associated Press that when editing video, journalists have an obligation to keep statements in the context they were delivered or explain to viewers why a change was made. In the video presented by Fox & Friends, he said, the edit was not at all clear.A Fox News spokesperson said Biden’s full remark was used when the story was repeated twice on Fox & Friends, and said the one-time edit was made because of time constraints.TopicsFox NewsJoe BidenUS politicsRaceDemocratsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More
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‘We’re here to deliver’: Biden touts infrastructure win as midterms loom
‘We’re here to deliver’: Biden touts infrastructure win as midterms loom President hits the road to sell bill as Democrats, facing daunting odds in 2022, fight to reach votersThe Port of Baltimore dazzled in the setting sun. Giant cranes arched over the Chesapeake Bay, the shoreline stacked with colorful shipping containers. At the center of the tableau was the American president, on a mission to promote his hard-won $1tn infrastructure package.“Infrastructure week has finally arrived,” Biden said last week, beaming at the mix of elected officials and local union leaders in attendance.The president’s visit to the bustling port came at the start of a cross-country tour to sell his sprawling public works plan to the American public, in the hope of parlaying the policy achievement into a political victory that will help Democrats keep their slim majorities in Congress.But while his policies are popular, Biden and his party, presently, are not. Last week, voters turned sharply against Democrats, delivering a number of surprising Republican victories in states Biden won handily in 2020.America needs help. Yet Democrats are getting sucked into fake culture wars | Hamilton NolanRead moreThe losses jolted Democrats into action on Capitol Hill, even as some moderates wondered if the president had misread his mandate. Within days, they sent the infrastructure bill, gridlocked for months amid intra-party feuding over a separate pillar of Biden’s agenda, to his desk for his signature.In the weeks ahead, the president’s promotional tour will test his political salesmanship and his theory of governance: that delivering concrete benefits is the best way to rise above the political tribalism roiling the country. “The American people sent us here to deliver. The American people sent us here to make the government work,” Biden said on Friday, during a cabinet meeting to discuss the implementation of his infrastructure bill. “They sent us here to make a difference in their lives. And I believe we’re doing that.”Facing daunting odds in next year’s midterm elections, Democrats are pleading with “Amtrak Joe” to make the pitch loud and clear.Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who leads the campaign committee for House Democrats, pleaded with the White House to put Biden on the campaign trail as frequently as possible to trumpet his domestic agenda. In an interview with the New York Times, he said his message to the White House was, “Free Joe Biden.”“That campaign needs to start now before the next crisis takes over the news cycle,” he said.On Monday, Biden will sign the measure into law during a ceremony at the White House, surrounded by a bipartisan group of legislators, governors and mayors. Following that, the president will hit the road, with plans to visit a bridge in Woodstock, New Hampshire, and a GM electric vehicle plant in Detroit, according to the White House.In addition, Biden is dispatching his cabinet members, including the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg; energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm; and interior secretary, Deb Haaland, to promote the bill’s investments in states, cities, towns and tribal communities.So far, the strategy echoes the administration’s “Help is here” tour to showcase the Democrats’ $1.9tn coronavirus relief package Biden signed into law shortly after taking office. But the presidential messaging blitz was soon swamped by the US’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, a summertime resurgence of the pandemic and a rise in inflation.Even though the legislation sent $1,400 stimulus checks to millions of Americans, expanded the child tax credit program and increased unemployment insurance – all tangible, popular benefits – Democrats hardly reaped the political rewards. An August poll by Daily Kos/Civiqs found that 57% of voters said the Biden administration had not done anything that has benefited them personally.“Voters don’t go to the ballot box with a spreadsheet of policies. They go with a feeling about who values them,” said Jesse Ferguson, a senior Democratic strategist. The way to show that, he said, was “to deliver on the things that matter to people who work for a living”, like lowering the cost of prescription drug prices, making childcare more affordable and providing paid family and medical leave.Whether a concerted appeal from the president can overcome a toxic political climate is an open question for Democrats. Biden’s standing with voters has dropped sharply, particularly among independents. Wide majorities say the nation is on the wrong track. A CNN poll released this week found that six in 10 American believe Biden has the wrong priorities. The number climbed among voters who ranked the economy as a top priority.As the administration’s messaging campaign ramps up, the White House says its digital team is developing explainer videos and other social content to educate voters about the Democrats’ initiatives. They are also planning for a burst of TV appearances, including with media outlets that serve Black and Latino communities.The push also includes an emphasis on local news organizations, such as WKRC-TV in Cincinnati, which sat down with Biden on Monday. In the interview, he predicted a long-overdue upgrade for the deteriorating Brent Spence Bridge that stretches between Ohio and the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s home state of Kentucky.McConnell was one of 32 Republicans in the House and Senate to vote for the legislation that has divided the party. Donald Trump savaged those in his party who supported the measure, blaming them for voting for “Democratic longevity” while his loyalists in the House accused them of disloyalty. Many of them have faced vicious backlash from constituents, including vulgar insults and even death threats.Speaking in Kentucky, McConnell squashed any suggestion that the unusual display of bipartisanship might extend beyond the realm of roads and bridges.“Let me sum it up this way,” he said. “I think every step we took this year … except infrastructure is in the wrong direction.”At home during the congressional recess, Democrats donned hard hats and lined up next to union workers to highlight how the once-in-a-generation investment in the nation’s infrastructure would benefit the wishlist of long-neglected public works projects in their districts and states. The plan, they said, would touch all 50 states, creating high-paying jobs and helping to rejuvenate the economy.The package, which includes the largest investment in infrastructure since Dwight Eisenhower began the interstate highway system in the 1950s, is popular with voters. But many of the projects won’t be started, much less completed, until long after the midterm elections are decided.“It is part of our job to let people know exactly what Congress did for them,” Madeleine Dean, a Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania, said on a press call showcasing the infrastructure bill’s investments in her state. “We have a lot of educating to do.”A Monmouth University poll released this week found 65% of Americans support the infrastructure bill while 62% approve of the Democrats’ spending measure. Yet the poll showed that voters increasingly believe Biden’s policies have not helped middle-class or poor families.Taken together, the results suggest the White House and Democrats “lack a cohesive and concrete message about how this bill will help the American public”, said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Poll.The measure’s bipartisan passage has given some Democrats fresh optimism that they can muster the votes to pass a second, even larger domestic policy measure and begin to reverse their political fortunes ahead of next year’s midterm elections.“Democrats are delivering – and we are making sure that the American people know it,” Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. The DNC is “doubling down” on their outreach to voters, working with state and local parties to help translate how the plan will benefit their communities.Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster and senior adviser to Building Back Together, a group advocating for Biden’s agenda, said voters were swayed by results.“I really like our chances if we are messaging on very popular policy that we have passed and signed into law and the other side is complaining about cultural issues,” he said.If Biden doesn’t pass the climate bill, it will be the betrayal of a generation | Daniel SherrellRead moreA Navigator Research survey found that Biden’s overall approval rating climbed in the days since Congress passed his bipartisan infrastructure deal. The same survey showed that support for the major pieces of Biden’s agenda remains high as a growing number of voters say they’ve heard about the bill.Yet the challenges threatening to derail Biden’s PR campaign are myriad. When Democrats return to Washington next week, a new fight awaits over the next phase of his agenda. Republicans are eager to weaponize rising inflation, using it to attack the spending plan as reckless. And even when Biden attempts to take a victory lap, as he did in Baltimore on Wednesday, the news of the day interferes.Designed as a solution to fix the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, Biden said the measure would also address immediate economic concerns caused by rising inflation and supply chain bottlenecks.The obstacles were underscored by his appearance in Baltimore. In his speech touting the “once-in-a-generation investment” in the nation’s infrastructure, he also delivered a lengthy explanation of supply chains and conceded that “consumer prices remain too high”.After his remarks concluded, Biden, a retail politician at heart, waded into the crowd, joking and laughing as he worked the rope line and glad-handed local officials.TopicsUS newsUS politicsDemocratsJoe BidenRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More
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What happens when Nancy Pelosi retires? Politics Weekly Extra
Known as one of the most powerful women in US politics, the speaker of the House of Representatives is due to retire in the next few years. Jonathan Freedland and Susan Page look back at the career of one of the longest-serving politicians on Capitol Hill, and what her eventual exit will mean for the Democratic party
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Archive: PBS Newshour, C-Span, Vox You can find Susan Page’s book here: Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More
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America needs help. Yet Democrats are getting sucked into fake culture wars | Hamilton Nolan
America needs help. Yet Democrats are getting sucked into fake culture warsHamilton NolanThe hoopla about CRT and the like is a Republican game serious leaders would not play. But Democrats don’t have serious leaders I do not know if I can survive three more years of Democrats stumbling over themselves to disavow the Democratic platform in a doomed attempt to win bad-faith culture wars. It is too painful, like watching ruthless hunters herding panicked animals over the side of a cliff. The poor, dumb beasts inevitably go extinct if they are not able to outthink such a rudimentary strategy.Message to Democrats: embrace economic bread-and-butter issues to win | Matthew Karp and Dustin GuastellaRead moreWalk around your town. Explore a major American city. Drive across the country. What are the most important problems you see? There is poverty. Homelessness. A lack of affordable housing. Vast and jaw-dropping economic and racial inequality. There is a lack of public transportation, a broken healthcare system, environmental degradation, and a climate crisis that threatens to upend our way of life. These are real problems. These are the things that we need our government to fix. These are what we need to hear politicians talk about. These are what we must debate and focus on, if we are really concerned about human rights and our children’s future and all the other big things we claim to value.I guarantee you that neither “cancel culture” nor “critical race theory” nor, worse of all, “wokeness” will grab you as enormous problems after your exploration of America, unless that exploration ranges only from a college faculty lounge to a cable TV studio to the office of a rightwing thinktank. These are all words that mean nothing. To the extent that they are real at all, they are niche concerns that plague such a small subset of Americans that they deserve to be addressed only after we have solved the many other, realer problems.All these terms function primarily as empty vessels into which bad-faith actors can pour racism, so that it may appear more palatable when it hits the public airwaves. Common sense tells us we should spend most of our time talking about the biggest problems, and less time on the lesser problems, and no time on the mythical problems. To engage in long and tortured debates over these slippery and indefinable culture war terms is to violate that rule, with awful consequences for everyone.Let’s not bullshit about this. Racism is a wonderfully effective political tool for Republicans, yet explicit racism is frowned upon in polite society now, so there is a constant flow of new issues to stand in for racism in political discourse. Lee Atwater, who invented Nixon’s “southern strategy”, explained this all decades ago, and it is still true. George Wallace could be outright racist, but subsequent generations of politicians have had to cloak it in “welfare reform” or being “tough on crime” or, now, opposition to “wokeness” and “critical race theory” – things which mean, by the way, “caring about racism”.Three-quarters of a million Americans are dead from a pandemic. We have a Democratic president and a booming economy. So we will get culture wars, and more culture wars, all of which are built on stoking various forms of hate. This is a game that serious leaders should not play. Unfortunately, we don’t have too many serious leaders. We have the Democratic party.Republicans will push these culture wars as far as they can, but it takes Democrats to make the strategy work. There are two types of Democrats falling for this trap now. One type is the group of fairly well-meaning people who assume that the fact there is a cottage industry dedicated to amplifying these terms in the media means there must be something to them. The other type are the opportunistic Democrats, who often brand themselves “centrists”, who see the culture wars as a way to steal power from the left wing of their own party, even if it comes at the cost of hurting millions of Americans.We have seen this movie before. The 1990s was the era of fiery and stupid debates over gay people in the military, flag burning and Sister Souljah. They were just an earlier iteration of the same thing we’re going through now. The decision of Democrats to lean into this dynamic by running to the right led to atrocities like Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform” and crime bills that won him momentary electoral power by immiserating an entire generation of poor, non-white people, many of whom are still caged in prison today. Choosing to give credence to the culture wars has real life consequences. Already, we can see panicked Democrats rushing to decry the very sort of social justice fights that give the decrepit party its only redeeming value.Here is the good news: we don’t have to do this. We can step off this train before it pulls out of Bad Faith Station on the way to the Trump 2024 victory party. What we need is some sort of broad force that can unite people of disparate races and persuasions around a shared, common interest. Something capable of demonstrating the value of the fight against inequality and corporate domination in a real, tangible way. Something that wages its fights in reality, not in the remote world of buzzwords and misdirection.Guess what? That thing already exists. It’s called the labor movement. And it’s energetic as hell right now. A wave of strikes across the nation that has been building for months is garnering levels of attention unseen in decades. The popularity of unions is high. This is a model of progressive values in action that a political party could rally around, if that party was not always so easily tempted to trip over its own shoelaces.In deep red rural Alabama, you can find hundreds of striking mine workers – black and white, Democratic and Republican – completely united and fighting hard, in unity, for economic justice. These people whom our society typically divides have come together in a union, and are sacrificing for one another, side by side. The military is the only other institution in American society that accomplishes this feat of unity, and unions can do it without shooting anyone. The labor movement is living proof that the substance of progressive politics – protecting the poor against the rich, promoting equality, giving everyone fair treatment no matter who they are or how much money they make – is a tool powerful enough to overcome the background drone of Fox News (and the Atlantic).Democrats do not need to wonder how to overcome the culture wars. We already know how: organizing working people to create power that can produce a more just and equal world. It works. But to make it work, you need to hold it up and promote it and help it and talk about it, rather than talking about whether things are “too woke”. Our problems are in the real world. Our solutions are in the real world as well. Our politicians? Many of them are floating in the ether. Come back down to earth, join the labor movement, and help people walk the path away from the incredibly dumb nightmare that awaits us if we get sucked into bullshit debates, with bullshit people, about bullshit.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporter at In These Times
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