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      On Virginia's Election and a Battle That Has Already Been Lost

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      On Tuesday, Virginians will vote to choose their next governor. The Democratic candidate is Terry McAuliffe, who served as governor from 2014 to 2018 but was term-limited out of office. The Republican candidate is Glenn Youngkin, a private equity executive and newcomer to electoral politics.There are real, material issues at hand in Virginia, where I grew up and where I currently live, from transportation and housing costs to climate, economic inequality and, of course, the commonwealth’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The battleground for this election, however, is culture, identity and the specter of the previous president.McAuliffe and his supporters want Virginians to feel that a vote for Youngkin is a vote for Donald Trump. “I ran against Donald Trump and Terry is running against an acolyte of Donald Trump,” said President Biden while speaking at a rally Tuesday night in Arlington. “We have a choice,” said McAuliffe at the same event. “A path that promotes conspiracies, hate, division, or a path focused on lifting up every single Virginian.”Youngkin, for his part, wants Virginians to know that a vote for McAuliffe is a vote for “critical race theory.” Not the legal discipline that deals with the distance between formal and actual equality, but the idea, spread by right-wing activists and their wealthy supporters, that public schools are teaching a racist ideology of guilt and anti-white sentiment. Youngkin’s singular message has been that he will keep this “critical race theory” out of Virginia’s schools.What this means, if the rhetoric of Youngkin’s strongest supporters is any indication, is an assault on any discussion of race and racism in the state’s classrooms. In an interview with the journalist Alex Wagner, a leading Republican activist in Virginia said exactly this, asserting that it should be “up to the parents” to teach students about racism and condemning a school assignment in which a sixth grade student blamed President Andrew Jackson for violence against Native Americans.Try to imagine what this would look like.Virginia is where African slavery first took root in Britain’s Atlantic empire. It is where, following that development, English settlers developed an ideology of racism to justify their decision to, as the historian Winthrop Jordan put it, “debase the Negro.” It is where, in the middle of the 18th century, a powerful class of planter-intellectuals developed a vision of liberty and freedom tied inextricably to their lives as slave owners, and it is where, a century later, their descendants would fight to build a slave empire in their name.And all of this is before we get to Reconstruction and Jim Crow and massive resistance to school integration and the many other forces that have shaped Virginia into the present. Just this week came news of the death of A. Linwood Holton, elected in 1969 as the state’s first Republican governor of the 20th century. Holton integrated Virginia schools and broke the back of the segregationist Byrd machine (named for the domineering Harry F. Byrd), which controlled the state from the 1890s into the 1960s.To take discussions of race and racism out of the classroom would, in practice, make it impossible to teach Virginia state history beyond dates, bullet points and the vaguest of generalities.One of the closing advertisements from the Youngkin campaign features a woman who took umbrage over Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” after her son, a high-school senior, said that the book gave him nightmares when he read it as part of an A.P. English class. (I do not doubt that this is true, but I also think that if Black students have to encounter racism — and speaking from experience, they do — then white students should at least have to learn about it.)Democracy requires empathy. We have to be able to see ourselves in one another to be able to see one another as political equals. I think history education is one important way to build that empathy. To understand the experiences of a person in a fundamentally different time and place is to practice the skills you need to see your fellow citizens as equal people even when their lives are profoundly different and distant from your own. This is why it’s vital that students learn as much as possible about the many varieties of people who have lived, and died, on this land.This democratic empathy is, I believe, a powerful force. It can, for example, lead white children in isolated rural Virginia to march and demonstrate in memory of a poor Black man who died at the hands of police in urban Minnesota.I do not know who will win the Virginia election. It looks, at this point, like a tossup. But I do know that, viewed in the light of empathy and its consequences, the panic against critical race theory looks like a rear-guard action in a battle already lost: a vain attempt to reverse the march of a force that has already done much to undermine hierarchy and the “proper” order of things.What I WroteMy Tuesday column was on the history of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and why Congress should expel those members who played a part in the Jan. 6 insurrection.If the ultimate goal of Section 3, in other words, was to preserve the integrity of Congress against those who would capture its power and plot against the constitutional order itself, then Representative Bush is right to cite the clause against any members of Congress who turn out to have collaborated with the plotters to overturn the election and whose allies are still fighting to “stop the steal.”My Friday column was a little more introspective than usual, as I tried to explain why I keep writing about structural and institutional changes I know will never happen:All of this is to say that I do not write about structural reform because I believe it will happen in my lifetime (although, of course, no one knows what the future will hold). I write about structural reform because, like Dahl, I think about and want readers to think expansively about American democracy and to understand that it is, and has always been, bigger than the Constitution.Now ReadingKeisha Blain on Fannie Lou Hamer for Time.Ali Karjoo-Ravary on Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of “Dune” for Slate.Garrett Epps on critical race theory for Washington Monthly.Talia B. Lavin on corporal punishment in her Substack newsletter.Anna Gaca on the Clash for Pitchfork.Andrea Stanley on the trauma of climate change in The Washington Post Magazine.Feedback If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to your friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at jamelle-newsletter@nytimes.com. You can follow me on Twitter (@jbouie) and Instagram.Photo of the WeekJamelle BouieHere is something a little more lighthearted than what I’ve written this week. It is from Dinosaur Kingdom II, a bizarre attraction near the Luray Caverns in central Virginia. It features life-size dinosaur figures engaged in pitched battle with Union soldiers. It’s very strange. I visited not long after moving back to Virginia and wasted a few rolls of film taking pictures. This was one of the keepers.Now Eating: Creamy Cashew Butternut Squash SoupThis is a great, if nontraditional, butternut squash soup. My only recommendation is that you should roast your butternut squash before adding it to the pot. I prefer to cut a squash into large chunks and then roast it at around 400 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes, to develop the flavor of the squash. It’s a little extra work, but you won’t regret it. Recipe comes from NYT Cooking.Ingredients3 tablespoons olive oil or unsalted butter1 large onion, peeled and finely chopped1 cup raw cashews1 clove garlic, finely chopped1 large butternut squash (about 2 pounds), peeled and cut into ½-inch dice5 cups vegetable or chicken stock, plus additional if needed2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger2 teaspoons ground cumin2 teaspoons ground coriander1 teaspoon curry powder1 teaspoon ground turmericKosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste1 cup coconut milk, plus additional1 sprig fresh rosemaryDirectionsIn large stockpot or Dutch oven set over medium-high heat, warm the olive oil until shimmering. Add the onions and cook, stirring, until they begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Add the cashews and cook, stirring, until the onions are translucent and the cashews have slightly browned, about 3 minutes. Stir in the garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Add the squash, broth, ginger, cumin, coriander, curry powder and turmeric and stir to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and bring the soup to a simmer. Reduce the heat to low, cover the pot, and cook the soup until the squash is easily pierced with a knife, 20 to 25 minutes. Uncover the soup and let it cool for 15 minutes.Starting on slow speed and increasing to high, purée the soup in small batches in a blender until smooth. Place a towel over the top of the blender in case of any splatters. You can also use an immersion blender (let the soup remain in the pot), but it will take longer to purée until smooth.If using a blender, return the soup to the pot, add the coconut milk and rosemary sprig, and cook over low heat, covered, until slightly thickened, for about 15 to 20 minutes. Serve immediately or refrigerate until ready. If serving the soup later, while reheating the soup, thin it out with more broth or coconut milk until the desired consistency. More

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      How Republicans Are Weaponizing Critical Race Theory Ahead of Midterms

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      Republicans hope that concerns about critical race theory can help them in the midterm elections. The issue has torn apart one Wisconsin suburb.Little more than a year ago, Scarlett Johnson was a stay-at-home mother, devoted to chauffeuring her children to school and supervising their homework.That was before the school system in her affluent Milwaukee suburb posted a video about privilege and race that “jarred me to my core,” she said.“There was this pyramid — where are you on the scale of being a racist,” Ms. Johnson said. “I couldn’t understand why this was recommended to parents and stakeholders.”The video solidified Ms. Johnson’s concerns, she said, that the district, Mequon-Thiensville, was “prioritizing race and identity” and introducing critical race theory, an academic framework used in higher education that views racism as ingrained in law and other modern institutions.Since then, Ms. Johnson’s life has taken a dramatic turn — a “180,” she calls it. She became an activist, orchestrating a recall of her local school board. Then, she became a board candidate herself.Republicans in Wisconsin have embraced her. She’s appeared on panels and podcasts, and attracted help from representatives of two well-funded conservative groups. When Rebecca Kleefisch, the former Republican lieutenant governor, announced her campaign for governor, Ms. Johnson joined her onstage.Ms. Kleefisch’s campaign has since helped organize door-to-door outreach for Ms. Johnson and three other school board candidates.Ms. Johnson’s rapid transformation into a sought-after activist illustrates how Republicans are using fears of critical race theory to drive school board recalls and energize conservatives, hoping to lay groundwork for the 2022 midterm elections.“Midterm elections everywhere, but particularly in Wisconsin, are pretty dependent on voter turnout as opposed to persuasion,” said Sachin Chheda, a Democratic political consultant based in Milwaukee. “This is one of the issues that could do it.”Scarlett Johnson in Mequon, Wis., in September. Ms. Johnson is an activist against teaching critical race theory in schools, orchestrating a recall of her local school board.Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York TimesBallotpedia, a nonpartisan political encyclopedia, said it had tracked 80 school board recall efforts against 207 board members in 2021 — the highest number since it began tracking in 2010.Education leaders, including the National School Boards Association, deny that there is any critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools.“Critical race theory is not taught in our district, period,” said Wendy Francour, a school board member in Ms. Johnson’s district now facing recall.Teachers’ unions and some educators say that some of the efforts being labeled critical race theory by critics are simply efforts to teach history and civics.“We should call this controversy what it is — a scare campaign cooked up by G.O.P. operatives” and others to “limit our students’ education and understanding of historical and current events,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.But Republicans say critical race theory has invaded classrooms and erroneously casts all white people as oppressors and all Black people as victims. The issue has become a major rallying point for Republicans from Florida to Idaho, where state lawmakers have moved to ban it.In July, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, promised to abolish critical race theory on “Day 1” in office. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, facing re-election next year, said recently, “I want to make sure people are not supporting critical race theory.” And in Arizona, Blake Masters, a Republican hoping to unseat Senator Mark Kelly in 2022, has repeatedly slammed critical race theory as “anti-white racism.”In some places, the tone of school board opponents has become angry and threatening, so much so that the National School Boards Association asked President Biden for federal law enforcement protection.Few places will be more closely watched in the midterm elections than Wisconsin, a swing state that Mr. Biden won by just over 20,600 votes and where Republicans would like to retain control of the Senate seat currently held by Ron Johnson, as well as to defeat Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.To succeed, Republicans must solidify support in suburban Milwaukee, an area of historical strength for the party. Recently, though, Democrats have made inroads in Ozaukee County, and particularly its largest city, Mequon, a mostly white enclave north of Milwaukee. President Donald J. Trump won the city last year with only 50.2 percent of the vote — a poor showing that contributed to his Wisconsin defeat.Now, with midterms on the horizon, prospective statewide candidates — including Ms. Kleefisch, Senator Johnson and the relative political newcomer Kevin Nicholson — have emphasized their opposition to critical race theory.Senator Johnson, who has not announced whether he will seek re-election, has talked about the importance of local elections as a prelude to next year’s midterms. He recently urged constituents to “take back our school boards, our county boards, our city councils.”Traditionally, school board elections in Wisconsin have been nonpartisan, but a political action committee associated with Ms. Kleefisch — Rebecca Kleefisch PAC — recently contributed to about 30 school board candidates around the state, including one elected last spring in Mequon.“The fact that this is being politically driven is heartbreaking,” said Chris Schultz, a retired teacher in Mequon and one of the four board members facing recall.Ms. Schultz relinquished her Republican Party membership when she joined the board. “I believe school boards need to be nonpolitical,” she said. “Our student welfare cannot be a political football.”Now, she thinks, that’s over. “The Republican Party has kind of decided that they want to not just have their say on the school board but determine the direction of school districts,” she said.Rebecca Kleefisch, Wisconsin’s former lieutenant governor, announces her candidacy for governor in September. Last week, volunteers from Ms. Kleefisch’s campaign organized outreach for Ms. Johnson’s school board candidacy.John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated PressAgainst this political backdrop, Ms. Johnson, who calls herself a lifelong conservative, is waging her own battle in the district that serves 3,700 students. Ms. Johnson, 47, has five children, ranging in age from 10 to 22. Her two oldest children graduated from Mequon-Thiensville’s vaunted Homestead High School. Complaining about a decline in the system’s quality, she said she chose to send her younger children to private schools.Ms. Johnson first got interested in school board politics in August 2020, after a decision to delay in-person classes because of an increase in Covid-19 cases. Angered over the delay, Ms. Johnson protested with more than 100 people outside school district headquarters.“Virtual learning is not possible for the majority of parents that work,” Ms. Johnson told a reporter.The next day, protesters gathered outside the business of Akram Khan, a school board member who runs a private tutoring center.“There was this narrative that I, as a board member, elected to close the schools down because it would directly benefit my pocketbook, which is the farthest thing from the truth,” Mr. Khan said.He shut down his business temporarily as a result of the protests and is now facing recall.Things got worse. Protesters showed up outside the home of the district superintendent; relationships among neighbors began to fray. School board meetings, formerly dull affairs, dragged on for hours, with comments taking on a nasty and divisive tone.“We’ve been called Marxist flunkies,” Ms. Francour said. “We have police attending the meetings now.”Akram Khan is facing a school board recall.Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York TimesWendy Francour, who is facing a recall, said school board meetings have gotten divisive: “We have police attending the meetings now.”Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York TimesAnger grew over masks, test scores and the hourlong video the school system posted about race, one of two that Ms. Francour said were offered because parents had asked what to tell their children about George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.Led by two consultants, the optional online seminar for parents included a discussion of the spectrum of racism — from lynching to indifference to abolitionism — and tips on how to become “anti-racist” through acts such as speaking up against bias and socializing with people of color. It ended with news clips about Mr. Floyd’s death.Ms. Johnson, who grew up poor in Milwaukee, the daughter of a Puerto Rican teenage mother and a father who had brushes with the law, said the video ran counter to her belief that people were not limited by their background or skin color.“For me the sky was the limit,” Ms. Johnson said in July on “Fact Check,” a podcast hosted by Bill Feehan, a staunch Trump supporter and the La Crosse County Republican Party chairman.The Wisconsin Democratic Party recently provided The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with deleted tweets by Ms. Johnson expressing nonchalance about the threat of white supremacy and accusing Planned Parenthood of racism.Spurred partly by the video, Ms. Johnson began leading an effort, Recall MTSD.com, to recall four of seven board members. Petitions were available at local businesses, including a shooting range owned by a Republican activist, Cheryle Rebholz.While the recall group insists theirs is a grass-roots effort, representatives of two conservative nonprofit organizations turned up to help.Amber Schroeder, left, and Ms. Johnson dropping off recall petitions in Mequon in August.Morry Gash/Associated PressOne of them, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, is funded by the Bradley Foundation, known for promoting school choice and challenging election rules across the country.The organization stepped in to help Ms. Johnson’s group by threatening legal action against the city of Mequon when it tried to remove banners, placed on public property, that promoted the recall.Another volunteer with a high profile in conservative circles was Matt Batzel, executive director of American Majority, a national group that trains political candidates. Mr. Batzel’s organization once published a primer on how to “flip” your school board, citing its role overturning a liberal board in Kenosha, Wis.Mequon’s recall election is Nov. 2. One candidate is Ms. Rebholz, the shooting range owner, who wrote an essay arguing that, “If the Biden-Harris team wins in November, Americans won’t be safe.”Meanwhile, Ms. Johnson is branching out.She serves as a state leader for No Left Turn in Education, an organization against critical race theory, and has recently been named to a campaign advisory board for Ms. Kleefisch.She spoke at a Milwaukee event last month. The topic: “What is Critical Race Theory and How to Fight It.” More

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      5 Takeaways From the First N.Y.C. Mayoral Debate

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      Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa offered different visions for New York City in their first debate on Wednesday night, disagreeing over everything from vaccine mandates to keeping a statue of Thomas Jefferson at City Hall.Mr. Adams, the Democratic nominee, tried to remain calm while Mr. Sliwa, his Republican opponent, lobbed a barrage of attacks and tried to tie Mr. Adams to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is deeply unpopular among many New Yorkers. Mr. Adams criticized Mr. Sliwa for admitting to faking crimes for publicity as the leader of the Guardian Angels — and for not following the rules of the debate, calling Mr. Sliwa’s confrontational and often random debate style “buffoonery.” Beyond trading barbs, there were some substantial policy differences between the candidates ahead of the general election on Nov. 2. Here are five takeaways from the debate:A disagreement over a vaccine mandate for city workersMr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, said he supports Mr. de Blasio’s new vaccine mandate for public workers that was announced on Wednesday. But Mr. Adams said he would have worked more closely with labor leaders to figure out a way to reach an agreement together.“I believe the mayor’s action today was correct,” Mr. Adams said. “I would have handled it differently.”Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels and a former radio host, said he opposed the mandate and worried that it could lead to the loss of some police officers.“I disagree with Eric,” Mr. Sliwa said. “I feel that we don’t have enough police officers as it is.”Attacks over past lies and a Brooklyn apartmentMr. Adams repeatedly sought to depict Mr. Sliwa as a liar and criticized him for interrupting and not following the debate rules.“Can he please adhere to the rules?” Mr. Adams asked one of the moderators.Mr. Sliwa said that he had apologized for making up crimes during the 1980s to try to attract more attention.“I made mistakes,” he said. “I was immature at the age of 25 and did things I should not have done. I know my opponent, Eric Adams, similarly has done things that he’s apologized for.”Mr. Sliwa sought to rattle Mr. Adams and was mostly unsuccessful. When questioned by one of the moderators, Mr. Adams refused to say how many nights he had slept at the Brooklyn apartment where he claims to have lived during the last six months. Mr. Adams, who has faced questions over his residency, said he sometimes works at Brooklyn Borough Hall until 4 or 5 a.m.“I don’t jot down the number of days I’m there, but that’s where I lay my head,” Mr. Adams said of his apartment. The men disagreed on another hot topic — the planned removal of the Jefferson statue from City Council chambers. Mr. Adams wants it gone; Mr. Sliwa said it should stay.Different visions for schoolsThe candidates offered opposing plans for the city’s schools. Mr. Adams wants to set a vaccine mandate for public school students — a departure from Mr. de Blasio. Mr. Adams said that schools already require vaccines for diseases like measles and that a mandate would help protect students from the coronavirus. For families who decide to keep children at home, Mr. Adams said he was “open to a remote option.”Mr. Sliwa, who noted that he has three sons in public schools, said he opposes a vaccine mandate for students because it could cause some students to stay home. “We need them in school learning,” Mr. Sliwa said. Both candidates have concerns over Mr. de Blasio’s decision to end the gifted and talented program for elementary school children and said they want to expand the program.Mr. Adams said that the city should re-examine the admissions exam for the program while increasing opportunities for so-called “accelerated learning” to every ZIP code in the city.“I made it clear that we need to look at that exam,” he said. “I don’t believe a 4-year-old taking the exam should determine the rest of their school experience. That is unacceptable.”.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-k59gj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;width:100%;}.css-1e2usoh{font-family:inherit;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;border-top:1px solid #ccc;padding:10px 0px 10px 0px;background-color:#fff;}.css-1jz6h6z{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;text-align:left;}.css-1t412wb{box-sizing:border-box;margin:8px 15px 0px 15px;cursor:pointer;}.css-hhzar2{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform ease 0.5s;-webkit-transition:transform ease 0.5s;transition:transform ease 0.5s;}.css-t54hv4{-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-1r2j9qz{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-e1ipqs{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;padding:0px 30px 0px 0px;}.css-e1ipqs a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-e1ipqs a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1o76pdf{visibility:show;height:100%;padding-bottom:20px;}.css-1sw9s96{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}.css-1in8jot{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;font-family:’nyt-franklin’,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;text-align:left;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1in8jot{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1in8jot:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1in8jot{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}What to Know About Covid-19 Booster ShotsThe F.D.A. has authorized booster shots for millions of recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. Pfizer and Moderna recipients who are eligible for a booster include people 65 and older, and younger adults at high risk of severe Covid-19 because of medical conditions or where they work. Eligible Pfizer and Moderna recipients can get a booster at least six months after their second dose. All Johnson & Johnson recipients will be eligible for a second shot at least two months after the first.Yes. The F.D.A. has updated its authorizations to allow medical providers to boost people with a different vaccine than the one they initially received, a strategy known as “mix and match.” Whether you received Moderna, Johnson & Johnson or Pfizer-BioNTech, you may receive a booster of any other vaccine. Regulators have not recommended any one vaccine over another as a booster. They have also remained silent on whether it is preferable to stick with the same vaccine when possible.The C.D.C. has said the conditions that qualify a person for a booster shot include: hypertension and heart disease; diabetes or obesity; cancer or blood disorders; weakened immune system; chronic lung, kidney or liver disease; dementia and certain disabilities. Pregnant women and current and former smokers are also eligible.The F.D.A. authorized boosters for workers whose jobs put them at high risk of exposure to potentially infectious people. The C.D.C. says that group includes: emergency medical workers; education workers; food and agriculture workers; manufacturing workers; corrections workers; U.S. Postal Service workers; public transit workers; grocery store workers.Yes. The C.D.C. says the Covid vaccine may be administered without regard to the timing of other vaccines, and many pharmacy sites are allowing people to schedule a flu shot at the same time as a booster dose.Mr. Sliwa reiterated his support for bringing the gifted program to all schools, noting that his son was one of thousands of students who took the test and “lost out.”Sliwa ties Adams to de Blasio and rich New YorkersTo hear Mr. Sliwa tell it, Mr. Adams is spending his time hanging out with high rollers, and also Mr. de Blasio.“I am the people’s choice,” Mr. Sliwa said. “Eric Adams is with the elites in the suites, the TikTok girls, trying to sort of live up to the Kardashians.” Mr. Adams does in fact seem to enjoy New York City’s nightlife. Just days after he won the primary, he was spotted at Rao’s in East Harlem, one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants, dining with a Republican billionaire. In September, Mr. Adams reportedly spent two nights in a row at Zero Bond, a private club in SoHo. And he has spent much of the post-primary season raising money from the donor class, including from several billionaires. He also took an undisclosed vacation to Monaco, which is known for its high-end casinos and idle rich.“Who goes to Monaco?” Mr. Sliwa asked in disbelief.Mr. Sliwa also sought to tie Mr. Adams to Mr. de Blasio, whose approval rating dropped after his failed presidential run. Mr. de Blasio is, in fact, an ally of Mr. Adams after quietly supporting him during the primary.“How about we do something novel and stop trusting these politicians like Eric Adams and de Blasio?” Mr. Sliwa said.Adams wants to close Rikers; Sliwa says he would move thereThe next mayor will take office with the city’s jail system in crisis. The Rikers Island jail complex has descended into violent chaos, with many correction officers refusing to show up to work. Fourteen detainees have died in city custody so far this year.Mr. Adams reiterated his support for Mr. de Blasio’s plan to close the jails on Rikers Island and replace them with smaller jails in different boroughs. But Mr. Adams also suggested uncertainty about the sites where those jails are supposed to go. Mr. Sliwa opposes the de Blasio plan outright.But replacing Rikers is a long-term plan. More immediately, Mr. Adams said he would “stop the bottleneck” and get detainees to court so they can be freed or serve their time. He would also tell the officers who are not reporting to duty to return to work, where he would offer a safe environment. He did not specify how.Mr. Sliwa suggested that he would take a hands-on approach as mayor. He said that on Jan. 2, he would move to the warden’s house on Rikers Island and personally supervise the jails and offer support to the correction officers working there. He said he would also hire 2,000 additional officers, relocate emotionally disturbed inmates to state facilities and break up the gangs inside the jail.“I can say that, because I’ve been on Rikers Island,” said Mr. Sliwa, who claims to have been arrested more than 70 times.In 1994, for example, the police arrested Mr. Sliwa after he prepared to paint over an art exhibition in a Brooklyn park that depicted assassinated police officers. More

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      Adams Commits to Keeping Gifted and Talented, But Leaves Details Unclear

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      Eric Adams, New York City’s likely next mayor, rebuked Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to scrap the current system as he prepares to leave office. Eric Adams said on Friday that he would keep New York City’s elementary school gifted and talented program if, as expected, he wins the general election for mayor next month — a clear rebuke to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who recently announced plans to eliminate the program.“There’s a new mayor next year, that mayor must evaluate how he’s going to deal with the gifted and talented program,” Mr. Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor, said in an interview with CNN. “He can’t get rid of it until next year,” he added of Mr. de Blasio.Asked directly whether he would eliminate the gifted program, Mr. Adams replied, “no I would not, I would expand the opportunities for accelerated learning.”In another break with Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Adams said in a radio interview on Friday that he supported requiring students to receive a coronavirus vaccine to attend class — an action the mayor has steadfastly resisted over concerns it could motivate some parents to keep their children home.“I say yes, if it’s F.D.A.-approved, we should also mandate it as we mandate with other vaccinations,” Mr. Adams said in the interview, with WCBS.As to the gifted program, Mr. de Blasio said last week that he wanted to scrap the current system, including an admissions exam for 4-year-olds that has been heavily criticized, and start over with a new one that offers an accelerated education to every elementary school student. Mr. Adams has yet to release his own plan for the city’s schools, and he has reversed course previously on at least one contentious education issue. But he made it clear on Friday that he was not going to let the outgoing mayor dictate a policy that has major implications for the nation’s largest school system. And although Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and an ally of Mr. de Blasio’s, avoided directly criticizing the mayor during the CNN interview, his comments appeared to betray some irritation that the plan had been announced barely a month before the election. Mr. de Blasio did not consult with Mr. Adams before releasing it. “There’s nothing to put back in place, because the next mayor must make the determination,” Mr. Adams said in the interview.Mr. de Blasio’s plan has elicited outrage among some parents who see the gifted program as a way of keeping their children enrolled in the public school system and as an alternative to struggling neighborhood schools. Many other families, as well as activists pushing to integrate the system, have strongly endorsed ending or overhauling the program, saying that it excludes too many Black and Latino students while weakening instruction for children in regular classes by removing strong performers.Mr. de Blasio is considering running for governor next year. Having won election in 2013 on a pledge to broadly reduce inequality in the city, he has been criticized for not doing more to reduce segregation in the schools and, more specifically, for not addressing inequities in the gifted program until the end of his tenure.About 75 percent of the 16,000 students enrolled in gifted classes are white or Asian American while 70 percent of the students in the overall system are Black and Latino, according to Department of Education data. The gifted program, which puts students on a separate academic track even before they enter the public schools, has exacerbated segregation in the city’s schools. Mr. Adams acknowledged the problem on Friday.“The gifted and talented program was isolated only to certain communities,” he said. “That created segregation in our classrooms.” Mr. Adams also said on CNN that all children should be assessed to determine whether accelerated classes were right for them. But he said such assessments would be a part of a broader plan to evaluate all students frequently, not just for academic strengths but also for challenges that might cause them to struggle in school. “We’re focusing on the gifted students,” he said. “They are going to be all right. How come we’re not focusing on those children with dyslexia, learning disabilities? We should be testing them periodically. That feeds our prison population. Fifty-five percent of Rikers inmates have learning disabilities.”Mr. Adams’s aides said he was considering delaying or altering next year’s test for screening 4-year-olds for the gifted program, and then seeking broader changes to the program the following year. His transition team will announce more details after the election, according to a person with direct knowledge of the work who was authorized to discuss it publicly. At the moment, there is no contract for administering a gifted exam in 2022 because an advisory board rejected the last one in a surprise decision. If Mr. Adams wanted to restore the test, he would need approval from the panel, which could again reject the contract.He would also have to move very quickly: If elected, he would take office on Jan. 1. His Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, has said that he would keep the gifted program.Under Mr. de Blasio’s plan, New York City would no longer admit rising kindergarten students into separate gifted classes or schools starting next fall. Instead, the city would train all of its roughly 4,000 kindergarten teachers to accommodate students who need accelerated instruction within their general education classrooms. Students who are already enrolled in the program would be allowed to finish, and the program would be phased out over five years.The National Association for Gifted Children criticized Mr. de Blasio’s plan in a recent statement, but praised his action on the test. The association said it was “supportive of the mayor’s plan to eliminate the one-size-fits-all standardized test to identify gifted students, as it often fails to recognize a significant number of Black, Brown and impoverished gifted students.” Many parents, including those whose children are enrolled in gifted classes or who support the program, have said the test causes unnecessary anxiety for young children, and has benefited some wealthy parents who can pay for test preparation for their 4-year-olds. Mr. Adams has been clear throughout the campaign that he did not plan to eliminate the gifted program. But he has appeared to take clear positions on education issues before, only to change his mind. As Brooklyn borough president, he was among the strongest supporters of a plan to eliminate the high-stakes admissions exam for the city’s so-called specialized high schools. The schools enroll tiny numbers of Black and Latino students, something that Mr. Adams has said infuriates him. A few weeks after standing alongside Mr. de Blasio to call for an end to the test, Mr. Adams reversed his position amid an outcry from some parents. He now says he wants to keep the exam in place. Researchers who study gifted education, including those who support the city’s current program, have said Mr. Adams’s call to expanding gifted classes would do little to diversify the program unless fundamental changes are made to the admissions process. Gifted programs in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods all but disappeared in many parts of the city after former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg introduced a citywide test-based threshold for admission into gifted classes. Today, there are nearly twice as many gifted programs in Manhattan’s District 2, one of the city’s whitest and wealthiest districts, as there are in all of the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough. In order to change that dynamic, Mr. Adams would almost certainly have to make big changes to the admissions system. Mr. de Blasio defended his plan during a radio appearance on Friday, although he was not asked about Mr. Adams’s comments. The current system, he said, is “incredibly exclusive and unhelpful.” Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting. More

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      How Schools Are Shaping the Virginia Governor's Race

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      Virginia Republicans in a tight governor’s race have been staging “Parents Matter” rallies and tapping into conservative anger over mandates and critical race theory.WINCHESTER, Va. — As a lifelong Republican in her home state of Virginia, Tammy Yoder faithfully casts her ballot for those who want to lower taxes, oppose abortion and back other conservative causes.But the issue that transformed Ms. Yoder, a stay-at-home mother, from a reliable voter to the kind of person who brings three young children to an evening campaign rally wasn’t her Christian values or her pocketbook.It was something even more personal, she said: What her children learn in school. “The past year has revealed a ton to me,” said Ms. Yoder, 41, as she waited in this Northern Virginia exurb for a speech by Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor. “The more I’ve listened and paid attention, the more that I see what’s happening in schools and on college campuses. And the stuff I see, I don’t want corrupting my children.”From fights over evolution to desegregation to prayer, education battles have been a staple of the country’s divisive cultural issues for decades. But not quite like this. After months of closed classrooms and lost learning time, Republicans in Virginia are making the schools the focus of their final push to capture the governor’s office, hoping to rally conservatives around both their frustrations over mask mandates and mandatory vaccinations and their fears of what their children are being taught.Vocal groups of parents, some led by Republican activists, are organizing against school curriculums, opposing public-health measures and calling for recalls of school board members. And Mr. Youngkin, a former private equity executive, has capitalized, seizing on conservatives’ concerns about instruction on race and the rights of transgender children to argue that Democrats want to come between parents and their children’s education.Mr. Youngkin’s attacks have forced Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic former governor trying to win back his old job, onto the defensive, and have thrust the ordinarily local issues surrounding schools into the middle of a rancorous nationwide shouting match.The Virginia race offers an early electoral test of that conservative energy. A victory by Mr. Youngkin would mark the first statewide win for Republicans in a dozen years and likely trigger a political panic within the Democratic Party about its prospects in next year’s midterm elections. Some Republican officials and strategists liken the surge of activism to the Tea Party, the anti-government movement that helped them win control of the House in 2010 and unleashed a revival of outrage politics that would define their party for the next decade.At a campaign rally in Winchester, Mr. Youngkin made little mention of Mr. Trump, vaccines or the coronavirus.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“There’s just so much focus on the schools, and it’s visceral,” said John Whitbeck, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia from Loudoun County, where acrimonious school board meetings have led to arrests, death threats and constant airtime on conservative media. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m against the debt ceiling.’ This is like, ‘You’re destroying our children’s education.’ And, look, angry people vote.”Polling in recent weeks has shown a tight race, with Democrats less enthusiastic than Republicans about voting. Mr. McAuliffe, who was barred from seeking re-election in 2017 by Virginia law, is faring worse in the fast-growing, voter-rich Northern Virginia suburbs than Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, did when he won four years ago, according to some surveys.Mr. Youngkin’s focus on schools may not resonate as strongly with the broader electorate.Measures such as mask and vaccine mandates are cutting differently in the governor’s race in more liberal New Jersey and are overwhelmingly popular among Virginia’s independents and Democrats. Critical race theory — an advanced academic concept generally not introduced until college — is not part of classroom teaching in Virginia and many voters say they do not know enough about it to have an opinion. And turning schools into a cultural war zone by railing against equity initiatives, books with sexual content and public health measures avoids tackling issues like budget cuts and the other thornier problems facing American education.But in an off-year election, when both sides anticipate a sharp falloff in voting, victory may hinge on which candidate can best motivate their base. Mr. Youngkin and his strategists believe that in the fights roiling schools they have discovered the rare issue that can galvanize their voters, even in places that are shifting the state to the left.Frustration with education is an issue that unites Republicans, energizing moderates eager to ensure their children remain in school as well as conservatives who see a liberal plot to indoctrinate their children with the belief that white people are inherently racist.Mr. Youngkin and his strategists believe that in the fights roiling schools they have discovered an issue that can galvanize their voters.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“The former governor is saying, ‘Hey I’ll decide how to teach your kids, not you’ — that’s really the issue driving this,” said John Fredericks, who led Donald Trump’s Virginia campaign last year. “Glenn Youngkin is the candidate that’s been able to straddle both sides of the party. And so far he’s given us just enough where we can enthusiastically vote for the guy.”Republicans have centered much of their closing argument around a statement by Mr. McAuliffe in last month’s debate. The comment came after Mr. Youngkin attacked Mr. McAuliffe over his 2017 veto of a bill permitting parents to opt out of allowing their children to study material deemed sexually explicit. The dispute was prompted by a mother who objected to her son, a high school senior, reading literary classics including Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”Mr. McAuliffe shot back that he did not believe “parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” In the weeks since, he’s stood by those remarks, saying that the state Board of Education and local school boards should determine what is taught in the classroom.But Mr. Youngkin and Republicans, stripping the quotation from its context, have turned the footage into the core of their argument that Mr. McAuliffe would side with government over parents. Video of the remark was featured in a flurry of digital ads and a statewide television commercial accusing Mr. McAuliffe of going “on the attack against parents.” Mr. Youngkin’s team began scheduling “Parents Matter” rallies in exurban counties, as they actively courted parent activist groups.And Mr. Youngkin has also voiced support for Byron Tanner Cross, a physical education teacher in Loudoun County. Mr. Cross was suspended after announcing at a school board meeting that he would not address transgender students by their preferred pronouns because of his Christian faith.At a campaign rally last week in Winchester, a small town in the Shenandoah Valley in one of the fast-growing exurb counties around Washington, Mr. Youngkin made little mention of Mr. Trump, vaccines or the coronavirus. Instead, he repeatedly invoked issues around schools as top priorities. He drew some of the loudest applause from the overwhelmingly white audience when he promised to ban critical race theory on his first day in office and vowed that schools would never be closed again.A victory by Mr. Youngkin would mark the first statewide win for Republicans in a dozen years.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“This is what big government means for Terry McAuliffe. He not only wants to stand between you and your children. He wants to make government a tool to silence us,” Mr. Youngkin told the crowd of nearly 200 people at a farm stand. “This is no longer a campaign. This is a movement. It’s a movement led by parents.”Mr. McAuliffe has dismissed the outrage surrounding critical race theory as “racist” and “a dog whistle.” He supports mask and vaccine mandates for students, teachers and school staff. (Mr. Youngkin says he encourages Virginians to get vaccinated against the coronavirus but does not support mandates.)But there are signs that Democrats sense danger. Mr. McAuliffe’s campaign has returned to highlighting his education proposals to undercut any argument that Mr. Youngkin could be stronger on the issue, promising to invest $2 billion in education, raise teacher pay, expand pre-K programs and invest in broadband access for students. On Friday, Mr. McAuliffe released an ad saying that Mr. Youngkin would cut billions of dollars in education funding and bring “Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos’s education policies to Virginia.”The parent organizations in Virginia say they are nonpartisan and more focused on school board elections than national politics. But many are led by Republican activists, raise funds from Republican Party donors and are helped by conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, which has held briefings to discuss model legislation to block critical race theory. Last month, the Republican National Committee ran ads attacking “fascist mask mandates” and highlighting video clips of angry parents yelling at school board members.Erin Holl, a Republican voter from Frederick County in the northern corner of the state, used to think of herself as conservative but not necessarily political. That was before the coronavirus. Months of online learning with her young daughters and the closure of her dog sitting business changed how much attention she paid the governor’s race.“I gave birth to her,” said Ms. Holl, gesturing to her daughter. “I have a right to say how she is raised. I have a right to say how she is vaccinated. This has changed how I felt about politics.” More

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      The California Recall Isn't Just Gavin Newsom Vs. Larry Elder

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      The prospect of Gov. Larry Elder has jolted California’s Democrats out of their apathy. Polling on the recall has swung from a dead heat in early August to an 8.4 margin for Gavin Newsom in FiveThirtyEight’s tracker. But I want to make an affirmative argument for continuing the Newsom experiment: Something exciting is taking shape in California. The torrent of policy that Newsom and the Democratic Legislature are passing amounts to nothing less than a Green New Deal for the Golden State.To understand Newsom, both his successes and his failures, you need to see the paradox that defines his career. The knock on him is that he’s all style, no substance — a guy who got where he is by looking like a politician rather than acting like a leader. The truth is just the opposite. Newsom’s style is his problem; his substance is his redemption.[Get more from Ezra Klein by listening to his Opinion podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”]When Newsom was the mayor of San Francisco, his nickname was “Mayor McHottie,” and he came complete with a tabloid-ready personal life and funding from the unimaginably wealthy Getty family. His worst mistakes as governor — like attending a birthday dinner for a lobbyist friend at the luxe French Laundry, unmasked, during the depths of the pandemic — deepen those suspicions. The “Beauty,” one of his recall opponents, who fancies himself “the Beast,” called him in a $5 million ad blitz.The attacks wound Newsom because what appear to be his strengths are actually his weaknesses. Newsom is handsome in a way that comes off as just a little too coifed, like the actor you’d cast to play a politician in a movie. His personal life and social misjudgments have dogged him for decades. He doesn’t have a knack for memorable sound bites or quick connection. (A sample line from our interview: “It was not without consideration that last year we passed a number of bills to site homeless shelters and supportive housing and Homekey and Roomkey projects with CEQA waivers and as-of-right zoning.”) He’s an eager nerd who presents as a slick jock, and he’s never found a way out of that dissonance.He’s also been governing amid the worst pandemic in modern history. California has outperformed most states in health outcomes and, particularly, in economic outcomes. “We dominate all Western democracies in the last five years in G.D.P.,” Newsom said. “The G.O.P. loves G.D.P.! Twenty-one percent G.D.P. growth in the last five years. Texas was 12 percent. And our taxes are lower for the middle class in California than they are in Texas.” Basically every economic indicator you can look at in California is booming, from household income growth to the $80 billion-plus budget surplus. But it’s still been a grueling 18 months of masks, lockdowns, deaths and discord. There’s been little attention to policymaking in Sacramento.As a result, people don’t realize how much Newsom and the Democratic State Legislature have done. But in the two and a half years since Newsom became governor, they’ve more than doubled the size of California’s earned-income tax credit and Young Child Tax Credit, and added a stimulus just for Californians (though some of the neediest were left out). They expanded paid family leave from six to eight weeks and unpaid leave to 12 weeks. They added 200,000 child care slots and $250 million to retrofit child care centers. They passed legislation giving all public school students two free meals each day, funding summer school and after-school programs for two million children and creating a full year of transitional kindergarten for all 4-year-olds by 2025.Newsom is “three years ahead of Joe Biden in terms of pro-family policy,” Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “Any parents or grandparents who back the recall are voting against their own financial interest, I’d say.”Housing has been harder, in part because you need to do more than just spend money. Ben Metcalf, who led California’s Department of Housing and Community Development for three years under Gov. Jerry Brown and one year under Newsom, recalls that “when Newsom first arrived, I was excited by his vision, but then dismayed by his inability to effectively deliver and get the Legislature to do what he wanted. Brown knew how to wield power. He knew the points of inflection. He had a team of people he could rely on.”You hear unflattering comparisons with Brown often when you ask around about Newsom. Brown was a more disciplined and experienced leader. He chose his priorities carefully, and he did what he promised. The surplus Newsom is spending is a gift bequeathed by Brown, who persuaded California’s voters to sharply raise taxes on the wealthiest residents. But Brown did little to address the state’s housing affordability crisis and neither did the Legislature.Nancy Skinner, a state senator who’s been a leader on housing, told me that “our shortage has been decades in the making.” The mantra, she said, was to just leave it to the cities. “For years, the Legislature just urged city governments to be more responsive. We tried to create some incentives. And only in the last five years did we realize this is a statewide crisis and we can’t just leave it to local governments to get it fixed. It took the Legislature a long time to get to the place of realizing the urging and carrots didn’t do it. We have to do the mandates.”Newsom, to his credit, prioritized housing from the beginning. Early in his term, in 2019, he sued the city of Huntington Beach for allegedly falling short on its housing commitments and threatened to sue dozens more. He made housing the primary focus of his 2020 State of the State speech. But the initial consensus was that he overpromised and underdelivered. There were widespread frustrations that he wasn’t tough enough with the Legislature and his interventions were often ineffective. He remains far behind his goal of building 3.5 million new housing units by 2025.“I said the 3.5 million houses was a stretch goal,” he protested to me. “I said in trying to achieve it, we’d find what we were capable of!”To be fair, Newsom couldn’t have predicted that the pandemic, which descended on California just weeks after his big housing speech, was coming. Still, in February, I was furious watching California’s political class, including Newsom, fail and fail again to pass major housing legislation. But when the facts change, so must your mind. The Legislature just passed, and Newsom will sign, a series of housing bills that achieve something I never expected to see in California: the end of single-family zoning. S.B.9 allows homeowners to divide their properties into two lots and to build two homes on each of those lots. It won’t solve the housing crisis, but it’s a start.Newsom and other Democrats are also finally appreciating the depth of the anger even liberals feel about homelessness. “People can’t take the tents and open-air drug use,” Newsom said to me. “They can’t. Nor can I. They want the streets cleaned up. They want more housing. They don’t care about task forces or bills. I think that sense of urgency coming out of Covid sharpens our edges. The five- to 10-year plans, no one is interested in that anymore. What’s the five- to 10-month plan?”In Newsom’s case, it’s using the state’s budget surpluses to drive a $12 billion investment over two years in permanent residences and mental health care for the homeless. How well it works remains to be seen, but no other state is investing in housing at anything like this scale or speed.What’s most encouraging to me is a broader change you can sense in the politics of this issue. At every level of power in California, the state’s political actors have realized they need to find ways to build. Inaction is no longer a viable option. Even the politicians who oppose development have to pretend to favor it. There’s no illusion that the tent cities can continue, nor that they can be cleared without offering housing to their residents. Politics isn’t just about policy. It’s also about will, coalitions and a sense of consequences. That’s what feels different in California right now. And Newsom deserves some credit for that.“The reason we began suing cities was to provide air cover,” Newsom told me. “I can’t tell you how many mayors privately thanked me even as they publicly criticized me for those lawsuits. We’re trying to drive a different expectation: We will cover you. You want to scapegoat someone, scapegoat the state. We haven’t had that policy in the past. Localism has been determinative. And that’s part of what’s changing.”This is why I disagree with those, like the economist Tyler Cowen, who argue that a Republican victory in the recall would be a healthy wake-up call for California Democrats, with little downside because Elder would be checked by the Legislature. The political system has already woken up. But the politics of housing are miserable, and there’s much more yet to do. To wreck the governing coalition that is finally making progress would be madness.“If Gavin were recalled, that’d be disastrous for housing policy in this state,” Brian Hanlon, the president of California YIMBY, a pro-housing group, told me. “The Legislature, I believe, could override Larry Elder’s vetoes on key bills. But all of these hard-fought housing bills that we are not passing with a supermajority cannot survive an Elder veto. All that would die.”“I also think that if the recall succeeds, in part due to housing, the overall situation in Sacramento would just be chaotic,” Hanlon added later. “It’ll be a lost year as Democrats and the Legislature work to retake the governor’s office in 2022.”Metcalf, the former head of the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, has moved from dismayed to impressed by Newsom’s record on housing. “We’re beginning to see Newsom find the levers to pull,” he said. “We’re seeing him figure out how to get the Legislature to do what he wants. We’re just getting there with Newsom, which would make it very painful to lose him now.”Every California politician brags that if California were a country, it would be the world’s fifth-largest economy. On climate, though, that’s a point of leverage, a way California can try to use its economic might to push the world to decarbonize faster. “There is no peer on California’s climate leadership,” Newsom told me. “We move markets. We move policy globally, not just nationally.”The first part of Newsom’s climate agenda is a series of executive orders setting aggressive decarbonization targets and standards. They include orders mandating that all new passenger cars sold in the state are zero-emission vehicles by 2035, a pledge to conserve 30 percent of the state’s land and waters by 2030, and directives to the California Air Resources Board to map out a pathway to carbon neutrality by 2035 and an end to oil extraction by 2045.California has, in the past, used access to its markets to transform the products that are sold globally — our tight fuel economy standards became the de facto national standard, and our subsidies for electric vehicles laid a foundation for that market to boom. Newsom wants to do that again, but for far more than just cars.I am, to be honest, skeptical of far-reaching targets and ever more aggressive decarbonization goals. It’s always easier to promise sweeping change in the future. But you can’t build a different future without planning for it now. What matters is whether these orders really do shape public and private decisions in California over the next decade. If Newsom or a like-minded successor remains governor, they have force. But they are instantly vulnerable if he loses office to Elder or anyone else.The second part of Newsom’s climate agenda is, well, money. The California Comeback Plan that Newsom signed this year put nearly $8 billion toward electric vehicles and climate resilience. Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who tracks state climate policies, said that “spending in the billions on climate is basically unheard of at the state level. No other state is doing anything remotely close to this scale.”I could keep going, and Newsom certainly did. He’s got a whole health care agenda meant to integrate physical and mental care called CalAIM that he gets extremely animated talking about (“If you could see me, I’m smiling, I’m so excited by this!”). He also has a plan to let the state bargain for prescription drugs on behalf of not just its public insurance programs but also any private insurers that want to join. He’s trying to convert the Valley State Prison into a rehabilitation center modeled on the Norwegian prisons that progressives admire. He’d love to tell you about his immigration ideas.It’s really a blizzard of plans. Newsom sees what he’s doing as “raising the bar of expectations.” He told me a quote, often attributed to Michelangelo, that he repeats to his staff: “The biggest risk is not that we aim too high and miss it. It’s that we aim too low and reach it.” He admitted they roll their eyes at this. But it is, for him, a strategy. “We’ve stretched the mind and I don’t think it goes back to its original form.”Perhaps. I’ve spoken to Newsom allies who worry that he’s attempting too much and that it could end with him achieving too little. Every one of these ideas will face serious implementation challenges. Transitional kindergarten, for instance, will require the state to produce 12,000 credentialed pre-K teachers and 20,000 more teacher’s aides in the next four years, according to Fuller. It’s going to require a decade of patient political work on housing to reverse California’s affordability crisis. Newsom’s health care agenda alone would preoccupy a traditional term, but his administration hasn’t done much to communicate its vision. When I asked a leading doctor at the University of California at San Francisco about it, he had no idea what it was.So there are challenges still to come — many of them. But I’d like to see Newsom and the Democratic Legislature get the chance to face them. If they succeed, they will make California the progressive beacon it’s long claimed to be.Additional reporting by Roge Karma.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Eric Adams Has Plans for New York, Beyond Public Safety

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      Mr. Adams, the Democratic mayoral nominee, has stances on policing, transportation and education that suggest a shift from Mayor Bill de Blasio.In the afterglow of winning the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, Eric Adams began to set out his mission if elected in November.“Safety, safety, safety,” Mr. Adams said in one interview. “Making our city safe,” he said in another.On Thursday, as a torrential storm flooded the city’s subway stations, Mr. Adams offered another priority: Fast-track the city’s congestion pricing plan, which would charge fees to motorists entering Manhattan’s core, so that the money could be used to make critical improvements to the aging system.The two initiatives encapsulate Mr. Adams’s self-characterization as a blue-collar candidate: Make the streets and the subway safe and reliable for New York’s working-class residents.But they also hint at the challenges that await the city’s next mayor.To increase public safety, Mr. Adams has said he would bring back a contentious plainclothes anti-crime unit that focused on getting guns off the streets. The unit was effective, but it was disbanded last year amid criticism of its reputation for using excessive force, and for its negative impact on the relationship between police officers and the communities they serve.Congestion pricing was opposed by some state lawmakers, who wanted to protect the interests of constituents who needed to drive into Manhattan. But even though state officials approved the plan two years ago, it has yet to be introduced: A key review board that would guide the tolling structure has yet to be named; its six members are to be appointed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is controlled by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.Mr. Adams, who would be the city’s second Black mayor, would face other steep challenges: steering the city out of the pandemic; navigating the possibility of a new City Council trying to push him to the left; grappling with significant budget deficits once federal recovery aid is spent.How he intends to accomplish it all is still somewhat theoretical, but he has offered a few concrete proposals — some costly, and with no set ways to pay for them — mixed in with broader ideas.Some of New York City’s mayoral transitions have reflected wild swings from one ideology to another. The current mayor, Bill de Blasio, ran on a promise to end the city’s vast inequities, which he said had worsened under his billionaire predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg. The gentle and consensus-building David N. Dinkins was succeeded by Rudolph W. Giuliani, a hard-charging former federal prosecutor.Privately, Mr. de Blasio supported Mr. Adams in the competitive primary, believing that he was the person best suited to carry on Mr. de Blasio’s progressive legacy, and if Mr. Adams defeats the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, an abrupt change in the city’s direction is unlikely.But in some ways, Mr. Adams has staked out positions on issues like affordable housing, transportation and education that suggest a shift from Mr. de Blasio’s approach.On policing, Mr. Adams, who has pledged to name the city’s first female police commissioner, has already spoken to three potential candidates, and is believed to favor Juanita Holmes, a top official who was lured out of retirement by the current police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea. Mr. Adams has also vowed to work with federal officials to crack down on the flow of handguns into the city, and he has expressed concerns about how bail reform laws, approved by state lawmakers in 2019, may be contributing to a recent rise in violent crime.On education, Mr. Adams is viewed as friendly toward charter schools and he does not want to get rid of the specialized admissions test that has kept many Black and Latino students out of the city’s elite high schools, a departure from Mr. de Blasio’s stance. He has also proposed opening schools year-round and expanding the universal prekindergarten program by offering reduced-cost child care for children under 3.Transportation and safety advocates hope that Mr. Adams, an avid cyclist, will have a more intuitive understanding of their calls for better infrastructure. He has promised to build 150 new miles of bus lanes and busways in his first term, and 300 new miles of protected bike lanes, a significant expansion of Mr. de Blasio’s efforts.Increasing the supply of affordable housing was a central goal of Mr. de Blasio’s administration, and Mr. Adams supports the mayor’s highly debated plan to rezone Manhattan’s trendy SoHo neighborhood to allow for hundreds of affordable units.Mr. Adams has said he supports selling the air rights to New York City Housing Authority properties to help finance improvements to authority buildings.  Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMr. Adams also supports a proposal to convert hotels and some of the city’s own office buildings to affordable housing units. The proposal originated with real estate industry leaders, who have watched their office buildings empty out during the pandemic.Mr. Adams favors selling the air rights above New York City Housing Authority properties to developers, an idea the de Blasio administration floated in 2018. Mr. Adams has said the sales might yield $8 billion, which the authority could use to pay for improvements at the more than 315 buildings it manages.Mr. Adams is viewed as pro-development — he supported a deal for an Amazon headquarters in Queens and a rezoning of Industry City in Brooklyn, both abandoned after criticism from progressive activists — and he was supported in the primary by real estate executives and wealthy donors.During his campaign, Mr. Adams met three times with the Partnership for New York City, a Wall Street-backed business nonprofit, according to Kathryn Wylde, the group’s president. Ms. Wylde expressed appreciation for Mr. Adams’s focus on public safety — a matter of great importance to her members — and confidence that he would be more of a check on the City Council, which she said was constantly interfering with business operations.“I think with Adams, we’ll have a shot that he will provide some discipline,” Ms. Wylde said. “Why? Because he’s not afraid of the political left.”Some of Mr. Adams’s stances have drawn criticism from progressive leaders like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Maya Wiley in the Democratic primary.Alyssa Aguilera, an executive director of VOCAL-NY Action Fund, said that “having a former N.Y.P.D. captain in Gracie Mansion” only means “further protections and funding for failed law enforcement tactics.”“With that framework, it’s hard to believe he’s going to make any substantial changes to the size and scope of the N.Y.P.D. and that’s what many of us are hoping for,” Ms. Aguilera said.Mr. Adams, a former police officer, has expressed confidence that, under him, the Police Department could use stop-and-frisk tactics without violating people’s rights. Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesMr. Adams insists that even though he has been characterized as a centrist, he views himself as a true progressive who can meld left-leaning concepts with practical policies.To address poverty, for example, Mr. Adams has proposed $3,000 tax credits for poor families — an idea he said was superior to his primary rival Andrew Yang’s local version of universal basic income.“There’s a permanent group of people that are living in systemic poverty,” Mr. Adams said recently on “CBS This Morning.” “You and I, we go to the restaurant, we eat well, we take our Uber, but that’s not the reality for America and New York. And so when we turn this city around, we’re going to end those inequalities.”To deal with the homelessness crisis, Mr. Adams has proposed integrating housing assistance into hospital stays for indigent and homeless people, and increasing the number of facilities for mentally ill homeless people, especially those who are not sick enough to stay in a hospital but are too unwell for a shelter.Mr. Adams did not emphasize climate change or environmental issues on the campaign trail. But in his Twitter post about the subway flooding on Thursday, he called for using congestion pricing funds to “add green infrastructure to absorb flash storm runoff.”His campaign has pointed to initiatives from his tenure as borough president: helping to expand the Brooklyn Greenway, a coastal bike and walking corridor, not only for recreation but for flood mitigation; and improving accountability for the post-Hurricane Sandy reconstruction process. Those actions are dwarfed by the sweeping change he will be called on to oversee as mayor — particularly by a City Council with many new members who campaigned on a commitment to mitigate and prepare for the effects of rising seas and extreme weather on a port city with a 520-mile coastline.Mr. Adams expresses confidence that he can reinstate the plainclothes police squad and use stop-and-frisk tactics without violating people’s rights, contending that his administration can effectively monitor data related to police interactions in real time, and intervene if there are abuses.“We are not going back to the days where you are going to stop, frisk, search and abuse every person based on their ethnicity and based on the demographics or based on the communities they’re in,” Mr. Adams said on MSNBC last week. “You can have precision policing without heavy-handed abusive policing.”When some subway stations flooded on Thursday, Mr. Adams called for using money raised through a congestion pricing plan to make the system more resilient against bad storms. Fiona Dhrimaj, via ReutersMr. Adams seems most likely to differ from Mr. de Blasio on matters of tone and governing style.He is known for working round-the-clock, while Mr. de Blasio has been pilloried for arriving late to work and appearing apathetic about his job. Mr. de Blasio is a Red Sox fan who grew up in the Boston area and lives in brownstone Brooklyn; Mr. Adams, a lifelong New Yorker, was raised in Jamaica, Queens, by a single mother who cleaned homes. He roots for the Mets. Mr. Adams will come into office in a powerful position because of the diverse coalition he assembled of Black, Latino and white voters outside Manhattan.“De Blasio spoke about those communities; Eric speaks to the communities,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban planning at New York University. “There’s a real difference. De Blasio was talented as a campaigner. Eric is going to be a doer.”Where Mr. de Blasio rode into City Hall as a critic of the police and a proponent of reform, he will end his term buried in criticism that he ultimately pandered to the department — a shift that many attribute to a moment, early in his tenure, when members of the Police Department turned their backs on him at an officer’s funeral.Officers were upset that Mr. de Blasio spoke about talking to his biracial son about how to safely interact with the police, a conversation that the parents of most Black children have. As mayor, Mr. Adams said he would gather with officers around the city for a different version of “the conversation.”“I’m your mayor,” Mr. Adams said he would tell officers. “What you feel in those cruisers, I felt. I’ve been there. But let me tell you something else. I also know how it feels to be arrested and lying on the floor of the precinct and have someone kick you in your groin over and over again and urinate blood for a week.”Mr. Adams will most likely be different from Mr. de Blasio in another way: He mischievously told reporters last week that he would be fun to cover. Indeed, he was photographed on Wednesday getting an ear pierced; the next day, he was seen dining at Rao’s, an exclusive Italian restaurant in Harlem, with the billionaire Republican John Catsimatidis.“He got his ear pierced and went to Rao’s,” Mr. Moss said. “He’s going to enjoy being a public personality.”Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard, Matthew Haag, Winnie Hu, Andy Newman and Ali Watkins. More

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      The Mike Pence Saga Tells Us More Than We Want to Know

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I was hoping to pick up where we left off last week, with the New York City mayoral primary and our new ranked-choice voting system. Assuming Eric Adams holds on to his lead, what do you think his win says about the state of the city — and of the Democratic Party?Gail Collins: Bret, this is why I love conversing with you. I’ve been hearing Republicans howl about the negotiations with Joe Biden on spending, and I was dreading a discussion on that subject.Bret: Biden gets out a little over his skis with a dumb remark, publicly admits he screwed up, pledges to keep his word on a bipartisan bill. Imagine that.Gail: Well, the city election is definitely a more interesting topic and I can see why Eric Adams intrigues you. He’s a Black former police officer who ran on his crime-fighting skills. Politically he’s a moderate — by New York standards, anyway. And talking with his supporters after the vote, I did get the impression that some were most concerned with blocking off Maya Wiley, the only real leftie with a chance of winning.Of course while the left was getting bad news in New York City, regular Buffalo Democrats were discovering their longtime mayor had lost the primary to a Black female socialist. Hoping to hear a lot more discussion about India Walton as we slowly make our way through this political year.Nothing is for sure yet in the city — thanks to our new preferential voting system New Yorkers may not get the final word on who won the primary for ages. But if it’s Adams, it could send a cheerful message to people like Chuck Schumer, who’s up for re-election next year. There’s been speculation about whether Schumer might be challenged by a progressive.Bret: New system or not, I still don’t understand why it should take forever to know the results of a municipal election. But I’ll be happy if Adams holds on to his lead, for lots of reasons.One good reason to cheer an Adams victory is that it would demonstrate yet again that the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left doesn’t represent the Democratic base. “Defund the police” is not a working-class interest.Gail: Yeah, but having unarmed, trained mediators who could respond to complaints like family fighting might get a good response.Bret: I used to think that was a good idea. Then several of our readers explained to me that family altercations are often violent and require more than a social worker.Getting back to working-class interests: Blocking Amazon and the thousands of jobs it would have brought to Queens was not pro-worker. Nor does it help the working class to deny parents who can’t afford to send their kids to Dalton the school choice they need, when it comes to getting a better education for their children.Gail: The public school issue is so important and so complicated. You want to make sure it’s always open to reform and improvement. Still, you don’t want to create a system that allows canny parents to get terrific options for their own kids while reducing public pressure for all-around quality education.But go on.Bret: My bottom line is that “democratic socialism” might be cool with pampered N.Y.U. undergrads, but it isn’t going to help people who aren’t partying in Washington Square Park. So hooray for Adams and all middle-of-the-road Democrats. In the meantime, our mutual friend Donald Trump is on the rally circuit again.Gail: Wow, I watched his speech over the weekend. I guess it was a sort of return to national politics — Trump’s been off the trail since January when his attempt to convince the world he didn’t lose the election led to a bloody riot.No violence this time. In fact, the whole thing was one big snooze.Hard to imagine him really making a comeback. But also hard to imagine who’d be coming next. Can’t really picture a President Pence.Bret: You know, I probably spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than I ought to, given my high blood pressure. He reminds me of Mr. Collins, the unctuous clergyman in “Pride and Prejudice,” who’s always bowing and scraping to the overbearing, tasteless, talentless Lady Catherine de Bourgh, while he also lords it over the Bennet family because he stands to inherit their estate. Alternatively, Pence could be a character out of Dickens, with some ridiculous name like Wackford Squeers or Mr. Pumblechook.Gail: Wow, great analogies. Plus, it is indeed possible you spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than you ought to.Bret: Here’s a guy who makes his career on the Moral Majority wing of the Republican Party, until he hitches his wagon to the most immoral man ever to win a big-ticket presidential nomination. Phyllis Schlafly deciding to elope with Larry Flynt would have made more sense. Then Pence spends four years as the most servile, toadying, obsequious, fawning, head-nodding, yes-siring, anything-you-say-boss vice president in history. He’ll do anything for Trump’s love — but not, as the singer Meat Loaf might have said, attempt to steal the presidential election in broad daylight.For this, Trump rewards Pence by throwing him to a mob, who tried to hunt him down and hang him. But even now Pence can’t get crosswise with his dark lord, so the idea of him ever taking the party in an anti-Trump direction seems like a fantasy.Gail: You have convinced me that Pence is too much of a wimp to rebel. But you can never tell — look what happened to Mitt Romney.Bret: Unlike Pence, Romney is a true Christian, with actual principles. As for Nikki Haley, I just don’t see her winning the Republican nomination. She’s just not Trumpy enough. My bet is on the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as his vice-presidential nominee. Crazy?Gail: Oh God. What a combo. l hear there’s a “Ron Be Gone” movement in Florida. Maybe they can combine it with a “Tim, Don’t Get In.” Or just: “Not Scott.”Bret: DeSantis is a very shrewd guy. He’s made a point of staying close to Trump, personally, and he’s also been very good at baiting the media. His handling of the pandemic was better than most liberals will ever give him credit for, because, unlike Andrew “I’m-still-standing” Cuomo, he made a point of protecting nursing homes. With Scott on the ticket he could also peel off some of the Black vote, or at least make white suburban voters feel comfortable about voting for a G.O.P. ticket that progressives will inevitably attack as racist.Of course none of that will stop Trump from turning on DeSantis if he decides to run again in 2024, and I have to assume there are skeletons in the governor’s closet. In the words of the immortal Beatles song, “Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey.”Gail: Right now the only thing we’re thinking about in DeSantis’s state is the terrible condo collapse near Miami. There are going to be lots of questions about how that disaster came to be, and the government’s role in ensuring public safety.Bret: It’s so heartbreaking. I have my own memories of what it’s like, from having lived through the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, which killed thousands of people and flattened a lot of buildings in the vicinity of my dad’s office. It’s hard to think of a more awful way to go.But I’d hate to see the issue politicized. Buildings collapse in cities and states run by Democrats, too, like the Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans a couple of years ago.Gail: Good point. But you will remember DeSantis is also the guy who’s been fighting against vaccine requirements on cruise ships.Bret: Sounds like an unreasonable government restriction on private enterprise trying to make the rules for what’s allowed on their premises.By the way, I’m increasingly of the view that Medicare and health insurance companies should refuse to underwrite treatment for any non-vaccinated people who wind up getting sick. People who take unreasonable private risks shouldn’t be allowed to socialize the cost of the consequences. What do you think?Gail: When said unvaccinated people get sick they’re going to need medical care. Which, if they’re uninsured and of low income, is going to have to be taken care of by the taxpayer unless the hospitals are directed to refuse to admit the unvaccinated critically ill.Bret: True, though my scheme would only apply to anti-vaxxers who refused to get a vaccine, not those who just didn’t have access to it. It’s never going to happen, for the same reason that we’re probably not going to deny coverage for lung cancer patients because they happen to be ex-smokers. But I just wish we lived in a country where being willfully dumb was a little more costly.Gail: Make being willfully dumb a little more costly — I think you’ve got a campaign slogan, Bret. Don’t let Mike Pence get his hands on it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More