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    Georgia Governor's Race Puts State at Center of 2022 Political Drama

    Former Senator David Perdue, encouraged by Donald Trump, is challenging Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican who defied the former president.ATLANTA — Former Senator David Perdue’s leap Monday into a primary challenge against Gov. Brian Kemp, his fellow Republican, ensured that Georgia will be at the hot molten core of the political universe next year, with costly and competitive races that will test the grip of Trumpism over the G.O.P. and measure the backlash against President Biden in a state that increasingly reflects the country’s demography and its divisions.Already a battleground at the presidential level, Georgia will be the scene of intense Republican primary showdowns for both governor and secretary of state, followed by general election contests in which Democrats — led by Senator Raphael Warnock, who is seeking a full term, and Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 governor’s race to Mr. Kemp and announced another bid last week — hope to keep the state a bluer tint of purple.Mr. Perdue, who lost his Senate seat after one term to the Democrat Jon Ossoff in January, is former President Donald J. Trump’s preferred candidate, while Mr. Kemp earned a place on Mr. Trump’s enemies list after declining to help the former president overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia. The two will now face off in May in an internecine war that may offer the closest approximation to a referendum on Trumpism next year as any in the country.“Look, I like Brian. This isn’t personal,” Mr. Perdue said Monday in a video announcing his candidacy. But he implied that Mr. Kemp had damaged his standing with Georgia’s Trumpist base of Republican voters.“He has failed all of us,” Mr. Perdue said of Mr. Kemp, “and cannot win in November.”Aides to Mr. Kemp gave Mr. Perdue a blistering reception, revealing the depths of the anger over what they view as his betrayal of a fellow Republican and former political ally. They noted that the governor had actually beaten Ms. Abrams, while Mr. Perdue was, most recently, that most loathsome of nouns in the former president’s vocabulary: a loser.And Georgians First Inc., a pro-Kemp political action committee, released an ad reminding voters of Mr. Perdue’s stock trades of companies whose business fell under the purview of his Senate committees.While Mr. Kemp boasted a “proven track record,” a campaign spokesman for the governor, Cody Hall, said on Monday, “Perdue is best known for ducking debates, padding his stock portfolio during a pandemic, and losing winnable races.”Endorsing Mr. Perdue on Monday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp “a very weak governor” who “can’t win because the MAGA base — which is enormous — will never vote for him.”In entering the governor’s race, Mr. Perdue joins a number of other G.O.P. candidates who could form a slate of high-profile Trump loyalists in November: The former football star Herschel Walker, with Mr. Trump’s encouragement, is seeking the nomination to run against Mr. Warnock. And Representative Jody Hice is challenging the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who also rebuffed Mr. Trump’s entreaties to help overturn his defeat.Both Mr. Walker and Mr. Hice have parroted Mr. Trump’s false claim that election fraud cost him the 2020 election..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.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-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{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;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}And Mr. Perdue did not limit his own attack to Mr. Kemp. Republicans were disunited in Georgia, he said, “and Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger are to blame.”The influence of Mr. Trump, who has not ruled out another presidential run in 2024, is bound to be felt in other states’ midterm races. But Mr. Trump has been particularly fixated on Georgia, a state he lost by fewer than 12,000 votes. He and some of his allies are being investigated by the Fulton County district attorney’s office for potential criminal violations after reaching out to state officials, including Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger, in an effort to change the election results.If Mr. Perdue and Mr. Walker lead the Republican ticket next fall, Georgia voters will be forced to choose between revulsion for Mr. Trump and his incendiary politics, on the one hand, and, on the other, dissatisfaction with Mr. Biden and unease with the liberal politics that Ms. Abrams and Mr. Warnock embody.The drama will unfold in a state that, with its gaping divides along the lines of race, class and region, mirrors the nation and its partisan, polarized and increasingly poisonous politics.Georgia also reflects broader trends among the two national parties. Democrats are increasingly turning to more diverse candidates. But the candidates are still stepping gingerly, as Ms. Abrams did in her launch video by trumpeting the idea of “one Georgia,” and seeking to elevate unifying issues that can appeal to die-hard liberals and fickle suburbanites alike.Some Democrats fear that Ms. Abrams, a veteran state legislator and voting-rights advocate, may face an uphill climb in the governor’s race given the challenges confronting the party nationally: an unpopular president, inflation, Covid-19, and simmering concerns over violent crime and how American history is taught in schools.But many expressed hope on Monday that the coming fight between Mr. Kemp and Mr. Perdue would benefit Ms. Abrams, who is seeking to become the state’s first Black governor, and other down-ballot Democrats.Stacey Abrams is hoping to benefit from the Republican infighting.Eze Amos for The New York Times“While David Perdue and Brian Kemp fight each other, Stacey Abrams will be fighting for the people of Georgia,” said her campaign manager, Lauren Groh-Wargo, pointing to Ms. Abrams’s stances on health coverage, school funding and Covid-related health policies.For Republicans, Georgia has now become perhaps the most consequential proving ground in the party’s Trump wars. Should Mr. Perdue and other Trump-backed candidates lose their primaries, it will raise grave questions about the former president’s clout in the party as well as his own capacity to compete in a must-win state in 2024.By running, Mr. Perdue and his supporters are effectively sending the message that Mr. Trump must be accommodated — and his election denialism perpetuated.Mr. Perdue’s allies say their case is very simple: Mr. Kemp is unelectable next November because a significant number of Trump devotees will stay at home if he’s nominated.“The bitterness between Kemp and Trump is so deep that Kemp cannot win a general election,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who is backing Mr. Perdue. “The question for Georgia Republicans is would you like Perdue or Stacey Abrams, because if you’re for Kemp, you’re effectively voting for Stacey Abrams.”For his part, Mr. Kemp, who in his 2018 race brandished guns and threatened to round up “criminal illegals” in his pickup truck, can be expected to remind Republican voters that it is hard to outflank him to the right on issues like gun rights or abortion rights. He also signed into law Georgia’s controversial new voting law, which limits ballot access for voters in urban and suburban areas that are home to many Democrats.Mr. Kemp’s supporters also say they believe that Ms. Abrams is enough of a polarizing force to cauterize any G.O.P. wounds sustained in the primary.“She will inspire Republicans to come back out,” said Erick Erickson, a Georgia-based conservative writer and radio host. “They’re not going to stay home in Kemp-versus-Abrams or Perdue-versus-Abrams.”Still, Mr. Erickson, an outspoken Trump detractor, expressed concern that a nasty primary could disrupt next year’s legislative session and deny Mr. Kemp any new accomplishments to run on.Brian Kemp earned a place on Mr. Trump’s enemies list after declining to help the former president overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesDemocrats, who are eager to amplify the opposition’s discord — and to downplay Mr. Biden’s unpopularity, which is weighing on the party in Georgia as elsewhere — can barely contain their glee.“All that Perdue is going to be talking about is ‘the election was stolen,’” said Jennifer Jordan, an Atlanta-area state senator running for attorney general. “The voters in my district, the chamber of commerce Republicans, that is incredibly unseemly to them. You have this guy, Perdue, who had some appeal in the business community, and he’s basically giving that away because now he’s just going to become Trump’s boy.”Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University, said she expected Republicans to rally around the party’s nominee in November. But even if that were Mr. Kemp, she said, Mr. Trump could still be a wild card.“If Brian Kemp won,” she said, “would Donald Trump be disciplined enough to keep his mouth shut in a general election?” More

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    Bob Dole, Old Soldier and Stalwart of the Senate, Dies at 98

    Mr. Dole, a son of the Kansas prairie who was left for dead on a World War II battlefield, became one of the longest-serving Republican leaders.Bob Dole, the plain-spoken son of the prairie who overcame Dust Bowl deprivation in Kansas and grievous battle wounds in Italy to become the Senate majority leader and the last of the World War II generation to win his party’s nomination for president, died on Sunday. He was 98. His death was announced by the Elizabeth Dole Foundation.It did not say where he died. He had announced in February that he had Stage IV lung cancer and that he was beginning treatment.A Republican, Mr. Dole was one of the most durable political figures in the last decades of the last century. He was nominated for vice president in 1976 and then for president a full 20 years later. He spent a quarter-century in the Senate, where he was his party’s longest-serving leader until Mitch McConnell of Kentucky surpassed that record in June 2018.President Biden called Mr. Dole “an American statesman like few in our history. A war hero and among the greatest of the Greatest Generation.” He added, “To me, he was also a friend whom I could look to for trusted guidance, or a humorous line at just the right moment to settle frayed nerves.”As the old soldiers of World War II faded away, Mr. Dole, who had been a lieutenant in the Army’s storied 10th Mountain Division and was wounded so severely on a battlefield that he was left for dead, came to personify the resilience of his generation. In his post-political career, he devoted himself to raising money for the World War II Memorial in Washington and spent weekends there welcoming visiting veterans.In one of his last public appearances, in December 2018, he joined the line at the Capitol Rotunda where the body of former President George H.W. Bush, an erstwhile political rival and fellow veteran, lay in state. As an aide helped him up from his wheelchair, Mr. Dole, using his left hand because his right had been rendered useless by the war, saluted the flag-draped coffin of the last president to have served in World War II.Mr. Dole with President Richard M. Nixon in 1971. He was national Republican chairman at the time. Associated PressPolitically, Mr. Dole was a man for all seasons, surviving for more than three decades in his party’s upper echelons, even though he was sometimes at odds ideologically with other Republican leaders.He was national Republican chairman under President Richard M. Nixon in the early 1970s; the running mate to President Gerald R. Ford in 1976; chairman of the Senate Finance Committee during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s; and presidential standard-bearer during Newt Gingrich’s “revolution” of the mid-1990s, when the Republicans captured the House for the first time in 40 years and upended the power dynamic on Capitol Hill.More recently, Mr. Dole, almost alone among his party’s old guard, endorsed Donald J. Trump for president in 2016, after his preferred candidates had fallen by the wayside. On the eve of his 93rd birthday, he was the only previous Republican presidential nominee to appear at the party’s convention in Cleveland, where Mr. Trump was nominated.Mr. Dole himself ran three times for the White House and finally won the nomination in 1996, only to lose to President Bill Clinton after a historically disastrous campaign. He had given up his secure post in the Senate to pursue the presidency, although, as he acknowledged, he was more suited to the Senate.As the Republican leader, he helped broker compromises that shaped much of the nation’s domestic and foreign policies.He was most proud of helping to rescue Social Security in 1983, of pushing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and of mustering a majority of reluctant Republicans to support Mr. Clinton’s unpopular plan to send American troops to Bosnia in 1995. (Mr. Dole was not wild about the deployment either, but he long believed that a president, of either party, should be supported once he decided something as important as committing troops abroad.)A skilled legislative mechanic, Mr. Dole understood what every senator wanted and what each could live with, and he enjoyed the art of political bartering.He was so at home in the Senate’s marble corridors that during his last campaign, in 1996, he constantly had to remind voters that he was “not born in a blue suit” — Dole shorthand for saying that he had a life before arriving in Washington in 1961. In fact, he had been shaped profoundly by the twin experiences of growing up poor in Depression-era Kansas and enduring the shattering wounds of war.Young Bob, left, with his siblings in the backyard of their home in Russell, Kan.Dole family photo, via Associated PressWith dust storms blackening the skies of his tiny hometown, Russell, in north-central Kansas, and destroying the wheat economy, the Doles moved into the cramped basement of their home and rented out the upstairs to make ends meet.As for the war, it changed the course of Mr. Dole’s life. A star athlete who lettered in football, basketball and track and who was voted best looking in his class at Russell High School, he had planned to become a surgeon. Instead, he came home from the war in Europe in a body cast, mostly paralyzed.He spent 39 months convalescing, much of it in surgery — as a patient, not as the surgeon he had hoped to become. Instead, he became a lawyer and a politician, though his injuries kept him from many of the fundamental rituals of politics. His right hand was so damaged that he couldn’t shake hands, and he would clutch a pen in his fist to discourage people from trying. Unable to cut his meat with a knife, he tended to avoid political dinners and ate at home.Mr. Dole began his political career as a conservative and evolved into a pragmatist, even forging relationships with prominent liberals. With George S. McGovern of South Dakota, he expanded the food stamp program, and with Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, he made school lunches a federal entitlement. Kansas farmers applauded both efforts.He was such a good deal-maker that his own convictions were not always apparent. By the end of his long career, Mr. Dole had cast more than 12,000 votes, having stood on both sides of many issues.He opposed many of the Great Society programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson, but he supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Avoiding budget deficits had been his North Star, given his hardscrabble youth. Sometimes he supported tax increases, which led Mr. Gingrich to brand him “the tax collector for the welfare state.” But in 1995, he tried to recast himself as a tax-cutter, memorably telling party leaders, “I’m willing to be another Ronald Reagan, if that’s what you want.” He then signed a pledge not to raise taxes as president, a pledge he had previously rejected.“It adds a certain poignancy,” Richard Norton Smith, the former director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, said in an interview for this obituary in 2009, “that he found himself chasing the caboose of movement conservatism at the height of his career.”Mr. Dole thrived as chairman of the Finance Committee, a powerful position that attracted big corporate donors often seeking favors. At one point he raised more money from special interests than any other senator. A particularly generous donor was Dwayne Andreas, chairman of Archer Daniels Midland, the giant agribusiness; over two decades, the company received millions of dollars in tax breaks and federal subsidies.“When these political action committees give money, they expect something in return other than good government,” Mr. Dole bluntly told The Wall Street Journal, pinpointing why the system benefited wealthy interests over poor ones.His fellow Republican senators elected him their leader in both the majority and the minority for a combined 11 years, from 1985 to 1996.Mr. Dole in 1990 on the balcony adjacent to the Republican leader’s office at the Capitol. The balcony was later named for him.Michael Geissinger/Library of CongressHe conducted much of his bargaining with other senators on the balcony off the Republican leader’s office. When he left the Senate in 1996, his colleagues unanimously passed a resolution naming it the Robert J. Dole balcony. It overlooked the National Mall and the Washington Monument, affording him what he wistfully called “the second-best view in Washington.” Unofficially, the balcony was called “Dole Beach,” because he often escaped there to soak up the sun and refresh his perpetual tan.But away from Capitol Hill, Mr. Dole was a fish out of water. His insider skills as a tactician and deal closer did not translate to the presidential campaign trail.During the 1996 race, he was faulted as having no overarching vision — for his campaign or for the country. He chafed at handlers who tried to package him, and he never adapted to the scripted politics of the television age. During speeches, he often lapsed into legislative lingo and referred to himself in the third person. He was detached as a candidate, more wry commentator than engaged participant.“Stayed on message,” Mr. Dole congratulated himself in front of reporters after one campaign event, then went on to mock the process in which he was involved: “Every time I do that ‘reconnect the government to values’ stuff, I feel like a plumber.”After that final quest for the presidency, Mr. Dole became a lobbyist for the powerhouse international law firm Alston & Bird. Despite his standing as a well-connected Washington insider, he cultivated a new persona, one unexpected for a man of Mr. Dole’s dark visage and mordant wit: that of self-deprecating loser.“Playing up the image of the downtrodden also-ran was great fun,” he wrote in his 2005 book, “One Soldier’s Story: A Memoir.” He starred in Super Bowl commercials for Visa (“I just can’t win”) in 1997 and for Pepsi in 2001 and later made a cameo in a Pepsi ad featuring Britney Spears. He spoofed previous ads he had made for the male potency drug Viagra, for which he had become a spokesman after undergoing surgery for prostate cancer.“Once you lose,” he told The New York Times, “people like you.”It was a surprising turn for Mr. Dole, who was long linked in the public mind with the glowering Nixon. He had defended that beleaguered president so fiercely that one critic branded him Nixon’s “hatchet man,” a label that stuck.Mr. Dole, then Senate majority leader, at a news conference with House Speaker Newt Gingrich during budget negotiations in 1996.David Scull/The New York TimesLike Nixon, Mr. Dole had overcome struggles early in life. And like Nixon, he felt embittered toward people for whom he thought things came easy.“I trust in the hard way, for little has come to me except in the hard way,” he said when he announced he was leaving the Senate in 1996.His bitterness found an outlet in partisanship, which he often expressed in acerbic asides. It flared in public during a vice-presidential debate in 1976, when he blamed Democrats for all the wars of the 20th century, and again in 2004, when some fellow Vietnam veterans challenged the military record of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee. Mr. Dole, who had received two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star with an oak leaf cluster, joined in, questioning whether Mr. Kerry had deserved his Purple Hearts.“Three Purple Hearts,” Mr. Dole said of Mr. Kerry, “and never bled that I know of.”Wounds and RecoveryRobert Joseph Dole was born in his parents’ house in Russell on July 22, 1923, the second of four children of Doran and Bina (Talbott) Dole. His mother was an expert seamstress and sold sewing machines; his father worked in a creamery and later ran a grain elevator.Mr. Dole enlisted in the Army Reserve during college and was called to active duty in 1943. On April 14, 1945, in the mountains of Italy outside the small town of Castel D’Aiano, about 65 miles north of Florence, the Germans began firing on his platoon. When he saw a fellow soldier fall, Mr. Dole went to pull him to safety. But as he scrambled away he was struck by flying metal. It blew apart his right shoulder and arm and broke several vertebrae in his neck and spine.His men dragged him back to a foxhole, where he lay crumpled in his blood-soaked uniform for nine hours before he was evacuated. He was just 21.It was a horrifying turn of events for one of Russell’s most promising young men. Unable to feed or care for himself, he feared he was doomed to a life of selling pencils on the street.Mr. Dole recovering from his war injuries in 1945. Flying metal had blown apart his right shoulder and arm and broke vertebrae in his neck and spine. Dole family photo, via Associated PressHe spent more than three years recovering and underwent at least seven operations. Back in Russell, he devised a homemade weight-and-pulley system to rebuild his strength. The townspeople rallied around him, pooling their nickels and dimes for his treatment.Russell was a speck on the flat Kansas prairie, but in the Dole biography it took on mythic significance. In his political campaigns, Russell was cast as the shaper of noble, small-town virtues and Mr. Dole as their personification.Remembering that period, and the generosity of his neighbors, often brought him to tears. In his first appearance with President Ford in Russell in 1976, with 10,000 well-wishers crammed into the downtown business district, he thanked the townspeople for their support after the war. Then he started to cry and couldn’t go on. The audience fell silent. Finally, Mr. Ford stood and began clapping, and the audience joined in.Regaining his composure, Mr. Dole said: “That was a long time ago.”And yet even in 1996, long after Russell and his recovery had become a staple of his origin story, he could hardly mention that period without choking up. When his image-makers wrote references to it in his prepared remarks, he would often skip over those passages or truncate them to avoid the inevitable tears.He could not avoid them on the final leg of his presidential campaign, however, by which time it was clear that he was going to lose. At a bowling alley in Des Moines, his friend Senator John McCain, a former naval aviator and Mr. Dole’s wingman in those last days on the road, delivered a spontaneous tribute to him.“This is the last crusade of a great warrior,” Mr. McCain told a small crowd over the clatter of falling bowling pins, “a member of a generation of Americans who went out and made the world safe for democracy so that we could have lives that were far better for ourselves and for our children.”Mr. Dole, standing nearby, wept.After the war, during his recuperation, he met Phyllis Holden, an occupational therapist, and married her three months later, in 1948. He returned to college on the G.I. Bill. He already had credits from the University of Kansas, where he had studied pre-med. With Ms. Holden’s help, he earned a dual bachelor’s and law degree in 1952 at Washburn Municipal University (now Washburn University) in Topeka, Kan. They had a daughter, Robin, in 1954.Readjusting his aspirations from medicine to the law, Mr. Dole had to develop his mind, he said, because he could not use his hands. His life, he said, would be “an exercise in compensations.”Bob and Elizabeth Dole following their wedding  at the Washington National Cathedral in 1975.Dole family photo, via Associated PressRussell Republicans approached Mr. Dole in 1950 to run for the Kansas State Legislature — they saw the hometown war hero as an easy sell. But he had not yet picked a party, though his parents were New Deal Democrats. He said later that he had signed on with the Republicans after he was told that that’s what most Kansas voters were.After a stint in the Legislature and as Russell County attorney, he won a House seat in Congress in 1960 and ascended to the Senate in 1968.The Nixon InfluenceNixon won the presidency that same year and became the driving political influence in Mr. Dole’s life. Mr. Dole saw them as soul mates. Both were self-made men, politically ambitious loners disaffected from their party’s elite Eastern establishment, Nixon hailing from California.Mr. Dole made a name for himself by zealously defending Nixon, particularly in the president’s continued prosecution of the Vietnam War and his controversial Supreme Court nominees. He could be so snarly, though, that Senator William B. Saxbe, Republican of Ohio, memorably derided him as Nixon’s “hatchet man” and said he was so disagreeable, “he couldn’t sell beer on a troop ship.”Even Nixon worried that Mr. Dole’s lust for the fight would undermine his effectiveness. In a memorandum made public years later, Nixon wrote that it was “important that we not let Dole destroy his usefulness by having him step up to every hard, fast one.”Mr. Dole had flown to Washington from Chicago aboard Air Force One in 1971 accompanying President Nixon and the first lady, Pat Nixon, along with members of Congress from Illinois: from left, Senator Charles H. Percy, Mr. Dole and Representatives Leslie C. Arends and John B. Anderson.Bob Daugherty/Associated PressNixon named him chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1971. It was a role Mr. Dole relished as he raked in political chits. The travel kept him far from home, and he and Phyllis divorced in 1972.Three years later he married Elizabeth Hanford, then a federal trade commissioner; she later became a cabinet secretary, president of the American Red Cross and a senator from North Carolina. They became one of Washington’s original power couples.Elizabeth Dole as well as Mr. Dole’s daughter, Robin Dole, survive him. His first wife, Phyllis Holden Macey, died in 2008. After Nixon won re-election in 1972 and the Watergate scandal was closing in, he dumped Mr. Dole as party chairman, saying the senator was too independent. But Mr. Dole remained loyal, so much so that he tried to shut down the live television coverage of the Watergate hearings.When Nixon died in 1994, Mr. Dole delivered a sentimental eulogy, sobbing as he described the disgraced former president as a “boy who heard train whistles in the night and dreamed of all the distant places that lay at the end of the track.”He also recalled Nixon’s advice that while failure was sad, “the greatest sadness is not to try and fail, but to fail to try.”Mr. Smith, the historian, said he believed that Nixon, in his preparations for his own funeral, had a political motive in asking Mr. Dole to deliver the eulogy. Nixon, Mr. Smith said, expected that Mr. Dole would become emotional, and that his “authentic display of grief” would reveal Mr. Dole’s human side and perhaps help his presidential bid.‘Democrat Wars’Ford, who was Nixon’s vice president and successor as president, gave Mr. Dole his first shot at national office, choosing him as his running mate in 1976. Ford needed to shore up strength with conservatives and also hoped that the selection would appeal to voters in farm states. But Mr. Dole’s performance during the vice-presidential debate on Oct. 15, 1976, against Walter F. Mondale, the Democratic nominee, was so harsh that some analysts say it contributed to Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter.Mr. Dole, the vice presidential nominee, with President Gerald R. Ford at the close of the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City.United Press InternationalIn response to a question about Ford’s 1974 pardon of Nixon, Mr. Dole veered off topic and in an inexplicable tangent said: “I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit.”A stunned Mr. Mondale said he could not believe that Mr. Dole would cast the war against Germany and Japan in partisan terms. Mr. Dole, he said, “has richly earned his reputation as hatchet man.” Even Republicans joined in the post-debate criticism, as did Mr. Dole himself.“I went for the jugular,” he said later. “My own.”The reaction was so negative that he sought out an image consultant and paid her to help him appear more likable.Still, he ran for president in 1980, a misbegotten venture that ended almost as soon as it began. He tried again in 1988 and won his party’s Iowa caucus, but couldn’t overcome Vice President Bush’s forces in New Hampshire, where Bush had the invaluable support of the governor, John Sununu, and ran a TV spot suggesting that Mr. Dole would raise taxes.The ad infuriated Mr. Dole, who snapped that Bush should “stop lying about my record.” The comment only reinforced the impression that Mr. Dole was too mean to be president.But by 1996 his party seemed incapable of denying him the nomination. At that point, President Clinton was popular, the nation was enjoying a period of peace and prosperity, and the strongest potential Republican contenders — Gen. Colin L. Powell among them — declined to run.Mr. Dole prevailed over a weak primary field that included Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, former Gov. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Patrick Buchanan, a conservative broadcast journalist. But then Mr. Dole ran a terrible general election campaign, offering voters little rationale for denying Mr. Clinton a second term. At times, he made no pretense that he was even taking his task seriously.Bob and Elizabeth Dole after he won  the presidential nomination at the 1996 Republican convention in San Diego.Stephen Crowley/The New York Times“We’re trying to get good pictures,” he told reporters on his campaign plane the day after he quit the Senate to devote himself full time to running for president. “Don’t worry very much about what I say.”In 1995, Richard Ben Cramer, one of Mr. Dole’s biographers, asked him to name the first thing he might do in the White House.“Haven’t thought,” he replied in clipped Dole-speak, as quoted by Mr. Cramer.“If I get elected, at my age, you know,” he trailed off, revealing a paucity of plans for the presidency. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. It’s not an agenda. I’m just gonna serve my country.”His lack of preparation stood in stark contrast to his wife’s tendency to over prepare. Mrs. Dole delivered a polished star turn for her husband at the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996. But her choreographed precision only highlighted how much her husband was winging it.“Watching Bob Dole campaign for the presidency,” the journalist Michael Kelly wrote in The New Yorker, “is a curious and dislocating experience, like showering clothed or eating naked.”Mr. Smith, the historian, said he was always puzzled about why Mr. Dole, who had sought the nomination for so long, seemed to take it so casually and “wasn’t willing to adapt himself to the changing media climate.” Mr. Smith concluded that this was a mark of Mr. Dole’s integrity. “He couldn’t jackknife himself into a persona that was fundamentally at odds with the real thing,” he said.In one of his last public appearances, in 2018, Mr. Dole saluted the coffin of George H.W. Bush, the last president to have served in World War II.Erin Schaff for The New York TimesOthers said his goal was not the presidency but winning the nomination — and proving he could rehabilitate himself politically just as he had physically.Mr. Dole won 41 percent of the popular vote, with Mr. Clinton taking 49 percent and Ross Perot, a Reform Party candidate, winning 8 percent. The magnitude of Mr. Dole’s loss was more evident in the electoral votes; he won just 159 to Mr. Clinton’s 379.In his memoir almost a decade later, Mr. Dole framed his crushing defeat in a way that would have made Nixon proud.“Losing means that at least you were in the race,” he wrote. “It means that when the whistle sounded, life did not find you watching from the sidelines.” More

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    Supreme Court's Abortion Decision Could Spill Into Midterm Elections

    Both sides anticipate that a Supreme Court decision scaling back abortion rights would roil next year’s elections, with Democrats sensing an advantage.WASHINGTON — A Supreme Court ruling to weaken or overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in the middle of next year’s midterm election campaign would immediately elevate abortion rights into a defining issue and most likely reinvigorate efforts to overhaul the court itself.Even as the justices weigh the case of the Mississippi law barring most abortions after 15 weeks, the political clash is already intensifying, with Democrats warning supporters that the court is poised to reverse access to abortion 50 years after it was recognized as a constitutional right.“What is fundamentally at stake is that every woman in our country should be able to make her own health care decisions and chart her own destiny and have the full independence to do that,” said Senator Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, who is seeking re-election in a race with significant implications for control of the Senate.As the court heard arguments in the Mississippi case on Wednesday, it appeared that the six conservative justices were likely to uphold the state’s law despite the precedent set in 1973 by Roe, which held that states could not bar abortion before fetal viability, now judged to be around 22 to 24 weeks.Several of the justices suggested that they were willing to go another step and overturn Roe entirely, leaving states free to impose whatever bans or restrictions they choose. The court is likely to release its decision in the case at the end of its term in June or early July, just as campaigning in the midterms is getting into full swing.While the subject of abortion and the Supreme Court has traditionally been seen as more of an energizing issue for Republican and evangelical voters, Democrats say that situation could be reversed should the court undermine Roe, raising the possibility that abortion could be banned or severely limited in many states.That outcome, Democrats said, would transform the long fight over abortion rights from theory to reality and give new resonance to their arguments that a Democratic Congress is needed to protect access to the procedure and seat judges who are not hostile to abortion rights.Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and fellow Democrats have repeatedly criticized state Republicans for cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood and instituting new abortion restrictions.Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times“There is no question that should the decision be one that would overturn Roe v. Wade, it will certainly motivate our base,” said Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Quite frankly, we know that a majority of the people in this country continue to believe it should be the law of the land.”“It will be an incredibly powerful issue,” Mr. Peters said.Republicans see advantages as well, saying it will validate their decades-long push to limit if not outlaw abortion and show that they should not back away from their efforts when they are succeeding.“Today is our day,” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, told abortion opponents outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday. “This is what we’ve been working for.”Aware that a decision undermining abortion access has political risks for them as well, Republicans say the fight will be just part of their 2022 message as they seek to tie Democrats to inflation, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and other subjects where they see a greater edge.“There’s a lot of issues out there,” said Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida and the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, suggesting the significance of abortion will vary from state to state. “Everybody’s going to take a position.”But it was quickly clear that some Republicans would embrace the drive against Roe.“I’m pro-life. I’m anti-Roe v. Wade,” Senator John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican who is seeking a second term next year, said in a fund-raising appeal sent hours after the court debate. “There is not much else I can say other than that.”In addition to the congressional elections, how the justices dispose of the case holds potentially grave implications for the court itself. The stature and credibility of the court were prominent subtexts of Wednesday’s arguments, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointedly asking how the court would “survive the stench” of overturning Roe in what many would see as a blatantly political act.Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana, in September. “Today is our day,” he told abortion opponents outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAfter Senate Republicans in 2016 blocked President Barack Obama from filling a Supreme Court vacancy with almost a year left in his term, progressives began calling for adding seats to the court or setting term limits on the now-lifetime appointments to offset what they saw as an unfair advantage seized by Republicans. Then, when Republicans seated Justice Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 election, those calls intensified.However, President Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been lukewarm to the idea of tinkering with the court, and a commission he formed to study the idea is not expected to embrace significant changes.Understand the Supreme Court’s Momentous TermCard 1 of 5Mississippi abortion law. More

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    Dr. Oz Says He’s Running for Senate in Pennsylvania

    Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is running as a Republican for an open Senate seat, described his frustration with the “arrogant, closed-minded people in charge” who shut schools and businesses during the pandemic. Dr. Mehmet Oz, a celebrity physician known as the host of the “Dr. Oz Show,” announced on Tuesday that he would run for Senate in Pennsylvania, jumping into a crowded Republican primary for an open seat that is crucial to both parties’ quest for a Senate majority in 2022.Dr. Oz, a first-time candidate whose political views are little known, entered a G.O.P. field roiled by the recent withdrawal of a candidate endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, in which most contenders are vying to show their loyalty to the Republican Party’s de facto leader.The Cleveland-born son of Turkish immigrants, Dr. Oz said he had been motivated to run because of the pandemic. In an online statement announcing his candidacy in The Washington Examiner, he criticized official responses to Covid-19 in terms embraced by conservatives.The pandemic, he wrote, has been mishandled by “elites” who stifled dissenting opinions, “mandated” policies and “closed our parks, shuttered our schools, shut down our businesses and took away our freedom.”Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, was under attack through much of 2020 by Republicans for orders closing businesses during the height of the pandemic.Dr. Oz, 61, is a heart surgeon who first came to the public’s attention as a regular guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” before starting his own long-running daytime show, where he dispenses medical advice on all subjects. He has also appeared regularly on Fox News discussing Covid-19, sometimes making controversial statements. In April 2020, citing a medical journal, he said that opening schools “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality” of the population. After a backlash, he took to Twitter to say he “misspoke.”The previous month, Dr. Oz promoted hydroxychloroquine to fight the coronavirus, even though researchers at the time warned that the drug was unproven.Dr. Oz first came to the public’s attention as a regular guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”George Burns/Harpo Productions, via Associated PressIn 2014, he was scolded before a Senate panel for using his TV show to promote foods and dietary supplements that falsely promised weight loss. Republicans in Pennsylvania expected that the entry of such a high-profile figure into the Senate race, one who is promising to spend large sums of his own fortune, would shake up a field without a front-runner. It follows the recent withdrawal of Sean Parnell, the Trump-endorsed candidate, who suspended his campaign after a judge gave primary custody of his children to his estranged wife, who had accused him of abuse.A number of Republican officials, whom Dr. Oz has been calling in recent weeks, said they thought voters would take the celebrity physician seriously.“The first thing I asked was, ‘Why are you running? Is this a vanity play?’” said Sam DeMarco III, the Republican chairman of Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh. But he said he was impressed with Dr. Oz’s seriousness in response to his questions. “My most important goal is to keep this seat in Republican hands come 2022, and I believe Dr. Oz’s entry into the race gives us a significant opportunity to do that,” Mr. DeMarco said.For Democrats, Pennsylvania represents perhaps their best chance to add a Senate seat to their column, since it is the only open seat next year in a state that President Biden carried in 2020. Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a Republican, is not seeking re-election. While the Democratic field has several seasoned candidates, including Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Representative Conor Lamb, the Republicans in the race are less experienced and, with the exception of Dr. Oz, less well known. Most have leaned into their connections to Mr. Trump to win favor with a party base that fervidly supports the former president, including his false claims that he won the state last year. Jeff Bartos, a real estate developer, has called for a “full forensic audit” of the 2020 election in the state. Kathy Barnette, a former financial executive, has pushed claims of voter fraud on Newsmax and OAN. David McCormick, the chief executive of Bridgewater Associates, a giant hedge fund company, has been exploring getting into the race as well. Dr. Oz, who hosted Mr. Trump on his TV show in 2016 and was later named by him to a White House advisory council on sports and nutrition, is not known for denying the 2020 election results. He once described himself as a “moderate Republican” and said a political inspiration was Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California and a Trump critic. But in his statement announcing his run on Tuesday, Dr. Oz positioned himself more aggressively as a foe of elites and as someone who has “fought the establishment” throughout his career.“Elites with yards told those without yards to stay inside, where the virus was more likely to spread,” he wrote of the response to the pandemic, adding, “We must confront those who want to change the very soul of America and reimagine it with their toxic ideology.”A surgeon at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, his biographical entry there lists his Emmy Awards ahead of his publications. Dr. Oz earned medical and business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. His principal residence, however, has long been in Bergen County in New Jersey, where he voted. He has also become a registered Pennsylvania voter, listing an address that is a home owned by his mother-in-law in Montgomery County, in the Philadelphia suburbs. Although rivals will surely accuse him of carpetbagging, one local Republican official said the issue may not play strongly with voters. “Being a newcomer, I don’t think that’s a drawback,” said Pat Poprik, the Republican chairwoman of Bucks County, the state’s fourth largest. “Issues are what voters are looking for.”Susan C. Beachy More

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    There Is Another Democrat A.O.C. Should Be Mad At

    Progressive Democrats in the House of Representatives can be forgiven their anxiety about whether Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona will support the more than $1.8 trillion Build Back Better plan. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, for example, rues the two senators’ outsize influence, while her colleague Rashida Tlaib of Michigan worries that Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema are “corporate Dems” led astray by special interests.But if disappointed progressives are looking for a Democrat to blame, they should consider directing their ire toward one of their party’s founders: James Madison. Madison’s Constitution was built to thwart exactly what Democrats have been attempting: a race against time to impose vast policies with narrow majorities. Madison believed that one important function of the Constitution was to ensure sustained consensus before popular majorities could prevail.Democrats do represent a popular majority now. But for Madison, that “now” is the problem: He was less interested in a snapshot of a moment in constitutional time than in a time-lapse photograph showing that a majority had cohered. The more significant its desires, Madison thought, the longer that interval of coherence should be. The monumental scale of the Build Back Better plan consequently raises a difficult Madisonian question: Is a fleeting and narrow majority enough for making history?In this Madisonian sense, Democrats are tripping over their own boasts. Even in announcing that the spending plan had been scaled back, President Biden repeatedly called the measure “historic.” No fewer than four times in a single statement, his White House described elements of the Build Back Better framework as the most important policy innovations in “generations.” Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, called the bill the House passed last week “historic, transformative and larger than anything we have done before.”Before the plan was trimmed from its original $3.5 trillion price tag, Democratic descriptions of it were even more grandiose. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, called the party’s initial proposal “the most significant legislation to expand support for American families since the era of the New Deal and the Great Society. If not quite Rooseveltian in scope, it is certainly near-Rooseveltian.” Ms. Pelosi said the legislation would “stand for generations alongside the New Deal and the Great Society as pillars of economic security for working families.”Madison might ask why legislation that will stand for generations should be enacted in months. The pragmatic answer, of course, is that Democrats may lose their majorities in the House and Senate next November. But that is part of the problem. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson passed the New Deal and Great Society with enormous, broad-based legislative majorities. The policies were so popular that they commanded at least some bipartisan support.There is a reason Madison thought it should be that way. In evaluating public opinion, he saw two distinctions as essential. The first was whether the public’s views were based on reason or passion. The second was whether the views were settled or fluctuating.According to Madison’s political psychology, passions were inherently short-lived. That was why he could say in Federalist 10 that factions would not overtake a geographically large republic: In the time it took for them to spread, passions would cool and dissipate. By contrast, opinions based on reason could withstand the test of time.Madison encapsulated his theory of democracy in Federalist 63, which pertained to the unique role of the Senate in pumping the brakes on speeding majorities. He assumed that “the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers,” just as there would be unusual moments when the people would get swept up in passionate measures “which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.”The most significant Madisonian fact is that majority rule is both a good idea and an inevitable one: public opinion both “ought” to and “will” win out in a republic. But, crucially, it will do so “ultimately,” not immediately. One original purpose of the Senate’s six-year terms was to give its members time between elections to resist public opinion. The different electoral clocks for representatives, presidents and senators require that public opinion cohere to prevail.In 1791, with the young Constitution in operation and nascent partisan alliances appearing, Madison wrote in a newspaper essay that the government owed deference to public opinion only when that opinion was “fixed” rather than fluctuating: “This distinction, if kept in view, would prevent or decide many debates on the respect due from the government to the sentiments of the people.”It is difficult to identify a case in American history of sustained, broad public opinion that did not ultimately manifest itself in public policy. Americans have been thwarted or delayed with respect to vague ideas like expanding access to health care. But they have also disagreed profoundly and deeply about what form those ideas should concretely take. When Americans have settled into an enduring consensus on particulars, they have almost always prevailed.One way proponents of particular policies encourage consensus is by appealing to public opinion. But according to Madison, the constitutional system judges majorities on their durability. A nearly $2 trillion bill that fundamentally alters relations between the government and the governed — even if in constructive and needed ways — should demonstrate broad and enduring support. A tied Senate and nearly tied House, acting in a space of months, cannot demonstrate that support on Madisonian terms.Democrats should not be overly faulted for failing to attract Republican support. At least since Democrats took the House in 2018, and arguably for longer, Republicans have been dogmatically uncooperative and uninterested in legislating.But the overuse of omnibus bills that throw every possible priority into a single measure make bipartisan support nearly impossible. Madison may have predicted the future of factions poorly. But his assumption was that coalitions would shift from issue to issue. A stand-alone bill on any one Democratic priority might well receive votes from across the aisle, as the recent $1 trillion infrastructure bill did. One reason for that bipartisan support is that isolating issues raises the cost of opposing them.In addition, the fact that one of the country’s two major political parties refuses to budge and — the decisive fact — feels no pressure from its constituents to do so is evidence that the Madisonian tests of durability and fixity have not been met. If majorities of the American people truly support the Democratic approach to social policy, the party’s candidates should be able to make that case on the campaign trail. The fact that they are trying to beat the clock instead suggests they know their support is fragile. Fragility is a poor foundation for major legislation.Polarization, especially when it falls along geographic lines, does not help. Madison, who foresaw that the enslavement from which he benefited might split the nation, warned against geographic fault lines. But to write off Republican politicians is also to write off broad swaths of voters who support them.Similarly, to blame Mr. Manchin for obstructing Democrats, as Representative Cori Bush of Missouri did in denying his authority “to dictate the future of our country,” is to ignore the fact that a 50-50 Senate gives every member of the body that power. A broader majority would deprive Mr. Manchin or Ms. Sinema of it. But because they serve as a moderating force that ensures wider support for legislation, disempowering them also risks increasing polarization.Devices like gerrymandering have the effect of exaggerating Republican support in the House. So does the geographic polarization reflected in the narrowly divided Senate. Consequently, Democrats’ slender margins in Congress may understate the degree of public support for their policies. But there is no constitutional means of registering public opinion other than elections. And it is equally unquestionable that the tragic flaw of many successful candidates for public office is exaggerating their mandates. The narrow majorities Democrats possess in Congress counsel caution instead. Mr. Biden’s mandate was largely for normalcy after four years of mania. It’s hard to make a case for being F.D.R. without a Great Depression.If progressive Democrats want to do more, they should demonstrate what Lincoln called “a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people.” If the people stand with them, Democrats will eventually — just not immediately — prevail.Greg Weiner (@GregWeiner1) is a political scientist at Assumption University, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Madison’s Metronome: The Constitution, Majority Rule, and the Tempo of American Politics.”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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    Sean Parnell Suspends G.O.P. Senate Bid in Pennsylvania

    Mr. Parnell, who was endorsed by Donald Trump in one of the highest-profile 2022 Senate races, had been accused by his estranged wife of spousal and child abuse.Sean Parnell, a leading Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, suspended his campaign on Monday after a judge ruled that his estranged wife should get primary custody of their three children in a case in which she accused him of spousal and child abuse.Mr. Parnell, who was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, said he was “devastated” by the decision and planned to appeal.“There is nothing more important to me than my children, and while I plan to ask the court to reconsider, I can’t continue with a Senate campaign,” he said in a statement. “My focus right now is 100 percent on my children, and I want them to know I do not have any other priorities and will never stop fighting for them.”Mr. Parnell’s wife, Laurie Snell, testified in court this month that Mr. Parnell had repeatedly abused her and their children, choking her and hitting one of their children so hard that he left a welt on the child’s back. In a ruling last week that was made public on Monday, a Butler County judge wrote that he had found Ms. Snell to be “the more credible witness” and that he believed Mr. Parnell had committed “some acts of abuse in the past.”The Pennsylvania seat, currently held by Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican, is widely considered one of the most competitive Senate races in 2022. Several Democrats have announced their plans to run for the seat, including Conor Lamb, a congressman from outside Pittsburgh, and John Fetterman, the current lieutenant governor.Mr. Parnell, a former Army Ranger who received the Purple Heart after serving in Afghanistan, had been seen as a top Republican candidate, particularly after Mr. Trump endorsed him in September.But Mr. Parnell’s family history illustrated the concerns among some Republican leaders about the candidates that Mr. Trump has been supporting in G.O.P. primaries for close midterm races.Mr. Parnell narrowly lost a congressional bid in 2020, and one of his Republican rivals in the Senate race, Jeff Bartos, had attacked him over temporary protective orders he received in 2017 and 2018.Yet some Senate candidates backed by Mr. Trump have remained viable despite questions about their pasts: In Georgia, Herschel Walker, the former football star, is seen as a leading contender to challenge Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, despite facing repeated accusations of threatening his ex-wife.In the testimony by Mr. Parnell’s wife this month, she said that he once punched a closet door so hard that it hit the face of one of their children and left a bruise. At the time, Ms. Snell testified, Mr. Parnell told his child, “It was your fault and get out of here.” At another point, Mr. Parnell forced his wife out of their vehicle and left her on the side of the road, telling her to “go get an abortion,” she said in court.Mr. Parnell has denied all the allegations. He testified that he had “never raised a hand in anger towards my wife or any of our three children.”The judge granted Ms. Snell primary physical and sole legal custody of the children, who are between 8 and 12 years old, allowing Mr. Parnell to take them three weekends a month.“She described many incidents,” Judge James G. Arner wrote in his ruling. “She provided factual details of each incident, including when they happened and what happened. She testified in a convincing manner.”Mr. Parnell, on the other hand, was “somewhat evasive” and “less believable,” the judge ruled.“He was dressed very casually for his appearances in court, in blue jeans and untucked plaid shirts, which did not show respect for the seriousness of the occasion,” Judge Arner wrote. “While testifying he looked mainly in the direction of his attorneys and toward members of the news media in the back of the courtroom, rather than at me.”The judge also wrote that Mr. Parnell’s frequent travel had been a factor in the ruling.Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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    What We Give Thanks for and What We Say No Thanks To

    Gail Collins: Happy Thanksgiving week, Bret. Anything you’re thankful for in particular — besides your lovely family of course.Bret Stephens: The E.M.T.s, cardiac surgeons and nurses who saved my mother’s life earlier this year will be the first people we’ll toast this Thursday, Gail.Gail: To the lifesavers!Bret: And I think we’ll also raise a glass to our regular readers, who seem drawn to a style of conversation that isn’t about compulsive loathing, bottomless contempt, frenzied recrimination, petty score-keeping, histrionic eye-rolling, suppurating disdain and Tucker Carlson-style smirking just because we sometimes have different political views.How about you?Gail: Well, gee, not gonna argue against toasting the readers. In a time when trashing folks on the web is so in, they’re so … out in a very, very fine way.Bret: Our readers: Gluttons for emollient.Gail: If I get to add one, I’d add teachers, especially the early childhood education community. They not only do essential work, they do it for very little applause — or money.Bret: Absolutely. But maybe I’m detecting a subtle hint that you really want to switch the subject to the House of Representatives passing the Build Back Bigger bill?Gail: Bret, I am now giving thanks that you remember at least part of the name of the Build Back Better bill. Which I will always think of as Not the Infrastructure Bill Even Though It Sounds Like It.Anyhow, we are talking about the social-safety-net-stop-climate-change bill. Known to many conservatives as That Two Trillion Dollar Thing.Bret: I gather you’re delighted with it.Gail: I’m happy. Never bought into the idea that President Biden was elected just to not be Donald Trump. He promised during his campaign to expand government help for non-wealthy families, battle the cost of prescription drugs, increase the scope of Medicare and achieve universal prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds.Got elected, now it’s happening. Good news.Bret: Sorry to be the perpetual Grinch, Gail, but I’ll bet you my considerable store of Zabar’s leftovers that it isn’t happening. Certainly not in anything like the size of the House bill and very possibly not at all. And I have two numbers to support my argument: 60 and 32. The first is Joe Manchin’s approval rating in West Virginia. The second is Joe Biden’s approval rating in West Virginia. If Manchin votes for the bill, about which he’s already expressed big doubts, it’s going to mean the likely end of his political career when he’s up for re-election in 2024.Gail: This gives me another chance to point out that West Virginia gets around twice as much in federal aid as its residents pay in federal taxes.Gee, do you think Manchin’s magical ability to hang onto that seat is connected to the federal largess he brings home?Bret: The other pair of numbers I’m looking at is minus 12.1 and minus 11.6 percentage points. The first is the spread between Biden’s approval and disapproval ratings, the second is Kamala Harris’s. Why do you think it makes sense for the administration to double down on its policies instead of a nice Clintonian U-turn?Gail: The negativity is mainly all about Biden’s inability to get things done. Which won’t look better if he fails to get this bill passed.Bret: Despite what you said earlier, I don’t think Biden was elected to be a transformative president the way Reagan or Obama were, both of whom had clear electoral mandates to change America. He was elected to be a steadying presence. Biden’s failed totally so far, partly for reasons that were not under his control, like the persistence of the pandemic, and partly for reasons that were, like the bungled exit from Afghanistan.Either way, he is misreading his mandate, and the new legislation won’t help. It’s deeply unwise to try to change the entire shape of government based on a tiebreaking vote in the Senate. It’s even more unwise to do so when prices for groceries and gas seem to be rising by the minute.Biden is overseeing a combustible mixture of sweeping progressive social change and working-class economic distress — a formula that gave us Trump in 2016 and may give us Trump again in 2024. And all this is on top of the already hyperpolarized culture we have in this country.Gail: Well, let’s move onto something even more depressing. I sorta hate to bring this up on a holiday week, Bret. But I have to ask you about the Rittenhouse verdict. Your thoughts?Bret: David French had a lovely line on the case in a recent essay in The Atlantic: “The law allows even a foolish man to defend himself, even if his own foolishness put him in harm’s way.” Obviously Kyle Rittenhouse should not have been out that night, much less waltzing around with a rifle. But it also seems clear from the trial that much of what the world thought it knew about him — that he was some kind of out-of-town white supremacist who had crossed state lines with a gun and was looking for trouble — was false.What’s your view?Gail: I can understand the way it went, given the absolute mess that Wisconsin’s gun laws seem to be. But I wish I believed it would be a call to state legislatures — and Congress — to fix the system so that toting guns around in public is flat-out illegal. For anybody.Bret: Something like 43 states allow people to carry around guns in most places. And depending on how it goes with a case being decided this term by the Supreme Court, that number may soon be 50. Personally, I’d argue that if you’re too young to buy a beer you’re surely too young to parade around with a gun, unless you’re in the military or the National Guard.Gail: The two things that totally depress me are realizing that our politicians aren’t going to stop fawning over the gun-rights lobby and knowing that Rittenhouse is going to become even more of a right-wing hero who’ll probably be given a medal at the next Republican convention.Bret: He’s no hero. But I also think this case is a good reminder of why America needs responsible and effective policing, particularly during violent urban protests or riots: When law enforcement fails to protect lives and property, vigilantes spring up.Gail: Back for a minute to the House vote on Biden’s non-infrastructure bill: I presume that you listened to every word of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s more than eight-hour speech against it, right? What were your takeaways?Bret: Yeah, sure, right after I performed a root canal on myself while watching “Ishtar” dubbed in Finnish.OK, I didn’t actually see the speech, but I did read The Times’s priceless account of it. My favorite detail: “Representative Madison Cawthorn, a hard-line Republican from North Carolina, sat behind him, stuffing his lip with chewing tobacco and spitting in a cup. Mr. McCarthy, for his part, sustained himself with peppermint candies, unwrapped one by one by aides.”Gail: Do you think that was in their original job descriptions?Bret: How much do you look forward to having him as Speaker, Gail?Gail: Aaauuughh. I’m not the most pessimistic Democrat when it comes to future expectations, but I have to admit the chances of the party hanging onto the House and Senate are not … super.My greatest source of optimism is what seems like a flood of terrible Republican candidates, many of them already endorsed by Trump despite minor defects like allegations of spousal assault.I know you have some extremely responsible, forward-looking Republican contenders you can point to, but it seems like there are only about six of them. Do you disagree?Bret: Unfortunately, you’re pretty much right. John Stuart Mill once described the Tories of his day as “the stupider party,” and the er in “stupider” seems to describe today’s G.O.P. pretty nicely. It isn’t out of the question that Republicans could trip themselves up on the way to a Congressional majority because all of the most Trumpy candidates win the primaries and then lose in the general election.On the other hand, Republicans will benefit mightily from the latest round of gerrymanders. Also, Glenn Youngkin in Virginia showed how a Republican candidate can distance himself just enough from Trump to win back more moderate voters, while not so much as to alienate the Trump die-hards. Which is another way of saying that I think you’ll be dealing with Speaker McCarthy and Leader McConnell in the next Congress.Gail: And both of them are the opposite of bipartisan, unless there’s a chunk of money for back-home roadbuilding up for grabs.OK, gonna block all this out until after the holidays.Bret: So, remind me again, what else will you be giving thanks for this Thanksgiving?Gail: Don’t know if I ever told you, but we have a tradition of having a group of old friends over every year for the holiday dinner. This is something we started in college — one of this year’s guests, who is 32, was born into it. So it’s partly an annual reunion and a chance to be grateful for longtime pals.As well, of course, for the relative newcomers. So when it comes to thanks, I’ll be including another year of conversing with you, Bret. And looking forward to carrying on into 2022 and beyond.Bret: As am I. And here’s to you.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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    The G.O.P. Has a Bad Men Problem

    How upbeat is the Republican Party about its prospects for taking control of the House and Senate next year? So upbeat that it apparently is cool with the fact that in three Senate races — Georgia, Missouri and Pennsylvania — it has leading candidates who have been accused of harassing, abusing, threatening or otherwise mistreating women.Once upon a time, this situation likely would have provoked a major display of concern, or at least an attempt at damage control, by the Republican establishment. Instead many party officials are brushing off related questions like pesky bits of dryer fluff.While the particulars of these cases vary — the allegations, the candidates’ responses, the warmth of the party’s embrace — the creeping not-so-casual misogyny is indicative of the dark path down which former President Donald Trump continues to lead the G.O.P.It is not simply that Mr. Trump has long worn his shabby treatment of women like a perverse merit badge — a symbol of how the rules of decent society do not apply to him. He also has made the Republican Party a welcoming place for other like-minded men. As president, rarely did he confront a harassment or abuse scandal in which he didn’t make clear his sympathies for the accused and his skepticism of the accusers. Pity the poor harasser. So misunderstood. So persecuted by humorless prigs. It almost takes the fun out of groping random chicks.In Georgia, Herschel Walker, the former N.F.L. star, has been accused of a host of erratic and frightening behavior, including threatening his ex-wife’s life while pointing a gun to her head. Some episodes he has denied. Others he has chalked up to his struggle with mental illness, about which he wrote a book in 2008. (He credits therapy and Christianity with saving him.) In September, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Walker. Party leaders, including Mitch McConnell, are probably hoping that Mr. Walker’s violent history won’t much bother voters, or better yet, that it will play as an inspiring redemption story.In Missouri, Eric Greitens is hoping for political vindication after stepping down as governor in 2018 amid a swirl of scandal. His bad behavior allegedly included threatening a woman with whom he’d had an affair to keep her trap shut about it or else he’d make public an explicit photo of her that he’d snapped without her permission.Mr. Greitens is still in hot pursuit of Mr. Trump’s endorsement, but he already has a number of Trumpworld stars in his corner. The Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio has signed on with the campaign, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Trump campaign aide and Don Jr.’s girlfriend, is its national chair. Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, and Rudy Giuliani, who at this point defies meaningful description, have stumped in the state for Mr. Greitens. Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s disgraced national security adviser, has given his endorsement.Finally, in Pennsylvania, Sean Parnell is neck-deep in a custody battle with his estranged wife, who has testified that he verbally and physically abused her and their children. He has flatly denied all accusations.Mr. Parnell was endorsed by Mr. Trump shortly before the controversy erupted. Other party leaders have been loath to comment on the unfolding drama. Asked recently whether, in light of the hubbub, Mr. Parnell was the right man to be the nominee, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, insisted it was inappropriate for him to take sides in a primary. “We have Republican and Democrat primaries across the country and in Pennsylvania, we have — both Republicans and Democrats have primaries, and so we’ll see who comes out of the primary,” he told CNN.Impressive moral leadership.Republican officials are in a tough spot. Accusations of sexual misconduct or domestic violence are not necessarily disqualifying in the party of Trump. In some cases, they can be dismissed as lies — Mr. Trump’s preferred approach — a nefarious attack by haters. Bad behavior that is indisputable can always be pooh-poohed as unfortunate but of secondary importance within the larger battle against radical leftists.For devout Trumpists, accusations of toxic masculinity can even be a comfort of sorts, a kind of corrective to a #MeToo movement that many in the MAGAverse consider excessive and anti-man. Remember when two White House aides resigned over accusations of domestic violence in early 2018? Mr. Trump popped up on Twitter to whine, “Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation.” Later, during the Brett Kavanaugh hubbub, Mr. Trump bemoaned what a “scary” and “difficult” time it was to be a young man in America.The rot goes beyond the disrespect and mistreatment of women. Under Mr. Trump, the Republican Party has undergone a fundamental shift, swapping a fixation on character and morality and so-called Family Values for a celebration of belligerence, violence, and, yes, toxic masculinity. Greg Gianforte won his 2017 House race after “body slamming” a reporter who asked an unwelcome question. Charged with assault and sentenced to anger management classes and community service, Mr. Gianforte was praised by Mr. Trump as “my kind of guy” for his violent display. Last year, Montanans elected him governor.This tendency is not restricted to the G.O.P.’s men. Just look at the way MAGA extremists like Representatives Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene play up their swaggering, gun-toting images to the delight of the base. Before arriving in Congress, Ms. Greene got her kicks indulging social media fantasies about killing Democratic leaders.Speaking of that, just this week, Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, a 62-year-old former dentist desperate to be known as a MAGA butt-kicker, got himself censured and stripped of committee assignments for posting an animated video depicting him slashing the throat of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York progressive. All but two of his Republican colleagues stuck by him. Ms. Boebert took to the House floor to deliver a barn-burning defense.Whatever the misconduct of individual Republicans, the larger scandal is in the party’s collective group shrug.When a party prizes thuggishness, it becomes harder and harder to figure out where to draw the line. The slope is not merely getting slipperier. It’s getting steeper.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