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    Providing Both Bombs and Food, Biden Puts Himself in the Middle of Gaza’s War

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    The president’s decision to send aid by air and sea represents a shift prompted by the growing humanitarian crisis. But it raised uncomfortable questions about America’s role.From the skies over Gaza these days fall American bombs and American food pallets, delivering death and life at the same time and illustrating President Biden’s elusive effort to find balance in an unbalanced Middle East war.The president’s decision to authorize airdrops and the construction of a temporary port to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza has highlighted the tensions in his policy as he continues to support the provision of U.S. weaponry for Israel’s military operation against Hamas without condition.The United States finds itself on both sides of the war in a way, arming the Israelis while trying to care for those hurt as a result. Mr. Biden has grown increasingly frustrated as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel defies the president’s pleas to do more to protect civilians in Gaza and went further in expressing that exasperation during and after his State of the Union address this past week. But Mr. Biden remains opposed to cutting off munitions or leveraging them to influence the fighting.“You can’t have a policy of giving aid and giving Israel the weapons to bomb the food trucks at the same time,” Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said in an interview the day after the speech. “There is inherent contradiction in that. And I think the administration needs to match the genuine empathy and moral concern that came out last night for Palestinian civilian lives with real accountability for Netanyahu and the extreme right-wing government there.”The newly initiated American-led air-and-sea humanitarian campaign follows the failure to get enough supplies into Gaza by land and represents a sharp turnaround by the administration. Until now, American officials had eschewed such methods as impractical, concluding that they would not provide supplies on the same scale as a functional land route and would be complicated in many ways.Airdrops are actually dangerous, as was made clear on Friday when at least five Palestinians were killed by falling aid packages, and they can create chaotic, hazardous situations without a stable distribution system on the ground. The construction of a temporary floating pier will take 30 to 60 days, if not longer, according to officials, and could entail risk for those involved, although Mr. Biden has stipulated that it be constructed offshore with no Americans on the ground.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Loves His Heritage. Just Don’t Call Him an Indian American.

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      The Republican presidential candidate says the celebration of diversity in America has come at the cost of national unity.Vivek Ramaswamy does not shy away from his Indian heritage.It is present in his name (his first name rhymes with “cake,” he explains) and his Hindu faith. He has explained on the campaign trail that he is vegetarian because of his family’s tradition. And during a Republican debate in August that was a breakout performance, he introduced himself as a “skinny guy with a funny last name,” echoing former President Barack Obama.Still, Mr. Ramaswamy recently said in an interview that he does not identify as an Indian American. Being Hindu and Indian is “part of my cultural identity, for sure, and I’m proud of that and very comfortable with that,” he said after a campaign stop in Marshalltown, Iowa. “But I’m an American first.”Mr. Ramaswamy, fourth from left, waves at the crowd as he takes the stage for a debate with other Republican primary candidates, from left, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott and Mike Pence.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMr. Ramaswamy, 38, a first-time presidential candidate and conservative author, is at once deeply in touch with his Indian roots and adamant that the growing focus on diversity and racial inequality in America has come at the cost of national unity. His message is geared toward a Republican electorate that is heavily white and Christian, and he has tailored his personal story for his audience. When asked by voters about his Hindu faith, for instance, he is often quick to emphasize that it allows for him to hold “Judeo Christian” values.Brimming with energy and brash talk, Mr. Ramaswamy seized enough attention at the party’s first debate in August to get a bump in polls — some briefly showed him leaping into second place, albeit well behind former President Donald Trump. He has since fallen back behind Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump.Still, Mr. Ramaswamy has attracted enough support to qualify for the third Republican debate on Wednesday in Miami. Many Indian Americans, even those who are critical of Mr. Ramaswamy’s political beliefs, have said in interviews they have a special pride seeing him on the national stage — more so than they have had for other Republican presidential candidates of Indian descent, like Bobby Jindal and Ms. Haley, who converted to Christianity in their youth and adopted Anglicized names.Mr. Ramaswamy’s story is emblematic of many Asian American millennials whose parents came to the country after immigration laws were liberalized in 1965 and migration from outside Europe grew dramatically. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the country, and Indian Americans now comprise the largest stand-alone group in the United States among them.As a child, Mr. Ramaswamy was enmeshed in a small but tight-knit Indian community in a Greater Cincinnati region that was mostly white. He belonged to a Hindu temple but attended a private Catholic high school, where he has said he was the only Hindu student in his class. As a teenager, he co-founded an India Association at school and also worked for a local Indian radio station, according to a 2002 article in The Cincinnati Enquirer.Mr. Ramaswamy speaking with voters in Iowa City, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesAs an undergraduate at Harvard University, Mr. Ramaswamy seemed to comfortably move between different worlds, his classmates said in interviews. He studied biology, served as chair of the Harvard Political Union and rapped under a libertarian alter ego known as ‘Da Vek.’ (At the time, he told The Harvard Crimson that Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” was his life’s theme song, which he unexpectedly reprised this summer at the Iowa State Fair.)At Harvard, he took a comedic turn in the annual cultural show organized by the South Asian Association and was active in Dharma, the Hindu student association. And he served as a student liaison for Mr. Jindal, at the time a rising political star who was a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in 2004 before he became governor of Louisiana and the first American of Indian descent to run for president.“If you had asked me when we were in college if being an Indian American was a big part of his identity, I would have said yes,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, Mr. Ramaswamy’s classmate at Harvard and a former chief of staff to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York.Mr. Ramaswamy went on to make a fortune as a biotech entrepreneur. After the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 propelled the racial justice movement, Mr. Ramaswamy made a name for himself in conservative circles by railing against identity politics and a corporate commitment to diversity and inclusion, which he referred to as “wokeism.” Since then, Mr. Ramaswamy has said he believes liberals have been fixated on skin color and race in a way that has contributed to divisiveness in the country.Like many Republican candidates of color, he has spoken at times about his own experiences facing discrimination, but he has said the country does not have systemic racism.“I’m sure the boogeyman white supremacist exists somewhere in America,” Mr. Ramaswamy told voters at a late August event in Pella, Iowa. “I’ve just never met him, never seen one, I’ve never met one in my life.”Mr. Ramaswamy, walking in a Labor Day parade in Milford, N.H. with his wife, Apoorva, has railed against identity politics and “wokeism.”Sophie Park for The New York TimesAt an event in late August with voters at Legends American Grill in Marshalltown, David Tracy, 37, an entrepreneur, asked Mr. Ramaswamy to elaborate on what it meant to him to be Hindu with “Judeo Christian” values. Mr. Ramaswamy responded by explaining that he had gone to a Christian school and shared the same values, and he wove in a biblical story as if to prove the point.“I may not be qualified to be your pastor,” Mr. Ramaswamy told the overflow crowd of mostly white, older voters. “But I believe that I am able to be your commander in chief.”Mr. Tracy, who lives in Des Moines, said in an interview last week that he understood why Mr. Ramaswamy has at times downplayed his Indian and Hindu roots in trying to appeal to Republican voters. But he also said that Mr. Ramaswamy has lost some authenticity in doing so. “He speaks more like a conservative white male than he does a Hindu son of immigrants,” Mr. Tracy said.Mr. Tracy said that he did not think Mr. Ramaswamy was against diversity but that the candidate felt too many Americans were focusing on their individual identity.“I think the point that Vivek is making is there’s personal identity and there’s national identity, and I think right now young people are collectively at a loss for what that national identity means,” he said.Susan Kunkel, 65, an undecided Republican, said last week at a campaign event for Ms. Haley in Nashua, N.H., that she did not like Mr. Ramaswamy’s constant pandering to the Trump base. But she appreciated that he was a fresh face in the party and agreed with his opposition to affirmative action.“It’s nice to have all different ages and sexes and genders, and you know, minorities, but it should be based on merit,” Ms. Kunkel, a practice administrator for a medical office, said of recent corporate diversity efforts.Mr. Ramaswamy greeting potential voters at the Salem G.O.P. Labor Day Picnic in Salem, N.H., in September.Sophie Park for The New York TimesOn the stump, Mr. Ramaswamy has often cited his family’s bootstrap story as an example of how anyone can achieve the American dream and should not blame racism for holding them back. “My parents came to this country 40 years ago with no money,” he has said. “In a single generation, I have gone on to found multibillion-dollar companies.”But many immigrants from India after 1965 arrived with advantages that other people of color have lacked, noted Devesh Kapur, a professor of South Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the book “The Other One Percent: Indians in America.” Mr. Ramaswamy’s parents came with advanced degrees; his father was an engineer at General Electric and his mother was a geriatric psychiatrist.“It’s a severe underestimation and underplaying of his privileged background,” Mr. Kapur said of Mr. Ramaswamy’s back story.“At some point along the way in the last 20 years I think we did fall into the trap of celebrating that which can be beautiful but which is only beautiful if there’s something greater that unites all of us,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesIn October, through posts on social media, Mr. Ramaswamy agreed to a debate with Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, that was held last Wednesday at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester, N.H. Mr. Khanna’s team had framed the event as a civil conversation between two children of immigrants who were rising Indian American political voices.In an interview, Mr. Khanna, who grew up in suburban Philadelphia, said that recognizing the history of racism and discrimination in America was crucial to building a cohesive, multiracial democracy. He said that not everyone in America was able to have “the opportunities that people like Vivek and I had,” referring to their middle-class upbringing.Until “everyone has that opportunity, we can’t say that race and class don’t matter,” he added.Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Ramaswamy campaign, said Mr. Ramaswamy’s decision to debate Mr. Khanna had little to do with their shared Indian identity.It was more about Mr. Ramaswamy being Mr. Ramaswamy.“Vivek does pretty much go on anything,” she said.Jonathan Weisman More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy and Ro Khanna Debate in New Hampshire

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      The meeting between Vivek Ramaswamy, a presidential candidate, and Representative Ro Khanna of California, was largely a showcase for Mr. Ramaswamy to try to rescue a flagging campaign.Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate, and Ro Khanna, a Democratic member of the House, squared off on Wednesday in New Hampshire in what was billed as a civil discussion between two Indian Americans over the future of the United States.But over the course of an hour at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., Mr. Ramaswamy repeatedly slipped into his stump speech on the “black hole” in America’s collective heart and his belief that the nation was not, as he once thought, the declining Roman Empire, while Mr. Khanna tried to articulate his economic ideas and talk up the record of President Biden against his opponent’s blizzard of words.“It is, I think, regrettable to be carrying the water of Joe Biden when the fact is that everyday Americans know they’re suffering at the hands of policies that came from this administration,” Mr. Ramaswamy snapped back.The appearance of Mr. Khanna, a California Democrat, on a stage in New Hampshire — the second time this year for him — was a testament to the frustrations that he has said he feels about how Mr. Biden and other Democrats have ceded ground to Republicans on putting forth an economic vision. The meeting was initially to be a conversation on race and identity at the University of Chicago, but when Mr. Ramaswamy backed out, Mr. Khanna challenged him on social media — and chased him to the first Republican primary state.On Nov. 30, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who has tried to extend the White House’s message to audiences he does not believe it’s reaching, will debate Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Fox News.In the end, the Saint Anselm meeting was largely a showcase for Mr. Ramaswamy to try to rescue a flagging campaign, which has slipped to fourth place in polling averages in the state, behind Mr. DeSantis, Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who has surged into second. All of them are well behind the front-runner, Donald J. Trump.Mr. Ramaswamy demonstrated that his dogged “America First” isolationism has not been jarred by the bloody conflict between Israel and Hamas. At one point, he declared, “I could care less about leading in the Middle East,” saying of Israel, “Let’s get out and let our true ally defend itself.”To that, Mr. Khanna asked: “Why do you have such an impoverished vision of America that the only thing America is going to have is a provincial sense of its own interest?”Mr. Ramaswamy also showed his propensity to not allow the facts to get in the way of his views. When Mr. Khanna boasted of the 13 million jobs that have been created under Mr. Biden, his opponent cautioned that the government was “the sector with by far the greatest growth in jobs.”While it is true that in recent months the government sector has shown signs of recovery, government employment, as of last month, remained below its prepandemic level by 9,000 jobs, while the private sector has now recovered all the jobs lost in the pandemic and then some.Mr. Khanna has been outspoken in challenging his party and his president to get more aggressive in sharing a vision for more inclusive economic growth. He tried again Wednesday, talking up government investment to rebuild manufacturing: “For the Republicans, and I see some of this in what you’ve adopted, they see any problem, and they say let’s cut taxes, let’s deregulate,” Mr. Khanna said. “How is that putting a steel plant up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania?”But he largely missed the opportunity to highlight Mr. Biden’s biggest legislative achievements in industrial policy, which got only glancing references: a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, a $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry and the Inflation Reduction Act, with its spending to combat climate change.Meantime, Mr. Ramaswamy’s well-worn talking points dismissing the threat of climate change, calling for eliminating three quarters of the federal government, and cutting education spending largely went unchallenged. More

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      For Progressive Democrats, New Momentum Clashes With Old Debates

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      A push and pull between progressive and moderate Democrats is shaping the party’s policies and politics.Progressive victories in Wisconsin and Chicago have injected new momentum into the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party. But those recent electoral successes are masking deeper internal tensions over the role and influence of progressives in a party President Biden has been remaking in his moderate image.Interviews with more than 25 progressive and moderate Democratic leaders and strategists — including current and former members of Congress and directors of national and statewide groups — revealed a behind-the-scenes tug of war over the party’s policy agenda, messaging and tactics. As the party looks toward next year’s elections, its key constituencies have undergone a transformation. Once mostly white, working-class voters, Democrats now tend to be affluent, white liberals, Black moderates and a more diverse middle class.On some fronts, progressives — a relatively young, highly educated and mostly white bloc that makes up about 12 percent of the Democratic coalition and is the most politically active — have made inroads. Their grass-roots networks, including several headed by Black and Latino leaders, have grown sharply since the heights of the widespread resistance to the Trump administration. Beyond the high-profile victories in Chicago and Wisconsin, they have won under-the-radar local and state races across the country. And many of their views have moved into the mainstream and pushed the government to expand the fight against child poverty, climate change and other social ills.“We as a movement helped articulate these things, to do these things,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, the Washington State Democrat who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus.Yet at the same time, the activist left wing remains very much on the defensive.The negotiations with the White House on some of the most sweeping legislation fell short of the bold, structural change many of their members sought. And progressives remain locked in an old debate with their moderate counterparts — as well as themselves — over how to communicate progressive ideas and values to voters at a time when slogans like “defund the police” have come under attack by Republicans and moderate Democrats.“In 2018, our party seemed to react to Donald Trump winning in 2016, and the reaction was to go further and further left,” said Cheri Bustos, a former Illinois congresswoman who is a moderate and was a leader of the House Democrats’ campaign arm. “When politics swings far to the left or far to the right, there always seems to be a reckoning.”As Mr. Biden has signaled that he plans to run for re-election in 2024, he has been emphasizing the moderate roots he has embodied throughout much of his roughly 50 years in politics. He has replaced a key ally of the left in the White House — Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s former chief of staff — with Jeffrey D. Zients, who some progressive groups see as too friendly to corporate interests. And he has been clashing with activists who have accused him of backsliding on his liberal approaches to crime, statehood for the District of Columbia, climate issues and immigration policy.Progressive is a label that encompasses various factions within the American left and can mean different things to different people. Broadly, progressives tend to believe the government should push for sweeping change to solve problems and address racial and social inequities. Like moderate and establishment Democrats, they support strong economic and social safety net programs and believe the economic system largely favors powerful interests.But points of tension emerge between moderates and progressives over tactics: Progressives tend to call for ambitious structural overhauls of U.S. laws and institutions that they see as fundamentally racist over incremental change and more measured policy approaches.In an interview with the socialist political magazine Jacobin, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, one of the most prominent progressive Democrats in the House, highlighted the tension by criticizing the president for making a “lurch to the right.”“I think it is extremely risky and very perilous should the Biden administration forget who it was that put him over the top,” she told the magazine, referring to the high turnout in the 2020 presidential election of young people and communities of color.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is the rare Democratic member of Congress to publicly criticize the president. Several other progressives said they had accepted their role as having a seat at the table, though not necessarily at the head of it. Some said they believed Mr. Biden would serve as a bridge to new generation of progressive leaders, even if for now they are caught in a waiting game.Progressive Democrats helped give Brandon Johnson a narrow victory in the mayor’s race in Chicago.Evan Cobb for The New York Times“Right now, the progressives are sort of building power — it is like a silent build that is just going to explode in a post-Biden world,” said Representative Ro Khanna of California, a co-chairman of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. “I just can’t conceive of a situation where progressives aren’t dominating presidential elections over the next 15 years after Biden.”The victories in Wisconsin and Chicago followed a similar playbook: Thousands of volunteers knocked on doors, made calls, wrote postcards, fired off mass texts and canvassed college campuses. They shied away from slogans and divisions among Democrats and emphasized the threat of an anti-democratic, Trumpian movement on the right. They turned out diverse coalitions of voters.In Chicago that allowed progressives to propel Brandon Johnson, a once little-known county commissioner and union organizer, to clinch a narrow victory in the mayor’s race over his more conservative Democratic opponent, Paul Vallas, who ran on a tough-on-crime platform and was endorsed by a police union. In Wisconsin, where Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, won a high-stakes race for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court, it allowed Democrats to lean into issues that the establishment wing of the party once tended to avoid in Republican and heavily contested areas: increased access to abortion and collective bargaining rights.“I couldn’t feel more proud or feel more vindicated that the type of politics we argued for are where more Americans are at,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, a grass-roots organization that often works with progressive Democrats and mobilized voters in Chicago and Wisconsin.Progressives have also been increasing their ranks in other places. Members of their wing now hold the mayor’s office in Los Angeles and a majority on the board of aldermen in St. Louis. They have swept into statehouses in Colorado, Connecticut and Wisconsin, where two Democratic Socialists this year revived a socialist caucus inactive since the 1930s. At the federal level, the House’s Congressional Progressive Caucus added 16 new members, bringing the total number of the organization to 102 — one of the largest ideological caucuses in Congress.But as they build their organizing power, progressives are contending with a financial framework at the mercy of boom-and-bust cycles. Major gifts from donors or progressive attention to a cause du jour can draw sudden revenue windfalls and then dry out. In the Trump years, some grass-roots groups had explosive growth as progressives rushed to combat Trump policies, elevate a younger and more diverse crop of candidates and help fuel a national reckoning with racism. By the 2022 midterms, some progressive candidates and groups were having to rewrite budgets, considering laying off staff members and triaging outreach programs and advertising as donations slowed.In Georgia, the Asian American Advocacy Fund, which focuses on mobilizing Asian American voters, went from having six full-time employees and a budget of roughly $95,000 in 2018 to a staff of 14 and a budget of $3 million in 2022. Its executive director, Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, said the boom allowed the group to run better programs but also made those projects harder to sustain when donations ran low. The group was among several in swing states that struggled in 2022 to get political canvassing efforts off the ground as major Democratic donors cut back on their political giving.“We lost momentum, and we lost the vast majority of people who tuned into politics and tuned into elections, many maybe for the first time in their lives, because there was this villain who needed to be defeated,” Mrs. Yaqoob Mahmood said.Political analysts also warned against reading too much into progressive gains in areas that already lean liberal. During the midterms, the candidates who won tough midterm contests in purple places like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada largely adopted more moderate positions. And more progressive nominees who beat moderates in a number of House primaries lost in the general election.“The whole name of the game is creating a majority, and the majority makers are the moderates,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist organization. Referring to progressives, he said: “They can win occasionally. But for the most part, they lose because what they’re selling isn’t what Dems want to be buying.”Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, defeated a conservative opponent for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesAs Mr. Trump vies for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, with multiple investigations hanging over his campaign, both moderate and progressive Democrats said they were forming a united front against a common foil and on issues where there is less division within their party, like abortion and protecting democracy. But for progressives, that has still meant a delicate dance about who they are.In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, successfully campaigning for Senate last year, argued that he was not a progressive but “just a Democrat.” In Virginia, Jennifer McClellan, who became the first Black woman to represent the state in Congress, has called herself a “pragmatic progressive,” emphasizing her decades of working across the aisle.The stakes are especially high for progressives in Arizona, where a fierce race is expected over Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s seat, after she left the Democratic Party in December to become an independent. Ms. Sinema flipped a Republican-held seat by hewing to the center and relying on progressive groups that turned out a large coalition of Democratic and independent voters.Now, Representative Ruben Gallego of Phoenix, a member of the progressive congressional caucus, is running for the seat.In some ways, Mr. Gallego is a bona fide progressive. He has been promoting policies like expanding affordable health care, enacting a permanent child tax credit and increasing wages. In other ways, he is reluctant to openly embrace the progressive brand, preferring instead to talk about his vision for Arizona or his experience as a Marine combat veteran and former construction worker as a way to help bring those working-class Latinos who now vote Republican back into the Democratic fold.Asked if he sees himself as a progressive, Mr. Gallego said, “I see myself as someone who has been a worker and a fighter for working-class families.” He added, “We are not going to be focusing on D.C. labels.”Susan Campbell Beachy More

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      Ro Khanna Endorses Barbara Lee’s Senate Campaign as He Declines to Run

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      The race in California to succeed Senator Dianne Feinstein is likely to be one of the most expensive in the nation in 2024.Representative Ro Khanna of California said on Sunday that he would not run in an already crowded Democratic field seeking to succeed his state’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, who is retiring at the end of her term.In deep-blue California, the Democratic winner of the primary is likely to join Alex Padilla in representing the state in the Senate. The major Democrats already running are three representatives: Katie Porter, a social media darling of liberal Democrats; Adam Schiff, who led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump; and Barbara Lee, the sole member of Congress to oppose a broad war authorization after the Sept. 11 attacks.Mr. Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, made his announcement on “State of the Union” on CNN, telling the host Jake Tapper that the best place “for me to serve as a progressive is in the House of Representatives.”He added, “I’m honored to be co-chairing Barbara Lee’s campaign for the Senate and endorsing her today. We need a strong antiwar senator, and she will play that role.”The race in California is likely to be one of the most expensive and competitive in the nation in 2024. Mr. Schiff, who represents a Los Angeles-area district, and Ms. Porter, of Orange County, have already raised millions to support their campaigns, while Ms. Lee, whose district includes Oakland, has lagged.Ms. Lee is seeking to become just the third Black woman in the Senate. The House has 28 Black women serving in its ranks, a high-water mark, but the Senate currently has none, a point Mr. Khanna emphasized on Sunday.“Frankly, Jake, representation matters,” he said. “We don’t have a single African American woman in the United States Senate. She would fill that role. She’ll be the only candidate from Northern California and she’s going to, I think, consolidate a lot of progressives. The other two are formidable candidates, but I think Barbara Lee is going to be very, very strong.” More

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      Fearing a New Shellacking, Democrats Rush for Economic Message

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      Democratic candidates, facing what increasingly looks like a reckoning in two weeks, are struggling to find a closing message on the economy that acknowledges the deep uncertainty troubling the electorate while making the case that they, not the Republicans, hold the solutions.For some time, the party’s candidates and strategists have debated whether to hit inflation head on or to heed warnings that any shift toward an economic message would be ending the campaign on the strongest possible Republican ground. Since midsummer, when the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, Democrats had hoped that preserving the 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion and castigating Republican extremism could get them past the worst inflation in 40 years.That is looking increasingly like wishful thinking.On Monday, Democrats unveiled new messages that appeared to switch tacks, incorporating achievements of the past two years with expressions of sympathy on the economy and dire warnings for what Republicans might bring.Former Representative Steve Israel, who headed the House Democrats’ campaign arm in a strong cycle of 2012 and weak one in 2014, said the dispute over how to address voters’ economic distress was essentially being resolved in favor of trying to accomplish a political feat that he said would be the trickiest he has ever seen: Democrats would continue to hammer Republicans on abortion and their ties to former President Donald J. Trump to boost turnout among their core supporters, while simultaneously trying to win over undecided voters whose biggest concerns are inflation and crime.“There was a narrative at one point that this was a Roe v. Wade election,” said Representative Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, whose district, newly drawn to lean Republican, has made him one of the most endangered Democratic incumbents in the House. “I never thought it was going to be that simple.”On Friday, four veteran Democratic strategists published a piece in The American Prospect, the liberal magazine, that pleaded with Democrats to find a new message that acknowledges the pain of rising prices and answers voter concerns. To do that, they argued, candidates need to convey their legislative successes while setting up culprits other than themselves: Republicans who voted against popular measures like capping the price of insulin, and wealthy corporations that are jacking up prices and reaping more profits.Voters “want to know you understand what is going on in their lives,” the strategists wrote. “They want to know you are helping with their No. 1 problem and have a plan. They want to know the difference between Democrats and Republicans when they cast their votes.” The piece was written by Patrick Gaspard, president of the liberal Center for American Politics; Stanley Greenberg and Celinda Lake, veteran Democratic pollsters; and Mike Lux, a senior White House aide under President Bill Clinton.Ms. Lake, in an interview on Saturday, said Democratic strategists were “extremely concerned” that the wave of support the party saw over the summer was evaporating at the worst possible time. But she insisted there was time, with barely two weeks to go, to correct course.“A lot of candidates aren’t really clear about what the economic message is,” she said. “What we need to do is set up a more vivid contrast. People are getting more pessimistic about the economy.”To some Democrats, liberals and moderates alike, the reluctance of frontline candidates to talk up the party’s achievements has been maddening. Faiz Shakir, a longtime political adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive mainstay from Vermont, called a campaign built around abortion and former President Donald J. Trump “political malpractice.”Representative Nancy Pelosi during a news conference on the Inflation Reduction Act.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesIn two years, the party has passed a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, a generous tax credit for parents that brought child poverty to historic lows, legislation that made good on the popular, longstanding promise to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, and the biggest investment in clean energy in history — all achievements that could be framed as helping people cope with rising prices.An ad launched on Monday by a Democratic super PAC in the Minnesota district of moderate Representative Angie Craig makes that point. And Mr. Sanders pressed it on Sunday, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying Republicans have said little about what they would do, and what they have said — like forcing cuts to entitlements like Medicare and Social Security and extending Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts — would be unpopular, make the problem worse, or both.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.A G.O.P. Advantage: Republicans appear to be gaining an edge in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains why the mood of the electorate has shifted.Ohio Senate Race: Tim Ryan, the Democrat who is challenging J.D. Vance, has turned the state into perhaps the country’s unlikeliest Senate battleground.Losing Faith in the System: As democracy erodes in Wisconsin, many of the state’s citizens feel powerless. But Republicans and Democrats see different culprits and different risks.Secretary of State Races: Facing G.O.P. candidates who spread lies about the 2020 election, Democrats are outspending them 57-to-1 on TV ads for their secretary of state candidates. It still may not be enough.“They want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at a time when millions of seniors are struggling to pay their bills,” Mr. Sanders said. “Do you think that’s what we should be doing? Democrats should take that to them.”But for the party in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, finding an effective message will be difficult, if not impossible. Republicans are evincing no fears of any Democratic shifts.“Democrats are out of time and out of solutions when it comes to fixing the rising costs they handed voters — now they’re going to pay the price at the ballot box,” said Michael McAdams, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans.In the 2010 midterms, then-President Barack Obama barnstormed the country with a message that Republicans had driven the country’s economy into a ditch, and Democrats had pulled the car out. Then voters delivered what Mr. Obama himself called a “shellacking,” giving Republicans 63 total seats in the House and seven in the Senate, the largest shift since 1948.David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief political adviser, recalled telling the president-elect in 2008 that Democrats would face a reckoning in 2010 after two successive wave elections and the most dire financial crisis since the Depression. After Democrats passed a huge economic stimulus bill, other economic measures like legislation to help consumers trade in their “clunker” cars for more efficient models, and a landmark regulation of Wall Street, they could say they had made progress on the economy.“But people didn’t feel the car was out of the ditch yet,” Mr. Axelrod said, “and they were looking to the guy who was in there now.”The lesson of 2010 was not to avoid the subject but to acknowledge the pain and set up a choice. Two years later, with the economic shock of the financial crisis still lingering, the Obama campaign made fighting for the middle class the central message of a re-election bid against a Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, who was painted as the essence of the out-of-touch plutocrat.“It was never going to work to not talk about the economy,” Mr. Axelrod said. “That’s sort of like, ‘How was the play otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln?’”If voter anguish in 2022 is similar to 2010, the economic issues are different. Unemployment is at record lows in several states. The issue is more a shortage of workers than a shortage of jobs. Wage growth is robust. But inflation — which lends itself to an attendant fear of the future and pervasive sense of falling behind — is a particularly destabilizing force. It helped topple Liz Truss, the British prime minister, after only six chaotic weeks, and helped usher in an Italian government that descends from Mussolini’s fascism.Ms. Truss’s support collapsed after her conservative economic plan of tax cuts skewed to the rich sent financial markets in a tailspin. The British pound also sank to near record lows against the dollar, and economists warned of still worse inflation. Representative Ro Khanna, a liberal Democrat from California, said Democrats needed to harness that experience to point out that Republican leaders have a similar economic plan if they take control of Congress.“The Republicans are running on an explicit promise of extending Trump’s tax cuts,” he said. “We have to frame the election as a choice on the economy.”Mr. Khanna was campaigning for Democrats in South Carolina on Saturday. He said the party’s candidates needed to answer the inflation question by hammering home the argument that Republican fiscal policies translate to tax cuts for the wealthy and sending jobs overseas.“We’ve got to do a better job having a clear economic message,” Mr. Khanna said. “I don’t think we can say, ‘Woe is me. Gas prices are going up.’”But Republicans, out of power, with no responsibility for much of the legislation of the Biden era, have a ready answer, which they have used with success: All those “achievements” created the inflation problem, by stoking consumer demand at a time when supply could not keep up. The U.S. economy was not prepared for a rapid shift from fossil fuels, their argument goes, so Democratic efforts to address climate change sent gas prices soaring. And Democratic promises for still more government assistance will only keep prices rising.Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican in an unexpectedly competitive re-election fight, has taken to quoting the Nobel Prize-winning conservative economist Milton Friedman on inflation repeatedly: “Consumers don’t produce it. Producers don’t produce it. The trade unions don’t produce it. Foreign sheikhs don’t produce it. Oil imports don’t produce it. What produces it is too much government spending.”That may be oversimplified in today’s strange economy. Some price increases were triggered by supply chains snarled by the pandemic that created pent-up consumer demand after periods of confinement and shuttered factories and shipping industries that were slow to return to peak production. Tight energy supplies and ensuing gas price increases are far more attributable to the war in Ukraine than any domestic energy legislation. Inflation is a global problem that is worse in Europe and Britain than in the United States.A gas station in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.Aimee Dilger/ReutersBut most economists do believe some Democratic bills — especially the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan — exacerbated the problem. The $1,400 checks that most American households received in 2021 have been forgotten. Their contribution to an overheated consumer economy has not.The latest Republican attack ads hit inflation and economic uncertainty hard and lay the blame on Democratic malfeasance, not the complexities of international commerce and conflict.“Democrats spent two years completely ignoring the country’s single-most pressing issue because they have nothing to say. They know their policies made inflation worse and they own this economic tsunami,” said Dan Conston, head of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a powerful super PAC aligned with the House Republican leadership.Mr. Axelrod said the Democrats’ secret weapon could be their opponents. For all the campaign ads harping on economic issues, many Republican candidates are using extreme language to spotlight more contentious issues: national abortion legislation, denying the validity of the 2020 election, and impeaching President Biden. Given some of the loudest voices in the G.O.P. seem uninterested in economic struggles, voters may not see the opposition party as a credible alternative.But, Ms. Lake said, the Democrats need to make that case.“There’s time; there’s money,” she said. “We’re going to be spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising in the next two weeks, and there’s vulnerability on the Republican side, but only if we articulate the contrast.” More

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      The First Post-Reagan Presidency

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      Credit…Timo LenzenSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionThe First Post-Reagan PresidencySo far, Joe Biden has been surprisingly progressive.Credit…Timo LenzenSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistJan. 28, 2021, 8:50 p.m. ETDuring Donald Trump’s presidency, I sometimes took comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time.”In Skowronek’s formulation, presidential history moves in 40- to 60-year cycles, or “regimes.” Each is inaugurated by transformative, “reconstructive” leaders who define the boundaries of political possibility for their successors.Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a figure. For decades following his presidency, Republicans and Democrats alike accepted many of the basic assumptions of the New Deal. Ronald Reagan was another. After him, even Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama feared deficit spending, inflation and anything that smacked of “big government.”I found Skowronek’s schema reassuring because of where Trump seemed to fit into it. Skowronek thought Trump was a “late regime affiliate” — a category that includes Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover. Such figures, he’s written, are outsiders from the party of a dominant but decrepit regime.They use the “internal disarray and festering weakness of the establishment” to “seize the initiative.” Promising to save a faltering political order, they end up imploding and bringing the old regime down with them. No such leader, he wrote, has ever been re-elected.During Trump’s reign, Skowronek’s ideas gained some popular currency, offering a way to make sense of a presidency that seemed anomalous and bizarre. “We are still in the middle of Trump’s rendition of the type,” he wrote in an updated edition of his book “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” “but we have seen this movie before, and it has always ended the same way.”Skowronek doesn’t present his theory as a skeleton key to history. It’s a way of understanding historical dynamics, not predicting the future. Still, if Trump represented the last gasps of Reaganism instead of the birth of something new, then after him, Skowronek suggests, a fresh regime could begin.When Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee, it seemed that the coming of a new era had been delayed. Reconstructive leaders, in Skowronek’s formulation, repudiate the doctrines of an establishment that no longer has answers for the existential challenges the country faces. Biden, Skowronek told me, is “a guy who’s made his way up through establishment Democratic politics.” Nothing about him seemed trailblazing.Yet as Biden’s administration begins, there are signs that a new politics is coalescing. When, in his inauguration speech, Biden touted “unity,” he framed it as a national rejection of the dark forces unleashed by his discredited predecessor, not stale Gang of Eight bipartisanship. He takes power at a time when what was once conventional wisdom about deficits, inflation and the proper size of government has fallen apart. That means Biden, who has been in national office since before Reagan’s presidency, has the potential to be our first truly post-Reagan president.“Biden has a huge opportunity to finally get our nation past the Reagan narrative that has still lingered,” said Representative Ro Khanna, who was a national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. “And the opportunity is to show that government, by getting the shots in every person’s arm of the vaccines, and building infrastructure, and helping working families, is going to be a force for good.” More