Presidential Election of 2008

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      It’s Trump’s Party, and He’ll Lie if He Wants To

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      To win a Republican primary in 2022, you’ll probably need to support a coup attempt.It’s not sufficient — David Perdue, a former senator, looks like he’s going to lose to the incumbent governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, in next week’s primary, despite his support for the “big lie” — but it makes a difference.The Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, won his race on the strength of his enthusiastic support for Donald Trump’s effort to subvert and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. As a state senator, Mastriano demanded that lawmakers invalidate Joe Biden’s electoral votes. He attended the “stop the steal” rally on Jan. 6 and has continued to accuse Democrats of fraud. Mastriano has not commented on the 2024 election, but he has let it be known that he supports the view that state legislatures can assign electoral votes against the will of the voting public.The Republican nominee for the Senate in North Carolina, Ted Budd, was similarly committed to Trump’s effort to keep himself in office. He was among the 139 House members who objected to certifying the presidential election in Biden’s favor.J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for the Senate in Ohio, has not endorsed the claim that Biden stole the election from Trump, but he did play footsie with the idea during his campaign. “I think we’ve got to investigate as much as possible,” Vance said of the 2020 election results. “I believe sunshine is the best disinfectant. And we’re going to learn a lot about what happened. But, you know, I think at a basic level we already know mostly what happened.”Overall, there are hundreds of Republican candidates in races across the country who have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat. Many, like Budd, voted against Biden’s Electoral College victory. Some, like Mastriano, attended the “stop the steal” protest in Washington on Jan. 6. And others signed legal briefs or resolutions challenging Biden’s victory.The extent to which election denialism and pro-insurrectionism are now litmus tests for Republican politicians is clearly attributable to Trump’s huge influence over the Republican Party. Despite his defeat, he is still the leader. But even if that were not true — if, instead of the boss, Trump were only one influential figure among many — there would still be reason for Republicans to embrace this view.That’s because Republican election denialism is simply the strongest form of a belief that has defined the Republican Party since at least the Newt Gingrich era in the 1990s. For many Republicans, theirs is the only legitimate political party and their voters, irrespective of their actual numbers, are the only legitimate voters — and the only legitimate majority. Democrats, from this vantage point, are presumptively illegitimate, their victories suspect, their policies un-American, even when they have the support of most people in the country.You see this in the years of voter fraud hysteria that preceded Trump’s claim, after the 2016 election, that he had been cheated of millions of votes. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide,” he said, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”In 2001, for example, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a crackdown on voter fraud, accusing unnamed actors (presumably Democrats) of manipulating elections. “Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed,” he said at a news conference that year. “The polling process has been disrupted or not completed. Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on Election Day.”After the 2008 election, Republicans went into a frenzy over the group ACORN, accusing it of perpetrating fraud on a national scale. How else, after all, could you explain Barack Obama’s unexpected victories in traditionally Republican states like Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina?The obsession with nonexistent voter fraud is hard to ignore. But there were other ways that Republicans expressed their belief that they were the only legitimate members of the political community.Sarah Palin’s rhetoric about the “real America,” very much in evidence during the 2008 presidential campaign — “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America” — was one of these ways. So was the Tea Party movement, whose members understood themselves as a disenfranchised majority, under siege by a Democratic Party of burdensome illegal immigrants, ungrateful minorities and entitled young people. The Fox News commentator Glenn Beck captured some of this feeling during a 2010 broadcast. “This is the Tea Party. This is you and me,” he said. “You are not alone, America. You are the majority.”Mitt Romney’s infamous claim that there are “47 percent of the people” who are “dependent upon government,” “believe they are victims” and are unable to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives” was condemned as classist and prejudiced during the 2012 presidential election. But you can also read it as an expression of the belief that there are some Americans who count — the “makers,” in the language of his vice-presidential nominee, Paul Ryan — and some Americans who don’t.Yes, the Republican Party’s present-day election denialism is much more extreme than the rhetoric surrounding voter fraud or the idea that there is a “real America.” But the difference is ultimately one of degree, not kind: Republicans have been trying to write Democrats out of the political community in one way or another for decades. It was only a matter of time before this escalated to denying that Democrats and Democratic voters can win elections at all.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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      Former Top McCain Aide Says He Lied to Discredit a Times Article

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      “John McCain’s lie became mine,” Steve Schmidt wrote about Senator John McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist.The senior strategist for Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign said on Sunday night that he had lied to discredit a New York Times article that reported on Mr. McCain’s close relationship with a female lobbyist, a claim that the candidate and the campaign attacked at considerable length at the time.The statement from Steve Schmidt, which he published in a late-night Substack post, was a remarkable turnabout for a former senior aide who once praised Mr. McCain as “the greatest man I’ve ever known.”More than 14 years after The Times’s article appeared and four years after the Republican senator’s death, Mr. Schmidt let loose a furious personal assault on the credibility of Mr. McCain and his family.“Immediately following the story’s publication, John and Cindy McCain both lied to the American people,” Mr. Schmidt wrote, adding, “Ultimately, John McCain’s lie became mine.”Defending his long silence on the matter, Mr. Schmidt said in his post that he “didn’t want to do anything to compromise John McCain’s honor.” His post then questioned Mr. McCain’s judgment in choosing the relatively unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate and accused Mr. McCain of cowering before her — “terrified of the creature that he created,” he wrote.In an interview on Monday, Mr. Schmidt said he was motivated to speak up now in part because he felt he had been unfairly associated for nearly 15 years with Mr. McCain’s choice of Ms. Palin, which he called “a burden.”Mr. Schmidt also accused Mr. McCain — a self-styled maverick who fought leaders of his own party as he pushed for stricter campaign finance restrictions and ethics rules around political activities like lobbying — of lying about one aspect of the article that particularly angered the senator.The article, published on Feb. 21, 2008, reported that several people involved with Mr. McCain’s first presidential campaign, in 2000, became concerned that he and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, had a romantic relationship. It was an explosive and potentially damaging claim for a presidential candidate who positioned himself as a corruption-fighter committed to exposing Washington’s self-dealing ways.Mr. Schmidt in 2008 behind Mr. McCain, who denied that he had a romantic relationship with a lobbyist years earlier.Mary Altaffer/Associated PressThe day after the article was published, Mr. McCain appeared with his wife, Cindy, at a news conference and stated that the article was wrong. “I’m very disappointed in The New York Times piece. It’s not true,” he said.Mr. McCain continued to deny until his death that he had a romantic relationship with Ms. Iseman. Mr. Schmidt, however, said Mr. McCain had privately acknowledged an affair to him after The Times published its article. “John McCain told me the truth backstage at an event in Ohio,” he wrote.Ms. Iseman sued The Times and demanded that it print a retraction of the article on its front page. Less than three months after she filed the lawsuit, she dropped it. The Times appended a note to readers at the bottom of the article that said it “did not state, and The Times did not intend to conclude, that Ms. Iseman had engaged in a romantic affair with Senator McCain or an unethical relationship on behalf of her clients in breach of the public trust.”Mr. Schmidt did not name Ms. Iseman in his Substack post, though he made several references to private phone calls he had with a “lobbyist” he describes in disparaging terms.Ms. Iseman did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.A spokeswoman for The Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, said the paper stood by the article. “We were confident in the accuracy of our reporting in 2008, and we remain so.”Mr. McCain’s daughter Meghan, a conservative author and former co-host of “The View,” said her family had no comment on Monday. More

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      Barack Obama’s New Role: Fighting Disinformation

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      The former president has embarked on a campaign to warn that the scourge of online falsehoods has eroded the foundations of democracy.SAN FRANCISCO — In 2011, President Barack Obama swept into Silicon Valley and yukked it up with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder. The occasion was a town hall with the social network’s employees that covered the burning issues of the day: taxes, health care, the promise of technology to solve the nation’s problems.More than a decade later, Mr. Obama is making another trip to Silicon Valley, this time with a grimmer message about the threat that the tech giants have created to the nation itself.In private meetings and public appearances over the last year, the former president has waded deeply into the public fray over misinformation and disinformation, warning that the scourge of falsehoods online has eroded the foundations of democracy at home and abroad.In a speech at Stanford University on Thursday, he is expected to add his voice to demands for rules to rein in the flood of lies polluting public discourse.The urgency of the crisis — the internet’s “demand for crazy,” as he put it recently — has already pushed him further than he was ever prepared to go as president to take on social media.“I think it is reasonable for us as a society to have a debate and then put in place a combination of regulatory measures and industry norms that leave intact the opportunity for these platforms to make money but say to them that there’s certain practices you engage in that we don’t think are good for society,” Mr. Obama, now 61, said at a conference on disinformation this month organized by the University of Chicago and The Atlantic.Mr. Obama’s campaign — the timing of which stemmed not from a single cause, people close to him said, but a broad concern about the damage to democracy’s foundations — comes in the middle of a fierce but inconclusive debate over how best to restore trust online.In Washington, lawmakers are so sharply divided that any legislative compromise seems out of reach. Democrats criticize giants like Facebook, which has been renamed Meta, and Twitter for failing to rid their sites of harmful content. President Joseph R. Biden Jr., too, has lashed out at the platforms that allowed falsehoods about coronavirus vaccines to spread, saying last year that “they’re killing people.”Republicans, for their part, accuse the companies of suppressing free speech by censoring conservative voices — above all former President Donald J. Trump, who was barred from Facebook and Twitter after the riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 last year. With so little agreement about the problem, there is even less about a solution.Whether Mr. Obama’s advocacy can sway the debate remains to be seen. While he has not sought to endorse a single solution or particular piece of legislation, he nonetheless hopes to appeal across the political spectrum for common ground.“You’ve got to think about how things are going to be consumed through different partisan filtering but still make your true, authentic, best case about how you see the world and what the stakes are and why,” said Jason Goldman, a former Twitter, Blogger and Medium executive who served as the White House’s first chief digital officer under Mr. Obama and continues to advise him.“There’s a potential reason to believe that a good path exists out of some of the messes that we’re in,” he added.As an apostle of the dangers of disinformation, Mr. Obama might be an imperfect messenger. He was the first presidential candidate to ride the power of social media into office in 2008 but then, as president, did little to intervene when its darker side — propagating falsehoods, extremism, racism and violence — became apparent at home and abroad.“I saw it sort of unfold — and that is the degree to which information, disinformation, misinformation was being weaponized,” Mr. Obama said in Chicago, expressing something close to regret. He added, “I think I underestimated the degree to which democracies were as vulnerable to it as they were, including ours.”Mr. Obama, those close to him said, became fixated by disinformation after leaving office. He rehashed, as many others have, whether he had done enough to counter the information campaign ordered by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to tilt the 2016 election against Hillary Rodham Clinton.He began meeting with executives, activists and other experts in earnest last year after Mr. Trump refused to recognize the results of the 2020 election, making unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud, those who have consulted with Mr. Obama said.In his musings on the matter, Mr. Obama has not claimed to have discovered a silver bullet that has eluded others who have studied the issue. By coming forward more publicly, however, he hopes to highlight the values for corporate conduct around which consensus could form.“This can be an effective nudge to a lot of the thinking that is already taking place,” Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser, said. “Every day brings more proof of why this matters.”The location of Thursday’s speech, Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, was intentional, bringing Mr. Obama to the heart of the industry that in many ways shaped his presidency.In his 2008 presidential campaign, he went from being an underdog candidate to an online sensation with his embrace of social media as a tool to target voters and to solicit donations. He became an industry favorite; his digital campaign was led by a Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, and several other tech chief executives endorsed him, including Eric Schmidt of Google.During his administration, Mr. Obama extolled the promise of tech companies to strengthen the economy with higher-skilled jobs and to propel democracy movements abroad. He lured tech employees like Mr. Goldman to join his administration and filled his campaign coffers with fund-raisers at the Bay Area homes of supporters like Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Meta, and Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.It was a period of mutual admiration and little government oversight of the tech industry. Though Mr. Obama endorsed privacy regulations, not a single piece of legislation to control the tech companies passed during his tenure, even as they became economic behemoths that touch virtually every aspect of life.Looking back at his administration’s approach, Mr. Obama has said he would not pinpoint any one action or piece of legislation that he might have handled differently. In hindsight, though, he understands now how optimism about online technologies, including social media, outweighed caution, according to Mr. Rhodes.“He’ll certainly acknowledge that there’s things that could have been done differently or ways we were all thinking about the tools and technologies that turned out at times to see the opportunities more than the risks,” Mr. Rhodes said.Mr. Obama’s views began to change with Russia’s flood of propaganda on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to stir confusion and chaos in the 2016 presidential election. Days after that election, Mr. Obama took Mr. Zuckerberg aside at a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, to warn that he needed to take the problem more seriously.Once he left office, Mr. Obama was noticeably absent for much of the public conversation around disinformation.“As a general matter, there was an awareness that anything he said about certain issues was just going to ricochet around the fun house mirrors,” Mr. Rhodes said.Mr. Obama’s approach to the issue has been characteristically deliberative. He has consulted the chief executives of Apple, Alphabet and others. Through the Obama Foundation in Chicago, he has also met often with the scholars the foundation has trained; they recounted their own experiences with disinformation in a variety of fields around the world.From those deliberations, potential solutions have begun taking shape, a theme he plans to outline broadly on Thursday. While Mr. Obama maintains that he remains “close to a First Amendment absolutist,” he has focused on the need for greater transparency and regulatory oversight of online discourse — and the ways companies have profited from manipulating audiences through their proprietary algorithms.Mr. Goldman compared a potential approach to consumer protection or food safety practices already in place.“You may not know exactly what’s in a hot dog, but you trust that there is a process for meat inspections that ensures that the food sold and consumed in this country and other countries around the world are safe,” he said.In Congress, lawmakers have already proposed the creation of a regulatory agency dedicated to overseeing internet companies. Others have proposed stripping tech companies of a legal shield that protects them from liability.No proposals have advanced, though, even as the European Union has moved forward, putting into law some of the practices still merely bandied about in Washington. The union is expected to move as soon as Friday on new regulations to impose audits of algorithmic amplification.Kyle Plotkin, a Republican strategist and former chief of staff to Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, said Mr. Obama “can be a polarizing figure” and could inflame, not calm, the debate over disinformation.“Adoring fans will be very happy with him weighing in, but others won’t,” he said. “I don’t think he will move the ball forward. If anything, he moves the ball backward.” More

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      Mike Gravel, Unconventional Two-Term Alaska Senator, Dies at 91

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      He made headlines by fighting for an oil pipeline and reading the Pentagon Papers aloud. After 25 years of obscurity, he re-emerged with a quixotic presidential campaign.Mike Gravel, a two-term Democratic senator from Alaska who played a central role in 1970s legislation to build the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline but who was perhaps better known as an unabashed attention-getter, in one case reading the Pentagon Papers aloud at a hearing at a time when newspapers were barred from publishing them and later mounting long-shot presidential runs, died on Saturday at his home in Seaside, Calif. He was 91.The cause was myeloma, his daughter, Lynne Mosier, said.Defeated in his bid for a third Senate term in 1980, Mr. Gravel remained out of the national spotlight for 25 years before returning to politics to seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He was a quirky fixture in several early debates in 2007, calling for a constitutional amendment to allow citizens to enact laws by referendums. But when the voting began in 2008, he never got 1 percent of the total in any primary.He nonetheless persisted, showing the same commitment to going it alone that he had displayed by nominating himself for vice president in 1972, staging one-man filibusters and reading the Pentagon Papers aloud — efforts that even senators who agreed with him regarded as grandstanding.But the pipeline was a lasting achievement, and one that forced him to develop allies. Senator Gravel (pronounced gruh-VELL), like most of his state’s leaders, favored construction of a pipeline to bring crude oil 800 miles from Alaska’s North Slope to the ice-free port of Valdez.But the project, formally proposed in 1969, was slowed or blocked in federal courts over environmental questions.Mr. Gravel seized the issue in 1973 by proposing legislation that would exempt the project from any further court intervention under the National Environmental Policy Act.Other pipeline supporters — including his Republican fellow Alaska senator, Ted Stevens — were wary because the environmental law was a proud accomplishment of Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, the chairman of the Interior Committee, which dealt with many Alaska issues.Senator Jackson favored the pipeline and said he believed that a thorough review would show that it could be built without damage to the environment. But he insisted that breaching the environmental act would be an “unfortunate precedent.”The Nixon administration backed Mr. Gravel and his call for swift action. His measure won, 50 to 49, with Vice President Spiro T. Agnew casting the deciding vote. The House quickly agreed, and the pipeline, which opened in 1977, made oil the center of Alaska’s prosperity.Senator Gravel in 1971, the year he drew national notice by reading aloud from the Pentagon Papers at a Senate subcommittee hearing. He was elected to the Senate from Alaska in 1968 and served two terms.Meyer Liebowitz/The New York TimesMr. Gravel drew much more national notice on June 29, 1971. The New York Times and other newspapers were under court injunctions to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret, detailed government study of the war in Vietnam.He read aloud from the papers to a subcommittee hearing that he had quickly called after Republicans thwarted his effort to read them to the entire Senate. He read for about three hours, finally breaking down in tears and saying, “Arms are being severed, metal is crashing through human bodies — because of a public policy this government and all of its branches continue to support.” (In a major ruling on press freedom, the injunction against The Times was overturned by the Supreme Court the next day.)Mr. Gravel acknowledged many years later that his political ambition had led him to express support for the Vietnam War at the start of his political career, although he said he had personally opposed it.In his 1968 Democratic primary challenge to Senator Ernest Gruening, one of two senators to vote against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to use conventional military force in Southeast Asia, Mr. Gravel said the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and not the United States was the aggressor. In 2007, while running for president, he told an NPR interviewer, “I said what I said back in 1968 because it was to advance my career.”He told Salon magazine the same year that Alaskans did not share Mr. Gruening’s opposition to the war at the time, and that “when I ran, being a realistic politician, all I had to do was stand up and not deal with the subject, and people would assume that I was to the right of Ernest Gruening, when in point of fact I was to the left of him.”Mr. Gravel won that primary, stressing his youth (he was 38 to Mr. Gruening’s 81) and campaigning in the smallest of villages, where he showed a half-hour movie about his campaign. He went on to defeat his Republican rival, Elmer E. Rasmuson, a banker and former mayor of Anchorage, in the general election.Senator Gravel in Miami Beach in July 1972, shortly before the Democratic National Convention there. He nominated himself for vice president.UPIHe won again in 1974, aided by the pipeline issue. But he lost the 1980 Democratic primary to Senator Gruening’s grandson, Clark Gruening. Mr. Gravel accused Mr. Gruening, who had announced that he would not take special interest money, of being “dishonest” because, he said, Jews who had made individual contributions amounted to a special interest group “that seeks to influence the foreign policy of the U.S.”Mr. Gravel had enjoyed little support from his party, depending instead on political action committees. His main issue was his all-out opposition to legislation designating more than 104 million acres in Alaska for new national parks, wildlife refuges and conservation areas.But when the Senate broke his filibuster against the bill and passed it just before the primary, it was a fatal blow to his campaign. He lost to Clark Gruening, who went on to lose the general election to Frank Murkowski.Senator Gravel had first sought national office by nominating himself for vice president at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Thirty-four years later, after returning to the real estate business and disappearing from the public eye, he announced his candidacy for the presidency.In the early primary debates for the 2008 election, he found much more public interest in the Iraq war than in his ideas about allowing citizens to enact laws, so he stressed his opposition to it, calling the Democratic senators who were seeking the nomination “gutless wonders” for not bringing the war to a halt.He was not invited to the later debates because of his low poll standings and fund-raising totals. He soldiered on, largely unnoticed during the contest between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In New Hampshire, where he did the most campaigning, he got just 404 votes, or one-seventh of 1 percent, in the state’s primary.In March, he formally quit the Democratic contest and unsuccessfully sought the nomination of the Libertarian Party. His best showing came a few weeks later, when he got four-fifths of 1 percent in the North Carolina Democratic Primary.Maurice Robert Gravel was born in Springfield, Mass., on May 13, 1930, to Alphonse and Maria (Bourassa) Gravel. His father was a contractor. Both his parents were French Canadian immigrants from Quebec, and the future senator did not speak English until he was 7.Mr. Gravel attended American International College in Springfield, served in the Army in the Counterintelligence Corps and then drove a cab in New York City while studying economics at Columbia University.He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956 and set off for Alaska, which was not yet a state. He worked in real estate and as a brakeman on the snow-clearing trains of the Alaska Railroad before starting his political career.Alaska attained statehood in 1958, and Mr. Gravel was elected to the State House of Representative in 1962. He served as speaker in 1965 and 1966 before leaving for an unsuccessful primary challenge to a four-term Democratic congressman, Ralph Rivers. Mr. Rivers then lost to the Republican candidate, Howard Pollock.Two years later, Mr. Gravel was elected to the Senate.After his defeat in 1980, Mr. Gravel returned to the real estate business but did not do well. He went bankrupt, as did his company.Mr. Gravel at the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2008 campaign, at Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C., in April 2007. He was a quirky fixture in several early debates, but when the voting began he never got 1 percent of the total in any primary.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHe is survived by his wife, Whitney (Stewart) Gravel; two children from his first marriage to Rita Martin, which ended in divorce, Martin Anthony Gravel and Lynne Denise Mosier; two sisters, Marie Lombardi and Sister Marguerite Gravel; four grandchildren and a great-grandson.In 2019, Mr. Gravel had one last political hurrah: He filed to run for president one more time, although he said he was running not to win but to qualify for the debates and “bring a critique of American imperialism to the Democratic debate stage.” He discouraged people from voting for him. His campaign was run by two teenagers, primarily on Twitter; Mr. Gravel himself had little involvement.After not qualifying for the first two debates, Mr. Gravel ended his campaign in August 2019 and announced that he would use some of his remaining campaign funds to establish a progressive think tank, the Gravel Institute.Into his later years Mr. Gravel held fast to his belief in direct democracy. He detailed his ideas for a fourth branch of the federal government, calling it the Legislature of the People, which would allow voters to pass new laws directly, circumventing in particular the Senate, which he saw as hopelessly corrupt.“What you need to have, and what I seem to have, is unreserved faith in the people,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2019. “There’s nothing else. And you can say: ‘Well, boy. That’s a stretch!’ You know what? The alternative is minority rule by the elites of society.”Adam Clymer, a reporter and editor at The Times from 1977 to 2003, died in 2018. William McDonald and Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      The Women Who Paved the Way for Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Women Who Paved the Way for Marjorie Taylor GreeneShe’s the latest descendant in a lineage of Republican women who embrace a boffo radicalism.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 7, 2021Credit…Susan Walsh/Associated PressWhen I was coming of age as a journalist, it was an article of faith — and political science — that female Republican politicians subdued their party’s excesses. It was a measurable phenomenon, even: Republican women voted to the left of their male counterparts in Congress.But as the G.O.P. began to radicalize, becoming not just a small-government party but an anti-government party — a government delegitimization party — this taming effect ceased to be. Moderates of both sexes cleared out of the building. A new swarm of firebrands rushed in. Not only did female Republican elected officials become every bit as conservative as their male counterparts; they began, in some cases, to personify the party’s most outlandish tendencies.This is the thought I keep returning to when I think about Marjorie Taylor Greene: That there is something depressingly familiar about her. She’s the latest descendant in a lineage of Republican women who embrace a boffo radicalism, who delight in making trouble and in causing offense.In her own freshman class, Greene has an outrageous comrade in Lauren Boebert, who once said she hoped QAnon was real and tried, post Jan. 6, to walk onto the House floor with her Glock.Before Greene and Boebert, there was Representative Marsha Blackburn, now a senator, who declared a preference for the title “Congressman” and co-sponsored a 2009 bill requiring presidential candidates to provide copies of their original birth certificates. (In 2019, her first year in the Senate, she was deemed its most conservative member by GovTrack.) There was Representative Michele Bachmann, who went on national television and repeated a story about the HPV vaccine supposedly causing “mental retardation”; openly fretted that President Barack Obama wanted to do away with the dollar; and called herself “a foreign correspondent on enemy lines,” reporting on the nefarious doings of the Democrats.There was Sarah Palin, who spellbound the base with her vaudevillian ad-libbing, sassy anti-intellectualism, denunciations of the lamestream media and laffy-taffy stretching of the facts. “She would say things that are simply not true, or things that were picked up from the internet,” Steve Schmidt, a former top adviser to John McCain’s 2008 campaign, told “Frontline.”Even when I was a young reporter covering Congress, the Newt Gingrich revolution ushered in a number of outrageous women who thrilled to their roles as troublemakers and conspiracists. North Carolina’s Sue Myrick wrote the foreword to “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.” Helen Chenoweth, like Blackburn, asked to be called “Congressman”; held an endangered-sockeye-salmon fund-raising bake; and said armed wildlife agents in black helicopters were invading her home state, Idaho.Michele BachmannCredit…Chris O’Meara/Associated PressMarsha BlackburnCredit…Pool photo by Stefani ReynoldsSue MyrickCredit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesElise StefanikCredit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockYou could argue that these women were in a better position to embody anti-government, populist sentiment than men. A decade ago, the Republican pollster Linda DiVall told The Atlantic that voters were more inclined to think female politicians “won’t be in the back room dealing with special interests.”Now recall Sarah Palin at the 2008 convention, railing in her Wasilla twang against “the good-old boys” brokering their secret deals. Recall Michele Bachmann in 2011, telling Jake Tapper, “What people see in me is that I’m a real person, I’m authentic.” And think of Marjorie Taylor Greene in these last couple of years, yammering on about the nefarious plots of the deep state, Jewish lasers and false flags. She’s here to tell you what’s going on in that back room — and that she’s going to put an end to it.After the 2018 midterm elections, when 10 Republican congresswomen lost their seats, New York’s Elise Stefanik (once a reasonable human being, now another Harvard Graduate for Sedition) told Republican leaders that the party had to make electing women a priority. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, agreed to help; outside groups and Stefanik’s own PAC did, too. Their efforts worked. Eighteen new Republican women showed up to the House this January.But in order to get elected, those women needed to win their primaries. And to win their primaries, they needed to present themselves as every bit as tough and conservative (socially and otherwise) as their male primary opponents — and to win over a subgroup of the electorate that historically has been less inclined to vote for women in the first place.This, in turn, led to what I think is an interesting paradox: These women are playing simultaneously into male Republican stereotypes of power — loving their guns, defending their country from the migrant hordes — and stereotypes of femininity, to reassure the Republican faithful that they’re still real women. Think of Palin, presenting herself as a mama grizzly with a shotgun. Motherhood was front and center in her self-presentation. Ditto for Lauren Boebert (mother of four, loves her Glock). Ditto for Bachmann (mother of five, partial to AR-15s).Greene loves her guns, too — so much that she was willing to harass a survivor of a school shooting, which may not have qualified as maternal behavior, now that I think of it.Hmm. Maybe we’ve rounded a corner. Maybe any kind of behavior from Republican female politicians now goes.Either way: A number of these politicians, including Palin and Bachmann, crashed and burned. But what if their evanescent political lives paved the way for more powerful male politicians?Corrine McConnaughy, a research scholar in politics at Princeton, stopped me in my tracks by asking whether Sarah Palin’s repeated complaints about the elite media made it easier for Donald Trump to frame himself as a victim of Fake News. Better for a woman to blaze the way on victimhood first, right, lest it be seen as unmanly? (Yes, Nixon also complained that the media were out to get him. But mainly in private.)Sarah PalinCredit…Mark Hirsch/Getty ImagesMcConnaughy didn’t know the answer. Neither do I. But it’s a great question. In hindsight, it certainly seems clear that folksy, populist, prevaricating Palin — a tabloid fixture and reality television star — cleared the way for Trump.Perhaps the media bear a tiny bit of responsibility for the coverage Greene is getting. We’re going through terrible outrage withdrawal. (“Have you seen CNN’s ratings recently?” Dan Senor, once an adviser to Mitt Romney, asked me not long ago.) So here is Greene, offering us a bottomless Mary-Poppins-carpet-bag of old videos that spew hate and derangement. She’s our methadone.Then again, she truly is monstrous.You can also ask whether unconscious gender bias plays a role in the coverage of Greene. Television loves a brassy hot mess. Greene’s despicable words and actions deserved censure and punishment, certainly. But it’s not as if there aren’t a ton of male Republican kooks in this Congress, too: Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks … the list is long.Me, I remain fixated on the new breed of Republican female politician that Greene continues to represent. As the political scientists Monica C. Schneider and Angela L. Bos have argued, we don’t yet have, as a culture, a firm idea of how a female elected official looks or acts, though we have stereotypes galore for male politicians (and men and women more generally).Hillary Clinton’s supporters were fond of the adage, “the future is female.” That may one day be true. But we should brace ourselves. That future may be quite different from the one we were expecting. The future often is.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story 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