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      Obama: Democrats need 'universal language' to appeal to moderate voters

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      Barack Obama has underlined his belief that Democrats should moderate campaign messaging in order to reach voters turned off by slogans including “Defund the Police”, telling a literary group: “If I spoke the language of James Baldwin as he speaks it on the campaign stump, I’m probably not gonna get a lot of votes in Iowa.”
      Baldwin, a leading 20th-century African American intellectual and the subject of the Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, “didn’t have to go out and get votes”, Obama said in interview extracts released by PEN America, which will give the former president its 2020 Voice of Influence award next week.
      Obama also said he thinks there is an opportunity for more expansive racial dialogue in the US. But his remarks may add to controversy which welled up this week when he said candidates using “snappy” slogans such as Defund the Police risked alienating voters otherwise broadly sympathetic to liberal aims.
      Defund the Police became a rallying cry on the left this summer, amid national protests for racial justice following the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, an African American man, and similar incidents in Atlanta, Kenosha and elsewhere.
      Some senior Democratic party figures, including South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, have claimed the call to Defund the Police contributed to disappointing results in Senate, House and state races.
      Obama is promoting A Promised Land, his memoir of his rise to the White House and first few years in office. Speaking to Snapchat this week, he added his voice to the chorus.
      “I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘Defund the Police’ but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it – which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” he said.
      “The key is deciding: do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?”
      In his remarks to PEN America, which will be streamed on Tuesday, Obama contrasted discussions of race in the context of “politics and getting votes” with “truth-telling and the prophetic voice”. Politicians, he said, often need to speak a “universal language” as a way to reach voters resistant to more pointed discourse about racial injustice.
      But he also allowed that the racial upheavals of 2020, coupled with generational change, may herald an era in which race can be discussed in the political realm in less nuanced terms.
      “What I think has changed – and we saw this this summer – is, because of people’s witness of George Floyd, because of what seems like a constant stream of irrefutable evidence of excessive force against unarmed Black folks, that I think white America has awakened to certain realities that even 20 years ago they were still resistant to.
      “That creates a new opening for a different kind of political conversation.”
      PEN America will also give an award, for courage, to Darnella Frazier, a young woman who filmed the killing of Floyd.

      A recent poll by political strategist Douglas Schoen, previously an adviser to Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, found that Democrats should drop references to Defund the Police if they want to be competitive in the next midterm elections, in 2022.
      “The data says to me that if the Democrats go the progressive route they can lose the House and the Senate overwhelmingly in 2022,” Schoen told the New York Post. “The incoming Biden administration has to understand that unless they take a moderate path, that is a likely potential outcome for the Democrats.”
      Asked if Biden’s victory was a “mandate” for centrist or progressive policies, 62% of respondents to Schoen’s poll said centrist. The survey also found that Defund the Police hurt the party in down-ballot races, as 35% of voters said the issue made them “less likely to vote for Democrats” while 23% said it made them more likely.
      Obama’s comments have not found support among leading progressives. Legislators including Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were quick to reject his comments to Snapchat.
      “It’s not a slogan,” tweeted Bush. “It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive.” More

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      Can dozens of new Republican congresswomen change the face of the GOP?

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      Kat Cammack was raised on a cattle ranch by a working class single mother. She was the third generation of her family to go into business as a sand blaster. And at 32, she is about to become the youngest Republican woman in the US Congress.“I think a lifetime of experiences has shaped me to be a Republican and a conservative,” said Cammack, elected to an open seat in Florida. “There has been a stereotype about the Republican party, that it was the Grand Old Party, that it was your grandfather’s political party of choice. The election in 2020 has definitely helped push back on that narrative.”Of the 12 seats in the House of Representatives that Republicans have flipped from Democratic control so far this year, nine were won by women, two by Latino men and one by an African American man. The trend represents a conscious effort by a party still dominated by white men: diversify or die.It also reflects the complexities of America’s voting demographics, which saw Trump make gains among Latinos in states such as Florida and Texas, win a majority of white women for the second time and improve his standing among African Americans. The counterintuitive data have been seen as a wake-up call for Democrats.Cammack argues that the Republican party was a natural choice for her after watching her mother try to run a small business while fending off intrusions from big government, and after the family lost their small cattle ranch in 2011 “due to an Obama-era housing programme”.She recalls: “That was really the turning point in my life where you find yourself homeless, you had a life plan and all of a sudden that is completely out the window and you have to make a choice. Do I put my head back in the sand? Do I rebuild my life and keep going down the path that I had envisioned for myself? Or do I do a hard right and get involved and try to fix the system?”Cammack duly went into politics at district and federal level and, seven years later, ran for Florida’s 3rd congressional district. She was endorsed as a “rising star” by E-Pac, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s political action committee dedicated to electing Republican women.A vocal supporter of Donald Trump, Cammack believes that Republicans’ pitch as the party of equal opportunity, not equal outcome, struck a chord whereas Democrats pushed a “government will take care of you” narrative and took some groups for granted. “Biden had several gaffes: most notably he said, ‘If you don’t vote Democrat then you’re not Black.’ What kind of ridiculous nonsense is that?“In 2016, I took heat from the left that because I was a young woman and I wasn’t supporting Hillary Clinton, I was a traitor of some sort. That is the most un-American, stereotypical sexist, racist nonsense I’ve ever heard. You should never discount someone’s individuality and basically say that they can only vote one way or for one party because they check a box.”When Cammack met other newly elected members of Congress earlier this month and swapped notes about their winning campaigns, she recalled, they all cited issues such as healthcare, the coronavirus and the economy. “We never once went out and said, ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman,’ or ‘Vote for me because I’m a millennial’.“It was always, ‘Vote for me because I’m the best person for the job and here’s why,’ and that is what is resonating with people. I think this narrative that if you are African American or if you are a minority or if you’re a woman you have to vote Democrat couldn’t be further from the truth and the results from this election prove that.”The Republican recruitment drive is starting from a low base. Eighteen months ago, just 13 of the party’s 197 House members were women. By contrast, 89 of 235 House Democrats were women and nearly 90 were Black or Latino. There is only one Black Republican in the Senate: Tim Scott of South Carolina.John Zogby, a pollster and author, said: “They’re still basically a lily-white party and they’re still a male-centered party, but let’s see if this is a formula for them. Frankly, if they have any hope at all, this is the only formula.”At least 36 Republican women will join the next Congress, beating the party’s record of 30 set in 2006. Of these, 28 will serve in the House, including at least 17 newcomers, based on results so far. Stephanie Bice, an Iranian American in Oklahoma, María Elvira Salazar, a Cuban American in Florida, and Michelle Steeland Young Kim, both Korean Americans in California, all defeated Democratic incumbents. More

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      Minnijean Brown-Trickey: the teenager who needed an armed guard to go to school

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      When Minnijean Brown-Trickey looks back at old pictures of 4 September 1957, she remembers the day her courage kicked in. “I look at the photos of the nine of us, standing there, in contrast to those crazy people,” she says. “And what I say is that they threw away their dignity and it landed on us.”Brown-Trickey, now 79, was one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of African American children to go to the city’s Central high school in September 1957 – and in doing so, desegregate it. On the teenagers’ first day at the Arkansas school, white residents were so furious they amassed in a 1,000-strong mob at the gates. In preparation, eight of the teenagers had been instructed by Daisy Bates, the leader of the Arkansas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to meet at her house, so they could travel to the school in a group. But one of the nine, Elizabeth Eckford, had no telephone and so was not told of the safety plan. Instead she was forced to run the gauntlet of the mob’s hatred alone. The pictures of the young girl encountering the baying crowd is the enduring image of that day for many. But to Brown-Trickey, despite its power, it cannot completely capture all nine children’s fear. “Still photos cannot show how we are shaking in our boots, sandwiched between the Arkansas National Guard and a mob of crazy white people,” she says.As they tried to walk into school, the children were subject to verbal abuse, spat on and denied admission. Three black journalists watching were also attacked. One, L Alex Wilson, was hit on the head with a brick, developed a nervous condition and died three years later aged only 51.It took a further three weeks for the students to actually step inside the building, thanks to fierce resistance from the Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who used the mob as a pretext for barring the nine, putting the state’s National Guard in their way. Brown-Trickey recalls how he warned of “blood in the streets” should the children be allowed to go to school. More

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      Racial segregation on US inter-state transport to end – archive, 26 Nov 1955

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      Washington, November 25The Inter-state Commerce Commission ruled to-day that racial segregation on inter-state trains and passenger buses must end by January 10, 1956. It also ruled that segregation of inter-state travellers in public waiting-rooms is unlawful.These two rulings put an end to the “separate but equal” doctrine which had guided the commission’s rulings for many years. Two months after the commission was established in 1887 it had its first case on racial discrimination. It then held that segregation would be most likely to produce peace and order and to promote “dignity of citizenship” in the United States.In to-day’s opinion the commission said that “it is hardly open to question that much progress in improved race relations has been made since then.” When the Supreme Court outlawed compulsory segregation in state schools it ruled that segregation in itself excluded the concept of equality and imposed an inferior status on these American citizens. It is this new concept which has now prevailed with the commission.In to-day’s ruling the commission said:“The disadvantage to a traveller, who is assigned accommodations or facilities so designated as to imply his inherent inferiority solely because of his race, must be regarded under present conditions as unreasonable. Also, he is entitled to be free of annoyances, some petty and some substantial, which almost inevitably accompany segregation even though the rail carriers, as most of the defendants have done here, sincerely try to provide both races with equally convenient and comfortable cars and waiting rooms.”Commissioner Johnson, of South Carolina, in a dissenting opinion, said “It is my opinion that the commission should not undertake to anticipate the Supreme Court and itself become a pioneer in the sociological field.”Precautions in GeorgiaIt should be understood that to-day’s rulings apply only to travel between states. The rulings have no effect on travel within a Southern state. Mr Eugene Cook, Attorney-General for Georgia, said he would try to use all legal procedures to maintain racial segregation “on travel within Georgia itself.” He conceded the difficulties because it is often hard to separate inter-state travellers from those travelling within the state alone. However, he had asked his legal staff to study this problem while giving first priority to Georgia’s continued resistance to a unified public school system in the state.The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People also tried to have the commission end segregation in the lunch room at the Union Station in Richmond, Virginia. The commission said that this room was operated under lease by the Union News Company, which is not itself engaged in transportation, and therefore does not come within the commission’s jurisdiction. The commission also dismissed a complaint against the Texas and Pacific Railway Company because the evidence failed to show that the case involved inter-state travel.Ten years ago, the commission authorised Southern Railways to serve Negro passengers in the dining-car behind a curtain in seats reserved exclusively for them. This method of segregation aroused intense public criticism and it was finally outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1950. To-day’s rulings are a notable advance of those started by the Court in 1950. More

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      Gary Younge on minority voters and the future of the Republican party – podcast

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      A look at the history of US voting rights and what the changing demographics of the country mean for Republicans

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Black and Latino voters overwhelmingly favoured the Democrats in the 2020 US election. Without their huge margins in key states, Joe Biden could not have won, the journalist Gary Younge tells Anushka Asthana. By 2045, white voters will be in the minority. These changing demographics are a concern for the Republican party. In 2013, just a year after turnout rates for black voters surpassed those for white voters for the first time, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which affected poor, young and minority voters. It’s important to remember, Gary tells Anushka, that the US was a slave state for more than 200 years; and an apartheid state, after the abolition of slavery, for another century. It has only been a non-racial democracy for 55 years. And that now hangs in the balance. If Biden does not produce something transformative, the disillusionment among voters may grow and people may once again look for someone who can disrupt the status quo, which is how Donald Trump won in 2016. • Read Gary Younge’s piece: Counted out: Trump’s desperate fight to stop the minority vote More

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      Barack Obama: ‘Donald Trump and I tell very different stories about America’

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      If you’re a former US president, there’s one guaranteed way to be remembered fondly – make sure you’re followed by a truly awful successor. It certainly worked for Barack Obama: you only had to mention his name these last four years to send millions of Americans (and others) into a reverie of nostalgic longing. The gulf in calibre between Donald Trump and his predecessor was so wide that each day Trump sat in the Oval Office, Obama’s reputation shone a little brighter.Not that he needed the comparison. Even before Trump took office, Obama left the White House with unusually high approval ratings: 59% of Americans thought well of him, according to Gallup – and that figure has held ever since. Outside the US, Obama recently displaced Bill Gates as the world’s most admired man, according to YouGov, which is handy as Obama is married to the world’s most admired woman.If you had to construct the unTrump, Barack Obama is what you’d come up with: cerebral and well-read; deliberative; self-critical to the point of self-doubt; a faithful husband and conspicuously devoted father. He was a chief executive whose team was so functional that, over the course of eight years, there was scarcely a leak; not a single person was forced to resign in disgrace, let alone face legal proceedings. The closest the Obama White House got to scandal was when he wore a pale “tan” suit in 2014, a look some considered unpresidential. Not for nothing did they call him “no drama Obama”.If you had to construct the unTrump, Obama is what you’d come up with: cerebral, well-read and self-criticalThere is much to criticise in his record, whether it be a covert drone war that saw 10 times the number of strikes as were authorised under George W Bush, resulting in the loss of as many as 800 civilian lives in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen – or a failure to enforce his supposed “red line” on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, a failure that Bashar al-Assad seemed to read as a licence to keep killing his own people. You can criticise Obama for failing to do enough for small-town and postindustrial America, so that people who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 voted for Trump in 2016. Still, and even taking all that into account, from the vantage point of 2020 the Obama presidency looks like a calm, flat sea before the roiling tempest of Trump.The outgoing president features only a little in Obama’s 751-page memoir, A Promised Land, which covers the period from the author’s entry into politics – winning a seat in the state senate of Illinois in 1995 – until the moment that may have ensured his re-election: the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. A second volume will address the rest. The book is written in the same voice that made Dreams From My Father a bestseller, letting the reader in on the author’s inner monologue – as Obama observes his own life as it plays out, questioning his motivations, noticing his hypocrisies.Trump’s cameo role is that of villain, the lead proponent of “birtherism”, spreading the racist smear that Obama was not really born in the US, “a conspiracy theory he almost certainly knew to be false,” Obama writes. Trump also makes an appearance as the butt of Obama’s jokes on the fateful night in 2011 when, delivering the traditional comic turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president mocked Trump as a man whose idea of an important decision was choosing between the boys’ and girls’ teams on Celebrity Apprentice. Was it that humiliation that stung Trump into seeking the presidency, just to get even? More

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      Why are politicians suddenly talking about their 'lived experience'? | Kwame Anthony Appiah

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      Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris told a TV interviewer the other day that she had promised Joe Biden that she would always share with him her “lived experience, as it relates to any issue that we confront”. That sounded comforting, but should it? This expression has a fairly standard application among qualitative sociologists, where it comes up in work that explores individual subjectivity. How to record and communicate “lived experience” has been a topic of earnest professional debate, sometimes involving appeals to the philosophical traditions of phenomenology. Yet the future vice-president assuredly wasn’t promising a former vice-president to deliver the results of a technical sociological method applied to her own case.
      Needless to say, the expression has, over the past decade or so, escaped the academy and assumed a somewhat different set of meanings. At first, it tended to designate firsthand experiences that were specific to women, minorities and other vulnerable groups. During last year’s Democratic primaries in the United States, one supporter of Julián Castro (who served in Barack Obama’s cabinet) was quoted saying: “It is important to have somebody who has the lived experience of being a brown person in this country on that stage – a dark-skinned Latino man.” Yet semantic sprawl had already set in; it turns out that “ordinary people” could be in possession of lived experience, too. Elizabeth Warren, before her run in the primaries, said that politicians such asBarack Obama, being overly impressed with hopeful economic statistics, were blind to “the lived experiences of most Americans”. Pete Buttigieg, another contender, remarked that when Democrats were over-focused on Trump-bashing, “it didn’t seem like we were talking about the lived experience of Americans”. If you were the sort of person who felt estranged from the coastal elites, it emerged, you, too, might have lived experience.
      And what made the phrase so powerful was the unappealable authority it seemed to represent. As Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, that most American of poems, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” You can debate my sociopolitical analyses – those facts and interpretations are shared and public – but not my lived experience. Lived experience isn’t something you argue, it’s something you have.
      Yet if lived experience was once viewed as a way to speak truth to power, power has learned to speak “lived experience” with remarkable fluency. Consider what happened when, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, Senate Republicans set out to counter a Democratic bill for police reform with a milder proposal of their own, one backed by Senator Tim Scott, from South Carolina. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, declared: “It’s a straightforward plan based on facts, on data and lived experience” – the lived experience evidently supplied by Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate. Somehow the lived experience of Cory Booker, the black senator who introduced a Democratic police reform bill, offered different lessons.
      Experience, alas, is never unmediated and self-interpreting. Ideology, though it can be shaped by experience, also shapes our experiences. The twins Shelby Steele and Claude Steele – a former professor of English and a professor of psychology – draw on their lived experience to produce opposite pictures of the black American condition. Claude has emphasised the detrimental effects of racial stereotypes; Shelby sees the real threat in efforts, such as affirmative action, to remedy racial disparities. Justice Clarence Thomas, a black conservative, draws from his lived experience to confirm a bootstrapping position (If I can make it, so can you), just as the late Congressman John Lewis, hero of the civil rights left, could do so to confirm the need for social intervention (I almost didn’t make it). There’s no guarantee what message people will take from their experience: no guarantee that we’ll all be singing the Song of Myself in the same key.
      When we’re thinking about policy, then, how much weight should we give to private experience? Pressed to explain what she had in mind, Harris listed some elements of her biography: growing up a black child in the US, serving as a prosecutor, having a mother who was a teenage immigrant from India. There’s no doubt, of course, that these are the sorts of experiences from which a person could learn a great deal. And stories drawn from our own experience can be powerful ways of recounting what we have learned. But identities are too multiple and complex to allow any individual’s experience to count as truly representative.
      Take being black. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an immigrant because she was studying at Berkeley, and she went on to be a university professor at McGill in Canada. Her father, born in Jamaica, is an emeritus economics professor from Stanford. Harris has doubtless experienced racial discrimination: in the US, that’s almost guaranteed for a person from an ethnic minority who spends any time out of the house. But her upper-middle-class upbringing, not to mention the fact that she spent five years of her teens in Canada, means that being black has affected her differently than it would someone who came from a background of modest education and means.
      The point isn’t that being middle class means you’re not an “authentic” black person. It’s that, as with all of us, her experience has been particular. People who have served as prosecutors will be found on the left, the centre, and the right. And the children of some Indian immigrants to the US will have voted enthusiastically for Donald Trump. There isn’t a black experience, shared by all black people, or an Indian immigrant experience, shared by the children of immigrants from India, or even a prosecutor’s experience, shared by all prosecutors.
      What makes the invocation of lived experience such a powerful move – the fact that it’s essentially private, removed from inspection – is exactly what makes it such a perilous one. No doubt a story about an injustice you’ve experienced, or a positive story about a state school or a public hospital, may be more powerful than some abstract evocation of equality. Still, people across the ideological spectrum will have their own perceptions of injustice, their own stories of public-sector success or failure. And so I hope the vice-president-elect will offer, alongside her lived experience, her considered judgment. We go wrong when we treat personal history as revelation, to be elevated above facts and reflection. Talk of lived experience should be used not to end conversation but to begin them.
      Kwame Anthony Appiah is professor of philosophy and law at New York University and author of In My Father’s House More

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      'Whatever it takes': how Black women fought to mobilize America's voters

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      [embedded content]
      Even before networks projected the presidential race for Joe Biden last Saturday, Wanda Mosley, a 50-year-old organizer based in Atlanta, Georgia, began to prepare to mobilize voters for her state’s two critical Senate runoff elections on 5 January.
      After one of the most turbulent presidential elections in US history, the two races in the battleground state will determine if the balance of power in Washington will fall to the president-elect once he is sworn into office. Georgia has yet to be called for Biden, a Democrat, though he currently leads Donald Trump, which motivates organizers such as Mosley who until early December will continue to register voters planning to vote in the January runoffs.
      “We understand fully how important these races are,” says Mosley, the senior state coordinator for Georgia’s Black Voters Matter, a nonprofit dedicated to voter engagement.
      “We’re still here. We’re still working,” Mosley said.
      Democrats have long pointed to Black voters, more specifically, Black women, as a crucial voting bloc, decisive to elections since former president Bill Clinton’s victories in the 1990s. But this November, successfully flipping the southern, Republican-led state of Georgia to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years has drawn attention to the organizational power of Black women, whose large-scale mobilization efforts appear to have resulted in massive turnout among people of color in those cities, experts say.
      “What might have been different is the greater role of on the ground mobilization and voter registration efforts in states like Georgia, and I think that that was the effort that was largely built by Stacey Abrams and others on the ground,” said Jamil Scott, an assistant professor in the government department at Georgetown University.
      Rather than rely on outside political consultants swarming into battleground states, Abrams, who lost to the Republican Governor Brian Kemp in 2018, led that charge in Georgia this year, says Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a national network advocating for women of color in politics. There was a 69% increase in voter turnout among women of color in Georgia this year compared to 2016, according to Allison, who cites data She the People analyzed from progressive data firm Catalist.
      “You have a group of voters of Black women who are the most effective organizers on the ground because they are trusted voices and are working in organizations year round. They don’t come in six weeks before and kind of rent out a storefront, they’re actually invested in, long-term, empowering the community through civic and political action,” she said.
      In America, this election year has not played out in a vacuum. Rather, it has been met with – and compounded by – America’s year of reckoning with police brutality and systemic inequality, which has driven even more people to vote.
      Thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths earlier this year as the Black community also shouldered the disproportionate impact of Covid-19. The meeting of those moments spurred political mobilization among Black voters, says Tim Stevens, the CEO of Pittsburgh’s Black Political Empowerment Project, a non-profit voting rights organization based in Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, where Trump was swiftly defeated last week.
      “The tragedies … made what was already present in the heart of Black people and people of color even more evident and more urgent,” said Stevens.
      Those mobilization efforts were evident as ballots were counted in diverse urban centers in key states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania where large populations of Black voters in Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia helped push Biden towards victory.
      Then there were a number of prominent Black women in leadership roles – like Abrams, Nikema Williams, who took on John Lewis’s congressional seat and is chair of Georgia’s state Democratic party, and Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms – helped fuel mobilization efforts among Black women this election, suggests Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor of political science and the chair of the department of Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame.
      One organizer in Pennsylvania points to the most prominent: the first Black and south Asian American vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris. “We had the same feelings we had when Obama was first elected,”says Brittany Smalls, the Pennsylvania state coordinator for Black Voters Matter. “We just never thought we would see the day that a woman in leadership looks like us.”

      Kamala Harris
      (@KamalaHarris)
      I want to speak directly to the Black women in our country. Thank you. You are too often overlooked, and yet are asked time and again to step up and be the backbone of our democracy. We could not have done this without you.

      November 9, 2020

      Now, as Americans across the country shift their attention away from the presidential race and to the runoff elections in Georgia, organizers like Mosley say they are keen to build on their success, in an election that could ultimately determine what kind of presidency Joe Biden will have.
      “This is the culmination of years and years and years of work, when other people didn’t think it was possible,” said Mosley. “We know how important the Senate is, and so if we can play a role in getting one – or possibly two seats – to try to shift that balance of power, you need to understand that Black women will do whatever it takes.”
      This piece was published in partnership between the Guardian and The Fuller Project. More