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    There Will Always Be a Trump. That’s Only Part of the Problem.

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    Because we forget history, we forget that the American experiment cannot succeed without constant, courageous leadership. Our nation is not inherently good and our high ideals are often eclipsed by our baser nature. This has been true since our founding, and it is true now.We also know that if American ideals depend on a single party for their protection, then that effort is doomed to fail. It’s not that America is one election from extinction. Our nation is not that fragile. But it can regress. It can forsake its ideals. And millions of people can suffer as a result.I’m writing those words in the context of a presidential contest that already represents a national failure. Even if Kamala Harris wins on Tuesday, there should be relief, not lasting joy. The United States will have come within an eyelash of electing a man who tried to overturn an election to cling to power.While Donald Trump’s individual actions were unprecedented, the idea that a critical mass of Americans would embrace a demagogue should not be a surprise.Last week, I helped host a fireside chat with Susan Eisenhower, the founder and expert in residence at the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College. She’s also Dwight D. Eisenhower’s granddaughter. During our conversation, she told a story that I’d forgotten — one with direct relevance to the present moment.In the aftermath of World War II, there was intense interest in General Eisenhower’s potential political career. He’d never voted before he left the Army in 1948. Both parties courted him, but the Republican Party needed him.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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      Photographing Every President Since Reagan

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      Doug Mills reflects on nearly 40 years of taking photos of presidents.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Through his camera lens, Doug Mills has seen it all: George H.W. Bush playing horseshoes. An emotional Barack Obama. A shirtless Bill Clinton. And he’s shared what he’s seen with the world.Mr. Mills, a veteran photographer, has captured pictures of every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan. His portfolio includes images of intimate conversations, powerful podium moments and scenes now seared into the American consciousness — like the face of President George W. Bush, realizing that America was under attack while he was reading to schoolchildren.Mr. Mills began his photography career at United Press International before joining The Associated Press. Then, in 2002, he was hired at The New York Times, where his latest assignment has been trailing former President Donald J. Trump. In July, Mr. Mills captured the moment a bullet flew past Mr. Trump’s head at a rally in Butler, Pa., and then a photo of Mr. Trump, ear bloodied, raising his fist.Over the past four decades, cameras and other tools have changed the job considerably, he said. While he once used 35mm SLR film cameras (what photographers used for decades), he now travels with multiple Sony mirrorless digital cameras, which are silent and can shoot at least 20 frames per second. He used to lug around portable dark rooms; now he can transmit images to anywhere in the world directly from his camera, via Wi-Fi or an Ethernet cable, in a matter of seconds.But it’s not just the technology that has changed. Campaigns are more image-driven than ever before, he said, thanks to social media, TV ads and coverage that spans multiple platforms. Not to mention, it’s a nonstop, 24-hour news cycle. He likens covering an election year to a monthslong Super Bowl.“It consumes your life, but I love it,” Mr. Mills said. “I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”Mr. Mills, who on election night will be with Mr. Trump at a watch party in Palm Beach, Fla., shared how one image of each president he’s photographed throughout his career came together. — Megan DiTrolioWe 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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      John Hinckley Jr. and the Madness of American Political Violence

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      In September 2016, three and a half decades after he shot President Ronald Reagan in a deranged bid to impress the actress Jodie Foster — a crime for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity — John W. Hinckley Jr. was released from St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. From there, he moved to Williamsburg, Va., where he lived for some years with his elderly mother, Jo Ann, in a large house overlooking the 13th hole of a golf course. The federal court that granted his release did so on certain conditions. One of these was that he must not speak to the media. Another was that Hinckley, who was a songwriter for some years before the failed assassination attempt, and who continued to play music as part of his psychiatric treatment, must not release for public consumption, even anonymously, any of his work, without the specific approval of the treatment team entrusted with his care.After his arrest, Hinckley was diagnosed with, among other conditions, atypical psychosis and severe narcissistic personality disorder; his extravagantly strange and violent actions had been bound up in a toxic fascination with celebrity and an egomaniacal glee at the fame those actions brought him. Although Hinckley’s treatment was successful, and the judge was satisfied that he presented a very low risk of reoffending, the restrictions were intended to ensure that he neither courted nor was courted by the media and that his mental stability would not be threatened in the immediate aftermath of his release by widespread attention.In 2022, not long after his mother died, the last of those restrictions were lifted. More than four decades after shooting Ronald Reagan — along with a Secret Service agent named Timothy McCarthy, a police officer named Thomas Delahanty and Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, who was left permanently disabled — he was, at 67 years of age, truly free. Hinckley had by then opened a Twitter account and amassed thousands of followers. On June 15, 2022, the day the restrictions were lifted, he posted the following: “After 41 years 2 months and 15 days, FREEDOM AT LAST!!!” His following grew, and he quickly began to use his platform to release music and promote upcoming gigs. He announced a total of a dozen performances. Unsurprisingly, these shows got a lot of attention and began to sell out. But every single one of them was canceled before he could play, as a result of backlash, including anonymous threatening emails, received by the venues.This made Hinckley a figure of prurient interest on social media. When he posted about his excitement for an upcoming show, for instance, along with a selfie in which he stared directly at the camera with a glazed and entirely affectless expression, the replies were a chorus of ironic quips and jokes. Someone replied with a GIF of Travis Bickle clapping — a reference to Hinckley’s infamous inspiration for his crime, an obsession with “Taxi Driver” and with Jodie Foster, who played the teenage prostitute Iris in the film. “Haven’t heard his new stuff but I like his earlier work,” read another. (Jokes about Hinckley’s “early work” follow him everywhere online.) For a majority of people who encountered his internet presence, Hinckley was an absurd and quintessentially American aberration: a guy who shot, and very nearly killed, the president and was somehow still alive to sing his songs about peace and love and redemption.Hinckley at his office in Williamsburg, Va., in June.Stefan Ruiz for The New York TimesThen, 43 years after that near assassination, in Butler, Pa., a 20-year-old loner named Thomas Matthew Crooks took several shots at Donald Trump with a semiautomatic rifle, wounding the former president’s right ear and plunging an already dark and chaotic world even deeper into darkness and chaos. Hinckley now became the focus of a different kind of interest. After the shooting, he posted the following message on the platform now known as X: “Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance.” He was quoting his old hero John Lennon, who was himself murdered by a strange and sick and lonely young man with a gun. The tweet provoked a by-now predictable response. There were GIFs of Jodie Foster looking haunted (“Hope she sees this bro”) and of Travis Bickle talking to himself in the mirror. There was an article in The Guardian headlined “Man Who Tried to Assassinate Reagan Says ‘Violence Is Not the Way to Go.’ ” Mostly, people seemed to be able to respond to the message only as evidence of the further derangement of things.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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      Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last

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      President Biden may owe his place in the top third to his predecessor: Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office.President Biden has not had a lot of fun perusing polls lately. He has a lower approval rating than every president going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower at this stage of their tenures, and he trails former President Donald J. Trump in a fall rematch. But Mr. Biden can take solace from one survey in which he is way out in front of Mr. Trump.A new poll of historians coming out on Presidents’ Day weekend ranks Mr. Biden as the 14th-best president in American history, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Ulysses S. Grant. While that may not get Mr. Biden a spot on Mount Rushmore, it certainly puts him well ahead of Mr. Trump, who places dead last as the worst president ever.Indeed, Mr. Biden may owe his place in the top third in part to Mr. Trump. Although he has claims to a historical legacy by managing the end of the Covid pandemic; rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure; and leading an international coalition against Russian aggression, Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Mr. Trump from the Oval Office.“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” wrote Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus, the college professors who conducted the survey and announced the results in The Los Angeles Times.Mr. Trump might not care much what a bunch of academics think, but for what it’s worth he fares badly even among the self-identified Republican historians. Finishing 45th overall, Mr. Trump trails even the mid-19th-century failures who blundered the country into a civil war or botched its aftermath like James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce and Andrew Johnson.Judging modern-day presidents, of course, is a hazardous exercise, one shaped by the politics of the moment and not necessarily reflective of how history will look a century from now. Even long-ago presidents can move up or down such polls depending on the changing cultural mores of the times the surveys are conducted.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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      My Father, Ronald Reagan, Would Weep for America

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      The night before my father died, Ronald Reagan, I listened to his breathing — ragged, thin. Nothing like that of the athletic man who rode horses, built fences at the ranch, constructed jumps from old phone poles, cut back shrubs along riding trails. Or of the man who lifted his voice to the overcast sky and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”Time and history folded over themselves inside me, distant memories somersaulting with more recent realities — the 10 years of his journey into the murky world of Alzheimer’s and my determination to abandon the well-worn trail of childhood complaints and forge a new path. To be blunt, I had resolved to grow the hell up.I can still remember how it felt to be his child, though, and how the attention he paid to America and its issues made me jealous.Long before my father ran for office, politics sat between us at the dinner table. The conversations were predictable: Big government was the problem, the demon, the thing America had to be wary of. I hated those conversations. I wanted to talk about the boy who bullied me on the school bus, not government overreach.In time I came to resent this country for claiming so much of him. Yet today, it’s his love for America that I miss most. His eyes often welled with tears when “America the Beautiful” was played, but it wasn’t just sentiment. He knew how fragile democracy is, how easily it can be destroyed. He used to tell me about how Germany slid into dictatorship, the biggest form of government of all.I wish so deeply that I could ask him about the edge we are teetering on now, and how America might move out of its quagmire of anger, its explosions of hatred. How do we break the cycle of violence, both actual and verbal? How do we cross the muddy divides that separate us, overcome the partisan rancor that drives elected officials to heckle the president in his State of the Union address? When my father was shot, Tip O’Neill, then speaker of the House and always one of his most devoted political opponents, came into his hospital room and knelt down to pray with him, reciting the 23rd Psalm. Today a gesture like that seems impossible.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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      Trump’s Carter Problems vs. Biden’s Reagan Possibilities

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      The low approval rating and various political headwinds for President Biden have invited comparisons with another first-term Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, and the challenges he faced running for re-election in 1980. Many Republicans are thinking about his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, bullish that Donald Trump also has what it takes to oust a flagging incumbent.It is true that the 2024 race is shaping up to be a 1980 replay of sorts, but with an important twist. The more significant comparisons could be between Mr. Trump and Mr. Carter and their difficulty in winning over voters and, even more, between Mr. Biden and Mr. Reagan and their attempts to address doubts about their age — which are flaring again for Mr. Biden.To be sure, Carter-Biden comparisons are real: Mr. Biden’s third-year job approval average was the lowest for a sitting president since Mr. Carter’s, and Americans were dissatisfied with the economy and with the direction of the country under both men.But what became increasingly clear throughout 1980 was that there was a ceiling on voter support for Mr. Carter. The electorate had already decided it didn’t want to give him a second term. Mr. Carter’s job approval at the end of March was close to his final 41 percent share of the vote in November.In this year’s race, it is Mr. Trump who closely resembles Mr. Carter in the most important ways, including his ceiling of political support.For one, the most galvanizing and divisive figures in 1980 and today were Mr. Carter and Mr. Trump. As with Mr. Carter, most voters have firm opinions about Mr. Trump. His ability to inspire his base is matched only by his ability to alienate the rest of the electorate — as evidenced by the Republican Party taking beatings in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections.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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      The Fed’s Decisions Now Could Alter the 2024 Elections

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      The state of the economy will affect voting next November, and the Federal Reserve may find itself in a delicate position, our columnist says.What’s happening in the economy now will have a big effect — perhaps, a decisive one — on the presidential election and control of Congress in 2024.To a remarkable extent, the economy is what matters to voters, so much so that one long-running election model relies on economic data to produce accurate predictions without even considering the identities, personalities, popularity or policies of candidates, or the strategies, messaging or dirty tricks of their campaigns.Right now, that model, created and run by Ray Fair, a Yale economist, shows that the 2024 national elections are very much up for grabs.The economy is strong enough for the incumbent Democrats to win the popular vote for the presidency and Congress next year, Professor Fair’s projections find. But it’s not a slam dunk. Persistent — though declining — inflation also gives the Republicans a reasonable chance of victory, the model shows. Both outcomes are within the model’s margin for error.It means small shifts in the economy could have an outsize influence on the next elections. That could put the Federal Reserve in a hot spot, even if the central bank tries to avoid it.The Fed strives to be independent. But policymakers’ decisions over the next 12 months could conceivably decide the elections.The Fair ModelProfessor Fair’s pioneering U.S. elections model does something that was fairly radical when he created it in the 1970s.It analyzes politics without really considering politics.Instead, Professor Fair focuses on economic growth, inflation and unemployment. With a few tweaks through the years, he has used economics to analyze elections since 1978, based on data for elections going back to 1916.What he’s found is that the economy sets the climate for national elections. The candidates and the political parties must live within it.Professor Fair makes his econometric models available on his website as teaching tools.“I encourage people to plug in their own assumptions and see how that will change the outcome,” he said.Professor Fair doesn’t even try to predict final election results. Just for a start, he doesn’t do state-by-state tallies or electoral college projections, or examine the potential impact of third-or fourth-party candidacies.But what his model does extremely well is provide a standard, historically based framework for understanding economic effects on the popular vote for the two main American political parties.What the model is showing is that the economy’s surprisingly strong growth and low unemployment since the start of the Biden presidency have already helped the incumbents considerably, while the uncomfortably high inflation levels during the period have helped the Republicans. Based on the history embedded in the model, if these critical economic factors shift, there’s room for a decisive change in the popular vote. But probably not much room.The Inflation EffectThere was jubilation on Wall Street over the past week over the positive news about inflation. The overall Consumer Price Index for October dropped to 3.2 percent annually from 3.7 percent the previous month — and from a peak, in this business cycle, of 9.1 percent in June 2022. At the same time, core inflation, which excludes fuel and food prices, fell to 4 percent in October, the smallest increase since September 2021.Inflation is still running well above the Fed’s target of 2 percent, but it’s declining, and traders are assuming that, at the very least, Fed officials won’t need to raise interest rates at their next meeting, in December. And there’s more.The Wall Street consensus, which is captured by the futures market, is that further encouraging inflation news will be coming, and that the Fed will start lowering rates by the spring. The sooner the Fed acts, this thinking goes, the more likely it is that a significant increase in unemployment — and a full-blown recession — can be avoided.There are political implications.Because interest rate cuts have lagged effects on the economy, the sooner such cuts occurred, the more likely it would be that the economy surged before next year’s election. An increase in economic growth in the first nine months of an election year — without a spike in unemployment — would help the presidential incumbent’s party, Professor Fair’s model shows. (If Republicans controlled the White House now, strong economic growth would help them more than it does the Democrats, history and the Fair model suggest.)On the other hand, a decline in inflation won’t help the Democrats much at this stage, Professor Fair said, because high inflation has already been baked into the vote prediction — and, presumably, into voters’ consciousness. The model averages the first 15 quarters — or 45 months — of a presidential administration, and we are already in the 11th quarter of the Biden presidency.For the overall inflation effect to diminish considerably, the basic math requires actual sustained deflation — a continuing fall in prices — in the months ahead. Historically, that has only happened during major economic declines, accompanied by soaring unemployment, as was the case in the Great Depression. A major recession would probably mean a Democratic debacle next year.A Looming NightmareBut a major recession in the next 12 months is not the consensus view among economists or in financial markets.Instead, a more benign prospect beckons. The probability of a “soft landing” — a decline in inflation without a recession — has grown in most forecasters’ estimations.But for the political outlook and for the Fed, the timing is tricky.A growth surge that is not accompanied by a big increase in unemployment would help the incumbent party, and large rate cuts by the Fed might well set off more economic growth. But the Fed will be reluctant to start reducing interest rates while inflation is still above 3 percent. Instead, as long as inflation is high, the Fed has vowed to keep interest rates “higher for longer,” and, in effect, it already has.Since July, short-term rates have stayed above 5.25 percent, mortgage rates are still above 7.5 percent and consumer borrowing is straitened. The longer this goes on, the greater the chances of a calamity in the financial system. Yet if the Fed eases interest rates too soon, and sets off another wave of inflation, the damage to its already tarnished reputation as an effective inflation-fighter would be severe.So the Fed is in a difficult spot. If the central bank doesn’t start to lower interest rates by the summer, it could be reluctant to do so at all in the autumn, because it would inevitably be seen as taking a partisan stance.As Ian Shepherdson, chief economist of the research firm Pantheon Macroeconomics, said in an online discussion, “there’s a lot hanging on the timing” of the inflation data in the weeks ahead. If the inflation issue isn’t resolved soon, he said, we will have to deal with “the nightmare of whether the Fed wants to be starting a shift in the policy cycle as the election approaches.”Incumbent presidents always want the economy to look great on Election Day. The one case in which it is well documented that a president put pressure on a Federal Reserve chairman to cut rates — and the central bank did so — involved President Richard M. Nixon and Arthur F. Burns in late 1971 and 1972. Mr. Nixon didn’t limit his improper actions to browbeating the Fed. There was also the Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, and the subsequent cover up. An investigation revealed the secret White House taping system — which recorded Mr. Nixon’s rough treatment of Mr. Burns.But there is substantial evidence of other instances of presidents and their emissaries trying to influence the Fed, without success. President Donald J. Trump repeatedly berated the current Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, for not lowering rates sufficiently. President Lyndon B. Johnson bullied William McChesney Martin to the point of physically manhandling him. And Paul Volcker revealed that, in President Ronald Reagan’s presence, James Baker, the chief of staff, told Mr. Volcker that the president “wants to give you an order”: Don’t raise rates as the 1984 election approaches. Mr. Volcker said Mr. Reagan looked on silently.In an oral history, Mr. Volcker said the meeting occurred in the White House library, not the Oval Office, probably to protect the president. “Whatever taping machines they had were probably not in the library,” Mr. Volcker said. “I didn’t want to say that we were going to raise rates,” Mr. Volcker recalled, “because we weren’t so as near as I can recall, I said nothing.”Mr. Powell has said he considers Mr. Volcker to be a role model. Generous and forthcoming in private conversations, Mr. Volcker was sometimes taciturn in public. It will be wise to emulate that reticence at critical moments in the months ahead.The Fed needs to be seen as independent and tough, and to squelch inflation, as Mr. Volcker did. Then, quite likely, it will need to cut rates aggressively to help the economy.The calendar may not cooperate. The tougher the Fed is now, the more delicate its position will become as the election approaches. More

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      Are We Looking at George H.W. Biden?

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      When you played second fiddle to a revered, charismatic, transformative president who chose you as his running mate not because you dazzled him but because you dully rounded him out, not because he saw you as the party’s future but because you were a link to its past, can you ever shine as brightly as you deserve to?When you’ve been in government forever and almost everything about you smacks of tradition, can you beat back complaints that you’re out of touch and sweet-talk voters who are soured on the status quo?George H.W. Bush, running for a second term more than three decades ago, couldn’t.Joe Biden, running for a second term now, is about to find out.Among Democrats justly nervous about Biden’s poll numbers and rightly angry about the dearth of respect he gets, it has recently been popular — and consoling — to compare him to a different commander in chief, the one for whom he served as vice president, Barack Obama. At this point in Obama’s first term, surveys strongly suggested that he would lose his re-election effort.Voters in late 2011 shortchanged Obama on credit for steering the nation out of the 2008 housing bust and recession, just as voters in late 2023 are shortchanging Biden for steering the nation out of the pandemic. They didn’t wrestle seriously with whether Obama merited a renewal on his White House lease until much closer to Election Day, and they won’t give Biden an accurate report card any sooner, or so the thinking goes. It also holds that once Obama focused on his campaign, he was able to cast his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, as an unacceptable choice. When Biden buckles down, he’ll do the same to his likely Republican rival, Donald Trump. Heck, he already did it in 2020.I’d buy that forecast — I want nothing more than for it to be true — but for a few pesky details. Obama was 50 then. Biden is 80 now. Obama, our first Black president, still had the perfume of history around him. Biden has no such bouquet. And the Tea Party of Obama’s era may have been a precursor to our MAGA moment, but it was a firecracker beside this dynamite, as the wreckage at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, showed. We live, and quiver, in more explosive times.The Bush-Biden parallels come easier. George H.W. Biden has a plausibility that Barack Biden doesn’t.Admittedly, it’s not a tidy fit, for a range of reasons: The first President Bush immediately succeeded his boss, Ronald Reagan, so it was as if the same presidency went on and on, while there were four years between Obama and Biden, who represented not a continuation of the Obama administration but a merciful reprieve from the Trump interruption. “Poppy Bush” had a famously patrician aura, while “Scranton Joe” is a scruffier sort.Then there’s the biggest difference of all. Bush faced an idealistic Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton, who presented a much younger, fresher face and whose liabilities didn’t include 91 felony charges tracing a contempt for democracy and appetite for insurrection. A vote for Clinton wasn’t a gesture of furious protest or expression of acrid contempt.Biden is staring at a nihilistic Republican opponent who raged through the West Wing once already and, to cleareyed voters, is an autocrat in waiting. A vote for Trump is like a civic suicide pact.Do the election results from Tuesday reflect an awareness of that? Democrats did very, very well: Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, a Democrat in a deep-red state, secured a second term. Democrats won control of both chambers of the Virginia legislature. Ohioans rejected Republican calls for limits on abortion, enshrining reproductive rights in the state constitution.“Democracy won and MAGA lost,” Biden said in a statement distributed by his re-election campaign. “It’s what we’ve always said. Voters vote. Polls don’t.”That’s indisputable. But there are nonetheless facets of Biden’s circumstances that prompt flashbacks to Bush during the 1992 race for the White House.The questions about whether Vice President Kamala Harris is a drag on Biden and should be replaced have nothing on the questions about whether Vice President Dan Quayle was a drag on Bush and had to go. Time magazine published a whole cover story on the dump-Dan movement, complete with a list of promising alternatives that included one Dick Cheney, then the defense secretary. And the dumping was seen as especially important because the president’s age made the possibility of the vice president’s ascent to the Oval Office seem very real. Sound familiar?Bush struggled to please a fractious Republican Party, its divisions clear in the primary challenge mounted by Pat Buchanan. Biden struggles to please a fractious Democratic Party, its divisions clear in the fact that 22 Democrats just joined House Republicans in voting to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, for her remarks about Israel.And those divisions matter more in the context of something else that Biden shares with Bush: “Biden is the first person elected president since George H.W. Bush without a political base,” Doug Sosnik, a political strategist who worked in the Clinton administration, told me. “Bush got elected basically as a Reagan third term, and Biden got elected as a vote against Trump.”By a “base,” Sosnik means a large core group of passionate supporters who see the candidate as more than just the best option available, who will stick with the candidate through thick and thin. Reagan and Obama had that. Trump has that, which is why the other Republican candidates for president can’t muscle him out of the frame.“A base is critical, because it becomes the foundation from which they’re able to persuade the remaining voters,” Sosnik added. “It’s critical because of the inevitable ebbs and flows when you’re in office — when things aren’t going well. It’s critical because it creates a higher floor for your support.”Bush hoped that his experience on the world stage and proven stewardship of tricky international relations — his elder statesman bona fides — might counteract voters’ dissatisfaction with the economy. There’s a similar wish in Biden’s camp, and it makes Bush’s experience in 1992 not just an interesting point of reference but also an instructive one, with an important lesson: Fail to project extreme attentiveness to Americans’ financial anxieties at your electoral peril. They want their pain felt.And it’s tough for a longtime Washington insider who lives in the bubble of the presidency to project that he’s sufficiently in touch. That required more intense and sustained effort than Bush managed in his day, and Biden will have to do better than “Bidenomics,” a nifty but nebulous portmanteau.Not that Trump is some exquisitely sensitive man of the people! He is, however, the challenger, and even with his own stint as president behind him, he represents change. Biden embodies continuity, which is often the harder sell, and an aged incumbent is a vulnerable creature. Bush learned as much. For all of our sakes, Biden should study that history.For the Love of SentencesA yak.Getty ImagesIn a recent essay about aging in The Washington Post, Anne Lamott fashioned one memorable sentence after another: “Getting older is almost like changing species, from cute middle-aged white-tailed deer to yak. We are both grass eaters, but that’s about the only similarity.” “Some weeks, it feels as though there is a sniper in the trees, picking off people we have loved for years. It breaks your heart, but as Carly Simon sang, there is more room in a broken heart. My heart is the roomiest it has ever been.” “In my experience, most of us age away from brain and ambition toward heart and soul, and we bathe in relief that things are not worse.” (Thanks to Melissa France of Flemington, N.J., and Steve Aldrich of Minneapolis, among others, for nominating passages from Lamott’s essay.)On her website The Marginalian, the Bulgarian essayist Maria Popova wrote: “We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.” Had she just seen “Oppenheimer”? (Jo Radner, Lovell, Maine)In the unsigned Lexington column of The Economist (which I happen to know is written by my former Times boss and colleague James Bennet), there was this description of the G.O.P. in 2016, when Donald Trump was its presidential nominee, versus 2012, when Mitt Romney was: “The Republicans’ swing in four years to Mr. Trump from Mr. Romney seems neck-snapping even now; it was a kind of penance in reverse, a brawling, bankrupting bender in a strip club after a quiet morning in the pews.” Give me the pews. (Roger Tellefsen, Berwyn, Pa.)In Slate, Luke Winkie marveled at the athleticism of Cooper Flagg, a precocious 16-year-old who recently joined the Duke basketball team. I didn’t understand all of Winkie’s terms — I’m a perversely but proudly stubborn naïf when it comes to college basketball — but could appreciate the writing even so: “At 6-foot-8 and still growing, Flagg can protect the rim, he can drift out for threes, he possesses a silky handle, and he can absolutely yam on any of the puny teenagers who step in the lane on his way to the basket. Flagg’s highlight mixtapes are downright gratuitous — look at him reducing these poor kids into piles of gristle and bone! It should honestly come with a content warning.” (Matthew Dallett, Brooklin, Maine)In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rendered a damning (and furry!) judgment of the organization that oversees college sports: “Handing the N.C.A.A. an investigation is like throwing a Frisbee to an elderly dog. Maybe you get something back. Maybe the dog lies down and chews a big stick.” (Paul Shikany, the Bronx)In The Times, David Streitfeld summarized the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried: “It’s impossible to read the sad saga of Mr. Bankman-Fried without thinking he, and many of those around him, would have been better off if they had spent less time at math camp and more time in English class. Sometimes in books, the characters find their moral compass; in the best books, the reader does, too.” (Paula Huguenin, Collex, Switzerland, and Christine Thielman, Arlington, Mass.)Also in The Times, David French puzzled over the supposed religiousness of Republicans like Speaker Mike Johnson, contrasting him with another Republican, Mike Pence: “One Christian man tells the truth, and it kills his career. Another Christian man helps lead one of the most comprehensively dishonest and dangerous political and legal efforts in American history, and he gets the speaker’s gavel.” (Phil Ryburn, Seattle)Also from that column: “This is precisely indicative of the political ruthlessness that’s overtaken evangelical Republicans. They are inflexible about policy positions even when the Bible is silent or vague. They are flexible about morality even when the Bible is clear.” (Joel Parkes, Altadena, Calif., and Michelle Cheatham, Calgary, Alberta, among others)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Writing, Watching and DoingJoe Raedle/Getty ImagesIn advance of the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, I talked with the polling analyst Nate Silver and Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor in chief of Reason, about the 2024 election. You can read our online political round table here.Chris Christie’s composure amid the jeers when he appeared at the Florida Freedom Summit on Saturday was neither any surprise nor any great credit to him: He has spent enough time in public life and dished out enough that he should be able to take it. But the accuracy and bluntness with which he called the puerile hecklers on their behavior and told them precisely how they were degrading themselves and the country were beautiful to behold: a firm spanking of the noblest order. Please watch.I’m excited to welcome my Times colleague Wesley Morris, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, to Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy on Monday, Nov. 20. That evening, I’ll interview him at an event open to the public, so if you’ll be in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, please consider popping by. Here are the details.On a Personal NoteDamon Winter/The New York TimesThe day after his election as the new speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson gave his first extended interview — on Fox News, of course — and said this: “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.”Those remarks drew enormous scrutiny, including from my Times colleague David French, who cited them in his excellent column — mentioned above — about the fickleness and hollowness of many Republicans’ professed religiousness.But while most commentators focused on the glimmers of Christian nationalism in Johnson’s words, I’m struck as well by their hints of simple-mindedness. Where’s the independence of thought in outsourcing all your judgments to a single source? Where’s the openness to evolving knowledge, to fresh perspectives, to different ones?I say that not to be besmirch Christianity or religion: I know and greatly respect many Christians and many other people who use the Bible, the Torah, the Quran or some other sacred text as a trove of inspiration, a store of wisdom, a repository of counsel. Their relationships with religion allow for broad interpretation and plenty of disagreement. They recognize the need for that.And maybe Johnson was speaking of the Bible in such a vein. But he didn’t say “guide.” He said “worldview.” His tone, his record and much else about him suggest an uncritical obeisance, and he’s emblematic of many current Republicans’ reductive and oppressive piety.He’s also emblematic of something broader, something by no means limited to certain strains of religiousness, something with secular examples aplenty: the temptation to quiet the jangle and resolve the complications of our maddening world by latching onto one answer, lining up behind one leader, taking the oath of one tribe and then reveling in its smug and censorious rightness.That’s undoubtedly a clarifying decision and a comfort. But it can be hell on a democracy. More

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      in Elections

      Here’s How Joe Biden Can Win Again

      by

      President Biden’s age is on the minds of American voters as they think about the 2024 election. It’s no wonder: In a poll I did last year, there was broad support (63 percent of Democrats, 55 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of independents) for establishing an upper age limit of 70 for any person to be sworn in as president. This past July, a Pew Research Center survey found that about half of respondents believed the best age range for a U.S. president was in the 50s — well below Mr. Biden’s 80 and Donald Trump’s 77.As a pollster and strategist who has been involved in four Democratic presidential campaigns, including Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, I don’t believe that age will determine this election. But it is a formidable reality that Mr. Biden and his team must deal with and transcend, just as Ronald Reagan did at age 73 in his 1984 re-election race. Mr. Reagan passed that test, removing age as a distraction for his campaign and voters and making the contest about “morning in America,” our economic turnaround and our leadership in the world. The 2024 election is going to hinge similarly on core issues and a vision that speaks directly to the lives and hopes of voters.Getting past the age question won’t be easy. It will involve persuading voters in memorable ways and will require a deft touch. But this is a winnable race for the president, even if it sometimes seems his team is shielding him from the public. The fact is, he’s old. A failure to confront the issue risks reinforcing that impression rather than overcoming it. Americans will be watching him closely in big moments, like his trip to Israel this week to deal with one of the most significant crises of his presidency. The Biden team needs to get the president out in front of the public more, finding opportunities for him to talk about age with a directness and confidence that convinces people it isn’t the core issue. Talk about it now so you aren’t talking about it next summer, then use the fall debates in 2024 to deliver a Reaganesque line that puts the topic to bed.If Mr. Trump becomes Mr. Biden’s opponent, this task is simpler. They’re both old, so I think the question of age will become moot for a lot of voters. Winning presidential candidates learn quickly not to launch attacks that can come back and bite them. Take Mitt Romney’s debate-stage effort in 2012 to cast Mr. Obama as unfit to be commander in chief over his handling of a deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. Mr. Obama’s stinging response won the president headlines praising his smackdown performance: “While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release, trying to make political points, and that’s not how a commander in chief operates,” Mr. Obama said.It’s likely that many independent and swing voters will be less concerned with Mr. Biden’s and Mr. Trump’s ages than about the preponderance of legal issues facing Mr. Trump, which would seem to give Democrats the edge. Despite his dominance in the Republican race, a poll my firm conducted shortly after he was indicted on criminal charges for the fourth time found that 24 percent of his party’s voters said his legal issues made them less likely to vote for him. That’s four times the 6 percent of Republicans who defected from him in 2020. Even worse for Mr. Trump, 61 percent of independent voters said his legal problems made them less likely to vote for him.The RealClearPolitics polling average currently shows Mr. Trump up by less than a point over Mr. Biden, 45.3 percent to 44.5 percent. A year ahead of the election, that’s meaningless information. The party of Hillary Clinton has learned the hard way not to take a slight polling edge for granted. I was Mrs. Clinton’s pollster in 2016, when public polling had her about two percentage points ahead of Mr. Trump. She won 48 percent of the vote to his 45.9 percent but, of course, lost the Electoral College by losing three battleground states that are crucial for Democrats in presidential campaigns. The campaign’s leadership had ordered a stop to most in-depth polls in those battlegrounds during October, which left us blind to the state of play.Our country has split down the middle in its politics for decades now. When I was on Bill Clinton’s polling team for his 1996 re-election campaign, he won with 49.2 percent of the vote. When I was the lead pollster on Mr. Obama’s team in 2008, he won with 52.9 percent of the vote; in 2012 he won with 51.1 percent of the vote, making him only the fourth president in over a century to be elected and re-elected with more than 50 percent.So what will it take for Mr. Biden to win? From both wins and losses, I’ve learned that there are three things every candidate needs to remember: Campaigns are about big things, not small things. Campaigns are about the future, not the past. And campaigns are about the voters’ lives, not the candidate’s.For Mr. Biden, following that mantra means making this election a forward-looking choice built on a contrast of economic vision and values. More important, it means leaning into his greatest asset: his long record of working across the aisle.He built his career on doing the hard work of compromising with the other side to get things done for the American people. Since he took office in 2021, he won passage of the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law to repair the nation’s roads, bridges and railways; bring high-speed internet to rural communities; and more, an achievement made possible by 32 Republicans who crossed the aisle (13 in the House and 19 in the Senate). He signed the most significant gun-safety legislation to pass Congress in nearly 30 years, with 29 votes from Republicans (14 in the House and 15 in the Senate).Those numbers may not sound like much, but in a country exhausted by political division and with him most likely up against a Republican opponent whose only game is to divide, it’s a critical advantage. By focusing on bipartisanship and doing less name calling about MAGA and the right, he would not just recite his accomplishments; he would bring focus to what government can do for the American people when both sides work together.Mr. Biden should also lean on his gifts of public empathy. Joe from Scranton is someone who understands that we can’t keep telling people that what they see and feel isn’t real. Month after month, the economic numbers of his presidency have provided evidence that our economy is recovering and our society is stable.But public opinion polling shows many Americans experiencing a sense of corrosive instability — worry that our rapidly changing economy and technological world may leave them behind, coupled with fears about crime and immigration. Connecting with those voters is about providing them with the tangible evidence that you’ve heard them, that you’re invested in improving their lives and that you have a vision for governing that addresses their fears and will create a better future for them and their families.During Mr. Obama’s 2012 campaign, we faced a similar disconnect. The country was still in the throes of an economic crisis that began before he took office in 2009. We knew we couldn’t overstate claims about the improving economy because people weren’t feeling it yet. The campaign needed to focus on the future and lift up working- and middle-class Americans in a way that Mr. Romney, with his private-equity background, could not effectively rebut.From our research, we developed key principles for the campaign: Talk about a country facing a make-or-break moment for the middle class and those striving to get there. Talk about the importance of building an economy from the middle out, not the top down. Talk about an economy in which hard work pays, responsibility is rewarded and everyone gets a fair shot and a fair shake.One thing Mr. Biden should stop talking about: Mr. Trump. It’s tempting. It’s the red meat his base wants. But it’s not the job. The months of Republican debates and headlines about court cases against the former president will inflict damage without Mr. Biden having to say a word.Come August — when most Americans start paying attention to a November presidential election — if Mr. Trump is indeed the G.O.P. candidate, he can be depended on to continue his campaign of doom, destruction and despair.But despite the aberration of the 2016 election, I believe Americans want to hear about the values and beliefs that bring us together, not the things that drive us apart. Mr. Biden is uniquely able to communicate a credible message of hope that we might again be a country that works together rather than a nation that is mired in perpetual division. He is a man I know to be an optimist by nature, and he believes unity trumps division. So do I.Joel Benenson is a veteran Democratic adviser who was the pollster on Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and chief strategist and pollster on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.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