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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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      Here’s How Joe Biden Can Win Again

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      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

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      Pro-Choice? Pro-Union? Donald Trump Has a Deal for You.

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      As Ron DeSantis’s challenge to Donald Trump has seemed to wither on the vine, a piece of conventional wisdom has hardened: That DeSantis has been offering Republican voters Trumpism without the drama, but now we know Republicans love the drama, indeed they can’t live without the drama, and mere substance simply leaves them cold.In one sense, that’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from the way that Trump’s multiplying indictments seemed to solidify his front-runner’s position, the way that he’s sucked up media oxygen and built his primary lead on the basis of what would be, for any normal politician, terrible publicity.But it elides the fact that DeSantis, like many of his rivals in the current battle for second place, hasn’t actually offered voters an equivalent of Trumpism, and certainly not the Trumpism that won the 2016 Republican primary fight and then upset Hillary Clinton.He has offered part of that package, certainly: the promise to wage war on liberalism by all available means, the harsh words for self-appointed experts and elites, the hostility to the establishment press. But he hasn’t really tried to channel another crucial element of Trumpism — the marriage of rhetorical extremism with ideological flexibility, the ability to drop a vicious insult one moment and promise to make a big, beautiful bipartisan deal the next.That was what Trump offered throughout 2016. While his rivals in the primaries impotently accused him of being unconservative, he cheerfully embraced various heterodoxies on health care and trade and taxes, selling himself as an economic moderate with the same gusto that he promised to build the wall and ban Muslim visitors from the United States.These heterodoxies were often more a salesman’s patter than a sincere policy agenda, which helps explain why his presidency was more conventionally conservative than his campaign.But now candidate Trump is back at the salesman’s game. In the last week, the man whose judicial appointees overturned Roe v. Wade and whose administration was reliably hostile to unions has condemned the six-week abortion ban signed by DeSantis, promised to magically bring the country together on abortion and indicated he’s going to counterprogram next week’s Republican presidential debate by showing up on the U.A.W. picket line.You can see these forays as proof that Trump thinks he’s got the nomination in the bag, that the pro-life movement especially has no choice but to support him and that he can start presenting himself as a general-election candidate early.But I suspect it’s a little more complicated than that, and that Trump’s willingness to show ideological flexibility — or, to be a bit harsher, to pander emptily to any audience he faces — has its uses in the primary campaign as well. Because what it showcases, even to primary voters who disagree with him, is an eagerness to win even at the expense of ideological consistency, an eagerness that much of American conservatism lacks.And showcasing electability is arguably even more important for Trump in 2024 than in 2016, because he was at his weakest after the 2022 midterms, which seemed to expose his election fraud obsessions as a political disaster for the G.O.P. So by moving to the center early, while DeSantis and others try to run against him from the right, he’s counteracting that narrative, trying to prove that he’s committed to victory and not just vanity. (And on the evidence of national polls, in which he now does slightly better than DeSantis against Biden, it’s working.)Does Trump actually have a labor-friendly solution to the U.A.W. strike or a coherent pro-worker agenda? The answers are no and not really. But if showing public sympathy for workers and promising a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods are respectively an empty gesture and a dubious gambit, they are still a better political message than, say, what we got from Tim Scott, the candidate of pre-Trump conservatism, who suggested that the U.A.W. workers should be fired the way Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. (This kind of nonsense position, invoking Reagan’s firing of federal employees in the completely different context of a private-sector fight where employers can’t fire strikers, is exactly what the term “zombie Reaganism” was invented to describe.)Likewise, can Trump actually mediate a national compromise on abortion by stiff-arming the pro-life movement? I wouldn’t bet on it; for better or worse, I expect his transactional relationship with anti-abortion organizations to survive in a potential second term.But his sudden pro-choice outreach is a cynical response to a real political problem for Republicans. If you aspire to restrict abortion beyond the reddest states in a politically sustainable way, you need at the very least a rhetorical modulation, a form of outreach to the wavering and conflicted. And better still would be some kind of alternative offer to Americans who are pro-choice but with reservations — with the obvious form being some new suite of family policies, some enhanced support for women who find themselves pregnant and in difficulty.But most Republicans clearly don’t want to make that kind of offer, beyond a few pro forma gestures and very modest state-level initiatives. DeSantis was quick (well, by his standards) to attack Trump for selling out the pro-life cause, and any abortion opponent should want to see Trump punished politically for that attempted sellout. But nothing in the DeSantis response was directed at the outreach problem, the political problem, the general-election problem that Trump in his unprincipled way was clearly trying to address.And so it has been throughout the primary season thus far. Trump makes big bold promises; his rivals check ideological boxes. Trump talks like a general-election candidate; his rivals bid against one another for narrower constituencies. Scott and Nikki Haley rerun the Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio campaigns; DeSantis aims to improve on Ted Cruz’s Iowa-first strategy … but the only candidate really promising the Trumpism of 2016 is, once again, Donald Trump himself.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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      Biden, Trump and the 2024 Field of Nightmares

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      In the bottom of the 10th inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, with the Boston Red Sox leading the New York Mets 5-3, Red Sox manager John McNamara sent Bill Buckner — a great hitter dealing with terrible leg problems that made him gimp his way around first base — back out to play the infield instead of putting in Dave Stapleton, Buckner’s defensive replacement. A half-dozen at-bats later, a Mookie Wilson ground ball went through Buckner’s wobbly legs, sending the World Series to Game 7 and a certain 6-year-old Red Sox fan to bed in desperate tears.Those tears were my first acquaintance with the harsh truth of a baseball aphorism: The ball will always find you. Meaning that if you place a player where he shouldn’t be, or try to disguise a player’s incapacity by shifting him away from the likely action, or give a player you love a chance to stay on the field too long for sentimental reasons, the risk you take will eventually catch up to you, probably at the worst possible moment.Obviously, this is a column about President Biden’s age. But not only about Biden, because America has been running a lot of Buckner experiments of late. Consider the dreadful-for-liberals denouement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s career, where nobody could tell a lifetime-tenured Supreme Court justice who had survived cancer that it was time to step aside and Democrats were left to talk hopefully about her workout regimen as she tried to outlast Donald Trump. And she almost did — but in the end, her legacy was reshaped and even unmade by a decision to stay too long on the political field.Or consider the Trump presidency itself, in which voters handed a manifestly unfit leader the powers of the presidency and for his entire term, various Republicans tried to manage him and position him and keep him out of trouble, while Dave Stapleton — I mean, Mike Pence — warmed the bench.This managerial effort met with enough success that by the start of 2020, Trump seemed potentially headed for re-election. But like a series of line drives at an amateur third baseman, the final year of his presidency left him ruthlessly exposed — by the pandemic (whether you think he was too libertarian or too Faucian, he was obviously overmastered), by a progressive cultural revolution (which he opposed but was helpless to impede), by Biden’s presidential campaign and finally by his own vices, which yielded Jan. 6.Naturally, Republicans are ready to put him on the field again.These experiences set my expectations for what’s happening with Democrats and Biden now. The increasing anxiety over Biden’s lousy poll numbers, which I discussed in last weekend’s column, has yielded a defensive response from Biden partisans. Their argument is that the president’s decline is overstated, that his administration is going well and he deserves more credit than he’s getting and that, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser suggests, the press is repeating its mistake with Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and making the age issue seem awful when it’s merely, well, “suboptimal.”I do not think Biden’s decline is overstated by the media; by some Republicans, maybe, but the mainstream press is, if anything, treading gingerly around the evident reality. But I do think Biden’s defenders are correct that the effect of his age on his presidency has been, at most, only mildly negative. It’s limited his use of the bully pulpit and hurt his poll numbers, but his administration has passed major legislation, managed a foreign policy crisis and run a tighter ship than Trump.Where I have criticisms of Bidenism, they’re mostly the normal ones a conservative would have of any liberal president, not special ones associated with chaos or incompetence created by cognitive decline.But in running Biden for re-election, Democrats are making a fateful bet that this successful management can simply continue through two sets of risks: the high stakes of the next election, in which a health crisis or just more slippage might be the thing that puts Trump back in the White House, and the different but also substantial stakes of another four-year term.“The ball will always find you” is not, of course, an invariable truth. It’s entirely possible that Biden can limp to another victory, that his second term will yield no worse consequences than, say, Ronald Reagan’s did, that having managed things thus far, his aides, spouse and cabinet can see the next five years through.But the Trump era has been one of those periods when providence or fate revenges itself more swiftly than usual on hubris — when the longstanding freedom that American parties and leaders have enjoyed, by virtue of our power and pre-eminence, to skate around our weak spots and mistakes has been substantially curtailed.Even Millhiser’s proposed analogy for the fixation on Biden’s age, the Clinton email scandal, fits this pattern. “Her emails” hurt Clinton at the last because they became briefly entangled with the Anthony Weiner sex scandal. This was substantively unfair, since nothing came of the Clinton emails found on Weiner’s laptop. But it was dramatically fitting, a near-Shakespearean twist, that after surviving all of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals the Clinton dynasty would be unmade at its hour of near triumph by a different, more pathetic predator.So whether it’s certain or not, I can’t help expecting a similarly dramatic punishment for trying to keep Biden in the White House notwithstanding his decline.That I also expect some kind of punishment from the Republicans renominating Trump notwithstanding his unfitness doesn’t make me inconsistent, because presidential politics isn’t quite the same as baseball. Unlike in a World Series, there need not be a simple victor: All can be punished; all of us can lose.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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      Ramaswamy-Pence Debate Clash Exposes Divide in Republican Party

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      Vivek Ramaswamy invoked Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” theme to mock a generation of Republicans he views as out of touch.Disbelief flashed across Vivek Ramaswamy’s face. The Republican presidential candidates, minus the front-runner, were 42 minutes into their first debate when former Vice President Mike Pence took issue with the young businessman’s claim that America was gripped by a national identity crisis.“We’re not looking for a new national identity,” said Mr. Pence, 64. “The American people are the most faith-filled, freedom-loving, idealistic, hard-working people the world has ever known.”“It is not morning in America,” Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, shot back in his rapid-fire Harvard debating style. “We live in a dark moment. And we have to confront the fact that we’re in an internal sort of cold, cultural civil war.”Extolling Ronald Reagan used to be the safest of safe spaces for an ambitious Republican. Yet here was an upstart candidate, with no record of public service, standing at center stage in a G.O.P. debate and invoking Mr. Reagan’s famous 1984 “morning in America” theme not as an applause line, but to mock one of the party’s staunchest conservatives — an original product of the Reagan revolution — as out of touch with America’s true condition.The moment captured a rhetorical and substantive shift inside the G.O.P. that accelerated during the Trump era and is now being fed to the base in a purer form by Mr. Ramaswamy, who in late July overtook the former vice president in national polling averages. It is a shift to the so-called new right — often younger, often very online — that rejects the sunny optimism of Mr. Reagan’s acolytes as the delusional mutterings of “boomers.”In the new right’s overheated vernacular, these older, more established Republicans — a group that includes Mr. Pence but also most of the Republican conference in the United States Senate — have no idea “what time it is.” They don’t understand that the Republic is on its last legs.In the new right’s telling, conservatives like Mr. Pence are hopelessly naïve, and must stop fetishizing civility, decency and the self-defeating ideal of “limited government.” Republicans aligned with the new right, such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, argue that conservatives should instead use every lever of governmental power available to them to defeat the “woke” left.Donald J. Trump established this theme in his 2016 campaign for president. He reinforced it in his inaugural address in 2017, in which he offered a dark vision of “American carnage.” And he continued the apocalyptic and vengeful rhetoric throughout his presidency. But the four criminal indictments of Mr. Trump have only intensified this retributive mood.Shortly before Mr. Trump surrendered on Thursday at the Fulton County jail, Taylor Budowich, the chief executive of the main pro-Trump super PAC, pointed to the Pence-Ramaswamy exchange in the debate as emblematic of a larger battle inside the party.“Last night Vivek Ramaswamy challenged Vice President Mike Pence’s strikingly naïve characterization of what ails America with, ‘It is not morning in America! We live in a dark moment’,” Mr. Budowich wrote in a statement he blasted out to the PAC’s email list. “The existential crisis facing the G.O.P. today is understanding the moment we live in.”Saurabh Sharma, the 25 year-old founder of American Moment, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to staffing the next Republican administration with “America First” conservatives, saw the interaction between Mr. Pence and Mr. Ramaswamy as one that “laid bare a core divide in the conservative movement.”“Older, well-meaning conservatives believe that the cultural and economic divide in America can be solved with modest policy changes,” Mr. Sharma said. “Generational change in the conservative movement and Republican Party will be the process by which quiet reformers give way to energetic young revolutionaries.”During Wednesday night’s debate, the repeated clashes between Mr. Pence and Mr. Ramaswamy dramatized this generational and ideological rift. On issue after issue, they seemed to be inhabiting different planets and speaking in different languages.Mr. Pence reminded the audience of the value of experience. In a shot at Mr. Ramaswamy, he said now was not the time for on-the-job training, not the time to risk a “rookie” in the White House. He talked about the need for America to show leadership in the world, about “peace through strength,” and he framed Ukraine’s fight against Russia as a fight for freedom that America must not shirk.Mr. Pence reminded the audience that he was a House conservative leader “before it was cool.” He quoted from Scripture to explain his opposition to abortion rights. He talked up the budgets he balanced in Indiana and said Republicans needed to confront the problem of the national debt. He promised more tax cuts and emphasized the need to reform entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare — a statement that used to be Republican orthodoxy but is now almost taboo after Mr. Trump jettisoned traditional fiscal conservatism.Mr. Pence left the impression that America would be fine if only it could be returned to the way things were. “We just need government as good as our people again,” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy, listening, frowned contemptuously. “I don’t know what that slogan means,” he replied. “We need to shut down the administrative state.”In breaking with Mr. Pence and his Reagan-inspired rhetoric, Mr. Ramaswamy has sought to cast himself as this era’s transformational figure — ready to deliver a 1980-style “Reagan Revolution.” Mr. Ramaswamy has praised Mr. Reagan as someone who did what was appropriate for his era, though he has argued that “Reaganite solutions” don’t meet the current moment.Ken Khachigian, a former Reagan speechwriter, found himself agreeing with much of what Mr. Pence was saying and criticized Mr. Ramaswamy for “using exaggerated phrases like ‘a dark moment’” that he said did not provide “a good snapshot of what America is today.”“I think if there’s no message of hope, or vision that America shares some of what Reagan’s sense of vision was, then you draw the curtain against what drove America to make it different — that we’re still a good people, and there’s still a lot of optimism in America,” he said in an interview.Mr. Ramaswamy took every opportunity during the debate to mock the incrementalism and governing records of his opponents.He instead promised “revolution.” He doubled down on his outlandish promises to shut down a host of government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service and the Education Department. He deployed Trumpian personal insults against his opponents — accusing all of his opponents of being “bought and paid for,” claiming Nikki Haley was chasing lucrative jobs with defense contractors, and suggesting Chris Christie was angling for a job on the liberal cable news network MSNBC.And, in a moment that visibly enraged several of his opponents, Mr. Ramaswamy, in full Tucker Carlson mode, ridiculed the idea that Republicans should support Ukraine.“I find it offensive that we have professional politicians on the stage that will make a pilgrimage to their Pope, Zelensky, without doing the same thing for people in Maui or the South Side of Chicago,” he said.The audience in Milwaukee cheered as Mr. Pence and Ms. Haley attacked Mr. Ramaswamy for caving in to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. But outside the arena, the party is shifting away from the old guard. The top two candidates in the race, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, are skeptical of support for Ukraine. And Mr. Trump, the overwhelming front-runner, has floated handing off chunks of Ukraine to Mr. Putin.This fight over foreign policy reveals the most radical difference between the Republican Party that Mr. Pence is belatedly trying to preserve and the one that Mr. Trump ushered in.Mr. Ramaswamy said that if elected he would stop all U.S. funding to help Ukraine fight back against Russia. “I have a news flash,” he told Mr. Pence. “The U.S.S.R. does not exist anymore. It fell back in 1990.”The last time a presidential candidate delivered a line like that on a debate stage was in 2012, when then-President Obama mocked his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, for naming Russia as America’s greatest geopolitical threat. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” Mr. Obama said.While Mr. Pence recoiled from Mr. Ramaswamy’s line, leaders of the increasingly emboldened anti-interventionist wing of the party rejoiced.“The divide in the G.O.P. on foreign policy isn’t between so-called isolationists or interventionists — it’s between people who still want to pretend it’s 1983 and those who recognize America exists in a much different world than 40 years ago,” said Dan Caldwell, who runs the foreign policy program at the Center for Renewing America, a think tank with close ties to Mr. Trump.“It is heartening,” he added, “that the three candidates polling the highest in the Republican presidential primary largely recognize the U.S. simply doesn’t have the financial, military or industrial capacity to do everything the neoconservative dead-enders want us to do globally.”Mr. Caldwell has another reason to feel heartened: It is his wing of the party that will probably take charge of the national security apparatus if Mr. Trump gets back into office in 2025. 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