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      ‘No Place for Hate in America,’ Haley Says, Recalling 2015 Church Massacre

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      Nikki Haley, fresh off a strong debate performance last week, was back on the trail and took a moment to condemn the weekend shooting in Jacksonville, Fla.Breaking from her usual stump speech at a South Carolina town hall event on Monday, Nikki Haley paused to condemn a deadly weekend rampage in Jacksonville, Fla., that the authorities were investigating as a hate crime.“I am not going to lie to you, it takes me back to a dark place,” Ms. Haley told an audience of roughly 1,000 people gathered in a corporate campus auditorium in Indian Land. “There is no place for hate in America.”Ms. Haley was governor in 2015 when a white supremacist opened fire in an African American church in Charleston, S.C., and killed nine Black parishioners at a Bible study. Ms. Haley eventually called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol. She later described struggling with the beginning effects of post-traumatic stress disorder in response to the shooting, but she said that the victims’ families showed her what strength and grace looked like.Ms. Haley also toed the Republican Party line on guns and racism, suggesting that such violence and mass shootings could be prevented if Americans improved mental health services, abided by gun laws and rejected division and hate in their everyday lives.She renewed her calls for the need to reverse what she often describes as a “national self-loathing,” or the idea that “America is bad or that America is rotten or that it is racist.”“Don’t fall into the narrative that this is a racist country,” she told the mostly white and graying crowd, citing her own election in 2010 as the first woman and person of color to lead the state as progress. “It was only 60 years ago today that Martin Luther King gave that speech. Look at how far we have come.”The way Ms. Haley, a former United Nations ambassador, and other Republican presidential candidates tend to downplay structural racism and prejudice — and to focus on the nation’s racial progress — puts them at odds with most Black voters.On Monday, Ms. Haley’s home state rival in the presidential race, Senator Tim Scott, called the Florida rampage “heinous.” He said that the killings had prompted patrons at his church service to discuss “the absolute devastation” in 2015 at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.Asked whether the Republican Party had done enough to denounce white supremacist violence, Mr. Scott argued that it was the duty of every American, regardless of party affiliation, to do their part. “The question is, Have humans done enough to talk about racism and discrimination that leads to violence and to death,” he said.Ms. Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy during the debate last week.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesOn Monday, Ms. Haley was back in her home state for a victory lap after a strong performance in the first Republican primary debate. In recent days, her polling numbers have climbed, and top donors have seen her as a standout. So many people packed into her town hall at the CrossRidge Center in Indian Land that attendees filled a balcony and an overflow room.As they return to the campaign trail, Ms. Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur and political newcomer, have continued the clashes they started on the debate stage, where they tussled over policy on China, Israel and the war in Ukraine. Mr. Ramaswamy has unveiled his foreign policy platform, and on his website, he accuses Ms. Haley of lying about his stances on Israel, and calls her by her first and maiden last name, Nimarata Randhawa. For her part, Ms. Haley did not mention Mr. Ramaswamy by name, but she elicited loud laughter from the audience on Monday when she asked voters if they had watched the debate.“Bless his heart,” she said. “I know I wear a skirt. But y’all see me at work. If you say something that is totally off the wall, I am going to call you out on it.”Leaving the town hall, Ross Payne, 62, a former managing director for Wells Fargo, said that he supported Ms. Haley, whom he called the “Iron Lady,” a reference to Margaret Thatcher and a hero of Ms. Haley. But he said he had been somewhat disappointed with her answer to his question on whether she would be willing to pull from both sides of the political aisle to regulate guns and automatic weapons.Ms. Haley said that though she worried about her own children, people should have the ability to protect themselves, and that she would improve access to mental health services and ensure that people arrested for gun violations stay behind bars.“Like with abortion, can’t we all agree that if you want an AR semiautomatic weapon, you’ve got to go through two or three weeks of training and extensive vetting before you can get your hands on a weapon like that?” Mr. Payne said, echoing Ms. Haley’s calls at the debate for consensus on abortion. “A weapon that can kill, you know, 10 people in 10 seconds.”Maya King More

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      Eminem Tells Vivek Ramaswamy to Stop Rapping His Songs

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      “To the American people’s chagrin, we will have to leave the rapping to the real Slim Shady,” Mr. Ramaswamy’s spokesman said after the campaign received a cease-and-desist letter.As it turned out, Vivek Ramaswamy only got one shot to lose himself in the music.Marshall B. Mathers III, better known as the rapper Eminem, has told Mr. Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate, that he is no longer to use Eminem music on the campaign trail, just weeks after Mr. Ramaswamy broke into an impromptu version of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” at the Iowa State Fair.The licensing arm of Mr. Mathers’s record company, BMI, informed the Ramaswamy campaign in a letter dated Wednesday and reprinted in The Daily Mail on Monday that “BMI will consider any performance of the Eminem works by the Vivek 2024 campaign from this date forward to be a material breach” of the firm’s licensing rules, “for which BMI reserves all rights and remedies with respect thereto.”The Ramaswamy campaign didn’t put up a fight. And it wasn’t a regular thing, this Eminem rap-along. At the fair, Mr. Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old political newcomer, had told Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa that his favorite “walk off” song was “Lose Yourself,” and an enterprising sound technician blared it over the fair’s loud speaker. The candidate picked up the mic and joined in.“Vivek just got on the stage and cut loose,” his campaign spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said on Monday. “To the American people’s chagrin, we will have to leave the rapping to the real Slim Shady,” another of Mr. Mathers’s noms de plume.Though Mr. Ramaswamy has professed his love for Eminem, the breakup was probably inevitable. Mr. Ramaswamy has clung more tightly to Donald J. Trump and his brand of right-wing populism than any other candidate in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and Eminem is no fan of the former president. In 2017, Eminem famously performed a freestyle protest against Mr. Trump, calling him “a kamikaze that’ll probably cause a nuclear holocaust.” More

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      Samuel Wurzelbacher, Celebrated as ‘Joe the Plumber,’ Dies at 49

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      For Republicans in 2008, he briefly became a symbol of Middle America when he questioned the presidential candidate Barack Obama in a televised encounter.Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who briefly became “Joe the Plumber,” the metaphorical American middle-class Everyman, by injecting himself into the 2008 presidential campaign in an impromptu nationally-televised face-off with Barack Obama over taxing small businesses, died on Sunday at his home in Campbellsport, Wis., about 60 miles north of Milwaukee. He was 49.The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Katie Wurzelbacher, said.Mr. Obama, then a United States senator from Illinois, was campaigning on Shrewsbury Street, in a working-class neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio, on Sunday, Oct. 12, 2008, when Mr. Wurzelbacher interrupted a football catch with his son in his front yard to mosey over and ask the Democratic nominee about his proposed tax increase for some small businesses.During a cordial but largely inconclusive five-minute colloquy in front of news cameras, Mr. Wurzelbacher said he was concerned about being subjected to a bigger tax bite just as he was approaching the point where he could finally afford to buy a plumbing business, which he said would generate an income of $250,000 a year.Three days later, “Joe the Plumber,” as he was popularized by Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, Senator John McCain, was invoked some two dozen times during the final debate of the presidential campaign.Mr. Wurzelbacher became a folk hero of sorts during the campaign’s final weeks, particularly among McCain supporters and conservative commentators who cottoned to his remarks that Mr. Obama’s share-the-wealth prescriptions for the economy were akin to socialism or even communism and contradicted the American dream. Mr. McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, also jumped in, appearing onstage with Mr. Wurzelbacher at rallies.Mr. Wurzelbacher during his encounter with Barack Obama in Ohio in early October 2008. Captured by television cameras, the moment thrust Mr. Wurzelbacher, labeled “Joe the Plumber,” briefly into the national spotlight.Jae C. Hong/Associated PressBut by Election Day, his tenure as a burly, bald, iron-jawed John Doe eroded as the public learned that he was not a licensed plumber (he could work in Toledo only for someone with a master’s license or in outlying areas) and owed $1,200 in back taxes.He flirted with supporting Mr. McCain but later referred to him as “the lesser of two evils” on the ballot and never revealed for whom he had voted that November.“Let’s still keep that private,” his wife said by phone on Monday.In 2012, Mr. Wurzelbacher won the Republican nomination to challenge Representative Marcy Kaptur, the Democratic incumbent in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District, but was crushed in the general election, winning only 23 percent of the vote to her 73 percent.During that campaign, he released a video defending the Second Amendment and blaming gun control as having helped enable the Ottoman Empire to commit genocide against Armenians in the early 20th century and Nazi Germany to carry out the Holocaust, saying gun laws had stripped the victims in both cases of the ability to defend themselves.Again defending a right to bear arms, he wrote to parents of the victims of a mass shooting in 2014 in Isla Vista, Calif., near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, saying, “As harsh as this sounds — your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher was born on Dec. 3, 1973, to Frank and Kay (Bloomfield) Wurzelbacher. His mother was a waitress, his father a disabled war veteran.After high school, he enlisted in the Air Force, where he was trained in plumbing. He was discharged in 1996, and worked as a plumber’s assistant as well as for a telecommunications company.Capitalizing on his celebrity after the 2008 election, he appeared in TV commercials promoting digital television; published a book, “Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream” (2009, with Thomas Tabback); and covered the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza in 2009 for PJ Media, a conservative website. In 2014, he went to work in a Jeep plant.In addition to his wife, who had been Katie Schanen when they married, he is survived by a son, Samuel Jr., from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; and three children from his second marriage, Samantha Jo, Henry and Sarah Jo.Although Mr. Wurzelbacher ended his encounter with Mr. Obama by shaking hands with him, he didn’t seem satisfied by the candidate’s response to how his tax proposal would affect a small plumbing business.“If you’re a small business — which you would qualify, first of all — you would get a 50 percent tax credit, so you’d get a cut in taxes for your health care costs,” Mr. Obama explained. And if his business’s revenue were below $250,000, he added, its taxes would not go up.“It’s not that I want to punish your success; I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too,” Mr. Obama added. “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody.“If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off,” he continued. “If you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you — and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody — and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”Mr. Wurzelbacher was unpersuaded.“It’s my discretion who I want to give my money to,” he would later say repeatedly. “It’s not for the government to decide that I make a little too much, and so I need to share it with other people. That’s not the American dream.”Ms. Wurzelbacher insisted on Monday that her husband’s encounter with Mr. Obama in 2008 was completely spontaneous, not staged by Republican operatives or anyone else, and that Mr. Obama’s appearance in the neighborhood had actually been arranged by a neighbor down the block.“It was completely coincidental,” she said. “It always amazed him that one question thrust him into the national spotlight.” More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Is Very Annoying. It’s Why He’s Surging in the Polls.

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      Of all the descriptors attached to Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old political tyro enjoying a bizarre surge in the Republican primary race for second place, the most common one seems to be “annoying.” After the Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday, a Politico headline quoted a party strategist about Ramaswamy’s performance: “It just got to be annoying.” In a widely shared essay, the writer Josh Barro, a Harvard contemporary of Ramaswamy, probed the quality that “makes Vivek so annoying.” CNN’s S.E. Cupp called him, in a column: “Obnoxious. Annoying. Disrespectful. Inexperienced. Conspiratorial.”Matt Lewis, an anti-Trump conservative writer for The Daily Beast, marveled that there are some who actually like Ramaswamy’s cocky, know-it-all persona: “As Seinfeld might say, ‘Who are these people?’”The answer, of course, is much of the Republican Party. The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight and Ipsos polled likely Republican primary voters before and after last week’s debate. Following his performance, Ramaswamy’s favorability rating rose from 50 percent to 60 percent, even though his unfavorability rating rose even more, from 13 percent to 32 percent. Participants in a CNN focus group of Iowa Republicans declared him the debate’s winner, as did a poll released on Thursday from JL Partners. The day after the debate, his campaign reportedly raised more than $1 million.The question is what Ramaswamy’s supporters see in this irksome figure. Some Republicans, clearly, appreciate the way he sucks up to Donald Trump, whom Ramaswamy has called “the best president of the 21st century.” But that doesn’t explain the roughly 10 percent of Republicans who tell pollsters they’re planning to vote for Ramaswamy instead of Trump. It can’t only be his shtick as Fox News’s “woke and cancel-culture guru,” as one anchor called him, since at this point even the Florida governor Ron DeSantis has learned that railing against wokeness is a losing message. Nor is Ramaswamy’s appeal tailored to the downwardly mobile Trump voters who appreciated the former president’s pledges to protect their entitlements, since Ramaswamy’s promise to “dismantle Lyndon Johnson’s failed ‘Great Society’” makes Paul Ryan look like a social democrat.Instead, I suspect that Ramaswamy’s fans are drawn to him for all the reasons his critics find him insufferable. Conservatives love being championed by representatives of groups that they think disdain them. Despite the right’s deep resentment of the entertainment industry, Republicans tend to adore celebrity candidates, from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Donald Trump. Think of the infamous tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” (They deleted it once the rapper Kanye West’s right turn veered into outright Hitler fandom.) At Democratic conventions I’ve seen famous actors walk around either unrecognized or ignored, while at Republican conventions C-listers are feted like superstars.Ramaswamy, too, is a performer, but what he’s performing is a parody of meritocratic excellence. If you’ve spent time around entitled Ivy League grads, you likely recognize him as an exaggerated version of a familiar type: the callow and condescending nerd who assumes that skill in one field translates to aptitude in all others. But to his fans, the very fact that he’s such a pure product of elite institutions — in addition to Harvard, he went to Yale Law and made his fortune with a biotech start-up he ran from Manhattan — likely gives him extra oomph as a class traitor.People who care about the basic workings of government are gobsmacked by Ramaswamy’s apparent ignorance — on Sunday, for example, he said that if he’d been in Vice President Mike Pence’s shoes on Jan. 6, 2021, he would have pushed through election reform “in my capacity as president of the Senate.” But he’s good at sounding like he knows what he’s talking about. Sarah Longwell, a political strategist who has conducted extensive focus groups with Republican primary voters, said that people who like Ramaswamy inevitably say, “I think he’s really smart.”That’s why Chris Christie’s comparison of Ramaswamy to Barack Obama, whom conservatives saw as a smug, smooth-talking foreign interloper, fell flat. Ramaswamy’s very superficial similarities to Obama work for him, giving conservative audiences the satisfaction of hearing their resentments affirmed by a defector from the culture of the coastal gentry. At the debate, Ramaswamy encouraged the analogy when he ripped off an old Obama line to introduce himself as a “skinny guy with a funny last name.” Longwell doesn’t think Ramaswamy has a shot at beating Trump for the nomination, but, she said, “I think that Republicans want their own Obama.”Many older white conservatives, after all, feel threatened by multiethnic younger generations that largely reject their most fundamental values about faith, gender and patriotism. Ramaswamy is part of this menacing cohort, and he’s telling Republicans that their suspicions about it are correct. “More than anything, he has portrayed his generation and younger ones as empty souls living meaningless lives,” Jonathan Weisman wrote in The Times. He’s a young man running an anti-youth campaign; a centerpiece of Ramaswamy’s platform is a call to strip the franchise from most people under 25 unless they pass a civics test. And he’s a person of color who argues, even in the wake of another white supremacist mass shooting, that most American racism comes from the left. If he annoys those who find him most familiar, that’s surely part of the point.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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      A New Trial Date. A New Primary Season.

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      A March trial could become the center of gravity of the G.O.P. primary, structuring the campaigns of Donald Trump and his rivals.This isn’t shaping up to be your usual presidential primary.On Monday, the judge overseeing the election subversion case against Donald J. Trump in Washington set a March 4 trial date, putting his trial right in the heart of primary season.If the trial goes as scheduled and lasts “no longer” than four to six weeks, as the government said in a filing, around two-thirds of the delegates to the Republican convention will be awarded during the trial of the party’s front-runner but, in all likelihood, before a verdict.A March trial could easily become the center of gravity of the primary season — the fact that structures the opportunities available to Mr. Trump and his rivals. It could even start to affect the calculations of the candidates today.When 2024 Republican Delegates Will Be AwardedAbout two-thirds of the delegates to the Republican convention could be awarded during the election subversion trial in Washington, which is expected to begin March 4. More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Is Suddenly Part of Our Political Life

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      Gail Collins: Bret, we haven’t talked since the Republican debate. Can’t say I fell in love with any of the contenders, but your fave Nikki Haley was certainly the most moderate voice onstage.Bret Stephens: Moderate and sane, but also cutting and sharp, particularly when it came to her vivisection of Vivek Ramaswamy’s neo-isolationist, Putin-kowtowing foreign policy.Gail: But she did promise to continue supporting Donald Trump for president, even if he’s convicted in any of the multitudinous, frequently anti-American charges against him.Bret: She shouldn’t have raised her hand, but I don’t think it was a fair question. All the candidates, including Chris Christie, pledged to support the party’s eventual nominee as a condition of being onstage. The important thing to me was that Haley was prepared to criticize Trump’s record and not just as a matter of character and ethics.The other candidate who seems to have everyone’s attention is Ramaswamy. Your thoughts?Gail: Wow, is he irritating. Not many people I can think of who I’d rather have over for dinner less than Donald Trump, but this guy’s one of them.Bret: I mentioned last week that he came to my house two summers ago for a pleasant lunch. That was before he got into politics.Gail: He’s very young and rich and I assume he’s figuring on making a name for himself with the right while Trump finishes out his career, in order to turn himself into the neo-Don of the late 2020s.Bret: Remember the John Cusack romantic comedy from the 1980s, “Say Anything”? It could become the slogan for a cohort of ambitious young conservatives whose views are endlessly malleable because their only goal is to advance their personal brand. Ramaswamy, for instance, would probably prefer not to be reminded that in his book he called the Jan. 6 riots “a disgrace” and a “stain on our history” that made him “ashamed of our nation.”Switching from the understudy to the master, what was your reaction to the Trump mug shot?Gail: Sigh. So deeply the story of our era that a former president charged, in effect, with attempting to overthrow our democratic form of government, would respond by selling a mug shot T-shirt.How about you?Bret: What ought to be a sad moment for the United States — when a former president who abused his power and disgraced his office faces legal consequences — has become a terrifying one, when that same former president treats the law with so much contempt that it becomes the springboard for his re-election campaign, to the applause of tens of millions of Americans.Ron DeSantis was right when he said at the debate that America is a nation in decline and that decline is a choice. He just wasn’t right in the way he meant it. We’re in decline because a spirit of lawlessness, shamelessness and brainlessness have become leading features of a conservative movement that was supposed to be a bulwark against all three.Gail: Now a lot of the debaters seem to think we’re headed toward national disaster because of government overspending. You’re kinda with them on that one, right?Bret: Kinda.My bottom line on government spending, both state and federal, is that what matters isn’t the amount, it’s the return on investment. We spent a lot on World War II, but it was worth it to defeat fascism. I’d argue the same about Eisenhower’s interstate highways or Reagan’s arms buildup. My quarrel with some of my liberal friends is that funding for, say, California’s $113 billion high-speed rail project from nowhere to nowhere is a colossal waste of money, as is every cent we spend subsidizing ethanol.Now I’m sure you’re going to say the same thing about my beloved F-35s, B-21s, SSN-774s and so on.Gail: Well, the big difference is that cutting back on global warming is approximately a billion percent more important than keeping weapons suppliers happy. That high-speed rail project has indeed been hell to complete — you’re talking about clearing the way through 171 miles in the middle of California. But eventually, it’ll get done and when it does there’ll be a dramatic reduction in motor vehicle emissions at a time when Americans are realizing that global warming can ruin the future for their children and grandchildren.Bret: Hmm. When Californians approved it, they thought they’d spend around $30 billion. It’s now costing almost four times as much and it’s not clear why people will prefer to go by train instead of just hopping a quick flight from San Francisco or San Jose to L.A. or Burbank. Plus, the inputs of concrete, steel and electricity all put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, too.Gail: That reminds me — during the Republican debate, when the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they believed human activity causes climate change, nobody was brave enough to do it. Although Haley did at least seem to admit it had a role.I know you don’t agree with our friend Ramaswamy, who called the climate change agenda “a hoax.” But do you feel yourself moving toward our oh-lord-this-is-a-world-crisis side?Bret: I feel myself moving toward the we-need-two-real-sides-in-this-debate side. Conservatives could have something meaningful to contribute if they acknowledged that climate change was real and that big-government solutions aren’t the way to go. We could do a lot to facilitate the permitting and construction of smaller, safer, next-generation nuclear reactors. We could welcome mining for rare-earths and other critical minerals in the United States. We could fight to end the environmentally destructive subsidies for biodiesels and the morally hazardous subsidies for flood insurance. We could take a Teddy Roosevelt-inspired conservationist approach to our shorelines to discourage beachfront development. We could support more investment in basic science, particularly for carbon capture and battery storage. We could support a carbon tax and offset it with a reduction in income tax. And we could agree to outlaw cryptocurrencies on purely environmental grounds, never mind that they’re mostly Ponzi schemes.What am I missing?Gail: Hey, we can go right back to our California discussion — whether it’s easy or not, the nation — and the world — has to encourage mass transit as opposed to carbon-spewing cars. Push solar and wind power as opposed to coal and oil and gas.Bret: All of the above. Plus hydrogen, tidal and did I mention nuclear?Gail: I rally behind your mention of flood insurance subsidies. We must, must stop developers from throwing up waterside housing complexes that are just invitations for the next disaster.Let’s go … less intense for a minute. Seen any good movies lately?Bret: I have, though it’s neither “Barbie” nor “Oppenheimer.” It’s “Golda,” which stars Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. It’s a smart and haunting film about a pioneering woman caught in a moment of national and personal crisis. But the movie has itself been caught in an idiotic controversy because Mirren — who knows how to play an anxious Jewish mother even better than my own anxious Jewish mother — isn’t herself Jewish. I don’t know when it became a thing, culturally speaking, that only members of a given ethnicity could represent characters from the same ethnicity. But it’s the antithesis of what acting and art ought to be about.Also, I’ll definitely see “Equalizer 3” when it comes out later this week because who doesn’t love watching Denzel Washington kill lots of people? What about you?Gail: We’ve been to see “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” The nice part was just going out to actual movie theaters and seeing shows that everybody’s talking about. These days almost every movie seems like it’s made to go right to TV. It’s convenient, but the communal experience is lost.Can’t say “Barbie” is great art, but it was nice to go to listen to the audience — or at least the part of the audience composed of young women — cheering for a plot that doesn’t involve blowing things up.Bret: My daughters loved it. You’d have to drag me to it kicking and screaming.Gail: On the other hand, “Oppenheimer” is most definitely about blowing things up — I’m amazed by how many folks decided to go out and spend three hours watching the history of the atomic bomb.Bret: I’ll be sure to watch it on a big screen. Now, as soon as the writers strike is over, I’m hoping that someone produces a series about all of the atomic spies: Klaus Fuchs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Ted Hall, David Greenglass, Morton Sobell. Many of them brilliant scientists and starry-eyed idealists who, in their political naïveté, put themselves in the service of a dreadful cause. I love stories about deception that are really stories about self-deception.Gail: Wow, as if the poor Hollywood writers don’t have enough dark clouds in their lives right now.Bret: Speaking of the “misguided but interesting” category, readers shouldn’t miss our colleague Clay Risen’s terrific obituary for Isabel Crook, an anthropologist who spent most of her life in China and died this month at 107. Crook was an ardent Communist and remained one even when her husband was imprisoned for six years during the Cultural Revolution. Can’t say I admire her politics, but it’s hard not to be awed by the sweep and romance of a long and storied life.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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      Vivek Ramaswamy, the Millennial 2024 Candidate, Emphasizes His Generation

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      The 38-year-old entrepreneur says he has a plan to fix what ails Americans his age and younger, but many of his positions are out of step with those voters.Vivek Ramaswamy, rising in the polls and buoyed by the first Republican primary debate this week, was barnstorming through central Iowa on Friday with a trademark smile and a remarkably bleak generational diagnosis of what ails younger America.Millennials like himself, the entrepreneur and political newcomer explained to an overflowing audience in Pella, Iowa, “are starved for purpose, meaning and identity”; robbed of those anchors that made America great — “faith, patriotism, hard work, family”; and stumbling from one cult to another — race, gender, sexuality and climate activism. The government “systematically lies to us,” he said. He told another gathering in Indianola, “We face a nonzero risk that the United States of America could cease to exist,” obliterated by the blossoming alliance of Russia and China.Young Americans, he concluded, have “a black hole in our hearts.”It is hardly Ronald Reagan’s shining city on the hill, Bill Clinton’s bridge to the 21st century or the countless evocations of American exceptionalism that have buoyed politics for decades now, including those offered by some of his 2024 rivals. And yet somehow his evocation of a generational malaise seems to resonate, at least with the crowds that are packing the restaurants, cafes and even larger venues in the state that will cast the first ballots this January for the Republican presidential nomination.Noticeably, however, those crowds don’t seem to include many young voters. And many of his views are out of step with those of his generation as well as with the one below it, particularly his positions on climate change — he loudly rejects prescriptions for combating it, like eliminating, or even reducing, the burning of fossil fuels — and the voting age, which he wants to raise, unless young voters can pass a civics test.Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, has never held elective office or worked in government, and he is competing for the presidential nomination in a party whose most loyal voters are baby boomers and Gen Xers, not millennials. (The Pew Research Center defines a millennial as anyone born between 1981 and 1996.)Yet in national polling averages, he is running second in the primary fight, far behind the front-runner, Donald J. Trump, but overtaking the man who was supposed to be Mr. Trump’s biggest threat, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Mr. Ramaswamy has pitched himself as the Republican future, a conservative in Mr. Trump’s image who holds forth at campaign events near a large list of commandments he’s labeled “truth.”Mr. Ramaswamy was greeted by crowds packing restaurants, cafes and larger venues in Iowa. While the crowds are dotted with younger people, they are largely made up of older voters.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesHis rhetoric in recent weeks has become increasingly strident, though he still delivers those lines with the calm tones and seeming intellectualism of the Harvard debater he was. He speaks now of “revolution” and his own “radicalism.” On Friday, he condemned Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts; the author Ibram X. Kendi; and other avatars of what he called the “racism of the left” as “the modern grand wizards of the modern K.K.K.”But most of his proposals have not changed for months, including eliminating the Department of Education, the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service; firing 75 percent of the federal work force; ending all aid to Ukraine and freezing the battle lines where they are (“Those would be real wins for Putin, I admit that,” he allowed in Indianola); ending birthright citizenship; and using the military to attack the drug cartels in Mexico.His positions have simply gotten the attention of opponents who until now have declined to take him seriously. Former Vice President Mike Pence called him a “rookie” on Wednesday night. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, accused him of sounding like ChatGPT.“You have no foreign policy experience,” said Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, “and it shows.”But at his events, Iowa voters are clearly with him on policy. Their qualms lie elsewhere.“He’s too young for the country,” said Kevin Klucas, 55, of Oskaloosa, Iowa, not for me, but the country tends to vote for older presidents.”Outside the Fireside Bistro in Indianola, Dan Bailey, 67, and Pat Hoppenworth, 70, agreed that Mr. Ramaswamy, along with the other candidates not named Trump, were all auditioning to join Mr. Trump’s ticket, and that Mr. Ramaswamy had won them over. But they could not agree on the order of the ticket: Ms. Hoppenworth thought the younger man should be president, with the former president by his side; Mr. Bailey said Mr. Ramaswamy would be vice president.“I will never give up on Trump,” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy’s views of American society, especially youthful society, could be politically risky. He doesn’t exactly deny the established science of human-made climate change, but he says climate change policy is a “hoax” and that “climatism,” what he calls the youth-driven activism seeking to reverse global warming, is a cult — a position that seems guaranteed to alienate young voters.He has proposed a constitutional amendment that would raise the legal voting age to 25, though 18- to 24-year-olds would retain the right to vote if they passed the same civics test that naturalized citizens must pass.More than anything, he has portrayed his generation and younger ones as empty souls living meaningless lives. “There’s more to life than the aimless passage of time, which is what we teach 18-year-olds today,” he said on Pella’s central square, to an audience at the Butcher’s Brewhuis that was so large dozens had to be turned away.Mr. Ramaswamy sparred with former Vice President Mike Pence during the debate on Wednesday over their idea of the country. The younger candidate said America was “in a dark moment.”Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMr. Ramaswamy’s views seem to strike a chord with the bulk of his audiences, who are older and unindicted by his observations. Rick Giarusso, a 61-year-old retired Army officer from Carlisle, Iowa, spoke of his 29-year-old son and his son’s 26-year-old wife, who he said are both “well-educated professionals” but with “a sense that something is missing.”The younger members of his audiences, a small minority, are more divided. Alex Foley, 32, a Pella resident, asked Mr. Ramaswamy a pointed question on his “truth” that “God is real,” and how he could unite a country where the idea of God inspires so many different beliefs. For Mr. Foley, who said he “loves Jesus intensely,” the notion of a young generation devoid of spirituality seemed alien. His own journey led him from drugs and clerking in a video store to a commitment to the Bible, hardly a path followed only by millennials.“Do I consider myself, aimless, purposeless, meaningless?” Mr. Foley said. “Of course, no one would like to consider themselves such thing. But do I feel like my generation has a particularly increased struggle to find what it is they should be fight for? I would say yes.”Taylor Harrison, 22, a Canadian from Alberta, and Drew Johnson, 24, from Pella, both members of Generation Z, saw the commotion at Butcher’s Brewhuis and packed in to see what Mr. Ramaswamy was all about.“Aimless and soulless, I wouldn’t say,” Ms. Harrison objected. She said her peers felt more that they had been dealt a bad hand, “so we’re not quite sure what to do with it.”“What sells on the news is just what’s wrong with everything,” Mr. Johnson chimed in. “Nobody wants to point out the good. No one wants to show the good things that are happening.”Austin Alexander, from Nashville, Tenn., was passing through Iowa and tracked Mr. Ramaswamy for much of the day. Mr. Alexander, who at 42 is a millennial, didn’t mind Mr. Ramaswamy’s portrayal of younger Americans, though he was quick to say that there were “a variety of faces in our generation.” Still, he said, he is old enough to remember when Lee Greenwood’s country anthem “Proud to Be an American” won over even young listeners. Now, he said, younger Americans are more likely to identify with the critique of violence, greed, nihilism and racism in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.”“I think he accurately diagnoses the lack of identity and purpose that some — many — in my generation and younger struggle with,” he said. “Especially with the identity of our country, there’s been a shift during my lifetime.” More