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      in US Politics

      Coronavirus: Mike Pence continues campaign tour despite chief of staff's positive test

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      Marc Short, the chief of staff for Mike Pence, has tested positive for coronavirus, the vice-president’s office has confirmed. One of Pence’s closest political advisers, Marty Obst, was also reported to have contracted Covid.
      “Vice-president Pence and Mrs Pence both tested negative for Covid-19 today, and remain in good health,” said Devin O’Malley, a Pence spokesman, on Saturday, adding that Donald Trump’s running mate would maintain his schedule “in accordance with the CDC guidelines for essential personnel”.
      Short is Pence’s closest aide and the vice-president is considered a “close contact” under CDC guidelines. Those guidelines mandate that essential workers exposed to someone with coronavirus closely monitor for symptoms of Covid-19 and wear a mask whenever around other people.
      After a day of campaigning on Saturday, Pence was seen wearing a mask as he returned to Washington on board Air Force Two once the news of Short’s diagnosis was made public.
      With Associated Press More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump told Republican donors holding Senate will be 'tough' – report

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      Shortly after Donald Trump insisted to reporters in Ohio he expected a “red wave” on election day, 3 November, it was reported on Saturday that he told Republican donors this week it would be “tough” for the party to hold on to the Senate.Trump trails Joe Biden in most national and battleground state polls. Democrats hold the House of Representatives and expect to keep it, while many forecasters think they have a good chance of re-taking the Senate, which Republicans hold 53-47, thereby achieving unified government.“I think the Senate is tough actually,” the Washington Post said Trump told donors in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday, before his last debate against Biden, according to an anonymous attendee. “The Senate is very tough.”The Post said Trump also insisted Republicans “are going to take back the House”. As Democrats hold that chamber by 232-197, few forecasters think there is much chance of that.Senate Republicans face defeat in Colorado, Maine, Arizona and perhaps North Carolina. Supposedly safer seats in Georgia, Iowa and Montana look far from secure. Trump reportedly told donors North Carolina would hold and Alabama would be taken back, but said there were “a couple” of senators he did not want to help.“There are a couple senators I can’t really get involved in,” the Post quoted him as saying. “I just can’t do it. You lose your soul if you do. I can’t help some of them. I don’t want to help some of them.”Trump has clashed with senators including Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who offered harsh criticism and predicted “a Republican bloodbath in the Senate”.Sasse is among conservatives eyeing post-Trump presidential runs. Others usually loyal but under pressure at the polls, such as John Cornyn in Texas and Martha McSally in Arizona, have mounted cautious bids to be seen as independent.Even Mitch McConnell, the ruthless architect of the Republicans’ push to install federal judges under Trump, has said he thinks his party has a “50-50” chance of keeping control. The majority leader, 78, set for re-election despite a tough fight in Kentucky, has rebuffed questions about his health after he appeared with severe bruising to his hands and face.Control of the Senate has allowed Republicans to rush through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the supreme court, thereby tipping it 6-3 in favour of conservatives.If the White House and Senate are lost, a reactionary court would be Republicans’ bulwark against a Biden legislative agenda that could include reform to the court and the Senate.The court is due to hear a challenge to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, on 10 November. Trump has said he wants the justices to bring the ACA down, thereby depriving millions of healthcare in a pandemic and kneecapping his own drive to defeat HIV.One senator who initially stood against the push for Barrett said during debate on Saturday she would vote to confirm. When the nomination comes to the floor on Monday, said Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, “I will be a yes. I have no doubt about her intellect … I have no doubt about her capability to do the job.”Generally a defender of abortion rights Democrats say Barrett will threaten, Murkowksi had said no new justice should be named before the election. More

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      in US Politics

      Obama campaigns for Biden in Florida as Trump heads to battleground Ohio – live coverage

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      Key events

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      5.00pm EDT17:00
      Alaska’s Murkowski will confirm Barrett for supreme court

      3.55pm EDT15:55
      Obama speaks in Florida: slams Trump, says Biden made Obama himself “a better president”

      3.50pm EDT15:50
      Sanders in PA, Booker in NC

      3.33pm EDT15:33
      Harris laments “hunger crisis”

      2.33pm EDT14:33
      Biden on fracking – no ban

      2.00pm EDT14:00
      Fauci supports national mask mandate

      1.40pm EDT13:40
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      Live feed

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      5.53pm EDT17:53

      Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris is calling for an administration that is frank about racist police brutality in America.
      “There isn’t a Black man I know, be it a relative or friend, who has not had some sort of experience with police that’s been about an unreasonable stop, some sort of profiling or excessive force,” she said. More

    • 188 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      We’re endlessly told why populism works. Now see how it might fail | Nick Cohen

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      We have heard lectures on why radical rightwing movements win for what feels like an age. A more pressing subject gains less attention. Like catching a glimpse of the path from a dangerous mountain when the mist parts, we can begin to see how they may lose.When liberals treat their enemies as evil geniuses, they bestow a backhanded compliment. They imply that, however wicked it may be, the right has a supernatural power to manipulate the electorate and rig the system. Donald Trump is many things, but he’s no genius, evil or otherwise. If Trump were a beggar screaming at passersby on a Washington sidewalk, rather than a billionaire in the White House, we would have no difficulty in saying he was mentally ill. I accept Boris Johnson has the superficial charm and rat-like cunning of the journalist-conman. But if he were a political mastermind, he would never have confirmed the deep suspicion of northern voters that southern snobs view them with contempt.One day, their obituaries may record that Trump and Johnson destroyed the base of their support without realising they were doing it; that they no more understood the forces that brought them to power than plastic sheeting blowing down a street understands the wind.Johnson’s failure to protect the British is equal to Trump’s failure to protect Americans, as the death rates showAge does not bring wisdom and before it is anything else Trump and Johnson’s base is old. Sixty per cent of voters over 65 supported Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum. American pensioners preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton 53%-45% in the 2016 presidential election. You don’t need me to tell you that Covid-19 targets the old. And you don’t need to be a genius to know that politicians shouldn’t give their supporters the impression they are happy to see them die. Trump’s failure to get a grip on the pandemic and the Republican party’s dismissal of basic health protections gives exactly that impression. Joe Biden can now tell old, white voters, whose backing Trump could once have counted on: “You’re expendable, you’re forgettable, you’re virtually nobody. That’s how he sees seniors. That’s how he sees you.”US polls bear out the staggering political insight that voters don’t want to die by showing that Biden has taken a substantial lead among pensioners. Far from making the clever choice and downplaying an issue that only harms him, Trump reveals his compulsive narcissism by refusing to let Covid-19 go. Moving on to talk about, say, the economy would entail accepting that he was in the wrong about the pandemic. Rather than bite his tongue, last week he was ridiculing the head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, whom Trump loathes for the childish reason that Americans trust his medical advice more than they trust Trump.Johnson’s failure to protect the British is equal to Trump’s failure to protect Americans, as the near-identical per capita death rates show. Johnson is also displaying Trumpian levels of political ineptitude, although the reason for his blundering is different. If Trump is driven by a narcissistic compulsion, Johnson is driven by power hunger.Not a single cabinet minister visited Manchester to make the government’s casePerhaps you have to be from the north of England to understand the suicidal politics of behaving as if the south can humiliate the north. I moved away from Manchester in the 1980s and even I found myself overcome by volcanic rage as ministers issued ultimatums that Manchester must accept the government’s miserly Covid-19 relief or pay the price. Johnson’s behaviour is incomprehensible because he knows the power of northern resentment. Since the Brexit referendum, the right has spun the story that elitist Remainers, lounging in their Islington ivory towers, had the nerve to denounce honest northerners as “thick” for backing Leave. The opinion pages of the Daily Telegraph have been filled with little else these past four years.Exploiting anti-metropolitan feeling helped the Conservatives win. Now northern Labour politicians can turn the years of physical and economic suffering that coronavirus will bring into the story of how Westminster’s Tory elite refused to treat the north with common decency. The Manchester Evening News’s Jennifer Williams wrote of her incredulity that, as reports of Tories refusing the support the north needed cut through to such an extent that pubs were offering free pints to Andy Burnham, not a single cabinet minister visited Manchester to make the government’s case. Perhaps it isn’t such a puzzle. This government hates and wants to crush anyone who argues back: judges, broadcasters, civil servants, regional mayors. When the mayor of Greater Manchester stood up for his region, the right’s hatred of a rival source of power blinded it to the danger of confirming every northern suspicion about the south.A deterministic explanation of contemporary society has taken a deep hold. The corruption and incompetence of governments do not matter, we are told. The material reality of whether you have a job or are unemployed, whether you expect to live or die, no longer determines how you vote. If you went to university, you back the left. If you didn’t, you back the right. Or so the story goes. Johnson can break his promises about Brexit bringing a new dawn. Trump can break his promises about fighting for working-class Americans. It doesn’t matter. Trump’s boast that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” encapsulates our age.If Trump wins, the cultural determinists will be vindicated. If he does not, however, the reasons for his defeat won’t be a mystery. Astonished US journalists won’t be wondering how to explain it. They will know that, far from helping him, Trump’s vicious culture war politics alienated white women, who came to find him repulsive, and his mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis alienated elderly people and many others besides.Northern Labour politicians I speak to still believe that Corbyn and the far left gifted the Conservatives another 10 years in 2019. But even they are wavering now and, like lost walkers when the mist parts on the fells, are catching the faintest glimpse of a way through the murk.• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist More

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      in Elections

      'I'm more enthusiastic now than in 2016': meet the voters standing by Donald Trump

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      Lisa Matthews voted for Barack Obama. But just the once. The daughter of an African American mother and Puerto Rican father, the 47-year-old grew up in one of the roughest neighbourhoods of Camden, New Jersey, a struggling former shipbuilding port on the Delaware river.“Camden was predominantly black, poor, a lot of welfare recipients, single parents, and crime. Big drug trade. My father was in the military, but he left the family when I was five. My mom was a single mom at the age of 23. We lived on food stamps,” Matthews says. “I had two of my cousins killed there in the city, and my stepbrother was murdered as well. My uncle was killed by an unknown shooter in 1987. It was a tough place to grow up.”Like her mother, Matthews became a single parent at 23 and worked several jobs to stay afloat. But her absent father’s time in the military had planted a seed. Her parents were posted around the US and to Britain, and her mother talked about other places with wonder. Matthews carried that with her. “My sister and I were very interested in the world, in other cultures,” she says. In her 20s, a friend encouraged her to move to Concord, North Carolina, where she got a job in a bank. Now she lives in a large house in a plush suburb where we chat over tea and Jammie Dodgers (she still loves all things British). She’s wearing her politics on her T-shirt: “President Trump 2020, Keep America Great”.In 2008, Matthews voted for Obama, helping to swing the former slave state to America’s first black president. “I wasn’t a really liberal Democrat back then. Even Barack Obama wasn’t that liberal in 2008. I was just excited that he was black, to be honest,” she says. But by the time the next election came round, she questioned the point of an African American president.“The black community rallied around him, but what message did he have for them? He could have said, this is how me and Michelle got out of the South Side of Chicago. We can help lift people up,” she says. “Instead he was telling people they’re oppressed: ‘Let me give you a handout.’”Matthews came to think that summed up the Democrats. As she saw it, the party kept the poor dependent on welfare instead of providing paths out of poverty. She drifted toward the Republicans, although she wasn’t ready to support Mitt Romney against Obama in 2012; that year, she didn’t vote.Four years later, Donald Trump made his attention-grabbing ride down the golden escalator of his New York tower to announce a run for president. By then Matthews had become a bank fraud investigator; she now owns her own home for the first time. She voted against Trump in the primaries, thinking he didn’t stand a chance. But when he won the Republican nomination, she embraced it.“I thought he was just a great American, New Yorker businessman. He was the epitome of what America is like. Brash, throwing money around,” she says. “But I didn’t know what kind of president he would be. I was never against him, but I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I am now. Now I tell people I love Trump.”***If Trump pulls off the unexpected once again, his victory will be built on the foundation of the four in 10 voters who have consistently said they will stick with him, despite one of the most tempestuous presidencies of modern times. Voters who have excused him, explained him, even despaired of him at times, but never spurned him.The most visible of those supporters can be found at Trump’s rallies, sporting Make America Great Again hats and cheering the president’s provocations; or forming armed vigilante groups, ostensibly to defend order and history. They push Trump’s myriad conspiracy theories, including about Covid-19, even after the president caught the virus. But most of those who remain loyal are not the ultras seen on television. Neither are they easily slotted into the demographics often assigned to Trump supporters – the embittered former factory workers turning their anger on minorities and voting against their own interests.When you see the coal trains and the trucks, and people going back to work, you see people’s attitudes changeThis autumn I drove for over a month across the US – from the south to Appalachian coal country in one of the poorest states, West Virginia; and from Detroit, Michigan, once the engine of America’s industrialisation, to the upper reaches of rural Minnesota on the border with Canada – the miles of Trump signs and flags are one demonstration of the enthusiasm some of his supporters retain. The voters were as varied as the landscape. The coalmine worker who was without a job for years. The former military officer whose father came to the US illegally. The estate agent and small city mayor angry about China. The former police officer despairing at Black Lives Matter. All told me why they are determinedly sticking with Trump.***Ronald Reagan, on his way to unseating President Jimmy Carter in 1980, famously asked American voters: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The division, uncertainty and fear of 2020 makes that seem an inadequate question ahead of this election. Bo Copley, however, doesn’t hesitate to say that he is. Copley lost his maintenance job on a West Virginia coalmine a year before the last election, and gained fleeting fame in 2016 after confronting Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail over her pledge to “put a lot of coalminers out of business”. More

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      in US Politics

      Wicked Game review: a fascinating but flawed memoir by Trump's jailed associate

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      Under a title which calls to mind Chris Isaak’s hit song from 1989, the former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates offers an interesting mixture of vignettes and dish, an effort to rewrite the history of 2016 before the 2020 election is over. Wicked Game is surprisingly readable and will leave process junkies with plenty to chew on.Making sausage is seldom pretty. The book reminds us that even after Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president, with his win in the Indiana primary on 3 May 2016, the convention was more than two months away. Trump’s opponents had plenty of time to organize one last challenge.Convention fights are rare – but possible. In 1980, Ted Kennedy mounted an attempt to wrest the Democratic nomination away from Jimmy Carter, the incumbent president, on the floor of Madison Square Garden. He lost. Four years before, Ronald Reagan came close to unseating Gerald Ford. In helping the president push back, Paul Manafort won his spurs.As a rookie candidate, Trump never recognized that he could be displaced. But Manafort and Gates did. Catapulted into the Trump campaign by the businessman Tom Barrack and the profane prankster Roger Stone, they took names and put down a prospective revolt before the convention got going. In the primaries, letting Trump be Trump worked. Nailing down the nomination required different skills. Patience and attention to detail mattered.And yet, in Trump’s universe, almost no one lasts, be they wives or staffers. Manafort would be forced out in favor of Steve Bannon, Trumpworld’s dark lord who would in turn be ousted from the White House and now stands under federal indictment.The Trump campaign was a hazardous place to be. Gates emerged as Barrack’s deputy on the inaugural committee. But in the end, while a jury convicted Manafort on charges arising from special counsel Robert Mueller’s campaign investigation, Gates copped a guilty plea, cooperated and was sentenced to 45 days in jail.Despite it all, Trump 2016 kept its eye on the prize, first winning the nomination, then the electoral college. Its message was venomously acrid – but somehow coherent. It got the biggest things right. Four years later, candidate and minions are distracted. Trump’s rallies are borscht belt shtick infused with anger and self-pity, the backdrop a mounting death toll. The US is far from turning the corner against the coronavirus. The grim reaper stalks the land.What worked against Hillary Clinton is coming up short against Joe Biden, everyone’s favorite uncle. When a “billionaire” sitting president has less cash on hand than his challenger, in the final days of a campaign, something has gone wrong.As for scoop, Gates lets the reader know Mike Pence was not the vice-presidential pick of Trump’s dreams. The Indiana governor had tepidly backed Ted Cruz. As Gates reminds us, Trump is not one to forget.And then there was Ivanka.“She’s bright, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, and the people would love her!” her father gushed, according to Gates, who italicizes his reaction: “OK … He’s not joking.”It turned out Pence was a good pick: all the loyalty of a puppy without the need to housebreak. Unlike Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich, the two other actual finalists, Pence conveyed a degree of stability and helped with white evangelicals, a key constituency that has stuck with Trump throughout. The former governor also brought that beatific gaze.By contrast, Christie labored under the cloud of Bridgegate and Gingrich had a personality that sucked all the air out of the room. Trump would not abide competition. As Trump put it, in Gates’s telling, “there was something wrong and off” about the former House speaker. Gingrich’s wife was appointed ambassador to the Vatican – a consolation prize.Twisting the knife, Gates also announces that Gingrich was Jared and Ivanka’s pick. It would neither be the first nor last time the dauphins would get things wrong. Kushner thought firing James Comey would bring bipartisan plaudits. We all know it did not.Instead, firing Comey triggered a two-year special counsel investigation that snared Gates and Manafort, enveloped the president and helped hand the House to the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi should send Kushner chocolates.Gates’s judgments can be premature. He lavishes praise on Brad Parscale, data guy to the 2016 campaign, now former campaign manager for 2020. Gates describes Parscale’s data operations as invaluable but adds, inauspiciously, that they continue “to this day”.Not quite. First, Parscale grossly overestimated the demand for a June rally in Oklahoma which apparently resulted in the sad death of Herman Cain, a contender for the 2012 nomination and ardent supporter of the president who contracted Covid-19. Ultimately, Parscale was dismissed. In September, he was hospitalized, after menacing his wife and threatening to harm himself.Gates also goes all-in on denouncing Robert Mueller and attacking any suggestion of “collusion” with Russia. Here too, he may have gotten over his skis.According to the Senate intelligence committee’s final report, Russia and WikiLeaks coordinated on interference in the 2016 election, while the Trump campaign “tracked” news about WikiLeaks, “Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and the press team” paying heed to Julian Assange’s document dumps.Gates emerges from his own book as a sympathetic figure, too low on the totem pole to be a driving force, close enough to the sun to get badly burned. If nothing else, his Wicked Game is a morality tale for our times. As Isaak sang: “Strange what desire will make foolish people do.” More

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      in World Politics

      Does Saad Hariri Really Believe He Can Save Lebanon?

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      My parents used to say, “Eat with your mouth and not your eyes.” This may be good advice for newly-minted Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri. He is clearly unable to resist trying once again to raise Lebanon from its deathbed, and this time the consequences may be more disastrous than just a bit of heartburn. Yes, I’m sure his supporters see this as the ultimate act of patriotism, and hopefully, he will be successful, but the odds are against him.

      First of all, Hariri is a well-known figure who understands the political calculus of his supporters and opponents. Yet this is not similar to his deal that brought the presidency to Michel Aoun in 2016. The reforms called for, and that Hariri has said he supports, are literally aimed at dismantling the edifice of economic and political corruption that has led to the erosion of Lebanon’s well-being.

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      Secondly, there is the matter of the timeframe called for under the French plan for change that serves as Hariri’s point of reference. It calls for significant reforms underway in six months as well as capital controls, anti-corruption measures, a robust social safety net and radical changes to how the government and banking system operate. Hariri, a three-time prime minister, has said that he will accept a government with a shelf life of six months and focus on the political and economic reforms to refresh and reinvigorate the country.

      Will the oligarchy, of which he is a member, yield to his office the necessary executive authority to bypass parliament to enact laws and regulations? There is no brotherly bond or even public tolerance between Hariri and Gebran Bassil, leader of the Christian Free Patriotic Movement. So, will the prime minister’s reliance on Hezbollah’s support bring him into the cross-hairs of US sanctions?

      A major sticking point will be the composition of the Hariri cabinet, which he promised will be made up of “nonpolitically aligned experts with the mission of economic, financial, and administrative reforms contained in the French initiative road map.” The downfall of the most recent prime minister, Mustapha Adib, was over this exact point, and it is a road too far for many of the political elites.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Finally, how much longer will the Lebanese people put up with leaders who are more concerned with their patrimony and their constituents rather than the health, safety and well-being of the country? Hariri may have the best of intentions, but we know which way that road can lead. As Al Jazeera reports, “Hariri’s return marks the biggest challenge yet for activists involved in the nationwide uprising against the country’s corrupt political class that had led to the resignation of Hariri and his coalition government last year.”

      The economic realities are well known, ranging from extensive corruption to government mismanagement and a failed government model built on cronyism. Soon, more than 70% of the people could be below the poverty line as the Lebanese pound has lost 80% of its value, unemployment is around 35% and people struggle with restrictions limiting access to their funds in banks. According to journalist Souad Lazkani, as many as 1 million will be unemployed by 2021 unless, by some miracle, reforms are urgently implemented by the new government.

      Deja Vu

      Hariri’s restart as prime minister is dreaded by many in the street who feel a sense of deja vu from the last decade. “Hariri’s return is the peak of the counter-revolution,” Nizar Hassan, a political activist told Al Jazeera. “A pillar of the political establishment, a multi-millionaire who represents the banks and foreign interests, and a symbol of inefficient governance and widespread corruption: He represents everything we revolted against.”

      So, the demonstrators who have been protesting for several months have to decide whether to publicly oppose these latest steps to maintain the status quo or come up with an alternative that, hopefully, will be nonviolent. With the hyperinflation that has caused shortages of basic goods like medicine and foods, the growing instability and dwindling prospects for change, Lebanon faces a very difficult winter.

      This is Hariri’s multilayered and multifaceted challenge. As he assembles his cabinet and prepares his ministerial statement of his government’s vision, he will be watched closely by people hoping that he can rise above the sectarian politics of the past, as well as by those who are most threatened by reforms. It is a difficult road ahead indeed.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More