The President Was Not Encouraging’: What Obama Really Thought About Biden

 

POLITICO

The way Joe Biden explained it on the campaign trail in Iowa, he and his friend Barack Obama had long talked of Biden succeeding him in the White House, continuing the work of their administration. It was only tragic fate, in the form of the loss of his son Beau, that intervened. Now, after four years, the plan could finally go forward, with Biden running as the administration’s true heir.

Barack Obama, Biden solemnly declared in his campaign announcement in Philadelphia, is “an extraordinary man, an extraordinary president.” On the social media-generated #BestFriendsDay, the campaign posted a picture of “Joe” and “Barack” friendship bracelets. Biden relabeled himself an “Obama-Biden Democrat.”

But behind all the BFF bonhomie is a much more complicated story—one fueled by the misgivings the 44th president had about the would-be 46th, the deep hurt still felt among Biden’s allies over how Obama embraced Hillary Clinton as his successor, and a powerful sense of pride that is driving Biden to prove that the former president and many of his aides underestimated the very real strengths of his partner.

“He was loyal, I think, to Obama in every way in terms of defending and standing by him, even probably when he disagreed with what Obama was doing,” recalled Leon Panetta, Obama’s secretary of Defense. “To some extent, [he] oftentimes felt that that loyalty was not being rewarded.”

Next week, Barack and Michelle Obama are each headlining different days of Biden’s convention, a lineup meant to display party unity and a smooth succession from its most popular figure to its current nominee. But past tensions between Obama’s camp and Biden’s camp have endured, forming some hairline fractures in the Democratic foundation. Some Biden aides boast that they wrapped up the nomination faster than Obama did in 2008. They tout that Biden’s abilities at retail, one-on-one politics are superior to those of the aloof former president. And they don’t easily forget the mocking or belittling of their campaign during the primary and revel in having proven the Obama brainiacs wrong.

Some have gotten caught in this crossfire—including Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, who has been working to regain Biden’s trust after having ditched the VP for Hillary Clinton’s campaign back when Biden still hoped to contend for the 2016 nomination.

Interviews with dozens of senior officials of the Obama-Biden administration painted a picture of eight years during which the president and vice president enjoyed a genuinely close personal relationship, built particularly around devotion to family, while at the same time many senior aides, sometimes tacitly encouraged by the president’s behavior, dismissed Biden as eccentric and a practitioner of an old, outmoded style of politics.

“You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” said Jen Psaki, the former White House communications director. Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden, like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended monologues that everyone had heard before.

Former administration officials treated Biden dismissively in their memoirs.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, who was known for his mind-meld with the president, wrote in his memoir that “in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.”

Former FBI Director James Comey recalled in his book that “Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask something, Mr. President?’”

Comey continued: “Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.”

Meanwhile, Biden loyalists stewed, aware that the vice president, who had gotten himself elected to the Senate at age 29 in the year of President Richard M. Nixon’s landslide reelection and served 36 years, had a range of Washington political skills Obama lacked. The president and his closest allies seemed unaware of how he would alienate potential allies with his preachy tone, particularly in Congress, where Biden excelled.

Biden, for his part, felt Obama too often let his head get in the way. “Sometimes I thought he was deliberate to a fault,” he wrote in his 2017 book Promise Me, Dad.

But, as is sometimes the case in a troubled marriage, there were three people in the Obama-Biden relationship.

And the person who ultimately came between Obama and Biden was Hillary Clinton.

Back in 2008, when Obama was struggling to close the deal on the Democratic nomination, he engaged in a legendary duel with then-Sen. Clinton, sparring with her for months in one-on-one debates in which the two matched wits like law professors in a mock courtroom.

Despite the exhaustive battle, Obama admired how she made him earn it (“backwards and in heels,” he said at her convention in 2016). Clinton and her husband’s enthusiastic campaigning for Obama that fall helped seal the respect between the former rivals: Obama wanted Clinton to be secretary of State and handle world affairs while he tackled the tumbling economy. Biden’s own 2008 presidential campaign, meanwhile, had barely made a mark and fizzled after he won less than 1 percent in Iowa.

From the start, Obama’s personal style meshed better with Clinton’s—in the sense that they were both very disciplined and cerebral—than with Biden’s much more free-wheeling approach. Even if Obama sensed that Biden provided a much-needed complement and contrast, he naturally gravitated toward Clinton.

Obama and Clinton both viewed themselves as pioneers who worked their way through America’s elite colleges. Obama went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he headed the law review; Clinton went from Wellesley to Yale Law School. They shared a work style as well, always sure to do their homework and arrive at a meeting prepared to get to the crux of an issue. “They do the reading,” said one former Clinton aide. “In Situation Room meetings, she had the thickest binder and had read it three times.”

Biden’s own academic career was unimpressive—he repeated the third grade, earned all Cs and Ds in his first three semesters at the University of Delaware except for As in P.E., a B in “Great English Writers” and an F in ROTC, and graduated 76th in his Syracuse Law School class of 85 students. He’s the first Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale in 1984 not to have an Ivy League degree. He was not a binder person, Clinton and Obama aides said.

Biden admitted as much in his 2007 memoir Promises to Keep, writing “It’s important to read reports and listen to the experts; more important is being able to read people in power.”

Biden’s tendency to blurt out whatever was on his mind rankled Obama, who wasn’t afraid to needle him for it. In his first press conference in 2009, the young president quipped “I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to—not surprisingly,” when asked about Biden’s assessment that there was a 30 percent chance they could get the economic stimulus package wrong.

The gaffes were only one side of the story, though. Obama warmed both to Biden’s effusive personality and his skill in implementing the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package, which the president had delegated to him.

Aides recall that Obama and Biden took almost polar-opposite approaches to policymaking, Obama always seeking data for the most logical or efficient outcome, while Biden told stories about how a bill would affect the working-class guy in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. When a deal was finally made, Obama would bemoan the compromises, while Biden would celebrate the points of agreement.

“Biden doesn’t come from the wonky angle of leadership,” said a senior Obama administration official. “It’s different than the last two Democratic presidents. Biden is from a different style. It’s an older style, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson of ‘Let’s meet, let’s negotiate, let’s talk, let’s have a deal.’”

Republicans who negotiated with the administration often came away finding Obama condescending and relying on Biden to understand their concerns.

“Negotiating with President Obama was all about the fact that he felt that he knew the world better than you,” said Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt that he thought about it so much, that he figured it all out, and no matter what conclusion you had come to with the same set of facts, his way was right.” Biden, he said, understood that “you’re gonna have to agree to disagree about some things.”

A former Republican leadership aide described Obama’s style as “mansplaining, basically.” The person added that Biden “may not be sitting down talking about Thucydides but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a high level of political intelligence.”

Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s close adviser and family friend, bristled at any suggestion that Obama’s negotiating style was responsible for tensions with members of Congress: “Obama was younger than many of them. He was the first Black president. He wasn’t a part of that club,” Jarrett said.

But Obama would often convey a weariness with the traditional obligations of political leadership: the glad-handing, the massaging of egos. Sometimes he couldn’t hide his disdain for part of the job he signed up for.

At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2013, in front of a roomful of journalists, Obama joked, “Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask. Really? ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ I’m sorry, I get frustrated sometimes.”

Biden, former aides say, didn’t get why that was funny. Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir that likely “the single most important piece of advice I got in my career” came from the late Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) who told him, “Your job here is to find the good things in your colleagues—the things their state saw—and not focus on the bad.”

Mansfield added: “And, Joe, never attack another man’s motive, because you don’t know his motive.”

Thus, Biden invested time in developing those relationships that Obama never did.

Denis McDonough, Obama’s former chief of staff, said Biden “always wanted to have had two conversations with someone before he would ask that person for something. … Once in a while you’re like, ‘Hey, can we get through those two touches so you can make the ask here,’ but he just wouldn’t do it. That’s the kind of operation he runs.”

Advance staffers recall that Obama’s speeches were arranged to be delivered alone on the stage with voters behind him, while Biden would push to include every local elected official up there with him, knowing they would love the exposure to the vice president—a chit to cash in later.

Psaki, for one, recalled that the president often saw photo lines as obligations while they might be the best part of the vice president’s day.

“His background is much more retail politics kind of person, and the president was very much sort of a wholesale kind of president,” said former Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden adviser who is now heading up his presidential transition effort.

Immediately after Obama’s reelection in 2012, Biden’s team started thinking about his own 2016 run. His mind wasn’t entirely made up, but he wanted to focus on a few areas—particularly infrastructure—that could form the basis of a forward-looking campaign agenda, according to former Biden officials and Democrats they consulted.

One former Biden aide described the vice president’s thinking as “I want to find the ways to stay viable to make the decision on my own terms.”

From early on, however, it became increasingly clear that Obama and many of his closest aides were helping along a Hillary Clinton succession.

In the past few years, the story of how that happened has taken on a particular shape. After Clinton’s 2016 loss and a certain amount of Monday-morning quarterbacking about her weakness as a candidate, many Obama aides tried to cast the president’s snub of Biden as purely an act of compassion: Biden was grieving for his son Beau, who died of cancer in 2015, and didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to handle a campaign.

Biden himself has offered this explanation in public, and Jarrett, the ultimate Obama loyalist, insists that was largely the case: “Vice President Biden was devastated, as any parent would be, by the loss of Beau. It was excruciating to watch him suffer the way he did,” she said.

But numerous administration veterans, including loyalists to both Obama and Biden, remember it differently: Obama had begun embracing Clinton as a possible successor years before Biden lost his son, while the vice president was laying the groundwork for his own campaign.

Just after Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, Democrats turned on their TVs to see Obama singing Clinton’s praises in a joint “60 Minutes” interview on the occasion of Clinton’s departure from the State Department—one that two Clinton aides say was suggested by Obama’s team, albeit as a print interview.

“Why have them sit together for two hours and have 200 of their words used?,” recalled Philippe Reines, Clinton’s press aide at the time. “I always just prefer TV. And I’m like, ‘Let’s go for gold. Let’s do ‘60 Minutes.’ And Ben [Rhodes] said, ‘I love it.’”

“I was a big admirer of Hillary’s before our primary battles and the general election,” Obama enthused. “You know, her discipline, her stamina, her thoughtfulness, her ability to project, I think, and make clear issues that are important to the American people, I thought made her an extraordinary talent. … [P]art of our bond is we’ve been through a lot of the same stuff.”

To which Clinton gushed, “I think there’s a sense of understanding that, you know, sometimes doesn’t even take words because we have similar views.”

When interviewer Steve Kroft raised the prospect of a Clinton presidential run, both Obama and Clinton played it coy, saying it was way too early for such thinking, but doing nothing to discourage the idea.

Then Obama’s political sage, David Plouffe [above]—the man who had dedicated a year and a half to taking down Clinton in 2008—offered his help in mid-2013 and met with Clinton, according to a Democrat familiar with the overture. (Plouffe maintains that Clinton’s team approached him first.) Obama’s pollster, Joel Benenson, later hopped on board. In early 2015, so did top Obama aides John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri. Clinton’s campaign even began interviewing and picking off people from Biden’s office, including Alex Hornbrook, who became Clinton’s director of scheduling and advance.

“It certainly felt like Obama’s world was behind us,” said one former Clinton campaign aide. “It wasn’t just Plouffe, Palmieri and Benenson. From the beginning, a lot of key Obama aides came over and helped stand up our campaign.” It was so blatant that some Clinton aides wondered whether Obama had just wrongly assumed that Biden wasn’t interested in running because of his age.

On January 5, 2015, Biden and Obama privately discussed a White House run at their weekly lunch. Obama “had been subtly weighing in against,” Biden recalled in Promise Me, Dad, his 2017 book.

“I also believe he had concluded that Hillary Clinton was almost certain to be the nominee, which was good by him,” Biden wrote. A campaign spokesperson added that in the meeting, Obama also said, “If I could appoint anyone to be president over the next eight years, Joe, it would be you.”

Panetta, who had known Clinton from his days as her husband’s White House chief of staff, recalled that “Both she and her staff worked at that a great deal in trying to build that support.” Among Obama and his aides, Panetta said, “I think there was a certain attraction to someone that would certainly break ceilings and kind of create the same kind of precedent that he created when he became president … as opposed to supporting somebody who’s kind of your more traditional politician and, you know, a white Irish Catholic guy.”

There was also dismissiveness of Biden in Clinton’s orbit that echoed Obama aides. “The good thing about a Biden run,” Neera Tanden, Clinton’s close aide who also advised the Obama administration on health policy, wrote to Podesta in 2015, in an email later exposed by WikiLeaks, “is that he would make Hillary look so much better.”

Obama tried to remain above the fray, even as his closest staffers largely rallied around Clinton—which they likely would not have done if there was a chance he would support Biden. “I knew a number of the president’s former staffers, and even a few current ones, were putting a finger on the scale for Clinton,” Biden wrote.

Pressed on whether Obama ever expressed a preference between Clinton and Biden, Jarrett demurred, saying, “that’s a conversation you’ll have to have with him.”

Obama declined to be interviewed through his spokesperson. “President Obama has been unequivocal in his respect for Joe’s wisdom, experience, empathy and integrity,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Even if he did express preference for Clinton, some Obama officials characterized it more as an acknowledgment of her strength than an attempt to undercut Biden.

“There was a feeling of inevitability about Hillary Clinton in every aspect,” recalled Psaki. “So it never felt to me like it was Obama choosing Hillary Clinton over Joe Biden. It was a feeling like it’s inevitable after Hillary Clinton left the State Department that she will be the Democratic nominee, and she will become the next president. So Obama … was trying to play a part in being helpful.”

Reines said Obama “was always very encouraging” of Clinton and that after serving as president, “he believed there was no one better prepared to do it.”

It was in the midst of the handoff to Clinton that Beau Biden’s health began deteriorating. Joe Biden had had an especially deep bond with his eldest son since Beau’s mother and sister died in a car accident that seriously injured Beau and his brother Hunter. Before the 46-year-old Beau passed away that May from an aggressive form of brain cancer, he had been a firm advocate for his Dad to run and, even in intense grief, Biden made serious preparations in the summer and fall of 2015 to jump into the race.

The Clinton camp took Biden’s deliberations seriously. Podesta told people he believed Biden would go for it. The Clinton team assembled an oppo-research book on him with the code name “Project Acela,” according to one former Clinton official. Negative stories began popping up. The Clinton campaign denied having had any role, but Biden was skeptical.

Obama pressed the issue in another private meeting. “The president was not encouraging,” Biden recalled.

A more direct kind of brushback occurred that fall. Plouffe—the Obama strategist who had been quietly advising Clinton since 2013—met with Biden and told him not to end his career in embarrassment with a third place finish in Iowa, according to multiple accounts of the meeting.

“There just wasn’t an opening,” Plouffe said, explaining why he advised Biden against the run. “He started asking the question in the 4th quarter of the contest.” Plouffe argued that Biden hadn’t done the necessary legwork before 2015 that previous vice presidents had done before their runs.

Clinton’s campaign conducted a survey around the same time showing Biden in third in Iowa. In a foreshadowing of Biden’s 2020 performance, the analysis also showed his tremendous strength among African American voters.

“With Biden in the race, our support among African Americans drops by 23 points,” an internal Clinton memo noted ominously. “While we still lead, it is not the overwhelming, commanding lead we hold in a one-on-one race with [Bernie] Sanders.”

The most stinging rebuke, however, came when Klain—Biden’s former chief of staff who went back decades with him to when he was chief counsel on Biden’s Judiciary Committee in 1989—defected to Clinton.

Ebola Response Coordinator Ron Klain, Vice President Joe Biden and White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett at a November 2014 meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

“It’s been a little hard for me to play such a role in the Biden demise,” Klain wrote to Podesta in October 2015, a week before Biden gave in and announced he would not run. “I am definitely dead to them—but I’m glad to be on Team HRC.”

According to the email, which was released by WikiLeaks in what American intelligence officials have concluded was a Russian-backed effort to hurt the Clinton campaign, Klain added: “Thanks for inviting me into the campaign, and for sticking with me during the Biden anxiety.”

In the years since Clinton’s loss, Democrat operatives have chuckled at Klain’s attempts to earn his way back into Biden’s good graces, including lots of Twitter praise for the former vice president. Klain is not on the campaign’s payroll but remains an adviser, and observers assume he’s hoping to be chief of staff in a Biden White House. Klain refused to elaborate on the situation: “I’m not going to comment on a story that uses Russian intelligence measures.”

In a sign of the raw feelings, Biden’s aides declined to comment on the fallout from Klain’s defection but said they are happy he is on board in 2020.

Lingering tensions between the Biden and Obama camps were subtly visible in the 2020 primary campaign, in which Obama declined to endorse any candidate.

Many top Obama administration and campaign officials sat on the sidelines or worked for candidates other than Biden. Top former aides including strategist David Axelrod and the young hosts of Pod Save America—Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer—at times ridiculed the former vice president’s campaign. Biden is one of the few candidates to have not gone on either of their popular podcasts during the campaign, despite having been invited: “I can’t speak for his campaign’s scheduling decisions,” said Vietor, “but the Zoom is always open.”

Biden aides acknowledge that Obama didn’t do nearly as much for Biden in 2020 as he did for Clinton in 2016.

The lack of public enthusiasm for Biden was noticeable enough that former Obama senior adviser Pete Rouse—who was one of the aides who helped Biden organize his potential 2016 run—addressed it at a fundraiser of Obama alumni for Biden last November that he helped organize.

“I think the turnout tonight demonstrates the high regard in which the vice president is held in the extended Obama family,” Rouse told the crowd of about 50 people. “And I think that that message is not out as far as it should be.”

Yet searing, anonymously sourced quotes from Obama kept appearing through the race. One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Speaking of his own waning understanding of today’s Democratic electorate, especially in Iowa, Obama told one 2020 candidate: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”

Biden’s weaknesses were such that even Clinton reconsidered her decision not to get into the race last fall, according to Reines.

“There were a number of people who decided not to run and then around, October, before Thanksgiving said to themselves, ‘You know, did I make the right decision?,’ he said, name-checking Mike Bloomberg and Deval Patrick who did make late entries. “She went through that exercise.”

But Biden proved them all wrong.

His focus on electability along with a sentimental message about saving the soul of the nation—“character is on the ballot”—was dismissed by many pundits and reporters as hokey and uninspiring, but ended up being the winning one.

One former Clinton aide noted that Biden’s ability to cultivate personal relationships paid dividends at the primary’s end: Bernie Sanders saw Biden as one of the few people in Washington who took him seriously before his 2016 run for president. After it was clear Biden had an insurmountable delegate lead, Sanders decided not to drag out the fight the way he did against Clinton in 2016.

“That relationship is why Bernie got out in March,” said the former Clinton aide.

“I don’t know who saw him sailing to the nomination,” said Psaki. Biden’s old-fashioned style of politics, she reasoned, “still taps into something in the American electorate. And maybe we’re not seeing that because I live in a suburb of Washington, D.C., with a bunch of upper middle-class white people.”

Or, as one former Biden official put it: “I don’t think he really cares about what a 30-something Pod Save America host thinks about him, and that honestly might be why he’s the nominee.”

But even in victory, Biden and his aides often act like they have something to prove to the Obama team that doubted them. Some Biden allies noted that Obama’s endorsement of Biden, when it finally arrived, lacked the effusiveness of his endorsement of Clinton. “I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office,” he said of Clinton in his video message in 2016. Four years later, in his endorsement video for Biden, he said: “I believe Joe has all of the qualities we need in a president right now … and I know he will surround himself with good people.”

Biden aides also fumed at Axelrod and Plouffe penning a New York Times op-ed that instructed them on “What Joe Biden Needs to Do to Beat Trump,” according to Democrats who talked with them.

Meanwhile, some senior Democrats credited Obama for Biden’s comeback given his strength among Black voters, while Biden has emphasized he did it on his own.

After the South Carolina primary win, he told aides that Obama hadn’t “lifted a finger” to help him. Anita Dunn, an Obama administration aide and top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign, said “[Biden] did feel that he needed to go out and earn it himself, as opposed to having people see it as an extension of a third Obama term or having it be any kind of referendum directly on Obama.”

Now, as Reines put it, Biden “might have the last laugh of everybody.”Biden has long been defensive about suggestions of being dumb or a lightweight—a narrative that took hold during in his first campaign for the presidency, in 1988. As a kid, a teacher mocked him for his stutter (“Bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden,” she went, according to his 2007 memoir). “Other kids looked at me like I was stupid,” Biden wrote.

Or, as Richard Ben Cramer wrote in his classic about the 1988 race: “Joe Biden had balls. Lot of times, more balls than sense.” Biden didn’t seem to mind that assessment, as he brought on Cramer’s researcher, Mark Zwonitzer, to help write his books in 2007 and 2017.

“I had to convince the Big Feet [his euphemism for national reporters] that I had depth,” he recalled about that 1988 race. Striving to answer his critics, he puffed up his academic credentials on the trail (“I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he later tried to explain). In a heated exchange in New Hampshire during the 1988 campaign, he uncharacteristically snapped at a voter who asked him which law school he attended and his class rank that “I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect.”

Sen. Joe Biden, pictured with his wife Jill, holds a news conference in Washington on Sept. 23, 1987, to announce he is withdrawing from the Democratic race for the presidential nomination.

In the less-remembered part of that encounter, however, Biden also decried the snobby intelligentsia that had taken over the Democratic Party. “It seems to me you’ve all become heartless technocrats,” he said. “We have never as a party moved this nation by 14-point position papers and nine-point programs.”

That sensibility is part of what separates him from Obama. “It really is the difference between street smarts and, you know, Harvard smart,” Panetta said.

That’s why even some Republicans believe Biden may be better poised to fulfill Obama’s promises of restoring unity and civility in Washington than the “change we can believe in” 44th president was. If Biden wins, many Democrats and Republicans believe that at least relations between the White House and Congress will be better than in any other recent administration, including Obama’s.

“Obama, clearly he was smart, he was bright, he would come up with proposals, but that second part of then taking those proposals and working and lobbying members and listening to them and doing all of the things that need to be done when you’re dealing with the egos on Capitol Hill was not something that came easily to him,” Panetta said. “He was impatient with that process. I think Biden understands that process and understands what it takes.”

Even with Biden as the Democratic nominee, Republican leadership and their aides can’t help but feel more animosity toward Obama than Biden. In negotiations, Biden asked them what they could sell to their caucus while Obama would trenchantly but unproductively lecture leadership about why their caucus’ worldview was wrong, the aides said.

“Frankly, I came to dread those Oval Office meetings because they were lost time,” said one such former aide. “Those were hours of your life you were never getting back.”

Vice President Joe Biden is emotional as President Barack Obama presents him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during a ceremony at the White House, Jan. 12, 2017.

Axelrod echoed this view in his memoir. “Few practiced politicians appreciate being lectured on where their political self-interest lies,” he wrote of Obama’s style. “That hint of moral superiority and disdain for politicians who put elections first has hurt Obama as negotiator, and it’s why Biden, a politician’s politician, has often had better luck.”

The other advantage Biden brings, according to his advisers, is his nearly unrivaled Rolodex.

“Obama knew some of these people, but it wasn’t like a deep relationship,” said Kaufman. “He knows mayors and governors, he knows the members of Congress much better than Obama did.”

Biden once wrote, “A person’s epitaph was written when his or her last battle was fought.”

Is this battle in part a way to show that Obama favored the wrong successor?

“I think Joe’s the type that victory makes all the difference,” said Panetta. “And if he can win the presidency, I think that will say an awful lot to a lot of people about who Joe Biden really is.”

 

 

 

Violent clashes erupt between far-right groups and racial justice protesters in Portland and other cities.

 

WASHINGTON POST

Far-right extremists and continued clashes between Black Lives Matter protesters and police this weekend renewed tensions in Portland, Minneapolis and other cities, pushing the country into its 80th day of consecutive demonstrations in some places.

A group with ties to far-right organizations that have long targeted Portland gathered downtown Saturday afternoon to wave American flags and push back against Black Lives Matter protests challenging police brutality. The event ended with two gunshots.

Protests in other cities also erupted into violence Saturday, as police grappled with small groups hijacking otherwise peaceful events, including far-right activists armed with pepper spray and wooden flagpoles.

One clash ended in fistfights after Proud Boys marched in Kalamazoo, Mich. Police intervened as the Proud Boys retreated into a parking garage, about seven minutes after a large brawl broke out between members of the far-right group and their opponents. Officers arrested some counterprotesters who had come out to oppose the right-wing group.

In Chicago, a protest also grew violent after people used umbrellas and skateboards to attack police officers, injuring 17. Twenty-four people were arrested.

And just before midnight Saturday, a group of roughly 50 protesters, most dressed in black and wearing full-face masks, descended on the 5th District police precinct in South Minneapolis.

The group lobbed rocks and fireworks at the building. The station’s front windows were sprayed with anti-police graffiti, and red paint was poured along the steps of the front entrance and the sidewalk.

“Blood on your hands,” one message read, while another referred to officers as “pigs.”

Early Saturday afternoon in Portland, far-right extremists walked around a few downtown blocks, trading barbs with antifascists. Video shows several people in the far-right crowd using pepper spray and pellets fired from paintball guns against the counterprotesters.

As the protest wrapped up, a car drove out of a parking garage, witnesses say, and one of the people inside the car pulled out a gun and fired two shots as they sped away. No one was injured.

“A blue Toyota Corolla came tearing out, and then out of the driver’s seat two shots were fired,” said Laura Jedeed, a freelance journalist who witnessed the shooting.

Video of the incident posted on social media appears to show two shots fired from the driver’s-side window of a blue car pulling out of a parking garage into the street. It’s not clear who fired the shots.

Some critics noted a disparity between how police responded to the right-wing group downtown and the left-leaning crowd that gathered outside a police building Saturday night. Officers did not intervene downtown despite reports of violence and gunshots, but they confronted protesters later that night after a small number of people in a large crowd threw fireworks at the police building and defaced it with graffiti. 

A disparity in police response was on display Saturday night, as hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters gathered outside a police building in southeast Portland.

The crowd remained peaceful for hours, but eventually a small number of people in the crowd began escalating tactics to draw out police. At least two fireworks were thrown into the driveway of the building. Two people dressed in all black approached the building and banged on the boarded-up windows, sprayed graffiti on the wall and damaged a security camera. A handful of people in the crowd threw rocks, eggs, glass bottles and plastic water bottles, which landed in the driveway of the building.

A short time later, police declared a riot. They deployed smoke and rushed the line of protesters, who had created a barrier at the property’s edge with shields. Officers then chased protesters into a residential neighborhood for almost an hour. They made 11 arrests, on charges including disorderly conduct, interfering with a peace officer and riot, among others.

Meanwhile, by Sunday morning, the bureau had not yet announced whether it is actively investigating social media reports of gunfire and a possible bomb at the right-wing event earlier in the day.

Trump revives ugly tactics with anti-Harris attacks

 

How both parties have responded to the Harris pick

VOX

• On Tuesday, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden selected California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate — a historic choice, and by all appearances one that Democrats are extremely excited about. [AP / Alexandra Jaffe and Will Weissert]
•  
• Harris has already powered the Biden team to record-setting fundraising numbers. The campaign reported Thursday that it raked in $48 million in the 48 hours immediately after the pick was announced. [Twitter / Johnny Verhovek]
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• That’s a major boon for Biden, whose July fundraising lagged the Trump campaign’s by about $25 million. Still, as of last week, the two campaigns were on roughly even footing in terms of cash on hand, with both hovering around the $300 million mark. [CNN / Eric Bradner, Sarah Mucha, and Donald Judd]
•  
• Harris could also provide a boost far beyond that initial surge. As Recode’s Teddy Schleifer reported on Tuesday, Harris’s ties to Silicon Valley run deep — which could well give the Biden campaign a valuable edge with Big Tech’s donor community. [Recode / Theodore Schleifer]
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• And according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, her favorability numbers exceed Biden’s with several potentially important groups of voters — including some Republicans. [Reuters / Chris Kahn]
•  
• While the Trump team has launched an expected barrage of attacks at Harris, the Republican response can best be characterized as scattered, veering from accusations that Harris is too liberal to criticisms of her record on criminal justice. [BuzzFeed / Kadia Goba and Henry J. Gomez]
•  
• 
• Trump has also resurrected birtherism as a line of attack on Harris, who is Black and South Asian American. The racist conspiracy theory he helped popularize when Barack Obama was president is just as racist — and just as patently false — now. [Vox / Ian Millhiser and Aaron Rupar]
•  
• Such attacks on the Biden campaign are becoming a theme for Trump, who on Wednesday appealed to racist fears about suburban integration by tweeting that “Biden would reinstall it, in a bigger form, with Corey Booker in charge! [sic]” [NYT / Annie Karni and Jeremy W. Peters]
•  
• Trump has claimed that the "suburban housewife" will vote for him in 2020, but evidence suggests that racist and sexist attacks like those he's leveled at Harris are having the opposite effect. His support in the suburbs has eroded since 2016, and there’s little evidence it’s coming back. [Politico / Meridith McGraw]

Trump Holds up coronavirus aid to block Postal Service funds for voting by mail.

 

REUTERS

Trump said he was blocking Democrats’ effort to include funds for the U.S. Postal Service and election infrastructure in a new coronavirus relief bill, a bid to block more Americans from voting by mail during the pandemic.

Congressional Democrats accused Republican Trump of trying to damage the struggling Postal Service to improve his chances of being re-elected as opinion polls show him trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Trump has been railing against mail-in ballots for months as a possible source of fraud, although millions of Americans - including much of the military - have cast absentee ballots by mail for years without such problems.

Trump said his negotiators have resisted Democrats’ calls for additional money to help prepare for presidential, congressional and local voting during a pandemic that has killed more than 165,000 Americans and presented logistical challenges to organizing as large an event as the Nov. 3 elections.

 “The items are the post office and the $3.5 billion for mail-in voting,” Trump told Fox Business Network, saying Democrats want to give the post office $25 billion. “If we don’t make the deal, that means they can’t have the money, that means they can’t have universal mail-in voting.”

Trump later said at a news briefing that if a deal was reached that included postal funding, he would not veto it.

The amount of money in question is less than 1% of either party’s current proposed aid package for Americans struggling because of the pandemic. Senate Republicans have floated a $1 trillion response while the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a $3 trillion bill in May.

The White House negotiating team of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has not met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in six days.

 

 

 

Rapprochement in the Middle East

 Israel and the UAE just struck a historic peace deal. It’s a big win for Trump.

A lot of details remain to be worked out, but this is still a really big agreement.

VOX

• On Thursday, Israel and the United Arab Emirates announced a historic peace deal. The agreement calls for the normalization of relations, cooperation in the search for a coronavirus vaccine, and the temporary suspension of Israel’s annexation efforts in the West Bank. [Vox / Alex Ward]
•  
• The deal makes the UAE just the third Arab country to establish a formal diplomatic relationship with Israel, and both countries say they plan to establish embassies now that the agreement is in place. [CNN / Betsy Klein]
•  
• It’s also backed by the US and by Trump, who said on Thursday that UAE and Israel representatives will meet at the White House for a signing ceremony in the near future. [WSJ / Felicia Schwartz]
•  
•  But it's unclear how long annexation efforts will remain suspended: On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that "there is no change to our plans to apply sovereignty over Judea and Samaria" — the biblical name for the West Bank often used in Israel. [Twitter / Raphael Ahren]

NY TIMES

• For the past 16 months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had doggedly pursued a right-wing dream that he saw as securing his legacy: annexing West Bank territory that the Palestinians counted on for a future state, potentially dealing a death blow to a two-state solution.

  On Thursday, with his annexation plan already running aground, Mr. Netanyahu abruptly walked away from it. Instead, he exulted in a potential legacy achievement of an entirely different character — one that, unlike annexation, could only improve Israel’s ties with the West and much of the Arab world.

  The announcement in Washington that the United Arab Emirates had agreed to a “full normalization of relations” with Israel in exchange for Mr. Netanyahu’s agreement to “suspend” his annexation push amounted to a breathtaking turnabout for the veteran Israeli premier.

  His drive for sovereignty on the West Bank had pushed Mr. Netanyahu into a corner: He was hectored by European leaders, rebuffed by his coalition partners, and distracted from a pandemic that was rapidly spiraling out of his control, even as the goal of annexation seemed ever more elusive.

  But the agreement with the Emiratis allowed Mr. Netanyahu, who has craved a historic achievement to cap his tenure as Israel’s longest-serving leader, to rank himself alongside Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, forerunners who struck peace accords with the nation’s former bitter enemies, Egypt and Jordan.

  The agreement allows the U.A.E., too, to enhance its international standing, which has been deeply damaged over its central role in a war that has turned Yemen into a humanitarian disaster, and over its proxy role in the conflict ravaging Libya. By making an end to annexation the price for bringing into the open a robust diplomatic relationship that had long been one of the Middle East’s worst-kept secrets, 

  Dennis Ross, a former Middle East negotiator for Republican and Democratic administrations, said that another lure for the Emiratis was the possibility of obtaining advanced weaponry they have long sought, which the United States sells only to countries at peace with Israel to preserve its qualitative military edge in the region.

  The rapprochement underscored the shifting political dynamics of a region where Sunni Arab states increasingly see Iran as a greater enemy than Israel and are less willing to condition relations on a resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians. But the big player remains Saudi Arabia, the Arab world’s richest country and caretaker of the Islamic holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Analysts said they suspected that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, would like to take such a step but will refrain given conservative elements in his country.

  “This is all about Trump being able to say, ‘Look what a great dealmaker I am, I’ve brought peace to the Middle East,’ and about Bibi being able to distract Israelis for a few hours,” said Anshel Pfeffer, a biographer of Mr. Netanyahu, referring to him by his nickname. Mr. Pfeffer had boldly predicted in May that the prime minister would never fulfill his annexation pledges.

  Meanwhile Palestinians felt abandoned by an Arab nation leaving them to remain locked in an untenable status quo even without the threat of annexation.

  For Mr. Netanyahu, the diplomatic coup came as a throwback of sorts to a time before the coronavirus, before he required three elections to defeat a political novice and form a government, before his indictment on corruption charges including bribery threatened to not only end his career but also send him to prison.

  His stock had momentarily soared early in the pandemic, but it has plunged since: Israel’s caseload now is greater than China’s, its hospital system is approaching overload and its schools are planning a reopening that many fear will be a disaster.

  More than 800,000 Israelis are out of work, and protesters have been flooding the streets and clamoring outside Mr. Netanyahu’s residence several times a week in a demonstration of sustained political anger that experts say modern Jerusalem has never seen.

  With his criminal trial set to ramp up early next year, Mr. Netanyahu has threatened to take Israel to a fourth election, in hopes of legislating his way out of the dock. But a poll this week showed him again falling short of a majority in Parliament.

  “He wasn’t functioning the way he was expected to, and this is the first time in a long period where he shows leadership and brings to the table something that no other politician allegedly can,” Ms.Shimrit Meir, an Israeli analyst of the Arab world said. “The subtext is that he’s still got it: He’s still a leader, and the others are merely politicians.” Dahlia Scheindlin, a left-wing analyst and pollster, said that even Israelis who dislike Mr. Netanyahu see him as the country’s foremost statesman. “He knows that it keeps the crown of ‘King Bibi’ on his head in the country’s eyes,” she said. 

  He reminded critics that he had long promised that Israel could gain international acceptance even without a settlement with the Palestinians.

Trump's plan to sabotage the USPS, explained

 

VOX

With the general election just 82 days away and Covid-19 still a major public health risk, Trump is dead-set on preventing as many people as possible from voting by mail this November. [CNN / Ellie Kaufman, Marshall Cohen, Jason Hoffman, and Nicky Robertson]

On Thursday, he told Fox Business that “[Democrats] need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots… But if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting.” [Twitter / Abby D. Phillips]

Later, he appeared to walk back his comments a bit, saying, "If they make a deal, the Postal Service is taken care of. All they have to do is make a deal." [Twitter / Sahil Kapur]

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow put it even more transparently on Thursday when he included “voting rights” as part of “really liberal left wishlists” when discussing coronavirus relief negotiations. [Twitter / Don Moynihan]

Both comments reflect what appears to be an increasingly serious strategy on the part of a historically unpopular president — to sabotage the US Postal Service in order to limit voter turnout and improve his chances of winning reelection. [NY Mag / Ed Kilgore]


Trump made strides toward that goal last week, when the new postmaster general — Louis DeJoy, a Trump donor — ousted 23 USPS officials from their jobs as part of a major reorganization. [Washington Post / Jacob Bogage]

Mail-sorting machines are also being removed from at least some USPS facilities, a move that workers have warned could impede their ability to quickly process mail, particularly if they receive a surge of ballots come November. [Vice / Aaron Gordon]

It’s not hard to parse what Trump’s problem with mail-in voting is. He gave away the game as early as March, when he told 
Fox and Friends that Democrats want “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” [Washington Post / Aaron Blake]

That’s not exactly how it works, at least not under normal conditions: As Vox’s David Roberts wrote in May this year, vote-by-mail does increase turnout, but there’s no evidence that it advantages either Republicans or Democrats. [Vox / David Roberts]

But a constant barrage of voter-fraud accusations by Trump and the GOP, as well as the politicization of public health guidance, mean that in November, far more Democrats are likely to vote by mail, whereas Republicans are more likely to vote in person. [Vox / Ian Millhiser]

According to NPR, around 70 percent of the votes cast in the general election could be by mail. That’s good news from a public health perspective, as experts say that voting by mail could well reduce the spread of the coronavirus — but Trump opposes it nonetheless. [NPR / Barbara Sprunt]



CORONAVIRUS UPDATES

The United States reported nearly 1,500 coronavirus deaths on Wednesday, the highest number of covid-19 fatalities in one day since mid-May. 

The country has now seen its seven-day average of newly reported deaths remain above 1,000 for 17 consecutive days. 

The Labor Department announced Thursday that about 960,000 workers filed for unemployment insurance last week. 

This is the first time that initial claims dipped below 1 million since March, but it’s also still more than the pre-pandemic record of 695,000, which had been set during the 1982 recession. All told, more than 28 million people are currently receiving some form of unemployment benefits.

The F.D.A. gives emergency approval for a new spit test as U.S. testing stalls.

With the United States facing an alarming drop in coronavirus testing that threatens to undermine national monitoring efforts, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for a new saliva-based test to detect the virus.

The new test, SalivaDirect, was developed by researchers at Yale University with some of the funding coming from the N.B.A. and the National Basketball Players Association, the university announced on Saturday in a news release. The method, it said, was being further validated through testing of asymptomatic N.B.A. players and staff members.

SalivaDirect is not the first test of its kind to secure the F.D.A.’s backing — a lab affiliated with Rutgers University received emergency authorization in May for a similar test.

Public health officials have argued for months that to get a handle on the pandemic, the United States still needs to increase overall testing, perhaps up to four million people daily, including many who are asymptomatic. But reported daily tests have trended downward for much of August and testing shortages have remained pervasive in many states.

According to the release, the researchers said they developed the test with affordability in mind, looking for ways to cut costs such as by eliminating the need for expensive collection tubes. They said they hoped labs could administer the test for around $10 per sample, contributing another test that could help combat the recent testing slowdown.

People who recovered do not need to be tested again for three months, CDC says

In recently updated guidance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that people who have recovered from the coronavirus do not need to quarantine or seek testing for three months after they have recuperated.

The new recommendation, last updated Aug. 3, cautions that those who were previously infected should still socially distance and wear masks but says they don’t need to quarantine or be tested if they “have been in close contact” with someone who tests positive, unless they develop symptoms.

Older Children and the Coronavirus: A New report questions an earlier finding regarding transmission by older children.




A study by researchers in South Korea last month suggested that children between the ages of 10 and 19 spread the coronavirus more frequently than adults — a widely reported finding that influenced the debate about the risks of reopening schools.

But additional data from the research team now calls that conclusion into question; it’s not clear who was infecting whom. The incident underscores the need to consider the preponderance of evidence, rather than any single study, when making decisions about children’s health or education, scientists said.

Some of the household members who appeared in the initial report to have been infected by older children in fact were exposed to the virus at the same time as the children. All of them may have been infected by contacts they shared.

The disclosure does not negate the overall message of that study, experts said: Children under age 10 do not spread the virus as much as adults do, and the ability to transmit seems to increase with age.

“The most important point of the paper is that it clarifies the care with which we need to interpret individual studies, particularly of transmission of a virus where we know the dynamics are complex,” said Dr. Alasdair Munro, clinical research fellow in pediatric infectious diseases at University Hospital Southampton in Britain.

The earlier study was not intended to demonstrate transmission from children to adults, only to describe contact tracing efforts in South Korea, said Dr. Young June Choe, assistant professor of social and preventive medicine at Hallym University College of Medicine and an author of both studies.

Sen. Kamala Harris is Joe Biden's VP pick

 

VOX

• On Tuesday, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden announced California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. [Vox / Li Zhou]
•  
• It’s a historic pick: Harris becomes the first Black woman and the first Asian American woman ever to run for vice president on a major-party ticket. [NPR / Scott Detrow]
•  
• On Twitter, Biden wrote that Harris, along with his deceased son Beau Biden, “took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse. I was proud then, and I'm proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign.” [Twitter / Joe Biden]

•  
• Harris is no stranger to the campaign trail. She ran for the Democratic nomination for president last year, dropping out in December, and drew headlines for a clash with Biden over his record on desegregating schools in the first Democratic debate. [Washington Post / Amanda Erickson]
•  
• She straddles the divide of the left and moderate wings of the Democratic Party, and has a background in criminal justice: She served as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general before her Senate bid. [NYT / Alexander Burns and Katie Glueck]
•  
• That background, however, has drawn criticism from some criminal justice reform advocates, who argue she was reluctant to embrace reforms as a prosecutor. [NYT / Danny Hakim, Stephanie Saul, and Richard A. Oppel Jr.]
•  
• As a senator, BuzzFeed notes, Harris's national profile "was elevated by her grilling of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings," including US Attorney General Bill Barr. [BuzzFeed / Henry J. Gomez and Molly Hensley-Clancy]
•  
• And Harris has championed police reform and racial justice issues in the Senate, particularly in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. [Politico / Adam Cancryn and Carla Marinucci]
•  
• Harris’s selection cements the Democratic presidential ticket with less than a week to go until the Democratic National Convention. Though ostensibly in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the majority of the event will be digital. [NBC News / Dareh Gregorian]
•  
• Now that the ticket is set, Harris and Biden will make their first public appearance as running mates Wednesday in Wilmington, Delaware. [Reuters / James Oliphant]
•  
• Harris will also face Vice President Mike Pence at the vice-presidential debate in Salt Lake City, Utah, on October 7. [Vox / Catherine Kim, Hannah Brown, and Cameron Peters]

ERROL LOUIS, DAILY NEWS

Harris’s place on the Biden ticket is all about increasing Black voter turnout for Democrats.

In 2016, Black voter turnout fell by 7% after 20 years of steadily increasing turnout. According to the Pew Research Center, “the number of Black voters also declined, falling by about 765,000 to 16.4 million in 2016, representing a sharp reversal from 2012.”

The falloff in Black voters helped doom the Hillary Clinton-Tim Kaine ticket. Dems famously lost Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — three traditionally Democratic states — by a combined total of less than 80,000 votes. This was part of a general phenomenon of Dems staying home: an estimated 4.4 million voters who had supported Obama didn’t come out in 2016, and a third of them were Black.

Democratic strategists are keenly aware that a more robust showing by Black voters in Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia might have won those states for the Democrats in 2016, and the White House with it.

She should make an effort to educate younger voters about her record — and make ample use of a line that Biden often quotes: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.”

This is a golden opportunity for hard bargaining around federal sentencing guidelines, programs to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, rewriting of the drug laws, prison-reentry programs and other tangible benefits. Harris will be willing to make a deal with activist Democrats. As the vice-presidential candidate, that is her job.

A poster child for mishandling the coronavirus crisis

 

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has repeatedly sought to downplay the virus.

The Sun Belt states have been especially hard hit as the virus has surged across most of the country this summer, forcing renewed shutdowns and public health warnings. But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican and favorite ally of President Donald Trump, has become a poster child for mishandling the crisis—holding out against issuing a stay-at-home order and then rushing the reopenings, even as experts warned that testing in the state was still insufficient.

Similar to Trump, DeSantis had repeatedly sought to downplay the virus, initially blaming an increase in the number of cases on increased testing, an assertion that experts said was not enough to explain the rise in infections and hospitalizations.

“A new case is just a positive test. It doesn’t mean somebody’s sick,” the governor said in June. “The number of cases is not necessarily something that’s going to tell you what the burden of the disease is.”

At one point, he suggested the media was to blame for failing to adequately cover the pandemic.

He has also been accused of sidelining the state's public health officials. In May, he fired the state's top data scientist who was charged with tracking infections. Rebekah Jones, who worked at the Florida Department of Health, said the governor had pressured her to manipulate the data to support the reopening. She said when she refused, she was let go.

At first, DeSantis tried to dismiss the complaint, saying he was under the impression from her supervisor that she was "tired and needed a break." Later, his office issued a statement saying that Jones "exhibited a repeated course of insubordination" and had herself tampered with the data.

Jones later created her own dashboard.

The state only began releasing hospitalization data on coronavirus patients on July 10th.

In keeping with Trump's agenda, DeSantis has also vowed to fully reopen schools, saying last month, "If you can do Home Depot, if you can do Walmart, if you can do these things, we absolutely can do the schools."

To date, DeSantis has resisted calls to issue a statewide mandate for wearing face masks in public, although almost one third of counties require them in certain settings.

DeSantis is also making a high-stakes gamble on school openings, with superintendents pressured into decisions that some fear will result in coronavirus outbreaks.  DeSantis this week forced one of the country's largest school districts to reopen campuses by the end of August, threatening to withhold up to $200 million in state aid.

The Republican’s administration told Hillsborough County — the eighth-largest system in the country — that it would lose state aid if it did not drop plans to reopen schools remotely for the first month of the 2020-2021 school year. So the county revised its plan and will start with just one week of remote learning. Then parents will choose whether to send their children into school buildings.

“It was very clear. If we do not follow their emergency order, we will be financially hindered,” Hillsborough Superintendent Addison Davis said Thursday. “We would forfeit close to $200 million. We just can’t do that. That would bankrupt us. It would put us in a terrible situation financially.”

DeSantis, cited Martin County Superintendent Laurie Gaylord’s view of reopening schools as a mission “akin to a Navy SEAL operation

The Mask Slackers of 1918

As the influenza pandemic swept across the United States in 1918 and 1919, masks took a role in political and cultural wars.

NY TIMES

The masks were called muzzles, germ shields and dirt traps. They gave people a “pig-like snout.” Some people snipped holes in their masks to smoke cigars. Others fastened them to dogs in mockery. Bandits used them to rob banks.

More than a century ago, as the 1918 influenza pandemic raged in the United States, masks of gauze and cheesecloth became the facial front lines in the battle against the virus. But as they have now, the masks also stoked political division. Then, as now, medical authorities urged the wearing of masks to help slow the spread of disease. And then, as now, some people resisted.

In 1918 and 1919, as bars, saloons, restaurants, theaters and schools were closed, masks became a scapegoat, a symbol of government overreach, inspiring protests, petitions and defiant bare-face gatherings. All the while, thousands of Americans were dying in a deadly pandemic.

1918: The infection spreads.

The first infections were identified in March, at an Army base in Kansas, where 100 soldiers were infected. Within a week, the number of flu cases grew fivefold, and soon the disease was taking hold across the country, prompting some cities to impose quarantines and mask orders to contain it. 

By the fall of 1918, seven cities — San Francisco, Seattle, Oakland, Sacramento, Denver, Indianapolis and Pasadena, Calif. — had put in effect mandatory face mask laws, said Dr. Howard Markel, a historian of epidemics and the author of “Quarantine!”

Organized resistance to mask wearing was not common, Dr. Markel said, but it was present. “There were flare-ups, there were scuffles and there were occasional groups, like the Anti-Mask League,” he said, “but that is the exception rather than the rule.”

At the forefront of the safety measures was San Francisco, where a man returning from a trip to Chicago apparently carried the virus home, according to archives about the pandemic at the University of Michigan. By the end of October, there were more than 60,000 cases statewide, with 7,000 of them in San Francisco. It soon became known as the “masked city.”

Workers at an information desk wearing masks in San Francisco in 1918.Credit...Hamilton Henry Dobbin, via California State Library

“The Mask Ordinance,” signed by Mayor James Rolph on Oct. 22, made San Francisco the first American city to require face coverings, which had to be four layers thick. 

Masks that looked like ‘slabs of ravioli’

Resisters complained about appearance, comfort and freedom, even after the flu killed an estimated 195,000 Americans in October alone.

Alma Whitaker, writing in The Los Angeles Times on Oct. 22, 1918, reviewed masks’ impact on society and celebrity, saying famous people shunned them because it was “so horrid” to go unrecognized.

“The big restaurants are the funniest sights, with all the waiters and diners masked, the latter just raising their screen to pop in a mouthful of food,” she wrote.

When Ms. Whitaker herself declined to wear one, she was “forcibly taken” to the Red Cross as a “slacker,” and ordered to make one and put it on.

King’: Let’s Discuss

A  policeman wearing a flu mask talking to a couple, one masked, one not.Credit...Hamilton Henry Dobbin, via California State Library

 The San Francisco Chronicle said the simplest type of mask was of folded gauze affixed with elastic or tape. The police went for gauze masks, which resembled an unflattering “nine ordinary slabs of ravioli arranged in a square.” 

There was room for creativity. Some of the coverings were “fearsome looking machines” that lent a “pig-like aspect” to the wearer’s face.

Mask court

The penalty for violators was $5 to $10, or 10 days’ imprisonment.

On Nov. 9, 1,000 people were arrested, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. City prisons swelled to standing room only; police shifts and court sessions were added to help manage.

“Where is your mask?” Judge Mathew Brady asked offenders at the Hall of Justice, where sessions dragged into night. Some gave fake names, said they just wanted to light a cigar or that they hated following laws.

Jail terms of 8 hours to 10 days were given out. Those who could not pay $5 were jailed for 48 hours.

Rail commuters wearing white protective masks, one with the additional message “wear a mask or go to jail,” during the 1918 influenza pandemic in California.Credit...Vintage Space/Alamy

The ‘mask slacker’ of San Francisco is shot.

On Oct. 28, a blacksmith named James Wisser stood on Powell and Market streets in front of a drugstore, urging a crowd to dispose of their masks, which he described as “bunk.”

A health inspector, Henry D. Miller, led him to the drugstore to buy a mask.

At the door, Mr. Wisser struck Mr. Miller with a sack of silver dollars and knocked him to the ground, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. While being “pummeled,” Mr. Miller, 62, fired four times with a revolver. Passers-by “scurried for cover,” The Associated Press said. 

Mr. Wisser was injured, as were two bystanders. He was charged with disturbing the peace, resisting an officer and assault. The inspector was charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

In Los Angeles, ‘To Mask or Not to Mask.’

That was the headline for a report published in The Los Angeles Times when city officials met in November to decide whether to require residents to wear “germ scarers” or “flu-scarers.”

Public feedback was invited. Some supported masks so theaters, churches and schools could operate. Opponents said masks were “mere dirt and dust traps and do more harm than good.”

“I have seen some persons wearing their masks for a while hanging about their necks, and then apply them to their faces, forgetting that they might have picked up germs while dangling about their clothes,” Dr. E.W. Fleming said in a Los Angeles Times report.

An ear, nose and throat specialist, Dr. John J. Kyle, said: “I saw a woman in a restaurant today with a mask on. She was in ordinary street clothes, and every now and then she raised her hand to her face and fussed with the mask.”

In Illinois, the right to choose, and to reject.

Suffragists fighting for the right to vote made a gesture that rejected covering their mouths at a time when their voices were crucial.

At the annual convention of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association, in October 1918, they set chairs four feet apart, closed doors to the public and limited attendance to 100 delegates, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported.

Headlines from newspapers in Chicago.Credit...Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

But the women “showed their scorn” for masks, it said. It’s unclear why.

Allison K. Lange, an associate history professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology, said one reason could have been that they wanted to keep a highly visible profile.

“Suffragists wanted to make sure their leaders were familiar political figures,” Dr. Lange said.

‘Four weeks of muzzled misery’

San Francisco’s mask ordinance expired after four weeks at noon on Nov. 21. The city celebrated, and church bells tolled.

A “delinquent” bent on blowing his nose tore his mask off so quickly that it “nearly ruptured his ear,” The San Francisco Chronicle reported. He and others stomped on their masks in the street. As a police officer watched, it dawned on him that “his vigil over the masks was done.”

Waiters, barkeeps and others bared their faces. Drinks were on the house. Ice cream shops handed out treats. The sidewalks were strewn with gauze, the “relics of a torturous month,” The Chronicle said.

The spread had been halted. But a second wave was on the horizon.

By December, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was again proposing a mask requirement, meeting with testy opposition. 

Police Court Officials of San Francisco holding a session in the open, as a precaution against the spreading influenza epidemic in late November of 1918.Credit...National Archives

 

Around the end of the year, a bomb was defused outside the office of San Francisco’s chief health officer, Dr. William C. Hassler. “Things were violent and aggressive, but it was because people were losing money,” said Brian Dolan, a medical historian at the University of California, San Francisco. “It wasn’t about a constitutional issue; it was a money issue.”

By the end of 1918, the death toll from influenza had reached at least 244,681, mostly in the last four months, according to government statistics.

1919: A new year

In January, Pasadena’s city commission passed a mask ordinance. The police grudgingly enforced it, cracking down on cigar smokers and passengers in cars. Sixty people were arrested on the first day, The Los Angeles Times reported on Jan. 22, in an article titled “Pasadena Snorts Under Masks.”

“It is the most unpopular law ever placed on the Pasadena records,” W.S. McIntyre, the chief of police, told the paper. “We are cursed from all sides.”

Some mocked the rule by stretching gauze across car vents or dog snouts. Cigar vendors said they lost customers, though enterprising aficionados cut a hole in the cloth. (They were still arrested.) Barbers lost shaving business. Merchants complained traffic dropped as more people stayed home.

Petitions were circulated at cigar stands. Arrests rose, even of the powerful. Ernest May, the president of Security National Bank of Pasadena, and five “prominent” guests were rounded up at the Maryland Hotel one Sunday.

They had masks on, but not covering their faces.

The Anti-Mask League.

As the contagion moved into its second year, so did the skepticism.

 On Dec. 17, 1918, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors reinstituted the mask ordinance after deaths started to climb, a trend that spilled over into the new year with 1,800 flu cases and 101 deaths reported there in the first five days of January.

That board’s decision led to the creation of the Anti-Mask League, a sign that resistance to masks was resurfacing as cities tried to reimpose orders to wear them when infections returned.

The league was led by a woman, E.J. Harrington, a lawyer, social activist and political opponent of the mayor. About a half-dozen other women filled its top ranks. Eight men also joined, some of them representing unions, along with two members of the board of supervisors who had voted against masks.

“The masks turned into a political symbol,” Dr. Dolan said. 

A call to protest by the Anti-Mask League in The San Francisco Chronicle, on Jan. 25, 1919.Credit...UC Berkley

 

On Jan. 25, the league held its first organizational meeting, open to the public at the Dreamland Rink, where they united behind demands for the repeal of the mask ordinance and for the resignations of the mayor and health officials.

Their objections included lack of scientific evidence that masks worked and the idea that forcing people to wear the coverings was unconstitutional.

On Jan. 27, the league protested at a Board of Supervisors meeting, but the mayor held his ground. There were hisses and cries of “freedom and liberty,” Dr. Dolan wrote in his paper on the epidemic. 

Repeal came a few days later on Feb. 1, when Mayor Rolph cited a downturn in infections.

But a third wave of flu rolled in late that year. The final death toll reached an estimated 675,000 nationwide, or 30 for every 1,000 people in San Francisco, making it one of the worst-hit cities in America.

Dr. Dolan said the story of the Anti-Mask League, which has drawn renewed interest now in 2020, demonstrates the disconnect between individual choice and universal compliance.

That sentiment echoes through the century from the voice of a San Francisco railway worker named Frank Cocciniglia.

Arrested on Kearny Street in January, Mr. Cocciniglia told the judge that he “was not disposed to do anything not in harmony with his feelings,” according to a Los Angeles Times report.

He was sentenced to five days in jail.

“That suits me,” Mr. Cocciniglia said as he left the stand. “I won’t have to wear a mask there.”

How Shame And Stigma Influence The Debate Over Extending $600 A Week Pandemic Assistance

 

GOTHAMIST

Evan Spigelman used to bring home $3,000 to $4,000 a month by juggling multiple theater gigs—from performing live in drag shows, to working behind-the-scenes as a stagehand. In March, when Spigelman was working an electrical gig at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, their income streams all came to a halt as news broke that Broadway was shut down.

“You saw an entire room full of stagehands completely lose their income and completely lose any sense of security that they had,” they recalled. They qualified for just $184 a week in unemployment benefits from New York, which works out to barely $800 per month, not enough to cover their rent. But another $600 from the federal CARES Act kept them afloat.

“This made it possible to live,” said Spigelman. It also meant they could stay in their Brooklyn apartment and not risk exposing themself or others to the coronavirus.

But on Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel has crafted a different narrative, as Democrats and Republicans fight over whether to restore that $600 a week benefit, which expired at the end of July.

“We should not be taxing somebody who’s been stocking shelves for months so the government can pay her neighbor more than she makes to sit at home,” McConnell said recently. Republicans argue that the payment creates a “disincentive” to work, because some Americans were collecting more money with the federal pandemic unemployment assistance than they earned when they had a job. He and his colleagues have proposed cutting the $600 benefit to $200.

Such language infuriates Spigelman. “There is a shaming going on that's led by Mitch McConnell and all those guys, all those Republicans,” he said, “But it's being picked up everywhere.”

In June, Mark Jaffe, who heads the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce, told Gothamist/WNYC that he and other employers were having a hard time getting low-wage workers to return to their restaurant, retail and office jobs because the unemployment benefit was much higher than their regular pay, and that some workers claimed to be fearful about catching COVID-19, just so they could remain home and collect unemployment.

“They're using every excuse in the book,” he said. “I see my employees are going grocery shopping. I see they're deposited their checks in the bank. They're getting paid too much to sit in home so they have a disincentive to work. Any worker that's making under $30 dollars an hour normally has a disincentive to work in New York State.”

Jaffe’s comments have created a backlash on social media. “Employers wouldn’t have this problem if they paid a living wage,” one person said on Twitter. Another accused the employers of paying “poverty wages.”

The pandemic has not only exposed just how big the gaps are in America’s safety net; with so many millions unemployed, it’s bringing more intense scrutiny to how the government values workers who have been left jobless through no fault of their own.

Maggie Dickinson is a professor at Guttman Community College and author of “Feeding the Crisis,” that looks at the federal food program and how it has come to subsidize low wage labor in the 21st century. She said there is a history in America, tied to race and racism, of shaming some groups for needing government help as getting something from the government for nothing.

“It was largely constructed around this idea of the ‘welfare queen,’ which was kind of coded racial way to build on people's resentments,” said Dickinson.

Dickinson said the problem this viewpoint fails to recognize is that wages are low: the federal minimum wage in the United States has been $7.25 for a decade. “So when people are like, ‘Oh, now people are taking advantage of the system,’ it's like, the system has been failing them for a really long time.”

Dickinson said that during the 1930s, the government had social welfare programs designed to help white mothers who were widowed or divorced. But when Black mothers began to campaign for access, the stigma was added. She also noted that the government excluded African-American workers from social security benefits by denying the aid to excluded sharecroppers and domestic workers, who were largely Black.

Darrick Hamilton, a professor of economics at The New School, said McConnell’s language plays on old racist ideas of the social welfare system “tilting the scale in favor of these individuals that are undeserving.”

“We created caricatures of welfare queens, deadbeat dads and super predators,” he said. Now, with millions of Americans of all backgrounds unemployed, whites who are poor or suddenly unemployed are feeling the stigma too, said Hamilton.

Nationally, the majority of the families receiving unemployment benefits from the government—53 percent—were white, according to a Congressional Budget Report from July. But Hamilton said there is a shift happening that parallels the social justice movement playing out in Black Lives Matter protests, that has seen support from whites, since the killing of George Floyd.

“We have a movement now that is reacting to our gross inequality and gross injustice,” he said. “There's a movement now to push back.”

Hamilton said the halt on the economy in response to the pandemic saved lives, but added that the 33 percent contraction in the economy during the second quarter indicates that more dramatic action should be taken.

He’d like to see Congress provide even more money to keep unemployed workers at home.

“The paramount indicator of our well-being is our health,” he said. “So I think that Congress needs to be even bolder than what they're considering. I think we should take lessons from Europe and have a paycheck guarantee to ensure that not only do workers stay home during this crisis that we keep...small businesses in place as well.”

“Because at the end of the benefits, and no solution in sight. There's a lot of panic about what is going to happen.”

Negotiations ended this week without any resolution, or any intervention from President Trump; this weekend, he’ll be at his golf course in New Jersey.

 

Trump doles out executive orders from his New Jersey golf club

 

Trump Signs (most likely ineffective ] Executive Actions as  Covid Relief

VOX

• Over the weekend, President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive actions intended to provide renewed coronavirus relief for Americans as negotiations on Capitol Hill stall — but experts say their constitutionality is questionable. [Vox / Zeeshan Aleem]
•  
• Technically, Trump only signed one executive order, on evictions, as well as three presidential memorandums. The latter ostensibly implement renewed unemployment insurance, a payroll tax deferral, and a student loan freeze. [Washington Post / Heather Long]
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• Trump’s authority on unemployment is more than a bit suspect: His Saturday memo is effectively an end run around Congress’s power of the purse, and is likely to face legal challenges. [Vanity Fair / Charlotte Klein]
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• Country club members awaiting the president
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• The new unemployment plan would set expanded benefits at $400 a week — down from $600 — and draw on federal disaster relief money for funding. States would also be required to put up $100 toward the $400 benefit. [NYT / Emily Cochrane, Alan Rappeport, and Luke Broadwater]
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• Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, has acknowledged that it is unclear how much states will be able to provide toward the unemployment benefit and when those benefits will be distributed.Credit...Michael Reynolds/EPA, via Shutterstock
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• Democrats, who passed a sweeping new coronavirus relief package in May that has since languished on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s desk, lambasted Trump’s actions as “unworkable, weak and narrow.” [NPR / Rachel Treisman]
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• Even Republicans weren’t especially happy with Trump. Though some, including McConnell, backed him over the weekend, GOP Sen. Ben Sasse condemned Trump’s actions as “unconstitutional slop.” [Politico / Evan Semones and Caitlin Oprysko]
•  
• Bipartisan condemnation of Trump doesn’t necessarily mean things will start moving on the Hill. The last update on negotiations put the two factions about $2 trillion apart, with the size of the unemployment benefit as a major sticking point. [Vox / Li Zhou and Ella Nilsen]
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• Democrats want to renew the benefit at $600 a week, the same level as in July. Republicans, meanwhile, hope to slash it to as little as $200 a week. [CNBC / Jennifer Liu]
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• Money for schools also appears to be a point of contention. Trump has indicated that he wants to condition funding on reopening, despite the public health risks. Early attempts at reopening in places like Georgia have gone poorly. [NBC News / Ginger Gibson, Lauren Egan, Josh Lederman, and Kelly O'Donnell]

A Majority Of NYPD Officers Don't Live In New York City, New Figures Show

 

51 percent of uniformed officers—which works out to 18,360 cops—currently live outside the city,

GOTHAMIST

Despite claims by Mayor Bill de Blasio that "more and more" NYPD officers live in the city they serve, new figures provided by the NYPD show that a majority of uniformed officers actually live outside of New York City. The numbers reflect a shift from four years ago, when a majority of cops lived in the five boroughs.

According to the police department, 51 percent of uniformed officers—which works out to 18,360 cops—currently live outside the city, with the rest having addresses in one of the five boroughs. The NYPD did not provide a breakdown by county.

Several weeks ago, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea claimed that "well over 50 percent" of the police department live in the city, but that percentage includes the NYPD's 19,000 civilian employees, who unlike uniformed officers, are required by law to live in the city.

Data provided to Gothamist in 2016 showed that 58 percent of officers lived in New York City. The NYPD’s Patrol Guide states that officers can reside in Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, Suffolk, and Nassau counties.

A residency requirement for NYPD officers has been debated over the years, with state Senator Kevin Parker [above] introducing the most recent legislation calling for such a requirement for new officers hired after December 31st, 2020.

Last month, Mayor de Blasio expressed skepticism about residency requirements for police officers. “A lot of NYPD officers who happen to be people of color are living in the suburbs for purely economic reasons, because they can’t find enough affordable housing here,” the mayor said. “We should have a real public debate about it. But we should be mindful that it’s not as easy an equation in New York city as it is in a lot of other places because of the pure cost of housing.”