Good morning, everyone!
Anne Gearan and Ashley Parker of Washington Post write about the possibilities that President Joe Biden may confront “the limits of personal diplomacy” on his first presidential trip to Europe.
But Biden may also find himself confronting the limits of personal diplomacy. The world has tilted in a sharply populist direction since he left the vice presidency, and several influential leaders — including Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron — have taken office since Biden’s last stint in power.
Beyond that, diplomats disagree on how much personal appeals by an American president can sway other leaders. Biden’s long, if testy, relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not mean the Israeli leader took heed when Biden quietly pressured him to back off an assault on Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. Biden then switched tactics and went public with what amounted to an American deadline for a cease-fire.
Most of the leaders Biden will see in Europe are likely to be grateful for a return to a more predictable American foreign policy agenda after Trump’s transactional populism. The big exception is Putin, a canny political survivor whose tenure in positions of power approaches Biden’s own.
Matthew Kartnitschnig of Politico Europe see Biden’s European tour as a return to normalcy in US/European relations, in spite of tensions in the relationship.
John McCain, the deceased American war hero and longtime Biden friend, liked to say that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” The maxim (often attributed to Mark Twain) would serve as a good motto for Biden’s trip to Europe this week, where he’ll participate in an alphabet soup of summits, from the G7 to NATO.
His aim is to shore up a Western alliance still shell-shocked by the Donald Trump years with a grand public display of American commitment to Europe. Behind the scenes, he’ll quietly dole out a bit of tough love, nudging Europe to move in America’s direction.
In other words, he’ll approach Europe like every other American president (save his immediate predecessor) since World War II.
Given the broad consensus among policymakers and wonks that the transatlantic alliance would never be the same after Trump, it’s almost jarring how quickly the relationship has returned to the norm.
Biden’s moves to rejoin the Paris climate accord, his pledge to steel NATO against Russian aggression and his effort to reactivate the Iran nuclear deal have left Europeans positively giddy. After just a few months in office, Tony Blinken, Biden’s French-speaking secretary of state (who happened to write a book about Reagan’s pipeline spat in the 1980s), is welcomed like an old family friend.
Jon Sopel of
BBC News has an interesting take on what the Joe Biden/Boris Johnson relationship
might look like thus far.
Boris Johnson clearly wants to get out of the binding agreement - freely signed by the British to get Brexit done - that in effect puts a trade barrier down the Irish Sea between mainland Britain and the province.
In a pre-visit interview, Joe Biden's national security adviser told me that Britain should not underestimate the strength of Biden's feelings on this subject.
And then there is the back story of the two men - Boris Johnson was seen by many in the US as Britain's Donald Trump (certainly by Donald Trump himself) - a bit chaotic, populist, unpredictable, a rabble rouser. And in return Boris Johnson was lavish in his praise of the former business tycoon occupying the White House - he was Making America Great Again said the British PM; he was worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in North Korea.
And no-one would say that Joe Biden is cut from the same privileged cloth as Boris Johnson. Somehow I can't quite imagine the young working class Joe from Scranton, Pennsylvania, in Bullingdon Club white tie. Indeed Biden went as far as describing Johnson as a "physical and emotional clone" of Donald Trump.
But equally, if you delve back into the manila folder of yellowing newspaper cuttings - or just used your search engine - you will find plenty of disobliging comments from BoJo from when he was mayor of London, talking about Trump's "stupefying ignorance".
All of which leads to an obvious point. That was then. Now is now.
Charles Blow of the New York Times has a reminder that Black voters have always dealt with voter suppression i one form or another.
Since the time Black people gained the right to vote during Reconstruction, racist white people have been trying to strip as many of them of that right as possible. In fact, disenfranchising people of color and immigrants is the overwhelming history of voter suppression in this country.
White people not only wanted the power that resulted from winning elections, they insisted on the power to shape the electorate that could participate in elections.
It was done by intimidation and terror. It was also done by law and ordinance. No one wanted “Negro domination” or the possibility that the Black vote could be determinative.
Black people dealt with those efforts at voter suppression, in a direct way, for nearly a century, until the successes of the civil rights movement led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But no sooner did some barriers come down than others went up. Up sprang mass incarceration, a phenomenon that disproportionately affected Black people and again stripped many of those Black people of their right to vote.
Then came the backlash to the first Black president, and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Now you have the election lie coming from a white supremacist president who was defeated in part because of the voting of people of color in key states.
Joan Vennochi of the Boston Globe writes about Boston’s racism problem.
As recent events show, it goes beyond one fan allegedly throwing a water bottle at Nets star Kyrie Irving. Over time, the problem has evolved from the horror of a white man assaulting a Black man with an American flag on City Hall Plaza to something more insidious. And it’s not one-sided. The hate directed by some Bostonians toward people of color generated understandable distrust and anger, and that’s now part of the overall problem.
Today, Boston’s race problem is not a school committee chair who leads a bitter charge against busing to achieve school integration, as Louise Day Hicks did back in the 1960s. Instead, it’s a school committee chair like Michael Loconto who was caught on a hot microphone mocking Asian names during a meeting that ultimately approved a change in admissions policy to increase diversity in the city’s exam schools. Ironically, Loconto was embracing equity at the same time he was making fun of the city’s diversity. He apologized during the meeting, saying he knew what was in his heart and mind. But it was not enough, because people heard what came out of his mouth, and he resigned.
***
Boston’s race problem is also ripe for exploitation. Consider the case of Dennis White, the city’s second Black police commissioner, who was fired this week by Acting Mayor Kim Janey, the first woman and the first Black Bostonian to serve in that position. White’s lawyer chose to cast the firing in racial terms, describing his client as “a Black man, falsely accused of crimes, not given a fair trial or hearing, and then convicted, or terminated, which is the equivalent here.” To her credit, Janey stood up to this racially charged framework. She said White was unfit for the job, not just because of decades-old allegations of domestic violence, but because of the way he dealt with the allegations. Now the case will probably play out in court.
I think that Vennochi is correct to note how deep the subject of race permeates in Boston.
….So deeply that even Vennochi allows a lazy construction like “some Bostonians toward people of color”...as if Boston is not a majority-minority city nowadays and “true” Bostonians are “white”?
Alex Samuels and Mary Radcliffe of Five Thirty Eight have an interesting read on why most candidates that lose when they run for a specific elected office lose on their second attempt as well.
For starters, candidates who’ve lost just once — let alone twice — often don’t have much better luck the next go-around. We looked at candidates who’ve run for U.S. Senate, governor or president after they lost just one election and then tried to run again and found that since 1998, only 33 of 121 of them have managed to win higher office after having lost once.1 Losses transcended political parties, too, with 53 Democrats and 36 Republicans failing in their second attempt.2
In understanding why these 33 candidates were successful the second time around, one pattern stands out: Just over one-third of these candidates were already in office when they tried to seek another seat; specifically, they were all sitting senators with their eyes on the presidency (think Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John McCain of Arizona and Cory Booker of New Jersey, to name a few). Another 30 percent were candidates who unsuccessfully ran for one office but successfully ran for another (Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp). And then there were 27 percent who lost their first race but won in a subsequent election for the same office (former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, South Dakota Sen. John Thune, former Nevada Sen. John Ensign). The last notable trend here is the people who have run for president more than once, winning their party’s primary after previously losing it (Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden).3 To be clear, though, neither Clinton nor Biden sought the presidency in back-to-back cycles; these are just the last two elected offices that either sought. (Clinton ran in 2008 and 2016, while Biden ran in 2008 and 2020.) And for Biden specifically, serving as Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years may have helped his 2020 bid for president, as he was able to build up both his name recognition and political bona fides.
Robin Givhan of the Washington Post writes about the fact that Kamala Harris is rightly seen in the United States and abroad as having made history: now what?
In watching Harris in Guatemala and Mexico, the history of her presence looms large in the way the United States is viewed globally. It speaks of possibilities for future generations. And yet, in the moment — in the perfectly choreographed instances when the public catches glimpses of her in the midst of other dignitaries and leading the American delegation — it means next to nothing. All that matters are the policies and the aid and the agreements. That’s both the dream and the reality of these historical occasions. They’re forever in the making and tremendously important, and then when they finally arrive we’re left with little more than … a person trying to get the job done. That’s as it always has been and as it will be when another barrier falls.
Staring into the bright glow of Harris — this political marvel — it has been hard making out the person that she is, although it has been relatively easy to see what she is not. She is not the maternal co-star in an administration led by a paternal president who displays unending patience for this country’s tantrums and tears. She is not the open book of favorite sayings, family stories, soul-searching reveries and self-deprecating humor. She is not the lady boss of Seventh Avenue’s designer fashion dreams — although she may well be the one who will hammer home the message that it’s hard to go wrong by keeping a simple dark suit in daily rotation.
This trip, however, offered a reminder of what first thrust her into the national consciousness: her willingness to speak in no-nonsense terms, her flinty gaze, the hint of impatience in her tone. They were in evidence when she spoke of entrenched corruption in Guatemala as that country’s president looked on.
Larry Brilliant, Lisa Danzig, Karen Oppenheimer, Agastya Mondal, Rick Bright, and W. Ian Lipkin write for Foreign Affairs on what should be obvious by now: SARS-CoV-2 is not being “eradicated” anytime soon anywhere in the world.
Over a year and a half into the pandemic, it has become clear that the race to contain the virus is simultaneously a sprint and a marathon. Yes, the world needs to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible to slow the spread of the virus. But if every human on the planet were vaccinated tomorrow, SARS-CoV-2 would still live on in multiple animal species, including monkeys, cats, and deer. In Denmark, more than 200 people contracted COVID-19 from minks. Although there is no evidence yet of sustained transmission from humans to animals and then back to humans, the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 in so many species means that it is not just plausible but probable.
The dream of herd immunity has also died. Just a year ago, some newly minted experts were arguing that the virus should be given free rein to circulate in order for countries to reach herd immunity as soon as possible. Sweden famously followed this approach; predictably, it experienced dramatically higher rates of infection and death than nearby Denmark, Finland, and Norway (while suffering similar economic damage). Only after hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths occurred worldwide was this misguided strategy abandoned.
More recently, epidemiologists were debating what percentage of a population had to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity and when that threshold would be reached. But now it is becoming clear that the world cannot wait for herd immunity to contain the pandemic. For one thing, vaccination is proceeding too slowly. It is taking too long to produce and deliver sufficient supplies of vaccines, and a sizable global anti-vaccine movement is dampening demand for them. For another thing, there has been a constant flow of new variants of the virus, threatening the progress that has been made with vaccines and diagnostics.
Scott L. Montgomery of The Conversation writes about exactly how President Biden could go further in punishing Russia and President Vladimir Putin for repeated cyberattacks that come from Russia.
The U.S. accuses Russia of meddling in American elections and launching repeated cyberattacks, which, among what it called other “harmful” transgressions, prompted Biden to unveil financial sanctions in April. This added to existing sanctions targeting Russia’s oil sector.
While the White House says it has low expectations for the June 16 meeting, hoping only to “restore predictability and stability to the U.S.-Russia relationship,” Biden’s threat to up the pressure on Putin if Russia fails to change its behavior will likely loom over their upcoming chat in Geneva. He says he told Putin in a phone call “we could have gone further” with the sanctions, “but I chose not to do so.”
This leaves open the question of what “further” might mean – and could it be any more effective than past sanctions at changing Putin’s behavior?
Finally this morning, The Angry Grammarian of the Philadelphia Inquirer on eliminating prepositions.
Prepositions tend to be small but mighty. There are only about 150 of them, out of more than 170,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. But 10 of the 25 most commonly used English words are prepositions, so we lean on them a lot.
Perhaps too much.
Down the shore is frequently marked as a Philly/New Jersey regionalism, though they say down the ocean in Baltimore, a city that’s basically Philadelphia in more ill-fitting clothing. People who see down only as an adverb or as something that happens in fours in football cry that down the shore needs a preposition like to or at in the middle.
But down is already a preposition — one you use regularly, as in, down the block.
Saying down to the shore would amount to a double preposition — something to avoid for brevity’s sake. You don’t need extra words getting in the way when there are Jersey waves to catch, tram cars to watch, Geators to heat.
Everyone have a good day!