We featured them in March in our annual Power List of 40 people with undeniable sway over key policy battles — from abortion to environmental justice to elections to tense negotiations with geo-political foes.
Kamala Harris
Selected on The Recast Power List for leading the White House’s abortion access fight during the midterm elections, the vice president herself pushed the administration to keep talking about the abortion issue, arguing it was an issue of personal freedom and would resonate with voters of any gender.
With Biden announcing his reelection bid last week, look for Harris to play a prominent role, making the case why voters should give the Biden-Harris administration four more years.
Diana Hwang
Hwang is nothing short of a change agent. Years ago she founded an incubator program aiming to identify and elevate progressive AAPI women in political leadership. In the past year she upped her game, with the Asian American Women’s Political Initiative creating a fellowship program focusing on giving women up to $10,000 for civic impact projects.
With upcoming elections next year and a growing AAPI influence in politics, we predict you’ll be hearing much more about her in the years to come.
Kimberly Yee
Nothing beats a politician that can connect with their voters. Yee demonstrated this like no other Arizona Republican could last cycle. In a year featuring election deniers like Kari Lake and Blake Masters sharing the same ticket — and losing their respective races – Yee won the race for state treasurer, easily. She attributed it to her campaign’s focus on not getting distracted by “side issues.”
Yee is now one of the few Asian American women to hold statewide office in the nation. Expect her profile to grow among National Republicans in the coming year.
Todd Kim
If you care about making polluters pay, then Kim is the one you call. Taking companies to court and compelling them to pay to limit toxic chemicals being spewed into the air and filing complaints in cities like Jackson for violating safe drinking water rules for their residents – that’s all part of Kim’s jam.
Keep an eye out for the DOJ attorney as he continues this fight — environmental justice is a key pillar of the Biden administration’s platform.
Lindsay Kagawa Colas
Paired on our list with Cherelle Griner, the wife of formally-detained WNBA star Brittney Griner, Colas played a pivotal role in helping secure the hooper’s release from a Russian prison. Colas used her bullhorn to highlight why Griner was in Russia to begin with: the huge pay disparity between WNBA stars and those in the NBA.
Look for Colas, who serves as Griner’s agent, to assist Griner as she navigates her way back to the court while advocating for other Americans detained in Russia.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
And fresh risks loom for Biden’s reelection campaign economy, including a potentially market-shaking fight over raising the debt limit and the risk of a banking industry meltdown that’s causing lenders to tighten up on credit.
“The U.S. economy is unwell, and it’s starting to show,” Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, tweeted Thursday morning.
The government’s latest GDP report Thursday underlined those concerns. The Commerce Department reported the economy expanded by just 1.1 percent in the first three months of the year, well below expectations of 2 percent growth and down from 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.
Biden’s bullish comments echoed President Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” reelection theme from 1984. Yet unlike then, the economy is clearly slowing now, presenting Biden with a potential hurdle to his securing a second term.
Still, the GDP report included some bright spots, including continued strong consumer spending, which drives about two-thirds of economic growth. And the economy has remained remarkably resilient, adding over 300,000 jobs per month in the first quarter, something Biden noted in comments on the growth figures on Thursday.
“Today, we learned that the American economy remains strong, as it transitions to steady and stable growth,” the president said in a prepared statement. “This past quarter, real personal disposable income increased and American consumers continued to spend, even as the overall pace of growth moderated.”
Yet most Wall Street banks and many economists — even left-leaning allies of Biden — predict a downshift once the impact of all the Fed rate hikes works through the system along with the fallout from tighter credit standards.
“We continue to expect economic growth to slow, and we are preparing for a range of scenarios,” Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said on the bank’s recent first-quarter earnings call.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said on a call last week: “We see and our experts see a mild recession coming.”
Similar comments are peppering earnings calls across the finance industry. Few executives are predicting a major decline in the economy, but many believe the long run of modest or better growth will finally come to a close with the jobless rate starting to rise again from record lows.
And even some Biden allies like former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers are warning that the economy will have to decline significantly to finally break the back of inflation.
“I think we’re going to have difficulty getting near a 2 percent inflation target until and unless the economy slows down substantially,” Summers said at an investment conference this week.
The latest reading on the economy was driven by a declining housing industry slammed by higher interest rates. Consumer spending remained resilient but is also likely to come under more pressure as Covid-era savings run out and inflation continues to pinch wallets. And the report showed inflation rising, not falling as the Fed expects, meaning another rate hike is likely when central bank policymakers meet next week.
“This morning’s data was the worst of both worlds, with growth down and inflation up,” Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for Independent Advisor Alliance, said in a client note.
And even Biden, in his reelection announcement, acknowledged that while he envisions greater prosperity ahead, he is aware of the risks, including prices that remain too high.
“We’ve got a lot more work to do, though,” he told union workers. “I know folks are struggling with inflation,” he said, but added that “it’s a global problem.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Canada and Spain have agreed to accept referrals from the processing centers, officials said.
News of the centers comes just two weeks before a seismic shake-up in border policy, the lifting of Title 42. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will announce details at a joint press conference Thursday morning at the State Department. The White House will also release a fact sheet about the regional processing centers and other efforts to prepare for the May 11 end of Title 42, the Trump-era border policy that has been used more than 2 million times to expel asylum-seeking migrants on public health grounds.
The processing centers are just one piece of the administration’s multi-pronged response as the White House tries to strike a balance of deterrence with creating additional legal pathways. Officials also announced the expansion of the family reunification parole program to include Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Colombia, a program previously only available to Cubans and Haitians.
“[It’s] a significant plan that is really at a level of ambition and scale that has never been done before,” a senior administration official told reporters. “However, there is far more that we could do if we had the cooperation of Congress. They have really tied our hands, and so we really do appeal to Congress to work with us.”
The White House has been intensely planning for the end of Title 42 since before the New Year, weighing a patchwork of policy solutions. May, already the historically busiest month for migration, is expected to bring one of the greatest policy challenges yet for the White House. And the timing falls at a challenging political moment for President Joe Biden, who just launched his 2024 reelection campaign.
The efforts to expand legal pathways and expedite processing will be paired with deterrence measures — in an effort to build upon the humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, which officials tout as a success story in bringing border numbers down. The program for these groups will continue, officials said, including the expulsion to Mexico of those who try to enter the U.S. unlawfully.
In place of Title 42, officials also plan to rely on a new rule that will bar some migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they cross the border illegally or fail to first apply for safe harbor in another country. The administration has been working to finalize and implement the rule — a version of a Trump-era policy often called the “transit ban” — before May 11.
The administration will also expand expedited removal processes under Title 8, officials said Thursday, which would allow the government to remove from the country anyone unable to establish a legal basis — such as an approved asylum claim.
“With this shift from Title 42 to Title 8, it does not mean that the border is open,” a senior administration official said Thursday. “Returning to regular order under Title 8 means that we will once again be able to impose significant consequences on those who fail to avail themselves of the many legal pathways that we have announced today and that already exist.”
The Biden administration has 24,000 agents and officers at the border and is hiring an additional 300 border patrol agents this year. They’re also prepping Custom and Border Protection facilities to include spaces for interviews with asylum officers, immigration judges and for counsel purposes.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Multiple large carriers used to fly in and out of Dubuque’s airport. Now, locals and visitors need to drive approximately 80 miles to Moline or Cedar Rapids, or, to get to bigger destinations, three hours to Chicago, mostly using a two-lane road.
Local leaders are deeply worried about the economic implications of being cut off from the rest of the U.S. as businesses calculate whether it’s worth it to continue operating or relocating to the Midwest city.
“To say that it’s challenging would be an understatement,” said Molly Grover, president of the Dubuque Area Chamber of Commerce.
Some small airports can get a lifeline through a multimillion-dollar federal subsidy program that pays airlines to connect rural locations to central hubs.
Under that “essential air service” program, the Transportation Department can require carriers trying to leave a location to remain until a replacement carrier is lined up. But it only includes about 108 airports and weighs factors such as the average number of daily trips, how much subsidy is needed and the distance to the nearest larger hub. Many cities — like Dubuque — can’t join because of limits put on the program in 2012.
Losing air service cost the Dubuque airport nearly 200 jobs and reduced its economic output by more than $26 million, according to an economic impact analysis the city paid for comparing data from 2019 to 2022.
The city is hoping to begin to close that gaping financial hole by welcoming budget airline Avelo, which in March launched seasonal, twice-weekly flights to Orlando, the result of an incentive package offered by the city that includes a revenue guarantee.
Repercussions may extend beyond financial losses. Dubuque Mayor Brad Cavanagh, a Democrat, believes that nothing else will have a greater impact on politics in the decade ahead than further isolating cities like his.
“In rural communities like ours there’s no way we’re going to survive long-term without air service,” Cavanagh said in an interview. “We’re going to die a slow, agonizing death.”
Feeling connected to the rest of the country is “a huge part of our identity and if we don’t feel like that’s being supported, that’s going to have huge implications politically,” he said. It’s what “people in the Midwest think of when they say Washington doesn’t think of them.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
In public comments, Justice Department officials have stressed that a past lack of international cooperation was a major hurdle to pursuing many of the cases.
Despite years of questionable Russian activity in many places, “executing on U.S. requests for search warrants, and subpoenas, and interviews, and other legal process remained a tall order because there is a mismatch in our U.S. and foreign allies’ sanctions regimes,” Andrew Adams, the director of Task Force KleptoCapture, said at the conservative Hudson Institute in January. The exceptional multilateral cooperation now, he stressed, has greatly enhanced sanctions enforcement.
What’s not clear is whether prior to 2022 the Justice Department, or the White House for that matter, put enough pressure on other countries to cooperate. And in many Ukraine-related cases, such as that of some oligarchs, it’s not clear why the U.S. didn’t go ahead and indict people who weren’t in custody anyway, at least to send a signal.
Former U.S. officials — most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because the topic involved sensitive legal issues and, in some cases, their previous employer — offered some theories:
It’s possible that U.S. intelligence agencies were watching the same target and asked the Justice Department not to act. The evidence collected may have involved methods that might not stand up in court, or prosecutors may have felt it wasn’t enough to indict. Prosecutors may have thought that, if they waited long enough, they could arrest someone should that person travel to a country cooperating with the United States. Some may not have wanted to indict on lesser charges even if they only had enough evidence for those. Plus, some prosecutors question the point of charging someone who is unlikely to ever land in U.S. custody — even if such name-and-shame cases can have symbolic value.
Several former officials said much of the department’s actions come down to a question of political will. But pursuing indictments also takes time, money and people — all finite resources. That latter point draws a lot of sympathy from former federal prosecutors.
“These cases take years. They take a lot of resources. A lot of these laws are complicated. They often involved classified information. And, at the end of the day, there may be no arrest. Are you going to take resources away from prosecuting violent crimes to do that?” asked Stephanie Siegmann, a former national security chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.
The Justice Department has over the past decade pursued several non-Ukraine cases against Russians, especially those involving cybercrime and interference in America’s 2016 presidential race, some of which fell under Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s purview. With rare exceptions, POLITICO did not include such cases in the 14 it deemed at least partially relevant to the war from 2014 through February 2022. That said, the level of international cooperation on those cases may have been easier to come by, especially if crime syndicates are targeting multiple countries.
In the past, another country may have felt less inclined to help Washington go after a person for violating U.S. sanctions if that other country didn’t have a similar sanctions statute. That concept of “dual criminality” matters because having parallel laws in two countries makes it easier to obtain evidence and extradite people.
Now, better-aligned U.S., British, and other European sanctions regimes have reduced the dual criminality hurdle.
Still, some foreign officials dismiss U.S. attempts to blame a lack of overseas cooperation for a dearth of past Ukraine-related prosecutions.
“When the U.S. really concentrates on getting someone extradited or prosecuting someone, it has a great record of getting countries to cooperate. There’s no reason why any of these cases should have been different,” a European official told POLITICO, speaking on condition of anonymity because the topic was so sensitive.
The former senior department official said that even prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Justice Department was searching for ways to elevate the topic of sanctions evasion.
The official added, however, that one important ingredient for a successful sanctions campaign against Russia is to havecabinet members beyond the attorney general — especially the secretary of State — press foreign governments to cooperate with U.S. investigations. In other words, it needs to be a whole-of-government political priority.
Pressed for comment on its history of pushing other countries to cooperate on investigations, a State Department spokesperson sent a statement focused on its present activities. “We support Department of Justice legal attaché offices at U.S. missions around the world to ensure access to foreign law enforcement entities and judiciaries,” the spokesperson said, having been granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.
Some former U.S. officials argue that the Treasury Department is the more important sanctions enforcer.
Treasury can levy fines on alleged violators; it also can impose new sanctions on people it believes are helping others evade sanctions, thus blocking their access to the U.S. financial system. Such efforts generally require meeting lower legal thresholds than criminal prosecutions.
Treasury has taken some such steps against suspected violators in the case of Russia and its war on Ukraine. But Treasury’s actions arguably lack the public impact of Justice Department moves, especially arrests and indictments, that can truly make wannabe culprits think twice.
“For every person who’s helping an oligarch evade sanctions who gets indicted, there’s a hundred more that are shaking in their shoes right now — it has a very powerful demonstration effect,” Browder said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
There is no doubt that the former governor, hailing from a red state where Democratic presidential candidates lose by 40 points, is a different kind of Democrat, especially on energy, cultural issues such as guns, abortion and immigration, and procedural matters like the filibuster and court-packing.
Yet, he’s still recognizably a Democrat, who tends to be there for his party — whatever drama he might create during the sausage-making — on big pieces of legislation.
During an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Manchin spoke openly about the possibility of a presidential run. He portrayed himself as a unifying force occupying the neglected center. “I’m fiscally responsible,” he said, “and socially compassionate” — a sentiment that owes more to false labels than no labels.
Let’s review the past two years: Manchin voted for the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill at the outset of the Biden administration; he voted for a $550 billion infrastructure bill; he voted for a $280 billion chips bill; and, finally, he voted for — indeed, helped craft — nearly $500 billion in yet more spending on green-energy and health care initiatives in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act that is offset by what is supposed to be roughly $800 billion in new taxes and reductions in Medicare spending.
Add it all up, and this is not the voting record of a fiscal conservative, a fiscal moderate, or even a fiscal realist.
It’s true that Manchin cut down Biden’s Build Back Better proposal by a couple of trillion before it morphed into the Inflation Reduction Act. But if your party wants to shoot money out of a powerful M20 Super-Bazooka (which was developed near the end of World War II), and you want to shoot money out of an earlier, less potent M1 Bazooka instead, that doesn’t make you a force for austerity.
In point of fact, you don’t need to shoot money out of bazookas at all.
While the Senate was evenly split, Manchin had stopping power. He could have single-handedly prevented Biden from spending an additional dollar. Instead, he went along with the big-ticket items and made it possible for Democrats to get more than they reasonably could have hoped for — and now harangues Biden to do more about the debt.
This is an accomplice to a crime after the fact, tsk-tsking the mastermind of the heist for not being more law-abiding.
Manchin has taken to complaining that his baby, the Inflation Reduction Act, has been distorted by the Biden administration. “When President Biden and I spoke before Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act last summer,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, “we agreed that the bill was designed to pay down our national debt and shore up America’s energy security.”
He might have wanted to get that in writing. If the rest of your party is convinced that a major bill is climate legislation — and proudly touts it as such — while you are the only one who believes that it is really about deficit reduction and exploiting more fossil fuels, there is a good chance you are the one who is wrong.
Say this for Biden — he may have lost a step, but he apparently can still take Manchin to the cleaners.
The senator had a large hand in drafting the bill, and had the leverage to insist on any provision that he wanted. There is nothing he wants nowthat he couldn’t have insisted on or made explicit in the legislation. Manchin’s denunciations of how the bill is being implemented are really confessions of his own poor negotiating and shabby legislative draftsmanship.
None of this is an auspicious launching pad for a national campaign. The typical fallacy of such third-party efforts is the belief that all, or a lion’s share, of self-identified independents would vote for an independent candidate. This ignores the fact that many independents lean Democrat or Republican, and vote much like actual Democrats and Republicans.
While the distaste for another Trump and Biden race is real, most Republicans and Democrats will make peace with these candidates if they win their respective nominations. Even if there is greater openness than usual to an alternative at the outset of the race, an independent candidate will inevitably look more like a spoiler or a wasted vote the closer the election gets, eroding their support further and making the campaign look even more quixotic and forlorn.
There’s also the matter of charisma and star power. The last independent candidate to get real traction, Ross Perot in 1992, was a one-of-a-kind American original with a kind of anti-charm and a set of distinctive issues, running in just the right populist environment. Manchin can do Sunday shows and looms large in West Virginia, but there’s nothing to suggest he has the performative ability or a unique ideology to dominate on a national stage.
Even if he did, he’d be most likely to help elect Trump. Biden wants to win independents and disaffected Republicans, the voters Manchin would be targeting as well. If he were serious about winning, Manchin would have to argue that Biden is not the moderate he campaigns as, and thus help make Trump’s case for him.
We live in a time of political unpredictability and disruption, just not enough for Manchin 2024 to make sense.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Edmund G. Brown Jr., who turns 85 on Friday, is one of this country’s most enduring public figures, enjoying a resilience and relevance into old age matched by few this side of the current occupant of the Oval Office. Unlike President Biden, who’s remained a Washington fixture from his 1972 election through the present, Brown has led a more itinerant political life.
The namesake of a governor who defeated Nixon only to lose to Ronald Reagan, the younger Brown has been governor for 16 years over three decades, state Democratic chairman, Oakland’s mayor, California’s attorney general and its secretary of state, a Jesuit seminarian, a student of Buddhism and an aspiring president three times, officially.
Now, he spends most of his time on 2,514 acres of his family’s land in rural Colusa County, well north of Sacramento, with his wife, Anne, and their dogs, Colusa and Cali.
Brown is not exactly living the serene life of a gentleman farmer, though. And he sure isn’t ready to discuss his legacy, rejecting in characteristic Jerry Brown fashion the very construct itself.
“What’s George Deukmejian’s legacy?” he demands, alluding to his little-remembered Republican successor in the 1980s before lamenting how even some giants are nearly forgotten. “You ask people about Earl Warren, people don’t know who Earl Warren was.”
Brown isn’t focused on the past because, as ever, he’s fixated on the here and now. To speak to him for over an hour is to see affirmation in the title of a superb recent biography: Man of Tomorrow.
So I’m a little reluctant to suggest that the topic Brown comes back to again and again in our conversation is his final mission, or some other catchy, sum-it-up phrase he’d detest as glib.
However, what worries Brown the most about tomorrow, in America and across the planet, is we won’t have very many of them if we stumble into a nuclear-tipped conflict with China.
“I’m very worried,” Brown told me. “And I don’t think the people in Washington are worried enough.”
Why not?
“That’s the big question: why are they not worried when nuclear powers are becoming so hostile to each other and there’s so little attempt at dialogue or reaching some modus vivendi, some way of co-existing.”
It’s easy to dismiss Brown as an alarmist.
After all, he’s been fretting about nuclear catastrophe for decades. I can recall him self-assigning a stop at the New York Times Washington bureau as governor a few years ago, where he came in to a quickly assembled group of reporters interested in politics, climate, immigration and all things Donald J. Trump (and, perhaps, Linda Ronstadt) and spent most of his time warning the group about the ticking doomsday clock before Armageddon.
However, our most recent conversation in San Francisco took place on the same day the Senate finally repealed the congressional authorization of force that sanctioned the U.S.’s war in Iraq. It was also just a few days after the 20th anniversary of an invasion that had strong bipartisan support at the time and now carries even stronger bipartisan regret today.
And at a moment when the two political parties are supposedly polarized, not even agreeing on the same facts, there sure does seem to be a great deal of bipartisan consensus about taking a hard line on China.
Look no further than the current visit of Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen. She met with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries when she was in New York, sat down with a bipartisan group of senators in the city and Wednesday, in a setting plainly aimed at sending a confrontational message to the Chinese, was feted by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and a large, bipartisan group of lawmakers at a bunting-laden mini summit at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. (Unlike the Nixon Library down the road in Yorba Linda, there’s no section in Simi Valley dedicated to peace-making with Peking.)
That Republicans are taking a hawkish posture toward China is not surprising to Brown, but he’s plainly uneasy that so many in his own party are doing the same.
“There’s not much dissent, the chorus on China is overwhelming,” he says.
Iraq, Brown notes, “was a very minor power” while China “with 23 percent of the world’s population contrasts with our 4.1 percent.”
He continues: “So the notion that we can scare China and push them around or contain them and suppress their growth and development is utter folly. But it does seem to be widespread.”
Brown’s solution: diplomacy, and more of it between the country’s two leaders, and a continuation of the longstanding U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” when it comes to Taiwan.
“This requires intensive exchange of views and ideas by the nation’s leaders,” Brown says. “In China, one guy counts. If you’re not talking to him, you’re not getting to the essence of what’s going on. So Biden is going to have to talk to Xi and they can’t talk for just an hour.”
The former governor doesn’t necessarily think Biden should visit China, but he favorably invoked how former President Barack Obama met with Xi Jinping at Sunnylands, the Annenberg estate near Palm Springs, in 2013. (Brown himself also met with Xi on that trip and subsequently in Beijing, making him one of the few governors to have such high-level contact)
Brown called Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s decision to cancel his trip to China following the balloon affair “a mistake if you want to have communication,” and minimized the incursion over American airspace.
“We have balloons, we have satellites, everybody is observing the other guy,” he said.
The closest Brown will come to criticizing Beijing’s autocracy, human rights abuses or any of its other transgressions is to acknowledge that “there are things in China we find horrendous.” But in the next breath, he says “not everything we have done has been perfect, so we ought to have a little humility.”
Nuclear conflagration aside, Brown deems it’s naïve to think China can be isolated. “Even a serious decoupling could mean a real deterioration in the American and the world economy,” he says, adding: “We get another serious banking failure, mortgage meltdown, we can’t stabilize the world economy without China. Whether we like it or not this is the world we live in.”
It’s worth quoting from Brown at length on China, if for no other reason than he’s right about this: few in the corridors of power today are willing to make the case for restraint.
Yet as blunt as he is about issues, he requires some reading between the lines, or at least repeated questioning, when it comes to people.
Take one of his predecessors as California’s state party chair, Nancy Pelosi. Didn’t her trip to Taiwan last year exacerbate U.S. tensions with China?
“I’m not going to bite on that one,” he says
Why not?
“Nancy Pelosi is a good friend of mine, I’m not offering advice,” he explains.
You sound like a politician all the sudden, I say, what happened to freewheeling Jerry Brown?
“You sound like a reporter, looking for your lede,” he shoots back. “I’m not going to give you those ledes.”
Brown, however, is more forthcoming when it comes to Biden who, Brown notes without prompting, was elected to the Senate two years after he was elected to his first office, secretary of state.
Brown has conveyed his views on China to the president through intermediaries, “people who are close to Biden,” and relays that he’s told it’s Beijing that’s now not being responsive to Washington’s entreaties, a bit of intelligence borne out in my colleagues’ reporting this week.
It’s hard to be the grand old man of the Democratic Party, a sage of hard-won wisdom, however, when the current president has been in the fray as long as you have.
Which brings us to what you’re likely wondering: yes, Brown thinks he could serve as president today.
“I can handle the job but I don’t think the politics can handle my age,” he says. “We’re not like the old Soviet Union, where they had all those men in the Politburo, people want some fresher faces.”
And that in turn raises the question of whether he thinks Biden should run for re-election.
“Well, you know, it depends on what the alternatives are,” Brown says, pausing. “I’d say this it’s not a slam dunk any way you look at it.”
If he were younger, yes, he concedes he’d mount a primary of his own. “It would probably be hard to hold me back,” he says in a moment of self-awareness, recalling his “very stupid” challenge of then-President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
It takes more pressing, though, to elicit his actual view of Biden, but it’s worth the effort and fitting that he’s seated on a couch as he offers his assessment of who this president is.
“It’s similar to my father’s politics,” Brown offers. “There’s a sense of right and wrong, there’s a sense of fairness, there’s a certain old-fashioned quality about it.”
He calls it “Eastern seaboard Catholic Democratic politics” and its virtues include a “respect for the verities that have made us what we are and hold us together.”
And the downside? “That you can’t respond to changed circumstances.”
Speaking of sibling (or paternal!) rivalries.
If Brown is eventually forthcoming on Biden, he’s at his most uncomfortable when I shift the topic to the Californian who may succeed the president — and who was state attorney general when Brown was governor a decade ago.
Of the other Democrats who could run in 2024, I point out, Vice President Kamala Harris would be an obvious contender.
“Of the people on offer, there’s no doubt Biden is the strongest,” Brown says, suddenly coming around to Biden’s re-election.
Is Harris ready to be president, I ask?
“I don’t think vice presidents are ever ready,” he says, recalling that Eisenhower didn’t think his vice president was ready. (There’s Nixon again.)
Yes, but does this vice president have the capacity for the job?
“People thought John Kennedy was kind of a lightweight but he rose to the occasion,” he says, again turning to history for a vivid non-answer before chiding me for asking him to make “all these judgements.”
He insists he has “a good relationship” with Harris and that he’s “texted her a few times” as vice president but he doesn’t put much effort into the case before sounding like one of those old-school politicians he was talking about a few minutes earlier: “She’s been friendly to me and I’ve been friendly to her.”
He will, though, offer the vice president a bit of advice, and it comes tinged with envy from somebody who in our conversation has casually referenced Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Huntington, George Ball and his own piece in the New York Review of Books.
“Surround yourself with the best thinking on foreign policy, particularly, and domestic issues,” Brown says he’d tell Harris, noting that “she has access to everybody.”
He adds, longingly: ”She has the catbird seat as far as being where history is being made.”
It’s clear why Brown believes he never got closer to that catbird seat.
When I bring up how tomorrow can often be glimpsed first in California, a cliché I thought worth pursuing to get the futurist in him revving, he interrupts me.
“It’s an important place except when it comes to electing presidents, well you know the history,” he says, arguing that Reagan is the exception because “he was the leader of a conservative movement, he was national in scope.”
California, Brown notes, is more liberal than the states required to carry the Electoral College.
Could that hamper Gov. Gavin Newsom’s future ambitions, I ask?
Again, he turns to history to answer the question by way of dodging it.
“Well, I think it handicapped me running against Bill Clinton, him coming from Arkansas,” he says of his 1992 race.
Come on, I press him, would Newsom make a good president?
“I think he’s been a pretty good governor, so who the heck knows,” he responds before turning back the clock again. “I don’t even know if I would be a good president.”
On the California race of the moment, the campaign to succeed Senator Dianne Feinstein, Brown is clear about what he thinks America’s largest state deserves in the Capitol.
“Somebody of stature and very large conception,” he says, invoking Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and William Fulbright of Arkansas.
He initially says he won’t comment about which of the candidates has reached out to him, but it doesn’t take much guesswork for him to reveal that he’s yet to hear from Rep. Katie Porter but has talked to Reps Adam Schiff and Barbara Lee, who have a much longer history in California politics than their younger colleague from Orange County.
Brown isn’t much interested in the early shadow boxing for a 2024 race, though, or really any politics-heavy conversation.
Which isn’t to say he’s uninterested in domestic issues. Although he talks about generational differences in lingo with his father — “he called it necking and we call it making out” — Brown sounds quite different from today’s liberals.
He largely eschews identity issues and, perhaps even more notable, appears unbothered by the threats to American democracy that alarm so many on the left and middle in the Age of Trump.
When I ask about the former president and whether he’s an extension of the backlash politics Brown witnessed up close in California or a more profound threat to the country, Brown quickly dispenses with Trump and comes back to China, Russia and the nuclear threat.
The domestic challenges he’s most fixated on are the ones he sees up close in California: climate change, homelessness, affordable housing and adequate education.
“Unless America can find some kind of convergence among its diverse groups it’s going to be paralyzed,” he warns.
There’s a more dangerous reason, Brown continues, to be concerned about the tug of identity politics on the right and left.
“As national identity weakens, smaller identities increase,” he says. “People want to identify with something.”
Now he’s onto Samuel Huntington and an essay Huntington wrote for Foreign Affairs in 1997 “bemoaning multi-culturalism” and arguing that “America needs a great national purpose which takes an enemy, and China isn’t strong enough but they will be someday.”
In case I had missed the point, Brown warns: “The fragmentation of America will be resolved by war.”
And just like that, he’s brought the conversation back to where he wants it.
Not surprisingly, when I close by asking what his one plea to Biden would be, Brown says: “They can’t demonize Xi Jinping to the point where dialogue is impossible.”
Returning to his nostalgia for Nixon’s diplomacy in Moscow and Peking, he says today we’ll “inherit a world with three nuclear powers on hair-trigger alert.”
However, nobody, Brown laments, “asks for my advice.”
But as we get up to leave, he wants to make sure his counsel will get through.
“Now what’s the lede?” he asks.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Jose Sanchez took over as mayor just four days after the Lunar New Year shooting that killed 11 people and injured nine. The Monterey Park City Council member and longtime civics teacher had spent years studying firearm laws, helping his class of high school seniors craft gun-safety legislation that reached the House floor. He thought he knew what to expect.
Nothing could have prepared him.
He was running on two to three hours of sleep a night as he juggled the demands of teaching with the tragedy’s aftermath. Meetings with state and federal government officials. Vigils and community events. Round-the-clock emails from residents worried about safety.
The father of three small children, he started bringing his oldest child to the office so they could spend more time together. Her sixth birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, which had been set for the day after the shooting, was canceled.
Two days after a gunman opened fire in a ballroom dance studio, Sanchez was back in his classroom at Alhambra High School, trying to talk with his students about what had happened without breaking down.
“I remember at the end of that period, a student patted me on the shoulder and asked if I was OK,” he said. “It’s not that often that my students ask me how I’m doing.”
Sanchez, a Democrat, had thought about the probability of a shooting while running his first campaign for elected office. He remembers telling his wife he would make sure Monterey Park was prepared.
The city, a majority Asian American suburb outside of Los Angeles that for decades attracted immigrants with the promise of good schools and single-family homes, had largely been spared from the proliferation of shootings across the nation.
His wife warned him that he was thinking about gun safety too much, and he wondered if she was right. That issue had consumed him since 2016, when he and a group of students visiting UCLA barricaded themselves in a women’s restroom after a professor was shot and killed.
“I wish I didn’t have to think about this issue,” Sanchez said. “And now that it has happened, it makes you think, how could we have been better prepared? What can we do now to prevent another one?”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Chinese leader Xi Jinping had one overriding message for his visiting French counterpart Emmanuel Macron this week: Don’t let Europe get sucked into playing America’s game.
Beijing is eager to avoid the EU falling further under U.S. influence, at a time when the White House is pursuing a more assertive policy to counter China’s geopolitical and military strength.
Russia’s yearlong war against Ukraine has strengthened the alliance between Europe and the U.S., shaken up global trade, reinvigorated NATO and forced governments to look at what else could suddenly go wrong in world affairs. That’s not welcome in Beijing, which still views Washington as its strategic nemesis.
This week, China’s counter-offensive stepped up a gear, turning on the charm. Xi welcomed Macron into the grandest of settings at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, along with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen. This was in sharp contrast to China’s current efforts to keep senior American officials at arm’s length, especially since U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called off a trip to Beijing during the spy balloon drama earlier this year.
Both American and Chinese officials know Europe’s policy toward Beijing is far from settled. That’s an opportunity, and a risk for both sides. In recent months, U.S. officials have warned of China’s willingness to send weapons to Russia and talked up the dangers of allowing Chinese tech companies unfettered access to European markets, with some success.
TikTok, which is ultimately Chinese owned, has been banned from government and administrative phones in a number of locations in Europe, including in the EU institutions in Brussels. American pressure also led the Dutch to put new export controls on sales of advanced semiconductor equipment to China.
Yet even the hawkish von der Leyen, a former German defense minister, has dismissed the notion of decoupling Europe from China’s economy altogether. From Beijing’s perspective, this is yet another significant difference from the hostile commercial environment being promoted by the U.S.
Just this week, 36 Chinese and French businesses signed new deals in front of Macron and Xi, in what Chinese state media said was a sign of “the not declining confidence in the Chinese market of European businesses.” While hardly a statement brimming with confidence, it could have been worse.
For the last couple of years European leaders have grown more skeptical of China’s trajectory, voicing dismay at Beijing’s way of handling the coronavirus pandemic, the treatment of protesters in Hong Kong and Xinjiang’s Uyghur Muslims, as well as China’s sanctions on European politicians and military threats against Taiwan.
Then, Xi and Vladimir Putin hailed a “no limits” partnership just days before Russia invaded Ukraine. While the West rolled out tough sanctions on Moscow, China became the last major economy still interested in maintaining — and expanding — trade ties with Russia. That shocked many Western officials and provoked a fierce debate in Europe over how to punish Beijing and how far to pull out of Chinese commerce.
Beijing saw Macron as the natural partner to help avoid a nosedive in EU-China relations, especially since Angela Merkel — its previous favorite — was no longer German chancellor.
Macron’s willingness to engage with anyone — including his much-criticized contacts with Putin ahead of his war on Ukraine — made him especially appealing as Beijing sought to drive a wedge between European and American strategies on China.
Xi Jinping sees Macron as the natural to Angela Merkel, his previous partner in the West who helped avoid a nosedive in EU-China relations | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
Not taking sides
“I’m very glad we share many identical or similar views on Sino-French, Sino-EU, international and regional issues,” Xi told Macron over tea on Friday, in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, according to Chinese state media Xinhua.
Strategic autonomy, a French foreign policy focus, is a favorite for China, which sees the notion as proof of Europe’s distance from the U.S. For his part, Macron told Xi a day earlier that France promotes “European strategic autonomy,” doesn’t like “bloc confrontation” and believes in doing its own thing. “France does not pick sides,” he said.
The French position is challenged by some in Europe who see it as an urgent task to take a tougher approach toward Beijing.
“Macron could have easily avoided the dismal picture of European and transatlantic disunity,” said Thorsten Benner, director of the Berlin-based Global Public Policy Institute. “Nobody forced Macron to show up with a huge business delegation, repeating disproven illusions of reciprocity and deluding himself about working his personal magic on Xi to get the Chinese leader to turn against Putin.”
Holger Hestermeyer, a professor of EU law at King’s College London, said Beijing will struggle to split the transatlantic alliance.
“If China wants to succeed with building a new world order, separating the EU from the U.S. — even a little bit — would be a prized goal — and mind you, probably an elusive one,” Hestermeyer said. “Right now the EU is strengthening its defenses specifically because China tried to play divide and conquer with the EU in the past.”
Xi’s focus on America was unmistakable when he veered into a topic that was a long way from Europe’s top priority, during his three-way meeting with Macron and von der Leyen. A week earlier the Biden administration had held its second Summit for Democracy, in which Russia and China were portrayed as the main threats.
“Spreading the so-called ‘democracy versus authoritarianism’ [narrative],” Xi told his European guests on Thursday, “would only bring division and confrontation to the world.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
