Alex Altman

Despite mixed returns at the polls, the billionaire businessman remains bullish his climate campaign can change politics

In 2014, Tom Steyer emerged as the Democratic Party’s great green hope. The billionaire financier pledged to sink a chunk of his fortune into a campaign to make climate change a central issue in the midterm elections, and he delivered on his promise. Steyer’s political-action committee, NextGen Climate, spent some $65 million during the 2014 cycle. It ran ads in seven hand-picked states, assembled a sophisticated field organization and built a sprawling database of committed supporters.

Was it money well spent? If you measure success at the ballot box, Steyer’s return on investment may seem skimpy.

Just three of the seven candidates NextGen supported were victorious on Tuesday. Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen fended off a challenge from Scott Brown in New Hampshire; Democratic gubernatorial nominee Tom Wolf coasted to victory in Pennsylvania; and Democratic Senate candidate Gary Peters won an open seat in Michigan.

But Steyer’s group lost competitive Senate races in Colorado and Iowa, states into which it poured nearly $12 million, and which may prove the difference in the battle for control of the chamber. (Not all ballots have been counted in the Alaska Senate contest, and Louisiana is headed for a December runoff.) NextGen also came out on the wrong side of tight gubernatorial races in Florida and Maine, despite heavy investment to dislodge incumbent Republicans Rick Scott and Paul LePage.

But Steyer is sanguine about the election’s outcome. In an interview with TIME on Thursday, he pointed to NextGen’s ability to push climate issues toward the forefront of campaigns, as well as its efforts to begin the construction of a political machine that can become a powerful force in coming years.

“In terms of the things that we can control, we felt like wow—we way over-performed our expectations,” Steyer says, noting that the group surpassed its target of amassing a quarter-million climate-driven voters by 100,000 and beat its goal by building an email list of a million names. “Climate was a top-tier issue in every one of the states we were working on,” Steyer says, “Which is a huge change—very different from 2012, very different from 2010.”

NextGen forced Iowa Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst to defend her climate position in Iowa, and Colorado Republican Senate candidate Cory Gardner was sufficiently cowed to run ads touting his support for wind energy in the state. But both GOP candidates prevailed. And in both states, voters declined to rank climate in the top quartet of issues, according to CNN exit polls, instead listing foreign policy, healthcare, the economy and illegal immigration as their top priorities.

In Florida, Scott made only fleeting gestures to the environmental community, and in Maine Steyer’s group failed to oust LePage, who calls climate change a hoax. NextGen’s efforts may have put Republicans on the defensive, but that’s a relatively modest achievement for tens of millions of dollars.

With the GOP poised to take control of Congress in January, the prospects for positive legislation on environmental issues have dimmed. Republicans are preparing a push to approve the Keystone XL pipeline—”a terrible idea,” especially amid plunging oil prices, Steyer says—as well as a likely effort to green-light drilling on public lands. But Steyer says that while NextGen will stay focused on educating people about the economic and environmental benefits of pursuing progressive energy policy, he’s conscious of the limits of its power to affect the legislative process.

“Do I think it’s possible for us to educate people about the facts on the Keystone XL pipeline and influence their thinking by making them aware of what the underlying issues are? Sure,” he says. “But we definitely can’t control this issue” in Congress.

The same goes for this week’s outcome at the polls. Steyer chalks up the defeats in close races to the headwinds of waging a campaign in an off-year cycle, when a second-term president with foundering approval ratings buffeted Democratic candidates. “There was a Republican wave that has nothing to do with us, and in certain of those races, it swept over us,” he says. “It’s something we can’t control.”

And so Steyer hasn’t wavered in his political or financial commitments. NextGen is “not a drive-by super PAC,” he says. “We’re going to build political assets, we’re going to build an organization, we’re choosing states that have national significance. All those things are [still] true … regardless of the outcome. So I feel really good about what we did, and I feel really good about where we’re going.”

After a stinging defeat last fall, the Republican Establishment seized control of the party and steered it to victory

For the Republican Party, Tuesday’s Senate triumph had roots in regret.

Last November, the GOP found itself perched on a political precipice. Its poll numbers had cratered, its demographic future was murky and the government shutdown had proven disastrous. Looming on the horizon was a year of bitter primary squabbles, which strategists feared would produce shoddy candidates capable of hobbling its quest to reclaim the Senate.

Twelve months later, Republicans notched sweeping victories, paced by a banner class of recruits and propelled by the money and muscle of an Establishment wing that finally snatched back the reins of the party. The GOP could not have defeated the Democrats without first dispatching its insurgents. And so the story of its decisive victory on Tuesday begins not in the corridors of the Capitol or on the stump in a swing state, but rather deep in Republican territory, with a sleepy special election in southwest Alabama.

In the wake of the shutdown debacle last fall, a mainstream Republican named Bradley Byrne was struggling to beat back Tea Partyer Dean Young for a seat opened by a congressional retirement. Young was the sort of insurgent the Establishment had grown to loathe. Incendiary and unpolished, he called Ted Cruz a model legislator and vowed to go to Washington to “shut it down again.” Party elders saw the race as their first chance to reshape the party in the wake of the shutdown. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose policy had long been to stay neutral in primaries, led a brigade of business lobbies into the district. The strike was a sneak attack. Eschewing TV ads, the Chamber quietly shelled out some $200,000 on the race, dropping direct mail around the district. Byrne won in a nail-biter.

It was the first time that the party’s establishment wing had directly confronted the Tea Party movement, and it set the tone for the battles to come. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell visited a Chamber board meeting the day after the race, and declared the sleepy special election the most important contest in the country, on a night that also saw Chris Christie win a decisive victory in the New Jersey governor’s race. It was a token of gratitude toward the Chamber, which would playing a leading role in the Establishment revolt, spending about $70 million on 2014 races and winning 14 of the 15 primaries it entered. “We don’t have anything against the Tea Party,” says Scott Reed, the Chamber’s chief political strategist. “But when a handful of bad actors hijacked the movement, that’s when we decided to step in.”

The goal, party strategists say, was to avoid the kind of disastrous candidates—the Todd Akins, the Sharron Angles, the Christine O’Donnells—whose extreme positions and outré remarks hampered the GOP up and down the ballot in past Senate stumbles. The plot to crush the Tea Party proved a smash success. For the first time since 2008, not a single incumbent Republican senator lost in a primary.

After Alabama, the emboldened Establishment moved quickly. Party committees blacklisted a Republican ad firm called Jamestown Associates, causing it to lose a series of lucrative contracts. Jamestown’s sin? Working with a group called the Senate Conservatives Fund, which was part of a passel of Tea Party groups who infuriated party bigwigs by egging on the shutdown. McConnell spread word that the leaders of these groups, whose organizing principle was fiscal discipline, were taking bloated salaries. The Senate Conservatives Fund, McConnell aide Josh Holmes, told the New York Times, “has been wandering around the country destroying the Republican Party like a drunk who tears up every bar they walk into. The difference this cycle is that they strolled into Mitch McConnell’s bar, and he doesn’t throw you out, he locks the door.”

In a series of key contests, the Establishment’s money and muscle helped lift struggling candidates out of crowded primary fields. In May, a coalition of center-right business groups boosted Thom Tillis, the North Carolina House speaker, over the 40% threshold to avoid a runoff, saving GOP forces around $20 million in the process. The next month, it did the same in Iowa for Joni Ernst, who went on to topple Democrat Bruce Braley in one of the year’s decisive Senate races.

Ernst also got a much-needed assist from a GOP research firm called America Rising. Launched by three top party operatives after 2012, the group had a mandate to erase the opposition research edge Democrats enjoyed in past cycles. The investment paid dividends early on a cold, dark March morning. Tim Miller, the group’s executive director, was reviewing the latest clips compiled by his team of twenty-something research junkies when he came across something so juicy it might just alter the balance of the Senate. “Holy s—!” he shouted. It was a video of Braley, standing before a half-dozen bottles of liquor at a Texas fundraiser, disparaging Sen. Chuck Grassley as a farmer who “never went to law school.”

Miller’s group leaked the video to an Iowa television reporter, hoping to assure at least a single airplay on local television, which would allow it to be aired in future ads. Instead it spread like wildfire. The clip cast Braley as out of touch with his agricultural state and proved a body blow to Braley’s Iowa hopes. In the final Des Moines Register poll, 39 percent of Braley’s own supporters said his comments about Grassley were a crucial mistake.

In all, dozens of research hits unearthed by America Rising would make their way into ads aired by candidates and allied groups. “One of our big takeaways from the last cycle was the Democrats did a better job of investing in tracking and opposition research,” says Miller. “This time we needed to invest in that in order to make our paid media more effective.”

Meanwhile, Republicans were expanding the political map by putting unexpected states into play. In March, prized recruit Cory Gardner coaxed potential challengers to let him run opposed against Democratic Sen. Mark Udall. In Virginia, former RNC chair Ed Gillespie launched a bid against Democratic Sen. Mark Warner. Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown moved to the Granite State to challenge Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in early April. Gillespie and Brown lost, but ran strong campaign that forced Democrats to funnel precious time and money into defending territory.

The next big moment came in a June, when GOP bigwigs scrambled to save Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran in a runoff against Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel. Back in Washington, strategists saw McDaniel as a ticking time bomb. The GOP was so determined to be gaffe-proof in 2014 that it dispatched staffers to harass Senate hopefuls at a Washington airport in hopes of steeling them against surprise encounters with hostile trackers. McDaniel was the kind of firebrand they feared.

The establishment, led by former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and his allies, pulled out every trick in the bag to snuff out the threat. In a tight runoff, they expanded the electorate by courting black voters. The Chamber enlisted Mississippi icon Brett Favre to cut a memorable ad for Cochran. They later repeated the tactic in North Carolina, where Nascar driver Richard Petty appeared in an ad for Tillis, and in Georgia, where hometown Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker made a Senate endorsement.

“If we had come up short in Mississippi, it would have had a domino effect” all summer, Reed says. “Beating McDaniel was a key turning point. It allowed us to turn the page on the primaries and focus on the general.”

As the Chamber led the way in the primaries and America Rising handled the research, the vaunted Koch network was laying the groundwork for November. The Kochs were the biggest spenders on the right on the 2014 election, with a hand in everything from the party’s ground game to its attack ads to its tech tools.

Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a Koch-based network of state-based activists, shelled out more than $125 million to boost Republicans. About half that sum was plowed into a robust ground game powered by some 550 field staff. AFP ran its first ads the week of Labor Day 2013, with a million-dollar buy against Kay Hagan in North Carolina. The campaign slowly chipped away at the incumbent’s s approval rating, which hovered around 55% as 2014 dawned. “The earliest and biggest strategic decision we made was to go early,” says AFP president Tim Phillips. As November drew near, other members of the Koch network switched up tactics. The super PAC Freedom Partners Action Fund began running “express advocacy” ads, spending some $25 million to boost candidates that helped Republicans reclaimed the Senate. The move forced the group to disclose donors, which it had long resisted. “That was a big decision for the Koch network,” says Phillips.

All these changes—better candidates, better research, smarter spending—coalesced on Tuesday, when Republicans picked up at least 7 Senate seats to seize control of the upper chamber for the first time since 2006.

With reporting by Zeke J. Miller

The keys to Tuesday's Senate elections, according to the two parties' top strategists

Millions of votes have been cast, the last ads have been cut, and there’s barely a household that remains blessedly untouched by the fight for the U.S. Senate. At some point, there is nothing left to do but wait. So with Election Night days away, the two parties’ top Senate strategists gathered Thursday in Washington to preview the drama that will unfold.

Much of the sparring between Rob Collins, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Guy Cecil, his counterpart at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, involved the ritual scramble to manage expectations. (Yes, we know both sides are optimistic about their chances—at least publicly, anyway.) But some big-picture themes emerged from the spin session between two parties’ top strategists. Here are four takeaways:

A tale of two frames

If Republicans retake the Senate, they have Barack Obama to thank. The GOP’s strategy in the battleground states was to make each election a referendum on the President, tying vulnerable Democratic incumbents to the policies of a chief executive whose approval ratings have sagged into the low 40s. “We have framed it through the prism of a group of incumbents voting with the President more than 90% of the time,” Collins said.

In contrast, Democrats have sought to localize these races, framing the contests as a choice between two candidates. “It’s clear the Republicans want to nationalize” the elections, Cecil said. “And it’s clear the Democrats want to make it about the two people on the ballot.”

Candidates matter

Inside the party committees and out, Republicans are gushing about their slate of Senate candidates this cycle. For the first time since 2008, no incumbent GOP Senator was toppled in a primary this year. That means no Todd Akins, no Sharron Angles—no challengers whose verbal missteps or outré positions dented party candidates up and down the ballot. “This is the best recruiting class in 30 years,” Collins said. Democrats are enthused by some of their recruits as well, especially Georgia’s Michelle Nunn, whom Cecil cited as the cycle’s best candidate.

And then there are the duds. Cecil called Nunn’s opponent, Republican businessman David Perdue, perhaps this year’s worst Republican candidate. Perdue’s competition for the ignominious title is Sen. Pat Roberts, the three-term GOP incumbent whose listless campaign cracked open the door for an unknown independent in blood-red Kansas. As for weak Democrats, Collins cited North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan as a candidate whose shortcomings were “hidden behind a big pile of money.”

The bellwethers say plenty about each side’s path to victory

On Election Night, Collins said, the GOP will be looking at North Carolina and New Hampshire as harbingers. Both are close states where the Democratic incumbents—Hagan and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, respectively—have led the whole way, only to see Republican challengers surge at the finish line. In contrast, Democrats are watching states like Alaska, Colorado, Iowa and Georgia. Democrats are even or behind in all of those contests, and just one—the Peach State—is a pickup opportunity for the President’s party. The bellwethers underscore just how much the map favors the GOP this year.

The money involved is massive

The two parties and their allied outside groups have carpet-bombed North Carolina, forking over more than $100 million on the Tar Heel State’s Senate contest. More than $55 million has been dropped on Alaska, a staggering sum in a state with cheap media markets and just 735,000 residents. And if Louisiana and Georgia go to runoffs? Expect the two sides to shell out another $35 million to $45 million apiece, Cecil predicted, if control of the Senate hangs in the balance. The DSCC has already reserved $10 million in television time in Louisiana. Which means the ad blitz may not let up until January after all.

Reformers urge the president to sign an expansive order allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in the U.S.

Immigration activists are ratcheting up the pressure on Barack Obama, warning the President that a failure to live up to expectations for executive action on immigration would jeopardize his party’s standing with the Hispanic community.

“We won’t take any more excuses,” says Cristina Jimenez of the immigration-reform group United We Dream. “What we expect from the President is for him to use his legal authority to enact a program that will protect as many people from our community as possible.”

Obama pledged over the summer to take executive action this fall on immigration in the absence of legislation to fix a broken system. That promise crumbled under political pressures, as vulnerable Democrats in red states cajoled the White House into postponing the move until after Nov. 4. Now, as the midterms draw near, some reformers fear they’re about to be brushed off once more.

As the White House begins to weigh the scope of executive action, the early whispers among immigration reformers are that Obama may fall short of the lofty targets the movement has set for him. The President is considering an order that would grant temporary protection from deportation and work authorization to a sizable number of the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., a step he could take unilaterally by expanding the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

The overarching question is how many undocumented immigrants he will protect. The White House signaled over the summer that it could extend administrative relief for up to several million undocumented immigrants and their families. By delaying the decision for political reasons, Obama has nudged expectations even higher.

At a “bare minimum,” said Pablo Alvarado, executive director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the immigration orders should include “an extension of work authorization to everyone who would qualify under the Senate bill and an end to the Secure Communities program and policies that criminalize immigrants. The President has the legal authority, the moral obligation, and the political capital required to take these important steps.” The Senate bill, which passed the upper chamber in June 2013 with 68 votes, would provide relief to some 8 million undocumented immigrants.

“This is an action that frankly we believe the President should have taken months ago,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. “The president has broad legal authority to do this. It’s really about his political will.”

But there is growing concern that Obama may lack the will to make a bold unilateral move, especially if his party suffers sweeping losses in elections that were, in many ways, a referendum on his policies. Two anonymous sources cited by Buzzfeed, which reported Tuesday that final recommendations were being sent to Obama, pegged the number in the low seven figures. And even some of Obama’s allies worry that a President with a mixed record on immigration and an instinct for the middle ground will disappoint the Hispanic community once again.

“We’re definitely concerned,” says a Democratic source involved with the immigration-reform push, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid angering the White House. “The history of this presidency is one of trying to accommodate the opposition.”

Timing is a mystery as well. The White House continues to say that Obama will act this year. But some in the immigration-reform movement worry the deadline could push once again. On Nov. 9, Obama leaves for a weeklong trip to Asia. The Thanksgiving lull arrives soon after. Then Congress needs to hammer out a deal to extend government funding, which expires in mid-December, amid a crammed lame-duck calendar. Executive action on immigration could throw a wrench in those budget talks.

Immigration reformers urged Obama to withstand those pressures. “Some might worry the backlash against a bold program will be too great,” said Hincapié. But that backlash will exist whether the President extends relief to one person, 1 million or many more. “We’re holding the president to his word,” she added. “There are no more excuses.”

Embattled chief Tom Jackson says he isn't going anywhere

The Ferguson, Mo. police department is denying reports that its chief is set to be replaced amid ongoing protests in a community bracing for a grand jury decision in the shooting death of Michael Brown.

“Nobody in my chain of command has asked me to resign, nor have I been terminated,” Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson told CNN, which reported late Tuesday night that Jackson would step down as part of a broad reorganization that would hand control of the department to the St. Louis County police. CNN, citing unnamed “government officials familiar with the ongoing discussions,” reported the move could come as soon as next week.

That was news to the Ferguson police department, which denied the report but left open the possibility that Jackson could vacate the post. “He has not been told to resign. He has not been fired. If he leaves, it will be his choice alone,” the department posted on Twitter.

Jackson did not immediately return a call or an email seeking comment on the report.

Officer Brian Schellman of the St. Louis County Police says his department is unaware of impending changes. “We have no knowledge of any of that,” Schellman says.

The report comes as the aftershocks of the Aug. 9 shooting continue to reverberate in the St. Louis suburb. A grand jury investigating the shooting of Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, is expected to hand down a decision by mid-November on whether to indict police officer Darren Wilson on murder or manslaughter charges. In recent weeks, the protests have regained steam amid a series of leaked reports that appeared to corroborate Wilson’s claim that the shooting came after Brown assaulted the officer. Local officials say they are worried about the protests that may erupt if Wilson is not indicted.

Jackson has come under withering criticism for his handling of the shooting. As riots roiled the St. Louis suburb in the days after Brown’s death, Jackson resisted the intense pressure to identify the officer who shot him. When he finally fingered Wilson six days later, he did so while releasing a video of an unrelated robbery Brown committed before the attack—which critics considered an attempt to taint the reputation of the dead teen.

The shooting released a wave of mounting frustration between Ferguson’s largely African American population and its heavily white government and police force. Residents have raised questions about what they say is a pattern of racial profiling and the Justice Department has opened a broad civil rights investigation into the Ferguson police department. Outgoing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who visited the troubled city in the aftermath of the shooting, has said his department is investigating the Ferguson force’s record of stops, searches and use of force against residents. Statistics indicate the police force has targeted African Americans at a disproportionate rate.

His attempt to force a nurse to stay under a 21-day quarantine didn't work out as expected

Quarantine decision prioritizes politics over policy

The decision to impose a mandatory quarantine in New York and New Jersey for health care workers arriving from Ebola-stricken nations has opened a rift between the Obama Administration and the governors of those states.

Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey and Andrew Cuomo of New York on Friday ordered doctors and nurses returning to be isolated for 21 days, the incubation period for the lethal pathogen that has killed nearly 5,000 in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. That was just a day after New York City physician Dr. Craig Spencer, who had been volunteering at a Doctors Without Borders clinic for Ebola patients in Guinea, was diagnosed with the virus. He is in isolation at a Manhattan hospital. The first health worker quarantined under the new provision was the nurse Kaci Hickox, who landed at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday and is being monitored at a Newark Hospital. She has tested negative for Ebola.

To the White House, the governors’ decision represents politics trumping public-health policy. With voters spooked by the specter of Ebola and supportive of tougher measures to prevent its spread, Cuomo and Christie say they are trying to assuage panic and protect the citizens of their states. But health officials say that health care workers who follow federal guidelines pose no threat to the public. And they worry that a mandatory quarantine will dissuade desperately needed medical personnel from volunteering to battle the virus at the source of the epidemic in West Africa.

The dispute simmered over the weekend, as Administration officials pressed the states to reverse the decision. “We have let the governors of New York, New Jersey, and others states know that we have concerns with the unintended consequences of policies not grounded in science may have on efforts to combat Ebola at its source in West Africa,” a senior Administration official tells TIME.

Christie and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sparred over the policy on Fox News Sunday. Fauci, a top federal health official, defended the government’s existing protective protocols and argued that a forced quarantine for health care workers who pose a “vanishingly small” risk of transmitting the virus could be a disincentive to volunteers.

“The best way to protect us is to stop the epidemic in Africa, and we need those health care workers. So, we do not want to put them in a position where it makes it very, very uncomfortable for them to even volunteer to go,” Fauci said. “If we don’t have our people volunteering to go over there, then you’re going to have other countries that are not going to do it, and then the epidemic will continue to roar.”

But for the governors, science may be secondary to politics. Polls show that many voters, in the grips of Ebola panic, favor measures to restrict the possible spread of Ebola, even those — like a ban on travel to and from virus-stricken nations — that medical experts say would make things worse.

As a result, Christie and Cuomo stand to benefit from going beyond the safety guidelines set forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So does Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, an embattled Democrat embroiled in a tough re-election fight, who also ordered a mandatory quarantine of health workers flying into that state.

Like Quinn, Cuomo is up for re-election on Nov. 4. His Republican opponent, Rob Astorino, has sought to harness the panic to gain ground, pummeling Cuomo’s preparation for the virus as “gross negligence.”

Christie is positioning himself for a possible White House run next year, and his advisers believe that his confrontational style of crisis management underscores his appeal to voters. Picking a fight with the feds over Ebola, even when the science doesn’t support his position, may be a way to resurrect the tactics that earned him bipartisan plaudits after Hurricane Sandy.

Appearing on the same program as Fauci, Christie defended the mandatory quarantine. “I don’t believe when you’re dealing with something as serious as this that we can count on a voluntary system,” he said. “The government’s job is to protect the safety and health of our citizens.”

Hickox, the nurse quarantined in New Jersey, wrote an essay for the Dallas Morning News on Saturday that slammed the decision. “We need more health care workers to help fight the epidemic in West Africa,” she wrote. “The U.S. must treat returning health care workers with dignity and humanity.” She has hired a lawyer, who has been cleared to visit her in the hospital. The American Civil Liberties Union has also inquired about the state’s legal right to quarantine her given her negative Ebola diagnosis.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio called the way that Hickox has been treated “inappropriate.”

— With reporting by Zeke J. Miller

Says thousands needed to stop the spread of Ebola

The global health community needs “thousands” more health-care workers in West Africa to tame the Ebola virus epidemic that has so far killed nearly 5,000 people, the president of the World Bank told reporters Friday.

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, chief of the international financial institution, said a lack of trained medical personnel in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone is one of the main challenges hampering the international effort to control an outbreak that has ravaged three West African countries and risks spreading to its neighbors.

Kim said the global community has stepped up its response to Ebola, but conceded that the World Bank, like other international organizations, was late to recognize the severity of the epidemic. The spread of the virus in the three stricken nations at the heart of the epidemic has left healthcare workers in triage mode. As a result, they are often unable to use “the ideal techniques” for combating an epidemic, such as contact tracing—the process of identifying and isolating the contacts of infected patients.

“We are now on a war footing,” Kim said, “but it took us a long time to get there.”

Kim said that international organizations have ratcheted up levels of support to West Africa after a sluggish start, but said more must be done. “We’ve got to get beyond these sort of nihilists notions that nothing can be done,” he said. The World Bank has pumped $400 million into West Africa to fight Ebola.

Kim praised Dr. Craig Spencer, the physician who was diagnosed with Ebola Thursday night in New York City. Spencer contracted the virus while treating Ebola patients in Guinea as a volunteer for the international organization Doctors Without Borders, or Medicins Sans Frontieres.

“Dr. Spencer is a hero,” Kim said, urging more doctors to follow his lead and fight the epidemic at its source. He added that both the patient and city officials executed a textbook response to Spencer’s symptoms.

Kim said he hoped that the cases in Dallas and New York would help open the eyes of the world to a disease gutting large swaths of West Africa and prompt the global community to spring into action more quickly in the future. “I think this is a wakeup call,” he said, pausing slightly. “I hope this is a wakeup call.”