This song has been stuck in my head ever since I stumbled on a review of Polk’s diary in our August 1895 issue, in which James Schouler looked back on the legacy of the 11th U.S. president:
Whatever may be thought of Mr. Polk’s official course in despoiling Mexico for the aggrandizement of his own country, one cannot read this Diary carefully without an increased respect for his simple and sturdy traits of character, his inflexible honesty in financial concerns, and the pertinacious zeal and strong sagacity which characterized his whole presidential career. ... Both [George] Bancroft and [James] Buchanan, of his official advisers, have left on record, since his death, incidental tributes to his greatness as an administrator and unifier of executive action; both admitting in effect his superior force of will and comprehension of the best practical methods for attaining his far-reaching ends.
Indeed, Polk—who was born on this day in 1795—“met his every goal,” as TMBG puts it. Schouler also noted that John Quincy Adams had left a similar diary:
No two Presidents could have been more at the antipodes than were Polk and John Quincy Adams in political affiliations and designs. Yet each, after his peculiar fashion, was honest, inflexible in purpose, and pursuant of the country’s good; and both have revealed views singularly alike—the one as a scholar, the other as a sage and sensible observer—of the selfish, ignoble, and antagonistic influences which surge about the citadel of national patronage, and beset each supreme occupant of the White House.
Striking words for partisan times. Read a PDF of Schouler’s complete review here, and read more from my colleague Adam on those antagonistic influences here.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
Have you read it cover to cover? If so, it’s time to test your memory. The quiz below contains 21 surprising facts, each one drawn from a different article in our latest issue. Each question includes the page number where you can find the answer, so if you’ve got a copy of the magazine handy, you can follow along on paper. Otherwise, go to the online table of contents, where the articles are listed in the same order as they appear in the quiz.
We have come full circle, friends. The election is drawing to a close, and, with it, Political Theater. So we’re going to end where we started: with Dave, the ultimate White House fairy tale.
The 1993 Ivan Reitman film, if you’ll allow me to borrow from that original note, goes like this:
Dave Kovic, owner of a temp agency in Georgetown, happens to look almost exactly like President Bill Mitchell—so much so that, in his spare time, he moonlights at parties and car-dealership openings as “the president.” But when the real Bill Mitchell has a stroke that leaves him in a coma, Dave, under the direction of two scheming West Wing advisers, steps in so that the Mitchell administration can continue despite its lack of Mitchell himself.
I know that doesn’t sound like much of a fairy tale, but here’s the real magic: Dave, the Regular Guy, ends up being a better president—more practical, more ethical, more compassionate, more fun—than the person the American public had actually elected to office. Dave is Cinderella, basically, only with a bulletproof limo instead of a bedazzled pumpkin.
The whole thing is cheesy and ridiculous. And it, like Head of State before it, celebrates the romance of the outsider in American political life—the very contemporary notion that there is something gross about “career politicians,” and that there is something to be celebrated, at the same time, about someone with no political experience being given political power.
Here’s the trailer:
We’ll be watching Dave today, Wednesday, 11/2, starting at 6:30 p.m. East Coast time. (The movie is streaming on Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, and other digital platforms for $2.99.) If you’re free to watch it at the same time, please join in! I’ll be tweeting some initial thoughts about it then, with the hashtag #AtlanticPoliticalTheater. As before, though, watch it whenever is good for you, and join the conversation whenever you’d like—via Twitter (I’m @megangarber) or via an email to hello@theatlantic.com.
Here’s a very rare experience that we haven’t seen in our reader series yet: embryo adoption. It’s a middle ground between having your own biological child and adopting one; you adopt an embryo created from a donor egg and sperm and bring the fetus to term in your own body, thus experiencing the biological aspect of motherhood when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. But let our reader tell it:
My husband is infertile and didn’t know it when he married his first wife (college sweetheart). Her sadness/bitterness was a leading cause of her leaving him after 13 years of marriage.
When we met several years later, he told me early on about his infertility “in case it’s a deal breaker.” I said it wasn’t, given our ages (36 and 45). Fast forward five years to today, married four years now, and we have a beautiful son born of “embryo adoption.” We met our son’s genetic parents through friends of friends and have an open adoption relationship (even though legally, it was just an embryo “donation”). They had leftover embryos from their own IVF and we adopted all three (and we’ll give our last one a chance at life next year). The four of us have become good friends and are like an extended family. We are ALL thrilled with this arrangement.
Success factors: (1) Embryo adoption/frozen embryo transfer is much less expensive than full IVF because the embryos already exist. (2) Neither my husband nor I are genetically related to our son, so it feels like “equal footing.” (3) We got to experience pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding like genetic parents. (4) It aligned with our ethical beliefs that embryos are humans; we didn’t create more to be discarded. (5) We are not overly enchanted with our own genes; we were happy to adopt others.
More stories of embryo adoption, and donation, are here.
The beginning of our reader’s note mentions how her husband’s first wife ended the marriage due to his sterility. We’ve previously heard from readers on how infertility has variously ruined marriages and strengthened them. Below are three more readers along those lines. The first one attests to how struggling to have a child forged an even stronger bond with her husband—partly because both of them have infertility issues:
I take strong issue with the urban legend that IVF can destroy a marriage. IVF is simply one of those major life events that will test the depth of a relationship and the maturity of the people involved in that relationship.
My husband and I feel that we were both very lucky but also very smart in our IVF process. When we started trying to conceive, because I was in my 30s and my husband in his 40s, my OB-GYN told me that if nothing was happening after four months of trying, get into a fertility clinic and have tests done. I also had an amazing herbalist/acupuncturist whom I worked with to regulate my cycles who gave the same advice. Furthermore, I had watched several friends struggle through IVF, and I knew that it was better to be proactive rather than waiting and trying and waiting and trying for years.
(By the way, it is infuriating when someone flippantly suggests, “Have you thought about adoption?” Adoption is not the panacea, and it is not a simple—or cheap—process, and IVF is usually cheaper. Adoption is simply a different means by which to have a child with its own particular challenges that may be different or similar to the challenges of going through IVF.)
After eight months of trying, we had fertility tests done. It turned out that we both had issues, which, honestly, was a relief in the sense that neither one of us could feel like it was our “fault.” We were even, and in it together.
Our issues mean that it is extremely unlikely that we will ever conceive naturally. I think that diagnosis was a blessing, because I know of other couples who don’t have a clear diagnosis and who go through IVF but secretly hope to conceive naturally. That is not a possibility for us, and it was a relief to be able to return to having sex as a form of relational intimacy and to let go of the pressure on sex to make a baby.
Because of our particular issues, we skipped over IUI and IVF and started straight away with ICSI [intracytoplasmic sperm injection]. I was grateful for this, because it would have been very hard (and expensive) to go through so many failed rounds. Our first round of ICSI worked, and we are expecting a baby girl in only a few more weeks.
Throughout the process, IVF brought my husband and I closer to each other. Going through IVF is a very intentional process. There’s no “magic” in it, like you see in the movies where getting pregnant seems to happen so effortlessly and is often used as a cheap plot device. Our process of having a child forced us to talk about things that some couples never talk about. We had hard conversations. These conversations can, yes, test a marriage, but our marriage was strong to start, and making these choices together only made our marriage stronger.
We also continuously reminded ourselves that we are a family with or without children. We told ourselves that if IVF didn’t work, then we would buy a scooter. Stupid, maybe, but it helped keep our perspective clear that our family and our life together is about more than having children, no matter how badly we want a child.
My husband administered all of the shots to me, and we went to every single appointment together. Actually, we didn’t do that once, and there was bad news, and we learned after that just how serious and vulnerable the process of fertility treatments is, and we made sure to do everything together from that point on.
Even if we hadn’t gotten pregnant through IVF treatments, the process was still very positive for us. It opened our eyes to a world of medical professionals who do incredible work everyday. It also gave us an appreciation for how unique each person’s experience with fertility is.
Finally, it forced us to get very clear about what our marriage means to us and what it means to have a family together. It made us acutely aware that if we want something in life, we have to go out and try to get it. There is nothing passive about IVF. Everyone’s experience is different, but for us, it was a very good experience, and I remember the closeness that we felt as we were preparing for the treatment as a time of deep love and togetherness.
This next reader’s marriage also survived infertility issues, but their infertility nevertheless had a powerful ripple effect on her extended family:
I was 25 when I married and we tried starting a family right away. I had normal periods but never could get pregnant. When I saw my gyne a year later, she found my FSH [follicle stimulating hormones] to be slightly elevated and sent us to a RE [reproductive endocrinologist] right away. That led to numerous IUI attempts and two IVF attempts, lab draws, and lots of tears and heartbreak. I remember getting up one night just sobbing so hard I could hardly walk at the thought of never being pregnant, giving birth, looking at a copy of me and my husband.
It is now 12 years later, we have since given up, but we are better emotionally now. Our marriage was in a rut for a long time, and needs of all kinds were not being met. We both stuck through it and have a stronger marriage now.
Along with my own heartbreak though, my sister also dealt with infertility and IVF treatments. Nothing worked for her either, and her husband expressed a desire to have “his own kids.” Sadly, their marriage did not survive. This is doubly hard on our family because my parents will never have biological grandchildren, so they are struggling with acceptance as well. My dad’s family ends with my sister and me.
Infertility affects more than just the infertile couple; it really affects a whole family. We are all still grieving over all the losses infertility caused and will one day, hopefully, move on.
Another reader also reconciled with being childless:
My wife and I pursued increasingly aggressive treatment for infertility necessitated primarily by what we eventually discovered to be my azoospermia [low sperm count]. We faced the feelings many couples experience of stress, personal failure, loss, jealousy, worry about the future, concern about the financial burden, questions about the consequences of donor sperm, and horror stories about adoption. It was a very difficult time in our lives, but we worked extremely hard to keep communicating our feelings with each other and to be supportive of those feelings, no matter how complex or mixed.
In the end, after receiving treatment for more than a year, we decided to remain childless, and we’re not sorry at all. What got us through dealing with infertility—communication, respect, and mutual support—has made our marriage stronger. We also feel that we tried as much treatment as we were comfortable with, and therefore that our choice not to have children is just that: our choice, made deliberately. Lastly, infertility treatment diagnosed a separate health issue I didn’t know I had, and treatment for that problem has improved my quality of life.
Two years later, our marriage is stronger than ever, and we’ve found a world of opportunities and experiences that fill whatever hole may have been left by the lack of children. I’m saddened by how many of your readers and others have had overwhelmingly negative experiences that destroyed those relationships. I know it’s a very hard situation, but not all experiences with infertility lead to the end of relationships.
Update from a reader who is understandably miffed:
I’ve been reading your series on infertility and am having a really hard time with these entries. Why? Because I am an adoptee. I was born in 1971 to a young woman who struggled with drug use, and after a month in foster care, I was adopted by a family who has given me everything in the world.
So when I hear language from your readers like “... her husband expressed a desire to have ‘his own kids’”; “This is doubly hard on our family because my parents will never have biological grandchildren, so they are struggling with acceptance”; and “my dad’s family ends with my sister and me”—well, perhaps you can’t imagine how hateful and hurtful that feels to someone who is adopted.
My grandparents were thrilled to have a new grandbaby, no matter how I got there. My parents definitely thought of me as their “own” kid, and their family line did not die out simply because they couldn't have biological children.
I would never say to a couple “just adopt,” because it’s a long and challenging process. But being a parent is about a lot more than just having a baby. It is utterly insulting to adoptees to imply that we are not a “real” part of our families. I heard this stuff a lot when I was a kid; I really didn’t think I’d still be hearing it into middle age.
For dozens of personal stories from readers on adoption, check out this Notes thread. For quick reference, here’s a chronological list of entries:
Head of State’s climactic scene finds the presidential campaign that the film has revolved around—D.C. alderman Mays Gilliam (Chris Rock) versus Vice President Brian Lewis (Nick Searcy)—distilled down to a single event: the live-televised presidential debate. It’s the ultimate show-down between those two enduring tropes in American politics: the outsider versus the career politician. And Lewis plays exactly according to type: He’s smooth. He’s calm. He speaks in soundbites. He says things like “this is what America’s all about,” and he ends his statements with “God bless America, and no place else.”
Gilliam, on the other hand … is surprising. He can’t play to type, because the political outsider, by definition, has no type: Outsiders are their own people. They have no patience for the traditional pageantries of politics. They simply tell the truth as they see it. And that is precisely what Gilliam does as he summarizes his position in the debate. “When it comes to paying farmers not to grow food, while people in this country starve every day,” he says—“yes, I’m an amateur.”
“When it comes to creating a drug policy that makes crack and heroin cheaper than asthma and AIDS medicine—yes, I’m an amateur.”
More applause.
“But there’s nothing wrong,” he continues, “with being an amateur. The people that started the Underground Railroad were amateurs. Martin Luther King was an amateur. Have you ever been to Amateur Night at the Apollo? Some of the best talent in the world was there!”
“But you wouldn’t know nothing about that,” Gilliam continues. “Why? Because when it comes to judging talent and potential, you, my friend, are an amateur!”
It’s a victorious performance—one that emphasizes the role that empathy, real empathy, must play in elections. “How can you help the poor if you’ve never been poor?” Gilliam asks. “How can you stop crime if you don’t know no criminals? How can you make drug policy if you never smoke the chronic?”
The crowd erupts, again, into cheers. And, with that, the fantasy of the political outsider is perfectly articulated (as Gilliam’s opponent sweats, profusely, into a handkerchief). If a presidential campaign is a job interview, then many of the hiring managers have decided that a lack of experience is preferable to a long career in public service. And that might have to do with a mistrust of bureaucracy, but it has even more to do with the political value of simple empathy. Career politicians, the idea goes, don’t understand what it means to suffer and want and need. They don’t, in every sense, get it.
Not so Mays Gilliam. “I’m a real American!” the presidential candidate says, in conclusion. “I’ve been high! I’ve been robbed! I’ve been broke! My credit is horrible! They won’t even take my cash!”
The crowd goes wild. And the career politician keeps on sweating.
A reader in New York writes about the way he is casting his vote. He also asks a question, for which my answer is below.
From the reader:
As a two-time Obama voter and Obama fan, I am not at all enthusiastic about HRC and plan to vote Gary Johnson to register my unease with her. Your views on Trump are well known, but I would like to know: what do you think of HRC, not as an alternative to Trump per se—who’s obviously so much worse—but as an affirmative choice for president?
Put another way, if you set aside the idea of influencing the outcome / blocking Trump and instead focus on voting as an act of affirmation, do you actively support HRC despite her flaws and why? Do you think we should feel good that she will be president? I have seen no evidence of her having “learned” from past ethical missteps or foreign policy misjudgments. My own views are below, and I see three main negatives in HRC.
Her poor judgment and paranoid streak (see: email fiasco) are not just unappealing, but undermine her effectiveness when they blow up in her face. This pattern will continue into her presidency.
The nexus of public service and personal enrichment known as Clinton Inc., regardless of whether it rises to the level of actual corruption. (That they’ve figured out how to land just shy of criminality almost makes the whole thing worse.)
Her foreign policy will be conventionally hawkish, with all the unnecessary / counterproductive use of resources that entails. Her presidency will be paralyzed domestically by unprecedentedly fierce opposition, so foreign policy will be the only arena where she can demonstrate “effectiveness.” This increases the risk of ill-conceived misadventures abroad for the sake of “doing something”—e.g. I expect the U.S. will be dragged into a morass in Syria that Obama has largely resisted. Her clearly telegraphed Syria policy will cost a lot of money; American servicemen will die; and it will worsen terrorist blowback from the Middle East. And this is to say nothing about new crises she’ll be faced with.
These negatives bother me very much—but they’re livable.
***
The negatives against Trump are overwhelming and intolerable, and stem only partly from his policies (which I do believe will be worse for America). Cracking down on immigration, banning Muslims or “extreme vetting” of foreign visitors, trade protectionism, massive unfunded tax cuts, haircutting the national debt—all of these will be worse for the country IMO….
But I’m even more swayed by Trump’s farcically, outrageously unfit temperament for the presidency. As prolifically chronicled in his Twitter feed, in the context of the U.S. presidency, Trump is a man of unprecedented pettiness, vulgarity, sensitivity to perceived slights, and emotional immaturity.
Yes, Clinton’s administration will be 50%+ preoccupied with fending off sundry investigations, inquiries, commissions, inquests, and controversies—some her own fault, others concocted by detractors. But President Trump will be 50%+ preoccupied with obsessively reading his own press, answering slights, and settling a continuous flow of spats, feuds, arguments, tizzies, vendettas, quarrels, and brouhahas—whether with b-list celebrities like Rosie O’Donnell and Alicia Machado, members of the press, bureaucrats and elected officials, or foreign leaders.
Why is that significant? Because it’s a near-certainty that he will re-purpose the powers of the presidency in general—most ominously including the U.S. military—as a vehicle for settling disputes, saving face, getting the last word, and asserting dominance. And he’ll be equally pliable by flatterers and favor-curriers, within his administration or without, domestic or foreign—including foreign despots much cleverer, more strategic than he is.
His decisions will be guided by emotion, vanity, and ego first, and a rigorous calculation of the national interest only a distant second. Not because he wants them to be, but becausehe can’t help it. By its very nature, this setup makes it literally impossible to predict what those decisions may be, except that they will bear only an incidental relation to what’s best for the country.
With Clinton, you know what you’re getting: a basically conventional policy offering—left of center domestically, relatively hawkish and interventionist abroad—combined with likely ethical and/or legal lapses; an unhealthy degree of secrecy / paranoia; probably some fresh embarrassments courtesy of Bill’s sex addiction (which I assume is alive and well); and maybe even health problems of some severity.
But the negatives are known and bounded. Either she has a decent, effective, scandal-free presidency; or she engages in various scandals, whether or not she gets away with it. But that’s the range of outcomes. Not all are desirable, but all are survivable. She may well blow up her presidency, sure—but what could she conceivably do that would be catastrophic not just to her legacy, but to the country? HRC’s range of outcomes is between “tolerable” and “pretty shitty,” with a non-zero if remote chance of “good.”
With Trump, we have no idea what we’re getting. The range of outcomes is unbounded and skewed to the negative. He could be great—one of the best. He could be Reagan Redux, as some have hoped. But he could also be catastrophic. Almost nothing is too far-fetched, too fantastical, to put in the realm of possibility. He could be the most negatively consequential president of the post-war era. Why not, given that he gets into 3 a.m. Twitter feuds with 1990s Venezuelan beauty queens while ostensibly running for president?
Forget about his hucksterism, his profound vulgarity and tackiness, his trail of credible sexual assault accusers, his policy ignorance and lack of curiosity… All bad things, but the dispositive issue for me is the signature Trump constellation of vindictiveness, vainglory, impulsiveness, and an ultra-fragile sense of pride. He could offer the best set of policies imaginable, and it wouldn’t matter. Those traits alone still make him a gamble that neither the status quo nor the many flaws of HRC are so bad as to justify.
So, if I’m casting the deciding vote, there is no contest: in this particularly loathsome election, HRC is the only sound choice. Thankfully, I’m not in that position and I do consider a third party vote a perfectly honorable thing to do in this cycle.
***
Like the reader, I vote in a jurisdiction whose Electoral College result is not in question—for him, New York; for me, D.C. Unlike him, I think it’s important to cast a vote for one of the two candidates with a chance of becoming president, which in my case means voting for Hillary Clinton.
I didn’t write TheAtlantic’s unusual (third time in 159 years) editorial endorsing Clinton, but I agree with its logic. Essentially: Hillary Clinton is a candidate of clear strengths and some very well-known weaknesses. Her foreign policy instincts and record are more hawkish than I would choose, which is the main reason I preferred Barack Obama in the Democratic primary eight years ago. In principle, it would be better if two families, Bush and Clinton, had not supplied four out of five successive presidents, which will be the case if she wins. But also in principle, it is long past time to have a female president, and if it doesn’t happen now it could be quite a while.
Most of all, as the reader points out, her weaknesses are known. Apart from a million such discussions from other people, I wrote about them recently here and here. There’s zero risk they’ll go undetected. There is a non-zero chance she might adjust and learn.
In contrast, her strengths have been taken for granted or under-appreciated. For evidence I’ll rest my case on these past three debates, since I’ve written so much about them. In terms of knowledge, she was never at a loss. In terms of poise and under-stress self-control, she had it while her adversary manifestly did not. (“Such a nasty woman.”) In terms of strategic planning, she had a plan and carried it out, as opposed to Brownian Motion on the other side. And all of this, “backwards and in high heels”-fashion, while dealing with judgments of her as a “shrill” or “harsh” woman that would not have been made of a man.
She was popular with her colleagues of both parties when she was in the Senate. She had a sky-high public popularity rating when she was Secretary of State:
As president she would do some things that I, personally, would be enthusiastic about, and others I would not like. But in all cases, from my perspective, she would be competent, intelligent, and serious about the job.
Since the real-world alternative is a someone who is ignorant, impetuous, and contemptuous of both the rules and traditions on which our democracy is based, with no hesitation I say: vote for her, and work out the problems later on. They’re the kind of problems our political system is supposed to cope with. The alternative is a problem for the system itself (as Conor Friedersdorf has argued here).
And to my taste, the third-party alternative of saying “Oh, there’s something wrong with them both, I’ll vote for this other person” is wrong on the merits (Gary Johnson has his obvious weaknesses) and also in its long-term implications. Hillary Clinton, with her strengths and flaws, is the alternative to Donald Trump six days from now. Voting for her is a recognition of that reality; it adds to her popular vote as well as Electoral College strength, both of which matter for her (sure to be challenged) legitimacy; and it gives the voter better karmic standing to hold her accountable afterwards.
My vote in D.C. doesn’t “matter,” but it matters to me.
A reader, Tom Schroeder, tries to lift us up as we approach the end of this death march of an election:
Aretha Franklin’s cover of “What A Fool Believes” is the best thing you will hear today—a bright light in dark times. The original version is a breezy number with Michael McDonald [of The Doobie Brothers] on vocals and a fun little synth line going on. You all know this song; it’s planted firmly in anodyne soft-rock canon (even serving as the central plot anchor in the first episode of Yacht Rock, a proto-web-series devoted to lovingly lampooning that era and genre). It won Grammys. Wikipedia calls it “one of the few non-disco No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 during the first eight months of 1979.”
Let’s fix that, said the Queen of Soul the following year. And oh, does she. There’s brass. There’s a slap-bass solo. There’s an ostentatious sax entrance near the end. There are, of course, delightful vocal vamps punctuating the whole thing.
Best of all? Aretha managed to record a decidedly non-yacht-rock cover of a yacht rock song—with backing musicians from Toto.
If you can write a review of your favorite cover song as well as he can, please drop us a note: hello@theatlantic.com.
(Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
Fallows is swamped at the moment, partly to finish a cover story for our upcoming issue, so he passed along a ton of reader email with permission to post. (Thanks to everyone who has written him, as well as the general hello@ account, and we’re trying to post as many of the best emails as we can before Election Day.)
To start us off, a few readers find that the FBI director was put in a very difficult position following his agency’s July announcement that it would not recommend charges to the Justice Department against Clinton for her “extremely careless” use of emails. Comey was then lambasted in public before the House Oversight Committee and increasingly invoked in Trump’s pernicious “rigged” rhetoric on the campaign trail. This Fox News clip is a taste of things as they got started in July:
A reader suggests that Trump won by getting into Comey’s head:
It seems to me that the unfortunate way that Comey handled this situation was definitely a very clear-cut case of “working the refs.” Trump and his campaign have pushed so hard on the idea that everything is rigged—including the FBI—that when these potentially new emails came up, Comey lost his backbone and decided to cover his ass and show The Republicans that he was not rigged. Sort of like a make-up call in a big game.
It is an indictment of our current state of affairs in regards to normalizing Trump that despite the widespread pushback on Trump’s “rigged” talk, it still was not discredited outright enough by EVERYONE. If we had a normal candidate who accepted the system, then Comey would not have been feeling the pressure to prove he was not “rigged,” and he would have followed the 60-day tradition that has been in place for decades even if it meant taking some heat about it down the line.
This next reader has outright sympathy for Comey—pity even, given his apparent weakness in the face of Trumpism:
Fallows makes a number of good points in his thoughtful piece on falling norms. My problem here is that one of the “norms” that has fallen is “equal justice” under the law in this country. The real tragedy here for Comey and the country is the fact that he gave Mrs. Clinton a pass when it is obvious that she violated several laws [or at least federal records rules, which—speaking of the erosion of norms—started to be chipped away by Clinton’s predecessor, Colin Powell]. The idea that she should not have been prosecuted is not credible and polls of the American people make that clear. Opinion writers like Fallows seem to ignore this fact, which is why there is the current situation.
I feel bad for Mr. Comey, but he should have done the right thing in the first place.
Update from a reader who rebuts a sentence above:
“The idea that [Clinton] should not have been prosecuted is not credible and polls of the American people make that clear.” This is, in fact, the problem itself. In a society governed by law, you have to accept the verdict of law. You can criticize it and rail against it, push for legal reforms, but you should not and cannot question its legitimacy itself (one more norm broken).
In this case, if Comey (a Republican) reviewed all evidence and decided that there was not enough to prosecute, our “feelings” and “polls of American people” (unfortunately) don’t matter. A similar parallel is Black Lives Matter, where unless a verdict that is acceptable to the activists is not reached, the jury is racist and the system is corrupt. A more thoughtful viewpoint is that in view of the facts presented, the jury could not / did not reach a “guilty” verdict.
For Comey’s part, according to officials close to him, he felt both a sense of obligation to Congress and “a concern that word of the new email discovery would leak to the media and raise questions of a coverup”—though not as much “raise questions” as throw fuel on the Trump dumpster fire already raging for weeks.
This next reader, a lawyer in L.A., while no apparent fan of Trump, points a finger at the Clintons and their deep establishmentarianism:
As far as Comey, the entire process was politicized, and I suspect a careful review of the government’s prosecution history for these offenses will show that Clinton was the only one who was not prosecuted for her security breach. A FOIA request could show that. One can be a Democrat, and all that, or simply despise Trump for being the unaccomplished heir that he is, but can one really argue that Billary do not enjoy unprecedented treatment from their capture of the Democratic Party, or that the capture did not lead to her nomination and the FBI’s decision not to prosecute?
Another lawyer, on the other hand, blasts Comey:
If there is no warrant to look at the emails, does that not mean that the FBI has not yet been able to articulate, even to the threshold of making a rational connection, that these new emails are connected to an offense? So the FBI is not yet in a position to make an argument to a judge, but the agency’s director is prepared to go straight to the public, 11 days before an election?
I am just a Canadian criminal prosecutor. We Canadians are not always the brightest bulbs, so I’m probably missing something. But I don’t quite understand why people don’t instantly see how outrageous this all is. I fear that you Americans are headed for a very dark place.
Buckle up, buckaroos. Here’s one more reader with some understanding of the difficult position the FBI director found himself in:
I’m far from an insider, but Comey from afar seemed to have a Boy Scout moment. My sense is he’s a complete man of the system, and as Jonathan Haidt showed, being responsible is a core value to conservatives. He felt a load of pressure, self imagined, and probably had a mini moral crisis. He’s probably, if not a hack, a life-long bureaucrat, who serves at others’ disposal and lacks a real sense of judgment or sense of psychology. It’s like the Book of Judges: In modern America, a random Republican in power will elect himself to steal the election—if not the Supreme Court, the head of the FBI.
I feel a sense of jaw-dropping dread, and Trump is going to play up the inevitability as charismatics do, and people are going to forget his idiocy and thuggishness. But logic—like that of Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium and the fact that there will be pushback for the monkeys in the middle to consider—leads me to believe that unless something really big comes up, Clinton will squeeze by. The likely worse outcome is that this will spur talk of impeachment and the illegitimacy of a Clinton regime.
This next reader raises an intriguing contrast between Comey and Gonzalo Curiel, the judge presiding over the Trump University case:
I find it interesting that Curiel chose to delay the trial until after the election so as not to influence it, and, I’m assuming, for there to be less potential influence on the integrity of the trial itself. I also find it interesting that it is the very same judge who Trump has lambasted in the media and accused of not being able to judge him fairly due to his race [and Curiel’s parents’ Mexican heritage]. Trump said Curiel should recuse himself or be removed from the case. I would have been delighted to see Trump on trial mid-election, but I felt wholeheartedly it was the correct decision, even though it very clearly benefits Trump.
Then, in stark contrast, we have Comey. His decision to release the statement saying there are new emails is bizarre and lacks logic. It seems to me there are two choices he has once he finds out about the emails, but both hinge on knowing what’s in the emails. The newest reports are saying the FBI had these for weeks prior to Comey’s bombshell. I just don’t understand how you don’t look at the emails or seek approval to look at the emails (via warrant) until 11 days before Election Day. His two choices should have been the following:
If he releases the statement, it is because there is new information that may or will result in prosecution. It’s pertinent information for voters to consider, so it should be released no matter the influence on the election, although precedent and policy seem to say this wouldn’t necessarily be enough justification to release the statement. But I at least could see why he felt an overwhelming need to make the statement.
If there’s no new information in the emails, then wait to release the statement until after the election. Wait to notify Congress because there’s no new info in the emails and any disclosure could sway the election unfairly.
Just as a side note, in an election that saw a number of firsts regarding mentions of sexual acts, parts, abuse, etc, this new email situation arose because of Wiener and his penis pictures. God help us.
Arose, ugh. Update from a reader, Kevin:
Let me posit two other possibilities behind Comey’s decision. First is that he is a supremely calculating bureaucrat, adept at self-preservation even if administratively incompetent. Given his failure to recommend action against candidate Clinton last July, Comey must know that his position as FBI director would be toast if Donald Trump, who had criticized him so bitterly, were to be elected. So Comey did Trump a solid based on no information. This explanation assumes that Comey is so naive as to believe that Trump holds any value to mutuality in any relationship—a position unsupported by the man’s history.
Comey must also have calculated that if Clinton were elected and fired him, it would certainly be considered grounds for impeachment by the atavistic GOP. Job insurance, Mafia-style.
The other explanation, which I favor most, is that Comey really is an adult Boy Scout and values his own reputation above all. But when does a fetish for reputation become ruinous? When it devolves into egoism and harms the long-term common good. Comey confused a tactical buttressing of his reputation for his position in history, which I cannot believe is going to be favorable.
You might ask your colleague Fallows about a great decision by an American president who sacrificed his reputation for the long-term good. In 1979, Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker as his Federal Reserve Board chair with an explicit mandate to tame inflation by any means necessary. Volcker’s extreme tight-money policies caused a sharp and prolonged recession and high unemployment—but it did bring inflation down (the collapse of OPEC unity did help as well). Carter’s replacement, the perennially overrated and intrinsically dishonest Ronald Reagan, trashed Carter, blaming him for the unemployment (but taking credit of course for the slashing of inflation).
Carter’s reputation—as a president, if not as a human being—has never really recovered. But it is undeniable that he set the course for several decades’ worth of a sustainable economy. Comey’s egoism and short-termism may just have set the course for a constitutional dark age in this country.
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Zooming out a bit from the Comey controversy, several more readers offer insight and supplemental reading on the broader themes of American politics that Fallows explored in “James Comey and the Destruction of Norms.” He called this email from a reader “well argued” when he passed it along to me:
The word “norms” is a squishy word; it sounds like an abbreviation of normal, mixed in with resonances of a first name shouted at someone who walks into the bar in Cheers. It lacks any immediate sense of purpose or consequence, almost as if it merely applied to manners or political correctness. It’s one thing for you to say that norms are important to democracy, but just saying that doesn’t communicate an understanding of why or how important they are.
Norms are structural. They create the framework within which we operate. They define up and down, and left and right. They establish what is good behavior and bad behavior. And they are absolutely necessary for democratic institutions to function. They are understood and honored because people recognize the dire consequences of violating them.
Deadlines are governed by the clock—unless someone cynically stops the clock to keep the deadline from passing. The Senate operates on majority rule—unless one party, routinely employing the filibuster, decides that it doesn’t. The Constitution requires advice and consent on appointments—unless one party, in a naked exercise of raw power, decides that it doesn’t. And if one party can make that decision, what’s the point of having a Constitution?
Norms are enforced by the community, not by law. In government they are enforced by the political parties and, ideally, the press. But the Republican party, as you pointed out, has been breaching norms for some time. A party responsible for the functioning of the Constitution has been undermining the very norms it is charged to uphold. And when half of the community fails to enforce norms, then, by definition, the norms are gone—unless the press clearly and loudly points out that the norms are not being enforced. And, except in some small pockets of the press world, that hasn’t happened.
And this is the most significant press failure. By false equivalence, and the moral relativism of “he said and the other guy said,” without reference to the non-normative behavior of one of the parties, the press has allowed norms to be washed away like a sand castle at high tide. Norms are made out of sand—they are illusory—because they’re only effective if the parties share in, and enforce, the illusion. And our institutions, indeed our democracy, cannot function without them.
Republicans have established new norms for a party out of presidential power. If the Democrats take up those norms should they lose the White House, we well never, ever, be able to function. And we will have Trumpism incarnate: He or she who can wield raw power, without consideration of norms, will prevail. And the American people will be the last consideration on the table.
This next reader looks to the intellectual forefather of American conservatism, Edmund Burke, whose lessons seem completely lost on Republicans these days—not to mention completely shredded by Donald Trump. His disdain for political norms and institutions during this election should give contemporary liberals more appreciation for Burke, a philosopher they might have ignored otherwise:
Your discussion of the importance of norms in government reminded me of a comment on the French revolutionaries (so similar in many ways to Donald Trump) by Edmund Burke, on whom I did my M.A. thesis. About their inclination to transgressive behavior, Burke wrote:
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
For most of us, most of the time, that “controlling power” involves our internalization of norms that support civil society—exactly the norms whose wholesale violation you have chronicled. What Burke is saying is that when those norms are discarded, society will have to fall back on enforced external controls, turning custom into law and regulation, if it is to survive. By discarding the norms we have voluntarily observed, we will bring ourselves under forceful compulsion. Our passions will have forged our fetters.
Another reader looks to a classic book by a classical liberal:
Over the past week I have been rereading de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. In it he emphasizes the importance of custom in regulating a democracy. Trash the norms and you begin the process of destroying our experiment in responsible self-rule. I don’t know if James Comey was acting as a partisan hack, covering his ass, or just being stupid, but he should be made to pay for the damage he has done. This election is simply awful and he has just made it that much more so.
Another reader looks to literature:
Whatever HRC has done, she’s still more trustworthy, intelligent, and competent than Trump, but for the past 20 or so years of teaching The Great Gatsby, I keep seeing the Clintons in Nick Carraway’s summation, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy, they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
And another introduces a new book:
I’m sure you are getting enough junk traffic on stuff like this. So, a link:
Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg’s latest book Toward Democracy lays out a distinctive vision of democracy—one that stresses not institutions or practices, but what he calls “an ethical ideal.” The essence of democracy isn’t one man, one vote. It isn’t majority rule. And it isn’t the principle of political representation. Rather, it lies in the combination of individual autonomy and an “ethic of reciprocity.” In other words, a willingness to think in other people’s shoes and act accordingly, a political version of the golden rule. If such ideals seem practically utopian in today’s climate, for Kloppenberg that is an indication of just how badly democracy has lost its way.
Another reader teaches us a new word:
An alternative explanation of the Trump campaign has kept urging itself forward to me. It requires a little background for some.
Ethnomethodology is a part of sociology that purports to be theory-free, or at least theory-neutral, concerned with identifying rules within a social group rather than figuring out what model the group fits. One of the research methods for ethnomethodologists is a breaching study, in which the researchers identify important norms in a group by participating in the group and systematically violating various observed norms. The responses of the group members to the breaches reveal the importance of the norms.
Is it possible that the entire Republican presidential campaign has been an ethnomethodology research project? How else do we explain the unprecedented series of breached norms (as you have noted in your Time Capsules)?
This reader digs up another time capsule of sorts:
In a letter to Joshua Speed dated August 24, 1855, Abraham Lincoln famously wrote:
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that “all men are created equal”. We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be take pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.
As president he would display charity in many ways, and sometimes give expression to it in religious themes. He would show magnanimity to rivals and critics, mercy to the accused, patience with insolent generals, eloquent sympathy to the bereaved, generosity to associates and subordinates, nonvindictiveness to enemies. He would explicitly disavow planting thorns, malicious dealing, holding grudges.
Two human beings more different than Lincoln and Trump can scarcely be imagined. Our current “progress in degeneracy” is indeed pretty rapid.
Lastly, a reader in Vermont tries to end on an optimistic note:
Thank you to Fallows for his reports from across the country showing how people are making things work. The professional dog-biter circus that goes for national politics needs to be documented, but it gets to be a bit much after a while. Whether or not it is true, at this point it is not that hard to believe that a major force in this campaign is that Trump was honey-trapped by the Russians. As it is, both Trump and the Russians would enjoy fouling the bed of American politics. They are both intent on profiting from a bitter, divided America.
Yesterday we heard from a reader with uterus didelphys, a genetic condition that forms two vaginas, two cervixes, and two uteri—each linked to an ovary through its own fallopian tube. It’s difficult to determine exactly how common the condition is, but it’s between one in every 2,000 to 3,000 women, including the following reader. Her uterus didelphys went undetected for many years—and nine months:
I have wanted to share my story since it happened to me, to let other women know it’s OK to have uterus didelphys and that you can successfully carry a baby to term even with the condition.
This spring I was 36 weeks pregnant when my doctor came in with some very scary news. My baby was slowing down on the growth curve and they didn’t know why. There were many possibilities, from genetic disorders to the more probable explanation that my placenta was not giving my baby the nutrients he/she needed. We ran tests and monitored the baby, and the whole while I knew something was different about my pregnancy.
I only ever felt the baby kick on my right side, and we could only ever find the heart beat on the right side.
I shared this with my friends and family, asking questions about their pregnancies and wanting to relate to their stories of the baby kicking their ribs one minute and their bladder the next, but I never shared it with my doctors. I think I thought that I was crazy and was just imagining it; certainly there was no way my baby was just on one side of my stomach.
The next four weeks were scary and we were worried. We didn’t know what was to come. My doctors wanted me to carry the baby as long as possible and were ok with me going into labor on my own. That didn’t happen, and I was brought in for an induction during my 40th week. For 48 hours we tried to get my body to go into labor on its own, but I never felt a contraction, even though I was supposedly going through them like clock work. I went in for a c-section on my second night in the hospital and had a healthy baby boy delivered not even an hour later.
During the C-section, my doctor discovered I had uterus didelphys. I have two sides to my uterus, which explained the baby only kicking on my right side, and I also have two cervices and two openings in my vagina. All of this came as a shock, but I was also so happy there was an explanation.
I was able to carry a healthy baby to term without even knowing that it was a high-risk pregnancy. My husband and I hadn’t been trying to have a baby, though we wanted kids eventually, and I am so glad it happened the way it did. If I knew what I know now, I, like the previous woman who wrote in, might not have wanted to try due to the risks.
The more I read about uterus didelphys and the struggles such women have had to get pregnant, the more I am so grateful for our little guy. He was born small (5lbs, 12oz) and had to be kept in the hospital nursery for about 24 hours, but I would do it over again any day to have him. I hope that other women who have this same condition hold on to some hope that they can have a healthy pregnancy and delivery.
The Boston Globehad a story over the weekend about the never-say-die small city of Eastport, Maine. As we’ve been chronicling online for the past few years, and in this magazine story in early 2014, Eastport balances the difficulties and the opportunities of its unusual location, at the northeastern extreme of Down East Maine across a strait from Campobello Island in Canada.
Difficulty: it is so far from anyplace else. It’s two-plus hours by car from Bangor, four-plus from Portland. Opportunity: its distant setting is so pristine and beautiful, and so close to both the tidal-power potential of the Bay of Fundy and the touristic and marine-economy potential of the sea.
Difficulty: it has so few people, roughly 1,300, who are poorer-and-older than average even for a state that is overall poor and that has the highest median age of all states. Opportunity: so many of these few people have been so inventive in exploring arts-related, advanced-tech, recreational, environmental, and other possible futures for their town.
The Globe follows up on a twist in the Eastport economy I reported in early September: the way the ramifications of the warfare in Syria had reached even this seemingly insulated locale, plus how the bad luck of a collapsing breakfront has complicated the city’s efforts. Worth reading, for the combination of hardship and hope, and also for the very good photos and graphic illustration of the pregnant-cow trade.
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As part of the Eastport story, it’s also worth checking out this piece by Deb in early September, about the surprisingly ambitious and large-scale arts scene in a little town. Among other characters you’ll meet Jenie Smith, the nephrologist who doubles as a coffee-bar owner (and whom we first saw as stage manager at the local playhouse, at a production of The Glass Menagerie). She provides a nice closing quote in the Globe piece. Also Richelle Gribelle, shown below, part of the artist-in-residence program in town.
Continued good luck and better fortune to the local patriots of Eastport, especially now as another winter comes on.
“Don’t read the comments.” “Comments are the worst.” “Comments sections are cesspools where empathy and democracy and humanity go to be stomped on and then cleaved in half and then burned at the stake, but with, like, a really, really small flame that takes its sweet time so that your consumption by fire happens slowly and with a maximal amount of agony.”
These are some of the things you might hear associated with the institution that is meant to embody the communal, conversational potential of the World Wide Web. Comments sections, far from becoming the public squares of internet-utopian vision, have all too often become, instead, public circles of hell. They are often mean; they are even more often angry; and I say that from personal experience: I am a woman, and I often write about gender, and those two things, combined, make a fantastic recipe for trollish internet commentary.
But I mention comments, today, not because of feminism, but because of chocolate. Specifically, because of a story we published late last week: “Milk Chocolate Is Better Than Dark, the End.” The story was itself a kind of long-form Internet Comment, in that it was argumentative and opinionated and entirely convinced of its own correctness in a way that would allow for no alternate viewpoints, and also in that it applied its own angry assumptions to a debate that matters not at all. (The story was also a joke; that part was not clear to everyone who read it, though. According to one gentleman who, choosing to overlook the irony, took the additional time to write in: “I can’t believe that I wasted 6 minute reading this trivia. Surely you actually have something to say.”)
Overall, though, the story ended up generating a lot of light-hearted—and, especially on Twitter, very, very funny—controversy. (It also, BONUS, generated some great recommendations for chocolate bars I should sample in order to disabuse myself of my culinary mistakes. I’ll try them with a mind as open as my mouth!) And though there will still, yes, plenty of Angry Comments in the mix—you’re wrong, this it stupid, how could The Atlantic doooooo this—I want to focus instead on the reactions that doubled as testaments to the fact that, even on the internet, people are capable of being good-humored and good-natured and delightful.
We got, for instance, quotes from public intellectuals:
Wow. You are just wrong here. Wrong wrong wrong. Dark chocolate is infinitely better and more flavorful than milk chocolate. It is complex in its bitterness. The taste of a dark chocolate chunk is worth savoring, melting over your tongue; the flavor deepening and twisting from not sweet to sweet like a chord progression meeting its resolution.
And some advice:
If you’re basing your opinion of dark chocolate on a Milky Way Midnight, you aren’t entitled to an opinion of dark chocolate. I’m not being a snob; I don’t buy fancy expensive dark chocolate; I eat Endangered Species, Giradelli, Lindt, etc. But what’s coating the outside of a Milky Way isn’t dark chocolate.
Also, I find that dark chocolate is better if you let it melt in your mouth rather than crunch it. It’s extremely smooth that way. I wasn’t a dark chocolate fan until I tried the Endangered Species mint variety. The mint was the gateway. Now I eat plain 90 percent cocoa and I love it. Still love good milk chocolate too.
And some full-on bravery (emphasis mine):
Milk chocolate is white “chocolate” with a hint of actual, you know, chocolate. It’s a fine confection for people who have suffered 4th degree burns on their tongues. For the rest of us, 70 percent is the absolute minimum. And yes, my chocolate preferences make me a better person than you. Also, macaroni and cheese is gross—all versions of it.
I disagree with your argument, but. That, right there, is the dream. So civil! So respectful! So spiked with humor!
So, in sum: Too many internet comments these days are dark chocolate: over-aggressive and bitter and angry. Many of the comments on this story, though, were the milk chocolate of internet-land: sweet and smooth and, above all, in good taste.
Presented with minimal elaboration, today’s installment of the “what is Director Comey thinking?” saga:
This story is still in the “unnamed sources say...” category, though it’s by an experienced and reputable reporter, Eamon Javers. Like everything else in these chaotic final days of this unendurable campaign, its full implications are impossible to know while the news is still unfolding.
But at face value the report underscores the depth of the bad judgment that James Comey displayed last week. It suggests that the director of the FBI knew, reflected upon, and was deterred by the possible election-distorting effects of releasing information early this month about Russian attempts to tamper with the upcoming election. Better to err on the side of not putting the FBI’s stamp on politically sensitive allegations—even though, as Javers’s source contends, Comey believed the allegations of Russian interference to be true:
According to the [unnamed former FBI] official, Comey agreed with the conclusion the intelligence community came to: “A foreign power was trying to undermine the election. He believed it to be true, but was against putting it out before the election.” Comey’s position, this official said, was “if it is said, it shouldn’t come from the FBI, which as you’ll recall it did not.”
That was at the beginning of October. But at the end of the month, three weeks closer to the election, he manifestly was not deterred by the implications of his announcement about the Abedin/Weiner emails. And this was even though, by all accounts, he did not know what they contained or even whether the emails were new. (As opposed to duplicates of what the FBI had already seen.)
The news of this is still in flux. I’m noting here just to mark its appearance more or less in real-time.
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We all have another week to get through. In theory, James Comey has seven more years in charge of the FBI.