The Washington Post National Weekly. March 8, 2020

SUNDAY, MARCH 8, 2020

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE National Weekly

How to un-break the primaries page 12 PAGE 8

Politics Biden’s big move 4

Nation Virus concerns 9

5 Myths Elections 23

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Politics

A broad coalition builds for Biden

Melina Mara/The Washington Post

A base of African Americans, suburbanites and anti-Trump voters helped boost him

BY T OLUSE O LORUNNIPA, C HELSEA J ANES AND G REGORY S . S CHNEIDER

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s Joe Biden racked up a string of unexpected victories in Super Tuesday primaries, he began to stitch together the kind of political coalition that had eluded his candidacy for months: a broad assembly of voters with the collective power to potentially defeat President Trump in November.

Biden’s strong showing among African Americans, suburbanites and moderate white voters — spanning geographical regions and drawing from a surge in turnout — boosted confidence among Democrats that the former vice president could soon win a Democratic race that voters have turned into a contest over which candidate is best positioned to beat Trump.

Biden, who won primaries in Texas, Virginia and eight other

states Tuesday, alluded to his burgeoning coalition during his victory speech Tuesday in Los Angeles.

“Our campaign reflects the diversity of this party and this nation, and that’s how it should be,” he told supporters. “Because we need to bring everybody along, everybody. We want a nominee who will beat Donald Trump, but also keep Nancy Pelosi the speaker of the House, and win back the United States Senate.”

Supporters of Joe Biden cheer as the former vice president speaks during a Super Tuesday party in Los Angeles on March 3.

He won primaries in 10 states that night.

His surprise overnight elevation to delegate leader pleased moderate Democrats and unnerved some Republicans who had expected Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to come out in front after 14 states voted on Super Tuesday.

The results also harked back to the 2018 midterm elections, in which Democrats won back the House and prevailed in several competitive gubernatorial races by capitalizing on disdain for Trump among moderate and sub-

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Politics urban voters, combined with high turnout among members of the Democratic base.

Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.), who flipped a Republican congressional seat in 2018, said Biden’s string of victories was reminiscent of his win in a district containing the suburbs of Charleston.

“A lot of folks who came out and supported us are the same ones who came out and supported him,” Cunningham said.

In a campaign where electability has been a major theme, Biden has taken to calling himself an “Obama-Biden” Democrat and pledging to rebuild the kind of diverse electorate that helped former president Barack Obama secure two terms.

But with Sanders capitalizing on energetic crowds and support from many young voters, Obama’s coalition has not fully rallied behind Biden, said Amy Walter, national editor of the Cook Political Report. While Biden has trailed Sanders among young people and Hispanic voters, he has quickly put together an emerging coalition that capitalizes on the strong anti-Trump sentiment among black voters and suburban women, she said.

“Every campaign should have its own coalition that is organic for the candidate and is the right coalition for the moment,” Walter said. “These suburban voters who in years past would split their votes more evenly between Democrats and Republicans are now coming out overwhelmingly against Trump.”

Virginia, where voters showed up in record numbers for Tuesday’s primary, is a case in point.

Roughly 1.3 million Virginia voters cast ballots, about 21 percent of the electorate, according to unofficial results. That’s up from the previous record of about 986,000 votes and 18 percent of the electorate in 2008, when Obama was challenging Hillary Clinton for the party’s nomination.

Biden was the beneficiary of the Virginia groundswell, easily beating Sanders and three other candidates.

“It’s just extraordinary. In the commonwealth of Virginia, folks are fired up. They want to beat Trump,” former governor Terry McAuliffe (D) said in an interview.

He pointed to massive jumps in

Julia Rendleman/The Washington Post

turnout in the once-purple D.C. suburbs, which he said reflected “the intensity of the anti-Trump feeling in Northern Virginia.”

Cities with large African American populations also registered strong gains, with black voters accounting for a quarter of all ballots cast.

Biden also prevailed in Minnesota, Massachusetts and across the South, building on a swiftmoving series of events in which two of his main moderate challengers dropped out and endorsed him before Tuesday.

The endorsements by former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, combined with Biden’s resounding win in South Carolina, had an impact.

Voters who decided late heavily backed Biden, according to exit poll results.

While Biden came away from Tuesday’s primaries with the most delegates, the contests revealed some of the challenges he faces as he tries to secure the nomination and pull together a fractured party.

He was trailing Sanders in the country’s most populous state, California, as votes were still being counted, and he continues to lag with Hispanics and younger voters. It’s also not clear how Biden would win over the liberal wing of the party, which has supported Sanders’s agenda advocating more sweeping changes.

But Biden’s victories also

Melina Mara/The Washington Post

brought into sharper relief Sanders’s failure to deliver on his pledge to drive a surge in turnout among young people and disaffected voters he contended would power his campaign to a revolution-style victory.

Sanders on Tuesday acknowledged he was disappointed in the turnout figures.

“I will be honest with you, we have not done as well in bringing young people into the political process,” he told reporters in Burlington, Vt. “It is not easy.”

According to exit polls, about 13 percent of voters in Super Tuesday states were 18-to-29-yearolds, compared with 3 in 10 who were 65 or older.

Republicans were quick to point out that Biden entered the race last year as a presumed leader, only to falter because of uneven performances on the campaign trail and lackluster fundraising.

“Just a few days ago, Democrats had left Joe Biden for dead because they realized he was a terrible candidate. Nothing has

Angela Williams, 33, casts her vote for former vice president Joe Biden while her children wait at Swansboro Elementary School in Richmond on March 3. Exit polling suggested that Biden won the votes of roughly 70 percent of black voters in Virginia.

KLMNO Weekly

changed,” said Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh. “He’s still a terrible candidate, and we still don’t know if he’ll be President Trump’s opponent.”

Trump and his campaign have sought to interfere with the Democrats’ primaries, openly pushing for a protracted fight between the party’s liberal and moderate wings that could last through the nominating convention in July.

A drawn-out Democratic battle over delegates and party rules would allow Trump to continue his attempts to build his coalition ahead of the general election.

Trump, who spoke to the Latino Coalition Legislative Summit on Wednesday, has been making a public appeal to minority voters to back his campaign.

Some younger Latino voters, who have backed Sanders overwhelmingly, distrust Biden because of the high number of deportations that took place during the Obama administration, said Stephen Nuño-Perez of Latino Decisions, a nonpartisan polling firm that focuses on Latino political and social attitudes and that has done work for Democratic organizations.

Exit polling suggested that Biden won the votes of roughly 70 percent of black voters in Virginia and Alabama and did nearly as well in North Carolina and Texas, getting roughly 60 percent of the vote. Biden also won in Tennessee, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Darren Peters, who worked on the presidential campaigns of Bill and Hillary Clinton, said Biden’s strong showing with black voters in Southern states could help him if he becomes the party’s nominee.

“It shows an ability to galvanize the kinds of constituencies that are going to be needed to win in a general election,” Peters said, highlighting the importance of the black vote in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

While some Democrats have wondered if Biden, a familiar face with a long track record, would lose in the same way as Hillary Clinton, Biden drew broader support in North Carolina and Virginia than Clinton did in 2016.

Clinton won 86 percent of Virginia precincts and 65 percent of North Carolina precincts in 2016.

Biden won 93 percent of precincts in both states. n

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Nation

Mayhem and miracles in Tennessee

BY F RANCES S TEAD S ELLERS, B RANDON G EE AND A NNIE G OWEN in Cookeville, Tenn.

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ric Johnson didn’t understand the red letters on his garage wall when he arrived back at the foundation where his house once stood, long after the tornado had gone and the screams were just faint echoes in his ears.

“DOAx2” spray-painted in bright red. Two people. Dead on arrival.

His own family had survived Tuesday’s devastating tornado crouched in a bathtub, with Johnson holding his wife and kids down until the tornado suctioned him off and flung him, praying to the Lord, 50 yards onto a mound of debris. He had wrapped a shirt around his bleeding head and found his wife, Faith, now perched on the broken tub, clasping their two toddlers tightly to her side. The 18-month-old still held his sippy cup in his mouth.

The bodies of two strangers had landed in their garage, Johnson later learned. A mother and a child from who knows where delivered to his door on the wind’s cruel whims.

Johnson and his family are survivors among the wreckage of many lives. He has nine staples in his head. Faith has three broken ribs. And they are reliving the howls of anguish, the struggle to free a dying neighbor pinned by rubble, and watching rescue workers comb through a swampy area across the street where other bodies may have found a dank and lonely resting place.

“It wasn’t my time,” Johnson said. “We are walking miracles, me and my wife.”

The tornado outbreak killed at least 24 people and injured dozens more, making it the deadliest in Tennessee since at least 2011. A state of emergency was declared as tens of thousands of residents grappled with the lack of electricity, disrupted gas and water lines and impassable roads.

In Putnam County, which was the hardest hit, at least 18 were

Matt McClain/The Washington Post

Residents grieve the dead and pick through debris after tornadoes wreak destruction across the state killed, officials said.

The destruction stretched for 50 miles across four counties, and Gov. Bill Lee (R), who surveyed the area via helicopter, said it will take days to assess the damage.

The area in Putnam where so many homes and lives were lost — a clutter of shredded buildings, upended cars and random objects displaced by wind — was cordoned off days after the storms hit. Mayor Randy Porter said the community had been inundated with food and some 2,400 volunteers, so many that they could take no more in the tightly restricted area.

Linda Leath was awoken from a dead sleep by a warning message on her phone Tuesday. She and her husband had tried to get to a safe space until a great gust forced them back.

The bedroom where they landed, shrouded in insulation, is the only room that now exists — three sherbet-green walls, a cedar chest and a bed, all for the world to see.

“I remember seeing the chan-

delier from the dining room fly right by my head,” Leath said. “If it had hit me, it would have killed me.”

Instead, clutching a President Trump hat she rescued from the rubble and thanking a small army of family and volunteers, Leath looks in disbelief at a neighborhood she no longer recognizes.

“There were houses down there, modern ones. All gone. And I don’t know if they ever found Phyllis,” she said referring to a neighbor who lived across the brow of the hill. “All those houses are gone.”

“It’s a miracle,” said Leath’s husband Billy, the patriarch of four generations who gathered to help save photos and a jigsaw puzzle made from pictures of the grandchildren.

Amid the damage and grief for the dying, there were many stories of miracles in Cookeville. A family of five with two puppies huddled in a downstairs bathroom while the upstairs flew across the road. A couple survived

Diana Kennedy salvages possessions from what is left of the home of Billy and Linda Leath in Cookeville, Tenn.

The Leaths survived Tuesday’s tornado in the bedroom, seen through the open door — the only room with walls still standing.

being flung from their house, which is now a just cinder block foundation and a pile of rubble.

The National Weather Service had sent alerts out just before the twisters took shape, but the storms moved quickly, making it difficult for many to get to safety.

“It hit so fast, a lot of folks didn’t have time to take shelter,” Porter had said Tuesday. “Many of these folks were sleeping.”

Donelson Christian Academy, a private school in suburban Nashville, was pulverized. Barb Oakley, who teaches prekindergarten there, was still reeling Wednesday. She wiped back tears as she surveyed the damage.

"We live by the weather,” reflected Oakley, who just hours before the storm read a book called “Lucky Girl” to the 4-yearolds in her class — a story about a family that survives a tornado only to find the baby is missing.

The whole town joins a frantic search until the baby is found, safely sleeping in her crib in a pasture.

“I hope that helped them,” Oakley said, who appeared dazed by the destruction she was seeing.

Under the collapsed roof, she could spot some of the supplies from her classroom. No sign of “Lucky Girl,” though.

“It’s stuff,” Oakley said. “We’re not looking at little feet under these boards.”

Some residents sifted through debris to find belongings that the high winds had stolen.

In the Donelson area, Jack Odum and a security guard stood at the entrance of three office buildings he owned, preparing to retrieve records and tools from a safe room.

While two of the buildings were mostly intact, the storm had ripped the roof off the third, snarling plasterboard with paperwork, buckets and branches, and yard upon yard of yellow insulation.

But the thing that puzzled Odum most was the heavy-duty dumpster that had flown maybe 1,000 feet from a neighbor’s property and landed in his.

“Never seen anything like it,” he said.

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Nation

KLMNO Weekly

Care gaps emerge as virus spreads

BY C HRISTOPHER R OWLAND AND P ETER W HORISKEY

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he growing coronavirus outbreak in the United States is revealing serious gaps in the health system’s ability to respond to a major epidemic, forcing hospitals and doctors to update and improvise emergency plans on a daily basis even as they remain uncertain how bad the crisis will get.

Nursing homes are emerging as especially vulnerable to the virus, with more than a million residents, many of them frail.

Many of the facilities have a history of struggling to contain even mundane infections.

But the gaps are spread out across the country and affect medical facilities of all types.

In Rhode Island, where two cases have been detected, doctors in protective garb were testing patients with mild symptoms in the hospital parking lot rather than allowing them to enter the emergency room. Officials said the emergency measure was being wound down Tuesday as the state’s testing capacity grows.

Officials in King County, Wash., this past week said they were purchasing a motel to house patients who needed to be placed in isolation.

In rural areas of Texas and elsewhere, small hospitals do not have test kits, and central labs for testing samples are hours away.

That means hospitals will be unable to conclusively determine whether they have people with covid-19 among their usual seasonal surge in influenza patients.

“There’s not anywhere near a sufficient number of kits to confirm or deny virus, or quarantine or control all these patients,’’ said John Henderson, who heads the association for Texas’s rural hospitals.

Ventilators and intensive care units, necessary to keep the most acutely ill patients alive, are largely limited to larger hospitals and academic medical centers in cities.

Front-line providers are dusting off old protocols for handling

David Ryder/Reuters

Nursing homes appear especially vulnerable as providers race to prepare for a potential crisis previous global health threats including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome, (MERS), H1N1 and Ebola. But the coronavirus is spreading rapidly and, with mild symptoms that mimic the flu, difficult to detect.

Nationwide, worries are growing about a lack of hospital beds to quarantine and treat infected patients. Major medical centers are typically full even without a flood of coronavirus patients.

“We just don’t have the capacity in the hospitals and health systems to deal with a massive influx of patients and keep them isolated,’’ said Gerard Anderson, a professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University.

Despite weeks of preparations, health planners continue to fret about shortages of masks and gowns for hospital staff, as well as lifesaving mechanical respirators for patients with severe cases of the disease.

“We need masks, we need ven-

tilators for our medical facilities, and we need it fast,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), whose state has experienced the largest fatal outbreak in the country, said on Tuesday.

The World Health Organization warned on Tuesday that panic buying and hoarding were creating a dangerous, global shortage of protective equipment. China, the origin of the virus outbreak, has stopped exports.

Federal funding for emergency preparedness in health care has been in a slow, steady decline for more than 15 years.

The amount of federal funding given to state and local officials to prepare for health emergencies has been cut in half or more over the past couple of decades, according to Crystal Watson, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

The two key federal programs amounted to $1.4 billion in 2003.

Those two programs amount to $662 million this year.

Medics move a patient to an ambulance on Tuesday at the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Wash., a nursing home that has been linked to at least nine of the 14 coronavirus deaths so far in the United States.

“Every administration has made cuts to these programs,” Watson said. “It’s been in a downward trend for a long time.”

At least nine of the 14 deaths so far in the United States have been linked to the Life Care Center nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., and that has focused attention on the nation’s more than 15,000 nursing homes and 20,000 residential care facilities.

At risk at both those kinds of facilities are more than 2 million Americans.

Some facilities are prepared for the outbreak, and some are not, according to Lisa Sweet, chief clinical officer of the National Association of Health Care Assistants, a group that represents nursing aides.

“It runs the gamut — there are some good providers who are really on the ball,” said Sweet, who keeps up with reports from members at nursing homes.

At the better facilities, she said, managers have taken special steps: checking the temperatures of employees as they report for work; reminding family members and vendors to steer clear if they are not feeling well; and running special training for infection control.

At others, members have reported to Sweet, there seems to be no urgency to prepare.

One of the particular challenges at nursing homes is that one worker, if infected, can become a “super-spreader,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied infectious-disease surveillance.

Moreover, many nurse’s aides at such facilities might be reluctant to stay home if they are not feeling well, because they lack sick leave.

A survey of hundreds of nursing homes published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2008 showed that slightly more than half lacked any plan to deal with a pandemic.

About half had stockpiled supplies such as gloves, alcohol rub, surgical masks and antiviral medications, the study found. n

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World

For Xi, a chance to tighten control A NNA F IFIELD in Beijing BY

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ncient Chinese doctrine has it that when heaven is unhappy with the emperor, it signals its displeasure by raining down disasters such as floods, plagues and swarms of locusts. The philosopher Mencius said a ruler could lose his “mandate of heaven” if he neglected his responsibility to care for the ordinary people.

These beliefs, still widespread, should concern China’s modernday emperor, Xi Jinping, as the country battles a coronavirus epidemic and braces for an invasion of locusts.

“He’s got an enemy that, for the first time, is absolutely uncontrollable, in a state that has always ruled by control,” said the Asia Society’s Orville Schell. “You can’t imprison a coronavirus or get it to undergo ‘thought reform.’ ” Yet the recent introduction of coronavirus-related surveillance measures, many of them unlikely to disappear when the epidemic is over, has also given Xi an opening to assert even tighter control over society.

Drones with cameras chase grandmas down rural roads if they are spotted not wearing a mask, calling out to them in a robotic voice. Apps enable users to pinpoint the nearest virus case to within 10 yards.

Since ascending to the top jobs in China’s political and military hierarchy in 2012, Xi has moved to make himself the strongest leader since Mao Zedong, the founder of this Communist state.

He unleashed an anti-corruption campaign to purge rivals and presided over an Orwellian expansion of the surveillance state.

Two years ago, he scrapped term limits, effectively enabling him to stay in power indefinitely, and this year, he has been styling himself as the “People’s Leader” — a term last applied to Mao. But with China’s death toll from the coronavirus nearing 3,000, Xi faces an unprecedented challenge to his leadership.

“When things get out of kilter,

Str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Coronavirus crisis exposes flaws in leadership, raises fears of more surveillance across China heaven expresses its disfavor,” said Schell, citing the Chinese philosopher Mencius. “Xi has been stripped of his air of invincibility and that is calling into question his ‘mandate of heaven.’ ” The party’s botched response to the virus has pierced Xi’s armor in multiple ways. His admission that he knew about the outbreak

by Jan. 7, two weeks before China activated its emergency response, directly implicated Xi in the initial coverup.

The outbreak has derailed his political and economic agenda by forcing the party to postpone its showcase annual meetings, where cadres rubber-stamp Xi’s plans for the year. Economists say the shutdown of swaths of the country will hammer growth.

More concerning for Xi will be the criticism that has burst into the open, notably with the death of whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang.

Dissent on Chinese social media is quickly erased by the party’s censors, but Chinese-language

discussion forums hosted overseas are full of comments about Xi being “gutless” for not going to Wuhan, displaying “tedious” leadership and being an “autocrat.”

Two prominent intellectuals who have criticized him have disappeared, apparently detained by security services.

The party has been battling to hide its missteps.

“With the failure of the central authority to provide even very basic public health information to the public, I think there’s now a lot more skepticism of the party,” said Victor Shih of the University of California at San Diego.

All of this has led to predictions — including from Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass — that the coronavirus could bring about a change in the way the party operates and may compel it to be more transparent and responsive to the population.

Some columnists have characterized the epidemic as China’s “Chernobyl moment,” a tipping

Coronavirus-infected patients wait at the top of the steps to be transferred from China’s Wuhan No. 5 Hospital to Leishenshan Hospital, a newly built facility for covid-19 patients, on Tuesday.

point that precipitates the end of Communist rule akin to the nuclear disaster that hastened the demise of the Soviet Union.

But the opposite is likely true, at least in the near term.

“The novel coronavirus has exposed flaws in Xi’s autocracy: the control on information, the absence of civil society and the lack of transparency have all had human costs,” said Natasha Kassam, a former Australian diplomat in China who is now at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney think tank.

“But rather than prompt a rethink in Beijing, Xi and China’s leaders are more likely to double down on the most repressive elements of the regime.”

With new cases dropping and the World Health Organization praising their response, China’s leaders are likely to feel vindicated, Kassam said.

In addition to effectively putting tens of millions of people under house arrest to contain the outbreak, China’s authorities have harnessed the tools of their techno-authoritarian surveillance state in the name of stopping the epidemic.

More than 200 cities across China have adopted “Alipay Health Code,” a QR code that runs through the payment app operated by tech giant Alibaba’s financial division. Alipay is now working, at the government’s behest, to take the service nationwide.

People are assigned a green, orange or red code, according to their risk of having the coronavirus, and must scan green codes before they can enter stores or restaurants, or take public transportation — an electronic passport for daily life.

The code syncs with payment and messaging apps but in Hangzhou, Alibaba’s hometown, the code can even be linked to a person’s social insurance and medical records, according to local reports. It will soon be required to enter office buildings, factory sites and technology parks.

The New York Times reported that the software’s code shares

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World data, including the user’s location, with the police.

Some officials and experts are talking of keeping these new systems in place after the epidemic, adding them to the arsenal of tech tools at Chinese authorities’ disposal. The government has already promoted a “social credit” system aimed at monitoring and evaluating people’s activities in society, similar to a financial credit score.

Hangzhou’s Communist Party secretary, Zhou Jiangyong, has praised the technology and said the city should look at ways to use such tools more widely.

“We must forge ahead along this path with resolve,” Zhou said Monday, while hailing the development of the QR health code.

Continuing to require healthcode scans will “increase the efficiency and lower costs for healthcare services” after the outbreak, said Zhou Tao, a professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

But human rights advocates outside China and ordinary people inside the country have voiced concerns. “I feel very uncomfortable about this kind of snooping,” one person wrote using a pseudonym on the Weibo microblogging site.

By deploying traditional measures of political control — including censorship, arresting dissidents and citizen journalists, nationalistic propaganda, and tighter surveillance — Xi has strengthened his hand, said Elizabeth Economy, director of Asian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a book about Xi. “But this is a short-term victory,” she said. “Over the long term, these actions have the effect of corroding the Communist Party’s legitimacy among the Chinese people. At some point after the virus subsides, Chinese citizens and the rest of the world will likely demand a full accounting of what transpired.”

Still, the coronavirus crisis is unlikely to produce a fundamental change in the way that Xi does business, or to precipitate a return to a more collective style of leadership.

“His approach to governance is rooted in an extraordinary degree of personal and party control,” Economy said, “and he has little interest in opening space for civil society to act independently.” n

KLMNO Weekly

The Congo rainforest is losing its carbon absorption BY

D ANIEL G ROSSMAN

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cientists have determined that trees in the Congo Basin of central Africa are losing their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, raising alarms about the health of the world’s second-largest contiguous rainforest and its ability to store greenhouse gases linked to climate change.

A study published in the journal Nature found that some sites in the Congo Basin showed signs of weakened carbon uptake as early as 2010, suggesting that the decline in Africa may have been underway for a decade.

Increasing heat and drought is believed to be stifling the growth of the trees in the African rainforest, a phenomenon previously noted in the Amazon. The new data provides the first large-scale evidence that tropical rainforests untouched by logging or other human activity around the world are losing their potency to fight climate change.

The study predicts that by 2030, the African jungle will absorb 14 percent less carbon dioxide than it did 10 to 15 years ago. By 2035, Amazonian trees won’t absorb any carbon dioxide at all, the researchers said.

By the middle of the century, the remaining uncut tropical forests in Africa, the Amazon and Asia will release more carbon dioxide than they take up — the carbon “sink” will have turned into a carbon source.

Tropical forests will “add to the problem of climate change, rather than mitigating against,” said Simon Lewis, an ecologist at the University of Leeds and the paper’s co-author.

The results imply that unless nations accelerate efforts to counter climate change, temperatures will rise even faster than anticipated. The Earth “is more sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than we thought,” said Lewis, who published a less comprehensive study of the African carbon sink in 2009.

Daniel Grossman

Wannes Hubau, an ecologist from the Africa Museum in Brussels, measures a tree at the Yangambi Research Station in Congo.

The findings contradict models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and governments around the world, which predicted that the Congo rainforest would continue to absorb carbon for many decades to come.

Scientists have warned for decades that increased temperature and reduced rainfall could hamper the tropical carbon sink, which is the absorption of carbon dioxide by tropical forests.

The researchers estimate that in the 1990s, 17 percent of the carbon dioxide pumped out of smokestacks and tailpipes when oil, coal and natural gas are burned was thought to be taken up by uncut tropical jungles rather than accumulating in the atmosphere, slowing climate change. That figure has dropped to only 6 percent, they say.

The Congo research required more than a decade of work, traveling to some of the world’s

most inaccessible jungles in dugout canoes, motorcycles and on foot, and measuring tens of thousands of trees by hand. “This has been a huge endeavor,” said Wannes Hubau, the paper’s author and a forest ecologist at the African Museum in Brussels.

The paper combines the work of researchers and field assistants who studied 135,625 trees at 244 African plots in 11 countries with data that, in some cases, goes back to the 1960s. It concludes that, on average, Africa trees absorbed the same amount of carbon dioxide for two decades through 2014. But a subset of trees began to lose their capacity to absorb carbon as early as 2010.

A typical acre of African jungle accumulates an extra 1,200 pounds of wood every year, equivalent to about half a cord of firewood. Like their Amazonian counterparts, the African forests appears to benefit from carbon dioxide fertilization — they grow more quickly as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere steadily increases.

But higher temperatures and increased drought, both detrimental to tree growth, are eroding the benefits of carbon fertilization, according to the study.

Lewis, Hubau and a long list of colleagues used the African records, combined with a comparable set already available from the Amazon, to tease out the factors that influence the health of the tropical carbon sink and to predict its future.

Researchers have already documented a reduction in carbon uptake in the Amazon rainforest. In a 2015 paper also published in Nature, scientists found that intact Amazon jungle absorbed 30 percent less carbon in the 2000s than in the 1990s.

The new study finds that Africa is lagging only 10 or 20 years behind the Amazon. Hubau says central African forests are cooler than the Amazon, which has delayed the impact of rising temperatures. n

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How to reform the

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any people in both major parties have soured on the presidential primary system. In 2016, the Democratic contest was riven by bitter arguments over whether the Democratic National Committee had put a thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton in her race against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s ascent revealed the inability of a major party to prevent a celebrity non-politician from hijacking the system and securing its nomination. (Republicans ultimately made their peace with that outcome.) This year’s Democratic primary race has hardly impressed observers as a model of candidate selection, either: It has featured a multibillionaire who skipped the

How we got the dysfunctional system we have now BY

Open the primaries so independents can also vote

E LAINE C . K AMARCK

BY

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he primary system as we know it is a fairly recent invention: For most of American history, party insiders decided who would run for president.

For the first few decades after the ratification of the Constitution — which does not mention political parties — presidential candidates were nominated by caucuses of each party in Congress. That system broke down in the 1820s, and in 1831 the Anti-Masonic Party held the first presidential nominating convention; the Democratic Republicans followed with their own convention that year. Between 1831 and 1972, parties selected their candidates using national conventions of delegates chosen by state leaders.

Although elected officials and party officials controlled the process, it wasn’t immune to public pressure. From time to time, new groups could and did take over the party leadership — Sen. Barry Goldwater’s co-opting of the Republican Party in the 1960s being a dramatic example.

But unless you were willing to invest the time to become a precinct chair or a county chair of your party, you had no say in who its standard-bearer would be. From the progressive era on, parties sometimes held primaries, but they were used largely to test the popular appeal of candidates, later chosen by elites.

The insider-driven system broke down after the tumultuous Democratic convention of 1968. Antiwar protesters were incensed that the Democrats selected Hubert Humphrey, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president, even though he hadn’t won a single primary. Throwing a bone to the protesters, the party formed a commission to study ways to improve the process. Chaired by Sen. George McGovern (S.D.) and Rep. Donald Fraser (Minn.), it recommended a fresh set of rules that were partly implemented for the 1972

T Illustrations by Tomi Um for The Washington Post

Democratic convention and fully in place by 1976. Republicans soon copied most of them.

Perhaps the most significant change was making primaries “binding.” Delegates are awarded to candidates on the basis of primary votes, and those delegates are expected to vote for that candidate at the convention.

Democrats tried to restore a modicum of party control in the early 1980s by creating “superdelegates” who were not bound by primary outcomes.

But they stepped back from that system after the 2016 clash between Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Hillary Clinton.

Today, the two national parties establish the rules of the road, but they do not control the outcomes — as the nomination of Donald Trump robustly demonstrated.

Once he started to win primaries, party leaders wanted to stop him but couldn’t.

America’s political parties have now relinquished their role in choosing presidential candidates to a degree unheard of in other major democracies. n Kamarck is the author of “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know About How America Nominates its Presidential Candidates.”

J AMES Z OGBY

he Democratic Party ought to open the nominating process to voters registered as independents, allowing them to sign up as Democrats on primary day. Sixteen states have created open primaries through laws or referendums, according to the nonprofit group Open Primaries, although the parties have the authority to do so unilaterally. Yet Democrats have done so in only six states, the group notes.

Reaching out to such voters — currently alienated by the two major parties — would increase the chances that the Democratic nominee can win in November. At the same time, the party needs to work to strengthen its bonds with its existing members.

The sad but simple truth is that “being a Democrat” (or a Republican, for that matter) no longer means very much to many Americans.

According to the most recent Gallup poll, only 27 percent of voters identify as Democrats, and 30 percent say they are Republicans. At the same time, 42 percent call themselves independents, including half of millennial voters (and more than one-third of black and Latino millennials). This share of American voters who don’t identify with any party has held constant for well over a decade.

When I was a youngster in Utica, N.Y., I delighted in knocking on doors with my mom or passing out literature on Election Day. Back then, people went to precinct meetings and knew the names of their precinct captain and ward leader. The party worked for them, and they worked for the party.

Today, for many, being a member of a political party merely means being on a list to get emails, mail or robocalls asking for money or a vote.

Imagine the reaction if Democratic staffers and

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primary system first four states, the early winnowing of all nonwhite candidates, shouty debates and — until this past week — a failure of the party’s moderate wing to settle on one person. ¶ From a historical perspective, the story of presidential primaries has largely been about the rise of voter power and the falling clout of party insiders; both parties still struggle with striking the right balance between those forces. Our opinion editors asked a range of politicians, scholars and operatives how they’d reform the presidential primary system. They proposed solutions from changing the calendar to changing the map — and even changing the Constitution to reduce the parties’ power to choose the presidential nominees. —Christopher Shea

Have a ‘contested convention’ every four years BY

H ANS N OEL

D volunteers went systematically door to door, asking voters not for a donation or a vote but about, say, any problems they might be having with government agencies, and if the party might offer assistance or advice?

During meetings of the Unity Reform Commission, formed after the bitter 2016 primary race, many Democratic stalwarts rejected that idea as costly and cumbersome — just as they rejected opening up the primaries to independent voters. Some of them told me open primaries would diminish the importance of registering as a Democrat, or might dilute the impact of important constituencies, such as black and Latino voters. Such issues are not to be taken lightly, but, as the survey data shows, many millennials from these key groups also feel distant from the party — and no one is helped if we lose elections.

The Democratic Party needs to give voters, including independents, a reason to become engaged in party-building. Since we need the votes of independents in the fall, shouldn’t we give them a voice in the spring? n Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute and a member of the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee. Bernie Sanders appointed him to the party’s primary reform commission.

emocrats may be headed for a “contested convention,” a scenario that many party members view with alarm: Several candidates could amass substantial numbers of delegates without anyone winning a majority — leaving the convention to choose the nominee through negotiations.

But a contested convention would be a good thing. And we should change the rules of primaries to make them more likely.

Contested conventions would produce more democratic outcomes than the system that’s become the norm, in which voters in a handful of states cast ballots (or caucus) in the first month of the campaign, winnowing the field. Candidates who win 20 or 30 percent of the vote in unrepresentative Iowa and New Hampshire get media attention and a fundraising boost, and then one typically emerges as the party’s only choice. This is not a reflection of the “will of the people” but of the peculiar dynamics at the very beginning of the race. It’s hard to call it democracy at all.

The nomination system is already set up to do something better. Representatives from across the country gather to select a candidate at the party convention, arriving in rough proportion to the preferences of voters. They should represent those voters — acting more like a legislature than they currently do.

Negotiation at a convention could bring a party with divergent views closer to consensus on the strongest nominee, and good-faith discussion could ease divisions rather than deepen them. Let’s say the leading candidate has 35 percent of the delegates, and two others each have just under 30 percent. The first candidate has a strong case for being the nominee but ought to do something to get support from the rest of the party, perhaps offering the vice

presidency to someone from another faction. If they won’t negotiate, that’s a sign that they should not be the standard-bearer. Maybe the supporters of the second and third choices would decide to unite behind one or the other — a democratic decision.

There are several ways to make contested conventions happen more often. Proportional allocation of delegates by state is a start. The Democrats do this everywhere, though Republicans cling to winnertake-all in some cases. But Democrats award delegates only to candidates who get at least 15 percent of the vote. That figure should be much lower — say, 5 percent — so delegate shares at the convention are more representative of voters’ preferences. And the parties should try to keep candidates who can get 5 percent in the race as long as possible; a much shorter primary calendar would help.

Popular skepticism is a major obstacle. Too many Americans view political parties as barriers to democracy, rather than central mechanisms for it.

But with a contested convention, Americans could watch the important decisions about candidates being made on television by representatives from all the states. Currently, they watch choices made by the citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire. Which one sounds more democratic? n Noel is an associate professor of government at Georgetown University.

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KLMNO Weekly

Cover Story

Hold more debates — and a greater variety

BY A LEX

Start with states not as white as Iowa, N.H.

C ONANT

BY A NDREA

Break up the two-party monopoly

B ENJAMIN

BY

B OB K ERREY

I

B

I

Conant, a founding partner at Firehouse Strategies, was the communications director for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Benjamin is an associate professor of African and African American studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Kerrey, a former Democratic senator and governor of Nebraska, ran for president in 1992.

t may be hard to believe — does it feel as if we haven’t had a chance to see the candidates square off against each other? — but the biggest change in presidential primaries over the past decade is the dramatic reduction in the number of debates.

In 2008, the Democratic candidates debated 26 times, while Republicans faced off 21 times. In 2012, Republicans debated 20 times. But in 2016, the candidates debated roughly half as often, and the Democrats are on a similar pace this cycle.

The reduction started after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss to Barack Obama. The Republican National Committee’s post-election autopsy called the number of debates “ridiculous” because “they’re taking candidates away from other important campaign activities” — namely, fundraising to pay for TV ads.

In an attempt to protect future front-runners, the RNC sanctioned a limited number of debates in 2016 — a move establishment Democrats supporting Hillary Clinton were happy to follow. The problem is that voters often make decisions based on what they see of the candidates in authentic, unscripted moments; that’s why campaigns value earned media so much more than paid media, and why the debates are do-or-die events.

Limiting debates deprives talented newcomers of opportunities to break through. In 2016, my then-boss, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), did very well in each of the early showdowns, but our campaign always lost momentum in the weeks between them. This time, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) did well in some debates but couldn’t build enough momentum to get to the top tier.

In addition to more debates, the parties should allow more formats. Right now, the only time candidates face off is when everybody is invited, resulting in crowded, raucous, multistage competitions for airtime. Under looser rules, independent groups and media outlets could host unique debates among a variety of candidates — Emily’s List, for example, which supports prochoice Democratic women, could host a debate for just the female candidates. n

y now, we all know the problem with the tradition of Iowa and New Hampshire kicking off the primary process: Neither state reflects the racial and ethnic diversity of either the Democratic Party (which is 43 percent nonwhite) or the country as a whole. According to the Census Bureau, the United States is 60 percent white, 13 percent black, 18 percent Latino and about 6 percent Asian American. Iowa, by contrast, is 85 percent white, 4 percent black, 6 percent Latino and 3 percent Asian American. New Hampshire, with its 90 percent white population, is even less representative.

From there, the contests have moved on to Nevada (49 percent white) and South Carolina (63 percent), but the tone of the competition is often set after the first couple of states.

Almost any other system would be better for giving a more diverse set of voters a say. My preference would be for each party to hold all of its primary elections and caucuses on one day, 60 days before each party’s convention. This would shift the spotlight away from the horserace side of politics and force citizens and the media to focus on candidates’ policy positions. But if the parties insist on having one or two states get things started, then they should randomly assign the order. Such quadrennial rotation would give diverse states like North Carolina (63 percent white) or Georgia (52 percent) a chance to shape the early stages of a primary race.

The current setup has fatal flaws. Polls out of Iowa help to define the early narratives about candidates, for instance, yet it’s mostly white people being queried. The messages candidates deliver early on may also play down issues of importance to members of minority groups, such as police-community relations, education and affordable housing. Candidates of color may feel pushed to run intentionally “deracialized” campaigns.

Scholars have raised questions about the accuracy of polling of Latino, black and Asian American voters nationally. But the minority populations are so small in Iowa and New Hampshire that the problems are amplified: It’s a major challenge to get accurate samplings of such voters. n

f the Iowa Democratic Party doesn’t understand that its incompetent caucuses increased the chance that President Trump will be reelected, its members are too delusional to be trusted with being the first in the nation to choose a presidential nominee.

After the debacle there in early February, I propose the following deal: Iowa gets to hold the first Democratic nominating contest only if the state party changes the format from caucuses to an election. The caucuses may be fun for Iowans, but they are undemocratic (not everyone has time to spend hours arguing with their neighbors over politics) and far too easy to corrupt (there is a good reason for a secret ballot). If local leaders insist on holding caucuses, the Democratic Party should move Iowa’s vote later in the year.

This would help at the margins, but it would do little to fix the biggest problem with the way Americans select our presidential nominees: The two major parties have way too much power over the rules.

Democrats have shifted to the left, and Republicans have moved (even further) rightward, leaving many nominal members of each party — not to mention independents — feeling out of place. So long as the parties maintain their current degree of power to select candidates, we will see qualified men and women conclude that they are insufficiently liberal or conservative to win a majority of either party’s delegates.

The solution is to amend the Constitution to create a commission with the power to create rules that are more likely to give Americans the opportunity to elect a competent, capable president. Such a commission would probably shorten the campaign season and recommend spending limits (possibly including a more robust public-financing option).

The language should be simple: “Congress shall create a 10-person Federal Commission with the power to write the rules governing the U.S. Presidential election.” I know amending the Constitution is difficult. Worthy causes always are. Unfortunately, it is the only way of correcting the defects in our current system. n

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Cover Story

Hold first primaries in key House districts

BY J OE

Strip superdelegates of their power

T RIPPI

BY S ELINA

‘S

Trippi has worked for several Democratic presidential campaigns.

Vickers was a delegate for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

uperdelegates” had some of their power stripped from them after the contentious 2016 Democratic primary contest. Now it’s time to finish the job: They ought to be neutered entirely.

The idea is that these special delegates — typically politicians and senior party officials — wouldn’t be bound by the decisions of state primary voters and caucusers: They could throw their weight behind whichever candidate they thought would perform best in the general election. The problem is that there can be a chasm between the judgments of party insiders and the grass roots about electability.

Superdelegates overwhelmingly went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, for example. Although she also defeated Bernie Sanders in the pledged-delegate count, the superdelegates were listed in news stories tracking the election along with pledged delegates; that produced the illusion that Clinton had amassed more delegates than she truly had. The false impression that a Clinton victory was inevitable may even have discouraged Sanders supporters from turning out in late-voting states.

After that, the rules were changed, and superdelegates will not be permitted to vote on the first presidential nominating ballot this year. That’s an improvement, but consider that the convention itself could change that rule.

A certain number of elected party leaders could retain the title of “automatic” delegates, but they should not have a “free” or “wild card” vote at any stage. Instead, they should pledge to a candidate before their state’s primary or caucuses. If their candidates don’t earn votes at the state level, they wouldn’t have a say.

Even in their weakened form, superdelegates are super-problematic. There is nothing preventing a corporation from lobbying them to use their votes to nominate a particular candidate, for instance. Sometimes, DNC members defend superdelegates by saying that they are responsive to public opinion. But what’s the point of having delegates with such power if they are permitted to flip their votes to make sure they are on the winning side? Much better to just ditch them. n

Weekly

Hold more of the primaries early

V ICKERS

T

echnology has upended primaries, robbing parties of power, just as it has upended almost everything else. There’s no going back to the days when “the party” could stop an insurgent candidate.

Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party in 2016 proved that the GOP is spent as a candidate-selecting force. An insurgent from outside the party, armed with a bellicose Twitter account, demolished the establishment — which then lined up behind him.

The Democratic Party’s power to choose its nominee is over, too. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest change has been the rise of small-donor money.

Once, if the party’s big-dinner donors all moved behind the establishment front-runner, the front-runner was guaranteed to become the nominee. That all changed with Howard Dean’s campaign, which I managed in 2004. With very primitive online fundraising tools, we broke the record for the most money raised by a Democrat to that point. The establishment rallied to stop Dean, and won. But four years later, Barack Obama rolled over the pro-Clinton establishment, raising close to half a billion dollars from small online donations.

Voters hold the power now. But the one area where a party can exert some control is its primary calendar. If the first primary had been in South Carolina, not Iowa, we might be talking about a Joe Biden-Kamala Harris race. Here’s the challenge: How do we offer an early contest that allows someone like Pete Buttigieg to come out of nowhere but is also diverse enough to be representative of the nation?

I propose that the first “primary” should not be held in a state or a regional group of states. Rather, clusters of three congressional districts in three different regions of the country would be the sites of the first contest.

Ideally, the clusters would be in areas Democrats need to win in a general election. These places would all hold primaries on the same day in February. Nine congressional districts would be small enough to give a dark-horse contender a chance to break out, yet the results might also help voters measure the strength of the candidates across three regions. n

KLMNO

BY C AITLIN

E . J EWITT

W

hen Iowa Democrats went to their caucus sites Feb. 3, 11 candidates were competing to be the party’s presidential nominee. Little more than a week later, the field was down to eight. As the 2020 nomination process unfolds, candidates will continue to drop out, meaning voters in states holding later contests will have fewer choices than earlier voters did.

That’s a strong argument for “front-loading” primaries: scheduling more of them sooner in the process.

With front-loaded calendars, more citizens get to weigh in when there are meaningful choices to be made.

The national parties dislike front-loading. They hold a romanticized view of the door-to-door politicking and momentum-building that can happen when you start with small states, and when primaries are spread out. With that in mind, the national parties allow four states to hold contests during the first month of the process. All the other states can schedule their contests between the first Tuesday in March and mid-June.

But this still leaves states with lots of flexibility: They should schedule their contests as early as the parties allow them to.

The most front-loaded primary in history came in 2008, when Super Tuesday distributed 52 percent of pledged Democratic delegates in 24 states — leading the media to dub the day Super Duper Tuesday (or Tsunami Tuesday). Hillary Clinton had expected to wrap up the nomination before the tsunami. But Barack Obama was able to hang on, and because he basically split the day’s delegates, he could continue in the race. In the end, voters in all 50 states got to choose between putting the first African American or the first woman at the top of the 2008 Democratic ticket.

Breaking up the Iowa-New Hampshire-NevadaSouth Carolina monopoly and having a flurry of primaries right off the bat would be ideal. But party rules protect those early states and punish others that jump the line, so the next-best solution would be voluntary front-loading by the other 46 states and the District. n Jewitt, a professor of political science at Virginia Tech, is the author of “The Primary Rules: Parties, Voters, and Presidential Nominations.”

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KLMNO Weekly

Environment

A winter too warm for comfort BY

S ARAH K APLAN

I

n New York’s Central Park, cherry trees put out their pale pink blooms in January — months ahead of schedule.

Temperatures in Sweden were so high ski resorts couldn’t make artificial snow for their slopes.

Snowplow operators in New Jersey had to go looking for landscaping work instead. And after one of the hottest, driest Februarys in state history, parched California is already ablaze.

Across much of the Northern Hemisphere this year, winter was a shadow of its former self — and climate change is partly to blame.

According to data released by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, Europe’s average temperature for December through February was 6.1 degrees Fahrenheit above the 40-year average, shattering the previous record by more than two degrees. In the United States, temperatures were above average for every state but Alaska.

The season was the secondwarmest on record for the globe as a whole — putting 2020 on track to be one of Earth’s top-10 hottest years.

This winter weirdness was in part driven by normal variations in global weather patterns, scientists say. But climate change, which tilts the planetary scales in favor of high-temperature extremes, exacerbated the variation and makes future warm winters more likely.

Karsten Haustein, a meteorologist at the University of Oxford, said climate change was the “only way to explain” these extraordinary highs. As long as humans continue to emit planet-warming gases, he added, winters as we once knew them will be fewer and farther between.

A Washington Post analysis of global temperature records has found that 10 percent of the planet has already warmed by more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) since the end of the 19th century. The majority of these new hot spots are at far northern latitudes, where winter tends to

ANTHONY BEHAR/SIPA/Associated Press

The toasty temperatures and extreme weather are linked to the polar vortex and climate change be the fastest-warming season.

The past three months, a weather pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation caused a powerful polar vortex in the upper atmosphere, keeping cold air bottled up over the North Pole. Ripples in the vortex that cause winter’s typical Arctic outbreaks never came or only briefly visited places known for their frigid cold seasons.

As a consequence, the jet stream that pushes weather systems across the hemisphere flowed fast and straight from west to east — a situation that traditionally produces mild weather.

It is not yet known whether this strong, persistent jet stream will become more commonplace as the world heats up, Haustein said.

But winters that tend to be warm will become even warmer and sometimes wetter — taking a toll from ski slopes to farms, from bustling cities to windswept tundra landscapes.

This year’s strong Arctic Oscillation contributed to persistently

warm, high-pressure air above the eastern United States. Winter storm tracks angled from the central United States toward Canada, missing much of the Appalachians and Mid-Atlantic, and the nor’easters that normally surge up the coastline were nowhere to be found.

“A third of the U.S. just wasn’t getting that deep, cold air,” said Karin Gleason, a climate scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Yet the same phenomena that stole winter from the East Coast contributed to extreme cold in Alaska, heavy snowfalls in the Rockies and far northern New England and record-dry conditions in California.

“This pattern we’ve been in . . . means the folks that are getting snow are getting lots of snow and the folks that are getting rain are getting lots of rain and the folks that aren’t getting anything aren’t getting anything,” Gleason said.

For the National Weather Service’s Eastern Region, which ex-

Pedestrians walk on the Brooklyn Bridge during springlike temperatures nearing 70 degrees on Jan. 12. In the National Weather Service’s Eastern Region, which includes New York, average temperatures in January were seven degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century norm.

tends from Maine to Georgia and along the Appalachians, average temperatures in January were seven degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century norm. The normally frozen Great Lakes spent much of the winter free of ice.

Several cities notched record-low snowfalls this winter.

Across the Atlantic, warm air and a powerful jet stream combined to brew successive deadly storms over the United Kingdom.

February was the wettest month in the country’s recorded history, according to the UK Met Office, and some regions received as much rain in a weekend as they normally would over 30 days.

Roiling brown rivers overtopped their banks, taking out bridges and deluging homes, even ripping off the tops of trees. At least six people were killed in the floodwaters, and roughly 2,700 properties suffered severe damage.

“It’s been a hideous winter,” tweeted John Curtin, executive director of flood and coastal risk management at the U.K. Environment Agency.

The balmy winter comes on the heels of a summer that was the hottest on record for the Northern Hemisphere. Fierce winds and ferocious heat fueled wildfires in Greece that killed more than 80 people. In Japan, deadly floods were followed by a killer heat wave. Germany in July notched its highest temperature ever recorded, 104.9 degrees Fahrenheit — and then broke that record the following day.

The land has “completely changed in one generation,” Dönnhoff said. “Every year we have to adapt to this new warm, hot weather we are having.”

In central Russia, days were so balmy they disrupted the hibernation of brown bears at the Bolsherechensky Zoo. Moscow officials had to cart in artificial snow for the city’s New Year’s festivities, and a suburban ski resort closed for part of December.

On the resort’s website, owners posted a forlorn plea: “Winter, do you remember that you are winter?” n

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KLMNO Weekly

Opinions

For victims of Nassar, offer is just latest insult Sally Jenkins is a Washington Post sports columnist.

America’s gymnasts should refuse to settle their sexual abuse case until they have so bankrupted the U.S. Olympic movement that there’s no option but to start over, with a completely new governing structure. That would be justice, and it also would be the safest thing for everyone’s kids. We need to get our athletes out from under this victimizing, money-siphoning, bungling, indifferent, predatory system.

U.S. Olympic authorities still haven’t cleaned out the evil internal rot — that’s evident from the utterly degrading settlement “offer” that USA Gymnastics and the United Olympic and ParaOlympic Committee have made to the victims of serial pedophile doctor Larry Nassar.

This nauseating document isn’t an offer so much as an accountability-evading ruse. Its chief feature is a clause that would force Simone Biles, Aly Raisman and 500 other young women to blanket-release a long list of abusers, molesters and enablers, as well as the entire USOPC, from all liability in exchange for a short stack of cash.

“It’s such a slap in the face, such complete disregard for the damage done,” said Rachael Denhollander, whose determination to go public brought down Nassar. “It’s nowhere near a step toward justice. It tells us: ‘Your assault was not that big a deal. Get over it.’ ” Without this list of releases, the offer document says, a financial settlement is impossible. The list is a host of creeps. Creeps such as Don Peters, banned for life from coaching over allegations he sexually abused teenage gymnasts. Creeps such as John Geddert, who allegedly gave one of his gymnasts a black eye. Bela

and Marta Karolyi, whose creepy sequestered camps became abuse havens.

Now, why would these releases be so nonnegotiable? It suggests there is more ugly conduct that Olympic officials don’t want to come to light, that’s what. It suggests a coverup is proceeding.

No wonder the gymnasts went crazy when they read the “offer.”

Biles slammed it on Twitter, and Raisman blasted it on “Today.”

Money is a measure of respect.

What this settlement “offer” says is that Olympic officials don’t respect the gymnasts’ injuries, recognize the seriousness of the damage or understand the reforms they want. Instead, in exchange for those nonnegotiable gag orders, they’ve offered a lowball figure of $215 million to be divided among more than 500 victims. The highest amount a young woman would get would be $1.2 million.

Want some context?

Sportscaster Erin Andrews won $55 million from Marriott for failing to protect her privacy.

Michigan State has agreed to pay $500 million to a far smaller pool of victims Nassar assaulted in his role as a university employee.

Raisman has said she felt forced by Olympic officials to submit to his “treatments” repeatedly for years. His youngest victim was just 10.

What’s the price for those invisible brands? What’s the

Matthias Schrader/Associated Press

Simone Biles publicly expressed her displeasure with USA Gymnastics’ settlement offer, which includes a blanket release of liability.

price for the years of flashbacks, rage, psychotherapy, self-blame, confusion and inability to trust?

How would you like to be Biles, who read the settlement document while sitting in an airport on her way to prepare for a competition and came across this sentence pressuring her to sign: “Courts are unlikely to hold the Debtor legally responsible for the unforeseeable criminal misconduct that gave rise to the Abuse Claims.”

Unforeseeable? USA officials knew Nassar improperly “treated” young girls on their beds. They never even bothered to check on the health and safety procedures at camps where Biles was isolated for days.

How would you like to be Raisman, leafing through your copy, when you come upon this sentence, insisting it’s in your best interest to sign for a pittance because, “Most fundamentally, all of the abuse claims are subject to dismissal on the basis that the Debtor did not have a legal duty to the Claimant.”

No legal duty?

The settlement offer will go nowhere but in the trash. The rightly enraged gymnasts will reject it. The presiding judge has said the USOPC needs to get out its wallet. But in the meantime, USOPC chief executive Sarah

Hirshland needs to be marched back to Capitol Hill, so she can explain why our Olympic officials have “no legal duty” to keep the United States’ athletes safe from being molested, abused and digitally raped by a team doctor.

This should be the last straw for Congress. When are legislators going to clean out this mess? When will they give our most inspired young athletes the organization they deserve? And when will they force answers from law enforcement?

The USOPC has protected itself from congressional action by suggesting that knocking down the organization and starting over would somehow harm preparations for the 2020 Tokyo and 2028 Los Angeles Games. Nonsense. Our athletes are primarily self-driven and self-funded — just try to stop them. They deserve a restructured, athlete-first organization, in which they come ahead of branding executives’ salaries, with the money flow uncorked and redirected from administrative bloat to athlete training and well-being.

Parents, ask yourselves: Should your prodigies really be entrusted to an organization that continues to argue it has “no legal duty” to protect girls from a gloveless Larry Nassar? n

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books

KLMNO Weekly

World’s end is just part of problem

In summary, George Washington

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

l

‘H

REVIEWED BY

J AKE C LINE

ow will the last generation know it is the last generation?” someone asks in Jenny Offill’s anxious and funny new novel, “Weather.” The question is one of many the book’s narrator, a college librarian named Lizzie, is paid to answer on behalf of a former professor who now hosts a popular podcast called “Hell and High Water.” The questions, submitted via email by the podcast’s more desperate and paranoid listeners, are often unanswerable: “What will disappear from stores first?” “What would it mean to geoengineer humans to be more efficient?” “Do angels need sleep?” Lizzie, who is herself skidding toward end-times neurosis, replies to them anyway, and even her wackiest responses are delivered with sincerity. (“It is unlikely, though we cannot be completely sure” is her answer to the angel question.)

If Offill had fashioned the entire book out of nothing but this correspondence, “Weather” would still be terrific. She didn’t, of course, and “Weather” instead follows the structure of Offill’s breakout 2014 novel, “Dept. of Speculation,” which involves a woman’s attempt to make sense of her unraveling marriage through philosophy, art and riddles. That book also told its story via short, bracing paragraphs. In “Weather,” Offill delivers paragraphs such as this one: “It is dusk when Henry and I leave the park. A car nearly runs us over. Now we’re right next to her at the light. My brother goes up to the window. ‘Lady you almost killed us,’ he tells her. But she won’t look at him. ‘You and your precious lives,’ she says.”

That paragraph is bookended by a riff on the word “enmeshed” and an uncomfortable encounter with the owner of a hardware store. “ ‘If you want Home Depot, go to Home Depot!’ he says.”

None of this hopscotching feels random. Offill is in total control

here, and all the asides, jokes and Q&As reflect the fraying state of Lizzie’s mind as her concerns over the climate crisis, the Trump administration, pernicious algorithms and other man-made threats intensify. Lizzie’s predicament, and the real question at the heart of this novel, is how she is supposed to prepare for the end of the world when day-to-day life itself is so maddening.

Lizzie’s frustrations are many, and they vary in size and scope, from the bullhorn-wielding woman who monitors the student drop-off at her son’s elementary school to her fear of dentists and her husband’s decision to go “glamping” for three weeks with his sister despite the “coming chaos.”

The biggest thing keeping Lizzie from becoming a full-on doomsday prepper is her dedication to her brother, Henry, a recovering drug addict, new father and catastrophist. Whereas most of Lizzie’s anxieties are rooted in real-world concerns, Henry’s fears are wild and irrational. Hen hides this side of himself from everyone but his sister, a burden that has the effect of tethering her to reality instead of yanking her from it. “Just give me time to stabilize Henry,” Lizzie implores her husband, even though they both know that time is limited.

“I keep wondering how we might channel all of this dread into action,” she thinks. Again and again, she comes up short, but for all her fretting about humanity’s current existential emergency, Lizzie never succumbs to hopelessness. Neither does Offill. “Weather” is too sharp a book to allow for pessimism or apathy. There is simply too much to be done, and there are too many people to care for and about, the novel argues, to not work through our deepest fears and fight our way past this ­crisis. n Cline is a writer and editor in Miami.

D Weather

By Jenny Offill Knopf. 224 pp. $23.95

You Never Forget Your First A Biography of George Washington

By Alexis Coe Viking. 261 pp. $27

l

REVIEWED BY

M ARJOLEINE K ARS

issatisfied with one-sided and larger-than-life portraits of George Washington, Alexis Coe set out to write a more balanced biography, becoming, by her own account, the first woman in 40 years (or an astounding 100 years if you restrict yourself to credentialed female historians) to tackle Washington’s life story. The result is a brisk and uncommonly brief biography of Washington that showcases both heroics and shortcomings, in the first president and in those who surrounded him, in public and in private.

Historians familiar with Washington’s life will find few surprises in “You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington,” but for the uninitiated, there is much to savor and enjoy. Washington comes across as a man amply possessed of charisma and gravitas, strict with himself and others (including his enslaved workers), a hard worker with an outsize sense of duty. He famously controlled his temper, especially in public, but when he lost it, especially at home with his slaves and servants, he turned into a tyrant.

There is much to admire. The man who could be held responsible for the start of the Seven Years’ War in North America became the architect of the Americans’ unlikely victory in the War of Independence. Washington’s skills as a diplomat, spymaster and public relations whiz, Coe suggests, were easily as important as his military talents in defeating the British.

After eight long years at war, Washington handed back power to the civil government and retired to Mount Vernon, his plantation in Northern Virginia. In 1789, Washington once more exchanged farming for public service by becoming the first occupant of the presidency, defining the office with his poise and solemnity and shaping enduring governmental practices. After serving two terms he resisted the many calls for a

third, setting a precedent that lasted until Franklin Roosevelt.

But Coe does not shy away from the warts. As she points out, Washington feared “unbridled partisanship” as the surest route to dysfunctional government, yet “his greatest failure was that he became increasingly partisan.”

His threat to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in 1794 with military might was a “extraordinary showing of executive overreach.” His treatment of Native Americans was downright brutal. And while he came to oppose slavery, he chose not to extract himself from it in his lifetime.

Worried about finances and keeping enslaved families together, Washington freed only one man outright in his will. The remaining 123 people he owned he would have emancipated only upon the death of Martha, who freed them within a year, lest they kill her.

If Coe is playful with her text, she also experiments with format.

The book contains numerous charts that run from the whimsical to the weighty. There are lists of Washington’s animals (ranging from bees to sheep) and his “frenemies” (Adams, Jefferson, Paine, Madison and Monroe), but also sage advice to his stepdaughter, the many diseases he survived, and his 16 military battles and their outcomes.

Compressing Washington’s life into just 200 pages of text necessitates leaving out context. For those who find their appetite whetted by this delicious bite and want to know more about Washington, recent books dish up larger helpings, such as “ ‘The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret’: George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon” by Mary V. Thompson and “The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation” by Colin G. Calloway. n Kars is a historian at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County.

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KLMNO Weekly

Five Myths

Elections BY

R ACHEL B ITECOFER

The way Americans pick their leaders, in high-stakes elections where candidates battle to distinguish themselves from one another, can feel nasty, fierce, aggressive and even desperate. In a democratic republic, that is exactly as it should be. But the process is also plagued by myths and errors about how the system really works. With Super Tuesday now behind us and the Democratic presidential race only heating up, here are some of the most persistent misconceptions about elections.

Myth No. 1 Politicians choose policies based on principles.

Politicians rarely take stands that work against their electoral interests. Most of the lawmakers whose votes most closely track the party line hail from districts that vote more heavily for one party than the other, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index (PVI), which measures a district’s partisan performance compared with the national average. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has taken lumps during the presidential primary contest for building a record friendly to gun owners in a predominantly white and moderate state where voters once strongly opposed anti-gun legislation. (Now white moderates in Vermont want action on guns, and Sanders is happy to deliver; he called his previous choices “bad” in the last debate.)

Myth No. 2 Gerrymandering isn’t driving polarization.

While gerrymandering may not be the root cause of polarization, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t contribute, perhaps significantly. The past two redistricting cycles radically shrank the number of competitive districts, from 164 in the late 1990s to just over 70 today, about 17 percent of the House. One consequence is the rise of the primary as the greatest threat to incumbents. Now that 83 percent of House members represent safe

districts, party primaries are dominated by ideologues and activists. The effort to fend them off drives officeholders to the political fringes. Republicans today, for instance, surely remember the object lesson of Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.), a stalwart conservative majority leader who was nevertheless dethroned by a challenger from the right in 2014.

Myth No. 3 College-educated, suburban GOP women flipped the House.

After the Republican defeat in the 2018 midterm elections, political analyst Bill Schneider told the Hill.TV that he noticed “a lot of affluent, white suburban voters, well-educated, particularly women, fleeing the Trump party.”

Yet party-loyalty voting in 2018 was typical, with 94 percent of all House votes cast by Republicans going to Republican candidates and 95 percent of Democrats voting for Democratic candidates, following the pattern of the past two decades.

The real change was who showed up to the polls — more women, young people (who increasingly live in suburbs), Latinos, Asian Americans and African Americans — not loyal voters who flipped. That meant electorates favorable for Republicans in 2014 became electorates favorable for Democrats in 2018. The real “swing” is the decision to vote at all, a choice driven largely by the backlash to Trump.

Brian Snyder/Reuters

Signs mark the way for early-voting locations last month at Medford City Hall in Massachusetts, which held its primary on Tuesday.

Myth No. 4 The American electorate is center-right.

Polls show there are many more ideological conservatives in the United States (31 percent, in a survey by the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University, where I am an assistant director) than there are ideological liberals (16 percent), while a solid chunk in the middle (51 percent) call themselves moderate.

But in the same surveys, voters express a clear preference for liberal policies, such as universal background checks for gun purchases, same-sex marriage and legalizing marijuana. — not to mention clear disdain for some key elements of President Trump’s agenda, such as building a border wall or 2017’s GOP tax-cut package.

The gap is due to a polling phenomenon known as “symbolic ideology,” in which people support general principles like “limited government” and “equality.”

Asked about specific policies, though, respondents manifest their “operational ideology,” in which they are consistently more progressive.

Myth No. 5 High turnout helps Democrats; low turnout helps Republicans.

A recent study of nonvoters commissioned by the Knight Foundation found that universal participation would benefit the GOP in many key swing states. In Virginia, 35 percent of nonvoters would vote for Trump and 31 percent would vote for a Democrat. In Arizona, where Democrats are trying to make headway, 34 percent would vote for Trump and only 25 percent would choose a Democrat.

That’s because the country is undergoing a long-term political realignment. Once dominated by rural voters, the Democratic Party is now the urban party; once urban, the Republican Party is now the rural party. America’s suburbs are ground zero, creating swing districts and swing states in places where the suburbs are competitive.

High turnout is benefiting Democrats in the suburbs, but high turnout in more rural and exurban areas boosts Republicans. n Bitecofer, an election forecaster, is an analyst and senior fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington.

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