The Washington Post National Weekly - January 10, 2016

Worst Week Ted Cruz 3

Politics Obama’s N. Korea problem 4

Cuisine America’s best food cities 16

5 Myths About habits 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2016

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

one year, two races Inside the Republicans’ bizarre, tumultuous 2015 — Before Trump and After Trump PAGE 10

SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2016

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2016 January-February

48 HOURS IN THE METHOW

Inside

Fit tipsm’s fitness challenge

nd onderlaigh Wintryriaw tly l scenes shine br Ae

Win your gy

In the January–February edition of Foothills Magazine, we celebrate winter with our cover article on 48 hours in the Methow. It’s not only a beautiful winter getaway, but there’s plenty to see and do in this nearby winter wonderland.

And if you’d like to see winter from a unique perspective, this edition includes a pictorial feature from Wenatchee World photo editor Don Seabrook shooting from a helicopter above the North Cascades last February.

Back on the ground, we have fitness tips for the new year from four individuals who each won their gym’s fitness challenge.

Whether you’re considering losing some weight or just becoming more fit, there’s great advice here to get in shape in the new year.

And in this edition, we shine the spotlight on Wenatchee High School principal Eric Anderson, plus feature a delicious salmon recipe from Damian Browne, former executive chef at Sleeping Lady Resort in Leavenworth.

Our fast five feature profiles five local cafes and diners, popular with tourists but truly enjoyed by locals this time of the year.

On the wine beat, we feature one of the newest wineries to open in our region. Siren Song opened their chateau-style winery in July of this year in Lake Chelan. Owners Kevin and Holly Brown have crafted an experience that includes wine, food, events, music and fun.

Pick up a copy of Foothills at locations throughout the valley--find the complete list of locations on our website at ncwfoothills.com.

Or if you’d prefer to receive Foothills in the mail, you can subscribe to all six editions published annually for just $14.99.

Subscribe online at wenatcheeworld.com/subscribe/foothills/ or call 509-663-5161 to begin your subscription.

oothills WENATCHEE

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SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Ted Cruz

by Chris Cillizza

E

verything was going exactly according to plan for Ted Cruz and his presidential campaign. Until, suddenly, the question of whether he could actually serve as president — an issue that’s percolated around Cruz for years but had remained on the back burner during the campaign — boiled over.

Cruz was born in Canada. Calgary, to be specific. His mother was and remains an American citizen. That makes Cruz a citizen. But does it also mean he fits the definition of a “natural born citizen,” as the Constitution requires America’s presidents to be?

That is the question that Donald Trump — of course — raised this past week, first in an interview with The Washington Post and then in roughly 2 million follow­up interviews.

“Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?” Trump said. “That’d be a big problem.” Later in the week Trump tweeted this advice to Cruz: “Go to court now & seek Declaratory Judgment.”

Thanks, Donald!

Cruz initially tried to laugh the whole thing off, tweeting a video of Fonzie from “Happy Days” jumping the shark — Internet­speak for when something has passed its sell­by date, culturally speaking. But then he put out a more serious statement insisting that “people will continue to make political noise about it, but as a legal matter, it’s

KLMNO WEEKLY

SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

quite straightforward.”

That didn’t stop Sen. John McCain, long at daggers drawn with the senator from Texas, from twisting the knife during a radio interview. “I am not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into,” he said of Cruz’s eligibility.

For Cruz, fighting back against insinuations that he might present a problem for Republicans if he is the nominee was not the way he wanted to spend a week this close to the Iowa caucuses.

Ted Cruz, for being birthered by the master, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 13

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY DINING BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

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ON THE COVER The story of how Republicans got to where they are today, told primarily through the impressions, recollections and analyses of the Republican candidates. Illustrations by RICHARD JOHNSON, The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2016

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POLITICS

Defiant Kim tests Obama’s approach While U.S. struck a nuclear deal with Iran, it pursued ‘strategic patience’ with North Korea

BY

D AVID N AKAMURA

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s President Obama focused intently on locking in a high-stakes nuclear deal with Iran, his administration pursued a decidedly less clear strategy on containing North Korea, a rogue state that already possesses an atomic weapon.

This past week, Pyongyang rattled the United States and its Asian allies by claiming to have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb, an act that, if confirmed, would represent a major step for that nation’s nuclear arsenal. Even if the bomb turns out to be less powerful than advertised, the test alone highlighted a conundrum for a president who has made nuclear disarmament a cornerstone of his foreign policy agenda.

The White House quickly condemned the test as a “provocative and flagrant” violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and promised to pursue punitive sanctions. But the unwillingness of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to respond to international pressure in a fashion similar to the government in Iran has left the Obama administration with few obvious options and opened the president to criticism Wednesday that he has been too cautious in his approach.

“North Korea is run by a lunatic who has been expanding his nuclear arsenal while President Obama has stood idly by,” Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), a Republican presidential candidate, said in a statement. “Our enemies around the world are taking advantage of Obama’s weakness.”

Aides said Obama spoke with the leaders of two U.S. allies, Japan and South Korea, and his national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, met with the Chinese ambassador in Washington.

But North Korea’s fourth nuclear test — its first since 2013 and the third during Obama’s presidency, and in a region where Obama has sought to intensify U.S. diplomatic and military attention — renewed concerns about the administration’s policy of “strategic patience” in dealing with Pyongyang.

KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY VIA REUTERS

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been unresponsive to pressure.

North Korea’s four underground nuclear tests Circle size is seismic energy released as a result of the test.

Kim Jong Il Oct. 2006

4.3

Kim Jong Un

May 2009

4.7

Magnitude of earthquake

Source: USGS

“The fact that we see provocative acts from North Korea is an indication we are not getting the results we’d like to see yet,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest acknowledged at his daily briefing.

Earnest dismissed GOP criticism as overheated campaign-trail rhetoric aimed at conservative primary voters and countered that Republicans have offered no reasonable alternatives for dealing with Pyongyang. The Obama administration has maintained economic sanctions on North Korea and sought to strengthen ties with regional allies, bolstering U.S. military exercises and resources.

“It’s true that we have not achieved our goal,” Earnest said.

“But we have succeeded in making North Korea more isolated than ever before and the international community more united than ever before.”

Republican leaders scoffed at

Feb. 2013

Jan. 2016

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that assessment and suggested that Pyongyang’s belligerence is part of a pattern of behavior from rogue states during the Obama presidency. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) cited Obama’s decision not to enforce a selfproclaimed “red line” after Syria used chemical weapons in 2013 and said the North Korean nuclear test “is exactly what happens when we appease and embolden rogue regimes.”

The difference between the level of U.S. engagement with Iran and with North Korea led some Asia analysts to conclude that the administration had downgraded the latter country as a national security priority.

As Obama has pursued an Asia strategy that includes a 12-nation Pacific Rim trade accord, the diplomatic opening of Burma and a climate pact with Beijing, he has failed to spend as much political capital on pressing China to force

North Korea to the negotiating table, said Victor Cha, who served as senior Asia director for the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration.

“China does not seem to have been trying very hard on North Korea,” said Cha, now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This is China’s responsibility, but the administration could have done more to make this a higher priority.”

Obama signaled early in his administration that he would elevate nuclear disarmament. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway in December 2009, Obama declaredthatpreventingthespread of nuclear weapons was an “urgent” priority and added that it is “incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system.”

Yet White House officials said Wednesday that the president and his advisers viewed the two nations differently upon taking office. Unlike Iran, North Korea achieved nuclear weapons capability during the George W. Bush administration, Obama aides said, meaning that its incentives were different.

Kim, who assumed power in 2011 after the death of his father, has proved unresponsive to resuming the nuclear talks between North Korea, the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia that began in 2003 but collapsed several years later with little progress.

Evan Medeiros, who served as senior Asia director in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2015, said the administration’s strategy was to “tighten the noose and to disrupt the old cycle of North Korea using a nuclear tantrum” to gain international attention to sue for sanctions relief.

In December 2014, the Obama administration pressed Beijing to help respond to alleged North Korean hacking after a highly publicized breach of Sony Pictures. A senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record said Wednesday that Beijing maintains leverage on Pyongyang “but they’re not prepared to use all of it.” n

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Bill Clinton’s scandals see a revival

BY K AREN T UMULTY AND F RANCES S TEAD S ELLERS

T

he ghosts of the 1990s have returned to confront Hillary Clinton, released from the vault by Donald Trump and revved up by a 21stcentury version of the scandal machine that almost destroyed her husband’s presidency.

This is a moment that her campaign has long expected. What remains to be seen is whether a reminder of allegations of sexual impropriety against Bill Clinton — which were deemed to have varying levels of credibility when they were first aired — can gain new traction in a different context.

The fresher case being made is that Hillary Clinton has been, at a minimum, hypocritical about her husband’s treatment of women, and possibly even complicit in discrediting his accusers.

And it is being pressed at a time when there is a new sensitivity toward victims of unwanted sexual contact, and when one of the biggest news stories is the prosecution of once-beloved comedian Bill Cosby on charges that he drugged and assaulted a woman 12 years ago — one of dozens who have accused him of similar behavior.

In November, Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” She has made women’s issues a central focus of her campaign and is counting on a swell of support for the historic prospect of the first female president.

Clinton’s campaign appears confident that Americans will see all of this as old news, and that her husbandwillremainanassettoher efforts to get his old job. It is happening early in the campaign season, and Trump himself has come under heavy criticism for his many boorish comments about women.

Trump started hammering on Bill Clinton’s behavior in retaliation for Hillary Clinton’s assertion, during a pre-Christmas interview with the Des Moines Register, that Trump has demonstrated a “penchant for sexism.”

“Hillary Clinton has announced

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Hillary is caught up in old sex accusations against her husband, but the climate is different this time that she is letting her husband out to campaign but HE’S DEMONSTRATED A PENCHANT FOR SEXISM, so inappropriate!”

Trump tweeted on Dec. 26.

In an interview Monday on CNN, Trump amped up his rhetoric, calling Bill Clinton “one of the great women abusers of all time” and saying Hillary Clinton was his “enabler.”

Both Clintons have declined to comment on Trump’s latest barrages against them.

Until Trump turned his outsized media spotlight to Bill Clinton’s past sexual behavior, the issue had largely receded to the darker corners of the Internet, although it had continued to percolate.

Last month, a woman in the audience at a Clinton campaign event in New Hampshire asked her: “You say that all rape victims should be believed. But would you say that about Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and/or Paula Jones?”

It was not a spontaneous ques-

tion. The woman read from a card and mispronounced the first two names she mentioned.

But to anyone who followed the sagas of the Clinton presidency, they were familiar ones: l Broaddrick had accused Bill Clinton of raping her in 1978, when she was working on his Arkansas gubernatorial campaign. l Willey, a former White House volunteer, said he had attempted to kiss and grope her in a private hallway leading to the Oval Office. l Jones, a onetime Arkansas state employee, sued Clinton in 1994 for sexual harassment, saying he had three years earlier exposed his erect penis to her and asked her to kiss it.

And, of course, the biggest of all was the scandal over Clinton’s extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky, who was a White House intern at the time. Diane Blair, a close friend of Hillary Clinton, wrote in her journal unearthed in 2014 that the then-first lady had privately called Lewinsky a “nar-

Hillary Clinton campaigns in Las Vegas. Her focus on women’s issues could leave her open to criticism over sexual affairs — and allegations of sexual abuse — involving former president Bill Clinton.

cissistic loony toon.”

Bill Clinton settled Jones’s lawsuit in November 1998 for $850,000, acknowledging no wrongdoing and offering no apology. Just under a month later, he was impeached by the House on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice that stemmed from Jones’s lawsuit; he was acquitted by the Senate. He also denied Willey’s and Broaddrick’s allegations.

But all of these past accusations are being stirred up again, including by some who claim they were his victims.

Broaddrick, now a Trump supporter, tweeted Wednesday: “I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73. . . . it never goes away.”

In an interview, she said she had watched Bill Clinton’s first solo campaign appearance on his wife’s behalf on television Monday.

“He looked so beaten, and he looked like everything in his past was catching up to him. . . . It made my heart sing,” Broaddrick said.

And she is not the only one.

Last month, Aaron Klein, a writer for such right-of-center publications as World Net Daily and host of a weekly radio talk show, wrote an article on Breitbart.com in which he described how his radio program had become “a support center of sorts” for Bill Clinton’s female accusers — “a safe-space for these women to sound off about the way they were allegedly treated by both Bill and Hillary.”

In the article, Klein quotes Broaddrick, Willey and Gennifer Flowers, an actress who had an affair with Clinton when he was governor.

In what Klein described as Flowers’s only interview since Clinton announced her candidacy, Flowers accused Hillary of being “an enabler that has encouraged [Bill] to go out and do whatever he does with women.”

“I think it’s a joke,” Klein quotes Flowers as saying, “that she would run on women’s issues.” n

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NATION

Stomach-churning lessons in safety BY

B RADY D ENNIS

U.

S. consumers could be forgiven for wondering about the state of the nation’s food safety

system.

Ice cream giant Blue Bell Creameries issued a nationwide recall last year after its products were linked to a listeria outbreak that hospitalized nearly a dozen people and contributed to three deaths. A salmonella outbreak involving cucumbers imported from Mexico sickened more than 800 people and killed four. In the fall, tainted chicken salad from Costco sickened 19 people across seven states.

And Chipotle has taken a beating for a series of E. coli outbreaks from Massachusetts to California that have left scores of people ill. On Tuesday, the company announced that comparable restaurant sales fell by 30 percent in December.

The stomach-churning headlines around those events and other multi-state outbreaks during 2015, involving everything from cheese to pork, can be hard to square with some public health officials’ optimism that the nation’s food supply is getting safer. Are we really getting better at preventing food-borne illnesses, which according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sicken about 48 million Americans each year and kill roughly 3,000? Are there signs of improvement?

The answers are a definitive . . . maybe.

According to the latest CDC analysis, there were 120 multistate outbreaks involving foodborne illnesses between 2010 and 2014 — an average of one about every two weeks. The outbreaks affected every state, leading to at least 66 deaths and 1,460 hospitalizations. The culprits included a range of foods, including dairy products, fruits and vegetables.

But the prevalence of outbreaks doesn’t necessarily mean that more people are getting sick, said Sandra Eskin of the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“One of the reasons we seem to be seeing more outbreaks is we have the technology that allows us

MARK STERKEL/ODESSA AMERICAN VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Better training of inspectors, planned FDA regulations may help improve U.S. food supply to be able to detect them” better than in the past, Eskin said, referring to technologies such as whole genome sequencing that can help link pathogens to their source.

“And every time there’s an outbreak, it’s an opportunity to look and say, ‘What can we do better?’”

The best hope for meaningful improvements might lie in a fiveyear-old food safety law, which the Food and Drug Administration only recently began translating into actual regulations. The agency in 2015 started putting in place major pieces of the law, which is aimed at making the nation’s food safety system more proactive, rather than merely reacting to outbreaks after they occur. The measures include ensuring that U.S. food manufacturers have detailed plans to prevent possible contamination risks in their production facilities, establishing new stan-

dards for growing and packing produce and requiring U.S. importers to verify the safety of their foreign suppliers.

Perhaps most significant, the massive federal spending bill that Congress passed last month included more than $100 million for the FDA to train inspectors, educate small farmers and food manufacturers about the new rules and team with state officials who will help enforce them. That funding had been far from a certainty earlier in the year.

“It’s a significant step forward, and it allows us to maintain momentum,” said Michael Taylor, the agency’s top food safety official. “[The new law] really can’t be successful if it’s implemented piecemeal. . . . If we wouldn’t have gotten that budget request, the whole system could have just sort of fallen off the rails. It’s a holistic sys-

At top, Robert Maldonado restocks Blue Bell Ice Cream in Texas after a recall. Above, former peanut executive Stewart Parnell, who received the stiffest penalty ever imposed on a U.S. producer in a food-borne illness case.

tem of prevention.”

The impact that the FDA’s effort will make over the coming year is difficult to predict. Many of the new regulations don’t kick in until 2017 or beyond, depending in part on the size of a particular farm or food company. But the earliest compliance dates arrive toward the end of 2016, and experts expect that many companies will start complying well ahead of the government’s deadlines, if they aren’t already. That makes Taylor confident in the long-term prospects of a safer system.

“The reason we’re doing this is to reduce the number of outbreaks and the number of illnesses,” he said. “Fewer people will get sick.

That’s the whole purpose of this. . . . It will make a difference, but it will be over time.”

Seattle food safety attorney Bill Marler agrees that the new rules eventually should lead to a safer food supply. But more is needed to prevent the kind of “old-fashioned outbreak linked to restaurants” that sicken many Americans annually, he warns. “Those things can be just as devastating as a supply-chain problem,” he said, pointing to examples from across the country of restaurant outbreaks that caused hundreds of illnesses during 2015.

Last year also saw former peanut executive Stewart Parnell sentenced to nearly 30 years in prison for his role in a nationwide salmonella outbreak in 2008 and 2009 that killed nine people. Though federal officials had recommended Parnell receive a life sentence, his sentence marked the harshest punishment in history for a foodrelated crime.

Marler said that the stiff sentence for Parnell, who had been found guilty of more than 70 criminal charges, including knowingly shipping tainted food across state lines, conspiracy and wire fraud, could serve as a deterrent to anyone who is tempted to cut corners on food safety in the years ahead.

“I don’t think you can discount that [case] for sending a pretty strong message to the food industry,” he said. “The message is: This can happen to you.” n

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1871 whaling wrecks found off Alaska BY

M ICHAEL E . R UANE

W

hen the ice opened for the last time, the local inhabitants urged the ships’ captains to get out before it returned and trapped the whalers against the northwest coast of Alaska for the deadly Arctic winter.

It was September, late in the season, but the wind had always kept an escape channel open that time of year. Plus, the whaling was finally going well. The Yankee skippers decided to wait.

It was a poor decision, which could have claimed hundreds of lives.

On Wednesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that it had discovered the wrecks of two of the 32 ships that were crushed by the ice that late summer of 1871 in one of the 19th century’s worst whaling disasters.

More than 1,200 mariners and their families barely escaped in small whale boats through narrow and rapidly closing channels in the ice to reach rescue ships 80 miles away, according to NOAA and old newspaper reports.

But the trapped whalers, many of which were owned by merchants of New Bedford, Mass., were destroyed, ruining the owners financially and damaging the 19th-century whaling industry, NOAA said.

The loss of the ships equaled about $33 million in today’s dollars, Brad Barr, the project’s codirector, said Wednesday.

The vessels, with names such as Concordia, Eugenia and Minerva, were left behind in the ice with their American flags flying upside down, a sign of distress, according to an old account in the New York Times.

NOAA said the discoveries, near Wainwright, Alaska, were made possible, in part, because climate change had melted ice in the area and made wreck sites more accessible to archaeologists.

Barr said that scientists had gone to the remote shores of the stormy Chukchi Sea, above the Arctic Circle, in August aboard a

ROBERT SCHWEMMER MARITIME LIBRARY VIA NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION

Discovery of two ships said to be aided by climate change melting chartered research vessel.

He said experts used state-ofthe-art sensing techniques to locate underwater remains of the wooden ships, anchors and telltale implements carried by whaling ships of the 1800s.

Among other items, the researchers found the iron braces, or “knees,” that supported the brick box in which the huge iron “try pots” boiled blubber into whale oil.

The finds provided a fascinating glimpse into a forgotten era in seafaring history.

The whaling ships “were working pretty late that year, because it hadn’t been a particularly productive year,” Barr said. “And they were trying to catch more whales.

“All of a sudden there was a

wind shift,” he said. “The wind pushed the sea ice in faster than they expected and it trapped the . . . vessels.”

The captains then held a meeting and decided to abandon their ships, lest they face death in the coming winter. They wrote up a resolution: “We, the undersigned, masters of whaleships now lying at Point Belcher, after holding a meeting concerning our dreadful situation, have all come to the conclusion that . . . we feel ourselves under the painful necessity of abandoning our vessels.”

They had found an escape route for the small whale boats and located the distant rescue ships, which were other whalers standing by.

This illustration of the whalers’ abandonment ran in Harper’s Weekly in 1871, shortly after the event. Thirty-two ships were lost.

Fearing the escape route might be iced in at any moment, the skippers packed their crews, many of whom were Hawaiians, into the small boats and fled.

Everyone survived, in spite of a gale they encountered as they reached the rescue ships.

Barr said the project team searched the coastline around Point Belcher and found wood framing and keel bolts, along with anchor chain and other items.

As for the other 30 ships, Barr said that in winter the shallow water there freezes from the surface to the bottom and, pushed by the wind, tends to grind up whatever is underneath.

Over time, that was probably the fate of the other wrecks, he said. n

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WORLD

Europe’s crises may push Britain out G RIFF W ITTE London BY

E

urope was pummeled by crises from start to finish in 2015, with terrorist attacks, bankruptcy brinkmanship and an unparalleled refugee influx combining to leave continental unity in tatters by year’s end.

But instead of relief, 2016 could bring an unraveling.

In addition to the flash points of the past year — all of which are poised to flare again — Britain is likely to throw fresh instability into the mix with a referendum on whether to leave the European Union. Once judged an unlikely prospect, many observers now see a 50-50 chance that populistminded, immigration-fearing British voters will elect to cut this island nation adrift from a continent beset by existential struggles.

If they do, it would mark the first time in the E.U.’s history that a country has chosen to withdraw.

A British exit could hasten a broader E.U. breakup, with continental leaders despairing that an already strained union may struggle to survive without one of its cornerstone members. Washington, too, has much to lose if the country that has traditionally bridged the Atlantic divide opts to sail off into the icy depths of the North Sea. And the United Kingdom itself could fall apart if Britain chooses to leave, with pro-E.U. Scotland likely to revive its demand for independence.

“Given that by any objective measure the E.U. is in a terrible mess, I’m shocked that the ‘in’ campaign is still getting half,” said Charles Grant, director of the London-based Center for European Reform.

Grant said he wants to see Britain remain part of the E.U., but he is pessimistic that it will. Fears about immigration explain why.

“It’s always quite easy to scare people,” Grant said. “If the British vote to leave the E.U., it will be because of worries about migration and refugees.”

Britain has largely insulated itself from the historic exodus of

SIMON DAWSON/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Leaving the union, once thought a long-shot, is gaining momentum ahead of a referendum millions of people fleeing the war zones that ring Europe. It has opted out of an E.U.-wide refugeerelocation program and has used the 19 miles of water that separate this nation from the European mainland as a barrier to those who try to make it here on their own.

But anti-E.U. campaigners have conflated the refugee issue with a record level of net-migration to Britain, much of which is fueled by European citizens moving here for economic reasons. Under the E.U.’s free-movement principle, Britain can’t stop them, prompting “out” advocates to argue that the country has lost control of its borders and can only get it back by ditching the European Union.

“The momentum is on our side,” said Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K. Independence Party and the country’s most prominent E.U. opponent. “For those of us who believe in nation-state democracy, 2016 is a very bright dawn indeed.”

It was political pressure from Farage and from Euro-skeptics

within Prime Minister David Cameron’s own Conservative Party that led him to promise a referendum in 2016. At the time, in January 2013, a British vote to leave seemed improbable.

Now Cameron is locked in delicate negotiations with his fellow E.U. leaders that could determine whether Britain stays or goes. The prime minister has vowed he will lead the campaign to keep Britain within Europe “with all my heart and soul,” but only if he can extract meaningful concessions that will give the E.U. less influence over British affairs. On Thursday, he was in Germany and Hungary making his case.

Cameron’s demands include permission for Britain to opt out of the E.U.’s founding ambition to “forge ever closer union”; greater power for national parliaments to block E.U. legislation; and formal recognition that the euro isn’t the union’s only currency.

European leaders have signaled that they’re willing to deal

Tourists walk across Westminster Bridge in view of the Houses of Parliament in London. Many observers now see a 50-50 chance that populist-minded, immigration-fearing Britons will vote to leave the European Union.

on those issues. But Cameron’s fourth demand — a restriction on benefits for immigrants from within the European Union — is far trickier. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others have pointed out, such a move would violate core E.U. principles that bar discrimination on the basis of nationality.

The issue is critical if Cameron wants to show he’s serious about reducing immigration to Britain — a promise he’s repeatedly made but has been unable to fulfill. And yet, with only weeks to go until a critical E.U. summit, there’s little indication of how negotiators can break the deadlock.

“Cameron can’t go into the referendum with nothing on this,” said Stephen Booth, co-director of the London-based think tank Open Europe. “But what will the compromise be? We really don’t know.”

After making his case for reform to fellow E.U. leaders over dinner in Brussels in late December, he told reporters that “2016 will be the year we achieve something really vital, fundamentally changing the U.K.’s relationship with the E.U. and finally addressing the concerns of the British people about our membership.”

But it could also be the year that divides his party — and costs him the premiership. If Cameron leads the “in” campaign and loses, he will come under pressure to resign just a year after leading the Conservatives to a commanding victory in national elections.

Cameron’s own cabinet is divided on the Europe question, and at least some of his ministers are expected to campaign for an exit, although none has shown their hand.

Without Britain, the E.U. would be greatly diminished, having lost the world’s fifth-largest economy and military. It would also take Europe’s focus away from its other struggles, which continue to demand urgent attention.

“The E.U. has got enough on its plate right now,” Booth said. “It doesn’t need one of its biggest and most dynamic members leaving.” n

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

A flow of Cubans — going home N ICK M IROFF Havana BY

M

auricio Estrada left Cuba in 2003 full of the same frustrations as so many others eager to move away. He married a Spanish woman, moved to Barcelona and got a job as a prep cook.

A dozen years later and divorced, Estrada is back, this time as the proprietor of a stylish Iberian-themed restaurant, Toros y Tapas, decorated with old matador posters and the taxidermied heads of longhorn bulls.

“Having my own restaurant is a dream,” said Estrada, 48. “I never could have done it if I’d stayed in Cuba.”

Estrada is a repatriado, a repatriate, one of the growing number of Cubans who have opted to move back to the island in recent years as the Castro government eases its rigid immigration rules.

The returnees are a smaller, quieter countercurrent to the surge of Cubans leaving, and their arrival suggests a more dynamic future when their compatriots may come and go with greater ease, helping to rebuild Cuba with earnings from abroad.

Not since the early years of Fidel Castro’s rule, when his leftist ideals brought home a number of exiles initially sympathetic to the 1959 revolution, have so many Cubans voluntarily returned.

The difference is that today’s repatriates are not coming back for socialism. They are coming back as capitalists. Which is to say, they are returning as trailblazing entrepreneurs. Prompted

by President Raúl Castro’s limited opening to small business and his 2011 move allowing Cubans to buy and sell real estate, the repatriates are using money saved abroad to acquire property and open private restaurants, guesthouses, spas and retail shops.

Cuban authorities said they could not provide up-to-date statistics, but in 2012, immigration officials said they were processing about 1,000 repatriation applications each year. The numbers appear to have increased since

LISETTE POOLE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Not since the early Castro years have so many returned, but these repatriates are capitalists then, at least judging from anecdotal evidence and the proliferation of new small businesses in Havana run by returnees.

Communist authorities no longer stigmatize such Cubans or view them as ideologically suspicious, provided they’re not coming back as anti-government activists. Virtually all Cubans who emigrated are eligible for repatriation unless they are deemed to have committed “hostile acts against the state.”

Returnees say the paperwork takes about six months to process.

It allows them to return home with a shipping container’s worth of goods and to regain access to the socialist country’s benefits, including free health care and food rations.

The repatriation trend is a classic case of “Cuban ingenuity,” said Pedro Freyre, a partner and an expert on Cuba trade laws at the Akerman law firm in Miami. “It’s an instinct for taking advantage

of any opening, and the perception that with this mechanism an expat can have the best of two systems.”

To be clear, the number of repatriates is dwarfed by the more than 70,000 Cubans who left the island in 2015, the highest figure in decades and nearly twice as many as departed in 2014. The emigration wave is being driven by a range of old and new factors, from the island’s perpetual economic troubles to new fears that better relations with the United States will bring an end to the unique U.S. immigration privileges extended to Cubans.

For Enrique Soldevilla, 34, the 2014 announcement that the United States and Cuba would begin normalizing relations was the decisive factor in his return home after a decade in the Dominican Republic. Optimistic that the U.S. thaw would bring better times to Cuba, he moved back to Havana in April, giving up

Mauricio Estrada, right, head chef and owner of the restaurant Toros y Tapas in the Miramar neighborhood of the Cuban capital, jokes with kitchen assistant Ewar Llerena as they prepare for a New Year’s Eve dinner.

a well-paid job in audio and video production.

Life in the Dominican Republic was good “professionally and financially,” Soldevilla said, “but something was always missing.”

Someone like Soldevilla would have had few options just a few years ago, when restrictions were tighter on private business and independent labor. Today, more than a quarter of Cuba’s workforce is not employed by the state.

Soldevilla has been working as a freelance producer, using his international contacts and his skills to get contracts with foreign clients. He has done casting work for the U.S. reality TV show “House Hunters,” something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, when Cubans were prohibited from having cellphones and going online was all but impossible.

Many of the repatriates, like Soldevilla, are returning from Europe and Latin America. Cubans in the United States may be more reluctant to return to the island because of their relatively high incomes. But American economic sanctions also make it essentially illegal for any U.S. resident to go to Cuba and run a business. And the ability to buy property remains mostly restricted to Cubans who live on the island.

Restaurant owner Estrada describes life abroad as a kind of international business school, an education in capitalism. Estrada said he has struggled with the training and management of his Cuban employees, who he said still treat their jobs as if they work for a government-run business.

Pilfering is a problem, he grumbled, along with tardiness and poor customer service skills.

Like other private restaurant owners here, Estrada said he prefers to hire workers with no experience that he can train to his standards, rather than hire employees who have picked up the bad habits of state-run businesses.

“In Spain, workers take their jobs seriously,” Estrada said.

“They know that if they don’t, they’ll be out on the street with nothing to eat.” n

JUNE 15, 2015

The

day the

race changed

It is an oppressively humid day in South Florida, and Jeb Bush has come home to declare his candidacy for president. The big crowd assembled at Miami Dade College is festive — and diverse, reflecting the culture of Miami that has shaped the former governor for decades and the kind of openness he believes his party needs to win the White House.

Bush has had a difficult spring, his candidacy buffeted by criticism and self-inflicted wounds. But in many circles he is still seen as the politician to beat for the Republican nomination.

His speech evokes what he hopes voters will see in him, someone with executive experience, conservative values and a reformer’s instinct — and perhaps above all, electability. “I will take nothing and no one for granted,” he says. The speech draws strong reviews, his best moment yet. For Bush, it is a day to put his problems behind him and begin the campaign anew.

JUNE 16, 2015 The scene at Trump Tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue is surreal.

Down the escalator, his image reflecting on the walls around the lobby, comes Donald Trump, the billionaire developer and reality-TV star. The crowd gathered in the lobby is large and boisterous.

Later, it will be revealed that some were paid to attend — an arrangement the candidate would not long need.

Trump is there to announce, to the surprise of so many, that he will seek the White House. He has flirted with this before but always stopped short. Now, he says he is in. His speech is rambling and seemingly off the cuff. He goes after China and President Obama and then turns to immigration.

Mexico is sending its worst across the border, he says — drug dealers, rapists and murderers among them. The language is harsh — shocking to many — and draws instant condemnations. For the novice politician, it is an inauspicious start to the campaign.

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BY DAN BALZ, PHILIP RUCKER, ROBERT COSTA AND MATEA GOLD

The year 2015 will be remembered as one of the most bizarrely compelling and genuinely unnerving in the nation’s modern political history. It is clear now that there were two halves to the year for the Republican Party: BT and AT, Before Trump and After Trump. From January to mid-June the story of the Republican race was mostly conventional, with Bush the focal point for good and ill. There were unanticipated twists, among them the sheer size of the field of candidates — ultimately a total of 17 who would formally declare. ¶ Those early months, however, were only a prelude to the real events that would follow. It is hardly overstatement to say that, on June 16, everything changed — though no one knew it at the time, not even Donald Trump. ¶ Trump’s entry brought scorn and dismissal. He was a clown, a carnival barker, the leading man in a sideshow with a short run. His outrageous rhetoric — an appeal to nativism and antipathy toward everything from institutional powers to cultural shifts — seemed to guarantee all that. ¶ Yet even on that day in June there were signs that the elites in the party and in the political community didn’t get what was stirring.

From New York, Trump flew to Iowa for a rally at Hoyt Sherman Auditorium in Des Moines, where he was cheered as he strode down the aisle to the front stage.

D

on and Kathy Watson were among those who had come to see him. Asked why Trump, she replied: “Why not?

He’s as good as anybody. . . . He’s not afraid. He’s not a politician.”

They weren’t certain they would support Trump, but they knew which candidate they would not support: Bush. “Dump him. We’ve had too many Bushes,” she said.

Trump’s reception that night showed that whatever the party establishment thought of him, many voters found him instantly attractive. Those early sentiments underscored the festering emotions that would soon burst forth, frustrations born of economic stress and disgust with Washington.

By the end of the year, every candidate running for the nomination could sense it — and all were trying to adapt, channeling the anger as best they could. Some adapted well, and may yet win the nomination. Others didn’t make it to the new year.

Aboard his campaign bus in Iowa two days before the arrival of 2016, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida reflected on what he had seen and felt through the amazing year of 2015.

“People are just tired,” he said. “They’ve tried Democrats, they’ve tried Republicans. They’ve tried a combination of both. They’ve tried new people, they’ve tried old people, and nothing changes. Things get worse. They don’t seem to get better, no matter who’s in charge; it feels like the country is stuck in neutral and people are fed up and that’s what brings us to the point where we’re at today.”

What Rubio said was an echo of what almost

every Republican candidate was saying by the end of the year. But as the election year opens, the lingering question — the big unknown — is whether 2015 will prove to be an aberration, a holiday from reality, or a portent of things to come.

What is clearest is what didn’t work in 2015, though it often worked in the past. Television advertising moved few voters. Policy rollouts fell ondeafears.Impressivepoliticalrésumésproved not to be persuasive. What took on the Republican side was a new kind of politics, one built on emotion and visceral connection. To some people, this represented a worrying turn toward a darker and more divisive politics. To others, it was a welcome turn away from what they considered to be too much political correctness.

Rick Santorum said of Trump: “He may have understood the game better than any of us.” But like so many people, the former senator from Pennsylvania wondered whether the billionaire mogul understands the game ahead. It is the question that hovers over everything in politics at this moment.

“I think the vote is much different than a poll and so I want to see what happens when people actually vote,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said in evaluating 2015. “Then we can start talking about eras being defined or newly established.”

The answer will come soon enough. What follows is the story of how Republicans got to where they are today, told primarily through the impressions, recollections and analyses of those who lived it personally — the Republican candidates. This article is based almost entirely on on-the-record interviews with most of the major candidates — some of whom fell away — and with their advisers and other strategists. It is the story of a remarkable year in American politics.

“I full well thought that by the fall of 2015, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry were going to be on the stage. . . . It was going to be me and Jeb.” Rick Perry

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THE QUESTION THAT HOVERED over the Republican Party a year ago was very different: Will he or won’t he?

In late 2014, the “he” in question was Jeb Bush. A son and brother of presidents. A towering figure in Florida politics. A cerebral executive celebrated for his policy chops and conservative record as governor. Though hobbled by his support for immigration reform and Common Core educational standards, Bush was seen by party elites as a man groomed for the office — a president at the ready.

The reality would prove to be more complicated.

To demonstrate that he was in touch with politics in the age of social media, Bush went on Facebook on Dec. 17 to declare that he was actively exploring a run. The announcement landed like a thunderclap, instantly thrusting him to the top and undercutting a slew of other establishment hopefuls, especially Christie and Rubio.

“Anytime someone with the last name Bush gets into a national race, the first impact you feel is fundraising, and that’s certainly the one that we felt most immediately,” Christie would later recall. “A lot of people started to sign on with him before we’d even gotten off the ground. It was his attempt, I think, to preempt the field.”

Sally Bradshaw, senior adviser to the Bush campaign, said there was no expectation of clearing the field — quite the opposite. “We knew this would be a more crowded and talented field than 2012, and we knew the electorate was angry at President Obama,” she said. “No one anticipated a Trump candidacy at that point.”

Bush’s aggressive effort to raise funds in early 2015, Bradshaw said, reflected the campaign team’s assumption that the nomination contest would be highly competitive and potentially lengthy.

The intense early pace startled Bush’s likely opponents. “I think everybody was a little surprised as to not just the timing but how successful he was early on,” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker recalled later.

The swaggering entrance of Bush was perhaps most acutely felt by Rubio.

“It just changes completely the way you have to go out and raise money,” Rubio recalled later.

He said he resorted to building a more grassroots donor network, as he did in his 2010 Senate race when he began far behind the handpicked candidate of party leaders, thenGov. Charlie Crist. “You have to find new people that haven’t traditionally been involved in the past but want to see a change in America.”

As Bush jetted from mansion to mansion securing donors, Bradshaw and Bush’s longtime political consigliere, Mike Murphy, were mapping out the campaign. They were confident about Bush’s chances to be the nominee.

Sure, he would have to overcome America’s historical aversion to dynastic politics and the country’s lingering distaste for the George W. Bush years. But he would easily establish his own political identity, they figured. He had done it in Florida. His campaign signs and continues on next page

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bumper stickers always bore the logo “Jeb!” — with a giant red exclamation point emphasizing that he was not just another Bush. They would do so again.

AS BUSH WAS FAST BUILDING HIS juggernaut, a threat emerged on the horizon.

Mitt Romney, who had run for president twice before, had grown restless in the two years since conceding to Obama. The world seemed as if it were on fire; back home, the middle class was getting crushed. Romney was itching to get back in the game, to have a shot at turning things around.

One night in early January, aboard a red-eye flight from San Francisco to Boston, Romney wrote in his journal: “If I want to be president, I’m going to have to run for president.”

In Romney’s mind, there was no “if.” And at a Jan. 9 gathering of some of his top 2012 campaign donors in Manhattan, hosted by New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, he made his

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Jeb Bush announces his candidacy on June 15. That day, he seemed to be the one to beat.

feelings known. “I want to be president,” Romney told the assembled financiers.

Romney’s surprising declaration electrified the Republican money and operative class and set off a tumultuous three-week period of public deliberation.

“This wasn’t going to happen by a claim of some kind or other people having a difficult time getting traction and then people turning to me and asking me to run,” Romney recalled thinking at the time. “If I wanted to be president, it was a decision I had to make. And Jeb, I think very wisely, had begun raising money and getting things started early on, so the time frame to make that decision was earlier than I might have thought.”

Strategist Stuart Stevens kept counseling Romney to make a personal decision, not a politicalone,thoughRomneystudiedthepolitics closely. Chicago investor Muneer Satter, a GOP mega-donor, commissioned polls from a dozen or so states and showed the data to Romney.

“Am I loved? Am I written off? Am I despised?

What does the Republican base think about me?” Romney recalled wondering.

He liked what he saw. Romney said the polls showed him with commanding leads among

potential Republican candidates in New Hampshire and Nevada and a smaller lead in Iowa. In South Carolina, he was tied at the top with Bush and others.

“It’s like, ‘Wow. Wow.’ That’s not a bad place to start from,” Romney said in a late-December interview in Boston at the well-appointed offices of Solamere Capital, the private-equity firm run

by Zwick and Romney’s eldest son, Tagg.

The reaction outside Romney’s orbit was less rosy. Governors, senators and other Republican leaders called him a decent man who has served the party well but said his time had passed.

On the right, the criticism was sharper. The Wall Street Journal editorial board lacerated him in a column headlined “Romney Recycled.”

Rupert Murdoch, whose company owns the Journal and Fox News Channel, said: “He had his chance, he mishandled it, you know? I thought Romney was a terrible candidate.”

Radio host Mark Levin summed up the sentiment in a tweet: “Been there, done that.”

Of the barrage of negativity, Romney suspected a culprit: “I recognized the hand of my good friend Mike Murphy, [who] in my view was fanning the flames of ‘No, he’s the disaster. It would be terrible. Only Jeb!’ I must admit that had the opposite effect [than] he might have intended, which is just like, ‘I’ll show them.’ ” Murphy, the Bush adviser, said that this was “absolutely not true” and that he did not talk down Romney’s chances with commentators, governors or senators. “I’m sorry he thinks that,” Murphy said, noting his long relationship with Romney. “I think the doubts were more organic than he believes.”

Romney believed that, if he passed on the race, Bush would be the most likely nominee.

Privately, he harbored serious doubts about Bush’s ability to beat Hillary Clinton. He recalled thinking, “I like Jeb a lot, I think he’d be a great president, but felt he was unfairly but severely burdened by the W years — and when I say the W years, it’s not only what happened to the economy, but the tragedy in Iraq.” He added: “A Bush-versus-Clinton head-to-head would be too easy for the Democrats.”

On Jan. 22, Bush flew to Utah, where the Romneys were settling into a new home in the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay, to pay Mitt a courtesy visit. The date had been set long before Romney expressed interest in running. The two men exchanged pleasantries and updated each other on their growing families; four days earlier, Romney’s 23rd grandchild had been born.

Then they got down to business. Romney told Bush about the private polls that showed him performing well in the early-voting states.

“It’s opened up a door that I didn’t think would be open to me,” he recalled telling Bush.

Romney also said he confronted Bush with his fears about his candidacy: “Jeb, to be very honest,Ithinkit’sveryhardforyoutopostupagainst Hillary Clinton and to separate yourself from the difficulty of the W years and compare them with the Clinton years.” He said Bush responded by saying that “he was going to make his campaign about the future, not about the past.”

“I didn’t say anything at that point,” Romney

“Anytime someone with the last name Bush gets into a national race, the first impact you feel is fundraising.”

Chris Christie

recalled. “But as he left, I said to myself, ‘Gosh, in my opinion, it’s not going to be as easy to make that separation as I think he gives the impression it will be.’ One of the few things I predicted that turned out to be true.”

Bush, through a spokesman, declined repeated requests to be interviewed. Bradshaw said: “We don’t talk about meetings that we consider to be private. We’re honoring Governor Bush’s commitment to Governor Romney to keep the meeting private. Governor Bush appreciates what Mitt did in waging an able campaign and leading our ticket.”

Romney privately consulted two of his closest friends in elected office: Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, his 2012 vice presidential running mate, whom he earlier had been badgering to run himself, to no avail; and Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. They didn’t discourage Romney, but neither did they push him to jump in.

Romney was arriving at the same conclusion.

He remembered thinking: “It’s going to take something unusual, something catching lightning in a jar to beat [Clinton], and the guy who ran before isn’t very likely to catch lightning in a jar. I’m too well known. I’m too well defined.”

On Jan. 30, exactly three weeks after declaring in New York that he wanted to be president, Romney announced that he was giving up on the dream. He did so with what many interpreted as a knock against the frontrunner, Bush.

“I believe that one of our next generation of Republican leaders — one who may not be as well-known as I am today, one who has not yet taken their message across the country, one who is just getting started — may well emerge as being better able to defeat the Democratic nominee,” Romney said. “In fact, I expect and hope that to be the case.”

AS THEY LOOKED TOWARD 2016, many Republicans believed the nomination battle would become a fight among the governors.

The list of prospective candidates from these ranks was long: outgoing Texas governor Rick Perry, who after a record 14 years in office could boast of sizeable job-creation numbers; Christie, who began 2014 in scandal surrounding the closure of lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge but ended it taking a victory lap as outgoing Republican Governors Association chair; Ohio Gov. John Kasich, newly reelected in a landslide in one of the most important swing states in the country; Walker, nationally known among conservatives for his battles with unions and who won three tough elections in four years; and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a policy wonk and idea generator.

Those were just the sitting governors. Beyond that were the former governors: Bush, Mike Huckabee (Ark.), George Pataki (N.Y.) and Jim Gilmore (Va.).

Many of the governors who were preparing to run had one overriding goal in mind: to become the alternative to Bush. In Bush’s camp, the other governors loomed largest as potential competitors, although which one was most threatening remained a mystery.

Perry, who had run a disastrous race for

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COVER STORY president in 2012 and had spent two years preparing for a second campaign, already could see the landscape ahead — a nomination contest that ultimately would come down to a competition between two men who had led two of the biggest states in the country.

“I full well thought that by the fall of 2015, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry were going to be on the stage having a thoughtful conversation about each of our competing visions for America and us comparing our records of success,” Perry said in a December interview.

Perry judged himself and Bush to be “two of the most successful Republican governors maybe in the history of the country.” Surely, he believed, “the American people would distill down which of these individuals had the best vision for America. . . . It was going to be me and Jeb.” The challenge was to break out from the pack. The first to do so was Walker, who delivered a fiery speech on Jan. 24 in Iowa at a day-long Freedom Summit, sponsored by the group Citizens United and hosted by Rep. Steve King, one of the most conservative members of Congress.

At the time, Walker later recalled, he found it amusing. “I laughed with the coverage that came out — ‘Oh, Walker gives his breakout speech,’ ” he said. In his own mind, it was no different than the performances he delivered on factory floors or at small rallies during his reelection in the fall of 2014.

With the attention came a brighter spotlight, and Walker then suffered through a series of errors. In London, during an official state business trip, he declined to say whether he believed in evolution. In an interview, he wouldn’t say whether he believed Obama was a Christian. At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, he appeared to cast his battles with the unions as a proving ground for his capacity to deal with Islamic State militants.

Walker wrote off the incidents as minor problems. And the missteps did not arrest his rise, at least not then. He soon became the poll leader in Iowa and, in the quickly congealing world of conventional wisdom, was described as the principal challenger to Bush.

IF GOVERNORS PLANNED TO RUN on their records of enacting reforms back home, a trio of first-term senators were hanging their hopes on their potential to disrupt Washington’s established order.

The first out of the gate was Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a combative conservative who, in his 14 months in the Senate, had made many more enemies than friends.

Cruz arrived on the presidential stage as a hero to tea party activists, but he had another objective: to make himself a hero to evangelical Christians and libertarian conservatives, too.

“Conservatives have always outnumbered moderates in a primary, but the way moderates have won previously is by dividing conservatives,” Cruz would later say. “Their strategy was to keep conservatives splintered. If conservatives ever unite, it’s game over.”

Thanks to his national profile in the Senate,

“I’m a big believer in politics that truth will out.

You run as who you are.”

Ted Cruz

Cruz had a powerful network of small-dollar donors, as had conservative grass-roots candidates of presidential campaigns past. But even beforeannouncing,hewasmovingstealthilyand aggressively to woo wealthy power brokers in his home state of Texas, on Wall Street and beyond.

Energy investor Toby Neugebauer first met Cruz years ago and the two men, born just a few days apart, quickly clicked. Their families vacationed together. By February, Neugebauer had grown concerned there was not an effective, high-dollar super PAC operation to bolster Cruz. Neugebauer said to his wife, “Either we believe or we don’t believe.” And he soon approached other wealthy Cruz backers, over Texas barbecue and at Manhattan tête-à-têtes, with a proposition: If they put $10 million into a network of super PACs, so would he.

On April 9, Neugebauer wrote a check for $10 million. The next day, hedge-fund executive Robert Mercer put in $11 million. And soon enough, Farris and Dan Wilks, brothers whose fracking services business had transformed them into billionaires, and their wives anted up $15 million.

“The money made the Cruz candidacy very real,” Neugebauer said, adding: “People realized, ‘This isn’t Michele Bachmann.’ ” Cruz’s campaign now had what no recent hard-right conservative candidate had: the resources to run a long campaign.

For Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the ambitions on display across the Appalachian Mountains as Cruz launched his candidacy at Liberty University in Virginia represented a sudden threat, though Paul might not have recognized it at the time.

Paul, a sometimes brusque maverick, embodied the tea party movement of 2010 when he catapulted from an ophthalmology practice in Bowling Green to the Senate. Paul’s father, Ron, had rallied libertarians during two quixotic bids for the presidency. Now Rand was aiming to do what his dad never could: win the Republican nomination.

In a Louisville ballroom on April 7, Paul declared his candidacy: “I have a message, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We have come to take our country back.”

This was a busy week in presidential politics.

That Sunday, Clinton entered the race with studied understatement: a fast-paced and folksy video that featured little of the former first lady and secretary of state in favor of a diverse assortment of Americans talking about their hopes and aspirations for the spring.

“Everyday Americans need a champion,” Clinton said, “and I want to be that champion.”

In Miami, Rubio and his advisers could hardly believe their good fortune. In just 24 hours, the ambitious young senator was set to make his formal announcement. What better way to enter the race than with a visceral comparison to the leading Democrat?

For Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, a compelling biography helped accelerate his ascent in Florida politics. And to accentuate his story under the national spotlight, Rubio launched his campaign at the Freedom Tower,

KLMNO WEEKLY

an iconic Ellis Island-like landmark in downtown Miami where a generation earlier U.S. officials processed Cuban refugees fleeing the Castro regime.

Rubio had been elected to the Senate in 2010 after taking on and defeating the establishment. After the party’s crushing defeat in the 2012 presidential election, he was a leading member of the Senate’s Gang of Eight that drafted an immigration reform bill, which included a path to citizenship for those here illegally.

He walked away from the legislation when sentiment inside the party shifted against that provision. But the issue remains a flash point in the Republican race to this day — and potentially one of Rubio’s biggest obstacles.

Rubio stepped forward under a banner that read “A New American Century.” Charismatic and boyish — he was 43, but could have passed for a few years younger — Rubio offered himself as a next-generation president for a rapidly changing world.

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Sen. Marco Rubio speaks in Iowa in midDecember. He has been a voice of dissent.

IN ALMOST EVERY PRESIDENTIAL campaign, someone unexpected rises toward the top of the field. In 2015, that role fell to Ben Carson, a world-renowned pediatric neurosurgeon with no political experience. He would come to symbolize the hunger among many Republicans for someone, anyone, not tainted by politics as usual.

Within weeks of Carson’s declaration of candidacy, Huckabee and former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania also joined the race.

They were the two previous winners of the Iowa caucuses, both over Romney — Huckabee in 2008 and Santorum by an eyelash in 2012.

Both were overshadowed by conservative newcomers and struggled to regain the support they had previously enjoyed. Huckabee would compare the dynamic to junior high school and boys’ fascination with the newest pretty girl in class.

“I’m seeing a lot of that in the presidential race,” he said in a December interview. “It’s that there’s the new-girl-in-school approach where you’ve got so many new girls in school. Some of us, we’ve been here since the first grade, so we’re having to just wait our turn to be rememcontinues on next page

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bered and liked again.”

Santorum said he anticipated that this would be the year of outsiders and felt that his 2012 campaign gave him credibility to tap the anti-establishment mood. “From my perspective, that’s what I did last time,” he said. “I took on the establishment. Four years had passed and there were more people doing the same thing and in a real-time way. . . . We were not in the headlines, not top of mind. We had been out of the fray. So from my perspective, I was starting all over again.”

The field of declared candidates grew quickly after Carson announced. The month of May brought in the only woman, Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive at Hewlett-Packard who lost a Senate race in California in 2010 in her only venture into politics. Also joining were Pataki and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.).

GREGORY BULL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, flirted with running again.

DONALD TRUMP’S BOEING 757 landed with a roar at Phoenix’s airport on a warm July afternoon. He stepped onto the tarmac in his uniform of dark suit and red tie — wisps of that famous hair turned up by the wind — and into a waiting black GMC Denali with a “TRUMP” license plate.

For the first time since Trump’s announcement, his seemingly long-shot presidential bid began to have the aura of a real, vibrating campaign: multi-city stops, a plane full of aides and security guards, and piles of printed news articles about him and his rivals.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” Trump said, clapping his hands in the style of a drill sergeant, as his entourage loaded into the caravan. In a region where illegal immigration has inflamed the public, Trump had come to capitalize on the issue.

Approaching the venue, he marveled from behind the vehicle’s tinted glass at the thousands who had come to hear what he would say.

Trump later would acknowledge that he had been taken by surprise by the power of the immigration issue. “When I made this speech about illegal immigration, I had no idea what it was going to become,” Trump said. “I mean, it was an important subject to me, but I had no idea it was going to resonate in the way it has.”

National polls were charting an unexpected Trump surge. Days after he announced, an

NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed him at just 1 percent, with Bush at 22 percent. A week after the announcement, a Fox News poll put him at 11 percent to Bush’s 15 percent. A week after the Phoenix rally, a Post-ABC News poll showed Trump at 24 percent to Bush’s 12 percent. Bush would never lead again.

Despite the polls, few political strategists took Trump seriously. Nor were candidates seeing a need to fundamentally adapt their strategies.

That soon began to change once it became clear that Trump was playing by different rules.

Trump’s surge continued, presenting all the candidates with a dilemma. Should they attack him, in hopes of accelerating what many thought would be an ultimate decline, or should they stay on course and hope that Trump would fade on his own?

Bush’s advisers telegraphed their theory: Bush would benefit from the amount of attention Trump was getting because he was drowning out the other candidates, including Walker and Rubio, who were positioning themselves to become Bush’s main rival.

But that assumption was based on the false premise that the Trump candidacy would burn itself out.

For Cruz, the anti-establishment senator, the playbook was counterintuitive: Praise Trump whenever possible and steer clear of direct engagement. The senator from Texas hoped Trump’s supporters would be future Cruz voters, when and if Trump slipped. “I think he’s terrific,” Cruz said in a Fox News interview at the time.

Trump’s candidacy benefited immensely from the fact that he had spent a decade hosting the NBC television program “The Apprentice.”

His celebrity appeal, combined with his blunt talk, produced a candidate unlike anything seen in the modern era of politics.

“We’ve never had someone, at least not in my lifetime, who was running for president before who, for the seven or eight years before that, had a top-10-rated national television show,” Christie said. “You cannot discount the celebrity factor in all this.”

Bush and others jabbed at Trump over immigration in those early weeks, but it was Perry who decided to make a frontal attack.

Perry called Trump’s candidacy “a cancer on conservatism” and said that “it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.”

AFTER MONTHS OF POSITIONING, the candidates descended on Cleveland to share a debate stage for the first time.

It was the start of a rollicking night in which Trump landed on the debate stage like a hand grenade, as he had from the day of his announcement.

As Kasich later observed, “If I said one of the things he had said about Hispanics, Muslims or women, I’d have to go into a witness protection program.”

After the Fox debate, Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, sought to put the question about a third-party run to bed. He solicited signed pledges from all

“Some of us, we’ve been here since the first grade, so we’re having to just wait our turn to be remembered and liked again.”

Mike Huckabee

of the candidates vowing to support the eventual nominee. Most sent theirs back right away.

For Trump, however, Priebus trekked up to New York to get the form in person. They met in the candidate’s Trump Tower office overlooking Central Park, where the billionaire signed the pledge and gave Priebus his assurances.

For the rest of the year, speculation would continue off and on about Trump going rogue.

But Priebus wouldn’t flinch. “I’ve never worried about him running as an independent,” he said in a December interview. “I am not one tiny, little bit worried about it. He’s not doing it.”

Walker said he quickly came to see that the focus on Trump kept him from breaking through. His policy rollouts, such as a prescription to overhaul the health-care law, received scant media coverage.

“I remember, one time, I went into a meeting and I came out 50 minutes later, and I won’t say what network it was, but it was one of the cable networks, still covering Trump’s speech live, 55 minutes later,” Walker recalled. “I don’t even think the president of the United States gets covered live for 55 minutes.”

Beyond the rhetoric, everything about Trump’s campaign style drew more attention to the candidacy, and perhaps nothing more so than the Boeing 757 that carried him from rally to rally. The plane carried gold-plated glamour along the campaign trail like no other competitor could.

Candidates playing by conventional rules, and with far fewer resources, found themselves at a huge disadvantage. By late summer, they began to fall away.

“That’s my misjudgment,” Perry said. He added: “The electorate is really disgusted with Washington, and the bullet goes through Washington and hits anybody that’s got any experience. They just lump us all into one.”

When Walker announced his suspension on Sept. 21, he said, “I believe that I am being called to lead by helping to clear the field in this race so that a positive, conservative message can rise to the top of the field. . . . I encourage other Republican presidential candidates to consider doing the same.”

None of the other candidates heeded Walker’s advice.

LEADING UP TO THE OCT. 28 DEBATE

in Boulder, Colo., Bush and his team escalated their criticism of Rubio.

In their debate preparations, Rubio and his advisers knew what to expect. The moment came 21 minutes into the debate.

Rubio counterpunched without missing a beat.

In that instant, whatever air was left in Bush’s balloon seemed to fizzle out. Reporters in the spin room that night peppered campaign manager Danny Diaz with questions about whether Bush should quit the race.

The Bush team continued to believe that if it could convey to voters the candidate’s record of successes and reforms in Florida, its candidate would eventually win their support. This had been the focus of the pro-Bush super PAC’s fall advertising blitz. But to some voters, what had

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COVER STORY gotten through was not the Florida record but Trump’s incessant and unyielding mocking of Bush as “low-energy.”

The candidate who made the most of the Boulder debate was not Rubio, however. It was Cruz.

“This is not a cage match,” Cruz thundered at the debate. “You look at the questions: ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math?’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ ” The live audience at the University of Colorado roared in approval. And over on Fox News Channel, the meter on pollster Frank Luntz’s focus group nearly went off the charts.

AS FALL TURNED TO WINTER, outside events conspired to reshape the race. The terrorist attacks Nov. 13 in Paris and Dec. 2 in San Bernardino, Calif., spread fear across the country. More than anything, Republican voters were looking for strength.

Carson became an immediate victim. The mild-mannered surgeon hardly fit the profile of a wartime commander in chief. He stammered over foreign policy in interviews. His national security tutors leaked word that he didn’t know what he was talking about. And when Carson deliveredahigh-profilespeechtotheRepublican Jewish Coalition, he repeatedly read “Hamas” in his speech notes and botched the name of the Palestinian-Islamist movement, pronouncing it as the ground-chickpea dish “hummus.”

The Paris and San Bernardino attacks convinced other candidates that a shift to life-ordeath issues of national security would expose Trump as unworldly and unknowledgeable.

But once again, he defied the norms of politics.

The policy pronouncement came over by email on Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day, at 4:16 p.m.: “Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration.”

Trump called for a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States, at least temporarily. His statement cited research that he said showed that large segments of the world’s fastest-growing religion were rooted in hatred and violence.

The proposal defied a call for tolerance toward Muslims that President Obama issued less than 24 hours earlier from the Oval Office.

It drew condemnations from leaders around the globe as well as his rival candidates. “Donald Trump is unhinged,” Bush tweeted.

The Muslim comment seemed to spur Bush to action. In the year’s final debate, he confronted Trump more vigorously than ever, delivering a performance that seemed to rejuvenate him.

He continued to carry the attacks on Trump through the rest of the year with the hope that in the upside-down world of the Republican race, no one was truly out of the running.

Bush’s candidacy now stood for something else, however, which was the epic failure of super-PAC dollars to change the dynamic of the Republican race in 2015. Right to Rise, Bush’s super PAC, spent tens of millions of dollars

through the fall and early winter months while Bush’s poll numbers continued to sag. But no other candidate’s super PAC was having any real success, either.

“When I made this speech about illegal immigration, I had no idea what it was going to become.”

Donald Trump

BY YEAR’S END, THERE WAS A PALpable sense of unease about the future — fear of possible terrorist attacks, distrust of institutions and political leaders, economic anxieties amid the recovery and lower unemployment, and confusion about what verdict the voters would deliver in November.

The Democratic nomination contest still falls along more conventional lines, with a strong front-runner in Clinton backed heavily by the establishment and an insurgent challenger in Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) powered by an energized progressive base.

The real turmoil is inside the Republican Party, now clearly split and heading for a potentially decisive clash between its warring factions.

Whatever lies ahead, the assumptions candidates and their strategists carried with them as last year began were mostly blown apart by what happened, including the possibility that Trump could become the Republican nominee.

Among Trump supporters, there is a belief that the political class doesn’t know what’s coming.

Party leaders still heavily discount that possibility, but they no longer rule it out.

“I’m not one of these people that think that Donald Trump can’t win a general election,” said Priebus, the RNC chair. “I actually think there is a huge crossover appeal there to people that are disengaged politically that he speaks to. . . . Donald Trump taps into the culture.

Some people in politics don’t get it, don’t understand it, are frustrated by it. It doesn’t matter. He does.”

The struggles of the establishment candidates to slow down Trump and Cruz, who by year’s end was surging in Iowa, led some party figures to think about a saving grace.

In late December in Boston, Romney said he still encounters Republicans trying to draft him. “Every day I get a call or letters,” he said. “I go to church, I get harangued at church. ‘Oh, you’ve got to run!’ ” “Look,” Romney added, “I had one person who was running for president, and I won’t give you the name . . . called me and said, ‘I hope you don’t close the door. We may need you.’ That’s a person running for president. A candidate. A Republican. I’m not giving it a second thought.”

One other thing has changed: At the time Trump entered the race and began to defy the conventional rules of past campaigns, there was a sense in the camps of some of his rivals that he had created an alternate universe that ran parallel to the more traditional path of politics.

It was there to observe but not necessarily understand or manage. Now many have come to see that they all are operating inside that alternate universe.

They are trying to adapt as best they can.

Rubio’s rhetoric is edgier than it was before.

Christie has used over-the-top language to attack Congress and especially Obama, whom

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he described as a “feckless weakling” at the last debate of the year.

For someone like Cruz, a terrain defined by anger is a welcome development. His campaign was shaped from the moment he arrived in Washington as one that would find its most fertilegroundamongthosemostdisaffectedwith the elites and the Washington establishment.

“I’m a big believer in politics that truth will out,” Cruz said. “You run as who you are. Indeed, the candidates who often tend to do the worst are those who can’t figure out who they are and who run one day as a conservative and one day as a moderate and end up getting the support of neither.”

Candidates far down in the polls hold out hope that the voters will prove to be unpredictable, as ever. “When people ask that question about surprise, they assume we know something about the election,” Paul said. “We haven’t

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Ben Carson, left, meets a voter at a December 2015 rally in Keene, N.H.

had an election. We have polls and things, but I don’t think we’ll know anything until the voting begins.”

As Kasich said, 2016 “could be a year where things could be absolutely normal because right now they appear abnormal. There’s no voting yet.”

Dec. 28-30, 2015 It’s the week after Christmas, and the first contests are little more than a month away. In Iowa and New Hampshire, voters brave nasty snow and difficult roads to question the candi­ dates.

Donald Trump begins the week in New Hampshire. Snow is coming overnight, but the gymnasium at the Pennichuck Middle School in Nashua is filled to capacity. Trump delivers an hour­long speech, punctuated by chants from the audience: “USA! USA! USA!” As he closes, Trump tells of a call he says he received from a reporter, a prominent reporter, he says, without offering a name. He says the reporter has told him, “What you’ve done no­ body has ever, ever done. . . . You’ve changed politics as we know it.” Trump likes the sound of that, but he knows better. He offers a parting thought — a reminder that all up to now is merely prelude. “Honestly,” he says, “unless I win, it doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.” n

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DINING

Whet your appetite with the best U.S. BY

T OM S IETSEMA | PHOTOS BY M ELINA M ARA

To be a great food city, it helps to have a large body of water nearby, a classic dish or three, and a population with a fondness for drink. ¶ Those are among my impressions after spending more than 60 days on the road this year, visiting more than a dozen destinations, then measuring them against a set of standards — for creativity, community and tradition, among other criteria — to come up with a Top 10 list of America’s Best Food Cities. ¶ Not every trip produced fruit. And there were plenty of surprises on the journey. ¶ Let the debate begin! But remember: Before rating my subjects, I ate, drank and shopped in 271 restaurants, bars, food stores and farmers markets.

CHARLESTON, S.C. Expect to find some of 10 the latest food fashions sprinkled among the abundant low-country treasures — which benefit from ingredients a stone’s throw away — but not, for the most part, polished service. Think farm-totable is new? Charleston, home to ace chef Sean Brock of the beloved Husk and cookbook maven Nathalie Dupree, has been a subscriber seemingly forever. It may lack culinary representation from around the world, but what’s wrong with serving the best shrimp and grits on the planet?

Defining moment: Craggy golden fried chicken, succulent shrimp and a heaping helping of hospitality at soul food purveyor Martha Lou’s Kitchen.

D.C. 9 WASHINGTON, No town delivers better In-

dian food, access to a more sumptuous countryside inn, finer Spanish tapas or a more thrilling avantgarde experience than the nation’s capital. Call me biased to put the city I know best, and longest, on a list of the country’s top food draws.

But initially, at least, my attachment was a disadvantage the area had to overcome: I am, after all, as familiar with its weaknesses as with its strengths. (If grocery shopping is second-rate, local wines are collecting international nods.)

Only after I auditioned a dozen

other candidates could I stand back and take stock of a market that, while low on tradition, was big on community and variety at all levels, including locally grown, socially conscious fast-food concepts with national ambitions.

(Go, Beefsteak and Sweetgreen!)

Celebrity chef José Andrés summed up the District scene, 2,000 restaurants strong, when he said, “We are not one thing, but so many things at once.”

Defining moment: Sitting in Barmini, the futuristic lounge created by Andrés, where I watched some cocktails change color.

YORK 8 NEW The dirty

little secret among some food writers? They’d rather eat in places other than New York right now. Count me among them after spending 11 days there this past August and September, with the daunting goal of putting a dent in a city that counts 45,000 restaurants, 200 cuisines and some of the biggest names in the business. As a serious observer of the scene for more than 25 years, I went in figuring I’d be using up my annual allotment of exclamation points. I left scratching my head and wondering whether New York is resting on its considerable laurels. Seven hundred dollars for an undistinguished omakase at Masa? Nine hundred bucks for dinner for two

at Eleven Madison Park, where the most exciting part of the night was watching a sommelier open a rare bottle of wine with heated tongs?

The raves lavished on Cosme, a Mexican newcomer, baffled me, and I guess you have to be a native New Yorker to appreciate Peter Luger Steak House, a sad Brooklyn icon that has seen better days. Oh, there were plenty of heady moments, too. Sushi Nakazawa proves a Japanese gem, Le Bernardin remains my favorite four-star, and when I munched on a $3 hot dog at Gray’s Papaya, amid exhaust and a mass of people, all seemed right with the world. And the country bows to the Big Apple for giving it bagels, Craig Claiborne, Mario Batali, fresh takes on food halls and gold-standard hospitality courtesy of Danny Meyer.

But sometimes more is just — more.

Defining moment: Being lectured to not take photographs at the klieg-light-bright Masa — before I even sat down.

7 CHICAGO Great Everyman

food?

Check. (My weakness: hot dogs “dragged through the garden.”)

Fine dining on par with the country’s best? Chicago can claim that distinction, too. Innovation and accessibility propel the Windy City’s food scene, second only to New York’s for the recognition it has received from the prestigious James Beard Foundation (more than 40 chef and restaurant awards). Chef Rick Bayless sets the Mexican standard in the country, at all price points, with a fleet of first-class eateries, while Grant Achatz of Alinea, which serves fruit-flavored balloons for dessert, pushes the molecular envelope to the moon. If some global flavors are only nominally represented, prime steaks and topnotch tacos are, like frigid winters, a given here. Bonus: This might be the only city in the country with an exciting new restaurant, Fat Rice, dedicated to the food of Macau. Its signature dish layers jasmine rice, Chinese sausage, Portuguese chicken thighs, pickles, prawns and more.

Top to bottom: Head bartender Derek Moorer at work at the Ranstead Room in Philadelphia. A grilled redfish comes to the table at Peche in New Orleans. At Leon’s Oyster Shop in Charleston, S.C., oysters from Massachusetts chill on a bed of ice.

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DINING

food cities

Defining moment: Grazing my way through the menu at the groovy Parachute, a mom-andpop that serves showstoppers including bibimbap with Spanish mackerel and preserved lemon.

6 PHILADELPHIA Armchair diners

know Philadelphia for its cheesesteaks, Reading Terminal Market, good Italian reputation and BYOB restaurants: plentiful tradition, in other words. Scratch that workingman surface, however, and you’ll encounter riches including ambitious vegetarian restaurants, contemporary Jewish standard-bearers and neighborhoods not previously known for their eats — funky Fishtown and East Passyunk — growing more delicious by the season. (For a taste of today’s Amsterdam, check out the cozy Noord Eetcafe.) Helping fuel the fun: entrepreneur Stephen Starr, whose 21 local restaurants pulled in 2.6 million patrons last year. Williams-Sonoma has nothing on the charm and variety stocked by Fante’s Kitchen Shop in the historic Italian Market.

Defining moment: Falling head over heels for the vegan menu at the elegant Vedge restaurant, featuring a whole roasted carrot transformed into a marvelous meatless “Reuben.”

5 HOUSTON The city I knew the least

Top to bottom: A pear and ricotta tart is served at Bestia Restaurant in Los Angeles. At Kitchen 713 in Houston, a cook prepares a curry dish. Sweet and sour pork chop is on the menu at Le Pigeon in Portland, Ore., deemed by The Post’s critic to be the top food city in the United States.

surprised me the most. Houston, where have you been all my (food) life? Your best Vietnamese cooking returns me to Saigon, and some of your Chinese menus rival those I’ve dipped into in Beijing.

As for Mexican, the seafoodthemed Caracol and Cuchara, staffed by female chefs from different regions of Mexico, set the pace. Meanwhile, locals of all persuasions gather around the city’s signature: not fajitas, but AsianCajun seafood boils. Few food scenes enjoy the easy, Texas-size camaraderie found in the country’s fourth-largest city; the chef of the popular Underbelly goes so far as to promote the competition by sharing a list of his favorite eats with his customers. As one discerning palate put it, “If L.A. and New Orleans had a baby, it might be Houston.”

Defining moment: Sampling the region’s barbecue renaissance at Killen’s Barbecue, where the sides match the peerless smoked

meats — and weekend waits are eased with gratis beer.

ORLEANS 4 NEW Joie de vivre and a rever-

ence for tradition were constant companions everywhere I went in the Louisiana port town: Guy’s for cayenne-spiked pork chop po’ boys, Hansen’s Sno-Bliz for snowballs (in 100-degree weather!), Galatoire’s for the best lunch of my entire year. Is there a single dish anywhere that’s more hallowed and more accessible than red beans and rice in New Orleans? I think not. At the same time, the only city with its own cuisine is quick to adopt fresh ideas, evinced by how banh mi came to be called Vietnamese po’ boys here. Few cities enjoy their fluids more than New Orleans, home of the Sazerac, the Vieux Carré and even a food museum that lets its visitors sip alcohol while touring.

Defining moment: Friday lunch (edging into dinner) at the dowager Galatoire’s. “No one gave me the hat memo,” a newcomer to the ritual whispered as we entered a sea of suits (and Sazeracs).

3

LOS ANGELES Name a part of the world you want to taste, and Los Angeles probably offers it somewhere on its sprawling map. Better yet, large groups of people who appreciate the food of their heritage support restaurants that don’t have to simplify their cooking for anyone.

That said, diners here are receptive to mash-ups; the filling on your tostada might mingle big-eye tuna, sea urchin and furikake, Japan’s answer to salt and pepper.

The city is a year-round Garden of Eden, bursting with produce and seafood that are the envy of the country, found not just at celebrated farmers markets but also in grocery stores of distinction. Like Portland, Los Angeles prefers its fine dining on the relaxed side.

That includes a Japanese restaurant where it’s possible to drop hundreds of dollars on raw fish — in a shopping strip.

Defining moment: Meandering through the glorious Hollywood Farmers’ Market on a Sunday morning and wishing I had a kitchen back at my hotel.

FRANCISCO 2 SAN With the possible exception

of New Orleans, no American city obsesses more about food — buy-

KLMNO WEEKLY

ing it, cooking it, eating it, talking about it — than my former stomping grounds on the West Coast.

Trends, including open kitchens and communal tables, often originate among the hilltops; arguably the first pop-up in the country is Tadich Grill, born as a coffee stand for gold miners in 1849. Easy access to fresh-grown everything makes cooking at home a pleasure, although the cutting-edge restaurant scene, fueled by some of the country’s most progressive chefs, provides plenty of competition for appetites. The best food hall in the country? The Ferry Building Marketplace. The cook most responsible for changing the nation’s palate, or trying to? You have Alice Waters of the groundbreaking Chez Panisse to thank for the lush greens in your salad.

Defining moment: Dinner at the hushed Quince, which bakes breads to accompany specific dishes and employs a staff member whose sole job is to clean the restaurant’s fragile stemware.

ORE. 1 PORTLAND, I relish the abundant quirks:

lines for (stellar) breakfasts, even midweek, and strip clubs inclusive enough to offer vegan fare. And I applaud the sense of pride demonstrated even by fast-food operators, foremost Burgerville, which rolls out raspberry milkshakes and Walla Walla onion rings in the summer. But most of all, I love the ingredients here — 300 kinds of truffles, berries so delicate they don’t leave the state — and what a small contingent of talented chefs does with them. One of the scene’s few missing ingredients: fine-dining establishments. Personally, I’d pick first-class farmers markets or some of the country’s trailblazing Asian retreats (hello, Pok Pok!) over a place that charges triple digits for dinner. Admittedly, I picked summer to visit, when Portland’s flavors are peaking. But superb coffee, wine and bread — crucial building blocks of any gastronomic destination — know no season. And it doesn’t hurt that everyone, fellow customers and servers alike, is Minnesota Nice.

Defining moment: At New Seasons Market, one of my favorite grocery stores anywhere, I asked an engaging clerk about what looked like bullet-shaped blueberries, at which point he introduced me to honeysuckle fruit from Siberia. n

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BOOKS

Roman tyrants in all their cruel glory N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

A

DYNASTY The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

By Tom Holland Doubleday.

482 pp. $30

bout midway through “Dynasty,” Tom Holland observes the end of an era, at a Roman funeral in A.D. 22. The deceased is an elderly woman named Junia. The reigning emperor is Tiberius, who, without being on hand physically, is such an overweening presence that the ancestral effigies on display do not include the most celebrated member of Junia’s family: her brother Brutus, who in 44 B.C. helped assassinate Julius Caesar, founder of the dynasty to which Tiberius belongs. Junia’s death has broken one of the last links between imperial Rome and the republic that Caesar left in shambles.

“Dynasty” is a sequel to “Rubicon,” Holland’s account of Caesar’s meteoric career. Many of us have a passing acquaintance with Caesar’s successors in the JulioClaudian line: the ruthless, power-amassing Augustus, the paranoid Tiberius, the wittily cruel Caligula, the freakish Claudius, the showboating Nero. But as told

by Holland with erudition and brio, the truth about these tyrants is more dramatic and complex than we may have thought.

Holland shows us how, after succeeding his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, Augustus won over the populace in ways that have since become tyrants’ stock in trade. By conquering distant provinces and imposing Roman rule there, he stoked his subjects’ pride. By building public works, he let them share in the spoils.

A good example of the latter approach came after the death of one Vedius Pollio, a tax collector whose administration of Asia Minor had markedly increased the revenue flow to Rome while also making him filthy rich. In his will, Pollio deeded to the emperor what Holland calls a “vast property that he had built on a spur above the Forum.” Augustus accepted this windfall only to level the site and hand it over to his wife, Livia, who, “no less conscious than her husband of her responsibilities to-

WALTERS ART MUSEUM

wards the Roman people, had it rebuilt in splendid fashion, complete with colonnades and fountains, and presented to the delighted public. So, in the new age presided over by Caesar Augustus, was the selfish greed of plutocrats justly treated.”

Such gestures were almost enough to make the “delighted public” overlook Augustus’s faults, among them sexual promiscuity.

One might assume that imperial rutting was something to be forgiven or even winked at. Not so, Holland asserts. “Augustus’s reputation as a serial adulterer, far from boosting the aura of his machismo, cast him instead in an effeminate and sinister light. No man could be reckoned truly a man who was the slave of his own desires. Playboys who chased after married women were well known to be womanish themselves. The [emperor], it was whispered, smoothed his legs by singeing off their hairs with redhot nut shells.”

Tiberius may have laid off the red-hot nut shells, but succeeding Augustus was a daunting assignment, especially for a poor communicator like himself. As his reign went on, Tiberius grew terrified of assassins. Consider his reaction to

the earthquake he endured at his home away from home, above the Bay of Naples. Any good Roman would have taken the quake as a sign from the gods, but what were they trying to say? The interpretation given by Tiberius — never to set foot in Rome again — seems wrong-way-round (shouldn’t he avoid the region where the earthquake hit?), but he was probably right to think that on the whole the countryside would be safer for him.

Tiberius got the natural death he wanted, which was more than you can say for some of his successors. Caligula, for one. Holland is at his best in the chapter on this flamboyant figure. Once upon a time, a soothsayer had scoffed that the boy had no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding across the Bay of Baiae on horseback. Caligula accepted the challenge. Once enthroned, he had dozens of ships lashed together to form a gigantic pontoon stretching over the bay, which he then rode across. As a display of limitless power, it could hardly have been bettered.

Caligula delighted not just in breaking with tradition but also in mocking it, as when he announced his intention to appoint

his horse Incitatus as consul (one of the most prestigious offices in the Roman government). “So cruel was the satire,” Holland notes, “that it seemed to the aristocracy almost a form of madness.” Conspirators assassinated Caligula after only four years in power, then hunted down and killed his wife and daughter. “So perished the line of Caligula,” Holland writes: “dead of a joke taken too far.”

Next came his uncle Claudius, who, as Holland puts it, was “so despised and discounted by his relatives that not even Caligula had got around to eliminating him.”

The slobbering misfit surprised everyone by becoming a savvy ruler, a breath of relative sanity in the Julio-Claudian madhouse.

Maddest of all was Nero, who seems to have been utterly lacking in self-awareness. The spectacle of an absolute monarch entering contests as a musician and an athlete, and then trying his utmost to excel, even though he knew that no judge would dare award him anything but first place — this is egotism as farce. As he swaggered toward his own abrupt end, Holland writes, “Nero remained true to what he saw as his highest responsibility: to delight his fellow citizens.”

This is great material, and Holland does it justice with a chiseled prose style and an eye for the luminous detail. He memorably sums up a region of interest to the Romans as “the kingdom of Armenia, a land of icy mountains, thick forests and notoriously effective poisons.” He emphasizes Roman cruelty by explaining how a soldier tasked with executing a young girl coped with the sacred tradition that forbade putting a virgin to death. He “made sure to rape her first.”

A graduate of both Cambridge and Oxford, Holland is a master of narrative history. On the strength of “Dynasty,” he deserves a laurel wreath. n Drabelle is a former contributing editor of Book World.

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BOOKS

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Akin to ‘Gone Girl’ but much scarier

A brilliant and mostly private star

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

C AROL M EMMOTT

att Marinovich takes us to the Hamptons in “The Winter Girl,” but don’t expect sunshine and warm ocean breezes. It’s early December when this dark, depressing story opens: “The skies are dull and white,” the ocean is gray, and the homes are encircled by “stunted and knock-kneed forest.” A low-grade hurricane, Marinovich writes, “would have ripped all of those fragrant pines out of the shallow graves their roots sat in.”

Unlike those scrubby trees, Scott and Elise, married four years, have already been uprooted. They moved from Brooklyn to care for Elise’s father, Victor, during his slow death from colon cancer. Scott and Elise may look like caring do-gooders, but as the story soon reveals, they prefer doing bad things — really bad things.

Elise left her job as a pediatric speech therapist in Park Slope to care for her father. Scott is a mediocre photographer who lost his job as an adjunct professor at the New School. For kicks, he once presented himself to one of Elise’s clients as a speech therapist and spent an hour working with the child while Elise listened outside the door.

No surprise then that creepy Scott gets off on snooping around the house next to Victor’s. One day, when he discovers the front door unlocked, he goes inside.

“There was no denying the thrill of it,” Scott says. “I felt like a suburban astronaut, exploring an abandoned home in which the crew had gone missing.”

In no time, he’s bringing Elise into the house where neither of them is shy about utilizing the thrill of the break-in as a “marital aid.” They have sex in one of the bedrooms and then make a horrifying discovery. Instead of calling the police, which would require explaining why they were in the house — they walk away. Scott, though, will return again and

again, pushing the plot toward something truly nasty.

And then there’s the matter of the “winter girl”: “Everyone,” Victor tells Scott, “should have a winter girl.” Victor, it turns out, is not just some poor old guy dying from cancer. The identification of his winter girl and what that means are disturbing revelations that you’ll be dying to find out.

But even though “The Winter Girl” is dark and dismal — Marinovich may have given birth to Hamptons noir — the novel is, essentially, the anatomy of a marriage and what happens when deadly secrets, like poisonous snakes, threaten those who seek to get close to them. Marinovich writes with startling authenticity about how it feels to be in a miserable relationship.

“The Winter Girl” is told from Scott’s naive perspective, and like him we don’t know a lot about Elise. Nor do we know much about Victor, the mysterious winter girl or the owners of the house next door. Maybe that’s because Scott is a master of selfabsorption, ruminating endlessly on the sorry state of his marriage.

“Don’t believe all that garbage you hear about happy couples,” he says. “The sad ones know more, feel everything twice as much. . . .

When an unhappy couple is happy, it’s almost like having a vision, or speaking in tongues. It’s like you’ve somehow burst to the surface on someone’s shoulders and been given a few moments to see everything you’ve been missing.”

If you had a love/hate relationship with Nick and Amy Dunne, the crazy couple at the center of Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” you’ll feel equally at home with Scott and Elise — just be forewarned that this devilishly good story is scads more scary. To quote Scott, “The worst decisions never let you go. They come circling back, even on the best days, to find you.” n Memmott is a freelance writer who lives in Northern Virginia.

A

THE WINTER GIRL

By Matt Marinovich Doubleday 224 pp. $24.95

MAGGIE SMITH A Biography

By Michael Coveney St. Martin’s. 353 pp. $27.99

l

REVIEWED BY

S IBBIE O ’ S ULLIVAN

lthough Maggie Smith has been admired by theater devotees since the 1950s, today she is recognized by millions, thanks to “Harry Potter” and “Downton Abbey.”

But being recognized is not the same as being knowable, as the brightest star is often the one farthest away. That is the challenge Michael Coveney confronts in his new biography, a continuation of his earlier one, “Maggie Smith: A Bright Particular Star” (1992). If Smith the person remains obscure, her “particular” acting talent is evident on each page.

Hers is a very British story: Born in 1934 to rigid, lower-middle-class parents, Smith shaped her future through determination and “stealth,” first at Oxford High School for girls, then at the Oxford Playhouse.Shewantedtoact,soshe did. London would soon be calling.

By 21, she was doing Broadway.

The Old Vic, a renowned English theater, became Smith’s home base in 1959. After that, there was no looking back. She excelled at comedy and tragedy. Soon there would be awards, television work and a seven-year film contract. Coveney tells us that her “breakthrough was now fully accomplished. She was working with theeliteof her profession.” In 1970, she won an Oscar for best actress for her performance in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” and numerous honors would accrue on both sides of the Atlantic.

Coveney’s descriptions of Smith’s early years read like a who’s who of British theater, film and television, and although one will recognize the most famous names, many require a Google search. Binkie Beaumont, anyone?

Even though this name-dropping might irritate readers who are not invested in British theatrical history, it provides a detailed backdrop for Smith’s ascent. She may have considered herself just a working actor, but everyone else knew she was headed for more.

As Smith is a private person, we see her through the comments of

her peers, and those comments, throughout the book, point the reader to a consensus of sorts. Her “gesticulatory repertoire” depends on loose limbs, expressive wrists and good timing. One critic characterizes her as having a “unique oddity.” In one Restoration drama, her “purr becomes . . . an ecstatic snap of the jaws: The cat turns chameleon turns crocodile.”

To some, she transcends human categorization. One of her directors remarked that “she can respond to something that perhaps only squirrels would sense in the air.” Everyone agrees that her intonation is superb, her eyes divine and her concentration unbreakable. She is a magical actor, full of “biological bravura.”

But who is she offstage? Coveney’s book has less to say about that. Married twice and the mother of two sons (“wobbly turnips,” she called them as babies), she didn’t return to England when her mother died (“What could I do? . . .

One can’t just chuck a show”). Her wit is acid-laced, and it’s surprising to learn that someone so grounded in actuality once consulted a “psychic nutritionist.” In a rare interview, she declared: “I don’t like myself very much. I’d much rather be someone else.”

So, we’re left with the work. And what work it is. Although much is made of Smith’s latest roles in “Harry Potter” and “Downton Abbey,” Coveney consistently directs us to less-famous but superb examples. It’s the monodrama for BBC TV, Alan Bennett’s “A Bed Among the Lentils” (1988), that deserves the most attention. Here is Smith, sans magic wand, as an unadorned housewife telling her story of hope and desperation with only her voice and facial expressions. Her performance transcends expectations. This has always been her talent: We may not know who she is, but she helps us understand who we are. n O’Sullivan writes on the arts and lives in Wheaton, Md.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2016

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Don’t fuss over measles; worry about flu shot rates DAVID ROPEIK is an instructor at Harvard and author of “How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.”

You probably heard about the Disneyland measles outbreak last year. One infected person is thought to have visited the theme park, and thanks in part to low immunization rates, 142 people in California and six other states got sick. It wasn’t close to the worst recent measles outbreak in the United States, but because of its origin in the shadow of Cinderella’s castle, it produced a crescendo of media and public concern about the larger problem of childhood vaccination rates, which have dipped slightly in some states. The discussion around vaccine reluctance has been growing for years, amplified by the chorus of celebrities and politicians who’ve weighed in, and the childhood vaccination problem has been the primary focus of public health officials in charge of vaccine programs for more than a decade.

But by any imaginable metric, resistance to childhood vaccination is hardly the most worrisome category of vaccination reluctance in the United States. Yes, hundreds of children are getting sick from measles or dying of pertussis (whooping cough) in communities where vaccine refusal has allowed what should have been isolated cases to spread. It’s tragic and infuriating.

But it is nowhere near the health threat Americans face because of the astoundingly low number of people getting vaccinated each year against the flu.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that since the 1970s, influenza has killed between 3,000 and 49,000 people each year, most of whom were 65 or older. An average of 200,000 people per year get so sick they have to be hospitalized, including 20,000 children under 5, whose immune systems haven’t fully developed.

In 2011-2012, the latest flu season for which the CDC has firm numbers, the illness killed 37 kids

under 18. It killed 122 children the season before and 348 during the 2009-2010 H1N1 pandemic.

These figures dwarf the stats for measles and pertussis. The CDC recorded 222 cases of measles in America in 2011, 120 in people 19 or younger. Nobody died. 2012 was a record year for pertussis, with 48,277 cases and 20 deaths, 18 of those in children.

The CDC recommends an annual flu vaccination for anyone 6 months and older. Herd immunity for flu — which means enough people are vaccinated so that if one person gets sick, the disease can’t spread — would be achieved if roughly 80 percent of us were inoculated. There isn’t a single age group that meets those targets. The CDC estimates flu vaccination rates of 67 percent for adults 65 and older, 47 percent for people 50 to 64, 34 percent for those 18 to 49, and 59 percent for kids 17 and under.

If the risk is so high, why are these vaccination rates so low? In short, because facts alone don’t determine how we feel about a risk. The affective, emotional nature of risk perception is such that we sometimes worry more than the evidence warrants — parents overly concerned about the health risks of childhood vaccines, for instance — and we sometimes don’t worry as much as the evidence warns. When it

H. LORREN AU JR./ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

comes to the flu, people aren’t nearly as worried as the facts suggest they should be.

In one study of adults who didn’t get the flu vaccine, 28 percent of respondents said, “I don’t need it,” and 16 percent said, “I didn’t get around to it” — essentially, they weren’t worried enough. Fourteen percent said, “I don’t believe in flu vaccines,” even though in most years, the vaccine reduces your chance of getting sick by more than half.

Another 14 percent said, “I might get the flu from the vaccine.”

(Like the association between childhood vaccines and autism, this common myth is incorrect.)

Five percent said, “I dislike needles,” even though the vaccine now comes in nasal-spray form.

And 3 percent said, “No vaccine was available,” which is stunning, since tens of millions of doses are prepared each year and millions of doses are thrown away unused at the end of every flu season.

Studies of the psychology of risk perception by Paul Slovic and others have found that we worry much more about risks to kids than risks to adults, and we worry much less about risks with which we’ve grown familiar, such as the regular seasonal flu. What worries us more prompts more widespread and more passionate advocacy, including more media attention. Together those factors raise pressure on the government to respond to what we’re most afraid of, even though what we

fear more might not be what threatens us the most.

That’s why we need better programs to increase flu vaccination rates, including improved public education and communication about risks.

We should also consider requiring vaccination for healthcare workers and for other workers who physically interact with the public; economic incentives, such as discounts on health insurance similar to those already offered to nonsmokers or people who join a gym; and disincentives, such as higher outof-pocket doctor’s visit fees for those who choose not to vaccinate.

Such programs would undoubtedly be cost effective.

They certainly would protect public health, and children’s health, far more than efforts to increase childhood vaccination rates for other diseases (work that should continue, of course).

A CDC report in December 2014 found that if flu vaccination levels had reached the government’s target of 70 percent during the 2013-2014 flu season, 5.9 million illnesses and 42,000 flu-related hospitalizations could have been avoided.

Tens of thousands of us are getting sick or dying from influenza. These illnesses and deaths could be dramatically reduced if we had the right priorities — and if we all simply got our flu shots. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

The president is right on guns GABRIELLE GIFFORDS is a Democrat from Arizona, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2012 and is a co-founder of Americans for Responsible Solutions.

The new year is a time of optimism and new commitments. For me, it’s also a powerful time for an additional reason: Every Jan. 8, I think about how close I came to losing my life on a bright January morning five years ago in Tucson, when a would-be assassin opened fire on me and a group of my constituents, injuring 12 others and killing six.

I was shot in the head from three feet away, but somehow I survived.

I made a decision that my new life would be lived as my old life was: in service of our country.

One thing that means for me is using my second chance to do everything I can to make this great country safer from the kind of gun violence that took the lives of those around me, and changed many others’, and mine, forever.

Instead of focusing on what I cannot do, I have tried to live without limits. I’ve set myself tougher and tougher goals. I’ve learned and delivered speeches. I jumped out of an airplane. In November, I rode 40 miles in Tucson’s annual charity bike ride, El Tour de Tucson.

And with my husband, Mark Kelly, I have fought to make sure our leaders finally do something to save the lives of the 33 Americans who are murdered with a gun every day.

Today, five years after I was shot, we are making progress.

While Congress refuses to act, many state leaders are embracing common-sense change that keeps guns out of the wrong hands.

This week, we made even more progress when President Obama announced that he is acting to significantly narrow the loopholes that let people buy guns without a background check. It is the right, responsible thing to do.

The president’s reasonable proposal addresses a lethal problem: People who are in the business of selling guns can avoid the current requirement to conduct background checks on their buyers by claiming not to be gun dealers. Go to a gun show, for example, and in booths right next to licensed gun dealers whose customers have to undergo a background check, you will see others who operate outside of the rules, selling dozens or hundreds of the same guns each year without a background check.

The steps announced this week will narrow that gap by requiring anyone who sells a significant number of guns or operates like a commercial dealer to get a license and require their buyers to pass a criminal background check. Truly private sales, such as simply selling a gun to a neighbor or a friend, will not be affected. But millions of firearms transactions that currently happen with no questions asked will be subject to background checks.

The president’s proposal makes another key improvement: It addresses the weakness in the background-check system that allowed a dangerous man to buy a gun and murder nine innocent people in a Charleston, S.C., church. It does this by making the system more efficient and effective, including by increasing the number of records examiners by 50 percent and reporting which states do and don’t provide essential background check records to the FBI. Other important provisions will require gun dealers to report lost and stolen guns, making it easier to crack down on the illegal gun trade; and increase investment in gun safety technology and mental-health treatment. This is common sense.

Almost three years ago, when a minority of senators caved in to

their fear of the corporate gun lobby and blocked sensible, bipartisan background-checks legislation in Congress, I said that those senators had failed their constituents, and with every preventable gun death, made shame their legacy.

Many of those same senators, along with a lot of other elected officials and some candidates for president, will be quick to haul out the talking points the gun lobbyists gave them and attack Obama’s reasonable action. They will warn of dire consequences and spread misinformation. But the truth is this: These new steps will hurt no one but they will protect many.

Around mile 32 of the bike ride I did in November, I almost gave up. I’m mostly paralyzed on my right side, and even though I had been training for months, my body was tired and it was hard to keep going. But I remembered my goal. I had a team of friends and supporters with me, so we just kept pedaling together. And then we crossed the finish line.

Reducing the number of Americans murdered or injured by guns is also not easy. It’s a long, hard haul. But we cannot falter now, and we cannot wait for a Congress in the gun lobby’s grip to prevent any of the 12,000 gun murders that happen in our country every year. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2016

22

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

BY JONES

We must fight Putin’s propaganda PAULA J. DOBRIANSKY AND DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. Paula J. Dobriansky was undersecretary of state for global affairs from 2001 to 2009. David B. Rivkin Jr. is a constitutional lawyer who served in the Justice Department and the White House under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Although international relations are not conducted under Marquess of Queensberry rules and political satire can be expected from one’s foes, intensely personal attacks on foreign leaders are uncommon except in wartime. While Soviet-era anti-American propaganda could be sharp, it did not employ slurs. But in recent years, racist and scatological salvos against foreign leaders have become a staple of official Russian discourse.

Turkish, German and Ukrainian officials are cast as sycophantic stooges of the United States. While slamming Ankara at a December news conference for shooting down a Russian plane that violated Turkish airspace, Russian President Vladimir Putin opined that “the Turks decided to lick the Americans in a certain place.”

The ugliest vilification campaign has been reserved for President Obama. Government officials openly send anti-Obama tweets. Irina Rodnina , a wellknown Duma member, tweeted doctored images of Barack and Michelle Obama staring longingly at a banana.

Nobody in Russia gets to freelance propaganda-wise. Thus, anti-Obama rants, even when coming from prominent individuals outside government, have Putin’s imprimatur. Russian

media personalities, including Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of the widely viewed “News of the Week” TV roundup, often deliver racist slurs, as compiled by Mikhail Klikushin on the Observer Web magazine. Evgeniy Satanovskiy, a Russian academic and frequent guest on Kiselyov’s program, recently also referred to Obama as a “monkey,” prompting laughter and applause from the audience.

Russia’s print and electronic media carry stories depicting Obama as lazy and incompetent.

Shops sell bumper stickers, posters, T-shirts and cardboard cut-outs with images of Obama as an ape and a chimney sweep.

Obama has been burned in effigy on numerous occasions, and zoo animals have been named after him, including a black piglet at the Volgograd zoo.

This despicable onslaught is not just the random venting of a

narcissistic Kremlin leader but also an indispensable component of Putin’s efforts to mobilize domestic support for his policies and enhance his standing. The fact that this propaganda campaign is working — Putin and his policies remain popular — is attributable to several factors.

First, the Kremlin controls the news and entertainment media.

Journalists who have refused to toe the official line have been fired, jailed or killed. This state monopoly, particularly when combined with the palpable failure by the West to communicate effective rebuttals to Russian audiences, has enabled the regime to mold Russian perceptions on every major policy issue.

Second, these propaganda themes skillfully capitalize on nostalgia felt by the Russian people about Moscow’s imperial past, which is often perceived in a highly idealized light.

But Putin’s propaganda campaign also bespeaks of certain desperation. The Russian economy is in free fall, buffeted by falling oil prices and Western sanctions. Fuel shortages and the resulting disruption of deliveries of key commodities pose a particular challenge to the Kremlin. Corruption and mismanagement are rampant and have drawn the ire of the

Russian people.

There is widespread labor unrest in cities where privatesector workers have not been paid for months at a time. Even fire and rescue first responders employed by the federal Ministry of Emergency Situations have not been paid in months.

Against this backdrop, and lacking either democratic or ideological legitimacy, Putin’s government is increasingly brittle. As the Kremlin doubles down on its aggressive foreign policy and increases domestic repression, it has also intensified its global propaganda efforts.

All Americans should support a robust U.S. response. To present such a response effectively to global audiences, Congress should promptly enact bipartisan legislation proposed by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Edward R. Royce (RCalif.) and ranking Democrat Eliot L. Engel (N.Y.) to revitalize America’s public diplomacy infrastructure. Winning the global battle of ideas is an essential part of fostering a stable democratic world order. The United States must lead in challenging Moscow’s racist propaganda and highlighting the moral narrative of democracy, tolerance, human rights and rule of law. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Habits BY

W ENDY W OOD

Just 8 percent of Americans achieve their New Year’s resolutions. A quarter will give up by the end of the second full week of January.

Since many of these pledges involve trying to establish new habits or conquer bad ones, here are some of the most common myths about changing habits:

1

A lack of willpower is to blame for our bad habits.

One-third of Americans say they lack the self-control that they need to accomplish their goals. About one-fourth attribute trouble sticking to a diet, for example, to personal character defects such as laziness.

In truth, many of our behaviors are not guided by self-control.

Half of the tasks we perform daily are things we do without thinking. And studies show that people with high levels of selfcontrol aren’t constantly battling temptation — they’re simply relying on good habits to exercise or to pay the bills on time without thinking about it much. In that way, high self-control is an illusion, instead consisting of a bedrock of habitual patterns.

2

Apps can help us change our behavior.

Apps such as Fitbit, MyFitnessPal and BookLover promise to help us change our habits by tracking our good (or bad) behavior.

But most apps simply monitor what you’re doing, which doesn’t necessarily lead to behavior change. As one group of scientists noted, there is “little evidence . . . that [apps] are bridging that gap.”

In my research, I’ve found that certain types of planning and monitoring get in the way of creating new habits, perhaps because they focus our attention on things that are irrelevant to behavior change. Some people might like these devices. But until there’s broader evidence of effectiveness, I recommend that most people don’t bother with them.

3

It takes 21 days to form a new habit.

This idea stems from a popular 1960s book by Maxwell Maltz, and it’s often repeated today. Self-help books promise that you can fix your woes in just three weeks.

In truth, there’s no magic number when it comes to establishing habits. They are created slowly as people repeat behaviors in a stable context.

Some simple health behaviors, such as drinking a glass of water before each meal, had to be repeated for only 18 days before people did them without thinking, according to one recent study. Others, such as exercise, needed closer to a year of repetition. Researchers found that it took an average of 66 days for a new habit to form.

For most people, more important than repeating an action for a set number of days is establishing a routine. Doing something at the same location or time of day (such as putting on sunscreen before you leave the house every morning) can help outsource control of the action.

4

The best way to change a habit is to set realistic goals.

In my lab, we recently conducted a study with people who wanted to change some behavior. When asked whether they would prefer a self-help book about goal-setting or one about environmental change, they overwhelmingly chose the book on goal-setting.

This is a mistake. Modifying our environment lets us remake our behavior without over-

ANDY ROBERTS/CAIAIMAGE VIA GETTY IMAGES

relying on willpower. Unwanted habits can be disrupted by changing the cues that activate them. People eat less unhealthy food if they put lids on candy dishes at the office and if stores place unhealthy snacks at the back of displays. Altering your surroundings can also set up cues to promote desired behaviors.

People who weigh less keep fruit on their kitchen counters. And children without televisions in their bedrooms have lower BMIs than children with. Of course, these sorts of associations don’t prove that putting fruit on your countertop or removing TVs will make you thinner. But they show how our environments cue healthy behaviors, or the reverse.

A study of returning Vietnam War veterans shows just how important environment can be.

Twenty percent were addicted to heroin while they were serving overseas. But just 5 percent relapsed after they returned home. Researchers concluded that these shockingly low rates were due to the dramatic change in environment vets experienced.

Back in the States, the triggering cues all but disappeared.

5

Learning about the benefits of new habits helps change our behavior.

This common misperception forms the basis for a plethora of public health efforts. For example, the federal government’s “Fruits and Veggies: More Matters” campaign has tried to educate people about the benefits of eating greens. It hasn’t worked. Since its inception in 2007, fruit and vegetable consumption has gone down.

That’s no surprise. Research has repeatedly shown that educating people about the benefits of a behavior does not change habits necessarily. Habits are formed through doing.

In our research, we’ve found that old habit associations endure, and hinder behavioral changes, even after people adopt new intentions. For example, once you see a prompt to surf the Web, it’s hard to forget that and focus instead on your new resolution. With habits, we learn not by learning, but by doing. n Wood is a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2016

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Sample Flavors of the Region at the Wenatchee

Presented by Forte Architects

Wenatchee Valley Museum 127 S. Mission St., Wenatchee Saturday, Jan. 23, 2016 6pm to 9pm v $50, or $40 for museum members; group pricing available v Sample award-winning wines and tasty bites v Live music v Silent auction v Bottles of wine available for purchase v Event proceeds, including wine sales, benefit the Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center v Tickets may be purchased in person, by calling 509.888.6240, or online at www.wenatcheevalleymuseum.org