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IN COLLABORATION WITH
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STEPPING UP
The little-known group that trains women to run for office — and win
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THE FIX
DACA now a game of chicken BY
A ARON B LAKE
C
ongress had a deadline, a mandate from the president, and an overwhelmingly popular program to center its latest immigration reform effort around. And yet, as it has so many times before, it again came up short. Four separate votes on four separate immigration packages Thursday all failed, leaving the immigration debate as stuck as it’s ever been and adding to the failures of 2007, 2010 and 2013. And that’s despite the almost universal desire to pass something — anything — to protect “dreamers.” Now we’re headed for a game of chicken. March 5 is the deadline for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program’s expiration, after President Trump terminated President Obama’s executive action protecting hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. That could be delayed for months because of court challenges, but we’re basically headed for a situation in which dreamers could lose their protections. Almost everybody says they don’t want that — including Trump. Yet he’s attempted to use DACA as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Democrats to get more border security and even funding for a border wall. It’s a highly unusual setup in which Democrats have basically been making concessions in exchange for something Trump has said he wants Congress to codify. Apparently in a desire to make it happen — and recognizing Republicans have the power over which bills to vote on — Democrats have played ball. But patience with what Democrats view as their own good-faith effort to negotiate has now apparently run out. It’s now about public pressure and gamesmanship as we draw closer and closer to the actual end of DACA. Trump has said DACA is dead without an
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SHANNON STAPLETON/REUTERS
Activists march up Broadway Thursday during the start of a five-day, 250-mile walk from New York to Washington, D.C., to demand that Congress pass a bill to help “dreamers.”
immigration deal — apparently signaling he won’t resurrect the program with an executive action of his own, even if just to give Congress more time. But if the program does lapse, Democrats may actually see their bargaining power increase. A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed Americans support protections for dreamers 73 percent to 21 percent. Even Republicans backed it 49 to 40 percent. Trump may argue that he can’t legally renew DACA and that Congress has to do it. But if and when it lapses, he will officially have undone a program protecting young people who became undocumented immigrants because of decisions that weren’t their own when they were children. If and when they get deported, it will be because of an action Trump took. That could be a PR problem for the GOP — and one they may try harder to avoid as we get closer to it becoming a reality. We know from the recent spending-bill fights that Congress will go right up to, or past, a deadline.
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. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 19
Trump and fellow Republicans may argue it’s congressional Democrats’ fault for failing to make enough concessions in the deals that earned votes Thursday. But strictly speaking, Trump is the one who undid DACA, and Congress could probably pass a stand-alone DACA bill immediately if he urged Congress to do so. He hasn’t done so, of course, and the White House has even suggested it would veto the bipartisan bill that came up six votes shy, despite it containing plenty of concessions in exchange for DACA. The question is whether that changes as we get closer to a deadline. Both sides seem to think the other will cave. Given the spectacular failures of the four bills on Thursday, it seems that’s about all that’s left in this debate. It’s a hell of a way to do business. But then again, this is Congress we’re talking about; things generally don’t happen until there’s a crisis affecting real people. n
©The Washington Post
ON THE COVER As one group trains women to run for political office, enthusiasm and expectations clash with reality. Illustration by MALIKA FAVRE for The Washington Post
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NATION
Despite the drills, never really ready
MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Students and faculty had run drills, but gunman still brought death to Fla. high school BY K EVIN S ULLIVAN, S AMANTHA S CHMIDT AND D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD
Parkland, Fla.
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he young man got out of an Uber, wearing school colors. He had on a maroon polo shirt with the logo of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Eagles on the sleeve. He was carrying a black backpack and a long black bag. He was walking — “purposefully,” a police report would later say — toward
the school’s “1200 building.” Three stories of classrooms, with interior hallways and few means of escape. If the gunman, whom police identified as Nikolas Cruz, 19, was trying to disguise himself as a student, it didn’t work. He was too well known at Douglas, where staffers had been warned that the troubled former student could someday potentially pose a risk. A staffer recognized him instantly and radioed to warn a co-worker. But the shooter still got to the 1200 building.
A few seconds later, the same worker heard gunshots. “Code Red!” he radioed — an all-out emergency call, meant to trigger a campus lockdown. In the next five minutes, 17 people were fatally shot. “I heard a girl screaming for help,” said Nathanael Clark, a student at the South Florida school. “And we can’t open the door because if we open the door then . . . the shooter will come inside and kill all of us. And then I heard gunshots after the screams.” Before Wednesday, the town of
People gather for a candlelight vigil in Parkland, Fla., in memory of the victims of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Seventeen people were killed in Wednesday’s rampage, the second-deadliest shooting to take place in a U.S. public school.
Parkland was known for being the safest city in Florida, with just seven violent crimes reported last year. Douglas — a high-achieving school set among suburbs on the edge of the Everglades — was known for graduating baseball star Anthony Rizzo. Its news was high school news: There was a dance marathon coming up. The tennis team was selling hoodies, yoga pants and pajamas with the Douglas logo, according to that morning’s announcements; see Coach Pena in the guidance office for details.
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NATION If the students felt safe, it was because they were prepared. There was an armed police officer on campus. The students had practiced to deal with an active shooter. But then, on Wednesday, police said, trouble arrived. The gunman walked purposefully, and nothing stopped him. “They knew what to do. We knew what to do,” said Melissa Falkowski, a teacher at the school, talking about students and faculty on CNN. “And, even still — even with that — we have 17 casualties.” She started to cry. On Wednesday morning, the suspect was staying with a friend’s family, which had taken him in after Cruz’s mother died last year. Most mornings, the friend’s father drove Cruz to an adult-education class, where he was studying for a GED. Not Wednesday. “He said something to the effect of, ‘Oh, it’s Valentine’s Day, I don’t go to school on Valentine’s Day,’ ” said Jim Lewis, an attorney who represents the family Cruz was staying with. That afternoon, Cruz hailed an Uber, using the online car-service app. In the car on the way to Douglas, he was texting with the friend whose family had taken him in. That friend was a junior at Douglas. He was in class as Cruz neared the school. But Cruz’s texts to him gave no reason for alarm. “Hey yo, hey whatcha doin?” was the last text Cruz sent, Lewis recounted. That was 2:18 p.m. At 2:19 p.m., the gunman arrived, according to a police timeline released Thursday. He walked into the 1200 building, also called the “freshman building,” because many of the classes were for first-years. Authorities say he removed an AR-15 assault-style rifle from the long black bag. At about 2:21 p.m., the shooting began. Bullets streamed from the hallway, through doorways, into classrooms on the first floor. In a psychology class, a bullet came in through the window in the classroom door and skimmed past Meghan Hill’s ear, trailing an intense ringing sound. It struck her friend in the knee. Three others also were hit. The gunman moved on. “No one was crying,” said Mackenzie Hill, Meghan’s twin sister, relaying her sister’s memories.
MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
The wounded were moaning. After firing into four classrooms on the first floor, police say the gunman went upstairs. Mackenzie, who’d just left the psychology class to use an upstairs bathroom, saw a man with a gun at the other end of the second-floor hallway. Mackenzie said she recognized him. “I immediately knew it was him,” she said. She remembered the boy from her middle school and from the Dollar Store in town. She recalled his terrifying Instagram posts about wanting to kill people. “I always had a bad feeling about him,” she said. Mackenzie, caught in the hallway, rushed to the nearest classroom. She knocked on the door. But the school had gone on lockdown. She couldn’t get in. She knocked on another door. A teacher she didn’t know looked out, saw her and opened the door. He must have “seen the fear on my face,” Mackenzie said. She hid in the back of the classroom, beside a desk, with students she barely knew. One girl was having trouble breathing. Mackenzie texted a photo to her parents, showing her hiding under a desk, tears falling down her face. “I love you guys so much,” she texted, fearing it could be her last communication. Elsewhere, entire classes were caught in the hallways: They had heard an alarm — possibly related to the shooting — and thought it
was a fire drill. So they left their classrooms, dutifully following the protocol for the wrong kind of emergency. Hearing the shots, geography teacher Scott Beigel tried to reverse course and rush his students back into the room he’d just left. He had locked it behind them. Beigel unlocked the door. Students ran in and cowered behind the teacher’s desk. They noticed Beigel wasn’t with them. “My teacher is on the floor,” Kelsey Friend, 16, texted her mother. Beigel, 35, had been shot while rushing students to safety. He died. “He’s my Superman,” Friend said Thursday. “Superman saves lives, and that’s exactly what Mr. Beigel did.” Another school staffer — Aaron Feis, an assistant football coach and security guard — also was credited with sacrificing his life to save students during the rampage. Elsewhere in the school, students huddled inside closets, under desks, searching for news coverage and texting parents and siblings and friends. “I love you,” Meghan Hill wrote in text messages to her sister, as they hunkered down one floor apart. “Please be safe.” In one classroom, a student used the social-media app Snapchat to record his classmates hiding. In the video, gunfire seems to be coming through the door into the classroom — about 18 shots, the gunman so close that smoke seemed to billow in the window
At Parkridge Church in Coral Springs, Fla., Fabio Rodriguez kisses his wife, Nicole, at a vigil for victims of the high school shooting. Authorities said a 19-year-old admitted to carrying out Wednesday’s attack, which killed 17.
A video monitor shows shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz making an appearance in court Thursday.
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behind the bullets. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” the student screamed, along with others. At 2:24 p.m., just five minutes after police say the gunman got out of the car in front of the school, the shooting stopped, according to an official police timeline. The rifle and backpack were ditched in a stairwell, and police say the shooter left the school in a crowd of fleeing students. In a Douglas High School polo shirt, he blended in. The armed police officer on the Douglas campus never encountered him, police said. The gunman walked to a nearby Walmart, police said, and bought a drink at the Subway outlet inside. Then he left and went to a McDonald’s. He sat for a while, then moved on. Back at the school, police began to clear classrooms, scooping up the wounded and leaving the dead. Students evacuated past bodies of their teachers and classmates, both inside and outside the building. Nathanael Clark — who’d heard a girl pleading for help outside his classroom’s locked door — left that classroom at last. He saw a girl’s body outside. He wondered if it was the girl he had heard. In the classroom where Mackenzie Hill had been hiding, police broke through the door. As the officers were guiding students out, they noticed something odd: One of the students had put on a bulletproof vest. The student said he’d been given the vest by his father, a police officer. Even in the safest city in Florida, he’d brought it to school with him, just in case. As ambulances began to bring the wounded to nearby hospitals, and students began to reunite with parents, Officer Michael Leonard spotted the suspected shooter walking into a neighborhood about a mile and a half from campus. Maroon shirt, black pants — the description matched. But Leonard said he hesitated, just for a moment. Could this really be the mass shooter he was looking for? This 5-foot-7, 120-pound teenager? “He looked like a typical high school student,” said Leonard, of the Coconut Creek Police. Leonard called out. The young man didn’t run. He lay down on the grass, and the handcuffs went on. It was 3:41 p.m. n ©The Washington Post
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WORLD
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Animal activists fear repeat of Sochi I SABELLE K HURSHUDYAN Moscow BY
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ochi’s strays were smuggled into cars and sped away to safety or adopted by famous athletes who later dedicated Instagram accounts to their new pups. As the world reacted with outrage to the city’s plans to kill the animals ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics, Russian activists hoped the experience would serve as a wake-up call for the country. Four years later, it’s more like deja vu. Conscious of its image as it prepares to host the World Cup soccer tournament this summer, Russia has been implementing plans to remove street dogs while avoiding the publicity disaster of four years ago, when dog lovers from all over the world scrambled to save Sochi’s strays from being shot with deadly poison darts. The sight of dogs dying in public spaces prompted an international outcry. “This is a question of our country’s reputation, because we are not savages, committing mass murder of animals on the streets, tossing their bloodied corpses into vehicles and driving them around town,” Vladimir Burmatov, the head of the Russian Parliament’s ecology and environmental protection committee, told Parlamentskaya Gazeta. There are an estimated 2 million strays in Russia’s World Cup host cities, and Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Mutko, a former sports minister, recently ordered the 11 regions to set up temporary shelters. But because city governments control their own budgets for such matters, activists are concerned that the killings will happen anyway, noting that some World Cup cities have already contracted companies to remove street dogs, perhaps through inhumane methods. Ekaterina Dmitrieva, the director of the Urban Animal Protection Fund, attended a roundtable discussion with Mutko recently, and she said he assured her that the killing of strays would stop.
YURI KOCHETKOV/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
As Russia prepares to host the World Cup, some worry whether strays will be handled humanely But the other week, Dmitrieva said, she discovered two more contracts posted for the city of Volgograd, with more than $22,000 allocated to the capture, maintenance and “destruction” of stray animals in that city. A Yekaterinburg city contract from Jan. 12, reviewed by The Washington Post, showed that more than $560,000 was paid to a company to catch and hold stray dogs. Dmitrieva said dogs in Yekaterinburg are kept for 10 days before being euthanized. In 2014, Sochi paid a company about $29,000 to remove 1,200 stray dogs and cats, using poisoned darts. Dmitrieva said the concern is that the same method may be used this time. “This looks like the economically effective way, but another question is: How do you measure life or death by economic effectiveness?” Dmitrieva said. One recent Sunday at a shelter in north Moscow, dogs rushed to the front of their cages at the sign of a person approaching, pressing
their front paws against the bars. They barked and howled for attention, four or five to a cell with snow covering the bottom. They are rarely let out of the cages, and most will spend their entire lives at the shelter. Shelters across Russia are expecting an influx of dogs as the World Cup nears. But Kelly O’Meara, senior director of companion animals and engagement at Humane Society International, said that because Russia doesn’t have “an adoption culture,” taking strays to a shelter isn’t the country’s best course of action. They’re overcrowded, she said, and many of the dogs are unprepared for the confined quarters. With just four months to go until the World Cup, O’Meara recommends mass vaccination for the rabies virus, a program she thinks would be relatively easy to implement. The most visible dogs are typically the friendliest, and they’re the easiest to catch. Vaccinate them, publicize the program to calm public fears, and the problem is solved,
A worker cares for dogs at a shelter in Moscow. In the runup to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, officials paid a company to remove stray dogs from the streets, using poisoned darts. Dog lovers around the globe were outraged at the sight of dogs dying in public places.
she said. “If you remove a street dog from the streets, or you remove a number of street dogs, the reason that there’s always new street dogs is you’re just opening up a void” for new arrivals, O’Meara said. “It’s a never-ending cycle. “Those friendly dogs that are being removed live harmoniously with people, but at the same time, they maintain that territory, so other dogs don’t come in,” she said. “So maybe more elusive, more aggressive, more unfriendly dogs are the ones that are going to be harder to catch. They’re the ones that are going to move into that void and repopulate it.” Concerns about Russia’s stray dogs — and the potential flak their fate could draw during the World Cup — have not been lost on international soccer officials. World Cup organizer FIFA and the Local Organizing Committee said in a statement to The Post that they “in no way condone cruel treatment of wild and stray animals” and would be monitoring “the appearance of stray animals in the stadiums” and “responding to any case in a humane manner.” FIFA and the organizing committee also said they were in contact with the host cities and “expect them to ensure the welfare of the animal population.” O’Meara said Humane Society International has written to Russian authorities offering to assist with vaccinations. But the longterm solution is sterilization, O’Meara and others say — neutering street dogs so that the population will decline naturally over time. That would also be the most cost-effective approach, she said. Considering that Russia was chosen as the 2018 World Cup host eight years ago, activists say they are disappointed the country didn’t turn to the sterilization option sooner. “Sochi was a catastrophe, and then the government said that they will never repeat what happened in Sochi,” Dmitrieva said. “Nothing is getting better. It’s getting worse.” n ©The Washington Post
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COVER STORY
SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST
a politician is born Trump’s victory enraged Kate Ranta. So she took a class in running for office.
BY JOANNA WALTERS
T
he morning of Nov. 9, 2016, found Kate Ranta sobbing under her quilt. She had taken to bed in her modest Alexandria, Va., apartment the night before, when it became clear which way the presidential election was going. Now, furious and heartbroken, she could not bring herself to get up. Across the country, millions of voters were feeling similarly devastated, but for Ranta, there were personal reasons why Donald Trump’s victory felt like a sucker punch. At the time, she was bracing to testify in the Florida trial of her ex-husband, who was charged with two counts of attempted murder for shooting her and her father — in front of the couple’s 4-year-old son. Since the shooting, she had moved back to her former home of Alexandria and become a gun-control activist. She’d met Nancy Pelosi and John Lewis; she’d spoken on the steps of the U.S. Capitol; she’d appeared in a documentary about National Rifle Association funding. And during the run-up to the election, she’d campaigned for Hillary Clinton. When Trump won, “after all that came out about what he thinks of women and how he treats them,” Ranta says, “I was incensed.” After the election, Ranta, 45, went about her duties as a digital marketer for a federal contractor, and as a single mom to William, now 9, and 14-year-old Henry, her son from an earlier marriage. But she was in a daze. Then, in December, she came across a Facebook post linking to a group called Emerge America, a national nonprofit that trains Democratic women to run for elected office. “I clicked on it and it was like a lightbulb moment,” Ranta recalls. Until then, she hadn’t seriously thought about entering politics — she had hardly any experience and few connections. But as she read further, she saw that perhaps she could get those things through the organization’s local chapter, Emerge Virginia, which offered a $750 political training program. The seven once-a-month sessions were designed to take women who were passionate political novices — women like her — and, by way of practical instruction and a network of contacts, turn them into candidates. She filled out the application.
Few people outside the world of politics have heard of Emerge — which started in California in 2002 — but the organization has, in recent years, become a quiet force. Of the 15 GOP seats that Democrats flipped in Virginia’s House of Delegates this past November, 11 were won by women — and nine of them were Emerge alumni. Across the country, Emerge alums have won 991 state and local races, and 21 are running for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, says Allison Abney, communications director of Emerge America. Those congressional hopefuls are part of a record 389 female candidates in House races, according to statistics kept by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University; there are also record numbers of women running for the U.S. Senate and state governorships. The center’s director, Debbie Walsh, says Emerge “is of tremendous value in the training process for women candidates.” And Virginia, in particular, needs an organization like Emerge, argues Toni-Michelle Travis, professor of political science at George Mason University. “We were one of the last states to send a woman to Congress: Leslie Byrne, in 1992!” she points out. Emerge’s training program — which is financed by individual donations, fundraising events and the tuition fees — offers advice on the details of running for office, but it also fosters assertiveness. Research has shown that women are less likely to believe in their own political potential. Jennifer Lawless of American University, for instance, has found that male college students are more than twice as likely as female college students to say they would be sufficiently prepared to run for office after they graduate and have been working for a while. The gender confidence gap is why groups like Emerge are necessary, says Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who was Clinton’s running mate: “There are so many women who would be fantastic public officials, but they need to be encouraged and given the tools to make them realize, ‘Hey, I can do this and be successful.’ ” Most Emerge participants don’t, of course, have histories as harrowing as Kate Ranta’s. But when she and 24 other women — Emerge Virginia’s Class of 2017, selected from a record
56 applicants — gathered in a drab suburban Richmond trade union building six days before Trump’s inauguration, it was clear that she wasn’t the only one whose private life helped provide motivation to pursue public office. Among the group was Lauren Colliver, 41, from Blacksburg, a mother of four who runs her husband’s medical practice. “I’m in a very red part of the state, and we’re a Jewish family, and it feels very isolated,” she said when introducing herself to the group. “First, I thought, ‘We are just going to tend our garden and look after ourselves,’ and then I was like, ‘Forget that, it’s time for me to stand up’.’ ” She said her husband was shocked and added, to ripples of knowing laughter: “I spend the whole time supporting him, so we are having a little power-shift issue right now.” McLean business consultant Lindsey Davis Stover, 39, told the women that her 7-year-old daughter had asked, about Trump, “How could someone so mean get elected?” before suggesting, “Mom, why don’t you just run?” Stover had been involved in politics but always behind the scenes: working as chief of staff for Texas Democratic Congressman Chet Edwards, and more recently as a liaison between the Obama White House and the Department of Veterans Affairs. For her part, Ranta took a deep breath and described how her ex-husband had initially showered her with gifts and affection before stalking her and eventually turning up with his gun. “He was love-bombing me,” she said. “But he was really an abuser, a sociopath. I know gaslighting. I know the pattern, now.” She saw ugly parallels in Trump. “And I still have relatives who voted for him.” Some of the women were in tears as she told her story, especially the part where she described how her ex stood over her with a gun after she’d already taken bullets to the chest and hand, as their son cried out: “Daddy, don’t shoot Mommy.” Presiding over the group was Emerge Virginia’s executive director, Julie Copeland, 50 — a longtime political operative who worked as then-Lt. Gov. Don Beyer’s chief of staff and as a campaign director during Mark Warner’s first run for U.S. Senate. On that January day, she continues on next page
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looked at her new cohorts, ages 26 to 57, and she glowed. It was, she would later tell me, the highest-caliber group she’d had to date, boasting a former spy, a senior nurse, an environmental advocate, several entrepreneurs, five lawyers, two military veterans and six federal employees, including a government linguist and an air traffic controller. There were 18 white women, four African Americans, two Latinas and one Korean American. Only one of the women had held public office before: Janelle Guest-Bakker, 36, a State Department employee from Fairfax who had been elected as an unpaid neighborhood precinct delegate in her native Detroit at 21. As the women introduced themselves, Copeland slipped in tips on stump speaking. Breathe deeply; this helps with confidence. Avoid: pen-clicking, ring-spinning, up-speaking, hair flopping over the face, giant earrings, busy blouses, and swaying while addressing the crowd. When the day wrapped up at 5 p.m., Ranta pointed her Ford Focus back in the direction of Alexandria, exhausted but buzzing. “That was amazing. I’m so fired up,” she said. Within hours the women had set up a private Facebook page and were pinging one another with their reflections on the day. At the February and March Saturday sessions, the getting-to-know-you coziness was
over. The cohort was drilled on message development, picking a seat to run for and getting on the ballot. The women were becoming a tight unit and networking with members of previous Emerge programs. Ranta was still stoked. She believed she’d do well in Virginia swing-state politics because she’d been brought up an enthusiastic Republican. “I had a little chalkboard and I wrote ‘Reagan’ on it with stars and hearts,” she remembers. Though she’d switched parties for Bill Clinton’s progressive policies and Everyman sensibilities, she thought she’d still be able to identify with moderate Republicans. Ranta’s own House of Delegates district belonged to a Democrat. But she noticed that the seat to the west, in Springfield, Va., was held by longtime Republican Del. Dave Albo — even though his district had gone for Clinton in 2016. She talked to Copeland about challenging Albo. “She thought it would be expensive and hard,” Ranta recalls, “but she was 100 percent supportive.” However, she says that Trent Armitage, then executive director of the House Democratic Caucus, had a different reaction when she met with him in Alexandria. “I was looking for, ‘Hell, yes, we’ll figure out a way to make this work,’ ” she recalls. Instead, she says, Armitage talked about how Albo, the popular hometown guy, had trounced previous opponents. “I had fire in my belly, but he just didn’t,” she remembers. “The wind was taken out of my sails a little bit.” (Armitage did not to respond to questions about this conversation. Instead, he emailed a statement that read, in part, “I was incredibly proud to have played a
role in helping to elect an historic number of diverse candidates, including a record number of women to the legislature.”) And stress was mounting in Ranta’s personal life. In February, she was laid off. A week later, she traveled to Florida to testify at her exhusband’s trial, where he was found guilty on both counts. Then, shortly before the sentencing in April, she was hospitalized for what turned out to be an anxiety attack. After that, she returned to Florida to give her victim impact statement and watch as her exhusband, sitting impassively, was given two 60-year prison sentences. It was a great relief for Ranta, who had been worried he would be released and come looking for her “to finish the job.” Ranta returned to Alexandria to forge ahead with her life. One of her Emerge cohorts had helped her get a marketing position at a nonprofit (though she would cycle through it and a few other jobs before landing at a good fit in September). Watching the early missteps by the Trump administration and reports of chaos in the White House, she was eager to find out where her political future lay. It’s rare for Emerge participants to announce they are running for office while still in the program. Yet by late April several of the women had declared their candidacies.
Top, Kate Ranta, left, with Chelsea Savage. The two took a course offered by Emerge Virginia that trains women to enter politics. Above, from left: Julie Copeland, executive director of Emerge Virginia, receives a quilt from Jacqueline Wilson and Candice Bennett during the women’s final political training session.
The first to announce was Chelsea Savage, 47, a nurse and the professional liability investigator for VCU Health in Richmond, who had enlisted to run for the Democratic nomination to challenge longtime Henrico County Del. John O’Bannon. “Julie sent me an email saying, ‘I need people to run,’ ” Savage said. “I felt like she had the creds and the connections to ask. Or maybe it’s because I’m a nurse and if someone says, ‘I need,’ I go running.” She threw her hat in the ring and soon drew attention not only for being a lesbian single mother in a rather conservative district but for being the survivor of a religious cult. After learning that three seats had opened up on the Blacksburg Town Council, Lauren Colliver looked at the issues she cared about — the environment, health care, discrimination, Blacksburg’s refugee families and increasing anti-Semitic vandalism across the country — and surprised herself by deciding to run. “It’s no longer okay to assume others are going to look out for my interests,” she told me. “And in this Emerge group, not one of us stands alone, and it feels better knowing that.” Then Lindsey Davis Stover declared she would fight for the Democratic nomination to challenge Barbara Comstock for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. “I’d always said no when people asked me about running for office. But it’s different now,” she told the group. Her husband Jeremey’s reaction was: “Finally!” Melissa Dart, 46, a health administrator from Richmond, declared she would try for the House of Delegates in the conservative 56th, a sprawling district that includes parts of Spotsylvania and Henrico counties. And Brittany Shearer, 27, revealed she was running for school board in Norfolk in 2018. As woman after woman announced, Copeland was simultaneously stunned and ecstatic. “In January, we didn’t expect anyone to run for office during the program,” she said. “And we weren’t looking to recruit candidates out of this class. But things happen.” Things were not happening for Ranta, however, at least not the right kind of things. In early April, Albo had abruptly announced he wouldn’t seek reelection for personal financial reasons, and the red seat in heavily blue Fairfax County was suddenly a prime target. Two other Democratic women had entered the race by then, however, and Ranta had missed the March filing deadline — though, looking back, she knew that moving and filing would have been difficult given everything going on in her life. She considered the congressional midterms, but there was no good target in the blue Alexandria area and, besides, campaigning would have to begin immediately. It was just too much, she concluded, though she longed to be part of the momentum. The group gathered for its late April training session at the GMMB political ad agency offices
in Foggy Bottom, overlooking the Potomac. The main exercise was mock stump speeches. One of the political consultants critiquing the
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COVER STORY women was Delacey Skinner, a founder of Eichenbaum Skinner Strategies and former political aide to Howard Dean and Tim Kaine. Copeland introduced her as “the candidate whisperer.” Lindsey Davis Stover spoke smoothly and had clearly done her research. But Skinner told her: “It’s not as passionate as it could be. Start with a story you really care about, otherwise it might seem too polished.” Voters in these populist times don’t always respond to competence, Skinner said, pointing to the example of Hillary Clinton. But she also acknowledged the difficulty of convincing voters you’re qualified, tough, confident and unflappable, yet warm, likable and authentic. Abigail Spanberger, 38, a charismatic exfederal cop and ex-CIA case officer, drew on her law enforcement experience in her practice speech. “When you work narcotics and money laundering,” she said, “you have your hand on the shoulder of the person in front of you and your gun drawn, a team going into a house, and it’s your job to keep everyone in there safe, even though you are there to arrest people.” She segued to health care and public education, then returned to national security for her payoff line. “Our country is in danger. We need people who can make hard decisions in tense times.” The class was spellbound. Chelsea Savage called out: “Abby, can you please run?” Skinner merely smiled and nodded approval. Ranta began her speech: “Boom, boom, boom, boom . . . boom. That’s what I heard when my ex-husband shot through the door of my apartment.” She went on to outline the rest of her story, then continued, confidently, “There are sensible solutions to gun violence.” When she moved on to other themes, however, she was more hesitant, and Skinner challenged her: “Kate, I’m not sure I’d start with your story. If you run, is it more important to you to win office or to fight for your causes?” “Win office,” Ranta said, instantly, sounding taken aback. “I do gun safety advocacy already, so my ambition to run for office is over and above that.” But she appreciated the feedback that she’d need to become better versed in other favorite policy topics and bring some of those to the forefront. The first political setback for the Class of ’17 occurred a few days after that April session: Savage lost her caucus to Debra Rodman, an anthropology and women’s studies professor at Randolph-Macon College, who had declared after she did. Shocked and crestfallen, Savage took small consolation in the fact that she had lost to another woman, who had been part of one of Emerge’s weekend “boot camp” training sessions. In June, Melissa Dart won her primary and Spanberger threw a party for her. But the euphoria soon mixed with the grinding reality of politics. Dart, who had also just been promoted at work, was having to travel a lot — both for her candidacy (across a sprawling district) and for her job — all while raising three young sons with her husband. She knew
PHOTOS BY SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST
she was in an uphill struggle in her solidly Republican district. She also felt she was getting limited financial and logistical support from the state party machine. “I almost broke down at one point, with the pressure,” Dart said in August. “But the reason I keep going forward is that it’s not about me. And I’m a different person than I was in January. Julie is one of the first people ever to say to me, ‘You are a leader. If you walk into a room, people follow.’ I know I’m meant to be here.” May’s Emerge session was about fundraising
— drawing up lists of potential donors and committing to daily “call time,” a euphemism for soliciting funds by phone — as well as recruiting volunteers and relentlessly knocking on voters’ doors. It was the vital but mundane stuff of good campaigns. The June class was taken up with diversity training, an emotionally charged session where the women brainstormed openly about gaps in their understanding of race, sexuality and social class. On July 10, Abigail Spanberger declared publicly that she would compete for the 2018 Democratic nomination to challenge Republican Congressman Dave Brat, a tea party conservative infamous for saying — about supporters of the Affordable Care Act — “the women are in my grill no matter where I go.” Her candidacy added to the excitement at Emerge’s “graduation” in late July, where the prosecco flowed — along with a few tears — and the women declared themselves a “political sorority.” But there was less a sense of finality than one of galloping continuity, with so many election campaigns in full swing. And so it continued into the fall, with many of the non-candidates helping out on the campaigns for Colliver, Dart and Spanberger. Much to Ranta’s delight, Lindsey Davis Stover, running in Northern Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, asked her to join her inner circle of policy advisers. “I rely on Kate for a lot of things, and she has a great heart,” Stover said. “She has expertise on reducing gun violence,
Johanna Shin takes a photograph with the rest of Emerge Virginia’s 2017 political training class.
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but she also understands a lot of economic issues facing many people in my district.” Then the November 2017 state election results struck like a thunderbolt, with Emerge alums playing a central role in many races. For members of the Emerge Class of ’17, however, the news wasn’t good: Melissa Dart lost her House of Delegates election decisively. Lauren Colliver became the first, and so far only, member of the group to win office by claiming a seat on the Blacksburg Town Council. Though the election of so many Emerge graduates from other classes burnished the organization’s star, the 2017 campaign cycle also exposed some fissures between the women of Emerge and the Democratic Party, as well as possible misunderstanding on the part of the candidates about how electoral politics works. It turned out that several women running in 2017 believed, like Dart, that the Democratic machine in Virginia had let them down. In fact, Copeland said, some of the Democratic women running for the House of Delegates, who belonged to a private Facebook group, were close to nominating five or six of their number to drop out of their races en masse in the late summer “and go to the press and reveal that the Democratic Party wasn’t helping them.” At the 11th hour, some of the candidates called Copeland, who spent several hours providing moral support but also warning them that if they dropped out, they’d never be able to run for anything again. “For me, this is a building process,” Copeland told me. “You cannot take a Republican district and flip it the first time. You have to knock on doors and find those Democrats. Maybe there will never be enough Democrats. [Dart] didn’t realize she would get no support, I know that. My board chair and I were talking about this last night: How do we teach this better — being on your own and never seeing your kids?” Emerge alum Jennifer Boysko, who was elected to the House of Delegates in 2015, says, “I agree there were some people who felt left out. It was a matter of capacity.” The party pitted more than 50 challengers against Republicans in House of Delegates races; typically, according to several people, the number of Democratic challengers is in the low 20s, because many GOP-held House seats go uncontested. When Ranta learned about the near uprising among unhappy female candidates, she thought back to her meeting with Armitage in February, when she’d briefly considered running for Albo’s seat. She says now, “I felt discouraged and dismissed.” In the end, Democrat Kathy Tran, who had attended an Emerge weekend boot camp, won the very seat Ranta had thought about pursuing. But Ranta refuses to dwell on what might have been. “You know what? The women won, and things have moved on,” she says. “They raised a ton of money and they flipped those seats. When it’s my time, I will do it, too.” n © The Washington Post
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LIFESTYLE
DANIEL FISHEL FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Hug it out? No, think it out. BY
L AVANYA R AMANATHAN
I
t seemed like a perfectly timed message for girls as the #MeToo movement picked up steam. “Reminder,” read a headline on the Girl Scouts Facebook page late last year. “She Doesn’t Owe Anyone a Hug. Not Even at the Holidays.” But the reaction was stunning . “You have gone overboard,” blasted one commenter among the hundreds of fiery responses to the November post. “One, no one MAKES a child give a hug. Two, don’t assume physical affection leads to negative behavior.” Countered another, “It’s about teaching a kid that her body is HERS, even from a young age.” Who would have thought that
hugging could trigger so much ire? After all, America today is a nation of huggers, clutching each other every chance we get. We hug to say hello, hug to say goodbye. Presidents hug. Total strangers hug. It’s harmless, right? More than that — it’s a sign that we’re open. That we’re caring. But now we have #MeToo. And it turns out that not everyone needs a hug. The Girl Scout dust-up exposed a deep national division — and not about the future of the republic. On one side of the gulf stand those who wonder why it has suddenly become so wrong to wrap your arms around another person — like, say, a co-worker — and hold them in a warm embrace.
On the other are those who want to know: Why in the world did anyone ever think it was right? Here’s what makes the hugging question so tricky: From the outside, all hugs look benign. Only the huggee knows whether what’s coming is a welcome embrace or slightly icky. Take the incident last summer, when Kesha bounded up to Jerry Seinfeld on a red carpet and pleaded for a hug as the cameras rolled. “No thanks,” Seinfeld replied, his voice creeping higher with alarm. “A little one,” the gregarious singer insisted, going in for it. “Yeah, no thanks,” Seinfeld repeated. By then, he had stepped back a full foot from the pop
The #MeToo movement has everyone reevaluating the default American greeting, and some are relieved
star/aggressor. Kesha, finally getting it, let out a wounded whine and slunk off. So who was in the wrong here? Everyone and no one, it seems. “I find it kind of hysterical that we go for the hug, even though we are really unsure of the hug,” says Lizzie Post, co-president of the Emily Post Institute, which is devoted to solving the nation’s etiquette quandaries. For what it’s worth, Post believes that we hug too much. “The reason I can say that is because we have these reactions,” she says. “It gets awkward, or someone has to say something ahead of the hug to stop the hug from happening. If we were really okay with hugging, we’d just hug.” Post has answered many questions about hugs in her 10 years at the institute. In one episode of her Awesome Etiquette podcast last year, a listener wrote in to ask whether it was bad form to refuse them. Particularly from the older male colleagues who always seem to want them. On the other side are those like the Texas sheriff who announced huffily on Facebook last year that he was quitting hugs because the workplace “can become hostile if an employee ‘feels’ threatened by your hugs.” “SO IT’S OVER,” he fumed. But is it? There’s no clearly defined moment when the hug became the gold-standard American greeting, nothing definitive about when we shed our stoic American reserve and started hugging it out on every holiday and first date and at the end of every argument. Sammy Davis Jr. infamously wrapped his arms around President Richard M. Nixon at a 1972 event, leaning into the comefrom-behind squeeze with closed eyes and a beaming smile as he showed his controversial support for the candidate. (The hug cost him dearly among his black fan base, which didn’t like Nixon one bit.) Pope Francis embraced Sunni Muslim leader Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb in 2016, telling onlookers, “Our meeting is the message.” Queen Elizabeth was moved to give Michelle Obama a little side hug in 2009, setting English tongues wagging because it was a clear break from Her Majesty’s strict no-touching protocol. And when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi enveloped President
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ENTERTAINMENT Trump in a bro hug last year, it might not have made such a stir if the embrace hadn’t cut short Trump’s usual protracted and strangely vigorous handshake with foreign leaders. As for former president George W. Bush, he hugs, well, everyone. For some, the hug has taken on divine meaning. An Indian saint known as Amma travels the world hugging followers who have been known to line up for hours just for a life-affirming cuddle. After the presidential election, a Massachusetts man started “Hug It Out America,” a one-man effort to connect with strangers after the 2016 election. After the 9/11 attacks, Brainard and Delia Carey, a.k.a. the performance art duo Praxis, opened their arms to legions of New Yorkers, offering free hugs in an East Village storefront. “It was the comfort people needed,” says Brainard Carey, adding that the emotional resonance of their project led them to hugging performances at major arts institutions. “It sounds like we’re doing this enormously altruistic thing — giving hugs to everyone. But you have to remember, we’re also receiving hugs from everybody. After a day of doing that, you get kind of high.” Science affirms the idea that hugs may be good not only for the soul but also for our physical well-being. “There are data showing that hugging provides a buffer to stress,” says Srini Pillay, a Harvard psychiatrist who studies brain science. “People will often recommend hugging as a form of social bonding that calms down the fight-or-flight system.” A good, solid hug releases oxytocin, may improve the immune system, and lowers blood pressure. “But when the hug is awkward,” Pillay warns, “I can’t imagine that what is actually happening is that the person is becoming calmer.” Culturally, says Post, we know that the hug is iffy territory. “A hug can feel too intimate to some people, especially now, in an era when we’re illuminating how women feel on a daily basis.” So maybe it’s time to embrace something new as our preferred greeting. Or something old. As Post notes, no one frets this much over a handshake. n
KLMNO WEEKLY
Why the ‘Black Panther’ film means so much to so many BY
D AVID B ETANCOURT
T
he crown for the world’s greatest black superhero has always been worn by the Black Panther. He was also the world’s first. And for more than 50 years, Marvel Comics’ African legend has been hurling a black-gloved fist to the stereotypical notion that superheroes of color only work as side characters. T’Challa, the man under the mask, is a king who rules an African nation that has never been invaded, one that’s the most technologically advanced society in the Marvel universe. He’s been an Avenger, married and divorced a member of the X-Men, and helped fend off aliens. Few Marvel characters come close to matching his intelligence, and he’s traded punches with some of the greatest The Black Panther has been breaking barriers for over 50 years.
©The Washington Post MATT KENNEDY/MARVEL STUDIOS/WALT DISNEY PICTURES
heroes and villains around and stood tall in the end. Heck, even his grandfather punched Captain America once. The Black Panther has allowed comic book fans of color to look past the medium’s lack of diversity and take solace in an undeniable fact: He’s simply one of the coolest superheroes around. The rest of the world has probably caught up since Friday, when Marvel Studios released the hotly anticipated, ecstatically reviewed “Black Panther” movie, which is expected to make at least $120 million over its opening four-day weekend. “Sometimes the first character of a category is perfect,” said former “Black Panther” comic book writer Reginald Hudlin. “Superman is like that. Batman is like that. Wonder Woman is like that. They are perfect. And Black Panther is like that.” In 1966, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the character to correct the lack of superhero representation — just months before the founding of the Black Panther Party. (To avoid controversy, Marvel briefly changed the name to Black Leopard but later realized that just didn’t have the same oomph.) In Black Panther’s first appearance, he defeated the Fantastic Four in their own comic. In the years since, fan-favorite runs of three black writers have come to define the character. Christopher Priest in the 1990s made him a no-nonsense hero with an elite all-female bodyguard squad, the Dora Milaje. Hudlin established Wakanda as an unrivaled kingdom in 2005. Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of “Between the World and Me,” took over in 2016 by having the character confront a revolution that questions the legitimacy of Wakanda’s monarchy. Black Panther’s path to the screen has been rocky. But after Marvel Studios cinematic universe started a decade ago and launched successful series such as “Iron Man” and “The Avengers” — while casting a bunch of white blond guys named Chris — fans
knew it was bound to use its rights to the top black superhero. Chadwick Boseman was cast in 2014, and the character made his first cinematic appearance in 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War.” Marvel hired Ryan Coogler, acclaimed director of “Fruitvale Station” and “Creed,” and cast the star of those films, Michael B. Jordan, as the villain. If the movie is indeed successful, one reason will be that the Black Panther’s ethos goes beyond superheroics and offers a deeper meaning. Salim Akil, co-creator of the “Black Lightning” TV show, said the character gets at “the connection that a lot of African Americans want to have with Africa. We lost that part of us, so it’s great to be able to see that in the context of a superhero.” Evan Narcisse, a writer for Io9 who also co-writes “The Rise of the Black Panther” miniseries with Coates, said T’Challa and his homeland channel a lot of unspoken desire that black readers have for how they want their collective paths to be represented. “Wakanda represents this unbroken chain of achievement of black excellence that never got interrupted by colonialism,” Narcisse said. Another writer, Roye Okupe, grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and has since created YouNeek Studios, a line of self-published African superhero graphic novels. Okupe said “Black Panther” has an opportunity to show mainstream viewers that there are ways Africa can be portrayed aside from the usual war and corruption. He hopes that after its success, “people around the world writing stories like this about Afro-futurism, high-concept fantasy stories based on African culture and African mythology, can be given an opportunity to pitch to movie studios, pitch to TV networks,” Okupe said. “It’s not just about shoving African-ness into your face. It’s showing the different side of a culture that you don’t necessarily get to see all the time.” n ©The Washington Post
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BOOKS
A view that changed our perspective N ONFICTION
B THE EARTH GAZERS On Seeing Ourselves By Christopher Potter Pegasus. 456 pp. $28.95
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REVIEWED BY
M ARCIA B ARTUSIAK
eware, flat-earthers. Christopher Potter has mounted a powerful assault on your most cherished belief. In 1948, British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle made an intriguing prediction: “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” With “The Earth Gazers,” his beautifully written overview of our voyage into the heavens, Potter shows us how that cosmic forecast played out. Photographs from space not only allowed us to see the entire planetary sphere suspended like a blue Eden amid a black void, they also informed us that the human species is “intimately connected, even embedded in its home. The more distant our perspective,” writes the author, “seemingly the more intimate.” It’s a familiar tale, one that the author largely draws from previous histories of aviation, rocketry and space travel. Yet Potter effectively delivers the highlights, maintaining an engaging narrative thread that links all the main players over the course of the 20th century. He begins with Charles Lindbergh, a college dropout who found his passion in aviation. Spurred by a $25,000 prize, Lindbergh then conquered the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 and gained lifetime fame. “Lindbergh said that he never saw the Earth so clearly . . . as he did in those early days of flight,” writes Potter. It was a first step toward Hoyle’s vision. Lindbergh imagined the next frontier — rockets — and quickly telephoned rocket pioneer Robert Goddard upon hearing of his test runs. As a teenager, Goddard dreamed of going to Mars. Once it was thought impossible to escape Earth’s gravitational pull, but “Goddard’s genius was to have worked out how,” Potter writes. “His brilliant concept was the multistage rocket propelled by
NASA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“Earthrise,” taken on Dec. 24, 1968, by astronaut Bill Anders on Apollo 8, was named one of the 100 most influential photos in history by Time magazine. For many, it illustrated the planet’s fragility.
liquid fuel.” But, though he was a brilliant inventor, he was a lousy engineer. Many of Goddard’s rockets blew up, sputtered out or failed to launch through the 1930s. As a result, the impetus in rocketry moved to Europe, particularly Germany, where Wernher von Braun was designing his country’s rockets. His personal goal was to go into space, but he dutifully advanced Hitler’s mandate to attack London. At the war’s end, von Braun packed up his documentation and achieved his aim of going to the United States to build a space rocket. No longer top dog, von Braun faced competition from the U.S. military and other government agencies. It was an internal tempest that slowed the U.S. effort,
allowing the Soviet Union to take the lead in rocketry and launch the first satellite into space — which may have been a blessing in disguise, according to Potter: “If von Braun had got his satellite into orbit first . . . the space race would surely have taken a different course. It seems highly unlikely that the American public of the time would have so readily funded such a costly enterprise without the motivating force of fear.” The book travels through “The Right Stuff” territory — swiftly moving from Projects Mercury and Gemini to the Apollo program. The gossipy space stories are captivating. Surprisingly, taking photographs in space was not a top NASA priority at first, denigrated
as being too touristy. But that changed with Gemini IV, when Richard Underwood, the man in charge of NASA photography, convinced the astronauts that the endeavor would be their “key to immortality.” Eventually, writes Potter, “it gave them a rare sense of independence and the opportunity to be more than just a man in a can; to be artists.” The first pictures of a full Earth from space, by both the Lunar Orbiter and an Earth-orbiting satellite in 1966, had little impact, probably because of the poor quality. But on Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to circle the moon, Bill Anders snapped a vivid, color picture of Earth rising over the lunar surface. On the way out, the Apollo 8 astronauts had been the first to see the entire Earth in a single glance. From 1968 to 1972, a total of 24 astronauts either walked on the moon or viewed the full Earth from space — both experiences appeared to have been life-altering. How did Hoyle’s prediction pan out for those of us who remained behind? For one, “Earthrise,” Apollo 8’s famous photograph, became one of the most reproduced pictures of all time. For many, it vividly illustrates our planet’s fragility. “Might this be another reason to travel into space,” Potter writes, “in order to experience what an alien might experience: to see ourselves from the outside?” If so, we vitally need a renewal of that enlightenment as we approach the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Decades after his Apollo 8 flight, Jim Lovell warned us that “the mind easily forgets. . . . People get back to the way they lived before — wars and disruption and human cruelty.” n Bartusiak is a professor in the MIT graduate program in science writing. She is the author of six books on astrophysics and its history. This was written for The Washington Post.
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BOOKS
KLMNO WEEKLY
Sexy spy series relishes in details
Secrets of the first black millionaires
F ICTION
N ONFICTION
J
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REVIEWED BY
D AVID I GNATIUS
ason Matthews has found a formula that is making him one of America’s most readable spy novelists: To animate the James Bond staples of seduction and violence, he has added touches of the meticulous tradecraft he learned in his 33 years as a CIA operations officer. The sex scenes in his books are good, but the surveillancedetection runs are sublime. “The Kremlin’s Candidate” is Matthews’s latest offering, and it doesn’t disappoint. It’s a traditional espionage story of dueling moles within U.S. and Russian intelligence. This is Matthews’s third novel featuring Dominika Egorova, the Russian superspy who began her career as a trained seductress, as described in his superb debut novel, “Red Sparrow.” She’s sort of a Russian Barbie doll on steroids, who can seduce, kickbox and plot geostrategy all at the same time. And if that’s not enough, she’s also a “synesthete,” which means that she can see what people are thinking as colors emanating from them. Dominika may sound implausible, but through three novels I’ve found her a thoroughly enjoyable character who’s convincing on the page. She’s a female Bond in the sack, but if you’re a spy-novel fan, it’s her skill at SRAC (short-range agent communications) that keeps you reading. In “The Kremlin’s Candidate,” as in its two predecessors, Dominika is matched with her CIA handler (and, inevitably, her lover), Nate Nash. He’s a bit of a cartoon character, too, who speaks Russian like a native, fights like a killing machine and is also a really sensitive guy. Matthews knows he’s writing popular fiction, meant to entertain, but his characters are saved from ridiculousness by the fact that they understand the real-life business of espionage as well as Matthews evidently did in his decades as a CIA case officer. This book feels longer and talkier than the first two, and the plot is more convoluted, bouncing from
Moscow and Washington to Greece, New York, Khartoum, Macao and Hong Kong. North Korean and Chinese spies are woven through the story, in addition to Russians and Americans, and there are a few more loops and switchbacks on the roller coaster than a purist might like. But the momentum is sustained, and the reader acquires some awesome Chinese tradecraft as well as some memorably vulgar Australian slang. What undergirds Matthews’s sometimes fanciful plot and characters is his attention to detail. He knows the Russian slang for “honey trap” and “orgasm.” He uses European bra sizes to describe the undergarments of his heroine, and he explains problems with Russian condoms. He drops the name that GRU operatives use for their headquarters (“the Aquarium”) and Putin’s nickname at the KGB (“the Pale Moth”). In the Macao and Hong Kong scenes, it’s the same thing, with Matthews dispensing Chinese espionage doctrine in Chi nese. These foreign phrases are meant to add verisimilitude to his yarn, and generally they do. Matthews should lighten up on the spurious details, though. There are too many brand names — for suits, shirts, ties, watches, guns, holsters, even fishing rods. At a certain point, these names stop conveying authenticity and read like product placements. Big breasts are a spy-novel convention, too, but I wonder if all three of Nate’s lovers had to be quite so top-heavy. Matthews’s most interesting challenge is a character named “Vladimir Putin.” We’ll never know whether the description of this “fictitious” Russian president’s lovemaking is accurate, thank goodness. But this is a book that convinces us — with a wink — that it gets such details right. n Ignatius is a columnist for The Washington Post and the author of 10 novels, including “Body of Lies” and, most recently, “The Quantum Spy.”
T THE KREMLIN’S CANDIDATE The Red Sparrow Trilogy By Jason Matthews Scribner. 434 pp. $26.99
BLACK FORTUNES The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires By Shomari Wills Amistad. 300 pp. $26.99
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REVIEWED BY
W ILEY H ALL III
he most significant revelation in “Black Fortunes,” the engaging profile of the first African Americans to become millionaires, is that these wealthy blacks managed to exist at all. African Americans of the antebellum era, when most of these success stories take place, have typically been portrayed as poor souls ground down by oppression, poverty and bigotry — too ignorant or too intimidated to amass a fortune. But as journalist Shomari Wills demonstrates, that first generation of business superstars owed their fortunes to hard work and enterprise, to seeing opportunities and taking advantage of them, to being faster on the draw than the other guy. In short, they exemplified all the values driving any successful business person. At the same time, they experienced extraordinary resistance because of their race. The men and women profiled in “Black Fortunes” dodged lynch mobs and assassins and outwitted conspiracies to steal their fortunes by legislative fiat. And they fought back. When gunmen shot at them, they grabbed guns and fired back. Discriminated against, they marched into court and sued for justice. What makes these success stories stand out is that they throw a spotlight on achievements that are often overlooked. “Black millionaires disrupt stereotypes of black impotence,” Wills writes. “They remind us that African Americans do not lack the desire or ability to work or build businesses and wealth, but instead that they have often had to overcome great struggles to achieve economic stability, let alone independence and power.” The entrepreneurs profiled include Mary Ellen Pleasant, a New England servant who built her fortune through a chain of boardinghouses, laundries and several other businesses, first during the whaling boom of the 1840s and then in San Francisco during the
gold rush of 1849. Pleasant also was a shrewd investor in the stock market. The country’s first black millionaire, according to Wills, was William Alexander Leidesdorff, son of a Danish sailor and a Caribbean woman. Leidesdorff built his fortune in the 1840s in the import-export trade. Living openly in San Francisco as a mixed-race man, Leidesdorff started a general store, a warehouse, a lumberyard, a shipbuilding business and the growing settlement’s first hotel. His estate was valued at $1.4 million when he died in 1848, the equivalent of $38 million in today’s dollars, and flags were flown at half-staff. Also profiled are Robert Reed Church, who for a while ranked as one of the largest landowners in Tennessee; Hannah Elias, who built a real estate empire in Harlem; Annie Turnbo Malone, a selftaught chemist who developed the first nationally known brand of hair-care products; Madam C.J. Walker, who took what Malone taught her, built a rival hair-care empire and promoted herself as America’s first black millionaire; and O.W. Gurley, a schoolteacher who built an all-black neighborhood in Tulsa that which became known as “Black Wall Street.” These early millionaires were pioneers pointing the way for future black success stories. “Today, as Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Robert Smith make up the first cohort of black billionaires, it’s important not to lose sight of the history and battles that were waged and are still being fought to make such achievement possible,” Wills writes. “Black Fortunes” provides necessary context to those achievements and as such is a significant addition to our ever-evolving understanding of collective history. n Hall is a former columnist with the Baltimore Evening Sun. This was written for The Washington Post.
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OPINIONS
BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
For the love of the Games DAVID VON DREHLE writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post.
To love the Olympics takes more than forgiveness. One must also forget. Forget the decades of snobbish exclusion, when European aristocrats and U.S. millionaires wielded the vague concept of “the amateur” to shut out many of the world’s greatest athletes. Forget the moral obtuseness that allowed Adolf Hitler to host the 1936 Games but barred defending gold medalist Eleanor Holm from competing in them because the 22-year-old drank champagne on the ship transporting the U.S. team to Germany. Forget the bigotry that led then-president of the International Olympic Committee Avery Brundage to minimize the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes by terrorists after he had thrown the book at two U.S. sprinters who in 1968 wordlessly raised their fists in a Black Power salute. Forget the hypocrisy with which the IOC ignored wholesale doping of athletes by East Germany. Forget the corruption that nearly derailed the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City. Forget the mismanagement that nearly bankrupted a number of host cities. Forget the collusion that has made a mockery of judging in sports from boxing to figure skating. In a couple of years, mark my words, we’ll be asked to forget the
rampant sexual abuse of the United States’ female gymnasts. To love the Olympics, one must forget the crass commercialism, the excruciating hype and the manipulated emotion. So I am forgetting all of it — at least through the Closing Ceremonies. I love the Olympics for two reasons: one from the head, another from the heart. I realized that in a world in which peace and friendship are elusive, the Olympics serve an important role as a valve to vent international conflict. The French nobleman Pierre de Coubertin created the modern Olympics out of his dismay at the weakness of his countrymen in their brief 1870 war with Prussia. His athletic festival would be war without the carnage, testing athlete against athlete — but also nation against nation.
BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD
Concepts of honor, courage, strength and nationhood, which stoked the engines of war for millennia, are channeled into the Olympics to be played out on fields of sport, not fields of battle. Countries large and small proclaim their sovereignty and express their pride. We heard the warrior spirit on Friday in the words of Tonga’s Pita Taufatofua, who reprised his bare-chested march into 2016’s Opening Ceremonies, this time in bitterly cold conditions. “I won’t freeze. I am from Tonga!” he declared. “We sailed across the Pacific. This is nothing.” The United States and China would not spend hundreds of millions on their training programs if they did not view the Games as an important venue for their rivalry, nor would Russia engage in systematic cheating if it weren’t desperate to maintain a place among the world’s powers. North Korea might not have sent athletes to South Korea if it didn’t see some plausible future other than lakes of fire. I love the Olympics despite themselves because I prefer symbolic wars to real ones. Even deeper is love from the heart, which stirs at the sheer beauty of human excellence. Philosophers have tried for ages to define the thing that separates
our species from all others. I think it is the capacity to aspire; to set lofty goals and endure hardships and sacrifices to achieve them. This defining human quality can be celebrated in countless walks of life, many of them mundane: One person seeks to be a better parent, another to be a better friend or neighbor or colleague. At the Olympics, though, we see it on grand and thrilling display. Athletes from around the world display the fruits of their aspirations: the plummets of the slalom skiers; the blinding spins and balletic jumps of the figure skaters; the mastery of exhaustion by the Nordic skiers and the speed skaters; the escapes from gravity by the snowboarders and ski jumpers; the lightning and thunder of the hockey players; the stifling of fear by the sled racers. And we have an inkling of what lies behind these dazzling displays: the years of pre-dawn alarm clocks and lonely workouts; the broken bones, torn muscles, burning lungs; the forgone comforts and blocked-out doubts. We treasure — in our age of hype and fakery — these examples of genuine, merited greatness. This Olympic spirit we must never forget. n
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SUNDAY, AUGUST FEBRUARY 18, 2018 SUNDAY, 18, 2018
KLMNO WEEKLY
FIVE MYTHS
Figure skating BY
J OY G OODWIN
Another Olympics is here, and it’s time for that American ritual: becoming an armchair expert in sports you haven’t watched in four years. Here are five persistent myths about one of the most popular events at the Winter Games: figure skating. MYTH NO. 1 It’s not a real sport. “Anything solely dependent on judging is not a sport,” Michael Wilbon wrote for The Washington Post in 1998. Actually, the number of Winter Olympic events scored by judges has been growing — from four in 1988 to 19 this year. The problem for figure skating is that costumes and choreography often mask the sport’s extraordinary athletic demands. Research shows that the hearts of elite skaters beat at rates comparable to those of elite 800meter runners. Skaters wear boots attached to what are essentially knives and barrel into their jumps at 15 mph. Digging one toe into the ice, they catapult themselves into the air, completing up to four revolutions (1,440 degrees) in less than a second and landing backward. Skaters also land on the slippery edge of a blade that’s an eighth of an inch wide. Coordination has to be perfect, down to the millisecond. And the ice offers an unforgiving surface, with virtually no shock absorption. The triple and quadruple jumps required to win an Olympic medal are so difficult that many top junior skaters never master them. Yet Olympic skaters pack their free programs with seven to eight huge jumps, plus spins and footwork — not to mention crisscrossing the 200foot length of the ice at top speed. Unlike other Olympic athletes, skaters are taught from a young age not to gasp for breath at the end of a routine. But look closely, and you’ll see their lungs heaving as they take their bows.
MYTH NO. 2 The judging is arbitrary. Under figure skating’s old 6.0 system, judges were given tremendous latitude in awarding their marks. At the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, a French judge confessed to voting under pressure for the Russian pair, who won the gold medal over their Canadian rivals by a vote of 5 to 4. Eventually, the French judge’s marks were thrown out, the event was declared a tie, and the Canadians were awarded gold medals of their own. After that, the International Skating Union moved to a new “Code of Points” system, which produces not 6.0’s but scores like 212.23. Roughly half of each skater’s points are still awarded for artistic skills (now called “components”). But when it comes to technical merit, the code attempts to treat a skating routine the way Olympic judges treat a dive: by multiplying its difficulty by its degree of execution. The absolute value of a triple Salchow doesn’t change from skater to skater, and there are clear guidelines about how to score the execution of that jump. It’s true that the subjective portion of the score can still be the place where national bias comes out. Dartmouth economist Eric Zitzewitz analyzed 15 years’ worth of competition data and found that judges consistently overmark skaters from their own countries. But PyeongChang offers a ray of hope: Because of a recent rule change, this is the first Olympics in 16 years where figure skating judges are not anonymous. Skaters are hoping that holding each country’s judge publicly
BERNAT ARMANGUE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mirai Nagasu performs Monday at the Winter Games in South Korea. She became the first U.S. woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics.
accountable will make judges think twice about over- or undermarking a skater. MYTH NO. 3 If you fall during your routine, you’re toast. The Code of Points system changed the scoring dynamics around falling. It grants partial credit for imperfect jumps — sometimes, quite a few points. So if Skater A falls once but lands everything else cleanly, she can conceivably outscore Skater B, who has three bad landings but stays on her feet. Another scenario in which Skater A can win, even with a fall: If she enters the free skate with a large lead over Skater B from the short program. MYTH NO. 4 If a guy’s a skater, he must be gay. While there have been famous male champions who are gay — including Brian Boitano and Johnny Weir — there are many straight males in elite figure skating. In fact, in many nations, this presumption about gay skaters doesn’t exist. The 2006 Olympic champion Evgeni Plushenko became a heterosexual
sex symbol in Russia in the 2000s. The bottom line: Skating, like all sports, includes athletes of different sexual orientations. MYTH NO. 5 Harding was a working-class kid. Kerrigan was rich. In 1994, most Americans knew that Tonya Harding had entered a country club sport from a working-class background. Nancy Kerrigan, on the other hand, was associated with her Vera Wang skating costumes and her Disney endorsements. But Kerrigan had a workingclass upbringing, too — albeit one very different from Harding’s. She grew up in suburban Boston, the third child of a welder and a homemaker. At times, her father held down three jobs to pay for her skating. Kerrigan’s mother was legally blind, so her father drove her to the rink every morning at dawn; he also drove the Zamboni to help offset the costs of her training. n Goodwin, the author of “The Second Mark: Courage, Corruption, and the Battle for Olympic Gold,” has reported on figure skating for ABC, NBC, ESPN and NPR. This was written for The Washington Post.
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