The Washington Post National Weekly - July 17, 2016

SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2016

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SPECIAL CONVENTION ISSUE

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Saturday, August 27

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POLITICS

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Supreme controversy BY

R OBERT B ARNES

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he unusual and apparently unprecedented battle of words between a justice of the Supreme Court and a presumptive presidential nominee stretched through much of this past week as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made clear that her criticism of Republican Donald Trump was not the result of an unguarded moment.

She told a CNN analyst in an interview late Monday that Trump was a “faker” and said she was surprised the media has not pressed him more to release his tax returns.

Trump responded by telling a New York Times reporter that Ginsburg’s comments were “highly inappropriate” and she should leave her lifetime appointment sooner rather than later. Early Wednesday, a more pointed message was posted to his Twitter account: “Her mind is shot — resign!”

The back-and-forth was an extraordinary confrontation. Usually the most public interaction between the court and the political world comes at the annual State of the Union address, where the justices sit stoically among partisan cheers and catcalls.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. earlier this year said the politics of Senate confirmation hearings give the public the mistaken view that justices are partisan. “We don’t work as Democrats or Republicans,” he said.

But in interviews over the past week, Ginsburg made clear her distaste for Trump.

“I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president,” Ginsburg told the New York Times. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.”

She also told the Associated Press she assumed Democrat Hillary Clinton will win the election. Ginsburg, 83, was nominated to the court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton.

Asked what would happen if Trump won

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instead, she said, “I don’t want to think about that possibility, but if it should be, then everything is up for grabs.”

Her comments were met with a wave of alarm by many judicial ethics experts, who called them surprising if not potentially recusal-worthy should a legal issue involving Trump come before the court.

But Ginsburg doubled down when she met late Monday for a previously scheduled interview with CNN’s Joan Biskupic.

“He is a faker,” Ginsburg said of Trump. “He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment.”

She added: “He really has an ego. . . . How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that.”

Trump got on the line with the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman to respond.

“I think it’s highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court judge gets involved in a political campaign, frankly,” Trump said. “I think it’s a disgrace to the court, and I think she

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. 40

should apologize to the court. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.”

Trump added: “It’s so beneath the court for her to be making statements like that. It only energizes my base even more. And I would hope that she would get off the court as soon as possible.”

Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathleen Arberg said at the time Ginsburg had no comment on Trump’s reaction to her comments. But on Thursday, Ginsburg issued this statement: “On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them. Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect.”

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said he found Ginsburg’s remarks “very peculiar.” Speaking on CNN Tuesday night, he said, “That strikes me as inherently biased and out of her realm.”

Nominations to the court, Ginsburg has indicated, are at the heart of her concern. There already is one vacancy. Ginsburg has noted that she and two others on the court will be 78 or older on Inauguration Day 2017. n

CONTENTS POLITICS COVER STORY NATION MARKETING ECONOMY BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

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ON THE COVER Republicans are set to nominate Donald Trump for president at their convention this week in Cleveland. Photograph by ERIK TANNER/Contour by Getty Images

BEN KIRCHNER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump spent decades waiting for the right president. Finally, he decided he was that man.

BY ROBERT SAMUELS AND SHAWN BOBURG

I About this story This article is based on reporting for “Trump Revealed,” a broad, comprehensive examination of the life of the presumptive Republican nominee for president. The biography, written by Washington Post reporters Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher in collaboration with more than two dozen Post writers, researchers and editors, is scheduled to be published by Scribner on Aug. 23.

n October 1980, in his first major interview on network television, Donald Trump sat on a couch in his Fifth Avenue apartment discussing the tough decisions he had made as a builder. (“Rona Barrett Looks at Today’s Super Rich” would air the following year.) Then the 34-year-old Trump abruptly turned the casual interview into something more controversial: a lecture on the lack of leadership in the United States.

Gas prices were soaring, and inflation was rampant. More than four dozen Americans who had been kidnapped from the U.S. Embassy in Iran were being held hostage while, according to Trump, “we just sit back and take everybody’s abuse. . . . I just don’t feel the country is going forward in the proper direction.”

Barrett was taken aback by Trump’s shift to politics. “Would you like to be president of the United States?” she asked.

No, he said. Politics was a “mean life. . . . Abraham Lincoln would probably not be electable today because of television. He was not a handsome man, and he did not smile at all.” Trump said he knew people who would be “excellent” presidents because they were “extraordinarily brilliant . . . very, very confident . . . and have the respect of everybody.” None of them would seek the office because of the media scrutiny, which he called a tragedy.

“One man could turn this country around. The one proper president could turn this country around,” he said.

Trump would spend the next two decades waiting for that person to come around. *** Since his rise as a businessman in the 1980s, Trump showed few constants when it came to politics, with one exception: He tried to

align himself with winners, people who could raise his profile and further his business goals. He teetered back and forth between political parties and offered conflicting clues about his core beliefs, from health care to abortion rights. Trump helped candidates on opposite ends of the political spectrum with money and endorsements, while often expressing concern that the country was losing its spirit and its stature.

Seven years after Trump’s Rona Barrett interview, in the spring of 1987, Michael Dunbar, a furnituremaker in Portsmouth, N.H., tried to convince Trump that he was the man who could turn things around. The Republican Party activist became fascinated by news reports about Trump’s business acumen and personality. He sent out mailers encouraging Republicans to “draft Trump.” Friends told him the idea was laughable, but Dunbar invited Trump to speak to the local Rotary Club. Trump, intrigued, invited Dunbar to discuss the idea at Trump Tower that summer.

In his 26th-floor office, Trump offered Dunbar a Diet Coke as they talked over the plan: Trump would fly his private helicopter to a New Hampshire airfield, speak to the Rotary crowd at Yoken’s restaurant and hold a news conference. They had a deal.

A few weeks later, Trump took out full-page ads opining on foreign policy in three major newspapers. “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” he wrote in the ads, which cost a combined $95,000. He questioned why the United States continued to provide military funds to Japan and Saudi Arabia and implored: “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.”

The image of the rest of the world laughing at U.S. leaders continues on next page

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would become an enduring theme in Trump’s political rhetoric. This time, it came in the seventh year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, just weeks before the publication of Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal,” in which Trump called Reagan a smooth performer but questioned whether “there’s anything beneath that smile.”

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n the day Trump’s foreign policy ads appeared, he told reporters that he would travel to New Hampshire. He was asked whether he was running for office. “There is absolutely no plan to run for mayor, governor or United States senator,” an unidentified spokesman replied. “He will not comment about the presidency.”

On the bright morning of Oct. 22, 1987, Trump’s helicopter landed at a New Hampshire airfield, where a limousine paid for

by Dunbar ferried him to Yoken’s restaurant. There, a waiting crowd held placards that said, “Vote Trump for President” and “Vote for an En-‘TRUMP’-eneur.”

In his talk, Trump reprised themes from his advertisements. But he then told the assembled reporters: “I am not interested in running for president.”

Dunbar wondered why Trump had even bothered coming to New Hampshire. Was it just a promotional gambit for his book? He later received a copy of Trump’s book, inscribed “To Michael: I really appreciate your friendship — You’ve created a very exciting part of my life — on to the future.”

Dunbar hoped he had planted a seed.

Trump’s brief flirtation with a run for office was over, but he reveled in the curiosity about his emerging political ambitions.

Promoting his book, he would continually repeat his stances on issues such as trade. “This sounds like political, presidential talk to me,” Oprah Winfrey told Trump when he appeared on her popular talk show in the spring of 1988.

“I just probably wouldn’t do it,” Trump said, “. . . but I do get tired of seeing what’s happening with this country. And if it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally.”

A few months later, Trump attended his first Republican convention, as George H.W. Bush accepted the party’s nomination for

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

the presidency. During an interview on CNN, talk-show host Larry King asked Trump why he was there. Trump said he wanted to see “how the system works.” King wanted to know if Trump classified himself as an “Eastern Republican” or a “Rockefeller/Chase Manhattan Republican,” shorthand for the liberal wing of the GOP. “I never thought about it in those terms,” Trump replied.

How about a “Bush Republican?” King asked.

Trump, who boasted of his great wealth, decided to cast himself as a man of the people: “You know, wealthy people don’t like me because I’m competing against them all the time . . . and I like to win. The fact is, I go down the streets of New York, and the people that really like me are the taxi drivers and the workers.”

“Then why are you a Republican?” King asked.

“I have no idea,” Trump said.

“I’m a Republican because I just believe in certain principles of the Republican Party.”

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a campaign rally at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls in January.

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rump became a vocal supporter of Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. “I think Bill Clinton is terrific,” Trump said Dec. 27, 1997, on CNN’s political talk show “Evans & Novak.” “I think he’s done an amazing job. I think he’s probably got the toughest skin I’ve ever seen, and I think he’s a terrific guy.”

One month later, reports surfaced that Clinton had had a secret sexual relationship with an intern named Monica Lewinsky, beginning when she was 22 years old in 1995 and lasting more than two years. Trump was unperturbed.

“The best thing he has going is the fact that the economy’s doing great,” Trump said in August 1998, days after Clinton finally admitted a relationship with Lewinsky. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, they talked about the ’80s were good. The ’90s are better.”

Trump suggested that if he were a candidate, he would face similar controversy: “Can you imagine how controversial that’d be? You think about him with the women.

How about me with the women?”

As a new election approached, Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime lobbyist, examined the potential

field, led by Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

Stone said that this could be Trump’s moment and that the path forward might be within a third party. Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire with no political experience, had won nearly 19 percent of the vote in 1992, and Jesse Ventura, a professional wrestler Trump knew from his involvement with WrestleMania, had improbably won the governorship of Minnesota in 1998 on the Reform Party ticket. Ventura had made his name parading in a feather boa and mocking Hulk Hogan as a World Wrestling Federation commentator. If Ventura could go from being known as “The Body” to being called “The Governing Body,” maybe Trump could become president.

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n Oct. 8, 1999, Trump announced on “Larry King Live” that he was leaving the Republican Party to join the Reform Party and was forming an exploratory committee to run for president. He made a U-turn on Clinton, calling the previous four years “disgusting” and professing Reagan as his role model because

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he had helped to regenerate the spirit of the country. Trump said his main competitor for the Reform Party nomination, Pat Buchanan, was too divisive. Trump insisted that he, on the other hand, was all about inclusiveness.

Who, King asked, would Trump pick as his vice-presidential candidate? Trump named Oprah Winfrey.

Although he called himself conservative, Trump was floating many liberal ideas. In the Advocate, a gay-oriented news magazine, he took issue with how Buchanan talked about “Jews, blacks, gays, and Mexicans.”

Trump called himself a conciliator, saying he would extend the Civil Rights Act to include protections for gay people and would allow them to serve openly in the military, repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the Clinton-era policy that had lifted a ban on gays in the military but forbade them from talking about their orientation while in the service. Trump also called for universal health care and the protection of Social Security, through a one-time tax on the super-wealthy and new money generated by renegotiating trade

agreements.

Two weeks after Trump announced his exploratory committee, he appeared on “Meet the Press,” where the moderator, Tim Russert, pressed him on a range of issues. At one point, Trump said he supported a right to partial-birth abortion, a procedure in which the fetus is partially removed from the womb before it is aborted. Stone, Trump’s political adviser, accompanied him to the interview.

When the two left the studio, Stone said, Trump admitted that he didn’t know what partial-birth abortion was.

In another book published in January 2000, Trump clarified that he supported a ban on partial-birth abortion after learning more about it. And he said that while he was “uncomfortable” with abortion, “I support a woman’s right to choose.”

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rump’s quasi-campaign traveled to Minnesota for a January 2000 meeting with his role model, Ventura, and his campaign staffers. Trump told them he wanted to learn how a man who started at the bottom of the

Protesters and Trump supporters clash after an event was postponed where Trump was to speak at the University of Illinois in Chicago in March.

polls, who was deemed by some to be a joke, ended up as governor.

Dean Barkley, who had chaired Ventura’s campaign, advised Trump: “Just be honest. It’s not what you say, but how you say it.

And talk to the public, not at them.”

Later that afternoon, Trump and Ventura appeared at a lunch for the local chamber of commerce. Trump the listener was gone; the showbiz Trump had returned. He mocked the Republican candidates, winning laughs: “Are these people stiffs or what?”

But Trump eventually chose not to run. On Feb. 19, 2000, he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in which he said that his exploratory campaign was the “greatest civics lesson that a private citizen can have.” But he was not sure a third-party candidate could win.

Although he had already pulled out of the race, Trump’s name remained on the Reform Party ballot in Michigan and California.

He won both primaries.

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efore he decided to run for office, Trump’s political donations were a cost of doing business, suggesting that his prac-

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tice of politics was transactional, not ideological. He hosted fundraisers and invited politicians to weddings.

“I give to everybody. When they call, I give,” Trump said. “And you know what? When I need something from them — two years later, three years later — I call them.

They are there for me.”

Trump and his major companies gave at least $3.1 million to local, state and federal candidates from both parties between 1995 and 2016, not including donations that may have flowed through the scores of limited-liability corporations that Trump controlled.

He donated to Hillary Clinton when she was running to be a U.S. senator from New York. Asked if he voted for her, Trump said: “I never say who I’m going to vote for.” He did say in a separate interview, however, that his votes for president were consistently Republican. Although he said he lost respect for the younger President Bush because of his handling of the war in Iraq, which he later called a “disaster,” he said he voted for Bush again in 2004 because he felt it was important to “carry the Republican line.” Recalling the 2004 vote, Trump said he showed his distance from Bush by not throwing fundraisers for him.

Trump’s public statements sent mixed signals about his political leanings. In 2006, he told the New York Times that Sen. John McCain, who would become the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, could not win because he advocated sending more troops to Iraq.

Trump praised the future Democratic nominee, then-Sen. Barack Obama, for his “wonderful qualities.” Nonetheless, Trump contributed $3,600 to McCain during the 2008 campaign and said he voted for him.

Trump changed parties seven times between 1999 and 2012, starting when he left the GOP to consider a run under the Reform Party banner. After registering as a Democrat in 2001, he switched back to the Republicans in 2003.

He became a Democrat again in 2005 and a Republican in 2009.

He chose not to be affiliated with any party in 2011. Asked what he would say to critics who saw the constant party-switching as proof that he had no core beliefs, Trump responded: “I think it had to do more with practicality because if continues on next page

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you’re going to run for office, you would have had to make friends.”

Then he returned to the GOP in 2012, once again stoking speculation that he had his sights on the presidency.

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rump’s celebrity status promptly put him among the 2012 front-runners. An NBC News-Wall Street Journal survey of early-primary-state Republican voters released in April 2011 showed him tied for second place behind Mitt Romney.

Among tea party supporters, Trump led the field. And his positions became more aligned with conservatives: Now he was against abortion and no longer advocated making gays a protected class.

He bashed Obama with an intensity he had never displayed for

his predecessors. He called the president’s signature health-care law a “job killer.” He drew wide attention for focusing on the longdiscredited assertion that the president had been born not in Hawaii but in Kenya, his father’s native country. “I have people that actually have been studying it, and they cannot believe what they’re finding. . . . I would like to have him show his birth certificate,” Trump said on NBC, cementing his role as a leader in what became known as the birther movement.

Obama put the document on public display and ridiculed the real estate mogul days later at the annual black-tie White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, joking that Trump could now turn his attention to whether the United States had faked the moon landing. The audience roared

George Davey promotes Trump with a billboard in the back yard of his West Des Moines home in January ahead of the Iowa caucuses. Trump placed second behind Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.).

with laughter while Trump looked on stone-faced, although he later insisted that the jokes were fine and the evening “phenomenal.”

Two weeks after the dinner, Trump announced that he would not run in 2012, saying that “business is my greatest passion and I am not ready to leave the private sector.” In a later interview, he explained the decision: “My children were younger. I was doing numerous jobs, many jobs, and I really wanted to wrap them up.”

On Feb. 2, 2012, he endorsed Romney and became an outspoken surrogate. On Election Day, Trump went to Boston to attend what he expected to be a Romney victory party. Romney’s loss made him livid. If only the candidate had used him more, Trump said, Romney would have been a winner. Trump took to his increasingly favored medium, Twitter, to

vent his frustration: “This election is a total sham and a travesty.”

“We can’t let this happen. . . . The world is laughing at us.”

The world is laughing at us. It was the same concern Trump had from his first interview with Rona Barrett, when he said one proper president could turn the country around. Now a full-fledged celebrity, Trump was certain who that man might be.

After Romney’s loss, Republican elders huddled to create ways to transform the GOP into a younger, more inclusive party with new ideas. Trump was forming a different plan. Twelve days after the 2012 election, he filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He wanted to trademark an old phrase from Reagan that he planned to make his own: Make America Great Again. n

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republicans FInd themselves with a big question to answer: just WHO ARE WE?

BY DAN BALZ in Cleveland

T WALTER ZEBOSKI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ronald Reagan campaigns during in Iowa during the 1976 primaries.

He had a profound effect on shaping the modern Republican Party.

hanks to Donald Trump, the Republican National Convention that opens here Monday will be like none other in the modern era — a gathering of a divided and nervous political party preparing to nominate a candidate who stormed through the nominating process after turning his back on a generation or more of conservative orthodoxy.

In many ways, what transpires in Cleveland will seem familiar.

There will be the customary symbols of political conventions — a series of speeches, goofy hats and pins, balloon drops and relentless attacks on the opposition party and its nominee. GOP leaders will attempt to project at least a patina of unity to the worldwide audience that will be tuning in.

Yet there will be no hiding the obvious — that an alternate reality forms the true backdrop for this convention, with many Republican leaders worried about what Trump’s candidacy has done to break apart its coalition and what he might do to their overall fortunes in November.

The modern Republican Party has been shaped by many forces, the most important being the presidency and conservative philosophy of Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan who cast modern conservatism in a positive and optimistic light and who moved the party sharply to the right after the debacle of Barry Goldwater’s defeat and the presidencies of two later Republicans, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Other politicians, movements and events have shaped it since, to the point that Reagan might not recognize — or be welcome in —

the party of today. After Reagan came the presidency of George H.W. Bush, which saw an end to the Cold War but foundered domestically. A backbench rebellion in the House, led by Newt Gingrich, helped shorten that Bush presidency but brought the GOP to power in Congress. After Gingrich came a second Bush presidency, that of George W. Bush, who after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, launched a disastrous war in Iraq that divided the country.

During President Obama’s tenure in office, Republicans have experienced a grass-roots tea party revolt, grand successes in midterm elections that brought the party to a high point of power in the states and consecutive failures in the past two presidential elections that underscored long-term vulnerabilities of a predominantly white party in an increasingly diverse country.

Throughout this period of change, through victories and defeats, the Republican Party and its followers adhered to a set of smallgovernment, pro-defense, socially conservative principles that were consistent and as coherent as any political coalition can muster. Now, in the course of one tumultuous year, Trump has shattered that consensus, exposing divisions that were either overlooked or ignored by the party establishment. As Ohio Gov. John Kasich put it in a recent interview, “I think the party right now is trying to figure out what it is for.”

Trump has changed, at least for now, much of what everyone believed it meant to be a leader of the Republican Party. He is anti-trade in a party of free traders. He wants to keep Social Security and Medicare mostly as they are while others continues on next page

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in the party are committed to entitlement reform. He has questioned America’s role in the world in a party long dominated by internationalists and, more recently, interventionists. He has spoken about the LGBT community in ways many Republicans do not.

He has put the establishment on notice and ignored their advice when it suits him — which is most of the time.

It is the very fact that Trump holds those views that rankles many in the party. It is also that — espousing those views — he managed to win more states, more votes and more delegates than any of the other 16 Republicans running for president.

The ruptures caused by Trump’s candidacy will be felt in Cleveland, if not always seen. What is left to be answered is whether Trump’s impact is lasting, or that his candidacy proves to be a brief, if unnerving, episode that fades quickly if he loses in November, allowing the party to return to some semblance of normalcy.

Those alarmed at the prospect of Trump at the top of the ticket in November despair at the state of the party. “I think it’s incredibly divided,” said Katie Packer, a GOP strategist who led a super PAC that tried to deny Trump the nomination. “You have Republican-onRepublican aggression because people are arguing over politics versus principle. Do we stand by the party that we’ve all been loyal to no matter what, or do we stand up and say no, this behavior is unacceptable and I want no part of it under any banner. It’s put people that they’re used to being in the bunker with against one another.”

But defenders of the presumptive nominee have another view of his impact on the party. Pollster Kellyanne Conway, who is now part of the Trump campaign, said the primaries highlighted the fissures within the Republican coalition between what she called the political and voting classes and changed the balance of power between them.

“This is the year the voters took the party back,” she said.

Conway, who worked during the primaries for a super PAC supporting Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said it was telling that Trump and Cruz finished as the top two candidates in a large field of experienced insiders. “The Republican Party was veering dangerously

close to cementing itself as the party of elites,” she said. “I would look at it as the haughty versus the rowdy in our party. . . . I’m not assigning any negative attributes to that. They’re [the Trump supporters] frustrated. They’re fed up and they feel betrayed.”

How splintered is the party?

Over the past few years, a number of authors have published books examining the state of the Republican Party. Although they have different perspectives and range across the ideological spectrum, three of these writers, in recent interviews, came to similar conclusions: The party circa summer 2016 is in a predicament, partly of Trump’s doing and partly the result of other forces, with no clear or simple way out.

“I think it’s in bad shape. I think it was in bad shape before,” said Matt Lewis, a conservative who writes for the Daily Caller and who wrote the book “Too Dumb to Fail.” “Trump in some ways has just exploited the lack of coherence, of competence within the party. I think he’s created chaos, but he’s also exploited preexisting conditions.”

In Lewis’s analysis, the party has been unraveling in one form or another since the end of the Cold War. Anticommunism was the glue that bound together a coalition of conservative, moderate and liberal Republicans who often saw the rest of the world differently. “I think now you’ve gotten to the point where there is a huge divide between the base of the party, which I think identifies with Donald Trump — it’s nativist and populist — and intellectual leaders like [House Speaker Paul] Ryan, [Sen. Ben] Sasse and [Sen. Marco] Rubio, who are more optimistic and forward-looking.”

Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote “Rule and Ruin,” an examination of the decline and fall of the GOP’s moderate wing in the period from the Eisenhower presidency to the early part of this century. In an interview, he noted that his admiration for the party’s now withered moderate faction doesn’t negate the reality that the period in which it was most dominant was when Republicans were doing terribly in election competitions generally.

“Since turning to conservatism, Republicans have seen all their dreams come true, at least in Congress and state legislatures and governorships,” he said. “So in that sense, the party is doing great.”

But as he was quick to add, that

DIRCK HALSTEAD/GETTY IMAGES

Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush smile at the Republican National Convention on July 21, 1980, in Detroit.

The ruptures caused by Trump will be felt in Cleveland.

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BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan, seen above and at top with their families during the 2012 Republican convention in Tampa, lost their bid for president and vice president.

Many prominent Republicans will be absent this week.

is only part of the story, the other half being the friction below the surface. “Trump . . . seems an expression of very negative things going on within the party that are now coming into fruition,” he said.

E.J. Dionne is a Washington Post columnist who critiqued the party from the perspective of a committed liberal. His book, “Why the Right Went Wrong,” examines the party’s evolution from Goldwater to the present day.

“One of the things Trump shows is that people vastly overread the tea party as some kind of pure libertarian anti-state movement and underestimated how many of its supporters were older, white Americans who were very angry about immigration,” he said.

“Trump’s advantage was that he was outspoken about immigration, in an extreme and sometimes racist way, where many of his opponents felt constrained talking about it.”

He added that a key to understanding why the party has been so split by Trump’s candidacy is what conservative intellectuals have been noting all year. “The Republican Party relied for decades on white, working-class voters and delivered no material benefits to them,” Dionne said. “Oddly, a man who says he is a billionaire has become the avatar of a working-class rebellion inside the Republican Party.”

The gulf between the Trump party and the more traditional Republican Party can be seen by the list of Republicans who have withheld their support from the presumptive nominee. They include the three Bushes — the two former presidents and Trump rival Jeb Bush, as well as the party’s 2012 nominee, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who has led the anti-Trump forces since last spring. Many other prominent Republicans will be absent from Cleveland this week while some there will be less than enthusiastic about the presumptive nominee.

Many Republicans fear a possible debacle in November. Optimistic Republicans still see a path to victory for Trump, given the anger that animates parts of the electorate as well as long-standing hostility toward Hillary Clinton. GOP congressional leaders are prepared to do whatever they must do to preserve their majorities should Trump falter in the late stages of the campaign.

No matter the outcome, however, Trump’s candidacy has high-

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lighted a party now debating what it actually believes. Vin Weber, a former House member from Minnesota and veteran strategist, said his concerns about the party go far beyond some of the offensive statements Trump has made.

“I’m as offended by that as anybody,” he said. “But . . . he is rejecting major, major policies that the Republican Party has stood for. . . .

You have to ask that question, what is it that we’ve misjudged about what the Republican Party actually believes?”

Weber’s answer is that Republicans have let their hostility toward President Obama, rather than the principles of conservatism, shape what they think about issues. He worries that the anti-Obama sentiment that has bound the coalition together is morphing into antiClinton anger, and that begs the question of where the party actually stands on key issues.

Weber said a Trump victory in November could shatter the party.

“I think it will cause a fracturing of the party more serious that we’ve seen up to now,” he said. “I can’t believe that the institutionalization of this phenomenon goes without severe consequences for the Republican Party.”

Dionne argued that Trump’s success should be a wake-up call to the Republican establishment that what the party long has preached has lost its resonance to many who have been voting Republican in recent years.

Conway said the success of the New York billionaire presents Republicans with a choice of what it will be in the future: “Cementing your status as a party of elites or following Donald Trump’s lead and become the party of the workers.”

Kasich doubts the party will break apart but nonetheless sees Trump as emblematic of a broader — and to him worrisome — shift in attitudes here and elsewhere. “I am increasingly concerned about worldwide — not just in America but worldwide — growing nationalism, a movement towards antiimmigration, a movement towards anti-trade, a movement towards isolation. None of these things am I comfortable with for our country, not just my party, but my country.”

The Republican convention will hardly resolve the differences that Trump’s candidacy has revealed.

They will continue to roil the party all the way through to Election Day — and probably beyond. n

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POLITICS ESSAY

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

A changing Cleveland with immigration still at its core

BY MARY JORDAN

People make their way down Fourth Street in Cleveland on June 3.

W

est 179th Street wasn’t the center of Cleveland, but it was its heart.

My street growing up was a couple of dozen small homes filled with people from other countries. My parents came from Ireland. The Schweichlers across the street arrived from Germany. We had Italian and Polish neighbors, and next door was Sylvia.

Sylvia Parnamagi, in her thick Estonian accent, would make a feast and talk of the hunger in Soviet-occupied times, and my mom, in her strong Irish brogue, would tell funny tales of working as a nanny for a rich Cleveland family that had a dumbwaiter and a 13-car garage. They were good friends, and though they often couldn’t quite understand each other’s ac-

cented words, they talked every day.

The Republican National Convention starring Donald Trump opens on Monday in Cleveland, an unlikely backdrop not only because it is heavily Democratic but because it was built, and continues to be shaped, by immigrants. A defining Trump message is that it is time to pull up the U.S. welcome mat: Build a giant wall on the Mexican border, deport millions of foreigners who did not enter legally, maybe even ban Muslims.

In the 1970s, when I was growing up in Cleveland, the city had twice the national average of foreign-born people. Many worked in the steel mills along the river or in the giant Ford plant that made engines for Lincolns and Thunderbirds.

My dad, who left his family farm in the west of Ireland and arrived in 1957, found work at the East Ohio

SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2016

13

POLITICS ESSAY Gas Company as a pipefitter. One of my best friends since kindergarten at Our Lady of Angels School spoke Arabic at home, the language of her Syrian-born parents.

After Soviet tanks smashed the 1956 uprising in Hungary and refugees streamed out, it was often said that there were more Hungarians in Cleveland than anywhere outside Budapest. I heard that at my disc jockey/phone answering job at NBN Radio, the Nationality Broadcasting Network, which continuously played music from around the globe — especially from Hungary, where the owners were from.

Every weekend, I would change music cassettes, from polkas to ballads, the music of 16 countries in all.

Listeners would call in and say those sounds from back home made them feel welcome on the shores of Lake Erie.

In fact, welcoming immigrants was how a politician got elected in those days. Ralph Perk was elected mayor of Cleveland in the 1970s three times, casting himself as the “ethnic candidate,” the one to represent all the blue-collar workers from so many different faraway places. That was a winning slogan for the Republican.

(Nationally, Perk was best known for accidentally setting his hair on fire with a blowtorch at an American Society of Metals convention, and because his wife famously turned down an invitation to the Nixon White House by saying it was her regular bowling night — but more on Cleveland punch lines later.)

Until 2013, when Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio left Congress, he was handing voters his cards in 20 different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian and Italian.

“It would benefit Mr. Trump to actually reach out and experience the power of the diversity in greater Cleveland,” said Kucinich, a Democrat and Fox News contributor. “It’s who we are.”

Cleveland has a world-famous orchestra and art museum, impressive turn-of-the-century architecture, the mansions of Millionaire’s Row built in the railroad baron era, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame built by I.M. Pei in the 1990s. It has Shaker Heights and Chagrin Falls, some of the nation’s most affordable high-end suburbs.

But the city itself has shrunk. It now has 400,000 people, a dizzying drop from 900,000 in 1950 when it was a manufacturing gi-

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

ant, drawing immigrants from Europe and African Americans from the South.

In 1967, Cleveland made history as the first major city to elect a black mayor, and today 53 percent are African American. In recent years, Mexican and other Latin American immigrants elsewhere in the country have helped push up the nation’s foreign-born population to 13 percent, higher than in Cleveland today.

Joe Cimperman, the president of Global Cleveland, a nonprofit that assists people settling in from overseas, sees Cleveland’s economic future brightened by more immigrants: “We want not only a door wider open but one with its hinges taken off.”

“The heart and soul of Cleveland is old friends who just met having come from other places,” he said.

Now instead of from Europe, those coming are from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

The jobs are more biomedical than blue-collar. Thousands from overseas are working at the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals.

In parks where my older brother Patrick teamed up with Irish tradesmen to play Gaelic football, Pakistani and Indian doctors now play cricket. Kuwaitis, many working in engineering, play soccer at East 12th and Chester.

Cimperman said last year the city settled 1,000 refugees, some from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We welcome it,” he said about the arrival of Trump and the debate over immigration. “It gives a chance

Photos of the 1924 Republican National Convention, held in Cleveland, are seen in the city’s public library downtown. The city again hosted the convention in 1936, when Republican Alf Landon was nominated.

to talk about it. Nobody is happy with the state of immigration now.”

In fact, in this swing state, there are those who embrace immigrants and those who would like to kick them out. Obama won Cleveland easily in 2012, but edged out Romney 50 to 48 percent in Ohio.

An embarrassing incident this month involving a United Arab Emirates businessman brought unwanted international attention.

When the man, speaking Arabic and wearing white traditional robes, was trying to check into a hotel in Avon, a suburb of Cleveland, the clerk “freaked.” Police got a 911 call about a man talking about the Islamic State, and when they showed up, tackled and arrested him. He collapsed. He had come to Cleveland to get medical care at the Cleveland Clinic. Police and city officials have apologized.

At this year’s convention, police are preparing for large demonstrations on both sides of the immigration debate stoked by Trump.

The last time Cleveland held a political convention was 1936.

With tens of millions of people expected to view the event on TV, Facebook and social media, city officials hope to showcase the changes in the city. After a few rough decades, it is coming back.

It is so yesterday to talk about a Full Cleveland (a polyester leisure suit with white shoes and a white patent leather belt). Now it’s all about the New Cleveland.

It has been almost 50 years since the polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire, making it the butt of jokes. Today people boat and fish

KLMNO WEEKLY

in the downtown river.

Over $5 billion has been pumped into downtown. It has become a magnet drawing people to a justunveiled Public Square, new lakefront condos and gastropubs. When I was growing up, downtown was a ghost town in the evening. Today it is the hot place to hang out and the number of people living downtown has soared 80 percent since 2000.

More than a million people crammed into downtown last month to cheer the Cleveland Cavaliers’ NBA championship, the city’s first major sports title in 52 years. The Cleveland Indians are first in their division and playing before sell-out crowds.

“Believeland” is a popular new T-shirt. Other home pride shirts simply say “Earned.”

“Damn right, we are Cleveland.

We are proud of being a little bit gritty,” said David Gilbert, the chief executive of Destination Cleveland, who is also running the host committee for the GOP convention. “We want to show the world who we are.”

Cleveland humor writer Mike Polk said success is so new it’s uncomfortable. “We had an identity: the loveable losers,” he said.

Now, he asked, “Who are we?”

Mayor Frank Jackson says the city’s strength “is the people.”

And what is striking about its people is their diversity, celebrated in so many landmarks.

The West Side Market, one of the city’s most photographed buildings, offers homemade food from around the globe — Polish pierogies, Cambodian banana leaf, Mexican enchiladas. The 276-acre Cultural Gardens is 29 distinct gardens honoring those who shaped the city. The first two planted a century ago were the British and Hebrew gardens. The African American garden opened in 1977, and the newest, planted since 2011, are Syrian and Albanian.

The Cleveland Clinic’s expansion recently claimed many of the houses on my old street. But before homes long owned by immigrants were razed, my brother Tom bought the fireplace from the Zilkos and the front door from the Schweichlers and made them part of his new Cleveland home.

On Monday, in the Quicken Loans Arena where thousands of devoted fans just roared for LeBron James, thousands of Republican visitors will be applauding Trump.

And the eyes of the world will be on a city of exceptional diversity. n

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POLITICS DEMOCRATS

A closer, but still awkward, union J OHN W AGNER Portsmouth, N.H. BY

B

ernie Sanders pledged to support presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at a boisterous but at times awkward rally last week, more than a month after Clinton effectively clinched the nomination.

“She will be the Democratic nominee for president, and I intend to do everything I can to make certain she will be the next president of the United States,” the senator from Vermont said Tuesday as the former rivals appeared side by side on a stage in a packed high school gym.

Sanders and Clinton touted the need to come together to defeat Republican Donald Trump, and both offered effusive praise for the other — words not uttered during the bruising Democratic primaries. But their body language was stiff, and it was clear from shouts of “We love you, Bernie!” that not everyone who supported Sanders was ready to move on.

Even with a few scattered signs of discord, however, Clinton and Sanders presented a more unified portrait of the Democratic Party than Trump has been able to do with the GOP. “You will always have a seat at the table when I am in the White House,” she said.

Much remains unknown about whether the political marriage between Clinton and Sanders will work. As they shook hands on their way to the stage, both were guarded by separate Secret Service teams and waved in different directions. And signs of lingering tension remained as some supporters yelled at one another and a police officer intervened to mediate a dispute in the bleachers.

Although they have a common enemy in Trump, Clinton and Sanders don’t have much of a personal or professional relationship.

Their chemistry Tuesday offered a marked contrast to that on display at a recent Clinton event featuring Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), another darling of the party’s progressive wing. While Warren punched the air to accentuate

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Sanders endorsed Clinton to help unify the party, but questions remain over their partnership Clinton’s applause lines, both Clinton and Sanders were more tepid in their enthusiasm for each other. Clinton and Warren seemed like a tag team; Clinton and Sanders presented more simply as a joint appearance.

Although Sanders left no doubt that he would support Clinton in the fall, he also touched on his accomplishments in the primaries, noting that he had won 22 states and would be taking nearly 1,900 delegates to the convention in Philadelphia.

“Together we have begun a political revolution to transform America, and that revolution continues,” he said. “Together we will continue to fight for a government that represents all of us and not just the 1 percent.”

Sanders devoted the bulk of his speech to the issues that he fought for during the campaign, pausing to note areas where he and Clinton shared common goals.

He broke into his broadest

smile of the event when Clinton referred to his vast success at soliciting campaign contributions — averaging $27 apiece — via the Internet.

“We accept $27 donations, too, you know,” she told the crowd.

The rally began with two Sanders supporters speaking: environmental leader Bill McKibben and Jim Dean, the leader of Democracy for America, a grass-roots group that endorsed Sanders in the primaries.

Dean announced that his group will now support Clinton.

McKibben touted Sanders’s appeal to young voters and said he hopes the Democratic Party will “not disappoint them” going forward.

“Secretary Clinton, we wish you Godspeed in the fight that now looms,” McKibben said.

Although Clinton is the presumed nominee, aides said Sanders has no plans to suspend his campaign or formally exit the race

“I intend to do everything I can to make certain she will be the next president of the United States,” Bernie Sanders said of Hillary Clinton at a rally at Portsmouth High School in Portsmouth, N.H.

before the convention next week in Philadelphia, but he is giving up his Secret Service protection.

Sanders’s decision to keep his campaign alive has alienated many Democrats, who thought the senator should have been more gracious in accepting defeat after a grueling nominating process. But it may have given him more leverage to push for changes to the party platform.

Clinton has agreed to push policies on free college tuition and expanded access to health insurance that reflect positions Sanders championed during the primaries. And Sanders has claimed major wins such as support for a $15 federal minimum wage and measures to combat climate change.

The joint appearance here was greeted with a news release from the Trump campaign highlighting the “top five reasons Sanders supporters will never be excited about Hillary Clinton.”

One of them was her past support for international trade deals, which Sanders repeatedly criticized during the primaries. Trump has tried to reach out to Sanders’s supporters on that issue, particularly those in the Rust Belt, where thousands of manufacturing jobs have been shed.

It remains to be seen how active Sanders will be on the campaign trail for Clinton — and how much he can do on her behalf.

Sanders supporters had begun consolidating around Clinton’s candidacy after she all but secured the nomination in May, according to Washington Post-ABC News polling. Before then, 71 percent of Democratic-leaning Sanders voters supported Clinton against Trump in a two-way matchup. The number rose to 81 percent in June.

Although only 8 percent of Sanders voters said they support Trump, the latest poll found that third-party candidates pose a risk to Clinton. In a four-way matchup, 11 percent of Sanders Democrats said they would back Green Party candidate Jill Stein and 8 percent would back Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, dropping Clinton’s support to 65 percent. n

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NATION

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Seeking to soothe a tense nation L OUISA L OVELUCK, W ILLIAM W AN AND M ARK B ERMAN Dallas BY

V

isiting yet another city heartbroken by a mass shooting, President Obama tried to defuse tensions that have erupted in the past days — first when black men in Louisiana and Minnesota were killed by police, then when a gunman who said he was angry about those and similar deaths opened fire on officers in Dallas.

At a memorial service Tuesday for the five officers slain here, Obama sought to unify a nation grieving and yet divided over fatal shootings involving police. The president called for open hearts and understanding from both law enforcement and those protesting against them.

Obama sharply criticized anyone who would paint all police as bigoted or seek violence against them. Yet he also acknowledged the fear and pain among black Americans who feel targeted and brutalized by police.

“We ask police to do too much, and we ask too little of ourselves,” Obama said during his remarks, which capped an emotional interfaith service just a mile from where the five officers died late Thursday.

The event was held in a soaring symphony hall, attended by 2,500 and marked by poignant moments.

Five seats were left empty in a box to the right of the stage, each draped in black and marked by a trifolded American flag. Spouses, children and parents of those killed sat front and center in the first rows.

On the streets of the city, officers from nearby jurisdictions patrolled to give Dallas officers, their badges still marked by black tape, a chance to attend and mourn.

Obama was joined on stage by former president George W. Bush, who was making a rare public appearance since moving to Dallas after he left the White House.

Even as the president spoke of unity, however, there were palpable signs of the deep chasm he said must be bridged.

TOM PENNINGTON/GETTY IMAGES

In Dallas, President Obama urges all sides to open their hearts and break ‘dangerous cycle’ Whenever Obama talked about the fallen — Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, Brent Thompson and Patrick Zamarippa — the hall, filled deep with men and women in uniform, broke into applause. But most did not clap whenever the president spoke about the Black Lives Matter protests or about the two African Americans shot and killed last week: Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn.

Afterward, one officer sitting near the stage tried to explain the silence. “The tragedy is very fresh in our minds — too fresh for some,” said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of respect for those grieving. “They clapped when we were praised, but when it came to race relations, it was more of a stony silence where I was sitting.”

For 40 minutes, Obama threaded the raw emotions and festering resentments of both sides, trying to pull them closer together.

“We wonder if an African American community that feels unfairly targeted by police, and police departments that feel unfairly maligned for doing their jobs, can ever understand each other’s experience,” he said.

He praised police: “We know that the overwhelming majority of police officers do an incredibly hard and dangerous job fairly and professionally. They are deserving of our respect and not our scorn.”

Yet he channeled the experiences of black Americans, too: “We also know that centuries of racial discrimination . . . didn’t simply vanish with the end of lawful segregation. We know that bias remains. . . . No institution is entirely immune. And that includes our police departments.”

Obama pleaded for each community to open its hearts. “If we cannot even talk about these things,” he said, “if we cannot talk honestly and openly not just in the comfort of our own circles, but with those who look different than us or

Misty McBride, an officer with Dallas Area Rapid Transit, hugs a fellow officer before an interfaith memorial service at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center to honor the five slain police officers.

bring a different perspective, then we will never break this dangerous cycle.”

Obama’s visit came on a quieter day after a stretch of demonstrations from New York to Dallas to Phoenix to San Francisco. In the wake of the deaths of Sterling, Castile and the Dallas officers, protests put numerous cities on edge. More than 200 people were arrested, sometimes after tense encounters with police dressed in riot gear.

The former police chief in Washington and Philadelphia compared the bitter divisions and anxiety to “a powder keg” heading into the Republicans’ and Democrats’ presidential conventions.

The nation’s continuing unease and jittery nerves were evident even at the Dallas memorial service. Helicopters circled overhead as Secret Service agents patrolled the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center’s perimeter. Inside, some officers acknowledged keeping an eye out for possible escape routes.

The rampage by former Army reservist Micah Xavier Johnson has left a deep scar, said Lorenzo Garza, a local federal deportation officer in the audience. “It reminds us that it could be any one of us.”

Dallas Police Chief David Brown received a huge response when he came to the podium to stress that “there’s no greater love than this that these five men gave their lives for all of us.”

Also on stage with him and the president were Michelle Obama; Vice President Biden and his wife, Jill; Bush’s wife, Laura; Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings; and other local and federal officials. After the service, the Obamas, Bidens and Bushes met for more than an hour with relatives of those slain as well as some of the officers who were injured in the shooting, the White House said.

“Those of us who love Dallas and call it home have had five deaths in the family,” the former president told those gathered. Bush also lamented the country’s painful divisions: “Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions, and this has strained our bonds of understanding.” n

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BY

MARKETING

S ARAH H ALZACK

I

n her nearly six decades on toy-store shelves, perhaps no year has brought bigger change for Barbie than 2016.

After watching the iconic doll’s dominant market share slip every year since 2009, Mattel gambled in January on a major makeover. It gave Barbie more varied body shapes, skin tones and hair types.

The overture was meant to address what has long been the hardest part of selling Barbie: Legions of parents think the buxom, oftenpale-skinned doll sends a lousy message to girls about beauty standards.

But, it turns out, her body was only part of the problem.

Barbie, it seems, has developed a reputation as something of a material girl.

“A lot of the conversation was focused on what Barbie had — her stuff,” said Tania Missad, Mattel’s senior director of global insights.

In other words, Mattel researchers found that when people thought of Barbie, they thought about the pink convertible, the Dreamhouse and the closet full of tiny, plastic stilettos. They thought of a character whose life was more “Real Housewives” than real world.

And this, executives knew, was a problem. Generation X parents were often content to have their girls play with a doll as long as it was merely entertaining. They found that millennials, however, were fixated on giving their children toys that had purpose and meaning.

And so begins yet another crucial quest for Mattel: It is working to use marketing and other strategies to reposition Barbie as an emblem of imaginative, creative play.

They’ll probably find a receptive audience in moms who have nostalgia for the brand, the ones who remember the offbeat careers and personal adventures they cooked up themselves while playing with the dolls back in the day.

And yet they’ll be challenged by the persistent perception that Barbie is a perpetuator of gender stereotypes, not an agent for smashing them.

Until now, if Mattel advertised on television, it was largely with commercials that spoke directly to 5- to 7-year-old girls, offering descriptions of the toys and showing them how to play with them.

But, starting this fall, look for

A material girl, rebranded for the millennial world

MATTEL

the company to be on the airwaves with ads aimed squarely at parents. During “Dancing With the Stars” and some of ABC’s holiday programming, for example, executives plan to run a 30-second spot that shows a girl playing with her Barbies, pretending to be a science professor and lecturing her dolls about the human brain.

Even sooner than that, Mattel will take a new tack in marketing its President and Vice President Barbie dolls, a set that has been rolling into stores in recent weeks and gets its marketing launch Wednesday. While it’s not new that Barbie is running for the highest office in the land — she’s been doing so in most presidential campaign years since 1992 — it’s new that she comes with a running mate. And Mattel this year has teamed up with a nonprofit group called She Should Run to cast the tiny politicos in a somewhat different light.

She Should Run is a nonpartisan group that works to get more women interested in running for public office. So, this year, instead of just presenting girls with an elegantly coiffed doll in a White

Mattel plans to realign Barbie’s ethos: Less acquiring and more aspiring For its President and Vice President Barbie dolls, Mattel allied with a nonpartisan group that encourages women to run for public office.

House-worthy power suit, the dolls’ packaging will come with a prompt to download a worksheet co-created with She Should Run that’s meant to get parents and kids talking about leadership.

The worksheet asks girls to circle words that describe them as a leader, with choices such as “brave” and “fearless.” And it has a fill-inthe-blank speech where girls can write about what they would do if they were president — a clear bid to push the buttons of the purposedriven millennial parent.

Mattel executives like to say that they want to change the focus from what Barbie has to what kind of play activity Barbie enables.

“It’s sort of the beginning of our brand to start encouraging girls to do something,” said Lisa McKnight, senior vice president and general manager of the Barbie brand.

If you’re wondering whether the doll is a warm embrace of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Mattel says not so much: The company works on an 18-month product cycle, so this doll was in the works before the

outcome was clear in this year’s presidential race. (And, for what it’s worth, President Barbie’s skirt suit and Vice President Barbie’s short peplum top are decidedly un-Clintonian ensembles.)

Mattel has also convened an advisory council of people outside the toy industry to offer it different assessments of the Barbie brand.

The group includes young female entrepreneurs, women who work in science and math fields, and Erin Loos Cutraro, chief executive of She Should Run, who is immersed in the political world.

In some ways, it shouldn’t be surprising that Mattel is finding millennial parents are seeking out purpose-minded brands, because they are doing so across all kinds of retailing categories. Retailer Warby Parker has gained traction in part by touting its donations to nonprofits in order to increase access to eyeglasses. Apparel startup Everlane has found an audience by sharing what factory has made each piece of apparel it sells.

Millennials have shown that they like their shopping with a side of corporate responsibility.

There are early signs that the efforts to reinvent the brand are working: In the United States, Barbie saw sales momentum picking up in the second half of 2015 and an increase in sales at retail stores in the first quarter.

“Mattel is doing a good job making her relevant again,” said Jim Silver, editor in chief at toy review website TTPM. And yet it may be difficult to change plenty of other people’s deeply ingrained views about Barbie.

Elizabeth Sweet, who studies gender-based toy marketing at the University of California at Davis, said she sees the new roster of diverse Barbies as a clear sign of progress for the brand.

And yet, Sweet said, “Unfortunately, the Barbie brand is rooted in appearance and beauty and body. And I don’t think they can really get away from that.”

McKnight said this kind of criticism is hardly new for Barbie brand to deal with.

“We can’t be reactive to every piece of feedback that we hear,” McKnight said. “That said, we also want to make sure that we’re listening, that we have an evolutionary mind-set, that we’re not too precious about any aspect of the brand.” n

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17

CRUNCHED

OUR REGION BY THE NUMBERS

ECONOMY

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e sharing economygap TheThprosperity

Brookings Institution researchers ranked the 100 most populated metropolitan areas on how Brookings Institution ranked the 100 mostsuch populated metropolitan areas Some areas “inclusive” their economies are,researchers using a variety of factors, as equity and growth. on how “inclusive” their economies are, using a variety of factors, such as equity and growth. with fast-growing economies haveeconomies not donehave well spreading prosperity.

— Annys Shin Some areas with fast-growing notatdone well at spreading prosperity.

— Annys Shin

TOP 10 TOP 10

Seattle

BOTTOM 10 BOTTOM 10

Salt Lake City Ogden, Utah

Provo, Utah Madison, Wis.

Minneapolis

Detroit

Scranton, Pa. Harrisburg, Pa.

San Jose

28th: Washington, D.C. 34th: Richmond 56th: Baltimore

Las Vegas Albuquerque Birmingham, Ala. Honolulu

Baton Rouge New Orleans

Memphis Jackson, Miss.

Jacksonville, Fla. Lakeland, Fla.

SOURCE: JOHN IRONS AND ALAN BERUBE, BROOKINGS METROPOLITAN POLICY PROGRAM; METHODOLOGY AVAILABLE AT brook.gs/1ZMS16n; MAP: ISTOCKPHOTO

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BOOKS

The year when politics fractured N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

C ARLOS L OZADA

W

AMERICAN MAELSTROM The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division

by Michael A. Cohen Oxford. 427 pp. $29.95

hen the world starts feeling chaotic — and yes, the summer of 2016 is making a strong play for chaos — it’s tempting to look back for reference points and precursors, to some past time that can explain why things turned out this way, that maybe can give us someone to blame.

Michael A. Cohen’s “American Maelstrom” chronicles a bygone presidential election featuring a fear-mongering, race-baiting candidate stoking white resentment; a long-shot lefty whipping up collegiate frenzy with his anti-statusquo message; and an establishment front-runner who, recovering from a painful electoral defeat eight years earlier, was hoping to prove just likable enough to win.

Voters cast their ballots against a backdrop of political assassinations, police brutality and a seemingly endless war, one that Americans did not want to lose but did not care to continue waging.

Cohen, a political columnist for the Boston Globe, does not draw direct parallels between particular candidates in 1968 and today; no, that would be too easy. The true link is not the politicians, he contends, but the politics. The presidential campaign would fracture the nation’s post-World War II “liberal consensus” — the understanding among Republican and Democratic elites that the federal government should provide economic opportunity and security at home and remain vigilant against communism abroad.

In its place, he argues, appeared the polarization now so pervasive in our politics, as “the ideologically committed wings of each side began to more forcibly assert themselves.”

The result was not just a Nixon presidency that would end in disgrace, it was “four decades of division, incoherence, and parochialism in American politics.”

Cohen tells this unhappy story through the strategies and fortunes of the men contending for

PHOTOS BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

Delegates to the Republican National Convention hold a demonstration for Richard M. Nixon in 1968.

Disputes erupted that year over the presidential pick at the Democratic National convention in Chicago.

the presidency: former vice president Richard Nixon, Gov. Ronald Reagan, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and Gov. George Romney on the Republican side; Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Sen. Robert Kennedy, Sen. Eugene McCarthy and (at times) President Lyndon Johnson for the Democrats; and former Alabama governor George Wallace, the Democrat-turnedindependent who was “so willing to tap into the dark pools of popular alienation.”

The book proceeds methodically, devoting separate chapters to the individual candidates’ campaigns before delving into the national party conventions, the election itself and its long-term aftermath. The result is a fast-paced and engaging account, almost too much so; whenever you want to dig deeper into any one story, you’re already moving on.

The broader political transformation Cohen describes happens in a pincer move: From the left, Democrats shattered the notion that the United States should devote blood and treasure to the anti-communist cause. McCarthy, though ambivalent about the presidency, “offered his candidacy as a political outlet for Americans sick of the war and dismayed with

Johnson’s leadership,” Cohen explains. McCarthy’s decision to represent the antiwar movement, while lacking a realistic hope of victory, “ended up being the most transformative event of the 1968 election,” nudging Johnson out of the race and drawing Kennedy in.

The senator from Minnesota didn’t just oppose the war; he “openly questioned the notion of American virtue in global affairs.”

Humphrey, long trapped in his subservient role as LBJ’s veep, finally unshackled himself with a major Vietnam speech just weeks before the election. Calling for a halt to the bombing of the North, Humphrey signaled that the antiwar movement, not the hawks, now called the shots in the party.

In Cohen’s telling, this shift led to decades of Democratic insecurity on national security.

From the right, the Republican Party upended the other half of the liberal consensus — the expectation that the federal government should buttress the population’s economic fate. Instead, the GOP cast itself as the defender of “traditional values,” while “playing on growing white resentment and anxiety over social disorder and racial integration.”

The implicit racial bias in Rea-

gan’s message was nothing next to Wallace, who became a regional hero in 1963 with his “stand at the schoolhouse door,” seeking to block integration at the University of Alabama. As he expanded his anti-civil-rights message into a populist indictment of federal activism, Wallace became a national political force. “By painting a picture of an overzealous federal government that put the needs of blacks ahead of those of ‘hardworking Americans,’ Wallace was taking a wrecking ball to the liberal consensus,” Cohen writes. No candidate had a lesser chance of winning, the author explains, yet “no politician did more to change the narrative and language of American politics.”

There are countless books declaring that one particular year — or one month, or even one week — changed everything. They’re usually a stretch, but they’re fun thought experiments, a chance to spitball on the contingencies of history. “American Maelstrom” offers a better case than most, plus it provides the irresistible opportunity to cast today’s candidates in 1968’s drama. n Lozada is the nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2016

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

The precursor to Trump’s candidacy

Re-examining the Burger high court

N ON-FICTION

N ON-FICTION l

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l

REVIEWED BY

D AVID G REENBERG

he fireball candidacy of Donald Trump has created shock waves of nostalgia for an ostensibly moderate, reasonable Republican Party of yore. Trump’s vulgarity, anti-intellectualism, mendacity, mean-spiritedness and brawling, bullying style have been deemed unprecedented and unparalleled.

But anyone prone to romanticize the old GOP should take a bracing shot of “Bush,” a hefty biography of our 43rd president by the prolific and acclaimed biographer Jean Edward Smith.

Written in sober, smooth, snarkfree prose, with an air of thoughtful, detached authority, the book is nonetheless exceedingly damning in its judgments about George W. Bush’s years in office. It reminds us anew of Bush’s own arrogance, recklessness, strongarm politics and scorn for ideas — and of the apoplexy he provoked from liberals and Democrats who felt powerless to rein him in.

If Smith’s narrative feels familiar, it may also be because he closely tracks the headlines of the day: Proceeding chronologically, his account showcases whatever was prominent in the news at a given moment. Events or decisions that escaped the spotlight when they unfolded are dealt with only when their ramifications become clear. Thus, Bush’s housing policies — from his promotion of an “ownership society” to the 2008 mortgage-market crash — are shoehorned into the book’s penultimate chapter, not laid out at the earlier moments when he was making or acquiescing in the steps that enabled the crisis.

Structuring the book this way deprives readers of the opportunity to glimpse events in a fresh light — to learn unexpected backstories or note juxtapositions that are revealing only in hindsight.

Some deeply consequential developments, such as Iran’s bid to acquire nuclear weapons, get al-

most no ink because they didn’t dominate the news until after Bush left office.

Because Smith dwells on what was in the news, his book is dominated by the wars undertaken in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban, and especially the more dubious choice to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, will almost certainly define Bush’s presidency for decades to come. It’s hard to imagine a better overview than this volume of both invasions, their troubled occupations, their political fallout, and their implications for civil liberties and executive power at home.

On Bush’s conduct of these wars — and indeed on most aspects of the man and his presidency — Smith is relentlessly critical and may strike some readers as hyperbolic. “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush,” his book begins, and the judgments rarely soften.

In sizing up Bush’s character, Smith is plainly put off by his subject’s swaggering manner, his unreflective style and his illiberal attitudes. Perhaps most displeasing to Smith is Bush’s mixture of pious righteousness and gut-level decision-making. Time and again, he writes with dismay of how Bush “dismissed” prescient warnings or thoughtful advice, or took big steps without proper consideration.

Even if one rejects the extreme verdict that Bush’s presidency was among the worst ever, the example of his unquestionably troubled tenure suggests that while scorn for ideas and indecision in a leader may have its costs, so too does the instinct for deciding things too quickly. n Greenberg is a Rutgers University professor and author of “Republic of Spin.”

A

BUSH

By Jean Edward Smith Simon & Schuster.

808 pp. $35

THE BURGER COURT AND THE RISE OF THE JUDICIAL RIGHT

By Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse Simon & Schuster.

468 pp. $30

REVIEWED BY

J USTIN D RIVER

fter President Richard Nixon tapped Judge Warren Burger to replace outgoing Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1969 and then appointed three more justices during his first presidential term, many legal liberals feared that this cohort would systematically overturn the Warren court’s most esteemed precedents, including Brown v. Board of Edu­ cation and Miranda v. Arizona.

But a curious thing happened next: The dreaded day of reckoning never materialized. This surprising outcome was captured in an influential 1983 volume of essays on the Burger court subtitled “The Counter-Revolution That Wasn’t.” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., who served with Burger for 15 years, amplified this perception in a speech to the American Bar Association in 1986, the final year of Burger’s tenure: “There has been no conservative counter- revolution by the Burger court. None of the landmark decisions of the Warren court was overruled, and some were extended.”

Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse’s ambitious and engaging new book seeks to dislodge this conventional account of the Burger court. Even if that institution did not explicitly overrule key Warren court contributions, Graetz and Greenhouse contend that the dominant assessment of the Burger years severely understates the legal transformation that occurred during this period. “The Burger Court dramatically diminished the scope and impact of the Warren Court precedents: they survived, but only their façade was left standing,” the authors conclude. While Brown’s prohibition on racial segregation technically remained good law, they note, the Burger court curtailed its import by placing geographic limitations on busing and by refusing to invalidate expenditure plans that left inner-

city schools underfunded. Similarly, the authors observe that, while police officers were formally required to inform arrested suspects of their Miranda rights, the Burger court hollowed out the decision by introducing major exceptions.

Instead of comparing the Burger court only with its institutional predecessor, the authors also examine the institution in light of its two successors: the Rehnquist court, beginning in 1986, and the Roberts court, beginning in 2005. Graetz and Greenhouse argue that on a wide array of issues — from presidential power to corporate power, from the establishment clause to the equal protection clause — it is impossible to understand the conservative shifts enacted by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts without first comprehending the body that initiated the rightward trajectory. As the authors contend, “Warren Burger’s Court played a crucial role in establishing the conservative legal foundation for the even more conservative Courts that followed.”

In recent decades, law professors have treated the Burger court as the nation generally has treated disco, lava lamps, acidwashed jeans and other cultural detritus from that bygone era: The less said, the better. Graetz and Greenhouse’s work serves as an important corrective, demonstrating that the Burger court demands far more sustained scrutiny and analysis than legal scholarship has generally afforded it.

Readers interested in the Supreme Court’s role in American society during the second half of the 20th century will gather significant insight from this book’s elegant, illuminating arguments. n Driver is a law professor at the University of Chicago and is writing a book about the Supreme Court.

SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

How to repair our toxic, partisan politics WILL BARDENWERPER served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army and, more recently, as a civilian employee in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

On a clear summer evening, we squinted into the sun setting over the softball field on our U.S. Army base in Germany. One of my friends, who hailed from a small Pennsylvania town, said: “Look out there, Will, and tell me that isn’t cool. There’s a good ole boy from West Virginia pitching; in center field, we have a black power­lifter from Florida; in right field, there’s a Puerto Rican; at first base, an Irish American from South Boston. I went to West Point, and you went to Princeton. If we were back home, what would be the chances that all of our paths would ever cross?”

I was reminded of that moment the other night as my wife and I watched the final scene of “Band of Brothers,” in which the soldiers play softball as the narrator explains what became of them after the war. After a few moments sitting in stunned silence as the credits rolled, in awe of the almost unimaginable self-sacrifice of Dick Winters and the men of Easy Company, “Band of Brothers” gave way to a cable news show and its cacophony of pundits shouting party-issued talking points at each other, without a trace of original thought. It was hard to avoid a sense of melancholy at the abrupt transition from Easy Company’s selfless service to today’s toxic political discourse, and to a social fabric that appears to be unraveling along partisan and socioeconomic lines.

How has the country for which our grandparents sacrificed so much come to this?

Yes, we have serious issues, but we are not confronted with an imminent existential threat.

We are not experiencing anything as ruinous as the Civil War or either of our world wars.

So why this sense that the ties that bind our country together are fraying while we furiously pull in opposite directions?

One powerful step that could

begin moving us toward a sense of shared destiny would be a period of national service, either military or civil. The question over whether it should be mandatory, or merely incentivized and encouraged, as the bipartisan Franklin Project is working toward, can be debated.

However, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal writes, the “need to create a culture of service where we are all invested in our nation’s future and feel a shared sense of responsibility to our nation and to each other” should not require extensive deliberation.

Many Americans have just about given up on our political class, sensing that it does little besides raise money and protect incumbency. This political paralysis threatens the health of our republic more than the Islamic State ever could. Though many have “chosen sides” in this self-defeating political bloodsport, how many feel inspired by a sense of a collective national mission?

But watching the selflessness of the Band of Brothers as they jumped into Normandy and endured the Battle of the Bulge reminds us of what Americans are capable of, and that we do not need to resign ourselves to this civic fragmentation.

In a society that continues to divide between red state and

SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Americorps volunteer Melona Markham, 20, of Detroit, mixes concrete for a playground refurbishing during a national day of service in 2014.

blue, the very rich and everyone else, encouraging everyone to spend a year working together to perform a mission focused on the collective good would bridge some of the divides that are weakening us as a country. How often do the “coastal elites” express befuddlement at the support for Donald Trump, confiding to each other that they’ve “never met a Trump voter.” Likewise, some people in the reddest of counties rarely, if ever, come face to face with a committed progressive.

The Brexit vote in Britain last month illustrates what happens when socioeconomic elites have grown so detached from the rest of the citizenry that a factory worker in Manchester seems more foreign to a banker in London than a fellow financier in Frankfurt.

Throw us all together as bunkmates in Basic Training, though, or the austere conditions of the FEMA Corps or the Peace Corps, and it is possible that the shared sacrifice could help us see what we have in common, and feel more invested in our collective success.

Would the experience lead to instant national harmony? No. But it would help us to humanize those whom we may otherwise be conditioned to disdain by partisan insiders and their media enablers, who perversely benefit from the increasingly corrosive

status quo.

Remarkably, the demand of those looking to serve actually exceeds the supply of opportunities. Beyond military service, we need not look far to see domestic problems that could be addressed by a workforce of thousands of young people, from our crumbling infrastructure to homelessness.

The benefits of the service would go beyond the children taught by Teach for America or homes built by Habitat for Humanity. It would even go beyond the estimated $4 returned to society in benefits for every $1 invested in these programs. The most valuable result would be in the volunteers themselves, many of whom would go on to become more productive citizens, as studies of AmeriCorps have shown.

My friend’s observation at our Army softball game was simple yet profound. It is why so many veterans, when asked what they miss about the military, mention the camaraderie and shared sense of purpose. If we are lucky, circumstances will not soon require the scale of self-sacrifice exhibited by the greatest generation. But the type of brotherhood displayed on that German softball field should not be beyond our reach.

National service is an idea whose time has come, assuming it’s not already too late. n

SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

The voices the country needs KATHLEEN PARKER writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary In 2010.

By now most Americans know the name of Dallas Police Chief David O. Brown — and quite a few wouldn’t mind seeing him play a larger national role. I hear Republicans are looking for a substitute nominee.

Brown is admired not only as a defender of law and order but also as a blunt spokesman for a nation reeling from violence. He minces no words when he says, “We’re asking cops to do too much in this country” or, addressing protesters around the country, “We’re hiring.”

“Get off that protest line and put an application in, and we’ll put you in your neighborhood and we will help you resolve some of the problems you’re protesting about.”

Such tough talk is welcome from a man who has his own share of suffering, including the death of his son, who went on a shooting rampage, killing two people, including a police officer, before being killed in a firefight with police. Whatever forces compelled those acts will no doubt become part of a larger story in time.

For now, Brown has focused his energies on comforting the families of the dead and articulating our anxieties amid the chaos and killing.

His has been the calming voice the country needs, made all the more powerful by virtue of his personal experience and the

heartfelt sorrow he shares with so many. And, let’s be honest, my fellow white folks, because he’s black. And another black Dallas voice has added texture and depth to the debate now roiling wherever people gather. Brian Williams, the surgeon who futilely tried to save some of the wounded officers’ lives, became emotional as he expressed his own grief, not only for the dead but also over the violence.

“I don’t understand why people think it’s okay to kill police officers,” he said in a CNN interview. “I don’t understand why black men die in custody and they’re forgotten the next day. I don’t know why this has to be us against them. . . .

Something has to be done.”

Most people don’t understand either. But, as Williams also said, we get the anger and frustration.

It is not without reason that

many black people distrust the police. In Ferguson, Mo., where events led to the Black Lives Matter movement, Justice Department investigators found department-wide racism.

It is not without reason that blacks have little faith in a criminal justice system that imprisons them at six times the rate of whites, according to a Pew Research Center study. Or that awards blacks nearly 20 percent longer sentences than whites for similar crimes, according to a 2013 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Personal experience and observation also play a role. Even Williams, whose demeanor is as nonthreatening as that of any central-casting physician, acknowledged his own “fear and mild inherent distrust in law enforcement, that goes back to my own personal experiences that I’ve had in my own personal life.”

This isn’t to indict all police officers or even many, but there are “those.” Writing for Vox, former black police officer Redditt Hudson posited that 15 percent of police will always do the right thing; 15 percent will abuse their authority at any opportunity; the remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they’re

with.

This is why voices such as Brown’s and Williams’s are so vital, even as I recognize the racial stereotyping implicit in this observation. But the larger point is that while protesters can be marginalized as rabblerousers, the voices of a respected doctor and a police chief can’t.

Nor can one ignore (black) tenured Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who on Monday released research findings that police officers don’t, in fact, use deadly force more often against blacks than whites. Indeed, in Houston, one of the cities studied, police were less likely to shoot when the suspect was black. But Fryer also found that black suspects more often than whites are subjected to nonlethal force, such as being shoved against a wall.

What’s clear as facts are added to narratives enhanced by video and live streaming is that few things can be reduced to black and white. It also seems we have reached a tipping point in what any society can tolerate when it comes to injustice. Finally, the nation’s long-overdue conversation about race and racism is on the front burner.

Keeping it there is the least we can do for those whose blood was shed to make it so. n

SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY CLAY BENNETT FOR THE CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

Is the nation’s car culture dying?

ROBERT J. SAMUELSON writes a weekly column on economics.

Few technological breakthroughs have had the social and economic impact of the automobile. It changed America’s geography, spawning suburbs, shopping malls and sprawl as far as the eye could see. It redefined how we work and play, from the daily commute to the weekend trek to the beach. It expanded the heavy industry — steelmaking, car production — that made the Midwest the economy’s epicenter for decades. And, finally but not least, the car became the quintessential symbol of American mobility, status and independence.

Now there are signs that the car and its many offshoots (SUVs, pickup trucks) are losing their grip on the American psyche and pocketbook. The car culture may be dying or, at any rate, slumping into a prolonged era of eclipse.

The only question is whether the signs of change can be believed.

It’s not clear.

Young Americans, particularly millennials (ages 18 to 35), have lost their zest for buying and driving cars, it’s said. Once upon a time, getting your driver’s license — typically at 16 or 17 — was a rite of passage. You were liberated from dependence on the parental chauffeur. It was a big step toward adulthood. But this landmark no longer seems to matter so much.

Just recently, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) published figures — first reported

on the Atlantic magazine’s CityLab website — indicating that the number of licensed drivers 16 or younger in 2014 had dropped 37 percent since 2009 and, at 1.08 million, was “the lowest number since the 1960s.”

More impressive, the trend seems long term. A report from the Highway Loss Data Institute cites studies showing that from 1983 to 2010 the share of 16-yearolds with a license fell from 46 percent to 28 percent; over the same period, the share of licensed 17-year-olds declined from 69 percent to 46 percent.

Theories abound to explain this shift. One emphasizes cost; it’s too expensive to own a car, especially after the high unemployment and meager wage gains of the Great Recession.

Uber and other on-demand transportation services make this

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY HALL

choice more practical.

Other theories focus on lifestyles and values. Cars pollute, contributing to global warming.

Millennials disapprove. They are said to prefer cities where they can walk, bike or use buses to get to stores, restaurants and jobs.

The most fascinating theory is that the Internet has displaced the automobile. Both are social instruments, it’s argued. Instead of going to the mall, teens and others stay in touch through social media and texting. It’s cheaper and more convenient.

Maybe. But a new study by Federal Reserve economists Christopher Kurz, Geng Li and Daniel Vine suggests that most potential young buyers couldn’t afford a new vehicle or didn’t want to incur the debt and operating expenses of doing so.

Economic considerations dominated.

The study confirmed that new vehicle sales to younger consumers (16 to 34) weakened after the Great Recession. From 2000 to 2010, their share of sales fell from 28.6 percent to 19.8 percent. By 2015, it had recovered slightly to 22.6 percent. But declines for some other age groups were larger. Among 35-to49-year-olds, the share of sales slid from 39.2 percent in 2000 to 29.9 percent in 2015. Indeed, the

only age group with big increases were those 55 or higher.

When the economists adjusted the buying behavior of different age groups for income, employment status and some demographic factors (marriage, children, education, race), they found few differences. “Economic factors,” as opposed to “permanent shifts in tastes and preferences,” shaped car sales.

Since 1960, ordinary drivers’ travel distances have nearly doubled, from 7,700 miles annually to 14,100 miles in 2014, reports the FHWA. Still, the car culture no longer exerts the stranglehold on the American consciousness that it once did.

There is too much congestion for that. Perhaps today’s millennials will break new ground, even if it is the consequence of their predicament — debts elevated, incomes squeezed — rather than a cause. More of them may decide that city living or clustered suburban communities are more appealing than traditional suburbs. Gentrification may defeat commuting.

Or perhaps not. We simply don’t know. What we do know is that we are, to a large extent, prisoners of the past. The car created today’s residential geography, and it cannot be repealed simply or swiftly. n

SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Class in the United States BY

N ANCY I SENBERG

“For the first time in a generation, the working class is front and cen­ ter in an election cycle,” one MarketWatch writer proclaimed. But the definition of “working class” is fuzzy, and there are lots of miscon­ ceptions about class in the United States.

MYTH NO. 1 The working class is white and male.

That’s true only if you ignore Asians, Latinos and African Americans.

This gets at something important: America has never housed some monolithic entity called the “working class.” As early as 1791, Alexander Hamilton argued that those best suited for factory work were women and children, which became the norm in textile mills until child labor laws were passed in the 20th century. Chinese workers built the Transcontinental Railroad; immigrants labored in the Ohio steel industry; whites and blacks toiled side by side in 20th-century Louisiana sawmills.

Today’s working class is even more diverse. A recent study found that more than half of all Hispanics and African Americans identify as working class.

Additionally, about 50 percent of women see themselves as working class. Another report predicted that people of color will make up the majority of the American working class by 2032.

MYTH NO. 2 Most Americans don’t notice class differences.

The United States has always been a stratified country. In Franklin’s time, people were sorted into three classes: “better,” “middling” and “meaner.” The people at the bottom were seen as coarse, vulgar, unfinished — composed of baser materials.

Thomas Jefferson described the upper echelon of the Virginia planter class as pure-blood aristocrats; those who married beneath their station produced

children who were “half-breeds.”

In the 19th century, Alabama lawyer and author Daniel Hundley defined class in ancestral terms, laying out seven different options. At the top, he placed an inherited aristocracy, descendants of royal Cavalier blood. At the bottom was “white trash,” heirs of the wretched poor dumped in the American colonies.

Today, record inequality divides the rich and the poor. Our country’s wealthy “1 percent” takes home 20 percent of all pretax income, double their 1980 share. For most middle-class and lower-income families, income has either stagnated or fallen. In short, Americans have not escaped class hierarchies, but reinvented them generation by generation.

MYTH NO. 3 Class mobility is uniquely American.

Indeed, Americans are more optimistic about their chances of getting ahead than people in other places. But in reality, it’s harder to rise above your class in the United States than in just about any other developed country; economic mobility is much more possible in places like Japan, Germany and Australia.

MYTH NO. 4 With talent and hard work, you can rise above your class.

Actually, it’s hard to rise above your income level. In cities such as Atlanta, New York and Washington, a child raised in a poor family has a less than 10 percent chance of becoming wealthy in his or her lifetime. It’s not much better in other parts of

LEWIS WICKES HINE/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A young laborer at the Alexandria Glass Factory in Alexandria, Va., in 1911 worked both day and night shifts.

the country.

There are lots of reasons for this. Our education-funding system perpetuates inequality.

Children in poor families more frequently attend poorer schools and receive fewer enrichment opportunities. As a result, they’re less likely to attend college and earn a degree. Data show that children from families with incomes of at least $120,000 score much better on the SATs than their peers from households earning $20,000 or less.

Sociologists have also found that parents’ wealth is one of the best predictors of a child’s economic success. Rich families are more likely to own property and to pass wealth on to their offspring. In America, land ownership is one of the best ways to preserve wealth — and share it with the next generation.

MYTH NO. 5 Class oppression isn’t as common as racial oppression.

Americans have a long history of making life harder for the poor, no matter their race. Jim Crow’s infamous poll tax divested poor whites as well as poor blacks of the right to vote. During the New Deal, Southern politicians (except

Huey Long) refused to extend Social Security to farm laborers, discriminating against blacks and whites alike. Even our tax policies penalize the poor. In 2009, the top 1 percent of earners paid 5.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the poorest 20 percent paid 10.9 percent.

Class power takes many forms.

Its enduring force, its ability to project hatred toward the lower classes, was best summed up by two presidents 175 years apart. In 1790, Vice President John Adams argued that Americans not only scrambled to get ahead; they needed someone to disparage.

“There must be one, indeed, who is the last and lowest of the human species,” he wrote. Lyndon Johnson came to the same conclusion in explaining the racism of poor whites: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” n Isenberg, the T. Harry Williams professor of American history at Louisiana State University, is the author of “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.”

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SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2016

The Wenatchee World

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