Washington Post National Weekly - October 14, 2018

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2018

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

‘You shouldn’t be doing this’ She was 16. He was 25.

Should marrying a child be allowed? PAGE 12

Politics Nikki Haley’s star power 4

Nation Fla. hurricane devastation 8

5 Myths The 2016 election 23

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THE FIX

The GOP’s Kavanaugh split BY

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f the approximately 3 million controversies that have dominated the news since President Trump was elected, the Supreme Court fight to get Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh seated this past week could be the one that most sticks with voters.

That is both good news for Republicans and bad news for Republicans.

There is a growing body of evidence that points to the ugly Kavanaugh fight as a major factor that will possibly help Republicans keep control of the Senate but give Democrats the boost they need to regain the majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 2010.

How could a singular event be good for some candidates of a party and bad for others? Because the types of voters who will decide each election are totally different.

In the Senate, the winning party needs to win over rural, conservative-leaning voters.

(Or, if you are a Democrat, you at least need to win some of those while hoping the rest do not turn out to vote in significant numbers.)

That is because races that will determine the Senate majority are happening in states such as North Dakota, Montana, Missouri, West Virginia and Indiana — all states with significant rural populations that lean conservative.

It is a much different picture in the battle for the House, where the winning party needs to secure the votes of independent, female voters, especially those who live in the suburbs of big cities such as Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver and Miami.

Polls suggest those two groups of Americans — rural, conservative voters and suburban, female voters — see the Kavanaugh fight very differently.

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ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), is facing a Republican challenger who expanded his lead in polls following the Kavanaugh vote.

An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll taken after the hearings involving Kavanaugh and his accuser Christine Blasey Ford found that by nearly a 2-to-1 ratio, suburban women did not want Kavanaugh on the court. It was nearly the reverse for rural voters.

Let’s take the battle for the House first.

There is evidence that independent voters, especially women, in the suburbs have struggled with supporting Trump as president.

He’s got a long record of saying controversial things about women and reflexively standing by men in his orbit who have been accused of behaving badly toward women. Throw in his Supreme Court pick being accused of sexual misconduct, and Republicans are going to find it difficult to win over swing voters in competitive House races, argues Jesse Ferguson, a House Democratic operative.

A new Washington Post-Schar School survey of 69 competitive House races suggests these voters were paying attention to the

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Kavanaugh fight, too. Eighty-five percent of all voters in these districts say the Supreme Court is either important or extremely important in deciding their vote for Congress this year. That same poll also found women in these districts favor Democrats over Republicans for Congress by 14 points.

So when Trump indicated he thought the allegations against Kavanaugh were a “hoax set up by Democrats,” it was the last thing Republicans trying to keep control of the House wanted to hear.

Rhetoric like that is arguably great for Republicans trying to keep control of the Senate, where a much different base will decide the outcome. That NPR/PBS/Marist poll showed Republican voter enthusiasm surging during the Kavanaugh battle. Around the same time, white male angst burst out in the open: an explicit fear that if Kavanaugh could be hobbled by accusations, so could any white man.

It was a similar strain of grievance that helped Trump get elected. Much of that energy has been concentrated in rural areas, and those are exactly the places that could knock off Senate Democrats running for reelection in North Dakota, Indiana, Montana, Missouri and West Virginia. A Fox News poll taken toward the end of the Kavanaugh fight showed Republican challenger Kevin Cramer expanding his lead against Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D) in North Dakota, despite the fact Cramer made headlines for asking whether what Kavanaugh was accused of should disqualify him from the top court.

That means if Kavanaugh supercharged anti-Trump sentiment in key House races, he also boosted pro-Trump sentiment that will decide control of the Senate. n ©The Washington Post

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

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ON THE COVER Maria Vargas, 16, glances out the window of her mobile home in Everett, Pa., to watch her 25-year-old husband, Phil, mow the lawn. Photo by MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON of The Washington Post

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POLITICS

CALLA KESSLER/THE WASHINGTON POST

‘She’s a N rising star and he’s king’

BY A SHLEY P ARKER AND P HILIP R UCKER

Haley is a potential threat to Trump even if she doesn’t run in 2020

ikki Haley’s abrupt and unexpected resignation from President Trump’s administration secured her membership in a singular club — the rare former White House official who leaves Trump’s orbit as a political force who could pose a potential threat to the president.

In a sign of her rising profile, the ambassador to the United Nations on Tuesday simultaneously announced her resignation at the end of this year while also reassuring Trump that she has no plans to challenge his reelection.

“No, I’m not running for 2020,”

President Trump and Nikki Haley appear in the Oval Office to announce her resignation, which will become effective in January.

she said, seated next to the president in the Oval Office. “I can promise you what I’ll be doing is campaigning for this one. So, I look forward to supporting the president in the next election.”

The blunt statement underscores both the loyalty demanded

by Trump and the political complications Haley could pose to the president.

At 46, Haley has built her own political brand and has a long potential career ahead of her. The former South Carolina governor mixes homespun Southern charm with hard-boiled political savvy — a daughter of immigrants boasting both executive experience in her home state and foreign policy chops from two years as one of Trump’s top diplomats.

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JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

“She’s a rising star and he’s king, so there’s always an inherent tension there,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist and Trump critic. “Politically, any star in the party is a threat to Trump because in his Stalinesque way, there’s only one sun god and it has to be Trump.”

For now, at least, Christine Matthews, a pollster who has worked with Republican candidates, said that Haley seems to be leaving the Trump administration on her own terms and with her personal and political bona fides still intact.

“She has served very well and has only enhanced her reputation and I think she’s probably the only person in the Trump administration who you can say that about,” Matthews said.

She likened Haley to Condoleezza Rice — the secretary of state and national security adviser under President George W. Bush — who was often mentioned as a possible GOP vice-presidential candidate. “She’s one of these rare people in Republican circles who conservatives and moderates really like and women and men can both agree on,” Matthews said. “She is somebody who is outside of stereotypical Republican central casting. She’s Indian American, she’s young, she’s both pragmatic as well as conservative, and I feel that she very much has that image going for her.”

Yet for a rising star, it remains unclear where she will shine. In the hours after her surprise announcement, political operatives floated options ranging from a high-dollar private-sector gig to a television contributor deal and book contract. There was also chatter that Haley could seek the Senate seat occupied by Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) — an idea quickly dismissed by Haley confidants, Trump and Graham himself. “I have zero desire to be a Cabinet member,” Graham quipped.

Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist and former adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), said that while Haley’s departure was highly choreographed — “Who gets to resign in the Oval Office? It’s unbelievable.” — the challenge for Haley will be how she bides her time, especially if Trump seeks reelection in 2020 as expected.

“If she runs in 2024, she’ll have to figure out how to keep her profile active for the next six years, and most politicians can’t manage that,” Tyler said.

The timing of Haley’s exit, less than a month before the 2018 midterms, struck many in the president’s circle as either savvy or suspect.

On the one hand, she leaves with foreign policy credentials, the credibility that comes from navigating an often chaotic White House and ahead of potential

Outgoing U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, right, has brushed off any speculation that she might run in 2020 against President Trump.

political fallout from the November elections or special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.

“She’s shrewd, which is good in politics, but you have to keep an eye open,” said H. Boyd Brown, a former Democratic South Carolina legislator who has battled with Haley in the past. “She’s coming for you if you are in her way.”

The suddenness and secrecy surrounding her announcement Tuesday also prompted speculation about her motives. The expansive portfolio she enjoyed during Rex Tillerson’s tenure as secretary of state was diminished by the arrival of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, who controlled foreign policy out of the White House and made themselves more visible than their predecessors.

Trump has also been leery of her ambitions at times, frustrated when she made announcements on television or when she garnered large amounts of glowing press coverage. Haley had been privately skeptical of some of the president’s politics and tactics, yet was careful even in private situations not to criticize him while marveling at his crowds and poll numbers.

“Resignations in national politics are highly calculated maneuvers — it’s not just like, ‘Uh, I think I’ll have chili for lunch,’ ” Murphy said. “This was so abrupt and the timing so politically weird that it sure reads like it’s preempting something . . . If it’s the political masterstroke, where’s the landing pad? Where’s the ooh and ahh?”

A polished campaigner, Haley already was a rising national star in the Republican Party when Trump began running for president in 2016. She did not hide her discomfort with his pugnacity and the racially insensitive aspects of his campaign, delivering criticisms of Trump’s rhetoric and demeanor, and ultimately endorsing a competitor, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

But Trump won the primary in Haley’s home state handily, so his move to make her U.N. ambassador was seen as an olive branch to the Republican establishment.

Haley — one of the few women in the Cabinet and one of the few minorities to hold a senior administration position — quickly be-

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came the face of Trump’s foreign policy, demonstrating political acumen and shrewdness in her dealings with the White House.

When speculation mounted last month that Haley might have written an anonymous New York Times column claiming a “resistance” within the Trump administration, Haley penned a Washington Post column under the headline: “When I challenge the president, I do it directly. My anonymous colleague should have, too.”

In April, Haley revealed in a television interview that the administration would be rolling out new economic sanctions against Russia. Trump was upset because he was not ready to impose the new penalties, and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said Haley had bungled the interview out of “confusion.”

The U.N. ambassador shot back the next day: “With all due respect,” she said, “I don’t get confused.”

Haley’s positioning on racial issues also stood in contrast with that of Trump. In August 2017, after Trump suggested both sides were to blame for the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Haley made clear she disapproved of the president’s response but stopped short of publicly breaking with him, saying that she had communicated her views to him in private.

Notoriously fearful of media leaks, Haley has long micromanaged her own image and career and has kept extraordinarily close counsel, discussing major career moves only with her family and a clutch of key advisers. During her 2010 gubernatorial campaign, she kept her own schedule, pecked out emails late into the night and personally monitored comments on her Facebook page.

Once based in New York City for her U.N. post, Haley sought to stand apart from the backbiting that has often defined the West Wing, balancing a desire to be seen as independent with not running afoul of Trump.

Katon Dawson, former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, said Haley’s whirlwind resignation was probably deliberate.

“She’s certainly not confused,” Dawson said. “What you saw was vintage Nikki Haley.” n ©The Washington Post

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ust like in the battle for the House of Representatives, Democrats are almost certain to pick up governor’s mansions this November.

The most competitive races keep tilting their way.

Nine of the 10 races most likely to flip parties are held by Republicans, spanning the country from Iowa to New Mexico. And while none makes our top 10, open seats in traditionally conservative states, such as Georgia, Kansas, South Dakota and Oklahoma, are all competitive.

The catch is that however many governor’s races the Democrats win, they will only be chipping away at Republicans’ historic level of success. Republicans control 33 governor’s mansions, a near-record high, and those include blue and swing states. And it’s not impossible that Republicans might also pick up control of a state like Connecticut, though that one has fallen off our top 10 list.

Here are our latest rankings of the 10 governor’s races most likely to flip parties, ranked in order of least likely to flip (10) to most (1).

10. Ohio (Republican­held seat that will be open in 2018. Previous ranking 9): With Gov. John Kasich (R) term-limited, Democrats are trying to take a seat in a state that Donald Trump won by 10 points in 2016. They’ve nominated a liberal hero of sorts in former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Richard Cordray. But GOP candidate Mike DeWine, a former U.S. senator and the state’s current attorney general, has fairly strong name identification.

9. Iowa (Republican­held. No previous ranking): Both sides say this is a real race. Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) was elevated to the job last year after Terry Branstad was appointed ambassador to China, so she doesn’t quite have the power of incumbency. Two public polls in September put Democrat Fred Hubbell with a slight edge or within the margin of error.

8. Wisconsin (Republican­ held. Previous ranking 10): One of the hardest things to do in politics is knock off a sitting governor, especially one as well-established as Gov. Scott Walker (R), who is going for a third term. But recent public and private polling show his Democratic challenger, Tony

4. Michigan (Republican­held seat that will be open in 2018.

Previous ranking 5): The race to replace outgoing, unpopular GOP Gov. Rick Snyder keeps looking rosier for Democrats. Gretchen Whitmer, the former party leader in the state Senate, is buoyed by Democratic activists who are frustrated that their state went for Trump in 2016. In addition, Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette just doesn’t seem to have caught on as a candidate.

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BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Nine are held by Republicans, but Democratic wins would only chip away at GOP success

7. Florida (Republican­held open seat in 2018. No change in ranking.): One Republican operative described Florida as the purest toss-up race in 2018. And it looks that way, as conservative Rep. Ron DeSantis battles it out with liberal Democrat Andrew Gillum. After starting out with a lead, recent polling shows Gillum up just by a point or two, though Democrats say they think the race is trending their way. The question is what do suburban swing voters dislike more: DeSantis’s wholehearted embrace of Trump or Gillum’s proposals for single-payer health care?

6. Nevada (Republican­held open seat in 2018. No change in ranking.): Nevada Democrats are trying to keep their up- and downballot success in 2016 going by taking the governor’s mansion from term-limited Brian Sandoval (R), who is leaving office with some 60 percent of the state feeling like Nevada is on the right track. It helps Democrats that Sandoval hasn’t endorsed the Republican nominee, Attorney General Adam Laxalt. Meanwhile Democratic nominee Steve Sisolak, a commissioner of the county that includes Las Vegas, is running ads tying himself to Sandoval’s education policy.

5. Maine (Republican­held open seat in 2018. Previous rank­ ing 4): If there’s any race where the battle over Brett M. Kavanaugh could alter the dynamic, it’s this one. Will Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-

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Maine) decisive vote to put him on the Supreme Court drive voters toward Democratic Maine Attorney General Janet Mills? Some private polling suggests independents could be leaning toward Mills. But Republicans nominated businessman Shawn Moody, who has plenty of money to try to outrun unpopular outgoing GOP Gov. Paul LePage’s large shadow.

The 10 governor’s seats most likely to flip

Evers, has a good chance. Will the small slice of truly independent voters in Wisconsin tire of Republican control and want a change, or do they stick with the governor they have had since 2011?

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An established governor such as Scott Walker (R-Wis.) usually is difficult to unseat, but recent polls show that his Democratic challenger has a good chance.

3. New Mexico (Republican­ held seat open in 2018. Previous ranking 1.): Neither side is particularly enthusiastic with the way their candidate — Democratic Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Republican Rep. Stevan Pearce — has panned out. This state is challenging for Republicans to hold onto for so many reasons: It’s a majority-Hispanic state, it’s trending blue, and outgoing Republican Gov. Susana Martinez is one of the most unpopular governors in America.

2. Alaska (Independent­held.

Previous ranking 3): Gov. Bill Walker (I) is having a tough time trying to win reelection in a state with high unemployment. He has two challengers, Republican Mike Dunleavy and Democrat Mark Begich. Polling shows Dunleavy leading by double digits.

1. Illinois (Republican­held.

Previous ranking 2): Illinois Gov. Bill Rauner (R) is the most vulnerable governor this cycle. Despite having endless millions to spend on his race, he was always going to have a tough path to reelection in a Democratic state. It was the entrance of a third-party conservative candidate that appeared to seal his fate by making Rauner a governor without a natural constituency. Democrat J.B. Pritzker, another billionaire, looks like he’ll cruise to victory. n ©The Washington Post

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Fla. towns ‘devastated like a war zone’ B Y L UZ L AZO, M ARK B ERMAN, E MILY W AX- T HIBODEAUX AND K EVIN S ULLIVAN in Springfield, Fla.

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ntire oceanfront communities in the Florida Panhandle were virtually obliterated, an Air Force base suffered “catastrophic” damage and at least six people were killed by Hurricane Michael, a sucker-punch of a storm that intensified suddenly and now ranks as one of the four most powerful hurricanes ever to strike the United States.

“This one just looks like a bomb dropped,” said Clyde Cain, who is with the Louisiana Cajun Navy, a group of volunteer searchand-rescue teams that went to Florida to help in Michael’s wake, just as they did last month during Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas.

Michael was downgraded to a tropical storm Thursday as it sped its way northeast through Georgia and the Carolinas on a path out into the Atlantic Ocean.

But its relatively short assault on Florida’s Gulf Coast was devastating.

Tiny Mexico Beach, Fla., a town of about 1,000 residents, appeared to be have been almost destroyed by Michael’s 155 mph impact — just 1 mph short of a Category 5 storm. Aerial footage showed much of the seaside enclave reduced to kindling, trees sheared off just above the ground, tangles of power lines strewn in the streets and cars and boats piled up like rubbish. Entire blocks seemed essentially empty, with houses and everything else that had been on them smashed by storm surge and wind and presumably washed out to sea.

“This is not stuff that you just put back together overnight,” said William “Brock” Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Official states of emergency were declared in Alabama, Georgia and as far north as the Carolinas and Virginia. Hundreds of thousands of people remained

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Places in the state’s Panhandle were wrecked by the hurricane, and several people were killed without power late Thursday across the Southeast, and some areas were essentially cut off more than 24 hours after Michael made landfall, with roads blocked by massive trees and cellphone service completely out.

Curtis Locus, a Florida Department of Transportation worker, said the damage he has seen across the Panhandle is unprecedented.

“This was a community in the middle of the forest. Now the forest is gone, and so is the community,” Locus said. “It’s a beautiful place. . . . This is Party Town, USA. Now it’s Devastated Town, USA. Everything along the coastline was devastated like a war zone.”

Here in Springfield and nearby Panama City, apartment buildings are roofless, gas station awnings are twisted beyond recognition, businesses collapsed, metal

posts as thick as tree trucks were folded in half, and billboards were blown onto homes or crushed cars.

“We didn’t figure it was going to be this bad,” said Mike Davis, 56, sitting on the sidewalk outside Oasis Liquor, a store on Panama City’s 15th Street, staring dully at the debris around him. “This is devastating.”

Davis lives two blocks away and rode out the storm with his family. He decided to stay because he didn’t think the storm would be very bad. When he woke Tuesday and heard that Michael had intensified, it was too late to leave.

“They ain’t going to fix this overnight,” he said. “It’s going to take a long time.”

Michael was as powerful as it was unexpected, careening across the Gulf of Mexico and intensifying rapidly into a powerhouse.

Kathy Coy stands amid the wreckage of her home in Panama City, Fla., on Thursday, the day after Hurricane Michael destroyed it and many other structures in the city in Florida’s Panhandle. She said she was in the home when it was blown apart.

Michael also pummeled Tyndall Air Force Base, on the shoreline between Panama City and Mexico Beach, causing “widespread roof damage to nearly every home and leaving the base closed until further notice,” officials said in a statement. The base’s 600 families had been evacuated Monday, and many were taken to shelters to ride out the storm. No injuries had been reported there as of late Thursday.

Rescuers continued to search for survivors and victims of the storm on Thursday as authorities warned that the death toll could rise. Michael’s immense devastation made it difficult for rescuers to reach some areas Thursday.

Cain, of the Cajun Navy, said even his storm-hardened rescue crews were being especially cautious because Michael knocked down so many trees and utility poles.

“This one is so powerful that my guys are having to use chain saws to cut through downed trees to get into the neighborhoods,” Cain said. “This one is just real bad, and no one saw it coming.”

Meteorologists had seen Michael coming and had been warning for several days that it was a serious storm. But what they did not anticipate, many said, was Michael’s furious intensification in the hours before it made landfall, and how far inland it managed to maintain that ferocity.

Robin Ford, an Air Force veteran who co-owns 4C BBQ Family Restaurant in Defuniak Springs, was helping feed hundreds of first responders on Thursday.

“I hate to say this, but we are sending these first responders into a war zone,” Ford said. “I used to be a deputy sheriff in Texas, and we had a tornado come through, and this is what it looked like. It looked like a nuclear bomb went off.”

Ford said scores of other veterans were helping out, clearing debris and assisting emergency responders. “We are loading up water and blankets, and we are taking stuff to anyone who has nothing,” Ford said. “And that’s looking like a lot of people.” n ©The Washington Post

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Underage Marriage under scrutiny B Y TERRENCE MCCOY in Everett, Pa.

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t was the day of the birthday party, and the husband and wife had invited everyone they knew. They had spent the morning buying food — a sheet cake, jumbo hot dogs, ground beef, soda, chips — and were now standing around a picnic table covered with it all, along a long lake under a cloudless sky, hoping at least some people would show up to eat it.

Today was the first time both sides of their family were supposed to come together, something that had not happened at their wedding four months before. On that day, not a single member of the husband’s family had attended — not his brothers, who had called him a fool for marrying like this, and not his parents, who had told him the relationship would only get him into trouble. Just about the only people who had gone that day, and were here so far on this day, had been the people involved in the wedding itself.

There was Maria Vargas, a shy and brooding girl who looked older than her 16 years, and her husband, Phil Manning, 25, who often acted younger than his. And nearby, smoking a cigarette, was a slight woman with long, narrow features, Michelle Hockenberry, 39, the mother who had allowed her daughter to marry.

Even in an era when the median age of marrying has climbed higher and higher, unions like Phil and Maria’s remain surprisingly prevalent in the United States. Between 2000 and 2010, an estimated 248,000 children were married, most of whom were girls, some as young as 12, wedding men. Now, under pressure from advocates and amid a nationwide reckoning over gender equality and sexual misconduct, states have begun ending exceptions that have allowed marriages for people younger than 18, the minimum age in most states.

Texas last year banned it, except for emancipated minors. Kentucky outlawed it, except for 17-yearolds with parental and judicial approval. Maryland considered increasing the minimum marrying age from 15, but its bill failed to pass in April.

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

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Maria Manning, 16, worried that her engagement ring was getting dirty, inspects it with her husband, Phil Manning, 25.

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Then in May, Delaware abolished the practice under every circumstance, and New Jersey did the same in June. Pennsylvania, which may vote to eliminate all loopholes this autumn, could be next.

“Devastating” is how the bill’s memorandum summarized the consequences of child marriage.

Nearly 70 percent of the unions end in divorce, research suggests, and for children in their midteens, it’s higher still — about 80 percent. Teen brides are nearly three times as likely to have at least five children. Their chance of living in poverty is 31 percent higher. And they are 50 percent more likely to drop out of school, which was the outcome that terrified Maria the most. The start of the school year was just two weeks away, and she still didn’t know whether her mounting responsibilities at home would keep her from returning to the classroom.

“There’s your parents,” she now whispered to Phil. Sinewy and sweating, Phil looked up from the grill and saw a bearded man and a dark-haired woman. They slowly made their way to the picnic table, piled with presents wrapped in tinsel paper to celebrate the second birthday of Maria’s son, Douglas, whom she’d had with another grown man. They stopped and looked down at the presents, then at Phil, then at his new wife.

There was a long silence as everyone looked at one another.

“What do you think, Mama?”

Phil finally asked, but his mother only shook her head.

Maria wandered away with her son to play at the lake’s edge. Phil went to the grill and started serving food. Michelle took a sip of iced tea and glanced at her daughter’s new in-laws.

“How you guys doing?” she tried.

“All right,” Phil’s mom said.

“Hot?” “Yeah.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

Maria walked back, straight black hair dripping from the water, and Phil met her halfway. He put his arm around her. He gave her a long kiss, and everyone watched them, expressionless.

The kiss ended, and Maria went to the picnic table. She looked at what the few guests had left behind. The vanilla cake that, by the

end of the day, would be only a third eaten. The dozens of hot dogs. The barely touched potato chips.

“Supposed to be a lot more people here,” Maria said. “I wouldn’t have gotten so much food.”

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his is how a child in America gets married: It was a Friday, March 16.

Maria woke early. She normally hated anything feminine — “a tomboy,” Michelle called her, who smoked, swore every few words, had skull tattoos — but today was different. She wanted it all. Michelle did her makeup and hair.

Maria put on a white dress and veil. Then, fearing authorities would arrest Phil at the local courthouse, they drove into nearby West Virginia, where they would not be recognized and which has one of the country’s highest rates of child marriage.

Within an hour of arriving at the Morgan County Courthouse, her mother had signed the form, the marriage license had been issued, an officiant at the ceremony outside had said, “It’s my pleasure to

be the first to introduce Mr. and Mrs. Philip Manning,” and everyone had begun to cheer. Maria felt happier than she had ever thought possible.

And now?

Now it was nearly five months later. She was waking once more, this time past 10 a.m., feeling exhausted again. She poured a bowl of Cocoa Puffs for Douglas’s breakfast, then looked at the mess around her. She swept the floor.

Scrubbed the counters. Pulled out a bag of garbage from the trash bin. Put in a load of laundry. Lit a scented candle. And checked on Douglas.

“I got to clean your room next,” she told him, sighing.

Maria was a housewife, in every sense. In this trailer at the edge of town, which she rarely left and which she and Phil shared with an unemployed friend, she cooked most meals, swept floors, dispensed advice and managed finances. Every month, Phil took home $1,600 from a furnace of a factory making drill bits, and every month, they spent about $1,150 of it on bills. To keep them disciplined, she’d stuck a budget

“I have no sympathy for you,” barks Maria as her husband fans his burning mouth.

She warned him not to swipe a bite of pork from the frying pan while she was still cooking. He tried to find something cold in the fridge to ease the pain.

to the refrigerator. “Monthly savings: $450,” it said. The sum seemed more hopeful than realistic, but it was what they had to save if they were ever going to get the money they needed to move to nearby Bedford, where she hoped to enroll at a high school that had on-campus child care for Douglas.

The possibility of going to school was the only remaining shard of a childhood that had long since splintered apart. She remembered the moments. She was 4, hugging her handcuffed mother, while Michelle was incarcerated for simple assault. She was 13, caring for her younger siblings, day after day, as Michelle watched her stepfather die of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the hospital.

She was 14, hanging out with a 19-year-old man who, according to police reports filed in the subsequent criminal cases, had sex with her at least five times at the Janey Lynn Motel in Bedford, got her pregnant, became her boyfriend and then later abducted her.

After Douglas was born, and after the father had gone to prison for the concealment and corruption of a minor, school seemed to

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COVER STORY matter less. Michelle told her she would look after Douglas. But Maria couldn’t bring herself to trust him with anyone, not even her mother, and did not return to the classroom that year. One of the first people, in fact, she allowed to care for Douglas was Phil, whom she had met at a friend’s place when she was 15 and with whom she had at first wanted only a physical relationship. But soon she could not imagine being with anyone else, and still couldn’t.

“Will you make me lunch today?” he now asked, as a hard rain washed over the trailer park and they sat on the porch smoking.

“I already made it,” she said of two tuna sandwiches. She stood and, noticing the time, glanced down at herself, still in pajamas, then at Phil, still shirtless.

“I got to get dressed,” she said.

“And then get Douglas dressed.

And get you dressed.”

Douglas had a pediatric appointment. Phil told her he was coming, too, and she was again reminded why she married him.

Even in the beginning, their relationship had never to her conformed to the stereotype — with her as victim, him as predator — but instead felt as if they were saving each other. She helped him stay out of jail, where he had twice gone on burglary convictions, and he helped her with Douglas, promising to treat the boy like his son.

“All right, we got to go,” Maria said. The roommate, a recovering heroin addict with short blond hair, drove them in his battered white sedan through downtown Everett, a drab collection of Colonial houses beneath a mountain, before pulling up to a pediatrician’s office. They went inside, and that’s when Maria saw her.

The middle-aged woman in the waiting room with her own child, wearing a shirt that said “Everett Warriors.” It was her old high school principal.

Maria had last seen her at the beginning of the 2017 school year, when, following her time away, she’d tried out Everett High School. Within weeks, she was back home. But did that mean 2018 would be that way, too? What would it feel like, she wondered, to do something, rather than having things done to her?

“I have to enroll,” she whispered to Phil.

“We are going to Bedford,” he

promised.

P

hil met Maria on Feb. 25, 2017, in a trailer on the other side of Everett, where a buddy from jail was living. He loved her hair, long and black, and all that night, she laughed and took pictures of him with her phone.

Phil leaning back, giving her a weird face. Phil closing his eyes, drinking a beer. Phil smiling in a selfie, bare shoulder pressing against hers. To him, she sure didn’t look 15, but he never asked.

What he did ask for was her phone number. “I’d caught feelings” was how he put it, and that was that.

He was 24, and he had a 15-yearold girlfriend.

What at first felt innocuous soon became a terrible secret.

They saw each other as often as they could but lived according to certain rules. Never hold hands in public. Never kiss unless they were alone. Never tell anyone anyNO MINIMUM AGE In these states, children of any age can get married, if conditions are met.

States with pending legislation to increase restrictions WA ID MT ND MN IL MI

ME VT NH

WI

NY MA

OR NV WY SD IA IN OH PA NJ CT RI CA UT CO NE MO KY WV VA MD DE AZ NM KS AR TN NC SC DC HI AK

OK LA MS AL GA TX

HI FL

Source: Tahirih Justice Center, Unchained At Last

thing, least of all the truth — that they were already sleeping together, that they weren’t just friends.

He thought about breaking up with Maria all of the time, and about how it could end if he didn’t. With him in jail. With his face on the Pennsylvania sex offender registry. With his life ruined. But instead he moved into her mother’s house, started calling Maria “wifey” and concocted another cover story. He was living there to help care for her mentally disabled brother, Donte, and nothing more.

All of the lies, one after another.

It got to be too much, especially after he had come to see her son as his own, and especially after he had ask her to marry that October, and she had said yes. So he stopped hiding it. He changed his Facebook picture to one of him and Douglas. He called Maria his girlfriend online. He started telling people. His parents were furious: “You shouldn’t be doing this; she’s 16 RECENT LEGISLATION years old,” his father Since 2016, these states said. His co-workers have increased restrictions. laughed: “Chester Cheeto,” they called Ended all child marriages him from then on, ME referencing the comWI VT NH ic strip “Chester the WA ID MT ND MN IL MI NY MA Molester.”

OR NV WY SD IA IN OH PA NJ CT RI Phil tried to exCA UT CO NE MO KY WV VA MD DE plain it to people. In AZ NM KS AR TN NC SC DC many ways, she was OK LA MS AL GA AK more mature than he FL TX was. She had already raised siblings and BRITTANY MAYES/THE WASHINGTON POST was now a parent,

Phil wipes sweat from his face after spending the afternoon doing yard work on a hot and humid day.

KLMNO WEEKLY

and a good one at that, which was more than he could say for himself. He had rarely spoken to his daughter, 8, whom he’d had with a woman outside Erie, where he was raised, but Maria had gotten him to change that. Maria was an example to work toward, and something to work for.

“I’m here to support my family,” he again explained to Maria one morning, when it was time again to get to it. He went to the bedroom. He put on death metal, felt it energize him, then put on a pair of work boots and a cutoff shirt.

He filled an empty two-gallon jug of Hi-C with water, placed the sandwiches Maria had made him into his lunch cooler, then went into the living room, feeling good, ready for his next shift. The work paid only $15 per hour, and the hours were terrible — 3 p.m. to midnight — but he wasn’t running around, one more addict in a town full of them. He was here, providing, each day another struggle to convince himself and others that he wasn’t a bad guy. He’d married a child, yes. But he wasn’t a bad guy.

He looked at their wedding photos on the bookcase against the wall.

“It felt right,” he said, sitting down. “There was a special connection.”

“You pedophile,” Maria said, just joking, but he winced.

“Thanks, babe,” he said.

Then she said something else that hurt even worse: “I don’t know, I don’t even think I should have gotten married with how young I am.”

“Do you think it was a mistake?” he asked softly.

“No,” she said, trying to backtrack. “Baby, you take things too personal.”

“I know, but that kind of put me down,” he said. “ ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten married yet.’ ” He thought for a moment more. “But I’m so happy.”

He had his wife. He had his job.

He had his house. His family even seemed to be coming around.

There was only one thing missing.

He loved Douglas, but he wanted his own son. A boy who would always and only know him as dad — not as Phil, or stepdad, but simply dad. So he’d been talking to Maria about it. Her birth control had been making her sick anyhow. And so she’d gone off it, and he was now trying for a son,

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COVER STORY

and to him, she didn’t seem to mind.

He knew he was being selfish, and some days he wondered whether they should stop. Maria had told him countless times about wanting to get back into school, and he recognized how smart she was. He had no doubt she would glide through, get a diploma without any special education, as he’d needed, and then become a certified nursing assistant, just as she’d always wanted.

But he still wanted a son.

W

hen Maria had first started thinking about having another child, she had called her mother. They talked on the phone for a long while, and Michelle told her it was an awful idea. What about school? What about the child she already had?

But Michelle didn’t know what more to do than that. Maria was married. She was emancipated.

And besides, her daughter rarely listened to her advice, no matter that Michelle understood everything that Maria was going through, because she’d once gone through it, too.

She was a wife at 14. A mother at 16. A dropout at 17. A divorced mom at 18. A cocaine addict at 27.

A prisoner of the state at 28. And now, at 39, she was here, a mother of six, driving through the mountains in a truck on empty, on her way to pick up her son from football practice, in an area she hoped was isolated enough to keep her youngest children from also following her path.

“Did you have fun?” she asked Roger, 13, as he climbed into the truck.

“I just want to take a cold shower,” he said.

“Well,” she said, touching his knee. “We’ll stop up here and get you something to drink, too.”

She would do anything to protect him, particularly now. He was at the age when she felt like she had lost Maria. Michelle knew her mistakes — the men who’d come and gone, the drugs she’d let consume her — had damaged her oldest child, Aaron, who was now locked up for felony arson. But Maria? Maria had always been her responsible child, the one she could count on. So when Michelle’s third husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2014, and she was gone at the Pittsburgh hospital all of the time, it had been

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Maria whom she had asked to watch her three younger siblings.

Michelle pulled up to a house down a dirt path, made sure Nadia, 10, and Moon, 5, had eaten the dinner she had prepared, then sat at the counter, shaking her head at the thought.

How could she have known that the arrangement would last nearly a year? How could she have predicted that Maria would grow so resentful of the added responsibilities that she would act out?

There were times when Michelle would return from the hospital and find Maria withdrawn and angry, or with a boy she was told was 16, and become scared. Maria could be using drugs. She could be having sex. Michelle tried to put her on birth control, only to find out it was too late — Maria was already pregnant — and that the boy wasn’t a boy at all, but 19.

She told Maria she could get an abortion, but Maria didn’t want to. She asked Maria to go to school, but Maria stayed home with Douglas. And then when she heard about Maria and Phil, she told Maria she couldn’t do this — not again — but Maria said she could. Lines blurred, family roles shifted: Was Maria the adult she often seemed, or the girl who still thought about prom, loved video games and sometimes needed mothering? And was Phil a “pervert,” as she had initially worried, or a husband who seemed to genuinely love Maria and was noth-

Maria takes an accidental kick in the face while playing with her 2-year-old son, Douglas, in the living room of their mobile home.

ing but decent every time Michelle saw him?

Michelle went outside and looked out at the mountains. She lit a cigarette, then another. Her two young daughters flitted in and out of the house, screeching and laughing. They were both wearing lipstick, which Michelle forbade whenever they were out of the house. She wanted them to remain children for as long as possible. She never wanted to confront another decision like the one Maria had brought to her last year.

Maria said she was marrying Phil, and they needed more than Michelle’s blessing. They needed her signature at the courthouse.

Michelle begged Maria to reconsider. But Maria said it was her decision — her mistake, even — and not her mother’s. In Michelle’s mind, it came down to this: Either a no, and they’d hate her for it, then marry later on. Or a yes, and hope it would last.

D

ays before the start of the school year, the trailer was quiet except for the murmur of the television and the running of the faucet as Maria washed dishes, worrying. She thought about the car the family didn’t have, and how Phil needed to bum a ride every day to work.

She thought about the new phone he needed. The replacement she’d bought off a guy on Facebook for $230 the day before had wound

up being broken. She finished with the dishes, then looked at the black kitchen rug, covered in crumbs and dirt again.

“Do you know what we really need right now?” she asked when Phil emerged from the bedroom past 11 a.m. “A vacuum.”

“I know,” he said, apologetic, always apologetic.

“You’re going to want to spend at least $150 for a vacuum. Anything cheaper and you’re working with a stick that does nothing,” she said, standing, then turning her glare back to the rug again. “I hate this carpet.”

“Look at this! Mold on the carpet,” she said, considering one more unplanned expense, one more reason she’d taken down their budget, because what was the point in trying to save if they never could?

She sat on the floor. She let out a frustrated sigh. She looked at Phil.

“We can’t move right now,” she said quietly. “We don’t have the money.”

“I know,” he said, nodding.

Neither said what Maria feared that meant. They wouldn’t be moving to Bedford, not in time.

She would not go back to school.

She would not graduate. This trailer, these walls, Phil wanting a baby: All of it would be her life instead.

She would decide to find another way, to change things. She would tell Phil she couldn’t have another baby, not now, and they would get back to using birth control. She would call Everett High School, and they would allow her to go part time in the morning, while Phil watched Douglas at home. She would start classes two weeks late, taking the ninth- and 10th-grade courses she’d missed. She would seize control of events. She would become an adult.

She had years to go and knew the delicate alchemy of this moment could suddenly evaporate.

Douglas could get sick. Phil could lose his job or switch shifts. She may never graduate.

But right now, early one Friday morning, those concerns seemed remote, as Douglas and Phil slept side by side in the bedroom, and Michelle wrote her a Facebook message, telling her she was proud of her, and Maria headed out by herself for school, the child bride who didn’t drop out. n ©The Washington Post

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SUNDAY, October, 14, 2018 19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

In middle age, an urge for creation

Tales of pampered British royals

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

T

l

REVIEWED BY

C HARLES F INCH

he great Japanese author Haruki Murakami grew famous writing about the tender melancholy of youth. Reading books from that period, you feel sad without knowing why — and yet, within that sadness glows a small ember of happiness, because to feel sad is at least to feel honestly.

Now, in his 60s, he has begun to consider middle age more carefully, as if he sees himself most clearly across a 20-year lag. It’s the subject of his underrated “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” and also of his immersive, repetitive, big-hearted new novel “Killing Commendatore.”

The narrator of “Killing Commendatore” is a 36-year-old painter. His wife has just left him. Having sacrificed his early ambitions as an artist to become a master portraitist, he leaves his Tokyo apartment bewildered, before coming to a realization: “I . . . wanted to try painting whatever I wanted.” A friend from art school lends him a remote house in the mountains, and he begins to search anew for the meaning he once found in pure creation.

As is often the case in Murakami’s fiction, a plot of relative simplicity — an artist’s reinvention — is disrupted by enigmatic, surreal or violent incidents. The narrator’s new residence once belonged to a famous painter, whose peculiar depiction of a sword fight, “Killing Commendatore,” remains in the attic. Soon after finding the painting, the house’s new inhabitant begins to hear the clear sound of a bell emanating from a “strange circular pit in the woods.”

These events disturb him, while also pressing him into a furious creativity; he begins to paint abstract portraits, not simply of faces and bodies but of the souls within them.

One of these portraits is of a mysterious, immensely rich man named Menshiki, who lives nearby. He has bright white hair, a

Jaguar and a “very clean, open smile,” while concealing, the painter thinks, “a secret locked away in a small box and buried deep down in the ground.”

It is Menshiki who manages the excavation of the pit. Inside, they find only the ancient bell — but its call brings to life (hold steady here, if you can) a two-foot-tall character from the ominous painting, with a message of mortal importance.

This stuff is very Murakami.

“Killing Commendatore” repeats almost exactly, for example, the descent through a well to a magical world that occurs in his earlier novel “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Odd creatures constantly come to life in his writing, perhaps most memorably the human-size frog preparing tea in the short story “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.”

Yet there’s a strong sense in Murakami’s work that his allegorical instincts are secondary, the radiation of his characters’ inner sense of dislocation. He took this method to its outermost limits in his monumental “1Q84” (is it time to admit that book is a mess?), but “Killing Commendatore” gets the balance right.

Lately, Murakami has written about how a yearning surges again in the middle of life, when we realize that we know less as we age, not more. His characters want to turn themselves inside out, to escape the indecipherable mechanical momentum of their lives. The only path he offers them out of that despair is art; the narrator of “Killing Commendatore” learns “the courage not to fear a change in one’s lifestyle, the importance of having time on your side.” They are humble lessons, given the ridiculous events that have befallen him. But that’s the point. Nothing we invent could be as strange as life. We honor that fact by inventing it anyway. n Finch is the author of “The Woman in the Water.” This was written for The Washington Post.

H KILLING COMMENDATORE

By Haruki Murakami Knopf. 704 pp. $30

BEHIND THE THRONE A Domestic History of the British Royal Household

By Adrian Tinniswood Basic. 416 pp. $32

l

REVIEWED BY

A NNA M UNDOW

ousekeeping, the historian Adrian Tinniswood reminds us, has always been a vexing business.

Never more so, perhaps, than in 17th-century England, what with dogs and servants urinating “all over the place;” house guests consuming “twenty-four lobsters and 624 chickens” in three days; scurvy and sweaty armpits at every turn; and kitchen visitors making off with “salmon tails and the heads of porpoises.” All of which and a great deal more are tastefully revealed in “Behind the Throne: A Domestic History of the British Royal Household,” Tinniswood’s charmingly erudite tour through five centuries of, well, cosseting.

For his subjects are no ordinary homemakers. “Kings and queens and their families were, and still are, entitled by virtue of their positions to a certain level of comfort,” Tinniswood decorously begins, “a cocoon of support to make their lives a little easier.”

Then he spells it out. “Sovereigns don’t cook. They don’t dress themselves, or pour themselves a drink, or make their own beds.”

The future king of England, we learn, may even require one of four valets to anoint the royal toothbrush with paste “from a crested silver dispenser.” Not that Tinniswood is mocking; Tinniswood hardly ever mocks. Indeed, his style is so restrained he could be a scientist describing the practices of a remote Amazonian tribe or family of mountain gorillas.

And the effect is at times wonderfully, if unintentionally, droll.

We cannot get enough, it seems, of royal peeping. Whether watching “The Queen” or “The Crown,” or reading the popular Tudor/ Elizabethan histories of Tracy Borman, we delight in monarchs reincarnated with inner lives revealed, typically in everyday scenes.

When Elizabeth I, for example, is quoted as saying “You know I am no morning woman” and Tinniswood goes on to describe her elaborate dressing routine and

her habit of constantly losing trinkets such as “a small fish of gold with a diamond in it,” she is, for a moment, uncannily present. As is Queen Anne in her misery (“not one of [her] seventeen children survived infancy”) and George III in his derangement (“At times he appeared to us as if he was crying”). Servants and courtiers, too, are given their say. Abigail Hill, for example, in 1728 describes her duties, (“The bedchamber woman pulled on the queen’s gloves, when she could not do it herself”); John Evelyn, a courtier to King James, deplores “the divers cringes” of priests celebrating Mass, and Philip Goldsworthy, court equerry in the 1780s, complains of having to “hear over and over again all that fine squeaking” at nightly concerts.

Such voices, along with telling vignettes, are expertly deployed to aerate what is, after all, a dense history: five centuries, 19 monarchs, all compressed into a little over 300 pages. Compressed but not diminished. For Tinniswood is both a careful scholar and a nimble writer, particularly adept at graceful summary.

Like a seasoned tour guide, Tinniswood keeps us moving through chambers of wonders, from the Elizabethan to the modern era, on a journey into dullness. “Little or nothing to be done till dinner,” one equerry writes of Victoria’s household.

Tinniswood concludes with a description of a modern British monarchy rich in online followers and marketing consultants though “one source at Clarence House recently likened the Prince of Wales’s household to . . . Wolf Hall, such were the internecine battles that went on there.” For, as the “groom of the stool” knew in the reign of Henry VIII, only those close to majesty may whisper in its ear, though often in vain. n Mundow is a freelance journalist and reviewer. This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Khashoggi’s passion for truth is why he’s beloved DAVID IGNATIUS is a former assistant managing editor and now a columnist for The Washington Post.

George Orwell titled a regular column he wrote for a Brit­ ish newspaper in the mid­1940s “As I Please.” Meaning that he would write exactly what he believed. My Saudi colleague Jamal Khashoggi has always had that same in­ sistent passion for telling the truth about his country, no matter what.

Khashoggi’s fate is unknown as I write, but his colleagues at The Washington Post and friends around the world fear that he was murdered after he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

I have known Khashoggi for about 15 years and want to share here some of the reasons he is beloved in our profession and the news of his disappearance has been such a shock.

Journalists can sometimes seem dry and remote, living in the flat two dimensions of a newspaper page. Khashoggi was a tall, reserved man, austere in the long, white thobe he wore until he went into exile in the United States last year. But in his work, he has always been full of life and daring; he embodied the restless curiosity and refusal to compromise on principle that are the saving graces of our business.

Khashoggi has always been the kind of journalist who annoys the authorities. That has been true of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who Khashoggi thought was an impulsive hothead who undermined his own good ideas for reform.

But Mohammed bin Salman was hardly Khashoggi’s first target. He was picking fights with the Saudi leadership 25 years ago. He was named editor of the reform newspaper Al Watan in 2003, got fired two months later for publishing criticism of the Saudi religious

leadership, got rehired four years after that, and then was forced to resign in 2010 after publishing another controversial piece criticizing Salafist extremism.

Khashoggi was passionate for reform of an Arab Muslim world that he considered corrupt and dishonest. He grew up in Medina, the son of a Saudi who owned a small textile shop. He went to the United States for college, attending Indiana State University. He also embraced Islam, joining the Muslim Brotherhood and, in the late 1970s, befriending the young Osama bin Laden, whom he tried to turn against violence.

Khashoggi failed to dissuade bin Laden. But he never temporized about the evil that alQaeda brought to Saudi Arabia and the world. He wrote a column for the Daily Star in Beirut on Sept. 10, 2002, titled “A Saudi mea culpa.” At a time when many Saudis were still finding excuses for the al-Qaeda killers, Khashoggi described Sept. 11 as an attack on “the values of tolerance and coexistence,” and on Islam itself.

Khashoggi and I were at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2011 as the revolt that came to be known as the Arab Spring was starting to sweep the Middle East. Khashoggi welcomed it. I quoted him in a column: “The Arab world has been seeking renaissance for the last 100 years,” but reform had been

OSMAN ORSAL/REUTERS

ABOVE: Activists hold pictures of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi during a protest outside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

BELOW: Khashoggi with his fiancee, Hatice Cengiz.

blocked by authoritarian leaders and inchoate public rage at corruption.

What infuriated him about Mohammed bin Salman, I always suspected, was that the leader was wasting the yearning for reform. Khashoggi praised the positive steps in his Post columns. The crown prince was “right to go after extremists” in the religious leadership; allowing movie theaters in the kingdom was a “huge step toward normalization”; letting women drive deserved “considerable credit.”

But Mohammed bin Salman undermined these advances.

Khashoggi wrote indignantly that the crown prince didn’t just lock up corrupt princes; he went after thoughtful intellectuals. He

let women drive yet jailed the activists who had urged the reforms.

Khashoggi understood that he could keep his mouth shut and stay safe, because he had so many friends in the royal family.

But it simply wasn’t in him.

Khashoggi wrote a column for the Post last year in which he described seeing some of his friends arrested and struggling with his conscience. “I said nothing. I didn’t want to lose my job or my freedom. I worried about my family. I have made a different choice now,” he wrote.

He had made a decisive break with Mohammed bin Salman, choosing exile and honesty in his writings. His simple four-word explanation: “We Saudis deserve better.” n

COURTESY OF HATICE CENGIZ

14 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2018

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Climate coverage needs to heat up MARGARET SULLIVAN is the Washington Post’s media columnist.

For those who were still able to take it in, the report could hardly have been more frightening: By 2040 — only 22 years from now — the world will be in deep trouble, according to the U.N.’s experts. Food shortages, wildfires and the mass death of coral reefs are just some dangers.

Getting the planet’s warming under even a modicum of control requires a fast-moving “transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before,” The Washington Post reported.

That story on the report was the most prominent one on The Post’s home page on Monday morning, and in almost as prominent a place in the New York Times, as well as both papers’ print front pages. It got prominent attention on TV, too.

But it will need sustained emphasis, by the media and the public, all over the world, if we stand a chance of maintaining a livable planet.

“A bracing reminder that every issue we devote attention to other than climate change is really a secondary issue,” wrote Philip Gourevitch, author and New Yorker staff writer, on Twitter about the report.

And The Post quoted Erik Solheim, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program: “It’s like a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen. We

have to put out the fire.”

That will be very much against the grain for the distractionprone media and the news-weary public.

Recall that in the three presidential debates, not a single question was asked about climate change. Nor was it raised in the vice presidential debate.

Since his election, President Trump has turned his back on national and global efforts to control the problem — essentially saying it’s going to happen anyway so why bother to try to stop it?

Meanwhile, there is so much else to distract us at every turn.

Taylor Swift, we learned last week, has broken her vow to keep out of politics, declaring her support to Tennessee Democrats.

Trump is holding raucous rallies and tweeting at every turn,

portraying his political opposition as a dangerous mob of arsonists — and all but ignoring the Times’s 18-month-long investigation that revealed fraud and deception in his, and his family’s, finances over decades.

There is just so much happening at every moment, so many trees to distract from the burning forest behind them. And some of that news seems more important: Certainly the apparent murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Post global opinions columnist, deserves our immediate attention.

So it’s hard to sustain interest in the environment. It’s not easy to find a compelling, immediate angle to compete with palace intrigue or horse-race politics.

“There’s not a lot of news in this area — we’re watching glaciers melting — so there isn’t an urgency to get things into the

MICHEL EULER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

paper right away,” Elisabeth Rosenthal, then a New York Times science reporter, told me in 2013.

Just as the world, especially the United States, needs radical change to mitigate the coming crisis, so too for the news media.

Journalists and news organizations all over the world — but especially in America — need their own transformation.

This subject must be kept front and center, with the pressure on and the stakes made abundantly clear at every turn.

There is a lot happening in the nation and the world, a constant rush of news. Much of it deserves our attention as journalists and news consumers. But we need to figure out how to make the main thing matter.

In short, when it comes to climate change, we — the media, the public, the world — need radical transformation, and we need it now.

Just as the smartest minds in earth science have issued their warning, the best minds in media should be giving sustained attention to how to tell this most important story in a way that will create change.

We may be doomed even if that happens.

But we’re surely doomed if it doesn’t. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The 2016 election BY

J OHN S IDES, M ICHAEL T ESLER

AND

L YNN V AVRECK

The 2016 election is nearly two years behind us, but debates contin­ ue to rage over what lifted Donald Trump to a victory that surprised so many political observers. All elections generate narratives that try to explain the outcome, but often those do not square with polling and other political science data. This conflict is remarkably sharp in the case of the 2016 election, in part because of the unusual nature of Trump’s candidacy. Here are five of the most prevalent myths.

MYTH NO. 1 Angry voters drove the results.

There is no evidence that Americans were any more angry in 2016 than they had been in 2012, when President Barack Obama won reelection. When CNN asked that same question in February 2012, 67 percent of voters said they were angry, only two percentage points less than in 2016, well within the margin of error. And other data suggested a rosier outlook: In early 2016, consumer confidence was rising among all income groups, and it was as high as it was at the same point in 1984, when Ronald Reagan won reelection under the “morning in America” banner.

Throughout 2016, Obama’s approval rating increased, hitting 56 percent in December.

MYTH NO. 2 Trump can say or do anything without losing support.

Trump created endless controversies during the presidential campaign yet prevailed, inspiring a theory that he was “unattackable,” as CNN’s Chris Cillizza put it.

The effects of specific controversies were often shortlived, but polling data shows that they did hurt Trump. During the primary campaign, Trump’s net favorability among Republicans dropped sharply — from +27 points to +11, according to YouGov/Economist polls — after he criticized John McCain’s record as a POW in Vietnam. It

fell again after he made offensively critical comments about Megyn Kelly following the Aug. 6, 2015, primary debate (+27 points to +13) and after he skipped a January 2016 debate (+38 points to +22).

During the general-election campaign, Trump’s standing in the polls suffered at multiple points, especially after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” video. It turns out that boasting about sexual assault on tape can drive at least some voters away.

MYTH NO. 3 Hillary Clinton’s inept campaign cost her the election.

“A series of strategic mistakes likely sealed Clinton’s fate,” including too much time spent attacking Trump, according to The Post.

Yet our experiments showed that voters randomly assigned to watch her attack ads on Trump were more likely to support her and less likely to support him.

Clinton, we found, did better in media markets where she had a larger advantage in televised advertising, another sign that her ad strategy was sound.

It is true that her field organization was smaller than Obama’s had been in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin (though not in Michigan) — all states Trump won — but research suggests that the impact of field organizing is modest.

JABIN BOTSFORD /THE WASHINGTON POST

A “Make America Great Again” hat on display. Why did Donald Trump win? It wasn’t necessarily because of voters’ anger or economic fears.

MYTH NO. 4 Trump’s victory was due to economic anxiety.

One particular rationale for Trump’s victory came to the fore immediately after the election: He “tapped into the anger of a declining middle class,” as Bernie Sanders put it, with a message that appealed to “people [who] are tired of working longer hours for lower wages.” The journalist David Cay Johnston concurred: “Trump won because many millions of Americans, having endured decades of working more while getting deeper in debt, said ‘enough.’ ” But the evidence is clear: Both in the Republican primaries and in the general election, white voters’ attitudes about African Americans, Muslims and immigration were more closely associated with how they voted than were any strictly economic concerns. In fact, racial attitudes were the prism through which voters thought about economic outcomes — something we call “racialized economics.”

During the 2016 campaign, the most potent political sentiment held that “people like me” were not getting ahead because of

“people like them.”

MYTH NO. 5 Democratic voters are still ideologically divided.

The Democratic Party is supposedly riven between Sanders-like progressives and Clintonian centrists.

However, the cleavages in the Democratic electorate were not really about ideology. In the surveys we examined, there were few differences on key policy questions such as the role of government in providing health care or child care. No wonder nearly 80 percent of Sanders voters became Clinton supporters in the general election — more than the share of Clinton voters who ended up backing Obama after the 2008 primary contest. n Sides is a professor of political science at George Washington University, Tesler is an associate professor of political science at the University of California at Irvine, and Vavreck is the Marvin Hoffenberg chair of American politics and public policy at UCLA. They are the co-authors of “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.”

16

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