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Hands-on with BlackBerry’s touchscreen phone

The DTEK50’s one big spec is security

What company in 2016 advertises a phone as having a touchscreen? BlackBerry does. Now, I know it’s because the Canadian mobile granddad distinguishes between its keyboard and touch devices, but does that really need to be on the box?
BlackBerry is this week introducing its second Android handset, the DTEK50, which is being promoted as “the world’s most secure smartphone.” I’ve just gotten to try it out for myself and it has frankly surpassed my expectations. If BlackBerry could just get out of its own way and present its devices without trying to inflate pedestrian features, I think the company might have a pretty good device on its hands. 
Then again, the thing to understand with the DTEK50 is that it’s not about the device at all. This is an off-the-shelf reference design from TCL, which you’ll already have seen in the form of the Alcatel Idol 4. The only BlackBerry difference is the replacement of the Idol’s glass back with a distinctly utilitarian rubber surface. It’s highly unusual for a phone, feeling like something you might use to scrub kitchen surfaces with, but I guess it conveys the point about this being a no-nonsense business phone.

BlackBerry’s sales pitch with this handset is about security. The company isn’t just securing the bootloader, it’s going below that layer and cryptographically signing the chipset as well. Once you have the DTEK50 up and running, the titular DTEK app (available only on BlackBerry phones) lets you monitor and granularly control every app’s access to system resources and information.
BlackBerry also promises to have a zero-day delay on delivering Google’s monthly security patches. When I raised the point about “zero-day” being a common term to refer to severe software vulnerabilities, I was met with blank stares. This is what I mean about BlackBerry’s marketing: the company finds awful ways to communicate good things. Most Android manufacturers struggle or simply refuse (Hello, Moto!) to keep up with Google’s monthly schedule for patches, and BlackBerry’s commitment to deliver them on the same day they become available is laudable and a real advantage.
The more I learned about the DTEK50, the more I understood BlackBerry’s premise behind the phone. The hardware is spartan and basic because it’s not what matters anymore. What people want is to have a sense of being taken care of, the notion of having someone looking out for their mobile security and wellbeing. Many might scoff at the very idea of trying to secure Android, but BlackBerry has given me more reason to trust that it is indeed doing something about this issue than any other Android OEM. Even if I never use the BlackBerry Hub, I can appreciate the company’s gradual improvements — which in the latest version include a pinching gesture that instantly filters messages by either unread status, flags, or markers of importance. There’s definitely maturation and improvement going on with BlackBerry’s Android software, offering at least the potential for a full-fledged, differentiated BlackBerry experience.
Maybe I’m grasping at straws here. After all, at $299.99, the DTEK50 is cheap only by BlackBerry standards and would struggle to convince price-sensitive Android shoppers. This year’s Moto G has the same Snapdragon 617 processor and a bigger battery inside, while offering a larger 1080p display than the DTEK50 at a lower price. Can the 5.2-inch DTEK50 overcome its hardware limitations with the promise of a more attentive manufacturer that takes care of the things that truly matter?

One thing that gives me greater confidence in BlackBerry than Moto is that the DTEK50 feels more fluid and responsive than the G. Its camera works faster and, on the evidence of my first few tries, doesn’t appear to be terrible. I like the simplicity of this phone’s design, even if BlackBerry’s only involvement was to downgrade it with that rubbery back cover. And I also like the clarity of the display. It just feels like a really decent phone.
Having endured BlackBerry’s painfully corporate and stilted presentation for the DTEK50 yesterday, I was preparing my jokes about an out-of-touch company delivering out-of-touch products. The weird thing is that I actually like the DTEK50 and I see room for it out in the world. If BlackBerry’s promises of superior security and fast and regular updates prove legitimate over the coming weeks and months, this might turn out to indeed be a respectable business phone. Let’s just keep its most basic specs off the pretty box, shall we, BlackBerry?
Hint: Use the ‘s’ and ‘d’ keys to navigate

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Be well informed. Read The Verge.

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First Click: iPhone sales are shrinking for the same reason that Pokémon Go is thriving

Apple today finds itself in the unusual position of having not one, but two consecutive quarters of slumping iPhone sales. The company’s stock price, however, has gone in the opposite direction, rising in response to Apple outperforming direr expectations. Those traders aren’t crazy. They just understand a phenomenon that is reaching its apotheosis in 2016: smartphone saturation.
Looking at the Pokémon Go infatuation that has gripped the globe this summer, I’m reminded about the ubiquity and commodification of the smartphone. Whether it’s an iPhone or an Android device, the smart mobile phone has grown so widely available and accessible that it’s not at all weird or worrying to see clusters of kids walking around on Pokémon hunts with each having his or her own handset. Things didn’t use to be this way.
It wasn’t long ago that smartphones were a primary target and reason for muggings. Phones are still the most personally valuable thing that the majority of people carry around with them, but they’re no longer the sort of prized asset that would get a kid in trouble. The phone is a commodity now, like a pair of sneakers, and the iPhone is evidently not immune to this situation.
There will inevitably be questions raised about Apple’s future growth strategy, and those are apt — every public company must offer its investors a vision of rising profits — but they shouldn’t be solipsistically focused on the iPhone. The fact is that with a finite human population, of which only a fraction have the required income to buy an iPhone, Apple was inevitably going to meet a ceiling to iPhone sales. The interesting thing is that the ceiling is gradually coming down, as more and more people have adequate to good smartphones that can run games like Pokémon Go. The game might prompt people to go out and buy more portable batteries, but it won’t drive a whole new wave of smartphone upgrades. Odds are that nothing short of a killer VR app will stimulate the extraordinary growth that characterized the past few years in smartphones.
Apple’s future is less certain now than it has been for a long time, because the company must find the next great profit driver to augment, if not entirely replace, the iPhone. It was fine to depend on a single device for 60 percent of revenue when that device was the most sought-after gadget in the world, but now that everyone who can afford a smartphone has one, Apple’s need for diversification is more pressing.
Pokémon Go couldn’t have been the success it has become in any other year than this one. Without the ubiquity of smartphones, it’d have been a cute diversion for a select few. But with it, the game has created a whole new class of urban ramblers. It’s this fundamental change, this achievement of almost total smartphone market saturation, that distinguishes this year from the preceding ones.

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Be well informed. Read The Verge.

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Remains of the Day: Microsoft to Fix Surface Pro 3 Battery Issues With a Software Update

Microsoft is working to fix some Surface Pro 3 tablets that have been plagued with extremely short battery lives. The good news, though, is that they should be able to fix it with a software update.
A degree of battery degradation is to be expected over the lifespan of the Surface Pro 3 but apparently some users are seeing as little as one to two minutes of battery life. Luckily it isn’t a hardware issue, apparently, and Microsoft may be able to fix the affected batteries with a software update, currently in the works. [Ars Technica]
Amazon has a new page that highlights products which began their lives as Kickstarter projects. There are some familiar successes like the Oculus Rift and Cards Against Humanity as well as 300 others you probably haven’t heard of. It’s pretty interesting to browse. [Amazon via BusinessWire]
Pandora can now recommend nearby concerts based on your music preferences, thanks to their purchase of Ticketfly last year. On one hand, it seems unlikely to purchase a ticket from an unexpected notification, but hey, you might learn about a show you didn’t know about. [TechCrunch]
Netflix news! The third season of Black Mirror will premiere in October. Maria Bamford’s wonderful Lady Dynamite has been renewed for a second season. Here’s a trailer for the return of Gilmore Girls.
Which of your favorite snacks from childhood still hold up as you consume them with your refined adult pallet? An adequate man investigates. [Deadspin]
Twitter will be streaming weekly out-of-market games from Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League, as well as a nightly sports program with highlights and commentary called The Rally. Sports! [Twitter]
Want more tips and tricks for living life better? Check out other articles like this on Lifehacker.

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Disability rights took the spotlight at the Democratic convention this year

People with disabilities are used to feeling like a second-class minority group. In American politics, when disability is mentioned at all, it’s too often in the context of trite inspiration porn or offensive and inaccurate myths about people faking problems to unfairly access public benefits. Rarely do disabled Americans hear meaningful discussion of the issues that impact our lives.
That’s what makes this year’s Democratic National Convention so surprising. The first two nights of the convention included an unusual level of disability-rights content. Both evenings have included prominent remarks from disabled speakers with decades-long relationships with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Yesterday’s session took place during the 26th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Former US Sen. Tom Harkin, one of the original co-sponsors of the ADA, spoke early in the day’s schedule about that landmark event. He took the opportunity to teach the assembled delegates how to say America in sign language — then praised Hillary’s support for ending an exemption that allowed companies to pay some disabled workers less than the minimum wage, and for passing legislation to promote community living supports.
Disability rights has long been a passionate cause of Sen. Harkin and a few other elected officials with a personal connection to the community. What’s unusual about this year’s convention was the degree to which disability has played a major role in the primetime symbolism used by the party to make their case to the American people.
Some of this may reflect a longstanding personal interest in the topic by the candidate. As Bill Clinton mentioned in his remarks last night, Hillary Clinton began her law career advocating for children with disabilities with the Children’s Defense Fund before the passage of Public Law 94–132, which required public schools to accept children with disabilities. Her campaign has issued impressively detailed policy plans regarding autism, substance abuse, Alzheimer’s, and HIV/AIDS, among other topics.
But it also reflects some important changing dynamics in America’s disability politics.
The interests of people with disabilities themselves have rarely been the subject of American politics
In previous election cycles, disability has been included mainly to tell a story designed to appeal to the non-disabled. Activists have long expressed frustration that disability — viewed within the community as a civil rights issue — has usually been presented as a source of human interest stories designed to evoke pity.
Christopher Reeve’s convention speech is a notorious case. Writing in her memoir Too Late to Die Young, Harriet McBryde-Johnson, a disabled attorney, author, and delegate at the 1996 Democratic convention, described her disappointment in the disabled actor’s remarks, which were praised in the general press but panned by most disability-rights commentators for casting disability as mainly an issue of medical research. McBryde-Johnson captured the disconnect:

On the giant TV screen in the rafters, there’s a woman in a wheelchair with both arms crossed over her chest, scowling. Quick cut to a nondisabled white woman, tears streaming across a smiling face, backlit to highlight her moment of inspiration. The lights pick out a variety of delegates. White, black, old, young, male, female. Everything but crips …

… the speech ends and the lights come on. Emotion has run through the vast space, in one of those communal experiences that touches each individual and transforms the group as a whole. But as Reeve and the crowd have enjoyed their communion, I have been placed outside the circle. The force that has been let loose in the hall redefines me as it defines Reeve, as a disability object, presumably tragic but brave, someone to gawk at, someone to make them grateful that they are not like us.

McBryde-Johnson’s criticism reflects a longstanding aspiration among the disabled to be seen as a minority group on par with black and Latino voters, Jews and Muslims, and the LGBTQ community, rather than as a public health problem. Seen in that light, convention remarks like those of Dynah Haubert, a disabled staff attorney at Disability Rights Pennsylvania, carry special resonance. Speaking among representatives of other minority groups on Monday, Haubert proclaimed that “disability is not a problem to be cured, but part of our identity and diversity.”

In prior cycles, politicians rarely went beyond generic statements supporting greater awareness or increased funding of research. With such a low bar, there wasn’t much of a pathway for campaigns to distinguish themselves.
Now we’re seeing a willingness to get down to specific proposals, even controversial proposals. This is happening in both parties. Witness the GOP platform’s call for including businesses owned by people with disabilities in the federal government’s minority-owned business contract preference program.
Or witness the battle that’s played out in Congress this year between competing Democratic and Republican visions for mental health reform. Democrats have by and large been arguing to protect the privacy rights of people with psychiatric disabilities under HIPAA and expand voluntary mental health supports; Republican leaders have argued for rolling back HIPAA and expanding more coercive court-ordered treatment models. Whatever side you’re on, it’s satisfying to see that the parties are finally starting to articulate exactly what they believe in when it comes to disability policy.
The disability community has matured politically
Americans with disabilities want to be recognized as an interest group worth pandering to — not as a source of inspiration or pity for the general public. Many believe that’s finally happening this year.
Even during the primaries, candidates on both sides of the aisle had begun to make commitments. When Jeb Bush rolled out his campaign, he highlighted the work he had done as governor to expand services to Floridians with developmental disabilities. John Kasich made similar remarks on the campaign trail.
In the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton made an early splash with a detailed plan for policies relevant to autism: It included commitments to expand funding for integrated employment opportunities as well as investments in services for autistic adults. Later, on the campaign trail, she responded to a question from an autistic lawyer in Wisconsin by committing to change federal labor law to extend minimum-wage protections to all disabled workers. She went on to endorse the Disability Integration Act, legislation designed to create an enforceable right for community-based supports. In both instances, Sen. Sanders quickly followed suit.
Interestingly, both the Democratic and Republican party platforms call for eliminating sub-minimum wage compensation to disabled workers (somewhat ironically so for the GOP, given that the party doesn’t support a federal minimum wage). And when an early draft of the Democratic platform was released without mention of the need for community-based services for the disabled, vocal lobbying by activists convinced the party to include language addressing their concerns.
A large group that’s politically up for grabs — in theory
Behind this growing interest is a fundamental political reality. Nearly one in five Americans possess a disability of some kind. While many are disconnected from disability politics, a substantial minority of disabled Americans and their family members consider disability issues a major factor in their voting decisions. (At the Democratic convention itself, the number of disabled delegates is up 35 percent, relative to the 2012 convention.)
Polling of the community suggests disabled voters are distributed through both political parties at about the same rate as the general population. Meaning that they remain up for grabs for either party. Disability issues can meaningfully influence voting behavior. In a 2013 poll, 87 percent of voters with disabilities reported they would consider voting against a candidate they otherwise supported if that candidate favored cutting disability services. Forty-five percent indicated such a stance would definitely lose their vote.
In 2016, the Democrats have an opportunity to dominate the disability vote — and they know it
There’s another reason why disability issues are getting greater representation at the convention. The Democratic Party in the 21st century has bet big on health care — if you want the federal government to play a role in expanding access and improving benefits, most of the policy proposals you’ll like will be on one side of the aisle.
Post-ACA, the percentage of Americans without health insurance is rapidly dropping. When President Obama came into office, the critical issue highlighted by health reform proponents was the lack of affordable coverage for a population of mostly non-disabled adults. Now that the ACA has created a pathway to universal insurance coverage, focus is starting to shift to what that insurance will pay for — an issue that’s most relevant for people with disabilities and those with chronic illness. At this point, if you want to do meaningful health policy, you have to focus on people with disabilities.
This isn’t only relevant for future policymaking. When the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, political compromise necessitated excluding health insurance from its nondiscrimination protections. The passage of the Affordable Care Act finally changed that, ending discrimination against Americans with disabilities and other pre-existing conditions on the insurance market.
While Republicans have a significant disability policy record of their own (the ADA itself was signed by George H.W. Bush), their party’s strenuous efforts to repeal the ACA and its ban on pre-existing-condition discrimination makes it difficult for them to reach out to the disability vote. As long as repealing the ACA remains a top priority for the GOP, the Democrats will have an easier case to make to Americans with disabilities. With that in mind, it’s not so surprising that they’ve chosen to boost the profile given to disability at this year’s convention.
Ari Ne’eman is the president and co-founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, an advocacy organization run by and for autistic adults seeking to increase the representation of autistic people across society. He has also served on the National Council on Disability, a federal agency that advises Congress and the president on disability policy issues.

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3 reasons Russia’s Vladimir Putin might want to interfere in the US presidential elections

The Clinton campaign, among others, has accused Vladimir Putin of encouraging Russian intelligence to hack the Democratic National Committee (DNC) files and hand over thousands of emails to WikiLeaks as part of a broader scheme to get Donald Trump elected president. 
But why would Putin even want to influence the US presidential election? There are several reasons Russia might want stir up trouble in an already contentious campaign. Russian views of the United States are at a low point; Putin believes the US plays its own nefarious games in Russian politics; and Moscow would like to undermine US international credibility by highlighting the deficiencies in American party politics. 
Putin thinks the US already did it to him first
As far as Putin and his inner circle are concerned, it was the United States that moved first to meddle in Russian politics when Putin decided to return for a third term. In 2011-’12, Russian demonstrators took to the streets to protest electoral violations in the parliamentary elections and the lack of alternative candidates to Putin in the presidential election. Putin and his inner circle believed the US was to blame. Putin even asserted that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had either incited or directly financed the demonstrations. 
In Putin’s mindset, the West always tries to bring Russia down. Next year will be the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and this year marks the 25th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the Russian worldview, first Germany in World War I and then the United States in the Cold War took advantage of domestic divisions and vulnerabilities and the Russian state collapsed twice in one century. 
So one of Putin’s primary objectives is to force Western leaders to back off in order to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Putin wants the United States and other Western governments to stop funding, as part of their foreign policies, organizations that promote political and economic transformations in Russia. He also wants to block US officials from meeting with opposition figures and parties. From Putin’s perspective, democracy promotion is just a cover for regime change. 
Putin thinks and acts like a KGB operative 
Before he was the leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin was an officer in the KGB, the Soviet-era secret intelligence service, and that experience continues to shape his views and actions. Putin approaches his dealings with the United States with the logic of a covert operative, steeped in plots and conspiracies. He also uses an intelligence operative’s tools. He’s prepared to fight dirty, and he relies on the element of tactical surprise to ensure maximum effect.
Putin has two features that distinguish him from other world leaders. As he puts it, he knows how to “work with people” and “work with information.” In the KGB, Putin learned how to probe people’s vulnerabilities, uncover their secrets, and use compromising information against them. In other words, blackmail and intimidation are part of his stock in trade. 
In his view, other world leaders are essentially “targets.” He gathers information and carefully tailors his approach to each leader to see how he can outmaneuver them. In one infamous and blatant episode, Putin played on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fear of dogs to put her edge during a one-on-one meeting at his dacha. He allowed his black Labrador to sniff around and lie at her feet. On numerous other occasions, Putin has signaled to visiting Western officials that he knows personal information from “their” old KGB files.
Putin also knows how to play the media. Russia already has a long tradition of propaganda and information warfare, but Putin is a master manipulator. Early in his presidency, he described the press as an instrument that he would deploy in the service of the state. The Kremlin has trained its own bloggers to create content on the internet. It has hired public relations firms to improve its media strategy. Kremlin-sponsored focus groups have helped hone messaging. As lies are part of the coin of the intelligence operative and facts are fungible, there have been few constraints on creative content. 
The Russian media machine functions as a huge psychological operation, a kind of massive pro-Putin Super PAC. At home, it rallies the Russian public around the flag by publicizing the damage Russia’s enemies are trying to inflict. Abroad, it focuses on scandals that underscore the hubris, hypocrisy, and failings of Western political systems. 
The DNC files may not have been given to WikiLeaks by Russian intelligence, but the selective release of email caches, at a juncture when they are likely to gain the greatest international media attention and have the most negative political impact in the United States, does have the hallmarks of a carefully considered operation. For Vladimir Putin, who sees himself as locked in a struggle for influence with the United States, this would all be fair game. 
Putin wants a weakened US presidency
There is much speculation that Putin may see Donald Trump as someone he can do business with, and that he has a grudge against Hillary Clinton. Trump’s praise of Putin as a “strong leader” is a notable break with the general trend of US politicians and opinion leaders castigating Putin and criticizing Russia, and Putin has made seemingly complimentary comments about Trump in return. 
In contrast, in public and private, Putin and other Russian officials have made it clear that they have a negative opinion of Clinton. In a 2014 interview with French television, for example, Putin lambasted Clinton for remarks she had made about him, noting that it was “better not to argue with women” and that Clinton was never “too graceful in her statements.”
Whatever his personal preferences, though, Putin cannot reasonably expect to influence the outcome of the US presidential election. The best he can hope for is to reduce the ability of whoever comes into the Oval Office to pursue policies that are detrimental to Putin’s and Russia’s interests. 
Right now, Putin wants the US to remove sanctions imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea in March 2014. Perhaps even more importantly, Russia has parliamentary elections this September, and presidential elections again in 2018, when Putin is expected to run for a fourth term. The Kremlin does not want a repeat of the protests of 2011-’12, and certainly no pronouncements from the US about whether the elections are free and fair or whether Putin has a genuine popular mandate for his next presidency.
Against this backdrop, the information from the DNC files underscores for the Russian public, and the outside world, that US party politics is just as dirty as in Russia or anywhere else. The US looks a lot less credible as the moral authority on the conduct of elections. 
Irrespective of whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is elected, from Moscow’s perspective, at the end of this ruinous political campaign, the new US president will look as wounded as Putin did when he took office again in 2012. A US president who is elected amid controversy and recrimination, reviled by a large segment of the electorate, and mired in domestic crises will be hard-pressed to forge a coherent foreign policy and challenge Russia.
Fiona Hill is a senior fellow and director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. A former US national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, she is co-author of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.

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Barack Obama is the most important political figure of our time, no matter who succeeds him

2016 marked the fourth consecutive time that Barack Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention. At his first, in 2004, he was only a state senator, running for an open US Senate seat. At his second, he was the party’s nominee for president. At his third, he was the incumbent president. And at his fourth, he is a popular outgoing president, naming a successor and arguing that only she is equipped to defend and further his legacy.
It is a farewell address of sorts, but despite his impending retirement, Barack Obama’s status as the central political figure of his generation will not end on January 20, especially if Hillary Clinton succeeds him. If anything, Obama’s departure from formal office will only make clearer the myriad ways in which he has fundamentally overhauled American government, reshaped the Democratic Party in his image, and built the most far-reaching and substantial record of achievements of any president since Ronald Reagan.
After he leaves, Obamacare will remain, a reminder that he succeeded where presidents before him had failed for a century in passing a comprehensive national health insurance bill. After he leaves, Dodd-Frank will remain, as will the changes wrought by his stimulus package, which both blunted the recession and transformed education and energy policy.
After he leaves, the Environmental Protection Agency will still being enforcing the toughest climate rules in American history, and America will still have signed a major international climate accord. The US will still be open to Cuba, for the first time in more than half a century, and still will have reached a peaceful settlement to the nuclear standoff with Iran.
Donald Trump and other Republicans can try to repeal some of these achievements, and in some cases they may succeed. But Obama has already dramatically cut the uninsured rate, changed the way Wall Street operates on a day-to-day basis, and remade America’s relationships with longtime enemies. Even hostile successors will have to deal with the way he has changed the facts on the ground.
You can celebrate or bemoan Obama’s accomplishments. Liberals hail them as moves toward a social democratic welfare state and a foreign policy more skeptical of military intervention; conservatives critique Obama’s efforts to expand regulation and the government’s reach, and accuse him of abdicating America’s role as world hegemon.
But no one can deny that the changes Obama has made are enormous in scale.
Obamacare: a big ****** deal

National health insurance has been the single defining goal of American progressivism for more than a century. There have been other struggles, of course: for equality for women, African Americans, and LGBTQ people; for environmental protection; and, of course, against militarism. But ever since its inclusion in Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose platform, a federally guaranteed right to health coverage has been the one economic and social policy demand that loomed over all others. It was the big gap between our welfare state and those of our peers in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
And for more than a century, efforts to achieve national health insurance failed. Roosevelt’s third-party run came up short. His Progressive allies, despite support from the American Medical Association, failed to pass a bill in the 1910s. FDR declined to include health insurance in the Social Security Act, fearing it would sink the whole program, and the Wagner Act, his second attempt, ended in failure too. Harry Truman included a single-payer plan open to all Americans in his Fair Deal set of proposals, but it went nowhere. LBJ got Medicare and Medicaid done after JFK utterly failed, but both programs targeted limited groups.
Richard Nixon proposed a universal health care plan remarkably similar to Obamacare that was killed when then-Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) walked away from a deal to pass it, in what Kennedy would later call his greatest regret as a senator. Jimmy Carter endorsed single-payer on the campaign trail but despite having a Democratic supermajority in Congress did nothing to pass it. And the failure of Bill Clinton’s health care plan is the stuff of legend.

Then on March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. It wasn’t perfect by any means. Liberals bemoan that it wasn’t single-payer; it lacked a public option, or even all-payer rate setting. And it still left many uninsured.
But it established, for the first time in history, that it was the responsibility of the United States government to provide health insurance to nearly all Americans, and it expanded Medicaid and offered hundreds of billions of dollars in insurance subsidies to fulfill that responsibility.
In an email, UC Berkeley’s Paul Pierson likened the law to a “starter home” to be expanded later on, much as Social Security — which initially had no disability benefits, left out surviving dependents and widows, and excluded (largely black) agricultural and home workers — was.
Brian Steensland, a sociologist who studies American social policy at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, agrees. “The main thing it does, I think, is establish the expectation in the public’s mind that access to basic health care is a right,” he says. “It’s going to be hard to go back to a time when access to health insurance, and the subsidies to help pay for it, wasn’t near universal.”
To pay for it all, the Affordable Care Act cut back on Medicare spending and hiked taxes on rich people’s investment income and health plans. It effected a massive downward redistribution of income. It’s one of the most startlingly progressive laws this country has ever enacted.
And it was passed with more opposition than the social insurance programs it followed. “FDR and LBJ had lots of fellow Democrats in Congress when they pushed for the New Deal and Great Society,” College of William and Mary political scientist Chris Howard says. “Their opponents, in and out of government, were not nearly as ideological or hostile as the ones facing Obama. The fact that the ACA exists at all is pretty remarkable.”
A lot of these facts are familiar to people who’ve been following Obamacare, but it’s worth dwelling on them for a second. When you consider the law in the context of 100 years of progressive activism, and in the grand scheme of American history, it starts to look less like a moderate reform and more like an epochal achievement, on the order of FDR’s passage of Social Security or LBJ’s Great Society programs.
It is, to quote Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol, “a century-defining accomplishment in the last industrial democracy to resist using national government to ensure access to health coverage for most citizens.” FDR failed, Truman failed, Nixon failed, Carter failed, Clinton failed — and Obama succeeded. He filled in the one big remaining gap in the American welfare state when all his forerunners couldn’t.
But Obama’s domestic achievements were not just limited to health care.
“On domestic issues Obama is the most consequential and successful Democratic president since LBJ. It isn’t close.”

The Affordable Care Act was hardly Obama’s only accomplishment. He passed a stimulus bill that included major reforms to the nation’s education system, big spending on clean energy, and significant expansions of antipoverty programs. He shepherded through the Dodd-Frank Act, the first significant crackdown on Wall Street’s power in a generation, which has been far more successful than commonly acknowledged.
He used executive action to enact bold regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and to protect nearly 6 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. He ended the ban on gay and lesbian service in the military, made it easier for women and minorities to fight wage discrimination, cut out wasteful private sector involvement in student loans, and hiked the top income tax rate. He reprofessionalized the Department of Justice and refashioned the National Labor Relations Board and the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department into highly effective forces for workers’ rights.
His presidency holds massive symbolic value as proof that the reign of white men over American government can be halted and America as a whole can be represented. And while he was too slow in announcing support for same-sex marriage, he appointed two of the justices behind the Supreme Court’s historic decision that legalized it nationwide, and enlisted his Justice Department on the side of the plaintiffs.
There are obviously places Obama fell short. I think he didn’t take monetary policy nearly seriously enough, that he’s fallen short on combating HIV/AIDS and other public health scourges abroad, that his early push to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants was indefensible, and that perpetrators of torture and other war crimes from the Bush administration should have been criminally prosecuted. But while Obama could have accomplished more, it could never be said that he accomplished little.
“When you add the ACA to the reforms in the stimulus package, Dodd-Frank, and his various climate initiatives,” Pierson says, “I don’t think there is any doubt: On domestic issues Obama is the most consequential and successful Democratic president since LBJ. It isn’t close.”
Obama’s foreign policy was a new direction for the Democratic Party — and the country

And on foreign issues, Obama’s record is perhaps the most successful of any Democratic president since Truman. He has reestablished productive diplomacy as the central task of a progressive foreign policy, and as a viable alternative approach to dealing with countries the GOP foreign policy establishment would rather bomb.
He established a viable alternative to the liberal hawks that dominated Democratic thinking during the Bush years, and held positions of influence on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign. And he developed a cadre of aides who can carry on that legacy to future Democratic administrations and keep a tradition of dovishness alive.
To understand how this happened, it’s worth going back to 2008, when YouTuber Stephen Sorta asked the most important question of the Democratic primary debates: “Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?”
The safe, reserved thing to do would be to say no: Sure, diplomacy’s great, but obviously there will be “preconditions.” This was the response of future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who called the idea “irresponsible and frankly naive” following the debate. It was also the response of future Vice President Joe Biden, who said, “World leaders should not meet with other world leaders unless they know what the agenda is, so you don’t end up being used.”
This was, famously, not the response of future President Barack Obama. “I would,” he replied. “And the reason is this: that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration — is ridiculous.”
At the time, Obama’s statement was treated like a gaffe. Today it feels more like a statement of purpose. Obama did correspond with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. His secretary of state met for weeks at a time with Rouhani’s foreign minister to hammer out a deal. And the result is a historic accord with Iran that, if successful, will stop Iran from developing a nuclear device for at least 10 years. More important than that, it eliminates the odds of a war between the US and Iran in the near future.
And of course, Iran isn’t the only country on Sorta’s list with whom Obama has engaged in direct talks. He also did away with America’s failed policy of isolating Cuba, ending the embargo and allowing for a rapprochement after more than 50 years. His radical openness to dialogue abroad got results in the form of two of the biggest American diplomatic breakthroughs since the Oslo Accords in 1994, perhaps since Camp David in 1978.
But the Iran and Cuba deals were of a different nature than those accords, or similar breakthroughs by Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush. From Watergate through 2009, America’s major diplomatic breakthroughs were generally either arms control deals with the Soviet Union or Russia, or trilateral agreements meant to protect Israel’s long-term security, like Camp David and Oslo.
Those are important steps, but they solidified America’s existing relationships. Obama, by contrast, achieved two huge openings to countries the US had previously counted as enemies for decades. They are achievements more like Nixon’s opening to China than, say, the SALT accords. And, of course, Obama has a major Russian arms control deal under his belt in the form of New START, as well.
In December 2015, Obama added the climate deal in Paris to the list. This wasn’t a traditional agreement, as it was not legally binding. But nonetheless, 195 countries agreed to submit plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s an astonishing degree of global consensus, even without a legally binding treaty.
And with luck, the Paris deal, for which the Obama administration fought hard, will encourage a flurry of bilateral or multilateral binding agreements between its signatories, creating a virtuous cycle in which nations pressure each other to cut emissions further and further. It may not be enough to stop catastrophic warming — but with 195 nations, it’s likely the best anyone could’ve hoped for.
Obama’s decisions haven’t been perfect. He revived Clinton-style militarism in the Middle East, where periodic airstrikes and special ops missions take the place of Bush-style invasion and occupation. The drone war is a moral catastrophe, and the 2009 surge in Afghanistan was a mistake. Syria remains a morass with no good options, though arguably Obama had no better choice than to muddle through. But certainly compared with his predecessors, Obama was a model of restraint, prudence, and openness in foreign policy.
You can generally divide American presidents into two camps: the mildly good or bad but ultimately forgettable (Clinton, Carter, Taft, Harrison), and the hugely consequential for good or ill (FDR, Lincoln, Nixon, Andrew Johnson). Whether you love or hate his record, there’s no question Obama’s domestic and foreign achievements place him firmly in the latter camp.

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Why Obama campaigning for Clinton is unusual — and historic

President Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention tonight won’t be his last on behalf of Hillary Clinton. As he gets ready to leave office, he’s going to be spending plenty of time on the campaign trail, persuading voters to elect the woman who’s essentially planning to govern as a third Obama term.
Obama is clearly eager to get on and make that case. Not only is electing a Democratic successor crucial to preserve his policies and legacy, but Obama also seems to get a particular charge out of attacking Donald Trump — something he’s already done at graduation speeches and on campaign-style stops. 
But in doing so, he’s engaging in an activity that few incumbent presidents have ever done. Obama is the rare two-term president who is both healthy enough and popular enough to campaign for his potential successor. The only parallel that comes close is Ronald Reagan campaigning for George H.W. Bush in 1988 — a parallel that augurs well for Clinton, particularly because Obama is campaigning harder than the 77-year-old Reagan did.
That said, it’s still unclear if this strategy will work or backfire. Making the case that Clinton will essentially amount to a third Obama term is politically risky. Obama, though, seems to think it’s worth the risk.
Truman and George W. Bush were too unpopular to help, and their successors lost

The last night of the Democratic National Convention in 1952, with Truman and Stevenson in a rare joint appearance.
Since World War II, there have been seven presidents who served more than one full term and could have campaigned for their successors: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. 
But most of those presidents saw only limited time on the trail — because they were unpopular, aging, ill, or all of the above.
Truman, for instance, certainly wanted to campaign for his potential successor in 1952. “I am going to take my coat off and do everything I can to help him win,” he said of Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats’ nominee. Truman was a tireless campaigner, and he took long train trips with dozens of stops to remind audiences of everything the Democrats had done for them and to exhort them to vote for Stevenson.
The problem was Stevenson didn’t want Truman’s help. By February 1952, Truman’s approval ratings had bottomed out at an all-time low of 22 percent. Inflation was rising, the Korean War was a stalemate, and the IRS was in the middle of a long-running corruption scandal. (Truman was initially expected to run in 1952 himself, but lost the New Hampshire primary and withdrew from the race.) Stevenson kept trying to distance himself from Truman; Truman, stung by the rejection, wrote multiple letters, never sent, expressing his irritation.
“I can’t stand snub after snub by you. … It seems to me that the Democratic Candidate is above associating with the lowly President of the United States,” Truman complained in one letter. In the end, Stevenson lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower in a landslide.
In 1968, Lyndon Johnson could have run for reelection, but with opposition to the Vietnam War rising, he faced a challenge he was likely to lose in the New Hampshire primary. So he decided not to run; with his presidential legacy in shambles, he stayed off the campaign trail.
The situation George W. Bush confronted in 2008 was not quite as bad, if only because Bush couldn’t have run that year if he wanted to. His approval ratings were scraping near Truman-esque lows. Bush endorsed John McCain, somewhat awkwardly, but then mostly stayed away from the campaign, save for headlining some Republican fundraisers. By late October, the two had appeared together only twice, and one of those times was a meeting on the financial crisis that also included Obama.
McCain, of course, also lost. Trying to succeed an unpopular two-term president is hard, whether that president joins the campaign or stays on the sidelines.
Al Gore ran away from Bill Clinton (and Monica Lewinsky)

I’m not saying Gore stayed away from Clinton, but there are almost no photos of them campaigning together from 2000 in the Getty Images archive.
Then there were the presidents who were popular enough that they could have helped their hypothetical successors, but — for whatever reason — they didn’t: Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton.
In 1960, Eisenhower was tremendously popular, leaving office with a 59 percent approval rating. But he didn’t campaign at all for Richard Nixon, his vice president and the Republican nominee that year. 
In fact, at one point Eisenhower even undermined his successor’s campaign. Nixon, facing the 43-year-old John F. Kennedy, had tried to emphasize that after eight years as vice president, he had the relevant experience to be president on day one. 
So reporters asked Eisenhower what Nixon had done while in office. And Eisenhower seemed irked that reporters didn’t understand that the president made all the decisions in the White House. He repeatedly said he trusted Nixon as a top adviser but drew a blank — publicly — when pressed for specifics on which decisions he influenced. “If you give me a week, I might think of one,” Eisenhower said. “I don’t remember.” 
Eisenhower’s health was also a limiting factor: Eisenhower had already had a heart attack, and after seeing campaign literature smearing Nixon, he had heart palpitations. His doctor forbade him from campaigning, and Eisenhower’s wife persuaded Nixon’s wife to stop Nixon from asking the president for help. Nixon lost, narrowly, and Eisenhower’s inability to fight for his potential successor was cited as one contributing factor.
Then there’s Al Gore in 2000. Gore was trying to succeed a popular president during a period of economic prosperity. Bill Clinton’s approval numbers remained high throughout the Monica Lewinsky scandal and his ensuing impeachment. Yet polls suggested that voters were tired of the Clinton circus of scandal, and Gore, who had suffered a fundraising scandal of his own, was both personally upset by the Lewinsky affair and afraid it would tarnish his chances.
The New York Times summed up the state of affairs in a brutal opening paragraph to an article in October 2000: “After eight years together, here is the state of the relationship between President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore: Mr. Gore won’t pick up the phone. He doesn’t call, and Mr. Clinton doesn’t know why.”
Gore’s campaign … well, we all know how that ended.
George H.W. Bush ran for a Reagan third term. Reagan helped. And he won.

Reagan on the campaign trail with George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Perhaps the closest parallel to Obama and Hillary Clinton today was Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, his vice president, in the election of 1988. 
Reagan was 77 when he left office, and by some accounts his health was already failing. His initial, lukewarm endorsement of Bush — during which, inexplicably, he mispronounced his vice president’s last name — was not auspicious. (He pronounced “Bush” like “blush.”)
By the end of the campaign, however, Reagan, whose approval rating had risen throughout 1988 to more than 60 percent, was campaigning hard. Between Labor Day and Election Day, he traveled at least 25,000 miles. “He is running so hard it is easy to forget that he, not Bush, is the surrogate,” the Los Angeles Times wrote.
Reagan was not campaigning out of affection for Bush but, like Obama, to defend his legacy. And George H.W. Bush, like Hillary Clinton, was essentially arguing that if Americans wanted the policies of the previous administration to continue, they should vote for him. “A vote for Bush is a vote for Reagan,” one rallygoer told the Chicago Tribune approvingly.
And Bush, unlike the other candidates above, won.
Can Obama-Clinton repeat the success of Reagan-Bush?

Stronger together — in more ways than one?
Obama is not Reagan-level popular, but, like Reagan, his numbers have been rising throughout his final year in office. For the first time since 2013, more people approve than disapprove of his performance. (Perhaps the presence of Donald Trump has convinced some people that the status quo isn’t all that bad.)
Nor has Obama’s final term been marred by new scandals, as Reagan’s was by Iran-Contra and the resignation of his attorney general. That puts Obama in, historically, an unusual position: Not only is he able to help Clinton run for office, but she appears to actually welcome the help. 
Democrats are hoping to capitalize on that approval. Clinton, a liberal candidate, is running essentially a conservative campaign on behalf of the Obama-era status quo — continuing his policies on health care, climate change, and so forth. (This was one of her main differences with Bernie Sanders in the primaries.) Given that Congress is likely to be gridlocked again next year, preserving the gains of the Obama era is one of Democrats’ key goals.
Still, there’s a reason that very few candidates position themselves as running for a third term the way Clinton is doing. Conventional wisdom among political scientists holds that after eight years of one party, Americans are usually ready for a change. And while things aren’t as bad in America as Trump’s rhetoric often implies, worries about the economy, crime, and terrorism mean it’s not exactly 1988 — when the economy was booming and the Soviet Union was falling apart — either. 
At the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last week, some Republican wore buttons saying “No Third Term.” The big question is whether most voters will agree with them.

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3 winners and 4 losers from the third night of the Democratic National Convention

On a normal convention night, either the sitting vice president or the newly named VP nominee would headline. When Mike Pence spoke in Cleveland last week, he was the main attraction, not the opener.
But the Democrats had a lot to fit into four days. And so Joe Biden and Tim Kaine — not to mention former CIA director/Defense Secretary/White House Chief of Staff/OMB director Leon Panetta, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, California Governor Jerry Brown, and former Congresswoman and mass shooting victim Gabby Giffords — served as opening acts to the main event: President Barack Obama.
Some of the openers bombed, some did surprisingly well, and along the way the speakers sent important signals about which constituencies and causes the party really values. Here’s who ended the night better than they started, and who lost ground.
Winner: Barack Obama

President Obama takes the stage.
If you tried to describe Wednesday night to someone living nine years ago, in August of 2007, it’s hard to emphasize how strange it’d sound.
First, Barack Obama somehow beats Hillary in the primaries. Then he picks Joe Biden as VP and makes him a broadly liked national figure, rather than a Beltway elder statesman. Then he not only wins but gets reelected. And then Hillary Clinton emerged as his successor, running on praising him and his record and his experience, and picking one of Obama’s earliest allies in the primary battle as her running mate.
The sequence was supposed to go in reverse. Clinton would get the nomination after Obama put up a respectable showing. She might pick him as a running-mate, or pick a fairly boring, well-qualified white dude like Biden or Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland or Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh or former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who would then run against a more seasoned Obama in the 2016 primary.
That would have resulted in a very different Democratic party in 2016. It would be a party inextricably, personally linked to the Clinton family, whose only qualified public servants and potential Cabinet appointees are people personally loyal to the Clintons. It would be a considerably more militarily hawkish party. It would be a party in which black and Latino voters are a growing constituency, but one unrepresented at the highest levels of party leadership.
Instead, the party that convenes this week in Philadelphia is Obama’s party, built around Obama’s accomplishments, gathered to nominate Clinton to consolidate and further the progress initiated by Obama, not the other way around.
Obama was gracious about this victory. He extensively praised Clinton, emphasized his decision to appoint her as Secretary of State, and buried and reburied whatever hatchet remained from the 2008 fight. But he didn’t let anyone forget who was the prime mover, who signed Obamacare and Dodd-Frank and the stimulus and opened Cuba and made a nuclear deal with Iran. He didn’t let anyone forget that Clinton was there to make sure that what he did survives.
“We’re going to carry Hillary to victory this fall, because that’s what the moment demands,” he told delegates, adding, conspicuously, “Yes we can.”
Obama’s absorption of Clinton into his own agenda, and his own legacy, mirrors what has happened at a personnel level. Clinton’s campaign has enjoyed the support and staff of Obama’s past efforts. It purposefully rounded up support from ex-Obamaites early on. And in the clearest sign of Clinton’s allegiance to Obamaism to date, the campaign picked Tim Kaine, who was one of Obama’s first early endorsers in 2007, as her running-mate.
And it mirrors what Clinton has done with her own campaign. Throughout the primary fight with Bernie Sanders, Clinton repeatedly tried to recast Sanders’ critiques of her as critiques of Obama — knowing that Obama is a more popular with figure with Democrats, that his name means more.
Obama achieved the intra-party victory he showcased tonight a long time ago. But Wednesday night’s speech was nonetheless a remarkable reminder of just how completely he has made this party his own.
Winner: Joe Biden

Joe gets into it.
Joe Biden is in an awkward position. When previous vice presidents have been in his position — when Al Gore, George H.W. Bush, and Hubert Humphrey were in his position — they typically ran for president, and won their party’s nomination. Dick Cheney didn’t run, but he never intended to. The closest analogue to Biden is Alben Barkley, Harry Truman’s VP, who tried and failed to win the party’s nomination in 1952 — a fate Biden avoided mostly by not running at all.
So here Biden was, facing a convention that he wishes was nominating him, and at which he remains quite popular. In that unenviable position, Biden stepped up in a big way. He gave exactly the speech that someone needed to give on Clinton’s behalf: a speech aimed squarely at working-class voters who might be attracted to Trump’s agenda.
The idea that support for Trump is driven by economic anxiety rather than racism is close to a punchline at this point. It just doesn’t jibe with all the quantitative evidence from surveys of Trump voters, and it doesn’t explain why this seemingly economic-driven revolt is coming at a time when the economy is doing better than it’s done in a decade.
But the theory’s failure as an explanatory approach doesn’t mean that voters who respond to Trump’s racism might also respond to economic appeals. These are voters who won’t be persuaded if you tell them that Trump is a xenophobe, that he’s bigoted against Muslims. Those are features, not bugs, to them. So instead of highlighting the aspects of Trump that make him so uniquely horrifying to Democrats, to reach these voters surrogates need to make an orthogonal argument, to change the subject to a topic the voters also care about and where their values are closer to Democrats’ than to Trump’s.
This was Biden’s task, and he nailed it. He did not try to convince viewers to oppose Trump on anti-racist grounds. He tried to convince them on pocketbook grounds, to convince them Trump is a fraud who does not care at all about their material needs. “He is trying to tell us he cares about the middle class,” Biden scoffed. “Give me a break. That is a bunch of malarkey.” He touted his own proletarian credentials: “I know I’m called middle-class Joe and in Washington, that is not meant as a compliment. It means you are not sophisticated. I know why we are strong, I know why we are held together.”
Biden’s speech was meant to target the anti-elite, populist tone of the Trump campaign head-on. It was one of the only speeches in this entire convention to date to do that. Who knows if the approach will work, but it shows promise, and Biden deserves credit for being the only one to really try.
Winner: Dad jokes

Tim Kaine, America’s dad.
America’s vice presidents need a personae, a personae they necessarily define after their selection due to their pre-VP run obscurity. Dan Quayle was a dunce. Al Gore was a dullard. Dick Cheney was a cartoonish super-villain. Joe Biden smokes ditch weed in his camaro with no shirt on.
Wednesday night, Tim Kaine got his personae. He’s a fun dad. You know, the kind of guy who sings hip-hop wrong to children and offers them tuna melts. Or the kind of guy who, as Kaine did, spends most of his vice presidential acceptance speech doing a not-particularly-great impression of Donald Trump:

If Tim Kaine has any secret emails, they’re probably to his bike buddies reminding them to bring spare tubes on the group ride.

— Benjamin Freed (@brfreed) July 28, 2016
It’s an easy trope to mock, but also one that’s potentially effective. Kaine is just goofier than Clinton, than Obama, arguably even than Biden, one of the goofiest national-level politicians in the history of American politics. That gives him a looseness, an ease with audiences, that enables him to be warmer, more purposefully endearing and chummy, than Democrats’ über-cerebral presidential nominees can be.
And ultimately, it’s not a bad shtick if you can get it. Due to the inherent silliness of the vice presidency, a position that is basically powerless 99 percent of the time but has a small probability of becoming the most powerful position in the entire world, most VPs get saddled with negative reps. Think Al Gore, the boring man who says he invented the internet, or George H.W. Bush, the weak-willed Reagan underling. That’s not always enough to sink a VP’s career (Bush and Gore both won the popular vote in presidential races) but it’s enough to hurt them.
Kaine has lucked into a reputation that’s ridiculous but fundamentally innocuous. That’s a neat trick to pull off.
Loser: Rahm Emanuel

Rahm in January.
It’s a rare thing to see a president throw one of their senior advisors entirely under the bus, on national television, but that’s exactly what happened Wednesday night. In telling the story of the passage of Obamacare, President Obama’s intro video included a detail familiar to political junkies but not typically emphasized in the administration’s own communications: many of his advisors thought he should abandon the fight for health care reform.
The first battle happened in August 2009, as the effort was stuck in the Senate Finance Committee, and was losing popularity. Some in Obama’s circle urged him to give up, most notably Joe Biden — and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. But Obama stuck with it.
Then again, after Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate election, “Rahm Emanuel was, once again, proposing to find a quick deal on a smaller bill that would insure just kids,” Jonathan Cohn writes in his history of the bill’s passage. “And he wasn’t just talking it up internally. He’d discussed the idea with members of Congress, and, in February, The Wall Street Journal published a story about it.”
Time after time, when the going got tough, Emanuel proposed the administration fold. He viewed maintaining approval ratings as more important than using a Congressional majority to pass historic, transformational legislation. It was an astonishing display of political cowardice, that seemed to confirm the worst parts of Rahm’s reputation as a principleless political opportunist.
Years later, Obama is a popular two-term president who achieved the dream of health care reform, and Emanuel is a reviled second-term mayor of Chicago, constantly under pressure to resign as the city suffers staggering levels of violence and he continues to take heat due to allegations that his administration covered up a video of police killing Laquan McDonald, an unarmed black man. Obama is near the highest point in his career. Emanuel could be at the end, the unplanned end, of his.
And just when Emanuel was at his lowest, Obama thew him under the bus. He mentioned Emanuel’s cowardice on health care in prime time, during the convention. He humiliated his former chief of staff before a national audience. It was a justified action — Rahm’s behavior was genuinely disgraceful — but nonetheless startling in its brutality.
Losers: Doves

An anti-drone protest in 2012.
One of the most jarring moments of Wednesday night came during the remarks of Leon Panetta, a figure who has served in an impressively diverse array of powerful positions in Democratic administrations. He was budget director and Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton, and CIA director and Defense Secretary to Obama. He was the CIA leader who killed bin Laden, earning a very positive film portrayal by James Gandolfini for his trouble.
But Panetta got by far the most hostile reaction of any DNC speaker to date, and that includes Michael Bloomberg, who purposefully included attacks on the Democratic party in his speech. He was booed, and at times drowned out by chants of “no more wars”:
That’s the thing: as CIA director, Panetta was the public face of the drone program, the most blatantly militaristic, civil liberties-defying policy of the Obama administration. When he was director, the administration made the decision to put Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, on a kill list; when Panetta was Defense Secretary, that ordered was carried out.
Obama was elected in large part on a promise to tack away from the liberal hawk tradition exemplified by Hillary Clinton and her advisors. In some sense he has done that. It’s easy to imagine a President Clinton intervening in Syria in 2011, whereas Obama didn’t. It’s easy to imagine her being more aggressive and committing more troops against ISIS in 2014, not least since she’s explicitly called for a no-fly zone.
But “better than Clinton” was not necessarily enough to make the dovish wing of the Democratic party feel like the battle was won. American robots were still raining death from the skies — and a liberal president, a president elected because he opposed the Iraq war when it counted, whipped up the legal rationales to support that appalling practice.
The doves didn’t do much better with Bernie Sanders, who gained their support basically by default, but who has never really cared much either way about foreign policy issues, and who supports drone strikes as well. But the success of the Sanders’ campaign did promise this wing of the party representation as delegates, delegates who were then able to protest Panetta.
Their anger is understandable. It was understandable under Obama, and it’s especially understandable as he and the entire Democratic party prepares to fight for the election of someone who promises a markedly more militaristic approach to the Middle East. No matter who wins this November, American foreign policy is going to get more bellicose. There will be more bombs. Fights that Obama would’ve avoided will be fought.
Even if doves accept Clinton as the lesser of two evils, this is a regrettable situation if you consider reducing American violence abroad a crucial goal. And lamenting it during Panetta’s remarks was a totally appropriate response.
Loser: Michael Bloomberg

You’re out of your element, Mikey.
Michael Bloomberg gave a good speech. “Let’s elect a sane, competent person,” is a good line. He’s the only legitimately surprising person in the DNC line-up. But the odds he’ll persuade anybody on the fence to vote for Clinton are very low.
Bloomberg is not a particularly well-known national figure. In January, as he weighed a presidential bid, Morning Consult found that a whopping 43 percent of Americans didn’t know if they viewed him favorably or unfavorably. 4 percent more viewed him favorably than not, but all the same his total favorable rating was a mere 30 percent — well below either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. And if you look at the crosstabs, he’s most popular with Democrats, and less so with independents. He’s disliked by 2012 Romney voters, and people who didn’t vote that year haven’t heard of him.
The idea that there’s some sizable pro-Bloomberg constituency, that’s no already sold on the Democratic ticket, is just not borne out by the numbers.
Moreover, what we know about the thinking of political “moderates” suggests that ones supporting a Bloomberg-esque combination of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism are the exception, not the rule. Research from political scientists David Broockman and Doug Ahler suggests that most self-identified moderate voters aren’t that kind of centrist at all. People who want lots of government programs but also are skeptical of abortion and immigration are a more typical kind of moderate. Indeed, Donald Trump is probably closer to most real American moderates than Bloomberg.
The real demographic group Clinton is struggling with are white men without college degrees — a group that Democrats always lose, but are doing particularly poorly with this time around. This, suffice it to say, is not the group that an elitist New York City plutocrat beloved of Ivy Leaguers like Bloomberg is bound to win over. 52 percent of respondents to the Morning Consult poll without college degrees had never even heard of Bloomberg.
The more likely result of Bloomberg’s speech is a further shift of his public reputation, from a true independent to a typical center-left Democrats, maybe one or two ticks to the right of Hillary Clinton on civil liberties and crime. That is already Bloomberg’s reputation is some quarters, but strengthening it will only damage his nonpartisan brand, and paint him as yet another monied Democrat.
Losers: Pro-gun Democrats

John Kerry goes a-huntin’
It’s easy to forget now, in the eighth year of a popular Democratic president’s tenure with a Democrat leading the polls to succeed him, but the ’00s, up until the 2006 midterms, were a period of near-total panic by Democratic operatives.
First George W. Bush, elected without winning the popular vote, gained a surge of popularity after 9/11. Then Republicans gained seats in the 2002 midterm elections, the first time a first-term incumbent’s party had done that since 1934. Then Bush won reelection despite presiding over an increasingly unpopular war.
Theories abounded about how best to staunch the damage, but one persistent theme was that Democrats should — must — move to the right on guns. Data point No. 1 was Mark Warner’s election to the Virginia governorship in 2001 as an enthusiastically pro-gun candidate, but pretty soon the 2004 Democratic presidential candidates were getting in on the game.
“In [Vermont], we have no gun control of any kind,” Howard Dean, who was running as the left candidate that year, bragged. “We don’t need gun control in our state, other than the federal gun control which I support.” He told crowds he was “more conservative” on the issue than his rivals.
John Kerry accused Dean of pandering to the National Rifle Association, but then in the general election he did exactly the same thing. While he supported efforts to close the gun show loophole, his campaign site’s section on guns began, “John Kerry is a gun owner and hunter, and he believes that law-abiding American adults have the right to own guns.” In October, he went on a hunting trip as a visual confirmation of his commitment to gun rights.
In retrospect, the moment this all changed was the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012. After that, the Democratic base demanded that gun control measures become a cornerstone of the party’s agenda. A push for expanded background check was a major emphasis in 2013. Hillary Clinton successfully used Bernie Sanders’ Vermont-driven pro-gun record against him, barely a decade after Dean’s Vermont-driven pro-gun record was touted as a major asset.
This is the first post-Sandy Hook Democratic convention, and it was littered with reminders of that event, of other mass shootings, and testimonials to Hillary Clinton’s commitment to cracking down on guns. Wednesday night featured Christine Leinonen, whose son Christopher died in the Orlando shootings. It featured Erica Smegielski, the daughter of Sandy Hook Elementary School’s slain principal. It featured Chris Murphy, the Connecticut senator elected the month before Sandy Hook who adopted the issue as his prime concern, and led a filibuster for gun control last month.
And it featured Tim Kaine, a longtime enemy of the NRA, as the VP pick — not Warner, his fellow, more pro-gun senator.
The convention, then, solidified a shift that has been underway over the past four years, from gun control as an cause abandoned by both parties, to a revival of the ’90s dynamic of partisan polarization on the matter. There is little room in the party anymore for candidates opposed to universal background checks or an assault weapons ban. You can celebrate or bemoan that shift, but it happened quickly, and the new consensus is entrenched very firmly.

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Obama’s Democratic Convention speech showed he knows his legacy is on the line

Hillary Clinton will is the heavy favorite be elected president in November. If she makes it to the White House, it will confirm Barack Obama’s status as one of the most consequential presidents in American history. Obama engineered a recovery from recession that, though slow to begin, is gaining strength in its seventh year rather than slowing. He’s tackled climate change in an unprecedented way, brought health insurance to an unprecedented number of Americans even while slowing the growth of health care costs, and taken crucial steps to cut the financial sector down to size.
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, reflecting on the rapturous reception Michelle Obama’s speech received on Monday, reflected that “as she has become a figure of admiration and esteem, almost befitting a national hero, so, too, one day will he.”
That’s almost certainly true — if Clinton wins, she will be able to protect much of Obama’s work and expand upon it.
Obama spoke tonight in an unusually prominent slot for an eighth-year precedent — more of an anchor than the party’s vice presidential nominee. This is certainly because he’s one of this generation’s greatest orators, but it is also because he is truly the anchor to the Democratic party and where it stands today.
Tonight, he spoke with an unusual urgency for a man with nothing left to run for. “I think it is fair to say that this is not your typical election,” he said, “it is not just a choice between parties or policies, the usual debates between left and right.” This year, Americans face “a more fundamental choice about who we are as a people and whether we stay true to this great American experience and government.”
That’s an extraordinary thing for a politician to say. Not just that the election is important. But that it’s actually more important than the races he directly participated in.
And he did it for a reason. Obama has a legacy to protect, but it’s not one he can protect by taking victory laps. If Clinton loses — especially to Donald Trump — that legacy could be essentially erased.
Today’s Democratic Party is weak
Obama has achieved much more than the typical president. But in his eight year in office, he also leaves a political party that’s in an unusually weak state.
Republicans currently enjoy unified three-branch control of government in 25 states — including in places like Wisconsin and Michigan that aren’t remotely swing states in national politics — Democrats have only seven. There are Republican governors in blue states like Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Jersey. Republicans run both houses of the state legislature in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, and control the state senates of Washington and New York. There is nothing comparable for Democrats in red country.
Republicans have a majority in the Senate, of course, and also the largest House majority they’ve had for many decades. Obama recognizes this, reminding the party faithful that “we all need to get out and vote for Democrats up and down the ticket.”
And, indeed, Democrats will likely improve on these rather dismal numbers in November. But the scenario where they do that is almost certainly the scenario where Clinton beats Trump. If she falters and loses, downballot Democrats will almost certainly lose too. The party won’t be irreparably doomed, but it will have been pushed down to a low ebb.
Republicans are unchastened
The downballot strength of the GOP matters because it helps explain why today’s Republicans are unchastened by defeat. Oftentimes a party that loses a few elections in a row feels compelled to moderate itself in order to win or govern. That leads to presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Bill Clinton whose policies in many ways simply confirmed the legacy of the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Reagan Revolution.
But today’s GOP is strong enough that despite losing twice to Obama (and losing the presidential popular vote in three of the four elections before that), they remain as militant as ever.
Today’s Republican Party is committed to:
Rollback of all of Obama’s new financial regulations.
Rollback of all of Obama’s new environmental regulations.
Repeal of his signature health care law.
Reducing federal taxes down to a level below where they were when he took office.
Block-granting Medicaid and food stamps in a way that would put them on the same road to extinction that made welfare reform into a failure.
There is every reason to believe that an ideologically emboldened Republican Party congressional majority would, in fact, do these things and that a newly elected Donald Trump would work with them to make it happen. Republicans, if they win in November, will not have won by moderating their positions relative. If anything, they’ve moved to the right since the Bush years.
Obama arrived at a time when liberals were insecure
But beyond his policy accomplishments, Obama’s profile in national politics has always been about a distinctive vision of national politics.
Twelve years ago, at a time when liberals were scared and defensive about issues of national identity, Obama delivered a speech that tackled the subject both squarely and slyly. It was nominally a speech about national unity between the red states and the blue states, but in reality the very pluralism and ecumenism of Obama’s vision of America was itself a partisan statement. For the red/blue divide posits a false symmetry. There isn’t — and wasn’t — a single, unitary Blue America facing off against the Red Team, with red and blue together reflecting diversity. Instead, diversity and pluralism is the signal quality of the blue vision of America — it’s the place where you find the Muslims and the Jews and the atheists, the immigrants and the descendants of slaves.
I was in the audience that day, and it immediately electrified the room because the idea it expressed was an idea that the delegates nearly and dearly hoped was true but weren’t quite willing to let themselves believe.
It was stirring and provocative — and largely stirring because it was provocative. Liberals would have liked to believe that Obama was right and theirs was the real, true America. But it wasn’t yet clear that they had the audacity to believe it.
Wednesday night, Obama returned to these themes:

We are not a fragile or frightful people. Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order. We don’t look to be ruled. Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago; We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that together, We, the People, can form a more perfect union.

That’s who we are. That’s our birthright — the capacity to shape our own destiny. That’s what drove patriots to choose revolution over tyranny and our GIs to liberate a continent. It’s what gave women the courage to reach for the ballot, and marchers to cross a bridge in Selma, and workers to organize and fight for better wages.

America has never been about what one person says he’ll do for us. It’s always been about what can be achieved by us, together, through the hard, slow, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately enduring work of self-government.

The crowd loved them again. But this time not hopefully, but triumphantly. Obama proved in 2008 and again in 2012 that he was right way back then in 2004.
Donald Trump would unravel Obama’s America
In this sense, Trump is not just a challenge to Obama’s legacy but a directed and pointed refutation of it.
Obama says “the worry black parents feel when their son leaves the house isn’t so different than what a brave cop’s family feels when he puts on the blue and goes to work.”
His thesis is that with reflection and compassion, we can understand each other and overcome problems. Trumpism is the exact opposite of that. He sees a world that is zero-sum in every way, from foreign trade to domestic policing, and security can only be achieved through granting impunity to the agents of state violence.
Trump’s promise to “make America great again” carries the not-at-all subtle implication that the new American identity Obama forged is fundamentally fraudulent. Many conservative intellectuals have criticized Trump for replacing conservative ideas with white identity politics. But Trump is, not coincidentally, doing considerably better than John McCain or Mitt Romney with whites who don’t have a college degree. They’ve flocked to Trump’s banner because virtually alone among the 2016 Republican field, Trump was eager to fight back against Obama’s vision of pluralistic America. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and even Ted Cruz all in their somewhat different ways wanted to market right-of-center policies to Obama’s America.
Trump is promising to erase it.
To have a sitting president so actively engaged in a general election campaign is historically unusual, in part because the confluence of circumstances that make it possible is itself unusual. But for Obama, it’s also an opportunity. The 2016 election is many things, but it’s clearly not a referendum on the relative merits of the dual visions for tax reform put forth by the two candidates.
It’s a referendum on Obama’s vision of America. He describes it as founded in “bonds of affection” and a “common creed” in which Americans “don’t fear the future; we shape it embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own.”
If Clinton wins, he’ll be proven right and he’ll go down in history as a politician who effected a profound transformation in the country’s public policies and self-understanding. But if he loses, it will all wash away as a strange anomaly. Nobody understands that better than Obama himself, and that’s why nobody will work harder to put Clinton in the White House.