Politics

In the clusters of billboards at intersections in Phoenix, positioned to grab the attention of drivers waiting for the lights to change, one candidate’s signs stand out. In a familiar red-white-and-blue collage of names, stars and stripes, the crisp bold-type white lettering on a black background reads: “BLAKE MASTERS FOR SENATE.” The monochrome placards are one of many conspicuous displays of disruption by Masters, the thirty-six-year-old Peter Thiel acolyte hoping to topple Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly. The video with which he launched his campaign last summer was starkly shot and melancholic: the Sonora desert at dawn and a synth-y soundtrack, not the in-your-face, truck commercial aesthetic that is par for the course on the right these days.

Democrats across the country should be grateful for what Republicans are about to do: rid them of a nagging disease known as Betoism. Beto O'Rourke, the erstwhile congressman from El Paso, Texas, who has far more glossy national magazine profiles than winning campaigns, is about to go down to defeat in his attempt to unseat centrist conservative Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott is a popular governor and quite capable in his own right of popping wheelies over most Democrats. But Beto has approached his run with all of his usual nationally tested talking points recycled from his idiotic presidential crusade, designed to go viral on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and via the T-shirt worn by your daughter's boyfriend who is still trying to find himself after sophomore year.

It’s not often that a senator launches a brutal, frontal assault on a president from his own party. It’s even rarer when he does it just before a national election. But that is exactly what West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin just did to Joe Biden. At issue was Biden’s recent speech attacking coal, a bedrock of the West Virginia economy. Manchin was furious over Biden's promise to shut down all of America’s coal-fired power plants. That view might be red meat for Biden’s audience of green-power advocates and rich California donors, but it is poison in West Virginia. And it is those West Virginians who elected Manchin, the only Democrat still standing in a state that is now deep red. Manchin didn’t just criticize Biden.

Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy doesn't like Nancy Pelosi. In this, he's hardly alone — the list of those who don't like Nancy Pelosi is long and includes Republicans, Democrats, moderates, progressives, intelligence officials, hair stylists, health nuts, probably a few farm animals and single-cell organisms. America's speaker of the House is polarizing in the same way that a rocket booster might be said to be noisy. Yet in McCarthy's case, he has good reason not to like Pelosi: she doesn't much like him either. After McCarthy last year criticized a mask mandate in the House of Representatives, Pelosi called him a "moron.

My friend here in rural Pennsylvania is the director of our local anti-hunger program. It’s orchestrated through the YMCA and has been ongoing for years, mostly providing supplemental food for rural children. But the program started running at full throttle when Covid hit in March 2020, and now, more than two years later, my friend tells me they’re doing about 25 food distributions a month — more than they were doing at the height of Covid. What’s more, he’s seeing twice the number of people lining up for free food, and 85 percent of those people have jobs. “When people think of hunger, they think of poverty,” my friend says.