Oliver Wiseman

Why ‘correcting the record’ won’t save the Democrats Leaked documents from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warn that Republican attacks have proved “alarmingly potent” in battleground districts. The memo warns that voters see Democrats as “preachy,” “judgmental” and “focused on culture wars.” Politico reports that the document is used by the DCCC to encourage incumbents not to ignore or deflect from what it calls GOP “culture war” attacks but to respond more directly. On a range of subjects from critical race theory to defunding the police, operatives argue that candidates should “correct the record” because “changing the subject risked confirming suspicions.

What’s up with Chuck? The first six weeks of 2022 haven’t gone especially well for senior Democrats in Washington. But has anyone had a worse start to the year than Chuck Schumer? First, there was the doomed election legislation push. Neither the White House nor Schumer got remotely close to persuading Democratic holdouts of the need to amend the filibuster, while the Senate majority leader’s strategy, in which he insisted on a vote on the bill without debate or amendments, only made things worse. Then there’s the awkward silence on Build Back Better — or whatever is going to take its place. At the end of last year, a frustrated Schumer promised an up-or-down vote on the bill’s provisions “earlier in the new year.

Biden on inflation: clueless or callous? Judging by the gracelessness with which he tends to respond to questions about rising prices, Joe Biden appears to understand that inflation is his biggest liability heading into this year’s midterm elections. It was a question about inflation that prompted the president to call Fox News reporter Peter Doocy “a stupid son of a bitch” last month. And when Lester Holt asked the president about inflation in an interview that aired yesterday, he responded snarkily, “Well, you’re being a wise guy with me a little bit.” Forgive the humorless tone, but I suspect sassy clapbacks are not the best way for the president to answer questions about American households getting poorer in real terms under his stewardship of the economy.

A libertarian moment? Are the libertarians winning? Some seem to think so. In fact, a slew of recent op-eds have contemplated whether the backlash to government overreach during the pandemic means we are living in a new “libertarian moment.” “A funny thing happened on our way to democratic socialism: America pushed back,” writes Scott Lincicome for the Dispatch. “Across the country, in all sorts of ways, Americans reacted to the state’s activism, overreach, incoherence, and incompetence and…kinda, sorta, embraced libertarianism.” He cites columns by Gerard Baker and Samuel Goldman making similar arguments. There’s plenty of evidence to back up the theory: from the failure of Build Back Better to the many mistakes of top-down policymaking throughout the pandemic.

How the RNC censure backfired She miscalculated. By now, it’s obvious that the censure of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, led by the Republican National Committee and its chair Ronna McDaniel, for their role in the House January 6 committee did not quite land the way its architects might have hoped. To recap, last Friday, the RNC passed a sharply worded resolution that accused Cheney and Kinzinger of participating in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” Since then, senior lawmakers have either been critical of the RNC resolution or, as in the case of House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, tried their hardest to avoid any discussion of the matter. Explicit support for the censure has been hard to come by.

The China-Russia threat comes into focus It is far too early to deliver anything like a definitive verdict on Joe Biden’s handling of the Ukraine crisis. But the White House has reason to feel pleased with how things have gone since the president’s disastrous “minor incursion” press conference three weeks ago. The West is considerably more united in opposition to Vladimir Putin’s aggression than it was in mid-January. Troop movements and armaments for Ukraine have sent a clear enough message to Moscow. Germany, laggards when it comes to confronting Russian bullying, are at least putting on a display of unity with the rest of the West.

Last stand in the mask wars Across blue America, the masks are coming off. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy announced Monday that the state’s mask mandate in schools will end on March 7. Connecticut governor Ned Lamont changed state level guidance to recommend that mask mandates in schools are lifted by the end of February. Delaware’s statewide mask mandate will end later this week. Oregon has announced that school mask mandates will be gone by the end of March. Even California governor Gavin Newsom, who has enforced some of the strictest pandemic regulations (on others if not himself), has announced he will lift mask the state’s indoor mask rule next week. (Here in DC, there is no end in sight to the indoor mask mandate.

GW sides with the CCP The images created by dissident Chinese artist Badiucao to draw attention to the evils of the Chinese Communist Party are subversive in style but their message could hardly be clearer. The posters depict Winter Olympic sports while revealing the crimes of the Chinese regime: blood drips from a figure skater’s blade, a biathlete points his rifle at the head of a Uighur prisoner, a competitor rides not a snowboard but a CCTV camera. Were a leader of a major American educational institution shown Badiucao’s art, you might expect a message of encouragement or admiration. Not so in the case Mark S. Wrighton, president of George Washington University.

Jeff Zucker and the boys in the bubble “If you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing,” Matt Gaetz, the scandal-plagued Florida congressman, writes in his memoir Firebrand. As Jay Caruso reports in our February cover story, the ultra-loyal Trumpist and inveterate controversy-seeker grew up in the house used to film The Truman Show. Given that Gaetz embodies the blurring of the lines between reality and fiction, entertainment and politics, performance and action, that biographical detail is almost too good to be true. But how much of an outlier is Gaetz, really?

What Eric Adams understands — and Biden doesn’t New York mayor Eric Adams has described himself as the “Biden of Brooklyn.” But when Biden travels to the Big Apple today to meet Adams, it is the president who needs the mayor, not the mayor who needs the president. With violent crime surging in New York and other American cities, Adams secured the mayoralty with a tough-on-crime message. Since coming into office, he has doubled down on that approach. To the chagrin of the city’s progressive activists, he has vowed to reintroduce a plain-clothes anti-gun crime unit disbanded by Bill de Blasio in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. A former cop himself, Adams recently delivered the eulogy at the funeral for Jason Rivera, one of two NYPD officers shot and killed last month.

What Pence did next Mike Pence was not the most exciting of vice presidents, but even by his low-key standards, the man instrumental in securing the transfer of power from Trump to Biden last January has managed to keep a remarkably low profile ever since. Over the last twelve months, Pence has neither embraced his surprising new role as #Resistance hero or bent over backwards to re-ingratiate himself with the MAGA crowd. When asked about his decision to certify the election results, he hasn’t fudged. He has said that he and the former president will “never see eye-to-eye” about January 6. “What is the name of the person who told you to buck President Trump’s plan and certify the votes?” an audience member asked Pence at a public appearance in November.

Normalcy 2.0 Normalcy, as casual observers of the 2020 election will know, is a popular proposition. A new poll reaffirms the American people’s hunger for getting back to they way things were. According to a Monmouth survey published Monday, 70 percent of Americans agree that “it’s time to accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives.” Among Republicans, 89 percent agree with the statement. Among independents, the figure is 71 percent. And among Democrats, it is 47 percent. On one level, the Biden administration appears to sense which way the wind is blowing. Omicron was met with panicked resignation in the White House.

Congress gets busy You may not have stuck to all of your New Year’s resolutions, but you probably got more done than Congress in January. The first month of 2022 wasn’t exactly productive for the legislative branch. The Democrats’ election law push was over before it had begun, while discussions of what, if anything might, the party might be able to glue together, wave around and call “Build Back Better” got nowhere. But developments both at home and overseas mean Capitol Hill faces a far busier February. First on the agenda is Russian sanctions. Senate Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Bob Menendez and Jim Risch, the ranking Republican on the committee, are leading a bipartisan team working on various sets of measures to counter whatever Vladimir Putin does next.

Another perfect call? Joe Biden spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday. The White House read of the phone call suggested an unremarkable conversation. According to the official summary, Biden reaffirmed US commitments to Ukraine, noted previous support America had offered and discussed with Zelensky efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the present crisis. A Ukrainian official’s account of the call paints a very different picture. CNN reports that, according to the senior official, the call “did not go well.” They described a “long and frank” conversation in which Zelensky and Biden found themselves at odds with one another over the threat of imminent invasion.

The retirement of Stephen Breyer is a rare piece of good news for Joe Biden. With the president and his team busy deciding which black woman they will pick to replace the court’s oldest justice and the senior member of its liberal wing, it’s not hard to see where the story ends. This may be the first time a president has had to get a Supreme Court nomination through a 50-50 Senate, but surely even this White House will manage to get the job done. But the politics of the nomination process are less predictable than its outcome. It’s not hard to see the political upside for the president. A disunited party might rally around Biden’s pick while the nomination process could remind them who the real enemy is.

A tale of two polls It’s not hard to understand why Republicans are optimistic about 2022. Things are going badly for Joe Biden. Democrats are, in the minds of lots of voters, the party of school closures and forever masking even as vaccines are widely available, cuts to police funding in a time of rising violent crime, massive public spending that coincides with the highest level of inflation in 40 years and toxic antiracism in an era of successful multiracial democracy. Everything points to a red tsunami, including the recent Gallup survey that found that 47 percent of Americans identify with the Republican Party versus 42 percent with the Democrats.

Get real on Russia To listen to some voices in Washington’s foreign policy debates, the United States is on the brink of a ground war with Russia in Eastern Europe. The claim tends to come from self-styled realists and restrainers, that is to say, those who claim a hard-nosed focus on national interests and inoculation against the utopianism and wishful thinking that has got America into trouble overseas in the past. “America can’t and mustn’t go to war with Russia over Ukraine,” argues Sohrab Ahmari in the Washington Post, swinging at a straw man with the ferocity of a five-year-old demolishing a piñata at a birthday party. Rod Dreher senses an “eagerness for war with Russia among Americans.” Really?

Want normalcy? Then please just be normal Is there a more self-defeating bunch out there than hardline opponents of vaccine mandates? Yesterday, the National Mall played host to an anti-mandate rally at which prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared the plight of the unvaccinated to the Holocaust. “Even in Hitler’s Germany…you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” he said. He then rambled on about Bill Gates’s satellites. Another speaker, Del Bigtree, warned that “Unlike the Nuremberg Trials that only tried those doctors that destroyed the lives of those human beings, we’re going to come after the press.

Are we past peak Trump? When it comes to prognostications over Donald Trump’s future role in US public life, everyone comes to the question with enormous amounts of baggage. On the one hand, there’s a great deal of motivated reasoning from those desperate for the former president not to be the Republican nominee in 2024. They jump on any sliver of evidence that Trump isn’t the omnipotent ruler of the American right and tell themselves everything is going to be OK. On the other, there are those who look at recent US political history and conclude that betting against Trump is generally a bad idea. It is an understandable view. From Access Hollywood to January 6, Trump has time and again disproved suggestions that his latest transgression has sealed his fate.

Biden’s ‘reset’ dismays Ukraine... Actions speak louder than words, even when it comes to press conferences. An email sent by White House press secretary Jen Psaki after Biden’s marathon Q&A with reporters yesterday to clarify the president’s comments on Ukraine and Russia confirmed what was obvious to anyone watching: that Joe Biden’s freewheeling discussion of what Vladimir Putin might do in Ukraine was a disaster. Biden said that Russia will be held accountable if it invades Ukraine, adding that his “guess” is that Putin will “move in.” But he said that the consequences Russia faces depends on what it does. “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having to fight about what to do and not do,” he said.