When Ron Klain admitted to me a year ago that the White House could have worked harder to elevate Kamala Harris’s profile, he didn’t know that the Democratic Party, and perhaps American democracy itself, would soon be riding on her readiness to be president. But perhaps he should have.
It was July 2023, and while interviewing President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff in his law office in downtown Washington, D.C.
You might not have known it from Katie Britt’s State of the Union rebuttal last night—a performance derided by members of her own party as “bizarre” and “confusing”—but up until then, Britt had distinguished herself in the Senate with a reputation for being startlingly, well, normal.
As in, she wasn’t obsessed with Twitter (or X, as it’s now called). She evinced more than a passing interest in policy. For her, conservatism seemed to mean things other than simply “supporting Trump.
Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment.
Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and opposition to civil rights—had found itself blacklisted by the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Nobody knows the official reason, because they don’t tell you that,” Smart, a field coordinator for the group, told me.
He has theories, of course.
On Friday, December 2, Elizabeth Whelan was at home on Chappaquiddick, off Massachusetts, when she received a text message from a State Department official—a representative from the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs—asking when she might be available for a visit. He had news concerning her youngest brother, Paul.