The racial-justice movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd has had two quite different effects on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. It has intensified the pressure on Biden to choose a Black woman as his running mate. And it has also intensified the pressure on him to choose a running mate with a history of challenging police brutality.
“Have you ever met anyone who’s read the party platform? I haven’t,” the former Republican House Speaker John Boehner said during a 2012 interview about his party’s manifesto. Last week, the Democratic National Committee released a draft of its new platform. But in this case, when it comes to China, the document merits a close read.
On Monday, the Associated Press reported that former Ohio governor and Republican presidential candidate John Kasich would speak at the Democratic National Convention in August. For one party to dragoon a notable from the other side into endorsing its presidential candidate is hardly unprecedented. And most of the time, it makes no difference. But, every now and then, a partisan defector perfectly amplifies the message his endorsee is trying to send.
When some presidents leave office, politicians and political thinkers jockey to be their intellectual heirs. Even Ronald Reagan, a Republican, claimed the legacy of John F. Kennedy. Even Barack Obama, a Democrat, claimed the legacy of Reagan.If Donald Trump loses this fall, few will be in a hurry to claim his legacy. Commentators on the left and in the center—and even some on the right—will compete instead to tar their foes with it.
In December 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. interrupted himself during a speech on desegregation to discuss an event on the other side of the world: the prodemocracy uprising then being quashed in Hungary. “Our minds leap the mighty Atlantic,” he told the National Committee for Rural Schools, because we are “concerned about the Hungarians as they confront the desperate situation that they stand amid everyday.
On a modest scale, police defunding is happening. For years, powerful police unions have made law-enforcement funding all but untouchable. As The New York Times noted in 2018, the number of police per capita has risen over the past three decades even as crime rates have plunged. Last week, however, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that he would shave at least $100 million from his city’s law-enforcement budget.