Kelly Swanson | Vox Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters. 2020-02-24T17:41:14+00:00 https://www.vox.com/authors/kelly-swanson/rss https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1 Kelly Swanson <![CDATA[George W. Bush: “Bigotry is emboldened” in today’s America]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/19/16504494/george-w-bush-speech-trump-critique 2017-10-19T15:20:03-04:00 2017-10-19T15:20:01-04:00

Former President George W. Bush gave a speech Thursday that served as a lengthy critique of President Donald Trump, ending with a call for “American institutions to step up and provide cultural and moral leadership for this nation.”

Bush never mentioned Trump by name, but his speech, published in full by Politico, didn’t make it too hard to connect the dots — from condemning the foundation of Trump’s immigration agenda to calling the Russian attempt to interfere in American elections a serious threat to democracy.

Here are four moments from the speech that were particularly pointed:

1) Calling out “bigotry” and “conspiracy theories”

Our governing class has often been paralyzed in the face of obvious and pressing needs. The American dream of upward mobility seems out of reach for some who feel left behind in a changing economy. Discontent deepened and sharpened partisan conflicts. Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.

Trump got his start in politics by promoting the false conspiracy theory that President Obama was born in Kenya. He’s continued to spread baseless stories and rumors, including that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the election.

2) Standing up for “international trade” and against “nativism”

We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism — forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America. We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade — forgetting that conflict, instability, and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism.

Trump’s administration has supported a reduction of legal immigration and has scorned international trade deals in favor of putting America first.

3) Criticizing a discourse of “casual cruelty”

We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions — forgetting the image of God we should see in each other.

This can be read as a critique of the political culture at large rather than just Trump, but the president has judged all Mexican and Central American immigrants based on the violent gang MS-13, mocked people with disabilities, and, this week, told the widow of a fallen American soldier that her husband “knew what he signed up for.”

4) Calling for action against Russian interference in the election

According to our intelligence services, the Russian government has made a project of turning Americans against each other. This effort is broad, systematic and stealthy, it’s conducted across a range of social media platforms. Ultimately, this assault won’t succeed. But foreign aggressions — including cyber-attacks, disinformation and financial influence — should not be downplayed or tolerated. This is a clear case where the strength of our democracy begins at home. We must secure our electoral infrastructure and protect our electoral system from subversion.

The reference to “downplaying” is a jab at Trump, who has frequently (although not consistently) denied that Russia interfered in the 2017 election at all, certainly not to help him, and, over the summer, announced a plan to cooperate with Russia to stop election hacking.

]]> Kelly Swanson <![CDATA[Letters Obama wrote to his college girlfriend are now on display at Emory University]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/19/16503288/obama-letters-college-girlfriend-emory-university 2017-10-19T12:40:05-04:00 2017-10-19T12:40:02-04:00

Nine letters from a young Barack Obama to his college girlfriend are now on display at Emory University.

The letters, from the 1980s, are to Alexandra McNear, Obama’s girlfriend at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he attended college until his junior year before transferring to Columbia University.

The letters address a variety of topics including his racial identity, his career, and his relationship with McNear. “I think of you often, though I stay confused about my feelings,” Obama wrote to her. “It seems we will ever want what we cannot have; that’s what binds us; that’s what keeps us apart.”

In that same letter, from 1983, Obama wrote about a trip to Indonesia to visit his mother and sister.

“I can’t speak the language well anymore,” he wrote. “I’m treated with a mixture of puzzlement, deference and scorn because I’m American, my money and my plane ticket back to the U.S. overriding my blackness. I see old dim roads, rickety homes winding back towards the fields, old routes of mine, routes I no longer have access to.”

Addressing his career in a letter dated November 15, 1983, while he was working as a research assistant for the Business International Corporation, Obama wrote, “Salaries in the community organizations are too low to survive on right now … so I hope to work in some more conventional capacity for a year, allowing me to store up enough nuts to pursue those interests next.”

In 1985, Obama then followed up on that dream, moving to Chicago to begin work as a community activist on the city’s South Side. 

The letters were obtained by Emory’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library in Atlanta and will be available to the public.

]]> Kelly Swanson <![CDATA[Poll: 46% of Americans believe major news outlets make up stories about Trump]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/18/16495544/poll-americans-news-outlets-fake-stories-trump 2017-10-18T11:20:04-04:00 2017-10-18T11:20:02-04:00

Attacks on the “fake news” media have become a staple of the Trump administration — and nearly half of voters, including the vast majority of Republicans, believe the president when he claims that the media is making up stories about him.

Forty-six percent of voters believe that major news organizations fabricate stories about Trump, while 37 percent do not and 17 percent are undecided, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll.

Among party lines, 76 percent of Republican voters believe the media puts out untrue stories about the president, while only 11 percent think the media is honest in its coverage of Trump. Twenty percent of Democrats believe the media creates fake stories about Trump, while 65 percent do not.

But a slim majority — 51 percent — said the government shouldn’t have the power to revoke broadcast news licenses for news organizations it believes are fabricating stories. This was an idea Trump recently floated on Twitter:

On Tuesday afternoon, Trump tweeted again about his thoughts on the “fake news” media.

]]> Kelly Swanson <![CDATA[The policy implications of the Harvey Weinstein scandal]]> https://www.vox.com/2017/10/17/16490894/the-weeds-policy-implications-harvey-weinstein 2020-02-24T12:41:14-05:00 2017-10-17T16:00:08-04:00

The recent allegations of sexual harassment and assault by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein raises a question: Are there any policies that can prevent this? On the October 17 episode of The Weeds, Ezra Klein, Sarah Kliff, and Matthew Yglesias explore the policy implications of the Weinstein revelations, debate tax reform, and discuss a white paper on Medicaid expansion.

One thing that could make a difference: a more bureaucratic hiring process, Ezra suggested. The informality of the hiring process at the Weinstein Company that made it ripe for abuse. It “made [Weinstein’s] sexual predation a formal process,” where an assistant would set up meetings for aspiring actresses with Weinstein in a private hotel room.

Ezra then went on to discuss the consent policies on college campuses, and said that we need to “change who is afraid.” Sarah agreed: “Instead of women being afraid of sharing stories, it’s men being afraid of being on that list [of abusers].”

Matt said that the legal liability rules around consent need to change. “I think that people understand that there are very strong incentives that women who are victimized have to not come forward. That is a real issue here.” He suggested a legal system that would reward women who do prevail in their claims of sexual assault because “there is a strong compelling public interest in having victims come forward, though it is generally not in the private interest of the victims to do that,” he said.

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Here’s Ezra comparing consent laws to other types of laws:

EZRA: You know when I go to my friend’s house, I can’t just take their shit, not legally. I need affirmative consent to borrow a stand mixer. Some of my friends, I am really good friends with, and I am not really that concerned that if I like grab something on my way out that I needed to use that they are going to call the police on me. We have enough of an understanding that it works out.

We really take property rights seriously in this country, and we make it the case that you need to be pretty fucking sure that you’ve got consent before you take somebody’s stuff, or you really need to ask them. We, in a lot of other spaces, have not done that. We don’t take it seriously. We are allowing and cultivating a space in which a lot of the places where there is grey area end up against the people who have less power. This is very true sexually. We have created a world in which women really bear the brunt of keeping themselves safe. Often, they can’t keep themselves safe, and then when they try to do anything about it, it is incredibly hard. It is incredibly hard because of the ways the laws are constructed and the way power is constructed.

People agree that Harvey Weinstein shouldn’t be able to be a sexual predator, but having the pretty big change in societal norms where you really moved where fear resides in different places, where people feel like the way they have done things forever that maybe they have to change it. Maybe they won’t understand what will be required to change it, and maybe they will have to be more tentative and maybe it will hurt them even if they do not think of themselves as a bad person. That is a real change in power, and people react to that very badly.

Show notes:

]]> Kelly Swanson <![CDATA[Democrats are leading by double digits in an early 2018 midterm poll]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/17/16488350/democrats-leading-double-digits-early-2018-midterm-poll 2017-10-17T11:00:10-04:00 2017-10-17T11:00:05-04:00

Republicans could be facing a tough election in the 2018 midterms, trailing Democrats by double digits in the generic ballot, according to a new CNN poll.

The poll found 51 percent of voters support the Democratic Party while 37 percent support the GOP on the generic ballot, which asks voters which party they would support but not about specific candidates. The poll was conducted from October 12 to 15 and has a sampling error of 3.5 percentage points.

Republicans are struggling slightly more than Democrats with their own voters. Eighty-eight percent of self-identified Republicans said they’d vote for the Republican candidate and 8 percent said they’d vote for the Democrat, compared to 98 percent of Democrats who said they’d vote for the Democratic candidate.

Of course, the 2018 midterms are still a long way away — but the poll suggests that the GOP might have an uphill battle to hang on to its congressional majorities. Forecasting models suggest that Democrats would have a good chance of retaking the House if they run 5 points ahead of Republicans on the generic ballot.

]]> Kelly Swanson <![CDATA[We need to change the way we think about the opioid crisis]]> https://www.vox.com/2017/10/14/16471610/weeds-heroin-opioid-addiction-obamacare-subsidies 2017-10-16T12:37:21-04:00 2017-10-16T12:37:19-04:00 The way Americans are starting to get addicted to opioids has changed in the last 10 years, according to a new study published in Addictive Behaviors. As Dylan Scott explains on the October 13 episode of The Weeds: “In 2005, 80 percent of people who were dependent on opioids started with painkillers and 10 percent started with heroin. In 2015, that had shifted to about 50 percent of people started with painkillers and 33 percent started with heroin.”

Dylan, Sarah Kliff, and Matt Yglesias also discussed new findings on the opioid crisis and Trump’s decision to cut off some Obamacare subsidies, as well as the latest executive order on health care

This shift in the starting points of opioid addiction, with more people starting to use heroin first, is a challenge for lawmakers. “When starting with prescription drugs we know the policy levers to pull. There’s continuing medical education and prescribing deadlines. The policy levers with reducing the number of people starting on heroin seem more challenging,” Sarah said.

Dylan agreed, and said that members of the Senate Health Committee are focused mainly on prescription drugs, not heroin. “You go down to Capitol Hill and when the Senate holds a hearing on this, there seems to be a lot of talk of, ‘OK if we turn this lever, if he just make it harder for people to get a hold of prescription painkillers, then that will fix the problem,’ and this fundamental shift towards heroin proves that is not true,” Dylan said.

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Here’s Dylan and Matt discussing the challenges of attacking heroin addictions:

Dylan: A repeated frustration that I have heard in talking to folks who work on this issue is that we focus almost entirely on the supply side of things, and whether that’s Donald Trump’s wall on the Mexican border or whether that’s better prescribing practices to preventing opioids from getting on the street, we don’t spend nearly as much time on how do we drive down the demand among a certain percentage of our population to want to abuse drugs.

Matt: This is a really bad situation. When the move was made to crack down on pill suppliers, I think policy makers were aware that there was a risk that you were going to see a lot of people diverting into the heroin market. I think they did not fully understand the fentanyl situation. But they knew that this was going to take the stock of addicts and actually put them at greater risk for overdoses, and they decided that they had to make that call. That the only way to cut off the flow of new addicts was to make this choice.

I think what you are seeing with the heroin initiations is that this sort of strategy to cauterize the wound and sacrifice a cohort of addicts to the streets and the black market but to cut off the new addicts, that that has not worked. That instead, this old stock of addicts has moved to heroin, and then the heroine dealers have now established a whole new pipeline into addiction that has nothing to do with the prescription drug market that the FDA can’t do anything about. Basically the whole discussion that we have been having is obsolete.

Dylan: I went out to a city in southern Indiana last year that had a terrible HIV outbreak because of needle abuse. And you talk to people there and they are like, we need to change this on a cultural level, on an economic level. It is a really holistic problem that is not tailored to neat and tidy solutions like prescription drug monitoring programs.

Show notes:

]]> Kelly Swanson <![CDATA[White House Chief of Staff John Kelly says he was not hired to control Trump’s behavior or tweets]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/12/16465542/john-kelly-not-control-trumps-behavior-tweets 2017-10-12T15:20:04-04:00 2017-10-12T15:20:01-04:00

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly wants to make it clear that he was not brought in to “control” President Donald Trump’s behavior and that Trump’s Twitter habits do not bother him.

“It’s funny, I read in the paper, you all know, you write it, that I have been a failure at controlling the president, or a failure at controlling his tweeting,” Kelly said at a press briefing on Thursday. “I was not brought to this job to control anything but the flow of information to our president so that he can make the best decisions.”

When asked if Trump’s tweets make his job harder to do, Kelly responded, “No, no.”

Kelly, a retired Marine general and the former secretary of Homeland Security, was appointed to the position of White House Chief of Staff in July after Reince Priebus resigned. Since his appointment, he’s been the subject of a constant stream of media reports that paint Kelly as frustrated by the president’s lack of discipline and his irrepressible tweets.

Kelly said all that isn’t true — and that he’s not planning on leaving his position or about to be fired, despite the rumors of tension.

]]> Kelly Swanson <![CDATA[The Supreme Court really might deal a huge blow to gerrymandering]]> https://www.vox.com/2017/10/11/16453534/supreme-court-huge-blow-gerrymandering 2019-01-16T14:14:59-05:00 2017-10-11T10:10:02-04:00

The Supreme Court might rule on a case to limit gerrymandering — and that’s a big deal, Sarah Kliff, Ezra Klein, and Matt Yglesias concluded on the October 10 episode of The Weeds, which also discussed the Children’s Health Insurance Program and a white paper from a Nobel Prize winner.

The background of the case in the Supreme Court, Gill v. Whitford, is this: In 2010, Wisconsin’s map of electoral districts was redrawn by the Republican state legislature. In 2012, Republican candidates in the statehouse won 48 percent of the vote but 60 of the 99 legislative seats. Democrats won 51 percent that year but only received 39 seats.

“Republicans had figured out a way to lock in a legislative majority basically no matter what happens. You could have a democratic wave bigger than you’d had in 40 years and Republicans would keep the state legislature,” Ezra said.

Ezra explains that in the past, the Supreme Court has ruled on gerrymandering but never could come up with a solution to the problem. This case seems to be different, he says, because, “It does seem like for the first time that there is a manageable standard. It looks like there might be a 5-4 majority for it, and this is in front of the Supreme Court in a pretty robust way.”

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The solution social scientists have drawn up is to keep the “efficiency gap” at or below seven percentage points As Ezra explains:

Eric McGee, a political scientist who works at the Public Policy Institute of California, invents this new standard for measuring partisan gerrymanders called the efficiency gap. You can gerrymander in two ways: You can do what is called “packing,” where you try to pack all of a political party’s voters into one district — so the idea there is, say Democrats are packed into a district where the Democratic candidate always wins by 85 percent, but that means that all of those Democrats are not available to vote in other congressional districts. Or you can do “cracking,” where you are spreading your own people very thin. Every one of your candidates wins by, like, 54 percent, and you get a very efficient situation.

Basically what the efficiency gap is doing is it tests how many votes are wasted. So how many votes you are having over a candidate’s winning margin in all districts and then compares the wasted vote count of Republicans and Democrats.

SARAH: Well, it is also counting the number of votes wasted in districts you lost, right? You are comparing those two against each other?

EZRA: Right, all wasted votes everywhere, and you are comparing them against each other. You are seeing if there is a huge difference in wasted votes across groups. I want to give an example here, and we actually had one of the plaintiff’s lawyers write this up at Vox. He writes, “take a state with five districts. You have two won easily by Democrats, 76 percent to 24 percent, and then three other districts that were won narrowly by Republicans, so 59 percent to 41 percent. Democrats wasted 26 percent of the vote in the two districts that they won and then Republicans wasted 24 percent of the vote in the two districts they lost and 9 percent in the three districts they win.”

So if you run the math on all this, the Democrats get 55 percent of the statewide vote but just 40 percent of the seats, which means there is a pro-Republican efficiency gap of 20 percent. So what the plaintiffs are alleging is that there is now a way to measure clearly whether somewhere has been partisan gerrymandered too aggressively. They are not saying there should be no level of partisan gerrymandering, but that the top efficiency gap that the Supreme Court should be willing to tolerate is plus 7 percentage points.

Show notes:

]]> Kelly Swanson <![CDATA[Trump wants to change tax law to punish the NFL]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/10/16452598/trump-tweet-change-tax-law-punish-nfl 2017-10-10T11:10:03-04:00 2017-10-10T11:10:01-04:00

President Donald Trump continues to fan the flames of his culture war, this morning tweeting again about NFL players who kneel during the national anthem and calling for an end to “tax breaks” for the football league:

The league office of the NFL previously was tax-exempt because of its nonprofit status, but that hasn’t been the case since 2015, when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced a change to the status, which he called a “distraction.” Individual teams do get big tax breaks from state and local governments when it comes to building or renovating stadiums, usually in the form of tax-free local bonds. Past presidents and members of Congress have tried, unsuccessfully, to limit those subsidies.

The tweet comes as a part of Trump’s crusade against NFL players who kneel during the national anthem to protest violence against African Americans — a subject he’s returned to several times since a rally in Alabama in September.

On Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence walked out of the football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday after players took a knee. Trump later tweeted that this stunt was his idea.

]]> Kelly Swanson <![CDATA[Poll: a majority of Americans do not believe Trump is fit to be president]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/28/16378584/poll-majority-americans-do-not-believe-trump-fit-president 2017-09-28T11:30:05-04:00 2017-09-28T11:30:02-04:00

A majority of American voters do not believe that Donald Trump is fit to serve as president, according to a new poll from Quinnipiac University.

The poll found that 56 percent of voters surveyed do not believe Trump is “fit to serve as president,” compared to 42 percent who do think he’s fit to serve. And 57 percent disapprove of the job he is doing as president, while only 36 percent of respondents approve. But the party divide is stark: The poll found that 94 percent of Democrats think that Trump is not fit to serve, and 84 percent of Republicans believe he is.

Breakdowns by race and gender were similarly stark. According to the poll, “Men are divided 49 – 49 percent” over Trump’s fitness to serve, but 63 percent of women think he is not fit.

  • Among white voters surveyed, a slim majority believe he is unfit to serve, 50 to 48 percent
  • Most Hispanic voters say he is unfit, 60 to 40 percent
  • Among black voters, he is widely viewed as unfit to serve, 94 to 4 percent

The poll asked about Trump’s handling of race relations as well, and found that the majority of Americans — 62 percent to 32 percent — disapprove of how Trump is handling race relations. “Disapproval is 55 – 39 percent among white voters, 95 – 3 percent among black voters and 66 – 28 percent among Hispanic voters.” It also found that a majority, 60 to 35 percent, say he is doing more to divide the country than to unite it.

The poll, which ran from September 21 to 26 and surveyed 1,412 voters nationwide, also asked voters their views on several of Trump’s qualities:

59 – 37 percent that he is not honest;

60 – 38 percent that he does not have good leadership skills;

56 – 42 percent that he does not care about average Americans;

67 – 30 percent that he is not level headed;

61 – 37 percent that he is a strong person;

55 – 42 percent that he is intelligent;

61 – 36 percent that he does not share their values.

Voters also seem sick of Trump’s tweets. “The anti-Twitter sentiment remains high as voters say 69 – 26 percent that Trump should stop tweeting,” the poll said.

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