Biden Tries to Turn the Tables on Trump: ‘He’s About as Old as I Am’ - The New York Times

Biden Tries to Turn the Tables on Trump: ‘He’s About as Old as I Am’

"In his first election-year appearance on a late-night television show, the president joshed with Seth Meyers and poked at former President Donald J. Trump’s own memory lapses.

Feb. 27, 2024Updated 8:02 a.m. ET

On “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” President Biden joked about his age.Bonnie Cash for The New York Times

President Biden has come up with a new defense against claims that he is too old to run for another term: At least he knows who his wife is — as opposed to “the other guy.”

As he expands his efforts to reassure voters that he is fit for another four years, Mr. Biden took a turn on the talk show circuit, using an appearance on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” on NBC to poke his challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, on his own struggles with memory.

In a playful but pointed interview aired early Tuesday morning, Mr. Meyers sought to help the president address the age issue, which polls show is an important drawback in the minds of most voters. Mr. Meyers jokingly told the president that he had obtained classified information indicating that “you are currently 81 years old.”

Mr. Biden went along with the joke. “Who the hell told you that?” he asked. “That’s classified!”

He then went on to jab Mr. Trump, who is 77, over a video in which he seems to call his wife, Melania Trump, by another name. “You got to take a look at the other guy,” Mr. Biden said. “He’s about as old as I am, but he can’t remember his wife’s name.”

Turning more serious, Mr. Biden added that the contest is not about how old the candidates are. “It’s about how old your ideas are,” he said. “Look, this is a guy who wants to take us back. He wants to take us back on Roe v. Wade. He wants to take us back on a whole range of issues that are — 50, 60 years, they’ve been solid American positions.”

The president has been on the defensive about his memory in recent weeks, particularly since a special counsel, in a report on Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents, explained that one reason he would not charge Mr. Biden is because he would come across to a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”During his interview with the special counsel, the report said, Mr. Biden could not remember key dates of his vice presidency or the year his son Beau died. Mr. Biden’s defenders assailed the special counsel for mentioning that.

Mr. Trump has had plenty of moments of confusion in recent weeks as well. Among other things, he has mixed up his Republican opponent Nikki Haley with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claimed to have beaten Barack Obama in 2016 rather than Hillary Clinton and warned that the country is on the verge of World War II.

The moment Mr. Biden was referring to came during a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland over the weekend when Mr. Trump was praising Mrs. Trump and then, as the audience applauded, said, “Oh, look at that, Mercedes — that’s pretty good.”

Mr. Meyers played that clip before Mr. Biden came out on the show, mocking Mr. Trump for seeming to have forgotten Mrs. Trump’s name. But Mr. Trump was addressing Mercedes Schlapp, a former White House adviser whose husband, Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, hosts the conference, according to the former president’s spokesman, Steven Cheung. “The clips were taken out of context by disingenuous people,” Mr. Cheung said.

Still, Mr. Trump has in the past misspelled Melania’s name on Twitter as “Melanie.” And during a deposition in the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll, Mr. Trump mistakenly identified a picture of Ms. Carroll as Marla Maples, his second wife. A jury found that Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll in the 1990s, and a separate jury ordered him to pay $83.3 million for defaming her.

Mr. Biden joined Mr. Meyers to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the late-night show, a decade after appearing on the program’s debut episode in 2014 when he was vice president. It was Mr. Biden’s fourth appearance on a late-night talk show since becoming president. He was a guest of Jimmy Fallon in 2021, of Jimmy Kimmel in 2022 and on “The Daily Show” in 2023.

The audience was an important one for Mr. Biden, who relied on strong support among younger voters to defeat Mr. Trump in 2020 and needs them again despite surveys showing disenchantment among that generation. But he slipped when asked about his 2024 agenda. “The 2020 agenda is to finish the job,” he said.

Mr. Meyers asked the president about the “Dark Brandon” meme that his younger aides have promoted online, a laser-eyed version of the president intended to make him seem cool and hip. Asked if he enjoys the meme, Mr. Biden quipped, “No, I resent the hell out of it,” and then put on Ray-Ban sunglasses.

When Mr. Meyers noted that many on the political right have embraced a bizarre conspiracy theory that he and Taylor Swift “are working in cahoots,” Mr. Biden playfully snapped: “Where are you getting this information? It’s classified. That’s classified information.”

“But,” he quickly added, “I will tell you she did endorse me in 2020.”

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker"

Biden Tries to Turn the Tables on Trump: ‘He’s About as Old as I Am’ - The New York Times

Republican Opposition to Birth Control Bill Could Alienate Voters, Poll Finds - The New York Times

Republican Opposition to Birth Control Bill Could Alienate Voters, Poll Finds

"A survey conducted by Americans for Contraception shows the overwhelming popularity of birth control, and suggests voters are primed to punish Republicans for opposing a measure to protect access to it.

Feb. 26, 2024, 5:07 a.m. ET

Many Americans across the political spectrum believe that access to birth control is actively at risk.Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

One month after the Supreme Court struck down the right to an abortion, Democrats who then controlled the House pushed through a bill aimed to ensure access to contraception nationwide. All but eight Republicans opposed it.

That vote two years ago, opposing legislation that would protect the right to purchase and use contraception without government restriction, may come back to haunt Republicans in November, as they seek to keep hold of their slim majority at a time when real fears about reproductive rights threaten to drive voters away from them.

The risks they face became glaringly clear last week, after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children. In response, a stampede of Republicans in Congress have rushed to voice their support for in vitro fertilization treatment — even though they have supported legislation that could severely curtail or even outlaw aspects of the procedure.

A new national poll conducted by Americans for Contraception and obtained by The New York Times found that most voters across the political spectrum believe their access to birth control is actively at risk, and that 80 percent of voters said that protecting access to contraception was “deeply important” to them. Even among Republican voters, 72 percent said they had a favorable view of birth control.

When voters were told that 195 House Republicans had voted against the Right to Contraception Act, 64 percent of them said they would be less likely to support Republican candidates for Congress, according to the poll. And overall, the issue of protecting access to contraception bolstered voters’ preference for Democrats by nine points, giving them a 12-point edge over Republicans, up from three.

The survey found that birth control access was especially motivating to critical groups in the Democratic coalition, including Black voters and young people, who are currently less enthusiastic about the election.

Pollsters said the shift in overall party preference — known as the generic ballot — was notable, particularly by such a large margin.

“It’s really hard to move a generic ballot because parties are branded,” said Molly Murphy, the president of Impact Research, which conducted the poll. “You can move numbers on named candidates, but people generally think they know the parties. It’s hard to change that perception.”

While the survey, conducted in early February, did not contain questions about I.V.F., its findings may help explain why so many Republicans have distanced themselves from a voting record that promotes policies that could put such procedures at risk.

Speaker Mike Johnson, for instance, added his voice on Friday night to the growing chorus of Republicans claiming they support in vitro fertilization treatments. But like many of the other House Republicans now saying they back unrestricted I.V.F., Mr. Johnson is a co-sponsor of the Life at Conception Act, which would recognize a fertilized egg as a person with equal protections under the 14th Amendment.

The bill states that the term “human being” includes “all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization,” and does not include any exceptions for I.V.F. and fertility treatments. If enacted, that could severely restrict I.V.F. treatments, which typically involve the creation of several embryos, only one of which is implanted while the others are frozen to allow for subsequent attempts at a successful implantation.

It is the latest bit of politically rocky terrain that Republicans have had to walk on issues of reproductive health since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has made real to voters the threat that other rights could be next to go. According to the new poll, three out of five voters living in states where abortion has been banned or restricted said they were concerned that contraception is next.

Ms. Murphy said Republicans’ reaction to the Alabama ruling indicated that they know they have a political crisis on their hands.

“The reason they’re having to come out against this is because they know that it isn’t plausible for voters to believe it was just a court in Alabama, but more of a representation of what this entire party stands for,” Ms. Murphy said. “If they thought this was an outlier ruling from a rogue court in the South and they didn’t have to say anything, they wouldn’t be saying anything. This is damage control.”

It will be the second national election cycle in which Republicans face a bind of their own making as they try to reconcile their party’s hard-line policies on women’s health — based on a fealty to a conservative religious doctrine — with a vast majority of the country that now views the issue differently.

A majority of voters support the Right to Contraception Act across party, racial and gender lines, according to the poll. About 94 percent of Democrats support it, and 68 percent of Republican voters favor it.

But when the proposal came before the House, Republicans balked. Many of them claimed that they supported contraception in practice but considered the bill a gateway to allowing abortion. They argued that the bill’s definition of contraceptives could be interpreted to include pills that induce abortion.

“The Republican Party has so underestimated the way the country has changed,” said Karen Finney, a longtime abortion rights activist. “This is part of the deal they made with very far-right conservatives who are unbending on these issues. There are Republicans who recognize the damage it could do to their base of support if they were to modify in any direction.”

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a prominent anti-abortion group, opposed the Right to Contraception Act and rated lawmakers according to their votes on the bill, downgrading those who supported it and rewarding those opposed.

Ms. Finney said Democrats will score their political opponents on it, too, in their own way. “You will see ads in some places questioning whether the Republican Party really is saying ‘abstinence only,’” Ms. Finney said. “That’s not going to win the youth vote.”

Some vulnerable Republicans have already been trying to change course on contraception after opposing the 2022 bill. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Republican of Iowa, led a group of Republican women in the House last year in sponsoring the Orally Taken Contraception Act of 2023, a bill they pitched as a way to expand access to birth control.

Democrats dismissed the bill — which was notably unopposed by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America — as so narrow as to have virtually no effect except as an attempt to mask House Republicans’ hostility to contraception. The bill, which Mr. Johnson has yet to bring up for a vote, would direct the Food and Drug Administration to issue guidance for companies that want to make oral contraception available without prescriptions.

Only two drug companies are actively working to offer birth control over the counter. One of them, Opill, was already approved for sale without a prescription before the legislation was introduced. The other, from Cadence Health, is years into the application process with the F.D.A. and would not necessarily benefit from or need the guidance the bill directs the agency to issue.

The new poll by Americans for Contraception, conducted between Feb. 2 and Feb. 8, included interviews with 1,800 voters.

In their conclusion, the pollsters delivered some unequivocal advice to Democratic candidates before the November elections that could also serve as a strong note of caution for Republicans who have opposed birth control access.

“Don’t shy away from talking about all forms of contraception, including I.U.D.s and emergency contraception like Plan B,” they wrote. “Contraception is popular, and voters want to be the ones making the decisions on what methods they use. They do not draw distinctions between types of birth control, and neither should we.”

Republican Opposition to Birth Control Bill Could Alienate Voters, Poll Finds - The New York Times

What to know about Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker and the embryo ruling - The Washington Post

Alabama justice who quoted Bible in IVF case often invokes religion

Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker in 2018. (Mickey Welsh/Advertiser/Reuters)

"In the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that said frozen embryos are people, Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote a concurring opinion that sought to define the “sanctity of unborn life,” citing heavily from scripture and theology. His opinion, which drew criticism from abortion rights activists for instilling religious beliefs into a judicial decision, was the latest in nearly 20 years on the bench in which he has repeatedly invoked religion on his way to laying the groundwork to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Parker has also openly criticized other judges for not sufficiently considering religion in their rulings and has expressed support for the theory known as the Seven Mountain Mandate, which calls for conservative Christians to run the government and broadly influence American life.

Who is Chief Justice Tom Parker?

• Parker, 72, was first elected to the Alabama Supreme Court in 2004 and won the chief justice’s seat in 2018. His term ends in 2025; state law prohibits judges older than 70 from being elected.
• Parker has for years been lauded by abortion foes and condemned by reproductive rights advocates for writing opinions that would help spawn the fall of Roe and further restrict abortion access.

What did he write in the concurring opinion?

Parker repeatedly invoked scripture in his ruling, arguing that Alabama law is based on theology that says God created every person “in His image.” He and the other justices in the 8-1 majority said that life begins at conception and that therefore frozen embryos are protected under the law.

“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” Parker wrote in his concurring opinion.

He added that state code recognizes “unborn human life,” and that destroying it — including frozen embryos — is an affront to God.

“All human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” he wrote.

He also referred to the writings of a 17th-century theologian as evidence that people were created in God’s image.

“The principle itself — that human life is fundamentally distinct from other forms of life and cannot be taken intentionally without justification — has deep roots that reach back to the creation of man ‘in the image of God,’” he wrote, citing the book of Genesis.

The chief justice also tried to swat away concerns that the ruling would imperil in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Alabama, suggesting that the legislature could restrict IVF embryos to one or two at a time to reduce the number that are destroyed while allowing the procedure.

At least three fertility clinics have since paused operations in the state, and Republicans nationwide have sought to distance themselves from IVF restrictions.

Republicans and Democrats in the Alabama legislature have been working to introduce legislation to protect IVF access.

Parker went on to write that, in passing a ballot initiative defining life beginning at conception, “the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state.”

“[Alabamians] have required us to treat every human being in accordance with the fear of a holy God who made them in His image,” he wrote in his conclusion.

Parker did not immediately respond to The Washington Post’s requests for comment Saturday afternoon.

What is his history in previous rulings and politics?

Parker served as an assistant attorney general under Jeff Sessions, who would go on to become U.S. attorney general in the Trump administration. He was an aide to Roy Moore on the state Supreme Court in 2000 until Moore was dismissed in 2003 for ignoring a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument he had ordered installed in the judicial building.

After Parker was elected to the state’s high court in 2004, he went to Washington to take the oath of office. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, one of his role models, presided.

Once on the bench, Parker routinely invoked scripture, criticizing his peers who didn’t.

“When judges don’t rule in the fear of the Lord, everything’s falling apart,” he once wrote, according to a 2014 ProPublica investigation. “The whole world is coming unglued.”

He frequently heard cases that allowed him to write opinions on fetuses and human life.

“Today, the only major area in which unborn children are denied legal protection is abortion,” he wrote in one case, according to ProPublica, “and that denial is only because of the dictates of Roe.”

He also wrote that Roe was wrong in arguing that states couldn’t ban abortions before viability.

Mississippi cited that line of reasoning in its case to challenge Roe at the U.S. Supreme Court, a move his supporters say helped pave the way for Roe’s fall in 2022.

What is his connection to the Seven Mountain Mandate?

Parker has often expressed support for the Seven Mountain Mandate, a theory that conservative Christians in America should use fundamentalist beliefs to influence and run government, education and media, among seven key areas of life. Its supporters have sought to restrict reproductive care while allowing discrimination of LGBTQ+ people for religious beliefs.

Last week, the same day the Alabama Supreme Court released its embryo decision and Parker’s concurrent ruling, the chief justice said in an online broadcast that “God created government” and that Christians should take it back from the “possession” of others.

The comments came during an interview with QAnon supporter Johnny Enlow, author of “The Seven Mountain Prophecy.” Enlow describes Parker as a “true pioneer” of the movement, while Parker thanked Enlow for promoting the Seven Mountain Mandate. The interview was reported by Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group.

Parker added in the interview that the country’s original form of government was based on the Bible, a common view of supporters of the Seven Mountain Mandate, and that its laws should reflect that. Scholars have criticized that interpretation, the Associated Press reports.

Still, Parker’s support for the movement is not new.

“The very God of Holy Scriptures, the Creator, is the source of law, life, and liberty,” he said in 2005 on his first day as a justice, according to ProPublica."

What to know about Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker and the embryo ruling - The Washington Post

Opinion | What Is Christian Nationalism, Exactly? - The New York Times

What Is Christian Nationalism, Exactly?

Feb. 25, 2024, 9:00 a.m. ET

Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

"If you’re alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism, the single worst thing you can do is define it too broadly. If you define it too broadly, then you’re telling millions of ordinary churchgoing citizens that the importation of their religious values into the public square somehow places them in the same camp or on the same side as actual Christian supremacists, the illiberal authoritarians who want to remake America in their own fundamentalist image.

Enter the new feature-length documentary “God and Country,” which examines the role of Christian nationalism in American politics. Even before I knew that Rob Reiner (the director of “A Few Good Men”) was involved in the project, I agreed to be interviewed by the filmmakers for two key reasons: First, I wanted to make sure that I could offer a sensible definition of Christian nationalism, one that didn’t cast aspersions on Christians simply for bringing their values into the public square. And second, I wanted to outline exactly why actual Christian nationalism presents a real danger to our Constitution.

To understand what Christian nationalism is, it’s important to understand what it is not. It is not Christian nationalism if a person’s political values are shaped by the individual’s Christian faith. In fact, many of America’s most important social movements have been infused with Christian theology and Christian activism. Many of our nation’s abolitionists thundered their condemnations of slavery from Northern pulpits. The civil rights movement wasn’t exclusively Christian by any means, but it was pervasively Christian — Martin Luther King Jr. was, of course, a Baptist minister.

Anyone may disagree with Christian arguments around civil rights, immigration, abortion, religious liberty or any other point of political conflict. Christians disagree with one another on these topics all the time, but it is no more illegitimate or dangerous for a believer to bring her worldview into a public debate than it is for a secular person to bring his own secular moral reasoning into politics. In fact, I have learned from faiths other than my own, and our public square would be impoverished without access to the thoughts and ideas of Americans of faith.

The problem with Christian nationalism isn’t with Christian participation in politics but rather the belief that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law. It can manifest itself through ideology, identity and emotion. And if it were to take hold, it would both upend our Constitution and fracture our society.

The sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead define Christian nationalism as a “cultural framework that blurs distinctions between Christian identity and American identity, viewing the two as closely related and seeking to enhance and preserve their union.” The author and pastor Matthew McCullough defines Christian nationalism as “an understanding of American identity and significance held by Christians wherein the nation is a central actor in the world-historical purposes of the Christian God.” Both definitions are excellent, but what does ideological Christian nationalism look like in practice?

In 2022, a coalition of right-wing writers and leaders published a document called “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” Its section on God and public religion states: “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” That’s an extraordinary — and ominous — ideological statement, one that would immediately relegate non-Christians to second-class status. It’s utterly contrary to the First Amendment and would impose a form of compelled deference to Christianity on both religious minorities and the nonreligious.

But Christian nationalism isn’t just rooted in ideology; it’s also deeply rooted in identity, the belief that Christians should rule. This is the heart of the Seven Mountain Mandate, a dominionist movement emerging from American Pentecostalism that is, put bluntly, Christian identity politics on steroids. Paula White, Donald Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, is an adherent, and so is the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Tom Parker, who wrote a concurring opinion in the court’s recent I.V.F. decision. The movement holds that Christians are called to rule seven key societal institutions: the family, the church, education, the media, the arts, business and the government.

One doesn’t have to go all the way into Seven Mountain theology, though, to find examples of Christian identity politics. The use of Christianity as an unofficial but necessary qualification for office is a routine part of politics in the most churchgoing parts of America. Moreover, one of the common red-America arguments for Trump is that he might not be devout himself, but he’ll place lots of Christians in government.

But what is Christian identity politics but another form of Christian supremacy? How does Christian identity alone make any person a better candidate for office? After all, many of the worst actors in American politics are professed believers. Scandal and corruption are so pervasive in the church that when a person says, “I’m a Christian,” it tells me almost nothing about their wisdom or virtue.

Finally, we can’t forget the intense emotion of Christian nationalism. Most believers don’t follow ideological and theological arguments particularly closely. In the words of the historian Thomas Kidd, “Actual Christian nationalism is more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance.” It is tied, in other words, to a visceral sense that the fate of the church is closely tied to the outcome of any given political race.

That fervor can make believers gullible and potentially even dangerous. Its good-versus-evil dynamic can make Christians believe that their political opponents are capable of anything, including stealing an election. It artificially raises the stakes of elections to the point where a loss becomes an unthinkable catastrophe, with the fates of both church and state hanging in the balance. As we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, this belief invites violent action.

Committed Christian nationalists represent only 10 percent of the population, according to a 2023 PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey. But even members of a minority that small can gain outsize power when they fold themselves into the larger Christian electorate, casting themselves as “just like you.” That’s why we cannot conflate Christian activism with Christian nationalism. One can welcome Christian participation in the public square while resisting domination, from any faith or creed."

Opinion | What Is Christian Nationalism, Exactly? - The New York Times

Opinion | It’s Not as Easy as Just Getting Joe Biden to Drop Out - The New York Times

It’s Not as Easy as Just Getting Biden to Drop Out

Feb. 24, 2024

Photo Illustration by Rachel Stern for The New York Times

You’re reading the Jamelle Bouie newsletter, for Times subscribers only.  Historical context for present-day events.

"In a recent episode of his podcast, my colleague Ezra Klein made the strongest case yet for replacing President Biden on the ticket with a new Democratic nominee. After listening to it, I disagreed with a few key points, and after discussing our differences, Ezra and I agreed that it would make sense to take this to the page, as it were.

A good part of the strength of Ezra’s case came from the fact that he anticipated the most significant objection to any push to remove Biden — namely, that there wouldn’t be enough time left to select a new nominee. To that, he said, the Democrats could choose a candidate at their convention this summer in Chicago.

Here was Ezra on how to use the convention process rather than a primary to choose the nominee:

The way we pick nominees now is still built around conventions. When someone wins a primary or a caucus, what he actually wins is delegate slots. How that works is different in different states. Then they go to the convention to choose the actual nominee.

The whole convention structure is still there. We still use it. It is still the delegates voting at the convention. What’s different now than in the past is that most delegates arrive at the convention committed to a candidate. But without getting too into the weeds of state delegate rules here, if their candidate drops out, if Biden drops out, they can be released to vote for who they want.

He went on to add that while one of the most infamous contested conventions ended in disaster — the 1968 Democratic convention, which was also held in Chicago — conventions have picked some of our greatest presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

I should say that I am a strong skeptic of the idea that there is a viable path to replacing Biden as the nominee as long as he is capable and competent. Ezra’s case was persuasive, but I think he underrated the real odds that a brokered convention would end in political disaster for the Democratic Party.

Yes, the convention process still exists. There are still delegates and voting, and it continues to be possible to have a contested convention where the party chooses a nominee. The fact that we call this modern process a convention, however, does not mean that it is the same process as the one that chose nominees from roughly 1831 to 1968.

A large reason: The American party system of the past half-century is not the same system as the half-century before that. The political parties themselves were different, and their relationship to democratic legitimacy was different as well.

There was no expectation that ordinary voters would confer legitimacy on a presidential nominee. The delegates were not selected by direct vote as representatives of individual candidates so much as they were representatives of state party organizations and political machines.

And so when we say that the Democratic Party nominated Roosevelt for president in 1932, what we mean is that a somewhat unwieldy coalition of state and regional political organizations — tied together by history, a few broadly held ideals and, more concretely, patronage — gathered to hash out their differences and settle on a candidate who could best represent them on a national field.

The critical point is that there were no binding primaries or caucuses or other forms of democratic contest. Roosevelt campaigned in the sense that his allies lobbied delegates for their support, but this was fundamentally a closed process.

With no expectation of popular legitimacy in the operation of internal party decisions, delegates representing their machines and organizations could bargain and negotiate with relative freedom. Once a nominee was chosen, voters would accept him, and the election would be held.

In the 1960s, the elitism of this system — the fact that it reliably chose insiders — clashed with the democratic and anti-establishment ethos of the youngest voters. The result is that the old convention process ended, with a bang, in 1968. When Democrats convened to choose a nominee in 1972, they did so under a new system in which the chief currency was democratic legitimacy and candidates would run highly public campaigns geared toward national audiences rather than state electorates.

We have had this new system for more than 50 years. Although the rules of the Democratic convention allow for something that looks like the old system, the modern convention process is not actually equipped to confer legitimacy on nominees the way it could in the past. A great deal of that legitimacy comes from the democratic process — from the fact that modern candidates must campaign for votes from the public.

And the public, in turn, wants to feel that it has a direct say in the selection of a nominee. There is also a practical advantage to our current system: It is much easier for a candidate to claim leadership of the party when he or she has won the most votes.

This is all to say that an attempt to hold an open, brokered convention would immediately run into the basic issue that no candidate would be able to claim any kind of democratic legitimacy, especially if the delegates were free agents unaccountable to the public. The nominee who would come out of this process would have little basis, given the norms since 1968, to say that he or she was any better or more viable than any other candidate. The odds of alienating large parts of the Democratic Party coalition would be just as large as the odds of finding an able and competent nominee.

That is especially the case when you consider the question of Vice President Kamala Harris. Ezra said that she was an underrated political talent and that there was a decent chance she would win the nomination in a brokered convention. But I think it is important to consider a scenario in which she wouldn’t.

In the modern era, a vice president who wants his or her party’s nomination for president must truly compete for it. This is a democratic competition: The voters, not the insiders, matter most. It would be one thing if Harris lost a democratic campaign to be the next nominee. The victor in that contest, after all, would have the legitimacy that came with winning the most votes. It would be something else entirely if Harris lost in a convention fight.

The view, for many Democratic voters, wouldn’t be that Harris lost a fair fight. The view would be that Harris — a loyal deputy to the president — was rejected by insiders who represented no one but themselves. Why, voters might ask, did insiders decline to elevate the vice president in this circumstance? Why was Harris, Biden’s handpicked successor, pushed to the side?

It is entirely possible that this wouldn’t fracture the Democratic coalition. It is entirely possible that Democratic voters would accept the results of a brokered convention, whatever they are. But I would not count on that outcome. It would be difficult for the Democratic Party to win the November election with an unpopular incumbent at the top of the ticket. It would be even more difficult to do so with a divisive nominee — who had neither earned the votes of Democratic voters nor weathered the vetting process of a primary campaign — and a fractured coalition.

The thing about a brokered convention, in other words, is that there would be no guarantee the party would get a better nominee than Biden. No guarantee that the nominee would not have serious baggage of his or her own. No guarantee that the process wouldn’t fracture the Democratic coalition. And no guarantee that the party would not end up weaker than where it started.

---

What I Wrote

Because of the holiday, I wrote only one column this week. It was about the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision extending some rights of personhood to frozen embryos and broadly about the interrelationship of freedom, equal rights and bodily autonomy.

You cannot disentangle abortion from reproductive rights. You cannot disentangle reproductive rights from bodily autonomy. And you cannot disentangle bodily autonomy from basic questions of equal rights and democratic freedom."

Opinion | It’s Not as Easy as Just Getting Joe Biden to Drop Out - The New York Times

Howard crew was the first all-Black rowing team — and then D.C. champions - The Washington Post

How the first all-Black rowing team went from pioneers to D.C. champions

The 1964 Howard crew team: James Grant, coxswain, back to camera; Steve McGruder, second from left in the “stroke seat” across from Grant; Harold Sanders; Bill Brown; Bernard Thoms; Frank Thornton; Rudy Smith; Roger Braxton; and Reggie Young. (Courtesy of Bernard Thoms)

"The morning of Saturday, May 2, 1964, dawned clear, bright and unseasonably crisp. Temperatures had reached only the mid-40s when rowers arrived along the Potomac River to prepare for the Washington Regatta, one of the city’s most anticipated boating events. It was far better than the freezing predawn practices they had endured earlier in the season, but the steady 15-mph headwind gave some rowers pause.

Other cities had better-known regattas — the Head of the Charles in Boston, the Dad Vail in Philadelphia — but in the nation’s capital, the Washington Regatta determined which collegiate crew was king. On that May morning, four eight-man rowing shells were lined up near the rocky Three Sisters Islands, north of the Key Bridge. All the usual crews were there — varsity teams from Georgetown, American and George Washington universities. Their boats were long and muscular, just like their athletes. All were White, and most of them had rowed in high school.

The fourth boat stood out. This was the fledgling crew from Howard, a historically Black university founded in Washington in 1867. Only in its fourth season, the Howard crew was the first all-Black competitive rowing team in American history. As newcomers to the sport, the Howard team had mostly put up defeats. Just a month earlier, the rowers had lost to Yale on the Housatonic River in Connecticut. But on this spring morning, they remained determined.

The 2,000-meter race began at the Three Sisters and continued under the Key Bridge, where the Potomac bends around Theodore Roosevelt Island. The finish line was set near Thompson Boat Center. In rowing, it’s no small thing to take a heavy eight-man boat from a dead stop to race pace, so the first few strokes are key.

At 6-foot-4, Bernard Thoms was one of the tallest and strongest men in the Howard shell. Sitting in the middle of the boat — a section known as the “engine room,” where the powerhouse rowers are placed — Thoms was ready. At the signal, he pulled as hard as he could on the oar, and the blade promptly broke off.

It felt like another defeat for a team that had faced naysayers since its formation. In 1952, a Howard University alumnus named Howland Ware had attended the famous Eastern Sprints Regatta, a tony event in Worcester, Mass., in which only Ivy League crews and other elite schools compete. Impressed by the sport’s sleek, aesthetic beauty and synchronicity, he made it his mission to establish a crew team at his alma mater.

“Even if I have to pay for it myself,” Ware said at the time, “they will have a rowing team at Howard.”

He spent the next few years pressing university officials, who finally agreed to field a crew in the spring of 1961, largely because Ware ponied up $10,000 of his own money to buy a boat and uniforms and agreed to drive the rowers to and from the river himself. Ware poached athletes from other campus sports to fill the first shell, including Howard Fulcher, Bill Beamer and Dennis Hightower, who went on to become the deputy commerce secretary under President Barack Obama. Ware also recruited a coach, Stuart Law, a White man who had rowed at Yale and was a law professor at George Washington University, to lead the neophyte team.

Law was, by all accounts, not that interested in civil rights. A 1964 Sports Illustrated article about the team called the coach “no crusader for racial equality,” adding that “his only interest in races is how to get his boys to the finish line first.”

Allen Nesbitt, who sat in the bow seat in the spring of ’64, agrees with this assessment. When the team stopped at a rest area near Philadelphia on the way to a regatta, Nesbitt opted to walk to a nearby cafe. When he entered, “they looked at me like I was an elephant,” he recalls.

“The man said, ‘Boy, we don’t serve your kind in here,’” Nesbitt says. “I went back to the coach and said, ‘These guys wouldn’t serve me.’ And the coach said, ‘Look, Allen, I’m hired to take you to a race and win a race. I’m not hired to make a social statement. We aren’t going anywhere and we ain’t doing nothing.’ I had to comply. I had to swallow it.”

Support for the team was sometimes hard to come by on the Howard campus, too. “So far the first Negro rowing team in the nation has not evoked any wild enthusiasm by its performances,” a student editorialist wrote in the Hilltop, the university’s newspaper, in 1962.

It didn’t help that the Black experience with water had been fraught with racism and trauma. During the era of slavery, Black families were trafficked up and down rivers away from their loved ones. In the Jim Crow era, swimming pools were segregated, and countless Black children never learned to swim.

“Black people, generally speaking … were water averse,” Thoms said in a 2022 interview. “Because a lot of things that happened around the water, particularly in the South, were not good for Black people.”

But the marches and demonstrations of the civil rights movement helped to embolden the rowers. Roland Daniels, a coxswain for the team from 1966 to 1968, says that when White crews stared or laughed at them, it only fueled his fire.

“I was pretty defiant,” he says. “My mother challenged me not to back down from anybody or anything. When I was on campus, I participated in a student uprising. So, I didn’t worry, really, what other teams thought about us.”

Winning had a way of silencing critics, too. In May 1964, after Thoms broke his oar at the start of the race, he felt sure that he’d doomed their chances. Thankfully, race officials postponed the heat until Thoms could secure a new oar.

For many athletes, the aborted start might have thrown them off their game. But the opposite happened. At the signal, the Howard boat shot out in front of the other competitors and stayed there. The rowers held a good line and crossed the finish at Thompson Boat Center with open water between them and the rest of the field. The Washington Post ran an overhead photograph of the team’s commanding win on the front page of the Sports section the next day. “Underdog Howard bucked the odds,” the paper reported, adding that the favorite, Georgetown, came in last, four boat lengths behind.

“I remember being so tired,” Nesbitt says. “But I finished up strong. It was a highlight of my career.”

Despite its success at the Washington Regatta, and other wins in the ensuing years, the Howard crew team succumbed to a current of indifference on campus, hanging up its oars for good in 1972. To this day, rowing is still dominated by White, affluent teams, although the sport’s governing body, USRowing, and other entities are working to recognize and eliminate barriers to the sport. In 2021, St. Augustine’s University, a historically Black university in North Carolina, launched the nation’s first all-Black women’s crew team.

In 2022, Unity Boat Club, a rowing club based at the Anacostia Community Boathouse in Washington that promotes diversity in rowing, acquired a new four-person racing shell that it named the Howard 64, after the groundbreaking team and its historic win. Nesbitt and Daniels attended the christening last summer.

This spring, four young rowers of color will race the Howard 64 at the San Diego Crew Classic. “During my own rowing career, I usually rowed in boats named after people who don’t look like me,” says Unity Boat Club President Brook Yimer, who is Black. “When you row in a boat and the name aligns with your story, you feel like you were meant to be there. You were meant to be in that boat. So that gives you that extra something to row stronger.”

Thoms passed away in October 2022. A photo of the Howard 64 was one of the last texts he received. His obituary noted that rowing on the nation’s first all-Black crew team was one of his proudest accomplishments.

Kim O’Connell is a journalist based in Arlington, Va., who is writing a book about Howard crew."

Howard crew was the first all-Black rowing team — and then D.C. champions - The Washington Post