Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: Billionaire donors, for all their swagger, don’t get to order a president around. But a cruel conventional wisdom is setting in. “I’d estimate that for every 10 people who think he should exit, one thinks he should stay,” said one donor adviser. The Biden campaign counters that this week was the best grass-roots fundraising start of any month during this campaign. The campaign, meanwhile, has not been able to answer the central question of their detractors….

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The Guardian reports: A nervous energy rippled through the crowd gathered at Lyon’s Place de la République. As the final polls closed in the most momentous election in recent memory, hundreds of people milled about, waiting to find out what would lie in store for France. Just after 8pm, Florent Martins came running through the plaza, mobile phone in hand. “We won,” the 23-year-old yelled out, his voice shaking with disbelief as those around him exploded into cheers and hearty…

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John Hendrickson writes: At Joe Biden’s rally in Madison, Wisconsin, this afternoon, the men and women who had crammed into a middle-school basketball gym dutifully clapped, yelled words of support, and waved signs bearing the president’s name. But when it came time to chant “Four more years,” they sounded as if they were merely going through the motions. Most of the attendees I spoke with said they were more committed to the Democratic Party than its 81-year-old leader. Some told…

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Politico reports: One of Joe Biden’s high-profile campaign surrogates is publicly urging him to consider exiting the presidential race. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a member of Biden’s national campaign advisory board who earlier this spring headlined a big-dollar fundraiser for him in Boston, said in a statement Friday that he should “carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope to defeat Donald Trump.” Biden “saved our democracy in 2020 and has done an outstanding job over the last four years,”…

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  The Guardian reports: The shock election of Masoud Pezeshkian as Iran’s new president is as much a testimony to his personality as to his politics. A former heart surgeon and health minister, he came across in the many presidential TV debates as a man of great personal integrity and humility, desperate to bring the country together after it had been divided domestically and abroad. In the end, it will only be his opponents’ fear of his continued popularity that…

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Patrick Boucheron, Antoine Lilti et al write: For the first time since the second world war, the far right is at the gates of power in France. As historians from differing political backgrounds who share an attachment to democratic values and the rule of law, we cannot remain silent in the face of an alarming prospect that we still have the capacity to resist. Despite a superficial makeover, the National Rally (RN) remains fundamentally the successor and heir of the…

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Julian Zelizer writes: If President Joe Biden decides to withdraw from the election, Democrats need not fear — they have a ticket in front of them that can still defeat presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. Not only would a ticket with Kamala Harris as president and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as her running mate have the best odds of getting the party through this moment of crisis, but also the potential to excite voters and produce a historic outcome. To…

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Elaina Plott Calabro writes: 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., I’d asked if the administration…

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CNN reports: Amid the ongoing fallout from Joe Biden’s debate performance, talk in many top Democratic circles has already moved to who Kamala Harris’ running mate would be. That’s how certain a widening group of leading party officials, operatives and donors are that the president’s slow start to salvage his campaign just won’t work, with several close allies skeptical that he is up to the reelection campaign he has pledged to stay in, based on CNN’s conversations with two dozen…

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