The Candidates Are Old but the Issues Are New

Insurrection, invasion, and abortion are all on the ballot in 2024.

The Arizona Supreme Court yesterday reinstated a 1864 law banning all abortions in the state—er, territory, since Arizona didn’t become a state until 48 years after that law was passed. “This case involves statutory interpretation,” noted Justice John Lopez IV, writing for the majority; “it does not rest on the justices’ morals or public policy views regarding abortion; nor does it rest on [the law’s] constitutionality, which is not before us.” We speculated yesterday about whether the Dobbs decision might influence the presidential election. It appears we have an answer. Happy Wednesday.

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This combination of pictures created on October 22, 2020 shows Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 22, 2020. (Photo by various sources / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKIJIM WATSONMORRY GASH/AFP/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

What’s At Stake

The 2024 presidential election looks like its predecessor. It features, after all, the same old candidates as in 2020. But what’s new about 2024 is as important as what’s old.

What’s new is this: This is the first presidential election since January 6, 2021; since February 24, 2022; and since June 24, 2022.  The major events that occurred on these dates have created fundamentally new circumstances and new choices for the American people.

January 6, 2021

This is the first presidential election since January 6, 2021.

The Republican party, having at first refused to impeach Donald Trump, then having cast into the wilderness anyone who sought accountability for the actions that culminated in January 6th, has chosen to renominate the man primarily responsible for January 6th. In fact, Trump now defends what he did that day, reiterates the big lie that led to it, and vows to pardon the insurrectionists. And he plans to move ahead in a second term on an authoritarian agenda to which that day was a kind of precursor.

The Democratic party, on the other hand,  is an anti-January 6th, anti-insurrection, anti-usurpation party. So January 6th is on the ballot this November.

February 24, 2022

The unprovoked and full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia on February 24, 2022, transformed a simmering, low-intensity war into the largest war in Europe in eight decades. On one side is a dictatorship seeking to eliminate a neighboring country, destroy its national identity, and subjugate its people. On the other side is a free people defending their country against an assault of extraordinary brutality and malignity.

The War of Putin’s Aggression has become, in its way, a world war. The civilized world stands with Ukraine. The dictators of China, Iran, and North Korea stand with Vladimir Putin.

And the stakes are global. On the outcome depends not just the future of Europe but the shape of the 21st century world order.

At first both of our political parties opposed Putin and supported Ukraine. Now the Republican party is at best divided—and its highest-ranking elected official, the Speaker of the House, has delayed crucial aid for Ukraine for six months, and its presidential candidate wants to end the war by arranging for a surrender to Putin.

So the Republican party tilts toward Putin. The Democratic party stands with Ukraine.

February 24, 2022 is on the ballot this year as well.

June 24, 2022

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overruled Roe v. Wade and its discovery of a constitutional right to abortion. The decisive votes in Dobbs were cast  by three appointees of President Trump.

And so abortion policy is now politically up for grabs, as yesterday’s 4-2 decision by the the Arizona Supreme Court reminds us. And as has been the case for a while, the two parties divide pretty neatly into pro-choice and pro-life camps. With Roe gone, that division has real political saliency and meaning.

So the policy choices opened up by the Dobbs decision are on the ballot this year as well.

It’s rare that a presidential election presents to the voters even one major issue, let alone three. But these three—the state of our democracy, the character of the world order, the resolution of a key issue of social policy and personal liberty—are fundamental. And they are on the ballot.

This year’s candidates are old. But the moment is new and the stakes are great.

—William Kristol

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Catching up. . .

• Even presidential immunity won’t save Trump, argues Jack Smith: Politico

• All the people switching from Biden to Trump (or vice versa) in one graph: Economist

• Senate Democrats to dismiss Mayorkas impeachment: Axios [Joe Perticone wrote about this in yesterday’s Press Pass.]

• French foreign minister says dialogue with Russia is over: Le Monde

• Mike Johnson snubs UK foreign minister meeting on Ukraine: The Times

• Parents of school shooter sentenced to 10-15 years: CNN

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Quick Hits

0. ‘We are not enemies, but friends.’

Can we delay the politics for just a minute? Yesterday was Appomattox Day, the anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to the Army of the Potomac at Appomattox Court House (that’s the name of the place, there was no judicial building involved) about 90 miles west of Richmond, Virginia. Per the National Park Service,

Grant’s longtime friend Lt. Colonel Ely S. Parker, a Seneca leader from the Tonawanda Reservation in New York, penned the formal copy of Grant’s letter [detailing the terms of surrender]. In one account of the meeting, General Lee is reported to have recognized Parker as a Native American, extended his hand and said, “I am glad to see one real American here,” to which Parker reportedly replied, “We are all Americans.”

1. What do you do with a problem like Gaza?

In the New York Times, David French writes,

Israel is facing many of the same challenges that America faced in Iraq, and it is making many of the same mistakes.

. . .

Israel was doing exactly what we did for much of the Iraq war—fighting again over ground we had presumably already seized. And the sad reality of those terrible battles reminded me of a seemingly counterintuitive truth: In the fight against terrorists, providing humanitarian aid isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s a military necessity.

Nobody really knows how to do what French is saying the Israelis should do. It’s relatively easy to destroy Hamas—just as it was relatively easy for the American-led coalition to topple the Taliban and Saddam and grind al Qaeda into the dirt and for that matter to annihilate the Viet Cong. It’s much harder to make sure they don’t come back. The term for this used to be “nation building,” but that became a dirty word. It’s good that French is writing about this, because it’s a devilishly hard problem. Read the whole thing.

2. Nothing works right anymore

Also in the New York Times, another friend of The Bulwark, Damon Linker, asks: What if the problem is that Biden is just too. . . normal?

The examples are almost too numerous to list: a disastrous war in Iraq; a ruinous financial crisis followed by a decade of anemic growth when most of the new wealth went to those who were already well off; a shambolic response to the deadliest pandemic in a century; a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan; rising prices and interest rates; skyrocketing levels of public and private debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border; spiking rates of gun violence, mental illness, depression, addiction, suicide, chronic illness and obesity, coupled with a decline in life expectancy.

That’s an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years. Yet for the most part, the people who run our institutions have done very little to acknowledge or take responsibility for any of it, let alone undertake reforms that aim to fix what’s broken.

. . .

Mr. Biden has worked within our elected institutions since the Nixon administration, making him deeply invested in them (and implicated in their failures). Finally, as a Democrat who came of age during the heyday of mid-20th-century liberalism, Mr. Biden is wedded to the idea of using a functional, competent and capable federal government to improve people’s lives—whether or not more recent history validates that faith.

3. Biden has the pro-democracy vote locked down . . .

But he needs a majority. On the latest episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol, former Obama chief strategist David Axelrod has some advice for his former colleague:

“I would not count on the shock and dismay of people over the fact that [Trump] is under 91 criminal indictments, or that he engineered an insurrection, and so on. I think you’re going to get that [vote] for free, but it’s not enough to win.” According to Axelrod, the Biden campaign also should not be complacent in thinking that touting Biden’s achievements during his first term will be enough. Instead, he argues, Biden needs to focus on the economic challenges people face today—while framing the election as a contrast between Biden and Trump, and not simply as a referendum on Biden’s presidency.

You can watch the whole episode on YouTube or listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

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Cheap shots