Starmer's in Trouble Without a Course Correction
But bad as the outlook is, there's no need for despair. With four years until another general election must be held, Starmer has plenty of time to turn the ship around — if only he can learn from his mistakes.
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New York Times
31 minutes ago
- New York Times
10 Ways of Making Sense of Zohran Mamdani's Win
Four years ago, when Eric Adams was elected mayor, New Yorkers were told that it marked the end of a progressive wave that had shaped national Democratic politics at least since the shock election of Donald Trump in 2016. Just five months ago, as Democrats reckoned with the meaning of a second loss to Trump, the refrain was similar: The party had been pulled too far left by its activist flank, which it needed to not just discipline but also perhaps disavow. At the time, Zohran Mamdani was registering just 1 percent support. Now he has won a decisive primary victory by bringing a remarkably novel electorate to the polls. And a lesson of his shock victory is one we probably should have learned several times over the past decade: Politics are fluid, even quicksilver, and the just-so stories we tell ourselves about what is possible and what is not are almost always simplistic and in many cases just plain wrong. New York is only one city, exceptional in many ways, and last week's was just one election — a primary at that, featuring a front-runner burdened by laziness and a toxic past. And there are obvious reasons to think that the Mamdani playbook now being debated so furiously both by its admirers and by its detractors would not work in other parts of the country — at least, not in all of them. But Mamdani's triumph is nevertheless, as I wrote a few weeks ago in anticipation, an extremely big deal, elevating an avowed leftist closer to a more consequential executive office than any has held in generations. And though Mamdani's ascension comes with meaningful risks, it also throws open a whole new horizon of political possibility. Mamdani's supporters are exhilarated by the fresh air. But the oxygen spent on him by his haters over the past week shows that they, too, think Mamdani's win is a major national event. Last month, I asked what stories we might tell about a Mamdani victory — for the left, for the city and indeed for the whole country. But election night delivered enough of an earthquake that a number of new and important story lines have emerged since — too many, I think, to organize in any way but as a grab bag of observations. Here are 10. 1. The American left has a new face, and New York City is now an extremely high-stakes progressive experiment. These days, with American politics more and more nationalized, every candidate everywhere is, to some extent, required to participate in national debates and be subjected to national scrutiny (on cable news and social media as well as offline). Perhaps in another era or another city an election like this could be cauterized from the national landscape, allowing an experiment in one city to play out on its own terms. Not now. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
32 minutes ago
- New York Times
With Trump's Policy Bill Teetering, Johnson Is in a Familiar Pickle
Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday found himself in a familiar pickle: teetering on the edge of failure as he worked to win over the regular holdouts in his party — and ultimately relying on President Trump himself to push legislation over the finish line to deliver his agenda. In the past, this formula has worked for Mr. Johnson. He has used it to clear multiple steep hurdles despite his inexperience and the lack of trust he inspires in some rank-and-file Republicans who privately believe he is in over his head. In Mr. Johnson's deeply divided Republican Conference, the margins are always too slim, the bill is always teetering on the brink of death, there is always more trouble looming for the next step of the process and mini-rebellions are always flaring up. Quashing them often involves sessions at the White House, where Mr. Trump plays the magnanimous host, sometimes offering photographs in the Oval Office or signing merch, to seal the deal. That was the case on Wednesday, as Mr. Johnson worked to put down multiple revolts in his party and bring the G.O.P.'s marquee legislation slashing taxes and social safety net programs to the floor for a final vote. 'This whole process has relied on a sense of inevitability that this will get done, no matter how steep the hill,' said Brendan Buck, a former top adviser to two Republican House speakers, John A. Boehner and Paul D. Ryan. 'And this will get done, someway, somehow. And when it does, Mike Johnson will deserve all the credit in the world for keeping an even keel, and Donald Trump will deserve all the credit for being the muscle standing over the speaker's shoulder.' Mr. Trump has been the muscle, but also the flatterer. That method has yielded favorable results. 'It's cool that the president knows my first name, I dig that,' Representative Tim Burchett, a hard-line Republican from Tennessee, said in March, just before he caved and voted for Mr. Trump's budget plan that he had originally opposed. On Wednesday, Mr. Burchett, one of many ultraconservatives raising concerns about giving final approval to the domestic policy bill, seemed giddy in a video he posted on social media after leaving yet another meeting with Mr. Trump. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
39 minutes ago
- New York Times
What's in Our Queue? ‘Face in the Crowd' and More
I'm a White House correspondent. I spend a lot of time and psychic energy reporting on the daily convulsions in Washington. I think it's good to unplug from the warp-speed news cycle from time to time, to let my mind wander to faraway places and the past. It helps → Elia Kazan's 1957 movie about another charismatic loudmouth who whips up a populist furor and rides it all the way to the pinnacle of power is another thing worth revisiting. It's a movie about mass media as much as about politics. I finally read this most famous of Russian novels and loved it for its cynical, florid absurdism, and most of all for the chapter on Satan's grand ball. The writing is so over the top and the guest list so wicked, it reminded me almost of Tom Wolfe describing a 1980s Park Avenue dinner party. This comprehensive, compulsively watchable docuseries about what happened after 9/11 features original interviews from big players in the Bush administration and beyond who played pivotal, often disastrous, roles in those years leading up to these wars we've only just disentangled ourselves from. I recently read for the first time Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning opus of a novel based on Huey Long, a.k.a the Kingfish, a.k.a the Dictator of Louisiana. It's such a dark, riveting tale of politics, power, the press, populism and elites, and I love the way he writes about the land itself. It's all sulfuric atmospherics. This masterpiece from 1969 unravels what life was like in one small town in France that collaborated with the Nazis. It's more than four hours, but gets better as it goes — the sort of thing you put on on a gloomy Sunday when you want to put your phone in the other room and really get lost in something.
