They’re measures of something other than leadership potential.

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Wednesday, July 31, 2019

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If you missed last week’s newsletter, you can read it here.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren after the debate on Tuesday. Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

These Democratic debates are awful.

I don’t mean the caliber of the candidates, the moderators’ questions or the sparring, which is inevitable and just. I mean the superficiality. You can’t have serious policy discussions in 60-second riffs and 30-second ripostes. You can’t demonstrate any agility of intellect or nuance of argument.

You can only perform, at least when there are 10 candidates jostling for time and desperate for viral moments. And while performance is part of leadership in general and the presidency in particular, it’s not nearly the whole of it. So I don’t think what we saw last night in Detroit and what we’ll see tonight on the same stage are all that helpful in picking the best successor to Donald Trump. And that’s a shame.

But these debates may suggest the best combatant for Trump, and that’s no small thing.

I know that Bernie Sanders often does better than Elizabeth Warren when Americans are polled about a hypothetical general-election contest between Trump and one of them, but I can’t escape the feeling that she’d be the stronger contender, even factoring in the sexism of many voters. As I wrote in my appraisal of their debate last night, she seems to be sharper and fresher, and she’s plenty pugilistic without seeming to yell the way he does. Sanders has only one gear. She maybe has two or three.

As I also wrote, I worry about either one of them as the nominee. But who else? Not Beto O’Rourke, not anymore: Whatever burned bright and then dimmed in him doesn’t seem to be coming back. He’s not the candidate I observed in Texas last year, when he impressed me. The bigger stage has made him smaller. It’s fascinating how frequently that happens in American politics — and how often those of us in the media don't see it coming.

I continue to be as wowed by Pete Buttigieg’s good sense, poise and verbal dexterity as I am concerned about the vulnerabilities of his age and experience. I keep waiting for one of the impressively accomplished moderates — Amy Klobuchar, say, or John Hickenlooper — to have a moment that changes their currently unpromising trajectories. That moment didn’t come for either of them last night.

But neither of them is a performer, and that’s what these debates ask politicians to be. In return those politicians practice and practice and come to the stage with certain arguments and details drilled into them. Did you catch that Klobuchar is from the Midwest? She said or alluded to it repeatedly. Did you catch that Hickenlooper governed a purple state? Same deal.

Even Buttigieg betrayed a strategic determination to turn every discussion around to how long everyone else on the stage had been around and what a fresh-faced arrival on the scene he was. I got the message long before he stopped bludgeoning me with it.

Pay attention to these debates, absolutely. They say something about candidates’ preparation, talent for succinctness, composure and charisma. But don’t let these debates be the deciding factor. They’re theater before they’re anything else. And governing is less flashy and more complicated than that.

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Robert Mueller’s Loudest Alarm

Robert Mueller. Tom Brenner/Reuters

Speaking of performance, much has been made of Robert Mueller’s reticence — of how badly he didn’t want to talk. Of how little he tried to say. Of his disinclination to have the final word on President Trump. Of his desperation to step away from the spotlight.

As I’ve written repeatedly, he was so intent on being apolitical and nonpartisan that he became accidentally and effectively political and partisan, speaking in sentences so hedged and syntax so gummy that they obscured the damning substance of what he discovered about the behavior of Trump and his campaign. And so Trump caught a break.

But there was one message that Mueller, both in his report and in his halting testimony, clearly did want to deliver — without equivocation or qualification, in a manner as lucid as possible. It just wasn’t the message that most of his American audience, including many politicians and most pundits, found sexiest.

If you read Mueller closely and listened to him carefully, he was saying that to get too wrapped up in Trump is to miss the bigger picture: A foreign actor — Russia, in this instance — interfered creatively, persistently and expansively in one of our elections. It exploited the dynamics of the digital age and the tools of social media. And there’s no reason to believe that this won’t happen again.“They’re doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign,” he said when he testified on Capitol Hill a week ago today. His uncharacteristic bluntness reflected the depth of his worry.

“We have underplayed to a certain extent that aspect of our investigation,” he said, and I don’t think he meant himself and his team as much as he did America. The first of his 448-page report’s two volumes didn’t look at Trump per se; it was an exposé of Russian interference that mirrored and added to some of the excellent journalism on the subject. That made narrative sense, but it was also his and his team’s “living message to those who come after us,” he testified. He pleaded that politicians not “let this problem continue to linger as it has over so many years.” He prophesied that other foreign actors would emulate and build on Russia’s attempts to disrupt and corrupt American elections.

The very next day, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the first volume of its bipartisan report on election interference in 2016, and it showed that “election systems in all 50 states were targeted by Russia,” as David Sanger and Catie Edmondson wrote in The Times. The committee noted “an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure,” meaning that Russia was involved in a kind of electoral cyber-terrorism, and that while there was no evidence that any votes were actually changed, “Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data” in the Illinois voter database. That’s absolutely terrifying.

Except, apparently, to Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s Republican majority leader, who keeps standing in the way of legislation to improve election security. “The Kentucky Republican is, arguably more than any other American, doing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding,” wrote Dana Milbank of The Washington Post last Friday in a column, “Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset,” which instantly became the talk of the town. McConnell’s critics, mimicking Trump’s predilection for nicknames, began referring to the senator as Moscow Mitch, and McConnell took to the Senate floor on Monday to deliver a self-pitying, self-righteous soliloquy about his unjustly wounded honor. McConnell? Honor? Spare me.

He’s the apotheosis of the Republican Party’s rationalizations, accommodations and abject surrender in the Trump era, but this era will pass. Trump will at some point (January 2021, I fervently pray) leave the White House. And what Mueller is exhorting McConnell and everyone else to bear in mind is that the dangers of the digital age will survive him and are here to stay. In fact they’ll metastasize, imperiling Americans’ self-determination and eroding what trust people maintain in a democratic system that’s already plenty flawed.

Why is this issue not center stage? Because too few Americans can see past their investment in what happens personally to Trump. Because they’re too busy defending him or deploring him to pull back and deal with a crisis that should be of concern equally to conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats. Because Trump bedazzles everyone. In that fashion, he blinds everyone, too.

For the Love of Sentences

Beto O’Rourke. Lauren Justice for The New York Times

There is one and maybe only one thing I appreciate about the carnival of American politics right now: It’s the wellspring for some wickedly good writing, not just about Trump but also about his enablers, detractors and would-be rivals. So let’s begin there. Let’s begin, in fact, with O’Rourke.

In the Opinion section of The Times, Mimi Swartz described his feeble performance in his June debate, when Julián Castro wiped the stage with him, writing: “Anyone who conjured the specter of a Trump-O’Rourke race around that time would picture Freddy Krueger moving in on Winnie the Pooh.” Thanks to Tim Palmer Curl of Harlem for bringing my attention to Swartz’s great line.

Thanks to Jim McGlynn of Little Compton, R.I., for noticing and celebrating my colleague Gail Collins’s recent characterization of Lindsey Graham’s transfer of devotion from John McCain to Trump. Gail wrote that it’s “sort of like a lonely teenager who used to pal around with the class rebel switching allegiance to the guy who steals tires off cars in the handicapped parking lot.”

Both Andrea Wittchen of Bethlehem, Penn., and Whit Waterbury of Manhattan singled out the same sentence in my colleague Charles Blow’s most recent examination of Trump’s racism: “The mouth that demeans may not always be attached to the hand that destroys, but they are most assuredly connected in spirit and in spite."

Enough national politics. Let’s go international — to Britain, which is hardly any calmer these days. Boris Johnson just became prime minister, so there have been many appraisals of him, including an excellent one by the British journalist James Butler in The Times. I especially admired the rhythm, parallelism and economy of this: “His personal life is incontinent, his public record inconsequential.” And “incontinent” — what a gorgeously damning word.

Let’s next go local — to New York City and to Robert McFadden’s obituary for Robert Morgenthau, the former Manhattan district attorney, who died a week and a half ago at the age of 99. McFadden wrote that while Morgenthau’s health remained good as he got on in years, “decades of strain in one of the city’s most demanding jobs were apparent in the stooped shoulders and the gaunt face lined with legal decisions.” Lined with legal decisions. So good! David Jaspen of the Bronx and Mohamed Ellozy of Thornton, N.H., made sure that I had seen it and that you could, too.

Finally, Janet Collier of Portland, Ore., directed me to Michael Powell’s coverage of the Tour de France and to an aside in which he appraises his own flawed French. He calls it “a bouillabaisse of nouns and verbs, and conjugations that too rarely align.” That “bouillabaisse” is perfect, suggestive of bedlam and so very French.

Thanks to all of you who sent me your favorite snippets of writing from The Times. Keep ’em coming.

On a Personal Note

NASA

Seldom have I experienced the kind of cognitive dissonance that I did when I traveled recently to the Greek island of Chios to write about an evergreen that grows there and is reputed to have magical curative properties. If you missed the column, you can read it here.

On the one hand, I was elated to be back in a gorgeous country that I love and have come to know well over the years. I was additionally thrilled to have a professional reason — a discrete purpose — for being there.

But I was exploring the history and promise of that evergreen because of my imperiled eyesight. I’m one of scores of people in an F.D.A.-approved clinical trial of a drug made from the evergreen’s resin. So my every step in Chios was a reminder of something sad and scary.

I felt warring tugs of gratitude and worry, worry and gratitude, until I sat down to lunch one day with a photographer who’d been dispatched from Athens to work with me. As each of us asked questions about the other’s life, the subject turned to travel and she mentioned Moscow. Had I ever been there? Yes. Why? I told her the story, which I frequently forget:

I was on assignment for a magazine that wanted me to go through the paces of training to be an astronaut. The magazine had already placed me on one of those super-expensive flights in an emptied-out plane that does these precise parabolas to create conditions of zero gravity for periods of 20 to 30 seconds, during which you float and tumble and swim through the air weightlessly. Act II of the assignment was a visit to Star City, a grim complex in the woods outside Moscow where Russian cosmonauts trained.

Star City has this enormous contraption that was billed then as the world’s largest centrifuge, into which a person — in this case, me! — could be buckled and spun around so that he or she experienced and became accustomed to the crushing multiples of gravity that an astronaut endures.

I remember being strapped tight to a vertical board, like Hannibal Lecter when he’s transported in “The Silence of the Lambs.” I remember a bunch of Russian strangers wheeling the board and me into this capsule. I remember marveling and then quivering at my volitional vulnerability. And I remember the physical pressure of 2 G’s and 3 G’s and then 3.55 G’s. It’s what you feel when your sinuses are profoundly congested, only your entire face, neck and chest are like that.

I also remember the chilled vodka. The Russians gave me several shots of it after they let me out of the capsule and off of that board.

Anyway, I told the Athens photographer all of this and, by the end of it, I realized that worry, anger and sadness about my current challenge are the indulgences of a spoiled brat. I’ve been blessed with so many adventures that some, like Star City, rarely and barely flicker in my memory.

There’s more that I want to do and to lay eyes on. But if I’m slowed down a bit and my senses narrow, well, I’ve already taken in an enormous share of this nutty and astonishing world.

To nominate favorite bits of writing from The Times to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.

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