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Apart from journalists assigned to review it and a book editor who considered publishing it, I have yet to meet anyone who has read, or is reading, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, the phenomenal new biography of the former president by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David J. Garrow. Although the book made No. 14 on the New York Times best-seller listno mean featit stayed there just one week. This is a little surprising, because Rising Star has got to be one of the most impressive and important books of the year. Its a masterwork of historical and journalistic research, Robert Caro-like in its exhaustiveness, and easily the most authoritative account of Obamas pre-presidential life weve seen or are likely ever to see. Its also a terrific read.

Garrows research alone makes his book essential for anyone who wants to understand our recently departed president. Early headlines pounced on his discovery of, and interviews with, a previously unknown Obama girlfriend: Sheila Miyoshi Jager. Now a professor at Oberlin College, Jager was a graduate student in anthropology (just like Obamas mother) when she lived with Obama in his community organizing days. He proposed marriage to her and even continued to see her a bit after he began dating Michelle.

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But the revelations about Jager are just the most sensational of innumerable new and often fascinating details Garrow reveals. He interviewed more than a thousand of Obamas friends and colleagues, and Obama himself for eight hours, and unearthed documents from every stage of the presidents life: his undergraduate poetry and his law school exams, an unpublished policy manuscript he co-wrote, his evaluations as a professor at the University of Chicago, his annual tax payments to the IRS, an opposition-research dossier from his 2004 U.S. Senate primary campaign, letters he wrote to his most serious girlfriends and even the diaries they kept of their years with him, including frank (though not lurid) accounts of sex. Whats more, Garrows meticulous reconstructions of Obamas formative years in Chicago organizing and of his political education as a state senator are unparalleled. Its a stunning and indispensable work of history.

So why isnt the book on everyones nightstand? No doubt some readers have been deterred by its formidable length; at 1,460 pages, 1,078 of them narrative text, its not so much a doorstop as a nightstand itself. But some would-be readers have mentioned to me a prominent pre-publication dismissal by the dean of book reviewers, the New York Times Michiko Kakutani, who trashed Rising Star (in her lead paragraph no less), as a dreary slog of a read bloated, tedious andgiven its highly intemperate epilogueill-considered. Four days later, a caustic viral tweet by the Washington Posts David Maraniss (a Pulitzer-winner in his own right whose admirablethough brieferBarack Obama: The Story Garrows volume effectively supersedes), probably scared off more readers: Will say this once only. David Garrow, author of new Obama bio, was vile, undercutting, ignoble competitor unlike any Ive encountered. Maraniss, whom I know a bit, is a decent and generous man; he doesnt lash out lightly.

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No question, Garrows jabs at his rivals, especially the two other Davids whove authored major Obama biographies (Maraniss and Remnick), are unnecessarily sharp, and probably altogether unnecessary. Rising Star quotes from the negative or mixed reviews those writers books received and folds in some cutting asides for good measure: Jager tells Garrow shes glad to hear from a first-rate historian (that would be Garrow) instead of a journalist; elsewhere, Garrow bemoans that scores of journalists looked into Obamas high school years and yet no more than two would take the trouble to even telephone, never mind visit, the only other black male student at Punahou, the academy he attended. Garrow also subtly drops in mentions of his own previous books, touting their appearance, for example, in the footnotes of the never-published manuscript that Obama wrote with his law school friend Rob Fisher. This coy self-referencing is more wry than grandiose, but it surely didnt charm adversely inclined reviewers. (Garrow, I hasten to add, is often magnanimous, too; throughout Rising Star he praises many writers whose books and articles he finds illuminating.)

A young Barack Obama stands amid shelves of books at Harvard Law School. | Getty Images

More notable than the digs at his competitors are the gratuitous and even petty swipes at Obama himself. Garrow notes, for example, that while Obama was on his modest book tour for Dreams from My Father, his celebrated 1995 memoir, the future president mispronounced W. E. B. DuBoiss surname, wrongly using a French enunciation in one interview. He tells us, too, that the letters Obama sent as a state senator to Illinois housing officials on behalf of the shady real estate developer Tony Rezko were grammatically incorrect. But who among us hasnt split the occasional infinitive? Even Rising Staras fluidly, briskly and engagingly written as it iscontains in its pages a dangling modifier, a misplaced apostrophe and impact used as a verb.

The gotcha tone is most pronounced when Garrow compares his research to Obamas recollections of his own life, which are continually exposed as incomplete, exaggerated or inaccurate. In Dreams and in other retrospective accounts of his past, Garrow finds, Obama overstated his facility in learning Indonesian, misrecalled a disturbing magazine article he read as a kid about a black man bleaching his skin, inflated his own importance to the Punahou basketball team, wrongly described himself as a bad boy during his teens, mischaracterized his post-collegiate work for the New York Public Interest Research Group and fudged or misstated the record in countless other ways.

Garrow seems to take pleasure in catching Obama in these mistakes, and I suspect that Rising Stars critics were put off by his manifest skepticism about the Obama legend. Obama, after all, still has his cheering gallery. In the last year of his presidency, media coverage displayed much of the same solicitous protectiveness toward him that was rampant during the 2008 campaign and never quite disappeared, a sense that this phenom was somehow different from all other politicians. Many of Obamas long-standing admirers seemed during his valedictory months to want to restore the shining vision of him that reigned in 2008the quasi-messianic figure, the rare authentic voice amid a fallen political world. This image was, of course, a carefully crafted illusion; Garrow quotes Bob Schieffer, the longtime CBS newsman, conceding, with understatement, that maybe we were not skeptical enough about Obamas candidacy. But that sentiment, however common among workaday Washington journalists, was never widely shared among the literati and the intelligentsia.

If Rising Star comes off at times as captious, its because, I think, Garrow is so doggedly determined to get to the real Barack Obama, to peel away the layers of mythologyincluding self-mythologizingthat surround his now-familiar story. As Garrow shrewdly notes, there have been, at least since the uplifting 2004 Democratic convention address that catapulted him to stardom, two Obamas. The public image of who he is is not who he actually is, Fisher, the law school classmate, explained. Or, as Obama himself put it, Theres me, and then theres this character named Barack Obama. Garrows remorselessness in deconstructing the character, the public personaand in seeking instead to recover and present the real, lesser-known Obamais what makes Rising Star such an unforgettable and valuable book. But its also what imbues the biography with its exacting, sometimes censorious tone.

Allison Davis, a Chicago mentor of Obamas, remembered his friend weeping after Malia displayed her new ballet steps. Im never at home, Obama lamented. Theyre growing up and Im missing out. | Getty Images

A recurring theme of Rising Star is the discrepancy between Obama as he was and Obama as he portrayed himself to othersin love letters, in interviews, in Dreams from My Father. Its no scandal that Obama should prettify his life story for public consumption, especially if, as Garrow persuasively argues, he was eyeing a political career when he wrote Dreams. We all chisel a little in our self-presentations, especially politicians. What gives Garrows exposure of Obamas self-fashioning its special frisson is the prevailing image of the president as a squeaky clean, non-political truth-teller. You expect Bill Clintons My Life or George W. Bushs Decision Points to be a self-serving political document. But a lot of people really thought Dreams was something different. When we read, toward the end of Rising Star, that Obama told Oprah Winfrey, The biggest mistake politicians make is being inauthentic, its hard not to appreciate Garrows irony.

Thus, in contrast to Obamas image as a religious man, Garrow tells us that even in Hyde Park he visited Jeremiah Wrights controversial Trinity Church irregularly and, as far as his Chicago friends could see, he did not have a religious bone in his body. Most of us think of Obamas progressive bona fides on social issues like gay rights as beyond reproach, but Garrow documents ever-shifting stands on same-sex marriage, depending on the political moment. During the 2008 campaign, Obama famously defused questions about the domestic terrorist Bill Ayers by calling him a guy who lives in my neighborhood, whos a professor of English in Chicago, who I know, but Garrow shows the relationship to have been closer than the candidate let on. (Obviously no one should hold Obama responsible for Ayers despicable deeds four decades earlier. The real outrage was what Chicago Magazine called the widespread willingness by Chicago intellectual society to disregard the violent pasts of Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, who was the more famous of the pair until 2008.)

Obamas instinct for self-fashioning was evident early in his career. Garrow quotes a young Obama telling his ex-girlfriend, Alex McNear, in a letter that he was one of the promising young men at the financial data analysis firm where he worked after graduating Columbia University in 1983. Without effort, I find I can perform with flawless grace, he wrote to her, patching up their insecurities, smoothing over ruffles among the co-workers. But given his colleagues starkly different memories of himsomeone not interested in other people, really just kind of kept to himself, self-involved, somewhat withdrawnGarrow concludes that Obamas self-rendering to Alex beggared belief.

Garrow likewise finds that Obama consistently denied the strength of his addiction to nicotine. Numerous acquaintances over the years volunteered to Garrow vivid memories of Obamas compulsive smoking. In college, he was remembered as having burned through multiple packs a day, and he did so again in later years when under stress. In law school, he merrily puffed away out in front of Gannett House, home to the Harvard Law Review, because a city ordinance prohibited it inside. In Chicago, he savored a ritual smoke after a workout, a basketball game or a round of golf. He kept a pack in his bag as a law professor (when students saw it, people were like, Ugh!, shattered, a student recalled). And he still enjoyed a lot of cigarettes later in life, until he gave up smoking altogether around 2011. Of course, Obamas downplaying of his smoking is hardly grounds for consternation, and perhaps little different from Franklin Roosevelts attempts to minimize the effects of his polio. But its one more discrepancy between the public and private Obamas, and a symbolic one.

Notwithstanding its persistent skepticism toward Obamas self-portraiture, Garrows book is far from unrelievedly negative. He also fact-checks right-wing biographies like Stanley Kurtzs Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, dispensing with their caricature of Obama as a flaming socialist, and, as a political liberal Garrow seems to have no ideological quarrel per se with his subject. In some instances, his research shows Obama in a decidedly favorable light. He makes clear for the first time just how absent Obama was from his daughters upbringingstuck down in Springfield or on the campaign trail or in Washingtonand how deeply this absence saddened him. A man named Allison Davis, a Chicago mentor of Obamas, remembered his friend weeping after Malia displayed her new ballet steps. Im never at home, Obama lamented. Theyre growing up and Im missing out.

The young candidate for U.S. Senate arrived on the national stage after an electrifying keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. | Getty Images

Garrows debunking goes into high gear when he gets to Dreams from My Father. That book, whose lyrical style and affecting narrative seduced many voters after its 2004 reissue, still furnishes the version of Obamas early life that most people subscribe to. Even though Obama was candid about having altered key details of his life in Dreams, including creating composite characters, the book was nonetheless marketed as a memoir and autobiography and taken by readers to be a reliable account of his life. Garrow, however, dwells on the substantial amount of invented material in Dreams and ultimately pronounces it, maybe too severely, historical fiction. He also discloses that Fisher, Obamas Harvard Law School buddy and frequent collaborator, was considerably more involved in conceiving and shaping the book than has been previously known. As Brent Staples remarked in his Sunday New York Times review, Rising Star is clearly intended to break the 44th presidents monopoly on his personal narrative that he established with Dreams. It certainly does so.

The unreliability of Dreams is of more than passing interest to Garrow. According to Jager, Obama crossed a line in how he portrayed her, abusing his literary license. Along with his previous girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, and perhaps others, she was folded into a composite character, left unnamed. Dreams described the character as white even though, Jager told Garrow, I dont consider myself exclusively white, as I am half Asian. As Jager saw it, theirs wasnt a relationship between a black man and a white woman but one between two interracial Americans. Barack is as white as I am, she told Garrow.

Jager also told Garrow that the scene, in Dreams, that precipitated their breakupa bitter row about race after they saw a play by an African-American playwrightmisrepresented the issues that actually divided them. In Jagers telling, the searing fight took place after they saw an exhibit at Chicagos Spertus Institute about the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial, a very different context. Where Dreams portrayed the lovers rift as at bottom a function of racial difference, Jager, while acknowledging the racial component of their strains, insisted she was mainly upset that day that Obama, in her recollection, was less than unequivocal in condemning black racism; it was at a moment when the overt anti-Semitism of Steve Cokely, a black mayoral aide in Chicago, had become a cause clbre in local politics. To Jager, what doomed their future together was Obamas incorrigible realism, his perpetual readiness to accept and work within given realitiesa trait she saw developing in the course of their relationshipwhile she wanted him to display moral courage.

The lovers disparate accounts may be attributable to differences in memory or even in contemporaneous perception. Still, Jagers observation about Obamas pragmatismratified by so many of Garrows brigades of intervieweesgives Rising Star its other abiding and unifying theme. Eventually, it leads Garrow to his damning judgment about Obama, much quoted, that the vessel was hollow at its core. That verdict is too harsh; indeed, some of those who were left cold by Obamas often vapid hope-and-change rhetoric of 2008 later welcomed signs of his hardheadedness and calculation as proof that he knew how to play politics. But Garrow is persuasive in highlighting this pragmatism as a key element in Obamas bildungsroman.

While in law school, Obama merrily puffed away out in front of Gannett House, home to the Harvard Law Review, because a city ordinance prohibited smoking inside. | Obama campaign

On the whole, Rising Star delivers what its subtitle promises: a new account of the making of Barack Obamaand in two senses of the word. As noted, Garrow unpacks the creation of Obamas public image as we know it today. But he also helps us see the making of the other Obama, the forging of Obamas inner character, and in particular the emergence of the will and drive that he developed in these years, mainly in his time as a community organizer. Obama in this period began to speak to Jager, and occasionally others, of his destinywhich was a reason he gave Jager as to why they couldnt marry. (Jager never says that Obama concluded that he had to marry an African-American woman for his political advancement, but their mutual friend Asif Agha told Garrow, He said that, exactly. Thats what he told me.) What is clear is that around this time, Obama came to feel that he had a calling for greatness, and that sense of destiny transformed him, nourishing his pragmatism and fueling his ambition.

Garrows Obama may be less impeccable than the demigod of popular lore, but he is also more complex, more interesting and, finally, more human. Obamas charisma and sense of destiny, recorded so carefully by Garrow through the words of his interviewees, were vital qualities in his sudden rise to the pinnacle of power, and to win the presidency next time, Democrats will need to find someone else with a touch of the magic he conjured in 2008. But Garrow is a historian, not a political consultant, the historians job isnt to bask in the radiance of charismatic individuals. It is, rather, to limn the complexity that makes them mortal.

Interestingly, Obama himself once addressed the perils for a movement of pinning its political hopes on a single magnetic leader. After leaving Chicago for Harvard, he was invited back to reflect on his community organizing experiences in a roundtable discussion in September 1989. To the jeers of some of the assembled, he said that the election of Chicagos mayor Harold Washingtonstill beloved in his circleshad raised hopes for grand changes. But in the end, he added ruefully, Washington was an essentially charismatic leader whose reforms hadnt gone deep enough to leave a lasting tangible legacy after his untimely death or to hold together his political base once he was gone. Almost alone among the discussants, Obama seemed to understand that to succeed in politicsthe art of who gets what, when and howit was necessary to do more.

David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, is a contributing editor at Politico Magazine. His most recent book is Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency.

Excerpt from:
Why So Many Critics Hate the New Obama Biography

Since leaving the White House in January, Barack and Michelle Obama have been living their best lives kitesurfing in the Caribbean , yachting with Oprah and eating gelato in Italy . But even with these luxurious vacations, it seems like what they're most enjoying is spending more quality time with each other and their two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

In honor of Father's Day, the two shared a heartwarming online exchange celebrating their adorable family. Michelle kicked things off Sunday by posting a throwback photo of her husband with a much younger Malia and Sasha. "Happy #FathersDay [Barack Obama]," she captioned the picture. "Our daughters may be older and taller now, but theyll always be your little girls. We love you."

Obama then retweeted his wife's message with a sweet sentiment of his own. "Of all that I've done in my life, I'm most proud to be Sasha and Malia's dad," he wrote. "To all those lucky enough to be a dad, Happy Father's Day!"

Read more from the original source:
Father's Day 2017: Barack, Michelle Obama Message Exchange ...

Despite the Donald Trumps claim, the Obama policy will be revised rather than overturned entirely. Photograph: Cristobal Herrera/EPA

Donald Trump has announced a partial rollback of his predecessors rapprochement with Cuba, tightening travel and trade rules on the grounds of what he said was a worsening human rights situation on the island.

The new rules will stop individual travel to Cuba and seek to restrict the flow of payments to the many Cuban companies owned by the regimes security forces. It will not fully reverse the steps taken by Barack Obama in 2015 to ease the half-century policy of isolating Cuba.

The outcome of the last administrations executive order has been only more oppression, Trump told an audience of Cuban Americans in Miami.

I am canceling the last administrations completely one-sided deal with Cuba. I am announcing a new policy, just as I promised in the campaign.

Despite the presidents claim, the Obama policy will be revised rather than overturned entirely. Diplomatic relations will remain in place and commercial air and sea links will be exempted from the new restrictions.

But the new measures are likely to have dampening effect on US nationals traveling to Cuba. Although a ban on tourism remained in place under the Obama administration, White House officials said many Americans skirted the rules by declared their trip to Cuba fell under one of the allowed categories, such as education or professional research.

When the Trump regulations are enacted, only travel with an organised group will be allowed and the purpose of the trip will be more strictly policed. Cuban Americans will still be able visit and send remittances to their families.

The requirement is that individuals who are going to Cuba actually engage in a full-time schedule of activities designed to enhance their interaction with the Cuban people and consistent with the policy objectives of ensuring that the money goes to the Cuban people and not to the military and intelligence services, a senior administration official said.

The new policy, when implemented by the treasury department, will restrict US business with companies linked to the army and intelligence organisations, most importantly the army-owned Grupo de Administracin Empresarial (GAESA), which has wide holdings across the Cuban economy, including most of the tourist hotels.

Trump made his announcement in the heart of the Cuban exile community at a theatre named after Manuel Artime a leader of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, an ill-fated CIA-backed attempt at counter-revolution.

We wont allow US dollars to prop up military monopolies that exploit and abuse the people of Cuba, Trump said. We enforce the ban on tourism. We will enforce the embargo... My action today bypasses the military and the government to help the Cuban people themselves form businesses and pursue much better lives

Trump reeled of a litany of the Castro regimes offenses, stretching back through the cold war to the 1962 missile crisis, and the 1996 shooting down of two planes piloted by anti-Castro activists, Brothers to the Rescue. The president told the crowd: You have heard the chilling cries of loved ones or the cracks of firing squads piercing through the ocean breeze not a good sound.

Trump was cheered by the crowd in the Miami theatre, many of them veteran anti-Castro activists.

The message was very clear, said Humberto Daz Arguelles, president of the Bay of Pigs veterans association, the survivors of the paramilitary Brigade 2506 who took part in the invasion attempt.

President Trump is one of very few presidents who has really absorbed the feeling of the Cuban situation, he knows what were about and it touched him, said Arguelles, who had a front-row seat at the Manuel Artime theatre.

Weve been waiting for that freedom for more than 58 years, he added. Its about time. The Castros have had a lot of give and take and nobody put a stop to them.

But for younger generations of Cuban-Americans who favoured the Obama-era policy of engagement, Trumps declaration was disappointing.

The window that opened, we were so excited about, said Alexa Ferrer, 21, a Miami-born, third-generation Cuban whose grandfather was a member of Brigade 2506. Now Im very nervous. What worries me is that shutting things down again will allow for another world power to come in and have influence [in Cuba].

The president was accompanied to Miami by Florida congressman Mario Daz-Balart and Senator Marco Rubio, who compared Trumps visit to Miami with Obamas breakthrough trip to Havana in March 2016.

A year and a half ago an American president landed in Havana and outstretched his hand to the regime. Today a new president reaches out his hand to the people of Cuba, Rubio told the crowd before Trump spoke.

Rubio was a Trump rival in the Republican primaries. But his vote and voice are now critical in the delicately balanced Senate especially on the Senate intelligence committee, which is currently conducting hearings on the Trump campaigns links with Moscow.

As always, US policy is predominantly responding to internal US politics, said Jos Buscaglia, a Cuba expert at Northeastern University. This is for Marco Rubio and for Diaz-Balart basically exchanging their votes that Trump needs for a symbolic stance towards Cuba that will please their hardline funders.

The speech was not broadcast in Cuba, but some residents of Havana expressed disappointment that the two countries were heading for a renewed period of frosty relations.

It hurts to be going backwards. To roll back the engagement will only manage to isolate us from the world, Havana resident Marta Deus told Reuters We need clients, business, we need the economy to move and by isolating Cuba, they will only manage to hurt many Cuban families and force companies to close.

By isolating Cuba, they will only manage to hurt many Cuban families and force companies to close

Esteban Morales, a member of the Cuban Communist Party and expert on relations with the United States, downplayed the significance of Trumps announcement.

This is no big change from the Obama policy, he said. There may be a little effect on immigration and business, but diplomatic relations with continue. That is the main part of the agreement [with Obama].

Camilo Guevara the eldest son of one of the Cuban revolutions most famous figures said the speech reversed some of the progress made by the Obama administration.

We expected a step back, but this went further. Trumps melodramatic, silly and blatantly mendacious speech was like something out of a Hollywood parody, he said.

Of course, it is much better to live in a relaxed atmosphere, of protocols and affability even if they are the result of opportunism, than in an aggressive and uncertain atmosphere. But we are accustomed to live under these dire circumstances and most importantly to survive amid them.

Democracy campaigner Rosa Mara Pay urged Trump to go further by supporting a plebiscite that would allow people on the island to decide their own future.

Only the Cuban citizens are capable of putting an end to totalitarianism in Cuba, so that the transition to democracy can really begin in Cuba, but we also need international solidarity. Thats way beyond any intellectual debate about the US embargo and/or the US engagement with the Cuban dictatorship, she told the Guardian.

Trump cited human rights concerns as the primary driver in tightening restrictions on Cuba, but the president has prided himself on his warm relations with some of the worlds most autocratic regimes, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and human rights violators like Phillippines president Rodrigo Duterte.

Justin Amash, a Republican congressman from Michigan, tweeted that Trumps Cuba policy is not about human rights or security. If it were, then why is he dancing with the Saudis and selling them weapons?

National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton, denied that the approach was inconsistent. Anton said that Trump approaches the question in different ways depending on relationship with each country, but added his concern is consistent no matter what the country.

Its true that the president approaches the question of human rights in different ways, depending on the relationship the United States has with a particular country, Anton said. So he takes a different tack depending on the nature of the relationship between the two countries, but his concern is consistent no matter what the country.

The administrations critics also pointed out Trumps professed support for human rights in Cuba was not reflected in his budget priorities.

Just last month, the presidents budget proposed zeroing out funding for programs that support human rights and democracy in Cuba, Democratic senator Ben Cardin said.

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Trump keeps rolling back Obama legacy by tightening travel ...

A ruling that granted graduate students at private universities a federally protected right to unionize.

Rules allowing union elections to proceed on a faster timetable. Many business groups refer to the current regulations as ambush rules, complaining that employers no longer have sufficient time to make the case to workers against unionizing.

On Monday, the White House announced the nomination of Marvin Kaplan, a lawyer serving on a federal health and safety commission, to one of two vacant seats on the board, which currently has a 2-to-1 Democratic majority. A second nomination is expected shortly.

Supporters said the nominations would restore a state of normality to the agency. I think the Obama labor board was extremely partisan and changed a lot of precedent, said Matthew Haller, senior vice president for communications and public affairs at the International Franchise Association. We are hopeful that the board will return to its traditional role as a neutral arbiter, balancing the interests of employers, employees and unions, and not just tipping the scales in favor of collective bargaining.

Mr. Haller cited a report produced by a coalition of which his organization is a member arguing that the board under President Barack Obama operated on a biblical scale, upending a series of precedents whose durations sum to more than 4,000 years.

Skeptics expressed concern that the nominations would undermine the labor rights of the rising proportion of the work force that is nonunionized, in addition to those who are union members.

The N.L.R.B. is a really important agency for unorganized workers, said Catherine Ruckelshaus, general counsel of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group. A lot of the workers we work on behalf of benefit from decisions the board has made under the Obama N.L.R.B., which are on the chopping block.

The Senate might not consider Mr. Kaplans nomination until the fall.

Mr. Kaplan has spent a large portion of his career serving in political roles, including a stint as a counsel for Republicans on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The committee held hearings during his tenure scrutinizing prominent N.L.R.B. actions in which the witnesses skewed toward business representatives and other skeptics.

Mr. Kaplan also had a hand in legislation hemming in the labor board, most prominently the Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act, which would have effectively undone the boards rules expediting election timetables. The legislation has yet to pass Congress.

I found him to be very thoughtful and careful, said Marshall B. Babson, who was a Democratic member of the board under President Ronald Reagan, and has worked for years as a management-side lawyer and interacted with Mr. Kaplan. But he was in a much more partisan role in that position and he made no bones about it.

Mr. Babson pointed out, however, that it is hardly unprecedented for a congressional aide to ascend to the board.

Whatever Mr. Kaplans appetite for politics, his record appears to place him in the mainstream of Republican labor policy. If Mr. Trumps second board nominee fits the same profile and the management-side lawyer said to be in line for the position, William J. Emanuel, appears to do so they would almost certainly join with the boards current Republican member, Philip A. Miscimarra, to undo crucial portions of the boards legacy from the Obama era.

Arguably the most prominent among them is Browning-Ferris, the 2015 ruling broadening the boards so-called joint employer doctrine. Under this approach, a company can be considered an employer of a worker employed by another firm, like a contractor or franchisee, even if the original company does not directly control working conditions there.

For example, scheduling software that affects the length and duration of workers shifts could be an indication of joint employment, even if the parent company doesnt schedule workers directly. The previous doctrine held that only direct control of working conditions made the parent company a joint employer.

The decision could have made it easier for workers to unionize and to bargain with the parent company, which, under the previous doctrine, could have simply cut ties with a contractor if workers employed by it were on the verge of unionizing.

Business groups have complained that the decision radically altered the joint employer concept and essentially rewrote the relevant portion of the National Labor Relations Act, something only Congress has the authority to do.

Defenders of the board decision argue that it simply updated the act to reflect the realities of the contemporary workplace, where more employers rely on contractors and temporary workers.

The same logic applies, they say, to a variety of other board decisions, like one allowing workers to use an employers email network to discuss organizing, and another that allows a union to represent employees who work at a company through a contractor or temp agency in the same group as the companys permanent employees without first winning approval from both companies, an often insurmountable hurdle. Republican politicians and management-side lawyers have largely opposed both decisions, and the boards Republican members dissented in all three cases.

The question is, on the major issues of the day, can we update the act to take account of changes in the labor market? said Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor law at Harvard Law School and a former union lawyer. These guys are on one side; the Obama board was on the other. Well see a profound change in direction of labor law.

See more here:
Trump Takes Steps to Undo Obama Legacy on Labor - New York Times

The most common Obama-to-Trump voter is a white American who wants government intervention in the economy but holds negative views toward minorities.

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Menahem Kahana/Getty Images and Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.

It has been more than seven months since a plurality of Americans put Donald Trump into the White House, and we are still grappling with how it happened. How should we understand the forces that gave Trump the election? A new data set moves us closer to an answer: in particular how to understand the voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012 only to back Trump in 2016. Its lessons have far-ranging implications not only for diagnosing Trumps specific appeal but for whether such an appeal would hold in 2020.

Jamelle Bouie isSlates chief political correspondent.

Two reports from the Voter Study Group, which conducted the survey, give a detailed look at these vote switchers. (You can learn more about the nonprofit survey herewhats key is that its longitudinal nature allows researchers to draw deeper conclusions on the issues that motivated voters.) One, from George Washington University political scientist John Sides, looks at racial, religious, and cultural divides and how they shaped the 2016 election. The other, from political scientist Lee Drutman, takes a detailed look at those divides and places them in the context of the Democratic and Republican parties. Starting in different places, both Sides and Drutman conclude that questions of race, religion, and American identity were critical to the 2016 outcome, especially among Obama-to-Trump voters. Thats no surprise. Whats interesting is what the importance of identity says about Donald Trumps campaign. Put simply, we tend to think that Trump succeeded despite his disorganized and haphazard campaign. But the Voter Study results indicate that Trump was a canny entrepreneur who perceived a need in the political marketplace and met it.

Whether or not they identified with a party, most people who voted in the 2016 election were partisans. Approximately 83 percent of voters were consistent partisans, writes Sides. In other words, they voted for the same major party in both 2012 and 2016. This is the typical case. But about 9 percent of Donald Trumps voters had backed Obama in the previous election, equivalent to roughly 4 percent of the electorate. Why? The popular answer, or at least the current conventional wisdom, is economic dislocation. But Sides is skeptical. He concludes that economic issues mattered, but no more or less than they did in the 2012 election. The same goes for views on entitlement programs, on trade, and on the state of the economy in general. The weight of those issues on vote choice was constant between the two election years.

What changed was the importance of identity. Attitudes toward immigration, toward black Americans, and toward Muslims were more correlated with voting Republican in 2016 than in 2012. Put a little differently, Barack Obama won re-election with the support of voters who held negative views toward blacks, Muslims, and immigrants. Sides notes that 37 percent of white Obama voters had a less favorable attitude toward Muslims while 33 percent said illegal immigrants were mostly a drain. A separate analysis made late last year by political scientist Michael Tesler (and unrelated to the Voter Study Group) finds that 20 to 25 percent of white Obama voters opposed interracial dating, a decent enough proxy for racial prejudice. Not all of this occurred during the 2016 campaigna number of white Obama voters shifted to the GOP in the years following his re-election. Nonetheless, writes Sides, the political consequences in 2016 were the same: a segment of white Democrats with less favorable attitudes toward these ethnic and religious minorities were potential or actual Trump voters.

What caused this shift in the salience of race and identity (beyond the election of a black man in 2008) and augured an increase in racial polarization? You might point to the explosion of protests against police violence between 2012 and 2016, and the emergence of Black Lives Matter, events that sharply polarized Americans along racial lines. And in the middle of 2015 arrived the Trump campaign, a racially demagogic movement that blamed Americas perceived decline on immigrants, Muslims, and foreign leaders, and which had its roots in Donald Trumps effort to delegitimize Barack Obama as a noncitizen, or at least not native-born.

But the fact that Trump primed and activated racial views doesnt immediately mean those white Obama voters acted on them. Which brings us to Drutmans analysis of the Voter Study Group.

For the first time in recent memory, populist voters didnt have to prioritize their values.

Drutman plots the electorate across two axesone measuring economic views, the other measuring views on identityto build a political typology with four categories: liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and populists. Liberals, the largest single group, hold left or left-leaning views on economics and identity. Libertarians, the smallest group, hold right-leaning views on economics but leftward beliefs on identity. Conservatives are third largest, with right-leaning views on both indices, while populiststhe second largest groupare the inverse of libertarians, holding liberal economic views and conservative beliefs on identity.

Most populists, according to Drutman, were already Republican voters in the 2012 election, prizing their conservative views on identity over liberal economic policies. A minority, about 28 percent, backed Obama. But four years later, Clinton could only hold on to 6 in 10 of those populist voters who had voted for Obama. Most Democratic defectors were populists, and their views reflect it: They hold strong positive feelings toward Social Security and Medicare, like Obama voters, but are negative toward black people and Muslims, and see themselves as in decline.

This is a portrait of the most common Obama-to-Trump voter: a white American who wants government intervention in the economy but holds negative, even prejudiced, views toward racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. In 2012, these voters seemed to value economic liberalism over a white, Christian identity and backed Obama over Romney. By 2016, the reverse was true: Thanks to Trumps campaign, and the events of the preceding years, they valued that identity over economic assistance. In which case, you can draw an easy conclusion about the Clinton campaigneven accounting for factors like misogyny and James Comeys twin interventions, it failed to articulate an economic message strong enough to keep those populists in the fold and left them vulnerable to Trumps identity appeal. You could then make a firm case for the future: To win them back, you need liberal economic populism.

But theres another way to read the data. Usually, voters in the political crosscurrents, like Drutmans populists, have to prioritize one of their chief concerns. Thats what happened in 2008 and 2012. Yes, they held negative views toward nonwhites and other groups, but neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney ran on explicit prejudice. Instead, it was a standard left vs. right ideological contest, and a substantial minority of populists sided with Obama because of the economy. That wasnt true of the race with Trump. He tied his racial demagoguery to a liberal-sounding economic message, activating racial resentment while promising jobs, entitlements, and assistance. When Hillary Clinton proposed a $600 billion infrastructure plan, he floated a $1 trillion one. When Clinton pledged help on health care, Trump did the same, promising a cheaper, better system. Untethered from the conservative movement, Trump had space to move left on the economy, and he did just that. For the first time in recent memory, populist voters didnt have to prioritize their values. They could choose liberal economic views and white identity, and they did.

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"He tied his racial demagoguery to a liberal-sounding economic message, activating racial resentment while promising jobs, entitlements, and assistance." This. Trump ran as a weird combination of a WWE goon and FDR. More...

This fact makes it difficult to post hypotheticals about the election. Its possible a more populist campaign would have prevented those Obama defections. But a Trump who blurs differences on economic policy is a Trump who might still win a decisive majority of those voters who want a welfare state for whites. In the context of 2016, that blend of racial antagonism and economic populism may have been decisive. (The other option, it should be said, is that with a more populist presidential campaign, Democrats might have activated lower-turnout liberal voters, thus making Obama-to-Trump voters irrelevant.)

The good news for Democratsand the even better news for the populist leftis that unless Trump makes a swift break with the Republican Party, his combined economic and identity-based appeal was a one-time affair. In 2020, if he runs for re-election, Trump will just be a Republican, and while hes certain to prime racial resentment, hell also have a conservative economic record to defend. In other words, it will be harder to muddy the waters. And if its harder to muddy the waters, then its easier for Democratsand especially a Democratic populistto draw the distinctions that win votes.

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Why Obama Voters Defected - Slate Magazine