THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

In the autumn of 1921, the U.S. Army faced a difficult choice. Among four identical, flag-draped caskets—each containing the unidentified remains of an American soldier killed in World War I—only one would be laid to rest at the new Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.It seemed only appropriate that an experienced commissioned officer ought to make the selection. All four men had died in the war and been buried at American cemeteries in France. But when word came that the French military had asked an enlisted man to pick France’s Unknown Soldier, the Americans quickly determined that they would not be one-upped by French egalitarianism on that day. That is how the selection came to be made by Edward Younger, a 23-year-old sergeant and one of the pallbearers who had carried the four caskets under consideration. Younger had survived being knocked unconscious by a shell and later being shot through the left thigh during vicious fighting in World War I. But he later wrote that being told to make this choice, standing alone with the four coffins, left him overwhelmed and numb.“Maybe these buddies had once been my pals,” Younger wrote in This Week, a syndicated magazine supplement, 15 years later. “Perhaps one of them had fought with me, had befriended me, had possibly shielded me from a bullet that might have put me in his place. Who would even know?”Younger left roses on the second casket to his right and reported that his duty was complete. The Unknown Soldier traveled that night by train to Paris and westward the following day to Le Havre, where his casket was carried aboard the USS Olympia en route for Arlington. The Unknown Soldier was buried under a marble slab atop a hill overlooking the nation’s capital from across the Potomac River. Among thousands of those who died in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and other conflicts, Younger’s choice offered a place to mourn for every parent whose child never returned home from battle.The tomb soon became a destination for tens of thousands of visitors to pay their respects to America’s war dead. In 1926, military guards were posted to discourage visitors from climbing or stepping on it. The large marble monument familiar to anyone on today’s tours was completed in 1932, and the watch became a 24-hour duty in 1937. Like Younger, the guards today… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Joe Biden has a favorite saying that he has attributed to various family members over the years, most often to his mother: Joey, she’d tell him, never bow; never bend; never kneel; never yield. That sentiment runs through his nearly 500-page memoir, as he recounts his four years as president, his decision to run for reelection, and his attempt to stay in the race after the worst presidential-debate performance in American history.“Today there is no shortage of people who think I blindly raced to run again. Driven by ambition. Selfishness. Unaware of the concerns about my age,” he states, accurately. “I knew better than anyone how old I was. I knew what I was—and wasn’t—capable of doing. I carefully monitored how I was meeting the demands of the job. And there is not a single example of me failing to handle my responsibilities.”Biden, as you can tell, is neither reflective nor repentant. He does not concede mistakes, and seems to regret almost nothing. He believes he was right to run for a second term, wishes he had been given the chance for a second debate with Donald Trump, and still insists he maintained the support of average voters even as party leadership pressed him to get out of the race. Evidence to the contrary never intrudes on Biden’s recounting of his last acts in politics after a half-century-long career. To make the case that his debate debacle should not have been disqualifying, he notes that Barack Obama had had a “terrible” outing during his first debate in 2012 and had left it to his vice president to “stop the bleeding. Which I did.” The argument may strain credulity, but it is quintessentially Biden.Several books have covered this ground—including Jill Biden’s View From the East Wing, which was released in June. But Joe Biden’s memoir, Promise Me, America, is the fullest account of his thinking in his own words. One of the most revealing passages comes in the last third of the book, after Biden narrates key episodes of his presidency. With Trump the likely Republican nominee, Biden comes up with a very Trumpian justification for why he needed to run against him, with echoes of Trump’s 2016 vow, “I alone can fix it”: “I believed I was the best person to do it. I was the only person who had ever beaten Donald Trump. And I felt I was the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Zack Mullock spent the past nine months campaigning for a U.S. House seat, but never actually pictured himself in Washington as a newly elected member of Congress. Yes, the mayor of Cape May, on the southern tip of New Jersey, believed in his long-shot congressional campaign. But the Democrat never really stopped to think about what would happen if he won. And why would he have? As of late October, political prognosticators still rated the seat he was running for, New Jersey’s Second Congressional District, as safely Republican.After Mullock eked out a shock victory against Representative Jeff Van Drew on November 3, there was a lot to do. For one thing, he had to Google how much members of Congress make ($174,000 a year—more than 10 times what he was paid to serve as mayor). Mullock, a 41-year-old father of three, also had to scramble his travel plans. He had scheduled a vacation for immediately after the election to mark the end of an exhausting stretch for his family. Then someone informed him that he needed to show up at freshman orientation instead. “The first thing I had to tell my kids was, ‘We’re not going to Florida, guys. I’m sorry,’” Mullock told us. Forty-eight hours later, he was on the road to D.C.When we ran into Mullock this past Tuesday outside the Capitol, he had just come from a last-minute shopping trip to Uniqlo, a few blocks away at Union Station. He’d bought a bunch of button-down shirts and crammed them into his messenger bag before running back to pose for a photo with the Blue Dogs, a group of moderate Democrats. He arrived just in time to stand on the outer edge of the crowd, which was clustered around a white 1997 Toyota Land Cruiser that belongs to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, one of the caucus’s co-chairs.Orientation for incoming members of Congress is a little like the first day of school. Cliques form quickly, helped along by geographical allegiances and ideological affinities. New members—young firebrands and 60-somethings making a major career pivot—jockey over where to sit. Looking the part—which could mean a crisp suit or a trucker hat and cowboy boots, depending on where you’re from—can’t hurt.“It really hadn’t sunk in until I first walked onto the House floor,” J. D. Ford, an Indiana state senator who ousted a Republican who’d won by nearly 19 points two years ago,… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Early in 2024, Donald Trump took the stage at the Black Conservative Federation gala in South Carolina. “We love you!” one audience member yelled. “We love you,” Trump responded, adding, “We’ve energized the Republican Party, and we’ve expanded the Republican Party.” At the time, he was right: The share of Black voters supporting Trump had ticked up in 2020 and seemed to be growing. “And they’re going, Wait a minute—there must be a mistake here; they’re saying, Black people must really like Trump. It must be a mistake,” he said. As he looked around at the organization’s leaders onstage with him, he smiled and said, “These guys know it’s no mistake.”When ballots were cast later that year, roughly 15 percent of Black voters chose Trump over Kamala Harris in the general election, up from 6 percent in 2016 and 8 percent in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. The gains were mainly among Black men, about 21 percent of whom took a flier on Trump, according to exit polling. Theories for the shift abounded: The culprit was misogyny, or frustration with President Biden and the Democratic Party in general, or the lure of rhetoric about strong families and self-reliance, or the appeal of Trump’s bravado to otherwise-disempowered young men. No one argument could capture the full picture, but the bottom line was clear: Black voters seemed to be moving, however tentatively, toward Trump and the GOP.Two years later, the picture looks different. According to the Associated Press, about 90 percent of Black voters supported Democrats last Tuesday, up from the roughly eight in 10 who went for Harris in 2024. Strong turnout throughout the country—and especially in majority-minority counties in the South—helped secure historic wins for Democrats. In Georgia, where Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman to be elected governor of any U.S. state, the share of Black midterm voters who went to the polls last week reached 54 percent, up from 45.5 percent in 2022 and 39 percent in 2010. In Texas, where a blue wave swept the entire slate of Democrats into statewide office for the first time in decades, the early and absentee Black vote rose 53 percent from 2022. And in Mississippi, where Scott Colom displaced the Republican incumbent to become the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, Black voters made up 33 percent of the electorate, up from 30 percent in 2024.… [TheTopNews] Read More.

If you’re a Democrat looking for razzle-dazzle in your politicians, Representative Jake Auchincloss might disappoint you. During an October swing through South Carolina, Auchincloss told a group of military veterans, “I think we have to make politics boring again,” drawing more nods and chuckles than whoops of approval.At times the 38-year-old Auchincloss, young and ambitious though he is, seems to embody the change that he seeks in the world. Spend enough time with him, as I did over the past several months, and you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about the evils of “cost disease” (and why inflation is worst in industries such as health care and education), the travails of family-owned pharmacies, and the importance of tutoring in public schools. You’ll be bombarded by an impressive and occasionally overwhelming array of statistics and factoids. (Did you know that Auchincloss’s highly engaged constituents in Massachusetts send him three times as much mail as in the average congressional district? I do now.) You might even start talking like you received a business degree from MIT, where taxes are called levies and everything is either “upstream” of this or “downstream” of that.Most of all, you will discover that Auchincloss has plenty of serious ideas about how the Democratic Party can earn back the trust of voters and use government to improve the lives of Americans. What he does not have right now is an obvious place to go with all of them. “The liberals need a new lion,” Auchincloss told me.Lest we get ahead of ourselves: Auchincloss will not be that lion—at least not yet. He is not running for president; he’s not even all that popular within his own caucus, having irritated colleagues with his willingness to criticize his party. But Auchincloss, who was registered as a Republican not that long ago, wants to have a say in who gets the Democratic presidential nomination and the platform that he or she campaigns on. To that end, he and the group he chairs, Majority Democrats, have summoned the many party leaders who are eyeing White House bids to Denver on Thursday for a postelection conference appropriately titled What’s Next.Auchincloss has found plenty to criticize in a party that lost two elections to Donald Trump, and even as it became clear that Democrats would do well last week, he did not view the elections as evidence that the party had… [TheTopNews] Read More.