Quote of the day…

Governments risk expending so much money and attention on merely coping with the impacts of climate change that they neglect efforts to reduce global emissions, exacerbating the crisis.

  THE WASHINGTON POST

Most read…

Artificial Intelligence may diagnose dementia in a day

Scientists are testing an artificial-intelligence system thought to be capable of diagnosing dementia after a single brain scan.

  BBC BY PALLAB GHOSH, SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT 

Bruce Willis diagnosed with dementia, says family

…Family of Die Hard and Pulp Fiction actor, 67, releases statement to share diagnosis following retirement from acting owing to aphasia”

  THE GUARDIAN

Beware a climate ‘doom loop,’ where crisis is harder to solve, report says

Humanity has a ‘brief and rapidly closing window’ to avoid a hotter, deadly future, U.N. climate report says

  THE WASHINGTON POS BY LEO SANDS

Vietnam to further delay rules for multi-billion-dollar wind power - business group

That is despite EU companies' pressure for swift regulatory progress, according to public recommendations and an internal document about this week's meetings seen by Reuters.

  REUTERS BY FRANCESCO GUARASCIO

When Americans Lost Faith in the News

Half a century ago, most of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, most say they don’t. What happened to the power of the press?

  THE NEW YORKER BY LOUIS MENAND

Is a Woman Ever Going to Win the White House?

Trump’s performative macho is scaring voters in both parties away from women candidates.

  THE NEW YORKER BY SUSAN B. GLASSER

Seaboard: pioneers in power generation in the country

Armando Rodríguez, vice-president and executive director of the company, talks to us about their projects in the DR, where they have been operating for 32 years.

  SOURRCE BY MERCADO DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

  28 JUNE 2022

More than 32 years ago, back in January 1990, Seaboard began operations as the first independent power producer (IPP) in the Dominican Republic. They became pioneers in the electricity market by way of the commercial operations of Estrella del Norte, a 40MW floating power generation plant and the first of three built for Seaboard by Wärtsilä.

Armando Rodríguez, vice president and executive director of Seaboard, joins us for this Mercado Interview to talk about the company's contributions to the Dominican Republic's electricity sector. "Our plants have been strategically located by the authorities of the electricity sector to make it possible to reduce blackouts in Santo Domingo and save foreign currency for all Dominicans," he explains.

Cooperate with objective and ethical thinking…

What is Artificial Intelligency?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer or a robot controlled by a computer to do tasks that are usually done by humans because they require human intelligence and discernment. Although there are no AIs that can perform the wide variety of tasks an ordinary human can do, some AIs can match humans in specific tasks.

Artificial Intelligence may diagnose dementia in a day

Scientists are testing an artificial-intelligence system thought to be capable of diagnosing dementia after a single brain scan.

  BBC BY PALLAB GHOSH, SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT 

  PUBLISHED, 10 AUGUST 2021

It may also be able to predict whether the condition will remain stable for many years, slowly deteriorate or need immediate treatment.

Currently, it can take several scans and tests to diagnose dementia.

The researchers involved say earlier diagnoses with their system could greatly improve patient outcomes.

Bruce Willis diagnosed with dementia, says family

Identify patterns

"If we intervene early, the treatments can kick in early and slow down the progression of the disease and at the same time avoid more damage," Prof Zoe Kourtzi, of Cambridge University and a fellow of national centre for AI and data science The Alan Turing Institute, said.

"And it's likely that symptoms occur much later in life or may never occur."

Prof Kourtzi's system compares brain scans of those worried they might have dementia with those of thousands of dementia patients and their relevant medical records.

The algorithm can identify patterns in the scans even expert neurologists cannot see and match them to patient outcomes in its database.

Memory clinics

In pre-clinical tests, it has been able to diagnose dementia, years before symptoms develop, even when there is no obvious signs of damage on the brain scan.

The trial, at Addenbrooke's Hospital and other memory clinics around the country, will test whether it works in a clinical setting, alongside conventional ways of diagnosing dementia.

In the first year, about 500 patients are expected to participate.

Their results will go to their doctors, who can, if necessary, advise on the course of treatment.

Denis and Penelope Clark want to know how his condition will progress, so they can plan for their future

Consultant neurologist Dr Tim Rittman, who is leading the study, with neuroscientists at Cambridge University, called the artificial-intelligence system a "fantastic development".

"These set of diseases are really devastating for people," he said.

"So when I am delivering this information to a patient, anything I can do to be more confident about the diagnosis, to give them more information about the likely progression of the disease to help them plan their lives is a great thing to be able to do."

Sometimes struggling

Among the first to participate in the trial, Denis Clark, 75, retired from his job as an executive for a meat company five years ago.

Last year, his wife, Penelope, noticed he was sometimes struggling with his memory.

And they are now concerned he is developing dementia.

Denis tries to describe his symptoms but Penelope interjects to say he finds it hard to explain what is happening.

The couple are worried about having to sell their home to fund Denis's care.

So Penelope is relieved they should not have to wait long for a diagnosis and an indication of how any dementia is likely to progress.

Normally, Denis might need several brain scans to see whether he has dementia

"We could then plan financially," she said.

"We would know whether as a couple we could have a few holidays before things get so bad that I can't take Denis on holiday."

Mental problems

Another of Dr Rittman's patients, Mark Thompson, 57, who began having memory lapses 10 months ago, before the trial of the artificial-intelligence system began, said it would have made a big difference to him had it been available.

"I had test after test after test and at least four scans before I was diagnosed," he said.

"The medical team was marvellous and did everything they could to get to the bottom of what was wrong with me.

"But the uncertainty was causing me more... mental problems than any caused by the condition.

"Was it a tumour? Would they need to operate? It caused me so much stress not knowing what was wrong with me."

Beware a climate ‘doom loop,’ where crisis is harder to solve, report says

Humanity has a ‘brief and rapidly closing window’ to avoid a hotter, deadly future, U.N. climate report says

  THE WASHINGTON POS BY LEO SANDS

  FEBRUARY 16, 2023

LONDON — The devastating effects of climate change on Earth could become so overwhelming that they undermine humanity’s capacity to tackle climate change’s root causes, researchers warned Wednesday.

They are calling it a “doom loop.”

The self-reinforcing dynamic, outlined in a report jointly published Wednesday by two British think tanks, warns of a spiral effect:

Governments risk expending so much money and attention on merely coping with the impacts of climate change that they neglect efforts to reduce global emissions, exacerbating the crisis.

“We’re pointing to a potential situation where the symptom of the climate and ecological crisis — the storms, the potential food crises, and things like this — start to distract us from the root causes,” report author Laurie Laybourn, an associate fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank, said in an interview. “You get a feedback that starts to run out of control.”

The report’s authors do not believe that climate change has already triggered a global “doom loop” that is irreversible, but warn that in some places the dynamic could begin to take hold.

“We could get to the point where societies are faced with relentless disasters and crises, and all the other problems that the climate and ecological crisis is bringing, and will increasingly distract them from delivering decarbonization,” said Laybourn.

Humanity has a ‘brief and rapidly closing window’ to avoid a hotter, deadly future, U.N. climate report says

One example of the doom loop is economic. As African nations spend increasing sums on simply mitigating escalating climate change crises, they have less money to invest in reducing long term emissions targets, Laybourn said.

According to the African Development Bank, the impact of climate change is already costing the entire continent between 5 and 15 percent of its annual GDP growth, per capita.

“Those costs just become even more insurmountable,” Laybourn said. “In that situation, you are eroding the ability of countries across Africa and other parts of the world to be able to deliver more prosperous — and of course sustainable — conditions.”

It could make it more difficult for African nations to raise the $1.6 trillion they have agreed to spend between 2022 and 2030 toward meeting their climate action pledges.

Climate change made the economically devastating floods across West Africa last summer around 80 times more probable to occur, according to an analysis in November.

Around the world, a report published in 2022 in the journal Nature found that each additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere cost the equivalent of $185, when the economic toll of deadly heat waves, crop-killing droughts and rising seas linked to climate change is taken into account. These costs add up quickly, the authors behind Wednesday’s report say, and will deplete governments of the economic resources they need to tackle climate change’s root causes.

Costs of climate change far surpass government estimates, study says

Humanity has already unleashed more than a trillion tons of carbon dioxide since the start of the Industrial Revolution, driving up global temperatures by more than a degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Within the next decade, global average temperatures could reach 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels — a threshold scientists say is critical to avoid irreversible changes.

It is still technically possible, and even economically viable, for nations to curb carbon pollution on the scale that’s required, according to the United Nations-assembled panel of 278 top climate experts. However, the authors of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2022 report warn that “it cannot be achieved through incremental change.”

In Europe, Laybourn warned that climate change could force more and more refugees to flee increasingly uninhabitable homelands, triggering political backlashes in wealthier host nations — and further distracting voters from climate change, which he says is the issue’s root cause.

By the year 2100, extreme heat events will make parts of Asia and Africa uninhabitable for up to 600 million people, the United Nations and Red Cross warned in October.

“This doom dynamic could manifest itself in things like a more nativist politics,” Laybourn said. In “a more ecologically destabilized world, it’s more conflicted, with more people on the move.”

However, even if humanity begins to enter a “doom loop," it isn’t doomed, researchers say. Laybourn believes that it is still possible for humanity to extricate itself from it — because societies, he believes, ultimately do have control over how they respond to destabilizing crises.

“The psychological element of this is the fundamental quantity,” Laybourn said, pointing to the way in which individuals dramatically relearned everyday habits in the face of the covid-19 pandemic, over a short period of time, potentially saving many lives.

“Throughout history, in moments of destabilization — you can see the doom dynamic. You can also see a virtuous circle as well, where certain events, shocks, create positive social movements,” he said. "It can happen in astonishingly short periods of time.”

Vietnam to further delay rules for multi-billion-dollar wind power - business group

  REUTERS BY FRANCESCO GUARASCIO

HANOI, Feb 16 (Reuters) - Vietnam may not have a legal framework to regulate offshore wind farms until next year, a European Union business representative said on Thursday, a delay that could stall billions of dollars of foreign investment in the sector.

Vietnam has big offshore wind power potential given the strong winds and shallow waters near coastal densely populated areas, according to the World Bank Group, which estimates the sector could add at least $50 billion to its economy.

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The Southeast Asian country's most recent draft power development plan from December, reviewed by Reuters, targets production of 7 gigawatt from offshore wind by 2030 from zero output now.

Its approval has been repeatedly delayed. It could now be further postponed, Minh Nguyen, vice president of the European chamber of commerce in Vietnam, told a conference on Thursday.

Hinging on its adoption is sizable investment in wind farms, including much of the $15.5 billion pledged by G7 countries in December for green energy transition projects.

Latest Updates

Minh said progress depended on new legislation on use of marine space for military, shipping or other purposes, which was not expected before October, citing talks between Vietnamese officials and EU businessmen earlier this week.

That is despite EU companies' pressure for swift regulatory progress, according to public recommendations and an internal document about this week's meetings seen by Reuters.

Some diplomats and experts say Vietnam is also keen to scrutinise Chinese investment in the sector for national security reasons, fearing windfarms could be used for surveillance.

Vietnam's foreign, industry and environment ministries and China's embassy in Vietnam did not immediately respond to separate requests for comment.

A delay would come as little surprise to investors in Vietnam, where bureaucratic and legislative delays are common.

Some are sanguine, however, confident that pilot projects could be approved quickly, even before legislation passes, while others see it as unlikely wind turbine makers would review investment plans given Vietnam's location and clout as a regional manufacturing powerhouse.

When Americans Lost Faith in the News

Half a century ago, most of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, most say they don’t. What happened to the power of the press?

  THE NEW YORKER BY LOUIS MENAND

  JANUARY 30, 2023

When the Washington Post unveiled the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” on February 17, 2017, people in the news business made fun of it. “Sounds like the next Batman movie,” the New York Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, said. But it was already clear, less than a month into the Trump Administration, that destroying the credibility of the mainstream press was a White House priority, and that this would include an unabashed, and almost gleeful, policy of lying and denying. The Post kept track of the lies. The paper calculated that by the end of his term the President had lied 30,573 times.

Almost as soon as Donald Trump took office, he started calling the news media “the enemy of the American people.” For a time, the White House barred certain news organizations, including the Times, CNN, Politico, and the Los Angeles Times, from briefings, and suspended the credentials of a CNN correspondent, Jim Acosta, who was regarded as combative by the President. “Fake news” became a standard White House response—frequently the only White House response—to stories that did not make the President look good. There were many such stories.

Suspicion is, for obvious reasons, built into the relationship between the press and government officials, but, normally, both parties have felt an interest in maintaining at least the appearance of cordiality. Reporters need access so that they can write their stories, and politicians would like those stories to be friendly. Reporters also want to come across as fair and impartial, and officials want to seem coöperative and transparent. Each party is willing to accept a degree of hypocrisy on the part of the other.

With Trump, all that changed. Trump is rude. Cordiality is not a feature of his brand. And there is no coöperation in the Trump world, because everything is an agon. Trump waged war on the press, and he won, or nearly won. He persuaded millions of Americans not to believe anything they saw or heard in the non-Trumpified media, including, ultimately, the results of the 2020 Presidential election.

The press wasn’t silenced in the Trump years. The press was discredited, at least among Trump supporters, and that worked just as well. It was censorship by other means. Back in 1976, even after Vietnam and Watergate, seventy-two per cent of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, the figure is thirty-four per cent. Among Republicans, it’s fourteen per cent. If “Democracy Dies in Darkness” seemed a little alarmist in 2017, the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, made it seem prescient. Democracy really was at stake.

That we need a free press for our democracy to work is a belief as old as our democracy. Hence the First Amendment. Without the free circulation of information and opinion, voters will be operating in ignorance when they choose whom to vote for and what policies to support. But what if the information is bad? What if you can’t trust the reporter? What if there’s no such thing as “the facts”?

As Michael Schudson pointed out in “Discovering the News” (1978), the notion that good journalism is “objective”—that is, nonpartisan and unopinionated—emerged only around the start of the twentieth century. Schudson thought that it arose as a response to growing skepticism about the whole idea of stable and reliable truths. The standard of objectivity, as he put it, “was not the final expression of a belief in facts but the assertion of a method designed for a world in which even facts could not be trusted. . . . Journalists came to believe in objectivity, to the extent that they did, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift.” In other words, objectivity was a problematic concept from the start.

The classic statement of the problem is Walter Lippmann’s book “Public Opinion,” published a hundred and one years ago. Lippmann’s critique remains relevant today—the Columbia Journalism School mounted a four-day conference on “Public Opinion” last fall, and people found that there was still plenty to talk about. Lippmann’s argument was that journalism is not a profession. You don’t need a license or an academic credential to practice the trade. All sorts of people call themselves journalists. Are all of them providing the public with reliable and disinterested news goods?

Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information, as long as it’s genuine, by whatever means and with whatever motives. Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. But top newspaper editors have insisted that what Assange does is protected by the First Amendment, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has protested the charges against him.

Lippmann had another point: journalism is not a public service; it’s a business. The most influential journalists today are employees of large corporations, and their work product is expected to be profitable. The notion that television news is, or ever was, a loss leader is a myth. In the nineteen-sixties, the nightly “Huntley-Brinkley Report” was NBC’s biggest money-maker. “60 Minutes,” which débuted on CBS in 1968, ranked among the top ten most watched shows on television for twenty-three years in a row.

And the business is all about the eyeballs. When ratings drop, and with them advertising revenues, correspondents change, anchors change, coverage changes. News, especially but not only cable news, is curated for an audience. So, obviously, is the information published on social media, where the algorithm selects for the audience’s political preferences. It is hard to be “objective” and sell news at the same time.

What is the track record of the press since Lippmann’s day? In “City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington” (Chicago), Kathryn J. McGarr weighs the performance of the Washington press corps during the first decades of the Cold War. She shows, by examining archived correspondence, that reporters in Washington knew perfectly well that Administrations were misleading them about national-security matters—about whether the United States was flying spy planes over the Soviet Union, for example, or training exiles to invade Cuba and depose Fidel Castro. To the extent that there was an agenda concealed by official claims of “containing Communist expansion”—to the extent that Middle East policy was designed to preserve Western access to oil fields, or that Central American policy was designed to make the region safe for United Fruit—reporters were not fooled.

So why didn’t they report what they knew? McGarr, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks it’s because the people who covered Washington for the wire services and the major dailies had an ideology. They were liberal internationalists. Until the United States intervened militarily in Vietnam—the Marines waded ashore there in 1965—that was the ideology of American élites. Like the government, and like the leaders of philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation and cultural institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, newspaper people believed in what they saw as the central mission of Cold War policy: the defense of the North Atlantic community of nations. They supported policies that protected and promoted the liberal values in the name of which the United States had gone to war against Hitler.

Many members of the Washington press, including editors and publishers, had served in the government during the Second World War—in the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the C.I.A.), in the Office of War Information, and in other capacities in Washington and London. They had been part of the war effort, and their sense of duty persisted after the war ended. Defending democracy was not just the government’s job. It was the press’s job, too.

When reporters were in possession of information that the American government wanted to keep secret, they therefore asked themselves whether publishing it would damage the Cold War mission. “Fighting for peace remained central to the diplomatic press corps’ conception of its responsibilities,” McGarr says. “Quality reporting meant being an advocate not for the government but for ‘the Peace.’ ”

There was another reason for caution: fear of nuclear war. After the Soviets developed an atomic weapon, in 1949, and until the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, end-of-the-world nuclear anxiety was widespread, and newsmen shared it. The Cold War was a balance-of-power war. That’s what the unofficial doctrine of the American government, “containment,” meant: keep things as they are. Whatever tipped the scale in the wrong direction might unleash the bomb, and so newspapers were careful about what they published.

Is a Woman Ever Going to Win the White House?

Trump’s performative macho is scaring voters in both parties away from women candidates.

  THE NEW YORKER BY SUSAN B. GLASSER

  FEBRUARY 16, 2023

Will America ever have a woman President? We’re closer to that than at any time in history, but what worries me most about this tired old question is that hardly anyone seems to be asking it anymore. On Tuesday, the California Democrat Dianne Feinstein—who, at the age of eighty-nine, is the oldest member of the Senate—made official what had long been evident: she will not seek reëlection next year. A host of ambitious younger Democratic politicians are already looking to run, including the Trump-prosecuting congressman Adam Schiff and the progressive favorite Katie Porter. In recent years, Feinstein has become something of an awkward symbol of Washington’s new gerontocracy, an officeholder clearly past her prime who refused to be hustled off the stage before she was ready. (It took a long time: my colleague Jane Mayer reported in 2020 on the painful effort.)

But I’ll always remember Feinstein as she was when she arrived in Washington in 1992—dubbed “the year of the woman”—after her victory and that of three other female Senate candidates. On the campaign trail, Feinstein had joked that “two per cent might be good for the fat content in milk, but it’s not good enough for women’s representation in the United States Senate.” The wins that year by Feinstein and Barbara Boxer meant that California was the first state to be represented in the Senate by two women, and altogether women made up seven per cent of the chamber after that election. Which, in truth, was still pathetic, but at least, it seemed, there was progress. Feinstein, a former mayor of San Francisco and a formidable figure who was poised to lead in Washington, embodied the feminist moment. Anything, even the White House, seemed attainable.

On paper, of course, the gender imbalance in American politics has changed substantially—and for the better—in the decades since then. Women are now twenty-five per cent of the Senate and twenty-seven per cent of the House. There are twelve women governors, and women are, for the first time, a majority of the Cabinet. Kamala Harris, who served for three years alongside Feinstein and continued the tradition of an all-female Senate delegation for California, is today the first female Vice-President. Given the actuarial realities facing Joe Biden, America’s first octogenarian chief executive, Harris stands a very real chance of becoming President. (To be fair, the actual actuarial table used by the Social Security Administration gives an eighty-year-old male such as Biden a life expectancy of 8.43 years.)

And yet it sure doesn’t seem like a moment of female ascendance. Roe v. Wade is no more. Feminism—whether first-, second-, or third-wave—is barely mentioned in the national political debate. Democrats every few years talk about resurrecting the Equal Rights Amendment; they haven’t slash can’t. After all the activism, all the #MeToo revelations, women currently make up ten per cent of Fortune 500 C.E.O.s—which is both a record high and ridiculously low.

Harris, meanwhile, could become President at any moment, but the thrust of many conversations in Democratic politics these days is a persistent worry about her weakness as a potential candidate if Biden, willingly or otherwise, does not run again. A deeply reported take by Jonathan Martin in Politico on Thursday makes the point that high-level Democrats don’t want Biden to run again but are afraid of saying so because their greater fear is Harris becoming the 2024 nominee and not being able to win in the general election. A recent Times piece was even harsher, quoting dozens of Democrats as saying that “she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.”

The prospects for a female breakthrough are hardly better among Republicans. On Tuesday, Nikki Haley, formally launched her candidacy for the 2024 G.O.P. Presidential nomination. South Carolina’s first woman governor before serving as Trump’s first Ambassador to the United Nations, Haley is the only woman to seriously figure on the longlist of potential Republican candidates this cycle, but in her announcement speech on Wednesday she treaded cautiously on the subject of her background. She is, after all, a daughter of Indian immigrants running in a party in which immigrant bashing is de rigueur. “This is not about identity politics,” Haley said. “I don’t believe in that. And I don’t believe in glass ceilings, either.” With polls showing her in the single digits, most pundits give her close to zero chance of winning. There is “no clear rationale for her candidacy,” the Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial. “Nikki Haley Will Not Be the Next President,” the Times opined in a headline, conveying the sentiments of a panel of ten columnists whom it convened to assess her candidacy.

Notably, the brutal appraisals of her prospects hardly mention her gender, except to note it as an example of her un-Trumpiness in a Republican Party that has yet to repudiate the former President. The commentators are more concerned, perhaps understandably, about her wildly flexible ideology and her hawkish platform’s decidedly 2015 vibe. Is this what counts as progress?

In the video launching her campaign, Haley did offer a classic line from the I’m-a-woman-but-I’m-tough school of political advertising, one that could have been delivered by the original Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, in the nineteen-eighties. “You should know this about me,” Haley says in the video, “I don’t put up with bullies, and, when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.” Some clichés, it seems, will never die. I would, however, love to see Haley follow through on that threat with a certain name-calling former President.

At a moment when both parties, for very different reasons, seem to be hurtling toward an outcome that few voters want—a rerun of the 2020 election, between two geriatric white men—Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign looms large over the question of when, how, or whether a woman can finally shatter that ultimate glass ceiling.

In 2018, the Pew Research Center asked Americans whether they believed that they would see a woman President in their lifetime. Sixty-eight per cent said yes, which was lower than the previous time the question was asked, in 2014, when seventy-three per cent thought that would happen. Clinton’s defeat sent hopes, at least temporarily, into reverse.

This is the context for the current, paradoxical moment: expectations remain high, but so, too, do fears that a woman simply can’t win. There’s a fatalism to the question, post-Clinton, that is profoundly depressing. How naïve, now, all that “year of the woman” cheerleading seems. My 1992 self would not be thrilled by the fact that it took women three decades to get to a quarter of the Congress and one embattled female Vice-President.

The reality is that American politics since Trump beat Clinton has taken a turn back to the macho. The rise of a would-be strongman in the Republican Party has made performative displays of aggressive masculinity the prevailing style in the rebranded G.O.P. Whether Trump himself returns as the nominee or not, the up-and-comers in the Party are a bunch of confrontational men. They are brawlers like Ron DeSantis or Twitter trolls like Ted Cruz.

The Trump factor hangs heavy over the Democrats as well. I’ve heard many of them voice the conviction that Trump’s election proved how deeply rooted American sexism remains. And, yes, I know that for everyone who believes that, there is someone else is who convinced it’s just that Clinton was a terrible candidate or that Harris is an awful Vice-President or that it’s simply not the right time for a woman. And that, in the end, is the point: so long as the threat of Trump winning another term in the White House hangs over the country, many Democrats aren’t willing to risk nominating anyone besides another white man to take him on.

“Biden is the guy that can beat Trump,” Joyce Beatty, a senior Black Democratic congresswoman, told Politico. The current President is the only politician, as his departing chief of staff, Ron Klain, reminded my colleague Evan Osnos the other day, who has ever beaten Donald Trump. So, too bad, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley. Once again, it appears, history will have to wait.