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  • So Much for Biden the Bridge President

    So Much for Biden the Bridge President

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    In retrospect, Joe Biden probably wishes he’d never uttered these words in public. Maybe it was just youthful exuberance: He was, after all, only 77 at the time.

    “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said at a rally in Detroit, one of his last pre-lockdown campaign appearances of the 2020 Democratic primaries. It was early March, and he was flanked by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and a pair of his former rivals, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker—all members of what Biden would call “an entire generation of leaders” and “the future of this country.”

    Few paid much attention to the future president’s remarks at the time. They appeared consistent with a prevailing assumption about his campaign: that Biden was running as an emergency-stopgap option. And once the emergency—Donald Trump—was dealt with, the old pro was expected to make way for that “entire generation.”

    “I view myself as a transition candidate,” Biden said during an online fundraiser shortly after he gave his bridge speech, according to The New York Times.

    Biden never explicitly said he would serve just one term, but multiple outlets reported that he and his advisers discussed making such a pledge. His allies reinforced the notion, even as Biden himself denied it. “It is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president,” Politico reported in December 2019, citing four unnamed sources who spoke regularly with Biden.

    As it would turn out, the “bridge” declaration proved to be one of Biden’s most memorable utterances of the past four years. The line has been quoted a great deal, especially lately—or hurled at him, usually by someone pointing out that this bridge seems to be stretching on much longer than anyone expected.

    Americans are plainly impatient for Biden to retire already, a point hammered home by the preponderance of poll respondents—including Democrats and independents—who say Biden should not be seeking a second term that would begin after his 82nd birthday. Elected Democrats, operatives, and donors keep saying the same in private, while an array of op-ed and cable kibitzers have exhaled a steady barrage on this subject. (The Atlantic has also explored this topic.)

    Read: Why Biden shouldn’t run in 2024

    But put aside the usual questions about Biden’s age and fitness to endure another campaign or term. What’s often overlooked in these discussions is the depth of frustration behind this public skittishness. It goes beyond the hand-wringing about possible health catastrophes that could befall the president at the worst possible time (i.e., next October). The displeasure over Biden’s determination to keep going suggests that voters might perceive him as acting selfishly, or that they feel misled by a candidate who ran for president on the pretense of a short-term fix, only to remain ensconced as a long-term proposition.

    When Biden ran in 2020, several friends and aides reportedly advised him to come out and say he would serve just one term, because that was understood to be his intent anyway. But he was loath to announce himself as a lame duck earlier than he had to. This was consistent with a Biden decree, dating at least to his days as vice president, when people asked whether he would consider running to succeed Obama. “Nobody in D.C. gains influence by declaring they are playing out the string,” Politico’s Glenn Thrush wrote in a profile of Biden, headlined “Joe Biden in Winter.” That was in 2014.

    In politics, Biden would tell people around him, you are either on your way up or on your way down—and there is no reason for a leader of any age to ever deny interest in moving up unless they want to declare themselves irrelevant to the future.

    Even so, the 2020 election was less about the future than it was about surviving a ghastly present. Biden came back to do a specific job. “I think it’s really, really important that Donald Trump not be re-elected,” Biden told me during the 2020 campaign, when I asked him why on Earth he was putting himself through another race at his age. “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative,” he was always saying.

    Biden and his aides didn’t shy from the label of “transition candidate” and typically were noncommittal on the prospect of a second term—right up until Biden transitioned himself into the White House and became much more definitive. “The answer is yes,” Biden said at a news conference in March 2021, the first time he was asked as president whether he would run again in 2024. “My plan is to run for reelection,” he continued. “That’s my expectation.”

    In fact, pollsters and focus-group facilitators report that many of their subjects still haven’t fully accepted that Biden decided to run again. “It seems pretty implicit in the way voters talk that they didn’t expect him to be a two-term president,” Sarah Longwell, the Bulwark publisher who has interviewed panels across the political spectrum, told me.

    “To insiders, a Trump-Biden rematch is a foregone conclusion,” Ben Tulchin, a Democratic pollster who worked for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, told me. But in his own focus groups—mainly of young and Latino voters—Tulchin said voters are not fully buying that, whether out of denial or distaste. “They don’t like being forced to make a choice that they don’t want to make yet,” he said.

    Biden has enjoyed perhaps the most triumphant last hurrah in American political history. Also, the longest. Start the clock in August 2008, when Barack Obama first selected him as his running mate. “I want you to view this as the capstone of your career,” Obama told Biden when he offered him the job, according to the eventual vice president. “And not the tombstone,” Biden joked in reply.

    Fifteen years later, he might suffer from a general intolerance that voters reserve for high-level government officials who grow old in office. The various freeze-ups and infirmities of Senators Mitch McConnell (81) and Dianne Feinstein (90), respectively, have drawn more sneers than sympathy. The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has come in for a great deal of posthumous scorn, even among her staunchest liberal admirers, for holding on long enough for her health to deteriorate and a Republican president (Trump) to appoint her successor.

    By appearances, Biden is in much better health than the examples cited above (especially Ginsburg, who died three years ago). But that does nothing to change the actuarial tables, or Biden’s unpopularity, or Vice President Kamala Harris’s. Nor does it stop anyone from trotting out Biden’s bridge quote and its corollaries from four years ago. The reminders carry a strong suggestion that the terms of the original “deal” have shifted, and that this is much more of Biden than anyone bargained for.

    “He has been a solid ‘transitional’ president, but transition requires transit, or a second act,” the journalist Joe Klein observed last week in a Substack column. National Review’s Jim Geraghty recently compared Biden to a relay runner who decides to “keep the baton to himself and attempt another circuit around the track, even though he’s slowing down.”

    Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden

    Fairness demands a few qualifiers and caveats here. Again, Biden never said he would serve just one term. The president has every right to run again, and any serious Democrat is free to primary him. There are solid arguments that Biden still has the best chance of any Democrat to beat Trump, given the power of his incumbency, the possible fractiousness of an open primary, and the uncertainty of whoever an alternative Democratic nominee would be.

    But perhaps Biden’s best reason for running again in 2024, or defense against suggestions of a bait and switch, is this: He probably did not expect Trump to still be here. Nor did many of the rest of us. There is no precedent for a defeated one-term president to so easily resume his status as de facto standard-bearer of his party. After the January 6 insurrection, Republicans sounded more than ready to move on. This bipartisan exhale was made possible by Biden—God love ya, Joey! Beating Trump should have been the ultimate “capstone” of his career. Yet three years later, Trump is still here. And so is Biden.

    “Politicians who know Biden well say that if he were convinced that Trump were truly vanquished, he would feel he had accomplished his political mission,” the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote in one of the most widely discussed recent entries to the “Please go away, Joe” cannon. In other words, meet the new justification, same as the last one. It’s probably as strong a rationale as any for Biden to attempt this.

    Except that it’s getting old, and so’s the bridge.

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • Was the COVID Toilet Panic Overblown?

    Was the COVID Toilet Panic Overblown?

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    In the dark early days of the pandemic, when we knew almost nothing and feared almost everything, there was a moment when people became very, very worried about toilets. More specifically, they were worried about the possibility that the cloud of particles toilets spew into the air when flushed—known in the scientific literature as “toilet plume”—might be a significant vector of COVID transmission. Because the coronavirus can be found in human excrement, “flushing the toilet may fling coronavirus aerosols all over,” The New York Times warned in June 2020. Every so often in the years since, the occasional PSA from a scientist or public-health expert has renewed the scatological panic.

    In retrospect, so much of what we thought we knew in those early days was wrong. Lysoling our groceries turned out to not be helpful. Masking turned out to be very helpful. Hand-washing, though still important, was not all it was cracked up to be, and herd immunity, in the end, was a mirage. As the country shifts into post-pandemic life and takes stock of the past three years, it’s worth asking: What really was the deal with toilet plume?

    The short answer is that our fears have not been substantiated, but they weren’t entirely overblown either. Scientists have been studying toilet plume for decades. They’ve found that plumes vary in magnitude depending on the type of toilet and flush mechanism. Flush energy plays a role too: The greater it is, the larger the plume. Closing the lid (if the toilet has one) helps a great deal, though even that cannot completely eliminate toilet plume—particles can still escape through the gap between the seat and the lid.

    Whatever the specifics, the main conclusion from years of research preceding the pandemic has been consistent and disgusting: “Flush toilets produce substantial quantities of toilet plume aerosol capable of entraining microorganisms at least as large as bacteria … These bioaerosols may remain viable in the air for extended periods and travel with air currents,” scientists at the CDC and the University of Oklahoma College of Public Health wrote in a 2013 review paper titled “Lifting the Lid on Toilet Plume Aerosol.” In other words, when you flush a toilet, an unsettling amount of the contents go up rather than down.

    Knowing this is one thing; seeing it is another. Traditionally, scientists have measured toilet plume with either a particle counter or, in at least one case, “a computational model of an idealized toilet.” But in a new study published last month, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder took things a step further, using bright-green lasers to render visible what usually, blessedly, is not. John Crimaldi, an engineering professor and a co-author of the study, who has spent 25 years using lasers to illuminate invisible phenomena, told me that he and his colleagues went into the experiment fully expecting to see something. Even so, they were “completely caught off guard” by the results. The plume was bigger, faster, and more energetic than they’d anticipated—“like an eruption,” Crimaldi said, or, as he and his colleagues put it in their paper, a “strong chaotic jet.”

    Within eight seconds, the resulting cloud of aerosols shoots nearly five feet above the toilet bowl—that is, more than six feet above the ground. That is: straight into your face. After the initial burst, the plume continues to rise until it hits the ceiling, and then it wafts outward. It meets a wall and runs along it. Before long, it fills the room. Once that happens, it hangs around for a while. “You can sort of extrapolate in your own mind to walking into a public restroom in an airport that has 20 toilet stalls, all of them flushing every couple minutes,” Crimaldi said. Not a pleasant thought.

    The question, then, is not so much whether toilet plume happens—like it or not, it clearly does—as whether it presents a legitimate transmission risk of COVID or anything else. This part is not so clear. The 2013 review paper identified studies of the original SARS virus as “among the most compelling indicators of the potential for toilet plume to cause airborne disease transmission.” (The authors also noted, in a dry aside, that although SARS was “not presently a common disease, it has demonstrated its potential for explosive spread and high mortality.”) The one such study the authors discuss explicitly is a report on the 2003 outbreak in Hong Kong’s Amoy Gardens apartment complex. That study, though, is far from conclusive, Mark Sobsey, an environmental microbiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. The researchers didn’t rule out other modes of transmission, nor did they attempt to culture live virus from the fecal matter—a far more reliable indicator of infectiousness than mere detection.

    Beyond that, Sobsey said, there is little evidence that toilet plumes spread SARS or COVID-19. In his own review, published in December 2021, Sobsey found “no documented evidence” of viral transmission via fecal matter. This, at least, seems to track with the three years of pandemic experience we’ve all now endured. Although we can’t easily prove that bathrooms don’t play a significant role in spreading COVID-19, we haven’t seen any glaring indications that they do. And anyway, the coronavirus has found plenty of other awful ways to spread.

    Just because toilet plume doesn’t seem to be a vector of COVID transmission, though, doesn’t mean you can forget about it. Gastrointestinal viruses such as norovirus, Sobsey told me, present a more serious risk of transmission via toilet plume, because they are known to spread via fecal matter. The only real solutions are structural. Improved ventilation would keep aerosolized waste from building up in the air, and germicidal lighting, though the technology is still being developed, could potentially disinfect what remains. Neither, however, would stop the plume in the first place. To do that, you would need to change the toilet itself: In order to create a smoother and thus better-contained flush, you could change the geometry of the bowl, the way the water enters and exits, or any number of other variables. Toilet manufacturers could also, you know, stop producing lidless toilets.

    But none of that will save you the next time you find yourself staring into a toilet’s blank maw. Crimaldi suggests wearing a mask in public bathrooms to protect against not just the plume created when you flush but also the plumes left by the person who used the bathroom before you, the person who used it before them, and so on. You don’t need to have any great affection for masking as a public-health intervention to consider donning one for a few minutes to avoid literally breathing in shit. Sobsey offered another bit of unconventional bathroom-hygiene advice, which he acknowledged can only do so much to protect you: If you find yourself in a public restroom with a lidless toilet, he said, consider washing your hands before you flush. Then “hold your breath, flush the toilet, and leave.”

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    Jacob Stern

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  • Abortion Could Define California’s Elections

    Abortion Could Define California’s Elections

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    CERRITOS, Calif.—Abortion rights dominated the message when the Democratic congressional candidate Jay Chen sent off a small group who had gathered to canvass for him here early on Sunday morning.

    “A right that we had all assumed we would have, the right of a woman to have control of her own health-care decisions, was taken away after 50 years,” Chen told the volunteers. He reminded them that his opponent, Republican Representative Michelle Steel, had co-sponsored “a federal ban on abortion” that would prohibit the procedure even in deep-blue California.

    “You name it, she’s on the extreme end of all these issues,” Chen said. “She’d be a complete outlier even in deep-red Kansas because even in Kansas they protected the right to an abortion. So for her to try to represent [this district] does not make any sense.”

    Chen’s exhortation captured the outsize role abortion rights could play across this year’s unusually large field of competitive U.S. House races in California, after the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer. The Golden State offers Democrats the nation’s single largest concentration of opportunities to offset losses elsewhere by flipping House seats now held by Republicans. And the abortion-rights issue offers Democrats their best chance to do so—particularly with a state constitutional amendment protecting access to the procedure also on the November ballot as Proposition 1.

    “Because we have this on the ballot, Republicans cannot run away from this issue,” says Dave Jacobson, a Democratic consultant who is advising Christy Smith, the party’s nominee against Republican Representative Mike Garcia in another Los Angeles–area district. “Every Republican in a competitive district is vulnerable with this issue at the top of the ballot as a constitutional amendment. I think it is going to drive turnout.”

    Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

    California will provide a crucial measure of how broadly the abortion issue may benefit Democrats this year. On both sides, there’s agreement that abortion’s increased prominence will strengthen Democrats in districts with a large number of white-collar voters—including the coastal seats south of Los Angeles now held by Democratic Representatives Katie Porter and Mike Levin. Less clear is whether the issue will prove as powerful in districts, such as those held by Republican Representatives Garcia and David Valadao, with larger numbers of blue-collar and Latino voters who may be acutely feeling the effects of inflation. The district in which Chen is challenging Steel demographically falls somewhere in between.

    “Presumably you’ll see coastal Republicans split with the party on things like choice,” predicts Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist and the publisher of the nonpartisan California Target Book, which analyzes state elections. “On the other hand, when you are looking at some inland and Central Valley districts, they are very different,” he told me. Although “there’s all this chatter that abortion is so important,” Sragow added, “I suggest most Americans do not wake up with abortion the thing they are most worried about,” particularly in working-class communities.

    Though solidly Democratic at the state level—Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is cruising to reelection this year without serious Republican opposition after defeating a GOP-backed recall effort—congressional contests in California have proved highly susceptible to swings in the national mood. As part of the “blue wave” in 2018, the party flipped seven Republican-held seats, reducing the GOP to its smallest share of California’s congressional delegation since the 1880s. But in 2020, Republicans recaptured four of those districts—a key part of their unusual success at gaining House seats nationwide while losing the White House.

    Earlier this year, when inflation was raging and the Democratic legislative agenda seemed stalled, Republicans were optimistic about advancing farther across California by potentially ousting Democratic Representatives Josh Harder in the Central Valley and Porter and Levin in Orange and San Diego Counties. Although Democrats acknowledge that those races (and another Democratic-held open seat) remain competitive, they now see the opportunity to go on the offensive against Steel, Valadao, and Garcia, as well as potentially Representatives Ken Calvert and Young Kim in Southern California; they also see an opportunity to contest a Republican open seat in the Sacramento area.

    Several other issues have also contributed to this reversal of fortune: increased attention to gun violence after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting; renewed focus on Donald Trump amid the revelations from the House January 6 committee and the firestorm over his mishandling of classified documents; and climate change after the passage of the Democrats’ slimmed-down reconciliation bill. But analysts in both parties see the Supreme Court decision reversing Roe as the pivotal factor shifting the congressional landscape across California. “We are just seeing an unprecedented level of outrage,” Representative Levin told me in an interview.

    As in other states, Republicans continue to express cautious optimism that frustration over inflation and disenchantment with the performance of President Joe Biden will outweigh views on abortion. “Of course [abortion] is going to be an issue, way more than it was in May of this year,” Lance Trover, a Republican consultant advising Representative Steel, who ousted a Democratic incumbent in 2020, told me. “But at the end of the day, the fundamentals of the economy are going to be key.”

    California Republicans face an unusually powerful headwind in moving beyond the abortion issue. Almost all Republicans holding or seeking congressional seats have staked out hard-line anti-abortion positions that directly collide with polls showing deep and broad support for abortion rights across the state.

    Polling in July by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that more than two-thirds of state residents opposed the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. That included about three-fourths of African Americans and Asian Americans, seven in 10 white voters, and just over three-fifths of Latino voters. About three-fourths of independents, whom Republicans need to compete in California, because they are so outnumbered by registered Democrats, opposed the ruling. Opposition to the decision was greatest in the big blue metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco, but even in areas where Republicans have traditionally performed somewhat better, such as Orange and San Diego Counties and the Central Valley, preponderant majorities opposed the decision.

    In another survey released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times, more than seven in 10 California voters said they intended to support the constitutional amendment inscribing abortion rights into the state constitution.

    “From a public-opinion perspective, it’s a settled issue in California,” Mark Baldassare, the PPIC president, told me. “We have seen what we would describe as overwhelming support for abortion rights in California consistently in our polls over many, many years … That’s pretty consistent across demographic groups and regions of the state.”

    The state’s Republican congressional delegation—as well as the party’s challengers in the key races—have placed themselves firmly on the opposite side of that consensus. Four of the House Republicans facing the potentially toughest contests—Steel, Garcia, Valadao, and Calvert—signed a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. All of them but Calvert have co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, a Republican bill that would define the unborn as a person under the Constitution from “the moment of fertilization” and effectively ban abortion nationwide, legal scholars say. Representative Kim, another Republican facing a potentially competitive race in an Orange County district, did not co-sponsor that bill, but has described herself as a “proud pro-life woman” who believes “the rights of the child must be respected.” The GOP challengers to Harder, Levin, and Porter have also publicly declared their opposition to legal abortion.

    As signs have grown of the backlash to the Supreme Court decision—including the Democratic victory in a New York congressional special election and the resounding defeat of a Kansas ballot initiative that would have opened the door to state abortion restrictions—several of the California Republicans have tried to obscure their positions. For instance, although the Life at Conception Act offers no exceptions and Steel earlier this year said she supported legal abortion only when the mother’s health was endangered, she told me in a statement, “I am pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest, and the health and life of the mother, and baby.” In a statement to the Los Angeles Times this week, Representative Garcia backed the same exceptions—which, again, are not included in the “life begins at conception” bill he is co-sponsoring.

    In her statement, Steel downplayed the possibility that a Republican-controlled Congress would seek to ban abortion nationwide, though notably without disavowing the idea: “Discussions surrounding a nationwide ban on abortion are purely hypothetical at this point,” she declared.

    But such vague dismissals may not dispel the vulnerability California Republicans face over the possibility of a national ban on abortion, particularly amid the parallel debate over amending the state constitution.

    Though neither supporters nor opponents of the constitutional amendment have yet raised much money, Newsom, who is emerging as a national leader for Democrats on cultural issues, is expected to campaign heavily for it and raise its visibility this fall. “I don’t want to give away our plans … but I would expect him to play a very prominent role,” Sean Clegg, a senior strategist for Newsom, told me. Abortion rights and the constitutional amendment to protect them, he added, are “going to have an effect in every single race in California.”

    Conor Friedersdorf: Gavin Newsom, the Ron DeSantis of the left

    The proposed amendment on the ballot in November represents the third level of protection for abortion rights in California. In earlier rulings, the state supreme court has already decided that the procedure is protected under the state constitution’s guarantees of liberty and privacy. This amendment, placed on the ballot by Newsom and the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature, adds an explicit guarantee that “the state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom … which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.”

    Yet even all those reinforcing levels of protection for abortion rights in the California constitution would be preempted if Congress approved a national ban, legal analysts agree. The Life at Conception Act would surely face legal challenges if a future Republican-controlled Congress passes it, but should the law be upheld, it would override any California action to guarantee abortion rights, according to Cary Franklin, a constitutional-law professor at UCLA and the faculty director of its Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. “If Congress were to pass a national ban on abortion, that would trump state law, even state constitutional law,” she told me.

    That’s a message Democrats are likely to pound across the state in the campaign’s final months. “If Steel has her way, she will pass a federal ban on abortion, which will override our protections here, and I think Californians are coming to realize that,” Chen, a Naval reservist and the owner of a business that manages commercial properties, told me. By contrast, Chen, like the other Democratic incumbents and challengers, supports legislation restoring a national right to abortion.

    Opponents of the state constitutional amendment, such as Steel, say it would authorize abortions at any point in pregnancy, ending current state restrictions after a fetus is viable outside the womb (unless the mother’s life is endangered). Its sponsors deny that interpretation, but it will likely become the centerpiece of the campaign against the amendment. “Pro-life people may have had enough,” Susan Swift Arnall, the vice president of legal affairs at California’s Right to Life League, told me. “They may say, ‘This is too far. This is too extreme … And we want to send a message back to the legislature that we don’t support abortion on demand for all nine months and even into the birth of the baby.’”

    But the greater likelihood is that the amendment mobilizes turnout among the decisive majority in the state who support abortion rights. “There’s no question the [Supreme Court] decision has really created a great deal of increased interest from women voters for sure, and not just Democrats,” Levin said. “We are talking about independents, even some Republicans. Those who historically haven’t voted in midterm elections, I think, are motivated.”

    By solidifying Democrats in suburbia, abortion rights’ growing visibility, like the increased focus on gun violence and renewed attention to Trump, may narrow the range of House districts the GOP can realistically contest both in California and nationwide, and lower the ceiling on their potential gains. But not enough voters may prioritize abortion to neutralize Republicans’ other advantages in economically strained areas. Like so much else in modern American politics, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe seems likely to further widen the chasm between white-collar and culturally cosmopolitan metropolitan areas trending toward the Democrats and blue-collar, socially conservative smaller places hardening in their support for the GOP, even in staunchly Democratic California.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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