may 2007

As they present their findings to the public, House Democrats may find it easier to let President Donald Trump build the case for impeachment himself.

The testimony that Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, delivered to Congress this morning was perhaps as politically damaging to Trump as anything presented during the first day of House impeachment hearings, on Wednesday. In a quiet but firm voice, she described how “a smear campaign” orchestrated by the president’s allies led to her abrupt dismissal as ambassador, and how “the color drained from my face” when she read a transcript of Trump bashing her in a phone call with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky. “It sounded like a threat,” Yovanovitch said, referring to the president’s comment that she would “go through some things.”

Remember these numbers. You’ll be asked about them at the end of the test: 70, 73, 76, and 78.

These are the ages of the leading candidates in the 2020 presidential election: Elizabeth Warren, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders, respectively. In most any other line of work, people in their eighth decade are usually retired. For most of human history—and still in most of the world today—people of this age were usually dead.

Last month, Jimmy Carter, the 95-year-old former U.S. president, said that the office requires a person “to be very flexible with [one’s] mind,” and that by age 80 he wouldn’t have felt able to do the job. He joined the growing ranks of those suggesting they would support an upper age limit for the office, either for purposes of breaking up the gerontocracy or to ensure a person has the physical and cognitive capacity. “You have to be able to go from one subject to another and concentrate on each one adequately and then put them together in a comprehensive way,” Carter said.

My colleague Megan Garber spoke up on Wednesday in defense of anger, a quality whose presence in a female presidential candidate gets her branded as hysterical and shrill, and whose absence, paradoxically, marks her as frosty and robotic. (Angry men are just “fired up”; angerless ones are “cerebral.” There are exceptions: Critics penalized Howard Dean for being a rage-monster and Michael Dukakis for being a passionless wuss.) The angry woman in this round is Elizabeth Warren, whose anger—mainly directed at billionaires—is becoming a signature quality.

I have been pessimistic about Warren’s chances, not because of her anger, but because of her apparent lack of a crucial quality that distinguishes successful presidential candidates, namely that they should be completely insane. The stresses of a campaign would be enough to make a normal person quit. Warren is scrutinized literally down to her genome, and the worst people in the world are scheming to defame her. The prize in this contest is the most burdensome job ever devised, one self-evidently worse than that of a tenured law professor at Harvard University. As a Richard North Patterson character put it:

After 30 minutes, the rat should have been dead. Sealed in a capsule-shaped chamber, the animal was breathing pure oxygen at a pressure high enough to cause a normal rat to have a seizure in five to 10 minutes. Dominic D’Agostino, a researcher at the University of South Florida, stood by, ready to flush the chamber with fresh air and rescue the creature at the first signs of a problem. But 30 minutes became 40 minutes, and still the rat appeared unbothered. At an hour, D’Agostino could only gaze at it on a video monitor with wonder. “The rat was just kind of staring back at us and grooming itself,” he says.

Shortly before placing the rat inside the chamber, D’Agostino had injected a new, one-of-a-kind molecule down the animal’s throat. Much of D’Agostino’s work is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Naval Research, and this experiment, which he conducted in mid-2011, was his first test of whether the new molecule could help a rat withstand an onslaught of oxygen. The hope was to one day do the same for Navy divers, who can experience devastating oxygen-toxicity seizures on deep dives.

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.

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