The debate was only a few minutes old, and Barack Obama was already tanking. His opponent on this warm autumn night, a Massachusetts patrician with an impressive résumé, a chiseled jaw, and a staunch helmet of burnished hair, was an inferior political specimen by any conceivable measure. But with surprising fluency, verve, and even humor, Obama’s rival was putting points on the board. The president was not. Passive and passionless, he seemed barely present.

It was Sunday, October 14, 2012, and Obama was bunkered two levels below the lobby of the Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Virginia. In a blue blazer, khaki pants, and an open-necked shirt, he was squaring off in a mock debate against Massachusetts senator John Kerry, who was standing in for the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. The two men were in Williamsburg, along with the president’s team, to prepare Obama for his second televised confrontation with Romney, 48 hours away, at Hofstra University in New York. It was an event to which few had given much thought. Until the debacle in Denver, that is.

The debate in the Mile High City eleven days earlier had jolted a race that for many months had been hard fought but remarkably stable. From the moment in May that Romney emerged victorious from the most volatile and unpredictable Republican-nomination contest in many moons, Obama had held a narrow yet consistent lead. But after Romney mauled the president in Denver, the wind and weather of the campaign shifted in something like a heartbeat. The challenger was surging. The polls were tightening. Republicans were pulsating with renewed hope. Democrats were rending their garments and collapsing on their fainting couches.

Obama was nowhere in the vicinity of panic. “You ever known me to lose two in a row?” he said to friends to calm their nerves.

The president’s advisers were barely more rattled. Yes, Denver had been atrocious. Yes, it had been unnerving. But Obama was still ahead of Romney, the sky hadn’t fallen, and they would fix what went wrong in time for the town-hall debate at Hofstra. Their message to the nervous Nellies in their party was: Keep calm and carry on.

Williamsburg was where the repair job was supposed to take place. The Obamans had arrived at the resort, ready to work, on Saturday the 13th. The first day had gone well. The president seemed to be finding his form. He and Kerry had been doing mock debates since August, and the session on Saturday night was Obama’s best yet. Everyone exhaled.

But now, in Sunday night’s run-through, the president seemed to be relapsing: The disengaged and pedantic Obama of Denver was back. In the staff room, his two closest advisers, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, watched on video monitors with a mounting sense of unease—when, all of a sudden, a practice round that had started out looking merely desultory turned into the Mock From Hell.

The moment it happened could be pinpointed with precision: at the 39:35 mark on the clock. A question about home foreclosures had been put to potus; under the rules, he had two minutes to respond. Before the mock, Kerry had been instructed by one of the debate coaches to interrupt Obama at some juncture to see how he reacted. Striding across the bright-red carpet of the set that the president’s team had constructed as a precise replica of the Hofstra town-hall stage, Kerry invaded the president’s space and barged in during Obama’s answer.

The president’s eyes flashed with annoyance.

“Don’t interrupt me,” he snapped.

When Kerry persisted, Obama shot a death stare at the moderator—his adviser Anita Dunn, standing in for CNN’s Candy Crowley—and pleaded for an intercession.

The president’s coaches had long worried about the appearance of Nasty Obama on the debate stage: the variant who infamously, imperiously dismissed his main Democratic rival in 2008 with the withering phrase “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” His advisers saw glimpses of that side of him in their preparations for the first showdown—a manifestation of a personal antipathy for Romney that had grown visceral and intense. Now they were seeing it again, and worse. The admixture of Nasty Obama and Denver Obama was not a pretty picture.

Challenged by Kerry with multipronged attacks, the president rebutted them point by point, exhaustively and exhaustingly. Instead of driving a sharp message, he was explanatory and meandering. Instead of casting an eye to the future, he litigated the past. Instead of warmly establishing connections with the town-hall questioners, he pontificated airily, as if he were conducting a particularly tedious press conference. While Kerry was answering a query about immigration, Obama retaliated for the earlier interruption by abruptly cutting him off.

Excerpted from Double Down: Game Change 2012, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, to be published on November 5, 2013, by the Penguin Press.

In the staff room, Axelrod and Plouffe were aghast. Sitting with them, Obama’s lead pollster, Joel Benenson, muttered, “This is unbelievable.”

Watching from the set, the renowned Democratic style coach Michael Sheehan scribbled furiously on a legal pad, each notation more alarmed than the last. Reflecting on Obama’s interplay with the questioners, Sheehan summed up his demeanor with a single word: “Creepy.”

After 90 excruciating minutes, the Mock From Hell was over. As Obama made his way to the door, he was intercepted by Axelrod, Plouffe, Benenson, and the lead debate coach, Ron Klain. Little was said. Little needed to be said. The ashen looks on the faces of the president’s men told the tale.

Obama left the building and returned to his sprawling quarters on the banks of the James River with his best friend from Chicago, Marty Nesbitt, to watch football and play cards. His advisers retreated to the president’s debate-prep holding room to have a collective coronary.

That the presidential debates were proving problematic for Obama came as no real surprise to the members of his team. Many of them—Axelrod, the mustachioed message maven and guardian of the Obama brand; Plouffe, the spindly senior White House adviser and enforcer of strategic rigor; Dunn, the media-savvy mother superior and former White House communications director; Benenson, the bearded and noodgy former Mario Cuomo hand; Jon Favreau, the dashing young speechwriter—had been with Obama from the start of his meteoric ascent. They knew that he detested televised debates. That he disdained political theater in every guise. That, on some level, he distrusted political performance itself, with its attendant emotional manipulations.

The paradox, of course, was that Obama had risen to prominence and power to a large extent on the basis of his preternatural performance skills—and his ability to summon them whenever the game was on the line. In late 2007, when he was trailing Hillary Clinton in the Democratic-­nomination fight by 30 points. In the fall of 2008, when the global financial crisis hit during the crucial last weeks of the general election. In early 2010, when his signature health-care-reform proposal seemed destined for defeat. In every instance, under ungodly pressure, Obama had pulled up, set his feet, and drained a three-pointer at the buzzer.

The faith of the president’s people that he would do the same at Hofstra was what sustained them in the wake of Denver. For a year, the Obamans had fretted over everything under the sun: gas prices, unemployment, the European financial crisis, Iran, the Koch brothers, the lack of enthusiasm from the Democratic base, Hispanic turnout in the Orlando metroplex. The one thing they had never worried about was Barack Obama.

But given the spectacle they had just witnessed at Kingsmill, the Obamans were more than worried. After spending ten days pooh-poohing the widespread hysteria in their party about Denver, Obama’s debate team was now the most wigged-out collection of Democrats in the country, huddling in a hotel cubby that had become their secret panic room. Three hours had passed since the mock ended; it was almost 2 a.m. Obama’s team was still clustered in the work space, reading transcripts and waxing apocalyptic.

“Guys, what are we going to do?” Plouffe asked quietly, over and over. “That was a disaster.”

Among the Obamans, there was nobody more unflappable than Plouffe—and nobody less shaken by Denver. But while Plouffe believed the public would brush off a single bad debate showing, he was equally convinced that two in a row would not be so readily ignored. If Obama turned in a performance at Hofstra like the one they had seen that night, the consequences could be dire.

“If we don’t fix this,” Plouffe said emphatically, “we could lose the whole fucking election.”

Almost from the moment that Obama stepped off the debate stage in Denver, he had been bombarded with advice about how to remedy what had gone wrong. But the truth was that virtually no one on the planet could understand what he was going through or up against.

A rare exception was Bill Clinton. Before Denver, Clinton had watched in wonder as Obama caught break after break. Although the economy wasn’t roaring back, neither the European banking crisis nor the unrest in the Mideast had caused it to nosedive. Meanwhile, Romney’s ineptness staggered Clinton. After the release of the 47 percent video, he remarked to a friend that, while Mitt was a decent man, he was in the wrong line of work. (“He really shouldn’t be speaking to people in public.”) As for Obama, Clinton trotted out for his pals the same line again and again: “He’s luckier than a dog with two dicks.”

Though the first debate brought the incumbent’s streak of good fortune to a crashing halt, Clinton was insistent that the Obamans not overreact. On the phone to Axelrod, 42 counseled restraint at Hofstra, warning that if 44 was too hot or negative in a town-hall debate, it would backfire. Four days after Denver, at a fund-raiser at the Beverly Hills home of Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, Clinton huddled with Obama and repeated the instructions.

Don’t try to make up the ground you lost, the Big Dog said. Just be yourself.

Obama faced a more immediate challenge, which was to arrest the metastasizing panic among his supporters. In 2008, Plouffe had airily dismissed Democrats who lost their minds in the midst of Palinmania as “bedwetters.” But now there was a similar drizzle as the public polls sharply narrowed—and worse. “Did Barack Obama just throw the entire election away?” blared the title of an Andrew Sullivan blog post.

Chicago’s internal polling strongly suggested that the answer was no—the race was back to where it had been following the party conventions, with Obama holding a three- or four-point lead.

Even so, as the full desultoriness of his Denver performance sank in, the president was consumed by a sense of responsibility—and shadowed by fears that his reelection was at risk. Outwardly, he took pains to project the opposite. When his staffers asked how he was doing, he replied, “I’m great.” To Plouffe, who had volunteered to soothe Sullivan, Obama joked, Someone’s gotta talk him off the ledge!

Obama returned from the West Coast and met with his debate team in the Roosevelt Room on the afternoon of October 10. He opened by saying he had read a memo drafted by Klain about what went awry in Denver and how to fix it before Hofstra, now six days away. He agreed with most of it but wanted everyone to know that they hadn’t failed him; he had failed them. “This is on me,” Obama said.

“I’m a naturally polite person,” he went on. Part of my problem is “erring on the side of being muted. We have to get me to a place where internally I’m not biting my tongue … It’s important for me to be fighting.”

The debate team received a boost 24 hours later from Obama’s second-in-­command, when Joe Biden took on Paul Ryan in the vice-presidential debate in Danville, Kentucky. “You did a great job,” the president told the V.P. by phone. “And you picked me up.”

In 36 hours, Obama would set off for debate camp in Williamsburg. But watching his understudy had already provided him with one helpful insight.

“These are not debates,” Obama observed to Plouffe. “These are gladiatorial enterprises.”

The first lady worried about her Maximus and his return to the Colosseum. In truth, she had fretted over the debates even before Denver. In July, around the time her husband’s prep started, she met with Plouffe and expressed firm opinions. That Barack had to speak from the gut, in language that regular folks could understand. Had to avoid treating the debates like policy seminars. Had to keep his head out of the clouds. (Michelle’s advisers paraphrased her advice as “It’s not about David Brooks; it’s about my mother.”) FLOTUS loved POTUS like nobody’s business, but she knew his faults well.

In the wake of Denver, Michelle was unfailingly encouraging with her husband: Don’t worry, you’re going to win the next one, just remember who you’re talking to, she told him. Before a small group of female bundlers, she pronounced that Barack had lost only because “Romney is a really good liar.”

Privately, however, Michelle was unhappy about how her spouse’s prep had been handled. There had been a late arrival in Denver, a rushed dinner at a crappy hotel. Inexplicably, he had been unable to reach Sasha and Malia by phone. He seemed overscheduled, overcoached, and under-rested. At first, Michelle conveyed her displeasure via senior White House adviser and First Friend Valerie Jarrett, who flooded the in-boxes of the debate team with pointed e-mails, employing the royal “we.” But the day before debate camp in Williamsburg, Michelle delivered marching orders directly to Plouffe: If the president wants our chef there, he should be there; if he wants Marty Nesbitt there, he should be there. Barack’s food, downtime, exercise, sleep, lodging—all of it affects his frame of mind. All of it has to be right.

Plouffe saluted sharply and thought, I guess the First Lady understands the stakes here.

That same Friday, October 12, Obama’s debate team gathered again in the Roo­sevelt Room for a final pre-camp session. The president was presented with a piece of overarching advice and a memo, both of which would have been inconceivable before Denver. The advice was: Be more like Biden, whose combativeness, scripted moments, and bluff calls on Ryan (“Not true!”) the night before had all proved effective tactics. The memo was an alliterative flash card to remind Obama of what it called “the Six A’s”:

Advocate (don’t explain)
Audience
Animated
Attacks
Answers with principles and values
Allow yourself to take advantage of openings

Ron Klain had no shame about such contrivances—whatever worked. A Washington super-staffer, Klain had served on every Democratic presidential debate-prep team for twenty years and co-led Obama’s effort in 2008. But his relationship with the president was not straightforward or particularly close. Right after the Denver disaster, he offered to resign from the debate team, but Obama refused to let him. Klain’s ego, pride, and future ambitions were all wrapped up in correcting the miscues from the Mile High City and constructing a comeback at Hofstra.

Klain turned Obama’s prep regime upside down: new strategy, new tactics, new structure. In Williamsburg, there would be an intense concentration on performance, including speeding up Obama’s ponderous delivery. There would be less policy Q&A and more rehearsal of set pieces and lines that popped. Less emphasis on programmatic peas and spinach, more on anecdote and empathy. Contrary to Clinton’s advice, there would be plenty of punching to go along with the counterpunching.

Camp commenced on Saturday in Williamsburg. Two levels down from the lobby of the Kingsmill Resort Center, on the precisely built replica of the Hofstra town-hall set, the president spent most of the day sharpening his answers with Klain and Axelrod. That night, his mock went better than any of the six sessions prior to Denver. The members of the debate team weren’t ready to declare victory yet, but they were relieved. Obama’s friend Nesbitt was exultant.

“That’s some good shit!” he told the president, patting him on the back. “That’s my man! He’s back!”

In the Sunday daytime sessions, Obama showed still more improvement, honing a solid attack on the 47 percent and another on his rival’s economic agenda. (“Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan; he has a one-point plan, and that’s to make sure folks at the top play by a different set of rules.”) As the team took time off for dinner before Obama and Kerry went at it again, Klain thought, Okay, we’re getting to a better place. Plouffe thought, He’s locked in.

A little before 9 p.m., they returned to the Resort Center. Obama and Kerry grabbed their handheld microphones and took their places—and the president proceeded to deliver the Mock From Hell.

Even before Nasty Obama snarled at Kerry-as-Mitt and Anita Dunn as CNN’s Candy Crowley at the 39:35 mark, Klain was mortified. The president’s emotional flatness from Denver was back. He was making no connection with the voter stand-ins asking questions. He was wandering aimlessly, digressing compulsively, not merely chasing rabbits but stalking them to the ends of the Earth. His cadences were hesitant and maple-syrupy slow: phrase, pause, phrase, pause, phrase. His answers were verbose and utterly devoid of message.

In Klain’s career as a debate maestro, he had been involved in successes (Kerry over Bush three times in a row) and failures (Gore’s symphony of sighs in 2000). But he had never seen anything like this. After all the happy talk from Obama and his consistent, if small, steps forward, the president was regressing—with 48 hours and only one full day of prep between them and Hofstra.

At the Pettus House, a colonnaded red- brick mansion on the riverbank where Obama and Nesbitt were bunking, the two men stayed up late hashing out what hadn’t worked, how the president was still struggling to find the zone. “You can’t get mad” at Romney’s distortions, Nesbitt said. “You come off better when you just say, ‘Now, that’s fucking ridiculous.’ When you laugh, that shit works, man.”

In Obama’s hold room at the Resort Center, his staff was moving past puzzlement and panic toward practical considerations. The lesson that Plouffe had taken from Denver was that you could no longer count on fourth-quarter Obama; what you saw in practice was what you got on the debate stage. If he doesn’t have a good mock tomorrow, there’s no reason to believe that it’ll get fixed when he gets to New York, Plouffe said.

Two schools of thought quickly emerged within the team. The first, pushed by Washington super-lawyer Bob ­Barnett—who was also a longtime debate prepper and was there serving on Kerry’s staff—was that Obama needed to be shown video in the morning. “This is what we did with Clinton,” Barnett sagely noted. The other, advanced by Favreau, was that Obama should be given transcripts. He’s a writer, Favreau argued. Words on the page will make a deeper impression.

The full transcript was in hand within 45 minutes—and became a source of gallows humor. As the clock ticked well past midnight, Favreau stagily read aloud some of Obama’s most dreadful answers. Soon his colleagues joined in, with Axelrod, Benenson, and Plouffe offering recitations and laughing deliriously over the absurdity and horror of the circumstances.

Barnett and others believed that Obama’s playbook had to be stripped down more dramatically, to a series of simple and crisp bullet points on the most likely topics to come up in the debate. Klain agreed and wanted to go a step further. In 1996, Democratic strategist Mark Penn had devised something called “debate-on-a-page” for Gore in his V.P. face-off with Jack Kemp. Klain suggested they do the same for Obama: a sheet of paper with a handful of key principles, attacks, and counterattacks.

Axelrod and Plouffe thought something more radical was in order. For the past six years, they had watched Obama struggle with his disdain for the theatricality of politics—not just debates, but even the soaring speeches for which he was renowned. Obama’s distrust of emotional string-pulling and resistance to the practical necessities of the sound-bite culture: These were elements of his personality that they accepted, respected, and admired. But they had long harbored foreboding that those proclivities might also be a train wreck in the making. Time and again, Obama had averted the oncoming locomotive. Had embraced showmanship when it was necessary. Had picked his people up and carried them on his back to the promised land. But now, with a crucial debate less than two days away—one that could either put the election in the bag or turn it into a toss-up—Obama was faltering in a way his closest advisers had never witnessed. They needed to figure out what had gone haywire from the inside out. They needed, as someone in the staff room put it, to stage an “intervention.”

The next morning, October 15, Klain stumbled from his room to the Resort Center, eyes puffy and nerves jangled. He’d been up all night hammering together and e-mailing around his debate-on-a-page draft. In Obama’s hold room, the team members gathered and laid out their plan for the day. They would screen video for the boss. They would show him transcripts. They would present him with his cheat sheets. They would devote the day to topic-by-topic drills until he had his answers memorized.

Normally, the whole group would now meet with the president to critique the previous night’s mock. Instead, everyone except Axelrod, Klain, and Plouffe cleared the room just before 10 a.m. Obama was on his way. The intervention was at hand.

Where’s everybody else?” Obama asked as he ambled in across the speckled green carpet with his chief of staff, Jack Lew, at his side. “Where’s the rest of the team?”

We met this morning and decided we should have this smaller meeting first, one of the interventionists said.

Obama, in khakis and rolled-up shirtsleeves, looked nonplussed. Between his conversation with Nesbitt the night before and a morning national-security briefing with Lew, he was aware that his people were unhappy with the mock—but not fully clued in to the depth of their concern.

The president settled into a cushy black sofa at one end of the room. On settees to his left were Axelrod, Plouffe, and Lew; to his right, in a blue blazer, was Klain, now caffeinated and coherent.

“We’re here, Mr. President,” Klain began, “because we need to have a serious conversation about why this isn’t working and the fundamental transformation we need to achieve today to avoid a very bad result tomorrow night.” We’re not going to get there by continuing to grind away and marginally improve, Klain went on. This is not about changing the words in your debate book, because the difference between the answers that work and the answers that don’t work is just 15 or 20 percent. This is about style, engagement, speed, presentation, attitude. Candidly, we need to figure out why you’re not rising to and meeting the challenge—why you’re not really doing this, why you’re doing … something else.

Obama didn’t flinch. “Guys, I’m struggling,” he said somberly. “Last night wasn’t good, and I know that. Here’s why I think I’m having trouble. I’m having a hard time squaring up what I know I need to do, what you guys are telling me I need to do, with where my mind takes me, which is: I’m a lawyer, and I want to argue things out. I want to peel back layers.”

The ensuing presidential soliloquy went on for ten minutes—an eternity in Obama time. His tone was even and unemotional, but searching, introspective, diagnostic, vulnerable. Psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually, he was placing his cards face up on the table.

“When I get a question,” he said, “I go right to the logical.” You ask me a question about health care. There’s a problem, and there’s a response. Here’s what my opponent might say about it, so I’m going to counteract that. Okay, we’re gonna talk about immigration. Here’s what I’d like to say—but I can’t say that. Think about what that means. I know what I want to say, I know where my mind takes me, but I have to tell myself, No, no, don’t do that—do this other thing. It’s against my instincts just to perform. It’s easy for me to slip back into what I know, which is basically to dissect arguments. I think when I talk. It can be halting. I start slow. It’s hard for me to just go into my answer. I’m having to teach my brain to function differently. I’m left-handed; this is like you’re asking me to start writing right-handed.

Throughout the campaign, Obama had been criticized for the thin gruel of his second-term agenda. Now he acknowledged that it bothered him, too, and posed a challenge for the debates.

You keep telling me I can’t spend too much time defending my record, and that I should talk about my plans, he said. But my plans aren’t anything like the plans I ran on in 2008. I had a universal-health-care plan then. Now I’ve got … what? A manufacturing plan? What am I gonna do on education? What am I gonna do on energy? There’s not much there.

“I can’t tell you that ‘Okay, I woke up today, I knew I needed to do better, and I’ll do better,’ ” Obama said. “I am wired in a different way than this event requires.”

Obama paused.

“I just don’t know if I can do this,” he said.

Obama’s advisers sat silently at first, absorbing the extraordinary moment playing out in front of them. In October of an election year, on the eve of a pivotal debate, the president wasn’t talking about tactics or strategy, about this line or that zinger. He was talking about personal contradictions and ambivalences, about his discomfort with the campaign he was running, about his unease with the requirements of politics writ large, about matters that were fundamental, even existential. We are in uncharted territory here, thought Klain.

More striking was Obama’s candor and self-awareness. The most self-contained president in modern history (and, possibly, the most self-possessed human on the planet) was laying himself bare, deconstructing himself before their eyes—and admitting he was at a loss.

All through his career, Obama had played by his own rules. He had won the presidency as an outsider, without the succor of the Democratic Establishment. He owed it little, offered less. He had ignored the traditional social niceties of the office, and largely resisted the media freak show, swatting away its asininities. He had refused to stomp his feet or shed crocodile tears over the BP spill, because neither would plug the pipe spewing oil from the ocean floor. He had eschewed sloganeering to sell his health-care plan, although it meant the world to him.

Now he was faced with an event that demanded an astronomical degree of fakery, histrionics, and stagecraft—and while he was ready to capitulate, trying to capitulate, he found himself incapable of performing not just to his own exalted standards but to the bare minimum of competence. Acres of evidence and the illusions of his fans to the contrary, Barack Obama, it turned out, was all too human.

Axelrod was more intimate with Obama than anyone in the room. The president’s humanity and frailties were no secret to Axe—nor was 44’s capacity for self-doubt. Since Denver, Obama had been subjected to a hailstorm of criticism, a flood of panic, and a blizzard of psychoanalysis. Like every president, he claimed he was impervious to it. But Axelrod knew it was a lie. All this shit is in his head, the strategist thought.

Look, said Axelrod softly, we know that you find these debates frustrating, that they’re more performance than substance. It’s why you are a good president. It’s why all of us feel so strongly about your winning. But you have to find a way to get over the hump and stop fighting this game—to play this game, wrap your arms around this game.

For the next hour, the three Obamans tried to carry the president across the psychic chasm. Plouffe reminded him of the stakes. “We can’t have a repeat of Denver tomorrow night,” he warned. “Right now, we’re not losing any of our vote, but we’re on probation. If we have another performance that causes people to scratch their heads, we’re gonna start losing votes. We gotta stop this now.”

Over Obama’s despair about his lack of an agenda, Plouffe and Axelrod took him on. “You do have an agenda, goddammit!” Plouffe said. “This isn’t a bunch of b.s. you’re selling. This is an agenda the American people support and believe in. But they’re not gonna believe in it if you don’t treat it that way, by selling it with great fervor. If you sell your agenda and Romney sells his agenda with equal enthusiasm, we will win.

“Think about this,” Plouffe went on. “You have two debates left. So take out Romney, take out moderator questions: You’ve got basically 75 to 80 minutes left of doing this in your entire life. That’s less than the length of a movie! You can do this! I know it’s uncomfortable. I know it’s unnatural. But that’s all. That’s the finish line, you know?”

Klain employed a sports analogy. The Tennessee Titans lost the Super Bowl a couple of years ago because their guy got tackled on the one-yard line, he said—the one-yard line! That’s where we are. The hardest thing for any candidate in a debate is to know the substance. You have that down cold. All we need is a little more effort on performance. You need to go in there and talk as fast as you can. You need to add a little schmaltz, talk about stuff the way that people want to hear it. This isn’t about starting over, starting from scratch. We’ve got most of it right. The part we have left to get right is small. But as the Titans proved, small can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Obama’s aides couldn’t tell if their words were sinking in. “I understand where we are,” the president said finally. I’m either going to center myself and get this or I’m not. The debate’s tomorrow. There’s not much we can do. I just gotta fight my way through it.

As the meeting wound to a close, the Obamans felt relief mixed with trepidation. Oddly, for Klain, the president’s lack of confidence about his ability to turn himself around was comforting. After all the blithe I-got-its of his pre-Denver prep, Obama for the first time was acknowledging that a genuine and serious modification of his mind-set was necessary.

Plouffe felt less reassured. “It’s good news–bad news,” he told Favreau afterward. “The good news is, he recognizes the issue. The bad news is, I don’t know if we can fix it in time.”

The full team reconvened in Obama’s hold room. Klain ran through his memo of the previous night and explained to the president the new new format for his prep: For the rest of the day until his final mock, they were going to drill him incessantly on the ten or so topics they expected to come up in the debate, compelling him to repeat his bullet points over and over again. Klain also presented Obama with his debate-on-a-page:

MUST REMEMBER
1. (Your) Speed Kills (Romney)
2. Upbeat and Positive in Tone
3. Passion for People and Plans
4. OTR [Off the Record] Mind-set—Have Fun
5. Strong Sentences to Start and End
6. Engage the Audience
7. Don’t Chase Rabbits

BEST HITS
1. 47%
2. Romney + China Outsourcing
3. Heaven & Earth
4. 9/11 Girl
5. Sketchy Deal
6. Mass Taxes—Cradle to Grave
7. Preexisting and ER
8. Women’s Health
9. Borrow From Your Parents

REBUTTAL CHEAT SHEET
1. Jobs—The 1-point plan
2. Deficits—$7 trillion and The Sketchy Deal
3. Energy—Coal plant is a killer
4. Health—Preexisting fact check and the ER
5. Medicare—He wants to save Medicare … by ending it!
6. Bus Taxes—60 Mins in rebuttal (i.e., pivot to personal taxes)
7. Pers Taxes—Tax cuts for outsourcing (i.e., pivot to job creation)
8. Gridlock—Romney brings the lobbyist back
9. Benghazi—Taking offense
10. Education—Borrow from your parents and/or Size Doesn’t Matter

That the intervention had had some effect on Obama was immediately apparent, though how much was unclear. He brought a new energy and focus to his afternoon drills. When he delivered an imperfect answer, he stopped himself short: “Let’s do that again.” At his debate camp before Denver, outside Las Vegas, Obama had been so intent on escaping that he took off one day for a visit to the Hoover Dam. Now he refused even brief breaks for a walk by the river. As the afternoon went on, the debate team concocted cutesy catchphrases to cue him at the slightest hint of backsliding.

“Fast and hammy! Fast and hammy!” Klain would say when his delivery was lugubrious.

“Punch him in the face!” Karen Dunn, another team member, chipped in when he missed a chance to cream Kerry-as-Mitt.

For Klain, the turning point came that afternoon, during a session in which Obama was fielding questions from junior members of the team who were standing in as voters. Tony Carrk, a researcher, introduced himself as Vito, a barbershop proprietor from Long Island, and asked which tax plan—Obama’s or Romney’s—would be better for small-business owners like him. Without missing a beat, the president savaged Mitt’s plan with verve, precision, and bite, closing with some good-natured joshing about Vito’s shop.

The perfect town-hall answer, Klain thought.

That night, for the final mock, Kerry was instructed to bring his A-game. With the team on pins and needles, Obama earned a solid B-plus. The contrast with the previous night was so dramatic it called to Axelrod’s mind the triumphant scenes in Hoosiers. When it was over, the team rose in unison and gave Obama a standing ovation.

“All right, all right, all right,” the president said, waving them off, smiling abashedly.

The next morning, before setting off for Hofstra, the team gathered once again in Obama’s hold room to review the mock. No one was remotely certain they were out of the woods. The past three days had carried them too close to the abyss for firm convictions of any kind. But the president’s mood could not have been more buoyant. Running through the team’s critique, he reveled in their praise of a particularly strong answer.

“Oh, you guys liked that?” Obama said, grinning broadly. “That was fast and hammy, right?”

For all the progress Obama had made in his final practice session, his team was far from serene as the witching hour approached at Hofstra. Backstage, Klain was a nervous wreck. One pretty good mock, one disaster in the past 48 hours, Plouffe thought. So which Obama shows up?

Just then, the president emerged from his holding room a few minutes before heading onstage. He found Klain, Plouffe, Axelrod, and Jim Messina in the hallway.

“Guys, I’m going to be good tonight,” Obama said. “I finally figured this out.”

When the lights went up, it took all of one answer for the Obamans to realize that the president wasn’t kidding. Replying to the first questioner, a 20-year-old college student worried about finding work after graduation, Obama locked eyes with the young man and spoke crisply and pointedly. In the space of six sentences, the president plugged higher education and touted his job-creation record, his manufacturing agenda, and his rescue of the auto industry—plunging an ice pick into Romney by invoking “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” When Mitt cited his five-point economic plan in answer to a follow-up from Crowley, Obama let loose with his one-point-plan zinger. He was fast. He was hammy. He was gliding around the stage.

In the staff room, Obama’s increasingly giddy team kept track of his progress, using his debate-on-a-page as a scorecard, ticking off the hits one by one as he delivered them. On outsourcing to China, immigration (self-deportation), women’s issues (Planned Parenthood), and more, the president was not only proving himself an able student but making Romney pay for every rightward lunge he had taken during the nomination contest.

Romney responded aggressively but with visible annoyance as he found himself forced to keep doubling back to answer attacks from minutes earlier, which made him appear petty and threw him off rhythm. In Denver, Mitt’s propensity for gaffes had vanished as if by magic; at Hofstra, presto-change-o, it returned. Boasting of his commitment to gender equity in the Massachusetts statehouse, he referred to the résumés he reviewed for Cabinet posts as “binders full of women.”

About two thirds of the way through the 90 minutes, Romney tried to roll out a hit on Obama’s financial portfolio. “Mr. President, have you looked at your pension?” Romney asked.

“You know, I don’t look at my pension,” Obama said without missing a beat and with a mile-wide smile. “It’s not as big as yours, so it doesn’t take as long.”

The debate was now a little more than an hour old. The next question from the audience had to do with Benghazi. Obama explained the steps he had taken in the wake of the September 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission there—and then turned his attention to his opponent. “While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release trying to make political points,” the president said sternly.

Romney got in a jab about the inappropriateness of Obama having taken a political trip on September 12. But Romney went further. “There were many days that passed before we knew whether this was a spontaneous demonstration or actually whether it was a terrorist attack,” he said. “And there was no demonstration involved. It was a terrorist attack, and it took a long time for that to be told to the American people.”

Obama summoned his highest dudgeon and responded: “The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden, and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror. And I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime. And then a few days later, I was there greeting the caskets coming into Andrews Air Force Base and grieving with the families. And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of State, our U.N. ambassador—anybody on my team—would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive. That’s not what we do. That’s not what I do as president. That’s not what I do as commander-in-chief.”

Obama returned to his stool and took a sip of water. Romney, incredulous, began to splutter.

“You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration? Is that what you’re saying?”

With an icy stare, Obama set a trap: “Please proceed, Governor.”

“I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president fourteen days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror,” Romney insisted.

“Get the transcript,” Obama said—at which point Candy Crowley interceded.

“He did, in fact, sir,” Crowley said to Romney. “He did call it an act of terror.”

“Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” Obama said, twisting the knife in Romney’s back. The crowd burst into laughter and applause.

Minutes later, the debate was over. The Obamans were ebullient. The president’s performance hadn’t been perfect, but judged against the standards of Denver (or the Mock From Hell) it was pure genius. As he came off the stage, Obama thought he had done well. But having initially misjudged his performance the last time out, he was slightly tentative.

“That was good, right?” Obama asked.

Monthly bill de Blasio gained the minimal little bit of beach front time he’s making the most of this weekend in Puerto Rico. His three-yr run to victory was a amazing feat of political smarts and fantastic luck. He offered his case with model and self-control, with a person excellent Television advertisement starring his son and a million repetitions of the phrase “a tale of two cities”—which his campaign strategists initially intended as a placeholder right up until they came up with a much more primary slogan. They under no circumstances did, and De Blasio created the Dickens work—one indicator of how deft he was at observing that voters wanted a progressive corrective to twelve a long time of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He rose from an obscure community workplace to handily defeat a better-regarded, far more experienced entrance-runner in the Democratic mayoral main and then won the basic election by the most significant open up-seat margin at any time. All extremely remarkable.

The reward is 4 many years of nonstop problems that will make remaining mocked as a socialist by Joe Lhota appear to be like joyful hour. There is no shortage of important complications on the horizon: a $2 billion city funds deficit, extra than 100 municipal labor unions clamoring for raises, the require to preserve general public security when easing up on stop and frisk. Individuals issues will unfold slowly, and the adult men and girls De Blasio hires for his administration will be very important to addressing them. But De Blasio will, in all circumstances, be the central choice-maker. And how he ­handles his relationships with two of New York’s prickliest political players deserves unique attention—not just since of the immediate policy implications, but for the reason that of what every single drama will expose about De Blasio’s possibilities to thrive as mayor.

The very first, and by significantly more significant, is with Governor Andrew Cuomo. A smaller trace of how interesting the dynamic will be arrived in September at a press convention on the techniques of City Corridor. The protocol at these rituals is fairly nicely established. The endorser introduces the endorsed—the applicant, the individual the event is created to boost—who closes the push conference on a large take note. Nevertheless listed here was De Blasio introducing Cuomo—the freshly minted Democratic nominee for mayor turning in excess of the microphone and the highlight to the incumbent governor, who proceeded to give a stem-winding speech that stole the display. It was a incredibly odd speaking order—and 1 that leading aides to the two politicians, um, discussed proper up until eventually the last moment.

Cuomo and De Blasio are genuinely helpful, just about the identical age, and have bonds heading back twenty decades. Their deepest day-to-working day shared working experience arrived when Cuomo, as HUD secretary, was De Blasio’s manager for two a long time, a pecking buy that is in the course of action of getting drastically altered. Cuomo will still outrank De Blasio, but the mayor of New York Metropolis has a more highly effective pulpit than the governor of the point out. To say that the political media is keen for fireworks is a laughable understatement. There will absolutely be strains and flare-ups. But I consider the governor and the new mayor are heading to shock and disappoint us by acquiring together famously—not minimum because Cuomo appears so keen to make the romance operate, each for a person a different and for New York. “A governor and a mayor, there is a organic rigidity amongst the two. But there is also a organic affinity,” the governor explained to me. “We’ve gone by hell and back again, Invoice and I—in our own lives, in our political life, and with each other. And neither of us are heading to enable nearly anything disrupt the essential relationship.”

De Blasio is equally effusive. “[Working for Cuomo at HUD] was a fantastic learning practical experience, in that he had this remarkable means to continue to be focused on his main agenda,” he informed me not too long ago. “Andrew also understood the difference between operating towards a aim and in fact accomplishing the goal. We’re not graded on hard work we’re graded on success. So that was a pretty, incredibly practical time for me in comprehension how to get a established of ambitions and get them to permeate an organization.” He sees the governor’s successful 1st yr in office as one thing of a product for what he’ll do as mayor, pointing in particular to Cuomo’s 2011 Medicaid-redesign commission as a “great template” for how De Blasio will check out to build at least the visual appearance of consensus on contentious problems.

Even now, the greatest power in holding the peace will be that each males have political incentives to perform as companions. De Blasio wishes to supply on his marketing campaign rhetoric about reshaping the metropolis into a progressive capital Cuomo would like to retain his remaining flank protected to roll up a massive reelection margin in 2014—and just in case the prospect to run for president in 2016 transpires to crop up. So what looks like an inescapable collision could change out to be an chance for the two to score details. De Blasio wants Albany’s acceptance for a signature marketing campaign guarantee, elevating taxes on the rich to pay for universal prekindergarten and expanded immediately after-university courses Cuomo suggests he’s all for beefing up training, but he’s determined to preserve decreasing New York’s taxes. If De Blasio slogs by way of the Legislature hoping to gain approval for the tax improve, only to run into a useless end with Senate Republicans, Cuomo might arrive up with an different route to fund the plan. Or Cuomo could persuade De Blasio to take care of the labor contracts prior to pursuing the educational institutions plan. “They can kind this out,” a Democratic colleague states. “Unless Bill presses for a tax raise for the sake of a tax raise. Which is not a combat the governor would shy away from.” De Blasio told me that he doesn’t see any substitute to boosting levies on the prosperous: “To me what’s really clear is that there is no other practical pathway.” But: “If new suggestions arise, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” he said. “I feel, in phrases of the more substantial discussion we’ve experienced in this metropolis, there is no query that a lot of men and women in this town want to see individuals who’ve carried out perfectly give back again to society. There is no question about that. But this is finally a sensible proposal.” And De Blasio and Cuomo are almost nothing if not useful politicians.

On another entrance, nonetheless, the new mayor seems prepared to go to war. De Blasio and Eva Moskowitz overlapped for 4 yrs in the Metropolis Council, and for the most part cordially, which is relatively strange, since the tough-charging Moskowitz has a expertise for finding less than people’s skin. Soon after leaving public workplace, she launched Good results Academy in Harlem considering the fact that 2006, it has developed to operate 22 constitution schools in four boroughs and racked up spectacular take a look at scores, as nicely as a collection of complaints that the educational facilities cull very low-doing and special-ed pupils. Which is made Moskowitz a lightning rod for constitution opponents, and during the Democratic main she was a handy focus on for contenders making an attempt to endear by themselves to the instructors union, De Blasio among them. He proposed that charters presently sharing house with conventional schools commence spending rent—but his assaults took on an unusually severe personalized edge. “There’s no way in hell Eva Moskowitz should really get cost-free hire [for her schools], all right?” De Blasio claimed at a discussion board in June. Even his allies found the vehemence a minor challenging to figure. “I comprehend Bill’s points about income inequality, economical housing, end and frisk,” a person Democrat says, “and how his critique of instruction reform suit into his anti-Bloomberg assault. But the charter-university things struck me as less authentic. Quite a few of those people educational facilities are serving the bad kids he cares about.”

In truth, De Blasio now suggests he’s inclined to master from the charters that perform greatest. “I imagine there are some charters that are executing a excellent job, that are agent, that present a good design, and we’ll function with them,” he explained to me. “But they will by no means switch the core capability of our classic community faculties.”

Possibly that is what’s seriously fueling his annoyance with Moskowitz. De Blasio’s major issue with charters is not philosophical—it’s that they suck up a disproportionate amount of political time and attention. He’d somewhat ignore the constitution-college movement than eliminate it, and as a substitute commit his educational energies to enhancing the 90 per cent of the city’s schools that aren’t charters. But 1 of the a lot of factors that is not distinct about ­De ­Blasio as a chief is whether he can different company from private. Bloomberg, as mayor, was usually in a position to scorn an adversary a person day and consider him an ally the next. Moskowitz will give an intriguing check case, since she would seem determined to goad De Blasio into ­backing up his marketing campaign rhetoric. In Oct, she led a help save-the-charters protest march across the Brooklyn Bridge, and she isn’t backing off now. Wasn’t the Million Moskowitz March prematurely confrontational? “Bill de Blasio took on Success Academy pretty straight in his marketing campaign and threatened our extremely existence,” she says. “To fulfill his campaign guarantee [about charging rent to charters] he would have to harm the quite young children he truly wishes to assist. And that I want to assistance. I’m delighted that the mayor-elect cares about equality, simply because that signifies equality of funding, that usually means equality of house. And constitution colleges have been discriminated against in so several means. And I’m not positive he’s informed of all individuals strategies.”

Bill de Blasio has a good deal of explanations to be mates with Andrew Cuomo and enemies with Eva Moskowitz. Acquiring a effective balance in people relationships, and in dozens of other conflicting passions, will be more durable. But accomplishing that equilibrium will identify no matter whether De Blasio can go from righteous candidate to agile mayor—and essentially carry New York’s two towns nearer together.

E-mail: chris_smith@nymag.com.

Irrespective of admitting final week that he did, following all, smoke crack, Toronto mayor Rob Ford has solved to run for reelection in 2014. His odds glance dicey, but voters have returned worse mayoral misbehavers to their posts. Below are 6 American scandals the embattled Canadian may possibly want to study right before producing his following go.

Rob Ford
2010–present
Ford to Torontonians: “Folks, I have practically nothing still left to cover.”
Consequence: in place of work

Tony Mack
2010–present
Trenton, New Jersey
Prices: corruption
Outcome: however in workplace, awaiting demo
Mack’s 2010 marketing campaign finances despatched up purple flags—how, for instance, did he lend the marketing campaign $20,000 though his home faced foreclosures? In 2012, federal brokers raided his dwelling. He was arrested that September for his involvement in a $119,000 bribery scheme to create a Trenton parking garage.

Vincent “Buddy” Cianci
1975–84, 1991–2002
Providence, Rhode Island
Convictions: assault later, racketeering
Consequence: resigned, reelected, resigned again
Cianci’s initial felony was his 1983 assault of a pal employing a hearth log, lit cigarette, and ashtray. That cost barred him from Rhode Island politics for quite a few decades. He was reelected in 1990, but his public services was slice shorter by a further felony, this time for racketeering.

Sheila Dixon
2007–10
Baltimore, Maryland
Conviction: embezzlement
Final result: resigned, place on probation (which she was accused of violating in 2012)
Nevertheless the point out prosecutor’s workplace started investigating Dixon for corruption in 2006, it was not until finally 2009 that rates stuck. She was found responsible of making use of Outdated Navy and Greatest Acquire gift cards donated to charity to buy items like a PlayStation and an Xbox 360.

Kwame Kilpatrick
2002–08
Detroit, Michigan
Conviction: 27 many counts
End result: resigned, presently serving a 28-yr sentence
Kilpatrick’s tenure was dogged by a lot of scandals (e.g., the mysterious loss of life of a stripper who allegedly had frequented the mayoral residence). The a person that did him in concerned perjury about an affair with his chief of staff members. He did 99 days’ time, only to return to the Significant Dwelling afterwards for corruption.

Bob Filner
2012–13
San Diego, California
Convictions: fake imprisonment, two counts of battery
Result: resigned, banned from politics
Months right after he took place of work, a few women accused Filner of sexual harassment. Other experiences of groping, kissing, and lewd behavior followed. He asked the metropolis to pay back his attorneys, then caved to tension and stepped down—taking his $98,000 in legal fees with him.

Marion Barry
1979–91, 1995–99
Washington, D.C.
Conviction: cocaine possession
Final result: served a 6-thirty day period sentence, later reelected
In 1990, Barry, then a 3rd-time period mayor and rumored addict, was caught on video clip smoking crack with an ex-girlfriend in a lodge area less than FBI surveillance. After prison, Barry squandered no time: He ran for metropolis council, then mayor, profitable each.

Have excellent intel? Mail recommendations to intel@nymag.com.

There had been threats up in Binghamton, a in close proximity to riot out on Long Island. But right here in Crown Heights, when condition instruction commissioner John King arrives for the hottest prevent on his “listening tour” about the implementation of new community-university specifications, things are weirdly tranquil. Though the volume is distinctly decreased, the stakes are not—and the dynamics far more intriguing than mere exchanges of shouts.

King is traveling the state to examine the Widespread Core, a set of federally-supported math and English benchmarks.* New York universities commenced teaching the new substance final 12 months past spring’s scores on the first round of the considerably harder Typical Core tests have been so lower it appeared little ones had stopped going to school fully. Widespread Core has swiftly develop into the new flash level in the community-college wars—teachers unions and opponents of greater standardized testing are combating its rollout. For King’s pay a visit to to Brooklyn, even though, the protesters were outflanked: Reps of StudentsFirstNY, the regional branch of Michelle Rhee’s big-revenue faculty-reform outfit, arrived early, distributing identically hand-painted indications and filling nearly the total speakers list with pro-Core parents whose remarks strike the same speaking factors.

The emotions, though, are uncooked and movingly honest. Ayana Bowen, a single of the moms and dads supporting the new standards, starts off talking slowly, striving to hold it collectively, describing life in Brownsville. The city is phasing out the nearby failing elementary school the substitution, P.S. 401, has gotten off to a rocky start—one 2nd-quality class experienced 5 different instructors in six months. Ninety-5 per cent of the students qualify for no cost lunch zero % of the students are white. This, Bowen suggests, is where by her 5-yr-aged daughter, Jayana, is in kindergarten. “It sickens me that people are versus Widespread Main,” she states. Then her composure crumbles. Her eyes brim with tears. “Just because we reside in a reduce-income group does not signify my boy or girl should have decreased opportunity. People in superior-off communities like Park Slope or the Upper East Facet want to lessen criteria for my baby.” When she finishes, there is scattered applause, but typically humbled silence.

A couple of minutes later, out in a hallway, Bowen has stopped quivering, but her desperation is just as palpable. “I went to public faculty in East Flatbush—it was not good, but it was not as bad as they are now,” she suggests. “The new mayor, what’s his name? He states he’s for greater expectations for all people. But I am not likely to think it right up until I see it.”

Monthly bill de Blasio grabbed headlines and votes by emphasizing a handful of themes and policy tips. A person of his basic marketing campaign pledges was that he’d “end the end-and-frisk era” and mend relations amongst cops and minority communities. De Blasio’s initial major conclusion as mayor-elect was to acquire a phase in that direction—while at the identical time reassuring the city’s elites that blood wasn’t likely to begin managing in the streets—by reinstalling Bill Bratton as law enforcement commissioner. Maintaining the metropolis protected even though minding civil liberties undoubtedly won’t be uncomplicated. But reforming the NYPD is a box of candies when compared with what awaits De Blasio’s educational institutions chancellor, whomever he or she turns out to be.

The mayor-elect’s other signature proposal as a applicant was a tax on the rich to fork out for expansions of pre­kindergarten and right after-university programs. Still even if these alterations ended up to get impact on January 2, they would be fairly insignificant components of the byzantine educational institutions puzzle, primarily for the 1.1 million kids presently in the procedure. There have been significant gains in the course of the previous twelve tumultuous several years of Michael Bloomberg’s faculties revamp—a willingness to consider new pedagogical procedures and university constructions, an enhanced feeling of urgency among principals and teachers—but the issues remain thornier and the players a lot more contentious than wherever else in city govt. Nearly no just one agrees on the alternatives to the biggest challenges: Graduation prices have improved significantly, but 35 p.c of the city’s community-faculty learners even now really don’t get a diploma—and the majority of the college students who do are not able of handling university-level courses. Poverty and dysfunctional family members are forcing educational facilities to shoulder a larger share of parenting on top of instructing grammar and algebra. The broad greater part of lecturers are keen to use whatsoever tools function best—but retraining lecturers is not as uncomplicated as redirecting cops mainly because of all the things from the paramilitary society of the NYPD to the imprecise science of education.

De Blasio’s friendlier tone, and presumably that of his chancellor, gives him a head start, as does his (and his spouse Chirlane McCray’s) encounter as a community-school guardian two times in excess of. He’s heading to will need each individual feasible edge to confront the critical troubles that now exist or loom just more than the horizon. Starting off with Widespread Main. Instructors are finding out the new English and math curricula at the exact time they are training them to children, and the changeover has been turbulent. Who warrants the blame is just just one of quite a few raging disputes in between DOE and the instructors union. “However they experience about Widespread Main, they are stuck with it,” claims David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College schooling professor. “The new administration has to figure out the specialist enhancement essential to put into action it improved. Which is a major problem.”

*This column has been corrected to exhibit that Prevalent Core is not federally mandated.

Then there is the matter of failing faculties. By the Bloomberg DOE’s count, 70 are in trouble, with a sizable portion probable at possibility of going out of organization if the mayor ended up sticking all over for a fourth time period. De Blasio has promised a moratorium on faculty closures but hasn’t claimed considerably about how he’d enhance the negative types over and above delivering them improved “support.” 30-five new educational institutions have been authorized to open up in the slide of 2014. Some could be hopeful destinations for students whose outdated schools are battling, even if they aren’t shut down underneath the new regime. De Blasio’s chancellor will will need to determine rather immediately if the plug is likely to be pulled on the new colleges that are ramping up.

Hovering above anything, nevertheless, is revenue. The teachers have been doing work devoid of a new deal due to the fact 2009 the old a single, in accordance to the DOE, has provided yearly raises of 3.6 per cent on common in the several years because, but United Federation of Lecturers president Michael Mulgrew is looking for far more and states he believes there’s $4 billion being paid to outside consultants that could instead go to his membership. Continue to, De Blasio has 151 other municipal unions he demands to negotiate with. And a person essential ingredient of the UFT bargaining, at the very least when it will come to delivering larger-­quality instruction to young children, may revolve not about dollars but operate policies. You are to be forgiven if you believed Governor Cuomo experienced fixed the deadlock more than instructor evaluations—the legislation developing evaluations did without a doubt get handed, but the union even now has the right to haggle more than the all-important information of how academics are assessed. Mulgrew and one of his previous adversaries from the DOE, previous deputy chancellor Eric Nadelstern, use the same a few words to describe the situation: “It’s a mess.” Most likely it is no ponder that one particular of De Blasio’s top rated choices to turn into chancellor, who is at the moment a professor at Stanford, is not packing up to depart Palo Alto.

The yelling started off really speedily. The mothers and fathers of P.S. 107 in Park Slope understood the college had challenges: Enrollment was down as much more affluent family members, notably white kinds, sent their little ones to the more prestigious P.S. 321. Now, on a spring evening in 2000, the district superintendent was threatening to ship in exclusive-ed systems to fill the vacant seats. Some parents loudly accused him of mounting a “witch hunt” against the principal for the reason that Viola Harper was black, the argument took on a tense racial subtext.

Then from the back again of the home arrived a tranquil voice: “Folks, fellas, parents—this is a time for you to come collectively. This is a definitely essential time. You will have a lot more power and additional impact if you stay alongside one another and figure out how you want to transfer ahead from right here, alternatively than arrive aside and get started fighting with every other.” The tall, goateed man was a faculty-board member who’d received his initially operate for office environment only months previously. It was a pretty early demonstration of De Blasio’s skill to browse the strategic realities—Harper was irreversibly on her way out—and of his gift for consensus-creating. Like almost all stories about the faculties, the ending isn’t tidily pleased: Tempers flared additional around the upcoming few months, even as De Blasio helped guidebook the parents toward the alternative of a proficient new principal. P.S. 107 improved tremendously, but gentrification has homogenized its pupil mix. The new mayor’s greatest mission is narrowing the hole amongst New York’s two towns, so that Brownsville does not just get the exact same benchmarks as Park Slope but the similar high quality of authorities providers. Buying a challenging and nimble chancellor will be important. Even much more essential will be no matter if Invoice de Blasio can acquire the skills for peacemaking and political maneuvering he exhibited in that a person faculty in his very own yard and scale them across five boroughs’ value.

E-mail: chris_smith@nymag.com.

In May possibly 1974, Roger Ailes obtained his initially television-news position as a PR advisor at a fledging network termed TVN, launched to battle the perceived liberal consensus of the Massive 3. Ailes, inspite of his inexperience, was promoted to information director 4 months later on. In a 1975 programming memo, excerpted under, Bruce Herschensohn, a former Nixon aide and movie director, described how TVN could adapt the tricks and tropes of television news to conservative ends.

Development of Information:
We can mail a newsman and a digicam crew above to the Capitol and chat to a congressman or senator about “the tale.” If the congressman or senator is prepared, we can create information in an instant. Most are prepared. It is an prospect to be viewed and heard. If it does not change out [the way we] preferred, we can throw it absent.

Case in point:
The most apparent examples had been the congressmen and senators picked for interviews throughout the period of time of time fees have been remaining produced from President Nixon and his administration. At the outset of the charges, when there was a equilibrium of sights in the congress, the viewer gained an unbalanced selectivity of individuals selected for interviews. At the time [Watergate special prosecutor] Archibald Cox was discharged the networks ran nineteen congressional attacks and two defenses, although this was not agent. Within just times Walter Cronkite had an eleven moment job interview with Archibald Cox on the CBS Evening News, devoid of any defender.

Pretense Balancing:
The motive is to present that the presentation is displaying “all sides” of a specific story when, in fact, the stability is tilted.

Instance:
On Vietnam Veterans Day of 1974, there have been a few segments to CBS’s information protection of that celebration. The 1st was the ceremony at Arlington Countrywide Cemetery, the second was Vietnam Veterans who had been dissenting on Capitol Hill, and the 3rd was the tale of a veteran who experienced his confront blown to bits in the Vietnam conflict, and who had awful and unjust problems with the Veterans Administration. This still left the viewers with 3 tales “regarding Vietnam Veterans Working day,” 1 favorable and two unfavorable. The favorable tale and the first unfavorable tale (the dissenters on Capitol Hill) had been really information tales of routines carried out in recognition of Vietnam Veterans Working day. The 3rd tale, which tilted the equilibrium, was not a news story, but a tale that experienced been documented months earlier to this newscast.

Commentator Speculations Which Appear to Be Factual:
Although the words are couched and the intervals are in the appropriate destinations separating information from speculation, the conclusion outcome of this procedure achieves a particular goal.

Illustration:
Dan Schorr wrapped up his October 18, 1974 report on the CIA by stating: “The era of covert operations is not ending, just evolving. There is rationale to think that suitable now in there, they’re working on contingency options, if referred to as on, for some of the world’s unstable areas. Portugal, Spain, Italy, the Arab Oil States could be the subsequent target.” The very last sentence was absolutely speculative and couched with the words and phrases “could be” but since of the specificity of nations and locations named, the audience impact was that Daniel Schorr was reporting specifics.

Capture-Phrases:
Catch-phrasing is a printed word and an audio technique which has been streamlined by tv newscasts with the use of simply remembered catchphrases which seem to be factual while they are, in reality, editorializations.

Example:
“The Saturday Night time Massacre,” “The Mysterious Notify,” “Operation Candor,” and the word “Watergate” itself, which was utilized to dwelling any and all unrelated expenses from the administration by the use of a term the place a regarded prison action did, in reality, choose spot.

Intercourse Appeal:
A pretty girl in a crowd or as an interviewee can do miracles in influencing a distinct level-of-watch. It can be used at will.

Example:
CBS coverage of the anti-Cambodian incursion demonstration in May well 1970. It appeared as however all the very girls were being from the incursion, and all the unsightly ones were being for it.

Invoice de Blasio was late. This time it was not his fault. State legislators lined up to shake arms and pose for photos with New York’s latest political star just before allowing for De Blasio to begin his testimony. Then they desired to share his televised spotlight, quizzing the mayor about his pre-K tax-the-wealthy plans right until his overall look prior to Albany’s finances committees stretched nearly two and a 50 percent several hours. Last but not least De Blasio was sent off, to a waiting pack of reporters, with a teasing farewell from Denny Farrell, the rascally octogenarian Democratic assemblyman.

“There’s a total bunch of persons ready for you,” Farrell stated with a sly chuckle.

“Are they welcoming individuals?” De Blasio replied with a goofy heh heh heh.

In mid-December, in Washington, a team of fellow mayors-elect had enable De Blasio consider the lead in talking to the press following a White Residence conference with President Barack Obama. Now, in Albany, the mayor’s next meeting was an additional—if much extra complicated—ratification of his soaring political stature. Governor ­Andrew Cuomo, as an alternative of allowing De Blasio occur and go from his dwelling turf without comment, had out of the blue scheduled a joint press convention, ostensibly to market their typical need to conserve Brooklyn hospitals. The mayor, when he spoke, was very careful to defer to the governor. But as the two sat elbow to elbow, grinning and backslapping with honest passion, it was uncomplicated to wonder just whose exhibit this really was.

In some approaches it is wildly out of proportion: By advantage of jogging and profitable as the remaining-most prospect in a Democratic principal in a overwhelmingly Democratic town, Monthly bill de Blasio has grow to be a nationwide figure. But politics is as substantially hype and art as it is science. And so De Blasio is now a beacon to liberals throughout the country. Which is why his area skirmish with Cuomo is about significantly much more than how to fund prekindergarten expansion. It’s about competing visions of the Democratic Celebration, and it’s a foreshadowing of a pressure that could form the 2016 presidential primaries.

Some of the De Blasio outcome is regular political flattery, the form of issue that transpires anytime a candidate wins an upset on a big phase. In New Orleans, two challengers to incumbent Mitch Landrieu peddled a “tale of two cities” (they misplaced anyway). Seattle’s new mayor, Ed Murray, is assembling an “income inequality committee” and pushing for a $15 bare minimum wage. The Newark Metropolis Council just passed a monthly bill mandating compensated unwell leave equivalent legislation is attaining floor in California, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Oregon, and Vermont. De Blasio fellow vacationers are even turning up in red states: Republican governors in Alabama, Indiana, and New Mexico, in their 2014 State of the Point out speeches, trumpeted initiatives to expend more cash on prekindergarten.

Were being they all impressed by De Blasio? No. And De Blasio himself is as a lot egg as he is hen, cannily capitalizing on a craze whose roots are in the 2008 fiscal meltdown, Occupy Wall Street, and the increase of Elizabeth Warren. Some thing was already happening out there. The question, particularly for countrywide Democrats, is how wide and deep the change is and will be. Certainly the left is investing excellent hope in its new hero. “Bill de Blasio is now found as the flagship for a likely city-policy enlightenment,” states Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the ­million-member team that was a key early fund-raiser for Warren. “If he is ­successful at earning New York profit daily, operating-course individuals, that could have enormous ripple consequences, pretty speedily, across the country.”

A major indicator will occur this fall, as Democrats consider to maintain on to their U.S. Senate majority. John Del Cecato, the De Blasio media strategist who crafted the famous “Dante” advertisement, is working on one of the more intriguing races, and his candidate is one more populist from Brooklyn—Brooklyn, Iowa. Bruce Braley, at this time a Democratic congressman, is operating for the U.S. Senate seat getting vacated by Tom Harkin, and the race will switch on Iowa-centric issues. But Braley will deliver an fascinating exam of how progressive themes perform in the heartland.

Best countrywide Democrats dismiss the idea that De Blasio’s priorities are now driving the political agenda. “We’re even now centered on financial fairness and option for the center class,” a person strategist claims. The govt director of the Democratic Senate Marketing campaign Committee, Guy Cecil, details out that every single contest has its possess dynamics, and that the particulars of De Blasio’s playbook are not conveniently ­transferable. “In most of our races, it is not always about building balance by increasing taxes in the way that De Blasio is executing it,” Cecil states. “The prescription for the trouble is not the exact.” In its place, he stresses conventional Democratic political talismans like preserving Medicare and Social Protection. But Cecil suggests that De ­Blasio’s information is extremely considerably in sync with what’s taking place nationally. “I do feel, all round, there is a typical concept about people today who are at or near the poverty line, and individuals who are squarely in the middle class, are finding the uncooked conclusion of the deal,” Cecil suggests. Wherever De Blasio harped on inexpensive housing, he says, Senate candidates are highlighting “pocket­book issues” like college loans that resonate with concentrate on constituencies, like Latino voters. “I really don’t know that an ­election in New York Metropolis is possessing any affect on this dialogue, as substantially as it may possibly be reflecting wherever the bigger nation is,” Cecil claims, “which is that we are seeing the inventory market place rise, and we’re observing enterprise setting up to improve, and GDP commencing to improve—and at the exact same time there are a ton of People who in their everyday life are not observing the advantage.”

Cecil’s reading through of the landscape is crucial not just for Democratic Senate candidates this calendar year, but for the reason that he’s probable to be on the small checklist to operate Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid, if she in fact operates. At this stage she’s the prohibitive favourite to grow to be the nominee—though that was legitimate at the exact stage in the operate-up to 2008, before most persons noticed Barack Obama coming. “I presume there will be a primary obstacle from the remaining, for confident,” Howard Dean says—though he also claims it will not be by him: “There are a lot of pragmatic progressives, and I’m just one of them, who are supporting her.” Dean campaigned for De Blasio previous yr, and he suggests that what transpires at Town Corridor will have ramifications much past the city. “Two progressive mayors—Bill and Eric Garcetti, in Los Angeles—don’t make a landslide toward progressivism. But I do imagine progressivism in typical is attaining the ascendancy in this country,” Dean suggests. “Bill has to be mayor very first, and he has to do a great job, and I assume he will. But what he does is pretty critical to the progressive movement. The rap on the progressive movement—mostly from the Wall Road types—is they can’t run anything, they can’t harmony the funds. That is not genuine. We have done a a great deal superior career than the Republicans of balancing the funds. Seem at Invoice Clinton.”

Andrew Cuomo acquired a excellent deal in the support of the Great Triangulator, and he is hardly the only Democrat who thinks that converse of a drastic shift to the remaining is overstated, particularly looking at that De Blasio’s “mandate” was shipped by a thin slice of the voters. Cuomo truly respects De Blasio and desires him to do well as mayor. But he has staked his governing solution and his political job on being a centrist, at minimum by New York criteria, and for 4 decades Cuomo has largely been a welcome pressure for budgetary sanity. Now, even though, he’s navigating a transform in the political wind. “Jeff Klein was by no means considered of as lefty, but he’s pretending to be 1 now,” a Cuomo adviser states of the Democrat who has set himself up as a electric power broker in the State Senate. “Klein, De Blasio, Eric Schneiderman, and Shelly Silver staying allied weirds out Cuomo. He wants to be Mr. Moderate, and these fellas are pulling him down the route of the ultraliberal things.” Cuomo’s response is also, as with most every­thing involving the governor, tied to the psychodrama of being the son of Mario Cuomo, a gentleman whose superior-minded rhetoric produced him a hero of the left Andrew is determined to make his mark with deeds, not phrases. Cuomo’s camp scoffs at De Blasio’s moralizing lefty tone, the mayor’s converse of becoming on a “sacred mission.” “He functions as if income inequality is a better reason,” a Cuomo ally claims. “ ‘We’re not speaking about filling potholes. We’re conversing about social justice.’ Bill’s been a pragmatist his complete job. You never ­really assume he’s transformed, proper?”

The compound and politics of the next handful of months are very important for the mayor. Resolving his pre-K struggle with Cuomo will enable determine regardless of whether battling for a tax enhance on the rich is a fantastic Democratic gambit. Yet it’s De Blasio’s substantial-stakes negotiations with labor unions that will be even much more telling. Shifting metropolis government’s values to the still left will not make a difference if De Blasio cannot get the dollars and cents appropriate and ends up turning into a spendthrift captive of the previous Democratic curiosity groups. But if De Blasio succeeds, his manufacturer of progressivism will achieve reliability, and the mayor will turn into a valued validator for liberals suspicious of HRC ’16. And if by some means Hillary does not operate, Cuomo could come across his friendship with De Blasio specially handy.

E-mail: chris_smith@nymag.com.

If you occur out in the up coming 3 minutes,” the e-mail reads, “just glance for the SUV trapped in 1983 and rocking to ‘Gloria.’ ” Philippe Reines is BlackBerrying from an Uber automobile idling outside Union Station in Washington, D.C. Guaranteed more than enough, there’s the black Suburban, shining in the afternoon solar amid lots of impatient taxis. Reines, Hillary Clinton’s most obvious spokesman and the guardian of her general public persona, is sprawled in the again passenger seat with the window a handful of inches down. “We’re going to push in circles,” he states.

In human being, Reines is none of the matters his status for tenacity would advise. He has, right now at the very least, forgone the Brooks Brothers uniform of the D.C. Energy Male in favor of a navy lengthy-sleeved polo and chinos. His thatch of dark hair is not particularly styled. The BlackBerry sits in the armrest cup holder but, in a further defiance of convention, Reines doesn’t verify it at all. As the Suburban begins to roll down Constitution Avenue, he is comfortable and undefensive. If the air of casualness is alone a sort of the image handle for which he is so well acknowledged, then it is operating.

Reines (pronounced RYE-niss), originally a product or service of the Higher West Facet, has worked as Hillary’s chief individual defender considering that becoming a member of her Senate workplace in 2002, going with her to the Point out Office in 2009 and often building news himself for his colorful and occasionally outlandish methods. The hottest example: In January, at an party with vehicle dealers, Clinton admitted that she hadn’t pushed a car or truck given that 1996, which prompted a BuzzFeed reporter to e-mail Reines seven queries about other modern-day factors that Clinton could not be up on. Had she ever acquired just about anything on the World wide web? Eaten at Chipotle? Swiped a MetroCard? Reines responded with a sneering e-mail that repeatedly referred to “BuLLfeed” and linked to numerous photographs of his patron appearing to do some (but not all) of the activities stated. BuzzFeed posted the full exchange, which designed its way to the scolds on cable Tv. This type of outing comes about to Reines all the time, suggesting, perhaps, that he ought to know far better.

“It’s not a excellent dynamic,” he claims with a rueful smile. “I’ve absent way past one’s healthful shelf life” as an every day spokesman, “which displays as a result of on an once-a-year foundation in some thing that I do or say.” There is only skinny visitors on the capital’s streets quickly we are dashing together I-395 and around the bridge to Virginia.* “I check out to converse to reporters as minor as attainable, just for my own private wellness and wellness,” he claims. “I consider that is a shared emotion. It is not a great deal of reporters who are like, ‘Oh, fantastic, I get to ask the Clinton business a hard issue now I’m positive this is gonna be the highlight of my week.’ ”

As any Washington spinmeister knows, the worst slip-up is one particular that underscores the perpetrator’s critical flaws, perceived or serious, which is why the most recent BuzzFeed episode stings: It echoes an trade about Benghazi with BuzzFeed reporter Michael Hastings, back again in 2012, in which Reines informed Hastings—again by using e-mail—to “fuck off” and “have a superior daily life.”

“The ‘fuck off’ point was awful,” Reines claims, not for the reason that he was aggressive with Hastings—who died in a car crash very last year—but because “I could not have been additional disrespectful of the tragedy” of the assault in Libya. “It was a Sunday morning when I wrote it,” Reines remembers. “Monday is when it hit. Tuesday, waking up and reading the clips of just headline right after headline immediately after headline that contained the phrases Benghazi, ambassador, 4 Us residents killed, Reines, Clinton, fuck off. It was just so disrespectful,” he suggests. “I never thoughts telling people to fuck off. Another person would like to know, you know, ‘We hear her shoe dimensions is seriously 5 and a 50 %, not six.’ I mean, fuck off.”

The Potomac is seen by the roadside trees, and Reines grows quieter. “I’ve always imagined that to the extent that I do a superior position, it’s because I’ve got diverse speeds,” he states. “And it’s tougher as lifetime goes on. I come to feel like I’m a 42-12 months-outdated pitcher who should have remaining at 37, and now I’ve only got a single pitch: Which is all everyone is aware.”

Extremism in defense of Hillary is no vice, on the other hand, and Reines’s manager is sticking with him. He a short while ago co-established a consulting business, Beacon World-wide Techniques, but he still is effective for Clinton as a 2nd comprehensive-time occupation. And if she runs again—he statements he doesn’t know if she will—Reines will be onboard. We have achieved the conclusion of the George Washington Memorial Parkway, and the driver turns all over in front of the gates of Mount Vernon and heads back again toward the District.

A 2016 campaign, if Reines has any say, will be operate extra sensibly than 2008’s: “I assume she’d be far better off not employing any individual above the age of 35,” he claims. “And I imagine they should really all be on a barge or on some kind of orbital platform that can only transmit to the Earth and not receive from it. You just want a roomful of individuals acquiring superior thoughts and fantastic strategies and then not recognizing what occurred. You arrive back to Earth the working day after the election.”

A house-station-like marketing campaign hub is the sort of radical effectiveness Reines tends to go for. He has positioned parental locks on all eleven of the televisions in his firm’s new headquarters, so that no one can look at MSNBC, the network that goes right after him most difficult. On Clinton’s international outings, he would journey with a foldable toothbrush that in good shape a lot more quickly into his pocket, elim­inating the want for a have-on bag. And for virtually two a long time now, he has long gone totally cashless. “I haven’t withdrawn a solitary piece of forex in any form” because June 2012, he suggests. As an alternative of a wallet he carries a card holder—but no ATM card. Cabs, a single of the last services for which Reines uncovered he desired actual banknotes, have been changed with Uber rides, the most latest of which is now drawing to a near at the corner of 21st and L Streets, in front of Beacon’s places of work.

The following day an e-mail comes from Reines made up of the electronic history of his last ATM withdrawal, at 3:57 p.m. on June 20, 2012. “1 12 months, 7 months, 17 days,” the subject matter line reads.* Just generating positive the story is exact.

*This article has been corrected to show that the writer and Reines took I-395, not I-495 and that his ultimate ATM withdrawal was on June 20, 2012, not June 12.

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A few weeks ago, the liberal comedian Bill Maher and conservative strategist and pundit Bill Kristol had a brief spat on Maher’s HBO show, putatively over what instigated the tea party but ultimately over the psychic wound that has divided red America and blue America in the Obama years. The rise of the tea party, explained Maher in a let’s-get-real moment, closing his eyes for a second the way one does when saying something everybody knows but nobody wants to say, “was about a black president.” Both Maher and Kristol carry themselves with a weary cynicism that allows them to jovially spar with ideological rivals, but all of a sudden they both grew earnest and angry. Kristol interjected, shouting, “That’s bullshit! That is total bullshit!” After momentarily sputtering, Kristol recovered his calm, but his rare indignation remained, and there was no trace of the smirk he usually wears to distance himself slightly from his talking points. He almost pleaded to Maher, “Even you don’t believe that!”

“I totally believe that,” Maher responded, which is no doubt true, because every Obama supporter believes deep down, or sometimes right on the surface, that the furious opposition marshaled against the first black president is a reaction to his race. Likewise, every Obama opponent believes with equal fervor that this is not only false but a smear concocted willfully to silence them.

This bitter, irreconcilable enmity is not the racial harmony the optimists imagined the cultural breakthrough of an ­African- American president would usher in. On the other hand, it’s not exactly the sort of racial strife the pessimists, hardened by racial animosity, envisioned either, the splitting of white and black America into worlds of mutual incomprehension—as in the cases of the O. J. Simpson trial, the L.A. riots, or Bernhard Goetz.

The Simpson episode actually provides a useful comparison. The racial divide was what made the episode so depressing: Blacks saw one thing, whites something completely different. Indeed, when Simpson was acquitted in 1995 of murder charges, whites across parties reacted in nearly equal measure: 56 percent of white Republicans objected to the verdict, as did 52 percent of white Democrats. Two decades later, the trial of George Zimmerman produced a very different reaction. This case also hinged on race—Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen from his neighborhood in Florida, and was acquitted of all charges. But here the gap in disapproval over the verdict between white Democrats and white Republicans was not 4 points but 43. Americans had split once again into mutually uncomprehending racial camps, but this time along political lines, not by race itself.

A different, unexpected racial argument has taken shape. Race, always the deepest and most volatile fault line in American history, has now become the primal grievance in our politics, the source of a narrative of persecution each side uses to make sense of the world. Liberals dwell in a world of paranoia of a white racism that has seeped out of American history in the Obama years and lurks everywhere, mostly undetectable. Conservatives dwell in a paranoia of their own, in which racism is used as a cudgel to delegitimize their core beliefs. And the horrible thing is that both of these forms of paranoia are right.

If you set out to write a classic history of the Obama era, once you had described the historically significant fact of Obama’s election, race would almost disappear from the narrative. The thumbnail sketch of every president’s tenure from Harry Truman through Bill Clinton prominently includes racial conflagrations—­desegregation fights over the military and schools, protests over civil-rights legislation, high-profile White House involvement in the expansion or rollback of busing and affirmative action. The policy landscape of the Obama era looks more like it did during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, when Americans fought bitterly over regulation and the scope of government. The racial-policy agenda of the Obama administration has been nearly nonexistent.

But if you instead set out to write a social history of the Obama years, one that captured the day-to-day experience of political life, you would find that race has saturated everything as perhaps never before. Hardly a day goes by without a volley and counter-volley of accusations of racial insensitivity and racial hypersensitivity. And even when the red and blue tribes are not waging their endless war of mutual victimization, the subject of race courses through everything else: debt, health care, unemployment. Whereas the great themes of the Bush years revolved around foreign policy and a cultural divide over what or who constituted “real” America, the Obama years have been defined by a bitter disagreement over the size of government, which quickly reduces to an argument over whether the recipients of big-government largesse deserve it. There is no separating this discussion from one’s sympathies or prejudices toward, and identification with, black America.

It was immediately clear, from his triumphal introduction at the 2004 Democratic National Convention through the giddy early days of his audacious campaign, that Obama had reordered the political landscape. And though it is hard to remember now, his supporters initially saw this transformation as one that promised a “post-racial” politics. He attracted staggering crowds, boasted of his ability to win over Republicans, and made good on this boast by attracting independent voters in Iowa and other famously white locales.

Of course, this was always a fantasy. It was hardly a surprise when George Packer, reporting for The New Yorker, ventured to Kentucky and found white voters confessing that they would vote for a Democrat, but not Obama, simply because of his skin color. (As one said: “Race. I really don’t want an African-­American as president. Race.”) Packer’s report conveys the revelatory dismay with which his news struck. “Obama has a serious political problem,” he wrote. “Until now, he and his supporters have either denied it or blamed it on his opponents.” Reported anecdotes of similar flavor have since grown familiar enough to have receded into the political backdrop. One Louisiana man told NPR a few weeks ago that he would never support Senator Mary Landrieu after her vote for Obama­care. After ticking off the familiar talking points against the health-care law—it would kill jobs and so on—he arrived at the nub of the matter: “I don’t vote for black people.” (Never mind that Landrieu is white.)

We now know that the fact of Obama’s presidency—that a black man is our ­commander-in-chief, that a black family lives in the White House, that he was elected by a disproportionately high black vote—has affected not just the few Americans willing to share their racism with reporters but all Americans, across the political spectrum. Social scientists have long used a basic survey to measure what they call “racial resentment.” It doesn’t measure hatred of minorities or support for segregation, but rather a person’s level of broad sympathy for African-Americans (asking, for instance, if you believe that “blacks have gotten less than they deserve” or whether “it’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough”). Obviously, the racially conservative view—that blacks are owed no extra support from the government—has for decades corresponded more closely with conservatism writ large and thus with the Republican Party. The same is true with the racially liberal view and the Democratic Party: Many of the Americans who support government programs that disproportionately offer blacks a leg up are Democrats. But when the political scientists Michael Tesler and David Sears peered into the data in 2009, they noticed that the election of Obama has made views on race matter far more than ever.

By the outset of Obama’s presidency, they found, the gap in approval of the president between those with strongly liberal views on race and those with strongly conservative views on race was at least twice as large as it had been under any of the previous four administrations. As Tesler delved further into the numbers, he saw that race was bleeding into everything. People’s views on race predicted their views on health-care reform far more closely in 2009 than they did in 1993, when the president trying to reform health care was Bill Clinton. Tesler called what he saw unfurling before him a “hyperracialized era.”

In recent history, racial liberals have sometimes had conservative views on other matters, and racial conservatives have sometimes had liberal views. Consider another measure, called “anti-black affect,” a kind of thermometer that registers coldness toward African-Americans. Prior to 2009, anti-black affect did not predict an individual’s political identification (when factoring out that person’s economic, moral, and foreign-policy conservatism). Since Obama has taken office, the correlation between anti-black affect and Republican partisanship has shot up. Even people’s beliefs about whether the unemployment rate was rising or falling in 2012—which, in previous years, had stood independent of racial baggage—were now closely linked with their racial beliefs.

Racial conservatism and conservatism used to be similar things; now they are the same thing. This is also true with racial liberalism and liberalism. The mental chasm lying between red and blue America is, at bottom, an irreconcilable difference over the definition of racial justice. You can find this dispute erupting everywhere. A recent poll found a nearly 40-point partisan gap on the question of whether 12 Years a Slave deserved Best Picture.

In 1981, Lee Atwater, a South Carolina native working for the Reagan administration, gave an interview to Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. In it, Atwater described the process by which the conservative message evolved from explicitly racist appeals to implicitly racialized appeals to white economic self-interest:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites … ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger.’ ”

Atwater went on to run George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988, where he flamboyantly vowed to make Willie Horton, a murderer furloughed by Dukakis who subsequently raped a woman, “his running mate.” Atwater died three years later of a brain tumor, and his confessional quote to Lamis attracted scarcely any attention for years. In 2005, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert picked out the quote, which had appeared in two books by Lamis. In the ensuing years, liberal columnists and authors have recirculated Atwater’s words with increasing frequency, and they have attained the significance of a Rosetta stone.

A long line of social-science research bears out the general point that Atwater made. People have an elemental awareness of race, and we relentlessly process political appeals, even those that do not mention race, in racial terms.

In the 1970s and 1980s, liberals understood a certain chunk of the Republican agenda as a coded appeal—a “dog ­whistle”—to white racism. The political power of cracking down on crack, or exposing welfare queens, lay in its explosive racial subtext. (Regarding Willie Horton, an unnamed Republican operative put it more bluntly: “It’s a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist.”) This is what Paul Krugman was referring to in his recent Times op-ed titled “That Old-Time Whistle.” When the House Budget Committee releases a report on the failure of the War on Poverty and Paul Ryan speaks of a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working,” you can conclude that the policy report is mere pretext to smuggle in the hidden racial appeal.

Once you start looking for racial subtexts embedded within the Republican agenda, they turn up everywhere. And not always as subtexts. In response to their defeats in 2008 and 2012, Republican governors and state legislators in a host of swing states have enacted laws, ostensibly designed to prevent voter fraud, whose actual impact will be to reduce the proportion of votes cast by minorities. A paper found that states were far more likely to enact restrictive voting laws if minority turnout in their state had recently increased.

It is likewise hard to imagine the mostly southern states that have refused free federal money to cover the uninsured in their states doing so outside of the racial context—nearly all-white Republican governments are willing and even eager to deny medical care to disproportionately black constituents. The most famous ad for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign depicted an elderly white man, with a narrator warning bluntly about Medicare cuts: “Now the money you paid for your guaranteed health care is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you.”

Yet here is the point where, for all its breadth and analytic power, the liberal racial analysis collapses onto itself. It may be true that, at the level of electoral campaign messaging, conservatism and white racial resentment are functionally identical. It would follow that any conservative argument is an appeal to white racism. That is, indeed, the all-but-explicit conclusion of the ubiquitous Atwater Rosetta-stone confession: Republican politics is fundamentally racist, and even its use of the most abstract economic appeal is a sinister, coded missive.

Impressive though the historical, sociological, and psychological evidence undergirding this analysis may be, it also happens to be completely insane. Whatever Lee Atwater said, or meant to say, advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.

One of the greatest triumphs of liberal politics over the past 50 years has been to completely stigmatize open racial discrimination in public life, a lesson that has been driven home over decades by everybody from Jimmy the Greek to Paula Deen. This achievement has run headlong into an increasing liberal tendency to define conservatism as a form of covert racial discrimination. If conservatism is inextricably entangled with racism, and racism must be extinguished, then the scope for legitimate opposition to Obama shrinks to an uncomfortably small space.

The racial debate of the Obama years emits some of the poisonous waft of the debates over communism during the ­McCarthy years. It defies rational resolution in part because it is about secret motives and concealed evil.

On September 9, 2009, the president delivered a State of the Union–style speech on health care before Congress. After a summer of angry tea-party town-hall meetings, Republicans had whipped themselves into a feisty mood. At one point, Obama assured the audience that his health-care law would not cover illegal immigrants. (This was true.) Joe Wilson, the Republican representing South Carolina’s Second District, screamed, “You lie!”

Over the next few days, several liberals stated what many more believed. “I think it’s based on racism,” offered Jimmy Carter at a public forum. “There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.” Maureen Dowd likewise concluded, “What I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy! … Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”

Assailing Wilson’s motives on the basis of a word he did not say is, to say the least, a loose basis by which to indict his motives. It is certainly true that screaming a rebuke to a black president is the sort of thing a racist Republican would do. On the other hand, it’s also the sort of thing a rude or drunk or angry or unusually partisan Republican would do.

One way to isolate the independent variable, and thus to separate out the racism in the outburst, is to compare the treatment of Obama with that of the last Democratic president. Obama has never been called “boy” by a major Republican figure, but Bill Clinton was, by Emmett Tyrrell, editor of the American Spectator and author of a presidential biography titled Boy Clinton. Here are some other things that happened during the Clinton years: North Carolina senator Jesse Helms said, “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page and other conservative organs speculated that Clinton may have had his aide Vince Foster murdered and had sanctioned a cocaine-smuggling operation out of an airport in Arkansas. Now, imagine if Obama had been called “boy” in the title of a biography, been subjected to threats of mob violence from a notorious former segregationist turned senator, or accused in a major newspaper of running coke. (And also impeached.) How easy would it be to argue that Republicans would never do such things to a white president?

Yet many, many liberals believe that only race can explain the ferocity of Republican opposition to Obama. It thus follows that anything Republicans say about Obama that could be explained by racism is probably racism. And since racists wouldn’t like anything Obama does, that renders just about any criticism of Obama—which is to say, nearly everything Republicans say about Obama—presumptively racist.

Does this sound like an exaggeration? Bill O’Reilly’s aggressive (and aggressively dumb) Super Bowl interview with the president included the question “Why do you feel it’s necessary to fundamentally transform the nation that has afforded you so much opportunity?” Salon’s Joan Walsh asserted, “O’Reilly and Ailes and their viewers see this president as unqualified and ungrateful, an affirmative-action baby who won’t thank us for all we’ve done for him and his cohort. The question was, of course, deeply condescending and borderline racist.” Yes, it’s possible that O’Reilly implied that the United States afforded Obama special opportunity owing to the color of his skin. But it’s at least as possible, and consistent with O’Reilly’s beliefs, that he merely believes the United States offers everybody opportunity.

Esquire columnist Charles Pierce has accused Times columnist David Brooks of criticizing Obama because he wants Obama to be an “anodyne black man” who would “lose, nobly, and then the country could go back to its rightful owners.” Timothy Noah, then at Slate, argued in 2008 that calling Obama “skinny” flirted with racism. (“When white people are invited to think about Obama’s physical appearance, the principal attribute they’re likely to dwell on is his dark skin. Consequently, any reference to Obama’s other physical attributes can’t help coming off as a coy walk around the barn.”) Though the term elitist has been attached to candidates of both parties for decades (and to John Kerry during his 2004 presidential campaign), the writer David Shipler has called it racist when deployed against Obama. (“ ‘Elitist’ is another word for ‘arrogant,’ which is another word for ‘uppity,’ that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.”)

MSNBC has spent the entire Obama presidency engaged in a nearly nonstop ideological stop-and-frisk operation. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell chided Obama for playing too much golf, Lawrence O’Donnell accused him of “trying to align … the lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama.” (McConnell had not mentioned Tiger Woods; it was O’Donnell who made the leap.) After Arizona governor Jan Brewer confronted Obama at an airport tarmac, Jonathan Capehart concluded, “A lot of people saw it as her wagging her finger at this president who’s also black, who should not be there.” Martin Bashir hung a monologue around his contention that Republicans were using the initialism IRS as a code that meant “nigger.” Chris Matthews calls Republicans racist so often it is hard to even keep track.

Few liberals acknowledge that the ability to label a person racist represents, in 21st-century America, real and frequently terrifying power. Conservatives feel that dread viscerally. Though the liberal analytic method begins with a sound grasp of the broad connection between conservatism and white racial resentment, it almost always devolves into an open-ended license to target opponents on the basis of their ideological profile. The power is rife with abuse.

By February, conservative rage against MSNBC had reached a boiling point. During the Super Bowl, General Mills ran a commercial depicting an adorable multiracial family bonding over a birth announcement and a bowl of Cheerios. The Cheerios ad was not especially groundbreaking or remarkable. A recent Chevy ad, to take just one other example, features a procession of families, some multiracial or gay, and declares, “While what it means to be a family hasn’t changed, what a family looks like has.” This schmaltzy, feel-good fare expresses the modern American creed, where patriotic tableaux meld old-generation standby images—American soldiers in World War II, small towns, American flags flapping in the breeze—with civil-rights protesters.

What made the Cheerios ad notable was that MSNBC, through its official Twitter account, announced, “Maybe the right wing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww.” It was undeniably true that some elements of the right wing would object to the ad—similar previous ads have provoked angry racist reactions. Still, Republicans felt attacked, and not unreasonably. The enraged chairman of the Republican National Committee declared a boycott on any appearances on the network, and MSNBC quickly apologized and deleted the offending tweet.

Why did this particular tweet, of all things, make Republicans snap? It exposed a sense in which their entire party is being written out of the American civic religion. The inscription of the civil-rights story into the fabric of American history—the elevation of Rosa Parks to a new Paul Revere, Martin Luther King to the pantheon of the Founding Fathers­—has, by implication, cast Barack Obama as the contemporary protagonist and Republicans as the villains. The Obama campaign gave its supporters the thrill of historic accomplishment, the sense that they were undertaking something more grand than a campaign, something that would reverberate forever. But in Obama they had not just the material for future Americana stock footage but a live partisan figure. How did they think his presidency would work out?

Even the transformation of the civil-rights struggles of a half-century ago into our shared national heritage rests on more politically awkward underpinnings than we like to admit. As much as our museums and children’s history books and Black History Month celebrations and corporate advertisements sandblast away the rough ideological edges of the civil-rights story, its under­lying cast remains. John Lewis is not only a young hero who can be seen in grainy black-and-white footage enduring savage beatings at the hands of white supremacists. He is also a current Democratic member of Congress who, in 2010, reprised his iconic role by marching past screaming right-wing demonstrators while preparing to cast a vote for Obamacare. And, more to the point, the political forces behind segregation did not disappear into thin air. The lineal descendants of the segregationists, and in some cases the segregationists themselves, moved into the Republican Party and its unofficial media outlets, which specialize in stoking fears of black Americans among their audience. (Like when Rush Limbaugh seized on a minor fight between two schoolkids in Illinois to announce, “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.”)

The unresolved tension here concerns the very legitimacy of the contemporary Republican Party. It resembles, in milder form, the sorts of aftershocks that follow a democratic revolution, when the allies of the deposed junta—or ex-Communists in post–Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, or, closer to the bone, white conservatives in post-apartheid South Africa—attempt to reenter a newly democratized polity. South Africa famously created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but that was easy—once democracy was in place, the basic shape of the polity was a foregone conclusion. In the United States, the partisan contest still runs very close; the character of our government is very much up for grabs.

And the truth is almost too brutal to be acknowledged. A few months ago, three University of Rochester political scientists—Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen—published an astonishing study. They discovered that a strong link exists between the proportion of slaves residing in a southern county in 1860 and the racial conservatism (and voting habits) of its white residents today. The more slave-intensive a southern county was 150 years ago, the more conservative and Republican its contemporary white residents. The authors tested their findings against every plausible control factor—for instance, whether the results could be explained simply by population density—but the correlation held. Higher levels of slave ownership in 1860 made white Southerners more opposed to affirmative action, score higher on the anti-black-affect scale, and more hostile to Democrats.

The authors suggest that the economic shock of emancipation, which suddenly raised wages among the black labor pool, caused whites in the most slave-intensive counties to “promote local anti-black sentiment by encouraging violence towards blacks, racist norms and cultural beliefs,” which “produced racially hostile attitudes that have been passed down from parents to children.” The scale of the effect they found is staggering. Whites from southern areas with very low rates of slave ownership exhibit attitudes similar to whites in the North—an enormous difference, given that Obama won only 27 percent of the white vote in the South in 2012, as opposed to 46 percent of the white vote outside the South.

The Rochester study should, among other things, settle a very old and deep argument about the roots of America’s unique hostility to the welfare state. Few industrialized economies provide as stingy aid to the poor as the United States; in none of them is the principle of universal health insurance even contested by a major conservative party. Conservatives have long celebrated America’s unique strand of anti-statism as the product of our religiosity, or the tradition of English liberty, or the searing experience of the tea tax. But the factor that stands above all the rest is slavery.

And yet—as vital as this revelation may be for understanding conservatism, it still should not be used to dismiss the beliefs of individual conservatives. Individual arguments need and deserve to be assessed on their own terms, not as the visible tip of a submerged agenda; ideas can’t be defined solely by their past associations and uses.

Liberals experience the limits of historically determined analysis in other realms, like when the conversation changes to anti-Semitism. Here is an equally charged argument in which conservatives dwell on the deep, pernicious power of anti-Semitism hiding its ugly face beneath the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel. When, during his confirmation hearings last year for Defense secretary, Chuck Hagel came under attack for having once said “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” conservatives were outraged. (The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens: “The word ‘intimidates’ ascribes to the so-called Jewish lobby powers that are at once vast, invisible and malevolent.”) Liberals were outraged by the outrage: The blog Think Progress assembled a list of writers denouncing the accusations as a “neocon smear.” The liberal understanding of anti-­Semitism is an inversion of conservative thinking about race. Liberals recognize the existence of the malady and genuinely abhor it; they also understand it as mostly a distant, theoretical problem, and one defined primarily as a personal animosity rather than something that bleeds into politics. Their interest in the topic consists almost entirely of indignation against its use as slander to circumscribe the policy debate.

One of the central conceits of modern conservatism is a claim to have achieved an almost Zenlike state of color-blindness. (Stephen Colbert’s parodic conservative talking head boasts he cannot see race at all.) The truth is that conservatives are fixated on race, in a mystified, aggrieved, angry way that lends their claims of race neutrality a comic whiff of let-me-tell-you-again-how-I’m-over-my-ex. But while a certain portion of the party may indeed be forwarding and sending emails of racist jokes of the sort that got a federal judge in trouble, a much larger portion is consumed not with traditional racial victimization—the blacks are coming to get us—but a kind of ideological victimization. Conservatives are fervent believers in their own racial innocence.

This explains Paul Ryan’s almost laughable response to accusations of racial insensitivity over his recent comments. “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race,” he insisted. “It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.” Why would anybody understand a reference to “inner cities” as racially fraught?

And so just as liberals begin with a sound analysis of Republican racial animosity and overextend this into paranoia, conservatives take the very real circumstance of their occasional victimization and run with it. They are not merely wounded by the real drumbeat of spurious accusations they endure; this is the only context in which they appear able to understand racism. One can read conservative news sites devotedly for years without coming across a non-ironic reference to racism as an extant social phenomenon, as opposed to a smear against them. Facts like the persistence of hiring discrimination (experiments routinely show fake résumés with black-sounding names receive fewer callbacks than ones with white-sounding names) do not exist in this world.

Conservatives likewise believe that race has been Obama’s most devious political weapon. Race consciousness, the theory goes, benefits Democrats but not Republicans. “By huge margins,” argues Quin Hillyer in National Review, “blacks vote in racial blocs more often than whites do.” Obama’s race, conservatives believe, lent him an advantage even among white voters. (As 2012 candidate Michele Bachmann put it in real-talk mode, “There was a cachet about having an African-American president because of guilt.”)

As a corollary, conservatives believe that the true heir to the civil-rights movement and its ideals is the modern Republican Party (the one containing all the former segregationists). A whole subgenre of conservative “history” is devoted to rebutting the standard historical narrative that the civil-rights movement drove conservative whites out of the Democratic Party. The ritual of right-wing African-Americans’ appearing before tea-party activists to absolve them of racism has drawn liberal snickers, but the psychological distress on display here runs much deeper. Glenn Beck’s “I Have a Dream” rally, the Republican habit of likening Obama and his policies either to slavery or to segregation (at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference alone, both Ralph Reed and Bobby Jindal compared the Obama administration to George Wallace)—these are expressions not of a political tactic but a genuine obsession.

This fervent scrubbing away of the historical stain of racism represents, on one level, a genuine and heartening development, a necessary historical step in the full banishment of white supremacy from public life. On another level, it is itself a kind of racial resentment, a new stage in the long belief by conservative whites that the liberal push for racial equality has been at their expense. The spread of racial resentment on the right in the Obama years is an aggregate sociological reality. It is also a liberal excuse to smear individual conservatives. Understanding the mutual racial-­ideological loathing of the Obama era requires understanding how all the foregoing can be true at once.

In February 2007, with the Obama cultural phenomenon already well under way, Joe Biden—being a rival candidate at the time, but also being Joe Biden—attempted a compliment. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-­American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

It was a cringe-worthy moment, but Obama brushed it off graciously. “He called me,” said Obama. “I told him [the call] wasn’t necessary. We have got more important things to worry about.”

This has been Obama’s M.O.: focus on “the more important things.” He’s had to deal explicitly with race in a few excruciating instances, like the 2009 “beer summit” with the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a friend of Obama’s, and James Crowley, the police sergeant responsible for Gates’s controversial arrest. (Obama’s response to the incident was telling: He positioned himself not as an ally of Gates but as a mediator between the two, as equally capable of relating to the white man’s perspective as the black man’s.) After the Zimmerman shooting, he observed that if he had had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. In almost every instance when his blackness has come to the center of public events, however, he has refused to impute racism to his critics.

This has not made an impression upon the critics. In fact, many conservatives believe he accuses them of racism all the time, even when he is doing the opposite. When asked recently if racism explained his sagging approval ratings, Obama replied, “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president. Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president.” Conservatives exploded in indignation, quoting the first sentence without mentioning the second. Here was yet another case of Obama playing the race card, his most cruel and most unanswerable weapon.

I recently asked Jonah Goldberg, a longtime columnist for National Review, why conservatives believed that Obama himself (as opposed to his less reticent allies) implied that they were racially motivated. He told me something that made a certain amount of sense. A few days before Obama’s inaugural address, at a time when his every utterance commanded massive news coverage, the president-elect gave a speech in Philadelphia calling for “a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives—from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry—an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.”

What struck Goldberg was Obama’s juxtaposition of “ideology and small thinking”—terms he has always associated with his Republican opponents—with “prejudice and bigotry.” He was not explicitly calling them the same thing, but he was treating them as tantamount. “That feeds into the MSNBC style of argument about Obama’s opponents,” Goldberg told me, “that there must be a more interesting explanation for their motives.”

It’s unlikely that Obama is deliberately plotting to associate his opponents with white supremacy in a kind of reverse-Atwater maneuver. But Obama almost surely believes his race helped trigger the maniacal ferocity of his opponents. (If not, he would be one of the few Obama voters who don’t.) And it’s not hard to imagine that Obama’s constant, public frustration with the irrationality pervading the Republican Party subconsciously expresses his suspicions.

Obama is attempting to navigate the fraught, everywhere-and-yet-nowhere racial obsession that surrounds him. It’s a weird moment, but also a temporary one. The passing from the scene of the nation’s first black president in three years, and the near-certain election of its 44th nonblack one, will likely ease the mutual suspicion. In the long run, generational changes grind inexorably away. The rising cohort of Americans holds far more liberal views than their parents and grandparents on race, and everything else (though of course what you think about “race” and what you think about “everything else” are now interchangeable). We are living through the angry pangs of a new nation not yet fully born.

Carlos eats breakfast at property in the Bronx.   (Photograph: Edward Keating) &#13

Carlos, a before long-to-be-19-calendar year-previous from Honduras, is most fond of pastimes and men and women who convey on short-term amnesia. His previous girlfriend, Maria, was one such satisfied distraction. He performs soccer every Saturday in the Bronx at Mullally Park, just a couple of blocks from Yankee Stadium. That assists, too. “I focus so considerably,” he claims, “that I neglect about every little thing else.”

Most of the recollections Carlos would like to lose arrive from the journey he built from Honduras to the United States as an unaccompanied migrant two yrs back. He fled simply because it was his greatest probability of obtaining an adulthood. His hometown San Pedro de Sula has the greatest murder amount in the Americas. When, gang associates on bikes arrived at a park wherever he had been playing soccer and opened hearth. A mushy white scar on his ideal calf documents exactly where a bullet pierced his skin. At 15, he observed a shut mate shot in entrance of him. As a witness, Carlos would possibly have to be a part of the gang responsible or be murdered. He went to are living at an aunt’s dwelling, an uncle’s, a further aunt’s — at every, gang users arrived, threatening him. “I advised my mother that if I was going to die, it would be attempting to get out,” he claims. She gave him $150 and he boarded a bus to Guatemala.

The day he arrived at the Mexican border, he was robbed. The very same week, he satisfied a young woman who was also intent on riding the freight trains, called la Bestia or el Tren de la Muerte, to the United States. “She was wonderful,” Carlos remembers. Soon right after they talked, he observed her stumble and fall on the tracks as she experimented with to board a practice. Her decapitated head rolled to the floor around Carlos’s toes.

Carlos at soccer follow.   (Photo: Edward Keating) &#13

A thirty day period into his journey, Carlos was detained by a member of the Zetas cartel who demanded $80. At the stash dwelling, he stood on a floor stained with blood and could hear the screams of migrants currently being tortured in again rooms. It was only simply because one of his traveling companions was a childhood buddy of Carlos’s kidnapper that he went no cost.

And then there was his 17th birthday, which he phone calls the worst working day of his lifestyle. Carlos was sleeping below a bridge when a male just a number of toes away from him was burned to demise. One more migrant awoke Carlos by telling him, “La migra [Immigration police] is coming.” He panicked and ran. The pungent scent of burning flesh was detectable even after he’d sought refuge in an adjacent forest.

Carlos witnessed awful points on the trains, too. He noticed a woman gang raped. Migrants ended up from time to time thrown from the best of la Bestia on to the tracks. When a family members made available him a occupation in Veracruz setting up chairs and cleansing an situations hall, he seized it so he could save funds to fork out for the bus.

Most Central People in america enter the U.S. by crossing the Rio Grande into Texas. Because his ultimate bus trip remaining him in the northwest corner of Mexico, Carlos traversed via the Arizona desert. He smelled the human bones and decomposing remains prior to he observed them. Twenty times into the trek, out of drinking water and hallucinating, he made his way to the freeway and walked on the double yellow line so he would be picked up by Border Patrol. Immediately after two times in a detention facility in Phoenix, he was transferred to a juvenile shelter in Westchester. When his grandmother, who is a U.S. citizen, noticed him there, she fainted. All through his 7 and a half months in Mexico, Carlos was ready to phone residence just 3 occasions. “It ran by way of their heads a great deal that I was useless,” he claims.

With his grandmother at their apartment.   (Image: Edward Keating) &#13

More than 10,000 unaccompanied child migrants had been apprehended at the border in June 2014 on your own. A public relations marketing campaign warning Central Americans in opposition to the journey, merged with a Mexican crackdown on migrants boarding la Bestia, assisted lower the range of arrivals by two thirds by the conclude of the summertime. Nevertheless, advocates estimate that some 74,000 little ones and adolescents will cross into the United States this yr. That is pretty much double the determine from 2013. Aside from Texas, New York has taken in much more of these kids than any other state.

In aspect since of geography, Carlos stands a superior chance than most of currently being permitted to keep. As a Central American, he is entitled to a court docket listening to to identify if he will be deported. (Mexican children, in contrast, can be screened and despatched back again by border patrol brokers.) And, in a break with the past, the Workplace of Refuge Resettlement — the section of the Division of Health and fitness and Human Companies that is dependable for the unaccompanied migrants — is finding up the tab for lawful representation of youngsters who are housed in their juvenile shelters in New York. Because Carlos was produced to his grandmother in New York Metropolis, it also meant he could obtain a medical and authorized clinic operated by Catholic Charities, the Children’s Wellness Fund, and Montefiore Clinic in the Bronx. Each individual other Wednesday night at the hospital, he and other unaccompanied teenage migrants in the metropolis can receive healthcare look at-ups, show up at a group counseling session, and meet with an legal professional.