WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE K A25
hong k ong
A
s tens of thousands of protest-
ers marched down Hennessy
Road toward government
headquarters Sunday after-
noon, chanting pro-democracy slo-
gans and waving American flags, it
was an exuberant celebration of this
territory’s yearning for f reedom.
The protesters seemed heedless of
the danger: Men and women, young
and old, ninja-clad teenagers and
moms with their kids, all joined in the
15th straight weekend of protest. A
doctor at a hospital, a 56-year-old
schoolteacher and a 19-year-old girl
studying German, English and philos-
ophy stopped to explain to me their
chant: “Fight for freedom! Stand with
Hong Kong!”
When the marchers passed a pro-
Beijing newspaper office, they booed.
Approaching the police headquarters,
they raised their middle fingers and
shouted insults, calling the cops gang-
sters and dogs. In the hot afternoon
sun, they distributed blue fans im-
printed with a cartoon of a frantic fish
and the words: “I thought water was a
basic fish right... and I thought free-
dom w as a basic human right.”
Watching the Hong Kong protests is
exhilarating in a world where democ-
racy often seems in retreat and auto-
crats are on the rise. But I had a nagging
fear, too. This idealistic, largely leader-
less protest reminds me of the early
days of the Arab Spring. That worries
me. Without strong leadership, this
movement could have a similar unhap-
py ending.
Sunday afternoon ended with a
spasm of violence that’s a foreboding
of trouble ahead. The hardcore pro-
testers lingered outside the govern-
ment offices on Harcourt Road while
the other marchers moved on. Watch-
ing from an overpass 100 yards away, I
could see the y oung w ould-be warriors
crouching behind concrete barriers,
cradling bricks and, it turned out, hid-
den petrol bombs — which they soon
began hurling toward t he riot police.
As the petrol bombs torched trees
and grass inside the government com-
pound, the protesters cheered. The
young radicals wanted a confronta-
tion, and t hey eventually got one. Can-
isters of tear gas were fired from near-
by buildings, and a water cannon ad-
vanced, followed by baton-wielding
riot police. (My thanks to Robert God-
den a nd J ennifer Wang of R ights Expo-
sure, a monitoring group, who provid-
ed me with protective gear so I could
watch the d rama unfold.)
It’s now more than 100 days since
the pro-democracy protests began in
early June. The South China MorningPost tallied the numbers: So far, there
have been 2,414 rounds o f tear gas f ired
and 1,453 people arrested. The eco-
nomic impact is growing, too. Cathay
Pacific, a Hong Kong airline, reported
a 38 percent slump in inbound traffic
in August compared with a year earli-
er; some hotels reported their occu-
pancy rates f alling to nearly half.
The democratic movement has
deep roots here. At nearly e very rapid-
transit stop and public gathering
place, there’s what’s known as a “Len-
non Wall,” with graffiti, placards and
personal protest notes. The authori-
ties take down the messages, and by
the n ext day, p eople have posted a new
array. Last week, demonstrators gath-
ered at shopping malls and other pub-
lic places to sing their new anthem,
“Glory to Hong Kong,” which pro-
claims: “ Freedom shall shine upon us.”
Martin Lee, a human rights activist
who led democracy protests a genera-
tion ago and is now 81, tells me he
sympathizes even with the militants
who have used violent tactics. “For
35 years, I used peaceful means, and
they ignored me,” h e says.
Where is this lovable but ill-defined
movement heading? During a week in
Hong Kong, I put that question to
militant protesters and pro-Beijing
government officials, as well as t o local
business leaders and media pundits.
In several dozen conversations, I
heard the same basic answer that Lee
gave: “How w ill i t end? I don’t k now.”
It’s n ow a precarious stalemate: T he
Hong Kong government is weak and
waging what amounts to a weekly
standoff; Beijing is frustrated but
seemingly doesn’t want to intervene
militarily; the protesters have broad
popular support but no leaders who
could forge a pragmatic victory. A
prominent former Hong Kong official
told me he wants to negotiate with t he
young protesters, but in this amor-
phous, Internet-based movement, he
can’t f ind them.
What’s profoundly moving is that
the Hongkongers are openly defying
mainland China, which in 1997 prom-
ised “one country, two systems” but is
widely seen to have reneged. A former
official explains w hy h e became disen-
chanted: “I thought we were on the
same railway line. Hong Kong was
ahead of the mainland, but we were
headed to the same destination (of
freedom). I don’t believe that any-
more.”
This is a brave, noble movement. It
needs leaders who can decide what
success looks like, and seize it now,
while they’re winning. The road dark-
ens a head.
Twitter: @IgnatiusPostDAVID IGNATIUSIn Hong Kong, the
road darkens ahead
T
he bright, bold line that runs
through Washington separates
the party of R’s from the party
of D’s. But there is another line
— a more subtle but very pronounced,
very important line — dividing the Ins
from the Outs. The first group is small
and powerful; the second is large and
envious. Lin-Manuel Miranda memori-
alized the line in his masterpiece,
“Hamilton.” The Ins are those few
individuals who are “in the room where
it happens.” As for the rest of us:
“No one really knows how the game
is played
“The art of the trade
“How the sausage gets made
“We just assume that it happens...
in / The room where it happens.”
Political journalists often strut and
pontificate like Ins, but really we’re
Outs. We spend our days sniffing at
closed doors, trying to piece together
the events and intrigues unfolding on
the other side. Like the fabled blind
men groping toward an image of an
elephant, our results are prone to be
piecemeal and distorted.
Ta lented, trailblazing Cokie Roberts
— who died Tuesday at age 75 after
complications from cancer — was the
rare political reporter born and bred
among the Ins. Across a career span-
ning more than five decades, she rarely
strayed far from the locus of her fam-
ily’s inside access: Congress. Her bone-
deep feel for the personalities and
motivations of the Ins — for the win-
ning, marshaling and using of power —
made her a fluent translator between
the two worlds. That, I think, was the
root of her remarkable career.
In the 1960s, when Corinne “Cokie”
Boggs was getting started in journal-
ism, few Americans were deeper Inside
than her father, Rep. Thomas Hale
Boggs Sr., a Democrat from Louisiana.
A deft reader of political winds, he
made the transition from Jim Crow to
the Great Society as nimbly as any
Southern politician not named Lyndon
B. Johnson, and ultimately reached the
lofty post of majority leader of the
House of Representatives.
If you ask how the Voting Rights Act
of 1965 happened, or the Occupational
Safety and Health Act of 1970 — or the
Warren Commission’s single-bullet
theory, for that matter — you’ll find the
answer behind a door with Hale Boggs
inside. So it was that the president and
first lady were among the 1,500 guests
at the 1966 marriage of Cokie Boggs to
New York Times journalist Steven
V. Roberts on the lawn of the congress-
man’s big house in Bethesda.
In Louisiana, politics is a family
business. When, in 1972, Hale vanished
in the trackless Alaska wilderness
while campaigning for a colleague in a
twin-engine bush plane, his widow,
Lindy Boggs, assumed his congres-
sional seat and held it for nearly
18 years. Their oldest daughter, Bar-
bara, served as mayor of Princeton, N.J.
Their son, To mmy, was for decades one
of the most prominent lobbyists in
Washington.
Cokie thought about entering the
family business, too, but worried that
she would create conflicts for her
husband. Instead, she became a trans-
lator of politics, an explicator, conduit
and buffer between the Ins and the
Outs. And together, she and her hus-
band became pillars of permanent
Washington — not the so-called deep
state but the society o f families that put
down stakes and make a transient
capital into a multigenerational home.
Families like theirs make Washington
livable — a trick more difficult with
each passing day — by approaching
politics as a community enterprise
rather than a weapon of mass
destruction.
In the process, Cokie played a key
part in the creation of National Public
Radio as a journalistic force. At a time
when Washington news was filtered
through a fog of testosterone, she and
her NPR colleagues struck a feminine
voice of authority. Along with Nina
To tenberg, Linda Wertheimer and Su-
san Stamberg — sometimes called the
Fallopian Club around the office —
Cokie found a voice for news that was
relaxed and intimate and knowledge-
able all at the same time. That blend of
timbres eventually became the voice of
NPR reporters and anchors generally,
whether male or female. The “founding
mothers,” the four women are some-
times called.
For her work at NPR and as a
television anchor and commentator at
ABC, she won a wall of trophies, includ-
ing three Emmys and membership in
the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame.
The seeming ease with which she
turned out best-selling books would
have been annoying to fellow authors if
she had been less winsome.
Cokie Roberts will be remembered
in some circles for the last phase of her
career, when she and her husband of
half a century co-wrote a syndicated
opinion column that was decidedly
anti-Trump. Seeing the entire world
through Trump-filtered lenses is the
curse of both the left a nd the right these
days.
Better that she be remembered for
the news she dug up, for the context she
gave it, for the audience she served and
for the smile that seemed so effortless.
[email protected]DAVID VON DREHLERoberts was
the best kind
of D.C. insider
BY CHANDRA BOZELKO
O
n Friday, U. S. District Judge
Indira Ta lwani sentenced
award-winning actress Felicity
Huffman to two weeks in pris-
on, a $30,000 fine and 250 hours of
community service for paying to inflate
her daughter’s college entrance exam
score. That punishment, the first to
result from the Justice Department’s
indictments in the Varsity Blues college
admissions scandal, sparked compari-
sons to the fate of Ta nya McDowell, a
black woman who received a five-year
sentence in part for using a false
address to register her son in a better
school district.
I’m intimately familiar with McDow-
ell’s case: I was incarcerated with her.
But as a white Princeton University
graduate, I got a sentence of similar
length for 13 felony convictions (they
remain under post-conviction review).
And while I understand the frustration
about these disparities, I’m glad Huff-
man got a lenient sentence. When
leveraged properly, it could set a prec-
edent that could free a lot of people and
get others more humane and appropri-
ate sentences in the first place.
It’s a fact, not an argument, that the
criminal legal system operates in two
tiers: Which one you’re sorted into is
determined by melanin and income.
According to research from the
U. S. Sentencing Commission, between
2012 and 2016, black men received
sentences that were 19.1 percent longer
than those imposed on white men in
federal courts, and they were 21.2 per-
cent less likely to receive a sentence
that revised the sentencing guidelines
downward. Though the study didn’t
specifically examine the wealth or in-
come of these defendants, other re-
search s uggests that poor b lack m en a re
far more likely to head to prison than
wealthier black men.
One response to these numbers is to
seek harsher punishment for people
blessed by judicial forbearance; in this
case, that would mean a harsher sen-
tence for Huffman. But when we try to
cure disparities by s imply incarcerating
more white, or wealthier, defendants,
the entire population ends up getting
punished more severely. A study con-
ducted by the sentencing commission
found that a decline in racial d isparities
in sentencing has been driven not by
shorter sentences for everyone but by
more people being sentenced to longer
periods under mandatory minimum
sentencing guidelines. If our s ole goal isto reduce disparities, we can l ock up the
Huffmans of the world more often and
for longer. But that doesn’t provide any
relief to a poor, black inmate whose
freedom was felled by structural
racism.
Instead, we need to start using
sentences such as Huffman’s to get
less-privileged people the same justice.
That’s exactly what public defenders
in Clark County, Nev., are doing. In-
stead of getting surly and resentful at a
rich person’s b reak, they g ot b usy t rying
to get the same deal for their clients
when Henry T. Nicholas III, the billion-
aire Broadcom founder, entered an
“Alford plea” in response to two felony
drug counts last month. Like Huff-
man’s, Nicholas’s sentence was merci-
ful in the extreme. Neither he nor the
woman who was arrested with him
would get prison time. Instead, they
each had to complete 250 hours of
community service and make a
$500,000 charitable contribution. Tak-
en together, that $1 million is a bout one
hundredth of a percent of Nicholas’s
net worth.
Now these defenders of the indigent
are drafting boilerplate motions for
each of their clients asking for the same
deal: a reduction in sentence without
having to post bond and an exactly
identical donation, 0.0128 percent of
the defendant’s net worth. In financial
terms, almost all clients of public
defenders have a net worth of zero. But
their human worth deserves equal
protection.
It’s too early to know if the Clark
County defenders will persuade lower-
court judges to go along with their
pleas for equal leniency. If nothing else,
they’re trying to establish an objective
measure that can be used for appellate
purposes or to grade judicial
performance.
It can’t hurt if other lawyers copy the
strategy while we wait. If they’re of-
fended by Huffman’s sentence, Federal
Defenders, the program that appoints
counsel for indigent defendants in
federal court, should try the same plan
as the Nevada lawyers. It’s not clear
how many people are currently incar-
cerated for the crimes to which Huff-
man pleaded guilty, but Huffman was
originally charged with conspiracy, and
black people are disproportionately
charged with and sentenced for that
crime. I think they should get a Huff-
man special, too.Chandra Bozelko is a criminal-justice
columnist with GateHouse Media.Fe licity Huffman’s sentence
is a good thing
W
hen then-Sen. Heidi Heit-
kamp (D-N.D.) m ade the ago-
nizing decision nearly a year
ago to vote against t he confir-
mation of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the
Supreme Court, she was well aware that
she w as probably sealing her doom in her
uphill race for reelection.
“Clearly, the vote hurt me,” Heitkamp
said Monday. “It energized the Republi-
can base. It for them defined the Demo-
cratic Party as — what I heard over and
over again — t he word t hat basically was
used to describe the Democrats was a
‘mob.’ ”
She is not the only one who believes
the fight that ensued over allegations
that Kavanaugh committed sexual mis-
co nduct decades ago hurt Democrats in
their quest to make gains in red-leaning
parts of the country. I n focus groups with
conservative and moderate white work-
ing-class women, the organization Gal-
vanize USA — which is trying to bring
those voters back into the Democratic
fold — w as hearing much the s ame thing.
While many of the women said they
welcomed the #MeToo movement, they
worried about how their husbands and
sons would fare in a climate in which
“public accusations without proof o r fair
trial are enough to bring down powerful
and successful men,” according to an
analysis done by the To pos Partnership
research organization.
It a dded: “The idea that a single trans-
gression could permanently derail a
man’s life is a deeply troubling thought to
these women, whose families include
husbands, sons, fathers, and nephews
who may or may not have behaved
blamelessly t hemselves.”
Here’s why this particular group of
voters is important: As we head into the
2020 presidential campaign, white
women without college degrees are the
shakiest part of President Trump’s base
and a slice of the electorate that both
parties see as a bellwether.
In 2016, exit polls and other post-
election analyses indicated that Trump
won this cohort by more than 20 percent-
age points, but its support for him has
eroded dramatically since then. The lat-
est Post-ABC News poll indicated the
president was at best running even with
his leading Democratic challengers
among white women without college
degrees. Only 42 percent said they
approve of his handling of the presiden-
cy in the survey conducted during the
first week of September, which marked a
12-point d rop since July.
So no doubt another fight over now-
Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh is onethat Trump and the Republicans would
love to have — and might get. According
to a new book by two New York Times
reporters, Max Stier, a Yale University
classmate of Kavanaugh who now heads
a well-respected, nonpartisan organiza-
tion in Washington, claims to have seen
Kavanaugh expose his penis to a woman
at a drunken college party. That con-
forms with behavior in a separate inci-
dent described by another accuser, Deb-
orah Ramirez. However, the woman
Stier claims t o remember as the victim i n
this incident has told friends she has no
recollection of this happening.
There is plenty here that bears exami-
nation. Why did the FBI, when it was
alerted to Stier’s recollection last fall,
neglect to even interview him? And why
did it fail to contact people whom R amir-
ez said could corroborate her account?
Was this slipshod investigatory work by
the FBI, or was it the product of political
pressure the FBI was getting from con-
gressional Republicans and higher-ups
in the Trump administration?
What is not warranted at this point is
the call for Kavanaugh’s impeachment
by no fewer than four of the Democratic
presidential contenders: Sens. Elizabeth
Warren (Mass.) and Kamala D. Harris
(Calif.), former housing a nd urban devel-
opment secretary Julián Castro and for-
mer congressman Beto O’Rourke (Tex.).
Heitkamp, for one, thinks Democrats
should tread cautiously. “There’s no do-
overs” on the Kavanaugh confirmation,
she told me. “You can talk about im-
peachment. It’s not going to happen. So
the important thing is to figure out what
in the process went wrong and how do
you fix that process.”
Those who favor pushing for Ka-
vanaugh’s impeachment will argue that
there is now more evidence that he com-
mitted perjury during his Senate testi-
mony. But this would not come as a
revelation to most Americans.
Polling around the time of the Senate
confirmation vote showed that only 1 in
4 believed that Kavanaugh was being
entirely honest about his actions. “The
problem that he had with his veracity
was a pivotal point for me,” said Heit-
kamp. “I think he lied repeatedly about
small stuff, and you know, when people
lie about small stuff, they’ll lie about big
stuff. But I think for the democracy, it’s
more important t hat you get to what was
happening internally at t he FBI.”
The Kavanaugh fight is over. But its
unanswered questions need answers.
We owe future justices — and ourselves
— s omething better than a mystery.
[email protected]KAREN TUMULTYDon’t revisit the Kavanaugh
fight. Learn from it.
KYLE LAM/BLOOMBERG
Riot police aim a tear-gas gun at demonstrators in Hong Kong on Sunday.HENRY OLSEN
Excerpted from washingtonpost.com/people/henry-olsenHispanics for Trump — really
President Trump’s claim during a rally in
New Mexico on Monday that he could win
the state based on Hispanic votes caused
much eye-rolling among Washington
pundits. They are likely right about New
Mexico, but Trump has a better chance to
increase Hispanic support than the pundits
think.
The common wisdom h olds that Trump’s
past rhetoric about Hispanics and his
immigration policies have turned this
group against him. That’s not a surprising
view given Trump’s many well-reported
comments about Hispanics from the 2016
campaign and his immigration policies.
The data, however, suggest this view is
overblown.
Trump’s Hispanic support in 2016 was in
line with that received by other recent
Republican nominees. Exit polls showed
Trump received 28 percent of the Hispanic
vote, one point higher than Mitt Romney
received in 2 012 and o nly three points l ower
than John McCain in 2 008.
Hispanic voters also bucked the
conventional wisdom in 2018, offering
Republican House c andidates 29 percent of
their vote. That’s right: Republicans got a
slightly higher s hare of the Hispanic vote i n
2018 than Trump did in 2016. This is in
contrast to the white vote, which moved
decisively against Republicans.
These results are corroborated by data
from the Pew Research Center’s HispanicTrends project: The share of Hispanics who
identify as Republican increased by three
percentage points from 2016 to 2018, albeit
from a low 24 percent to a still-low
27 percent. The share who are Democrats
went down, from 64 p ercent t o 62 percent.
Trump’s current job approval rating
among Hispanics suggests there’s further
room for him to grow. Three recent polls
break out his ratings among Hispanics,
ranging from a low of 29 percent in one poll
to 37 percent in the other two. Presidents
tend to obtain about the same share of the
popular vote as their most recent job
approval rating, so Trump might break
30 percent of the Hispanic vote if the election
were held today. Pretty good for a man who
has been reviled a s an anti-Hispanic racist.
Even a slight uptick in Hispanic support
could be enough to fuel his reelection.
Hispanics are a significant component of the
electorate in the key states of Florida,
Arizona and Nevada. Hiking his share of the
Hispanic vote by a mere three percentage
points in each state shifts the margin by
about a point in his favor. Raise it by five
points, and Florida becomes safe for Trump,
Arizona becomes difficult for Democrats to
win and Nevada becomes a toss-up. Trump
would still lose Hispanics by large margins,
but the slight g ain would pay huge dividends.
Trump is not going to win New Mexico.
But h e can win more H ispanic votes t han he
did in 2016. If his new effort is successful, it
could help him just enough to put him over
the t op.