The Petraeus scandal has become the sort of story in which knowing that an F.B.I. agent in his forties e-mailed a shirtless photograph of himself and two bullet-riddled, also shirtless mannequins to a couple of dozen people, rather than to one woman, makes you think better of him. Conspiracy theorists have been drawn to this one since the beginning—how could they not be, when the head of the Central Intelligence Agency resigns because of an affair. But at this point, it might be more helpful to consult a string theorist: the latest round of revelations have been, above all, a reminder that the world, even in its non-tabloided state, can be a very strange place—one in which the original plan for this past weekend, as Barton Gellman of Time reported, was for David Petraeus to go on a birthday bike ride with Lance Armstrong.
“He is entitled to due process in this matter,” Leon Panetta, the Secretary of Defense, said in the early morning hours of Tuesday, on a plane to Australia. If you had blinked, you might have missed whether he was talking about David Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A., who resigned after his affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer, was exposed when Broadwell sent threatening e-mails to Jill Kelley, a volunteer social organizer at the MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa. Or maybe it was the unnamed—and unshirted—F.B.I. agent to whom Kelley turned, but who was removed from the case for reasons related to e-mails containing bare-chested photos of himself that he allegedly sent to Kelley. Or was it General John Allen, who is now commanding our forces in Afghanistan and seems to have sent Kelley “potentially inappropriate” e-mails and other communications that somehow add up to twenty to thirty thousand pages? And so in the course of the time it took the Steelers to beat the Chiefs in overtime, the Petraeus scandal got bigger and stranger. With Allen in the story, we now have one current and one retired general who have worn eight stars between them, and are entangled in at least as many subplots. Allen’s addition is like the moment, in 1986, when everyone learned that the Contras had a part in the Iranian arms-for-hostages scandal—it simultaneously becomes more serious and more farcical, although in this case the balance is still tilted much more toward farce.
“Yesterday afternoon, I went to the White House and asked the President to be allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my position as D/CIA,” David Petraeus wrote in a letter released today. What personal reasons?
After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the President graciously accepted my resignation.
And then he thanked his staff, and talked about the strengths of the C.I.A. He will be replaced, in the short term, by his deputy, Mike Morell. Obama, in his own statement, talked about Petraeus’s “extraordinary service.” “My thoughts and prayers are with Dave and Holly Petraeus, who has done so much to help military families through her own work.” The mention of Petraeus’s wife—she had worked with Michelle Obama, and with Elizabeth Warren, on issues like for-profit colleges that cheat veterans—suggests some of the complications here, but certainly not the only ones. Slate’s Fred Kaplan, who has a book about Petraeus coming out in January, reported that the woman with whom he had an affair was Paula Broadwell, who wrote a biography of the general that portrayed him in a flattering light. (The title is “All In.”) That connection, soon widely confirmed, says something about the peculiar vulnerabilities of powerful men—those observations, again, will not be the only ones.
“So…you guys,” President Obama began, as he stood in a room that looks, in a video his campaign released yesterday evening, like it had seen the wear of long nights and pizza boxes. He was talking to staff members, many of them young, who had worked tirelessly to reëlect him. It was Wednesday morning, and the cumulative amount of sleep that had been had by everyone in the room was probably not much into the double digits. (David Axelrod, in the corner of the frame, looks dazed.) Obama talked about when he first moved to Chicago, wanting to change the world. “I didn’t really know how to do it,” he said. He got a job as a community organizer, and learned something, he said, about aspirations, as well as needs. “It taught me something about how I handle disappointment, and to what it meant to work hard on a common endeavor. And I grew up. I became a man during that process,” he said.
“You turned a civics lesson into a nightmare,” Suzi Hileman said to Jared Loughner yesterday, at a sentencing hearing in a court in Arizona. Loughner and Hileman had both showed up for a Congress on Your Corner event in Tucson, Arizona, in January, 2011. “We brought wives, husbands, friends, and children that morning. You brought a gun,” Hileman said, according to press reports. The child Hileman had brought was her nine-year-old neighbor, Christina-Taylor Green, who had just run (and won) her first political campaign, for her elementary school’s student council. When Loughner began shooting at Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and anyone else he could see, Hileman shielded Christina with with her body. By the time Loughner was subdued, she was badly wounded; Christina was dead, as were five others.
Nothing tonight broke Mitt Romney’s way—or, in most cases, the Republican Party’s. It now looks like a rebuke. Early on, Obama won Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Michigan, Wisconsin—the last two of those are the home states of, respectively, Romney and his running mate. At 10 P.M., Florida and Virginia hadn’t been called, that they were too close to call said nothing good about Romney’s prospects. Ohio seemed to have more to do with what a mess the voting-day procedures were there than with either candidate’s chances. But no matter: after a period of intense obsession with Ohio, in which President Obama, only half joking, promised Ohioans chocolate, the evening sped toward a scenario in which Ohio, for electoral purposes, would not even matter. The networks called it for Obama, and called it early.
There are only a few hours left to be an undecided voter. It may be hard to say goodbye to the status, the attention, the Bruce Springsteen concerts in your district. But tonight you will either be decided, or a non-voter. There are likely some people who get on line undecided—and it is the shame of our country, and not their own shame, that in some states they have to stand there for so many hours that they might decide, and revise, and undecide all over again. The worst decision is to go home without voting.
The polls are beginning to open, and so some of the questions that have troubled us for months, like what numbers add up to two hundred and seventy, will be answered soon. Or maybe they won’t: this is a close election, and, as Jeffrey Toobin writes, recounts are in the same region where madness lies. Here are seven questions that we may get some clues about today, but that will most likely still be troubling us tomorrow.
1. Did the weather do it? And what will we do about the weather? According to Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian and New Yorker writer, the only time that the weather has determined the identity of the President was in 1841, when a cold rain fell on the day William Henry Harrison delivered his inauguration speech. He died of pneumonia thirty-two days later. Is this the second time? There is now a growing body of polling evidence that Obama’s response to Hurricane, a.k.a. Superstorm, Sandy helped him. (John Cassidy has more on that.) We’ll see today how it affects the mechanics of voting—poll closings, displaced voters. The bigger question is for elections to come, in a world with more and more extreme weather: Will we finally find the political will to address climate change?
Just what sort of Vice-President would Paul Ryan be, in what sort of Administration? On the campaign trail, at least in public appearances, he has been the sort of attack dog who manages to be both droopy-eyed and tightly smiling. He is everywhere—running onstage at rallies, claiming kinship with half a dozen states based on everything from his mother-in-law’s birthplace to, as Reuters points out, college-football conferences. (“Ryan likes to call Wisconsin and Ohio, ‘Big Ten’ country.” ) And he is nowhere—Politico noted that, since the Vice-Presidential debate, he has stopped doing local-news interviews, after earlier doing scores of them. But this is a campaign in which not everything is meant for every audience. This weekend, Ryan took part in what the National Journal called “an unpublicized teletown hall” with the Faith & Freedom coalition, an evangelically-oriented group founded by Ralph Reed. In it, he talked about the danger of Barack Obama, and of where the President is taking America:
And so the 2012 campaign comes to a close, with the Romney campaign mangling not only the political legacy of the Party of George Herbert Walker Bush, but also the literary inheritance of George Herbert, the seventeenth century writer—and ending up with something ugly. It started in Springfield, Ohio, when a crowd responded to Barack Obama’s mention of how Clinton’s policies had been opposed by “the Republican Congress and a Senate candidate by the name of Mitt Romney” by jeering. He told them:
No, no, no, don’t boo—vote! Vote! Voting is the best revenge.
