The transition to the Biden administration may be going, let us say, a bit slower than transitions have in the past. But the rumbles of the age-old, post-election shift in Washington can still be heard. Thousands of victorious campaign staffers, donors, glory seekers, and hangers-ons will soon be swarming the capital in search of jobs in the new administration. And, in a few weeks, there will be a convenient guidebook published for them.
The book is officially called United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions, but it's better known as the Plum Book because of its purple cover — and also probably because it's filled with plum jobs, many of which are appointed by the winning presidential candidate. The book is published every four years after presidential elections. It's a long list of positions around the federal government, typically providing information on who last held them and what their salary was.
Often a more genuine measure of the philanthropic side of politicians is their work following terms in a major office. Three US presidents stand out among their peers for their charitable work both during and after their presidencies: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. While there are certainly other presidents and politicians who are generous in their philanthropic work, these three offer an interesting array of causes, socio-economic climates, and timelines.
Like Hurley, she voiced impatience with people who see the flag as a symbol burdened by racism: "The United States is still pretty much the most equal place you could have for people of different backgrounds. For people to compare the U.S. to an ideal is unfair."
But many of the roughly 1,800 people who responded to NPR's call out, especially people of color and those who lean more liberal, said it's not that simple. They told us the American flag comes with baggage that can't be ignored.
he most obvious reason America’s presidential candidates are so old might be that Americans are getting older. Voters over 65 routinely go to the polls more often than young voters do, and political-science research has found that voters typically prefer candidates “who are closest to themselves in age.” This sounds like a universal formula: Older countries produce older politicians.
But since the 1980s, almost every European country has gotten older, while the typical European Union leader has actually gotten younger. In the United Kingdom, although people over 55 outvote people under 30 by one of the widest margins in the world, the current prime minister, Boris Johnson, is “only” 55. Biden, Sanders, and Trump are all older right now than the U.K.’s five previous prime ministers, going back to Tony Blair.
So the preference for very old candidates seems to be weirdly, specifically American. What’s that about?
Maybe it’s about decades of youth disengagement from politics. According to The Economist, older Americans have outvoted younger Americans by a wider margin than in the typical OECD country. This is particularly true at the local level. As Timothy Noah writes in Politico, studies have found that the median voter age in America’s municipal elections is 57—“nearly a generation older than the median age of eligible voters.”
Months after dropping out of the Democratic presidential primaries, Pete Buttigieg is back with a warning: America, he says, is facing a crisis of trust. And he says building that trust, in both American institutions and fellow citizens, is the only way to address the other challenges facing the country.
Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., called trust one of his "rules of the road" during his presidential campaign.
An address is something many people take for granted today, but they are in fact a fairly recent invention that has shaped our cities and taken on great political importance. Deirdre Mask is the author of The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, which looks at all the ways the world has changed since the popularization of street addresses during the Enlightenment. The book examines how addresses impact wealth and poverty, and how they serve as proxies for our most contentious debates. Mask also explores a digital future where we aren’t reliant on the numbers on our homes to tell us where we are or where we’re going. The Address Book Order The 99% Invisible City