he buttons said "Frat Bros for Harris" and "Hillbillies for Harris" and "Banned Book Readers for Harris" and "Unity 2024." The stickers said "demo(b)rat" and "Existing in Context" and "F*ck Project 2025" and "Hotties for Harris." The Washington State delegation wore "Cowboy Kamala" sashes and cowboy hats fringed with flashing lights.
按钮上写着“哈里斯的兄弟们”、“哈里斯的乡巴佬”、“哈里斯的禁书读者”和“2024 团结”。贴纸上写着“民主（b）党”、“在上下文中存在”、“去你妈的 2025 计划”和“哈里斯的帅哥”。华盛顿州代表团穿着“牛仔卡马拉”的绶带，戴着装饰有闪光灯的牛仔帽。
("The Smithsonian already came by to collect one," Shasti Conrad, the head of the delegation, told me.) Some pieces of merch seemed to have been printed in June-a T-shirt with images of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter, but no Kamala Harris—and others were designed sometime between late July, when Biden left the race, and midAugust, when people started arriving in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention.
（“史密森学会已经来收集了一件，”代表团负责人沙斯蒂·康拉德告诉我。）一些商品似乎是在六月印刷的——一件印有乔·拜登、巴拉克·奥巴马、比尔·克林顿和吉米·卡特的 T 恤，但没有卡马拉·哈里斯——而其他商品则是在七月底拜登退出竞选和八月中旬人们开始抵达芝加哥参加民主党全国大会之间的某个时间设计的。
It surely wasn't spontaneous when Biden finished his keynote speech and Harris told him, within view of the cameras, "I love you so much." Still, stagecraft and all, it did feel a bit like Unity 2024.
拜登结束主题演讲时，哈里斯在镜头前对他说：“我非常爱你。”这显然不是自发的。尽管如此，舞台效果和一切，确实让人感觉有点像 2024 年团结大会。
"Two months ago, it was impossible to contemplate that anyone other than Biden could unite the Party," Peter Welch, the junior senator from Vermont, told me.
"两个月前，除了拜登之外，没人能想象能够团结党派，"佛蒙特州的初级参议员彼得·韦尔奇对我说。
"Then it was people tiptoeing around, going, 'O.K., he's not the best messenger, but we can't address that without tearing the Party apart.' Now that's all ancient history."
然后人们小心翼翼地走来走去，心里想着，‘好吧，他不是最好的传递者，但我们不能在不撕裂党的情况下解决这个问题。’现在这一切都已经是过去的历史了。

There are two U.S. senators from Vermont, one of whom is a household
佛蒙特州有两位美国参议员，其中一位是全职家庭主妇
name. After Biden delivered perhaps the worst televised debate performance in American Presidential history, Bernie Sanders, the senior senator, became one of his staunchest defenders.
在拜登可能是美国总统历史上最糟糕的电视辩论表现后，资深参议员伯尼·桑德斯成为了他最坚定的支持者之一。
A vast majority of voters told pollsters that Biden was too old to run, and there were widespread calls for him to drop out of the race.
大多数选民对民意调查表示，拜登年纪太大，不适合参选，并广泛呼吁他退出竞选。
Yet Sanders insinuated that these calls may have been artificially
然而，桑德斯暗示这些电话可能是被人为操控的
orchestrated by élites-"a small group of people," he called them, "not ordinary people."
由精英们主导——“一小群人，”他称他们为“非普通人。”

Meanwhile, Welch was making the opposite case. After serving eight terms in the House, Welch, who is seventy-seven, was elected to the Senate as part of the 2022 "freshman class." Among his classmates were J. D.
与此同时，韦尔奇则提出了相反的观点。在众议院任职八届后，现年七十七岁的韦尔奇作为 2022 年“新生班”的一员当选为参议员。他的同班同学包括 J.D.

Vance, with whom he co-sponsored a bill expanding rural Internet access, and John Fetterman, who told Politico that Welch was "the nicest dude in D.C." On the night of the debate, the Senate was in recess, and Welch was at home with his wife in Norwich, Vermont.
瓦恩与他共同发起了一项扩展农村互联网接入的法案，约翰·费特曼在《政治家》上表示，韦尔奇是“华盛顿最友好的人”。在辩论的晚上，参议院正在休会，韦尔奇和他的妻子在佛蒙特州的诺里奇家中。
"I was in the other room, and Margaret goes, 'You've got to watch this,'" Welch told me.
我在另一个房间，玛格丽特说：‘你一定要看看这个。’
He was disturbed by Biden's garbled answers, but perhaps even more disturbed by the split-screen shots of Biden standing slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, looking lost. "Right away, I knew," he said.
他被拜登含糊不清的回答所困扰，但更让他感到不安的是那些拜登呆滞、眼神空洞、显得迷茫的分屏画面。“我立刻就明白了，”他说。
"You can't make people unsee this." The following day, his staff drove him to various events-a meet and greet with dairy farmers in Waitsfield, a media conference in Burlington. Whatever the ostensible topic, the only thing that people wanted to talk about was the debate.
"你无法让人们忘记这一点。"第二天，他的团队带他参加了各种活动——在 Waitsfield 与乳制品农民的见面会，以及在 Burlington 的媒体会议。无论表面上讨论的是什么，大家唯一想谈论的就是那场辩论。
"It was maybe eighty-twenty, or ninety-ten, in favor of 'Biden cannot be
这可能是八成支持，或者九成支持，认为“拜登无法”
our nominee, " Welch told me. "And this is in Vermont"—the state that gave the President his widest margin of victory in 2020.
我们的提名人，“韦尔奇告诉我。 “这发生在佛蒙特州”——这个州在 2020 年为总统赢得了最大的胜利幅度。
From the car, Welch called every Democratic insider he could get on the linestrategists, pollsters, about a dozen senators-and laid out, in painful detail, his sense that Biden had become a liability.
从车里，韦尔奇拨打了他能联系上的每一位民主党内部人士——包括战略家、民调专家和大约十位参议员——详细说明了他认为拜登已经成为负担的看法。
"Some of them openly agreed with my analysis, some were more circumspect," Welch recalled. (As a Democratic Party boss in nineteenthcentury Boston put it, "Don't write when you can talk; don't talk when you can nod your head.") "No one seemed eager to take it on.
"他们中有些人公开同意我的分析，而有些人则显得更加谨慎，"韦尔奇回忆道。（正如十九世纪波士顿的一位民主党领袖所说，“能交谈时就不要写信；能点头时就不要交谈。”）“似乎没有人急于承担这个任务。”
But no one told me I was wrong."
但没有人告诉我我错。

Like most red-blooded Americans, members of Congress have group chats. On debate night, and for days afterward, these were full of conflicting emotions: shock, outrage, false bravado, sheer dread.
和大多数热血的美国人一样，国会议员们也有群聊。在辩论之夜及其后的几天里，这些群聊充满了复杂的情感：震惊、愤怒、虚假的自信和深深的恐惧。
Welch has several text threads with House and Senate colleagues, including a Signal thread with messages that periodically self-erase. The prevailing sentiment was: Someone has to do something. But what, exactly?
韦尔奇与众议院和参议院的同事们有几条短信交流，包括一个定期自动删除消息的 Signal 线程。大家普遍认为：总得有人采取行动。但究竟该怎么做呢？
"There is no such entity as 'the Democrats,' "Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, told me. "When the Party acts, it's the result of a set of individual decisions, either coördinated or, sometimes, surprisingly
“没有‘民主党’这个实体，”来自康涅狄格州的民主党参议员克里斯·墨菲告诉我。“当党派采取行动时，实际上是由一系列个人决策所决定的，这些决策要么是协调一致的，要么有时会让人感到意外。”
uncoördinated." The House was in session on the night of the debate, and more than a dozen representatives, all moderate Democrats, gathered at a watch party in D.C. hosted by Jake Auchincloss, of Massachusetts, which quickly turned funereal.
未协调。众议院在辩论的晚上召开会议，十多位温和派民主党代表聚集在马萨诸塞州的杰克·奥金克劳斯主办的华盛顿观战派对上，气氛迅速变得沉重。
"About fifteen minutes in, we cracked open the bourbon,"Jim Himes, a congressman from Connecticut, told me. "I'm getting messages from everyone I know outside D.C.—'Fix this!'—but it's not like there's a red phone I can pick up and on the other end is the smoke-filled room.
大约十五分钟后，我们开始喝波本酒，康涅狄格州的国会议员吉姆·海梅斯告诉我。'我收到来自华盛顿特区外每个人的消息——“快解决这个问题！”——但并不是说我能拿起一个红色电话，另一端就有个烟雾弥漫的房间。'
The Party is-I don't want to call it rudderless, but it's amorphous."
这个党派——我不想说它没有方向，但它的形态很模糊。

Some Democrats in the House joined Sanders in trying to breathe the embers of Biden's candidacy back to life. "Maybe I'm being too riskaverse," Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, in an Instagram live stream, about the possibility of switching candidates.
一些众议院的民主党人和桑德斯一起，试图让拜登的候选人身份复苏。“也许我太过于谨慎了，”亚历山大·奥卡西奥-科尔特斯在一次 Instagram 直播中谈到换候选人的可能性。
"Maybe I'm taking a big 'L.'" Many, if not most, believed that Biden was on track to lose, and to bring House and Senate Democrats in close races down with him, but that there was nothing they could do about it.
“也许我正在经历一个巨大的‘失败’。”许多人，甚至大多数人，都认为拜登注定会失败，并且会把在激烈竞选中的众议院和参议院民主党人一起拖下水，但他们对此无能为力。
"The last thing you want to do is be out there grandstanding, risking your reputation," Welch told me, "for a fight you've got no chance of winning anyway." Adam Smith, a congressman from Washington State, told me that, the day after the debate, "I called up the White House and went, 'Guys, we all know what has to happen here.'I hung up thinking, He'll do the honorable thing.
你最不想做的就是在那里炫耀，冒着失去声誉的风险，"韦尔奇告诉我，"为了一个你根本没有机会赢的争斗。"来自华盛顿州的国会议员亚当·史密斯告诉我，"辩论后的第二天，我打电话给白宫，问，'伙计们，我们都知道接下来该怎么做。'我挂掉电话时想着，他会做出光明正大的决定。
And instead I watched the palace guard go, 'Nope, fuck off,' and start circling the wagons." Washington is full of Biden loyalists, and loyalists often hold grudges.
而我看到宫殿卫兵说：“不，走开，”然后开始围起马车。华盛顿充满了拜登的忠实支持者，而忠实支持者往往心存怨恨。
"I was so critical of my Republican colleagues who would say terrible things about Trump until he came to power, and then they just fell in line," Senator Martin Heinrich, of New Mexico, told me.
"我曾对我的共和党同事们非常批评，他们在特朗普上台之前说了很多可怕的话，但他上台后，他们却都乖乖服从了，" 新墨西哥州的马丁·海因里希参议员告诉我。
"I thought we had a responsibility to show that we can be different.
我觉得我们有责任展示出我们可以与众不同。
And, at times, I wasn't sure whether we would." In mid-July, shortly after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, an unnamed House Democrat told Axios, "We've all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency."
“而且，有时我不确定我们是否会。”在七月中旬，唐纳德·特朗普遭遇刺杀未遂后，一位匿名的众议院民主党人对 Axios 表示：“我们都已经接受了特朗普连任的事实。”

The Democratic Party used to be a formidable institution run by thuggish bosses and shifty insiders.
民主党曾是一个由强势老板和狡诈内部人士主导的强大机构。
(Say what you will about Boss Tweed, but he wouldn't have let an unpopular candidate run for mayor of New York-he would have given bribes, or made threats, until he got his way.) For most of the twentieth century, primary elections were nonbinding "beauty contests," when they happened at all.
（无论你对博斯·特威德怎么看，他绝不会让一个不受欢迎的候选人竞选纽约市市长——他会通过贿赂或威胁来达到自己的目的。）在整个二十世纪，初选大多是非约束性的“选美比赛”，即使有时也会举行。
Nominees for President were picked at the Convention, by the élites in the room, and the power struggles could be brutal. But reforms enacted after the 1968 Convention made primaries binding, and stripped Party insiders of much of their power.
总统候选人在大会上由房间里的精英们挑选，权力斗争可能非常激烈。然而，1968 年大会后实施的改革使初选具有约束力，并剥夺了党内人士的大部分权力。
The idea was to make the Democratic Party more democratic, but the nominating process also became less nimble.
这个想法是让民主党更加民主，但提名过程却变得不够灵活。
One trade-off, not much contemplated at the time, was that in the event of some unlikely glitchsay, a candidate who clinched the nomination but then, on live television, demonstrated that he was unfit to run-the Party would be stuck.
当时并未充分考虑的一个权衡是，如果发生一些不太可能的情况，比如一位候选人在获得提名后，在直播中表现出他不适合竞选，党派将会陷入困境。
"The upside of the new system is that it got us away from the old smoke-filled rooms," Elaine Kamarck, a longtime leader of the D.N.C., said. "The downside of the new system is that, every once in a while, it royally fucks up."
新系统的好处在于让我们摆脱了旧时烟雾弥漫的房间，" D.N.C. 的长期领导者伊莱恩·卡马克说。"但新系统的坏处是，偶尔会出现严重的问题。

The twenty-three days between Biden's debate performance and the end of his candidacy were a high-stakes natural experiment playing out both in private and in public. A dangerous or incompetent President can be
拜登的辩论表现与他竞选结束之间的二十三天是一个高风险的自然实验，既在私下进行，也在公众面前展开。一个危险或无能的总统可能会
impeached, but neither political party has a formal mechanism by which elected officials (or party elders, or George Clooney) can force a presumptive nominee out of the race.
尽管被弹劾，但没有任何政党有正式的机制可以迫使当选官员（或党内长老，或乔治·克鲁尼）退出竞选。
"A corporation has a board that can replace the C.E.O.," Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, told me.
一家公司有一个董事会，可以更换首席执行官，夏威夷的民主党参议员布赖恩·沙茨这样告诉我。
"Our party doesn't have anything like that." The Democratic National Committee is nominally quasi-independent, but everyone knows that the buck stops with the Democratic President, when there is one.
"我们的政党没有这样的东西。"民主全国委员会名义上是准独立的，但大家都知道，当有民主党总统时，最终的责任还是在他身上。
When Kamarck wrote the Party's platform, she sent a draft to the White House first. James Zogby, a D.N.C. member since 1993, said that he has tried to make the organization "less like an extension of the White House," but that, "if anything, it has gone in the wrong direction." In the end, Biden stepped aside, and this year's Convention, which once seemed poised to be a poker-faced slog, instead became an ecstatic celebration.
当卡马克撰写党的纲领时，她首先将草稿发送给白宫。自 1993 年以来一直是民主党全国委员会成员的詹姆斯·佐格比表示，他试图让这个组织“少一些像白宫的附属机构”，但“如果有什么变化的话，那就是它走向了错误的方向。”最终，拜登让位，今年的大会曾一度看似将是一场扑克脸的艰难斗争，但最终却变成了一场热烈的庆祝活动。
But it could easily have gone the other way.
但事情本可以朝另一个方向发展。

Peter Welch was among the few congressional Democrats to call on Joe Biden to step aside in the wake of the first Presidential debate.
彼得·韦尔奇是少数几位国会民主党人之一，他呼吁乔·拜登在第一次总统辩论后辞去职务。

After the Presidential debate, lawmakers returned to Washington and continued their frantic conversations. But a culture of rectitude and risk
在总统辩论结束后，立法者们回到华盛顿，继续进行紧张的讨论。然而，正直与风险的文化依然存在。
aversion, especially in the Senate, caused almost all of them to toe the party line.
尤其是在参议院的反感，几乎让他们所有人都遵循党的立场。
John Hickenlooper, a senator from Colorado, told me, "Meetings were cancelled so that people could keep talking about it, into the night." Still, he said, the Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, advised his caucus to "keep our powder dry until we could speak with one voice." Whenever Welch passed reporters in the halls, he was expected to put on a smile and stay quiet.
科罗拉多州的参议员约翰·希肯卢珀告诉我：“会议被取消，以便人们可以继续讨论这个问题，直到深夜。”尽管如此，他表示，参议院多数党领袖查克·舒默建议他的党团“保持警惕，直到我们能够齐心协力发声。”每当韦尔奇在走廊上经过记者时，人们都期待他面带微笑，保持沉默。
Was this how America stumbled into authoritarianism, with a polite smile and a "no comment"? He called his best friend in Vermont, "a guy who's been a kind of moral touchstone for me over the years," and talked through all the Washington-insider reasons to hold his tongue.
这就是美国以礼貌的微笑和“无可奉告”走向威权主义的方式吗？他称他的好朋友在佛蒙特州为“多年来一直是我道德的指引”，并讨论了所有华盛顿内部人士保持沉默的理由。
Sure, the friend replied, you could give yourself those excuses. Or you could just say what you and most of your constituents are thinking.
当然，朋友回答，你可以给自己找借口，或者你可以直接说出你和大多数选民的想法。

On July 10th, Welch decided to speak out. "I understand why President Biden wants to run," he wrote in the Washington Post. "But he needs to reassess whether he is the best candidate to do so. In my view, he is not." At the time, Welch had almost no political cover.
7 月 10 日，韦尔奇决定发声。“我理解拜登总统想要参选的原因，”他在《华盛顿邮报》中写道。“但他需要重新考虑自己是否是最合适的候选人。在我看来，他并不是。”当时，韦尔奇几乎没有政治支持。
Just nine House Democrats had called on Biden to step aside; Welch was the only senator to do so. "I had a lot of affection for Joe Biden-I thought he was a great President—but I didn't go way back with the guy the way some of my colleagues did," he told me.
只有九名众议院民主党人呼吁拜登退位，韦尔奇是唯一一位这样做的参议员。“我对乔·拜登有很深的感情——我认为他是一位伟大的总统——但我和他并没有像我的一些同事那样有很深的交情，”他告诉我。
"Maybe that made it easier for me to separate the personal from the political." It's said that every senator looks in the mirror and sees a future President, but Welch is one of the rare senators with no aspirations of running for higher office, or even of chairing an important committee.
"也许这让我更容易将个人与政治区分开来。"人们常说，每位参议员在镜子中看到的都是未来的总统，但韦尔奇是少数没有追求更高职位或担任重要委员会主席的参议员之一。
This left him "totally liberated" to speak his mind. He added, "And maybe I also had the advantage of being new enough to
这让他“完全解放”了，可以自由表达自己的想法。他补充说：“也许我还有一个优势，那就是我还比较新。”
the Senate that I didn't really know the rules."
我对参议院的规则并不太了解。
6 political party," according to the political scientist E. E.
根据政治学家 E.E.，6 是一个政治党。
1 Schattschneider, "is an organized attempt to get control of the government." He wrote this in 1942, and it remains the canonical definition. It sounds obvious, until you look closely.
1 Schattschneider 说：“这是一个有组织的尝试，旨在控制政府。”他在 1942 年写下了这句话，这仍然是经典的定义。乍一看似乎很明显，但仔细观察后会发现并非如此。
For one thing, it implies that a party that is not trying to win ("We've all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency") is not, in some fundamental sense, a real party at all.
首先，这意味着一个不试图赢得胜利的政党（“我们都已经接受了第二个特朗普总统任期”）在某种根本意义上并不算是真正的政党。
For another thing, Schattschneider locates a party's beating heart within its leaders, not its voters. "The Democratic party is not an association of the twenty-seven million people who voted for Mr. Roosevelt," he wrote.
另外，沙茨施奈德认为，一个政党的核心在于其领导者，而非选民。“民主党并不是由二千七百万投票给罗斯福先生的人组成的协会，”他写道。
"It is manifestly impossible for twenty-seven million Democrats to control the Democratic party." If this was élitist, it was also typical of its time.
二千七百万民主党人显然无法控制民主党。如果这被视为精英主义，那也是那个时代的典型特征。
(In 1942, few readers needed to be reminded why it might be dangerous to view politicians as irrefutable tribunes of the will of the people.) And then there's the word "organized." When members of Congress do TV hits from the Capitol, they often stand next to a statue of Will Rogers, a humorist from the early twentieth century, who joked, "I don't belong to any organized political party-I am a Democrat." Smith, the congressman from Washington State, told me, "I always thought that Will Rogers thing was just a punch line.
（在 1942 年，很少有读者需要提醒，为什么将政治家视为人民意志的不可辩驳的代言人可能是危险的。）接下来是“有组织”这个词。当国会议员在国会大厦进行电视采访时，他们常常站在威尔·罗杰斯的雕像旁边。威尔·罗杰斯是 20 世纪初的幽默家，他曾开玩笑说：“我不属于任何有组织的政党——我是一名民主党人。”来自华盛顿州的国会议员史密斯告诉我：“我一直认为威尔·罗杰斯的那句话只是个笑话。”
Then I got here and went, Oh, maybe he was being too nice."
然后我来到这里，心里想，哦，也许他对我太好了。

The Founders cautioned against factional discord and then immediately succumbed to it. In 1824, four Democratic-Republicans ran for President. Andrew Jackson, a charismatic war hero, won the popular vote, but they all fell short of an Electoral College majority.
创始人们警告要避免派系纷争，但他们很快就屈服于这种纷争。1824 年，四位民主共和党人竞选总统。安德鲁·杰克逊，这位富有魅力的战争英雄，赢得了普选票，但他们都未能获得选举人团的多数。
The House-led by Speaker
由议长主持的众议院

Henry Clay, who despised Jackson-handed the Presidency to John Quincy Adams, the Republic's first nepo baby.
亨利·克莱鄙视杰克逊，将总统职位交给了约翰·昆西·亚当斯，成为共和国的第一个“裙带关系”婴儿。
(Jacksonians dubbed this the "corrupt bargain" after Adams, returning the favor, named Clay his Secretary of State.) Martin Van Buren, then a senator from New York, decided that this was no way to run a country.
（杰克逊派称之为“腐败的交易”，因为亚当斯回报了这一点，任命克莱为国务卿。）当时来自纽约的参议员马丁·范布伦认为，这样治理国家是不合适的。
He started developing the mass party as we know it, with the goal of "substituting party principle for personal preference": the Democratic Party, then also known as the Democracy.
他开始发展我们所熟知的群众党，目标是“用党的原则取代个人偏好”：民主党，当时也被称为民主。
Under Van Buren's control, the Party didn't just run candidates every few years; it wove itself into the fabric of daily life, establishing partisan newspapers, local social clubs, and patronage networks that engendered fierce loyalty.
在范布伦的领导下，政党不仅每隔几年就提名候选人，而是深入日常生活，建立了党派报纸、地方社交俱乐部和培养忠诚的任人唯亲网络。
When the Party needed votes in the South, Van Buren courted the South Carolinian John C. Calhoun to be Jackson's running mate; a few years later, when Van Buren concluded that Calhoun posed a threat to the nation, and to the Party, he promptly dumped him.
当党在南方需要选票时，范布伦向南卡罗来纳州的约翰·C·卡尔霍恩示好，试图让他成为杰克逊的副手；几年后，范布伦意识到卡尔霍恩对国家和党构成威胁，便果断地抛弃了他。
Among contemporary historians, Van Buren is having a bit of a moment. In "Realigners," a sweeping reassessment of "partisan hacks" and "political visionaries," Timothy Shenk portrays him as both.
在当代历史学家中，范布伦正受到关注。在《重新调整》一书中，蒂莫西·申克对“党派黑客”和“政治远见者”进行了全面的重新评估，将他描绘成这两者的结合体。
"What It Took to Win," Michael Kazin's recent history of the Democratic Party, traces a narrative "from the rise of Martin Van Buren, the first party builder, to Nancy Pelosi." Kazin writes that the Jackson campaign set up local clubs where Democrats "munched on barbeque, and mounted street parades .
《赢得胜利所需的条件》是迈克尔·卡津最近撰写的关于民主党的历史，讲述了从马丁·范布伦（第一位党派建设者）的崛起到南希·佩洛西的故事。卡津提到，杰克逊的竞选活动在地方设立了俱乐部，民主党人在那里“享用烧烤，参加街头游行。”
. .party' was functioning both as a noun and an intransitive verb."
“. .party”既可以作为名词，也可以作为不及物动词使用。

Every party boss who has ever implemented a reform has claimed to be doing it on behalf of the people. Yet some bosses really have tried to help the organization and its constituents, while also helping themselves.
每位曾实施改革的党首都声称是为了人民的利益。然而，有些党首确实努力帮助组织及其选民，同时也为自己谋取利益。

Robert (Fighting Bob) La Follette, a Progressive Republican, crusaded against the Party machine; when they went low, he went low more effectively.
罗伯特（战斗鲍勃）拉福莱特是一位进步的共和党人，他对抗党派机器；当对方采取卑劣手段时，他则更加有效地反击。
In 1904, while running for reëlection as governor of Wisconsin, he pledged to implement direct voting in local primaries, a pro-democracy reform that would also benefit him politically.
1904 年，他在竞选威斯康星州州长连任时承诺实施地方初选的直接投票，这项有利于民主的改革也将对他的政治生涯产生积极影响。
His opponents planned to block his renomination, by force if necessary, by flooding the state Convention, held in a university gym, with fake electors bearing counterfeit badges.
他的对手计划通过必要时的强制手段阻止他的重新提名，具体做法是在大学体育馆举行的州大会上用假选民和伪造的徽章进行干扰。
La Follette hired a construction crew to work overnight, surrounding the gym with barbed wire, and a dozen college football players, "physically able to meet any emergency," to guard the door. He nearly split the Party, but he got what he wanted.
拉福莱特雇了一支建筑队在夜间工作，用铁丝围住体育馆，并请了十几个“身体能够应对任何紧急情况”的大学橄榄球运动员来守门。他几乎使党派分裂，但最终得到了他想要的。

Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919, six years into his Presidency, but he was still determined to run for a third term. "The President's whole left side was paralyzed," Wilson's personal secretary wrote in a memoir.
伍德罗·威尔逊在 1919 年中风，担任总统六年后，他仍然决心竞选第三个任期。“总统的整个左侧都瘫痪了，”威尔逊的私人秘书在回忆录中写道。
"Looking at me he said: 'I want to show them that I can still fight and that I am not afraid.' "As Party insiders took sleeper trains to San Francisco for the Democratic Convention the following year, they started talking, and a consensus emerged: no matter what Wilson said, the Party was not with him.
他看着我说：'我想向他们证明我仍然能够战斗，并且我不怕。' 当党内人士乘坐卧铺火车前往下一年的民主大会时，他们开始交谈，达成了共识：无论威尔逊怎么说，党都不支持他。
The governor of Alabama was quoted in the Chicago Tribune as saying that Wilson's renomination would spell "party suicide." More than halfway through the Convention, Wilson gave in.
阿拉巴马州州长在《芝加哥论坛报》中表示，威尔逊的重新提名将意味着“政党的自杀”。在大会进行到一半时，威尔逊选择了妥协。
"When it comes to a party's internal decision-making, democracy should not be the only criterion, or even the main one," Sam Rosenfeld, a political scientist at Colgate University, told me.
"在政党的内部决策中，民主不应是唯一的标准，甚至也不应是主要标准，"科尔盖特大学的政治学家萨姆·罗森费尔德对我说。
"You want parties that are open to input, but above all you want them to be able to reach decisions that mean they can gain power and achieve things. That's the whole
你希望聚会能够开放接受意见，但最重要的是，他们能够做出决策，从而获得权力并实现目标。这就是关键所在。

One of the provocative claims in "The Hollow Parties," a new book by Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman, a political-science professor at Johns Hopkins, is that Franklin D.
在罗森菲尔德和约翰霍普金斯大学的政治学教授丹尼尔·施洛兹曼的新书《空心政党》中，有一个引人注目的论点是富兰克林·D。
Roosevelt's most enduring legacy was the instantiation of the "personalistic presidency." The New Deal was a monumental achievement, but the Democrats under F.D.R. were whatever F.D.R. wanted them to be.
罗斯福最持久的遗产是“个人主义总统制”的建立。新政是一个伟大的成就，但在 F.D.R.的领导下，民主党完全是 F.D.R.所希望的样子。
(In 1932, when he flew to Chicago to accept the Democratic Party's nomination in person, it was seen as an unprecedented display of personal ambition.) Then came Truman's "bomb power," Lyndon Johnson's arm-twisting, and the ever-expanding imperial Presidency.
（在 1932 年，他飞往芝加哥亲自接受民主党的提名，这被视为前所未有的个人野心的表现。）接着是杜鲁门的“核武器力量”、林登·约翰逊的施压，以及日益扩大的帝国总统权力。
By the time we get to Nixon and Reagan and Trump and Biden, the average President's self-understanding is essentially "Le parti, c'est moi."
到了尼克松、里根、特朗普和拜登时代，普通总统的自我认知基本上是“政党就是我。”

In January, 1968, the final year of Johnson's first term, the President told Horace Busby, a speechwriter who acted as his Boswell, that his renomination was assured: "Somebody may try, but they can't take it away." Two months later, though, Eugene McCarthy, a little-known antiwar senator from Minnesota, came surprisingly close to winning the New
1968 年 1 月，约翰逊第一任期的最后一年，总统告诉霍勒斯·巴斯比，这位充当他博斯威尔的演讲撰稿人，他的再次提名是有保障的：“有人可能会尝试，但他们无法夺走。”然而，两个月后，来自明尼苏达州的鲜为人知的反战参议员尤金·麦卡锡却意外地接近赢得新...

Then Robert F. Kennedy, the glamorous senator from New York, entered the race. Johnson, spooked, decided to drop out.
然后，来自纽约的魅力参议员罗伯特·F·肯尼迪加入了竞选。约翰逊感到恐慌，决定退出。
He was rattled by his loosening grip on power, and by his declining health, but he seemed to take consolation in knowing that his decision would be a bombshell that only he could drop.
他因对权力的逐渐失去和健康的下降而感到不安，但似乎在知道自己的决定将是一个只有他能引发的轰动中找到了安慰。
When he let Busby in on his secret plan to retire, "a smile played across his face," Busby wrote. "'That,' he said, 'ought to surprise the living hell out of them.'"
当他向巴斯比透露他退休的秘密计划时，“他的脸上露出了微笑，”巴斯比写道。“‘这，’他说，‘肯定会让他们大吃一惊。’”

Kennedy was assassinated, and McCarthy won most of the remaining primaries. Yet the delegates at that summer's Convention, in Chicago, ended up nominating Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's Vice-President and an avatar of the Democratic establishment.
肯尼迪被刺杀后，麦卡锡赢得了大部分剩余的初选。然而，在那个夏天的芝加哥大会上，代表们最终提名了约翰逊的副总统、民主党体制的象征——休伯特·汉弗莱。
For this and other reasons, the 1968 Convention was consumed by acrimony, both inside the hall and on the streets.
由于这些原因以及其他因素，1968 年公约在会议厅内外都充满了争议。
To avoid such a damaging spectacle at future Conventions, the Democrats enacted what was later called the robot rule-instead of acting as free agents, the delegates were now warm bodies who had to do as they were told.
为了避免未来大会上出现如此有害的场面，民主党制定了后来被称为“机器人规则”的规定——代表们不再是自由代理，而是成为了必须服从指令的“温暖身体”。
Conventions became anticlimactic, pro-forma pageants where the presumptive nominee became the official nominee.
会议变得乏味，成了一种例行公事的仪式，假定的提名人最终成为了正式提名人。

One of the central debates in political science concerns whether the two major American parties are-and these are technical terms-"strong" or "weak" parties. Everyone agrees that the old party machines were strong.
政治科学中的一个核心争论是关于美国两个主要政党是——这些是专业术语——“强”党还是“弱”党。大家都同意，旧的政党机器是强大的。
By comparison, the contemporary parties look weak: the voters have more
相比之下，现代政党显得无力：选民的选择更多了
say, which seems fairer but also messier.
说起来，这似乎更公平，但也更复杂。
"The Hollow Parties" complicates this dichotomy by describing both parties as lumbering leviathans, "seemingly everywhere and nowhere, overbearing and enfeebled, all at once." Even as they have grown more formalized, the parties have been hollowed out by their respective "party blobs": super PACs, think tanks, media figures, and other "paraparty organizations." Some of this hollowness is infrastructural.
《空洞的政党》通过将两个政党比作笨重的巨兽，复杂化了这种二元对立，称它们“似乎无处不在又无处可寻，既专横又虚弱，一切尽在其中。”尽管这些政党变得更加正式，但它们却被各自的“政党团块”掏空了：超级政治行动委员会、智库、媒体人物和其他“准政党组织”。这种空洞感在某种程度上源于基础设施的缺失。
Why should the Democrats go to the trouble of building a block-by-block canvassing operation if MoveOn or the National Education Association is already doing it for them? Some of it is ideological.
为什么民主党还要费力去建立逐块的拉票活动，既然 MoveOn 或全国教育协会已经在为他们做这些工作？其中有些原因是出于意识形态考虑。
It's hard for the Republican Party to turn down the donor base and voter enthusiasm provided by a group such as the National Rifle Association; but, as the N.R.A. keeps pushing for more radical policies, Republican lawmakers may find themselves boxed in.
对于共和党而言，拒绝国家步枪协会提供的捐赠者基础和选民热情是很困难的；然而，随着国家步枪协会不断推动更激进的政策，共和党立法者可能会发现自己陷入困境。
Barack Obama was personally popular enough that he could have won a third term, but he didn't leave behind a Party organization capable of delivering a Democratic successor.
巴拉克·奥巴马的个人魅力足以让他赢得第三个任期，但他没有留下一个能够培养民主党接班人的党组织。
Trump's nomination in 2016 was a vivid example of party fecklessness: Ted Cruz and John Kasich scrambled to pull off a brokered Convention; National Review published a special issue, featuring twenty-two leading conservatives, under the banner "Against Trump." By November, most Republican insiders had boarded the maga train.
特朗普在 2016 年的提名生动地展示了党派的无能：泰德·克鲁兹和约翰·凯西克急于进行一场代理大会；《国家评论》发布了一期特刊，刊登了二十二位主要保守派人士，标题为“反对特朗普”。到 11 月，大多数共和党内部人士已经加入了“maga”阵营。
After that, the Republican blob came to encompass QAnon and Stop the Steal, and the Party fielded fatuous candidates who either lost (Kari Lake) or won but seemed uninterested in legislating (Marjorie Taylor Greene).
之后，共和党的阵营开始涵盖 QAnon 和“停止盗窃”，而党派则推出了一些不靠谱的候选人，他们要么失败（卡里·湖），要么获胜但似乎对立法毫无兴趣（玛乔丽·泰勒·格林）。
A more functional party might have cultivated better candidates, or created stronger disincentives to going off the rails. But, in the age of
一个更具功能性的政党可能会培养出更优秀的候选人，或者设立更强的阻碍措施来防止偏离正轨。但在这个时代
hollowness, the President and the blob were in charge, not the Party.
空虚，掌控一切的是总统和那个怪物，而不是党。
"The Hollow Parties" came out in May, the month that Trump was convicted of thirty-four felonies, and it was largely received as a gloss on the hollowed-out G.O.P. Then the Presidential debate, in June, cast a harsh light on the hollowness of the Democrats.
《空洞的派对》在五月发布，那是特朗普被判定犯有三十四项重罪的月份，广泛被视为对空虚的共和党的一种反思。随后，六月份的总统辩论对民主党的空虚进行了严厉的揭示。
When I spoke to Schlozman recently, he assured me that he had not somehow engineered this summer's news as a viral marketing campaign. In the book, Schlozman and Rosenfeld declare themselves "partisans of parties," which they know is an increasingly unpopular view.
最近我与施洛兹曼交谈时，他向我保证他并没有策划这个夏天的新闻作为病毒营销活动。在书中，施洛兹曼和罗森菲尔德自称是“政党的支持者”，他们知道这种观点越来越不受欢迎。
"I think it's possible to feel some nostalgia for how parties, at their best, took people with divergent interests and helped them figure out how to live together," Schlozman told me. "Or to feel, at least, some trepidation about what happens when those institutions fail."
我认为人们可能会对聚会在最佳状态下如何将不同利益的人聚集在一起并帮助他们找到共同生活的方式感到怀旧，"施洛兹曼告诉我。"或者至少会对这些机构失败后会发生什么感到一些担忧。
The Russell Senate Office Building is hushed, with high ceilings and wide marble corridors, like a half-vacant luxury hotel or an expensive hospital. When senators want to land culture-war jabs, they can express themselves on social media, or via their office swag.
拉塞尔参议院办公大楼显得格外安静，拥有高耸的天花板和宽敞的大理石走廊，仿佛是一家半空置的豪华酒店或一家高档医院。当参议员们想要发起文化战争时，他们可以通过社交媒体或办公室的周边产品来表达自己的观点。
(Liberals fly transpride flags outside their office doors; conservatives fly Israeli flags; at least one Republican senator has started flying the Appeal to Heaven flag, which was carried by some rioters on January 6th and recently got Justice Samuel Alito into trouble.) But in person, in the Senate cloakroom or at the gym, it's forever 1950, and the rule is clubby cordiality.
（自由派在办公室门外悬挂跨性别骄傲旗帜，保守派则悬挂以色列国旗；至少有一位共和党参议员开始悬挂“天的呼唤”旗帜，这面旗帜曾在 1 月 6 日的骚乱中被一些人举起，最近让大法官塞缪尔·阿利托陷入麻烦。）然而在参议院的休息室或健身房里，一切似乎永远停留在 1950 年，社交规则依然是友好的礼仪。
"Best-dressed man in Washington," Welch said as we walked past Mitt Romney in a hallway. After a warm chat with Lindsey Graham, he said, "Lindsey has been really helpful to me on some Judiciary Committee stuff, though I
“华盛顿最时尚的男人，”韦尔奇在我们经过米特·罗姆尼的走廊时说道。在与林赛·格雷厄姆热情交谈后，他表示：“林赛在一些司法委员会的事务上对我帮助很大，尽管我
don't know if he'd want me to admit that." Most senators carry themselves like movie stars, but Welch comes across as a small-town public defender, which he was.
"我不知道他是否希望我承认这一点。"大多数参议员都像电影明星一样举止，但韦尔奇给人的感觉更像是一个小镇的公设辩护人，而他确实是这样的。
Unusually for a person in his position, but usefully for journalists, he sometimes reflexively says what he's thinking. When he and I found ourselves in a cramped elevator with Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, Welch said, "Sherrod, we were just talking about the Biden thing.
对于他这个职位的人来说，这种情况不常见，但对记者来说却很有帮助，他有时会下意识地表达自己的想法。当他和我在一个狭窄的电梯里遇到俄亥俄州的谢罗德·布朗参议员时，韦尔奇说：“谢罗德，我们刚刚在谈论拜登的事情。”
Did you want to explain why you ended up where you did?" Brown blanched and looked at the floor. No comment.
你想解释一下为什么会走到这一步吗？布朗脸色变得苍白，低头看着地面。没有回应。

Welch is trim and energetic, with tortoiseshell glasses and silver hair-the sort of senior citizen who is inevitably described as "spry." Unlike Teddy Roosevelt, who combined smooth diplomacy with Machiavellian threats, Welch speaks softly and carries a small stick.
韦尔奇身材苗条，精力充沛，戴着玳瑁眼镜，银发苍苍——那种常常被形容为“活泼”的老年人。与结合了圆滑外交和阴险威胁的西奥多·罗斯福不同，韦尔奇说话温和，手中握着一根小棍子。
He endorsed Bernie Sanders for President-"Bernie has helped me out over the years, and I've tried to help him out"-but his political style is closer to Biden's.
他支持伯尼·桑德斯竞选总统——“伯尼这些年来一直在帮助我，我也尽力帮助他”——但他的政治风格更接近拜登。
In his Washington office, his staffers' desks are decorated with innocuous memes ("Welch" written on a "brat"-green background) and knickknacks, including a copy of "Our Revolution," the 2016 campaign book by Sanders, with Sanders's name replaced by Welch's. The joke is obvious:
在他华盛顿的办公室里，工作人员的桌子上装饰着一些无害的迷因（“Welch”写在“香肠”绿色的背景上）和小摆件，其中包括一本 2016 年桑德斯的竞选书《我们的革命》，桑德斯的名字被替换成了 Welch 的名字。这个笑话显而易见：
before his high-profile rift with the Party over Biden's candidacy, no one could have mistaken Welch for a revolutionary.
在他与党派因拜登的候选资格产生高调分歧之前，没人会把韦尔奇视为革命者。

In the days after the debate, Senator Mark R. Warner, of Virginia, informally polled many of his Democratic colleagues, and it appeared that all but one had grave concerns about Biden staying in the race.
在辩论后的几天里，来自维吉尼亚州的参议员马克·R·华纳非正式地对许多民主党同事进行了民意调查，结果显示除了一个人外，其他人都对拜登继续参选表示了严重的担忧。
(Warner would neither confirm nor deny to me that the lone senator was Sanders. "Bernie saw all the corporate donors coming after Biden, and his sense was, These people have always been opposed to the pro-worker parts of Biden's agenda," a longtime Sanders aide told me.
华纳既没有向我确认也没有否认那位孤独的参议员是桑德斯。“伯尼看到所有的企业捐赠者都在追逐拜登，他觉得这些人一直反对拜登的亲工人政策，”一位桑德斯的长期助手告诉我。
"And then to have all these backstabbing machinations, the insiders coördinating to push Biden out-I think he was reminded of what happened to him.") Three of Biden's top aides met with Democratic senators, hoping to restore their confidence, but the meeting had the opposite effect.
然后看到这些背后捅刀的阴谋，内部人士协调着要把拜登推下台——我想他想起了自己曾经经历的事情。拜登的三位高级助手与民主党参议员会面，希望能恢复他们的信心，但会议的效果却恰恰相反。
Senator Michael Bennet, of Colorado, normally a mild-mannered pragmatist, asked if the campaign had any internal polling data to allay his fears that Biden would lose, but the aides could offer only vague platitudes.
科罗拉多州的参议员迈克尔·贝内特，通常性格温和务实，他询问竞选团队是否有内部民调数据，以缓解他对拜登可能落败的担忧，但助手们只能给出模糊的回应。
One senator, a stolid institutionalist, seemed to be on the verge of tears. "The notion that this was just some bed-wetting by Party élites was completely contrary to what I saw," Bennet told me.
一位稳重的制度主义者似乎快要流泪了。“认为这只是党内精英的无谓担忧，完全与我所看到的情况相反，”贝内特告诉我。
"It was several of us saying to the campaign, Show us a plan, because otherwise Trump is going to win, and our kids and grandkids will never forgive us." On a Zoom call with a political-action committee associated with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Mike Levin, of California, told Biden directly that the overwhelming majority of his constituents wanted Biden to step aside.
"我们几个人对竞选团队说，给我们一个计划，否则特朗普就会赢，我们的孩子和孙子永远不会原谅我们。" 在与国会西班牙裔核心小组相关的政治行动委员会的 Zoom 会议上，加利福尼亚州的迈克·莱文直接告诉拜登，他的绝大多数选民希望拜登让位。
Biden responded, "I think I know what I'm doing," and the call ended soon after that. The following day, on a call between Biden and centrist Democrats in the House, Jason
拜登回应道：“我想我知道自己在做什么，”然后通话很快结束。第二天，拜登与众议院中间派民主党人通话时，杰森

Crow, from Colorado, said that voters were "losing confidence" that Biden could "project strength." Biden responded, "I don't want to hear that crap." Adam Smith, the representative from Washington, told me, "It was really defensive, and frankly a bit weird." Another Democratic representative put it to me even more vividly: "We were all prepared for 'This is so sad, we're going to have to take the car keys away from Grandpa.' We were not prepared for the scenario where you try to take the keys away from Grandpa and Grandpa points a gun at your head."
科罗拉多州的克劳表示，选民们正在“失去信心”，认为拜登无法“展现出力量”。拜登回应说：“我不想听这些废话。”来自华盛顿的代表亚当·史密斯告诉我：“这真的很防御性，坦白说，有点奇怪。”另一位民主党代表更生动地告诉我：“我们都准备好了‘这太悲伤了，我们得把车钥匙从爷爷手里拿走。’但我们没有准备好那种情况：你试图从爷爷那里拿走钥匙，而爷爷却把枪指着你的头。”

In the following days, Smith "kept trying to push the snowball over the hill," but he couldn't tell whether the snowball was growing or melting. Through a donor in Hollywood, he tried to get celebrities involved.
在接下来的日子里，史密斯“不断尝试将雪球推过山丘”，但他无法判断雪球是变大还是融化。通过好莱坞的一位捐赠者，他试图让明星们参与其中。
"I know someone who knows Hunter Biden, so I even tried that angle," Smith said. He spoke out several times a day on cable news, which seemed to make an impression on his colleagues.
"我认识一个与亨特·拜登有联系的人，所以我甚至尝试过这个方向，"史密斯说。他每天在有线新闻上发言几次，这似乎给同事们留下了深刻的印象。
"One member stopped me in the hall and said, 'All right, you guilted me into it,' " Smith told me. "I actually hugged him." Before Welch made his doubts public, he had sent word to the White House, and to Schumer's office, about his decision.
"有个成员在走廊里拦住我，说，‘好吧，你让我感到内疚，’" 史密斯告诉我。“我真的拥抱了他。”在韦尔奇公开表达疑虑之前，他已经向白宫和舒默的办公室传达了他的决定。
"They weren't thrilled, but they didn't try to stop me," Welch said. He appeared on MSNBC the day after Biden said that he would drop out only "if the Lord Almighty" told him to. "The job for our party is to defeat Donald Trump," Welch said.
"他们并不太高兴，但也没有试图阻止我，"韦尔奇说。他在拜登表示只有“如果全能的上帝”告诉他时，第二天出现在 MSNBC 上。“我们党的任务是打败唐纳德·特朗普，”韦尔奇说。
"This isn't a decision for the Lord Almighty."
这不是上帝的决定。

After the first Presidential debate, a vast majority of voters told pollsters that Biden was too old to run, and there were widespread calls for him to drop out of the race.
在第一次总统辩论后，绝大多数选民告诉民意调查者，拜登年纪太大，不适合参选，并广泛呼吁他退出竞选。

Party insiders tried to signal to the public, and to each other, what should happen next. Zogby, the member of the D.N.C., wrote a memo explaining how the Party could conduct a quick "mini-primary" to select a new candidate.
党内人士试图向公众和彼此传达接下来应该做什么。D.N.C.的成员 Zogby 写了一份备忘录，解释了党如何快速进行“迷你初选”以选出新的候选人。
James Carville, a former strategist for Bill Clinton, supported this plan.
詹姆斯·卡维尔，前比尔·克林顿的战略顾问，支持这一计划。
He told me, in July, "Mini-primary, blitz primary-call it whatever the fuck you want, just put 'em all onstage and let 'em fight it out." (I started to ask a follow-up question, based on his knowledge of how the D.N.C. works, but he cut me off: "I have no idea how it works.
他在七月对我说：“迷你初选、闪电初选，随便你怎么称呼，只要把他们都放上舞台，让他们争斗就行。”（我想基于他对民主党全国委员会运作的了解问一个后续问题，但他打断了我：“我不知道它是怎么运作的。”）
Nobody has any fucking idea how it works, 'cause it doesn't fucking work.")
没有人知道它是怎么回事，因为它根本就不管用。

The Democratic Convention was scheduled for August, but the D.N.C., apparently at the urging of the White House, had decided to make the nomination official a month early, via Zoom, like trying to rush a shotgun wedding before anyone could get cold feet.
民主大会原定于八月举行，但民主党全国委员会显然在白宫的催促下，决定提前一个月通过 Zoom 正式提名，这就像试图在任何人还没反应过来之前匆忙举行一场婚礼。
"They really overstepped with that one," Representative Jared Huffman, of California, told me. He drafted a letter of protest, and texted other members of Congress for their
“他们真的做得太过分了，”加利福尼亚州的代表贾里德·哈夫曼告诉我。他起草了一封抗议信，并给其他国会议员发了短信。
support. "But some of the people I texted were apparently double agents, back-channelling everything we were saying to the White House," he said.
他说：‘我发短信的一些人显然是双重间谍，他们把我们说的每一句话都传给了白宫。’
David Axelrod, formerly Obama's chief campaign strategist, told me, "The D.N.C. votes on things, but all roads lead back to the President."
大卫·阿克塞罗德，曾是奥巴马的首席竞选策略师，告诉我：“民主党全国委员会会进行投票，但一切最终都归结于总统。”

I
n total, apart from Welch, only three Democratic senators publicly urged Biden to step aside. Neither Schumer nor Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, were seen as major factors in the process.
除了韦尔奇，只有三位民主党参议员公开呼吁拜登辞职。舒默和众议院少数党领袖哈基姆·杰弗里斯并未被视为这一过程中的关键因素。
A few people cracked jokes about how the congressional leadership was acting more like the congressional followership. Adam Smith told me that, after a while, "I went, O.K., this just isn't going to happen."
一些人开玩笑说国会领导层的表现更像是国会的追随者。亚当·史密斯告诉我，过了一段时间后，他想：“好吧，这根本不可能实现。”

But Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, continued to push, using a combination of private conversations, press leaks, and carefully calibrated public statements. On July 10th, Pelosi appeared on "Morning Joe," on MSNBC, setting off a frenzy of Beltway tasseography.
但是，前众议院议长南希·佩洛西继续施加压力，利用私人对话、媒体泄露和精心调整的公开声明。7 月 10 日，佩洛西在 MSNBC 的“早安乔”节目中亮相，引发了华盛顿圈的热烈反响。
"It's up to the President to decide if he is going to run," she said, even though Biden had insisted repeatedly that he'd made up his mind.
"这由总统决定是否参选，"她说，尽管拜登一再强调他已经做出了决定。
"We're all encouraging him to make that decision." ("Such a gangster move," a ranking House committee member told me.) More recently, when asked on CBS whether she had led a "pressure campaign," she replied, "I didn't call one person." That may be true, but there are other ways to use a phone.
"我们都在鼓励他做出那个决定。”（“这真是个黑帮的举动，”一位高级众议院委员会成员告诉我。）最近，当在 CBS 上被问到她是否发起过“施压运动”时，她回答：“我没有打过一个电话。”这可能是真的，但还有其他方式可以使用电话。
At one point, Welch sent Pelosi a long text message, sharing his fears about Biden's candidacy, and she promptly sent him a brief but affirmative reply.
在某个时刻，韦尔奇给佩洛西发了一条长短信，分享了他对拜登竞选的担忧，而她很快给了他一个简短而肯定的回复。
(Some next-generation Robert Caro may already be at work on a multivolume biography of Pelosi, scrambling after screenshotted texts.) It's also possible that Pelosi didn't initiate calls, but
（一些新一代的罗伯特·卡罗可能已经在撰写佩洛西的多卷传记，忙于处理截图的短信。）也有可能佩洛西并没有主动拨打电话，而是
that she sometimes picked up when her phone rang. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas and the first member of Congress to call on Biden to withdraw, told me that, before he did so, "I had a conversation with Pelosi. . . .
她有时会在电话响起时接听。来自德克萨斯州的民主党议员劳埃德·多格特是第一个呼吁拜登撤回的国会议员，他告诉我，在他这样做之前，“我和佩洛西进行了交谈……”
It seemed to me that there was a recognition of the severity of the problem." On the cover of her new memoir, "The Art of Power," Pelosi looms over the National Mall in a white pants suit.
在我看来，似乎大家对问题的严重性有了认识。”在她的新回忆录《权力的艺术》的封面上，佩洛西身穿白色裤装，俯视国家广场。
"She knew how much time she had on the clock, and she kept ratcheting up the pain until the Biden people got the message," Smith told me. "An absolute master class."
她清楚自己还有多少时间，她不断加大痛苦，直到拜登团队明白过来，"史密斯告诉我。"这真是一堂绝妙的课程。

To get from the Russell building to the Capitol, senators pass through an air-conditioned tunnel and a gantlet of narrow foyers, where they are politely accosted by paparazzi in business suits: the Senate press corps.
从拉塞尔大楼到国会大厦，参议员们需要经过一个空调隧道和一系列狭窄的前厅，在那里，他们会被身穿西装的狗仔队礼貌地拦住：参议院新闻团。
Two days after Biden dropped out, and a day after Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee, she had already broken fund-raising records, pulled even with Trump in some polls, and flooded social media with goofy, approachable memes.
拜登退出的两天后，卡马拉·哈里斯成为了预期的提名人，她已经打破了筹款记录，在一些民调中与特朗普并驾齐驱，并在社交媒体上发布了许多搞笑、亲切的表情包。
Every Democrat I spoke to expressed palpable relief, as if they'd just spent three weeks staring down a firing
我交谈的每位民主党人都显得松了一口气，仿佛他们刚刚经历了三周的紧张对峙
squad only to find out that the rifles had been filled with confetti all along. "It seems absurd now how long we spent going, 'We can't change nominees, it'll be chaos,' "Welch told me.
小队只发现步枪里一直装满了五彩纸屑。“现在想想，我们花了那么长时间说，‘我们不能更换提名人，这样会很混乱，’”韦尔奇告诉我。

At one point, I played paparazzo myself, half jogging after Bernie Sanders to ask him why he'd so vehemently defended Biden. "No, no, no, no," Sanders said, shaking me off.
在某个时刻，我也扮演过狗仔队，半跑着追着伯尼·桑德斯，问他为什么如此激烈地为拜登辩护。“不，不，不，不，”桑德斯说着，摆脱了我。

Welch, for his part, did not seem to be in a hurry.
韦伯看起来并不急于行动。
"Senator, have you been briefed on 'brat'?" a reporter asked.
"参议员，您是否了解‘小坏蛋’这个词？" 一位记者问。
Sort of-at least enough to know which part of speech it was.
至少要知道它属于哪种词性。
"Senator, have you officially endorsed Harris for President yet?" another said.
参议员，您正式支持哈里斯竞选总统了吗？
"Of course I have," Welch said. "You think I just fell out of a coconut tree?"
当然有，"韦尔奇说，"你以为我只是从椰子树上掉下来的？

Back in his office, Welch talked on speakerphone with Elaine Kamarck, the D.N.C. leader. He had planned to ask her what might happen if there was an open Convention. But that was now academic: none of Harris's potential opponents showed any interest in challenging her.
在办公室里，韦尔奇通过扬声器电话与民主党全国委员会的领导人伊莱恩·卡马克交谈。他原本打算询问如果召开公开大会会发生什么，但现在这个问题已经不再重要：哈里斯的潜在对手们对挑战她毫无兴趣。
"We'll still find something to fight about," Welch said.
韦尔奇说：‘我们总会找到一些争论的事情。’
"You remember '80, don't you, Peter?" Kamarck asked. "What a mess." In 1980, when President Jimmy Carter ran for reëlection, Senator Ted Kennedy ran against him in the primary, lost, and took his challenge to
"你还记得 80 年代吗，彼得？"卡马克问道。“真是一团糟。”在 1980 年，当时的总统吉米·卡特竞选连任，参议员泰德·肯尼迪在初选中与他对抗，最终失败，并将挑战带到了
the Convention, hoping to persuade delegates to switch to his side. This failed, because of the robot rule.
这个公约希望说服代表们站到他这一边，但由于机器人规则，这一尝试失败了。
After 1980, that rule was quietly replaced by Rule 13(J), which states that delegates "shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them." It's not clear what this means, because it has never been tested, but it seems to provide some wiggle room.
1980 年后，这条规则悄然被第 13(J)条替代，该条规定代表“应在良心中反映选民的意见。”这具体意味着什么并不明确，因为从未经过检验，但似乎提供了一定的灵活性。
If Biden had refused to bow out, and delegates decided that their "good conscience" required them to nominate someone else, could Party insiders have overpowered a President? "We've never had to find out," Kamarck said. "So far, anyway."
如果拜登拒绝退位，而代表们认为他们的“良心”要求提名其他人，党内人士能否压倒一位总统？卡马克说：“我们从未需要知道答案，至少到现在为止。”
The special cocktails at the LGBTQ + Victory Fund party, on the first night of this year's Democratic Convention, were the Madam President (vodka and muddled blackberries), the Brat (Midori sour), and the Coconuts for Kamala (coconut tequila, mint, and lime).
今年民主党大会首晚 LGBTQ + 胜利基金派对上的特别鸡尾酒包括：女总统（伏特加和捣碎的黑莓）、小恶魔（青苹果酸酒）以及为卡马拉调制的椰子鸡尾酒（椰子龙舌兰、薄荷和青柠）。
The speakers were Sophia Bush ("Is she, like, a Bush Bush?" "No, she's from 'One Tree Hill'") and Maura Healey ("What show is she from?" "She's the governor of Massachusetts"). "We are not dangerous," an m.c. said, introducing a lineup of drag performers. "We are love.
演讲者是索非亚·布什（“她是布什家族的人吗？”“不，她来自《一树山》”）和莫拉·希利（“她来自哪个节目？”“她是马萨诸塞州的州长”）。一位主持人说：“我们并不危险，”在介绍一系列变装表演者时说道。“我们是爱。”
We are America. But don't mess with a drag queen, honey, or we will stomp you with our stiletto heels."
我们是美国。但别惹变装皇后，亲爱的，否则我们会用高跟鞋踩扁你。

Debra Cleaver, the founder of VoteAmerica and Vote.org, wore a buttondown shirt and a Zabar's baseball cap. "I can't believe they're letting straights in here," she joked. "I think you should have to be at least ten per cent queer to enter." She was with a straight friend, a woman wearing a jumpsuit, who did not take offense.
德布拉·克利弗，VoteAmerica 和 Vote.org 的创始人，穿着一件衬衫和一顶 Zabar's 棒球帽。“我真不敢相信他们让异性恋者进来，”她开玩笑说。“我觉得至少要有百分之十的酷儿才能进来。”她和一位穿着连体衣的异性恋女性朋友在一起，那个朋友并没有感到被冒犯。
After the Convention, the friend planned to go to Burning Man, where she had always wanted to run a voter-registration drive. She and Cleaver compared "playa names,"
在大会结束后，这位朋友计划去燃烧人节，她一直想在那里举办选民登记活动。她和克利弗互相比较了“沙漠名字”。

Burning Man monikers that carry over from year to year. "Mine is Rainbow," Cleaver admitted. Her friend laughed and said, "Mine is Nancy Pelosi."
每年延续的燃人节绰号。“我的绰号是彩虹，”克利弗说。她的朋友笑着回应：“我的绰号是南希·佩洛西。”

The prime-time speeches and roll-call votes took place in the United Center, the arena where the Bulls play, but there were Convention-themed events across the city.
主要演讲和点名投票在联合中心举行，这是公牛队的主场，但全市各地都有与大会主题相关的活动。
The InterContinental hotel hosted nightly "Float While They Vote" happy hours in the pool, where civic-minded swimmers could keep up with a live stream of the proceedings while sipping "patriotic cocktails." In Union Park, a few thousand pro-Palestinian protesters gathered for a March on the D.N.C., chanting about "Genocide Joe" and "Killer Kamala." The Chicago History Museum hosted a walking tour, visiting the sites of Chicago Conventions from 1860 to 1968.
洲际酒店在泳池举办了每晚的“投票时漂浮”欢乐时光，公民意识强的游泳者可以在享用“爱国鸡尾酒”的同时，跟进会议的直播。在联合公园，几千名亲巴勒斯坦的抗议者聚集，举行了针对民主党全国委员会的游行，口号是“种族灭绝乔”和“杀手卡马拉”。芝加哥历史博物馆组织了一次步行游览，参观了 1860 年至 1968 年间芝加哥大会的历史遗址。
In 1968, Welch was in Chicago, on leave from college, working as a housing organizer. "The protests then felt existential," he told me. "The protesters now have reasonable demands, but it doesn't feel like the end of the Party."
1968 年，韦尔奇在芝加哥，大学休假期间，担任住房组织者。“那时的抗议让人感到生死攸关，”他告诉我。“现在的抗议者有合理的诉求，但这并不让人觉得是党的终结。”

Dean Phillips, a congressman from Minnesota, launched a Presidential campaign in October. He blames his failure on informal collusion-a "culture of silence" pervading the Democratic Party and its allies.
明尼苏达州的国会议员迪恩·菲利普斯在十月启动了总统竞选。他将自己的失败归因于一种非正式的共谋——在民主党及其盟友中弥漫的“沉默文化”。

The Pennsylvania delegation hosted a breakfast in a hotel ballroom where the first speaker, already a bit hoarse at seven in the morning, was Governor Josh Shapiro.
宾夕法尼亚代表团在一家酒店的舞厅举办了早餐，第一位发言者是早上七点就有些嘶哑的州长乔什·夏皮罗。
"'The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania' has a whole lot of letters in it, but we really live by three letters," he told the delegates, and the TV cameras behind them. "G.S.D.: gettin' stuff done." Then came a procession of folksy Midwestern governors-J. B.
“‘宾夕法尼亚州’这个名字里有很多字母，但我们真正遵循的是三个字母，”他对代表们和他们身后的电视摄像机说。“G.S.D.: 完成任务。”接着是一群朴实的中西部州长的游行——J.B.
Pritzker, of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer, of Michigan, and the one who was recently named Harris's running mate, Tim Walz, of Minnesota. Walz tried to
伊利诺伊州的普里茨克、密歇根州的格雷琴·惠特默，以及最近被任命为哈里斯竞选搭档的明尼苏达州的蒂姆·沃尔兹。沃尔兹试图
pander to the western Pennsylvanians by alluding to the beloved convenience-store chain Sheetz; this just annoyed the eastern Pennsylvanians, who heckled him with cries of "Wawa!" Rookie mistake.
为了迎合西宾夕法尼亚人，他提到了受欢迎的便利店连锁 Sheetz；这让东宾夕法尼亚人感到不满，他们用“Wawa！”的喊声嘲讽他。这是个新手错误。

During the day, the D.N.C. hosted panels and exhibitions in a vast convention center. There was an election-tech pavilion sponsored by Microsoft, a panel called "Go Dox Yourself" sponsored by Yahoo, and a display of Presidential footwear sponsored by a shoe company.
白天，民主党全国委员会在一个庞大的会议中心举办了多个小组讨论和展览。展区包括一个由微软赞助的选举技术展馆，一个由雅虎赞助的名为“自己做文档”的小组讨论，以及一个由一家鞋业公司赞助的总统鞋履展示。
One exhibit, called "The Coconut Club," had three fake-brick walls with colorful signage. (Creed No. 1: "Be yourself and do you.") I walked around to the open end, curious if there would be something on the inside-a café, or maybe a place to sit-but it was just an empty shell.
一个名为“椰子俱乐部”的展览有三面假砖墙和五彩缤纷的标识。（信条第 1 条：“做你自己，做你自己。”）我走到开放的一端，想看看里面是否有东西——比如一个咖啡馆，或者一个可以坐的地方——但里面只是一个空壳。

The last person I met at the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund party was Dwayne Bensing, a lawyer from Delaware and one of the state's nineteen delegates.
我在 LGBTQ+胜利基金会派对上遇到的最后一个人是来自德拉瓦州的律师德维恩·本辛，他是该州十九名代表之一。
Biden won all of Delaware's Democratic delegates, of course-Joe Biden is Delaware politics-but, the day after the debate, Bensing started to have doubts. "I know I'm pledged to Biden, but fifty million people just saw what I saw," Bensing recalled thinking.
拜登当然赢得了特拉华州所有的民主党代表——乔·拜登就是特拉华州的政治人物——但在辩论后的第二天，宾辛开始感到怀疑。“我知道我承诺支持拜登，但五千万人刚刚看到了我看到的，”宾辛回忆道。
"Doesn't the Party have to say something, for our own credibility?" On a Signal chat that included all of the Delaware delegates, he shared a piece by the Times editorial board calling on Biden to step aside, quoting a sentence that urged Democrats to "find the courage to speak plain truths." The response in the chat was not enthusiastic.
“党难道不应该说点什么，以维护我们的信誉吗？”在一个包含所有特拉华州代表的 Signal 聊天中，他分享了一篇《纽约时报》社论，呼吁拜登退位，并引用了一句鼓励民主党人“勇敢说出真相”的话。聊天中的反应并不热烈。
"The majority of the press are bought into optics over substance," one delegate wrote. Bensing reread the rules, especially Rule 13(J). "I asked the people in charge, 'If "all good conscience" doesn't apply here, when would it apply?' But they shut down that line of questioning
“大多数媒体关注的是表象而非实质，”一位代表写道。Bensing 重读了规则，特别是第 13(J)条。“我问负责的人，‘如果‘良心’在这里不适用，那什么时候才适用？’但他们终止了这个问题的讨论。”
pretty quick." In the Signal chat, he posted polling data showing that most Democratic voters wanted Biden out of the race, but the other delegates dismissed the polls. Bensing told me, "If we're not even going to be the 'We believe in facts' party, then what are we, exactly?"
在 Signal 聊天中，他分享了民调数据，显示大多数民主党选民希望拜登退出竞选，但其他代表对此不以为然。Bensing 对我说，'如果我们连'我们相信事实'的党都不想做，那我们究竟是什么呢？

T n a sense, the apprehension about Biden's renomination started before 12024.
从某种意义上说，人们对拜登再次提名的担忧早在 2024 年之前就已经开始了。
Thirteen years earlier, when Biden was Vice-President of the United States, he visited Minneapolis for a fund-raiser at the home of Dean Phillips, a moderate Democratic donor and an heir to a liquor fortune.
十三年前，当拜登担任美国副总统时，他曾前往明尼阿波利斯，在温和的民主党捐赠者迪恩·菲利普斯的家中参加筹款活动。
"He was charming, in command-really impressive," Phillips recalled recently.
他非常迷人，掌控全局——真的让人印象深刻，菲利普斯最近回忆说。
"He spent time with my kids, made them feel like they were the only people in the room." Five years later, the morning after Donald Trump was elected, Phillips promised his teen-age daughters, as they wept at the breakfast table, that he would do something for what was being called the resistance.
"他花时间陪我的孩子们，让他们觉得自己是房间里唯一的人。" 五年后，在唐纳德·特朗普当选的早晨，菲利普斯向他哭泣的女儿们承诺，他会为被称为抵抗的事情做点什么。
He ran for Congress, and won, flipping his suburban district from red to blue for the first time since 1960.
他竞选国会并成功当选，使他的郊区选区自 1960 年以来首次由红色转为蓝色。
During the 2020 Presidential campaign, when Biden said that he viewed himself as "a bridge" to the next generation of Party leaders, Phillips was reassured: "I thought, O.K., his age makes me a bit nervous, but he'll make a fine oneterm President."
在 2020 年总统竞选期间，拜登表示他把自己视为“下一代党领导者的桥梁”，这让菲利普斯感到安心：“我想，好吧，他的年龄让我有些担心，但他会成为一位出色的一任总统。”

In 2021, Phillips watched Biden address the Democratic House caucus for half an hour, to ask for support for an infrastructure bill. "He was disjointed, wandering off script—it was really jarring," Phillips recalled.
2021 年，菲利普斯观看了拜登对民主党众议院党团的讲话，持续了半个小时，请求支持一项基础设施法案。“他的表达很不连贯，时常偏离主题——这让人感到非常震惊，”菲利普斯回忆道。
"At the end, Pelosi went to the podium, looking frustrated, and said something like 'If the President isn't going to make his pitch, then I guess I'll have to.' It was sort of played off as a joke, but I did not find it funny."
最后，佩洛西走到讲台前，显得很沮丧，说了类似于‘如果总统不打算发表他的看法，那我想我得来做了。’虽然这听起来像是个玩笑，但我并不觉得好笑。
(Andrew Bates, a White House staffer who was in the room, told me that the President did not go off message.)
（安德鲁·贝茨，作为在场的白宫工作人员，告诉我总统并没有偏离主题。）

Two years later, when Biden announced his reëlection campaign, Phillips said that, in private, most Democrats in Congress were "surprised, and quite disappointed." (Other congressional Democrats told me that they had no reason to worry about Biden's capacities at that point.) "It felt like we were sleepwalking into another 2016 disaster, only this time we knew it," Phillips continued.
两年后，当拜登宣布连任竞选时，菲利普斯表示，在私下里，大多数国会民主党人感到“惊讶且相当失望。”（其他国会民主党人告诉我，那时他们并不担心拜登的能力。）菲利普斯继续说道：“我们感觉就像在无意识中走向另一个 2016 年的灾难，只不过这次我们心里有数。”
He tried to encourage either Whitmer or Pritzker to run against Biden in the primary, but, he says, they wouldn't even return his calls. He also contacted several Democratic consultants, some of whom would speak only on the condition of anonymity, for fear of being blacklisted.
他试图鼓励惠特默或普里茨克在初选中挑战拜登，但他说，他们甚至不接他的电话。他还联系了几位民主党顾问，其中一些人出于担心被列入黑名单，只愿意匿名发言。
"Their sense was, Yeah, we're in big trouble, but it's too late," Phillips said. We were talking in Phillips's tony town house, a few blocks from the Capitol-Edison bulbs, fresh white orchids, an original George McGovern campaign poster printed by Alexander Calder.
“他们的感觉是，是的，我们陷入了大麻烦，但已经来不及了，”菲利普斯说。我们在菲利普斯的豪华公寓里交谈，距离国会大厦几个街区，房间里有爱迪生灯泡、鲜白的兰花，还有一张由亚历山大·考尔德印刷的乔治·麦戈文竞选海报。
Some members of Congress sleep on cots in their offices or room together, like middleaged frat boys, but Phillips has the means, and the temperament, to live alone.
一些国会议员在办公室里睡在床垫上，或者像中年兄弟一样合住，但菲利普斯有能力和性格选择独自生活。

In October, 2023, Phillips announced that he would run for President himself.
2023 年 10 月，菲利普斯宣布他将亲自竞选总统。
During our interview, he vacillated between framing his candidacy as purely symbolic ("I was less George Washington than Paul Revere, trying to sound the alarm") and as an unlikely but genuine attempt to win. He didn't come close, of course.
在我们的采访中，他在将自己的候选资格视为纯粹的象征（“我更像是保罗·里维尔，而不是乔治·华盛顿，试图发出警报”）和作为一个不太可能但真实的竞选尝试之间犹豫不决。当然，他并没有接近成功。
He blames informal collusion-"a culture of silence" pervading the Democratic Party and its allies in the media, the consultancies, and the rest of the blob. "I couldn't in good
他指责民主党及其在媒体、咨询公司和其他相关机构中的盟友存在非正式的共谋——一种弥漫的“沉默文化”。“我无法在良心上……”
conscience ask my colleagues in Congress to support me-they'd be destroying their own careers," he said. "I had a network of donors who could have financially supported the campaign, but most of them were too scared to touch it.
我的良心让我请求国会的同事们支持我——这样做只会毁掉他们自己的职业，"他说。"我有一个捐赠者网络可以在经济上支持这场竞选，但大多数人都太害怕去参与。
If you want to maintain your access to power, you have every incentive not to speak up."
如果你想维持对权力的掌控，你就没有理由去发声。

When Phillips ran for President, he decided not to run for reëlection in the House. He'll retire from politics in January. If he is aggrieved, he doesn't show it.
当菲利普斯竞选总统时，他决定不再竞选众议院的连任。他将在一月退休，退出政坛。如果他感到不满，他并没有表现出来。
For the most part, he seems faintly embarrassed about the position he finds himself in: a literal conspiracy theorist, albeit one who plaintively insists that the conspiracy he's disclosing is not only real but an open secret.
大多数情况下，他似乎对自己所处的境地感到有些尴尬：一个真正的阴谋论者，尽管他悲伤地坚持认为自己揭露的阴谋不仅真实，而且是一个公开的秘密。
"I don't have direct evidence of coördination between the White House and MSNBC, for instance," he told me.
"我没有直接证据表明白宫与 MSNBC 之间存在协调，"他对我说。
"But I have no doubt, if you just connect the dots, that there's a lot of that sort of thing going on." His campaign consultants were alumni from the John McCain, Andrew Yang, and Bernie Sanders campaigns.
"我毫不怀疑，如果你把这些点连接起来，就会发现有很多类似的事情在发生。" 他的竞选顾问都是约翰·麦凯恩、安德鲁·杨和伯尼·桑德斯竞选团队的校友。
"When I saw how hard the Democratic establishment was working to freeze me out, I tweeted an apology to Bernie," Phillips told me. "The gist was, When you complained about Democratic collusion, I dismissed you as a sore loser, but you were absolutely right."
当我看到民主党内部为了排挤我而如此努力时，我给伯尼发了一条道歉的推文，"菲利普斯告诉我。"大意是，当你抱怨民主党的勾结时，我曾把你视为一个失落者，但你完全是对的。

During the Presidential debate, Phillips said, his immediate reaction "was just sadness, and also surprise that everyone was so surprised. Was this not what everyone was seeing all along?" His colleagues in the House were now ready to admit that his critiques looked prescient.
在总统辩论中，菲利普斯表示，他的第一反应“只是感到悲伤，还有惊讶，大家怎么会如此惊讶。这难道不是大家一直都在看到的事情吗？”他在众议院的同事们现在也准备承认他的批评确实很有先见之明。
"He's been vindicated on the question of Biden's age," one of them told me. "But the reason Dean didn't get farther as a Presidential candidate is that Dean was
他在拜登年龄的问题上得到了证明，"其中一个人告诉我。"但迪恩没有作为总统候选人走得更远的原因是迪恩是
never a convincing candidate." Phillips appeared on "Face the Nation," saying, " Pass the torch,' the term that everybody's using now . . .
从来没有成为一个令人信服的候选人。"菲利普斯在《面对国家》节目中说，"传递火炬，"这是现在大家都在使用的说法 . . .
is exactly what I called for a year ago." He was on vacation in Italy the morning after the Biden-Trump debate, and he woke up to more than a thousand missed calls and texts.
"这正是我一年前所期待的。" 他在拜登与特朗普辩论后的早晨正在意大利度假，醒来时发现自己有超过一千个未接来电和短信。
He read me one, from a Democratic colleague: "I just called so I could give you the joy of saying 'I told you so' to someone."
他给我读了一段，来自一位民主党同事：“我打这个电话是想让你有机会对某人说‘我早就告诉过你’。”
1
n Chicago, Phillips walked into the United Center wearing a pocket square and suède loafers. "This feeling of rebirth, instead of the funeral we were anticipating-it's uniquely gratifying," he said.
在芝加哥，菲利普斯穿着口袋方巾和麂皮乐福鞋走进联合中心。“这种重生的感觉，而不是我们原本预想的葬礼，真是让人感到特别满足，”他说。
He ran into Wiley Nickel, a Democratic congressman from North Carolina, and clapped him on the back. "When Dean announced, I said, 'Look, this is a democracy, I respect anyone's right to run,' " Nickel told me.
他遇到了来自北卡罗来纳州的民主党国会议员怀利·尼克尔，并拍了拍他的背。“当迪恩宣布参选时，我说，‘看，这是一个民主国家，我尊重任何人参选的权利，’”尼克尔告诉我。
I asked him if he'd received pushback from the Party for taking that position. "Well, I didn't say it publicly," he admitted. Phillips moved on, walking around the inner perimeter of the United Center-not a victory lap, exactly, but a sort of vindication lap.
我问他是否因为这个立场而受到党内的反对。“嗯，我没有公开说，”他承认。菲利普斯继续前行，绕着联合中心的内圈走——这并不是完全的胜利庆祝，而是一种自我证明的巡回。
"You're kicking ass, brother," an admirer said. "I just wanted to shake your hand," another said.
"你真厉害，兄弟，"一位崇拜者说道。"我只是想和你握个手，"另一位说。
More than one person said "It could've been you!," to which Phillips's response was "All's well that friggin' ends well." On the main stage, Harris made a "surprise appearance," wearing a tan Chloé suit, and the crowd went wild.
不止一个人说“可能是你！”，对此菲利普斯回应道：“一切都好，结局才是最重要的。”在主舞台上，哈里斯“惊喜亮相”，穿着一套浅色的 Chloé西装，观众们为之疯狂。
"That's my President!" a man in a sequinned hat shouted. The following day, with an assist from Lil Jon, the delegates reaffirmed her nomination.
"那是我的总统！"一个戴着亮片帽子的男人喊道。第二天，在 Lil Jon 的协助下，代表们再次确认了她的提名。

In 2022, when Liz Truss flamed out as Prime Minister of the U.K., the Conservative Party picked a new leader within four days. American parties don't work that way. Still, it took less than a month for Walz to rise from
2022 年，当莉兹·特拉斯在担任英国首相时遭遇失败，保守党在四天内选出了新领导人。而美国的政党并不是这样运作的。尽管如此，沃尔兹在不到一个月的时间里便崭露头角。
near-obscurity to Harris's running mate-a choice that most Democrats feel great about, at least so far.
从几乎被遗忘到哈里斯的竞选搭档——大多数民主党人对此感到非常满意，至少到目前为止。
That selection was made by Party insiders, not by voters, but that doesn't worry Julia Azari, a political scientist at Marquette University, in part because she is skeptical that the current primary system gives voters much meaningful choice, anyway.
这个选择是由政党内部人士做出的，而不是由选民决定的，但这并没有让马凯特大学的政治学家朱莉亚·阿扎里感到担忧，部分原因是她对当前的初选制度是否真的能给选民提供有意义的选择持怀疑态度。
In open cycles, the primary race is so interminable that most people stop paying attention; in reëlection years, the incumbent almost always wins. "Smokefilled rooms-or vape-filled rooms, whatever they would be now-are not the right paradigm," Azari told me.
在开放的周期中，主要的竞争是如此漫长，以至于大多数人都不再关注；在连任年，现任者几乎总是获胜。“烟雾弥漫的房间——或者现在的电子烟房间——并不是正确的模式，”阿扎里告诉我。
"But you can't just throw it open and say, 'Great, voters got to participate, so all is well.' "
但你不能仅仅打开它，然后说，‘太好了，选民参与了，一切都很好。’

Several people in Chicago suggested that, after the near-miss the Democrats had just witnessed, surely the Party would consider changing its rules.
芝加哥的几位人士建议，民主党在刚经历的险些失误后，肯定会考虑修改其规则。
Phillips thought that House and Senate Democrats should hold votes of confidence, by secret ballot, to let Presidents know when they'd lost the trust of their party.
菲利普斯认为，众议院和参议院的民主党人应该通过秘密投票来进行信任投票，以便让总统知道他们何时失去了党内的信任。
Kamarck proposed a "peer review" process: before candidates ran for the nomination, they would have to be preapproved by elected Party leaders.
卡马克提出了一种“同行评审”机制：候选人在竞选提名之前，必须获得当选党领导人的预先批准。
"This would weed out the jokers like Marianne Williamson, or Donald Trump, who can't even tell you what the nuclear triad is," she told me.
"这将会把像玛丽安·威廉姆森和唐纳德·特朗普这样的笑话淘汰掉，他们连核三位一体是什么都说不清楚，"她告诉我。
"People who have no business being President, frankly, who are just there to sell books." A stickier question is what a peer-review system would mean for a candidate like Bernie Sanders-someone who passes Kamarck's nuclear-triad test but breaks with the Party's dominant ideology in a way that thrills voters yet alarms Party insiders.
"那些根本不该担任总统的人，坦率地说，他们只是为了卖书而存在。" 更棘手的问题是，像伯尼·桑德斯这样的候选人对同行评审系统意味着什么——他通过了卡马克的核三位一体测试，但在某种程度上与党的主流意识形态相悖，这让选民感到兴奋，却让党内人士感到不安。

Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist who was once Daniel
塔达·斯科奇波尔，曾是丹尼尔的哈佛政治学家

Schlozman's dissertation adviser, doesn't quite buy his argument that the Democrats are a hollow shell-after all, replacing their nominee was an unprecedented test, and they passed it—but she does concede that the Party's infrastructure has eroded over time, and there is no quick fix for that.
Schlozman 的论文顾问并不完全认同他的观点，即民主党只是一个空壳——毕竟，替换提名人是前所未有的考验，而他们成功应对了这一挑战——但她确实承认，党的基础设施随着时间的推移已经严重削弱，且没有快速解决的办法。
"Look, I'm a structuralist, but you can't just change the rules to prevent the last problem you had," she told me.
"听着，我是个结构主义者，但你不能仅仅为了避免上一个问题而改变规则，"她对我说。
"The iron law of institutional analysis is: A procedural reform intended to have outcome X almost never does." After 1980, to counterbalance the robot rule, the D.N.C. added "superdelegates," Party elders whose votes were unpledged, allowing them to swing as they saw fit.
"制度分析的铁律是：旨在实现结果 X 的程序改革几乎从未成功。" 1980 年后，为了对抗机器人的统治，民主党全国委员会增加了“超级代表”，这些党内长者的投票不受约束，允许他们根据自己的判断进行投票。
But after 2016, when Bernie Sanders felt that Party-insider chicanery deprived him of a fair shot at the nomination, their power was diminished.
但在 2016 年之后，当伯尼·桑德斯感到党内的阴谋剥夺了他获得提名的公平机会时，他们的权力就减弱了。
"I love Bernie, but the basic problem here is that the D.N.C. is a fund-raising organization, not a real party organization with real oversight power,"James Zogby told me. "Tweaking the rules won't get us there."
我喜欢伯尼，但这里的根本问题在于，民主党全国委员会只是一个筹款机构，而不是一个真正拥有监督权力的政党组织，"詹姆斯·佐格比对我说。"单纯调整规则是无法解决问题的。

Between daytime sessions, I met up with Schlozman in the convention center, and we bought breakfast burritos from a kiosk. There were no tables in sight, but lots of empty space, so we sat cross-legged and ate our burritos on the floor.
在白天的会议间隙，我在会议中心与施洛兹曼见面，我们从一个小摊买了早餐卷饼。周围没有桌子，但有很多空地，于是我们盘腿坐下，在地上享用我们的卷饼。
Looking around, he referred to the proceedings as a "blob Convention." Corporate-sponsored galas, podcast tapings, side meetings between influence-peddlers-"There's a lot happening, a lot of money being spent and favors being exchanged, but the formal Party, the actual nomination, is almost incidental." The best goalies don't need to pull off many miraculous diving saves, because they've already cut off the angles to prevent clear shots on goal.
他环顾四周，将这次会议称为“blob 大会”。企业赞助的晚会、播客录制、影响力交易者之间的私下会谈——“发生了很多事情，花费了很多钱，交换了很多恩惠，但正式的党派和实际的提名几乎是附带的。”最优秀的守门员不需要进行太多惊险的扑救，因为他们已经封堵了角度，防止对方有清晰的射门机会。
Similarly, a robust party may not have required a last-ditch scramble to save itself from probable disaster. "I
同样，一个强大的政党可能不需要进行最后的努力来拯救自己免于可能的灾难。“我
understand the temptation to memory-hole the month of July and just go with 'It all turned out great!' " he told me earlier.
我理解想要抹去七月记忆的诱惑，只想说“结果很好！”他之前这样告诉我。
"What I'm saying is, if the Party is healthy, then why did this have to be such a crisis, and why did it come so close to not happening?" The way Schlozman saw it, the whole episode was "an edge case showing the outer limits" of the Democratic Party's hollowness: the Party was vigorous enough to pull it off, but just barely.
"我想说的是，如果党是健康的，那为什么会出现如此危机，差点没能成行？" Schlozman 认为，这整个事件是“一个边缘案例，显示了民主党的空洞性极限”：党虽然有足够的活力来完成这一切，但几乎是勉强做到的。
"The optimistic case," he said, "would be 'An effort like this has to have a focal point.
乐观的情况是，"他说，"这样的努力必须有一个明确的焦点。
This time it was Pelosi, and next time it'll be someone else.' The more pessimistic case is 'Nancy Pelosi learned at her father's knee, in postwar Baltimore, how to do hard-charging backroom politics.
这次是佩洛西，下次可能会是其他人。更悲观的说法是“南希·佩洛西在战后巴尔的摩从她父亲那里学会了如何进行激烈的幕后政治。”
No one learns those skills anymore, and after her they'll retire the model.'" When we'd finished our burritos, we stopped by one of the conventioncenter rooms, where Chuck Schumer was addressing the Labor Council. "This is a happy Convention," Schumer said.
现在没有人再学习那些技能了，在她之后，他们将会退役这个模型。我们吃完墨西哥卷饼后，停在了会议中心的一个房间里，查克·舒默正在向劳工委员会发表讲话。他说：\"这是一个愉快的大会。\"
"America is smiling from ear to ear." Next up was Josh Shapiro, who, now that it was afternoon, gave the PG-13 version of his stump speech ("G.S.D.: gettin' shit done").
美国笑得合不拢嘴。接下来是乔希·夏皮罗，到了下午，他给出了 PG-13 版本的竞选演讲（“G.S.D.: 做事”）。

Maybe I was taking all the talk of strength and weakness too literallyand surely the many soirées with open bars and complimentary Chicagostyle hot dogs didn't help-but I got it in my head that prescriptions for party reform may be like exercise tips.
也许我对力量和弱点的讨论理解得太过字面了，当然，许多有开放酒吧和免费芝加哥热狗的晚会也没有帮助——但我心里觉得，派对改革的建议可能就像锻炼的建议一样。
Anyone selling one weird trick to get shredded is probably a huckster; the real answer, and also the last answer anyone wants to hear, is that building the institutional body you want will take a lot of time and effort, and may involve a bunch of innercore work that will remain mostly invisible.
任何声称有奇怪技巧能让你变得健美的人，可能都是在忽悠你；真正的答案，以及大家最不想听到的最后一个答案是，想要建立理想的身体需要付出大量的时间和努力，并且可能还需要进行一些内在的工作，这些工作大部分是看不见的。
At the end of "The Hollow Parties," Schlozman and Rosenfeld offer a model for such long-term party rejuvenation: the "Reid Machine." Harry Reid, the long-serving senator
在《空洞的派对》结尾，Schlozman 和 Rosenfeld 提出了一个长期党派复兴的模型：“里德机器”。哈里·里德，这位长期担任参议员的政治家
from Nevada, was a D.C. power broker, but he never lost touch with his state's Democratic Party.
他来自内华达州，是华盛顿特区的权力中介，但始终与自己州的民主党保持联系。
If anything, he micromanaged it, increasing its full-time staff tenfold and filling it with his people, and he "aggressively recruited candidates for office up and down the ticket." As a result, Schlozman and Rosenfeld argue, Nevada remains a competitive state for Democrats, whereas others, like Florida, have slipped out of reach.
如果说有什么的话，他对这个项目进行了微观管理，使全职员工人数增加了十倍，并填充了他自己的人。他“积极招募各级候选人。”因此，Schlozman 和 Rosenfeld 认为，内华达州仍然是民主党竞争的州，而其他州，比如佛罗里达州，已经失去了竞争力。
"Democrats have put their stock in national candidates, but the real work of party-building is local and year-round," Michael Kazin told me. "Give people places to show up, fun things to do-opportunities to identify with the party as such, not just with a celebrity nominee."
民主党将希望寄托在全国候选人身上，但真正的党派建设工作是地方性的，并且是全年进行的，"迈克尔·卡津告诉我。"要为人们提供参与的场所和有趣的活动，让他们有机会认同这个党，而不仅仅是认同某个名人提名。

In Washington, three days after Biden ended his candidacy, Welch had gone to a dinner in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, a BeauxArts showpiece that makes the Senate buildings look shabby.
在华盛顿，拜登结束竞选三天后，韦尔奇参加了国会图书馆大礼堂的晚宴，这是一座让参议院建筑显得陈旧的博兹艺术风格的杰作。
His former colleagues in the House greeted him with a mixture of pride and passiveaggressiveness, as if he were a home-town boy made good.
他在众议院的前同事们以自豪和微妙的敌意迎接他，仿佛他是一个成功的家乡小子。
"I released my statement on Biden the same day you did, but you totally upstaged me," Earl Blumenauer, a bow-tied congressman from Oregon, said. "'Oh, a senator has something to say, let's all listen to the senator!"
我在你发布关于拜登的声明的同一天也发布了我的声明，但你完全抢了我的风头，"来自俄勒冈州的系领带国会议员厄尔·布卢门 auer 说。"'哦，参议员有话要说，大家都来听听参议员的！

At dinner, Welch struck up a conversation with Jared Huffman, of California, and I asked them both whether the Party should make any structural reforms in light of the Biden affair.
晚餐时，韦尔奇与加利福尼亚的贾里德·哈夫曼交谈，我问他们是否认为党应该根据拜登事件进行结构改革。
"No more uncontested primaries," Huffman said.
哈夫曼说，今后将不再有无争议的初选。
"I'm not sure it's a systemic thing," Welch said. "We had a good President who got too old. We didn't see it, and then we did. I think it's a one-off."
我不确定这是否是一个系统性的问题，"韦尔奇说。"我们曾有一位优秀的总统，但他年纪大了。起初我们没有注意到，后来才意识到。我认为这只是个别情况。
"I know he wants to be remembered as Cincinnatus, willingly giving up power," Huffman added, referring to the Roman leader who was said to have resigned to become a farmer. "The fact is, he desperately wanted to run out the clock and hang on to power."
我知道他希望被记住为辛辛那提斯，自愿放弃权力，"哈夫曼补充道，提到这位据说辞职去当农民的罗马领袖。"实际上，他非常想拖延时间，牢牢把握住权力。

Welch asked, "But isn't that what we all want?"
韦尔奇问：“这难道不是我们大家都想要的吗？”
An earlier version of this article misstated Peter Welch's congressional title in a photo caption.
这篇文章的早期版本在照片说明中错误地提到了彼得·韦尔奇的国会职务。

Published in the print edition of the September 2, 2024, issue, with the headline "Life of the Party."
发表在 2024 年 9 月 2 日的印刷版上，标题为“聚会的灵魂”。

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有时候熊会抓住鲍比小弟。
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