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POLITICO illustration/Photos by iStock | How long until you die? You can find the answer on a map of the U.S. That’s according to a fascinating set of data out of Nationhood Lab, a Salve Regina University project founded by Colin Woodard, author of this week’s Friday Read. Their research has found that where you live in the U.S. has an incredible impact on your life expectancy. And the connection between geography and longevity holds true even for similar places in different regions. For example, take Lexington County, South Carolina, and Placer County, California. They have a lot in common: they’re big, wealthy, suburban counties with white supermajorities that border on their respective state’s capital cities, and both voted for Donald Trump twice. But Placer’s life expectancy of 82.3 rivals that of Scandinavian countries, whereas Lexington’s, at 77.7, is worse than China’s. It’s not just a question of poverty, either. Washington County, Maine, is the poorest in New England, ravaged by the opioid epidemic. But its life expectancy of 75.5 still beats that of the equally remote and drug-battered Perry County, Kentucky, by a full six years. So where do these disparities come from? To answer that question, we have to go back to before America’s founding. “The reason the U.S. has strong regional differences is precisely because our swath of the North American continent was settled in the 17th and 18th centuries by rival colonial projects that had very little in common,” Woodard writes. “Those colonial projects — Puritan-controlled New England; the Dutch-settled area around what is now New York City; the Quaker-founded Delaware Valley; the Scots-Irish-dominated upland backcountry of the Appalachians; the West Indies-style slave society in the Deep South; the Spanish project in the southwest and so on — had different religious, economic and ideological characteristics.” And those characteristics have echoed down through the ages to influence culture, politics and, consequently, health. Read the story.
| | | |  | “Severe aging health issues and/or mental health incompetence in our nation’s leaders MUST be addressed. Biden, McConnell, Feinstein, and Fetterman are examples of people who are not fit for office and it’s time to be serious about it.” Can you guess who said this? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**
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POLITICO illustration/Photos by Hunter Abrams/BFA.com; Getty; iStock | Did Putin Kill a Man in Washington? … Yevgeny Prigozhin isn’t the first critic of Vladimir Putin to fall from the sky. A year ago, Soviet-born U.S. citizen Dan Rapoport, who made his fortune in post-Soviet Russia before souring on the regime, plunged from an M Street apartment building to his death. D.C. police almost immediately said there was no foul play — but Rapoport’s allies say something doesn’t add up. “Those who knew him — I’ve talked to a lot of venture capitalists — nobody is convinced he just up and decided to jump,” says Jason Jay Smart. In this week’s Capital City column, Michael Schaffer looks into Rapoport’s death — and why it hasn’t made a bigger splash in the Beltway.
| | | |  | Vivek Ramaswamy declared Richard Nixon his favorite foreign policy president in last week’s Republican presidential debate, calling Nixon’s “realism” foundational to his own view on how to deal with other nations. But the pitch was bunk. When your friends talk up Ramaswamy’s debate performance, hit them with these details. (From POLITICO’s Jack Shafer) - Nixon, unlike Ramaswamy, was no foreign policy amateur, having served as U.S. ambassador at large in his eight years as vice president, and consulted with thinkers and policy makers. - Ramaswamy proposed a worldwide military retreat, sounding more like former presidential candidate Republican Robert A. Taft and Democrat George McGovern than Nixon. - Definitely do not parrot what Ramaswamy says about Russia: The candidate thinks that by giving Russia the chunks of Ukraine it currently occupies and barring that nation’s entry into NATO, he could convince Putin to break with China — Russia’s more stalwart ally. Point out how Ramaswamy doesn’t understand the Sino-Russian relationship, which is the best it’s been since the 1950s. As long as they see the U.S. as a common rival and share similar views of a post-American world order, the two will remain friendly neighbors. - If all your friends are already dunking on Ramaswamy, here’s what to say to stand out. Sure, his foreign policy proposals are scattered, but he did push other candidates to expand the debate. Plus, he’ll likely fully pull back the curtain on how the “Vivek Doctrine” would work in the real world during his future campaign stops. Hint to your friends that there’s more to come.
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Illustration by Chloe Zola for POLITICO | The Hunter Biden Fan Club … The laptop. The drug problem. The gun. Hunter Biden’s many scandals have lit up headlines and provided conservatives with a bludgeon to use against President Joe Biden. Even many Democrats see him as a liability. But to political junkies on the post-Bernie Sanders, irony-poisoned left, Hunter Biden isn’t a stain on the White House — he’s “based.” “The … love affair between Hunter Biden and leftists who have little love for his father might seem like a surprising pairing,” writes Calder McHugh. Yet “if you examine Hunter’s misdeeds and escapades from just the right angle, they can be viewed as illuminating the hundreds of little cracks in the foundation of the American empire. For people who aren’t buying what America has sold, that’s heartening.”
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Believers light up candles during an evening service at Saint Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery, the headquarters of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine. | Roman Pilipey/Getty Images | After the War, Will Ukraine Still Pray? … Amid the ongoing bloodshed of Putin’s invasion, the politically conservative Orthodox Church of Ukraine — which gained independence from the Russian church in 2019 — has become the most important spiritual institution in the war-torn country. More than half of Ukrainians identify as orthodox, and the church provides more chaplains to the Ukrainian army than any other religious group. The church hopes growing religiosity is more than wartime sentimentality, that it will flourish even after the fighting stops. But younger Ukrainians are less religious than their parents, and Ukraine’s future depends on support from comparatively secular, liberal countries in the West — all of which could make the church’s aspirations for growth and prominence both culturally and politically difficult to advance, writes Cole Aronson.
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cabsbigman/eBay | Mitch McConnell's second moment of "freezing" in recent months occurred on Wednesday — but this isn’t the senator’s first serious health scare. At the age of two in 1944, his upper leg became paralyzed, and he was diagnosed with polio — terrifying news for a family living in a small town in Alabama (McConnell did not move to Kentucky until he was 14, in 1956). The family, however, was fortunate enough to live near one of the best places in the country to be treated for polio: the facility at Warm Springs, Ga. that had been developed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was here that FDR died on April 12, 1945, and it is not a little surprising to realize that the future Republican leader had been a very recent patient. In a time when there is so little shared history that Republicans and Democrats can agree upon, this might prove to be a rare exception — a place where party labels did not matter in the slightest. Warm Springs brought comfort and community to all Americans, including the Senate minority leader. This postcard of the place comes in at a New Deal price, 99 cents. (From historian Ted Widmer.)
| | | **Who Dissed answer: It was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the growing number of people who want to enact the 25th Amendment — which can be invoked to remove a president deemed unfit to serve — and explore similar measures for lawmakers. politicoweekend@email.politico.com | | | | Follow us | | | | |
