3.14.15 HRC Clips

HRC Clips

March 14, 2015

 

 

HRC

Emails Clinton Said Were Kept Could Be Lost (The New York Times)........................................... 3

Hillary Seems Tired, Not Hungry (The Wall Street Journal)............................................................. 6

Will Hillary Clinton Follow Democrats on Capital Gains? (The New York Times).......................... 9

Hillarynomics: Big Policy Questions for Clinton (The New York Times)....................................... 11

Hillary Clinton’s fear of the trail (Politico)..................................................................................... 14

Hillary Clinton staffs up in New Hampshire (The Washington Post)............................................. 17

Clinton Takes Campaign Step With New Hampshire Hiring (The New York Times)..................... 18

Clinton Said to be Close to Choosing Brooklyn for Campaign Headquarters (The New York Times) 20

Hillary Clinton set on Brooklyn HQ, eyes April launch (CNN)...................................................... 21

Jeb Bush, a Clinton Critic, Took Time Releasing His Own Emails (The New York Times)............ 23

Jeb Bush: I’m No Hillary Clinton When it Comes to Email (ABC News)....................................... 25

Hillary Clinton’s secret mess; The e-mail saga is a reminder that the Clintons rarely play by the same rules as everyone else. (The Washington Post) 27

Public’s right to know lost in email; State Dept. fails to practice the transparency it preaches  (Boston Herald)        29

Hillary Clinton’s Questionable Process for Sorting Work Emails (The Atlantic)............................ 31

Judge Orders State Dept. to Release Records From Clinton Trips  (The New York Times)........... 34

Is Hillary Clinton Vulnerable? (The Wall Street Journal)................................................................ 35

How Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama Became Media Control Freaks (Daily Beast)................... 39

Here’s what a real Democratic presidential primary might look like (The Washington Post)......... 42

Hillary Clinton isn’t running unopposed. She’s just crushing the competition. (Vox)..................... 44

Poll Shows Younger Americans Tuning Out Clinton Story (The Wall Street Journal).................... 47

Top State Dept. officials’ work emails not automatically archived before February (Politico)....... 49

Why the email controversy probably hasn’t dented Hillary Clinton’s public image (The Washington Post)     51

Poll: the only presidential contender more popular than Hillary Clinton is Ben Carson (Vox)........ 53

You Won’t Be Surprised To Hear That Hillary Clinton’s Emails Are More Divisive Than Ever (Huffington Post)    54

Jerry Brown says challenging Hillary Clinton is like challenging Jerry Brown (The Washington Post) 56

Jerry Brown: Leave Hillary Clinton alone (Politico)....................................................................... 58

8 Must-Know Stats About Women’s Rights Around The World From Hillary Clinton’s “No Ceilings” Report (Bustle)        59

 

 

Emails Clinton Said Were Kept Could Be Lost (The New York Times)

By Michael S. Schmidt and Julie Hirschfeld Davis

March 14, 2015

The New York Times

 

WASHINGTON -- As Hillary Rodham Clinton this week defended her use of a personal email account to conduct State Department business, she emphasized that because she was corresponding frequently with other department officials on their government accounts, the messages were preserved on government servers.

But the State Department disclosed on Friday that until last month it had no way of routinely preserving senior officials’ emails. Instead, the department relied on individual employees to decide if certain emails should be considered public records, and if so, to move them onto a special record-keeping sever, or print them out and manually file them for preservation.

This patchwork system, reflecting a broader confusion and slowness throughout the government as federal agencies struggle to catch up with the digital age, raises the possibility that some emails from Mrs. Clinton to other State Department officials may have been lost altogether.

In a briefing with reporters on Friday, Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the State Department, acknowledged that the system in place under Mrs. Clinton was ‘‘imperfect,’’ and said the department was still trying to establish a comprehensive document retention program.

In February, the State Department began using a system that automatically keeps the emails of the department’s highest ranking officials -- like the deputy secretary of state, and under and assistant secretaries. Secretary of State John Kerry’s emails have been automatically retained since around the time he took office in 2013.

Regulations issued by the National Archives in October 2009 said that agencies where employees were free to use private email systems ‘‘must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.’’

In a news conference she held on Tuesday, and backup documents that her staff circulated the same day, Mrs. Clinton argued that she had complied with those record-keeping rules.

‘‘It was my practice to communicate with State Department and other government officials on their dot-gov accounts so those emails would be automatically saved in the State Department system to meet record-keeping requirements, and that, indeed, is what happened,’’ Mrs. Clinton said at the news conference. She said she had used the personal account for convenience because she did not want to carry two cellphones.

The State Department disclosure is likely to bring intense scrutiny to the process that Mrs. Clinton and her lawyers used in deciding late last year which of the roughly 60,000 emails from her personal account should be considered work-related and turned over to the State Department. That is because the State Department servers -- given the system that was in place -- appear to lack comprehensive backup records of the former secretary of state’s correspondence with other officials.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton did not return an email, call or text seeking comment.

An Obama administration directive in 2012 mandates that agencies must devise a system for retaining and preserving email records electronically by the end of 2016, but many agencies’ current practice is to save emails by printing them out and storing them in files.

The Department of Health and Human Services began automatically archiving and saving the emails of all senior officials and political appointees only in December, said Kevin Griffis, a spokesman for the department.

There is also no consistent system throughout the federal agencies for determining which emails should be saved. The White House has strict requirements dating back two decades that no emails be discarded, but federal agencies are in charge of setting their own policies for determining which emails constitute government records worthy of preservation and which ones may be deleted.

‘‘It really is chaos across the government in terms of what agencies do, what individuals do, and people understand that they can decide what they save and what they don’t,’’ said Patrice McDermott, the director of the transparency watchdog group OpenTheGovernment.org. ‘‘If you leave it up to the agency, some are going to behave properly and take it seriously, and some are going to see it as carte blanche to whitewash the record.’’

What is clear is that email poses a unique problem for government agencies, which are required under the law to preserve anything that relates to official business. ‘‘It doesn’t matter on what medium or in what form it occurs,’’ said Gary M. Stern, the general counsel for the National Archives and Records Administration, the agency in charge of preserving federal documents.

But, he said, ‘‘There’s such a challenge with email, because everyone gets a couple of hundred a day and nobody has the time to go through and say, ‘Is this a record, or is it not?’ ‘‘

President Obama signed legislation late last year requiring government officials who use personal email addresses for official business to bring those records into the government within 20 days. Before that, the National Archives and Records Administration simply required those messages at some point to be provided to the government.

The vagueness of federal guidelines have caused agencies, cabinet members and other senior officials to forge their own policies and practices, sometimes getting them into trouble.

Lisa P. Jackson, Mr. Obama’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator used ‘‘Richard Windsor’’ -- a combination of her dog’s name and a New Jersey town -- for her electronic alias. Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee charge that she had created the alias to ‘‘hide’’ her actions, part of what they described in a September 2013 report as a pattern of ‘‘obfuscation’’ and a ‘‘culture of secrecy and evasion.’’

Ms. Jackson said the alias was a matter of convenience and practicality, arguing that she had complied with requirements that any message relating to E.P.A. business would be captured on the agency’s system.

‘‘You’ll find this with any cabinet head,’’ Tom Reynolds, an E.P.A. spokesman, said of generic government email addresses. ‘‘You just can’t use those because you’d just get inundated with emails. It’s not pragmatic.’’

The White House adopted its strict email rules during the Clinton administration after a federal court determined that White House emails -- until then considered the same as disposable sheets on a phone-message pad -- should be treated as government records.

As part of a settlement in that case, a little-known staff secretary to President Bill Clinton drafted a memo laying out the new policy: Emails had to be preserved and external networks should not be used because those messages would not be retained.

The aide’s name was John D. Podesta. ‘‘Podesta helped push the White House essentially into the digital age and created electronic archiving,’’ said Thomas S. Blanton, of the National Security Archive.

In January, Mr. Podesta left his post as a senior counselor to Mr. Obama. His anticipated new job: chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s expected presidential campaign.

Hillary Seems Tired, Not Hungry (The Wall Street Journal)

By Peggy Noonan

March 14, 2015

The Wall Street Journal

 

Maybe we’re not stuck in Scandal Land.

For a while I’ve assumed Hillary Clinton would run for her party’s nomination and be a formidable candidate in the general election. After Tuesday’s news conference I’m not so sure.

Did she seem to you a happy, hungry warrior? She couldn’t make eye contact with her questioners, and when she did she couldn’t sustain it. She looked at the ceiling and down at notes, trying, it seemed, to stick to or remember scripted arguments. She was shaky. She couldn’t fake good cheer and confidence. It is seven years since she ran for office. You could see it.

Her claims -- she stayed off the State Department email system for “convenience,” she thought “it would be easier to carry just one device,” her server “contains personal communications from my husband and me” -- were so transparent, so quickly disprovable. Minutes later journalists were posting earlier statements in which she said she carries two devices, and The Wall Street Journal’s report saying Bill has sent only two emails in his life.

This wasn’t high-class spin. These were not respectable dodges. They didn’t make you grudgingly tip your hat at a gift for duplicity. I could almost feel an army of oppo people of both parties saying, “You can do better than that, Hillary!”

This wasn’t the work of a national, high-grade political-response team, it was the thrown-together mess of someone who knew she was guilty of self-serving actions, who didn’t herself believe what she was saying, who didn’t think the press would swallow it, and who didn’t appear to care.

She didn’t look hungry for the battle, she looked tired of the battle.

Everyone knows what the scandal is. She didn’t want a paper trail of her decisions and actions as secretary of state. She didn’t want to be questioned about them, ever. So she didn’t join the government’s paper-trail system, in this case the State Department’s official email system, which retains and archives records. She built her own private system and got to keep complete control of everything she’d done or written. She no doubt assumed no one outside would ask and no one inside would insist -- she’s Hillary, don’t mess with her.

She knew the story might blow but maybe it wouldn’t, worth the chance considering the payoff: secrecy. If what she did became public she’d deal with it then. When this week she was forced to, she stonewalled: “The server will remain private.”

Is it outrageous? Of course. Those are U.S. government documents she concealed and destroyed. The press is not covering for her and hard questions are being asked because everyone knows what the story is. It speaks of who she is and how she will govern. Everyone knows it.

She knows it too.

At the news conference she seemed like a 20th-century figure in a 21st-century world. Her critics complain it’s the 1990s returning but it isn’t, it’s only the dark side of the ‘90s without the era’s peace and prosperity.

Mrs. Clinton is said to be preparing to announce her candidacy for the presidency in three to four weeks. But did that look like the news conference of a candidate about to announce? It lacked any air of confidence or certitude. For a year the press has been writing about the burgeoning Clinton Shadow Campaign. Where’s the real one?

Defenses of Mrs. Clinton were ad hoc, improvised, flat-footed. It all looks disorderly, as if no one’s in charge, no one has drawn clear lines of responsibility or authority. We hear about loyalists, intimates, allies, pals, hangers-on, Friends of Hill. People buzz around her like bees on random paths to the queen.

In 2008 Barack Obama had impressive, disciplined people around him -- David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, David Plouffe. I remember thinking at the time that they were something unusual in politics: normal. Hillary has people like David Brock, a right-wing hit man who became a left-wing hit man. Who’s he supposed to do outreach to, the other weirdos?

Is this thing really happening? Is the much-vaunted campaign coming together?

After the news conference I thought what I never expected to think: Maybe she doesn’t really want this. Maybe that’s what this incompetence is meant to be signaling.

Here I will speculate, but imagine being Hillary Clinton right now:

Her mother, the rock of her life, died in 2011. In the past years she’s had health issues. She’s tired, having worked at the highest levels of American life the past 25 years. She’s in the middle of a scandal and, being Hillary, knows that others might pop along the way.

Add this: Maybe she thought her ideological hunger, which was real, would sustain her throughout her life, and it hasn’t.

Maybe what happened to her, in part, is the homes of her Manhattan mega-donors. She’s been in the grand townhouses and Park Avenue apartments since 1992. She’d go in and be met and she saw what they had. Beauty. Ease. Fine art of a particular, modern sort, the kind that is ugly, that reminds its owners that just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they don’t understand that life is hard, painful, incoherent. It is protective, cautionary, abstract and costs $20 million a picture.

But what lives they have! Grace and comfort and they don’t have to worry about the press, they don’t have to feel on the run, they don’t have to press the flesh with nobodies.

She’d like those things! But she went into “public service” and had to live on some bum-squat-Egypt Southern governor’s salary.

She wanted what they have. They’re her friends, no more talented than she. But they went to Wall Street and are oozing in dough. She stayed in the lane she was in. And she figures she missed out on the prosperity her husband presided over.

She has her causes -- women’s rights, income inequality. But she can advance them in other ways.

Maybe she isn’t really hungry enough for the presidency anymore. And maybe she doesn’t have illusions anymore. She’s funded by Wall Street. Her opponent will be funded by Wall Street.

Maybe she’s of two minds about what she wants. But it’s not really hunger that’s propelling her now, its Newton’s law of inertia: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

Maybe she thinks about another line of work, a surprising fourth act. She likes to be served, be admired, be taken care of by staff. But you can get those things without being president. If you are wealthy, and she is now -- and maybe that was the purpose of all those six-figure speeches -- you can get those things easily.

Maybe she doesn’t, really, want to run. Maybe she’s not sure she can. Or maybe she’ll go for it: It’s what she’s been going toward all her life.

Maybe Democrats who saw that news conference will sense an opening and jump in. There’s the myth of the empty bench, but it won’t be empty if she leaves it. That’s another law of physics: Nature abhors a vacuum.

We all talk so much about the presidency and who’s got the best chance. Maybe it’s not Hillary. Maybe that’s over and no one knows, even her.

License this article from Dow Jones Reprint Service

Will Hillary Clinton Follow Democrats on Capital Gains? (The New York Times)

By Josh Barro

March 14, 2015

The New York Times

 

As my colleague David Leonhardt notes, one of the big policy questions for Hillary Clinton is how eager she is to tax the rich. But this isn’t just a question of the top rate on wages. If she runs for president, it will be very interesting to see whether Mrs. Clinton takes a position substantially to Barack Obama’s right on capital gains taxes, as she did in 2008.

In a debate in April of that year, Mrs. Clinton said she would not raise the capital gains rate above 20 percent “if I raised it at all.” At the time, the top rate was 15 percent, as a result of the Bush tax cuts. Ms. Clinton’s position was in line with the economic policies of Bill Clinton’s administration, which called for much higher tax rates on wage income than capital income for high earners. In 1997, Mr. Clinton signed a law that cut the top capital gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20; in 1993, he had raised the top tax rate on ordinary income from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, and imposed a Medicare tax on high earners that effectively pushed their top tax rates above 40.

Mr. Obama ran in 2008 as an advocate of a large capital gains tax increase. In a 2007 speech, he said he would “adjust the top dividends and capital gains rate to something closer to — but no greater than — the rates Ronald Reagan set in 1986.” The rate set in 1986 was 28 percent, so this position left the door open to a near-doubling of the top capital gains tax rate.

President Obama has delivered on that promise: The Affordable Care Act created an additional 3.8 percent tax on capital gains for high earners, and the so-called fiscal cliff deal of 2013 added another 5 points to the rate, so the top tax rate on capital gains has gone from 15 percent in 2008 to 23.8 percent today, higher than the red line Mrs. Clinton set. In his most recent budget, Mr. Obama proposed to further increase the rate to 28 percent.

Economists tend to advocate lower taxes on capital on the grounds that investors are more likely to be driven away by high taxes than workers are, and because much capital income is subjected to corporate income tax before the capital gains tax is applied.

But the shift among Democrats toward supporting higher taxes on capital isn’t surprising, given the party’s increased skepticism of Wall Street and the focus on inequality. While high taxes on the salaries of high earners can increase collections from law firm partners and senior business executives (and collect a lot of revenue in the process), the wealthiest Americans tend to draw their income from investments. So tax policies that aim at the extreme top of the income distribution will have to focus on capital.

Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who formerly served as Vice President Joe Biden’s top economic adviser, attributed the shift among Democrats to increased frustration with income shifting: labor income being recharacterized as capital income in order to take advantage of tax preferences.

“The only tax rule of thumb I’m 100 percent certain of is if your tax code provides preferential treatment to any kind of income, that’s the kind of income a lot of rich people will all the sudden have a lot more of,” he said in an email.

Since Marco Rubio has endorsed a plan that would cut capital gains taxes to zero, the 2016 campaign may offer a very sharp divide on the question of how investment should be taxed and how progressive the tax code should be, especially if Mrs. Clinton follows Mr. Obama’s lead on the issue. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton declined to comment about whether her views had changed since 2008.

Hillarynomics: Big Policy Questions for Clinton (The New York Times)

By David Leonhardt

March 14, 2015

The New York Times

 

Barring an unexpected economic boom over the next year and a half, the 2016 Democratic nominee for president will probably not base her campaign around being President Obama’s heir.

The economic picture remains too muddled and the country too polarized. A candidate who can claim to fix Washington will be in a better position than one who tries to explain or defend the last eight years.

Hillary Clinton — still the overwhelming favorite to be that nominee, in spite of the recent mess over her use of a private email account while she was secretary of state — will especially need to find ways to project freshness. And pundits will no doubt scour her remarks and campaign proposals looking for such differences.

So it’s worth acknowledging something now: Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have far more similarities than differences, especially on economic matters.

They both consider the stagnant incomes of recent decades to be a defining national issue. They both want to address the stagnation through a combination of government programs and middle-class tax cuts. They both see climate change as a serious threat. They both think workers have too little power and corporations too much.

They both are to the political left of every single Republican in Congress. They are also to the right of many liberals — friendlier to markets and global trade, more comfortable with incremental change.

Yet for all their similarities, Hillarynomics (the phrase “Clintonomics” is already taken) and Obamanomics will not be identical.

In the coming months, Mrs. Clinton is likely to begin releasing her economic policy proposals. They will no doubt be devised to address the fact that, as she has said, “it feels harder and harder to get ahead.”

Along the way, she will need to deal with some thorny policy questions that don’t have obvious answers for a Democrat. My goal here is to lay out the biggest of those questions. Mrs. Clinton’s answers to them will begin to define Hillarynomics.

Taxing the rich. For two decades, Democrats have been largely united on taxes. Bill Clinton raised the top marginal tax rate (which now applies to couples making more than $450,000) to 39.6 percent. Mr. Obama spent years fighting — and ultimately succeeding — to raise it back to that level, from a 35 percent rate.

But now the issue gets trickier for Democrats.

Total federal taxes on top earners are already near the top of their narrow range over the last 35 years. But pretax inequality has soared during that time. And federal tax rates are still much lower than they were in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

Have the politics of inequality changed to the point that Mrs. Clinton will propose a top marginal rate above 40 percent? Or will she instead propose more subtle tax increases, such as reducing tax breaks, as Mr. Obama recently has?

Either way, she seems likely to push for middle- and low-income tax cuts. As a result, she will need either to propose further tax increases on high earners — or to acknowledge that her plan would increase the budget deficit.

Bargaining power. Top Democrats spent much of the 1990s moving to the right on economics. They have spent the last decade inching back to the left. The move isn’t really about the personal views of Mr. Obama and the Clintons. Instead, it’s a reaction to the great wage slowdown of the last 15 years, which has left the party looking for more aggressive ways to address inequality.

Take the party’s stance toward labor unions. Democrats who previously were wary of aligning too closely with unions are now searching for ways to strengthen workers’ bargaining power. The Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, a group with close ties to Mrs. Clinton, recently made “expanding worker voice” one of its centerpiece recommendations. “If you made it less easy for employers to fire union organizers, you would meaningfully impact the amount of collective bargaining,” Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary, said.

Although labor leaders support many of Mr. Obama’s decisions, they also hope that the next Democratic nominee will go further — on enacting overtime-pay rules, on using the bully pulpit to criticize corporations and on appointing labor-friendly advisers. “We have learned through bitter experience that it really matters who makes up a president’s economic team,” said Damon Silvers, a top A.F.L.-C.I.O. official.

Schools and tests. Mr. Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have pursued a decidedly centrist course, pushing states to demand more accountability from schools. The approach can claim significant successes, including a rising high school graduation rate.

Yet many students, parents and teachers have also grown frustrated by the amount of standardized testing. Some of this frustration stems from the fact that accountability isn’t fun. Many school officials would rather be left alone to judge their own performance. Other aspects of the frustration, though, are more substantive.

A central challenge for the post-Obama Education Department will be finding a way to make accountability more popular. The obvious answer probably involves fewer, better tests — but creating such tests isn’t easy. The next president will have some big decisions to make.

Medical costs. The sharp slowdown in the growth rate of health spending — which has reduced the federal deficit — has been one of the happiest economic surprises of the Obama years. It stems in part from efforts within medicine that predated his presidency and in part from the 2010 health care bill. But the battle to reduce wasteful medical spending is still in its very early stages.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, has set a goal that at least 50 percent of Medicare payments be based on quality, not quantity, of care by 2018 — which is two years into the next administration.

Right now, many outcome-based payment systems are voluntary. To get to 50 percent, notes Peter Orszag, the former Obama budget director, Washington will probably need to force more hospitals and doctors into such systems. And because accountability isn’t fun, many are sure to squawk about it.

If you want to judge how serious Mrs. Clinton is about the long-term budget deficit, keep an eye on the signals she sends about health costs. Nothing affects the deficit more than health spending.

Style. This list obviously is not an exhaustive one. Ultimately, though, the biggest differences between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama may revolve around style.

In the 2008 campaign, she criticized him for his naïveté about the potential for major bipartisan compromises. “We’ve got to be really clear that this is a struggle, and this is just not a moment where everybody will see the world the way it should be seen and come together to solve these problems,” she told me then. “There are powerful forces at work in our society.”

Mr. Obama has since moved toward Mrs. Clinton’s view, more willing simply to defy Republicans when compromise isn’t an option. But many Democrats continue to believe that if the party holds the White House in 2016, it will be better served by a harder-edged approach to leadership and negotiation. (And many Obama advisers roll their eyes at such criticism as vague wishful thinking.)

Whatever the truth, Mrs. Clinton’s view about these questions now matters more than anyone else’s in the Democratic Party. The most influential critic of a president is the one who succeeds him, and she still seems to be the only Democrat with a good chance to do so.

 

Hillary Clinton’s fear of the trail (Politico)

By Glenn Thrush

March 13, 2014

Politico

 

This was the week when Hillary Clinton’s highest aspiration, being president, collided with her deepest fear — actually running for president.

 

It’s not that Clinton craves a coronation, people close to her say, it’s just that she wants to forestall her leap into the sulfurous political lava as long as possible. The chaotic indignity of Tuesday’s press conference on her use of a private email server as Secretary of State did nothing to change that opinion, or convince her to push up the campaign start date.

 

The firestorm over the emails – and earlier stories about the solicitation of foreign donations at the Clinton family charitable foundation have rattled the expanding crew of new operatives signing up for 2016 who haven’t experienced the maelstrom of a Clinton presidential campaign before. But the only two opinions that really count come from Hillary and Bill Clinton, and – despite the carping of Democrats inside and outside their own circle — they harbor few regrets about the way things have gone down so far.

 

“Eighteen months ago who would imagined Hillary Clinton would have zero competition in the primaries? That’s pretty good, right?” said one longtime Clinton insider, reflecting the prevailing view in the no-rush camp, which includes the Clintons and their longtime consigliore Cheryl Mills.

 

“Everybody has an incentive to start this campaign – the staff, the consultants who are working for nothing and want to get paid, you guys in the media – everybody except Hillary Clinton,” the person added. “The goal here is to make this the shortest campaign possible. The emails thing didn’t change that.”

 

The danger, of course, is that the 20th Century political victors are ignoring 21st Century political reality and inviting the American body politic play by their idiosyncratic set of rules — as they did by deciding to use Bill Clinton’s private server as a conduit for Hillary Clinton’s government correspondence. Moreover, as the press conference proved, it’s put her in the familiar — and bizarre — position of entering the 2016 campaign as both the strongest non-incumbent ever to seek the office and a wounded, vulnerable frontrunner.

 

“She’ll get past these sort of little dust-ups, but we really have to start having a conversation,” says Iowa Democratic operative Tavis Hall, expressing the growing anxiousness of battleground Democrats eager for Clinton to hoist a flag to rally around.

 

The response to the emails controversy was hampered by the lack of a campaign team — and the candidate’s reluctance to share details of her personal email server with the people who could defend her; Clinton’s people were rebuffed by surrogates who refused to appear on TV because they weren’t given details about the system, according to two potential surrogates interviewed by POLITICO. Moreover, it took eight days for Clinton to reluctantly agree to appear before the media — and only then at the urging of her young campaign manager Robbie Mook and eminence-grise campaign chairman John Podesta.

 

“It’s clear they lack an apparatus. She’s a candidate without a campaign.” Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary under President Obama told The Washington Post. And former Obama strategist David Axelrod told MSNBC he thought the campaign’s sluggish response on the emails story was the result of a “lack of answers from the Clinton campaign, or the nascent campaign.”

 

Last September, another Obama stalwart, 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe, was summoned to Clinton’s home in Washington for a consultation with the would-be candidate. His advice? Start assembling a campaign apparatus as quickly as possible, set them to work immediately — and more, importantly, settle on a robust rationale for the campaign not based merely on her celebrity or gender.

 

She’s mostly ignored that advice — and details about her personnel moves have proven far more plentiful than details about her policy plans, or her rationale for seeking the job, apart from vague references to her experience and a new willingness to emphasize her role as a gender trailblazer.

 

Yet, in some respects, Clinton has showed a willingness to change her basic approach as a candidate. Late last year, she enlisted another Obama mainstay, pollster Joel Benenson, to oversee a sprawling polling operation, supervise messaging and hire a communications team. Benenson’s philosophy in assembling the team was to avoid the hard-edged, confrontational approach of the Clinton 2008 war room — and he enlisted current White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri, a veteran Democrat operative with deep relationships in the media, to head the team. “She’s hiring people who believe in engaging reporters, not beating the shit out of them,” said one person close to Clinton.

 

But campaigns invariably reflect the attitude of the candidate, and Clinton — scarred deeply by the Whitewater and Lewinsky battles of the 1990s — still thinks of the press corps as hostile adversaries who often carry the water of GOP opposition researchers. “Look, she hates you. Period. That’s never going to change,” a 2008 Clinton veteran told me when I asked if her attitude towards the media had evolved.

 

All of this has fostered a deep reluctance to formally jump into the 2016 fray, even as the political and journalistic bullets have started whizzing past. As recently as December, people close to her say, Clinton was still seriously considering not running in 2016 — at least that what she was telling friends. And she didn’t start reading the pile of campaign memos aides and would-be staffers had compiled for her until Christmas, when she started telling people she would probably take the plunge, according to several aides I spoke to.

 

She approached the press conference with a sense of even-tempered resignation, they told POLITICO, with little of the finger-pointing from staff, or the cold silences on conference calls that characterized her reactions to bad news in 2008. Mostly, she was ticked off that the email story overshadowed the release of a report, partly funded by the Clinton foundation, on the educational and economic progress of woman around the world (Tellingly, she was particularly annoyed that The New York Times, a paper she believes she has battled for decades, didn’t write about the “No Ceilings” report more extensively).

 

Yet for close observers of Clinton, Tuesday’s performance offered the glimmer of a new more conciliatory approach, and a little more ease in the campaign klieg lights.

 

“Looking back, it would’ve been better for me to use two separate phones and two email accounts,” she told reporters with a sheepish smile. “I thought using one device would be simpler, and obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way.”

 

Several people close to Clinton pointed out that those remarks — widely criticized for garbling the technical details in question — represented a change from her behavior in 2008, when Clinton was almost universally unwilling to admit fault for fear of being labeled indecisive (In the last campaign, it took her months, for instance, to concede that she had not actually flown into a live-fire zone during a trip to the Balkans in the 1990s).

 

But this week Clinton agreed, without complaint, when advisers suggested she concede that she made a mistake in using her private email account. To one veteran of Hillaryland, it was part of a welcome trend of humanizing contrition: Last summer she issued a semi-apology last summer for suggesting she was “dead broke” upon leaving the White House in 2000.

 

“Maybe things will be different this time when she finally gets in,” the person said. “Or maybe not.”

 

Hillary Clinton staffs up in New Hampshire (The Washington Post)

By Anne Gearan

March 13, 2015

Washington Post

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton has lined up three Democratic staffers credited with helping New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen (D) win re-election last fall to lead the emerging Clinton campaign operation in that state, Democratic officials said.

 

Clinton is expected to formally announce her presidential campaign next month, but top staff are already unofficially on the job in at least two states with early primaries, as well as in New York City where Clinton plans to house her campaign headquarters.

 

In New Hampshire, which has the nation’s second nominating contest, Democrats familiar with the hires said Clinton has selected Mike Vlacich, who ran Shaheen’s 2014 reelection, to be the state director. Harrell Kirstein, who was Shaheen’s 2014 communications director, will reprise that role for Clinton, and Shaheen political director Kari Thurman will be a senior political aide in New Hampshire, the Democrats said.

 

Democrats who confirmed the hires asked not to be identified because Clinton has not yet announced her candidacy.

 

The three New Hampshire hires were first reported Friday by the Associated Press, the Boston Globe and WMUR.

 

Shaheen’s victory was a bright spot in an otherwise bleak midterm year for Democrats. The race was closer than expected, with Brown taking 51 percent of the vote to former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown’s 48 percent.

 

Shaheen is close to Clinton and the two are longtime political allies. The governor expected to play a big role in Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign. Clinton campaigned for Shaheen, including a rally the weekend before the election that marked Clinton’s final stump appearance for the cycle.

 

In Iowa, which holds the first contest of 2016, Clinton’s campaign is expected to be headed by Matt Paul, a political adviser to former Gov. Tom Vilsack. Brenda Cole, a seasoned Iowa campaign aide, will also play a senior role, CNN reported Friday.

Clinton Takes Campaign Step With New Hampshire Hiring (The New York Times)

March 13, 2015

New York Times

 

CONCORD, N.H. — In a direct step toward a run for the presidency, Hillary Rodham Clinton is hiring political staff to guide her Democratic primary efforts in the early voting state of New Hampshire.

 

The team-in-waiting is made up of senior operatives in Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s successful re-election bid in 2014, when she survived a Republican wave that knocked out many other Democrats. Mike Vlacich, Shaheen’s campaign manager, will serve as Clinton’s state director, said a New Hampshire Democrat with knowledge of the move. The Democrat spoke on condition of anonymity because people will not be officially hired until Clinton announces a campaign.

 

Clinton is expected to announce her 2016 White House bid in the next few weeks, a race that presents few primary rivals at this point, in contrast to the crowded Republican contest.

 

The former secretary of state has been trying to dig out from a controversy over her use of a private email account and server after acknowledging days ago that she should have avoided relying exclusively on personal email while at the State Department. Word of her hirings in New Hampshire came as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, expected to be a leading contender for the Republican nomination, is in the state on his first visit in years.

 

In addition to Vlacich, Clinton is turning to Kari Thurman, Shaheen’s political director, and Harrell Kirstein, Shaheen’s campaign communications director, to serve in the same functions for her, the source said. Shaheen on Friday wished the three of them well “in their next venture,” praised their service to her and described Vlacich as “a dedicated public servant and a brilliant political strategist.”

 

Clinton won the 2008 New Hampshire primary and many prominent Democrats in the state are already backing her assumed campaign. Democrats recently told The Associated Press that she has begun retaining staff in the early voting states of Iowa and South Carolina as well.

 

Clinton returned to New Hampshire last fall for the first time since 2008, campaigning for Shaheen and Gov. Maggie Hassan before the 2014 midterm election. She and her husband, Bill, have maintained friendships and political alliances in New Hampshire that date to the early 1990s.

 

Vlacich emerged from the 2014 election as one of the most successful Democratic operatives in the country, helping Shaheen beat back a challenge from Republican Scott Brown, a former senator from Massachusetts, when Democrats lost competitive races across the country. Vlacich’s wife, Liz Purdy, is also a Clinton confidante, serving as a top adviser to Clinton’s 2008 bid in the state.

 

“Mike is the kind of person who can just pull activists together,” said Peter Burling, a former Democratic National Committeeman from New Hampshire. “I think that’s going to be an essential part of this next campaign, getting Democrats to come out and participate.”

 

Robby Mook, Clinton’s likely campaign manager, also has ties to Shaheen, serving as her 2008 campaign chief.

 

In Iowa, Clinton’s campaign is expected to be run by Matt Paul, a longtime adviser to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former Iowa governor. South Carolina Democrats have told AP that Clinton will again hire Democratic consulting firm Sunrise Communications, owned by Darrell Jackson, a state senator and pastor.

Clinton Said to be Close to Choosing Brooklyn for Campaign Headquarters (The New York Times)

By Maggie Haberman

March 13, 2015

New York Times

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s aides are close to locking in space for a campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, people familiar with the decision confirmed.

 

Mrs. Clinton’s aides are looking at the Metro Tech complex in Brooklyn Heights, two people with knowledge of the plans said. Other options, including one in the Long Island City section of Queens, fell through.

 

Mrs. Clinton’s team initially looked at space in White Plains, nearer to her home in Chappaqua. They then moved their focus to New York City, in part because the commute for many of her top advisers to Westchester County seemed prohibitive. Options in Manhattan were considered, but ultimately they chose Brooklyn. The selection was first reported by CNN.

 

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton did not immediately respond to an email.

 

Brooklyn is where the city’s progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio, used to work as a city councilman, and his administration tried to bring the 2016 Democratic National Convention to the borough (losing out to Philadelphia). But Brooklyn has also become almost as expensive to find affordable housing as Manhattan, something many potential staff members are surely worried about.

 

Hillary Clinton set on Brooklyn HQ, eyes April launch (CNN)

By Dan Merica and Jeff Zeleny

March 13, 2015

CNN

 

Washington (CNN)As Hillary Clinton’s expected April presidential launch nears, her already sizable campaign apparatus is moving into place and getting close to signing a lease for office space in Brooklyn.

 

Clinton and her team have recently coalesced around the New York borough, according to multiple sources, and are nearing a deal for office space at the MetroTech complex in Brooklyn Heights.

 

A lease has not been signed yet, according to a source with knowledge, but very serious negations are ongoing and the Clinton team settled on Brooklyn after eying other locations around New York City. She ran her 2008 presidential campaign from Virginia, just across the Potomac river from Washington.

 

The Clinton team is still preparing for an April announcement, several top Democratic aides, donors and supporters say, although the precise date still remains up for discussion. Dozens of campaign staffers, who have been sworn to secrecy after being notified that they were being hired, have been told to report to New York by late March.

 

Clinton has been conducting personal interviews with several potential advisers at her home in Chappaqua, while her top aides have been assembling a communications, fundraising, political and social media team.

 

Clinton supporters see a number of benefits in Brooklyn, including ease of attracting talent to the New York area and the fact that it’s known for ethnic and socio-economic diversity.

 

On the downside, some Clinton supporters have expressed concern with being closely associated with New York City, and in particular Wall Street, which is only two subway stops away.

 

The campaign headquarters also creates a logistical challenge for staffers in a city of high rents. The campaign is asking supporters in New York if anyone who can open their doors and take in young workers.

 

The email controversy that has engulfed the Clinton operation for nearly two weeks did not accelerate the timing of her presidential announcement, several top Democrats said, but it did underscore the need for a full-scale campaign apparatus to deal with the incoming criticism.

 

“I think folks are realizing now more than ever that they need to announce earlier rather than later,” a source with knowledge told CNN. “The whole argument that she is left undefended without an official apparatus around her just became magnified 100 times over with this email issue.”

 

The scale and scope of the campaign will ultimately reach into the hundreds, but aides said it would grow gradually.

 

A larger grassroots operation is planned for Iowa, site of the first-in-the nation caucuses, where campaign workers will train over the next several months before being dispatched to battleground states. New Hampshire, home of the first Democratic primary, will also be used as a training ground for field and political staffers.

 

While Clinton isn’t expecting an aggressive Democratic primary contest, advisers said they realized they have little time to waste and are approaching the race as though they already have a dozen challengers -- namely the prospective Republican candidates who are trying to distinguish themselves by forcefully criticizing Clinton.

 

Because of that undisputed frontrunner status, though, Clinton and her team have had their pick of top talent around the country without having to fight with other campaigns.

 

In New Hampshire, the nascent presidential campaign plans to hire three advisers to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s reelection bid in 2014 to lead Clinton’s New Hampshire operation, according to Granite State Democrats.

 

Mike Vlacich, a longtime New Hampshire operative, will be Clinton’s state director, Kari Thurman, the Shaheen campaign’s political director, will fill the same role for Clinton, and Harrell Kirstein, the Shaheen campaign’s communications director, will run Clinton’s communications shop.

 

The all-but-announced campaign has also tapped Iowa leadership.

 

Matt Paul, a longtime adviser to former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, will lead the Clinton’s Hawkeye operation. Paul, who currently serves as a top adviser to Vilask at the department of Agriculture, is returning to Iowa for the job and is expected to place in place by the end of the month, according to Democrats in the state.

 

Joining Paul in Iowa will be Brenda Cole, a longtime Iowa operative, and Lily Adams, currently the deputy communications director at the Democratic National Committee, according to Democrats in the state. Adams will runs Clinton’s communications shop in the Hawkeye State and Cole will be her political director.

 

As CNN reported on Thursday, Clinton has started to line up a press operation, too, an effort that became a priority when the former secretary of state was seemingly left undefended during a recent controversy over her exclusive use of a private email system.

 

Jeb Bush, a Clinton Critic, Took Time Releasing His Own Emails (The New York Times)

By Michael Barbaro

March 14, 2015

The New York Times

 

Jeb Bush has rebuked Hillary Rodham Clinton for her use of a private email account as secretary of state, holding up his own conduct as an example of transparency in government.

But it took Mr. Bush seven years after leaving office to fully comply with a Florida public records statute requiring him to turn over emails he sent and received as governor, according to records released Friday.

Mr. Bush delivered the latest batch of 25,000 emails in May 2014, seven and a half years after leaving the Statehouse and just as he started to contemplate a potential run for the White House, according to a newly disclosed letter written by his lawyer.

A Florida statute governing the preservation of public records requires elected officials, including the governor, to turn over records pertaining to official business “at the expiration of his or her term of office.”

“If they’ve been adding to it, it’s a technical violation of the law,” said Barbara A. Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group in Florida that advocates access to government information.

She added, “The law clearly says you’re supposed to turn everything over at the end of your term in office.”

Aides to Mr. Bush, an avid user of email, said they had provided many of his messages to his successor’s office as they were being reviewed for inclusion in the state archives, a process that dragged on for years because of the large volume.

“At the conclusion of Gov. Bush’s time in office, aides worked with the Executive Office of the Governor to continue to fulfill public records requests, as well as provide a full set of his official emails to the state for historical and archival purposes,” Kristy Campbell, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bush, said in a written statement.

Mr. Bush on Friday offered no detailed explanation for the seven-year delay in completing the search for his emails. Mr. Bush used a private email address, jeb@jeb.org, throughout his eight-year term as governor and encouraged constituents to write to him.

After it was revealed that Mrs. Clinton had relied exclusively on a private email account during her time as secretary of state, raising questions about her compliance with public records rules, Mr. Bush’s aides gleefully pointed to their handling of electronic correspondence as a model.

Mr. Bush, they recalled, had publicly advertised his personal email address and had promptly released tens of thousands of the emails to the public on a website.

“Transparency matters,” Mr. Bush wrote in a message on Twitter. Mrs. Clinton’s “emails should be released.”

The newly disclosed documents, made available after a request from The New York Times on Friday afternoon, suggest that Mr. Bush delivered his emails to state archives in several waves starting in 2007. New batches arrived in 2009, 2010 and 2011 as Mr. Bush and his aides reviewed whether they were subject to disclosure.

But in 2014, they discovered a new set of 25,000 emails, which represents about 9 percent of the 280,000 emails that he has turned over to the state from his private account. Until then, public records requests seeking emails to or from Mr. Bush would not have captured those messages, Ms. Petersen said.

In a letter explaining the delay, a lawyer for Mr. Bush, Raquel A. Rodriguez, wrote that the new messages were discovered when “we recently reviewed Gov. Bush’s records and came across some additional email messages that may be public records.” The letter did not elaborate on where or how the messages were found.

Ms. Petersen said she gave Mr. Bush credit for turning over emails as he found them but said the yearslong delay was curious.

“I can see how it might take six months or so, a year maybe to locate all these records,” she said. “But we are talking, what now, seven years?”

 

Jeb Bush: I’m No Hillary Clinton When it Comes to Email (ABC News)

By Meghan Keneally

March 14, 2015

ABC News

 

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush dedicated his return to New Hampshire after a 15-year-long absence to defining himself outside of his family’s shadow and distancing himself from any similarities to another likely presidential candidate with legacy ties: Hillary Clinton.

 

Speaking after a business roundtable with the Nashua Chamber of Commerce on Friday, Bush said that his use of a private email server was “totally different” than that of the former Secretary of State, adding that he had been “totally transparent” about his communication habits.

 

While Clinton said this week that she used a private account out of “convenience” and later went through a “thorough process” to deliver her work-related messages to the State Department, Bush said he regularly complied with Freedom of Information Act requests during his tenure as governor and later posted a trove of thousands of emails online.

 

“I had a Blackberry. It was part of my official portrait for crying out loud,” he said Friday. “There was nothing to hide.”

 

“We complied with the law and … long before Mrs. Clinton’s issues came up, we made them public for you to see, so it’s totally different,” he said.

 

Though Bush, who left the governor’s mansion in 2007, maintained that his office has been dedicated to being “totally transparent” for years, a trove of his emails from his term were only handed over last summer, according to American Bridge, a liberal super PAC.

 

American Bridge released a report Saturday saying the Florida Department of State confirmed that an undisclosed amount of emails concerning “policy discussion” from 2002 to 2003 were not sent to the Florida State Archives until June of last year. That would give him, like Clinton, years where he had access to his personal email server but the government did not.

 

Though Bush declined to comment on what the scandal may mean for Clinton, he said he wasn’t surprised that her team would suggest that his actions were similar to hers.

 

“That’s standard operating procedure for them,” he said of the allegations.

 

Later Friday, after Bush left his first public event in Hudson and stopped at a closed-door fundraiser, the former governor attended a house party hosted by former New Hampshire GOP Chairman Fergus Cullen, where he was happier to talk about his connections to some other former White House residents.

 

After working his way through the jammed dining and living rooms of the Cullens, Bush talked about how his family members have defined him for many years, saying how he’s long-been known as “George’s boy, or Barbara’s boy, or George’s brother.”

 

That wasn’t a problem for some in the hundred-strong crowd, including Brad Ludington, an endodontist who said that he had been waiting more than a decade to shake Bush’s hand.

 

“The last two people I shook the hands of became president,” Ludington said of Bush’s father and brother.

 

Ludington said he was excited to hear the former governor speak, and though he liked the other Bush politicians, they were “totally different people.”

 

Bush is one of a handful of likely 2016 presidential candidates to sweep the Granite State this week. Former Texas governor Rick Perry met voters at a series of smaller events in VFW halls upstate Friday, while Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will headline a training session for volunteers and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has several events scheduled for Sunday.

 

While Perry found support in New Hampshire during the 2012 primaries, some state activists appear to be making an effort to change the tenor of the upcoming primary politicking. On Friday night, Cullen introduced Bush by taking a swipe at the earlier field, saying they “didn’t have enough serious, credible candidates” in 2012.

 

“Governor Bush would be a one-person antidote to that problem,” Cullen said.

 

Bush repeatedly shied away from the conclusion that he is formally running for president. When asked about how he would address the spread of ISIS, Bush said that he would only answer the question as a third-person hypothetical because he is only “considering the possibility of running.”

 

But that’s enough for supporters. Before the potential candidate even started addressing the group at the house party, Ludington felt that he had done his part to get another Bush in the White House.

 

“I gave him my lucky handshake,” he said.

Hillary Clinton’s secret mess; The e-mail saga is a reminder that the Clintons rarely play by the same rules as everyone else. (The Washington Post)

By Kathleen Parker

March 14, 2015

The Washington Post

 

On March 2, the story broke that Hillary Clinton had possibly violated e-mail regulations while secretary of state.

You could almost hear the collective gasp in Washington: Oh, no, here we go again.

But the next evening, Clinton was feted at the Emily’s List 30th-anniversary gala dinner as though nothing had happened. Only the trumpets were missing from what felt like her coronation as the Democratic presidential nominee and, possibly, the next president of the United States.

Fast-forward a dozen days and Clinton’s position in the presidential sweepstakes seems less assured, her inevitability not so inevitable.

The most perplexing question isn’t about the e-mails themselves but why she put everything at risk over such a small detail, declining to segregate her personal and business e-mail.

There can only be one answer, and it isn’t “convenience,” as Clinton claims. Think of another word that begins with the letter “C”: control.

Clinton claims she opted for the convenience of one cellphone and a personal server — rather than use a government-issued phone for business and another device for personal matters. Too much stuff to lug around?

So the whole question of her conduct as secretary of state boils down to a few ounces of electronic equipment. Hate to say it, but only a woman could come up with such an excuse. It’s all about the purse.

Plainly, Clinton didn’t want anyone snooping around her virtual file cabinet. Who does? But this isn’t the point. When you are secretary of state and are mulling a run for president, you steer clear of anything and anyone remotely questionable. No one should know this better.

Questions that merit serious consideration include whether the Clinton server was secure. Clinton insists that it was because her New York home, where the server lives, is protected by the Secret Service. Given the optional sobriety of agents these days, this is less than reassuring. Then, too, hacking doesn’t require on-site handling.

Here’s the real muddle for Clinton. Whether her server suffered no breaches — and whether there’s nothing in those 32,000 deleted personal e-mails — matters little. In politics, you’re guilty as perceived. It looks bad.

Most likely this error (rather than crime) is a function of remoteness more than dishonesty. The Clintons have been around so long, they are the essence of bubble life. Removed from the hubbub of ordinary existence — escorted, driven, valeted, catered to, styled, fluffed and obeyed — being Clinton means never having to hear the word “no.” It must be easy to forget that you have to live by the same rules as everyone else.

This is a concept the Clintons have never fully accepted. One can understand, given their extended public life — and the hyper-scrutiny under which they live — that they might seek to erect high walls around their private lives. Fame and celebrity breed not just insularity but also paranoia.

Maybe there’s nothing of interest in those personal e-mails, but how would we know? Team Clinton handpicked the “personals” and now they’re deleted, thus creating the impression that she is hiding something. The Clintons always seem to be hiding something. Not so much holding their cards close to the chest as kicking the body back behind the dust ruffle.

Even though investigations into every “gate” associated with them in the past — Travelgate, Filegate, Troopergate, you-name-it-gate — failed to produce much more than a blue dress, there seemed to be something not quite right. And now there’s this. Not illegal per se but not quite right.

Clinton says she figured that, because all her communications to State Department staff went to the dot-gov server, they automatically would have gone into storage as required. True, but what about the rest? What’s in those deleted e-mails? Don’t we imagine that personal and business often overlap in the Clinton Rolodex?

Adding to the suspicion is that the 55,000 pages of e-mails that Clinton did turn over to the State Department surfaced only after the House select committee investigating Benghazi requested her correspondence about the attack. Would she have turned them over anyway?

Maybe. Still and again, it doesn’t look good. And the entire mess serves as a reminder of a movie we’ve seen before — and it wasn’t so great the first time. Whether this episode proves fatal remains to be seen, but we won’t hear the end of it until every note of condolence, yoga date and wedding plan is known to someone other than Hillary.

Public’s right to know lost in email; State Dept. fails to practice the transparency it preaches  (Boston Herald)

By Rachelle Cohen

March 13, 2015

Boston Herald

 

Each year the U.S. State Department hosts thousands of public officials from around the world under its International Visitor Leadership Program. It is one of the better things our government does, bringing the best and the brightest from distant lands — public officials, judges, journalists — and giving them a taste of how we operate here.

I know this because several times a year I get to host such groups at the Herald where the topic du jour is usually transparency — government transparency — everything from the cameras and Tweets from inside the Aaron Hernandez trial to the lengthy and detailed “Statement of Financial Interests” filed by every high-ranking state and local official, to the public payrolls we put up on our website. The latter is always a crowd pleaser — especially if we can look up the salary of some state official who might be in the room at the time.

For government officials from the Ukraine, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, or journalists from Latin America or the Middle East this is eye-opening stuff — scary too, but they are universally quick to realize that transparency is at the heart of preventing the kind of corruption that eats away at public trust.

Many of their countries are right at that critical juncture — knowing where they need to be, but measuring progress in inches.

Now make no mistake, I always include a segment on how less than perfect we as a nation are, and how journalists are constantly fighting to push the envelope to keep government honest and open.

So what the hell do I tell them now? How do I explain Hillary Rodham Clinton and her private email server and her deletion of more than half of the emails she sent or received during her four years as secretary of state?

And there is the delicious irony of the State Department — which brings all of these smart up-and-coming officials here to worship at the American altar of transparency — now finding itself being sued by The Associated Press to force the release of Clinton’s government emails.

The AP announced this week it was filing the suit after years of filing fruitless requests under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act — including at least one request that dates back five years and others pending since the summer of 2013.

The FOIA requests sought Clinton’s emails regarding the Osama bin Laden raid and National Security Agency surveillance practices and correspondence between Clinton and top aides who might be expected to be part of a future presidential campaign, such as Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

“State’s failure to ensure that Secretary Clinton’s government emails were retained and preserved by the agency, and its failure to timely seek out and search those emails in response to AP’s requests, indicate at the very least that State has not engaged in the diligent, good-faith search that FOIA requires,” the AP suit says.

And even as Clinton herself was trying to tap dance around the possible destruction of government documents (in the all-too-likely event that some of those 30,000 “private” emails weren’t about Chelsea’s wedding or yoga routines at all), the inspector general for the department released his own well-timed report this week.

In fact the IG found that of more than a billion emails sent in 2011, State Department employees created only 61,156 official “record emails” that would be preserved in the system. In 2013 that figure was down to 41,749.

“Some employees do not create record emails because they do not want to make the email available in searches or fear that this availability would inhibit debate about pending decisions,” the IG wrote.

Really? Who would have guessed?

So if Hillary Clinton set the standard, the rest of the crew at State was all too eager to follow her lead.

Guess it’s true what they say about the fish rotting from the head the down.

Rachelle Cohen is editor of the editorial pages.

 

Hillary Clinton’s Questionable Process for Sorting Work Emails (The Atlantic)

By Conor Friedersdorf

March 13, 2015

The Atlantic

 

Hillary Clinton asked the public to trust her during a recent press conference at the United Nations, when she stated that she has already complied with transparency laws by turning over all public records she generated as Secretary of State.

 

She had no business making that claim. A Time magazine report about the process used to identify public records in her possession shows that she cannot possibly know if she is in compliance with the law. And juxtaposing her process with the words used in her press conference shows her core claim to be misleading. 

 

Unless she can disprove the story, her credibility can only suffer from the comparison.

 

* * *

 

To understand the impression Hillary Clinton created at her press conference, before additional facts were available, it is best to begin with her words. What follows are the parts of the event where she characterized the emails she has turned over.

 

She began:

 

... after I left office, the State Department asked former secretaries of state for our assistance in providing copies of work-related emails from our personal accounts. I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related, which totalled roughly 55,000 printed pages, even though I knew that the State Department already had the vast majority of them. We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails and deliver them to the State Department.

A reporter at the press conference followed up, asking, “Can you explain how you decided which of the personal e-mails to get rid of, how you got rid of them and when? And how you’ll respond to questions about you being the arbiter of what you release?”

 

Her reply:

 

In going through the e-mails, there were over 60,000 in total, sent and received. About half were work-related and went to the State Department and about half were personal that were not in any way related to my work. I had no reason to save them, but that was my decision because the federal guidelines are clear and the State Department request was clear. For any government employee, it is that government employee’s responsibility to determine what’s personal and what’s work-related. I am very confident of the process that we conducted and the e-mails that were produced.

Later still, she added, “I have absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department.”

 

And she said this:

 

... my direction to conduct the thorough investigation was to err on the side of providing anything that could be possibly viewed as work related. That doesn’t mean they will be by the State Department once the State Department goes through them, but out of an abundance of caution and care, you know, we wanted to send that message unequivocally. That is the responsibility of the individual and I have fulfilled that responsibility, and I have no doubt that we have done exactly what we should have done. When the search was conducted, we were asking that any email be identified and preserved that could potentially be federal records, and that’s exactly what we did ... I trust the American people to make their decisions about political and public matters. And I feel that I’ve taken unprecedented steps to provide these work-related emails.

To review, she asserted 1) a thorough investigation that included “going through” roughly 60,000 emails; 2) a standard of erring on the side of disclosing “anything” that could “possibly” be viewed as work related; 3) a “thorough” process robust enough to warrant “absolute confidence” in its results; 4) a process to turn over emails that could plausibly be characterized as “unprecedented.”

 

Nearly everyone listening to these assurances came away with the impression that a person or team of people went through those 60,000+ emails and sorted them into two categories: work or personal. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart mocked the notion that sorting through tens of thousands of emails was more “convenient” than maintaining both work and personal email accounts. Most criticism of the approach focused on the fact that Hillary Clinton confidantes, rather than neutral arbiters, were making the judgment calls about these 60,000+ emails.

 

But it turns out that no one was “going through” each email to sort work from personal correspondence or to error on the side of disclosure when the line was blurry.  

 

According to David Von Drehle of Time, the process used was actually as follows:

 

She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department—spurred by the congressional investigation—asked her to do so.

 

And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache—31,830 emails—did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be “private, personal records.”

The idea that such a process could produce “absolute confidence” that all public records were identified is as curious as the notion that Bill Clinton never inhaled.

 

Here is a made up email to illustrate the point:

 

To: Bill Clinton

 

From: Hillary Clinton

 

Subject: Ugh

 

Assume you saw the latest. This could blow up in our faces if we don’t get out in front of it ... and frankly, the WH isn’t helping matters much. I’m tempted to reverse course but wonder if it would affect your latest ask. What does SB think?

A keyword search would not flag messages where (for example) official business is rendered in pronouns, “White House” is rendered as an abbreviation, and “Sidney Blumenthal” is rendered in shorthand. Or consider an email that concerns Benghazi, but that was typed on a smart phone in a moment of distraction, causing an unintententional misspelling: “Benhgazi.” A key-word search would miss that email. The process described would label it a “private, personal record.”

 

As for creating a list of names, that would doubtless flag a lot of relevant work emails, but no busy professional remembers the name of every person who emails them for work over a multi-year period encompassing tens of thousands of messages.

 

And those problems apply even if we assume that Team Clinton made an earnest effort to use search terms that would flag all relevant emails, while it could be the case that they knew what they hoped to hide and crafted the search accordingly. Had the technology existed in an earlier era Richard Nixon’s attorneys presumably wouldn’t have included “Watergate” or “burglary” in the search terms. 

 

This revelation ought to harm Hillary Clinton insofar as it shows her earlier statements to be misleading. It also suggests what question she ought to be asked next: What list of names and key words were included in the email-archive search? It’s easy to imagine search terms that would suggest an earnest effort at identification, the shortcomings of the method notwithstanding, and equally easy to imagine search terms so self-evidently inadequate or with such glaring omissions that, like the private server itself, they suggest that official business was being hidden.

 

Even if Hillary Clinton’s server was wiped clean and her email archive is unrecoverable, she can further reveal the specific details of her inadequate process.

 

Will she?

Judge Orders State Dept. to Release Records From Clinton Trips  (The New York Times)

By Amy Chozick

March 13, 2015

The New York Times

 

A federal judge on Friday ruled on behalf of Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group, in its lawsuit against the State Department for documents related to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure there.

Judge Gladys Kessler of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the State Department to produce passenger manifests from 47 overseas trips that Mrs. Clinton made as secretary of state. Citizens United requested the manifests last July through a Freedom of Information Act Request.

The State Department, the judge wrote, must release the first batch of records by April 3, with more being released every two weeks; all the documents must be given to the group no later than Aug. 1.

The group requested the flight manifests to examine whether Clinton Foundation donors had accompanied Mrs. Clinton on State Department trips.

“Clearly, the State Department is not getting the benefit of the doubt from judges anymore,” David N. Bossie, president of Citizens United. said Friday.

A State Department spokeswomen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Citizens United has made 18 FOIA requests for information, none of which have not been fulfilled. The group said it planned to file a lawsuit next week that would seek to gain access to documents that show any existing correspondence between senior State Department officials and donors to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Requests for public records requests have been complicated or made impossible because of Mrs. Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email address while she was at the State Department. The Associated Press filed a lawsuit this week against the State Department to force the release of outstanding documents requested through FOIA.

Citizens United has a history of litigation involving projects designed to portray Mrs. Clinton in a negative light. A lawsuit the group brought against the Federal Election Commission over its 2008 anti-Clinton documentary, “Hillary: The Movie,” reached the Supreme Court and led to a 2010 decision that overhauled campaign finance rules.

Is Hillary Clinton Vulnerable? (The Wall Street Journal)

By James Taranto

March 13, 2015

The Wall Street Journal

 

More details are emerging about Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and they don’t look good from either a transparency or security standpoint. Time reports on how she determined which emails to print out for the State Department:

For more than a year after she left office in 2013, she did not transfer work-related email from her private account to the State Department. She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department—spurred by the congressional investigation—asked her to do so. And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, [Mrs.] Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache—31,830 emails—did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be “private, personal records.”

In Tuesday’s press conference Mrs. Clinton claimed to have undertaken “a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails” and to have “provided [printouts of] all my emails that could possibly be work-related.” If Time’s account is accurate, the process was not thorough, and the claim that the printouts included all work-related emails is almost certainly untrue. The search terms the lawyers employed were narrow enough to exclude more than half (51.1%) of all the emails on the server. Are we supposed to believe the terms were also broad enough to include every single email that involved official business?

Moreover, if Time’s account of the lawyers’ method is comprehensive, then they made no effort to shield from disclosure those personal emails that happened to include the selected keywords. Given Mrs. Clinton’s penchant for privacy, does that seem likely? One wonders if perhaps there was a second set of search terms flagging emails to be withheld—and, since she said she “chose not to keep” them, destroyed.

“Hillary Clinton Is More Vulnerable in 2016 Than You Think” read a New York Times headline early this week. The article was an analysis of her approval and disapproval ratings in opinion surveys, but her use of a private server to conduct sensitive official business raises the prospect of another kind of vulnerability—questions even Vox.com raised after the press conference in a piece titled “Clinton Says She Had No Email Security Breaches. But She Doesn’t Know That.”

At the press conference, the former secretary laughably claimed that the server was secure because “it was on property guarded by the Secret Service.” Maybe she’s been watching “House of Cards,” whose second season has a hacking subplot that involves obtaining physical access to a server farm. But of course that’s not how hackers typically operate in the real virtual world.

In a Sunday article for GeekWire.com, Christopher Budd, a specialist in both computer security and public relations, argues that Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private server while secretary of state may “represent one of the most serious breaches in data handling that we’ve ever heard of.” He lists three reasons:

1. The Secretary of State is a very “high value target” from the standpoint of nation-state threat actors. The President, Secretary of Defense and the head of the CIA would also qualify in this top tier. These individuals handle the most important, most sensitive, most dangerous and therefore most interesting information to foreign intelligence.

2. Nation-state threat actors represent the top of the food chain in terms of adversaries in information security. Nation-states can bring the most talent and resources to bear in this arena. For all the worry about cybercriminals and terrorists, everyone in information security looks at nation-state threat actors as the most advanced and sophisticated threat to defend against.

3. Take #1 and #2 together and you have a situation where the very high value targets are threatened by the most advanced and sophisticated offensive information security capabilities out there. Put another way, the best of the best are gunning for those people to get their information.

The third point is critical: if the best of the best are after your information, you need the best of your best protecting it. And there is simply no way that a “homebrew” server is EVER going to have the security and resources appropriate to defend it adequately.

Since Budd wrote, experts and reporters have fleshed out some of these concerns. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that according to Venafi, an Internet security company, “the Clinton server was encrypting data it sent and received as of March 29, 2009.” But “during the first two months of her tenure . . . it doesn’t appear that Mrs. Clinton’s email had such protections.”

In a Wednesday blog post, Venafi’s vice president for security strategy and threat intelligence, Kevin Bocek, explains what this means: “During the first 3 months of Secretary Clinton’s term in office, web browser, smartphone, and tablet communications would not have been encrypted. Attackers could have eavesdropped on communications. As well, the server would not have been uniquely identified as being clintonemail.com and therefore could have been spoofed—allowing attackers to more easily trick an unsuspecting user of the site to hand over their [sic] username and password or other sensitive information.”

Even the belated security measures might not have been enough, Bocek explains:

Obtaining the cryptographic key and digital certificate for clintonemail.com would be an important step for attackers seeking to compromise Secretary of State Clinton or others [who] might access the server. With them, bad guys could masquerade as the legitimate site or decrypt what was thought to be private communications. As a standalone Microsoft Windows Server, the site is very vulnerable. In 2013, over 800 trojans were known to steal keys and certificates—and that number has swelled since then. The use of digital certificates on clintonemail.com provides users with the confidence that they are connecting to the real site and communications cannot be inspected. But when on government networks, anyone accessing the site and depending on the certificate needs to be highly suspicious. The site has received tremendous attention and its contents and certificate are likely targets for compromise and misuse.

Fox’s James Rosen reports that “a determined band of hackers, IT bloggers, and systems analysts have trained their specialized talents and state-of-the-art software on clintonemail.com . . . and uncovered serious lapses in security, according to data shared with Fox News”:

Perhaps most concerning, private analysts determined that clintonemail.com has been running an older model of Microsoft Internet Information Services, or IIS—specifically version 7.5, which has been documented to leave users exposed on multiple fronts. The website CVEDetails.com, which bills itself as “the ultimate security vulnerability datasource,” is awash with descriptions of serious security vulnerabilities associated with version 7.5, including “memory corruption,” “password disclosure vulnerability,” and the enabling of “remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service.”

The cyberlab technician who discovered the Clintons’ use of version 7.5 marveled at “the vulnerabilities the Clintons are ignoring” in an email to Fox News. “This is a big deal and just the thing real-world hackers look for in a target and will exploit to the max,” the source said.

“Several of these vulnerabilities have been known since 2010 and yet HRC is running official State comms through it.”

Mrs. Clinton insisted during her press conference that “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.” Even if true, there are three reasons that is not reassuring.

First, as the Journal notes in a Wednesday editorial, “emails between a Secretary of State and others in government don’t have to be classified to be valuable to foreign hackers.” Second, as the Journal points out in a Thursday editorial, “Mrs. Clinton didn’t say she never received classified information via email.”

Third, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy argues at National Review Online, it depends on what the meaning of “material” is:

In the government, classified documents are maintained on separate, super-highly secured systems. Yes, if security gets lax or you have a determined Ed Snowden type with sufficient expertise, the protections can be defeated. But in general, Mrs. Clinton would not have been able to access classified documents even from a .gov account, much less from her private account—she’d need to use the classified system. In fact, many government officials with security clearances read “hard copies” of classified documents in facilities designed for that purpose rather than accessing them on computers.

That said, there are two pertinent caveats. First, since we’re dealing with Clintonian parsing here, we must consider the distinction between classified documents and classified information—the latter being what is laid out in the former. It is not enough for a government official with a top-secret clearance to refrain from storing classified documents on private e-mail; the official is also forbidden to discuss the information contained in those documents.

The fact that Mrs. Clinton says she did not store classified documents on her private server, which is very likely true, does not discount the distinct possibility that she discussed classified matters in private e-mails. We would not be able to judge that absent reviewing the e-mails. If any of the 31,830 withheld e-mails from the private, non-secure system—involving America’s top diplomat who was in constant discussions with other important diplomats, top military and national-security officials, her trusted advisers, and even the president of the United States—touched on classified matters, that could land Mrs. Clinton in very hot legal water. It would be a powerful incentive to hit the “delete” key.

A frequent complaint from journalists and other advocates of government transparency is that agencies dealing with national security classify far too much material. “I would assume that more than 50 percent of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified,” a “former senior State Department official who served before the Obama administration” tells the New York Times. “Was every single email of the secretary of state completely unclassified? Maybe, but it’s hard to imagine.” (The official requested and was granted anonymity “because he did not want to seem ungracious to Mrs. Clinton.”)

In light of all this, it’s fair to say Mrs. Clinton’s press conference raised more questions than it answered. About the only thing we know for sure is that she is determined “the server will remain private.”

 

How Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama Became Media Control Freaks (Daily Beast)

By Lloyd Grove

March 13, 2015

Daily Beast

 

mbattled former secretary of state Hillary Clinton can console herself with the knowledge that she’s not alone.

 

The presumptive presidential candidate and email deleter—whose apparent reluctance to release public records and documents prompted the Associated Press to sue the State Department this week—is by no means unique in her wish to starve the insatiable media, or at least restrict ravenous reporters to a bland diet of happy news.       

 

It has been the desire of politicians and government agencies through history to manipulate the Fourth Estate into publishing their press releases and ignoring their missteps and scandals. Technological advances, meanwhile, have cut both ways, allowing not only instantaneous public distribution of official government spin but also massive leaks of political and national security secrets, digitally downloaded from cyberspace.        

 

 “The basic narrative [of the latest Clinton controversy] is consistent with what we have seen from the Pentagon Papers through Watergate to the fundamental tension between the media and the political establishment,” said Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs and former Washington bureau chief of CNN.

 

“It centers on secrecy and any suggestion of a cover-up. And what technology has changed is there is more demand for more information, more rapidly and more transparently shared. So that creates a collision course between the media and, in this case, Hillary Clinton.”

 

President Barack Obama’s minions, obsessed with preventing unauthorized disclosures, have turned this understandable impulse into an overpowering imperative, say journalism advocates who deal with them daily.         

 

“These folks are control freaks,” said longtime media lawyer Lucy Dalglish, dean of the University of Maryland’s Phillip Merrill College of Journalism and former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “To a certain degree, I can understand when it comes to sensitive information that can just be put on a thumb drive and flown to Russia. That’s scary, and they do need those controls. But that doesn’t mean you have to control all access.”       

 

Dalglish was among the First Amendment advocates who attended a quarrelsome high-level meeting in November 2013 between President Obama’s communications staff, led by then-White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, and aggrieved and angry representatives of the White House press corps.       

 

“The topic of that particular meeting at the White House was, ‘You’re not allowing independent photography; you only allow [Obama’s personal photographer] Pete Souza to take pictures. This is insane!’” Dalglish recalled.

 

“And they started going into their song and dance. ‘We’re the most transparent White House in history!’ ‘We post things on Facebook!’ ‘You don’t want us to have Facebook. You don’t want us to have Twitter and Instagram. Isn’t that hypocritical?’”       

 

Dalglish continued: “Our response was ‘Hold it! Time out! You guys can blog. You guys can tweet. You guys can post photos. Good for you! Go do it. God bless. But it’s not the same thing as journalism. A series of photos you posted from Pete Souza are not the same as photos shot by independent professionals. And the fact that you don’t recognize that is troubling.’ Carney didn’t seem to understand.”

 

Amazed that Carney, a former Time magazine Washington bureau chief, would argue that White House-approved and edited photos were just as valid journalistically as those taken for independent news organizations—”Don’t get me started,” Dalglish said—she could barely believe her ears.    

 

Carney remembers the encounter somewhat differently. “I’ve never said, and do not believe, that official photos are journalistically equivalent to photos take by independent photo journalists,” he emailed The Daily Beast. “What I did say, and believe, is that official photos have value, and that it’s a good thing to give the public access to them.”       

 

The former White House press secretary acknowledged, however, that technology has inevitably placed the administration’s PR juggernaut in direct competition with news outlets.

 

“There were issues of access, which was something we could address and improve,” he emailed. “And there were issues of distribution, which were more difficult. Back in the 1980s, say, the official White House photographers took photos, decided which ones to distribute, developed them and then physically handed them out in the press room. The wires, the papers and the networks got to decide which, if any, the public would get to see.”

 

Carney continued: “The Internet has changed that. The early part of the process is the same now as it was then, but now the images are digitized and distribution is direct. The White House can simply post official photos online. More people get to see them, and see them sooner. I think that’s a good thing. But it doesn’t replace independent photography, and neither I nor anyone I worked with believed that it should or could.”        

 

Photography aside, however, Dalglish listed a series of new limits demonstrating that the Obama administration’s relationship with the media is even more restrictive—arguably paranoid—than that of George W. Bush, hardly known as a press-friendly president.       

 

“For instance, journalists can’t talk without pre-approval to any of the scientists at a scientific agency, whether it be NASA, the National Institutes of Health or the National Weather Service,” she said. “They’re cracking down on their experts, not allowing their actual scientists to speak to reporters. They make you go through ‘information specialists’ who translate the scientists for you. I’m sorry, but that’s insulting, unnecessary, and exhibits the mindset of a terrified control freak.”       

 

In another instance, Dalglish said members of the intelligence community are required to file reports on even their most casual encounters with University of Maryland professor Dana Priest, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post reporter who specializes in national security issues.       

 

“Every time they see her they have to report it,” Dalglish said. “She was telling me that there was a meeting of the crew team of her daughter’s school, and there was a parent, the father of another kid, who works for one of the intelligence agencies. And he just came up to her and said, ‘Just so you know, every time I see you, I have to report that I saw you. I’m not trying to be rude, but they’re watching.’ “ Priest didn’t respond to email and voicemail messages from The Daily Beast.       

 

Still, law professor Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago—who has studied the institutional tensions between the media and government secret-keepers—defended the intelligence community’s legitimate interests in holding the press at arm’s length.       

 

Citing the massive and potentially harmful disclosures of classified material—by Chelsea Manning to Wikileaks and by Edward Snowden to The Guardian and other outlets—Stone said there’s little doubt that the resulting news stories damaged national security.       

 

“The people in the intelligence community see the media as self-interested and superficial, reckless with information and a genuine danger to the nation, who do not understand what they’re doing, and, frankly, don’t care,” said Stone, who interviewed both spies and reporters as a member of the President’s Review Group on NSA Surveillance.

 

“The journalists tend to see the people in the intelligence community as being much more interested in protecting themselves from criticism than they are in allowing the public to be informed on matters on which the public should be informed. The truth is, they’re both right.”        

 

The Associated Press’s lawsuit to obtain emails, calendars, phone logs and other material from Hillary Clinton’s four years at the State Department is the latest battleground of these opposing attitudes.

 

The central clearing house of U.S. diplomacy—which takes an average of 450 days to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, according to a 2012 inspector general’s report—is by far the worst performer of any government agency. Even the CIA is seven times faster in responding, and the Treasury Department is even quicker—30 times faster than State. 

 

AP General Counsel Karen Kaiser filed the current lawsuit on behalf of the non-profit wire service—which represents 1,700 member news outlets—after one of the AP’s Clinton-related FOIAs languished for five years at the State Department without a response.

 

She said it’s possible that after negotiations with the Justice Department’s civil division there could be arguments before a federal judge, and some of the requested documents could be forthcoming within a few months.

 

At which point, Hillary Clinton—likely to be in smack-dab in the middle of her campaign for the Democratic nomination—will either be facing a pesky new scandal or a collective media yawn.

 

Here’s what a real Democratic presidential primary might look like (The Washington Post)

By Greg Sargent

March 13, 2015

Washington Post

 

The other day, I noted that it might be time to start hoping for a real Democratic presidential primary. Not solely because Hillary Clinton’s handling of the email mess shows she might benefit from being challenged, but also because there are real differences among Democrats that would benefit from an airing.

 

Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who has been talking about challenging Hillary Clinton from the left, has given an interview to Salon’s Joan Walsh that provides a preliminary glimpse into what such an intra-Dem debate might look like.

 

O’Malley seems to throw his lot in with what is widely being called the “Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party.” The divide on economic policy between the Warren-ites and the more moderate Democrats tends to be exaggerated — there’s probably more consensus on these matters among Democrats than there has been in many years — but there are real differences, and they matter.

 

For instance, O’Malley comes out for expanding Social Security (Obama has flirted with cutting it), arguing: “Right now we’re facing a looming retirement crisis in our country. People who used to have personal savings, or pensions, don’t have them.  More and more people are going to be relying solely on Social Security.” Some high profile Democrats, such as Warren, have endorsed this idea, which would be funded by lifting the cap so higher earners pay more into the system, while re-indexing for inflation to boost benefits. This goal is shared by some Dem constituencies, such as organized labor and activist groups. To my knowledge Clinton has not said whether she favors this.

 

O’Malley also declares his support for reinstating Glass-Steagall, i.e., separations between commercial and investment banks. This goal has also been championed by Warren, on the grounds that it could minimize the risks to the financial system posed by Wall Street “high stakes gambling.” O’Malley mocks fellow Democrats for “supporting Dodd Frank lite,” suggesting that they are mostly doing so because “we have monied interests tying Congress in knots,” an apparent effort to speak to Democratic voters who believe their party is too beholden to Wall Street.

 

The original Glass-Steagall, of course, was repealed under a president also named Clinton, which is one of the reasons many claim Hillary Clinton is “too cozy with Wall Street.” I’m a bit skeptical of that claim, but there are plainly differences among core Democratic constituencies over how far to go in regulating Wall Street, and a debate on this topic would be helpful and clarifying for Democratic voters.

 

O’Malley also brings up a topic we rarely hear about these days: Raising the income threshold for workers to qualify for overtime pay. The Obama administration will soon announce a rules change raising the threshold, and some liberal economists expect him to set it lower than he might. This is not a small matter: Going big on overtime pay might be the single most dramatic thing a Democratic president might do unilaterally to help the middle class — and if a Dem is elected in 2016, he or she will face a GOP House. O’Malley also talks about the need to boost the collective bargaining power of workers, which would be key to any serious effort to combat inequality. Clinton, too, is reportedly thinking along these lines, but still, debate on these topics would be great for the Democratic audience.

 

Then there’s the possible nuclear deal with Iran, a topic on which Clinton has been vague, and the argument over the proper parameters of the conflict with ISIS, a topic on which Obama and many Democrats disagree.

 

Yes, there is a lot of consensus among Democrats on the broad economic strokes: Higher taxes on capital gains and inherited wealth to fund middle class tax relief. More investments in infrastructure and education, particularly subsidized community college. Universal child care and early education; national family leave and sick leave policies designed to enhance workplace flexibility. A minimum wage hike. But there are remaining disagreements among core Dem constituencies and among party actors.

 

Can anyone force a real primary? Should anyone try? There has been a lot of snickering about how O’Malley can’t possibly mount a serious challenge to Clinton, and for all I know, that may be right. But as Jonathan Bernstein has explained, even if Clinton’s nomination appears close to inevitable, there really are a number of serious Democrats out there, and even the effort to compel a contested primary might help the party:

 

It’s good for the party to have competition, because it gives party actors leverage over the candidates, and therefore helps force the nominee, if elected, to be loyal to the party as president.

 

In other words, the debate itself is a worthy goal, even if it might have little chance of changing the outcome.

 

Hillary Clinton isn’t running unopposed. She’s just crushing the competition. (Vox)

By Ezra Klein

March 13, 2015

Vox

 

Jonathan Bernstein and Reihan Salam have written two smart articles on the Democratic presidential primary — or lack thereof — that are best read in tandem. Bernstein’s article is meant to explain why it looks like Democrats don’t have a bench even though they do, and Salam’s article is meant to show who’s sitting on it.

 

Bernstein’s argument is related to the “invisible primary” theory of presidential elections. Hillary Clinton, he says, “has earned the support of the bulk of Democratic party actors, and gained the acquiescence of other Democrats who aren’t as enthusiastic about her.” The result is that the Democratic Party’s “perfectly viable other candidates either dropped out or never seriously considered the race.”

 

Perhaps a slightly clearer way to put it is this: in the invisible primary, when the contest is as much a draft as it is a campaign, Clinton is “opposed” by essentially every Democrat fit for the presidency. If the party’s powerbrokers didn’t want to support Clinton and instead really wanted Sen. Michael Bennet to run, or Gov. Andrew Cuomo to lead the field, they would be working toward that outcome. Instead, they’re lining up behind Clinton. In this telling, Clinton isn’t winning by default. She’s winning by winning. The absence of competition is the product of Clinton’s strong, successful campaign to win over Democratic Party elites.

 

Hillary’s strength is evident in public polling, too. Gallup has a useful favorability-familiarity index, the upshot of which is that Clinton is both better known than anyone else in the race and viewed more favorably than almost anyone else in the race (Ben Carson is viewed very favorably too, but as he becomes better known among Democrats, my guess is that his negatives will rise quickly):

 

This is the context for Hillary’s dominance on the Democratic side: she’s in a much stronger position not just than any Democrat going into 2016, but also than any Republican. These are early polls and the numbers can and will change, but look where Clinton is compared to Jeb Bush or Scott Walker. That’s a big deal to Democrats, and a big reason they’re supporting her rather than looking for an alternative.

 

The Democratic bench

 

Salam offers a “wish list of Democratic presidential contenders.” His list excludes possible candidates like ex-Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley or ex-Virginia Senator Jim Webb. Rather, it includes plausible candidates who seem to have no interest in becoming actual candidates.

 

“Any contest for the Democratic presidential nomination needs an earnest, nerdy liberal technocrat who appeals to the intelligentsia,” writes Salam, and he nominates Sen. Ron Wyden, a favorite of wonks (and civil libertarians) everywhere:

 

His steadfast opposition to dragnet surveillance has won him many friends among civil libertarians, and that’s no small thing in a Democratic primary, particularly in dovish, independent-minded states like New Hampshire. A Pew survey from January found that 31 percent of Democrats hold an unfavorable view of the National Security Agency, which is not a bad little foundation for a Wyden campaign. Moreover, Wyden has proposed a universal health care plan more ambitious than Obamacare, and he’s championed the idea of allowing states like Vermont and Oregon to build their own single-payer health systems.

 

Salam goes on to push Sen. Sherrod Brown as a liberal champion, ex-Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick for his ability to speak to the post-Ferguson moment in the post-Obama Democratic Party, ex-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as the grave centrist, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar as a Midwest problem-solver.

 

The point isn’t that any of these candidates will run. The point is that they could run, and they would be, in theory, at least as credible as a Scott Walker or a Jeb Bush. They may not seem like presidential contenders now, but as Bernstein writes, “the way those solid politicians become Serious Presidential Candidates and not just random governors and senators — I’m talking here about folks such as Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Bobby Jindal — is to start running, and visibly enough so the press notices. “

 

Which is all to say that Bernstein is right: the Democratic Party has a bench. It’s just that Clinton is running so strongly in the invisible primary that no one on it thinks it’s worth getting in the game.

 

The question for the Democratic Party is whether Clinton is going to be as strong in the visible primary — and the visible election — as she is in the invisible one. The skills necessary to win over Democratic Party elites may not be the skills necessary to win the election — and if Hillary doesn’t face serious opposition in the visible primary, Democrats may not find that out until too late.

 

Poll Shows Younger Americans Tuning Out Clinton Story (The Wall Street Journal)

By Dante Chinni

March 13, 2015

Wall Street Journal

 

As Washington gauges the political fallout of the Hillary Clinton email story, the impact among the electorate may hinge one crucial aspect: the age of the voters in question.

 

A poll from the Pew Research Center shows a sharp partisan divide over interest in the story, but if you look at the numbers by partisan leaning and age, much of that partisan divide disappears.

 

This chart shows the percentage of people who say they are following the Clinton story closely.

 

Among Republicans overall (including “leaners”), 50% saying they are following very closely or somewhat closely the story about how Mrs. Clinton used a private account to conduct official business when she was secretary of State. For Democrats the overall figure is 36%. That’s a 14-point gap. (Note: the poll was conducted before Mrs. Clinton’s press conference Tuesday.)

 

But if you look at Democrats and Republicans younger than 50, the data look very different. The numbers are much lower, and closer together. Among those younger Democrats, only 27% say they are following closely. Among Republicans it is only 32%.

 

The partisan divide nearly disappears when you look at the percentage of those younger Democrats and Republicans who say they aren’t following the story “closely at all.” Among Democrats, that number is 55%. Among Republicans, it is a nearly identical 53%.

 

Is this just how young people feel about the news in general? That is, are 18- to 49-year-olds just less interested in the news?

 

That’s part of it. The numbers for following all news events are lower for that age group. But the numbers are weakest for the email story – slightly more people uninterested in it than in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.

 

 

There are several possible ways younger people see the story different than older people. Younger people, particularly those under 35, may see Mrs. Clinton and the Clinton name in general differently. Their awareness of Mrs. Clinton as a politician came while she was a popular senator and secretary of state, not during her time as first lady.

 

Also, Mrs. Clinton’s explanation that she used one email account (and one device) for convenience may resonate with some younger people — or strike others as unsatisfying. In any case, Americans who have grown up with social trails that live forever, as well as with self-destructing messages on services like Snapchat, may continue to see the Clinton email story differently.

 

The Pew poll surveyed 1,000 adults from March 5 to March 8.

 

 

Top State Dept. officials’ work emails not automatically archived before February (Politico)

By Josh Gerstein

March 13, 2015

Politico

 

Hillary Clinton’s explanation for her use of a personal email account while she served as secretary of state suffered another blow Friday as the State Department disclosed that the email accounts of senior department officials were not automatically archived until last month.

 

Clinton said at a news conference Tuesday that she believed the vast majority of work-related emails she sent or received from her private account were “preserved” because she was in correspondence with other officials using “.gov” accounts.

 

However, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters Friday that archiving of the work email boxes of senior State Department officials besides the secretary did not begin until “February of this year.” She previously said Secretary of State John Kerry uses an official account and his emails have been archived since soon after he succeeded Clinton.

 

Psaki said the automatic archiving began last month for “dozens” of top officials — such as the deputy secretary, under secretaries and assistant secretaries. “Our goal is to apply this to all employee mailboxes by the end of 2016,” she said.

 

A Clinton spokesman had no comment on the department’s disclosure.

 

Psaki also revealed that the department had “recently” requested copies of work-related emails some current and former State officials had sent or received on private accounts. She said she believed the letter requesting such records was sent earlier this week and was related to investigations underway on Capitol Hill.

 

“There have obviously been requests from Congress for certain information,” Psaki said. She did not immediately have details on how widely the department’s request for current and former officials was distributed.

 

Clinton sent copies of 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department in December in response to a letter sent in October to her and three other former secretaries seeking copies of work-related records held in private accounts.

 

Psaki declined to answer reporters’ repeated questions about whether the department was satisfied with Clinton’s explanation for her use of a private email account as secretary.

 

Later in the briefing, however, Psaki suggested that there was confusion among some State Department employees about what was and was not being automatically saved.

 

“I assume some assumed that was happening at the time as well,” Psaki said. “We’re updating it because it’s an imperfect system.”

 

Speaking without reference to Clinton, Psaki said the duty was on individual employees to save records that met standards for permanent archiving. “Clearly, individuals — any top officials — would also be expected to preserve their documents,” she said.

 

Psaki said the move last month to begin archiving senior officials’ emails was not triggered by concerns about Clinton’s email practices. “They have long been planning to do this. It’s just something that it took some time to put in place,” she said.

 

Despite the State Department’s practice of not archiving top officials’ emails until recently, some of the emails were saved when employees printed them and put them in permanent files, saved them in electronic folders, or — in a specific agency system — marked them as permanent records.

 

“Obviously, this [automatic archiving] is a more efficient way — a way that will require less human effort….We have quite a bit going on here at the State Department,” Psaki said. “There were ways to preserve [emails] and employees and individuals were expected to do that prior to this new process.”

 

Psaki also noted that it might not be accurate to say that all the unarchived email messages were gone, because it was possible some might be retrievable.

 

“I wouldn’t state it’s ‘lost to history’ because there are technical means of gaining access to past information,” Psaki said. “I’m not an expert on the technical capabilities.”

 

Why the email controversy probably hasn’t dented Hillary Clinton’s public image (The Washington Post)

By Paul Waldman

March 13, 2015

Washington Post

 

The first polls taken since the news of Hillary Clinton’s email controversy broke are beginning to trickle in, and they aren’t likely to make Republicans particularly happy. According to the Pew Research Center, only 17 percent of people said they were following the story closely (though that included 34 percent of Republicans). Starved as we are for campaign news, we in Washington may have found it riveting, but voters weren’t nearly so interested.

 

And it doesn’t seem to have affected how they think of her: A new Gallup poll, taken between last Monday and Wednesday (the story broke last Monday), shows Clinton’s approval rating at 50 percent, with 39 percent disapproving, not too different from what it was before. That +11 net positive is higher than any of the Republican candidates with the exception of Ben Carson (who comes in at 20-8 approval, for a net of +12).

 

The fact that she’s so much better known than any of her potential Republican opponents highlights the difficulty of the task they face. When a candidate is new and unfamiliar, a negative story like this one can comprise a large part of what people know about them. For instance, what the average voter knows about Scott Walker is that he fights with unions (if they know even that). If we find out that he’s running a dog-fighting ring, he’d become the guy who fights with unions and runs a dog-fighting ring; the latter would loom very large in his public image. But even a real scandal about Hillary Clinton would be one of a hundred things voters know and think about her.

 

That isn’t to say that opinions of Clinton can’t change, because they’ve changed before. Over the last twenty years, her favorability ratings have waxed and waned according to how much she was perceived as a partisan political figure. It was high during her quieter times as First Lady, dipped when she ran for Senate, rose when she was quietly doing legislative work, dipped again when she ran for president, rose when she was Secretary of State, and has now settled back in what we might think of as the partisan zone of around 50 percent. The vast majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view her favorably, while the vast majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents don’t. Any change will come only at the margins.

 

Right now, both Clinton and her detractors are probably thinking there’s something unfair about this email story. Clinton probably thinks it’s been overblown, just like so many fake scandals she’s suffered through before, while her opponents probably think the public isn’t taking it as seriously as they should. There are ways in which they may both have a point.

 

Consider that when the story broke, many in the media justified the blanket coverage it received on the basis that it “plays into a narrative” — in other words, before they could determine whether it had any merit, they would run with it because it dovetailed with stories of the past.

 

But in fact, there’s another narrative at work. It’s a narrative in which she or her husband get accused of something, it gets a lot of coverage, Republicans express outrage, and then in the end it turns out to be somewhere between unimportant and completely meaningless, both substantively and politically. The public is quite familiar with that narrative, too.

 

Does that mean she’ll get off relatively easy for things that would torpedo a different politician’s candidacy? It could. But right or wrong, there will be an awfully high bar to clear before a controversy has a real impact on what the voters think of her.

 

Poll: the only presidential contender more popular than Hillary Clinton is Ben Carson (Vox)

By Andrew Prokop

March 13, 2015

Vox

 

As the 2016 presidential hopefuls move closer to officially announcing, a new Gallup poll explores 16 top contenders’ favorability ratings. Hillary Clinton is near the front of the pack, with net favorability of +11 — topped only by Dr. Ben Carson, who gets +12.

 

The major difference between Clinton and Carson, as you can see in this chart, is that Clinton is extremely well known — 89 percent of the public says they know enough to have an opinion on her. Carson, however, is one of the least-known candidates, with only 28 percent. The other candidates fall in the middle. Theoretically, this means the other candidates have more room to grow, since views on Clinton are set.

 

But often, potential candidates who aren’t well known to the public start out with very few people disliking them. What’s striking about this chart is that so few of the less well-known candidates this year start off with strongly positive net favorability.

 

For comparison, in a 2007 CBS poll taken as candidates were preparing to officially announce, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Barack Obama, and John Edwards all had net favorability exceeding +13, as you can see below.

 

This time around, no Republican except Carson scores even close to there, and the others fall into two groups. One batch starts off with slightly positive net favorability — this is Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Scott Walker, and Bobby Jindal. Candidates in the other group — Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry — start off with more Americans disliking them than liking them, a tough hurdle to surmount.

 

Potential rivals to Clinton get little good news here. Even Elizabeth Warren starts out with a meager +3 net favorability, well behind Obama’s +18 rating in 2007. The others — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Jim Webb — don’t manage positive ratings at all.

 

It is worth noting that only part of Gallup’s poll was conducted after the Clinton email story broke, so it’s at least possible that a newer poll would find her ratings have sunk. But a Pew poll found that only 17 of respondents said they were following the email story very closely — and those were overwhelmingly Republicans and conservatives, who already dislike Clinton.

 

You Won’t Be Surprised To Hear That Hillary Clinton’s Emails Are More Divisive Than Ever (Huffington Post)

By Ariel Edwards Levy

March 13, 2015

Huffington Post

 

After a week of stories about Hillary Clinton’s use of email during her time as secretary of state, the controversy is more polarizing than ever. A new poll shows that Republicans are increasingly convinced of the issue’s importance and Democrats are increasingly sure that the media is overhyping things, while independents remain somewhere in between.

 

In the aftermath of Clinton’s press conference Tuesday, during which she fielded a number of questions about her use of a personal email account, attention to the story has continued to grow, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds. Sixty-five percent of Americans now say they’re following the story at least somewhat closely, up from 53 percent in a survey last week. The percent of Americans who call the issue at least somewhat serious has also ticked up, from 47 percent to 54 percent.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, the gulf between Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of the situation has grown as well.

 

In the earlier poll, Republicans were 27 points more likely than Democrats to consider the email issue “very serious.” That partisan gap now stands at 52 points, with members of the two parties moving in opposite directions.

 

Democrats, many of whom were convinced during the 2008 campaign that the media was biased against Clinton, are becoming more likely to view the controversy over the emails as overhyped. Seventy-one percent now say the media is making too big a deal out of the story, up 9 points from last week. A majority of Republicans, by contrast, continue to think the story isn’t getting enough attention. Independents, who were closely divided last week in their opinions about the media response, are now more 8 points more likely to say the media is overhyping the controversy than to say it’s being under-reported.

 

That doesn’t mean independents aren’t at all concerned. Thirty-four percent of political independents now say Clinton’s use of a personal account is very serious, up 8 points since last week. But those independents are also the least likely to be paying much attention, with 57 percent saying they’re following the email story at least somewhat closely, compared to 78 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats.

 

There’s not yet much data to indicate whether the saga has affected Clinton’s ratings, but the numbers that are available suggest it may have taken a small toll. In the latest HuffPost/YouGov poll, the former secretary of state is just underwater, with 44 percent rating her positively and 45 percent negatively. That’s near the bottom of where’s she’s stood since the 2014 midterm elections, according to a series of YouGov/Economist polls using the same question and methodology. Those polls have found Clinton’s favorable rating ranging between 43 percent and 52 percent.

 

The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted March 11-13 among U.S. adults using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.

 

The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the poll’s methodology are available here.

 

Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate.

 

Jerry Brown says challenging Hillary Clinton is like challenging Jerry Brown (The Washington Post)

By Phillip Rucker

March 13, 2015

The Washington Post

 

On paper, Jerry Brown looks like he could give Hillary Rodham Clinton a scare. He’s a governor with a compelling record of fixing California’s budget and reviving the biggest state’s economy. He’s admired by liberals for his work to combat climate change and address immigration laws. And he caught the presidential bug long ago, running for the White House three times.

 

So why is Brown not stepping forward to challenge Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016?

 

“Running against Hillary is like running against Jerry Brown in California,” Brown, 76, said in an interview Friday at The Washington Post. “In the Democratic Party, it’s not going to happen. You reach a certain point of party loyalty and it’s very powerful.”

 

In a wide-ranging interview with Post reporters, Brown said Clinton enjoys “the power of incumbency” as President Obama’s former secretary of state and heir apparent. A primary challenge to her, he said, “doesn’t look like a fruitful use of my time.”

 

“I would say she’s extremely formidable and it doesn’t appear that there’s anything that would block her path,” Brown added.

 

Brown disagreed with some leading Democrats who believe a strong primary challenge would actually benefit Clinton by helping her get into fighting strength before she faces the eventual Republican nominee in the general election.

 

“Primary oppositions are not helpful,” Brown said, recalling his own 2010 race for governor when former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman was wounded after veering right in her rhetoric and positions to fend off a primary challenge from Steve Poizner.

 

“Some people think that strengthens the process or helps the candidate go through his or her paces,” Brown said. But, he said, “the truth is it’s not helpful. The real competition has to start right away with a Republican-Democratic difference. There’s plenty there to create conflict and debate and do whatever you have to do to get ready for the November election. You can do that facing off against the Republican opponents, of which there’s so many, and there’s so many stupid things they’re saying. That’s a far better place than cutting nuanced differences with some Democratic insurgent.”

 

That Brown is advocating an unobstructed glide path for Clinton to the Democratic nomination might come as a surprise given his own history. In 1992, Brown was Bill Clinton’s most persistent and pesky Democratic primary opponent and for months refused to endorse him.

 

Asked in Friday’s interview about the state of his relationship with the Clintons, Brown said very little. “It’s all been written about,” he said. An aide reminded Brown that he had met with Bill and Hillary several times over the past few years.

 

“We come from different parts of the country,” Brown said. “I think I occupy a unique part of the party, and I don’t find too many people in the same place....It’s a very small part of the party, unfortunately.”

 

Brown is in his second stint as California governor, after serving between 1975 and 1983, and has also been state attorney general and mayor of Oakland. He said he has more of a “western sensibility,” especially on environmental issues.

 

When asked about the recent controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account as secretary of state, Brown said he is not convinced the issue is a passing storm, as many other Democrats contend.

 

“I don’t know that,” Brown said. “With these things, what makes a difference, you often don’t know until it unfolds because nothing is just what it is. It’s always in part of a larger context. Things unfold and things happen.”

 

Jerry Brown: Leave Hillary Clinton alone (Politico)

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

March 13, 2015

Politico

 

Jerry Brown ran against Bill Clinton in the 1992 Democratic primaries. Now he doesn’t think anyone should run against Hillary Clinton when she seeks the nomination next year.

 

“I can’t think of anything I’d rather have less if I were running for president than to have a competitor in the primary,” the California governor said, speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday afternoon following a series of meetings with staff about climate change.

 

Brown said he didn’t see the need for an internal party fight. What he wants, he said, is Clinton knocking the GOP field on immigration reform, Obamacare, climate change and other differences.

 

“The primaries get into all the little nuances and small differences of candidates of the same party,” Brown said. “What Hillary needs is a good debate drawing the distinctions between where she stands and where all these Republicans, these wannabes running around.”

 

He took particular aim at the lawsuit from many Republican governors and attorneys general challenging President Barack Obama’s immigration executive actions, calling their position “at best troglodyte, and at worst, un-Christian.”

 

All the more reason, Brown said, to focus on the fight with the other party, and not within his own.

 

“There’s some big differences, and they’re more with the Republicans. So let’s have the debate and let’s see where America wants to be,” Brown said. “I don’t think running some couple of Democrats would illuminate the process.”

 

Brown didn’t meet with Obama, who was in Los Angeles on Friday, or with Vice President Joe Biden, who’s vacationing in the Virgin Islands.

 

8 Must-Know Stats About Women’s Rights Around The World From Hillary Clinton’s “No Ceilings” Report (Bustle)

By Kristen Sollee

March 13, 2015

Bustle

 

Although Hillary Clinton’s email account has been making headlines, her foundation’s “No Ceilings” report on the status of women’s rights around the world is in dire need of the spotlight.  Twenty years ago at the United Nations’ 4th World Conference On Women in Beijing, First Lady Clinton famously said, “If there is one message that echoes from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.” This simple yet radical statement bears repeating (and repeating), and so the Clinton Foundation along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation compiled The Full Participation Report to flesh out all the ways women’s rights have changed since the former Secretary of State’s 1995 pronouncement.

 

The weighty report is packed with statistics on the health, occupation, education and safety of women around the world, from America to Zimbabwe to Pakistan and Brazil. Although it includes a dizzying array of facts and charts, the entire compendium is worth reading, if only to get a sense of how far women have come over the past twenty years — and how very far we still need to go.

 

These are 8 vital facts of many that you should know about global women’s rights today.

 

1. Rates of Death During Childbirth Have Decreased

Let’s start with some good news: according to the report, the rate of women who die in childbirth has gone down by 40 percent in 76 countries and by almost 60 percent in South Asia from 1995 to 2013. This rate is directly linked to education, as the more education a woman has, the less likely she or her child is to die during childbirth.

 

2. The Wage Gap Ranges From 10-40%

In high-income countries, men make around 15 percent more than women do. The wage gap is as low as 6 percent in Belgium and as high as 37 percent in South Korea. The gap tends to increase during a woman’s childbearing and childrearing years, which the report calls a “motherhood penalty.”

 

3. 1 In 3 Women Experience Sexual or Physical Violence

And you thought the campus rape statistics in the United States were horrifying. Of these 1 in 3 women who experience sexual and physical violence, a majority of them suffer at the hands of their partner.

 

4. Spousal Abuse Is Still Considered Acceptable

Cultural attitudes greatly shape how men and women view spousal abuse. According to data collected in the report, more than half the men in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, India, Iraq, Nigeria, the Philippines, Rwanda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe believe beating their wives is sometimes acceptable. In addition, a recent U.N. study of 10,000 men in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Papua New Guinea felt it was their right to have sex regardless of whether a woman provides consent.

 

5. More Women Are Enrolled In College and Universities Than Men

Women have made major gains around the world in tertiary education since 1995. In regions across Europe, North America, and Latin America, women are lapping men in college enrollment — but not necessarily in all majors. The STEM fields remain a problem, and in 2010, women in the U.S. earned approximately 18 percent of computer science bachelor degrees, down from a high of 37 percent in 1984.

 

6. 2/3 of Illiterate People In The World Are Women

As women have made gains in education, their literacy rates have also risen globally, reaching a high of 80 percent in 2012. However, of those that remain illiterate in the world, 2/3 are women.

 

7. Women Are Majorly Underrepresented in STEM Fields

It’s no secret that women are majorly underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math, and there is still an uphill battle ahead.  The report suggests that “gender stereotypes, cultural barriers, and poor-quality education have contributed to low participation rates for women in STEM In 2010.”

 

8. Women Are Living Longer Than Ever

As The Full Participation Report emphasizes, there are many challenges facing women around the world— but longevity isn’t one of them. Since 1995, a woman’s life expectancy has risen from 69 years to 73 years in 2012. Even in developing nations, there has been a 14 percent increase in life expectancy across the board.