H4A News Clips 5.24.15
H4A Press Clips
May 24, 2015
Hillary Clinton took questions for reporters Friday for the second time in a week, commenting on the State Department’s disclosure of emails related to the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Mrs. Clinton has been publicly calling for the release of her emails by the State Department, and said on Friday that she’d like them to be released even faster.
On Thursday, the campaign announced its big kick-off rally, where Clinton will address supporters with a big-picture speech about her candidacy and her vision for the future.
SUMMARY OF TODAY’S NEWS....................................................................... 1
TODAY’S KEY STORIES................................................................................... 2
Hillary Clinton Takes Questions Again and Addresses Emails // NYT // Jess Bidgood - May 23, 2015 2
On policy, Clinton plays it safe // Politico // Annie Karni - May 23, 2015........................................ 4
Hillary Clinton in Seacoast: 'I want to be small business president' //Seacoast Online // Erik Hawkins - May 23, 2015........................................................................................................................................... 7
Hillary Clinton's Surprisingly Effective Campaign // The Atlantic // Peter Beinart - May 22, 2015... 9
SOCIAL MEDIA............................................................................................... 11
The New York Times (5/23/15; 1:07PM): Breaking News: Ireland Becomes First Country to Legalize Gay Marriage by Popular Vote......................................................................................................................... 11
HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE......................................................................... 11
Va. Democrats hope to use Clinton mojo to improve their own position // WaPo // By Rachel Weiner – May 24, 2015.......................................................................................................................................... 11
The Real Democratic Primary: Hillary Versus the Media // The New Republic // Suzy Khimm -May 22, 2015 13
Clinton’s NH appearance draws ardent supporters, curious onlookers // Concord Monitor //Casey McDermott - May 23, 2015............................................................................................................................. 16
Hillary Clinton says more emails will be released // Boston Globe // Chris Cassidy -May 23, 2015. 18
Question foreshadows Hillary Clinton’s biggest fear // Boston Globe // Joe Battenfield - May 23, 2015 20
Hillary Clinton responds to released emails while in N.H. // WHDH // Byron Barnett - May 23, 2015 21
What the resurfacing of Sidney Blumenthal says about Hillary Clinton //Vox // Jonathan Allen - May 23, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 22
Why Less Competition Is Hurtful to Hillary // Real Clear Politics // Andrew Kohut - May 23, 2015 24
Miss Uncongeniality // Free Beacon // Matthew Continetti - May 23, 2015.................................. 25
Silda Wall Spitzer hosts Hillary fundraiser // Politico // Annie Karni - May 23, 2015..................... 28
Hillary Clinton to Hold Fund-Raiser Hosted by Spitzer’s Ex-Wife // NYT // Maggie Haberman - My 23, 2015 28
OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE............................................ 30
Elizabeth Warren and Democrats should be down with TPP // WaPo// Johnathan Capehart - May 23, 2015 30
7 ways Bernie Sanders could transform America // Salon // Mathrew Rozsa - May 23, 2015........... 32
Kaine’s quest for war legitimacy // WaPo // George F Wil - lMay 23, 2015..................................... 35
Democrats' Vanishing Future // National Journal // Josh Kraushaar - May 21, 2015..................... 37
GOP................................................................................................................ 39
Ben Carson wins SRLC straw poll // Politico //Alex Isenstadt - May 23, 2015................................ 39
Chris Christie: The strong, loud type // CBS News // John Dickerson - May 22, 2015..................... 41
A Rubio campaign blueprint, for all the world to see // WaPo // Dan Balz - May 23, 105............... 43
Rick Santorum’s got a point: Nothing helps poll numbers like winning // WaPo // Philip Bump - May 23, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 45
Kasich May Miss Cut in Ohio Debate // RCP // Rebecca Berg - May 22, 2015................................ 46
Ten Is Too Few // Weekly Standard // Jay Cost - June 1, 2015..................................................... 48
Reform Conservatism Is An Answer To The Wrong Question // The Federalist // Robert Tracinski - May 22, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 50
The power grab that destroyed American politics: How Newt Gingrich created our modern dysfunction // Salon // Paul Rosenberg - May 23, 2015.................................................................................................. 52
“The party of white people”: How the Tea Party took over the GOP, armed with all the wrong lessons from history // Salon // David Sehat - May 23, 2015....................................................................................... 58
TOP NEWS..................................................................................................... 63
DOMESTIC.................................................................................................. 63
After Senate vote, NSA prepares to shut down phone tracking program // LAT // Brian Bennett and Lisa Mascaro - May 23, 2015........................................................................................................................... 63
McConnell's NSA gambit fails // The Hill // Jordain Carney and Julian Hattem - May 23, 2015..... 66
States quietly consider ObamaCare exchange mergers // The Hill // Sarah Ferris - May 23, 2015.. 68
INTERNATIONAL....................................................................................... 72
Ireland legalizes gay marriage in historic vote // USA Today // Kim Hjelmgaard - May 23, 2015.... 72
ISIS Gains Momentum With Palmyra, Assad Squeezed on Multiple Fronts // NBC News // Cassandra Vinograd - May 23, 2015............................................................................................................................. 74
39 die in Mexico police shootout with suspected cartel members // LAT // Deborah Bonello -May 23, 2015 76
OPINIONS/EDITORIALS/BLOGS.................................................................. 77
Weary of Relativity // NYT // Frank Bruni - May 23, 2015............................................................ 77
Echoes of Iraq war sound in 2016 presidential race // LAT // Mark Z. Barabak - May 23, 2015....... 80
Obama has a strategy for fighting ISIS -- one that isn't working // LAT // Doyle McManus - May 23, 2015 82
Is the Ex-Im Bank Doomed? // NYT // Joe Nocera - May 22, 2015................................................ 84
End Ex-Im Bank, the government's Enron // Washington Examiner // Rep. Bill Flores and Senator Mike Kee - May 21, 2015............................................................................................................................. 86
Banks as Felons, or Criminality Lite // NYT // Editorial Board - May 22, 2015.............................. 88
Why Obamacare makes me optimistic about US politics // Vox // Ezra Klein - May 22, 2015........ 89
The Islamic State is entirely a creation of Obama’s policies // WaPo // Ed Rogers - May 22, 2015.. 93
The Art of Avoiding War // The Atlantic // Robert D. Kaplan - May 23, 2015................................. 94
The Notorious R.B.G. // National Journal // Editorial Board - May 22. 2015................................. 96
Hillary Clinton Takes Questions Again and Addresses Emails // NYT // Jess Bidgood - May 23, 2015
Hillary Rodham Clinton took questions for reporters Friday for the second time in a week, commenting on the State Department’s disclosure of emails related to the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
“I’m glad the emails are starting to come out,” Mrs. Clinton said at a campaign event in Hampton, N.H. “This is something that I’ve asked to be done, as you know, for a long time. And those releases are beginning. I want people to be able to see all of them.”
The State Department made public 296 emails related to the attacks, which had been stored on Mrs. Clinton’s private email server. Republicans have attacked Mrs. Clinton’s use of personal email during the time she was secretary of state, suggested she was trying to hide her correspondence.
Mrs. Clinton has been publicly calling for the release of her emails by the State Department, and said on Friday that she’d like them to be released even faster. She noted that one of the emails was just declared classified. The email, forwarded to her by her deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan, involved reports of arrests in Libya of possible suspects in the attack, and was not considered classified at the time.
At the event in New Hampshire, Mrs. Clinton said, “I’m aware that the FBI has asked that a portion of one email be held back. That happens in the process of Freedom of Information Act responses. But that doesn’t change the fact that all of the information in the emails was handled appropriately.”
Mrs. Clinton made the remarks at the Smuttynose Brewing Company, where she led a round-table discussion on American small businesses.
As the event wound down, reporters crowded around Ms. Clinton when she posed for selfies with those in attendance. And then, to the surprise of some who have grown accustomed to Ms. Clinton keeping her distance from the press in her nascent campaign, she took questions.
In response to a question about Iraq, Mrs. Clinton said she agrees with American military strategy there and she did not allude to recent victories by the Islamic State in Ramadi, Iraq, and Palmyra, Syria.
“I basically agree with the policy that we are currently following, and that is American air support is available, American intelligence and surveillance is available, American trainers are trying to undo the damage that was done to the Iraqi army by former Prime Minister Maliki,” Mrs. Clinton said. She added, “There is no role whatsoever for American soldiers on the ground to go back other than in the capacity as trainers and advisers.”
And she had a curt response to a question about whether Americans trust her on Benghazi:
“I’m going to let Americans decide that,” said Mrs. Clinton, before aides whisked her away.
The emails siphoned attention from the intended theme of the day. During her small-business roundtable, which lasted about an hour, Mrs. Clinton discussed economic opportunities for the middle class, declaring at one point, “I want to be the small business president.”
Mrs. Clinton also used the event to highlight her support for the Export-Import bank, which guarantees loans for American exports and which faces opposition from congressional Republicans – including some of the presidential candidates – as it nears a deadline for reauthorization.
“It is wrong that Republicans in Congress are now trying to cut off this vital lifeline for American small businesses,” said Mrs. Clinton. “It’s wrong that candidates for president who really should know better are jumping on this bandwagon.”
She also, briefly, seemed to lose track of where she was. “Here in Washington, we know that, unfortunately, the deck is still being stacked for those at the top,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Mrs. Clinton has a long history in New Hampshire — she won the 2008 primary here before going on to lose the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama — and some audience members arrived here carrying relics from trips Mrs. Clinton made to the state in the 1990’s during her husband’s candidacy and presidency.
David Schwartz, an 58-year-old attorney, had in his pocket a photograph of himself and Mrs. Clinton that he said was taken by Bill Clinton when he was a presidential candidate in 1992. Mr. Schwartz, who works with lenders, is a Republican, but said he would consider supporting Mrs. Clinton because the issue of small business loans is important to him.
Mr. Schwartz compared his photograph to a framed one held by Lincoln Soldati, 66, a defense lawyer. The image showed Mr. Soldati in conversation with Mrs. Clinton when she paid a visit to the University of New Hampshire at some point in the 1990s, and he said he was thrilled that she has returned.
“I don’t believe there’s ever been anybody running for president that is more qualified than she is,” said Mr. Soldati, who is a Democrat.
On policy, Clinton plays it safe // Politico // Annie Karni - May 23, 2015
HAMPTON, N.H. — Hillary Clinton’s approach to policy, so far, has been as risk-averse as her media strategy.
On the trail, she prefers the safe haven of the controlled roundtable setting, and for the most part avoids taking questions from the press. And when it comes to the issues she wants to talk about, Clinton sticks with those that are either so broadly popular as to present no threat to her brand or general-election prospects, or so small-bore as to carry little chance of backlash.
On Friday in New Hampshire, Clinton spoke with a passionate, progressive voice, pounding away at Republicans for “jumping on the bandwagon” to kill the Export-Import Bank, whose authorization in Congress is set to expire June 30. It was a safe call, to say the least: House Democrats support the bank. Moderate Democrats such as Sen. Chuck Schumer support the bank. A liberal like Sen. Elizabeth Warren? She’s pro-bank, too.
“It is wrong that Republicans in Congress are now trying to cut off this vital lifeline for American small businesses,” said Clinton, at the SmuttyNose Brewery in Hampton. Republicans, she said, would threaten the livelihoods of American workers rather than “stand up to the Tea Party and talk radio. It’s wrong, it’s embarrassing.”
Weighing in forcefully on an issue where her outlook matches that of the majority of her party was right in line with Clinton’s posture on many policy issues during this first phase of her campaign.
In her month and a half on the trail, Clinton has spoken in broad terms that give her the appearance of sometimes channeling Sen. Elizabeth Warren and championing the left — in the case of her appearance at SmuttyNose Brewery, sticking up for small businesses and bashing the GOP.
She sounds like she’s wrapping her arms around the progressive wing of her party while alienating few. She uses rhetoric that sounds Warren-esque (“The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top”) while being vague about details of how precisely she would address the problem.
One Democratic strategist described Clinton’s positioning as a “head fake, making the general audience of the left think she’s one of them.”
The risk is that Clinton plays into the stereotype that she is a cautious and poll-driven politician more inclined to appease rather than lead. In an op-ed in the Portsmouth Herald Friday, Sen. Marco Rubio knocked Clinton for playing it safe and feeling no pressure to “offer new ideas.”
Clinton campaign advisers, meanwhile, argue that her positioning is not a strategy at all, but rather a sincere reflection of her record of fighting for the middle-class.
“The campaign is built on that record and consistent with the values Hillary Clinton has always championed,” spokesman Jesse Ferguson said. “It’s not about left or right, it’s about the values Hillary Clinton believes in and the fight she is continuing to wage.”
But the issues her advisers cite tend to be broadly accepted Democratic chestnuts. Clinton has said same-sex marriage should be a constitutional right; the minimum wage should be raised; the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision should be overturned to remove big money out of politics; community college should be free; police departments should be equipped with body cameras; what works in Obamacare should be extended and the high cost of prescription drugs should be lowered; paid family leave should be instituted; effective treatment should be provided for those who suffer from mental health and substance abuse problems.
Some of her stances, such as that on same-sex marriage, represent an evolution from where she has been in the past. But overall, Clinton has not supported progressive positions where she would have to stick her neck out from where the majority of her party is.
Moderate Democrats have taken note. “She’s being smart by checking the boxes on progressive issues that have wide appeal across the party, but keeping her general election powder dry by not going too far to the left,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way, a think tank started by former Clinton administration staffers.
Nonetheless, she’s succeeded in giving the impression of moving to the left.
The right-wing America Rising PAC has already accused Clinton of “staking out far-left positions that are outside of the mainstream of most Americans.” Even some of her biggest donors claim they see a shift.
“I think she is moving a little bit to the left and I think that’s fine,” hedge fund manager Marc Lasry, who recently hosted a fundraiser for Clinton, said in a television interview with Bloomberg. “People who are giving money to her understand that.”
But supporting universal pre-k and reforming student loans are hardly bold positions for Democrats in 2015 — instead, Democratic strategists argued, they act as liberal stalking horse issues that allow a candidate to appear boldly progressive while risking little.
A real sign that Clinton was tacking left would be a call for a single-payer healthcare system, or a promise to break the country’s large banks, or returning to a higher income-tax rate on everyone making more than $1 million a year. Clinton is unlikely to take those positions, and so far has not offered those kinds of specifics.
Indeed, as Vox.com’s Jonathan Allen pointed out, 91 percent of voters said they favored police officers wearing body cameras, according to a Pew poll from last year. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from April showed that 58 percent of respondents favor legalizing same-sex marriage. And 57 percent of voters support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who live in this country, according to a CBS/New York Times poll from earlier this month.
On those issues that could be potentially costly to her — like weighing in on President Obama’s trade deal or the Keystone XL Pipeline— Clinton has notably refused to weigh in.
“Her strategy: alienate no one,” said Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “Give the left of the Party no reason to criticize. Rhetoric works better than detail. Rhetoric you can change or edit. Details are difficult to erase.”
Details, such as how much she would like to raise the minimum wage, have yet to be shared. Even on immigration, where Clinton surprised many of the immigration activists who in the past had protested her speeches, some are still waiting eagerly for specifics. Clinton has yet to outline how, legally, she would be able to institute any policy that would go beyond where Obama went with an executive action to let millions more undocumented immigrants gain protections and work permits.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton eyes her chocolate peanut butter fudge ice cream Friday during a stop at Moo's Place in Derry, N.H. AP Photo
“Everything we hear now is words on the campaign trail, but the proof is in the pudding,” said Javier Valdes, co-executive director of Make the Road Action Fund. “We appreciate that she’s pushing the envelope. But the details will matter. We’re happy to hear that she’s taking that stance but we need to hear a little bit more.”
The hope, Democrats said, is that Clinton will soon add specifics to the outlines of policy she has only traced so far.
On Thursday, the campaign announced its big kick-off rally, where Clinton will address thousands of supporters with a big-picture speech about her candidacy and her vision for the future.
Hillary Clinton in Seacoast: 'I want to be small business president' //Seacoast Online // Erik Hawkins - May 23, 2015
HAMPTON — Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state, began her day in the Seacoast Friday at Smuttynose Brewery, playing to the crowd of small business leaders gathered for the occasion.
"I want to be the small business president," Clinton said. "Let's make 'middle class' mean something again."
Before she sat down at the forum, Clinton took a 20-minute tour of the brewery with owner Peter Egleston. Clinton called the brewery "impressive."
When Egleston noted his beer is served even in Dublin, Ireland, Clinton said, “It’s a small world story.”
Clinton received a warm reception in the crowded warehouse stacked high with kegs as the strains of Miles Davis played and she joined Egleston and Joanne Francis, owners of Smuttynose Brewing, along with five other area business owners for a discussion on making small businesses successful.
Clinton's remarks were brief. She said although the national economy is "out of the ditch," the country still has to "stand up and get running again."
Clinton said small business owners' hard work and investments should pay off, and they should feel secure in saving for their children's college and their own retirement.
"The big businesses have a lot of advantages that you don't," she said.
Clinton also called for regulations to be loosened on community banks to ease lending to small businesses.
Francis, the brewery's co-owner, said it had been a "white-knuckle ride" securing loans and other money to start the brewery and open a new operations facility in 2014. "It was terrifying, to be honest with you," Francis said.
Panelist Charlie Cullen, of The Provident Bank, in his closing words with Clinton asked her to "please soften (the Dodd-Frank bill) just a little bit," then added, "I think now it's time for a Smutty!"
There were a few eyebrows raised when, while standing in front of prominently placed Smuttynose signs, Clinton began a remark by saying, "Here in Washington ..." The apparent gaffe went unremarked on at the time, though it began circulating quickly online through social media and news reports.
After greeting supporters and taking several brief questions from the press, Clinton departed for Exeter's Water Street Bookstore, for a grassroots organizing meeting.
When asked about the recent release of her State Department emails, Clinton said she was glad the emails from her controversial private server were being released, albeit slowly.
"It has been my request from the beginning that they release as many as possible," she said. "I also understand that there is a protocol being followed."
When asked her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently being negotiated by President Obama, which has drawn criticism from the political left and perceived to be conceived in secrecy, Clinton was not prepared to take a firm stand.
"I have some concerns about protecting American workers and a level playing field, as well as currency manipulation ... as I've said before, though, I will make up my mind — I will judge this when I see exactly what's in it," she said.
Clinton also said regarding the conflict in Iraq and the setbacks in the fight against Islamic State militants that, "at the end of the thought process, this has to be fought and won by the Iraqis. There is no role whatsoever for American troops on the ground beyond training the Iraqis."
At Water Street Bookstore in downtown Exeter, Clinton joined owner and town Selectman Dan Chartrand, along with other local Democratic activists and representatives including state Reps. Alexis Simpson and Marcia Moody, Selectwoman Nancy Belanger and Selectwoman Julie Gilman to continue her discussion of concerns facing small businesses.
Water Street filled quickly with supporters, including a group of Phillips Exeter Academy students, who said they were missing a scheduled sports photo in order to catch a glimpse of Clinton. Across the street, a handful of Clinton opponents gathered for a brief time holding signs that read, "Clinton Lied. Four heroes died," and Tea Party slogans, but appeared to disperse quickly.
Chartrand said after the event that Clinton's message about expanding access to capital for small business owners resonated strongly with him, and that although he only truly became politically active in 2012, he was "now a canvasser, through and through."
"I've fallen in love with campaigning," he said.
"What I love specifically is that she has a real focus in her economic plan for leveling the playing field for small businesses and community banks," he added. "That's a huge part of the reason I'm supporting her."
Hillary Clinton's Surprisingly Effective Campaign // The Atlantic // Peter Beinart - May 22, 2015
Hillary Clinton has been an official candidate for president for five weeks, and she still hasn’t done the thing most candidates do on day one: given a speech laying out her vision for America. Nor is she planning on doing so anytime soon. Politico reports that Hillary’s “why I’m running for president,” speech, initially scheduled for May, has now been delayed until June, or even later.
There’s a reason for that: The speech is unlikely to be very good. Soaring rhetoric and grand themes have never been Hillary’s strengths. That’s one reason so many liberals found her so much less inspirational than Barack Obama in 2008. And it’s a problem with deep roots. In his biography, A Woman in Charge, Carl Bernstein describes Hillary, then in law school, struggling to articulate her generation’s perspective in an address to the League of Women Voters. “If she was speaking about a clearly defined subject,” Bernstein writes, “her thoughts would be well organized, finely articulated, and delivered in almost perfect outline form. But before the League audience, she again and again lapsed into sweeping abstractions.”
Team Clinton appears to understand this. And so it has done something shrewd. Instead of talking vision, Hillary is talking policy, which she does really well.
The Many Measures of Hillary Clinton
If Hillary’s struggles with vision go back a long time, so does her passion for wonkery. As a student government leader at Wellesley, Bernstein notes, Hillary developed “a better system for the return of library books” and “studied every aspect of the Wellesley curriculum in developing a successful plan to reduce the number of required courses.” In 1993, she took time off from a vacation in Hawaii to grill local officials about the state’s healthcare system. In his excellent book on Hillary’s 2000 Senate race, Michael Tomasky observes that, “In the entire campaign, she had exactly one truly inspiring moment” but that, “over time it became evident to all but the most cynical that she actually cared about utility rates.”
Hillary’s handlers have played to this strength. On April 29, she devoted the first major speech of her campaign not to her vision for America, but to something more specific: race and crime. She began with a graphic and harrowing description of the young black men recently killed by police:
Walter Scott shot in the back in Charleston, South Carolina. Unarmed. In debt. And terrified of spending more time in jail for child support payments he couldn’t afford. Tamir Rice shot in a park in Cleveland, Ohio. Unarmed and just 12 years old. Eric Garner choked to death after being stopped for selling cigarettes on the streets of this city. And now Freddie Gray. His spine nearly severed while in police custody.
She recounted advocating for prisoners while director the University of Arkansas’ legal-aid clinic. She noted the parallels between race and class, observing that life expectancy is declining not only for many African Americans, but also for white women without high-school degrees. And she made the crucial point that because government currently treats drug addiction and psychiatric disorders primarily as criminal rather than public-health problems, “our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions.”
The speech was not merely substantive. It was authentic. It showcased the real Hillary Clinton: A woman who, whatever her faults, hates injustice and knows what she’s talking about when it comes to government.
A week later in Las Vegas, Hillary gave another impressive speech, this one on immigration. In a media environment where “pro” and “anti” immigration often refers merely to how many people America lets in, Hillary turned the conversation to how America treats immigrants once we do. First, she talked movingly about her childhood memories of the migrant farm workers who worked in the fields around Chicago. Then she attacked the idea, common in “pro-immigration” Republican circles, that America should legalize undocumented immigrants without allowing them citizenship. “Today not a single Republican candidate, announced or potential, is clearly and consistently supporting a path to citizenship,” she declared. “Not one. When they talk about “legal status,” that’s code for “second-class status.” America, Hillary insisted, must see the undocumented not merely as workers, but as human beings.
Sooner or later, Hillary will have to move from policy to philosophy. It may be a rocky transition. And if the Republicans nominate Marco Rubio (which at this point looks like a decent bet), she will face a candidate who interweaves personal biography and national aspiration better than she does. But if Hillary stumbles, these opening weeks of her campaign may offer a template for how she regains her footing. She’s at her best talking about America not abstractly, but concretely. She’s most inspiring when talking not about what she believes, but about what she wants to do. And she most effectively humanizes herself by being true to who she is: knowledgeable, passionate, and vaguely obsessive about making government work. Against Rubio, or any other likely Republican challenger, that identity should provide an excellent contrast.
The New York Times (5/23/15; 1:07PM): Breaking News: Ireland Becomes First Country to Legalize Gay Marriage by Popular Vote
HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE
Va. Democrats hope to use Clinton mojo to improve their own position // WaPo // By Rachel Weiner – May 24, 2015
Hillary Rodham Clinton needs Virginia Democrats next year. But they need her now.
In what is expected to be a heavily competitive presidential battleground in 2016, Democrats have a more pressing challenge this fall: trying to gain control of one of the state legislature’s two Republican-held chambers.
Democrats are within one seat of taking the state Senate. But low turnout in off-year elections tends to favor Republicans, and there is little evidence so far that voters are engaging with unusual enthusiasm.
That’s one reason organizers think a little Clinton excitement could help.
That dynamic was on full display on a recent weeknight night in Arlington, when a couple of hundred Clinton enthusiasts gathered at a second-floor sports bar for one of the first campaign meetings in the state.
“Hillary is all about building up the Democratic Party,” Susan Johnson told the crowd, many of whom knew each other from previous campaigns. “What she wants us to do is make sure our Democratic candidates in the state Senate, in the House of Delegates, get elected.”
Ginning up grass-roots excitement during off-year state elections helps Clinton, too, by starting to build the organization she’ll need to win the battleground state next year and earning favor with Democrats who might think she is taking her nomination for granted.
Johnson, a elementary school teacher turned full-time political activist, is the one paid Clinton staffer in the state. Since the Clinton campaign launched in mid-April, Johnson has been working to build up a network of volunteers aimed at sustaining momentum until the real staff comes in. She’s held similar events in Annandale and Richmond. Three more are scheduled for Newport News, Ashburn and Roanoke.
Clinton is “extremely supportive of us in Virginia to take this opportunity, while we’re building the grass roots for her, applying that grass roots immediately and getting Dems elected this year,” Johnson said.
A visit by Clinton in June is being promoted heavily as a chance to refill depleted state party coffers. Democrats are expecting so large a crowd that the annual Jefferson-Jackson event is no longer being called a “dinner” — the party hopes for so many attendees that a sit-down meal would be challenging.
A spokesman said Clinton will “earn every vote” in Virginia’s primary and is “committed to strengthening Virginia Democrats so they win elections across the board in this year and beyond.”
Democratic control of the state Senate would be a boon for a close friend of Clinton’s, too: Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D). It would give the governor a bulwark against the Republican-dominated House in his final two years in office. It would show his clout as a Democratic leader on the national stage. And it would help build momentum in crucial areas of the state for Clinton, whose campaign he chaired in 2008.
“The best way you can help Hillary is to help elect Democrats to the state Senate,” said Brian Zuzenak, who leads the governor’s political action committee.
The Democrats’ path to that mutual victory won’t be easy, though they need to take only one Republican seat to create an even split in the Senate. (That would give Democratic Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam the power to break any tie votes.) Republicans are already mobilizing.
“We’re expecting our targeted races to make thousands of voter contacts each week now, and if they’re not we’re having some real heart-to-heart conversations with them,” said Republican Senate Caucus Chairman Ryan T. McDougle (Hanover).
In only one of the districts Democrats are hoping to flip have they consistently won the past few statewide elections. That seat is held by retiring Sen. John C. Watkins (R-Powhatan). Watkins represents both Demo¬cratic Richmond voters who Clinton will be looking to turn out in droves and ¬Republican-leaning suburban areas where she will need to be competitive.
Other top Democratic targets may be harder to win, but they are in swing territory that will be critical in 2016 — Loudoun and Prince William counties, Hampton Roads.
Arlington is now solidly Democratic, but it’s where some of the party’s most dedicated and well-connected members are based.
Northern Virginia is “the top of the swing, the base of the tsunami that’s going to roll down south and turn the entire state blue,” Johnson told the crowd to cheers.
But the cheering was far more muted when she turned to this year’s races. How many eager Clinton volunteers will turn out, as she urged, at the “awesome parade” in Falls Church on Memorial Day?
Democrats hope many of them will be like Arman Azad, a voluble 17-year-old who can’t yet vote but has been volunteering for Democrats for years. He took the Metro from Tysons Corner to Arlington by himself and quickly gravitated toward the few other teenagers in a room of 20-to-50-something professionals.
Azad got involved with the Arlington County Democratic Committee when he was looking for a school community service project. Soon he was a convert, trudging through the snow to help elect state Sen. Jennifer T. Wexton (Loudoun) in a hotly contested special election last year.
Growing up, he says, “I always perceived Virginia as this conservative Southern state.” When he started paying attention to politics, gay marriage was banned in the state and the government was embroiled in controversy over transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.
Now, the marriage ban has been overturned in court after the state attorney general refused to defend it.
“It’s just a seismic shift,” Azad said. “It’s kind of cool to be part of that transition.”
Some friends, he said, agree that progressive political activism is now “cool.” Others are persuaded that it will look good on their college applications.
Maurice Champagne, 34, is way past college. He just finished graduate school. When he saw Clinton’s announcement video, he laughed, because the first story was his own. Like the woman in the video, his mother moved from Pittsburgh to Falls Church so he could go to a school where a 7-year-old wouldn’t get jumped in the halls.
He volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008 but was too busy with his dissertation in 2012. The Clinton event Tuesday was his “first step to get back into the real world.”
Asked whether he would keep volunteering from now through 2016, however, he was skeptical.
“Until I find a job,” he said.
The Real Democratic Primary: Hillary Versus the Media // The New Republic // Suzy Khimm -May 22, 2015
Beth Lilly, 29, remembers the first time she felt like the media was doing Hillary Clinton wrong: It was in 1992, when she was just about six years old, and remembers that people weren’t happy about Hillary’s chocolate-chip cookie recipe.
The incident was actually one of the most infamous moments of the 1992 campaign. “I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession,” Hillary said. The comment prompted a media firestorm—and an invitation from “Family Circle” magazine to pit her cookie recipe against Barbara Bush’s. “The press coverage was just so absurd,” recalls Lilly, who’s now a policy attorney in Washington, D.C.
It was Lilly’s very first memory of Hillary. Twenty-three years later, Lilly sees the Hillary pile-on is happening yet again, and she’ll be there to support her. “So her foundation took money. It’s kind of what foundations do,” she tells me at a recent happy hour for Clinton supporters in Arlington, Virginia.
To the irritation of her biggest devotees, the controversial donations to the Clinton Foundation—and the efforts to tie them to Hillary's policymaking at the State Department—have loomed over the early weeks of her official campaign. Jack Bardo, a young Democratic activist from Arlington, believes “the media is missing the mark” by focusing on such issues. “I wasn’t surprised—that’s what you’d expect in this media landscape,” says Bardo, who supported Clinton in the 2008 primary.
The lack of competition in the Democratic primary has left Hillary’s most ardent supporters with the strange task of having someone to root for, without having someone to root against. Her Republican opponents are a distant challenge; the other Democratic candidates are mere speed bumps in the polls. Instead, the most visible threat to Hillary is her own public image, leaving her early supporters with the dual mission of ginning up enthusiasm for her campaign—and pointing fingers at the media for trying to drag her down.
Just a few Metro stops from the White House, the northern Virginia corner of Hillaryland is particularly well suited to the task of flacking for Clinton, full of political junkies, yellow-dog Democrats, media-savvy consultants, grad students, wannabe Hillary campaign staffers, and other ambitious professionals who are old enough to have grown up with Hillary but too young to have been burned out on anti-Clinton mudslinging.
Nate Maeur, 29, remembers seeing Hillary for the first time on TV when he was young. She was advocating for children’s rights in Africa. “I remember being glued to the TV as a really little kid, watching her, almost being entranced by what she was saying, what she believed in, because it was exactly what my mother was saying,” says Maeur, who runs a workforce development organization. “I’m surprised I didn’t confuse my mom for her, and say—‘Oh, there’s Mom right there.’”
For Clinton’s younger supporters—many of whom, like Maeur, were Barack Obama campaign volunteers—their memories of the scandals and pseudo-scandals of the Clinton years are hazy at best, filtered through the soft focus of childhood. In sharper relief for them are the accomplishments that Hillary has racked up since then—U.S. senator, 2008 candidate, secretary of state—which her young Arlington supporters quickly rattled off when asked why they were backing her. “She’s going down in history whether people like it or not,” says Renzo Olivari, 19, a political science major at James Madison University who hopes to run for office one day. He was still in middle school during the 2008 campaign but remembers watching her speeches at age 12 and getting “emotionally invested” in the Clinton campaign even then.
In Clinton, young supporters see someone who’s risen up through the political establishment on her own merits: the ultimate Washington success story. What they missed earlier in the ‘90s was what Josh Marshall describes as the “Vince Foster moment” that the Clintons had to overcome first:
For those of you not familiar with Vince Foster, his tragic suicide or the years-long right-wing clown show it kicked off, it is probably best described as the '90s version of Benghazi...It's never enough for the Clintons' perennial critics to be satisfied with potential conflicts of interest or arguably unseemly behavior. It's got to be more. It always has to be more. There have to be high crimes, dead people, corrupt schemes. And if they don't materialize, they need to be made up. Both because there is an organized partisan apparatus aimed at perpetuating them and because there is a right-wing audience that requires a constant diet of hyperventilating outrage from which to find nourishment.
Hillary’s older supporters remember those days all too well and are quick to point out the larger machinations of the anti-Clinton apparatus. “You think of all this dirt that gets thrown out at her every day. There are what, 30 organizations that have been founded to throw crap at her?” says Allida Black, 63, a historian and long-time Hillary supporter who co-founded the Ready for Hillary SuperPAC.
The Clinton Foundation story is almost perfectly designed to polarize Clinton’s supporters and opponents along traditional lines. Critics say donations from foreign governments and business interests with a stake in administration policy raise conflict-of-interest questions, but even the conservative author leading the charge on the issue, Peter Schweizer, acknowledges there’s no “direct evidence” linking Clinton to any specific quid pro quo deal. Whether you believe there’s more to the story than just bad “optics” mostly depends on whether you see it as merely the latest in a long line of trumped-up Clinton scandals that didn’t pan out or the newest example of those ruthless and corrupt Clintons flouting the rules for personal gain.
But like many of Hillary’s young supporters gathered in Arlington, Olivari doesn’t blame Republicans or a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Instead, he faults the media itself for driving the controversy over the Clinton Foundation, the Libya intervention, and Clinton’s use of her personal email at the State Department. (The New York Times broke the story on her personal email, going off a tip from an unidentified source.) “The media—they’re bringing these allegations and these scandals up to see if anyone else in the Democratic side will emerge as a strong candidate and they can go head to head,” says Olivari, who hopes to run for office one day. He adds: “That sells, if you put that out, it sells. It’s them trying to tailor the election to their own needs, rather than what the election is.”
Hillary herself has been keeping the media at an arm’s length, taking only a handful of questions from the press in the early weeks of the campaign. And that control—otherwise known as campaign “discipline”—has even extended to the upstairs bar in Arlington where her early supporters gathered on Tuesday. I try to talk to Nalini Pande, a health policy consultant who had organized the happy hour in Arlington as a more casual alternative to the traditional house party. But a Clinton grassroots organizer in Virginia offers herself up for comment instead.
Obama’s own campaign had a similarly defensive attitude toward the media, but also pioneered new ways to bring his own message directly to supporters without the press. And that’s ultimately what the Clinton campaign is trying to draw on as well: Growing its own grassroots network of support—online and on the ground—that doesn’t need external news outlets to carry her message. And ultimately, the need for that ground-level enthusiasm that will be a far biggest obstacle for Clinton to overcome than Clinton Foundation-palooza.
The Clinton campaign has been organizing similar grassroots events with paid staffers in all 50 states. It’s building not only a base of volunteers for Hillary’s campaign, but also a way to push back against the barrage of negative attention in the media that Clinton’s early supporters are so frustrated with. “Every day I meet people who are so happy about this in a way that’s different,” says Black. “This is what you want to get done, not about what you’re against.” After everyone goes home, Pande keeps the cheering squad alive on Twitter: “So excited that the Hillary Happy Hour I planned in Arlington,VA had an awesome turnout! It looked like we had about 200 people!#Hillary2016.”
Clinton’s NH appearance draws ardent supporters, curious onlookers // Concord Monitor //Casey McDermott - May 23, 2015
The windows were papered over from the inside, and on the door of the Water Street Bookstore in the middle of Exeter, a sign informed customers: “We are closed from 12-3 p.m. today due to a private event. We apologize for the inconvenience!”
For those who hadn’t seen the candidate arrive firsthand, these clues — and the steadily growing crowd of onlookers waiting on the sidewalk outside of the bookstore — were enough to attract dozens and dozens more as the afternoon wore on.
“Hillary Clinton is inside the bookstore,” one young woman, who waited well over an hour outside of the store yesterday afternoon, assured a friend on the other end of her cell phone. “I’m not kidding . . . I’m sure it’s Hillary Clinton, dude.”
Indeed, dudes, Clinton was there inside greeting an audience of about 50 supporters — taking questions and signing books before eventually emerging to an enthusiastic group. It was her second stop on her second trip to New Hampshire in her second bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, and one that attracted the largest audience of onlookers of any of the events she’s held so far this year.
Earlier in the day, Clinton toured Smuttynose Brewery in Hampton and hosted a roundtable to talk about the challenges facing small businesses. Later in the day, her schedule included a stop for ice cream at Moo’s Place in Derry and more time spent in private events with supporters.
Inside the bookstore, the group included a mix of those invited by the campaign and by the owner. Outside, the group was even more varied: plenty of ardent supporters, others who were somewhat supportive but not entirely sold on Clinton’s latest bid for the White House, some students from nearby Phillips Exeter Academy, and lots who wanted to meet (or, at the very least, take a picture of) the presidential candidate. One woman held a handmade sign that declared, “We (heart) Hillary!”; another man held a less-enthusiastic sign that played off of Clinton’s supporters’ “Ready for Hillary” rallying cry, “I’m Ready for Oligarchy.”
Two of the students who were waiting outside, Ariana Patsaros and Nicole Don, will be voting in their first presidential election next year. Both 18 years old, they were drawn to the chance to see the candidate up-close — but they held different sentiments toward Clinton.
Patsaros, who said she’s been active in her school’s Democratic Club, was already a big fan and is hoping to soon intern with the candidate. She only arrived about 15 minutes before Clinton exited the store, but she still lucked out with a good spot.
“Some tall person let me in front of him, and I ended up getting a selfie with her,” she said, adding, “She’s my idol, to be honest. I’m so glad that I had this opportunity.”
Don, meanwhile, is still making up her mind. She said she’s socially liberal, but economically more conservative, and she’s paying close attention to candidates’ foreign policy positions.
“I’m torn,” Don said after the event, as the crowd had mostly disappeared and the street returned to normal. “Still torn.”
Unlike her friend, she didn’t get a chance to see Clinton up-close. She picked a spot on the other side of the store, and the candidate was farther out of view.
“I know it’s totally random what happened,” Don said. “Still, it hits you in the gut when you wait an hour and a half.”
Laura Lunardo was passing through town when it seemed like things were buzzing outside of the bookstore. The Exeter resident didn’t stick around with the rest of the crowd, but she said she would have liked to see more face-to-face interaction from Clinton on the campaign trail.
“I think there should be more public events. I think she needs to be accessible, and people want to hear some answers,” said Lunardo, who hasn’t yet committed to Clinton but tends to lean toward Democratic candidates. “People who hate her are going to hate her. People who want to try and support her, just tell us what’s going on. And the reporters, let the reporters talk to you.”
Martha Kies was picking up her daughter, Solveig, at school up the street when she saw the gathering on the sidewalk. Luckily for the two of them, they managed to get a place right next to a Secret Service officer and had a prime spot to wave to Clinton when she left the store. Kies, who also leans Democrat, said she’s still “waiting to hear a bit more” before making her mind up on who to support for the 2016 presidential race. In any case, she thought it would be great for her young daughter to see the candidate up close.
“If she wins she’ll be the first woman to win,” Kies said. “So we talked about that. It’s exciting for young girls to see that possibility.”
Overall, Kies was grateful to have the chance to see Clinton. Still, she said, “It would have been great to have her talk, rather than just sort of make an appearance” outside before leaving.
One of those inside the store with Clinton was Nancy Richards-Stower, whose long history of campaign work in New Hampshire includes an active role in Bill Clinton’s 1992 bid for president. Earlier in the day, Richards-Stower was stationed at the bottom of the hill at Smuttynose Brewery — balancing a giant “Hillary” campaign sign against a tree while holding another handmade sign supporting her.
As she waited to give the candidate a warm welcome ahead of the brewery tour, Richards-Stower said there’s no question in her mind about supporting Clinton this time around.
“They’re issue people,” she said of the Clintons, recalling how impressed she was with Hillary during her time campaigning for her husband two decades ago. “They’re issue people and loyal friends, and that’s what I love.”
Now, as Clinton takes on another campaign of her own, Richards-Stower said she doesn’t think the focus on roundtables and private events, over more public ones, will be a problem in the long run.
“There’s being president, and there’s being a campaigner. So which do you care more about — that she’s going to be a fabulous president or a fabulous campaigner?” she said. “This is her opportunity — it sounds so trite, but it’s true — to really hear what the struggles are of the normal person. And you can’t get that if you’re standing in front of a thousand people in a big auditorium. You have to get that in a small group. Now, how does Hillary Clinton get to be in a small group? It has to be organized.”
Hillary Clinton says more emails will be released // Boston Globe // Chris Cassidy -May 23, 2015
HAMPTON, N.H. — Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton said she wants more of her private emails as secretary of state to come out faster as she faced the press yesterday just minutes after the State Department released nearly 300 of her messages, many of them on the Benghazi attack.
“I’m glad the emails are starting to come out,” Clinton told reporters. “This is something I’ve asked to be done for a long time. Those releases are beginning. I want people to be able to see all of them.”
Among the highlights of the 896-page email treasure-trove:
• One of her emails about the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack was upgraded from unclassified to “secret” with 23 words of a November 2012 message redacted at the FBI’s request.
• Clinton appears to mistakenly refer to one of the Benghazi attack victims as “Chris Smith,” though it’s unclear whether she’s referring to diplomat Sean Smith or Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens — who both died. The email asks whether the State Department should announce the death that night or in the morning.
• Clinton asked to “pls print” an article called “Benghazi Was Obama’s 3AM Call,” a headline referencing Clinton’s famous attack ad against then-Sen. Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary.
• As Clinton recovered from health issues, including a concussion that forced her to miss a congressional hearing, she wrote to two State Department officials attending in her place: “I’ll be nursing my cracked head and cheering you on as you ‘remain calm and carry on!’ ” In a follow-up email, she wrote: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (as I have rationalized for years), so just survive and you’ll have triumphed!”
Clinton hardly seemed defensive about the emails yesterday.
“I would just like to see it expedited so we can get more of them out more completely,” she said.
Clinton held a tightly controlled small business roundtable at the Smuttynose Brewery and answered five questions from the mob of reporters — but none from the 50 people gathered at the invitation-only event.
Arrows printed on paper were hung up to guide Clinton through her brewery tour, and an event organizer repeatedly ordered a Herald reporter to push back to arbitrary places on the warehouse floor to prevent any unplanned interaction between the candidate and a member of the press.
“I wouldn’t want you to jump out at her,” one of the organizers warned.
Afterward, Clinton spoke to campaign supporters in Exeter and Amherst, and stopped at Moo’s Place in Derry, where she greeted customers and ordered a “kiddie”-size chocolate peanut butter and fudge sundae with a cow-shaped cookie on top.
“Most excellent,” Clinton declared. “One of my most favorite things.”
Question foreshadows Hillary Clinton’s biggest fear // Boston Globe // Joe Battenfield - May 23, 2015
Only once did Hillary Clinton’s armor show signs of cracking — just enough to reveal a glimpse into what her cruise control campaign fears the most.
On the floor of a New Hampshire brewery, surrounded by kegs and cases of porter and IPA, Clinton easily batted away media questions until this one got through:
“Many Americans don’t believe you’ve told the truth about Benghazi ...”
Clinton didn’t wait for the finish to shoot back: “Well, I’m going to let the Americans decide that.”
Just one word, “Americans,” but the annoyance was audible. Clinton, of course, already knows voters will pick her. A remnant from the arrogant White House days.
But here’s the problem: If Clinton is so sure voters are behind her, why is she mostly avoiding them in her visits to New Hampshire? Not a single town hall meeting with unscreened questions.
Clinton is just mailing it in right now, and she really doesn’t have to do much more.
During her visit to Smuttynose Brewery, where the general public was kept far away by campaign aides and Secret Service, Clinton didn’t even have to demand “equal pay for women.” One of the invited guests at the “small business” roundtable, Smuttynose co-owner Joanne Francis, did it for her.
The other co-owner of the brewery, Peter Egelston, who sat on the other side of Clinton, is a stalwart Democratic donor, records show. And FYI, Hillary, he lives in Maine, not New Hampshire.
It’s not uncommon for candidates to pack their events with ringers, but all the others have subjected themselves to sometimes unpleasant questions at town hall meetings.
Not Clinton, yet. She did make a quick stop for ice cream yesterday, posing for photos. And she’s finally starting to answer questions from the press — yesterday mostly national reporters who know her. She walked over to NBC’s Andrea Mitchell first.
But on those new revelations that she used her private server for emails in the aftermath of Benghazi, Clinton stuck to script. She wants the State Department to release those gosh darn emails as quickly as possible, of course.
Those answers won’t suffice when the campaign gets more heated and more details about the emails surface. That’s not even counting potentially more damaging questions about donations to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary and Bill raking in huge corporate paychecks for speeches.
Republicans will get their chance soon in debates to hone their attacks on Clinton, and the most skilled one will probably get the nomination.
And luckily, “Americans” who aren’t in the tank will eventually get their chance. And savvy Granite Staters will probably want to know one thing from Hillary Clinton.
Just what are you afraid of?
Hillary Clinton responds to released emails while in N.H. // WHDH // Byron Barnett - May 23, 2015
EXETER, N.H. (WHDH) -
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton received information on her private email server that has now been classified about the deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi.
The email in question, forwarded to Clinton by her deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, relates to reports of arrests in Libya of possible suspects in the attack.
The information was not classified at the time the email was sent but was upgraded from "unclassified" to "secret" on Friday at the request of the FBI, according to State Department officials. They said 23 words of the Nov. 18, 2012, message were redacted from the day's release of 296 emails totaling 896 pages to protect information that could damage foreign relations.
Because the information was not classified at the time the email was sent, no laws were violated, but Friday's redaction shows that Clinton received sensitive information on her unsecured personal server.
No other redactions were made to the collection of Benghazi-related emails for classification reasons, the officials said. They added that the Justice Department had not raised classification concerns about the now-redacted 1 1/2 lines when the documents were turned over to the special House committee looking into the Benghazi attack in February. The committee retains a complete copy of the email, the officials said.
It is at the end of a chain of communication that originated with Bill Roebuck, the then-director of the Office of Maghreb Affairs, that pointed out that Libyan police had arrested several people who might have connections to the attack. The redacted portion appears to relate to who provided the information about the alleged suspects to the Libyans. A total of five lines related to the source of the information were affected, but only the 23 words were deleted because the FBI deemed them to be classified.
Roebuck's email was sent to a number of senior officials, including the former assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, Elizabeth Jones, who then sent it to Sullivan with the comment: "This is preliminary, but very interesting. FBI in Tripoli is fully involved."
Sullivan then forwarded the email to Clinton with the comment: "FYI."
There was no immediate indication that Clinton herself forwarded the email.
While touring the Smuttynose Brewery in Hampton, New Hampshire, the main focus of Clinton's visit was promoting small businesses. She addresses the State Department releasing her emails and said she was "glad" the emails are beginning to come out.
"I'm aware that the FBI has asked that a portion of one email be held back," said Clinton. "That happens in the process of Freedom of Information Act responses. But that doesn't change the fact that all the information in the emails was handled appropriately."
Clinton participated in a roundtable discussion at the brewery, where she said she wants to be the "small business president." She also criticized the Republican presidential candidates for supporting measures to cut government funding that helps small businesses.
What the resurfacing of Sidney Blumenthal says about Hillary Clinton //Vox // Jonathan Allen - May 23, 2015
Old Clinton hands don't fade away. They always resurface.
That's the case with Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton scandal veteran and purveyor of opposition research who turned up in a trove of Hillary Clinton e-mails at the center of the House Benghazi Committee's investigation into the attack that killed four Americans in Libya in 2012.
As the New York Times first reported, Blumenthal sent Clinton a big batch of memos about the situation on the ground, many of which she forwarded to other State Department officials and many of which were deemed off-base by the agency's own experts. According to the Times, Blumenthal was, at the same time, advising associates who were trying to win business from the transitional Libyan government Clinton had helped install by pushing for a coalition war to oust Qadhafi.
His pet theories included a warning that the Al Qaeda affiliate in North Africa would use American weapons to retaliate against the U.S. for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
The emails, which were released Friday as part of a larger disclosure by the State Department, don't provide much texture to Clinton's decision-making on Libya or how she assessed the situation in Benghazi in real time. The real question is what was in the emails Clinton destroyed after determining unilaterally that they did not deal with government business. But the emails released by State do show that Blumenthal, who had no connection to the U.S. government, acted as an unofficial adviser to Clinton on Libya — and that she sent her own aides to chase down his leads, no matter how implausible.
More saint than sinner
Blumenthal's ability to access her when she was secretary of State is a reminder that it's damn near impossible to be ex-communicated from Clinton's orbit, especially if one has been bloodied defending her and her family in Washington's political wars.
Even after President Obama promised to let Clinton pick her own team at State, the White House drew a line at hiring Blumenthal. That's because they suspected him of peddling the nastiest "opposition research" about Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary.
But he's seen much more as a saint than a sinner in a Clinton world that values loyalty above all other traits. That's why his proximity to Clinton didn't come as a shock to people in her inner circle.
He was among her most ardent and vicious defenders during the Clinton White House years. Back then, his aggressive tactics included digging into reporters and was frequently accused of pushing negative storylines about officials who investigated Bill Clinton. As a former reporter, he could be counted on to have a view of how to manipulate the press, and, in the emails released Friday, he appeared to take credit for placing a story by Craig Unger in Salon in an email to Clinton.
He's a walking reminder of the bloodsport politics that defined the Clintons in the 1990s.
Longtime Clinton advisers say one her great strengths and weaknesses is that she seldom casts anyone aside. That means she gathers information from a vast array of sources. But it also means political players like Blumenthal who have burned through their good will with many other Washington figures can still gain influence through her.
Blumenthal, who wrote a book about his years as a White House defender called "The Clinton Wars," stands out because he's well known in Washington and because he was e-mailing Clinton about Libya and Benghazi, the very topics at the center of Republican inquiries into Clinton.
The State Department
Some of the dozens of emails Blumenthal sent Clinton on Libya and the Benghazi attack.
But former advisers frequently send Clinton long memos on all manner of issues, from politics and communication to policy. She likes to absorb it all. In that way, and perhaps only in that way, her communication with Blumenthal is orthodox for Clinton. And there's nothing wrong, per se, with him sending her memos. That said, she kept her longtime adviser working for her, against the will of the Obama White House, while he worked for the Clinton Foundation.
Why Clinton won't cast him aside now
Now, there's even more reason for her to hold Blumenthal close: He will appear before the Benghazi Committee. If she cut him loose, he might be less inclined to keep her best interests at heart when testifying.
Clinton gave him a vote of confidence during a Tuesday press conference.
"He has been a friend of mine for a long time. He sent me unsolicited e-mails which I passed on in some instances," she said. "When you're in the public eye, when you're in an official position, I think you do have to work to make sure you're not caught in the bubble and you only hear from a certain small group of people. And I'm going to keep talking to my old friends, whoever they are."
Why Less Competition Is Hurtful to Hillary // Real Clear Politics // Andrew Kohut - May 23, 2015
It is increasingly clear that Hillary Clinton will have to overcome a number of serious voter concerns about her to win the presidency. These challenges have been complicated by the unprecedented position in modern times of not having a real challenger from within her own party.
Though the latest polls continue to show her leading the modest field of announced and potential Democratic candidates, they also show significant declines in her favorability rating and concerns about her honesty and trustworthiness. One of the most troubling findings for her in recent national surveys is that while she leads most Republican candidates in head-to-head match-ups, she runs about even with Sen. Rand Paul and is not that far ahead of several others.
Her strategic problem is that, absent a strong Democratic challenger to duke it out with, questions about various Hillary controversies, her age and the “Bill factor” will hang there to be resolved in the general election against a Republican candidate who has been on the road addressing his or her own image weaknesses.
Meanwhile, the press, which would ordinarily be covering a full set of Democratic candidates, has and will continue to turn its undivided attention to Hillary. And that has a downside. Note, for example, recent criticisms over Clinton not taking press questions for 21 days, getting speaking fees from lobbying groups, the income she and Bill have earned in recent years, and so on. While media attention is a positive for a candidate, being its almost sole focus on the Democratic side has not been easy.
And this could well serve to demoralize Democratic voters. There are already signs of that in the national polls. The Pew Research Center found Democrats far less engaged in the presidential race than they were eight years ago, while Republicans are not. A March survey found just 58 percent of Democrats saying they had given a lot or some thought to the presidential candidates, compared to 71 percent back in 2007. There was no significant falloff in Republican campaign interest.
Indeed, according to the latest Pew survey, Republicans are more positive about the GOP field than they were at nearly comparable points in the past two presidential campaigns: 57 percent rate it excellent or good. In contrast, fewer Democrats (54 percent) are positive about the current group of candidates than felt the same way in September 2007 (64 percent). Not surprisingly, then, an April Gallup poll found 54 percent of Democrats saying a number of strong candidates competing for the nomination would be better for the party, while only 40 percent thought it would be better for a single strong candidate to emerge early.
In the end, Hillary’s problems are not with Democrats, who will ultimately back her if she is the nominee, but with the broader electorate. And recent polls showed the impact of the latest round of Clinton controversies.
Gallup found her unfavorable rating climbing steadily—from 39 percent in March to 46 percent in mid-May—which virtually matches her unfavorable rating in Pew’s May survey (47 percent). And the April Wall Street Journal/NBC poll added that 50 percent of its respondents gave her a negative rating when it comes to being “honest and straightforward.”
The good news for Hillary is that she recovers well. Her favorable ratings have dipped into the 40s in the Gallup rating on a number of occasions over the past 20 years, only to strongly recover into the 60s for significant periods of time. And while voters worry about her honesty, they give her a positive rating for being knowledgeable and having the experience to handle the presidency (51 percent, according to WSJ/NBC) and having strong leadership qualities (65 percent, CBS/New York Times).
From this vantage point, Clinton would be well served at this stage by having other Democratic candidates to absorb some of the torrent of press scrutiny to which she has been subjected. On the Republican side, only Jeb Bush has received anything close to the same focus. At this pace, one can only wonder about the condition of her public image when she starts to take on the Republican nominee.
Miss Uncongeniality // Free Beacon // Matthew Continetti - May 23, 2015
There it was—the classic Hillary charm. Close to a month had passed since the Democratic frontrunner answered questions from the press. So this week, when reporters were invited to gawk at the spectacle of Clinton sitting with “everyday Iowans,” Ed Henry of Fox wanted to know: Would the former secretary of state take a moment to respond to inquiries from non-stage-managed reporters?
Before Henry was able even to finish his sentence, however, Clinton interrupted him, tut-tutting his impertinent shouting and raising her hand, empress-like, to quell her subject. After a few seconds of talking over each other Clinton must have realized that she had to give Henry an answer. Whereupon she said, slowly and sarcastically: “I might. I’ll have to ponder it.” What a kidder.
After the photo-op was over, Clinton did take six questions from reporters—raising the total number of media questions she has answered since announcing her candidacy in April to a whopping 26. She committed no gaffes, but unleashed the full blizzard of Clintonian misdirection, omission, dodging, bogus sentimentality, false confidence, and aw-shucks populism. Voting for the Iraq war was a “mistake,” like the kind you make on a test; she and Bill are lucky people (that’s one way of describing them); Charlotte needs to be able to grow up in an America where every little boy and girl has the chance to go from public office to a foreign-funded slush fund; and family courtier and dirty trickster Sid Blumenthal is just an “old friend” who sent her emails about Libya, where he had business dealings, so that she could get out of her “bubble.”
Not much for an enterprising reporter to go on. And for all we know, the ice caps will have melted before Clinton submits to more questions. It’s part of her strategy: limiting press availabilities also lessens the chances of another “dead broke” moment, of giving answers that raise more questions. Clinton is busy—raising money, positioning herself on the left to thwart a liberal insurgent, doting on Iowa so as not to repeat her defeat there in 2008. Talking to reporters would be a distraction or, worse, an error. Everyone knows who she is. And interviews leave exposed the most vulnerable part of her campaign: herself. Nor is it like she doesn’t have anything to hide. She has a whole lot to hide: her record, her emails, her charity, her brothers, and her friends. Why risk it?
This strategy of press avoidance worked for Clinton pal Terry McAuliffe in 2013 when he was elected governor of Virginia. McAuliffe rarely if ever spoke to reporters, and instead visited with carefully selected businesses and interest groups and sob stories to whom he would nod sympathetically and explain, in the vaguest of ways, how he would make the commonwealth a better, more progressive place. McAuliffe’s campaign manager was Robby Mook, who now performs the same job for Clinton. The lesson he must have drawn from his Virginia experience was that the press, at best, is a nuisance and irrelevant to the outcome of an election. Strategic communications, lots of money, television advertising that defines one’s opponent as extreme, and the Democratic “coalition of the ascendant” are enough to win.
At least it’s enough to win Virginia in a—surprisingly close—off-year election. But treating the press with contempt may not work at the presidential level. On the contrary: It could backfire. Not because voters care about how the press is being treated; they don’t. But because the media are exactly that: the medium through which a candidate is presented to the public. Disturb the medium, tic off its individual components, and the presentation may begin to change.
Slowly and subtly, a candidate may find herself shown to be inaccessible, aloof, conniving, manipulative, privileged, elusive, dishonest. The questions she faces might grow more hostile; the investigations into her wealth might widen; interest in her husband’s friendship with Jeffrey “Lolita Express” Epstein might sharpen. The message she wants to communicate could be displaced by a media-driven caricature.
Republicans know what I’m talking about. They live with it every day: rising stars that go into eclipse, hidden behind media cartoons. Dan Quayle, Clarence Thomas, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz. The latest target is Tom Cotton—see how a Harvard-educated combat veteran is being labeled an amateur, out of his depth, disruptive because of his efforts to stop the nuclear deal with Iran. Our media are fickle, sensationalistic, anxious, insecure, and petty. They’re surprising me with their tough coverage of the Clinton Foundation. Imagine what might happen if Hillary really begins to annoy them.
The assumption has been that the mainstream press will guard Clinton like they did Obama in 2008—avoid damaging lines of inquiry, play up the gender angle just as they played up the racial one. I don’t see it happening yet, however. Clinton can’t be happy with the way her candidacy has been portrayed in the media, from her speaking fees to her email server to the family foundation. You can’t ascribe this treatment to the conservative press alone—though we’ve happily played our part.
Since Bill first became president the Clintons have held a suspicious attitude toward the media, an attitude the media seem to have reflected back at them. Obama was new, cool, postmodern, suave; Clinton is old, a grandmother, clumsy, a millionaire many times over who has been one of the most famous people in the world for more than two decades. She has none of Obama’s edge, his antiwar bona fides, the quasi-mystical importance his followers bestowed on him. No one would have written a story about Obama like the one McClatchy wrote about Hillary on Thursday: “Clinton campaigning in a bubble, largely isolated from real people.” That’s why she has Sid.
The press will no doubt take a different approach once the Republicans choose a nominee, who can then be written off as primitive or corrupt or inexperienced or stupid. I’m not expecting a revolution here, a paradigm shift in the way the media establishment conducts itself. But I am surprised at the way in which Hillary and her supporters dismiss media complaints as extraneous. Bad press hurts campaigns—ask Al Gore, John Kerry, or Mitt Romney. It can hurt Hillary Clinton too. Saturday Night Live is already portraying her as a power-mad robot; think of the damage that could do to perceptions of her over time. And there’s plenty of time.
By not talking to the press Clinton has made a strategic choice, as valid as any other. But it may be the wrong choice—in fact it probably is the wrong choice, because most of the choices Hillary Clinton has made since 2006 have been bad. She lost the Democratic nomination, she was the top foreign policy official for a president who is widely seen to have bungled foreign policy, she joined the ethically murky Clinton Foundation and gave high-paying speeches to business groups despite knowing she’d soon be running for president.
It’s the same lack of judgment and mismanagement that would cause her to vote for Iraq, then oppose the surge, then support the troop withdrawal; to do Obama’s bidding on Russia, Israel, Iran, Libya; to keep up the pen pal correspondence with Blumenthal; to act unlike any presidential candidate in recent memory. Maybe I’m dreaming, but the press could respond by taking someone who’s likable enough—and making her not likable at all.
Silda Wall Spitzer hosts Hillary fundraiser // Politico // Annie Karni - May 23, 2015
Call it the wronged political wives club.
Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s ex-wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, is hosting a $2,700-a-head fundraiser for Hillary Clinton on June 1 in Manhattan, from 12 to 2 p.m., billed as “a conversation with Hillary Clinton.”
In 2008, Silda Wall Spitzer drew notice for standing stoically by her husband’s side when he resigned from office after it was revealed that he was caught up in a prostitution ring scandal.
The “Hillstarter” event is notable as the former governor — who ran unsuccessfully for New York City comptroller in 2013 and now oversees his family’s real estate firm — has ties to Team Martin O’Malley. O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, is expected to announce his candidacy for president on May 30 in Baltimore, Md., and Spitzer has been in a long-term, committed relationship with O’Malley’s spokeswoman, Lis Smith, for close to two years. But Spitzer is now said to be completely out of politics and not expected to donate to either Democratic candidate.
Silda Wall Spitzer has kept a low profile since her divorce from the former governor was finalized last year, when she reportedly received a $7.5 million payout, including the former couple’s Fifth Avenue home. She has been a stalwart Clinton supporter, giving $5,000 to the independent Ready for Hillary super PAC in 2013.
On the same day as the Manhattan event, Clinton is also scheduled to hit up a fundraiser in Queens, N.Y. and a fundraiser at the home of longtime supporters Mindy and Jay Jacobs in Laurel Hollow, N.Y., according to a copy of the email invitation obtained by POLITICO.
On June 5, Clinton will attend a fundraiser at the home of philanthropists Carolyn and Malcolm Wiener in Greenwich, Conn.
Hillary Clinton to Hold Fund-Raiser Hosted by Spitzer’s Ex-Wife // NYT // Maggie Haberman - My 23, 2015
Hillary Rodham Clinton will hold a string of fund-raisers on June 1, including one hosted by the ex-wife of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York who resigned amid scandal in 2008.
The event for Mrs. Clinton, one of three New York-based events that day, will be hosted by Silda Wall, according to the invitation.
The hosts of Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raisers this cycle haven’t been particularly noteworthy — most have been longtime supporters, and Ms. Wall is no exception. But Ms. Wall is also the ex-wife of Mr. Spitzer, who resigned after he was caught up in an investigation into a prostitution ring.
Mr. Spitzer is in a long-term relationship with Lis Smith, a well-known Democratic operative who is also a longtime spokeswoman for Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland who is expected to begin his 2016 presidential campaign on May 30. The fund-raising event was first reported by Politico.
Some of Mrs. Clinton’s allies still recall with frustration the Democratic presidential primary debate in October 2007 in Philadelphia, when she stumbled over a question about a plan by Mr. Spitzer to allow driver’s licenses for unauthorized immigrants. That stumble was seen as contributing to her downward spiral in the polls. Mr. O’Malley has frequently talked about his support for such driver’s licenses.
Mr. O’Malley is seen as a potential vessel for more left-leaning Democrats looking for a challenge to Mrs. Clinton within the party. He has been ratcheting up his populist oratory, drawing comparisons to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a vocal proponent of curtailing Wall Street excesses.
Yet that language is also very similar to how Mr. Spitzer carved out a role on the national stage; he became known as the “sheriff of Wall Street” when he was the New York attorney general. Mr. O’Malley has hired Jimmy Siegel, a Madison Avenue ad-maker whose first political campaign was Mr. Spitzer’s run for governor in 2006, and who subsequently worked for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
Mr. O’Malley’s aides, meanwhile, have grown sharper in drawing a generational contrast with Mrs. Clinton, who will be 69 on Election Day 2016.
Mr. O’Malley, 52, was a strong supporter of Mrs. Clinton in her 2008 presidential campaign. But in recent days, his aides have signaled that they will point to him as a more future-looking candidate than she is.
Asked about the fact that some Maryland elected officials, such as Senator Ben Cardin, have been backing Mrs. Clinton, and her team’s aggressive efforts to corral support in Mr. O’Malley’s home state, one of Mr. O’Malley’s aides, Haley Morris, gave a statement to the Baltimore Sun that used the word “old” twice.
“The establishment backing the establishment is the oldest story in politics,” Ms. Morris said. “If Governor O’Malley runs for president, he’ll bring new leadership — not old-guard establishment thinking — to the race.”
Mrs. Clinton is holding more than a dozen fund-raisers in different cities ahead of her June 13 campaign kickoff rally.
OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE
Elizabeth Warren and Democrats should be down with TPP // WaPo// Johnathan Capehart - May 23, 2015
Now that the Senate has passed a Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill that would fast-track passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, the action moves to the House where my hope for cooler Democratic heads will surely be dashed. And we will have Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) partially to thank for it. The leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has whipped into a frenzy members of Congress who insist on fighting the last war.
Warren was dead set against TPA, which is basically a broad, congressionally approved outline that sets the parameters for the TPP that President Obama is negotiating with 11 other nations. Her steadfast opposition to TPP on behalf of American workers who believe global trade shipped their jobs overseas is understandable. I just wish Warren were telling the truth.
During an interview with Peter Cook of Bloomberg News on May 19, Warren trod her usual path to slam a trade deal she strongly believes is detrimental to the American people. “We’re being asked to grease the skids for a deal that’s basically done but is being held in secret until after this vote,” Warren said in a double-play diss of TPA and TPP. Here’s the thing: nothing’s secret.
Yes, it is secret from you and me. As Ruth Marcus correctly explained, “This is not secrecy for secrecy’s sake; it’s secrecy for the sake of negotiating advantage. Exposing U.S. bargaining positions or the offers of foreign counterparts to public view before the agreement is completed would undermine the outcome.” But TPP is not secret to Warren. She has read it.
“Have you been able to read the deal,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked Warren during an April interview. “Yes,” Warren replied. She went on to explain that any member of Congress can do so. That is true. The voluminous and changing deal sits in a basement room in the Capitol where members and staff with security clearances can read it. Any member of Congress who wants to be briefed on the emerging agreement or ask questions about what they are reading can call the offices of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). According to the folks at USTR, there have been more than 1,700 in-person briefings on the deal. In fact, Ambassador Michael Froman, who is the USTR, has personally briefed Warren on various aspects of TPP.
Now, about Warren’s assertion that TPA “grease[s] the skids for a deal that is basically done.” She used that phrase six times in the 10-minute Bloomberg interview. And she makes it sound like Congress has no and has had no input whatsoever into TPP. Not true. Warren conveniently neglects to mention that every proposal in the deal is and has been previewed with Congress. Or that members of Congress can offer and have offered proposals of their own to USTR.
Again, the concerns about the effect another trade deal will have on the American worker are real. The opposition roaring out of the House Democrats is understandable. After 21 years, the bitter aftertaste of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) remains. Shuttered factories and the lost jobs that ensued led many Americans, Democrats and Republicans, to turn inwards to protect their livelihoods. That’s why Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) said in a statement last month that past trade deals “put the American Dream out of reach for countless working families.” Even the president acknowledges that “past trade deals haven’t always lived up to their promise.”
United States Trade Representative Michael Froman (Andrew Harnik/The Washington Post)
But as I read and do my own reporting on TPP, I keep coming back to a reported conversation between Obama and the late Apple maestro Steve Jobs. According to the New York Times, at a 2011 dinner in Silicon Valley, the president asked Jobs why iPhones couldn’t be made in the United States?
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
Froman told me the United States has three options with regard to TPP. The first option is the status quo. That’s the state of play we have now where “those jobs aren’t coming back,” as Jobs said. It’s also a state of play where large companies may see greater benefits to moving operations abroad and smaller ones face a hill too steep to export. And let’s not even talk about the existing trade deals between some of our biggest trading partners that put U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage.
The second option is implementing TPP. Froman and the administration have argued consistently that unprecedented labor requirements (minimum wage, the right to collective bargaining) and environmental standards (protections for endangered wildlife and oceans) would “level the playing field” for American workers to compete with their counterparts in what would be the largest free-trade zone in the world. “With open markets there, you give U.S. companies an incentive to keep manufacturing here and ship goods overseas,” Froman said.
The third option, Froman said, was for the U.S. to sit back and let China set the rules in the region with its own trade deals with nations in the region. China would love nothing more than for TPP to fail. According to a story from MarketWatch, China’s State Council is “panicky” over the trade deal. The report points out that the Council believes, “Implementation of the TPP will ‘further impair China’s price advantage in the exports of industrial products and affect Chinese companies’ expansion’ abroad….”
“They are working to carve up the market,” Froman told me. “Would you rather a world where the Chinese set the rules of the road or we set the rules of the road?” The latter option is unacceptable. With its polluted air and controlled economy that has a seemingly endless supply of controlled workers, Beijing couldn’t care less about labor, the environment or any of the other values forming the foundation of TPP. In addition, the geopolitical benefit of the deal is a stronger U.S. presence in the region as a counterweight to China.
No trade deal is perfect. The U.S. won’t get everything it wants in the negotiations, but it’s getting pretty darned close. And the people’s representatives in Congress have and have always had the ability to see and shape the forthcoming agreement. Once completed, its terms will be seen by all and debated at the Capitol. That’s as it should be. But this nation cannot pretend the world and the global economy haven’t changed since 1994. And Democrats cannot pretend that a progressive president who has championed the cause of the middle class and who they have supported for the last six years would negotiate “a bad deal” that further put American workers at risk.
The House needs to pass TPA so that TPP can be completed and move towards final passage. It’s not “greasing the skids.” In the 21st century global economy, it’s a necessity.
7 ways Bernie Sanders could transform America // Salon // Mathrew Rozsa - May 23, 2015
Say what you will about the presidential candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), but if nothing else, it has certainly introduced some interesting ideas into America’s political debate. Considering that the most recent polls show Hillary Clinton with a nearly five-to-one lead over her nearest rival, this can only be viewed as a positive thing.
As Reddit‘s favorite politician, Bernie Sanders has enormous influence on our political discourse, and his recent policies have been making huge headlines on the Internet. Here are seven ways in which our national discussion on a wide range of issues could be transformed by the Sanders campaign.
1) Guaranteeing free college
In a press conference on Monday, Sanders advocated that the government fund tuition at four-year public colleges and universities through a so-called Robin Hood tax on Wall Street, one that would set a 50 cent tax on every $100 of stock trades on stock sales, as well as lesser amounts on other financial transactions.
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While Sanders’ critics are expected to denounce the plan as socialistic, the Vermont Senator is quick to point out that similar proposals are already in effect and successful elsewhere. “Countries like Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and many more are providing free or inexpensive higher education for their young people,” Sanders points out. “They understand how important it is to be investing in their youth. We should be doing the same.”
Although Obama promised free community college for students who qualify, Bernie Sanders’ proposed policy shows that with America’s burgeoning debt crisis, we need to go even further.
2) Addressing income inequality
In an interview with the Associated Press confirming his presidential run, Sanders cited America’s growing income inequality as one of the chief motivators behind his campaign, a well-timed stance given the recent #FightFor15 on Twitter.
“What we have seen is that while the average person is working longer hours for lower wages, we have seen a huge increase in income and wealth inequality, which is now reaching obscene levels,” Sanders argued. “This is a rigged economy, which works for the rich and the powerful, and is not working for ordinary Americans.”
Sanders has proposed a number of reforms to solve this problem, from legislation that would close corporate tax loopholes to raising the minimum wage above $7.25 an hour, a rate Sanders describes as a “starvation wage.” For the working poor, getting by continues to be a daily struggle, and Sanders is fighting to change that.
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3) Regulating Wall Street
If you think Sanders’ free college plan has Wall Street concerned, you can only imagine how they feel about Sanders’ proposed bill for breaking up banks that are considered “too big to fail.” In fact, polls show 58 percent of likely voters agreewith his basic argument that “if an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist,” indicating that merely denouncing Sanders as a radical won’t necessarily work for this measure.
What’s more, banking lobbyists are concerned that anti-bank sentiment within the Democratic grassroots could push Clinton to the left on this issue. “The prospects of it becoming law are nil,” reported one banking lobbyist to the Hill. “But we care about whether this impacts Hillary and whether she’ll try to pander to the far left.”
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But for the millions who continue to be affected by the 2008 crash and the effects of the American banking bubble on our Great Recession, it’s not just about pushing Hillary to the left. It’s about pushing America forward.
4) Legalizing marijuana
Although Sanders told Time magazine that he doesn’t consider marijuana legalization to be “one of the major issues facing this country,” his sympathies on the subject are pretty clear.
“If you are a Wall Street executive who engaged in reckless and illegal behavior which helped crash the economy leading to massive unemployment and human suffering, your bank may have to pay a fine but nothing happens to you,” heexplained in an AMA session on Reddit. “If you’re a kid smoking marijuana or snorting cocaine, you may end up in jail for years.”
He also supports increased use of medical marijuana and takes pride in the fact that no one was arrested for marijuana possession or use when he was mayor of Burlington, Vt. Given the negative impact of three decades of the War on Drugs on incarcerating urban residents at disproportionate rates, particularly black men, this is a policy that is long overdue.
Although Hillary has vowed to fight the prison-industrial complex, Sanders shows he’s already ready to take the first steps.
5) Fighting free trade
There is another issue in which Bernie Sanders may push Clinton to the left: free trade.
Although hardly a trending topic, Sanders is a longstanding opponent of international trade agreements like NAFTA that he believes work against the interests of average American laborers. His current target is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is being pushed by the Obama administration despite the fact that its provisions have not been made public.
“It is incomprehensible to me that the leaders of major corporate interests who stand to gain enormous financial benefits from this agreement are actively involved in the writing of the TPP,” Sanders wrote in a letter to the Obama White House, “while, at the same time, the elected officials of this country, representing the American people, have little or no knowledge as to what is in it.”
6) Confronting climate change
Sanders’ has made no secret of his contempt for global warming deniers. To embarrass anti-science Republicans, he introduced a “sense of Congress” resolution in January that simply acknowledged man-made climate change was real and needed to be addressed. By voting in favor of the measure, Congress would do little more than place itself “in agreement with the opinion of virtually the entire worldwide scientific community.”
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Although the amendment was tabled by a mostly party-line vote of 56-42, Sanders’ reputation as an unwavering advocate of pro-environmental policies when dealing with climate change hasn’t gone unnoticed. Climate Hawks Vote, a super PAC dedicated to addressing global warming, ranked Sanders as the number-one climate leader in the Senate.
7) Criticizing Israel
If elected in 2016, Sanders would be America’s first Jewish president, and that makes his willingness to criticize Israel all the more significant. During a town hall event last year, Sanders got into a shouting match with constituents who were angered by his statement that Israel “overreacted” in its military campaign against Hamas and was “terribly, terribly wrong” for bombing UN facilities.
His stance on Israel could hardly be described as blindly pro-Palestinian, however. In the same town hall meeting, he acknowledged that Israel was in a tricky situation because Hamas was firing rockets from populated areas, but he has no love for Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, distinguishing himself as the first Senator to openly refuse to attend Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.
Regardless of whether one agrees with Sanders’ views on these issues, the odds are still far greater than not that he won’t receive the Democratic nomination next year. In addition to being on the far left in his own party, Sanders is a septuagenarian from a minority background who hails from one of America’s smallest states.
At the same time, he is still giving voice to a series of positions that deserve a more prominent place in our political debate. When all is said and done, this can only be a good thing.
Kaine’s quest for war legitimacy // WaPo // George F Wil - lMay 23, 2015
The Revolutionary War and the Civil War ended in Virginia, which was involved, by the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, in the beginning of today’s war with radical Islam. Now a senator from Virginia is determined that today’s war shall not continue indefinitely without the legitimacy conferred by congressional involvement congruent with the Constitution’s text and history.
Tim Kaine, former Richmond mayor, former Virginia governor and former national chairman of the Democratic Party, represents the distressingly small minority of legislators interested in crafting an authorization for use of military force (AUMF). This is easier vowed than accomplished.
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a contributor to FOX News’ daytime and primetime programming.
Kaine’s interest in Congress’s role in the making of war quickened in October 2002, when President George W. Bush, on the eve of midterm elections, sought an AUMF regarding Iraq, even though the invasion was not imminent. The University of Virginia’s Miller Center released the report of the National War Powers Commission , co-chaired by former secretaries of state James Baker and Warren Christopher. It recommended a new codification of the allocation of war powers between the president and Congress.
On Sept. 7, President Obama said he was going “on the offensive” against the Islamic State. In August, he had gone beyond the protection of threatened consular staff at Irbil, an emergency presidential responsibility requiring no congressional authorization. When, however, he unilaterally undertook, also in August, military action to protect a dam about 80 miles from Irbil, Congress, with the lassitude of an uninvolved spectator, did not express itself. Instead, it recessed unusually early, seven weeks before the 2014 elections.
Such dereliction of duty, Kaine says, is as unacceptable as pretending that the AUMF of Sept. 18, 2001, suffices to regulate presidential war-making discretion in the current context. Lacking both temporal and geographic limits, it authorized force “against those nations, organizations, or persons” who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks “or harbored such organizations or persons.” The Islamic State did not exist then and today is a hostile rival to al-Qaeda. Even while the twin towers and Pentagon still smoldered, Congress rightly rejected language authorizing force “to deter and pre-empt any future” terrorism or aggression.
While now claiming to need no authorization beyond that of 2001, Obama suggests an AUMF that would permit military action against the Islamic State and “associated forces,” which would include any group, anywhere, seeking a charisma injection by claiming adherence to the Islamic State.
Because the definitions of today’s enemy and the nature of today’s war are blurry, perhaps any new AUMF must be extremely elastic. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) suggests one authorizing “whatever steps are necessary to defeat ISIS. Period.” To at least partially immunize the future from today’s paralyzing ambiguities about the executive’s and legislature’s respective war-making responsibilities, Kaine and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) propose legislation essentially incorporating the National War Powers Commission recommendations, as follows:
Unless Congress declares war or otherwise authorizes any “significant armed conflict” (“lasting more than a week”), it must, within 30 days of the beginning of such a conflict, vote on a joint resolution of approval. This protects presidential power by reversing the presumption of the 1973 War Powers Resolution that inaction by Congress suffices to establish congressional disapproval.
The Kaine-McCain legislation would, however, constrain presidents by institutionalizing consultation: The joint resolution would be proposed by a permanent Joint Congressional Consultative Committee made up of the House speaker and Senate majority leader, the minority leaders of both bodies and the chairs and ranking members of the four most germane committees of both (Armed Services, Foreign Relations, Intelligence and Appropriations).
Demographic and geographic factors have driven Kaine’s interest in foreign and military policies. When he was born in 1958, 1 in 100 Virginians was foreign-born; today, 1 in 9 is. From its south, with the world’s largest naval base (Norfolk), to its north, with Quantico (where Marine Corps officers train) and the Pentagon and associated military contractors, Virginia is, he says, “the most militarily connected state.”
As Obama’s war strategy collapses, he should welcome company during his stumble through the gathering darkness. As always, however, his arrogance precludes collaboration with Congress. And Congress, knowing that governing involves choosing, which always involves making someone unhappy, is happy to leave governing to him.
When Kaine began running for the Senate, he says he was warned that he would join “the unhappiness caucus” composed of senators who previously had experienced the pleasure of exercising executive power. He is, however, finding satisfaction, of sorts, reminding the national legislature that the fault is not in the stars but in itself that, regarding the most solemn business, it is an underling.
Democrats' Vanishing Future // National Journal // Josh Kraushaar - May 21, 2015
One of the most underappreciated stories in recent years is the deterioration of the Democratic bench under President Obama's tenure in office. The party has become much more ideologically homogenous, losing most of its moderate wing as a result of the last two disastrous midterm elections. By one new catch-all measure, a party-strength index introduced by RealClearPolitics analysts Sean Trende and David Byler, Democrats are in their worst position since 1928. That dynamic has manifested itself in the Democratic presidential contest, where the bench is so barren that a flawed Hillary Clinton is barreling to an uncontested nomination.
But less attention has been paid to how the shrinking number of Democratic officeholders in the House and in statewide offices is affecting the party's Senate races. It's awfully unusual to see how dependent Democrats are in relying on former losing candidates as their standard-bearers in 2016. Wisconsin's Russ Feingold, Pennsylvania's Joe Sestak, Indiana's Baron Hill, and Ohio's Ted Strickland all ran underwhelming campaigns in losing office in 2010—and are looking to return to politics six years later. Party officials are courting former Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina to make a comeback bid, despite mediocre favorability ratings and the fact that she lost a race just months ago that most had expected her to win. All told, more than half of the Democrats' Senate challengers in 2016 are comeback candidates.
On one hand, most of these candidates are the best choices Democrats have. Feingold and Strickland are running ahead of GOP Sens. Ron Johnson and Rob Portman in recent polls. Hill and Hagan boast proven crossover appeal in GOP-leaning states that would be challenging pickups. Their presence in the race gives the party a fighting chance to retake the Senate.
But look more closely, and the reliance on former failures is a direct result of the party having no one else to turn to. If the brand-name challengers didn't run, the roster of up-and-coming prospects in the respective states is short. They're also facing an ominous historical reality that only two defeated senators have successfully returned to the upper chamber in the last six decades. As political analyst Stu Rothenberg put it, they're asking "voters to rehire them for a job from which they were fired." Senate Democrats are relying on these repeat candidates for the exact same reason that Democrats are comfortable with anointing Hillary Clinton for their presidential nomination: There aren't any better alternatives.
For a portrait of the Democrats' slim pickings, just look at the political breakdown in three of the most consequential battleground states. Republicans hold 12 of Ohio's 16 House seats, and all six of their statewide offices. In Wisconsin, Republicans hold a majority of the state's eight House seats and four of five statewide partisan offices. In Pennsylvania, 13 of the 18 representatives are Republicans, though Democrats hold all the statewide offices. (One major caveat: Kathleen Kane, the Democrats' once-hyped attorney general in the state, is under criminal investigation and has become a political punchline.) These are all Democratic-friendly states that Obama carried twice.
If Strickland didn't run, the party's hopes against Portman would lie in the hands of 30-year-old Cincinnati Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld, who would make unexpected history as one of the nation's youngest senators with a victory. (Sittenfeld is still mounting a long-shot primary campaign against Strickland.) Without Feingold in Wisconsin, the party's only logical option would be Rep. Ron Kind, who has regularly passed up opportunities for a promotion. Former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett already lost to Gov. Scott Walker twice, and businesswoman Mary Burke disappointed as a first-time gubernatorial candidate last year. And despite the Democratic establishment's publicized carping over Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania, the list of alternatives is equally underwhelming: His only current intra-party opposition is from the mayor of Allentown.
In the more conservative states, the drop-off between favored recruits and alternatives is even more stark. Hagan would be a flawed nominee in North Carolina, but there's no one else waiting in the wings. The strongest Democratic politician, Attorney General Roy Cooper, is running for governor instead. And in Indiana, the bench is so thin that even the GOP's embattled governor, Mike Pence, isn't facing formidable opposition. Hill, who lost congressional reelection campaigns in both 2004 and 2010, is not expected to face serious primary competition in the race to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Dan Coats.
Even in the two swing states where the party landed young, up-and-coming recruits to run, their options were awfully limited. In Florida, 32-year-old Rep. Patrick Murphy is one of only five House Democrats to represent a district that Mitt Romney carried in 2012—and his centrism has made him one of the most compelling candidates for higher office. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee quickly rallied behind his campaign (in part to squelch potential opposition from firebrand congressman Alan Grayson). But if Murphy didn't run, the alternatives would have been limited: freshman Rep. Gwen Graham and polarizing Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz being the most logical alternatives.
In Nevada, Democrats boast one of their strongest challengers in former state Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, vying to become the first Latina ever elected to the Senate. But her ascension is due, in part, to the fact that other talented officeholders lost in the 2014 statewide wipeout. Democratic lieutenant-governor nominee Lucy Flores, hyped by MSNBC as a "potential superstar," lost by 26 points to her GOP opponent. Former Secretary of State Ross Miller, another fast-rising pol, badly lost his bid for attorney general against a nondescript Republican. By simply taking a break from politics, Cortez Masto avoided the wave and kept her prospects alive for 2016.
This isn't an assessment of Democratic chances for a Senate majority in 2017; it's a glaring warning for the party's longer-term health. If Clinton can't extend the Democrats' presidential winning streak—a fundamental challenge, regardless of the political environment—the party's barren bench will cause even more alarm for the next presidential campaign. And if the Democrats' core constituencies don't show up for midterm elections—an outlook that's rapidly becoming conventional wisdom—Democrats have serious challenges in 2018 as well. It's why The New Yorker's liberal writer John Cassidy warned that a Clinton loss next year could "assign [Republicans] a position of dominance."
By focusing on how the electorate's rapid change would hand Democrats a clear advantage in presidential races, Obama's advisers overlooked how the base-stroking moves would play in the states. Their optimistic view of the future has been adopted by Clinton, who has been running to the left even without serious primary competition.
But without a future generation of leaders able to compellingly carry the liberal message, there's little guarantee that changing demographics will secure the party's destiny. The irony of the 2016 Senate races is that Democrats are betting on the past, running veteran politicians to win them back the majority—with Clinton at the top of the ticket. If that formula doesn't work, the rebuilding process will be long and arduous.
Ben Carson wins SRLC straw poll // Politico //Alex Isenstadt - May 23, 2015
OKLAHOMA CITY — Ben Carson won the straw poll at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference Saturday, demonstrating his popularity among conservative activists at one of the party’s traditional presidential cattle call events.
Carson, a former surgeon who formally launched his underdog campaign this month with an appeal to the GOP’s tea party wing, finished first with 25 percent. He was followed by Scott Walker, who received 20 percent, and Ted Cruz at 16 percent. Chris Christie and Rick Perry tied at 5 percent, with Jeb Bush narrowly behind. Marco Rubio tied with Bobby Jindal and Rand Paul at 4 percent.
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The straw poll victory doesn’t necessarily represent a breakthrough for Carson. Carson and Cruz, both middle-of-the-pack candidates in the early 2016 polls, mounted serious efforts to win the straw poll but most candidates did not compete. They hoped it would give them badly needed momentum as they compete against a sprawling field of better known and better funded rivals. Four years ago here, Mitt Romney notched a narrow, one-vote win over Ron Paul.
The announcement of the results brought an end to a three-day event that has become a mainstay of the party’s nominating contest. It drew 2,000 or so activists from around the South, organizers said, with 958 casting votes in the straw poll. It also drew many of the 2016 Republican hopefuls, all of whom used 25-minute speeches at the downtown Cox Convention Center to throw out red meat to the conservatives gathered.
Rubio and Cruz, who were originally scheduled to make appearances, had to cancel as a result of the ongoing negotiations in Washington over renewal of the Patriot Act.
The three front-runners for the party’s nomination — Bush, Walker, and Rubio — did not have a major presence in the halls. Privately, their advisers said they saw little point in investing time and resources in winning a contest without any electoral implications. None wanted to be seen as seriously competing for a straw poll, which would have little upside and could result in an embarrassing loss.
Cruz and Carson, however, decided to participate in a big way. Both candidates had supporters who manned booths, where they passed out literature, took down information from prospective supporters, and encouraged them to cast votes in the straw poll. Carson backers, wearing blue “I’m with Ben” stickers, crowded the halls and invited attendees to take pictures with a life-size cardboard cut-out of the candidate.
“He has a large contingency here,” Steve Fair, Oklahoma’s Republican national committeeman, said of Carson.
For Cruz — who was initially slated to be the keynote speaker at a Friday night dinner but had his father, Rafael, substitute for him — the organizing surrounding the straw poll was nearly a month in the making. Weeks ago, his top advisers developed a projection of which activists would be most likely to attend the conference and set out to contact them. The campaign would end up calling about 2,000 people throughout Oklahoma, northwest Louisiana, North Texas, and western Arkansas — all areas likely to be heavily represented at the event — and encouraged them to come and register their support for the Texas senator.
The cost of the effort was low — Cruz’s advisers estimate they spent only around $1,800 — but they saw a return in competing. By doing so, they made contact with thousands of conservatives across the South, a constituency that could be inclined to support the Texas senator. Several of Cruz’s top aides spent the conference roaming the halls and talking to activists and party leaders in hopes of increasing his support.
Republicans are grappling with a similar discussion over whether to compete in the Iowa Straw Poll in August, a traditional measuring stick that has been seen as an early barometer of a candidate’s strength in the critical first-caucus state. Earlier this month, Bush said that he wouldn’t be competing, saying that it’s not relevant. Mike Huckabee also announced earlier in the week that he would skip the Iowa Straw Poll. Walker, the current front-runner in Iowa, has yet to say whether he will participate. For both, a loss in the Iowa event — which carries more political cachet than the SRLC poll — would be seen as a black eye.
The SRLC represents one of the party’s major events of the pre-primary season, bringing together activists from the most reliably Republican region in the nation. The 2016 hopefuls who trekked to Oklahoma City, a hub for oil and gas interests, came to speak but also to court influential local political leaders and donors with private meetings. Walker, Bush and Rick Santorum all organized get-togethers in the Devon Tower, the 50-story skyscraper that towers above the city. Christie, meanwhile, held an event for a super PAC that’s been set up to to support his anticipated candidacy.
Some Southern leaders are looking to increase the region’s influence in the nominating process by altering the primary calendar. A number of states, including Alabama, Texas, and Virginia, have announced plans to hold their contests on March 1 and create an “SEC primary,” a reference to the NCAA Southeastern conference. In recent presidential election years, Southern states had their primaries on different dates.
As the conference wrapped up on Saturday, a number of candidates were expected to formally launch their campaigns in the coming days. Santorum is set to launch his bid next week in Pennsylvania, with Perry and Lindsey Graham the week after. Christie, Bush and Walker, meanwhile, are expected to formally launch their candidacies later in the summer.
Chris Christie: The strong, loud type // CBS News // John Dickerson - May 22, 2015
OKLAHOMA CITY--Chris Christie doesn't give speeches so much as engage in performance art. How he speaks is as much a part of his message as what he says. At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference on Friday, after explaining his plan to manage the growth of entitlements, the New Jersey governor said he knows that Social Security is a "third rail of American politics," but that's why he's meddling with it. "I just grabbed it and hugged it, everybody, because that's what leadership is."
Every Republican candidate has a strong suit he thinks will get him to the presidency. Sen. Marco Rubio says he represents the future, Sen. Ted Cruz says he's the purest conservative, Sen. Rand Paul is Mr. Liberty, former Gov. Rick Perry is running on his Texas record, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is positioning himself to be the general election candidate. Christie's route to relevance will be based on the show he puts on for voters.
Christie faces a steep hill to climb with Republicans. In the latest CBS News poll, 42 percent of Republicans said they would never vote for him. That's higher than any other candidate. What makes matters worse is that Christie is among the most well-known candidates in the field. That means unlike Gov. Scott Walker, who is still making a first impression with many primary-goers, voters already have opinions about Christie.
As Mom told us, it's hard to get a second chance to make a first impression. Christie is trying a variety of gambits anyway, including informing voters about his record, using the word conservative a lot, and unveiling policy proposals. But all of it is less important than the way he conveys the information.
Christie starts his remarks in his typical stump speech by talking about his bluntness, the product of his Irish and Italian parents. He tells the story of his mother, who instructed bluntness and truth-telling from an early age. This could be defensiveness--Jeb Bush starts by talking about his father and brother to clear the air, proclaims his love of family but also his independence, and moves on--but Christie has designed his speech and his entire performance around this bluntness. "I didn't run for governor of New Jersey to be elected prom king," said Christie in New Hampshire last month. "I'm not looking to be the most popular guy in the world. I'm looking to be the most respected one."
The message isn't just what you see is what you get, but what you see is what you want. On no issue is this clearer than national security, where Christie, like all Republican candidates, is preaching strength as the antidote to the weakness President Obama has shown. When Christie makes his strength pitch, it's not about his plan for destroying ISIS, restoring U.S. influence in Asia, or countering Vladimir Putin with a stronger NATO. It's about how he talks. "People say lots of different things about me, but they never say that I'm misunderstood, and they never say that I'm unclear. And no one around the world will doubt the resolve of the American people, doubt our strength ... because I will say it directly, whether I'm saying it to a friend or an adversary." In the strength in foreign policy contest, Christie hopes that showing is better than telling.
Will Christie's rhetorical feats of strength work? It was working on some of the members of the audience who listened to him on Friday. "I wasn't fond of him when I came into the room, and he changed my opinion," said Ben Ross, 67, of Oklahoma City. "I didn't like the way he responded to the tragedy of Hurricane Sandy. That hit me the wrong way, but these wounds healed, based on what he said." Dane Trout of western Oklahoma stood outside the convention hall after Bush spoke and compared the two men: "Chris Christie had further to go with me than Jeb Bush, and he did that."
Christie's performance is pleasing to the crowd in a party craving strength after the Obama years, but the question is whether any of the conversions he performed on voters are permanent. If so, those grim poll numbers can be improved. Then he's got to find a way to get himself in front of every possible voter he can.
At the end of his strong-man act, Christie returned to the story of his mother. On her deathbed she told him that because they had been frank with each other their whole lives, there was nothing left to say, and he should go back to work. Strong stuff.
A Rubio campaign blueprint, for all the world to see // WaPo // Dan Balz - May 23, 105
It isn’t often that a presidential campaign blueprint comes packaged between covers and available in bookstores and online for all to see. But that’s the inescapable conclusion from looking through the pages of the book entitled, “2016 and Beyond,” by Republican pollster Whit Ayres.
Ayres is one of his party’s leading analysts. He also happens to be the pollster for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). The new book is subtitled, “How Republicans Can Elect a President in the New America.” If not exactly the strategy memo for a Rubio campaign, it’s a good proxy.
Dan Balz is Chief Correspondent at The Washington Post. He has served as the paper’s National Editor, Political Editor, White House correspondent and Southwest correspondent.
Ayres’s demographic analysis looks at the issue of a changing America from the perspective of the growing minority population (and his party’s weaknesses there) and the majority white population (and his party’s strengths and limitations there). His argument is straightforward: To win the White House, Republicans must systematically improve their performance among minorities while maintaining or even improving their support among white voters.
In an electorate in which the white share of the vote was 72 percent, President Obama won reelection in 2012 despite losing the white vote by a bigger margin than any winning Democrat in the past. The white share of the electorate in 2016 will be a point or two smaller.
Based on estimates of the composition of the 2016 electorate, if the next GOP nominee wins the same share of the white vote as Mitt Romney won in 2012 (59 percent), he or she would need to win 30 percent of the nonwhite vote. Set against recent history, that is a daunting obstacle. Romney won only 17 percent of nonwhite voters in 2012. John McCain won 19 percent in 2008. George W. Bush won 26 percent in 2004.
Sen. Marco Rubio, who's running for president in 2016, is known for his stances on immigration and tax reform. Here's the Florida Republican's take on Obamacare, the Islamic State and more, in his own words.
Put another way, if the 2016 nominee gets no better than Romney’s 17 percent of the nonwhite vote, he or she would need 65 percent of the white vote to win, a level achieved in modern times only by Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide. Bush’s 2004 winning formula — 26 percent of the nonwhite vote and 58 percent of the white vote — would be a losing formula in 2016, given population changes.
Ayres also points out that the GOP’s support among whites is not evenly distributed across the country. He notes that Romney won “overwhelming margins” among whites in conservative southern states, but won fewer than half the white vote in northern states such as Maine, Vermont, Iowa, New Hampshire and Oregon. More importantly, Romney won fewer white votes than he needed in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
To Ayres, this isn’t an either-or choice for the GOP. As he puts it, “For Republicans to become competitive again in presidential elections, Republican candidates must perform better among whites, especially in the overwhelmingly white states of the upper Midwest, and much better among minorities.”
The coming Republican nomination contest will test the appeal of the candidates with both groups of voters. Is there any one candidate who can raise the share of the nonwhite vote and attract more white votes in the Midwest?
When I put that question to Ayres, he said yes, with this caveat: “If that candidate can relate to people who are struggling economically and relate to people who have been disadvantaged by a remarkably changing economy.”
Ayres addresses immigration at length, seeking to debunk those in his party who say Hispanics will always vote overwhelmingly for Democrats or those who say there are more than enough white voters who stayed home in 2012 to make up the deficit by which Romney lost.
He lists any number of GOP candidates who have won significant portions of Hispanic voters in state races and includes an interesting table that shows that, even if all the “missing white voters” had turned out in 2012, and Romney had won them all, “he still would have lost the election.”
Much of Ayres’s book is an examination of public opinion on a range of issues. His conclusion is that, on the key issue of the role and size of government, the country is center-right, not center-left. On debt and deficit, he argues that a Republican candidate is on solid ground talking about both, as long as he or she doesn’t make it all about the numbers and instead links it to policies to stimulate more economic growth.
He sees cultural hot buttons of abortion and same-sex marriage as separable. On abortion, he argues that Americans are and will remain “torn about the morality” of the issue and sees no particular downside for the GOP to remain the antiabortion party, as long as candidates talk about it with sensitivity.
On same sex marriage, he concludes that the political debate is over, that public opinion has made a decisive shift. But he acknowledges that changing the party’s position will be wrenchingly difficult and sketches out some do’s and don’ts for those opposed, including not advocating federal intervention to overturn same-sex marriages adopted through referendums or legislative action.
Ayres urges Republicans to set aside their satisfaction over their big victories in 2010 and 2014 and focus on the reasons they have fallen short in the past two presidential campaigns. He reminds them that deepening their hold on state and local offices in red states is no indicator of their presidential prospects.
In one example, he looks at the dominance of the Republican Party at the state level in states that Romney won in 2012. The party holds between 53 percent and 87 percent of the state senate seats in those places, according to Ayres’s calculations. Some Republicans, he argues, look at those numbers and say, what’s the problem? But Ayres notes that those states still leave the Republicans short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
Ayres said he wrote and published the book before Rubio made a final decision to run for president and said he hoped it would be a blueprint not just for Rubio but for any of the candidates running in 2016. What the party needs, he said, is a candidate who will prompt people who have not voted for the Republicans in the past to consider doing so in 2016 rather than one who offers modifications in message.
“It’s more a matter of not nominating a candidate who looks like the same old, same old, but who looks like a fresh start for the party century,” he said in a phone interview Friday. “It’s bigger than this position or that position. Republicans have got to nominate a transformational candidate because the country has changed more than most of us realized, even in the last 12 years.”
Rubio will choose to run as he sees fit, but the similarities between what he already is saying and doing and what Ayres lays out in his book are striking. The interest in a Rubio candidacy clearly exists within the party for the reasons Ayres outlines. But there is a large leap from the pages of a pollster’s book to the rigors of a presidential campaign. Ayres has offered the road map. Now comes the road test of whether the candidate can deliver.
Rick Santorum’s got a point: Nothing helps poll numbers like winning // WaPo // Philip Bump - May 23, 2015
When Fox News announced on Wednesday that it would limit participation in the first debate of the Republican calendar to the top 10 candidates in national polling, it was instantaneously obvious that there would be friction.
And sure enough, within 24 hours Rick Santorum (who would not make the top-ten cut, if it were today) offered a complaint. But a good one.
"In January of 2012," he said at a conference in Oklahoma, "I was at 4 percent in the national polls, and I won the Iowa caucuses. I don't know if I was last in the polls, but I was pretty close to last."
He was not last in polls. He was indeed close to last -- at least in Real Clear Politics' polling average.
2012 was different in a lot of ways. (For example, Santorum would have been included in a debate using Fox's rules at that point.) But the more interesting point is: Look what happened to his poll numbers afterward. Within days, he shot up over 15 percent support, and never fell below that level again. Later in the campaign, though, his numbers jumped again -- this time after winning majorities in the Colorado and Minnesota primaries.
From Jan. 3, the date of the Iowa caucus, to March 3, the last contest before Super Tuesday, the winner of each contest went into the next one doing better in the polls.
That makes sense, certainly. Losing candidates drop out and support moves around, for one thing. But also, people gravitate toward candidates they think might actually win. Before Iowa, most people probably wouldn't have included Santorum. Afterward, they would.
Santorum's immediate point was, expand the universe of participants in the debates, because you never know. But he actually did more to undermine his point. Santorum was in all of the debates and still only polled at 4 percent. The debates didn't do much. It took winning to actually make his mark on those numbers.
Kasich May Miss Cut in Ohio Debate // RCP // Rebecca Berg - May 22, 2015
The 10-candidate cap set by Fox News for the first Republican debate has raised the awkward possibility that a state’s sitting governor could be excluded from a forum held on his home turf.
The Aug. 6 debate will be in Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena, the same venue that will host the Republican National Convention in July 2016. But only the candidates who rank in the top 10 in national polling will be invited to the Fox News forum, the network announced Wednesday — meaning Ohio Gov. John Kasich might not make the cut.
In public, Kasich’s allies are expressing confidence that he will meet the threshold come August.
“We believe that if Gov. Kasich decides to run, he will be on the stage in Cleveland,” said Chris Schrimpf, a spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party.
But Kasich, who is thought to be laying the groundwork for a campaign, although he has not announced his candidacy, currently scores just 2 percent in the RealClearPolitics national polling average, putting him outside of the top 10 candidates.
Now, behind the scenes, it is his political team’s “top focus to try and get him in the debate,” said a Republican operative with ties to Kasich.
“It would just be flat-out embarrassing if he didn't meet the top 10 threshold in his home state," the operative said.
That objective poses an unusual strategic challenge. Normally, candidates focus their spending during the primary solely on winning the key states on the path to the party’s nomination. But national polls can be influenced by purchasing ads on national television — and candidates on the bubble for debates will need to decide whether to splurge on that advertising.
Kasich is not the only candidate who may face this dilemma: Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, former New York Gov. George Pataki, former Sen. Rick Santorum and Sen. Lindsey Graham could also be vying for the tenth slot come August.
But the stakes are perhaps more personal for Kasich, who lobbied hard to bring the Republican National Convention to Cleveland — and now might be blocked from debating in the very venue that will later host the convention.
In spite of the potential awkwardness and the obstacles the debate format will present to lower-tier candidates, the Republican National Committee has nevertheless thrown its full weight behind Fox’s decision.
“We support and respect the decision Fox has made, which will match the greatest number of candidates we have ever had on a debate stage,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said after Fox announced its criteria.
The RNC decided it would leave it to each debate’s host to decide the threshold candidates must meet to participate, meaning each debate will be handled differently. While Fox News will limit its August debate stage to 10 candidates, CNN will divide its September primary debate into two stages: the first for the top 10 candidates and the second for the remainder.
“They asked for input and ideas,” said Steve Duprey, a New Hampshire committeeman and chairman of the RNC’s 2016 debate committee. “Our input was to make the debates as inclusive as you can.”
Although Kasich has not yet commented publicly on the Fox News debate configuration, other Republican candidates who might be left out have begun to make noise
Santorum, who barely registered in national polling at the start of the 2012 Republican primary contest, but went on to place second to Mitt Romney, told the National Journal on Thursday that the debate thresholds are "arbitrary" and "not legitimate."
“Hopefully they put it out there and they're going to listen to what the comments are, and factor those in, and determine what is the right way,” Santorum said.
In a conciliatory gesture, Fox News host Greta Van Susteren invited those candidates who do not make the network’s debate to appear on her show that same evening.
But then, Kasich would give up his a home-field advantage for a smaller stage — an outcome his team will be working to avoid.
Ten Is Too Few // Weekly Standard // Jay Cost - June 1, 2015
Last week, Fox News announced its guidelines for the first debate among presidential contenders endorsed by the Republican National Committee (RNC). The network plans to invite the top 10 candidates, with the ranking determined by an average of the five most recent national opinion polls before the August 6 event. This is similar to the approach it has taken in previous cycles.
Following historical precedent is often smart. In addition, using a hard-and-fast metric, like a candidate’s poll position, is better than subjective criteria to determine whether a candidate is “serious.”
However, Fox has adopted the wrong approach, and the RNC is wrong to endorse it. Several problems stand out:
* The “margin of error” in polling does not disappear when one averages polls together. For instance, five polls with 750 respondents apiece would still yield a margin of error of about 1.5 points. That may not seem like much, but it could be trouble early in the cycle. What if the candidate in 10th place is polling at 4 percent on average, while the 11th-place candidate is at 3.5 percent? Statistically speaking, there is no difference between the two, yet one would be included while the other would be left out.
* Polls have been misbehaving of late. They were wildly wrong in Britain and Israel, and they were wide of the mark in our 2014 midterms. Worse, there has been evidence of what Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight calls “herding”: pollsters producing results that closely mimic one another, but not what is happening in the real world.
* Polls simply do not tell us very much so early in the cycle. Voters are hardly paying attention, which means their opinions can be arbitrary and easily changed. We saw this in both the 2008 and 2012 GOP nomination battles, where the primary debates rapidly moved public opinion. Why should pre-debate polls carry any weight?
* There is no meaningful separation between the candidates yet. The Real Clear Politics polling average has Jeb Bush in first place, with 15 percent, and John Kasich in 11th place, at 2 percent. A 13-point gap is insubstantial in the early days of a presidential campaign cycle. Just ask President Barack Obama. At one point in 2007, he trailed Hillary Clinton by 26 points in the RCP average.
* It is not the business of Fox News or the RNC to determine the range of acceptable choices for Republican voters. If this were a typical cycle, with maybe a half-dozen serious candidates, a threshold such as this would make sense. It is the only way to exclude obviously nonserious or fringe candidates. But this is not a typical cycle. If we used the current RCP polling averages, the proposed threshold would exclude John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, and Lindsey Graham from the first debate. These are all serious candidates—two sitting governors, a sitting senator, and a former Fortune 500 CEO. Moreover, the RNC has talked a good game about how to grow the party. Does it make sense to exclude a woman, the son of immigrants from India, and the governor of a must-win purple state? Neither Fox News nor the RNC should take it upon itself to decide that such candidates are unworthy of consideration. That task is best left to the voters.
There is no doubt that the RNC faces a logistical challenge with these debates. It is simply not practical to include more than 10 candidates in a single session (and even 10 will be a stretch). However, excluding serious candidates based on statistically meaningless poll positions so early in the cycle is a terrible solution.
There has to be a better way. For instance, CNN intends to have two debates, one with “first tier” candidates, and another with “second tier” candidates pulling in at least 1 percent apiece. But this approach still creates an arbitrary and meaningless distinction between who participates in which debate.
Both Fox and CNN should hold more two (or even three) debates, with the candidates divided up by some random selection, including all candidates who meet some basic threshold like 1 percent in the polls or a minimum sum of money raised. It makes sense to apply more stringent criteria later in the cycle; however, there should be a maximally inclusive approach in the early days of the campaign, without discrimination between candidate “tiers.”
The GOP electorate would surely appreciate this. A recent Pew poll found that Republicans are more excited about this field than their choices in the previous two cycles. It is an easy bet that primary voters would eagerly watch multiple debates.
In fact, the RNC should insist on inclusion. The only way to produce the best candidate to defeat Hillary Clinton is to examine all the credible contenders carefully. This means they all should be included in the debates, even if this means two or three-tiered debates in the early going.
Reform Conservatism Is An Answer To The Wrong Question // The Federalist // Robert Tracinski - May 22, 2015
In less than a year, the agenda of the Republican Party will be pretty much fixed by the selection of its presidential nominee, whose policies we will all feel pressured to get behind, because they will probably be better than the prospect of Hillary Clinton selling the Oval Office furniture to the highest bidder.
So there is a certain urgency for those who are fighting over what that agenda should be. Hence the renewed push by those who call themselves “reform conservatives.” An examination of their agenda featuring The Federalists‘s Ben Domenech led to an insightful roundtable from some of our contributors. I talked with Ben about it yesterday on the Federalist Radio Hour, and we covered a lot of interesting ground, including the curious way that “reform conservatives” feel like a bunch of think-tank elites trying to draft a populist platform. This explains some of the disconnect between the ambitious goal of making the agenda of the right more appealing to the common man—and the result, which is a laundry list of technical policy tweaks.
What struck me most of all is that “reform conservatism” looks a lot like a rebranding of neoconservatism—not the neoconservative foreign policy that everyone has been talking about for the past decade, but the neoconservative domestic policy.
I remember way back in 1993 opening the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal—we read things on paper back then—and seeing an op-ed by Irving Kristol (which seems to be reprinted here) calling for “a conservative welfare state.” His starting point was that it was going to be impossible ever to roll back the welfare state and the middle-class entitlements: “the welfare state is with us, for better or worse.” So we might as well make it for better by redesigning “a welfare state consistent with the basic moral principles of our civilization and…our nation.”
In practice, this meant that the “conservative welfare state” should provide greater incentives for the moral values conservatives like, such as work and marriage, and it should be made more efficient by introducing “free-market” elements, which usually ends up meaning some form of vouchers or tax credits in place of a centrally administered welfare program. This is pretty much what the “reform conservatives” are offering now as if it were a new idea.
More to the point, this doesn’t really count as a reform of conservatism or of the Republican agenda. Offering more efficient and responsible management of the welfare state is the Republican agenda of the past thirty years. That isn’t a reform. That’s what needs reforming.
Offering more efficient and responsible management of the welfare state is the Republican agenda of the past thirty years. That isn’t a reform. That’s what needs reforming.
The key premise of this non-reforming “reform conservatism” is the idea that it’s impossible to really touch the welfare state. We might be able to alter its incentives and improve its clanking machinery, but only if we loudly assure everyone that we love it and want to keep it forever.
And there’s the problem. Not only is this defeatist at its core, abandoning the cause of small government at the outset, but it fails to address the most important problem facing the country.
“Reform conservatism” is an answer to the question: how can we promote the goal of freedom and small government—without posing any outright challenge to the welfare state? The answer: you can’t. All you can do is tinker around the edges of Leviathan. And ultimately, it won’t make much difference, because it will all be overwelmed in the coming disaster.
America’s real problem is that we have entrenched a set of middle-class entitlements that are about to yawn wide open and swallow the economy. They’ve already swallowed the federal budget. Non-defense discretionary spending—the stuff left over after entitlements and the military—has been whittled down to insignificance and is about to disappear altogether. Defense spending is still quite large, but not much larger than the deficit. What this means is that most of the money the federal government actually raises in taxes is immediately spent on entitlements, and we have to borrow huge sums of money to pay for anything else.
America’s real problem is that we have entrenched a set of middle-class entitlements that are about to yawn wide open and swallow the economy.
It’s only going to get worse as the Baby Boomers age and drop out of the workforce at the same time that they massively increase the load on Social Security and Medicare. Greece is the harbinger of our future, as we hurtle toward the point when we’ve borrowed so much money—and need to keep on borrowing, just to keep cutting the entitlement checks—that it becomes doubtful we can ever pay it all back. Then our creditors start to clamp down and the whole house of cards collapses.
So tinkering on the edges isn’t an adequate response. The question we need to be asking is not: how can we reform the welfare state without challenging it? The question is: how can we convince the American people to start rolling back the welfare state? How can we wean the nation off entitlements?
How we can do that is a big topic, and I don’t pretend to have any easy answers. But it is at least the right question to ask.
It’s also true that this might not give us much guidance for how to win elections in the short term. But that’s not what this discussion is supposed to be about, is it? It’s not about the crude opportunism of “rebranding” the GOP for the next election cycle. It’s about finding a long-term agenda that can help the right define and achieve its goals. “Reform conservatism” looks to me like a great plan for rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. What we need is a plan to show everyone the iceberg, point to the clear waters in the other direction, and turn the boat around.
The question is: how can we convince the American people to start rolling back the welfare state?
More broadly, we need a program that would achieve the real, fundamental moral reform this country needs: a rediscovery of personal responsibility, private initiative, and self-reliance. Do you know how you encourage individuals to take the reins of their own lives and make their way in the world, instead of sitting back and waiting for a government handout? You let them do it.
The defeatism is really quite astonishing. We are a people who crossed mountains and cultivated prairies, who built farms and steamships and steel mills, who created astonishing new technologies that altered every aspect of life. That’s the story of two centuries of our history. By contrast, the cradle-to-grave welfare state is an upstart experiment that only really took hold in the last thirty to fifty years. Yet we’re supposed to act as if that is the permanent, unchangeable, immovable part of our society—while the American as builder, creator, and self-made man is a vision that no longer has any power to stir the soul.
I think that’s a short-range, self-defeating approach. It doesn’t really reform anything, and the only thing it conserves is the welfare state.
The power grab that destroyed American politics: How Newt Gingrich created our modern dysfunction // Salon // Paul Rosenberg - May 23, 2015
In rolling out his proposal for a progressive agenda, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has repeatedly referenced Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” On one level that makes sense, since the “Contract with America” is arguably the only example most people can think of where a national political platform of sorts did not come from a presidential campaign. It also played a significant—though sometimes poorly understood—role in altering the trajectory of American politics, and thus it makes sense to reference it when setting out to alter that trajectory again.
A lot of what people remember about the Contract just isn’t so, and a lot of what was so is forgotten. It was not a conservative document so much as it was a targeted GOP play for the support of Ross Perot voters (as described in the book “Three’s a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and the Republican Resurgence” by Ronald Rapoport and Walter Stone), and despite its poll-driven nature (touted by Gingrich at the time), its late release indicated it was less a play for broad political support than it was for shaping elite political discourse after an election Republicans knew they would win. At its core, it was the very essence of political gamesmanship, even as it paraded itself as a populist attack on the establishment.
In contrast, de Blasio’s agenda clearly is a progressive document, and brings together a range of similarly themed aspirations to create a fairer, more inclusive future. His 13 points are organized under three broad headings,“Lift the Floor for Working People,” including points like raising the federal minimum wage to $15/hour and passing comprehensive immigration reform; “Support Working Families,” including passing national paid sick leave and paid family leave, and making Pre-K, after-school programs and childcare universal; and “Tax Fairness” including closing the carried interest loophole and ending tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.
Aside from referencing Gingrich’s Contract, other statements de Blasio has made reinforce a very different picture of the core political processes as well as the end goal that he has in mind, as Amanda Terkel reported:
“Obviously the Washington dynamics are broken for all intents and purposes, and history has shown us that a lot of the greatest success I think we’ve ever seen in the history of American government, in terms of dealing with economic crisis, is the New Deal,” he said. “That arrived largely from actions that were already started at the state and local level and were developed into national policies. I think we’re in a similar paradigm right now. The local level is way ahead of the federal level in terms of addressing these issues.”
While de Blasio’s intention is continue and expand the New Deal heritage, Gingrich was opposed to it. Yet, he did nothing to change the basic structure of American political attitudes, which embody broad support for maintaining or expanding social spending programs in practice, even while fitfully deploring it in theory—a “schizoid” state first documented by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril in their 1967 book, “The Political Beliefs of Americans.” They found that two-thirds of the population qualified as operationally liberal, supporting an activist federal government when asked about specific programs or responsibilities, while half the population qualified as ideological conservatives, based on questions about government interference and individual initiative. Half of all ideological conservatives even qualified also as operational liberals. For all the effort he expended, Gingrich did nothing to change this basic situation. What he did do was to significantly aggravate this disconnect, intensifying America’s political dysfunction.
The story surrounding how that happened is best told by Rapoport and Stone in “Three’s a Crowd.” They find a direct relationship between Perot vote share in 1992 and the chances of a GOP House pickup two years later. “Only 2.2 percent of Democratic districts where Perot received 10 percent or less of the district vote flipped to the Republicans in 1994, while 42 percent of Democratic districts where Perot ran most strongly in 1992 switched to the GOP,” they write. How much did this matter? A lot: “Had Perot won the same popular vote [in 1992] as he captured in 1996 (8.4 percent, less than half of what he actually received in 1992), we estimate that the Republicans would have picked up about twenty-nine seats over what they held in 1992, leaving Democratic control intact.” That’s only three seats more than the average number of seats lost by the president’s party between 1946 and 1990—a negligible difference. Thus, Perot’s 1992 showing was absolutely crucial to GOP success in 1994—the “Contract with America” was merely the primary means for tapping into that potential.
Looking back to 1992, Perot’s affinity with the Democrats appeared stronger, once Clinton was nominated. He even withdrew from the race for a time. After the election, however, Clinton alienated Perot and his supporters, most dramatically by pushing through NAFTA, with Vice President Gore publicly debating Perot on NAFTA and treating him disdainfully in the process. Despite the fact that more Republicans than Democrats voted for NAFTA (with Gingrich playing a key role), Clinton’s leadership was key, and the disrespect shown to Perot personally was emotionally most resonant. At the same time Clinton/Gore were treating Perot with contempt, Republicans were viewing him like a gold mine:
As the dynamic of third parties suggests, after Perot identified and mobilized a large constituency, both major parties bid for its support in subsequent elections. The Republicans, as the party out of power in both houses of Congress and the presidency, had the greater opportunity and incentive to appeal aggressively to the Perot constituency. Beginning with the February 1993 Republican post-election retreat, a group of Republican leaders, spearheaded by Newt Gingrich and John Kasich, established close ties with Perot and his UWSA organizations. Despite initial reluctance from other party leaders, including Bob Dole and Haley Barbour, Gingrich and his colleagues brought the Republican Party into line behind a Perot-base strategy. Most impressive in this effort was the Contract with America, which reflected both the form of Perot’s checklist for candidates at the end of his book “United We Stand America” and many of the same issue priorities of Perot and his supporters, while ignoring issues—such as abortion and free trade—where differences between the GOP base and the Perot movement were sharp.
Although there were some real affinities between Republicans and Perot voters, three sharp differences are particularly illuminating in terms of fundamental deceptions that the Contract embodied. Each involves a matter of principle for Perot voters, which Gingrich and the Republicans adopted purely as matter of political expediency—and even then, not too convincingly. First was the call for term limits. As the minority party, out of power for four decades, it was an easy call for Republicans to adopt this Perot position, except when it came down to actual cases, as reported at the time:
And for some GOP incumbents the contract presents awkward contradictions. Gingrich, for instance, finds himself advocating that no House member be allowed to serve more than six terms–even as he runs for his ninth.
Asked to explain the apparent double-standard on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, he declined to say directly whether he would step down if the term-limits proposal became a reality.
“The notion that everybody who’s for something has to offer to commit suicide in order for you to think they’re sincere, I think is fairly outrageous,” Gingrich said.
There was a similar strategic logic to adopting the Perot call for a balanced budget. It was, after all, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush who had exploded the deficit like never before, so why not stick a Democratic president with the job of fixing their mess? Especially since it would mean getting Democrats to do Republican’s dirty work for them? (Which some had seen as the point all along.) In this case, the hypocrisy wasn’t quite so self-evident in advance. That would come after Clinton left office, and George W. Bush quickly plunged the government deeply into deficits once again.
The third point was the matter of congressional reform, two items in particular: the first to “cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third,” and the second to limit the terms of all committee chairs. While Perot supporters saw such measures in terms of making Congress more accountable to the people, Republicans had a much more clear-eyed view of things: it would make Congress more dependent on special-interest lobbyists, who would become significantly more important in the process of drafting legislation.
But for Gingrich personally, there was an additional payoff: it got rid of knowledgeable congressional staffers who readily saw through his grandiose BS. As I’ve noted before, this has been pointed out by Bruce Bartlett, a top economic adviser to presidents Reagan and Bush I, in a piece titled “Gingrich and the Destruction of Congressional Expertise,” where he explained:
He [Gingrich] has always considered himself to be the smartest guy in the room and long chafed at being corrected by experts when he cooked up some new plan, over which he may have expended 30 seconds of thought, to completely upend and remake the health, tax or education systems.
Because Mr Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress’ professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise.
To remove this obstacle, Mr Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories….
In addition to decimating committee budgets, he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations.”
Of course, the GOP had decades of no-nothing history before Newt Gingrich came along. But his evisceration of congressional expertise was something without parallel in American history. Regrettably, when the Democrats did briefly regain control of the House, they did nothing significant to reverse the damage Gingrich had done. The kind of expertise that Gingrich eliminated is precisely what America needs to make sound policy decisions—on everything from WMDs in Iraq to climate change, financial regulation, community-based policing and drug policy reform. In its absence, we’ve had an endless parade of committees investigating Benghazi, and various other forms of clownish behavior.
Such is the extreme end result of the Contract with America. As I said above, Gingrich did nothing to change the basic structure of American political attitudes, the “schizoid” state described by Free and Cantril. Instead, he merely aggravated the schizoid disconnect. But even with that disconnect, landslide majorities still support robust social spending—the exact opposite of what our political classes have decided on. Where Gingrich aimed to confound the majority will, de Blasio aims to liberate it, by bringing together existing movements and synergizing their power to restore what still remains the dominant popular political outlook in the nation at large—a belief that government should be an instrument of the popular will, enabling us to achieve together what we cannot achieve on our own.
While this view has been present throughout our history, it achieved its modern formulation during the New Deal, and knowledge of this is reflected in de Blasio’s core understanding of what he’s up to, as refected in Amanda Terkel’s reporting cited above. It’s reflected in de Blasio’s timing as well. As already noted, Gingrich’s Contract was unveiled less than two months before the 1994 election, on Sept. 27, leaving no opportunity to forge any organic popular foundation. But de Blasio’s announcement provides an 18-month lead time, plenty of time to build support, dialogue, revise, and forge alliances for post-electoral action.
In contrast to the Contract’s evolution as a carefully calculated political document, de Blasio’s 13-point agenda is much more driven by the actual content of the proposals and movements it seeks to encompass. Salon’s Joan Walsh was certainly right to call attention to key missing pieces:
De Blasio was flanked by big placards supporting debt-free college and expanding Social Security, two demands that have rocketed to the top of the progressive agenda thanks to strong movements behind them. But those issues haven’t yet officially made the 13-point list. A bigger omission was any mention of criminal justice reform.
If, like Gingrich’s Contract, de Blasio’s lead time were less than two months, this could prove fatal. But an 18-month lead time allows for these omissions to be addressed via a much more organic process of consultation. The greater challenge will be shaping a cohesive narrative whole. As Walsh also noted, the logic of de Blasio’s agenda is supported by a more detailed analysis in the Roosevelt Institute report “Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity,” advancing the arguments that “Inequality is not inevitable: it is a choice we make with the rules we create to structure our economy.” And this bedrock insight—that the economy is a structured human creation, which can be reshaped by structuring it differently—is the foundation on which the struggle for America’s future needs to be waged.
There is nothing particularly new or radical in this view. Almost 240 years ago, in “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith did not blindly assume that the “invisible hand” of the market automatically produced the best outcome, as many mistakenly believe. Smith was quite aware that markets reflect the rules built into them, which in turn reflect underlying power. Hence, he wrote: “Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.”
Yet, the free market fantasy of a primordial pristine state has a powerful hold on the American imagination, and it plays a key role in shaping the views of ideological conservatives, which brings us back to “The Political Beliefs of Americans” again. In the last section of their book, Free and Cantril noted that “the principles according to which the majority of Americans actually behave politically have not yet been adequately formulated in modern terms,” and argued that “it is only because the American system has demonstrated such flexibility and such a capacity to accommodate to new situations that this schizoid state has not more seriously impeded the operation and direction of government.”
Two points are worth making here. The first is that what they wrote in 1967 has remained true ever since. Decades of polling, particularly the “attitudinal measures” in the General Social Survey, show slow cyclical variations, but no overall erosion of these attitudes. As noted above, broad support remains for maintaining or expanding social spending programs, even among conservatives, and Gingrich’s Contract did not destroy that support.
The second point is that what Gingrich did do was to significantly impair the American system’s flexibility and capacity to accommodate to new situations. Although Gingrich’s narrow power-grabbing agenda quickly failed, and he left Congress only a few years later, the heightened impairment to the system’s flexibility and adaptability lived on, furthering the negative consequences of the underlying schizoid state. Things have now reached such a crisis state that even the most basic, broadly supported, non-ideological forms of government spending are being crippled: spending on infrastructure, education and scientific research, spending that even the wealthiest Americans support.
Free and Cantril also said:
There is little doubt that the time has come for a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve. Such a statement, with the right symbols incorporated, would focus people’s wants, hopes, and beliefs, and provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and consistent manner.
Something along these lines is the long-term task that progressives have before us. Building movements, and drawing them together—as de Blasio and others are working hard to do—are necessary precursors. But for the long haul, we will need to go even deeper than Free and Cantril imagined, even changing the language we use to talk about economy—as the rule-governed human creation it actually is, not as something natural that’s best left alone—as cognitive linguist Anat Shenker-Osorio explains in her book “Don’t Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense about the Economy” (my review here). Ultimately, what’s needed is a fundamental reorientation in how we see ourselves as a people and a country, as well as how we see the economy. We need a new, inclusive vision, and a language that reflects the fact that America is what we make it, together: E pluribus unum.
“The party of white people”: How the Tea Party took over the GOP, armed with all the wrong lessons from history // Salon // David Sehat - May 23, 2015
There was an emerging disagreement among conservatives, one that grew out of differing dispositions, if not principle. The Tea Party movement possessed an almost centrifugal force in which ideas gravitated from the center to the margins. On the anti-intellectual fringe, the narrative about the Founders was taken up by absolutists and paranoids who supported citizen militias and the like. Yet even those not on the fringe supported the radical rhetoric. It was, in some sense, built into the movement. The logic of their argument—that conservatives were losing the country, that it had fatally departed from the Founders’ intentions, that the republican experiment required periodic revolutions to renew old values—suggested that extreme and uncompromising measures were necessary to restore the nation to the old ways.
The Republican leadership, by contrast, was made up of realists. Though establishment politicians had used similar revolutionary rhetoric often enough—since at least the time of Ronald Reagan—when it came to governing they recognized the limits of their power and the importance of incremental change. But with the Tea Party revolution, the rhetoric became harder to control. The conservative base had slipped its leash. The new Tea Party activists, who rejected incremental change as part of the same old pattern that slouched toward tyranny, had begun speaking of revolution in sometimes the most literal sense.
As early as August 2009, David Frum, a speechwriter for George W. Bush, warned that conservatives were playing with fire. “All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence,” he wrote during the angry summer recess. “It’s not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric.”
His warning turned out to be tragically prescient two days after the 2011 legislative session began, when Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head at a constituent event in Arizona. All told, nineteen people were shot. Six of them died, including a federal judge who was present. Reporters quickly discovered that Giffords had been on Sarah Palin’s target list. The police had been called when a man dropped a gun at one of her summer events in the infamous 2009 summer recess. And she had been one of the representatives to receive police protection after her affirmative vote on Obamacare. In retrospect, it was clear that she had been in danger for some time. Now she lay in a medically induced coma with the surgeons uncertain about the extent of her injuries.
Some commentators wondered if perhaps the Republicans had foolishly tried to ride the Tea Party tiger. It had been clear for some time that the Tea Party combined legitimate outrage over Democratic policies with more disreputable elements that tended toward extreme directions, a dialectic that the conservative columnist Matthew Continetti called “the two faces of the Tea Party.” One side sought to repair various “deformities” in American politics. The other, according to Continetti, was “ready to scrap the whole thing and restore a lost Eden.” One side was reformist. The other was revolutionary. One was responsible. The other was dangerous. It was really important, Continetti believed, to encourage the one side and suppress the other.
But when Continetti first began worrying about how to separate the responsible side from the reactionaries, other commentators had argued that it was impossible to draw such a line. Over at the National Review, Jonah Goldberg suggested that these two faces were actually marching in lockstep, as they had always done. Like Goldwater and Reagan in an earlier era, the two sides were really differing dispositions. One was more strident. The other was sunnier. One sometimes drifted into apocalyptic pronouncements. The other maintained a more realistic position while offering the hope of change. But both shared a policy vision, he argued, and both rejected the twentieth-century welfare state as a betrayal of the Founders’ idea of self-reliance. If the strident faction seemed to be ascendant at the moment, as it had since 2009, Goldberg was not particularly worried. Tea Party zeal would only catalyze conservative momentum that could eventually be channeled toward legislative success.
But after the shooting, things looked different. With Giffords lying in a coma and half a dozen people dead, it became much more important to distinguish the hysterical faction from the responsible one. Republican leaders would need to contain the more unruly components of the Tea Party revolution, while nevertheless harnessing its energy to accomplish Republican purposes.
Unfortunately for the Republican leadership, the Tea Party seemed barely interested in governance. Tea Partiers wanted, above all else, a confrontation with the president regardless of the wisdom of the conflict. And because the 2010 freshman class was so large, Speaker John Boehner did not have a functional majority to pass bills without Tea Party support. That dynamic made Republican attempts to convert the posture of rage into actual policy initiatives difficult if not impossible.
The problems began straightaway. By early spring, it became apparent that the U.S. debt ceiling would need to be raised, a regular occurrence since the spiraling debts under the George W. Bush administration, now exacerbated by the Great Recession and the Democrats’ stimulus package to combat it. Republican leaders decided that they would resist all increases to the debt ceiling until they received sufficient concessions that would, they hoped, force a fundamental change in course.
The tactic was not new. Fights over the debt ceiling had been occasional going back to the exploding deficits of the Reagan administration. But what was new was the unbending posture of the Tea Party. In the past, when the opposition party threatened not to raise it, there was no real risk that the ceiling would not be raised. Refusing to do so was simply a way of extracting concessions. Everyone understood that actually going through with the obstruction would put the U.S. government into default—not a live option.
But what the Tea Party–led Republicans demanded—a massive cut to spending that would increase over time, a balanced-budget amendment that would permanently limit spending in the future, and the promise that these aggressive cuts would somehow balance the budget rather than creating recession and larger budget deficits—was unprecedented. There was no way that Obama could give even half of what the Tea Party faction demanded. So what would otherwise have been a routine maneuver in public credit of the United States. The Tea Party threatened to burn down the house in order to “save” it.
As the standoff lasted through the summer, many old-guard Republicans began to grow nervous. Even those not known for their moderation began to appeal to the Tea Party faction for a sense of perspective. Under the headline “Ideals vs. Realities,” the conservative pundit Thomas Sowell reminded his allies that they needed to keep in mind the course of the Founders in the American Revolution. Just as George Washington retreated from British troops to find a more strategic ground, Sowell argued, so the Tea Party might find a different place than the debt limit to begin the quest for smaller government.
But the Tea Party members remained firm. They were engaged in a revolution, and a revolution demanded, above all else, extreme commitment. They would continue to the bitter end. As former House majority leader Dick Armey had said at a Tea Party rally, they needed to follow the Founders and the Constitution without thought or equivocation—“This ain’t no thinkin’ thing,” he said.
Once the Treasury commenced extraordinary measures to put off default, more business-minded Republicans became frantic. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial denouncing the self-destructive extremism of the Tea Party faction under the title “The GOP’s Reality Test.” The editorial board was now convinced that the Republican Party had been taken over by a bunch of lunatics who were unhinged from the actualities of economics and governance.
The future was now clear. The Tea Party movement was determined to follow their vision, even if it was self-stultifying. They professed to want to shrink government to unleash the capitalist system and they argued that not raising the debt ceiling would be a first step. But a default would have plunged the nation’s economy back into recession, which would have lowered tax receipts and massively increased the debt. And the default would have further raised the cost of borrowing, which would then further increase the debt. So not raising the debt ceiling as a first step in stopping the debt cycle would have, in fact, massively increased the deficit, added enormously to the debt, and thrown the nation’s economy into chaos.
As the radicalism of the new freshman class became apparent, Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times wondered if perhaps the Tea Party could learn from Jefferson, their idol. Jefferson was the originator of the antistatist tradition in American politics. He had invented many of the rhetorical postures that the Tea Party now adopted. But like the Tea Party, Jefferson had found his ideology and his posturing challenged by reality, as had many anti-statist politicians who crusaded to shrink government. In fact, by the measurement of actually accomplishing their goals in office, Tanenhaus wrote, “Jefferson and his heirs have been abject failures.” But by learning once in office and by adjusting to the realities before him, Tanenhaus believed, Jefferson succeeded in governance.
Could the Tea Party do the same? The answer was no. Unlike Jefferson, who proved to be supple in adjusting his ideology to reality, the Tea Party faction was determined to remain consistent to the bitter end. Their failure was not merely one of political thought, but grew instead out of an intellectual and rhetorical style that substituted paranoid sloganeering for actual policy analysis. Tea Partiers assumed, as Reagan, Goldwater, and others before them had done, going all the way back to Jefferson, that principles and values naturally cohered without trade-offs. Those principles had been handed down from the Founders, were betrayed at some point in the past, and now needed to be reapplied or else the people would find themselves under a federal despot. Given those stakes, the niceties of economics, the actual numbers by which decisions are made, and the policy considerations that guide choices and trade-offs were all beside the point. Total resistance was the only option.
It would be a long next few years.
SECESSION IS AN AMERICAN PRINCIPLE
“Is the Tea Party Over?” the columnist Bill Keller asked hopefully at the start of the 2012 election season. After the near miss with the default, Keller was not alone in wishing for a reprieve. But it was not to be.
Because of Republican gerrymandering after the 2010 election, the party leadership could not abandon the Tea Party radicals. Since many conservatives were in safe seats, the only credible challenge that they could face would be from the right. To ignore the Tea Party faction or to sideline their political interests would only cause a challenge to the seat. “You have to kowtow to the Tea Party,” a spokesman for Richard G. Lugar of Indiana said, summarizing the view of many Republican politicians. And because of the Tea Party’s unbending radicalism, the Republican Party was, in effect, being driven by its most extreme faction.
The resulting environment was not hospitable to moderate Republicans, especially coming up on a presidential election cycle. After seeing the radicalism of the moment, many viable Republican governors decided to sit out the 2012 race. Navigating the way through a Republican primary required too many bows to Tea Party orthodoxy and an almost willful detachment from basic budgetary math. As Jacob Weisberg observed, the new Republican orthodoxy expected all candidates “to hold the incoherent view that the budget should be balanced immediately, taxes cut dramatically, and the major categories of spending (the military, Social Security, Medicare) left largely intact.” “There is no way to make these numbers add up,” Weisberg concluded, a fact that had been pointed out numerous times by nonpartisan sources. But the Tea Party required the incoherent litmus test nevertheless, which had the effect of winnowing the field.
As more responsible Republican governors bowed out of the race, the resulting crowd of candidates was filled with minor and often eccentric figures who hewed to Tea Party orthodoxy. The primary season itself unfolded with an unseemly chaos. Each Tea Party–supported candidate—Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum—took a turn in the lead before making a gaff, losing a crucial primary, or exposing his or her basic ignorance of public affairs. At that point, a new candidate would begin to rise to the top.
Tea Partiers remained cool to Romney, even after it became apparent that he was to be the nominee. To energize the base, Romney decided to add some Tea Party flair to the ticket, choosing as his running mate Paul Ryan, a Tea Party darling and architect of the 2012 Republican budget that, among other things, promised to convert Medicare into a voucher system and to cut taxes (again) on the wealthy. Ryan had strengthened his already robust Tea Party credibility when he rehearsed the standard-issue Tea Party rhetoric during his 2011 Republican response to Obama’s State of the Union address. Warning that the nation was “reaching a tipping point,” Ryan called the nation back to its anchor “in the wisdom of the founders; in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence; and in the words of the American Constitution.”
Ryan seemed the perfect choice. But it turned out that the Tea Party and the American electorate had begun to diverge. Although Ryan’s place on the ticket energized Tea Party conservatives, in a time of economic stagnation the Tea Party rhetoric did not sell with the wider public. The Romney-Ryan ticket was stuck in the mud, unable to pull ahead in what many Republicans had anticipated would be an easy contest. After the late-summer conventions, polling suggested a close race. But some pollsters, most notably Nate Silver of the New York Times, were predicting Obama’s reelection.
Still, many conservatives went into election night expecting to win. “I just finished writing a victory speech,” Romney told reporters on his campaign plane. And a concession speech? “I’ve only written one speech at this point,” Romney said.
Yet as the election returns came in, it became apparent how out of touch Republicans had become. Obama won in decisive fashion, 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206. Even more disturb-ing—at least for Republicans—was the demographic composition of those who voted from Romney versus those who voted for Obama. Romney lost nearly every important demographic with one exception: 88 percent of Romney voters were white. In a nation that was turning increasingly brown, those numbers suggested crisis.
Watching the agony unfold, Sam Tanenhaus, one of the keenest of political observers, came to a disturbing conclusion: the Tea Party–led GOP was headed to the most extreme Jeffersonian position, that of John C. Calhoun prior to the Civil War. According to Tanenhaus, Calhoun’s position had been built into the conservative movement from the beginning. At William F. Buckley’s National Review, for example, Calhoun was “the Ur-theorist of a burgeoning but outnumbered conservative movement, ‘the principal philosopher of the losing side.’ ” Through the fervent embrace of such early conservatives, Calhoun’s views on federal power and the Tenth Amendment became central in the emergence of the newly conservative politics.
But problems had begun to set in by the 1990s and only intensified during the Bush administration. Although Bush was reelected, it had become obvious that the Jeffersonian-Calhounian rhetoric ceased to mobilize the electorate in the same way as the nation became less white and as conservative policy goals failed to pan out. By 2009, the conservative movement hit crisis. “In retreat,” Tanenhaus argued, “the nullifying spirit has been revived as a form of governance—or, more accurately, anti-governance.” Led by the Tea Party, Republicans stumbled into a series of unwinnable fights over the budget, the debt ceiling, and Obamacare, each justified, according to Tanenhaus, “not as a practical attempt to find a better answer, but as a ‘Constitutional’ demand for restoration of the nation to its hallowed prior self.”
But now that approach had come to its logical endpoint after the 2012 election. The Jeffersonian argument about maintaining founding principles had degenerated into a Calhounian vision of state-sponsored nullification and retrenchment. “Denial has always been the basis of a nullifying politics,” Tanenhaus believed, but after the election it was obvious that “modernity could not be nullified.”
How would Republicans now respond? They could either abandon their form of antigovernance—with its genuflections toward the Founders, its simplistic solutions to complex problems, and its general tendency toward obstruction. Or the party would remain, Tanenhaus predicted, “the party of white people.”
After Senate vote, NSA prepares to shut down phone tracking program // LAT // Brian Bennett and Lisa Mascaro - May 23, 2015
Hours after the Senate balked at reauthorizing the bulk collection of U.S. telephone records, the National Security Agency began shutting a controversial program Saturday that senior intelligence and law enforcement officials say is vital to track terrorists in the United States.
The Senate had debated into early predawn hours Saturday but failed to reach a deal to reform the program or extend its life beyond May 31, when the law used to authorize it is set to expire. Lawmakers then left on a weeklong recess, vowing to return at the end of it to try again in a rare Sunday session.
Administration officials said later that they had to start the lengthy procedure of winding down the counter-terrorism program in anticipation that Congress failed to act and a full shutdown was required.
“That process has begun,” an administration official said Saturday.
Intelligence officials warned of a precipitous gap in data collected if Congress did not come up with a plan before May 31 to either expand the NSA's authority — which is unlikely — or replace the program in an orderly way over several months.
The start of the wind-down process marks the most significant step the Obama administration has taken to limit the data collection since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents in 2013 showing the government was siphoning and holding millions of so-called toll records of domestic phone calls.
The data include the number dialed, duration, date and time for most telephone calls made by Americans. The information is then searched for connections to the phone numbers of known or suspected terrorists. About 300 such searches were made in 2014.
Opponents of the program, including presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), are concerned that the massive database could invite abuse by future administrations that want to probe how citizens are connected to each other, stifle dissent or crack down on political enemies.
“The Bill of Rights is worth losing sleep over,” Paul wrote on Twitter on Friday night after he sent the Senate into overdrive by running the clock on procedural steps. “Continuing to filibuster against NSA bulk surveillance.”
Paul won praise from his supporters for his unrelenting stand against the surveillance program. Two Republican lawmakers from the House came to the late night Senate session to support the Kentucky senator. But elsewhere in the Capitol, his maneuver drew grumbles from fellow senators in his party who viewed it as a campaign stunt.
The program, which relies on siphoning data directly from phone companies into U.S. databases, is complex and requires several days to shut down, officials said. Intelligence officials said they had to start taking steps now in order to stay within the bounds of the law, particularly after a federal circuit court ruling this month found the NSA program to be illegal. The decision invalidated the legal analysis of the Patriot Act that NSA lawyers used for years to justify large-scale collection and storage of call records.
The standoff in Congress also puts in jeopardy some lesser-known parts in the Patriot Act, which was passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
One of them allows the FBI to collect business records, such as credit card and banking data, for use in terrorism investigations. Another authorizes “roving wiretaps,” which permit the FBI to eavesdrop on every phone used by a suspected terrorist without seeking separate court warrants for each one.
And another helps the FBI track a “lone wolf,” an individual suspected of planning a terrorist attack, even if he or she has no known link to a terrorist group. If the provisions lapse, the FBI could continue using the “roving wiretap” and “lone wolf” authorities in existing cases only.
“We better be ready next Sunday afternoon to prevent the country from being endangered by the total expiration of the program,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said as he left the Capitol.
Senators had rejected two bills that would have continued the program, including one overwhelmingly approved by the House and backed by the White House that would put limits on the government’s ability to acquire phone data.
The House bill gave the NSA six months to shift from collecting and holding the raw call data itself on government servers to a program that requested the records from telephone companies on a case-by-case basis. It fell just three votes short of advancing. Many view it as the most viable compromise.
Proposals from McConnell to continue the program as is, with no reforms, for as little as one extra day, also fell short.
Paul objected to those measures, as did two Democrats, a further sign of bipartisan opposition to extending the program without changes. Paul, who has made shutting down the NSA program a focus of his presidential bid, engaged in a 10½-hour talk-a-thon this week to delay proceedings.
“It’s not about making a point, it’s about trying to end bulk collection,” Paul said. The debate has been difficult for Congress, and especially McConnell, the Republican leader who backs Paul for president but disagrees with his fellow home-state senator on this issue.
In a sign of the growing political consensus for changes, Senate Republican leaders had reversed course earlier Friday and signaled that upon returning from the holiday recess they were willing to consider legislation to reform how the NSA searches U.S. telephone records.
Legislation promised by Sen. Richard M. Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is expected to include many elements of the House-passed USA Freedom Act, which would impose limits on the NSA surveillance program.
Fearful of allowing a counter-terrorism program to close on their watch, some senators suggested an agreement could still be reached before May 31. “We don’t want a dark period,” Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said before lawmakers adjourned.
Others expressed hope that if record collection were interrupted, the impact on the NSA would not be dire.
“What would happen during that time period, they just wouldn't be scraping data, but they still would be carrying out other parts of the program,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
But more hawkish lawmakers oppose elements of the compromise approach. They want to keep the program in place as is until they are certain the alternative methods being pushed by privacy advocates will work.
“The way you determine it doesn’t work is when the bomb goes off, and all of a sudden people say, ‘Hey, it didn’t work,’” Coats said. “That’s why holding it at current level is, we think, necessary until it’s proven that, yes, we can do this.”
Administration officials are urging Congress to act quickly and comprehensively. A stopgap measure to extend the program past May 31 would not satisfy the court order, they say, and thus would not stop the dismantling of the phone record collection effort.
McConnell's NSA gambit fails // The Hill // Jordain Carney and Julian Hattem - May 23, 2015
Mitch McConnell staged an epic gamble over U.S. spying powers — and lost.
The Republican leader pledged to keep senators in Washington through the weekend to finish work on expiring provisions of the Patriot Act, but Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called his bluff.
Instead, when the smoke cleared in the early hours of Saturday morning, the 2016 presidential contender was the one with bragging rights.
The battle between the two Kentucky Republicans spilled over on the Senate floor, with Paul using procedural tactics to force the chamber into an early Saturday vote. He then used his leverage to kill off McConnell’s repeated attempts to reauthorize the expiring National Security Agency (NSA) programs — first for two months, then for eight days, then for five, then three, then two.
McConnell and the Republican leadership team had appeared confident even into Friday evening that they could kill the House-passed USA Freedom Act. They had planned to force the Senate into accepting a “clean” reauthorization of the provisions — set to expire at the end of the month — at least for a short while.
But Paul and other opponents of the “clean” renewal held firm, forcing McConnell to kick the can and adjourn the Senate without a clear path forward on how to prevent a shutdown of the NSA programs.
Leaving the Capitol, Republicans seemed confused on what their leader’s next steps would be.
“That's a really good question,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said, when asked what would change between Saturday and when senators return to Washington for a rare Sunday session on May 31.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) seemed equally unsure if Paul would accept a deal before returning to Washington.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. They march to a different drum,” the Armed Services Committee chairman said, adding that he was sure Paul’s tactics were “a great revenue raiser.”
Even Paul himself appeared non-committal on whether or not he would accept a deal.
“We'll see,” he told reporters as he left the Capitol. "It depends, sometimes things change as deadlines approach."
The junior senator from Kentucky wants votes on two amendments, and said that he didn’t understand why McConnell wouldn't let them pass by a simple majority threshold.
Supporters of the USA Freedom Act appeared bolstered by the amount of support the House-passed legislation received, coming three votes shy of the 60 needed to overcome a procedural hurdle.
Lee said he suspects McConnell will try to work out a deal over the recess, adding that “I hope that whatever that is, is going to be built on… the House-passed USA Freedom Act.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, who is competing against Paul for his party’s presidential nomination, said he was “hopeful” that McConnell would see the light on the reform bill, which passed the lower chamber in an overwhelming 338-88 vote.
"Sometimes the Senate takes some time for debate and consideration,” the Texas Republican said. “I think we'll take a week and come back and cooler heads will prevail."
Cruz, while acknowledging that he disagreed with Paul, refused to criticize his hardball tactics, saying that he’s “a big fan” of the libertarian favorite.
McConnell didn’t respond to a barrage of questions from reporters as he left the Capitol, and has given no sign of what his next step would be.
McConnell and Paul have been allies of late. Paul endorsed McConnell last year in his reelection bid, and McConnell is backing Paul's White House run.
But the Republican leader appeared to be caught off guard by his fellow Kentuckian’s resolve, and had previously brushed aside Paul’s filibuster threat.
“Well, ya know, everybody threatens to filibuster. We’ll see what happens,” McConnell told ABC’s “This Week.” “This is the security of the country we’re talking about here. This is no small matter. We see it on display on almost a weekly basis.”
Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the Republican whip, suggested that Republicans would be able to find a way out of the current standstill, telling reporters after the votes that, "yeah, we'll fix it. I am confident."
Even with path to a deal unclear, the spy brawl had one clear winner — Paul's political ambitions.
He has staked much of his presidential campaign on his civil libertarian bone fides. The stalemate, as well as his filibuster earlier this week, has helped him, and his presidential campaign, dominate the media this week.
Paul showed no sign early Saturday morning of letting go of that spotlight.
“The Senate has refused to reauthorize bulk data collection. I am proud to have stood up for the Bill of Rights,” he tweeted from his campaign’s account on Saturday. “But our fight is not over.”
“The Senate will return one week from Sunday,” he added. “With your help we can end illegal NSA spying once and for all.”
But he also flatly rejected that his hardline on the Patriot Act provisions was part of a campaign stunt, telling reporters, “I think people don’t really question my sincerity.”
States quietly consider ObamaCare exchange mergers // The Hill // Sarah Ferris - May 23, 2015
A number of states are quietly considering merging their healthcare exchanges under ObamaCare amid big questions about their cost and viability.
Many of the 13 state-run ObamaCare exchanges are worried about how they’ll survive once federal dollars supporting them run dry next year.
Others are contemplating creating multi-state exchanges as a contingency plan for a looming Supreme Court ruling expected next month that could prevent people from getting subsidies to buy ObamaCare on the federal exchange.
The idea is still only in the infancy stage. It’s unclear whether a California-Oregon or New York-Connecticut health exchange is on the horizon.
But a shared marketplace — an option buried in a little-known clause of the Affordable Care Act — has become an increasingly attractive option for states desperate to slash costs. If state exchanges are not financially self-sufficient by 2016, they will be forced to join the federal system, HealthCare.gov.
“What is happening is states are figuring out the money is running out,” said Jim Wadleigh, the director of Connecticut’s exchange, hailed as one of the most successful in the country. “At the end of 2016, everyone has to be self-sustaining.”
Other states are being driven to consider the idea by the King v. Burwell case, in which the Supreme Court will decide whether subsidies are allowed in states that didn’t set up their own health exchanges.
If the court rules against the Obama administration, millions of people in states across the country will lose subsidies.
Some of those states could be interested in joining with other states that have their own ObamaCare exchanges.
“It’s absolutely being driven by the court case,” said Joel Ario, the former director of the federal government’s Office of Health Insurance Exchanges.
Most Republican state leaders have avoided talking about how they would respond to a decision against the use of subsidies on the federal exchange. Behind the scenes, however, many are anxiously contacting states that run their own exchanges.
“In the last seven business days, I’ve probably had seven to 10 states contact me about contingency plans,” Wadleigh said, though he declined to disclose the names of states he’s been talking to. “You can imagine the political backlash that would be if the names got out.”
Wadleigh, who became the CEO of Connecticut’s exchange last fall, said he has been in conversations with many states — some using the federal exchange and some running their own exchanges — about possible partnerships.
“Clearly, we can’t sell the code, which was paid for by federal dollars, but what we can do is have collaborations like joining exchanges, if that’s feasible,” Wadleigh said.
His office met recently with officials from Vermont and Rhode Island to talk about ways to collaborate. A few weeks earlier, the directors of all state marketplaces met in Denver to discuss ways to share services.
That same group will come together again in late July at a conference hosted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
By most accounts, creating a multi-state marketplace would be a logistical nightmare.
It’s unlikely that states could ever merge the full responsibilities of a marketplace, such as regulating plans and managing risk pools.
But even with a simpler model, like a shared call center or website platform, there are big questions about how states could share those costs and duties.
Jennifer Tolbert, a state health expert with the Kaiser Family Foundation, said “one of the trickiest issues” would be determining a governing structure for multi-state exchanges.
“I don’t know how that would be resolved,” she said.
These hurdles have been big enough to thwart multiple states from moving forward with their plans. Delaware, Maryland and West Virginia, which commissioned a study on the option in June 2013, have all dropped the idea.
What is more feasible, experts believe, is a technology-sharing system, where multiple states all hire the same private contractor. States could also create a regional call center or outreach team.
"There’s lot of states that are trying to crack this sustainability problem, and there have been times when they’ve talked about regional solutions, but it's really been very early on in those discussions," said Pat Kelly, the director of Idaho's health exchange, Your Health Idaho.
He said sharing some services, particularly technology, could bring big benefits to states, though his own state couldn't do so because it used federal dollars for the contract.
“Is it possible and is it a good idea? Absolutely,” he said. “Every time you can share the costs, it’s going to be more efficient.”
Eventually, it could also involve states that are already on the federal exchange, though that kind of transition would likely take years, said Ario, who has served as the state insurance commissioner for both Oregon and Pennsylvania.
“I think if King goes against the government, there will be a flurry of activity,” added Ario, who is now the managing director at Manatt Health Solutions. “Otherwise, it will be more of a gradual transition.”
He said it could be possible for states in some regions — like the Great Plains, where the politics and populations are similar — to leave HealthCare.gov in favor of their own, more autonomous system.
“You can imagine an SEC exchange,” he said, referring to states participating in the Southeastern Conference college football league. “Maybe they could run an exchange really well.”
The idea is becoming more attractive as more and more states are facing dwindling budgets.
Already, Oregon and Nevada have been forced to scrap their own systems and move to the federal exchange. Hawaii is now nearing a shutdown of its program after lawmakers rejected a last-ditch $10 million funding request.
The costs of running Vermont’s ObamaCare exchange are expected to rise to $200 million this year, while California has made major cutbacks after seeing lower-than-expected enrollment figures. Its latest budget, released last week, scales down the budget for advertising, outreach budget and technology services.
For all states, technology is the biggest cost item and the biggest barrier for states to set up their own exchanges.
The Obama administration, which has given $5 billion in grants to help launch exchanges, has already pushed back the deadline for state marketplaces. Exchanges were initially told to be self-sufficient by 2015.
Still, while forming larger exchanges could make financial sense for the states, it could risk a political backlash.
The state-based exchanges were included in the Affordable Care Act to calm fears that the law would lead to a new, national system for obtaining insurance similar to a “public option.”
Kevin Counihan, the CEO of HealthCare.gov, said earlier this month that he has been encouraging to share “best practices” among state marketplaces that are struggling.
“Our role is to do everything we can ... to help those states succeed,” Counihan told a group at the Health Insurance Exchange Summit earlier this month.
Wadleigh, who will speak at the CMS-sponsored July conference, said officials have been “very supportive” about his discussions with other states, including multi-state partnerships.
A spokesperson from the CMS declined to answer questions about the exchanges.
Ireland legalizes gay marriage in historic vote // USA Today // Kim Hjelmgaard - May 23, 2015
DUBLIN — Ireland became the first country Saturday to legalize same-sex marriage by national referendum, a result that highlights the dramatic pace at which this traditionally conservative Catholic nation has changed in recent times.
Just 22 years after decriminalizing homosexuality, 62.1% of voters approved the measure changing the nation's constitution to allow gay marriage, according to official results by Ireland's referendum commission. National turnout in Friday's poll was 60.5% of 3.2 million eligible voters.
"With today's vote we have disclosed who we are: a generous, compassionate, bold and joyful people," Prime Minister Enda Kenny said, welcoming the outcome Saturday, according to the Associated Press.
Emily Neenan, a physics student at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, was holding a large rainbow-colored umbrella in the forecourt at Dublin Castle, where "Yes" supporters gathered to celebrate outside the Irish government complex.
"I am absolutely thrilled and I didn't think it would pass with such a resounding yes," she said. "Even in more traditional rural areas, it looks like we have done a lot better than we thought we would."
As Neenan spoke on an unseasonably warm and sunny day in Ireland, an occasional cheer rose up from the crowd as Irish politicians who spearheaded the "Yes" campaign passed close by on their way to be interviewed by Ireland's domestic broadcasters.
"You know, it's about time Ireland did this," she said. "It's time Irish society better understands what it looks like, and needs."
Before official results were released, both sides confirmed the outcome earlier Saturday as votes were tallied.
"We're the first country in the world to enshrine marriage equality in our constitution and do so by popular mandate," Leo Varadkar, Ireland's health minister who revealed he was gay during the campaign, told state broadcaster RTE. "That makes us a beacon, a light to the rest of the world of liberty and equality. It's a very proud day to be Irish."
David Quinn, the director of the conservative Iona Institute, a leading figure behind the "No" campaign, tweeted: "Congratulations to the 'Yes' side. Well done. #MarRef."
Quinn said Friday that the movement to secure equal marriage rights for same-sex couples in Ireland appeared to be insurmountable. For months, polls indicated the majority of Irish voters were in favor of the change.
But in the days leading up to the vote, Ireland's government — which supports the measure — warned that attitudes may have been hardening and that victory wasn't certain.
Campaigners on both sides said the high turnout, buoyed by strong engagement from younger members of the electorate as well as the many Irish expatriates who returned home to cast their votes, contributed to the "Yes" result.
The referendum is seen as an especially complex one for Ireland, where about 85% of the population still identify as Roman Catholic even though church attendance has been steadily declining for a few decades. The church's moral authority has been questioned in the wake of a series of sexual abuse scandals and coverups involving children.
The country has been slow to follow a path of social liberalization that has taken root across Europe. Except in cases where a mother's life is perceived to be in danger, abortion is still illegal in Ireland. A prohibition on divorce was repealed only in 1996 following a national referendum.
Dublin's storied pubs were fuller than usual Saturday, and reverie spilled out onto streets all across the capital. Many were carrying balloons, flags and other accessories highlighting an issue that for some in that gay and lesbian community seemed almost too good to be true.
"It's an incredible day that even two years ago we could not have dared to imagine," said Panti Bliss, a well-known Irish transvestite who appeared at a rally at Dublin Castle.
"I think (outsiders) are still hung up on the idea that Ireland is some sort of very conservative country ruled by the Catholic Church," Panti, whose real name is Rory O'Neill, told journalists.
Around the world, 18 countries have approved gay marriage nationwide, the majority of them in Europe. Others, such as the United States and Mexico, have approved it in certain regions. In the United States, 37 states have approved gay marriage and the Supreme Court is currently weighing the issue.
"This is a joyous day for Ireland and for LGBT people and our allies everywhere," Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, a U.S.-based gay-advocacy group, said in a statement. "We are thankful for the leadership of the Irish people, and we hope that many countries, including the United States, follow suit by extending marriage to all their citizens."
Visitors to St. Patrick's Cathedral — founded in 1191 to honor Ireland's patron saint — in central Dublin on Saturday afternoon appeared mostly wrapped up in their appreciation of the building's impressive stonewall facades.
"It is good that Ireland is approving this legislation," said Michael Lendhofer, a tourist visiting from Hanover, in northwestern Germany.
"But I also think that there are some things about the gay community that I don't agree with. For example, I think they should be more private," he said, without elaborating.
ISIS Gains Momentum With Palmyra, Assad Squeezed on Multiple Fronts // NBC News // Cassandra Vinograd - May 23, 2015
ISIS' conquest of the ancient city of Palmyra marked the latest in a series of setbacks for the Syrian regime, but analysts say not to count out President Bashar Assad just yet.
This week's capture of the so-called "Venice of the Sands" and its Roman-era ruins marked what appeared to be the first time ISIS directly seized a city from Syrian military and allied forces.
French President Francois Hollande said the fall of Palmyra showed Assad was significantly diminished and called for a new push to broker a deal for his ouster.
"With a regime that is clearly weakened, and with a Bashar Assad who cannot be the future of Syria, we must build a new Syria which can be rid, naturally, of the regime and Bashar Assad but also, above all, of the terrorists," he said Friday.
NBC News reported in December that ISIS and Assad's forces were mostly ignoring each other on the battlefield, focused on eliminating smaller rivals ahead of a possible final showdown.
The Assad regime was focused on stamping out the moderate and weaker opposition — and knew ISIS was doing so too. Now both are starting to engage in a "much more concerted way" because "there isn't much of a moderate left," according to Matthew Henman, head of IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Center.
However, there is still one large, well-funded and well-armed obstacle acting as a thorn in both sides: the Army of Fatah, a coalition which includes the al Qaeda-linked Nusra front and recently seized control of Idlib from pro-government forces.
Analysts say the Army of Fatah also poses a longterm threat to ISIS as a competitor. Rumors are rife that the coalition is receiving funding from a variety of external actors — Saudi Arabia, Turkey and even Qatar — and Assad has had to rely on Hezbollah fighters for help in the Qalamoun Mountains to beat back the rebels.
"The Assad government now is being squeezed between these two groups who are still competing with each other," Henman said.
In a rare public appearance earlier this month, Assad downplayed recent setbacks in Idlib as a normal part of any war.
"Psychological defeat is the final defeat and we are not worried," the Syrian leader said at the time, explaining that amid his army's relentless war there were occasions when the fighters had to "retreat back when the situation warrants."
With other Islamist groups like the Army of Fatah taking the fight directly to the Assad regime — particularly in the northwest of the country —ISIS has "clearly felt a need to respond to that," according to Henman.
Seizing Palmyra looks like a solid way of doing so: It put ISIS back in the headlines as a force capable of snatching territory away from Assad and positioned the group along a key highway network well-situated for further gains.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Friday that ISIS had seized the last border crossing between Syria and Iraq controlled by Assad's forces, situated in Homs province. The monitoring group also has said with the capture of Palmyra, ISIS now controls more than half of all Syrian territory.
That doesn't mean that ISIS necessarily outsmarted pro-government forces for Palmyra, according to analysts. Instead, it appears that ISIS found a way to "take advantage of the situation," Henman said.
"The opportunity was right to strike at Palmyra … while the government is very busy elsewhere fighting," he added.
Analysts said that while the Assad regime certainly is facing a number of challenges — including an overstretched military — it would be premature to interpret Palmyra's fall as a sign of its impending collapse.
Failing to put up a big fight for Palmyra actually could have even been a strategic move on Assad's part, according to Ayham Kamel, the Eurasia Group's Middle East & North Africa director.
While previously the regime tried to maintain at least nominal control in each of Syria's provinces, Kamel said the losses of Palmyra and Idlib show that "the former strategy is no longer working."
He said that with fights on so many fronts it simply has become "unsustainable" for the military to devote equal resources in all locations — quite possibly forcing the regime to literally pick its battles.
"Palmyra is a national treasure but it is not key to the regime's fate," he explained. Instead, the regime might be calculating that troops are needed elsewhere in more strategic locations for long-term viability.
While the regime is "definitely" weaker than six months ago, it's not necessarily weaker than two months ago, Kamel said.
"We've seen very clearly that in the war, the pendulum sways in both directions," he added. "The current balance of power on the ground is not necessarily permanent."
39 die in Mexico police shootout with suspected cartel members // LAT // Deborah Bonello -May 23, 2015
gunfight between Mexican police and suspected criminals in the cartel-dominated western state of Michoacan left at least 39 people dead Friday, according to authorities and news reports.
The firefight occurred in Tanhuato on Michoacan’s border with Jalisco state. The region has seen intense drug-related violence in recent months, at least in part because of the approaching midterm elections June 7.
Controversial former top cop shot in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez
Controversial former top cop shot in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez
Early reports Friday suggested that the Jalisco New Generation cartel, Mexico’s fastest growing criminal group, might have been behind the attack in Tanhuato. Details about who died in the gunfight were not immediately available.
Tension between the Jalisco New Generation cartel and the Mexican government has been high since members of the cartel shot down a police helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade early this month, killing six soldiers. The army was in pursuit of a cartel convoy when the copter was downed.
After the attack, the national security commissioner, Monte Alejandro Rubio, told Mexico’s Televisa network that “the full force of the Mexican state will be felt in the state of Jalisco.”
In early April, Jalisco New Generation ambushed and killed 15 members of the federal police, the largest death count in an attack on state forces here since 2010.
Tanhuato is minutes from Yurecuaro, where a political candidate was fatally shot last week during a campaign event. The slaying of Enrique Hernandez of the left-leaning Movement for National Regeneration, or Morena, party prompted authorities to reinforce security along the state line between Michoacan and Jalisco, which also forms part of a region known as Tierra Caliente, or hotlands.
Tierra Caliente is a center of drug production and trafficking in Mexico and has been a focus in President Enrique Peña Nieto’s security strategy. Civilians began to rise up in arms there about two years ago to defend themselves against the criminal groups that kill, kidnap and extort money from residents.
On Thursday, three bodies were found near Chilapa in Guerrero state, where at least 16 people went missing this month when the town was taken over by armed, masked men for five days.
The bodies were not immediately identified, but the leader of the federal police, Enrique Galindo, on Friday made his second trip to Chilapa to speak to the families of the missing.
The Mexican government has moved quickly over the last few days in an attempt to take control of the situation. Peña Nieto and his administration want to avoid a new scandal involving mass disappearances after international condemnation last year over the abduction of 43 college students.
The students vanished in September after being detained by local police in the city of Iguala,about a three-hour drive from Chilapa. The federal government initially gave jurisdiction for the incident to Guerrero’s state government, for which it was heavily criticized.
Since then, clandestine graves containing about 100 bodies have been discovered in the hills around Iguala; the remains of only one of the students have been identified.
Weary of Relativity // NYT // Frank Bruni - May 23, 2015
SAY anything critical about a person or an organization and brace for this pushback: At least he, she or it isn’t as bad as someone or something else.
Sure, the Roman Catholic Church hasn’t done right by women. But those Mormons have more to answer for!
Yes, there are college presidents with excessive salaries. But next to the football and basketball coaches on many campuses, they’re practically monks!
Set the bar low enough and all blame is deflected, all shame expunged. Choose the right points of reference and behold the alchemy: naughty deeds into humdrum conformity. Excess into restraint. Sinners into saints.
Arkansas into Elysium.
I mention Arkansas because of a classic bit of deflection performed last month by one of its senators, Tom Cotton. He was rationalizing a so-called religious freedom bill that would have permitted the state’s merchants to deny services to people based on their sexual orientation. And he said that it was important to “have a sense of perspective.”
“In Iran,” he noted, “they hang you for the crime of being gay.”
I see. If you’re not hauling homosexuals to the gallows or stoning them, you’re ahead of the game, and maybe even in the running for a humanitarian medal.
Like I said, you can set the bar anywhere you want.
And you can justify almost anything by pointing fingers at people who are acting likewise or less nobly.
Naturally, this brings us to the current presidential campaign.
Earlier this month Hillary Clinton not only made peace with the “super PACs” that will be panhandling on her behalf, but also signaled that she’d do her vigorous part to round up donations for one of them, Priorities USA.
She did this despite much high-minded talk previously about taming the influence of money in politics.
She did this without the public hand-wringing of Barack Obama when he reluctantly embraced his super PAC, which happened at a later point in his 2012 re-election effort.
She did this because Jeb Bush and other potential Republican rivals were either doing or poised to do this.
And she did this, no doubt, because of the Koch brothers and their political network’s stated goal of raising and spending nearly $1 billion on behalf of Republicans during this election cycle. For Democrats, “the Koch brothers” is at once a wholly legitimate motivation and an all-purpose exoneration, a boogeyman both real and handy, permitting all manner of mischief by everybody else. True, I’m vacuuming up money like an Electrolux on Adderall. But in a Koch-ian context, I’m a sputtering Dustbuster.
Democrats tell themselves that they have a ways to go before they sink as low as Republicans do. Republicans tell themselves that none of their machinations rival the venal braid of conflicting interests and overlapping agendas in the Clintons’ messy world.
The Clintons tell themselves that their assiduous enrichment since the end of Bill’s presidency still doesn’t put them in a league with the fat cats whom they’ve met and mingled with, and that they earned their wealth rather than inheriting or shortchanging shareholders for it.
Other politicians tell themselves that if the Clintons are lapping at the trough so rapaciously, surely they’re entitled to some love and lucre of their own.
When it comes to money, almost everybody looks up — not down or sideways — to determine how he or she is doing and what he or she might be owed. There’s always someone higher on the ladder and getting a whole lot more, always someone who establishes a definition of greed that you fall flatteringly short of.
One titan’s bonanza becomes the next titan’s yardstick, and the pay of the nation’s top executives spirals ever further out of control.
In the warped context of their compensation packages, the $8.5 million that Richard Levin, the former president of Yale University, received as an “additional retirement benefit” after he strode out the door in 2013 probably struck some of the enablers who gave it to him — and perhaps Levin himself — as unremarkable.
Never mind that Yale is a nonprofit institution or that the values of higher education are supposed to diverge from those of Wall Street. Now Lee Bollinger, the current president of Columbia, can feel modest about the nearly $3.4 million package that he received for one recent year.
THAT magnitude of compensation didn’t dissuade him from musing last week about how completely content he and his wife were back when their apartment hosted roaches and dinner was Lipton noodle soup. He recalled that distant past in remarks to graduating seniors, whom he urged, without any evident irony, to address “persisting inequalities, especially of wealth.”
And if Bollinger can feel modest, Drew Faust, the president of Harvard, can feel positively ascetic: She makes less than a third of what he does. Of course she supplements that by sitting on the corporate board of Staples, an arrangement that some Harvard students and faculty have understandably questioned and quibbled with.
Then there’s the moral jujitsu that American voters have become especially adept at in these polarized times. Many of them unreservedly exalt their party’s emissary — and inoculate him or her from disparagement — simply because he or she represents the alternative to someone from the other side. Being the lesser of evils is confused with being virtuous, though it’s a far, far cry from that.
President Obama stumbles or falls and is pardoned by all-or-nothing partisans on the grounds that he’s not George W. Bush. Those same partisans wave off any naysaying about his foreign policy by bringing up the invasion of Iraq. And the bungled rollout of Obamacare? A mere wisp of inconvenience in comparison with the botched response to Hurricane Katrina. Everything’s relative.
Except it’s not.
There are standards to which government, religion and higher education should be held. There are examples that politicians and principled businesspeople should endeavor to set, regardless of whether their peers are making that effort. There’s right and wrong, not just better or worse.
And there’s a word for recognizing and rising to that: leadership. We could use more of it.
Echoes of Iraq war sound in 2016 presidential race // LAT // Mark Z. Barabak - May 23, 2015
Every war casts a long shadow, from the heroism of the Greatest Generation to the dark ambiguities of Vietnam. It was inevitable, then, that the 2016 presidential candidates would be confronted with the war in Iraq.
Twelve years on, the broad questions raised by the invasion — about trust in Washington and its leaders, about faith in dubious overseas alliances, about the best ways to fight terrorism and how to bring peace to the Middle East, if that's even possible — have not gone away.
If anything, the politics have grown more fraught for members of both parties.
Kentucky Republican Rand Paul seized the Senate floor Wednesday for a 101/2 -hour speech aimed at ending the domestic surveillance program that grew out of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — part of President George W. Bush's justification for war.
The accusations of government overreach have been a centerpiece of Paul's presidential bid and made him a champion to privacy advocates and the libertarian-minded. But it also sets him against Republicans eager to portray the freshman lawmaker as feckless and too quick to drop the nation's guard.
In a mocking speech, New Jersey's Republican Gov. Chris Christie laced into those he called “civil liberties extremists,” who he said were trying to convince Americans “there's a government spook listening in every time you pick up the phone or Skype with your grandkids.”
“They want you to think that if we weakened our capabilities, the rest of the world would love us more,” Christie told a New Hampshire audience on Monday. “Let me be clear: All these fears are exaggerated and ridiculous.”
The challenge for candidates like Christie and others in the GOP field is to sound tough — certainly tougher than President Obama is perceived — without appearing belligerent or too eager, as some now fault Bush, to go to war.
Familial ties make that balance all the more acute for his brother, Jeb Bush, should he emerge as the Republican nominee, which is why his ham-handed performance last week — seemingly for the Iraq war before he was against it — was so unexpected and potentially damaging.
The former Florida governor spent days calibrating and recalibrating a series of statements before flatly declaring that, in retrospect, the invasion should never have occurred. “Knowing what we know now, I would not have engaged,” Bush said. “I would not have invaded Iraq.”
The question could not, or at least should not, have caught him by surprise, raising doubts about Bush's campaign faculties after a years-long layoff; several GOP rivals were quick to align themselves with popular sentiment, saying they would never have gone to war given the knowledge they possess today.
“I don't know how that was a hard question,” said former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, turning the knife.
Bush, however, was not alone among Republicans. On Sunday, in a convoluted Fox News interview, it was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's turn to weave and stumble about the issue, defending President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, given his thinking at the time, while suggesting it was a mistake he would not wish to repeat.
For the Democratic candidates, familiar divisions surrounding the war have also begun to emerge.
Some on the left have never forgiven the party's favorite, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for backing the war as a United States senator in 2002, and they are once more calling her judgment into question. The former New York lawmaker and secretary of State has expressed regret for her vote many times since, including again this week.
Clinton's sole announced challenger, independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, said in an interview during a March swing through Iowa, a state with a broad pacifist streak: “I think the war in the Mideast, how we got into it and how we're going to address the current problems, are issues that every American should be concerned about.” He opposed the Iraq war, he tells audiences, from the start.
Since 2003, when the Iraq war began, every presidential campaign has been shaped to some degree by the U.S. invasion, its faulty pretense — weapons of mass destruction that were never found — and the war's vexing aftermath.
President Bush might not have been reelected in a close 2004 race but for voters' reluctance to replace him in the throes of the conflict.
His successor, President Obama, would probably not be in office today had his antiwar position not given him the traction in 2008 to take on Clinton, who was then — as now — the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination.
But politically it is no longer as simple as being for or against the Iraq invasion.
After the withdrawal of U.S. troops under Obama, after the drawing of red lines in Syria and the violent birth of the terrorist group Islamic State, critics can no longer blame Bush for all that torments the region.
“In 2008 and 2012 there was only one narrative, and that benefited Democrats,” said Peter Feaver, a Duke University expert on war and public opinion.
“In 2016 there is another narrative, which says President Obama inherited an Iraq that was stable and headed on a trajectory to success and then, through choices of his own, destabilized the situation and so bears responsibility for what happened,” said Feaver, who served on the National Security Council in Bush's second term.
Ultimately, though, the debate comes back to Bush and his decision to send U.S. troops to topple dictator Saddam Hussein, a move he said would leave the world a better, safer place.
“It's a generational pivot point,” said Matthew Dowd, a onetime member of Bush's inner political circle, who was chief strategist for the president's 2004 reelection campaign before souring on the war in Iraq.
At a cost of $2 trillion and more than 4,000 American lives, the war's legacy “affects everything,” Dowd said. “What do we do in Syria? What are we willing to do in Iran? How do we pay to fix our railroads and pay for our kids' college loans?”
“All of this stuff ripples,” he said, and will be debated by presidential candidates for many years to come.
Obama has a strategy for fighting ISIS -- one that isn't working // LAT // Doyle McManus - May 23, 2015
Obama administration critics often charge that the president has no strategy in the war against Islamic State, but that's not true.
Eight months ago, after Islamic State's army swept across northern Iraq, President Obama's national security aides drew up a plan to reverse the militants' gains. It began with airstrikes, to stop their advance. It also included a series of steps to enable Iraq to defeat the invaders without using U.S. combat troops.
First, the United States planned to push Nouri Maliki, the stubborn Shiite prime minister, out of office. Then it would help a new government rebuild the country's security forces, set up a "national guard" of local militia units, and arm Sunni tribesmen who wanted to fight Islamic State. Once those steps were underway, a strengthened Iraqi army would march north and retake Mosul, the country's second-largest city.
So Obama does have a strategy — but for the most part it hasn't worked.
U.S. pressure helped shove Maliki out of the prime minister's office last fall, but his successor, Haider Abadi, hasn't succeeded in making most of the other changes the administration sought.
Some 3,000 American military advisors are in Iraq, but they couldn't prevent Iraqi army units from abandoning the western city of Ramadi to Islamic State last week.
Abadi's government drafted a law to set up the national guard, which would allow Sunni military units to defend Sunni provinces, but Shiite politicians have blocked the bill in parliament.
As for arming the Sunni tribes, U.S. officials say the Iraqi government has budgeted money and weapons for 8,000 fighters in Anbar, the largest Sunni province — but most of the aid hasn't been delivered. "The weapons have all been approved," a U.S. official said last week. "We just have to get them to the site and get them to the guys."
And the Iraqi recapture of Mosul, which some officials rashly predicted could happen this spring? It's been postponed several times — most recently because aides have concluded that retaking Ramadi must come first.
U.S. officials say the Iraqi government has budgeted money and weapons for 8,000 fighters in Anbar, the largest Sunni province -- but most of the aid hasn't been delivered.
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Obama's reaction to these reversals has been to counsel patience, reaffirm faith in his strategy — and blame the Iraqis. "If the Iraqis themselves are not willing or capable to arrive at the political accommodations necessary to govern, if they are not willing to fight for the security of their country, we cannot do that for them," he told Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine last week.
A large portion of the blame clearly does belong in Baghdad — especially to the Shiite factions that have blocked Abadi's attempts to do more.
But plenty of pro-American Iraqis and Americans who have spent time in the country believe the Obama administration could do more, too — without putting U.S. troops in ground combat.
"America can help," Rafi Issawi, a moderate Sunni leader and former deputy prime minister, said during a visit to Washington this month. He called on the Obama administration to set up "joint committees" in Sunni provinces to get aid and weapons flowing. "Direct financing from the American side encouraged people to defeat Al Qaeda in 2006 and 2007," he noted.
"The administration's strategy is a good strategy — but it only gets done if you actually do it," Ryan C. Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, told me. "There hasn't been enough political engagement at the top level. Where are the visits [to Iraq] by the secretary of State and the secretary of Defense? Where are the phone calls from the president? It's not happening."
Crocker said he met with Iraqi politicians in exile last week — "guys who usually want to kill each other" — and heard a common refrain: "Where is America?"
"They're all realistic; they understand we are not going to do boots on the ground," he said. "But they all think we can do more than we're doing now."
Part of the problem, he warned, is that Abadi is under increasing criticism from both sides, Sunni and Shiite. "He's being seen as weak — and in Iraq, weakness is death," he said.
What more could the United States do? There are several options, some already under consideration by the administration, officials say.
The United States could send more advisors and trainers to Iraq to expand the relatively small force already there and allow them to work with more Iraqi units, or even accompany Iraqi forces onto the battlefield.
Although the administration has already increased military aid to the Iraqi army, it could be tougher in demanding that Baghdad's defense ministry implement its promises to arm Sunni forces before more aid arrives.
The U.S. could also consider arming Sunni forces directly. That step, however, could undermine Abadi and accelerate Iraq's division into sectarian camps.
Finally, Obama probably needs to take steps to bolster Abadi — which could include more economic aid and even a symbolic visit or two.
If Iraqi attitudes don't change, the war against Islamic State won't be won. And Iraqi attitudes don't appear likely to change without more pressure from the United States — whether it comes from Obama or, 20 months from now, his unlucky successor.
Is the Ex-Im Bank Doomed? // NYT // Joe Nocera - May 22, 2015
It’s looking pretty grim for the Export-Import Bank of the United States.
Over the last few months, the bank, which extends loans and government guarantees to help American companies export their goods and thus create jobs, has been under intense assault from conservative Republicans opposed to its very existence. Almost every day I get at least one email blast from a conservative think tank denouncing the bank for its “crony capitalism” and “corporate welfare.”
Conservative economists keep pounding away at their belief that, in macroeconomic terms, the Ex-Im Bank’s job creation is illusory; whatever jobs might be gained when one company starts exporting are lost at another company, they say. Most of the Republican presidential candidates are falling all over themselves to declare their opposition to the agency, which is set to die unless Congress reauthorizes it by June 30.
In the House of Representatives, Jeb Hensarling, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee — and is an implacable foe of the bank — has made it plain that he is eager to see the bank die, casting the issue as one of free markets versus “business interests.” He has made no moves to introduce a reauthorization bill.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, who is also against the bank, has grudgingly agreed to allow a vote on a reauthorization amendment, which supporters hope to attach to a future must-pass bill that would then go to the House.
But don’t get your hopes up. “Just because the Senate votes on a piece of crap doesn’t mean we have to vote for it,” retorted Representative Mick Mulvaney, a House Republican from South Carolina, according to Roll Call, a newspaper on Capitol Hill. In a news conference this week, Hensarling said that “the momentum is in our favor.” He’s right.
There are dozens of countries that have so-called export credit agencies like the Ex-Im Bank. They all do the same thing. They help finance some of their country’s exports. Some countries, like China, use a variety of other techniques to push their exports. Guess how many of those countries are following America’s lead in trying to wind down that assistance? You guessed it: none. On the contrary, they’re rather enjoying watching the U.S. cut off its nose to spite its face.
The conservative opposition is rooted in ideology, of course. Conservatives argue, for instance, that the government has no business guaranteeing loans if the private sector isn’t willing to make them. But this defies reality. In the real world, there are plenty of perfectly good loans that the private sector won’t make. Small companies that want to expand abroad have a terrible time getting loans. Big companies often need a government guarantee just to compete for a major contract. After the financial crisis, the Ex-Im Bank increased its financings precisely because the banks were gun-shy. Now that the private sector is making more loans, the agency has backed off.
Another conservative argument I’ve heard recently is that the big companies that use guarantees from the Ex-Im Bank, such as Boeing, General Electric and Caterpillar, have years of back orders, so they can afford to lose a little business if the agency dies. “Boeing has a backlog of $441 billion in back orders,” said Diane Katz of the Heritage Foundation. (It’s now up to $495 billion, according to Boeing.) “They can’t keep up with all the work.” She can’t really mean to say that it’s O.K. if Boeing, America’s largest manufacturing exporter, loses business, can she?
Nocera: "Over the last half-dozen years, Republicans have done many things that have hurt the American economy and the American worker,...
For goodness' sake! This continent's colonization was founded on government assistance. How have fiscal conservatives become so short...
Mr. Nocera asks and answers the key question we should all be worried about: "Guess how many of those countries are following America’s...
A third argument is the macroeconomic one: that ultimately the Ex-Im Bank does not create net new jobs. “Whenever you subsidize a U.S. company, you are ignoring the fact that other U.S. companies could have made that same sale” without the subsidy, said Daniel Ikenson, the director of trade policy studies at the Cato Institute and a leading proponent of this theory.
But I wonder. Reuters this week reported that General Electric will lose a $350 million deal to build locomotives for Angola without the Ex-Im Bank’s assistance. The winner won’t be another American company, though; it will be a Chinese company, which will have export credit financing. The Times wrote about another G.E. deal, this one a $668 million public water project, done in partnership with a second company, that relied on Ex-Im loan guarantees. Without the bank, the second phase of the project will again be lost to a Chinese rival. The Wall Street Journal recently told the story of Air Tractor, “a maker of crop-dusting and firefighting aircraft in the rural West Texas town of Olney” that will lose a quarter of its business without the Ex-Im Bank. How is that a good thing?
Over the last half-dozen years, Republicans have done many things that have hurt the American economy and the American worker, including the debt-ceiling crisis of a few years ago. If they succeed in eliminating the Ex-Im Bank, you’ll be able to add that to the list.
End Ex-Im Bank, the government's Enron // Washington Examiner // Rep. Bill Flores and Senator Mike Kee - May 21, 2015
Congress has a choice to make, with a deadline of June 30. It can either renew the authorization of the Export-Import Bank — a taxpayer-backed credit agency that picks winners and losers in the marketplace — or let it expire and begin the bank's orderly winding-down.
As conservatives, we believe that one of Congress' top responsibilities is to protect taxpayers from corruption, waste and mismanagement. That is why we support letting Ex-Im expire. Congressional oversight has revealed that the bank is broken, ignores opportunities for reform and proves a financial liability to American taxpayers.
Originally, Ex-Im was conceived to help small American businesses compete with the Soviet Union. It has evolved from a Cold War relic to become a prime example of the perils of Washington's "government knows best" philosophy.
The bureaucrats who run the bank believe that government can outwit markets and help some businesses at the expense of others. We know, however, that America can compete in a modern global economy without interference from bureaucrats. In fact, the best thing Washington can do to help our economy thrive is to enact common-sense tax reforms, unleash America's energy production and lower the barriers for international trade.
Past, present and potential future presidential candidates will fill political talk shows Sunday.
The Senate will instead reconvene in an unusual Sunday session next week to try again.
Unfortunately, Ex-Im is more than an outdated agency — it is fundamentally broken. And it should come as no surprise that when such an agency wields the heavy hand of governmental power, mismanagement, misconduct and corruption become the norm. It is a modern day "Enron" of the federal government.
Take, for instance, the case of former Ex-Im official Johnny Gutierrez, who pleaded guilty just last month to accepting nearly $79,000 in bribes. On 19 separate occasions between 2006-13, Gutierrez accepted cash in return for recommending the bank approve certain unqualified loan applications.
This example is not isolated. At a recent congressional hearing on Ex-Im, House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, pointed out that Ex-Im has seen an overall increase in criminal charges since President Obama appointed Chairman Fred Hochberg to head it six years ago. According to the chairman, the supposedly small bank's rap sheet is impressive: "Sixty-five matters have been referred to prosecution, 31 arrest warrants, 85 indictments, 48 criminal judgments, decades of combined prison time, a quarter of billion in fines, restitution and forfeiture."
Those numbers may soon rise even higher — at the same hearing, Ex-Im's inspector general testified that there are at least 31 open fraud investigations involving Ex-Im that could lead to future indictments.
Ex-Im's employee misconduct is a symptom of a larger problem. The bank has simply proven itself incapable of reform. Congress, the General Accountability Office and the bank's own inspector general have made numerous recommendations to "fix" Ex-Im, which its officials have boldly ignored. After years of repeated warnings, the bank has made clear that they have no interest in changing their troubling and irresponsible practices — and they are putting taxpayers at risk in the process.
According to Ex-Im's IG, the bank does not subject borrowers to the same level of scrutiny that private lenders do, and it has no robust and systematic process for keeping an eye on borrowers. The standards for underwriting loans are also decentralized and potentially subjective, as well. In 2010, the Bank's board of directors authorized certain officials to approve loan applications under $10 million, raising concern that the bank was no longer doing its due diligence or applying a uniform standard for loan approval. The IG recommended Ex-Im improve its credit underwriting process, but there is no indication these changes have been implemented.
Ex-Im has also ignored recommendations to manage its risk, as wise private investors do, by diversifying its portfolio geographically and by sector. As a result, its portfolio is too heavily concentrated in a handful of industries. If a sector of the economy heavily subsidized by Ex-Im — like aerospace, for example — were to suffer, taxpayers could be on the hook for billions of dollars in bad loans.
We have paid for such bad decisions before. The painful lessons of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should not go unheeded. Congress made it clear that Ex-Im needs to reform the way it does business, but Ex-Im has made it clear it will not change. Ex-Im is at risk of becoming another Enron — that legendary corporate example of mismanagement and misconduct, which itself once benefited from Ex-Im financing.
The government should not be in the banking business to begin with, but a government bank that defies the government's elected representatives is even more inappropriate. We are both determined to let Ex-Im begin what will likely be a 20-year process of winding down its operations in order to protect taxpayers and pave the way for a freer, more prosperous economic future.
Banks as Felons, or Criminality Lite // NYT // Editorial Board - May 22, 2015
As of this week, Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland are felons, having pleaded guilty on Wednesday to criminal charges of conspiring to rig the value of the world’s currencies. According to the Justice Department, the lengthy and lucrative conspiracy enabled the banks to pad their profits without regard to fairness, the law or the public good.
Besides the criminal label, however, nothing much has changed for the banks. And that means nothing much has changed for the public. There is no meaningful accountability in the plea deals and, by extension, no meaningful deterrence from future wrongdoing. In a memo to employees this week, the chief executive of Citi, Michael Corbat, called the criminal behavior “an embarrassment” — not the word most people would use to describe a felony but an apt one in light of the fact that the plea deals are essentially a spanking, nothing more.
As a rule, a felony plea carries more painful consequences. For example, a publicly traded company that is guilty of a crime is supposed to lose privileges granted by the Securities and Exchange Commission to quickly raise and trade money in the capital markets. But in this instance, the plea deals were not completed until the S.E.C. gave official assurance that the banks could keep operating the same as always, despite their criminal misconduct. (One S.E.C. commissioner, Kara Stein, issued a scathing dissent from the agency’s decision to excuse the banks.)
Barclays was one of the banks that pleaded guilty to federal crimes in a currency manipulation case. Credit Mike Segar/Reuters
Also, a guilty plea is usually a prelude to further action, not the “resolution” of a case, as the Justice Department has called the plea deals with the banks.
To properly determine accountability for criminal conspiracy in the currency cases, prosecutors should now investigate low-level employees in the crime — traders, say — and then use information gleaned from them to push the investigation up as far as the evidence leads. No one has thus far been named or charged. Nor has there been any explanation of how such lengthy and lucrative criminal conduct could have gone unsuspected and undetected by supervisors, managers and executives. The plea deals leave open the possibility of further investigation, but the prosecutors’ light touch with the banks makes it doubtful they will follow through.
An argument has been made that the S.E.C. was right not to revoke the banks’ capital-market privileges because doing so might disrupt the economy. That is debatable. What is not debatable is that bringing criminal charges against individuals and even sending some of them to jail would not disrupt the economy. To the contrary, holding individuals accountable is all the more important in instances of wrongdoing by banks that, for whatever reason, have been exempted from the full legal consequences of their criminal behavior.
If I walk into the local bank, demanding the teller hand over X dollars, I would immediately get tackled and hauled off to jail. If I used...
Bribes become acceptable when they have enough 0s.
We all know exactly where the NYSE floor is. Nothing is stopping private citizens from waiting outside and putting the fear of god into...
The plea deals mimic previous civil settlements. In all, the banks will pay fines totaling about $9 billion, assessed by the Justice Department as well as state, federal and foreign regulators. That seems like a sweet deal for a scam that lasted for at least five years, from the end of 2007 to the beginning of 2013, during which the banks’ revenue from foreign exchange was some $85 billion.
The banks will also be placed on “corporate probation” for three years, which will be overseen by the court and require regular reporting to the authorities as well as the cessation of all criminal activity. And the banks are also required to notify customers and counterparties that may have been directly affected by the banks’ manipulation of the currency markets.
The Justice Department intended the criminal pleas to look tough. Instead, they reflect at bottom the same prosecutorial indulgence that has plagued the pursuit of the banks in the many financial scandals of recent years.
Why Obamacare makes me optimistic about US politics // Vox // Ezra Klein - May 22, 2015
Five years after its passage, Obamacare stands as a monument to much that's wrong with American politics. But it also, increasingly, is evidence of much that's right with it, too.
First, the bad news. Obama isn't just as bitterly polarizing as ever — it's also as confusing as ever. The media has covered the law and its implementation more thoroughly than perhaps any other law in recent American history. But according to a national poll conducted by PerryUndem for Vox, only 18 percent of Americans say they know enough about what's in the Affordable Care Act. And it's not clear that more information would do much good: only 19 percent of Americans think what they hear in the news about Obamacare is even "mostly true."
Much of what Americans know about Obamacare is simply wrong. A plurality, for instance, think the law is costing more than originally estimated. Only 5 percent know it's actually costing quite a bit less:
The result is that opinions on the law are pretty much the same as the day it passed: 83 percent of Americans say their view of Obamacare hasn't shifted over the past five years.
But the good news is, well, really good. Obamacare's premiums are much cheaper than anyone expected, and a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows most enrollees are happy with their health insurance, happy with the value they're getting for their money, and happy with their choice of doctors and hospitals:
In total, a new Rand study estimates that Obamacare has gotten 16.9 million people insured. And all this is happening amidst the most profound slowdown in national health-care costs in decades.
More information won't save American politics
Obamacare is an example of a depressing fact of American politics: more information doesn't change minds.
Social scientists have tested this again and again. The more information partisans get, the deeper their disagreements become. When it comes to politics, people reason backward from their conclusions. Politics makes smart people stupid.
Consider how much we've learned about Obamacare in the past five years — and how few elected officials have changed their minds about it. We know how many people it's covering and how much its premiums are costing and how badly Healthcare.gov was designed and how high the deductibles are and how narrow the networks are becoming and how happy people are with their insurance.
Yet no congressional Democrats have watched Obamacare's progression and turned against the law. No congressional Republicans have noticed the law covering tens of millions of people with cheaper-than-expected premiums and decided maybe it's not such a disaster after all.
If anything, the opposite has happened. In a last-ditch effort to wound Obamacare by wrecking it in Republican states, conservatives have begun developing a bizarro-Earth history of the law — one in which Congress built federal exchanges for the sole purpose of ruining insurance markets in recalcitrant states. Five years later, it is not just opinions on Obamacare's worth that have diverged. The two sides can't even agree on what the law says or the history of how it was passed.
Among these elites, the problem is not too little information, nor too little trust in the information. It is too much information that confirms their priors, and too much trust in arguments and "facts" that suit their ends. But the result is much the same. If Americans sometimes seem to disagree on Obamacare because they know too little, Washington's bitter divide is the result of knowing too much.
This is a good place to stop for a moment and be clear about my priors, though they are already quite obvious: I think the evidence is, at this point, overwhelmingly on the side of the law. Obamacare is nowhere near perfect, but it's doing pretty much what it said it would do, at a lower cost than anyone thought. The law can and should be improved, but the simple fact is that the federal government is covering millions of previously uninsured Americans and spending less on health care with Obamacare than it expected in 2010 to spend without Obamacare. That's remarkable.
Some readers might see my side of this argument as convincing. Some might see it as deluded. In some ways, that's the point. My counterparts and I are drowning in Obamacare data and are no closer to agreement than we were five years ago. More information is just giving both sides more ways to confirm what they already believe.
Washington can't reason. But it can govern.
The state of the Obamacare debate is depressing. But the state of the law is encouraging across pretty much every metric you can find.
Despite a terrible start — the mess that was Healthcare.gov will be used to scare public administration students for generations to come — the law is working pretty well.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obamacare will cut the ranks of the uninsured by 17 million in 2015 — and will cost more than $100 billion less than originally thought. Enrollees are quite happy with their coverage. And, nationally, America's health-care spending is growing more slowly than it has since the 1960s — a trend Obamacare can't take full credit for, but that it hasn't interrupted and is likely helping along.
Obamacare's biggest problem is that the Supreme Court let states opt out of the Medicaid expansion — and dozens did.
But a few years in, a majority of states have signed up, and even the reddest locales are slowly but surely coming around. Right now, Kansas and Utah are thinking about joining Obamacare's Medicaid expansion even while Obama remains in office. It's a pretty safe bet that once Obama leaves, and some of the polarization around his signature law leaves with him, all or nearly all states will eventually participate in the law.
And this is, more broadly, the bright spot for American politics as a whole. Even as it is often irrational for elected officials to look at the facts and come to a conclusion that puts them at odds with their party, it is rational for them, when in power, to come to conclusions that will help them govern well.
This was evident even when the Democratic Party first passed and implemented Obamacare. The law was unpopular by the time it passed — and one reason was that Democrats had actually made it fiscally responsible legislation, adding hundreds of billions in spending cuts and tax increases. Healthcare.gov was a mess on the day it launched, but the White House fixed it quickly — even as some liberals downplayed the severity of technical problems, the Obama administration knew its legacy depended on the law actually working.
This is true across policies. Democrats may broadly support tax increases, but Democratic presidents worry about the distortionary effects of high taxes. Republicans may want to drown the government in a bathtub, but they know better than to get voters too wet. That isn't to say either party governs perfectly, or even always rationally. But governing has feedback loops that press releases don't. Parties that want to stay in power — and they all do – have an incentive to do a good job.
In that way, voters discipline the system even if they don't know much about individual policies, and even if they don't regularly update their opinions on how various laws are working. Most people aren't experts on politics, but they are experts on their lives and the lives of their loved ones. If the economy is tanking, or their health insurance is being yanked away, or their cousin was just wounded in an unnecessary war, they eventually punish the politicians they think responsible.
It's not a perfect system — sometimes elected officials end up paying for the sins of their predecessors, or can pass legislation where the bill will be sent to their successors — but it's better than we sometimes give it credit for.
For all the rhetoric, imagine what would happen to, say, President Jeb Bush if he sought to uproot Obamacare entirely. Tens of millions of Americans would lose their health insurance overnight. Any search for a coherent replacement would spark a brutal political war within the Republican Party. Republicans would suddenly be on the wrong end of the "if you like your health care, you can keep it" promise. Remember that for all the energy congressional Republicans spent in the 1990s trying to cut Medicare, Bush's brother, once in the White House, ended up massively expanding it. The incentives of governing are very different from the incentives of politicking.
The Islamic State is entirely a creation of Obama’s policies // WaPo // Ed Rogers - May 22, 2015
As reported by Robert Costa in The Washington Post, Republicans are blaming the president not only for allowing the Islamic State to develop as a terrorist organization in the first place, but also for failing to effectively combat the group as it has grown. Yet there appears to be some objection to Republicans calling President Obama out on his lack of a foreign policy strategy. Well, yeah. The Islamic State is 100 percent a creation of Obama’s policies. Plain and simple.
Iraq security forces withdraw from Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's Anbar province, 115 kilometers (70 miles) west of Baghdad, Sunday, May 17, 2015. Suicide car bomb attacks killed over 10 members of Iraqi security forces Sunday in Ramadi, which now is largely held by the Islamic State group, authorities said. Last week, the militants swept through Ramadi, seizing the main government headquarters and other key parts of the city. It marked a major setback for the Iraqi government's efforts to drive the militants out of areas they seized last year.
By his own admission, Obama announced the “end” of the Iraq war, standing in front of returning troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., on Dec. 14, 2011. In that speech, he said the United States was leaving behind “a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government.” There was no Islamic State threat at that time. Fast forward to this month, when the president said in an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg the day after Ramadi, Iraq, fell to Islamic State fighters that, “No, I don’t think we’re losing.” I wonder what this administration thinks “losing” looks like? This isn’t a “technical setback.” The losses in Iraq and the splintering of Syria are a direct result of at least three key Obama decisions.
First, Obama let the sectarian Nouri al-Maliki form a government in Iraq, even after Maliki failed to win the Iraqi parliamentary elections in 2010. Second, Obama folded in 2011 and did not ensure that an American fighting force remained in Iraq. Third, Obama refused to identify and groom an allied force fighting against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. To be clear, Obama is completely to blame for the Islamic State — the “JV team,” in his words — and its rapid consolidation of territory in western Iraq and through half of Syria. We are paying the price for the president’s dithering and his refusal to cultivate and equip an allied force that could shape events inside Syria and western Iraq. As your Insider said on May 18, “A ‘Sunni-stan’ is being created in front of our eyes.”
And since all Insiders readers know that bad gets worse, we can assume the march of the Islamic State will continue unless the president acknowledges some new realities. That doesn’t seem likely, as White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest is incredibly still claiming that the Obama administration’s strategy against the Islamic State is “overall” a success. So there is virtually no chance the president will acknowledge that the borders of the nation called Iraq, ruled from Baghdad, no longer exist; or that the nation called Syria, with its current borders, will not continue to be ruled from Damascus.
Anyway, I have always accused this White House of lacking insight and being incapable of being self-aware — much less self-critical — so despite the urgent nature of world events, the prospect of a wholesale revision of our foreign policy objectives and policies is unlikely.
This lack of insight — the denial, delusion and downright, jaw-dropping inability to deal with the world as it is — was on display Wednesday during Obama’s remarks at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy commencement ceremony. Given the realities of America’s decline and retreat from the global stage and the growing threats to our country, the president thought the most important thing he could say to a U.S. military force was, “Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security … And so we need to act — and we need to act now.”
Since the president has been wrong about almost everything else concerning our national security, perhaps he’s wrong about the threat he sees in global warming. These are serious matters, but it’s hard not to ridicule what the president said at the academy. Perhaps if global warming persists at the pace the president desires, maybe it could actually improve America’s strategic positioning. Maybe global warming will work to America’s advantage since Obama cannot. Maybe global warming will cause the islands China is creating to flood. Maybe warm weather will strain the air conditioners in the North Korean laboratories where scientists are miniaturizing nuclear weapons. Maybe another Russian sinkhole will open up and swallow Vladimir Putin, making it impossible for him to continue to humiliate the president. Maybe a drought will somehow inhibit the Islamic State and keep it from murdering the few allies we still have in the Middle East.
Anyway, the Republican voices seeking to replace Obama need to speak with urgency so that the rest of the world will take notice. Even if Obama continues to be a befuddled pushover on the world stage, perhaps their forceful statements — combined with those of our GOP congressional leaders — will send the message that our enemies and competitors should temper their ambitions because a new sheriff is only 20 months away.
The Art of Avoiding War // The Atlantic // Robert D. Kaplan - May 23, 2015
The Scythians were nomadic horsemen who dominated a vast realm of the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea, in present-day Ukraine and southern Russia, from the seventh century to the third century b.c. Unlike other ancient peoples who left not a trace, the Scythians continued to haunt and terrify long after they were gone. Herodotus recorded that they “ravaged the whole of Asia. They not only took tribute from each people, but also made raids and pillaged everything these peoples had.” Napoleon, on witnessing the Russians’ willingness to burn down their own capital rather than hand it over to his army, reputedly said: “They are Scythians!”
The more chilling moral for modern audiences involves not the Scythians’ cruelty, but rather their tactics against the invading Persian army of Darius, early in the sixth century b.c. As Darius’s infantry marched east near the Sea of Azov, hoping to meet the Scythian war bands in a decisive battle, the Scythians kept withdrawing into the immense reaches of their territory. Darius was perplexed, and sent the Scythian king, Idanthyrsus, a challenge: If you think yourself stronger, stand and fight; if not, submit.
Idanthyrsus replied that since his people had neither cities nor cultivated land for an enemy to destroy, they had nothing to defend, and thus no reason to give battle. Instead, his men harassed and skirmished with Persian foraging parties, then quickly withdrew, over and over again. Each time, small groups of Persian cavalry fled in disorder, while the main body of Darius’s army weakened as it marched farther and farther away from its base and supply lines. Darius ultimately retreated from Scythia, essentially defeated, without ever having had the chance to fight.
Killing the enemy is easy, in other words; it is finding him that is difficult. This is as true today as ever; the landscape of war is now vaster and emptier of combatants than it was during the set-piece battles of the Industrial Age. Related lessons: don’t go hunting ghosts, and don’t get too deep into a situation where your civilizational advantage is of little help. Or, as the Chinese sage of early antiquity Sun Tzu famously said, “The side that knows when to fight and when not will take the victory. There are roadways not to be traveled, armies not to be attacked, walled cities not to be assaulted.” A case in point comes from the ill-fated Sicilian Expedition of the late fifth century b.c., chronicled by Thucydides, in which Athens sent a small force to far-off Sicily in support of allies there, only to be drawn deeper and deeper into the conflict, until the prestige of its whole maritime empire became dependent upon victory. Thucydides’s story is especially poignant in the wake of Vietnam and Iraq. With the Athenians, as with Darius, one is astonished by how the obsession with honor and reputation can lead a great power toward a bad fate. The image of Darius’s army marching into nowhere on an inhospitable steppe, in search of an enemy that never quite appears, is so powerful that it goes beyond mere symbolism.
Your enemy will not meet you on your own terms, only on his. That is why asymmetric warfare is as old as history. When fleeting insurgents planted car bombs and harassed marines and soldiers in the warrens of Iraqi towns, they were Scythians. When the Chinese harass the Filipino navy and make territorial claims with fishing boats, coast-guard vessels, and oil rigs, all while avoiding any confrontation with U.S. warships, they are Scythians. And when the warriors of the Islamic State arm themselves with knives and video cameras, they, too, are Scythians. Largely because of these Scythians, the United States has only limited ability to determine the outcome of many conflicts, despite being a superpower. America is learning an ironic truth of empire: you endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.
The United States does not chase after war bands in Yemen as Darius did in Scythia, but occasionally it kills individuals from the air. The fact that it uses drones is proof not of American strength, but of American limitations. The Obama administration must recognize these limitations, and not allow, for example, the country to be drawn deeper into the conflict in Syria. If the U.S. helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences? Perhaps this is a battle that, as Sun Tzu might conclude, should not be fought. But Assad has killed many tens of thousands, maybe more, and he is being supported by the Iranians! True, but remember that emotion, however righteous, can be the enemy of analysis.
So how can the U.S. avoid Darius’s fate? How can it avoid being undone by pride, while still fulfilling its moral responsibility as a great power? It should use proxies wherever it can find them, even among adversaries. If the Iranian-backed Houthis are willing to fight al‑Qaeda in Yemen, why should Americans be opposed? And if the Iranians ignite a new phase of sectarian war in Iraq, let that be their own undoing, as they themselves fail to understand the lesson of the Scythians. While the Middle East implodes through years of low-intensity conflict among groups of Scythians, let Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran jostle toward an uneasy balance of power, and the U.S. remain a half step removed—caution, after all, is not the same as capitulation. Finally, let the U.S. return to its roots as a maritime power in Asia and a defender on land in Europe, where there are fewer Scythians, and more ordinary villains. Scythians are the nemesis of missionary nations, nations that obey no limits. Certainly America should reach, but not—like Darius—overreach.
The Notorious R.B.G. // National Journal // Editorial Board - May 22. 2015
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s more florid admirers sometimes refer to her as “The Notorious R.B.G.,” as though notoriety, which she seems intent on courting, were a virtue for a justice of the Supreme Court. On the matter of same-sex marriage, Justice Ginsburg long ago stopped behaving like a judge and started behaving like a member of a political campaign. She talked up the prospects of same-sex marriage earlier this year — Bloomberg headlined the story, not inaccurately, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Thinks Americans Are Ready for Gay Marriage” — and declared that Americans’ acceptance of a federal redefinition of family life, should five of nine Supreme Court justices demand it, “would not take a large adjustment.” Other than the jettisoning of state marriage laws and a few thousand years of social evolution, that is. Ginsburg is a bit of a freelance advocate of Democratic policies and priorities, having praised, among other things, the so-called Affordable Care Act, the constitutionally questionable provisions of which she voted to uphold.
Likewise, her public call for Congress to undo the effects of the Lilly Ledbetter case and her implausible, poorly reasoned dissent in the Hobby Lobby case speak to political rather than legal priorities.
Justice Ginsburg’s bare political activism is unseemly, a reminder that the Court, like any other institution, is corruptible. Last week she presided at a same-sex wedding, not her first — the two gentlemen strolled down the aisle to the accompaniment of “Mr. Sandman” — during which, the New York Times reports, she put a theatrical weight upon the word “Constitution,” with a “sly look and special emphasis,” as Maureen Dowd put it. And that, of course, is one of the questions before the Supreme Court: whether the 14th Amendment, unbeknownst to its 19th-century architects, has all along contained within it a provision mandating the nationwide enshrinement of same-sex marriage as a matter of fundamental rights. “Bring me a dream,” indeed.
But Justice Ginsburg’s admirers are not troubled by that — far from it, in fact: They want what they want, and their conception of government is that it exists to give them what they want. Principle? Limitation? Separation of powers? For the infantile, nothing is able to stand against the great “I want.”
Justice Ginsburg might be expected to have a more sophisticated understanding of the architecture of our constitutional order. That she does not is both an intellectual and a moral indictment of Justice Ginsburg, and an indictment by extension of her sycophants in the press and the legal establishment. It is further evidence that there is something other than the law at work in the rulings of the Supreme Court, indeed that the law may be considered an obstacle by justices seeking to satisfy political appetites. And this appears to be especially the case when it comes to same-sex marriage, an issue where legal reasoning has consistently taken a back seat to political advocacy. If this really were a legal proceeding, subject to standard principles of recusal, Justice Ginsburg’s open support for one side of the litigation would create a moral obligation for her to recuse herself. But an honest interpretation of the 14th Amendment is not what is going on, and Justice Ginsburg’s own comments are evidence of it: Whether the country is “ready” for same-sex marriage is, of course, irrelevant to whether it is a constitutional command. This is a ward-heeler’s approach to the Constitution. She really should be notorious.
Alexandria Phillips
Press Assistant | Communications
Hillary for America | www.hillaryclinton.com
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