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Correct The Record Monday November 10, 2014 Morning Roundup:
Headlines:
The New Yorker: “The Inevitability Trap”
“‘The only thing anybody gave a damn about that night was who came in second—Who was the other guy?’ Joe Trippi, who ran Mondale’s campaign in Iowa, told me.”
Washington Post: “Left struggled to move voters with Koch attacks and other big-money messages”
“There were moments on the campaign trail this fall when Hillary Rodham Clinton, the expected Democratic presidential front-runner, picked up the [anti-Koch] theme.”
Washington Post column: E.J. Dionne Jr.: “Don’t govern on fantasies”
“They’re saying, in other words, that spending two more years making Obama look bad should remain the GOP’s central goal, lest Republicans make the whole country ready for Hillary Clinton.”
“For every Senate seat that Republicans flipped in 2014, there’s one — or more — that’s likely to flip back to the Democrats in 2016. The chances that the GOP will still control the upper chamber of Congress after 2016 are slim.
MSNBC: “Scott Walker: Hillary Clinton is big loser of midterms”
Gov. Scott Walker: “I do think if we’re going to beat Hillary Clinton in this next election, we’ve got to have a message that says, ‘Hillary Clinton is all about Washington.’ I think in many ways, she was the big loser on Tuesday because she embodies everything that’s wrong with Washington.’”
The Hill blog: Ballot Box: “Cantor: Democrats have no bench for 2016”
“Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said on Sunday that the Democrats’ ‘lack of bench’ for 2016 will likely dent their chances of keeping the White House.”
Politico: “Anti-Keystone groups aren't giving up”
“With 2016 in sight, other political considerations could offer an incentive for Obama to dispose of the controversy quickly by striking a deal with the GOP to approve Keystone, eliminating an issue that has already dogged prospective presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.”
“In the short term, Democrats must do the obvious: Settle on a strategy with the president to break the gridlock, build a new farm team of outstanding candidates for the Senate and House and convince voters that a Hillary Clinton presidency can get big things done.”
Articles:
The New Yorker: “The Inevitability Trap”
By Ryan Lizza
November 17, 2014
[Subtitle:] Hillary Clinton and the drawbacks of being the front-runner.
The Sunday before Election Day, Hillary Clinton addressed a crowd of voters at an afternoon rally in Nashua, New Hampshire. The state has long served as a source of political renewal for the Clintons. Early in 1992, during Bill Clinton’s first Presidential run, he was hobbled by allegations of womanizing, but he finished a strong second in the New Hampshire primary, and his campaign rebounded. In 2008, Hillary lost to Barack Obama in the Iowa caucuses but defied the polls in New Hampshire, which showed Obama far ahead, and won the state, setting up a marathon nomination fight that lasted into June. On Sunday, she was ostensibly in the state to boost the campaigns of Governor Maggie Hassan and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, both threatened by the surging Republican tide. It was also an ideal opportunity for Clinton to advertise her unofficial status as the Democrat to beat in the 2016 primaries.
“It’s really hard for me to express how grateful I am, on behalf of my husband and myself, to the people of New Hampshire,” Clinton said. “Starting way back in 1991, you opened your homes and your hearts to us. And in 2008, during the darkest days of my campaign, you lifted me up, you gave me my voice back, you taught me so much about grit and determination, and I will never forget that.”
Many of the candidates for whom Clinton campaigned throughout the summer and fall lost on Tuesday. Shaheen, though, was one of the clear Democratic winners. She asked at the rally what many were thinking: “Are we ready for Hillary?” The crowd chanted Clinton’s name, and she mouthed a thank-you. In national surveys this year, Clinton’s support among Democrats has been as high as seventy-three per cent. That makes her the most dominant front-runner at this stage of a Presidential contest in the Party’s modern history. Media pundits and political strategists agree overwhelmingly that Hillary’s lead within the Party is unassailable. Tuesday’s results, which gave Republicans control of both the House and the Senate, may solidify her standing, as Democrats close ranks around her in an effort to hang on to the White House, their last foothold on power in Washington. But the election results could also lead to an entirely different outcome: a Republican Party that overinterprets its mandate in Congress and pushes its Presidential candidates far to the right, freeing Democrats to gamble on someone younger or more progressive than Clinton.
In every fight for the Democratic Presidential nomination in the past five decades, there has come a moment when the front-runner faltered. “Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does politics,” Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist, told me. Voters in the early states, perhaps spurred by a sense of civic responsibility, begin to take an interest in candidates they had previously never heard of. Those candidates seize on issues, usually ones that excite the left, that the front-runner, focussed on the general election, has been too timid to champion. The press, invested in political drama, declares that the front-runner is vulnerable.
Since the nineteen-eighties, four Democratic-primary contests have featured an establishment-backed front-runner who, early in the race, encountered little competition, but who eventually faced a vigorous challenge from a relative unknown. In 1984, Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s Vice-President, loomed over the Democratic field much as Clinton does now. In Iowa, Mondale defeated Senator Gary Hart, a younger candidate whose aim was to modernize the Democratic Party, by a wide margin, 49 to 16.5 per cent, but Hart emerged as a serious threat nonetheless. “The only thing anybody gave a damn about that night was who came in second—Who was the other guy?” Joe Trippi, who ran Mondale’s campaign in Iowa, told me. But nobody in the Hart campaign had thought to slate delegates in the later primary states, and Mondale’s superior organization prevailed.
In 2000, Vice-President Al Gore’s ability to raise money and secure Democratic endorsements scared off most competitors, but then Senator Bill Bradley jumped into the race and briefly threatened Gore. Dunn, who worked for Bradley, said that the campaign used Gore’s experience against him “by finding the things that progressives were upset with in the Clinton Administration.” In 2004, the dark horse was Howard Dean, an unknown ex-governor of Vermont, who faced four experienced members of Congress: Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Dick Gephardt. Kerry emerged as the leading candidate, but Dean briefly surged ahead in the polls when he attacked Kerry and other Democrats for being too supportive of the Bush Administration. Although Dean built a large following, he couldn’t organize it.
“In some ways I got captivated by my own campaign,” Dean told me. He found it impossible to make the ideological and stylistic shifts that might have transformed him from insurgent into front-runner. “The problem with running against somebody like Hillary—or my problem running against Kerry—is that, when you make the turn, then you disappoint all your followers.”
In the fall of 2007, Obama had a respectable national following as a senator, but Hillary Clinton led by more than thirty points in some national polls. Like Hart, Obama ran on a simple message of new versus old—“Change”—but he was prepared for a long fight over delegates when the press anointed him Clinton’s main challenger. As Bradley had done with Gore, Obama attacked Clinton on matters that liberals cared about, but his main issue—the war in Iraq—was more powerful than anything available to Bradley, who had focussed on gun control and universal health care. And, like Dean, Obama energized new voters, including many African-Americans, a key voting group in Democratic primaries. But Obama had a sophisticated plan to get them to the polls. These three ingredients—message, demographics, and organization—were just enough to defeat Clinton in the primaries. For the first time in modern history, a Democratic insurgency defeated the establishment.
Could it happen again? “There is going to be a challenge,” Trippi said. “And I would never underestimate the challenge if I were the Clinton campaign.” Dean has said that he will support Clinton if she runs. “I think the chances are fifty-fifty the Republicans are going to nominate a nutcase, and Hillary’s the perfect foil for a Rand Paul or a Ted Cruz,” he told me. But he also endorsed the idea of a strong debate: “I actually don’t think a primary is a bad thing. I think coronations are bad things.” Another Democratic strategist described the effect that even a losing challenger could have on the race. “If you get a deft insurgent, they may not win. But an insurgent could torture this poor woman.”
“Hi, I’m Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland. Are you guys Iowans?”
O’Malley, who is fifty-one, is one of several candidates who are considering running for the Democratic nomination. A two-term governor of Maryland, he is youthful-looking despite a receding hairline. In January of 2013, he briefly became an Internet sensation when photos emerged of him participating in a polar-bear plunge, wearing a bathing suit and revealing six-pack abs. One Sunday morning in mid-October, he was scanning the crowded tables at the Drake Diner in Des Moines. He was hungry—“Smelling all these eggs, it’s killing me!”—but he had work to do before he could eat. He pirouetted around a waitress delivering omelettes and descended on a family of four to introduce himself. Like most of the restaurant’s patrons, they had no idea who he was.
Historically, the longer a party remains in power, the more emboldened its activist base becomes. Many liberals are frustrated with Obama’s inability to enact more progressive change, such as assertive policies against global warming and income inequality, comprehensive immigration reform, or a less hawkish foreign policy. Democratic-primary voters are always eager to see a fresh potential candidate. “Seventy or eighty per cent of people want to hear from a new perspective before they make a decision about whether to go with what they know,” O’Malley told me. “A person becomes very famous in this country very quickly.”
O’Malley isn’t new to politics. His parents met in 1954, in Washington, where they worked together on a Young Democrats newsletter. In 1965, when he turned two, they frosted his birthday cake with the words “Martin for President 2004.” He’s been running for one office or another since he was in grade school, at Our Lady of Lourdes, in Bethesda, Maryland. In the past twenty-four years, he has served at just about every level of government in his state: Baltimore city councilman for eight years, mayor of Baltimore for eight years, and governor of Maryland for eight years. In January, facing term limits, he’ll be out of a job. There’s only one other elective office he wants to pursue.
In Des Moines, at the diner, O’Malley eagerly introduced himself to patrons and asked them to vote for Iowa’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Jack Hatch, who was not known for his flash or political skills. A longtime Democratic state legislator, Hatch was running fifteen points behind, in an ultimately doomed campaign against Terry Branstad, the state’s Republican chief executive. O’Malley was one of the few Democrats who had bothered to campaign for him. It was an odd scene: a little-known governor from a state a thousand miles away, introducing the candidate to his own voters. “He’s running for governor, and he needs your help,” O’Malley said, then dashed to another table to greet more Iowans.
Clinton can’t present herself as a novelty. She’ll be sixty-nine on Election Day in 2016 and has been a national figure for a quarter century. The last politician to become President after a similarly long and distinguished career was George H. W. Bush. Since then, the office has been won by relative newcomers: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. “The one time in my political life that we’ve gone back a generation was Carter to Reagan,” Dean said. “Once you change the page on generations, you don’t go back.” He added that Clinton could be the exception.
O’Malley has been thinking about the political dynamics of new versus old for a long time. In 1984, he took a semester off from Catholic University to volunteer for Hart, who represented a new generation of Democratic thinking, even though he was only eight years younger than Mondale. O’Malley and a friend signed on with the campaign. “We made the decision at the age of twenty that we weren’t going to defeat Reagan after one term by offering up the same old leadership from yesterday,” O’Malley told me.
The conventional wisdom heading into the Iowa caucuses, he reminded me, was that “Mondale was totally inevitable, and the only person with a chance of beating him was astronaut John Glenn.” The story that unfolded instead “was that Glenn totally imploded, pancaked, and Gary Hart got sixteen per cent, and it was that distant second place that was heard around the world.”
The Hart campaign’s organizational failure was an education for O’Malley. “It was like a ‘Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ experience for me,” O’Malley said. “I walked into the wardrobe, I got about twenty years of adult experience in management and being under deadlines and high pressure, and then I came back and I was still twenty-one.”
The history of Democratic primaries suggests that an insurgent can’t expect to gain recognition with only a fresh face and a superior organization. Inevitably, the candidate must attack the front-runner from the left. O’Malley is not necessarily a natural candidate to pursue this strategy, but he is trying.
As a mayor and as a governor, he has been known for bringing a McKinsey-esque reform to Baltimore and to Annapolis, instituting programs that use computer-aided metrics to judge government performance. In 2002, when he was mayor, Esquire called him one of the “best and brightest”; in 2009, as governor, he was honored by the magazine Governing as one of the “public officials of the year.” He applied his data-driven techniques to crime, and Baltimore’s murder rate plummeted to below three hundred per year for the first time in a decade. Until recently, he hasn’t offered much to Democrats who are worried that Hillary is too centrist on economics and foreign policy. But in the past two years he has won approval of gun-control legislation, a new state immigration law, the repeal of the death penalty, and an increase in the minimum wage. There was only one warning sign for O’Malley as he canvassed Iowa. His lieutenant governor, Anthony Brown, who was running to succeed him as governor, was in a close race against a local businessman and political upstart, Larry Hogan, who attacked the O’Malley administration for raising taxes.
O’Malley’s strategy so far suggests that the 2016 primaries may turn into a debate not so much about Clinton’s record as about Obama’s effectiveness as a leader—an issue that Republicans used to win races last week, and which they would almost certainly raise in a general election against Clinton. O’Malley told me that Obama’s response to the 2008 financial crisis was too timid: “When the Recovery and Reinvestment Act was introduced, it was probably half of what it needed to be, and the congressional parts of our own party watered it down to a half of that, which meant it was about a quarter of what it needed to be.” And Obama was too soft on Wall Street, O’Malley said. “The moment was ripe for much more aggressive action. If an institution is too big to fail, too big to jail, too big to prosecute, then it’s probably too damn big.” O’Malley also talks about inequality, in terms that more populist Democrats, like Elizabeth Warren, who insists she isn’t running for President, have embraced, but which Obama and Clinton have generally avoided.
Clinton has said little about economic policy in recent years and could co-opt some of the same arguments without seeming overly disloyal to the President. Many liberals, though, will want concrete promises on policy rather than mere sound bites. Michael Podhorzer, the political director at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said, “What we learned from the Obama Administration is that if the Presidential candidate surrounds themself with the usual Wall Street suspects, then, whatever the populist rhetoric is, that’s not going to be good enough.”
At the Drake Diner, O’Malley sat down briefly with Hatch and Monica Vernon, Hatch’s running mate, to discuss the race against Branstad. O’Malley had a tightly scheduled day of events ahead and he ordered the No. 5: scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, pancakes, and coffee.
“How’s it going?” he asked the two candidates.
Hatch complained that everyone except a few labor PACs had given up on him. Voters weren’t giving him a close look, because Branstad seemed like the inevitable victor. O’Malley told Hatch not to give up.
“There’s a tremendous David-versus-Goliath Zeitgeist going on out there,” he said. In his own underdog races, the key was to figure out “the narrative” to use against the front-runner and to stick to it. “You guys have to be the new.”
On Tuesday, Hatch lost by more than twenty points. In Maryland, in one of the biggest upsets, Hogan defeated Brown by five points. The loss will make it difficult for O’Malley to argue that his economic agenda in Maryland is a winning formula for his party nationally. “I wasn’t on the ballot,” he told me after the election, insisting that the results won’t change his plans. “In the last race that I ran, in 2010—not a very easy year—the exact same tax attacks were levelled and the economy was even worse, and we won by fourteen points.”
At the diner, O’Malley’s aide told the Governor it was time to get to the next event. He looked at her and frowned. “But I ordered the No. 5.”
Democratic strategists like to divide the Party’s electorate into “wine track” and “beer track” voters. Insurgents typically have done well with the wine track—college-educated liberals—and although that portion of the electorate has grown, it’s still not enough to win. (Hart once told me that he did well in all the states that were benefitting from globalization; Mondale, who had union support, did well in all the states where workers were feeling economically squeezed.) It’s not clear what major demographic group O’Malley could steal from Clinton; for now, he seems like a classic wine-track insurgent. On Tuesday, the Republican victory in Maryland was fuelled by working-class and suburban voters, who revolted against higher taxes.
Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb, who served one term, from 2007 to 2013, and then retired, has the potential to win the beer-track vote. In early October, I drove from Washington to a residential building that sits high on a hill in Arlington. On the eighth floor, in a condominium with a sweeping view of Washington’s monuments, Webb has been plotting his own path to defeating Clinton. “I do believe that I have the leadership and the experience and the sense of history and the kinds of ideas where I could lead this country,” he told me. “We’re just going to go out and put things on the table in the next four or five months and see if people support us. And if it looks viable, then we’ll do it.”
Webb is a moderate on foreign policy, but he is a Vietnam veteran from a long line of military men. His condo, which he uses as a study, is filled with antique weaponry and historical artifacts from his ancestors. He showed me a bookcase filled with collectibles. “I’ve been to a lot of battlefields,” he said. He pointed to some sand from Iwo Jima; glass from Tinian, the island from which the Enola Gay was launched before it dropped an atomic bomb on Japan; and some shrapnel from Vietnam. “I have that in my leg,” he said.
After the war, Webb became a writer. His most famous book, “Fields of Fire,” published in 1978, is a novel based on his own experiences and has been credibly compared to Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” for its realistic portrayal of war. Webb has always moved restlessly between the military and politics and the life of a writer. In the late seventies and early eighties, he worked as a counsel on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and later as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy. He has also travelled around the world as a journalist for Parade. In 2007, I interviewed him in his Senate office weeks after he was sworn in. He noted that he was having a hard time adjusting to life as a senator and missed his writing life. Now, in Arlington, he talked about the unfinished business of his Senate career.
In his senatorial race, Webb did well not only in northern Virginia, which is filled with Washington commuters and college-educated liberals, but also with rural, working-class white voters in Appalachia. In 2008, those voters were generally more loyal to Clinton than to Obama, but Webb believes that he could attract a national coalition of both groups of voters in the Presidential primaries. He laid out a view of Wall Street that differs sharply from Clinton’s.
“Because of the way that the financial sector dominates both parties, the distinctions that can be made on truly troubling issues are very minor,” he said. He told a story of an effort he led in the Senate in 2010 to try to pass a windfall-profits tax that would have targeted executives at banks and firms which were rescued by the government after the 2008 financial crisis. He said that when he was debating whether to vote for the original bailout package, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, he relied on the advice of an analyst on Wall Street, who told him, “No. 1, you have to do this, because otherwise the world economy will go into cataclysmic free fall. But, No. 2, you have to punish these guys. It is outrageous what they did.”
After the rescue, when Webb pushed for what he saw as a reasonable punishment, his own party blocked the legislation. “The Democrats wouldn’t let me vote on it,” he said. “Because either way you voted on that, you’re making somebody mad. And the financial sector was furious.” He added that one Northeastern senator—Webb wouldn’t say who—“was literally screaming at me on the Senate floor.”
When Clinton was a New York senator, from 2001 to 2009, she fiercely defended the financial industry, which was a crucial source of campaign contributions and of jobs in her state. “If you don’t have stock, and a lot of people in this country don’t have stock, you’re not doing very well,” Webb said. Webb is a populist, but a cautious one, especially on taxes, the issue that seems to have backfired against O’Malley’s administration. As a senator, Webb frustrated some Democrats because he refused to raise individual income-tax rates. But as President, he says, he would be aggressive about taxing income from investments: “Fairness says if you’re a hedge-fund manager or making deals where you’re making hundreds of millions of dollars and you’re paying capital-gains tax on that, rather than ordinary income tax, something’s wrong, and people know something’s wrong.”
The Clintons and Obama have championed policies that help the poor by strengthening the safety net, but they have shown relatively little interest in structural changes that would reverse runaway income inequality. “There is a big tendency among a lot of Democratic leaders to feed some raw meat to the public on smaller issues that excite them, like the minimum wage, but don’t really address the larger problem,” Webb said. “A lot of the Democratic leaders who don’t want to scare away their financial supporters will say we’re going to raise the minimum wage, we’re going do these little things, when in reality we need to say we’re going to fundamentally change the tax code so that you will believe our system is fair.”
Webb could challenge Clinton on other domestic issues as well. In 1984, he spent some time as a reporter studying the prison system in Japan, which has a relatively low recidivism rate. In the Senate, he pushed for creating a national commission that would study the American prison system, and he convened hearings on the economic consequences of mass incarceration. He says he even hired three staffers who had criminal records. “If you have been in prison, God help you if you want to really rebuild your life,” Webb told me. “We’ve got seven million people somehow involved in the system right now, and they need a structured way to reënter society and be productive again.” He didn’t mention it, but he is aware that the prison population in the U.S. exploded after the Clinton Administration signed tough new sentencing laws.
The issue that Webb cares about the most, and which could cause serious trouble for Hillary Clinton, is the one that Obama used to defeat her: Clinton’s record on war. In the Obama Administration, Clinton took the more hawkish position in three major debates that divided the President’s national-security team. In 2009, she was an early advocate of the troop surge in Afghanistan. In 2011, along with Samantha Power, who was then a member of the White House National Security Council staff and is now the U.N. Ambassador, she pushed Obama to attack Libyan forces that were threatening the city of Benghazi. That year, Clinton also advocated arming Syrian rebels and intervening militarily in the Syrian civil war, a policy that Obama rejected. Now, as ISIS consolidates its control over parts of the Middle East and Iran’s influence grows, Clinton is still grappling with the consequences of her original vote for the war in Iraq.
Although Webb is by no means an isolationist, much of his appeal in his 2006 campaign was based on his unusual status as a veteran who opposed the Iraq war. “I’ve said for a very long time, since I was Secretary of the Navy, we do not belong as an occupying power in that part of the world,” he told me. “This incredible strategic blunder of invading caused the problems, because it allowed the breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines at the same time that Iran was empowering itself in the region.”
He thinks Obama, Clinton, and Power made things worse by intervening in Libya. “There’s three factions,” he said. “The John McCains of the world, who want to intervene everywhere. Then the people who cooked up this doctrine of humanitarian intervention, including Samantha Power, who don’t think they need to come to Congress if there’s a problem that they define as a humanitarian intervention, which could be anything. That doctrine is so vague.” Webb also disdains liberals who advocate military intervention without understanding the American military. Referring to Syria and Libya, Webb said, “I was saying in hearings at the time, What is going to replace it? What is going to replace the Assad regime? These are tribal countries. Where are all these weapons systems that Qaddafi had? Probably in Syria. Can you get to the airport at Tripoli today? Probably not. It was an enormous destabilizing impact with the Arab Spring.”
Early on as a senator, Webb championed the idea of the so-called “pivot to Asia,” a rebalancing of America’s strategic and diplomatic posture from the Middle East to the Far East—an idea that Obama and Clinton subsequently adopted. Webb pushed Secretary of State Clinton to open up relations with Burma, a policy that Clinton includes in her recent book, “Hard Choices,” as a major achievement. (Obama is travelling to Burma this week.) When I raised the subject with Webb, he seemed annoyed that he hadn’t received adequate credit for the Burma policy. People who know him well suggest that part of what’s motivating him to consider a primary challenge to Clinton is his sense that she hasn’t expressed the proper gratitude.
It remains to be seen whether Democratic voters will care as much about foreign policy in 2016 as they did about Iraq in 2008. And it’s unclear how Clinton’s record on the Middle East will look two years from now. If Webb runs, Clinton will face an unpredictable debate about her hawkishness.
At the end of our interview, I noticed a picture of Don Quixote on Webb’s wall of military treasures. He laughed when I asked about it. “The beauty of Don Quixote is not that he dreamed impossible dreams,” he said. “It’s that, because he believed, he caused other people to believe.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist and the longest-serving independent in Congress, is seventy-three; he speaks with a Brooklyn accent that is slightly tempered by more than two decades of living in Vermont, where he was previously the mayor of Burlington and then the state’s representative in the U.S. House. One evening in mid-October, he was hunched over a lectern addressing students at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Supporters selling “Run, Bernie, Run!” bumper stickers milled around the edges of the crowd, along with a local labor leader, Kurt Ehrenberg, who is a regular volunteer with Sanders’s potential Presidential team in the state. Long wisps of Sanders’s white hair levitated above his head, as if he were conducting electricity.
“The great crisis, politically, facing our nation is that we are not discussing the great crises facing our nation,” he told the students. He launched several attacks on billionaires, each one to cheers. “We look at the United Kingdom and their queens, their dukes, and whatever else they have, and say, ‘Well, that is a class society, that’s not America.’ Well, guess what? We have more income and wealth inequality in this country than the U.K. and any other major country on earth.” It was time “for a political revolution.”
Earlier in the day, Sanders had told me that he was thinking about running for President. If he does, he will be the Democratic Party’s Ron Paul: his chance of winning would be infinitesimal, but his presence in the race and his passion about a few key issues would expose vulnerabilities in the front-runner’s record and policies, as Paul did with John McCain and Mitt Romney. Sanders recited for me a list of grievances that progressives still harbor about the Clinton Presidency and made it clear that he would exploit them in his campaign.
“The Clinton Administration worked arm in arm with Alan Greenspan—who is, on economic matters, obviously, an extreme right-wing libertarian—on deregulating Wall Street, and that was a total disaster,” Sanders said. “And then you had the welfare issue, trade policies. You had the Defense of Marriage Act.”
He said that the George W. Bush Presidency “will go down in history as certainly the worst Administration in the modern history of America.” But he has also been disappointed by Obama. “I have been the most vocal opponent of him in the Democratic Caucus,” he told me. In his view, Obama should have kept the grass roots of his 2008 campaign involved after he was elected, and he should have gone aggressively after Wall Street. “His weakness is that either he is too much tied to the big-money interests, or too quote-unquote nice a guy to be taking on the ruling class.”
Sanders, like Paul, has a loyal national following that finances his campaigns. He made life difficult for Democrats in Vermont for many years. In 1988, when he was the mayor of Burlington, he went to the Democratic caucus in the city to support Jesse Jackson’s Presidential campaign. One woman, angry with Sanders for his attacks on local Democrats, slapped him in the face. Soon after he won a seat in the House of Representatives, in 1990, some Democrats tried to exclude him from caucusing with them. At a meeting to decide the matter, his opponents humiliated him by reading aloud his previous statements criticizing the Democratic Party.
“I didn’t know that they could track back everything you had ever said,” Sanders told me. “That did not use to be the case. You could certainly get away with a lot of stuff—not anymore!”
The Democrats eventually welcomed him back as a collaborator. In 2006, when he ran for the Senate, the Party supported his candidacy. He now campaigns for those Democrats who are comfortable having an avowed socialist stumping for them, and raises money for others. But he has never been a member of the Democratic Party, and if he decides to run against Hillary in the primary, he will have to join. The alternative would be to run as a third-party candidate in the general election. “It’s a very difficult decision,” he said. “If I was a billionaire, if I was a Ross Perot type, absolutely, I’d run as an independent. Because there is now profound anger at both political parties. But it takes a huge amount of money and organizational time to even get on the ballot in fifty states.”
Most likely, he said, he will run in the Democratic primaries, if he runs at all. I asked him if he thought there was deep dissatisfaction with Hillary on the left. “I don’t think it’s just with Hillary,” he replied. “I think it’s a very deep dissatisfaction with the political establishment.” He insisted that he would run a serious campaign against her, not just “an educational campaign” about his pet issues. “If I run, I certainly would run to win.”
The 2016 Presidential primaries will be the first fought by Democrats since the Supreme Court opened the door for individuals to spend unlimited sums of money on an election. In 2012, those new rules almost cost Romney the Republican nomination, when nuisance candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who in previous years would have never survived their early losses, were propped up by rich allies. Before 2012, it would have been difficult to find interest groups that might help fund someone like O’Malley, Webb, or Sanders. Now all it takes is a billionaire who cares about gun control, climate change, war, or inequality.
“What if you decided to have a really strong antiwar person run?” one Democratic strategist told me. “Don’t you think four or five crazy rich people from the Democracy Alliance”—a network of wealthy Democratic donors—“would be funding that?”
Democratic voters often like to flirt with other candidates in the primary, before the arranged marriage is made. O’Malley wants Democrats who were demoralized by Tuesday’s election results to know that they have a choice. “None of our surrogates from the Party’s past were able to affect the results of this wave,” O’Malley said, in a veiled reference to the Clintons, who campaigned hard for many candidates who were defeated. “I think a reasonable person could conclude that the nation is looking for new solutions to our problems and looking for new leadership.”
In October, at a campaign event in Iowa, O’Malley arrived late to a small gathering of boozy liberals at a fund-raiser for Bruce Braley, the Democratic Senate candidate, who ended up losing by eight points. In his spare time, O’Malley plays in an Irish rock band called O’Malley’s March. He strapped on a guitar and sang “Scare Away the Dark,” a neo-folk song by the band Passenger about choosing your own path, rather than the one everyone else says you should follow. The white, middle-aged crowd clinked wineglasses and rose to their feet when he belted out the chorus:
To sing, sing at the top of your voice,
Love without fear in your heart.
Feel, feel like you still have a choice.
If we all light up, we can scare away the dark.
O’Malley wandered through the crowd, shaking hands, and ordered a drink at the bar. “People,” he said, “want to be inspired.”
Washington Post: “Left struggled to move voters with Koch attacks and other big-money messages”
By Matea Gold
November 9, 2014, 5:08 p.m. EST
One clear lesson emerged from last week’s midterm elections: Running against big money in politics is hard to do.
Democrats and their allies made the topic one of their central lines of attack this year, featuring the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch in nearly 100 different political spots that ran in states from Alaska to Florida. But the issue failed to gain traction, and most of those Democrats lost.
The difficulty they encountered in transforming the public’s disgust with rich donors into political action speaks to how hard it is to move voters who view both parties as captives of wealthy patrons.
Even as Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) repeatedly railed against the Kochs in speeches on the Senate floor, billionaire hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer commanded attention this year for the tens of millions he poured into a super PAC backing Democratic candidates.
“It’s very understandable for voters to feel like there’s a pox on both houses,” said Nick Penniman, executive director of Issue One, a bipartisan group working to reduce the influence of wealthy interests in politics.
The 2014 campaign should have presented a ripe environment to push a message about money in politics. Super PACs and other groups reported spending more than $550 million on congressional races, a record for midterm elections. Voters complained bitterly about waves of negative ads that were backed by out-of-state outfits.
Across the country, candidates sparred over the influence of their rich contributors, while new reform-minded super PACs sought to make campaign money a potent political issue.
But the argument proved to have its limits.
Mayday PAC, which launched with much fanfare as the “super PAC to end super PACs,” failed to play a decisive role in any race.
Some Democrats argue that the anti-Koch message contributed to their victories in Senate races in New Hampshire and Michigan. But it did not save incumbents in states such as North Carolina, Iowa, Colorado and Arkansas, all of whom highlighted the intense spending against them by the Koch-backed political network.
The answer, some party strategists think, is not to abandon the anti-Koch message but to amplify it.
“The way I view it is that we were just getting started,” said David Brock, founder of American Bridge, the independent pro-Democratic research operation.
Brock’s group plans to dig even deeper into the Kochs as part of an effort to tie them to the incoming class of congressional Republicans, a theme it will then carry into the 2016 presidential race.
“The Kochs themselves were put on the defensive for the first time, and a number of their candidates were put on the defensive when these issues were raised,” he said. “To me, that’s a sign that we’re on to something.”
Top officials in the Koch political operation say Tuesday’s dismal showing for Democrats proved that the left’s strategy was flawed.
“While Harry Reid and Senate Democrats spent their time attacking job creators who spoke out against their failed policies, we focused on the issues voters cared about,” said James Davis, spokesman for Freedom Partners Action Fund, a super PAC financed by the Kochs and other donors. “Americans showed they are tired of the political games — they want solutions.”
Some activists seeking to curb the political power of wealthy interests also see the anti-Koch strategy as problematic.
“I think any time you vilify a single family, you create a too-narrow perspective on the problem in a way that inhibits the bigger conversation that we need to be having,” Penniman said. “It’s not about a single family. It’s about a core dysfunction in the American experiment.”
In Kentucky’s Senate campaign this year, liberal groups sought to cast Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as beholden to his campaign donors. The Republican fired back by attacking rich Hollywood figures and other liberal contributors who supported Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes.
His response proved effective: while 46 percent of Kentucky voters named McConnell as the candidate closest to wealthy donors, 39 percent said it was Grimes, according to an election eve poll conducted by Every Voice Action, a super PAC that seeks to give small donors greater influence in campaigns.
“It’s not enough to just beat up on your opponent, because now we’ve seen evidence in this cycle that your opponent can just beat up on you,” said David Donnelly, the group’s president. “You have to have a real policy agenda and you have to point out where your opponent’s solutions fall short.”
Groups on the left tried myriad approaches to the money-in-politics issue this year.
One of the most high-profile efforts was Mayday PAC, a super PAC started by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig that spent more than $10 million going after candidates opposed to measures that would lessen the impact of wealthy donors.
In the end, the group could not point to a race in which it turned an election. But Lessig maintains it still had influence, noting that Mayday’s late campaign against Rep. Fred Upton forced the powerful Michigan Republican to plow millions into what most expected was going to be an easy reelection.
“That was a tax on Fred Upton, and other people should look at this and think, ‘Do we want to be in the position to be taxed like Fred Upton if we’re on the wrong side of this issue?’ ” he said.
Most of the messaging about money was focused on the Kochs, a campaign that Reid launched in a speech on the Senate floor. The attack was echoed throughout the year not only by the party’s campaign committees but also by independent groups such as NextGen Climate Action, a super PAC largely financed by Steyer.
The Steyer group spent more than $62 million on congressional races, losing the bulk of the campaigns it played in. But Chris Lehane, the group’s chief strategist, argued that the success of Democratic Senate candidate Gary Peters in Michigan, where NextGen sought to tie the Kochs to local pollution issues, “provides a paradigm for the future.”
The take-away for some Democratic strategists this year was that making an issue out of wealthy donors can work.
“A message completely reliant on who is funding candidate X is not going to work on its own, but I think it can be quite effective as part of a larger framework to show how a candidate is out of touch with the people they represent,” said Ali Lapp, executive director of the Democratic super PAC House Majority PAC.
Pollster Geoff Garin, who did work for the super PAC Senate Majority PAC and other Democratic campaigns this year, said he saw evidence that voters were swayed by the anti-Koch message when the ads were at their most intense over the summer.
In one poll of voters in 10 states conducted in early August, 62 percent said they would have a less favorable impression of the Republican Senate candidates if they heard that the Koch brothers were backing them with millions of dollars, Garin said.
“Wherever and whenever those ads ran, they had a breakthrough quality that wasn’t true of other negative advertising,” he said.
The problem, he thinks, is that Democrats did not keep up the line of attack through Election Day.
“If anything, we let up on the Koch brothers too soon,” Garin said.
Some party strategists think the new Congress will provide them with ample opportunities to draw more connections between new GOP lawmakers and their wealthy backers. And they expect the anti-Koch message to continue to dominate in 2016.
There were moments on the campaign trail this fall when Hillary Rodham Clinton, the expected Democratic presidential front-runner, picked up the theme.
At an October rally for Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Clinton denounced the “onslaught of out-of-state money and negativity” leveled against the incumbent, urging her supporters to show “that no matter how much money has flooded into this state, North Carolina is not for sale.” Hagan lost on Tuesday.
Bill Clinton went even further on the stump. During a swing through Michigan, the former president singled out the Koch brothers, warning: “They’re spending so much money, what they want after this is a Congress full of Koch pets.”
Washington Post column: E.J. Dionne Jr.: “Don’t govern on fantasies”
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
November 9, 2014, 7:42 p.m. EST
When high-mindedness collides with reality, reality usually wins. Remember this when you hear talk of making the next two years a miracle of bipartisan comity.
Begin by being skeptical of the lists of what President Obama and the now Republican-controlled Congress should “obviously” agree on. Notice that liberal lists (including mine) start with immigration and sentencing reform while conservative lists focus on free trade and tax reform. Surprise! The election changed no one’s priorities.
And don’t be fooled by anyone who pretends that the 2016 election isn’t at the top of everyone’s calculations.
With Washington now so deeply divided philosophically, each side is primarily interested in creating a future government more congenial to getting what it wants. Republicans want to win total power two years from now; Democrats want to hang on to the presidency and take back the Senate.
Therefore, don’t misread the internal Republican debate. It is not a fight between pristine souls who just want to show they can govern and fierce ideologues who want to keep fighting. Both GOP camps want to strengthen the conservatives’ hand for 2016. They differ on how best to accomplish this.
The pro-governing Republicans favor a “first do no harm” approach. Thus did incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wisely rule out government shutdowns and debt-ceiling brinkmanship. He’s happy to work with Obama on trade because doing so advances a free market goal the GOP believes in — and because a trade battle would explode the Democratic coalition. For Republicans, what’s not to like?
The more militant conservatives are more candid about the real objective, which is “building the case for Republican governance after 2016.” Those words come from a must-read editorial in National Review, instructively entitled “The Governing Trap.”
“A prove-you-can-govern strategy will inevitably divide the party on the same tea-party-vs.-establishment lines that Republicans have just succeeded in overcoming,” the magazine argued. Also: “If voters come to believe that a Republican Congress and a Democratic president are doing a fine job of governing together, why wouldn’t they vote to continue the arrangement in 2016?”
They’re saying, in other words, that spending two more years making Obama look bad should remain the GOP’s central goal, lest Republicans make the whole country ready for Hillary Clinton. This is the prevailing view among conservatives. McConnell’s main argument with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), and his followers is not about ends but means. McConnell is no less focused than Cruz on bringing down Obama and discrediting Democratic governance, but McConnell needs to be more subtle about it.
Where does this leave Obama and the Democrats? The first to-do item on Obama’s list must be to repair his currently abysmal relations with his own party on Capitol Hill. He will need his party as the GOP goes after him in one “investigative” hearing after another. He also needs them if he goes ahead, as he should, with executive orders on immigration reform.
Obama has already drawn a red line on immigration from which there is no easy retreat. And exit polls explain why Republicans, particularly House Speaker John Boehner, have little reason to act before Obama’s gone.
Overall, 57 percent of voters favored granting illegal immigrants “a chance to apply for legal status,” while 39 percent preferred deporting them. But those who favored deportation voted for Republican House candidates by better than 3 to 1. Boehner won’t risk alienating this loyal group. Better for Obama to pick a fight in which he is taking action than to give way to passivity and powerlessness.
In the end, Obama needs to govern as best he can even as he and his allies prepare for the longer struggle.
Democrats were tongue-tied about economics in the campaign. They avoided highlighting the substantial achievements of the Obama years for fear that doing so would make them seem out of touch with voters whose wages are stagnating. But neither did Democrats come up with plausible answers and policies to win over these voters. They lost both ways.
A Democratic Party paralyzed on economics won’t deserve to prevail. The president and his party — including Clinton — must find a way of touting their stewardship while advancing a bold but realistic agenda that meets the demands of Americans who are still hurting. This encompasses not only defending government’s role in achieving shared growth but also, as Obama suggested Friday, restoring faith in how government works.
Solving the country’s economic riddle would be a much better use of their time than investing in the fantasy that McConnell and Boehner will try to make Obama look good.
By Howard Kurtz
November 10, 2014
You might have thought, after a traumatic and gut-wrenching defeat for the Democrats, that the midterms were a nightmare for Hillary Clinton.
Ah, but you don’t understand the sophisticated spin at work. The election was actually her dream come true!
Her team has convinced some reporters and pundits — or they have convinced themselves — that Hillary emerges enhanced from the wreckage.
I’m skeptical of that, but I’m also going to let you in on a secret: The midterms were probably a wash for Hillary. This whole notion that when a big shot goes out and campaigns for candidates and gets some credit for the victories and some blame for the defeats — it’s a journalistic construct. Most voters don’t care about endorsements. Alison Lundergan Grimes loses to Mitch McConnell by nearly 16 points, and Hillary was supposed to have saved her?
No one wants to say that, because it doesn’t get you clicks or ratings. So there’s a “debate”: Did the midterms help or hurt?
If I had to choose I’d lean toward hurt. But here’s what the New York Times says in a front-page story:
“The lopsided outcome and conservative tilt makes it less likely she would face an insurgent challenger from the left.” Like Hillary was losing sleep over Bernie Sanders?
“And a Republican-led Senate creates a handy foil for her to run against: Rather than the delicate task of trying to draw a stark contrast with an unpopular president in whose administration she served, her loyalists say, Mrs. Clinton can instead present herself as a pragmatic alternative to what they predict will be an obstructionist Republican Congress.
‘Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and their allies in the House’ will be ‘pushing Republican leadership hard,’ said Geoff Garin, a pollster who succeeded Mark Penn as chief strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign. ‘When that happens, it will give Hillary Clinton or whoever the Democratic nominee is a better platform to run.’”
An obstructionist Republican Congress? We’ll have to see. Pure spin, of course. But if you’re going to quote the spin from the left, why not include the shots from the right — such as Rand Paul saying the midterms were not only a referendum on President Obama but on Hillary?
Now it’s true that it will be easier for Hillary to run against a Republican Senate and House rather than dancing around Harry Reid. But it’s also true that as a former secretary of State, she is inextricably tied to an administration that was just repudiated at the polls, regardless of how she might try to distance herself.
Yahoo News has also been trumpeting the notion that Hillary is a 2014 winner:
“Even Tuesday's huge GOP victory shows that Republicans still have some catching up to do if they want to defeat her in 2016.
“Let’s start with the map. Sure, the GOP won a remarkable number of races Tuesday night. But how many purple states did Republicans actually pick up?
“For every Senate seat that Republicans flipped in 2014, there’s one — or more — that’s likely to flip back to the Democrats in 2016. The chances that the GOP will still control the upper chamber of Congress after 2016 are slim.
“How does this help Clinton? By giving her an added boost on an electoral playing field that already favors a Democratic presidential nominee.”
That seems a stretch. The electoral map was always going to favor the Dems in 2016, regardless of last week’s outcome. And to take one example, instead of having friendly Democratic governors in Florida, Illinois and Wisconsin, the machinery will be controlled by Republicans.
The conservative Washington Free Beacon takes the other side:
“The 2014 election was a disaster for Hillary Clinton. Why? Let us count the ways.
“She will have to run against an energetic and motivated Republican Party. If the GOP had failed to capture the Senate, the loss would have been more than demoralizing…
“She would have claimed partial credit for saving the Senate. She would have promised to build on Democratic success. You would have been able to see her aura of inevitability for miles.
“But she has been denied. Instead she must calculate how to salvage the wreckage of 2014. She must convince Democrats that their savior is a grandmother who lives in a mansion on Massachusetts Avenue. It is her party that is shell shocked, not the GOP. Trust me: You don’t want to be in that position.”
The author of the Times piece, Amy Chozick, has reported aggressively on Hillaryland, and she did break the news that the unofficial candidate will stop her paid speeches and go on a listening tour (sound familiar?) before her announcement. Plus, the campaign headquarters will likely be in New York’s Westchester County (the better to appeal to suburban voters than, say, Manhattan).
The bottom line is that Hillary will be running for a third Democratic term. Beats me why anyone thinks that task was made easier by the party’s midterm drubbing.
MSNBC: “Scott Walker: Hillary Clinton is big loser of midterms”
By Irin Carmon
November 9, 2014, 4:05 p.m. EST
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, fresh off his third victory in four years, dropped some heavy hints about running for president in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.
Asked by moderator Chuck Todd about a pledge Walker made in October to serve his four-year term, Walker, a Republican, hedged. “I said my plan was for four years. I’ve got a plan to keep going for the next four years. But, you know, certainly I care deeply about not only my state, but my country,” Walker said. “We’ll see what the future holds.”
Polls had shown a close race between Walker and businesswoman Mary Burke this year, raising Democrats’ hopes that they could take out a champion of conservatism, but Walker won with 52.3% of the vote. He also survived a recall election in 2012.
Todd asked Walker if he would defer to Congressman and fellow Wisconsinite Paul Ryan, who was their party’s vice presidential nominee in 2012.
“I love Paul Ryan. I’ve said many times before I’d be the president of Paul Ryan fan club,” said Walker. But there is a limit to his love, apparently: “But I do think if we’re going to beat Hillary Clinton in this next election, we’ve got to have a message that says, ‘Hillary Clinton is all about Washington.’ I think in many ways, she was the big loser on Tuesday because she embodies everything that’s wrong with Washington.” Pressed by Todd to spell out whether or not that meant he wouldn’t defer to Ryan, Walker said, “Paul Ryan may be the only exception to that rule. But overall, I think governors make much better presidents than members of Congress.”
But for all of the talk of “executive experience,” Todd pointed to indicators suggesting that Walker’s economic record isn’t all that great. “When it comes to wage growth, it’s below the national average, Wisconsin is. When it comes to job growth, it’s below the national average. And your tax cut policy has created a larger deficit, a $1.8 billion deficit hole that you’re going to have to plug next year. And part of it is because state revenues didn’t come in as expected. Is it possible that the idea of cutting taxes as a way to create jobs and assimilate the economy just isn’t working in Wisconsin?”
Walker disputed that, claiming that the deficit hole was temporary pending more revenues and budget cuts, and adding, “So the simple answer is, you compare us to Illinois where they raise taxes, we lower taxes by $2 billion in property and income, and we had a much, much lower unemployment rate and a much better economy than they do. Thank God they elected [Republican] Bruce Rauner, because that’ll help turn things around down there, just like we have in Wisconsin.”
Walker also defended his decision to refuse the federal Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. A nonpartisan report found Wisconsin would have saved $206 million over two years and $500 million over three and a half years had it expanded Medicaid, covering over 80,000 more people.
Walker suggested the federal government would renege on its obligations. ”I mean, think about it. States that have taken the Medicaid expansion are betting on the fact that the Congress and the president, who can’t deal with the $17 trillion are going to magically somehow come up with new money. They haven’t paid that money for Medicaid even to the states as we speak,” he said, adding, “Relying on the federal government for your balancing a budget is really I think a fool’s bet.”
The law says that the federal government will pay 100% of the cost of new Medicaid enrollees until 2016, then gradually decreasing to 90% of the cost in 2020. Only repeal, the dear wish of Republicans, would stop that money from coming.
The Hill blog: Ballot Box: “Cantor: Democrats have no bench for 2016”
By Sarah Ferris
November 9, 2014, 12:00 p.m. EST
Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said on Sunday that the Democrats’ “lack of bench” for 2016 will likely dent their chances of keeping the White House.
“Look at our bench. I bet there’s a dozen people out there looking to run,” Cantor, who lost is seat in a primary shocker, said in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”
On the Democratic side, Cantor said he could only point to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as someone with the “passion and intensity” to run. Warren has so far declined a bid in 2016.
Cantor said an early frontrunner like Hillary Clinton has kept away other candidates, arguing that the Democratic party is also "out of ideas."
Cantor also cautioned that the 2014 midterms – which targeted President Obama – could hurt the chances for the former secretary of State.
“She's going to have very difficult time disconnecting from the Obama administration,” he said.
Politico: “Anti-Keystone groups aren't giving up”
By Elana Schor
November 9, 2014, 9:55 p.m. EST
[Subtitle:] The pipeline's opponents are regrouping after a rough midterm season.
The environmentalists who spent years fighting the Keystone XL pipeline to a standstill are back in a familiar position: against the ropes, Washington abuzz with speculation about their imminent defeat.
They don’t mind it. A new congressional clash over the oil pipeline stands to motivate greens’ base after a dismal midterm election that left them with an $85 million bill and several longtime allies out of office.
“Republicans want to pick this fight, but it’s also been one of our most successful issues,” said one official at a major environmental group who’s working on the anti-Keystone campaign. “We’re gearing up for this, and that’s what we’re good at, turning people out into the streets. We know how to fight this fight.”
The lack of any post-election resignation among climate activists closest to the pipeline fight is especially striking given how confident Republicans are that Tuesday’s elections handed them the votes they needed to force President Barack Obama’s hand on the $8 billion project. Supporters of the pipeline will have a filibuster-proof majority in the new Senate, and Republicans have said a bill to greenlight Keystone will be one of the first bills they pass in January.
On Thursday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest was noncommittal on how the president would respond to such a bill. When reporters pressed him about the high probability that Republicans can approve a Keystone bill next year, Earnest said, “OK, well, we’ll see.”
Behind those four words is a back story that greens remember well: Nearly three years ago, Republicans successfully added language to a must-pass tax bill that gave Obama 60 days to decide on Keystone. The president signed that bill — then rejected the pipeline, saying Congress’ deadline didn’t allow enough time for the State Department to finish its permit review. Keystone developer TransCanada had to reapply.
Obama could carve out a similar rationale if Republicans send him a bill forcing approval of the long-delayed Alberta-to-Texas pipeline. Greens took heart this week after both Obama and Earnest spoke about the integrity of the State Department’s review “process.”
“We’ve seen Republicans on the Hill talking a big game, saying they’re going to ram this through, but if you look at the way this issue has played out over the last several years, they might be too confident,” League of Conservation Voters Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Tiernan Sittenfeld said in an interview.
And even a White House wounded by Tuesday’s midterm rout is unlikely to accept Congress prodding Obama on Keystone before he’s ready, greens say, given his vow last year to consider climate change in ruling on the pipeline.
“As much as they lost the election, it doesn’t mean they like to get bullied and be perceived as weak, which is what will happen if they allow Congress to force them to approve the project,” 350.org communications director Jamie Henn said.
The green group official agreed, requesting anonymity to predict that should Republicans attempt “to force the president to make a decision, because of the frame in which he’s indicated he’ll make the decision, they risk losing the project.”
Keystone supporters see the State Department “process” — which has dragged off and on for six years — as little more than political cover for Obama to delay a decision that will bring him flak no matter which side he comes down on. But now, with 2016 in sight, other political considerations could offer an incentive for Obama to dispose of the controversy quickly by striking a deal with the GOP to approve Keystone, eliminating an issue that has already dogged prospective presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.
American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard, calling the pipeline “the first test” of whether Obama can credibly partner with the new Republican Congress, offered to help lower the volume of the Keystone battle.
“We’re all ears,” Gerard said, “prepared to meet any place, any time to work through a way if the president needs to have further dialogue on this.”
But Gerard slammed the administration’s stated rationale for pausing its Keystone review in April — the need to wait for the outcome of a Nebraska Supreme Court challenge to the validity of a state law regarding a portion of the pipeline’s route. That’s a “smokescreen” and a “sideshow” that is “totally unrelated to the president’s decision, and the White House knows that,” Gerard said.
Depending on how the Nebraska court rules, either late this year or early next year, the State Department has said it would resume its review of whether Keystone would meet the national interest. That analysis was nearing its final moments before last spring’s delay.
Further complicating the political calculus of any bipartisan Keystone deal, however, is the chance that even a fast-tracked resolution of that State Department review would take weeks to complete. The White House, then, could face a race to decide on the pipeline next year before congressional Republicans force another Keystone showdown.
Obama has offered few clues about his opinions on the project, aside from public and private remarks in which he cast doubt on both environmentalists’ warnings of doom for the planet and Republicans’ claims that Keystone would be a major job creator. Energy analysts have interpreted some of his words as hints he may be open to a deal with Canada, including his comments to The New York Times that the Canadians “could potentially be doing more” to counteract the greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta’s oil sands.
Republicans remain on the offensive over Keystone, making it a centerpiece of their early agenda planning for 2015. They chastised Obama for saying Wednesday that the pipeline is only “one small aspect of a broader trend” toward greater North American energy production.
“House Republicans agree that our energy strategy should be broader than just one pipeline, which is why we have passed more than a dozen other bills to support the American energy boom and unleash the benefits,” House Energy and Commerce Committee aides wrote in a memo Thursday. “But Keystone XL still remains an important part of any comprehensive energy plan so we will keep fighting for its approval.”
Environmentalists welcome that fight. They note that Democratic Rep. Gary Peters of Michigan, an unabashed Keystone critic, won his Senate race easily on Tuesday, and they dispute oil industry arguments that Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) lost his seat last week because of his failure to fully support Keystone.
“The mobilized constituency on Keystone is the opponents,” Henn said, “not the proponents.”
By David Gergen
November 9, 2014, 11:45 p.m. EST
In the short term, Democrats must do the obvious: Settle on a strategy with the president to break the gridlock, build a new farm team of outstanding candidates for the Senate and House and convince voters that a Hillary Clinton presidency can get big things done.
It's the long term that seems harder to figure out. For my money, Democrats must once again become the party of the future. For more than 80 years, their leaders have turned to government as the option of first resort in tackling national problems. That worked well for decades, but now it manifestly doesn't.
One federal institution after another has experienced egregious failures in recent years -- from Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Department of Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services to the Internal Revenue Service. Public faith in government has plunged, and voters in the midterms blamed Democrats -- especially Obama -- for incompetence.
We live in an era where a spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship is sweeping the country but most federal institutions seem oblivious. Democrats should look to mayors in cities like New York, Boston and Chicago who have been streamlining services and overhauling the way government works. In Boston, Mitchell Weiss, the former chief of staff to our beloved Mayor Thomas Menino, is introducing a course at the Harvard Business School on "public entrepreneurship." Democrats should sign up.
Hillary Clinton actually has a foundation upon which to build -- the initiative her husband and Al Gore introduced to "re-invent" government two decades ago. It didn't go as far as it should and Democrats since have abandoned the idea. Now is the time to revive it. They could start by organizing a blue ribbon panel right now -- to be ready for the 2016 elections -- that comes up with a fistful of ideas to bring innovation and entrepreneurship to Washington.
Calendar:
Sec. Clinton's upcoming appearances as reported online. Not an official schedule.
· November 14 – Little Rock, AR: Sec. Clinton attends picnic for 10thAnniversary of the Clinton Center (NYT)
· November 15 – Little Rock, AR: Sec. Clinton hosts No Ceilings event (NYT)
· November 21 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton presides over meeting of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (Bloomberg)
· November 21 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton is honored by the New York Historical Society (Bloomberg)
· December 1 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton keynotes a League of Conservation Voters dinner (Politico)
· December 4 – Boston, MA: Sec. Clinton speaks at the Massachusetts Conference for Women (MCFW)
· December 16 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton honored by Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights (Politico)