H4A News Clips 6.7.15
H4A News Clips
June 7, 2015
TODAY’S KEY STORIES..................................................................................... 3
Hillary Clinton Traces Friendly Path, Troubling Party // NYT // Jonathan Martin & Maggie Haberman – June 6, 2015........................................................................................................................................... 3
On the economy, is Clinton prepared to take her stand? // WaPo // Dan Balz – June 6, 2015.......... 7
HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE............................................................................. 9
In 2008, Clinton couldn’t buy Iowans’ love. So she bought them snow shovels. // WaPo // David A. Fahrenthold – June 6, 2015............................................................................................................................... 9
Hillary Clinton talks education, health care at New Haven fundraiser // New Haven Register // Mary O’Leary – June 6, 2015.............................................................................................................................. 15
America may not understand the Clintons — but Wall Street does // Business Insider // Linette Lopez – June 6, 2015.......................................................................................................................................... 17
Malloy makes it official: His choice is Hillary // CT Mirror // Mark Pazniokas - June 7, 2015.......... 19
GOP Has Reason To Fret As Clinton Leads Bush 47-40 In North Carolina // Politicus // Keith Brekhusmore – June 6, 2015...................................................................................................................................... 20
Experts Fear Messy Consequences if Hillary Clinton’s Automatic Voter Plan Is Enacted // The Blade // Fred Lucas – June 6, 2015.................................................................................................................. 21
Hillary has Roosevelt Island officials in the palm of her hand // NY Post // Bill Sanderson – June 7, 2015 22
OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE................................................. 23
O’MALLEY................................................................................................... 23
O'Malley makes a pitch to younger voters // The Baltimore Sun // John Fritze – June 6, 2015...... 23
SANDERS.................................................................................................... 27
Exclusive–Iowa Gop Chairman Reacts To Bernie Sanders’ And Martin O’Malley’s Reception In Iowa: ‘Socialism Is So Odd To Us’ // Breitbart News – June 6, 2015.......................................................................... 27
Bernie Sanders isn’t a “crackpot” — and the progressive agenda isn’t “left-wing” // Salon // Bill Moyers And Michael Winship – June 6, 2015................................................................................................. 27
OTHER........................................................................................................ 30
Obama, Clintons join mourners at Beau Biden's funeral // AP – June 6, 2015.............................. 30
Can You Be a Latino Politician If You Don't Speak Fluent Spanish? // NBC News // Suzanne Gamboa – June 6, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 32
GOP................................................................................................................. 34
BUSH........................................................................................................... 35
For Jeb Bush, the challenge remains making it about ‘Jeb,’ not ‘Bush’ // WaPo // Ed O’Keefe – June 6, 2015 35
A foreign policy checkmark for Jeb Bush // AP // Thomas Beaumont – June 6, 2015..................... 37
RUBIO......................................................................................................... 39
Rubio's real estate dealings often a drag on his finances // AP // Nicholas Riccardi – June 6, 2015 39
Marco Rubio Is Now Channeling JFK — Explicitly // The National Journal // Shane Goldmacher – June 6, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 43
Marco Rubio is what Republicans hope the future looks like // VOX // Dara Lind – June 6, 2015.. 44
Rubio seeks to rebut skeptics on the experience factor // The Hill // Rebecca Shabad – June 6, 2015 45
PAUL........................................................................................................... 45
Paul: Laws on sexuality could be more ‘neutral,’ but all should be protected // WaPo // Katie Zezima – June 6, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 45
Rand Paul on Transgender Rights: "Government Shouldn't Ask About Your Personal Life" // David Weigel – June 6, 2015...................................................................................................................................... 46
Paul: 'We have come to take our liberty back' // The Union Leader // Dan Tuohy – June 6, 2015... 47
Rand Paul demands White House release trade deal text immediately // The Hill // Rebecca Shabad – June 6, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 49
Ron Paul: 'I don't want to distract' from Rand // The Hill // Mark Hensch – June 6, 2015.............. 49
WALKER..................................................................................................... 50
Scott Walker Riding With Joni Ernst in Iowa as Rivals Give Chase // NYT // Trip Gabriel – June 6, 2015 51
Scott Walker’s Effort to Weaken College Tenure // NYT // The Editorial Board – June 6, 2015....... 53
Iowa's 'Roast and Ride': 5 takeaways // Politico // Katie Glueck – June 6, 2016............................ 54
Republican Walker is leader of 2016 election pack in Iowa // Reuters // John Whitesides – June 6, 2015 56
Scott Walker: Hillary Clinton "firmly out of touch" on voting rights // CBS News // Reena Flores – June 6, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 58
Scott Walker in Iowa: 'We did not inherit fame or fortune' // The Hill // Rebecca Shabad – June 6, 2015 59
CHRISTIE................................................................................................... 60
Christie slams Clinton on voter IDs: 'She doesn't know what she's talking about' // Washington Examiner // Sean Higgins - June 6, 2015............................................................................................................... 60
PERRY........................................................................................................ 60
Can Rick Perry close the deal? // WaPo // Stephanie McCrummen – June 5, 2015........................ 60
Perry touts experience as governor // The Hill // Mark Hensch – June 6, 2015............................. 67
Rick Perry announces Iowa presidential campaign team // The Des Moines Register // William Petroski – June 6, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 69
HUCKABEE................................................................................................. 70
Huckabee: I'm 'only person' to take on Clinton machine // The Hill // Mark Hensch – June 6, 2015 70
KASICH........................................................................................................ 71
Hillary Clinton draws ire of John Kasich on voting // The Columbus Dispatch // Darrel Rowland – June 6, 2015................................................................................................................................................. 71
CARSON....................................................................................................... 73
Ben Carson’s Nascent Campaign Faces Personnel Turmoil // NYT // Ashley Parker – June 6, 2015 73
Dick Morris: Ben Carson's Fame Helps GOP Run, But More Is Needed // Newsweek // Todd Beamon – June 5, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 73
Why is Ben Carson doing so well in the polls? // WaPo // Amber Phillips – June 5, 2015............... 75
Carson: Political experience not needed to be a good president // The Hill // Mark Hensch – June 6, 2015 76
JINDAL........................................................................................................ 77
As he nears a 2016 bid, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal hits political bottom // WaPo // Tyler Bridge – June 6, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 77
FIORINA...................................................................................................... 79
Fiorina: Government is 'giant, bloated, unaccountable' // The Des Moines Register // Grant Rodgers – June 6, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 79
OTHER........................................................................................................ 80
Presidential Hopefuls Descend on Iowa, Courting Favor With Joni Ernst // NYT // Ashley Parker – June 6, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 80
A First for Snapchat // NYT // Ashley Parker – June 6, 2015........................................................ 81
In Iowa, pork, patriotism and presidential politics // WaPo // Jenna Johnson & Dan Balz – June 6, 2015 84
Can conservatives find their footing in Hollywood in 2016? // CNN // Maeve Reston – June 5, 2015 87
GOP hopefuls blame Obama's China policy for data breach // The Hill // Cory Bennett – June 6, 2015 88
TOP NEWS...................................................................................................... 90
DOMESTIC.................................................................................................. 90
Marriage today: rich-poor gap, later vows, gays gain access // AP // David Crary – June 6, 2015... 90
GOP-led states trying bolster budgets by limiting government assistance programs // Fox News – June 6, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 95
INTERNATIONAL....................................................................................... 96
Behind Tough Talk on Russia, G-7 Leaders Face Tough Reality // AP // Julie Pace – June 6, 2015. 96
OPINIONS/EDITORIALS/BLOGS.................................................................... 98
Running Against Hillary // NYT // Ross Douthat – June 6, 2015.................................................. 98
Hillary the Tormentor // NYT // Frank Bruni – June 6, 2015...................................................... 100
Why Join the Military With a Reckless (Meaning Republican) Commander-In-Chief? // HuffPo // Doug Bandow – June 6, 2015............................................................................................................................ 103
Hillary Clinton Traces Friendly Path, Troubling Party // NYT // Jonathan Martin & Maggie Haberman – June 6, 2015
Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to be dispensing with the nationwide electoral strategy that won her husband two terms in the White House and brought white working-class voters and great stretches of what is now red-state America back to Democrats.
Instead, she is poised to retrace Barack Obama’s far narrower path to the presidency: a campaign focused more on mobilizing supporters in the Great Lakes states and in parts of the West and South than on persuading undecided voters.
Mrs. Clinton’s aides say it is the only way to win in an era of heightened polarization, when a declining pool of voters is truly up for grabs. Her liberal policy positions, they say, will fire up Democrats, a less difficult task than trying to win over independents in more hostile territory — even though a broader strategy could help lift the party with her.
This early in the campaign, however, forgoing a determined outreach effort to all 50 states, or even most of them, could mean missing out on the kind of spirited conversation that can be a unifying feature of a presidential election. And it could leave Mrs. Clinton, if she wins, with the same difficulties Mr. Obama has faced in governing with a Republican-controlled Congress.
Should Hillary Rodham Clinton win the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, she would most likely follow the path that Barack Obama took to victory in 2008 and 2012.
Already, it is causing consternation among Democrats in conservative states that could be given short shrift by her campaign or bypassed altogether.
When Bill Clinton reclaimed the presidency for Democrats in 1992, his road to the White House ran through Southern and Southern-border states filled with what were then a precious commodity: swing voters.
Twenty years later, Mr. Obama convincingly won a second term without competing in states like Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee or West Virginia that powered Mr. Clinton. And because of his strong appeal among liberals, Mr. Obama did so even while losing among independent voters.
As Mrs. Clinton intensifies her campaign for the Democratic nomination, it is clear from her left-leaning policy stances, her hiring and her focus on data-driven organizing that her strategy is modeled on Mr. Obama’s, not her husband’s.
If she won, it would suggest that the so-called Obama coalition of young, nonwhite and female voters is transferable to another Democrat. And it would validate the idea that energizing core supporters is more important in presidential contests than persuading those still undecided.
To the architects of the Obama strategy, Mrs. Clinton’s approach is not mere homage: It is unavoidable, given that there are few genuine independents now and that technology increasingly lets campaigns pinpoint their most likely voters.
“If you run a campaign trying to appeal to 60 to 70 percent of the electorate, you’re not going to run a very compelling campaign for the voters you need,” said David Plouffe, a top Obama strategist who has consulted informally with Mrs. Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton has said repeatedly that she does not want a lonely victory in 2016; she wants to elect Democrats down the ballot. A group of her senior aides met recently with officials at the Democratic House, Senate and governor campaign arms to brief them on the aides’ research and plans for her message and organization. And Senate Democrats are hopeful that she will lift their prospects, because there is considerable overlap in crucial states: The results in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin will almost certainly determine both who wins the White House and which party controls the Senate.
Bill Clinton, then the Democratic nominee for president, greeted supporters in 1992 in Carrollton, Ky. His road to the White House took him through many Southern and border states, where he won the support of swing voters.
House Democrats, while realistic about the difficulty of retaking control, are also counting on Mrs. Clinton to drive turnout for their candidates. There will be contested races in some presidential swing states, but Democratic strategists say Mrs. Clinton could also help the party unseat House Republicans in deep-blue states like New York and California.
So to Democrats in states where Mrs. Clinton is unlikely to compete, her relying on Mr. Obama’s map would be worrisome. It would not only further diminish beleaguered state parties, but also leave Mrs. Clinton with a narrower margin for error.
“Go ask Al Gore,” Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, said about the risk of writing off states such as his, where Democratic presidential candidates prospered until 2000. “He’d be president with five electoral votes from West Virginia. So it is big, and it can make a difference.”
Centrist Democrats also worry that focusing on liberal voters could lead to a continuation of the problems Mr. Obama has faced with a Congress elected by a vastly different subset of the nation.
“That’s not good for the country,” Mr. Manchin said, adding that he hoped Mrs. Clinton would “come to the middle” if she became president.
Of her campaign, he said, “If they get her too far over, it’s going to be more difficult to govern, it truly is.”
Other rural-state Democrats are sending not-so-subtle messages.
“I think that we always appreciate when people want to kind of talk to the whole country and listen to concerns, and I think farm country is critically important,” said Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota.
A larger risk of a tailored strategy is that by taking advantage of polarization, a candidate could lose some of the authority that comes from the civic exercise of appealing to much of the nation.
“The president is the one person who potentially could be the unifying figure in the country,” said H. W. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin. “And if the president or a presidential candidate basically writes off 40 states, then how in the world do the people in those 40 states feel like they have a stake in that person or that election?”
Mrs. Clinton’s strategists appear mostly unmoved.
“I think everybody understands how tough it’s going to be next year if we get through the primary,” Robby Mook, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, said. “So I’m not concerned about hand-wringing on the strategy.”
Aides acknowledged that Mrs. Clinton’s map would closely resemble Mr. Obama’s, with roughly the same eight or so key states as in the last two presidential elections, and with the possibility of competing in historically Republican states like Arizona where the demographics increasingly favor Democrats.
But given the Clintons’ deep ties to party leaders, including in many red states, and their instinct for building up party machinery, some Democrats wonder whether Mrs. Clinton will be able to resist old friends who press her to at least test the waters in Republican-leaning areas.
Gov. Steven L. Beshear of Kentucky said he had reminded Mr. Clinton this year that he carried Kentucky twice — and said Mrs. Clinton could win it, too.
Many in Mr. Obama’s orbit are watching closely to see which impulse wins out: an Obama-style faith in the data or a temptation to acquiesce to the familiar. So far, Mrs. Clinton is heeding her mostly new team of advisers.
“One of the hardest things to do in politics is dispense with old behavior,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama adviser. “That will be a challenge. But they’re setting themselves up to avoid that.”
Mrs. Clinton and her husband expressed concern last year when Democratic turnout fell precipitously. Recognizing that Democrats had to be galvanized to show up at the polls, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers used surveys and focus groups to assess the risks of running a strongly liberal campaign. They concluded that there were few.
So she is embracing the central lesson of the Obama school: that voters turn out when they believe that an election makes a difference and that their party’s standard-bearer is a champion on issues important to them.
By emphatically staking out liberal positions on gay rights, immigration, criminal justice, voting rights and pay equity for women, Mrs. Clinton is showing core Democratic constituencies that she intends to give them a reason to support her.
The stoke-the-base approach is a hallmark of Mrs. Clinton’s young campaign manager, Mr. Mook. He used similar tactics to lift Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia to victory in 2013, in a race both Clintons watched closely.
It is a starkly different style from that of Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign, when she was often concerned about being seen as too liberal to appeal to centrists.
This time, Mr. Pfeiffer said, “she hired people with a sense of where the electorate is now, not where it was in 1992.”
Mrs. Clinton’s strategic intentions are also evident in her focus on organizing. Mr. Mook noted twice in an interview that her campaign already had supporters in all 50 states mustering volunteers to register voters and ensure Mrs. Clinton is on the ballot. That is partly why the campaign postponed her first rally: so her team could have time to make it more of an organizing event.
That kickoff in New York next Saturday will be an important test of enthusiasm for Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy, and of her campaign’s ability to use big events to build the machinery that will identify and turn out voters.
What Mrs. Clinton says there will matter. But the organizing around the rally, and around the events her campaign is holding that night to build a volunteer network, will be just as consequential.
It is a far cry from her husband’s campaigns.
“The highest-premium voter in ’92 was a voter who would vote for one party some and for another party some,” said James Carville, Mr. Clinton’s chief strategist in 1992. “Now the highest-premium voter is somebody with a high probability to vote for you and low probability to turn out. That’s the golden list. And that’s a humongous change in basic strategic doctrine.”
On the economy, is Clinton prepared to take her stand? // WaPo // Dan Balz – June 6, 2015
In a week, Hillary Rodham Clinton will take the next step in her campaign for president with a big rally in New York. Her aides say that she will offer a fuller description of where she would take the country. On economic policies, will she stand with President Obama or apart from him and closer to her populist rivals on the left?
The answer depends in part on how Clinton diagnoses the state of the economy and on the effect of the president’s policies. Friday’s employment report showed an increase of 280,000 jobs in May, the best this year. As White House officials noted, the economy has added private sector jobs for 63 consecutive months. In the past two years, more than 5.6 million jobs have been added to the economy and 12.6 million since the consecutive-months streak started.
The employment report provided a helpful offset to the recent report that showed the economy had contracted during the first quarter of the year, because of severe winter weather and other factors.
That may be just one bad quarter. But for all the jobs added over the past five years, the economy continues to grow slowly, and many Americans continue to say that they haven’t seen much benefit. More than 7 in 10 Americans say they remain worried about the future direction of the economy, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Clinton has said that the economy is not working for everyone, that the deck is stacked against ordinary Americans and in favor of those with power, influence and financial wealth. In one form or another, she is saying that, after more than six years with a Democratic administration and despite the number of jobs added, the economy still isn’t working the way it should.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley have launched their candidacies with a populist critique of the economic status quo. As they, like Clinton, aim their toughest criticisms at Republican policies, their economic analyses also represent at least a partial rebuke of their own party’s policies.
When she announced her candidacy in April, Clinton highlighted the economic unease of many American families and said she wanted to be a champion for the middle class. What she has not done is offer an explanation of why Democratic policies have failed to adequately address the factors that contribute to middle-class angst.
Sanders and O’Malley have argued that the administration has not been vigorous enough in taking on entrenched economic power in behalf of workers. They also have said that officials have been negligent in not trying to bring some in the banking community to justice for their contributions to the collapse of the financial system in the fall of 2008. Both call for significant increases in government spending for infrastructure and other domestic initiatives.
Sanders and O’Malley also see the pending 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership as emblematic of the administration’s upside-down values when it comes to workers. They have come out against the agreement (which is still being negotiated) as being bad for American workers. But that’s not so with Clinton, who promoted a Pacific trade deal as secretary of state. Until there is or isn’t an agreement, she is reserving judgment, keeping a foot in both camps.
Rhetorically, Clinton often has sounded like Sanders and O’Malley and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is credited with pushing populist themes into the national debate. In policy terms, Clinton has been holding back, but that time may be coming to an end.
Will she embrace the president’s policies, arguing that they simply need a bit of tweaking and some more time to begin spreading benefits more widely? Will she claim that the Republicans have blocked the Democrats’ policies from being fully realized and provide evidence that she would have greater success than Obama in getting them implemented? Or will she acknowledge implicitly or explicitly that the policies haven’t worked by setting a different course?
Right now, the 2016 president election appears to be headed toward a stale rerun of the two-party economic debate of the last campaign. Republicans see Obama’s policies — spending, taxing and regulatory — as inhibiting growth. They see big government as an obstacle and would pare away at it size and reach. Democrats see Republicans as offering a return to policies that favor the wealthy and that provide little for working families, policies that would cut spending and create pain.
This debate played out in 2012 as a “who-do-you-trust” choice. Obama cast himself as the empathetic protector of the middle class and attacked Republican rival Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch business executive who cared only about profits for corporations and their owners and not for average people. Romney described Obama as someone who understood little about how the economy really worked.
Voters split over who would be better at handling the economy (49 percent for Romney, 48 percent for Obama), but on the question of who cares about “people like me,” 81 percent cited the president. Case closed.
But a “who-do-you-trust” frame isn’t sufficient. As the recovery has failed to produce a more equitable distribution of benefits, and as overall growth rates remain well below what they were a generation ago (through both Republican and Democratic administrations), it’s clear that something more is needed in the coming election. The prospect of another predictable economic debate between the two parties is hardly what the country needs.
Republicans have their own questions to answer about how they would change their policies. It is popular now for Republican candidates to talk about the lack of economic mobility and the gap between Wall Street and Main Street. They are trying to avoid the trap Romney fell into in the last election. But voters have a right to know whether they have fresh thinking behind their rhetoric. So far there’s been only a little of that.
Among Democrats, party progressives are clamoring for something more than more of the same. But 21/2 years after Obama defeated Romney, some Democrats plainly think that empathy alone will not solve the problems of a struggling middle class. The possibility of an engaged Democratic-nomination contest provides the vehicle for a debate that would examine what has and hasn’t worked.
Sanders, O’Malley and the others who are joining the race might not be equipped politically to deny Clinton the nomination. Still, their presence makes it more likely that Democrats will get the debate that many say they would like to see.
No one, including Clinton, argues for a return to the policies of her husband’s presidency, though the economy was strong then. But neither is she likely to want to run as a third term of the Obama presidency. If Clinton thinks the president’s economic policies have been and are working, she could say so directly. If she thinks they have been inadequate regarding the size and complexity of the economic ills that she describes, she can say that. She now has an open forum in which to engage those questions.
HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE
In 2008, Clinton couldn’t buy Iowans’ love. So she bought them snow shovels. // WaPo // David A. Fahrenthold – June 6, 2015
In Phyllis Peters’s garage, there is a snow shovel. A nice one: green, shiny, with an ergonomic steel handle. It came from Hillary Rodham Clinton.
And it plays a part in a modern-day political legend, about some of the strangest money a candidate has ever spent.
Eight years ago, Peters was a volunteer for Clinton’s first presidential run. She had been an admirer of Clinton since her time as first lady. But just before Clinton lost the Iowa caucuses, her staffers did something odd: They bought shovels for Peters and the hundreds of other volunteers.
“If you’re in Iowa, you have a snow shovel” already, Peters said. But she accepted. To be nice. This is Iowa. “We’re not rude people,” Peters said.
Today, the story of Clinton’s snow shovels is being told again in Iowa, as supporters worry that her second campaign could repeat the mistakes of the first. For both those who gave out the shovels and those who received them, they came to symbolize a candidate who never quite got their home state.
Clinton doesn’t face near the same challenge in Iowa in 2016. But the state still matters as a test of basic politics, a gauge of whether she has gotten any better at connecting with the people she wants to vote for her.
Last time around, Clinton tried to win over Iowans with bloodless logic, touting her résumé and her grinding work ethic. When that fell short, Clinton’s well-funded campaign — unable to buy her love — started buying everything else.
An expensive chartered “Hill-a-copter.” A $95,000 order of deli sandwiches. And 600-odd new snow shovels, some of which still sit, unused, in basements and garages across Iowa.
The idea behind them seemed to be that Clinton’s own voters might be so old, or so un-enthused, that they wouldn’t leave the house if it snowed. And that Clinton’s own Iowa volunteers — if sent on a voter-rescue mission — might not be prepared for . . . winter. In Iowa.
“It’s sort of like, ‘Yeah, I’ll take a snow shovel,’ ” said Marisue Hartung, one of Peters’s fellow Clinton volunteers in Ames. “But why?”
The story of the snow shovels starts way back in the fall of 2007. At that time, Clinton — a second-term senator from New York — was crushing Barack Obama in national polls,up 20 points. In Iowa, she was up by a handful.
But already, Clinton staffers were discovering a problem here:
Their voters.
There were large numbers of elderly people. Shift workers. Single mothers. All people who might be too tired, or too busy, to come out and vote the way Iowans vote: with their feet, in a gym, in a long caucus night of speechifying and waiting around.
“We left, and we all wanted to go drink. It was like, ‘I don’t know what a caucus is,’ ” said one Clinton staffer from the 2008 campaign. “We realized that, like, we were going to lose because we weren’t going to be able to get out all of these Hillary supporters” to stay as long as it took to be counted.
So Clinton needed more people. New people. She was pouring resources into Iowa. But so was Obama, and his soaring message of hope and change was spreading among the kind of people who really would come to a caucus and stay.
To Clinton, by contrast, politics was not about soaring. It was about grinding — a constant, incremental struggle — and she was the candidate who could succeed at it. That might have been true. But it was hardly the stuff of joy.
“We all want change,” she would say. “Some people believe you bring it about by hoping for it. I believe you bring about change by working really, really hard for it.”
The other problem was Clinton’s distance — both emotional and real. Even when she was in Iowa, it felt as if she wasn’t.
Obama “would get on a bus, and he would go from town to town to town, and people would ride on the bus with him. People would get to know him,” said Chris Gowen, who was part of Clinton’s advance team. “Whereas we would fly into Des Moines . . . then dart back to the airport, and fly to northern Iowa, then dart back to the airport.”
“We were spending all this money,” he said. “And you’d never really connect with people.”
As the Jan. 3 caucuses approached, Iowa seemed to be slipping away from Clinton. But her campaign still had money coming in — on some days, more than $1 million.
And money is for spending. With Iowa still theoretically in play, there would be no prizes for saving it.
“The reality is, the closer you get to an election day, the harder it is to spend money in a smart way,” said Karen Hicks, a senior adviser to Clinton’s 2008 campaign. It was getting too late to buy ad time on television, or print up new fliers, or train new staff, before the caucuses. “It gets harder to spend in a way that you can tie to an incremental vote or caucus victory.”
At a time like that, Hicks said, “you probably should stop spending.”
The campaign didn’t.
It spent big on the “Hill-a-copter,” a Bell 222 with leather seats that the campaign chartered, trying to hit 16 Iowa counties in five days. News reports put the cost at thousands per day.
Even when it worked, this was not a perfect idea. Clinton — seeking to project a common touch — would meet voters by descending from the sky.
An even more last-minute purchase was the $95,384 order of deli sandwiches from the Hy-Vee grocery chain. The Iowa tradition was to bring munchies, not meals. But the Clinton people were worried about their young mothers and shift workers. Would they skip the caucuses if it meant waiting hours to eat?
And then: the shovels.
“I remember when they were ordered. There was an actual conversation about is there anything else, you know. ‘We are sure that we can’t purchase any more phone time?’ ‘Are we sure that we can’t purchase any more flights of mail?’ ” said the former Clinton campaign staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relations with the current campaign.
The shovels were bought, and they were distributed to offices and precinct captains by campaign staff. It’s not clear, from campaign-finance records, what they cost — but it seems certain to have been at least $10,000.
In hindsight, there is debate about why snow shovels appeared to be a better choice than nothing.
Some people saw them as a metaphor: a physical reminder that Clinton’s volunteers were needed to get their people out, come hell or high water — or snow.
“I think the same thing could have been accomplished by giving out a key chain with a snow shovel on it that costs 30 cents,” said the former Clinton staffer.
Hicks said this was a preemptive maneuver, grabbing a valuable resource before the enemy did. And if voters didn’t stay home, there was another worry: caucus sites. Snowy walks. Voters might not make it to the door.
Maybe. But, again, if you live in Iowa, you probably have a shovel.
Neither Obama nor Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), the other two top contenders, seem to have bought snow shovels. Did they laugh when Clinton did? “I’m not going to answer that on the record,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, Edwards’s Iowa state director.
To the Iowans who got them, they did not make much sense. Either as a metaphor or as a shovel.
“All down the hallway in the office are these brand-new snow shovels,” said Justin Sharp, then a University of Iowa student volunteer. He asked. Somebody explained. Sharp thought it was the same kind of thinking that had led Clinton’s campaign to tell him to knock on doors in Iowa City on Saturdays, during Iowa Hawkeyes football games.
“If they’re going to go to the caucus, they’re going to go,” Sharp remembered thinking. “And if they’re not, they’re not going to go — even if you shovel them.”
In West Des Moines, Clinton volunteer Tom Laughead, who admired the candidate for her work on health-care reform, actually tried to put his gift to use. A few days before the caucuses, he cleared old snow off a walkway at one woman’s house.
Just to show that he, and Clinton, were serious.
“She said, ‘Oh, well, thank you very much,’ and then she just kind of like, uhhh,” Laughead said, miming a woman trying to avoid eye contact with a Clinton volunteer.
“I just hope to see you there,” Laughead remembered saying.
And?
“I don’t remember seeing her there.”
When caucus night came at last, Clinton’s volunteers saw what Clinton’s staff had feared. Their well-funded campaign — so flush it could give shovels to people who had shovels — was going to lose.
“It was like, ‘This half of the room is where the Obama delegates are going to be, and everybody else go in this half of the room,’ ” said Sharp, the University of Iowa volunteer. In his college town, Clinton’s supporters were in the “everybody else” part, lumped in with the other losers. “They never told us that this could happen. We were just expecting that the support was going to be there.”
The sandwiches didn’t seem to help much. “The Obama people, and the Edwards people, I think they ate as many as the few Hillary people did,” Sharp said.
And the shovels didn’t help much, either. On caucus day, it did not snow anywhere in Iowa.
“The Obama people had these shirts. And everyone loved these T-shirts, and people were running around like madmen to get these shirts,” said Gowen, the advance man. In the caucus environment, where people can watch each other vote, the red T-shirts signaled to undecided voters that Obama’s strength was strong and catching. “Had we gone with T-shirts over shovels,” Gowen said, “we might have had a different president right now.”
Okay maybe that’s a little strong.
“Had we gone with T-shirts, I think we would at least have come in second,” Gowen said.
Instead, Clinton came in third, behind Edwards.
Now, Clinton is back in Iowa. Some supporters here say she doesn’t need to change her logical, résumé-based appeal. The problem in 2008 was Obama and the wellspring of frustration with the Bush administration that he tapped.
Both are out of the picture now.
“It’s sort of an urban myth that the Clinton campaign didn’t do well in Iowa in 2008. The truth is that she got more votes than anybody in the history of the Iowa caucuses,” said Jerry Crawford, her Midwestern co-chair in 2008 and still a close adviser. “It just wasn’t as much as the other two.”
But many in Iowa, and on Clinton’s campaign staff, say they are determined to do some things differently.
For her first Iowa event, in April, she arrived in her “Scooby” van, not in a Hill-a-copter. And she has held a series of small events — house parties and roundtables — to emphasize her desire to start small and listen first.
“Hillary made it very clear to us that she wanted to have a conversation with Iowans and hear their thoughts, concerns and ideas for the future,” Matt Paul, Clinton’s Iowa state director, said in an e-mail interview. “The caucus is about relationships, and to build those, you’ve got to listen — and that’s exactly what she’s been doing.”
But elements of the old approach remain.
For one thing, Clinton’s small events have still been stiffly staged, with attendees often pre-screened by staff or by the Secret Service. “We passed the deadline for a security clearance, so we didn’t get to go,” said Nancy Sweetman, a green-shovel owner who saw too late an invitation to a “house party” with Clinton in Mason City. “But you know, living in Iowa, we’ll see her again.”
Chuck and Nancy Sweetman of Mason City were staunch supporters of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. They have two souvenir snow shovels. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Clinton still focuses on her résumé and work ethic, casting herself as “a champion” for the middle class. That means her appeal can still be tied to the idea that politics is a grind.
“She’s got the strength to take the criticism right now from the press on avoiding questions from the press,” said Dean Genth, a Clinton supporter who hosted the Mason City house party.
“She’s going to have to connect at a very different level if she wants to be president,” said Janelle Rettig, a Clinton precinct captain in 2008 who is now a county supervisor in Johnson County. “It’s very hard for me to go against a woman who’s smart, who’s qualified and who’s experienced. But I also need somebody who I’m passionate about. And that’s not there, yet.”
A few weeks ago, one of Clinton’s new campaign staffers came to Ames to ask advice from three locals who had seen the last campaign up close. All three owned green snow shovels. Whatever else happened, they wanted Clinton to know that they didn’t need more.
“The snow shovels aren’t necessary,” Hartung said. Iowans come to caucus, whether it snows or not. “We were going to get there anyway.”
Hartung recalled the staffer’s response: “She sort of said, ‘You know, I’ve heard other comments about this. . . . ’ ”
Hillary Clinton talks education, health care at New Haven fundraiser // New Haven Register // Mary O’Leary – June 6, 2015
Hillary Clinton was late for her fundraiser in New Haven, stuck with all those other Connecticut drivers who regularly curse the congestion on Interstate 95 through Fairfield County.
It was her second fundraiser of the day, having first picked up contributions at the Greenwich home of philanthropist Malcolm Weiner and his wife, Carolyn Weiner.
The ask at both the Greenwich event and the one in New Haven at the home of Yale Law School professors Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis was the same: $2,700 per person.
To be a co-host to the invitation-only event and receive membership in her Hillstarters Program, individual supporters were given the task of raising $27,000, according to the Greenwich Times. Host of these private fundraisers are asked to raise $50,000, which then puts them in the Clinton’s Hillraisers Program.
Clinton is among three Democrats who have announced their intention to run for president in 2016, a campaign that has already attracted nearly a dozen Republicans for their primary fight.
One of those rivals, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., was in Stamford Thursday night, the honored guest at the GOP’s Prescott Bush Awards Dinner. He picked up some $50,000 at a fundraiser prior to the dinner, according to the Greenwich Times.
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn, U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4, and U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., were among the estimated 100 people at the Greenwich event, as was former Connecticut Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz.
Blumenthal, who attended the Yale Law School at the same time as Clinton and former President Bill Clinton, was at both events.
Bysiewicz, who said she was helping Clinton with grassroots organizing and fundraising, did the same thing. She also brought her 93-year-old aunt, Mary Stewart, a World War II Coast Guard vet. “She was hoping to meet her,” Bysiewicz said.
Many in attendance from New Haven were associated with the Yale Law School, with former Dean Harold Koh acting as one of the organizers.
Koh served as the legal adviser to the State Department during President Barack Obama’s first term, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of the state.
The head count in New Haven was also around 100, according to Charles Pillsbury, a neighbor of the hosts, who attended with his wife, the Rev. Allie Perry.
Connecticut Democratic Party Chairman Nick Balletto showed up on time for the New Haven event in the East Rock neighborhood, where the guests started arriving just before 4:30 p.m. Mayor Toni Harp was also a guest.
“I think her values and the things she stood for over a lifetime and in public life are things that would be good for our country,” Harp said.
Everyone was first checked off on an invitation list and then had to pass through security set up on the front lawn at the home on St. Ronan Street.
The guests mingled inside and on a rear porch as they waited for Clinton, who arrived around 6:15 p.m. by a back entrance, avoiding the small press contingent assembled across the street.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and the state party are expected to endorse Clinton for president this weekend in Hartford.
Pillsbury said he feels Clinton “is our best hope.”
He said she spoke about the importance of early childhood education and said the tension between the public schools and the charter schools is a false dichotomy.
The former secretary of the state said the public and charter schools should be working together. She offered the example of schools in Houston, where the successful elements of the charters have been incorporated into the public school system, Pillsbury said.
He said Clinton, who first conducted a listening tour before declaring her candidacy, told the donors that she learned two things on that tour, that she might not have stressed beforehand.
The candidate said families told her how drug addiction was ruining the lives of their children, with heroin the problem in New Hampshire and meth the scourge in Iowa.
The other issue was the lack of mental health practitioners. While there is more coverage under the Affordable Care Act, there are not enough professionals to serve the population, she told them.
Clinton, according to Pillsbury, talked of supporting a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United court ruling. The court found that corporations and unions can pay for political ads made independently of candidate campaigns. That finding and others have opened up a flood of campaign spending, where often the names of donors are hidden.
Rubio on Thursday took a shot at the fundraising efforts of the Clintons, according to press reports.
“I don’t have a family foundation that raised over $2 billion from Wall Street and foreign nations,” Rubio said at the dinner.
On environmental issues, Clinton said in the move away from coal, something will have to be done to replace those jobs now performed by miners.
Pillsbury said the candidate recalled her trip to Indonesia when she was secretary of state and a talk show host had asked how she could work for Obama who had said such harsh things about her in the campaign.
She said she did it because she loved her country. Clinton said she realized that often people’s loyalties are to regions or tribes. The concept of patriotism expressed in the United States was foreign to them, Pillsbury recalled.
After having sat in traffic in Connecticut, Clinton, as she left the St. Ronan Street home, was shouted a question as to whether she would advocate for funds for the state to fix its commuter nightmare.
“Absolutely. I believe in infrastructure,” she said before getting back into the black Explorer with Secret Service agents.
America may not understand the Clintons — but Wall Street does // Business Insider // Linette Lopez – June 6, 2015
Here are some things the Clintons do that most of America doesn't understand:
Using a separate email server at the State Department.
Borrowing your friend's private plane.
Owning shell companies.
Answering questions about your family foundation.
You know who does understand all that?
Wall Street does.
That's why the recent so-called scandals Hillary Clinton is facing in her presidential campaign won't necessarily impact the money she collects from The Street.
"The Clintons are not dirty," one young portfolio manager told Business Insider this week.
"They make appearances, get money, put it in the fund, build schools. It's not going into their personal bank accounts. It's the way the world works; I find nothing wrong with it."
Lots of people on Wall Street are familiar with the hoops they and their companies must jump through to give to the Clinton Foundation. All donations must meet AML and AB+C requirements.
(That's anti-money laundering and anti-bribery and corruption for all us civilians.)
For people who are used to giving to charitable organizations, this whole rigmarole is rather familiar.
Big donors on Wall Street are also people who may have borrowed a friend's private plane at one point — or known someone who knows someone who has.
One thing that Clinton could do to upset Wall Street — that in fact any candidate can do to upset the industry — is talk about its money (or its taxes, or its lawsuits). That's a no-no.
Clinton has touched on the no-no.
“There’s something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than nurses or the truckers that I saw on I-80 as I was driving here over the last two days,” Hillary Clinton said while on the road in America's heartland last month. “Something is wrong when CEOs earn more than 300 times than what the typical American worker earns and when hedge fund managers pay a lower tax rate than truck drivers or nurses,” she added.
And that was more than enough. Masters of the Universe, you see, are very sensitive.
Lee Cooperman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Goldman Sachs vet went off on these in an interview with CNN this week.
"I don't need anybody crapping all over what I do for a living," Cooperman, 72, told CNN Money's Cristina Alesci.
He added that Clinton "hangs out with these people in Martha's Vineyard and in the Hamptons, and the very first thing she does is criticize hedge funds."
Cooperman felt that Clinton's comments were "bogus."
"This notion of crapping all over hedge funds is so bogus it makes me nauseous. The only thing that makes me more nauseous is those hedge funds that support her," he said.
If you think that this may be a bit of an over-the-top reaction from people who have drivers, hire private security, and live in gated communities, that's your opinion. Obama went through this. Every politician goes through this. After Occupy Wall Street it only got worse, and it's not going to change.
All of this is means that Clinton's campaign probably won't go all in on populism by any means.
However, given that America is really focused on economic inequality right now, it also means you probably won't see Clinton throwing any big parties at Goldman Sachs (where employees are actually pretty split down the middle in terms of party affiliation).
When she courts Wall Street it will be done quietly. At private dinners sponsored by bundlers who will assure the oh-so-sensitive Masters of the Universe in attendance that her populism is just popular, and that at the end of day Clinton understands their way of life.
That's all they really want anyway — to be understood.
Malloy makes it official: His choice is Hillary // CT Mirror // Mark Pazniokas - June 7, 2015
Malloy embracing Bill Clinton at a rally in 2014. He is returning the favor, endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.
It’s not a recent decision, nor is it a surprise. But the time has come to go public: With the legislative session over, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president Sunday.
"I've been an admirer of hers for many years, going back to when she was first lady. I want to see her get elected president. I also think she is the best candidate the Democrats could run. I think she is one of the most experienced candidates that any party has run," Malloy said.
Clinton was elected U.S. senator from New York in 2000 as her husband's presidency was winding down. After losing the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, she joined the administration of Barack Obama as secretary of state.
“I’ve known the Clintons for a long time. I think she is the best prepared candidate, and I’m really excited about helping her get elected president,” Malloy said.
Malloy’s national profile will grow next year as becomes chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, a role likely to win him a slot as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention.
One of his friends and DGA predecessors, former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, announced his candidacy last week, but Clinton already has wrapped up key endorsements, even in O’Malley’s home state. O'Malley should not be surprised by Sunday's news, Malloy said.
“The governor and I had discussion about this in the past, where I had made it clear if Hillary was a candidate I would support her,” Malloy said. “And I have had the opportunity more recently to indicate I would be supporting Hillary. But I don’t think there was an expectation I would be supporting him over Hillary.”
Malloy was to announce his endorsement at an event promoting the kickoff of the Democratic Party’s municipal election season.
“I think it’s an opportunity to talk about two races at once, the municipal races which are coming in November, followed by the first primaries and caucuses that will play out,” he said. “They automatically overlap, so why not admit that and do the two things together?”
He also talked about the endorsement in a taped segment to air Sunday morning on WFSB, Channel 3’s “Face the State.”
In 2008, when Malloy was mayor of Stamford, Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the Connecticut primary. Malloy’s two successful runs for governor in 2010 and 2014 benefitted from get-out-the-vote rallies headlined by Obama and Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton is the Democrat who ended the GOP’s run of carrying Connecticut in six consecutive presidential years. Beginning with his win in 1992, Connecticut has gone blue in six straight presidential elections.
GOP Has Reason To Fret As Clinton Leads Bush 47-40 In North Carolina // Politicus // Keith Brekhusmore – June 6, 2015
A Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey released on June 4th, found Democrat Hillary Clinton enjoying a modest 47-40 lead over Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush in North Carolina. The Tarheel State is a crucial battleground state that Republicans cannot afford to lose. Barack Obama won North Carolina in 2008, but lost the state to Mitt Romney in 2012.
The poll also found Clinton leading or tied with eight other GOP candidates. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul fared best of the Republican candidates. Walker managed a 45-45 tie with Clinton, and Rand Paul tied her 44-44. Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio all trailed Clinton by margins ranging from one to seven percentage points.
Clinton polled especially strong with women voters and African-Americans in North Carolina. Although Jeb Bush held a slight 45-41 advantage with male voters, Clinton held a dominant 51-37 lead with women voters. Clinton also had a crushing advantage with black voters. The poll found Clinton garnering 86 percent support from African-American voters compared to a pitiful 3 percent who backed Jeb Bush.
While the election is still 16 months away, Hillary Clinton’s strong numbers in North Carolina bode well for Democratic prospects in 2016. By amassing overwhelming support from black voters and a decisive edge with women voters, Hillary Clinton is well positioned to lock down North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes.
The poll also points to Jeb Bush’s weakness if he becomes the Republican nominee. His 7-point deficit to Clinton in North Carolina matched fringe candidate Ted Cruz’s poor numbers in the state. Rather than being one of the strongest GOP candidates, Jeb Bush appears to be one of the weakest candidates in the Republican field.
Republicans have reason to fret about the poll numbers in the Tarheel State, because without carrying North Carolina the GOP has no path to victory in the 2016 presidential election. If the current polling numbers continue to hold in North Carolina, Hillary Clinton would not only carry the Tarheel State but the nation as well, becoming the 45th U.S. President.
Experts Fear Messy Consequences if Hillary Clinton’s Automatic Voter Plan Is Enacted // The Blade // Fred Lucas – June 6, 2015
Hillary Clinton’s call for national automatic voter registration, if enacted, could create messy consequences for ballot integrity, according to some election law experts.
“Automatic registration, I’m afraid, would result in increasing the number of ineligible registrations as well as duplicate registrations,” Hans Von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Elections Commission and now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told TheBlaze.
“Many people are on government databases in more than one state,” he said. “We already have a problem in the current system with people being registered to vote in more than one state.”
During a speech Thursday in Houston, Clinton called for “universal automatic voter registration” and declared that “every citizen in every state in the union should be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 – unless they choose to opt out.”
In May, Oregon became the only state to enact automatic voter registration, placing every adult with a driver’s license on a list to get a ballot in the mail several weeks before Election Day. The new law is expected to add another 300,000 registered voters, The Atlantic reported. Oregon was the first state to move to all mail-in balloting in 1998.
“In light of legislative efforts around the country to make voting more difficult, we are pleased that Oregon’s leadership to ensure voting access for all eligible voters is receiving national attention as a model for other states and the nation,” Oregon Secretary of State Jeanne P. Atkins told TheBlaze in a statement.
During her speech, Clinton criticized voter ID laws and claimed concerns about voter fraud was “fear mongering.”
But such a law could pose challenges for frontline election workers.
“How would it be automatic? Just show up to vote with a driver’s license or proof you are 18?” Susan Gill, a board of directors member of the National Association of Election Officials, asked.
The NAEO represents state and local election officials involved in voter registration and election supervision. “What’s the mechanism to make it workable?” she also wondered.
Gill, also the supervisor of elections of Citrus County, Florida, asked how Oregon will handle eligible voters without driver’s licenses. Contrary to making voting more difficult, Gill contended that basic voter integrity laws ensure that votes count.
“The right to vote is so sacred we need reasonable safeguards against fraud. Verification and ID are important parts of keeping the vote safe,” Gill told TheBlaze. “But it is not like the 1960s or earlier. Because of computers we are now far less likely to have large-scale voter fraud. We are most likely to see it today in absentee voting.”
Clinton’s proposal is also similar to a measure enacted in Canada, which adopted an automatic voter registration law in 1997 — but without the desired effect.
A higher percentage of Canadians vote than Americans, but the nation to the north has still seen a steady decline in voter participation since the 1970s that continued after the 1997 law, Von Spakovsky said.
He along with journalist John Fund coauthored the 2012 book, “Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.”
“Low turnout has nothing to do with voter registration rules. It is easy to register to vote,” Von Spakovsky noted. “Canada went to automatic voting in 1997 and it hasn’t done a thing to increase turnout.”
Hillary has Roosevelt Island officials in the palm of her hand // NY Post // Bill Sanderson – June 7, 2015
Whatever Hillary wants, Hillary gets from the poobahs who oversee Roosevelt Island’s memorial to Franklin Roosevelt.
Hillary Clinton will officially launch her campaign next Saturday with a big event at the state-owned Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island.
The rally displaced an “Imagination Playground” event for kids, which had to be rescheduled for October.
The park is overseen by a conservancy with a board of directors packed with prominent Democrats.
The conservancy’s president, Sally Minard, is a longtime Clinton fan and fund-raiser. She was a “coordinator” on Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign and gave $6,900 to her 2008 presidential campaign, federal records show.
Minard was also a big “bundler” of donations to President Obama’s presidential campaigns, gathering a total of $511,098 from various donors, the campaign-finance monitoring Web site OpenSecrets.org reports.
So far, public records don’t show any donations by Minard to Clinton’s 2016 campaign. The Upper East Side resident took no salary from the conservancy in 2013, records show.
The conservancy board’s chairwoman, Barbara Shattuck Kohn, is also a longtime Clinton supporter. She also contributed $6,900 to Clinton’s 2008 campaign, records show.
Other Democrats on the conservancy’s board include former City Council member Jessica Lappin, former Ambassador William vanden Heuvel and his daughter, Katherine vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, a liberal magazine.
Conservancy officials could not be reached Saturday.
OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE
O'Malley makes a pitch to younger voters // The Baltimore Sun // John Fritze – June 6, 2015
Martin O'Malley came to this New England college town bearing pizza, and a message he hopes will click with the young voters who could be critical for his long-shot bid for president.
"One thing I've been struck by is a big generational shift underway in our country," O'Malley told about 100 students gathered May 31 in a small library meeting room at Dartmouth College last week. "I've rarely met someone under 40 who denies climate change is real. I rarely meet anyone under 40 who wants to scapegoat immigrants."
The line brought murmurs of agreement from the crowd of young Democrats.
As the former two-term Maryland governor sets out on an ambitious campaign for president, he is courting the type of young voters who fueled Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012. He relies on words like "this generation" and "new leadership" to make a not-so-subtle point about his opponents, who are not only older but have spent more time in Washington.
But the 52-year-old guitar-slinging politician faces stiff competition for the under-30 set. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont are also working to lock down the potentially powerful constituency.
Whoever inspires them will have an important advantage in the Democratic primaries next year, and the general election in November. In 2014 there were 46 million eligible voters under 30, compared with 39 million seniors, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
One display of their ability to influence an election: If Republican Mitt Romney had managed to just split the youth vote with Obama in 2012, he would have won Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio — and the presidency.
Obama carried at least 60 percent of the young voters in each of those states.
So it was little surprise that O'Malley planted himself in the Dartmouth library a day after announcing his campaign on Federal Hill in Baltimore. He spoke about college affordability, climate change and the job market that some of the students listening are anxiously preparing to enter.
"I'm for moving us to a point as a country where we have debt-free college," O'Malley told the group. "You can finance a home at less than you can finance your college education. And sadly, if you can't finance your college education you're never going to be able to buy a home."
Plenty of O'Malley's lines drew applause, and several students said they would follow his campaign more closely.
Connie Lee, an 18-year-old freshman from Houston, said she was "vaguely" aware of O'Malley before the event.
"It's interesting that he's taking the direction of appealing to the younger audience in contrast with Hillary Clinton," she said. "He addressed a lot of the social issues this younger generation cares about. I think it was effective that he highlighted that."
Charlotte Blatt, also 18 and a freshman, is vice president of the Dartmouth College Democrats.
"As a college student, it's important to hear politicians speaking about the issue of college loans and student debt," she said. "It's really crippling."
Because students arrive on campus from across the country, many do not necessarily vote in the state where they study. But young voters are often an important part of a campaign's volunteer base.
Turnout among young voters can be fickle, and it is frequently lower than other age groups' rates.
O'Malley launched his long-expected bid for the Democratic nomination in Baltimore on May 30. Polls show him in the single digits in Iowa, New Hampshire and nationally — but he has managed to capture headlines when he takes on Clinton. Most recently, that criticism has manifested itself as an attack on Wall Street, and its ties to the Clinton campaign.
But as far back as last summer O'Malley was using words like "fundamentally newer" and "new way of leadership" to describe his approach.
On the campaign trail, those phrases have become sharper, and they have taken on added meaning in the context of a race that includes Clinton, a former first lady, senator and secretary of state who has spent decades in Washington.
O'Malley has never directly made an issue of Clinton's age — at 67, she is 15 years his senior — and he has demurred when asked about it directly. Yet he has sought to project an image of youth by appearing more often with his Celtic rock band and by talking about the data-focused management he employed as Baltimore's mayor and Maryland's governor.
Clinton, by contrast, often touts her status as a new grandmother — as in Houston last week, when she welcomed Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee to "the grandmothers' club."
"As a member of now a little over eight months," she said, "it is the best club you will ever be a member of."
But Clinton also used the words "young people" three times.
"Now what possible reason could there be to end preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds and eliminate voter outreach in high schools?" Clinton asked. "We should be doing everything we can to get our young people more engaged in democracy, not less."
Sanders is 73.
O'Malley has "got to say something," said Charlie Cook, editor and publisher of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "But right now it doesn't matter what Martin O'Malley is saying. The ball's in Hillary Clinton's court. She's either resonating or she's not."
Early polling indicates that she is.
Clinton is viewed favorably by more 18- to 34-year-olds than she is by the electorate as a whole. Among that group, 55 percent have a favorable impression of her, according to a CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday. Among those over 50, 42 percent have a favorable impression of Clinton.
That's a remarkable shift from the results of the 2008 Democratic primaries. Obama received 57 percent of young voters in the first 16 primaries that year, compared to Clinton's 41 percent, according to exit polls analyzed by the Pew Research Center.
He won the youth vote in every one of the early primary states except California, Arkansas and Massachusetts.
A CNN/ORC poll from last month showed that just more than half of Americans believe Clinton "represents the future." For O'Malley, a 42 percent plurality said he "represents the past."
A quarter of respondents in the poll had no opinion of the former governor.
But there may be a sliver of good news for O'Malley in the polling from Maryland, where he is known best. Though his approval slipped during the 2014 gubernatorial election, he does slightly better among young voters in the state — though the difference is within the margin of error.
A Goucher Poll from October found than 18- to 34-year-olds in Maryland had a slightly better impression of O'Malley than older age groups did.
"I think he will try to use his youthfulness as a way to attract those voters," said Mileah Kromer, director of the Sarah T. Hughes Field Politics Center at Goucher. "While in Maryland we have seen this shtick before and it's old news to us, it's not old news to the rest of the United States."
Alex Doser, president of the Iowa State University College Democrats, heard O'Malley speak in April. If O'Malley becomes better known, Doser said, his message could appeal to young voters.
"I see a lot in O'Malley's rhetoric that can connect to young people but he hasn't really gotten his name out there yet," he said. "He hasn't made the kind of dent on the Internet that Sanders has and he's not featured in the media like Clinton has been.
"People are losing faith in the idea that their voice makes a difference in Washington. So there's a lot of room to bring in young voters if you can convince them that you are sincerely fighting for them."
In other words, O'Malley's broader challenge — and perhaps also his opportunity — lies in raising awareness of his campaign.
A few minutes after he left the Dartmouth event, two young men wearing baseball caps walked by the room where he had spoken. One asked why all of the desks had been pushed aside.
"Martin O'Malley was here," the one student said.
His friend's response: "Who?"
Exclusive–Iowa Gop Chairman Reacts To Bernie Sanders’ And Martin O’Malley’s Reception In Iowa: ‘Socialism Is So Odd To Us’ // Breitbart News – June 6, 2015
The self proclaimed socialist, “Sanders attracted overflow crowds in Ames and Davenport, then Sanders capped his three-day trip with a Saturday night stop in Kensett, where more than 300 people greeted him,” Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson wrote earlier last week.
“To a certain degree, I think socialism is so odd to us – I think there would be people that want to hear how in the world an American could promote socialism,” Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kauffman told Breitbart News – adding that he is interested in how Sanders will put his campaign message all together.
Breitbart News questioned if Iowans were interested in both Sanders and O’Malley because they aren’t Clinton – as Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness has been crumbling among independent voters, a recent poll suggests.
“The Democrats I know certainly are – I don’t know if a socialist is going to provide that – but you know, if you look at Hillary’s voting record she’s a socialist in the making – and wait until she gets in the Obama White House and picks up whatever he leaves, in terms of his policies,” Kauffman added.
Breitbart News noted how Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is the favorite in Iowa in many recent polls but that former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) were the only two candidates in a recent poll that Iowans selected in an individual match up with Clinton.
“These polls are going to be so fluid … I listen to the polls obviously – you know, I’m not going to get real serious about the polls at least for the top ten until – I’ll tell you it’s going to almost have to be October before I start listening,” he said.
Kauffman said it’s hard to believe anything in a June or July poll can be of any predictive value of what is going to happen in February.
Bernie Sanders isn’t a “crackpot” — and the progressive agenda isn’t “left-wing” // Salon // Bill Moyers And Michael Winship – June 6, 2015
Congressman John K. Delaney, what the hell are you talking about?
In a recent Washington Post op-ed piece, headlined, “The last thing America needs? A left-wing version of the Tea Party,” the Democratic congressman from Maryland scolds progressives and expresses his worry “about where some of the loudest voices in the room could take the Democratic Party.”
He writes, “Rejecting a trade agreement with Asia, expanding entitlement programs that crowd out other priorities and a desire to relitigate the financial crisis are becoming dominant positions among Democrats. Although these subjects may make for good partisan talking points, they do not provide the building blocks for a positive and bold agenda to create jobs and improve the lives of Americans.”
Rep. Delaney even implies that a freewheeling, open discussion of “these subjects” could lead to the election of a Republican president.
Good grief, John. A trade agreement that favors multinational corporations over working people? Cutting “entitlement programs” such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, worker’s compensation? Letting Wall Street off the hook for crashing the economy and costing millions of Americans their jobs and homes? These are Republican policies, bought and paid for by plutocrats. If Democrats simply mimic them, there would be no need to bother with voting for a Republican president; we could cancel the election and put the billions saved in campaign contributions straight into the Clinton Foundation.
The progressive agenda isn’t “left wing.” (Can anyone using the term even define what “left wing” means anymore?) The progressive agenda is America’s story — from ending slavery to ending segregation to establishing a woman’s right to vote to Social Security, the right to organize, and the fight for fair pay and against income inequality. Strip those from our history and you might as well contract America out to the US Chamber of Commerce the National Association of Manufacturers, and Karl Rove, Inc.
At their core, the New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society programs were aimed at assuring every child of a decent education, every worker a decent wage, and every senior a decent retirement; if that’s extreme, so are the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution.
But such is the level of what passes for discourse inside the Beltway these days. The cushioned political and media elites who eat, drink, and make merry with each other at the annual White House Correspondents & Celebrity Ball are so cozy up there in the stratosphere that they dismiss as the lunatic fringe any voice from below that challenges the status quo.
And by the way, John, the “loudest voices in the room” aren’t populists or progressives; they belong to the auctioneers selling our government to the highest bidders.
Can you believe this? Rep. Delaney even thinks that progressives are too engaged “in time-consuming rhetoric attacking banks that has little chance of producing more financial reform and distracts from far more consequential areas of economic risk…” Yet his words come on the heels of another round of billions in fines against the big banks for perpetrating fraud, an ongoing attempt by Republican Senator Richard Shelby and his Wall Street-funded colleagues on the Senate Banking Committee to eviscerate the reforms of Dodd-Frank, and an updated report from the University of Notre Dame and law firm Labaton Sucharow that says, “Nearly seven years after the global financial crisis rocked investors’ confidence in the markets and financial services in general, our survey clearly shows that a culture of integrity has failed to take hold. Numerous individuals continue to believe that engaging in illegal or unethical activity is part and parcel of succeeding in this highly competitive field.” (And why not, when the chances of going to prison for your blatant misdeeds are virtually nil?)
But Rep. Delaney seems to think any objection to these behaviors and other misdeeds just jams the works and keeps the grownups from taking care of business. So does former Mitt (“47 percent”) Romney advisor and George W. Bush (slash taxes on the One Percent!) speechwriter Peter Wehner, who recently warned in The New York Times that many Democrats “are placing a very risky bet that there are virtually no limits to how far left they can go.”
How about far enough left to reach Main Street?
Just take a look at the initial press reaction to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy. As Steve Hendricks observed in the Columbia Journalism Review, “For not going with the flow, and for challenging Hillary Clinton, the big fish many elites have tagged as their own, Sanders’s entry into the race was greeted with story after story whose message — stated or understated, depending on the decorum of the messenger — was ‘This crank can’t win.’”
Hillary Clinton’s “corporatism,” Hendricks writes, “wed to her social liberalism and her imperial hawkishness appeals to those in the moneyed Second and journalistic Fourth Estates who would embrace Republicanism but for its misogynistic, homophobic, racist, science-denying core.” And so Sanders was tarred at the outset as a doomed crackpot candidate, followed then by article after article that fixated not on ideas and policies but on various idiosyncrasies, Sanders’ age and hippie past, the ideology of democratic socialism, and for heaven’s sake, his flyaway hair.
But if Senator Sanders is a crackpot, so are the majority of Americans. The ideas and policies he espouses have far more public support than the journalist habitués of Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue would have you believe.
Juan Cole of the blog Informed Comment pulled together some of the figures:
Some 63 percent of Americans agree that the current distribution of wealth is unfair. And in a Gallup poll done earlier this month, a majority, 52 percent, think that government taxation on the rich should be used to reduce the wealth gap… A majority of Americans oppose the Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, one of a number of such rulings that have increased the ability of the super-wealthy to influence politics. A good half of Americans support federally financed political campaigns so as to level the playing field… Some79 percent of Americans believe that education beyond high school is not affordable for everyone. And some 57 percent of people under 30 believe student debt is a problem for youth… According to a very recent Yale/Gallup poll, some 71 percent of Americans believe global warming is occurring, and 57 percent are sure that human activity (emitting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide) is causing it…
There you have it: Far from being an outsider, Sanders is paddling his way along the mainstream of American public opinion. Look at the crowds that are gathering to hear him speak: More than 3,000 in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Sunday, standing room only in Ames, Davenport and Iowa City, Iowa. Reporters can’t help but take notice now. “At campaign stops in early states and elsewhere, the firebrand from Vermont is drawing enthusiastic crowds that are several times larger than those that gather for [fellow presidential aspirant Martin] O’Malley,” notes The Washington Post. And The New York Times: “The crowds at Mr. Sanders’s Iowa events appeared to be different from the state’s famously finicky tire-kickers. Many said they had already made up their mind to support Mr. Sanders. They applauded his calls for higher taxes on the rich to pay for 13 million public works jobs, for decisive action on climate change and for free tuition at public colleges.”
Oh, how the mighty tremble when they hear such things! The murmuring crowd is their worst nightmare. So plutocratic Republican apologists like Peter Wehner, the corporate Democrats of Clinton, Inc., and killjoys like Congressman Delaney will double down against Bernie Sanders, just as they have against all those in politics before them who champion bottom-up democracy. If that means turning “left,” so be it. For Democrats, it’s the way home. They would do well to remember that apocryphal saying, usually attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Obama, Clintons join mourners at Beau Biden's funeral // AP – June 6, 2015
Mourning a loss that touched people on Delaware street corners and far beyond, President Barack Obama on Saturday remembered Beau Biden, the vice president's son, as a public servant who learned through early tragedy what mattered most and resolved to "live a life of meaning."
"He was a scion of an incredible family who brushed away the possibility of privilege for the harder, better reward of earning his own way," Obama said in a deeply personal eulogy. The president described Beau Biden as a son, a father, a soldier and a politician who didn't cut corners in his efforts to serve his country and others.
Obama reflected on the "cruel twist of fate" that killed Beau Biden's mother and infant sister in a car crash four decades ago and left 3-year-old Beau and younger brother Hunter hospitalized.
Out of that tragedy, Obama said, Beau as a "very young boy made a very grown-up decision: He would live a life of meaning. He would live a life for others."
Vice President Joe Biden, who did not speak at his son's funeral, embraced Obama at the funeral's start, after crossed himself solemnly as he entered the church to the strains of "Bring Him Home," from "Les Miserables."
Obama's eulogy reflected the strong bonds that Joe Biden and the president have developed after more than six years together in the White House, with the president declaring his family to be "honorary members" of the extended Biden clan.
Speaking directly to the vice president and his wife, Jill, Obama said, "Michelle and I thank God you are in our lives. Taking this ride with you is one of the great pleasures of our lives. Joe, you are my brother."
The overflow crowd of 1,000 at St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church included Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, an array of state and national political figures, as well as people from across Delaware and beyond who lined up hours in advance, drawn by their strong bonds to the Biden family.
"Joe Biden is Delaware, and his son is also Delaware to me," said Lisa Rial, 54, who grew up in Delaware but lives in Pennsylvania. "They're synonymous with Delaware." Outside, along the route to the church, residents held up signs reading "Rest in Peace, Beau."
Gen. Ray Odierno, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, where Beau Biden once served, eulogized him as a dedicated soldier and selfless friend. Odierno suggested that the presidency could even have been within Beau Biden's reach as he spoke of his dedication to "a nation that I believed one day Beau Biden would someday lead."
The vice president's two surviving children, Hunter and Ashley, also spoke, and Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin, a favorite of Beau Biden, sang the meditation at the end of the service, "'Til Kingdom Come"
Joe Biden had just been elected senator in 1972 when his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash. He developed a reputation over the years for possessing a deep ability to comfort those in grief.
Often, Biden is called upon to eulogize fellow American leaders. Now, it was Obama's moment to speak words of comfort to the vice president and his family and friends.
The president described Beau Biden as very much his father's son.
"His dad taught him that everybody mattered. He even looked and sounded like Joe a although I think Joe would be the first to acknowledge that Beau was an upgrade a Joe 2.0," Obama said to chuckles from those in the audience. "But as much as Beau reminded folks of Joe, he was very much his own man. He was an original."
Beau Biden served two terms as attorney general before setting his sights on the governor's mansion. Many imagined his career would mirror that of his father, who represented Delaware for decades in the U.S. Senate before becoming vice president.
But in 2010, at age 41, Beau Biden suffered a stroke. He was diagnosed with brain cancer three years later. He returned to work after what doctors said was a successful operation to remove a small lesion, but his illness returned, and he died last Saturday, less than two weeks after being admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
Can You Be a Latino Politician If You Don't Speak Fluent Spanish? // NBC News // Suzanne Gamboa – June 6, 2015
The prospect that he might be a running mate to Hillary Clinton made Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro a target over his Spanish speaking skills, something that many Latino politicians are all too familiar with.
In a story published Thursday, Politico paraphrased an unnamed source saying Castro's ethnic background "may not be as effective in appealing to Hispanic voters as some believe."
"Tim Kaine speaks Spanish much better than Julian Castro does," the Clinton ally told Politico. Kaine is a Virginia Democrat who spent a year working in Honduras with Jesuit priests.
Castro is considered by many to be a potential running mate for Clinton, a 2016 presidential candidate.
Castro spokeswoman Betsaida Alcantara said she would not comment on the criticism saying, Castro is "laser-focused on ending homelessness, expanding responsible homeownership, tackling the affordable housing crisis and creating communities of opportunity across the nation, not on 2016."
But what appeared to be a flippant matter to the "Clinton ally" is one that can be agonizing and even embarrassing to some Latinos, something that opens them to questioning about their Latino identity.
Former U.S. Rep. Charles Gonzalez of Texas experienced painful ridicule and embarrassment over his Spanish speaking skills, often at the hands of other Latinos.
"There were people who tested me all the time when I was in office, just to see if I spoke Spanish," said Gonzalez, whose parents and grandparents spoke Spanish and who like Castro is from San Antonio.
"I'm not sure if you are supposed to be shamed into some sort of apology that you don't (speak Spanish) … It's expected of us and I don't think we should have that expectation. As you move forward in the generations we are no different than those groups that come from this country."
The focus on Castro's Spanish skills and the comparison of them to the speaking ability of a white politician reflect a continuing struggle in the country to understand the diversity of the Latino community and what it takes to reach them politically, a struggle found even within the Democratic party that won the Latino vote by 2-1 margin in the last election.
Gonzalez acknowledged that speaking Spanish is an asset, something to strive for, but said it cannot be something that determines how a person votes. In the end, what matters is the substance of what is being said to the Latino community in English or Spanish, he said.
"Our community should be be more engaged and involved in the substance," Gonzalez said.
Castro was born in the United States and is the son of a U.S.-born mother fluent in English and Spanish.
Like a number of Latinos, his family can trace its presence in the U.S. for several generations. Some Latinos had famiies in the U.S. Southwest when it was still Mexico or family who were native Americans, or both. Castro's maternal grandmother is from Mexico.
Castro is a Stanford University graduate who served as mayor of San Antonio, the nation's seventh largest city with a large, long established Hispanic population. He understands and speaks some Spanish but is not fluent.
"Those kinds of comments from someone who is trying to get Hillary Clinton elected are not helpful, not productive and misinformed," said Larry Gonzalez, a Washington, D.C. lobbyist who is Mexican American, grew up in a bilingual household but expanded his Spanish in school (he is not related to Charlie Gonzalez.)
"While yes, Spanish is helpful with certain audiences in certain parts of the country, it is his story and his family's story and their plan to help the Latino community - their being Hillary as a potential president and him as a potential vice president - that matter," said Gonzalez, who speaks Spanish.
The criticism comes even as some are questioning the ability of Latinos to weave themselves into the fabric of the country and demands are being made for immigrants to be English proficient as a qualification for citizenship.
Republican Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, can move easily between Spanish and English; Jeb Bush regularly uses his fluent Spanish.
Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican of Cuban descent who lived part of his life in Canada, admits his inability to speak Spanish, which also exposed him to questioning about whether he was truly Hispanic.
Castro has had to contend with other references to his heritage. The Washington Post last August apologized after it was swiftly criticized for a "We'll need more fajitas" subhead over a column item about Castro dining with Bill Clinton. And while Castro might not be fully fluent in Spanish, it hasn't stopped others from using Spanish when talking to him. While testifying at a House hearing in February, Castro found himself unable to quickly locate Rep. Steve Pearce of New Mexico, the committee member who was about to ask him questions. As he looked around the dais, Pearce said "Aquí! Right here" to get Castro's attention.
Recent waves of Latino immigrants, combined with the growth of Spanish-language media as well as technology have boosted the language. Progress has been made since recent decades when Jim Crow laws were applied to Spanish speakers, prohibiting them from speaking the language in school and segregating them into Mexican schools.
But as with previous generations of Latinos and other immigrant groups, English takes over as time passes. Pew Research Center recently reported that a record 33.2 million Hispanics speak English proficiently while the share who speak Spanish at home is the lowest it's been in 13 years.
Former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros said he does think it's important for a Latino candidate to speak Spanish. He said it's an act of respect to one's heritage and often instills a degree of pride in Latinos watching someone use their "heritage language."
Cisneros spoke only Spanish at home as young boy until his father, a World War II veteran who was bilingual and born in the U.S., decreed English would be spoken at home so they would not be at a disadvantage in school.
By high school, he said, he had forgotten most of his Spanish and took Latin. He revived his speaking when he was in Washington, D.C. as a graduate student and he taught citizenship classes to Latinos. His ability to speak Spanish grew when he was a city council member and did Spanish-language interviews and later in his role as president of Univision.
"All of us can improve. All of us educated in U.S. schools can work at it," Cisneros said. "It's something to work on and Julián will be just fine in that regard in due course."
Charlie Gonzalez joked that he has a single recommendation for people who are truly bilingual or not. Reaching into the language of Chicanos, he said: "End each sentence with con safos," which can loosely mean the insult can't come back to you.
For Jeb Bush, the challenge remains making it about ‘Jeb,’ not ‘Bush’ // WaPo // Ed O’Keefe – June 6, 2015
A banner in the town square says “Happy 90th Barbara Bush.” Postcards read “Kennebunkport: 2 presidents, 1 town.” A local gift shop is selling unofficial Jeb Bush 2016 magnets.
In this coastal hamlet made famous by George H.W. Bush and his cigarette boat, it is hard to escape the Bush family — but Jeb Bush is trying hard to do so.
After festivities this weekend to celebrate his mother’s 90th birthday, Bush will jet overseas for a foreign-policy tour and then launch his 2016 presidential campaign 1,500 miles to the south, in Miami.
The iconic family compound here, called Walker’s Point, is a fitting metaphor for what has emerged as Jeb Bush’s central political challenge: how far to distance himself from his family’s political legacy.
The past month has brought into stark relief the fundamental dilemma posed by Bush’s lineage, even as his front-runner status fades. He repeatedly stumbled to answer questions about the now-unpopular Iraq war started by his brother and has been visibly conflicted about whether to embrace or play down the policies and reputations of his closest relatives.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush's vacation home is seen under construction on Walker's Point in Kennebunkport, Maine, on May 24. (Joel Page/AP)
He conceded last weekend to CBS that distancing himself from his brother George W. Bush “is not something I’m comfortable doing.”
But when asked last Tuesday by Fox News whether he’ll use his brother on the campaign trail, he said: “Absolutely. I will use my brother, my sister, every relative, every person I can.”
On paper, Jeb Bush’s record — two terms as governor of a large swing state with a conservative governing record — seems exactly what Republicans would want. But the party faithful are increasingly seeking younger, fresher candidates — they’re “Bushed out,” as Barbara Bush has told visitors here in recent years.
And so when Jeb Bush’s anticipated presidential bid begins June 15, he will seek to set himself apart from his brother and father — an effort that will form one of the abiding themes of the impending campaign, according to aides and close friends.
He will make his announcement at a Miami community college under the moniker of his nickname, leaving the surname behind. There probably won’t be “Bush” on the “Jeb 2016” campaign paraphernalia. On stage will be his Mexican-born wife, Columba, and their three grown children. Neither of Bush’s parents will attend the announcement, and aides won’t say whether any of his siblings will, either.
Later, his two sons — not his father or brother — are expected to play active and visible roles in the campaign.
Al Cardenas, a longtime Bush friend, said that polls have tightened because media attention is too focused on Bush’s family history and not on his record as Florida governor. “It’s about Bush, not Jeb,” he said.
Former president George H.W. Bush, then-President George W. Bush and then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush walk from the 18th green after playing an early morning round at Cape Arundel Golf Club in Maine on July 7, 2001. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
But once people learn more about his time as governor, Cardenas said, “then it will become more about Jeb, not Bush.”
Bush has told voters repeatedly in recent months, “I have to show what’s in my heart” regarding his family. But he also said recently that a presidential run “can’t be about the past; it can’t be about my mom and dad, or my brother, who I love. It has to be about the ideas I believe in to move our country forward.”
Here in Kennebunkport, the prospect of another Bush in the White House intrigues local residents, many of whom say they don’t know George and Barbara’s second-oldest son that well.
Jeb Bush usually visits Maine once a year to see his parents, play early-morning rounds of golf and visit local haunts such as the HB Provisions general store. He has told voters that he rarely takes lengthy vacations and — unlike his brother’s Crawford, Tex., ranch — he has no vacation estate at the moment. He and his family usually spend their Christmas vacation on Gasparilla Island in southwest Florida, sometimes joined by his parents.
“I think Jeb’s the only one I really don’t know,” said John Downing, who served as the local York County, Maine, chairman for the George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush presidential campaigns. “I’ve not seen him around.”
“From everything I can gather, he’s been nothing but a good governor of the state of Florida, certainly a good father and husband,” Downing said about Jeb Bush. “I think those things are very positive about him.”
Downing, who is also a real estate agent, said local businesses are pondering how a third Bush presidency might provide another jolt of economic activity.
“We’ll take anything that helps the home values go up,” he said.
Despite not coming often, Bush appears to feel the pull of the family’s coastal headquarters. After this weekend, Bush is expected to return July 9 for a two-day “retreat” with fundraising “co-chairs” who help him secure at least $27,000 in donations, according to people who have received invitations. The hope is to raise as much as $5 million for his campaign by the end of July, said one Bush supporter, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the plans. By then, a new home being built for him at the family compound will probably be ready for guests.
On Thursday at Walker’s Point, construction workers could be seen climbing ladders around the new home being built for Jeb’s use. A large, yellow truck was seen backing away from the site, while a bulldozer was parked behind it.
The $1.4 million, two-story cottage — in most places it would be called a large house — sits on a 1.3-acre plot just south of several much smaller cottages also used by Bush family members. Aides said that the new home will be occupied by other relatives and guests when Jeb isn’t in town.
To the south of the new home is a ranch-style structure housing George H.W. Bush’s office. On the southernmost point sits the iconic family home, where the 41st president and former first lady live with unobstructed views of the Atlantic Ocean.
Above it all flies an American flag, with the flags of Maine and Texas billowing beneath. If the Lone Star state’s colors are flying, George and Barbara are in town. They’re usually here every May to October, family spokesman Jim McGrath said.
Elizabeth Spahr, a member of the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust, was at a nearby overlook weeding and pruning a planter next to a memorial built by locals to honor George H.W. Bush.
Spahr said she has met several of the family members and is most fond of Laura Bush. Barbara Bush is seen most mornings walking her dogs on a nearby beach.
Looking over at the compound, she said: “I guess they’re building a new home for Jeb. It’s awfully big.”
When asked about Jeb Bush’s presidential ambitions, she turned back to her weeding. “I don’t have an opinion on that,” she said.
A foreign policy checkmark for Jeb Bush // AP // Thomas Beaumont – June 6, 2015
Jeb Bush heads to Europe next week to put a checkmark in a final box before making his 2016 Republican presidential campaign official: an overseas visit to catch up with a few of America's friends.
All of his hosts, Germany, Poland and Estonia are stalwart U.S. allies, and they're calmer destinations than the cauldron of the Middle East. But the last name Bush still stirs anger in parts of Europe — a legacy of former President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.
For this Bush, the trick with his first trip overseas as a White House hopeful is to avoid spending too much time making the same case to European leaders he's had to make at home to American voters — that he's not his brother.
"If he tries to make this trip about see-how-I'm-not-like-George W. Bush, if that's the story line of the trip, it will not have been a success," said Peter Feaver, former head of strategic operations at the National Security Agency and now a professor at Duke University.
The trip comes at a key time for Bush. He will return a day before kicking off his campaign with an event in Miami, fresh from a journey he hopes will show he's ready to step onto the world stage.
"A Republican doing a listening tour of American allies, that makes sense," said William Inboden, who served as senior director for strategic planning with the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. "But you're also wanting to demonstrate the ability to be proficient in personal diplomacy."
Bush's six-day trip begins with a speech in Berlin on Tuesday to the economic council of the Christian Democratic Union, the conservative party led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. A mix of public and private events there and in Poland and Estonia follow.
The early days of the Republican campaign suggest much of the party's presidential primary debate will focus on foreign policy, given the ongoing unrest in Iraq, civil war in Syria and a preliminary agreement — deeply unpopular among Republicans — between Iran and the U.S. and five allies aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear program.
There's also the prospect that next year the party's nominee will face Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was secretary of state in President Barack Obama's first term.
Bush's early discussions about foreign policy have often drifted into his brother's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which some critics cite as the cause of regional unrest that helped lead to the rise of the Islamic State.
Jeb Bush's effort to avoid publicly criticizing his brother led him into a twisted series of answers about whether he would have made the same invasion decision, making for his roughest political week since he expressed interest last December in running for the White House.
While he still plans to talk about the threat posed by the Islamic State during his trip, he'll do so in a place where the discussion can be about how the extremist group is one of several shared threats faced by America and its Western allies.
Aides said Bush aims to underscore the early themes of his approach to global affairs during his visit, namely that the U.S. ought to reinforce its relationships with its allies and demonstrate solidarity with the democratic success stories in Eastern Europe.
Expect a lot of talk about Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.
"We need to restore the relationships with Europe and encourage them to be part of their own national defense, as we see Russia engaged in parts of the world they shouldn't be," Bush said in Michigan last week.
It's a message that will resonate most loudly in Poland and Estonia, two nations paying particularly close attention to Putin's actions in Ukraine.
"At a time like this, when we have a rather unpleasant and difficult situation with Russia, Poles are becoming more pro-American than they would have been otherwise," said Marcin Zaborowski, the head of the Polish Institute of International Affairs. "And having a presumed presidential candidate to come and talk to the Poles about security, defense and the relationship with the United States will be more than welcome."
Rubio's real estate dealings often a drag on his finances // AP // Nicholas Riccardi – June 6, 2015
During Marco Rubio's first year in the Florida Legislature in 2000, the 29-year-old lawmaker filled out the required forms detailing his personal finances. On the line listing his net worth, Rubio wrote: "0."
Since then, he has risen to lead the state House as speaker, won election to the U.S. Senate and earned at least $4.5 million at a series of six-figure jobs and by writing a best-selling memoir. Yet his net worth has improved only modestly.
Like many Americans in the days since the recession, Rubio and his family — he has four children — have struggled in the housing market.
Factor in some questionable moves with money and a hefty load of student loans, and it's clear that the Republican presidential candidate's real estate dealings often have been a drag on his finances despite an income most would relish.
"He's like any normal American with four kids that has a mortgage," said Bernie Navarro, a past president of the Miami-based Latin Builders Association, who has advised Rubio on his real estate transactions. "He goes through what any normal family goes through, living with a salary, and he has to make adjustments."
Rubio made two in the past few weeks:
—he sold a home in Tallahassee, Florida, that he owned with a former colleague. That freed Rubio from a monthly payment on an interest-only loan and the cost of upkeep. But he lost money on the deal.
—he consolidated the debt on his primary residence in West Miami, Florida. The original mortgage required only payments of interest on the principal in its first decade. Rubio has only paid off about 4 percent of overall principal since buying the house.
At end of last year, Rubio was worth no more than $355,000, according to an analysis of his personal financial disclosures records filed with the Senate. That does not include any equity he may have in his West Miami home or proceeds expected from his second book, published in December.
Rubio, 44, has written and spoken of being torn between a drive for public service and the need to support his family. At times, he has made decisions that put politics ahead of his personal comfort or financial security.
He and his wife, Jeanette, moved in with his mother-in-law to make ends meet at the start of his career. Late last year, he liquidated a retirement account, saying he might need the cash for everything from a new refrigerator to college for his eldest daughter.
At other points, Rubio's political connections have helped financially.
One of Rubio's biggest political backers, Miami billionaire Norman Braman, hired Rubio as his lawyer after Rubio left the Florida Legislature in 2008, and Braman funded a teaching position at Florida International University that Rubio still holds.
Braman's foundation also pays Rubio's wife to advise it on charitable giving.
Rubio isn't shy about his relative lack of wealth, which is a far cry from the financial standing of his fellow Floridian and rival for the Republican nomination, former Gov. Jeb Bush.
Rubio told conservative activists in Nevada last week that "the latest one I've heard now from some is I'm not rich enough to be president."
In an interview, Rubio said, "The cost of living goes up, and you can just imagine how people who make a quarter of what I do face today."
Rubio's career began in politics, and he rarely has not held office or worked for those who do.
After graduating from the University of Miami's law school in 1996, the then-25-year-old worked as the South Florida coordinator for Bob Dole's presidential campaign. Dole lost soundly to President Bill Clinton, but Rubio impressed Florida GOP powerbrokers; one, Al Cardenas, offered him a job.
Rubio had planned to join a local prosecutor's office after the election, but the job paid less than $30,000. Cardenas was offering $57,000.
Rubio wrote in "An American Son," his 2012 memoir: "I wanted to be a prosecutor. I wanted to gain courtroom experience. I relished the excitement of trying cases and had little interest in the land use and zoning law that Al practiced. But I had student loans to repay. I wanted to get married. And I wanted to help support my family so my father could at last retire."
Despite the financial incentive, the job at Cardenas' firm couldn't hold Rubio's interest. Less than two years later, he was running for office, winning a seat on the West Miami city commission and landing a job at another law firm. Roughly a year after that, he moved up to the Florida House, but his new firm deducted Rubio's $27,000-a-year lawmaker's salary from his paycheck.
In his book, Rubio said he was unsure he could keep his full-time job while spending months at the state Capitol. In 2000, he listed the value of his household furnishings at $5,000 on state records but reported more than $160,000 in student loan debt plus $30,000 in "assorted credit + retail debt."
To save $1,500 a month in rent, Rubio and his wife moved in with her mother. He was climbing the GOP ranks, but, "I imagined telling my children someday that I had been the majority whip of the Florida House but ... had to leave politics to make a living," he wrote in his book.
A headhunter helped Rubio land a new job, this one with a $93,000 salary at a law firm that wouldn't hold his time in Tallahassee against him. It was enough for the Rubios, who had their first child in 2000, to buy a 1,200-square-foot three-bedroom house in the working-class West Miami neighborhood where Rubio grew up.
The Rubios would sell that house near the peak of the Florida real estate bubble for more than twice what they paid for it. The buyer was the mother of a neighbor — a chiropractor who unsuccessfully lobbied Rubio to extend a state insurance provision and was later prosecuted for violating campaign finance laws unrelated to Rubio.
A few years later, in 2003, Rubio secured the votes needed to become state House speaker. Not long after that, he moved up to a new, politically connected law firm and a much bigger salary: $300,000 a year. He was moving homes, too.
In March 2005, Rubio and a fellow state lawmaker, David Rivera, went in together on a house in Tallahassee to live in while in the state capital, making no down payment and taking out a $135,000 mortgage that initially only required interest payments. Meanwhile, the Rubios upgraded to a newly built four-bedroom 2,600-square-foot home with a pool in West Miami.
Real estate records show the Rubios made a 10 percent down payment to buy that $550,000 house. He says he paid cash for upgrades to the home before construction finished.
A little more than a month after the Rubios closed on the house in December 2005, a bank owned by one of his political supporters appraised the house at $735,000 and gave Rubio a $135,000 home equity loan. Rubio has said the add-ons to the house, plus Florida's heated real estate market, justified the appraisal.
It was around this time that other issues in Rubio's finances started to surface.
He shut down two political groups — one run out of his house — that had come under scrutiny for tens of thousands of dollars in poorly explained expenses. In his book, Rubio acknowledged the committees were "an accounting mess."
Rubio also gained access to a state Republican Party charge card in 2005, which he says he inadvertently used at times to pay for personal items.
Records from 2007 and 2008 show Rubio charged about $160,000 to the card, including $1,000 for repairs to the family minivan after it was dented by a valet at a political event, a $134 bill at a hair salon and numerous meals and airline flights.
Rubio has said most of the spending was the legitimate expense of building party infrastructure, but he paid $16,000 of the charges personally.
They became a campaign issue when Rubio ran for the U.S. Senate in 2010, but not one that kept him from winning handily.
Once in Washington and making a $174,000 salary as a senator, Rubio still felt the bite of his old real estate transactions.
The bank moved in 2010 to foreclose the house in Tallahassee after Rubio and Rivera fell behind on the payments. Rivera paid $9,200 to bring the house out of foreclosure, and the pair sold the house for $117,000 last week — $18,000 less than the original purchase price.
(Federal prosecutors have said Rivera, who served one term in Congress, is being investigated by a grand jury in a campaign finance case unrelated to Rubio.)
The collapse of the housing market in Florida haunts Rubio, too.
The home next to his in West Miami was foreclosed, which he says is part of the reason why the county has assessed the value of his current house at $400,000 — well below the price Rubio sought when he put it on the market in 2013. The asking price was $675,000, but it didn't sell.
"We wanted to see if we could get the right price," Rubio said. "We had offers, but I'm not going to give it away."
He decided to refinance his initial mortgage and the separate home equity loan. On May 26, Professional Bank in Coral Gables, Florida, wrote Rubio a $604,000 mortgage at 4.5 percent interest, according to records and Rubio's campaign.
Navarro, the Rubio backer who owns a real estate firm and helped him with the refinance, said that lowers Rubio's monthly payment by about $1,000 a month.
"It was a good financial move for him," Navarro said.
Marco Rubio Is Now Channeling JFK — Explicitly // The National Journal // Shane Goldmacher – June 6, 2015
Sen. Marco Rubio has slipped a symbolically significant new passage into his stump speech, linking his candidacy to that of another youthful and charismatic 40-something politician: John F. Kennedy.
From the start, Rubio, 44, has wrapped his campaign in the rhetoric of youth. "Yesterday is over," he said the day of his launch in Miami. Campaigning near Iowa State on Saturday, Rubio railed against "outdated leaders" and declared, "If we keep promoting the same people we'll be left behind by the future."
But it was a new line he began road testing in Iowa that stood out. Rubio presented the 2016 campaign as a generational pivot point, likening his vision for a "New American Century" — the tagline of his campaign — to Kennedy's 1960 challenge to the nation to embrace a "New Frontier."
"This election isn't about what laws we're going to pass. It's about what kind of country we're going to be," Rubio said to a packed Holiday Inn conference room. "And we've made that choice before. Asked six decades ago, this nation and that generation chose to embrace a New Frontier. In fact, they took up the challenge of a then young president who said, 'Ask not what your country can do, ask what you can do for your country.'"
"And here's the hard truth," Rubio continued. "For far too long, leaders in both parties have been campaigning on the promise of what your government can do for you. But my campaign is built on the idea of what together we can do for America. Because America doesn't owe us anything. But every single one of us, especially me, has a debt to this country we will never repay."
The line broke through.
"He's got it like Kennedy got it!" said an unprompted Ed Enright, a 70-year-old Republican who was clutching a copy of Rubio's book and wearing a "Marco Rubio for president" t-shirt.
Asked if he had caught the reference to Kennedy's New Frontier, Enright smiled. "Maybe he's sending us a little message there," he said. "Fresh ideas, fresh youth."
Jack Whitver, Rubio's Iowa campaign chairman, said the Kennedy comparison was apt. "He is a person who can reignite the Republican Party and unite it," Whitver said. "Like JFK, he can inspire the country."
If elected, Rubio would be the youngest president since Kennedy, who took office at 43. Rubio turned 44 a little over a week ago.
But, as he said to laughs on Saturday, "I feel 45."
Marco Rubio is what Republicans hope the future looks like // VOX // Dara Lind – June 6, 2015
Florida Senator Marco Rubio is a presidential candidate Republicans can feel good about. He's young and relatively handsome; he has a compelling biography (his parents emigrated from Cuba to make a better life in America, with his father working as a hotel bartender and his mother working as a cashier and housekeeper) that he's spun into an optimistic stump speech; and he is, by most accounts, an extremely compelling public speaker.
He's also firmly in line with the Republican establishment on the issues — which sets him apart from some of the other candidates running for the 2016 nomination. He's best known for his break with the GOP base to support comprehensive immigration reform in 2013, but he's reversed his position and is vocally opposed to it now (unlike, say, Jeb Bush). He's hawkish on foreign policy and reliably conservative on social issues. And he's pushed some innovative reforms, notably on tax and education policy, but is clearly trying to appease traditional Republican tax-cutters.
In other words, Rubio is a fresh face who doesn't pose much of an ideological challenge to his party. From the standpoint of the Republican establishment, it would be great if the future of their party were fresh and forward-thinking while continuing to advocate its current stands on the issues.
But is 2016 too soon for the future? In Washington, Rubio's still seen as a little young and callow. It doesn't help that he's spent the past two years trying to distance himself from his only major legislative accomplishment, the comprehensive immigration reform bill passed by the Senate in 2013.
Rubio shares a support base with his fellow Floridian and former mentor Jeb Bush — the people who'd be most excited about Rubio in any other year are Bush backers in 2016. And Rubio's appeal to the GOP base beyond Florida is untested. So many political insiders assume he's running for the VP spot on the ticket.
But Rubio's likely to stay in the race for a while. Thanks to his foreign policy hawkishness, he's likely to get support from Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson — which could be enough to keep him in the race for a certain amount of time. And he's done well in polls since announcing the start of his campaign in April. It's possible that he's been underestimated by observers who've called him "the perfect second choice for GOP voters."
Rubio seeks to rebut skeptics on the experience factor // The Hill // Rebecca Shabad – June 6, 2015
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Saturday took aim at those skeptical of his qualifications to lead the White House.
At the inaugural “Roast and Ride” hosted by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) in Boone, Iowa, the GOP presidential candidate defended his experience and his ideas.
“I’ve had some people say i’m not old enough or I haven’t been in government long enough, and I heard that, too, when I was speaker of the Florida House, but let me tell you what we did,” Rubio said.
As speaker, Rubio said the Florida legislature balanced the third largest state budget without raising taxes and increased school standards without Common Core.
“I’m 44 years old, but I feel 45. And I’ve been in government long enough to know that what we’re doing now doesn’t work anymore,” he said.
The latest criticism Rubio received, he said, is that he’s “not rich enough.” He then used the statement to jab at Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Clinton foundation.
“It’s true I don’t make $11 million a year giving speeches to special interests. And I don’t have a family foundation that’s raised $2 billion, a lot of it from foreign interests,” he said. “But my wife and I work to ensure that we have enough money to send our kids to have a Christian education at a private school and we have a mortgage we pay every month.”
“We have all of these leaders, especially on the left, that are stuck in the past,” he said.
Rubio’s campaign theme focuses on a “New American Century” because he says the economy and world have changed too much to keep using ideas from the 20th century.
Paul: Laws on sexuality could be more ‘neutral,’ but all should be protected // WaPo // Katie Zezima – June 6, 2015
Sen. Rand Paul said Saturday that he thinks the issue of sexuality is one that should be left behind closed doors.
“And I think if we did a little more of that then maybe the law doesn’t have to engage in stuff that’s really personal, and the law could be more neutral, but I think the law ought to be fair to people and ought to provide equal protection for everybody,” he said.
Paul was asked about Bruce Jenner coming out as a woman named Caitlyn. Social conservatives in the Republican Party have felt isolated by the nation’s acceptance of Jenner, a change they see as immoral. Paul said he hasn't given Jenner's transition much thought but said that sexuality should remain private.
“We’ve exposed so much of our lives that were at one time private, and if it were private, than maybe the law wouldn’t have to take a position on it, you know what I mean?” Paul said in an interview here.
Paul said that if he goes to a cocktail party, “most of us don’t talk about our personal sexuality, our sex lives, why does it have to be part of public discourse?”
Rand Paul on Transgender Rights: "Government Shouldn't Ask About Your Personal Life" // David Weigel – June 6, 2015
A news week that started with Caitlyn Jenner's debut in Vanity Fair ended with another transgender rights milestone. On Thursday, the United States Air Force announced that it would no longer discharge recruits with gender dysphoria, and that "identification as transgender, absent a record of poor duty performance, misconduct, or a medically disqualifying condition, is not a basis for involuntary separation."
Republican candidates for president did not exactly sprint for the microphones. The two veterans in the contest, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, served in the Air Force Reserve and Air Force, respectively. Neither commented on the new ruling; neither has said much, generally, on the frontiers of LGBT policy.
On Friday, I asked Kentucky Senator Rand Paul if, as president, he'd continue the Obama administration's approach to transgender rights. Since December, the Department of Justice has interpreted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to include gender identity.
“I don't know why we have to talk about our sex life.”
On the question of the Justice Department's move, Paul didn't exactly endorse the policy but, interestingly, he didn't exactly repudiate it either. He speculated that government could bar discrimination, but wondered about the legal implications.
"I think that government should not ask about your personal life," said Paul. "I would make that a rule – government shouldn’t ask about your personal life when you apply to anything. It would be wrong for the government to discriminate based on anything like that. But then, I don’t know what that exactly means. You get into [questions like] can you sue over it? The government ought to be as neutral as possible."
Asked about the Air Force's new transgender rule, Paul continued speculating about a way the law could be fair without getting into the thorniness of identity.
"The thing that’s weird about this was that there was a time when it was nobody’s business," he said.
New Hampshire State Senator Andy Sanborn, a supporter of Paul who sat in for the interview, suggested that this was the defunct "Don’t Ask, Don't Tell" policy.
"We had rules, and these rules went back to the beginning and could be applied in a non-discriminating way," said Paul. "It’s behavior. It’s fraternizing. No matter what it is, you’re not supposed to do it in the barracks, because that disrupts discipline. So it wouldn’t have to be that specific. You’d still have rules about it."
Paul had not quite endorsed either of the new non-discrimination policies; as he finished, he suggested that the subject might be a little overheated.
"I don’t know why we all have to talk about our sex life," he said. "I’m just not interested in other peoples’ – I never go to anybody’s house and everybody wants to talk about it. Why do we have to talk about it?"
Paul: 'We have come to take our liberty back' // The Union Leader // Dan Tuohy – June 6, 2015
Rand Paul shouted to supporters as press huddled around and asked him yet again about the Patriot Act.
"Hey, anybody here think it’s a good idea for the government to have all of your phone records?"
"No!" came the anticipated response.
Paul, the Republican presidential hopeful and Kentucky senator, boasted of his work to end the National Security Agency’s "illegal spying program," even as he says the USA Freedom Act, which replaces expired Patriot Act provisions, still threatens constitutional rights.
Paul acknowledged it was a partial victory during remarks at his campaign office opening Friday in Manchester.
Some of his colleagues in the U.S. Senate called Paul’s filibuster of the Patriot Act a political stunt because he has used the issue to raise donations. Other critics called Paul an isolationist, a tag he has rejected in the past.
Paul, in an interview with the Union Leader on Friday, said national defense is the federal government’s most important function.
"I believe in a robust national defense," Paul said. "I believe in a national defense that is strong enough to deter and repel all attacks. I’m a Reagan Republican. And I don’t think any of that speaks to any, or in anyway resembles any of those critiques. I think there are a lot of candidates, some of them grasping for relevancy, and so they will hurl ad hominem and names at people. But the bottom line is I don’t think there’s anything more important that we do than national defense and it doesn’t just stop at the water’s edge. There are international and there are American interests around the world that have to be defended."
The bulk collection of phone records was illegal and unconstitutional, and even the government says it is not getting any useful information from those surveillance provisions, according to Paul.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who announced Monday he is running for the Republican nomination for President, is one of Paul's critics. In an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader on Tuesday, Graham called Paul "ill-prepared" for the White House.
Paul dismissed criticism from political rivals and the establishment, saying most Americans agree with him on this issue.
"I’m not so sure I like all of the replacement (Freedom Act) where the phone companies may well be doing some of the same thing," Paul said in the interview. "My understanding is the NSA works at the phone companies, snatches up all the data and sends it to Utah. I’m worried that they’ll still be doing the same thing, they just won’t be pressing the 'send' button."
Paul said he supports the NSA looking into information for those suspected of terrorist acts, with appropriate, individualized warrants.
Paul spoke to a packed office in Manchester, and greeted an overflow crowd outside his office at 50 Bridge St. His schedule included stops Saturday at Joe’s Diner in Amherst, MaryAnn’s Diner in Derry, "Politics & Pie" at the Snow Shoe Club in Concord, and a town hall event at Turbocam in Barrington.
In his remarks in Manchester, Paul said he is the Republican best positioned to beat Democratic candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in battleground states.
Following the event, he criticized Clinton for answering few press questions.
"If she ever pops her head up and takes questions, we should ask Hillary Clinton: Knowing what you know now, was it a good idea to topple Gaddafi and get involved in Libya. I think all of the objective evidence shows that things are more chaotic, worse, and that there’s more of ISIS influence in Libya, and we are more threatened by having toppled the government there."
Rand Paul demands White House release trade deal text immediately // The Hill // Rebecca Shabad – June 6, 2015
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Saturday it “boggles the mind” that the White House has not yet released the text of trade deal it’s pushing, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
“It kind of boggles the mind,” Paul said in an interview with Breitbart News. “Who’s in charge of the administration that decides to keep a trade treaty secret? To keep it classified makes no sense at all.”
Paul said the administration should immediately release the text of the trade deal so members of the Senate can decide how to vote later on.
The Senate recently voted to fast-track the trade deal, which would allow an up-or-down vote on it. House GOP leaders could hold the fast-track vote as early as next week despite opposition from groups in both parties.
“To me, it’s kind of you put the cart before the horse to give the permission to do something you haven’t seen,” Paul said. “They claim you’ll get to see it, again but you’ll only get an up-or-down vote with no amendments. Also, they get rid of some of the rules on — I guess it’s not, you can’t filibuster it either. It passes with a simple majority.”
Paul explained he has proposed legislation that would require the Senate to wait one day before a vote is held for every 20 pages of legislation.
“So 800-page legislation [like Obamatrade] would wait 40 days. You’d wait 40 days so we’d have adequate time to read it. Yeah, I’m a believer that we should read legislation before we vote on it.”
Last month, Secretary of State John Kerry said the final text of the trade deal would be made public at a minimum of 60 days before President Obama would sign it.
Ron Paul: 'I don't want to distract' from Rand // The Hill // Mark Hensch – June 6, 2015
Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said Saturday he did not want to steal attention from his son’s 2016 GOP presidential campaign.
“There’s no plans for it,” Ron Paul told CNN host Michael Smerconish when asked whether he would stump for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on the campaign trail.
“I went to his announcement and supported him there,” he said. “But it’s his show right now. And I don’t want to distract from what he’s doing. So it’s one of those things that I think will work its way out.”
Rand Paul launched his White House bid April 7 in Louisville, Ky.
Ron Paul praised his son’s performance Saturday amid one of the most crowded GOP presidential fields in recent memory.
“He’s the only one that, from my viewpoint, is talking any commonsense,” he said.
“I think he is able to talk more to the American people than the other candidates because I think he has a set of principles, which means that he’d much rather see smaller government and not make excuses for expanding the surveillance state and not expanding our military presence around the world.”
Ron Paul also praised his son’s repeated battles to reform the National Security Agency (NSA) and its intelligence-gathering methods.
“When he did the NSA thing, people said, you know, ‘he’s done – he’s finished,’ ” he said. “And Republicans and Democrats all in the Senate – everybody in Washington – jumped on him.”
“Yet when you did a poll of the national people, they were with him and not with McConnell,” Ron Paul added, citing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his opposition to NSA reforms.
The Senate approved the USA Freedom Act on Tuesday.
It ended the NSA’s controversial warrantless bulk collection of individual phone records while reauthorizing less divisive counterterrorism measures.
Ron Paul also expressed concern with how the media would handle 2016’s large Republican presidential field for televised debates.
“I’d take it out of the hands of the media because that becomes very biased,” he said, noting his own problems appearing on a Fox News debate in New Hampshire while on the 2012 campaign trail.
“So, no, I don’t think they should have as much clout,” Ron Paul added.
“I think it was better when the League of Women Voters or some other independent group, a truly independent group, would schedule the debates, rather than the media outlets, because I think they’re very, very slanted.”
Ron Paul retired in January 2013. He sought the White House twice while in office, in 2008 and again in 2012.
Scott Walker Riding With Joni Ernst in Iowa as Rivals Give Chase // NYT // Trip Gabriel – June 6, 2015
When Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin throws his leg across his beloved Harley-Davidson Road King for a celebration of motorcycles and Iowa pork on Saturday, the political symbolism will be as thick as the smoke from the roasting pits.
Mr. Walker, who first broke from the pack of other Republican presidential hopefuls thanks to a speech in Iowa, will be alone among seven declared and likely candidates on a chopper alongside Senator Joni Ernst, a fellow biker and one of Iowa’s most popular Republicans.
The other 2016 candidates will be left in the dust for the initial 28-mile ride of “Joni’s Roast & Ride,” a daylong political fund-raiser.
Mr. Walker, whose early surge in national polls has receded, still enjoys a decisive lead in Iowa, thanks to an unflashy style that resonates with Iowans’ Midwestern sensibilities and to an unusual appeal across a wide ideological swath of Republicans.
But that head-of-the-pack status has come with high expectations and a target on his back.
Two challenges loom on the near horizon for Mr. Walker, who has said the path to the presidency “comes through the Midwest.” They are the first Republican debate, in Ohio on Aug. 6, in which he could be the target of the nine other candidates on stage, and a decision on whether to compete in Iowa’s straw poll in Boone two days later.
Several top-tier candidates, including former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, have said they will skip the straw poll, a gathering of thousands of Iowa Republican activists that does not award any delegates for the party’s nomination. It is costly for campaigns to organize and bus in supporters, and the poll’s reputation as a predictor of victory has tumbled in recent years.
The decisions of others gives Mr. Walker cover if he, too, takes a pass. His Iowa advisers declined to say if he would participate in the straw poll, noting he has yet to declare his candidacy. (An announcement is expected late this month or early July.)
If Mr. Walker skips the event, Republican strategists in Iowa said, he risks allowing another candidate to steal some of his momentum. Party insiders unaffiliated with other candidates said he was in a lose-lose situation.
“If you don’t participate, it’s going to be viewed as a sign of weakness by some, and you’re going to turn off some of the party establishment and key activists,” said Craig Robinson, who ran the straw poll for the state Republican Party in 2007. “And if you do it, he has no choice but to win and win convincingly.” He could end up spending time and money to compete against long shot candidates like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon.
Mr. Walker’s favorability rating among likely Republican caucusgoers in Iowa was higher than any other candidate, 67 percent, in a poll conducted at the end of May for The Des Moines Register and Bloomberg Politics (with a five-point sampling error). He enjoyed a solid seven-point lead, an opening he first created with a passionate speech to conservatives in Des Moines in January.
“I had never heard him before; I was blown away,” said Sam Clovis, a prominent Iowa conservative who is state chairman for former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who entered the race Thursday.
At a reception after a recent fund-raising dinner for the state Republican Party, Mr. Walker, in an apron, served Wisconsin cheese to a long procession of admirers, many of whom signed pledge cards to support him.
His support in Iowa, as elsewhere, traces to his reputation for winning conservative fights against state employee unions in 2011 and Democrats who mounted a recall effort against him in 2012.
“There were an awful lot of folks riveted to that whole recall thing,” said Eric Woolson, a senior adviser to Mr. Walker in Iowa. “They watched it every night on Fox or wherever else. It was high political drama.”
So far, Mr. Walker has had an unusual ability to draw support from both the social conservatives and the business-oriented wing of the party.
The social conservatives embrace his signing of bills as governor to defund Planned Parenthood, and his strong expression that prayer is central to his life. Business conservatives admire that he cut taxes and dealt crippling blows to unions.
But his ability to span the wings of the party — to win the argument that he is the most conservative candidate capable of winning the general election — could become a weakness if enough voters decide they would rather go with a purer expression of their ideal candidate.
He is competing for social conservatives against Mr. Huckabee, who won the caucuses in 2008, as well as Mr. Carson, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and others.
Among business-focused candidates he must fight for supporters with Mr. Bush, who is expected to announce his candidacy this month, and Mr. Rubio
“Each of those lanes within the caucus electorate are crowded with other credible options,” said Matt Strawn, a former chairman of the Iowa Republican Party. “So the challenge going forward is how well Governor Walker can balance support from two distinct factions that rarely align behind the same candidate.”
Mr. Walker may lead the pack on two wheels on Saturday, but his competitors are not ready to stay behind.
Scott Walker’s Effort to Weaken College Tenure // NYT // The Editorial Board – June 6, 2015
Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal for weakening tenure at Wisconsin’s highly respected state university system and undermining the faculty’s role in campus governance will appeal to conservative voters whose support he needs to win the Republican presidential nomination.
But if this proposal becomes law, it will damage the university, perhaps irreparably. It will make it harder to recruit top-tier faculty members, who have the pick of other institutions that respect academic independence and where they do not have to fear dismissal for taking controversial views or for doing research that might be frowned upon by politicians.
It has become fashionable to portray academia as a haven for people who enjoy job security while others are subject to layoffs and downsizing. But most college instructors are not protected by tenure. According to federal data, only 20.35 percent of instructional faculty at American colleges are full-time, tenure-track workers (down from 45 percent in 1975). Colleges rely heavily on miserably paid part-timers who flee the campus when class is finished so they can get to the next job.
Tenure protections were devised in the mid-20th century to protect academics from political reprisals. Current Wisconsin state law respects this tradition, allowing tenured faculty to be fired for just cause or in financial emergencies.
A committee of state lawmakers last week approved a new proposal that would remove tenure from state law, leaving the matter to the university system’s 18-member Board of Regents, 16 of whom are appointed by the governor with the confirmation of the State Senate. Under the proposal, the board would be able set new, vaguer standards for firing tenured faculty: “when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection.” Another provision would weaken the faculty’s voice in policy and personnel decisions.
Faculty members have ample reason to suspect Mr. Walker’s motives. Earlier this year, he issued a budget containing devastating spending cuts that also sought to amend the university’s mission statement to make it sound more like a trade school than a prominent research institution. He backed away from the new language after the state erupted in protest.
The Legislature, which will take up the new proposals later this month, can still reject them. Rubber-stamping them would set the state university on a course that Wisconsinites could regret for decades to come.
Iowa's 'Roast and Ride': 5 takeaways // Politico // Katie Glueck – June 6, 2016
Seven presidential prospects showed up but it was Harley-riding Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker who stood out.
BOONE, Iowa — The Iowa caucuses are a long eight months away, but a gaggle of presidential hopefuls descended on a field here Saturday anyway, eager to work the crowd, hone their organizing skills and build out their volunteer lists. For the candidates who made it to Sen. Joni Ernst’s first annual “Roast and Ride” event — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, former Hewlett-Packard head Carly Fiorina, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — it was a chance to pay their respects to Ernst, the state’s freshman senator and a newly influential figure in state politics.
Yet it was also an opportunity to connect with hundreds of Iowans and the state’s political establishment in an informal, festival-like setting, one without the pressures and expectations of the next big event on the state political calendar — the Iowa Straw Poll in August.
Here are POLITICO’s five takeaways from the event:
This was Scott Walker’s day
The “Roast and Ride” event was tailor-made for Walker, the neighboring Wisconsin governor who’s already leading the field in Iowa polls. He stood out Saturday by being the only candidate to suit up and ride with Ernst on the optional 38-mile motorcycle journey from Des Moines to Boone — he’s a motorcycle owner himself. And as an aficionado of the iconic Wisconsin manufacturer Harley-Davidson, Walker naturally showed up to the ride’s kick-off in a leather jacket and boots bearing the brand’s name.
The governor basked in media attention for the first half of the day as he fielded questions about his frontrunner status, leading the influential Drudge Report website to feature a photo of Walker with the banner headline: “Leader of the Pack.”
At the pig roast portion of the event, Walker’s PAC’s booth was consistently busy, offering more goodies and swag — including beer coozies that read “Go big. Go bold” and candy — than any of the other campaigns. Walker’s remarks didn’t deviate much from his standard stump speech, but they were well-received. It was a day that offered a good, high-profile opportunity for down-home retail politicking, and Walker seized it.
There’s room for Rubio in Iowa
The Florida senator is still introducing himself to the state after skipping several other cattle calls here. But the reception he received Saturday suggests that Iowans are interested in learning more, and they like what they hear so far. When he arrived, Rubio was mobbed by attendees who asked for meetings, talked policy and clamored for pictures. One voter asked Rubio to record a message for his girlfriend, and the senator obliged, while several people who were volunteering in Carson’s tent left their posts to take pictures with Rubio, saying they hadn’t decided whom to support yet. The crowd was receptive to Rubio’s speech, including his swipes at critics and his implicit jabs at Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.
Rick Perry’s still got it
The former Texas governor’s stump speech didn’t stand out, but when it comes to glad-handing and working a crowd, Perry still sets the gold standard even if he trails in the polls. When he arrived in Boone, fresh off of a separate motorcycle ride he did for an organization that supports veterans, attendees and cameras swarmed him. The Texan posed for pictures, put his hands on peoples’ shoulders and clasped attendees’ hands as he worked his way across the field as voters praised him as a “patriot.” He also got the rare shout-out from Ernst, who was asked how she felt about his organizing another motorcycle event.
“I do want to thank him, actually, for doing this because he is riding with a number of military veterans” and those are the beneficiaries of his ride, she said, adding that she was “grateful” for his effort.
It’s clearly not 2011, when Perry entered the presidential race as the frontrunner before flaming out shortly after, but don’t underestimate his retail politicking skills. There’s a reason he’s the longest-serving governor in Texas history, and he gave a taste of that Saturday.
Carly Fiorina continues to gain traction
Fiorina often gets rave reviews from conservative activists for her pointed criticism of Hillary Clinton — and she continued to impress with that message Saturday.
“There was recently a poll this week that asked Americans who they most wanted to see debate Hillary Clinton,” she said, as someone appeared to shout, “you!” To applause and laughter, Fiorina continued, “I was gratified that I won that poll, and so I was thinking this morning, I really would be tempted, on that general election debate stage, to ask Hillary, if she’s ever ridden on a John Deere tractor [something Fiorina did that morning.]. I know she’s had a few photo ops. But the truth is, the question we need to ask Hillary Clinton now is, ‘Mrs. Clinton, what else don’t we know?’”
Fiorina also scored points in talking about Israel, the Veterans’ Administration and the size of government. She received loud applause when she said her first phone call as president would be to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “a man I’ve known a long time.”
At the moment, Fiorina isn’t yet guaranteed a place in the upcoming debates because of her low station in the polls. But if she continues to use her Clinton zingers to stand out and energize crowds — as she did here — it’s hard to imagine she’ll remain at the bottom of GOP polls.
Noted in Iowa — who wasn’t there
A few top-tier contenders failed to make the scene — Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz all skipped the event.
Bush had a family obligation — it’s his mother’s 90th birthday weekend —and Paul and Cruz were both campaigning elsewhere, in New Hampshire and North Carolina respectively. Paul, in particular, has missed a slew of cattle calls, opting to campaign on his own schedule instead.
This one stands out as a missed opportunity, though. It’s not that attendees were lamenting their absence. Rather, they didn‘t seem to be missed at all. Voters were too distracted by, and excited about, the face-time they were getting with the other 2016 candidates — and that’s exactly the problem for Bush, Cruz and Paul. At the Roast and Ride, even candidates who barely register in the polls, like Lindsey Graham, were generally surrounded by curious voters, and all of the candidates in attendance used the event as an organizing tool to build out their Iowa lists. Given the uncertainties about who will participate in the Iowa Straw Poll in August, it’s unclear when another Iowa politicking opportunity this good will come along.
Republican Walker is leader of 2016 election pack in Iowa // Reuters // John Whitesides – June 6, 2015
Scott Walker, a likely Republican presidential contender who is riding high in polls in the early voting state of Iowa, was literally the leader of the pack on Saturday at a gathering of 2016 White House hopefuls.
Walker, the governor of neighboring Wisconsin, joined U.S. Senator Joni Ernst at the head of a parade of about 300 motorcycle riders who traveled 39 miles (62 km)to Ernst's inaugural "Roast and Ride," a political event combining barbecue and the roar of Harley-Davidsons.
The spot in front was appropriate for the new front-runner in Iowa, the state that in seven months holds the first nominating contest to pick the party's presidential candidate before the November 2016 election.
Walker, who built his reputation by taking on labor unions, has led the five most recent polls in Iowa, including the respected Des Moines Register poll. The Register showed him with a seven-percentage point lead over four tightly bunched rivals and found he was viewed favorably by two-thirds of likely Iowa caucus-goers.
"If the caucuses were today, he would win. Unless he really screws up, he should win," said Doug Gross, state chairman for Mitt Romney's 2008 campaign and former chief of staff for longtime Governor Terry Branstad.
Iowa political veterans say Walker's popularity stems from his Midwestern background and his appeal to all elements of the state's Republican base, from pragmatic establishment voters looking for a winner to the social and religious conservatives who play an influential role in the state's politics.
But things will get tougher for Walker as he moves into the daily grind of face-to-face campaigning in a state where voters are accustomed to being wooed.
"The next test for Governor Walker is transitioning from the big stage, multi-candidate events to the hand-to-hand combat of retail campaigning and organizing in Iowa," said former state party chairman Matt Strawn.
Walker has not formally declared his candidacy, and he told reporters on Saturday he would make the announcement "probably soon after the end of this month."
The governor also dodged questions about whether he would participate in the state's straw poll in August, a test of strength that traditionally winnows the field. The poll has been criticized for being too expensive for candidates.
Several other contenders, including former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, have said they will skip the straw poll. Without Walker, the state party might be forced to drop it.
Walker, a motorcycle enthusiast who addressed Saturday's crowd in his black Harley-Davidson t-shirt, was one of seven declared or likely Republican presidential contenders to give brief speeches at Ernst's barbecue.
Texas Governor Rick Perry led his own motorcycle ride to the fairgrounds. U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, former business executive Carly Fiorina and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson spoke but did not participate in the motorcycle ride, although each contender put up a tent at the site to woo voters.
Walker pushed back at criticism from Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton about Wisconsin's voting laws.
"In our state, we have a law that makes it easy to vote but hard to cheat," he said. "It’s another example of how Hillary Clinton is squarely out of touch with mainstream America."
Republicans at the barbecue said Walker's record of battling public sector labor unions to restrict bargaining rights was a strong selling point - along with his two election wins and a victory in a recall effort in Democratic-leaning Wisconsin.
"My No. 1 thing is I want to support a Republican who can win in 2016, and I think Walker can win," said Ron Tekippe, a computer programmer from Ankeny who likes Walker but is still undecided.
Scott Walker: Hillary Clinton "firmly out of touch" on voting rights // CBS News // Reena Flores – June 6, 2015
Potential Republican presidential candidate and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker knocked Hillary Clinton for being "firmly out of touch" on the issue of voting rights just days after the former secretary of state announced her proposals championing minority access to voting.
"In our state we have a photo ID requirement that would make it easy to vote and hard to cheat," Walker told reporters Saturday at Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst's Roast and Ride event. "And I think that's a good example where her statements of late show that she's firmly out of touch with I think where mainstream America is."
When asked by a reporter about universal voter registration for the state of Wisconsin, Walker shrugged and shook his head, pointing instead to Wisconsin's turnout records.
"From our standpoint, we think we've got one of the most effective systems right now where we have one of the highest levels of voter participation," Walker said. "We've got a pretty good system."
In the 2012 general election, Wisconsin had the second-highest voter-turnout rate in the nation with 73 percent of the population participating. The state trailed just behind Minnesota, which had a 76 percent turnout rate. Wisconsin also ranked second in the nation during the 2008 general election.
In a speech Thursday calling on Congress to restore portions of the Voting Rights Act, Clinton singled out the Wisconsin governor for cutting back early voting and signing legislation that would make it more difficult for college students to vote.
"Today, Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting," Clinton said Thursday at Texas Southern University in Houston, a historically black college. "What part of democracy are they afraid of?"
Clinton specifically named three other current and former Republican governors who, the former first lady says, enacted policies that limited minority voting opportunities.
"We have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what's really going on," Clinton said. "What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to the other."
When Walker was asked Saturday about the changes his administration had done in Wisconsin, he said the reforms were "just common sense."
"I can pull out my driver's license right here," Walker said, drawing out the ID card. "Again, we make it available for people to get a driver's license or a state-issued ID card. I think most Americans regardless of party overwhelmingly think that's a common sense reform."
Clinton also attacked former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who recently declared his candidacy for president, and criticized other potential GOP contenders like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
Christie told CBS' "Face the Nation" this week that the former secretary of state "doesn't know what she's talking about" on voter fraud.
"In New Jersey, we have early voting that are available to people," the Republican governor said. "I don't want to expand it and increase the opportunities for fraud. And maybe that's what Mrs. Clinton wants to do. I don't know. But the fact is that the folks in New Jersey have plenty of an opportunity to vote."
Scott Walker in Iowa: 'We did not inherit fame or fortune' // The Hill // Rebecca Shabad – June 6, 2015
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told voters in the key early-voting state of Iowa on Saturday he didn’t inherit fame or fortune, but worked hard to achieve the American dream.
“I look back on my life, and my brother and I realized we did not inherit fame or fortune from our family. What we got was more important, and that is the belief that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can do and be everything you want in America,” Walker said in a short speech at an event hosted by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).
“That’s the American dream!” he said.
The Wisconsin governor, who has not yet officially launched a 2016 presidential bid, has been leading other GOP contenders in recent Iowa polls.
On Saturday, Walker led a pack of 300 motorcyclists on a 28-mile route with Ernst for the “Roast and Ride” event.
Walker said his first jobs were washing dishes and flipping hamburgers at McDonalds. His dad was a small-town preacher and his mom was a bookkeeper.
“We understand that true freedom and prosperity does not come from the mighty hand of the government," said Walker, who was dressed in jeans, a black t-shirt and a baseball cap.
Walker slammed President Obama’s foreign policies, calling for a president who will view radical Islamic terrorism is a threat.
"We’re going to stand up and fight it,” he said. “We need a leader in America that Israel is actually an ally and should start treating it as such.”
“We need to lead from the front again in America,” he added.
Walker was the only speaker at the "Roast and Ride" event to note launch a 2016 White House campaign.
The other speakers were former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Dr. Ben Carson and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.
Christie slams Clinton on voter IDs: 'She doesn't know what she's talking about' // Washington Examiner // Sean Higgins - June 6, 2015
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, R-N.J., slammed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, over her recent remarks that Republicans were using voter ID laws in an effort to discourage legal voters.
"Well, first, she doesn't know what she's talking about. ...[T]he fact is that the folks in New Jersey have plenty of an opportunity to vote. And maybe, you know, if she took some questions some places and learned some things, maybe she wouldn't make such ridiculous statements," Christie told CBS's "Face the Nation." The interview was recorded Friday and set to air tomorrow, according to Politico.
In a speech Thursday in Houston, Clinton attacked the push for voter ID laws, mostly initiated by Republican governors.
"What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to the other," Clinton said.
Suggestions include: taxes and spending, environmental laws, govt research, Medicaid and infrastructure.
She singled out Christie for vetoing a bill that would have allowed in-person early voting at polling places. New Jersey does not have a voter ID law.
Republicans counter that the laws are modest protections to prevent fraud. The Supreme Court said in 2008 that state could adopt laws requiring a photo ID, such as a driver's license, to vote. In March, it refused to hear an appeal regarding a Wisconsin law.
Can Rick Perry close the deal? // WaPo // Stephanie McCrummen – June 5, 2015
When it happens, Rick Perry is speaking to a friendly crowd in a plaid-and-paisley living room in Greenville, S.C. He appears relaxed. His suit fits perfectly. Hair: just great. Glasses: starting to seem more natural.
He’s gotten nods talking about jobs in Texas, laughs with the line about flunking organic chemistry and claps when he says a brighter future “starts right here . . . today!”
Then a man poses a question about the importance of speaking plainly, and Perry pauses a moment before he answers by asking rhetorically, which is to say confidently: “Did I say anything today you couldn’t understand?”
Because Rick Perry is a winker, and has been for a long time.
“It’s something he’s always done,” said a friend who has known Perry since he was a Texas state legislator in the 1980s. “I’ve seen him do it at an inaugural, from a podium. It’s a way he communicates. He’s very good at it, and it’s very disarming. It’s real natural to him. Like some people can whistle with their fingers? Actually, he can do that, too.”
It could be argued that the Perry persona comes down to the wink, which friends and supporters describe as part of a broader repertoire of natural-born gifts that makes the 65-year-old former Texas governor one of the most instinctive retail politicians in the 2016 GOP field.
Other notable political winkers: George W. Bush, who winked at Queen Elizabeth II after he accidentally suggested she helped America celebrate its birthday in 1776 rather than 1976; Sarah Palin, who winked during 2008 vice-presidential debates; President Obama, who winked in his State of the Union speech earlier this year, after dressing down the congressmen who clapped when he alluded to the end of his term.
More recently, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott apologized for winking at the host of a call-in radio show as a retiree explained that she was surviving by working for an adult sex line, an incident that came to be called “winkgate.”
The Rick Perry wink, though, comes with its own set of associations.
On one hand, it evokes his bona fide country upbringing, Texas swagger and ability to say things such as “I’m gonna love on you,” meaning flatter you, without sounding as though he is laying it on thick. Only a winker could sell T-shirts with his own grinning mug shot, as Perry did after being indicted last year on felony abuse-of-power charges that he has dismissed as politically motivated.
More fundamentally, the wink can seem to reveal a certain sensitivity — an ability to read a room, to feel for the right moment to reach in for the handshake, touch an elbow or a shoulder and close the deal.
On the other hand, a wink can evoke the overconfidence and cheap tricks of the used-car salesman, the sort of character that Perry’s critics have often cast him as, especially after his performance in the 2012 Republican primary. The infamous debate when Perry froze — trying for 45 seconds to remember the third federal agency he would abolish, before he finally gave up with an "oops" — has been read not just as a human fumble but the moment he was exposed as a lightweight.
All of which leads to the question: Which is it?
Is the wink the mark of Perry’s essential authenticity, possibly his greatest asset? Or does it represent his biggest challenge — overcoming the perception that he’s all flash and little substance? Or is it something more complicated?
What is the meaning of the Rick Perry wink?
Part of the answer lies in Greenville, where the wink is playing well in a friendly room.
For one, Perry’s timing is impeccable. He deploys the wink at the moment the audience seems most with him, as they’re still laughing. Second, the wink isn’t strained; it seems natural, even through the lenses of his hipster glasses. Third, he aims it not at the man who asked the question but in the opposite direction — toward a cluster of women, including Racine Cooper, the bylaws chairwoman of the Greenville County Republican Women’s Club, who says later that he struck her as “a simple person who knows what it is to say something plainly. He’s not full of it.”
After the wink, Perry grins and shifts back into a more serious tone.
“Good,” he says as the laughs die down. “All right. Hey, listen. I’m telling ya. We’re on the verge of the greatest days in America’s history. That’s not rhetoric.”
He thanks South Carolina for sending soldiers to defend the Alamo, then steps into a red-walled room for the meet-and-greet.
“Watch him,” says Katon Dawson, state chairman of Perry’s political action committee. “Whether you’re with Rick or not, you can’t not like him.”
“C’mon, man, get in here!” Perry is saying to a man in a blue blazer, shaking his hand then pulling him in for a photo, arm around his back in what seems less like a pose than a one-armed hug. “All right.”
To a man in a button-down shirt: “Get in here. . . . What kind of work you do?”
“I’m in property,” the man says.
To the man in khakis: “How old?”
“Twenty-nine,” the man says.
“Twenty-nine,” Perry repeats, taking the arm of a woman next in line while keeping eye contact with the man. “I got a daughter who’s 29 . . . ”
He turns to the woman, who shakes his hand with her two and holds it.
“We watched you in Spartanburg last time,” she says gravely, referring to the last days of his 2012 campaign. “Good to see you again.”
“Well,” Perry says, upbeat, “I’m healthy and prepared this time.”
He gives her shoulder a squeeze and moves on to a woman who says she is from Colombia.
“Medellin?” Perry guesses.
“Yes!” the woman says.
To a man with a buzz cut who appears to lift weights: “I bet I can guess your line of work.” Then Perry guesses correctly: security.
To a couple: “And who are you?”
“Seth and Mariah,” the husband says.
“And the wind was named Mariah,” Perry sings for a moment, riffing on lyrics from a Broadway musical far older than them, “Paint Your Wagon.”
“Pretty name,” he says to the woman, then turns to a young man. “C’mon in here!”
It all suggests an extroverted personality, and yet when asked how he prefers to spend his free time, Perry answers like an introvert.
“I’d rather spend time with my dogs,” he says in an interview at a Hyatt Place hotel in Greenville the morning after the fundraiser. “I just like being in the country and being with the dogs. It’s fun to watch the dogs.”
Asked about how he reads a room, or closes a deal, Perry shrugs.
“I don’t have a checklist I go down,” he says.
He grew up in the dusty flat sprawl of Paint Creek in West Texas, where his father, Ray Perry, was a cotton farmer and longtime county commissioner, so politicking was always in the air.
Perry’s mother, Amelia, told the Dallas Morning News that when Ray and other men would gather to talk before service at the Methodist church, her 7-year-old son was always there, trying to work his way into the circle. “He wanted those men to recognize him,” she said.
In elementary school, he campaigned for Halloween king by handing out candy.
There is the often-told but unverified story that when Perry, a popular high school football player, once got knocked flat out on the field and the coach went to ask if he was okay, Perry replied that he was fine but wanted to know how the fans were taking it.
At Texas A&M, Perry was known for elaborate pranks, such as dropping an M-80 firecracker down a toilet pipe.
He was popular, but he also wanted to be popular, winning election to be one of five “yell leaders,” a prestigious position at the school that is essentially like being a cheerleader.
Then there was his first job: as a Bible-book salesman.
During college, Perry worked for the Southwestern Co. in Festus, Mo., where he was dropped off with a friend from college, John Brieden, at a gas station with nothing but his dad’s old Army bag and a box of Bible encylopedias, dictionaries and Wycliffe commentaries.
The young men rented a room in town, ate breakfast at a diner and split up for long, hot days of knocking on doors in their sections of town, making the sales pitch they were taught during a week of training in Nashville.
“You’d do it so many times it became normal,” recalls Brieden, who went on to become an insurance salesman and is now a county judge in Texas. “We had a case we carried a set of books in. So you’d set the book on the case, hold the book so you’re looking at it upside down, flipping the pages, and then ask them to buy.”
At night, the two young men would sit at the diner and compare notes.
“John and I, we would support each other every evening when we got in,” Perry says in the interview, then leans in and lowers his voice to reenact the dinner-table scene. “ ‘You know how many super-sets I sold today? A bunch.’ And we might not have sold any.”
The former governor of Texas is a good bluffer.
“Got told no a lot,” Perry says, asked about whether selling came easily.
He pauses and leans in again.
“But I got told yes enough to buy a 1967 Catalina Pontiac!” he says, grinning. “I want to say it was $2,700, which, that is a huge amount of money in 1969!”
Perry always had a well of ambition underneath the charm, Brieden says, recalling a conversation at the washateria that summer. Perry asked Brieden whether he had goals; Brieden said he wanted to pay for college.
“He said, ‘No, no, what are your goals?’ ” Brieden recalls. “He said, ‘I’ve got three goals.’ ”
One was to graduate, which the chemistry-challenged Perry knew was no guarantee for him; two was to be a yell leader; three was to be a member of the Ross Volunteers at Texas A&M, an elite group of cadets who served as honor guard for the Texas governor.
“He did all of those three things,” Brieden says.
Perry talks to a Fox News reporter via speakerphone in December in his Austin office, a few weeks before the end of his term. (Julia Robinson for The Washington Post)
After college, Perry joined the Air Force and flew C-130 cargo planes, duty that included rotations in England and Germany and missions to Saudi Arabia and South America.
Then something happened that could be considered out of character for someone as driven and cocky as Perry seemed: In 1977, he came home to Paint Creek, moved into his childhood bedroom and spent six years adrift.
“I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t happy,” Perry has said of that time, describing himself as “lost.”
He helped on the cotton farm, but Perry’s parents also recalled in an interview with the Dallas Morning News how their son would disappear for days with nothing but a bedroll, his horse and his dog. A neighbor recalledhow Perry would borrow his plane and just take off somewhere.
Eventually, he decided to apply for a pilot job with Southwest Airlines. But before he got hired, a group of young Texan politicos convinced him there was a better use for his rugged good looks and obvious gifts, and Perry entered a profession that chose him as much as he chose it.
He was elected as a Democrat to the state legislature, and then was persuaded to run as a Republican for agriculture commissioner, a campaign that included the famous “Marlboro Man” ad in which Perry is filmed in chaps, saddling up a horse and silhouetted at sunset.
He won, and kept on winning, eventually becoming the longest-serving governor in state history, a job he approached the way he knew best: as a salesman.
Perry’s critics and admirers alike say that his central achievement has been to sell Texas, luring companies from Toyota to eBay to Latex Foam International to the state with billions in incentives, face-to-face pitches and radio ads.
“This is Texas Governor Rick Perry, and I have a message for California businesses,” began one that aired in the state in 2013. “Come check out Texas . . . and see why our low taxes, sensible regulations and fair legal system are just the thing to get your business moving. To Texas.”
Perry set up the controversial Texas Enterprise Fund, which critics called a massive slush fund that has rewarded Perry’s political allies and which Perry called “the largest deal-closing fund of its kind in the nation.”
“Look, in powers of persuasion, he is among the top of all the governors, and I’ve worked with a lot,” says Dennis Cuneo, a former vice president for Toyota who was in charge of site selection for a new pickup-truck assembly plant soon after Perry became governor in 2000. “It’s his whole demeanor. The way he shakes your hand, how he looks you in the eye. He says, ‘I’m here to make you successful.’ ”
Cuneo says he was struck by the governor’s unbridled enthusiasm.
“Texas was a long shot,” he says. “So I paid a visit to Perry in 2002. It was supposed to be a half-hour meeting and turned into two hours.”
Cuneo says Perry knew he had grown up in Pennsylvania and struck up a long conversation about Pittsburgh. Perry told him that the pickup was “born in Texas” and that moving there would help with Toyota’s marketing. He upped the incentive package. He mentioned that he had spoken to the family that needed to sell the land for a potential site. He gave Cuneo his cellphone number, and when Cuneo called later, Perry answered.
“He’s governor of a pretty big state — that doesn’t happen often,” he says, laughing slightly at Perry’s aggressive pitch. “He knows how to close the deal.”
At the start of the 2012 GOP primary, Perry was closing deals all over the place, raising millions from the business community, winning the support of conservative Christians, bounding out of his bus in the South Carolina sun and soaring to the top of the polls.
The wink and all the confidence and swagger it embodied seemed to be working again — until the oops, and an especially animated speech in New Hampshire that was odd enough that some speculated that Perry was drunk or high on painkillers for a back condition, all of which Perry denied.
There was a last, awkward swing through South Carolina in which Perry wandered through an empty antique shop and, finally, in a moment that was the opposite of a wink, announced he was dropping out and returned to Texas.
Rick Perry in his own words: His take on guns, Obamacare and more
Only now here he is again, trying to get it all back.
He’s at a Pizza Ranch in Indianola, Iowa, where some voters say they can get past the oops if Perry can.
He’s at the conservative gathering called CPAC in Maryland, walking on stage to AC/DC’s “Back in Black” and delivering a speech during which his body language appears stiffer than it does in a small room. As he often does, he begins by saying the world is more dangerous now than ever before, and that “on three points, we must be clear” — and then successfully reels off the three.
And he’s in Greenville, at the Hyatt Place hotel, saying that he didn’t learn everything about retail politics in one place, and talking about Paint Creek, dust storms and his parents, the well-worn stories of his stump speech.
“So,” Perry is saying, “watching your—”
He stops himself. He pauses. Five seconds pass. Six. He’s squinting into the corner of the room. Seven seconds. Still pausing.
And this is the other thing about Rick Perry: As confident and swaggering as he can seem these days, there are still moments when he can seem lost. Not exactly lost in thought. Just lost, not unlike he appeared to be on stage during the debates in 2011 — far from Texas and the persona he created there, standing before crowds that were not always friendly, not necessarily buying what he was selling.
“We never had a lot of new things,” Perry says finally, and now he’s back to the familiar persona and stump-speech stories, talking about how the harsh life of west Texas taught him how to handle adversity, his father’s stoicism, and on until an aide tells him that it’s time to go.
And it is somewhere between then and Perry’s closing argument — that he’s better prepared this time, and that he’s certain voters “will see a very different individual when it comes to my performance” — that it happens again.
Perry winks and, a little while later, heads to New Hampshire.
Perry touts experience as governor // The Hill // Mark Hensch – June 6, 2015
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry said Saturday his time governing Texas made him the best candidate for the White House in 2016.
“This is going to be a ‘show me, don’t tell me’ election,” Perry told listeners at the inaugural “Ride and Roast” event in Boone, Iowa.
Perry cited the diverse range of challenges he had faced while governing Texas as proof he was ready to lead the nation.
“No one gave me a manual that says, ‘Here’s how you deal with Ebola when it shows up on the shores of America and in your state,’ ” he said.
“No one gave me a manual when tens of thousands of people showed up on our borders and our federal government failed in its constitutional duty to keep it secure,” Perry said. “If you elect me president, I will secure that border.”
Perry said he would authorize the Keystone XL oil pipeline as a means of making the U.S. “energy secure.”
He also promised he would lower the nation’s corporate taxes, regulations he called the “highest corporate tax rate in the Western world.”
“Let’s make 2016 the great year of getting America back to being America again,” Perry told listeners.
“America’s freedoms are the greatest in the world, and we need to fight for them every day,” Perry added. “If you elect me the president of these United States, that is exactly what I will do for you.”
Perry touted past U.S. history as proof of American exceptionalism.
“We’ve been through a Civil War, we’ve been through two World Wars, we’ve been through a Great Depression,” he said.
“We’ve been through Jimmy Carter, we can make it through a President Obama,” he quipped.
The former Texas governor remarked that the right president could make 2016 the starting point of America’s brightest future yet.
“We are just a few policy changes at the top from the greatest days of our nation,” Perry said.
“This is an incredible country,” he added. “I am excited about the future of America.”
Perry launched his 2016 campaign Thursday from an airplane hangar outside Dallas.
“We have the power to make things new again,” he said Thursday, flanked by Marines, Navy SEALs and Medal of Honor recipients. “And that is why I am running for the presidency of the United States of America.”
Perry vowed he would approach the campaign trail with renewed resolve after his failed 2012 bid.
He has made his gubernatorial experience a central part of his campaign rhetoric since joining the race.
“Leadership is not a speech you give on the Senate floor,” he said Thursday. “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.”
“I have been tested,” he added. “I have led the most successful state in America.”
Rick Perry announces Iowa presidential campaign team // The Des Moines Register // William Petroski – June 6, 2015
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday, said Saturday his Iowa caucus campaign will be headed by Sam Clovis, a prominent Republican activist from northwest Iowa.
Clovis, who supported Rick Santorum for president four years ago, unsuccessfully ran for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate in a June primary last year and then lost a November bid for state treasurer. Clovis served 25 years in the Air Force as a fighter pilot and now is an economics professor at Morningside College in Sioux City. He is also well-known in northwest Iowa for his work as a radio talk show host.
Robert Haus, senior strategist. Haus was co-chairman of Perry's 2012 Iowa campaign. He has helped oversee the Iowa presidential caucus campaigns for Steve Forbes, Fred Thompson and Phil Gramm. He is a New Hampton native who has also led several statewide and congressional races in Iowa.
Jamie Johnson, senior director. Johnson will work with conservative leaders in Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire. He has spent three decades in local, state and federal politics across the United States, including work on Santorum's 2012 campaign. Johnson is an ordained Anglican minister.
Sheila Murphy, Iowa consultant focusing on coalition building. Murphy is a longtime GOP activist in Iowa and Nebraska. She was campaign manager for Brenna Findley's attorney general campaign in 2010 and political director of Rod Robert's 2010 governor's campaign.
Andy Swanson, Iowa state director. An Iowa native, Swanson has experience in Iowa, having worked on two previous presidential campaigns and several statewide efforts. He is originally from Dayton.
Dane Nealson, eastern Iowa political director. He is a native of West Liberty and has more than a decade of campaign experience. He worked for Perry in 2012. Nealson is also the former chairman of the Story County GOP.
Kip Murphy, western Iowa political director. Murphy is a longtime Iowa grassroots activist, having worked in the field for several congressional and statewide candidates. Murphy is also the former chairman of the Harrison County GOP.
Quentin Marquez, Iowa field director. He worked with Americans for Prosperity in 2014, and has held executive positions with the University of Iowa College Republicans and Iowa Federation of College Republicans.
Christina Bettini, Iowa field director. Bettini worked with the Iowa House Majority Fund in 2014 and has been a legislative clerk in the Iowa Statehouse.
Huckabee: I'm 'only person' to take on Clinton machine // The Hill // Mark Hensch – June 6, 2015
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Saturday he was the only 2016 GOP presidential candidate who had experience facing off with the Clintons in past elections.
“I fought the Clinton political machine in every election I’ve been in,” he said at the first annual “Roast and Ride” in Boone, Iowa.
“If you want someone who has fought the Clinton political machine and won, you’re looking at the only person who has lived to tell about it,” he said of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Huckabee encountered the Clintons while serving as Arkansas’ governor between 1996 and 2007.
He charged Saturday that they represent the kind of political power he would avoid should he win in 2016.
“America is a great country, but we are losing this nation because we have failed to understand that when we elect people, they have to serve us,” Huckabee said. “We are not supposed to serve them.”
Huckabee argued that a government divorced from its people put its own interests before theirs.
He cited the economy as an example of imbalance he would fix upon taking the Oval Office.
“People are working harder than ever before and have less to show for it,” Huckabee said. “There are a lot of people in this country that are sweating through their clothes and lifting heavy things every day.”
Military veterans struggling for their benefits, he added, was another example of failed leadership.
“It is a shame they have to beg and plead to get their veterans’ benefits from” the Department of Veterans Affairs, he said.
“This is a government that has broken a lot of its promises,” he added.
Huckabee also ripped Social Security as a program the federal government was badly mismanaging.
“We’re not talking about an entitlement,” he said. “This is an earned benefit you paid for.”
The former Arkansas governor doubled down on his recent criticism of the Supreme Court for abusing its powers.
“Nine unelected, black-robed judges do not get to determine what’s right or wrong,” he said, calling their decisions “judicial tyranny” if left unchecked.
Huckabee concluded his remarks by mentioning that the birth of his fifth grandchild was expected on Sunday.
He said he wanted to ensure a vibrant future for his family’s latest addition by winning the White House next year.
“I’m on a mission to make this country a better one for my five grandchildren than it would be if we keep going down the direction we’re heading on,” Huckabee said.
Hillary Clinton draws ire of John Kasich on voting // The Columbus Dispatch // Darrel Rowland – June 6, 2015
Ohio Gov. John Kasich chastised Hillary Clinton on Friday for engaging in “pure demagoguery” on voting rights when the country is struggling with racial issues.
“We live in a time when race relations are very sensitive, and to be using that kind of reckless language is not helpful to this country,” Kasich said before his final event of the two-day swing through the state that holds the nation’s first primary election.
“To be saying that Republicans are intent on cutting people off to vote — that’s targeted at folks that feel very vulnerable.”
Clinton, speaking at a historically black college in Texas on Thursday, blasted voting restrictions imposed by the GOP in Ohio and other states.
“We have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what’s really going on in our country, because what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other,” the former secretary of state said.
But Kasich fired back: “It’s downright divisive to say that there is a plot to take away your right to vote. That’s the kind of thing in this campaign that will further divide America, and I’m not in this to divide the country, I’m in this to help be a uniter.”
The jousting with Clinton came the day after he warned fellow Republicans about criticizing her over issues such as Benghazi and the Clinton Foundation.
He defended the latest remarks by noting they did not touch on any of the areas he warned about. “I said there’ll be a time and place. Unfortunately, the time has come because of those comments. It’s outrageous.”
The back-and-forth began with an appearance on Fox News where Kasich said Clinton’s language “ was really offensive to me. And I like Hillary and I haven’t been attacking Hillary, OK? But for her to say that there are Republicans who are deliberately trying to keep people from voting? It’s just pure demagoguery.”
He said it was “silliness” for Clinton to criticize Ohio for repressing the vote when the state has 28 days of early voting and New York (where Clinton lives) has only Election Day.
Daniel Wessel, press secretary for the pro-Clinton group Correct the Record, said, “Gov. Kasich is trying to distract from the many efforts of Republicans in his state to make it more difficult for Ohioans to vote — including limiting early-voting locations and attempting to limit early-voting hours. Hillary Clinton’s proposals would make it easier for all eligible voters to vote, unlike Gov. Kasich, who has turned this fundamental right of Americans into a partisan issue.”
Kasich’s comments echoed those made by other Ohio Republicans on Thursday — including Secretary of State Jon Husted — who noted that Clinton’s proposal to require at least 20 days of early voting in every state already is exceeded in Ohio.
Last month, an attorney who represents the campaign of Clinton and several other Democrats filed a federal lawsuit against Husted and Attorney General Mike DeWine, saying that GOP officials’ actions were designed “to bolster artificially the likelihood of success of Republican candidates in Ohio elections,” which “threatens the very bedrock of our democracy.”
Ohio Democratic Chairman David Pepper said in a statement: “When Gov. Kasich says it’s ‘ demagoguery’ to fight for expanded access to the polls, he’s the one being divisive. The act of voting is essential to our idea of America, and our democracy is better when every citizen can participate. Wanting more people to vote and modernizing elections doesn’t divide Americans; it unites them.
“When Kasich and Secretary of State Jon Husted tout Ohio voting laws, they leave out a key fact: Ohio’s voting laws are what they are today because civil-rights groups, community leaders and Ohio Democrats have taken Husted and the state to court over and over again to stop numerous attacks on voting rights.”
Ben Carson’s Nascent Campaign Faces Personnel Turmoil // NYT // Ashley Parker – June 6, 2015
Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon and Tea Party folk hero, has emerged as one of the most talked-about Republican candidates for president in 2016, buoyed by the strength of his outsider’s appeal and captivating life story.
But the very political greenness that has made Mr. Carson such an attractive candidate to his fans is also proving problematic as he tries to ramp up his campaign organization.
Since officially declaring himself a candidate in Detroit last month, Mr. Carson’s organization has unraveled, with the loss of four top staff members: his campaign chairman, national finance chairman, deputy campaign manager and general counsel. The Washington Post first reported the turmoil on Saturday.
But walking into Senator Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride” here on Saturday, Mr. Carson showed up with an easy smile and ready set of talking points, brushing off the reports. He breezily described the recent staff departures as a “planned exodus” and said his campaign was “running as smoothly as it possibly can be.”
“Things could not be better,” Mr. Carson said, listing his more than 140,000 donations, social media presence and standing in the polls. “It’s hard to imagine how we could be doing any better, so if that’s what chaos is, bring it on.”
Yet the struggles of Team Carson appear to be both internal and external. Two outside “super PACs,” Run Ben Run and One Vote, have found themselves competing with each other, and the Carson campaign, to attract money and volunteers.
Terry Giles, who resigned as Mr. Carson’s campaign chairman last month, plans to start yet another super PAC; he told The Post he hoped to convince the other two groups to stand down and coordinate with his effort, the goal of which is to complement the official campaign more seamlessly.
Asked about the tension between his outside groups, Mr. Carson noted that he was, by law, not allowed to coordinate with them. But, he added, in an ideal world, “I would like to see everybody singing ‘Kumbaya.’ ”
Dick Morris: Ben Carson's Fame Helps GOP Run, But More Is Needed // Newsweek // Todd Beamon – June 5, 2015
Presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson has so far successfully translated his fame as a world-renowned neurosurgeon to politics, but the biggest challenge he faces is trying to "convince Republicans that he can take on Hillary Clinton," political analyst Dick Morris told Newsmax TV on Friday.
"You're asking someone who's never been around a heavyweight boxing match to get into the ring with Muhammad Ali," Morris, who served in the Bill Clinton administration, told "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth. "There is nobody that has more experience at doing this than Hillary.
"All of the debates she had while running for Senate, running for president, and all the primaries and now again," he added. "It's scary to think of somebody who has never been around, been fighting for a round, to be in that match.
"He has to convince people that he can hold his own — and that's the big obstacle."
Carson's soft-spoken, easygoing style could prove daunting for a White House run, Morris said as he reflected on Arizona Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential race.
"It didn't work with McCain. You're always sort of wanting to turn up the volume when he was speaking," Morris said. "I don't think it's going to be an effective approach. He's got to be much more forceful and much more dynamic.
"Politics is its own occupation — and I don't think I could do neurosurgery, and it takes some adjustment of skills to do politics.
"Dr. Carson's approach is a very good one in a vacuum, but when it comes to fighting someone and going head-to-head, toe-to-toe, that's harder — and that kind of a low-key approach sometimes will get run over by a truck," Morris said.
But there's another reality that could work against Carson: President Barack Obama.
"We all have in the back of our minds have Obama, who had almost no experience, more than Carson, but not much — and look at how ineptly he's governed," he told Hayworth.
"I'm just concerned about bringing someone in who's got nothing, doesn't know anything about the process."
Throughout the campaign trail, Carson has noted the pressure involved in separating conjoined twins and other sensitive pediatric operations around the world during his nearly four decades as a physician, but politics requires a different set of skills, Morris cautioned.
"What's important here is the give and take, because there's always a subtext going on. One is who's wining the debate, who's making the points. The other is who's a strong and forceful leader?
"That's the one strength that Hillary has — and going against Carson without Carson being more aggressive is going to be difficult to watch," Morris said.
The analyst's advice to Carson: distinguish himself from other Republican candidates.
"It is important that Carson takes one or two issues, preferably issues where he disagrees with the other Republicans," Morris told Hayworth. "Maybe it's free trade fast-track deal, maybe the NSA reform bill that just passed — maybe he wants to go further.
"It's important that he takes a political issue and use it to define his advocacy, his strength, and his position. Because you can't run for president just on a resume."
Why is Ben Carson doing so well in the polls? // WaPo // Amber Phillips – June 5, 2015
He has compared Obamacare to slavery, thrown around words like bestiality and pedophilia while arguing against same-sex marriage and said our society resembles Nazi Germany.
He's basically the longest of long shots to run our country in 2017, and there are signs his nascent presidential campaign is struggling with this reality.
So why is retired pediatric neurosurgeon, political novice and presidential candidate Ben Carson near the top of almost every recent poll of the 2016 race?
A recap:
A Washington Post-ABC News poll out this week had Carson tied for sixth among Republican-leaning voters -- but in a statistical tie for the lead in the crowded field. He was at 7 percent alongside Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, while the leader, Jeb Bush, was at 13 percent.
A Fox News poll released Wednesday of likely GOP primary voters found Carson third among 16 candidates, at 11 percent. That's just behind Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, each at 12 percent. Again, a statistical tie for the lead.
The Real Clear Politics average of national polls has Carson tied with libertarian-leaning Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul for fourth place overall.
The answer has less to do with Carson's skill as a candidate and more to do with his background and fortunate timing. Carson has arguably the best non-political background in the field, and he's running for president in an election in which there are so many candidates on the GOP side that it's going to be incredibly tough for one person to command much of a lead.
In contrast, around this time before the 2012 presidential elections, seven GOP candidates were in the race. Eventual nominee Mitt Romney led the field with 17 percent of the vote, according to the Real Clear Politics average. And even that was pretty low for a frontrunner.
At this point, any candidate who has a small, committed group of supporters is going to stand out. And Carson definitely has street cred among tea party supporters.
He earned star power and fueled presidential buzz in conservative circles back in 2013, when he criticized President Obama at a National Prayer Breakfast with the president sitting just a few feet again. Since then he's elevated himself to celebrity status among conservatives.
There's a big difference between getting 10 percent of the vote and competing to win states -- a far taller hurdle for a political novice like Carson. But being at 10 percent also means Carson will look like a contender until other candidates start actually rising from the mess of a crowded field that exists.
But we shouldn't expect that 10 percent support to dry up, no matter how badly his campaign struggles. After all, he got it with very little skill as a candidate, and the things that give him a niche today aren't really going away.
Carson: Political experience not needed to be a good president // The Hill // Mark Hensch – June 6, 2015
GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson argued Saturday that a lifetime of private-sector success was just as valuable as a political background for running the nation.
“I’ve had decades of experience on corporate boards seeing how things work efficiently and inefficiently,” he said at the inaugural “Roast and Ride” in Boone, Iowa.
“Our government is incredibly inefficient at this stage right now,” he said.
“There are a lot of people in politics who are wise and can solve our problems,” Carson added. “But there’s some people in politics I wouldn’t let tie my shoes.”
Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, hit back at claims his medical career meant he was unqualified on issues like finances or foreign policy.
“The government is not supposed to tell us what to do,” he said, citing ObamaCare as an example. “If we accept that, it will continue to erode our freedoms.”
Carson said the economy offered proof that the “experts” did not always have the correct lawmaking solutions.
“One of our most severe problems is the stagnant economy,” he said. “As we go forward, something has to give.”
As he nears a 2016 bid, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal hits political bottom // WaPo // Tyler Bridge – June 6, 2015
Just weeks before he is expected to announce his presidential campaign, Bobby Jindal is at the nadir of his political career.
The Republican governor is at open war with many of his erstwhile allies in the business community and the legislature. He spent weeks pushing a “religious freedom” bill that failed to pass, while having little contact with legislators trying to solve Louisiana’s worst budget crisis in 25 years.
Jindal is now so unpopular in deep-red Louisiana that his approval rating plunged to 32 percent in a recent poll — compared with 42 percent for President Obama, who lost the state by 17 percentage points in 2012.
“This is very much a low point for Bobby Jindal,” said Pearson Cross, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who is preparing a book on the governor.
Much of the trouble swirling around Jindal is connected to his unannounced presidential campaign and his regular travels to early primary states, which have angered many of his fellow Republicans in the GOP-controlled legislature.
In recent months, Jindal has focused his political energy here on trying to appeal to social conservatives nationally by pushing the Marriage and Conscience Act, which would have prohibited the state from taking “adverse action” against those opposed to same-sex marriage. But the measure died last month in the legislature amid opposition from major corporations that feared boycott threats by gay rights groups viewing such measures as sanctioning discrimination.
The legislature is also in the final days of grappling with the budget crisis, which was caused, in part, by personal and corporate tax cuts passed under Jindal’s watch that haven’t paid for themselves.
Yet he has kept up his thinly veiled 2016 travels, having appeared at political events Monday in New Hampshire and Tuesday in Florida. Jindal will announce his plans in New Orleans on June 24.
Jindal will need a serious bump in popularity if he hopes to compete: Currently, he doesn’t make the Top 10 cut in national polls to participate in the first Republican presidential debate, to be held Aug. 6 in Cleveland.
But Jindal told reporters recently that he is merely paying the price for making hard choices in cutting the number of state employees and refusing to raise taxes. He also vowed to do the same if he won the White House.
“If I were to run for president, it would certainly be based on the premise that this country needs big changes,” Jindal said. “We need somebody who will go to D.C. and rescue the American Dream from becoming the European nightmare. This president has presided over an expansion in federal government spending, taxing, borrowing and regulating that is hurting our economy.”
A Rhodes scholar long described as a whiz kid, Jindal headed Louisiana’s state Department of Health and Hospitals at 24, moved on to a series of high-level government jobs, was elected to Congress at 33 and now, at 43, is completing his second and final term as governor. Until recently, he was described as a rising star in the Republican Party.
“A lot of people disapprove of his national travel at a time of a budget crisis,” said Bernie Pinsonat, whose firm, Baton Rouge-based Southern Media & Opinion Research, conducted the poll showing Jindal at 32 percent favorability.
“There’s been no end in sight to the red ink and headlines over concerns about state cuts to public hospitals and universities,” Pinsonat said.
The governor has championed a business-friendly environment in Louisiana, supporting tax breaks for companies, revamping the state’s worker-training programs to better suit the needs of businesses and depleting a $450 million economic-development fund to subsidize new plants and facilities.
But his rightward turn ahead of a likely presidential run has also put him in conflict with the business community. Jindal dropped his support of the business-backed Common Core education standards and this year pushed the legislature to abandon them; state lawmakers paid him no heed.
With Louisiana facing a projected $1.6 billion budget deficit this year — 20 percent of the state’s general fund — Jindal sought to eliminate $526 million per year of tax refunds given to businesses.
Nixing the refunds — which Jindal calls “corporate welfare” — adheres to the guidelines of Americans for Tax Reform, the influential anti-tax group run by Grover Norquist. But business leaders say Jindal is trying to raise their taxes.
In the meantime, Jindal made passage of the Marriage and Conscience Act one of his three legislative priorities this year. He said it would protect those who oppose same-sex marriages.
“In Indiana and Arkansas, large corporations recently joined left-wing activists to bully elected officials into backing away from strong protections for religious liberty,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed in late April. “It was disappointing to see conservative leaders so hastily retreat on legislation that would simply allow for an individual or business to claim a right to free exercise of religion in a court of law.”
IBM, Dow Chemical, the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau and gay rights groups all opposed Jindal’s bill, and lawmakers wanted no part of the controversial legislation in an election year. They gave it a single committee hearing late in the session before it was killed on a 10-to-2 vote.
Two hours later, Jindal issued an executive order prohibiting the executive branch from taking action against anyone who opposes same-sex marriage.
“We perceive this as largely a political statement by our conservative governor in support of his national position on the issue,” the convention bureau said in a statement, adding that the order was not likely to have any practical impact.
Buddy Roemer, a former Republican governor, said many are disappointed in Jindal and doubt his ability to mount a credible presidential bid.
“Several times a day, I get phone calls from business people who are concerned,” Roemer said. “They are irate, angry and bewildered at how he thinks he can amass a national political following. The next governor will have to spend four years making tough decisions that Jindal hasn’t made.”
Fiorina: Government is 'giant, bloated, unaccountable' // The Des Moines Register // Grant Rodgers – June 6, 2015
"You got it going on, girl," Carly Fiorina told a young admirer after her Roast & Ride speech, pointing to the girl's painted toenails.
Unlike six other candidates at Saturday's event, the former software CEO waited until after her 10-minute speech to mingle with the audience. An enthusiastic group met her moments after she stepped off stage and snapped photos in front of a trailer stacked with hay bales.
Between photos, she autographed a man's Harley-Davidson baseball cap. "We need your brain in office," another supporter shouted.
The former Hewlett-Packard CEO is keen to point to her career in business to separate herself from competitors. A successful showing at the Iowa GOP's Lincoln Dinner in May and earlier multi-candidate cattle calls has created hype around her long-shot candidacy.
Best moment: Two women wearing buttons supporting Ben Carson, the conservative former neurosurgeon who also spoke Saturday, asked to have pictures taken with Fiorina.
"I mean, I love Ben, too, but you gotta have a picture without that button," she jokingly told the women.
Quote: "There was recently a poll earlier this week that asked Americans who they most want to see debate Hillary Clinton. I was gratified that I won that poll. ... I think what we need to ask Hillary Clinton now is, 'Mrs. Clinton, what else don't we know?'"
On stage: Fiorina highlighted what she called the federal government's inept response to foreign hack attacks.
The remark came a day after the U.S. government announced that personal data of 4 million federal employees had been breached in a hack from China. It's just one example of vulnerabilities created by a "giant, bloated, unaccountable" federal government, Fiorina said.
Reaction: One of Fiorina's biggest applause lines came when she said she'd call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on her first day in office. "We need to reassure our allies that a friendship with the United States means something," she said.
Presidential Hopefuls Descend on Iowa, Courting Favor With Joni Ernst // NYT // Ashley Parker – June 6, 2015
Arriving at the kickoff of her inaugural “Roast and Ride” event here, fresh off a two-hour ride up from Red Oak on her 2009 Soft Tail Deluxe Harley-Davidson Saturday morning, Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa grinned as a friend pressed a Monster Energy drink into her hand.
“I need the caffeine,” she enthused.
Indeed, monster energy was on the agenda Saturday, as no fewer than seven 2016 Republican candidates descended on the state for a day heavy on the hogs (both the bikes and the pork) and an opportunity to make their pitch to primary voters.
Early caucus and primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire have recently found themselves facing the threat that the look-every-candidate ethos on which they have long prided themselves may be slipping away. A confluence of factors, including the national polling criteria to qualify for televised debates and the waning influence of the Iowa straw poll, are pressuring candidates to focus on raising their national media standing instead of greeting voters one Pizza Ranch and town hall at a time.
But Saturday’s overcast skies promised a day of retail politics on overdrive — with heaping plates of ribs and coleslaw; lawn games like cornhole and horseshoes; and white-topped candidate tents giving away candy as if it were Halloween, in an effort to attract new supporters.
Before leading bikers on a 39-mile ride from the Big Barn Harley-Davidson (where the event began) to the fairgrounds in Boone, Ms. Ernst — clad in black motorcycle boots, snug blue jeans, and a black leather vest with a bald eagle on the back — made sure to say “Iowa is a great cross-section of America.” She dismissed questions that had implied her state may be losing its coveted influence, but said that the nature of campaigning here, including the premium placed on the Iowa straw poll, may be changing.
“I think it’s important that they participate in one way or another,” Ms. Ernst said. “Maybe they won’t be able to be there physically, but I hope they have some sort of presence here in Iowa.”
After greeting her fellow bikers like old friends — “This is so fun!” she said excitedly, “You look wonderful!” — Ms. Ernst demurred when asked whether Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a motorcycle aficionado who participated in the ride alongside Ms. Ernst, had a leg up on the other candidates.
But she noted that motorcyclists possess some of the traits she would like to see in a future president: “I think you have to be a leader and you have to make decisive determinations of what path you take,” she said. “Whatever that path his, you have to follow it.”
Ms. Ernst had also offered several other candidates, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a ride on the back of her bike, but none took her up on the offer. (Arriving at the main event, clad in a plaid shirt and khakis, Mr. Rubio said his schedule simply had not worked with hers, but joked, “Can’t wait until they do the Jet Ski one. I’ll be here for that one.”)
The day, after all, was Mr. Walker’s to lose. Asked if he was the front-runner, the Wisconsin governor said he was going to be riding behind Ms. Ernst.
And, in fact, Mr. Walker’s joke held more than an Iowa kernel of truth. As the bikes pulled out, there he was, just behind Ms. Ernst as promised — but just close enough to her left shoulder to be visible in all the media shots.
A First for Snapchat // NYT // Ashley Parker – June 6, 2015
The fast-growing social media platform Snapchat just landed its first political ad.
The American Action Network, an outside group closely associated with the House Republican leadership, placed a 10-second ad on Snapchat pegged to Senator Joni Ernst’s inaugural “Roast and Ride” here on Saturday.
The buy is part of a larger, $900,000 campaign by the network urging Congress to pass trade promotion authority.
The ad will appear as part of a Snapchat-curated “live story” — which will include a variety of photos and videos from Ms. Ernst’s event — and will be promoted to users in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Washington, D.C.
“We’re excited to be the first in the political space to utilize the growing medium for advertising,” said Dan Conston, communications director for the American Action Network. “A.A.N. is using Snapchat because its allowing us to deliver an engaging ad experience to an audience of influencers and younger, hard to reach voters.”
Indeed, Snapchat users not only trend younger but, to view any content on the app, including ads, users must hold a finger on the screen — meaning, says Snapchat, they are the highly engaged audience that advertisers covet.
“Users watching the Roast and Ride story today are likely interested in politics but may be surprised to see our direct appeal to pass T.P.A. in the story,” Mr. Conston said. “We think that will resonate and be memorable with this key audience.”
Grilling, but no flare-ups, at Ernst's 'Roast and Ride' // Politico // Katie Glueck – June 6, 2015
Scott Walker rode a Harley, Marco Rubio jabbed his rivals and Rick Perry rolled up with an entourage of veterans.
Seven presidential candidates and likely contenders came to a field here in this rural part of the state, about 45 minutes from Des Moines, for freshman Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s first “Roast and Ride.” The event featured a significantly longer and more prominent guest list than the Iowa Straw Poll currently has, making the Saturday gathering potentially the biggest retail politicking event here of the year.
It was an opportunity for the candidates to gladhand, take shots at Hillary Clinton and show off their barbecue skills in a very casual setting, where attendees listened to speeches from lawn chairs and candidates — some sporting jeans — traipsed through muddy grass to greet voters.
Each candidate was given eight minutes to address the crowd — a timeframe they more or less stuck to — and the speeches focused heavily on veterans, the American Dream and praising Iowa and especially its junior senator, the host of the event. The 2016ers in attendance were Walker, Rubio, Perry, Ben Carson, Lindsey Graham, Carly Fiorina and Mike Huckabee.
“I love a senator who knows how to castrate a pig, ride a hog and cut the pork from Washington, D.C.,” Walker said, referencing an Ernst ad from her 2014 Senate race in which she discussed castrating hogs and making Washington “squeal.” “Wouldn’t it be nice if she had an ally in the White House to help get the job done?”
The Wisconsin governor was the only candidate to join Ernst on the “Ride” part of the event — a 38-mile motorcycle jaunt from Des Moines up to Boone, to honor veterans.
“I’m riding behind Joni today in the ride so I guess that makes me second to her,” Walker, in a leather Harley Davidson jacket, motorcycle gloves and Harley Davidson boots, told reporters when asked whether he was the frontrunner in Iowa.
Graham, the South Carolina senator who opened his address in Boone with one joke after another, said of Ernst, “Joni rocks … She promised to make people [in Washington] squeal. They’re squealing. Mainly the men,” before going on to praise her military service.
Most of the content in the addresses from the candidates was typical GOP campaign fare: calls to rein in government, tackle radical Islam and embrace American exceptionalism.
Rubio, the Florida senator, made those points as well, but he also used his speech to sharpen his rebuttal to criticism from some, including those within his own party, who say he’s too inexperienced to run for president. Some Republicans had expected Rubio to step aside for fellow Floridian Jeb Bush and hold onto his Senate seat instead.
“I’ve heard the voices, some have said I shouldn’t run, I should have waited my turn,” Rubio said, adding he heard the same at the beginning of his successful 2010 Senate race. In a veiled swipe at both Bush and Hillary Clinton, he said to applause, “I ran then for the same reason I run now. If we keep promoting the same people, we get the same results and the future leaves us behind.”
“The latest one is that I shouldn’t run for president because I’m not rich enough,” continued Rubio, whose personal finances have come under some scrutiny. “And it’s true I don’t make [millions] from speeches and I don’t have a family foundation that’s raised [billions], a lot of it from foreign donations. But my wife and I work to ensure we have enough money to send our kids to a Christian education at a private school. We have a mortgage we’re paying … but the biggest debt I owe is to the United States.”
Walker, like Rubio, also dinged family dynasties, comments that appeared directed at Bush: “My brother and I did not inherit fame or fortune from our family. What we got was more important. And that was the belief that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can be anything you want to be in America.”
Everyone received standing ovations and had some applause lines — and as usual, Fiorina’s Clinton zingers were well-received —but no one’s performance brought down the house. The real action took place on the sidelines, where each of the candidates had a tent set up. There, volunteers took down attendees’ information, and some — like Walker’s tent — served up swag like beer coozies and candy. The candidates made appearances at their booths, where some Iowans demanded photos while others probed policy positions. Walker, Rubio and Perry were particularly mobbed as they worked the crowds, though everyone drew interested bystanders.
“I doubt the candidates will win any converts during their eight allotted minutes onstage — all of the activity is going to take place off stage, off the bikes, actually interacting with and talking to Iowans,” said Matt Strawn, a former Iowa GOP chairman who worked closely with Ernst during her 2014 Senate campaign. “What I’m watching for are, which candidates understand this is meant to be a fun, relaxing event designed for them to interact with Iowans? Most of the large events in the state have been forums in ballroom theater settings, not an opportunity to spend a lot of time personally interacting.”
To that end, Rubio indulged a woman who ribbed him about a recent story highlighting his rocky driving record — she referenced someone who had made it well into life without a ticket, to which Rubio replied that that person “doesn’t live in Florida!” He could be found later carving up meat, while Walker was seen flipping pork chops on the grill. Perry was constantly surrounded by bikers and veterans, following a charity motorcycle ride he did to benefit an organization that provides service dogs to wounded veterans. And Fiorina lingered for pictures after the speeches were done.
The “Roast and Ride” shone the national spotlight on Ernst, who has been showered with attention from presidential contenders since her Senate contest — a race in which the bulk of the current presidential field showed up to curry favor as Ernst surrogates. Rubio, in particular, was an early endorser, and there is considerable overlap between Ernst’s Senate campaign team and both the Rubio and Walker 2016 shops.
Ernst has no plans to endorse, but instead is aiming to serve as a facilitator between Iowa voters and the candidates who want to cozy up to them.
With the inaugural hog roast, Ernst is following in the footsteps of longtime Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, whose seat she now holds. Harkin feted his party with an annual steak fry that became a must-attend event for Democratic presidential candidates and aspiring national Democratic figures over its 37-year run. The freshman senator aims to build a similar tradition.
“Sen. Harkin had the wonderful tradition of the Steak Fry, and this is actually an event we’ve wanted to do during the campaign cycle but didn’t have the opportunity,” Ernst said Saturday morning in Des Moines, where she kicked off a motorcycle ride to the event. “So we thought, why not start with an inaugural ‘Roast and Ride,’ a little twist … this is something uniquely Joni Ernst and I love it, so I’m glad to have so many people participating.”
So far, there appears to be important party buy-in. Top Iowa officials attended, including Gov. Terry Branstad and Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds —a personal friend of Ernst’s —and both of them sent out solicitations for the event to build attendance.
“We’ve got a great group [of candidates], they’re spending a lot of time in Iowa and I love that,” Reynolds said. “My role is to encourage them to come here, come here often, go to all 99 counties … and really give Iowans the opportunity to ask questions.”
In Iowa, pork, patriotism and presidential politics // WaPo // Jenna Johnson & Dan Balz – June 6, 2015
The day started with the sputtering roar of motorcycles and ended with pork sandwiches, and Republican presidential hopefuls taking shots at Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama.
Throughout the first "Roast and Ride" here on Saturday, Iowa Republicans made this case to anyone who would listen: This state still deeply matters in the nominating process -- plus, look how much fun it is to campaign here.
Presiding over the day was Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa, who has only been in Washington for five months but has quickly emerged as a powerful and popular conservative in her party. She hopes that the event -- which started with a 39-mile motorcycle ride from the edge of Des Moines to a rural event center -- will replace the famed Steak Fry that her predecessor, Democrat Tom Harkin, once held. Especially ahead of presidential elections.
"Iowa is always very important," Ernst told reporters after downing an oversized can of a zero-calorie energy drink, but before hopping on her bike. "Iowa is a great cross-section of America."
For a brand-new event, it sure felt like a time-tested tradition: Roughly 300 bikers showed up, plus hundreds more spectators carrying their own lawn chairs, dozens of national reporters and seven announced or likely presidential contenders. The candidates differentiated themselves by talking about their biographies, rather than attacking one another. But there was no clear winner from the afternoon's speeches -- one more sign of just how fluid the GOP race is here and nationally.
Iowans often roll their eyes at how easily they become stereotyped during the caucuses, but this event played up so many things that East Coasters think of when they think of the Midwest -- and that political strategists look for when planning campaign stops. A large red tractor sat near the stage, behind a wall of hay bales and in front of the local fire department's massive ladder truck that displayed an oversized American flag. Nearly every candidate who took the stage declared "God Bless America" and focused heavily on talking about how the working class has fallen behind under Democratic control -- along with criticizing Clinton, the Democratic front-runner.
The day started with breakfast at the Harley-Davidson Big Barn in Des Moines. The ride honored military veterans and many of the bikers wore leather vests, T-shirts or tattoos featuring patriotic phrases like: "Freedom isn't free."
Ernst has been riding bikes for most of her life -- starting with a dirt bike when she was a farm kid, riding messages from her mom out to her dad in the fields. She now rides a 2009 Harley-Davidson Softail Deluxe, which she wheeled to the front of the pack on Saturday morning. Right behind her was Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on a rented 2015 Harley-Davidson Road King that he said rode just like the 2003 model he has at home. Alongside them was a black pickup truck with seven photographers and videographers in the bed. Former Texas governor Rick Perry also rode to the event, although on his own route accompanied by his own posse of military. Ernst had offered to let her Senate colleague, Marco Rubio of Florida, ride on the back of her hog, but he passed.
Ernst said there are parallels between riding a Harley and governing: "You have to be a leader, and you have to make decisive determinations of what path you want to take. So whatever that road is, you have to follow it." But when asked if riding a motorcycle should be a prerequisite for running for president, Ernst laughed and said: "Not a qualifier but definitely an interesting factoid."
Upon arriving at the event site, Ernst quipped, “No bugs in my teeth but plenty on the windshield.”
The venue, the Central Iowa Expo, provided a state-fair-like feel to the event -- much like the Iowa Republican Party's straw poll, which is expected to happen in August in the same location, although no top-tier candidates have committed to attending. Attendees ate roasted pork sandwiches, potato salad, baked beans and chips, while the Iowa band The Nadas played country music over blaring speakers. Some people played picnic games. Perry and Walker wore black shirts, jeans and caps. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was the only one to wear a sport coat.
The main attraction was speeches from seven declared or likely presidential candidates. Among those missing was former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who was with his family celebrating the 90th birthday of his mother, Barbara. They all painted a bleak picture of America under Obama's leadership and, of course, lavished praise on Ernst. "I love a senator who knows how to castrate a pig, ride a hog and cut the pork in Washington, D.C.," Walker said.
Walker talked up his Midwestern values and the importance of freedom, while pointing out that Harley-Davidson is based in Wisconsin. Perry -- who took the stage with a "Howdy, Iowa!" -- focused heavily on patriotism and the need for national leadership. Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson both blasted big government. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- who dropped joke after joke -- called for a better defense of the country. Rubio talked about the American Dream, the new century and defended himself against criticism that he is too young and inexperienced to run. Huckabee talked about an economic vision that is at odds with many in his party.
Collectively, the candidates impressed the activists who sat through the seven speeches, but individually there was no clear favorite.
“I think we have a fantastic field,” said David Freligh of Pella. “I am not yet in favor of anyone in particular but I am reassured that there’s a good strong field of very qualified people. I feel good about it.
“I’ve always liked Ben Carson because he can unite the nation. I thought Carly was very articulate, and Scott Walker was very articulate. I have not made up my mind.
“They’re all so impressive,” said Bonnie Cornick, of Creston. “I’ve been sitting here talking to the people next to us saying how am I ever going to caucus because I like them all?"
She cited Walker, Rubio and Perry as three who impressed her, but added, “There isn’t a one of them I don’t [like].”
Sonya Crosby of Ottumwa listed Graham, Rubio and Huckabee among her favorites. “They’re all good, though,” she said. Asked how she would make up her mind, she said, “I don’t know at this point. Keep listening. It’s tough.”
Can conservatives find their footing in Hollywood in 2016? // CNN // Maeve Reston – June 5, 2015
The West Coast has long been a fundraising bastion for Democrats -- famously fueling the long struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential race when Hollywood's loyalties were divided. And George Clooney grabbed headlines in 2012 by raising a $15 million haul for Obama in one night.
But Republicans have raised plenty of money on the West Coast -- albeit more quietly than their Democratic rivals. Now the Republican Jewish Coalition, with its roster of influential donors and board members, is looking to raise the profile of Hollywood conservatives at their annual gala Sunday night in Beverly Hills.
Arizona Sen. John McCain, New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson will be the featured guests at the gathering, but the Republican Jewish Coalition is also hosting its own red carpet to draw attention to more conservative actors and studio executives including Raquel Welch, Angie Harmon, Jeremy Boreing and Nick Searcy.
On Sunday night, the group plans to honor actor Jon Voight, who has often drawn headlines with his vociferous critiques of President Barack Obama's approach to foreign policy.
The group plans to praise Voight for his outspoken support of Israel, and specifically for responding publicly to an open letter signed by Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, as well as other Spanish actors, directors and writers that condemned the incursion into Gaza by the Israeli military last year. European press outlets reported that the letter signed by Cruz, Bardem and Pedro Almodovar urged a cease-fire and was critical of Israel's actions in Gaza.
In his opinion column in The Hollywood Reporter, Voight wrote that he was "heartsick that people like Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem could incite anti-Semitism all over the world and are oblivious to the damage they have caused."
Both Bardem and Cruz, who are married, issued statements after the event clarifying that they were expressing their wish for peace in the region.
"I am now being labeled by some as anti-Semitic, as is my wife -- which is the antithesis of who we are as human beings," Bardem said in a statement last year. "We detest anti-Semitism as much as we detest the horrible and painful consequences of war."
Nick Searcy of the FX series "Justified" said he and others would be attending the gala Sunday in part to honor Voight's advocacy for conservative causes as an example to others with similar political views.
"There are really are some (conservatives)" in Hollywood," Searcy told CNN in a telephone interview. "I've met them -- some of them will tell you who they are and some of them won't."
Searcy called political recognition of Voight by the Republican Jewish Coalition "a big step."
"Jon obviously has been very outspoken in his disagreements with the Obama-Democrat foreign policy, and at the same time, he doesn't seem to be hurting for work," Searcy said. "In a town like Hollywood -- where we're supposed to be about freedom of thought and freedom of expression -- it's good to see Jon practicing that."
GOP hopefuls blame Obama's China policy for data breach // The Hill // Cory Bennett – June 6, 2015
OP presidential hopefuls are bashing President Obama over his handling of China in the wake of a massive digital theft of federal workers’ data that officials have tied to Beijing.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on Thursday revealed that hackers had snapped up roughly 4 million employees’ records.
Several Republican candidates argued on Friday that Obama’s failure to employ a strong hand with the Asian power empowered the country to launch digital assaults at will against the U.S. government and private sector.
“The lack of common sense in this White House is beyond breathtaking,” said former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
“We need a different strategy to confront Chinese behavior — whether in the South China Sea or in cyberspace,” said Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard executive, on Facebook.
“Yet another example of America being walked over by rivals and adversaries,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who declared his candidacy Monday.
In recent years, security experts say China has built up its cyber capabilities, ranking as a leading world power.
In addition to using its considerable prowess to monitor its own citizens, China has also launched a pervasive cyber espionage campaign against the U.S.
“China is rapidly evolving from a sometime partner, sometime competitor, into an adversary,” Fiorina said.
The recent OPM breach is thought to be part of a broader scheme to create a database on high-ranking U.S. officials and defense contractors.
Researchers have linked the suspected OPM hackers to the digital intruders behind the gargantuan breaches at health insurers Anthem and Premera, which exposed over 90 million people’s data, possibly including that of White House cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel.
Experts worry the stockpile of data could be used to imitate or even blackmail senior U.S. officials.
“They have a tremendous amount of stepping stones they can use for further activity,” said John Hultquist, senior manager of online espionage threat intelligence at iSight, a security firm.
The problem, say Republican candidates, is that China has no fear of repercussions.
“We need a leader who will challenge the status quo in Washington and confront our adversaries abroad,” said Fiorina.
The U.S. has struggled to maintain diplomatic cyber relations with China, while simultaneously trying to step up pressure on Beijing to end its hacking and digital theft of commercial secrets.
The Justice Department last year indicted five members of the Chinese military for hacking.
Recently updated White House and Pentagon national security and cybersecurity documents also directly call out China on cyber espionage.
But the administration continues to promote a diplomatic path in the hopes of establishing international norms in cyberspace. The Department of Homeland Security has taken steps to reestablish an official cyber dialogue, which was cut off following the DOJ indictments last year.
The tactic doesn’t sit well with the GOP field.
“The Obama administration's failures in foreign policy and national security continue to pile up yet they do nothing to change course,” Graham said.
Huckabee has criticized the president for even engaging China in trade deals.
“China cheats, rips-off American products, abuses its people, taunts our allies, and now they're crawling through our federal government stealing sensitive personal information from millions of people,” he said.
“As president, I will stop Chinese cheating, hold China accountable, and never, ever apologize for protecting Americans.”
Marriage today: rich-poor gap, later vows, gays gain access // AP // David Crary – June 6, 2015
Through two decades of debate on whether America's gays and lesbians should have the right to marry, opponents of such unions depicted their resistance as "defense of marriage." Now, on the cusp of a Supreme Court ruling that could legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, the underlying institution is under scrutiny anew.
Does marriage in America indeed need help? What kind of shape is it in? In simplest terms, the diagnosis is mixed.
Among college-educated, relatively affluent couples, marriage is doing pretty well. Where education and income levels are lower, it's often a different story — higher divorce rates, and far more children being born out of wedlock, including many to single mothers.
There's broad sentiment that this "marriage gap" is unfortunate, but no consensus on what to do about it. Some believe government-funded marriage-promotion programs can make a difference, although their effectiveness has been questioned. Others depict marriage-focused solutions as misguided and say the problems can be eased only by broader economic and social initiatives benefiting all types of households.
"There is no one silver bullet," said David Blankenhorn, head of a centrist think-tank, the Institute for American Values, that focuses much of its work on marriage and families.
Yet despite uncertainty about solutions, he and others believe there is now an opportunity to bridge the left-right split over marriage, particularly in light of the sweeping gains for gay and lesbian couples, which have changed the tenor of the discussion.
For many years, the gay-marriage debate was intertwined with assertions about "traditional marriage" between a man and a woman. A federal act passed in 1996 and a subsequent wave of amendments adopted in many states used the term "defense of marriage" to deny recognition to same-sex unions. Many opponents of same-sex marriage argued that allowing gays to wed would somehow undermine heterosexual marriage.
Such arguments have fared poorly in recent federal court cases. And there's a strong likelihood that the Supreme Court will order the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states in a ruling expected soon. Opinion polls show a solid majority of Americans support it.
"Marriage as culture war in America can now be replaced by marriage as common cause," said a coalition of scholars and civic leaders in their manifesto for a new initiative called Marriage Opportunity.
The group, with Blankenhorn as an organizer, envisions liberals fighting for economic opportunity, conservatives fighting for stronger families and gays who have now won marriage rights for themselves all uniting to confront the marriage gap and to promote "a new embrace of marriage's promise."
Among the scholars chronicling the marriage gap is Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University and author of "Labor's Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America."
Cherlin says the gap stems in large measure from the loss of stable, well-paid industrial jobs — consigning legions of young adults to precarious, low-paid jobs, and prompting many to put off marriage even while having children out of wedlock.
In contrast, college-educated young adults are more likely to wait until marriage to have children and then have the prospect of raising them in a household supported by two good incomes. For such couples, Cherlin writes, marriage is a status symbol, and their divorce rates are now much lower than for couples with only a high school education.
According to the Pew Research Center, the share of American adults who have never been married is at an historic high. In 2012, roughly 20 percent of adults 25 and older had never been married, compared to only 9 percent of adults in that age range in 1960. Back then, according to Pew, the likelihood of being married didn't vary according to level of education; now men with advanced degrees are far more likely to have married than those who didn't go beyond high school.
There's a wealth of other data illustrating challenges confronting the institution of marriage:
—Americans are waiting longer to get married. According to the Census Bureau, the current median age for a first marriage — 29 for men and 27 for women — is the highest in more than a century. In 1960, the median age at first marriage was 23 for men and 20 for women.
—Unmarried mothers account for 40.6 percent of children born in the U.S., according to the latest Census data. The rate is particularly high in the African-American community — 71.5 percent.
—Even for couples raising children, marriage is increasingly optional. According to the research group Child Trends, there were 3.1 million cohabiting but unmarried couples in the U.S. raising children in 2014, up from 1.2 million in 1996.
Tera Jordan, a professor of human development at Iowa State University, has studied various aspects of marriage and relationships among black Americans.
To the extent that marriage is under siege in their communities, she sees a need for multiple changes — more access to good-paying jobs, better educational opportunities, a lowering of the incarceration rate for young black men. Her advice to young adults wondering about marriage: "Be clear about your goals, be patient. Finish your education."
Long-term, she is optimistic.
"Americans still hold marriage in very high regard," she said.
Before moving to Iowa, Jordan worked with a federally funded marriage-strengthening program in Georgia. In all, according to experts who study the field, more than $1 billion in public funding has been spent since 2005 on an array of marriage and relationship programs.
Yet the effectiveness of these programs remains subject to debate.
For example, there were negative findings in a rigorous study of a federally funded program called Building Strong Families, which taught relationship skills to more than 5,100 low-income, unwed couples who were expecting a child or just had a baby.
The study by Mathematica Policy Research found that after three years, the program had no effect on the quality of couples' relationships and co-parenting skills, and did not make them more likely to stay together or get married.
The largest and most durable state-level program is the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, recently renamed Project Relate. Since its launch in 1999, it has served more than 400,000 Oklahomans — about 10 percent of the population.
Alan Hawkins, professor of Family Life at Brigham Young University, describes it as "the most comprehensive and effective public policy effort to help couples achieve healthy relationships and enduring marriages." It provides relationship education for teens, young adults, unmarried cohabiting parents, engaged couples and married couples.
One of its primary programs, Family Expectations, entails 30 hours of classes for low-income expectant parents, whether married or not, who want to strengthen their relationships. Independent assessments found that couples taking the program are more likely to stay together than other couples. Other research has credited Oklahoma's initiative with a slight increase in the percentage of children living with two parents and a slight decrease in the percentage living in poverty.
Kendy Cox, a senior director of Project Relate, said its annual funding is between $6.5 million and $7 million, mostly from federal welfare appropriations.
Many low-income couples believe in the concept of marriage, Cox said, yet are unsure if it's the right step for them.
"It's become seen as sort of pie in the sky for some couples," she said. "Even if they've already had a baby, they have this sense of, 'I have so much work to do before we can even consider marriage.'"
Among the graduates of Family Expectations is Rachel Chudoba, 27, who now has a job with Public Strategies, the private firm which handles daily management of the marriage initiative.
Chudoba and her then-fiance, Chad — now her husband — were only 19 when they signed up for Family Expectations in 2007.
"We both wanted to do it," Chudoba said. "We were pretty much in agreement that we didn't know what we were doing."
They put in a full day of coursework each Saturday for six weeks, then received periodic coaching over the next two years. They're now parents of a son and daughter.
Chudoba said the communications skills they learned came in handy when Chad, a member of the Army National Guard, was deployed to Afghanistan in 2013.
"Our communication was so sporadic — mostly by email," she said. "All the things I was taught were really important in those moments."
Among the lessons she applied, Chudoba said, was learning to take a timeout when an argument flared.
"It's hard to acknowledge that you need a timeout in a conversation when you don't get to talk very often," Chudoba said. "But being separated for a year, you are going to have disagreements, and solving them is difficult."
Chudoba said both she and her husband came from challenging backgrounds — both of Rachel's parents had multiple divorces, while Chad spent time in foster care.
"We didn't have a lot of positive examples of how to have a relationship and how to raise children," she said. "That was a huge thing for me and my husband — not repeating the mistakes of the older generation."
Several members of her extended family are in their early 20s, and wondering where marriage fits in their future. "I see people who are apprehensive," Chudoba said. "I see a lot of looking for answers."
Oklahoma, along with Utah, also has initiated a program seeking to save some marriages by curtailing divorce. Hawkins, the BYU professor, says they are the only states with mandatory education programs for divorcing parents that include specific advice on how to reconcile.
According to Hawkins, about 10 percent of divorcing couples — both husband and wife — still want to save the marriage even near the end of the divorce process.
"Divorce may be easy legally, but it's not easy psychologically — very few people are casual about it," he said. "Even many people experiencing some of the hardest problems — adultery, substance abuse — don't want a divorce and are willing to work hard to solve those problems."
Looking nationally, Hawkins says he understands the widespread skepticism about state-backed marriage programs.
"Success has been modest in relation to the size of the problem," he said. "We don't know what levers we could pull to make a difference."
In Raleigh, North Carolina, Brad Hambrick says he's seen positive results from a mentoring program for young couples at the Summit Church, a Southern Baptist congregation that he serves as pastor of counseling.
Raleigh, he says, has a large population of transients — a status that can be challenging for newly married couples.
"If you don't have that network of parents, aunts, uncles, high school friends, marriage bears much more of the total social weight," he said. "What is expected of marriage becomes much greater — it either winds up being really good or really bad."
He recalls one younger couple in the church's program telling their mentors, "You're the first people who've talked positively to us about marriage."
Among the veteran mentors is Tom Droege, 57, a software developer who has teamed up with his wife, Paula, for more than a decade of counseling younger couples. Part of what they teach is how to handle conflict — including "how to fight fairly," he says.
"What they get from our program is a better understanding of expectations, so that when they run into the typical kinds of challenges that marriage presents, they don't feel that it only happens to them — it's normal."
GOP-led states trying bolster budgets by limiting government assistance programs // Fox News – June 6, 2015
Lawmakers in the Sunflower State have been scrambling for years to make up a $400 million revenue gap following a 2012 income tax cut that left deep holes in the state budget.
Republican Gov. Sam Brownback wants recover some of the money by placing limits on government assistance.
Starting in July, people in Kansas who collect government assistance will be limited to a single ATM withdrawal not exceeding $25 per day. The Kansas law also prohibits public-assistance spending at swimming pools, tattoo parlors and video arcades.
Though it might sound extreme to some, Kansas is just the latest GOP-led state to launch campaigns to cut or limit public assistance.
A 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that 73 percent of Republicans and 32 percent of Democrats believe the government can’t afford to spend much more on assistance programs. The number of families receiving cash through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program stood at 1.5 million at the end of 2014.
When Brownback signed the bill in April he defended it by saying the primary focus isn’t a handout but instead to “get people back to work, because that’s where the real benefit is – getting people off public assistance and back into the marketplace with the dignity and far more income there than the pittance that government gives them.”
Shannon Cotsoradis, president of the advocacy group Kansas Action for Children, told Bloomberg News that state lawmakers “acted on anecdotes” about TANF cards being used on cruise ships and casinos and that the information used to sway lawmakers isn’t “data-driven.”
But lawmakers in a growing number of states believe chipping away at a budget shortfall can be done by limiting the amount of government assistance being doled out.
In Michigan, the state Senate recently passed a bill that would put families on the welfare chopping block if their children are regularly absent from school. The “Parental Responsibility Act” would give the state the ability to cut off assistance if a child whose parents are receiving assistance is chronically truant.
If the child is younger than 16, the whole family could lose its cash benefits.
“During the recession there were lots of blue states, for fiscally driven reasons, that were cutting welfare,” Liz Schott, a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank, told Bloomberg News. “This year’s cuts feel more ideologically driven.”
In May, Missouri’s Republican legislature overrode a veto by Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, to enact a bill that would take away assistance from more than 6,400 children -- 2,600 of them below the age of 5, his office said in published reports.
Nixon described the bill “a misguided measure that punishes poor children” in a “zeal to reduce reliance on government assistance.”
And in Arizona, lawmakers slashed the amount of time residents could stay on assistance to 1 year – the shortest window in the nation.
The Associated Press described the cuts as a reflection of the “prevailing mood” among lawmakers who believe that public assistance programs are what keeps the poor from getting back on their feet permanently.
But not everyone subscribes to the sentiment.
Jessica Lopez, 23, said cutting off benefits isn’t fair.
Lopez, who gets $133 per month, gave birth to her son while living in a domestic violence shelter and has struggled to hold onto jobs because she has dyslexia and didn’t finish high school.
“We’re all human,” she told the AP. “Everybody has problems. Everybody is different. When people ask for help, we should be able to get it without having to be looked at wrong.”
Behind Tough Talk on Russia, G-7 Leaders Face Tough Reality // AP // Julie Pace – June 6, 2015
Behind the tough talk on Russia expected from President Barack Obama and other leaders gathering in Germany this weekend is a stark reality.
None of the world powers believes the economic and diplomatic punishments levied on Russia for its alleged aggression in Ukraine are changing President Vladimir Putin's calculus, yet there are no plans to shift strategies.
At most, leaders hope to emerge from two days of talks in the Bavarian Alps with an agreement to keep U.S. and European Union sanctions against Russia in place, and perhaps a pledge to enact deeper economic penalties if the crisis escalates. While there is little expectation that a show of unity will lead to a quick resolution in Ukraine, officials hope it will at least give Putin pause if he is considering ratcheting up Russia's moves.
A fresh outbreak of violence between government troops and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine is threatening to derail an already tenuous cease-fire.
The fact that sanctions have not altered Putin's military posture is "a sign of how heedless the Russian government seems to be about the long-term welfare of its own people that it has not yet resulted in a change, in a reversal at least, of course, which is what we want out of Russia," Defense Secretary Ash Carter told reporters after a Friday meeting in Germany with American military and diplomatic leaders.
The Group of Seven summit marks the second year in a row that leaders from the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan will assemble without Putin. After Russia annexed territory from Ukraine last year, the world powers kicked Russia out of what had been called the Group of Eight, a move aimed at isolating Putin and signaling the West's united opposition to his provocative actions.
Yet Putin remains a major player on pressing issues.
Russia is a partner of the U.S. and other nations in the nuclear talks with Iran, an Obama priority. Putin is a linchpin in any discussions on resolving the civil war in Syria, given Russia's status as President Bashar Assad's biggest benefactor.
Republicans have accused Obama of putting his interest in the Iran nuclear talks above supporting Ukraine. GOP White House hopeful Jeb Bush is set to arrive in Europe just as Obama departs, with stops in Germany, Poland and Estonia. Bush is expected to pledge broader U.S. backing for the region if elected president.
White House officials defend the engagement with Russia on Iran and other matters, and say the U.S. can work with Moscow on issues of mutual interest while also confronting Putin over Ukraine.
But experts say Secretary of State John Kerry's meetings with Putin in Russia last month raised questions in Europe about whether Washington might be pursuing a new policy toward the Kremlin. Kerry's trip was the first time a senior U.S. official has traveled to Russia since Moscow annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine.
"It created this cloud of controversy around what is the U.S. strategy: Why did he go?" said Julianne Smith, a former Obama White House official who is now a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. "So I think there'll be a little bit of mopping up from that trip."
European nations are watching whether the U.S. commitment to isolating and penalizing Russia is weakening. Europe has far stronger ties to Russia than the U.S. and some leaders face pressure from the business community to ease off penalties that have affected their finances.
Still, the European Union is expected to renew expiring sanctions later this summer.
Thousands of people gathered Saturday in a town a few miles from the summit venue to protest a range of causes, including a proposed trans-Atlantic trade deal, before the leaders' arrival.
Obama departed Washington Saturday evening after delivering an emotional eulogy at the funeral service for Vice President Joe Biden's son, Beau. Joining Obama on Air Force One for the trip to Germany were four House Democrats who support his efforts to win special authority to negotiate a Pacific Rim trade deal.
The trade debate on Capitol Hill is being closely watched by G-7 leaders. While Obama has Senate backing to seek fast-track authority of the Trans Pacific Partnership pact, he faces a steep challenge in getting his own party's support in the House. Japan and Canada are both part of TPP.
European nations are not part of the pact, but the congressional debate could affect whether Obama has the political capital left to pursue a trans-Atlantic trade deal with the EU before leaving office.
After his overnight flight to Munich, Obama was to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, then join other leaders for talks at Schloss Elmau, a one-time Bavarian artist retreat turned luxury spa.
Also on Obama's schedule was a meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose party is coming off an unexpectedly strong election victory. The president also planned to see Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who was invited to the G-7 meeting to discuss the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State in his country, as well as in Syria.
Running Against Hillary // NYT // Ross Douthat – June 6, 2015
BEFORE anything else is said, they deserve the thanks of a grateful nation. Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, even Lincoln Chafee: They are stepping up where others quailed, laying their bodies on democracy’s altar, saving their party’s nominating contest from resembling a presidential re-election in Kazakhstan.
But if they aspire to more than just holding Hillary Clinton below the 97.7 percent of the vote that Nursultan Nazarbayev claimed in his last trip to the hustings, her primary rivals will need more than courage. They’ll need a plan.
A little while ago, the plan for a not-Hillary candidate looked obvious: While Clinton played it safe and hugged the political center, her challenger would run hard to her left, channel the energy of the party’s grass-roots activists, campaign against the front-runner’s establishment instincts and her husband’s triangulating past.
This road map did not promise victory. (Only Hillary herself can stop Hillary from winning — and even then not without a lot of work.) But it promised, at least, a meaningful battle of ideas, and maybe even a chance to make things close in Iowa.
Since her official entrance into the race, however, Hillary has moved aggressively to shrink the space for that kind of battle. Her big policy statements – on criminal justice reform, immigration, and now universal voter registration – have all aligned her explicitly with the party’s activists, and to an extent many them did not expect.
Her theory seems to be that the political center has moved leftward, and that mobilizing Democratic constituencies will matter as much in the general election as reaching out to swing voters; she may also be haunted, understandably, by memories of 2008. (There’s no reason to think she isn’t sincere in her new stances, but with the Clintons it’s always fair to analyze strategy before belief.)
Whatever the motivation, this new positioning has made it even harder for the not-Hillarys to run against her. They can move further to her left (Sanders, in particular, won’t have trouble doing so), but then their campaigns will seem even more quixotic. And if Hillary stays committed to their major goals, the party’s activists will have clear incentives to just take her “yes” for an answer.
So what remains for our brave few, our band of brothers? Well, they can attack her as a latecomer, a flip-flopper, a fair-weather progressive. But such charges are rarely politically effective; if they were, Mitt Romney would never have been the 2012 G.O.P. nominee. At some level, voters know that they’re voting for the platform more than for the candidate. And the left, in particular, has philosophical reasons to be comfortable with flip-flops: If you think the Arc of History is bending toward your ideas, then it’s actually a kind of vindication when a politician bends your way.
Alternatively, our anti-Hillarys can focus on foreign policy, where her Iraq War vote helped doom her seven years ago. Here they’ll have a stronger case, since she probably remains more hawkish (see her role in our Libyan war for evidence) than her party’s dovish base.
But Clinton can find shelter by associating herself with the current president: She’ll just say (as she’s already saying) that she’s exactly as hawkish as Obama, no less and no more. If he escalates against ISIS, she’ll support it; if not, she won’t. Ditto Putin, Assad, you name it. This won’t protect her left flank fully, but so long as she’s hugging the president she’ll lose more left-wing intellectuals than actual progressive voters.
So all that really remains for her would-be challengers is to attack her ethics. There, at last, the anti-Hillary argument becomes an easy one: From the Nixonian style of her State Department operation to the way her family fattened itself on global tribute during her recent public service, her rivals can point to sins and misdemeanors that would have already disqualified a lesser candidate.
But will many Democrats really want to hear that argument? The advantage of making an ideological case against Hillary is that progressives can accept it – yes, she’s not as liberal as we would like, we’re glad somebody’s pressing her, and maybe we’ll cast a protest vote for them – and still feel O.K. about her inevitability and about voting for her in the general election.
The ethical case, on the other hand, is more personal, discomfiting, and easily repurposed by Republicans. So any time Hillary’s rivals offer those kinds of critiques, their audience will hear intimations of G.O.P. attacks to come. And since she’s almost certainly going to be the nominee, Democratic voters may not be particularly grateful for the foretaste; they may, instead, dismiss the men offering it for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
In which case those men will still deserve our gratitude. Because then, at least, whatever happens in a Clinton presidency, her supporters won’t be able to say that they weren’t warned.
Hillary the Tormentor // NYT // Frank Bruni – June 6, 2015
LATELY I’ve been running into people even more put off by the Clintons than the nefarious operatives in the “vast right wing conspiracy” ever were.
They’re called Democrats.
I had breakfast with one last week. I’d quote him directly, but The Times doesn’t permit profanity.
He’s furious at Hillary and Bill, because they’ve once again created all these ugly, obvious messes that they could and should have avoided. He’s disgusted, because he has come to believe that they’re tainted.
He’s also resolute: He’s voting — even rooting — for Hillary.
Party loyalty motivates him. On top of which, he’s worried about the Supreme Court and how a Republican president might pack it.
And he keeps hearing the voices of little girls in his life who have asked him whether a woman can be president of the United States in reality, not just on some TV show.
He wants them to see: Yes, she can.
So here he stands, or rather squirms, exhilarated by what Hillary embodies and repelled by what she represents, wanting to see her take the oath and wanting never to lay eyes on her and Bill again, determined that they reclaim the White House and despairing of the muddy road there and the certain muck beyond. He’s a riot of warring emotions, a paradox with a pulse.
The Clintons will do that to a person.
Or to a country.
There was a suggestion last week that Clinton weariness and wariness had again overtaken Americans: Two new national polls showed that regard for Hillary had declined, at least for the moment, to levels not seen in many years.
In both surveys, more respondents saw her unfavorably than favorably. In the one by ABC News and The Washington Post, only 41 percent said that she was honest and trustworthy, while 52 percent said that she wasn’t.
Such findings will fluctuate, as Jack Shafer noted aptly and archly in Politico: “While glory awaits the journalist who buries Hillary Clinton, carves her tombstone and tidies her grave, the makings of her demise cannot be read in these poll results. Clinton rides a favorability roller coaster, and has been riding it hard for the past 23 years.”
I bring no coffin, carry no shovel and am less interested in her roller coaster than in the hard ride that she and Bill have taken us on. It never ends.
And it’s different from politics as usual. It’s politics as a peculiar form of psychological torture, because the Clintons have a way — it’s their trademark — of being the best, most exciting vessel for people’s hopes even as they make those people feel icky about their investment in the couple.
Just ask Democrats who were in Congress during Bill’s impeachment. Many fought to save his presidency, and thus gave the requisite interviews and said the right words, all the while roiling with outrage over the selfish, reckless manner in which he’d put his and the party’s agenda at risk.
Just look at all the liberal women who rallied then to his defense, studiously turning a blind eye to his personal behavior because his policy priorities were preferable to those of his attackers. It was an understandable bargain, but it wasn’t a pretty one.
It’s never as simple and humdrum as being for or against the Clintons. And while countless other politicians force supporters to make special allowances, stomach imperfections and come to terms with a tangle of good and bad, few do so on the Clintons’ operatic scale.
A prediction: With the publication on June 16 of two new books that assess Richard Nixon — “One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon,” by Tim Weiner, and “Being Nixon: A Man Divided,” by Evan Thomas — you’re going to see and hear some comparisons of Nixon and Hillary.
These will touch on paranoia and on relationships (or, rather, the lack of them) with reporters.
“It’s definitely true that Hillary is like Nixon in her sense of aggrievement and her deep suspicion of the press,” Thomas told me, though he hastened to add, “Nixon ultimately was a darker figure.”
It’s also true that voting for her may require of many Democrats what voting for him did of many Republicans, which is the suppression of profound misgivings. Thomas said that in 1968, people backing Nixon often felt that “there really wasn’t any other choice.” At least for the nomination, he was inevitable.
As is she, and this time around, in contrast to 2008, there’s no Barack Obama in the wings, at least none that Democratic operatives can detect. Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee don’t qualify.
At some point over the last year Democrats placed just about all of their chips on Hillary, reassured by the depth of her experience, aware of how much money she could raise, and inspired by what a perfect sequel to Barack Obama she’d be. He broke the color barrier. Now she’d shatter the glass ceiling that she put all those cracks in.
But the Clintons facilitate a thrilling scenario only to pollute it. They come wrapped in shiny folds of promise and good intentions, then the packaging comes off, and what lies beneath are emails from Sidney Blumenthal, shakedowns of Petra Nemcova.
Recently Bill wrote a letter to supporters of his, Hillary’s and Chelsea’s sprawling charitable foundation, outlining its global reach. He described the breadth of services it provides, including H.I.V./AIDS medicines for nearly 10 million people in 70 countries, and the diversity of people it supports, from farmers in Africa to female entrepreneurs in Latin America.
His words were a reminder that perhaps no other former president has lavished so much travel and star power on such an ambitious engine of good deeds. The foundation is an exemplar.
Until you peek inside and behold a convoluted braid of public service and personal aggrandizement, a queasy-making brew of altruism and vanity, a mechanism for employing loyalists and rewarding friends, a bazaar for favor trading. Straightforward admiration is no longer possible.
Frustration supplants it. Worry, too. A few days ago I spoke with one Democratic elder who ranted, like my breakfast companion, about all the ammunition that the Clintons had needlessly created for a Republican nominee.
He envisioned a flood of negative ads in Florida and Ohio about State Department emails, speaking fees and foreign donations. He said that this deluge could very well make a difference.
He was livid.
Would that keep him from campaigning for Hillary?
No, he said. Even if he couldn’t count on her, she could count on him.
It didn’t seem fair.
It did seem familiar.
Why Join the Military With a Reckless (Meaning Republican) Commander-In-Chief? // HuffPo // Doug Bandow – June 6, 2015
Former governor and presidential candidate Michael Huckabee issued a clarion call for young Americans not to join the military if he or virtually any Republican wins the presidency in 2016. Well, that's not exactly what he said. But it was the obvious implication of his remarks.
Huckabee declared: "I'd wait a couple of years, until we got a new commander-in-chief, that will once again believe one nation under God and believes that people of faith should be a vital part of the process of not only governing, but defending this country." It was an oblique, even confusing attack on President Barack Obama. Apparently the former Baptist pastor was upset about Pentagon restrictions on proselytizing within the armed services.
It's a fair area for debate since the Obama administration sometimes has taken a careless, if not hostile, stance toward religious liberty. But there's no evidence that the president doesn't want people of faith joining the military (or being involved in "governing," whatever that means).
However, Huckabee inadvertently raised a far more important issue. Should Americans join the military if the next commander-in-chief of the armed services is an arrogant, ignorant, irresponsible, war-happy hawk? Patriotic young men and women want to serve their country, challenge themselves and more. Many of America's best and brightest join the armed services. But with the U.S. constantly at war, joining is a life or death decision, dependent on the judgment of whoever sits in the Oval Office.
There is much to criticize in President Obama's foreign policy. He is too aggressive -- twice increasing troop levels in Afghanistan, and recently prolonging the U.S. presence, going to war in Libya, making the Islamic State's sectarian conflict America's own, putting combat and training personnel in a number of smaller conflicts, including Uganda and Ukraine. The administration's execution also often suffers. Sadly, the word incompetent comes to mind.
Nevertheless, the president apparently is thoughtful and thus reluctant to loose the dogs of war. In contrast, ever-angry 2008 presidential candidate John McCain urges war in virtually every circumstance. He never seems to think about the consequences of bombing or invading other nations. One would be a real risk-taker to join the military under such a commander-in-chief.
President George W. Bush demonstrated a different set of faults. By all accounts he knew little about the countries he was invading and peoples he was fighting. He believed the fairy tale promises of more "optimistic" advisers. He wasn't willing to finish what he started, essentially abandoning the Afghan war, which was tied to 9/11, to initiate the far most disastrous Iraq war, which was unrelated to the attack on America. Bush then refused to accept responsibility while carrying on with a failed policy.
As a consequence, more than 4,500 American service members, plus other U.S. employees and contractors, died needlessly. New enemies and enemy organizations were created, such as the Islamic State, which are active today. Iran was greatly empowered, the same Iran that most of the current GOP presidential candidates believe should be bombed. It is a miracle -- or a testament to so many Americans' deep patriotism -- that anyone enlisted while Bush was president (and Richard Cheney was vice president, a scary heartbeat away from the Oval Office).
The 2016 contenders are almost all worse than President Obama. There are some outliers, like Sen. Rand Paul and former Senators Jim Webb and Lincoln Chaffee. A few others are unclear players such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former governors Jeb Bush and Martin O'Malley. The first group take a more nuanced and restrained approach to foreign policy, though not all their positions are consistent. The others so far have not committed themselves or have given conflicting signals.
The other contenders appear more interested in promoting ideology than addressing reality in foreign policy. For instance, Hillary Clinton has spent most of her political life as a hawk. She reportedly was a leading advocate of military action in the Balkans in the 1990s -- a complicated, murderous conflict of primary interest to Europe in which the U.S. ignored massive ethnic cleansing by its allies, Croatia and the ethnic Albanian Kosovars. Bosnia and Kosovo remain problems because the U.S. attempted to impose a "solution" from outside through force.
As senator, Clinton voted to authorize the Iraq war, the most foolish, counterproductive foreign policy decision by the U.S. government in decades. Iran was empowered, sectarianism exploded in Iraq, and radical forces including the Islamic State were born. She obviously learned no lessons, however.
As secretary of state, Clinton was a constant advocate of more war. She appeared to enthusiastically back the force build-up in Afghanistan and insisted that war was an option against Iran. Observed neocon intellectual Robert Kagan: "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy." He told the New York Times that her policy is "something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that."
Libya was Clinton's war. That conflict was supposed to be another cakewalk. Alas, it resulted in thousands of deaths, multiple war atrocities, an incipient civil war, another home for Islamic State killers, and the regional spread of arms, including anti-aircraft missiles. The good news is that no Americans died fighting. But Americans stationed in Libya died afterwards, on her watch, and now are at risk battling the Islamic State. Out of office, she supported the president's initial plan for bombing Syria over its apparent use of chemical weapons as well as re-involvement in Iraq to fight the Islamic State.
When has she ever supported peace? Anyone serving under her should recognize the risks of being sent into another foolish, counterproductive war.
However, most of the Republicans are no better -- indeed, some are a good deal worse. Lindsey Graham is running in order to promote a policy of constant conflict. In recent years he joined with John McCain to advocate on behalf of every war fought and many not started. If Graham was president, members of the armed services could expect to spend years overseas occupying and remaking foreign societies. Kind of a permanent Afghan-Iraqi policy, only everywhere.
The media has anointed Sen. Marco Rubio as having "expertise" in foreign policy, despite his endorsement every war since his election in 2010. He backed bombing Libya, bombing Syria, bombing the Islamic State, and possibly attacking Iran. Apparently unaware that Iran was, if anything, even more hostile than Washington to the Islamic State, Rubio recently combined bellicosity with ignorance. Alas, George W. Bush demonstrated that that is a really bad combination for a president. (Rubio also has taken on the contradictory task of promoting new thinking while backing the half century old economic embargo on Cuba.)
A couple of former governors, Huckabee and Rick Perry, previously ran as "bomb-first" neocons, believing that most every foreign policy problem would be solved by another war. A gaggle of governors -- Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal -- avoided much of the foreign policy debate while serving but generally have been attempting to outflank each other with hawkish pronouncements. None has demonstrated knowing very much about the subject and, in general, they have backed the Iraq war, inveighed against the nuclear agreement with Iran (the alternative to which likely is a nuclear Iran or war with Iran), insisted in increased military outlays, spouted the usual pabulum about the importance of "leadership" and "toughness," and denounced President Obama as weak. It is hard to know what they would do in any particular instance, but taken at their word they likely would send military personnel into combat for reasons minor or even frivolous.
One suspects that when the issue of foreign policy comes up at the Republican presidential debates, most of these candidates will break into the Maori Haka in an attempt to demonstrate that they are tougher and meaner and readier for war than their competitors. That is, unless someone reminds them that New Zealand is a peaceful nation which does not constantly start stupid wars.
Other Republicans who today are back benchers might come to the fore with an uber-hawkish president. Sen. Tom Cotton, for instance, recently made a thinly veiled appeal for military action against Iran despite the prospect of a negotiated settlement. But he argued it wasn't anything to worry about, that a few days of bombing would suffice. Even more bizarrely, he contended that "You have to be focused everywhere." The failure to set priorities really works well in wars.
All of the Republicans, including Rand Paul, also advocate essentially a blank check for the Pentagon, adopting the traditional Democratic position that spending more money on something is the same as achieving something. Paul, at least, wants to cut other outlays as an offset. Most of the candidates simply favor more money for more wars, wherever they might be fought.
What's a patriotic potential service member to do? Pine for Ronald Reagan.
It's not just the grand rhetoric of freedom and genuine appreciation for military service. It's also his very restrained, responsible use of the armed services. Caricatured as a wild cowboy, he only used the military three times. Once to oust a bloody communist regime in nearby Grenada which, he contended, threatened American students in medical school there. Another instance was to retaliate against Libya for a terrorist attack. The last was to support Lebanon's government in the middle of that nation's tragic civil war.
The first two were finished quickly. The third proved to be a horrible mistake, from which Reagan learned. He didn't send in another 100,000 troops, impose a multi-year occupation, and engage in nation-building. Instead, he pulled the troops out. And he never repeated that mistake.
Michael Huckabee is right. Americans should consider the commander-in-chief before joining the military. Unfortunately for Huckabee, if they did so they would disqualify him and most of the other presidential contenders. Voters should insist on good military as well as moral character.
Alexandria Phillips
Press Assistant | Communications
Hillary for America | www.hillaryclinton.com