podesta-emails
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***Correct The Record Monday January 5, 2015 Morning Roundup:*
*Headlines:*
*CNN: “Hillary Clinton's gender politics”
<http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/05/politics/hillary-clinton-gender/index.html>*
“Gender -- the issue that Hillary Clinton struggled to find her balance on
during her 2008 campaign -- is front and center as she prepares for a
possible 2016 presidential run.”
*Washington Post: “Clinton, Clinton; Cuomo, Warren”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-clinton-cuomo-warren/2015/01/03/0f05c972-9363-11e4-ba53-a477d66580ed_story.html>*
“History never repeats, but sometimes things circle back in intriguing
ways. How else to explain parallels between 1992 and 2016, with a pair of
candidates named Clinton, at the start of their presidential campaigns,
shadowed by liberal icons of the Democratic Party?”
*New York Times column: Frank Bruni: “Are Two Dynasties Our Destiny?”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-clinton-bush-and-the-2016-presidential-election.html>*
“One of them? Sure. Both? Too much could go wrong.”
*Boulder Daily Camera: “A conversation with Gary Hart: New policies for a
new world”
<http://www.dailycamera.com/opinion/conversations/ci_27246714/conversation-gary-hart-new-policies-new-world>*
FMR. SEN. GARY HART: “Are there a lot of people who want a woman president
for the first time? Yes. Is she [Sec. Clinton] well-known? Yes. Is she
experienced? Yes. Do those three things qualify her to be president at a
time when new ideas, new people and new thinking are required? I'd just
leave it at that.”
*Washington Post: “Local experts predict the sports, music and food D.C.
will be buzzing about in 2015” [PARTIAL]
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/express/2015predictions>*
“Who will be the presidential nominees for 2016? Larry Sabato, director of
the University of Virginia Center for Politics, edits the Crystal Ball
website, which analyzes upcoming elections across the country. Sabato
predicts Hillary Rodham Clinton will face off against Jeb Bush in 2016.”
*Electablog: Hillary’s rise is inspiring — Jeb’s is everything that’s wrong
with America
<http://www.eclectablog.com/2015/01/hillarys-rise-is-inspiring-jebs-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-america.html>*
"The rise to become the first female frontrunner for the presidency is
unprecedented in American history... Hillary Clinton deserves credit for
career and the historic opportunity she may seize. Take on her policies,
please. But don’t do Republicans the favor of lumping her in with John
Ellis Bush AKA Jeb."
*New York Post: Page Six: “Hillary Clinton is already seeing big-name
support”
<http://pagesix.com/2015/01/03/hillary-clinton-is-already-seeing-big-name-support/>*
“CEO of DreamWorks Animation Jeffrey Katzenberg and co-founder and CEO of
Avenue Capital Group Marc Lasry are already planning on ways to support
Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
*Wall Street Journal: “Top Iowa Democrats Slow to Rally Around Hillary
Clinton”
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/top-iowa-democrats-slow-to-rally-around-hillary-clinton-1420418121?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories>*
“Iowa Democratic leaders say they are troubled by the prospect that Hillary
Clinton could win the state’s 2016 presidential caucuses without a serious
challenge, a view primarily rooted in a desire for a more liberal candidate
or at least a robust debate about the party’s policies and direction.”
*Wall Street Journal blog: Washington Wire: “What Iowa’s Democratic Leaders
Want: 4 Takeaways”
<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/01/05/what-iowas-democratic-leaders-want-4-takeaways/>*
“Here are four takeaways drawn from interviews with more than half the
Democratic chairpeople in Iowa’s 99 counties.”
*Real Clear Politics: Video: “Van Susteren: I'm Not Convinced Hillary Is
Going To Run; O'Malley ‘The Big Sleeper Candidate’”
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/01/04/van_susteren_im_not_convinced_hillary_is_going_to_run_omalley_the_big_sleeper_candidate.html>*
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: “I actually think the big surprise is going to be the
Democratic side of the ledger, whether or not former secretary of state
Hillary Clinton runs. I'm actually not convinced -- I'm not convinced she's
going to run…”
*Politico Magazine: Matt Latimer, speechwriter for Pres. George W. Bush:
“Why Republicans Are Ready for Hillary”
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/republicans-2015-ready-for-hillary-113956.html#.VKn4bfldWSo>*
“Conservatives do have one thing to be thankful for: The fact is that
Hillary Clinton learned so many lessons from her surprising 2008 defeat
that she’s repeating each of them all over again.”
*Politico Magazine: Bill Scher, senior writer at the Campaign for America’s
Future: “The Democrats’ Donkey in the Room”
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/obama-ratings-2015-dilemma-113945.html#.VKn2bPldWSo>*
“As the presidential race shifts into gear in 2015, much rides on how the
expected Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton navigates these various poles
in the Democratic big tent. Assuming she runs and maintains her wide lead
among Democrats, she will have more say than anyone as to how Democrats
define their post-Obama future.”
*Articles:*
*CNN: “Hillary Clinton's gender politics”
<http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/05/politics/hillary-clinton-gender/index.html>*
By Maeve Reston
January 5, 2015
Gender -- the issue that Hillary Clinton struggled to find her balance on
during her 2008 campaign -- is front and center as she prepares for a
possible 2016 presidential run.
It is, in many ways, a remarkable evolution for a female politician once
bedeviled by gender politics to the self-defined "pantsuit aficionado and
glass ceiling cracker" of today.
For much of this year, Clinton has spoken with ease -- and little
controversy -- about female empowerment. At Tina Brown's 'Women in the
World' conference in April, Clinton declared that the "double standard" for
women was "alive and well." In countless public appearances, she has opened
up about how that standard played out in her own career: from being
underestimated by male colleagues as a young lawyer to the advice given to
career women her age that they should keep family pictures off their desks.
The former Secretary of State has turned scrutiny about her scrunchies,
headbands and hairstyles into laugh lines. She has poked fun at the sexist
slights of foreign leaders—like that of Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko
Borisov, who told her he was briefed that she only wore her hair back when
she was in a "bad mood."
She often advises young women to handle criticism by developing skin "as
tough as a rhinoceros." And she rarely gave a speech this fall without
reminding audiences she was soon to be a grandmother. The tableau was
complete when she tweeted a softly lit image of her cradling newborn
Charlotte while Bill Clinton beamed over her shoulder.
The careful choreography illustrates the attention her team is giving to
reconnecting Clinton with Democratic women, a core constituency that Barack
Obama was able to slice into during her first presidential run in 2008.
The renewed courtship essentially began with her concession speech in 2008
when she told supporters that although they hadn't "shattered that highest,
hardest glass ceiling," it had "about 18 million cracks in it."
"Should she run, she has an opportunity to continue to build on what
(Barack Obama) has done, and another fantastic step on that ladder is the
possibility of the first woman president of the United States," said Tracy
Sefl, who advised the Clinton campaign on communications strategy in 2008.
"The possibility of a woman president is a welcome one, more so than is a
foreign one."
Now, Clinton allies encouraging her to run see an opportunity for her not
only to hold the Obama coalition, but to improve on his 2012 showing among
women, which would spell trouble for her Republican opponent in 2016.
The President led among women by about 11 points in both 2008 and 2012. But
some 56% of white women—which were a strong demographic for Clinton—favored
2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, compared to 42% for Obama in 2012.
Obama also lost married women to Romney by 7 points.
This year's effort to put gender front and center is a nod to those
numbers. It also reflects a politician who, after more than two decades in
the public eye, is more comfortable sharing her personal experiences with
voters.
Another asset is that Obama's historic election -- along with Clinton's
competitive bid in 2008 -- changed societal expectations of what an
American President must look like. In interviews during this year's midterm
elections, many Democratic voters, particularly women, said they feel it is
her turn for a historic victory.
Though Clinton has not defined her 2016 message, her speeches this year
have hinted a partial framework for her candidacy: her argument that the
'women's issues' she has championed -- pay equity, family leave, raising
the minimum wage, access to childcare -- are really "family issues" that
are part of her life's work -- and that of her husband -- to boost the
middle class.
"With women" in the next election cycle, Center for American Progress
President Neera Tanden said, "the opportunity is to connect up these
economic issues that they see as time challenges for them—like paid leave,
or sick days or childcare—to a broader economic message."
"I can't think of anyone who would be better at doing that than Hillary
Clinton," said Tanden, who advised Clinton on policy as first lady, senator
from New York and during her presidential campaign.
Clinton is still a cautious speaker. But when it comes to connecting with
other women through her own story, she seems more comfortable in her own
skin than she did even a few years ago. It is an open question, however,
whether independent voters and moderate Republican women will embrace the
issues she seems most inclined to talk about in 2016.
"Her natural focus is that she wants to be seen as this person who is a
champion for women. It remains to be seen whether that's a particularly
successful general election strategy," said Katie Packer Gage, whose firm
Burning Glass coaches Republican candidates on connecting with female
voters. "Women just don't have history of voting for women; they have a
pretty decent history of following their party behavior. So being a woman
doesn't necessarily provide some kind of big advantage."
As Democratic Sen. Mark Udall's failed re-election campaign in Colorado
this year showed, strategies that are too rooted in gender can backfire.
But Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said that during the 2008 recession
male voters became more attuned and receptive to the economic issues that
disproportionately affect women, like raising the minimum wage and pay
equity.
"What happened in this recession was that men lost their jobs before women
did," said Lake, who oversaw focus group research for the Clinton campaign
in 1992 and served as a consultant to the campaign. "In lots and lots of
families, you had the woman at some point as the primary, and maybe the
only, breadwinner in the family. So this last recession really changed
things."
Over her long career, Clinton's remarks about women's personal and career
choices have often shaped the peaks and valleys of her popularity.
She was shadowed during her husband's 1992 campaign by his suggestion that
American voters could "buy one, get one free." That notion quickly became a
liability as Hillary Clinton's work as opponents scrutinized her work as a
lawyer in the Rose Law Firm while he was governor of Arkansas, as well as
her outspoken demeanor.
Fed up with what she considered "spurious" charges about her business
dealings in March of 1992, Clinton delivered the disastrous retort that she
"could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas." When strung
together with her earlier defense of her husband from charges of
infidelity—"I'm not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like
Tammy Wynette"—she became a sharply polarizing figure among women.
"Critics were venomous," she recalled in her first memoir, Living History.
"I was called a Rorschach test for the American public, and it was an apt
way of conveying the varied and extreme reactions that I provoked."
Even by the summer of that 1992 campaign, she noted, most Americans did not
realize that she had a child. She relented to a joint People magazine
interview where the couple described 12-year-old Chelsea, who appeared with
them on the cover, as the center of their lives.
"Friends of the Clintons say that the public labeling of Hillary as an
ambitious careerist misses her warmth and playfulness," one notable line
from the 'People' profile said. Both Clintons defended her tea and cookies
comment as misunderstanding. "It gave a totally false impression of who she
is," her husband told the magazine, insisting that she had not been
"muzzled" after the controversy.
Improving the First Lady's image among women and presenting her in a more
"likeable light" became a preoccupation for the White House staff, as 1990s
documents released by the National Archives this year reveal.
She regained some of her footing at a 1995 women's conference in Beijing
where she said that "human rights are women's rights, and women's rights
are human rights." In another sign of how the female-centered message will
coincide with her campaign, the Clinton Foundation plans to release a
report tracking women's progress since her 1995 speech this spring.
But as late as 1999 before her Senate run, she was still being advised by
strategist Mandy Grunwald to try to show "more sides" of herself and look
for "opportunities for humor" to avoiding coming off as so stern.
"The only two (female) candidates I can think of over time who were really
perceived as being too tough are Dianne Feinstein and Hillary Clinton,"
said Dianne Bystrom, who has studied female politicians since the 1990s at
Iowa State's Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics.
That liability surfaced for Clinton most notably in 2008. She spoke early
on about trying to break the glass ceiling of the presidency. But her
campaign ultimately centered on the message that she was the only candidate
with the strength and experience to lead. When she was asked what it meant
to be a woman running as president, her answer was always that she was
proud to be a woman making that attempt, but she was running because she
thought she'd be the "best president."
Not long before her third place finish in the Iowa caucuses, Bystrom
recalled, Hawkeye state polls indicated that voters perceived her as
tougher than Obama, but less caring. Soon the campaign had launched a
website full of soft testimonials from friends and admirers about the
"Hillary I know," and cut ads featuring Clinton and her mother laughing in
the kitchen.
She won the New Hampshire primary a day after startling voters by becoming
emotional when asked how she was handling the pressure of the campaign.
"It's not easy," she said as her eyes filled with tears before a group of
undecided women at a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, diner.
Her campaign arranged other female-focused events in the long duel with
Obama that followed, but that New Hampshire meeting would mark a rare
moment of vulnerability for a candidate who was profiled in 'The New
Yorker' in March 2008 as "The Irony Lady."
Clinton had soon swerved back to framing herself as "someone tested and
ready to lead in a dangerous world," as one of her ads said—the person
voters would want answering the phone at the White House at 3 a.m..
Looking ahead to 2016, Clinton seems unlikely to face the hurdle of a
competitive primary, much less a battle over historic firsts. And after
four years as Secretary of State—which tabled the experience question for
many voters, according to polls—Clinton may feel that she simply has more
latitude to talk about her life experiences in a more personal way than in
previous campaigns.
"She has more freedom, because she has more political accomplishments than
she did when she ran in 2008," said Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women
& Politics Institute at American University. At the same time, "all of the
Monday morning quarterbacking suggests that it was probably a mistake that
(the 2008 Clinton campaign) took the women's vote at all different
generation levels for granted."
Primary or not, Clinton and her team seem determined not to make that
mistake again.
*Washington Post: “Clinton, Clinton; Cuomo, Warren”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-clinton-cuomo-warren/2015/01/03/0f05c972-9363-11e4-ba53-a477d66580ed_story.html>*
By Dan Balz
January 3, 2015
[Subtitle:] Could 2015 be like 1991 all over again? Democratic hopes for
2016 may be at stake.
History never repeats, but sometimes things circle back in intriguing ways.
How else to explain parallels between 1992 and 2016, with a pair of
candidates named Clinton, at the start of their presidential campaigns,
shadowed by liberal icons of the Democratic Party?
For Bill Clinton, it was Mario Cuomo, the three-term governor of New York,
who died on New Year’s Day this year. For Hillary Rodham Clinton, it is
Elizabeth Warren, the first-term senator from Massachusetts. The two
pairings speak to ever-present tensions within the Democratic Party. But
they also highlight some important differences between then and now.
As Bill Clinton began his run for the White House in the fall of 1991,
Cuomo loomed large. Most of the Democrats’ heavyweights had already passed
on the 1992 race. Then-president George H.W. Bush had started 1991 with a
victory in the Persian Gulf War that took his approval rating to about 89
percent in the Gallup poll. At that point he looked unbeatable to
risk-averse Democrats.
Clinton was among those who sensed an opportunity. He had come close to
running in 1988 but chose to stay out. In the intervening four years, he
had used his standing as the chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council
to accelerate the process of trying to redefine his party, seeking to move
it off its traditional liberal moorings toward a new centrist
identification.
He was anything but a dominant front-runner in the fall of 1991, just one
of a number of Democrats with hopes and dreams. Although he had served as
governor of Arkansas almost continuously since 1978 (he lost his first bid
for reelection in 1980) and had a network of friends that extended far
beyond the borders of his home state, he knew he would have to prove
himself to become the party’s presidential nominee.
Cuomo, meanwhile, was a major figure, if a rather reluctant presidential
candidate. He was the leading liberal in the Democratic Party, a politician
of intellectual depth and rhetorical virtuosity. Through the 1980s, he was
a counterweight to the philosophy of President Ronald Reagan and the rising
conservative sentiment in the country. To the delight of his party’s
liberal base, Cuomo offered a vigorous defense of an expansive role for
government, with an emphasis on aiding the poor, the homeless and the
downtrodden.
By the late fall of 1991, as Clinton began his rise, Cuomo suddenly
appeared as a potentially serious obstacle when he announced that he would
consider entering the race. Clinton was both wary of, and ready for, a
Cuomo challenge — wary due to the New York governor’s national prominence
and political heft; ready because he had been honing his arguments for
years about the need for the Democrats to change if they hoped to recapture
the White House.
Their differences were substantial. Cuomo’s governmental philosophy, though
he once called it “progressive pragmatism,” was the embodiment of New Deal
and Great Society ideas and values. After seeing Democrats defeated in
three consecutive presidential elections, Clinton recognized that public
faith in Great Society programs had waned, that constituency politics had
its limits and that the cultural liberalism of the Democrats had created
roadblocks with many voters whose support the party needed to win again
nationally.
Clinton also knew at the time that there were doubts about him among party
liberals. At a forum in Chicago in November 1991, he was asked a planted
question about fears that he was a Republican posing as a Democrat. His
answer showed his political agility to be a New Democrat rooted in old
Democrat symbols. “My granddaddy thought when he died, he was going to
Roosevelt,” he said.
Throughout December of that year, Cuomo dithered until it was too late. On
the day of the deadline for filing papers to enter the New Hampshire
primary, there were chartered planes waiting on a tarmac in Albany to fly
him to New Hampshire, a lectern set up outside the state capitol in Concord
and throngs of reporters in each place awaiting what most thought would be
a positive announcement.
In the end, Cuomo chose not to run, earning him the nickname “Hamlet on the
Hudson.” Mike Pride, the former editor of the Concord Monitor, tweeted the
other day that, at the moment Cuomo said no, “Clinton exhaled.”
Democrats and the country were denied what might have been an epic
confrontation between old and new Democratic philosophies, offered by two
of the party’s brightest minds and political talents. We can only speculate
how history might have been changed had that clash occurred.
Clinton was ready for a fight that never came. Instead he faced weaker
opposition — and his own scarred past — in the nomination campaign. He was
able to move his party to the right with relative ease.
*The Warren effect*
Now, more than two decades later, the dynamics of the Democratic nomination
contest are different. Now it is the liberal wing calling for the party to
change. Hillary Rodham Clinton is cast as the status quo candidate, a
politician rooted in Democratic centrism, defending an older order ushered
in by her husband.
Many in the progressive wing of the party — just how many isn’t yet clear —
are suspicious of the former secretary of state. They see the party as far
too tied to corporate and moneyed interests. Fairly or unfairly, they blame
the Clintons for much of this. Although Democrats under President Obama
have moved left in some areas, progressives pointing to 2016 are restless
and looking for someone to shake things up. In Warren they see the ideal
candidate.
Whenever a story appears about divisions within the Democratic Party, there
are objections raised by those who contend that Democrats across the
spectrum are mostly in agreement on policy matters — economic and social.
They argue that what Clinton wrought with his presidency has taken root
within the party, that the differences are manufactured.
Progressives believe otherwise. They say there are substantial differences.
Trade issues divided Democrats when Clinton ran in 1992 and still do today.
Warren advocates increasing Social Security benefits at a time when some
other Democrats believe they will need to be squeezed. But the gaps between
those who see Warren as a champion and those rallying around Clinton appear
far narrower than the differences that existed between Bill Clinton and
Mario Cuomo.
The differences today are both issue-based and stylistic. Progressives are
pushing for a sharper, more populist edge to the Democratic message, with
more attention aimed at working- and middle-class families who haven’t
enjoyed the fruits of the economic recovery. Warren has that populist edge.
Clinton so far does not.
*Progressive reprise?*
Two decades ago, Bill Clinton was ready to take on Cuomo and his philosophy
— although his approach never involved a repudiation of the Democratic
past. He always found a way to blend old and new. But today, the question
is how much Hillary Clinton will feel the need to accommodate those who
yearn for a Warren candidacy. How much will she move left, while remaining
largely rooted where she is?
In the end, Hillary Clinton could end up as her husband did, without the
party’s contemporary liberal icon in the presidential field. Warren appears
as or more reluctant than Cuomo did in 1991. Although she couches her
denials in present tense — “I am not running for president — there is
nothing that she is yet doing to suggest preparations for a serious
campaign. Perhaps that will change.
In 1992, Cuomo ended up delivering the nominating speech for Bill Clinton
at the Democratic convention in New York. He offered a robust, fulsome
embrace of the young New Democrat. If Warren stays out of the 2016 race,
and if Hillary Clinton runs and wins the nomination, could we see the
Massachusetts senator in the role of Mario Cuomo at the next Democratic
convention?
*New York Times column: Frank Bruni: “Are Two Dynasties Our Destiny?”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-clinton-bush-and-the-2016-presidential-election.html>*
By Frank Bruni
January 3, 2015
[Subtitle:] Clinton, Bush and the 2016 Presidential Election
JEB and Hillary. Hillary and Jeb. It’s getting to the point where a mention
of one yields a reference to the other, where they’re semantically
inseparable, presidentially conjoined. Should we just go the extra step,
save ourselves some syllables and keystrokes? The 2016 matchup as
envisioned by many: Jebary. Or, more economically still, Heb.
The fascination with this pair as possible rivals for the White House makes
perfect sense, because it defies belief. We’re talking about tomorrow while
trafficking in yesterday. We’re saying we need to turn the page by going
back to a previous chapter.
We’re a country of self-invention (that’s the myth, at least) in thrall to
legacies and in the grip of dynasties, riveted by the mightiest surname in
modern Democratic politics and its Republican analogue, imagining not just
a clash of the titans but a scrum of the successors.
It would be a replay of the 1992 race, but with the wife of the victor
against a son of the loser. It would also call to mind the 2000 race, when
that victor’s heir apparent, Al Gore, squared off against another of that
loser’s sons, George W. Bush. That too was a Clinton-Bush contest, because
Bush campaigned against the incumbent president, repeatedly suggesting that
his conduct with a White House intern had brought dishonor to the office.
And then, years later, they all somehow got chummy. In an interview with
C-Span that aired last January, Barbara Bush revealed that Bill Clinton had
developed the habit of dropping by her family’s Kennebunkport, Me.,
compound every summer for a visit.
“I love Bill Clinton,” she said, explaining that he and her husband, the
42nd and 41st presidents, had formed a special bond. “Bill’s father wasn’t
around, and I think that he thinks of George a little bit like the father
he didn’t have.” If he’s an adopted son of sorts, then Jebary would be
incestuous in addition to operatic.
How irresistible.
But how unlikely, despite all the current speculation following Jeb Bush’s
maneuvers to prime a candidacy: the release of emails from his years as
governor of Florida; the announcement last week that he’d resigned his
positions on the boards of corporations and nonprofit organizations.
There’s no doubt that he and Hillary Clinton enjoy enormous structural
advantages — in terms of name recognition, fund-raising and ready-made
support networks — over other potential aspirants for their parties’
nominations.
But they also have significant external problems and internal flaws, and
there are serious open questions about each. Factor those in and it’s a
reach, as a sheer matter of probability, that they wind up as the final two.
One of them? Sure. Both? Too much could go wrong.
A successful campaign isn’t just coffers and endorsements, though those
matter. It’s narrative and emotion. It’s a speech-by-speech,
handshake-by-handshake seduction, and on this score it’s unclear that
Clinton and Bush are especially well positioned or masters of the game.
They’re formidable candidates, yes. But are they good ones?
What I’ve previously noted about her is true as well of him: They’re not
fresh and unfamiliar enough for all that many voters to discover them, the
way they did Barack Obama in 2008 and to some extent George W. Bush in
2000, and develop that kind of political crush.
They’re not naturals on the stump. Clinton came into the 2008 campaign with
extensive experience in the spotlight; still she struggled to warm up to
audiences (and vice versa) and find the looseness and air of intimacy that
many voters crave. Her “Hard Choices” book tour last year was rocky, with
awkward moments that she created or should have been able to avoid.
And it’s impossible to predict how Bush would fare on the trail, because he
hasn’t waged a campaign since his re-election as governor of Florida in
2002. That’s significant, and it’s getting less attention than it should.
His bid for the Republican nomination, if he formalizes it, would be his
first. And while his brother succeeded on his maiden voyage, the subsequent
two nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney, were making second tries.
Practice helps.
EVEN Bush’s most ardent admirers don’t sell him as a rousing orator. Last
April I happened to hear him give an education reform speech, at an event
where Chris Christie had been the headliner the previous year, and the
contrast was stark. Christie had come across as impassioned, unscripted. He
filled and held the room. Bush was a phlegmatic blur. Afterward his
supporters talked about and fretted over it.
Both he and Hillary Clinton may be too awash in money. More so than other
Democrats and Republicans who’ve signaled interest in the presidency,
they’ve existed for many years now at a financial altitude far, far above
that of ordinary Americans.
And reporters digging into their affairs would provide voters with constant
reminders of that, revisiting the Clintons’ speaking fees and examining Jeb
Bush’s adventures in private equity, which a Bloomberg Politics story from
December described under this headline: “Jeb Bush Has a Mitt Romney
Problem.”
It’s hard to fathom that at this of all junctures, when there’s growing
concern about income inequality and the attainability of the American
dream, voters in both parties would choose nominees of such economically
regal bearing.
Clinton would at least hold the promise of history in the making — a first
female president — and her candidacy would wring excitement from that. But
to seal the deal, she’d probably have to tamp down excessive talk of
inevitability, forge a less combative relationship with the news media and
find a nimbleness that has often eluded her.
As Peter Beinart observed in a National Journal appraisal last year, “She’s
terrific at developing and executing a well-defined plan. She’s less adept
at realizing that a well-defined plan is not working and improvising
something new.” He was previewing a Clinton presidency, but his assessment
is equally germane to a Clinton candidacy.
And Clinton and Bush together have more baggage than the cargo hold of a
747. That’s the flip side of all of those family tentacles, all that
political history, all those privileged inside glimpses of the process.
They make you putty in the hands of the right opposition researcher.
We’re nearly two years away from November 2016. So are Clinton and Bush.
They remain abstractions.
But they won’t get to campaign that way, and we won’t know some of the most
important stuff about them until they’re actually in the arena, showing us
their fettle and whether it fits the mood of the moment.
Maybe Jebary really is who we are and where we’re headed. I suspect a
different destination.
*Boulder Daily Camera: “A conversation with Gary Hart: New policies for a
new world”
<http://www.dailycamera.com/opinion/conversations/ci_27246714/conversation-gary-hart-new-policies-new-world>*
[No Writer Mentioned]
January 3, 2015, 6:00 p.m. MST
Correction, update: Former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart sent the following statement
to the Camera on Sunday.
"In a long interview printed today with Mr. Dave Krieger, I am quoted as
suggesting that the Orange Order might be included in the category of a
paramilitary organization in Northern Ireland. That is an incorrect
statement. There is an Orange Volunteer organization which has been so
characterized. But the Orange Order is not, nor has it been, considered a
paramilitary organization. I would appreciate this correction being
printed."
The article has been edited to reflect this correction.
Former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart had just returned from Northern Ireland, where
he was serving as Secretary of State John Kerry's personal representative,
when he sat down for a conversation with Daily Camera editorial page editor
Dave Krieger in his Denver law office on Dec. 11.
The one-hour, 40-minute conversation moved from his current assignment to a
variety of other topics, including Vladimir Putin, U.S. defense spending, a
new book about the stakeout that destroyed Hart's second presidential
campaign, the corruption of electoral politics by special interest money
and the prospective field of Democratic presidential contenders in 2016.
This is the first half of the conversation. Part 2 will be published next
week.
Q: Let's start with your current assignment. What is the task in Northern
Ireland?
A: Well, you can't understand it without some history, so I'm afraid I'll
have to ramble a bit. The Protestant majority/Catholic minority in Northern
Ireland began to clash over perceived injustices that the minority were
receiving at the hands of the British government. As you know, Ulster, or
northeast Ireland, is a province of the United Kingdom, together with
England, Scotland and Wales. This had been developing for quite a long
time, since the creation of the Irish Republic in 1922 in the so-called
Anglo-Irish Agreement. Ulster was carved out. This led to a brief civil war
in Ireland. Long history.
In any case, in the '60s, paramilitaries formed on both sides ... . Bombs
and bullets flew and 3,000 people died. At the end of the Cold War and the
beginning of the Clinton administration, I, among others, I think I was one
of the first, urged Bill Clinton to send a personal representative or
special envoy or whatever you want to call it, to Northern Ireland, if the
parties would agree to it, to try to negotiate a peace agreement. That was
'94. In '95, he appointed George Mitchell, a friend and former colleague.
In '98, the Good Friday Agreement was signed by the British and Irish
governments, but most of all by the parties in Northern Ireland. There are,
by the way, two major parties but six political parties overall.
Three of them are so-called unionist parties. They believe in continuing
the affiliation with the United Kingdom. And that is the Protestant
majority. But that majority, by the way, is declining in population.
The cease-fire occurred under considerably complicated terms. Further
negotiations went forward and led to something called the St. Andrews
Agreement, named for where the negotiation took place, that created a
so-called devolved government. By that was meant that London would transfer
authority for self-government to a government that was composed of the two
major parties. It was structured with a first minister from the Democratic
Unionist Party, the leading unionist party, and a deputy first minister
from the Sinn Féin, or the Irish Nationalist or Republican side. That
turned out to be a man called Peter Robinson, currently, and, on the other
side, a well-known former member of the IRA, Martin McGuinness. So that's
all the backdrop.
Time went by, we're now talking between '06 and '14, when progress was made
and then there would be periods of stagnation. There were several sets of
issues.
The principal issues today, and there have been kind of fits and starts,
have to do with the budget. The budget comes from London, the U.K.
government, and it's basically one billion pounds sterling per year. It's
big. Northern Ireland is the size of Connecticut. It has a million and a
quarter to a million and a half people. So it's human scale and yet it
costs a lot. And the reason it costs a lot is the economy is not good and
it's heavily, heavily subsidized by the British government. So the British
government is cutting spending under a Conservative government, (prime
minister) David Cameron, and that means across the board, including
Northern Ireland. That meant cutting welfare payments. Sinn Féin said no.
'We have too many poor people here, too many people who were victims of the
Troubles.' So that's been the principal area of contention.
A second set of issues is very hard to explain. They're called the legacy
issues. They combine victims and survivors, and that's never been resolved.
Should people be compensated on both sides for what happened to them and
their loved ones, death and dismemberment, houses destroyed and so forth.
But also, flags and parades. Now, you say flags and parades to Americans
and they roll their eyes. Why are they going on at such length about flags
and parades?
To which I say, wait a minute. Have you heard of Ferguson, Missouri? Those
are parades. Protests. The same thing is going on in Northern Ireland.
Flags, I say, do you remember, it was only recently where capitals in South
Carolina and other places wanted to fly the confederate flag? These are
symbols. So, OK, Americans begin to understand it a little bit better.
The third set of issues has to do with unfulfilled ideas in the Good Friday
Agreement. Sinn Féin wanted schools to include the study of the Irish
language. That hasn't been resolved. Sinn Féin wants a bill of rights. That
hasn't been resolved. So those are also legacy issues.
Then finally, the devolved government in '06 needs to be reformed.
Ministries need to be consolidated, members of the legislative assembly
have to be reduced.
So here you have four baskets of issues. Nothing was happening in the
summer of this year and Secretary of State John Kerry, a friend and former
colleague, asked if I would go over in August to see whether there was
anything the United States could do to get the sides talking to each other.
The theory being, it's still volatile. There are still streets, for
example, the famous street called the Ardoyne (in Belfast), where every
building would have a unionist flag on one side and every building on the
other side would have an Irish flag.
Protestant schools, Catholic schools. And barriers, still barriers from the
time of the Troubles, physical barriers between neighborhoods. So
stagnation leads to friction. Friction leads to confrontation.
Confrontation leads to possible violence.
So I made a trip in August. I went to London to meet with the British
government, Dublin to meet with the Irish government, and then Belfast. I
reported back to Secretary Kerry, urging him to bring pressure to bear on
the British government to start negotiations, discussions. Strangely
enough, two weeks later, I think the second or third week in September, we
have a consulate in Belfast and the consul general sent a message back
saying the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland, a woman called
Theresa Villiers, has called on the parties to start talking. Now, who
knows how that happened, but it was a 180-degree turnaround from when I was
there the last week of August.
So they began to talk, starting with Robinson and McGuinness, but involving
the other four parties as well, and tried to work out a formula for dealing
with these four baskets of issues. That was September. It went into
October. I went back for a week in October and went from party to party and
met with community groups and so forth. And then finally, last week I was
there for a whole week in more intense negotiations that finally began end
of November, early December, two or three days a week, but intense.
Now, today, the prime minister of Great Britain, David Cameron, and the
prime minister of Ireland, who bears the Irish title of Taoiseach, Enda
Kenny, are both showing up in Belfast and participating in these talks. The
hope is they will reach a comprehensive agreement.
As the Secretary of State's representative, I am not called special envoy
and I'll give you a little of the history of that. For purposes of title, I
am personal representative of the secretary of state. I observe and
encourage and support and push. Mr. Robinson particularly was very
resistant to an American presence. I don't think it was personal. His
argument is, "We were given this government, this devolved government from
the St. Andrews Agreement, meant that we should govern ourselves. So why do
we need an outside party?" He even pushed back against the Irish foreign
minister participating, Charlie Flanagan. So it was more of a sovereignty
question than an anti-American question. But they let me hang around. They
gave me an office in Stormont House, where the negotiations were taking
place, and people came and went, and I went to their office and they would
come to my office. It was quite an interesting experience.
The real justification for an American (being there): Northern Ireland has
gotten more American interest over the past 40 years or more, than any
other place on Earth of comparable size except one, which is Israel. And
people might say, why are we so interested in Northern Ireland? Forty
million Americans claim Irish heritage. Last week, I heard it was 70
million.
It's demographically impossible. Even the wave of migrants in the mid-19th
century from the potato famine did not lead to 40 or 70 million Americans.
So there's something romantic, I don't know what, going on. But there is
considerable organized interest, particularly from Irish-Americans on the
Catholic side, over what happens in Ireland generally but also what happens
to Sinn Féin and the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. That's the
political justification for all this American interest. Plus, all the
parties over there, some more than others, do credit us, from the Mitchell
period onward, with preventing more bloodshed and violence. So we have some
moral authority and political authority in that regard.
But George was a politician, as I was. In between were three or four
special envoys. Largely during Bush II, I think there were three or four,
they were diplomats. They had a State Department hat on and went in a
diplomatic capacity. By training and background, George and I are more from
a political background. So the hope is that a comprehensive agreement that
will enable the Northern Ireland government to function productively and
begin to help solve some of these problems, will be reached even under
constrained budgets. That's the big problem. The key now, frankly, I think
Sinn Féin and D.U.P. (Democratic Unionist Party) have reached a general
agreement over welfare payments and the budget. It's up to the British
government to meet their demand, is what it amounts to. And that's why
Cameron is showing up there.
Q: If that agreement were to be reached in the next couple of weeks, do you
think that would end your role there?
A: That's never been determined. One of the reasons John Kerry's office
came up with 'personal representative' is he and I are very good friends
and have worked together. I supported him when he ran for president. He
wanted to leave open other assignments. So it's not personal representative
for Northern Ireland. The assignment right now is Northern Ireland. Now,
what I have said to the parties over there, I wrote an op-ed for the
Belfast Telegraph and I issued a press statement when I was over there last
week. And I did a kind of truncated press conference of sorts in which I
was very candid about, "My role is vague, I'm not George Mitchell, this is
not that kind of situation. I'm here to encourage and promote."
But John Kerry and I have not discussed what happens after that. What I am
proposing and hope to carry out is a congressional delegation to go to
Northern Ireland, either February or April, and an investment business
group to go to Northern Ireland, American companies that will explore the
markets. What we can help with and they desperately need is employment.
That sounds familiar. They're in the same boat we're in, only they've got
12-17 percent unemployment, again, in six counties.
(Editor's note: The parties announced an agreement on Dec. 23. John Kerry
issued a statement saying in part: "I applaud the parties and the two
governments for securing this agreement and pledge America's full political
support for the new arrangements. I'm also particularly grateful to my
personal representative, Sen. Gary Hart, and his deputy, Greg Burton, whose
deep engagement helped ensure the success of the talks. I know Sen. Hart
looks forward to continuing his efforts next year in support of a peaceful
and prosperous Northern Ireland, and I am very lucky to have Gary devoting
his time to this effort.")
Q: Do you like the role? If this were to be resolved and John Kerry were to
call you and say, 'You know what, I'd like you to go to the Middle East for
me,' would you have any interest?
A: I couldn't do that. The Middle East would be more intensive. George took
a crack at that a couple years ago. You almost have to live there. My wife
of 56 years is just not going to tolerate that. I can come and go, but I
think the short answer is, intensive negotiations, probably not. I've spent
an awful lot of time in Russia and I've discussed with Secretary Kerry a
possible role there as someone who might carry messages back and forth and
so forth.
"This is an atmosphere that only a Henry Kissinger would appreciate, a
student of European diplomacy in the 17th and 18th centuries."-- Gary Hart,
on the intrigue in the Middle East
* * *
Q: That's one of the fascinating spots in the world right now.
A: Well, it's not only fascinating. I've advocated for years, going all the
way back, that the U.S.-Russian relationship in the 21st century is going
to be one of the most important that we have. Not the closest, but the most
important. And I think that's proving to be true. We're not managing it
well. They're managing it extremely poorly and making it very difficult.
It's not all Putin's fault but there's a long history there as well. I
would welcome a chance to play a role there, but it wouldn't be ambassador
or anything like that.
Q: This is an extremely approximate analogy, but the impressions in the
U.S. of Stalin right after World War II were sort of similar to the
impressions of Putin in the West today. There's a certain romanticism about
these guys, and it took the West a long time to figure out who Stalin
really was. And I wonder if you think there's any parallel there. Is Putin
a danger, a threat?
A: I'd push back against a comparison to Stalin. I mean, Stalin killed 25
or 30 million people. I don't think Putin's going to do that. The world
wouldn't stand for it today. We weren't in a similar position in the '30s
to prevent him from doing that. There certainly was no United Nations and
European Union and things like that.
A danger only in a relatively minor way, which is this Greater Russia
theory that he's promoting is a danger not only in the Ukraine, eastern
Ukraine, but in the Baltic states as well. So I'd say anywhere on the
western and southwestern perimeter, anytime Georgia, for example, or the
-stans, the former Soviet Muslim republics, anytime he has a Russian
minority population, he's going to try to figure out a way to bring them
into the Russian orbit. What he's trying to do is create a smaller version
of the former Russian empire.
What happened in August of '91 was the collapse of two empires — the
Soviet, but also the traditional Russian empire. And I see him notionally
trying to recreate some version of the old Russian empire. I think that's
what he's up to. That already is leading to friction. Happily so far, it's
being played out on the economic battlefield not the military one.
Q: And it's having a significant effect on the ruble, on the Russian stock
market. He doesn't seem to care.
A: "Care" is an internalized word. It has to bother him politically and
economically, obviously. Even worse is the drop in oil prices on top of
that because that's his overwhelming source of income.
Q: Is that on purpose? Do you think Saudi Arabia is doing that to Russia
specifically?
A: Oh, no, no. It's fracking in Colorado.
Q: Well, there is that, but Saudi Arabia could cut production to increase
prices and it's not doing that.
A: Sure. But they've done that to us, too. I mean, anytime we try to get an
alternative energy industry going, anything like that, oil shale in
Colorado, all they've got to do is drop their price. Now, circumstances
have changed because of fracking and the huge increase in American
production. We're even in the export business now. So they just don't have
the same lever they had 20 or 30 years ago, by any means. They could
determine American energy policy, I mean, six guys in a room, just by
manipulating the price post-OPEC.
I don't see that happening as a lever on Russia. They don't have that big a
stake. However, when you begin to look at this complicated Middle East and
the competition, for example, between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the
Sunni-Shiite, on top of all that, the rise of the Islamic State, what I see
the Saudis doing, and I've been over there several times recently, in the
last year or two, is struggling to maintain some of their dominance in the
region against a rising Iran. And now, as you know, if you look at the last
12 or 18 months of how sides are sorting themselves out vis-à-vis ISIS,
Syria and all the rest of it, it's bewildering. I mean, you've got to have
a political map every day to figure out who's on whose side because
interests are changing so fast between the Sunnis and the Shiites, who
wants to align with the Saudis and what's their future as an oligarchy.
They're thinking, "What happens if there's a U.S.-Iranian agreement?" The
Israelis are worried about that. It's a nightmare. That one's a nightmare.
Q: The theory, I think, is Russia's support of Iran. If the Saudis can
damage Russia, maybe they reduce its support of Iran.
A: There may be some of that calculation, but this is an atmosphere that
only a Henry Kissinger would appreciate, a student of European diplomacy in
the 17th and 18th centuries. That's the way Kissinger sees the world. He
understands, or thinks he does, and loves, intricate, behind-the-scenes
maneuvering, because he thinks that's the way the world runs anyway. I
don't, but he does. And it may be for the time being in the Middle East;
that is to say, that the Saudis would play a game against the Russians to
satisfy some interest way away from Russia.
Q: Let me bring it back to the United States and our role in the world and
our defense budget. With all the talk about the debt, obviously people
focus on that $625 billion. It's part of the discretionary side, so you can
actually affect it. In your view, is the level of defense spending today
too little, too much, about right?
A: You know, I've struggled with that question throughout most of my life,
certainly since I went to the Senate and joined the Armed Services
Committee in 1975. So how long ago was that? Forty years? Every time I do
that calculation my jaw drops. Anyway, I'd love to go back, and should, to
what the DOD budget was in 1975, and this was still during the Cold War.
Defense spending increased in the Carter years, contrary to what
conservatives have said. It began to go down under Bush I because of the
end of the Cold War and a belief, not that peace had come to the world but
that it was a different arena and we hadn't sorted out what was needed. Now
it's going back up again.
I'd answer your question this way. I know the traditional nation-state wars
that began after the treaty of Versailles are declining sharply because of
globalization. I co-chaired a committee called the U.S. Commission on
National Security for the 21st Century from 1998 to 2001. We forecast the
terrorist attacks, among other things. We went around the table the first
couple of months and said, 'What's the threat?' We had a member early on in
that commission, a Republican woman, who said "China, China, China." She
couldn't get even Newt Gingrich and James Schlesinger to agree with her, so
she quit and left. Her name was Lynne Cheney, Dick Cheney's wife. She told
her husband, "These fools don't understand it's us vs. China."
Well, it's ridiculous. The biggest holder of American bonds is China. We're
their biggest market. I have a line in speeches where I say the only reason
the Chinese would invade us, presuming they could, is to get their money
back.
So we're still arming ourselves for nation-state wars — big bomber wings,
B-1s and B-2s; nuclear aircraft carrier task groups at sea; and big Army
divisions, 10,000-man Army divisions. That's not a force structure and
weapons acquisition system designed for the conflict of the 21st century.
What's going down is nation-state wars that require all those things.
What's going up is irregular, unconventional, tribal, radical
fundamentalist conflicts, all over the place. What do you need? Special
forces.
Actually, I proposed 10 or more years ago that we have a fifth service
called Special Ops or Special Forces. Now, the services don't want to give
up their individual special forces so it's probably not going to happen,
but it is de facto a fifth service, Special Forces. That's the cutting
edge. Instead of aircraft carriers, we're going to need small coastal ships
that can operate in waterways and inlets in close. Different kind of
aircraft. The F-35 is probably not going to be necessary. You're going to
need more something like an A-10, a second- or third-generation A-10
Warhawk.
Q: The F-35 is something like an $11 billion budget line item.
A: That's the other problem is cost growth per unit. Every individual
weapons system costs more now. What we need are M-1 rifles that work in the
sand. It's not so much how much we're spending. It's how it's being spent.
Q: So you would change the focus and then figure out how much that costs to
do.
A: Well, yeah, exactly. And I said that when I was in office. We shouldn't
debate, as we did in the Armed Services Committee, on the floor of the
Senate, in conference committees, what the total number's going to be. What
do we need to defend ourselves? And then get out the calculator. That's the
way you should do it.
Q: So from a strategic standpoint, there's a new book by Bret Stephens that
says America's in retreat. Obama has withdrawn from the world and other
actors are filling the vacuum. There is of course a countervailing view
that we were way too active on the ground under Bush and that this is an
appropriate restraint. We spend more, I think, than the next eight defense
budgets in the world put together.
A: More than all the rest of the world combined.
Q: So Obama comes in as the alternative to Bush and ends up doing a lot of
the same things. The drone attacks are increasing. Do we have to be the
world's policeman because nobody else will take the job or is there another
way?
A: Well, we certainly don't have to be the world's policeman. I've written
books and articles to the effect that what we need are new security
alliances. We're operating in two ways. One, unilaterally. We're going to
go kill somebody, or stop people from killing somebody. Or we're going to
round up NATO. NATO was created as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.
There is no Soviet Union. NATO has survived 25 years without a real
rewriting of its mission. Now, we employed it to a degree in Afghanistan
because of Article 5 and a threat to one is a threat to all, and because of
9/11 and the dramatic nature of that, they came in — some in a token
capacity, others in a real capacity.
But what I've envisioned is a 21st-century NATO or 21st-century
international security alliance or a set of regional NATOs. For example, I
can see — it's more difficult now because of China's behavior — but I could
have seen a Southeast Asian NATO, where we, the Chinese, the Japanese, the
Australians and some minor players formed a security alliance and used that
as the forum for resolving internal conflicts, anticipating the Spratly
Islands and all the friction going on over those little rocks. Frankly, the
same is true of northeast Asia. China, Japan and Russia have an interest in
what happens in North Korea as much as we do. And we could have had a
Northeast Asian security alliance patterned after NATO. And the list goes
on.
So, in an ideal world, starting in the Clinton years, really Bush I, but
Clinton primarily, we would have restructured the security environment
regionally and engaged with people that parties like Lynne Cheney saw as
adversaries. My theory of security is if you can get a country inside the
tent, you're better off. At least, you're talking. Your generals and
admirals are talking. Your security advisors are talking. And you're
devising common security interests. You're looking at what you have in
common rather than what you have in opposition. So I would have redesigned
the world that way in the late 20th century. Didn't happen, unfortunately.
So what's our principal security alliance? One that was created in 1947 in
a much, much, different world. We're making it up as we go along. That
includes Democratic presidents too, by the way. George W. Bush, when he
took office, didn't pay any attention to our report and other warnings and
eight months later, 3,000 Americans died and that became the building block
for particularly Richard Cheney, (Donald) Rumsfeld and others — the
neo-cons — to fashion a whole global outlook, war on terrorism. When's the
last time you heard that phrase?
Then, in typical American cyclical fashion, we fight two wars, one and a
half of which were voluntary, wars of choice, not necessity. The man that
follows him then has to wind those down and extract us from those wars that
had dragged on for more than a decade and is still doing so, by the way.
And that preoccupied him to the extent that he couldn't think more
strategically, holistically and begin the process of remaking the world.
But here you're talking to a guy that is fed up with Washington in more
ways than one. Particularly the politics and the lobbying, but you now have
these elites. This has been true, I suppose, since the age of Jefferson.
But really in the post-World War II era, a relatively small number of
people, the foreign policy elite, centered around the Council on Foreign
Relations and those kind of organizations, have dominated American foreign
policy. Are there smart people there? Yes, of course. Do they have
interests to promote? Of course.
But it's a closed shop. And the same people are recycled over and over and
over again. Obama's foreign policy team is basically Clinton III. What we
have now is the fourth Clinton administration in terms of personnel. The
problem is they all know each other, the same Rolodexes, but they're
promoting the same policies and the world changes. So Obama comes in from
Springfield, Illinois, basically, and wins the election and he has to put
together an administration. Who does he turn to? Two people: Rahm Emanuel
and John Podesta, both Clintonites. Who did they bring back into
government? Clinton. Are they capable people? Were they assistant
secretaries? Yes. But that was in the 1990s.
Q: So how do you feel about Hillary 2016?
A: Well, I have to give you an anecdote. As a young Denver lawyer, I
started working in 1971 for Sen. George McGovern, after the Robert Kennedy
assassination. In the spring or summer of 1972, when it looked like
McGovern might improbably win the Democratic nomination, we then had to
begin to think about a national general election campaign. Much different.
And one of the key people in the campaign at that point had been a Rhodes
Scholar and he said, "There's a guy at the Yale Law School, he's from
Arkansas, we ought to bring him in and send him to a key southern state
like Texas."
So he brought him in. It was Bill Clinton. Clinton brought his girlfriend
with him and I sent Bill Clinton down to help organize Texas because he had
a southern accent and he was a smart guy and very ambitious. And the
girlfriend with very thick glasses followed him. That's how long I've known
the Clintons.
Are there a lot of people who want a woman president for the first time?
Yes. Is she well-known? Yes. Is she experienced? Yes. Do those three things
qualify her to be president at a time when new ideas, new people and new
thinking are required? I'd just leave it at that.
What I would say is that I hope there are others that get into the
competition and not just, as the Washington press corps wants, give her the
nomination, a coronation. There ought to be a competition and it ought to
be to some degree generational. And I say this as someone who ran in '84
against a former vice president who wasn't that much older than I was, but
it represented a generation of different thinking about the future of the
Democratic party. And that played out all the way to the '84 convention. So
I'd like to see competition. And if the rank and file of the Democratic
Party, including young people, want Hillary Clinton and believe she'd be a
great president, then she should get the nomination.
I'm Oriental in the sense I think your strength is also always your
weakness. Her strength is all that experience, but I think it's also her
weakness. Same people, same ideas, same agenda. Her Achilles' heel, which
showed itself in '08, is still there — caution on contentious issues,
wanting to wait and see how the dust settles first in the Democratic Party
and then in the greater society. She's made some bland statement about, 'We
shouldn't torture.' Well, what was she going to say? We should torture?
Q: Cheney did.
A: Cheney is Cheney. We don't need two Cheneys.
Q: Do you have anybody in mind in terms of the generational challenge?
A: Well, a young guy who celebrated his 21st birthday on my campaign became
governor of Maryland, Martin O'Malley. He's pushing himself forward. Fifty
years old. Successful governor. There's former Sen. Jim Webb. Very strong
on national security and has an ability to appeal to blue-collar working
people. Others should jump in as well. I'm trying to think who else has
kind of edged forward.
Q: Elizabeth Warren?
A: She would stir things up, and I like her economics, at least on the
issue of concentrated wealth, but being president's more than that. It
ain't a one-issue office.
Q: Let me ask you about what's happened since you ran for president in
terms of the economics of America. Not only the income inequality and the
distribution of wealth and the top 1 percent, but, it seems to me, the sort
of institutionalization of that. Thanks to Citizens United, big money owns
the political process now. How does that get fixed or does it get fixed?
A: I submitted a manuscript for my 21st book in August. It's at the
publisher's now and the publication date is 30 June for the Fourth of July
weekend. It addresses that issue.
Q: Does it have a title yet?
A: The title is, "The Republic of Conscience." It's taken from a poem by
the Northern Ireland poet Seamus Heaney who won the Nobel prize for
literature, now dead. It seeks to address the issue why, given our wealth
and prosperity, Americans are so unhappy with their own government. And my
thesis is that instinctively people out on the streets of Denver and
everywhere, sense that our country has become something that they were not
taught it was. What it was, what its founders created it to be, was a
republic.
Now, if you stop 10 Coloradans and say, define a republic, nine of them
couldn't do it, but it meant a lot to everybody — Washington, Adams,
Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, all of them — because they were students of
ancient Greece and Rome and they knew a republic predated democracy.
Jefferson called himself a democratic republican. Why the republic was so
important was it was the first citizen self-government, from ancient
Greece, Athens, fourth, fifth century B.C.. Democracy came along to say it
shouldn't be just the leaders of the community who meet in the square. It
should be everybody. So democracy is about access to the republican form of
government.
A central thesis of republican government, from Athens forward, was
resistance to corruption. And every founder and all of the ancients that
they read said that the thing that is most dangerous to a republic is
corruption. Now, they didn't mean the quid pro quo, buying votes. They
defined it, even in those days, 2,500 years ago, as putting special
interests ahead of the common good or common wealth, and the term
commonwealth comes from that far back. And it meant, in a republic there
are things that everybody owns together. And it is the integrity of the
government, it is the public assets, and on and on. And those must be
protected against any special interest or narrow interest, however powerful
it is.
That was who we were created to be and who we were taught, and I was
taught, in eighth-grade civics in Ottawa, Kansas, we were. That is not who
we are today. By that definition, given our system of lobbying, campaign
contributions, access to power, and the intertwining, with the help of the
current Supreme Court, of powerful interests and money and politics, we're
massively corrupt. We're a massively corrupt republic. That's what the book
is about.
Q: How do you fix that, or does it get fixed? How do you take back control
of it?
A: Oh, boy. My study of American history, and I went back to school when I
was in my 60s to finish a degree; unprecedented, I think, in American
history ...
Q: The one at Oxford?
A: Yeah. The Senate historian told me he had no record of any other senator
ever doing that.
Q: Philosophy?
A: No, it was political theory. And I wrote on Jefferson. And the Oxford
University Press published the thesis, which they don't always do. But late
in life, Jefferson wrote Adams, when they resumed their correspondence, and
he said, 'When we put this together, I think we missed' — and of course, he
was off in Paris during the Constitutional Convention — 'I think we missed
a point, and that is there's no venue for citizen participation. It's all
representative democracy.' You vote for people to go to the state capital
or Washington to represent you, but republican government requires citizen
involvement and participation. And he said in the letters to Adams and
others, that's the best corrective to corruption. If citizens are involved,
they're not going to let the banker or the real estate developer or the
airline or even the nurses or teachers, to dominate the government and get
what they want unless it fits into the broader common interest.
All the Jefferson books would almost fill this whole building, but there
was very little written on that because it occurred in the last five or 10
years of Jefferson's life, after he'd been president. So people just
thought he was off on some tangent. He didn't want to amend the
constitution, but he wanted to institute what he called ward or elementary
republics. He wanted small communities to govern themselves under the
federal blanket. So the second half of the thesis is, if we were to do that
in the 21st century in America, how would it work?
Oddly enough, I was chairing the U.S. Commission on National Security at
the same time, commuting back and forth, and we forecast terrorist attacks.
So I said, OK, national security is going to become a local interest and
we've got the army to deal with that. That's called the National Guard.
Militia is mentioned three times in the constitution because they were
supposed to repel foreign dangers until the regular army could appear.
That, of course, is the reason for the Second Amendment.
Q: And when Jefferson was governor of Virginia, he completely failed in
that.
A: Yeah, of course, yeah.
Q: While we're on the subject of elections, I know you wrote something in
strong support of Mark Udall before the election. What's your take on the
outcome?
*Washington Post: “Local experts predict the sports, music and food D.C.
will be buzzing about in 2015” [PARTIAL]
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/express/2015predictions>*
By Sadie Dingfelder
January 5, 2015, 6:18 a.m. EST
Enough with the 2014 memories — we’re now squarely in 2015 and ready to
look ahead. What’s awaiting us? We asked those in the know about foodie
trends, the 2016 presidential race, D.C.’s interminable transit woes, the
big Redskins QB question, and more. Think you know better than the experts?
Take our 2015 predictions survey and prove it.
THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE
Who will be the presidential nominees for 2016? Larry Sabato, director of
the University of Virginia Center for Politics, edits the Crystal Ball
website, which analyzes upcoming elections across the country. Sabato
predicts Hillary Rodham Clinton will face off against Jeb Bush in 2016.
“Some people say the public is concerned that U.S. politics is turning even
more dynastic. But I’ll bet many Americans welcome the trend. Dynasty
reduces their workload as citizens; they only have to keep up with two
families, the Bushes and the Clintons.” … and in 2024? Following the same
school of thought: “The logical match-up will be George P. Bush vs. Chelsea
Clinton — both of whom will be in their 40s, well above the age-35
threshold,” Sabato says. S.D.
…
*Electablog: Hillary’s rise is inspiring — Jeb’s is everything that’s wrong
with America
<http://www.eclectablog.com/2015/01/hillarys-rise-is-inspiring-jebs-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-america.html>*
By LOLGOP
January 4, 2015
Fresh out of college, I watched Al Gore and George W. Bush’s face merge
together in the Rage Against the Machine video “Testify,” directed by
Michael Moore, and thought, “Exactly, man. What’s the difference?”
George W. spent the next 8 years showing me exactly what the difference was.
He destroyed the fiscal balance of the Clinton era, did everything he could
to make climate change worse and launched a massively wasteful war of
choice that could not be “won.” And we’ll see it for decades in the two men
to the Supreme Court who have ruled more on behalf of corporations than any
Justices in our lifetime.
Now, after six years of Barack Obama, I sense hints of the ache I felt in
2000.
A Democratic president inevitably disappoints. This president’s capacious
exercise of war powers and unwillingness to use the Justice system to reign
in crimes of the last administration or systematic abuses that led to the
financial crisis stand out as disappointments.
But the progress Obama led is not be limited to the two fine women he
appointed to the Supreme Court.
In his first two years — much like Bill Clinton with his tax increases on
the rich, the Brady Bill and the Motor Voter Law — Obama signed laws that
will continue to transform this country and possibly even reduce the
withering of the middle class. His Stimulus created our clean energy
industry from scratch. His appointments reshaped the federal courts and his
leadership has led us into the first effort to combat climate change as a
nation.
But as we learned over the last decade, this legacy could easily be wrecked
by his predecessor. Which leads us to 2016.
With Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton both likely to run, there’s already a
tendency to lump the two together as an example of American legacies run
amok.
“Clinton and Bush together have more baggage than the cargo hold of a 747,”
The New York Times’ Frank Bruni wrote on Sunday.
There are fair criticisms of Hillary Clinton — but they are rarely made by
Republicans or “centrist” members of the press. Her baggage is that of a
historic figure blazing paths in front of our face, often with a target on
her back.
When her husband asked her to lead his attempt at health care reform in
1993, Governor Mario Cuomo asked Hillary, “What did you do to make your
husband so mad at you?”
The right-wing onslaught against Hillarycare — and personal attacks on
Hillary — would seem distant and strange now, if we hadn’t just been
through six years of the same senseless assault on the even more moderate
Obamacare. After the failure of that reform, Mrs. Clinton retreated into a
less visible role as she championed policies like State Children’s Health
Insurance Program, which greatly reduced our population of uninsured
children.
The idea that it’s natural and easy for First Lady to transition directly
to electoral politics is completely negated by the fact that it’s never
happened before. Clinton’s name was a definite advantage in New York State
but it was a name she help built in a political partnership with her
husband that has not been seen since Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
As a Senator, she helped lead the fight to support 9/11 first responders.
After she made the mistake of voting for the Iraq War, she took on the
administration’s failure to adequately support the troops.
When Clinton lost the Democratic primary to Barack Obama, she devoted
herself and her husband to Obama’s election then completely subjugated her
ego to become his Secretary of State.
Jeb Bush is a fortunate son of man whose father was a banker and a U.S.
Senator.
While George H.W. Bush distinguished himself as a war hero then worked his
way up the rungs government, Jeb passed go and went straight to his first
campaign for governor of Florida, which he lost. He then won twice, along
the way helping his brother “win” an election in which the Bush received
fewer votes than Al Gore.
Jeb — we’re supposed to believe — is more competent than his brother. His
conservative dogma is just as blind and his foreign policy is as shapeless
as W.’s was in 2000. But he’ll more than likely share numerous advisers.
If Jeb is a more competent administrator than his brother, that should be
even more frightening for the middle class. Conservative policies, when
applied effectively, create inequality by driving power and profits into
the hands of an increasingly small group of Americans.
We have every reason to be afraid that inherited wealth enabled by
conservative governance could completely destroy any semblance of fairness
in our economy.
“The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t
just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re
also on a path back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding
heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by
family dynasties,” Paul Krugman wrote in his review of economist Thomas
Piketty’s latest book, which warns of a “new Gilded Age.”
The Clintons inherited nothing.
You can argue that they are now too close to entrenched power and that the
Clinton’s administration’s embrace of the drug war and deregulation helped
exacerbate two of the great crises of our time. Democrats would benefit
from a contentious primary season that forces all candidates to define and
defend their beliefs. That’s how we got three frontrunners all embracing
health care reform in 2008.
In a certain way, Republicans almost seem eager to pick a candidate who
negates their arguments against Clinton. The right attacks her for being to
old or too rich then flirts again with Mitt Romney, who is older and
richer. The right wants to say she hasn’t earned her brand then it flirts
with a candidate whose name is synonymous with nepotism gone wrong.
And every other candidate Republicans have to offer from Rand Paul — who is
literally inheriting his father’s presidential campaign — to Scott Walker
to Marco Rubio will be likely offering a platform that gives Clintons a tax
break and cuts the safety net to pay for it. None of them have accomplished
any more than Clinton — and what they have accomplished has been to the
detriment of working people.
The rise to become the first female frontrunner for the presidency is
unprecedented in American history.
Women have been able to vote in this country for less than a century. And
just as a black candidate brought out some of worst of America’s instincts
on race, at least 50 shades of misogyny will be on full display if Mrs.
Clinton decides to run.
Hillary Clinton deserves credit for career and the historic opportunity she
may seize. Take on her policies, please. But don’t do Republicans the favor
of lumping her in with John Ellis Bush AKA Jeb.
*New York Post: Page Six: “Hillary Clinton is already seeing big-name
support”
<http://pagesix.com/2015/01/03/hillary-clinton-is-already-seeing-big-name-support/>*
By Mara Siegler
January 3, 2015, 9:30 p.m. EST
CEO of DreamWorks Animation Jeffrey Katzenberg and co-founder and CEO of
Avenue Capital Group Marc Lasry are already planning on ways to support
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
We’re told the pair was overheard talking about fundraising for the
Democratic presidential hopeful — who has not yet announced her candidacy —
at Coba restaurant at the Viceroy in Anguilla on Wednesday.
Katzenberg and Lasry are both longtime supporters of the Clintons.
In October, Katzenberg co-hosted a fund-raiser that Hillary headlined,
helping to raise $2.1 million for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee.
A rep for Katzenberg declined to comment.
*Wall Street Journal: “Top Iowa Democrats Slow to Rally Around Hillary
Clinton”
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/top-iowa-democrats-slow-to-rally-around-hillary-clinton-1420418121?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories>*
By Reid J. Epstein and Peter Nicholas
January 4, 2015, 7:35 p.m. EST
[Subtitle:] Many Say They Would Prefer a More Liberal Candidate or At Least
a Robust Debate
Iowa Democratic leaders say they are troubled by the prospect that Hillary
Clinton could win the state’s 2016 presidential caucuses without a serious
challenge, a view primarily rooted in a desire for a more liberal candidate
or at least a robust debate about the party’s policies and direction.
Interviews with more than half of Democratic chiefs in Iowa’s 99 counties
show a state party leadership so far reluctant to coalesce behind Mrs.
Clinton. County Democratic officials also voiced qualms about Mrs.
Clinton’s ability to win a general election and her fundraising ties to
Wall Street firms and corporations, which remain a target of liberal ire.
Many county officials said they would like to see senators including
Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont enter the
race, though they were split over whether any could gain traction and
overtake Mrs. Clinton.
“My heart wouldn’t be in it for Hillary to the extent that it might be if
it was a different candidate,” said Jennifer Herrington, chair of the Page
County Democrats in southwest Iowa. “I admire Hillary, she’d be a great
president, but you know, she isn’t my first choice I guess.”
Of course, candidates can secure a party nomination without winning Iowa,
an idiosyncratic contest that tends to reward candidates with strong local
organization and passionate supporters. But as the first-in-the-nation
contest, set to take place about a year from now, Iowa draws outsize
attention from candidates and the media, and it can set a narrative for a
party’s entire primary season.
Mrs. Clinton was also the front-runner at the start of the 2008
presidential campaign, but her big polling lead eroded as the Iowa campaign
wore on and caucus participants migrated to the insurgent campaign of
then-Sen. Barack Obama , who won in Iowa, and former Sen. John Edwards ,
who finished in second place. Mrs. Clinton bounced back with a win in New
Hampshire and won several other states before bowing out of the race in
early June after Mr. Obama built an insurmountable delegate lead.
This time, polling in Iowa again shows Mrs. Clinton with a big lead, nearly
50 points, over other possible Democratic candidates. But Iowa Democratic
officials, most of whom backed Mr. Obama or Mr. Edwards in 2008, said they
fear what several called a Clinton “coronation” that would deprive the
party of a discussion about its direction on economic issues. Those qualms
reflect the unease of a national party increasingly split between its
centrist and liberal wings.
While all the Iowa party chiefs interviewed said they would support Mrs.
Clinton in a general election, many described her as their second choice in
the Democratic contest.
“The Hillary Clinton inevitability talk is the same thing we heard in 2008,
and the caucusgoers in Iowa chose a different route,” said Joe Judge,
chairman of the Democratic Party in Monroe County. “The field is wide open
for that again.”
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton declined to comment.
Ms. Warren, a freshman senator, has said she isn’t running and has pledged
to finish out her term. But liberal activists are trying to lure her into
the race. MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group, has been interviewing
activists and is looking for office space in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids as
part of its Draft Warren effort, spokeswoman Victoria Kaplan said.
State Democratic officials also want a contested race because that boosts
the party apparatus and fundraising. Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign attracted
scores of volunteers who remain active in the party. Various presidential
hopefuls, moreover, serve as star attractions for fundraising dinners and
barbecue cookouts across the state.
John Stone, party chairman in Cerro Gordo County, throws the annual Wing
Ding supper in Clear Lake in August. When Mr. Obama spoke there in 2007, he
drew nearly 700 people, with attendees paying $25 a ticket to benefit local
candidates in 17 northern Iowa counties. Without a big name, the dinner
draws closer to 400 people, Mr. Stone said.
“When we have these candidates out here running for office, we invite them
to county dinners and the numbers swell at these events,” said Tom
Henderson, chairman of Democratic Party in Polk County, which includes Des
Moines. “So it is a great, great service for the Democratic Party to have
these candidates running for office.”
Veterans of the state’s Democratic caucuses recall a lean period from 1988
to 2004 and are wary of a repeat, especially with a rollicking Republican
contest in the offing. Some Iowa Democrats believed the state party
suffered even in 2012, when Mr. Obama was running for re-election.
“I think even though the president won in 2012, the Republicans were on
national TV with all the debates and their ideas were promoted over and
over and over, and Democratic values were not,” said Julie Stewart, the
chairwoman of the Dallas County Democrats, who is a Clinton supporter. “Our
values were lost, and I think it showed up in 2014 that we had no message.”
None of this is to suggest state party leaders wouldn’t support Mrs.
Clinton should she win the nomination. Many described her in admiring
terms, even while pining for a Warren candidacy.
“I think [Mrs. Clinton] has the experience, I think she is intelligent and
quite frankly, with her husband and the experience he had, he would be able
to give her some advice,” said Carol Gordon, the Democratic leader in
Grundy County, between Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.
Yet Ms. Gordon said she is so enthralled with Ms. Warren that she purchased
a copy of the senator’s latest book and donated it to the local public
library.
Added Lorraine Williams, chairwoman of the Washington County Democrats:
“Elizabeth Warren, I would enjoy going out to lunch with her. Hillary,
less.”
Beyond the personal, some worry Mrs. Clinton might not be best-positioned
to defeat the eventual Republican nominee, concerned her candidacy wouldn’t
be exciting enough to draw in the younger voters who backed Mr. Obama.
Tom Swartz, who heads the Marshall County Democrats, said he wanted to
learn more about Ms. Warren, Mr. Sanders and former Sen. Jim Webb of
Virginia, who has set up a committee exploring a presidential run. He
suggested Mrs. Clinton’s best chance may have come and gone.
“There’s always the nagging feeling that her ship may have sailed,” he said.
*Wall Street Journal blog: Washington Wire: “What Iowa’s Democratic Leaders
Want: 4 Takeaways”
<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/01/05/what-iowas-democratic-leaders-want-4-takeaways/>*
By Peter Nicholas
January 5, 2015, 7:07 a.m. EST
What are Iowa’s Democratic leaders thinking one year before the state hosts
the first contest of the 2016 presidential campaign season? Wall Street
Journal reporters Peter Nicholas and Reid J. Epstein spent last week
calling dozens of Iowa Democratic county officials to gauge the mood. Here
are four takeaways drawn from interviews with more than half the Democratic
chairpeople in Iowa’s 99 counties:
1. Iowa’s Democratic political leadership leans left.
State Democratic chiefs are worried about income inequality, sluggish wage
growth and corporate clout. They want to hear the candidates offer concrete
proposals that would roll back what they see as a troubling concentration
of wealth by the nation’s richest families. There seemed little appetite
for centrist positions aiming to boost job growth through business-friendly
tax, trade and regulatory policies.
Jason Frerichs, chairman of the Montgomery County Democrats, said he has
had to postpone buying a house until he pays off his student-loan debt. “I
want to see a true progressive in the White House,” he said.
Which brings us to ….
2. Many state Democratic leaders want liberal Sens. Elizabeth Warren and
Bernie Sanders to run.
Polls suggest neither Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) nor Sen. Bernie
Sanders (I., Vt.) would stand a chance against potential Democratic
front-runner Hillary Clinton. That doesn’t seem to faze the party leaders.
Many said they believed Ms. Warren, in particular, has a devoted following
that would make her a serious threat to Mrs. Clinton. They like Ms.
Warren’s impassioned attacks on the banks involved in the 2008 financial
crisis. Fresh in their minds is the Democratic contest of that year, when
Mrs. Clinton lost her lead and wound up finishing third.
Don Paulson, co-chair of the Muscatine County Democrats, said: “A lot of
people are upset about the big banks. Sure, they’ve paid some fines. But a
lot of people would like to see the CEOs put in jail.”
That viewpoint reinforces another takeaway ….
3. The leaders aren’t sold on Mrs. Clinton as the Democratic nominee.
It isn’t that they dislike Mrs. Clinton on a personal level; it’s that they
have qualms about her candidacy. Some voiced doubts that she could win a
general election; others said she seemed out of step with the prevailing
liberal winds. They said they were troubled by corporate donations made to
her family’s charitable foundation, questioning whether such financial ties
would give her the independence to act on behalf of a struggling middle
class.
Ken Mertes, chairman of Monona County Democrats, said: “I’d like to see
Hillary change her position. I think she’s too friendly with corporate
interests.”
Still, even those who want to see someone other than Mrs. Clinton win the
nomination are of the view that …
4. Mrs. Clinton would be tough to beat in Iowa.
The list of Mrs. Clinton’s advantages is long. She has the backing of the
national political establishment. She has a vast network of fundraisers
eager to sink millions into her campaign. She knows the state, having
competed hard in Iowa in 2008. Then there’s the convenient fact that, as
far as anyone knows, Ms. Warren has no plans to run. Very few of the Iowa
Democratic chairs even mentioned some of the other prospective candidates:
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Virginia Democratic Sen. Jim Webb.
The Democratic bench just isn’t that deep.
Kathy Winter, chairwoman of the Osceola County Democrats, said that Mrs.
Clinton’s front-runner status presents an opportunity. Rather than have a
competitive primary in which Democrats beat up on one another, she said,
why not rally behind Mrs. Clinton and send her into the general election
contest unbruised?
“Let’s march toward the end result and not tear one another down,” she
said. “A lot of what is said about you comes back to haunt you.”
*Real Clear Politics: Video: “Van Susteren: I'm Not Convinced Hillary Is
Going To Run; O'Malley ‘The Big Sleeper Candidate’”
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/01/04/van_susteren_im_not_convinced_hillary_is_going_to_run_omalley_the_big_sleeper_candidate.html>*
[No Writer Mentioned]
January 4, 2014
MARTHA RADDATZ, ABC'S THIS WEEK: Greta, any surprises out there, anybody
who will get in or who won't get in?
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS: I actually think the big surprise is going to
be the Democratic side of the ledger, whether or not former secretary of
state Hillary Clinton runs.
I'm actually not convinced -- I'm not convinced she's going to run and I
think the big sleeper candidate is actually going to be Governor Martin
O'Malley of Maryland. I realize that the governorship was lost and that the
Republicans in Maryland this last run that -- last run.
But whoever takes Iowa -- and if you look at 2008, Huckabee took it for the
Republicans; 2012, Santorum. It really takes someone who's going to go
there and knock on the doors. I think that's what we have to keep our eye
on.
And Governor Martin O'Malley, he's been there a number of times. He's a
knock-on-the-door type candidate. He's not the -- so I think that he may be
a sleeper.
*Politico Magazine: Matt Latimer, speechwriter for Pres. George W. Bush:
“Why Republicans Are Ready for Hillary”
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/republicans-2015-ready-for-hillary-113956.html#.VKn4bfldWSo>*
By Matt Latimer
January 4, 2015
For conservatives, the dawn of a presidential cycle is always the best time
of the political season. It’s that glorious springtime when every
Republican candidate promises to be the next Ronald Reagan. Of course, over
time they slowly dissolve into Gerald Ford.
It’s also the time of year when the dons of the Washington establishment
tell the rest of us who the conservative grassroots will select next year
to lose politely to the Democrats. It’s always fascinating how many people
in DC believe they can project how conservatives across America will vote
without ever really talking to them. The only Republicans DC elites know
are the ones they bump into at Talbott’s or who drive their BMW X-3s to
parents’ night at St. Albans—not people who go to church instead of
watching “Meet the Press” or who’d trudge through snow to vote in a caucus
in Iowa. Nonetheless Washingtonians are so certain about next year’s
outcome that they’re already angling to become pals with the people most
likely to be in charge of invitations to events at the Clinton White House.
Conservatives do have one thing to be thankful for: The fact is that
Hillary Clinton learned so many lessons from her surprising 2008 defeat
that she’s repeating each of them all over again. Once more she is running
as the overconfident, inevitable nominee with safe speeches filled with
mush and a bloated campaign staff that already is leaking against each
other in the press.
Which is probably why so many Republicans, fresh off of their 2014 election
triumphs, are excited. They have a chance. It is also why so many
prospective GOP candidates—18 or 20 by some estimates—are considering a
run. Indeed, the GOP field looks to be so crowded that its first debate may
have to be held on an aircraft carrier. The USS Ronald Reagan is available.
Almost all of the oft-mentioned candidates are people of quality and worth,
with impressive resumes and realistic shots at the nomination, if
circumstance fall a certain way. (This is the point at which your
conflict-of-interest plagued columnist should concede that I’ve worked with
some of the potential candidates, even worked for some of their enemies,
and in one instance worked for one of their brothers in the White House.)
Of course, as with any presidential election these days, there are bound to
be a few “Doing it to Build my Brand” campaigns—with candidates running a
skeleton crew of neophytes in order to score a few book deals and up their
speaking fees. Think of them as Republican Al Sharptons or, if we want to
be even more obscure, Mike Gravels: candidates who would be so shocked if
they won even one primary contest that they’d probably ask for a recount.
And what would a presidential season be without the semi-annual Running of
the Bull, the never-gonna-happen Donald Trump campaign, his declarations
always conveniently timed for new seasons of “The Celebrity Apprentice.”
Everyone please watch—supposedly Ian Ziering and one of the kids from the
Cosby Show have decided to demean themselves before Mr. Trump this year—so
“Apprentice” has good ratings and we are spared this spectacle again.
With the GOP field taking shape rather nicely, and so little to make fun
of, we are left to train our guffaws on those always vulnerable for
good-natured mockery: the D.C. pundit class and their confident delusions
and myths about the Republican race.
Myth #1: Mitt Romney will run
There is nothing this town likes more than to get everyone to root for
someone only to then slowly take them apart bit by bit: sort of what George
RR Martin did to the Starks on “Game of Thrones.” This year the DC class is
prepping the former Massachusetts governor for that role.
Assuredly, no one has performed a better comeback in terms of public esteem
than Mr. Romney. And it’s no accident that his image picked up after most
of the DC consultants who stocked his failed campaign moved on to bring bad
ideas and general doom to other presidential hopefuls across the land.
Basking in praise and leading in polls, Romney, or at least a part of him,
clearly wants to run for president one more time. But Romney, for all of
his talk of being a Reagan in waiting, is basically a cautious and
practical man. He didn’t make his millions by purchasing lottery tickets
and waiting for lightning to strike. In the end, the risks from running
will prove far greater than the potential reward. Unfortunately for him,
he’s had one too many chances. Lose the presidency twice—and you’re
unfortunate. Lose a third time and you’re a national joke. Forever.
Myth # 2: This race has a frontrunner
There is no frontrunner in the GOP race. Most D.C. reporters don’t believe
this, of course. Neither do the top GOP consultants and pundits.
All of whom love to dine together at places like The Palm and tell each
other how smart they are. In 1980 these same DC insiders thought anybody
but Ronald Reagan would be the GOP nominee—he was too old! too
conservative! too dumb! Didn’t come to enough Georgetown parties! And guess
who won anyway?
This year’s line is that Jeb Bush has the GOP nomination for the taking.
That’s very good news for journalists in town—they already know the Bush
people. Great folks, good sources, the kind who quietly laugh about the tea
party during rounds of highball at the Club. The DC crowd can’t wait to go
back to Kennebunkport and ride in speedboats.
Yet to many others outside the DC bubble, there’s something vaguely
depressing that America might replay Election 1992—Bush v. Clinton. Are
these two families really so singularly special that we honestly can’t find
anybody else? Or are the voters just that lazy? A Bush-Clinton rematch
would be like a prolonged version of NPR’s “Serial”: a long, convoluted
journey with twists and turns that only took us back to right where we
started, a little more confused and frustrated for the trip.
In any event, history is not on the Bushes’ side this time. At least not
yet. When I worked in the White House of George W. Bush, the oft-expressed,
though usually whispered, sentiment was that Jeb was the smarter brother.
On arcane bits of policy, this was probably true, although W. was often
surprisingly astute on the minutia when it came to issues in which he had
interest. But when it came to politics, the view is even more questionable.
Consider that in 1994, Jeb was the odds-on favorite to win the race for
governor in Florida—and lost. That same year W. was written off by the D.C.
pundit class as a goner in Texas against Ann Richards—whom everyone in
Washington loved. He, of course, won.
And even with recent media salivation—I mean, saturation—on Jeb’s possible
presidential bid, he still hasn’t garnered about 25 percent of the vote in
GOP polls. (Phantom candidate Mitt Romney beats him.) Which means, that at
least three-quarters of the electorate that supposedly can’t wait for the
Bushes Round 3 currently prefer someone else. That number is likely to get
worse. Which brings us to ...
Myth #3: It is the time of the moderates (or the Tea Party is dead)
George W. Bush also was smart enough to know something about the GOP
presidential contest that so far seems to elude his younger brother. The
Jon Huntsman strategy doesn’t work. You don’t run to the embrace of the
D.C. political class and—horrors—the mainstream media if you want to win
the GOP nomination. The minute I saw Huntsman treated to a gushing profile
in Vogue back in 2011—“his left eyebrow is pitched slightly lower than the
other, and the eye below it has a slight squint. This gives him a perpetual
expression of thoughtful engagement, the look of someone listening intently
to what others are saying”—I knew he was doomed in Iowa. Even today D.C.
politicos don’t get this about the Republican base: When you are the toast
of the liberal media, you are toast in Des Moines. The sure sign Jeb is
about to drop out of the race is when he gets a photo taken by Annie
Leibovitz.
And yet our political chattering class truly seems to believe that across
the plains of Iowa and deep in the hills of New Hampshire are millions of
Republican caucus goers and primary voters shaking their heads and
whispering, “Please bring us more candidates from the middle of the road.”
That is simply not how the most committed GOPers think. If anything,
they’re more fed-up with the moderates in Washington—which is how they
think of almost every Republican in the nation’s capital—than ever.
Even those making the slightest observation of the GOP should see that the
base is far more excited by people they think of as true believers—Ted Cruz
and Rand Paul, for example—than they are for, say, Chuck Grassley. This
explains why in 2014 almost every GOPer—from Mitch McConnell on down—ran as
conservatives, not moderates. Indeed, they posed so far to the right that
they made Margaret Thatcher look like a hippie who wanted to set American
flags on fire.
But every so often a candidate decides he’s going to show us something
different. John McCain nearly derailed his 2008 nomination by challenging
his party’s base on immigration. And that was just one hot-button issue to
fight with his own voters over; Jeb Bush has picked not one, but three
(immigration, education reform and taxes.) We will soon see what havoc that
wreaks for him. Rest assured: The “tea party” label may be badly damaged,
but the frustration and disillusionment with Washington that started the
movement is as strong as ever.
Myth #4: Chris Christie was permanently damaged by Bridgegate
One candidate who seems unlikely to misunderstand the reality of the GOP
nomination process is the ever-savvy Chris Christie. He didn’t make himself
a presidential contender through his sensible compromises with Democrats in
the New Jersey legislature, but his passionate harangues against
conservatives’ favorite enemies: the media, big unions, government
bureaucracy. It was for that reason that so many Republicans pined for him
to run in 2012—the great hope of conservatives and the world.
That of course was then. Today D.C. bigwigs speak quite confidently about
how Christie’s aspirations have been ruined by “Bridgegate.” The scandal
remains—solely—a Washington fixation. Want to bet how many people in South
Carolina or Iowa or the Super Tuesday states can recite the details of that
episode? Mention “Bridgegate” to most of them and they’ll think you’re
referring to tires.
If there’s one thing candidates can count on, it’s the short attention span
of the voters. Christie may have other problems should he enter the race,
but this won’t be one of them. If he decides to run, he’ll start on the
right and surprise a lot of people who’ve counted him out. Then of course
they’ll all be saying they predicted the Christie comeback all along.
Myth #5: This race will go all the way to the convention
We haven’t heard this one yet, but with so many candidates in the race,
it’s only a matter of time before the D.C. consensus turns to thoughts of a
brokered GOP convention. Such a spectacle hasn’t happened to the GOP since
1948—and for good reason. Republicans are an orderly crew. They’ll kick the
candidates’ tires for a couple of primaries or two, but pretty soon settle
on the man, or woman, they want as their standard-bearer. At this point,
that could be anybody. Which is what is going to make 2016 so fun.
*Politico Magazine: Bill Scher, senior writer at the Campaign for America’s
Future: “The Democrats’ Donkey in the Room”
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/obama-ratings-2015-dilemma-113945.html#.VKn2bPldWSo>*
By Bill Scher
January 4, 2015
Democrats are beginning 2015 in an uneasy state, but it’s not as bad as it
could be. Rather than the bloody circular firing squad that the party
resembles all too often, the Democratic agenda looks more like a nerdy
scatter plot graph. Public naming and blaming for the midterms has been
kept to a minimum, while wonkish blue dots appear to be fleeing from what
was a unified straight line of explanation. It feels like every Democrat
has his or her theory why they lost and where the party should go from here
Driving the Democratic dispersion is not just the November defeats.
Democrats are grappling with the reality that the Obama presidency is
nearing its end, and they don’t know what to say about it. That question,
more than any other, will likely define the Democratic Party debate in 2015
as the next presidential race gets underway.
If President Barack Obama had approval ratings safely above 50 percent, and
the middle-class was flush, Democrats would have no hesitation wrapping
themselves in the Obama banner. Conversely, if Obama were presiding over an
economic collapse, failed war or White House scandal, there would be as
many proud Obama Democrats as Hoover Republicans.
Instead, Democrats will face an Obama record that can be interpreted as
either a historic advance of liberalism or a colossal disappointment, and
on which the public mood appears to be shifting back and forth across the
line. Most recently, building on an improving economy and a decisive series
of post-election moves like the new opening to Cuba, he has climbed back to
dead-even in approval ratings, Gallup reported, after 450 days in negative
territory. The choice depends on which data points you emphasize and, more
importantly, where you think the trend lines are headed.
Obama enacted an anti-recessionary package unprecedented in size and
swiftness that made possible years of steady job creation. But the burst of
GDP growth since 2013 has not lifted middle-class wages, as least not yet,
leaving many to feel the recovery has passed them by. He’s created the most
progressive tax code in 35 years, but that has not been enough to reverse
the trend of widening income inequality. His legislative legacies of
health care reform and Wall Street re-regulation have been implemented
slowly, allowing debate to churn over how successful they ultimately will
be. His administrative efforts in immigration and climate change are even
less far along, leaving open whether they will be transformational or
insufficient and ephemeral.
It’s a classic half-glass problem. Should Democrats marshal all the
positive data available to make the case that Obama’s record proved
activist government worked, bolstering the case for an extra helping of
liberalism to solve outstanding problems? Or should Democrats keep Obama at
a distance, and treat the past six years as just another chapter in the
decadeslong assault on the middle-class, proving that Obama’s watered-down
compromises were incapable of eradicating the rules rigged for the top 1
percent?
Obama himself is the captain of the Half-Full Squad. In October, he
delivered an address that listed his economic successes, declaring, “it is
indisputable that our economy is stronger today than when I took office”
while also proposing policies to help the “millions [who] don’t yet feel
enough of the benefits of a growing economy.” Last month, following a
particularly strong monthly employment report, Obama reduced his hedging to
a minimum in a triumphant weekly address: “More jobs. More insured. A
growing economy. Shrinking deficits. Bustling industry. Booming energy.
Pick any metric you want — America’s resurgence is real.”
Elizabeth Warren is presently leading Team Half-Empty. In her major
speeches, such as her 2012 convention address, her July 2014 Netroots
Nation keynote and her most recent Senate floor slam of Citigroup, Warren
doesn’t cite much of the Obama record outside of the creation of her
signature Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She goes as far as
suggesting the problem of Wall Street dominance has gotten worse on Obama’s
watch, saying things like: “Now the biggest banks are even bigger than they
were when they were too big to fail in 2008.” Warren’s populist ally Sen.
Bernie Sanders looks past Obama to rip “the status quo, which includes a
40-year decline of our middle class.” Neither excoriates Obama personally,
but their rhetoric treats him at best as an impotent bystander to corrosive
corporatism and his record as useless to the progressive cause.
Another voice inside the pessimist camp is Sen. Chuck Schumer, who recently
made headlines at the National Press Club second-guessing Obama’s decision
to prioritize health care reform before the economy healed. Schumer also
sees the past six years as having done little to impress middle-class
voters, but he parts ways with Warren’s focus on blaming banks and other
moneyed institutions for rigging the rules.
Schumer offered a nod in Warren’s direction, saying Democrats “must first
prove that the era of big corporate influence over government is over.” But
he treats that step as more political necessity than policy solution.
Schumer assured “those of us who don’t consider ourselves populists” that
he’s only recommending Democrats incorporate “an element of populism” —
just enough “to open the door” with skeptical voters so they can be
persuaded to accept a “strong government program.” Unlike Warren, who
regularly fingers Wall Street as the main culprit, Schumer more gently
focuses on the faceless forces of “technology and globalization” that “push
[the middle-class] around” yet “are not inherently malign.” For the most
part, Schumer doesn’t want to unrig the rules; he wants policies that help
the middle-class “adapt” to the inevitable.
As the presidential race shifts into gear in 2015, much rides on how the
expected Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton navigates these various poles
in the Democratic big tent. Assuming she runs and maintains her wide lead
among Democrats, she will have more say than anyone as to how Democrats
define their post-Obama future.
The bitter 2008 primary fight has conditioned observers to look for
daylight between Clinton and Obama, and surely she will pick her spots. But
in an October appearance at The Economic Club of Chicago, she sounded like
an Obama surrogate. The American economy “currently is the envy of the
world,” she insisted, saying “the very hard choices the president and his
economic team made early on in the administration laid the groundwork, both
to prevent worse economic consequences and to begin the climb out of the
deep hole we were in.” (Yes, she even turned her “Hard Choices” book title
into praise for her former rival.) If she sticks to that message, she will
be moving the Democratic Party away from both Warren and Schumer, tying it
to a robust defense of the Obama record.
Deciding whether or not Obama’s economic performance should be cherished
also dictates congressional Democratic strategy in 2015, in one key regard:
how much Democrats should be willing to give up in exchange for keeping the
government open.
White House economic aide Jeff Zients, at a POLITICO Morning Money
Breakfast, defended last month’s “CRomnibus” — despite its provision that
chipped away at a part of Wall Street reform — because avoiding government
breakdowns over the past year boosted the economy with higher GDP, more
jobs and, in the last monthly employment survey, “early signs of some wage
growth.” He went on to predict the economy was “teed up … in 2015,” so long
as Congress did not create “unnecessary distractions.”
From Obama’s perspective, the economy on his watch is poised to end strong,
strong enough for the middle class to feel it. GDP growth can still raise
middle-class wages; it’s just taken a long time because economies recover
slowly from financial crises and because a Republican House, in addition to
its past brinkmanship, didn’t allow for additional stimulus. Therefore,
it’s worth trading away minor concessions to prevent any whiff of
government shutdowns or debt defaults in his final two years. Future
Democrats will then be able to hold up his economic record and argue that
patiently sticking with his public investments, regulations and reforms
paid off with a middle-class firmly on the road to prosperity.
Those Democrats who believe that there is something fundamentally broken
with the economy, preventing GDP growth from sparking middle-class wage
growth, don’t see the point in protecting the economy from short-term
hiccups at any cost. They’d rather dig in their heels to fight concessions
that smack of more rule-rigging. In their worldview, the economy won’t get
better until that problem is solved.
Obama got what he wanted in December, but mostly thanks to Republican
votes. Whether or not he can convince his Democratic critics to come around
to his way of thinking will depend heavily on the forthcoming monthly jobs
and wage data.
The Democratic scatter plot still largely points in the same direction.
“Democrats must embrace government, not run away from it,” exhorted
Schumer. None of the squabbling Democratic factions disagree. The
intraparty debate is over how to diagnose our remaining economic problems,
and how exactly government should be deployed to fix them.
But the factions that are hesitant to exploit Obama's record in making the
case for more government have their own challenges in proposing an
alternative strategy. Schumer counsels, “we must illustrate that government
can provide solutions by delineating specific concrete programs that if
enacted would actually improve lives and incomes” and that people believe
are actually “attainable.” But he doesn’t delineate programs that meet his
criteria, because that’s the hard part.
As the New York Times’ David Leonhardt wrote in November, the Democrats
have lacked a clear “short-term” economic plan, because their inclination
is toward reforms that lack immediate bang for the buck. “Some of the
policies that Democrats favor, such as broader access to good education,
take years to pay off. Others, like reducing medical costs or building new
roads, have an indirect, unnoticed effect on middle-class incomes.” The
same can be said of any unrigging of rules such as installing new bank
regulations or eliminating corporate tax breaks. Leonhardt’s recommendation
for a lightning strike is a middle-class tax cut. The Washington Post’s
populist columnist Harold Meyerson proposes it be a payroll tax cut.
However a tax cut comes with its own downsides, notes Josh Bivens of the
Economic Policy Institute: “Middle-class taxes would have to be cut a lot
to move the dial on income growth” requiring politically difficult offsets,
be they spending cuts or tax hikes on the rich. Bivens counters that
“boosting the bargaining power of workers” is what would really address the
root cause of the wage problem. Maybe so. But with the private-sector
unionization rate at a dismal 6.7 percent, boosting bargaining power is
another yearslong project.
If Democrats continue to struggle to identify an elusive quick fix, that
too could lead them back to leaning on Obama’s record. What better way to
“illustrate that government can provide solutions” than showing how the
current Democratic government provided solutions? Instead of selling
fast-acting elixirs, or tying themselves in knots explaining why Obama’s
policies shouldn’t be considered a case study in economic liberalism,
Democrats could be contending that Obama’s presidency proves that
progressive policies work, when given enough time to work.
Without unequivocal evidence of middle-class improvement, Obama may have to
suffer naysayers within his party for his final two years. Ronald Reagan,
the president Obama hoped to emulate in “chang[ing] the trajectory of
America,” was similarly dogged by dissatisfied conservatives throughout his
presidency. But once he was out of the Oval Office, old charges that Reagan
had gone soft on communism, sold out on taxes and failed to balance the
budget were swept under the rug, along with the left’s carping over
Reagan’s legacy of a widening wealth gap. Forevermore, conservatives will
pound into the discourse that Reaganomics grew the economy, slashed
inflation, lowered interest rates, created jobs and lowered unemployment.
Their mission to this day is to show what Reagan’s policies did, not what
they didn’t do, in hopes of building on that record and shifting the
nation’s ideological center of gravity.
Democrats may not be prepared to give Obama the Reagan treatment just yet.
But Obama’s past record and continued activity are too consequential for
Democrats to ignore. Democrats will have no choice in 2015 but to begin
reconciling where Obama fits in their party’s history, a task that will be
much easier and foster more party unity if 2015’s economic numbers continue
to improve.
*Calendar:*
*Sec. Clinton's upcoming appearances as reported online. Not an official
schedule.*
· January 21 – Saskatchewan, Canada: Sec. Clinton keynotes the Canadian
Imperial Bank of Commerce’s “Global Perspectives” series (MarketWired
<http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/former-us-secretary-state-hillary-rodham-clinton-deliver-keynote-address-saskatoon-1972651.htm>
)
· January 21 – Winnipeg, Canada: Sec. Clinton keynotes the Global
Perspectives series (Winnipeg Free Press
<http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/Clinton-coming-to-Winnipeg--284282491.html>
)
· February 24 – Santa Clara, CA: Sec. Clinton to Keynote Address at
Inaugural Watermark Conference for Women (PR Newswire
<http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hillary-rodham-clinton-to-deliver-keynote-address-at-inaugural-watermark-conference-for-women-283200361.html>
)
· March 19 – Atlantic City, NJ: Sec. Clinton keynotes American Camp
Association conference (PR Newswire <http://www.sys-con.com/node/3254649>)
ℹ️ Document Details
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