podesta_email_01291.txt

podesta-emails 67,605 words email

P22 P23 V11 D3 D4

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News Clips* *June 5, 2015* *LAST NIGHTS EVENING NEWS* ABC and NBC both had brief segments on Rick Perry entering the race today; Perry is citing his military experience and record as Governor of Texas. On CBS John Dickerson was interviewed and noted HRC was the titan of the race; Dickerson said Chafee was interesting because he challenged HRC’s trustworthiness and foreign policy judgment, while MOM argues that America needs a new generation. Dickerson said the danger for HRC was that voters would hear a consistent message from Republicans and Democrats for a long time. *LAST NIGHTS EVENING NEWS......................................................................... **1* *TODAY’S KEY STORIES..................................................................................... **4* *Hillary Clinton Says G.O.P. Rivals Try to Stop Young and Minority Voters* // NYT // Amy Chozick – June 4, 2015.................................................................................................................................................. 4 *Hillary Clinton calls for sweeping expansion of voter registration* // WaPo // Anne Gearan & Niraj Chokshi – June 4, 2015........................................................................................................................................ 6 *Clinton names and shames Republicans for voting restrictions* // Politico // Annie Karni – June 4, 2015 9 *SOCIAL MEDIA................................................................................................. **11* *Chris Murphy (6/4/15, 12:15 pm)* - No one is going to fight harder for CT families than @HillaryClinton. That's why I'm proud to endorse her today................................................................................................... 11 *Norah O’donnell (6/4/15, 7:06 am)* - .@CBSNews confirms Jeb Bush event on June 15 in Miami will be his presidential announcement: bit.ly/1dfHazv................................................................................ 11 *Mark Murray (6/4/15, 9:46 am)* - No doubt O'Malley racked up progressive achievements as MD GOV. But that '07 op-ed undercuts that he's always been a true-blue progressive.................................................... 11 *Gabriel Debenedetti (6/4/15, 6:44pm)* - O'Malley super PAC @GenFwdPAC drops $33k for ads in Iowa, according to new FEC filing: http://1.usa.gov/1FyEOTb.............................................................................. 11 *Peter Nicholas (6/4/15, 1:27 pm)* - Bernie Sanders, on CNN, says "Secretary Clinton had the same information I had" and yet she voted to authorize Iraq war in 2002................................................................... 11 *Peter Nicholas (6/4/15, 1:30 pm)* - DNC Chair DWS rejects idea that Dem pres candidates should criticize Hillary's ethics. Lincoln Chafee had said "too many ethical" qs re HRC....................................................... 11 *Mark Murray (6/4/15, 12:56 pm)* - Perry's speech epitomizes GOP's rhetorical shift from economy/debt (No.1 issue in 2012) to national security/foreign policy................................................................................. 12 *Caitlin Huey-Burns (6/4/15, 1:39 pm)* - Rubio, on Fox, calls HRC's immigration position big shift from 2008 when she wasn't sure if she'd give licenses to undocumented immigrants............................................. 12 *HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE............................................................................ **12* *Why a Presidential Campaign Is the Ultimate Start-Up* // NYT // Neil Irwin – June 4, 2015.......... 12 *Appealing to Union, Hillary Clinton Calls Teachers ‘Scapegoats’* // NYT // Maggie Haberman – June 4, 2015 16 *Hillary Clinton, in Texas, Tries to Win Over Forlorn Democrats* // NYT // Amy Chozick – June 3, 2015 16 *51 percent of Democrats say Benghazi is a legitimate issue for Hillary Clinton* // WaPo // Amber Phillips – June 4, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 20 *Hillary Clinton Calls for Automatic Voter Registration* // WSJ // Laura Meckler – June 4, 2015..... 21 *Why Hillary Clinton is pushing early voting in 2016* // AP // Ken Thomas – June 4, 2015.............. 23 *Democrats fret over recent Hillary Clinton polling* // Politico // Katie Glueck – June 5, 2015......... 25 *Clinton calls out GOP opponents by name on voting rights* // CNN // Dan Merica & Eric Bradner – June 4, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 29 *Hillary Clinton's Call to Ease Voting Impacts Growing Latino Vote* // NBC News // Suzanne Gamboa – June 4, 2015.......................................................................................................................................... 31 *Hillary Clinton lays out sweeping voting rights vision* // MSNBC // Zachary Roth – June 4, 2015.. 34 *Hillary Clinton Calls For Automatic, Universal Voter Registration* // HuffPo // Ryan Reilly – June 4, 2015 37 *The Robby Mook Playbook* // Buzzfeed // Ruby Cramer – June 4, 2015........................................ 37 *Will Hillary Be Our 3rd Black President?* // The Daily Beast // Michael Tomasky – June 5, 2015... 51 *Hillary Clinton Cannot Afford to Lose Black Voters* // The National Journal // Emily Schultheis – June 4, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 53 *Bernie Sanders Is Surging Among White Democrats, Minorities Love Hillary* // NBC News // Perry Bacon Jr. & Dante Chinni - June 3, 2014....................................................................................................... 55 *Is Hillary Ready for More Debates?* // US News // David Catanese – June 4, 2015........................ 57 *IRS sends Congress unsigned form letter to brush off demands for Clinton Foundation investigation* // The Washington Examiner // Pete Kasperowicz – June 4, 2015......................................................... 60 *Clinton camp wants donors to contribute – by giving staffers a place to crash* // Fox News – June 4, 2015 60 *Ohio secretary of state slams Clinton over voter access* // Fox News - June 4, 2015....................... 62 *Attention, pundits: If the polls confirm Hillary’s slide, it must be true* // Fox News // Howard Kurtz - June 05, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 63 *This is what Hillary Clinton's campaign is saying about her poll numbers* // Business Insider // Hunter Walker – June 4, 2015.............................................................................................................................. 64 *Why you might eventually like Hillary Clinton* // The Chicago Tribune // Jonathan Bernstein – June 4, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 66 *OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE................................................. **67* *O’MALLEY................................................................................................... **67* *Ad Backing Martin O’Malley Jabs at Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush* // NYT // Nick Corasaniti – June 4, 2015 67 *O’Malley’s claim on unprecedented wage stagnation for 70 percent of Americans since World War II* // WaPo // Michelle Ye Hee Lee.................................................................................................................. 67 *Eight years ago, O'Malley argued that Democrats needed to focus on the center, not the left* // NBC News // Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, & Carrie Dann – June 4, 2015............................................................ 69 *Martin O'Malley Just Took His Populist Pitch Full-Throttle* // ABC News // Ali Dukakis – June 4, 2015 71 *O'Malley Is Running To The Left, But In 2007 He Urged The Center* // NBC News // Mark Murray – June 4, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 73 *Martin O'Malley going after 'bullies of Wall Street' in campaign, but he has ties to big banks too* // NY Daily News // Cameron Joseph – June 4, 2015............................................................................................. 74 *SANDERS.................................................................................................... **76* *Bernie Sanders asks Congress to spend $5.5 billion on 1 million jobs for youths* // WaPo // Aaron Davis – June 4, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 76 *Bernie Sanders, The Wide-Eyed Pragmatist* // HuffPo // Sam Stein – June 4, 2015...................... 77 *Bernie Sanders scrambles to build Iowa team to meet popular demand* // The Des Moines Register – June 4, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 80 *The 1 percent’s “centrist” propaganda war: Why Bernie Sanders & Elizabeth Warren are so threatening to the establishment* // Salon // Conor Lynch – June 4, 2015................................................................ 82 *CHAFEE...................................................................................................... **84* *Lincoln Chafee and the last mile* // Politico // Adam Lerner – June 4, 2015.................................. 84 *OTHER........................................................................................................ **87* *Democrats Get a Primary* // TIME // Joe Klein – June 4, 2015..................................................... 87 *Democrats' Supreme Court Litmus Test: Citizens United* // Bloomberg News // Sahil Kapur – June 4, 2015 88 *GOP................................................................................................................. **90* *As Republican Debates Near, Candidates Vie to Make Cut* // NYT // Maggie Haberman & Jeremy Peters – June 4, 2015......................................................................................................................................... 90 *BUSH........................................................................................................... **92* *How Jeb Bush made a mockery of ‘exploring’ a presidential campaign* // WaPo // Chris Cillizza – June 4, 2015................................................................................................................................................ 92 *Jeb Bush Facing Crucial Two-Week Stretch* // Bloomberg // Michael C. Bender - June 5, 2015...... 94 *Bush leads GOP field in NC, Clinton up on most Republicans* // Public Policy Polling – June 4, 2015 97 *PERRY........................................................................................................ **98* *Rick Perry ‘Super PAC’ Ads Going Up in Iowa* // NYT // Maggie Haberman – June 4, 2015............ 98 *After ‘oops,’ Rick Perry is ready to try again* // WaPo // Dan Balz - June 4, 2015............................ 99 *Meet the people who are going to try to get Rick Perry elected president* // WaPo // Patrick Svitek – June 4, 2015............................................................................................................................................... 102 *Rick Perry spent $350 per vote in 2012* // WaPo //Phillip Bump – June 4, 2015.......................... 103 *What Rick Perry thinks about the issues* // VOX // Andrew Prokop & Tez Clark – June 4, 2015.... 104 *Tea Party Unloads on 'Complete Imbecile' Rick Perry* // The Daily Beast // Olivia Nuzzi – June 4, 2015 107 *Rick Perry’s second chance to make a first impression* // MSNBC // Steve Benen - June 4, 2015... 110 *GRAHAM.................................................................................................... **111* *Graham: 'Don't vote for me' if you're 'worn out by war'* // The Hill // Mark Hensch – June 4, 2014 111 *Can Lindsey Graham Win His Home State?* // Real Clear Politics // Caitlin Huey-Burns & Rebecca Berg – June 4, 2015........................................................................................................................................ 112 *An Adelson Backs Lindsey Graham for President* // The National Journal // Adam Wollner – June 4, 2015 115 *RUBIO........................................................................................................ **116* *What happened when Marco Rubio spoke at a Bush awards dinner* // WaPo // Sean Sullivan – June 4, 2015 116 *Rubio: Hillary, Dems will struggle to convince Americans they’re about the future* // The Washington Times // David Sherfinski – June 4, 2015................................................................................................ 117 *Marco Rubio just made another confusing comment about his Middle East policy* // Business Insider // Hunter Walker – June 4, 2015.............................................................................................................. 119 *KASICH..................................................................................................... **120* *The 2016 campaign’s new straight shooter: John Kasich* // WaPo // Amber Phillips – June 4, 2015 120 *Kasich makes favorable impression on the influential in New Hampshire* // The Columbus Dispatch // Darrell Rowland – June 4, 2015........................................................................................................... 123 *OTHER...................................................................................................... **125* *GOP hopefuls fight for post-launch poll bounce* // The Hill // Jonathan Easley – June 4, 2015.... 126 *Poll: Which Republican Presidential Candidate Should Democrats Fear Most?* // National Journal // Sara Mimms – June 5, 2015......................................................................................................................... 128 *TOP NEWS..................................................................................................... **130* *DOMESTIC................................................................................................. **131* *The number of Fortune 500 companies led by women is at an all-time high: 5 percent* // WaPo // Ana Swanson – June 4, 2015............................................................................................................................ 131 *Most Americans back legal status for undocumented immigrants* // Politico // Nick Gass – June 4, 2015 131 *Senate Dems ready to blockade all spending bills* // Politico // Rachel Bade & John Bresnahan – June 4, 2015............................................................................................................................................... 132 *Fracking Has Had No ‘Widespread’ Impact on Drinking Water, EPA Finds* // WSJ // Russell Gold & Amy Harder – June 4, 2015............................................................................................................................ 135 *Barnard College will now accept transgender women* // CNN // Emily Jane Fox – June 4, 2015... 136 *As Supreme Court Obamacare case looms, Republicans split on response* // Reuters // Susan Cornwell & Caroline Humer – June 4, 2015.............................................................................................................. 137 *INTERNATIONAL..................................................................................... **138* *House could be forced to debate war against ISIL* // Politico // Bryan Bender – June 4, 2015...... 138 *China suspected in massive breach of federal personnel data* // AP // Ken Dilanian and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar – June 4, 2015............................................................................................................................ 140 *Obama to meet Iraqi prime minister at G7* // The Hill // Jordan Fabian – June 4, 2015............... 141 *OPINIONS/EDITORIALS/BLOGS................................................................... **142* *Let Transgender Troops Serve Openly* // NYT // The Editorial Board - June 4, 2015.................... 142 *Listen to Rand Paul* // WaPo // Fareed Zakaria – June 4, 2015................................................... 146 *Jeb Bush vs. Rick Perry* // WaPo // Jennifer Rubin – June 4, 2015............................................. 147 *What Hillary Clinton's Campaign Is Getting Right* // Esquire // Charles Pierce – June 4, 2015..... 149 *Hillary Clinton gets it on voting rights, Republican contenders don't* // CNN // Donna Brazile – June 4, 2015............................................................................................................................................... 150 *Hillary Clinton’s Bold Plan for Voting Rights* // The Nation // Ari Berman – June 4, 2015............ 152 *TODAY’S KEY STORIES* *Hillary Clinton Says G.O.P. Rivals Try to Stop Young and Minority Voters <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/us/politics/hillary-clinton-says-republican-rivals-try-to-stop-young-and-minority-voters.html?_r=0&gwh=241B43B2956D9E937E72FE5FB002D7AD&gwt=pay> // NYT // Amy Chozick – June 4, 2015 * Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday accused Republicans including her potential rivals Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Rick Perry of “deliberately trying to stop” young people and minorities — both vital Democratic constituencies — from exercising their right to vote, as she presented an ambitious agenda to make it easier for those groups and other Americans to participate in elections. Speaking at Texas Southern University here in front of her largest crowd yet as a candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton accused Republicans generally of enacting state voting laws based on what she called “a phantom epidemic of election fraud” because they are “scared of letting citizens have their say.” “What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to the other,” Mrs. Clinton told a crowd of about 2,000 in a basketball arena at the historically black campus. She called for automatic voter registration in every state when young people turn 18, criticized Republican-sponsored voting laws in North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin, and urged Congress to take immediate action to reinstate an important provision of the Voting Rights Act that she said the Supreme Court had “eviscerated” in a 2013 ruling. In addition to areas she said needed to be addressed, like easier online registration, shorter lines at polling precincts and a minimum of 20 days for early voting before an election, Mrs. Clinton called for a nationwide law modeled on one recently passed in Oregon that automatically adds voters to the rolls when they turn 18, using driver’s license data. Residents would have to opt out to avoid being added to the voter rolls. But she also used the occasion to attack by name several of her potential Republican rivals. “There are people who offer themselves to be leaders whose actions have undercut this fundamental American principle,” Mrs. Clinton said. Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor who formally entered the race for the Republican nomination on Thursday, “signed a law that a federal court said was actually written with the purpose of discriminating against minority voters,” she said, and he “applauded” when the Voting Rights Act was “gutted.” “But Governor Perry is hardly alone in his crusade against voting rights,” Mrs. Clinton continued. In Wisconsin, Governor Walker “cut back early voting and signed legislation that would make it harder for college students to vote,” she said. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey “vetoed legislation to extend early voting.” And when Jeb Bush was governor of Florida, she recalled, “state authorities conducted a deeply flawed purge of voters before the presidential election in 2000” that sent his brother George W. Bush to the White House. “What part of democracy are they afraid of?” she said. Orlando Watson, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, called Mrs. Clinton’s remarks “misleading and divisive” and “shameless,” and said they “ignore the fact her Democrat-led home state of New York does not allow early voting while dozens of Republican-led states do.” Mrs. Clinton’s early and aggressive stance on voting rights could help bolster her liberal credentials and energize black voters. In her appearance at Texas Southern University, where blues music and a high school marching band played before she arrived, she invoked the civil rights leaders who worked on the 1965 Voting Rights Act, in a speech that had the feel of an impassioned pitch to the young and minority voters who largely supported Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton in 2008, and whom she will need to win in 2016. Mrs. Clinton recalled helping register poor and Hispanic voters in Texas for George S. McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972. And she praised Barbara Jordan, the congresswoman and civil rights leader for whom an award Mrs. Clinton accepted on Thursday was named. Texas is a solidly red state, but by delivering her remarks here, Mrs. Clinton could communicate to voters in battleground states without seeming too overtly political, her supporters said. “Ohio will hear it. Pennsylvania will hear it,” said Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat who presented Mrs. Clinton with the inaugural Barbara Jordan Gold Medallion. “The rhetoric is great,” said Representative James E. Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and the highest-ranking African-American in Congress. “But that’s all you can do when you’re not in office, is talk,” he cautioned. “It takes getting elected to get something done.” Mr. Clyburn, who clashed with Bill Clinton on racial issues during the 2008 Democratic primary, said of Mrs. Clinton’s remarks, “I’d hope people would respond with their voting, sufficiently enough for her to win the office and follow through.” Mrs. Clinton spoke not just of minority voters, but also of young people who she said had been disenfranchised by new voting laws in states like Texas. “If you want to vote in this state, you can use a concealed weapon permit as a valid form of identification, but a valid student ID isn’t good enough,” Mrs. Clinton said. *Hillary Clinton calls for sweeping expansion of voter registration <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-calls-for-sweeping-expansion-of-voter-registration/2015/06/04/691f210c-0adb-11e5-9e39-0db921c47b93_story.html?postshare=8971433448620089> // WaPo // Anne Gearan & Niraj Chokshi – June 4, 2015* Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday called for sweeping changes in national voter registration laws aimed at making it easier for young people and minorities to take part in elections, putting her on a collision course with Republicans who say such reforms are a political ploy that would lead to widespread abuses. In a speech at a historically black college here, Clinton called for federal legislation that would automatically register Americans to vote at age 18 and would mandate at least 20 days of early voting ahead of election days in all states. Clinton believes that universal registration would help “expand access to the ballot box,” particularly for young people, the elderly and minorities, an aide said ahead of Clinton’s speech at Texas Southern University. Nationwide mandatory voter registration would help Democrats, whose support frequently comes from younger, poorer and minority groups that may also be less likely to sign up to vote at 18 on their own. The change would have to be approved by Congress — now controlled by Republicans — so it is unlikely to happen in time to benefit Clinton in the 2016 election if she is the Democratic nominee. Clinton said Republican state legislatures are deliberately restricting voting by curtailing early access to the polls and other measures in an effort to suppress Democratic turnout. Several GOP presidential hopefuls, including Rick Perry in Texas and Scott Walker in Wisconsin, pushed such restrictions as governors. Clinton spoke on the same day that Perry announced his own second White House run near Dallas. Republican efforts to limit voter registration have a disproportionate impact on low-income communities and on young voters, Clinton said. Under universal voter registration, every citizen would be automatically registered to vote on their 18th birthday, unless they actively opt out. About 71 percent of eligible adults nationwide are registered to vote, according to Census figures, and a lower percentage actually show up at the polls. Registration and turnout tend to be higher among older and relatively affluent white voters, who are also more likely to vote Republican. Although early voting has become fairly common in the last decade, it remains a cause of suspicion for many Republicans who say it increases the opportunity for fraudulent voting. Republicans have raised similar objections to same-day registration and other efforts — many of them led by Democrats — to make voting easier or more convenient. Election analysts generally agree that voter fraud is rare, although there have been a handful of well-publicized examples of fraudulent names being added to the rolls. Clinton’s address comes as Democrats are pursuing legal challenges to voting rule changes approved by Republican legislatures in several states. The candidate and her allies claim the changes are aimed at narrowing the electorate in ways that benefit Republicans. “This is, I think, a moment when we should be expanding the franchise,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said in an interview Wednesday. “What we see in state after state is this effort by conservatives to restrict the right to vote.” In recent weeks, top Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias has co-filed lawsuits over voting access in Ohio and Wisconsin, both key presidential battleground states with Republican governors who may join the 2016 race. “This lawsuit concerns the most fundamental of rights guaranteed citizens in our representative democracy — the right to vote,” lawyers wrote in a federal complaint filed Friday in Wisconsin. “That right has been under attack in Wisconsin since Republicans gained control of the governor’s office and both houses of the State legislature in the 2010 election,” the lawsuit alleges. Since the 2010 Republican wave, 21 states have implemented new laws restricting voting access, some cutting back on early voting hours and others limiting the number of documents considered valid identification to vote, according to a new analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank at the New York University School of Law. For 14 of those states, the 2016 contest will be the first presidential election with the new restrictions in place. Some limits also flowed from the 2013 Supreme Court decision that invalidated some parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The day that decision came down, Perry praised it as a “clear victory for federalism and the states” and vowed to proceed with the implementation of a strict photo ID requirement, previously blocked under the law. That requirement is currently being challenged in court, with a resolution expected as soon as this summer. About three dozen states and D.C. offer early voting of some kind, allowing voters to cast ballots before Election Day without an excuse. The average early voting period is roughly 22 days, the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures reported earlier this year. Oregon’s breakthrough “new motor voter” law passed earlier this year is the closest any state has come to the kind of automatic registration Clinton called for. Under the new law, all Oregonians applying for a new or updated driver’s license are automatically added to the voter rolls, unless they opt-out. Hillary leans hard into the battle over voting // WaPo // Greg Sargent – June 4, 2015 As you may have heard, Hillary Clinton is already leaning into the ever-simmering battle over voting. Her Democratic allies are preparing to wage a national legal battle against GOP state-level voting restrictions, and she is calling for a national 20-day early voting period. But now, Clinton is rolling out a third prong in her push for an expansion of voting access: In a speech in Texas that is underway right now, she is calling for universal, automatic voter registration. Automatic voter registration for citizens has long been championed by voting reformers as a key part of modernizing our voting system. Clinton’s proposal would require the registration of all citizens in every state when they turn 18 years of age, unless they opt out. She is also endorsing the general goal of universal registration for those over 18, without endorsing a specific mechanism to accomplish this. According to the Brennan Center, there are various ways to add people to the voter rolls, such as when changes of address are filed. States can also implement required universal registration for people of all ages, as Oregon has done. Clinton cited Oregon as an example today. Voting reform advocates favor universal, automatic registration as a way to streamline and simplify the registration process, to eliminate matching problems between state databases, reduce the possibility of voter registration fraud, and maximize voter participation. In political terms, Clinton’s call for universal voting registration appears to be a bid to energize millennial voters. As it is, the broader voting access push — like her recent moves leftward on immigration, climate change, and sentencing reform — is partly about mobilizing core Obama coalition groups, including minorities. Today’s proposal is more heavily focused on the young. After all, one of the key unknowns of the cycle is whether Clinton will be able to turn out Obama voters on the same levels he did, and young voters — who were excited by the historical nature of Obama’s candidacy — are key to that. “There’s a good policy reason why Clinton might support universal voting, but there’s also a good political reason,” Rick Hasen, a voting law expert, tells me. “These are issues that motivate the Democratic base. Talking about Republicans suppressing the vote gets Democrats excited, just like talking about voter fraud motivates Republicans.” Indeed, Clinton’s proposal today seems likely to draw opposition from conservatives and Republicans. For one thing, they would probably seize on the chance to attack her for favoring another government mandate and federal encroachment on states, and also to argue that government mandated registration could produce other types of fraud. The Clinton camp will probably try to pitch this proposal — and her push for more voting access in general — in a way that rebuffs GOP efforts to turn independents against it, casting it as key to maintaining the integrity of the process. For another thing, as Hasen has noted elsewhere, the battle over voting access revolves around a much deeper dispute, in which some opponents of increased access have explicitly argued that making voting harder actually leads not only to less voter fraud but to more informed choices. “There are two ways of thinking about voting,” Hasen tells me. “The first, which is associated with conservatives, is that voting is about choosing the best candidate. If you take that view, you might want restrictions that winnow out uninterested or uneducated voters. Democrats and liberals are more likely to take the second view — that we should all have an easy way to vote and share in political power.” That seems like an argument the Clinton campaign might want to have. *Clinton names and shames Republicans for voting restrictions <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/hillary-clinton-early-voting-rights-gop-118636.html> // Politico // Annie Karni – June 4, 2015* For the first time since hitting the campaign trail two months ago, Hillary Clinton took on her Republican rivals by name, calling out four presidential contenders as she spoke authoritatively about restoring voting rights and asked rhetorically, “What part of Democracy are they afraid of?” The former secretary of state also called for a new national standard of at least 20 days of early in-person voting in every state, a move she argued would reduce long lines at the polls and expand participation. “What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to another,” Clinton said in a fiery 30-minute speech at Texas Southern University, a historically black college. But it was the portion of her speech where she uncharacteristically went on a personal attack against former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie that was the apex of her speech. About two-thirds of the way into her remarks, she blasted the group for “fear-mongering” on a “phantom epidemic of election fraud.” “Former Governor Rick Perry signed a law that a federal court said was actually written with the purpose of discriminating against minority voters,” she said. “He applauded when the Voting Rights Act was gutted.” She slammed Texas for having laws where student IDs are not accepted as valid identification at the polls but a concealed weapons permit is. “In Wisconsin, Scott Walker cut back early voting and signed legislation that would make it harder for college students to vote,” she said, and called out Christie for vetoing legislation to extend early voting. “In Florida, when Jeb Bush was governor, state authorities conducted a deeply flawed purge of voters before the 2000 presidential election,” she said. “Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting.” Of her four targets, only Perry is a declared candidate so far. Clinton challenged the entire group to “explain why they’re so scared of citizens having their say.” Arguing for a change of law to allow voting on the weekends, she said: “If families coming out of church on Sunday are inspired to vote, they should be free to do just that. We know that early, in-person voting will reduce those long lines and give citizens the chance to participate.” Clinton said the fight to protect voting rights was “for the student who has to wait hours for his or her right to vote, for the grandmother who’s turned away from the polls because her driver’s license expired, for the father whose done his time and paid his debt to society but still hasn’t gotten his rights back.” The event at Texas Southern University, during which Clinton accepted an award named after Barbara Jordan, the first African-American woman to represent Texas in Congress was her only public event during her Texas trip, sandwiched by fundraisers. Clinton has been building up her attacks on her likely Republican opponents. In South Carolina earlier this month, she drew a contrast with remarks on equal pay by Walker, and Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky. But she did not mention them by name. At a roundtable discussion on immigration reform in Las Vegas last month, she challenged Republicans to attack her by moving beyond President Barack Obama on the issue, and told the participants, “this is where I differ from everyone on the Republican side.” While her campaign maintains Clinton is squarely focused on the primary, Clinton on Thursday showed that the personal attacks are not a one-way street as she embraced an issue that is a flash point between Democrats and the GOP. Democrats, and particularly minority groups, are energized and angered by what they see as blatant Republican attempts to disenfranchise them. Obama has claimed that the very right to vote is threatened. Democrats have hit the issue hard, not only on the merits but also because it galvanizes the party’s base and helps raise money. On the GOP side, leaders argue restrictive voting laws they support are necessary to maintain ballot box integrity. But many of those laws disproportionately impact minority communities. Outside groups supporting Clinton see the overall contrast with the Republican party as a strong play for the former secretary of state. As senator, they note, Clinton introduced the Count Every Vote Act, which would have made Election Day a national holiday and put in place early voting, same-day registration and uniform standards for IDs across the states. “Nearly the entire Republican Party has worked to restrict voting, from Republicans like Scott Walker and Marco Rubio who supported limiting opportunities for early and weekend voting, to Rick Perry who signed legislation that disenfranchised up to 600,000 registered Texas voters,” said Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the pro-Clinton group Correct the Record. “Hillary Clinton her entire life has championed the right of Americans to have a voice at the ballot box.” *SOCIAL MEDIA* *Chris Murphy (6/4/15, 12:15 pm)* <https://twitter.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/606479766246400000>* - No one is going to fight harder for CT families than @HillaryClinton. That's why I'm proud to endorse her today.* *Norah O’donnell (6/4/15, 7:06 am)* <https://twitter.com/norahodonnell/status/606416663836262400?refsrc=email&s=11>* - .@CBSNews confirms Jeb Bush event on June 15 in Miami will be his presidential announcement: bit.ly/1dfHazv <http://bit.ly/1dfHazv>* *Mark Murray (6/4/15, 9:46 am)* <https://twitter.com/mmurraypolitics/status/606456976780857344>* - No doubt O'Malley racked up progressive achievements as MD GOV. But that '07 op-ed undercuts that he's always been a true-blue progressive* *Gabriel Debenedetti (6/4/15, 6:44pm)* <https://twitter.com/gdebenedetti/status/606577374700826624>* - O'Malley super PAC @GenFwdPAC drops $33k for ads in Iowa, according to new FEC filing: http://1.usa.gov/1FyEOTb <http://1.usa.gov/1FyEOTb>* *Peter Nicholas (6/4/15, 1:27 pm)* <https://twitter.com/PeterNicholas3/status/606512587665244161>* - Bernie Sanders, on CNN, says "Secretary Clinton had the same information I had" and yet she voted to authorize Iraq war in 2002.* *Peter Nicholas (6/4/15, 1:30 pm)* <https://twitter.com/PeterNicholas3/status/606515722731327490>* - DNC Chair DWS rejects idea that Dem pres candidates should criticize Hillary's ethics. Lincoln Chafee had said "too many ethical" qs re HRC* *Mark Murray (6/4/15, 12:56 pm)* <https://twitter.com/mmurraypolitics/status/606504709696798720>* - Perry's speech epitomizes GOP's rhetorical shift from economy/debt (No.1 issue in 2012) to national security/foreign policy* *Caitlin Huey-Burns (6/4/15, 1:39 pm)* <https://twitter.com/CHueyBurnsRCP/status/606500626827231232>* - Rubio, on Fox, calls HRC's immigration position big shift from 2008 when she wasn't sure if she'd give licenses to undocumented immigrants* *HRC** NATIONAL COVERAGE* *Why a Presidential Campaign Is the Ultimate Start-Up <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/upshot/why-a-presidential-campaign-is-the-ultimate-start-up.html?mwrsm=Email&abt=0002&abg=0> // NYT // Neil Irwin – June 4, 2015 * A new start-up in Brooklyn Heights has 80,000 square feet of freshly leased office space, computer boxes used as improvised furniture and enormous ambitions. Its growth plans put Silicon Valley start-ups to shame. The new outfit expects to hire hundreds of people and raise and spend one or two billion dollars by late next year. Its competition is stiff, with similarly well-funded rivals in Florida, Wisconsin and elsewhere. But if the Brooklyn team succeeds, it will make history. It is a political campaign, not a fledgling tech company, and it aims to get Hillary Rodham Clinton elected president of the United States. Like the presidential campaigns of a host of other candidates, announced and unannounced, it faces a complex management challenge that parallels those of fast-moving tech start-ups, according to people who have worked in both. Those commonalities contain lessons about how to build a company — or, for that matter, get someone elected president. Campaigns are “The Fastest Start-ups in the World,” as Matt McDonald, a former McKinsey consultant who worked on the 2008 John McCain effort and other Republican campaigns, calls them in a new report issued by Hamilton Place Strategies, the Washington public affairs firm where he is a partner. He points out that buzzy social media firms may attain multibillion-dollar paper valuations quickly, but take years to reach a scale equivalent to a major presidential campaign in spending and employee count. A serious candidate for president, after all, requires a high-functioning team that is built from scratch in just a few months. That typically means appointing a campaign manager who may have a background as a political strategist but who becomes de facto chief executive of a complicated enterprise that has no time to evolve gradually. Start-ups and campaigns are both driven by people with a range of motives: an idealistic desire to change the world along with less noble goals of attaining a great fortune or power. An enormous staff must be assembled, learn how to work together and execute intricate and interrelated tasks. Among them are raising vast sums of money and developing and executing what is essentially an enormous marketing campaign. In the end, of course, participants hope to persuade millions of people to “buy” — meaning, show up at the polls and vote for the candidate on Election Day. “A lot of start-ups and a lot of campaigns are similar,” said David Plouffe, the manager of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign who is now chief adviser at the fast-growing transportation upstart Uber. “Decisions need to be made, and there are new challenges every day, while at the same time you’re trying to hire a lot of people and scale an organization.” Ken Mehlman, who headed George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign and is now an executive at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the private equity firm, sees similar challenges. “I viewed my job as being the C.E.O. of a company that in the beginning was a start-up, and was ultimately a very large company,” he said. “My underlying thesis is that my job wasn’t to be a political genius. My job was to take best management practices and apply them to politics.” Those Obama and Bush campaigns were, almost by definition, the most successful of the last 15 years. One propelled a man with barely two years of experience in the Senate to a two-term presidency, and the other re-elected an incumbent whose popularity was starting to be weighed down by a war. Their lessons are already being emulated by the 2016 presidential campaigns, and could as easily be borrowed by aspiring Mark Zuckerbergs. The 2008 Obama campaign, for example, put a premium on hiring people for whom the job was a bit of a stretch. All else being equal, for example, it preferred to appoint as director for a given state someone who had been a deputy director in a previous campaign, not someone who had served in the same role many times. Part of this was necessity; when the Obama effort began in 2007, Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination had locked up many experienced operatives. But in the view of Mr. Plouffe and his colleagues, their approach had advantages because it created a team that had something to prove and was unlikely to be complacent. “If you assemble a bunch of grizzled veterans, you’re not going to get that sense of inventiveness, and the culture will be one that is not terribly conducive to good ideas emanating from everywhere,” said Mr. Plouffe. “It happens more naturally in the tech world, where the C.E.O. can come out of anywhere and brilliant people may not have a lengthy résumé.” A related strategy was to create relatively rigid pay bands and avoid getting into lengthy negotiations over salary, the approach being more “this is what this job pays; take it or leave it.” It meant that many people working on the campaign did so for less money than they could have made elsewhere. This helped to create a culture of frugality and made it more likely that people joined the staff because they believed in the campaign, not just for a paycheck. George W. Bush’s campaigns were known for frugality, and Hillary Clinton’s nascent 2016 campaign reportedly strives for it (among the manifestations of the thrift: no business cards, and employees are to use their cellphones rather than a desk line). Mr. Mehlman said that in the 2004 Bush campaign, this culture came from the top: His own salary was $150,000 a year, and no one made more than that. Travel arrangements were made on the cheap, the logic being that every dollar spent on a high-end hotel was one fewer available for advertising or voter outreach in swing states. “I stayed in Motel 6’s just like everyone else,” he said. The parallel for start-ups is striking. While there are exceptions, young companies typically want to keep expenses down to minimize the rate at which they burn cash, and they want people drawn by belief in the company, not by the allure of a cushy office, generous expense account or high salary. There are important differences, of course. For people working for campaigns, the potential reward tends to be a job at the White House or a top government agency, while for start-up employees it is a giant payday from stock options. But campaigns and start-ups share common challenges as they ramp up operations. A campaign that wins its party’s nomination must expand exponentially as it moves from primaries to a general election. What was once a small, tight-knit group must suddenly add many more people, often those with more experience. It is much like a start-up that goes from a dozen people in a garage to hundreds of staff members, many with deeper résumés than the original ragtag crew. Part of the job for those at the top is massaging egos and trying to keep everyone committed and enthusiastic even as that transition takes place. “You need to layer in some more senior hands who have been through it before, but deciding who is in decision meetings and who is in charge can be difficult as you scale from a primary campaign to the general,” Mr. McDonald said. “It’s not dissimilar to the old stereotypical Silicon Valley start-up where a company raises venture capital money and gets the company to a certain level, and the V.C.s say, ‘Thanks very much, now we’ll hire a real C.E.O.’ ” Some of the management questions are fundamental. Should power be concentrated at the top of an organization or distributed broadly? Should there be strict lines of authority in which everyone stays in his or her narrow lane, or a more open management structure where people cut across organizational barriers? Veterans of both worlds argued that a hybrid approach makes the most sense. They stressed the importance of the leaders setting clear goals and giving subordinates leeway to reach them — combined with accountability should they fail. Both the Bush and Obama campaigns emphasized measuring success and failure quantitatively. Even for seemingly subjective areas like communications, the Bush campaign would calibrate how many potential voters in a swing state were likely to have seen a news broadcast of a positive story. In other words, a nice press clip was great, but it counted as a success only if it was seen by large numbers of voters in Ohio and Florida. “Great campaigns are formulaic in the way they establish responsibilities for campaign staff, but also ruthless in their tracking and demands for results,” said Tucker Bounds, a veteran Republican campaign operative who later worked at Facebook, which has a similar culture of high expectations and reliance on data. One of the biggest tests of management is how it copes with a crisis. For a tech start-up the issue might be a failed product introduction, a big move by a competitor or fund-raising problems that necessitate layoffs; for a campaign it might be the loss of a major primary or the emergence of an unflattering videotape. Both types of organizations are built on momentum, and both risk a vicious cycle when something goes wrong. Negative headlines can be self-fulfilling, as would-be campaign supporters or a company’s customers and investors flee. Leaders in either world must rise to the occasion. Mr. Plouffe, for example, described how the Obama 2008 campaign weathered a loss to Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, which sapped the campaign’s momentum. “You make clear that you will diagnose what went wrong, and have a sense that this is a tough blow,” Mr. Plouffe said. “You have to tell people how you’ll get through it.” In that case, he said, he had to explain how the campaign intended to win future states and ultimately enough delegates to capture the Democratic nomination. “Without that it would have seemed like happy talk,” he said. “But the first time you deal with a setback and recover, those bonds between people on the team really strengthen. When you show the ability to fight through it, you become a band of brothers and sisters.” The best-managed campaign won’t necessarily win the presidency. The political winds, the skills and positions of the candidates and the state of the economy all help determine that. Similarly, the best-run company doesn’t necessarily prevail against a competitor with a better product. Leading a start-up effective enough to win the presidency is no easy task. But it may pale next to the challenge and opportunity ahead: reconstituting a successful management team to steer the 2.7 million civilian employees of the executive branch. Having mastered the high-speed start-up, in other words, the candidates and their lieutenants may get to apply their talents to running the government of the United States. *Appealing to Union, Hillary Clinton Calls Teachers ‘Scapegoats’ <http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/06/04/appealing-to-union-hillary-clinton-calls-teachers-scapegoats/> // NYT // Maggie Haberman – June 4, 2015 * Hillary Rodham Clinton made an appeal for an endorsement from the American Federation of Teachers this week, suggesting in a private meeting with union officials that critics have turned teachers into “scapegoats for all of society’s problems.” “From what I’ve seen, all of the evidence, and my own personal experience, says that the most important and impactful thing we can do for our public schools is to recruit, support and retain the highest-quality educators,” Mrs. Clinton said before a question-and-answer session with teachers, according to the union, which released her remarks. “It is just dead wrong to make teachers the scapegoats for all of society’s problems,” she said. “Where I come from, teachers are the solution.” Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were first reported by BuzzFeed. Mrs. Clinton, as well as two other Democratic presidential hopefuls, former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, appeared at the union’s executive council meeting this week. But even allies of Mr. O’Malley and Mr. Sanders acknowledge that Mrs. Clinton is likely to earn the federation’s backing. Still, Mrs. Clinton is under some pressure from advocates of an education overhaul, who have been at odds with the teachers’ union for several years and believe President Obama has been a supporter of their issues. Representatives for teachers have publicly denounced Mr. Obama’s education agenda and programs like “Race to the Top,” which awarded bonuses to school districts based on performance markers. That makes Mrs. Clinton’s comments about teachers as “scapegoats” all the more striking. In an interview in March, Ann O’Leary, who has since become a senior policy adviser for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, indicated that the candidate planned to engage in a dialogue with both the teachers and advocates of an overhaul, something Mr. Obama has been accused of not doing. Lea Crusey, of the group Democrats for Education Reform, who called Mr. Obama “a consistent champion for reform,” said advocates had “been in contact” with Mrs. Clinton’s team, and that they hoped to hear from her on issues such as college affordability, charter schools and “continued support for accountability.” Mrs. Clinton has a long record on the subject, including on efforts to overhaul public education. In Arkansas, when she was first lady, she was part of a task force that tried to improve the state’s poor-performing schools. *Hillary Clinton, in Texas, Tries to Win Over Forlorn Democrats <http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/06/04/hillary-clinton-in-texas-tries-to-win-over-forlorn-democrats/?smid=nytpolitics> // NYT // Amy Chozick – June 3, 2015 * It’s lonely to be a Democrat in Texas these days. As Hillary Rodham Clinton makes a two-day swing through the state mostly to raise money, even swaggering Texans with gold belt buckles and ranches that sit behind gated expanses are beginning to feel a little, well, used. Last year, liberal groups like Battleground Texas sold local Democrats a tall tale that turnout would spike in the midterm election and that the state would show it still had hints of blue. Then, Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for governor, lost in a landslide to Greg Abbott, a Republican. Adding insult to injury, many of the Hispanic voters who were supposed to help turn the tide either didn’t vote or favored Mr. Abbott. Democrats had hardly licked their wounds when Mrs. Clinton and the outside groups that support her came knocking for money for 2016, when the state is all but certain to keep its solid red streak. “All Texas is to anyone is a stop to pick up money,” one disillusioned donor said. Mrs. Clinton’s decision to deliver a substantive, high-profile speech on voting rights here on Thursday — in addition to fund-raising stops in Austin, Dallas and San Antonio — can do much to assuage those concerns. (She will most likely tell her usual story about the summer she spent in Texas in the 1970s helping to register Hispanic voters on the George McGovern presidential campaign.) The speech was not made final until last week, and the site, Texas Southern University, had to find a larger auditorium to accommodate the local officials, supporters and national news media who would attend, Democrats involved in the planning said. But immediately after Mrs. Clinton’s plea to increase access to the polls, she will head to (where else?) a fund-raiser in a gated community in this city’s upscale Memorial area. (Guests were told they would receive details and the address after delivering their $2,700 checks.) Texas Democrats are a nostalgic clan, still basking in the legacy of such homegrown firebrands as Lyndon B. Johnson, Ann Richards, the columnist Molly Ivins (“Real Texans do not use the word ‘summer’ as a verb,” she famously wrote of the elder George Bush) and Barbara Jordan, the congresswoman and civil rights leader after whom the award Mrs. Clinton will accept here on Thursday is named. It makes sense that Mrs. Clinton chose the home state of L.B.J., the architect of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to talk about voting rights. She will also condemn Republican rivals, including former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who have supported laws increasing requirements for voters. The restrictions, voting rights activists say, prohibit minorities, the poor and young voters — groups that tend to vote Democratic — from casting ballots. Texas has among the strictest voting laws of any state in the country, and turnout is generally abysmal, particularly among its Hispanics. “I hope it’s in Texas because Texas is a microcosm of all of this,” Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, said in an interview, referring to Mrs. Clinton’s voting rights speech. “She is going to where the problem is.” It’s not just the voting laws that have the state’s Democrats feeling down. Recently, the Texas Legislature supported bills that would allow residents to openly carry handguns and permit students to carry concealed weapons on college campuses, policies most Democrats abhor. An exasperated Arthur L. Schechter, a Houston-based donor whose support for Bill Clinton earned him an ambassadorship, pointed to the recent shootout at a Waco bar between rival biker gangs. “It’s like the days of Wyatt Earp are back,” he said. Hillary Clinton declares war on Voter ID // WaPo // Janell Ross – June 4, 2015 When Hillary Clinton gave her speech Thursday on voting rights, her campaign staff had already given a pretty ample set of previews to publications across the country. No one was expecting fire. But Clinton’s speech – focusing on some of what Clinton presented as the ugliest truths about voting in the United States – was no boilerplate stump speech. Clinton went big. She called for universal and automatic voter registration and a 20-day (or more) period of early voting in every state, before every election. Clinton's speech identified the work of protecting and expanding voting rights as a critical part of her campaign. Clinton talked about the fact that African Americans consistently rank among the most deeply affected by the contours of Voter ID laws, must wait in the longest lines on Election Day and cast ballots at polling sites that very often house fewer machines and poll workers than other sites. That, Clinton told the crowd, “is no accident.” Then, her campaign sent out a tweet that drove the point home. In case you don’t know, a student ID can’t be used to vote in Texas, but a concealed carry permit can. The implication: the Democratic Party’s base of young and minority voters are far more likely to be rendered unable to vote than the GOP’s gun-loving base. For Clinton, that's a situation that inherently ties her political fate to groups of voters she says are imperiled. It was also no accident that Clinton’s carefully stage-managed speech was scheduled for Texas Southern University, a historically black college in Houston. After all, the current Voter ID law that governs voting in Texas was initially blocked by federal officials. Then, within hours of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2013 Voting Rights Act decision eliminating the requirement that states like Texas run voting changes past federal authorities, the state put the law into effect. African Americans, even in big red states like Texas which the most hopeful Democrats insist sits on the verge of turning purple, remain a core part of the constituency that Clinton needs. But Clinton needs to more than attract African-American voters to her campaign. She needs them fired up to vote. Consider this. Black America’s first record-setting turnout for Barack Obama in 2008 might have been about making history. But in 2012, when a larger proportion of blacks voted than any other group for the second presidential election in a row, plenty of the nation’s political prognosticators attributed that to the sense that black access to the franchise was under active attack. And so, Clinton came to Houston. She declared war on Voter ID and other Republican efforts to rein in things like early voting. And she asked the audience to join her. The day before Clinton waged her frontal attack, New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice issued a report offering a far more subdued but equally cautionary look at the nation’s voting rights situation. And the center's assessment of 2015 is, well, nuanced. The most stringent Voter ID laws could disenfranchise anywhere from 8 to 12 percent of the population in these states, the Brennan Center’s Myrna Pérez, deputy director of organization’s Democracy Program, told me. That’s also a group disproportionately made up of people of color, very young voters and the very old, the poor and women. These groups are less likely to have one of the forms of ID these laws require and more likely not to have the kinds of underlying documents needed to obtain them such as a birth certificate or passport. For women, the common practice of changing one's last name can seriously complicate the work of obtaining ID needed to vote. After a raft of bills around the country in 2011 aiming to require ID to vote, and several legal challenges, some have been put in place. Fourteen states have passed voting law changes that if not overturned by a court will be in place for the first time on Election Day 2016. North Dakota also passed its own Voter ID law this year. But only some of these laws include the kind of narrow lists of acceptable forms of ID like the law in Texas, according to that Brennan Center report. And those are the laws voting rights organizations are fighting in court. In the court of public opinion, fighting these laws is arguably more difficult. That's because polls show huge majorities of Americans agree with the concept of requiring ID to vote. So when Clinton pushes for more early voting, it's likely to be popular; when she warns that voter ID disenfranchises African Americans, it's a tougher sell. But Clinton isn't the only one taking up the cause, and the movement isn't all in one direction. At the other end of the spectrum, a small group of states that will likely surprise people in the political know – Florida, Oklahoma and New Mexico – have seen bipartisan groups of legislators create laws to make online voter registration a reality. Maryland and Minnesota came close to overturning laws that bar convicted felons from voting, a practice that excludes millions of citizens around the country from voting booths. And in Oregon, Democrats pushed through a measure that will come very close to Clinton’s universal registration idea. The state will register anyone with an Oregon driver’s license who is eligible to vote. Oregon license holders will have to take steps to opt out of registration if they are adamant about it. The law is expected to add anywhere from 300,000 to 400,000 voters to Oregon’s rolls. These fights have largely happened off the front page and in the little-watched state Houses of America. Clinton is trying to put them on the national radar -- with a clear eye toward getting key demographic groups geared up to elect another Democrat as president. *51 percent of Democrats say Benghazi is a legitimate issue for Hillary Clinton <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/06/04/51-percent-of-democrats-say-benghazi-is-a-legitimate-issue-for-hillary-clinton/> // WaPo // Amber Phillips – June 4, 2015 * Most voters aren't paying much attention to Republicans' ongoing investigation into the Benghazi attacks that happened during Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as secretary of state. It's a political witch hunt, Democrats cry. But more than any other problem she's faced so far, the 2012 attack on U.S. diplomatic compounds in Libya that killed four Americans, including ambassador J. Chris Stevens, is seen as fair game for 2016. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Tuesday, 55 percent say how she handled Benghazi is a legitimate issue for the 2016 campaign. Most interestingly, it's far from a partisan issue; that number includes 51 percent of Democrats and half of independents. The Benghazi attack ranks slightly higher as a legitimate issue for voters than other, more recent negative headlines for Clinton: The Clinton Foundation's fundraising from foreign governments (53 percent) and her use of personal e-mail while she was head of the State Department (48 percent). Both those numbers break down along much more partisan lines, too. Of course, the fact that voters think Benghazi is a legitimate issue doesn't mean they think it's a negative one for Clinton. In total, half of voters disapprove of the way Clinton handled questions about the deadly attack, with 33 percent approving. But that breaks down much more along partisan lines; 82 percent of Republicans compared to 23 percent of Democrats disapprove of her response to the questions. So many/most Democrats who see it as a legitimate issue don't necessarily see it as a negative. This would seem to be good news for Republicans, who have been hammering away at Clinton on Benghazi for three years now, accusing her of getting a free pass and skirting tough questions. In Congress, House Republican lawmakers are on their eighth sanctioned investigation into the incident, with their findings expected to be released in the throes of the presidential election in 2016. On the presidential trail, GOP candidates have mostly stayed away from the touchy subject, preferring to attack Clinton on other issues, including the money she took for very well-paid speeches since departing as secretary of state (among other problems for the Hillary camp). Attacking Democrats on Benghazi can be tricky, though. The GOP's 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, faltered in a debate against Obama on the question. But Clinton isn't the only presidential hopeful with a complicated issue in the Middle East. The Washington Post/ABC poll also asked voters whether Jeb Bush's hypothetical handling of his brother's Iraq war was a legitimate issue. The former Florida governor's stumbles over the question have produced arguably his most negative headlines thus far. But the issue seems to be less of an issue for Bush than Benghazi is for Clinton. More voters (48 percent) say no, what he would have done in Iraq is not an issue, while 44 percent say it should be part of the 2016 debate. Again, things aren't as partisan as you might expect -- 44 percent of Republicans say it's a legitimate issue, for example -- but overall, people don't seem as interested in hypotheticals about what George W. Bush's brother would have done if he had been in Dubya's shoes (and with more information). But perhaps that's because it is precisely a hypothetical question. In the same poll, just 23 percent of Republicans said they think Bush would continue the same policies as his brother if elected. No one can say for certain whether either Benghazi or the Iraq war -- which recently matched its lowest approval rating in ever among the American public -- will sway voters next November. But these latest numbers should serve as a reminder to candidates that the past is never really in the past. *Hillary Clinton Calls for Automatic Voter Registration <http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-calls-for-automatic-voter-registration-1433449800> // WSJ // Laura Meckler – June 4, 2015 * Hillary Clinton proposed Thursday that Americans be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18, unless they opt out, one of a series of voting-law changes she said would expand access to the ballot box. In her remarks to a largely African-American audience in Houston, she accused Republicans of making voting harder, particularly for minorities and young people. Republicans say they are focused on rooting out voter fraud. The front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination also proposed expanded in-person early voting, called on Congress to restore parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013 and said felons who have served their sentences should have voting rights restored. The speech marked the latest in a series of policy announcements likely to be popular with core Democratic voters. Democrats also see voting rights as critical to helping them win elections. “We have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what’s really going on in our country. Because what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to another,” she said at Texas Southern University, a historically black college. Many candidates for office currently expend significant energy helping register people to vote who they hope will vote for them. This work is particularly urgent for Democrats, as young people and minorities are less likely to register but more likely to vote Democratic. In his two presidential victories, Barack Obama’s campaign worked to “expand the electorate” in key states by registering likely supporters. Universal registration would obviate the need for these efforts. The proposals contrast with Republicans, who have worked to require photo identification at the polls and purge registration lists of those ineligible to vote. They argue that these steps are necessary to combat voter fraud, and that early voting isn’t worth the cost. Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the Clinton plan wouldn’t succeed in expanding voter turnout and could result in people being put onto the rolls more than once. “Americans feel one of their rights is the right to be left alone by the government,” he said. “People should be able to make the voluntary decision as to whether they want to participate or not.” Mrs. Clinton cited a law enacted in Oregon this year to automatically register eligible citizens who have driver’s licenses, as long as they don’t opt out. Lawmakers in 14 other states, plus the District of Columbia, have introduced similar proposals, according to a count by the Brennan Center for Justice, which is advocating for universal registration systems. The proposals vary; some also register people who have conducted business with other government agencies as well. “The biggest obstacle to free and fair elections is the ramshackle voter registration system,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center. The center estimates that at least 50 million eligible citizens aren’t registered. Under the current system, he said, people fall off the voter rolls when they move and remain there after they die. He argued that a stronger government hand would lead to more accurate voter rolls. He said the government would have to conduct checks to make sure people who aren’t eligible to vote, such as noncitizens and, in some states, felons, aren’t registered. Mrs. Clinton’s speech comes at the same time her campaign is supporting Democratic efforts to challenge voting rules in Wisconsin and Ohio, which allege GOP-backed laws are restricting people’s right to vote. The campaign isn’t a party to the suits, but its top election attorney is working on the cases. The Wisconsin rules being challenged in court include a photo-ID requirement, reduction in the early voting window, an increase in the in-state residency requirement and elimination of weekend and evening voting times. Courts have found voter-ID requirements to be constitutional. Mrs. Clinton also sold herself as an early champion of voting rights. She pointed to her work registering voters in Texas in 1972 for Sen. George McGovern’s presidential campaign, and to legislation she introduced while in the U.S. Senate to make Election Day a national holiday, expand registration and increase early voting. In her speech, Mrs. Clinton urged Congress to pass legislation restoring federal oversight of elections in states that historically discriminated against minority voters, after a 2013 Supreme Court decision found Congress hadn’t adequately justified that supervision when reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act in 2006. Mrs. Clinton also called for a national standard of at least 20 days of early, in-person voting in every state, with early polls open on some weekends and evenings. She said this standard would reduce wait times at polling places and give more people the chance to vote, particularly those who work or have family obligations on Election Day. The campaign said that a third of states have no early voting. *Why Hillary Clinton is pushing early voting in 2016 <http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2015/0604/Why-Hillary-Clinton-is-pushing-early-voting-in-2016-video> // AP // Ken Thomas – June 4, 2015 * Hillary Rodham Clinton is calling for an expansion of early voting and pushing back against Republican-led efforts to restrict voting access, laying down a marker on voting rights at the start of her presidential campaign. The Democratic presidential candidate is using a speech Thursday at historically black Texas Southern University to denounce voting restrictions in North Carolina, Texas, Florida and Wisconsin and to encourage states to adopt a new national standard of no fewer than 20 days of early in-person voting, including weekend and evening voting. Clinton is plunging into a partisan debate in many statehouses, which have pitted Democrats who contend restricting voter registration aims to suppress turnout among minority and low-income voters against Republicans who say the steps are needed to prevent voter fraud. The issue is closely watched by black voters, who supported President Barack Obama in large numbers and will be an important constituency as Clinton seeks to rebuild Obama's coalition. Democrats have signaled plans for a large-scale legal fight against new voter ID laws and efforts to curtail voting access. Party attorneys recently filed legal challenges to voting changes made by GOP lawmakers in the presidential battleground states of Ohio and Wisconsin. One of the attorneys involved in the lawsuits is Marc Elias, a top elections lawyer for Democrats who is also serving as the Clinton campaign's general counsel. The campaign is not officially involved in the lawsuits. Clinton will also urge Congress to take steps to address a 2013 Supreme Court ruling striking down a portion of the Voting Rights Act. Clinton said at the time of the decision that the court had "struck at the heart" of the landmark law and warned that it would make it difficult for the poor, elderly, minorities and working people to vote. She is also expected to urge the full adoption of the recommendations of Obama's bipartisan commission on voting administration. Raising the voting issues allow Clinton to draw sharp distinctions with the potential Republican presidential field, which has largely endorsed the changes. Three potential GOP rivals — Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio and former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas — helped overhaul their states' election laws. Democrats, meanwhile, still blame former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, another likely GOP candidate, for purging his state's voting rolls of certain eligible voters prior to the 2000 election, which ended with his brother, former President George W. Bush, narrowly winning the state following a lengthy recount. "Time and again, members of the 2016 Republican field have put partisan political interests above the fundamental American right to vote," said Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist and longtime Clinton adviser. Republicans have defended the changes, saying they ensure the integrity of the voting process. Under Walker, Wisconsin's changes included requiring a proof of residency except for overseas and military voters, reducing the early voting period and increasing residency requirements. "Any measure that protects our democracy by making it easier to vote and harder to cheat is a step in the right direction. This is a bipartisan issue and Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are on the wrong side," said Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for Walker's political action committee. About 20 million people voted early in the 2014 elections. However, about one-third of states do not have any early voting. Republicans note that Clinton's home state of New York is one of the states that lack early voting. Thursday's event will be hosted by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and Clinton will be honored with an award named after Barbara Jordan, the late Texas congresswoman and civil rights leader. The former secretary of state has been actively raising money for her campaign and the speech is part of a two-day trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Texas, where she is holding private fundraisers in Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and Houston. *Democrats fret over recent Hillary Clinton polling <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/hillary-clinton-2016-polling-concern-democrats-insiders-caucus-118667.html> // Politico // Katie Glueck – June 5, 2015* Despite polls, many early-state insiders say there’s enthusiasm for Hillary’s presidential bid — especially among women. Early-state Democrats are evenly divided over whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign should be worried about recent polls showing her highest unfavorability ratings in years. Exactly 50 percent say there’s cause for concern while the other 50 percent saw no reason for alarm. That’s the assessment of this week’s survey of the POLITICO Caucus — a bipartisan group of influential activists, operatives and elected officials in Iowa and New Hampshire. “Twenty-plus Republicans beating her up, Elizabeth Warren talking about the working man issues that terrify her, a couple of candidates like Bernie [Sanders] and Martin [O’Malley] to fill in her policy blanks and a media that feels stiffed by her lack of access, so all we can focus on is emails and the notorious Clinton Foundation and newly acquired wealth that suggests, at a minimum, the appearance of impropriety,” one Granite State Democrat said, offering an explanation for her sinking favorability. “Frankly if Hillary could step back at look at herself she would rate herself unfavorably as well.” That remark comes during a week in which two major national polls delivered troubling results, including a CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday that showed Clinton with her highest unfavorability ratings of the past 14 years. A separate poll released Tuesday by The Washington Post and ABC News found that Clinton’s favorability was just 45 percent — her lowest in that survey since April 2008, when she was in the middle of a nomination battle with Barack Obama. Caucus participants largely chalked those numbers up to a spate of unflattering stories about donations made to the Clinton Foundation, as well as scrutiny of Clinton’s email practices when she was at the State Department. Some blamed the media — the “drumbeat” of negative headlines was a common explanation for her slide in popularity. But others argued that she should engage more with the press about those subjects. “She is not proactively addressing the issues of concern to Americans,” said an Iowa Democrat who, like everyone in the POLITICO Caucus, was granted anonymity in order to speak freely. “Her refusal to take questions is taking a toll. These polls indicate that she needs to take a more proactive role. Not that she needs to be completely responsive to the media, but she can’t ignore them.” “Emails, Clinton Foundation, etc,” one New Hampshire Democrat responded. “She is taking the initial barrage from the punditocracy trying to frame the narrative of the race — which is largely about process and character, not very much about issues — and because she is not taking the bait she’s in a little bit of a roper-doper strategy right now. I think she needs to go on offense.” But many Democrats also attributed falling poll numbers to the fact that she is now a partisan candidate for political office, rather than secretary of state, and noted that she still outpaces the Republican candidates in polls. And several who responded that the Clinton campaign should be concerned by those surveys said the information should be used only to make minor adjustments. “Any candidate facing waves of partisan attacks for weeks on end sees the impact in their numbers, but the list of folks capable of sustaining this kind of a barrage and still looking this good is very small,” said a Granite Stater. Another New Hampshire Democrat, who believes the Clinton campaign should be concerned about the polls, explained, “Hillary Clinton generates extremely strong passions, both positive and negative. She needs to be completely candid and transparent about the [Clinton] Foundation’s dealings and accomplishments and cannot engage in either spin or obfuscation. As long as she is straight, truthful and credible, she will be fine.” Despite the rising negative ratings and polling suggesting high numbers of voters question her trustworthiness, three-quarters of early-state Democrats say Clinton is generating sufficient excitement about her presidential bid — especially among women. “Regular people, particularly women of all age groups are beyond excited about this candidacy,” a New Hampshire Democrat said. “Sufficient is the right choice of words,” said another New Hampshire Democrat. “Hillary is, and remains, solid in the eyes of Democrats.” Some respondents, however, wondered whether there’s enough energy and enthusiasm for the long haul. “There is almost “forced” excitement from establishment types trying to sell the Clinton brand as the perfect standard bearer for rank and file Democrats,” said one New Hampshire Democrat. “In New Hampshire, there does not appear to be a barrage of new Clinton supporters; rather, just the usual Clinton supporters.” An Iowa Democrat cautioned, “Sufficient to win a primary yes, a general election right now — we aren’t there.” On the Republican side, unsurprisingly, 94 percent of insiders said her campaign should be concerned by the polls, and 91 percent said they’re not seeing much enthusiasm about her candidacy. Several insiders likened Clinton to former Sen. Bob Dole, who won the 1996 GOP nomination but lost to Bill Clinton. “Hillary Clinton is this cycle’s version of Bob Dole. It’s her turn but holy sh**!” one Granite State Republican said. Here are three other takeaways from this week’s POLITICO Caucus: Expectations are high for Clinton’s June 13 announcement rally Hillary Clinton has been a candidate since April, but she will officially kick off her race on June 13 at a rally in New York. That’s a good time for her to spell out exactly why she’s running, Democratic insiders say — it’s a way to show skeptical voters that she’s pursuing the White House because of an issue set or philosophy, rather than out of a sense that she’s inevitable or entitled. A New Hampshire Democrat suggested Clinton answer these questions. “Why is she the best person out of 320 million people to be President? Where’s the passion? And what can you say that will truly inspire non-base voters?” “She needs consistency of effort in transferring attention from herself to the issues on which she is running,” an Iowa Democrat said. “June 13th plays an important role in putting the attention on her priority issues.” A New Hampshire Democrat added that Clinton should try to explain that the campaign is bigger than she is, and bigger than the Clinton brand: “That this campaign isn’t about her and it isn’t about Washington, that it’s about Manchester and Davenport and other communities and the issues that matter there — a quality education for your kids, safe neighborhoods, good roads and bridges, confronting the drug epidemic, lowering the costs of healthcare, childcare, student loans and energy prices. Don’t make this campaign about the Clintons, but about families all across the country who are just trying to do the right thing everyday.” Other non-Democrats — Republicans and a handful of nonpartisan respondents — indulged in some wishful thinking. Clinton should say “I am not a crook,” suggested at least two insiders. “I have decided to spend more time with my family and thus I am resetting my priorities and going to devote my life to the Clinton Foundation,” deadpanned a New Hampshire Republican. As Warren fades, Sanders rises Supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren are increasingly taking her at her word that she won’t run for president — which makes room on the left for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Fully 100 percent of Iowa Democrats, and 72 percent of New Hampshire Democrats, see Sanders as the heir to Warren’s support, rather than former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley or former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee. “The lane is on the left,” an Iowa Democrat said. “There’s not enough room for Left of Hillary but Right of Bernie. Why settle for a mainstream liberal when you can have a lefty dream candidate?” “Bernie is taking it to the streets. He’s calling for political revolution. While he is not the picture of change one might imagine, he has the ability to reprise the role of Howard Dean in 2004 in the Democratic primary,” an Iowa Republican said. A New Hampshire Republican, questioning enthusiasm for Clinton, said, “Hundreds of people are turning out for a socialist from Vermont!” But an Iowa Democrat noted, “Sanders is the flavor of the month in [Iowa]. He has connected with the [Dennis] Kucinich and Dean supporters from years ago. The big question is whether they are curious or committed.” Carly Fiorina is on fire — for now One hundred percent of New Hampshire Republicans and about 80 percent of Iowa Republicans say GOP candidate Carly Fiorina is gaining traction. “People love Carly when they see her. Momentum in Iowa is real,” a Hawkeye State Republican said. A New Hampshire Democrat added a word of support: “She is different from all the other candidates in the Republican field, and for more than her gender. Her business background, her communication style, her willingness to talk like a general election candidate right now, her never holding office, and her personal story, are all interesting. If she is not one of the 10 people on that debate stage, the process is not working.” An Iowa Republican noted that Fiorina’s status as the GOP field’s most frequent critic of Hillary Clinton is going a long way for her candidacy. “Fiorina has been wowing crowds and exceeding expectations wherever she goes in Iowa,” the insider said. “It’s one part love for the Clinton zingers, one part excitement in a charismatic Republican woman, and one part interest in the unknown, but she is making headway in Iowa in a real way.” But, a New Hampshire Republican said of the former Hewlett Packard head, “she’s had a free ride so far attacking Hillary, which is easy, with no critical review of her record or policies. That will change.” *Clinton calls out GOP opponents by name on voting rights <http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/04/politics/hillary-clinton-voting-rights-texas/index.html> // CNN // Dan Merica & Eric Bradner – June 4, 2015* Hillary Clinton accused four potential GOP presidential rivals by name of being "scared of letting citizens have their say" as she called Thursday for every American to automatically be registered to vote. Clinton told an audience at the historically black Texas Southern University that she supports the concept of signing every American up to vote as soon as they're eligible at age 18, unless they specifically opt out. She called for expanded access to polling places, keeping them open for at least 20 days and offering voting hours on evenings and weekends. For the first time in her campaign, she attacked her likely opponents by name as she laid into four GOP governors -- Texas's Rick Perry, Wisconsin's Scott Walker, Florida's Jeb Bush and New Jersey's Chris Christie -- telling them to "stop fear-mongering about a phantom epidemic of voter fraud." "All of these problems voting just didn't happen by accident," she said. "And it is just wrong -- it's wrong -- to try to prevent, undermine and inhibit Americans' right to vote." The former secretary of state's move to put voter access front and center in the 2016 presidential campaign highlights a contrast with laws implemented by GOP-controlled legislatures in states like North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and Florida that cut down on early voting times and tighten voter identification rules. The Supreme Court also ruled in 2013 that a key aspect of President Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Act of 1965 is no longer constitutional. "What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to the other," Clinton said. In her 2008 campaign, Clinton rarely addressed voting rights. But Democrats have fretted that policies imposed by GOP state legislatures in recent years could dissuade African-Americans and those in urban areas from voting, cutting into crucial blocs of Democratic support in swing states. The Democratic frontrunner highlighted the issue in a heavily political speech as she received an award in the name of Barbara Jordan, a pioneer African-American lawmaker and civil rights leader. "Forty years after Barbara Jordan fought to extend the Voting Rights Act, its heart has been ripped out," Clinton said. "I wish we could hear her speak up for the student who has to wait hours for his or her right to vote; for the grandmother who's turned away from the polls because her driver's license expired; for the father who's done his time and paid his debt to society but still hasn't gotten his rights back." Her complaints about the Republican governors: Perry signed a law that courts later ruled intentionally discriminated against minority voters; Walker signed one that made voting more difficult for college students; Christie rejected an expansion of early voting; and Bush oversaw a purge of the state's voter rolls. And she attacked the nation's high court for its 2013 ruling on the Voting Rights Act as well as its 2010 decision on campaign finance laws. "We need a Supreme Court who cares more about the right to vote of a person than the right to buy an election of a corporation," Clinton said. While the speech appears to be good politics, the likelihood of achieving universal voter registration is questionable even to people who support it. Rob Richie, the executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy, a group in favor of universal registration, said Thursday that the "very decentralized" voting systems in the United States make it "feasible" but "difficult." The primary problem: The United States does not have a national ID system like other countries that have universal voter registration. "There is not a simple single approach because we do not have this simple, singular ID that connects us," said Richie, noting that instead of registering to vote nationally, in the United States, you register with your state. One solution to the problem would be to implement a national identification card, said Richie. The problem: Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and others are vehemently against a national ID, calling it a "slippery slope" to surveillance and monitoring citizens. Clinton supports the concept of universal registration, but not a specific method, an aide said. The former first lady has long been a supporter of voting rights: She helped register voters in Texas' Rio Grande Valley during the George McGovern's failed 1972 presidential run and as a senator introduced legislation to make Election Day a national holiday and reduce lines at polling stations. Clinton's top campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, has also taken on the fight by filing lawsuits challenging voter restriction laws in Ohio and Wisconsin. He told The New York Times on Wednesday that "we should all want to ensure that all eligible voters can exercise their right to vote and have their vote counted." Clinton's aides have said that they are aware of the lawsuits and are supportive of their goals. Obama won 93% of African-American voters in 2012 and 95% in 2008, according to exit polls. Some Democrats worry that Clinton needs a similar performance with African-American voters and disenfranchisement is an issue that Democrats hope will activate that base. The first few months of Clinton's campaign have seen a number of events and trips focused on African-American voters. In her first speech as a candidate, Clinton called for mandatory police body cameras across the country and end "era of mass incarceration," an issue that connected with African-American activists concerned about black men dying at the hands of law enforcement. Clinton also focused on a minority-owned business in her first trip to South Carolina, a state with a sizable African-American population that overwhelmingly picked Obama over her in the 2008 primary. *Hillary Clinton's Call to Ease Voting Impacts Growing Latino Vote <http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/hillary-clinton-call-ease-voting-impacts-growing-latino-vote-n370081> // NBC News // Suzanne Gamboa – June 4, 2015 * Although the setting for her voting rights speech was a historically black college, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton's call for making it easier for Americans to vote has implications for the political involvement of Latinos. Every year, at least 50,000 Latino youth turn 18. Pew Research Center has projected that Latinos would account for 40 percent of the growth in America's eligible to vote through 2030 and in that year, some 40 million Latinos would be able to vote. Speaking at Texas Southern University - established in Houston in 1927 as Colored Junior College to educate blacks - Clinton proposed automatic voter registration for young people when they turn 18, unless they opt out. She also proposed a national standard of no fewer than 20 days of early voting in every state. Clinton added that she'd push for Congress to pass a bipartisan bill hammered out in the last Congress but never voted on that would restore Voting Rights Act protections from voting discrimination. "I believe every citizen has the right to vote and I believe we should do everything we can to make it easier for every citizen to vote," Clinton said. Although the Supreme Court decision gutting protections against discrimination in the Voting Rights act is often discussed in the context of black voters, the decision has significantly impacted potential Latino voters, said Maria Teresa Kumar, founding president of Voto Latino, a group that works to get young Latinos to vote. For example, the county that brought the lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act, Shelby County, experienced a 297 percent growth in its Latino population during 2000 to 2010. "Most folks think the Voting Rights Act (challenge) was to disenfranchise blacks," Kumar said. "When you look at the states that started implementing voting restrictions after the decision - Texas, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina - the voting restrictions paralleled the states with the fastest Latino growth." A Texas voter ID law that was rejected by a federal court in Washington, D.C. was deemed racially discriminatory, which Clinton mentioned and used to take a swipe at former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican who announced his presidential bid Thursday. Since President Barack Obama's 2012 election, a number of Republican-controlled state legislatures and governors have passed or signed laws instituting restrictions on voting. Supporters of the restrictions have said they are aimed at curbing fraud, but opponents have tagged them as a response to the coalition of black and brown voters who heavily supported Obama in both elections. While requirements for specific forms of identification at the polls have gotten the most attention, a slew of other laws have been instituted on voting, including reductions in early voting periods, elimination of election day voter registration, cuts in voting hours, elimination of laws allowing young people to register when they get driver's licenses (though they could not vote until they turned 18) and more. "We should be clearing the way for more people to vote, not putting up any roadblock anyone can imagine," said Clinton, who received an award at the event. The award is named after Barbara Jordan, whose legislation in Congress broadened the Voting Rights Act's protections to Latinos and other groups. The Republican Party criticized Clinton's comments saying she was "misleading" and "divisive." "The vast majority of Americans - including minority voters - support commonsense measures to prevent voter fraud," said Orlando Watson, an RNC spokesman. He said Clinton's home state of New York does not allow early voting while dozens of Republican-led states do. "Her exploitation of the issue underscores why voters find her dishonest and untrustworthy," Watson said. But Pratt Wiley, the Democratic Party's national director of voter expansion, said people are kept from registering to vote in other ways. About 60 percent of all Americans are registered to vote when they get their driver's licenses, through what is known as motor voter laws, Wiley said. Groups all over the country are asserting that state departments that oversee driver's licensing are falling down on the job of giving people the opportunity to register to vote by not asking if people want to register, he said. Also, counties are not processing applications when they get them, are slow to do so or are losing applications, Wiley said. "Voter ID is part of a whole suite of restrictive laws and tactics" that Republicans have employed to keep people from voting, Wiley said. "These laws are not passed to make our system safer. They were not passed to save money … But that's what you do if your election strategy is to have as few people vote as possible. That's what the Republican strategy is." He provided quotes from some Republicans that he said demonstrated the strategy: _ "I guess I really feel we shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban - read African-American - voter-turnout machine," Ohio GOP Chairman Doug Preis said. _ "I've had some radical ideas about voting and it's probably not a good time to tell them, but you used to have to be a property owner to vote," Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla. said. _ "If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it," Buncombe County, North Carolina GOP Precinct Chair Don Yelton said on The Daily Show about the state's voter ID law. Daniel Garza, executive director of LIBRE, a conservative group that wants to increase Latino voting, said he has no problem with requiring identification to vote because his group believes in preserving the "integrity" of the vote and the principle of "one man, one vote." "I've never been in a meeting where people have said we need to suppress the vote. I've never heard a conservative in a room saying 'What can we do to keep Latinos from voting? It doesn't occur, it doesn't happen," Garza said. Garza said he did not know enough about the other voting restrictions passed in states, so could not comment on that. But he said his group puts a priority on informing Latinos and wants them to be informed and is not trying to keep people home. "The left has worked hard to suppress our voice. We've been slammed by the left to shut up to not do outreach, to not engage," Garza said. In her speech, Clinton recalled her days working to register voters in the Rio Grande Valley 33 years ago. "Some of the people I met were understandably a little wary of a girl from Chicago who didn't speak a word of Spanish, but they wanted to vote. They were citizens, they knew they had a right to be heard. They wanted to exercise all the rights and responsibilities that citizenship conveys," she said. Clinton is scheduled to speak next week before the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), a bipartisan group. Any increase in getting young people to register and turn out to vote would benefit Latinos because it is a young population. The Supreme Court's decision on the Voting Rights Act removed protection for 7 million Latino voters, said Arturo Vargas, NALEO's executive director. "We would want to have those protections restored," he said. "But we are very interested in a modernized Voting Rights Act that looks to prospectively protect the rights of all voters." *Hillary Clinton lays out sweeping voting rights vision <http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hillary-clinton-early-voting-nationwide> // MSNBC // Zachary Roth – June 4, 2015 * In a major speech on voting rights Thursday, Hillary Clinton laid out a far-reaching vision for expanding access to the ballot box, and denounced Republican efforts to make voting harder. Speaking at Texas Southern University in Houston, Clinton called for every American to be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 unless they choose not to be. She backed a nationwide standard of at least 20 days of early voting. She urged Congress to pass legislation strengthening the Voting Rights Act, which was gravely weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling. And she slammed restrictive voting laws imposed by the GOP in Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin, which she said affect minorities and students in particular. “What is happening is a sweeping effort to dis-empower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.” “We have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what’s really going on in our country,” Clinton said, “because what is happening is a sweeping effort to dis-empower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.” “We should be clearing the way for more people to vote, not putting up every road-block anyone can imagine,” Clinton added. From a political perspective, forthrightly calling out Republican voting restrictions and advocating greater access to voting will likely help Clinton shore up key sections of her base – minorities and students in particular. And it could put the GOP on notice that further efforts to make voting harder may backfire by giving Democrats a tool to motivate their supporters. Clinton, the prohibitive front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, called out by name several of her potential 2016 rivals – Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie – for supporting restrictive voting policies. She said Republicans should stop “fearmongering about a phantom epidemic of voter fraud.” Clinton said relatively little about the most hot-button voting issue, voter ID – an approach that also appears politically savvy. Despite evidence that as many as 10% of eligible voters, disproportionately minorities, don’t have the ID required by strict versions of the law, polls show voter ID is generally popular. Instead, Clinton sought to move the voting rights debate for 2016 toward more advantageous terrain for Democrats and voting rights supporters: expanding access to voting and voter registration, to make it easier to cast a ballot and bring more Americans into the process. Noting that between one quarter and one third of all Americans aren’t registered to vote, Clinton called for an across-the-board modernization of the registration process. The centerpiece: universal automatic voter registration, in which every citizen is automatically registered when they turn 18 unless they affirmatively choose not to be, effectively changing the system’s default status from non-registered to registered. Oregon passed such a law earlier this year, and several other states, including California, are considering the idea. “I think this would have a profound impact on our elections and our democracy,” Clinton said. Clinton also said registration should be updated automatically when a voter moves, and called for making voter rolls more accurate secure. And she said Republican efforts to restrict voter registration, seen in Texas, Florida, and other states, disproportionately affect marginalized communities, and students. Around 50 million eligible voters aren’t registered, according to a recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy, based on Census Bureau data. That’s three times as many as the number who are registered but stay home. Clinton said the nationwide early voting standard of at least 20 days should also include evening and weekend voting, to accommodate those with work or family commitments. “If families coming out of church on Sunday are inspired to go vote, they should be free to do just that,” Clinton said, in a reference to the Souls to the Polls drives that are popular in Africa-American communities, in which people vote en masse after church. Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina — all Republican-controlled states — have cut their early voting periods in recent years, with the latter two states also eliminating same-day voter registration. And a third of all states offer no early voting at all. Democratic efforts to create or expand early voting have been killed, or allowed to languish in committee, by Republicans in at least 15 states, eight of them in the south, according to a tally compiled by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. In addition, Clinton called for Congress to fully implement the recommendations of a bipartisan presidential panel on voting released last year, which included online voter registration and establishing the principle that voters shouldn’t wait more than 30 minutes. And she suggested that laws barring ex-felons from voting should be liberalized, adding her voice to a growing push against felon disenfranchisement laws. And Clinton lamented the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act. “We need a Supreme Court that cares more about protecting the right to vote of a person to vote than the right of a corporation to buy an election,” she said. Asked by msnbc on a call with reporters whether it was realistic to propose legislation, given the record of the Republican-controlled Congress, a senior official with the Clinton campaign pointed to ”encouraging signs” in the states, arguing that such changes could be implemented at the state level with federal support. On voter ID, Clinton’s criticism of Texas’s law was centered on a provision that allows concealed gun permits but not student IDs, suggesting partisan bias. She didn’t offer the kind of broader condemnation of ID laws per se often voiced by voting and civil rights groups. And in criticizing Wisconsin and North Carolina’s slew of voting restrictions, she focused on cuts to early voting rather than those states’ ID laws. Hours before Clinton spoke, a de facto arm of her campaign that provides pro-Clinton information to the media sent out an email documenting the GOP 2016 hopefuls’ records of supporting restrictive voting policies, which it contrasted with Clinton’s expansive approach. Clinton’s speech comes less than a week after her campaign’s top lawyer, Marc Elias, filed suit to challenge Wisconsin’s voting restrictions. Last month, Elias filed a similar lawsuit challenging Ohio’s early voting cuts. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted called the lawsuit “frivolous” in a statement to msnbc and said Elias is wasting Ohioans’ tax dollars. “Hillary Clinton is calling for a national standard for early voting that is less than what Ohio currently offers,” Husted said. “Given this fact, I call on her to tell her attorneys to drop her elections lawsuit against Ohio.” The Clinton campaign has said it’s not officially involved in the lawsuits but supports them. In choosing to give the speech in Texas, Clinton was going into the belly of the beast. In addition to the ID law, which has been struck down as racially discriminatory and is currently being appealed, Texas also has the strictest voter registration rules in the country. And last week, a voting group alleged that the state is systematically failing to process registration applications, msnbcreported. Clinton has long had a strong record on voting issues. As a volunteer for the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign, Clinton worked to register Latino voters in Texas. And in 2005 as a senator, she introduced an expansive voting bill that would have made Election Day a national holiday and set standards for early voting. At Texas Southern, Clinton received the Barbara Jordan Leadership Award, named for the crusading civil rights leader who was the first southern black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. *Hillary Clinton Calls For Automatic, Universal Voter Registration <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/04/hillary-clinton-voting-rights_n_7513858.html?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000016> // HuffPo // Ryan Reilly – June 4, 2015 * Hillary Clinton in a speech on Thursday called for universal, automatic voter registration, saying every citizen in the country should be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18, unless they opt-out. Clinton spoke at Texas Southern University in Houston, where she was receiving the Barbara Jordan Public-Private Leadership Award. She also said Republican-led efforts in several states to further regulate voting and voter registration disproportionately harm both underrepresented communities and young people. Clinton also called for a national standard that would require every state in the country to offer at least 20 days of early in-person voting, including keeping polling stations open on weekends and evenings. During her speech, Clinton also called on Congress to pass legislation to give the federal government power to review changes to state voting laws before they go into effect. A Supreme Court decision in 2013 struck down a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act that required certain states to have their voting changes pre-cleared by the Justice Department or by a panel of federal judges before they were implemented. *The Robby Mook Playbook <http://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/the-robby-mook-playbook#.slr14B2N3> // Buzzfeed // Ruby Cramer – June 4, 2015 * Eight years ago in Nevada, on the first race he managed for Hillary Clinton, Robby Mook provided everyone on the team with a copy of his 175-page training manual. Some staffers‚ the field organizers, received a second item: one standard-issue composition notebook, bound in black-and-white marble, the kind kids use in school. These were “organizing books.” They were considered vital to the field operation, or as Mook called it, “the program.” And like everything pertaining to the program, the organizing books came with a system, and the system with instructions. In this particular case, they could be found in the manual. (Page 110, “Getting Organized.”) Your notebook should be divided into three sections per day: calendar, notes, and action items… Every morning began with a new calendar entry — a simple table, two columns. Down the left-hand margin, organizers wrote out 24 timestamps, one for every half-hour interval in the day. (Twelve hours, minimum.) To the right, they scheduled and recorded their activity. You will track progress to goal using the tools provided by the campaign including maintaining your organizing notebook… For eight months, it went like this. They started in desert summer, 100-degree days. For eight months, they logged every half-hour of every hour of every long and hot day. For eight months, time passed in 30-minute intervals — from the statewide call (which got earlier as the caucuses got closer), to the single break in the daily schedule (lunch, 12:30 to 1 p.m.), to the long slog of the afternoon (the one-on-one meetings with volunteers, the call-time, the house meetings in the evening), to the final, most important task of the day. At 9 p.m., it was time to report. All Hillary Clinton for President-Nevada staff are expected to report nightly by 9:15 p.m…. These reports are vital to ensuring that our strategy is succeeding and an important recognition of the tremendous contribution staff are making… Organizers went first, entering the results of their day into a finicky computer system called the Donkey. Next, the regional directors. Then the field director. It was his job to take their aggregate data and combine it all into one last report. And that went to Mook. Then the day was over. All of this — the ledgers, the reports — was in service of the goals. Mook laid them out in the training manual, his initial plan. To beat Barack Obama in Nevada, the Clinton campaign would need to enlist exactly 2,475 volunteers, train 1,744 precinct captains, and generate 24,751 caucus-goers. And to meet those goals, the team would have to meet their smaller daily goals. The benchmarks underwent constant examination and adjustment. They were continually evaluated, tweaked, and reset, all based on data from the field team’s nightly progress reports. It was a three-part process, played out ceaselessly, day after day — as if the heartbeat of the campaign. On Jan. 19, 2008, that’s how Clinton won. There was some initial confusion about the national delegate count. Because of his victory in a more heavily weighted district, Obama walked away that night with an extra delegate. But Clinton carried the vote. Mook, at 28 years old, delivered the campaign’s first caucus win — and at a time when they needed it badly. He then took his playbook to Ohio, Indiana, Puerto Rico. Most of his team came with him — and they beat Obama there, too. The operative, clean-cut and unassuming, was Clinton’s most winning state director. He came out of 2008 a star. But working for Mook was hard. The days were long and unrelenting. The structure was rigid. Failure to report nightly will have serious consequences and may be grounds for dismissal. They were exhausted all the time. And yet, the next morning, they woke up and did it all over again… They wanted to. Some members of the Nevada field team struggled to explain why in interviews — though most pointed to Mook. It’s not that he wasn’t regimented, they said. He was. All the time. But there was something else that kept them going. And it was essential. In 2010, Mook helped write another manual — this one for Democrats hoping to run a race like Nevada. They called it the “Engagement Campaign.” There, a manager’s job is plainly described as winning: “setting clear, measurable, WINNING campaign goals and creating a culture of excellence and commitment to meet those goals.” But the other required component, the manual says, is “motivation.” Since one of your major resources is people — and since people are the resource that generate your other key resource, money — an Engagement Campaign is all about motivating people… Brian DiMarzio, the deputy field director in Nevada, described it another way. There was one night on the campaign, he said, that didn’t end the way it always did. Clinton happened to be in town, and it was thunderstorming badly. After her event, the staff dragged everything back to headquarters in the pouring rain. The power was out, and they sat there in the darkness, dripping wet. Then, from the silence, they heard clapping. It was Mook. He was going into his routine. It started slow at first. Then other people joined in and the pace picked up and the clapping got louder. It was still dark in the office — and they were still wet. But soon everybody was clapping. They clapped faster and faster, and then they were cheering too, and the sound in the room got so loud and fast it was almost frenzied. Finally they went still… and Mook started to speak. “Everyone was back in that place he gets you in,” said DiMarzio. “He’d talk about the event you just did, and about how it’s neck-and-neck, and it’s so close, and” — he slipped into a Mook impression — “‘do you want to look back at the end of this campaign, if we lose by 1,000 votes and think, I could have maybe pulled in a couple hundred votes myself if I’d just done 15 minutes harder each day?’” It was contagious, DiMarzio said. Former colleagues described similar moments. Sometimes on a staff call — other times in the office. (One referred to it as “the preach.”) It’s about motivating staff, volunteers, and voters… To do that, you must do more than merely talk about the candidate’s biography and policy positions… “He could get you to give everything that you had, you would give it, and then thank him for it later,” said DiMarzio. “When you’re working more than 12 hours every day and it’s 10:30 p.m., you finish and think, I’m gonna strangle Robby. But at the end of the day, you’d be clapping with everyone else — and you believed it.” … To engage people, you must inspire them. “By the end of it, you’re on Team Robby, and you’re not getting off.” A lot of people are on Team Robby. It is a big team, full of committed teammates. By the time Clinton lost 2008, it had a name: the “Mook Mafia.” Its members share one thing. They have witnessed or experienced firsthand a campaign with the 35-year-old operative. In the Mafia group, Mook is equal parts friend, mentor, and figurehead. But for many of the affiliated, Team Robby is as much about its leader as the political philosophy he champions: namely, the power of “organizing.” Mook is now at the helm of Clinton’s second presidential campaign — and that model will be tested like never before, on the biggest stage there is. In each of the early states, he’ll construct what he did eight years ago in Nevada: a true organizing program. It will be the biggest challenge of his young career. Mook has managed plenty of races since 2008. Most recently, he helped Terry McAuliffe, the longtime Democratic fundraiser and Clinton family friend, become governor of Virginia. But now Mook is running a campaign larger than his background in field. And to accomplish what he does best, he’ll have to foster the environment his campaigns require. At the center of the intractable, messy thing known as “Clintonworld,” Mook needs another Nevada: that rare mix of discipline and accountability with enthusiasm and encouragement that makes his field programs possible. It will be a momentous first — for Mook, for his followers, and for a generation of operatives who see themselves as organizers. Never before has a manager constructed a national campaign operation like this, so deliberately or so squarely, under the banner of organizing or in the mold of the so-called “Engagement Campaign.” Hillary Clinton delivers a speech at a high school in Las Vegas in 2007. Isaac Brekken / AP About 10 years ago, Clinton was pitched on an early version of this strategy. It was, she was told, a “new kind of organizing” — and it was going to change politics. This was the summer after the 2004 election, when a collection of campaign aides from that cycle got the chance to attend a private gathering of Democratic senators. It was an audience with some of the party’s top legislators — and a rare opportunity to speak directly with the senator many in the room viewed as the party’s next nominee. So when the moment came, they talked to Clinton about organizing. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign had done something special in New Hampshire, they said. And there were technological advances rapidly changing the face of elections. Imagine the gains Democrats could make, the operatives told Clinton, if they could weave it all together. Dean, of course, didn’t make it past February in the primaries. But for many of the operatives and activists who came up in politics around the time of his brief rise, the former Vermont governor helped redefine the very concept of “field.” Most campaigns focused almost exclusively on building supporter lists, often from scratch. The effort requires identifying voters — supporters, undecideds, backers of the opponent, and various shades in between. The process, called “voter contact” in field-speak, is simple, time-consuming, and necessary. And it happens only one way: door by door, call by call, for hours and hours, every day. Campaigns can use staff and volunteers — but often, they pay a team of canvassers to do the work. In New Hampshire, Dean aides flipped the traditional field operation on its head. They pulled people off voter contact — away from the doors and the phones — and instead trained them as organizers in the tradition of the ’60s and ’70s. Using techniques from the protest and labor movements of that era — one-on-one meetings, house meetings — the Dean campaign set out to build a volunteer army. The idea went was this: Organizers sought to cultivate relationships with voters, enlist them as volunteers, and then develop those volunteers into “volunteer leaders” — who would invest even more time, take on even more responsibility, and recruit even more volunteers. The objective was an organization of devoted supporters, not cogs in the machine or paid labor. And the result, ultimately, was far greater capacity for voter contact. The volunteers, together, could do more at the phones and the doors and on Election Day than the campaign ever could have otherwise. Or at least, that was the bet. Each half-hour spent on organizing — finding, meeting with, or training volunteers — was a half-hour that could be spent simply identifying voters. But the risk was worth pursuing, the Democratic aides told Clinton in 2005. Zack Exley, an adviser on the Dean race who attended the meeting with the senators, said that he and the other operatives urged Clinton to embrace the organizing practices of 2004 — and to push officials at the Democratic National Committee to do the same. “We were saying to her, ‘Senator, you need to take care of that,’” Exley recalled of the exchange. “‘This is a new kind of field organizing that’s possible. If you connect it with the right online stuff, it’ll change everything. You gotta get on this.’” Clinton was a receptive listener — but remained unconvinced. “The organizing takes care of itself,” the senator told the operatives, according to Exley. “Once you have that clear message, then organizing just takes care of itself.” She believed organizing would “rise up around a good message automatically,” Exley said. “Kind of like if setting up a field campaign was like placing a media buy.” Three years later, Clinton lost on message and on organizing. Barack Obama captured Democrats’ eagerness for something different. And in both Iowa and South Carolina, despite pressure from headquarters to keep up with voter-contact metrics, aides were given the room they needed. Many were among the upstarts of the 2004 races, an ascendant new class of operatives-as-organizers. Clinton had some of them, too. Mook won in Nevada — and his mentor, Karen Hicks, the engineer of Dean’s New Hampshire program, oversaw the early states. But aides at headquarters hardly made a full-scale commitment to organizing. Even as Mook went to work building his field program, his operation remained badly under-resourced. “Robby ran a very organized campaign on a shoestring in Nevada,” as Hicks put it. One summer day, as temperatures climbed into triple digits out West, a Clinton aide back in Virginia sent a staff-wide email to say: There’s ice cream cake in the freezer. “We never got any of the resources we needed,” said one former Nevada staffer. “We have 75-year-old ladies we’re sending out to canvass in the 110-degree heat… and somebody in Arlington is saying there’s ice cream cake in the freezer?” This time, Clinton has made organizing the priority. Campaign officials have said that the state directors in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada will not only have the resources they need — but they’ll also get the candidate often, and in settings tailored to benefit their organizing efforts. Internally, they have even replaced the word “field” with “organizing” in staffers’ titles. As Exley put it, with Mook in charge, “she’s not making the same mistake this time.” But there will be challenges. One question is whether the organizing model can actually scale effectively across the board in a presidential campaign. Obama came close in 2008. But before that, there were only isolated cases: John Kerry did it in Iowa in 2004. And Dean, whose campaign helped introduce organizing conceptually to a national electoral audience, really only did it in one state — New Hampshire. Hicks, the operative who pulled it off, said the approach “lends itself to a primary” — and to a presidential candidate capable of exciting volunteer support. But there are two things organizing requires, and they stay the same, she said, “no matter what the campaign.” First is a commitment to disciplined goals. Second is a commitment to the “shared values” — the methods and the principles that guide the campaign. Mook has excelled at both. But it doesn’t happen on its own. His campaigns come with requirements — a particular kind of leadership and a particular kind of anatomy. If there is a prototype of the Mook campaign, it is Nevada in 2008. For the evangelical belief in data — look to the sign that hung on his office wall, a reminder to himself and the staff of the three steps in their ongoing, data-driven process. “Set Goals, Experiment and Learn, Celebrate and Appreciate,” it read. For the sense of “accountability,” fostered by the subculture of field and all its peculiarities — look to his idiosyncratic shorthand. One favorite: “No silos!” (Always said as if with an exclamation point.) The meaning: Keep communication open between departments. Another Mook term was the “plus delta.” (A twist on the “action item.”) This one, derived from the Greek letter denoting change, was a word for something specific that a staffer could improve or incorporate into his or her goals. For the self-discipline — look to his fascination with “personal mastery,” which he preached to some of his staffers. It’s a concept from The Fifth Discipline, a 1990 book by MIT’s Peter Senge. Personal mastery is defined as a lifelong practice, divided into three parts: redefining and deepening your personal vision, focusing your energy, and “seeing reality objectively” as it pertains to others and, most important, to yourself. (The book touches on other Mook tropes: Senge writes that organizations are best built around a “shared vision,” not a leader’s goals or personality. And teams, he says, develop “extraordinary capacities” beyond the sum total abilities of individual members.) And for his precise focus on the thing this was all for, the final goal — look to Dec. 12, 2007, when just one month before the caucuses, Mook got his regionals together to deliver big news. The numbers they’d all been working toward, the ones in the manual, wouldn’t be enough. They needed to double their goal — from 24,751 caucus-goers to 60,000. Most of the team was alarmed. There’s a photo of two field staffers, Stuart Rosenberg and Dan DeBauche, as they listen to Mook in the meeting. (It still makes the rounds every few months.) Rosenberg is dismayed, bent over in his seat, head in hand. “Stu looks like he’s about to have a coronary,” said DeBauche, the regional field director for South Las Vegas, Henderson, and Boulder City. DeBauche is shown leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. He looks fine. “Everyone was freaking out, but internally we already had a plan,” he said. A couple nights before the meeting, Mook and Marlon Marshall, the field director, had pulled DeBauche in to help game out the new numbers. The expression, he said of the photo, reflected the calm of the boss. Mook knew it was possible, so long as they could answer the one question that mattered: “How do we get to 52% with this new reality?” DeBauche, left, with Rosenberg, right, in the meeting with Mook and Marshall in December 2007. Courtesy of Zack Exley That’s the thing, essentially, they were asking, of themselves and of one another, with every meeting, every organizing-book entry, every nightly report. And the answer — it was another question, one written in all caps on printouts, taped to the office wall: “DID YOU REPORT YET?” When organizers fell short, managers consulted the data — or the marble composition books — before advising adjustments. (This is phase two: “Experiment and Learn.”) If organizers were holding a good number of one-on-one meetings with potential volunteers but barely recruiting any, they’d get help on their asks. If they weren’t scheduling enough, they’d get help with time management. “If your numbers weren’t good, we needed to understand why,” said DiMarzio, the deputy field director, of the organizing books. “That means you are going to use every minute of every day as effectively as you could be to elect Hillary Clinton.” Mook made clear that meeting daily goals, even for the most junior members of the organizing team, was essential to 52% in Nevada. Three hours of call-time wasn’t three hours at a desk with a phone and a list of numbers — it was three hours for which you were beholden to your teammates, accountable for winning. “He ensures that everyone understands their part in achieving our shared goal,” said Mara Lee, who served as Mook’s caucus director in Nevada. The work itself was a grind. Field staffers on the campaign recalled daily disappointments: It wasn’t uncommon to invest hours in a volunteer who would then flake on a commitment. Or to spend a day working the phones with little success. (Consider the numbers: Say an organizer makes 150 calls to potential volunteer recruits. From those calls, the organizer might schedule 15 volunteer shifts. Of those shifts, 10 volunteers might show up. And in that small pool, the organizer might find one potential precinct captain. It’s hours of work for the possibility of one precinct captain.) Once, as a “trial by fire” for a new batch of organizers, DeBauche asked they make phone calls for 12 continuous hours, from 9 a.m. “straight through until 9 p.m.,” he said. He still hasn’t forgotten one. Lisa. She made 681 calls that day. “Of course I remember,” he said. “That’s just ridiculous!” Through the hot slog of Nevada, Mook worked just as hard as his team. Eight years later, the old staff still expressed disbelief at his schedule: He did things like arrive at the office at 6 a.m., leave at 3 a.m., and then do it again the next day, they said. Mook wanted the office to see him share in the work. He made it a frequent practice, across departments, to take on jobs here and there, said Lee. “He is notorious for doing the work himself: making fundraising calls, knocking on doors, marching in the parade, separating literature — or whatever task is needed.” Field staffers said Mook would jump into a regional’s office, grab a call list, and run down 10 or 15 names. He wanted to show them, Lee said, that “no one is too senior or too important.” He also wanted to set the bar high for work ethic, another former field staffer said. “He wanted us to see that he was always working so that we would do the same.” And he took every opportunity: At headquarters, a business center in Las Vegas, the campaign occupied two ground-floor suites separated by a narrow courtyard. Mook chose an office with large plate window that provided a view outside — and into the other office suite across the way. Members of the field team recalled a ubiquitous image from their time in Las Vegas: Mook at his desk, always working, always within view. The plain details of the Nevada campaign could sound grim: a strict, grinding affair, all in service of a losing candidate whose primary defeat meant her staffers could never completely share in the Democratic euphoria of election night 2008. And yet, the large share of the field team talks about their time in the desert, living in 30-minute blocks, with warmth and zeal. There is a second necessary piece to Mook’s campaign: It is cultural, and it begins with him. There’s no easy explanation of the tone he sets, how he sets it, and keeps it, even as the demands of the work grow. (“He’s just one of those people,” offered Exley.) Not everyone left Nevada as devoted to Mook as his team of organizers. There were other departments — communications, operations. Mook ran them, but his mind was always on the program. And his core following was there, in the field department. Those who worked as his organizers struggled putting into words exactly what draws people to the young campaign manager. But many are, and have been for years. Mook showed that from the start, in the summer of 2003, when a group from Howard Dean’s campaign spent a sweltering weekend in Durham, N.H., learning how to organize. Hicks, leading the New Hampshire operation, had asked a veteran of the trade to act as their teacher. And so Marshall Ganz, a Harvard professor who worked as an organizer with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the ’60s and ’70s, spent those few un-air-conditioned days going over the basics: the relationship-building, storytelling, the one-on-ones, house meetings, and the nuts and bolts of the quantitative side. That was the part Mook liked — he was, as Ganz observed, “the data guy.” But to colleagues, he was just as skilled with the interpersonal element. “He was the best at people. Everybody coming out of the New Hampshire experience was a mad genius at field. He was a mad genius but didn’t come across that way,” said Exley. “People talk about the way Bill Clinton makes you feel like you’re the only person in the room — Robby has that.” “I think people felt genuinely loved by him. He exuded this love of individuals.” Some former staffers described him as they might a well-loved camp counselor. He was serious about the work, but could be goofy. He had an infectious enthusiasm for campaigns. And he put others at ease, old Nevada colleagues said, because he was comfortable with his own eccentricities — of which there were many. He’d walk into the campaign office, and to greet the staff, let out one long “TEEEEEAAAAAAAAAMM.” There were state-specific variations, too. One former aide recalled him once yelling out to the Ohio office, “APPALAAAACHHIA WOOMMENNN.” (They’d been targeting female voters in the state’s Appalachian communities.) When an organizer submitted his nightly report on time, without first needing a reminder, Mook might offer his praise by spelling out a fake URL — “www.accountability.com!” — as if a lighthearted pat on the back. And then there were the nicknames. Everyone in Nevada had one. (Brian DiMarzio was “Bri Guy.” Dan DeBauche, “De-Boo,” pronounced DEE-boo. And Mara Lee, “Nobody Does It Like Mara Lee,” rhyming, of course, with the Sara Lee jingle.) Creating the right culture, Ganz said, ultimately becomes the “central skill” required of a manager on an organizing-based campaign. “The old school says there’s a boss that shouts at everybody and tells them what to do,” he said. “People are terrorized.” Mook makes his first television appearance as campaign manager last month. CNBC “A campaign needs to be a story, a strategy, and a structure. The narrative is the values and the inspiration,” said Ganz. “The reason you need the details and the numbers is not just so that you can watch people — it’s so that you can learn.” “You have to create a spirit of learning and of support.” There was a larger effect in Nevada. People talk about the experience in personal, almost electrifying terms. Some are eager to explain, to try to tell you how it all felt in the end — the conditions, the exacting work, the shared culture, just being around him. It was something close to whatever they felt that rainy night in Las Vegas, soaking wet and clapping — something close, a few said, to “inspiration.” It was heightening. “It’s a crazy thing to be that inspired by somebody who is just a guy, you know?” said DeBauche. “He gets the most out of people. If you have any self-awareness, you leave that realizing that you accomplished things you didn’t think were possible.” “I knew it was happening as it was happening.” For DiMarzio, Mook was like a coach. “He taught me how to organize my work, how to be disciplined and focused, to do things I didn’t think I could do,” he said. “When someone teaches you, and empowers you, you start to think, I can do this. I can do amazing things. Maybe I can do anything. Robby said I could.” The mechanics of Mook’s campaigns have produced an unusual thing. It has roots in Nevada and has grown in size and shape in the years since. It was, in the months running up to his job on the 2016 campaign, talked about in the media more than any of Mook’s previous accomplishments or qualifications as a manager. And it still is, many of its members say, badly misunderstood. To observers, the Mook Mafia and an email listserv by the same name most resemble a “cult.” The group is less an exclusive club, more a loose confederation of friends and former colleagues, men and women, from various campaigns, numbering around 150 people. The members are tight-knit enough to attend an annual reunion. They don’t disagree it’s cult-like. But they also don’t mean it in a bad way. It’s just a by-product of the Mook experience. They worked the hardest they ever had, felt more capable, more enabled than ever by a state director who didn’t appear concerned with his own standing. Just the team’s. And they bought into that, to the whole thing. They committed to the organization, to the process, the cause — the leader. It wasn’t “just for the candidate” that they all worked like hell, as one field staffer said, “but for Robby and the whole team — because you really were a team.” The Mook Mafia has, in fact, been the most visible manifestation of that team — of the buy-in that produces what appears to be, to the outside, such strange devotion. The email list. The nicknames. (“Deacon Mook,” “Reverend Marshall.”) The hashtags. (“#Mafia4Life.”) The reunion itineraries (with maps, pictures, schedules). The grainy website, a WordPress blog from 2009, featuring job listings and a Mafia logo. (The bubble lettering is, in place of a color, filled with an image of Mook and Marshall.) There’s been a conscious effort to keep the welcome feel of the campaign. But they haven’t always succeeded. In 2008, an invite-only offshoot group called the “Free Radicals” materialized briefly, somewhere out of Indiana. It was too exclusive, a “Mafia elite” for senior staff — and so they shut the thing down. The incident was “small,” a former aide said, “but pretty big to a lot of people who weren’t invited to join in.” The logo on the Mook Mafia’s old website, now defunct. Wordpress It’s all very intense. And Mook is often the focus. Members once printed Mafia tees that read “Est. 2004,” not because the group dates back that far — but because that’s the year Mook got his start in politics. And in 2009, when the WordPress blog went live, a member left a comment to congratulate the group: “glad Mafia finally got on the web. next feat: a facebook page for Robby Mook.” Marlon Marshall, his longtime right hand, emailed the list more often than his counterpart and played a heavier role in facilitating events like the reunions. Mook, meanwhile, is known as a private guy. He is social, but not a partier. He does interviews, but not if he can help it. And he is the first openly gay person to manage a major presidential campaign, but he won’t be boasting about that or much else. He is an unlikely fit for the figurehead role, and that may be why he’s in it. Peter Senge spends a good deal of his management book, The Fifth Discipline, describing the qualities that make an effective leader. (“Personal mastery,” the concept Mook mentioned to other staffers in Nevada, plays a major role.) There are leaders who are “heroes in their own minds,” writes Senge, and they will never successfully lead an organization. True leaders don’t think of their own interests: “Their focus is invariably on what needs to be done, the larger system in which they are operating, and the people with whom they are creating — not on themselves as ‘leaders.’” True leaders have shared vision, and that results in a loyal following. As Senge puts it: “Leaders with vision are cult heroes.” It was November 2014, and it looked like he was going to get the campaign manager job, when early one morning, Mook and his group ended up in the headlines. The first one, an ABC News “EXCLUSIVE,” landed at 6:01 a.m., the same day the Clintons and their friends and former aides kicked off a big reunion weekend in Little Rock, Arkansas: “Read the Secret Emails of the Men Who May Run Hillary Clinton’s Campaign.” The group hadn’t been a secret. Neither was the Mook Mafia email list. But the article, quoting a set of largely innocuous messages, cast the group as controversial, maybe even salacious. (The most “eyebrow-raising” email was a mock press release quoting Bill Clinton: “This is even more exciting than walking through the back of the Bellagio.”) The Mook Mafia list was shut down that day. At some point over the year, the group’s WordPress blog was also removed, its various pages scraped from the Internet Archive. And the last annual reunion, one of the longest Mafia traditions, never happened. Since late 2008, when they all met up in Nevada, members of the group have made time once a year for a weekend away. This was a first. At no point did the story put Mook’s job in danger, but the incident rattled some Clinton advisers. There were theories about the leak: Some thought it came from a former staffer, one with an axe to grind against Mook. Some saw it as a move to boost another operative’s chances at campaign manager. Whatever the reason, some of the emails were said to have been circulating among reporters for months. And when they made it into print, when the email list was deactivated — the Mook Mafia died a little. Since the ABC News story, there has been no activity inside the group. It was the earliest, starkest sign that Mook would have to work hard to create and preserve the very particular environment his campaigns require to succeed — and that building it in the middle of Clinton’s world would be an exceptional challenge. In the four decades since Bill’s first run for office, he and his wife have acquired a tangled and unwieldy network of friends, associates, and confidants. Many worked on, advised, or meddled in unhelpful ways with Hillary Clinton’s first presidential bid. The campaign’s outstanding feature, in the end, was its dysfunction. The infighting tampered with the team’s operation, and spirit, in a way Mook’s system could not abide. Two months into the 2016 race, Mook has put the mechanics in motion. There’s no doubt they’ll focus on organizing in this campaign. Senior campaign officials will tell you that Clinton is headquartered in Brooklyn — but that the lifeblood of the operation is in the early states. They’ll tell you that the state directors are building a volunteer leadership organization, that digital will enhance but not replace the classic model. They’ll tell you this is a campaign to win Iowa, the first of the caucus states. But there’s more to it than that. There’s a difference between what Mook hopes to do and what Ganz, the organizing expert, described as a purely “mechanical” field program. People can “run around doing what they’re told, reading scripts, getting responses.” Or they can participate in an organizing program. But to make it work, Ganz said, “people have got to support it, and protect it, and invest in it, and believe in it.” In the 2010 manual he helped write, “Campaigning to Engage and Win,” creating a “deliberate culture” is ranked as the first task of any manager — ahead of the budget, of fundraising, of building the website, of developing trust with the candidate. Every campaign has a culture — the way staff and volunteers engage with each other and with your opponent and their staff. The challenge is taking the time and creating the space to develop that culture deliberately… Create a culture of accountability, not rules… a culture of excellence… a culture of learning… “Culture” is not a loose term. It is built into the program. Strong campaigns are those where staff and volunteers are committed not just to the candidate, but also to each other in a common purpose to win. Eight years ago in Nevada — in a one-page document about halfway through the training manual — Mook outlined his idea of the culture for the campaign, the “Team Values,” in five categories: Respect, Accountability and Discipline, Communication and Honesty,Leadership and Creativity, and Teamwork and Loyalty. A string of bullet points follows the headings, expanding on the tenets and qualities behind each one. The last in the list reads, “Know we are at our best when we are together.” There will be no shortage of resources for field in this campaign, no question that the organizers will get what they need, no resentment in Iowa or New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina, over ice cream cake in the freezer at headquarters. The question is whether the entire staff — from the volunteers to the campaign chair to the most seniors advisers to Bill Clinton — will support, protect, and invest in what Mook does… Whether he can be the leader he was in Nevada, overseeing a growing staff in Brooklyn, at the top of a billion-dollar Clinton operation… Whether he can walk down the hallway and duck into an office and run down 15 names on a call list… Or head into the bullpen and let out one long, steady “TEEEEEAAAAAAAAAMM.” Can he do any of that this time? Can he give a nickname to someone who’s been in Clinton’s orbit for a decade, or get them talking about plus deltas or personal mastery or setting goals — or ask them to use every minute of every day, ask them to work harder than they ever have? Can he make them followers — can he push them, inspire them, get them clapping in the dark at night? This is what the culture requires. Everyone in the campaign must give themselves over to the rules; the structure; the rigor of adjustment; the constantly changing goals; the trust in common, sincere shared values; the purpose. Everyone must be accountable and must believe. Everyone must buy in. His success will depend on it. *Will Hillary Be Our 3rd Black President? <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/05/will-hillary-be-our-3rd-black-president.html> // The Daily Beast // Michael Tomasky – June 5, 2015* Were Obama’s 95-5 margins an aberration because of his race? So everyone says. But maybe 95-5 (or something close) is the new normal. Here’s one story I predict you’re going to read (should you choose to) about 367 times over the next 17 months: that Hillary Clinton isn’t going to do as well or maybe even nearly as well among African American voters, because, well, it’s obvious. Black people, we’ll be told, won’t be enthusiastic about turning out to vote for her, because what’s she ever done for them. And of course some portion of those 367 stories will feature breathless speculation that the Republican, whoever it is, just might surprise us among black voters, because remember what George W. Bush did in 2004, and the younger generation of African Americans don’t feel the old loyalty to the Democrats their parents did, and, and, and, you can write the rest yourself. It will be a key element in the “Hillary’s in Trouble” meme that’s going to dominate the coverage of her campaign in the mainstream media. But is there any truth to it? Yes, a little. Clinton and John Podesta and her other strategists are acknowledging as much with the big speech she gave yesterday in Texas laying the lumber into Republicans about voting rights and recent GOP voter-suppression schemes. This was her first capital-P Political speech of the campaign, and the fact that she chose to make that speech about this topic and not a broader economic one, or one aimed squarely at women, say, demonstrates clearly enough that Clinton is concerned about getting out the black vote. It was also a partisan speech, of the sort she doesn’t usually give and most presidential candidates don’t typically deliver this early in the process. If it’s true that partisanship turns off centrist voters, and it is to some extent, then the Clinton camp obviously made the calculation that with respect to this issue and the larger goal of black turnout, alienating some white independent voters is a price worth paying. But how much worrying does Clinton really need to do here? The standard media line, as suggested above, will be that Obama skewed things by being black and all, and that if you go back to 2004 and recall that George W. Bush got 16 percent of the black vote in Ohio, that was somehow a more “normal” state of affairs, since there were two white candidates. So let’s look at the numbers. Yes, Obama did skew things. He won the black vote 95-4 in 2008 and 93-6 in 2012. By contrast, John Kerry won the black vote 88-11. If you go back to 1964, that’s exactly what the Democratic nominee averages, 88 percent. The Republican averages 10 percent. Aside from head-to-head numbers, there’s the matter of turnout. Obama also inspired blacks to vote in larger numbers, of course, so they made up 13 percent of the overall electorate in 2008 and 2012, as opposed to 11 percent in 2004. The increase in Ohio was particularly striking. In 2004, blacks constituted 10 percent of total Ohio vote. In 2012, they were 15 percent. When Gerald Ford was getting 15 percent of the black vote in 1976, his party wasn’t carrying out a jihad to make sure as few black people could vote as possible or uncorking champagne when the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act. But here’s the question. Are the Obama-era numbers an aberration, or are they more like a new normal? The near-universal assumption among journalists is aberration. But here’s the case for why they might be something closer to the new normal, which rests on two points. The first is the much-discussed demographic change. The white vote over the last three presidential elections has gone from 77 percent (2004) to 74 percent (2008) to 72 percent (2012). If the Obama era was an aberration, you’d expect that figure to bounce back up. But electoral demographers say quite the opposite. One comprehensive statistical model predicts that the white vote will just keep dropping, down maybe to 70 percent in 2016. The African American vote is expected to at least hold steady at 13. But second and more important, it’s about the Republican Party of then versus now. When Gerald Ford was getting 15 percent of the black vote in 1976, his party wasn’t carrying out a jihad to make sure as few black people could vote as possible or uncorking champagne when the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act. Or, for that matter, trying to make sure as few working poor people as possible could have access to health insurance. When I was young I thought Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party was bad on race, and it was, but the GOP is a far more openly and aggressively anti-black-people party today. Back then, there were still a fair number of moderate Republicans in the House and Senate who voted for civil rights measures. Arguably the greatest legal crusader against segregation of the 1960s and 1970s was a Republican, the venerable John Doar. Heck, Republicans in Congress even reauthorized the VRA when Dubya was president! Those days are long, long gone. Maybe not forever, but certainly for the foreseeable future. Clinton will have to work it. And she is—a proposal for automatic voter registration for every citizen who turns 18 (unless that citizen decides to opt out), which she called for in the speech, is great stuff. But her competition—unless they nominate Rand Paul, which seems increasingly unlikely—is making it easier for her. She probably won’t duplicate Obama’s numbers, but if someone wants to bet you that her black-vote totals will be closer to John Kerry’s than to Obama’s, that’s a bet I’d advise you to take in heartbeat. *Hillary Clinton Cannot Afford to Lose Black Voters <http://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/hillary-clinton-cannot-afford-to-lose-black-voters-20150603> // The National Journal // Emily Schultheis – June 4, 2015 * Barack Obama didn't need to do much—almost anything—to win record turnout from African-American voters. Hillary Clinton will need to pull out all the stops to score just a fraction of that support. An exaggeration? Black political leaders don't think so. "Make no mistake, there will be some drop-off," said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, whose comments echoed those of other influential African-American Democrats. Indeed, black leaders concede it will be nearly impossible for Clinton to replicate the level of turnout Obama's candidacy generated among this core demographic—a group of voters central to the national coalition necessary for a Democrat to win the White House. So she'll need to coax them to the polls by honing specific messages about policies relevant to the black community, something her team says she's preparing to unveil. On Thursday, Clinton will call for expanded early voting in every state, including weekend and evening hours over many days before Election Day—positions supported by Democrats who say working-class voters need greater access to the polls. And she'll specifically criticize laws in North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin that, she argues, reduced rather than expanded access to the polls. These are significant targets for Clinton. Democrats have their eyes on changing demographics in counties in North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere that might begin to shift those states away from Republicans, perhaps as soon as 2016. Black voters, specifically, are growing as a share of the electorate in many states. But while pollsters think Clinton will win them by similar margins to Obama—95 percent of African-Americans voted for the president in 2012—her team should not underestimate the challenge she will have motivating African-Americans to show up when the first black president isn't at the top of the ticket. In 2012, the U.S Census Bureau estimated that just more than 66 percent of eligible black voters showed up at the polls—the highest turnout ever for this demographic group, higher even than turnout among whites. Indeed, Obama's support among black voters "went off the charts," said Brookings demographer William Frey—enough so that minority turnout, especially black turnout, was a deciding factor in the president winning a second term. And in states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, a difference in turnout of even a few percentage points could have big repercussions, Frey added. "You could call it the excitement factor," he said. "At least in these states … where blacks are a huge part of the minority population, she's going to need that." In other words, unlike Obama, Clinton will really have to work for high black turnout. "I can't in all honesty say that she will receive the same level of support as an African-American president," said Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio, "but clearly I do believe that if her message is strong she can get close." Late last week, Clinton appointed LaDavia Drane, the former executive director of the CBC, as her African-American-outreach director. Drane joins a staff at Clinton's Brooklyn headquarters with several other high-profile African Americans among its ranks, including Marlon Marshall, the director of state campaigns; Maya Harris, a top policy adviser; and Karen Finney, a senior spokeswoman. Harris, sister of California Democratic Senate candidate Kamala Harris and formerly of the Center for American Progress, has done research specifically on encouraging greater turnout of minority women, and she argued that they are a reliable voting bloc when they're given strong policy reasons to vote. That's true of black voters overall, she noted, and is part of the campaign's calculus. "One thing we know is that issues matter—that at the end of the day, whether [African-American] voters are going to turn out is going to depend on whether they have been motivated to turn out," Harris told National Journal. "Secretary Clinton is well-situated to do that, both in terms of what she has already demonstrated in her life's work and in the issues she's talking about." That motivation will come partly from policy proposals and partly from focusing on parts of Clinton's biography, the campaign says. Speaking in South Carolina last week, she put deliberate focus on her early career experiences at the Children's Defense Fund and her work for women and children. The campaign is also talking about specific policy positions that are relevant to the black community—health care, a minimum-wage increase, substance-abuse issues, and perhaps most noticeably, criminal-justice reform, which Clinton addressed in a speech at Columbia back in April. Clinton aides are quick to note that it was her first policy speech as a candidate—and with its proposals to provide body cameras for police officers nationwide and end the "era of mass incarceration," it was a direct response to unrest over police activity in Baltimore and other cities. "Her speech in New York was amazing," said Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state legislator who backed Obama in 2008 but is now supporting Clinton. "It's a serious plank in terms of African-American outreach, it's one that can be developed, it's one that can help galvanize not just your typical participants … but also a new generation of voices." The other key piece of necessary strategy is the ground game. Cleaver said African-American leaders are welcoming signs from Clinton that her team will build a robust turnout operation in urban areas, which is something Obama—whose candidacy was naturally a source of excitement to many black voters—didn't need to do. Clinton's 2016 team, with campaign manager Robby Mook at the helm, is placing heavy emphasis on grassroots strategy; it has sizable field teams in the four early states. "The president did not have to do a lot in the urban core, and didn't—he used his resources elsewhere," Cleaver said. "So I think you're going to find elected officials celebrating the fact that there's a great deal of attention being paid to the ground game." That starts in South Carolina, the only one of the four early states with a large African-American population. Clinton's campaign has hired a team of staffers and field organizers—including state director Clay Middleton and state political director Jalisa Washington, both of whom are African Americans with strong ties to the state's politics. A half-dozen field organizers are already in place in the state, focusing on traditionally African-American neighborhoods and gathering places as they start to introduce themselves and the campaign to the state's voters."We are going to where the voters are. So we are in faith-based communities, we are at churches, we are at several social-justice organizations," Middleton said. "We have field organizers that look like the community and understand the community and can relate to those individuals." *Bernie Sanders Is Surging Among White Democrats, Minorities Love Hillary <http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/bernie-sanders-surging-among-white-democrats-others-love-hillary-n369251> // NBC News // Perry Bacon Jr. & Dante Chinni - June 3, 2014 * When Hillary Clinton gives a speech in Houston on Thursday at a historically-black college calling for 20 days of early voting in every state, she will be reemphasizing her long-held commitment to defending the voting rights of minorities. She will also be appealing to some of her strongest supporters: non-white Democrats. In the early stages of the Democratic primary race, one of Clinton's rivals, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, has drawn huge crowds and surged in polls, although he remains well-behind the former secretary of state. Sanders appears to have been benefited from the much-discussed divide between traditional Democrats like Clinton and those who are more liberal on economic issues like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But another divide has emerged that favors Clinton: white versus non-white Democrats. In a new Washington Post/ABC News survey, 56 percent of white Democrats backed Clinton, while 14 percent supported Sanders. Among self-described liberals, Sanders had 17 percent support, compared to 63 percent for Clinton. (Vice President Biden, who has given no indication he will run, polled in double-digits among both groups.) But among non-white Democrats (the survey did not break them down by ethnicity), Clinton had 72 percent support, compared to 5 percent for the Vermont senator. This finding mirrors that of other surveys. As Dante Chinni wrote last week, Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling shows that 68 percent of non-white Democrats say Clinton does not need a primary challenger, while the majority of white Democrats (53 percent) want her to face other candidates. Among white Democrats, 56 percent say Clinton will bring "real change," compared to a whopping 81 percent of non-white Democrats, according to the WSJ/NBC survey. A CNN poll showed Sanders with 14 percent of the white vote, compared to 5 percent among non-white Democrats. A Pew poll in March, before Clinton formally started her campaign, showed that 74 percent of black Democrats said there was a "good chance" they would back the former first lady. Only 54 percent of white Democrats agreed with that statement, with many of them (34 percent) opting with the less enthusiastic "some chance." Sanders disproportionate support among whites and liberals is an advantage early in the primary process because it starts in Iowa and New Hampshire, two overwhelmingly-white states. In Iowa, 93 percent of the Democratic electorate was white in 2008. And caucuses in particular reward the kind of intense supporters who are drawn to a candidate like Sanders. But he will need to vastly expand his base to become a true challenger to Clinton. More than 40% of the people who voted for Obama in 2012 were ethnic minorities. Blacks may be the majority of voters in some Democratic primaries in the South, as they were in 2008. For Clinton, barring the entrance of a candidate who would have more appeal to minority voters (First Lady Michelle Obama would be very strong with blacks and Biden would be more formidable than Sanders), this advantage among non-white voters provides a kind of security blanket for her in the primary. But the former secretary of state is likely to keep courting non-white voters, in part to prepare for the general election, where maintaining Obama's huge advantage among minority voters is a virtual requirement for winning. While Clinton has said little to address economic liberals in her first few weeks as a candidate, she has strongly emphasized her commitment to creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and reforming America's criminal justice system, issues that are strong priorities for black and Hispanic activists. Clinton has a long-standing and ardent opposition to some of the voting provisions adopted recently by GOP governors and state legislatures, such as limits on same-day registration and requirements to present a photo ID to cast a ballot. In one of her first political speeches after leaving the State Department in 2013, Clinton called a North Carolina law, "the greatest hits of voter suppression." She is expected to use similar language on Thursday, as well as calling for Congress to write a new version of the Voting Rights Act, after one of its core planks was struck down two years ago by the Supreme Court. *Is Hillary Ready for More Debates? <http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/run-2016/2015/06/04/is-hillary-clinton-ready-for-more-democratic-party-debates> // US News // David Catanese – June 4, 2015 * Since January, Republicans with dreams of occupying the White House have dutifully traipsed to a dozen gatherings before audiences eager to compare and contrast their options for the presidency. In order, there was the Iowa Freedom Summit, the Freedom Partners Koch brothers summit, the Conservative Political Action Conference, the Iowa Ag Summit, the South Carolina National Security Action Summit, the New Hampshire Freedom Summit, the First In the Nation Republican Leadership Summit, the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition forum, the South Carolina Freedom Summit, the National Review Ideas Summit, the Southern Republican Leadership Conference and Florida Gov. Rick Scott's Economic Growth Summit. And on Saturday, the GOP contenders will make it a baker's dozen by descending on Boone, Iowa, for Sen. Joni Ernst's "Roast and Ride," which is also, essentially, a summit. With motorcycles and barbecue. These summits aren't debates, but they do allow likely primary voters to measure a contender's message, style and substance against his or her competitors. Additionally, they attract gobs of media attention for the slew of contenders seeking a breakout moment. Yet so far, all of this action has taken place on the Republican side. The Democratic field, which grew to four this week, has had no such platforms. Not one. What's more, while Republicans have agreed to hold at least nine and up to a dozen primary debates, the Democratic National Committee is only sanctioning half as many. All of this is resulting in an obvious dialogue disparity between the two parties, one that progressives are now moving to remedy, U.S. News has learned. In a move which could potentially place pressure on front-runner Hillary Clinton to interact with her field of Democratic rivals sooner than expected, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee has made initial inquiries to Democratic campaigns about holding one or more additional debates, beginning as early as this August. The PCCC, an ardent cheerleader of the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party, is advocating what they're dubbing an "open debate" format, in which questions would be formulated by voters rather than media figures. They've even begun a dialogue with conservative groups to organize a similar venture among Republican candidates, and are floating the idea of holding an "open debate" for the general election. The initial test, though, will be whether the liberal group can foster agreement to participate from all camps on the Democratic side. "Debates are absolutely essential if we want a race to the top with them racing with each other to support big ideas," PCCC co-founder Adam Green says. "There's going to be broad support among most progressives for more debates, not less." Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley signaled swift interest in the organization's pitch. "It's a great idea," says Lis Smith, O'Malley's deputy campaign manager. "Gov. O'Malley enjoys taking unscripted questions from voters wherever he goes, and we think it's critical that Democrats have more – not fewer – debates." Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, is circulating a petition and imploring the Democratic Party to begin holding debates this summer, seemingly eager to take part in any format. "More debates will encourage more people to vote, and when more people vote, Democrats win," he wrote in an email to supporters this week. But it's Clinton's participation that's the key to this effort, and so far her campaign has been quiet on the topic. After the DNC announced its plan for six debates, Clinton tweeted that she's "looking forward to a real conversation," without making a firm commitment to the number proposed. Her campaign did not respond to multiple inquiries from U.S. News. "We informed Hillary that this was brewing and let them know we'd like to talk to them about it," Green says. Asked if he thought Clinton would ultimately sign on to his idea, he replied, "We will find out." As a historic party front-runner leading her field by an exorbitant margin in the polls, there may not be much incentive for Clinton to expose herself further. But that's where pressure from interest groups and her rivals comes in. O'Malley, Sanders and newly minted candidate Lincoln Chafee have shied away from attacking Clinton directly so far, but that's prone to change if she's skirting engaging with them. In fact, this could become the first fault line in what's been a quiet primary. And the PCCC isn't the only group that will be looking for facetime with all of the candidates. "We'll look for opportunities, once the field is set in the fall, to have all the candidates engage with and make the case to our 8 million members on key issues they care about," Ilya Sheyman, executive director of MoveOn.org Political Action – one of the nation's leading progressive groups – tells U.S. News in an email. During the 2008 campaign, the last time there was an open-seat race for the presidency, Democrats held more than two dozen debates between their candidates, which eventually narrowed from eight to only Clinton and Barack Obama. Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks in Columbia, S.C., on May 27, 2015. Clinton plans to deliver the first major speech of her Democratic presidential primary campaign in New York City next week in a new phase of her campaign adding some fanfare and policy specifics to a White House bid marked by small events in parts of the country since its launch. The glaring reduction this cycle may best be explained by the perceived lack of competitiveness on the Democratic side of the ledger. While a cast of more than a dozen Republicans are bunched up in national and early primary state polling, Clinton looms as the nominee-in-waiting, amassing a 46-point lead over her Democratic rivals in the latest CNN survey. "I just don't see where there's an opening for anybody," Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says. "There's not a lot of Democratic primary voters looking for an alternative to Hillary Clinton." Many progressives consider that argument irrelevant, though. They see early debates as the only way to pressure Clinton on their pet issues, such as college affordability, financial regulation and expanding Social Security. Plus, Green thinks his unique format could be potentially advantageous to Clinton, because the questions will be driven by substance, not cable newshounds trying to advance headlines on topics like The Clinton Foundation or her email use. "I assume they'd much rather talk about college affordability and Social Security than more petty things like the right-wing scandal of the day," he says. Whereas Republicans worry a protracted debate schedule could damage their party brand and wear down their ultimate nominee, some Democrats see less risk in greater exposure of their national candidates. "Our candidates, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, aren't a bunch of crazy people. I don't worry about them saying something that would hurt the party brand. I think getting our ideas out there in the mainstream would benefit," says Boyd Brown, a Democratic National Committee member from South Carolina and an O'Malley supporter. "The more debate, the better." Now they wait to see if Clinton agrees. *IRS sends Congress unsigned form letter to brush off demands for Clinton Foundation investigation <http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/irs-sends-congress-unsigned-form-letter-to-brush-off-demands-for-clinton-foundation-investigation/article/2565634> // The Washington Examiner // Pete Kasperowicz – June 4, 2015* The IRS responded to a Republican request for an investigation into the Clinton Foundation's tax-exempt status with a one-page form letter that starts with "Dear Sir or Madam." In May, more than 50 House Republicans asked the IRS to review the Clinton Foundation's tax-exempt status, after it became clear that the foundation had failed to report millions of dollars in grants from foreign governments. That letter, led by Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, said a review was "appropriate" given that this money was accepted and not reported while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of state. In response, the IRS sent Blackburn a form letter, which Blackburn received late Wednesday. The letter thanked her for submitting the request, and said the IRS has an "ongoing examination program" to ensure tax-exempt groups comply with tax law. "The information you submitted will be considered in this program," it said. The letter was from Margaret Von Lienen, director of exempt organizations examinations, but she didn't sign it. Blackburn said the perfunctory response is far below the level of customer service members of Congress should be getting. "The IRS response is not acceptable and lacking in the requisite tact that should accompany a congressional inquiry," she said. "It is unbelievably disrespectful that Margaret Von Lienen couldn't even take the few extra seconds needed to sign the letter." "It begs the question – do they even take our request seriously? This is exactly why people don't trust the IRS," she added, noting that 51 of her colleagues took the time to ask a series of questions that deserve an answer. "We'd expect officials at the IRS, who also work for and are paid by the U.S. taxpayer, to take the same care and effort in crafting a response to our inquiry," she said. "The allegations swirling around the Clinton Foundation are very serious and raise issues of great public importance." *Clinton camp wants donors to contribute – by giving staffers a place to crash <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/06/04/clinton-camp-asks-donors-to-provide-place-for-volunteers-to-crash/?vgnextrefresh=1> // Fox News – June 4, 2015 * Apparently facing a space crunch at their new 2016 headquarters in New York City, the Clinton campaign has started asking supporters to pony up their Big Apple pads for the cause. An email sent Wednesday asks them to sign up to "host" Clinton campaign workers arriving to the city. “Do you have a spare room – or just a spare couch! – where a new staffer could stay?” Marlon Marshall, director of State Campaigns and Political Engagement at Hillary for America, asks in the email. Marshall, who did not respond to requests by FoxNews.com for comment, said in his email pitch: “You and I both know that finding a place to live in New York can take longer than an afternoon of apartment hunting.” But he wrote that the campaign needs its new hires to start "right away" at the Brooklyn HQ. He then promised that the to-be bunkmates will most likely “be working long days, so they really just need a place to sleep, and they’ll be so grateful to be staying with someone who shares their beliefs and their goals.” Of course, Marshall is right -- scoring an apartment in crowded New York isn’t easy or cheap. According to the April 2015 Elliman Real Estate report, Manhattan rents have gone up for 14 consecutive months, with the largest increases seen in entry-level apartments. Brooklyn rents rose to a new record in April as well apartments of all sizes in northwest Queens. Whether droves of Clinton supporters are willing to go the extra mile and open their doors to her campaign staff, though, is an open question. The host-a-staffer drive isn’t the first of its kind. In September 2012, President Obama’s campaign supporters were hit with a similar request. The pitch began by asking volunteers to open up their private residences to some “dedicated organizers” working on Obama’s re-election campaign. The email asked: “A group of the most dedicated organizers and volunteers will be coming to Northern Virginia for the remaining weeks of the campaign. They heard we’re looking to run a fierce ground game for President Obama this fall – and they want to be a part of it. But here’s the thing: They need somewhere to stay. And I’m hoping you can lend them a hand with that.” So what’s an apartment or house owner get in return? Tales from the frontlines of a reelection campaign. Obama's pitch said: “I bet they’ll come back at night with some amazing stories about all the people they’ve reached and the energy they’re sparking – stories that you might not get to hear.” *Ohio secretary of state slams Clinton over voter access <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/06/04/ohio-secretary-state-takes-aim-at-clinton-over-voter-access/> // Fox News - June 4, 2015 * Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted blasted Hillary Clinton's call for an overhaul of voter access laws Thursday, saying her proposals were less than what the Buckeye State already offers. Clinton’s top campaign lawyer Marc Elias launched a court challenge to Ohio voting laws last month, claiming restrictions are designed to suppress minority and young voters. In a speech at Texas Southern University in Houston on Thursday, Clinton blasted Republicans for “systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting” and called for universal, automatic voter registration for young people when they turn 18, as well as a new national standard of 20 days of early, in-person voting, including weekend and evening voting. “What part of democracy are they afraid of? I believe every citizen has the right to vote and I believe we should do everything we can to make it easier for every citizen to vote,” Clinton said at the historically black university. However, Husted took issue with Clinton’s remarks, saying her proposals are weaker than what Ohio already has on the books. “With 28 days to vote and the ability to cast a ballot without ever leaving your home, Ohio voters enjoy some of the most generous voting options in the country. For this reason, and many others, our state is a national leader in voter access,” Husted said. The complaint against Ohio, filed by a group of lawyers -- including Elias -- on behalf of The Ohio Organizing Collaborative and three individuals, called for an injunction on a number of measures passed in Ohio in recent years. These included laws that limit the time and locations for early voting, such as abolishing an early voting period known as “Golden Week” in which voters could register and cast an in-person ballot on the same day. The laws, passed by a Republican legislature and signed by GOP Gov. John Kasich, “were designed to and will disproportionately burden specific populations, including African-Americans, Latinos and young people – each of which are, not coincidentally, core Democratic constituencies,” the complaint said. Husted mentioned the legal challenge in his remarks: “Hillary Clinton is calling for a national standard for early voting that is less than what Ohio currently offers. Given this fact, I call on her to tell her attorneys to drop her elections lawsuit against Ohio. Stop wasting Ohioans tax dollars defending your frivolous lawsuits,” Husted said. *Attention, pundits: If the polls confirm Hillary’s slide, it must be true <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/06/05/attention-pundits-if-polls-confirm-hillarys-slide-it-must-be-true/> // Fox News // Howard Kurtz - June 05, 2015* But the evidence was hidden in plain view. For many weeks now, it’s been clear that Hillary has had an awful campaign launch, that she has been submerged by an array of negative stories, and that her message has been underwater as well. But when I’ve brought this up—on the air, in print, at social gatherings—what I’ve heard again and again is: It doesn’t matter. It’s not a problem. This is media-bubble stuff. She’s emerged unscathed. It’s not hurting her in the polls. But now it is. The pundit class is so poll-addicted that if something doesn’t show up in fav/unfav, or right track/wrong track, or cares-about-people-like-you, it didn’t happen. I know that journalists were just as aware as I was that Hillary has been hammered since the day her listening tour began. But most of them couldn’t believe their own eyes because, well, it wasn’t there in the data. Of course, polls can be a lagging indicator, and the barrage had to be chipping away at Clinton’s image—especially among independents. And that’s exactly what happened. In the CNN poll, 57 percent say she’s not honest and trustworthy, compared with 42 percent who say she is. In the Washington Post/ABC poll, 52 percent say she’s not honest and trustworthy, compared with 41 percent who think she is. Now polls bounce around, of course, but those are troubling numbers. They show the combined impact of the private emails scandal, the ethical questions swirling around the Clinton Foundation, the six-figure speaking fees, and one more thing: the constant avoidance of the press. It’s not that people are up in arms about journalists getting stiffed. We aren’t very popular either. But by barely responding to questions about the negative stories, she ceded the turf to all the damaging headlines. Her operation seemed antiseptic and orchestrated. And by having bland conversations with small groups of voters, Hillary made no competing news. She left a vacuum filled by all the financial and email stories. Perhaps that will change after Hillary does her Roosevelt Island kickoff in New York next week. But impressions about trustworthiness are hard to change, especially with a figure as well known as Hillary Clinton. There is some truth to the spin that Hillary was always going to slip in the polls when she descended from the lofty perch of secretary of State to the grubby reality of campaigning. But that doesn’t fully explain her slide on the honesty question in just the last couple of months. Most political journalists are smart. They can see when a presidential candidate is struggling. And they don’t need the latest pollster’s survey to report what they’re seeing and hearing. *This is what Hillary Clinton's campaign is saying about her poll numbers <http://www.businessinsider.com/what-hillarys-campaign-says-about-her-poll-numbers-2015-6> // Business Insider // Hunter Walker – June 4, 2015 * Some negative numbers from a pair of recent polls on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign have made headlines this week and caused some Democrats to express concern. However, Team Clinton has a different read on the numbers. Business Insider had a lengthy conversation about Clinton's poll performance with a campaign spokesperson on Wednesday. The spokesperson, who asked to remain anonymous in order to discuss polling and strategy, pointed out there have been several surveys in addition to the two that generated much of the hand-wringing, which came from CNN/ORC and The Washington Post and ABC News. Both of those polls showed Clinton's popularity is down, with about 50% of voters saying they have an unfavorable impression of her. The other recent polls cited by the campaign spokesperson came from The New York Times and CBS News, the Des Moines Register, and The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. The spokesperson noted that all of the recent polls show Clinton well ahead of her Democratic primary rivals. Additionally, she is leading in head-to-head matchups with all of her presumed and announced Republican opponents. While touting Clinton's lead on her prospective opponents, the spokesperson argued her standing has remained strong in spite of what they described as a period of sustained recent media scrutiny. In the weeks surrounding Clinton's April campaign launch, there has been extensive press coverage on a series of controversies involving her personal finances, family charitable foundation, and her use of a private email address while she was secretary of state. Along with bad headlines, the spokesperson noted these flaps have fueled attacks from Clinton's Republican rivals. Clinton's campaign believes there is one number that shows she has weathered the recent scrutiny. The Des Moines Register poll, which surveyed Democratic voters in Iowa's influential early primary, contained a specific data point that the spokesperson said her team sees as evidence Clinton wasn't badly hurt by the recent controversies and scrutiny. That poll showed at least 70% of Democratic primary voters in Iowa are not bothered by the questions about Clinton's emails or foundation. According to the spokesperson, the campaign believes that proves various controversies that have emerged around Clinton won't factor into the Iowa caucus — and potentially other states' primaries. One of the main negative numbers from the CNN/ORC and Washington Post/ABC poll concerned Clinton's trustworthiness. The CNN poll found 57% of voters do not think Clinton is "honest and trustworthy. According to the Washington Post/ABC poll, 52% of voters don't see Clinton as "honest and trustworthy." The spokesperson pointed out the CNN poll did not ask voters whether they found any of the likely Republican candidates trustworthy. Because of this, they said there was no point of comparison for Clinton's numbers. Further, the spokesperson said Clinton's campaign believes a more important question is asking voters who they trust to address the issues they care about. They described this question as more finely tuned whereas a question about general trustworthiness can be more subjective. Additionally, the spokesperson said this is the key question Clinton is trying to address with her campaign, which is designed to brand her as the candidate who can serve as a champion for Americans who will improve the economy. The Clinton campaign spokesperson pointed out The Washington Post/ABC poll showed Clinton is doing eight points better on the more finely tuned question of whether she "understands the problems of people like you" than the general trustworthiness question. In that poll, they noted she was doing nine points better than one of her top Republican rivals, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), on the more specific trustworthiness question. Still, in spite of these arguments, there's no denying Clinton's favorability numbers have declined in recent polls. The spokesperson suggested this was a natural part of Clinton's transition from being secretary of state to becoming a more apolitical figure, and then reentering the political fray. They said the American public is skeptical of the government and politicians. As a result, they argued anyone who made themselves an official 2016 candidate would have issues with trustworthiness and would not be able to avoid some decline in their numbers. In the end, though they said Clinton's team is satisfied with where she is sitting in relation to her rivals, the spokesperson forecast the number of people who say they trust her to confront the issues they care about will improve. They identified this question as the key one her campaign is designed to answer and predicted it will begin to do so as Clinton unveils more specific policies following her relaunch event next week. *Why you might eventually like Hillary Clinton <http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-hillary-clinton-popularity-20150604-story.html> // The Chicago Tribune // Jonathan Bernstein – June 4, 2015 * This Candidate, you're going to believe, can really connect with the American people. He/she is a new kind of [Democrat/Republican]. This Candidate's qualifications for the presidency aren't just impressive. It's uncanny how well This Candidate's skills and history seem exactly made for the challenges the U.S. faces in 2016. Most politicians just spout cliches, you'll think, but This Candidate talks with, not at, us. Oh, and on a personal level: What about that heartbreaking anecdote about This Candidate's family history? Why didn't This Candidate talk more about the personal stuff earlier? People would have realized then just how special he/she is. And what a refreshing collection of technocrats, oddballs and respected veterans are running This Candidate's campaign! Some things in elections are difficult to predict, but the cycle of enthusiasm for presidential nominees isn't one of them. It's real, foreseeable and practically irresistible. As John Sides said on Wednesday in the Washington Post, "campaigns almost always rally each party's voters behind their nominee." This is in the context of what he predicts will be a temporary (and modest) decline in Hillary Clinton's polling numbers among Democrats. But the ebb-and-flow pattern is even more relevant to the generally dismal polling numbers the Republican candidates have compiled in this presidential cycle. The way we feel about politicians is affected by context. A good example is to look back at John Kerry's favorable/unfavorable ratings over time. Back before 2004, the year of his first presidential campaign, Kerry was mostly unknown, but those who knew him liked him. He has a rating of 30 percent favorable and 9 percent unfavorable. As his campaign for the Democratic nomination began, his unfavorability spiked (with both Republicans and Howard Dean supporters learning who he was probably and not liking him), leaving him with a rating of 31 percent favorable and 32 percent unfavorable. Then he won a bunch of primaries, and his "you'll love this candidate" moment arrived in spring 2004, when he peaked at 61 percent favorable. By the fall, his unfavorable rating had almost doubled from 23 percent to 44 percent, and after losing to President George W. Bush he fell further. By July 2005, he was at 42 percent favorable, 48 percent unfavorable. Kerry's standing recovered once he returned to being a senator — with 48 percent favorability in spring 2013. After he became secretary of state, a (seemingly) less partisan position, he got a big bump up. Last time Gallup checked, in February 2014, he was at 55 percent favorable, 34 percent unfavorable. It isn't that Kerry became more appealing or less appealing. It's that we respond to political context more than we do to individuals. It just feels as if we're reacting to those politicians. I don't mean to sound cynical. The temporary enthusiasm we will feel for our party's future nominee is healthy for democracy. It's healthy, too, when our critical faculties re-engage along with disillusion. It's even fine that most of us skip the critical stage by tuning out politics for a few years. After all, the ability of most citizens to safely ignore politics most of the time is a sign of the stability and success of the polity. So there's no need to worry much about the favorability ratings of presidential candidates right now, especially with regard to the general election. And [This Candidate] shouldn't be worried, either. *OTHER DEMOCRATS NATIONAL COVERAGE* *O’MALLEY* *Ad Backing Martin O’Malley Jabs at Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush <http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/06/04/ad-backing-martin-omalley-jabs-at-hillary-clinton-and-jeb-bush/?nytapp=true> // NYT // Nick Corasaniti – June 4, 2015 * A new TV ad from the “super PAC” supporting former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland is titled “Wall Street’s Public Enemy No. 1.” But it seems the intended target of the ad is Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush. The ad from Generation Forward splices excerpts from Mr. O’Malley’s recent presidential announcement speech, centered around his suggestion that the head of Goldman Sachs would be “just fine with either Bush or a Clinton.” It then repeats his criticism that “the presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth by you between two royal families.” Mr. O’Malley has focused his early campaign message on the anti-Wall Street sentiment popular among the Democratic left. But Generation Forward, while staying at least on the surface in line with that theme, framed the critique around political dynasties as well. The $25,000 ad purchase will focus on the Iowa media markets of Cedar Rapids, Des Moines and Davenport, and will start airing with Thursday’s evening news. The title of the ad comes from a phrase uttered by the Fox Business Network correspondent Charles Gasparino, who said that Mr. O’Malley is “public enemy No. 1 in the halls of Goldman Sachs, in the halls of Black Rock, the big money management firm. All throughout Wall Street right now.” *O’Malley’s claim on unprecedented wage stagnation for 70 percent of Americans since World War II <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/06/04/omalleys-claim-on-unprecedented-wage-stagnation-for-70-percent-of-americans-since-world-war-ii/> // WaPo // Michelle Ye Hee Lee* O’Malley officially entered the Democratic presidential race last weekend, framing himself as a progressive alternative to front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton. His launch speech focused on economic inequality and attacked Wall Street and corporate power. In describing the “growing gap of injustice in our country today,” O’Malley said 70 percent of Americans are “earning the same or less” than they were 12 years ago, for the first time since World War II. Is he correct? The Facts O’Malley’s staff pointed to June 2014 research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and 1947-2013 historical Census data as sources of his figures. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found slow and unequal wage growth in recent decades, and a “near stagnation” of hourly wage growth over the past generation for the majority of American workers. Hourly wage data compiled by the group, from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, show a breakdown by percentile from 1973 to 2013, adjusted to 2013 dollars. Hourly wages for the 10th through 60th percentiles in 2013 were lower, or relatively flat compared to their hourly wages in 2001. The trend begins to change in the 70th percentile, whose 2013 hourly wages ($23.88) were slightly higher than in 2001 ($23.57). The increase in hourly wage becomes progressively bigger in the 80th, 90th and 95th percentiles. It is unclear exactly at which point between the 60th and 70th percentiles that the trend changes. This spreadsheet dates to 1973, and there were two other 12-year periods when hourly wages fell or remained flat for the 70th percentile: 1973 to 1985, and 1979 to 1991. EPI President Lawrence Mishel said the group does not track the information back to World War II. But given that wages grew after the war and through the 1960s, Mishel said he is confident there was not the same wage stagnation in the 1950s or 1960s. The EPI data support O’Malley’s general point that wage stagnation in the last 12 years has been broader than in other periods, including previous recessions, and occurred over two economic recoveries, Mishel said. The 1947-2013 Current Population Survey data from O’Malley’s staff show a breakdown of family income (not earnings) for each fifth percentile, adjusted to 2013 dollars. The table shows that family income at the 80th percentile is lower in 2013 than in 2001, and was the case for 12-year periods going back to 1999. It is important to note that according to experts, Census data prior to 1960s are not as reliable as more recent data. The data support a “story of broad stagnation” for the American economy and American families, although the language in the speech is imprecise, said Gregory Acs, director of the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center. O’Malley says “70 percent of us” in America are earning the same or less. That can be interpreted to apply to 70 percent of individual Americans, or Americans at the 70th percentile. The percentile data do not reflect individual Americans’ wages, and instead shows the distribution of wages. The Current Population Survey does not follow the same people over time. So the people who were in the 70th percentile in 2001 may not be in the same percentile in 2013, even though his statement could mean that 70 percent of the same Americans earn less or the same 12 years later. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics does measure that information. The ongoing study began in 1968, of nationally representative sample of individual Americans. But such longitudinal study would not support O’Malley’s claim, according to Urban Institute’s Stephen Rose. Tracking individual wages this way would show growth in majority of 12-year periods, if only for the life cycle effect: people tend to earn more money up to about 50 years old, then even out until retirement. O’Malley spokeswoman Haley Morris said the point that he is trying to make is about broad and evident trends, not specific families or individuals. The Pinocchio Test O’Malley’s general point has some merit — that wages for the bottom 70 percent of Americans fell in the past 12 years. But neither dataset provided by his staff supports the specifics in his claim, especially that this is the “first time that that has happened this side of World War II.” (PolitiFact rated this comment “Half True.”) The EPI table dates to 1973, and the most recent 12-year period (2001 to 2013) was the third time wages fell between 1973 and 2013 for up to the 70th percentile. Census data from the campaign show the same trend started in the 12-year period beginning in 1999, for family incomes at the 80th percentile. The 12-year decrease began in 1999, and the data do not exactly refer to “70 percent of us” in America nor to earnings. We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios. But the details matter — especially when making such a specific statement in a speech as significant as the announcement of his run for president. So O’Malley earns Three Pinocchios. *Eight years ago, O'Malley argued that Democrats needed to focus on the center, not the left <http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/our-process-picking-president-brutal-its-getting-worse-n369651?cid=sm_twitter_feed_firstread> // NBC News // Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, & Carrie Dann – June 4, 2015* Martin O'Malley is running as a progressive with a gubernatorial record to back it up. The latest example came yesterday, when he vowed he "would never give up" on efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform, per NBC's Leigh Ann Caldwell. But contrast today's Martin O'Malley with this 2007 Washington Post op-ed he co-wrote with Harold Ford Jr. (!!!) entitled: "Our Chance to Capture the Center." In the op-ed, the two said, "Some on the left would love to pretend that groups such as the Democratic Leadership Council, the party's leading centrist voice, aren't needed anymore. But for Democrats, taking the center for granted next year would be a greater mistake than ever before." More: "Contrast the collapse of a conservative president with the success of the last centrist president. Bill Clinton ran on an agenda of sensible ideas that brought America a decade of peace and prosperity. He was the only Democrat to be elected and reelected president in the past seven decades, and he left office more popular than almost any other president in recent memory." Remembering the context of that 2007 op-ed Don't forget the context of that Aug. 2007 op-ed: It came when Hillary Clinton (whom O'Malley had already endorsed) was facing Barack Obama and John Edwards from her left. What's more, that entire message -- Democrats must stick to the center to win the White House -- was pretty much undercut by Obama's successful presidential victories in 2008 and 2012. One of the reasons why some progressives haven't been jumping on the O'Malley bandwagon was the sense that he ALWAYS hasn't been a progressive. And this 2007 op-ed, plus his endorsement of Hillary over Obama in 2008, only adds to that sense, despite his progressive record as Maryland governor. First Read reached out to O'Malley's campaign for comment on the '07 op-ed, but we didn't hear back by our publication time. Lincoln Chafee hits Hillary Clinton on war, trustworthiness // CNN Jeremy Diamond – June 4, 2015 The latest Democratic presidential candidate is running to Hillary Clinton's left on foreign policy, but when it comes to questions about her emails and foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, Lincoln Chafee sounds like a Republican. Chafee pointed to what he described as Clinton's "long record just going back over decades of questionable ethical practices," pointing not just to recent questions over Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, but also to the decades-old Whitewater scandal on Thursday in an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day." "It seems like it just never stops," Chafee said. "Anytime you're running for office...trustworthiness is a main concern of the voters," Chafee said Thursday on CNN's "New Day." Chafee hinted at a recent CNN/ORC poll that showed 57% of Americans believe Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, up from 49% in March. Those numbers came as Republicans have continued to hammer Clinton on her use of private email housed on a personal server during her time as secretary of state and over foreign donations made to the Clinton Foundation during that same time. "Those poll numbers and that perception of untrustworthiness, it just cannot sweep away. It's something very, very important no matter what office you run for," Chafee said. Clinton's other two primary opponents, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, have looked to set up a contrast with Clinton but have been warier of attacking Clinton, notably on the questions swirling around the Clinton Foundation and her email use. But Chafee hasn't hesitated, even before he formally announced his candidacy Wednesday. Chafee is also going after Clinton's record on foreign policy, calling her a "hawk" in the interview Thursday. And he is saying that Clinton's vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002 -- which she has since called a mistake -- should disqualify her from carrying the Democratic Party banner into the 2016 general election. "I would submit to the Democrats across the country we are going to be compromised in trying to win the election in 2016 if our nominee supported the war in Iraq," Chafee said Thursday. "In 2016, this should be a republican war, a Republican mess (in Iraq)." He said he plans to raise questions about how the U.S. got "into this endless tragic quagmire" in Iraq and "who made the mistakes that got us there." Not Chafee, he would argue, as he voted against authorizing military intervention in Iraq when he was a U.S. senator. Chafee said he would present himself as the candidate who wants to "wage peace," not war. He is also running on a less common presidential platform: bringing the metric system to the U.S., which he said would ring "big economic benefits" to the country. *Martin O'Malley Just Took His Populist Pitch Full-Throttle <http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/martin-omalley-populist-pitch-full-throttle/story?id=31520684> // ABC News // Ali Dukakis – June 4, 2015* The Democratic Party’s newest candidate on the block, Martin O’Malley, took his Wall Street offensive full-throttle Wednesday, attempting to capitalize on signs that questions about the Clintons’ personal earnings and the dealings of their foundation could mean a fall from grace for presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. In his first public engagement as a presidential candidate, the former Maryland governor joined the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., for 45 minutes of questions and answers with the chamber president and CEO Javier Palomarez. O’Malley then took a handful of questions from reporters who had been pre-selected on a first-come basis. O’Malley launched his populist appeal right out the gate, answering Palomarez’s first question asking him to describe who he is and why he should be president after a recent CBS News poll found 72 percent of Democrats don’t know him well enough to decide whether they’d support his bid for president. “I am one of six kids born to Tom and Barbara O’Malley who are two Americans born into The Depression,” O’Malley said. He added that his father was only able to afford college thanks to the G.I. Bill, and “the generous country that understood that the stronger we made our citizens, the more we made it possible for more families to send their kids to college, the stronger we would be as a nation.” Citing chatter that O’Malley, 52, has shown reluctance to take on Clinton directly, Palomarez asked, “So the question is, and no pun intended here governor, are you, as they say, ‘Ready for Hillary’?” O’Malley remained steadfast in painting himself as a candidate of the people looking to save the American Dream, which he said “is in deep trouble.” “Other candidates in this race have come to the conclusion that they have that combination of experience and vision to be able to do this and so now the way it works is now that we’ve made up our minds, now the public gets to decide, and that’s the way it’s supposed to work,” he said, striking Clinton. While answering a questions about whether he’d accept contributions from big businesses to his campaign, O’Malley said, “I understand I’ve been named public enemy number one by Goldman-Sachs, so while I’m three days a presidential candidate, I am one day a public enemy of Goldman-Sachs.” O’Malley, also a former mayor of Baltimore, hit populist high notes as he charted the history of America’s workers and wage from its high-functioning peaks during the New Deal, citing a sea change 30 years ago that brought the U.S. economy to the perilous state it’s in today. “We need to realize that our economy is not money, our economy is people, and we need to put wage policies at the center,” he said. He later added, “No state and no city is an island, we need to get our national economy functioning again by getting wages to start rising instead of declining.” Even in response to questions unrelated to America’s economic climate or Clinton herself, O’Malley seemed to work income inequality and the importance of taking down big money giants into many of his answers. When faced with a damning statement from the Maryland ACLU that named his legacy as governor, specifically his “zero tolerance” policing strategy, as a culprit in creating high tension and distrust between the citizens and police in Baltimore, O’Malley cited his record of cutting the crime rate and number of police-involved shootings “to the lowest level I think in modern times,” but ultimately brought his message back to income inequality. “These policing incidents are the spark, but the rage that erupted in Baltimore that night was not only about policing, and not only about race – it was about the fact that our economy is leaving huge portions of our population behind,” he said in reference to the April rioting after the funeral of Freddie Gray, the man who died in police custody. Of course, the populist message isn’t unique to O’Malley. Also playing on the Democratic primary field is Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who solidified his reputation as a fierce critic committed to taking down Wall Street fat cats far before he set his sights on the White House. And with the effort to draft perhaps big business’ greatest watchdog in government, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to run for office officially coming to an end this week, it seems O’Malley may be sensing it’s his time to distinguish himself on one of the issues that matter to the party most – and that happens to be an area of weakness for his main opponent, Clinton. *O'Malley Is Running To The Left, But In 2007 He Urged The Center <http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/omalley-running-left-2007-he-urged-center-n369721> // NBC News // Mark Murray – June 4, 2015 * Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who has tried to seize the progressive mantle in his White House bid, wrote an op-ed he eight years ago where he argued that the center - not the left - should be the Democratic Party's focus. The 2007 Washington Post op-ed he co-authored with former Congressman Harold Ford Jr., then the chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council was entitled "Our Chance to Capture the Center." The two men wrote, "Some on the left would love to pretend that groups such as the Democratic Leadership Council, the party's leading centrist voice, aren't needed anymore. But for Democrats, taking the center for granted next year would be a greater mistake than ever before." The op-ed is a contrast with what O'Malley has been promoting in his presidential bid. At his speech officially announcing his presidential candidacy last Saturday, O'Malley said, "Our economic and political system is upside down and backwards and it is time to turn it around." In his eight years as Maryland governor, O'Malley racked a record with progressive achievements on gay marriage, gun control and immigration. But the context of that 2007 op-ed is striking: It came when Hillary Clinton (whom O'Malley had already endorsed) was facing Barack Obama and John Edwards from her left in the 2008 contest. What's more, that entire message - Democrats must stick to the center to win the White House - was pretty much undercut by Obama's successful presidential victories in 2008 and 2012. O'Malley and Ford also wrote: "Contrast the collapse of a conservative president [George W. Bush] with the success of the last centrist president. Bill Clinton ran on an agenda of sensible ideas that brought America a decade of peace and prosperity. He was the only Democrat to be elected and reelected president in the past seven decades, and he left office more popular than almost any other president in recent memory." Reached for comment about this 2007 op-ed, the O'Malley campaign cited a 2002 Baltimore Sun article with O'Malley calling himself a "progressive liberal." The article, however, also recounts O'Malley's appearance at a Democratic Leadership Council event. "O'Malley said he was recruited to join the DLC soon after he was elected mayor three years ago. He said that although he enjoys debating strategy with the organization, he doesn't subscribe to all the positions of its leadership," the Sun article says. "He said he made clear his differences in discussions that included leaders such as Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and Evan Bayh of Indiana and focused on what the council calls the 'battle over the soul of the Democratic Party.'" *Martin O'Malley going after 'bullies of Wall Street' in campaign, but he has ties to big banks too <http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/martin-o-malley-wall-st-ties-big-banks-article-1.2246630> // NY Daily News // Cameron Joseph – June 4, 2015* Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley has been bashing Hillary Clinton for being too cozy with Wall Street, but he's got some ties of his own to financial big-wigs. O'Malley has been looking to show he's a populist warrior in the Democratic presidential primary, hoping he can get to Clinton's left and capitalize on the anti-Wall Street mood coursing through the progressive base while ripping Clinton for her well-heeled support. "When you have somebody that's the CEO of one of the biggest repeat-offending investment banks in the country telling his employees that he'd be fine with either Bush or Clinton, that should tell all of us something," O’Malley said on ABC Sunday, pointing out that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has said he'd be happy with either Clinton or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the White House. O'Malley also warned the "bullies of Wall Street" during his Saturday campaign announcement that "the presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth by you between two royal families." But while he was the finance chairman of the Democratic Governors Association in 2008, Goldman Sachs gave $100,000 to the organization. O'Malley admitted on Wednesday that he "probably" had asked for big checks from financial giants in the past before refusing to rule out soliciting more from the financial industry for his presidential bid. "I probably have. I was the chair of the Democratic Governors Association. I'm quite sure I've called everybody that they've put up sheets in front of me," he said when asked about past donations during an event in Washington with the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, referring to the fundraising call sheets candidates dial through looking for donations. "I'm not prone to call up the head of Goldman Sachs or those individuals, nor am I inclined to tell those people in the financial industry that they shouldn't be involved in my campaign, in fact I think they should," he continued. "There's a lot of good people who work in our financial industry." Hillary Clinton has been slammed by O'Malley for her ties to Wall Street. That's a different tune than a Wednesday fundraising email from O'Malley's campaign that asked for donations to "help us fight back against Wall Street." According to CNBC, O'Malley wined and dined with Wall Street leaders including Robert Wolf, president and chief operating officer of UBS Investment Bank, and Marvin Rosen, a corporate and securities lawyer, at the swanky Lever House in November 2013. Some of O'Malley's current campaign supporters have ties to big banks as well. George Appleby, who introduced him last weekend in Iowa, is a registered Des Moines lobbyist who counts Wells Fargo and OneMain Financial, formerly the Citigroup Management Corporation, among his clients. O'Malley began his career as a member of the business-friendly Democratic Leadership Council, and his current rhetoric runs counter to a 2007 op-ed he coauthored with the group's then-leader and former Rep. Harold Ford (D-Tenn.), who currently works for Morgan Stanley and at the time was at Merrill Lynch. The two wrote then that Democrats must seek a "centrist agenda" and praised Bill Clinton's presidential campaign for its "sensible ideas." And when O'Malley was governor, he appointed former Legg Mason CEO Richard C. Mike Lewin to the Maryland Transportation Authority and former Deutsche Bank Alex Brown managing director Mark Kaufman to head Maryland's committee on financial regulation. Kaufman helped O'Malley keep banks from foreclosing on families during the financial crisis and was named the 2014 consumer advocate of the year by the Maryland Consumer Rights Association. O'Malley is now calling to break up the big banks and reimpose the Glass-Steagall Act, which would impose tighter restrictions on the banking industry. Professor Adam Sheingate of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said O'Malley "never took a populist anti-Wall Street stance" when he was mayor or governor, though he pointed out that O'Malley successfully pushed through some new financial regulations while he was in office. "He can say he took on the financial services industry, and he did some things that I don't think went very far in terms of curtailing payday loans and require banks to renegotiate mortgages instead of foreclose on people," he said. O'Malley's campaign downplayed his ties to banks. "Governor O'Malley's strong call to finally rein in Wall Street has clearly struck a chord with the powers that be. They can try to leak as many meaningless tidbits as they want, but Governor O'Malley has shown he will stand up to his own party to call for real structural and accountability reforms of Wall Street," O'Malley spokeswoman Haley Morris told the Daily News. "Rather than engaging in this silly back and forth, every candidate should have the courage to say where they stand on this issue." *SANDERS* *Bernie Sanders asks Congress to spend $5.5 billion on 1 million jobs for youths <http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/bernie-sanders-asks-congress-to-spend-55-billion-on-1-million-jobs-for-youths/2015/06/04/0354e9dc-0ae6-11e5-9e39-0db921c47b93_story.html> // WaPo // Aaron Davis – June 4, 2015 * Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday called on Congress to immediately fund a million jobs for disadvantaged young Americans, adding to a pile of high-cost plans that might only become reality if he prevails in his longshot bid for the White House. Sanders’s bill, which he introduced in a D.C. neighborhood with relatively high unemployment and crime rates, would send $5.5 billion to local and state governments to fund job-training programs. Much of the money would go to helping unemployed African Americans. Sanders suggested the investment could pay for itself if it keeps more young black men out of jail. “If current trends continue, 1 in 3 black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. This is an unspeakable tragedy,” Sanders said. “But this crisis is not just a destruction of human life. It is also very, very costly to the taxpayers.” Sanders pegged the country’s annual prison tab at $70 billion. “It makes a lot more sense to me to be investing in jobs, in job training . . . than to be building more and more jails and to be locking more and more people up,” Sanders said. The bill, introduced with longtime Michigan Rep. John Conyers (D), comes as declared Democratic presidential candidates Martin O’Malley and Hillary Rodham Clinton have tried to find the right tone to respond to riots from Ferguson to Baltimore over police tactics that stirred national debate over racial and economic inequality. For Sanders (I-Vt.), the bill’s introduction also highlighted the long and detailed — if highly controversial — policy plans he has put on the record over three decades on Capitol Hill. The Vermont independent has recently renewed legislative efforts for $1 trillion in infrastructure spending and $750 billion in new taxes on overseas profits to make all state college and universities free. Announcing the policy in D.C. also marked a rare campaign-style appearance for a candidate in the nation’s capital. While election-year fundraisers in the city abound and Clinton is expected to appear before a congressional committee investigating her e-mail retention as secretary of state, candidates usually seek backdrops as far from D.C. as possible. On Thursday, Sanders traveled just three miles down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol. Across the Anacostia River in a building atop a rundown strip mall, Sanders noted the unemployment rate, which hovers around 15 percent there and above 20 percent in the city for young black men. The event raised the possibility that Sanders may embrace D.C. in his campaign, where he has readymade access to the city’s large press corps, and his role as a current elected lawmaker is unique among Democratic contenders. It was the third event Sanders has held in D.C. since the spring, including his announcement outside the Capitol, and a town hall meeting before he became a candidate. At that event, he warned of impending disaster in the next federal budget decided by congressional Republicans. As he rushed back to the Capitol for a vote Thursday in a compact car with Vermont tags, Sanders declined to comment on whether President Obama had done enough on youth unemployment, or on the positions of his competitors. Clinton has spoken without specifics about addressing youth unemployment, and O’Malley has talked about using the fourth year of high school for skills training. “This issue is a crisis facing American society. It is an international disgrace,” Sanders said. “It has to be dealt with, and I hope every candidate feels that we have to address this issue.” *Bernie Sanders, The Wide-Eyed Pragmatist <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/04/bernie-sanders-2016_n_7514328.html> // HuffPo // Sam Stein – June 4, 2015 * With days to go before Congress adjourned for August recess last year, the prospects of passing a Veterans Affairs reform bill looked dim. Weeks of turmoil over long waits, cover-ups, and potentially avoidable deaths at VA hospitals had not produced a legislative agreement. Instead, the two lawmakers responsible with crafting one hadn't spoken in days. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who as chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee was half of this duo, hastily organized a press conference to lash out at his House counterpart, Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), for pushing a proposal outside the agreed-upon parameters. Miller's office responded by leaking emails showing that Sanders' staff had refused to join a meeting in retaliation for not being given advance notice. The VA reform effort seemed likely to end up in the same trash heap as all the other attempts to respond to the crises of summer 2014, from illegal border crossings, to lost IRS emails, to the dwindling highway trust fund. And then, it was saved. A phone conversation took place between Sanders and Miller. Their staffs held marathon negotiating sessions. And three days before the calendar turned to August, they finalized a deal. It permitted veterans to get care at private hospitals under certain conditions, spent $5 billion to shore up the VA's own system, allocated additional funds to leasing new facilities and implemented new policies to encourage doctors to work for the VA. The revitalization of VA reform legislation is an unsexy tale. It is the story of two lawmakers who swallowed their ideological pride to make moderate progress. But it also illustrates a defining paradox of one of the more dynamic figures currently in politics. Bernie Sanders, the wide-eyed socialist running for president in 2016, just happened to produce one of the few -- and perhaps the largest -- bipartisan legislative breakthroughs in the last Congress. "I'm a pragmatist," Sanders said in an interview with The Huffington Post. "If I was a writer or paid to go around giving speeches, then that is something I could do. But I was elected by the people of Vermont to be their elected representative in Washington. And that requires me to shape and pass legislation.” Few people think of Sanders this way. His reputation -- reinforced by his firebrand speeches, rumpled suits and Dr. Emmett Brown hair -- is that of an uncompromising ideologue. And he often plays the part. He's been virulently opposed to Trade Promotion Authority for years and has an unbending view of Social Security: it should be expanded, not cut. This past week, he indicated on "Meet The Press" that he'd support a bill reforming the NSA's bulk data collection program, even if he thought it didn't go far enough. Days later, he voted against it. But those who work with him in Congress see Sanders differently. Miller called him a "realist" whose inability to play coy was refreshing. "He is very open and honest as he goes through the process," Miller said. "You know where Bernie is coming from." Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who helped write the Senate version of the VA reform bill, praised Sanders for having the gumption to drop F-bombs one minute and counteroffers the next. "Negotiating with Bernie was not a usual experience, because he is very passionate and he and I are both very strong-willed people and we spend a lot of time banging our fists on the table and having the occasional four-letter word," McCain said. "But at the end of the day, Bernie was result-oriented." Sanders rose through the political system, rather than entering it late. He was a mayor for eight years and a congressman for 16, during which time he figured out that protest votes and purity could only get him so far. He pursued smaller priorities to attach to larger pieces of legislation that he invariably found less than ideal. A Rolling Stone article from 2005 called him "the amendment king of the current House of Representatives," as he'd passed more roll call amendments than any other member. This pick-your-spots approach extends to the current day. Sanders has routinely flouted the Democratic Party's agenda on gun control. He got $12 billion for community health centers included in the final version of Obamacare, which he ultimately voted for despite being an unwavering single-payer advocate. He secured a provision for an audit of the Federal Reserve in the final version of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which he voted for despite worries that it didn't go far enough. The latter, in particular, separates Sanders from certain politicians to whom he's often compared. He helped strike a deal to make the Fed audit a one-time thing, which ultimately led to its passage. But it also ended up splintering Sanders from his collaborator on the issue, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who had wanted the audit to be rolling. "We were very disappointed when Sen. Sanders gutted Audit the Fed in 2010 and are even more disappointed that he has thus far refused to cosponsor Audit the Fed this Congress," said Megan Stiles, communications director for Paul's Campaign for Liberty. Sanders' team doesn't mind such criticisms, in part because there's little risk that anyone outside Paul's universe will brand him a sell-out. Compared to other politicians running for president, Sanders is downright rigid. That he has pursued a few policy victories on the side just makes him a more open-minded member of that rigid class. "After decades of Congressman Paul trying, Bernie was able to actually get a piece of legislation passed," said Michael Briggs, Sanders' long time aide. The tougher criticism comes from those who argue that Sanders' victories aren't nearly as impressive as he wants voters to believe. Despite the praise from McCain and Miller, others ask how the VA was allowed to deteriorate so badly with him chairing the veterans' affairs committee. "I think he is an ideologue and had a very difficult time getting anything done for vets," said Paul Rieckhoff, the founder and executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "Oftentimes he just viewed the criticism of the VA as an attack on the VA … Saying he reached a compromise with John McCain after the whole world saw what happened is not a win." To be sure, problems persist within the VA, even after last summer's passage of the law. Sanders said he wanted more money in the final bill to shore up long waits at VA hospitals. His staff, meanwhile, frames the legislation as reform-minded pragmatism rather than political ingenuity, though they do praise some of its smaller components, such as student loan repayments for VA doctors. "The fact is, he was able to work with McCain across the party aisle and accomplish the most significant piece of legislation in the past year," Briggs said. "Yes, the bar is pretty low. But they got it passed, without much help from Paul Rieckhoff." So far in his run for the White House, Sanders has spent little time talking about this or other elements of his legislative record. This is partly because producing legislation is an inherently unflattering process filled with messy trade-offs. But more to the point, it's not the most galvanizing part of his candidacy. It's better, after all, to warn of the ills of politics than to tout that you, too, know how to play the game. "In given moments in my political career, we had to make compromises to get things done. And of course I’ve done that. And I will continue to do that," Sanders said. "But at the end of the day, the way we bring about real change and the way we are most effective is by rallying the people to stand up and fight back." *Bernie Sanders scrambles to build Iowa team to meet popular demand <http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2015/06/04/bernie-sanders-scrambles-build-iowa-team/28477881/> // The Des Moines Register – June 4, 2015* Campaign aides for liberal warrior Bernie Sanders are scrambling to hire more staff in Iowa and open an Iowa office to keep up with momentum as each of his events attracts a crush of hundreds. "People are out ahead and we're trying to play catch-up organizationally to give these people a vehicle to participate in the campaign," Sanders' campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, told The Des Moines Register on Thursday morning. Sanders is the no-party Vermont U.S. senator who's running for president as a Democrat. His rebel yell calling for a revolution — he wants to fight economic inequality and wrest control of the government from millionaires — has brought Iowans running. Sanders's crowd-attracting abilities are reminiscent of another revolution-rallying, white-haired grandfather-like figure who was also famous for stemwinders on big change for the federal government: Ron Paul, the Republican who finished in third place just 3 points behind the leaders in the 2012 Iowa caucuses. While Paul was a libertarian-leaning conservative who blasted U.S. intervention in the Middle East and the war on drugs, Sanders is liberal independent who supports the decriminalization of marijuana possession and says Muslim countries should be the ones who lead the fight against Islamic terrorists. After Sanders' April 30 formal presidential campaign announcement speech yielded an estimated 5,000 in Vermont, he packed in roughly 700 for a Davenport town hall, 300 in the tiny town of Kensett and several hundred at a recreation center in Iowa City. When all the seats were full, Iowans grabbed exercise balls to sit upon. Sanders is the rival-in-chief to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. He has seen his support triple with Iowa likely caucusgoers in the last four months, according to the new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll. But he's the first choice of only 16 percent of Democratic likely caucusgoers, 41 points down from Clinton, who is currently the first choice for 57 percent. During his speeches in Iowa, Sanders calls for guaranteed sick leave and vacation for workers, more cushion from Social Security for retirees, a reduction in unemployment, a minimum wage increase, free public college, free preschool to help reduce the need for expensive child care, government-run health care that covers the entire population, and other changes. Weaver, Sanders' campaign manager, is in Iowa this week to sign a lease for a Des Moines campaign office and bring on more staff to help Sanders' Iowa director, Pete D'Alessandro, who has been almost single-handedly dealing with swarms of Iowans who want to connect with the campaign. This is the first early state where Sanders has opened a headquarters; New Hampshire is next, Weaver told the Register. "Iowa's a very important state to us. We're going to be competing here very aggressively. We won't have what she has," Weaver said, referring to the big staff and nine offices Clinton already has in Iowa, "but we'll be competing very aggressively." On the same day Sanders drew 700 in Davenport, Ron Paul's son Rand Paul, who is running for president in the 2016 race, drew about 100 in Davenport. Politics watchers on Twitter argued that Sanders was offering "free money" while Paul was promoting hard work. "This is not about handouts — people pay taxes in this country," Weaver responded Thursday. "We're talking about leveling the playing field so every person has the opportunity to succeed to their maximum potential." Sanders is focused on the day-to-day lives of Americans who don't have enough money to pay the mortgage or send their child to college or to afford quality child care, Weaver said. "The Republicans give lip service to this idea of everyone succeeding, but the deck starts so lopsided there's no way for people in many cases, especially for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, to succeed," he said. Sanders intends to return to Iowa soon, he said. *The 1 percent’s “centrist” propaganda war: Why Bernie Sanders & Elizabeth Warren are so threatening to the establishment <http://www.salon.com/2015/06/04/the_1_percents_centrist_propaganda_war_why_bernie_sanders_elizabeth_warren_are_so_threatening_to_the_establishment/> // Salon // Conor Lynch – June 4, 2015 * After last Novembers elections, the GOP had a bit of a revelation. Once they had gained control of the congress, bipartisanship suddenly became the mature and necessary thing to do. The people spoke, after all, and had given the go ahead for Republican’s to push through their ideology, and it was now the responsibility of the Democrats to play along. “Serious adults are in charge here and we intend to make progress,” said Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, with an air of superiority. Yes, this is the same fellow who made the following remark a few years back: “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.” It is also the same party that has fought bitterly against nearly every policy that President Obama has advocated, like health care reform, the economic stimulus, immigration reform, etc. Of course its all nonsense. The GOP is about as interested in bipartisanship as Reagan was interested in a balanced budget. They say one thing, and do something entirely different. They are politicians, this is what they do. But still, this does lead to a different question that has been floating around lately, which is whether the Democratic Party should be embracing the liberal movement, led by people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, or falling back to a more centrist plan that Bill Clinton embraced back in the ’90s. This question seems legitimate, but it actually is not. In reality, it is a question that is subtly being posed by the right wing and Wall Street Democrats, in the hope of slowing down a movement that is quickly becoming a true force in American politics. Former speechwriter for George W. Bush, Peter Wehner, wrote quite an embarrassing piece last week in the New York Times that argued that the Democratic party has indeed gone too far to the left, saying that “Democrats believe that they are riding a tide of presidential inevitability. They may want to rethink that. They are placing a very risky bet that there are virtually no limits to how far left they can go.” I have discussed the article previously in more detail, but the gist of his argument is based on comparing the views of modern Obama with ’90s-era Clinton, as if we have nothing to learn from time and evidence, lamely ignoring changes that have occurred over the past three decades, like the increasing scientific evidence of climate change, the skyrocketing rate of inequality, and the complete disaster that is the war on drugs. These arguments for centrism are just red herrings cloaked as pragmatic advice, designed to distract people from real problems, like the fact the GOP is actually a dying breed, while the rise of the modern liberal movement is overwhelmingly associated with the millennial generation. Indeed, the largest base for conservatism today will be, quite literally, dying off in the near future. The Republican party is the old white party, which is not a very good survival strategy, as white people will cease to be a majority in about three decades, and todays elderly will be dead. This seems to be a much more significant problem than the Democratic party going too far to the left, which is actually a wise strategy for the future, if we are to believe the data suggesting the millennial generation is the most liberal yet. In fact, a few years ago, a Pew poll suggested that millennials (18-29) view socialism more favorably than capitalism, which is quite astonishing for the United States. Elizabeth Warren and the rising liberal movement have created a real fear within the Republican party and Wall Street. Certain right wing pundits paint Warren as nothing less than a radical socialist, aiming to overthrow the capitalist system. This is fear. Fear that the new liberal movement is not just a fad, and that the future is moving leftward. The argument for centrism within the Democratic party is a distraction, but also a tactic. After all, what does centrism really mean in Washington? It means corporatism. It means the neoliberal alliance between Wall Street and D.C. that we have seen wreak havoc over the past 30 years. It means the Clinton administration signing financial deregulation into law, and refusing to regulate derivatives. It means the promotion of corporatist trade deals like NAFTA and the TPP. Centrism also means “easily bought,” and funded by the 1 percent. Take the “centrist” think tank, “Third Way,” which was founded by former Clinton staffers. This organization has aggressively gone after Elizabeth Warren and the liberal movement, saying in a Wall Street Journal editorial: “If you talk to leading progressives these days, you’ll be sure to hear this message: The Democratic Party should embrace the economic populism of New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Such economic populism, they argue, should be the guiding star for Democrats heading into 2016. Nothing would be more disastrous for Democrats.” Its the same argument that Wehner made, this time from so-called (Clinton) Democrats. It may seem like they are stuck in the nineties, but it is more likely a result of their funding and history. Third Way’s board of trustees is made up almost entirely of investment bankers and CEOs, and it is funded by the banking community. So, is this group simply a DINO (Democrat in name only) organization? That wouldn’t be entirely fair, as the Democratic party contains different factions, and neoliberal Democrats still exist — just look at Andrew Cuomo (and even Obama in some cases). The fact is, Wall Street is afraid of modern liberalism, and is working hard to kill it from within with the same arguments that were made in the eighties and nineties. The only difference is, today, we know just how bad neoliberalism has been for the majority of people, and how good it has been for folks on Wall Street. The financial crisis and the current inequality we face discredits the neoliberal ideology of the past thirty years. Centrism tends to be promoted as pragmatism, and the only way to win national elections. This may have been true in 1992, but today it is false. Centrism is a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a strategy for corporatism, to stop progress with a slogan of practicality. But giving in to the crony-capitalist status quo is not a practical move for the middle class, just the one-percent. *CHAFEE* *Lincoln Chafee and the last mile <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/lincoln-chafee-metric-system-american-politics-118650.html> // Politico // Adam Lerner – June 4, 2015 * Announcing his quirky run for the White House Wednesday, Lincoln Chafee may have inadvertently touched one of the more obscure third rails of American politics: conversion to the metric system, or “metrication” to those in the know. Touting his time as a farrier in kilometer-loving Canada, the Rhode Island Republican-cum-Independent-cum-Democrat called metrication a “bold embrace of internationalism” that, in due course, “will help our economy.” Political journalists chortled, and for good reason: More than two centuries of history show that Americans really can’t be persuaded. “Nobody is really interested in giving up their measurement systems,” said Russ Rowlett, a retired professor of mathematics at UNC Chapel Hill who authored “How Many? A Dictionary of Units of Measurement.” In every country minus the U.S., Liberia, and Burma, the metric system has been applied via some sort of top-down coercion, said Rowlett. “We have such a large economy, we don’t feel that same pressure.” “Ordinary people don’t,” he clarified. “Industry does.” The measurement question has surfaced and resurfaced in American politics since the country’s founding. Even the Articles of Confederation, the proto-constitution that was famously discarded because it did not provide the federal government with enough authority, allowed the central government the “sole and exclusive right and power” to fix the standard of weights and measures. The U.S. Constitution similarly then gave this power to the Congress in the same clause that allowed it the exclusive right to coin money and regulate its value. In 1790, then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson issued a proposal to Congress to establish a base-ten system of measurement, less than a decade before the French First Republic adopted the metric system in 1799. Jefferson’s system included ten inches in every foot, 10,000 feet in every mile and a whole host of new measurements like a ten-foot-long “decade,” a 100-foot-long “rood” and a 1,000-foot-long “furlong.” In true congressional fashion, the legislature balked and did nothing, partly because subsequent bills relating to land acquisition depended upon the old mile measurement. Americans largely retained the system of English measurements established by the British parliament in prior centuries, including the inch, foot, mile, pound and gallon. ARLINGTON, VA - JUNE 03: Democratic presidential candidate and former Sen. Lincoln Chafee (D-RI) announces his candidacy for the U.S. presidency at George Mason University June 3, 2015 in Arlington, Virginia. Chafee joins Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley in seeking the Democratic nomination. By the mid-1800s the metric system began to gain steam around the rest of the world, largely because of colonialism and the support of engineers, scientists and businesses who favored its easy conversions and internationalism. In 1875, 17 countries — including the United States — met in Paris and signed a treaty establishing the International Bureau of Weights and Measures that internationalized the metric system. The treaty is largely credited with giving the system the final push it needed to achieve near-universality. But the U.S. and UK continued to resist. By the 1970s, as globalizing forces picked up, both countries saw renewed pushes for metrication. The UK slowly but surely adopted the metric system as businesses switched over to meters and grams to secure access to European markets. And in 1975, the U.S. Congress likewise passed the Metric Conversion Act, which called for making the metric system the “preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce.” “To say that this legislation is historic is an understatement,” President Ford said in a statement upon signing the bill. Still, Ford and the Congress were reluctant to push metrication too hard. He added that “the conversion contemplated in this legislation is to be a completely voluntary one. The Government’s function … will be to coordinate and synchronize increasing use of metric measurement.” Dr. Donald Hillger, president of the U.S. Metric Association, which advocates complete metric adoption, believes this word, “voluntary,” was the nail in metrication’s coffin. “If that word were not in there and if they had decided to fully support the issue” by giving the legislation “teeth,” he said, “they could have [pushed conversion].” Ford’s successor, Jimmy Carter, supported the 1975 legislation, but also did not push to make metric conversion mandatory. The bill established the U.S. Metric Board, and during Carter’s presidency the group began sponsoring public service announcement to promote the metric system. One of these was a series of television shorts that aired alongside Saturday morning cartoons in 1978 called “The Metric Marvels.” Produced by the makers of “Schoolhouse Rock!” the series featured superheroes like Meter Man, Liter Leader, Super Celsius, and Wonder Gram. “Metric superheroes, fighting to stamp out metric ignorance and introduce the system that rules the world!” the theme song declared. But the system never stuck. President Ronald Reagan began his tenure by overturning a law to promote teaching of the metric system in American schools, and in 1981 and in 1982 Reagan disbanded the U.S. Metric Board, citing his “program to reduce government spending and streamline its operations” in a letter to the board’s chairman. Reagan wrote that the secretary of commerce would continue to support “voluntary metrication” and that he would continue to support the 1975 law, but federal efforts to convert the public largely languished. In 1988, Reagan did sign a bill requiring the federal government to go metric by the end of 1992, however, and in 1994 President Clinton signed a law requiring metric units on a variety of consumer products. But the public stubbornly refused to follow the federal push, and Congress declined to make adoption mandatory. A 2010 survey by Consumer World found that, more than 30 years after the law’s passage, up to 80 percent of those tested could not identify how much sugar was in a product when it was expressed in grams rather than in common household measurements like teaspoons. Part of Americans’ reluctance can be attributed to the fact that, even though supporters assure that metrication will ease barriers to trade and boost the economy in the long-run, in the short run converting all of the signs — not to mention hearts and minds — would be costly. For instance, in 1995 the GAO estimated the total cost of changing all of the nation’s highway signs to kilometers to be between around $520 million and $650 million in today’s dollars. Considering the clumsiness such a conversion would impose on older generations accustomed to the old system, the costs could skyrocket. From supermarket goods to construction sites to pants sizes, shifting to metric would require substantial changes. So the United States has stayed a “soft metric” country, with both Democrats and Republicans content to let private industries decide which measurements they use. In response to a 2013 “We the People” petition, Under Secretary of Commerce Patrick Gallagher wrote that, since the 1970s, the U.S. has settled on promoting metric within the government while privately pushing a dual system that allows private citizens “the power to make this choice.” Even though the issue has lost steam with the U.S., plodding along industry by industry, immigrant family by immigrant family, Chafee apparently believes he can revive it. At the very least, support for metrication provides a point of contrast with his Democratic rivals. The Clinton, Sanders, and O’Malley campaigns all did not respond to a request for comment on the issue (though O’Malley reportedly told the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson that he’s “not passionate about the metric system” when cornered on an Amtrak train). But Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has already incorporated it into an attack. In an email to POLITICO, his spokesman Michael Reed said Chafee is a “Typical Democrat — wants to make America more European. Governor Jindal would rather make the world more American.” Dr. Hillger refused to assess the Rhode Island Democrat’s chances against front-runner Hillary Clinton, though he is pessimistic about Chafee’s ability to drive debate. “I don’t think [metrication] will be the issue that will challenge her,” he said. But he’s optimistic that, eventually, Americans will have to abandon their beloved inches for centimeters, and miles for kilometers. “It’s inevitable.” *OTHER* *Democrats Get a Primary <http://time.com/3908652/hillary-clinton-primary-challengers/> // TIME // Joe Klein – June 4, 2015* The zinger captured the current 2016 campaign zeitgeist on several levels. There is a yeasty popu-lism rising in both parties. Among the Democrats, it’s anti-Big Business; for the Republicans, it is anti-Big Government (and labor). There is also a rising discomfort with the aforementioned royalist candidates, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Bush’s relatively moderate conservatism separates him from the pack temperamentally, but he is hardly the front runner at this point. No one is. Clinton is very much the presumptive Democrat, but not a very dynamic or compelling one. Indeed, the entry of O’Malley and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders into the race during the last week of May produced something of an energy jolt among Democrats, who have a preternatural need for a horse race, even when the horses are lame, and a long-festering desire for an ideological fight between left and center. It should come as no surprise that Sanders seems to be catching fire among the leftish faithful, drawing big crowds and scoring double digits in an Iowa poll. He is a recognizable Democratic type–the prophet scorned, gushing rumpled authenticity. Usually, this phenomenon occurs when Democrats find themselves enmeshed in a foolish war: Eugene McCarthy in 1968, George McGovern in 1972, Howard Dean in 2004. Sanders’ distinction is that he is an economic Jeremiah, pitchforking the depredations of Wall Street. This is fertile turf. It is a fight that has been coming since moderate Democrats began courting Wall Street donors in the mid-1980s. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s wanton sloshing about in the plutocratic pigpen of their foundation makes it a particularly fat target this time. Sanders flies commercial. But the populist case against the Clinton-Obama economic policies has real substance as well. It is no coincidence that the fundamental distortion of the American economy, with the deck stacked to benefit the financial sector, also dates back 30 years, when Democratic Congresses began to slip pro-bank provisions into the tax code, reaching a peak during the Clinton Administration with the demolition of the wall between commercial and investment banking and the flagrant refusal to regulate exotic derivative financial instruments—which, in turn, led to the Great Recession. Both Sanders and O’Malley would take specific action against the Wall Street giants. They would break up the too-big-to-fail banks; they would reinstate the Glass-Steagall rules that used to separate legitimate banking from casino gambling. And if O’Malley got off the best zinger of the early campaign, Sanders has the best policy proposal: a tax on Wall Street transactions, tiny enough to impact only the computer-driven churning that makes the markets more volatile than they should be. He would spend some of the proceeds on a $1 trillion infrastructure-improvement program that would create, Sanders estimates, 13 million jobs—another good idea. This should be a bright line in the primary, the most important substantive issue facing Hillary Clinton: How would she reform the tax and regulatory codes that unduly favor the financial sector? I went to an O’Malley house party in Gilford, N.H., on the last day of May and met Johan Anderson, 68, who had been a successful sales executive but is now working two minimum-wage jobs to augment his Social Security. He had been a Republican and a town official in Stamford, Conn., “back in the days when you could be a Republican and a human being”—that is, before the party’s rightward lurch. Now he was engaged in the ancient New Hampshire pursuit of candidate shopping. “I really respect Hillary Clinton,” he said. “She’s obviously very smart and experienced. But I wonder about her leadership abilities. She made a mess of her health care plan [in 1994], and she didn’t organize her last campaign very well [in 2008]. My heart is with Bernie Sanders. I’d love to vote for him, but can he win? O’Malley is young [52] and brings a real freshness and energy to the race.” I’m not sure how many people like Anderson are out there: perhaps enough to make Clinton a better candidate, perhaps enough to give her a scare. But there will definitely be a Democratic primary. *Democrats' Supreme Court Litmus Test: Citizens United <http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-06-04/democrats-supreme-court-litmus-test-citizens-united> // Bloomberg News // Sahil Kapur – June 4, 2015 * In past presidential elections, Supreme Court litmus tests were a Republican issue, with candidates vying for the evangelical vote by attacking the Roe v. Waderuling that legalized abortion nationwide. This year, Democrats have a litmus test of their own: Three of the four declared presidential candidates are suggesting they'll seek Supreme Court nominees who want to overturn Citizens United. Martin O'Malley on Wednesday became the latest contender to jump aboard the bandwagon. In an interview with Bloomberg, he made it clear he will try to engineer a reversal of the landmark 2010 ruling, widely blamed for a new wave of big money in politics. The 5-4 ruling, which pitted justices appointed by Republican presidents against those appointed by Democrats, paved the way for super PACs and unlimited spending by corporations and unions to influence elections. In the 2014 election cycle, super PACs -- entities that can raise and spend political money in unlimited amounts -- raised close to $1 billion to influence Senate and House elections, according to the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation. "I would appoint judges who don't think corporations are people. We need to overturn Citizens United," the former Maryland governor said after a Washington event hosted by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "And we need to recognize that big money is having a corrupting influence on our politics." Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, long a vociferous opponent of the 2010 ruling, kicked off the debate May 10 in an interview on CBS. "If elected president," he said, "I will have a litmus test in terms of my nominee to be a Supreme Court justice and that nominee will say that they are going to overturn this disastrous Supreme Court decision." One week later, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton told activists in Mason City, Iowa that the Citizens United ruling was "a grave error" by the Court. "I will do everything I can to appoint Supreme Court justices who protect the right to vote and do not protect the right of billionaires to buy elections," she said. A spokesperson for Lincoln Chafee, the former Rhode Island governor and U.S. senator who launched his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this week, declined Thursday to weigh in. A nationwide poll released this week by the New York Times found that a whopping 84 percent of Americans think money has "too much" influence in political campaigns. The survey found that 78 percent said political spending should be limited, while 19 percent said it should remain unlimited. The Citizens United decision, prompted by a legal challenge to a documentary that took aim at Hillary Clinton during her 2008 presidential bid, has long drawn the ire of progressive activists and campaign finance reformers, upset over the seven-figure political donations it has enabled. It has sparked calls for a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision, an idea that has lacks support from congressional Republicans. In Citizens United v. FEC, the justices overturned a provision of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act and struck down limits on political spending by corporations, unions and nonprofit groups as a violation of the First Amendment. Those groups can now give unlimited amounts to influence an election as long as they don't coordinate with the candidates themselves. In practice, however, most of the big-spending committees are closely linked to candidate committees. The court followed up in the 2014 McCutcheon v. FEC ruling by invalidating limits on the aggregate amount that people can give to candidates and political committees in a two-year election cycle. Caroline Fredrickson, the president of the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal advocacy group, said the backlash has echoes of how conservatives responded to the 1973 Roe ruling, which remains deeply divisive today. "I think it's happening," she said. "Whether it'll reach the level of fervency of Roe v. Wade, it's hard to say. But it certainly seems to be going in that direction." *GOP* *As Republican Debates Near, Candidates Vie to Make Cut <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/us/republican-presidential-candidates-fight-to-make-cnn-fox-debate-cut.html?smid=tw-share> // NYT // Maggie Haberman & Jeremy Peters – June 4, 2015 * Carly Fiorina is a woman on the clock, a nine-week clock to be exact. That is when the first Republican debate of the 2016 election will happen. And if she does not get her poll numbers up, she will not make the cut. “I need your help to get on that debate stage,” Ms. Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, wrote in an urgent plea to supporters the other day. “I need to grow my team of supporters.” Rick Santorum, the former senator and two-time presidential candidate, also might find himself excluded. “If you’re a United States senator, if you’re a governor, if you’re a woman who ran a Fortune 500 company,” he vented to reporters recently, “then you should have a right to be on stage.” The announcements by Fox News and CNN that they will limit the first two debates to candidates who rank in the top 10 in national polls has given the Republican Party a “Hunger Games”-type atmosphere. Facing the possibility of being excluded from the first nationally televised face-offs of the 2016 election – and deprived of the priceless media attention the events can generate – some of the lesser-known candidates are under tremendous pressure to raise their visibility. They are imploring supporters to give more money. They are increasing their national television presence. And they are not waiting for the spotlight to find them. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who barely cracks the top 10 in many polls, has spoken to Fox News at length twice in recent weeks, stressing conservative positions. Ms. Fiorina invited reporters and cameras last week to follow her to the same hotel in Columbia, S.C., where Hillary Rodham Clinton was speaking. She then stood outside and taunted Mrs. Clinton, landing copious headlines. For Republicans in states like Iowa and New Hampshire that hold the first primaries and caucuses, the trend is troubling. They fear candidates are too focused on getting on television to enhance their poll standing, when they should be out meeting voters in town halls and greasy spoons. Making matters worse, they say, is that the networks are using only national polls to determine who makes the top 10 – not state-based polls — so a candidate who builds momentum in Iowa could still be left off the stage. There are already signs that the early-state rituals are being neglected, with a number of candidates waving off traditions like the Iowa straw poll in August. Jeb Bush and SenatorMarco Rubio of Florida have said they will skip it, and representatives of Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin last week declined to send anyone to an informational meeting on the poll. Making the cut for the first debates is now “on everybody’s mind,” said Steve DeMaura, executive director of Carly for America, thesuper PAC working for Ms. Fiorina. “If you’re currently at 5 percent or below, you have to know that everybody is trying to get in,” he said. Some Republicans said the traditional role of taking the measure of candidates has effectively been outsourced to the networks. “The centralization of the presidential primary process is very concerning, especially when you have the very real prospect of network executives, not actual voters in an early primary or caucus states winnowing the field,” said Matt Strawn, a former chairman of the Iowa Republican Party. “The strength of early states like Iowa and New Hampshire,” he added, “is the fact that a candidate, no matter their station or title in politics, is expected to look voters in the eye.” Those at risk of being left out could include politicians who in any other election year would be competitive. There is Lindsey Graham, a popular senator from South Carolina; two former governors of big states, Rick Perry of Texas and George Pataki of New York; and three sitting governors: Mr. Christie, Mr. Jindal and John R. Kasich of Ohio. In Mr. Kasich’s case, exclusion would come with an added indignity: the first debate will take place in his own state. The scramble underway shows the degree to which the Republican Party is still struggling to exert control over the debate process after the last election cycle, in which a series of debates — 20 in all — seemed to exasperate party leaders and, occasionally, candidates too. The Republican National Committee has sanctioned only nine debates this time, with the possibility for three more. But there are 15 declared or likely candidates, and each will be looking for ways to stand out in such a crowded pack. Then there is the gnawing question of what to do with Donald Trump. Mr. Trump ranks high in national polls because of his name recognition. Many Republicans worry that the inclusion of Mr. Trump, who few believe will follow through with an authentic presidential campaign, will squeeze out someone like Mr. Kasich or Mr. Jindal. Despite the frustrations of state officials and back-of-the-pack candidates, the party and the networks say there is no easy way to avoid leaving some people out. “Nobody knows how to do this. Nobody,” said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House who saw his campaign for president in 2012 take off after he delivered two aggressive debate performances in South Carolina. Chief among the concerns among the campaigns is the networks’ methodology for selecting the top 10. Early polls have shown the contenders closely bunched together, with the differences in their ranking still statistically insignificant. Mr. Santorum’s top political adviser, John Brabender, likened the criteria set by Fox News and CNN to pulling numbers out of a hat. And Mr. Pataki’s spokesman, David Catalfamo, said the criteria would have barred “Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and probably Abraham Lincoln” from the stage. Network executives, who said they could find no precedent for a televised debate including more than 10 people, believe they have been as fair as possible under unusual circumstances. And they point out that they have long used national polls to narrow who gets on the debate stage. CNN has set up a two-tiered debate for Sept. 16, with the lower-polling candidates participating in a segment that will air before the main event. Fox said it would l offer airtime on the same day of its Aug. 6 debate to candidates who do not clear the top 10. But these secondary debates – likely to be taken as consolation prizes for being denied a seat at the adults’ table – may not mollify everyone. And that has raised questions about what candidates might do to get a piece of the spotlight. “People got to do what they’ve got to do to draw attention,” said Armstrong Williams, a friend and adviser to Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who is a Republican candidate, adding: “I can see them just totally disrupting the rules and the process.” Mr. Gingrich offered one possibility. “So you don’t want me to be on the stage? Fine. So I’m going to be the guy who comments about dumb answers online,” he said. “You could imagine the social media around the debate being bigger than the actual debate.” *BUSH* *How Jeb Bush made a mockery of ‘exploring’ a presidential campaign <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/06/04/how-jeb-bush-made-a-mockery-of-exploring-a-presidential-campaign/> // WaPo // Chris Cillizza – June 4, 2015 * Finally, after months and months of hand-wringing, fingernail-chewing and nervous pacing, the world will know June 15 whether Jeb Bush is going to run for president. WHAT WILL HE SAY!? He will say, of course, that he is running for president.* This is the same thing he has been doing, actively but unofficially, for at least the last six months. And we will cover it as though this is a breaking news event on par with a natural disaster or a 23-inning baseball game. Here's some breaking news for you: It is not a breaking news event. While all candidates -- and campaigns -- draw out their announcement schedule long after they have made up their mind in order to raise interest (and by interest, I mean money), Bush has taken the "exploratory" phase of a campaign to its logical extreme with his if-I-runsmanship over the last six months. "Lawyers say Mr. Bush, a former Florida governor, is stretching the limits of election law by crisscrossing the country, hiring a political team and raising tens of millions of dollars at fund-raisers, all without declaring — except once, by mistake — that he is a candidate," wrote Eric Lichtblau and Nick Corasanti this week. The duo quote Karl Sandstrom, a former Federal Election Commissioner and a campaign finance lawyer, saying that Bush's approach "makes a mockery of the law." Right. Here's the thing: The only reason Jeb hasn't announced for president is because by not doing so, he has allowed himself to raise oodles of cash for his Right To Rise super PAC. Once he says "I'm running," Jeb can't coordinate with the super PAC anymore, which takes the super PAC's fundraising power down several notches. But as long as Bush is "actively exploring" a candidacy, he can go to these events, talk about the platform he would run on and ask those donors to be supportive in the event he runs. The reason Bush has drawn this process out even further than others: He has taken the novel step of essentially outsourcing much of his campaign to the super PAC, which can raise money in unlimited amounts. When he officially launches, he won't be able to control precisely what the super PAC does, but he gets the benefit of no contribution limits. It's all very wink wink, nudge nudge, and it speaks to the ridiculousness of campaign finance law in the modern age. The idea that Jeb Bush is somehow not an official candidate because he hasn't filed his "statement of candidacy" with the FEC is absolutely ludicrous. Ask yourself this: Is there any doubt in your mind that Jeb Bush will announce he is running for president in 11 days time? Any? And then ask yourself when the last time was that you had any doubt about him running? Four months ago? More? This exchange between Bob Schieffer and Bush over the weekend on CBS' "Face the Nation" makes quite clear how thinly stretched Bush's equivocations on a candidacy are. Schieffer: Do you think, in some way, you may be just at least violating the spirit of the law? Do you feel that you have violated the law? Jeb: No, of course not. I would never do that. And I'm nearing the end of this journey of traveling and listening to people, garnering, trying to get a sense of whether my candidacy would be viable or not. We're going to completely adhere to the law, for sure. Look, politics is politics. There's always people that are going to be carping on the sidelines. And should I be a candidate, and that will be in the relatively near future where that decision will be made, there'll be no coordination at all with any super P.A.C. Schieffer: Now, you're not telling me that there's a possibility you may not run? Jeb: I, look, I hope, I hope I run, to be honest with you. I'd like to run, but I haven't made the decision. Even Jeb had trouble selling that last line. Bush is, of course, taking advantage of the holes in campaign finance law. Common sense makes clear he is running for president. But, campaign finance law isn't dictated by common sense -- obviously. All advocates for common sense reigning in politics can hope for is that the way in which Bush has stretched the law will force the FEC (or Congress) to reconsider the way in which a candidate becomes a candidate. Judging from the level of activity out of the FEC (and Congress) in recent years, however, I wouldn't hold my breath. *Jeb Bush Facing Crucial Two-Week Stretch <http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-06-05/jeb-bush-facing-crucial-two-week-stretch?cmpid=yhoo> // Bloomberg // Michael C. Bender - June 5, 2015* Bush will visit Germany, Poland and Estonia next week, before campaigning in Florida, Iowa and New Hampshire. When Jeb Bush returns next week from Estonia, the tiny, technologically advanced country that shares a border with Russia, he’ll have about 48 hours to shake off the jet lag before a June 15 rally in Miami, where he formally announces his decision to enter the race for the Republican presidential nomination. That will be the midpoint of a crucial two weeks in which Bush will first try to establish his foreign policy credentials, and then introduce himself to voters. The week before his campaign launch, the former Florida governor travels to Germany, Poland and Estonia; the week after, he will be stumping in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. In case there's any doubt what Bush will be announcing later this month, his spokeswoman Kristy Campbell offered this Thursday: "Governor Bush is thankful for the support and encouragement he's received from so many Americans, and is excited to announce his decision." “The Bush kids have had a chance to have a front-row seat in history.” Jeb Bush Bush's "decision" will come just two days after Hillary Clinton holds her much-ballyhooed first campaign rally in New York City. But if there were any concerns about sharing the spotlight with the other political dynasty in the race—or about the quick transition from Europe to a campaign announcement at Miami Dade College’s Theodore Gibson Health Center (a complex that includes a 3,200-seat gymnasium)—they may have been overridden by other scheduling issues. The fact is, Bush has waited so long to make it official that he's running into a bit of a calendar crunch: The last week of June is expected to bring highly anticipated U.S. Supreme Court rulings on Obamacare and gay marriage, both decisions that have the potential to dominate the political news cycle and force candidates off message as they respond. Then comes the long Independence Day holiday weekend and the start of family vacation season. And then, the first Republican presidential debate in Cleveland on August 6. To have any chance of getting a ticket to be on stage, a candidate has to be officially in the race. Before Bush becomes the 11th major Republican candidate in the race, he’ll have a chance to polish his foreign-policy résumé with a week in Berlin, Warsaw and Tallinn, Estonia. It’s the kind of opportunity that some of his potential Republican rivals haven’t been able to seize, especially the governors among them. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has curiously claimed that President Reagan’s firing of air-traffic controllers who went on strike in 1981 was the most important foreign policy event of the past five decades (and wrongly said the move influenced U.S.-Russian relations). New Jersey Governor Chris Christie refused to answer questions about foreign policy issues while traveling to England in February. Asked by a Washington Post reporter during the trip about the terrorist threat from Islamic State, Christie said, “Is there something you don’t understand about ‘no questions’?” Foreign policy prompted Bush’s one major gaffe in the seven months since he served notice in December that he was serious about running for president. In an interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on May 9, Bush said he’d have authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq even knowing the intelligence was faulty. Bush struggled for the next week to give a clear answer, finally saying on May 14 that he “would not have engaged” in Iraq, knowing what he knows now. “That’s one that shook a lot of people,” a Bush fundraiser who requested anonymity to speak about private conversations told Bloomberg. “That’s a question you know was coming. It should have been a slam dunk and gone, and it didn’t happen that way. But even the most professional of these guys stumble from time to time.” Bush has also incorrectly claimed that the Islamic state didn’t exist when his brother, George W. Bush, was president, and that al-Qaeda had been wiped out. But expectations for Bush should be high. A fluent Spanish speaker who lived in Venezuela before entering politics, Bush led trade and advocacy missions to at least 18 countries as governor, including Peru and Israel, as well as a six-day trip in 2005 that included stops in Dusseldorf and Munich, two of Germany’s largest cities. As a former senior advisor to London-based Barclays PLC, Bush says he traveled overseas 89 times to 29 countries in the eight years after leaving office. Last year, Bush started an investment fund with backing from a Chinese conglomerate. He has said he had been traveling about four times a year to China, where his father, George H.W. Bush, served as U.S. ambassador before being elected the nation's 41st president. "The Bush kids have had a chance to have a front-row seat in history,” Bush said at a Republican National Committee rally during his father’s 1992 re-election bid. “We’ve seen the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, the hammer and the sickle going down from the Kremlin on Christmas Day just a few years ago. We’ve seen so many incredible things happen.” In Berlin, Bush will participate in a question-and-answer session during an economic conference on June 9, where he'll have a prime speaking slot sandwiched between Google Inc. Chairman Eric Schmidt, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel supports the nuclear negotiations with Iran that Bush opposes, but Bush’s father remains very popular in the country because of the role he took promoting German reunification while he was in the White House. Outside the former president's library in College Station, Texas is a statue of horses leaping over pieces from the Berlin Wall, a Cold War relic that came down during his term in the White House. Germany unveiled its own monument in Berlin in 2010, known as the "Fathers of German Unity," that includes bronze busts of Bush, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. That legacy may help Bush counter the one left by his brother. The nation's 43rd president remains generally disliked in Europe because of his aggressive foreign policy and unpopular war in Iraq, said Alexander Privitera, a senior fellow at at the Johns Hopkins American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. While Europeans are "going to be looking for signs of whether he's similar to his brother," Privitera predicted that “there won’t be thousands protesting against Jeb Bush. A lot of people will associate him with memories that are overcharged with emotions." In Poland, Bush will participate in a roundtable with the Polish-American Freedom Foundation, a pro-democracy, free-market group, and meet with senior members of the Polish government about efforts to support Ukraine. In Estonia, where the Internet phone service Skype was born and where residents can vote and pay their taxes online, Bush will participate in a roundtable discussion about transatlantic security with the International Center for Defense and Security, a group focused on cyber attacks, social cohesion and energy policy in the Baltic-Nordic region. Bush will also tour NATO’s Cyber Defence Center of Excellence, and meet Estonians from the e-Estonia Showroom, a briefing center that highlights the country's digital successes. Bush called Estonia “this really cool, tiny country” during a speech in Florida on Wednesday. He held up the Balkan nation, population 1.3 million, as an example of a relatively simple tax code. “You can fill out your tax return in Estonia online in five minutes,” Bush said. “That should be a worthy aspiration for a great nation.” *Bush leads GOP field in NC, Clinton up on most Republicans <http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2015/06/bush-leads-gop-field-in-nc-clinton-up-on-most-republicans.html> // Public Policy Polling – June 4, 2015 * For the most part Jeb Bush has been struggling in PPP's recent Republican primary polling across the country- one exception though is the South. Bush leads our North Carolina polling for the second time in a row. He's at 19% to 12% each for Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker, 11% for Ted Cruz, 10% for Mike Huckabee, 9% for Ben Carson, 8% for Chris Christie, and 2% for Carly Fiorina. Bush also led our most recent surveys in Florida and South Carolina. Bush has the same problems with the far right in North Carolina that he does everywhere else- only 35% of 'very conservative' voters have a favorable opinion of him to 44% with a negative one and he's in 6th place in the horse race with that group. But Bush has a commanding lead with voters who identify themselves as being just 'somewhat conservative'- with them he's at 30% with the next closest Republican contender coming in at 13%. In 2012 the front runner with 'very conservative' voters shifted around a lot over the course of the cycle but Mitt Romney was generally leading the field with 'somewhat conservative' voters- who might be seen as the moderates at least within the confines of the GOP electorate- and that was enough to propel him to the nomination. The candidates at the top of the heap in North Carolina in terms of their overall popularity are Mike Huckabee at 56% favorability and Marco Rubio at 55% favorability. We've found a similar story in a lot of places recently. Chris Christie continues to be very unpopular with only 29% of voters seeing him positively to 47% who have a negative view. All but two candidates are within 1 point of where we found their support in April- the exceptions are Scott Walker who dropped from 16% to 12% and Rand Paul who improved his support from 6% to 12%. Walker still leads with voters identifying as 'very conservative' despite his overall drop this month. On the Democratic side Hillary Clinton continues to be as dominant as ever. 62% of Democrats say they want her to be the nominee to 14% for Bernie Sanders, 5% for Jim Webb, and 4% each for Lincoln Chafee and Martin O'Malley. Clinton polls over 80% with African Americans, over 60% with liberals, moderates, women, seniors, and younger voters, and polls over 50% with men. There's not much sign of her position for the Democratic nomination weakening at all. Clinton leads 7 out of 9 Republicans for the general election in North Carolina, generally by modest margins. The two exceptions are Rand Paul and Scott Walker, who she's tied with at 44% and 45% respectively. Marco Rubio trails by only one point at 45/44, Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee are each down by 2 at 46/44, Chris Christie has a 3 point deficit at 43/40, Carly Fiorina is down 6 at 46/40, and Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz each trail by 7 at 47/40 and 49/42 respectively. This continues a string of polls showing that the Presidential race in North Carolina is likely to be close once again next year, following up on the state's being the second closest in the country in both 2008 and 2012. Almost all the Presidential candidates have negative favorability ratings in the Tar Heel State- the only exceptions are Ben Carson and Scott Walker. All non-Clinton Democratic candidates trail by a wide margin in possible match ups with Walker- Bernie Sanders is down 10 at 43/33, Jim Webb trails by 11 at 42/31, Lincoln Chafee has a 13 point gap at 42/29, and Martin O'Malley is down 16 at 44/28. That's a function of only 54-59% of Democrats voting for their second tier candidates because of their current unfamiliarity with them but at any rate it makes it clear that for all the hand wringing about Hillary Clinton she is still by far and away the Democrats' strongest candidate. *PERRY* *Rick Perry ‘Super PAC’ Ads Going Up in Iowa <http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/06/04/rick-perry-super-pac-ads-going-up-in-iowa/> // NYT // Maggie Haberman – June 4, 2015 * The “super PAC” supporting former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has made a large reservation for television ad time in two Iowa markets, just as the former Texas governor has announced his second campaign for the White House. Opportunity and Freedom PAC, which is being led by Austin Barbour, a Republican consultant, began placing nearly $170,000 worth of ads this week, according to a person tracking media spending, who was unauthorized to speak publicly. Mr. Barbour did not respond to a call for comment. But the ad purchase is in two Iowa media markets, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, for the first two weeks of June. The amount of airtime is significant. Running ads this early is not particularly effective in terms of luring voters, since few are paying attention. But it is likely an attempt to raise Mr. Perry’s profile to help him qualify for the early debates, hosted by Fox News and CNN, two networks that are trying to manage an unwieldy field of nearly 20 candidates and relying on polling performance to determine participation. Follow the New York Times Politics and Washington on Facebook andTwitter, and sign up for the First Draft politics newsletter. *After ‘oops,’ Rick Perry is ready to try again <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-oops-rick-perry-is-ready-to-try-again/2015/06/03/2587a252-0a54-11e5-951e-8e15090d64ae_story.html> // WaPo // Dan Balz - June 4, 2015 * On Thursday, Perry made his candidacy official on his official Web site. “I am running for president because I know our country’s best days are ahead of us,” said a message on the site, which included a video that stressed his ability to bridge political divides in Washington. The post came hours before Perry was scheduled to announce his plans for 2016 at an airplane hangar in this northern suburb of Dallas, surrounded by military veterans and others in a patriotic display. There is little suspense about what he intends to say, according to advisers, but there are plenty of questions about whether greater preparation, good intentions and personal determination are enough to overcome the impressions he left behind after his first campaign. When he first announced his candidacy for the White House in August 2011, he seemed almost the perfect candidate to compete seriously for the Republican nomination. He was a long-serving Texas governor in a party whose political base was in the South. He governed during a period of rapid growth and job creation in his native state. His anti-Washington instincts made him a tea party darling before there was a tea party. He had never lost an election. Within weeks of his announcement, he was atop the polls, a major threat to the front-runner, Mitt Romney. But within weeks of achieving those lofty poll numbers, his candidacy was in a rapid descent, caused by his opponents’ attacks and his own maladroit performances in a series of early debates. By the time he said “oops” on a debate stage in Michigan (he couldn’t remember all the agencies in Washington he planned to zero out as president), his candidacy was already history, as he has since admitted. Now, as he prepares to announce his intentions, he is in an utterly different position — mired in low single digits in early polls, lightly regarded by many of his rivals, ignored or dismissed by many in the media and struggling for the kind of attention that a politician who served 14 years as chief executive of one of the nation’s most populous states might normally command. He and his advisers believe that, if he was overestimated but ill-prepared four years ago, he is the opposite now, underestimated and in their estimation readier for the challenges that a presidential campaign presents. They say he likes nothing better than to be underestimated. These advisers say a second campaign is not simply for redemption but rather because Perry believes he has something to offer his party and his country. But the former governor also is eager to prove all the doubters wrong — and those doubters are widespread. Talk privately to strategists working for other candidates and they say he is a likable politician and one who could cause problems for some other candidates, but not one they see as a genuine threat to compete for the nomination. Many share the view of Matthew Dowd, who helped former president George W. Bush win two elections to the White House and is now an independent analyst. Dowd sees an extremely difficult road ahead for Perry, owing to the impressions he made four years ago. Asked about Perry’s prospects of becoming the GOP nominee, Dowd said: “I wouldn’t say impossible but very difficult. . . . The caricature has been made of him and it’s hard to get out of it.” But Matt Rhoades, who was Romney’s campaign manager and who saw Perry as enough of a threat in the late summer of 2011 to move aggressively to bring him down, offered a dissenting view — suggesting that people are foolish to write off the former governor as an afterthought in the nomination battle. “Gov. Perry has worked hard and done the right things to reposition himself for a run in 2016,” Rhoades, the founder of the conservative political action committee America Rising, said in an e-mail message. “I believe his candidacy will have a major impact on the primary and voters will give him a second chance.” Perry long has been open about the mistakes of his first campaign, saying at one point last year that he was “a bit arrogant” in thinking he could suddenly jump into that race with minimal preparation. He also entered shortly after major surgery for a back ailment, and he was plagued by health problems for weeks that he said affected his candidacy. In the intervening years, he has devoted himself to policy briefings, some foreign travel, trips to the early states — all in contrast to his previous campaign. Ray Sullivan, who served as one of Perry’s senior advisers during the governorship and the 2012 campaign but who is not formally a part of the 2016 campaign, said he expects voters will take a fresh look. “When he entered in 2011, he gave himself and our campaign team six weeks to prepare,” Sullivan said. “He entered the race as a front-runner and had no ramp-up time and no room for really any error. He clearly learned from that experience and is a much better prepared, more informed campaigner for it.” In his season of preparation, Perry has offered himself as a fiscal conservative with a sterling record of economic success during his time in office; a social conservative in good standing with the Republican right; and an optimistic leader who will provide muscular leadership whether in dealing with the issue of immigration by securing the U.S.-Mexico border or taking on Islamic State militants and other foreign-policy challenges. Many of the themes he has been talking about this year were the same ones that were supposed to boost him four years ago. “We did a horrible job of telling that story last time,” said a senior Perry adviser who declined to be identified in order to speak openly. “We jumped in and thought everybody knew that story. The American people are going to see a very different Rick Perry.” Like his many rivals, Perry has taken part in candidate forums, done quieter trips to Iowa and New Hampshire and counts on his retail skills as a candidate to win over voters who still have negative impressions from 2012. He has won applause and some plaudits for robust rhetorical skills, and some voters who have seen him over the past year say he is not the same candidate they remember from 2012. So far, none of this has translated into significant support. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, released earlier this week, showed Perry at 2 percent nationally among registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, tied for 12th place among 16 candidates tested. In the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls, he is 10th on the list of candidates. The polls may be only an early snapshot, certain to change with time, but they are important now because they will be used to determine who is invited to participate in the first two GOP debates later this summer. Perry is at risk of not being among the 10 candidates on the stage, though his advisers say they are confident he will be among the candidates in the opening debate in Cleveland on Aug. 6. Perry’s path begins in Iowa, seen by other Republicans as the linchpin state where he must finish in at least the top three. He is far from that today, standing 11th at 3.3 percent in the most recent Bloomberg Politics-Des Moines Register Poll, though history says there could be considerable movement among the candidates there before next year’s caucuses. His advisers also concede that, after his 2012 campaign, there is little margin of error. Some other candidates have had small stumbles this year but have not paid a significant price. Perry can ill afford any such missteps. In that sense, Perry will be running, at least for the time being, against the image of his last candidacy as much or more than against any of the others in the field. Said one Perry loyalist: “He has to continue to grind it out — and do well.” *Meet the people who are going to try to get Rick Perry elected president <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/06/04/meet-the-people-who-are-going-to-try-to-get-rick-perry-elected-president/> // WaPo // Patrick Svitek – June 4, 2015 * Rob Johnson and Jeff Miller Johnson and Miller are by far Perry's most senior advisers. Miller, who spearheaded Perry's 2012 bid in California, has long been expected to run his 2016 campaign, while Johnson, it is said, will eventually settle into a role as Perry's top strategist. Johnson ran Perry's 2012 campaign, a credential that makes him the highest-ranking holdover from the last bid. Miller has received the most credit for rehabilitating Perry's national image in the years since his 2012 campaign ended in embarrassment. The two are among Perry's closest confidantes. In some ways, Johnson and Miller have filled the void left by Dave Carney, the veteran New Hampshire-based strategist who had been with Perry for years before orchestrating his 2012 run. This time around, Carney is not expected to be involved in Perry's presidential operation. Abby McCloskey and Avik Roy McCloskey and Roy likely will serve as Perry's top policy hands. McCloskey, a Dallas economist who used to work for the American Enterprise Institute, played a central role in organizing a series of briefings over the past several months aimed at bringing Perry up to speed on a wide range of issues. Roy, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Forbes opinion editor, is among the most respected GOP voices on health care, though his work for Perry's 2016 campaign is expected to span a variety of issues. Margaret Lauderback Another holdover from Perry's 2012 campaign, Lauderback is expected to serve as his top fundraiser. Having also raised money for his 2010 gubernatorial re-election bid, she is well-versed in the vast world of GOP fundraising in Texas — and Perry's longtime connections to it. Her resume also includes finance consulting gigs for Republican Governors Association, National Republican Senatorial Committee and Greg Abbott's 2014 gubernatorial campaign. Greg Strimple A veteran Republican pollster, Strimple is completely new to Perry's orbit for 2016. Strimple, president of Idaho-based GS Strategy Group, has served as a senior adviser to Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Arizona Sen. John McCain. The top pollster on Perry's 2012 campaign, Tony Fabrizio, now works for another GOP presidential candidate, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. The Barbours The Barbour family, a big brand in GOP politics, has long been close to the Perrys. Brothers Austin and Henry, both Mississippi-based operatives, are poised to be the most involved in Perry's 2016 plans. Austin is running a pro-Perry super PAC called Opportunity and Freedom PAC, while Henry remains an informal adviser who reliably has the former governor's ear. The early-state operatives Perry's point men in the early-voting states have played especially active roles in light of his nearly nonstop travel to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina since stepping down as governor in January. Calling the shots in Iowa is Bob Haus, the veteran GOP strategist who served in the same capacity for Perry's 2012 bid. Katon Dawson, Perry's top adviser in South Carolina, is another return player from the 2012 campaign. New to Perry's early-state crew is New Hampshire's Mike Dennehy, the longtime Republican strategist who helped engineer John McCain's come-from-behind win in the 2008 Granite State primary. Lucy Nashed and Travis Considine Having worked seven years in Perry's office, there perhaps is no other spokesperson on the campaign as well-equipped to discuss his gubernatorial record than Nashed. She is expected to lead Perry's press shop, which likely will also include Travis Considine, a former spokesman for former Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. Considine and Nashed were Perry's most active liaisons to the press as he wound down his governorship and prepared for a 2016 bid. Other people to know — Erin DeLullo is handling Perry's outreach to the universe of conservative groups that promise to shape the 2016 primary. A Washington-based fundraiser, DeLullo has spent years introducing candidates to the outside organizations such as the staunchly limited-government Club for Growth. — Jamie Johnson is an Iowa-based ordained minister with deep ties to the evangelical community who's helping connect Perry with social conservatives in the early-voting states. During the 2012 race, Johnson worked in Iowa for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, the eventual winner of the caucuses. — Anita Perry, the former first lady of Texas, has long had a role in her husband's political life — and 2016 looks no different. It was she who broke the news this month on Twitter that Perry would announce his presidential plans Thursday in Dallas. *Rick Perry spent $350 per vote in 2012 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/06/04/rick-perry-spent-350-per-vote-in-2012/?postshare=4811433442585486> // WaPo //Phillip Bump – June 4, 2015 * Rick Perry's 2012 campaign went badly. I know that's not what he'd like us to talk about on the day that he announces his 2016 candidacy, and I am confident that some Perry supporters will pointedly request that we focus on his policies* and not his past performance. Well, too bad! Because his past performance was so bad -- historically bad -- that it's worth revisiting. Particularly if you're thinking about giving him money. Perry didn't actually spend that much, at least compared to other recent candidates. That's in part because he did badly enough, early enough that he stopped writing checks. According to FEC data, he ended up spending less than everyone on the graph below, save Mike Huckabee. But he still spent a lot, in average-American terms. Nineteen million in 2012 dollars! And for that, he got ... very few votes. And that 0.1 million votes was very close to being 0.0, because of rounding. According to U.S. Election Atlas, he earned 42,251 primary votes and 12,646 votes in the caucuses. That's 54,897 votes, which rounds up to 0.1 million by the skin of its teeth. A lot of money spent for a not-a-lot of votes? That means Rick Perry's votes cost a lot more. A whole lot more. (Now you see why we did that weird, drop-down format in the earlier graphs.) We also conducted this exercise after Perry dropped out in 2012, at which point he had spent more than $1,000 per vote. He wound up getting enough votes after he dropped out of the race, though, to fall well below that threshold. The fuller picture also means his campaign isn't quite the most expensive per-vote in recent federal primaries. That would have been Linda McMahon's 2010 Connecticut Senate campaign, at $454 per vote. Anyway, this is Rick Perry 2016, a whole new guy! He's learned his lessons! He probably won't win this time, either, but at the very least, he'll likely end up with a slightly better cost-per-vote ratio. Or so those people writing checks hope. *What Rick Perry thinks about the issues <http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/6/4/8730469/rick-perry-issues> // VOX // Andrew Prokop & Tez Clark – June 4, 2015 * Rick Perry is so conservative that when he ran for president in 2011, he proposed eliminating so many federal agencies that he couldn't remember them all. In his 14 years as governor of Texas, Perry pursued a low-tax, deregulatory agenda. And as he launches his 2016 bid for the Republican presidential nomination, he's sure to lean on that record. But like many politicians, when Perry had the responsibility of governing a state, he diverged from his party's national line on some issues. He tried to build new highways all over Texas. He let unauthorized immigrants get in-state tuition at colleges and universities. He mandated that girls entering the sixth grade be vaccinated for HPV. And he supported reforms of his state's criminal justice system. In his campaign announcement speech Thursday, Perry unsurprisingly emphasized the most conservative parts of his record and agenda, saying, "We need to return power to the states and freedom to the individuals." And he tried to tout his credentials on foreign policy and national security, arguing that America needed to lead in a dangerous world. Slash taxes and eliminate several government agencies During his 2011 presidential campaign, Perry proposed slashing both federal taxes and federal spending. On taxes, his plan gave Americans the option of paying a flat tax rate of 20 percent with many fewer deductions, eliminating the federal estate tax, and cutting the corporate and capital gains tax rates. On spending, he backed a cap of federal expenditures at 18 percent of GDP, and a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. He proposed eliminating the Departments of Commerce, Education, and Energy, and repealing Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform law. He's no fan of the Federal Reserve either, saying in 2011 that its easy money policies might be "treasonous," and that if Ben Bernanke visited Texas, "we would treat him pretty ugly." Mandated HPV vaccine, then disavowed it One of the biggest controversies Perry was involved in during his governorship focused on his 2007 executive order mandating that sixth-grade girls be vaccinated for HPV. Though there was an option for parents to have their children opt out of the vaccine, Perry was criticized by conservatives who thought the vaccine encouraged sexual risk-taking, people who doubted the science of vaccines and feared they could cause health problems, and others who thought Perry was serving the interest of pharmaceutical companies. (Perry's former chief of staff Mike Toomey was a lobbyist for Merck, and pushed for the executive order). So as his presidential campaign geared up in 2011, Perry declared that the executive order was "a mistake" and backed the legislature's support for overturning it. "I didn’t do my research well enough to understand that we needed to have a substantial conversation with our citizenry," he said. "If I had it to do over again, I would have done it differently." Opposes same-sex marriage and supported Texas's sodomy ban As governor, Perry supported Texas's law banning gay sex, which the Supreme Court overturned in 2003. He's also been an opponent of same-sex marriage, saying that "it’s fine with me that a state is using their sovereign rights to decide an issue," but that "obviously gay marriage is not fine with me." In June 2014, Perry reportedly made comments comparing homosexuality to alcoholism. He soon walked that back, saying, "I stepped right in it." His main interest, he said, was in talking about how "whether you're gay or straight, you need to be having a job." Tough on border security, but let unauthorized immigrants get in-state tuition As governor, Perry has argued repeatedly for the importance of border security. During the summer 2014 child migrant crisis, he deployed the National Guard to his state's border with Mexico. On immigration reform, he's said, "I don’t think anyone with a sense of reality thinks that we’re going to ship 11 or 12 million people back to where they’re from." But he's argued that border security has to come first. As governor, Perry signed a law that let unauthorized immigrants pay in-state tuition at Texas public universities. And when he was questioned about it during a 2011 presidential debate, he said that if you oppose the law, "I don't think you have a heart." Lately, he's said that that "was a really bad choice of words," but that he stands by his support for the law. He said the choice he faced was, "Are you going to put these people in a position of having to rely upon government to take care of themselves, or are you going to let them be educated and be contributing members of society, obviously working toward getting their citizenship?" His sweeping plan for new highways was blocked Early in his governorship, Perry unveiled an ambitious plan to build a network of toll roads and rail lines that would be called the Trans-Texas Corridor. But as the New York Times's Deborah Sontag recounted, the plan became intensely controversial. What horrified some opponents, Sontag writes, "was the realization that the corridors were going to rip through the heart of rural Texas and require 146 acres of right of way for every mile of road — or 584,000 acres total." After public opposition grew, Perry's party abandoned the plan, and Perry himself eventually disavowed it. Criminal justice policy shouldn't be driven by "fear" Perry argues that under his leadership, "Texas fundamentally changed its course on criminal justice." He says the state started focusing "on diverting people with drug addiction issues from entering prison in the first place, and programs to keep them from returning." Specifically, he touts his support for drug courts allowing some low-level offenders to avoid going to prison, and greater investment in treatment and rehabilitation programs for drug addicts. "I am proud that in Texas, criminal justice policy is no longer driven solely by fear, but by a commitment to true justice, and compassion for those shackled by the chains of addiction," he wrote in a 2015 essay. A skeptic of climate science Like many Republicans, Rick Perry questions the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change. He's claimed that "there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data," and that global warming is "a scientific theory that has not been proven" and "is more and more being put into question." He said last year that "calling CO2 a pollutant is doing a disservice the country, and I believe a disservice to the world," and that he was "offended" that skeptics of climate science were called "deniers." Drastic overhaul of Social Security is necessary In 2011, Perry said that our Social Security program is a "Ponzi scheme," and argued that the program needed a massive overhaul to survive. (PolitiFact rated the "Ponzi scheme" characterization as false.) He proposed letting younger workers have access to private accounts in Social Security, as well as letting some state and local government workers opt against paying into the program. A foreign policy hawk In the Republican Party's split between hawks and doves, Perry has sided firmly with the hawks. He's argued that ISIS "represents a real threat to our national security," and called on Obama to "do more with our military and intelligence communities" against them. The more non-interventionist policies of Sen. Rand Paul, Perry says, would "only endanger our national security even further." In his announcement, he criticized President Obama for prematurely withdrawing troops from Iraq. "Our president failed to secure the peace," he said. He also said he'd withdraw from any nuclear agreement with Iran that "legitimizes their quest to get a nuclear weapon." *Tea Party Unloads on 'Complete Imbecile' Rick Perry <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/04/tea-party-unloads-on-complete-imbecile-rick-perry.html> // The Daily Beast // Olivia Nuzzi – June 4, 2015 * When Texas Gov. Rick Perry was indicted last month on two felony charges stemming from how he dealt with a misbehaving Democratic state official, the image of the stuttering 2012 Republican primary challenger was replaced with that of a hero-cowboy in the eyes of many conservatives. Perry was under attack from the left wing, and his response was not to apologize but to walk through a hail of blue-hued bullets and emerge laughing, without a mark on him. But some conservative true believers have begun to notice something rather suspicious: The company Perry keeps seems more suited to a mainstream Republican—or a right-of-center Democrat—than to their hero-cowboy. Perry is associated with three operatives who have concerned some members of the die-hard right wing: lobbyist Henry Barbour, former Bill Clinton aide Mark Fabiani, and McCain-Palin campaign chief and MSNBC pundit Steve Schmidt. Well, maybe “concerned” is putting it somewhat mildly. “The only two options are that Rick Perry is a complete imbecile and he has no idea who these people are and what they’ve done and how the conservative base—who votes in primaries—feels about these guys, or he’s doing it on purpose because that’s the kind of message he wants to send,” said Keli Carender, the national grassroots coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots. Either way, she assured: “It will be an issue. We will make it an issue.” Barbour is already working on Perry’s 2016 bid for the White House. But conservatives know him best for his role running the political action committee Mississippi Conservatives, founded by his uncle, Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi. In this year’s Magnolia State primary fight—and “fight” is an understatement—between U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran and state Sen. Chris McDaniel, Barbour reportedly played an influential and controversial role. According to National Review, his PAC funneled money to produce ads against McDaniel that alleged he would set back “race relationships between blacks and whites and other ethnic groups.” The ads, which seemed intended to drive African-American voters to the polls, enraged McDaniel’s Tea Party supporters. As reported by Breitbart News, some conservatives loathe Barbour so much that they tried to get the Republican National Committee to censure him, to no avail. “Republicans should not hire Henry Barbour unless and until he apologizes for the tactics he helped fund in Mississippi...I don’t think [keeping Barbour around] necessarily means Perry is endorsing what he did, but it means he’s certainly not properly condemning it or taking it seriously enough,” Quin Hillyer, a conservative writer and activist, told The Daily Beast. “What he helped finance was so far beyond the pale that he should be blackballed by conservatives, and if Perry wants to be considered a conservative, he should no longer employ Henry Barbour.” Rick Shaftan, a Republican consultant who involved himself in the Mississippi primary, offered a somewhat different view of Barbour to The Daily Beast: “I don’t like what he did in Mississippi, but you know what? It shows he’s a ruthless, cutthroat operative, and there’s something to be said for that on the Republican side. Because we don’t have enough of them. If the force of evil can be brought to do good, then that’s a good thing.” Normally, staffers don’t matter much to voters, Carender noted. But Mississippi is different for many on the far right. It’s become the ultimate test of Tea Party fidelity, a measuring stick for whether a conservative will sell out his principles to inside-the-Beltway Washington RINOs or will stay true to the cause and the grassroots activists who are the heart and soul of the movement. People don’t recognize, Carender said, just “how plugged in the conservative base is to Mississippi…If you’re a man of integrity, you don’t associate with Henry Barbour as far as we’re concerned.” Perry has associated with Barbour since at least 2012, when Barbour served on his ill-fated but memorable presidential campaign. (Haley Barbour, for his part, supported Newt Gingrich.) Publicly, Perry may have shrugged at last month’s indictment—but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been taking Lone Star State-size measures to ensure it doesn’t sink him for good. As part of his legal team, Perry has hired the Harvard-educated Mark Fabiani, best known for his ties to the Democratic Party. From 1994 through 1996, Fabiani worked as special counsel to President Bill Clinton. He then served as Al Gore’s communications director during his 2000 presidential campaign. Fabiani has worked for the Democratic former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom as well. Perry also has hired Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist and former consultant to John McCain in 2008. Schmidt has long enraged Tea Party conservatives with his candor about members of his own party. Schmidt has called McCain’s VP pick, Sarah Palin, “someone [who] was nominated to the vice presidency who was manifestly unprepared to take the oath of office should it become necessary and as it has become necessary many times in American history.” Asked whether Palin would have a future in politics, Schmidt once remarked: “I hope not...And the reason I say that is because if you look at it, over the last four years, all of the deficiencies in knowledge, all of the deficiencies in preparedness, she’s done not one thing to rectify them, to correct them.” Then Schmidt described Palin’s unflattering qualities, which could, unfortunately for Perry, double as descriptions for most members of the Tea Party: “She has become a person who, I think, is filled with grievance, filled with anger, who has a divisive message for the national stage...” Conservative radio host Mark Levin wondered of Schmidt, “Why would Perry hire this conservative attacker and Palin hater?” Schmidt made those comments on MSNBC, where he is employed as a political analyst. Shaftan said of Perry hiring the strategist: “If they have Steve Schmidt working for them, why are they telling people? That I don’t understand.” Perry has been basking in the glory of the conservative credibility his fight with Texas Democrats has lent him—so much so that his mugshot features a prominent smirk, one you can wear on a T-shirt being sold by his PAC for just $25. Some Republicans made that same image their Facebook profile pictures in a show of support, in the way some do for gay marriage, or to end violence against children. But you’re only as good as the company you keep, according to some members of the far right who have in the past proved themselves to be loud enough to get their way. Conservative HQ columnist Richard Viguerie wrote of Perry’s team: “When you hire a consultant, you hire his reputation, strategy, and tactics. We doubt that Governor Perry plans to win the Republican presidential nomination by race-baiting, recruiting Democrats to vote in Republican primary elections, and trashing as ‘poisonous’ conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh…” Hillyer agreed: “A very important law of politics and government, as emphasized again and again by conservative movement leader Morton Blackwell, is that personnel is policy. If somebody wants to get a sense of how a political leader might govern, it certainly is important to see who he hires.” *Rick Perry’s second chance to make a first impression <http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/rick-perrys-second-chance-make-first-impression> // MSNBC // Steve Benen - June 4, 2015* There was actually a point at which Rick Perry was a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. It was August 2011. At the time, party activists and officials realized that Mitt Romney was well on his way towards dispatching weak rivals, but there were widespread fears that he would struggle in a national race. The then-Texas governor rode in on a white horse to rescue his party and very quickly took the lead. Perry’s support eroded quite quickly. Most remember his “oops” moment from November 2011, but the truth remains that the Texas Republican’s campaign was already faltering. His first day as a candidate was a disaster, and the weeks that followed were no better. The more voters saw of him, the more Perry’s support evaporated. Four years later, Perry believes he’s ready to be a far better candidate the second time around. MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt reported today: Now Perry is set to announce a second – and this time, long-shot – bid for president. He’ll do so on Thursday from his home state of Texas, where he’ll stand in front of an enormous airplane emblazoned with “Perry for President.” Joining him is Marcus Luttrell, the Navy SEAL made famous in the movie “Lone Survivor,” and by the widow of Chris Kyle, the focus of the film “American Sniper.” It’s all aimed at highlighting Perry’s military experience – he served in the Air Force – at a time when foreign policy is at the forefront of the campaign. Perry will also focus on his economic record as Texas governor; he says he created 1.8 million new jobs during his tenure. They’re themes he’s also been emphasizing on the campaign trail in recent months, especially in New Hampshire, where veterans are a key voting bloc. Whereas Perry entered the 2012 race as a savior candidate, the Texan enters this year as an afterthought. Despite being well known to Republicans, Perry’s national support is hovering below 3%, which may be enough to qualify for debate participation – though it’ll be close. Perry’s not even especially popular in Texas, where’s he’s running a distant fifth in a state he led for over a decade. There’s also the matter of the felony charges pending against him. As Rachel noted on the show last night, Perry will become the first presidential contender to launch a campaign while under criminal indictment on corruption charge. Last summer, as regular readers no doubt recall, Perry was charged with two felony counts – the former governor faces the potential of jail time – which generally doesn’t help presidential candidates get ahead in a crowded field. There’s also Perry’s challenge overcoming his often bizarre ideological radicalism. ThinkProgress pulled together several examples of “completely bonkers things” Perry believes about constitutional law – the list didn’t even include his flirtation with secession – and the Democratic National Committee followed up with a similar list of its own, noting Perry’s opposition to the federal minimum wage and Social Security, among other things. But even if we put aside the pending criminal charges, the weak support, and the radical governing vision, Perry’s biggest problem may be the perception that he’s just not a serious person. When Kasie Hunt asked the Texas Republican late last year, “Are you smart enough to be president of the United States?” the obvious answer should have been something along the lines of, “Of course I’m smart enough.” Instead, Perry replied, “Running for the presidency’s not an IQ test.” It’s safe to say the Texas Republican faces long odds of success. *GRAHAM* *Graham: 'Don't vote for me' if you're 'worn out by war' <http://thehill.com/policy/defense/244022-graham-dont-vote-for-me-if-youre-anti-war> // The Hill // Mark Hensch – June 4, 2014 * Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Americans on Thursday not to vote for him in the 2016 presidential election if they are worn out by war. The 2016 GOP presidential candidate appeared on Fox News’s "Fox & Friends," where co-host Steve Doocy questioned his past war hawk rhetoric. “It’s a tough message,” he told Graham. “A lot of people are just worn out by war.” "Well, don’t vote for me," the Republican senator responded. "Don't vote for me, because I’m telling you what’s coming: Barack Obama’s policies leading from behind are going to allow another 9/11." "[ISIS] is large, rich and entrenched,” he added, referring to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. “If I’m president they will be poor, small and on the run.” Graham also said that U.S. ground forces were necessary for defeating ISIS before they could reach targets on American soil. “I’m trying to tell the American people and the Republican primary voter — the only way I know to defend this country is to send some of us back to Iraq and eventually to Syria to dig these guys out of the ground, destroy the Caliphate, kill as many of them as you can, hold territory and help people over there help themselves,” he said. Graham further tied President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy to Hillary Clinton, his former secretary of State and the Democratic presidential front-runner. “I think it’s the lack of confidence in her ability to distinguish herself from Barack Obama,” he said when asked about Clinton’s lack of media availability on the campaign trail. “Her biggest nightmare is for someone to ask her, ‘Hey, do you think the war on terror is going well? Do you agree with Barack Obama’s foreign policy?’” he said. “’If you don’t, tell us why.’ ” Graham added that Clinton’s perceived secrecy would likely cost her voters next year. “Well, it’s easier to talk to the North Korean guy than it is her,” he quipped, comparing Clinton to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “At the end of the day, when 57 percent of people don’t trust you, you’ve got a problem,” Graham officially launched his 2016 presidential campaign on Monday from his hometown of Central, S.C. He has already made a muscular foreign policy a key theme of his bid. “I want to be president to defeat the enemies trying to kill us, not just penalize them or criticize them or contain them, but defeat them,” he said on Monday. *Can Lindsey Graham Win His Home State? <http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/06/03/can_lindsey_graham_win_his_home_state.html> // Real Clear Politics // Caitlin Huey-Burns & Rebecca Berg – June 4, 2015 * South Carolina has been good to Lindsey Graham. The U.S. senator from the small town of Central has never lost an election in his home state over a two-decade political career. Last year, he was elected to a third term in the upper chamber after winning a six-way Republican primary with 57 percent of the vote. This week, Graham became the ninth GOP aspirant to officially join the 2016 presidential race, and the Palmetto State’s first-in-the-South primary will play an especially significant role in winnowing the most crowded field in memory. But given the expansive roster of candidates, a competitive financial race, and two early states to get through first, there’s a real chance Graham won’t make it all the way home. State strategists acknowledge their senior senator’s political savvy and experience, and believe his foreign policy credentials will play a key role in the larger Republican debate about international affairs. But as Graham stands now in the polls, he won’t likely make it onto the first debate stage in August. Graham has been talking about a presidential run for a few months, but is polling third in his home state—nearly six percentage points behind Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, according to the Real Clear Politics average. And he barely registers in the first two voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, where he is campaigning this week. “Given the way things are going, I’d be surprised if we get here in [February] and he was still alive as a candidate,” says David Woodard, a political science professor at Clemson and a former political consultant. “He's not a popular ‘favorite son’ in South Carolina and the idea he could be limping along and South Carolina can crown him is just not backed up.” A recent Winthrop University poll found that while Graham has a 58.2 percent approval rating as a senator, 55 percent of survey respondents would not even consider voting for him as a presidential contender. Even though seemingly every GOP politician is seeking the White House this cycle, Graham’s presidential campaign has sparked conspiracy theories. Is he in the race just as a foil to Rand Paul’s libertarian philosophy on foreign affairs? Is he eyeing a Cabinet post in 2017? Is he planning to make it through the first two primaries only to then throw his support behind a rival ahead of his home state contest? Graham has insisted he can win South Carolina’s primary, telling Fox News in April, “If I didn’t think I could win South Carolina, I wouldn’t be talking to you. If I’m on the ballot, I’ll win South Carolina.” This week, the Graham campaign signaled it is working to shore up support on his home turf, announcing a 100-person state finance committee. “This list is a ‘Who’s Who’ in the South Carolina business and professional community,” said Graham’s Finance Committee chairman, David Wilkins. “Bringing this group together is a remarkable statement about how much these top leaders respect and support Lindsey Graham and the unique qualifications he brings to this presidential race.” Graham has also been meeting individually with members of South Carolina’s congressional delegation, and has asked them to stay neutral if they are not supporting his bid for president, according to an aide for one of the members. So far, the delegation has indeed kept quiet about Graham. Rep. Mark Sanford attended a South Carolina rally for Rand Paul earlier this year, although the Charleston-area congressman did not endorse the Kentucky senator. And conspicuously absent from Graham’s announcement Monday in Central was that district’s representative, Jeff Duncan, who recently hosted a Faith and Freedom forum, a cattle call attended by most of the presidential contenders. Gov. Nikki Haley is remaining noncommittal for now as several candidates come through her state, but her eventual endorsement is highly coveted. And despite having a hometown pol on the ballot in 2016, Haley has said she would prefer that a governor get the GOP nomination. “Even Senator Graham admits he’s running for president of the United States and not president of South Carolina,” says Matt Moore, the state GOP chairman. “Our voters here are savvy in terms of presidential politics. While he may have a little bit of home-field advantage, it won't be a deciding factor. He has to compete.” Still, strategists say Graham’s connections are valuable in the state—as evidenced by the way in which he suavely cleared substantial challengers from his Senate primary in 2014—and can help him at least in the short term. His candidacy has frozen some of the establishment wing of the party in South Carolina, including loyal donors, major business owners, and some older elected officials who do not necessarily believe he can win but have enough respect for Graham that they will not support other candidates for as long as he is in the race. “People who support him now anticipate he will get out and they intend to be for someone else when it’s all said and done,” says one state Republican operative working for a rival super PAC. “There may have been a time way back in the day when primaries were smaller or more controlled that a favorite son could get in there and mess things up, but that’s not case anymore.” If Graham does poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire, he will have a difficult time competing in his home state against one or two candidates who will have gained momentum from their performances in either state (or both). “Graham's going to have his most loyal supporters, but the overwhelming majority of the state is still up for grabs,” said another state Republican operative. “The question would be whether, if Graham doesn't see this through to the end, he has the sway to take his block and send it toward a single candidate." Some prominent Republicans who might have supported Bush have already stepped up to support Graham, such as Wilkins, who chaired George W. Bush’s South Carolina campaign in 2004 and was later appointed ambassador to Canada. Wilkins attended Graham’s announcement in Central on Monday. But Marco Rubio is also seriously competing in the state. His campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, is a veteran South Carolina operative. In addition, the Florida senator’s team is stocked with state operatives, and has cultivated significant business community support, according to a National Journal report on Rubio’s emerging clasp on the state. Walker, the son of a preacher, has been appealing to the state’s Christian base in recent campaign stops. Rick Santorum, who announced his bid last week, also plans to compete in the state. He has made several stops there in recent months, and his son attends The Citadel. Rick Perry, who dropped out of the running before the South Carolina primary in 2012, has been visiting the state as well. South Carolina, with roughly 600,000 primary voters, has picked the eventual Republican nominee almost every cycle since 1980, with Newt Gingrich’s 2012 win being an exception. With so many candidates running this year, the Palmetto State could play a crucial role as the first deep-red state to weigh in on the primary field, and could help set the tone heading into Super Tuesday on March 1, where voters in a significant number of Southern states will cast ballots. “If you can't win here, you probably can't win nationally,” says Moore. “This [state] is a test of organization and message, and it’s as important as ever.” *An Adelson Backs Lindsey Graham for President <http://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/an-adelson-backs-lindsey-graham-for-president-20150604> // The National Journal // Adam Wollner – June 4, 2015* Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate and highly sought-after Republican mega-donor, still isn't sure which Republican presidential candidate he will back for the nomination in 2016. But Adelson's younger, lesser-known brother has lent his support to Sen. Lindsey Graham's long-shot White House bid. Graham named Lenny Adelson, along with 38 others, to his long-shot campaign's national finance committee on Thursday. Lenny Adelson typically keeps a much lower political profile than his brother. While Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam gave nearly $100 million in disclosed contributions to conservative outside groups during the past two election cycles, the only disclosed federal donations Lenny Adelson made during that time frame were a pair of $2,600 contributions to two House candidates—one Republican and one Democrat—in his home state of Massachusetts, according to records maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics. Sheldon Adelson's net worth currently stands at $29 billion, but little is publicly known about his brother's finances. A press release issued by the Graham campaign didn't specify Lenny Adelson's current occupation, and a 2014 Federal Election Commission filing listed "Adelson Graphics" as his employer. Lenny Adelson does not tend to get involved with his brother's business affairs. But he did originally introduce Sheldon Adelson to Hong Kong businessman Richard Suen, who is now suing him. Suen claims Sheldon Adelson owes him more than $300 million for helping his company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., secure a license to operate a casino in Macau in 2002. The trial is still ongoing. Lenny Adelson, as well as a spokesman for Sheldon Adelson, could not immediately be reached for comment. Just about every GOP presidential hopeful has aggressively courted the elder Adelson, who bankrolled a super PAC during the 2012 primary campaign that kept Newt Gingrich afloat. But he hasn't committed to backing anyone just yet. Adelson did, however, co-chair a fundraiser for an exploratory committee Graham set up in March. Aside from Adelson, Graham's list of national finance committee members features a few other notable names. Jeff Immelt, the chairman and CEO of General Electric, and Ronald Perelman, the CEO of MacAndrews & Forbes, Inc., are among the committee's co-chairs. "We are thrilled to have such strong support from these individuals who believe that Senator Graham is the candidate best equipped to address the issues facing our nation," said Graham spokeswoman Brittany Bramell. *RUBIO* *What happened when Marco Rubio spoke at a Bush awards dinner <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/06/04/what-happened-when-marco-rubio-spoke-at-a-bush-awards-dinner/> // WaPo // Sean Sullivan – June 4, 2015 * As Republican donors sipped their wine and munched on their salads in a hotel ballroom here Thursday evening, a clip of Marco Rubio launching his campaign on the promise that "yesterday is over" played on the television screens around the room. Then, the screens quickly cut to a message welcoming everyone to the Prescott Bush awards dinner, named for the late grandfather of Jeb Bush, Rubio's likely presidential rival and a man seen by many as an implicit target of Rubio's generation-centric rhetoric on the campaign trail. In his 25-minute speech at the fundraising dinner for the state GOP named after the former Connecticut senator and Bush family icon, Rubio never once mentioned the Bush name. But the elephant in the room was not lost on the crowd. "It is interesting because it's Jeb Bush's grandfather and now it's a guy running against him who also happens to be from Florida," said Jay Sheehy of Stratford. Rubio had ventured into the heart of a state where the Bush family has deep roots. Still, the crowd was mostly welcoming, applauding at several points in his speech. As he does often on the campaign trail, Rubio started by mentioning his parents, who came to the United States from Cuba. He called for a muscular national security strategy, slammed President Obama's signature health-care law and took a swipe at the Clintons for making millions from paid speeches, among other things. Like former Florida governor Bush, whose father and brother were president, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton is also seen as a target of Rubio's "new generation" argument. "The time has come for a new generation of leaders to guide us in our transition from the past we are so proud of to the exciting future that awaits our country," Rubio said. He also cited John F. Kennedy's famous line from his inauguration speech: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." "The truth is that for far too long, leaders in both parties have asked for your vote on the promise of what our government can do for you," said Rubio. "But I'm asking for your vote on the promise of what together we can do for America." The Prescott Bush dinner is state GOP's largest annual event. Jeb Bush keynoted the dinner in 2014. Tickets for this year's event ranged from $199 to $5,000. As the donors gathered inside the hotel ballroom to hear Rubio speak, about three dozen demonstrators lined up outside to protest the Florida senator's position on immigration. "Up up with liberation, down down with deportation!" they chanted about 45 minutes before the dinner as a uniformed officer looked on and black cars pulled up to the hotel. Some held up signs labeling Rubio the "anti-immigrant." Rubio pushed a sweeping immigration reform bill that included a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in 2013 before backing away from it. He's faced criticism from both conservative and liberal activists on immigration. Rubio now favors a piecemeal approach to reform that prioritizes border security and enforcing current laws. Rubio will campaign in Idaho on Friday. On Saturday, he will make his second appearance in Iowa since announcing his campaign in April. Carol Way of Fairfield, Conn., said she has been impressed by both Bush and Rubio. But Rubio has to prove himself to her, she said, citing an infamous moment from his 2013 State of the Union response. "I was one of the ones that watched the water bottle thing," she said. *Rubio: Hillary, Dems will struggle to convince Americans they’re about the future <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/4/marco-rubio-hillary-clinton-dems-will-struggle/> // The Washington Times // David Sherfinski – June 4, 2015* Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Democrats are going to struggle to convince Americans they’re part of a movement about the future, as he continues to fine-tune his pitch for a “new generation of leadership” in the country. “I believe Hillary Clinton and her whole party, for the most part, is going to struggle to convince Americans that they are a movement about the future,” Mr. Rubio, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate, said Thursday on Fox News’ “Outnumbered” program. Asked if he thought Mrs. Clinton, 67, is too old to be president, Mr. Rubio, 44, said it doesn’t have anything to do with a person’s age, but rather “the age of their ideas.” “So we have all these people out there today struggling to get ahead — the answer cannot be ‘we’re going to raise the minimum wage by a couple bucks,’” he said. “Ten dollars and 10 cents doesn’t solve the problem for someone. “We need to figure out how can we help people that are making nine dollars an hour to make 30 dollars an hour?” he continued. “And the only way that’s going to happen is if you have an economy that produces that $30-an-hour job and that person has the skills that that job requires. And the answer to both of those questions today is no.” In a videotaped message earlier in the week to an economic forum hosted by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, Mr. Rubio had criticized “outdated leaders” and said the time has come for a “new generation of leaders.” Other 40-somethings who are either running for president or are seriously considering runs on the Republican side include Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, 44, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, 47, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, 43. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is running, is 52, as is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is laying the groundwork for a possible bid. One of Mr. Rubio’s top GOP rivals could be former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, 62, who spoke in person at the forum and said he didn’t think the comments were directed at him. “It’s kind of hard to imagine that my good friend Marco would be critical of his good friend Jeb,” Mr. Bush told reporters with a smile, according to the New York Times. Mr. Rubio, for his part, also offered praise for the GOP field, which grew larger Thursday with the addition of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. “I always tell people as a Republican, I’m glad that we have so many good candidates. The Democrats are struggling to come up with one,” Mr. Rubio said. “So I think it’s great that we have so many good candidates — I believe this field is going to produce the next president, potentially the next vice president, maybe a future president, and cabinet officers. And we’re going to have a vibrant, spirited primary where that … competition is going to drive excellence and ultimately give us a stronger nominee.” “These are quality people that are going to be well-financed and have a good message — we agree on a lot of issues; we have some differences. We’ll talk about those. But I think from a competitive process like this, you get a better nominee — someone who’s been tested, someone who’s had to spend time working with people to fine-tune both their ideas and their delivery and I think competition drives excellence, so it’s a good thing,” he said. *Marco Rubio just made another confusing comment about his Middle East policy <http://www.businessinsider.com/marco-rubios-confusing-comment-about-iraq-nation-building-2015-6> // Business Insider // Hunter Walker – June 4, 2015 * Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) offered a somewhat confusing explanation of his Iraq policy in an appearance on Fox News' "Outnumbered" on Thursday. Rubio seemed to express support for US troops being present in Iraq, but he maintained this did not represent the controversial "nation-building" philosophy that led to a protracted American military presence in that country following the US invasion in 2003. However, while insisting he doesn't advocate "nation-building," Rubio seemed to define his policy as exactly that. "It’s not nation-building. We are assisting them in building their nation," Rubio said of his vision for Iraq. Watch a video of Rubio's remark below. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPrHm_zyWzw The exchange began when a host asked Rubio whether he agrees with other Republican presidential candidates who have criticized the extended presence of US military troops in that country. He began by explaining that America "can't build a democracy" in Iraq, but could help the country with practical matters like infrastructure that might help them "govern" long term. The host responded by saying he seemed to be expressing support for "nation-building." This query provoked Rubio's claim that he's not calling for "nation-building" in Iraq and is instead talking about "assisting them in building their nation." His campaign did not immediately respond to an email from Business Insider asking them to clarify how that is any different from "nation-building." After making his seemingly contradictory statement about "nation-building," the senator went on to explain why he believes the US has a "vested interest" in helping Iraqis govern their country. "The alternative to not doing that is the chaos we have now," he said. He argued that President Barack Obama's administration supported former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has been criticized for trying to consolidate power in the country among his fellow Shias while leaving out Sunni Muslims. Rubio said this behavior by al-Maliki facilitated the rise of the jihadist group Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Iraq. "What happened in Iraq under this administration is they rallied around Maliki. Maliki was a Shia leader who used his power to go after Sunnis," Rubio explained. "That created the environment that was conducive for ISIS to come back in and cause all these problems." The US-led war in that country proved extremely unpopular and questions about the government's handling of Iraq have come up on the campaign trail for both the Republicans and Democrats who are aiming to win the White House in 2016. These questions have been fueled by the fact ISIS gained a foothold in Iraq following US troop withdrawal. Last year, the US military launched operations aimed at wiping the group out. Rubio's comments on "nation-building" are the third instance where he has seemingly stumbled while discussing Iraq. As CNN has noted, Rubio, who has made foreign policy expertise a cornerstone of his campaign, has been "vague" about whether he'd support committing ground troops to fight ISIS. And last month, in an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations, Rubio said he would not have supported the decision to invade Iraq, which was an apparent reversal from multiple prior comments he made in support of the war. *KASICH* *The 2016 campaign’s new straight shooter: John Kasich <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/06/04/the-2016-campaigns-new-straight-shooter-john-kasich/> // WaPo // Amber Phillips – June 4, 2015 * John Kasich is quickly becoming the most quotable candidate in the 2016 field. The two-term Ohio governor told the Washington Post's Dan Balz and Robert Costa that he'll consider jumping into the race at the end of this month (and allies think he'll run). This would be his second time running for president; he entered the 2000 GOP primary, then quickly bowed out because his campaign didn't go anywhere. “I didn’t get scared out, I got destroyed out,” he told Balz recently. “I had no money and no oxygen." See what we mean? Balz, who has interviewed Kasich several times in recent years, describes his conversation style this way: Kasich spews out current initiatives and ideas for new ones at a rapid pace, often shifting from one thought to another mid-sentence. Here are more of Kasich's straight-shooter quotes. (For the record, The Fix urges all politicians to be this blunt.) On whether he's going to gain traction this time around: "Either I got it, or I don't." -- At a May 1, 2015 Christian Science Monitor breakfast On the all-important first nominating state of Iowa: “I haven’t been to Iowa." -- Washington Post interview, May 27, 2015 Actually, Kasich has a lot to say on Iowa -- all of it entertaining. On whether he'd run for 2016, in a September 2014 editorial board meeting with Ohio's Youngstown Vindicator: "Honestly, I just don’t see it. I tried it once. You come with me. You can go with me out to Iowa. You wouldn’t believe it. You’d never go to Iowa again." Oops. More on Iowa, in an October 2014 interview with Dan Balz: "I blew this one,” he said of the Vindicator comment. “I like the people of Iowa. ... I never liked the system they had where you had to pay to park your RV in a parking lot. I wasn’t here to insult the people of Iowa. (This is a reference to the Iowa straw poll, where prime real estate will cost your campaign.) That wasn't the only time Kasich's blunt rhetoric has gotten him into trouble. In 2011, he had to apologize to a Columbus traffic cop who gave him a ticket. Kasich called him "an idiot." And earlier this year Kentucky lawmakers demanded an apology from Kasich when he held a joint press conference with Democratic Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear and bashed state lawmakers there for not wanting to toll a cross-border bridge between the two states. Kasich, as quoted inthe Cincinnati Business Courier: "At the end of the day, he (Beshear) can't force a group of legislators who want to put their heads in the sand to go forward and do something that needs to be done. He needs help from all of you," Kasich told business leaders in the room. From the podium, Kasich randomly shouted out to "Tommy" a couple of times – North American Properties president Tom Williams. Kasich is a bit of an odd duck in the Republican Party. As governor of Ohio, he expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and promoted federal social programs to help low-income residents. He also expressed resignation after voters rebuked his move to rein in the collective bargaining rights of unions. In an interview with Robert Costa in February, Kasich acknowledged his uniqueness: “It's pretty hard to peg me." More on the issues. Kasich is officially for marriage "between a man and a woman," but said he'll uphold as president whatever the Supreme Court decides. "I have a number of friends who are gay. I like them," he said at the May 1 Christian Science Monitor breakfast. At the same breakfast, Kasich on the question of the moment for GOP candidates of -- whether he'd attend a friend's or relative's gay wedding: "I don't usually go to weddings of people that I don't know, okay? I don't go to 'em. But if somebody that I like is getting married in the traditional sense or in the non-traditional sense, I'm not hung up about it. I'll be celebrating with them." More on how his views don't quite align with Republican Party: "I’ve always said the party is my vehicle and not my master,” he told Balz and Costa this May. In the same interview, Kasich said if he runs, it won't be away from his record: " If people are bored by it, well, they’ll have to put up with it while I give them the résumé. They need to know.” But in November 2011, when Ohio voters overwhelmingly voted to repeal a law he supported to limit collective bargaining rights, Kasich was humble about his loss: "If you don’t win and the people speak ... you have to pay attention to what they’re saying." Kasich also thinks young people don't focus enough on politics. (He's probably right.) “Instead of young people talking about Justin Bieber or how bad the Grammys were, maybe we could get people talking about Washington, Madison and Monroe, and have a renewal of American history," he told Costa in February. Kasich launches some pretty blunt attacks at his GOP competitors. He's focused his criticism so far on the frontrunner, Jeb Bush, who most analysts see him competing against for establishment-minded voters. On Bush's nonprofit and super PAC, "Right to Rise": "I don’t know anything about [Bush’s theme]. I really don’t. I’ve never listened to him. What’s “Right to Rise”? Getting up in the morning?” he said in May. And as to why he's campaigning in New Hampshire this week: Kasich is also plain-spoken when it comes to foreign policy. The former congressman probably is best described as a hawk who has called for sending troops to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Kasich, on the Hugh Hewitt radio show in April, on peace in the Middle East: "People who think that there is a solution are naïve." On Obama's much-maligned nuclear deal with Iran, at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast: Obama is "so in love" with the idea. It's like, Kasich said, "You're so hungry to get that car you'll pay anything for it." Kasich doesn't take himself too seriously, though. His philosophy on life on the Hugh Hewitt show: "You know what? Everybody needs to take a deep breath and have a little fun once in a while, huh?" We couldn't agree more, Mr. Kasich. *Kasich makes favorable impression on the influential in New Hampshire <http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/06/04/Kasich_in_NH.html> // The Columbus Dispatch // Darrell Rowland – June 4, 2015 * Renee Plummer wanted to pin down exactly what time Ohio Gov. John Kasich and his entourage were coming to her condo Thursday evening for a private dinner. She was ordering fried clams and filet mignon for the 18 or so guests, so she needed a firm commitment. But it’s Plummer’s commitment Kasich and other Republican presidential hopefuls are seeking. While Kasich didn’t quite win that Thursday, he did get glowing praise from a woman regarded as highly influential in New Hampshire politics. Earlier in the day Kasich was the ninth possible presidential candidate that she hosted for a luncheon with nearly 50 business leaders in a conference room near her office next to the airport. And in this Plummer Primary he did what he must do time and time again in coming months if he is to become a serious presidential candidate: Win converts. “I knew this was going to happen,” Plummer said after the lunch. “People who were walking out (after Kasich’s 52-minute talk) who thought they were with somebody else said ‘I love this guy.’ “They stopped me. It was like, ‘All right, you know what? He’s like my No. 1.’ They thought they were all set before they saw him.” And Plummer wasn’t the least bit surprised. “I said, ‘Told you.’ He’s real. He’s a real person. He’s smart. ... I’ve been telling everybody, wait until you hear this guy speak.” The business roundtable was Kasich’s only public event Thursday, but he also campaigned behind the scenes aside from the dinner with Renee and Danny Plummer’s place. Just before Plummer’s luncheon, for instance, he gave an interview to National Public Radio. But perhaps the most important get-together of the day came with former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu, patriarch of the state’s leading GOP family. Kasich’s campaign committee already is backed by his son, former U.S. Sen. John H. Sununu, which Danny Plummer said is very notable. Kasich was accompanied by Franklin County Republican Chairman Doug Preisse as well as his campaign committee’s top two leaders in New Hampshire: consultant Bruce Berke and state director Paul Collins, who worked for both Sununus. Renee Plummer — who also praised the performance of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former executive Carly Fiorina at her roundtables — said she appreciates the fact that Kasich talks about working with Democrats rather than attacking them. The Ohio governor raised eyebrows during a question-and-answer period following his roundtable speech by saying that any GOP presidential hopeful who thinks the party can topple Hillary Clinton by emphasizing the Republicans’ familiar message about her questionable dealings is dead wrong. “We are not going to beat Hillary Clinton on the basis of Benghazi and emails and the Clinton Foundation,” Kasich said. “You know how you win? You better have a bigger vision as to how Americans feel that America’s going to be better for them. And how they’re going to play a role in it. And how the American Dream is not dead.” While bashing Clinton and President Barack Obama may win applause from GOP partisans, “That’s hitting it in the cheap seats. That’s not what’s going to change this country.” It was merely the latest deviation from the party line for Kasich, seeking to make an impact in a presidential race where he is little known. Thursday morning, Hotline dubbed him the “Most Interesting Man in the Field” and moved him up to No. 7 with an “up” arrow in its new GOP presidential power rankings. Thursday afternoon, a much-watched Washington Post blog called him “the 2016 campaign’s new straight shooter.” Kasich declined to criticize specific candidates in the GOP field, praising former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who entered the race Thursday. However, he did refer to the underwhelming performance of Bush to explain his serious consideration of running. “I just thought that Jeb was going to suck all the air from the room. It hasn’t happened. No hit on you Jeb!” Kasich told the business crowd. And he took a jab at GOP ideologues in the race. “If you think that somebody can get elected president, and go down to Washington and change that city without understanding how it works, it will not happen. It will not happen,” Kasich said. “It cannot be done with some strict ideology and without understanding how you get other people in the other political party to support your efforts.” The governor said his effort is hitting internal organizational and fundraising goals, and “we’r e getting closer and closer to making the final conclusion” on whether he will officially launch his campaign. He could be the final major entrant into the contest. But in a line he repeats often, Kasich said he would be as content spending time on his back porch with his family as he would running for president. “I’m playing for a bigger game than that, which is really my eternal salvation, (which) is what matters to me. I think I’ve got it.” *OTHER* *GOP hopefuls fight for post-launch poll bounce <http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/243977-gop-hopefuls-fight-for-post-launch-poll-bounce> // The Hill // Jonathan Easley – June 4, 2015 * Republican presidential candidates entering one of the most crowded primary races in recent history are hoping to get a big bounce from their campaign launches. Each of the nine candidates in the race so far has fought to win attention from social and traditional media when jumping into the race — but not everyone has been successful. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) jumped to the top of the pack after his announcement, while Sen. Rand Paul’s (Ky.) approval ratings stayed relatively stable after his. Some big names — former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — have yet to enter the race. And for others, it is too early to tell. Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) joined the fight this week, while former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.) and former New York Gov. George Pataki got in the GOP race last week. Here is a look at how each Republican presidential candidate has fared in the wake of their announcements. Marco Rubio Rubio has had the best bounce from his campaign launch. As recently as March 31, Rubio was buried in the polls, sitting in seventh place with only 5 percent support, according to the RealClearPolitics (RCP) average. After announcing his candidacy on April 13, he saw his numbers double, and the lift has yet to fade. He now tops the GOP field with 14 percent, according to the latest CNN/ORC poll released on Tuesday. Rubio was already rising before his campaign launch in Miami, as influential conservative pundits lauded him as a next-generation candidate with unmatched rhetorical skills. He had already risen to 7.3 percent, according to the RCP average, the day of his announcement. Since then, he’s underlined his status as a top-tier contender. Ben Carson Carson had seen his support erode in the weeks leading up to his announcement; he arrived in his hometown of Detroit on May 4 taking only 5 percent. That placed him eighth. But the media attention surrounding his campaign launch has helped his polling numbers. He stands at 9.5 percent — good for fourth place — according to the latest RCP average. A Fox News poll released in mid-May showed Carson tied for first with Bush. Carson’s launch energized his base; his supporters are flooding his campaign with small-dollar donations and helping him to build a substantial election fund. Although he trails Rubio, he might be the Republican candidate with the best chance of locking up the conservative vote in the primary. Ted Cruz Cruz also enjoyed a sizable boost in polls after his announcement on March 23. Unfortunately for the Tea Party senator from Texas, his numbers haven’t remained elevated like Rubio’s and Carson’s have. According to the RCP average, Cruz sat at 4.6 percent on the day of his announcement, burying him in eighth place. Less than one month later, Cruz peaked at 11.3 percent — trailing only Walker and Bush. Cruz got a jump on the GOP field, becoming the first presidential contender to enter the race with a direct appeal to evangelical conservatives at Liberty University, the nation’s largest Christian college. Cruz had a full two weeks to himself as the GOP’s lone candidate, and his aggression was rewarded by a tremendous lift in the polls. Cruz’s early announcement helped him draw in conservative backers. His support among those who identify as “very conservative” shot up from 11 percent in March to 33 percent in April, according to a survey from Public Policy Polling. But as other candidates have entered the race, particularly Carson and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Cruz has seen his polling bump fade. He’s currently at 8.2 percent, according to the RCP average, and has fallen back into seventh place. Mike Huckabee Huckabee’s presidential announcement helped him put an end to what had been a prolonged slide in the polls. In early March, when the polls are largely driven by name ID, Huckabee was near the top of the field with 13.3 percent, according to RealClearPolitics. On May 5, when Huckabee launched his campaign from his hometown of Hope, Ark., he had slid into sixth place with 7.5 percent. Huckabee has seen a modest uptick in since. He is currently in fifth place with 9.3 percent. That’s not as much of an uptick as some candidates received, perhaps because Huckabee entered an already crowded race. Rand Paul Paul got almost no bump from his campaign launch. The Kentucky Republican became the second presidential candidate to enter the GOP race on April 7, hitting the launch button in a well-received event in Louisville, Ky. At the time, Paul was polling in the middle of the pack, taking 8.7 percent and sitting in fifth place, per RCP. After the launch, he ticked up to the 9.5 percent range, and fourth place in the polls. The lack of a bounce might be because of his messy launch, which was overcome by a high-profile dust-up with NBC “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie the day after his announcement. Video of Paul chastising and talking over Guthrie went viral, and he spent the rest of the week having to explain himself. The libertarian will look for a second wind after campaigning heavily on his Patriot Act talkathon. Carly Fiorina Fiorina was the first candidate not to launch with a major event, opting instead to announce on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on May 4. She hails from a deep blue state and lacks a clearly defined base of support, never having won political office. At the time, she barely registered in the national polls. Still, Fiorina has earned rave reviews on the campaign trail for her fiery speeches and aggressive attacks against Republicans’ likely opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton. But nothing has changed for Fiorina in the polls. She consistently pulls only 1 percent, despite benefitting from outsized media coverage in places like the Drudge Report. *Poll: Which Republican Presidential Candidate Should Democrats Fear Most? <http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/poll-gop-candidate-democrats-fear-most-20150605> // National Journal // Sara Mimms – June 5, 2015* 'Jeb can better battle Hillary for the center and exploit her pandering to the Warren faction.' Q: Which Republican presidential candidate should Democrats fear most? Jeb Bush: 37% Marco Rubio: 29% Scott Walker: 5% John Kasich: 13% Rand Paul: 4% Mike Huckabee: 2% Ben Carson: 0% Chris Christie: 0% Ted Cruz: 0% Carly Fiorina: 0% Jeb Bush "He's the one who can unify his party at the end of the day and win swing voters in November 2016." "If he can get through the primaries, he has the most crossover appeal to moderates and undecideds. He would also make great inroads with Hispanic voters." "He'll have the deep-pocket Republican establishment behind him. Rubio a close second." Marco Rubio "He's young, handsome, has charisma. Thank God he is not nearly as good a candidate as Obama was." "Rubio is likable, dynamic, and has a great story to tell, and he tells it well. He can connect. His earnest, youthful contrast to [Hillary Clinton] is worrisome." "Broadest appeal and most different from Hillary. Represents [the] fresh / new." Scott Walker "Probably the best politician in the group. Also the least likely to be a good president if he wins." "Danger is Scott Walker could bore the electorate to victory." Q: Which Republican presidential candidate should Democrats fear most? REPUBLICANS (56 VOTES) Marco Rubio: 43% Jeb Bush: 21% John Kasich: 12% Scott Walker: 9% Chris Christie: 7% Ben Carson: 2% Ted Cruz: 2% Carly Fiorina: 2% Rand Paul: 2% Mike Huckabee: 0% Marco Rubio "He represents a significant turning of the page for the GOP and has the potential to appeal to Hispanics and millennials in ways the others can't." "A powerful combination of personal story and great ability to inspire. It's up to his campaign to see how far he can go." "He is a natural campaigner that will fare well with the independents." Jeb Bush "Will keep GOP base, while getting more Latino votes than his brother." "Jeb can better battle Hillary for the center and exploit her pandering to the Warren faction." John Kasich "Experienced, centered, Ohio, with little baggage. Perfect matchup with Clinton." Scott Walker "Midwest governor who turned blue state red, beat public-sector unions three times at polls, and made Wisconsin a right-to-work state. That's a tough hombre." Chris Christie "If he runs and survives the primary, his tell-it-like-it-is persona will be perfected, and he rivals Bill Clinton in terms of charisma. Hillary can't compete." *TOP NEWS* *DOMESTIC* *The number of Fortune 500 companies led by women is at an all-time high: 5 percent <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/04/the-number-of-fortune-500-companies-led-by-women-is-at-an-all-time-high-5-percent/?tid=sm_tw> // WaPo // Ana Swanson – June 4, 2015 * Female leaders in the Fortune 500 had another record year. This year’s Fortune 500 list “ties the record (set last year) for highest number of female CEOs with 24, including Mary Barra (General Motors), Meg Whitman (Hewlett-Packard), Ginny Rometty (IBM) and more.” So reads the press release about the new list of America’s 500 largest companies by revenue, which was published this morning. But there's a less charitable way to look at this new. The number of female CEOs of America’s most influential companies is stuck at a 5 percent, as it was the year before. While women make up 45 percent of the labor force of the S&P 500, few are climbing to the very top. Catalyst, http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-sp-500-companies That said, there has been progress. In 1998, just one woman led a Fortune 500 company. By 2009, the figure had risen to 15, but then it fell to 12 in 2011 before doubling to 24 in 2014. Among American companies overall, the percentage of female CEOs is slightly higher: about 15 percent, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on women in the workplace. The percentage of women on U.S. corporate boards has been stuck at around 17 percent for almost a decade. There are various arguments for bringing more women into the highest levels of corporate power. Some say it’s a moral issue, while others stress that more diverse viewpoints bring better governance. But the most persuasive argument may be the simplest one. When you draw from a smaller pool of people, you miss out on a lot of talent. Women are 50.8 percent of the population. Would you rather select your executive team from a pool of 100 people, or from 49? Bringing more women into the workforce has already added a lot to the American economy. Consultancy McKinsey calculates that the additional productive power of women entering the workforce between 1970 to today accounts for about a quarter of the size of the U.S. economy. *Most Americans back legal status for undocumented immigrants <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/poll-americans-support-undocumented-immigrants-legal-status-118639.html> // Politico // Nick Gass – June 4, 2015 * More than seven in 10 Americans say undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the United States legally, as long as they meet certain requirements, according to a new Pew Research Center survey released Thursday. A majority — 72 percent — say that immigrants should be allowed to legally remain in the country, including 80 percent of Democrats, 76 percent of independents and 56 percent of Republicans. Of those 72 percent, 42 percent say they should be allowed to apply for citizenship, while 26 percent would allow for permanent residency. Just 27 percent responded that they should not be allowed to stay. A majority of Republicans support allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in the U.S., but 58 percent see giving them a path to legal status as a reward for doing something that is against the law. Only 23 percent of Democrats and 33 percent of independents surveyed feel that way. And Republicans and leaners aren’t happy with the way their party is dealing with the issue. Just 34 percent say the GOP is doing a good job, with 59 percent in disagreement. By contrast, 51 percent of Democrats think their party is doing well on the issue, with 34 percent dissatisfied. Additionally, 63 percent of Republicans surveyed said immigrants are a burden on the country, compared to 27 percent who called them a strength. Overall, 51 percent said immigrants strengthen the country, compared to 41 percent who said they do not. As far as legal immigration goes, a plurality of 39 percent said it should stay at current levels, while 31 percent say it should be decreased and 24 percent want more. According to Pew, the share of Americans favoring less legal immigration has not declined in the last two years, though it has gone down in the past decade. Just 37 percent approve of President Barack Obama’s handling of immigration, while 65 percent disapprove. The poll was conducted May 12-18 among 2,002 adults nationwide via landlines and cellphones, carrying an overall margin of error of 2.5 percentage points. Among 506 Republicans, the margin of error is plus or minus 5 percentage points; among 636 Democrats, it is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points; among 758 independents, it is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. *Senate Dems ready to blockade all spending bills <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/senate-democrats-to-block-spending-bills-118641.html> // Politico // Rachel Bade & John Bresnahan – June 4, 2015 * Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is plotting to block GOP spending bills — an attempt to force Republicans to the negotiating table and hasten a deal to raise strict spending caps. At a closed-door Democratic leadership meeting Tuesday night, Reid (D-Nev.) vowed that his caucus wouldn’t allow a single appropriations bill to get a floor vote, sources familiar with the meeting say. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of Reid’s top lieutenants, told their House counterparts that they’re asking colleagues to filibuster and prevent Republicans from even calling up the spending measures. “We will not vote to proceed to the Defense appropriations bill or any appropriations bills until Republicans have sat down at the table and figured out with us how we’re going to properly fund the Defense Department … and our families’ domestic needs,” Schumer said Thursday at a news conference disclosing the strategy. Republicans in both chambers are working on spending bills that give the Pentagon more money, skirting 2011 spending caps by tucking the money into a war fund. But President Barack Obama and the Democrats want dollar-for-dollar funding boosts for domestic priorities like education and transportation programs, too — and they’re betting that gumming up the appropriations process will force the GOP to make a deal. The plan, if executed correctly, would deliver a huge blow to the Senate’s fledgling Republican majority, barring it from completing one of its top legislative priorities. The GOP has prioritized a return to “regular order” — where all 12 appropriations bills are individually scrutinized and passed on the floor — as a way to demonstrate Republicans can govern effectively with control of both chambers. They want to avoid funding the government with a series of stop-gap continuing resolutions and last-minute legislating. And while many Republicans are also interested in raising the spending caps eventually — though not until much, much later in the year — they’d hoped to clear GOP appropriations bills first, which would have given them bragging rights, at the very least. Obama has promised to veto their appropriations measures, but the latest Democratic strategy means those bills wouldn’t even make it to his desk. “Every day that goes by without an agreement to replace sequestration in a responsible way is a day that makes it tougher,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), calling GOP insistence on moving their own spending bills a “waste of time.” She and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) took a full two months to hammer out the first agreement to lift the caps in 2013, she said, a pact that many lawmakers hope can be recreated this year. “It’s getting us, every day, closer to a meltdown.” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said some kind of Democratic stand is necessary to “reinforce the president’s veto threat and … compel a negotiation over the future of the budget.” Republicans will no doubt call Democrats obstructionists, accusing them of flirting with a government shutdown. But Democrats are already playing defense, suggesting at a Thursday news conference that refusing to move to a deal immediately would hurt military families and veterans. They argue the ball is in the GOP’s court. “[T]he onus will be on Republicans to come to the table,” a senior Democratic aide said. Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. is pursued by the media as he departs a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, June 2, 2015, where officials and families of 9-11 victims called for the 28 classified pages of the 9-11 report to be declassified. Paul has been voicing his dissent in the Senate against a House bill backed by the president that would end the National Security Agency's collection of American calling records while preserving other surveillance authorities. Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois told POLITICO that he and leadership had not whipped the count yet to ensure the entire party was on board, and when asked whether it would be easy to do so, Durbin responded with a terse, “No — nothing’s easy.” But Democratic leaders already have a number of key Senate Democrats lined up, including former Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, who still leads the panel for the left. “I want to put the chairman on notice: The president will veto bills at this allocation, and Democrats will vote against motions to proceed to these bills on the Senate floor,” the Maryland Democrat warned at a recent spending mark-up. “We need a sequel to Murray-Ryan, and we need it sooner rather than later ” Senate Armed Services ranking member Jack Reed stood with leadership at the Thursday news conference, suggesting the defense-minded Rhode Island Democrat also backs the strategy. And Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, another Democrat with a keen eye for military needs, says she’s in. “I certainly am inclined to vote against [the motion] to proceed to appropriations that’s going to damage our military permanently by not dealing with the base budget needs,” she said. “The appropriations bill is really where the fight will come.” Across the Rotunda, House Democrats under Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are also playing offense. Though chamber rules don’t allow them to muck up the process like the Senate can, the California Democrat also promised at Tuesday night’s meeting that Democrats would continue to oppose House appropriations bills in large swaths to ensure Republicans cannot claim they have a veto-proof majority. She also suggested that Democrats need to push for revenue increases to offset a portion of the cost associated with raising spending caps. “What we have done is come together with a unified message of the folly of this budget’s austerity,” said House Democratic appropriator David Price (D-N.C.). “At some point there’s going to be some sort of budget agreement … so what’s it going to take to precipitate that action?” House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, when asked whether such a strategy would quicken work toward a deal, shrugged. “I don’t know,” said the Kentucky Republican, who’s been calling for a deal to raise the caps for a few months now. “We’re going to continue with what we’re doing. We’re working at a record pace, and we’ll just have to see.” *Fracking Has Had No ‘Widespread’ Impact on Drinking Water, EPA Finds <http://www.wsj.com/articles/fracking-has-had-no-widespread-impact-on-drinking-water-epa-finds-1433433850?cb=logged0.593785903416574> // WSJ // Russell Gold & Amy Harder – June 4, 2015* A decade into an energy boom led by hydraulic fracturing, the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded there is no evidence the practice has had a “widespread, systemic impact on drinking water.” The report is the federal government’s most comprehensive examination of the issue of fracking and drinking water, and it bolsters the position staked out by the energy industry and its supporters: that fracking can be carried out safely and doesn’t need to pose a threat to water. While there have been some cases involving spills and leaking wells, the spread of fracking didn’t cause extensive damage to groundwater resources, the EPA found. The four-year study noted that there were certain “potential vulnerabilities” to water supplies that needed to be addressed, including ensuring wells are well built and wastewater is disposed of properly. “EPA’s draft study will give state regulators, tribes and local communities and industry around the country a critical resource to identify how best to protect public health and their drinking water resources,” said Thomas Burke, deputy assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Research and Development. While the report doesn’t recommend any specific action, it could reinvigorate a debate over the role of fracking in the nation’s energy landscape at a time when environmentalists have increasingly called to ban the practice outright, a step that two states with gas resources—New York and Maryland—have recently taken. Fracking remains controversial in some communities as critics of the practice have recently moved to highlight other concerns with the practice, including air emissions, community health impacts and the proliferation of earthquakes that some studies have tied to injecting fracking wastewater. Fracking involves shooting millions of gallons of water, laced with chemicals, into dense rock formations to create fractures and allow oil and natural gas to flow out. Several years ago, as fracking spread across the U.S., there were widespread fears that fracking would lead to contaminated drinking water. Many of these fears were stoked by the 2010 documentary Gasland. One of the most notable scenes showed a landowners lighting his faucet on fire. In Congress recently, the political debate over fracking has subsided. Almost all Republicans endorse fracking, and many Democratic lawmakers have increasingly been supportive as well, in large part because it has brought economic growth to their districts. The growing skepticism of fracking by the Democratic Party’s environmental base has done little to move Democrats toward that position. The EPA’s report, whose findings echo that of many Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the Obama administration, will reinforce much of the conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill about the drilling practice. *Barnard College will now accept transgender women <http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/04/pf/college/barnard-college-transgender-admissions/index.html> // CNN // Emily Jane Fox – June 4, 2015 * Barnard College announced Thursday that it will admit transgender women, a move that follows a number of women's colleges who have expanded their policies on gender identity over the last several months. Barnard, an all women's college in New York affiliated with Columbia University, said its board voted to consider admissions for applicants who "consistently live and identify as women, regardless of the gender assigned to them at birth." This will go into effect for those applying in the fall of 2016. The policy does not apply to transgender men, who were born female and identified as male when they applied, though the college said it will continue to support and enroll those who transition to males after they have already been admitted. Before now, Barnard did not have an official policy on transgender students or applicants. The decision was made after a year-long discussion on campus, consisting of five town halls and a virtual forum that collected more than 900 responses. From the conversations and feedback, a statement from the college said two things were made clear: "There was no question that Barnard must reaffirm its mission as a college for women. And there was little debate that trans women should be eligible for admission to Barnard." Barnard's announcement comes as a spate of women's colleges across the country have reached similar decisions, amidst a national dialogue about transgender issues. Last fall, Mount Holyoke College announced it would admit "any qualified student who is female or identifies as a women." This means that it admits those who were born female and identify as female, those who were born male and identify as female, and, in a step further than Barnard, those who were born female and identify as male. The school also clarifies that it admits those who were born female and don't identify as either a man or woman. In February, Bryn Mawr College adopted a policy that is much like Barnard's new policy, admitting those who were born male but identify as female at the time of application. Wellesley College came to a similar decision in March, as did Smith College in May. *As Supreme Court Obamacare case looms, Republicans split on response <http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0OK2LU20150604?irpc=932> // Reuters // Susan Cornwell & Caroline Humer – June 4, 2015* U.S. Republicans face a potential political backlash from voters if the Supreme Court rules soon against President Barack Obama's healthcare law, and are split over what to do about it, with some calling on the Obama administration for help. But the White House, perhaps sensing a chance to blame Republicans for trouble, is showing no outward signs of crafting a contingency plan in case of an adverse outcome in King v. Burwell, expected to be ruled on by the end of this month. The outcome could mean millions of Americans, many of them Republicans, would lose their Obamacare health insurance coverage. One of them might be Rosel Ettress, of Chicago. A daycare center manager and mother of three, Ettress could lose $250 a month in tax subsidies that help her afford the premiums for her insurance under 2010's Affordable Care Act. She said in a telephone interview that this would be a blow and she urged Republicans and Democrats in Congress to act. "I would like for Congress to come up with a way to fix this where everyone could still get the subsidies and still save a little money in the process," she said. King v. Burwell is the result of a lawsuit brought by anti-Obamacare libertarian activists. Ordinarily, Republicans might be expected to cheer for a ruling damaging to Obamacare, which the party has opposed since its passage. But there are many Republicans among the 6.4 million low- and middle-income Americans who get Obamacare premium subsidies in 34 states. If those Americans lost their coverage as a result of the case, who would they blame at the polls in 2016? REPUBLICANS DIVIDED Republicans in Congress have been working on post-King v. Burwell plans for months, but still can not decide what to do. Some favor extending the Obamacare subsidies long enough to protect people like Ettress for a time and prevent them from possibly seeking revenge on the party. In another approach, the Republican Study Committee, a group of some 170 House of Representatives conservatives, on Thursday proposed a model for a longer-term replacement for Obamacare. But the group's chairman, Representative Bill Flores, said it would not offer an interim plan for the immediate aftermath of King v. Burwell, in part because members can not agree on whether to temporarily extend the Obamacare subsidies. "I will not vote to extend the subsidies unless the president is willing to sit down with us and do the things to reduce the overall cost of the premiums," said Representative Austin Scott, a member of the committee, at a news conference. In the Senate, there was rising Republican anxiety about what might need to be done in the wake of King v. Burwell. Twenty-one of 24 Republicans who are running for re-election to the Senate next year are from states on the federal exchange, Healthcare.gov, which King v. Burwell specifically targets and from which the court could make the subsidies disappear. "Millions have grown accustomed to those subsidies and we're gonna have to replace them" if the court nixes them, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona told Reuters earlier this week. One of the senators running for re-election in 2016, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, has 31 co-sponsors including McCain for his bill to extend the Obamacare subsidies through August 2017. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, a Senate Republican leader, this week said Obama should step in. "The president made the mess. He doesn't seem to be a willing partner to work with in finding solutions to the mess he's made," Barrasso said. White House officials said they have no Plan B if the Court rules against the administration. "If the Supreme Court were to throw the health care system in this country into utter chaos, there would be no easy solutions for solving that problem,” spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday. *INTERNATIONAL* *House could be forced to debate war against ISIL <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/house-war-debate-isil-118651.html#ixzz3c7Qn1Fun> // Politico // Bryan Bender – June 4, 2015 * Rep. Jim McGovern, calling Congress “the poster child for cowardice,” is taking advantage of an obscure provision to force the House to debate the 10-month-old war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The Massachusetts Democrat took to the House floor Thursday to introduce a bipartisan resolution under the provisions of the War Powers Resolution, which would require a full debate within 15 days on whether U.S. troops should withdraw from Iraq and Syria. He cited the Congress’ failure to authorize the U.S.-led air campaign against the militant group, along with some 3,000 military advisers to help train Iraqi troops. “Frankly speaking, this is unacceptable,” McGovern said, saying that if the Congress “doesn’t have the stomach” to authorize the war it should vote to bring U.S. forces home. His resolution is co-sponsored by Reps. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). “This House appears to have no problem sending our uniformed men and women into harm’s way. It appears to have no problem spending billions of dollars for the arms, equipment and airpower to carry out these wars. But it just can’t bring itself to step up to the plate and take responsibility for these wars,” McGovern said in prepared remarks. “Congress is the poster child for cowardice.” “Just yesterday Gen. John Allen, the U.S. envoy for the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIL, said that this fight may take ‘a generation or more,’” McGovern went on. “If we are going to invest a generation or more of our blood and our treasure in this war, then shouldn’t Congress at least debate whether or not to authorize it?” “Every single hour the taxpayers of the United States are paying $3.42 million for military actions against the Islamic State. $3.42 million every hour,” he declared. The War Powers Resolution requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action. It also requires the troops be brought home after 90 days without without an authorization of the use of military force or a declaration of war — a requirement that has largely been ignored over the decades since it was adopted after the Vietnam War. An aide described the procedure McGovern is relying on to force such a debate this way: “The way it works, the clock would start tomorrow and there would then be 15 calendar days for the House Foreign Affairs Committee to act. If they fail to act, the resolution can then be brought up for a vote once it has ‘ripened’ the week of June 22, specifically on the first day of session that week, June 23.” At the urging of members of both parties, President Barack Obama sent Congress a proposed authorization for the use of military force in February, but due to deep disagreements in both parties neither the House nor Senate has taken action. Jones, who represents Fort Bragg, cited in his floor remarks Thursday Congress’ war making authority in the Constitution. “The House has a responsibility to the men and women in uniform and the American people,” he said. *China suspected in massive breach of federal personnel data <http://news.yahoo.com/us-officials-massive-breach-federal-personnel-data-210302099--politics.html> // AP // Ken Dilanian and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar – June 4, 2015 * China-based hackers are suspected of breaking into the computer networks of the U.S. government personnel office and stealing identifying information of at least 4 million federal workers, American officials said Thursday. The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that data from the Office of Personnel Management and the Interior Department had been compromised. "The FBI is conducting an investigation to identify how and why this occurred," the statement said. The hackers were believed to be based in China, said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican. Collins, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said the breach was "yet another indication of a foreign power probing successfully and focusing on what appears to be data that would identify people with security clearances." A U.S. official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the data breach, said it could potentially affect every federal agency. One key question is whether intelligence agency employee information was stolen. Former government employees are affected as well. "This is an attack against the nation," said Ken Ammon, chief strategy officer of Xceedium, who said the attack fit the pattern of those carried out by nation states for the purpose of espionage. The information stolen could be used to impersonate or blackmail federal employees with access to sensitive information, he said. The Office of Personnel Management is the human resources department for the federal government, and it conducts background checks for security clearances. The OPM conducts more than 90 percent of federal background investigations, according to its website. The agency said it is offering credit monitoring and identity theft insurance for 18 months to individuals potentially affected. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents workers in 31 federal agencies, said it is encouraging members to sign up for the monitoring as soon as possible. In November, a former DHS contractor disclosed another cyberbreach that compromised the private files of more than 25,000 DHS workers and thousands of other federal employees. Cyber-security experts also noted that the OPM was targeted a year ago in a cyber-attack that was suspected of originating in China. In that case, authorities reported no personal information was stolen. One expert said it's possible that hackers could use information from government personnel files for financial gain. In a recent case disclosed by the IRS, hackers appear to have obtained tax return information by posing as taxpayers, using personal information gleaned from previous commercial breaches, said Rick Holland, an information security analyst at Forrester Research. "Given what OPM does around security clearances, and the level of detail they acquire when doing these investigations, both on the subjects of the investigations and their contacts and references, it would be a vast amount of information," Holland added. DHS said its intrusion detection system, known as EINSTEIN, which screens federal Internet traffic to identify potential cyber threats, identified the hack of OPM's systems and the Interior Department's data center, which is shared by other federal agencies. It was unclear why the EINSTEIN system didn't detect the breach until after so many records had been copied and removed. "DHS is continuing to monitor federal networks for any suspicious activity and is working aggressively with the affected agencies to conduct investigative analysis to assess the extent of this alleged intrusion," the statement said. Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, called the hack "shocking, because Americans may expect that federal computer networks are maintained with state of the art defenses." Ammon said federal agencies are rushing to install two-factor authentication with smart cards, a system designed to make it harder for intruders to access networks. But implementing that technology takes time. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., said the government must overhaul its cybersecurity defenses. "Our response to these attacks can no longer simply be notifying people after their personal information has been stolen," he said. "We must start to prevent these breaches in the first place." *Obama to meet Iraqi prime minister at G7 <http://thehill.com/policy/international/244043-obama-to-meet-iraqi-prime-minister-at-g7> // The Hill // Jordan Fabian – June 4, 2015* President Obama will meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at this weekend’s Group of Seven (G7) summit in Germany amid tensions over the administration’s strategy in fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It will be Obama and Abadi’s first face-to-face meeting since the city of Ramadi fell to ISIS militants last month, a major blow for the international coalition’s campaign against the group. The two leaders will discuss “the situation on the ground and our efforts to support the Iraqi security forces,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters Thursday. The White House has publicly expressed confidence in Abadi’s leadership, but there have been signs of a strained relationship since ISIS took control of the Sunni stronghold of Ramadi. Abadi called for greater international support for Iraqi ground forces during a meeting of coalition partners in Paris this week. “This is a failure on the part of the world,” Abadi told reporters. “There is a lot of talk of support for Iraq. There is very little on the ground.” ISIS has also made recent gains in Syria, taking the ancient city of Palmyra and advancing on Aleppo. Rhodes said there are no plans to announce any shift in strategy. He expressed confidence in the existing plan to fight the group, which includes a new offensive in Anbar Province, where Ramadi is located. There are approximately 3,000 U.S. troops training and equipping Iraqi forces, but they do not serve in combat roles. In addition, the government has sent 2,000 anti-tank missiles to Iraq to help combat ISIS’s use of car bombs placed inside armored vehicles. The administration has also pledged to speed up other weapons shipments. Last month, Iraqi officials were angered when Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Iraqi troops who were routed in Ramadi showed “no will to fight.” That prompted Vice President Biden to smooth over tensions and pledge support for the Iraqi forces in a phone call with Abadi. *OPINIONS/EDITORIALS/BLOGS* *Let Transgender Troops Serve Openly <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/opinion/let-transgender-troops-serve-openly.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-top-region®ion=opinion-c-col-top-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-top-region&_r=0> // NYT // The Editorial Board - June 4, 2015 * Staff Sgt. Loeri Harrison could receive the paperwork any day now, forms certifying that after an exemplary eight-year Army career, she is no longer fit for duty and must leave Fort Bragg because she is transgender. Early this year, Senior Airman Logan Ireland feared he might face a similar fate when he disclosed to his commanders during a recent deployment in Afghanistan that he transitioned from female to male. Yet, his supervisors have been supportive, allowing him to wear male uniforms and adhere to male grooming standards even though Air Force records continue to label him as female. It can go either way in the military these days. While transgender civilians in the federal work force enjoy robust legal protections from discrimination, those in the armed forces may be discharged at any moment. The Pentagon, shamefully, has yet to rescind anachronistic personnel guidelines that prohibit openly transgender people from joining in the military, labeling their condition a “paraphilia,” or perversion. The policy has forced thousands to serve in silence, repressing an essential part of their identity. The Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, which researches gender issues, estimates there are about 15,500 transgender troops serving in uniform. Those who take steps to transition while in uniform must carefully compartmentalize their lives as they test the shifting boundaries of tolerance within an institution that still allows discrimination on the basis of gender identity. While some service members have come out in recent years to commanders willing to bend or disregard rules, scores have been expelled. The absence of common-sense leadership on this issue by Pentagon leaders has forced commanders on the ground to develop a patchwork of unofficial rules. Those have created a tremendously uneven landscape in which some service members are treated with respect and assured career advancement, while others are subject to scorn, if not dismissal. A recent graduate at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., who is in the early stages of transitioning from male to female, is agonizing about the months ahead. When she reports for flight school in Pensacola, Fla., in the fall, and undergoes a medical exam, the officer may be forced to explain why she has been on hormone replacement therapy for more than a year. “If they let me serve as myself, I will give 30-plus years,” said the 22-year-old Navy officer, who asked to be identified only as Alex, wihch is part of her name. “I will sign up for the rest of my life. I love the military. I love my peers. I love the whole structure of the military.” The rules that prohibit transgender people from entering miltary service were introduced in the early 1980s, an era during which few people lived openly and those who did were widely stigmatized. The Pentagon’s transgender ban went largely unchallenged, even as the medical community’s understanding of gender identity evolved considerably over the years. In the 1990s, when Congress passed the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law allowing gay and lesbians to serve in the military as long as they remained closeted, there was no mention of transgender troops. The unspoken consensuswas that they did not belong in the force. During the months leading to the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law in 2011, gay activists refrained from publicly talking about the transgender ban, which was never codified in law. Some feared that advocating for transgender rights would cause Congress to enact a ban on transgender service. After “don’t ask, don’t tell” was rescinded, transgender service members felt slighted. Like gay troops had done a few years earlier, some began to mobilize covertly, initially largely online, to make the case that they, too, deserved to serve openly and proudly. Sergeant Harrison, a satellite communications expert who joined the Army in 2007, contacted Sparta, an advocacy group for gay and transgender troops, after returning in 2012 from her second deployment to Afghanistan. At the time, her marriage was crumbling, and she was finding it increasingly hard to suppress the desire to live as a woman. She was among the active duty service members who traveled to Houston in January 2014 for a Sparta strategy meeting attended by representatives of prominent advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the Palm Center. It was a galvanizing moment for those who had been too afraid of taking steps to transition. Senior Airman Ireland met an Army nurse, Cpl. Laila Villanueva, to whom he is now engaged. The two legally changed their names last year and began coming out gradually. The underground support community started expanding. “Meeting all those people, seeing what they were doing, how they were balancing the military life with themselves, gave me an impetus to do more than just talk to a therapist,” said Sergeant Harrison, who legally changed her name this year. Soon after the Houston meeting, Sergeant Harrison told her battalion physician during a regular checkup that she intended to start hormone replacement therapy soon. The doctor urged her to notify her commander. “That was a scary moment, basically going up to someone and saying, ‘Here is my career. You can flush it if you want, but this is what I need to do to be sane,’ ” she said. Much to her surprise, her commander was supportive. As long as she adhered nominally to male grooming standards during the day, he said, the unit would overlook everything else that was happening in her life. She used strong gel to slick her hair back during the work day, asked close colleagues, as a personal favor, to use female pronouns, and began using a female restroom near her office that was infrequently used. Late last year, after a stressful period at work, Sergeant Harrison went to the behavioral health center at Fort Bragg to talk to a therapist, where she broke down in tears. A physician who reviewed her file during that visit filled out a form setting in motion her expulsion from the Army. Two former secretaries of defense, Leon Panetta and Chuck Hagel, were urged to review the military’s ban on transgender troops and the type of policies needed to allow them to serve openly. Neither made it a priority. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter should take on what they refused to do. The current policies leave transgender troops vulnerable to discrimination that the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission describe as a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Medical and military experts who have studied the policies have concluded that there is no rationale for disqualifying transgender troops from serving on medical grounds. On the ground, commanders and military doctors who have reached the same conclusions have resorted to makeshift, imperfect solutions. Some doctors prescribe hormones for transgender patients without clearly documenting the reason on their medical files. In rare cases, policies on personal grooming and uniform standards are waived. Lt. Cmdr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, a Navy Reserve doctor who returned recently from a deployment to Afghanistan, has treated several transgender service members. He said the type of medical care most of them need is fairly basic and should not preclude them from being deployed. “They do just fine and are able to serve appropriately,” he said. “I’ve seen folks deploy with all sorts of complex medical conditions that are frankly more limiting.” Yet, some commanders have prohibited troops from taking hormones to transition. Military officials from several of America’s closest allies have been pragmatic and enlightened about this issue for years. Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany and Israel are among the nations that allow transgender people to serve openly. The Israeli military has begun educating commanders and rank-and-file troops about gender identity to ensure that the handful of service members who transition each year are treated with respect. “It’s not that hard,” Brig. Gen. Rachel Tevet-Weisel, a senior Israeli military leader who played a significant role in fostering an open environment for transgender troops. “The issue is you have to have very good education for the young soldiers coming each year.” Commander Ehrenfeld and Senior Airman Ireland were among the troops who met with Mr. Carter during his visit to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in February, a few days after being sworn in. The doctor asked Mr. Carter what he thought about transgender troops serving in austere environments, a reference to the argument some officials at the Pentagon have made to justify the ban. Mr. Carter replied that he hadn’t studied the issue closely, but he added that the military should be working to attract the most qualified people. “That’s the important criteria,” he said. “Are they going to be excellent service members?” They already are. While some, like Senior Airman Ireland, are thriving, others, including Sergeant Harrison, fear that their careers could unravel at any moment. That is an inexcusable way to treat Americans who want to serve their country. Alex, the recent Naval Academy graduate, decided during her junior year that she would transition publicly in the near future. The only alternative, she felt, was suicide. “I’m going to stop fighting it, and I’m going to do something about it to save my life,” she said she decided then. She is scheduled to report for flight school in October. That gives Mr. Carter ample time to ensure that her career gets off the ground smoothly, and that transgender troops will no longer have to suffer in silence. *Listen to Rand Paul <http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/listen-to-rand-paul/2015/06/04/f3d9c9a8-0af1-11e5-95fd-d580f1c5d44e_story.html> // WaPo // Fareed Zakaria – June 4, 2015 * It turns out that Republicans in Washington are united on one issue: their hatred of Rand Paul. John McCain says that he is “the worst possible candidate . . . on the most important issue.” Marco Rubio opines that “he has no idea what he’s talking about.” Lindsey Graham concludes that it would be “devastating” for the party to nominate him. Conservative commentators are even more vicious and ad hominem. The obsession with Paul is striking. In a Post op-ed last summer, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry mentioned Paul 10 times. I cannot recall an instance in recent decades when so much vitriol has been directed against a leading political figure by his own party. The attacks are almost entirely focused on Paul’s foreign policy, which is routinely characterized as dangerous and isolationist. In fact, the real problem appears to be that Paul is trying to force Republicans and many Democrats to defend what has become a lazy, smug consensus in favor of an ever-expanding national security state. I have read Paul’s proposals and speeches on foreign policy. There are some bloopers, odd comments and rhetorical broadsides, but for the most part his views are intellectually serious and well within a tradition of what he (correctly) calls conservative realism. They are also politically courageous. Paul has taken positions and cited authorities that are deeply unpopular with his own party. Yes, of course, he craves publicity and engages in stunts. What politician doesn’t? But what makes his opponents most uncomfortable is the substance, not the style. Take the most recent example: his opposition to the blanket extension of the Patriot Act, which has resulted in some modest restraint on the vast expansion of government powers since 9/11. (The new checks and balances are close to ones recommended by a panel put together by the Obama administration.) In defending his position, Paul notes— correctly — that we would not even know of the existence of this system of metadata collection if not for Edward Snowden’s revelations, that the FBI has been unable to cite a single terrorist plot disrupted by it and that the special courts in place have few checks and little transparency. He cites, glowingly, the 1979 dissenting opinion regarding the dangers of government collection of phone records by Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, the Supreme Court’s two most prominent liberals of the past half-century. Or consider Paul’s views on lifting the embargo on Cuba, on which he writes: “The supporters of the embargo . . . fall strangely silent when asked how trade with Cuba is so different than trade with Russia or China or Vietnam.” This is not a path to primary voters’ hearts in Florida. He has raised uncomfortable questions that no other politician dares raise about Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda leader who was killed in a car on a road in Yemen by a U.S. drone strike. Paul has pointed out that since Awlaki was a U.S. citizen, this action creates an extraordinary legal precedent — that the president of the United States can execute a U.S. citizen without trial. He cites approvingly the American Civil Liberties Union, which, he writes, has pointed out that “in modern history, a presidential order to kill an American citizen away from a battlefield is unprecedented.” In the Middle East, Paul has called for caution before the next military intervention, suggesting that it is worth learning some lessons from the past decade. U.S. military interventions, he has argued, have destabilized countries and led to perverse consequences. “As secular dictators fell in Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and now Syria, radical jihadists exploited the vacuum,” he has noted. In Afghanistan, he said, President Obama added 50,000 troops to the U.S. force and spent an additional $120 billion on the effort with little effect. Afghanistan today is by some measures as dangerous as ever — after 14 years of continuous U.S. military intervention and $1 trillion spent, by one estimate. Surely this is worth pondering? I don’t agree with Rand Paul on many things, including foreign policy. I think some of his positions on civil rights are historically blind, cruel and dangerous. But in the arena of national security, he has time and again raised important, inconvenient questions, only to have them ruled out of order and to be told that he is a crank, far outside the mainstream. In fact, it would be useful and important for Republicans — and Democrats — to stop the name-calling and actually discuss and debate his ideas. *Jeb Bush vs. Rick Perry <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2015/06/04/jeb-bush-vs-rick-perry/> // WaPo // Jennifer Rubin – June 4, 2015* Former Texas governor Rick Perry will officially announce his run for the presidency in less than two hours. Jeb Bush will announce his run on June 15. In comparing the two, Bush’s challenges become clear. Jeb Bush was not a combatant during most of the Obama presidency. Perry was famous for suing the federal government, challenging the president to enforce the border and railing against federal overreach. Some Republicans who have engaged in political combat have the sense that Bush was not there in the trenches. Bush is knowledgeable and impressive; Perry is emotional, enthusiastic and engaged. The latter attributes may be more helpful in a campaign. Perry and Bush have similar views on immigration (secure the border, fix legal immigration and then deal with the 12 million here illegally). Perry, however, gains credibility with the right wing because he took on the White House and deployed National Guard troops to secure the border. Bush will need to show that he is emphatic about border security. Bush, however, is not the most generous when it comes to illegal immigration. While Bush flirted with the idea, both Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are foursquare in favor of an earned path to citizenship. Both candidates were accomplished conservative governors, but given the passage of time, Bush’s record of accomplishment is not well known to most voters. He will need to show what he accomplished and why he more than every other candidate can deliver conservative results. By contrast, most Republican primary voters are well aware that Perry’s job creation record during the recession was by far the best of any governor. Expectations for Bush are high, so when he leads the pack but with less than 15 percent support he is in “trouble”; Perry enjoys low expectations and the ability to surprise voters. In the debates, Bush is likely to be attacked; Perry is not expected to be a target for many candidates. Bush does not seem to relish skewering Hillary Clinton, and there are real concerns that he won’t be aggressive enough to deliver fatal blows. Perry (like Carly Fiorina) seems downright giddy when it comes to attacking the Chappaqua millionairess. If Bush wants to convince Republican primary voters that he can beat Clinton, he needs to show some fire, beginning now. Bush is not only a “Bush,” but he is perceived as someone whose background and life experience set him apart from regular Americans. Perry can play up his origins as a poor boy from Paint Creek, Tex. Bush has to become “Jeb” and not just another Bush. That requires that he show enough about his own life so he does not become a caricature like Mitt Romney. Both Bush (62) and Rick Perry (65) are younger than Clinton (67), but they are not of the “next generation” of new leaders that some Republicans want. Both Republicans will need to show energy, vigor, technological sophistication and recast the GOP’s image if they are to paint Clinton as past her sell date. Both Bush and Perry have a newer rival whom they need to get past to solidify their support. Bush faces a younger, more dynamic reformer in Rubio. Perry will need to displace the younger conservative governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. In both cases, one suspects that Bush and Perry will argue that the newcomers just are not ready or that their rhetoric does not always match their results. Bush will have tons of money, but it makes a real difference if the race becomes a long slough. However, what we have seen is that there is more than enough money to go around and at least in the early states it is time on the ground and emotional connectivity more than ad dollars that are decisive. In sum, Bush — like Perry — would come into the presidency with a record of accomplishment and with leadership skills that Clinton entirely lacks. But the trick for each is convincing the primary voters he is the best candidate to retake the White House. *What Hillary Clinton's Campaign Is Getting Right <http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35474/hillary-clinton-voting-rights-act/> // Esquire // Charles Pierce – June 4, 2015 * Perhaps it's been overlooked by the inside baseball press corps but, so far, Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has hit all the right buttons about what's really going on in the country. Specifically, the rigging of our politics to suit the needs of the money power, the slide toward oligarchy that has not been arrested for any length of time since Ronald Reagan started the snowball down the mountain with his first budget in 1981. She has come out in favor of a constitutional amendment to reverse the Citizens United decision and its progeny–a longshot proposition at best, but the only real solution at law to the legalized influence-peddling that the decision produced. (Read the decision again. It's damned near bulletproof.) And, Thursday, in a speech she's planning to take on the second arm of the pincer attack on popular democracy–John Roberts's declaration of the Day Of Jubilee. The voting rights speech at the historically-black college Texas Southern University will be one of the first policy speeches of Clinton's newly launched campaign and will mark one of the first times a 2016 presidential candidate has spoken out about voting restrictions which have swept the country since the high courtstruck down Section 4 of the VRA in its Shelby County ruling in 2013. According to her campaign staff, the speech will include a call for a new standard of no fewer than 20 days of early in-person voting in every state, including weekend and evening voting. In 2014, 20 million American voters cast their ballot early but currently,one thirdof states offer no early voting. HRC also is planning to call for Congress–I know, I know, but elect some damn Democratic candidates and see–to restore those parts of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court fed to the woodchipper. In addition, she is not just talking the talk on this one. Her campaign has gone to court in several important swing states to challenge the new voter-suppression laws that have become all the rage since the Day Of Jubilee was declared. While Clinton speaks out against restrictive voting measures which studies have shown disproportionately keep African Americans and younger voters from the polls, her campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, has started bringing legal actions against restrictive laws in a number of key swing states. Last month, he and others filed a suit against Ohio alleging the state's restrictive voting laws were designed to suppress the votes of groups that typically vote for Democrats, including students, African Americans and Latinos. And last week, he hit Wisconsin with another suit claiming laws that have curtailed early voting and other restrictive changes put in place by Republican lawmakers hurt minority voters and other groups. Make no mistake. This is a fight worth making and a debate worth having. The Republican party considers its efforts to restrict the franchise an unalloyed triumph. It helped get Greg Abbott elected governor of Texas. Scott Walker never shuts up about the grotesque law that he and his pet legislature enacted in Wisconsin, the state that gave us so many of the mechanisms by which the money power first was struck from our elections. And, in where-the-fck else, Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback may allow his secretary of state, Kris Kobach, the man behind the Papers, Please theory of immigration law, to prosecute "voter fraud" cases that state prosecutors had declared non-starters. Voter suppression is a litmus test on the political Right now, and it is a central pillar of Republican politics general, and it has been ever since Karl Rove used it as the casus belli in his purge of U.S. Attorneys nine years ago. It is a long game they've been playing. As hard as it may be for the likes of Chris Cillizza to understand, there is considerable merit in taking on important issues that do not necessarily poll as well as "Eeek! Moosssslims!" does. The corruption of our politics by the money power, and the new mechanisms enacted to safeguard it, is the fundamental issue of our time because, unless it is reversed, and soon, all of the other issues won't matter because no real solutions will emerge from the one place where they are supposed to emerge. Ms. Rodham Clinton seems to get this. Good on her for bringing it up. *Hillary Clinton gets it on voting rights, Republican contenders don't <http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/04/opinions/brazile-hillary-clinton/index.html> // CNN // Donna Brazile – June 4, 2015 * Hillary Clinton is speaking Thursday in Texas about the importance of protecting and expanding the constitutional right to vote for all citizens of the United States. Clinton will also call for a new national standard of "no fewer than 20 days of early in-person voting, including weekend and evening voting." It has been 50 years since the historic march led by John Lewis, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights activists from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama, protesting voting restrictions used against African-Americans who wanted to exercise their right to vote. It was only a few months later, on August 6, 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act to end all barriers to political participation for racial and ethnic minorities, once and for all. While a great deal of progress has been made over the years, today, we face new challenges to those who are eligible to vote, and some of the leading culprits of erecting barriers are running for president. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that Republicans are imposing new restrictions on the right to vote -- restrictions that disproportionally affect African-Americans, Latinos, working Americans, seniors and America's youth -- the very groups the Voting Rights Act was formed to protect. It is because of these restrictions that we must continue to march for the right of all eligible citizens to exercise their right to vote. We march because the right to have one's voice heard in this country is embodied in our Constitution, and in the spirit of our democracy. That's the fundamental difference between Democrats and the current GOP presidential field. As Democrats, we believe in the right of every eligible citizen to vote and have that vote counted; we are fighting to expand and protect the right to vote, while Republicans are doing just the opposite. Many of the Republican presidential hopefuls would make it more difficult for people to cast their ballots because they believe that is their party's best path to victory, to have a smaller electorate with fewer minority voters. While a small number of Republicans have worked to restore protections to voting rights struck down by the Supreme Court, too many of them support laws that prevent people who disagree with them from participating in the electoral process. Jeb Bush has a long history of opposing basic voting rights, calling for more stringent voter ID laws and signing into law legislation that restricted the hours and locations for early voting. And let's not forget when the Jeb Bush administration purged 12,000 eligible voters from the Florida voter rolls ahead of the 2000 presidential election, and attempted a similar voter purge ahead of the 2004 election. Republican hopeful, Sen. Marco Rubio also supported voter ID laws. While on the campaign trail for Mitt Romney, Rubio stated his support for these laws, saying "What's the big deal? What is the big deal?" Well according to the Brennan Center for Justice, the "big deal" is that more than 11% of eligible voters lack government-issued identification. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry also signed legislation to make Texas voter ID laws stricter. Even though Texans were already required to bring an ID with them to the polls, the new law would have required them to bring a photo ID. The Department of Justice blocked the law, stating that it violated the Voting Rights Act and disproportionately affected Hispanic voters. Sen. Ted Cruz, son of a Cuban immigrant, introduced federal legislation that would have required voters to present "proof of citizenship" before casting their ballots in elections for federal office. This measure would have amended the National Voter Registration Act. Sen. Rand Paul claims he is the single GOP candidate qualified to broaden his party's appeal to constituencies they normally ignore. But when asked about the need to strengthen the Voting Rights Act, Paul suggested it wasn't necessary because "we have an African-American president." Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed into law a piece of legislation that slashed early voting and ended same-day registration in the state. The Cleveland Plain Dealer's editorial board even said the legislation was "a breathtaking bid to suppress voting despite constitutional guarantees of voting rights." And then there's Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has arguably the worst record among the GOP's potential candidates in terms of voting rights. In 2010, Walker enacted one of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the country that also cut the early voting period from 30 to 12 days, eliminated weekend and evening voting, and required proof of residence when registering to vote, along with many other strict provisions. To no one's surprise, lawsuits were filed in recent weeks maintaining that Ohio and Wisconsin laws violated the Voting Rights Act. In Ohio, the lawsuit claimed that "hundreds of thousands of Ohioans will find it substantially more difficult to exercise" their right to vote. In Wisconsin, the lawsuit was specifically filed against the voting laws passed under the Walker administration, claiming that the measures targeted "African-American, Latino, young, and/or Democratic voters in Wisconsin in particular." Clearly, these guys just don't get it. It's time the GOP presidential candidates get behind one of their party's own elected officials, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, and others who want to fulfill the promise of the Constitution and protect everyone's right to vote. Listen, at the end of the day, the right to vote is sacred in this country, especially for the people who have fought so hard over the years to have their voices heard. When Republican lawmakers play politics and take that away, they silence the voices of so many across the country. I'm glad Clinton is speaking out on this issue and, who knows, we might get a chance to hear from others before the end of the summer. *Hillary Clinton’s Bold Plan for Voting Rights <http://www.thenation.com/blog/209265/hillary-clintons-bold-plan-voting-rights> // The Nation // Ari Berman – June 4, 2015 * Hillary Clinton was a senior in high school when she watched on a black-and-white television as President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Fifty years later, the VRA—the country’s most important civil rights law—has been gutted by the Supreme Court and voting rights are under attack across the country. From 2011 to 2015, 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in forty-nine states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, and twenty-one states have adopted new laws making it harder to vote, 14 of which will be in effect for the first presidential cycle in 2016. Clinton sounded the alarm about the widespread push to roll back voting rights during a high-profile speech in Texas today and offered innovative solutions to fix our broken political system. “What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to the other,” Clinton said. She criticized the GOP contenders for president for “systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of Americans from voting” by peddling a “phantom epidemic of voter fraud.” She offered three major policy ideas for expanding voting rights: 1. Automatically register voters Up to a third of Americans are not registered to vote. Clinton proposed fixing that problem by automatically registering every American when they turn eighteen unless they opt out. Universal, automatic voter registration—recently adopted by states like Oregon—would add 50 million Americans to the voting rolls. “I think this would have a profound impact on our elections and our democracy,” Clinton said. 2. Expand early voting 14 states have no form of early voting before Election Day and many others have limited days and hours. Clinton proposed a minimum of 20 days of early voting nationwide, with expanded hours on nights and weekends. “Early, in-person voting will reduce those long lines and give more citizens the chance to participate, especially those who have work or family obligations that make it difficult to get to the polls on Election Day,” she said. Unfortunately, many states continue to move in the opposite direction. Republicans have killed bills to expand early voting in fifteen states so far this year, according to Carolyn Fiddler of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. 3. Restore the Voting Rights Act Nine of fifteen states that previously had to submit their voting changes with the federal government before the Supreme Court gutted the VRA have passed new voting restrictions since 2010. The Supreme Court’s decision has had a devastating impact in states like Texas, whose strict voter ID law was previously blocked under the VRA but is now in effect, leading to many longtime voters being turned away from the polls. “We need a Supreme Court who cares more about the right to vote of a person than the right to buy an election of a corporation,” Clinton said. Efforts to restore the VRA have gone nowhere in Congress, even after 100 lawmakers traveled to Selma to observe the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. These policy proposals would make it easier for millions of Americans to cast a ballot and participate in the political process. Clinton’s speech signaled that voting rights will be a major issue in the 2016 race. Lawyers affiliated with her campaign have already filed suit against restrictive voting laws in Ohio and Wisconsin and have hinted that more lawsuits are to come. It’s unfortunate that voting rights has become such a partisan issue. For many years both Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly supported the VRA. Only recently, particularly after the election of Barack Obama, has the issue become so politicized, with GOP lawmakers passing new laws curtailing access to the ballot. Many in the media will no doubt report that Hillary’s policy proposals are intended to boost her campaign and core Democratic constituencies. Regardless of the motive, expanding voting rights is good for everybody. There’s no equivalence between policies that make it easier to vote and policies that make it harder to vote. *Alexandria Phillips* *Press Assistant | Communications* Hillary for America | www.hillaryclinton.com