Correct The Record Tuesday August 12, 2014 Afternoon Roundup

podesta-emails 12,693 words email
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*Correct The Record Tuesday August 12, 2014 Afternoon Roundup:*

*Tweets:*

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: .@HillaryClinton
<https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton> worked to create “thousands of
American jobs” which “have been vital” to the Phoenix-area economy.
http://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2014/08/08/gpec-pursuing-creative-solutions-to-regional-challenges/#ixzz3A5v0Rt34
…
<http://t.co/RcXZH6qc2q>[8/12/14, 8:40 a.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/499173541120856064>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: .@MayorWolcott
<https://twitter.com/MayorWolcott> wrote about how @HillaryClinton
<https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton> worked to “improve the lives of the
people” of Arizona.
http://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2014/08/08/gpec-pursuing-creative-solutions-to-regional-challenges/#ixzz3A5v0Rt34
…
<http://t.co/RcXZH6qc2q> [8/11/14, 8:25 p.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/498988516790247425>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: .@MayorWolcott
<https://twitter.com/MayorWolcott>: @HillaryClinton
<https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton> was an “advocate for American
businesses while she served as secretary of state”
http://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2014/08/08/gpec-pursuing-creative-solutions-to-regional-challenges/#ixzz3A5v0Rt34
…
<http://t.co/RcXZH6qc2q> [8/11/14, 7:00 p.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/498967133930663936>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: HRC launched an energy partnership
that addressed sustainable energy in the Caribbean #HRC365
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/HRC365?src=hash>
http://correctrecord.org/hillary-clinton-protecting-the-environment/ …
<http://t.co/ZEVM9F8MAc> [8/11/14, 5:30 p.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/498944552611643393>]

*Headlines:*

*Bloomberg opinion: Megan McArdle: “When Obama Beat Hillary, We All Lost”
<http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-11/when-obama-beat-hillary-we-all-lost>*

“I think that Hillary Clinton would have been more cautious when dealing
with Republicans, and therefore ultimately more successful in some ways.”

*National Journal: “The Audacity to Be Authentic: Hillary Clinton's Risky
Hedge Against Obama”
<http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/the-audacity-to-be-authentic-hillary-clinton-s-risky-hedge-against-obama-20140812>*

“It may be that we've just witnessed a rare and risky act of authenticity.”

*Vox: “How Hillary will try and distinguish herself from Obama”
<http://www.vox.com/2014/8/12/5991207/how-hillary-will-treat-obama-in-2016-campaign>*

“Judging by an interview posted Sunday by the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg,
mostly on foreign policy, she'll argue for the necessity of restoring
America's greatness.”

*Bloomberg: “Axelrod Fires Back at Clinton on ‘Don’t Do Stupid Stuff’”
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-12/axelrod-fires-back-at-clinton-on-don-t-do-stupid-stuff-.html>*

“All seemed forgiven in 2013, though, when Clinton headlined a fundraiser
for the epilepsy-research charity and Axelrod called her the organization’s
‘patron saint.’”

*Politico: “Axelrod swipes at Clinton over Iraq”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/david-axelrod-hillary-clinton-iraq-109948.html?hp=l1>*

“David Axelrod, the longtime top adviser to President Barack Obama, has
taken to Twitter to slam Hillary Clinton in the wake of her comments
rejecting the core of the Obama administration’s self-desribed foreign
policy principle.”

*CNN: “David Axelrod smack-tweets Hillary Clinton”
<http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/08/12/david-axelrod-smack-tweets-hillary-clinton/>*

“David Axelrod, former adviser to President Barack Obama, hit
back Tuesday against Hillary Clinton's recent criticism of Obama's foreign
policy.”

*Washington Post blog: The Fix: “Obamaworld isn’t taking Hillary Clinton’s
foreign policy critique lying down”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/08/12/hillary-clinton-vs-barack-obama-part-2/>*

“The tweet, of course, is a reference to Clinton having voted for the Iraq
war.”

*Time: “Obama Ally Knocks Hillary Clinton Over Iraq War Vote”
<http://time.com/3103648/hillary-clinton-barack-obama-david-axelrod/>*

“A close confidant and former senior adviser to President Barack Obama took
a not-so-veiled shot at Hillary Clinton on Tuesday for voting to authorize
the Iraq War, in apparent push-back to the former Secretary of State’s
criticism of Obama’s foreign policy.”

*Vox: “Hillary Clinton’s Atlantic interview show she’s not inevitable”
<http://www.vox.com/2014/8/12/5992793/hillary-clintons-interview-shows-both-how-she-might-win-and-how-she>*

“The most important unanswered question about Hillary Clinton's 2016
presidential campaign (which she more or less confirmed to Jeffrey Goldberg
in an Atlantic interview) is how she's changed since 2008. The answer is
that she hasn't — at least not on foreign policy.”

*Bloomberg opinion: Al Hunt: “Calculating Hillary Gets the Math Wrong”
<http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-12/calculating-hillary-gets-the-math-wrong>*

“It makes her look calculating -- probably unfairly -- when she already
faces some skepticism about her authenticity.”

*New York Magazine: “Good Hillary, Bad Hillary”
<http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/hillary-clinton-2014-8/>*

[Subtitle:] “What’s worse than being depicted as a bloodthirsty
power-monger with a filthy mouth? Depicting yourself so blandly that no one
cares.”

*BBC: “The US, IS and the conspiracy theory sweeping Lebanon”
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28745990>*

“He was referring to the latest talk of the town: the United States is
behind the creation of the Islamic State group (formerly known as Isis, the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and Hillary Clinton admitted it in her
book ‘Hard Choices’.”

*Haaretz opinion: Peter Beinart: “Israel’s new lawyer: Hillary Clinton”
<http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.610007>*

“It’s Hillary Clinton. In her interview on Sunday with Jeffrey Goldberg,
Clinton offered the most articulate, sophisticated, passionate defense of
Netanyahu’s conduct I’ve heard from a government official on either side of
the Atlantic. Unfortunately, important chunks of it aren’t true.”

*Mediaite: “RNC Chairman: I ‘Prefer’ a Hillary Run in 2016”
<http://www.mediaite.com/online/rnc-chairman-i-prefer-a-hillary-run-in-2016/>*

“Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is ‘ready for
Hillary’ in 2016.”

*Articles:*

*Bloomberg opinion: Megan McArdle: “When Obama Beat Hillary, We All Lost”
<http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-11/when-obama-beat-hillary-we-all-lost>*

By Megan McArdle

August 11, 2014, 2:33 p.m. EDT

For journalists, the dog days of August are the worst. Nothing happens
because Congress and the rest of you are all on vacation. So now is the
time for whatever quirky column has been niggling at the back of one’s
mind, waiting for a break in the news cycle. Unfortunately, even if nothing
has been niggling, your deadline still beckons. So it’s also the time for
thumb-suckers about America in the 21st century, homages to parenthood,
wild speculations about what sort of electronic devices our grandchildren
will use, or anything else that will fill the requisite inches.

One of my favorite members of this genre is the counterfactual: Would
Hitler have won World War II if he had left Russia alone? Would Medicare
exist if JFK had lived? What would 20th-century literature have looked like
if Ernest Hemingway had been shot while driving that ambulance? There’s no
way to tell, but how much fun to debate!

Well, Kevin Drum tickled my counterfactual fancy this morning with the
following aside: “I don't have any problems with Hillary's domestic policy.
I've never believed that she 'understood' the Republican party better than
Obama and therefore would have gotten more done if she'd won in 2008, but I
don't think she would have gotten any less done either. It's close to a
wash.”

I’m actually going to disagree a bit here. I think that Hillary Clinton
would have been more cautious when dealing with Republicans, and therefore
ultimately more successful in some ways. At the very least, she would not
be facing the same level of vehement opposition in Congress.

I think liberals really do not understand emotionally the extent to which
the Tea Party was created by the Affordable Care Act and the feeling that
its government was simply steamrolling it. From the Tea Party's
perspective, you had an unpopular program that should have died in the same
way, and for the same reasons, that Social Security privatization did:
because sensible politicians saw that, no matter how ardently they and
their base might desire it, this was out of step with what the majority of
the country wanted (and no, you cannot rescue the polls by claiming that
the only problem with the law was that it wasn’t liberal enough; when you
dig down into what people mean when they say that, the idea that there was
ever a majority or a plurality that was secretly in favor of Obamacare
collapses).

The rage was similar to what progressives felt as they watched George W.
Bush push the country into a war in Iraq. That defined and animated the
anti-war movement (which is why said movement collapsed when Bush left
office, and not, say, when Bush agreed to a staged withdrawal of our
forces). Yes, those people would still have hated Republicans, even if
there had been no Iraq War. But they would not have been as passionate, as
organized or as powerful without it.

Liberals tend to write off this anger as racism, as irrational hatred of
Barack Obama, or as perverse joy in denying health care to the poor, but at
its root, it’s the simpler feeling that your country is making a mistake
and you can’t stop it because the people in charge are ignoring the
obvious. Yes, a lot of money and energy was poured into the Tea Party by
rich backers, but rich backers cannot create a grassroots campaign unless
the underlying passion is there in the voters (paging Karl Rove and
Crossroads). The Obama administration created that passion with Obamacare.

I think that Hillary Clinton would have pulled back when Rahm Emanuel (or
his counterfactual Clinton administration counterpart) told her that this
was a political loser and she should drop it. I’ve written before about how
my Twitter feed filled up with comparisons to 1932 the night that Obama
took the presidency, and it’s quite clear to me that the Obama
administration shared what you might call delusions of FDR. It thought that
it was in a transformative, historical moment where the normal rules of
political caution didn’t apply. The administration was wrong, and the
country paid for that.

That’s not to say that Republicans would have somehow been all kissy-kissy
with Clinton -- they weren’t very nice to her husband, after all. She would
of course still have faced stiff opposition in Congress, because the
partisan divide in this country is getting wider and congressional
districts are getting more polarized, which makes it harder and harder to
do deals across the aisle, or even treat each other with a modicum of
decency. But I doubt she would have had the debt ceiling debacle or the
deep gridlock of the last four years, because it was Obamacare that elected
a fresh new class of deeply ideological Republicans who thought they were
having their own transformative political movement, and they were willing
to do massive damage to their party, their own political fortunes and, in
my opinion, to the country in order to take a stand against “business as
usual” -- business that included legislating or paying our bills.

Of course, in my counterfactual, Hillary also probably wouldn’t have
proposed ambitious health-care reform; she’d have done something more
modest, like a Medicaid expansion. Progressives might well say that they’d
rather have the first two years of the Obama administration, followed by
gridlock, than steadier but more modest achievements by a Hillary Clinton
administration. And that doesn’t even get us into foreign policy, where the
differences were deeper and more passionate.

To my mind, however, that would have been a much better outcome for
everyone. So there’s my counterfactual for the summer: If Hillary Clinton
had won, Obamacare wouldn’t have happened, and Democrats -- and the country
-- would be better off.

*National Journal: “The Audacity to Be Authentic: Hillary Clinton's Risky
Hedge Against Obama”
<http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/the-audacity-to-be-authentic-hillary-clinton-s-risky-hedge-against-obama-20140812>*

By Ron Fournier

August 12, 2014

[Subtitle:] Conventional wisdom says it's smart to attack an unpopular
president. Conventional wisdom may be wrong.

The rap against Hillary Clinton is that she's a cynical and conniving
public figure who hardly takes a breath without calculating the political
advantage of a sigh. That caricature fueled coverage of Clinton's public
break from President Obama on global affairs. "The benefits to Clinton are
clear," wrote Juliet Eilperin, channeling convention wisdom for The
Washington Post.

But I'm not so sure the former secretary of State has helped herself
politically. It may be that we've just witnessed a rare and risky act of
authenticity.

To review, Clinton told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that Obama failed
in Syria by refusing to back rebel forces, as she had advised. Clinton also
dismissed Obama's emphasis on avoiding mistakes overseas that might lead to
military confrontation—a philosophy he privately labels, "Don't do stupid
shit." Echoing the president's critics, she told Goldberg, "Great nations
need organizing principles—and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing
principle."

On one level, this is a sensible move for a likely 2016 presidential
candidate. Her former boss's job-approval rating hovers meekly around 40
percent, and an even smaller percentage of Americans appreciate the way
he's handled the spate of global crises.

"It's in her political interest to begin to distance herself from an
unpopular president and to drive home the fact that she's risk-ready while
Obama's risk-adverse," Aaron David Miller, vice president for new
initiatives at the Wilson Center, told Eilperin.

Another keen observer, Mark Landler of The New York Times, wrote that
Clinton is suggesting she would project American power much differently
than Obama. "His view is cautious, inward-looking, suffused with a sense of
limits, while hers is muscular, optimistic, unabashedly old-fashioned."

Setting aside the obvious fact that "unabashedly old-fashioned" is the
exact opposite of Clinton's ideal campaign slogan, I wonder whether
underscoring her hawkish ways is, in the long run, more helpful or hurtful.
Remember, there was a time early in the 2008 presidential cycle when
conventional wisdom dictated that 1) supporting the Iraq War was the smart
political move and; 2) Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would easily win the
Democratic presidential nomination.

Her immediate problem is with the Democratic base, which has always viewed
Clinton warily as an interventionist. Michael Cohen, a fellow at the
progressive Century Foundation, told Politico that Clinton's approach was
"out of touch with Democrats in 2008, and it's out of touch now."

Influential liberal writer Joan Walsh of Salon.com called Clinton's remarks
"sobering" and fired a warning shot. "Clinton may think she can write off
the anti-interventionist left—again—and win the White House this time," she
wrote. "But she may find out she's wrong this time, too."

Clinton needs to brace for stiff challenges in 2016, from inside and
outside her party. There will be no coronation. The next several election
cycles are going to be wildly unpredictable, as an electorate buffeted by
titanic economic and sociological shifts grows to demand the sort of
disruption of political and governmental institutions that they've
witnessed elsewhere, most prominently in the retail, media, and
entertainment industries.

OK, bashing Obama causes problems with the Democratic base. But she's
triangulating away from both Obama and President Bush to appeal to
independents in the general election, right? I'm not so sure. Polls
suggest that Obama is far more connected to public sentiment than Clinton
is.

A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that 47 percent of
respondents called for a less-active role in world affairs, a larger share
than in similar polling in 2001, 1997, and 1995. Last year, the Pew
Research Center reported that a record 53 percent of Americans want their
country to "mind its own business internationally."

The public is of two minds about Obama. They agree with his America-first,
don't-rush-to-war philosophy; they just don't like how he's projecting it.
He dithers and waffles, and seems to be a mental step behind adversaries
like Russian President Vladmir Putin.

If I'm reading the public correctly, Americans aren't clamoring for a
muscular and old-fashioned hawk as much as they want a pragmatic leader,
somebody they can be proud of, who puts them first and keeps them safe.
They want what Obama promised to be.

Clinton may be aiming for that sweet spot between Bush's belligerence and
Obama's neglect—what Karl Rove called the "Goldilocks of foreign policy."
But I could think of safer, more calculated, ways of going about it than
stiff-arming the Democratic base and beating war drums over Syria.

In her memoir, Hard Choices, Clinton apologized for her support of the Iraq
War, but she has made no secret of her interventionist streak. She wanted
more troops in Afghanistan than Obama, for example, and was not "swept up
in the drama and idealism" of the Arab Spring like other, younger White
House aides.

Call me naïve, but maybe Clinton is simply being honest. After all, that's
really want Americans want in a leader.

*Vox: “How Hillary will try and distinguish herself from Obama”
<http://www.vox.com/2014/8/12/5991207/how-hillary-will-treat-obama-in-2016-campaign>*

By Andrew Prokop

August 12, 2014, 8:00 a.m. EDT

One fact that Hillary Clinton must be extremely aware of is that
presidential candidates from a party that's held the White House for two or
more terms tend to lose: they've only won 2 of 9 such elections in the
postwar period. Even when incumbent presidents have been quite popular in
their final years — as Dwight Eisenhower was in 1960, and Bill Clinton in
2000 — their would-be successors only managed about a tie in the popular
vote, and lost the electoral college. This time around, President Obama is
unpopular, Congress is unproductive and polarized, the economy remains
underwhelming, and the headlines from overseas grow grimmer by the day. So
how is Clinton going to try and make the case that Democrats should keep
the presidency?

Judging by an interview posted Sunday by the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg,
mostly on foreign policy, she'll argue for the necessity of restoring
America's greatness.

"Great nations need organizing principles," she said. For her, those
principles would be "peace, progress, and prosperity" — which happens to be
a slogan her husband's White House used to describe its record. "We don't
even tell our own story very well these days," she said. When Goldberg
offered that "defeating fascism and communism is a pretty big deal," she
exclaimed, "That's how I feel!" She added, "This might be an old-fashioned
idea — but I'm about to find out, in more ways than one."

This effort would involve extensive and active US "engagement" overseas.
"In the world in which we are living right now, vacuums get filled by some
pretty unsavory players," she said. She argued for "containment" of
jihadist groups, staked out a position a bit to Obama's right on Iran
(though she still supports the ongoing nuclear negotiations), and
emphasized that she supported arming rebels in Syria, something Obama has
resisted.

But Clinton emphasized that economic prosperity at home would be necessary
to sell the American public on a major overseas role. "Americans deserve to
feel secure in their own lives, in their own middle-class aspirations,
before you go to them and say, 'We're going to have to enforce navigable
sea lanes in the South China Sea,'" she said. "You've got to take care of
your home first."

Deciding what to say about Obama, who is broadly unpopular while still
well-liked by Democrats, will be a challenge for Clinton's campaign. But
even many core Democratic supporters will admit to a sense of
disappointment and malaise. During the interview, Clinton seemed to float
one possible way she'd handle this — she'd argue that Obama was a
competent, hard-working steward during very difficult times.

"I think he is cautious because he knows what he inherited, both the two
wars and the economic front, and he has expended a lot of capital and
energy trying to pull us out of the hole we're in," she said. She
continued: "The economy is not growing, the middle class is not feeling
like they are secure, and we are living in a time of gridlock and
dysfunction that is just frustrating and outraging."

Her implication, on both foreign and domestic policy, is that Obama didn't
finish the job — and that she's the person who can do it. Clinton is
clearly worried about being too closely associated with an administration
the public increasingly views as a letdown. And she knows very well that
when the public thinks things aren't going well, a prospective presidential
candidate has to be able to promise change.

Every candidate running in difficult times has to make a case about how
they'll fix what ails America — whether it's through inspirational rhetoric
or a new policy agenda. While Clinton has suggested a few different foreign
policies, she seems set to argue that it's mainly her leadership that's
needed to put the US back on track. The question is — will anyone believe
her?

*Bloomberg: “Axelrod Fires Back at Clinton on ‘Don’t Do Stupid Stuff’”
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-12/axelrod-fires-back-at-clinton-on-don-t-do-stupid-stuff-.html>*

By Jonathan Allen

August 12, 2014, 12:53 p.m. EDT

President Barack Obama’s longtime political adviser fired back at Hillary
Clinton over her recent criticism of the commander-in-chief’s foreign
policy doctrine of avoiding messy entanglements.

“Just to clarify: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ means stuff like occupying Iraq
in the first place, which was a tragically bad decision,” David Axelrod
tweeted today. Obama aides often have been quoted in news stories using
that mantra to describe the president’s guiding principles.

In an Aug. 10 interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Clinton said:
“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is
not an organizing principle.”

Axelrod’s response on Twitter escalates an already tense fight between a
White House eager to defend its foreign policy at a time of global chaos
and a Clinton operation equally eager to separate the former secretary of
state from Obama decisions she fell in line to support. Her efforts to do
that could hurt her with Democratic primary voters should she run for
president in 2016 and help her with independents and
national-security-minded Republicans in a general election.

Clinton told Goldberg that she advocated arming moderate Syrian rebels in
2012 and was rebuffed by Obama. The Islamic State, a militant force now
sweeping across Iraq, took root in the Syrian conflict. A Clinton aide said
in an e-mail that what Clinton said in the interview was no different than
what she’d written in her book.

*Results Unknown*

Clinton didn’t make public her disagreement on Syria policy while she
served in government, and she told Goldberg that she couldn’t say for
certain that her approach would have yielded any different outcome.

The timing of her remarks caused discomfort for the White House because of
the crisis in Iraq. In addition, Clinton and the president are scheduled to
appear together tomorrow night on Martha’s Vineyard at a birthday party for
Ann Dibble Jordan, wife of Vernon Jordan, the former president of the
National Urban League and a confidant of both Obama and former President
Bill Clinton.

The anti-war base of the Democratic Party has long mistrusted Hillary
Clinton’s support for a muscular foreign policy. Obama used her vote as a
U.S. senator to authorize the Iraq war as a cudgel in defeating her in the
2008 Democratic presidential primary, and some of her political critics are
re-emerging.

*Political ‘Frenemies’*

“Secretary Clinton, and any other person thinking about seeking the
Democratic nomination in 2016, should think long and hard before embracing
the same policies advocated by right-wing war hawks that got America into
Iraq in the first place and helped set the stage for Iraq’s troubles
today,” Ilya Sheyman, executive director of the political action arm of
MoveOn, a Democratic group, said today in a statement.

Clinton and Axelrod have been political “frenemies” for many years. She has
appeared at fundraising events for the charity that Axelrod and his wife
created to fight epilepsy, a disorder that afflicts their daughter. Clinton
and Axelrod grew apart during the 2008 campaign as he led Obama’s messaging
campaign against Clinton.

All seemed forgiven in 2013, though, when Clinton headlined a fundraiser
for the epilepsy-research charity and Axelrod called her the organization’s
“patron saint.”

*Politico: “Axelrod swipes at Clinton over Iraq”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/david-axelrod-hillary-clinton-iraq-109948.html?hp=l1>*

By Maggie Haberman

August 12, 2014, 10:39 a.m. EDT

David Axelrod, the longtime top adviser to President Barack Obama, has
taken to Twitter to slam Hillary Clinton in the wake of her comments
rejecting the core of the Obama administration’s self-desribed foreign
policy principle.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Clinton said the White House doctrine of
“Don’t do stupid stuff” is “not an organizing principle.”

“Just to clarify: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ means stuff like occupying Iraq
in the first place, which was a tragically bad decision,” read the tweet
from Axelrod. He declined to expound on the tweet when reached over email
by POLITICO.

As a senator during the presidency of George W. Bush, Clinton voted to
authorize the use of force in Iraq, a vote that played a major role in
costing her the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

Axelrod’s astonishing public swipe against Clinton revealed the extent to
which Obama allies are furious over her comments to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey
Goldberg, in which the former secretary of state also allied herself
tightly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called the
decision not assist Syrian rebels early on a “failure.”

Several sources close to the White House described Obama aides as angered
by Clinton’s critiques, which her team had warned them was coming but which
landed as the president is grappling with a string of crises globally.

The Axelrod tweet took what had been a simmering rift and blew it open.
Between that and Clinton’s comments, the sense of unity that her team had
tried to establish with the White House has broken down.

Obama was a major critic of the war in Iraq during the 2008 campaign, and
that message helped give rise to his candidacy. In her book, “Hard Choices”
Clinton finally wrote that she was “wrong” for the vote, but she has said
very little about the process of arriving at that conclusion.

*CNN: “David Axelrod smack-tweets Hillary Clinton”
<http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/08/12/david-axelrod-smack-tweets-hillary-clinton/>*

By Ashley Killough, David Chalian, Dan Merica, Jim Acosta, and Kevin Liptak

August 12, 2014, 11:32 a.m. EDT

David Axelrod, former adviser to President Barack Obama, hit back Tuesday
against Hillary Clinton's recent criticism of Obama's foreign policy.

In an interview with “The Atlantic” published over the weekend, Clinton
argued the decision not to arm Syrian rebels early on had led to Islamic
militants taking over swaths of territory in the region.

The former secretary of state also took a swipe at an oft-repeated phrase
Obama uses to sum up his foreign policy choices - “Don’t do stupid stuff.”

"Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is
not an organizing principle," Clinton said.

In his tweet, Axelrod appears to be knocking Clinton's 2002 vote as U.S.
senator in favor of the Iraq War. (Of course, his tweet can also be aimed
at Republican hawks who support a harsher response to the current situation
in Iraq.)

The PAC for the progressive group MoveOn also tweaked Clinton.

“Secretary Clinton, and any other person thinking about seeking the
Democratic nomination in 2016, should think long and hard before embracing
the same policies advocated by right-wing war hawks that got America into
Iraq in the first place and helped set the stage for Iraq’s troubles
today,” Ilya Sheyman, the PAC’s executive director, said in a statement
Tuesday.

Clinton later said she regretted supporting the authorization of the Iraq
war.

"I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could
with the information I had," Clinton writes in her new book. "And I wasn't
alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple."

The recent tension between Clinton and Obama's team invokes memories of
their 2008 battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, when the two
candidates butted heads over foreign policy.

A White House official said Monday that the White House is not getting
amped up over Clinton's interview. They don't see this as her break-away
moment, according to the source, though they anticipate she will move away
from Obama over time.

The President and his former chief diplomat will have a chance to talk
things out Wednesday night; the two are expected to attend the same event
in Martha's Vineyard.

Clinton is also getting hit by the Republican National Committee, which
accuses Clinton of playing politics on the issue.

"You can't distance yourself from this administration’s foreign policy when
your job for four years was to lead its foreign policy," RNC spokesman Sean
Spicer said.

*Washington Post blog: The Fix: “Obamaworld isn’t taking Hillary Clinton’s
foreign policy critique lying down”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/08/12/hillary-clinton-vs-barack-obama-part-2/>*

By Aaron Blake

August 12, 2014, 10:55 a.m. EDT

Unfortunately for the former secretary of state, attempting to do so in as
blunt a fashion as she did carries with it significant risks. By
paraphrasing Obama's own attitude toward foreign policy — "Don't do stupid
[stuff]" — and turning it against him, she has understandably touched a few
nerves in Obama-world.

Case in point: David Axelrod. The top former Obama adviser tweeted this
broadside Tuesday morning:

[TWEET]

The tweet, of course, is a reference to Clinton having voted for the Iraq
war. That issue just happens to be the one which really opened the door for
a guy named Barack Obama to beat her in the 2008 primary. In other words,
Axelrod's rejoinder is about as personal and pointed as Clinton's initial
criticism of Obama's foreign policy. In neither case were Clinton or Obama
actually named, but the targets are unmistakable in both cases. And in both
cases, the messages were broadcast in strikingly public ways.

In addition, it's pretty clear that administration officials are only so
happy to try and undercut Clinton's attempts to distance herself from
Obama. Witness this New York Times story from late Monday, in which
anonymous administration officials suggest that Clinton doth protest too
much when it comes to certain foreign policy issues:

“Still, when Mrs. Clinton says that ‘the failure to help build up a
credible fighting force’ against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria ‘left a
big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,’ the suggestion is that
Mr. Obama’s refusal to arm the rebels might end up being a singular
misjudgment. But at the time of the Obama administration’s internal debate
over that decision, several officials said, Mrs. Clinton’s advocacy was far
less thunderous: The United States had tried every diplomatic gambit with
Syria, she said, and nothing else had worked, so why not try funneling
weapons to the moderate rebels.”

And this:

“At the end of her tenure, for example, Mrs. Clinton wrote a memo to Mr.
Obama recommending that the United States lift its half-century-old trade
embargo against Cuba. It was not a position that she seriously advocated
while at the State Department, officials said.”

If you think it's any coincidence that anonymous "officials" are speaking
out in ways that make Clinton look hypocritical is any coincidence, we have
some oceanfront property in Arizona to sell you. No, it's pretty clear that
feelings have been hurt and battle lines have been/are being drawn.

As in relationships, sometimes when you want a clean break, you need to be
a little harsher than you'd like to be. Unfortunately for Clinton, that
means the other person is much more liable to hold a grudge. And when that
person is the incumbent president of the United States, things can get
messy.

*Time: “Obama Ally Knocks Hillary Clinton Over Iraq War Vote”
<http://time.com/3103648/hillary-clinton-barack-obama-david-axelrod/>*

By Zeke Miller

August 12, 2014, 11:18 a.m. EDT

[Subtitle:] A flashback to 2008 campaign as Clinton tries to distance
herself from Obama

A close confidant and former senior adviser to President Barack Obama took
a not-so-veiled shot at Hillary Clinton on Tuesday for voting to authorize
the Iraq War, in apparent push-back to the former Secretary of State’s
criticism of Obama’s foreign policy.

“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is
not an organizing principle,” Clinton told the Atlantic in an interview
published this week, as she attempts to distance herself from the President
ahead of a possible 2016 White House run. White House aides use a more
profane version of the phrase “Don’t do stupid stuff” to characterize
Obama’s foreign policy vision.

“Just to clarify: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff” means stuff like occupying Iraq
in the first place, which was a tragically bad decision,” David Axelrod
wrote on Twitter, in clear reference to Clinton’s vote in favor of the Iraq
War in 2002—a vote Obama said he opposed.

The critique was a rare rebuke of Clinton from Obama’s inner circle, just
as Clinton is starting the tricky balancing act of distancing herself from
her increasingly unpopular former boss. Many Obama political aides,
including 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina, have thrown their support
behind a Clinton candidacy in 2016. The flare-up is also something of a
flashback to the 2008 campaign, when Obama, with Axelrod’s help, maneuvered
to secure the Democratic nomination in a bitter fight largely by tying
Clinton to the unpopular war.

And it also highlights the lingering frustration among liberal groups over
the Iraq War vote as Obama has reengaged American forces in an aerial
campaign in that country, as well as the deep divisions that have emerged
in the Democratic Party over the role of America in the world.

MoveOn, the liberal group that was organized largely around opposition to
the Iraq War, blasted Clinton in a statement Tuesday: “Secretary Clinton,
and any other person thinking about seeking the Democratic nomination in
2016, should think long and hard before embracing the same policies
advocated by right-wing war hawks that got America into Iraq in the first
place and helped set the stage for Iraq’s troubles today.”

*Vox: “Hillary Clinton’s Atlantic interview show she’s not inevitable”
<http://www.vox.com/2014/8/12/5992793/hillary-clintons-interview-shows-both-how-she-might-win-and-how-she>*

By Ezra Klein

August 12, 2014, 11:00 a.m. EDT

1. The most important unanswered question about Hillary Clinton's 2016
presidential campaign (which she more or less confirmed to Jeffrey Goldberg
in an Atlantic interview) is how she's changed since 2008. The answer is
that she hasn't — at least not on foreign policy.

2. Read the interview and you quickly see Clinton's strength as a
candidate: she is more fluent, informed and authoritative in affairs of
state than any of her plausible challengers. In the 2008 race, she famously
posed the 3am phone call test: did voters trust her or naive, inexperienced
Barack Obama to answer the kinds of calls that wake the president at 3am?
She lost that campaign, but her subsequent experience as Secretary of State
has only widened her lead on that question.

3. Read the interview, however, and you also see Clinton's weakness as a
candidate: she is more hawkish than the post-Iraq Democratic Party. She is
upset that she lost the internal administration debate over whether to
intervene in Syria. She's focused on the expansive ambitions of radical
jihadists. She takes a hard line on Iran's nuclear ambitions. She's
frustrated that Obama thinks more about the dangers of action than the
dangers of inaction. She's dismissive of Obama's shorthand foreign policy
principle "don't do stupid stuff". She wants the country that defeated
fascism and communism to develop a grand — and more interventionist —
strategy to guide its leadership of the world. She sounds like a Democrat
from 2002 rather than 2014.

4. She presents Democrats, to a surprising degree, with the same choice
they faced in 2008. There's no doubt that Clinton is more prepared to
answer that 3am call. But they may not like the call she makes immediately
after. There are a lot of liberals out there who would prefer a nuclear
Iran to a war with Iran. Many of them believe, rightly or wrongly, that
President Obama quietly agrees with them. Clinton does not agree with them,
and they're going to know it.

5. I remain skeptical that Rand Paul can win the Republican nomination for
president. But if he does, it will set up a race in which the Republican is
significantly more dovish than the Democrat. That will scramble political
coalitions in unusual, and possibly significant, ways. For instance,
Millennials have swung hard towards Democrats in recent years, but they're
also much more dovish than older generations. Seniors, on the other hand,
have become more Republicans, and are also more hawkish.

6. There is a pattern that has emerged in almost every recent interview
Clinton has given: liberals walk away unnerved. She bumbled through a
discussion of gay marriage with Terry Gross. She's dodged questions about
the Keystone XL pipeline. She's had a lot of trouble discussing income
inequality. I initially chalked some of this up to political rust. I am
quickly revising that opinion.

7. In general, people underestimate the convictions politicians have and
overestimate the cynicism of their positions. The interview with Goldberg
is being analyzed as a calculated gamble on Clinton's part to distance
herself from the Obama administration, and perhaps it is. But it matters
because it's also much more than that: this is what Clinton really
believes. It's what she believed before the Obama administration, it's what
she fought for inside the Obama administration, and it's what she believes
after leaving the Obama administration. This is insight into the kind of
president Clinton would be, not just the kind of candidate she would be.

8. Political campaigns are decided not just by what candidates say but by
which of their statements supporters believe to be true. One advantage
Obama had in the Democratic primary was that even when he rhetorically
moved towards the middle his liberal base didn't really buy it; his
repeated assertions that he opposed gay marriage were never taken very
seriously by his supporters, for instance. Clinton will have the opposite
problem — and, potentially, the opposite advantage: She has clear and
substantive disagreements with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party,
and so her efforts to move to the left during the primary will often be
viewed skeptically. But those disagreements will make it harder for
Republicans to paint her as a liberal who's exactly like Barack Obama.

*Bloomberg opinion: Al Hunt: “Calculating Hillary Gets the Math Wrong”
<http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-12/calculating-hillary-gets-the-math-wrong>*

By Albert R. Hunt

August 12, 2014, 11:26 a.m. EDT

Picture the ad, either in the Democratic primaries or from a liberal
independent candidate: Hillary Clinton -- a pro-Wall Street buckraker, a
foreign policy interventionist -- championing George W. Bush's invasion of
Iraq and looking like a lukewarm supporter of President Barack Obama.

Clinton's break last week with some of Obama's unpopular foreign policies,
in an interview with my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic, is
going to cause her political problems.

It makes her look calculating -- probably unfairly -- when she already
faces some skepticism about her authenticity. And her hawkish,
interventionist stance is at odds with the country and especially the base
of the Democratic party, of which she remains a formidable favorite to lead
in the 2016 presidential race.

She said Obama's failure to aid the Syrian rebels last year contributed to
the rise of the radical jihadists, Islamic State, threatening parts of
Syria and Iraq today. She went a little further in her new book, "Hard
Choices." She even suggested the administration lacks any overarching
foreign policy vision.

Her support from Wall Street and the huge speaking fees she has taken from
financial institutions since departing as secretary of state have already
set off alarms with the Elizabeth Warren-loving populist wing of her party.
Even in the country at large, Wall Street is about as popular as Congress,
slightly ahead of toxic dump sites.

In the Atlantic interview, she essentially re-stated previous positions;
she has long advocated an activist foreign policy. For good measure, she
seemed to suggest she'd be more supportive of Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu than Obama has been.

This at a time when little is going well for the president on the
international front. Voters, by 60 percent to 36 percent, disapprove of the
president's handling of foreign policy, according to last week's Wall
Street Journal-NBC News poll.

Yet, as Politico's Maggie Haberman, a premiere Hillary watcher, reported,
while it was her "furthest, most public step away" from Obama, the
interview was scheduled well before the latest Islamic State-induced
crisis, and the Hillary camp warned the White House about it.

In 2008, then-Senator Clinton ran against Obama as a backer of a muscular
foreign policy who had voted for the Iraq invasion; it hurt her in that
losing quest. She subsequently said she was mistaken on the war, yet now
she's urging a greater American involvement in the region.

On Libya, she gets a bum rap from Republicans who hold her responsible for
the killing of Americans in Benghazi two years ago. But she was the
champion of American intervention in Libya to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi.
When he was toppled, she thought it would be her signature achievement as
secretary of state. Yet as that country has disintegrated into chaos, it's
no longer a point of emphasis.

Clinton also hinted at further breaks with Obama policies. That's natural,
yet she has to walk a delicate line, not looking too contrived. Surveys
show Americans give her good marks for competence, intelligence and
experience, but not so good on integrity and candor. And while Obama's
popularity is low, his hardcore base remains loyal.

Clinton is an overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination in two
years, but her evolving positions may well encourage potential challengers
who could be damaging. Think Pat Buchanan and the Republicans in 1992, or
even Gene McCarthy and the Democrats in 1968.

*New York Magazine: “Good Hillary, Bad Hillary”
<http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/hillary-clinton-2014-8/>*

By Frank Rich

August 12, 2014

[Subtitle:] What’s worse than being depicted as a bloodthirsty power-monger
with a filthy mouth? Depicting yourself so blandly that no one cares.

Thirty years ago, Michael Kinsley, then with The New Republic, sought to
prove his theory that few of Washington’s elites actually read the
highfalutin best sellers that they dutifully buy and profess to admire. At
a local bookstore, he slipped a note with his phone number deep into the
pages of hot new books by the likes of the foreign-policy hand Strobe
Talbott and the political pundit Ben Wattenberg, promising a $5 reward to
anyone who read that far. Kinsley reported that no one called.

In the digital age, we have the technology to address this same question on
a national scale. This summer, a University of Wisconsin mathematician,
Jordan Ellenberg, created a small stir by inventing what he called the
“Hawking Index” in honor of Stephen Hawking’s much-praised, if not
necessarily much-read, A Brief History of Time. Using Amazon’s posted lists
of the top five “popular highlights” in books notated by Kindle
­readers—and the page numbers those highlights fall on—Ellenberg crafted a
quasi-scientific formula to compute how thoroughly best sellers were being
consumed. At the high end by far was Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch,
which scored an anomalous 98.5 percent on the Hawking Index. Among
nonfiction books, Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys was a leader, at 21.7 percent.
At the bottom, breaking Hawking’s previous low (6.6 percent), was the
most-written-about best seller of the year, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the
Twenty-First Century, at 2.4 percent. It didn’t take long for a wiseass at
the Washington Post to note that another best seller fell still lower than
Piketty on the Hawking scale, at 2.04 percent: Hillary Clinton’s Hard
Choices.

It has been an unexpectedly hard summer for Hard Choices—and, by
implication, for its author. The book had a dream rollout worthy of J. K.
Rowling: a prime-time ABC special with Diane Sawyer, Good Morning America
with Robin Roberts, a CNN town hall with Christiane Amanpour, Jane Pauley
on CBS, The Daily Show, online Q&As at Facebook and Twitter, even a
respectful interview with Greta Van Susteren and Bret Baier at Fox News.
But the book tour was stalked by controversies—Clinton’s tone-deaf
complaint about being “dead broke” after leaving the White House in 2001,
her fumbled answers to questions about her astronomical speaking fees. And
much of the press was unkind to Hard Choices itself. You know a Clinton
book is in trouble when one of its few partisans is a Fox News
personality—Van Susteren, who called it “a fun read.” John Dickerson of
Slate spoke for many of those hardy few who actually read the book from
cover to cover when he described it as “the low-salt, low-fat, low-calorie
offering with vanilla pudding as the dessert.” The only news in Hard
Choices was not to be found in its 656-page ocean of prose but in the
subtext. Despite Clinton’s disingenuous claim in the epilogue about 2016
(“I haven’t decided yet”), no one in her right mind would write a fat book
this dull, this unrevealing, and this innocuous unless she were running for
president.

The ultimate indignity arrived soon after publication: Following a brief
reign as a No. 1 best seller, Hard Choices was toppled by Blood Feud: The
Clintons vs. the Obamas, by Edward Klein, whose loathing of the Clintons is
exceeded only by his loathing of the Obamas. Klein had no big book tour, no
broadcast-network interviews, and almost no reviews. Yet once Blood Feud
had usurped Hard Choices, Clinton never returned to the top of the Times
list.

In terms of cumulative sales, the best-seller-list pecking order is a red
herring. Hillary will easily outsell Klein in the final accounting; so
large were her sales in that first week before word-of-mouth took its toll
that it is statistically unimaginable that he could catch up. Nonetheless,
the showing of Hard Choices is disappointing by Clinton standards—far below
the benchmark set by her 2003 memoir, Living History. Extrapolating
charitably from the sales figures tracked thus far by Nielsen BookScan,
half of the 1 million copies in the “sold out” hardcover first printing may
be returned by booksellers for a refund. By the time of publication, it was
reported that signed copies of Hard Choices were selling for close to $400
on eBay. By last week, they were going begging by the score at $79.95.

The Clinton camp was sufficiently stung by the perception of failure to try
to spin the numbers. Finally, spokesmen for all three Clintons were moved
to release a joint statement attacking Klein and a couple of other
anti-Clinton authors whose new titles have less successfully competed with
Hard Choices this summer. Their books, the statement said, “should be
reserved for the fiction bin, if not the trash … Legitimate media outlets
who know with every fiber of their being that this is complete crap should
know not to get down in the gutter with them and spread their lies.”

But the disappointing trajectory of Hard Choices and the concurrent rise of
Blood Feud say more about Hillary Clinton, her own book, and the
vulnerabilities of her potential presidential run than they do about the
media or the commercial durability of Clinton bashers. Aside from money,
which she does not need, and publicity, which she also does not need, what
is the motivation to write and strenuously promote a memoir that obscures
more than it tells and that is not so much a personal statement about the
hard choices she has faced as a string of uncontroversial position papers
salted with upbeat anecdotes? It’s safe to assume that the readers who
bought Hard Choices, a sizable group when compared with the audience for
most books, admire and in many cases revere Hillary Clinton. They hunger to
get to know her better. What is to be gained—whether now or in 2016—by
selling them a book whose main value is as a sleep aid?

As it happens, Klein’s book is complete crap, but it is relatively amusing
crap (Hawking Index: 19.7 percent) next to Hillary’s slog through seemingly
every engagement on her official secretary of State calendar. According to
the Times, “Some publishing industry insiders” believe that Blood Feud,
despite being a “barely sourced account full of implausible passages,” was
selling not just to the usual Clinton haters but to liberals and “readers
who are simply looking for irresistible entertainment.” If you’ve read Hard
Choices, you can’t blame them for seeking comic relief—and possibly seeking
a different Hillary.

“Before we are Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, or any
of the other labels that divide us as often as define us, we are Americans,
all with a personal stake in our country,” the Hillary of Hard Choices
writes, typically, early on. You fear you’ve wandered by accident into a
“for kids” edition aimed at lower-school readers, but no such luck. The
entire book is crafted to avoid startling children and adults of all ages.
Hardly do we encounter its uncontroversial thesis—“Our choices and how we
handle them shape the people we become”—than we get a disclaimer: “Of
course, quite a few important choices, characters, countries, and events
are not included here.” And so it goes. Hillary can’t begin a paragraph
with the sentence “I am not alone in feeling so personally invested in
Israel’s security and success” without starting the subsequent paragraph
with “I was also an early voice calling publicly for Palestinian
statehood.” In chapters like “Iran: Sanctions and Secrets” and “Climate
Change: We’re All in This Together,” she tells us what we already know,
larded with an excess of superficial and sometimes self-­aggrandizing
detail as well as bullet points from various official proposals and hefty
excerpts from speeches and town-hall meetings. There’s lots of
name-checking (“I always enjoy seeing Ehud”) and lots of firsts. “No
previous U.S. Secretary of State had ever visited the organization’s
headquarters” (ASEAN, if you’re asking) … “No Secretary of State had ever
visited this city before” (Chennai, India) … “I would be the first
Secretary of State to visit in more than half a century” (Burma). Quantity
always trumps quality.

Some of us don’t expect (or want) to hear about the Clintons’ private
lives. But if Hillary insists on taking us to Chelsea’s wedding anyway, she
might include a little personal revelation to go along with the generic
Hallmark sentiments. Instead the occasion is repurposed for political
branding: “This, I thought, is why Bill and I had worked so hard for so
many years to help build a better world—so Chelsea could grow up safe and
happy and one day have a family of her own, and so every other child would
have the same chance.”

The only touching passages in Hard Choices can be found in Hillary’s
generous and humorous portrait of the one-of-a-kind diplomat Richard
Holbrooke, who died tragically while trying to stave off incoming fire from
Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the antagonists in the Obama White House
(unnamed, of course) who tried “to force him out of the job.” Next to
Holbrooke, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama emerge as ciphers in Hard Choices.
Hillary’s trusted aide Huma Abedin is more vividly present, but the public
spousal scandal that proved a major distraction to both her and the nation
during her service at State goes unmentioned. Also “not included here” are
the hard choices—a.k.a. bad choices—that hobbled Hillary’s 2008
presidential campaign. To her credit, she does finally call her 2002 Senate
vote to authorize the Iraq invasion “a mistake,” though the blame is
deflected from her own faulty judgment and political cowardice to the Bush
administration’s phony case for war. The candor of this overdue admission,
however, is negated by an account of her 2011 speech in Geneva championing
LGBT human rights in which she schooled foreign leaders that “leadership,
by definition, means being out in front of your people when it is called
for.” Given that the Clinton administration’s “leadership” record included
being out front in supporting “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the Defense of
Marriage Act, you might expect at least a mini mea culpa, or some
circumspect grace note of irony, but Hillary just leaves out that
embarrassing history entirely. No wonder she bristled when Terry Gross
challenged the timing of her tardy evolution on gay marriage in a book-tour
interview for NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

If Clinton could be flummoxed by NPR, it only followed that her camp would
hyperventilate about Ed Klein. Blood Feud is patently ridiculous, but
despite the Clinton statement chastising “legitimate media” for spreading
its “lies,” the “legitimate media” is doing no such thing. Neither has the
“illegitimate media” (the pro forma Drudge headlines aside) or conservative
media. It’s not just that the Times, the Washington Post, and Slate either
ignored or ridiculed Blood Feud. The Weekly Standard and National Review
didn’t bother to review it either; the Murdoch imprint that originally
bought the book dropped it. (The boutique right-wing house Regnery stepped
in.) On his radio show, no less a Hillary hater than Rush Limbaugh said he
found “some of the quotes” in Klein’s book “odd in the sense I don’t know
people who speak this way.” He also questioned the credibility of the
book’s two pivotal confrontations between the Clintons and the Obamas: a
couples dinner in the Obama White House’s private residence that could be
an outtake from Meet the Fockers, and a fateful golf game where Obama
supposedly assented to a deal to support Hillary in 2016 in exchange for
Bill’s supporting him in 2012.

Limbaugh was just the latest to join the many on the right who have bailed
on Klein. When Klein’s first Clinton hit job, The Truth About Hillary, was
published in 2005, John Podhoretz famously wrote: “Thirty pages into it, I
wanted to take a shower. Sixty pages into it, I wanted to be
decontaminated.” In that book, Klein had claimed that Chelsea Clinton had
been conceived in an incident of marital rape and that Hillary was a
(nonpracticing) lesbian, or in any case had lesbian friends, or closeted
lesbian friends, or whatever, as an undergraduate at Wellesley College.
Bill O’Reilly refused to book Klein on his Fox News show then, a snub he
repeated for the new book. Even a host on the rigidly party-line Fox News
morning show Fox & Friends was skeptical about Blood Feud, joking that the
only possible source for one of the book’s Bill-Hillary exchanges would
have had to be Chelsea.

That Blood Feud has sold so well can’t be attributed to the salaciousness
of its breathless “revelations.” No rape this time, and none of Klein’s
weirdly self-­revealing sapphic fantasies. We must settle instead for the
news that Hillary may have had some “work” done, and that she may have some
routine health concerns that require monitoring, a condition she shares
with basically every other 66-year-old in America. There’s a moment where
Hillary jabs Obama with her finger to argue a point and Obama later tells
Michelle that “it hurt.” But Klein himself doesn’t lay a finger on Hillary.
Indeed, he absolves her of the biggest crime the right holds against her—an
alleged Benghazi cover-up. In contrast to Hillary’s lengthy and defensive
rehash of that incident in Hard Choices, Klein just blames the supposed
subterfuge on Obama. The president, it turns out, had concocted a cover
story and ordered his secretary of State to disseminate it. When Hillary
recounts her plight to Bill, he replies, “Those bullshit talking points
manufactured in the White House sausage factory aren’t going to hold up …
Eventually, the lie is going to be exposed, and you’ll take the fall for
it. Then, believe me, Obama will dump you.” Say what you will about
Limbaugh, he knows bogus dialogue when he hears it.

Blood Feud is padded with recyclings from Klein’s previous anti-Obama book,
The Amateur, and citations from ­mainstream-media Obama reporting by
writers like Jodi Kantor and Ryan Lizza. What makes the book enjoyable is
the self-­parodistic overkill of Klein’s writing (a Rahm Emanuel anecdote
ends with him hitting “his forehead with the heel of his hand” and saying,
“Oy vey!”); the sheer absurdity of his conspiracy theories; and, against
all odds, the unexpected, perhaps even unintentional, emergence of a
likable Hillary.

Unlike The Truth About Hillary, which mustered the fig leaf of footnotes,
Klein doesn’t bother with that pretense this time around and instead cloaks
all in “what journalists call ‘deep background.’ ” And so, delightfully,
anything goes. We learn that Valerie Jarrett runs the White House with an
iron fist and is plotting an Illinois Senate bid by Michelle Obama against
the stroke-impaired Republican incumbent, Mark Kirk. Bill commissions a
“secret poll” in 2012 showing that Hillary is more popular than Barack
Obama and urges her to lead an intraparty insurrection against the sitting
president. The Obamas hate the Clintons so much that the president wants to
renege on his promise to back Hillary in 2016 and support Joe Biden or
possibly John Kerry or an unspecified Obama “mini-me” instead. (Lately,
Klein has been identifying the mini-me in New York Post “exclusives” as
Elizabeth Warren; she’s not even mentioned in his book.) Klein’s blood-feud
thesis, culminating in a chapter titled “ ‘There Will Be Blood,’ ” is so
nonsensical that he is compelled to write: “At this point, some readers
might raise an objection: How was it possible for Bill Clinton to campaign
all-out for Barack Obama [in 2012] while wishing to see him lose? How does
that make sense? It only makes sense if we stop to remember that
politicians are different from you and me.” Got it!

The cumulative bottom line of this narrative is that next to Barack Obama,
who is portrayed as an incompetent mobster, and Bill Clinton, who is always
turning red with anger when he’s not cruising waitresses in close proximity
to his presidential library in Little Rock, Hillary is by far the most
appealing character, a foulmouthed, independent-minded executive you’d like
to have that proverbial beer with. You can’t fault a reader for wanting to
spend time with Klein’s two-fisted Hillary rather than the often robotic
self-­censoring bureaucrat of Hard Choices. Both these Hillarys are in
essence fictional creations crafted for the marketplace—one embellished
with camp to sell books, the other embalmed with civic virtue to win
votes—so in the end, it all comes down to which kind of fiction you prefer.
The real Hillary, whomever she may be, is scantly visible in either book.
But with all due respect to Greta Van Susteren, it’s Klein’s who turns out
to be “fun.”

One of the several shopworn themes of Hard Choices is that when you make a
mistake, you learn from it. No doubt the 2016 Clinton-campaign-in-waiting
is learning, as many have reported, that its candidate is rusty after her
years above the political fray as secretary of State and that she and her
enforcers still don’t know how to deal with a press corps they despise.
Hillaryland reacted to the mishaps of the book tour, the disappointing
sales, and the nuisance of a gnat like Klein with an overkill that recalls
its ham-fisted efforts to cope with the Obama insurgency in 2008.

Now as then, the case for a Hillary victory is overwhelming: a more-or-less
unified Democratic Party; the lack of a gangbusters opponent in either
party; a fractious and self-immolating GOP that seems determined to drive
away women, minorities, and young people; and an ability to raise tons of
money. But as we all know, Hillary was inevitable in 2008 too. Anything can
happen in the next two years.

The continued failure of Benghazi (or, for that matter, any foreign-policy
issue on Hillary’s watch) to gain traction with the public has lately
spawned an alternative line of attack by potential Republican opponents:
Hillary is a “20th-­century candidate.” As a recent fund-raising appeal
from Mario Rubio’s PAC had it, “Clinton’s ideas are from the days of the
Macarena, Prodigy Internet, and the Y2K scare.” That’s a big step forward
from the 19th-century ideas championed by the GOP’s anti-government and
xenophobic base, but the orchestrated rollout of Hard Choices nonetheless
reeked of old-school Establishment political culture: the inevitable hype
about how the D.C. “superlawyer” Robert Barnett secured a
multimillion-dollar advance, the prepublication press embargo to build
suspense, the leaks of selected passages to friendly media, the breathless
accounts of which television name would be awarded the “get” of the first
interview with the author, the fiercely stage-managed book signings. It was
all reminiscent of the stately, too-big-to-fail corporate culture of
Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign.

A bigger issue raised by Hard Choices is a more fundamental one—the
assumption by Hillary and her handlers that the Hillary Clinton portrayed
in its pages is the one voters want: a cautious, unspontaneous caretaker of
all things good and true who will never run a yellow light or frighten the
horses. Not a Hillary who knocks back a drink stronger than Chardonnay, not
a Hillary who will fire back at the partisan congressional committee
running a Benghazi witch hunt with a rightly intemperate “What difference
at this point does it make?”

The blandness of the Hillary presented in Hard Choices was a political, not
a literary, choice. It is what created the vacuum that a nimble opportunist
like Klein could fill—and that conceivably an opposing candidate might
fill, much as Obama did. It’s a book that made no effort to entice, let
alone win over, voters who weren’t Hillary fans in the first place. On the
other hand, Blood Feud just might attract some new adherents. One of my
favorite moments in Klein’s fantasia occurs when Bill Clinton tells his
wife that he wants her to get plastic surgery because “dowdy and old
doesn’t win the White House these days.” To which, in the author’s
inimitable style, Hillary responds, “Fuck you. Get your own face-lift.” I
am sure that the Clinton camp is correct and this deplorable, trashy scene
never happened. But tell me: Wouldn’t you be more enthusiastic about voting
for Hillary Clinton if it had?

*BBC: “The US, IS and the conspiracy theory sweeping Lebanon”
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28745990>*

[No Writer Mentioned]

August 11, 2014

[Subtitle:] Is America behind the creation of the Islamic State? The BBC's
Suzanne Kianpour, in Beirut, looks at the latest conspiracy theory doing
the rounds in Lebanon.

"In the Middle East, conspiracy theories are in our blood," one former
Lebanese official said over lunch in a restaurant in central Beirut.

He was referring to the latest talk of the town: the United States is
behind the creation of the Islamic State group (formerly known as Isis, the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and Hillary Clinton admitted it in her
book "Hard Choices".

As Islamic State (IS) militants advanced into Lebanon last week - spreading
terror into the village of Arsal, bordering Syria, and driving hundreds out
of their homes - whispers pinned the blame for their actions on the US.

Horrific videos of IS atrocities against Lebanese Armed Forces circulated
on the internet. So did the theory that America is behind the existence and
emboldening of the group.

To back up their claim, conspiracy theorists online pointed to a powerful
piece of "proof": the word of Hillary Clinton - the former US secretary of
state widely expected to make a bid for the presidency.

*Dispelling rumours*

Screenshots of supposed "excerpts" from her book spread far and wide on
social media in Lebanon, claiming the US created IS to instil instability
in the region for American gain.

The rumour even prompted the Lebanese foreign ministry to summon US
Ambassador to Lebanon David Hale.

Furthermore, to try and quash the gossip, the US embassy in Beirut issued a
statement on Facebook:

"Any suggestion that the United States ever considered recognising the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant as anything other than a terrorist
organization, or had any role in its creation, is patently false.
Allegations circulating in Lebanon to the contrary are a fabrication."

Instead, what Hillary Clinton has said is that the failure to help Syrian
rebels led to the rise of IS.

It's not completely shocking that such a theory may have started, given
America's history of supporting militant and guerrilla groups; the
mujahideen in Afghanistan, from which al-Qaeda emerged, quickly comes to
mind. The fact that US allies in the Gulf are accused of supporting IS also
doesn't help their case.

"Such theories abound, largely because Washington has shown a propensity
for outsourcing regime change. Support for insurgent groups in that context
is certainly not a new practice and, as of late, has not been a
particularly effective one," says Octavius Pinkard, a Brussels-based
specialist in foreign policy analysis and Middle East politics, who has
been conducting fieldwork in Beirut.

*Tarnished image*

Rumours like these risk harming US interests in Lebanon - a nation where
they have a keen interest in maintaining soft power. Symbolic confrontation
and proxy battles for clout with another group also seeking to win over the
Lebanese people, Hezbollah, are nothing new.

But a theory that America is to blame for beheadings and the barbaric acts
attributed to IS can be severely damaging to the US image - leaving them at
risk of losing support and the tide turning against them.

Recently, the narrative on the streets of Beirut has increasingly been that
Hezbollah won't let IS get to the Lebanese capital, not "America will help
us."

"Most people here believe the US and Saudi are one and when it comes
strictly down to oil money, the ultimate benefactor from the whole IS
debacle is Saudi/the US. As history has taught us, it is usually the
benefactors who are the instigators," says Amer Murad, a native of Beirut.

"An important development that we have seen is the collaboration between
the Lebanese Army and Hezbollah in their efforts to protect Lebanon from
threats posed by the Syrian civil war spilling over into Lebanese
territory," Octavius Pinkard says.

As the conflict in Syria/Lebanon evolves, so does the perception of
Washington. And it appears the Hezbollah/Damascus/Tehran trio is winning
the propaganda battle.

However, when Obama announced airstrikes against IS in Iraq on Thursday,
love for the US returned to Facebook.

"I've never been happier for American intervention," one Lebanese user
posted.

Perhaps it may be too soon to say if US popularity in Lebanon might recover
based on their progress in Iraq, but at the moment, America appears to be
suffering a PR crisis among the people normally supportive of it.

*Haaretz opinion: Peter Beinart: “Israel’s new lawyer: Hillary Clinton”
<http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.610007>*

By Peter Beinart, The Atlantic

August 11, 2014, 5:24 p.m.

[Subtitle:] She sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through Bibi’s eyes,
which could be the reason she gets so much wrong.

Who’s the Israeli government’s best spokesperson? Ron Dermer? Michael Oren?
Bibi himself? Nope. It’s Hillary Clinton. In her interview on Sunday with
Jeffrey Goldberg, Clinton offered the most articulate, sophisticated,
passionate defense of Netanyahu’s conduct I’ve heard from a government
official on either side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, important chunks of
it aren’t true.

Let’s take her claims in turn.

In his first term, Netanyahu moved towards a Palestinian state

Clinton began her defense of Bibi by noting that in his first term, in the
late 1990s, he had “give[n] up territory” and “moved in that direction
[towards a Palestinian state], as hard as it was.”

That’s extremely generous. It’s true that in 1997, Bibi withdrew Israeli
troops from most of the West Bank city of Hebron (though they can reenter
any time Israel wants) and the following year signed the Wye River Accords,
under which Israel was supposed to hand over 13 percent of the West Bank to
the Palestinian Authority (though Bibi’s government fell before it could do
so).

What Clinton leaves out is that Bibi only agreed to these withdrawals to
forestall the far larger ones envisioned under the Oslo Accords he
inherited from Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. In 1993, when Oslo was
signed, Bibi publicly compared it to Neville Chamberlain’s surrender of the
Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler.

He accepted Oslo in the 1996 election campaign only because he couldn’t
repudiate a process endorsed by the Israeli center and championed by the
United States. So Bibi sabotaged Oslo by accelerating settlement growth and
minimizing the amount of land Israel relinquished. “Before I took office,”
he later boasted, “the conception was to give away everything except for
two percent [of West Bank] while I turned everything around and gave just
two percent to [full control] of the Palestinian Authority.” Or as he told
settlers after leaving office, “I stopped the Oslo Accords.”

The Clinton administration officials who dealt with Bibi in his first term
understood this all too well. “Neither President Clinton nor Secretary
[Madeleine] Albright believed that Bibi had any real interest in pursuing
peace,” writes Dennis Ross in The Missing Peace. Ross’ deputy, Aaron
Miller, adds in his memoir that, “all of us saw Bibi as a kind of speed
bump that would have to be negotiated along the way until a new Israeli
prime minister came along who was more serious about peace.”

That’s a far cry from what Hillary told Goldberg. Then again, Ross and
Miller aren’t running for president.

Bibi agreed to a settlement freeze but Abbas wouldn’t negotiate

Fast-forwarding to the Obama years, Clinton claims that, “I got Netanyahu
to agree to the unprecedented settlement freeze… It took me nine months to
get Abbas into the negotiations even after we delivered on the settlement
freeze.”

What’s striking, again, is what Clinton leaves out. The settlement freeze
was indeed, unprecedented. Unfortunately, it didn’t actually freeze
settlement growth. It’s not just that, as Clinton admits, the “freeze”
exempted East Jerusalem. Even more importantly, it exempted buildings on
which construction had all ready begun. This loophole proved crucial
because, as the Israeli press reported at the time, settlers spent the
months preceding the “freeze” feverishly breaking ground on new
construction, on which they continued to build during the ten month
“freeze,” before breaking new ground once it expired. As a result,
according to Peace Now, there was more new settlement construction in 2010
- the year of the freeze - than in 2008. As Obama administration envoy
George Mitchell admitted to Palestinian negotiator Saab Erekat, the Obama
administration had wanted a freeze that truly stopped settlement growth but
“we failed.”

Clinton’s claim that Abbas refused to negotiate until the last minute is
disingenuous too. In fact, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met
repeatedly during the “freeze.” In January 2010, just over a month after it
began, veteran Israeli columnist Ben Caspit reported that, “In the past
weeks, Israeli representatives, including Netanyahu, have repeatedly
rejected official documents that their Palestinian counterparts have tried
to submit to them, with details of the Palestinian positions on all the
core issues. The Israeli representatives are completely unwilling to
discuss, read or touch these documents, not to speak of submitting an
equivalent Israeli document with the Israeli positions.”

While reporting my book, The Crisis of Zionism, I heard four different
Obama officials confirm this account. During the settlement “freeze,” the
Palestinians submitted to Netanyahu and his aides the same positions they
had submitted to Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert. These included a
Palestinian state on the 1967 lines with a 1.9 percent land swap for
territory inside Israel proper, Israeli control of all the Jewish
neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, international troops in the Jordan Valley
and the return of 150,000 Palestinian refugees over ten years. The
Netanyahu government, by contrast, steadfastly refused to discuss the
parameters of a Palestinian state.

In her interview with Goldberg, Clinton never mentions that.

Netanyahu’s views on Palestinian statehood resembled Ehud Barak’s.

Given the evidence that during her time as secretary of state, Bibi refused
to discuss territory, Clinton’s claim that “I saw Netanyahu move from being
against the two-state solution to…considering all kinds of Barak-like
options” is bizarre. Whatever you think of Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David
in July 2000, it was a detailed offer. Netanyahu, by contrast, refused put
forward a territorial proposal not merely during Clinton’s term, but during
John Kerry’s far more aggressive effort to broker a deal. During the Kerry
negotiations, according to Haaretz’s Barak Ravid, Netanyahu “flatly refused
to present a map or even to discuss the subject theoretically…throughout
the nine months of the talks Netanyahu did not give the slightest hint
about the scale of the territorial concessions he would be willing to make.”

It’s too bad Goldberg didn’t press Clinton on what kind of “Barak-like
options” she heard Netanyahu propose, because the best reporting we have
suggests he offered no territorial “options” at all.

Netanyahu is right to demand indefinite control of the West Bank

Most remarkable of all, Clinton tells Goldberg that, “If I were the prime
minister of Israel, you’re damn right I would expect to have security
[control over the West Bank].” What makes this statement so remarkable is
that earlier in the interview, Hillary praised the Clinton parameters
outlined by her husband in December 2000. Those parameters permit Israeli
troops to remain in the Jordan Valley, along the West Bank’s border with
Jordan, for three years. Later in the interview, Clinton claims that she
convinced Abbas to agree to allow Israeli troops to remain for “six, seven,
eight years” and that she “got Netanyahu to go from forever to 2025” as a
date for their withdrawal. Even this, from a Palestinian perspective,
represents painful backsliding from the position outlined by Hillary’s
husband. But as Hillary must know, Bibi three weeks ago said that in light
of regional developments, “there cannot be a situation, under any
agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of
the River Jordan.” Which is to say that, as of now, Bibi’s position really
does seem to be “forever.” Yet rather than challenge that stance, Clinton
endorses it.

Why does Clinton again and again endorse Netanyahu’s view of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict even when it contradicts long-standing
American positions? Because she’s so willing to see the world through his
eyes. Notice how she begins her statement about security control of the
West Bank: “If I were the prime minister of Israel.” There’s nothing wrong
with that. U.S. officials should understand, and empathize with, Israeli
leaders, even right-wing ones. But what’s missing from Clinton’s interview
is any willingness to do the same for Palestinians. If it’s so easy to
understand why some Israelis might want perpetual military control of the
West Bank, why can’t Clinton understand why Palestinians - after living for
almost fifty years under a foreign army - might not want it to indefinitely
patrol their supposedly independent state.

One of the hallmarks of Barack Obama’s statements about Israel and
Palestine, going back to his 2008 presidential campaign, has been his
insistence on giving voice to the fears and aspirations of both sides.
Writing about his trip to Israel in The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote that,
“I talked to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in
suicide bombings; I heard Palestinians talk of the indignities of
checkpoints and reminisce about the land they had lost.” In Jerusalem last
March, he spoke movingly, and in detail about the Jewish story, but also
asked Israelis to “put yourself in their [the Palestinians] shoes. Look at
the world through their eyes.” In her interview with Goldberg, that’s
exactly what Clinton does not do. Her interpretations of recent
Israeli-Palestinian history reflect from a deep imbalance: a willingness to
see reality through Israeli eyes and an almost total refusal to do the same
for Palestinians.

“For far too long,” wrote Aaron Miller in 2005, “many American officials
involved in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, myself included, have acted as
Israel's attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the
expense of successful peace negotiations.” From the beginning, Barack Obama
has tried to avoid that. Although he hasn’t brokered Israeli-Palestinian
peace, he has tried to make good on his campaign promise to “hold up a
mirror” to both sides. In Hillary Clinton, by contrast, at least judging
from her interview on Sunay, Israel has yet another lawyer. And a very good
one at that.

*Mediaite: “RNC Chairman: I ‘Prefer’ a Hillary Run in 2016”
<http://www.mediaite.com/online/rnc-chairman-i-prefer-a-hillary-run-in-2016/>*

By Eddie Scarry

August 12, 2014, 10:54 a.m. EDT

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is “ready for
Hillary” in 2016.

Preibus said in a new interview with Real Clear Politics that though he
think former secretary of state Hillary Clinton is “sending mixed signals”
about her political ambitions, he would be okay with Republicans facing her
in the next presidential election.

“I think her favorables are way too low for someone that’s supposed to be
inevitable,” Priebus said. “I think that she’s exhibited an uncanny ability
to make mistakes politically and she completely unifies the Republican
Party. And all I’m telling you is, politically, that’s not a bad place. I
actually would prefer it.”

Priebus has said in the past that Republicans have a “truckload” of
opposition research to use against Clinton in the event that she runs. He
has also said he would use her husband’s extramarital affair with Monica
Lewinsky against Clinton.

Priebus said in his interview with RCP that he has doubts, however, that
Clinton will run. “Does she really want to go through with all of this?” he
said. “Does she really want to deal with the politics and the grind of a
primary for the next two years?”

Clinton has seen a drop in her popularity of late, due in large part to
several awkward encounters and comments she made while promoting her new
memoir.

Watch via RCP:

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