podesta_email_19312.txt

podesta-emails 4,317 words email

P17 P22 D6 V11 P20

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*​**Correct The Record Thursday January 15, 2015 Morning Roundup:* *Headlines:* *CNN: “One month without a Hillary Clinton headliner” <http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/15/politics/hillary-clinton-month-hiatus/>* “As the 2016 race heats up on the Republican side, with a new Super PAC, donor check or staffing announcement dropping every hour since Christmas, Hillary Clinton's schedule has been notably empty.” *Bloomberg column: Jonathan Bernstein: ‘Did Hillary Clinton Just Clinch the Nomination?” <http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-14/did-hillary-clinton-just-clinch-the-nomination>* “It's a lot more unusual for the nomination to be wrapped up with a year of the ‘invisible primary’ (the part of the campaign before voters get involved) remaining on the clock. But Clinton may have done it.” *New York Time blog: The Upshot: “Trying to Solve the Great Wage Slowdown” <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/upshot/trying-to-solve-the-great-wage-slowdown.html?abt=0002&abg=0>* “It’s hard not to see the report partly as the first draft of an agenda for a presumptive campaign by Mrs. Clinton.” *Time: “How Elizabeth Warren Is Yanking Hillary Clinton to the Left” <http://time.com/3668768/elizabeth-warren-hillary-clinton-left-wing/>* “Warren is likely to conjure more change by being a progressive foil to Clinton than by running herself.” *New York Times: First Draft: “Clinton Takes to Heart a 6-Year-Old Lesson in Accounting” <http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/01/15/?entry=mb-4&_r=0>* “While she does not yet have a campaign, people close to the would-be candidate say that it is likely that she will not solicit general election donations during the Democratic presidential primaries.” *New York Daily News: “Ready for Hillary is extending its run as Hillary Clinton stays mum” <http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/ready-hillary-extending-run-spring-blog-entry-1.2077849>* “Ready for Hillary is extending its run as Hillary Clinton continues to delay an announcement on whether or not she will run for President.” *Articles:* *CNN: “One month without a Hillary Clinton headliner” <http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/15/politics/hillary-clinton-month-hiatus/>* By Dan Merica January 15, 2015 As the 2016 race heats up on the Republican side, with a new Super PAC, donor check or staffing announcement dropping every hour since Christmas, Hillary Clinton's schedule has been notably empty. The last time the presumed Democratic front-runner headlined an event -- something she did with regularity throughout most of 2014 -- was Dec. 15, when she joined forces with former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to promote keeping reliable date about women and girls around the globe. Clinton's spokesman has said for the last two weeks that the former secretary of state's public schedule would be quiet, and it won't be until Jan. 21 -- the day after President Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union address -- that Clinton will return the spotlight with two events in Canada. The dearth in events is noticeable, even with the natural quiet of the holidays, when compared to her Republican counterparts and considering Clinton's prevalence last year. She headlined random trade conferences in massive convention centers, went from bookstore-to-bookstore hawking her new memoir and picked up paychecks all over the country for paid, high-profile speaking gigs. But for the last month -- as Clinton approaches the point where other Democrats says she has to make up her mind -- none of that has happened. Clinton's absences also comes at a time when the Republican side of the 2016 race is feverishly heating up: - Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has been publicly and "actively" exploring a presidential run for nearly a month, and news from his team has leaked at a steady stream including ambitious fundraising goals and launching a leadership PAC to boost those efforts. - Sen. Rand Paul has been campaigning in New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary state, this week and will spend part of the weekend in Nevada, another important presidential primary state. Paul has also hired Chip Englander as the campaign manager for his likely presidential campaign. - Mitt Romney— the Republican's 2012 nominee who repeatedly spent his 2014 saying he wanted nothing to do with a third presidential bid — told a roomful of donors last week that he is seriously considering a 2016 bid and has since set the political world ablaze by calling possible supporters and agreeing to attend a Republican National Committee meeting near San Diego this week. And that's before we even get to other Republicans, like former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who have all also signaled loudly they are getting closer to making a 2016 bid. Clinton's decision to stay out of the spotlight shows the differences between a crowded field in one party and in another a presumed front-runner is so far ahead of the pack of would be primary challengers. The fact Clinton isn't this out front right now is making most pro-Clinton Democrats happy. While some commentators have quietly wondered why Clinton didn't say anything about the terrorist attacks in Paris -- a Clinton spokesman didn't respond to multiple emails on the topic -- most have been encouraged by her month-long hiatus. "Usually, historically, it is the Republican Party that has been the more stayed, predictable, boring party. They always nominate the oldest white guy in line," said Paul Begala, a longtime Clinton supporter and former Clinton White House aide. "My party, which has always been burning man without the nudity, now looks like the stable one. There is real stability on the Democratic side." Begala continued: "Everything has risks, but that spotlight is so hot, there is only so long you can dance in it, so lets push it over to the GOP for a little while. Let's turn that on them for a while." But Clinton and her orbit has been far from quiet. Clinton has commented publicly on issues like Obama's decision to loosen restrictions on Cuba and the deaths of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo. Clinton and her husband, Bill Clinton, also attended Cuomo's funeral in New York earlier this month. More importantly, though, over the last two weeks, Clinton's political operation has grown with multiple reports that Clinton has met with top campaign aides and is starting to piece together a possible campaign apparatus. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that John Podesta, a top White House adviser and former Clinton White House aide, would leave the administration in February to join Clinton's growing political apparatus ahead of a 2016 run. Podesta is seen by many pro-Clinton Democrats as a top choice for campaign chairman and has told multiple reporters he would leave the White House in February to help Clinton if she chooses to run. The Washington Post also reported on Tuesday that Clinton has recruited Joel Benenson as a chief strategist and Jim Margolis as a media advisor. Politico has also reported that Benenson, an operative who worked for Obama in 2008 and 2012, has signed on to help Clinton. Even as Clinton sits back, Democrats thinking about running haven't been making waves like Republicans. Jim Webb had knee surgery this month, but has shied away from any media interaction, opting, instead, to continually update his Twitter. Elizabeth Warren has given high profile speeches, but emphatically said "no" on Tuesday when asked whether she will run for president in 2016. And politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley have continued to reiterate that they are strongly considering a run at the presidency. *Bloomberg column: Jonathan Bernstein: ‘Did Hillary Clinton Just Clinch the Nomination?” <http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-14/did-hillary-clinton-just-clinch-the-nomination>* By Jonathan Bernstein January 14, 2015, 5:30 p.m. EST Hillary Clinton hasn't even declared her candidacy for 2016, but can someone tell me why she didn't just lock up the Democratic presidential nomination? There were two indicators this week. First, after months of playing around, Senator Elizabeth Warren finally declared herself out more definitively. It wasn't Shermanesque, and plenty of politicians have entered or re-entered past presidential races after more solid exits, but it’s getting late for someone to rule out a run and still have time to mount a serious one. Maybe Warren ended the semi-flirtation because she came to believe that support for her candidacy didn't extend far beyond a relatively small group of activists. Maybe she learned that Clinton’s support in the rest of the party was solid. This won't end the Draft Warren quest, as Greg Sargent of the Washington Post explained. A competitive nomination fight is in the collective interest of liberals (and, I've argued, the Democratic Party). But for most individual politicians it doesn't make sense to fill that role, as Dan Larison of the American Conservative notes in arguing why Warren shouldn’t run. The other development this week is that several big-name operatives have signed on to Clinton’s campaign, even though she hasn't even made an informal announcement yet that she is running. John Podesta would not likely be leaving the White House if he thought her campaign might be short-circuited at any moment. And if Clinton wasn’t giving convincing assurances to party actors that her campaign is real, they would be publicly pressuring her to decide. Her strategy of doing as little as possible, at least publicly, to maintain her position has to end sometime. Eventually, she’ll need to make some informal acknowledgment of her candidacy, with a formal announcement later in 2015. Clinton has had perhaps the best second-year-of-the-cycle of any non-incumbent presidential candidate in the modern period. She's been running, and very effectively. Though some of her support could be less solid than it seems, don't forget: About half of recent nominations have likely been locked in before voters in Iowa caucused and voters in New Hampshire went to the polls. It's a lot more unusual for the nomination to be wrapped up with a year of the "invisible primary" (the part of the campaign before voters get involved) remaining on the clock. But Clinton may have done it. *New York Time blog: The Upshot: “Trying to Solve the Great Wage Slowdown” <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/upshot/trying-to-solve-the-great-wage-slowdown.html?abt=0002&abg=0>* By David Leonhardt January 15, 2015 After almost 15 years of a disappointing economy, it’s easy to get pessimistic. Incomes for the middle class and poor have now been stagnating over a two-term Republican presidency and well into a two-term Democratic one. The great wage slowdown of the 21st century has frustrated Americans, polls show, and raised serious questions about what kind of policies, if any, might change the situation. Yet if you look around the world, you can find reasons for hope. While wages and incomes have stagnated in the United States (as well as in Japan and large parts of Europe), they have not done so everywhere. In Canada, a broad measure of incomes has risen about 10 percent since 2000, even as it’s fallen here. In Australia, it’s up 30 percent. These aren’t just any countries, either. They’re among those most similar to the United States: far-flung, once ruled by Britain, with a frontier culture and a commitment to capitalism. Though Australia and Canada obviously are not identical to the United States, it certainly seems worth asking what they’re doing differently. On Thursday, an all-star commission of economists and policy experts from several countries is publishing a detailed analysis of the great wage slowdown. It is a defining challenge of our time, the report argues, before offering a meaty list of possible solutions. “Today, the ability of free-market democracies to deliver widely shared increases in prosperity is in question as never before,” writes the group, which includes Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation; the economist Lawrence Summers; and leaders from Britain, Canada and Sweden. “This is an economic problem that threatens to become a problem for the political systems of these nations — and for the idea of democracy itself.” In a clear reference to China, the report notes that “apologists for anti-democratic regimes” have used the stagnation of living standards in the West as a cudgel to argue that capitalist democracies are broken. Those democracies and China are now racing for influence across much of the world, especially in Africa and Asia. The report is meant to shape the political debate – both in this year’s British general election and the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States. Already, Democrats and Republicans have signaled that the wage slowdown will be at the center of their campaigns. Hillary Clinton often says, “It feels harder and harder to get ahead,” while Jeb Bush, in a nod to upward mobility, has named his fund-raising operation “Right to Rise.” The report certainly includes ideas that can appeal to conservatives, including more employee ownership and profit-sharing at companies and a more rigorous approach to infrastructure financing. But it’s hard not to see the report partly as the first draft of an agenda for a presumptive campaign by Mrs. Clinton. The commission was created by the Center for American Progress, a Washington research group founded by Clinton allies a decade ago as a counterweight to influential conservative groups. The report also avoids a couple of topics that make many progressives uncomfortable (public-school accountability and the decline of two-parent families). Politics aside, it is a deeply serious document – one of the best overviews of income stagnation and inequality that I’ve read. Its central message is that the great wage slowdown is not inevitable. Yes, some unstoppable economic forces, namely technological change and globalization, have played a role in the slowdown. But those forces have also brought great benefits to billions of people. And some high-income countries have done a better job capturing the benefits of the modern economy while avoiding its downsides. “We should not be fatalistic,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a commission member. “There are things we can do. They may be hard things. But there being hard things you can do is very different from there being nothing to do.” Two protagonists in this optimistic take are Australia and Canada. They too have suffered from slower economic growth in recent decades, and they too have rising income inequality. But the bottom 90 percent of earners are still faring better than the bottom 90 percent in the United States, the report shows. An Upshot analysis last year came to the same conclusion: America’s middle class, long the world’s richest, has fallen behind Canada’s. What are Canada and Australia doing differently? For starters, they are doing a better job with mass education. They have near-universal preschool, and they both do more to get low-income students through college. In Australia, college is free. “Increasingly,” the report says, “a college education is similar to the high school education of the past — necessary for a prosperous life.” The efforts to create a more skilled work force in Canada and Australia (as well as Sweden and some other countries) have led to better jobs – and stronger pretax income growth. Beyond education, these other countries do more to intervene in the free market on behalf of the middle class and the poor. “It was a reasonable reading of history for a substantial time that the principal determinant of what happened to middle-class families was the overall rate of growth for the economy,” Mr. Summers told me. “Today, a substantial part of our success or failure in raising middle-class living standards will have to do not only with overall economic performance but also with the distribution of income.” Other countries, for instance, have more generous child care and family leave – and their share of women with jobs has surpassed the share in this country. Their tax policies demand relatively more of the affluent. Canada, in particular, appears to have stronger financial regulation. One theme is that the countries where the middle class has fared better are countries where workers have more power. The share in labor unions is higher, much as unionized workers in this country make more than otherwise similar workers. Some countries also have less formal “worker councils” that advise management – and can push back against some of the short-termism that afflicts corporate America. A fascinating tidbit in the report is that privately held American companies devote more of their resources to long-term investments than publicly traded companies. The commission has proposed a long list of solutions, touching on many of the areas I’ve mentioned here. It also proposes a middle-class tax cut and fewer tax breaks for executive compensation. Whatever you think about any one of these, I’d argue that the crucial point is the broader one: Middle-class stagnation is not preordained. No country has found a magic bullet, but many are doing some things better than the United States – and have the better results to show for it. Three years ago, the economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson published an important book called “Why Nations Fail.” They argued that the defining features of national success were broadly shared prosperity and political participation. When countries are organized to deliver good, improving lives to the masses, they succeed. When they don’t, they decline. The debate over how – and whether – to help the American middle class and poor certainly has its technocratic aspects, as any policy debate must. Ultimately, though, it’s a debate about the future of America’s global standing. *Time: “How Elizabeth Warren Is Yanking Hillary Clinton to the Left” <http://time.com/3668768/elizabeth-warren-hillary-clinton-left-wing/>* By Rana Foroohar January 15, 2015, 6:06 a.m. EST [Subtitle:] She may not run, but she’s already exerting a gravitational pull Elizabeth Warren, the famously anti–Wall Street Senator from Massachusetts, has become the lunar goddess of liberal politics. Just as the moon pulls the tides, Warren is slowly but steadily towing the economic conversation in the Democratic Party to the left. Witness the barn-burning speech she gave on the Senate floor in December, railing against the fact that lobbyists from Citigroup and other big banks had been allowed to squeeze a rider into the latest congressional budget bill that would make it easier for federally insured banks to keep trading derivatives, which Warren Buffett once described as the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that sparked the 2008 crisis. Then there was her opposition to President Obama’s most recent Treasury nominee, Antonio Weiss, a banker who Warren told me “has no background to justify his nomination other than working for a big Wall Street firm.” (Weiss dropped out shortly after Warren began denouncing him.) Couple that with her continued calls to break up the big banks and criticism of policies espoused by longtime Democratic economic advisers like Bob Rubin and Larry Summers, and you’ve the makings of a consequential gravitational pull. Warren is more than just a dogged critic. The former Harvard law professor’s influence comes in large part because she’s tapped into an existential crisis on the left: namely, liberals’ belated anxiety over the capture of the Democratic Party by high finance, which began two decades ago. Ronald Reagan might be the President most closely associated with laissez-faire economics, but both Republicans and Democrats have frequently turned to finance to generate quick-hit growth in tough times, deregulating markets or loosening monetary policy rather than focusing on underlying fixes for the real economy. Shrugging and citing a market-knows-best philosophy to avoid difficult political decisions has been a bipartisan exercise for quite a long time now. And the anxiety is deepened because democrats, like Republicans, bear blame for the financial crisis of 2008. Jimmy Carter deregulated interest rates in 1980, a move that pacified consumers and financiers grappling with stagflation but also helped set the stage for the home-mortgage implosion. In 1999, as President Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Rubin signed off on the Glass-Steagall banking-regulation death certificate, a move that many, Warren included, believe was a key factor in worsening the crisis. Loose accounting standards supported by many Democrats during the Clinton years also encouraged the growth of stock options as the main form of corporate compensation, a trend that French academic Thomas Piketty, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and many other economists believe exacerbated the staggering gap between rich and poor in the U.S. today. I asked Warren whether she blamed such policies for our current wage stagnation, which has persisted despite robust economic growth. “I’d lay it right at the feet of trickle-down economics, yes,” she says. “We’ve tried that experiment for 35 years, and it hasn’t worked.” Speculation has been rife that Warren might consider a presidential run of her own, taking on front runner Hillary Clinton just to make sure the same trickle-down team doesn’t end up in office again. When I ask her flatly if she’d run if she thought a Rubin or Summers would be making economic policy for the next four years, she paused. “I tell you … I’m going to do everything I can. I’m going to fight as hard as I have to. This has to change.” Change won’t come easily. Resetting the economic table is not just about breaking up big banks or raising the minimum wage. Real change would mean grappling with a deep, multidecade shift from a society in which the state, the private sector and the individual all shared responsibility for economic risks to one in which individuals are now increasingly left on their own to pay for the trappings of a middle-class life–health care, education and retirement–while corporations capture a record share of the country’s prosperity without necessarily reinvesting in the common good. Complaining about too-big-to-fail banks, sleazy lobbyists and the 1% is easier than crafting an entirely new, inclusive growth policy. Warren is likely to conjure more change by being a progressive foil to Clinton than by running herself. Her sway has old economists scrambling to learn new tricks. The Center for American Progress, a think tank with close ties to the Clintons, is releasing a new report on wages and the plight of the middle classes on Jan. 15. Its chief author: none other than Summers. Meanwhile, Clinton recently took an ideas meeting with Stiglitz, once considered too far left to touch. In politics, stars may rise, but the moon is constant. *New York Times: First Draft: “Clinton Takes to Heart a 6-Year-Old Lesson in Accounting” <http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/01/15/?entry=mb-4&_r=0>* By Amy Chozick January 15, 2015 Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to have learned at least one valuable lesson from her unsuccessful 2008 presidential run: Don’t get ahead of yourself when it comes to fund-raising. While she does not yet have a campaign, people close to the would-be candidate say that it is likely that she will not solicit general election donations during the Democratic presidential primaries. The move would represent a significant break from her approach six years ago, when her campaign collected $2,300 — the maximum then allowed for an individual contribution to a candidate — from donors for both the primaries and the general election. When she ended up losing to Barack Obama in the primaries, she was forced to raise money to pay her debt and liquidate more than $23 million in contributions set aside for the general election. Mrs. Clinton had to loan the campaign $11.4 million of her own money and had about $9.5 million in unpaid bills to vendors, including her ousted chief strategist, Mark Penn, according to her campaign’s April 2008 filings with the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Obama’s campaign ended up pleading with its own donors to help Mrs. Clinton pay down her debts. Eliminating donations for the general election is easier said than done because many donors will want to contribute the maximum. But it could also help diminish expectations that her nomination is inevitable and that she expects an easy ride to the general election. *New York Daily News: “Ready for Hillary is extending its run as Hillary Clinton stays mum” <http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/ready-hillary-extending-run-spring-blog-entry-1.2077849>* By Annie Karni January 14, 2015, 4:50 p.m. EST Ready for Hillary is extending its run as Hillary Clinton continues to delay an announcement on whether or not she will run for President. The independent super PAC building grassroots support for a potential Clinton presidential run in 2016 has always said it would wind down its operation if and when Clinton declares herself a candidate. The group’s leaders had expected to end operations between Jan. 15 and Feb. 1. But now Ready for Hillary will be fundraising and building support at least until the spring. “We’ve expanded,” Ready for Hillary founder Adam Parkhomenko told the Daily News. “We’re going longer than anticipated. We’re planning to be up until April 1. Our plan is to be around all first quarter and to keep doing what we’re doing. We’ve always said we’re going until she announces. But by reading media reports, it doesn’t seem like the decision is coming until the end of the first quarter.” The independent PAC has 21 major donor events scheduled through March 21, as well as dozens of grassroots fundraising events, Parkhomenko said. Ready for Hillary said at its national finance council meeting last November that it had raised $11 million for a Clinton campaign, and has compiled what it hopes is a valuable list of 3 million names of Clinton supporters that it plans to hand over to the former secretary of state. *Calendar:* *Sec. Clinton's upcoming appearances as reported online. Not an official schedule.* · January 21 – Saskatchewan, Canada: Sec. Clinton keynotes the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce’s “Global Perspectives” series (MarketWired <http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/former-us-secretary-state-hillary-rodham-clinton-deliver-keynote-address-saskatoon-1972651.htm> ) · January 21 – Winnipeg, Canada: Sec. Clinton keynotes the Global Perspectives series (Winnipeg Free Press <http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/Clinton-coming-to-Winnipeg--284282491.html> ) · February 24 – Santa Clara, CA: Sec. Clinton to Keynote Address at Inaugural Watermark Conference for Women (PR Newswire <http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hillary-rodham-clinton-to-deliver-keynote-address-at-inaugural-watermark-conference-for-women-283200361.html> ) · March 19 – Atlantic City, NJ: Sec. Clinton keynotes American Camp Association conference (PR Newswire <http://www.sys-con.com/node/3254649>)