“Governors As Mini-Presidents”: Being A Governor Is Not The Same As Being The Commander In Chief
In a Sunday Show appearance mainly given notice as indicating his apparent eagerness to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, Martin O’Malley did something that is sadly common but ought to be mocked out of existence: pretending that being a governor is not only an adequate but a complete preparation for the presidency. Get this (from JP Updates‘ Jacob Kornbluh):
O’Malley, who came as close as he can to announcing a 2016 presidential run, cited Maryland’s state sanctions on Iran’s economy under his tenure as one example of how he had already slowed Iran’s rush towards acquiring a nuclear bomb. Maryland had “passed some of the earliest and strongest sanctions against Iranian nuclear development of any state in the nation,” he asserted.
C’mon, give me a break. This is the foreign policy equivalent of the exceedingly annoying tendency of governors to take personal credit for national economic booms, like a child in a car seat pretending to drive his parent’s automobile. I say this as someone that worked for three governors and have had opportunities to closely watch many others–including O’Malley. I like and admire these people, as a group, far more than Members of Congress. But in trying to counter Washingtonian prejudice against politicians who aren’t performing in the Big Top, they sometimes go too far.
O’Malley isn’t remotely as egregious on this score as Scott Walker, who is rhetorically trying to reshape the world in the image of the view from his window in Madison. But he still ought to cut it out. He’s been a two-term big city mayor and a two-term governor. He’s qualified to run for president by any reasonable standard. But the idea that if elected he can smoothly move into the Oval Office and assume the responsibilities of Commander-in-Chief without some culture shock is simply not credible. That’s true of Very Senior U.S. Senators, for that matter. Truth is, there is only one putative candidate for president who is entirely acclimated to the foreign policy challenges of the presidency, and in my opinion, that should offset a lot of the carping we hear about her lack of specific “accomplishments.”
In any event, governors should stop trying to project themselves as mini-presidents. Being a governor is a big job, and an important job, and a job that tells you a lot about its occupant’s qualities. But it’s really not the same thing.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 30, 2015
“Don’t Run, Elizabeth Warren, Don’t Run!”: She Just Might Actually Have More Leverage As A Non-Candidate
And so the ratcheting up continues: Now The Boston Globe has weighed in with not one or two or three but four pieces, one of them an in-house editorial, urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president. All right; this is the kind of thing hometown newspapers do, and it gets them attention. And it means that more people will press Warren to take The Globe’s advice when they run into her at the Star Market. But does it really raise the pressure on her in any serious way?
The arguments, by the paper’s editorial board and by contributors Bob Kuttner, Josh Green, and Anna Galland, are reasonable and sound. Warren has a huge following (true). Warren is the Democratic Party’s most articulate and high-profile crusader for the middle and working classes (true). Warren uniquely can pressure Clinton to adopt more populist positions on these issues than she has been associated with in the past (true).
But then come two arguments I find less persuasive, and I write as an admirer of Warren’s. The first is that Warren can have more influence as a candidate than not. The second is that a primary run against an opponent who’s in her political weight class (none of the other Democrats are) will toughen Clinton up in all the good ways. I think there are very good reasons to be less sure about the validity of either of those.
Inside the Democratic Party right now, Warren has as much influence as just about anybody short of the president. She has moral authority. She can move armies. But here’s the next thought in that chain, and it’s important: She can move them without much—or even any—intra-party pushback. The Clinton people know that to throw a brushback pitch at Elizabeth Warren is to risk alienating her millions of followers in a deep way.
But if Warren gets into the race, that hesitation on the part of the Clinton people ends. It would not be a gloves-off, no-holds-barred kind of combat, but combat it would be. The Clinton team would plant negative stories about her. Is there even any real dirt on Elizabeth Warren? Not that anyone knows about, now that she danced her way across Scott Brown’s “fake Cherokee” bed of hot coals. But this is politics. There’s always something. Tim Geithner at least would probably try to supply it. Jim Carville would go on the Sunday shows and start popping off about it. So suddenly, her profile would change: Right now, she’s above the fray; as a candidate, she’d be knee-deep in it, against the Clinton operation.
Even so, Warren would probably win a primary or two, or more, maybe several more. What then? It could actually get kind of ugly in a way that damages both of them. Now I suppose we’ve segued into the second argument, about how a good primary would toughen Clinton up. Maybe. But no one who is writing that sentence today can possibly know for certain that that’s how it would turn out.
People say, “Oh, but look at how the 2008 primary process helped toughen up Obama.” Did it? I’m not so sure. Or if it did, this fabled toughening-up process didn’t have much to do with Clinton. The two biggest crises Obama had to work through during the primary process were entirely self-inflicted: explaining away both a) why he spent all those years in the pews of a pastor who hated America and b) what exactly he meant when he said red-state people cling to guns and religion.
And anyway, Obama did not win the 2008 general election because a long primary season toughened him up. He won for three reasons: America was psychically ready to elect a black man, this particular black man, as its president; the financial meltdown happened on GOP watch; and John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. It had very little, or indeed arguably nothing whatsoever, to do with the primary process.
One could well argue that a long primary fight between her and Clinton would mainly work to the Republicans’ benefit. Especially with the media acting as they inevitably would with two women running against each other—that is, playing up the catfight angle as much as possible, running deep into the ground every cliché from the kingdom of nature about emasculating females.
I have speculated in the past that maybe Warren doesn’t even really want to be president (for foreign policy-related reasons). I also suspect there’s a part of her that doesn’t want to risk doing anything that might end up helping the GOP and allowing the media to indulge its Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford fantasies at the expense of the party.
Finally I suspect Warren knows that she has a tremendous amount of power and leverage as things stand right now. She can sway Clinton’s course plenty as a non-candidate. She doesn’t even have to say or do much. She just needs, every so often, to remind Clinton that she exists, and that her army exists.
So, presidential candidate? She doesn’t need to bother. The things people say she would gain from such a candidacy she in fact has already. However…vice presidential candidate…think about it. Clinton-Warren. I’ve been chewing on this one for months. Mold-shattering. Exactly like what Clinton’s husband did in choosing Al Gore. Precisely the kind of bold play she needs to make to shed her image of caution. Two-thirds of women voters, easy. They’d be a great team on the trail. And imagine that closing-night convention visual. And in office, they could be a great governing team, too.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, my contention is that Warren is at a point of very high leverage as it is, and no one from anywhere inside the Democratic tent wants to lay a glove on her. That would change if she ran. I can understand why her most ardent partisans want her to run—there’s only one gold ring in American politics, and that’s the presidency. But she has been absolutely insistent that she does not want to run. At some point, people ought to accept that she means it. Besides, she’s actually in the catbird’s seat now. She has the power without having to endure the scrutiny. I don’t know many politicians who wouldn’t take that.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 25, 2015
“Just Take A Look At The Man In The Mirror”: Saudi Money And The Moral Posturing Of Rand Paul
Expecting morally serious debate from any would-be Republican presidential contender is like waiting for a check from a deadbeat. It could arrive someday, but don’t count on it.
But listening to someone like Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) feign outrage over a real moral issue can still be amusing, if you know enough about him to laugh. The Kentucky Republican has seized on stories about millions of dollars donated by Saudi Arabian agencies and interests to the Clinton Foundation, demanding that the Clintons return those funds because of gender inequality under the Saudi version of Islam.
Speaking to reporters in New Hampshire, the senator said the Saudi monarchy is waging “a war on women,” turning a phrase often used to describe what Republican politicians do to women here. Like all aspiring leaders in the GOP, Paul wants to prove that he would be tough enough to take on Hillary Rodham Clinton in a national campaign. Women and men alike may admire her and hope that she will become America’s first female president — but how can she speak on behalf of women and girls if her husband’s foundation accepted support from the Saudis?
Certainly it is true that the Saudi monarchy inflicts special oppressions on its female subjects. But before examining how that should influence the policies of a charitable foundation – and a former president or secretary of state – it is worth considering the feminist credentials of Rand Paul and his fellow Republicans.
Presumably, Paul favors permitting women to drive and exercise other rights that they would be denied in Riyadh. In his habitual hostility to any legislation improving the status of women in this country, however, he is all too typical of his party. He opposed the Paycheck Fairness Act, designed to ensure that women are paid equally to men for similar work, as an assault on the “free market” worthy of the “Soviet Politburo” (which somebody should tell him no longer exists).
Like Senators Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and other presidential hopefuls, he co-sponsored the Blunt Amendment, a mercifully defeated law that would have deprived millions of women of contraceptive and other vital insurance coverage at the whim of any employer. He sponsored a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion and some forms of birth control. And he even opposed reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act – a vote that the ultra-right Saudi imams would no doubt approve.
If Paul wants to confront an enemy of women’s advancement, he need only glance in the mirror.
As for the Clinton Foundation, leave aside the fact that the senator only knows about any Saudi donations because the foundation’s transparency exceeds anything required under U.S. law – and that the Carter Center, the Bush 41 and Bush 43 presidential libraries, Oxfam, and the World Health Organization, among many other charities, have also accepted Saudi funding.
Paul and other critics ought to explain specifically how the foundation’s receipt of support from Saudi Arabia has compromised its mission of empowering women and girls. Anyone who has attended the annual meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance, has seen and heard that commitment repeated again and again, around the world, in Muslim countries and everywhere else.
The fact that economic and social development demand full gender equality has been the unmistakable message of those meetings, year after year, for more than a decade. And no Saudi official who looked at the foundation’s programs in health, education, or economic development could misunderstand what the Clintons and their foundation are saying and doing.
To consider just one example: Over the past dozen years, the Clinton Health Access Initiative has helped to save millions of lives, including many women and girls suffering from HIV/AIDS. In Ethiopia, the Saudi billionaire Sheik Mohammed Al Amoudi donated $20 million to a Clinton Foundation program providing AIDS drugs to infected men, women, and children.
Would it have been better to refuse the Saudi money, provide less medicine, and let some of those Ethiopians die?
While Bill Clinton’s answer is plain enough, let’s not pretend such moral quandaries really trouble Rand Paul and his ilk. We already know that politicians like him are quite prepared to “let ’em die” here as well as over there, because they are eager to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ruin Medicare, and gut the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
But it is a question for the rest of us to consider seriously.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, The National Memo, March 20, 2015
“A Clear Stake In The Issue”: The Media Is Obsessed With Hillary’s Emails Because The Media Is Obsessed With Stories About Itself
That the email controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton is still raging after nearly two weeks has awakened in Democrats a familiar dread. Nobody expected Republicans to give Clinton an easy time, but some of her supporters clearly hoped that time and experience had changed the way the press would adjudicate scandal accusations, or at least had diluted old suspicions so that the Clintons, their political enemies, and the media wouldn’t combine to form such a toxic brew.
As TPM’s Josh Marshall wrote, “the email story is shaping up to be another classic Clinton scandal. On the merits, the hyperventilation seems way out ahead of the actual facts…. And yet here we are again—with an almost infinite, process-driven scandal that can easily continue on into a Clinton presidency, if there is one…. Always a dance, always drama.”
The ingredients of this particular drama lend themselves to unending innuendo and recrimination. Clinton and her lawyers controlled all of her State Department–era emails, decided amongst themselves which to hand over to the government, and will presumably resist all GOP efforts to peek into the remainder, assuming they’re still retrievable. Republicans can thus whip the paranoid/birther contingent of their coalition into a state of permanent suspicion by projecting whatever malfeasance they want on to the missing emails.
But I think the nature of the email story makes it a poor proxy for gauging the relationship Clinton’s campaign will have with the press going forward. Keep in mind that this isn’t the first Clinton error Republicans have tried to exploit. When the press has taken GOP Benghazi accusations seriously, it’s gotten burned. Republicans have more credibly tried to raise questions about Clinton’s big dollar speeches and Clinton Foundation fundraising practices, but none of these stories have captured the press’ interest quite like the email controversy.
What distinguishes the email controversy is that it intersects in obvious ways with the professional interests of the same political press corps that will cover Clinton throughout the presidential campaign. It’s such big news because the news itself has a clear stake in the issue. The national press corps doesn’t generally expend a tremendous amount of energy holding senior bureaucrats to the letter of records-keeping protocols, or worrying about how much public business government officials are conducting on private email accounts—though perhaps they should.
But when reporters learned that the most public and politically aspirant of these officials had it in her power to deprive them of records to which they should be entitled, those reporters, quite predictably, responded not just as reporters but as representatives of their trade. This isn’t just any old process story, but one which practically invites reporters to miscalibrate in expressing industry outrage.
It’s also an old phenomenon, and one Clinton really should have anticipated. She hadn’t left Foggy Bottom for more than five months when the same press corps erupted over the revelation that, while conducting a leak investigation at the State Department, the DOJ had used a secret warrant to seize Fox News reporter James Rosen’s emails.
The press was correct to criticize that particular tactic, but in so doing it revealed a kind of shallowness about itself. It didn’t object to DOJ intimidation per se, but to the fact that a reporter rather than a mere civilian had been the target. If Rosen had been an imam in Michigan or a political dissident, the White House briefing room would have been mostly silent about it.
Instead they made it front page news, and forced the administration to examine itself to such great effect that Attorney General Eric Holder now considers the DOJ’s conduct toward Rosen his greatest regret. My hunch is that Hillary Clinton will have to put herself through a similar reckoning before the press lets go of the email story.
Assuming she does, though, I don’t think we can say with any certainty that it will set a tone for the media’s overall coverage of Clinton’s campaign. And as a political issue of its own, the email controversy will probably prove to be self-limiting. Republican presidential hopefuls like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker have email problems of their own—which, unsurprisingly, are a much bigger deal to in-state reporters in Florida and Wisconsin than to the national press corps that has been covering Clinton. Moreover, if Republicans in Congress allow their questions about Clinton’s emails to morph into a witch hunt, they’ll turn her into a martyr.
This particular Clinton drama is sui generis. Which means we’ll have to wait until the next imbroglio to learn whether the media and the Clintons will get along better this time around than they did in the 1990s.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, March 16, 2015
“Look Over There!”: The Plot Thins On The Clinton Email ‘Scandal’
So over the weekend, the Times, which had already walked back some of the wilder implications of its Hillary Clinton-email reporting, did so just a little bit more. It did it under a provocative (though basically defensible) headline that tried to make it sound like the plot was thickening, but in fact this plot is thinning faster than Tony Blair’s hair (seriously, have a look). What began life two weeks ago as another “Clintons play by their own rules” mega-scandal is now pretty clearly devolving into a “what do you expect, it’s the government” saga that is about as dog-bites-man as it gets.
The Times headline, on A1 Saturday, proclaimed: “Emails Clinton Said Were Kept Could Be Lost.” The article, co-bylined by the reporter who broke the original story and another, reported that the State Department did not start automatically archiving the state.gov email traffic of deputies until February of this year. This bit of information came from department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who discussed this at her daily briefing the day before (i.e. last Friday).
Now. Remember what Clinton had said at her UN press conference last week—that even though she used a personal address, everything she wrote to her deputies’ state.gov addresses was archived: “The vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department.”
She’s right that they were captured, but that doesn’t mean they were archived, according to what Psaki said Friday. So the Times put those two factoids together and produced its Saturday piece, the most dramatic possible reading of events, which opened by informing readers that contrary to what Clinton had said, not everyone at State was required to archive their email correspondence, so maybe some of those emails she told us had been preserved had quite possibly not.
It’s a defensible news story. But here’s the thing. If you read farther down into the article—and certainly, if you read the transcript of Psaki’s Friday briefing—the picture that is very clearly beginning to emerge here is one of a lumbering department (is there any other kind when it comes to matters like this?) taking a long time (shocking!) to get itself into compliance with regulations and laws. Toward the end of the Times article, it quotes experts saying the kinds of throw-up-your-hands things that people say when they think a situation is unfortunate but not genuinely a scandal (“it really is chaos across the government in terms of what agencies do, what individuals do, and people understand that they can decide what they save and what they don’t”).
As for the State briefing, here’s what happened. Psaki fielded a question that went: “You had said that you would check—yesterday, you said a couple of times that you’re now automatically archiving…the emails of certain principals.” Psaki said yes, that process started in February of this year (there’s your news). Somebody else asked, naturally enough, why not until February of this year:
Psaki: “Out of an effort to continue to update our process. Our goal, actually, is to apply an archiving system that meets these same requirements to all employee mailboxes by the end of 2016. So it’s only natural that you’d start with the Secretary, which we did in 2013; that you would progress with other senior Department officials, and we’ll continue to make—take steps forward.”
Then somebody asked, again naturally enough, why not sooner. “I’m sure,” she said, “if we had the technical capability to, we would have, and it’s just a process that takes some time.” And then later: “This has been a process that’s been ongoing, and obviously, it’s not only time-consuming and requires a lot of effort on the part of employees to do it in other ways, but they have long been planning to do this. It’s just something that it took some time to put in place.”
You get the idea. Anybody shocked to hear those words? A government agency got a directive, and it’s taking a long time to implement it!
Now, you can blame Hillary Clinton for all this if you want to. She was the boss, and in some sense the buck stops at the boss’s desk. But don’t you think the secretary kinda has bigger things on her mind than this? “Hey, Steinberg, forget Middle East peace and Russia and just go find out where we are on compliance with that 2009 National Archives and Records Administration directive!”
In other words—a lot of what has happened here would probably have happened no matter who was secretary of state. If the secretary had been John Kerry then or Dick Holbrooke or whomever—why, even if it had been Clinton scold Maureen Dowd!—the department would almost surely have operated exactly as it did in terms of regulatory compliance. So, if some of these records weren’t preserved, it wasn’t a Clinton thing. It was a State Department thing.
Now obviously, the issue of whether we can trust that Clinton and her staff made an honest effort of determining which of her emails were public and which were private remains. That’s a fair question, although it’s one we’ll probably never know the answer to (just as we’ll never know it with Jeb Bush). As I wrote previously, Clinton needs to learn some lessons from this episode, and one is that suspicions will linger about her.
She ought to be cognizant of this. Not long after she becomes a candidate, for example, she ought to say that this episode has taught her about the importance of transparency and propose that if she is president, her administration will set up a system by which some kind of independent third parties will go through high-level officials’ emails to determine what is and isn’t public. This would constitute direct acknowledgement that she gets why that looks funny to people, and it would not only put the whole thing to bed, she’d get actual points.
But in the meantime, here’s what we’ve learned. On March 2, when the story broke, this was dynamite—a scandal that might prevent Clinton from even getting in the race. Then it emerged that the original Times report overstated things a little. Then it emerged that all kinds of other former secretaries of state and cabinet officials do more or less what Clinton did (some quite a bit less). Then it emerged that Jeb Bush took seven years to release all his emails and chose which ones to put out just like Clinton did. Then it emerged that other Republican candidates also have transparency issues at least the equal of Clinton’s. And finally, it emerged last Friday that the State Department performs certain administration functions rather slowly.
And remember, the only reason we’re going through all this anyway is that the Republicans, who’ve investigated Benghazi six ways to Sunday and come up with nothing on her, are now taking rocks they’ve already turned over and turning them back over. The whole Gowdy committee is nothing but a capital-P Political sting operation. It’s clearer than ever now that this is a committee to investigate Clinton that has one job and one job only: find something, anything, that might keep her out of the White House.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 16, 2015
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