“Vote Republican Or Else”: GOP Campaign Slogan; Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid
Republican presidential candidates want to win your votes by scaring you.
Thanks to the national security lapses of the Obama administration, “we will pay a terrible price one day,” says Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
“The next 20 months will be a dangerous time,” warns Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, but he offers this hint of hope: “January 2017 is coming.”
And so on. Republicans think fears of terrorist attacks are a major issue, and a major political motivator.
“Republicans are looking for some issue where they have a clear advantage,” said Ann Selzer, a Des Moines-based pollster who conducts Iowa and national surveys.
Selzer’s April 6-8 national poll found the percentage of people who name terrorism or the Islamic State as the 2016 campaign’s most important issue had nearly doubled since December.
Among Republicans, one-fourth said terrorism was their top concern. Democrats still listed unemployment as their first worry, with climate change next. Terrorism tied for fourth among Democrats.
Republicans see another big reason to keep pounding away on terrorism. If Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton wins her party’s nomination, they can conveniently brand her as a key architect of President Barack Obama’s national security policy. Clinton was secretary of state in Obama’s first term.
Republicans can also keep talking about the 2012 terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya. The House of Representatives has a special committee investigating the incident, and Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said he’ll call Clinton to testify. He also wants her to testify separately on conducting government business using email from a private computer server.
This campaign is all part of a narrative that’s become highly popular among the Republican candidates in stump speeches and media appearances.
They tend to start with zingers aimed what they label the Obama administration’s ineptness. “Barack Obama has never run a lemonade stand,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush maintains that Obama is the first post-World War II president who “does not believe that America’s presence in the world as a leader and America’s power in the world is a force for good.”
That’s why, says Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, “We need a commander in chief in this country who, once and for all, will identify that radical Islamic terrorism is a threat to us all.”
Their narrative usually continues with dire warnings.
“There are thousands of people around the world who are plotting to kill Americans here and abroad,” Rubio said recently in New Hampshire. “This risk is real. This is not hyperbole. It needs to be confronted.”
He didn’t mention how the White House has tried to do just that. In February, the president hosted a summit on violent extremism, and cited U.S. involvement in a 60-nation fight against terrorism.
Republicans won’t relent.
Sometimes, tough guy talk backfires, as when Walker said in February that he was equipped to fight terrorists because he fought labor union protesters in his state.
Finally, in the Republican pitch comes the message of hope. “There is a pessimism in the world, but it does not have to be that way,” says former Texas Gov. Rick Perry
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Sometimes Republicans are at war with one another. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., labeled U.S. involvement in Libya a mistake and criticized U.S. policy toward Syria and the rebels. He called Graham and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., “lapdogs for President Obama.”
McCain fired back, saying, “The record is very clear that he simply does not have an understanding about the needs and the threats of United States national security.”
Democrats’ response is that of course they want to combat terrorism. If Republicans are so intent on doing so, they ask, why did they stall Loretta Lynch’s nomination as attorney general for months?
“With all that this country is facing from terrorism,” asked Sen. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent, “How at this vital time can anyone elected to the Senate play partisan politics with something as sensitive as the head of the Justice Department?” On Thursday, Sanders announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Whether the Republican assault on national security policy becomes a winning strategy depends largely on events. President George W. Bush was able to use the war in Iraq — and the votes of dozens of congressional Democrats for the war — to help himself win re-election in 2004, but war weariness hurt Republicans in 2008 and 2012.
This time, Republicans see the public as weary of Democratic policies, and that’s a big potential plus. “Republicans have always been trusted more on national security,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, “and Obama has been a weaker leader than people expected.”
By: David Lightman, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS); The National Memo, May 2, 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
“Clinton; Not A Scandal, Yet. But…”: The Right Is Going To Be Gunning For Her From Day One
So by now we’ve read every possible interpretation of why Hillary Clinton used a personal email account to conduct her State Department business. There’s a lot that isn’t clear, and a lot we still don’t know. The main thing we know that is the original Times story that broke the news was really slipshod, staggeringly so for such a major story in America’s best newspaper. After I and others noted this, you could tell the Times acknowledged as much, because the paper’s Day Two follow-up didn’t really have any new news, just facts and dates that should have been in the original article to begin with. It took reporters the better part of the day Tuesday to figure out exactly which regulation the Times piece was accusing Clinton of potentially violating.
Even Mark Halperin, nobody’s idea of a Clintonista, slammed the original article. “There are things in the Times story that if they’re not flat out wrong are really misleading and unfair to the Clintons,” he said on Bloomberg TV.
The Times’ overheated sloppiness does not mean, however, that Clinton is totally in the clear here. I didn’t say that (“Clinton still has some questions to answer,” I wrote Tuesday). The citizens on whose behalf she was conducting business obviously have the right to hear her explain why she opted to use a private account. And we have the right to know whether the private server was more secure than State’s or less, and whether any classified information was electronically transported across this server. (You may think it implausible that a private server could have been more secure than State’s, but remember, Wikileaks didn’t seem to find the State systems too impenetrable, and it is after all the federal government we’re talking about.)
If the answers to any of these questions turns out to be alarming, this could become a legitimate scandal. And of course, depending on the content of the emails, we may well be in for another, related Clinton “scandal.” She doesn’t have to have said anything self-incriminating in these emails. The way the other side is out to get her, one ill-considered verb could end up being hung around her neck for days or weeks.
But even if this story were to end right here, or right after she does a press conference about it, there are a couple of lessons Clinton ought to take away from this.
First, she desperately needs someone on her staff to serve as a kind of average person-common sense barometer, and this person has to have the stature to be able to give it to her straight, and she has to listen to this person. In this case, back in early 2009, this person might have said something like, “I don’t know, Hillary. When an average person gets a job at First Federal Bank, he gets a First Federal email address, and that’s the account through which he conducts his banking business. Anything other than that is just gonna look weird to people.”
Or, last year, on the topic of her paid public appearances: “No, Hillary, not Goldman Sachs. Avocado growers, I see no harm. American Association of Sheetrock Manufacturers? Fine, if you insist. But not Goldman!”
Or: “You know, maybe it’s not the world’s best idea for you to put your name on that foundation. Cuz then whenever a question arises about its funding sources you can say ‘Hey, it’s his foundation, not mine!’”
Or, more proactively: “I was thinking, Hillary, with all these millions you’ve now made, and coming out of State, why not start your own foundation? Help women around the world with microcredit and all that. Can’t lose.”
Yes, she ought to be able to make these calls herself, but it seems clear that she can’t. They’re obviously not Bill’s strong suit either. So since neither of them seems able to do it, they need to hire some help. Or maybe assemble a panel of actual average Americans, and when one of these decisions looms, her staff can video-tape the panel reacting, and she can watch.
The second thing she needs to get is this: If she does become president, the right is going to be gunning for her from Day One, sniffing around for impeachable offenses from the second she takes the oath. This kind of secrecy and defensiveness will only add fuel to the fire—and it will put the media on the right’s side. It will make it look—not just to Hillary-haters, but to average people—like she’s hiding something even when she doesn’t have anything she needs to hide. We’ve seen that movie many times.
If she’s president, she has to break that habit. The White House operates under far more onerous disclosure and accountability rules than the cabinet departments do, and if she doesn’t follow those rules and then some, she’s just going be handing those out to get her the proverbial match.
Old habits die hard as they say. We seemed to have reason to think that the Hillary Clinton who urged the stonewalling of The Washington Post on Whitewater documents back in 1994 had gone away. We never heard any such stories in her Senate or State years until now. But that Hillary is still around, apparently. The Tweet she sent out late Wednesday night doesn’t quite equate to transparency.
The other old habits that won’t die easily are 1) right-wing loathing of her and desire to discredit and even destroy her, and 2) the mainstream media’s reflexive, uncritical, and panting promotion of every charge the right levels against her (remember, though this story came through the Times, it obviously originated in Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee’s investigative staff). Clinton’s old habit just feeds these others, and it’s not a dynamic she or the country will need if she’s in the White House.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 6, 2015
The Media Already Bungled Hillary’s ‘Emailgate’: This Is Why The Former Secretary Of State Can’t Stand The Press
Hillary Clinton found herself in a familiar place on Tuesday: amid a gaggle of excited reporters eagerly shouting questions at her about a matter they thought was of the highest importance and she thought was absurdly trivial. If this is the first Clinton controversy of the 2016 campaign, it has a meta quality about it: since no one knows if there’s anything problematic (let alone incriminating) of substance in her emails themselves, we’re left talking about how we talk about it.
At this early stage, that can be an important conversation to have. I’ve written some very critical things about Clinton, both in the past and with regard to this issue; most particularly, on Monday I wrote this piece arguing that she owes her liberal supporters a campaign worthy of all she and her husband asked of them over the years. And since the presidential race is just beginning, this is a good opportunity for the reporters who will be covering her to do some reflection as well, about where they and their colleagues went wrong in the past and how they can serve their audiences better in the next year and a half.
You can’t understand Hillary Clinton’s perspective without understanding what happened in the 1990s, and the media transformation that was going on while Bill Clinton was president. From the first moments of that presidency, Clinton’s opponents were convinced he was corrupt to the core. They assumed that if they mounted enough investigations and tossed around enough charges, something would stick and Clinton would be brought down. If you think the endless Benghazi investigations are ridiculous, you should have been around then; if Bill Clinton wore the same tie two days in a row, Republicans would hold a week’s worth of hearings to investigate what he was covering up.
The media atmosphere in which this all occurred was profoundly different than it had been just a few years before. Conservative talk radio came into its own in the 1990s, providing Republicans both an outlet for their most outrageous charges and a goad to produce more of them. (When they won control of Congress in 1994, Republicans literally made Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their freshman class). Fox News debuted in 1996, in time for the impeachment crisis of 1998. The previously leisurely news cycle accelerated rapidly, and nothing fed it like scandal.
While the Clintons bear responsibility for getting many of those scandals going with questionable decision-making or behavior, it’s also true that the mainstream media made huge mistakes during that period by treating every Republican charge, no matter how ludicrous, as though it was worthy of a full-scale investigation splashed across the front page. Again and again, they reacted to the most thinly justified accusations as though the next Watergate or Iran-Contra was at hand, and when it turned out that there was no corruption or illegality to be found, they simply moved on to the next faux-scandal, presented no less breathlessly.
That past — and journalists’ failures to reckon with it — are still affecting coverage today. When this email story broke, how many journalists said it was important because it “plays into a narrative” of Hillary Clinton as scandal-tainted? I must have heard it a dozen times just in the past week.
Here’s a tip for my fellow scribes and opinionators: If you find yourself justifying blanket coverage of an issue because it “plays into a narrative,” stop right there. That’s a way of saying that you can’t come up with an actual, substantive reason this is important or newsworthy, just that it bears some superficial but probably meaningless similarity to something that happened at some point in the past. It’s the updated version of “out there” — during the Clinton years, reporters would say they had no choice but to devote attention to some scurrilous charge, whether there was evidence for it or not, because someone had made the charge and therefore it was “out there.”
“Narratives,” furthermore, aren’t delivered from Mt. Sinai on stone tablets. They’re created and maintained by journalists making decisions about what’s important and how different issues should be understood. If you’re going to tell us that a new issue “plays into a narrative,” you ought to be able to say why there’s something essentially true or significant about that narrative.
To be clear, I’m not saying reporters shouldn’t aggressively investigate Hillary Clinton, when it comes to her tenure at the State Department, her time in the Senate, her activities as a private citizen, or anything else. They absolutely should, just as they should look into all candidates — that’s their job. She wants to be president, and the public needs to know as much as possible about who she is and what she would do if she gets to sit in the Oval Office.
But as they do that, they should exercise their considered news judgment, just as they do every day on every other topic. They should apply similar standards to all the candidates; if it’s important that Clinton used a private email account while at State, then it must be equally important that other candidates have used private emails for work, and they should be subject to as much scrutiny as she is. When a new revelation or accusation emerges, the questions reporters should ask themselves include: Is there evidence for this? What’s the context in which it took place? How does it bear on the presidency? How can I present it to my audience in a way that makes them smarter and better informed?
Any reporter could come up with a dozen others. But “Does this play into a narrative?” ought to be the last question they ask. As I wrote about Hillary Clinton, there are ways in which she owes her supporters better than what they’ve gotten from her in the past. But that’s only half the story. The news media owes their readers, listeners, and viewers better than what they got, too.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Week, March 11, 2015
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