“Hillary’s Strategy Is Actually Brilliant”: From A Strategic Standpoint, Clinton Is Right To Stay As Low Profile As Possible
Has any future president been more misunderstood than Hillary Clinton?
As someone who cannot imagine any possible scenario in which I would cast a ballot for the former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, First Lady, and Goldwater Girl, I note this with a heavy heart. But Clinton’s deafening and widely criticized silence since announcing her candidacy isn’t a weakness or a failing on her part. It underscores exactly the professionalism, strategizing, and discipline that explain why she is atop the polls.
She has nothing to gain and everything to lose from shooting off her mouth for at least the rest of the year. Like an aging boxer who survives more by smarts than by slugging, Clinton knows that the fight for the White House is a 15-round bout that will certainly go the distance. Only a showboating chump would punch themselves out in the early rounds.
Sure, over the past few weeks, she’s lost some ground among Democratic voters to socialist Bernie Sanders. But she’s still ahead of him, not to mention the ever-growing gaggle of Republican rivals. Sure, ever since announcing she was running for president, Clinton has stayed awfully quiet, popping up in Chipotle surveillance camera footage like Patty Hearst on the lam and eschewing actual public events for “intimate” meetings with vetted, handpicked supporters.
On the rare occasions when she does step out of her bubble, things have gotten hinky, like when she literally roped off the press during a Fourth of July parade in New Hampshire. The optics of that scene—photogs and journos being physically restrained from getting close enough to her highness to take good pics or ask embarrassing queries—would be shame-inducing if not suicide-inducing to most candidates.
But do we need to spell it out, really? Hillary Clinton is not most candidates.
She’s learned from the acknowledged master—husband Bill, who can’t even be bothered to flatly promise not to give paid speeches if he becomes First Dude—that there’s never a reason to give in to common decency and slink off into the dark night of political oblivion. Hillary Clinton hasn’t driven a car since 1996 and it’s a safe bet that she hasn’t felt shame for even longer.
Since announcing for president, Clinton has granted exactly one televsion interview, with CNN’s Brianna Keilar, and smartly used the occasion to attack the Republican field for their weak-tea responses to Donald Trump’s muy stupido assertion that Mexican immigrants are mostly rapists. Indicating that she was “disappointed” (read: elated) “in those comments,” Clinton went on to note that her Republican rivals “are all in the same general area on immigration.”
The worst part of that? She’s absolutely right. Once the party of near-open borders (watch this video from 1980 in which Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush one up each other on praising the contributions of illegal immigrants), today’s GOP, with minor exceptions, vilifies the wretched yearning to breathe free, at least when they come from Latin America.
In 2004, George Bush won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. Eight years later, Mitt Romney—who counseled that illegal immigrants should practice “self-deportation”—pulled just 27 percent. In the GOP “autopsy” of Romney’s failure in 2012, the authors wrote, “If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence.” Given the way that the current candidates have been non-reacting to Trump, that might be the best outcome the Republican Party could hope for.
Against such a backdrop, Clinton is right to keep mum, except when making easy layups against her opponents. Let Bernie Sanders whip Democrats into a progressive frenzy and then step in with vague nods toward equality and growth for all. She knows full well that Sanders is not her real rival—that will be the GOP nominee, not a frothing-at-the-mouth socialist from a state with a population smaller than Washington, D.C.’s.
She also knows as well as anyone that her toughest challenge will be sweetening the air of inevitability that surrounds her like noxious secondhand smoke. No one outside of their immediate families wants to see a Clinton-Bush contest, but such a showdown is more likely than not. She may indeed be as “arrogant” as Commentary and a thousand other similar publications contend, but she’s likely smart enough to realize that nothing humanizes her more than right-wing outlets foaming at the mouth about everything from blowjobs to Benghazi.
This is not to say that she’s a perfect candidate. In fact, the roping off of journalists—on a day celebrating independence, no less!—suggests Hillary Clinton is in many ways singularly off-putting. Her feminist bona fides were rightly called into question during her time as First Lady, her time as senator from New York was unmemorable, and her tenure as secretary of state nothing short of disastrous. When under attack, she’s capable of mind-bogglingly stupid comments, like when she started talking about Bobby Kennedy’s assassination during the end days of her 2008 run for the Democratic nomination.
This is why she is smart to be running a rope-a-dope strategy, essentially letting her opponents (Democratic and Republican) punch themselves out in the early rounds. When they’ve taken their best shots and mostly exhausted themselves, she can come off the ropes and throw a haymaker or two. Along with forgoing shame, this is another great tactical advantage she’s learned from her husband.
Bill Clinton outlasted his opponents—think Newt Gingrich and a gaggle of moralistic congressmen, many of whom had skeletons of their own to hide. Bill was like Muhammad Ali taking on George Foreman in the jungle heat, a personable motormouth who loved to talk and press the flesh (sometimes a bit too much, to be sure). Hillary is turning into a defensive master, but on her own terms. She’s more like Floyd Mayweather, nobody’s idea of a fun person to hang out with, but capable of taking huge amounts of punishment and coming off the ropes in the late rounds to secure victory.
If the eventual Republican nominee—whether it’s Jeb Bush or Rand Paul or god help us all Donald Trump—wants a real chance at the crown, they’d do best to back away from Hillary and the anger-bear rhetoric that only makes her more sympathetic. The nominee would do well to outline an actually positive and inclusive message about how they plan to guide the country into the 21st century rather than constantly harp on last century’s scandals, the need for even newer and bigger wars, and protecting us from the scourge of immigrants so desperate for a better life that they’re willing to risk arrest to come to America.
A Republican employing positive rhetoric—which is exactly how Barack Obama toppled Clinton in 2008—would pull her out of her crouch and cause her to swing recklessly and wildly. In all that lunging, she’d be likely to knock herself out. But so long as the Republicans keep smacking themselves in the face, she’s smart to hold her punches.
By: Nick Gillespie, The Daily Beast, July 10, 2015
“Bernie Sanders Is Not The Left’s Ron Paul”: Representing A Wing Of The Democratic Party Whose Influence Is Increasing
Ever since Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination for president, he has drawn comparisons to a similarly disheveled, longtime politician with a cult-like following and a strong independent streak: former Congressman Ron Paul, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2008 and 2012. It’s true that Sanders and Paul have a lot in common: They both have rabid fan bases, don’t hold their tongues, and embrace ideologies that are rejected by the establishment of their respective parties. And like Paul, Sanders could challenge his party’s frontrunner early on, but doesn’t stand much of a chance of winning the nomination. As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie wrote this week:
Sanders won’t be the Democratic nominee. But that doesn’t mean he won’t be important. Here, it’s useful to think of Ron Paul … He helped bridge the divide between libertarians and the Republican right, and he inspired a new group of conservative and libertarian activists who have made a mark in the GOP through Paul’s son, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. If Sanders can sustain and capture the left-wing enthusiasm for his campaign, he could do the same for progressives.
I disagree; Sanders’s campaign isn’t simply one that will put “democratic socialist” ideas on stage against a more mainstream Democratic view, as Paul sought to do with his libertarian ideas. Rather, his candidacy represents a wing of the Democratic Party whose influence on the establishment is increasing with each election, as moderate Democrats (and their Republican counterparts) become extinct.
For a more apt Republican analog to Sanders’ campaign, one must go back to 2000. John McCain, like Sanders, was thought to have little chance to defeat George W. Bush, who, as the son of a former president and governor of a major electoral state, had more money and more party support. But McCain harnessed the anti-establishment sentiment of the time to build a strong online following, at a time when the internet’s infancy as a political tool. He fought a hard campaign against Bush, even winning the New Hampshire primary, before being knocked out of the race in early March.
Apart from the major issue of campaign finance reform, however, he had very little major policy or ideological differences with Bush and the Republican establishment. What set him apart was his press-appointed “maverick” status: He was willing to say things in public that no other candidate would—what David Foster Wallace, in his classic profile of the McCain campaign, called “obvious truths that everyone knows but no recent politician anywhere’s had the stones to say.” (His campaign bus was even called the “Straight Talk Express.”)
Likewise, Sanders refuses to hold his tongue. In June, he opened an interview with HBO’s Bill Maher by saying, “This campaign is about a radical idea: we’re going to tell the truth.” And that message seems to be working with liberals and even disaffected voters. As one New Hampshire resident, a self-described undecided independent voter, told The New Republic recently, “Do I think he can win? No. But I do like the somewhat fresh take of being a straight shooter.”
And much like Bush and McCain fifteen years ago, Clinton and Sanders are closer on the issues than a lot of progressives would like to admit. Sanders is championing reforms—a legislative or constitutional fix to Citizens United, universal healthcare, increased regulation of the financial system, income inequality—that most Democrats have supported for years, including Clinton; she was the face of the universal healthcare fight during Bill Clinton’s first term and has focused on income inequality and Citizens United in her 2016 campaign. Similarly, McCain’s biggest issues in that 2000 campaign—national defense and the Middle East—would define the Bush administration and the neoconservative movement as a whole for the next decade.
On the major issues that Sanders and Clinton disagree on—the extent to which the banking system should be reformed, surveillance, and free trade—Sanders’s position is just as popular within the party as Clinton’s, if not more so. These are the battles for the future of the Democratic Party, and where both Sanders and Clinton will seek to stake out a position independent of the other. And in those few instances where McCain and Bush disagreed, like the McCain-led campaign reform act, a McCain bill that expanded rights for terrorism detainees, and how much of a role social conservatism should play in the Republican Party, the disagreements were public.
McCain’s challenge to Bush was ultimately unsuccessful, but both were neoconservatives working toward the same goal. McCain campaigned for Bush, voted with the administration’s position 95 percent of the time, and was an ardent supporter of the war in Iraq. Although we can’t possibly know how often Sanders would vote with a hypothetical Clinton administration, we do know they voted together during their two years spent as Senate colleagues 93 percent of the time. And given Sanders’s endorsement of Obama in 2008 and 2012, it’s likely that, should he lose, he would throw his weight behind Clinton. John McCain may not have liked Bush much, but he supported him in both 2000 and 2004. In 2008, Ron Paul snubbed both McCain and the Libertarian Party candidate, instead endorsing the Constitution Party candidate, and refused to “fully support” Mitt Romney in 2012.
Similar to 2000, a dark-horse candidate running a candid campaign has emerged as the principal challenger to the frontrunner, one he’s a long shot to defeat. And like that first McCain bid for the presidency, Sanders’s loss would be because Clinton is a strong nominee who is more well-known and deemed an acceptable general election candidate to a majority of Democrats—not because his ideas are too fringe, as Paul’s were in his campaigns, for his party’s base.
By: Paul Blest, The New Republic, July 9, 2015
“Which Interests Does He Have In Mind?”: Jeb Bush Says He’s Going To Tackle Special Interests In Washington. Don’t believe Him
Jeb Bush didn’t just release 33 years of his tax returns this week. He also had his campaign create a snappy online presentation, complete with graphs, to help everyone understand them. In the accompanying narrative there was one line that caught my eye. While he may have made millions after leaving the Florida governor’s mansion, Jeb wrote, he didn’t debase himself by doing any lobbying. “That was a line I drew and it was the right one. And it’s a line more people should be drawing in Washington, D.C., where lobbying has become our nation’s premier growth industry. And this culture of special interest access is a problem I plan to tackle as President.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m eager to hear more. How exactly will Bush tackle the culture of special interest access? Does he have some strict new rules in mind to lock the revolving door between government and business? Or will it be merely the power of his personal integrity that will keep those dastardly special interests from getting what they want?
Bush might surprise us, but if I had to guess I’d say this is something he’ll pay lip service to during the campaign, but then do little or nothing about if he actually becomes president. He’d be following a well-worn path if he does — candidates always say they’re going to change Washington’s culture and reduce the power of special interests, but somehow they never do.
That’s in large part because the institutions, norms, and relationships of Washington, D.C., are so firmly entrenched that one administration can’t do too much about them. And whatever kind of reform a president might have in mind, it’s always secondary to the policy goals any administration has, so it’s easy to put it to the side in favor of more pressing issues.
While some might like to shut the doors of the Capitol to lobbyists, that’s impossible — their work is protected by the First Amendment, which after mentioning freedom of religion, speech, the press, and assembly, says that we all have a right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” And though there’s plenty of petitioning going on and plenty of grievances crying out for redress, there has actually been a slight decline in the number of registered lobbyists in recent years: While the number peaked at 14,829 in 2007, last year it fell to 11,800. The drop may be due to any number of reasons, but one lobbyist friend told me he was leaving the business because a divided government means there just aren’t enough bills being passed to lobby about.
Even when they make a sincere effort, presidents have trouble transforming Washington culture. When Barack Obama took office, he announced that no registered lobbyists would be allowed to serve in his administration. That probably helps explain the reduction in registered lobbyists, since many Democrats hoped to get a job with the administration one day, but few people believe the rule has seriously diminished the influence of special interests. After all, the administration found over and over that people it wanted to hire had lobbyist pasts, so it kept making exceptions.
On the flip side, there are public-spirited people who claim they have been shut out by the administration for being the kind of registered lobbyists we would presumably want more of. We’re talking about people who lobbied for causes like domestic violence prevention and environmental protection.
Which brings up the question: How special does an interest have to be before it’s problematically special? When we hear that term, it’s always said with disdain, assuming that somebody’s getting something they don’t deserve. In practice, though, we think of only the interests we don’t like as the ones who shouldn’t have influence.
You could look at it this way: You just need to pick the constellation of special interests you prefer, and vote accordingly. Would you rather that labor unions, environmental groups, and civil rights organizations had the ear of the government, or oil companies, anti-abortion groups, and the NRA? They’re all special interest groups to one degree or another, even if they all believe that what’s good for them is good for America. Chances are that if you dislike a politician for being beholden to special interests, what really turns you off is which interests she listens to.
Of course, that tells only part of the story. Some of the most effective special interest influence is exercised in ways that don’t make headlines, on behalf of interests most people know little about, and much of that isn’t partisan. For years before the financial crisis of 2008, the banking industry was acknowledged by many as the single most effective special interest lobby in Washington, in part because the congressional committees that had oversight of the industry were basically in the industry’s pocket — and that applied to both Republicans and Democrats.
The truth is that special interests are always going to get what they want to at least some degree, because that’s just the nature of special interests. When you have a particular interest in something — let’s say you’re a defense contractor who really wants the government to fund your new fighter plane — you’re going to marshal all kinds of resources to make it happen. The rest of us may have a diffuse interest in the plane not being built, if it’s a boondoggle. But we probably won’t organize to fight it, and our voices won’t be heard by those making the decision.
I’m not arguing for cynicism, or saying that every administration is equally steeped in the kind of legalized corruption that is endemic to Washington. But when a politician tells us he wants to get rid of the special interests, we ought to ask him which interests he has in mind, and exactly how he’s going to go about it. Because chances are it’s little more than posturing.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Editor, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, July 2, 2015
“The Limits Of “Israeli Exceptionalism”: The Perilous Path The Current Israeli Government Is Pursuing
This incident from the 2008 campaign, relayed by Matthew Duss at TNR, tells you a lot about trends in U.S. thinking about Israel in the Netanyahu era:
[R]epresentatives of the Obama, McCain, and Clinton teams appeared at a Jewish community forum. Daniel Kurtzer, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, spoke for Obama, explaining that he wanted to see a “plurality of views” on Israel. Clinton adviser Ann Lewis responded that the United States should simply support Israeli policy, regardless of its content. “The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel,” she said.
It was a pretty strange statement (is there any other country in the world to whose electorate anyone would similarly suggest outsourcing U.S. policy decisions?), but it does accurately describe the operating theory upon which much of conservative pro-Israel advocacy in Washington is based.
But it’s an increasingly rare point of view outside the conservative opinion bubble. After her service in the Obama administration, it’s pretty clear Hillary Clinton would not again allow herself to be represented as simply ratifying whatever policy is yielded by Israeli elections (presumably the only way one is permitted to deduce “decisions of the Israeli people,” who are deeply divided by Netanyahu’s policies towards Palestinians and indeed towards the rest of the world).
It’s against this backdrop of a growing tendency among Democrats to reject the idea of “Israeli exceptionalism” as the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy that you can understand the perilous path the current Israeli government is pursuing in demanding the same–or perhaps greater– unconditional American support as in the past. This posture is not only liberating Democrats to assert national interests as superior to those of any foreign country in formulating U.S. foreign policy, but as I think we will see in 2016, leading public sentiment in the same direction.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Wasgington Monthly, June 17, 2015
“Scott Walker Would Be A Very Dangerous President”: Vicious And Vindictive, With An Attack Dog’s Contempt
Joe Nocera has a piece today in the New York Times confirming what many of us have been saying for a while now, including here at the Washington Monthly and at the Political Animal: Scott Walker isn’t a terribly attractive presidential candidate for the GOP, but he would make a vicious and vindictive President.
Walker’s shtick has been to make up for personal lack of charm and charisma with a bluntly cynical eye to maximizing his appeal to the right-wing base not improving their lives, but rather by aggressively making punching bags of traditional liberal targets. These include labor unions, teachers, universities in general, people who work for a living, women who need abortions, and so on.
And why? Not even because it helps him with big donors, although that certainly doesn’t hurt. It’s mostly just a matter of spite, political gamesmanship and riling up his base as a warrior against anything and anyone Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have ever hated. As Nocera notes:
To put it another way, Walker busted the public employee unions not because he had to but because he could.
Similarly, there was no deep desire on the part of the business community to have Wisconsin become a right-to-work state, even though it would most likely bring about lower labor costs. Kaufman quotes a leader of the Wisconsin Contractors Coalition, who told him that “right-to-work is going to compromise my quality, my competitiveness.” That’s because the unions have long served to screen workers and keep them up to date on new technologies.
No, what motivated Walker, clearly, was politics. Unions, which have long been traditional Democratic allies, have been in steep decline — except for public employee unions, which now make up just under half of all union workers. By crippling them, Kettl told me, “Walker is trying to put a stake in the heart of a strong piece of Democratic support that has long been a thorn in the side of the Republicans.”
Once they reach the Oval Office, presidential candidates tend to keep doing what got them there in the first place. In Walker’s case, that would constitute an all-out assault on both the economic and social fronts, including and especially wage and worker protections. While the entire Republican Party has gone off a radical cliff over the last few decades and its current crop of candidates is no exception, most of the current aspirants to the nomination are simple demagogues, plutocrats and also-ran Congressional pretenders. Walker, on the other hand, isn’t just an egotistical bluffer seeking to capture billionaire donor dollars for his friends. He’s a committed soldier with an attack dog’s contempt and commitment to destroy his political opponents.
A Walker presidency would be a very dangerous thing indeed–not just for the left, but for the entire country. As demographic changes shrink the GOP base further and further, a man who gains his power by stoking the angers of a shrinking minority of angry conservatives by sticking the maximum possible pain on the majority of the country and the few remaining pillars of the middle class could be a serious threat to democracy.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 13, 2015
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