“The Right’s Impeachment Trap”: How Pundits Blame Obama For GOP Extremism
Every once in a while, those of us who were slow to board the magical Barack Obama 2008 Hope and Change Express get to say “We told you so,” and then go back to work. This is one of those times. Forgive me.
As Ezra Klein insists Obama has achieved success only by “breaking American politics,” and Ron Fournier tells us “the fundamental reason he became president was he was promising there’s no red state, there’s no blue state, I’m going to bring the country together,” people who resisted candidate Obama’s wispy, post-partisan rhetoric back then shake our heads and feel a little bit vindicated. Personally, I have to say: I hate being vindicated (on this, anyway). It would feel so much better to have been wrong.
Somebody broke politics, but it wasn’t Barack Obama — and yet he gave his enemies plenty of evidence to frame him.
Even President Obama has to regret some of his 2008 rhetoric, which partly blamed the Clintons for the right’s vengeful crusade against them, as pundits use it to claim that he not only broke politics, but that he will actually deserve the blame if Republicans impeach him for doing his job. Journalists still blame Democratic presidents for the unhinged behavior of Republicans.
Exhibit A is an allegedly “balanced” Wednesday Fox News panel where the non-right-wingers – journalists Fournier and A.B. Stoddard – joined conservative Charles Krauthammer in suggesting Obama could be responsible for his own impeachment, if he goes ahead with an executive order deferring deportation action on the parents of children who already enjoy deferred status. (Krauthammer called the move “impeachment bait” in Thursday’s Washington Post column.)
But the reaction of Stoddard and Fournier is worth breaking down in detail. (Thanks, Daily Caller, for capturing it.)
“If President Obama goes too far on this — whether it’s within his legal right or not — the outrage will be so incredible on the Republican side, it will probably bring more Democratic losses this fall,” the Hill’s Stoddard began. “Because I don’t know that Latinos are going to turn out this fall as a result of this issue. But it also could become a constitutional crisis.”
So it’s a bad move, “whether it’s within his legal right or not,” because a) it might not work politically and b) “it could also become a constitutional crisis.”
Fournier quickly agreed.
Let’s assume for a second that legally he can do this — just stipulate that, just for a second. Should he do it? Even if you agree, like I do, that we really need to do something about these 12 million people who are in the shadows, even if you agree that it is legal, I still think there is an argument to be made that he should not do it.
OK, let’s stop there. The president shouldn’t do something to ease the immigration crisis, “even if you agree that it is legal.” Why is that? Fournier has a quick answer:
“Because the fundamental reason he became president was he was promising ‘there’s no red state, there’s no blue state, I’m going to bring the country together.’ He’s been a polarizing president.”
I’m not sure what qualifies Fournier to pronounce “the fundamental reason” Obama was elected, either in 2008 or 2012. Some people may have indeed admired his post-partisan rhetoric. But speaking as a two-time Obama voter, many of us wanted to see healthcare reform and less income inequality. Many members of the Obama coalition, who make less than $50,000, wanted economic relief from the Bush recession and the 30-year downward economic spiral that began under Ronald Reagan. Many of the Latinos who voted for Obama very much wanted immigration reform.
The political desires of the Obama coalition don’t much concern Fournier. “This would be a nuclear bomb that would blow open and make this country even more divided,” he warned. “In a way that most Americans just don’t want.”
In case you missed his point, Fournier followed up his Fox appearance with a whole column elaborating on it. The headline sums up the wrong-headed argument: “Even if reform is needed and legal, endowing the presidency with new, unilateral powers is a dangerous precedent.”
Obviously if reform is “legal,” then it wouldn’t endow the presidency with “new, unilateral powers.”
Kevin Drum boils the argument down to this: “President Obama shouldn’t do anything that might make Republicans mad.”
It really is that simple. If you grant, as Fournier seems to, that the president can legally change deportation priorities, but you think he shouldn’t, because it will further divide the country and Republicans will use it as an excuse to impeach him, you’re granting irrational people control of the nation. This is largely what happened during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, but that time, Obama was listening to the Fourniers and Stoddards of the world, and trying to both be bipartisan, and also to appease the crazy Tea Partyers who would blow up the global economy rather than raise the debt limit.
That only enabled the crazies, who were being coddled by supposed moderates like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who crowed approvingly that his party’s right flank proved the debt ceiling was “a hostage worth ransoming.”
So we know Republican leaders aren’t going to stand up to the party’s far-right base. And we know Krauthammer is going to accuse the president of creating a constitutional crisis to turn out his base for the midterm elections, because that’s Krauthammer’s job. But it would be nice if writers who don’t identify themselves with conservatism could describe this dynamic, maybe even critique it — not become part of it.
For the record, I can’t say conclusively whether the executive action the president is pondering is “legal,” and neither can Fournier or Krauthammer. (They both rely on Obama’s own previous statements denying that he has such powers; so he was right then, but he’s wrong now?) Anyway, it’s a perfectly legitimate point to debate. But I feel confident in saying that the enormously cautious Obama, who is sometimes too cautious for my taste, won’t do it cavalierly – not to turn out his base in November, and certainly not as “impeachment bait.”
The right is setting an impeachment trap for the president, and the media are starting to play along.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 8, 2014
“The Inevitability Of Republican Reactions”: Opposition Is A Republican Action, Not A Republican Reaction
Ron Fournier of the National Journal has become (to liberal bloggers anyway) the embodiment of multiple sins of the Washington press corps. Most notably, there’s the High Broderism, in which the blame for every problem is apportioned in precisely equal measure to both parties, and the embrace of the Green Lantern theory of the presidency, in which anything can be accomplished, including winning over a recalcitrant opposition, by a simple act of will from the Oval Office. The latter’s most comical manifestation is Fournier’s frequent pleas for President Obama to “lead,” with the content of said “leadership” almost always left undetailed (though one suspects it might involve giving a great speech, after which Republicans would decide to come together with Democrats to solve the nation’s problems).
Though lately I’ve been trying to limit my pundit-bashing to once or twice a month, I couldn’t overlook this passage in Fournier’s latest column expressing his dismay that Obama might take some executive actions in areas where Congress hasn’t done anything, like immigration or corporate inversions. While I’ll give Fournier credit for acknowledging that to know whether such actions are good or bad we’d have to look at each one individually (a remarkable concession), I can’t stomach this:
For argument’s sake, let’s say Obama is right on the issue and has legal authority to act. The big question is …
Would it be wrong to end-run Congress? Another way to put it might be, “Would more polarization in Washington and throughout the country be wrong?” How about exponentially more polarization, gridlock, and incivility? If the president goes too far, he owns that disaster.
Fournier is saying that even if Obama is right on the merits of an issue and has legal authority to take a particular executive action, to go ahead and do so is the same thing as creating “exponentially more polarization, gridlock, and incivility.” But it takes two to tango, or to create polarization. (Gridlock and incivility, one party can do on its own, as we well know.) In other words, Fournier is saying that when Republicans react to an executive action by remaining firm in their obstructionism and being uncivil about it to boot, it’s one person’s fault: Barack Obama.
Isn’t it long past the time when we were able to put aside the quaint notion that Republican actions are determined in any meaningful way by what Democrats do or don’t do?
It isn’t only journalists who have believed this; for some time; Democrats believed it, too. Many Democrats voted for Obama in the 2008 primaries because they were worried about the ferocious opposition Hillary Clinton would engender from the GOP. As they quickly found out, that opposition is a Republican action, not a Republican reaction. I remind you (for the umpteenth time) that on the very day Barack Obama was inaugurated, Republican leaders met for dinner and decided to oppose anything and everything he tried to do. Politically, it was a pretty smart move. But it wasn’t because Obama hadn’t reached out to them and they were mad—he had only been president for a couple of hours. Within weeks, they responded to the fact that Obama hired people to work in the White House by accusing him of appointing a group of unaccountable “czars” who were wielding tyrannical power.
On this subject, there are basically two kinds of Republicans. There are those who understand that maximal opposition will yield lots of political benefit for them, and there are those who genuinely believe that Obama is an evil Kenyan Marxist tyrant trying to destroy America. When it comes to things like how they react to the administration’s policy initiatives, the distinction doesn’t matter. They both arrive at the same place, whether through clear-eyed political calculation or wild-eyed hatred. And nothing—nothing—President Obama does or doesn’t do makes a bit of difference.
To read Fournier, you might think that if Obama came out and said, “Fixing immigration is really Congress’ responsibility, so I’m not going to do a thing until they put a bill on my desk,” Republicans would respond, “We appreciate the trust the President is putting in Congress, so we’re going to get right to work passing comprehensive immigration reform.” But of course they won’t.
If we know anything about the way today’s Republicans react to this president, it’s that nothing he does really matters. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. There will be gridlock and incivility if he does things they don’t like, and there’ll be gridlock and incivility if he does nothing at all. To think otherwise you have to ignore everything that’s happened for the last five years.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 7, 2014
“Can Political Coverage Ever Get Better?”: There Are Strong Incentives For Reporters To Keep Coverage As Crappy As It Is
As we begin inching our way toward the next presidential campaign, it may be far too early to begin the idiotic speculation with which coverage at this stage tends to be consumed (Can anyone beat Hillary? Will Ted Cruz be the Tea Party darling? Who’ll win the Iowa straw poll? Dear god, who?). But it’s never too early to ask whether anything can be done to improve the news coverage through which Americans see campaigns.
Political scientist Hans Noel points to the uneasy relationship between reporters and scholars, even as the latter work hard to improve that coverage:
Every election cycle, journalists and pundits over-react to early polls that are not predictive of presidential nominations. They get excited about nonsense independent and third-party candidates who have no hope of being elected. They think an increasing number of voters are unaligned independents. They downplay and misrepresent the role of the economy and other fundamentals. And it’s not that they don’t know. They push back against political scientists who try to correct them.
I sort of understand it. As one very smart journalist (who shall remain nameless, as I was on the record for this conversation, but he really wasn’t) told me when interviewing me about a campaign-centered story, their professional incentives cut against social science. He said that if they accepted that inside baseball isn’t that important, they’d have nothing to write about every day, and no reason to follow the candidates around.
Part of the difficulty political scientists have in getting the truths to which he alludes across is the nature of the conversations they have with reporters. Nine times out of ten, when a reporter calls up a scholar, he isn’t looking for an interesting perspective on political developments. He’s looking for a quote that he can use in his story, and he wants it quickly. He doesn’t have time to have a leisurely, stimulating discussion about what research demonstrates, because he’s got a deadline in an hour. As the conversation proceeds, he’ll try to steer it to where that quote might be produced, no matter what the scholar wants to talk about.
Some reporters have a better ear for quotes than others; I’ve been on both sides of that conversation, and on more than one occasion when I was on the scholar side I served up what I thought was a perfect quote—pithy, insightful, not too long—only to find that the reporter decided instead to quote me using some utterly banal baseball metaphor (reporters find metaphors utterly irresistible). A reporters working on a tight deadline isn’t going to call up a scholar and say, “Tell me about the interesting research that’s out there.” And if she can’t give him the quote he’s looking for, he isn’t going to call her back next time. The result is usually a quote from a political scientist that sheds no particular light on the topic.
The good news is that more and more scholars are doing things like blogging to get their ideas out into the non-academic world, and the multiplication of forms of journalism and commentary means that there are more writers, even some affiliated with big media organizations like newspapers, who are interested in what the scholars have to say.
But there’s still the practical problem of what journalists confront on a day-to-day basis. In response to Noel, Jonathan Bernstein gives a shot to articulating a better way to cover campaigns. It’s worth quoting at length:
Let’s say we’re talking about general-election campaigns for the presidency, where overcoverage of gaffes and such is probably the most severe. And let’s say that reporters stopped believing (or pretending) that day-to-day campaigning has massive electoral effects. What would remain for them?
- Policy coverage: What would the candidate actually do about public policy if she won? Is it realistic? How would it work?
- Rhetoric coverage: Related, but not identical, to the first one. What is the candidate actually promising? Not just in terms of “issues,” but also about style? How might those promises help or constrain him if he wins?
- Candidacy coverage: Who does the candidate surround himself with? What does that suggest about how she would act in office?
- Voters coverage: What are voters taking away from candidate speeches? In-depth voter interviews are no substitute for polling coverage, but are a good compliment to it. What do voters hear when candidates talk about deficits, taxes, jobs and more?
- Gaffe coverage: Funny, stupid, or just bizarre things that candidates do are interesting, even when they have zero effect on the November vote. Take a page from Hollywood reporting. No one pretends that the various gaffes and foibles of the stars will have any consequences at all, but so what? They’re still fun to watch and to read about.
By the way, if that’s not enough to justify following the candidates all the time (and I suspect it is), don’t forget that there are hundreds of other elections, lots of which are important and exciting, that receive little or no national attention. Just basic descriptive stuff on the best of those campaigns is more than enough to give reporters an excellent reason to stay out of the newsroom.
Bernstein’s list is a good one, but with the exception of the gaffes, the main problem may be that none of these things constitute events. Think about it this way: like a restaurant or a web site, campaigns have a front end and a back end. The back end—raising money, doing polls, managing voter lists, administering a large and dynamic organization—is stuff the campaign doesn’t want reporters to see. The front end is a series of events they put on, the multiple speeches and appearances the candidate does every day. Covering events is relatively easy for reporters. You go there, you write down what happened, you talk to some voters for their reactions, get a quote from a campaign staffer or two, and boom, you’ve got your story.
The other kinds of things Jonathan suggests talking about, as valuable as they are, require more work and thought, which is why they’re much more likely to be done by people like magazine reporters who have longer lead-times on their stories, and much less likely to be done by the newspaper and TV reporters who are out on the trail and have to do a story every day. Events are easier, and they’re always new (we do call it “news,” after all), even if today’s rally is pretty much exactly like the rally they candidate did yesterday and last week and last month.
Also (and I’m sure Jonathan would acknowledge this), the reporters can’t really be trusted to regularly distinguish between the things that are diverting and interesting but not particularly consequential, and the things that actually affect the outcome of the election. That isn’t because they don’t understand it, it’s because there are strong incentives to portray everything as consequential. It’s one of the most powerful biases in political reporting. The president’s approval went up two points? Comeback! The candidate got mustard on his tie? Game changer! It’s understandable, to a point: when you’re suffering through the drudgery of the campaign trail, you don’t want to believe this thing to which you’ve devoted a year of your life is all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
All that means that as long as those incentives remain in place, it’s going to be hard to make large improvements in campaign coverage. But every little bit helps.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 4, 2014
“Ted Cruz Is Trolling Congress”: It’s Time The Media Calls Him On It
In the accountability-free zone that passes for Sunday morning news shows, it takes a lot for a politician to generate any kind of pushback from their intellectually malleable hosts. So, it passes as noteworthy when Bob Schieffer, host of CBS News’ Face the Nation, recently followed up on a ridiculously false statement by one of his show’s guests, Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
BOB SCHIEFFER: All right, lemme—lemme go back to one thing and—the question I asked you was, “Would you ever conceive of threatening to shut down the government again?”
SEN. TED CRUZ: Well, as I said, I didn’t threaten to shut down the government the last time. I don’t think we should ever shut down the government. I repeatedly voted—
BOB SCHIEFFER: Well—
SEN. TED CRUZ: —to fund the federal government.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Senator—
(OVERTALK)
BOB SCHIEFFER: —if you didn’t threaten to shut down the government, who was it that did? I mean, but we’ll go on—
Not exactly withering cross-examination, to be sure. But what even the transcript of the absurd exchange doesn’t fully capture, though this video clip does, is Schieffer’s astonishment—to the point of outright amusement—at Cruz’s brazen embrace of an obvious lie. The clubby world of DC punditry depends upon an unspoken agreement of plausible deniability between both pundits and politicians. So when one of the latter so clearly and consistently leaps off the cliff of reality, members of the former who try to stick with the equivocating, “both sides” script risk being taken down as well. That someone like Schieffer could be reduced to near giggles by Cruz’s duplicitousness symbolizes how timid and soft the Washington press corps has grown. And it reveals how ill-prepared the media is to deal with someone like Cruz, whose shtick is naked, intellectual dishonesty.
Put more simply, Cruz is little more than a Congressional troll. Since his election fifteen months ago, he has embarked upon a non-stop campaign of willful antagonism, privileged contrarianism, and unabashed self-aggrandizement. Trolls peddle phony outrage and crave undeserved attention and, not coincidentally, Cruz’s political toolkit contains just two elements: monkey wrenches and soapboxes.
As just one among 100 in the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” Cruz tends to get written off by the press as merely a colorful, mostly harmless crank. The Senate’s precarious legislative process and the House’s deep polarization, however, means Cruz’s disingenuous obstructionism makes an already dysfunctional Congress even more unpredictably combustible. All last summer, he ran a traveling political medicine show for the FEMA-camps-and-Benghazi-conspiracy crowd, touting the potential for repealing Obamacare as part of the impending government budget showdown. Though his trolling was an obvious fundraising and publicity stunt with zero chance of success, Republicans in Congress went along with his no-win scenario, taking the whole of the federal government down with his party in October.
In the past week, Cruz pulled two more variations on this same reckless behavior. While Senate Republican leaders had already accepted the necessity of passing a clean debt limit bill and were willing to let Democrats approve it with a simple majority, Cruz nearly blew up the process by threatening a filibuster at the last minute. Facing yet another publicity disaster, not to mention risking the full faith and credit of the nation’s financial system yet again, twelve GOP Senators reluctantly voted for passage. And while disaster was temporarily avoided in that case, Cruz likely killed off the House’s numerical advantage on immigration reform when he unexpectedly stuck the incendiary “amnesty” label on Speaker Boehner’s broad principles for reform last week.
Of course, no one should shed tears for folks like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell when they have to publicly confront the embarrassment of the GOP’s slouching towards Bethlehem. And if the Republicans’ refusal to address immigration before next fall’s midterm elections costs it seats in the House or its chance for the majority in the Senate, so much the better. But make no mistake, Republican self-immolation on this scale means millions of Americans are burned in the backdraft.
Sadly, the press rarely connects the dots on the long-term, real-world damage of Cruz’s legislative sabotage. In fact, his tactics have so mesmerized the media that what would otherwise be unprecedented intransigence by the rest of the GOP caucus gets normalized. For example, there was this New York Times story last week, which soft-peddled Cruz’s key role in sparking the potential debt ceiling disaster but that gave credit to Senate Republican leaders for having “rescued” the aforementioned debt ceiling vote. Politico, as only it can do, one-upped the Times with a long, behind-the-scenes process story that also glossed over Cruz as provocateur and instead featured this laugher of a quote from Senator John McCain about Mitch McConnell’s “yea” vote: “I must say it was a very courageous act.” Yes, inside the Beltway, it takes “courage” for the Senate Minority Leader to vote for a bill to pay for things that Congress has already spent money on.
The usual suspects, apathy and ignorance, are no doubt contributing factors in the political press’s unwillingness to call out Cruz’s spiteful grandstanding. I suspect subconscious bias is at work as well. The “Everybody hates him” reputation Cruz has now firmly and deservedly established sounds an awful a lot like the old newsroom shibboleth about objectivity—that when both parties are complaining about your reporting that’s a sure sign you’re doing it right. If you’ve ever wondered how far afield from honest governance a politician can wander before the “objective” media finally calls out his or her bullshit, Ted Cruz looks to be the ongoing case study.
This kind of journalistic negligence emboldens other extremist Republicans in Congress to sow even more dysfunction, though. In addition, the lack of public accountability only serves to discourage more rational members of the GOP who might otherwise be tempted to leverage intra-party pressure in stopping the needless obstruction. Indeed, it’s gotten so bad that the fear of facing a primary threat on the right from the next wannabe Ted Cruz—whom the press will lavish with uncritical attention—has reduced some feckless House Republicans to concern trolling with their Congressional votes, as part of what’s being called the “vote no, hope yes” caucus.
In the end, this is the most pernicious effect of Cruz’s trolling—the way his deceitful behavior disconnects political rhetoric and action from the good faith of those Americans he represents—and more importantly—how it impacts those Americans he doesn’t. Any press corps that proclaims to be a beacon of truth and accountability in a free society should feel compelled to call out these anti-democratic tactics for what they are. Failure to do so really is no laughing matter.
By: Reed Richardson, The Nation, February 18, 2014
“Media Fantasy Becoming Completely Undone”: GOP’s “Deep Bench” For 2016 Is Now In Splinters
Last time I saw former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, he was sashaying around Tampa, Fla., in 2012 as though we’d see him again, big time, in 2016. Elected with Chris Christie in that 2009 statehouse rebuke to President Obama, he’d been a rising star, tapped to make the 2010 GOP State of the Union reply and an opening night convention address in Tampa. He made sure to shake my hand as I replaced him in the shared CNBC/MSNBC makeup cubby off the convention floor. Good times. Now McDonnell’s only thoughts of 2016 are making sure he doesn’t spend it in prison, as he fights public corruption charges for taking an estimated $165,000 in gifts from a grifting donor.
Meanwhile his class of 2009 buddy Chris Christie looks at McDonnell and has to worry: the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they turn, and they are inexorably turning now for Christie – lots of them. Between the genuine George Washington Bridge retribution scandal involving his closest aides, and newer charges that his lieutenant governor threatened to use Sandy aid as payback if Hoboken’s mayor blocked a Christie donor’s development deal, the New Jersey governor is vulnerable on more fronts than McDonnell ever was, though to be fair, investigators aren’t in Christie’s kitchen – not yet, anyway.
So concern-troll Hillary Clinton all you want, Beltway pundits. You’re missing the only 2016 story that matters, and not surprisingly, it involves a lot of you. The mainstream media fantasy of a remarkably “deep bench” of 2016 contenders for the GOP was never founded in reality – but such a bench, if it ever existed, is surely in splinters today.
That “deep bench” metaphor, by the way, seems to have come directly from Mitt Romney’s V.P. vetter Beth Myers, although you had to ask, then and now: if the GOP bench was so deep, how did they wind up with Paul Ryan, who couldn’t even carry his home state of Wisconsin? (More on Ryan in a moment.)
But for now, let’s revisit that bench: It’s not just McDonnell (No. 3 on the National Journal’s 2012 “deep bench” list for 2016) and Christie (he was No. 1) who are finished. No. 2 contender Sen. Marco Rubio is, too: He made a play for the center with immigration reform, panicked and tacked right, and now he’s nobody’s top choice. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (lucky No. 7!) flamed out after telling the GOP to stop being “the stupid party,” then acting, well, stupidly, and becoming, by August of 2013, the most unpopular Republican governor in the country (and that’s saying a lot).
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz isn’t even on the list, but he deserves some attention. He came out of nowhere in 2012, but he’s already imploded spectacularly, going from a top-tier contender in early polls to far behind because of his self-promoting and nasty (not to mention extremist) brand of politics.
Sen. Rand Paul made many lists (the National Journal’s No. 6), and he still has a few admirers, especially among his father’s old fans. But Paul has proven to be a lightweight with a plagiarism problem whose one somewhat interesting attribute – his national security and foreign policy skepticism — is politically suicidal with the GOP (and most of the Democratic) establishment. He will not be the GOP nominee.
Then there’s Rep. Paul Ryan, last seen reinventing himself as a friend of the poor and a fan of Pope Francis (even if he couldn’t resist lecturing the pope for his faulty knowledge of capitalism). He plays a wonk on TV, but badly; his only contribution to the 2012 ticket was to hurt Romney. While the National Journal had Ryan at No. 5, no defeated V.P. candidate has ever become president except FDR, and no number of loving McKay Coppins profiles will ever make Paul Ryan FDR.
While we’re in Wisconsin, let’s look at Gov. Scott Walker, who’s getting a little play now that Christie is tumbling. Walker is a charisma-free Koch brothers toady who has more in common with Christie than alleged statehouse pragmatism: his own ethically challenged aides, back in Milwaukee. Three Walker associates were convicted in an earlier probe into campaign finance violations; last October, a new investigation began. Walker was named one of the nation’s “worst governors” by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. He is not ready for the glare of a national campaign.
That leaves Jeb Bush (National Journal’s No. 4*). He and his brother are disliked by the Tea Party, but the former Florida governor is beloved by the GOP establishment; he could be said to embody it. But is the country ready for another Bush? His own mother says no, and his wife, Columba, is also said to be against it. And as long as pundits insist Hillary Clinton’s ties with Wall Street could hurt her in this populist era – and they could – Bush’s will do the same thing, because they’re even closer. He went to work for doomed Lehman Brothers after leaving the governor’s mansion, because apparently Bushes aren’t wealthy enough.
Then, sadly, Florida’s state and local pension funds lost $1 billion when the firm went bankrupt. Bush came in for blame, since he was also on the State Board of Administration, which invests public funds, but he insists he played no role in advising public fund administrators to use Lehman. Still, the potential conflict would get new oxygen from a national race.
So let Larry Sabato and Ron Fournier concern-troll Hillary Clinton. It’s true, she may not run, and if she runs, she may not win. But if you want to be president in 2016 — man or woman, black or white, Republican or Democrat — you’d rather be Hillary Clinton than anyone else in the world.
Especially anyone on that shattered GOP bench.
* Just in case you’re curious, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, South Dakota Sen. John Thune and Indiana Rep. Mike Pence rounded out the National Journal list.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 24, 2014
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