text:
Topic: Hillary Clinton
Elizabeth Warren's Temptation
When Senate Democrats tapped Elizabeth Warren to be their official liaison to their party's left-wing base last Thursday, it was yet another indication of the Massachusetts senator's stature as a liberal icon. As Politico reports, that same day Warren was also besieged by those in attendance at a meeting of major liberal donors with calls for her to run for president in 2016. But while Warren and figures close to her continue to insist that she has no interest in opposing presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, she could hardly be blamed for wondering if her decision to rule out such a race had been premature. Unlike most of the veteran politicians in both parties whose desire for the White House is no secret, we don't know whether Warren truly wants to be president. But if she does, she may probably never have a better chance.
When Senate Democrats tapped Elizabeth Warren to be their official liaison to their party's left-wing base last Thursday, it was yet another indication of the Massachusetts senator's stature as a liberal icon. As Politico reports, that same day Warren was also besieged by those in attendance at a meeting of major liberal donors with calls for her to run for president in 2016. But while Warren and figures close to her continue to insist that she has no interest in opposing presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, she could hardly be blamed for wondering if her decision to rule out such a race had been premature. Unlike most of the veteran politicians in both parties whose desire for the White House is no secret, we don't know whether Warren truly wants to be president. But if she does, she may probably never have a better chance.
Unlike most efforts to persuade a person to run for president, the would-be candidate or friendly media isn't orchestrating the Warren boomlet. Rather, it seems to be a genuine uprising on the part of many liberals against the impending coronation of Hillary Clinton and what is perceived on the left as her establishment cronies whose loyalty to hard-core liberal ideology on domestic and foreign issues is very much in question.
Moreover, Republicans aren't the only ones who have noticed that the willingness of most Democrats to assume that she will be President Obama's successor can't conceal her weakness as a candidate. Clinton's book tour was a gaffe-ridden public-relations disaster rather than a triumph. Her interventions in the midterms demonstrated the weakness of the Clinton brand. Even worse, her attempts to play to the left and imitate Warren, such as her absurd suggestion that corporations don't create jobs, fell flat and once again her lack of authentic convictions.
No sensible politician would take on the Clinton machine blithely. The Clintons have wisely attempted to try and sew up the Democratic nomination so as to avoid the possibility of another charismatic challenger jumping in to take it from her as Barack Obama did in 2008. The strategy seems foolproof if for no other reason that the weak Democratic bench seems to be populated only with gadflies like Bernie Sanders and James Webb or lightweights like outgoing Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley. But if there is anyone who can fit the Obama profile of a candidate who has a better connection with the base than Clinton, it's Warren.
The Warren rationale also could tap into the fact that both party's bases take it as a matter of faith that it is smarter to run conviction politicians who are true believers than establishment-style moderates. Liberals are convinced that the Democrats lost the midterms because they ran away from Obama and tried to move to the center instead of highlighting left-wing talking points. A Warren candidacy plays right into this belief that Clinton may be a loser in spite of her generally strong favorability ratings because she has spent her career trying to be all things to all people.
Like Obama, Warren's candidacy could not have been predicted only a few years ago. In just two years, Warren has gone from being an obscure figure whose chief ambition was to lead a new federal regulatory agency (Republicans have long since realized that blocking her appointment as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau backfired) to being a leader in a party that seems to have lost touch with its grass roots and has few other rising stars.
Assuming that she has any appetite for the presidency, and few who are offered a chance for it have the character to say no, there are two key questions to be asked.
One is whether there is an issue on which her candidacy could be leveraged in the same manner that Obama's opposition to the Iraq War both endeared him to the liberal base and differentiated him from Clinton in 2008. Economic populism would be Warren's chief issue but while Clinton's record is weak, there is no equivalent to her vote for the Iraq War to hold against her. Warren could however compensate for that by putting herself forward as a fresh face for a party that may not wish to be dominated by the Clintons and their baggage. A Warren candidacy would also not suffer, as would any male Democrat challenging Clinton, from the idea of stopping the country from electing its first female president.
The other question is whether 2016 really is Warren's best opportunity. Should Clinton lose to a Republican in 2016, Warren might be the presumptive front-runner for 2020. If she wins, the Democratic nomination wouldn't be open again until 2024. But here the comparison with Obama argues in favor of her running now. Obama could have waited his turn in 2008 and looked to the future but rightly understood that he would never have a better opening in any other year. Warren could wait but although she is new to elective politics, she is not young. At 65 now, the idea of waiting until 2024 when she would be 10 years older may not be realistic.
But the most important argument in favor of her running is the fact that the grass roots of her party would embrace her. Rather than merely having a liaison to the Democratic leadership to the Senate, most liberals would prefer to be running the show. It's clear the Democratic base agrees with President Obama's decision to ignore the verdict of the midterm elections and push ahead with a radical left-wing agenda regardless of the consequences. That same spirit would pump life into a Warren candidacy in which Democrats could swing away at Wall Street without having to worry about offending a key Clinton constituency.
Against anyone else, Clinton would have no trouble in the primaries. But Warren would change the political equation. With Clinton looking vulnerable, Warren still has time to reconsider her decision to stay out of the 2016 fray. If she does, she may find her path to the nomination is not as steep as the Clintons would like us to believe. If she is at all tempted by the presidency, now may be her moment.
For Dems, All Roads Lead to Hillary
The conventional wisdom on whether the shellacking experienced by the Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections was good for Hillary Clinton's prospects is shifting slightly. It began even before the elections, when the writing was on the wall. "If Democrats lose the Senate, the 2016 Democratic nominee can run against Congress and Senate Democrats would be poised to recapture it in two years," a senior Capitol Hill Democrat told TIME magazine's Zeke Miller for an October 15 story.
The conventional wisdom on whether the shellacking experienced by the Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections was good for Hillary Clinton's prospects is shifting slightly. It began even before the elections, when the writing was on the wall. "If Democrats lose the Senate, the 2016 Democratic nominee can run against Congress and Senate Democrats would be poised to recapture it in two years," a senior Capitol Hill Democrat told TIME magazine's Zeke Miller for an October 15 story.
Miller continued: "In Democrats' telling, likely-candidate Hillary Clinton could run on a narrative of Republican obstruction to passing legislation on issues like income inequality, raising the minimum wage, and equal pay for women." Indeed, President Obama's attempts to run against a "do-nothing Congress" were always ridiculous, since the Democrats controlled the Senate, shut the GOP out of the process, and everything had to go through Harry Reid (and thus, Obama) to make it to the Senate floor. But once the Republicans actually won the Senate and controlled both houses of Congress, the thinking went, the fiction of a do-nothing Congress controlled by the other side becomes plausible.
After the election turned out even worse for Democrats than expected, this spin held steady. It was argued that when Democrats lost the race to succeed Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, it weakened an already shaky prospective challenger to Clinton. And as one Democratic operative told the Washington Post, Republicans would likely spend the next two years trying to undo some of the Obama administration's handiwork, enabling Hillary to "both make the case against the Republicans while currying favor with the Obama base."
As time went on, however, the Democrats' attempts to spin the loss caused a clash of two self-soothing narratives. The idea that a Republican majority could help Hillary be the savior in 2016 ran up against the White House's preferred narrative: that the low turnout of the midterms compared to presidential elections meant the Democrats really didn't have a crisis on their hands. They didn't need a savior because, they argued, demographics still favored them in presidential years. That meant that not only were they in good shape for 2016, but that a good turnout could give them back the Senate only two years after losing it.
Such consolation was temporary, however, when Democrats realized the implications of their spin: gridlock, not liberal triumph. After all, if they would struggle in midterm congressional elections, it meant they could kiss their emerging Democratic majority goodbye. All of a sudden it didn't matter quite so much if 2014 was good for Hillary's 2016 hopes: they already held a built-in advantage in presidential elections. And yet, here's the situation in which they found themselves the morning after, as the Washington Post reported:
While the GOP is likely to control 54 percent of all Senate seats and 56 percent (or so) of the House come January, it also will now control more than two-thirds of state legislative chambers across the country — as in nearly seven in 10. And given Republicans also won at least 31 governorships, they are basically in control of the state government in 24 states. That could soon hit 25 if they win the still-undetermined governor's race in Alaska.
That meant, according to the WaPo, "47.8 percent of Americans will now be led by GOP-controlled governments with little/no ability for Democrats to thwart them. …Democrats, meanwhile, will govern unilaterally in states with just 15.6 percent of Americans — less than one-sixth of the country. And that's with the nation's biggest state, California, firmly in their back pocket. Without that, they would govern over just 3.5 percent (less than one-25th) of the nation's residents."
The new spin was that Democrats had to find some way to animate their base so they could chip away at local Republican dominance. One way to do that would be to draft a challenger to Hillary Clinton from the left. There are not many to choose from after Elizabeth Warren, who almost certainly isn't running. Jim Webb isn't a threat to Hillary, and neither is the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders. What to do?
A better idea, as Noam Scheiber points out in a smart piece for the New Republic, is to expand the coalition. That's what Republicans did to win these midterms so resoundingly. Democrats need to win back some–not all, nor even most, just some–white working-class voters, Scheiber writes. Democrats' ability to do so has deteriorated because the populism that appeals to some of their voters repels other voters, and the same goes for social issues.
What can Democrats do to solve this puzzle? Scheiber has good news: once again, it's a problem that is in the process of solving itself. Thus:
there's a coalition available to Democrats that knits together working class minorities and college-educated voters and slices heavily into the GOP's margins among the white working class. … The basis of the coalition isn't a retreat from social progressivism, but making economic populism the party's centerpiece, as opposed to the mix of mildly progressive economic policies (marginally higher taxes on the wealthy, marginally tougher regulation of Wall Street) and staunchly progressive social policies that define the party today.
Scheiber raises one glaring weakness in this strategy: Hillary's not a great fit for the role. And that, in the end, tells us why Democrats will end up with Hillary anyway, and that even if she doesn't give them their permanent majority she's still their best choice. The Democrats don't have anyone on their bench who is both a populist firebrand and can win. So we're back to square one: Democrats can run a populist from Hillary's left. Hillary will mimic whatever populism she needs to, even though she doesn't mean it, to win the nomination. And the Occupy Democrats will recede back into irrelevance.
Hillary Learning Wrong Midterm Lessons
If you thought something important was missing from the extensive coverage afforded the midterm elections this week, you were right. Amid the deluge of interviews and analyses of the stunning Republican victory, there was complete silence from one of the most important political players in the country: Hillary Clinton. The former first lady/secretary of state was presumably in a secure undisclosed Democratic location once the returns started coming in so as to avoid having to say anything about the defeat of her party and some of the people she worked hard to elect. But now that the dust is settling, the "ready for Hillary" crowd thinks it will soon be safe for her to come out of hiding and begin the process of allowing Democrats to coronate her as their next presidential nominee. But, if the report about their thinking in the New York Times is any indication, it looks like Hillary and her acolytes are choosing to learn all the wrong lessons from the midterms.
If you thought something important was missing from the extensive coverage afforded the midterm elections this week, you were right. Amid the deluge of interviews and analyses of the stunning Republican victory, there was complete silence from one of the most important political players in the country: Hillary Clinton. The former first lady/secretary of state was presumably in a secure undisclosed Democratic location once the returns started coming in so as to avoid having to say anything about the defeat of her party and some of the people she worked hard to elect. But now that the dust is settling, the "ready for Hillary" crowd thinks it will soon be safe for her to come out of hiding and begin the process of allowing Democrats to coronate her as their next presidential nominee. But, if the report about their thinking in the New York Times is any indication, it looks like Hillary and her acolytes are choosing to learn all the wrong lessons from the midterms.
According to this very friendly insider report in the Times, Hillary's crowd is actually encouraged by this week's election results. While they indicate that the candidate will take her time and conduct a listening tour of the country to help her figure out what stands and issues to campaign on, they believe there's no point in delaying the start of her campaign much longer. The Clintonites think having a Republican Congress in power will give her an easy foil to run against in 2016. And though many of her allies were beaten on Tuesday, they are actually taking solace from one of their party's most humiliating defeats — the loss in deep blue Maryland's governor's race — since that can be interpreted as a rejection of outgoing Governor Martin O'Malley, who may challenge Clinton in the presidential primaries.
All three of these conclusions should trouble those who are rooting for Clinton to be elected in 2016.
First, the idea that Hillary will be spending the coming months in much the same way she began her career in elective office when running for a New York Senate seat, reminds us of her greatest weakness as a politician.
Unlike most people who are running for president, Clinton never seems to know what exactly she stands for except her own advancement. Listening is one thing, trying to concoct yet another new political identity on the fly is quite another. Bereft as she is of any political principles, she can never decide whether she is a centrist who can play the adult in the room or an Elizabeth Warren-style left-wing populist. Clinton may believe if she listens to enough smart people and takes good notes, she will learn her lessons and be able to present herself as a plausible president. But as she has repeatedly demonstrated this past year on first her book tour and then her campaign appearances for what Rand Paul's staff aptly labeled "Hillary's losers," the transparent inauthenticity of her approach as well as her lack of the natural campaign skills her husband possesses, inevitably leads to gaffes and embarrassment. Anyone who expects a different result this time is bound to be disappointed.
Second, the facile optimism about the GOP victory being good news for Clinton shows few in her circle are thinking seriously about the results.
It is true that many Democrats think Clinton can profit from running against what they will label a "do-nothing" or "obstructionist" Congress regardless of whether these descriptions are accurate. But the notion that Republicans will remain the sole owners of Washington gridlock in the next two years is a dubious one. If the House and the Senate act in concert, as they should, it will be Obama who will be the one saying "no" via vetoes, not the right-wingers in the House or Senate. That will make it harder for someone who will effectively be running for a third term for Obama to absolve herself and her party of all connection to the nation's problems.
Just as important, the returns reminded us that without the magic pull of the president at the top of the Democratic ticket, there is no guarantee of the sort of massive turnout of minorities and young people that characterized the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. Clinton may hope the historic nature of her own candidacy will enable her to pull off the same feat as Obama did. But we know Clinton can't hold a candle to the president when it comes to political appeal. The midterms proved that the Democrats' reliance on their old memes about the beastliness of the GOP has run out of steam. Hillary will need to think up something new and that brings with it as many dangers as advantages. As Michael Barone writes, the shrinkage of Obama's blue empire this year may well indicate that Democrats are losing ground. While the 2016 electorate will probably be more favorable for Democrats than that of 2014, it may not be enough to convince voters to allow Obama's party yet another term in office.
Last, any relief about O'Malley's discomfit at the Maryland results only serves to reinforce the lack of sense that always seems to characterize Hillary's camp. O'Malley, the most deferential to Clinton of all her potential Democrat challengers, was never going to be a threat to Hillary. Her real trouble will come from the hard left as Bernie Sanders and the rest of the Elizabeth Warren crowd cheering him on, will push her away from centrist positions if she hasn't already abandoned them.
Though Hillary Clinton is the certain Democratic presidential nominee and will enter 2016 with considerable advantages, nothing that happened this week should be considered good news for her candidacy. That Clinton's camp seems incapable of figuring this out as they prepare for another fake listening tour, is a harbinger of trouble for her efforts.
Democrats' Pitiful Premature Sour Grapes
Faced with a likely defeat in tomorrow's midterm elections, some Democrats are in denial and predict an unlikely victory. Others have already started to form the usual circular firing squads, pointing their fingers at either an unpopular President Obama or those politicians that tripped over themselves in embarrassing efforts to disassociate themselves from the administration. But perhaps most telling are those choosing to dismiss the significance of tomorrow's results even before they happen. Trying to deny the inevitable or to shift blame for it when defeat happens isn't productive but nevertheless must be termed normal political behavior. The greatest danger for Democrats in the days following their likely loss of the Senate, however, is to pretend that a midterm disaster brings with it no hard lessons for the defeated.
Faced with a likely defeat in tomorrow's midterm elections, some Democrats are in denial and predict an unlikely victory. Others have already started to form the usual circular firing squads, pointing their fingers at either an unpopular President Obama or those politicians that tripped over themselves in embarrassing efforts to disassociate themselves from the administration. But perhaps most telling are those choosing to dismiss the significance of tomorrow's results even before they happen. Trying to deny the inevitable or to shift blame for it when defeat happens isn't productive but nevertheless must be termed normal political behavior. The greatest danger for Democrats in the days following their likely loss of the Senate, however, is to pretend that a midterm disaster brings with it no hard lessons for the defeated.
In recent days, the New York Times provided its liberal readership with a trifecta of midterm denial. But though these attempts to salve Democratic wounds that had not yet started bleeding were exactly what the paper's readers want, they are the worst kind of medicine for a political party.
The most absurd was an op-ed by a Duke University professor of public policy and one his students. In it David Schanzer and Jay Sullivan, a junior at the school, argue that it is time to abolish the midterms. According to them, the exercise of allowing the people to have their say about Congress every two years is a nuisance. They say it is a big waste of time that forces members to spend too much time raising money and fundraising. But the real reason they don't like it is that lately Republicans have done better at them because congressional Democrats don't motivate the same kind of turnout from those with a marginal interest in politics, as Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012. Schanzer and Sullivan don't like the "whiter, older and more educated" midterm electorate so they think the best thing is to extend House terms to four years from two and change senators from having six years in office to either four or eight (!) before they have to face the voters.
Like all efforts to change the Constitution in order to manipulate the system to immediate partisan advantage, this scheme is a farce. The reason why the Founders wanted frequent elections for the House is that they rightly believed one house of Congress should be more reflective of the political passions of the moment while the other would be more reflective of long-term concerns. The pair from Duke wish to sacrifice this laudable aim because it doesn't currently help the party they seem to favor without remembering that it could just as easily flip to help the Democrats as it has at times in the past. While I don't think many serious people will pay much attention to this nonsense, it does illustrate the willingness of many on the left to do anything to somehow game the system in their favor.
While that piece was just plain foolish, more destructive was the explanation for the likely Democratic loss from Times columnist Charles Blow. The writer tends to view virtually every issue through a racial lens, so it is no surprise that this extreme liberal thinks the Democrats' big problem remains racial animus toward President Obama. He agrees with Obama that the reason for criticism of his administration is that there are "some folks who just really dislike me because they don't like the idea of a black president." Since black support for Obama has not wavered throughout his presidency, Blow naturally assumes that the dropoff elsewhere must be due to racism, something that is accentuated by the Democrats' reliance on huge turnouts from African-American voters to remain competitive.
Racism still exists in America but this is, of course, the same president who won clear majorities in two presidential elections in which a lot more white people voted than blacks. But despite these historic victories, he prefers to blame his troubles on irrational hatred rather than face the facts that a lot of people have buyer's remorse about reelecting him after a record of failure in the last two years. While Democrats have resorted to race-baiting this fall in what may prove to be a futile effort to increase black turnout, the party would be well advised to distance itself from the politics of racial grievance once the dust settles. Playing to your base is important, but, as Republicans have shown us, doing so exclusively is a formula for electoral disaster.
But perhaps Nate Cohn in the Times's Upshot section illustrated the most dangerous variety of Democratic thinking in his piece. In it, he gives us the ultimate sour grapes interpretation by saying that even if the GOP wins in key battleground states outside of their southern comfort zone, it won't be a big deal if it is a close margin. His point is that since Democratic turnout will inevitably be far greater in 2016, anything short of a GOP landslide means the next presidential election will repeat the pattern of 2010 and 2012 in which a Republican win was followed by an impressive Democratic victory.
While it is true that Democrats have in recent years tended to do better in presidential years, that is mostly the function of a singularly historic figure named Barack Obama. Though the party hopes Hillary Clinton will perform just as well as the putative first female president succeeding the first African-American, her poor political skills (illustrated again last week) make that a chancy proposition. The thing about politics is that it changes all the time. Any assumptions about the next election based on the last few is, in this case, another instance of wishful thinking on the part of the left, not a sober analysis.
What happened this year is that Republicans learned some of their lessons from the past few cycles, nominated good candidates, and stayed on message. Democrats thought they could survive the downturn in Obama's popularity by playing the same tired themes about a war on women and racism but are finding that it didn't work as well as the last time. If they lose this week, Cohn's advice might lead them to think that they have no need to re-evaluate that mistake but should, instead, merely do more of the same in hope of a better audience in 2016.
Whatever happens tomorrow, what the loser must do is to take a hard look at their defeats, and draw the proper conclusions. If Democrats emerge on Wednesday putting it all down to racism or the accident of a midterm, they will be setting themselves up for a far worse surprise in 2016 when conditions and turnout factors may not be as favorable for them as they think.
Warren Is Hillary's Unwitting Collaborator
There is a fair amount of irony buried throughout Maggie Haberman's entertaining story on how Elizabeth Warren is "vexing" Hillary Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign even without running herself. The story is a good reminder of one reason Warren isn't likely to run: she doesn't have to. Left unsaid is the corollary: Warren is a populist on the campaign trail but a heavyhanded wielder of power and a surprising policy lightweight in the Senate. Most of Warren's appeal is what leftists pretend she could be, not what she really is.
There is a fair amount of irony buried throughout Maggie Haberman's entertaining story on how Elizabeth Warren is "vexing" Hillary Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign even without running herself. The story is a good reminder of one reason Warren isn't likely to run: she doesn't have to. Left unsaid is the corollary: Warren is a populist on the campaign trail but a heavyhanded wielder of power and a surprising policy lightweight in the Senate. Most of Warren's appeal is what leftists pretend she could be, not what she really is.
So Warren not only doesn't have to run to impact the party's political future; she's probably better off not running. Her actual policies range from nonsensical to intellectually bankrupt, but her shallow applause lines are perfectly calibrated to what the economic illiterates of the leftist fringe want to hear. Warren can be a hero without ruining the economy, because she won't have the power to ruin the economy. Put her in the Oval Office and the calculus changes. She would also be exposed further as a suffocating regulator with an academic's flimsy and theoretical understanding of complicated economics.
Hillary Clinton doesn't have such an obstacle holding her back, because her fan base doesn't care about serious policy. The cult of Hillary is powered by pure identity politics, and Clinton is a mainstream figure in Democratic Party governance. That is to say, she intends to be the figurehead of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, much like Obama has been. Obama's one major policy "accomplishment," after all, was a launching pad for newly created regulatory behemoths to make policy that fell outside the intent or oversight of Congress.
When it comes to Hillary, it's about what (and who) she represents. As an executive, all indications are that she's a terrible manager, as her time at Foggy Bottom proved. And she's interested in symbolic politics, not nuts-and-bolts governance–again, her time as secretary of state showed her to be risk-averse and image hyperconscious.
Ideologically, the contrast is interesting. Hillary doesn't actually believe in anything, so she's running as a representative of her Wall Street funders who appear to be even writing her "populist" talking points for her. This is one reason Warren won't go away and wants to at least keep Hillary on her toes. For Clinton, it's all a game. Nothing has any real significance for how she'd govern. Clinton is coopting Warren's populist rhetoric for the express purpose of empowering precisely those economic actors Warren is railing against.
So how to handle the contradiction? Warren's supporters liked the idea of Clinton having to look over her shoulder and see Warren because they knew it meant pushing Clinton to the left. But it really meant pushing Clinton's rhetoric to the left. In actuality, it allows Clinton to crowd out any space there might be for Warren by mimicking her and then forgetting she and her supporters even exist.
That's why Clinton's populist rhetoric is so strained and clumsy. The most recent example was when she made the ridiculous statement that businesses don't create jobs. It's not that Clinton actually believes instead that the Job Fairy leaves jobs under the pillows of good liberals. It's that Clinton has no idea how to play the populist because she doesn't think along those lines economically and she very clearly doesn't like interacting with the populace at all.
Haberman is exceedingly generous, calling the gaffe "a misdelivered line about businesses not creating jobs." That kind of life-raft spin from the media to cover for Hillary will crop up throughout the campaign. But it didn't cause a bigger splash because the expectations for Hillary's discussion of policy are so low. Haberman also includes Hillary's own pushback:
Clinton allies are quick to point out that the woman who was synonymous with the government-led "Hillarycare" effort has a claim on economic populism. She gave a speech discussing the anger people feel in the current economy earlier this year. Her speeches for other candidates this fall have hit the core issues of the new Democratic populism, and she has woven in a message similar to her husband's from 1992 about raising the middle class.
But she is not yet a candidate delivering her own pitch, and she has shown she is still figuring out the notes to strike.
And that last line gives it away. What jumps out about Hillary's campaign is the soullessness of it all. She's still "figuring out the notes to strike" because she doesn't write her own songs. She's a cover artist, down at the local pub mangling Mr. Jones and waiting for the next request.
Warren might actually be enjoying all this–though temperamentally, she does not appear to be a person who enjoys anything, ever, and doesn't want you too either. That's something she and Clinton have in common. But humorlessness is just another box to check to win the favor of the American left, and Hillary fulfills that requirement. Warren may think she's influencing Hillary or the campaign, when in reality she's merely an ornament. The corporatists in her party, who hold the real power, are happy to keep up the charade.
The Consequences of a "Chickensh*t" Policy
No doubt the gang in the Obama administration have been congratulating themselves for planting some juicy insults aimed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jeffrey Goldberg's latest column in The Atlantic. But now that the wiseacres in the West Wing and/or the State Department have done their dirty work the question remains what will be the consequences of the decision to widen as well as to embitter the breach between the two countries. While most of those writing on this subject, including Goldberg, have emphasized the real possibility that the U.S. will sandbag Israel at the United Nations and otherwise undermine the Jewish state's diplomatic position in the last years of Obama's term in office, that won't be the only blowback from the administration's "chickenshit" diplomacy. Rather than harm Netanyahu, this ploy, like previous attacks on the prime minister, will strengthen him while making mischief for the president's party in both this year's midterms and in 2016.
No doubt the gang in the Obama administration have been congratulating themselves for planting some juicy insults aimed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jeffrey Goldberg's latest column in The Atlantic. But now that the wiseacres in the West Wing and/or the State Department have done their dirty work the question remains what will be the consequences of the decision to widen as well as to embitter the breach between the two countries. While most of those writing on this subject, including Goldberg, have emphasized the real possibility that the U.S. will sandbag Israel at the United Nations and otherwise undermine the Jewish state's diplomatic position in the last years of Obama's term in office, that won't be the only blowback from the administration's "chickenshit" diplomacy. Rather than harm Netanyahu, this ploy, like previous attacks on the prime minister, will strengthen him while making mischief for the president's party in both this year's midterms and in 2016.
There is no doubt that Obama's lame duck years will be stressful for Israel and its friends. As Seth noted earlier today, the administration's full court press for détente with Iran is setting the table for a strategic blunder on their nuclear quest that will severely harm the balance of power in the Middle East as well as lay the groundwork for challenges to American national security for decades to come.
Nor should anyone discount the potential for severe damage to Israel's diplomatic standing in the world should Obama decide to collude with the Palestinian Authority and to allow them to get a United Nations Security Council resolution on Palestinian statehood, borders, and Jerusalem. The Palestinians' drive to annul Jewish rights and to bypass the peace process could, with Obama's support, further isolate Israel and strengthen the efforts of those forces working to promote BDS—boycott, divest, sanction—campaigns that amount to an economic war on the Jewish people.
This is a dire prospect for a small, besieged country that still relieves heavily on U.S. security cooperation and defense aid. But for all the huffing and puffing on the part of Obama's minions, the administration's real objectives in all this plotting are not likely to be achieved. That's because nothing published in a Goldberg column or leaked anywhere else will weaken Netanyahu's hold on office or prompt the Palestinians to make peace or Iran to be more reasonable in the nuclear talks. The only people who will be hurt by the attacks on Israel are Obama's fellow Democrats.
As I pointed out yesterday, Obama's barbs aimed at Israel haven't enticed the Palestinians to negotiate seriously in the past and won't do so in the future. If the Palestinian Authority really wanted a state they would have accepted the one offered them in 2000, 2001, or 2008 or actually negotiated with Netanyahu in the last year after he indicated readiness to sign off on a two-state solution.
The boasts about having maneuvered Netanyahu into a position where he may not have a viable military option against Iran (actually, Israel may never have had much of an option since it can be argued that only U.S. possesses the forces required to conclusively knock out Iran's nuclear facilities) is also nothing for the U.S. to be happy about since it will only strengthen the Iranians' conviction that they have nothing to fear from Israel or a U.S. president that they think is too weak to stand up to them.
But Obama should have also already learned that challenging Netanyahu and insulting the Jewish state in this manner has one definite side effect: strengthening the prime minister's political position at home. The same thing happened after Obama's attacks on the status of Jerusalem in his first term. The administration thought it could topple Netanyahu soon after his election in February 2009 and failed, but even after his election to another term in 2013 as well as the absence of any viable alternative to him, they are still clinging to the delusion that the Israeli people will reject his policies. But that isn't likely to happen for one reason. The overwhelming majority of Israelis may not love the prime minister but they share his belief that there is no Palestinian peace partner and that turning the West Bank into a sovereign state that could be controlled by Hamas and other terrorists just like Gaza would be madness. They also oppose efforts to divide their capital or to prohibit Jews from the right to live in some parts of the city.
Netanyahu won't back down. In the wake of the summer war with Hamas that further undermined an Israeli left that was already in ruins after 20 years of failed peace processing, Netanyahu was clearly heading to early elections that would further strengthen the Likud. Obama's attacks will only make that strategy more attractive to the prime minister. But whether he is reelected in 2015, 2016, or 2017, few believe Netanyahu won't be returned to office by the voters for his third consecutive and fourth overall term as Israel's leader. Though a lot of damage can be done to Israel in the next two years, that means Netanyahu is almost certain to be able to outlast Obama in office and to enjoy what will almost certainly be better relations with his successor whether it is a Democrat or a Republican. Waiting out Obama isn't a good strategy for Israel but it may be the only one it has available to it and will likely be rewarded with a honeymoon with the next president.
But Netanyahu isn't the only person who will profit politically from this astonishingly crude assault on the Jewish state's democratically elected leader.
Foreign policy is rarely a decisive factor in U.S. elections but at a time when Democrats are suffering the ill effects of Obama's inept response to the threat from ISIS, it won't do the president's party any good for the administration to pick a fight with it's sole democratic ally in the Middle East. Americans have a right to ask why an administration that was slow to react to ISIS and is intent on appeasing a murderous Islamist regime in Iran is so intent on fighting with Israel. That won't help embattled Democrats seeking reelection in red states where evangelicals regard backing for Israel as a key issue.
Nor will it help Democrats as they head toward 2016. Though Hillary Clinton will likely run away from Obama on his attacks on Netanyahu as she has done on other foreign-policy issues, running for what will in effect be Obama's third term will still burden her with the need to either actively oppose the president's anti-Israel actions in the UN or détente with Iran or accept the negative political fallout of silence. Any Republican, with the exception of an isolationist like Rand Paul, will be able to exploit this issue to their advantage.
Those who worry about the damage to Israel from a lame-duck Obama administration that is seething with hatred for Netanyahu and thinks it has nothing to lose are not wrong. But Democrats will be hurt politically by a crisis that was created by Obama, not Netanyahu. They won't be grateful to the president for having put them in this fix while Netanyahu will probably emerge from this trial strengthened at home and in a good position to repair relations with Obama's successor.
Hillary's Fake Populism and Her Fatal Flaw
It didn't take long for Hillary Clinton's handlers to start walking back the putative 2016 Democratic presidential nominee's latest whopper. While campaigning alongside Senator Elizabeth Warren — the Democrat most members of her party's base really like — Clinton tried to play can you top this with the popular left-winger by telling her audience, "Don't let anybody tell you that corporations and businesses create jobs." It's hard to imagine a more mind-boggling confession of her ignorance of basic economics. But even after her staff tried to explain it as merely opposition to certain tax breaks or "trickle down economics," it's hard to explain what she was thinking.
It didn't take long for Hillary Clinton's handlers to start walking back the putative 2016 Democratic presidential nominee's latest whopper. While campaigning alongside Senator Elizabeth Warren — the Democrat most members of her party's base really like — Clinton tried to play can you top this with the popular left-winger by telling her audience, "Don't let anybody tell you that corporations and businesses create jobs." It's hard to imagine a more mind-boggling confession of her ignorance of basic economics. But even after her staff tried to explain it as merely opposition to certain tax breaks or "trickle down economics," it's hard to explain what she was thinking.
Granted, in a week in which Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz actually said that she agreed with the idea that Republicans are more dangerous than Ebola or ISIS, it must be acknowledged that Clinton's wacky attack on capitalism isn't even the most outrageous thing said by a Democrat. But it nevertheless offers us a fascinating insight into her character and inherent weakness as a candidate.
Clinton understands that although Warren has wisely decided to decline to attempt to challenge her for her party's presidential nomination, her left-wing populism makes her the darling of Democrats. Though she can't be too worried about a gadfly like Senator Bernie Sanders providing competition in the 2016 primaries, Clinton needs the enthusiasm as well as the support of her party's liberal core. So when placed alongside Warren, her instincts tell her to not merely echo the Massachusetts senator's attack on the market economy but to go even further down the ideological road to a place that must surely baffle the Clinton enterprise's big money Wall Street donors.
This is, of course, the same Hillary who likes to pretend to be the adult in the room on economic as well as foreign policy issues. But as she proved during her time as secretary of state, Clinton is a political chameleon with no core beliefs other than her own personal ambition. Just as she gladly went along with President Obama's decision to cut and run from Iraq and ultimately from Afghanistan and stay out of Syria even though she supposedly disagreed with much of this, when placed in Warren's orbit in front of an audience of rabid liberals, Clinton is ready to stake out a position that seems to assert that only government is responsible for job creation.
Rather than a misstatement or a gaffe or even a late life avowal of neo-socialist claptrap her nonsense about corporations not creating jobs is testimony to her inauthentic nature.
In another context, we'd just put her down as an unprincipled flip-flopper but with Clinton it is more than that. After more than 20 years in our national political life, Hillary Clinton has amassed an impressive resume and can count on her party and the mainstream media to treat her quest to be the first female president as being a national crusade deserving of slavish and unquestioned support. But even after all this time in the spotlight, she's still trying to figure out who she is and what she wants us to think she believes. And she's ready to say anything, whether tilting to the right or the left to fit the circumstances.
Just as important, all that time spent at the side of our country's most gifted politician since Ronald Reagan has taught her nothing about how to speak or behave while under scrutiny. Coming after her awful book tour in which she committed gaffe after gaffe (including her memorable claim about being broke after leaving the White House that left out the fact that she had received a multi-million dollar book advance), this attack on the corporations that she hopes will donate money to her presidential bid is just the latest proof that she is a terrible candidate who isn't improving with age and experience.
Democrats are laboring under the delusion that Clinton is a political colossus who will follow in Barack Obama's footsteps and sweep aside any GOP opposition in another historic campaign. But this misstep is a reminder that she has never (as Obama knows all too well) beaten a tough opponent in an election and is capable of blowing elections that seem impossible to lose. Even if this doesn't tempt Warren to try and steal the party out from under Clinton's nose, it should encourage Republicans who may believe that changing demographics and other problems doom their party to inevitable defeat. Americans can smell a phony from a mile away and this week Hillary proved again that this is her glaring and perhaps fatal weakness.
Do Early 2016 Polls Matter? For Democrats, Not Republicans
There's a strange asymmetry to the 2016 presidential primary polls. For the Democrats, the polls actually matter, or at least tell us something important. Hillary Clinton's dominance over her rivals has led to some recalling the "inevitability" narrative in 2008 that was, of course, shattered by Barack Obama. But the polls that showed Clinton ahead in those days weren't as lopsided, and the path wasn't quite so clear. It's true that there's no such thing as a sure thing, but Clinton's chances of cruising to the nomination are much better this time around.
There's a strange asymmetry to the 2016 presidential primary polls. For the Democrats, the polls actually matter, or at least tell us something important. Hillary Clinton's dominance over her rivals has led to some recalling the "inevitability" narrative in 2008 that was, of course, shattered by Barack Obama. But the polls that showed Clinton ahead in those days weren't as lopsided, and the path wasn't quite so clear. It's true that there's no such thing as a sure thing, but Clinton's chances of cruising to the nomination are much better this time around.
Additionally, the polls tell us something else: Democratic voters are not interested in nominating Joe Biden. That's significant this time if only because he's the sitting vice president, and therefore has some claim to be next in line. It also means he has high name recognition, which is the key to leading such early polls. (Although it's worth pointing out that if this Jimmy Kimmel man-on-the-street experiment is any indication, Biden has lower name recognition than you might otherwise think.)
Name recognition, in fact, is basically both the question and answer to deciphering such early polls. So while it's the reason polls showing Clinton in the lead are worth paying attention to, it's simultaneously the reason polls of the Republican side of the equation are meaningless. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll makes this point pretty clearly:
Hillary Clinton continues to hold a commanding lead in the potential Democratic field for president in 2016, while the GOP frontrunner in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll is a familiar figure – but one not favored by eight in 10 potential Republican voters.
That would be Mitt Romney, supported for the GOP nomination by 21 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. That's double the support of his closest potential rival, but it also leaves 79 percent who prefer one of 13 other possible candidates tested, or none of them.
But what happens when you remove Romney's name from contention and ask his supporters the same question? This:
When Romney is excluded from the race, his supporters scatter, adding no clarity to the GOP free-for-all. In that scenario former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul have 12 or 13 percent support from leaned Republicans who are registered to vote. All others have support in the single digits.
As I wrote last month on Republicans and name recognition:
Take this summer poll from Gallup on the public's familiarity with 2016 candidates. The only two Republicans to crack 60 percent were Chris Christie and Jeb Bush. … If he wins reelection in Wisconsin, Scott Walker would be considered among the GOP's strongest candidates (on paper at least, which is all we have so far for the newbies). … Yet Gallup found Walker with the lowest familiarity of any of the GOP candidates, at just 34 percent.
Similarly, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal–the human résumé–was at just 38 percent. Huckabee was at 54 percent, higher than previous candidate Rick Santorum (but lower than Rick Perry) as well as all the non-previous candidates except Christie, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul, who was at 55 percent. Huckabee also tied Christie for the highest favorability rating in that poll.
Now look at the new ABC/WaPo poll. There's Huckabee, along with Jeb Bush and Rand Paul plus Romney at the top. Name recognition still roughly determines the outline of the race.
And that brings up another reason these polls aren't much help: the actual makeup of the field when the primaries get under way. It's doubtful Romney will run again. Huckabee is far from a sure thing to run again. Jeb Bush is probably more likely than not to pass as well, considering the fact that Christie still appears to be running and so does Bush's fellow Floridian Marco Rubio.
Yet according to the ABC/WaPo poll, the top three vote getters on the GOP side are … Romney, Bush, and Huckabee. The pollsters took Romney out of the lineup to get a better sense of where Romney's support was coming from (leaving Bush and Huckabee still in the top three), but they might have done better taking all three out of an additional question and seeing where the field would be without them. Rand Paul is the top voter-getter among those who either haven't previously run for president or whose last name isn't Bush.
After that, it gets more interesting–but not by much. Paul Ryan is a popular choice, but that's name recognition as well since he ran on the 2012 national ticket. He also doesn't seem all that enthusiastic about a run for president. If he doesn't run, that means there's a good chance three of the top four vote getters in the Romney-free version of the poll aren't running, leaving Romney's supporters without any of their favored candidates except Rand Paul.
Here's another such poll, this one of Iowa voters from last week. The top two choices are Romney and Ben Carson, followed by Paul, Huckabee, and Ryan. Perhaps Romney really is running and Carson is a strong sleeper pick. But I doubt it on both counts. I also doubt Romney would win Iowa even if he ran, no matter what the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll says.
This is an indication of how wide-open the race is on the GOP side. But not much else. And the polls should be treated that way.
Syria: What Might Have Been
The Obama administration, like its predecessors, has used strategic leaks to the press to buttress arguments in which officials are (theoretically) hamstrung by secrecy laws. Usually the Obama administration has done so in order to look tougher than critics give the president credit for being, but in today's New York Times they've taken the opposite tack: a leak designed to support the president's instinctive caution on Syria. Unfortunately for Obama, the attempt to spin his Syria policy merely reveals just how little the president understands about military strategy and the Middle East.
The Obama administration, like its predecessors, has used strategic leaks to the press to buttress arguments in which officials are (theoretically) hamstrung by secrecy laws. Usually the Obama administration has done so in order to look tougher than critics give the president credit for being, but in today's New York Times they've taken the opposite tack: a leak designed to support the president's instinctive caution on Syria. Unfortunately for Obama, the attempt to spin his Syria policy merely reveals just how little the president understands about military strategy and the Middle East.
The story in the Times recaps a classified report from the CIA to the president analyzing the success rate of arming rebels in past conflicts. The report, according to the story, greatly contributed to Obama's reluctance to help the Syrian rebels. But there are two problems with this approach. The first, and obvious, one is that Obama has already given the green light to arming the rebels the administration considers sufficiently moderate. If the CIA report was the reason not to arm them sooner, what's the reason to arm them now?
The answer to that appears to be: Obama wants to fight ISIS more seriously than he wanted to defeat Bashar al-Assad–though that still doesn't account for the fact that the president believes it's a policy with very low odds of succeeding. Indeed, the story itself eventually points out that Obama nonetheless chose the least effective method of helping the rebels:
The C.I.A. review, according to several former American officials familiar with its conclusions, found that the agency's aid to insurgencies had generally failed in instances when no Americans worked on the ground with the foreign forces in the conflict zones, as is the administration's plan for training Syrian rebels.
So this arguably raises as many questions as it answers. But the other aspect of this is about the dishonesty with which the administration seeks to push back on its critics, especially those who recently left the administration–Leon Panetta most prominently, but also Hillary Clinton, Michele Flournoy, and former Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford. The Times mentions Clinton, Panetta, and David Petraeus:
The debate over whether Mr. Obama acted too slowly to support the Syrian rebellion has been renewed after both former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta wrote in recent books that they had supported a plan presented in the summer of 2012 by David H. Petraeus, then the C.I.A. director, to arm and train small groups of rebels in Jordan.
But the tone and nature of this argument coming from the administration is just a repeat of a classic Obama tactic: setting up a straw man and then knocking him down. The administration wants to paint Syria intervention as simply a gunrunning operation, with some foreign training. But the idea that it was either CIA gunrunning or nothing is what the president, were he on the receiving end of this argument, would call a false choice. And it goes to the heart of why Obama's foreign policy has been so unnerving: he doesn't seem to really understand the issues at play.
Arming and training the Syrian rebels was indeed a key part of interventionists' early argument. But it wasn't the whole argument. A more comprehensive intervention that still stopped shy of an American ground war included territorial carve-outs to secure parts of the country in the hands of certain rebels; a no-fly zone (or more than one) to enforce the boundaries of the new carve-outs; large on-site training programs; and humanitarian corridors to those territories from neighboring friendly countries, like Jordan and perhaps Kurdish positions in Iraq and Turkey.
This would also allow intelligence from Israel to be better coordinated and utilized, at least for air support and the tracking of enemy forces, and would improve and streamline recruitment efforts. And it would protect segments of the disappearing borders of these countries, to make it more difficult (though far from impossible) for Islamist terrorist groups to take advantage of porous borders, especially between Iraq and Syria. It would also go some way toward protecting at-risk minorities from groups like ISIS, and it would force ISIS to either defend more territory (instead of almost always being on offense) or leave forces behind in territory through which it marches virtually unopposed to hold that territory, spreading its resources thinner and disrupting its communications and supply lines.
Obama seems to think that the fragmented nature of the Syrian rebels and the weakness of the Syrian state and the Iraqi army vindicate his reluctance to help the Syrian rebels. But the opposite is the case. There were better options available to the president than simply gunrunning in Syria. Had he taken those options, it's likely the situation would be better today than it is. But that would require the president to first admit that those options even exist.
Marylanders to the Rest of the Country: Beware Martin O'Malley
What does Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley have in common with self-described socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders? The same percentage of Maryland Democrats want them to be the next Democratic presidential nominee. That would be 3 percent. It's just one of the many data points to come out of the latest Washington Post/University of Maryland poll to support H.L. Mencken's contention that "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
What does Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley have in common with self-described socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders? The same percentage of Maryland Democrats want them to be the next Democratic presidential nominee. That would be 3 percent. It's just one of the many data points to come out of the latest Washington Post/University of Maryland poll to support H.L. Mencken's contention that "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
Although, in the interest of basic compassion, it might be unkind to claim Maryland residents–or anyone, really–deserve to get two terms of Martin O'Malley.
And, to their immense credit, Marylanders don't want the rest of the country to bring Martin O'Malley upon themselves. The message from Marylanders to the nation at large is: Don't let our years governed by O'Malley be in vain; let something good come out of all of this. And that something good appears to be a national future unencumbered by Martin O'Malley as the nation's chief executive.
But there are worse numbers in the poll for O'Malley than Democratic voters' resounding declaration that they don't want him representing their party in the next presidential election. That at least can be spun away. After all, if Democrats are asked to pick one politician to be their next presidential nominee, it's no surprise that so many–63 percent–chose Hillary Clinton. (Although it is somewhat humorous that "Other/no opinion" polls nearly five times as well as O'Malley. They say you can't beat something with nothing, and O'Malley appears to be the exception that proves the rule.)
No, the most unflattering portion of the poll is probably when registered voters are asked "Do you think Martin O'Malley would make a good president, or not?" The response: 14 percent said yes; 70 percent said no. The poll contrasts that with the result when the same question was asked in October 2012. At that time, the numbers were only slightly better–22 percent said yes; 62 percent said no–but still so far underwater as to be invisible from the surface.
There are more bad numbers–really, the whole poll is just an opportunity for Marylanders to unload on their horrendous governor. As the Post reported in an accompanying story, his "job-approval rating has fallen to an eight-year low of 41 percent, with his biggest defections coming from fellow Democrats." What happened? The Post offers some suggestions:
Although O'Malley is not on the ballot this year, his policies in Maryland — particularly a string of tax increases during his tenure — have come under heavy fire from other candidates. Months of attacks, including some from fellow Democrats, appear to have taken their toll, some analysts say.
Other observers suggest that the time O'Malley has spent crisscrossing the country, seeking to gain national exposure, has alienated some constituents in Maryland.
Plausible. But it might be worth delving a bit more into his policies. The lesson might not be one national Democrats want to learn:
His legacy will include legalization of same-sex marriage, a sweeping gun-control bill, repeal of the death penalty, several measures expanding immigrant rights and an increase in the minimum wage. He has also overseen multiple tax hikes during his tenure, including increases in personal income taxes paid by high earners, the corporate income tax, sales tax, gas tax, tobacco tax and alcohol tax.
All politics is local (though not as local as it ought to be), so I doubt it'll worry Democrats too much. Some of this might be personal; O'Malley is, after all, deeply unlikeable. But his agenda is also very liberal in a pretty liberal state, and voters don't seem to love the results. It's a common feature in American politics: there's only so much liberalism even liberals can take.
And part of that could be the impression of the stereotype come to life. Reread that list of O'Malley tax increases, and you not only understand the O'Taxey nickname but get the sense the governor is to taxes what Bubba Blue is to shrimp.
Democrats may counter all this by pointing out that O'Malley is terrible at his job, and Democrats who aren't terrible at their jobs will not suffer the same poll numbers. That's true. But an element of O'Malley being terrible at his job is that, when it comes to issues like taxes, he cranks his liberalism up to eleven.
The other phenomenon here is just how "Ready for Hillary" national Democrats are. They don't want a divisive nomination fight, and they don't want a battle over ideas, in part because they want to nominate Hillary instead of a candidate who has ideas. So they're not much interested in even having this conversation. And you almost can't blame them: O'Taxey, a Vermont socialist, Joe Biden–the alternatives to Hillary aren't exactly a sparkling A-team of Democratic leaders.
And that's what might actually concern Democratic Party leaders more than O'Malley's unpopularity: the prospect that there is no A-team. There's just Clinton. They may get the nominee they want, but as far as Democrats see it, that's not because she's their best choice as much as that she's their only choice.
Dems Prepare for World Without Obama
After two presidential election victories that were won largely on the force of his personality and the historic nature of his candidacies, Barack Obama's political stock is low and getting lower. But while the sidelining of the president in this year's midterm elections is depressing for his many and adoring media cheerleaders, it is an important dry run for his party. Though much of the attention in the midterms is on the Democrats efforts to retain control of the Senate, they're also attempting to do something else: prepare for a political world without Obama. Their success this year or lack thereof may go a long way toward answering the question as to whether Obama's past victories truly transformed American politics or were just a passing phase.
After two presidential election victories that were won largely on the force of his personality and the historic nature of his candidacies, Barack Obama's political stock is low and getting lower. But while the sidelining of the president in this year's midterm elections is depressing for his many and adoring media cheerleaders, it is an important dry run for his party. Though much of the attention in the midterms is on the Democrats efforts to retain control of the Senate, they're also attempting to do something else: prepare for a political world without Obama. Their success this year or lack thereof may go a long way toward answering the question as to whether Obama's past victories truly transformed American politics or were just a passing phase.
Heeding the call of his immense ego rather than the advice of his party's political consultants, last week President Obama attempted to inject himself into this year's midterm elections. But the unpopular president's declaration that his policies, if not his name, was on the ballot in November was remarkable mainly for the fact that it was treated as a major political gaffe rather than as an inspiring call to arms for Democratic activists. This turn of events is a comedown for a man who entered the White House like a messiah but will spend his last years there as a lame duck. But, as the New York Times reports today, the real story here is whether the Obama coalition of young people, unmarried women, minorities, and educated elites that elected him twice is a foundation for his party's future or something that stopped being relevant after 2012.
The president's supporters believe he can still play a role in mobilizing key Democratic constituencies. In deep-blue states like Illinois, New York, and California that might be true. But as the president's poll numbers head south, the idea that the magic of his personality can create a governing majority is no longer viable. With Democratic candidates in battleground states avoiding the unpopular chief executive like the plague, it is increasingly clear that his party is on its own.
It should be remembered that in the wake of the 2008 and 2012 elections, we were treated to a round of Democratic triumphalism about Obama having changed American politics in a way that gave his party what amounted to a permanent majority for the foreseeable future. That in turn generated a companion wave of Republican pessimism about their inability to win in a changing demographic environment in which minority voters would ensure GOP losses in national elections.
But like all such predictions (remember how George W. Bush's victory in 2004 was thought to herald a permanent GOP majority?), these analyses failed to take into account that issues, candidates, and circumstances make each election a unique event. The Democrats' victories were impressive and influenced heavily by the fact that the electorate is less white than it was only a decade ago. But if you take the Obama factor out of the equation, the notion of a permanent hope-and-change coalition seems more like science fiction than political science.
As the Times notes, the president isn't only less popular among groups that are less inclined to support him but also among those that were crucial to the Democrats' recent victories like young people and women. While no one thought that Obama would be anything but a liability to Democrats in red states like Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, or Georgia, he's also being politely asked to keep out of swing states like North Carolina and even light blue states like Michigan. All of which means that this midterm is shaping up as a preview of 2016 when Democrats will try to win a national election without the old Obama magic helping them.
One Democratic answer centers on their past and their likely 2016 nominee: the Clintons. Hillary Clinton will have her own coalition to build and can certainly count on enthusiasm for what may be our first major-party female candidate for president. But as much as Democrats in states like Arkansas are happy to welcome her husband in to help bolster their tickets, it may be too much to ask even of Bill Clinton to expect him to save incumbents like Mark Prior.
Without the Obama personality cult boosting Democratic turnout, they will have to fall back on their technological edge in turnout and organization. Yet in the end each election is decided more on the names on the ballots than anything else. It remains to be seen whether the Democrats' shaky incumbents and weak bench is strong enough to build on what Obama accomplished. But those who are counting on the same sort of enthusiasm fueling future Democratic campaigns need to explain who, in the absence of a charismatic leader, can give a reason for voters to heed the social networking appeals and other strategies that have worked so well for them in the recent past.
A world without Obama is terra incognita for a Democratic Party that must prove it can win a victory without the aid of a boogeyman like George W. Bush or a hope-and-change messiah. Moreover, eight years of a largely failed presidency has altered the political landscape just as much as the changing demographics. Next month we will get the first indication whether Democrats are equipped to deal with that dilemma. If the polls that currently give the GOP an edge are any indication, they might not like the answer.
Dem Senate Candidates: Bombs Away!
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. You just need Jeanne Shaheen.
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. You just need Jeanne Shaheen.
As Politico recounts in a story today, Democratic Senate candidates are finding their inner hawks on the campaign trail, but none more noticeably than Shaheen, the New Hampshire incumbent trying to fend off a challenge from Scott Brown. Shaheen, on matters of war and peace, is a walking focus group:
When she ran unsuccessfully for the Senate a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, she said at a debate: "I'll stand with President Bush on national security, the war on terrorism and to disarm Saddam Hussein."
In a 2008 rematch against then-Sen. John Sununu, after the war had gone south, Shaheen vowed to fight to bring the troops home.
"I would vote to authorize military action if the U.S. or any of its treaty partners are attacked militarily, and to prevent an imminent attack," she said on a 2008 questionnaire. But "I oppose the Bush doctrine of preemption because it implies that the United States will use preemption as a first option, rather than a last resort."
Setting aside her obvious ignorance of the Bush doctrine (an ignorance she shares with virtually everyone on the left), we should ask Shaheen: Which way are the winds blowing this time? Answer:
Republican candidate Scott Brown has been hammering Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen for failing to understand "the nature of the threat," as he put it in one commercial that began airing last week.
This has prompted the freshman Democrat to begin quietly running a response ad (her campaign has not released it to the news media), in which she says: "I support those airstrikes. I think it's important for us to take the fight to ISIL."
A narrator accuses Brown of playing politics and says, over patriotic music, that Shaheen "always works to keep America strong."
Even her ads are a study in contradiction. It's apparently "playing politics" for politicians to campaign on the issues, and yet Shaheen takes the bait and claims that she, too, enthusiastically wants to bomb some folks, as the president might say.
But Shaheen is just a product of a Democratic Party that has not had a coherent approach to national security in over a decade. During President Bush's first term, Al Gore maniacally accused him of betraying the country. The Democrats then nominated John Kerry in 2004, to make crystal clear they didn't have the energy to even pretend they cared about national security.
In 2008, Democrats nominated Barack Obama, whose antiwar speech in 2002, lauded by the left, was startlingly unintelligent and Ron Paul-esque in its wild-eyed conspiracy theories. Obama followed the usual fringe leftist critique of blaming Wolfowitz and Perle for manipulating the country into war. He also called them "weekend warriors," showing he doesn't know what "weekend warrior" means. He then accused Karl Rove of manufacturing the war to distract the country from the economy and to protect corporate evildoers from public opprobrium. The speech sounded like a raving fusion of Glenn Greenwald and Alex Jones. So naturally the Democrats chose him to represent their party.
And then when he won, the script had to be flipped. The president was introduced to reality, and he embraced his power to expand America's war in the Middle East and Central Asia. He had genuine successes, like the operation to take out Osama bin Laden, which he then made his campaign slogan to the extent that it was actually surprising his nominating convention speech didn't feature him standing over bin Laden's body while exclaiming to the audience "Are you not entertained?"
Indeed they were entertained. The thousands of Democratic Party voters and activists cheered on targeted assassination. In his foreign-policy debate with Mitt Romney, Obama taunted his challenger's lack of appetite for the messy business of spilling bad-guy blood. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, then stepped down and immediately spread the word that Obama was insufficiently hawkish for her, and that, as she rocketed to the top of 2016 Democratic polls, she would take the country further into battle. You only think you're entertained now, Clinton's message intimated; you ain't seen nothing yet.
And that was all before Obama abandoned Iraq and watched ISIS rise, march on territory, and then start beheading Americans. The public may have been war weary, but they won't stand for being targeted with impunity. Obama did the right thing and agreed to try and push back ISIS and protect the ethnic and religious minority groups whose existence ISIS was trying to extinguish. He also was informed of credible threats against America and acted accordingly.
And Democratic candidates are following suit. The idea of "antiwar liberals" was always something of a misnomer. They were, mostly, anti-Bush or anti-Republican liberals. What matters most to the left is not who is being bombed but who is ordering the bombing. It's why Jim Webb is probably kidding himself if he believes an antiwar candidate poses a credible challenge to Hillary Clinton. If he wants to know if there's space on the left for a serious antiwar campaign, he's going through entirely too much effort by traveling around the country and talking to prospective supporters. All he really needs to do is ask Jeanne Shaheen.
Clinton's Leftist Critics: Still Irrelevant
Imagine the following scenario. The Democratic Party continues to push Hillary Clinton as its nominee for 2016. The women of the party who could challenge her, like Elizabeth Warren, continue showing deference and bowing to reality by staying on the sidelines and supporting Hillary, knowing their turn may yet come. But then, word gets to Warren that an activist with Occupy Wall Street is put off by Clinton's cozy connections to Wall Street, and wants someone like Warren to challenge her, to be the conscience of the party. Game changer, right?
Imagine the following scenario. The Democratic Party continues to push Hillary Clinton as its nominee for 2016. The women of the party who could challenge her, like Elizabeth Warren, continue showing deference and bowing to reality by staying on the sidelines and supporting Hillary, knowing their turn may yet come. But then, word gets to Warren that an activist with Occupy Wall Street is put off by Clinton's cozy connections to Wall Street, and wants someone like Warren to challenge her, to be the conscience of the party. Game changer, right?
Of course not. Elizabeth Warren is not going to take her career advice from pseudoanarchist trustfunders who defecate on police cars and shield rapists from legal trouble. Neither is Hillary Clinton, or anyone running the Democratic Party. And so it is in that light that we read about the latest anti-Hillary grumbling from the economically illiterate perpetual freshmen on the populist left. According to The Hill, there is an email group called "Gamechanger Salon," consisting of about 1,500 liberal journalists, activists, and campaign strategists. Someone leaked the contents of the emails to The Hill. The "Gamechangers" are, of course, reveling in blissful unawareness of their own irrelevance to the 2016 presidential election:
"[A] Clinton presidency undos [sic] all our progress and returns the financial interests to even more prominence than they currently have," Melissa Byrne, an activist with the Occupy Wall Street movement, said in a November 2013 email.
The progressives expressed an appetite for an alternative to Clinton to teach her — and those from the centrist wing of the party — a lesson.
Liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has repeatedly said she won't run for president, but some on the left aren't convinced.
"The establishment Dems need to be punished, and the best way for that to happen is for Warren to beat Hillary in the primary on a populist message," Carl Gibson, a progressive activist and writer for Occupy.com, wrote in one email.
Even though months have passed since the emails were sent, the sentiment remains.
Mike Lux, a prominent strategist and an active member of the group, told The Hill that the concerns haven't changed and operatives "are probably more worried at this point rather than less."
Well sure, naturally they'd be more worried now than less, since Hillary Clinton is closer to her party's nomination. She's not just incredibly wealthy herself, with help from her Wall Street speaking clients, but she's even asking them to help shape her talking points on economic inequality, as the New York Times reported last week:
Fledgling efforts to develop a message are quietly taking place, said the people close to Mrs. Clinton. Without discussing her 2016 plans, she has talked to friends and donors in business about how to tackle income inequality without alienating businesses or castigating the wealthy.
Certainly one can imagine why left-wingers aren't thrilled to read that Hillary is outsourcing her policy and campaign communications to the people she's asking for money. And they wouldn't be alone in that uneasiness were Hillary a Republican. The ads would write themselves, as would the New York Times editorials. (Though to be fair, the Times editorials have already been written; they'd just be recycled with the name changed.)
Speaking of Republicans, what did Hillary's benefactors and influence seekers tell her to say about economic policy? This might sound familiar:
That message would likely be less populist and more pro-growth, less about inversions and more about corporate tax reform, less about raising the minimum wage and more long-term job creation, said two people with firsthand knowledge of the discussions.
She's running as Mitt Romney, in other words, but with less management experience and greater dependence on her donors. You can imagine why leftists are just thrilled.
Part of the story, according to The Hill, is lingering discontent over Clinton's vote in favor of the Iraq war. She has since apologized, seeking proper absolution. But all is not forgiven. One activist told The Hill he wants to see people like Clinton "punished at the ballot box" over the war. But didn't that already happen? Hillary did, after all, lose in 2008 to Barack Obama, whose campaign really did get a lift from his opposition to the Iraq war.
On the other hand, you can see where these activists are coming from, since Clinton was a more interventionist and hawkish proponent of force in Obama's Cabinet. The presumption on the part of these activists is that Clinton's regret over the Iraq war vote is disingenuous to the extent that it hasn't altered her worldview or her faith in American firepower. They don't care as much that she regrets the last Iraq war because they think she'd jump right into the next one.
And maybe that's true. But again, it doesn't really matter. The "Gamechangers" are anything but. There is still no serious opposition to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party, and there does not appear to be any on the horizon. And a progressive email list isn't going to change that.
Bill and Hillary's Awkward Iowa Adventure
Hillary Clinton is running for president. And running, as fast as she can, away from Iowa.
Hillary Clinton is running for president. And running, as fast as she can, away from Iowa.
The former secretary of state was in Iowa over the weekend for outgoing Democratic U.S. Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry. It's one of the many Iowa non-campaign campaign events that have made the state's role in presidential politics both essential and insufferable. And though her husband was on his best behavior, the event still raised the persistent question of whether Bill is helping or hurting his wife's presidential ambitions.
It's not a new question, of course: Newsweek asked it in 2007, the last time Hillary was running for president with Bill at her side. But it usually centers on his tendency toward bad behavior and his caddish history with women, at a time when the Democratic Party is running most of its campaigns on its own fabricated war on women. (Monica Lewinsky's recent return to the news was facilitated by liberals, not mischievous conservatives.)
Yet the Iowa steak fry showed a different side of this possible hindrance: when Bill is doing precisely what the campaign needs of him–generally being the Democrats' ambassador to anyone who doesn't live on a coast–he so completely outshines Hillary as to make abundantly clear Hillary's great weaknesses as a candidate. For one, Bill Clinton likes people. As Michael Barone wrote recently, contrasting the former president with the current one: "If you were in a room with Bill Clinton, he would discover the one issue out of 100 on which you agreed; he would probe you with questions, comments, suggestions; and he would tell you that you enabled him to understand it far better than he ever had before."
Contrast that with how the Economist describes Hillary's photo-op at the fry:
Mrs Clinton was the guest star at the 37th and final "Harkin Steak Fry", a combined outdoor picnic, political fundraiser and gathering of the clans for Iowa progressives, hosted by the state's outgoing Democratic senator, Tom Harkin. While a crowd of several thousand Democrats waited on a sloping, grassy field below, Mrs Clinton, her husband and Senator Harkin staged a mini-grilling of steaks for the press at a single barbecue grill in a fenced-off enclosure, framed by a handsome tree and a picnic table filled with some patient Iowans. Mrs Clinton gamely posed, pretending to grill a steak that had been pre-cooked for her. After briefly ducking into a small building, she emerged to exchange some careful banter with reporters.
The Duchess of Chappaqua can only pretend to grill a steak, just as she can only pretend to know what a grill is. She was nice enough to go sans tiara to mingle with the press while pretending to mingle with the commoners, but she might have done better not to act as though visiting a remote Amazonian tribe whose language she couldn't hope to understand.
And where was Bill during all this? Practically crowd surfing:
Ex-President Bill Clinton could hardly be dragged from the press, cheerfully ignoring aides who kept calling "OK, guys, thank you" to reporters, as if we were holding their boss captive, and "Got to go eat a veggie burger" (a reference to Mr Clinton's heart-conscious vegan diet). He had thoughts to offer on the mid-term elections (Democrats are in better shape than people think) and his red gingham shirt, a gift from his wife ("I worried I looked like a tablecloth in a diner," he confided).
There is no question Hillary has benefited from her husband's success, so there is a limit to the debate over whether Bill's a help or a hindrance. Additionally, the type of weaknesses often matter in politics more than anything. Hillary has an obvious aversion to the commoners. She is not a people person, and does not appear to like the voters whose support she needs. She does not like the press, though they would step in front of a train for her. And the Democratic Party she seeks to lead is, more than ever, disgusted by freethinking individualism and nonconformist behavior. So every interaction with the voters is, for Hillary, a mine field.
And it doesn't help, either, that the Democrats' identity politics necessitate a total lack of humor. Their comedians become court jesters at the thought of another Clinton presidency; Stephen Colbert, in his move to late-night television, will go from impersonating Bill O'Reilly to impersonating Giacomo.
It is into this stuffy, grievance-filled atmosphere that Hillary will send Bill, the last liberal not named Brian Schweitzer who can smile without being prodded by an aide to do so. The message from Hillary's campaign is simple: You probably don't like me, and I don't like you; but my husband's a funny guy, and he's the free toaster you get by signing up for Hillary.
Is it a winning slogan? Don't be so eager to write it off. For one thing, this sort of campaign phoniness is usually a hindrance in the early states like Iowa and New Hampshire, especially during a primary contest. But if Hillary's campaign continues into 2016, there won't be a primary contest. Iowa voters won't choose Martin O'Malley over Hillary because she doesn't grill her own steaks. It's doubtful heartland voters would choose O'Malley over a root canal, in fact.
Does it hold Hillary back in the general election? Like every version of this question, the answer depends on who her opponent is. But a more interesting question is whether it helps or hurts Hillary to have Bill on the campaign trail with her. Voters may like talking to Bill, but at a certain point they're going to notice that like actors need stunt doubles, their would-be president needs a schmooze double.
Cuomo Agonistes
Just a few days before Andrew Cuomo's victory over Zephyr Teachout in New York's gubernatorial primary, a video of Cuomo at the Labor Day parade made the rounds. It neatly summed up the New York populist left's relationship with Cuomo: he doesn't acknowledge they exist.
Just a few days before Andrew Cuomo's victory over Zephyr Teachout in New York's gubernatorial primary, a video of Cuomo at the Labor Day parade made the rounds. It neatly summed up the New York populist left's relationship with Cuomo: he doesn't acknowledge they exist.
Here's the video, originally posted on the New York True website:
Teachout attempts for about a minute to get Cuomo's attention to say hello to him. She is repeatedly boxed out by Cuomo's handlers and he doesn't appear to even notice her, despite her proximity. Eventually, she is crowded out when someone Cuomo does recognize, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, approaches. Although it's doubtful Cuomo saw and ignored Teachout (unless I missed it), the forced smile pasted on his face and the complete lack of awareness of Teachout made for a pretty accurate description of how Cuomo feels about the Occupy left.
Cuomo won the primary by nearly thirty percent, but Teachout got 34 percent herself, the best primary challenge to a sitting New York governor on record. That left commentators with a kind of strange story to tell: a primary that wasn't close but was closer than it should have been. It wasn't a near-upset, but the publicity and support generated by the Teachout campaign (the New York Times even declined to endorse in the primary) were indicative of something not quite significant but not easily ignored either.
In a smart column for the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson tries to tease out the conflict:
Cuomo's estrangement of Democratic liberals wasn't due to any social conservatism on his part. In his first term as governor, Cuomo pushed through a same-sex marriage bill and tighter gun-control legislation. But his resistance to some key economic imperatives, allowing New York City to set a minimum-wage rate higher than the state's and keeping a heightened tax rate on the income of the state's wealthiest residents (that is, Wall Street bankers), and his unwillingness to campaign for Democratic control of the state Senate, which would boost the prospects for such legislation, angered many of his fellow Democrats. They believed Cuomo was cultivating Wall Street support for a possible presidential bid, an ambition that stood athwart their efforts to mitigate New York's skyscraper-high inequality.
Cuomo's vulnerability on economic issues was compounded by his vulnerability on ethical ones. Confronted with the spectacle of a steady stream of legislators moving from Albany to prison after convictions for corrupt practices, Cuomo convened an ethics commission to investigate and reform New York's business of politics. Earlier this year, however, he disbanded it with its mission unaccomplished — a decision that prompted a federal prosecutor to announce that he was looking into Cuomo's abrupt change of heart.
This strikes me as exactly right. So it's worth playing this scenario out a bit. Meyerson compares the liberal angst bubbling up into Teachout's campaign to that of Elizabeth Warren. The comparison is imperfect, but apt in one way: Warren would only run for president, presumably, if Hillary Clinton isn't in the race. Clinton is running as a Wall Street Democrat through and through, and there does not appear to be real appetite on the left to take her on.
That's because at the national level, Democrats are far more interested in winning. The only real friction between Clinton and the left so far, as Ben Domenech points out in this month's COMMENTARY, concerned Clinton's career-long opposition to gay marriage, until the polls shifted enough for her to flip flop. At the national level, social issues, and culture-war issues more broadly, get top billing from Democrats.
As Meyerson notes, that's not true at the state level in New York. Democrats there care about social issues, but in a deep blue state those issues are not nearly so controversial. It's how Cuomo could tell pro-life New Yorkers that they "have no place in the state of New York because that's not who New Yorkers are" and still expect to win reelection. Liberals may appreciate Cuomo's social liberalism (and his mildly totalitarian anger-management issues), but he's not exactly going out on a limb.
And that's why Cuomo would essentially have to decide between being a true-blue Democratic governor of New York or being a viable national figure. Since Cuomo has hopes of at least keeping the door to a presidential run open, he's chosen to be a national Democrat. This has the advantage of not requiring him to have principles, and it's also not much of a threat to his career as governor: if the best the left can do is keep him at two-thirds of the vote, he's going to continue pretending they don't exist.
And yet it may still come back to haunt him. Cuomo's ethics shenanigans mean the possibility of indictment is unlikely but not nonexistent. If he makes it without legal trouble, people will wonder just how he did so. And if he alienates the left enough–Zephyr Teachout's campaign had no trouble attracting headlines even outside New York, and she raised money outside the state as well–he'll have no grassroots bandwagon for a national campaign. (Good luck in Iowa!)
Cuomo knows that it's difficult to be a New York liberal in a national campaign. Now he's learning that it's not so easy not to be a New York liberal in New York. He wanted an uneventful governorship and a shot at the presidency. Both are looking increasingly out of reach.
A "Berlin Airlift" for the Ukrainian Winter
Russian aggression remains very much in the headlines, as President Vladimir Putin last week re-opened the southern front and more recently reportedly bragged that he could capture the Ukraine in just a couple weeks. Max Boot rightly writes that the gestures NATO envisions won't deter Putin. The problem with American and perhaps NATO policy goes deeper, however.
Russian aggression remains very much in the headlines, as President Vladimir Putin last week re-opened the southern front and more recently reportedly bragged that he could capture the Ukraine in just a couple weeks. Max Boot rightly writes that the gestures NATO envisions won't deter Putin. The problem with American and perhaps NATO policy goes deeper, however.
So much policy in recent years has been based on wishful thinking. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton preferred to see problems in U.S.-Russian relations as rooted more with their predecessors than with Putin himself, hence the investment in the "reset." There continued years of denial about Putin's true intentions, all the while making compromises and offering concessions based on the deluded notion that Putin was more partner than pariah. When Putin invaded Crimea, when he shot down Malaysian Airlines flight 17, and when he continued his push into his neighbor, Obama simply reacted with a patchwork of statements and superficial pronouncements until the television cameras moved on. Indeed, if there is one core principle to the Obama doctrine, it is not leading from behind (for that would imply leading), but rather simply reacting to world events in a scattershot fashion.
It's time to be proactive. Putin can boast that he can take the Ukrainian capital Kiev in two weeks, but he really doesn't need to. After all, Ukraine remains overwhelmingly dependent upon Russian gas shipments to power its factories and heat its homes during the winter. If Putin simply turns a nozzle, he can freeze Ukrainians into submission. Everyone sees the winter coming, and yet there does not appear to be much planning within U.S. policy circles about how to prevent Russian hardball with energy shipments.
It's time to talk about a "Berlin Airlift" of escorted shipments of fuel into Ukraine. Such an operation would be difficult, but then again, so was the Berlin Airlift. American warships can enter the Black Sea on routine patrol, and Romania can contribute and provide basing and logistical support, if not active partnership. If the United States could reflag Kuwaiti tankers to protect them, so too could the United States re-flag tankers bound for the Ukraine.
There is no doubt that any Ukraine flotilla would be expensive. It is also true that European officials—and especially Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany—construct their policies more on mercantile considerations than on principles. But then again, if economics always trumped freedom, there would have been no Berlin Airlift and the Cold War would have taken a far worse turn. But looming problems require more than posturing and press conference; they require proactive resolutions. Alas, time is running out to construct such a solution and to prevent Putin from transforming Ukraine into the vassal he envisions.
Can the GOP Lower the Gender Gap?
Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus had a point when in an appearance on MSNBC's Daily Rundown, he pushed back at the story published by Politico in which the publication spun two webs that showed the GOP continuing to trail the Democrats among female voters as proof that it was "stuck in the past." Though Priebus is right to note that the generally negative view of the Democrats held by women is nearly as bad as that of Republicans, there's no denying that a gender gap exists. More to the point, there's little use denying that it's bound to get worse in 2016.
Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus had a point when in an appearance on MSNBC's Daily Rundown, he pushed back at the story published by Politico in which the publication spun two webs that showed the GOP continuing to trail the Democrats among female voters as proof that it was "stuck in the past." Though Priebus is right to note that the generally negative view of the Democrats held by women is nearly as bad as that of Republicans, there's no denying that a gender gap exists. More to the point, there's little use denying that it's bound to get worse in 2016.
As Preibus noted, the internal polls conducted by two conservative PACs—Crossroads GPS and American Action Network—showed that 49 percent of women view Republicans negatively while 39 percent think the same of Democrats. That's a clear gender gap and a big advantage for Democrats in any election. But the spin on the poll coming from Politico seemed to center on the notion that the GOP was hopelessly out of touch with most women who viewed them as insensitive to their issues. While carping about the characterization of his party, he acknowledged that the problem is serious and he also asserted that it was not insurmountable.
There are two conclusions to be drawn from this situation.
The first is that although the Democrats' charge that Republicans are waging a "war on women" is the lowest kind of specious partisan propaganda, it has worked. Though married women still support Republicans, the problem for the GOP is that the far more numerous unmarried women have bought into the Democrats' tactics, especially in the Middle West and Northeast.
Why? Because many young, liberal women have accepted the notion that conservative positions on economic issues and the need for smaller government hurts them. Moreover, to a generation of women who have come to believe the unfettered right to abortion and free contraception from their employers is essential to their well being, GOP arguments are bound to fall flat.
The second is that if Hillary Clinton is, as is likely, the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, nothing Preibus and the Republicans do is likely to narrow the gender gap.
So should the GOP give up? No. But its expectations must be tempered by a knowledge that the Democratic advantage with the mainstream media and in the world of popular culture are going to make it very hard to erase their deficit until they find national candidates who can appeal to more women.
The RNC's proposed response to the problem makes sense. It advocates seeking to "neutralize" Democratic arguments about "fairness" by pointing out that the best way to deal with inequality is to reform liberal big government programs that encourage the dependency that hurts poor families and women. It also correctly advises that the only way for a pro-life party to deal with abortion is to acknowledge the disagreement and then move on to other issues and to rely on the fact that many women have concerns about abortion and that even most supporters of it don't view it as a litmus test issue. Yet if a GOP consultant quoted by Politico is right to say that many women view Republicans as the "old, white, right, out of touch" party, then it is necessary for the GOP to put forward younger, diverse candidates who can appeal to more voters.
That's easier said than done, but it's also just as obvious that what Republicans need to do is to recruit more female candidates. That's something the party has done better in recent years and it can cite successes such as New Mexico's Governor Susana Martinez, New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers from Washington to prove it. But, as with the need to get more visible Hispanics on the GOP line, the need for more female GOP leaders must become a priority rather than an afterthought.
For all of the negative poll numbers about women voters, Republicans need not be afraid of waging a war of ideas against a Democratic Party that has staked its future on returning to the failed liberal patent nostrums of the 1960s. But, as Preibus rightly pointed out, it is not enough to have good ideas. You've got to take them to the voters and articulate them in a way that can be understood and supported. Politics is, above all, a test of personalities, and until the voters start associating the GOP more with the likes of Martinez, Ayotte, and Rogers than with Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, they're not likely to change their minds.
Which is why the impending lesson of 2016 ought to be concentrating the minds of Republicans on promoting conservative women to leadership positions in the years to come. Hillary Clinton's presence at the top of the Democratic ticket is such a powerful symbol that it is bound to offset most of the GOP's efforts to make headway with women. Yet that makes it all the more important for a party that already has a gender gap to ensure that Republican women aren't tokens or outliers but equal partners in promoting conservative ideas.
In Picking Crist, Dems Look Beyond Florida
If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything–or you just might become governor of Florida. Last night, Charlie Crist won the Democratic nomination for Florida's upcoming gubernatorial election, in which he'll face incumbent Rick Scott. In doing so, he completed something of a trifecta: he was the Republican nominee for governor the first time he ran, then was the independent candidate on the ballot in his run for Senate after the rise of Marco Rubio, and now he's the Democratic candidate for governor. Whoever you are, whatever you believe, Charlie Crist has at one point or another pretended to agree with you.
If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything–or you just might become governor of Florida. Last night, Charlie Crist won the Democratic nomination for Florida's upcoming gubernatorial election, in which he'll face incumbent Rick Scott. In doing so, he completed something of a trifecta: he was the Republican nominee for governor the first time he ran, then was the independent candidate on the ballot in his run for Senate after the rise of Marco Rubio, and now he's the Democratic candidate for governor. Whoever you are, whatever you believe, Charlie Crist has at one point or another pretended to agree with you.
It's easy to dismiss the smarmy, oleaginous Crist as a transparent phony and a walking caricature of everything Americans profess to hate about politics. But there is a certain degree of sincerity in his insincerity: it can be argued he has finally found his place in the natural order of politics. Indeed, just glance at his career arc: Republicans saw him as an unprincipled fraud and booted him from their ranks. Democrats saw him as an unprincipled fraud and nominated him to represent their party.
Nothing about that is out of the ordinary. The Democrats have today taken on the ideology of power. Barack Obama ran two vapid campaigns driven by a personality cult and enforced groupthink. He has chosen, and his people have accepted (thus far at least), Hillary Clinton as his successor, who virtually guarantees the same type of campaign all over again. Ideas are dangerous things, and liberals tend to keep their distance from them. Hence their decision to have Crist represent them in a key state.
But what people often forget about cynical, self-serving politicians is this: they tend to stick around. If you act as a conduit for taxpayer cash and a megaphone for all and sundry personal grievances, you can get a lot of people to vote for you. How many? Well, that's a question Crist seeks to answer not only for himself but for Democrats nationally. As Florida-based political consultant Rick Wilson writes:
You may share the kind of visceral dislike of Crist with most Republicans, but you need to know that the risk of Charlie Crist reaches far beyond Florida, and offers an insight into an emerging behavior of national Democrats. While we chase perfection, they chase election. They demonstrably don't care about character, and Crist is a perfect example of the moral vacancy of Democratic voters.
You're thinking, "Meh. Florida's crazy. So what if he wins? The GOP owns the Legislature." Don't count on it. Florida's GOP majorities in the House and Senate have some admirable scrappers, and some will fight Crist until the last dog dies. But there's already a Quisling Caucus in the State Senate quietly whispering that Charlie might not be so bad.
Next, Charlie is very much a road-test for limits of reinvention of future Democratic candidates, including the Damsel of Chappaqua. He transformed himself from far-right Reagan Republican to left-of-Obama liberal in a year and a half without missing a beat. There is no lie the man won't tell, no promise he won't make, and no deal he won't cut to return to power. Hillary is watching, as are other Democrats, as Crist attempts to define history down.
Wilson posits that Crist will hope not only to be a model for America's soulless liberalism but will also seek to boost his new party's fundraising, rejuvenate its political machine, and go to bat for the expansion of federal programs in the two years between Election Day 2014 and Election Day 2016. All that is normal state politics, but it does have national implications.
A good example of why that is comes from the Washington Post's Aaron Blake. In a piece about the implosion of the campaign of Ed FitzGerald, the Democrats' gubernatorial nominee in Ohio, Blake notes that what FitzGerald's freefall exposed was the Democrats' lack of a good farm system. Blake explains that in Ohio, Republicans improved their electoral map in the House as well as the state legislature. That means, simply, more Republicans and fewer Democrats to choose from.
But Blake goes on to say that Republicans have pressed this advantage in states beyond Ohio. And Florida is one of them. He notes that in Florida, not only do the Republicans have a numbers advantage due to redistricting but they hold far more competitive districts, which helps develop candidates. Here's Blake:
So while 11 Florida districts lean Republican by seven or fewer points, just one Democratic-leaning district is even remotely competitive.
Want to guess which kind of district is more likely to produce a credible candidate for statewide office? Hint: It's not the district where the incumbent only has to impress his or her heavily liberal constituents.
It is not altogether too surprising, then, that Democrats had to go looking for a hired gun like Crist. But the real aim of the national Democrats backing Crist is to staunch the statewide bleeding and then start rebuilding the roster of future candidates.
And they're relying on Crist to get the state Democrats up off the mat so the national party can try to secure its tenuous hold on Florida in presidential elections as well. All this is a pretty far cry from where Crist was just four years ago, as a Republican about to turn independent. You can argue Crist and the Democrats are taking a cynical route to power all you want; you can't say they don't understand the stakes.
Has Rand Paul's Moment Passed?
This should be the moment when Senator Rand Paul's rise to the top of the list of 2016 Republican presidential hopefuls should be halted. With foreign terror threats like ISIS that have grown precisely because of an American attempt to disengage from the Middle East, Paul's neo-isolationist approach has been exposed as hopelessly shortsighted. But the Kentucky senator's featured appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday revealed him to be, if anything, more confident than ever about his 2016 chances. Is he right?
This should be the moment when Senator Rand Paul's rise to the top of the list of 2016 Republican presidential hopefuls should be halted. With foreign terror threats like ISIS that have grown precisely because of an American attempt to disengage from the Middle East, Paul's neo-isolationist approach has been exposed as hopelessly shortsighted. But the Kentucky senator's featured appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday revealed him to be, if anything, more confident than ever about his 2016 chances. Is he right?
Paul scored a public relations coup by getting NBC to send a camera crew and reporter to Guatemala to observe him performing free eye surgeries. This kind of publicity is priceless as was the opportunity to draw attention to the senator's grandstanding on the border crisis while in Central America. He also got the chance to lambaste the government's sending of heavy weaponry to local police departments that was highlighted by events in Ferguson, Missouri. But the headline of the segment was his boast that the American public now agrees more with him about foreign policy than mainstream Republicans or even Democrats like Hillary Clinton who rightly say that what's happening in Iraq is the result of the Obama administration's failure to act in Syria before groups like ISIS had the chance to get going:
I think the American public is coming more and more to where I am, and that those– people, like Hillary Clinton, who, she fought her own war, Hillary's War, you know, people are gonna find that, and I think that's what scares the Democrats the most, is that in a general election, were I to run, there's gonna be a lot of independents and even some Democrats who say, "You know what, we are tired of war. We're worried that Hillary Clinton will get us involved in another Middle Eastern war, because she's so gung-ho."
If you wanna see a transformational election in our country, let the Democrats put forward a war hawk like Hillary Clinton, and you'll see a transformation like you've never seen.
In other words, Paul believes that Americans are so war weary from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that they are incapable of drawing conclusions from recent events. He's not alone in thinking that. As Chris Cillizza noted in the Washington Post, a raft of polls taken earlier in the year all support the notion that Americans want a less aggressive foreign policy and are opposed to any further involvement in Middle East conflicts, like the potential wars that a "hawk" like Clinton might get the U.S. into.
Cillizza notes that these attitudes are far less popular among Democrats than Republicans, who, on the whole, remain faithful to their party's traditional posture that deplores a more "narrow role in world affairs." But, as Cillizza says, just because the GOP has been the standard bearer for a strong America in the recent past and Democrats the party of retreat, doesn't mean that will always be the case.
But, as we have noted here before, Paul's problem is that the Obama administration's disastrous mistakes abroad have made it far less safe to assume that fears about terrorism and the decline of U.S. influence will no longer dictate attitudes about foreign affairs. While Clinton will, at least in theory, stand to benefit from being seen as someone who can implement a rational course correction from Obama's path (so long as, that is, voters forget that she was his secretary of state for four years), Paul is actually offering an even more extreme version of Obama's foreign-policy vision that has left the world a chaotic mess.
The crises in the Middle East in which Obama's follies have played a not insignificant role in exacerbating conflicts in Gaza and Iraq and with the Russian assault on Ukraine proceeding may be just the start. Barring an unlikely complete transformation of the Obama administration over the course of the next two years, the odds are that America's foreign-policy woes will grow rather than recede. That will make it harder to sell Republican primary voters, let alone the rest of the country, on Paul's brand of isolationism. The unique moment in history in which an opening for a Republican who was actually to the left of Obama on foreign affairs may have already come to an end.
Nor, as I wrote here last week when discussing Paul's efforts to present himself as a friend of Israel despite opposing aid to the embattled Jewish state, do polls give Republicans much reason to believe that there will be, as the senator says, a surge of young Democratic voters coming over to their side if Paul is the GOP candidate.
But mainstream Republicans who have observed the way the murder of James Foley and the general feeling of crisis have affected the public mood should not be too confident about Paul's inability to win the nomination in 2016. As his clever stage management of the trip to Guatemala as well as past coups such as his drone filibuster in 2013 proved, the Kentucky senator is a formidable politician. His willingness to reach out to groups that have little reason to back him such as blacks, Hispanics, and supporters of Israel does more than show his ambition to expand the base of extremist libertarians. It illustrates a political vision that seeks to establish him as a genuine front-runner and plausible option for president.
It is far too early to project how this will play out in 2016. But the point here is that Paul's ability to generate positive press from even the liberal mainstream media just at the moment when his views about the world are being discredited by events ought to scare his potential opponents. The follies of the Obama presidency may make it safe for conservatives to espouse their traditional support for a strong foreign policy in 2016 in a way that was harder to do in 2012. Yet anyone in the GOP who underestimates Rand Paul's sheer political talent will be making a big mistake.
Is Hillary Rooting for a GOP Senate?
For Democrats looking for some early consolation heading into a midterm election in which their party seems fated to suffer the loss of the Senate, the New York Times provides some comfort. A piece by John Harwood in today's paper claims that while a Republican Senate would blight the last two years of the Obama presidency, it might well guarantee the election of Hillary Clinton in 2016. But while there is a superficial logic to his thesis the notion that the former secretary of state should be rooting for Mitch McConnell to become majority leader next January is a bit of a stretch.
For Democrats looking for some early consolation heading into a midterm election in which their party seems fated to suffer the loss of the Senate, the New York Times provides some comfort. A piece by John Harwood in today's paper claims that while a Republican Senate would blight the last two years of the Obama presidency, it might well guarantee the election of Hillary Clinton in 2016. But while there is a superficial logic to his thesis the notion that the former secretary of state should be rooting for Mitch McConnell to become majority leader next January is a bit of a stretch.
The argument that a Republican Senate would help Clinton's presidential hopes is simple. If the GOP controls both the House and the Senate heading into the 2016 election, that will make it even easier for Democrats to run against what they will undoubtedly label a "do-nothing" or "obstructionist" Congress. The confrontations between the Republicans and the White House would escalate in 2015 with the president seeking to govern on his own via executive orders. At the same time, as Politico notes in an interesting preview of 2015, McConnell is planning a series of actions meant to stymie Obama's attempts to circumvent constitutional checks and balances that could lead to a veto battle and Republicans daring Obama to shut down the government in order to force them to fund his pet projects. These struggles will feed into the media's favorite meme about dysfunctional government in which both parties will, not without some justification, be damned as part of the problem rather than the solution.
But the notion Harwood advances that this will allow Clinton to present herself as an outside-the-Beltway figure who is not tied to this fracas is hard to swallow.
The longer an unpopular president and his more-unpopular partisan adversaries battle to a standstill, the easier it is to offer herself as a fresh start.
"It would be bad for the country," said Stanley B. Greenberg, President Bill Clinton's former pollster, but "total gridlock would allow Hillary to be the change."
Mrs. Clinton has had as many political personality changes as she's had hairdos in her decades in the public eye, but the idea that this grizzled veteran of Washington could present herself as "the change" that voters want is laughable.
Clinton's in a strong position to win the presidency no matter what happens in November 2014. As the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination, unless a credible left-wing alternative emerges to force her to abandon her criticisms of Obama's foreign-policy failures, she has already begun the pivot to the center that most candidates can't attempt until after they've won their party's nod. More than that, as the potential first woman to be elected to the presidency, she has a compelling narrative as well as the loyalty of most party activists even if they are to her left on many issues. And with so many Republicans defending Senate seats in 2016 as the class of 2010 seeks reelection, Democrats will, with the help of their traditionally large presidential-year turnouts, have a chance to take the Senate back.
But after hanging around the capital in one guise or another and engaging in some of the nastiest gutter fights there for more than 20 years, Clinton can't pretend to be a breath of fresh air in hyper-partisan Washington. Nor, after serving as secretary of state for four years, can she completely evade the tag of running for a third term for the Obama administration.
Just as important, if, as is likely, the next two years are marked by more bitter partisan warfare, the likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 won't be able to stand aloof from Obama's struggles with Congress. While the GOP House and Senate will undoubtedly make for attractive targets for Clinton's scorn, that will tie her even more closely to Obama's autocratic governing style rather than allowing her to distance herself from his troubled presidency. Republicans will be able to point out that Clinton's own positions on the environment and immigration will make her just as likely to try to override the will of Congress as Obama has been.
As Harwood points out, President Obama will likely see a Clinton victory as the best chance to solidify his legacy. So will the voters. Moreover, Clinton's opponent in 2016 won't be McConnell or House Speaker John Boehner, much though she would love to run against either of them. In contrast to Clinton, the Republican nominee may turn out to be someone who actually is from outside the Beltway or one of those members of the Senate who are seeking to stop the business-as-usual approach to politics that Clinton embodies.
It may be that Clinton's strengths will enable her to overcome the handicap of being tied to an unpopular and unsuccessful incumbent. But a Republican Senate won't make that any easier. The loss of the Senate will be a body blow to liberal plans to expand government even more than Obama has already done. Doing so may not stop Clinton from winning in 2016, but it won't make it any easier for her either.