As Rand Paul Pledges to 'Defeat Washington Machine,' Critics Say He is No Better Than the Rest

Published on Tuesday, April 07, 2015

by Common Dreams  

As Rand Paul Pledges to 'Defeat Washington Machine,' Critics Say He is No Better Than the Rest

Despite the populist rhetoric, critics say that under the Senator's own policy proposals economic inequality would only worsen

 by Lauren McCauley, staff writer

US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) formally announces his candidacy for president during an event in Louisville, Kentucky, April 7, 2015. (Photo: Reuters/John Sommers II)

With bravado and big ideas, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul on Tuesday announced that he is running for the Republican candidacy in the upcoming 2016 presidential elections.

"I have a message, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We have come to take our country back," Paul declared before a crowd in a Louisville hotel ball room. "We have come to take our country back from the special interests that use Washington as their personal piggy bank, the special interests that are more concerned with their personal welfare than the general welfare."

In a speech that lambasted Washington bureaucracy, foreign intervention, government surveillance, radical Islam, corporate taxes, public education, liberals and conservatives alike, the Tea Party favorite announced his candidacy as a political outsider who has come to bring salvation to the United States, "with the help of liberty lovers everywhere."

During his speech on Tuesday, Paul channeled a more populist tone by touching upon themes such as economic inequality.

"Under the watch of both parties, the poor seem to get poorer and the rich get richer," he said. "Politically connected crones get taxpayer dollars by the hundreds of millions and poor families across America continue to suffer. I have a different vision, an ambitious vision, an ambitious vision, a vision that will offer opportunity to all Americans, especially those who have been left behind."
However, observers note that his policy proposals would only worsen the situation for America's poor.

As Matt Bruenig wrote for the Demos think tank Policy Shop blog, Paul supports a tax platform that effectively redistributes wealth from the poor to the rich. Further, Bruenig notes, the Kentucky Senator subscribes to a "college-student-inflected libertarianism where he thinks things like taxes and social insurance are the forceful aggression of the government."

Vox reporter Dylan Matthews outlines what exactly Paul would attempt to do as President of the United States, based on detailed, federal budgets put forth by the Senator annually. Proposals include eliminating or drastically cutting two of the biggest programs for the working poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, as well as eliminating Section 8 housing vouchers.
Senator Paul's father, Rand Paul, former U.S. Representative for Texas, ran two presidential campaigns on a similar platform—though he has been widely dismissed as "bonkers" or "woman-hating crazy."

Paul now joins Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in the bid for Republican candidacy and will likely be joined in the months ahead by other hopefuls including former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Florida Senator Marco Rubio is expected to launch his campaign next week.

A recent CNN poll has Paul placing third for the party nomination at 12%, behind Bush at 16% and Walker at 13%.

According to his campaign website, Paul will immediately hit the campaign trail with scheduled stops in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada.
Despite the obvious attempt to distance himself from the pack with a pledge to "defeat the Washington machine," critics say that according to the Senator's own record, he is no better than the rest.

As the Nation's John Nichol's wrote Tuesday, "Unfortunately, the supposedly 'different' Rand Paul talks a better line than he delivers." Nichols points to the recent example of Paul's thwarting of the District of Columbia Budget Autonomy Act, a power-to-the-people measure designed to give DC voters and their elected officials more authority over the spending of their tax dollars.

"When it counts, Paul reveals himself as an rather too predictable contemporary Republican," Nichols continued. "He is not interested in winning the battle of ideas. He is simply interested in winning—and if that means using the power of big government to thwart the legitimate and honorable democratic aspirations of citizens, so be it."

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Unsafe at Any Speed: What Makes Cruz Run?

Ted Cruz Is Unelectable, So Why Is He Running For President?

By: Becky Sarwate

Monday, March, 23rd, 2015, 9:02 pm

Well gang, it’s officially here. It’s Presidential primary season! The festivities got off to a real bang early Monday morning with the first hat thrown conclusively into the ring. That Stetson belongs to Texas’ junior Senator and government shutdown advocatorTed Cruz. Ending months of very little suspense, Cruz tweeted “I’m running for President and I hope to earn your support!” to his 370,000 followers.

In a piece entitled Ted Cruz Hopes Early Campaign Entry Will Focus Voters’ Attention, writers Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times quote longtime Republican strategist Dave Carney as saying, “It’s the shiny object principle. He wants to be first, get in the conversation, not show any doubt or hesitation.” If there are two things at which Cruz excels, it is the use of shiny objects to distract constituents from real issues and a refusal to second guess himself. Thus the announcement bore a fitting similarity to the man making it.

After capturing the zeitgeist and the ire of lawmakers from both parties during October 2013’s partial government shutdown, GOP rainmakers no less authoritative than longtime Arizona Senator John McCain labeled Cruz’s pointless stoking of the House, “a fool’s errand.” New York Republican Congressman Peter King minced a few less words in observing, “My sound bite is to say he’s a fraud…I start with that, and then I go on. It takes me two or three minutes to explain it.”

With just three years on the Senate floor, Cruz has certainly cut some kind of figure. Love him or hate him, he’s made sure we all know his name. However when it comes to gearing up for general elections, it’s easy to dissipate into a footnote. As theTimes piece notes, “in recent months, Mr. Cruz has been overshadowed by other potential Republican candidates in the early competition for donors, staff, volunteers and news coverage. Most notably, Mr. Walker has drawn attention from those interested in an alternative to former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida.”

There are only so many right wing base unifying government shutdowns a man can leverage. Unfortunately for Cruz he’s now going to have to deal with highly skeptical Republican moderates who rightfully question whether the Senator’s loyalties lie with the nation – or with number one.

Though numerous GOP strategists have concluded that a prolonged primary season is bad business for the party (as it was in 2012 when Romney’s conservative pandering pivot fell completely flat), this part of the show is actually kind of fun for the rest of us. As our own Jason Easley wrote this week, disingenuous circus clown Donald Trump beat low-class liberals to the fray by immediately launching a fake birther conversationabout Cruz’s legal right to run. Whee!

And if there’s anything more delightful than watching a senior statesman with a long record of accomplishment flat out dismiss the idea of a one-trick narcissist in the Oval Office, I’ve yet to discover it. On this past Sunday’s edition of NBC’s Meet the Presswhile addressing the topic of climate change, California Governor Jerry Brown told host Chuck Todd, “That man betokens such a level of ignorance and a direct falsification of the existing scientific data. It’s shocking and I think that man has rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office.”

Here’s the thing though. I struggle to believe that Cruz is delusional enough to think he can win the nomination. Smarmy and dangerous? Yes. Stupid? Not at all. He pulled in just 4 percent of Republican primary voters in the latest CNN/ORC poll. And as I’ve argued already, the support of the GOP establishment is far from guaranteed. So why put himself and his family through the grueling, often humiliating process that is party vetting?

I offer that Cruz and Trump are actually fairly similar. Ignore either man too long and like a pouty puppy, he’s going to do something to get attention. The conversation has shifted away from Cruz for far too long. He can stand the ignominy of primary season. He can handle being called “a wacko bird” by McCain. But what he can’t suffer is our silence. That gnawing, aching need for limelight, even more so than Cruz’s disingenuous flouting of science in exchange for base adoration, is what makes him unfit to lead. See: Sarah Palin 2008.

The real source of Hillary’s transparency problem

YAHOO News

The real source of Hillary’s transparency problem

Early in their political lives, the Clintons needed to maintain a level of artifice. Times change

By Matt Bai

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Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during a news conference at the United Nations in New York …

All in all, Hillary Clinton offered a plausible response this week to the allegations of missing emails. She thought it easier to carry just one device rather than two. She assumed her emails with staff were being archived. And then a bunch of other stuff about servers and bureaucratic process that I frankly missed because it bored me into a near coma, causing me to have a strange dream in which Senate Republicans sent a letter to Iran claiming to be a Nigerian prince and asking the ayatollahs to send them $400 billion for the federal deficit.

If Clinton thinks, however, that her explanation is going to end speculation about whatever sinister secrets she is said to be keeping, she’s mistaken. And that’s not because she’s an especially nefarious person, or because she’s a woman, or because the media is bent ondestroying her.

No, to understand why truth and transparency are Clinton’s main vulnerability in 2016, you need to understand the moment in which the Clintons entered American politics, and how they came to dominate it.

First, let me say that I have a hard time getting too worked up about Clinton’s vanishing emails, although maybe I should. It’s possible, I guess, that in the many thousands of unreleased emails is evidence of her having endangered national security by talking policy on unsecured servers. It’s possible that some emails refer to meetings that Clinton or her aides would rather not make public.

And yet what Clinton said about her daughter’s wedding and family vacations being off limits resonated with me; even our highest public officials should probably be able to fire off notes to friends, or even ruminate on substantive decisions, without having every word scrutinized by reporters and enemy campaigns. Emailing for most of us now is more like having an impromptu chat than writing a letter, and no executive expects to have every chat archived.

What’s really going on here, though, doesn’t have much to do with emails, public or private. Rather, it has to do with the Clintons themselves and the assumption that they’re always holding something back.

It’s not an unfounded perception, but neither is it entirely their fault. You have to remember that when Bill Clinton and his wife rose quickly through the ranks of Democratic politics, during the 1980s, the country was in the throes of both a cultural and political transformation.

At 32, Bill Clinton wasn’t only the youngest governor in the country when Arkansans elected him in 1978; he was also on the leading edge of a generational transition, as the ’60s generation emerged from social movements to begin their ascent in electoral politics. The boomers, of course, were self-analytical, idealistic, permissive — different in every way from the World War II generation that still held sway politically.

At that time, too, American politics was just beginning to undergo a tectonic realignment. The South in which Clinton had grown up — a South dominated by Democrats, both segregationist and reformist — was fast becoming the base of a new, socially conservative Republican Party. A lot of older Democrats would hold on to their seats in the former Confederacy for many years to come, but few young Democrats would rise from it.

There was no way to navigate these turbulent currents, to somehow bridge the divide between one generation and the next in American politics, without creating some artifice and living by it. In Arkansas in the late 1970s, Bill Clinton had to maintain a persona that was a little more Southern than he probably felt after years spent in Washington, England and New Haven. (His wife, having grown up in Illinois, had to work even harder at fitting in.)

Somewhat out of step with the both the culture and the politics of the older power structure in Arkansas, which didn’t go in for antiwar protesters and draft dodgers, the Clintons had to seem less liberal than they really were. Clinton’s centrist, “new Democrat” argument was substantive and based in genuine conviction, but it also happened to be the only tenable political strategy available for a Southern Democrat in the 1980s.

Later, after Clinton became the first boomer politician to win the nomination and then the White House (and after Hillary became the first Ivy League-educated lawyer to serve as first lady), he and his wife worked to present themselves as a more traditional couple, with more traditional gender roles, than they or most of their contemporaries really were. Having arrived just as the media decided to treat politicians as celebrities, the Clintons had to stage their marriage in a way that no previous president and first lady, most of whom had less than perfect unions themselves, had ever been forced to do.

All politicians present an idealized version of themselves and their families, of course. All modern candidates are in some part performance artists. But with the Clintons, the artifice isn’t incidental; it was born of necessity, and it’s integral to their political identities.

We think they’re always hiding something essential about themselves, because they always have. The truth is that an America cleaved by generational and ideological change would never have accepted them any other way.

This is why Hillary Clinton will never be easily afforded the same zone of privacy that the media has generally extended to Barack Obama. No one assumes Obama is keeping secrets. With Hillary, there’s always some suspicion that what’s private is being kept private because it contradicts the public script.

What struck me, watching Clinton parry questions Tuesday, is how little she seems to appreciate this circumstance and her own role in creating it. Her words were sensible enough, but her manner was, as ever, contemptuous, her exasperation barely concealed. It wasn’t that she couldn’t answer the questions coming at her; it was that she didn’t think she should have to.

If I’m a Clinton adviser, that’s a problem for me. Because this isn’t 1992, when politics could be staged for the evening news. Transparency and authenticity are paramount in the social media culture, and the lack of them is fatal. Ask Mitt Romney.

This email fiasco should cause Clinton to think twice about the kind of campaign she wants to run, assuming she’s still hell-bent on running at all. To become president, she may need to dispense with the artifice, after all these years, and ask America to accept her for who she really is, rather than the part of herself she feels safe in revealing.

Old habits die hard. Presidential campaigns, not so much.

4 Reasons Elizabeth Warren Should Run for President

4 Reasons Elizabeth Warren Should Run for President

By Scott Conroy - November 6, 2014

For most Democrats, Tuesday's elections were an across-the-board disaster -- a collective nightmare they'd rather not dwell on for another moment. 

In the case of Elizabeth Warren, however, the 2014 midterms could end up being a call to arms.

The Massachusetts senator has repeatedly denied interest in running for president, and there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton would remain the overwhelming favorite to become the next Democratic nominee regardless of whether Warren gets in the race.

But the first-term senator wouldn’t be the first ambitious politician to change her mind about running for the nation’s highest office (see: Obama, Barack), and the results of Tuesday’s elections crystalized the underappreciated reasons why it makes sense for her to do just that.  

At some point over the next couple of months, Warren will have to decide whether to keep her word about 2016 or throw caution to the wind and take on the Clinton behemoth.
 
Here are four reasons why she should choose the latter route.


1. She Fits the National Mood


Voters aren’t just dissatisfied with Washington, D.C. They’re angry, and they’re anxious.

According to exit polls conducted Tuesday, about two-thirds of voters said the country is on the wrong tack -- an even higher percentage than said the same thing during the Republican wave of 2010.

Additionally, voters by a 2-to-1 margin said they expect life will get worse for the next generation of Americans, while about two-thirds said that the economy favors the wealthy.

This sentiment is smack dab in the middle of Elizabeth Warren’s political wheelhouse.
 
No Democrat speaks as passionately and as effectively about issues related to income inequality, lack of functional governance, and the declining American middle class as Warren does. And during a campaign season in which Democrats had little to get excited about, her fist-pumping, high-decibel, populist harangues got crowds fired up wherever she went.

In a modern era that requires any serious presidential candidate to have the unquantifiable “it” factor, Elizabeth Warren already does.

No one knows this better than Hillary Clinton.

During her own appearances on the 2014 campaign trail, Clinton attempted to co-opt some of Warren’s “defender of the little guy” identity, telling a crowd in Boston, “Don’t let anybody tell you it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.”

A clear overreach, the remark drew immediate ridicule in a variety of circles, as it was readily apparent that Clinton lacked fluency in Warren-ese.
Unlike the former secretary of state, Warren doesn’t have to work very hard to conjure up outrage over the privileges granted to Wall Street or the plight of the little guy.

These frustrations are the very reasons why the former consumer advocate entered politics in the first place, and they frame the issues that could propel her to the next level.


2. Clinton’s Current Standing in the Polls Won’t Last


As anyone who follows politics knows, at around this time eight years ago, Hillary Clinton was widely characterized as her party’s “inevitable” 2008 presidential nominee.

Her eventual loss to Barack Obama demonstrated once again the folly of considering anything in this business to be preordained. And yet, here we go again.

Proponents of assigning the “I-word” to Clinton’s 2016 candidacy insist that this time, it’s clear for all to see, she really is inevitable. There is no Obama waiting in the wings, they observe. And Clinton’s overall standing among key Democrats -- whether early state voters, key officials, or millionaire funders -- is without rival.

The woman is ahead by almost 50 points in Iowa, for God’s sake!

But here’s the problem with this argument: Clinton’s current poll position could change dramatically once Democrats are presented with a real choice in 2015-16.

Warren, after all, is still somewhat of an unknown commodity.
At this point in 2006, Obama was already a household name -- a political celebrity known for his soaring keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, as well as his compelling life story and vision for the nation that he chronicled in his best-selling books. 

Though Warren has already become a cult hero among many left-leaning activists, rank-and-file Democrats who aren’t political junkies just don’t know her all that well yet.

If she were to announce her candidacy for president tomorrow, Warren would still trail Clinton in the polls, of course, but the current gap she faces would almost certainly narrow amid the media attention she’d receive.

And in a one-on-one match-up, many Democrats might be surprised to find that they respond more viscerally to the bright new star on the scene than to the steadfast veteran whom they had expected to get behind.

And that’s a recipe for a real campaign.


3. Someone Has to Do It 


Despite her strengths, it’s difficult to conceive of a scenario in which Clinton becomes the first non-incumbent ever to run unopposed for her party’s nomination. Someone’s going to run against her.

6 reasons Elizabeth Warren should run for president

6 reasons Elizabeth Warren should run for president

Updated by Ezra Klein on October 24, 2014, 10:00 a.m. ET @ezraklein ezra@vox.com

 

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Is Elizabeth Warren running for president? Maybe!

In the past, when asked if she's running for president, Warren has been pretty clear: "I am not running for president," she said in June of 2014. "Do you want to put an exclamation point at the end of that?"

But in a recent interview with People, Warren was rather less emphatic. "I don't think so," she replied, before saying: "If there's any lesson I've learned in the last five years, it's don't be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open."

Warren's office, of course, insists "nothing has changed."

The truth is that at this point, Elizabeth Warren has no idea whether she'll run for president. The election is too far away, and too much could change, and she doesn't need to make a decision yet.


The more interesting question is the one she's probably asking herself: should Elizabeth Warren run for president? Luckily, the answer to that is easy, and obvious: of course she should. There are six reasons why.

1) She can

In 2012, 416 people registered as presidential candidates with the Federal Election Commission. But you probably haven't heard of most of them. Being taken seriously as a presidential candidate requires a rare mixture of money, supporters, staff, volunteers, poll numbers, luck, elite credibility and more. Warren has it.

There are already Draft Warren campaigns popping up around the country. There are already willing donors. There's intense media interest. She would instantly be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. She would be in every debate. She would have press at every campaign stop. She would have volunteers in every state. Not many people get that opportunity. Warren should take her shot.

2) She has something to gain

The best argument against Elizabeth Warren running for president is that she'll almost certainly lose — at least as long as Hillary Clinton is also running. I agree with that. It's just not a very good argument against Warren running for president.

There are a lot of reasons to run for president. One of them, of course, is that you just may win. But with the exception of the presidency itself,  there's no better platform for forcing your ideas to the top of the political agenda. This is true even if you lose.

One of the ways that front-runners squash challengers is by co-opting their best ideas. Mitt Romney scrapped a perfectly sensible tax plan and replaced it with something much more mathematically inventive after Herman Cain got traction with his 9-9-9 pitch. Barack Obama brought out a serious health-reform bill and promised to make it a top priority in his first term after John Edwards and Hillary Clinton forced it to the front of the Democratic agenda.

But once the idea is co-opted, it becomes a campaign promise — and presidential candidates hew much closer to their campaign promises than most people realize. There's a good argument that Obamacare only happened because Edwardscare was a threat during the Democratic primaries.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

3) She has something to say

Elizabeth Warren is an unusual politician: she ended up in politics because she had big ideas that people really liked. That's a departure from most politicians, who basically don't have any original ideas at all, and who end up in politics because they badly want to be politicians.

Warren made her name as a Harvard law professor who became something of a public intellectual. She was early in recognizing how squeezed middle-class families had become, and in arguing for a consumer financial protection bureau, and in making the case against the spiraling complexity of Wall Street.

She's continued pushing some big thoughts in the Senate. She's been out front arguing for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, for instance. She's made interesting points about the pro-business drift of the federal judiciary. She's pushed hard on the idea that banks shouldn't become so big that they're effectively immune from criminal prosecution.

She's in politics, in other words, because she cares about policy, and because she's got some big ideas for improving it. A presidential campaign is her best shot at making those ideas the Democratic Party's platform rather than just Elizabeth Warren's press releases.

4) What else is she going to be doing between 2015 and 2016?

If Warren were, say, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, and if Democrats controlled the House and the Senate and the presidency, then there would be a good argument that Warren could do more as a legislator than as a candidate. But Warren is, in real life, the second-most junior senator on the Banking Committee. And she's likely to be serving in a Senate controlled by Republicans, at a time when the White House is controlled by a Democrat, and absolutely nothing is getting done.

So it's not just that running for president could do an enormous amount to push Warren's issues forward. It's that hanging around the Senate isn't going to do anything for Warren's issues at all. It's hard to imagine two better years to spend away from the Senate than 2015 and 2016.

5) She might not get another chance

This is an argument Ryan Lizza made in December of 2005, in a piece arguing that Obama should do the then-unthinkable and run for president, so I'll just quote him:

The kind of political star power Obama has doesn't last. My favorite law of American politics is that candidates have only 14 years to become president [or vice president]. That is their expiration date … the majority of presidents since 1900 have fallen on the low end of this zero-to-fourteen-year spectrum: zero (Dwight Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover, William Howard Taft), two years (Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt), four years (Franklin Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge), and six years (George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Warren Harding). The lesson is that Obama must strike while he is hot or risk fading into obscurity.

You can pretty much swap Warren's name in for Obama's throughout that whole section. If Warren doesn't run in 2016 and Hillary Clinton does run and wins, then it will be at least eight years until Warren can run again. By then, she will likely have lost all or most of her star power. Wall Street reform will probably have faded as an issue. And she'll be 75 years old. Warren will have missed her moment.

6) And if she loses? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Warren isn't up for reelection in 2016, so there's no particular conflict between keeping her seat and running for president. And if she loses, there's no particular reason to think she won't join the illustrious ranks of senators who ran for president, fell a bit short, and then became even more important senators. That list includes Democrats like Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, as well as Republicans like John McCain, Bob Dole, and Richard Lugar. Senators don't get penalized for running for president and losing.

Which is all to say that the question isn't, "Why should Elizabeth Warren run for president?" It's, "Why shouldn't she?"

7 Things About the Inevitability of Hillary Clinton You Probably Haven't Thought About

  News & Politics  

AlterNet / By Guy Saperstein

7 Things About the Inevitability of Hillary Clinton You Probably Haven't Thought About

As in 2007, war hawk Clinton is less of a shoo-in, but Warren shines.

November 7, 2014  |  

In December 2007, just as the 2008 presidential primaries were beginning to heat up, and with Hillary Clinton 26 points ahead in national polling of Democrats, I wrote an article for AlterNet arguing that she was beatable, that she had vulnerabilities the other candidates did not have, that she had historically high “unfavorables,” that she polled poorly against Republicans and that Democrats should rethink the “inevitability” of her candidacy. Apparently, they did and we know how that turned out.

Once again, Clinton is riding high in polling of Democrats; once again, her supporters are claiming she is “inevitable;” and once again, she has vulnerabilities other candidates lack, including extremely high “unfavorables,” as well as additional liabilities in 2016 she didn’t have in 2008 — some of her own making, some not.

1. Worrisome Polling

Hillary Clinton has maintained consistently high “unfavorable” ratings since at least 2007 (ranging from 40 to 52 percent). In December 2007, they were running 45 percent and are still hovering in the 45 percent range today. In 2007, I wrote that her unfavorable” ratings “currently are running 45 percent — far higher than any other Democratic or Republican presidential hopeful and higher than any presidential candidate at this stage in polling history. Hillary may be the most well-known, recognizable candidate, but that is proving to be as much of a burden as a benefit.” That still seems to be true.

Before Chris Christie melted down in the Bridge-Gate scandal, Quinnipiac, a well-respected poll, had him running ahead of Hillary Clinton 43-42 percent. That doesn’t, in my opinion, mean Christie is a strong candidate — people hardly know who he is — but it suggests Clinton is a weak, or at least vulnerable, candidate. She is someone who has been on the national scene prominently for 20-plus years, people know her, yet a relatively unknown Republican runs even with her? Not a sign of strength.

In an April 24, 2014 Quinnipiac poll in Colorado, a state with two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor, Rand Paul is out-polling Clinton 45-40 percent and she is running 42-42 percent against the scandal-ridden Christie. Colorado is a blue state Democrats need to win in 2016 and having a well-known Democrat running behind a virtual unknown Republican is not good news.
And, in a recent [October] Presidential match-up poll by the Des Moines Register, Hillary trails Mitt Romney in Iowa by one point [44-43] and runs only one point ahead of Paul Ryan and three points ahead of Rand Paul.

This should be a serious concern for Democrats because in Presidential years, Iowa has become a fairly reliable Democratic state.  In fact, Romney lost Iowa by 6 points to Obama in 2012 and Obama won Iowa by 10 points in 2008.  To be trailing in Iowa by even a point to a Republican candidate who lost the state by six points just two years ago and, to date, has shown no interest in even running for President, is one more ominous indication that Hillary is not as strong a candidate as her supporters want you to think.  But this is not the only reason to think that Hillary's relationship to voters is not robust.  In the just-concluded 2014 mid-term election, of the Senate candidates Hillary personally appeared and spoke on behalf of, 8 won and 14 lost [one race remains undecided].  By contrast, Elizabeth Warren personally stumped for 11 Democratic Senate candidates: 6 won and 5 lost. Elizabeth Warren pulled voters; Hillary did not.

2. New Liabilities

By every metric, voters are in a surly mood and they are not going to be happy campers in 2016, either. Why should they be? The economy is still in the toilet, not enough jobs are being created even to keep up with population growth, personal debt and student debt are rising, college graduates can’t find jobs, retirement benefits are shrinking, infrastructure is deteriorating, banksters never were held accountable for melting down the economy, inequality is exploding — and neither party is addressing the depth of the problems America faces.

As a result, voters in 2016 will be seeking change and there is no way Clinton can run as a “change” candidate — indeed, having been in power in Washington for 20-plus years as First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State, she is the poster child for the Washington political establishment, an establishment that will not be popular in 2016. This problem is not really her fault, but it creates serious headwinds for her candidacy and makes her susceptible to any Republican candidate who does not appear to be crazy, who can say a few reasonable things and who looks fresh, new and different. The status quo is not going to be popular in 2016 and if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic presidential candidate, even though she will try to harken back to the relative prosperity of the 1990s, she will not be able to escape being the candidate representing old ideas and an unpopular status quo.

3. Democratic Party Base

On nearly every important issue, except women’s issues, Clinton stands to the right of her Democratic base. Overwhelmingly, Democrats believe that Wall Street played a substantial role in gaming the system for their benefit while melting down the economy, but Clinton continues to give speeches to Goldman Sachs at $200,000 a pop, assuring them that, “We all got into this mess together and we’re all going to have to work together to get out of it.” In her world — a world full of friends and donors from Wall Street — the financial industry does not bear any special culpability in the financial meltdown of 2007-'08. The mood of the Democratic base is populist and angry, but Clinton is preaching lack of accountability.

According to an April 29, 2014 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll done by Hart Research, only four percent of American voters have a great deal of confidence in the financial industry, while 43 percent have “very little or none at all.” With Wall Street at a historic low in popularity and respect, with her close ties to Goldman Sachs, Bob Rubin and the financial industry, Clinton will be perceived as Wall Street’s candidate.

Clinton has not explained why she supported the repeal of Glass-Steagall legislation, which deregulated banks during the Clinton administration and contributed significantly to Wall Street speculation, the meltdown of big banks and the trillion-dollar federal bailout. She has not explained her support for NAFTA, which has eroded the manufacturing base of America and cost American workers a million-plus well-paid jobs; nor her support as Secretary of State for the Trans Pacific Partnership, which has been described as “NAFTA on steroids.” On all these core financial issues, Clinton is well to the right of the Democratic base, so how is she going to fire up the base the way Obama’s promises of “Hope and Change” fired it up in 2008?

Clinton is no more in-tune with her Democratic base on foreign policy issues than on domestic issues. She is not simply a hawk at a time when the Democratic base (and the country) is sick of expensive and counter-productive foreign adventures, she is a superhawk, consistently trying to outflank Republicans on foreign policy issues. We all know she voted in favor of invading Iraq in 2003, despite the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and despite the fact that evidence of WMDs was sketchy at best. She has never recanted that vote, shown any remorse about not examining classified reports about Iraq, reports that were made available to her before the vote nor expressed any qualms about the fact that the U.S. blew $3 trillion down a rat-hole in Iraq and Afghanistan with nothing to show for it. Then, five years later, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan collapsing, she strongly urged new President Obama to escalate the commitment of troops in Afghanistan, advice that proved disastrous. It is no surprise that General David Petraeus has endorsed Clinton for President. He knows a military hawk when he sees one.

More recently, she supported invading Libya and bombing Syria. And, at a time when Obama was trying to moderate Putin’s behavior in the Ukraine and get our European allies to support economic sanctions against Russia, Clinton threw gasoline on the fire by comparing Putin to Hitler, a comparison which is ridiculous on many counts, but which played very badly with our allies.
Ironically, Rand Paul represents the concerns of the Democratic base far better than Clinton about foreign interventions and the excesses of the National Security State and if he were the Republican presidential candidate, would undermine her support among Democrats in an unprecedented way.

4. Assets

Clinton’s biggest asset, in my opinion, is that she is a woman, and America is long past the time when a woman should be elected President. But Democrats already win the women’s vote and lose the vote of men, so what is the net advantage? She also has the highest name-recognition of any candidate, which is why she is polling so highly in Democratic polls, but name-recognition evaporates in any high-profile campaign and is an ephemeral asset.
Indeed, that is the essence of her problem: She has a small and active hardcore base of feminist supporters and donors; a large core of conservatives who hate the Clintons; and among others, her support is a mile wide and two inches deep — which is why a relative unknown ran her down and beat her in 2008.

5. Bill’s Legacy

Hillary Clinton's campaign will harken back to the glory years of the Clinton administration, but how much is that going to help? Certainly, Bill Clinton deserves credit for some things. He increased taxes on the rich, wages grew in his second term and jobs were created in his eight years as President (helped in no small part by the tech revolution and the financial bubble he helped create and which ended in disaster 10 years later). Bill also expanded the earned income tax credit, which helped working people. But there are a lot of things his administration did which don’t look very good in hindsight.

With help from Newt Gingrich, he enacted a Draconian welfare reform program; he overrode the opposition of labor to enact NAFTA, again with mostly Republican support; and, he repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which deregulated Wall Street. As he described himself to Bob Woodward, “I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?” Conservative Alan Greenspan, whom Bill twice appointed to chair the Federal Reserve Board, said, “Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we’ve had in awhile.”

So here we are, 20 years later, with wages of average workers in decline, CEO pay and Wall Street bonuses accelerating at obscene rates, pensions disappearing, the loss of millions of jobs to developing countries thanks to NAFTA and exploding wealth inequality. Yes, we can blame Bush/Cheney for their contributions to these trends, but the major policy changes that started the ball rolling steeply downhill for workers and the middle class began in the Clinton administration.

6. Accomplishments

There is no question Hillary Clinton is smart, hard-working and competent. She does her homework, shows up for work every day and works long hours. Yet she has been on the world stage for more than 20 years, so it is fair to ask what are her accomplishments over those 20 years. She led a healthcare task force in Bill Clinton’s first term, but that effort failed, largely because she was not collaborative and failed to involve Congress, despite the fact Democrats controlled it. She repeatedly claims credit for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, passed during Bill Clinton’s second term, and while her role has been disputed even by the bill’s sponsors, she played an important role in supporting it within the White House and later publicly.

In 2008, however, she tried to bootstrap many accomplishments of her husband by exaggerating her role as First Lady and got roundly mocked for her exaggerations. She had a term as U.S. Senator, and was re-elected, but can anyone identify anything of consequence that she accomplished during that period other than facilitating Republican idiocy by supporting Bush’s war in Iraq? Then she spent four years as Secretary of State, which certainly improved her public profile, but can anyone identify any substantial accomplishments she had as Secretary of State?

Clinton came to the role of Secretary of State with a huge asset — her strong relationship with AIPAC and the Israeli government. She, like President Obama, supports a two-state solution, opposes Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory and seeks peace with the Palestinians. There was hope when she was appointed that she would leverage her strong relationship with AIPAC and move Israel away from aggressive settlement activity and toward the peace process. That did not happen. Clinton is cautious, by nature, and I have little doubt she feared angering her wealthy Jewish donors by pushing them hard on peace negotiations. So she didn’t act and whatever leverage she had was wasted; it was not until John Kerry replaced her as Secretary of State that peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine resumed. Likewise with Iran, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was a consistent advocate of tough sanctions and serious peace negotiations did not begin until John Kerry replaced her.

7. Foreign Policy Credentials

The Arab Spring exploded on her watch, but Clinton and U.S. foreign policy drifted. There were no long-term strategies and with her stewardship, America supported whoever looked like a winner. When it was Mubarak, she supported Mubarak. When he was going down, she supported elections. Then when they had elections and the military tossed out the winners, she supported the military. Of course, she is not the only person responsible for the policy drift, but where did she leave a positive imprint on the direction of American foreign policy?
In my opinion, she has been wrong about almost every major foreign policy question in recent American history. She probably lost the Democratic presidential primaries and the presidential nomination due to her ill-advised vote to start a war in Iraq, a vote which ultimately gave Obama’s candidacy substantial impetus, and it is reasonable to assume she will face some amount of accountability with voters for her consistently hawkish and unpopular views on foreign interventions.

In the past few months, Hillary has double-downed on her hawkish positions in the Middle East by her continued unconditional support for Israel, despite its murderous assault on Gaza which killed 2,000 mostly defenseless people, her criticisms of President Obama for not arming Syrian rebels and her hawkish stance about making a peace deal with Iran.

In an August interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, published in The Atlantic, and elsewhere, Hillary said, “The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad — there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle — the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled." This is mostly fantasy. The U.S. invested trillions of dollars in Iraq trying to train an Iraqi Army and utterly failed in the effort. What could possibly make Clinton think the U.S., with far fewer resources available for Syria, had the capacity to train a competent rebel army, let alone even determine who the "good rebels" were?  Is she unaware of how bad---and counter-productive---America's track record has been arming and training fighters in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere? And, if she really believed Syrian rebels needed to be armed, why didn't she protest publicly at the time? The fact that she remained silent as Secretary of State shows lack of conviction and no courage.

In the interview, Hillary also took a very hard line on Obama's negotiations with Iran’s nuclear expectations: “I’ve always been in the camp that held that they [Iran] did not have a right to enrichment,” Clinton said. “Contrary to their claim, there is no such thing as a right to enrich. This is absolutely unfounded. There is no such right. I am well aware that I am not at the negotiating table anymore, but I think it’s important to send a signal to everybody who is there that there cannot be a deal unless there is a clear set of restrictions on Iran. The preference would be no enrichment. The potential fallback position would be such little enrichment that they could not break out.” When asked if the demands of Israel, and of America’s Arab allies, that Iran not be allowed any uranium-enrichment capability whatsoever were militant or unrealistic, she said, “I think it’s important that they stake out that position.”

Claiming Iran has "no right to enrichment," is, at best, a half-truth. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty does not expressly grant a right to uranium enrichment to any nation, but it also doesn't prohibit enrichment, so long as enrichment is not done secretly. Hillary, of course, knows this, but by choosing to emphasize only parts of the Treaty and ignore the rest, intellectually she is little different than right-wing evangelicals who only want to read the parts of the Bible they like, while ignoring everything else.  It all cases, it misleads and inflames the discussion. In the case of Iran, misinformation feeds right-wing opposition and potentially could jeopardize a peace agreement with a country with an educated population and democratic traditions [destroyed by the CIA coup in 1953] which could be a stabilizing force and America's ally in the Middle East.

Ironically, as Secretary of State, Clinton explicitly recognized that Iran could enrich uranium under the terms of a negotiated comprehensive deal, which, of course, is exactly what Obama is seeking to do, but now, as a potential Presidential candidate, Hillary appears to want to distinguish herself from Obama by criticizing him from the right.

Concerns about these types of hawkish positions by Clinton are not academic or inconsequential. Becoming enmeshed unnecessarily in long-term sectarian conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of people, including 5,000 Americans, and cost U.S. taxpayers $3+ trillion, and counting, as 500,000 war-damaged American vets get healthcare, most for the rest of their lives. Worse, U.S. military intervention inflamed a situation America never had control over, or ever could have control over, promoted recruitment of thousands of militants by terrorist organizations, and made America, despite this huge investment, less safe.

It has been a total clusterfuck, but apparently Hillary Clinton is willing to repeat the policy mistakes which caused it. Voters should be concerned.

Is There a Democratic Alternative?

Bernie Sanders has declared his intent to run, but Sanders is technically a socialist; more importantly, his candidacy is unlikely to present a formidable challenge to Clinton.

The name on people’s lips is Elizabeth Warren, who is the harshest critic of Wall Street excesses and who speaks to the populist zeitgeist. Would she run, despite having said she is not interested?

I think we should take her protestations of disinterest seriously. Running for President is a brutal task: Two years of living in motels; two years of banquets and bad food; two years of glad-handing people; two years of dialing for donor dollars; two years of facing attacks from Republicans. No rational person would do it. Unless they wanted to change the world.

I believe there are five scenarios that would make it possible, perhaps even likely, for Elizabeth Warren to run in 2016:

1. Elizabeth Warren ran for the U.S. Senate because she wanted to change the world, most immediately to break the stranglehold on American politics and the economy that Wall Street currently holds. If she sees Hillary Clinton continuing to suck up to the financial industry and offering the failed economics and deregulation beliefs of Bob Rubin, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, Warren might rethink what she can accomplish in the U.S. Senate. She is a person of great principle; she has fought for her principles, often against brutal odds. In the end, principles could prove more compelling than the easier and more comfortable path of stepping back.

2. I have been told by friends of hers that Warren likes her job as senator and thinks she can make important contributions in that role. But if the Democrats lose the Senate in November 2014, she might need to rethink that, because as a member of the minority in a rigidly controlled Republican Senate, it is unlikely she could accomplish anything.

3. Warren might rethink the clock. She is 64 now and would be 67 on Election Day 2016. 2016 could be the only chance she has to run for President.

4. Clinton could choose not to run. In December 2012, she suffered dehydration and fatigue, fainted, fell and hit her head, suffering a concussion. She was rehospitalized two weeks later and her condition was described as a clot between her brain and skull. She previously had suffered a large blood clot in her leg. These medical issues could cause her to rethink undertaking the rigors of a presidential campaign, which are brutal.

5. Warren raised a record $42.5 million to run for the Senate and Democratic donors would come out in droves to fund her presidential campaign. A challenge to Clinton and Democratic Party orthodoxy by Warren would be like catnip to the media. So the minute Warren declared to run for President, she would have $100 million worth of free advertising from the media telling her story and playing up the differences between her and Clinton. Even if Warren lost, she would have pushed Clinton away from Wall Street and toward more progressive Democratic Party positions and ignited a new generation of Democrats opposed to neoliberalism and dedicated to making America a more fair and equal society.

Barbara Bush recently commented that America should have more choices for President than two family dynasties. This may be the first time I have ever agreed so strongly with Barbara Bush.

Guy T. Saperstein is a former civil rights attorney and past president of the Sierra Club Foundation. He is a board member of Brave New Films, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Northern Sierra Partnership.

The Hillary Difference

By E. J. Dionne

The Hillary Difference

May 5, 2014 12:00 am Category: Featured Post, Memo Pad, Politics 36 Comments A+ / A-

WASHINGTON — There are two majorities in the country right now. One disapproves of President Obama. The other is still inclined to vote Democratic. The key question for the 2014 elections is whether voting this fall — and Obama’s approval ratings — can come into line with the electorate’s broader Democratic leanings?

There is also this: Obama’s difficulties do not appear to be hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency in 2016.

These are the findings just below the surface of the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll released last week. Obama’s approval rating in the survey was just 41 percent, both with the general public and among registered voters. But in a hypothetical matchup with Jeb Bush for the 2016 presidential race, Clinton was favored by 53 percent of registered voters, Bush by 41 percent.

The roughly one-eighth of voters who disapprove of Obama but nonetheless support Clinton for 2016 may be the most important group in the electorate. If Democratic candidates can collectively manage to corral Clinton’s share of the national electorate this fall, the party would likely keep control of the Senate and might take over the House of Representatives. The latter outcome is now seen (even by most Democrats) as a virtual impossibility. These Hillary Difference Voters, as we’ll call them, could find themselves the most courted contingent in this year’s contests.

Who are they? A comparison of those who back Clinton but disapprove of Obama with the group that is both pro-Clinton and pro-Obama suggests that the swing constituency is much more likely to be blue-collar and white — 71 percent of the mixed group are white, compared with only 57 percent of the pro-Obama, pro-Clinton group, and it is also somewhat more Latino. Whites without college degrees constitute 47 percent of the Hillary Difference Voters but only 30 percent of the pro-Clinton, pro-Obama group. In keeping with this, 62 percent of the Hillary Difference Voters have incomes of less than $50,000 annually.

Ideologically, the swing group includes significantly fewer self-described liberals. Among the Hillary Difference Voters, only 29 percent call themselves liberal; among those who both favor Clinton and approve of Obama, 43 percent are liberals. Nearly a third of the mixed group are white evangelical Protestants, compared with only 10 percent of those who react positively to both Democrats. Clinton also runs ahead of Obama’s approval rating among voters aged 30 to 49, among white Southerners, and among independents, including those who say they lean Republican.

Interestingly, while the swing group is 63 percent female — yes, Clinton does have particular appeal to women — this is not hugely different from the pro-Clinton, pro-Obama group, 59 percent of whom are female. Both numbers show how important women have become to the Democratic coalition.

As for the fall elections, the poll found that overall, 45 percent said they would vote for the Democratic candidate in their congressional district, while 44 percent said they would vote for the Republican. Not surprisingly, Democrats win the pro-Obama, pro-Clinton group overwhelmingly, 86 percent to 7 percent. But the Hillary Difference Voters split only 56 percent Democratic, with 26 percent choosing the Republican, and most of the rest still undecided. Again, this is the group in which Democratic support has room to grow. (Thanks to Peyton Craighill, The Washington Post’s polling manager, for pulling together these numbers.)

The findings call into question easy comparisons of Clinton’s establishment standing with the populist appeal of Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat whose new book A Fighting Chance is becoming a bible for the party’s economic liberals.

While Hillary Clinton, like her husband, can reach moderate voters — thus her popularity among non-liberals — the contours of the Hillary Difference constituency are decidedly populist. The voters Obama and the Democrats need to re-engage are a less affluent, non-elite group for whom the economy is the central concern. In their different ways, both Clinton and Warren may end up pointing the party and the president in the same direction.

This is why Friday’s very encouraging jobs report was about the best sort of news Obama could get. It’s also why he has been spending a lot of time talking about the minimum wage — and why Bill Clinton gave a stemwinder last week touting his own economic record as president. The swing voters this year are motivated by economic discontent. They don’t trust the Republicans but aren’t happy with the Democrats. Hillary Clinton has many of them. Obama needs them to come back his way.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons