Please Don’t Run, Hillary

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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

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How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk
Throughout her career she has displayed instinctson foreign policy that are more aggressive than
those of President Obama — and most Democrats.

By MARK LANDLER
APRIL 21, 2016
Hillary Clinton sat in the hideaway study off her ceremonial office in the State Department, sipping tea and taking stock of her first year on the job. The study was more like a den — cozy and wood-paneled, lined with bookshelves that displayed mementos from Clinton’s three decades in the public eye: a statue of her heroine, Eleanor Roosevelt; a baseball signed by the Chicago Cubs star Ernie Banks; a carved wooden figure of a pregnant African woman. The intimate setting lent itself to a less-formal interview than the usual locale, her imposing outer office, with its marble fireplace, heavy drapes, crystal chandelier and ornate wall sconces. On the morning of Feb. 26, 2010, however, Clinton was talking about something more sensitive than mere foreign affairs: her relationship with Barack Obama. To say she chose her words carefully doesn’t do justice to the delicacy of the exercise. She was like a bomb-squad technician, deciding which color wire to snip without blowing up her relationship with the White House.

“We’ve developed, I think, a very good rapport, really positive back-and-forth about everything you can imagine,” Clinton said about the man she described during the 2008 campaign as naïve, irresponsible and hopelessly unprepared to be president. “And we’ve had some interesting and even unusual experiences along the way.”

She leaned forward as she spoke, gesturing with her hands and laughing easily. In talking with reporters, Clinton displays more warmth than Obama does, though there’s less of an expectation that she might say something revealing.

Clinton singled out, as she often would, the United Nations climate-change meeting in Copenhagen the previous December, where she and Obama worked together to save the meeting from collapse. She brought up the Middle East peace proc­ess, a signature project of the president’s, which she had been tasked with reviving. But she was understandably wary of talking about areas in which she and Obama split — namely, on bedrock issues of war and peace, where Clinton’s more activist philosophy had already collided in unpredictable ways with her boss’s instincts toward restraint. She had backed Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recommendation to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, before endorsing a fallback proposal of 30,000 (Obama went along with that, though he stipulated that the soldiers would begin to pull out again in July 2011, which she viewed as problematic). She supported the Pentagon’s plan to leave behind a residual force of 10,000 to 20,000 American troops in Iraq (Obama balked at this, largely because of his inability to win legal protections from the Iraqis, a failure that was to haunt him when the Islamic State overran much of the country). And she pressed for the United States to funnel arms to the rebels in Syria’s civil war (an idea Obama initially rebuffed before later, halfheartedly, coming around to it).

That fundamental tension between Clinton and the president would continue to be a defining feature of her four-year tenure as secretary of state. In the administration’s first high-level meeting on Russia in February 2009, aides to Obama proposed that the United States make some symbolic concessions to Russia as a gesture of its good will in resetting the relationship. Clinton, the last to speak, brusquely rejected the idea, saying, “I’m not giving up anything for nothing.” Her hardheadedness made an impression on Robert Gates, the defense secretary and George W. Bush holdover who was wary of a changed Russia. He decided there and then that she was someone he could do business with.

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“I thought, This is a tough lady,” he told me.

A few months after my interview in her office, another split emerged when Obama picked up a secure phone for a weekend conference call with Clinton, Gates and a handful of other advisers. It was July 2010, four months after the North Korean military torpedoed a South Korean Navy corvette, sinking it and killing 46 sailors. Now, after weeks of fierce debate between the Pentagon and the State Department, the United States was gearing up to respond to this brazen provocation. The tentative plan — developed by Clinton’s deputy at State, James Steinberg — was to dispatch the aircraft carrier George Washington into coastal waters to the east of North Korea as an unusual show of force.

But Adm. Robert Willard, then the Pacific commander, wanted to send the carrier on a more aggressive course, into the Yellow Sea, between North Korea and China. The Chinese foreign ministry had warned the United States against the move, which for Willard was all the more reason to press forward. He pushed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, who in turn pushed his boss, the defense secretary, to reroute the George Washington. Gates agreed, but he needed the commander in chief to sign off on a decision that could have political as well as military repercussions.

Gates laid out the case for diverting the George Washington to the Yellow Sea: that the United States should not look as if it was yielding to China. Clinton strongly seconded it. “We’ve got to run it up the gut!” she had said to her aides a few days earlier. (The Vince Lombardi imitation drew giggles from her staff, who, even 18 months into her tenure, still marveled at her pugnacity.)

Obama, though, was not persuaded. The George Washington was already underway; changing its course was not a decision to make on the fly.

“I don’t call audibles with aircraft carriers,” he said — unwittingly one-upping Clinton on her football metaphor.

It wasn’t the last debate in which she would side with Gates. The two quickly discovered that they shared a Midwestern upbringing, a taste for a stiff drink after a long day of work and a deep-seated skepticism about the intentions of America’s foes. Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence analyst who conducted Obama’s initial review on the Afghanistan war, says: “I think one of the surprises for Gates and the military was, here they come in expecting a very left-of-center administration, and they discover that they have a secretary of state who’s a little bit right of them on these issues — a little more eager than they are, to a certain extent. Particularly on Afghanistan, where I think Gates knew more had to be done, knew more troops needed to be sent in, but had a lot of doubts about whether it would work.”

As Hillary Clinton makes another run for president, it can be tempting to view her hard-edged rhetoric about the world less as deeply felt core principle than as calculated political maneuver. But Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” It set her apart from her rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama, who avoided military entanglements and tried to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. And it will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.

Photo

Credit lllustration by Justin Metz, based on a concept by Pablo Delcan.
“Hillary is very much a member of the traditional American foreign-policy establishment,” says Vali Nasr, a foreign-policy strategist who advised her on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the State Department. “She believes, like presidents going back to the Reagan or Kennedy years, in the importance of the military — in solving terrorism, in asserting American influence. The shift with Obama is that he went from reliance on the military to the intelligence agencies. Their position was, ‘All you need to deal with terrorism is N.S.A. and C.I.A., drones and special ops.’ So the C.I.A. gave Obama an angle, if you will, to be simultaneously hawkish and shun using the military.”

Unlike other recent presidents — Obama, George W. Bush or her husband, Bill Clinton — Hillary Clinton would assume the office with a long record on national security. There are many ways to examine that record, but one of the most revealing is to explore her decades-long cultivation of the military — not just civilian leaders like Gates, but also its high-ranking commanders, the men with the medals. Her affinity for the armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as Bush once put it, into “any dark corner of the world.” Unexpectedly, in the bombastic, testosterone-fueled presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk left in the race.

For those who know Clinton’s biography, her embrace of the military should come as no surprise. She grew up in the buoyant aftermath of World War II, the daughter of a Navy petty officer who trained young sailors before they shipped out to the Pacific. Her father, Hugh Rodham, was a staunch Republican and an anticommunist, and she channeled his views. She talks often about her girlhood dream of becoming an astronaut, citing the rejection letter she got from NASA as the first time she encountered gender discrimination. Her real motive for volunteering, she has written, may have been because her father fretted that “America was lagging behind Russia.”

Political conversion came later, after Vietnam and the ’60s swept over Wellesley College, where she spoke out against the establishment at her graduation. But even in the tumultuous year of 1968, she was still making her transition from Republican to Democrat, managing to go to the conventions of both parties. As a Republican intern in Washington that summer, she questioned a Wisconsin congressman, Melvin Laird, about the wisdom of Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalating involvement in Southeast Asia.

It was after law school that she had her most curious encounter with the military. In 1975, the year she married Bill Clinton, she stopped in at a Marine recruiting office in Arkansas to inquire about joining the active forces or reserves. She was a lawyer, she explained; maybe there was some way she could serve. The recruiter, she recalled two decades later, was a young man of about 21, in prime physical condition. Clinton was then 27, freshly transplanted from Washington, teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses. “You’re too old, you can’t see and you’re a woman,” he told her. “Maybe the dogs will take you,” he added, in what she said was a pejorative reference to the Army.

“It was not a very encouraging conversation,” Clinton said at a lunch for military women on Capitol Hill in 1994. “I decided, Maybe I’ll look for another way to serve my country.”

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RECENT COMMENTS

APS 39 minutes ago
Why are people hawks? Same as why they rob banks. That's where the money is.
DCBinNYC 51 minutes ago
She was NY's senator during 9/11. She panders to whomever she's trying to appeal to. She became a hawk.
Doug 51 minutes ago
Keane is the kind of general who sees waras a growth industry and gets other peoples kids killed.Obama is an intellect and deep thinker. I...
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Some reporters have cast doubt on the veracity of this story, which she repeated in the fall of 2015 over breakfast with voters in New Hampshire: certainly, there’s no concrete evidence that it happened, and Bill gave a different account of it in 2008, substituting the Army for the Marines. Why would a professionally minded Yale Law graduate, on the cusp of marriage, suddenly want to put on a uniform? It’s impossible to decipher her possible motives, but Ann Henry, an old friend who taught at the university after Clinton moved to Little Rock, offers a theory: During those days, she recalls, female faculty members, as an exercise, would test the boundaries of careers that appeared closed to women. “I don’t think it’s made up,” she says. “It was consistent with something she would have done.”


In Their Own Words: the Libya Tragedy
Clinton’s next sustained exposure to the military did not come until she was first lady, almost two decades later. Living in the White House is, in many ways, like living in a military compound. A Marine stands guard in front of the West Wing when the president is in the Oval Office. The Mili­tary Office operates the medical center and the telecommunications system. The Navy runs the cafeteria, the Marines transport the president by helicopter, the Air Force by plane. Camp David is a naval facility. The daily contact with men and women in uniform, Clinton’s friends say, deepened her feelings for them.

In March 1996, the first lady visited American troops stationed in Bosnia. The trip became notorious years later when she claimed, during the 2008 campaign, to have dodged sniper fire after her C-17 military plane landed at an American base in Tuzla. (Chris Hill, a diplomat who was onboard that day and later served as ambassador to Iraq under Clinton, didn’t remember snipers at all, and indeed recalled children handing her bouquets of spring flowers.) But there was no faking the good vibes during her tour of the mess and rec halls. With her teenage daughter at her side, she bantered and joked with the young servicemen and women — an experience, she wrote, that “left lasting impressions on Chelsea and me.”

When Clinton was elected to the Senate, she had strong political reasons to care about the mili­tary. The Pentagon was in the midst of a long, politically charged process of closing military bases; New York State had already been a victim, when Plattsburgh Air Force Base was closed in 1995, a loss of 352 civilian jobs for that hard-luck North Country town. New York’s delegation was determined to protect its remaining bases, especially Fort Drum, home of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, which sprawls over a hundred thousand acres in rural Jefferson County. In October 2001, a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Clinton traveled to Fort Drum at the invitation of Gen. Buster Hagenbeck, who had just been named the division’s commander and would be deployed to Afghanistan a month later. Like many of the officers I spoke with, he had preconceptions of Clinton from her years as first lady; the woman who showed up at his office around happy hour that afternoon did not fulfill them.

“She sat down,” he recalls, “took her shoes off, put her feet up on the coffee table and said, ‘General, do you know where a gal can get a cold beer around here?’ ”

It was the start of a dialogue that stretched over two wars. In the spring of 2002, Hagenbeck led Operation Anaconda, a 16-day assault on Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in the Shah-i-Kot Valley that was the largest combat engagement of the war to date. When the general came back to Washington to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Clinton took him out to dinner on Capitol Hill for her own briefing. They also spoke about the Bush administration’s preparations for war in Iraq, something which Hagenbeck was following anxiously. The general, it turned out, was more of a dove than the senator. He warned her about the risks of an invasion, which was then being war-gamed inside the Pentagon. It would be like “kicking over a bee’s nest,” he said.

Hagenbeck excused Clinton’s vote in 2002 to authorize military action in Iraq. “She made a considered call,” he says. And “she was chagrined, much after the fact.” For him, what mattered more than Clinton’s voting record was her unstinting public support of the military, whether in protecting Fort Drum or backing him during a difficult first year in Afghanistan.

Clinton’s education in military affairs began in earnest in 2002, after the Democratic Party’s crushing defeat in midterm elections moved her up several rungs in Senate seniority. The party’s congressional leaders offered her a seat on either the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the Senate Armed Services Committee. She chose Armed Services, spurning a long tradition of New York senators, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jacob Javits, who coveted the prestige of Foreign Relations. Armed Services deals with more earthbound issues, like benefits for veterans, and it had long been the preserve of Republican hawks like John McCain. But after 9/11, Clinton saw Armed Services as better preparation for her future. For a politician looking to hone hard-power credentials — a woman who aspired to be commander in chief — it was the perfect training ground. She dug in like a grunt at boot camp.

Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk left in the race.
Andrew Shapiro, then Senator Clinton’s foreign-policy adviser, called upon 10 experts — including Bill Perry, who was defense secretary under her husband, and Ashton Carter, who would eventually become President Obama’s fourth defense secretary — to tutor her on everything from grand strategy to defense procurement. She met quietly with Andrew Marshall, an octogenarian strategist at the Pentagon who labored for decades in the blandly named Office of Net Assessment, earning the nickname Yoda for his Delphic insights. She went to every committee meeting, no matter how mundane. Aides recall her on C-SPAN3, sitting alone in the chamber, patiently questioning a lieutenant colonel. She visited the troops in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day in 2003 and spoke at every significant military installation in New York State. By then — 30 years after she recalled being rejected by a Marine recruiter in Arkansas — Hillary Clinton had become a military wonk.

Jack Keane is one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq surge; he is also perhaps the greatest single influence on the way Hillary Clinton thinks about military issues. A bear of a man with a jowly, careworn face and Brylcreem-slicked hair, Keane exudes the supreme self-confidence you would expect of a retired four-star general. He speaks with a trace of a New York accent that gives his pronouncements a rat-a-tat urgency. He is also a well-compensated member of the military-industrial complex, sitting on the board of General Dynamics and serving as a strategic adviser to Academi, the private-security contractor once known as Blackwater. And he is the chairman of an aptly named think tank, the Institute for the Study of War. Though he is one of a parade of cable-TV generals, Keane is the resident hawk on Fox News, where he appears regularly to call for the United States to use greater military force in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He doesn’t shrink from putting boots on the ground and has little use for civilian leaders, like Obama, who do.

Keane first got to know Clinton in the fall of 2001, when she was a freshman senator and he was the Army’s second in command, with a distinguished combat and command record in Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. He had expected her to be intelligent, hard-working and politically astute, but he was not prepared for the respect she showed for the Army as an institution, or her sympathy for the sacrifices made by soldiers and their families. Keane was confident he could smell a phony politician a mile away, and he didn’t get that whiff from her.

“I read people; that’s one of my strengths,” he told me. “It’s not that I can’t be fooled, but I’m not fooled often.”

Clinton took an instant liking to Keane, too. “She loves that Irish gruff thing,” says one of her Senate aides, Kris Balderston, who was in the room that day. When Keane got up after 45 minutes to leave for a meeting back at the Pentagon with a Polish general, she protested that she wasn’t finished yet and asked for another appointment. “I said, ‘O.K., but it took me three months to get this one,’ ” Keane told her dryly.

Clinton exploded into a raucous laugh. “I’ll take care of that problem,” she promised.

She was true to her word: The two would meet many times over the next decade, discussing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranian nu­clear threat and other flash points in the Middle East. Sometimes he dropped by her Senate office; other times they met for dinner or drinks. He escorted her on her first visit to Fort Drum and set up her first trip to Iraq.

They generally agreed to forgo talk of politics, but at a meeting in Clinton’s Senate office in January 2007, Keane tried to sell her on the logic of a troop surge in Iraq. The previous month, he had met with President Bush in the Oval Office to recommend that the United States deploy five to eight Army and Marine brigades to wage an urban counterinsurgency campaign; only that, he argued, would stabilize a country being ripped apart by sectarian strife. His presentation angered some of Keane’s fellow generals, who feared that such a strategy would deepen Iraq’s dependency and prolong America’s involvement. But it had a big impact on the commander in chief, who soon ordered more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.

Photo

Clinton touring an Army barrack in Baghdad in 2003, while still the junior senator from New York and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Credit Dusan Vranic/AFP/Getty Images
Clinton was another story. “I’m convinced it’s not going to work, Jack,” she told him. She predicted that the American soldiers patrolling in Iraqi cities and towns would be “blown up” by Sunni militias or Al Qaeda fighters. “She thought we would fail,” Keane recalls, “and it was going to cause increased casualties.”

Politics, of course, was also on her mind. Barack Obama was laying the groundwork for his candidacy in mid-January with a campaign that would emphasize his opposition to the Iraq War and her vote in favor of it — a vote that still shadows her in this year’s Democratic primaries. Obama was setting off on a fund-raising drive that would net $25 million in three months, sending tremors through Clinton’s political camp and establishing him as a formidable rival. Although she disagreed with Keane about Iraq, Clinton asked him to become a formal adviser. “As much as I respect you,” he replied, “I can’t do that.” Keane’s wife had health problems that had moved up his retirement from the Army, and he did not, as a policy, endorse candidates. Sometime during 2008 — he doesn’t remember exactly when — Clinton told him she had erred in doubting the wisdom of the surge. “She said, ‘You were right, this really did work,’ ” Keane recalls. “On issues of national security,” he says, “I thought she was always intellectually honest with me.”

He and Clinton continued to talk, even after Obama was elected and she became secretary of state. More often than not, they found themselves in sync. Keane, like Clinton, favored more robust intervention in Syria than Obama did. In April 2015, the week before she announced her candidacy, Clinton asked him for a briefing on military options for dealing with the fighters of the Islamic State. Bringing along three young female analysts from the Institute for the Study of War, Keane gave her a 2-hour-20-minute presentation. Among other steps, he advocated imposing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria that would neutralize the air power of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, with a goal of forcing him into a political settlement with opposition groups. Six months later, Clinton publicly adopted this position, further distancing herself from Obama.

“I’m convinced this president, no matter what the circumstances, will never put any boots on the ground to do anything, even when it’s compelling,” Keane told me. He was sitting in the library at his home in McLean, Va., which is lined with books on military history and strategy. His critique of Obama was hardly new or original, but much of it mirrors the thinking of Clinton and her policy advisers. “One of the problems the president has, which weakens his diplomatic efforts, is that leaders don’t believe he would use military power. That’s an issue that would separate the president from Hillary Clinton rather dramatically. She would look at military force as another realistic option, but only where there is no other option.”

Befriending Keane wasn’t just about cultivating a single adviser. It gave Clinton instant entree to his informal network of active-duty and retired generals. The most interesting by far was David Petraeus, a cerebral commander who shared Clinton’s jet-fueled ambition and whose life stories would mix heady success with humbling setbacks. Both would be accused of mishandling classified information — Clinton because of her use of a private server and email address to conduct sensitive government business, a decision that erupted into a political scandal; Petraeus because he had given a diary containing classified information to his biographer and mistress (he was eventually charged with a misdemeanor for mishandling classified information).

On Clinton’s first trip to Iraq in November 2003, Petraeus, then a two-star general commanding the 101st Airborne Division, flew from his field headquarters in Mosul to the relative safety of Kirkuk to brief her congressional delegation. “She was full of questions,” he recalls. “It was the kind of gesture that means a lot to a battlefield commander.” On subsequent trips, as he rose in rank, Petraeus walked her through his plans to train and equip Iraqi Army troops, a forerunner of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. It worked to their mutual benefit: Petraeus was building ties to a prominent Democratic voice in the Senate; Clinton was burnishing her image as a friend of the troops. “She did it the old-fashioned way,” he says. “She did it by pursuing relationships.” When Petraeus was sent back to Iraq as the top commander in early 2007, he gave every member of the Senate Armed Services Committee a copy of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which he edited during a tour at Fort Leavenworth. Clinton read hers from cover to cover.

Although Clinton’s reservations about the surge were valid — the stability that the additional troops brought to Iraq didn’t last — her opposition to it, like her vote for the war, came back to haunt her. This time, it was her ally Bob Gates who summoned the ghost. In his memoirs, Gates wrote that she confessed to him and the president that her position had been politically motivated, because she was then facing Obama in the Iowa caucuses. (Obama, he wrote, “vaguely” conceded that he, too, had opposed it for political reasons.) Clinton pushed back, telling Diane Sawyer of ABC News that Gates “perhaps either missed the context or the meaning, because I did oppose the surge.” Her opposition, she told Sawyer, was driven by the fact that at that time, people were not going to accept any escalation of the war. “This is not politics in electoral, political terms,” Clinton said. “This is politics in the sense of the American public has to support commitments like this.”

‘They knew that if they walked into the Situation Room and they had her, it made a huge difference.’
The next time she found herself in a debate over sending troops into harm’s way, she voiced no such reservations.

“We need maps,” Hillary Clinton told her aides.

It was early October 2009, and she had just returned from a meeting in the Situation Room. Obama’s war cabinet was debating how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan, where the United States, preoccupied by Iraq, had allowed the Taliban to regroup. The Pentagon, she reported, had used impressive, color-coded maps to show its plans to deploy troops around the country. The attention to detail made Gates and his commanders look crisp and well prepared; the State Department, which was pushing a “civilian surge” to accompany the troops, looked wan by comparison. At the next meeting, on Oct. 14, the team from State unfurled its own maps to show the deployment of an army of aid workers, diplomats, legal experts and crop specialists who were supposed to follow the soldiers into Afghanistan.

Clinton’s fixation with maps was typical of her mind-set in the first great war-and-peace debate of the Obama presidency. She wanted to be taken seriously, even if her department was less central than the Pentagon. One way to do that was by promoting the civilian surge, the pet project of her friend and special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke. “She was determined that her briefing books would be just as thick and just as meticulous as those of the Pentagon,” a senior adviser recalls. She also didn’t hesitate to get into the Pentagon’s business, asking detailed questions about the training of Afghan troops and wading into the weeds of military planning.

She resolved not to miss out on anything — a determination that may have been rooted in a deeper insecurity about her role in what was to become the most White House-centric administration of the modern era. On the morning of June 8, 2009, she emailed two aides to say: “I heard on the radio that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are we sending?” On Feb. 10, 2010, she dialed the White House from her home, but couldn’t get past the switchboard operator, who didn’t believe she was really Hillary Clinton. Asked to provide her office number to prove her identity, she said she didn’t know it. Finally, Clinton hung up in frustration and placed the call again through the State Department Operations Center — “like a proper and properly dependent secretary of state,” as she later wrote to one aide in a mock-chastened tone. “No independent dialing allowed.”

The Afghan troop debate, a three-month drama of dueling egos, leaked documents and endless deliberations, is typically framed as a test of wills between the Pentagon’s wily military commanders and an inexperienced young president, with Joe Biden playing the role of devil’s advocate for Obama. While that portrait is accurate, it neglects the role of Clinton. By siding with Gates and the generals, she gave political ballast to their proposals and provided a bullish counterpoint to Biden’s skepticism. Her role should not be overstated: She did not turn the debate, nor did she bring to it any distinctive point of view. But her unstinting support of General McChrystal’s maximalist recommendation made it harder for Obama to choose a lesser option. (McChrystal was later fired by Obama after his aides made derogatory remarks about almost every member of his war cabinet to Rolling Stone magazine; she was the exception. “Hillary had Stan’s back,” one of his aides told the reporter, Michael Hastings.)

“Hillary was adamant in her support for what Stan asked for,” Gates says. “She made clear that she was ready to support his request for the full 40,000 troops. She then made clear that she was only willing to go with the 30,000 number because I proposed it. She was, in a way, tougher on the numbers in the surge than I was.” Gates believed that if he could align Clinton; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen; the commander of Central Command, David Petraeus; and himself behind a common position, it would be hard for Obama to say no. “How could you ignore these Four Horsemen of national security?” says Geoff Morrell, who served as the Pentagon press secretary at the time.

Just as Clinton benefited from her alliance with the military commanders, she gave them political cover. “Here’s the dirty little secret,” says Tom Nides, her former deputy secretary of state for management and resources. “They all knew they wanted her on their side. They knew that if they walked into the Situation Room and they had her, it made a huge difference in the dynamics. When she opened her mouth, she could change the momentum in the room.”

Photo

Clinton visiting the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea in 2010 as secretary of state. Credit Mark Wilson-Pool/Associated Press
David Axelrod recalls one meeting where Clinton “kicked the thing off and pretty much articulated their opinion; I’m sure that’s one that they remember. There’s no doubt that she wanted to give them every troop that McChrystal was asking for.” Still, Clinton didn’t prevail on every argument. After agreeing to send the troops, Obama added a condition of his own: that the soldiers be deployed as quickly as possible and pulled out again, starting in the summer of 2011 — a deadline that proved more fateful in the long run than a difference of 10,000 troops. Clinton opposed setting a public deadline for withdrawal, arguing that it would tip America’s hand to the Taliban and encourage them to wait out the United States — which, in fact, was exactly what happened.

In the final days of the debate, Clinton also found herself at odds with her own ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry. He, too, held different views than she did on the wisdom of a surge, which he put into writing. On Nov. 6, 2009, in a long cable addressed to Clinton — and later leaked to The New York Times — he made a trenchant, convincing case for why the McChrystal proposal, which she endorsed two weeks earlier in a meeting with Obama, would saddle the United States with “vastly increased costs and an indefinite, large-scale military role in Afghanistan.”

Much of Eikenberry’s analysis proved prescient, particularly his warnings about the threadbare American partnership with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. It carried an extra sting because he was a retired three-star Army general who was the commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. Clinton, who had not asked for the cable, was furious, fearing it could upset a debate in which she and the Pentagon were about to prevail.

What the cable made clear was the degree to which the Afghanistan debate was dominated by military considerations. While Clinton did raise the need to deal with Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan, her reflexive support of Gates, Petraeus and McChrystal meant she was not a powerful voice for diplomatic alternatives. “She contributed to the overmilitarizing of the analysis of the problem,” says Sarah Chayes, who was an adviser to McChrystal and later to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen.

In October 2015, the persistent violence in Afghanistan and the legacy of Karzai’s misrule forced Obama to reverse his plan to withdraw the last American soldiers by the end of his presi­dency. A few thousand troops will stay there indefinitely. And for all of Clinton’s talk about a civilian surge, it never really materialized.

For Clinton, the Afghanistan episode laid bare a vexed relationship between her and Eikenberry, one of the few generals with whom she didn’t hit it off. A soldier-scholar with graduate degrees from Harvard and Stanford, Eikenberry was brilliant but had a reputation among his colleagues for being imperious. Clinton had a similarly chilly relationship with Douglas Lute, another Army lieutenant general with a graduate degree from Harvard, who also fought with Holbrooke. “She likes the nail-eaters — McChrystal, Petraeus, Keane,” one of her aides observes. “Real military guys, not these retired three-stars who go into civilian jobs.”

“There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton’s more muscular brand of American foreign policy is better matched to 2016 than it was to 2008,” said Jake Sullivan, her top policy adviser at the State Department, who plays the same role in her campaign.

‘She wanted to give them every troop that McChrystal was asking for.’
It was De­cem­ber 2015, 53 days before the Iowa caucuses, and Sullivan was sitting down with me in Clinton’s sprawling Brooklyn headquarters to explain how she was shaping her message for a campaign suddenly dominated by concerns about national security. Clinton’s strategy, he said, was twofold: Explain to voters that she had a clear plan for confronting the threat posed by Islamic terrorism, and expose her Republican opponents as utterly lacking in experience or credibility on national security.

There were good reasons for Clinton to let her inner hawk fly. After the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., Americans’ concern about a major attack on the nation spiked. A CNN/ORC poll taken after Paris showed that a majority, 53 percent, favored sending ground troops to Iraq or Syria, a remarkable shift from the war-weary sentiment that prevailed during most of Obama’s presidency. The Republican candidates were reaching for apocalyptic metaphors to demonstrate their resolve. Ted Cruz threatened to carpet-bomb the Islamic State to test whether desert sand can glow; Donald Trump called for the United States to ban all Muslims from entering the country “until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses.”

Yet such spikes in the public appetite for mili­tary action tend to be transitory. Three weeks later, the same poll showed an even split, at 49 percent, on whether to deploy troops. Neither Trump nor Cruz favors major new deployments of American soldiers to Iraq and Syria (nor, for that matter, does Clinton). If anything, both are more skeptical than Clinton about intervention and more circumspect than she about maintaining the nation’s post-World War II military commitments. Trump loudly proclaims his opposition to the Iraq War. He wants the United States to spend less to underwrite NATO and has talked about withdrawing the American security umbrella from Asia, even if that means Japan and South Korea would acquire nuclear weapons to defend themselves. Cruz, unlike Clinton, opposed aiding the Syrian rebels in 2014. He once supported Pentagon budget constraints advocated by his isolationist colleague, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Thus might the gen­eral election present voters with an unfamiliar choice: a Democratic hawk versus a Republican reluctant warrior.

To thwart the progressive insurgency of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Clinton carefully calibrated her message during the Democratic primaries to align herself closely with Barack Obama and his racially diverse coalition. But as she pivots to the general election, that balancing act with Obama will become trickier. “There’s going to be a huge amount of interest in the press to score-keep,” Sullivan says. “It just so easily can become a sport that distracts from her ability to make an affirmative case.”

In showing her stripes as a prospective commander in chief, Clinton will no doubt draw heavily upon her State Department experience — filtering the lessons she learned in Libya, Syria and Iraq into the sinewy worldview she has held since childhood. Last fall, in a series of policy speeches, Clinton began limning distinctions with the president on national security. She said the United States should consider sending more special-operations troops to Iraq than Obama had committed, to help the Iraqis and Kurds fight the Islamic State. She came out in favor of a partial no-fly zone over Syria. And she described the threat posed by ISIS to Americans in starker terms than he did. As is often the case with Clinton and Obama, the differences were less about direction than degree. She wasn’t calling for ground troops in the Middle East, any more than he was. Clinton insisted her plan was not a break with his, merely an “intensification and acceleration” of it.

It’s an open question how well Clinton’s hawkish instincts match the country’s mood. Americans are weary of war and remain suspicious of foreign entanglements. And yet, after the retrenchment of the Obama years, there is polling evidence that they are equally dissatisfied with a portrait of their country as a spent force, managing its decline amid a world of rising powers like China, resurgent empires like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and lethal new forces like the Islamic State. If Obama’s minimalist approach was a necessary reaction to the maximalist style of his predecessor, then perhaps what Americans yearn for is something in between — the kind of steel-belted pragmatism that Clinton has spent a lifetime honing.

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby backtoiam » Fri Apr 22, 2016 10:49 pm

Webb Hubbels daughter speaks on gun control.


Image

"A mind stretched by a new idea can never return to it's original dimensions." Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby backtoiam » Fri Apr 22, 2016 11:26 pm

Soros Recruiting 400,000 Hispanic Voters for Hillary

Image

George Soros teamed up with Hillary’s lawyer to stop voter ID laws. And now the billionaire is spending oodles of money to lure Hispanics into voting for Clinton.

Liberal Billionaire George Soros committed $5 million last year to a litigation effort challenging voter ID laws in multiple states. The project is being headed by Marc Elias, who is Hillary Clinton’s top campaign lawyer. Elias is an attorney for the Washington, DC-based Perkins Cole Law Firm, but is working independently of Clinton’s campaign on the voter ID challenge.

More recently, Soros donated $3 million on March 11, 2016 to a brand new super PAC, “Immigrant Voters Win PAC”. So far, Soros is the only donor to this PAC, according to FEC filings. Immigrant Voters Win PAC is a part of a campaign called “Families Fight Bank”, organized by immigration activist groups and aimed at getting Latinos out to vote for Democrats. Their goal is to register 400,000 new Latino voters in time for the November election.

Soros had told the NY Times that he would commit at least $5 million to the PAC. He had promised “consequences” for proposals by Republican candidates to control immigration. “The intense anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric that has been fueled by the Republican primary is deeply offensive,” Mr. Soros said. “It is harmful to our democracy and to our national interests. There should be consequences for the outrageous statements and proposals that we’ve regularly heard.”

Three groups joined together to form “Families Fight Back”, which include the Center for Community Change Action, Latino Victory Project, and America’s Voice…. and Soros’ money and connections is interwoven through it all.

http://dennismichaellynch.com/highlight ... r-id-laws/

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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby backtoiam » Fri Apr 22, 2016 11:41 pm

more than one way to skin a trump I reckon....

Virginia Governor Allows Convicted Felons To Vote In Boost To Hillary's Election Odds



As the Richmond Times Dispatch reports, Governor Terry McAuliffe today signed an order to restore voting rights to more than 200,000 convicted felons in Virginia. The order applies to nonviolent and violent felons, and according to a confidential draft of research for the order obtained by the Richmond Times Dispatch, is authorized under the Constitution of Virginia. Why this surprising announcement now? As Reuters says, the "move that could help the Democratic nominee in November's presidential election."

In other words Hillary's elections chances just jump thanks to the support of convicted criminals as at least one state allowed them to vote. Expect many more states to follows.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-2 ... ction-odds
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby zangtang » Sat Apr 23, 2016 9:56 am

Farce.

Tragi-comic farce. I'm hoping on that unprecedented nationwide outbreak of massive civil disobedience anytime soon.
- what else have you got?
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 23, 2016 10:15 pm

Charles Koch: It's possible Clinton is preferable to a Republican for president

By Kristen East

04/23/16 07:38 PM EDT

Billionaire businessman Charles Koch said in an interview airing Sunday that “it’s possible” another Clinton in the White House could be better than having a Republican president.

Koch, the CEO of Koch industries, made the comment to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl for an interview airing on ABC’s This Week.

Koch and his brother, David, and their associated groups plan to spend nearly $900 million on the 2016 elections.

The comment came after Karl asked about former President Bill Clinton’s term, to which Koch said Clinton was “in some ways” better than George W. Bush.

“As far as the growth of government, the increase in spending, it was two-and-a-half times under Bush that it was under Clinton,” he said.

Karl followed up by asking about whether or not Koch could see himself supporting Hillary Clinton.

Koch hesitated before giving an answer that didn’t rule out the possibility.

“We would have to believe her actions would have to be quite different than her rhetoric, let me put it that way,” he said.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/c ... z46he1PQDl
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby NeonLX » Sun Apr 24, 2016 2:20 pm

Gawd, the state of the political culture of this country is...fucked. Maybe it always has been. Maybe we have been, and are, just a subset of the "London Corporation" and merely another avatar of The Empire. Maybe I shouldn't give a shit.
America is a fucked society because there is no room for essential human dignity. Its all about what you have, not who you are.--Joe Hillshoist
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby slimmouse » Sun Apr 24, 2016 3:51 pm



Ever contemporary probably circa 2000bc, :thumbsup
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby 82_28 » Sun Apr 24, 2016 3:58 pm

NeonLX » Sun Apr 24, 2016 10:20 am wrote:Gawd, the state of the political culture of this country is...fucked. Maybe it always has been. Maybe we have been, and are, just a subset of the "London Corporation" and merely another avatar of The Empire. Maybe I shouldn't give a shit.


@occultmeanshidden do you care to chime in?
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby slimmouse » Sun Apr 24, 2016 4:03 pm

82_28 » 24 Apr 2016 19:58 wrote:
NeonLX » Sun Apr 24, 2016 10:20 am wrote:Gawd, the state of the political culture of this country is...fucked. Maybe it always has been. Maybe we have been, and are, just a subset of the "London Corporation" and merely another avatar of The Empire. Maybe I shouldn't give a shit.





FWIW, you should give a shit, and oppose in any way possible the recognisable lunacy, however the hell you possibly can.

If everyone did that, it probably wouldnt take that long, since the lunacy of the control sytem is becoming increasingly evident.
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby Elihu » Sun Apr 24, 2016 7:25 pm

Maybe we have been, and are, just a subset of the "London Corporation" and merely another avatar of The Empire.


yes we are. Incorporated. 1871 officially. like the british east India company dutch east india company etc. i never realized it before but in retrospect it should have been obvious :starz: war is a euphemism for bizness. carry on...
But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby NeonLX » Mon Apr 25, 2016 12:16 pm

I'm a "consumer", don'tcha know. That's my purpose is in this life--to consume. Eat and shit and buy stuff. That's how it works.
America is a fucked society because there is no room for essential human dignity. Its all about what you have, not who you are.--Joe Hillshoist
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby conniption » Fri Jun 03, 2016 8:04 am



Naked Capitalism
(embedded links)

Why Some of the Smartest Progressives I Know Will Vote for Trump over Hillary


Even on Wall Street, a powerful Sanders contingent so hates what Clinton stands for—the status quo—they’ll pull the lever for almost anyone else.

By Yves Smith

June 01, 2016

Why do progressives reject Hillary Clinton? The highly educated, high-income, finance-literate readers of my website, Naked Capitalism, don’t just overwhelmingly favor Bernie Sanders. They also say “Hell no!” to Hillary Clinton to the degree that many say they would even vote for Donald Trump over her.

And they don’t come by these views casually. Their conclusions are the result of careful study of her record and her policy proposals. They believe the country can no longer endure the status quo that Clinton represents—one of crushing inequality, and an economy that is literally killing off the less fortunate—and any change will be better. One reader writes:

“If Clinton is the nominee 9 out of 10 friends I polled will [do one of three things]:

A. Not vote for president in November.
B. Vote for Trump.
C. Write in Bernie as a protest vote.

"We are all fifty-somethings with money and college educations. Oh, and we are all registered Democrats.”


Or as another reader puts it:

“I don’t want to vote for Trump. I want to vote for Bernie. But I have reached the point where I feel like voting for Trump against Clinton would be doing my patriotic duty. … If the only way to escape a trap is to gnaw off my leg, I’d like to think I’d have the guts to do it.”


To be sure, not all of my Sanders-supporting readers would vote for Trump. But only a minority would ever vote for Clinton, and I'd guess that a lot of them would just stay home if she were the nominee. Many of my readers tend to be very progressive, and they have been driven even further in that direction by their sophisticated understanding of the inequities of Wall Street, especially in the run-up to and the aftermath of the financial crisis, when no senior executives went to jail, the biggest banks got bigger, and Hillary paid homage to Goldman Sachs. True progressives, as opposed to the Vichy Left, recognize that the Clintons only helped these inequities along. They recognize that, both in the 1990s and now, the Clintons do not and have never represented them. They believe the most powerful move they can take to foster change is to withhold their support.

Some of them also have very reasoned arguments for Trump. Hillary is a known evil. Trump is unknown. They'd rather bet on the unknown, since it will also send a big message to Team Dem that they can no longer abuse progressives. I personally know women in the demographic that is viewed as being solidly behind Hillary—older, professional women who live in major cities—who regard Trump as an acceptable cost of getting rid of the Clintons.

Who does Naked Capitalism represent? The site, which I describe as “fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power,” receives 1.3 million to 1.5 million page views a month and has amassed approximately 80 million readers since its launch in 2006. Its readership is disproportionately graduate school-educated, older, male and high income. Despite the overall predominance of male readers, many of the fiercest critics of Clinton in the commentariat are women, with handles like HotFlash, Katniss Everdeen, Martha r, Portia, Bev and Pat.

What they also object to is that the larger bloc of Sanders voters has been treated with abuse and contempt by the Clinton camp, despite the fact that their positions—such as strengthening Social Security and Medicare, stronger educational funding and higher minimum wages—have for decades polled by solid majorities or, at worst, ample pluralities in the electorate at large.

By contrast, the Democratic Party in the Clinton and Obama administrations has consistently embraced and implemented policies that strip workers of economic and legal rights to benefit investors and the elite professionals that serve them. Over time, the “neoliberal” economic order—which sees only good, never bad, in the relentless untrammeling of capital and the deregulation of markets—has created an unacceptable level of economic insecurity and distress for those outside the 1 percent and the elite professionals who serve them.

The result is that the U.S. economy is becoming lethal to the less fortunate, according to the New York Times, which reported this week that U.S. death rates have risen for the first time in a decade. The increase in death rates among less educated whites since 2001 is roughly the size of the AIDS epidemic. One cause, the opioid epidemic, resulted from Purdue Pharma overselling the effectiveness of reformulated OxyContin, then recommending higher dosages when it failed to work properly, which experts deemed a prescription for creating addicts, according to a number of lawsuits. This was permitted by the U.S. government, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Despite President Barack Obama’s Panglossian claim that the economy is doing well, the spike in suicides to levels over those during the financial crisis belies that.

Yet the Clinton campaign is in such denial about this that it has become vitriolic in its verbal and tactical attacks on Sanders and his supporters—rather than recognizing that the stunning success of his campaign is proof of their abject policy failures. The message is clear: The Clintons believe, as Bill himself put it, that the true progressives have nowhere to go.

But in fact, they’ve been leaving. The Clinton and Obama administrations presided over the worst losses in congressional and state races in modern history in 1994, 2010 and 2012. And voter preferences were clear. Under Obama, it was the Blue Dog, Third Way Democrats who were turfed out, while candidates with strong stances on economic justice kept their seats. Similarly, as political scientist Tom Ferguson pointed out in a Roosevelt Institute paper, Obama’s loss of a Senate majority when Republican Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was the result of his focus on bailing out banks rather than aiding distressed homeowners (or forcing mortgage services to give modifications to borrowers who still had adequate income, as banks had done historically). The level of votes for Brown was strongly correlated with the amount of foreclosures in those particular districts.

True progressives know that the Clinton and Obama presidencies have brought inequality to Gilded Era, banana-republic levels. They know that Obama’s policies, which the Clintons embrace, have had all of the post-crisis income gains accrue to the top 1 percent. In addition, corporate profits have risen to nearly double the ratio to GDP that Warren Buffett deemed unsustainably high in the early 2000s. Unlike China, they’ve also ushered in an era of high unemployment and underemployment, as reflected in unheard-of low levels of labor force participation and unemployment among the young in a nominal expansion.

The Clintons’ dismal record, which Hillary cannot run away from, speaks for itself. And this is what makes many progressives I know unable to support her, even if she wins the nomination. Consider the reasons why they feel this way:

Social Security. Bill Clinton made a deal with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security, but Monica Lewinsky derailed his plans. Sanders has promised to strengthen Social Security. By contrast, Clinton wants to “preserve” it, which includes means-testing. That would put Social Security on a path to being a welfare program, not a universal safety net, making it vulnerable in the long run. Bill Clinton’s ending of welfare is an illustration of the regular pattern, dating back to England’s Poor Law of 1834, of gutting safety nets for the poor.

Climate change. Sanders calls for a full-bore, Marshall-Plan level commitment to reducing carbon output. Hillary talks about climate change but pushed for fracking in Europe while secretary of state. The Clintons remain firmly committed to fracking, which ruins water supplies and releases large amounts of methane.

Minimum wage. Inflation-adjusted minimum wage increases under Clinton were negligible—virtually identical to those under George H.W. Bush. Obama promised a minimum wage increase to $9.50 an hour and failed to act in the first four years of his presidency. Sanders wants to raise minimum wages to $15 an hour, while Clinton stands pat with the administration plan to increase wages to $12 an hour by 2020.

Trade deals. Bill Clinton ushered in NAFTA, which was touted as positive for growth and employment, and is now widely acknowledged to have cost nearly a million jobs. Even one of its chief promoters, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now deems it to have been a failure for American workers. Hillary consistently backed the Trans-Pacific Partnership until Sanders made an issue of it, and she’s recently returned to supporting it. The potential growth and income gains from this agreement and its European sister, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, are only marginally positive, while the loss of national sovereignty would be enormous. These agreements would enable foreign investors to challenge laws for labor, environmental and consumer protection, for threatening future profits.

Health care. Sanders wants single-payer, government-provided health care. Around the world, single payer has uncontestably demonstrated that it delivers better results overall at vastly lower cost. Obamacare took single payer off the table, instead rearranging the current costly, clumsy system while guaranteeing profits for health insurers and Big Pharma. Clinton at most has offered patches, but the pressure from Sanders has compelled her to suggest an early buy-in for Medicare.

That’s before we get to the Clintons’ loyalty to the Robert Rubin and neoliberal fetish of balanced budgets, which most economists say are not necessary. The recent European experience with austerity shows how disastrous that approach is, particularly in the wake of a financial crisis. Hillary’s hawkishness means an even greater commitment to military spending, so voters are assured to get more guns and less butter were she to become president.

The Sanders supporters I interact with also reject Hillary’s trickle-down feminism as a substitute for economic and social justice. Clinton is correct when she points out that there is a glass-ceiling issue for women. There are fewer female CEOs, billionaires and senators. Women in the elite don’t have it as good as men. But pray tell, what is having more women, or Hispanics or blacks, in top roles going to do for nurses and hospital orderlies, or the minority group members disproportionately represented in low-wage jobs like part-time fast food workers? Class mobility has become close to nonexistent in America. If you are born in one of the lower-income cohorts, you are almost certain to stay there.

As a woman who broke through an important glass ceiling on Wall Street—Christina Mohr, the first woman to become partner in mergers and acquisitions at Lazard—told a shocked group at Radcliffe seeking better career opportunities for women many years ago: “Nothing will change until women own the means of production.” And that sort of change comes from the bottom up.

Then there are questions of competence. Hillary has a résumé of glittering titles with disasters or at best thin accomplishments under each. Her vaunted co-presidency with Bill? After her first major project, health care reform, turned into such a debacle that it was impossible to broach the topic for a generation, she retreated into a more traditional first lady role. As New York senator, she accomplished less with a bigger name and from a more powerful state than Sanders did. As secretary of state, she participated and encouraged strategically pointless nation-breaking in Iraq and Syria. She bureaucratically outmaneuvered Obama, leading to U.S. intervention in Libya, which he has called the worst decision of his administration. And her plan to fob her domestic economic duties off on Bill comes off as an admission that she can’t handle being president on her own.

Mind you, these issues are all topics in the current debates. But what is as important, but not as obvious, is the way that most citizens have been stripped of legal and economic protections. As economist Michael Hudson put it, “Most inequality does not reflect differing levels of productivity, but distortions resulting from property rights or other special privileges." The Clinton era brought in weaker anti-trust enforcement, which allowed companies to accumulate more market share and with it, more ability to extract rents. Binding arbitration, which strips employees and consumers of their right to a day in court, has become widespread. Pensions, which used to be sacrosanct (and still are if you are a CEO), are regularly renegotiated. Banks got away with predatory servicing and wrongful foreclosures. Not only was the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement a “get out of liability almost free” card so large that it was tantamount to a second bailout, but banks were not required to fix their faulty servicing platforms, assuring that they’d revert to foreclosure abuses again when delinquencies rise. And let us not forget that senior bankers are a protected class, exempt from prosecution.

Finally, there is the stench of corruption, dating back to Hillary’s impossible—by any legitimate means—trick of parlaying $1,000 into $100,000 in a series of commodities trades in 1978. The Clintons and their backers seriously expect the rubes to believe that large financial firms happily forked over their hefty speaking fees purely out of interest in what they had to say, or that Middle Eastern and Taiwanese moneybags gave big bucks to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was
secretary of state out of their deep belief in the foundation’s lofty goals. Why has Hillary refused to release the transcripts of her Goldman speeches, wiped her server and foot-dragged on releasing allegedly personal emails?

The Sanders voters in Naked Capitalism’s active commentariat also explicitly reject lesser-evilism, the cudgel that has previously kept true lefties somewhat in line. They are willing to gamble, given that outsider presidents like Jimmy Carter and celebrity governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura didn’t get much done, that a Trump presidency represents an acceptable cost of inflicting punishment on the Democratic Party for 20 years of selling out ordinary Americans.

The Clintons, like the Bourbons before the French Revolution, have ensconced themselves in such a bubble of operative and media sycophancy that they’ve mistakenly viewed escalating distress and legitimate demands from citizens as mere noise. Sanders voters are taking their cue from Talleyrand, the statesman who navigated the Revolution and the turbulent 50 years that followed with remarkable success: “I have never abandoned a party before it abandoned itself.”

If my readers are representative, Clinton and the Democratic Party are about to have a long-overdue day of reckoning.

Yves Smith is the pen name of Susan Webber, a principal of Aurora Advisors and publisher of the Naked Capitalism economics blog.
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby conniption » Sun Jun 05, 2016 6:41 am

counterpunch

June 3, 2016
How Nate Silver Provides Political Cover for Hillary Clinton


by Ben Burgis

I went to highschool with Nate Silver in East Lansing. We were never friends, but we were briefly on the ELHS Debate team together, and I always liked him. When Nate rose to national prominence during the 2008 and 2012 elections, I was inclined to take a certain amount of hometown pride in the guy.

There were always signs that his political judgment left something to be desired. His commentary on Thomas Piketty was a travesty and his book The Signal and the Noise includes a fawning interview with war criminal Donald Rumsfeld. Still, none of that seemed to matter very much. Nate wasn’t a political commentator. He was a poll cruncher and a popularizer of important ideas about statistics and probability and he seemed to be doing good work in that capacity.

Nate Silver and Hillary Clinton

Unfortunately, in the specific context of the 2016 Democratic primary, Nate’s political judgment has started to get in the way of his primary mission. In the dispute about whether Hillary Clinton is (as she insists) a “progressive who knows how to get things done” or (as the Bernie or Bust crowd believes) a corporate shill and a dangerous warmonger to boot, he’s repeatedly come to her defense, arguing that “the numbers” show that she’s about as progressive as her opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination.

In July of last year, for example, Silver wrote that “[t]he policy differences between the Democrats aren’t all that profound; Clinton is pretty liberal…she and Sanders voted together 93 percent of the time in the two years they spent in the Senate together.”

In Fivethirtyeight’s live coverage of the MSNBC Democratic debate in February, he appealed to the same evidence to make the same point:

“If the policy differences between Sanders and Clinton seem relatively minor, that’s because they are. The two of them voted the same way 93 percent of the time for the two years they were in the Senate together, according to research by Derek Willis.”


He was taken enough with this factoid to repeat it later that night on his personal twitter account: “Clinton and Sanders voted together the same way 93% of the time.”

In his commentary on theresults in Kentucky and Oregon, he did grant that Clinton and Sanders weren’t ideological twins, but still insisted that their policy conclusions were more or less identical, using the only piece of evidence he ever uses to make this point: “They voted together 93% of the time when in Congress together.”

Why It Matters

Socialist Seattle City Councilwoman Kshwama Sawant argued in CounterPunch last month that instead of endorsing Hillary Clinton when she wins the Democratic nomination, Senator Sanders should either run as an independent or team up with Jill Stein on the Green Party’s ticket. I thought she made a good case, and I signed her petition. But if Nate Silver is right about the fundamental political similarity between Bernie and Hillary, this is nonsensical advice. Why split the vote between the two candidates if they’re in near-total agreement?

The first and most obvious problem with Silver’s analysis is that not all votes are equally important. The second is that, even if they were, the author of The Signal and the Noise would be committing an embarrassingly basic probabilistic fallacy in his treatment of the 93% factoid.

Breaking it Down

In the context of Senate voting records, there’s room for entire worlds in a difference of seven percent. Imagine two Senators who served together for two years in 2001 and 2002 and voted together differently on only two occasions in that entire time (as opposed to Clinton and Sanders, who voted differently on dozens of issues in the same amount of time). Now imagine that the three votes were on the Patriot Act and invasion of Iraq…i.e. the de facto legislative abolition of the Fourth Amendment and a catastrophic war that led to well over a million deaths and untold amounts of human suffering. Would you describe those differences as inconsequential? How about if they’d voted the same way on those two issues but voted differently on a dozen or two minor procedural votes? Would they be more different in the first scenario or in the second one?

To see whether the 93% figure is telling or misleading, we need to look at how many of those votes were matters on which every member of the caucus voted the same way, or even trivial issues commanding broad bipartisan agreement. In acting as if the raw uninterpreted frequency of Clinton and Sanders voting together means much of anything in itself, Silver is acting like a caricature of a “data-driven” journalist.

Even the source of Silver’s factoid, Derek Willis, has said that “the 31 times Clinton and Sanders disagreed [in their two years in the Senate together] happened to be on some of the biggest issues of the day…” Here are some of the votes on which they differed:

* The war in Iraq—Sanders voted against the invasion and Clinton voted for it

* A long series of votes to continue funding for the war which Sanders opposed and Clinton favored

* A long series of trade deals which Sanders opposed and Clinton favored

* The Patriot Act—Sanders voted against it and Clinton voted for it

* Reauthorizing the Patriot Act—Sanders voted against it and Clinton voted for it

* Guantanamo Bay—Clinton voted for a bill to force President Obama to keep the facility open by blocking funds for the transfer of detainees and Sanders voted against it

* The Bank Bailout—Clinton supported it and Sanders opposed it

Significantly, some of the biggest ticket items on this list, like (1) and (4), don’t even make it into Silver’s factoid, because the 93% only covers the two years when they were both in the Senate. Bernie Sanders voted against the Patriot Act and the invasion of Iraq while he was in the House. Hillary Clinton voted for both as a Senator.

This brings us to the second problem with Silver’s argument. There’s no more basic probabilistic fallacy than the Fallacy of Hasty Generalization, which we commit when we draw substantive conclusions from tiny and unrepresentative samples, and in using the 93% number to draw large conclusions about Sanders’ and Clinton’s policy preferences, Nate Silver is committing this fallacy in a particularly obvious and galling way.

Bernie Sanders has held elected office in one form or another since 1981, and he’s been in one or the other Houses of Congress since 1989. Hillary Clinton has been politically active either as an advisor to her husband or as a politician in her own right throughout the same period. As Doug Henwood has documented in his book My Turn, she spent her years in Arkansas waging relentless war on the state’s teachers’ unions. (This is what the campaign bios are talking about when they say she “fought for better education in Arkansas.”) She spent the 90s promoting NAFTA, harsher laws for criminal defendants, and draconian “welfare reform,” all of which Sanders bitterly opposed.

The problem isn’t just that Silvers’ sample size is absurdly small. The two years in which Clinton and Sanders overlapped in the Senate were 2007 and 2008. You don’t exactly have to be a political junkie to recall that Senator Clinton spent most of that time doing something other than hanging out at her D.C. office and showing up for votes in the Senate. Presidential candidates are constantly faced with trade-offs between missed votes and missed campaign opportunities. Every one understands this, and their colleagues make allowances for it. Under those circumstances, the votes she would have been most likely to show up to were those that were most important to the Democratic Party’s liberal base. Even so, she cast dozens of votes on the anti-Sanders side of “some of the biggest issues of the day.”

If you want to know whether to take a spike in Donald Trump’s poll numbers seriously or whether Ohio’s likely to go red or blue in the general election, ask Nate Silver. Look elsewhere if you want to know whether Hillary Clinton is a Sanders-like progressive or something entirely different.
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby Karmamatterz » Sun Jun 05, 2016 8:47 am

After Gaddafi fled Tripoli and was captured in his home town of Sirte, U.S.-backed rebels sodomized him with a knife and murdered him. Upon hearing of Gaddafi’s demise, Secretary of State Clinton clapped her hands in obvious glee and declared, “we came, we saw, he died.”


Full story: https://consortiumnews.com/2016/06/04/l ... s-hillary/

Chaos = profits

Hey AD, these folks are the real fascists with power. The images and stories about the white supremacists and emblem toting carnival barkers of hate are a red herring in the ecosystem of war profits and global totalitarianism.

The death industry would love to get Hillary elected.
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/06/04/l ... s-hillary/
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