Subject: ​Correct The Record Thursday October 2, 2014 Afternoon Roundup
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 13:56:56 -0400
List-Id: <CTRFriendsFamily.americanbridge.org>

*​**Correct The Record Thursday October 2, 2014 Afternoon Roundup:*

*Tweets:*

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: "We count you as family," @TAPS4America
<https://twitter.com/TAPS4America> founder Bonnie Carroll told Clinton,
"and we love you a great deal."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-emotional-at-event-for-families-of-fallen-military/
…
<http://t.co/Cri8cqzkoX> [10/2/14, 12:38 p.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/517715186250039297>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: "It's really important to me that we
never forget your loved ones and we never forget you." @HillaryClinton
<https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton>
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-emotional-at-event-for-families-of-fallen-military/
…
<http://t.co/Cri8cqzkoX> [10/2/14, 12:09 p.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/517707878656778240>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: VIDEO: @HillaryClinton
<https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton> honors military families
http://correctrecord.org/hillary-clinton-honors-military-families/ …
<http://t.co/cJJGEBhPOX> via @nytpolitics <https://twitter.com/nytpolitics>
 [10/2/14, 12:02 pm. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/517706139161473024>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: .@HillaryClinton
<https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton> Gets Close, Candid With Military
Families via @rubycramer <https://twitter.com/rubycramer>
http://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/hillary-clinton-gets-close-candid-with-military-families#41l0lm2
…
<http://t.co/am6Reve6ix> [10/2/14, 10:06 a.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/517677081355124736>]

*Headlines:*

*ABC News: “Hillary Clinton Comforts Military Families Who’ve Lost Loved
Ones”
<http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/10/hillary-clinton-comforts-military-families-whove-lost-loved-ones/>*

“In her first public appearance since the weekend birth of granddaughter
Charlotte, Hillary Clinton spoke at an event this evening in New York for
an organization that cares for the families of fallen military members, who
greeted her with moving stories of their loved ones.”

*CBS News: “Hillary Clinton ‘emotional’ at event for families of fallen
military”
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-emotional-at-event-for-families-of-fallen-military/>*

“Hillary Clinton received a lifetime achievement award from a group that
provides support for the families of fallen military service members on
Wednesday, thanking the survivors for sharing their often heart-wrenching
stories and praising the organization's work.”

*Vogue: “State of Play: John Kerry’s High-Stakes Year”
<http://www.vogue.com/1414623/john-kerry-secretary-of-state/>*

“Kerry began addressing each with gusto. ‘The way he views it is that
Secretary Clinton was secretary at a time when we had to repair our
relationship with the world,’ says State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki.
‘He’s building on a lot of the work she has done.’ (‘I telephone Hillary
here and there and ask her for her thoughts about things,’ Kerry says. ‘I
have a lot of admiration and friendship for her.’)”

*The Hill blog: Briefing Room: “Priebus: GOP women worth 'bragging' about”
<http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/219561-priebus-gop-does-bad-job-bragging-about-women>*

“The comments come with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presumed
to be Democratic frontrunner for president in 2016. ‘She doesn't poll as
well as you would think with women,’ Priebus said. ‘We need to do better
[...but] women, as of today, they don't have a sizable advantage in the
Democratic Party over the Republican Party, as much as that narrative has
sunk in.”

*Chicago Sun-Times: “Dungeons & Dragons Kickstarter campaign features
Hillary Clinton”
<http://politics.suntimes.com/article/washington/dungeons-dragons-kickstarter-campaign-features-hillary-clinton/thu-10022014>*

“Here are three things that don’t normally go together: Hillary Clinton,
Kickstarter and Dungeons & Dragons. For now, they do because one group
wants to raise money to hire Clinton to speak and ‘help us bring our
fantasy world to life.’”

*Articles:*

*ABC News: “Hillary Clinton Comforts Military Families Who’ve Lost Loved
Ones”
<http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/10/hillary-clinton-comforts-military-families-whove-lost-loved-ones/>*

By Shushanna Walshe

October 2, 2014, 10:22 p.m. EDT

In her first public appearance since the weekend birth of granddaughter
Charlotte, Hillary Clinton spoke at an event this evening in New York for
an organization that cares for the families of fallen military members, who
greeted her with moving stories of their loved ones.

“This a great privilege, but it is also for me emotional as we celebrate
the birth of our granddaughter and as I look out and see all of you who are
thinking of your loved ones and the life that he or she lived,” Clinton
said at the event for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors or TAPS,
a group that supports, connects and provides grief resources to military
families who have lost loved ones.

In the introduction, TAPS president Bonnie Carroll  told Clinton she is
“family” and gave her the organization’s Lifetime Service Award.  Clinton
spoke at another event for the group in 2006 and has served as an honorary
chairwoman.

Throughout her speech, some in the crowd became emotional and many of them
took to the rope line afterwards to share stories of their deceased family
members and show photos, with several telling her heartbreaking stories.
Some just wanted to take a photo with Clinton, but many more had a story to
tell.

One woman, after telling the former secretary of state about her fallen
husband, said, “I miss him every day, thank you for coming.”

Clinton listened to their stories and expressed her condolences, saying
over and over again, “I am so, so sorry,” at times holding the family
members’ hands. One man who urged Clinton to run for president also told
her about his nephew who he said “got the run around” and “got screwed at
the VA,” referring to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“We need to fix the VA and we need to fix the mental health system,” he
told her. Clinton nodded in agreement.

In her speech, she told the families “it’s really important to me that we
never forget your loved ones and we never forget you.”

“At a time when sometimes we seem divided and people seem to be arguing all
the time we really have to take stock of how blessed we are and grateful
for the men and women who serve us and be thankful that we have through all
of our ups and downs and our challenges continues to stand for the values
that unite us: freedom and democracy and opportunity and by supporting you
all who will serve in the future,” Clinton told the crowd at Stella 43
Trattoria, a restaurant inside the iconic New York City Macy’s store.

*CBS News: “Hillary Clinton ‘emotional’ at event for families of fallen
military”
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-emotional-at-event-for-families-of-fallen-military/>*

By Jake Miller

October 2, 2014, 10:16 a.m. EDT

Hillary Clinton received a lifetime achievement award from a group that
provides support for the families of fallen military service members on
Wednesday, thanking the survivors for sharing their often heart-wrenching
stories and praising the organization's work.

The award was presented in New York City by the Tragedy Assistance Program
for Survivors (TAPS), a group that provides "peer-based emotional support"
and "grief and trauma resources" for the families of the departed,
according to its website. Clinton has previously served as the group's
honorary chairwoman.

Clinton said the event was particularly "emotional" for her, according to
the Associated Press, especially given the birth of her granddaughter last
Friday. It was the former secretary of state's first public appearance
since her daughter Chelsea gave birth to a baby girl, Charlotte Clinton
Mezvinsky.

"This a great privilege, but it is also for me emotional as we celebrate
the birth of our granddaughter and as I look out and see all of you who are
thinking of your loved ones and the life that he or she lived," she said,
according to ABC News. "It's really important to me that we never forget
your loved ones and we never forget you."

Clinton nodded at her work on the Armed Services Committee when she was a
senator from New York, recalling her work with TAPS and other groups to
increase survivor benefits for the families of fallen service members.

"We fought, we cajoled," she said, adding that they eventually secured an
increase in immediate survivor benefits from $12,000 to $100,000.

Several attendees shared their stories of loss with Clinton. One man
described his nephew's frustrating experience with the Veteran's Affairs
medical system, which has been buffeted this year by scandal after reports
revealed crushing wait times and employee misconduct at VA facilities.

"If you run, and I hope you do, fix the VA and fix the mental health
system," he said, according to Buzzfeed. "My nephew was lost, and let me
tell you something...he really got screwed."

Another woman told Clinton it had been two years since her brother's
suicide.

"Did he get any help at all?" Clinton asked.

"Not the right help," the woman said.

Bonnie Carroll, the president and founder of TAPS, thanked Clinton for her
previous work with the group.

"We count you as family," she told Clinton," and we love you a great deal."

*Vogue: “State of Play: John Kerry’s High-Stakes Year”
<http://www.vogue.com/1414623/john-kerry-secretary-of-state/>*

By Suzy Hansen

October 2, 2014, 8:00 a.m. EDT

[Subtitle:] Through one international crisis after another, America’s
Secretary of State is waging a marathon campaign of high-stakes diplomacy.

Back in June, Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to the tiny French
village of Saint-Briac-sur-Mer to do something he never could have done
while running for president—celebrate his European roots. Kerry’s mother, a
descendant of the Forbes shipping family, grew up here on an estate called
Les Essarts, which was destroyed by the Nazis and then rebuilt as an
enormous blue-shuttered château the family still owns today. “Johnnie,” as
one of his cousins, the town’s former mayor, calls him, spent his boyhood
summers in this idyllic, immaculate place: all stone buildings, cobbled
streets, épiceries with bright awnings, and women in Jean Seberg striped
jerseys outside the Bar Tabac de la Poste. Having come from the
seventieth-anniversary commemorations of the Normandy invasion, Kerry, 70
himself and slender as the Tin Man, is dressed in a midnight-blue suit and
a pink-orange tie, his dense, graying hair as immovable as ever. He glances
toward the windswept Brittany coastline and then at the crowds trailing his
convoy, eager to see an eminent American so intimately connected with their
village give a speech about the war.

I have been traveling with Kerry for several days—from Warsaw to Beirut to
France—and though I have caught glimpses of his playful side, the Secretary
of State has largely lived up to his reputation for reserve. In the
backseat of his SUV, we discuss the elaborate Normandy festivities at Omaha
Beach, where President Obama, German chancellor Angela Merkel, and Russian
president Vladimir Putin gathered to remember the sacrifice of hundreds of
thousands of Allied soldiers—and Kerry is pensive. He speaks of how
terrifying the invasion must have been for the soldiers. I ask if he, as a
former officer, could put himself in their shoes. He shakes his head.
“There was the possibility that we would be killed,” he says, referring to
his tours of duty in Vietnam, “but it was more remote in that you didn’t
know when you were going to be ambushed. You didn’t know when something was
going to happen. In that situation”—D-day—“you know. You are watching boats
blown up around you. It’s hell.”

I compare the America of 70 years ago, the America that liberated France
and won the admiration of the world, to the America of today, which seems
more embattled and wary. It’s a moment, I suggest, “where there are
accusations that America is ‘pulling back’——”

“No, no! We’re not, we’re not pulling back,” he says. Kerry leans forward
in his seat. “That kicks me into gear and makes me want to go out and
explain more. We have to make it clearer to people. I intend to, and the
president intends to. That’s what he did at West Point.”

He is referring to President Obama’s much-discussed speech in May at the
military college, in which he laid out a vision of American foreign policy
that emphasized diplomatic engagement over the reflexive use of military
force. “We have to build on that,” he continues. “And that’s what I am
going to do.”

But Kerry will barely get the chance. The summer will bring a cascading and
surreal series of international crises, which keeps him constantly on the
move. Rarely a day goes by without shocking and terrifying news: a fierce
election dispute in Afghanistan that threatens to bring the country to
civil war; the downing of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner in Ukraine; a deadly
conflict between Israel and Hamas; the advance across Iraq of the jihadist
group ISIS, on whom President Obama authorizes air strikes in mid-August.

During this jolting period Kerry will seem to be everywhere at once,
engaging in negotiations, jousting with his foreign counterparts, and
struggling to pull off small victories before jumping back on his plane. “I
don’t think there has ever been a Secretary of State who has thrown himself
into the job with as much verve and conviction as this guy has,” says
Strobe Talbott, a deputy Secretary of State under President Clinton and now
the president of the Washington think tank the Brookings Institution as
well as a Kerry adviser. “If he can’t get a workable and acceptable
compromise on a dispute, it’s very hard to imagine anybody who can.”

Kerry practices just the sort of vigorous diplomacy President Obama spoke
about at West Point—but his relentlessness, especially on issues as
seemingly intractable as Israeli-Palestinian peace, has been bruising at
times. Does America wield the influence in the world that it once did?
Critics say that Kerry’s go-for-broke diplomatic style raises just this
question—and that he has wasted time on problems that the U.S. cannot
solve; supporters say that if Kerry achieves a breakthrough in even one of
his major endeavors—say, a nuclear deal with Iran—he could be one of the
most important Secretaries of State in recent history.

“There’s a lot going on,” Kerry acknowledges when I meet with him over the
summer in his office at the State Department. “But when you have four or
five flare-ups at the same time, you’ve still got to talk to people; you’ve
got to sit down with them face-to-face, look in their eyes, grab the
problem, and work through it. So we’re managing. We can multitask.”

It’s a tremendous amount of pressure for someone who already suffered a
large-scale defeat in his political career, but Kerry seems at ease. “I
feel comfortable, and I feel free,” he says of the work he’s doing now. “I
feel completely liberated. But, you know . . . I was a lot better senator
after I ran for president because I had done it. I had run. I came within
59,000 votes in one state”—Ohio—“so for three hours I was president.” He
smiles to make sure I get what I am not completely sure is a joke.

“I feel like I made a few mistakes, but I didn’t blow it,” he continues and
shrugs. “The one thing I kick myself about back then is not listening to
myself a few times . . . not letting it all out.”

Democrats could be forgiven for feeling less sanguine about 2004. Many
still consider Kerry’s loss to President George W. Bush an almost
unfathomable debacle. The war in Iraq was proving disastrous at the time,
and Kerry had the perfect presidential résumé: a Kennedy-like background, a
record of courage in Vietnam, 20 years in the Senate. But some voters found
him hard to connect to and perceived an aristocratic air that the Right
mercilessly exploited. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smeared Kerry’s
military record, Republicans branded him a flip-flopper on Iraq (a war he
had voted for in 2002), and, in the end, Kerry lost the popular vote by 3
million.

“I don’t think there’s anything harder in this life,” apart from matters of
life and death, “than losing a presidential election,” says his friend
former Yale classmate and State Department adviser David Thorne. “It
requires determination and toughness to get back up on the horse.”

After the election, Kerry largely faded from view as he returned to the
Senate, chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, and recovered from his
loss. “I would say he became more confident,” says his longtime chief of
staff, David Wade. “That experience of running a campaign like that . . .
and then losing in a pretty heartbreaking way. He came out of that
experience with a great deal of conviction about how he wanted to spend his
60s and his 70s.

“I also think it left him with a little sense of ‘I just don’t really give
a shit,’ ” Wade adds. “People are going to make judgments, but you play a
long game.”

That long game has brought a kind of vindication. Today President Obama’s
foreign policy happens to look much like Kerry proposed America’s should
during the campaign in 2004: more modest, more interested in multilateral
diplomacy and fighting terrorism on a case-by-case basis. Kerry praises
what he calls President Obama’s “very careful, hard-nosed approach” to
decision-making. “I am impressed by the questions he asks . . . and how he
wants to know the strategy and the facts that support that choice before he
makes it—not afterward.”

The world is also more turbulent, multipolar, and crisis-prone than it was
a decade ago. When Kerry succeeded Hillary Clinton as secretary in 2013,
after President Obama’s presumed choice, Susan Rice, withdrew her name
following the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, he faced a dizzying list of
problems. The U.S. was in the midst of messy withdrawals from Iraq and
Afghanistan. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process was dead. The Arab
Spring had upended American policy in the Middle East. Syria had become a
humanitarian catastrophe, and Iran still posed a nuclear threat.

Kerry began addressing each with gusto. “The way he views it is that
Secretary Clinton was secretary at a time when we had to repair our
relationship with the world,” says State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki.
“He’s building on a lot of the work she has done.” (“I telephone Hillary
here and there and ask her for her thoughts about things,” Kerry says. “I
have a lot of admiration and friendship for her.”)

At press time, Kerry had traveled some 543,687 miles, visited 55 countries,
and spent almost 1,200 hours in the air. “He has chosen to tackle head-on
some difficult strategic issues,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S.
national-security adviser, “and these issues would probably deteriorate
into more dangerous prospects without some serious signs of U.S. interest.”

“He listens well,” says Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq, of Kerry’s
diplomatic style. “He will listen to his interlocutors, understand their
viewpoint, and make his points within the context of where they stand. That
kind of empathy goes a long way to creating a climate in which compromise
and agreement become possible. And he also has a reputation for absolute
honesty and integrity. He never misleads, and he’s known for it.”

There are those who call Kerry naive or arrogant for believing that he can
somehow solve problems that no one else can. “I think he vastly overstates
his personal ability to persuade people to do what the U.S. wants,” says
Stephen Walt, an expert on foreign policy and a professor of international
affairs at Harvard. “Kerry is like Madeleine Albright, who said that the
U.S. is ‘the indispensable nation.’ So if a problem happens in the South
China Sea or Nigeria or Ukraine, Kerry thinks there’s a solution in
Washington. And he hops on a plane to try and provide it. I think that view
is occasionally correct, but usually not.”

Kerry’s response is that he would “rather get caught trying than never try
at all” (this, incidentally, was also a favorite phrase of President
Clinton’s). He acknowledges that President Obama has given him “enormous
latitude. I actually thanked him a couple of months ago,” he tells me. “I
said, ‘You know, Mr. President, I want to thank you for giving me the
breadth to take the ball and roll with it.’ ”

It’s obvious that Kerry is more suited to the diplomatic life than he ever
would have been to the modern presidency. He is far less extroverted and
eager to please than most politicians—and he can’t fake a folksy, telegenic
style. He has a solemn air of politeness, which seems to come from a sense
of duty. At a press conference in Beirut, for example, I watch a Lebanese
journalist yell angrily at him because she believes Kerry’s staff has cut
the time short. Kerry, halfway off the dais, stops mid-stride, eyebrows
raised, and returns to the microphone. “I’m very happy to take your
question,” he says with gentle amusement. On his plane, he briskly walks
the aisles to say hello to members of the press, flashing a T-shirt given
to him by a Lebanese security detail, posing obligingly for photos. The
routine lasts for only a minute or two before he passes his huddled staff
and the hulking bodyguards stowing their weapons, and returns to his
cabin—back to work.

Work is a constant. Only rarely do photographers catch him relaxing or
kiteboarding on Nantucket, and his reading tends toward serious history and
biography (though he recently made time for The Art of Fielding). For a man
in his eighth decade, Kerry takes remarkably little time off—but he seems
to be having a good time on the road, too. One night in Paris, I run into
him outside the gilded Westin hotel near the Tuileries Garden, returning
from dinner at Chez L’Ami Louis with David Thorne, his stepson André Heinz,
and both men’s partners. He stands on the sidewalk extolling the virtues of
the wine he’d had that evening, then poses for selfies with some eagle-eyed
Boston natives. It is midnight when he disappears into the hotel bar, his
staffers trailing behind him, struggling to keep up.

“I really do think some of it comes out of Vietnam,” says Wade about
Kerry’s drive. “He came out of Vietnam with a pretty fundamental conviction
that for whatever reasons a lot of his closest friends never came home, and
he did. He has this conviction of not wasting time.”

Peals of laughter can be heard from his plane cabin when Kerry FaceTimes
with his daughter Vanessa, a critical-care physician in Boston, and his
two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Alexander. Kerry’s other daughter,
Alexandra, a film director, recently had a baby girl. “He’s been awesome,
actually,” Vanessa says of Kerry as grandfather. “I have left him alone to
babysit Alexander, which makes me feel really guilty. I remember asking
him, ‘What are you going to do if the prime minister of Israel calls?’ And
he said, ‘I’ll figure it out.’ ”

“We have many late-night and early-morning phone calls, and John takes
every opportunity to get home,” reports his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, whom
he married in 1995 and who quickly became known for her outspokenness and
humor on the campaign trail. Now 75, she suffered a seizure last summer
while vacationing on Nantucket, and has been keeping out of the public eye
through her recovery. “I have learned so much about the brain and the time
it takes to recover from a seizure such as mine,” she adds. “I feel blessed
to have the support of my husband—who quite literally lay beside me in my
hospital bed last year.”

Kerry’s first wife was Vanessa and Alexandra’s mother, Julia Thorne, who
died of cancer in 2006. (She and Kerry divorced in 1988.) Since her death,
Kerry has become assertive with parental advice. Vanessa remembers when she
was getting married in 2009—Kerry was senator then—her father handed her a
sketch of what resembled a wedding dress. “I don’t know what he was going
for—I think it was sort of a strapless gown that was formfitting up top and
flowing on the bottom. He drew on a sticky note, like, ‘This is what I
think the dress should look like.’ He genuinely had been thinking about it.
It’s been really sweet to see him cross some of the normal territory
because we don’t have our mom.”

“Most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about
America’s presence; they worry about what would happen in our absence,”
Kerry told the graduating class at Yale this May, sounding like the
idealistic young man who signed up to serve in Vietnam. In other ways,
though, he remains the heartbroken veteran who turned against the war, too.
“I think the president and I share a tremendous sense of the damage that
was done by the prior administration’s approach—particularly to Iraq, and
its inattention to Afghanistan,” he says to me during our interview at the
State Department. America’s “wars of choice . . . never should have become
what they were, and never should have taken place.”

His office suite, decorated with traditional Washington Federal-style
furniture and Oriental rugs in patterns of scarlet and blue, overlooks the
Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. It’s a handsome but not particularly
personal space, and I imagine Kerry prefers his plane or Boston, where he
works out of an office in his Beacon Hill town house.

I ask about the fears of American decline expressed so often on the
political Right. “Well, first of all, there’s no empire; there’s no desire
for empire. The age of empire is over,” he tells me. “What we’re looking at
now is an age of alliances and partnerships.”

He adds that “democracy is not on the wane. People want democracy.” What we
have to be mindful of is “young people around the world being co-opted by
the demagoguery of individual leaders. If we don’t find a global approach
to them, we’re all going to feel the heat.” This brings terrorism into our
conversation; he calls it “the instrument of choice that fills the vacuum
left by inadequate governance.”

His assessment of the terrorist group ISIS and their murderous tactics is
unsparing: “They’re ugly. They’re really horrible—as bad as anything I’ve
seen in public life. They’re willing to kill indiscriminately.” He adds
that “they have proclaimed definitively that they intend to attack the
West” and that countries across the Middle East—from Israel to Iran to
Syria to Jordan—oppose the group: “All of us are unwilling to tolerate the
rise of a jihadist ISIS.”

I ask him if it’s painful to see the sectarian deterioration in Iraq.
“Well, it makes me angry,” he says. “Painful is not the word I’d choose. We
never should have turned it upside down. Having done so, they”—the Bush
administration—“never put a political process together.” We will speak
about Iraq again after the country’s embattled leader, Nouri al-Maliki,
resigns, and shortly before the execution by ISIS of American journalist
James Foley. Over the phone, Kerry will express some cautious optimism:
“It’s moving in the right direction with Maliki stepping down peacefully.”
A legitimate government, he says, “was the prerequisite for President
Obama, from day one, to say now we can do something about ISIL”—an
alternative name for ISIS. “The U.S. is not going to get involved in any
on-the-ground combat troops . . . but we’re not going to shy away from
equipping and assisting.”

The fighting that broke out between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip
captured Kerry’s focus like no other development this summer. In July, Fox
News caught him on a live microphone speaking to his Deputy Chief of Staff
Jonathan Finer and seeming to complain about the scope of Israel’s
incursion into Gaza (“It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,” he’ll tell
Finer sarcastically). Back on air, he will quickly champion Israel’s right
to defend itself, as he will even after being criticized by Israeli leaders
who publicly dismiss Kerry’s efforts to broker peace.

With me he defends his attempt to get a cease-fire. “The level of
collateral damage that was taking place inevitably was going to turn
against Israel and be harmful to the overall effort and harden people
against cutting some kind of long-term agreement. So that’s why we were
pushing. We continue to work at this and we’re going to, despite
frustrations in one camp or another—because the stakes are very, very high.”

At the end of the summer, Kerry traveled to Australia and Myanmar and
declared, upon his return, that he would be turning his attention to
“long-term opportunities” in that region of the world. It was a reminder
that Kerry has another two years to serve as the president’s chief
diplomat, and much ground still to cover. If you ask him about the legacy
he hopes to leave, however, he practically snaps. “I don’t think about a
legacy. I think about getting the job done as well as I can, and you and
history and other people will take care of the rest of it.”

But he does reflect on the past. “You know, obviously, losing the
presidency is not the option of first choice,” he says and laughs, as if
awed by the memory. “But you can’t get lost in it. I said, ‘I am not going
to make this the defining moment of a life of involvement in public service
and caring about things.’ I was a senator and had a lot I was interested
in; I have a great family, a great life, and I have nothing to complain
about. So I went right back in and started kicking. . . .

“I love it, I really enjoy this job, it’s a great job,” he continues. “And
I am excited. Look, we got the deal on chemical weapons [in Syria]; we’ve
got Iran talking. We’ve got the Middle East people talking—we’ve made a lot
of progress there, and I believe we’ll get back to talking.” He cocks his
head pointedly, with a faint smile. “I am not finished.”

*The Hill blog: Briefing Room: “Priebus: GOP women worth 'bragging' about”
<http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/219561-priebus-gop-does-bad-job-bragging-about-women>*

By Kevin Cirilli

October 2, 2014, 10:59 a.m. EDT

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Thursday that
his party is making gains among women voters, but it needs to do more
"bragging" about the women in its own ranks.

During a panel at George Washington University, Priebus praised GOP leaders
like Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Rep.
Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.).

"We do a really bad job bragging about it," he said following his prepared
remarks. "As far as putting more women up on the news on Sunday morning and
making sure that we're placing people better — I think we've improved on
that a lot."

The comments come with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presumed
to be Democratic frontrunner for president in 2016.

"She doesn't poll as well as you would think with women," Priebus said. "We
need to do better [...but] women, as of today, they don't have a sizable
advantage in the Democratic Party over the Republican Party, as much as
that narrative has sunk in.

Priebus also said the party must shift its strategy in 2016 to focus more
on a ground game as opposed just to raising large amounts of money.

"We had become a U-Haul trailer of cash for a presidential nominee," he
said of 2012. "That is a loser's strategy."

Priebus said that party can't just "raise a gazillion dollars and hand it
off to the presidential nominee" or engage in a "23-debate traveling
circus," alluding to the 2012 Republican nominating process. "

You have to be a national party obsessed over mechanics, obsessed over a
ground game, over the data game," he said.

*Chicago Sun-Times: “Dungeons & Dragons Kickstarter campaign features
Hillary Clinton”
<http://politics.suntimes.com/article/washington/dungeons-dragons-kickstarter-campaign-features-hillary-clinton/thu-10022014>*

By Chad Merda

October 2, 2014, 10:42 a.m. EDT

Here are three things that don’t normally go together: Hillary Clinton,
Kickstarter and Dungeons & Dragons.

For now, they do because one group wants to raise money to hire Clinton to
speak and “help us bring our fantasy world to life.”

The only problem for the Dungeons & Dragons group from New York? They don’t
have $200,000, which is what Clinton’s reportedly paid to speak. So
naturally, they’re turning to Kickstarter to help and have launched a
fundraising campaign called “Hillary Clinton: The Ultimate Adventure.”

So far, they’re off to a slow start, with a little more than $200 pledged.

“Everyone can benefit from Hillary’s legendary political savvy and
top-notch oratory skills. Especially gamers,” writes Jared Logan, who
started the effort.

And really, it’s all about the D-word.

“By achieving this goal, we will prove that a democracy is for the people
and by the people,” Logan writes. “We will show that even the most
disenfranchised and oppressed group in this country (tabletop roleplayers)
can still access our nation’s leaders and speak to them face to face.”

And if by some small miracle they not only raise the money, but manage to
lure Clinton to New York, she’ll have to forgo the large venue she’s
accustomed to — and maybe even duck to avoid hitting her head on some low
beams and exposed plumbing.

Why? Because she’d be speaking for an hour, “in Eric’s Dad’s basement in
Greenpoint, Brooklyn.”