Subject: ​Correct The Record Tuesday October 14, 2014 Afternoon Roundup
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 15:06:51 -0400
List-Id: <CTRFriendsFamily.americanbridge.org>

*​**Correct The Record Tuesday October 14, 2014 Afternoon Roundup:*

*Tweets:*

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: #ICYMI
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/ICYMI?src=hash> @GGPotter
<https://twitter.com/ggpotter> is proud to have @HillaryClinton
<https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton> at UNLV via @ElkoDaily
<https://twitter.com/ElkoDaily>
http://elkodaily.com/09/commentary-proud-to-have-hillary-clinton-at-unlv/article_c5a48f1d-9ee8-58a5-bef1-8b126969ebdc.html
…
<http://t.co/e6CqWF9z47> [10/13/14, 5:41 p.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/521777702957633537>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: .@HillaryClinton
<https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton> “has done so much more to promote
education than just raise money… She’s...​ ​made a real difference.” -Gregg
Potter [10/13/14, 3:43 p.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/521747999995600896>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: UNLV grad: “Hillary Clinton… has spent
her entire career increasing educational opportunities for so many people,
including me.” ​@ElkoDaily <https://twitter.com/ElkoDaily> [10/13/14, 3:38
p.m. EDT <https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/521746727825469441>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: Commentary: Proud to have Hillary
Clinton at UNLV via @ElkoDaily <https://twitter.com/ElkoDaily>
http://elkodaily.com/09/commentary-proud-to-have-hillary-clinton-at-unlv/article_c5a48f1d-9ee8-58a5-bef1-8b126969ebdc.html
…
<http://t.co/mILEYisMnc> [10/13/14, 3:34 p.m. EDT
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/521745713827688449>]

*Headlines:*

*Huffington Post opinion: Peter D. Rosenstein: “Hillary Clinton is Right;
Every Child must be Considered 'Too Small to Fail'”
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-d-rosenstein/hillary-clinton-is-right_b_5984090.html>*

“Ensuring that children do well is the goal of a new Clinton Foundation
initiative begun by Hillary Clinton.”

*Politico blog: Dylan Byers on Media: “Christie, Clinton top 2016 coverage”
<http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/10/christie-clinton-top-coverage-197049.html>*

“Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie have received more newspaper coverage
than any other potential 2016 presidential candidate so far this year, a
new Pew report found.”

*Washington Post blog: The Fix: “Hillary Clinton’s best campaign surrogate
is barely a month old”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/10/14/hillary-clintons-best-campaign-surrogate-is-barely-a-month-old/>*

“Politicians show off their kids and their families all the time, mostly as
a way to telegraph all- American normality. Clinton is doing something
different. She is using Charlotte as a kind of mirror to both recognize her
own privilege and argue against it.”

*Wall Street Journal blog: Washington Wire: “Hillary Clinton: Putin Must Be
Kept Contained”
<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/10/14/hillary-clinton-putin-must-be-kept-contained/>*

“In a speech Monday night in Las Vegas, Mrs. Clinton depicted Russian
President Vladimir Putin as a mortal threat to sovereign European countries
and U.S. interests. She called for a sustained commitment to keep him
contained.”

*Washington Post blog: All Opinions Are Local: “Tim Kaine probably is at
the top of everyone’s VP list”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/all-opinions-are-local/wp/2014/10/14/tim-kaine-probably-is-at-the-top-of-everyones-vp-list/>*

“The political bottom line: Kaine’s the right balance for her [Sec.
Clinton] should she win the 2016 presidential nomination.”

*Yahoo: “In Iowa, Ready for Hillary builds a list and hopes for the best”
<http://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-s-list-builders-can-t-fix-all-that-went-wrong-in-2008-221008821.html>*

“So why is Ready for Hillary hard at work in Iowa — and so far in advance
of the caucuses — if Clinton did so well here in 2008? There are a few
reasons, her supporters say.”

*Associated Press: “Arkansas Democrats calling, again, on Bill Clinton”
<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/04c9a6113f8f475294a425f34245815c/arkansas-democrats-calling-again-bill-clinton>*

“Democrats announced Tuesday that former President Bill Clinton will
headline rallies this weekend in several Arkansas cities. Most of his stops
will be in the 4th District, where one of his former Cabinet officials is
running for Congress.”

*Articles:*

*Huffington Post opinion: Peter D. Rosenstein: “Hillary Clinton is Right;
Every Child must be Considered 'Too Small to Fail'”
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-d-rosenstein/hillary-clinton-is-right_b_5984090.html>*

By Peter D. Rosenstein

October 14, 2014, 1:15 p.m. EDT

In a recent Washington Post article it was reported that the federal
Healthy Start program was changing and becoming more of a competitive grant
program. That would be totally counter-productive to the stated goals of
the program. Rather than cutting it this program should be expanded to
include even more children and focus on them from birth to five.

According to the Health Resources and Services Administration's (HRSA)
website "The Healthy Start program works to prevent infant mortality in 87
communities with infant mortality rates at least 1.5 times the national
average and high rates of low birth weight, preterm birth, maternal
mortality and maternal morbidity (serious medical conditions resulting from
or aggravated by pregnancy and delivery). Healthy Start communities are
some of our nation's poorest and Healthy Start families frequently struggle
to meet their most basic needs. Healthy Start reaches out to pregnant women
and new mothers and connects them with the health care and other resources
they need to nurture their children."

The benefits of this program have been seen in the District of Columbia, a
city of both rich and poor. There are parents who can afford the best for
their children and don't need help and parents who desperately need help so
their children can grow up healthy with the opportunity to reach their full
potential. Both sets of parents want the best for their children but one
group either doesn't have the knowledge or the resources, or both, to do
what is needed. The Healthy Start program is making a difference.

The Mayor of the D.C. recently announced the District's partnership in a
Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) program called Stronger2gether. It is a
public-private partnership with over 40 CGI partners working to improve
maternal and child-health outcomes. According to the Mayor "Stronger2gether
is working to reduce infant mortality utilizing innovative analytics, best
clinical practices and the mobilization of community partners. The idea is
to create a culture of health and help babies get to their first birthday
healthy and ready to thrive." One must question why when CGI and its 40
partners recognize the importance of such a program the federal government
is cutting back theirs.

Our priorities as a nation must include a focus on children and their
quality of life from birth to age five. We need to not only keep children
alive but ensure that with a combination of nature and nurture they thrive.

Ensuring that children do well is the goal of a new Clinton Foundation
initiative begun by Hillary Clinton. The foundation in partnership with
Next Generation began a project called Too Small to Fail. Its stated goal
is, "to help parents, caregivers, communities and businesses take
meaningful, evidence-based actions that will improve the health and
well-being of America's youngest children, age zero to five, and prepare
them to succeed in the 21st century."

According to its materials the Too Small to Fail project, which builds on
the work for children that has been the hallmark of Hillary Clinton's
career, it is based on the fact that, "Research on the brain informs us
that the most important time in building a person's capacity to learn and
understand is between the ages of zero to five. That is when with
appropriate stimulation a child's brain grows the fastest and synapses
connect. It is the time when every sound, every sight, every touch, and
every spoken word get gathered together and filed away to be referenced and
built upon with every interaction as the brain develops. It is during these
first few years of life that we learn language, important social and
emotional skills, critical thinking, and how to focus on tasks at hand."

If we strengthen our focus on infants and young children we will accomplish
what has been the elusive holy grail of the education system; doing away
with the achievement gap. We can ensure every child comes to school equally
ready to learn. While Too Small to Fail is developing a public action
campaign and testing it out in a number of communities, others need not
wait to adopt this idea. One option is to push for expanding Healthy Start.
We should provide for each child age zero to five who doesn't have someone
at home who can do it; a mentor who will talk to, read to, sing to, and
play music for them.

We need to model this program on the idea some attribute to an old African
proverb, and which Hillary used as the title for her book, 'It Takes a
Village'. We must involve the whole community, including the faith
community, so that each child has at least one person able to commit the
quality time it will take to make a difference in their lives from zero to
five. We must insist that government not shirk what should be its
responsibility and provide the funding for our children's future when
others either can't or won't.

*Politico blog: Dylan Byers on Media: “Christie, Clinton top 2016 coverage”
<http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/10/christie-clinton-top-coverage-197049.html>*

By Hadas Gold

October 14, 2014, 11:11 a.m. EDT

Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie have received more newspaper coverage
than any other potential 2016 presidential candidate so far this year, a
new Pew report found.

In 15 top U.S. newspapers from Jan. 1 to Sept. 27, 2014, the New Jersey
governor and former Secretary of State were each the subject of 82 stories
focused on the 2016 campaign. On the Republican side, Mitt Romney came in
second for coverage with 74 stories. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is a
trailing second for Democrats, with just 22 stories.

Overall, Pew found that more stories focused on potential Republican
candidates than Democratic ones, 202 to 115 stories respectively.

And, Pew found that there's more coverage two years before the 2016
election as there was two years ahead of the 2012 and 2008 election. In the
first nine months of 2014, there have been 541 newspaper stories written
about the 2016 presidential campaign compared to 271 in 2010, and 460 in
2006. The 2010 decrease is expected since President Barack Obama did not
have a primary challenger. Pew credits the uptick in 2014 and focus on
Christie to the "Bridgegate" scandal that dominated media earlier this year.

In the same study last year the coverage focused on Sens. Marco Rubio
(R-Fla.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Christie, while Clinton and Vice President
Joe Biden dominated on the Democratic side.

*Washington Post blog: The Fix: “Hillary Clinton’s best campaign surrogate
is barely a month old”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/10/14/hillary-clintons-best-campaign-surrogate-is-barely-a-month-old/>*

By Nia-Malika Henderson

October 14, 2014, 12:06 p.m. EDT

The prospect of Grandmother Hillary Clinton offered so many opportunities
for political reporters and pundits to chew over so very many things.

How would Clinton weigh being a grandmother against being president?  Could
she in fact do both, or would the pull of knitting booties just be too
strong?

Would the whole experience and the grandbaby anecdotes "humanize her"?

What would be the most politically beneficial name?

If she had a girl, what would that mean?

And then there was that question about what little Charlotte would call her
grandmother. Nana Secretary was one guess, with a request for readers to
offer more suggestions. (How about let's not and say we did?)

Just in case you are wondering:

Aides to Hillary Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, declined to
answer what Charlotte will call her maternal grandmother. And three people
close to Hillary Clinton said they couldn't pry an answer out of her when
they asked.

The overarching question was, as always, how Charlotte would fit into the
Clinton narrative.  That is to say, how Charlotte/Grandmother Clinton would
be received by the public and what all of it had to do with politics.
(Let's note here that this question was never, ever, ever, once asked about
Grandpa Mitt Romney. Not once.)

Based on Clinton's last few post-Charlotte speeches, we now have an answer
to a question that probably should not even have been asked.

Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky, the closest thing we Americans have to a royal
baby, is the poster infant for girl power and for economic populism.  At a
time when high profile politicians tend to steer clear of the "regular
person" anecdotes (remember what happened to Al Gore?), Charlotte is the
anecdote that keeps on giving.

Just five days after she was born, Clinton was already putting her to work.

“I think my granddaughter has just as much God-given potential as a boy who
was born in that hospital on the same day,” Clinton said at a women's real
estate convention in Miami. “I just believe that. That’s the way I was
raised.”

Speaking at a rally for Tom Wolf, running for Pennsylvania Governor,
Clinton offered Charlotte up as an example of  what Elizabeth Warren has
said is a system rigged towards the rich.

"You should not have to be the grandchild of a president to get a good
education, to get good healthcare,” she said. "Let’s make sure we give
every child in Pennsylvania the same chance that I’m determined to give my
granddaughter.”

In some ways, Clinton is assuming the gaze of the American public when she
considers her granddaughter.  Much the same way people look at say Prince
George and wonder about the life of riches he will enjoy, Clinton knows the
average American might wonder the same about Charlotte and then perhaps
wonder about fairness and what exactly elite, wealthy Americans like her
know about it.

Politicians show off their kids and their families all the time, mostly as
a way to telegraph all- American normality.  Clinton is doing something
different. She is using Charlotte as a kind of mirror to both recognize her
own privilege and argue against it.

*Wall Street Journal blog: Washington Wire: “Hillary Clinton: Putin Must Be
Kept Contained”
<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/10/14/hillary-clinton-putin-must-be-kept-contained/>*

By Peter Nicholas

October 14, 2014, 7:47 a.m. EDT

As a newly minted secretary of state, Hillary Clinton seemed convinced that
she could bring about a thaw in America’s chilly relationship with Russia.

That heady period in 2009 is long gone.

In a speech Monday night in Las Vegas, Mrs. Clinton depicted Russian
President Vladimir Putin as a mortal threat to sovereign European countries
and U.S. interests. She called for a sustained commitment to keep him
contained.

Mrs. Clinton, a likely presidential candidate in 2016 warned that under Mr.
Putin’s leadership Russia is using military power in combination with its
leverage as an energy producer to cow European leaders.

Some Europeans “just don’t want to confront Putin in any way,” Mrs. Clinton
said in a question-and-answer session that was part of a paid speaking
engagement sponsored by the UNLV Foundation. “I think that’s a mistake. I
think he is at heart a bully and you have to be smart; not confrontational,
but you have to stand up and you have to encircle and you have to try to
choke off his ability to be so aggressive.”

Mrs. Clinton’s appearance had drawn protests from student leaders at the
university, who objected to her $225,000 speaking fee. Mrs. Clinton has
said she won’t pocket the money but will instead plow it into her family’s
charitable foundation.

She received a warm reception at the event, held at the Bellagio hotel. The
moderator, Las Vegas Sun Publisher Brian Greenspun, gave her a pair of
running shoes as a gift. The shoes were a nod to her possible political
ambitions — and also a light reference to her appearance in Las Vegas six
months ago when someone in the audience hurled a shoe at her.

Famously, former President George W. Bush said in 2001 that he had looked
Mr. Putin in the eye and found him to be “straight-forward and trustworthy.”

Asked how she perceived the Russian leader, Mrs. Clinton said: “Well, I see
a very cold-blooded, calculating former KGB agent who is determined to not
only enrich himself and his closest colleagues, but also to try to revive
Russia’s influence around its border.”

The line echoes one used by Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) who while running
for president in the 2008 election said he looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes and
saw “three letters: A K, a G, and a B.”

Should Mrs. Clinton run for president in 2016, opponents are likely to call
attention to the moment in 2009 when Mrs. Clinton and her Russian
counterpart pushed a mock “reset” button to symbolize a new era of good
will.

The rapprochement ultimately fizzled. With Russia’s annexation of Crimea
and incursions into Ukraine, U.S.-Russian relations have hit a post-Cold
War low point.

No more is Mrs. Clinton talking of a reset.

She warned of allowing “the borders of Europe — after the bloodiest century
in human history – to be rewritten the way Putin is trying to rewrite
Ukraine and threatening other places as well. We cannot let that happen
because there will be no stop to it.. … Put aside his personality, his
agenda is one that threatens American interests and we have to be smart
about how we’re going to contest it.”

As secretary of state she said she warned Europeans that they needed to
“move toward energy independence” so that they wouldn’t be so reliant on
Russia.

“I think there was an unwillingness on the part of the Europeans to commit
to that,” she said. “Each country was pretty much looking out for its own
energy needs. Now, of course, they’re scrambling to figure out how to get
out from under Russian intimidation using energy as a weapon. And the
United States needs to stay deeply involved in working with our allies in
Europe – to move them toward more energy independence.”

As ever, Mrs. Clinton fielded the inevitable question: Will she run for
president?

And, as ever, she gave an answer that was noncommittal. Yes, she’s
considering it. She wants to find ways to help people, but hasn’t decided
whether the presidency or her family foundation is the best vehicle.

“As I make my decision, part of what I will be thinking about is, What do I
want to do with the next years of my life,” said Mrs. Clinton, who will
turn 67 on Oct. 26. “How do I want to spend my time?”

*Washington Post blog: All Opinions Are Local: “Tim Kaine probably is at
the top of everyone’s VP list”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/all-opinions-are-local/wp/2014/10/14/tim-kaine-probably-is-at-the-top-of-everyones-vp-list/>*

By Norman Leahy and Paul Goldman

October 14, 2014, 10:09 a.m. EDT

Is Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) the new Harry Truman? As a senator from Missouri,
Truman led a bipartisan congressional effort overseeing World War II
operations. This rankled President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s
administration. Not wanting to draw FDR’s ire onto themselves, senior
senators gave the job to the backbencher from the “Show-Me” state.

But when FDR ran again, bipartisan praise for a job well done led to Truman
getting on the party’s national ticket. Seventy years later, a young man
who grew up in Missouri seemingly has acquired some of “Give’em Hell
Harry’s” moxie.

In January, Sen. Kaine co-sponsored legislation challenging President
Obama’s professed authority to pursue his Middle East war policy. “It
really concerns me that the president would assert he has the ability to do
this unilaterally,” Kaine said.

The Virginian’s co-sponsor: Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, who lost
to Obama in 2008.

This meant Kaine, among the president’s earliest backers, had hooked up
with the strongest Republican critic of his friend’s Middle East military
policy. Media commentators predictably said Kaine and McCain wanted to rein
in the president. Their proposed legislation changed the 1973 War Powers
Act to give Congress more say — and the president less — in deployment and
use of U.S. military force.

Kaine said the historic tension between the legislative and executive
branches over foreign intervention had always been a legal “obsession.”

The Constitution gives Congress sole authority to declare war. But since
Truman, every president, including Obama, has maintained that the
Constitution gives the commander in chief the power to send military forces
into harm’s way without official congressional approval.

President George W. Bush, for example, did ask for congressional
“authorization” of the Iraq war. But he made clear he didn’t legally need
their approval, much less a war declaration.

Kaine believes the current constitutional and legal murkiness needs
clarification. Yet Congress’s long-standing ambivalence on the scope of
presidential war powers reflects military and political reality.

History shows that it can be politically risky to vote against a president
after the commander in chief has made a case that military action is vital
to national security.

Sen. Kaine underscored this point by combining his seemingly anti-war
measure with strong support for Obama’s actual military policy.

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is also instructive. President Kennedy
followed the basic Kaine-McCain approach. He created a special war group
that included congressional leaders, met with them whenever requested,
shared secret information, gave them full access to the Pentagon brass and
didn’t act until getting their final advice.

What happened? Congressional leaders didn’t want to appear weak against
communism, perhaps fearing their “secret meeting” recommendations wouldn’t
stay secret. Their recommendations surely would have led to a nuclear war.

Fortunately, JFK ignored them. Back-channel discussions with the Soviet
premier uncovered his similar willingness to stand up to his own nuclear
war hawks, saving humanity.

In the end, no War Powers Act, however amended, can guarantee the required
good judgment. Still, Kaine has a valid point: To help get this good
judgment, a more defined and mandatory consultation process would seem to
be necessary.

Kaine’s self-described “obsession” with the obvious has earned him
political plaudits and a Truman-like advantage.

Democrats are generally seen as the anti-war party. Then-Sen. Hillary
Clinton’s vote to green light the Iraq war is likely the main reason she
failed to shut down anti-war underdog Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008
before it became unstoppable. Tim Kaine is uniquely positioned politically:
dovish enough for the anti-war left but covered on the right by hooking up
with the hawkish McCain. Front-runner Clinton figures to run more hawkish
than the dovish Democratic norm.

The political bottom line: Kaine’s the right balance for her should she win
the 2016 presidential nomination. He created picture-perfect politics from
perfunctory policy. Luck? No way. Then-Gov.  Kaine made the Veep list in
2008. Right now, he leads the one for 2016.

*Yahoo: “In Iowa, Ready for Hillary builds a list and hopes for the best”
<http://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-s-list-builders-can-t-fix-all-that-went-wrong-in-2008-221008821.html>*

By Jon Ward

October 13, 2014, 5:12 a.m. EDT

[Subtitle:] It's less glamorous than you might think

DES MOINES, Iowa – You get a funny response when you ask Ready for Hillary
leaders in Iowa what they’re doing to avoid a repeat of Clinton’s loss in
the 2008 caucuses here, where she came in third.

Ready for Hillary was built to avoid and correct the mistakes of 2008,
right?

“You know, I’m kind of confused by that,” said Derek Eadon, who oversees
Iowa and the entire Midwest for Ready for Hillary, the group started last
year to prepare a campaign in waiting for Clinton.

Jerry Crawford, an Iowa-based adviser to the group, was even more blunt. “I
think Hillary ran a very good campaign in 2007-2008 in Iowa. The notion
that she didn’t … is more urban legend than truth,” Crawford told me. “She
was a very good candidate. She turned out more caucusgoers than had any
Democratic candidate for president in history.”

Only, of course, Barack Obama turned out more people than she did. John
Edwards wooed more supporters than Clinton, for that matter.

Eadon and Crawford hail from different generations and look back at 2008
from different points of view. Eadon, a 30-year-old Iowa native, worked for
Obama in 2008 as a paid campaign organizer in Cedar Rapids. Crawford, 65,
is a longtime Clinton loyalist who helped run Clinton’s 2008 campaign in
Iowa and is helping Ready for Hillary’s efforts today. But Eadon now says
he thinks the Clinton campaign in Iowa was about as good as Obama’s, and
that too much retrospective meaning about their operations has been
attached to the outcome of the 2008 caucusing.

“Because [Clinton] lost they did everything wrong. Because Obama won he did
everything right. But I think there were a lot more similarities in the two
campaigns,” Eadon said, sitting in a windowless conference room inside an
office park near the state Capitol building.

So why is Ready for Hillary hard at work in Iowa — and so far in advance of
the caucuses — if Clinton did so well here in 2008?

There are a few reasons, her supporters say.

First, there is the perception among Iowans that Clinton ignored them in
2008 and didn’t want to campaign hard for their votes. And to some extent
this is true. She didn’t fully commit to the state until the summer of
2007, after an internal campaign memo was leaked that showed advisers
encouraging her to totally skip over the Hawkeye State. So in a way, Ready
for Hillary — a national organization — has a very specific job to do in
Iowa when it comes to salving hurt feelings and forestalling resentments.

Ready for Hillary operatives at the national level have a clear sense of
this mission. “You can’t take grass-roots supporters for granted,” said
Adam Parkhomenko, the group’s executive director.

Second, Obama did a better job than Clinton did of hiring Iowa natives
around the state as organizers and of attracting new blood into the caucus
process to volunteer and vote. Crawford bristles at the charge that
Clinton’s Iowa operation failed here, and points the finger at the national
operation, which he said treated Iowans and their unique process with
disrespect. “When people say top-down, that’s really a comment about the
national campaign staff last time,” he said. “If you’re looking for
accuracy, it’s more a comment about them than about the Iowa campaign.”

Third, Clinton supporters wanted to try to keep the playing field clear of
competitors who could take advantage of a vacuum to develop momentum. They
have done this very effectively. And Clinton will need every advantage here
in the general election if she is the nominee in 2016. She trailed
Republican Mitt Romney in a Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics survey
of voters released on Saturday.

But what is Clinton going to do in 2016 (insert obligatory “if she runs”)
that she didn’t do in 2008?

“It’s a good question,” Eadon said.

If that answer seems puzzlingly noncommittal, it’s probably because Ready
for Hillary is doing a lot of the same things that Clinton’s supporters did
in 2007 and 2008. They’re just doing it earlier than Clinton or Obama or
Edwards did it, by more than a year. They are building a list of supporters
for Clinton, which could be sold to an eventual Clinton campaign. Its
staffers and volunteers are building a local organization in the hopes that
an eventual national Clinton campaign team will come along and pick up
their work.

The work is not that complicated and it also cannot address the biggest
problems of the 2008 campaign, which involved high-level strategic
decisions, such as choosing not to make Clinton available to the local
press in Iowa, and not prioritizing repeated trips to the hinterlands of
Iowa’s many small towns.

Furthermore, much of the corrective work being done by Ready for Hillary is
outside of Iowa. Clinton was plenty organized in Iowa in 2008, but she
wasn’t able to catch up to Obama because he out-prepared and out-organized
her in many of the subsequent primary and caucus states.

“A lot of states where there were no volunteer organizations during the
2008 campaign, we wanted to make sure that — should she run and she goes to
Minnesota or Maine or Utah — those people are ready to go,” Parkhomenko
said.

Ready for Hillary’s list-building will also give Clinton something like the
advantage that Obama, as an incumbent president, had in 2012. He set up an
operation to maintain a list of supporters through Organizing for America
after taking office, which kept its hands on his 13 million-member email
list, and kept many of those supporters engaged and in touch. Most
importantly, they ensured that Obama had the most current contact
information for these supporters, in an age when people change cell phone
numbers and email addresses with high frequency.

The 2008 Clinton campaign's list was at about 3 million email addresses at
its height, and has now shrunk to about 1 million active names, said a
source familiar with the list. Ready for Hillary, meanwhile, has an
up-to-date list of nearly 3 million names, ready to hand over to a Clinton
campaign.

“We’ve surpassed where she ended her campaign in 2008,” Parkhomenko said.
“What that does is, she starts off where she left off. For a nonincumbent,
that is just a remarkable place to begin.”

Eadon and his deputy, Gracie Brandsgard, have full-time organizing
counterparts in the northeast, working in New Hampshire; in the South,
based at the group’s Northern Virginia headquarters, and active in South
Carolina and North Carolina; and out west, based in California.

In the end, however, the value and impact of any work done now will be
determined by the actions of a formal national organization that does not
yet exist.

One Clinton insider who has worked in Iowa politics for a long time says
getting her national team to value the hard work of early primary state
blocking and tackling and of empowering grass-roots volunteers rather than
taking them for granted is “a done deal.” “Is she going to put together an
A team nationally? Yes, she never makes a mistake twice,” the insider said.

In Iowa, where 239,000 Democrats set a record for caucus participation in
2008, the work of building a list is as much about human interaction with
key activists as it is about data wizardry.

There are only two Ready for Hillary staffers in Iowa: Eadon and
Brandsgard. They are in charge of the entire Midwest. Their headquarters is
a single open room on the ground floor of an office building two blocks
from the intersection where Obama held his last rally of the 2012 campaign.
They share space with employees of Eadon’s consulting firm, Blueprint
Strategies, and of NextGen Climate, the climate change group founded by
billionaire Tom Steyer.

The Democratic Party’s data capabilities are formidable. But they have been
so worshipped in the press that the perception is they have not just the
name of every voter but also their favorite toothpaste.

Ready for Hillary, however, is building a list of supporters “from
scratch,” Eadon said. It’s a little bit of an exaggeration. But not
entirely.

Democrats have an impressive array of voter information at their fingertips
dating back several election cycles. And late in the fall of 2013, Ready
for Hillary bought the 50-state voter file through NGP VAN, the company
that coordinates the building of the Democratic Party's voter file. In
January, it bought a list of all Hillary Clinton’s 2008 supporters and
emailed them, offering a free bumper sticker in exchange for a signup with
the group.

Since then, Ready for Hillary has continued to sign people up through its
website, through social media, and by showing up at fairs and community
events. It has also built up a robust direct mail operation. But in Iowa,
after those initial contacts, Eadon and Brandsgard have not been sitting at
their desks dialing phone numbers for the last six months.

Instead they hit the road to meet people who have already signed up. A
common misperception is that list-building is just a one and done activity:
get the name, get the person's info, add it to the list, and move on to the
next one. This is a static view of organizing that the Republican Party is
still trying to overcome in many quarters.

The Democratic view is kinetic. Eadon and Brandsgard did events in the 12
biggest counties in Iowa early in the year. There they met with Clinton’s
most gung-ho supporters, and asked them to start building local support
networks for Clinton and to start recruiting people to sign up with Ready
for Hillary through their neighborhoods and their social networks. They
also sent volunteers to county conventions in 84 of Iowa’s 99 counties in
March.

But if that was the end of the engagement, RFH might have lost contact with
the supporters and allowed their enthusiasm to lapse. And so the midterm
elections have served as an important galvanizing agent for Ready for
Hillary. The group has directed members to the state party in Iowa and
helped turn them out to knock on doors and make phone calls for Democratic
candidates on the ballot this fall. It has curried favor with the grass
roots and establishment at the same time, while also keeping these Clinton
fans engaged in the political process, and in touch with her proto-campaign
in waiting.

The national group continued this virtuous cycle in the late summer and
early fall, exchanging portions of its lists with 14 different campaigns
across the country. The campaigns, which were not disclosed, got a list of
active volunteers eager to help them campaign. And Ready for Hillary got a
batch of names ripe for targeting over email. Ready for Hillary has also
dispatched staff from its offices in the Washington area to 14 states
across the country, including Iowa, to help the last-ditch effort to keep
the Senate. Iowa’s Senate race between Republican Joni Ernst and Democrat
Bruce Braley is one of the closest in the nation.

The plan was always for RFH to dissolve after Clinton makes a decision in
the months immediately following the midterms. Parkhomenko said that on the
day Clinton announces, the group plans to send an email to its list,
directing people to Clinton’s campaign website. It will check to see who
clicked the link in their email and visited Clinton’s website, and follow
up a few times with those who didn’t. The final step would be to work with
a third party vendor to compare Ready for Hillary’s list with the Clinton
campaign’s list, to see which supporters it doesn't have.

The organizations would then do an even swap, with the Clinton campaign
getting names and emails it doesn't already have, and Ready for Hillary
getting the same from the campaign in exchange.

At that point, Ready for Hillary’s work will be done. Iit will be up to
Clinton’s people to make sure they don’t waste it.

*Associated Press: “Arkansas Democrats calling, again, on Bill Clinton”
<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/04c9a6113f8f475294a425f34245815c/arkansas-democrats-calling-again-bill-clinton>*

By Andrew DeMillo

October 14, 2014, 12:25 p.m. EDT

Arkansas Democrats are again enlisting their favorite political son as they
try to fend off a Republican takeover of the state's top offices in
November.

Democrats announced Tuesday that former President Bill Clinton will
headline rallies this weekend in several Arkansas cities. Most of his stops
will be in the 4th District, where one of his former Cabinet officials is
running for Congress.

The visits come only a week after the former Arkansas governor led rallies
in central and northern Arkansas. At those events, Clinton urged voters to
not use the November election as a protest vote against President Barack
Obama. Early voting beginsMonday.

Clinton will visit Hot Springs on Friday; Hope, where he was born, on
Saturday; and North Little Rock, Pine Bluff and Forrest City on Sunday.