Subject: ​Correct The Record Monday October 20, 2014 Morning Roundup
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 09:42:52 -0400
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*​**Correct The Record Monday October 20, 2014 Morning Roundup:*

*Headlines:*

*Associated Press, via The Republic: Hillary Clinton returns to San
Francisco to headline Democratic fundraiser
<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#1492d5652299eee9_ap>*

“Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is returning to San
Francisco to headline a Democratic fundraiser. Clinton is scheduled to
address a sold-out women's luncheon at the Fairmont Hotel to raise money
for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.”

*Portland Press Herald: Hillary Clinton coming to Maine on Friday to stump
for Michaud <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#1492d5652299eee9_portland>*

“U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud’s campaign said Sunday that former Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be in Scarborough on Friday to campaign
with the Democratic candidate for governor.”

*Bloomberg: Getting Ready for Hillary Costs About $1,000 Per Hour
<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#1492d5652299eee9_bloomberg1>*

“Hillary Clinton's friendly super-PAC is spending roughly $23,000 a day –
nearly as much as it's bringing in – as it builds a database of supporters
and donors for a possible 2016 Democratic presidential bid.”

*Bloomberg: Could Hillary Clinton Blow a Lead This Big?
<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#1492d5652299eee9_bloomberg>*

“The anybody-but-Clinton crowd would need a champion with even better
closing speed than President Barack Obama to deny Hillary Clinton the
party's presidential nomination again.”

*Harper’s Magazine: Stop Hillary! Vote no to a Clinton dynasty
<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#1492d5652299eee9_harpers>*

“What is the case for Hillary (whose quasi-official website identifies her,
in bold blue letters, by her first name only, as do millions upon millions
of voters)? It boils down to this: She has experience, she’s a woman, and
it’s her turn. It’s hard to find any substantive political argument in her
favor.”

* <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#1492d5652299eee9_huffpo>*

*Huffington Post: Here Are 5 Takeaways From The Harper's Anti-Clinton Story
<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#1492d5652299eee9_huffpo>*

“In the November issue of Harper’s magazine, Doug Henwood argues that
Hillary Clinton, if elected president, would do little to assuage liberals'
disappointment in President Barack Obama. This is how Henwood sums up the
case for Hillary’s candidacy in 2016: ‘She has experience, she’s a woman,
and it’s her turn.’ But, he says, ‘it’s hard to find any political
substance in her favor.’”

*Des Moines Register: Sen. Warren raises the roof for Braley
<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#1492d5652299eee9_desmoines>*

“’Wow! Dynamite.’ That was the assessment of longtime Iowa Democrat and
Hillary Clinton supporter Bonnie Campbell after U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren
delivered a fist-pumping call to action at today's rally for Bruce Braley.”

*New York Magazine: Andrew Cuomo and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very
Bad Year <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#1492d5652299eee9_nymag>*

“Cuomo believes the center is still the most responsible place from which
to govern New York—and the country… ‘Where is the national Democratic Party
now? Well, they’re talking about Hillary Clinton. Her last name is Clinton,
which represented that centrist-left platform. So I think that’s where the
party is nationwide. And the Clinton philosophy is still a winning
philosophy.’”

*Articles:*

*Associated Press, via The Republic: Hillary Clinton returns to San
Francisco to headline Democratic fundraiser*
<http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/fd27c6178b5a4134b99357cb0c5407db/CA--Hillary-Clinton-Democratic-Fundraiser>

 [No author mentioned]

October 20, 2014 6:13 a.m. EDT

SAN FRANCISCO — Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is
returning to San Francisco to headline a Democratic fundraiser.

Clinton is scheduled to address a sold-out women's luncheon at the Fairmont
Hotel to raise money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The fundraiser will also feature House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

The former secretary of state gave the keynote address last week at
Dreamforce 2014, a software convention held in San Francisco.

Clinton has traveled widely after leaving the State Department to give
speeches to industry groups, college students and others.

A potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, Clinton also has
been stepping up her campaign activity for Democrats in the weeks before
the November elections.

*Portland Press Herald: Hillary Clinton coming to Maine on Friday to stump
for Michaud*
<http://www.pressherald.com/2014/10/19/hillary-clinton-to-stump-for-michaud-in-maine/>

By Dennis Hoey

October 19, 2014 5:15 p.m. EDT

With the debates in the tightly contested gubernatorial race due to end
this week, one campaign – on the eve ofMonday night’s televised debate –
stepped up its efforts to attract undecided voters by announcing that one
of the nation’s best-known politicians will appear on its behalf in Maine
this week.

U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud’s campaign said Sunday that former Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be in Scarborough on Friday to campaign
with the Democratic candidate for governor.

“There is so much at stake in this election, and we can’t take anything for
granted. If we want change in Augusta, we have to make it happen,” Michaud
said in a statement. “That’s why I am so humbled and excited to have
Hillary Clinton coming to Maine to rally voters and join me in energizing
supporters so we can ensure a great turnout on Election Day.”

A spokesman for Gov. Paul LePage’s re-election campaign responded to the
news that the former first lady would speak to a crowd at Scarborough High
School by saying that voters can expect to see at least one more
“high-profile Republican” come to Maine on LePage’s behalf before the Nov.
4 election.

Meanwhile, independent gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler, who has been
endorsed by independent U.S. Sen. Angus King, a former Maine governor, said
the news that Clinton would be coming to Maine is a sign “that (Michaud’s)
campaign is in trouble” and needs a jump-start from a big-name politician.

Monday’s debate will be held on the Portland campus of the University of
Southern Maine. The debate – to be aired on WGME-TV, Channel 13 – is
scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. in Hannaford Hall.

The final scheduled televised debate will be Tuesday night at the Auburn
studios of WMTW-TV, Channel 8. It also will start at 7 p.m.

Lizzy Reinholt, a spokeswoman for Michaud’s campaign, said the previous
debates have not significantly changed voters’ opinions of the candidates.

“I think the dynamics remain the same. It’s going to be a tight race
between us and Gov. LePage,” Reinholt said.

Most polls have placed Michaud and LePage in a tight race with Cutler
trailing well behind, but Cutler says polls can be misleading.

“Polls are snapshots in time,” Cutler said in a telephone interview
Sunday night.
“I’m more confident today than I was yesterday. The race is wide open.”

Cutler said he believes that a strong showing by a candidate in a debate
can influence the way a person votes, especially the large number of
undecided voters that remain in Maine. In 2010, Cutler made a late surge in
the governor’s race and came close to defeating LePage.

Alex Willette, LePage’s re-election campaign spokesman, said the governor
has used previous debates as a way to communicate directly to voters.

“The governor has been able to get his message out without the fetters of a
newspaper,” Willette said. “People know he is a plain-spoken guy who
doesn’t mince words.”

Willette noted that Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has
visited Maine three times this year to campaign on behalf of LePage.

Former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida also came to Maine in February
to host a fundraiser for the governor.

Willette said he was unable to disclose the identity of the high-profile
Republican who is expected to come to Maine later this month.

Reinholt said the Michaud campaign event that Clinton will attend at
Scarborough High School will be open to the public beginning at 4:30 p.m.
Friday. She said those who want to attend may RSVP at
www.michaud2014.com/hillary. President Obama is scheduled to appear Oct. 30 at
the Portland Exposition Building on behalf of Michaud.

Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, and first lady Michelle
Obama have already come to Maine this year to campaign for Michaud.

Cutler’s campaign announced Sunday that he had received an endorsement from
the Portsmouth Herald.

*Bloomberg: Getting Ready for Hillary Costs About $1,000 Per Hour*
<http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-10-20/getting-ready-for-hillary-costs-about-1000-per-hour>

By John McCormick

October 20, 2014 6:59 a.m. EDT

The super-PAC is building a list of supporters that is already hovering
around 3 million.

Hillary Clinton's friendly super-PAC is spending roughly $23,000 a day –
nearly as much as it's bringing in – as it builds a database of supporters
and donors for a possible 2016 Democratic presidential bid.

Viewed another way: Getting Ready for Hillary costs her supporters about $2
million per quarter, covering expenses for everything from political
consultants to voter databases to Des Moines hotel rooms, according to
disclosure reports released October 15.

"Rather than building up a large bankroll, we have sought to invest in
engaging our supporters and building our list for the day that Hillary's
decision comes," said Seth Bringman, the super-PAC's spokesman.

It costs money to raise money, and the group's biggest expenses include
printing, postage and online advertising. Payroll and travel costs also
continue to grow. Bringman said the super-PAC has about 35 full-time
employees. "Given that her decision is looming, I wouldn't anticipate that
we will staff up much more," he said.

Based in a Virginia suburb outside Washington, Ready for Hillary raised $2
million and spent about $2.1 million during the quarter that ended
September 30.

By comparison, Senator Rand Paul's Rand PAC spent a fraction of that, about
$598,000 while raising $480,363. Like the Clinton group, the Republican is
using his PAC to stockpile supporters and favors for a potential White
House bid.

Ready for Hillary's fundraising prowess has helped create what amounts to
the most robust campaign infrastructure of any prospective 2016 candidate,
whether Democrat or Republican. The group says it has connected with more
than 3 million Clinton supporters, persuaded 900,000 people to sign a
pledge to help her win if she runs and distributed 600,000 bumper
stickers.  Contributions have arrived from more than 100,000 people in all
50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and every U.S. territory.

Nicco Mele, who teaches classes on the Internet and politics at the Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University, has estimated that presidential
candidates will probably need an online list of 1 million to 3 million
people to be financially competitive.

To understand just how quickly the money can flow, look to mid-September,
when Senator Tom Harkin's annual Steak Fry committee spent more than
$50,000 for a private jet to shuttle Bill and Hillary Clinton into and out
of Iowa.  Ready for Hillary also racked up some major bills.

The super-PAC paid for hotel rooms for virtually its entire staff as well
as key activists, roughly 60 to 70 people in total, Bringman said. The
weekend bill at the Des Moines Marriott? More than $27,000.

"We wanted to make as big a contribution as possible," Bringman said,
adding that staff and volunteers helped shuttle Democrats to the steak fry
and pitched in to build the set for the one-day event. Ready for Hillary
also contributed $5,000 directly to the steak fry committee and paid the
Iowa Democratic Party $20,000 for its database of participants in the 2008
Iowa caucuses, Bringman said, adding that the group will be making similar
data acquisitions in other states with early 2016 nomination contests.

"We've done a lot of work in Iowa compiling our list of supporters there,"
he said. "We want to understand who our supporters are and how best to
communicate with them."

More expenses, as reported to the Federal Election Commission:

Airlines

Staff members went to Iowa and back, but that wasn't all of their travel.
During the third quarter the super-PAC spent $69,657 with three airlines –
Delta, US Airways and United. Staff members routinely travel to train
volunteers and coordinate fundraisers events, Bringman said.

Stamps and snail mail

It may be a dot-com world, but Hillary's allies still spend plenty on
postage stamps. Stamps.com was paid $38,280 during the quarter. An
additional $5,164 went to the Postal Service. And Windward Strategies of
Bethesda, Md. got more cash from the group than any other entity: $558,319
for "direct mail production," which Bringman said includes design, copy,
printing and postage.

Networking

Ready for Hillary also set out to make friends, donating about $58,000 to
candidates and state-level political parties, mostly in states with early
nomination contests. Its biggest contribution during the quarter – $25,000
– was to Jack Hatch's campaign for Iowa governor. The Democrat trailed
Republican Governor Terry Branstad in a recent Bloomberg Politics/Des
Moines Register Iowa Poll, but he could provide a valuable network of
political activists if Clinton decides to run.

*Bloomberg: Could Hillary Clinton Blow a Lead This Big?*
<http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-10-19/could-hillary-clinton-blow-a-lead-this-big>

By Jonathan Allen

October 19, 2014 12:15 p.m. EDT

[Subtitle:] The gap between HRC and her competition for a presidential
nomination keeps growing.

The anybody-but-Clinton crowd would need a champion with even better
closing speed than President Barack Obama to deny Hillary Clinton the
party's presidential nomination again.

A new ABC/Washington Post poll shows Clinton with a 51-point lead over Vice
President Joe Biden, her nearest competitor for the 2016 Democratic
presidential nomination. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has
said she won't run, comes in third.

Clinton's 64-13-11 advantage over Biden and Warren is consistent with other
recent polling, and it will surely renew calls from anti-Clinton corners to
remember just how far she fell in 2008.

It wasn't this far.

In October 2006, Clinton led then-Senator Barack Obama by — wait for it —
11 points. Over the next year, she would expand her 28-17 advantage in that
CNN poll as Obama failed to gain significant ground.

Clinton peaked in October 2007, taking 51 percent of registered Democrats
in CNN and CBS polls and registering a 31-point lead over Obama — 48-17 —
in an L.A. Times/Bloomberg survey.

*Harper’s Magazine: Stop Hillary! Vote no to a Clinton dynasty*
<http://harpers.org/archive/2014/10/stop-hillary/>

By Doug Henwood

November 2014 Issue

 “How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?” Sarah Palin asked
American voters in a taunting 2010 speech. The answer: Not so well. We
avoided a full-blown depression, but the job market remains deeply sick,
and it’s become quite mainstream to talk about the U.S. economy having
fallen into structural stagnation (though the rich are thriving). Barack
Obama has, if anything, seemed more secretive than George W. Bush. He kills
alleged terrorists whom his predecessor would merely have tortured. The
climate crisis gets worse, and the political capacity even to talk about
it, much less do anything about it, is completely absent. These aren’t the
complaints Palin would make, of course. But people who voted for Obama in
2008 were imagining a more peaceful, more egalitarian world, and they
haven’t gotten it.

Be of good cheer, though. Many savants — and not all of them Democrats —
have a solution for 2016. That would be putting Hillary Clinton in the
White House.

What is the case for Hillary (whose quasi-official website identifies her,
in bold blue letters, by her first name only, as do millions upon millions
of voters)? It boils down to this: She has experience, she’s a woman, and
it’s her turn. It’s hard to find any substantive political argument in her
favor. She has, in the past, been associated with women’s issues, with
children’s issues — but she also encouraged her husband to sign the 1996
bill that put an end to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program
(AFDC), which had been in effect since 1935. Indeed, longtime Clinton
adviser Dick Morris, who has now morphed into a right-wing pundit, credits
Hillary for backing both of Bill’s most important moves to the center: the
balanced budget and welfare reform.1 And during her subsequent career as
New York’s junior senator and as secretary of state, she has scarcely
budged from the centrist sweet spot, and has become increasingly hawkish on
foreign policy.

1 Morris’s ties to the Clinton machine go back nearly four decades. That
said, his pronouncements on both Bill and Hillary should be taken with a
substantial grain of salt. Their mutual-admiration society collapsed in
1996, when media reports about Morris’s frolics with prostitutes caused his
expulsion from Bill’s reelection campaign. Since then, the uber-consultant
has turned on his old patrons, flaying them in such books as Rewriting
History (2004) and Because He Could (2004), and founding, in September
2013, a PAC called Just Say No to Hillary. On the subject of Morris,
Hillary has for years kept conspicuously mum. On the subject of Hillary,
Morris was typically dismissive when we spoke in July. “She’s a trial
lawyer who fights for a position,” he told me. “But she’s not creative and
she’s not a broad strategic-policy thinker.” The gun-for-hire accusation
was particularly poignant coming from Morris, who has worked for figures as
diverse as Jesse Helms and Howard Metzenbaum, Trent Lott and Kenyan
presidential contender Raila Odinga — and who, indeed, was advising House
Republicans at the same time he was rescuing Bill’s imperiled presidency
after the 1994 midterms.

What Hillary will deliver, then, is more of the same. And that shouldn’t
surprise us. As wacky as it sometimes appears on the surface, American
politics has an amazing stability and continuity about it. Obama, widely
viewed as a populist action hero during the 2008 campaign, made no bones
about his admiration for Ronald Reagan. The Gipper, he said,

changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and
in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different
path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt [that] with
all the excesses of the Sixties and the Seventies, government had grown and
grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was
operating.

Now, the “excesses of the Sixties and the Seventies” included things like
feminism, gay liberation, the antiwar movement, a militant civil rights
movement — all good things, in my view, but I know that many people
disagree. In any case, coming into office with something like a mandate,
Obama never tried to make a sharp political break with the past, as Reagan
did from the moment of his first inaugural address. Reagan dismissed the
postwar Keynesian consensus — the idea that government had a responsibility
to soften the sharpest edges of capitalism by fighting recession and
providing some sort of basic safety net. Appropriating some of the language
of the left about revolution and the promise of the future, he unleashed
what he liked to call the magic of the marketplace: cutting taxes for the
rich, eliminating regulations, and whittling away at social spending.

What Reagan created, with his embrace of the nutty Laffer curve and his
smiling war on organized labor, was a strange, unequally distributed boom
that lasted through the early 1990s. After the caretaker George H. W. Bush
administration evaporated, Bill Clinton took over and, with a few minor
adjustments, kept the party going for another decade. Profits skyrocketed,
as did the financial markets.

But there was a contradiction under it all: a system dependent on high
levels of mass consumption for both economic dynamism and political
legitimacy has a problem when mass purchasing power is squeezed. For a few
decades, consumers borrowed to make up for what their paychecks were
lacking. But that model broke down once and for all with the crisis of
2008. Today we desperately need a new political economy — one that features
a more equal distribution of income, investment in our rotting social and
physical infrastructure, and a more humane ethic. We also need a judicious
foreign policy, and a commander-in-chief who will resist the instant
gratification of air strikes and rhetorical bluster.

Is Hillary Clinton the answer to these prayers? It’s hard to think so,
despite the widespread liberal fantasy of her as a progressive paragon, who
will follow through exactly as Barack Obama did not. In fact, a close look
at her life and career is perhaps the best antidote to all these great
expectations.

The historical record, such as it is, may also be the only antidote, since
most progressives are unwilling to discuss Hillary in anything but the most
general, flattering terms. Pundits who have written about her in the past
dismissed my queries in rude and patronizing ways. Strangely, though, I was
contacted out of nowhere by a representative of something called American
Bridge, who wanted to make my acquaintance. At first I thought it was a new
think tank — but I soon found out it was a pro-Hillary lobbying group
formed by the G.O.P. apostate David Brock. I can’t prove it, of course, but
it sure felt like the Hillary machine was subtly attempting to spin this
piece. Brock himself declined to speak with me, as did a diplomat who had
worked for Hillary at the State Department. Apparently you have to take a
loyalty oath to get an interview.

Hillary Rodham grew up in the affluent Chicago suburb of Park Ridge,
Illinois. In her child-rearing manual, It Takes a Village (1996), she
recalls that her family “looked like it was straight out of the 1950s
television sitcom Father Knows Best.”

Hillary has a long history of being economical with the truth.2 One can
forgive her reticence about sharing the traumas of her childhood, which
included her father cutting down his brother’s corpse from a noose. But it
was not the stuff of sitcoms. As Gail Sheehy reports, Hugh Rodham was an
“authoritarian drillmaster,” a reactionary who demanded austerity,
discipline, and self-reliance. Displays of emotion were regarded as signs
of weakness. Her mother, Dorothy Rodham, fought loudly with her husband —
but ultimately put up with him, as Hillary would with her future husband.

2 Discussing her voluminous but minimally informative memoir Living History
(2003), Carl Bernstein noted that it was mostly valuable for its “insight
into how Hillary sees herself and wants the story of her life to be told.
It is often at variance with my reporting, other books, and with newspapers
and periodicals as well.”

Hillary absorbed the conservatism of her father and her surroundings. In
junior high, she fell under the influence of a history teacher, Paul
Carlson, a frothing McCarthyite. As Carlson told Sheehy, the young Hillary
was “a hawk.”

Soon after, though, she found another guru, one she would stick with for
years — a young minister at the First Methodist Church of Park Ridge named
Don Jones. Jones was a dashing intellectual who helped open Hillary’s mind.
He got the church youth reading D. H. Lawrence, listening to Bob Dylan, and
talking about Picasso. He took them to the South Side of Chicago to meet
with black and Latino teenagers. In January 1963, Jones upped the ante
further and brought Hillary to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Chicago
— and escorted her onstage to meet him. She was moved, but not enough to
stop her from campaigning for Goldwater in 1964.

Then she was off to Wellesley, where she eventually began to feel alienated
from what she called “the entire unreality of middle-class America.” Still,
Hillary was not about to become a student revolutionary: identifying
herself as an “agnostic intellectual liberal [and] emotional conservative,”
she stayed away from the protests and picket lines.

Hillary wrote her undergraduate thesis on the founder of community
organizing, Saul Alinsky. Her academic adviser, Alan Schechter, told Bill’s
biographer David Maraniss that she “started out thinking community action
programs would make a big difference,” but later dismissed them as “too
idealistic and simplistic” and compromised by their dependence on outside
money and help. There’s an interesting hint of Hillary’s future in her
characterization of Alinsky’s thinking: “Welfare programs since the New
Deal have neither redeveloped poverty areas nor even catalyzed the poor
into helping themselves. A cycle of dependency has been created which
ensnares its victims into resignation and apathy.” While there’s an element
of truth to this, Alinsky’s remedy was for poor people to claim political
power on their own behalf. Hillary, as we have already seen, would instead
support welfare “reform” in the 1990s, leaving single mothers at the mercy
of the low-wage job market.

During Hillary’s senior year, a movement arose to have a student speaker at
graduation, and she was universally seen as the one for the job. Her
remarks, though enthusiastically received, were meandering. What stands
out, however, is this remarkable passage:

We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and
attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we
feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate
life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us.
We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of
living.

3 Bill, another pragmatist to the core, hit a similarly emotional note
during a 1993 speech to the National Realtors Association, in which he
quoted some cherished lines by Carl Sandburg: “A tough will counts. So does
desire. / So does a rich soft wanting. / Without rich wanting nothing
arrives.” That’s right. Under all that duplicity and ambition, they’re just
a pair of romantics.

That is not the Hillary we know today.3 But the practical Hillary has
always had a gift for overruling the ecstatic and penetrating Hillary: when
Alinsky offered her an organizing job after college, she rejected it in
favor of law school. He said, “Well, that’s no way to change anything.” She
responded: “Well, I see a different way from you. And I think there is a
real opportunity.”

It’s widely known that Hillary and Bill met when they were students at Yale
Law School; it’s less known that their first date essentially involved
crossing a picket line. Bill suggested they go to a Rothko exhibition at
the university’s art gallery, but it was closed because of a strike by
unionized employees. After clearing away some garbage that had piled up
during the strike, Bill convinced a guard to let them in. Hillary was
impressed — and not for the first time — by his powers of persuasion. She
found him “complex,” with “lots of layers.”

By Yale Law standards, Hillary was a conservative, which meant that she
opposed the Vietnam War but still basically believed in American
institutions. Despite looking like a hippie in her tinted glasses and
candy-striped slacks, she had no patience for the utopianism of the time.

In 1973, the year after she graduated from law school, she published a
paper in the Harvard Educational Review on the legal rights of children.
She’d gotten interested in the topic when she heard Marian Wright Edelman —
the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar — speak at Yale.
After the lecture, she approached Edelman and ended up working at her
D.C.-based public-interest law firm during the summer of 1970, focusing on
the conditions of migrant farm laborers and their families.

Although the right would later denounce Hillary’s paper as a radical
anti-family screed, which supposedly advocated turning over the work of
child-rearing to the state, it was anything but. In “Children Under the
Law,” she concluded that the state was obliged to intervene only in the
case of actual harm to children — a standard that had to be extremely
strict:

Only medically justifiable reasons for intervention should be acceptable.
Parental behavior that does not result in medically diagnosable harm to a
child should not be allowed to trigger intervention, however offensive that
behavior may be to the community.

It was the first in a series of legal articles on children and families,
and an early instance of what she would characterize as a lifelong interest
in such issues. Hillary later chaired the board of Edelman’s Children’s
Defense Fund (CDF) — though her relationship with her former mentor would
be strained by Bill’s 1996 welfare legislation, which Edelman angrily
condemned, declaring that his “signature on this pernicious bill makes a
mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.”

Soon after his own graduation, Bill returned to Arkansas — first for a
stint as a law professor, and then to run for Congress. He advised John
Doar, who was putting together the legal team for the Nixon impeachment
case, to hire Hillary, who was then at the CDF. Yet according to Maraniss,
Bill also sounded out the Arkansas politician David Pryor for his thoughts
on how this might affect his own political future. “He knew that his career
would be in politics,” Pryor told Maraniss, “and the question was whether
Hillary’s connection with the Watergate committee might have political
ramifications.”

In any case, she was hired. On the impeachment-committee staff, Hillary
became friends with Bernard Nussbaum, who would later serve as Bill’s White
House counsel. She told him — and anyone else who would listen — that her
boyfriend was destined to be president someday. Nussbaum, not surprisingly,
thought this was delusional. In Sheehy’s account, Hillary tore into him:

You asshole. Bernie, you’re a jerk. You don’t know this guy. I know this
guy. So don’t pontificate to me. He is going to be president of the United
States.

Of course, expectations were high for her too. So what to do after the
impeachment committee dissolved in 1974? She could go back to the CDF. She
could go to Washington, work at a law firm, and get a feel for politics — a
route complicated by her having failed the D.C. bar exam, an embarrassing
fact she kept secret for thirty years. Or she could move to Arkansas to be
with Bill. She had visited a few times, but moving to the sticks made her
nervous.

She chose Arkansas, where Bill’s 1974 congressional campaign was already
under way. He lost. But he also made a name for himself, challenging an
incumbent against long odds and almost beating him, and immediately began
thinking of the next race. His eye was on the governorship, but he thought
attorney general might be a better first step.

Hillary, meanwhile, was teaching law and running the school’s legal-aid
clinic. They spent lots of time together, but marriage was still an open
question. She had political ambitions and worried that she would be a bad
feminist if she took on family obligations. To gauge the wisdom of marrying
Bill, who had already proposed several times, she went back East and
canvassed her friends. When she returned to Arkansas, Bill greeted her with
a house he had just bought and another marriage proposal. She accepted.

During his 1976 campaign for attorney general, Bill alienated the state’s
unions by refusing to support the repeal of Arkansas’s right-to-work law.
It was the first in a long line of gestures aimed at distancing himself
from traditional liberal politics. This election he won — though everyone
knew the office was just a stepping stone.

The young couple moved from the relatively bohemian Fayetteville to the
more formal Little Rock. Hillary went from the legal clinic to the Rose Law
Firm, which represented the moneyed interests of Arkansas. It did not hurt
her prospects at the firm that her husband was the state’s chief legal
officer. Not that Bill planned to stay AG for very long. Less than a year
after the election, his chief of staff called in a brash young political
consultant from New York, Dick Morris, to evaluate Bill’s next step —
governor or senator? Morris urged a race for governor, beginning a
twenty-year association, interrupted by occasional storms, between the
crafty tactician and both Clintons.

While at Rose, Hillary’s allegiances began to shift. The
community-organizing group ACORN, then based in Arkansas and very much in
the Alinsky tradition, got a ballot measure passed that would lower
electricity rates for residential users in Little Rock and raise them for
commercial users. Business, of course, was not pleased, and filed a legal
challenge, with Rose representing them. Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN
and a friend of Hillary’s, was shocked to see her arguing the case in
court. And not only did she argue the case — she helped to craft the
underlying legal strategy, which was that the new rate schedule amounted to
an unconstitutional “taking of property.” This is now a common right-wing
argument against regulation, and Hillary was one of its early architects.

Bill won the 1978 gubernatorial election and embraced as one of his
signature programs the improvement of the state’s miserable highway system.
He chose to finance it by raising automobile license fees — which proved
enormously unpopular and was a major reason he lost his bid for reelection
two years later.

Almost as soon as the ballots were counted, Bill and his consigliere began
plotting his comeback. Morris’s polling discovered that the people of
Arkansas liked Bill, more or less, but saw him as someone who had gone
astray at Yale and Oxford. Morris advised him to do a televised mea culpa,
which he did. And Hillary, who’d been sticking with her maiden name like
the feminist she was, now took Bill’s. He won. And he, Hillary, and Morris
together decided that the best way to conduct politics was through a
permanent campaign. Policy and polling would be inseparable.

This model of governance also depended on enemies. Bill & Co. — and Hillary
was intimately involved with this choice from the beginning — picked the
teachers’ union. A court had declared the Arkansas education-finance system
unconstitutional: it was woefully unequal, with teachers in some districts
paid so poorly that they qualified for food stamps. Raising taxes in any
serious manner would be a political challenge. So the Clinton team paired a
modest, one-point increase in the sales tax with a proposed competence test
for teachers. The Arkansas public was not fond of the teachers’ union,
Morris found, so Bill could present himself as doing it all for the kids.
And, as Morris noted, it was a politically crafty break from the Old
Democrat left.

As Bernstein recounts, the Arkansas State Teachers Association “was not
exactly the antichrist, and in fact had done some pretty good things in a
state where the legislature had typically accorded more attention to
protecting the rights of poultry farmers to saturate half of Arkansas’s
topsoil with chicken feces than providing its children with a decent
education.” But setting them up as the enemy paid rich political dividends.
Clinton got the tax increase and the competence test.

These measures did not, however, lead to any significant improvement in the
state’s educational performance. A review of the reform efforts by the
Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation later found “a serious, large
demoralization of the teaching force. They feel constrained by what they
perceive to be a stranglehold of mandates, needless paperwork and limited
encouragement.” The problems of the educational system were so structural,
so deeply rooted in the state’s poverty and backwardness, that it would
require a wholesale overhaul of the political economy to fix them — and the
Clintons weren’t about to take that on.

Instead, they were laying the groundwork for what would eventually hit the
national stage as the New Democrat movement, which took institutional form
as the Democratic Leadership Council. Teacher testing and right-to-work
were nice ways to show his (their, really) distance from organized labor.
Bill went light on environmental enforcement and spread around tax breaks
in the name of economic development. Tyson Foods, the major producer of
that aforementioned chicken shit, got nearly $8 million in such breaks
between 1988 and 1990, at a time when the company’s budget was twice the
state’s.

When she wasn’t busy doing political work for the Clinton enterprise,
Hillary was defending the leading lights of Arkansas business at Rose and
serving on corporate boards — including the viciously anti-union Walmart
(though she did encourage the company to begin a recycling program). And
inevitably, there were connections between Rose and the state government,
from routine bond issues to more complex litigation. It was all a little
smelly, and would later cause the couple no end of headaches.

The Clintons had outgrown Arkansas. Bill contemplated running for president
in 1988 but decided not to, in part because he was terrified that one or
more of his countless paramours would come forward. But four years later,
he found his nerve. There were still plenty of skeletons in the closet, of
course. An internal campaign memo from March 1992 listed more than
seventy-five potential problems for the candidacy. Among them, needless to
say, were Bill’s many women — but about two thirds of the sore spots
involved both Bill and Hillary, and eighteen of them pertained to Hillary’s
work at Rose.

He won anyway. It was the next stage of what they had earlier called the
Journey — their joint venture to change the world. (Hillary’s private
slogan was: “Eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill.”) They settled into
something resembling a copresidency, with Hillary exercising an influence
no previous First Lady ever had. And she caused trouble right from the
start. Always suspicious of the media, she shut off reporters’ access to
the West Wing of the White House. It ended up alienating the press to no
good effect.

More substantively, Hillary was given responsibility for running the
health-care reform agenda. It was very much a New Democrat scheme.
Rejecting a Canadian-style single-payer system, Hillary and her team came
up with an impossibly complex arrangement called “managed competition.”
Employers would be encouraged to provide health care to their workers,
individuals would be assembled into cooperatives with some bargaining
power, and competition among providers would keep costs down. But it was
done in total secrecy, with no attempt to cultivate support in Congress or
among the public for what would be a massive piece of legislation — and one
vehemently opposed by the medical-industrial complex.

At a meeting with Democratic leaders in April 1993, Senator Bill Bradley
suggested that she might need to compromise to get a bill passed. Hillary
would have none of it: the White House would “demonize” any legislators who
stood in her way. Bradley was stunned. Years later, he told Bernstein:

That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton. You don’t tell members of
the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who
she is. The arrogance. . . . The disdain.

Health-care reform was a conspicuous failure, and most of the blame has to
fall on Hillary. Dusting herself off, she soon reinvented herself as a
freewheeling “advocate.” In Living History, she recalls changing gears to
focus on “children’s health issues, breast cancer prevention, and
protecting funding for public television, legal services, and the arts.”
She campaigned for changes in the adoption laws and for a bill to guarantee
that newborns and their mothers wouldn’t be kicked out of the hospital
sooner than forty-eight hours after the birth. It was all very high-minded,
and good for her image, but of limited impact.

She did, however, throw her weight behind Bill’s controversial initiative
to (as he put it more than once) “end welfare as we know it.” In Living
History, she insists that welfare reform was designed to be “the beginning,
not the end, of our concern for the poor.” Really? The whole point of
welfare reform was disciplining the poor, not helping them. Still, she
bragged that during the Clinton era, “welfare rolls had dropped 60 percent
from 14.1 million to 5.8 million, and millions of parents had gone to work.”

Of course, those gains came during the strongest economic expansion of the
past several decades, which was itself the byproduct of the unsustainable
dot-com bubble. In August 2014, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
published a report on how the Clinton welfare regime, officially designated
as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), had worked out over the
longer term. They found that TANF is serving fewer families despite
increased demand, that the value of benefits has eroded to the point where
beneficiaries can’t meet their basic needs, and that it does far less to
reduce poverty than its predecessor, AFDC. In addition, the report noted
that almost all of the early employment gains for single mothers have since
been reversed.

And then there were the scandals, many of them Hillary’s. The most famous
was Whitewater, a word it pains me to type. Democrats love to say that
there was nothing to that scandal. While it was certainly not the
diabolical conspiracy Republicans made it out to be during the fevered days
of the Clinton impeachment, it was not nothing. In short: A sleazy and
well-connected pal of the Clintons, Jim McDougal, came to them in 1978 with
a proposal to invest in a piece of undeveloped riverfront land in the Ozark
Mountains that he hoped to turn into vacation homes. They took the bait —
and paid almost no attention afterward, which turned out to be a mistake.

What happened was that McDougal then bought himself a savings and loan
association, which he renamed Madison Guaranty and used to fund his real
estate ventures, Whitewater among them. Speculators operating on borrowed
money are always dangerous — doubly so when they’ve got their own bank to
draw on. And Madison Guaranty, like hundreds of other S&Ls in the early
1980s, was bleeding money. By 1985, a desperate McDougal hired Rose to
handle the bank’s legal affairs. That was malodorous in itself, since
Madison was regulated by the state and a Rose partner was the governor’s
wife. But the Clintons, of course, were also investors in McDougal’s
schemes. The fact that they appear to have lost money on Whitewater, and
were never convicted of any criminal behavior in connection with the
scandal, hardly excuses this farcical round-robin of ethical conflicts.

4 Their escape from the Whitewater morass is all the more striking when you
consider what happened to the other participants. Jim McDougal was
convicted of eighteen counts of felony fraud and conspiracy in connection
with rotten Madison Guaranty loans; his wife, Susan McDougal, served
eighteen months in prison for refusing to testify about the scandal, before
receiving a presidential pardon from Bill; and even Bill’s successor as
Arkansas governor, Jim Guy Tucker, was sentenced to four years on
Whitewater-related conspiracy and mail-fraud charges.

Yet Whitewater itself is of far less interest than how Hillary handled it:
with lies, half-truths, and secrecy. She initially claimed during the 1992
campaign that she hadn’t represented clients before state regulators. She
then backpedaled and said that she had “tried to avoid such involvement and
cannot recall any instance other than the Madison Guaranty matter in which
I had any involvement, and my involvement there was minimal.” In fact,
Madison wasn’t the only instance. Another was the Southern Development
Bancorporation, which paid Rose more than $100,000 in fees and received
$300,000 in state investments.

5 Longtime readers of this magazine may recall “Fool for Scandal,” a 1994
report in which Gene Lyons demolished much of the accepted wisdom about
what he called the “Great Whitewater Political Scandal and Multimedia
Extravaganza.” Lyons makes a convincing case that Bill did not lean on the
Arkansas Securities Commission to treat his friend and business partner
with kid gloves. But in discussing Hillary’s legal representation of
McDougal’s enterprise, even Lyons grows uneasy: “For Hillary Rodham Clinton
to have ventured anywhere near Madison in any capacity was a damn fool
thing to do.”

Hillary also claimed the Rose billing records for the Madison case, which
were under multiple subpoenas, had disappeared. Then they suddenly
reappeared, discovered by a personal assistant in a room in the residential
quarters of the White House. When asked about this mysterious turn of
events, Hillary responded as if she, too, were an injured party: “I, like
everyone else, would like to know the answer about how those documents
showed up after all these years.” The records showed that far from having a
trivial role in representing Madison, she had actually billed for sixty
hours of work.

Although it’s been more than thirteen years since the Clintons left the
White House, it’s amazing how little there is to say about Hillary’s
subsequent career. If she was going to follow through on the
eight-of-Bill-eight-of-Hill plan, she certainly needed a new political
perch. Despite never having lived in New York — or, according to Dick
Morris, ever having shown the slightest interest in the city or state — she
decided to run for the Senate seat that Daniel Moynihan was vacating in
2000.

Hillary was plainly a carpetbagger. One way she fought that perception was
by engaging in a “listening tour” early in her candidacy, crisscrossing the
state that she barely knew, learning its physical and social geography, and
trying to convince voters that she cared. But listening wasn’t the point —
flattering voters was. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The New Yorker, “Here
was a woman who could be doing anything, and what she wanted to do was to
expand broadband access in Cattaraugus County.”

6 What makes the book strange is its central (and now counterfactual)
argument: The only thing that will stop Hillary’s inevitable march to the
presidency in 2008 is a Condoleezza Rice candidacy. Morris assured me that
I would find the list of Hillary’s accomplishments “adorable.”

And that was precisely the sort of issue that Hillary focused on after
winning the election. In Condi vs. Hillary (2005), a strange book that Dick
Morris wrote with his wife, Eileen McGann, there’s a list of her senatorial
accomplishments.6 Drawing on Library of Congress records, the authors
report that Hillary passed a total of twenty bills during her first five
years in the Senate. Fifteen of them were purely symbolic: supporting
Better Hearing and Speech Month, honoring Alexander Hamilton on the
bicentennial of his death, congratulating the Le Moyne College men’s
lacrosse team on a big win. Others encouraged the use of electric cars or
high-efficiency lightbulbs.

Granted, this is the stuff of retail politics. But what of her more
substantive legislative achievements? One of these, allegedly, is the
passage of something called the Nurse Retention and Quality of Care Act,
which she cosponsored with the Oregon Republican Gordon Smith. But a Senate
staffer told Morris that the bill was going to pass anyway, and that to
claim Hillary “was instrumental in passing it is pure puff.” There was also
legislation extending unemployment benefits for victims of 9/11 (what New
York senator wouldn’t have pushed for something like that?). And according
to Steven Brill’s exhaustive After: The Rebuilding and Defending of America
in the September 12 Era, it was the state’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer,
who did most of the heavy lifting on those bills.

What Hillary did do was make friends with her Republican colleagues. While
ideologically dubious, it did have the long-term benefit of softening
potential opposition to her future campaigns for the presidency. As Daniel
Halper (a smart, nonrabid conservative) writes in his recent book Clinton,
Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine:

I spoke to many, if not all, of Senator Clinton’s biggest opponents within
the Republican Party during her time as First Lady. On or off the record,
no matter how much they were coaxed, not one of them would say a negative
thing about Hillary Clinton as a person — other than observing that her
Democratic allies sometimes didn’t like her.

She buddied up to John McCain and attended prayer breakfasts with
right-wingers like Sam Brownback of Kansas. She befriended Republicans who
had served as floor managers of her husband’s impeachment. Even Newt
Gingrich has good things to say about her.

Oh, and she voted for the Iraq war, and continued to defend it long after
others had thrown in the towel. She cast that vote without having read the
full National Intelligence Estimate, which was far more skeptical about
Iraq’s armaments than the bowdlerized version that was made public —
strange behavior for someone as disciplined and thorough as Hillary. She
also accused Saddam Hussein of having ties to Al Qaeda, which was closer to
the Bush line than even many pro-war Democrats were willing to go. Alas, of
all her senatorial accomplishments, this one arguably had the biggest
impact. The rest were the legislative equivalent of being against breast
cancer.

There was the debacle of 2008, in the course of which she squandered an
initial two-to-one lead over her closest opponent for the Democratic
nomination. And there was her ascension, once the hopey, changey tidal wave
put Obama in the White House, to secretary of state. To be fair to Hillary,
Obama never allowed her much power in that post. An unnamed “former
high-ranking diplomat” told Halper that the president “brought her into the
administration, put her in a bubble, and ignored her.” Foreign policy was
run mostly out of the White House by people with little experience in the
area, and Obama, fearful of appearing soft, often deferred to military and
intelligence personnel.

For her own part, Hillary was less of a diplomat and more of a hawk, who
had made a campaign-trail promise in 2008 to “totally obliterate” Iran in
the event of an attack on Israel. Part of this may have been pure
temperament, or an impulse to prove that she was tougher than a man. But
she may also have been reacting against public perception of the job
itself. As the feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe, who specializes in gender
and militarism, told me in a 2004 interview, there’s a “long history of
trying to feminize the State Department in American inner circles.”
Diplomats are caricatured as upper-class pansies instead of manly warriors.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld even attempted to feminize Colin Powell, she
argued, “which is pretty hard to do with somebody who has been a general.”

But the problem becomes particularly acute with a female secretary of state
— and Hillary countered it with a macho eagerness to call in the U.S.
Cavalry. She backed an escalation of the Afghanistan war, lobbied on behalf
of a continuing military presence in Iraq, urged Obama to bomb Syria, and
supported the intervention in Libya. As Michael Crowley wrote in Time, “On
at least three crucial issues — Afghanistan, Libya, and the bin Laden raid
— Clinton took a more aggressive line than [Defense Secretary Robert]
Gates, a Bush-appointed Republican.”

On the other hand, Hillary and her backers might well stress her skimpy
résumé as a peacemaker. Correct the Record, a pro-Hillary PR organization
also run by David Brock, informs visitors on its website that she traveled
956,733 miles as secretary of state. This fact then links to a list of her
accomplishments at the State Department. For instance, she helped to
restore America’s “leadership and standing in the world,” though the only
metrics offered to support this are the miles logged and meetings taken
with “foreign leaders in 112 countries.” She worked to avoid all-out war in
Gaza (oops) and developed the “pivot to Asia” strategy, which “will
probably be Obama’s most lasting strategic achievement” (though it would be
hard to describe just what that is). She negotiated free-trade pacts with
Colombia and South Korea, despite her newfound reservations about NAFTA
during the 2008 campaign. She elevated the cause of women’s rights — which
is entirely laudable, but seems to have had little impact in what the
website refers to as “deeply reactionary cultures.”

Since leaving the State Department, Hillary has devoted herself to what we
can only call (echoing Halper’s title) Clinton, Inc. This fund-raising,
favor-dispensing machine is key to understanding her joint enterprise with
Bill. Unlike the Bush family, an old-style WASP dynasty for all W.’s
populist bluster and blunder, the Clintons are arrivistes who approach
politics in a highly neoliberal manner. That means nonstop self-promotion,
huge book advances, and fat speaking fees (Hillary has now joined Bill in
the six-figure club). It means the various Clinton foundations, which were
led first by Bill, but now include Hillary and Chelsea. According to a Wall
Street Journal investigation, they’ve collectively raised between $2 and $3
billion since 1992, three quarters of it from business interests, with
finance the leading sector.

And with an eye to the presidency, Hillary has also kept up her line of
neocon patter, while carefully separating herself from Obama. In a
notorious interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, she declared her enthusiastic
support for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and for Israel’s
pummeling of Gaza. She claimed that she’s always been against Iran’s right
to enrich uranium (though in 2010 she actually said otherwise). Prominent
neocons such as Robert Kagan and Max Boot have made supportive noises about
Hillary — and with an isolationist wing rising within the Republican party,
advocates of a countervailing “muscular” foreign policy might do
considerably more as 2016 approaches.

When I spoke to Dick Morris, I asked him how Hillary would differentiate
herself from Obama during the 2016 campaign. His prediction: She would say
that her predecessor had outlined a beautiful vision, but now voters “need
someone who can get things done.” He added that she would criticize Obama
for not having armed the Syrians rebels earlier. Two weeks later, in her
conversation with Goldberg, Hillary did exactly that, while also suggesting
that the president was to blame for the rise of ISIL. (In a revoltingly
laudatory Washington Post review of Henry Kissinger’s new book, Hillary
distinguishes between the president’s first term, during which they “laid
the foundation” for a new approach to international relations — and the
“crises of the second term,” as if the world suddenly changed when she
strolled out of the State Department.)

Morris’s record as a political fortune-teller is hardly unspotted (he
predicted a landslide for Mitt Romney the last time around), and who knows
what sort of long game this Fox-friendly Republican could be playing? For
what it’s worth, though, he’s assigned Elizabeth Warren the same sort of
spoiler role he gave to Condoleezza Rice in the 2008 contest. Morris told
me that if the Massachusetts senator “or some genuine figure from the new
populist left of the Democratic Party” were to challenge Hillary, “they
could upend her in much the same way that Obama did in 2008.” Warren,
meanwhile, swears she doesn’t want to run, even as Hillary dons the mantle
of inevitability for the second time.

Eight years of Hill? Four, even? To borrow her anti-McCain jab from the
2008 Democratic convention: No way, no how!

*Huffington Post: Here Are 5 Takeaways From The Harper's Anti-Clinton Story*
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/19/hillary-clinton-2016_n_6011954.html?utm_hp_ref=tw>

By Sam Levine

October 19, 2014, 9:00 p.m. EDT

In the November issue of Harper’s magazine, Doug Henwood argues that
Hillary Clinton, if elected president, would do little to assuage liberals'
disappointment in President Barack Obama. This is how Henwood sums up the
case for Hillary’s candidacy in 2016: “She has experience, she’s a woman,
and it’s her turn.” But, he says, “it’s hard to find any political
substance in her favor.”

Tracing Clinton’s life from her upbringing to her time at the State
Department, Henwood portrays her as a pragmatic politician motivated more
by ambition than by principle. Here are five key takeaways from Henwood’s
piece:

1. Hillary Clinton didn’t do much during her time in the U.S. Senate.

Relying on records collected by former Clinton adviser Dick Morris, Henwood
argues that the legislation Clinton passed during her first five years in
the Senate had little substance. The vast majority of bills, according to
Henwood, were purely symbolic or would have passed without Clinton’s
support. Clinton did work to extend unemployment benefits for 9/11
responders, but Haywood cites Steven Brill's book, The Rebuilding and
Defending of America in the September 12Era, to make the case that Sen.
Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was actually responsible for pushing the legislation
through.

Even though she didn’t have much of a legislative impact in the Senate,
Clinton did spend a lot of time befriending Republicans like Sen. John
McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who could potentially support
her in a presidential campaign, Henwood says.

Clinton’s most substantial legislative accomplishment, Henwood says, is her
support for the Iraq War. The rest of her accomplishments in the Senate
“were the legislative equivalent of being against breast cancer.”

2. Hillary Clinton is a hawk.

In addition to her support for the Iraq War, Henwood notes, Clinton also
linked Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Such an accusation “was closer to the
Bush line than even many pro-war Democrats were willing to go,” he writes.

The article goes on to say that during her time at the State Department,
Clinton had a “macho eagerness” to call in the U.S. cavalry in foreign
affairs. Quoting Time writer Michael Crowley, Henwood writes that, “On at
least three crucial issues -- Afghanistan, Libya, and the bin Laden raid --
Clinton took a more aggressive line than [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates,
a Bush-appointed Republican.”

3. Hillary Clinton is ambitious.

Shortly after Bill Clinton graduated Yale Law School, Hillary was already
telling colleagues that he was going to be president. Henwood also says
Clinton’s private slogan for her and her husband was “eight years of Bill,
eight years of Hill.”

4. Hillary Clinton is not idealistic.

At Wellesley College, Clinton wrote her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky’s
community organizing tactics, but later found them to be “too idealistic
and simplistic,” according to Bill Clinton’s biographer David Maraniss. In
her thesis, Clinton doubted the effectiveness of welfare programs, writing
that they "neither redeveloped poverty areas nor even catalyzed the poor
into helping themselves.” When Clinton turned down a job offer from Alinsky
after college, Alinsky reportedly told her that she wouldn’t change the
world by going to law school. Clinton told him that she disagreed.

5. Hillary Clinton has no problem representing the rich.

When she worked for the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, she represented business
owners who were upset over a ballot measure in Little Rock pushed by
community organizers that would have raised electricity rates on businesses
and lowered them on residents. Clinton played a crucial part in developing
the legal argument that the higher electricity rates would be an
“unconstitutional taking of property,” Henwood says, noting that similar
arguments are now frequently used against regulation.

*Des Moines Register: Sen. Warren raises the roof for Braley*
<http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/kathie-obradovich/2014/10/19/sen-warren-raises-the-roof-for-braley/17586195/>

 By Kathie Obradovich

October 19, 2014 10:56 p.m. CDT

"Wow! Dynamite."

That was the assessment of longtime Iowa Democrat and Hillary Clinton
supporter Bonnie Campbell after U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren delivered a
fist-pumping call to action at today's rally for Bruce Braley.

Warren, a Massachusetts senator, packed venues in Iowa City and Des Moines
today for Braley, who is running in a tight race for U.S. Senate. It was
Warren's first campaign trip to Iowa of the 2014 cycle.

She has said repeatedly she's not running for president in 2016, but she
noted Iowa's prominence in national politics.

"Iowa has led this country, time after time after time. You have put it on,
you've raised the issues, you've put them out there, you've made it clear
to the rest of America – what's happening, what's happening to our country,
where our values are, how we build a future," she said.

Warren and Braley both told personal stories featuring hard-working parents
who had to find ways to support the family after their bread-winning
fathers suffered illness or injury. Warren's father had a serious heart
attack and couldn't work for months, so her 50-year-old, stay-at-home
mother went to work to save their house.

"She walked to the Sears Roebuck and got a minimum-wage job – in an America
where a minimum-wage job would support a family of three," she said.

Braley said his father, a WW II Marine Corps veteran, was seriously injured
in a fall at a grain elevator and was laid up for almost a year. "And
without the safety net of workers compensation payments and friends and
family that rallied to my family's support, we wouldn't have made it," he
said. "And that's when I learned, you're only as strong as the people who
you care about and what we do together matters."

Warren, known for her populist political values, outlined an agenda similar
to Braley's: Raising the minimum wage and investing in education,
infrastructure and scientific research. She said Republicans had undermined
these investments over the years in order to cut taxes for the rich.

Of all of the political surrogates I've seen this cycle of either party,
Warren was hands-down the best at firing up the room. "We can whine about
what the Republicans have done. We can whimper about what they've done, or
we can fight back. Me, I'm fighting back," she shouted, to thunderous
cheers and chants in the audience.

She said the core issue in the race for U.S. Senate is: "Who does the
government work for? Does it work just for the millionaires, just for the
billionaires, just for those who have armies of lobbyists and lawyers, or
does it work for the people?"

Iowa Democrats who plan to participate in the 2016 caucuses are
overwhelmingly supporting Hillary Clinton as a prospective presidential
candidate right now, according to the Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll.

Warren is not well-known among likely caucusgoers, but she is on their
radar as a second choice. Judging from her performance in Iowa today,
she'll have plenty of invitations from Iowa Democrats who want to share a
stage with her in the future.

*New York Magazine: Andrew Cuomo and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very
Bad Year*
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/andrew-cuomos-bad-year.html>

By Chris Smith

October 19, 2014 9:00 p.m. EDT

The phone is Andrew Cuomo’s instrument. Somehow distance brings out the
governor’s full range of operatic inflections and rhetorical flourishes
that he doesn’t deploy effectively in person. Today, on the phone, three
weeks from Election Day, cruising toward a second term, he is in full
Rodney Dangerfield mode.

“I passed gay marriage! I passed the toughest gun law in the country! I
closed more prison cells than any governor in the history of the state!
Minority job vouchers! My record of progressive accomplishment tops
anyone!” Pause, dramatic reduction in volume. “Now, do you have some voices
on the left that are impossible to placate in any realistic way? Yeah … Ask
yourself: If he were more liberal, he would have done what? What more could
I have possibly done? You’re gonna use the tax code just to take money from
the rich and give it to the poor? That’s not liberalism. That’s
confiscation! Liberalism was ‘Lift up the poor’ … The problem for liberals
and progressives—of which I am proudly one—is you have to demonstrate you
can actually do what you talk about. And that’s what I’ve been doing. My
government works.”

Cuomo has a point. On balance, he’s had a strong first term. The state has
gone from a $10 billion deficit in 2010 to a projected $6 billion surplus.
He’s restored functionality, if not total rationality, to a state
government that had become a national embarrassment. Cuomo has also poured
money and attention into Buffalo, and the state’s second-largest, formerly
woebegone city is seeing fresh job growth. He has been opportunistic,
pushing through tighter gun laws after the shootings in Sandy Hook and
wrangling the legalization of gay marriage just two years after the State
Legislature had rejected the idea by a fairly wide margin.

There have certainly been flaws. Cuomo is replacing the decrepit Tappan Zee
Bridge without really explaining how he’s going to pay for the new $4
billion spans. He’s still stalling on a fracking decision. There have been
tax cuts for corporations and spending cuts for social services. But the
lack of enthusiasm for Cuomo, in both the citizenry and the political
class, is as much about his muscular style as any substance. “Is he a son
of a bitch at times? Yeah,” one of the governor’s Albany allies says. “He
is a mechanic; he works on cars as a hobby, fixes engines. And in politics
he moves the process forward. You don’t love Andrew Cuomo. But there hasn’t
been a better governor, not in the last 50 years.”

The current year, though, has been a rough one. He underestimated the anger
of the state’s left wing and the ability of the Working Families Party to
marshal it against him—at least for a few embarrassing days in May. Then he
ignored his Democratic primary challenger, Zephyr Teachout, who mounted a
surprisingly robust, albeit unsuccessful, insurgency. Since winning the
primary, Cuomo has barely campaigned, avoiding in-person debates with the
Republican candidate, Rob Astorino. (He did agree to a radio debate.) Even
if Astorino, or Teachout, was never a real threat, Cuomo’s attitude toward
the campaign has fueled the perception that he views himself as above the
democratic process.

The fallout from his Moreland Commission machinations haven’t helped. One
of his loudest campaign promises four years ago was that he’d clean up
corruption in Albany. In 2013, the governor empaneled the commission to
investigate ethical violations in government, but his higher priority was
using the commission as a subpoena-packing weapon to pressure the
Legislature to pass stricter ethics laws. The move was classic Cuomo:
ethically debatable tactics to achieve modestly higher ethical ends.

The governor insists that he’d declared from the outset that he’d shutter
the commission when the Legislature passed an ethics bill, and that’s true.
In July, however, the Times detailed how Cuomo’s aides meddled with
Moreland’s work, and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has been pursuing the
leads the commission developed.

Maybe the successes of the first three years made Cuomo overconfident. Or
maybe his bumpy 2014 was partly rooted in the growing realization that his
shot at a 2016 presidential bid was slipping away. “Psychologically, the
governor is a guy that’s goal-oriented,” a senior state Democrat says. “He
would never admit it, but he’d been driven by positioning himself for
president. Now that that’s off the table, he’s a little bit adrift.”

Cuomo is far more complicated than that, though, and so are the
circumstances. Holding back big new ideas until January, when the new
legislative season starts, for instance, is a strategic choice. Not that
he’s promising any revelations. “I fundamentally intend to continue doing
what I’m doing,” he says. “Fiscal discipline and pushing the envelope on
socially progressive issues … For me, the team comes out of the locker room
for the second half, the team is ahead 21 to 0, what are you gonna do
different in the second half? Very little.”

Still, he seems to be casting about for a set of challenges worthy of his
restless intensity for the next four—and maybe eight—years in Albany. After
three years of travel avoidance bordering on the phobic, he will take
“trade missions” to China, Mexico, Israel, Canada, and Italy. The
publication, last week, of his autobiography also seems to have revived his
energy. “Writing it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “The
editor, she said, ‘You’re writing it like a lawyer writes a legal brief,
and it becomes a boring, sterile read.’ She wanted more emotion and
hyperbole and rhetoric. I said, ‘Yeah, but in my business, if they can spin
the language to mean something else, they will.’ ”

There’s plenty of emotion at the mention of his antagonists. Cuomo is
emphatic, if not especially convincing, that he didn’t see Teachout
standing right in front of him at a parade in September. “There was
somebody between me and her. Look, I shook hands with that guy … uh, the
lieutenant governor, Wu!” Cuomo says, referring to Tim Wu, who ran for that
office in the primary. As for Teachout’s surprising 34 percent? “That
showing had nothing to do with her,” he snaps. “In a very small-turnout
election you have the [state] teachers union, which is against me, you have
the public employees that are against me … and the fracking people,
probably the largest single issue for activist Democrats, who are upset
that I won’t ban it.”

The Times drives him crazy; he thinks its editorial board is obsessed with
public financing of campaigns, a reform Cuomo says he supports, even though
he’s dubious that it has much relevance in the age of big-money
independent-expenditure committees.

Not that he cares to dwell on some pesky liberal carping when he’s got the
whole state to worry about. Cuomo believes the center is still the most
responsible place from which to govern New York—and the country, though
he’s merely an informed spectator on that front, of course. Aren’t national
politics increasingly polarized, with the right and the left wings setting
the agendas for the Republicans and the Democrats? “That’s always been
true,” Cuomo says, quickly warming to the subject. “But you’re leaving out
a big piece of history. Bill Clinton wins saying to the left of the party,
‘You are unelectable.’ Bill Clinton gives a speech saying, ‘Mario Cuomo,
Dukakis, Ted Kennedy are the politics of a failed Democratic Party.’ Bill
Clinton does Sister Souljah, puts his finger in the chest of Jesse Jackson.
That was after a period of left dominance. Clinton is then
centrist-moderate-left, right? Sort of tacks back and forth between the
two. Where is the national Democratic Party now? Well, they’re talking
about Hillary Clinton. Her last name is Clinton, which represented that
centrist-left platform. So I think that’s where the party is nationwide.
And the Clinton philosophy is still a winning philosophy.”

Ah, the multiple psychodramas embedded in that single paragraph. Cuomo,
though, sounds more relaxed than usual, claiming he’s content ruling New
York for the foreseeable future. “I am so happy that I got to do what I’m
doing. This is a gift,” he says. “I want a great record. That’s what I
want. That’s what matters. When you’re dead politically—and I’ve been dead
politically, and I saw my father dead politically—what matters is what you
got done.”

*Calendar:*

*Sec. Clinton's upcoming appearances as reported online. Not an official
schedule.*

·  October 20 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton fundraises for House
Democratic women candidates with Nancy Pelosi (Politico
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/hillary-clinton-nancy-pelosi-110387.html?hp=r7>
)

·  October 20 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton fundraises for Senate
Democrats (AP
<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/03fe478acd0344bab983323d3fb353e2/clinton-planning-lengthy-campaign-push-month>
)

·  October 23 – MN: Sec. Clinton fundraises for Gov. Mark Dayton (AP
<http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/279621542.html>)

·  October 24 – RI: Sec. Clinton campaigns for Rhode Island gubernatorial
candidate Gina Raimondo (Politico
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/hillary-clinton-gina-raimondo-rhode-island-elections-111750.html>
)

·  October 24 – Mass.: Sec. Clinton campaigns for Mass. gubernatorial
candidate Martha Coakley (CNN
<https://twitter.com/danmericaCNN/status/522906865332944896>)

·  October 24 – NE: Sec. Clinton campaigns for ME gubernatorial candidate
Mike Michaud (PressHerald
<http://www.pressherald.com/2014/10/19/hillary-clinton-to-stump-for-michaud-in-maine/>
)

·  October 25 – NC: Sec. Clinton campaigns for Sen. Kay Hagan (AP
<http://abc11.com/politics/hillary-rodham-clinton-to-campaign-for-hagan/356139/>
)

·  October 30 – Washington, DC: Sec. Clinton speaks at the launch of The
International Council on Women’s Business Leadership (CNN
<https://twitter.com/danmericaCNN/status/522470101749342208>)

·  November 2  – NH: Sec. Clinton appears at a GOTV rally for Gov. Hassan
and Sen. Shaheen (AP
<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/03fe478acd0344bab983323d3fb353e2/clinton-planning-lengthy-campaign-push-month>
)

·  December 1 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton keynotes a League of
Conservation Voters dinner (Politico
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/hillary-clinton-green-groups-las-vegas-111430.html?hp=l11>
)

·  December 4 – Boston, MA: Sec. Clinton speaks at the Massachusetts
Conference for Women (MCFW <http://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/>)