Subject: Correct The Record Tuesday November 18, 2014 Afternoon Roundup
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 13:37:20 -0500
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*​**Correct The Record Tuesday November 18, 2014 Afternoon Roundup:*

*Tweets:*

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: .@HillaryClinton
<https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton> launched a partnership to improve
teacher quality in S. Africa #HRC365
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/HRC365?src=hash> http://map.correctrecord.org/
<http://t.co/enGHrjXSoH>[11/18/14, 11:16 a.m. EST
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/534741857272487936>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: Use our map to navigate @HillaryClinton
<https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton>’s legacy as Secretary of State:
http://map.correctrecord.org  <http://t.co/KRlJaepyfh>[11/17/14, 5:55 p.m.
EST <https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/534480027245903872>]

*Correct The Record* @CorrectRecord: .@HillaryClinton
<https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton> traveled to 112 countries & nearly 1M
miles in 4 years...and that’s just the start #HRC365
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/HRC365?src=hash>http://map.correctrecord.org/
<http://t.co/baHkJcw9Rt> [11/17/14, 2:11 p.m. EST
<https://twitter.com/CorrectRecord/status/534423644081250304>]

*Headlines:*

*MSNBC: Rachel Maddow Show blog: “Walker latest to talk up Hillary
Clinton’s age”
<http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/walker-latest-talk-hillary-clintons-age>*

“Incidentally, the former Secretary of State is a half-year younger than
Mitt Romney. That doesn’t seem to affect occasional chatter about his
possible ambitions.”

*The Hill blog: Ballot Box: “Backers set deadline to convince Warren to
run”
<http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/224519-backers-set-deadline-to-convince-warren-to-run>*

“A group urging Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to run for president [Ready
for Warren] on Tuesday announced a Feb. 16 deadline to get her to jump in.”

*Washington Post blog: She The People: “How Elizabeth Warren is already
influencing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 bid”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/11/18/how-elizabeth-warren-is-already-influencing-the-2016-race/>*

“The group is set to launch today ‘Time for Warren,’ an effort that will
culminate on President’s Day, with 100,000 letters being delivered to
Warren, urging her to run for president in 2016.”

*Washington Post blog: Post Politics: “One Democrat with no position on the
Keystone XL pipeline: Hillary Clinton”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11/18/one-democrat-with-no-position-on-the-keystone-pipeline-hillary-clinton/>*

“A former secretary of state and U.S. senator and likely 2016 presidential
candidate, Clinton has refused over the past several years to weigh in on
the contentious debate.”

*The Week: “Why Hillary Clinton will struggle to rebuild the Obama
coalition”
<http://theweek.com/article/index/272156/why-hillary-clinton-will-struggle-to-rebuild-the-obama-coalition>*

“Without Obama at the top of the ticket, even in the reduced-inspiration
mode of 2012, that coalition is unlikely to emerge a third time. Whatever
other qualities she will bring to a presidential campaign, neither novelty
nor outsider populism will be among them.”

*ABC News: “Clinton Tourism: Go Along on a 'Billgrimage'”
<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/clinton-tourism-arkansas-ride-billgrimage/story?id=26996388>*

“A classic Billgrimage includes a visit to four cities in Arkansas: Hope,
to see Clinton’s birthplace; Hot Springs, were he graduated high school;
Fayetteville, where he and Hillary Clinton taught law; and Little Rock, the
state’s capital where he was governor and that served as the launch pad for
his political career.”

*Articles:*

*MSNBC: Rachel Maddow Show blog:
<http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/walker-latest-talk-hillary-clintons-age>**“Walker
latest to talk up Hillary Clinton’s age”
<http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/walker-latest-talk-hillary-clintons-age>*

By Steve Benen

November 18, 2014, 8:00 a.m. EST

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), who’s made no secret of his national
ambitions, sat down over the weekend with the Fox affiliate in Milwaukee,
which asked him about his possible presidential campaign. The Republican
governor’s response seemed noteworthy.

“To me, I’m not going to run just because of the pundits or anything else
like that. The closer you get to something like that the more you realize –
and I say this only half-jokingly – that you have to be crazy to want to be
president. And anyone who has seen pictures of this president or any of the
former presidents can see the before and after. No matter how fit, no
matter how young they are, they age pretty rapidly when you look at their
hair any everything else involved with it.

“Whether it’s two years, six years or 20 years from now – because I think
of Hillary Clinton. I could run 20 years from now and still be about the
same age as the former Secretary of State is right now.”

In context, the question the reporter asked was, “Do you have a sense that
this is your moment?” There were no previous references to Clinton or ages;
it was just what Walker had on his mind at the time, and he felt inclined
to share the thought, no matter how gratuitous it was.

The Wisconsin governor’s comments come just a week after Sen. Rand Paul
(R-Ky.) was “none too subtly raising the issue of her age,” too.

To be sure, we’re still very much in the oblique phase of the debate,
though Walker was more direct than Paul, so I’m not suggesting the left
crank the Outrage-O-Meter to 11. Clinton has no doubt heard much more
offensive criticism from Republican rivals before.

That said, this is an awkward game Republicans are playing.

As we discussed last week, there is an inevitability to all of this.
Reagan, at age 69, faced questions about his age in 1980, as did John
McCain in 2008 at age 72 and Bob Dole in 1996 at age 73. Clinton is 67 now,
she’ll be 69 in 2016, and if she runs she’ll have to talk about this. I
rather doubt this will be a problem for a possible Clinton campaign, but
we’ll find out soon enough.

But GOP candidates and their allies have to realize that a preoccupation
with this issue won’t do them any favors. Republicans are already
struggling with a gender gap; the more they run around needlessly
referencing Clinton’s age, the more they risk making matters worse.

Incidentally, the former Secretary of State is a half-year younger than
Mitt Romney. That doesn’t seem to affect occasional chatter about his
possible ambitions.

*The Hill blog: Ballot Box: “Backers set deadline to convince Warren to
run”
<http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/224519-backers-set-deadline-to-convince-warren-to-run>*

By Peter Sullivan

November 18, 2014, 11:36 a.m. EST

A group urging Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to run for president on
Tuesday announced a Feb. 16 deadline to get her to jump in.

The group, Ready for Warren, has started an online petition, where they are
trying to gather 100,000 signatures by the President's Day deadline.

According to MSNBC, which first reported the new effort, the group will
also seek to flood Warren with hand-written letters calling on her to run.

“Warren is well-known enough already that she could jump into the race far
later and still win," founder Erica Sagrans will write in an email to
supporters, according to MSNBC. "But the fact is that we’ll soon be one
year out from the Iowa caucuses, so we can’t afford to wait."

Warren has passionate backing on the left, and liberals have encouraged her
to run amid concerns that Hillary Clinton is too close to Wall Street. But
Warren has repeatedly insisted that she is not running.

Warren was invited to address a gathering of the liberal donors of the
Democracy Alliance last week, while Clinton was not. The Democracty
Alliance said that was not an indication of a preference for president.

There were rumblings last week that the Clinton camp is in the early stages
of setting up meetings with liberal groups such as the Progressive Change
Campaign Committee and Democracy for America.

*Washington Post blog: She The People: “How Elizabeth Warren is already
influencing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 bid”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/11/18/how-elizabeth-warren-is-already-influencing-the-2016-race/>*

By Nia-Malika Henderson

November 18, 2014, 11:04 a.m. EST

Nobody parses Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren's words about
her political future closely than Erica Sagrans, the campaign manager for
the "Ready for Warren" draft movement. And Sagrans was paying particularly
close attention recently, as Warren assumed a new leadership post in the
Senate Democratic caucus -- a move that Sagrans says underscores her
emergence as the future of her party. Now Sagrans is planning a stepped up
effort, capitalizing on a midterm election that saw Warren in a number of
states campaigning for Democrats and expanding her brand to unlikely places
like West Virginia.  The group is set to launch today "Time for Warren," an
effort that will culminate on President's Day, with 100,000 letters being
delivered to Warren, urging her to run for president in 2016. They have
also hired Kate Albright-Hanna, who ran then Senator Obama’s video team in
2008, We caught up with Sagrans, who is also an Obama alum, about
continuing to build momentum around Warren, who has so far said she has no
plans to run.  Our conversation is below, edited only for grammar.

FIX: What was the takeaway from the midterms?

Sagrans: The midterms were a clear moment that shows we need leaders that
are courageous and inspiring to people and ones that have clear plans and
ideas that speak to people's lives and struggles. We need someone to run
like that in 2016 to give people a reason to get involved. We need
candidates who aren’t trying to play it safe, which is what we see in
Warren. There is a question now about where the Democratic party is headed
and we want to see it going in Warren’s direction. We should have that
debate in the Democratic primary. Her new role shows she is a leader in the
Democratic party and whatever her future role is, she will guide the
Democratic party. It’s an exciting development that she is getting
recognized, but her platform would be bigger if she were to run for
president.

FIX: Democrats lost big among Southern whites. People in Clinton's circle
are arguing that they can expand the map by appealing to Southern whites.
What do you make of that argument?

Sagrans: We saw in the exit polling that people in general are frustrated
and two thirds of people say the system is rigged in favor of the rich.
Overall there is frustration that crosses racial lines. Warren's appeal to
white voters is that she is speaking to that frustration with the failure
to help working families. Her populist streak could bring in voters who may
have not been as interested in Democrats more recently.

FIX: In Massachusetts, where Warren was at a campaign event for Martha
Coakley, Hillary Clinton tried to do her populism thing by saying
corporations don't create jobs.

Sagrans: That moment showed Warren’s effect already on the Democratic
primary. Clinton is embracing her language around corporations and Wall
Street. She has pushed the language that Clinton is using. It’s a start.
But we want to see more than that. We want to see Clinton and future
candidates really embrace Warren’s words and views and passion when it
comes to working people taking on Wall Street and helping students with
debt, for instance. There are places where they agree, but places where
Warren goes further in how she wants to do things. Part of it is also the
people we want to see in charge and who they are accountable to.

FIX: There's been some speculation that now, just maybe Warren, who has
said she won't run, might be using different language signaling that she
might just do it.

Sagrans: We saw her open the door to running with the People magazine
article she did. She said you never know what could happen in response to a
question about 2016. She is considering it. She hasn’t made a decision yet.
We have this opportunity to convince her to run. We've got retired women in
Iowa working on this, a pretty active group in New York, a leader in
Connecticut, somebody on the ground in Florida. People who have popped up
and asked how they can help all over the map. We are also going to ramp up
our focus on the early states, Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina and
Nevada and raise money to hire state coordinators and build stronger local
teams in those places. And we are going to focus on an aggressive
media[strategy] and doing a lot of video and we will get them to Warren and
to the public about why people are calling on her to run.

*Washington Post blog: Post Politics: “One Democrat with no position on the
Keystone XL pipeline: Hillary Clinton”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11/18/one-democrat-with-no-position-on-the-keystone-pipeline-hillary-clinton/>*

By Philip Rucker

November 18, 2014, 11:31 a.m. EST

With Senate Democrats divided over whether to approve the Keystone XL oil
pipeline in a vote Tuesday night, they won't be getting any guidance from
the person poised to become their standard-bearer.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has no stated opinion on the matter.

A former secretary of state and U.S. senator and likely 2016 presidential
candidate, Clinton has refused over the past several years to weigh in on
the contentious debate. She has said that her connection to the State
Department, which has been central to the Obama administration's review of
the pipeline, prevents her from taking sides.

For Clinton, there is no upside to taking a stance. If she came out in
favor of the pipeline, she would anger environmental and climate activists,
including super PAC founder Tom Steyer and many other major Democratic
donors. If she opposed it, she would be at odds with the business community.

Yet as she moves toward a presidential candidacy, Republicans have been
trying to draw her into messy congressional debates. With embattled Sen.
Mary Landrieu (D-La.) scrambling to round up votes from her Democratic
colleagues ahead of Tuesday night's scheduled Senate vote, Republicans are
criticizing Clinton for remaining neutral on such a high-profile and
contentious issue.

“She wrote a book called 'Hard Choices,' but she wouldn't take an opinion
on the Keystone Pipeline,” said Tim Miller, executive director of America
Rising, a GOP group leading the attack on Clinton. “She may be the only
person in America without a position on the Keystone Pipeline at this
point.”

A Clinton spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During multiple speaking appearances and interviews in Canada earlier this
year, Clinton has been asked about the Keystone Pipeline. In June, she told
The Globe and Mail:

“We have no better relationship. [But] this particular decision is a very
difficult one because there are so many factors at play. I can’t really
comment at great length because I had responsibility for it and it’s been
passed on and it wouldn’t be appropriate, but I hope that Canadians
appreciate that the United States government – the Obama administration –
is trying to get it right. And getting it right doesn’t mean you will agree
or disagree with the decision, but that it will be one based on the best
available evidence and all of the complex local, state, federal,
interlocking laws and concerns.”

As she told an audience in March in Vancouver, “No comment.”

*The Week: “Why Hillary Clinton will struggle to rebuild the Obama
coalition”
<http://theweek.com/article/index/272156/why-hillary-clinton-will-struggle-to-rebuild-the-obama-coalition>*

By Edward Morrissey

November 18, 2014, 9:52 a.m. EST

[Subtitle:] The stars aligned for the Democrats in 2008 and 2012. It may
not happen a third time.

In the wake of the disastrous midterms for Democrats, analysis of their
prospects for the 2016 elections — and especially the outlook for Hillary
Clinton — ranged from shrugs to panic. Some argued that the unique turnout
models of midterms do not allow for any projections in a presidential
cycle, while others talked about an electoral realignment. Neither extreme
applies, but the elections show that the Democrats do have a big problem:
it will not be easy for Hillary Clinton, should she choose to run, to
rebuild the coalition that won two elections for President Obama.

First of all, one must take care not to over-apply the midterm results to
non-midterm elections. Republicans learned that lesson in 2012, especially
when it came to analyzing poll results. Analysts on the right, including
myself, made the mistake of thinking that the electorate had changed
permanently in 2012, going so far as to "unskew the polls" to apply a
turnout model closer to the 2010 results. While the 2012 election turned
out millions fewer voters for Barack Obama, the model of those who did vote
trended much closer to 2008 than 2010, and the president won re-election
over Mitt Romney.

Similarly, Democrats and analysts on the left hoped that the 2014 midterm
turnout would prove 2010 a fluke. That assumption turned out to be wrong,
and the failure produced similar results. Pollsters assumed that Democrats'
get-out-the-vote efforts would recreate their success from two years
earlier. Even Republican pollsters bet incorrectly in that regard, which
created poor decisions on resource outlays.

The points is that voter predictions have always relied on assumptions
about the demographics. The gathering of data was not the issue, but how it
got applied.

That has been a problem ever since Barack Obama first ran for president.
After two terms of George W. Bush, nearly everyone predicted that the
nation would turn to the Democrats, especially after the GOP got creamed in
the 2006 midterms. The Clintons had kept their political machine in place,
waiting for the opportunity to make a return to the White House. With
national discontent directed at Republicans and Hillary Clinton winning a
second term in the U.S. Senate, the conventional wisdom considered the
Democratic primary a coronation rather than a fight.

Enter Obama. Largely on the basis of his memoirs and a blockbuster speech
at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama offered a change from the
normal political cycles. He got people who normally sat on the sidelines
interested in the electoral process. His team proved superior at
identifying Democratic primary voters and getting them to the polls. The
freshman senator found new donors and new activists to outperform even the
Clinton machine, overturning all assumptions about the composition of the
electorate as Obama inspired a youth movement.

He outfought the Clintons to the end, and wound up trouncing John McCain in
the general election. Four years later, Obama hung onto enough of those
voters to see "the Obama coalition" triumph one more time.

The problem for Hillary Clinton is just that point. Without Obama at the
top of the ticket, even in the reduced-inspiration mode of 2012, that
coalition is unlikely to emerge a third time. Whatever other qualities she
will bring to a presidential campaign, neither novelty nor outsider
populism will be among them. The Clintons are a known commodity; by the
time the 2016 elections arrive, they will have been part of the Washington,
D.C., scene for almost a quarter-century.

Furthermore, the national mood has shifted away from Democrats, thanks to
Barack Obama. His approval ratings have plummeted, and a new scandal this
week with ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber won't restore much luster to
the Democratic brand. The shoe is squarely on the other foot for Democrats
in 2016.

The Clinton team still hasn't recognized the reality of the predicament
faced by Hillary and her party. Talking Points Memo interviewed Ready For
Hillary activist Mitch Stewart, who claimed that the Clintons could compete
for voters who rejected Democrats two weeks ago, especially in states like
Arkansas, Indiana, and Missouri. "Where I think Secretary Clinton has more
appeal than any other Democrat looking at running," Stewart argued, "is
that with white working-class voters, she does have a connection."

There are a number of holes in that argument, but let's look at Arkansas
first. Both Clintons campaigned hard in Arkansas for incumbent Democrat
Mark Pryor, who lost his Senate seat to Tom Cotton by a whopping 17 points.
He won only 29 percent of white working-class voters, despite having a
well-known family name, the advantages of incumbency, and full-throated
support from the former first couple of Arkansas.

Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post explains that Stewart's assumptions
are based on a voter model that's outdated, plus it ignores the fact that
any improvement would be incremental at best. Both Indiana and Missouri
have become much more Republican, even in elections with Obama on the top
of the ticket; he lost both states in 2012 after winning them in 2008.
"Clinton would almost certainly do better with white working-class voters
than Obama did," Cillizza writes. "But, in some of the states that Stewart
puts in that first bucket, that's a pretty low bar."

Obama transformed the electorate by being a transformational candidate, at
least in promise and theory. He also had the wind at his back with the
economic collapse in late 2008 and general fatigue with Bush and
Republicans. The latter has reversed, which means that any Democrat would
have a difficult time inspiring the Obama coalition back into force, let
alone an establishment figure (and an Obama administration official) like
Hillary Clinton.

She looks less like Barack Obama in this scenario than she resembles John
McCain. She would be running on a damaged party brand, representing
continuity rather than change — a symptom of the problems of Washington
rather than their cure.

*ABC News: “Clinton Tourism: Go Along on a 'Billgrimage'”
<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/clinton-tourism-arkansas-ride-billgrimage/story?id=26996388>*

By Liz Kreutz

November 18, 2014, 12:01 p.m. EST

The first Billgrims came 10 years ago.

Following the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library Nov. 18, 2004,
travelers descended on Arkansas like never before. Suddenly, the state was
welcoming people from all around the world who came to tour Bill Clinton’s
library and, along the way, visit other historic landmarks related to the
former president.

The trip became known as a “Billgrimage.”

A classic Billgrimage includes a visit to four cities in Arkansas: Hope, to
see Clinton’s birthplace; Hot Springs, were he graduated high school;
Fayetteville, where he and Hillary Clinton taught law; and Little Rock, the
state’s capital where he was governor and that served as the launch pad for
his political career.

Originally, visitors were given a small “passport” by Arkansas’ tourism
bureau and could get stamps at each destination they visited in the state.
The passport has since been discontinued and, these days, fewer people make
the entire four-stop trail. But Little Rock continues to see a huge tourism
boost, largely to the presidential library, which is celebrating its 10th
anniversary today.

In the past decade, its economic impact on the local community has totaled
an estimated $3.3 billion, according to a new study released Monday, and
longtime residents talk incredulously about the transformation they’ve seen.

“Oh gosh, it’s huge,” Paul Leopoulos, a friend of Bill Clinton’s since
elementary school, who had just reunited with the former president to
celebrate the library’s anniversary, recalled Saturday morning at the
sunlit office of his arts education foundation in North Little Rock.

“When they finally announced they were going to build it everything started
to change. Businesses and hotels opened up immediately, and this was two
years before the thing was even built.”

And for Richard Davies, the executive director of the Arkansas Department
of Parks and Tourism, the library was the “shot in the arm” the city needed.

For those on the Billgrimage in Little Rock, there are five must-see
historic sites. These are the Governor’s Mansion, a former house of Bill
and Hillary Clinton, the Capitol Building, the Old State House Museum where
Clinton gave his election night speeches and, lastly, the library, which
looks like a big box (or as one Billgrimage blogger described it, a trailer
house), that sits prominently along the Arkansas River and houses nearly
100,000 archival documents from Clinton’s eight years in the White House.

For Joe Purvis, another childhood FOB (“Friend of Bill’s”), a Billgrimage
is not complete without indulging in the local cuisine.

“I love to eat,” Purvis said, looking down upon his belly from the
high-rise of his law practice in downtown Little Rock, “And I can ensure
that before his heart attack, the president liked to eat as well.”

The spot to go is Doe’s Eat Place, a local favorite known for its tamales
and 3-pound steaks.

“Bill Clinton, in his prime, would certainly go to Doe’s,” Purvis quipped,
but questioned whether his new diet would allow him to make the visit.

A waitress there, however, said Clinton still comes in to the restaurant
roughly once a year, but did concede that now as a vegan, there’s little on
the menu that he can eat.