Subject: ​Correct The Record Thursday November 27, 2014 Roundup
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 12:53:52 -0500
List-Id: <CTRFriendsFamily.americanbridge.org>

*​​**Correct The Record Thursday November 27, 2014 Roundup:*

*Headlines:*

*The Nation: “How Erstwhile Clinton Nemesis David Brock Built an Empire to
Put Hillary in the White House”
<http://m.thenation.com/article/191529-how-erstwhile-clinton-nemesis-david-brock-built-empire-put-hillary-white-house>*

“Complementing that operation is Correct the Record, a subsidiary of
American Bridge that Brock launched last year to push back against
misinformation about Democratic presidential candidates, which so far has
meant defending Clinton constantly and consistently.”

*New York Times column: Gail Collins: “Counting Benghazi Blessings”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/opinion/gail-collins-counting-benghazi-blessings.html?_r=0>*

“There are rumblings from some Senate Republicans that what the next
Congress needs is a good joint House-Senate Benghazi investigation. On the
other hand, the House Agricultural Committee seems to have no interest
whatsoever in initiating a probe. For this, we are truly thankful.”

*Associated Press: “Southern Democrats trying to recover lost ground”
<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/502da8f1552d489982b055c3bcd16478/southern-democrats-trying-recover-lost-ground>*

“Georgia's Democratic chairman, DuBose Porter, defended Carter and Nunn as
‘world-class candidates’ who can run again. He said Democrats ‘proved
Georgia can be competitive in 2016,’ but he cautioned against looking for a
nominee other than Clinton. ‘She puts us in play,’ he said.”

*Politico: “Political caution on Ferguson”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/ferguson-protests-2016-presidential-candidates-113205.html>*

“So far, Clinton has kept quiet about the grand jury’s decision and the
eruptions that followed, even though she has spoken about the issues raised
by Brown’s death in the past.”

*The Nation editorial board: “Wanted: A Challenge to Clinton”
<http://www.thenation.com/article/191497/wanted-challenge-clinton?_ga=1.212567638.336510103.1415994615>*

[Subtitle:] “Even the most ardent Hillary supporters should acknowledge
that Democrats—and the country—will be better served if she has real
competition in the primaries.”

*Politico blog: Dylan Byers On Media: “Not ready for Hillary, cont.”
<http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/11/not-ready-for-hillay-cont-199314.html>*

“Eariler this month, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel told our colleague
Maggie Haberman that her magazine planned on propping up a Democratic
alternative to Hillary Clinton.”

*Breitbart: “Krauthammer: Dems ‘Betrothed’ To Hillary”
<http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/11/26/Krauthammer-Dems-Betrothed-to-Hillary>*

“Columnist Charlies Krauthammer said that Democrats are ‘betrothed’ to
Hillary Clinton on Wednesday's ‘Hugh Hewitt Show.’”

*Articles:*

*The Nation: ‘How Erstwhile Clinton Nemesis David Brock Built an Empire to
Put Hillary in the White House’
<http://m.thenation.com/article/191529-how-erstwhile-clinton-nemesis-david-brock-built-empire-put-hillary-white-house>*

By Michelle Goldberg

November 25, 2014, 2:05 p.m. EST

David Brock, the conservative journalistic assassin turned progressive
empire-builder, is sitting in a conference room in the Park Avenue South
offices of the MWW Group, a public-relations firm owned by Democratic
mega-donor Michael Kempner. Fifty-two years old with a silver pompadour,
and wearing round glasses with wire frames, he's barely recognizable as the
skinny, dark-haired operative who, during the Clinton administration, had
an answering-machine message that said, ‘I'm out trying to bring down the
president.’

That, of course, was before he publicly repented, first in a 1997 Esquire
article, ‘Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,’ and then in 2002's
self-flagellating book, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an
Ex-Conservative. It was before he founded Media Matters for America, which
monitors the right-wing media, in 2004, and American Bridge, an
unprecedented Democratic opposition-research organization, in 2010. It was
before he became a favorite of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the very couple
he'd spent his years as an enfant terrible trying to destroy.

Yet Brock's years in the conservative movement still mark him, particularly
in how he conceives of his current mission to expose and defeat his former
allies. First among the lessons he learned on the other side, he says, ‘is
the idea of permanence. Ideological campaigns for our values have to be
waged on a permanent basis and not only in election years.’ Further, he
says, ‘you have to have the resources commensurate with your goals if
you're going to hope to achieve them. Money isn't by a long shot enough,
but it's a prerequisite. Something else I saw on the right, and that I've
tried to apply in a different context, is recruiting top talent and trying
to pay them close to what they're worth. And the last thing—and this might
be the most important—is patience. Goals this big, you're not going to
achieve them overnight.’

These days, Brock has moved well beyond the repentance phase of his
political turnaround. He's no longer trying to ingratiate himself with the
Democratic establishment—he's now a part of it, employing hundreds of
people at organizations with budgets in the tens of millions. Recently, his
network has been experiencing a spurt of growth—one that's likely to
continue as the Democrats ramp up their efforts on the 2016 race after the
disastrous midterm elections.

An avid Hillary Clinton supporter, Brock is already deeply engaged in the
presidential contest. His group American Bridge captures almost every
public utterance by prominent Republican politicians, using both DC-based
researchers and a national network of professional trackers; it currently
has people following all of the even remotely plausible contenders for the
Republican nomination. Complementing that operation is Correct the Record,
a subsidiary of American Bridge that Brock launched last year to push back
against misinformation about Democratic presidential candidates, which so
far has meant defending Clinton constantly and consistently.

Meanwhile, in the last year, Brock has expanded into law, ethics and
journalism organizations, giving him multiple new fronts for political
combat. In August, he took over the corruption watchdog Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, prompting fears that the
progressive but nonpartisan group—which in the past has gone after members
of both parties—will start ignoring the ethical lapses of Democrats. (Brock
disputes this. He could, he says, imagine CREW pursuing Democrats under his
watch, but he emphasizes that CREW's history shows there's simply more
corruption to be found on the right.)

The same month he acquired CREW, Brock announced the formation of the
American Democracy Legal Fund, which is intended to battle the GOP in the
courts and has already filed fifteen complaints against Republicans and
Republican-aligned groups. Also, his new journalistic grant-making
organization, the American Independent Institute, will give out $320,000
this year to reporters investigating right-wing misdeeds.

When I met with Brock, he suggested that I talk with Howard Dean about the
work he's been doing. Shortly thereafter, Dean e-mailed me to set up the
interview. Dean had become chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC)
in 2005, a year after Brock launched Media Matters, and says he quickly
realized that Brock had ‘the best communications shop on the left. He had
an ability to crystallize issues, mobilize people and call out the
Republicans—and the Democrats to this day are still floundering over that.’

‘It never occurred to me that David Brock needed to be redeemed,’ Dean
adds. ‘He redeemed himself.’

* * *

Journalists writing about Brock's growing web of organizations sometimes
say he aims to be the Democratic Karl Rove. A better analogy, though, might
be that he's becoming a liberal version of Paul Weyrich, an architect of
the modern conservative movement who founded or co-founded the Free
Congress Foundation, the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative
Exchange Council, among other organizations.

‘Beginning in the early 1970s…Weyrich set out to create an infrastructure
on the right—political and legal interest groups, coalitions, think tanks,
magazines, and political action committees—to rival that of the left,’
Brock wrote in Blinded by the Right. Within a decade, ‘Weyrich's operation
dwarfed anything like it on the left, making it possible for people like me
to flock to Washington in droves and find jobs.’

Brock's early career is a testament to the power of the right's ideological
apparatus to recruit and nurture new talent. Arriving at the University of
California, Berkeley, in 1981, he was a liberal Democrat, his politics
formed, in many ways, by his alienation as a closeted gay teenager growing
up in a crushingly conservative Dallas suburb. At Berkeley, though, he
found himself repelled by the culture of doctrinaire leftism and swung the
other way. Once he did, he was embraced by a well-organized right-wing
network ready to groom smart young foot soldiers.

As an undergraduate, Brock started a neoconservative weekly, the Berkeley
Journal, financed by conservative alumni, and published an op-ed in The
Wall Street Journal, ‘Combating Those Campus Marxists.’ John Podhoretz,
then the editor of Insight, the magazine of The Washington Times, noticed
it, flew him to DC for an interview and gave him a job as a writer. Next,
Brock moved to a fellowship at the Heritage Foundation underwritten by the
John M. Olin Foundation, and then a job at the money-losing American
Spectator magazine, which was primarily supported by the billionaire
Richard Mellon Scaife. There, a right-wing heiress offered to fund a
‘special investigation’ into Anita Hill, who had accused Supreme Court
nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; it eventually became Brock's
scurrilous bestselling book, The Real Anita Hill.

Next, he became a key player in the campaign to bring down Bill Clinton. It
was Brock who gave us the trumped-up ‘Troopergate’ story, introducing the
world to a woman named Paula, who later came forward as Paula Jones. Her
sexual-harassment lawsuit against Clinton—waged, in part, by the Rutherford
Institute, a conservative Christian legal group—would ultimately lead to
the exposure of the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky, and to his
impeachment.

* * *

It took years for Democratic funders to awaken to the need to build an
intellectual infrastructure to compete with the one that almost destroyed
Clinton's presidency, and that later helped to put George W. Bush in the
White House. In 2003 and 2004, Rob Stein, a prominent figure in Democratic
politics, began showing select groups of progressive donors, politicians
and activists a PowerPoint presentation that he'd created, ‘The
Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix,’ which laid out the internal
workings of the modern right. One slide broke down how much right-wing
donors were spending, as of 2002, to maintain their ideological apparatus,
including $200 million on think tanks, $46 million on legal advocacy and
$11 million on media monitors.

Former New York Times Magazine political reporter Matt Bai devoted a
chapter of his 2007 book, The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake
Democratic Politics, to Stein and his ‘Killer Slide Show.’ Bai wrote:
‘Wealthy contributors on both coasts told me that Rob's slides had awakened
them, at last, to the truth of what was happening in American politics.
They stumbled back onto Wall Street or Wilshire Boulevard or the
Embarcadero blinking into the sunlight, as if having witnessed a
revelation.’

In 2005, Stein organized about 100 of these donors, including George Soros
and Peter Lewis, into the Democracy Alliance, a group that agreed to direct
money toward building progressive institutions. In its first year, the
Democracy Alliance brought $1.75 million in new funding to Media Matters,
making up more than a fifth of its budget. (Other recipients included CREW,
the Center for American Progress, America Votes and the powerful
progressive-voter database Catalist.)

Donors loved Brock's conversion story, particularly since he'd been inside
the machine they hoped to replicate. And Brock, in partnership with
fundraiser Mary Pat Bonner—often described as his secret weapon—has turned
out to be unparalleled at maintaining rich liberals' loyalty and support.
‘The two of them together are probably the most effective
major-individual-donor fundraising team ever assembled in the
independent-expenditure progressive world,’ Stein says.

That wouldn't matter, however, if Brock couldn't show his backers that he's
effective. Over the years, Media Matters has won or assisted in a number of
tangible victories, from getting Glenn Beck off cable news to holding 60
Minutes accountable for its faulty Benghazi reporting. It obviously hasn't
shut down Fox News, which remains the highest-rated cable network, but
Brock is persuasive when he argues that his group has been key in
convincing the mainstream media to take Fox News less seriously.

‘When we started, the right-wing media were operating with total impunity,
and with no consequences or repercussions for anything they said or did,’
Brock asserts. ‘And that's changed. Not to the extent that we'd like—we're
still working on it—but they don't get away with what they used to get away
with. I think we've had success in marginalizing and discrediting a lot of
those characters.’

* * *

American Bridge was the natural next step. By means of this group, Brock
took the Media Matters method—which involves monitoring virtually every
word uttered by the right-wing media—and transferred it to the realm of
Republican politicians. ‘There's no organization that does the level of
tracking and research that we do,’ says American Bridge president Brad
Woodhouse, who previously served as communications director for the DNC.
‘The parties don't do it; the campaigns don't invest in it. There's no one
that has the ability to pull this type of stuff—video, news archives, our
own video archives—as quickly and as cleanly to use in a rapid-response
fashion as we do.’

As its archive grows, Woodhouse expects the organization to only become
more powerful. ‘The true testament to this is going to be what our archive
looks like five years from now,’ he says. Woodhouse is sitting in his
office on the sixth floor of the DC Chinatown building that houses American
Bridge as well as Media Matters—a floor that, with its high ceilings,
exposed pipes and Ping-Pong table, looks more like a tech start-up than a
wonky political shop. Gesturing around, he notes: ‘This whole floor will be
nothing but servers at some point, full of all of our tracking footage, all
of what we've captured from radio interviews, television interviews, both
nationally and locally. There won't be anybody who has that.’ As of this
year, American Bridge staffers can search the archives by audio, meaning
that they needn't sit through hours of footage to find a particular
incriminating name or phrase.

Initially, American Bridge was greeted with skepticism by Democratic
insiders and journalists alike. As a devoted Clintonite, Brock had little
connection with Obama's people, who were wary of independent-expenditure
groups, as were some of his own donors. ‘[W]hen Brock went to his donor
base and asked, it did not step up,’ wrote Jason Zengerle in a 2011 New
York magazine profile. ‘For the first time in his fund-raising career,
Brock didn't have the magic touch. Peter Lewis, for instance, hasn't given
any money…. In the end, Brock was forced to dramatically scale back his
plans.’

Reports of American Bridge's failure, however, turned out to be premature.
Shortly after the profile ran, Brock met with Lewis in his New York
apartment, and the billionaire agreed to become an American Bridge seed
funder. More important, American Bridge would have an enormous impact on
the 2012 elections, where it deployed trackers in thirty-three states. One
of them was watching the local Missouri television station KTVI when Senate
candidate Todd Akin opined about ‘legitimate rape’ being unlikely to result
in pregnancy.

Akin's remark in many ways defined the 2012 election cycle, powering the
idea that the GOP was fighting a war on women. As Paul Begala, a former
adviser to Bill Clinton, points out, without American Bridge, the remark
might not have made any impact at all. Akin's ‘bizarre rant,’ he says,
‘would have been a tree falling in the forest—but some nerd from American
Bridge saw that. Todd Akin would be a United States senator if it wasn't
for David Brock and his team.’

Begala, like Dean, is an unabashed Brock fan. He's quick to emphasize that
American Bridge's value isn't limited to capturing gotcha moments. As an
adviser to Priorities USA Action, a major Democratic Super PAC, Begala says
of American Bridge: ‘They produced for us a 950-page book of every business
deal of Mitt Romney's career. We spent something like $65 million [in the
2012 election], and I believe every single ad was in some ways informed by
Brock's research.’

Unfortunately for Democrats, there wasn't an Akin moment in the 2014 cycle.
American Bridge may have been a victim of its own success, as Republicans
went to great lengths not to provide Brock and his allies with new fodder.
‘Little was left to chance: Republican operatives sent fake campaign
trackers—interns and staff members brandishing video cameras to record
every utterance and move—to trail their own candidates,’ The New York Times
reported the day after the election. ‘In media training sessions,
candidates were forced to sit through a reel of the most self-destructive
moments of 2012, when Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock's comments on rape and
pregnancy helped sink the party.’

Ultimately, relentless tracking operations—which Republicans, taking a page
from Brock, are now deploying against Democrats—may portend a future in
which candidates are even less candid than they are now, and the only
viable politicians are those who learn to spout vapid talking points the
moment they win their first State Senate race or City Council seat. Yet
Brock insists that tracking will remain important. The very structure of
American politics, in which Republicans must win over far-right voters in
primaries before tacking to the center in general elections, ensures a
degree of flip-flopping and dissimulation that Democrats can exploit. ‘It's
a bit overstated that tracking is only looking for the ‘macaca' moment,’
says Brock, referring to the slur caught on camera that derailed Senator
George Allen's re-election bid in 2006. ‘Tracking is very, very valuable
for when candidates change their positions. It's a versatile thing.’

With a budget of more than $17 million and some eighty-plus staffers,
American Bridge has grown even bigger than Media Matters, which has a staff
of just under eighty and a budget of $10 million. In addition to tracking
every Republican Senate candidate and plausible presidential contender in
2016, it also has people following twenty-one gubernatorial campaigns and a
number of House races. Further, through its ‘Rising Stars’ program,
American Bridge is tracking Republicans who aren't running for major office
now, but who might one day go on to national prominence—people like George
P. Bush, Jeb Bush's son and a candidate for Texas land commissioner.

‘When somebody who ran for Congress in 2012 runs for president in 2028,
we're going to have an archive full of material,’ says American Bridge
chief operating officer Jessica Mackler.

* * *

No matter how big his operations get, however, there are still some
fundamental ways Brock can never achieve a true analogue of the right-wing
network that launched his career. One reason for this—and the reason that
most on the left can applaud—is simply that Brock has more integrity than
his previous employers. For all the comprehensiveness of his opposition
research, Brock no longer traffics in sexual innuendo or character
assassination; Begala says he's never received a single morsel of personal
dirt from American Bridge. The ugliness of Brock's early career, Begala
adds, left him with a ‘marrow-deep aversion to the politics of personal
destruction. It's definitional with David. I've been around him a fair
amount ever since then, and I've never heard him say, ‘Let's go after John
Doe—he beats his dog!' Nothing like that.’

But if Brock isn't as ethically unconstrained as his old friends, he's also
not as passionately ideological. In the end, his political journey has
taken him roughly back to where he started: he's a center-left Democrat,
uninterested in any sort of radicalism. His final exit from conservatism,
after all, happened after he set out to write a book trashing Hillary
Clinton and came, instead, to sympathize with her. Since then, he's been
transformed into a fervid Clintonite, and he doesn't hide the fact that he
wants to see her elected president. Brock is interested in fighting the
right, not in pushing his own party to the left.

In Blinded by the Right, he recalls how one of Weyrich's first scalps was
the Republican Texas senator John Tower, George H.W. Bush's nominee for
defense secretary, who was distrusted by conservatives as a pro-choice
moderate. Testifying before the Senate at Tower's confirmation hearing,
Weyrich said, ‘I have encountered the nominee in a condition—a lack of
sobriety—as well as with women to whom he was not married.’ These rumors
ultimately helped sink the nomination, even though Tower wasn't married to
anyone at the time.

It's nearly impossible to conceive of Brock mounting a similar attack on a
Democratic president's nominee, even in a less slimy way. He has, however,
gone after left-wing critics of the Clintons. When Harper's published the
October cover story ‘Stop Hillary!’ by Doug Henwood, a Nation contributing
editor, Correct the Record responded with a point-by-point rebuttal of over
9,000 words. Some of it was convincing, some of it—particularly an earnest
defense of Clinton's record on welfare reform—less so. Whatever you make of
it, though, it demonstrated that Brock is willing to fight challenges to
the Democratic establishment that come from progressives as well as
conservatives.

In fact, should there be a contested Democratic primary, Brock won't swear
off using Correct the Record to defend Hillary Clinton from a left-wing
challenger. ‘We don't know if Hillary Clinton is running; if she does run,
we don't know whether there will be a contested primary; and if there is,
we don't know what that will look like,’ he says. ‘So I'd just say I'm not
going to comment on anything that's hypothetical.’

It was probably inevitable that an intellectual infrastructure funded by
rich progressives wouldn't be radical in the way of one funded by rich
reactionaries. Guy Saperstein, a retired Oakland trial lawyer and major
liberal donor, quit the Democracy Alliance in 2008 out of frustration with
its failure to invest in new, boundary-pushing left-wing ideas. (The same
year, he stopped donating to Brock, whom he admires tremendously, because
Brock was ‘so heavily tilted towards Hillary.’) Much of his frustration
came from the fact that his fellow funders seemed more committed to
electing Democrats than to deep, systemic ideological change.

‘You've got to give it to the conservatives,’ Saperstein says. ‘They've
really run circles around our side. They staked out ground very early on,
on subjects where the political consensus would have called them crazy. Of
course we need a welfare program—it's crazy that they would go out and
attack the welfare system. But, you know, twenty years later, they have
Bill Clinton saluting them! They just moved the whole debate, and they've
done that in so many areas.’

With few exceptions—gay marriage being a big one—deep-pocketed Democratic
donors have rarely shown the zeal or the patience to nurture far-reaching
ideological change; they tend, ironically, to be more conservative in the
small-c sense. Gara LaMarche, who became president of the Democracy
Alliance last year, may begin to change this pattern. He has been vocal
about the need for donors to support a progressive vision that extends
beyond the next election. ‘In general, progressives have not been audacious
enough,’ LaMarche says, speaking about his desire to make the Democracy
Alliance ‘not a cheering section for the Democratic Party, but a place
where progressives can actually talk about the long term.’

At this point, however, the Democracy Alliance is far from united in a
desire to push Democrats leftward. Its membership, according to LaMarche,
‘includes everyone from people who are very associated with, let's say,
Elizabeth Warren's view of economics, to people who have worked in the
Clinton administration and have more of an identification with the Rubin
wing of the party.’ (He's referring to Robert Rubin, the Goldman Sachs
veteran and former director of Citigroup who served as Clinton's treasury
secretary.)

From Brock's perspective, there is nothing to lament in the fact that
liberal donors and institution builders tend to be more moderate than their
right-wing counterparts. Members of the conservative establishment can
empower right-wing radicals, he says, ‘because they don't have any regard
for the truth of anything. They have no standards, and they're very brazen
about it. It's a very different culture on the
Democratic/liberal/progressive side.’ And it's within that
culture—sensible, nondogmatic and technocratic—that Brock has finally found
his place. ‘I don't think progressives can abandon their respect for
evidence-based conversation and logic, because it's one of their
strengths,’ he says. ‘I don't think you should throw that away to have a
noisier machine.’

*New York Times column: Gail Collins: ‘Counting Benghazi Blessings’
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/opinion/gail-collins-counting-benghazi-blessings.html?_r=0>*

By Gail Collins

November 26, 2014

This year, in a break from tradition, I am giving thanks for the House
Intelligence Committee’s final report on Benghazi.

Also family and friends. But I give thanks for them every year. This is our
first opportunity to be grateful for the House Intelligence Committee’s
Benghazi report. So let’s jump at it.

Really, you don’t get good news like this all the time. The committee spent
two years conducting a bipartisan investigation into the terrible night in
2012 when four Americans, including the Libyan ambassador, were killed in a
violent attack on an American compound. It found that while mistakes were
made, the Americans on the ground in Libya made reasonable decisions, as
did the people trying to support them. The C.I.A. was brave and effective.
Nobody in the White House thwarted a possible rescue or deliberately tried
to mislead the public about what happened.

Whew. You can imagine the excitement when this report was unveiled. Or,
actually, quietly posted on the committee’s website. On Friday evening. On
the eve of a holiday week.

The Intelligence Committee is, of course, led by members of the Republican
majority. The only time Republicans don’t talk about Benghazi, it turns
out, is when they report about their findings.

The silence was pretty deafening. Except for Senator Lindsey Graham, who
helpfully told CNN: ‘I think the report’s full of crap.’ And Newt Gingrich,
who theorized that the Intelligence Committee had been ‘co-opted by the
C.I.A.’

Newt knows. (‘I’ve talked to four different people who have a real interest
in this topic at a professional level. They are appalled by this report.’)

There have always been two ways of looking at Benghazi. One is as a
terrible loss that might have been mitigated if the diplomatic compounds
had been better protected, and that the State Department needs to rethink
its traditional bureaucratic approach to overseeing security. The other,
far more exciting, possibility is that this is all about Obama-Clinton
perfidy. Was there a team of potential rescuers who were kept away from the
fray because the administration didn’t want to admit it had underestimated
the terror threat in Libya? Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the
House Oversight Committee, confided at a Republican fund-raising dinner
that he had ‘suspicions’ that Hillary Clinton told then-Defense Secretary
Leon Panetta ‘to stand down.’ The Intelligence Committee didn’t find any
evidence whatsoever that that had occurred. But they were, you know,
co-opted.

The committee and its staff spent what one Democratic member said was
‘thousands of hours’ reading intelligence reports, cables and emails about
the incident. It was a heck of a commitment. Although, to be fair, surely
no more than the House Armed Services Committee, the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, which have been looking into exactly the same events
and coming up with pretty much the same conclusions.

Still to come: A special $3.3 million House Committee that Speaker John
Boehner has created to pursue what Chairman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina
says will be the ‘final, definitive accounting of the attack.’ The effort
is needed, Boehner said, because the ‘American people still have far too
many questions’ to let the inquiries drop now after nobody has had a chance
to look into the matter except a special independent review board, the
House Intelligence Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee.

And then, of course, there’s the House Oversight Committee, under the
irrepressible Representative Issa, which shows no sign of wrapping up its
Benghazi investigations. Issa has already sent Gowdy a 37-page letter
listing what he said were State Department efforts to obstruct his probes.
But he’s required to step down as chairman at the end of the year, and his
replacement, Jason Chaffetz of Utah, seems to be planning a less lively
approach. The top Democrat on the committee, Elijah Cummings, said Chaffetz
had shown ‘a sincere interest in working together,’ as opposed to Issa’s
sincere interest, at one point, in cutting off Cummings’s microphone at a
public hearing.

We give thanks for all the congressional investigations into Benghazi. Who
says Congress can’t reduce unemployment? In March, the Defense Department
said that it had devoted ‘thousands of man-hours to responding to numerous
and often repetitive congressional requests regarding Benghazi, which
includes time devoted to approximately 50 congressional hearings, briefings
and interviews’ at a cost of ‘millions of dollars.’

Meanwhile, there are rumblings from some Senate Republicans that what the
next Congress needs is a good joint House-Senate Benghazi investigation. On
the other hand, the House Agricultural Committee seems to have no interest
whatsoever in initiating a probe. For this, we are truly thankful.

*Associated Press: ‘Southern Democrats trying to recover lost ground’
<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/502da8f1552d489982b055c3bcd16478/southern-democrats-trying-recover-lost-ground>*

By Bill Barrow

November 27, 2014, 9:00 a.m. EST

ATLANTA (AP) — To rebuild in the conservative South, Democratic leaders say
their party must become more aggressive advocates for the middle class in
an effort to energize African-Americans and attract whites.

After the Republicans' success in the midterm elections, many say the
Democratic Party should openly embrace government as a tool for lifting
people out of economic hardship. They are advocating a return to party
roots by emphasizing education and public works spending, stronger voting
rights laws, tighter bank regulation and labor-friendly policies such as a
higher minimum wage.

‘It's time to draw a line in the sand and not surrender our brand,’ said
Rickey Cole, the party chairman in Mississippi. He believes that candidates
have distanced themselves from the last half-century of Democratic
principles.

‘We don't need a New Coke formula,’ Cole said. ‘The problem is we've been
out there trying to peddle Tab and R.C. Cola.’

Even so, Cole and other Southern Democrats acknowledge divisions with
prominent populists such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is expected to run
for president in 2016, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

A major challenge in the South is finding candidates who can win
high-profile races now that Republicans dominate the leadership in state
legislatures and across statewide offices.

Georgia Democrats thought legacy candidates were the answer. But Senate
hopeful Michelle Nunn, former Sen. Sam Nunn's daughter, and gubernatorial
challenger Jason Carter, former President Jimmy Carter's grandson, each
fell short by about 8 percentage points despite well-funded campaigns and
ambitious voter-registration drives.

Arkansas Democrats lost an open governor's seat and two-term Sen. Mark
Pryor. Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu led an eight-candidate primary but
faces steep odds in a Dec. 6 runoff. Democrats' closest statewide loss in
the South was North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan's 1.7 percentage point margin
of defeat.

Exit polling suggests Democrats did not get the black turnout they needed
and lost badly among whites. Nunn and Carter got fewer than 1 in 4 white
votes, while Pryor took 31 percent and Landrieu 18 percent.

Should Landrieu lose, Democrats will be left without a single governor,
U.S. senator or legislative chamber under their control from the Carolinas
westward to Texas.

J.P. Morrell, a state senator from New Orleans, faulted a muddled message
that began with candidates avoiding President Barack Obama. ‘You have to
articulate why the economic policies we advocate as Democrats actually
benefit people on the ground,’ Morrell said.

In Georgia, Nunn supported a minimum-wage increase and gender-pay equity,
but her television ads focused on ending partisan rancor. Carter mostly
accused Republican Gov. Nathan Deal of shortchanging public education. Nunn
and Carter supported Medicaid expansion under Obama's health overhaul, but
neither emphasized that argument in television advertising.

‘No real economic message got through,’ said Vincent Fort, a state senator
from Atlanta.

Georgia's Democratic chairman, DuBose Porter, defended Carter and Nunn as
‘world-class candidates’ who can run again. He said Democrats ‘proved
Georgia can be competitive in 2016,’ but he cautioned against looking for a
nominee other than Clinton. ‘She puts us in play,’ he said.

In an interview, Carter focused more on tactics than on broad messaging,
saying the party must register minority voters and continue outreach to
whites. ‘If 120,000 people change their mind in this election, it comes out
differently,’ he said. ‘But it takes a lot of time to build those
relationships. ... You can't expect it to happen in one year.’

Gary Pearce, a Democratic strategist and commentator in North Carolina,
said Hagan's margin in a GOP wave offers hope for 2016, when statewide
executive offices will be on the ballot. Fresh arguments, he said, ‘will
have to come from younger Democrats in the cities.’ He pointed to several
young Democratic candidates who won county commission seats in Wake County,
home to Raleigh.

Cole, the Mississippi chairman, acknowledged that any new approach won't
close the party's gap in the South on abortion, same-sex marriage and guns,
and said Democrats intensify that cultural disconnect with ‘identity
politics.’

While the party's positions on gay rights, minority voting access, women's
rights and immigration are not wrong, Cole said, ‘those people who don't
see themselves in those groups say, 'What have the Democrats got for me?'‘

Unapologetic populism, he said, would ‘explain better that the Democratic
Party is for justice and opportunity — with no qualifiers — for everyone.’

*Politico: ‘Political caution on Ferguson’
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/ferguson-protests-2016-presidential-candidates-113205.html>*

By David Nather and Katie Glueck

November 26, 2014, 7:15 p.m. EST

[Subtitle:] As tensions flare, 2016 presidential crowd treads lightly

One by one, potential 2016 candidates are starting to weigh in on this
week’s events in Ferguson — carefully.

For New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who may run
for the Republican nomination, it’s all about stopping the violence.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, also a Republican, also called for calm, while
adding ‘we all should be color blind.’ Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a
possible long-shot Democratic candidate, says the answer is better
listening and better understanding.

And Hillary Clinton? She’s stayed silent, and her aides are giving no sign
that that’s about to change.

The only likely 2016er to opine at length on Ferguson is Rand Paul, a
Republican who has made criminal justice reform and minority outreach part
of his brand. He told POLITICO on Tuesday that the crisis in the Missouri
town highlights the need to reform the justice system, a topic he expanded
on at length in a an opinion piece for Time later that day.

But for the most part, the men and women eyeing the White House are
sticking to generalities or staying out of it completely. Few have offered
their sympathies to Ferguson residents and protesters across the country
who see a grave miscarriage of justice in a grand jury’s decision not to
indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer who shot dead Michael Brown,
an unarmed black 18-year-old.

There are good strategic reasons for that, political operatives and
lawmakers say. While 2016 candidates will have to say at some point where
they stand on the issues of race and justice raised by Ferguson, doing so
now, as disruptive demonstrations continue, risks coming across as
opportunistic. And just one poorly thought-out comment could inflame an
already sensitive subject.

‘If Hillary Clinton, who is someone I consider a friend … called and asked
me what she should do about the situation, I would just say, ‘Look, there’s
a road that leads around Ferguson. I suggest you keep driving down that
road,’’ said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat who is closely
involved in the efforts to ease the tensions there. ‘This is a very
delicate situation, and the last thing we need is political exploitation …
I don’t think it would be helpful now.’

So far, Clinton has kept quiet about the grand jury’s decision and the
eruptions that followed, even though she has spoken about the issues raised
by Brown’s death in the past. The same goes for many of the best-known
possible Republican contenders, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush,
Rep. Paul Ryan, and Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

Christie, however, wasn’t shy when asked about the issue while serving
Thanksgiving dinner at a Newark soup kitchen on Wednesday.

‘I think everyone has a right to protest, but those protesters need to be
nonviolent,’ Christie said, according to The Associated Press. And in a dig
at President Barack Obama, Christie noted that ‘the country has anxiety
over lots of things, and the only thing that clears up anxiety is
leadership and direction.’

He added, though, that ‘I’m suggesting lots of people have responsibility
for that … not just the president. He’s just one of them.’

Perry also emphasized the need to prevent violence and his support for law
enforcement. ‘Any time a young person loses their life it’s a tragedy, but
it is wrong to perpetuate tragedy with violence. I support the rule of law
everywhere in America and commend law enforcement officials who put their
lives on the line to protect our families and support responsible leaders
who advocate for peace,’ the Texas governor said in a statement Wednesday.

O’Malley echoed the call for less violence.

‘The only way to promote peace in the streets of our nation is to better
and more deeply understand the pain that all of our fellow citizens have
now experienced in Ferguson. Violence only brings about more violence,’
O’Malley said. ‘To improve law enforcement in America, to save lives, to
promote peace, we must be able to better understand and listen to one
another.’

Other potential 2016 hopefuls will have a hard time avoiding questions
about Ferguson in the coming days, especially at public appearances.
Clinton’s next such event is on Monday, when she addresses the League of
Conservation Voters. Her aides didn’t respond to requests for comment
Wednesday.

Clinton did address the Ferguson issue in a carefully balanced speech in
late August, declaring that ‘we cannot ignore the inequities’ in the
criminal justice system and concluding that ‘we can do better’ — but also
praising the ‘decent and respectful law enforcement officers who showed
what quality law enforcement looks like.’

Staffers working for other potential White House contenders aren’t ruling
out statements at a later date; a Ryan aide said the Wisconsin
representative is not expected to say anything ‘until after Thanksgiving.’

But so far, the potential candidate who has said the most about the events
in Missouri is Paul.

‘Michael Brown’s death and the suffocation of Eric Garner in New York for
selling untaxed cigarettes indicate something is wrong with criminal
justice in America. The War on Drugs has created a culture of violence and
put police in a nearly impossible situation,’ Paul wrote in Time.

He also declared that while he’ll keep working on criminal justice reform
and restoring voting rights to non-violent felons, ‘my hope is that out of
tragedy, a preacher or teacher will arise — one who motivates and inspires
all of us to discover traits, ambitions, and moral codes that have slowly
eroded and left us empty with despair.’

An aide to Paul said the Kentucky senator spoke out because ‘after
everything that had happened in Ferguson, he wanted to say something, he
wanted to reiterate what the Brown family said and channel those
frustrations toward positive change.’ Paul is also expected to introduce
legislation soon to prevent the militarization of local police forces, an
issue he’s been working on with GOP Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

Dave Carney, a Republican strategist and a former Perry adviser, said it
makes sense for Paul to take on the issue: ‘It’s going to be his brand, or
part of it. He’s in a perfect position to do that.’ But otherwise, he said,
politicians should weigh in on Ferguson only as part of a broader, coherent
philosophy. Those who haven’t thought through their position on race
relations, he said, should avoid injecting themselves into the issue.

‘If you get asked about it, you should definitely have a position,’ he
said. ‘But throwing out a press release, unless you’ve really thought
through this and have a framework to solve the overall issue, I just don’t
know what the benefit would be to comment.’

Aside from Paul, one potential 2016 candidate who directly broached the
issue of race in his statement this week was Jindal.

‘A young man is dead — this situation is truly a tragedy and our hearts go
out to his family,’ the Louisiana governor said in a statement to POLITICO.
‘Some have used this as an excuse for lawlessness, arson and destroying
property, but that is not the answer. The community must come together in
the aftermath of this situation, not divide itself by acts of violence. I
do not care what pigmentation anyone’s skin is. Justice is color blind, God
is color blind, and I believe we all should be color blind.’

For most political operatives, the bottom line is that a candidate can do
more harm than good by speaking out too quickly.

‘The worst thing a candidate could do is say something that could
potentially inflame the situation,’ said Democratic strategist Bill Burton,
a former Obama spokesman. ‘I think there will be a time to have a debate on
the factors that led to Ferguson, but now is almost certainly not that
moment.’

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, however, said it’s fine for
presidential candidates to start to make their views known — as long as
they don’t screw it up.

‘If politicians can find ways to discuss the way forward and not just try
to inject themselves to sow seeds of discord or even further division, than
the simple answer is yes,’ Brazile said. Like the demonstrators, she said,
‘politicians and even would be presidential candidates have the right to
speak.’

*The Nation editorial board: “Wanted: A Challenge to Clinton”
<http://www.thenation.com/article/191497/wanted-challenge-clinton?_ga=1.212567638.336510103.1415994615>*

By The Nation’s editorial board

November 25, 2014

[Subtitle:] Even the most ardent Hillary supporters should acknowledge that
Democrats—and the country—will be better served if she has real competition
in the primaries.

After the dispiriting midterm elections, with the highest spending in
history and the lowest turnout in the postwar era, there is a heightened
sense of urgency about the 2016 presidential election. Senator Bernie
Sanders feels it acutely. ‘This country faces more serious problems today
than at any time since the Great Depression. We have already, in the
midterms, gone through an election where there was no substantive debate
about the most important issues, which is why you have, I think, the lowest
voter turnout since 1942,’ says the independent from Vermont. ‘The idea
that we could go through a presidential election where you have all these
right-wing Republicans on one side talking about their issues, and then,
within the progressive community, not to discuss issues like the collapse
of the middle class, the growth in poverty, the fact that we’re the only
country in the industrialized world without a national healthcare program…
to discuss climate change when the scientific community tells us that we
have a short window in which to address it; not to discuss these and other
issues would, I think, be horrendous for this country. Absolutely
horrendous.’

Horrendous, yes, but not beyond the realm of possibility.

In February, The Nation launched Project 45, a multiyear examination of the
process by which the forty-fifth president will be chosen, with a
‘commitment to encourage those who will fight to prevent the hijacking of
the 2016 campaign by high-powered strategists, well-heeled donors and big
media outlets that are more interested in cash, and a vapid politics of
personality, than in a genuine clash of ideas.’

Many will argue that in today’s politics, shaped by mega-rich donors and an
intellectually disengaged punditocracy, the best we can hope for is a
contest between candidates who are acceptable to the money and media
elites. The first test of whether this is the case comes in the next few
months, as potential challengers to former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton—characterized by a Wall Street executive in a Politico article as
the ‘relatively tolerable’ Democrat—must decide whether to try to displace
a front-runner who leads national polls and key-state surveys by more than
40 percent.

Sanders is one prospect. Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb is another; he
has launched an exploratory committee to determine whether there’s room for
a ‘nobody owns me’ populist run. Outgoing Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley
would also like to be considered, despite suffering a setback when his
designated successor unexpectedly lost on November 4. And the group Ready
for Warren just launched a three-month drive to get Massachusetts Senator
Elizabeth Warren to rethink her steady refusal to run. The desire for an
alternative to Clinton is real: a November survey of Democracy for America
members found 42 percent favored a Warren run, while 24 percent were for
Sanders. Clinton was at 23 percent.

We share that desire. As we argued in February, even the most ardent
Hillary supporters should acknowledge that the Democratic Party, and the
country, will be better served if she has real competition in the
primaries. This is not an anti-Hillary message; it’s a pro-democracy one.
It is about whether the party will speak to the real concerns of voters. We
need a Democratic presidential candidate with a smart, populist program
untethered to Wall Street and committed to dismantling a rigged system that
enriches the very few at the expense of everyone else. The appeal of
progressive values and issues in the midterm elections—in which voters in
red and blue states overwhelmingly endorsed referendums calling for
increases in the minimum wage, paid sick leave and Medicaid
expansion—demonstrates the public’s hunger for such a message, and the
promise of such a politics.

The Democratic Party’s challenge today is that, in the minds of many
voters, it is no longer linked with the issues it says are important. In
part, that’s because big money and bad media warp our politics. But it’s
also because the party is too close to corporate funders and too frequently
fails to speak to the tens of millions still struggling in a weak recovery.
One of the core understandings of Project 45 is that, in the process of
nominating a presidential candidate, parties define themselves not merely
as a reflection of the candidate, but as a reflection of the demands raised
in primaries and platform fights. For this process to work, however, there
must be challenges both to the front-runners and to assumptions about what
is possible and what is necessary.

Bernie Sanders is right when he says there is ‘a desperate need’ for
candidates who will challenge those assumptions. But he is also right that
it can’t just be about candidates; it has to be about movements. Activists
must be willing to do the hard work—inside and outside the Democratic
Party—of building a powerful progressive movement that can redefine our
politics. Only organized people can counter organized money, and because
organizing takes time, the point at which to make that commitment is not in
2016. It is now.

*Politico blog: Dylan Byers On Media: ‘Not ready for Hillary, cont.’
<http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/11/not-ready-for-hillay-cont-199314.html>*

By Dylan Byers

November 26, 2014, 3:02 p.m. EST

Eariler this month, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel told our colleague
Maggie Haberman that her magazine planned on propping up a Democratic
alternative to Hillary Clinton. ‘We believe that there’s a kind of economic
populism and an agenda … that we hope to drive into 2015 and 2016. And
Hillary Clinton, because of her history, because of her team, has not been
part of that wing of the Democratic Party,’ Vanden Heuvel said. ‘[E]ven the
most ardent Hillary fans should understand that sometimes not only her
party and the country — but her candidacy — would be better served if she
has competition.’

As promised, The Nation has now published an editorial calling for such a
challenger:

‘The desire for an alternative to Clinton is real: a November survey of
Democracy for America members found 42 percent favored a Warren run, while
24 percent were for Sanders. Clinton was at 23 percent. ... We share that
desire. As we argued in February, even the most ardent Hillary supporters
should acknowledge that the Democratic Party, and the country, will be
better served if she has real competition in the primaries. This is not an
anti-Hillary message; it’s a pro-democracy one. It is about whether the
party will speak to the real concerns of voters. We need a Democratic
presidential candidate with a smart, populist program untethered to Wall
Street and committed to dismantling a rigged system that enriches the very
few at the expense of everyone else. The appeal of progressive values and
issues in the midterm elections—in which voters in red and blue states
overwhelmingly endorsed referendums calling for increases in the minimum
wage, paid sick leave and Medicaid expansion—demonstrates the public’s
hunger for such a message, and the promise of such a politics.’

More on progressive media's disenchantment with Hillary here and here.

*Breitbart: ‘Krauthammer: Dems ‘Betrothed’ To Hillary’
<http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/11/26/Krauthammer-Dems-Betrothed-to-Hillary>*

[No Writer Mentioned]

November 26, 2014

Columnist Charlies Krauthammer said that Democrats are ‘betrothed’ to
Hillary Clinton on Wednesday's ‘Hugh Hewitt Show.’

‘I think the Democrats are in such a swoon over Hillary...they are
committed, they are betrothed, this marriage has already been set. I don't
think anybody's going to give her serious trouble’ he stated.

Krauthammer added that Clinton's status as a longtime politician ‘works
somewhat against her,’ but would not be fatal because ‘she's Clinton,’ and
was not seen as a ‘hack politician’ like Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV).

*Calendar:*

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

·  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 1 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton hosts fundraiser for Sen. Mary
Landrieu (Times-Picayune
<http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/11/hillary_clinton_hosting_new_yo.html>
)

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

·  December 16 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton honored by Robert F. Kennedy
Center for Justice and Human Rights (Politico
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/hillary-clinton-ripple-of-hope-award-112478.html>
)

·  February 24 – Santa Clara, CA: Sec. Clinton to Keynote Address at
Inaugural Watermark Conference for Women (PR Newswire
<http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hillary-rodham-clinton-to-deliver-keynote-address-at-inaugural-watermark-conference-for-women-283200361.html>
)