Subject: Correct The Record Thursday January 15, 2015 Morning Roundup
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 08:50:38 -0500
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*​**Correct The Record Thursday January 15, 2015 Morning Roundup:*

*Headlines:*

*CNN: “One month without a Hillary Clinton headliner”
<http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/15/politics/hillary-clinton-month-hiatus/>*

“As the 2016 race heats up on the Republican side, with a new Super PAC,
donor check or staffing announcement dropping every hour since Christmas,
Hillary Clinton's schedule has been notably empty.”

*Bloomberg column: Jonathan Bernstein: ‘Did Hillary Clinton Just Clinch the
Nomination?”
<http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-14/did-hillary-clinton-just-clinch-the-nomination>*

“It's a lot more unusual for the nomination to be wrapped up with a year of
the ‘invisible primary’ (the part of the campaign before voters get
involved) remaining on the clock. But Clinton may have done it.”

*New York Time blog: The Upshot: “Trying to Solve the Great Wage Slowdown”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/upshot/trying-to-solve-the-great-wage-slowdown.html?abt=0002&abg=0>*

“It’s hard not to see the report partly as the first draft of an agenda for
a presumptive campaign by Mrs. Clinton.”

*Time: “How Elizabeth Warren Is Yanking Hillary Clinton to the Left”
<http://time.com/3668768/elizabeth-warren-hillary-clinton-left-wing/>*

“Warren is likely to conjure more change by being a progressive foil to
Clinton than by running herself.”

*New York Times: First Draft: “Clinton Takes to Heart a 6-Year-Old Lesson
in Accounting”
<http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/01/15/?entry=mb-4&_r=0>*

“While she does not yet have a campaign, people close to the would-be
candidate say that it is likely that she will not solicit general election
donations during the Democratic presidential primaries.”

*New York Daily News: “Ready for Hillary is extending its run as Hillary
Clinton stays mum”
<http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/ready-hillary-extending-run-spring-blog-entry-1.2077849>*

“Ready for Hillary is extending its run as Hillary Clinton continues to
delay an announcement on whether or not she will run for President.”

*Articles:*

*CNN: “One month without a Hillary Clinton headliner”
<http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/15/politics/hillary-clinton-month-hiatus/>*

By Dan Merica

January 15, 2015

As the 2016 race heats up on the Republican side, with a new Super PAC,
donor check or staffing announcement dropping every hour since Christmas,
Hillary Clinton's schedule has been notably empty.

The last time the presumed Democratic front-runner headlined an event --
something she did with regularity throughout most of 2014 -- was Dec. 15,
when she joined forces with former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to
promote keeping reliable date about women and girls around the globe.

Clinton's spokesman has said for the last two weeks that the former
secretary of state's public schedule would be quiet, and it won't be until
Jan. 21 -- the day after President Barack Obama delivers the State of the
Union address -- that Clinton will return the spotlight with two events in
Canada.

The dearth in events is noticeable, even with the natural quiet of the
holidays, when compared to her Republican counterparts and considering
Clinton's prevalence last year. She headlined random trade conferences in
massive convention centers, went from bookstore-to-bookstore hawking her
new memoir and picked up paychecks all over the country for paid,
high-profile speaking gigs. But for the last month -- as Clinton approaches
the point where other Democrats says she has to make up her mind -- none of
that has happened.

Clinton's absences also comes at a time when the Republican side of the
2016 race is feverishly heating up:

- Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has been publicly and "actively" exploring a
presidential run for nearly a month, and news from his team has leaked at a
steady stream including ambitious fundraising goals and launching a
leadership PAC to boost those efforts.

- Sen. Rand Paul has been campaigning in New Hampshire, the
first-in-the-nation primary state, this week and will spend part of the
weekend in Nevada, another important presidential primary state. Paul has
also hired Chip Englander as the campaign manager for his likely
presidential campaign.

- Mitt Romney— the Republican's 2012 nominee who repeatedly spent his 2014
saying he wanted nothing to do with a third presidential bid — told a
roomful of donors last week that he is seriously considering a 2016 bid and
has since set the political world ablaze by calling possible supporters and
agreeing to attend a Republican National Committee meeting near San Diego
this week.

And that's before we even get to other Republicans, like former Arkansas
Gov. Mike Huckabee, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris
Christie and neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who have all also signaled loudly
they are getting closer to making a 2016 bid.

Clinton's decision to stay out of the spotlight shows the differences
between a crowded field in one party and in another a presumed front-runner
is so far ahead of the pack of would be primary challengers.

The fact Clinton isn't this out front right now is making most pro-Clinton
Democrats happy. While some commentators have quietly wondered why Clinton
didn't say anything about the terrorist attacks in Paris -- a Clinton
spokesman didn't respond to multiple emails on the topic -- most have been
encouraged by her month-long hiatus.

"Usually, historically, it is the Republican Party that has been the more
stayed, predictable, boring party. They always nominate the oldest white
guy in line," said Paul Begala, a longtime Clinton supporter and former
Clinton White House aide. "My party, which has always been burning man
without the nudity, now looks like the stable one. There is real stability
on the Democratic side."

Begala continued: "Everything has risks, but that spotlight is so hot,
there is only so long you can dance in it, so lets push it over to the GOP
for a little while. Let's turn that on them for a while."

But Clinton and her orbit has been far from quiet.

Clinton has commented publicly on issues like Obama's decision to loosen
restrictions on Cuba and the deaths of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.
Clinton and her husband, Bill Clinton, also attended Cuomo's funeral in New
York earlier this month.

More importantly, though, over the last two weeks, Clinton's political
operation has grown with multiple reports that Clinton has met with top
campaign aides and is starting to piece together a possible campaign
apparatus.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that John Podesta, a top White
House adviser and former Clinton White House aide, would leave the
administration in February to join Clinton's growing political apparatus
ahead of a 2016 run.

Podesta is seen by many pro-Clinton Democrats as a top choice for campaign
chairman and has told multiple reporters he would leave the White House in
February to help Clinton if she chooses to run.

The Washington Post also reported on Tuesday that Clinton has recruited
Joel Benenson as a chief strategist and Jim Margolis as a media advisor.
Politico has also reported that Benenson, an operative who worked for Obama
in 2008 and 2012, has signed on to help Clinton.

Even as Clinton sits back, Democrats thinking about running haven't been
making waves like Republicans. Jim Webb had knee surgery this month, but
has shied away from any media interaction, opting, instead, to continually
update his Twitter. Elizabeth Warren has given high profile speeches, but
emphatically said "no" on Tuesday when asked whether she will run for
president in 2016. And politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Maryland
Gov. Martin O'Malley have continued to reiterate that they are strongly
considering a run at the presidency.

*Bloomberg column: Jonathan Bernstein: ‘Did Hillary Clinton Just Clinch the
Nomination?”
<http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-14/did-hillary-clinton-just-clinch-the-nomination>*

By Jonathan Bernstein

January 14, 2015, 5:30 p.m. EST

Hillary Clinton hasn't even declared her candidacy for 2016, but can
someone tell me why she didn't just lock up the Democratic presidential
nomination?

There were two indicators this week. First, after months of playing around,
Senator Elizabeth Warren finally declared herself out more definitively. It
wasn't Shermanesque, and plenty of politicians  have entered or re-entered
past presidential races after more solid exits, but it’s getting late for
someone to rule out a run and still have time to mount a serious one.

Maybe Warren ended the semi-flirtation because she came to believe that
support for her candidacy didn't extend far beyond a relatively small group
of activists. Maybe she learned that Clinton’s support in the rest of the
party was solid.

This won't end the Draft Warren quest, as Greg Sargent of the Washington
Post explained. A competitive nomination fight is in the collective
interest of liberals (and, I've argued, the Democratic Party). But for most
individual politicians it doesn't make sense to fill that role, as Dan
Larison of the American Conservative notes in arguing why Warren shouldn’t
run.

The other development this week  is that several big-name operatives have
signed on to Clinton’s campaign, even though she hasn't even made an
informal announcement yet that she is running.

John Podesta would not likely be leaving the White House if he thought her
campaign might be short-circuited at any moment. And if Clinton wasn’t
giving convincing assurances to party actors that her campaign is real,
they would be publicly pressuring her to decide.

Her strategy of doing as little as possible, at least publicly, to maintain
her position has to end sometime. Eventually, she’ll need to make some
informal acknowledgment of her candidacy, with a formal announcement later
in 2015.

Clinton has had perhaps the best second-year-of-the-cycle of any
non-incumbent presidential candidate in the modern period. She's been
running, and very effectively. Though some of her support could be less
solid than it seems, don't forget: About half of recent nominations have
likely been locked in before voters in Iowa caucused and voters in New
Hampshire went to the polls.

It's a lot more unusual for the nomination to be wrapped up with a year of
the "invisible primary" (the part of the campaign before voters get
involved) remaining on the clock. But Clinton may have done it.

*New York Time blog: The Upshot: “Trying to Solve the Great Wage Slowdown”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/upshot/trying-to-solve-the-great-wage-slowdown.html?abt=0002&abg=0>*

By David Leonhardt

January 15, 2015

After almost 15 years of a disappointing economy, it’s easy to get
pessimistic. Incomes for the middle class and poor have now been stagnating
over a two-term Republican presidency and well into a two-term Democratic
one. The great wage slowdown of the 21st century has frustrated Americans,
polls show, and raised serious questions about what kind of policies, if
any, might change the situation.

Yet if you look around the world, you can find reasons for hope.

While wages and incomes have stagnated in the United States (as well as in
Japan and large parts of Europe), they have not done so everywhere. In
Canada, a broad measure of incomes has risen about 10 percent since 2000,
even as it’s fallen here. In Australia, it’s up 30 percent.

These aren’t just any countries, either. They’re among those most similar
to the United States: far-flung, once ruled by Britain, with a frontier
culture and a commitment to capitalism. Though Australia and Canada
obviously are not identical to the United States, it certainly seems worth
asking what they’re doing differently.

On Thursday, an all-star commission of economists and policy experts from
several countries is publishing a detailed analysis of the great wage
slowdown. It is a defining challenge of our time, the report argues, before
offering a meaty list of possible solutions.

“Today, the ability of free-market democracies to deliver widely shared
increases in prosperity is in question as never before,” writes the group,
which includes Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation; the
economist Lawrence Summers; and leaders from Britain, Canada and Sweden.
“This is an economic problem that threatens to become a problem for the
political systems of these nations — and for the idea of democracy itself.”

In a clear reference to China, the report notes that “apologists for
anti-democratic regimes” have used the stagnation of living standards in
the West as a cudgel to argue that capitalist democracies are broken. Those
democracies and China are now racing for influence across much of the
world, especially in Africa and Asia.

The report is meant to shape the political debate – both in this year’s
British general election and the 2016 presidential campaign in the United
States. Already, Democrats and Republicans have signaled that the wage
slowdown will be at the center of their campaigns. Hillary Clinton often
says, “It feels harder and harder to get ahead,” while Jeb Bush, in a nod
to upward mobility, has named his fund-raising operation “Right to Rise.”

The report certainly includes ideas that can appeal to conservatives,
including more employee ownership and profit-sharing at companies and a
more rigorous approach to infrastructure financing. But it’s hard not to
see the report partly as the first draft of an agenda for a presumptive
campaign by Mrs. Clinton.

The commission was created by the Center for American Progress, a
Washington research group founded by Clinton allies a decade ago as a
counterweight to influential conservative groups. The report also avoids a
couple of topics that make many progressives uncomfortable (public-school
accountability and the decline of two-parent families).

Politics aside, it is a deeply serious document – one of the best overviews
of income stagnation and inequality that I’ve read. Its central message is
that the great wage slowdown is not inevitable. Yes, some unstoppable
economic forces, namely technological change and globalization, have played
a role in the slowdown. But those forces have also brought great benefits
to billions of people. And some high-income countries have done a better
job capturing the benefits of the modern economy while avoiding its
downsides.

“We should not be fatalistic,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center
for American Progress and a commission member. “There are things we can do.
They may be hard things. But there being hard things you can do is very
different from there being nothing to do.”

Two protagonists in this optimistic take are Australia and Canada. They too
have suffered from slower economic growth in recent decades, and they too
have rising income inequality. But the bottom 90 percent of earners are
still faring better than the bottom 90 percent in the United States, the
report shows. An Upshot analysis last year came to the same conclusion:
America’s middle class, long the world’s richest, has fallen behind
Canada’s.

What are Canada and Australia doing differently? For starters, they are
doing a better job with mass education. They have near-universal preschool,
and they both do more to get low-income students through college. In
Australia, college is free. “Increasingly,” the report says, “a college
education is similar to the high school education of the past — necessary
for a prosperous life.”

The efforts to create a more skilled work force in Canada and Australia (as
well as Sweden and some other countries) have led to better jobs – and
stronger pretax income growth.

Beyond education, these other countries do more to intervene in the free
market on behalf of the middle class and the poor.

“It was a reasonable reading of history for a substantial time that the
principal determinant of what happened to middle-class families was the
overall rate of growth for the economy,” Mr. Summers told me. “Today, a
substantial part of our success or failure in raising middle-class living
standards will have to do not only with overall economic performance but
also with the distribution of income.”

Other countries, for instance, have more generous child care and family
leave – and their share of women with jobs has surpassed the share in this
country. Their tax policies demand relatively more of the affluent. Canada,
in particular, appears to have stronger financial regulation.

One theme is that the countries where the middle class has fared better are
countries where workers have more power. The share in labor unions is
higher, much as unionized workers in this country make more than otherwise
similar workers.

Some countries also have less formal “worker councils” that advise
management – and can push back against some of the short-termism that
afflicts corporate America. A fascinating tidbit in the report is that
privately held American companies devote more of their resources to
long-term investments than publicly traded companies.

The commission has proposed a long list of solutions, touching on many of
the areas I’ve mentioned here. It also proposes a middle-class tax cut and
fewer tax breaks for executive compensation.

Whatever you think about any one of these, I’d argue that the crucial point
is the broader one: Middle-class stagnation is not preordained. No country
has found a magic bullet, but many are doing some things better than the
United States – and have the better results to show for it.

Three years ago, the economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
published an important book called “Why Nations Fail.” They argued that the
defining features of national success were broadly shared prosperity and
political participation. When countries are organized to deliver good,
improving lives to the masses, they succeed. When they don’t, they decline.

The debate over how – and whether – to help the American middle class and
poor certainly has its technocratic aspects, as any policy debate must.
Ultimately, though, it’s a debate about the future of America’s global
standing.

*Time: “How Elizabeth Warren Is Yanking Hillary Clinton to the Left”
<http://time.com/3668768/elizabeth-warren-hillary-clinton-left-wing/>*

By Rana Foroohar

January 15, 2015, 6:06 a.m. EST

[Subtitle:] She may not run, but she’s already exerting a gravitational pull

Elizabeth Warren, the famously anti–Wall Street Senator from Massachusetts,
has become the lunar goddess of liberal politics. Just as the moon pulls
the tides, Warren is slowly but steadily towing the economic conversation
in the Democratic Party to the left. Witness the barn-burning speech she
gave on the Senate floor in December, railing against the fact that
lobbyists from Citigroup and other big banks had been allowed to squeeze a
rider into the latest congressional budget bill that would make it easier
for federally insured banks to keep trading derivatives, which Warren
Buffett once described as the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that
sparked the 2008 crisis. Then there was her opposition to President Obama’s
most recent Treasury nominee, Antonio Weiss, a banker who Warren told me
“has no background to justify his nomination other than working for a big
Wall Street firm.” (Weiss dropped out shortly after Warren began denouncing
him.) Couple that with her continued calls to break up the big banks and
criticism of policies espoused by longtime Democratic economic advisers
like Bob Rubin and Larry Summers, and you’ve the makings of a consequential
gravitational pull.

Warren is more than just a dogged critic. The former Harvard law
professor’s influence comes in large part because she’s tapped into an
existential crisis on the left: namely, liberals’ belated anxiety over the
capture of the Democratic Party by high finance, which began two decades
ago. Ronald Reagan might be the President most closely associated with
laissez-faire economics, but both Republicans and Democrats have frequently
turned to finance to generate quick-hit growth in tough times, deregulating
markets or loosening monetary policy rather than focusing on underlying
fixes for the real economy. Shrugging and citing a market-knows-best
philosophy to avoid difficult political decisions has been a bipartisan
exercise for quite a long time now.

And the anxiety is deepened because democrats, like Republicans, bear blame
for the financial crisis of 2008. Jimmy Carter deregulated interest rates
in 1980, a move that pacified consumers and financiers grappling with
stagflation but also helped set the stage for the home-mortgage implosion.
In 1999, as President Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Rubin signed off
on the Glass-Steagall banking-regulation death certificate, a move that
many, Warren included, believe was a key factor in worsening the crisis.
Loose accounting standards supported by many Democrats during the Clinton
years also encouraged the growth of stock options as the main form of
corporate compensation, a trend that French academic Thomas Piketty, Nobel
laureate Joseph Stiglitz and many other economists believe exacerbated the
staggering gap between rich and poor in the U.S. today. I asked Warren
whether she blamed such policies for our current wage stagnation, which has
persisted despite robust economic growth. “I’d lay it right at the feet of
trickle-down economics, yes,” she says. “We’ve tried that experiment for 35
years, and it hasn’t worked.”

Speculation has been rife that Warren might consider a presidential run of
her own, taking on front runner Hillary Clinton just to make sure the same
trickle-down team doesn’t end up in office again. When I ask her flatly if
she’d run if she thought a Rubin or Summers would be making economic policy
for the next four years, she paused. “I tell you … I’m going to do
everything I can. I’m going to fight as hard as I have to. This has to
change.”

Change won’t come easily. Resetting the economic table is not just about
breaking up big banks or raising the minimum wage. Real change would mean
grappling with a deep, multidecade shift from a society in which the state,
the private sector and the individual all shared responsibility for
economic risks to one in which individuals are now increasingly left on
their own to pay for the trappings of a middle-class life–health care,
education and retirement–while corporations capture a record share of the
country’s prosperity without necessarily reinvesting in the common good.
Complaining about too-big-to-fail banks, sleazy lobbyists and the 1% is
easier than crafting an entirely new, inclusive growth policy.

Warren is likely to conjure more change by being a progressive foil to
Clinton than by running herself. Her sway has old economists scrambling to
learn new tricks. The Center for American Progress, a think tank with close
ties to the Clintons, is releasing a new report on wages and the plight of
the middle classes on Jan. 15. Its chief author: none other than Summers.
Meanwhile, Clinton recently took an ideas meeting with Stiglitz, once
considered too far left to touch. In politics, stars may rise, but the moon
is constant.

*New York Times: First Draft: “Clinton Takes to Heart a 6-Year-Old Lesson
in Accounting”
<http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/01/15/?entry=mb-4&_r=0>*

By Amy Chozick

January 15, 2015

Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to have learned at least one valuable lesson
from her unsuccessful 2008 presidential run: Don’t get ahead of yourself
when it comes to fund-raising.

While she does not yet have a campaign, people close to the would-be
candidate say that it is likely that she will not solicit general election
donations during the Democratic presidential primaries.

The move would represent a significant break from her approach six years
ago, when her campaign collected $2,300 — the maximum then allowed for an
individual contribution to a candidate — from donors for both the primaries
and the general election. When she ended up losing to Barack Obama in the
primaries, she was forced to raise money to pay her debt and liquidate more
than $23 million in contributions set aside for the general election.

Mrs. Clinton had to loan the campaign $11.4 million of her own money and
had about $9.5 million in unpaid bills to vendors, including her ousted
chief strategist, Mark Penn, according to her campaign’s April 2008 filings
with the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Obama’s campaign ended up
pleading with its own donors to help Mrs. Clinton pay down her debts.

Eliminating donations for the general election is easier said than done
because many donors will want to contribute the maximum. But it could also
help diminish expectations that her nomination is inevitable and that she
expects an easy ride to the general election.

*New York Daily News: “Ready for Hillary is extending its run as Hillary
Clinton stays mum”
<http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/ready-hillary-extending-run-spring-blog-entry-1.2077849>*

By Annie Karni

January 14, 2015, 4:50 p.m. EST

Ready for Hillary is extending its run as Hillary Clinton continues to
delay an announcement on whether or not she will run for President.

The independent super PAC building grassroots support for a potential
Clinton presidential run in 2016 has always said it would wind down its
operation if and when Clinton declares herself a candidate.

The group’s leaders had expected to end operations between Jan. 15 and Feb.
1.

But now Ready for Hillary will be fundraising and building support at least
until the spring.

“We’ve expanded,” Ready for Hillary founder Adam Parkhomenko told the Daily
News. “We’re going longer than anticipated. We’re planning to be up until
April 1. Our plan is to be around all first quarter and to keep doing what
we’re doing. We’ve always said we’re going until she announces. But by
reading media reports, it doesn’t seem like the decision is coming until
the end of the first quarter.”

The independent PAC has 21 major donor events scheduled through March 21,
as well as dozens of grassroots fundraising events, Parkhomenko said.

Ready for Hillary said at its national finance council meeting last
November that it had raised $11 million for a Clinton campaign, and has
compiled what it hopes is a valuable list of 3 million names of Clinton
supporters that it plans to hand over to the former secretary of state.

*Calendar:*

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

·  January 21 – Saskatchewan, Canada: Sec. Clinton keynotes the Canadian
Imperial Bank of Commerce’s “Global Perspectives” series (MarketWired
<http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/former-us-secretary-state-hillary-rodham-clinton-deliver-keynote-address-saskatoon-1972651.htm>
)

·  January 21 – Winnipeg, Canada: Sec. Clinton keynotes the Global
Perspectives series (Winnipeg Free Press
<http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/Clinton-coming-to-Winnipeg--284282491.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>
)

·  March 19 – Atlantic City, NJ: Sec. Clinton keynotes  American Camp
Association conference (PR Newswire <http://www.sys-con.com/node/3254649>)