It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.
Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday. It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama, never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.
As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.
In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.
Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:
1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.
2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.
3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.
The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:
1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..
2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.
3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.
4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).
5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.
6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.
7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.
Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,
Only one candidate in last week’s Republican presidential debate was asked to directly address the Black Lives Matter movement and that candidate was Gov. Scott Walker.
Moderator Megyn Kelly asked Walker:
“Governor Walker, many in the Black Lives Matter movement, and beyond, believe that overly-aggressive police officers targeting young African-Americans is the civil rights issue of our time. Do you agree? And if so, how do you plan to address it? If not, why not?”
Walker responded with an answer about sufficient training of officers “not only on the way into their positions but all the way through their time” and about “consequences” for those who don’t properly perform their duties.
Both the question and the answer focused an inordinate amount of attention on police conduct and not enough on revealing that they are simply the agents of policy instituted by officials at the behest of the body politic.
This deficit of examining systems exists all across this debate. It fails to indict society as a whole, as I firmly believe it should. It puts all the focus on the tip of the spear rather than on the spear itself.
Look at it this way: Many local municipalities experience budgetary pressure. Rather than raise taxes or cut services in response, things that are often politically unpalatable, they turn to law enforcement and courts to make up the difference in tickets and fines. Some can also increase the number of finable offenses and stiffen the penalties.
Officers, already disproportionately deployed and arrayed in so-called “high-crime” neighborhoods — invariably poor and minority neighborhoods — are then charged with doing the dirty work. The increase in sheer numbers of interactions creates friction with targeted populations and ups the odds that individual biases will be introduced.
Without fail, something eventually goes horribly wrong.
We look at the end interaction, examining the officers for bias and the suspect for threatening behavior, rather than looking at the systems that necessitated the interactions.
Society itself is to blame. There is blood on everyone’s hands, including the hands still clutching the tax revenue that those cities needed but refused to solicit, instead shifting the mission of entire police departments “from ‘protect and serve’ to ‘punish and profit,’ ” as Mother Jones magazine recently put it in a fascinating article on this subject.
Is it a coincidence that many of the recent cases involving black people killed by the police began with stops for minor offenses?
This “fiscal menace,” as the magazine called it, is added to a system often already addicted to ever-improving crime numbers — a statistically unsustainable condition — and a ballooning prison population. To maintain the momentum, cities needed to crack down on lower and lower-level crimes, sacrificing more and more lives — largely poor and minority ones — to feed the beast. Public safety gave cover for a perversion of justice.
In another moment during the debate, Kelly asked Ben Carson about race relations in America and “how divided we seem right now.” She continued: “And what, if anything, you can do — you would do as the next president to help heal that divide.”
First, before the answer, I have a nit to pick with the question. The framing of the state of race relations as a “divide,” to my mind, creates a false impression, an equivalency. It suggests a lateral-ness. But this discussion is about vertical-ness, about hierarchy. It is about whether state power is being used disproportionately as an oppressive and deadly force against minorities — particularly black people — in this country.
Carson responded with a prelude that seemed to label those demanding justice and equality “purveyors of hatred” seeking a “race war,” an outrageously exaggerated use of incendiary rhetoric.
Then he said:
“What we need to think about instead — you know, I was asked by an NPR reporter once, why don’t I talk about race that often. I said it’s because I’m a neurosurgeon. And she thought that was a strange response. And you say — I said, you see, when I take someone to the operating room, I’m actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn’t make them who they are. The hair doesn’t make them who they are. And it’s time for us to move beyond that.”
This was an eloquent exposition of the absurdity of race as a biological construct, but also an absurdly elementary avoidance of racism as a very real social construct. I wish it were that people could all simply “move beyond that” at will, that they were able to simply choose to slough off the cumulative accrual of centuries of systematic anti-black negativity. But, that is not a power people possess.
That is why when people respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter,” it grates. All Lives Matter may be one’s personal position, but until this country values all lives equally, it is both reasonable and indeed necessary to specify the lives it seems to value less.
……..”is a Cabinet mtg this am”. “Can I go?”. Wow, so much dirt in those for you to rant on about. Time to Listen to the Boss Again on Her Emails and Grow Up and Move On.
America remains, despite the damage inflicted by the Great Recession and its aftermath, a very rich country. But many Americans are economically insecure, with little protection from life’s risks. They frequently experience financial hardship; many don’t expect to be able to retire, and if they do retire have little to live on besides Social Security.
Many readers will, I hope, find nothing surprising in what I just said. But all too many affluent Americans — and, in particular, members of our political elite — seem to have no sense of how the other half lives. Which is why a new study on the financial well-being of U.S. households conducted by the Federal Reserve, should be required reading inside the Beltway.
Before I get to that study, a few words about the callous obliviousness so prevalent in our political life.
I am not, or not only, talking about right-wing contempt for the poor, although the dominance of compassionless conservatism is a sight to behold. According to the Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of conservatives believe that the poor “have it easy” thanks to government benefits; only 1 in 7 believe that the poor “have hard lives.” And this attitude translates into policy. What we learn from the refusal of Republican-controlled states to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the bill, is that punishing the poor has become a goal in itself, one worth pursuing even if it hurts rather than helps state budgets.
But leave self-declared conservatives and their contempt for the poor on one side. What’s really striking is the disconnect between centrist conventional wisdom and the reality of life — and death — for much of the nation.
Take, as a prime example, positioning on Social Security. For decades, a declared willingness to cut Social Security benefits, especially by raising the retirement age, has been almost a required position — a badge of seriousness — for politicians and pundits who want to sound wise and responsible. After all, people are living longer, so shouldn’t they work longer, too? And isn’t Social Security an old-fashioned system, out of touch with modern economic realities?
Meanwhile, the reality is that living longer in our ever-more-unequal society is very much a class thing: life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot among the affluent, but hardly at all in the bottom half of the wage distribution, that is, among those who need Social Security most. And while the retirement system F.D.R. introduced may look old-fashioned to affluent professionals, it is quite literally a lifeline for many of our fellow citizens. A majority of Americans over 65 get more than half their income from Social Security, and more than a quarter are almost completely reliant on those monthly checks.
These realities may finally be penetrating political debate, to some extent. We seem to be hearing less these days about cutting Social Security, and we’re even seeing some attention paid to proposals for benefit increases given the erosion of private pensions. But my sense is that Washington still has no clue about the realities of life for those not yet elderly. Which is where that Federal Reserve study comes in.
This is the study’s second year, and the current edition actually portrays a nation in recovery: in 2014, unlike 2013, a substantial plurality of respondents said that they were better off than they had been five years ago. Yet it’s startling how little room for error there is in many American lives.
And something that even startled me: 47 percent said that they would not have the resources to meet an unexpected expense of $400 — $400! They would have to sell something or borrow to meet that need, if they could meet it at all.
Of course, it could be much worse. Social Security is there, and we should be very glad that it is. Meanwhile, unemployment insurance and food stamps did a lot to cushion unlucky families from the worst during the Great Recession. And Obamacare, imperfect as it is, has immensely reduced insecurity, especially in states whose governments haven’t tried to sabotage the program.
But while things could be worse, they could also be better. There is no such thing as perfect security, but American families could easily have much more security than they have. All it would take is for politicians and pundits to stop talking blithely about the need to cut “entitlements” and start looking at the way their less-fortunate fellow citizens actually live.
KEENE, N.H. — One day last month, in the middle of a furniture factory here, Hillary Rodham Clinton finished prepared remarks about her presidential candidacy and opened the floor for discussion.
A middle-aged worker, Pamela Livengood, began to speak, tentatively at first, about the drug addiction that has tormented her daughter and left her granddaughter in her care.
“This little 5-year-old lives with me, and I’m guardian — Grandpa and I have guardianship because of all the growing drug problems in our area,” Ms. Livengood said.
Mrs. Clinton gave her a sympathetic, knowing nod.
“Pam, what you just told me and what I’m hearing from a lot of different people, there is a hidden epidemic” of heroin, methamphetamine and prescription pills that is “striking in small towns and rural areas,” she said, taking out an index card and scribbling notes.
Mrs. Clinton lacks some of the extraordinary gifts for connection and empathy that her husband possesses, and the round-table events that have characterized her early campaign can feel stage-managed. But even these settings are producing revealing moments, as Mrs. Clinton finds herself far from the world of international diplomacy and scrambling to re-educate herself about the nation she hopes to lead.
Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Clinton at the parade in Chappaqua, N.Y. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times
A lot has changed since Mrs. Clinton left domestic politics to become secretary of state: Student debt has ballooned, access to credit has tightened, and the cause of income inequality has taken on a forceful momentum.
Ever an eager student, she has immersed herself in dense briefing papers and academic tomes and consulted more than 200 experts as she thought about her economic policy. But now, as the campaign faces pressure to reveal specific policy proposals, Mrs. Clinton has 35 million more advisers — also known as the Democratic primary electorate.
There is not a lot of I-feel-your-pain hugging at these events, and few uproarious moments. But Mrs. Clinton brings a wonkish intensity, arriving at each round table armed with specific data points. She said, “The average four-year graduate in Iowa graduates with nearly $30,000 in debt,” and, “In New Hampshire, 96 percent of all businesses are considered small businesses.” She nods, jots down notes and interjects conversations with words of encouragement: “That’s interesting,” and, “That’s a very good point.”
And she relays what she is hearing back to her campaign’s policy shop in Brooklyn; the problem of drug addiction, especially in small towns, has now become a prominent theme for her on the campaign trail.
“She came back from both places and said, ‘I want you guys to go beyond standard policies and really take a hard look at some of the more creative or forward-looking policy positions,’ ” said Jake Sullivan, the campaign’s senior policy director. “So we’re in the process of working on those at the moment.”
To be sure, part of Mrs. Clinton’s reassuring voters that she is learning has to do with an acute awareness in her campaign that she must combat the opinion of some voters in 2008 that she seemed aloof and entitled. “The goal,” said Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, is to “take advantage of the long campaign season, start small” and “not just shake hands but get under the hood.”
Mrs. Clinton is clearly most comfortable devising and thinking about policy, and it has given her a way to interact with voters. And the round tables suggest that, in her 2016 campaign, Mrs. Clinton is embracing her inner geek, rather than trying to mimic President Obama’s cool or Bill Clinton’s common touch. The campaign is betting that approach may have its own appeal. A newly revamped gift shop offers supporters $55 needlepoint-style pillows and $30 scarlet pan suit-theme T-shirts (“Pantsuit Up,” the slogan on the back reads.)
After she stopped at a coffee shop on her first trip to Iowa as a candidate, the people she met bemoaned all the red tape faced by entrepreneurs. From her van on the way to the next stop, Mrs. Clinton called policy advisers to talk through some of the issues she had heard on the ground. Small-business growth is now central to her campaign.
On Friday, she made the second stop of her small-business push, telling voters at a family-owned brewery in Hampton, N.H., how she hopes to be “the president for small business.”
She takes frequent opportunities to remind voters that she is, indeed, listening and, yes, she is learning. “I want to hear from people of New Hampshire,” Mrs. Clinton said at a small gathering of supporters last month.
All these conversations could potentially muddy the policy-making process back in Brooklyn. In the last month, Mrs. Clinton has told her team to zero in on mental health, too, after a mother in Council Bluffs, Iowa, told her that coverage under the Affordable Care Act did not do enough to support her son, who has Asperger’s syndrome.
She told her campaign team to start using a new expression for education, “opportunity system,” after Dr. Mick Starcevich, the president of Kirkwood Community College in Monticello, Iowa, used the term and Mrs. Clinton jotted it down on a notepad.
Bryce Smith, a 23-year-old owner of a bowling alley near Des Moines, told Mrs. Clinton that his biggest challenge in starting a business was his $40,000 in student loans affecting his access to credit. “I went for education in college so I could teach, but I fell in love with bowling,” Mr. Smith said. “So that’s my biggest thing, is the barrier of entry and financing.”
Mrs. Clinton lit up. “We all know about the student loan debt, but I’ve never heard anyone so persuasively link it to the slowdown in business start-ups,” she said. “You’ve given me an insight that nobody else has, and I’m grateful to you,” she told Mr. Smith.
Mrs. Clinton told her campaign team that the separate advisers working on college affordability and small-business policies needed to coordinate more closely, thanks to Mr. Smith, now a minor celebrity who is seeking elected office in Iowa. Mrs. Clinton sent Mr. Smith and other round-table participants handwritten notes thanking them for their insight.
Mr. Sullivan, the senior policy adviser, is not just waiting to hear from Mrs. Clinton, though. In recent weeks, he has traveled to places like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Minneapolis, where a campaign infrastructure does not yet exist, to talk to people about policies and report back to Mrs. Clinton.
The campaign will hold its official kickoff rally on June 13. After that, it will be hard for Mrs. Clinton to keep listening and learning without talking about specific policy proposals. If those specifics do not come soon, her political opponents will more than likely seize on her vagueness.
“The asset she has at this point is that everything she says gets picked up, and people hear it,” said David Winston, a Republican strategist.
“The problem is, she has gotten to this point, and what is she saying?” he continued. “What are the policy directions? It was a fuzzy, soft reintroduction to the general public who already believes they know who she is.”
CEDAR FALLS, Iowa — Hillary Rodham Clinton was in a forgiving mood. She had been discussing the small-business economy at a round-table gathering at a bike shop here on Tuesday when the Fox News correspondent Ed Henry interrupted. When, he shouted, would she take questions from the news media she had ignored for weeks on end?
“Maybe when I finish talking to the people here,” Mrs. Clinton said as she leaned over a 3-D printed mechanical part that looked like a post-apocalyptic Rubik’s cube. “How’s that?”
“You’ll come over?” Mr. Henry followed up.
“I might,” Mrs. Clinton said teasingly. For the amusement of the 19 local residents invited to attend this latest installment of the movable Clinton court, and to the annoyance of the more than 50 members of the news media roped off around them, she added: “I have to ponder it. But I will put it on my list for due consideration.”
Unlike in 2008, when Mrs. Clinton’s regal bearing was brought low by Barack Obama’s insurgent campaign, there is no one to force her out of her Rose Garden. Neither Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, nor Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, has applied significant pressure on her. That leaves the news media as her only real opponent so far on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination, and while it may not be great for an educated populace or the furtherance of American democracy, it makes all the political sense in the world for Mrs. Clinton to ignore them, too.
There is no shortage of reminders of the downsides of engagement. She need only look at her Republican counterparts, starting with Jeb Bush, who has made a point of opening up more to reporters but damaged himself during a several-day struggle with how to answer a question about the wisdom of the war in Iraq.
Senator Marco Rubio’s difficulties with the same question were condensed to a few highly awkward and viral minutes. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has been working for weeks to overcome his flubbing of initial questions about foreign policy, and Senator Rand Paul’s snappish interactions with female reporters have only fed the impression that he is thin-skinned.
Mrs. Clinton had her own rocky introduction to the 2016 press corps when she gave defensive and not entirely convincing answers at a news conference prompted by the revelation that she had used a private email server as secretary of state. But as reporters have dug deeper into the emails, the financial conduct of her family’s foundation and the character of the company she keeps, Mrs. Clinton has only seemed more comfortable and dominant on the campaign trail.
She has rolled out more liberal positions on immigration reform and college debt and stayed mum on inconvenient things she does not want to talk about, like a potential trade deal or Israeli policiesloathed by her liberal base. And unlike in 2008 — when the battle between her and Mr. Obama forced Mrs. Clinton to do events late into the night, and she often slipped up or held forth about brain science — she is keeping her campaign schedule to a bare minimum.
This week, as she campaigned in Iowa, Chicago and New Hampshire, where on Friday she again took questions from reporters — a relative flurry of activity — she generally filled each day with one event open to the news media, a smaller one with a pool reporter, and then some unexpected stops where she ordered coffee or bought toys for her grandchild. Always the grandchild.
At the bike shop event on Tuesday, she listened intently to the stories of the round-table participants, nodding 43 times a minute as they talked about their ice cream shops and 3-D printing. As television lights cast the shadows of two rows of “everyday Americans” onto the tablecloth, she looked expertly over the locals’ heads and into the television cameras behind them to give her prepared remarks (“I want to make the words ‘middle class’ mean something again”).
She complimented the participants on their inquiries (“that’s a very fair question” or “that’s a very good question”), and when the moderator unexpectedly pushed her on her position on President Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, she dodged artfully.
When it finally came time to ask their questions, the reporters seemed more agitated than the candidate as they pushed against a rope line for the impromptu news conference and gasped when her traveling press secretary, Nick Merrill, joked, “Wouldn’t it be funny if she walked off?”
“Hey, y’all ready?” Mrs. Clinton asked as she sauntered over.
“Yeah!” said the chorus of reporters.
“Tell me — tell me something I don’t know,” she said, almost musically, as she snapped her head to the left in a Janet Jackson-era dance move. “Ha, ha, ha, ha.”
The smile on Mrs. Clinton’s face slowly faded as she nodded and replied and obfuscated in response to the half-dozen questions asked of her. She did so with ease, despite the people shouting about her destroying her emails and calling out, “Did you take official actions for the Clinton Foundation donors?” And then she turned away, essentially dusting the whole dodging-the-press story line off her bird’s-eye blazer.
Mrs. Clinton’s relationship with the political press has never been warm. She started the 2008 race straight-arming reporters, and only when the nomination began slipping from her grasp did she seek to embrace them. It was too late. When she boarded the press bus with bagels (“I didn’t want you to feel deprived”), no one partook. Despite that chill, though, there was a sense of professionalism and familiarity on the Clinton bus, because many of the reporters represented New York-based publications and had covered her as a senator. News conferences were not frequent, but they occurred behind curtains after events.
Now, both Mrs. Clinton and the news media have changed. She seems less a presidential candidate than a historical figure, returning to claim what is rightfully hers. And the press corps, both blessed and cursed with live streaming, tweeting and Snapchatting technologies, is armed with questions devised to win the moment. The result is a carnival atmosphere. It is not clear what Mrs. Clinton gains politically from playing the freak.
The solution for her team has been to keep the press at bay as Mrs. Clinton reads the scripts to her daily campaign shows.
“The media was confined between the bar and the stove,” Gary Swenson said, describing an event with Mrs. Clinton at his home in Mason City, Iowa, on Monday. Asked if he had learned anything from her talk, he said, “No, I don’t think I learned anything remarkably new,” but added after a pause: “I think it was more her demeanor. It astonished me. I expected somebody who had space between herself and the people who lived here, and there was none.”
The press did not learn much, either, from Mrs. Clinton’s remarks in Mason City or her answers at the impromptu bike store news conference, except that she is an exceedingly strong candidate. But that did not mean the event was entirely without news.
Outside, by the steps of the bike shop, Mr. Henry did a stand-up in front of his Fox camera. “The reason she had a news conference is because I started shouting questions,” he crowed to his viewers. He called that the day’s “bottom line.”
Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida hardened his position against same-sex marriage in an interview that aired on Sunday, making clear he did not believe in constitutional protection for gay marriages — an issue now before the United States Supreme Court — and leaving out his past call for “respect” for gay couples.
Appearing on “The Brody File” on the Christian Broadcasting Network, Mr. Bush, a likely Republican candidate for president in 2016, was asked in a brief interview if he believed there should be a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
“I don’t, but I’m not a lawyer, and clearly this has been accelerated at a warp pace,” he said. “What’s interesting is four years ago, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had the same view that I just expressed to you.” He added: “Thousands of years of culture and history is just being changed at warp speed. It’s hard to fathom why it is this way.”
He also warned that the country’s future would be at risk without traditional marriages between a man and a woman who go on to raise children.
“To imagine how we are going to succeed in our country unless we have committed family life, committed child-centered family system, is hard to imagine,” Mr. Bush said. “We need to be stalwart supporters of traditional marriage.”
Mr. Bush was explicitly opposed to same-sex marriage for years, but in recent months, since he has been considering a run for the presidency, he has made a wider range of statements — saying same-sex marriage is an issue that should be decided by the states, for instance. This winter, as gay couples began to wed in Florida, Mr. Bush also struck a conciliatory tone about those marriages.
“We live in a democracy, and regardless of our disagreements, we have to respect the rule of law,” he said in a statement to The New York Times in January. “I hope that we can show respect for the good people on all sides of the gay and lesbian marriage issue — including couples making lifetime commitments to each other who are seeking greater legal protections and those of us who believe marriage is a sacrament and want to safeguard religious liberty.”
Mr. Bush reiterated in the “Brody File” interview on Sunday that his views about same-sex marriage are based on his Catholic faith. “I think traditional marriage is a sacrament,” he said. “It’s at the core of the Catholic faith.”
Ireland’s Marriage Equality Moment
ByFINTAN O’TOOLE (NEW YORK TIMES)
DUBLIN — ON a Sunday in May, a reporter for The Irish Times went looking for religious people who might be expected to oppose same-sex marriage. The issue is a hot topic in Ireland because on Friday the nation votes in a referendum that, if passed, will enshrine marriage equality in the Constitution.
The reporter engaged an older woman after Mass at Dublin’s main Catholic cathedral. “I’m just going to vote for gay people because I have nothing against them,” the woman,Rita O’Connor, told the journalist. “I can’t understand why anybody is against it.” And she dismissed the church’s opposition: “It’s a stupid carry-on.”
Conservatives sometimes say that marriage equality is an elite project, pushed through by courts or parliaments, but popular enthusiasm for the cause is palpable. The referendum has already been good for the travel trade.
Ireland does not permit citizens to vote from abroad, so many younger people are traveling back for the historic vote. Anyone booking a flight to Dublin from Boston or New York before Friday must expect to pay top dollar. Closer to home, a London-based group namedGet the Boat 2 Vote has organized group travel by rail and ferry.
If polls are accurate, Ms. O’Connor represents a majority view — in a corner of Europe hardly thought of as a bastion of liberalism, like Sweden or the Netherlands. In spite of opposition from the Roman Catholic and Presbyterian churches, from Islamic leaders and conservative civic groups,surveys of public opinion consistently show more than 70 percent in favor of the government’s starkly simple proposal to add a line to the Irish Constitution: “Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.”
Few on either side of the argument expect the result to be as emphatic, and Irish referendums have a history of surprising results. Twice in recent years, major changes in European Union treaties have initially been rejected by Irish voters in shock results. Most pollsters believe that some likely “no” voters are shy about saying what they think.
Nevertheless, the odds are that the Irish will embrace same-sex marriage, and by doing so send a message that they accept gay men and lesbians as ordinary citizens. Who would have guessed that the country poised to become the first country in the world to grant same-sex couples full legal equality by direct popular vote would be socially conservative Ireland?
There is a certain poignancy in this possibility. The most notorious case of the legal persecution of homosexuality in modern Irish history was the trial and imprisonment of the writer Oscar Wilde, in England, in 1895. In 1916, a campaign to prevent the execution of the Irish revolutionaryRoger Casement was thwarted when influential supporters were shown extracts from Casement’s secret diaries, detailing his homosexual activities. For a long time, Irish nationalists insisted that the diaries must be forgeries (forensic studies later authenticated them).
Ireland retained British laws against “gross indecency” — under which Wilde was punished — on its statute books after independence in 1922. Upheld by the Irish Supreme Court, those laws were not changed until 1993, and only after an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
Ireland was thus one of the last Western democracies decriminalize consensual sexual activity between adult gay men. That it may now consolidate same-sex marriage as the new normal in the developed world is striking evidence of how quickly and profoundly attitudes have changed. If it happens, it will owe much to two circumstances, one great and epic, the other small and intimate.
Few democracies have ever seen such a close alignment of religious and political power as Ireland after independence. The new state was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and deeply identified with the church. For decades, almost all political parties followed church teaching on “moral” questions and inscribed that teaching in law.
Contraceptives were fully legalized only in 1985. Divorce was outlawed until a narrowly approved referendum in 1995. Ireland’s abortion laws are still so restrictive that they allow almost no exceptions, even for rape, incest or fatal fetal abnormalities.
Yet the church’s power proved immensely damaging to those who once wielded it. Its arrogance resulted in the catastrophic scandals of church leaders’ covering up decades of child abuse by priests and religious orders. The church’s moral authority has largely collapsed in Ireland.
As a result, its ability to influence the referendum on same-sex marriage is limited. Many church leaders have avoided taking a hard line. This owes something to Pope Francis’s more conciliatory tone on homosexuality, but even more to an awareness that many of the faithful, like Ms. O’Connor, no longer take church teaching on sexuality as gospel. The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, went so far as to warn church leaders not to use “language which is insensitive and over-judgmental” — a warning surely rooted in his understanding of the other, more personal force in this debate.
Changes in attitudes to L.G.B.T. people have been driven by one overwhelming factor: Once people were out of the closet, they were not “them” but “us” — family, friends, neighbors. This is a powerful force in a close-knit country like Ireland.
Ireland doesn’t always function well at the level of large institutions, but the Irish tend to be good at social relations. If they know you, they want to think well of you.
Before the referendum campaign got underway, the minister for health, Leo Varadkar, who is widely seen as a possible future prime minister, announced that he was gay. The only negative reactions were good-humored expressions of disappointment from female admirers of the 36-year-old doctor, while some gay men joked on social media that their mothers were urging them to marry the minister.
Mothers count in this debate. The Irish mammy is a formidable figure and Irish mammies want their children to be able to marry, whatever their partner’s gender.
In a memorable intervention, a former president of Ireland and a practicing Roman Catholic, Mary McAleese, joined her son, Justin, who is gay, in calling for a “yes” vote. Borrowing from the 1916 proclamation of the Irish Republic,she said that she wanted “the children of the nation to be cherished equally.”
Standing between mothers and what they want for their children is not a comfortable place for the proposition’s conservative opponents to be.
by Ashley Parker and Nick Corasaniti (The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — A Twitter post trecently caught the eye of Bill McKibben, the environmental advocate and godfather of the Keystone XL pipeline protests. It included an image from “The Simpsons” showing Homer and his family basking in mountains of cash in their living room, followed by a report on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s appearing at a fund-raiser with a lobbyist from the Keystone fight.
Mr. McKibben’s environmental organization, 350.org, has been trying to raise awareness about the ties it sees between lobbyists for the oil pipeline and former aides to Mrs. Clinton. He promptly shared the post with his 150,000 Twitter followers, and the reaction was immediate.
“You expect different from a Clinton?” one person responded on Twitter. And from another: “Did you need another reason not to vote for Hillary Clinton?” Lost in the response was the source of the offending tweet. It was not another environmental organization or even a liberal challenger to Mrs. Clinton. Instead, it was a conservative group called America Rising PAC, which is trying, with laserlike focus, to weaken the woman who almost everyone believes will be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president in 2016.
For months now, America Rising has sent out a steady stream of posts on social media attacking Mrs. Clinton, some of them specifically designed to be spotted, and shared, by liberals. The posts highlight critiques of her connections to Wall Street and the Clinton Foundation and feature images of Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, interspersed with cartoon characters and pictures of Kevin Spacey, who plays the villain in “House of Cards.” And as they are read and shared, an anti-Clinton narrative is reinforced.
America Rising is not the only conservative group attacking Mrs. Clinton from the left. Another is American Crossroads, the group started by Karl Rove, which has been sending out its own digital content, including one ad using a speech Ms. Warren gave at the New Populism Conference in Washington last May.
“Powerful interests have tried to capture Washington and rig the system in their favor,” intones Ms. Warren, as images of Mrs. Clinton with foreign leaders flash by.
The new-style digital campaign captures some basic facts about 21st-century communication: Information travels at warp speed on social media, it is sometimes difficult to know where that information comes from, and most people like to read things with which they agree. The result, said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco who specializes in political advertising, is something more sophisticated.
“Politics is usually basic math,” he said, “and this is a little bit of calculus, thinking a couple steps ahead.”
The tactic is making for some awkward moments online. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. sent to its more than 60,000 followers an America Rising tweet praising its president, Richard L. Trumka, for a speech that was seen as challenging Mrs. Clinton on economic issues, only to take it down a few hours later, saying it was a mistake.
Laura Hart Cole of Verbank, N.Y., whose father, Philip A. Hart, was a senator from Michigan and a liberal icon, was shocked to learn that she had, like Mr. McKibben, shared the meme from America Rising on Twitter. Republican groups, she said, “have a history of sleazy tactics.” But she added: “I guess it’s fair. If what they’re saying is factual, then I guess it’s fair play. It’s a dirty game.”
Conservative strategists and operatives say they are simply filling a vacuum on the far left, as well as applying the lesson they learned in 2012, when they watched in frustration as Mitt Romney was forced to expend time and resources in a protracted primary fight. By the time he secured his party’s nomination, President Obama hardly had to make the case that his opponent was a coldhearted plutocrat; Republicans like Newt Gingrich had already made the argument for him in the primaries.
Few Republicans are more familiar with that nightmare than Matt Rhoades, who was Mr. Romney’s campaign manager. He founded America Rising in response to a recommendation contained in an autopsy of Romney’s failed presidential run that was ordered by the Republican National Committee. The group’s original goal was to compete with American Bridge, the Democratic opposition research group, but its focus under Mr. Rhoades has been to subject Mrs. Clinton to an ordeal similar to Mr. Romney’s.
“The idea is to make her life difficult in the primary and challenge her from the left,” said Colin Reed, America Rising’s executive director. “We don’t want her to enter the general election not having been pushed from the left, so if we have opportunities — creative ways, especially online — to push her from the left, we’ll do it just to show those folks who she needs to turn out that she’s not in line with them.”
No one thinks attacking Mrs. Clinton from the left is likely to turn the most liberal Democrats into Republican voters. But Steven Law, president of American Crossroads, said the goal was simply to erode what should be her natural core of support.
“It can diminish enthusiasm for Hillary among the base over time,” he said. “And if you diminish enthusiasm, lukewarm support can translate into lackluster fund-raising and perhaps diminished turnout down the road.”
This year, Zac Moffatt, a co-founder of Targeted Victory, a right-leaning political technology firm, who handled Mr. Romney’s digital operation and has worked with groups like America Rising and American Crossroads, laid out the strategy in a memo to several clients. “There was a hole to fill in the market,” he said, and if Democrats were not willing to challenge Mrs. Clinton, Republicans could do it themselves.
For example, as Mrs. Clinton was traveling through Las Vegas this month on a campaign swing, “liberal Democrats” (as identified by Targeted Victory’s voter file) in the Las Vegas area saw a video pop into their Facebook news feeds, highlighting recent news reports about foreign government donations to the Clinton Foundation. The video was shared by America Rising and received over 6,300 views, most from people who would never follow a group like America Rising on social media.
Other groups are also using micro-targeted advertising to inject their content into the Facebook and Twitter news feeds of “liberal Democrats,” environmentalists and declared supporters of Ms. Warren, among others.
“You might start looking at union households. You might start looking at Bernie Sanders’s core of support,” Mr. Moffatt said, referring to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Mr. Law said members of his staff at American Crossroads had easily been able to inhabit the liberal role, despite being fervent Republicans. “We wear these little bracelets — W.W.E.W.D.,” Mr. Law joked, referring to “What would Elizabeth Warren do?”
In the face of Republican activity aimed at undermining its liberal support, the Clinton campaign has been publicly circumspect. Asked for a comment, it would only note that in aQuinnipiac University poll last month, Mrs. Clinton led her closest opponent, Mr. Sanders, by 46 points among voters who consider themselves “very liberal.”
And even some of those unhappy with Mrs. Clinton, like Joel Gombiner of Brooklyn — who posted the “Did you need another reason?” response to the Twitter message shared by Mr. McKibben — think the conservative groups may be outsmarting themselves.
“They view this as a means of weakening the Democratic Party and weakening the chance in a presidential election,” said Mr. Gombiner, 26. But “that’s the whole point of a democracy, that the arguments make you stronger.”
AS fleetly as Hillary Clinton vacuums up the money, she piles up the paradoxes.
She showed fatal weaknesses the last time she chased the presidency and her inevitability evaporated like a California puddle, but she’s somehow inevitable all over again. Invincible, even. Journalists have to remind themselves daily not to type or say “presumptive Democratic nominee” before her name.
She’s fashioning herself as someone uniquely attuned to “everyday Americans” while her husband fashions $500,000 speeches as amulets against the bill collector. Someone’s got to pay for the burrito bowls.
And her Republican rivals convince themselves that “I’m not Hillary” is their strongest argument and best bet, although the reverse holds true. At least for now, not being any one of them is her ace in the hole.
The 2016 race in its adolescence is between the dependably messy, perpetually maddening spectacle of the Clintons and a party with a brand-decimating profusion of mad hatters like the two who announced their bids and grabbed the spotlight last week, Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson.
Advantage: Hillary Clinton.
That’s a clear takeaway from several surveys of voters released last week. They showed that despite her email shenanigans, despite the ethical muddle known as the Clinton Foundation, despite the growing confusion about whether the Hillary Clinton of 2016 will be of an ideological piece with the Hillary Clintons of yesteryear, voters will gladly take her, considering the alternatives.
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll she was six points ahead of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio in head-to-head contests with either. She was 10 points ahead of Scott Walker.
Inexplicably and rather alarmingly, she was only three ahead of Rand Paul. The mysteries of the American electorate are boundless.
Meanwhile a New York Times/CBS News poll found that over the past month and a half, during which she weathered a veritable hurricane of negative news coverage, her favorability rating improved, and the percentage of voters who see her as a strong leader rose to 65 from 57. Nearly 80 percent of the Democrats surveyed deemed her honest and trustworthy.
There are many explanations. For starters, the hurricane I mentioned was experienced as a drizzle, if that, by many Americans, who aren’t exactly riveted by political news. Inasmuch as they notice journalists pouncing on the Clintons, they’re apt to shrug. The substance of the accusations is eclipsed by the familiarity of the tussle. It’s like lions on an impala: bloody, yes, but the natural order.
And the Clintons are being accused of what? Greed? There’s plenty of that to go around. Just ask Huckabee, a self-styled man of God and slave to Mammon.
As recounted by Trip Gabriel in The Times Ron Fournier in the National Journal and Max Brantley in Salon, he’s a case study in financial high jinks, a master class in shamelessness. He reportedly used the Arkansas governor’s office “as a personal ATM,” in Fournier’s description, channeling public money toward private expenditures (a doghouse, Taco Bell) and accepting tens of thousands of dollars in highly questionable gifts, some from people who later received prominent political appointments.
More recently he did an infomercial hawking dietary supplements as a diabetes cure, even though reputable physicians and medical associations call it poppycock. Only three of the following four adjectives correctly describe that decision: tacky, mercenary, irresponsible and presidential.
Clinton benefits from not being Huckabee, who described Obamacare’s contraception provision as a big-government sop to women who can’t “control their libido,” blamed an absence of God in schools for the deadly shooting rampage in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 and then proceeded to write a book with a title that put firearms on a comforting par with breakfast food. Run, don’t walk, to pick up your copy of “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy.”
Clinton also benefits mightily from not being Carson, who has lumped together homosexuality and bestiality and has likened Obamacare to slavery, President Obama to a psychopath and the United States under President Obama to Nazi Germany. It is said that Carson is a talented brain surgeon. I’m taking my cerebellum elsewhere if it ever comes to that.
And Clinton benefits as well from not being Carly Fiorina, who also declared a candidacy for the presidency last week. When Americans look askance at professional politicians, it doesn’t mean that they long for the polar opposite and are poised to award the presidency to someone who, in Fiorina’s case, has never held elected office, routinely failed to vote in the past, bungled her role as a surrogate for John McCain in 2008, had a miserable showing in her 2010 race for the United States Senate against Barbara Boxer, and claims a business expertise that’s long been in vigorous dispute. Her campaign will be powered by hubris, not logic.
REPUBLICANS crow about their deep bench. And they do have some formidable candidates, including Marco Rubio, who is an anti-Hillary in ways that could indeed work for him, and Jeb Bush. But Rubio and Bush share the bench with an unruly crowd that pulls them and the party too far to the right.
Republicans also take heart from their majority in the Senate and their greater number of governors. But voters behave somewhat differently in presidential elections than in other ones, which is one reason Wisconsin has remained blue even during Walker’s red reign.
The party’s image hasn’t gone through the intended upgrade after its defeat in 2012. According to the Times/CBS poll, just 29 percent of Americans now view Republicans favorably, though 43 percent feel that way about Democrats. That number is unlikely to improve much with the likes of Huckabee, Carson, Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum roaming Iowa and foaming at the mouth.
Besides, these two words come into play: Supreme Court. I know voters who’d give more consideration to Rubio, Bush, Chris Christie or John Kasich if they didn’t fear the kind of jurist one of them might nominate at the behest of the religious right. And the next president could easily wind up filling two vacancies on the high court.
That thought is the soil in which love for Hillary Clinton flowers. It’s a prompt for people who otherwise suffer bone-wearying Clinton fatigue to focus on her unquestioned smarts over her questionable scruples, her experience over her i.o.u.s, her sturdiness over her slipperiness. There’s a case to be made for her, and there’s motivation to make that case.
In another recent poll, by CNBC, she was the preferred candidate of voters with a net worth of $1 million or more. Apparently they, too, have made peace with her. Or maybe they just recognize a kindred spirit.
The Amazing Democrats 