The3rd“draftMitt”movementstillhasa

The 3rd “draft Mitt” movement still has a few glaring problems

posted at 5:31 pm on August 9, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

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Our friend Matt Lewis takes to the pages of the Telegraph this week with an impassioned defense of the record – and perhaps future political viability – of Mitt Romney. And to be sure, a lot of the admittedly retrospective praise in this article is fully deserved.

First, since his 2012 defeat, Mr Romney has been proved right about a variety of issues. When he called Russia a “geopolitical foe” during a 2012 presidential debate, Mr Obama gibed: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War has now been over for twenty years.” …

Within seconds of taunting Mitt over Russia, during that same debate, Mr Obama crowed: “Just a few weeks ago, you said you think we should have more troops in Iraq right now.” …

But it wasn’t just foreign policy. On the domestic front, Mr Romney warned about ObamaCare, saying that some of the “people who counted on the insurance plan they had in the past” would “lose it”. In 2013, Politifact named the “if you like your plan, you can keep it” line their “lie of the year”.

It’s hard to argue with Matt on any of these points. Mitt Romney was proven to be right on a variety of important topics, and not just areas where he found some subtle difference of opinion with his debate opponent. Many of these are policy areas where Romney was openly and widely ridiculed, providing fodder for The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live. Of course, nobody is laughing now.

But Lewis launches from this solid platform of analyzing Romney’s vision to speculate that it might not be all that crazy to think that Mitt should still wind up in the Oval Office.

He was often cast as a rich guy who led a charmed life. But Americans like a comeback story, and what better way to reinvent oneself as a man of the people than to have lost at something, only to get up, brush yourself off, and try again.

Mr Romney ran for the Republican nomination in 2008, falling short to John McCain. So this would be his third attempt at the presidency – which is not unprecedented. Most famously, William Jennings Bryan was a three-time losing Democratic nominee for president. But the American public has presumably grown more fickle since then.

He goes on from there to draw other historical parallels, further pointing out that Nixon lost presidential and gubernatorial bids in 1960 and 1962, only to go on to win the White House in 68. That’s certainly true, but I would note that the examples given come from a very different era, when American attitudes and the political machines of the day operated in a very different way. We had many perpetual candidates in the first half of the 20th century and it was nothing unusual. But the demand for something new all of the time in America has swept those old campaign modes aside. US voters in the modern era take a page from the opening speech of the movie Patton, never tolerating “a loser” for very long. Mitt was dedicated and persevered, but he’s now lost to both John McCain and Barack Obama.

Also, I simply don’t see any sort of grassroots conservative uprising to draft Mitt again. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Matt points to some recent polls which show that, if they had the chance to do it over again, voters wish they’d chosen Romney over Obama. True enough, and easy to understand, but that’s not to say that they wish to head to the theaters and watch this movie for a third time. Mitt still rings up big numbers in New Hampshire, but these are voters who carry a clear memory of Romney as a candidate for the best part of a decade and as yet have no definitive, declared candidates for the next cycle who aren’t mired in questions and controversy. As we get closer to 2016 and some substantial hats are tossed into the ring, that will probably change drastically.

And finally, there is the real missing piece of the Romney 2016 equation: we have yet to see any indication that Mitt is actually interested or could even be cajoled into another turn in the line of fire. As Noah pointed out in June, Romney has very recently been asked about it and said the idea was silly. Some members of Romney’s own inner circle have brought it up and gotten a response of (quote) No, no, no, no, no,no, no, no.

There may be a Draft Mitt movement taking place out there, but I think it’s largely a media creation. And even in as much as it may exist, Mitt himself doesn’t seem to be a member of it.

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DidCuomoobstructhisownanti-corruptioncrusade?

Did Cuomo obstruct his own anti-corruption crusade?

posted at 1:21 pm on July 23, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Last year, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared that he’d had enough of corruption in the state capital, and launched a high-profile commission to independently find and root it out. When it got to close to Cuomo himself, the New York Times reports today, the governor had a change of heart and shut it down. Now the feds want to take a closer look at both the corruption and Cuomo’s actions in obstructing his own commission (via Jammie Wearing Fool):

The investigators did not realize that the firm, Buying Time, also counted Mr. Cuomo among its clients, having bought the airtime for his campaign when he ran for governor in 2010.

Word that the subpoena had been served quickly reached Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aide,Lawrence S. Schwartz. He called one of the commission’s three co-chairs, William J. Fitzpatrick, the district attorney in Syracuse.

“This is wrong,” Mr. Schwartz said, according to Mr. Fitzpatrick, whose account was corroborated by three other people told about the call at the time. He said the firm worked for the governor, and issued a simple directive:

“Pull it back.”

The subpoena was swiftly withdrawn. The panel’s chief investigator explained why in an email to the two other co-chairs later that afternoon.

“They apparently produced ads for the governor,” she wrote.

If this scenario had played out in a police investigation, that would be criminal obstruction of justice. As it is, the grant of subpoena power to the supposedly independent commission may end up having the same effect. After all, the executive branch is responsible for law enforcement, and the commission was clearly an attempt to work around any other potential conflicts of interest in the executive branch to perform that function. Granting the commission subpoena power would establish that, as opposed to just a fact-finding commission that reports on issues for the governor and whose operations would be clearly political rather than investigative or the enforcement of law.

Cuomo told the NYT that he created the “independent” commission, and therefore he could run it any way he saw fit:

“A commission appointed by and staffed by the executive cannot investigate the executive,” the statement said. “It is a pure conflict of interest and would not pass the laugh test.”

Yet, The Times found that the governor’s office interfered with the commission when it was looking into groups that were politically close to him. In fact, the commission never tried to investigate his administration.

Besides, that conflicts with what Cuomo told the press last year:

Gov. Cuomo said Thursday his special investigative panel on government corruption can investigate whoever it wants — even him.

“Anything they want to look at they can look at — me, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the Controller, any senator, any assemblyman,” Cuomo told reporters during an event in upstate Oneida. “They have total ability to look at whatever they want to look at.” …

“If this doesn’t give people faith and trust, I don’t know what else can,” Cuomo said.

In March, Cuomo quietly shut the panel down, but US Attorney Preet Bharara was not pleased. The cases that prompted the commission’s formation came out of his office, and Bharara had urged the commission to get aggressive. Suddenly, Cuomo’s initiative looked a lot less like a courageous attempt to clean up Albany on his own, and more like a way to pre-empt the US Attorney from doing his job. He seized the files from the commission and assigned investigators to continue the probes that had gotten shut down — and started a new one about Cuomo’s interference with the commission and its subpoenas.

This has other consequences, too. Cuomo, like his father Andrew, reportedly has presidential ambitions and hoped to use his track record as governor of the second-most populous state as a springboard in the future. This kind of obstruction of a corruption probe, even if it doesn’t prove criminal, will almost certainly hobble those ambitions, especially if Bharara files indictments either against Cuomo’s staff or against lawmakers that his commission let off the hook. For now, this removes one potential Democratic alternative to the stumbling Hillary Clinton in 2016, or at least “pull[s] it back” considerably.

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MSNBC:Say,thatHillaryClintonbooktourwas

MSNBC: Say, that Hillary Clinton book tour was a big mistake, huh?

posted at 10:01 am on July 22, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Let’s try a thought experiment. If Hillary Clinton had not written her second memoir Hard Choices and never had to go on a book tour to promote it, where would she stand now in the political realm? As Mark Halperin notes with a grin on Morning Joe today, “she’d have a lot less money,” but she would also have avoided the public beating over the thin gruel offered in her memoir and the ridiculous attempt to paint herself as a member of the “struggling” class for the past thirteen years. Would people be talking about Elizabeth Warren with any degree of seriousness now?

Well, maybe not now, but ….

The panel discussion kicks off with yesterday’s Politico poll that shows that the electorate has a better memory of Hillary’s tenure at State than most political media do.  Until her book tour, Hillary’s public image was generally positive, but irrelevant. As Halperin states, she had the opportunity to make herself relevant while still keeping electoral politics at arm’s length, or at least at wrist length, as everyone understood the “memoir” to be a thinly-disguised campaign platform. Instead of transforming the softball environment into political gold, complete with handpicked media appearances designed to give her the softest focus, Hillary “lost control of her image” in a series of gaffes and retreats that seem almost unreal in retrospect. How could anyone with that much preparation have blown it so badly?

Well, that’s actually a rather easy question to answer. Hillary Clinton is a lousy candidate, that’s why. She has little charm, a tin political ear, and no real agenda other than her own ambition, as Byron York points out when comparing her to Warren. She won her Senate seat in the safest environment the Clintons could find in 2000, and then proceeded to blow what was supposed to be a coronation in 2o08 to a first-term Senate backbencher, who also had an agenda rather than a resumé. Everything that happened over the past month would have happened in 2015 as well, especially in the tougher scrutiny of a presidential primary fight. The reason Democrats are looking at Warren as a Plan B is because they are now remembering 2008, and are starting to panic.

Marco Rubio offers another perspective on Hillary Clinton that also comes through — she’s a nostalgia candidate at a time when most Americans want to look to the future:

In terms of his political opponents, Rubio said Hillary Clinton is “extremely vulnerable on her record.

“The truth of the matter is she was the secretary of state during an administration that has had virtually no successes on foreign policy,” he said.

Rubio, who is 43, said his continuing career in public service is motivated by the nation being at a “generational, transformational crossroads.” He dismissed Clinton as being on the wrong side of those particular tracks.

“I just think she’s a 20th century candidate,” he said. “I think she does not offer an agenda for moving America forward in the 21st century, at least not up till now.”

Was the book tour a big mistake? Not really. It put a lot of cash into her pockets, and that’s not a small consideration for someone who considers herself a member of the “struggling” class. The downside would have taken place anyway, and for Democrats, it’s better to get this reminder now rather than in December 2015 when they can’t do anything about it.

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Tags: 2016 election, Elizabeth Warren, hard choices, Hillary Clinton, Mark Halperin, Morning Joe

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Perry:RandPaul’spositiononIraqis“disheartening

Perry: Rand Paul’s position on Iraq is “disheartening … curiously blind”

posted at 5:31 pm on July 12, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Rick Perry has had quite the renaissance this summer. The Texas governor lowered his profile after his unsuccessful 2012 run for the Republican presidential nomination, focusing instead on finishing his last term in Texas before deciding on his future. After the border crisis erupted, though, Perry has emerged again as a national leader in the GOP. That has buzz going about a potential second presidential run, and the Christian Science Monitor concluded that Perry won the week against Barack Obama in their border show-down in the context of 2016:

By “win,” we mean it might boost Perry’s stature within his own party. He has forced Obama to change his plans (somewhat) and will get to put himself on the US chief executive’s level with an exchange of ideas. That’s a big step up for a possible 2016 presidential candidate whose 2012 campaign ended in a pile of “oops” during a nationally televised debate. It might help Perry appear more presidential to GOP primary voters. It will certainly help him with the conservative core, many of whom want their party to stand up to Obama, particularly on the immigration issue.

“Rick Perry two-stepped his way back into the national spotlight this week, using the crisis at the border to skewer President Barack Obama while pumping up his own conservative bona fides,” reads the top of a piece by Politico’s Katie Glueck on Wednesday. 

If anyone thought that Perry’s emergence was just accidental or momentary, think again. Perry took time out from his efforts to press for better border security to address a completely different national security issue, the emergence of ISIS in Iraq, in today’s Washington Post. And Perry not only takes on the Obama administration in this broadside, but also a potential 2016 GOP rival, Senator Rand Paul. Perry calls Paul “curiously blind” to the threat of ISIS in a clear effort to align himself against the non-interventionist wing of the Republican Party:

As a veteran, and as a governor who has supported Texas National Guard deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, I can understand the emotions behind isolationism. Many people are tired of war, and the urge to pull back is a natural, human reaction. Unfortunately, we live in a world where isolationist policies would only endanger our national security even further.

That’s why it’s disheartening to hear fellow Republicans, such as Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), suggest that our nation should ignore what’s happening in Iraq. The main problem with this argument is that it means ignoring the profound threat that the group now calling itself the Islamic State poses to the United States and the world.

In the Islamic State, which came to prominence in Syria and now controls ample territory, weapons and cash in both that country and Iraq, the world is confronting an even more radicalized version of Islamic extremism than al-Qaeda. This group is well-trained, technologically sophisticated and adept at recruitment, with thousands of people with European passports fighting on its side, as well as some Americans.

This represents a real threat to our national security — to which Paul seems curiously blind — because any of these passport carriers can simply buy a plane ticket and show up in the United States without even a visa. It’s particularly chilling when you consider that one American has alreadycarried out a suicide bombing and a terrorist-trained European allegedlykilled four at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

The essay rebuts a column from Paul last month, in which Paul claimed that Ronald Reagan would have never gotten entangled in Iraq in the first place:

Though many claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan on foreign policy, too few look at how he really conducted it. The Iraq war is one of the best examples of where we went wrong because we ignored that.

In 1984, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger developed the following criteria for war, primarily to avoid another Vietnam. His speech, “The Uses of Military Power,” boils down to this: The United States should not commit forces to combat unless the vital national interests of the U.S. or its allies are involved and only “with the clear intention of winning.” U.S. combat troops should be committed only with “clearly defined political and military objectives” and with the capacity to accomplish those objectives and with a “reasonable assurance” of the support of U.S. public opinion and Congress and only “as a last resort.”

Much of the rationale for going to war in 2003 did not measure up to the Weinberger Doctrine, and I opposed the Iraq war. I thought we needed to be more prudent about the weightiest decision a country can make. Like Reagan, I thought we should never be eager to go to war. And now, 11 years later, we are still dealing with the consequences.

Actually, the issue of Iraq doesn’t go back 11 years, but almost 24 years, and not to George W. Bush but to George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s successor. We have been caught up in the affairs of Iraq ever since that point, for better or worse. While Paul perhaps makes a good case for non-involvement in late 1990 — a signal sent by the Bush 41 administration at the time, which allowed Saddam Hussein to conclude that the US would not react to a forcible annexation of Kuwait — it’s a moot argument now. We are engaged in Iraq even without troops on the ground, and a full retreat from the region will not be a passive act.  It will leave a vacuum which will be filled by Iran, Saudi Arabia, and al-Qaeda and ISIS. A shrug has its consequences too, as we learned in late 1990. Absent that shrug, for which Paul argues now, we may not have spent the last 24 years in Iraq at all.

That doesn’t mean that Paul’s entirely wrong, or that Perry’s entirely right. The problem in the US isn’t that we don’t have the ability to make an impact — we clearly have that power in spades — but that we don’t have the political will to see these projects through to completion. And “completion,” in the context of the post-Versailles world, is at best a foggy concept anyway. That region isn’t Europe, after all, and even Europe didn’t fully settle its post-Versailles arrangement until after another World War, a Cold War, and the Balkans war — and may not yet be quite finished, either, especially in Kosovo. In the Middle East, it will probably take centuries to settle their post-Versailles tensions, whether or not the West remains actively engaged. If that’s depressing, welcome to the long expanse of history from the temporal vantage point.

We’re going to have this debate for a long, long time. The most interesting part of it for the moment is that Perry has decided to engage it in a public, national manner, and has deliberately taken on the Paulist wing of the GOP. That’s not the action of a man just looking to play out his string in Texas and head back to the ranch.

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Tags: 2016 election, Iraq, ISIS, Rand Paul, Rick Perry

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And the least-read political book is …

Andtheleast-readpoliticalbookis…

Dr.BenCarsonreallydoesn’twanttobe

Dr. Ben Carson really doesn’t want to be president

posted at 11:01 am on July 6, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

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I attend a fair number of political shindigs, and for the rest of you who do also, you’re probably familiar with the sight of various groups pushing to Draft Ben Carson as a potential 2016 GOP nominee. I saw them out in force at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference this year, and they’ve been making the rounds at all the other usual confabs. But what about Dr. Carson himself? Does he really want to take the big chair? Rare conducted an interview with him this week and lobbed the usual question. The answer may prove enlightening.

Kurt Wallace: I know a lot of people have asked you ‘are you going to run for president’ my question to you is do you want to run for president? Do you want to be the president?

Ben Carson: Well, the second question is very easy – the answer is no. Why would any sane person want to do that. I mean have you noticed that everybody who goes in that office after about three years looks like they’ve been there 20 years.

Kurt Wallace: As a doctor you wouldn’t recommend things like that?

Ben Carson: It certainly was not my intention to move into the political realm. I found myself thrust there after the national prayer breakfast speech. But you know my preference would be for someone to come along who really wants to do that and understands the constitution. And understands personal freedom, responsibility. The place of the government versus the place of the people. The place of the states versus the place of the federal government. Understands business and how to get moving by deregulating in terms of the excessive regulations not the ones that are necessary. And knows how to get things done. I mean we need to reform the tax code, it’s absolutely absurd. And it’s a blanket over economic progress.

When the beltway media asks any prospective or active candidate for office “The Question” during an interview, it’s generally accepted that it will be why do you even want the job. (It’s widely considered that the failure to be able to answer the question of why is how we wound up with Jimmy Carter instead of Ted Kennedy.) The question of “do you want it” is taken as settled. I don’t recall any other instances off the top of my head when a promising contender who is working to raise their national profile went so far as to say that they have no appetite for the Oval Office to begin with.

If Carson does run, expect this clip to surface again later in the primary process. If he had qualified it a bit, saying that the job was obviously a grinding one which aged the occupant prematurely, but he was willing to shoulder the burden if another suitable candidate couldn’t be found, this would be water under the bridge. But an unadorned, “the answer is no” is just red meat on the platter. Opponents will ask why voters should put it all on the line to support his bid when he doesn’t even want the job himself.

Of course the other possibility is that Carson is just being brutally honest. The man may just want to participate in the process and get the message out without diving into the swamp of DC and a very dirty national election mess. And really, who could blame him?

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SecondlookatAlGore? postedat

Second look at Al Gore?

posted at 7:01 pm on July 5, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

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Allahpundit touched on this idea briefly this week in an article primarily to do with Mitt Romney in specific and the general question of whether or not there are second acts for losing party nominees in the 21st century. But apparently the idea has taken root in a few places, and as he noted in the article, the Daily Caller (or at least Mark Halperin) talked about it without being entirely tongue in cheek.

Mark Halperin, the senior political analyst for “Time” magazine, appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Thursday and boldly reiterated his Wednesday Twitter assertion that Al Gore — the same Al Gore who served as Bill Clinton’s vice president — poses the greatest threat to Hillary Clinton’s White House aspirations. Still, he stopped short of saying Gore would run in the Democratic primary.

“I don’t know that Al Gore will run against her, but I do know that of all the other people who’ve talked about running against her, I don’t think anybody has his strengths. And I think Al Gore would like to be president. And I think that if he decided to do it, it would be a matchup worth running,” Halperin explained.

“I think he’s got a better chance of beating her in a primary, today, than any Republican does in the general election,” Halperin continued.

Jay Nordinger at The Corner was on the story as well, though I can’t help but think he was smiling a bit.

Two thoughts: Hillary would then be running as the poorer candidate, right? Or have she and Bill together beaten out Al in the moolah department?

Do Hillary and Bill pool their money? Like, you know — John and Jane Doe?

Thought No. 2.: I don’t have many questions about recent American politics, frankly. If I had the chance to interview Bill Clinton, I really don’t know what I’d ask him. I know what all his answers would be. “Why did you commute the sentence of Susan Rosenberg?” (a Weather Underground terrorist). He’d BS his way through that one, same as all the others.

But there is a mystery surrounding Al Gore: Why didn’t he run for president in 2004?

As for the primary – assuming he was even interested – Al does offer one thing that most of Hillary’s other potential competitor’s don’t. For those in the Left base who are just aching for a carbon tax and somebody who would really do something to stop the polar bears from moving to Minnesota or whatever, he’s got the bona fides. Their most devoted voters are probably more than a little disappointed that Obama never really did anything but pay lip service to the idea in a successful effort to win votes. Gore is the consummate green warrior for them.

How does Gore fare in the general election? The guy is so far left that I think most of the GOP field currently under discussion would beat him handily, but it would make for one heck of a debate stage. And hey.. he could replay that famous stage kiss with Tipper over and over and over and over…

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FormerSecStatewithpresidentialambitionscan’ttellthe

Former SecState with presidential ambitions can’t tell the players in UK?

posted at 12:41 pm on July 3, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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When I first saw this clip earlier today, I was inclined to dismiss it. After all, plenty of people make the mistake Hillary Clinton does in this interview with BBC Radio today. The interviewer asks the former Secretary of State to gauge the strength of the “special relationship” between the US and the UK, and offers a rather insipid answer that applies to nearly all of our allies in the West. But it’s the apparent ignorance of the UK’s political parties from a woman who served for four years as America’s chief diplomat that got the buzz (via TWS and NRO):

BBC: So how special is the special relationship?

CLINTON: It is so special to me, personally, and I think it is very special between our countries. There’s just a — not just a common language — but a common set of values that we can fall back on. It doesn’t matter in our country whether it’s a Republican or Democrat, or frankly in your country whether it’s a Conservative or a Tory. There is a level of trust and understanding. It doesn’t mean we always agree because of course we don’t.

In case you don’t get the joke, the Tories are the Conservatives in the UK. Their other major political parties are Labour and Liberal Democrats, which means this is another way in which the comparison is a bit inapt. That confusion shouldn’t surprise anyone who recalls this gem from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shortly after assuming that position in March 2009:

“I have never understood multiparty democracy.

“It is hard enough with two parties to come to any resolution, and I say this very respectfully, because I feel the same way about our own democracy, which has been around a lot longer than European democracy.”

Let’s not forget that most Western democracies use parliamentary systems with three or more major parties, including our two closest allies, the UK and Canada. So does the system we set up in Iraq. They’re not terribly exotic or difficult to understand at all, at least not functionally, although they may take slightly more work to study than the US two-party system. At the very least, they’re easy to recognize.

On the whole, though, I figured that fumbling on Conservatives vs Tories was a momentary and extemporaneous brain fade more than a display of actual ignorance. The answer itself is strange even apart from that. The BBC didn’t ask why the relationship was special to Hillary Clinton, but what the status of the relationship was between the US and UK. Clinton begins with a weird celebration of the special relationship as being super-special to herself, and then describes it in terms that are about as generic as one can possibly imagine. “Common set of values … level of trust and understanding,” as if that doesn’t describe nearly every close alliance in history between nations. It all but declares that the US-UK alliance isn’t special at all; I doubt that answer gives any confidence to most of the BBC’s listeners.

National Journal’s Alex Seitz-Wald thought the comment should have drawn more attention than it did, especially in the British press:

Surprised British press seems uninterested in Hillary's "Tory" gaffe. Seems notable for someone running on int'l chops.

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) July 3, 2014

Maybe they’re just used to the fact that Hillary Clinton doesn’t understand multiparty democracy, or apparently recalls that the UK has such a system.

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Mitchell:HillaryClinton“alittlebitoutof

Mitchell: Hillary Clinton “a little bit out of touch”

posted at 9:21 am on June 30, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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The Huffington Post called this “harsh words,” but under the circumstances it sounds more like a qualified defense. David Gregory asked Andrea Mitchell why Hillary Clinton has come under such harsh scrutiny already when “she’s not even a candidate,” which is a laughable premise on which to deconstruct the past three weeks. Mitchell reminds Gregory that Hillary launched a book tour on her own initiative, and then says that the big takeaway is that the presumptive frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination is “rusty,” and that she should stop giving paid speeches:

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell had some harsh words for Hillary Clinton during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press” Sunday.

Mitchell told host David Gregory that Clinton is “rusty” and “out of touch,” to judge by recent comments the former secretary of state made during her ongoing book tour.

“She is a little bit out of touch,” Mitchell said, “despite all of her work and all of her connection to hardworking people in the middle class.” …

“It’s a little bit of lack of self-awareness when she talks about being dead broke and she then tried to fix it, but still not getting the language, you know, politically correct,” Mitchell said.

The problem with Hillary over the past few weeks has not been that she’s continuing to get paid for speeches. It’s that she can’t speak straight when it comes to her own wealth and standard of living. She wants it both ways — to live like a One Percenter while pretending to be down with the “struggle” of Occupy Wall Street. It doesn’t work that way, especially when Wall Street sticks $20 million into your husband’s pockets for a few speeches over the years.

That’s not a lack of self-awareness. It’s flat-out hypocrisy. This book tour didn’t happen spontaneously; it was a long-planned effort to shape the political battlefield for the 2016 presidential campaign. The book was written for that purpose (which is why it spends 600 pages saying next to nothing, as reviewers have lamented), and the interviews carefully selected for maximum impact. Hillary had months to prepare for questions about her income — after all, it’s Democrats who made class warfare their central strategy over the last three years. The stumbles over the last three weeks aren’t about being “rusty,” but being tone-deaf in the first place.

That tone-deafness translates into a big problem on public trust for Hillary Clinton. While a thin majority believes her to be relatable — boosted by 86% among Democrats — her trustworthiness is under water in an NBC/WSJ poll taken during her first week of the tour:

The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 55% of all voters think Mrs. Clinton is “knowledgeable and experienced enough to handle the presidency,” but more voters disagree than agree with the statement that she is “honest and straightforward.”

The poll results highlight a problem that has dogged Mrs. Clinton since her 2008 campaign. Her three decades in national politics have cemented an image of an experienced public servant with the chops to be president but who has a tougher time making a personal connection with voters and gaining their trust.

Today, 38% of voters say she is “honest and straightforward,” compared with 40% who say she isn’t. That figure is better for Mrs. Clinton than in March 2008, during the Democratic primaries, when 33% said she was honest and 43% said she wasn’t. But she may have trouble making up more of that ground as she moves out of her self-imposed break from politics and is increasingly seen as a 2016 presidential candidate.

Pretending to not be “truly well off” after making more than a hundred million dollars in the past 23 years — and scoring a $14 million bonus for her latest memoir — didn’t make her appear any more trustworthy or straightforward, either. The Washington Post uses this first-week poll result to argue today that she’s not doing real damage to her standing:

Although D.C. gossiped endlessly about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ”inartful” comments on her wealth, most Democrats don’t seem to have paid attention — or just don’t care.

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll shows that 86 percent of Democrats think she can relate to average Americans “as well as” other potential 2016 presidential candidates, despite her “position and economic circumstances.’’

As you might guess, she fares less well among all other voters — although she still has the backing of a solid majority of all voters who don’t see her as the next Thurston Howell III. The poll found that 55 percent of all people think she’s as relatable as other possible candidates, with 37 percent disagreeing.

But that doesn’t mean Clinton has nothing to worry about. The “as well as” clause in the poll’s question probably waters down negative reactions to the Clinton family’s wealth and how she has talked about it in recent days. That’s because (1) we really just don’t know who those other candidates will be, and (2) when we do meet those candidates, people might not view them as very “in touch” (see: Mitt Romney, John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis). If people were simply asked whether Clinton was relatable, full stop, the numbers might be a little lower.

There’s also the fact that these gaffes continued well past the period in time in which this poll was taken. The original comment about being “dead broke” might have been shrugged off by many as a one-off fumble, but at the end of three weeks it’s apparent that Hillary really thinks she can sell herself as a member of the struggling proletariat. The more she tries to sell that, the less credible and relatable she will become … even to Democrats.

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Tags: "truly well off", 2016 election, Andrea Mitchell, class warfare, dead broke, hard choices, Hillary Clinton, NBC/WSJ poll, wealth

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AretheClintonsinthetop1%of

Are the Clintons in the top 1% of the top 1%?

posted at 5:31 pm on June 28, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Live by the class-warfare sword, die by the class-warfare sword. The One Percenter argument that effectively painted Mitt Romney in 2012 as an out-of-touch patrician in a nation full of populists has boomeranged on Bill and Hillary Clinton in 2014, thanks in large part to Hillary’s own declarations of poverty and struggle. With Democrats paving the way two years ago to attacks on wealth, the Wall Street Journal’s Tim Hanrahan looks at financial disclosures and other public records and concludes that the Clintons aren’t just One Percenters — they’re among the top One Percent of the One Percenters:

The nationwide level to make the top 1% of households in 2012 was $567,719,according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center,  a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. And the level for the top 0.1% was about $2.9 million, a bar the Clintons easily surpassed.

The Tax Policy Center data stop there, at the top 0.1% — or the top 10% of the top 1% of Americans.

Did the Clintons reach the top 1% of the top 1%, based on their 2012 income? A different measure offers a strong clue. The Tax Policy Center says that IRS data for 2011, the most recent numbers available, show 11,500 total tax returns with adjusted gross income over $10 million that year, out of 145 million total returns. So a $10 million adjusted gross income puts one in the top 0.007% of all tax returns, and the Clintons’ income was well above that — likely putting it into the top 1% of the 1%.

The AP noted yesterday that the last public disclosure of the Clinton’s net worth was in 2012, when it ranged from $5 million to $25 million. That’s not exactly hereditary peerage level, but it’s far from “not truly well off,” let alone “struggling.” That’s apart from their earnings, which have surpassed the nine-figure mark over the last thirteen years; Bill Clinton by himself has made over $100 million just in speeches. Every speech either gives can be measured in multiples of annual average household incomes for Americans. For instance, two speeches at UCLA brought in more than 10 times the annual US household income, the Washington Post reported yesterday:

Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton was paid $300,000 to speak to students and faculty at the University of California Los Angeles in March, the university confirmed Friday.

UCLA spokesman Jean-Paul Renaud said Clinton’s fee was paid through a private endowment established for a lecture series by Meyer Luskin, an investor and president of Scope Industries, a food waste recycling company.

In 2012, former president Bill Clinton was paid $250,000 to deliver the inaugural address in the Luskin lecture series, Renaud said.

Meyer Luskin is a diffident Democratic donor, but apparently enough of a fan of the Clintons to cough up more than a half-million dollars for a couple of hours’ worth of speeches.

There’s nothing wrong with making a living off of the speaking circuit, of course. Ronald Reagan did that for years to hone his political craft before running for governor in California and then President, unsuccessfully in 1976 and successfully in 1980. Even the amount of money wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that Hillary and her apologists (now including Bill) have to shoehorn it into the demagoguery of the class-warfare strategies of their party — a class warfare strategy that worked in 2o12 but looks like it will backfire in 2014 and 2016 if Hillary runs for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Ruth Marcus has some advice for Hillary Clinton today. Either shut up entirely — including a retirement from the six-figure fees on the speaking circuit — or retire from politics, and pronto:

The issue isn’t that you’re rich, or even that you and your husband became rich after leaving office. American voters don’t have a problem with wealthy candidates or even wealthy ex-presidents and ex-officials.

They have a problem with wealthy candidates who are whiny and/or defensive about their wealth; who are greedy and/or ostentatious in their acquisition and display thereof; or whose wealth makes them, or makes them appear to be, out of touch with the concerns of everyday people. Your difficulties, at the moment anyway, appear to be chiefly in the first two categories: defensiveness and greed. …

Madam Secretary, enough already. This behavior borders on compulsion, like refugees who once were starved and now hoard food. You’re rich beyond your wildest imaginings! You don’t need any more! Just. Stop. Speaking. For. Pay.

In the midst of a book tour (and with the ample cushion of a multimillion-dollar advance), you don’t need to be hustling for another $200,000 or so from the United Fresh Produce Association and Food Marketing Institute. On the verge of a potential presidential bid, please feel free to say yes to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas if you want to speak there. But you don’t have to hit its foundation up for a $225,000 fee, even one you plan to donate to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Fix this now, or decide not to run. Then you can rake in the fees to your heart’s content.

I suspect that Marcus is not alone in this sentiment on the Left, not even among Hillary’s supporters. The more Hillary Clinton talks, the more the media will keep dissecting her remarks and compare them to the reality of the overwhelming Clinton earnings and wealth, and the more ridiculous the class-warfare arguments from Democrats will look.

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Tags: 2014 election, 2016 election, Bill Clinton, class warfare, demagoguery, Hillary Clinton, one percenters, wealth

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Hillary’swealthofpoliticalmediocrityemerges…again

Hillary’s wealth of political mediocrity emerges … again

posted at 12:01 pm on June 24, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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In the two weeks of Hillary Clinton’s re-entry in pop and political culture with her book tour, she has demonstrated a remarkable inability to connect with people, to communicate effectively, and to even comprehend the damage she’s doing to herself. Any other politician with this kind of fortnight would find it fortunate to be called a mediocrity. To make this point, let’s start with the contrarian view. Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein wants to remind everyone of “Hillary’s Mad [Political] Skillz” today, but doesn’t exactly make a compelling case:

Klein sums up Hillary Clinton this way: “Her political career has involved winning a Senate seat in New York over a weak Republican opponent in a year that Al Gore carried the state by 25 points — and squandering a massive lead against candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic nomination battle.”

Well, sort of. She also managed to win a very valuable open Senate nomination despite not actually being from the state; she built an impressive lead in the 2008 nomination battle, crushing several candidates, only to come up just barely short; and she has now built what appears to be an unprecedented lead — outside of incumbent presidents and vice-presidents — for the presidential nomination.

In the words of Jules Winnfield, allow me to retort. Hillary rode a wave of public sympathy over the Lewinsky affair, the resurgent popularity of her husband, and her celebrity to carpetbag into what was otherwise a dull Senate primary in New York, along with the then-invincible Clinton machine, to win a US Senate seat in deep-blue New York. She built an impressive lead in the 2008 nomination with the same Clinton machine against a field of non-entities, only to blow the lead and the nomination to a one-term Senate backbencher who had an even less impressive resumé than she did. She has a massive lead now in a race of one, because everyone else is smart enough to lay low until 2015.

Philip Klein comes much closer to the mark:

After previously trying to justify her six-figure speaking fees by claiming she and Bill Clinton were “dead broke” when leaving the White House, she’s come under fire for stating that she wasn’t that “well-off.” This has led to a spate of stories about whether the Clintons’ enormous wealth would weigh on her presidential ambitions in a nation with growing populist sentiment. But the deeper takeaway from her recent dustups isn’t her wealth, but that she’s an overrated politician. …

My operating assumption is that by the time the campaign rolls around, Hillary will find a way to answer questions about her wealth. It’ll probably go something like: “Bill and I have been fortunate enough to have a lot of opportunities, but I recognize that a lot of poor and middle class Americans aren’t so lucky, which is why I’m fighting for [insert redistributionist policy here].”

But all sorts of questions are going to come up over the course of a long campaign — some easily anticipated, others surprising. Her recent tone-deaf answers on questions about wealth speak to the fact that she’s a lot more politically clumsy than people assume.

My operating assumption is that she would have come up with that answer by … oh, the day after her “dead broke” gaffe with Diane Swayer. Instead, she’s still trying to pretend that she’s had it tough her whole life, right up to almost yesterday, apparently in the belief that Americans will identify with her “struggle.” That’s why she tried telling the Guardian that her wealth — unlike others — was made by “dint of hard work.” In my column for The Week, I explore that claim a little, and show why it’s poison for Democrats in the midterms:

“The dint of hard work,” as Clinton describes it, consisted of record-breaking bonuses for three (probably ghostwritten) memoirs (two for her, one for Bill), plus massive fees for delivering speeches written in large part by aides. Despite her observation that she pays taxes just like the next guy, the profits from this hard work went into tax shelters that the Clintons claim to oppose as the refuge of One Percenters. Bloomberg reported that the Clintons managed to ease their struggles by exploiting the same estate-tax loopholes they oppose as a form of “evading taxes,” as do Democrats in general in their income-inequality crusade.

Not too many of the hoi polloi will identify with that kind of “struggle” faced by the Clintons, and that’s precisely the problem for Democrats this year, as well as in 2016. Ever since Mitt Romney began his run for the presidency, President Obama and the Democrats made him a personal target for their income-inequality political messaging campaign. They painted him as a clueless One Percenter who couldn’t possibly relate to middle-class voters. They spent the summer of 2012 attacking the business he built, even though it created middle-class jobs and invested in private-sector success stories like Staples.

With ObamaCare a disaster, the economy still stagnant, and Obama’s foreign policy collapsing, Democrats running in red states this year need to maintain the demagogic income-inequality theme. They have little else to cling to. Suddenly, though, the party’s presumed front-runner for 2016 has turned into a comic figure, someone akin to what Democrats imagined Romney to be. She laments the struggle of earning eight figures in a single year after leaving the White House and entering the Senate, while giving Sawyer a guided tour of her $5 million home in Washington, D.C. It doesn’t get much more tone deaf than this.

Hillary Clinton is a living example of the hypocrisy of Democratic rhetoric and the attacks on Romney’s character, at a moment in time when Democrats can least afford it. Chris Cillizza notes that Clinton is handing Republicans the issue ”on a silver, ahem, platter.” Ouch.

She’s the poster child for income inequality and the cluelessness of the One Percenters, which all but eliminates that argument for Democrats as long as she has her Unprecedented Lead in the Field Of One. Her mediocrity and cluelessness will expose the hypocrisy and the demagoguery of the Democratic Party’s class warfare, all the more so to the extent that Democrats are forced to explain away Hillary’s bumbling. Without that, they’re toast in November, and possibly in 2016 as well.

Update: Ana Marie Cox believes that Hillary’s dissembling is an even greater threat:

The real mystery of her present disingenuousness is that there’s really nothing shameful, in and of itself, about the kind of wealth the Clintons have accumulated. As Bill himself said just the other day, “Americans don’t resent other people’s successes.” And polls show that Americans still love rich people! In 2012, 92% of people describing themselves as middle-class and 84% of self-described lower-income people said they admired the wealthy. Whenever Hillary denies she one of them, she just proves the point of the 34% of Americans who say the wealthy are less honest than the rest of us.

Simply being rich isn’t insulting; pretending you aren’t is.

Clinton’s ongoing misrepresentations – an unwillingness to accept and acknowledge that her life in politics has been not just educational but lucrative – reflects the central conundrum of Hillary Clinton, campaigner: she thinks she’s earned your vote because she’s worked hard and studied and has a 4.0 GPA, but she doesn’t quite believe that votes always go to those who’ve earned them. Indeed, that was, for the Hillary camp, the lesson of 2008.

And so she undercuts her legitimately impressive career with false modesty about the very quality that one can quantify: wealth. The thing about running for president and not head of the class is that she can’t show us her grades or awards of merit. Her boasts of competency – 3am phone calls and navigating world diplomacy – require a certain amount of faith in her word; when she tells us she’s broke, we know she’s lying.

It makes her look like she’ll say anything to get her hands on power, and that’s not exactly a winning perception in American politics.

Update: Made a couple of minor edits and added a qualifying statement in the original conclusion regarding Democratic apologists for Hillary.

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Tags: "truly well off", 2016 election, class warfare, credibility, dead broke, hard choices, Hillary Clinton, income inequality, midterms, wealth

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