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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsInformative New Yorker story on Hillary and the rest of the field for 2016
The piece also looks at other potential contenders, including Martin O'Malley, Jim Webb, and Bernie Sanders.
I like Sanders, but Webb looks interesting, too.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/inevitability-trap
The Political Scene NOVEMBER 17, 2014 ISSUE
The Inevitability Trap: Hillary Clinton and the drawbacks of being the front-runner.
BY RYAN LIZZA
Bernie Sanders, Martin OMalley, and Jim Webb may all run for President in 2016.
The Sunday before Election Day, Hillary Clinton addressed a crowd of voters at an afternoon rally in Nashua, New Hampshire. The state has long served as a source of political renewal for the Clintons. Early in 1992, during Bill Clintons first Presidential run, he was hobbled by allegations of womanizing, but he finished a strong second in the New Hampshire primary, and his campaign rebounded. In 2008, Hillary lost to Barack Obama in the Iowa caucuses but defied the polls in New Hampshire, which showed Obama far ahead, and won the state, setting up a marathon nomination fight that lasted into June. On Sunday, she was ostensibly in the state to boost the campaigns of Governor Maggie Hassan and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, both threatened by the surging Republican tide. It was also an ideal opportunity for Clinton to advertise her unofficial status as the Democrat to beat in the 2016 primaries.
Its really hard for me to express how grateful I am, on behalf of my husband and myself, to the people of New Hampshire, Clinton said. Starting way back in 1991, you opened your homes and your hearts to us. And in 2008, during the darkest days of my campaign, you lifted me up, you gave me my voice back, you taught me so much about grit and determination, and I will never forget that.
Many of the candidates for whom Clinton campaigned throughout the summer and fall lost on Tuesday. Shaheen, though, was one of the clear Democratic winners. She asked at the rally what many were thinking: Are we ready for Hillary? The crowd chanted Clintons name, and she mouthed a thank-you. In national surveys this year, Clintons support among Democrats has been as high as seventy-three per cent. That makes her the most dominant front-runner at this stage of a Presidential contest in the Partys modern history. Media pundits and political strategists agree overwhelmingly that Hillarys lead within the Party is unassailable. Tuesdays results, which gave Republicans control of both the House and the Senate, may solidify her standing, as Democrats close ranks around her in an effort to hang on to the White House, their last foothold on power in Washington. But the election results could also lead to an entirely different outcome: a Republican Party that overinterprets its mandate in Congress and pushes its Presidential candidates far to the right, freeing Democrats to gamble on someone younger or more progressive than Clinton.
In every fight for the Democratic Presidential nomination in the past five decades, there has come a moment when the front-runner faltered. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does politics, Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist, told me. Voters in the early states, perhaps spurred by a sense of civic responsibility, begin to take an interest in candidates they had previously never heard of. Those candidates seize on issues, usually ones that excite the left, that the front-runner, focussed on the general election, has been too timid to champion. The press, invested in political drama, declares that the front-runner is vulnerable.
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Much more at the link.
Autumn
(45,107 posts)OMalley is certainly right on this, People want to be inspired."
recommended.
RiverLover
(7,830 posts)Fools.
Rowdyboy
(22,057 posts)that Jim Webb was as progressive economically as he is portrayed. Interesting perspective on Sanders and Clinton too.
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)JI7
(89,252 posts)wanting someone who is liberal.
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)Foreign policy:
The issue that Webb cares about the most, and which could cause serious trouble for Hillary Clinton, is the one that Obama used to defeat her: Clintons record on war. In the Obama Administration, Clinton took the more hawkish position in three major debates that divided the Presidents national-security team. In 2009, she was an early advocate of the troop surge in Afghanistan. In 2011, along with Samantha Power, who was then a member of the White House National Security Council staff and is now the U.N. Ambassador, she pushed Obama to attack Libyan forces that were threatening the city of Benghazi. That year, Clinton also advocated arming Syrian rebels and intervening militarily in the Syrian civil war, a policy that Obama rejected. Now, as ISIS consolidates its control over parts of the Middle East and Irans influence grows, Clinton is still grappling with the consequences of her original vote for the war in Iraq.
Although Webb is by no means an isolationist, much of his appeal in his 2006 campaign was based on his unusual status as a veteran who opposed the Iraq war. Ive said for a very long time, since I was Secretary of the Navy, we do not belong as an occupying power in that part of the world, he told me. This incredible strategic blunder of invading caused the problems, because it allowed the breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines at the same time that Iran was empowering itself in the region.
He thinks Obama, Clinton, and Power made things worse by intervening in Libya. Theres three factions, he said. The John McCains of the world, who want to intervene everywhere. Then the people who cooked up this doctrine of humanitarian intervention, including Samantha Power, who dont think they need to come to Congress if theres a problem that they define as a humanitarian intervention, which could be anything. That doctrine is so vague. Webb also disdains liberals who advocate military intervention without understanding the American military. Referring to Syria and Libya, Webb said, I was saying in hearings at the time, What is going to replace it? What is going to replace the Assad regime? These are tribal countries. Where are all these weapons systems that Qaddafi had? Probably in Syria. Can you get to the airport at Tripoli today? Probably not. It was an enormous destabilizing impact with the Arab Spring.
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Wall Street and Economic Policy
Because of the way that the financial sector dominates both parties, the distinctions that can be made on truly troubling issues are very minor, he said. He told a story of an effort he led in the Senate in 2010 to try to pass a windfall-profits tax that would have targeted executives at banks and firms which were rescued by the government after the 2008 financial crisis. He said that when he was debating whether to vote for the original bailout package, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, he relied on the advice of an analyst on Wall Street, who told him, No. 1, you have to do this, because otherwise the world economy will go into cataclysmic free fall. But, No. 2, you have to punish these guys. It is outrageous what they did.
After the rescue, when Webb pushed for what he saw as a reasonable punishment, his own party blocked the legislation. The Democrats wouldnt let me vote on it, he said. Because either way you voted on that, youre making somebody mad. And the financial sector was furious. He added that one Northeastern senatorWebb wouldnt say whowas literally screaming at me on the Senate floor.
When Clinton was a New York senator, from 2001 to 2009, she fiercely defended the financial industry, which was a crucial source of campaign contributions and of jobs in her state. If you dont have stock, and a lot of people in this country dont have stock, youre not doing very well, Webb said. Webb is a populist, but a cautious one, especially on taxes, the issue that seems to have backfired against OMalleys administration. As a senator, Webb frustrated some Democrats because he refused to raise individual income-tax rates. But as President, he says, he would be aggressive about taxing income from investments: Fairness says if youre a hedge-fund manager or making deals where youre making hundreds of millions of dollars and youre paying capital-gains tax on that, rather than ordinary income tax, somethings wrong, and people know somethings wrong.
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Criminal Justice
Webb could challenge Clinton on other domestic issues as well. In 1984, he spent some time as a reporter studying the prison system in Japan, which has a relatively low recidivism rate. In the Senate, he pushed for creating a national commission that would study the American prison system, and he convened hearings on the economic consequences of mass incarceration. He says he even hired three staffers who had criminal records. If you have been in prison, God help you if you want to really rebuild your life, Webb told me. Weve got seven million people somehow involved in the system right now, and they need a structured way to reënter society and be productive again. He didnt mention it, but he is aware that the prison population in the U.S. exploded after the Clinton Administration signed tough new sentencing laws.
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