Howard Fineman:
Is Hillary Clinton actually moving left, and if so, why?
The answer is yes, though not on every topic. And the reason is to push young voters' turnout and grassroots organizing enthusiasm as close as possible to the levels that President Barack Obama enjoyed in 2008.
“After two terms of President Obama, it won’t be easy, but our challenge is to again excite the passion of the youngest voters,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta told fellow Georgetown Law Center alums at a luncheon last week.
Yes, yes, you can post and say it's not working for you, personally. The question is the voters in general.
Pew (with a wide look at the candidates):
Though wide majorities of Democrats across all demographic groups view Clinton positively, her favorability rating is lower among younger Millennials (ages 18-25), who were too young to vote in Clinton’s 2008 race. About two-thirds (65%) of younger Millennial Democrats view Clinton favorably. That compares with 79% of older Millennial Democrats (those ages 26-34). Among older Democratic age cohorts, 82% of Gen Xers, 76% of Boomers and 79% of Silents view Clinton favorably.
As was the case in August 2007, liberal Democrats view Clinton more favorably (81%) than do conservative and moderate Democrats (74%). Unlike eight years ago, there are virtually no gender differences in views of Clinton among Democrats: 78% of Democratic women and 75% of Democratic men view her favorably.
More politics and policy below the fold.
David Brooks rewrites Iraq history from an Applebee's salad bar:
Which brings us to Iraq. From the current vantage point, the decision to go to war was a clear misjudgment, made by President George W. Bush and supported by 72 percent of the American public who were polled at the time. I supported it, too.
What can be learned?
The first obvious lesson is that we should look at intelligence products with a more skeptical eye. There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war.
That doesn’t gibe with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows that this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found “a major intelligence failure”: “The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers.”
Simon Maloy:
David Brooks’ sickening Iraq apologia: How the New York Times hack just rewrote history
Kurt Eichenwald:
The CIA officer sitting across from me at the Silver Diner in McLean, Virginia, seemed nothing like Hollywood’s portrayal of an intelligence agent. It wasn’t so much his appearance—bearded, bald, with glasses and a brown plaid shirt—that belied Ben Bonk’s occupation. Rather, it was the tears in his eyes.
“Maybe if they hadn’t deceived me, I could have done something,’’ he told me. “Maybe I could have stopped the Iraq War.”...
And Bonk’s statements—about deceptions that prevented solid intelligence on Iraq from reaching President George W. Bush, as well as other information kept from the public during the buildup to war—are once again in the news as candidates for the Republican presidential nomination fumble with questions about whether that invasion was a mistake. This has been asked of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio, each time with a qualifier: “Given what we know now...”
James Fallows:
First some operating principles, then a little history lesson. The principles:
1) No one ever again—not a news person nor a civilian, not an American nor one from anyplace else—should waste another second asking, “Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded Iraq?” Reasons:
a) It’s too easy. Similarly: “Knowing what we know now, would you have bought a ticket on Malaysia Air flight 370?” The only people who might say Yes on the Iraq question would be those with family ties (poor Jeb Bush); those who are inept or out of practice in handling potentially tricky questions (surprisingly, again poor Bush); or those who are such Cheney-Bolton-Wolfowitz-style bitter enders that they survey the landscape of “what we know now”—the cost and death and damage, the generation’s worth of chaos unleashed in the Middle East, and of course the absence of WMDs—and still say, Heck of a job.
b) It doesn’t tell you anything. Leaders don’t make decisions on the basis of “what we know now” retrospectively. They have to weigh evidence based on “what we knew then,” in real time.
The Fallows piece is a must read.
Here's a more academic take on the politics from Julia Azari:
In the broader view, this isn’t just about Iraq or foreign policy but about the Republican Party and late regime politics. Just as the Democratic Party became fractured and without a clear purpose in the late 1970s as the New Deal era came to a close, the Republican Party is probably in a period of transition as the Reagan era comes to a close. This idea builds on the political time thesis offered in a number of works by APD scholar Stephen Skowronek (disclosure: Skowronek was one of my dissertation advisors). I’ve written about it here before, and I have an interest in interrogating and applying the theory. Are there clear ways we can assess the politics of different parts of the political time cycle, so as to test the implications of the theory? If late regime politics have distinct nomination dynamics, then we should be able to develop ways to compare with other points in the cycle – 1996 vs. 2016, perhaps – and with comparable points in other cycles, like the Democratic nomination in 1976.
Katrina vanden Heuvel:
Less than two months later, the most extraordinary thing about former governor Jeb Bush’s statement that he would have authorized the Iraq war despite “knowing what we know now” wasn’t the statement itself, but rather the immediate backlash it provoked among conservative pundits and candidates for the Republican nomination. “You can’t still think that going into Iraq, now, as a sane human being, was the right thing to do,” said conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham. “If you do, there has to be something wrong with you.” And nearly all of the party’s would-be standard bearers, including Rubio, pounced on the controversy. “Not only would I have not been in favor of it,” he declared, “President Bush would not have been in favor of it.”
The uproar on the right was especially remarkable given that hawkish foreign policy has become something of a litmus test in the Republican primary.
As Julia Azari points out above, Marco Rubio and other Republicans also have problems with answering this, basically because as Fallows points out, they simply can't handle the truth.