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Today's Hillary News & Views begins with coverage of Clinton's friends in the Senate joining her on the campaign trail.
CNN reports:
Clinton shared a stage at a YWCA in Manchester with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow and New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. While the women praised the Vermont senator, they also questioned his preparedness and the thesis behind his campaign: revolution.
"When folks talk about the revolution, the revolution is electing the first woman president of the United States," Stabenow said to a small but fired-up audience. "That is the revolution. And we are ready for the revolution."
Clinton followed Stabenow's lead in her brief but direct speech. Although Clinton offered Sanders a slight olive branch -- reaching out particularly to his young supporters -- she also said that Thursday night's debate in New Hampshire made it clear "there is only one candidate who is prepared to do all aspects of the job on day one."
"I want to say a word to the extraordinary people, particularly the young people, who are supporting Senator Sanders. I know you may not be for me know, but I am for you," Clinton said before repeating a pledge to make Sanders "the first call I will make" should she win the Democratic nomination.
"I look forward to working with him as a partner in the Senate," Clinton said.
Clinton also made clear on Friday that she is ready to get passed the primary, stressing that all Democrats should be more focused on making sure "we don't get a Republican back in the White House."
Hey, did you know that the candidate who got the post-Iowa polling bounce was Hillary Clinton?
Princeton Election Consortium reports:
It is probably hopeless to counteract reporters who weave the tale that Sanders is surging. Based on actual data, it might be exactly the opposite.
- In aggregated data, Hillary Clinton has gotten approximately a 6-point bounce in New Hampshire. The median margin was Sanders +21.5% in 4 surveys conducted January 26-30. This narrowed to Sanders +15.5% in 6 surveys conducted February 2-4.
- A daily tracking poll from U.Mass. Lowell shows even more narrowing. On February 1 it showed Sanders +31%, which by February 5th narrowed to Sanders +15%, a 16 percentage point change in Clinton’s favor.
- In national surveys, Clinton went from a median of Clinton +12% (4 polls, January 22-February 1) to Clinton +16% (3 polls, February 2-4). This is noisy data, but the median change is a national 4-point bounce for Clinton. It is possible there was little change in either direction (see confidence intervals below).
It is not possible to rule out the idea that Hillary Clinton has remained level or risen in her national standings. This may be counterintuitive, considering the tone of the coverage by the press corps. Since Sanders is still in the lead in New Hampshire, my guess is that few reporters will get static for portraying an imagined surge.
Politifact checked out Clinton's debate claim about being an early voice calling for Wall Street regulations:
Our ruling
Clinton said she "called for addressing risks of derivatives, cracking down on subprime mortgages and improving financial oversight" early on in the financial crisis.
The crisis hit a peak in summer 2008, though it started to gain traction in 2007. Clinton began addressing the subprime mortgage issue in her appearances in March 2007. Later that year, she took on derivatives. She also proposed specific plans for solving these problems and increasing oversight of financial institutions.
Her statement is accurate, and we rate her claim True.
Shakesville again notes that Clinton’s gender does matter when considering whether or not she is the “establishment”:
Naturally, there is already an enormous amount of pushback insisting that Hillary Clinton does indeed exemplify the establishment, for this reason or that reason, but it really comes down to something as simple as this: A boys' club changes when they (are forced to) let a woman in. All you have to do is listen to the bitter complaints of the men who moan about having to share space with a woman to know this is true.
And I'll say again: One might reasonably ask if I imagine that Hillary Clinton, with all her privilege, is really some sort of definitive challenge to the establishment. No. That is not what I imagine. What I imagine is that her being a woman matters. Because paths littered with obstacles are always easier to traverse if someone has tread them before. What I imagine is a future in which there are so many women with influence, multiple female presidents with ideas more radical than Hillary Clinton can even conjure, that to suggest a woman is representative of the establishment might be more than a mirthless punchline regarded as fact by people who think gender is irrelevant.
It's not a coincidence that after Clinton's credible '08 run and President Obama's two terms the Republican clown car now includes two Latino candidates, a black candidate, and a woman. And, sure, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina have garbage ideas just like the rest of the white men in their field, but the point is that people other than white men now have the opportunity to espouse their garbage ideas on the same highly visible platform.
I want Cruz, Rubio, Carson, and Fiorina kept out of the Oval Office because their policies are hot dumpster juice, but I don't want them kept out of the contest because of their identities.
Washington Post has an op-ed from Reps. Sander Levin and Henry Waxman:
Our party needs our nominee to emphasize what a breakthrough the ACA was, and how it’s working for millions of Americans and improving our health-care system. We’ll need to convince voters in the general election that defending the ACA is a reason to vote Democratic. The same will be true in key contests in the Senate and House.
That’s why we believe that Sanders’s proposal to throw away the ACA to pursue a single-payer system is counterproductive at best and dangerous at worst.
Ron Pollack, the executive director of Families USA, has said he worries it “moves us away from an effective and practical agenda.” Policy-oriented progressive writers Jonathan Cohn, Matthew Yglesias and Jonathan Chait have each described Sanders’s plan as vague and unrealistic. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has declared that “for all the talk about being honest and upfront . . . Sanders ended up delivering mostly smoke and mirrors.”
Many worry that relying on funding from income and payroll taxes, as the Sanders plan does, means that many people who receive subsidized coverage today would end up worse off. For example, under the ACA, people on Medicaid and families on health-care exchanges get coverage with strictly limited premiums and caps on cost sharing. Under the Sanders plan, they would bear a new tax burden that, in many cases, could lead to them paying more for coverage than they do now.
Ever since Hillary Clinton first testified before Congress in 1993 on the need for the United States to pursue universal health care, she has been fighting this battle. Today, she has put forward real and achievable ideas to keep the ACA moving forward, and that is a major reason we both support her to be our party’s 2016 presidential nominee. We have confidence in her ability to help Democrats complete our great unfinished work.
Paul Krugman makes a similar argument at The New York Times:
But a lot of what I hear from the left is not so much a complaint about how the reform falls short as outrage that private insurers get to play any role. The idea seems to be that any role for the profit motive taints the whole effort.
That is, however, a really bad critique. Yes, Obamacare did preserve private insurance — mainly to avoid big, politically risky changes for Americans who already had good insurance, but also to buy support or at least quiescence from the insurance industry. But the fact that some insurers are making money from reform (and their profits are not, by the way, all that large) isn’t a reason to oppose that reform. The point is to help the uninsured, not to punish or demonize insurance companies.
And speaking of demonization: One unpleasant, ugly side of this debate has been the tendency of some Sanders supporters, and sometimes the campaign itself, to suggest that anyone raising questions about the senator’s proposals must be a corrupt tool of vested interests.
Recently Kenneth Thorpe, a respected health policy expert and a longtime supporter of reform, tried to put numbers on the Sanders plan, and concluded that it would cost substantially more than the campaign says. He may or may not be right, although most of the health wonks I know have reached similar conclusions.
But the campaign’s policy director immediately attacked Mr. Thorpe’s integrity: “It’s coming from a gentleman that worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield. It’s exactly what you would expect somebody who worked for B.C.B.S. to come up with.” Oh, boy.
And let’s be clear: This kind of thing can do real harm. The truth is that whomever the Democrats nominate, the general election is mainly going to be a referendum on whether we preserve the real if incomplete progress we’ve made on health, financial reform and the environment. The last thing progressives should be doing is trash-talking that progress and impugning the motives of people who are fundamentally on their side.
The Atlantic notes that in the unlikely event that Sanders wins the nomination and is elected president, his ability to govern would pale in comparison to Clinton’s:
Sanders as president would be left with two main options: reduce his goals to aim for more incremental progress, or adopt a defensive approach to keep Obama’s policies from being rolled back—exactly what he has condemned in Hillary Clinton’s approach to governance. And while Sanders has been a more effective lawmaker than Cruz (or Rubio, for that matter, as demonstrated by Rick Santorum’s embarrassing failure on Morning Joe to find one accomplishment for his endorsee) there is little evidence that he has or could build the kinds of relationships with other members of Congress, or find ways to move the now humongous boulder up the hill (or Hill) of a thoroughly dysfunctional governing process. And, of course, he would face the deep disappointment of the activists he has inspired.
Could Clinton do better? Yes. First, she has an entirely realistic understanding of where American politics are, something she would carry into the White House on the first day. Progress can be made, on health delivery, financial regulation, the tax system, energy and infrastructure, but it will be a series of incremental steps, a tenth or a quarter of a loaf at a time. Second, in her time in the Senate she showed an impressive ability to build relationships with her Republican colleagues; many of them privately praise her even as they will do their duty and condemn her through the campaign. And she knows enough about the executive branch to use its tools effectively early on to protect the Obama legacy and extend it a bit further. Some progressives, like Bill Press, have expressed disappointment with Obama’s failure to further their agenda; to one who has watched the lawmaking process up close and personal for more than four decades, his ability to move the ball in the face of challenges from his own party and Republicans, and in the face of huge headwinds from the conservative wind machine, has been extraordinarily impressive.
For better or worse—actually, very much for worse—America has a sharply divided and tribalized political system. There will be no sweeping landslide party victories for many years to come; most states, not to mention the overwhelming majority of congressional and state legislative districts, are distinctly red or blue. I would love to get all Americans voting, but there is no reason to believe that moving turnout from 50 or 60 percent to 95 or 98 percent would bring any profound change in policy direction because of a silent supermajority either on the left or the right, or across the populist divide. Presidents almost always face serious constraints on their agendas, with a handful of exceptions built around landslides driven by crises or events. No candidate now running will transform the system in 2016. But some candidates would have an easier time governing through the dysfunction. Ron Brownstein and others have noted that facing that reality could seriously hamper Hillary Clinton in her outreach to voters demanding inspiration, not perspiration. That could well be true. But it also reflects her realistic understanding of the limits of American politics in this unfortunate day and age.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is headed north with an army of volunteers.
Boston Globe reports:
Mayor Martin J. Walsh is heading to New Hampshire this weekend with more than 1,000 volunteers to stump for Hillary Clinton, as Tuesday’s vote nears in the Democratic presidential primary, a Walsh spokesman said.
Walsh, who endorsed Clinton in the fall, has already made three trips to the Granite State to campaign for the former secretary of state — serving as a surrogate at one campaign event and bringing along volunteers, said Michael Goldman, the mayor’s campaign spokesman.
“He personally has been up there three times,’’ Goldman said. “He’s done extensive door-knocking all over, especially in the Manchester area.”
Indeed, the mayor’s political machine has been churning for Clinton. The head of his Office of Women’s Advancement, Megan Costello, and the chief of staff for civic engagement, Daniel Manning, have been organizing weekly bus trips to New Hampshire, Goldman said. Both have been doing the work on their own personal time, Goldman stressed.
Clinton received the endorsement of the lawyer that represented the families of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin.
Buzzfeed reports:
“Crump will talk to South Carolina voters about what’s at stake in this election and Hillary Clinton’s strong record of fighting for families,” a Clinton aide said. “He will highlight how Clinton is the only one who will stand up to the gun lobby, has a plan to reform our criminal justice system, and understands the issues that keep families up at night.”
Crump introduced Clinton at the National Bar Association’s event commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Ala. in December. Clinton delivered an address which celebrated the achievements of the legal community in the protest.
“So even as we celebrate all that our country has achieved in the past 60 years, we must, in keeping with the legacy of those who have gone before, look to the future and the work that is left to do,” Clinton said, highlighting the need for an overhaul of the criminal justice system. “We can’t go on like this. We’ve got to change.”
Crump is among the civil rights leaders who will meet with Clinton on Feb. 16th in New York to discuss issues facing the black community, including voting rights, poverty, unemployment, mass incarceration, the campaign said Friday.
Other attendees include Melanie Campbell of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation; Marc Morial of the National Urban League, Rev. Al Sharpton; Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; and Wade Henderson, the outgoing president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Someone has finally catalogued all of the evil things that Clinton has done.
Market Watch reports:
I have a confession to make: I can’t keep up.
Am I supposed to hate Hillary Rodham Clinton because she’s too left-wing, or too right-wing? Because she’s too feminist, or not feminist enough? Because she’s too clever a politician, or too clumsy?
Am I supposed to be mad that she gave speeches to rich bankers, or that she charged them too much money?
ong before “Benghazi” and her email server, there was “Whitewater” and “the Rose Law Firm” and “Vince Foster.” For those of us following her, we were promised scandal after scandal after scandal. And if no actual evidence ever turned up, well, that just proved how deviously clever she was.
So today I’m performing a public service on behalf of all the voters. I went back and re-read all the criticisms and attacks and best-selling “exposes” leveled at Hillary Rodham Clinton over the past quarter century. And I’ve compiled a list of all her High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Here they are:
1. When she was first lady, she murdered White House lawyer Vince Foster and then dumped his body in a park.
2. She drove Vince Foster to commit suicide through her temper tantrums.
3. She was having an affair with Vince Foster.
4. She’s a lesbian.
5. Chelsea isn’t Bill Clinton’s child.
6. She murdered Vince Foster to cover up that she once bought a tract of undeveloped land in Arkansas and lost money.
7. She murdered Vince Foster to cover up her role in firing the White House travel department.
8. After she murdered Vince Foster, she ransacked his office in the middle of the night and stole all the documents proving her guilt.
9. When Bill was governor of Arkansas, she was a partner in the state’s top law firm, and it sometimes did work involving the state government.
10. She once invested in commodities futures on the advice of a friend and made $100,000, proving she’s a crook.
11. She once invested in real estate on the advice of another friend and lost $100,000, also proving she’s a crook.
12. Unnamed and unverifiable sources have told Peggy Noonan things about the Clintons that are simply too terrible to repeat.
13. The personnel murdered at Benghazi make her the first secretary of state to lose overseas personnel to terrorism — apart from Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, George Schultz, Dean Rusk and some others.
14. Four State Department staff were murdered at Benghazi, compared with only 119 others murdered overseas under every secretary of state combined since World War II.
15. She illegally sent classified emails from her personal server, except that apparently they weren’t classified at the time.
16. She may have cynically wriggled around the email law by “technically” complying with it.
17. She once signed a lucrative book contract when she was a private citizen.
18. Donald Trump says she “should be in jail,” and he’s a serial bankrupt casino developer in Atlantic City, so he should know.
19. Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay says his “law-enforcement sources” tell him she is “about to be indicted” — and if a man once convicted of money laundering and conspiracy doesn’t have good law-enforcement sources, who does?
20. She’s a hard-left radical who wants to break up the nuclear family.
21. She’s a conservative “mousewife” who refused to break up her own family.
There are another 45 entries.
Hillary used Twitter yesterday for a moment of solemnity:
And to defend herself from yet another dishonest attack from the Sanders camp:
And just to close with an example of gender bias in action:
Politico reports the increasingly nasty and vitrolic tone at Sanders rallies, of which there is no counterpoint at Clinton events:
The boos are getting louder. The chants are getting more personal. The shouts from the crowd are getting more frequent.
Top Democrats supporting Hillary Clinton have noticed the disdain that some of Bernie Sanders’ most hardcore backers have toward her, and are beginning to worry about what it’s going to take to bring them into the fold in November, when they assume Clinton will be the party nominee.
Some of Clinton’s most prominent supporters and fundraisers were unsettled by chants of ‘she’s a liar’ by Sanders supporters Monday at his caucus night rally in Des Moines and the loud booing that ensued when Clinton was shown on the large screens at the front of the room – a reaction that appeared to prompt the nervous Sanders staff into turning off the televisions.
In New Hampshire — likely to be a swing state in November — Sanders’ energetic rallies have been marked by booing when he mentions Clinton, and wild cheers when he lists the issues where she is out of step with progressives. The Vermont senator’s supporters have grown so familiar with his stump speech that some respond even before he’s made his point.
On Tuesday in Claremont — near the Vermont border — Sanders started the portion of his speech that rails against the bank Goldman Sachs, but was barely able to get the name of the financial institution out of his mouth before one man yelled, “Hillary goes there!” and others around him erupted in cheers.
And look who is responsible for addressing such despicable conduct. Not the candidate or his supporters, but the one being targeted:
“It’s a concern, and a lot of it depends on how Hillary reacts during the [primary] contest and after the contest. She can go after Bernie, but she has to go after him respectfully and acknowledge all the time how he brought these issues to the front-burner. She’s gotta keep doing that: ‘We owe a debt of gratitude for bringing these topics to the forefront,’” said former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a staunch, longtime Clinton backer. “It’s a concern, but only if we let it become a concern."
“I’m starting to hear a little bit about this in Santa Fe, which is a Sanders enclave,” said former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Clinton backer who ran against her for president — and then endorsed Obama — in 2008. “She has to strike a balance. These voters will come home, and this is why she has to not take the bait and respond viciously and negatively to Sanders."
Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.