Why Trump and Sanders Were Inevitable
It was only a matter of time before we had a populist backlash to 30 years of flawed globalization policies that both parties embraced.
By Michael Hirsh
There were, in retrospect, clear signs of what was to come—signs that if Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders did not appear on the scene, someone else like them would have. We’ve had decades of forewarnings as the top income earners —the “one percent”—began taking bigger shares of our economy starting in the 1980s: The anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s. The rise of Ross “NAFTA-will-suck-our-jobs-away” Perot and Pat “Pitchforks” Buchanan against the GOP establishment. The brief but intense Occupy Wall Street movement. The adoration of Elizabeth Warren. The warnings from superstar economist Thomas Piketty in recent years that the United States was suffering the worst income inequality in the developed world, worse than anything since the 1920s—and that it was not sustainable.
Above all, there was the drip-drip-drip social acid of stagnating middle-class income—interrupted by the false dawn of the mid-2000s mortgage mania, when the poor felt rich but in truth were only more indebted—and the simultaneous self-isolation of our increasingly uber-wealthy class over three long decades. All without any effective policy response from Washington to redress the widening income gap.
On the contrary, from Washington there was only the all-too-self-confident movement of both political parties toward a full-on embrace of policies that further promoted the brutally unequal society that America is today. First, the Republicans became ardent free traders, then the Democrats under Clinton, with Obama following suit. Even the Democrats—having become deficit-slashing “Eisenhower Republicans,” in Bill Clinton’s tart phrase—responded with mostly harsh trickle-down medicine: “Workfare.” Unfair tax policies, with capital-gains earners (read: plutocrats) getting most of the breaks. Rubinomics. Greenspan worship. And all the while we in the media listened—in hushed awe of their genius—to the economists who told us that of course there were inequities and a lot of people would be left behind, but globalization and ever-freer markets were still good for most of us, overall anyway, sort of, we think. … And besides, what’s the alternative?
The only wonder, perhaps, is that it took Trump and Sanders this long to get here.
True, both men may fail in their respective insurgencies against the establishment. After his weekend thumping in South Carolina and facing long odds on Super Tuesday, Sanders could fade quickly as a candidate. Trump, meanwhile, still faces a sharp backlash from Republicans, some of whom are already saying publicly they can’t support him as their party’s nominee. But make no mistake: The message that Sanders and Trump are bringing to the stump isn’t going away soon, not until the two parties acknowledge the deep flaws in the economic paradigm that got us to this place of inequality, but which neither the Democratic nor the Republican leadership have questioned deeply.
Trump and Sanders are thus in many ways the yin and yang of America’s present discontent; both address, in different ways, the seething sense of unfairness, of inequality in Americans. Their supporters tend to be angry, somewhat less educated, more-industrial-age-than-information-age-skilled Americans—and in other cases, insecure young people just out of college, for whom unemployment until the age of 30 still averages 12 percent—who believe their political parties no longer represent them. Trump emphasizes shutting down job-stealing immigrants and getting “better” deals from the world; Sanders, imprisoning wealth-gobbling, spoiled Wall Streeters and getting “fairer” deals from the world. Both candidates plainly appeal to people who feel that no one is really standing up for them and what used to be known as their middle class; people who want more of the pie than they’ve been getting for a long time, and people who realize that their political parties are at best half-hearted about doing anything about that
For some economists out of the mainstream, like Harvard’s Dani Rodrik, who issued one of the earliest warnings against the idea of the free-market-as-panacea nearly two decades ago in his book Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, this merciless crushing of the middle class at the hands of a mere economic theory has been a “slowly growing cancer” that has gone untreated by politicians. Today, he says, the Trump-Sanders phenomenon is plainly the long-awaited political reckoning for 30 years of errant policy and too-facile belief in the wonders of markets: the wild-talking building magnate on the right and the wild-haired socialist on the left have met up at the same intersection, one bounded by the four corners of anti-globalization, anti-free-trade, anti-immigration and anti-Wall Street sentiment.
“I don’t want to sound like the economist who called 10 out of the last five recessions, but yes, this is the populist backlash that unremitting globalization has historically unleashed and I had warned about,” he says. “When mainstream politicians are unable to generate meaningful responses to inequality, social exclusion and insecurity, populists of various ilk gain ground.”
The United States, which once idealized itself as a classless society, has become more socio-economically stratified than the aristocratic “old Europe” of the pre-World War I period, says Piketty. Much of this is the unintended consequence of untrammeled globalization, which has enriched the masters of capital, especially at the expense of blue-collar labor. In the global system, investment capital moves at blinding speed, while labor still must go by boat, train and plane—and that’s if it’s lucky, since immigration restrictions are much harsher than they used to be. All this helps to explain why U.S. labor is at the mercy of vicious competition abroad and Wall Street has the whip hand over corporate performance; why the gap between executive and worker pay has widened to record levels; why even incompetent executives enjoy golden parachutes while high-performing employees can be laid off without explanation or apology.
Above all, globalization has disrupted our national narrative in profound ways, says Rodrik. “The sense that we’re all in this together as one nation, a common society and a common policy, has been disrupted by globalization. Now, there is a greater realization that the benefits of globalization accrued disproportionately to the professional classes, the higher skilled, the ones who had the mobility and access to capital.”
Nothing underlined this divergence of fortunes between rich and poor more than the Big Crash of ’08, which caused a calamitous drop in Americans’ median net worth. According to the Federal Reserve, a broad group of Americans loosely defined as the middle class saw its net worth plummet from a median of $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. Thus we came out the other side of the Great Recession a very different economy altogether. “The recovered wealth—most of it from higher stock prices—has flowed mainly to richer Americans,” The Associated Press reported. According to Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, the wealthiest 1 percent of the country actually made out better, in percentage terms, during Obama’s “recovery” than they did from 2002-07 under George W. Bush.
By 2012, according to Saez, the top 1 percent were earning 23 percent of the nation’s income, almost the same ratio as in 1929. “My guess is that was one of the last straws that led to Trump and Sanders, but things had been building for a while,” says Frank Levy, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-authored a much-cited 2007 paper concluding that labor began losing the fight to capital and Wall Street in the late 1970s, leading to greater inequality than in the days of what Levy calls the “Treaty of Detroit”—a consensus that supported high minimum wages, progressive taxation and other New Deal policies.
Cue Bernie and Donald, both of whom convey a message that Americans have every right to be angry about a rigged, big-money-corrupted economic system. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, nearly three-quarters of voters likely to head to the polls in November’s election say they think the United States is on the wrong track, and these disaffected people make up a majority of the base for both Trump and Sanders—87 percent and 54 percent, respectively.
Both Democratic and Republican leaders, meanwhile, are still kidding themselves that their respective bases are … basically OK with their economic agendas, when plainly the numbers show they aren’t. On the GOP side, there were those who thought the tea party was libertarian, but nothing could have been further from the truth, as Rand Paul discovered when his presidential bid crashed and burned. Even a conservative in the maltreated middle class doesn’t want less help from government; instead the tea party backlash was anti-immigrant and anti-Obama—not so much opposed to government per se as to how government redistributes wealth. The Democratic establishment from Obama to Hillary Clinton has been continually surprised by the anger and sense of betrayal within its progressive wing, which is why so few people took Sanders seriously at first (including the Clintons).
Thus what we have now is an emerging ideology with no party to speak for it. Among those claiming vindication is Pat Buchanan, who told the Washington Post recently that the “revolution” he predicted (the pitchforks in other words) was finally at hand: “What’s different today is that the returns are in, the results are known. Everyone sees clearly now the de-industrialization of America, the cost in blood and treasure from decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the pervasive presence of illegal immigrants.”
We can debate the causes of inequality; and certainly whether Sanders and Trump have any real solutions or are just making empty promises. What is not debatable is that growing inequality is a major, society-shaking problem—one that, as Rodrik says, has actually made America less cohesive, and neither Democrats nor Republicans are doing much about it. Here too we’ve had years of warning: Real wages for most U.S. workers have been relatively stagnant since the 1970s, while those for the top 1 percent have increased 156 percent, and those for the top 0.1 percent have increased 362 percent, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. Thus, the Harvard Gazette reported earlier in February, the poorest 20 percent of Americans received just 3.6 percent of the national income in 2014, down from 5.7 percent in 1974. The upper 20 percent, meanwhile, received nearly half of U.S. income in 2014, up from about 40 percent in 1974, according to Census Bureau statistics.
This has translated into inequality in education—which in turn exacerbates the larger inequality in a vicious circle. “Smart poor kids are less likely to graduate from college now than dumb rich kids. That’s not because of the schools, that’s because of all the advantages that are available to rich kids,” Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said recently.
Ordinary Americans feel poorer for a reason. Adjusted for inflation, average hourly wages declined by 1 percent from 1970 to 2009 while home prices increased 97 percent; gas prices went up 18 percent; health costs rose 50 percent; and the price tag for public college spiked a whopping 80 percent after adjusting both wages and costs for inflation, according to figures compiled by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The average family of four needs an annual income of $68,000 just to cover basic costs, but in 2010, half of all jobs paid less than $33,840. Perhaps the greatest irony of Obama’s “Yes, we can” presidency is that inequality actually increased during his tenure.
All these bleak numbers raise obvious questions about the dominant economic paradigm since the end of the Cold War. For more than a generation, economists, trade experts and policymakers, including both Republican and Democratic presidents, have told us that we could do little about globalization and the brutal displacement of old industries and jobs, and that we might as well just get used to it. Indeed, we were told, the United States must lead this charge: Free trade in the West helped to win the Cold War, after all, and the United States emerged as the sole superpower. This self-conceit infected both political parties. It was Clinton, after all, who pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement and “triangulated” his way to agreement with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich on a workfare replacement to the welfare system.
Most economists agree that opening up markets, especially in the aftermath of the Cold War, did produce a wealthier world overall. At the same time, however, globalization’s advocates have plainly overstated its benefits and underestimated its hazards, including social upheaval. The open trading system that Washington adopted more aggressively than any other major country—particularly, the giant economies of China, Germany and Japan—has exacerbated inequalities at home far more than the government was prepared for. And those who challenged the wisdom of the day, who pushed for “fair trade” (more tariffs, unemployment insurance and worker protections) over “free trade,” were typically branded protectionists and driven from the discussion. The outcasts included Robert Reich, Clinton’s dissident labor secretary, who loudly advocated a sturdier safety net for the middle class and was edged out of power; and Paul Volcker, who wanted to crack down more on Wall Street but was largely ignored by Obama’s chief economic advisers, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, as the middle class was further gutted by the subprime collapse (with a minimal effort by Obama to help underwater mortgage holders dig out) and Wall Street escaped jail-free. Earlier, those who second-guessed the massive deregulation of Wall Street mostly suffered the same fate: They were ignored. What job training and adjustment programs the government did provide were meager and mostly ad hoc.
“About 30 years ago, the market system turned ferociously—you might even say viciously—against low-skilled labor,” former Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton University, told me a few years ago. “Regardless of the underlying cause, that phenomenon was going to lead to substantial rise in inequality. So you might have thought the government would look at that and say, to quote William F. Buckley, well, we’re not going to ‘stand athwart history yelling, Stop!’ but we are going to have to ameliorate the effects on low-skilled labor. What government did instead was almost the opposite, starting with the [regressive] Reagan tax cuts. And they tried to cut the welfare state.”
Among the few who has long second-guessed the Washington mind-set is MIT’s Levy. “I’m not sure how much better we could have done in preserving the middle class,” Levy told me a few years ago. “But I know that, with a few exceptions, like the earned income tax credit, we didn’t really try.”
Trump and Sanders at least say they’ll try, however far-fetched their solutions. And plainly for many voters, that’s enough. If both candidates lose and fade away, and Hillary Clinton—the ultimate establishment candidate—becomes president, that will mean another victory for the status quo policies that delivered America to this time of inequality. But unless the underlying economic problem is addressed, such an outcome is likely to generate only new insurgencies in the future—perhaps worse than what we’ve seen so far.
February 29, 2016
Ignore Trump
Ex-CIA director: Armed forces would ignore Trump
By Nick Gass
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden blasted Donald Trump's rhetoric in a recent interview, saying that the U.S. military would refuse orders from him, even as commander-in-chief, to kill the families of terrorists, as Trump has pledged to do.
Appearing on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" to promote his latest book, Hayden expressed concern about Trump's language, including the Manhattan real-estate magnate's vow to bring back waterboarding and worse because "they deserve it."
“I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the way that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign," Hayden said.
Maher brought up Trump's pledge to kill family members of Islamic State terrorists. “That never even occurred to you, right?” Maher deadpanned.
“God, no!” Hayden exclaimed. “Let me give you a punchline: If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act.”
Maher responded incredulously, “What? Well, that’s quite a statement, sir.”
“You cannot—you are not committed, you are not required, in fact you’re required to not follow an unlawful order," Hayden replied. "That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict.”
“You’ve given us a great reason not to support Trump. There would be a coup in this country," Maher cracked.
Hayden said he was not sure about "a coup."
"I think it's a coup that you said it," Maher said.
By Nick Gass
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden blasted Donald Trump's rhetoric in a recent interview, saying that the U.S. military would refuse orders from him, even as commander-in-chief, to kill the families of terrorists, as Trump has pledged to do.
Appearing on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" to promote his latest book, Hayden expressed concern about Trump's language, including the Manhattan real-estate magnate's vow to bring back waterboarding and worse because "they deserve it."
“I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the way that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign," Hayden said.
Maher brought up Trump's pledge to kill family members of Islamic State terrorists. “That never even occurred to you, right?” Maher deadpanned.
“God, no!” Hayden exclaimed. “Let me give you a punchline: If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act.”
Maher responded incredulously, “What? Well, that’s quite a statement, sir.”
“You cannot—you are not committed, you are not required, in fact you’re required to not follow an unlawful order," Hayden replied. "That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict.”
“You’ve given us a great reason not to support Trump. There would be a coup in this country," Maher cracked.
Hayden said he was not sure about "a coup."
"I think it's a coup that you said it," Maher said.
Brokered convention
'Cockamamie': Kasich campaign rejects talk of brokered convention
By Kyle Cheney
John Kasich’s campaign rejected suggestions Sunday that it’s pursuing a strategy to knock out Donald Trump at a brokered Republican National Convention in July.
During a conference call with reporters, the Ohio governor’s senior strategist John Weaver called the idea “cockamamie” and dismissed a New York Times story describing Kasich advisers quietly seeking support for the strategy. Instead, Weaver described a path — one that many establishment Republicans have in turn described as cockamamie — to hang on by a thread through unfriendly Super Tuesday contests and out-wait other faltering rivals to wind up in a head-to-head race with Trump.
Then, he said, Kasich could win the nomination on the convention’s first ballot.
The scenario requires Ted Cruz to underperform on Tuesday, when seven Southern states, including his home state of Texas, go to the polls. It also requires Marco Rubio to lose his home state of Florida on March 15 and Kasich to win Ohio simultaneously. In that scenario, Weaver said Kasich would likely be the only candidate with a path to take on Trump. Weaver also rejected the Times’ contention that Mitt Romney — the 2012 GOP presidential nominee — had urged Kasich to exit the race.
“No one has come to the governor or to myself or any other member of the campaign leadership and asked him to do anything [other] than what he’s doing,” Weaver said.
Kasich trails badly in polls of nearly every Super Tuesday state. His campaign has outlined a plan to win delegates in Massachusetts and Virginia — both of which have low thresholds to qualify — and turn his attention to Michigan, which votes March 8. But even in those more favorable states, polls show Kasich trailing Trump badly, and he’s relying on the uncertain prospect of a shrinking field to help deliver more support his way. (Kasich did get a boost Sunday in Michigan — an endorsement from the Detroit Free Press.)
“I know from polling that if it was one-on-one in Michigan, we’d beat Donald Trump by 20 points,” he said. But there’s virtually no chance of that one-on-one scenario. Cruz and Rubio are expecting to jockey for second- and third-place finished across the dozen Super Tuesday states, in many cases scoring delegates of their own and leaving little reason for them to exit the race immediately.
Weaver declined to say when the campaign would begin airing TV ads in Michigan, a state that Kasich has compared to New Hampshire in importance. Kasich surged to a second-place finish in New Hampshire on Feb. 9, a distant second to Trump but a strong enough showing to give him an edge over other establishment-backed candidates.
By Kyle Cheney
John Kasich’s campaign rejected suggestions Sunday that it’s pursuing a strategy to knock out Donald Trump at a brokered Republican National Convention in July.
During a conference call with reporters, the Ohio governor’s senior strategist John Weaver called the idea “cockamamie” and dismissed a New York Times story describing Kasich advisers quietly seeking support for the strategy. Instead, Weaver described a path — one that many establishment Republicans have in turn described as cockamamie — to hang on by a thread through unfriendly Super Tuesday contests and out-wait other faltering rivals to wind up in a head-to-head race with Trump.
Then, he said, Kasich could win the nomination on the convention’s first ballot.
The scenario requires Ted Cruz to underperform on Tuesday, when seven Southern states, including his home state of Texas, go to the polls. It also requires Marco Rubio to lose his home state of Florida on March 15 and Kasich to win Ohio simultaneously. In that scenario, Weaver said Kasich would likely be the only candidate with a path to take on Trump. Weaver also rejected the Times’ contention that Mitt Romney — the 2012 GOP presidential nominee — had urged Kasich to exit the race.
“No one has come to the governor or to myself or any other member of the campaign leadership and asked him to do anything [other] than what he’s doing,” Weaver said.
Kasich trails badly in polls of nearly every Super Tuesday state. His campaign has outlined a plan to win delegates in Massachusetts and Virginia — both of which have low thresholds to qualify — and turn his attention to Michigan, which votes March 8. But even in those more favorable states, polls show Kasich trailing Trump badly, and he’s relying on the uncertain prospect of a shrinking field to help deliver more support his way. (Kasich did get a boost Sunday in Michigan — an endorsement from the Detroit Free Press.)
“I know from polling that if it was one-on-one in Michigan, we’d beat Donald Trump by 20 points,” he said. But there’s virtually no chance of that one-on-one scenario. Cruz and Rubio are expecting to jockey for second- and third-place finished across the dozen Super Tuesday states, in many cases scoring delegates of their own and leaving little reason for them to exit the race immediately.
Weaver declined to say when the campaign would begin airing TV ads in Michigan, a state that Kasich has compared to New Hampshire in importance. Kasich surged to a second-place finish in New Hampshire on Feb. 9, a distant second to Trump but a strong enough showing to give him an edge over other establishment-backed candidates.
Ukraine policy
Obama's Ukraine policy in shambles
Distracted by ISIL, frustrated by infighting in Kyiv, the administration makes little progress against Putin in Europe.
By Michael Crowley
President Barack Obama’s effort to rescue Ukraine from Russia’s military grip has stalled, and turmoil inside Ukraine's government may hand Russian President Vladimir Putin a victory in a conflict that Obama has said involves "the most basic principles of our international system.”
Two years after the pro-western protests that toppled Kyiv’s government, enraged Putin, and caused an international crisis, Obama’s Ukraine policy is foundering — the victim of Putin’s steely determination, the distractions of Syria and ISIL, and wavering support from European allies eager to move past the conflict.
Despite personal pleas from Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. officials fear that Kyiv's leaders are near a political implosion that would derail efforts to stabilize the country and eject Russia from its eastern territories.
"Syria has really taken the focus off of Ukraine. It feels to me like its going to be difficult for Europe to stay together and continue to pressure Russia with sanctions," the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, told POLITICO. "At some point you're going to have a frozen conflict that's very much to Putin's advantage."
Critics like Corker say that Obama's actions have failed to live up to his rhetoric, which casts Russia's presence in Ukraine as a grave threat to European security. Obama has rejected calls from several top advisers to provide Ukraine with weapons to fight off Moscow-backed separatists.
"Putin has paid no price," Corker said, adding that European leaders have told him Putin says "there is just no push back" from the U.S.
Nonetheless, the U.S. and Europe have imposed several rounds of economic sanctions on Moscow, and in recent months Obama has beefed up America's military presence on NATO's eastern flank.
But even as he warily partners with Putin on a cease-fire for Syria, Obama has not shaken the Russian leader’s support for the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, where fighting has killed nearly 10,000 people and stunted the country’s political and economic progress. After a lull in violence, combat has spiked in recent weeks to the highest levels since last summer.
“Nothing has happened to suggest that the Russians are any more willing to give us control of Ukraine than they were before,” said Ivo Daalder, Obama’s first ambassador to NATO and now President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “In some ways, Syria became a distraction for us because it led us to work with Russia to try to address the Syrian crisis and to ignore what’s happening in Ukraine.”
Obama officials insist that the core of their strategy — implementing a February 2015 peace accord signed in Minsk that calls for Russia to withdraw forces from the country’s east — is still on track.
“We are pressing hard to see Minsk fully implemented by the time the president leaves office,” said a senior administration official, referring to the pact brokered by France and Germany and signed by Ukraine and Russia. “We’re aiming for implementation during the second half of 2016.”
Under the Minsk deal, Moscow must withdraw forces from eastern Ukraine and end its support for separatists; Kyiv must allow elections and greater autonomy for the country's relatively pro-Russian east; and the U.S. and Europe will lift sanctions on Moscow.
Privately, U.S. officials concede that a government collapse could make implementing the Minsk accord — something that was supposed to happen by the end of 2015 — all but impossible, at least before Obama departs the White House.
"The worst thing that could happen right now is for the government to collapse and to have new elections," said a second senior administration official, "because everything will spin into chaos, and the whole system will get locked up."
That was Biden's concern when he flew to Kyiv in early December. In an address to parliament, Biden urged Ukraine's government to remain focused on political unity and reform in the face of Putin's intimidation.
“It is no exaggeration to say that the hopes of freedom-loving people the world over are with you because so much rides on your fragile experiment with democracy succeeding,” Biden said. “It may be your last moment.”
Biden had barely departed when, two days later, the country's beleaguered prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenuk addressed the same parliament. As he spoke at the podium, a rival member threw his arms around him and carried him off like a mannequin, touching off a wild brawl.
The government nearly fell earlier this month when Yatsenuk, who enjoys a single-digits approval rating, narrowly survived a no confidence vote in parliament. Ukraine's President, Petro Poroshenko, has called for Yatsenuk's resignation, but Poroshenko is barely more popular, and faces charges he has done too little to combat rampant corruption.
Biden has been conducting damage control from Washington. The vice president, who has visited Ukraine four times since 2014 and says he's logged "close to a thousand hours on the telephone" with its leaders, has placed several more call to Yatsenuk and Poroshenko this month.
Russia has gleefully exploited the political disarray, casting Ukraine's leadership as unable or unwilling to take the political steps required by the Minsk deal.
"Our Ukrainian friends aren't doing their share," Moscow's ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, said in a recent interview. Russia wants the Ukrainians to move first on steps like amending the country's constitution to grant more autonomy to the east.
U.S. officials are adamant that Moscow is mainly to blame for the stalemate, saying that Kyiv can't be expected to move first when a portion of their country is a combat zone stoked by Russia.
But even some Western officials concede that the Russians have a partial point.
"The implementation of Minsk now is more or less frozen," said a European diplomat. "Unfortunately, the Ukrainians are now actually carrying a big part of the responsibility of the blockage, because of the crisis in Kyiv.”
Such talk from Europe is ominous given the pressure European leaders are facing to end sanctions on Moscow, which have slowed their economies and cost their businesses profits.
Despite the occasional fistfight, U.S. officials insist things in the capital are not quite as bad as they appear. Ukraine's parliament has passed some significant reform measures in recent months. Poroshenko recently fired the country's prosecutor general, whom the U.S. saw as a major obstacle to battling Kyiv's endemic corruption.
"It's not necessarily pretty to watch," said one Western diplomat, arguing that "rooting out the vestiges of the old Soviet state" was never going to be easy — particularly amid "a concerted effort from their big neighbor to see that the reform project fails," he added.
That "big neighbor" is Russia, where Putin has worked to thwart Ukraine's political progress — including through the use of organized crime, according to Western officials.
And although Putin dialed down the violence in Ukraine's east last fall, Obama officials have been alarmed by a recent spike in fighting there. It remains unclear whether Putin is escalating the conflict, officials say, or if the separatists might be acting on their own.
U.S. officials say that until Putin stands down in the east, Kyiv will be hard-pressed to pass the political reforms required by Minsk. The problem was illustrated when the parliament considered a measure granting limited autonomy for separatist-controlled areas last summer; violent protests broke out in Kyiv, leaving several people dead.
"Minsk is now in tatters. Western attention at the highest level is gone due to the migration crisis and the Obama administration's priorities lying elsewhere," said Andrew Weiss, a former Clinton White House national security aide now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The whole thing just looks really messy."
"The Russian bet here is that we have ADD, won't be able to keep the sanctions regime together, and will find other stuff to worry about," Weiss added.
The second administration official said the U.S. would remain focused on Ukraine, but that resolving the crisis could be impossible so long as its parliament looks like a fight club.
"Our message is, you have to have a government that functions. You can’t have disarray" the official said. "Otherwise, support from the international community is going to evaporate. So that’s the main point: 'You guys have got to figure this out.'"
Distracted by ISIL, frustrated by infighting in Kyiv, the administration makes little progress against Putin in Europe.
By Michael Crowley
President Barack Obama’s effort to rescue Ukraine from Russia’s military grip has stalled, and turmoil inside Ukraine's government may hand Russian President Vladimir Putin a victory in a conflict that Obama has said involves "the most basic principles of our international system.”
Two years after the pro-western protests that toppled Kyiv’s government, enraged Putin, and caused an international crisis, Obama’s Ukraine policy is foundering — the victim of Putin’s steely determination, the distractions of Syria and ISIL, and wavering support from European allies eager to move past the conflict.
Despite personal pleas from Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. officials fear that Kyiv's leaders are near a political implosion that would derail efforts to stabilize the country and eject Russia from its eastern territories.
"Syria has really taken the focus off of Ukraine. It feels to me like its going to be difficult for Europe to stay together and continue to pressure Russia with sanctions," the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, told POLITICO. "At some point you're going to have a frozen conflict that's very much to Putin's advantage."
Critics like Corker say that Obama's actions have failed to live up to his rhetoric, which casts Russia's presence in Ukraine as a grave threat to European security. Obama has rejected calls from several top advisers to provide Ukraine with weapons to fight off Moscow-backed separatists.
"Putin has paid no price," Corker said, adding that European leaders have told him Putin says "there is just no push back" from the U.S.
Nonetheless, the U.S. and Europe have imposed several rounds of economic sanctions on Moscow, and in recent months Obama has beefed up America's military presence on NATO's eastern flank.
But even as he warily partners with Putin on a cease-fire for Syria, Obama has not shaken the Russian leader’s support for the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, where fighting has killed nearly 10,000 people and stunted the country’s political and economic progress. After a lull in violence, combat has spiked in recent weeks to the highest levels since last summer.
“Nothing has happened to suggest that the Russians are any more willing to give us control of Ukraine than they were before,” said Ivo Daalder, Obama’s first ambassador to NATO and now President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “In some ways, Syria became a distraction for us because it led us to work with Russia to try to address the Syrian crisis and to ignore what’s happening in Ukraine.”
Obama officials insist that the core of their strategy — implementing a February 2015 peace accord signed in Minsk that calls for Russia to withdraw forces from the country’s east — is still on track.
“We are pressing hard to see Minsk fully implemented by the time the president leaves office,” said a senior administration official, referring to the pact brokered by France and Germany and signed by Ukraine and Russia. “We’re aiming for implementation during the second half of 2016.”
Under the Minsk deal, Moscow must withdraw forces from eastern Ukraine and end its support for separatists; Kyiv must allow elections and greater autonomy for the country's relatively pro-Russian east; and the U.S. and Europe will lift sanctions on Moscow.
Privately, U.S. officials concede that a government collapse could make implementing the Minsk accord — something that was supposed to happen by the end of 2015 — all but impossible, at least before Obama departs the White House.
"The worst thing that could happen right now is for the government to collapse and to have new elections," said a second senior administration official, "because everything will spin into chaos, and the whole system will get locked up."
That was Biden's concern when he flew to Kyiv in early December. In an address to parliament, Biden urged Ukraine's government to remain focused on political unity and reform in the face of Putin's intimidation.
“It is no exaggeration to say that the hopes of freedom-loving people the world over are with you because so much rides on your fragile experiment with democracy succeeding,” Biden said. “It may be your last moment.”
Biden had barely departed when, two days later, the country's beleaguered prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenuk addressed the same parliament. As he spoke at the podium, a rival member threw his arms around him and carried him off like a mannequin, touching off a wild brawl.
The government nearly fell earlier this month when Yatsenuk, who enjoys a single-digits approval rating, narrowly survived a no confidence vote in parliament. Ukraine's President, Petro Poroshenko, has called for Yatsenuk's resignation, but Poroshenko is barely more popular, and faces charges he has done too little to combat rampant corruption.
Biden has been conducting damage control from Washington. The vice president, who has visited Ukraine four times since 2014 and says he's logged "close to a thousand hours on the telephone" with its leaders, has placed several more call to Yatsenuk and Poroshenko this month.
Russia has gleefully exploited the political disarray, casting Ukraine's leadership as unable or unwilling to take the political steps required by the Minsk deal.
"Our Ukrainian friends aren't doing their share," Moscow's ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, said in a recent interview. Russia wants the Ukrainians to move first on steps like amending the country's constitution to grant more autonomy to the east.
U.S. officials are adamant that Moscow is mainly to blame for the stalemate, saying that Kyiv can't be expected to move first when a portion of their country is a combat zone stoked by Russia.
But even some Western officials concede that the Russians have a partial point.
"The implementation of Minsk now is more or less frozen," said a European diplomat. "Unfortunately, the Ukrainians are now actually carrying a big part of the responsibility of the blockage, because of the crisis in Kyiv.”
Such talk from Europe is ominous given the pressure European leaders are facing to end sanctions on Moscow, which have slowed their economies and cost their businesses profits.
Despite the occasional fistfight, U.S. officials insist things in the capital are not quite as bad as they appear. Ukraine's parliament has passed some significant reform measures in recent months. Poroshenko recently fired the country's prosecutor general, whom the U.S. saw as a major obstacle to battling Kyiv's endemic corruption.
"It's not necessarily pretty to watch," said one Western diplomat, arguing that "rooting out the vestiges of the old Soviet state" was never going to be easy — particularly amid "a concerted effort from their big neighbor to see that the reform project fails," he added.
That "big neighbor" is Russia, where Putin has worked to thwart Ukraine's political progress — including through the use of organized crime, according to Western officials.
And although Putin dialed down the violence in Ukraine's east last fall, Obama officials have been alarmed by a recent spike in fighting there. It remains unclear whether Putin is escalating the conflict, officials say, or if the separatists might be acting on their own.
U.S. officials say that until Putin stands down in the east, Kyiv will be hard-pressed to pass the political reforms required by Minsk. The problem was illustrated when the parliament considered a measure granting limited autonomy for separatist-controlled areas last summer; violent protests broke out in Kyiv, leaving several people dead.
"Minsk is now in tatters. Western attention at the highest level is gone due to the migration crisis and the Obama administration's priorities lying elsewhere," said Andrew Weiss, a former Clinton White House national security aide now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The whole thing just looks really messy."
"The Russian bet here is that we have ADD, won't be able to keep the sanctions regime together, and will find other stuff to worry about," Weiss added.
The second administration official said the U.S. would remain focused on Ukraine, but that resolving the crisis could be impossible so long as its parliament looks like a fight club.
"Our message is, you have to have a government that functions. You can’t have disarray" the official said. "Otherwise, support from the international community is going to evaporate. So that’s the main point: 'You guys have got to figure this out.'"
Super Tuesday
South Carolina sets up Super Tuesday endgame for Sanders
Hillary Clinton's romp dramatically narrows Bernie Sanders' path forward.
By Annie Karni
A bruising, nearly 48-point loss to Hillary Clinton in South Carolina on Saturday night dramatically narrowed the path forward for Bernie Sanders, raising serious doubts about his ability to win the delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination.
South Carolina will widen Clinton’s delegate lead, which stood at one after her Nevada win on Feb. 20. But more significantly, the contest here demonstrated that the Vermont senator has failed to make any headway at all with African-American voters in the South. Even with 200 paid Sanders staffers on the ground and nearly $2 million in television spending, Clinton swept the black vote by a 5-to-1 ratio, according to exit polls. Among black voters 65 and older, Clinton won by a stunning 96 percent to 3 percent.
“When we stand together, there is no barrier too big to break,” Clinton said at her victory rally in Columbia, where, for the first time on a 2016 election night, she took the stage without Bill or Chelsea Clinton by her side. “Tomorrow, we take this campaign national.”
Now, heading into Super Tuesday, when 11 states will cast ballots on March 1, Sanders will face possibly insurmountable contests in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas and Virginia, all states with sizable black populations in which he has not invested as much time or money.
“Delegates determine the presidential nomination, and I don’t see a path for Sanders to get there,” said Jeff Berman, a consultant to the Clinton campaign who ran Barack Obama’s 2008 delegate strategy.
Running through a best-case scenario for Sanders, Clinton operatives said they expect Sanders could win Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Vermont — states tailor-made for the democratic socialist because they hold caucuses, are predominantly white, located in New England or have a history of electing progressives.
But even if Sanders manages to pull out significant wins in all five, the delegate math will make it difficult for Sanders to catch up: They represent only one-third of the delegates up for grabs on Tuesday. And the Clinton campaign has invested heavily in states like Colorado and Minnesota in order to limit Sanders’ margins.
Sanders’ operatives said they are looking beyond Super Tuesday, to the friendlier terrain of Kansas, Nebraska and Maine to deliver them wins. But by then, Clinton operatives predicted, it could be too little, too late to close the delegate gap.
“Our delegate lead will only grow in the period after Super Tuesday,” Berman said.
Sanders’ situation is similar to one in which Clinton found herself eight years ago, when Barack Obama established a delegate lead during 11 consecutive victories after Super Tuesday and she was never able to catch up. In that race, Super Tuesday resulted in a colossal tie between Obama and Clinton.
This year, however, it’s on Super Tuesday that Clinton operatives expect to open up a lead of 50 delegates or more and leave Sanders behind for good.
“Super Tuesday in 2016 is not the same as in 2008, when the Democratic candidates fought to a draw,” said Berman. “This year, it is much more Southern-dominated, heavily diverse with African-American voters in many states and Hispanic voters in Texas. South Carolina is telling us how well Sanders can compete among these voters and how he’ll perform … on Super Tuesday.”
The states where Sanders is expected to win — like his home state of Vermont — don’t give him the margins he needs to remain competitive. Vermont awards just 16 delegates, for example, compared to 222 awarded in Texas, where Sanders is not advertising on television and has spent little time campaigning over the past 10 months.
But he started to make a push there on Saturday and showed he is still able to turn out Taylor Swift-size crowds — more than 10,000 supporters turned out for his rally in Austin.
That grass-roots support and his extraordinary small-donor fundraising juggernaut are expected to keep Sanders fighting through June.
“We tried to win Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, and we almost did,” said Sanders’ senior strategist, Tad Devine. “When it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, we took a much longer view of this. Our view extends to the middle of March. We’re in sprint mode.”
Devine acknowledged that the results in South Carolina indicate the campaign has a difficult task ahead in terms of winning over black voters.
“We’ve tried hard in South Carolina,” he said, “and it’s an important first step in a long process of introducing him to the African-American community all across the country and build support. That’s going to take time, though.”
The problem for Sanders is that time is running out. The next real battleground contest will take place on March 8 in Michigan, where Clinton has been making the toxic-water woes of Flint a centerpiece of her campaign.
A win there would be symbolically important for Sanders, because of the outsize role Flint has played in Clinton’s campaign. But Clinton operatives noted that Mississippi, which votes on the same day and where Clinton is expected to win, would allow them to win more delegates even if Sanders takes Michigan.
Sanders’ campaign expects that the Vermonter’s personal story — he is the son of Polish immigrants — will resonate more deeply with Latino voters. And Devine said the campaign will fight to win New York, where Clinton served as senator for eight years, because Sanders has roots in Brooklyn and upstate New York shares a small media market with Burlington, so he is better known.
But for now, Clinton allies who expect that Sanders will plow on through June are feeling friendlier toward the candidate whose popularity and attacks on Bill Clinton have infuriated the former president. Rather than calling on Sanders to drop out anytime soon, they are attempting to tone down the rhetoric of the campaign so Sanders doesn’t escalate his attacks on Clinton and soften her up ahead of a general election.
“Bernie is running a great campaign,” said longtime Clinton ally Paul Begala, who now advises Clinton’s super PAC, Priorities USA. “He’s raising money; he’s building crowds. I don’t want him to go away. He’s making Hillary a better candidate. And he’s not running an insult-based campaign. I don’t want it to end.”
Hillary Clinton's romp dramatically narrows Bernie Sanders' path forward.
By Annie Karni
A bruising, nearly 48-point loss to Hillary Clinton in South Carolina on Saturday night dramatically narrowed the path forward for Bernie Sanders, raising serious doubts about his ability to win the delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination.
South Carolina will widen Clinton’s delegate lead, which stood at one after her Nevada win on Feb. 20. But more significantly, the contest here demonstrated that the Vermont senator has failed to make any headway at all with African-American voters in the South. Even with 200 paid Sanders staffers on the ground and nearly $2 million in television spending, Clinton swept the black vote by a 5-to-1 ratio, according to exit polls. Among black voters 65 and older, Clinton won by a stunning 96 percent to 3 percent.
“When we stand together, there is no barrier too big to break,” Clinton said at her victory rally in Columbia, where, for the first time on a 2016 election night, she took the stage without Bill or Chelsea Clinton by her side. “Tomorrow, we take this campaign national.”
Now, heading into Super Tuesday, when 11 states will cast ballots on March 1, Sanders will face possibly insurmountable contests in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas and Virginia, all states with sizable black populations in which he has not invested as much time or money.
“Delegates determine the presidential nomination, and I don’t see a path for Sanders to get there,” said Jeff Berman, a consultant to the Clinton campaign who ran Barack Obama’s 2008 delegate strategy.
Running through a best-case scenario for Sanders, Clinton operatives said they expect Sanders could win Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Vermont — states tailor-made for the democratic socialist because they hold caucuses, are predominantly white, located in New England or have a history of electing progressives.
But even if Sanders manages to pull out significant wins in all five, the delegate math will make it difficult for Sanders to catch up: They represent only one-third of the delegates up for grabs on Tuesday. And the Clinton campaign has invested heavily in states like Colorado and Minnesota in order to limit Sanders’ margins.
Sanders’ operatives said they are looking beyond Super Tuesday, to the friendlier terrain of Kansas, Nebraska and Maine to deliver them wins. But by then, Clinton operatives predicted, it could be too little, too late to close the delegate gap.
“Our delegate lead will only grow in the period after Super Tuesday,” Berman said.
Sanders’ situation is similar to one in which Clinton found herself eight years ago, when Barack Obama established a delegate lead during 11 consecutive victories after Super Tuesday and she was never able to catch up. In that race, Super Tuesday resulted in a colossal tie between Obama and Clinton.
This year, however, it’s on Super Tuesday that Clinton operatives expect to open up a lead of 50 delegates or more and leave Sanders behind for good.
“Super Tuesday in 2016 is not the same as in 2008, when the Democratic candidates fought to a draw,” said Berman. “This year, it is much more Southern-dominated, heavily diverse with African-American voters in many states and Hispanic voters in Texas. South Carolina is telling us how well Sanders can compete among these voters and how he’ll perform … on Super Tuesday.”
The states where Sanders is expected to win — like his home state of Vermont — don’t give him the margins he needs to remain competitive. Vermont awards just 16 delegates, for example, compared to 222 awarded in Texas, where Sanders is not advertising on television and has spent little time campaigning over the past 10 months.
But he started to make a push there on Saturday and showed he is still able to turn out Taylor Swift-size crowds — more than 10,000 supporters turned out for his rally in Austin.
That grass-roots support and his extraordinary small-donor fundraising juggernaut are expected to keep Sanders fighting through June.
“We tried to win Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, and we almost did,” said Sanders’ senior strategist, Tad Devine. “When it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, we took a much longer view of this. Our view extends to the middle of March. We’re in sprint mode.”
Devine acknowledged that the results in South Carolina indicate the campaign has a difficult task ahead in terms of winning over black voters.
“We’ve tried hard in South Carolina,” he said, “and it’s an important first step in a long process of introducing him to the African-American community all across the country and build support. That’s going to take time, though.”
The problem for Sanders is that time is running out. The next real battleground contest will take place on March 8 in Michigan, where Clinton has been making the toxic-water woes of Flint a centerpiece of her campaign.
A win there would be symbolically important for Sanders, because of the outsize role Flint has played in Clinton’s campaign. But Clinton operatives noted that Mississippi, which votes on the same day and where Clinton is expected to win, would allow them to win more delegates even if Sanders takes Michigan.
Sanders’ campaign expects that the Vermonter’s personal story — he is the son of Polish immigrants — will resonate more deeply with Latino voters. And Devine said the campaign will fight to win New York, where Clinton served as senator for eight years, because Sanders has roots in Brooklyn and upstate New York shares a small media market with Burlington, so he is better known.
But for now, Clinton allies who expect that Sanders will plow on through June are feeling friendlier toward the candidate whose popularity and attacks on Bill Clinton have infuriated the former president. Rather than calling on Sanders to drop out anytime soon, they are attempting to tone down the rhetoric of the campaign so Sanders doesn’t escalate his attacks on Clinton and soften her up ahead of a general election.
“Bernie is running a great campaign,” said longtime Clinton ally Paul Begala, who now advises Clinton’s super PAC, Priorities USA. “He’s raising money; he’s building crowds. I don’t want him to go away. He’s making Hillary a better candidate. And he’s not running an insult-based campaign. I don’t want it to end.”
South Carolina win
5 takeaways from Clinton’s crushing South Carolina win
As Sanders looks just about done, Clinton turns to Trump.
By Glenn Thrush
Saturday was the best night of Hillary Clinton’s political life — a crushing, better-than-expected rout that just might have cracked the back of Bernie Sanders’ momentum-driven insurgency.
It’s hard to believe that barely a month ago, Clinton staffers were ruefully refreshing their screens in disbelief as her lead in Iowa shrank from 2, to 1, to 0.5 to the ultimate hairsbreadth victory margin of 0.2 percentage point. From the minute the polls closed here on Saturday night, Clinton’s lead oscillated between insane and incomprehensible, finally settling in at 47 percent, double what most polls had predicted.
This is what a wave looks like — she won black voters by a jaw-dropping 87-to-13 percent margin and dominated among all but the youngest voters — reinforcing her campaign’s argument that the Vermont senator is a no-sale in all but the whitest, smallest or most liberal states.
The Palmetto State massacre, coupled with Clinton’s surprisingly strong 6-point win in Nevada the previous week, doesn’t spell instant doom for the Vermont senator (who has parlayed his anti-Wall Street message into online-donor gold). But it has, more or less, reset the race to where it began last summer, with the former secretary of state as the odds-on favorite to win her party’s nomination.
With that in mind, here are five takeaways.
It might be over Sanders is still a viable candidate — with the capacity to raise millions online in a few hours — but he’s fast falling victim to the merciless electoral math that doomed Clinton in 2008. His strength with younger voters provided the rocket fuel for his rise this winter — but his weakness among blacks and Hispanics is likely to sink him in the spring.
He trails Clinton by 50 points to 60 points among African-American voters — and he’s likely to be obliterated, as he was Saturday night, in the six delegate-rich Super Tuesday states where black voters represent 40 percent to 60 percent of the primary electorate: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Virginia and Tennessee. Clinton’s current lead in Virginia and Texas — which account for a combined 363 delegates — ranges from 17 points to 30 points.
Sanders’ campaign has basically conceded those states — while pouring resources into Oklahoma, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado and Vermont. He could win most or all of those states, but the polls (aside from his home state) are pretty close, so he’s likely to eke out just a few delegates. And these would be Clinton 2008-type victories: They look good on a news release, but are a wash when it comes to delegates. Meanwhile, Clinton continues to run the table when it comes to establishment-loyal superdelegates.
Then comes March 15: Current polling shows Clinton leading by roughly 25 points in the winner-take-all Florida primary, which brings 246 delegates. Tad Devine, Sanders’ top strategist, told me the week before last that Michigan is the “linchpin” of his candidate’s strategy, but recent polls there show Clinton up from the high teens to more than 30 points.
Barring some unforeseen sea change, it’s hard to see a path forward for a momentum-driven candidate who has just lost the biggest state to vote so far by nearly 50 points.
The Trump effect? Call Mexicans rapists, suggest you’ll support judges who roll back civil rights laws (while saying super-sensitive stuff like “the African-Americans love me”), spend years demanding to see the first black president’s already-produced birth certificate and allegedly forged college records — oh, and retweet white supremacists — and guess what?
Overall turnout was way down in South Carolina from the high stakes Obama-vs.-Clinton primary in ’08, in part because polls have been predicting a Clinton landslide for weeks and Democratic turnout has been lagging in a less-than-scintillating Clinton-Sanders contest all over the country.
But a record percentage of black voters in South Carolina turned out on Saturday: 62 percent of the Democratic electorate. That might be a function of white voters sitting it out, but recent polls suggest that black and Hispanic voters feel under siege and are more energized this year than in the past — and Clinton has a decisive advantage with both groups.
Clinton’s strategy increasingly involves looking past Sanders to the bombastic developer turned reality-TV star. “Despite what you hear, we don’t need to make America great again,” she said, mocking Trump’s campaign slogan. “America has never stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again.”
Heal the Bern Clinton’s big win in South Carolina (coupled with her race-changing victory in Nevada the previous week) gives her time to solve some of the more vexing problems of the campaign — messaging, online fundraising, etc. — but it can’t remedy her worst defect, an inability to connect with younger voters that first plagued her in ’08. Democratic operatives, Clinton allies and staffers think she can’t do much to alter the dynamic in the primaries (although she did much better in South Carolina with blacks younger than 50 than with younger whites in Iowa and New Hampshire). But there’s an obvious answer in the general election: an electrifying 74-year-old democratic socialist who took her to the brink with his anti-Wall Street, anti-Hillary crusade.
The battle against Sanders has been a bitter one, closely following Team Obama’s 2012 strategy against Mitt Romney in 2012: define your opponent early and often. Democrats relentlessly tagged Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy, and Clinton’s aides have gone all Brooklyn against Bernie, consistently labeling him a “one-issue” candidate who couldn’t hope to pass the commander in chief test. (Sanders has reciprocated by walloping Clinton for her links to Wall Street and her plutocratic speaking fees.) There are tests yet to come — and Sanders could mount a comeback on Super Tuesday, and there’s always the simmering email scandal — but expect Clinton to soften her tone toward the Vermont senator. Youth must be served, even if a septuagenarian is the waiter.
Take this olive branch from happy Clinton warrior Paul Begala (via my colleague Annie Karni): “I don’t want him to go away. He’s exciting young people, which is a vital part; he’s making Hillary a better candidate,” he said.
White is wrong If he loses, Sanders’ failure to counter Clinton’s dominance among black voters will likely be remembered as a fatal flaw in an otherwise inspirational and brilliantly executed campaign. While he was hammering away at his core issue of income inequality — which he viewed as a fundamental societal flaw that has undermined African-American progress — the Clinton campaign was, ever so cleverly, undermining him with black voters week after week after week.
Seemingly broad policy attacks on Sanders’ position on gun control and other issues served double-duty as a dog whistle in a community decimated by gun violence. But it was Sanders’ inability to understand that his criticism of President Barack Obama, though often mild and respectful, served to sour his relationship with black voters who are deeply invested in Obama’s legacy and keenly suspicious of white politicians who don’t give the president his due.
Clinton masterfully painted Sanders’ careerlong advocacy for single-payer, government-funded health care as an attack on Obamacare, and he made a major blunder by offhandedly suggesting the former first lady was embracing Obama’s achievements simply to win black votes. “I think that a lot of people resented that,” the Rev. Al Sharpton recently told me in an interview.
He’s still drawing the crowds — a biracial rally in Chicago early last week drew more than 6,000 people. But another event, held at a historically black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina, on Friday, drew dozens of people to a gym that could hold hundreds.
Bubba, redeemed Bill Clinton has the worst poker face in politics, and his relaxed, (mostly) happy-go-lucky tour of western South Carolina last week had a joyful, triumphant quality utterly absent from his bitter battles on the rope lines of Charleston, Columbia and Spartanburg eight years ago.
In 2008, he wagged a bony, disapproving finger when a pack of us reporters asked whether he thought the Obama campaign was playing “the race card” in the Palmetto State — and he rasped “Shame on you!” in our direction, even though we were an innately shameless lot. Recrimination has yielded in 2016 to relief: The black voters who had abandoned the Clintons have flocked back, and few even remember a humiliating loss that has lingered with the former “first black president” for years.
When I accosted him on a rope line in the Charlotte suburb of Rock Hill a few days ago, he smiled and clutched my forearm when I asked whether he was having more fun this time around. “I feel good; we both feel good. It feels good, like I’ve come home,” he said — and the voters proved him right.
As Sanders looks just about done, Clinton turns to Trump.
By Glenn Thrush
Saturday was the best night of Hillary Clinton’s political life — a crushing, better-than-expected rout that just might have cracked the back of Bernie Sanders’ momentum-driven insurgency.
It’s hard to believe that barely a month ago, Clinton staffers were ruefully refreshing their screens in disbelief as her lead in Iowa shrank from 2, to 1, to 0.5 to the ultimate hairsbreadth victory margin of 0.2 percentage point. From the minute the polls closed here on Saturday night, Clinton’s lead oscillated between insane and incomprehensible, finally settling in at 47 percent, double what most polls had predicted.
This is what a wave looks like — she won black voters by a jaw-dropping 87-to-13 percent margin and dominated among all but the youngest voters — reinforcing her campaign’s argument that the Vermont senator is a no-sale in all but the whitest, smallest or most liberal states.
The Palmetto State massacre, coupled with Clinton’s surprisingly strong 6-point win in Nevada the previous week, doesn’t spell instant doom for the Vermont senator (who has parlayed his anti-Wall Street message into online-donor gold). But it has, more or less, reset the race to where it began last summer, with the former secretary of state as the odds-on favorite to win her party’s nomination.
With that in mind, here are five takeaways.
It might be over Sanders is still a viable candidate — with the capacity to raise millions online in a few hours — but he’s fast falling victim to the merciless electoral math that doomed Clinton in 2008. His strength with younger voters provided the rocket fuel for his rise this winter — but his weakness among blacks and Hispanics is likely to sink him in the spring.
He trails Clinton by 50 points to 60 points among African-American voters — and he’s likely to be obliterated, as he was Saturday night, in the six delegate-rich Super Tuesday states where black voters represent 40 percent to 60 percent of the primary electorate: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Virginia and Tennessee. Clinton’s current lead in Virginia and Texas — which account for a combined 363 delegates — ranges from 17 points to 30 points.
Sanders’ campaign has basically conceded those states — while pouring resources into Oklahoma, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado and Vermont. He could win most or all of those states, but the polls (aside from his home state) are pretty close, so he’s likely to eke out just a few delegates. And these would be Clinton 2008-type victories: They look good on a news release, but are a wash when it comes to delegates. Meanwhile, Clinton continues to run the table when it comes to establishment-loyal superdelegates.
Then comes March 15: Current polling shows Clinton leading by roughly 25 points in the winner-take-all Florida primary, which brings 246 delegates. Tad Devine, Sanders’ top strategist, told me the week before last that Michigan is the “linchpin” of his candidate’s strategy, but recent polls there show Clinton up from the high teens to more than 30 points.
Barring some unforeseen sea change, it’s hard to see a path forward for a momentum-driven candidate who has just lost the biggest state to vote so far by nearly 50 points.
The Trump effect? Call Mexicans rapists, suggest you’ll support judges who roll back civil rights laws (while saying super-sensitive stuff like “the African-Americans love me”), spend years demanding to see the first black president’s already-produced birth certificate and allegedly forged college records — oh, and retweet white supremacists — and guess what?
Overall turnout was way down in South Carolina from the high stakes Obama-vs.-Clinton primary in ’08, in part because polls have been predicting a Clinton landslide for weeks and Democratic turnout has been lagging in a less-than-scintillating Clinton-Sanders contest all over the country.
But a record percentage of black voters in South Carolina turned out on Saturday: 62 percent of the Democratic electorate. That might be a function of white voters sitting it out, but recent polls suggest that black and Hispanic voters feel under siege and are more energized this year than in the past — and Clinton has a decisive advantage with both groups.
Clinton’s strategy increasingly involves looking past Sanders to the bombastic developer turned reality-TV star. “Despite what you hear, we don’t need to make America great again,” she said, mocking Trump’s campaign slogan. “America has never stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again.”
Heal the Bern Clinton’s big win in South Carolina (coupled with her race-changing victory in Nevada the previous week) gives her time to solve some of the more vexing problems of the campaign — messaging, online fundraising, etc. — but it can’t remedy her worst defect, an inability to connect with younger voters that first plagued her in ’08. Democratic operatives, Clinton allies and staffers think she can’t do much to alter the dynamic in the primaries (although she did much better in South Carolina with blacks younger than 50 than with younger whites in Iowa and New Hampshire). But there’s an obvious answer in the general election: an electrifying 74-year-old democratic socialist who took her to the brink with his anti-Wall Street, anti-Hillary crusade.
The battle against Sanders has been a bitter one, closely following Team Obama’s 2012 strategy against Mitt Romney in 2012: define your opponent early and often. Democrats relentlessly tagged Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy, and Clinton’s aides have gone all Brooklyn against Bernie, consistently labeling him a “one-issue” candidate who couldn’t hope to pass the commander in chief test. (Sanders has reciprocated by walloping Clinton for her links to Wall Street and her plutocratic speaking fees.) There are tests yet to come — and Sanders could mount a comeback on Super Tuesday, and there’s always the simmering email scandal — but expect Clinton to soften her tone toward the Vermont senator. Youth must be served, even if a septuagenarian is the waiter.
Take this olive branch from happy Clinton warrior Paul Begala (via my colleague Annie Karni): “I don’t want him to go away. He’s exciting young people, which is a vital part; he’s making Hillary a better candidate,” he said.
White is wrong If he loses, Sanders’ failure to counter Clinton’s dominance among black voters will likely be remembered as a fatal flaw in an otherwise inspirational and brilliantly executed campaign. While he was hammering away at his core issue of income inequality — which he viewed as a fundamental societal flaw that has undermined African-American progress — the Clinton campaign was, ever so cleverly, undermining him with black voters week after week after week.
Seemingly broad policy attacks on Sanders’ position on gun control and other issues served double-duty as a dog whistle in a community decimated by gun violence. But it was Sanders’ inability to understand that his criticism of President Barack Obama, though often mild and respectful, served to sour his relationship with black voters who are deeply invested in Obama’s legacy and keenly suspicious of white politicians who don’t give the president his due.
Clinton masterfully painted Sanders’ careerlong advocacy for single-payer, government-funded health care as an attack on Obamacare, and he made a major blunder by offhandedly suggesting the former first lady was embracing Obama’s achievements simply to win black votes. “I think that a lot of people resented that,” the Rev. Al Sharpton recently told me in an interview.
He’s still drawing the crowds — a biracial rally in Chicago early last week drew more than 6,000 people. But another event, held at a historically black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina, on Friday, drew dozens of people to a gym that could hold hundreds.
Bubba, redeemed Bill Clinton has the worst poker face in politics, and his relaxed, (mostly) happy-go-lucky tour of western South Carolina last week had a joyful, triumphant quality utterly absent from his bitter battles on the rope lines of Charleston, Columbia and Spartanburg eight years ago.
In 2008, he wagged a bony, disapproving finger when a pack of us reporters asked whether he thought the Obama campaign was playing “the race card” in the Palmetto State — and he rasped “Shame on you!” in our direction, even though we were an innately shameless lot. Recrimination has yielded in 2016 to relief: The black voters who had abandoned the Clintons have flocked back, and few even remember a humiliating loss that has lingered with the former “first black president” for years.
When I accosted him on a rope line in the Charlotte suburb of Rock Hill a few days ago, he smiled and clutched my forearm when I asked whether he was having more fun this time around. “I feel good; we both feel good. It feels good, like I’ve come home,” he said — and the voters proved him right.
Can Still Fix It???
How We Can Still Fix Libya
Contrary to what people think, we were neither naïve nor ill-prepared when we intervened, says one of Obama’s former Libya advisers. And the story is not over.
By Ben Fishman
Looking back today, five years after Libya’s improbable February 17 revolution, most pundits treat the U.S. intervention in that country synonymously with failure, as yet another American misadventure in the Middle East. This election season and especially the politicization of the Benghazi tragedy have only reinforced the accusation that members of the Obama administration—especially the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—should have known better. Conveniently, these critics draw a straight line between President Barack Obama’s decision to conceive of and execute a U.N.-authorized and NATO-backed civilian protection mission to the rise of the Islamic State in Libya today.
That well-worn story may sound authoritative when reduced to soundbites, but as a former National Security Council official who worked on Libya policy under President Obama, I can attest that this narrative is misinformed and rife with simplicities. And Libya is not yet lost; the Libyans are even now striving to form a new unity government, and calibrated U.S. and international assistance can still help to stabilize the country and reduce the Islamic State’s presence.
Let’s review the facts. First and foremost, the narrative of U.S. failure in Libya downplays the role that the Libyans had in determining their own future. Five years ago, the Libyan people united in the face of a heavily armed regime with deep pockets. With the assistance of a NATO-led coalition, they ousted the Qadhafi regime in October 2011. But even while the Libyans were extremely grateful for NATO’s contribution to their revolution, they were adamant from the outset of the transition that they themselves should determine the country’s future. They rejected out of hand any prospect of an international force to provide security until the government was appropriately formed and the army and police reconstituted, ignoring examples from Bosnia to East Timor.
The international community was never going to impose such a force on Libya without its consent, so the U.S. and its European allies offered an array of security assistance programs (as well as economic and governance assistance) to help reconstitute professional security forces to protect the government and the Libyan people. Unfortunately, few of those programs took root in the chaos of post-Qadhafi Libya (with the exception of an important but little-publicized multinational effort to destroy Qadhafi’s remaining chemical weapons).
What had much more impact was the decision by the newly elected government to add thousands of militia members to the public sector payroll rather than find a way to demobilize them after the revolution and reintegrate them into civilian positions. Once the precedent was set to pay the militias who only contributed to Libya’s insecurity, it was nearly impossible to reverse. Any time a militia sought to extort something from the government, they would simply storm the relevant office, most famously holding the parliament hostage until it passed a poorly understood law limiting the role prior regime members could play in Libya’s future governments (comparable to Iraq’s harmful de-Baathification law). In other words, the government became beholden to the militias instead of commanding their authority.
Second, we had good reason to believe that Libya had a reasonable chance to begin to stabilize after the revolution. It was an oil-rich country (unlike the other Arab Spring states) with billions of dollars in the bank and a small population that had none of the sectarian divisions of Iraq or Syria. It established an interim government in December 2011 and organized a free and successful election in June 2012 that global experts praised for its conduct, enthusiasm and lack of security incidents. Importantly, the National Transitional Council, which served as the interim authority during the revolution until the election, gave up power to the newly elected body, the General National Congress.
It is important for critics of the administration’s Libya policy to keep these 2012 dates in mind. The election was held in June. The GNC elected its president in early August. Ramadan was in August, when little official work occurs. Fitting into that mix was the Benghazi tragedy that occurred on September 11, taking four American lives including our Ambassador Chris Stevens. Beyond the profound loss the attacks left on the families, friends and colleagues of the deceased, our Libya policy was irrevocably damaged as a result. The ambassador’s job was to work with Washington, the Libyan government, and our international partners on the ground to formulate a policy to support the newly elected government to strengthen its governance and adopt necessary institutional reforms, including on the security front.
We were in the process of developing precisely those plans when they were derailed by a devastating blow from which we never fully recovered.
The political climate at home spurred on by the endless Benghazi theories left us with few options to help strengthen the nascent Libya authorities. Without the benefit of American troops (which no one in Washington or Libya wanted to see) providing security to diplomats working closely within the walls of Libyan civilian ministries, we had very limited capabilities to help the Libyan government. And our efforts to provide assistance through a U.N.-coordinated process fell flat. Adding to the difficulties was an inability of any Libyan government to define what assistance it wanted or to follow up with seemingly minor bureaucratic necessities like signed documents or payments for projects it claimed that the government of Libya would fund itself.
As the Libyan government grew weaker from 2013 to mid-2014, exemplified by the kidnapping of the prime minister, the political climate was becoming more intense. When another election occurred in June 2014, it led to intense militia violence and forced most of the international community, including the United States, to leave Tripoli. Violence has continued since then between the so-called Dawn and Dignity coalitions of militias, resulting in approximately 1,500 deaths in 2015, according to the website LibyaBodyCount.org. The U.N. has engaged in political negotiations for the past year and a half that have shown promise in the past couple of months, but a new unity government still needs the backing of key Libyan factions and it remains in Morocco until it gains that support.
Today, it is true that Libya resembles a failed state. It features a dangerous combination of Islamic State terrorists, militias of varying strength and loyalties, as many as three dysfunctional governments, and a deepening economic crisis due to decreasing oil production, declining global energy prices and irresponsible spending. But it should be made clear that the Obama administration was neither naïve nor ill prepared when it became involved in Libya. It was always going to be a very difficult problem for U.S. policy and none of the choices were good or easy. Yes, we underestimated the extent to which Qadhafi deprived the country of functioning institutions and created a complex among officials where no one wanted to take responsibility for approving key decisions. More resources from the international community might have helped significantly, but that was not in cards due to Libyan intransigence and American politics (Congress refused to support assistance for oil-rich Libya in 2011-2012, and certainly not after Benghazi).
Some have argued that we should never have intervened in Libya and simply allowed Qadhafi to crush the revolt in Benghazi. That is also a convenient counterfactual. Aside from ignoring the impending humanitarian catastrophe in Benghazi, which we had little doubt would occur due to Qadhafi’s troop movements, there is little reason to believe the dictator could have returned stability to Libya. If anything, the existing Islamist-oriented militias in Libya would have gained strength, launched an insurgency and served as a magnet for other foreign fighters even before the Islamic State was formally declared in 2014. In other words, the situation could look very similar to how Syria has played out today, just on a smaller scale.
The tragedy for the Libya people today is that the initial promise of the revolution has evaporated. Civil society activists, who were among the bright spots of the post-revolution period, have been driven away by a spate of executions. Politicians seeking to adopt incremental change don’t have the authority or ability to enforce their policies. And in the midst of all this is an-ever enlarging terrorist quasi-state based around Qadhafi’s hometown of Sirte that is importing ISIL recruits from Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.
After months of failed negotiations, the U.N. managed a breakthrough late last year when representatives of Libya’s competing governments and parliaments agreed in principle to a plan outlining a unity government and a path to resuming Libya’s broken political transition. The parties nominated a prime minister to head a nine-member “presidency council,” which is in the process of proposing names of cabinet members for parliamentary approval (one proposal was already rejected because it contained too many positions). If this sounds confusing and multilayered, it is, possibly even incoherent.
In the best case, the new government will be approved, and it can be seated in Tripoli (the presidency council is operating out of Morocco). Then it will be able to resume control of Libya’s ministries and try to operate as a normal government. Its priorities should be reestablishing security, confronting terrorism, reestablishing governance, rebuilding infrastructure and adopting a budget that eases Libya’s massive deficit spending. In ideal circumstances, the U.S. and its international partners would readily assist the new Libyan government, especially in a collective fight again terrorism.
Unfortunately, as we have seen time and again in Libya and the Middle East, Plan A is rarely realized. While the diplomats continue to press for a positive outcome during the talks, it is worth considering what Libya means to U.S. policy now and where our priorities lie in the country. While it would obviously be ideal to see Libya emerge with a unified democratic government, our priority now must be halting the spread of the Islamic State, which has already established a beachhead 400 miles from Sicily. Last year, its fighters struck two popular tourist sites in Tunisia, killing dozens of Europeans and dealing a crushing blow to Tunisia’s vital tourism industry.
Ultimately, establishing a stable, unified and secure government should be the goal of a long-term Libya policy. But if the government takes several more weeks to form and even more time to request and shape counter-Islamic State support, is that a risk we can afford to take given the possibility of continued threats against Tunisia, or to European or American interests abroad? By striking an Islamic State training camp west of Tripoli on February 19 and apparently killing a top Islamic State leader responsible for planning the Tunisia attacks, the Obama administration signaled that it would not wait for a unity government to establish itself before taking at least some action. It did so against the advice of many Libya watchers who argue that any outside intervention could pose a devastating setback to the unity government formation process.
An initial anti-Islamic State campaign that is scoped carefully and involves the right mixture of local forces, regional actors, with key contributions of U.S. air, intelligence, and Special Forces assets, is far superior to letting the Islamic State continue to expand with impunity. The Pentagon has already confirmed that U.S. Special Forces have been conducting reconnaissance for potential targets and to identify friendly local forces. In response to the news that the February 19 strike resulted in the deaths of two Serbian diplomats, the Pentagon spokesman said, “Our forces watched this training camp for weeks leading up to the operation,” suggesting that at least some U.S. personnel had been involved in reconnaissance on the ground. They should continue to do so and serve as forward air controllers, developing a series of targets that would deal ISIL a serious blow within the city of Sirte, making clear to the delicate blend of tribal and regional loyalists that the true targets of the international strikes are against ISIL and its foreign fighters—not against the Libyan people. In addition, limited numbers of U.S. forces should support local forces willing to take on ISIL and support the unity government. Not only would this help put a legitimate Libyan face on the counter-Islamic State campaign, but it could also help establish more reliable units who could help protect the government in the future.
If sold effectively to the Libya people by Libyan and Arab voices, most of whom reject the ISIL presence out of hand, there is the possibility that the unity government can actually be strengthened. In order to gain real credibility, though, a new Libyan government would have to execute concurrently a quick development agenda, for example, restoring oil production, improving basic services such as regular electricity and health care, rebuilding critical infrastructure and providing public security where possible. That’s where Libya’s supporters in the international community should be poised to contribute from Day One.
The Obama administration is not responsible for the rise of the Islamic State in Libya, but the February 19 airstrike was an important first step in taking the terrorists on. The key question for long-term success against the Islamic State in Libya is whether we can develop more effective and reliable local partners there than in Syria and Iraq. We should continue to try.
Contrary to what people think, we were neither naïve nor ill-prepared when we intervened, says one of Obama’s former Libya advisers. And the story is not over.
By Ben Fishman
Looking back today, five years after Libya’s improbable February 17 revolution, most pundits treat the U.S. intervention in that country synonymously with failure, as yet another American misadventure in the Middle East. This election season and especially the politicization of the Benghazi tragedy have only reinforced the accusation that members of the Obama administration—especially the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—should have known better. Conveniently, these critics draw a straight line between President Barack Obama’s decision to conceive of and execute a U.N.-authorized and NATO-backed civilian protection mission to the rise of the Islamic State in Libya today.
That well-worn story may sound authoritative when reduced to soundbites, but as a former National Security Council official who worked on Libya policy under President Obama, I can attest that this narrative is misinformed and rife with simplicities. And Libya is not yet lost; the Libyans are even now striving to form a new unity government, and calibrated U.S. and international assistance can still help to stabilize the country and reduce the Islamic State’s presence.
Let’s review the facts. First and foremost, the narrative of U.S. failure in Libya downplays the role that the Libyans had in determining their own future. Five years ago, the Libyan people united in the face of a heavily armed regime with deep pockets. With the assistance of a NATO-led coalition, they ousted the Qadhafi regime in October 2011. But even while the Libyans were extremely grateful for NATO’s contribution to their revolution, they were adamant from the outset of the transition that they themselves should determine the country’s future. They rejected out of hand any prospect of an international force to provide security until the government was appropriately formed and the army and police reconstituted, ignoring examples from Bosnia to East Timor.
The international community was never going to impose such a force on Libya without its consent, so the U.S. and its European allies offered an array of security assistance programs (as well as economic and governance assistance) to help reconstitute professional security forces to protect the government and the Libyan people. Unfortunately, few of those programs took root in the chaos of post-Qadhafi Libya (with the exception of an important but little-publicized multinational effort to destroy Qadhafi’s remaining chemical weapons).
What had much more impact was the decision by the newly elected government to add thousands of militia members to the public sector payroll rather than find a way to demobilize them after the revolution and reintegrate them into civilian positions. Once the precedent was set to pay the militias who only contributed to Libya’s insecurity, it was nearly impossible to reverse. Any time a militia sought to extort something from the government, they would simply storm the relevant office, most famously holding the parliament hostage until it passed a poorly understood law limiting the role prior regime members could play in Libya’s future governments (comparable to Iraq’s harmful de-Baathification law). In other words, the government became beholden to the militias instead of commanding their authority.
Second, we had good reason to believe that Libya had a reasonable chance to begin to stabilize after the revolution. It was an oil-rich country (unlike the other Arab Spring states) with billions of dollars in the bank and a small population that had none of the sectarian divisions of Iraq or Syria. It established an interim government in December 2011 and organized a free and successful election in June 2012 that global experts praised for its conduct, enthusiasm and lack of security incidents. Importantly, the National Transitional Council, which served as the interim authority during the revolution until the election, gave up power to the newly elected body, the General National Congress.
It is important for critics of the administration’s Libya policy to keep these 2012 dates in mind. The election was held in June. The GNC elected its president in early August. Ramadan was in August, when little official work occurs. Fitting into that mix was the Benghazi tragedy that occurred on September 11, taking four American lives including our Ambassador Chris Stevens. Beyond the profound loss the attacks left on the families, friends and colleagues of the deceased, our Libya policy was irrevocably damaged as a result. The ambassador’s job was to work with Washington, the Libyan government, and our international partners on the ground to formulate a policy to support the newly elected government to strengthen its governance and adopt necessary institutional reforms, including on the security front.
We were in the process of developing precisely those plans when they were derailed by a devastating blow from which we never fully recovered.
The political climate at home spurred on by the endless Benghazi theories left us with few options to help strengthen the nascent Libya authorities. Without the benefit of American troops (which no one in Washington or Libya wanted to see) providing security to diplomats working closely within the walls of Libyan civilian ministries, we had very limited capabilities to help the Libyan government. And our efforts to provide assistance through a U.N.-coordinated process fell flat. Adding to the difficulties was an inability of any Libyan government to define what assistance it wanted or to follow up with seemingly minor bureaucratic necessities like signed documents or payments for projects it claimed that the government of Libya would fund itself.
As the Libyan government grew weaker from 2013 to mid-2014, exemplified by the kidnapping of the prime minister, the political climate was becoming more intense. When another election occurred in June 2014, it led to intense militia violence and forced most of the international community, including the United States, to leave Tripoli. Violence has continued since then between the so-called Dawn and Dignity coalitions of militias, resulting in approximately 1,500 deaths in 2015, according to the website LibyaBodyCount.org. The U.N. has engaged in political negotiations for the past year and a half that have shown promise in the past couple of months, but a new unity government still needs the backing of key Libyan factions and it remains in Morocco until it gains that support.
Today, it is true that Libya resembles a failed state. It features a dangerous combination of Islamic State terrorists, militias of varying strength and loyalties, as many as three dysfunctional governments, and a deepening economic crisis due to decreasing oil production, declining global energy prices and irresponsible spending. But it should be made clear that the Obama administration was neither naïve nor ill prepared when it became involved in Libya. It was always going to be a very difficult problem for U.S. policy and none of the choices were good or easy. Yes, we underestimated the extent to which Qadhafi deprived the country of functioning institutions and created a complex among officials where no one wanted to take responsibility for approving key decisions. More resources from the international community might have helped significantly, but that was not in cards due to Libyan intransigence and American politics (Congress refused to support assistance for oil-rich Libya in 2011-2012, and certainly not after Benghazi).
Some have argued that we should never have intervened in Libya and simply allowed Qadhafi to crush the revolt in Benghazi. That is also a convenient counterfactual. Aside from ignoring the impending humanitarian catastrophe in Benghazi, which we had little doubt would occur due to Qadhafi’s troop movements, there is little reason to believe the dictator could have returned stability to Libya. If anything, the existing Islamist-oriented militias in Libya would have gained strength, launched an insurgency and served as a magnet for other foreign fighters even before the Islamic State was formally declared in 2014. In other words, the situation could look very similar to how Syria has played out today, just on a smaller scale.
The tragedy for the Libya people today is that the initial promise of the revolution has evaporated. Civil society activists, who were among the bright spots of the post-revolution period, have been driven away by a spate of executions. Politicians seeking to adopt incremental change don’t have the authority or ability to enforce their policies. And in the midst of all this is an-ever enlarging terrorist quasi-state based around Qadhafi’s hometown of Sirte that is importing ISIL recruits from Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.
After months of failed negotiations, the U.N. managed a breakthrough late last year when representatives of Libya’s competing governments and parliaments agreed in principle to a plan outlining a unity government and a path to resuming Libya’s broken political transition. The parties nominated a prime minister to head a nine-member “presidency council,” which is in the process of proposing names of cabinet members for parliamentary approval (one proposal was already rejected because it contained too many positions). If this sounds confusing and multilayered, it is, possibly even incoherent.
In the best case, the new government will be approved, and it can be seated in Tripoli (the presidency council is operating out of Morocco). Then it will be able to resume control of Libya’s ministries and try to operate as a normal government. Its priorities should be reestablishing security, confronting terrorism, reestablishing governance, rebuilding infrastructure and adopting a budget that eases Libya’s massive deficit spending. In ideal circumstances, the U.S. and its international partners would readily assist the new Libyan government, especially in a collective fight again terrorism.
Unfortunately, as we have seen time and again in Libya and the Middle East, Plan A is rarely realized. While the diplomats continue to press for a positive outcome during the talks, it is worth considering what Libya means to U.S. policy now and where our priorities lie in the country. While it would obviously be ideal to see Libya emerge with a unified democratic government, our priority now must be halting the spread of the Islamic State, which has already established a beachhead 400 miles from Sicily. Last year, its fighters struck two popular tourist sites in Tunisia, killing dozens of Europeans and dealing a crushing blow to Tunisia’s vital tourism industry.
Ultimately, establishing a stable, unified and secure government should be the goal of a long-term Libya policy. But if the government takes several more weeks to form and even more time to request and shape counter-Islamic State support, is that a risk we can afford to take given the possibility of continued threats against Tunisia, or to European or American interests abroad? By striking an Islamic State training camp west of Tripoli on February 19 and apparently killing a top Islamic State leader responsible for planning the Tunisia attacks, the Obama administration signaled that it would not wait for a unity government to establish itself before taking at least some action. It did so against the advice of many Libya watchers who argue that any outside intervention could pose a devastating setback to the unity government formation process.
An initial anti-Islamic State campaign that is scoped carefully and involves the right mixture of local forces, regional actors, with key contributions of U.S. air, intelligence, and Special Forces assets, is far superior to letting the Islamic State continue to expand with impunity. The Pentagon has already confirmed that U.S. Special Forces have been conducting reconnaissance for potential targets and to identify friendly local forces. In response to the news that the February 19 strike resulted in the deaths of two Serbian diplomats, the Pentagon spokesman said, “Our forces watched this training camp for weeks leading up to the operation,” suggesting that at least some U.S. personnel had been involved in reconnaissance on the ground. They should continue to do so and serve as forward air controllers, developing a series of targets that would deal ISIL a serious blow within the city of Sirte, making clear to the delicate blend of tribal and regional loyalists that the true targets of the international strikes are against ISIL and its foreign fighters—not against the Libyan people. In addition, limited numbers of U.S. forces should support local forces willing to take on ISIL and support the unity government. Not only would this help put a legitimate Libyan face on the counter-Islamic State campaign, but it could also help establish more reliable units who could help protect the government in the future.
If sold effectively to the Libya people by Libyan and Arab voices, most of whom reject the ISIL presence out of hand, there is the possibility that the unity government can actually be strengthened. In order to gain real credibility, though, a new Libyan government would have to execute concurrently a quick development agenda, for example, restoring oil production, improving basic services such as regular electricity and health care, rebuilding critical infrastructure and providing public security where possible. That’s where Libya’s supporters in the international community should be poised to contribute from Day One.
The Obama administration is not responsible for the rise of the Islamic State in Libya, but the February 19 airstrike was an important first step in taking the terrorists on. The key question for long-term success against the Islamic State in Libya is whether we can develop more effective and reliable local partners there than in Syria and Iraq. We should continue to try.
Court Brief Citing
That Time Ted Cruz Submitted a Supreme Court Brief Citing … Ted Cruz
How his ‘extremely conservative’ law school article about ritual sacrifice made it to the highest court.
By Michael Linhorst
Twelve years ago, in the fall of its 2003 term, the U.S Supreme Court received a written brief from Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz with a very unusual footnote. The case was called Locke v. Davey, and it concerned the constitutionality of a Washington State college scholarship that excluded students studying religion—a key issue for the movement conservatives Cruz considered his political allies. Texas wasn’t a party in the case, but the ambitious lawyer was already gaining a reputation for inserting himself into national debates by filing briefs about attention-grabbing cases with no direct relation to his state.
Like all legal briefs, Cruz’s cited cases, laws and law journal articles as authorities to back up his argument. Among those sources was an obscure article about animal sacrifice, which the author argued should be allowed as an expression of religious liberty. The subject matter was unusual for a Supreme Court brief, but even more unusual was the article: It was a student’s analysis published nearly a decade earlier in a conservative journal at Harvard Law School.
Cruz didn’t name the student author in his brief. But if the justices had looked it up, they would have found a surprise: It was a 24-year-old Harvard law student named Ted Cruz.
In fact, Cruz cited his own 1994 article not once but twice before the Supreme Court: in briefs submitted in Locke v. Davey and in another religious liberty case in 2006, Anderson v. Town of Durham. Cruz referred to the article only to support a few general statements—nothing groundbreaking or controversial. But he didn’t identify himself as the article’s author either time—which was a violation of the legal citation guidelines in place at the time and, legal experts say, was a bit deceptive.
“I think the court would have preferred to know, and might have felt somewhat misled if anyone went to read the note,” says Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and a leading legal authority on religious liberty. “I would have identified myself.”
Leah Litman, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who served as a clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy, agrees that it was “a little strange” Cruz didn’t identify himself. “He’s identified as the author of the piece [in the journal]. And when you cite a secondary source in a brief, you give the author. There really isn’t a good reason not to,” she says.
Cruz’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Cruz’s secret self-citations might be minor details in the story of a bright young lawyer rising to political prominence. But these details—and the article itself, which has never been publicly analyzed—offer an important window into the tactics and thinking of a man whom law school classmates and political colleagues have described as arrogant and sharp-elbowed. The arguments in the article also offer a glimpse at the intellectual development of an unflagging conservative who promises as president to nominate “principled constitutionalists” to the Supreme Court.
The Ted Cruz of 20 years ago, it turns out, was much the same as the Ted Cruz of today.
Published in 1994 in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, a conservative student journal for which Cruz served as an editor, the article is well-written. But it is also brash, legal scholars said, combining a focus on religious liberty with a level of self-regard unusual even among Harvard Law students. And its arguments about the First Amendment fall further right than even the most conservative Supreme Court justice supported at the time and, from the perspective of a constitutional conservative, go strategically beyond the case at hand.
Cruz analyzes a Supreme Court case involving Santeria, a Cuban religion fusing African-Yoruba beliefs with Catholicism in which adherents perform animal sacrifices on special occasions. When a group wanted to open its own church in a city near Miami in 1987, the city council got worried. It held an emergency meeting at which residents cheered the idea of throwing people practicing Santeria in jail, and the local police department’s chaplain called the religion “an abomination to the Lord.” The council quickly passed a series of ordinances banning the ritual slaughter of animals. The official reason for the new laws was protecting public health and safety, but everyone knew they were really about keeping Santeria out of town.
The Supreme Court decided the case, Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, in 1993 and unanimously overturned the city’s ordinances for violating the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom to practice religion. The justices said that even though the ordinances were written in a neutral way—they outlawed ritual sacrifice regardless of what religion wanted to do it—they were actually targeted at Santeria and so were unconstitutional.
Cruz agreed wholeheartedly with that decision, writing that the court was “absolutely correct.”
But he took issue with a more technical part of the court’s decision, staking out a position described by constitutional law experts as unusually conservative. The issue was the way in which the First Amendment’s protection for freely exercising religion was applied—or “incorporated,” in the legal jargon—to state and local governments, rather than just the federal government.
The court used the 14th Amendment’s due process clause (no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”); that is a common strategy for incorporation, but one that some conservatives dislike because it rests on the definition of “due process,” which might change over time. Worried that the strategy would make it too easy for courts to trample on religious liberty in the future, Cruz called the use of the due process clause “a symbol of illegitimate judicial activism.” Instead, he argued that a different part of the 14th Amendment—prohibiting states from denying equal protection of the law—would give activist judges less leeway to infringe on religious freedom than the due process clause and therefore should be used for incorporation.
Courts haven’t adopted the equal protection idea, which amounts to a wholesale rethinking of how the Bill of Rights applies to the states and survives just in the writings of some conservative legal thinkers. Not even Justice Clarence Thomas, known to be the furthest right on the Supreme Court, embraces the approach to incorporation that Cruz advocated.
“It’s a pretty radical view,” says Michael Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell Law School. “Thomas’ view requires you to reconfigure some doctrine, but it doesn’t require you to undo most of incorporation doctrine,” as Cruz’s position would.
“This is the note of an extremely conservative activist,” Laycock agrees.
The writing in Cruz’s article stands out too, illustrating a degree of brashness unusual in such staid settings as legal journals, according to the legal experts who read the article for this story. “There’s something both arrogant and un-scholarly about the prose style,” Dorf says.
Cruz called the court’s decision “absolutely” correct not once but twice—an uncommon claim for a law journal that is conservative not only in its politics, but also in its prose. He also unreservedly endorsed the decision in a predecessor of the Lukumi decision, Employment Division v. Smith—which was actually quite controversial at the time among conservatives. Smith held that a generally applicable law, one that applied to everyone regardless of religion, was constitutional even if it harmed members of one religion more than another. Some conservatives worried that the reasoning in Smith would severely weaken the free exercise of religion clause because it might allow lawmakers to come up with rules that appear to be evenhanded but actually have the effect of discriminating against a particular religion.
This was an apparent weakness in the argument of a defender of religious freedom. “He glibly signs on to a disaster for religious liberty” by unconditionally supporting the Smith decision, Laycock says, even as “he postured himself as arguing to save religious liberty.”
The animal sacrifice article wasn’t the only piece of writing Cruz published in law school. As an editor on the Harvard Law Review, he most likely wrote short articles—describing Supreme Court cases, reviewing books and the like—but student pieces in the law review are published unsigned. The Review has a policy against identifying the authors of student articles, and when asked to identify which work was his, two of Cruz’s contemporaries on the law review and two current editors all declined to do so.
There was one other legal article, though, that Cruz did put his name on. A dense argument about contract and tort liability law, it was much less ideological than his animal sacrifice piece. Cruz and his co-author and law school friend, Jeffrey Hinck, argued that an idea known as the “informed minority” theory—that a marketplace will remain efficient even if most consumers don’t understand what’s in the contracts they sign, so long as some consumers do—doesn’t hold up in practice. The pair made clear that they supported free markets; their goal, they wrote, was to strengthen the rhetorical position of free-market supporters by persuading them to abandon a theory that Cruz and Hinck saw as a losing argument.
Together, the contracts and animal sacrifice articles illustrate the breadth of Cruz’s academic work. He was busy in law school: Alongside his spot on the Harvard Law Review and his midlevel editor post on the Journal of Law and Public Policy, he helped found the Harvard Latino Law Review and worked as a research assistant for several professors. One of them, Alan Dershowitz, a legendary criminal defense attorney who later represented O.J. Simpson, has described Cruz as “off-the-charts brilliant.”
Bill Waller, who was an editor on the Journal of Law and Public Policy when Cruz wrote his Lukumi analysis, says the topic of Cruz’s article is a testament to his intellectual abilities—not every student got to write about high-profile Supreme Court decisions. “He was just an overall a very good writer. He got a really good topic,” Waller says.
Dorf, the Cornell law professor, agrees that the article’s description of the law was “certainly competent.”
Cruz, not surprisingly, seemed to think well of his writing, too. He opened the article with an extended quote from John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration, seemingly equating his own arguments to those of the famous Enlightenment thinker.
He remained proud to share that writing years later—even directing the justices of the Supreme Court to read it, too.
How his ‘extremely conservative’ law school article about ritual sacrifice made it to the highest court.
By Michael Linhorst
Twelve years ago, in the fall of its 2003 term, the U.S Supreme Court received a written brief from Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz with a very unusual footnote. The case was called Locke v. Davey, and it concerned the constitutionality of a Washington State college scholarship that excluded students studying religion—a key issue for the movement conservatives Cruz considered his political allies. Texas wasn’t a party in the case, but the ambitious lawyer was already gaining a reputation for inserting himself into national debates by filing briefs about attention-grabbing cases with no direct relation to his state.
Like all legal briefs, Cruz’s cited cases, laws and law journal articles as authorities to back up his argument. Among those sources was an obscure article about animal sacrifice, which the author argued should be allowed as an expression of religious liberty. The subject matter was unusual for a Supreme Court brief, but even more unusual was the article: It was a student’s analysis published nearly a decade earlier in a conservative journal at Harvard Law School.
Cruz didn’t name the student author in his brief. But if the justices had looked it up, they would have found a surprise: It was a 24-year-old Harvard law student named Ted Cruz.
In fact, Cruz cited his own 1994 article not once but twice before the Supreme Court: in briefs submitted in Locke v. Davey and in another religious liberty case in 2006, Anderson v. Town of Durham. Cruz referred to the article only to support a few general statements—nothing groundbreaking or controversial. But he didn’t identify himself as the article’s author either time—which was a violation of the legal citation guidelines in place at the time and, legal experts say, was a bit deceptive.
“I think the court would have preferred to know, and might have felt somewhat misled if anyone went to read the note,” says Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and a leading legal authority on religious liberty. “I would have identified myself.”
Leah Litman, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who served as a clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy, agrees that it was “a little strange” Cruz didn’t identify himself. “He’s identified as the author of the piece [in the journal]. And when you cite a secondary source in a brief, you give the author. There really isn’t a good reason not to,” she says.
Cruz’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Cruz’s secret self-citations might be minor details in the story of a bright young lawyer rising to political prominence. But these details—and the article itself, which has never been publicly analyzed—offer an important window into the tactics and thinking of a man whom law school classmates and political colleagues have described as arrogant and sharp-elbowed. The arguments in the article also offer a glimpse at the intellectual development of an unflagging conservative who promises as president to nominate “principled constitutionalists” to the Supreme Court.
The Ted Cruz of 20 years ago, it turns out, was much the same as the Ted Cruz of today.
Published in 1994 in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, a conservative student journal for which Cruz served as an editor, the article is well-written. But it is also brash, legal scholars said, combining a focus on religious liberty with a level of self-regard unusual even among Harvard Law students. And its arguments about the First Amendment fall further right than even the most conservative Supreme Court justice supported at the time and, from the perspective of a constitutional conservative, go strategically beyond the case at hand.
Cruz analyzes a Supreme Court case involving Santeria, a Cuban religion fusing African-Yoruba beliefs with Catholicism in which adherents perform animal sacrifices on special occasions. When a group wanted to open its own church in a city near Miami in 1987, the city council got worried. It held an emergency meeting at which residents cheered the idea of throwing people practicing Santeria in jail, and the local police department’s chaplain called the religion “an abomination to the Lord.” The council quickly passed a series of ordinances banning the ritual slaughter of animals. The official reason for the new laws was protecting public health and safety, but everyone knew they were really about keeping Santeria out of town.
The Supreme Court decided the case, Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, in 1993 and unanimously overturned the city’s ordinances for violating the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom to practice religion. The justices said that even though the ordinances were written in a neutral way—they outlawed ritual sacrifice regardless of what religion wanted to do it—they were actually targeted at Santeria and so were unconstitutional.
Cruz agreed wholeheartedly with that decision, writing that the court was “absolutely correct.”
But he took issue with a more technical part of the court’s decision, staking out a position described by constitutional law experts as unusually conservative. The issue was the way in which the First Amendment’s protection for freely exercising religion was applied—or “incorporated,” in the legal jargon—to state and local governments, rather than just the federal government.
The court used the 14th Amendment’s due process clause (no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”); that is a common strategy for incorporation, but one that some conservatives dislike because it rests on the definition of “due process,” which might change over time. Worried that the strategy would make it too easy for courts to trample on religious liberty in the future, Cruz called the use of the due process clause “a symbol of illegitimate judicial activism.” Instead, he argued that a different part of the 14th Amendment—prohibiting states from denying equal protection of the law—would give activist judges less leeway to infringe on religious freedom than the due process clause and therefore should be used for incorporation.
Courts haven’t adopted the equal protection idea, which amounts to a wholesale rethinking of how the Bill of Rights applies to the states and survives just in the writings of some conservative legal thinkers. Not even Justice Clarence Thomas, known to be the furthest right on the Supreme Court, embraces the approach to incorporation that Cruz advocated.
“It’s a pretty radical view,” says Michael Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell Law School. “Thomas’ view requires you to reconfigure some doctrine, but it doesn’t require you to undo most of incorporation doctrine,” as Cruz’s position would.
“This is the note of an extremely conservative activist,” Laycock agrees.
The writing in Cruz’s article stands out too, illustrating a degree of brashness unusual in such staid settings as legal journals, according to the legal experts who read the article for this story. “There’s something both arrogant and un-scholarly about the prose style,” Dorf says.
Cruz called the court’s decision “absolutely” correct not once but twice—an uncommon claim for a law journal that is conservative not only in its politics, but also in its prose. He also unreservedly endorsed the decision in a predecessor of the Lukumi decision, Employment Division v. Smith—which was actually quite controversial at the time among conservatives. Smith held that a generally applicable law, one that applied to everyone regardless of religion, was constitutional even if it harmed members of one religion more than another. Some conservatives worried that the reasoning in Smith would severely weaken the free exercise of religion clause because it might allow lawmakers to come up with rules that appear to be evenhanded but actually have the effect of discriminating against a particular religion.
This was an apparent weakness in the argument of a defender of religious freedom. “He glibly signs on to a disaster for religious liberty” by unconditionally supporting the Smith decision, Laycock says, even as “he postured himself as arguing to save religious liberty.”
The animal sacrifice article wasn’t the only piece of writing Cruz published in law school. As an editor on the Harvard Law Review, he most likely wrote short articles—describing Supreme Court cases, reviewing books and the like—but student pieces in the law review are published unsigned. The Review has a policy against identifying the authors of student articles, and when asked to identify which work was his, two of Cruz’s contemporaries on the law review and two current editors all declined to do so.
There was one other legal article, though, that Cruz did put his name on. A dense argument about contract and tort liability law, it was much less ideological than his animal sacrifice piece. Cruz and his co-author and law school friend, Jeffrey Hinck, argued that an idea known as the “informed minority” theory—that a marketplace will remain efficient even if most consumers don’t understand what’s in the contracts they sign, so long as some consumers do—doesn’t hold up in practice. The pair made clear that they supported free markets; their goal, they wrote, was to strengthen the rhetorical position of free-market supporters by persuading them to abandon a theory that Cruz and Hinck saw as a losing argument.
Together, the contracts and animal sacrifice articles illustrate the breadth of Cruz’s academic work. He was busy in law school: Alongside his spot on the Harvard Law Review and his midlevel editor post on the Journal of Law and Public Policy, he helped found the Harvard Latino Law Review and worked as a research assistant for several professors. One of them, Alan Dershowitz, a legendary criminal defense attorney who later represented O.J. Simpson, has described Cruz as “off-the-charts brilliant.”
Bill Waller, who was an editor on the Journal of Law and Public Policy when Cruz wrote his Lukumi analysis, says the topic of Cruz’s article is a testament to his intellectual abilities—not every student got to write about high-profile Supreme Court decisions. “He was just an overall a very good writer. He got a really good topic,” Waller says.
Dorf, the Cornell law professor, agrees that the article’s description of the law was “certainly competent.”
Cruz, not surprisingly, seemed to think well of his writing, too. He opened the article with an extended quote from John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration, seemingly equating his own arguments to those of the famous Enlightenment thinker.
He remained proud to share that writing years later—even directing the justices of the Supreme Court to read it, too.
Trump University
PolitiFact tackles Trump University
By Nick Gass
Donald Trump's declaration that his Trump University venture, long embroiled in litigation in at least three states, received an "A" rating from the Better Business Bureau is patently false, according to fact-checking outlet PolitiFact.
As PolitiFact noted in its post, published Sunday evening, the "university," which had to change its name to Trump Entrepreneur Institute because it resembled something closer to a seminar program, came up during a Jan. 28 "Meet the Press" interview. In that segment with NBC's Chuck Todd, Trump claimed that the institution held an "A" rating from the Better Business Bureau.
Trump Entrepreneur Institute does not have a rating from the Better Business Bureau, as it mostly ceased operations in 2011. When reached for comment by PolitiFact, a Trump spokeswoman repeated the candidate's claim that the school had an "A" rating while it was operational.
The communications director for the Council of Better Business Bureaus said the organization does not provide past years' ratings, but it did issue a statement noting that "[o]ver the years, the company’s BBB rating has fluctuated between an A+ and a D-."
PolitiFact noted several articles from the New York Daily News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS News in late 2010 and early 2011, which made reference to reports of Trump University receiving a D- and Trump's subsequent objections to the grade.
"Trump University had an A at some point," the fact check concludes. "The Better Business Bureau doesn't release details of its past ratings, but it did say Trump's program had ratings that ranged from A+ to D-. What we do know, from several published reports, is that the university had a D from 2009 to 2011. Trump’s claim is literally wrong and also ignores the university’s lower Better Business Bureau scores. We rate it False."
By Nick Gass
Donald Trump's declaration that his Trump University venture, long embroiled in litigation in at least three states, received an "A" rating from the Better Business Bureau is patently false, according to fact-checking outlet PolitiFact.
As PolitiFact noted in its post, published Sunday evening, the "university," which had to change its name to Trump Entrepreneur Institute because it resembled something closer to a seminar program, came up during a Jan. 28 "Meet the Press" interview. In that segment with NBC's Chuck Todd, Trump claimed that the institution held an "A" rating from the Better Business Bureau.
Trump Entrepreneur Institute does not have a rating from the Better Business Bureau, as it mostly ceased operations in 2011. When reached for comment by PolitiFact, a Trump spokeswoman repeated the candidate's claim that the school had an "A" rating while it was operational.
The communications director for the Council of Better Business Bureaus said the organization does not provide past years' ratings, but it did issue a statement noting that "[o]ver the years, the company’s BBB rating has fluctuated between an A+ and a D-."
PolitiFact noted several articles from the New York Daily News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS News in late 2010 and early 2011, which made reference to reports of Trump University receiving a D- and Trump's subsequent objections to the grade.
"Trump University had an A at some point," the fact check concludes. "The Better Business Bureau doesn't release details of its past ratings, but it did say Trump's program had ratings that ranged from A+ to D-. What we do know, from several published reports, is that the university had a D from 2009 to 2011. Trump’s claim is literally wrong and also ignores the university’s lower Better Business Bureau scores. We rate it False."
Dynasties
How Dynasties Sank the GOP and the Democrats
The power of the Houses of Bush and Clinton was supposed to define the race. Instead, their weaknesses blew it up.
By David S. Bernstein
No matter what happens on Super Tuesday, it’s clear who the real losers will be on election night: The Democratic and Republican parties. An election season that began as a presumptive showdown between two inevitable dynastic front-runners—Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton—has now devolved into an electoral dumpster fire. And it’s time to name the culprit: The dynasties themselves.
From the earliest stages of this election—the so-called invisible primary for funding and top-level staffers—the House of Bush and House of Clinton hoarded the race’s resources. So much so, that they broke the process and made room for outsider candidates who now pose existential threats to the parties themselves. Jeb is already out, and there’s an inclination to feel sorry for him—but the damage he wrought by vaporizing $150 million is a weakened establishment and a Trump juggernaut that will take a small miracle to defeat. On the Democratic side, it looks like Hillary will survive—but her party will have to live with a candidate who, voters have made clear, has the wrong message for its mood. Well into the spring, she’ll have to weather a crowdfunded socialist whose grass-roots campaign is bleeding young people and women from her base, while whacking her on her Wall Street ties. And she’ll head into the fall with a risky email scandal hanging over her head.
If this cycle teaches us anything, it’s that political dynasties are bad for parties the way monopolies are bad for business: They impede competition, and reward power rather than merit. Voters—both Republican and Democrat—have rejected the unassailability and inevitability of the Bush and Clinton dynasties. What’s troubling is that the parties didn’t—that they were blinded by the name on the packaging, not realizing how weakened both candidates had become.
Many of the two parties’ insiders, fundraisers, activists, elected officials and staffers are no more than one degree removed from the Clintons or Bushes. Many owe their jobs to the former presidents, or their networks. Equally as important, no GOP candidate without the Bush dynasty behind him would have been able to deny his rivals funding in the crucial, early primary states.
“A lot of us stayed on the sidelines,” says Nancy Dwight, former executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee and longtime New Hampshire political activist. She ultimately endorsed Ohio Governor John Kasich; others she knows are still on the sidelines. “We didn’t want to say no to the Bushes, or say we were against our friends.”
For their part, neither Bush nor Clinton seemed to realize how their own parties had changed since the last time they campaigned—2008 for Hillary, 2002 for Jeb. “The party changes so fast,” says Stuart Stevens, political consultant and former Mitt Romney strategist. “It’s like the NFL—you can’t go up in the booth for a couple of seasons and then go back.”
“For both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, as a legacy you can be insulated from the realities of your party,” says Dante Scala, assistant professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. “It’s great to have all these resources available to you, but it can enlarge your blind spot. You lose your ear for politics.”
The Bush dynasty was already putting its imprint on the race in March 2015, three months before Jeb announced his presidential campaign. It began with a tweet that sent a buzz through New Hampshire political circles.
To some in New Hampshire political circles, this picture of the likely presidential candidate with his father’s former chief of staff—John H. Sununu, one of the state’s most powerful Republicans—was one of many reminders to officials, fundraisers, activists and staffers of the reach and influence of the Bush family. (Sununu never did endorse Bush, in deference, people say, to his son, former Senator John E. Sununu, a close friend of Kasich. He remained officially neutral, but periodically expressed his preference for a “governor or former governor.”)
During critical early months before his June 2015 announcement, while less-established candidates needed to build their national operations and fundraising teams, Bush tried to freeze the field. In late 2014 and early 2015, some top Republican operatives in New Hampshire told me that Bush had asked them not to commit to any other candidate until he gave the word. It didn’t work on everybody—Jim Merrill, who ran New Hampshire for Romney, signed on with Marco Rubio in early 2015—but it did on some. To put it bluntly, no other ex-governor—especially one eight years removed from the political arena—would have been able to consolidate so much party support and resources. “The GOP has always coronated its nominees,” says Scala. “Why shouldn’t Jeb have expected to be coronated, like his brother?”
In sharp contrast to previous cycles, elected officials across the country conspicuously refrained from endorsing. That might have been partly due to flaws with the other candidates—Governor Chris Christie was embroiled in a bridge-closing scandal, for instance.
But it certainly has been striking to see the flood of endorsements for Rubio coming the moment Bush dropped out of the race. Not when Bush’s national poll numbers plunged into single digits last year, or when he finished sixth with 3 percent of the Iowa vote.
Then there was the circling of fundraising wagons. In October 2015, the campaign released a list of 341 early fundraisers that, USA Today wrote, “reads like a who’s who of Republican politics.” That helped explain the lack of early fundraising by other equally credible candidates.
At the midway point of 2015, establishment pariah Ted Cruz led the GOP pack, with close to $15 million raised. Rubio—largely shut out in his home state of Florida by the Bush machine—did best within traditional party circles, coming up with $8.6 million by the end of June. Rand Paul had $5.3 million. Others had to wait until the third quarter to start, and they hardly broke the bank: From July through September, the combined campaigns of Kasich, Christie, Scott Walker, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal raised well under $20 million. Repeat: Combined.
Compare those figures with the 2008 GOP field. When John McCain’s campaign raised just $13 million by June 2007, it was seen as evidence of a “collapse.” By then, Rudy Giuliani and Romney had each raised more than $30 million. And there was enough left on the table for Fred Thompson to raise $16 in four months beginning in June.
The story was even more stark when you look at Bush’s impact on super PACs. “There’s a limited amount of resources out there,” Stevens says, “and a vast amount of it went to Right to Rise.” Indeed: Right to Rise had raised a staggering $100 million by the time Bush officially entered the race in June 2015. That hurt his opponents, but didn’t help him. “The evidence is very clear,” says Bill Mayer of Northeastern University, “that the Bush family name helped him with the fundraising, probably helped with the consultants, and hurt him tremendously with the voters.”
Looking back, it’s fair to ask: How much of the chaos of the race was engendered simply by Bush being in it? The dynasty was great at launching the campaign—but it also inspired great antipathy. Bush sucked up a lot of funding, yet he didn’t keep the field clear. In fact, 15 other candidates thought his name would be enough of a liability that they got into the race. Thanks to Jeb, they just couldn’t find a foothold.
While Bush was looking for his coronation, Clinton was receiving hers. By June 2015, she had raised $47 million, with another $15 million in her main super PAC. She has been ahead of even Al Gore’s 2000 pace for endorsements, according to the analysis at FiveThirtyEight.com, let alone other eventual nominees. To this day only three members of the House of Representatives—and no U.S. senators or governors—have endorsed another Democrat.
To be sure, Clinton was a deserving front-runner: a former U.S. senator, secretary of state, and runner-up in the party’s last nominating contest. But that doesn’t entirely explain the nearly unanimous support from party actors. “In all my years of watching presidential campaigns, I’ve never seen anything like what the party did this time,” says Northeastern’s Mayer. “The Democratic National Committee really put its thumb on the scale.”
Many observers also accused the official party structure, and in particular Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz—a national co-chair of Clinton’s 2008 campaign—of rigging what was already a massively tilted process. That included scheduling very few debates, at obscure viewing times, with rules that some said were designed to sideline challengers. There were some close ties between DNC and HRC personnel, and critics charged that Wasserman Schultz used the inappropriate access of voter data as a pretext to punish the Bernie Sanders campaign at a crucial juncture.
Clinton certainly has issues as a candidate. Her favorability ratings are more than 10 points underwater—20 points in the crucial swing state of Ohio, according to a Quinnipiac poll this month. She was exposed as out of step with her party eight years ago; She has a history of same-sex marriage opposition, tough-on-crime policies, military hawkishness, Wall Street coziness and questionable campaign-finance practices that she has altered to fit the current party’s beliefs. Today, she is struggling to catch a rapidly moving target—in a party that tends to favor a fresh face in its nominees. The GOP, like a traditionalist white-shoe firm, is the one that wants tried-and-proven nominees: Romney, McCain, Bob Dole, and George H. W. Bush all ran and lost at least once before getting the nomination. Democrats tend to favor first-time candidates who fit the party at the moment, including John F. Kennedy, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, John Kerry and Barack Obama.
The Clinton dynasty is turning into a lose-lose proposition. Exit polls make clear that younger voters—for whom the Clinton-era ‘90s exist only in reruns and history books—are not fawning at the Clinton name: Sanders took more than 80 percent of voters 18 to 29 in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. In fact, the main reason Sanders appears to have held his own among Nevada Hispanics is because they are so young—three times as likely to be under 30 than other caucus attendees. Clinton “is going to have to deal with this generational fallout,” says Scala. “That’s the issue for any legacy candidate. Not only is she running for Obama’s third term, her name is a name of the past.”
That’s the other problem with political dynasties: The election becomes a referendum on the family name. “Clearly she has the overriding support of the super-delegates, she initially raised a lot more money than anybody else—but she’s a very problematic candidate” says Mayer. “And too bad for the Democrats they don’t have a mainstream alternative to her.”
There’s another downside to dynastic candidates: the other living members. Bush fumbled when addressing his brother’s record on the war in Iraq, the economy, and even 9/11. And while contending with the legacy of two previous presidents, Jeb’s father and brother were notably absent on the campaign trail —right up to the moment in South Carolina when Dubya thoroughly upstaged the candidate, and failed to save him from a campaign-ending distant fourth-place finish. Meanwhile, Trump has been foreshadowing his plan of attack in a general election by going after Bill Clinton’s infidelities. And Hillary has been forced to answer for her husband’s policies on criminal justice, welfare, and gay rights. African-Americans have now forgiven Bill Clinton for his demeaning comments during the campaign eight years ago—most notoriously, comparing Obama’s South Carolina victory to Jesse Jackson’s—but his broadsides against Sanders earlier this month were a reminder of how polarizing he can be.
A stronger Democratic field—one that hadn’t been scared off or starved by the Clinton dynasty—might have given the party a stronger option against an unconventional opponent like Trump. The Sanders phenomenon has been fueled by a remarkably deep reservoir of antipathy—one that Clinton and her team clearly never saw coming. With another mainstream Democrat in the race, a far-left outsider like Bernie would likely have had a much narrower lane to strike. Instead, Sanders has played Clinton essentially to a draw in the early voting states, and raised close to $100 million—guaranteeing he’ll be around to harass her even if she wins big in the South.
A common argument I hear was that the candidate pool was simply shallow this time around, because of a weak Democratic bench after tough 2010 and 2014 elections. There’s a grain of truth to that, but just a grain. Consider that Cory Booker, Andrew Cuomo, Kirstin Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Terry McAuliffe, Janet Napolitano, Jay Nixon, Brian Schweitzer, Kathleen Sebelius, Tom Udall, and Mark Warner were among many—along with Martin O’Malley—who could have vied for party support, had there been any available.
The dumpster-fire 2016 election does not seem to be forcing any significant degree of self-reflection about both parties’ embrace of dynastic candidates. It should. Dynastic American politics—from John and John Quincy Adams to George and Mitt Romney—have always been an uncomfortable fit with America’s self-image as a monarchy-ousting land of self-made success. But 21st century voters seem especially unwelcoming to the notion of power and influence built up by one politician transferring to a relative.
Strong familial ties in national politics—with their accompanying powerful networks—have certainly helped in the nomination process, but haven’t always guaranteed an easy path. President William Henry Harrison’s grandson Benjamin needed eight ballots and extensive maneuvering to win the Republican nomination in 1888. Vice President Adlai Stevenson I’s grandson won the 1952 Democratic nomination on the third ballot, allowing himself to be drafted at the convention; he was renominated in 1956 despite many Democrats, including former President Harry S Truman, turning against him. Ted Kennedy’s 1980 attempt to follow his brother Jack into the White House, by upending incumbent Jimmy Carter, failed. These and other family lines all suffered their downfalls, often creating more turmoil for their party along the way.
Will this cycle finally teach the parties their lesson? Not necessarily: After Clinton and Bush, there are still prominent familial candidates on the way: Just look at Rand Paul, who made an early exit but is young enough, at 53, to be back again. Or up-and-coming Congressman Joe Kennedy III, who at 35 is the oldest of Jack, Bobby and Ted’s grandchildren and surely not the last to follow their political path. Or Romney’s five sons, of whom, Tagg, is considered most likely to run for office. Or Jeb’s own son, George P. Bush, already establishing the beginnings of a public record as Texas Land Commissioner. This year’s race suggests the lure of dynastic power is finally losing its hold on voters. But the examples of Joe Kennedy III, Rand Paul and countless others suggests they aren’t exactly losing their hold on political operatives, for whom a name brand is always going to seem like an asset.
“I think these are the flaws of two specific dynasties,” says Mayer. “The Clinton dynasty would be doing fine, except the only candidate they had after Bill was Hillary. The Bush dynasty might still be going strong, if George W. had been a halfway decent president.”
The power of the Houses of Bush and Clinton was supposed to define the race. Instead, their weaknesses blew it up.
By David S. Bernstein
No matter what happens on Super Tuesday, it’s clear who the real losers will be on election night: The Democratic and Republican parties. An election season that began as a presumptive showdown between two inevitable dynastic front-runners—Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton—has now devolved into an electoral dumpster fire. And it’s time to name the culprit: The dynasties themselves.
From the earliest stages of this election—the so-called invisible primary for funding and top-level staffers—the House of Bush and House of Clinton hoarded the race’s resources. So much so, that they broke the process and made room for outsider candidates who now pose existential threats to the parties themselves. Jeb is already out, and there’s an inclination to feel sorry for him—but the damage he wrought by vaporizing $150 million is a weakened establishment and a Trump juggernaut that will take a small miracle to defeat. On the Democratic side, it looks like Hillary will survive—but her party will have to live with a candidate who, voters have made clear, has the wrong message for its mood. Well into the spring, she’ll have to weather a crowdfunded socialist whose grass-roots campaign is bleeding young people and women from her base, while whacking her on her Wall Street ties. And she’ll head into the fall with a risky email scandal hanging over her head.
If this cycle teaches us anything, it’s that political dynasties are bad for parties the way monopolies are bad for business: They impede competition, and reward power rather than merit. Voters—both Republican and Democrat—have rejected the unassailability and inevitability of the Bush and Clinton dynasties. What’s troubling is that the parties didn’t—that they were blinded by the name on the packaging, not realizing how weakened both candidates had become.
Many of the two parties’ insiders, fundraisers, activists, elected officials and staffers are no more than one degree removed from the Clintons or Bushes. Many owe their jobs to the former presidents, or their networks. Equally as important, no GOP candidate without the Bush dynasty behind him would have been able to deny his rivals funding in the crucial, early primary states.
“A lot of us stayed on the sidelines,” says Nancy Dwight, former executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee and longtime New Hampshire political activist. She ultimately endorsed Ohio Governor John Kasich; others she knows are still on the sidelines. “We didn’t want to say no to the Bushes, or say we were against our friends.”
For their part, neither Bush nor Clinton seemed to realize how their own parties had changed since the last time they campaigned—2008 for Hillary, 2002 for Jeb. “The party changes so fast,” says Stuart Stevens, political consultant and former Mitt Romney strategist. “It’s like the NFL—you can’t go up in the booth for a couple of seasons and then go back.”
“For both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, as a legacy you can be insulated from the realities of your party,” says Dante Scala, assistant professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. “It’s great to have all these resources available to you, but it can enlarge your blind spot. You lose your ear for politics.”
The Bush dynasty was already putting its imprint on the race in March 2015, three months before Jeb announced his presidential campaign. It began with a tweet that sent a buzz through New Hampshire political circles.
To some in New Hampshire political circles, this picture of the likely presidential candidate with his father’s former chief of staff—John H. Sununu, one of the state’s most powerful Republicans—was one of many reminders to officials, fundraisers, activists and staffers of the reach and influence of the Bush family. (Sununu never did endorse Bush, in deference, people say, to his son, former Senator John E. Sununu, a close friend of Kasich. He remained officially neutral, but periodically expressed his preference for a “governor or former governor.”)
During critical early months before his June 2015 announcement, while less-established candidates needed to build their national operations and fundraising teams, Bush tried to freeze the field. In late 2014 and early 2015, some top Republican operatives in New Hampshire told me that Bush had asked them not to commit to any other candidate until he gave the word. It didn’t work on everybody—Jim Merrill, who ran New Hampshire for Romney, signed on with Marco Rubio in early 2015—but it did on some. To put it bluntly, no other ex-governor—especially one eight years removed from the political arena—would have been able to consolidate so much party support and resources. “The GOP has always coronated its nominees,” says Scala. “Why shouldn’t Jeb have expected to be coronated, like his brother?”
In sharp contrast to previous cycles, elected officials across the country conspicuously refrained from endorsing. That might have been partly due to flaws with the other candidates—Governor Chris Christie was embroiled in a bridge-closing scandal, for instance.
But it certainly has been striking to see the flood of endorsements for Rubio coming the moment Bush dropped out of the race. Not when Bush’s national poll numbers plunged into single digits last year, or when he finished sixth with 3 percent of the Iowa vote.
Then there was the circling of fundraising wagons. In October 2015, the campaign released a list of 341 early fundraisers that, USA Today wrote, “reads like a who’s who of Republican politics.” That helped explain the lack of early fundraising by other equally credible candidates.
At the midway point of 2015, establishment pariah Ted Cruz led the GOP pack, with close to $15 million raised. Rubio—largely shut out in his home state of Florida by the Bush machine—did best within traditional party circles, coming up with $8.6 million by the end of June. Rand Paul had $5.3 million. Others had to wait until the third quarter to start, and they hardly broke the bank: From July through September, the combined campaigns of Kasich, Christie, Scott Walker, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal raised well under $20 million. Repeat: Combined.
Compare those figures with the 2008 GOP field. When John McCain’s campaign raised just $13 million by June 2007, it was seen as evidence of a “collapse.” By then, Rudy Giuliani and Romney had each raised more than $30 million. And there was enough left on the table for Fred Thompson to raise $16 in four months beginning in June.
The story was even more stark when you look at Bush’s impact on super PACs. “There’s a limited amount of resources out there,” Stevens says, “and a vast amount of it went to Right to Rise.” Indeed: Right to Rise had raised a staggering $100 million by the time Bush officially entered the race in June 2015. That hurt his opponents, but didn’t help him. “The evidence is very clear,” says Bill Mayer of Northeastern University, “that the Bush family name helped him with the fundraising, probably helped with the consultants, and hurt him tremendously with the voters.”
Looking back, it’s fair to ask: How much of the chaos of the race was engendered simply by Bush being in it? The dynasty was great at launching the campaign—but it also inspired great antipathy. Bush sucked up a lot of funding, yet he didn’t keep the field clear. In fact, 15 other candidates thought his name would be enough of a liability that they got into the race. Thanks to Jeb, they just couldn’t find a foothold.
While Bush was looking for his coronation, Clinton was receiving hers. By June 2015, she had raised $47 million, with another $15 million in her main super PAC. She has been ahead of even Al Gore’s 2000 pace for endorsements, according to the analysis at FiveThirtyEight.com, let alone other eventual nominees. To this day only three members of the House of Representatives—and no U.S. senators or governors—have endorsed another Democrat.
To be sure, Clinton was a deserving front-runner: a former U.S. senator, secretary of state, and runner-up in the party’s last nominating contest. But that doesn’t entirely explain the nearly unanimous support from party actors. “In all my years of watching presidential campaigns, I’ve never seen anything like what the party did this time,” says Northeastern’s Mayer. “The Democratic National Committee really put its thumb on the scale.”
Many observers also accused the official party structure, and in particular Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz—a national co-chair of Clinton’s 2008 campaign—of rigging what was already a massively tilted process. That included scheduling very few debates, at obscure viewing times, with rules that some said were designed to sideline challengers. There were some close ties between DNC and HRC personnel, and critics charged that Wasserman Schultz used the inappropriate access of voter data as a pretext to punish the Bernie Sanders campaign at a crucial juncture.
Clinton certainly has issues as a candidate. Her favorability ratings are more than 10 points underwater—20 points in the crucial swing state of Ohio, according to a Quinnipiac poll this month. She was exposed as out of step with her party eight years ago; She has a history of same-sex marriage opposition, tough-on-crime policies, military hawkishness, Wall Street coziness and questionable campaign-finance practices that she has altered to fit the current party’s beliefs. Today, she is struggling to catch a rapidly moving target—in a party that tends to favor a fresh face in its nominees. The GOP, like a traditionalist white-shoe firm, is the one that wants tried-and-proven nominees: Romney, McCain, Bob Dole, and George H. W. Bush all ran and lost at least once before getting the nomination. Democrats tend to favor first-time candidates who fit the party at the moment, including John F. Kennedy, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, John Kerry and Barack Obama.
The Clinton dynasty is turning into a lose-lose proposition. Exit polls make clear that younger voters—for whom the Clinton-era ‘90s exist only in reruns and history books—are not fawning at the Clinton name: Sanders took more than 80 percent of voters 18 to 29 in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. In fact, the main reason Sanders appears to have held his own among Nevada Hispanics is because they are so young—three times as likely to be under 30 than other caucus attendees. Clinton “is going to have to deal with this generational fallout,” says Scala. “That’s the issue for any legacy candidate. Not only is she running for Obama’s third term, her name is a name of the past.”
That’s the other problem with political dynasties: The election becomes a referendum on the family name. “Clearly she has the overriding support of the super-delegates, she initially raised a lot more money than anybody else—but she’s a very problematic candidate” says Mayer. “And too bad for the Democrats they don’t have a mainstream alternative to her.”
There’s another downside to dynastic candidates: the other living members. Bush fumbled when addressing his brother’s record on the war in Iraq, the economy, and even 9/11. And while contending with the legacy of two previous presidents, Jeb’s father and brother were notably absent on the campaign trail —right up to the moment in South Carolina when Dubya thoroughly upstaged the candidate, and failed to save him from a campaign-ending distant fourth-place finish. Meanwhile, Trump has been foreshadowing his plan of attack in a general election by going after Bill Clinton’s infidelities. And Hillary has been forced to answer for her husband’s policies on criminal justice, welfare, and gay rights. African-Americans have now forgiven Bill Clinton for his demeaning comments during the campaign eight years ago—most notoriously, comparing Obama’s South Carolina victory to Jesse Jackson’s—but his broadsides against Sanders earlier this month were a reminder of how polarizing he can be.
A stronger Democratic field—one that hadn’t been scared off or starved by the Clinton dynasty—might have given the party a stronger option against an unconventional opponent like Trump. The Sanders phenomenon has been fueled by a remarkably deep reservoir of antipathy—one that Clinton and her team clearly never saw coming. With another mainstream Democrat in the race, a far-left outsider like Bernie would likely have had a much narrower lane to strike. Instead, Sanders has played Clinton essentially to a draw in the early voting states, and raised close to $100 million—guaranteeing he’ll be around to harass her even if she wins big in the South.
A common argument I hear was that the candidate pool was simply shallow this time around, because of a weak Democratic bench after tough 2010 and 2014 elections. There’s a grain of truth to that, but just a grain. Consider that Cory Booker, Andrew Cuomo, Kirstin Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Terry McAuliffe, Janet Napolitano, Jay Nixon, Brian Schweitzer, Kathleen Sebelius, Tom Udall, and Mark Warner were among many—along with Martin O’Malley—who could have vied for party support, had there been any available.
The dumpster-fire 2016 election does not seem to be forcing any significant degree of self-reflection about both parties’ embrace of dynastic candidates. It should. Dynastic American politics—from John and John Quincy Adams to George and Mitt Romney—have always been an uncomfortable fit with America’s self-image as a monarchy-ousting land of self-made success. But 21st century voters seem especially unwelcoming to the notion of power and influence built up by one politician transferring to a relative.
Strong familial ties in national politics—with their accompanying powerful networks—have certainly helped in the nomination process, but haven’t always guaranteed an easy path. President William Henry Harrison’s grandson Benjamin needed eight ballots and extensive maneuvering to win the Republican nomination in 1888. Vice President Adlai Stevenson I’s grandson won the 1952 Democratic nomination on the third ballot, allowing himself to be drafted at the convention; he was renominated in 1956 despite many Democrats, including former President Harry S Truman, turning against him. Ted Kennedy’s 1980 attempt to follow his brother Jack into the White House, by upending incumbent Jimmy Carter, failed. These and other family lines all suffered their downfalls, often creating more turmoil for their party along the way.
Will this cycle finally teach the parties their lesson? Not necessarily: After Clinton and Bush, there are still prominent familial candidates on the way: Just look at Rand Paul, who made an early exit but is young enough, at 53, to be back again. Or up-and-coming Congressman Joe Kennedy III, who at 35 is the oldest of Jack, Bobby and Ted’s grandchildren and surely not the last to follow their political path. Or Romney’s five sons, of whom, Tagg, is considered most likely to run for office. Or Jeb’s own son, George P. Bush, already establishing the beginnings of a public record as Texas Land Commissioner. This year’s race suggests the lure of dynastic power is finally losing its hold on voters. But the examples of Joe Kennedy III, Rand Paul and countless others suggests they aren’t exactly losing their hold on political operatives, for whom a name brand is always going to seem like an asset.
“I think these are the flaws of two specific dynasties,” says Mayer. “The Clinton dynasty would be doing fine, except the only candidate they had after Bill was Hillary. The Bush dynasty might still be going strong, if George W. had been a halfway decent president.”
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