Category Archives: Hillary Clinton

One of Robert’s best cartoons EVER

It’s been interesting to watch the writers at The Wall Street Journal begin their shift from fighting the Trump juggernaut with all their might (standing alongside me in pushing for Kasich), to getting back into their comfort zone by going after Hillary.

This column today, reminding us of all the Clinton scandals, is a case in point.

As if people who know better have an alternative to Hillary, not matter how many unpleasant memories she represents.

I’m not joining that trend, but it reminds me of something, so I thought I’d share this, one of Robert Ariail’s best ever. Bill Clinton was a huge inspiration to Robert, which is one reason why he was a Pulitzer finalist twice during that era.

This one, from 1998 I believe, exhibits one of Robert’s signature strengths — his inspired use of language as well as his drawing ability.

I was looking for this cartoon yesterday to stick into a comment, but since Robert went to the trouble to dig it up for me, I thought I’d give it better play than that.

Please just tell us: Is this as bad as it gets on Hillary’s emails?

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This just in:

State Dept. inspector general report sharply criticizes Clinton’s email practices

The State Department’s independent watchdog has issued a highly critical analysis of Hillary Clinton’s email practices while running the department, concluding that she failed to seek legal approval for her use of a private email server and that department staff would not have given its blessing because of the “security risks in doing so.”

Her official SecState portrait.

The inspector general, in a long awaited review obtained Wednesday by The Washington Post in advance of its publication, found that Clinton’s use of private email for public business was “not an appropriate method” of preserving documents and that her practices failed to comply with department policies meant to ensure that federal record laws are followed.

The report says Clinton, who is the Democratic presidential front-runner, should have printed and saved her emails during her four years in office or surrendered her work-related correspondence immediately upon stepping down in February 2013. Instead, Clinton provided those records in December 2014, nearly two years after leaving office….

There’s further stuff supporting that “sharply critical” language in the headline. But there are also findings that support the Clinton campaign’s claim that she did nothing unusual. Colin Powell comes in for some sharp criticism himself:

It was particularly critical of former secretary of state Colin Powell — who has acknowledged publicly that he used a personal email account to conduct business — concluding that he too failed to follow department policy designed to comply with public-record laws….

Which, of course, doesn’t make it right, boss. But it does mean Secretary Clinton wasn’t acting outside of the norm.

So what I want to know is, is this as bad as it gets? If so, this seems survivable — “not an appropriate method” is tepid stuff. Sounds kind of like Well, it wasn’t the best way, but…

Or is there worse stuff to come, stuff that will cripple her as a candidate? If there is, I wish it would hurry so that the Democrats will have time to replace her with someone who can win. Because Trump must be stopped….

Are Graham, Bush and Romney just resigned to Hillary now?

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So are the erstwhile voices of GOP reason utterly resigned to a President Hillary Clinton?

So are the erstwhile voices of GOP reason now utterly resigned to a President Hillary Clinton?

I can see no other reasonable explanation for Lindsey Graham raising money for Ted Cruz, and Jeb Bush endorsing him.

As recently as Feb. 25 — that’s less than a month, people — our senior senator was saying “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” That’s how utterly unthinkable supporting Ted Cruz was.

That was in the same speech in which he said “My party’s gone bats— crazy,” since it was narrowing its presidential choices to Cruz and Donald Trump. There was plenty of evidence to support his assertion.

But it must be catching, because Sen. Graham is now supporting and raising funds for the unthinkable Cruz, apparently operating on the principle that Trump is even less thinkable.

Now we have this:

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush endorsed Ted Cruz for president on Wednesday, the latest sign that the Texas senator is eagerly seeking to unite Republican Party leaders behind his campaign in an attempt to stop Donald Trump.

Securing the Bush endorsement is a coup for Cruz, who may not be well-liked by many GOP colleagues in Washington, but can now boast the support of a key political family and its vast, unrivaled donor network….

And that follows on this even greater outrage, offering clear evidence that Mitt Romney may have gone the most “bats___” of all:

First Romney recorded robocalls for Marco Rubio, then he hit the campaign trail with John Kasich. Now just a week later, he’s urging voters in Utah and Arizonanot to vote for the Ohio governor in a Cruz campaign robocall. “This is a time for Republicans across the spectrum to unite behind Ted. He is the only Republican candidate who can defeat Donald Trump,” Romney says in the message, according to Politico. “And at this point, a vote for John Kasich is a vote for Donald Trump.”

Romney said last week that he intends to vote for Cruz in Utah’s caucuses on Tuesday, but his allies stressed that he wasn’t endorsing the Texas senator. On Facebook, Romney explained that he likes Kasich and would have voted for him in Ohio, “but a vote for Governor Kasich in future contests makes it extremely likely that Trumpism would prevail.” There was a time when saying you intend to vote for a particular candidate and urging others not to vote for anyone else would be called an endorsement, but that’s not how things work in 2016….

Gentlemen, it is clear that you have but one honorable choice at this point, given that Trump and Cruz are still what Graham accurately said they were back in January — a choice between “being shot or poisoned:” Get behind John Kasich with all your might. Work your networks to try to get friendly delegates to the convention, to support him on the ballots after Trump fails on the first.

So what if he’s coming in third in most states? That’s a whole lot better than you supposed exemplars of the party, Lindsey and Jeb, managed to do when you were running. Do you really, truly, not stand for anything?

Have some self-respect. Get behind an honorable candidate who doesn’t make you retch when you think of him being president. At the very least, strengthen his hand so that even if he can’t get nominated, there’s a rational person in better position to help determine who does.

Other sincere, mainstream Republicans — ones with less high profiles — have had no trouble doing this. What’s your problem?

Perhaps you should just come out and acknowledge that you are resigned to Hillary Clinton being elected. Because that seems the logical outcome of the courses you’re pursuing, supporting a candidate you cannot stand for the nomination.

Thoughts on last night’s Univision debate?

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These things are wearing me out. And there’s another one tonight!!!

I only Tweeted once during the whole thing:

I’ve decided that what I like least in these debates is the audience cheering and going “Woooo!” The candidates just aren’t that exciting…

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) March 10, 2016

You know what I mean? Last night, it got sounding like one of those reality/talent shows that I could almost tolerate if not for the constant shrieking of the crowd. Those audiences exercise no judgment whatsoever. They scream at exactly the same volume and pitch for every performer. I’ll never understand people like that, or how other people can listen to them.

At least the howling last night was variable. Apparently it was the fans of Hillary and Bernie cheering whatever was said.

I like debates with rules against applause. Actually, I wouldn’t mind applause if it were impartial — if the audience cheered only when either candidate said something really good. But you know that the level of hollering is purely a matter of who managed to pack the room with more of his or her own followers. Which means that it’s just meaningless noise.

Aside from that, there were only two parts of the debate I liked, both from Hillary:

When she admitted that she is lacking in political gifts, especially compared to her husband and President Obama. So true, so it’s good that she knows it.
When she started riffing on Trump’s wall in his terms, going on about how beautiful it would be, etc. I like when pols make jokes that work…

That was about it.

Which would you prefer as president: Trump or Underwood?

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PrezHouseOfCardsAriailW

Robert Ariail has proposed it in a cartoon, as a joke.

But as an alternative to, say, Donald Trump, would you accept the devious scoundrel Frank Underwood as president?

Robert also posed the question with regard to Hillary Clinton, and go ahead and address that if you choose.

But I’m more interested with the conundrum on the GOP side, where the dynamic is entirely different. Whatever you think of her, Hillary is pretty middle-of-the-road among Democrats — members of that party won’t have an identity crisis if she is their nominee. “Anybody but Hillary” isn’t really a thing on that side.

It’s over on the Republican side that we see serious people considering deals with the devil.

We’ve already seen Lindsey Graham, who like everyone else in the Senate utterly despises Ted Cruz, say that it might be necessary to embrace the Texan in a last-ditch effort to stop the disaster of Trump. Even though he has described Cruz, accurately, as “toxic.”

So why not Underwood? Think about it: Does he advocate any horrible policies? Not so I can recall (although y’all might remind me of some dealbreakers.) Basically, he’s a thoroughly rotten, ruthless individual when it comes to seizing and keeping power. But as long as the policies were relatively benign, would that not make him preferable to someone who is both personally and in policy terms unthinkable?

Saying that runs against my own inclinations. Over the years I’ve increasingly come to care less about people’s specific policy proposals and more about their character. That’s because no one can predict what will really arise once the person’s in office — the candidate’s promises may become impractical, or ill-advised, based on unforeseen circumstances. I look for someone who I trust to make good decisions in the face of the unanticipated.

And it occurs to me that maybe, maybe we could expect ol’ F.U. — who is a pretty smart guy, aside from all his character defects — to act wisely and responsibly, if only because he does love power so much, and therefore would not want to screw up and lose political support.

Whereas we know that Donald Trump doesn’t know wise policy from a hole in the ground. Even if he were trying to do the right thing just to look good, he wouldn’t know how.

Thoughts?

Frank Underwood

Mia McLeod trashes Identity Politics

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Sometimes Rep. Mia McLeod loses me with her rhetoric. But hey, I — or some other grumpy heterosexual white guy — could have written this, from a missive she sent out Saturday:

A reporter asked me whether I chose race over gender when I supported Sen. Obama over Sen. Clinton in 2008. But he didn’t stop there. Next, he wanted to know whether I’m supporting Hillary now because she’s a woman.

Really?

His questions weren’t meant to be offensive. They just were.

I didn’t choose race then or gender now. I chose the person I believed to be the best candidate…the one whose vision and life experiences resonate most with me…the one whose passion and purpose move and inspire me.

So why are my choices presumably defined by or limited to race and gender?

If race trumps everything, shouldn’t I be down with Dr. Ben Carson, whose neurosurgical skills I’ve always admired and respected, but whose politics I can neither understand nor appreciate? Should I believe he’s the right “prescription for America,” simply because he’s the only black man who’s running?

And when it comes to gender, am I expected to support any woman who runs for office…just because she’s a woman?

If that’s the general sentiment, I can see how we got Nikki Haley….twice….

So how is Mia is trashing Identity Politics just as I would do? I guess because our “life experiences resonate.”

You see, we were both born in Bennettsville…

Any last thoughts to share on S.C. primaries?

Anybody at all excited about SC Democratic primary?

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I asked sort of the same question last week about the GOP contest. But this week it feels even more appropriate.

The Democratic primary is so low-energy that I’d be surprised if I get comments exceeding single digits on this post.

We know, or think we know, it’s going to be relatively low turnout.

Bernie is blowing SC off, and Bernie has been the only source of excitement on the Democratic side.

The campaign has seemed relatively invisible — probably because the one candidate actually running here can only be so many places at once. But it may also be because I’m a white guy who voted last week — if you’re not a black Democrat, that Hillary isn’t trying to seek you out.

Those black Democrats aren’t going to get as excited as they did in 2008, no matter what she says or does.

In fact, probably the one person who has any adrenaline going at all is Hillary Clinton herself, who has to win big here, or else. And that adrenaline probably isn’t all that great, since it seems that is going to happen. Although she might occasionally wake up in the middle of the night, filled with unreasoning fear that it won’t happen.

Anyway, is anyone else seeing this differently?

Cruz, of all people, has put out possibly my favorite political ad of all time

Where the Boys Are: Gloria Steinem redefines feminism

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I might have to stop quoting Madeleine Albright.

Y’all know how I like to cite her “indispensable nation” explanation of America’s role in the world.

Well, after she said this, in the context of supporting Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, I may have to give the Albright quotes a rest:

While introducing Mrs. Clinton at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, Ms. Albright, 78, the first female secretary of state, talked about the importance of electing a woman to the country’s highest office. In a dig at the “revolution” that Mr. Sanders, 74, often speaks of, she said the first female commander in chief would be a true revolution. And she scolded any woman who felt otherwise.

“We can tell our story of how we climbed the ladder, and a lot of you younger women think it’s done,” Ms. Albright said of the broader fight for women’s equality. “It’s not done. There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”…

Yikes. Really? You think hell is organized that way? Huh.

Then there’s what Gloria Steinem had to say on the subject:

Ms. Steinem, 81, one of the most famous spokeswomen of the feminist movement, took the sentiment a step further on Friday in an interview with the talk show host Bill Maher. Explaining that women tend to become more active in politics as they become older, she suggested that younger women were backing Mr. Sanders just so they could meet young men.

“When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie,’ ” Ms. Steinem said….

Yikes.

You know, over the decades, I’ve often had to get people to explain to me what feminism actually is. Is it that we’re supposed to appreciate that women are different and value them as they are instead of uphold masculine modes of being as the ideal? Or is it that we’re supposed to believe that there are no differences? Sometimes it seems it’s one, sometimes the other.

That’s confusing enough (and apparently, the answer is “either,” depending on the brand of feminism to which you subscribe). But now, I’m definitely going to have to go back to Remedial Consciousness Raising, circa 1970, because Gloria Steinem, who I thought was supposed to embody feminism, has really thrown me for a loop…

Last night’s Democratic debate in Charleston

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Hillary Clinton sitting on the COLD State House steps this morning with Todd Rutherford, awaiting her turn to speak.

Well, I meant to write today about the Democratic presidential candidates at the King Day at the Dome observance, but technical problems intervened. I watched some of it (via WIS) on my laptop and iPad, but the signal kept getting interrupted — both wifi and 4G.

Finally, when Hillary Clinton was done and Bernie Sanders had started, and I could see him but hear nothing, I put on my coat (and hat, and gloves, and scarf, remembering the bitter cold of a similar such rally eight years ago) and walked the four blocks or so to the State House, and… it was over. I walked onto the grounds against the flow of uniformed Secret Service officers hurriedly leaving.

I saw Sheriff Leon Lott, and he told me I hadn’t missed much, in terms of what the candidates had to say. He said if you heard them last night, you heard what they said today.

So let’s talk about the debate last night.

My quick takeaways…

Most who watched who are not Hillary Clinton supporters saw Bernie Sanders as the winner. And that’s probably true, partly because he stayed on message and partly because ex-Sen. Clinton was so obviously, deliberately lashing out at him, in light of the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Note that term, “deliberately.” Everything Hillary Clinton does is so calculated, it’s one of the reasons a lot of people like Bernie, and a lot of other people wish Joe Biden had run.
Saying Bernie won does not mean I liked what he had to say. The raw paranoia of it is so disturbing — the whole Occupy Wall Street narrative about a few billionaires running the country (when anyone who looks around would see nobody’s running the country; it’s kind of on autopilot). How do people believe that stuff? Just because you aren’t doing well (and hey, I can identify with that) doesn’t mean that there’s some conspiracy against you. It just doesn’t. It’s like… when I was laid off from the paper, I wasn’t mad at anybody. The world changed, and the business model that supported newspapers collapsed under them. Nobody did it on purpose.
O’Malley did a nice job, and got to play the reasonable guy on the stage a number of times when Hillary was lashing out at Bernie and Bernie was spouting about super PACs, the wicked banks and billionaires. But it’s over for him.
I felt for Hillary when the moderator asked, “If Obama couldn’t bring the country together, how could you?” I mean, that’s a cruel question to ask someone who is Republicans’ favorite punching bag (as they are hers). He might as well have added, “… of all people.” But as she said, she has reached out and tried to work with the Lindsey Grahams of the Senate. No one would call it a core strength of hers, though.

I guess that’s enough to get some conversation going. I’ll close with this, which I tweeted when the debate was over:

Smart money would say that, when all is said and done, Hillary Clinton will win the election. How are all of y’all feeling about that?

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) January 18, 2016

Joel Lourie had asked me essentially the same question earlier in the evening, after I said I expected her to win the election. My answer? “Not all that great.” All the reasons why I preferred Obama on the Democratic side eight years ago are still present, only this time there’s no Obama.

That was, for me, the no-lose election, since I liked both Obama and McCain a lot. But this time? I like Hillary on foreign affairs, and I like that she’d veto the GOP’s perpetual attempts to scuttle the ACA. But she does not inspire enthusiasm.

And it’s looking increasingly like the sensible options on the Republican side have the odds stacked against them.

So I’m nostalgic for 2008. Maybe someone will inspire me before it’s over. But the chances of that don’t look great at the moment.

Could Bernie Sanders be viable in SC? The gut says ‘no,’ but there are now reasons to consider the possibility

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Something just struck me, in the middle of a conversation with a longtime colleague about the upcoming primaries…

After a period several months ago when it looked like Hillary Clinton was in real trouble, and Joe Biden was doing his Hamlet routine (to run… or not to run), the once and future front-runner regained control, and Joe stayed out. Consequently, since that point in the fall, we’ve been back to assuming Hillary is inevitable. Especially in South Carolina, where Democrats tend to be a bit less, you know, socialistic.

But consider this…

She and Bernie Sanders are pretty much neck-and-neck in both Iowa and New Hampshire at the moment. That kind of mo is very good for Sanders this late in the game, and horrible for Clinton.

It has people such as Chris Cillizza at The Fix saying:

Close your eyes for a minute and imagine it’s Feb. 10. In the past nine days, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) has beaten his Democratic presidential challenger Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. There won’t be another vote for 10 more days (Nevada), and then it’ll be another week until South Carolina, the last of the big four early states, votes.

That scenario would be a total nightmare for Clinton. Period. It’s also a lot more likely to go from fantasy to reality than most people — including most establishment Democrats — understand….

Which raises the question: Could Bernie Sanders come from way behind to win the South Carolina primary?

The temptation is to say NO WAY. Democrats here tend to love them some Clintons. (Except if they are named Dick Harpootlian, or James Smith, or… you know what? There were a bunch of people looking around for alternatives, up until the time Biden definitely said no.)

But think about eight years ago: South Carolina was Clinton country then, too. There were a lot of black Democrats who thought the idea of Barack Obama as nominee sounded good, but they didn’t believe in it as a real possibility.

Then he won Iowa. Which meant white folks would vote for him, despite many doubts before that.

But then Hillary won New Hampshire, barely, after much sweat and some tears.

And yet the Iowa result was enough to seal the deal for Obama, and he picked up the further momentum he needed right here in SC.

What if… and as Cillizza says, this is now less crazy than it may sound… Sanders won both Iowa and New Hampshire?

It… could… happen.

Sure, the dynamics would be different. That rush of good feeling about maybe nominating the first black president would be absent.

But it’s worth thinking about now…

Jaime Harrison talking to Rachel Maddow about SC Democratic Party

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This clip, brought to my attention today by the state Democratic Party, features MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow talking to SC Democratic chair Jaime Harrison during her visit to SC for the debate Friday night.

This is interesting because you see how the state party chair opens up about his challenges when he has a sympathetic ear who nevertheless knows how to ask pointed questions.

As long as he’s got that ear, he makes his pitch through Maddow to the national party for what he terms a Democratic Southern Strategy. He’d like to see the national party get as serious about winning back the South as Harry Dent et al. were about taking it away from them in the 1960s.

He also talks about his biggest challenge — the lack of a bench here in SC. It’s hard to win back anything when you have a scarcity of strong candidates.

Oh, and about that Democratic debate the other night — did you watch it? I confess I didn’t even try. Maybe it’s wrong of me, but I sort of lost interest when Biden said he wouldn’t run, and Hillary just stomped all over her opposition in the previous debate — and the GOP failed to lay a glove on her in the Benghazi hearing. If she gets in serious trouble again (like, email-server trouble or worse), I might get interested again. Until then, we know whom the Democrats are going to nominate…

SC Democrats are becoming what SC Republicans once were

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This news from The Hill:

Clinton holds huge lead over Sanders in South Carolina: https://t.co/7bKs0PD823 pic.twitter.com/lAM65b153W

— The Hill (@thehill) November 10, 2015

… is hardly news to us in South Carolina. We knew that since Joe Biden (who had a lot of support among party regulars here) said definitively that he would not run, Hillary has had our primary pretty much sewn up.

But it made me realize something.

For a generation, South Carolina Republicans were known for always choosing their party’s eventual nominee in their presidential preference primaries. It’s one reason why the nation paid so much attention to what happened here.

Then, in 2012, they went nuts and chose Newt Gingrich over the guy everyone knew would be the eventual nominee. This year, they’re gaga over Donald Trump and Ben Carson, and if either of those guys is the eventual nominee, the national Republican Party might as well have a going-out-of-business sale.

But the Democrats in South Carolina are showing the centrist conservatism for which their rivals were once known, lining up dutifully behind the establishment candidate who is ordained to pull the sword from the stone.

Maybe in the future, the nation’s pundits will watch our endangered Democrats as closely as they have watched the GOP here in the past…

Really, Trey? THAT’s the look you’re going with?

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I was out of pocket yesterday playing in a charity golf tournament (to benefit Healthy Learners) out at Fort Jackson, which means I probably had a better time than you did. (How did I do? Well, the official score was 70, which sounds great until you learn that it was captain’s choice — which, for the uninitiated, means that we had four tries at every shot — and that was the team score. When I left, the leading team had come in with a 56, and we were tied for last place. But it was a beautiful day, and we had a good time.)

But while I didn’t blog exactly, I did mini-blog and bit, and this was my most popular Tweet of the day, garnering a number of reTweets and favorites:

Time’s running out: Can Trey Gowdy figure out what to do with his hair by tomorrow’s big hearing? pic.twitter.com/3vzggeG2Fe

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) October 21, 2015

You may have noticed that South Carolina’s own Rep. Gowdy has made almost as many attempts to do different things with his hair as Eric Clapton, only with less success. I am not the only one to compare the above look to Oswald Cobblepot, a.k.a. The Penquin, on “Gotham:”

@BradWarthen @MikeFlack1 Looks a little like Penguin from the show Gotham. pic.twitter.com/mkgALVZ7pN — Brian Flack (@Fliggity) October 21, 2015

Others have mentioned Draco Malfoy, possibly after seeing this particular do.

You might be tempted to say that he’d look better if he just grew it out some, particularly on the sides. But then you would take that back upon seeing this. And let’s not even get started on this one…

The most normal he has ever looked was when he went with the neoclassical Brutus cut, as they called it when it came into fashion in the early 19th century. Or perhaps we should call it the Cassius look, as in:

Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.

Maybe that’s why he abandoned it. He didn’t want Kevin McCarthy talking about how “yond Trey hath dim’d the star of Hillary Macbeth…”

But when the big day came, what did he do? He whipped out the Butch Wax and went with the kewpie doll look:

It was Clinton, then Sanders, O’Malley, Webb and Chaffee

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I think maybe, just maybe, this was on CNN.

As I said last night:

What have I learned? That it’s no fluke that Hillary and Bernie are the leading candidates. They’re both WAY better at this than the other 3

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) October 14, 2015

Hillary did the best job, Bernie was second, then O’Malley (a DISTANT third), then Webb, with Chaffee dead last…

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) October 14, 2015

To elaborate a bit:

Everyone seems to agree that HIllary Clinton towered over the others. That was certainly my impression, although I don’t think her performance was as flawless as some say: She started out hesitantly, just for a second or two, on more than one occasion — but then quickly recovered. Her best moments were when she demonstrated the self-assurance and courage to stand to the right of her opponents — defending capitalism (staking out the moderate position that capitalism is a glorious thing, although we should stand ready to address its worst excesses), and then being the one total grownup on the stage on the subject of Edward Snowden.
Sanders showed why he’s wowing the disaffected left out there at his rallies, although I’m not sure whether the chicken or egg came first — is his delivery so practiced and effective because of all those successful rallies, or are the rallies successful because his delivery is that good. Anderson Cooper was of course completely right that in the extremely unlikely event that Sanders were nominated, the Republican attack ad writes itself (I hadn’t even known about the “honeymoon in the Soviet Union” part). But he remains a far more attractive candidate, based on the debate performance, than the other three guys on the stage.
Next, we take a big step down to No. 3, Martin O’Malley. I honestly don’t remember much that he said now, but I do remember the sort of supercilious, holier-than-thou tone he had when he said a lot of it. All I remember right now was his mantra about Glass-Steagall, which I suppose he kept mentioning in order to run down Chaffee, who really needed no help on that score; he was scuttling his chances just fine on his own. Anderson Cooper dramatically underlined O’Malley’s weakness as a debater by doing what O’Malley so glaringly failed to do: taking a few words to explain what Glass-Steagall was.
I had really expected more from Jim Webb. Maybe because he was a military guy and once served in a Republican administration, I guess I thought he’d be more UnParty than the others or something. But man, was he lame. He comes in as far behind O’Malley as O’Malley does behind Sanders. Was anyone looking at a stopwatch? If so, just how much time did he spend whining about not being allowed enough time? Oh, sure, you call time on ME, but you just let all the other kids go on all day, yadda-yadda… Cooper lectured him about it (another instance of the host presuming to correct the candidates, which was presumptuous as all get-out, but in the two cases I mention here, they really deserved it). Then there was that weird smile when he said that the Vietnamese who threw the grenade that wounded him wasn’t around to comment. What was that? And was that anecdote in any way relevant to the question?
Then, in a category all on his own, there was Chaffee. Is he always like this? If so, how has he ever been elected to anything? His answer to almost every question was something like, “Hey, I was always against going into Iraq,” as though he couldn’t think of anything to say about this decade. And on the Glass-Steagall thing… Wow. Aw, come on, guys, cut me a break on that! I was new in town, my Dad had just died, I was this dumb kid, and it was my very first vote! Don’t you get a mulligan on your first vote?… Really? That’s your answer? You have your big moment on the national stage, you’ve had all these years to think about it, and that’s your answer? As someone I read this morning said, at least “Oops” was short.

That’s enough to get a discussion started. Your thoughts?

“Secretary Clinton, do you want to respond?” “No.”

Hillary now blows to wherever the wind may take her

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Wow, Hillary Clinton is really getting desperate.

She is so anxious to placate the emotional left of her party that she has abandoned the Pacific trade agreement she promoted until recently. The WSJ summed up her conversion this way:

Mrs. Clinton was asked on PBS’s NewsHour whether the trade deal is “something you could support?”

Her reply: “What I know about it, as of today, I am not in favor of what I have learned about it. And there is one other element I want to make, because I think it’s important. Trade agreements don’t happen in a vacuum, and in order for us to have a competitive economy in the global marketplace, there are things we need to do here at home that help raise wages. And the Republicans have blocked everything President Obama tried to do on that front. So for the larger issues, and then what I know, and again, I don’t have the text, we don’t yet have all the details, I don’t believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set.”

So she hasn’t seen the agreement’s text, and can’t speak to the details, but she’s against the deal because Republicans who haven’t held the White House in seven years haven’t raised wages.

Mrs. Clinton previously called the Pacific pact the “gold standard in trade agreements,” and as recently as her memoir in 2014 she praised it as “important for American workers who would benefit from competing on a more level playing field.” At State she took a leading role in promoting the pact and in January 2013 said that “I think the Trans-Pacific Partnership is one way that could really enhance our relationship” with Japan. She supported Nafta and she backed the trade deal with South Korea, but now she’s had a change of heart—or should we say soul….

Basically, she preemptively dropped this hot potato before she even had a good grip on it. But the fact that this agreement is a hot potato shows how far gone her party is.

People go on about how the Republicans have lost their way, being held hostage by the flakes on its fringe, and they’re absolutely right to do so.

Well, the Democrats have the same problem. They have their own Know-Nothings, with notions about trade and growth that seem to have been drafted by Occupy Wall Street, and leading candidates are in their thrall.

It’s been awhile since the party has had sensible Third Way leadership with names such as… Clinton.

Does high-resolution digital photography call for a new journalistic ethic?

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This is a tough topic for a couple of reasons. First, it ventures into the sensitive area that Donald Trump stomped all over with his gross comments about Carly Fiorina — the area in which women are unfairly judged by their appearance.

Second, I can’t really show you what I’m talking about on a standard-resolution PC. You sort of need the Retina display of a late-model iPad. Since I can’t see what I’m talking about at my end on this machine, I doubt that you can, either. (You can sort of, but not quite, see what I mean if you click on the above image, then click again to enlarge it. But it’s not the same.)

But I thought I’d try to raise it anyway.

Over the weekend, I was scrolling through the stories in the Washington Post app on my iPad, and paused on this story (at least, that’s what includes this photo when I look back — I think originally it was something else) about Hillary Clinton, which featured the above photo full-screen. And my first thought was, “That’s not fair.”

The resolution in this moderate close-up was just ridiculously good. It’s not just that it showed every line in the face of a 67-year-old woman in an unguarded moment, unlit by a smile or any other sort of expression. It’s that I could practically see the grains in her makeup. It was just way, way too up close and personal.

And it occurred to me that, had I been the editor in charge of preparing that story for tablet publication, I would have paused, and thought, “Don’t we have something a little less intrusive?” Not something flattering, necessarily, just something neutral.

Something else occurred to me this morning when I was looking around for a photo of a male candidate where you could see the TV makeup on him with this kind of detail — and it occurred to me that I have not seen a photo like that anywhere. There are closeups, such as the one below of a sweaty Bernie Sanders — but none with obvious makeup, which we all know they sometimes wear. (And I was looking for that because I think it was the fact that I could see all of her makeup in such detail that made it seem so invasive.)

I don’t know where I’m going with this, except that photography as detailed as what we have today with high-end digital cameras — and sometimes just with iPhones — raises new questions of editorial propriety.

The last couple of weekends, I’ve been digitizing some old slides from back in the ’70s, and I’ve been scanning them at a rather ridiculous resolution — 4800 dpi — in order not to lose any detail. And I’ve learned something — there just wasn’t that much detail in 35mm photography, at least not like what I’ve grown accustomed to with even garden-variety digital images.

And occasionally, this extreme increase in detail raises questions about how much is enough, and whether there is such a thing as too much…

Tenenbaum: Using private email account was clearly against federal rules

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Another little contact report…

Talking with Inez Tenenbaum this morning about her support of Joe Biden, I changed the subject to Hillary Clinton and asked, somewhat facetiously, whether Inez used two email accounts when she was in Washington as head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

“No,” she said. “I was told emphatically… that all federal business had to be conducted on federal email addresses.”

“We had lawyers that did nothing but ethics” at her agency, and they let her know “we could not use our own private email.”

And if by any chance she did use private email for public business, it would be treated as public — she was told such communications would all be subject to Freedom of Information requests.

When I asked why she thought Hillary Clinton doesn’t seem to have gotten the same message, she declined to go there.

I had called Inez because she has been named to co-chair (along with Sen. Gerald Malloy) the Draft Biden effort in South Carolina.

She had no news on that front. “I don’t know” whether he’s going to run or not. “It could go either way.”

But she’s ready to support him if he does. And in explaining why, she talks more about a personal connection than anything having to do with politics or policy. “He has been a friend of ours, and we have had a close relationship with him.”

While she cordially knows Hillary Clinton as well, she just has “a much closer relationship” with Biden. “And I just have so much respect for him” as someone who has “serve the country for 40 years.”

If you’ll recall, the last time around (in 2007) she came out early for Barack Obama, while her husband Samuel was backing Biden. Samuel is not in a position now to endorse candidates because of his job, but as an attorney in private practice, Inez has no such barriers to contend with.

I asked whether she’s gotten any pushback from the Clinton campaign. No, she said. “I got lots of calls from the Hillary people early on” seeking her support. But even though there was no serious anticipation at that point that Biden would get in, she said she felt an obligation to him to wait until he said definitively whether he was running or not.

As to whether he should, “One part of me wants him to get into it… one part of me understands” why he might decide not to go through that grinder.

I asked her to keep me in mind if she hears anything…

OK, there’s ONE reason I might prefer Hillary to Joe Biden

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Generally, I’ve been happy, even a little excited, to hear that Joe Biden might challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Part of it is the unsavory side of the presumed front-runner that her email mess reveals, day after day. Actually, not so much “reveals” as “reminds us of.” We are reminded of the control freak, the Nixonian figure who can’t see legitimate criticism as anything other than another attempt by her enemies in the “vast right-wing conspiracy” to trump up a way to do her in.

Whereas I’ve always liked Joe. He was my fave on the Democratic side in the 2008 campaign until he dropped out. It’s hard not to like Biden; he’s just so chock-full of the best kind of Joe-ness. (What is Joe-ness? Oh, it’s many things. One example: Earlier this morning I was talking to Samuel Tenenbaum, and told him to say hi to Inez and tell her I want to talk with her about Biden. That caused Samuel to tell me about Biden calling him to wish him a happy birthday a couple of weeks back. They got to talking about books they had read recently. Samuel, who loves to share books with friends, mentioned he had wanted to send a book to the veep but couldn’t get past his staff. According to Samuel, Biden said, “My staff and the Secret Service can be a pain in the ass.” That’s one type of Joe-ness.)

However it turns out, I’ll be happy to see him get into it, if he does.

But… all of that said, I read a column this morning in The State that reminds me of at least one reason I might prefer Hillary as a commander-in-chief.

It was by Doyle McManus of the L.A. Times. In part, it said:

Biden and Clinton aren’t far apart when it comes to domestic issues, but that’s decidedly not true when it comes to international affairs.

Clinton was on the hawkish side of Obama’s team. She supported a big surge of U.S. troops into Afghanistan in 2009; Obama opted for a smaller surge, with a time limit. In 2011, she called for U.S. military intervention in Libya; Obama went along. In 2012, she urged him to send military aid to Syrian rebels; Obama resisted (after Clinton left office, he changed his mind).

Biden was on the opposite end of all three debates. He didn’t think adding U.S. military force in Afghanistan would solve the country’s problems. He didn’t think Libya was central enough to U.S. interests to justify airstrikes. And he was skeptical about the idea of arming Syrian rebels.

The two even disagreed over whether the president should launch the secret 2011 raid in Pakistan that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Clinton “concluded that this was a rare opportunity and believed we should seize it,” then-CIA Director Leon Panetta wrote in his memoir. “Biden argued that we still did not have enough confidence that Bin Laden was in the compound [where the CIA believed he was living], and he came out firmly in favor of waiting for more information.”

There’s a clear pattern here. Each time, Clinton argued in favor of U.S. intervention. Each time, Biden was a skeptic, warning Obama that the risks outweighed the potential gains….

This piece reminds me that one of the thing I’ve always liked about Hillary is that she is on “the hawkish side of Obama’s team.” It’s not that I’m such a hawk, as many of you believe. It’s just that I’m definitely, without question, to the hawkish side of the current POTUS. More than that, she understands America’s role in the world, that the United States is, as Madeleine Albright used to say, “the indispensable nation.”

And Joe even tried to put the brakes on the Abbottabad operation? OK, it wasn’t unreasonable to want to be more certain about Osama bin Laden being in that compound. Anyone would. Certainty is a nice thing to have. But as it turned out, Obama made the right call in going ahead, and it stands as one of the wisest decisions of his presidency.

So where do we stand here? Definitely, I prefer Joe on a personal level — he passes the “would you want to have a beer with him” test with flying colors. But there’s a lot to be said for Hillary’s approach to national and collective security — which is, you know, kinda important when picking a POTUS.

The bin Laden mission: Biden was the cautious one.

bradwarthen.com

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OK, there’s ONE reason I might prefer Hillary to Joe Biden