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Long viewed as an ally by Wall Street, likely 2016 presidential contender Hillary Clinton has increasingly been taking banks and big business to task while on the campaign trail for Democrats across the country. Continue reading #Clinton Sounding More Like #Warren as 2016 Nears→
In the November issue of Harper’s magazine, Doug Henwood argues that Hillary Clinton, if elected president, would do little to assuage liberals’ disappointment in President Barack Obama. This is how Henwood sums up the case for Hillary’s candidacy in 2016: “She has experience, she’s a woman, and it’s her turn.” But, he says, “it’s hard to find any political substance in her favor.”
The former secretary of state, and probable candidate for president, outlines her foreign-policy doctrine. She says this about President Obama’s: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. In an interview in February, the president told me that “when you have a professional army … fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict—the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”
“As a campaigner, Hillary can do a shot and a beer better than Barack Obama can,” Shapiro says. So there’s that.
As a reporter and columnist for Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, USAToday, Esquire, Salon, and other publications, Walter Shapiro has covered nine presidential elections and the nation’s politics for four decades. He is currently a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and a lecturer in political science at Yale while he finishes a book about his great-uncle, a vaudevillian and con man who once swindled Hitler.
Shapiro is also an accomplished Hillary-ologist, having first interviewed Hillary Clinton in the Arkansas governor’s mansion for Time in September 1992. In early May, Shapiro sat down with Prospect editor-at-large Harold Meyerson to talk about a question he’s internally debated for years: On balance, would a Hillary Clinton candidacy and presidency be a good or bad thing for the liberal cause?
Hillary Clinton has a unique asset if she runs for president — Bill Clinton, who presided over a booming economy and an era of sunny Democratic centrism.
But she also faces a singular challenge: convincing voters who are skeptical of some Wall Street-friendly policies during his tenure that she can connect with their concerns at a time when the wealth gap is massive between the very rich and everyone else.
After a decade and a half of being tethered to her husband’s record, Hillary Clinton established her own political identity as senator and as secretary of state. But a string of questions from interviewers during her book tour about her husband’s tenure as president underscores the ongoing issue she will face reconciling their past with her future. Continue reading A Clinton approach for angrier times | POLITICO→
The former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has said Edward Snowden should have the right to launch a legal and public defence of his decision to leak top-secret documents if he returns to the United States.
Over at The Washington Post, the usually sensible Greg Sargent endorses the notion that divisions among Democrats are “mostly trumped up.” The tension between the Wall Street wing of the party and the Warren (as in Elizabeth) wing is an overblown fiction of a press corps desperate for some action.
It’s true that the prior divisions on social issues have dissipated, as liberals have swept the field. Obama’s halting attempts to wean the US from its foreign wars have garnered widespread support. And on economics, Sargent argues that Democrats “largely agree on the menu of policy responses to the economic problems faced by poor, working and middle class Americans — a higher minimum wage, universal pre-K, higher taxes on the wealthy to fund a stronger safety net, job creation and job training — whatever the broader rhetorical umbrella is being used.” Even Hillary says she agrees with Thomas Piketty that extreme inequality is a “threat” to our democracy. Continue reading Economic Populism at Heart of Emerging Debate Among Democrats | Bill Moyers→
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