H4a news Clips [April 11, 2015] Summary of Today’s news


NRA convention becomes Hillary Clinton roast [John McCormick, Bloomberg Politics, April 10, 2015]



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NRA convention becomes Hillary Clinton roast [John McCormick, Bloomberg Politics, April 10, 2015]
Prospective 2016 Republican presidential candidates and the leaders of the National Rifle Association focused more on Hillary Clinton than President Barack Obama on Friday as they criticized their gun-control views and other policies.
NASHVILLE—Prospective 2016 Republican presidential candidates and the leaders of the National Rifle Association focused more on Hillary Clinton than President Barack Obama on Friday as they criticized their gun-control views and other policies.
"We're onto her. She's been coming after us for decades," NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre told the group's annual convention. "Hillary Clinton hasn't met a gun control bill she couldn't support."
In a sprawling ballroom at the Music City Center convention center, LaPierre took members of the nation's largest and most powerful gun organization on a stroll down memory lane of Clinton controversies, saying the former secretary of state, senator and first lady "has more 'gates' than a south Texas cattle ranch."
"Hillary Clinton has more 'gates' than a south Texas cattle ranch."
NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre
Clinton is poised to announce her second bid for the presidency as early as this weekend.
"We will stand and we will fight with everything we're got and in 2016, by God, we will elect our next great president of the United States of America and it will not be Hillary Rodham Clinton," LaPierre said.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who announced his candidacy last month, made a reference to a cannon involved with the Texas Revolution in the 1830s, as he noted Clinton's pending entry into the race.
"This weekend, Hillary Clinton is announcing for president," he said. "Well, I'll tell you, if Hillary Clinton is going to join with Barack Obama and the gun-grabbers that come after our guns, then what I say is come and take it."
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush called the Second Amendment "the original Homeland Security Act," as he  pitched his record on guns.
“I’ve been in the trenches with you. And when I was governor, we were passing laws and creating protections for gun-owners that set the bar for other states to follow," he said. “I will match my record against anyone else’s when it comes to the support and defense of the Second Amendment."
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida kept his criticism directed at Obama. "Strong defenses, both on the national and the personal level, are means of preventing violence, not of promoting it," he said. "Weakness, on the other hand, is the friend of danger and weakness is the enemy of peace. President Obama has been a weak president. The only thing President Obama has strengthened over the last six years has been his own, unlawful power."
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker criticized Obama's unsuccessful efforts to tighten gun regulations. "Mr. President, last time I checked, the Second Amendment is part of the Constitution," he said. "You don't get to pick and choose which part of the Constitution you like and which part you don't."
Walker said his support for the NRA and less restrictive gun laws isn't just because his state has a strong hunting heritage. "When we signed into law concealed carry, it was about freedom," he said.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, arrives at the podium.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, looking out onto the audience at the start of his remarks, made a Clinton reference as well. "I think all of us are what Hillary Clinton once called the 'vast right wing conspiracy,'” he joked.
Jindal called the NRA the "most effective civil rights organization" in the U.S. "It is our duty to not only exercise our freedoms, but to defend the freedoms of all Americans," he said.
Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is known for jogging with a firearm, told the gathering that he had "hung out the 'open for business' sign for gun manufactures." The best defense against crime is an "armed citizenry," he said.
Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon-turned-conservative-activist, sought to assure NRA members about a 2013 statement he made about semi-automatic weapons. "I've learned how to express myself better," he said. "I am extremely pro-Second Amendment."
Despite what he has seen on the streets and in emergency rooms, Carson said he remains solidly pro-gun. "I spent many a night operating on people with gunshot wounds to their heads," he said. "It is not nearly as horrible as having a population that is defenseless against a group of tyrants who have arms."
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee ended his speech with a "God bless the NRA," after arguing that guns are central to the nation's self-defense. "We will not disarm and America will never fall," he said. "It will not fall because we will not let it."
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina kept his focus on Obama, as he said that virtually all of the Republicans likely to run for president are supportive of gun rights. "The next time you vote for president, make sure they've at least run a lemonade stand, they're proud of their country in terms of being exceptional and they know somebody who owns a gun," he said.
In total, almost a dozen prospective Republican candidates spoke Friday afternoon, near the start of a three-day convention that organizers say will draw about 70,000. Absent were New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who weren't invited.
Christie, who once criticized the NRA after the group featured Obama's children in a video, received a marginal grade (C) from them before of his successful 2013 re-election.
Paul, who opposes gun control legislation and has been an outspoken on the Second Amendment, is in the midst of a four-state tour following his Tuesday presidential campaign announcement.
With the exception of Christie, nearly all of the prospective Republican candidates are opposed to new limits on the purchase or use of guns. Their NRA ratings range from A-plus to an A-minus.
The Hillary Clinton steamroller rumbles to life [Harry Enten, FiveThirtyEight, April 10, 2015]
Hillary Clinton boasts a historic lead in the 2016 Democratic primary.
Let’s do something a little unusual. Instead of going through all the reasons that Hillary Clinton is so likely to win the Democratic nomination (and she is) and then tucking a caveat-laden paragraph at the bottom of this article, let’s start with one big caveat:
Presidential elections aren’t baseball. They take place just once every four years, so we don’t have thousands of at-bats to analyze. Clinton, who will reportedly officially announce her campaign Sunday, could lose the primary. Perhaps there’s some scandal we’re unaware of. Perhaps she’ll have to drop out because of some health issue. Maybe Martin O’Malley will straight-up beat her; stranger things have … well, OK, maybe not.
Clinton’s primary campaign is by far the most dominant for a non-incumbent president since nominations began to be determined by caucuses and primaries in 1972. The best predictors we have all say Clinton is going to be the Democrats’ 2016 presidential nominee.1
Endorsements
Clinton has pretty much already won the endorsement primary, the all-important pre-voting race to lock up party establishment support.2 Last time she ran for president, Clinton lost the endorsement primary. By this point in the 2008 campaign, she had only one senator endorse her publicly. According to a CNNcount in February, Clinton has already secured endorsements from 27 of 46 Democratic senators. That’s a ton of support so early in the campaign.
Clinton’s strength is unique. Most years, the campaign is barely underway in early April. And in the years in which endorsements come quickly, elected officials usually wait at least until a candidate formally declares.
But here’s the more amazing thing about those 27 endorsements: That total would still be impressive even if no one else were to endorse Clinton. Only George W. Bush’s 2000 machine picked up more senator endorsements (33), and it took him the entire primary campaign. He didn’t reach 27 until November 1999. The only other two campaigns to come close to 27 were Bob Dole’s in 1996 and Al Gore’s in 2000; each picked up 26. Like Bush, Dole and Gore rolled over the competition.
Just as important as the number of endorsements is where they are coming from on the ideological spectrum. Clinton is earning endorsements from the left, center and right of the Democratic caucus. In this kernel density function of endorsers plotted against their congressional voting record, we see that the senators who have endorsed Clinton look ideologically very similar to those who haven’t (more negative scores are more liberal):
Unlike in 2008, Clinton has her left flank well-covered. She has the endorsement of liberal stalwarts such as Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren. Clinton also has the endorsement of moderate senators such as Joe Manchin and Claire McCaskill.
Polling
Clinton also has the most dominant poll numbers of any candidate at this point in the election cycle in the modern era. Early primary polling is not the be-all and end-all, but candidates who are polling very well across the board early tend to win their nominations. In an average of polls taken since the beginning of the year, Clinton is above 50 percent in Iowa, New Hampshire and nationally. No other non-incumbent in the modern era has done that in the first half of the year before the primaries began.
It’s only in Iowa where Clinton doesn’t have an outright claim to the strongest polling average in recent history. But she’s still in a strong position at 62 percent — about where Gore was in early 1999. Gore went on to win Iowa with 63 percent of the vote and every single primary after that. Dole was the only candidate besides Clinton and Gore to hit at least 40 percent in early Iowa, New Hampshire and national polling. He won 44 states and easily took the 1996 GOP nomination.
Clinton is in a far stronger position than she was last time around. Back in 2008, she was trailing in early Iowa polls. She earned only a third of the vote in early New Hampshire polls and was below 40 percent nationally.
Nor are there any real holes in her support. According to YouGov pollingconducted in March, 68 percent of Democrats believe she is “about right” ideologically.3 Only 12 percent of Democrats would not consider voting for her, according to a February CBS News survey. In the latest Marist College survey, she earns more than 60 percent among liberal,4 moderate and conservative Democratic primary voters.
Clinton’s early polling tells the same story as the endorsements: Democrats don’t seem open to other options. It’s not a situation likely to tempt a formidable Democrat to jump into the race. Which brings us to the third point …
The (lack of) competition
Clinton looks like she’ll have perhaps four competitors for the nomination: O’Malley, Lincoln Chafee, Bernie Sanders and Jim Webb. Sanders is the only one who currently holds elected office. Only O’Malley has ever been elected as a Democrat to any office for more than one term.
Chafee, who is from Rhode Island, has never won a Democratic primary for any office. He served in the U.S. Senate as a Republican and was an independent governor. The only time he could have won a Democratic primary (for governor), he bowed out because he faced a bruising campaign. He frequently had an approval rating of around 30 percent in blue Rhode Island.
O’Malley’s turn as governor of deep-blue Maryland went so far south that a Republican succeeded him, which is a fate that didn’t even befall Chafee. As I’ve written previously, O’Malley’s ideological record and donor base do not suggest that he can successfully challenge Clinton from the left.
Although Sanders caucuses with Democrats in the Senate, he’s a self-described socialist. If he ends up running, he’ll win some plaudits on the left, but that’s about it.
Webb, like Chafee, is a former Republican with little history with the Democratic Party. That might be forgivable if he were actually a mainstream Democrat, but he was the fourth-most-conservative Democratic senator during his final term in Congress.
When you look at the board, there is no Barack Obama waiting in the wings. Warren has endorsed Clinton and has given every indication that she is not going to run.
At this point, Clinton’s path to the nomination looks easier than anything we’ve seen before.
O’Malley aiming for late May announcement on ‘colossal undertaking’ [John Wagner, WaPo, April 10, 2015]
With the announcement of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid close at hand, Martin O’Malley says it could be late May before he shares his decision about moving forward.
DES MOINES, Iowa -- With the announcement of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid close at hand, one of her potential Democratic rivals, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, says it could be late May before he shares his decision about moving forward.
O’Malley said in an interview Thursday night that there are “fewer and fewer” factors left for him to weigh and that he continues to hear from fellow Democrats that “our country’s looking for new leadership.” But O’Malley said he remains engaged in conversations with friends and family about what would be “a colossal undertaking.”
“You have to allow the time to give your friends the ability to tell you whether they think you’re crazy or whether they’re on board," O'Malley said. "You have to give your family the ability to tell you that as well. And that requires an amount of time and patience.”
[More bad news for Hillary Clinton’s fiercest rival]
O’Malley, who is barely registering in early polls but has been warmly received by Democratic audiences, spoke following an event Thursday night where close to 150 people packed into an Irish bar in the Beaverdale neighborhood here. After delivering a speech laced with populist themes, O’Malley, who has a side career as a musician, picked up a borrowed acoustic guitar and played a folk song, as he has in several other recent appearances in early nominating states.
[In Iowa, O’Malley sounds a lot like a Democrat liberals love: Warren]
Asked in the interview if Clinton’s entrance into the race will affect his thinking, O’Malley said: “Not any longer.”
“My sense, having traveled around the country now over the course of the last year, is that Americans … feel that their politics has been very badly damaged, that the rules have been unfairly manipulated in ways that threaten the future of our American Dream and of a growing American middle class,” he said. “And people in our party, I think, are looking for new leadership that will break with the failed policies of our past and create a new and better day for our country. That’s my sense.”
Running for the presidency, he added, is “a colossal undertaking, and you have to be equipped to climb the mountain and not fight the mountain. You have to be prepared to climb it, and that takes a lot of work. That takes a lot planning, and that takes a lot of thought.”
The former governor is in the midst of a two-day swing through Iowa that also included appearances Thursday before the House and Senate Democratic caucuses of the state legislature and at a fundraiser in Indianola for state Rep. Scott Ourth.
On Friday, O’Malley is booked to appear here at a Polk County Democrats awards dinner, along with another potential Democratic presidential candidate, former senator James Webb of Virginia.
During remarks at Ourth’s fundraiser, held at a local winery, O’Malley referenced his work in Iowa during the 1984 presidential cycle for the campaign of “a little-known, 1 percent candidate named Gary Hart.”
Hart faced a formidable front-runner that year in former vice president Walter Mondale. After beating expectations in Iowa, Hart went on to upset Mondale in New Hampshire and became his chief rival for the Democratic nomination, eventually falling short.
“I know how seriously you take your responsibility,” O’Malley told the Democratic activists in the room. “I know that you have the ability to actually change the course of history.”
In Iowa, Martin O'Malley lays out vision for Democratic Party [Ari Melber, MSNBC, April 10, 2015]
Martin O’Malley says if he runs for president, he will try to pull the Democratic Party back to its populist roots.
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley says if he runs for president, he will try to pull the Democratic Party back to its populist roots.
“You know what it’s about? It’s really about calling our party back to its true self,” he said in a wide-ranging MSNBC interview airing Friday. “Our politics has been greatly impacted, for the worse, by big money and the concentration of big money.”
O’Malley, in Iowa this week for meetings and a local Democratic Party event, took a break to talk about his potential 2016 challenge to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Smokey Row Coffee, a bustling coffee shop on the West side of Des Moines. Clinton is expected to begin her presidential campaign as early as this weekend.
Widely known as number-crunching technocrat, O’Malley sounds pretty blunt when criticizing what he calls Wall Street’s growing dominance of campaigns and government – including some members of the Obama administration.
“For 30 years we’ve followed this trickle-down theory of economics that said, ‘Concentrate wealth at the very top, remove regulation and keep wages low so we can be competitive – whatever the hell that means,” O’Malley says.
“What it led to was the first time since the Second World War where wages have actually declined, rather than going up – where almost all of the new income earned in this recovery has gone to the top 1%,” he says, invoking the famous phrase from the Occupy Wall Street protests.  
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” he continues, arguing, “these things are not effects that blew in on a gulf stream or on a polar vortex – these are the products of the policy choices we made over these 30 years.”
O’Malley says the system is rigged “in many ways” – a concern pressed by the “Elizabeth Warren wing” of the Democratic Party – and contends middle class priorities should be “at the center of our economic theory.”
Asked whether President Obama has appointed the wrong people to the Securities and Exchange Commission and Justice Department, O’Malley responds, “Yes, I would say that.” He laments that no bank executives went to jail for “wrongdoing” in the financial crisis.
“I think that the S.E.C. has been pretty feckless,” he says, “when it comes to reigning in reckless behavior on Wall Street.”
O’Malley has clearly honed his campaign lines on this theme.
While his op-eds are peppered with references to the S.E.C.’s civil liability standards and the Depression-era Glass-Steagall bank regulation, he has more relatable examples at the ready in Iowa.
“There are more repercussions for a person being a chronic speeding violator in our country,” he argues, “than there is for a big bank being a chronic violator of S.E.C. rules!” O’Malley posts similar lines and videos on his social media accounts. He also tries to channel the anger against Wall Street into an argument for a stronger federal government.
“We can’t expect Wall Street to police itself – that’s why we have a federal government,” he declares.
O’Malley freely admits most Iowans he meets haven’t heard of him, but he believes they are receptive to his economic focus – and they aren’t all ready for Hillary.
Many Iowans want to literally “meet every candidate” before they decide, he says, and they don’t accept “the inevitability or the punditry or whatever the polls happen to say.”
O’Malley should know. He got started in politics working on Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign in Iowa, and he believes history shows there’s really no such thing as inevitable candidates.
“There is an ‘inevitable’ front-runner who remains ‘inevitable’ right up until he or she’s no longer inevitable,” he says. “And the person that emerges as the alternative is the person that usually no one in America had heard of before – until that person got into a van and went county to county to county.”
O’Malley is careful not to criticize Hillary Clinton by name, but her presence clearly looms over his possible candidacy.
Her perceived dominance in the Democratic Party constrains the momentum of any potential challenger. From O’Malley to Vice President Joe Biden, the would-be alternatives are treated by politicos and reporters as little more than the negative space in Clinton’s painting, and yet it’s the very prospect of anointing a nominee that seems to animate O’Malley’s rationale for running.
On the stump and in our interview, he talks about the need for a real race, an “alternative” choice and a “contest of ideas” – paeans to the democratic process that can be read as Clinton code words.
Asked about the dynasties that could compete in the presidential race, O’Malley says the presidency shouldn’t be a “hereditary right.”
He has hit that theme before, telling George Stephanopoulos last month that the White House shouldn’t simply “pass back and forth between two families.”  The line speaks to Bush and Clinton fatigue, but isn’t exactly a substantive disqualification for higher office. (Former Sen. Lincoln Chaffee, by contrast, said this week that Clinton should not be president because of her vote for the Iraq War.)
O’Malley looks like a politician out of central casting – piercing green eyes, close cropped hair, crisp suit – he was even part of the basis for the ambitious mayor in “The Wire,” which dramatized the drug trade and extreme poverty O’Malley confronted as the mayor of Baltimore. Yet his conventional appearance belies some pretty liberal politics – voters may find activist tendencies under that Brooks Brothers suit.
“I’ve actually done the things on a state-wide basis,” he argues, that national Democrats “only talk about doing.” And he ticks off a battery of liberal reforms like a proud father.
“We made it easier for people to vote not harder. We passed marriage equality. We made it easier for new American immigrants to get driver’s licenses so they can travel to and from work, and take care of their families.”
“We made it easier for people to vote not harder,” he says. “We passed marriage equality. We made it easier for new American immigrants to get driver’s licenses so they can travel to and from work, and take care of their families. We raised the minimum wage. We passed a living wage. We made bigger investments in improving the education of our children and made our schools No. 1. We made bigger investments in infrastructure, water, wastewater, cyber and the rest – and created a better rate of job creation than our neighbors north or south of us.”
He continues, “So look, these are the things that actually make our economy grow and make our middle class stronger. And it is why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce named our state No. 1 in innovation and entrepreneurship three years in a row. It is why we maintain the highest median income of any state in the nation over these last eight years. So these are the differentiators. People want leaders who have the ability to get things done.”
If that weren’t wonky enough, O’Malley is also eager to explain his numerical approach to governing, the idea that “the things that get measured get done.”
He established statistical measuring programs – Citi-State and Comp-Stat – to focus law enforcement and government services. Some dubbed it “Moneyball” for government.
Reflecting on that approach, O’Malley says any organization can use metrics, accountability and technology to improve results, including the federal government.
He rattles off tools that would make most people’s eyes glaze over – “performance management” and “graphical information technologies” – insisting these dry concepts helped stop drug dealers from murdering children. “We achieved the biggest reductions in crime of any major city in America,” he says.
The statistics themselves have been in some dispute in Maryland, but even conservative estimates showed robberies and aggravated assaults down over 30%, while successful homicide investigations rose from 54% to 80%.
Unlike many traditional urban crackdowns, however, O’Malley took on violent crime while advancing criminal justice reforms, including repealing the death penalty and harsh marijuana laws.
The federal death penalty is back in the news after a jury convicted Dzhokar Tsarnaev in the Boston Marathon bombing case this week, and O’Malley says he remains opposed to capital punishment even in cases of domestic terrorism.
“I’m opposed to the death penalty; I don’t believe that it works,” he says. “In the case of this individual, I probably think killing’s too good for him – he should rot in prison for the harm that he’s done to so many people and children.”
O’Malley also argues the U.S. is also in the wrong camp on this issue internationally.
“The countries on this globe that are responsible for the greatest numbers of public executions are places like Yemen, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, communist China,” he says. “I don’t believe our country belongs on that list.”
That’s an unusual position for an aspiring national Democrat. Ever since Michael Dukakis was pilloried for being “soft on crime” and opposing the death penalty, the party’s presidential nominees have supported it. (Clinton and Obama firmly backed it, while Kerry revised his opposition in 2004 to support capital punishment for terrorists.)
O’Malley’s critiques of the criminal justice system also provide common ground with at least one Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Rand Paul.  At his presidential campaign launch this week, Paul said the U.S. should repeal “any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color.”
O’Malley says he agrees with Paul’s statement – and as a chief executive he tried to change the “different standards of justice” for crimes occurring “in poor neighborhoods, neighborhoods of color” or “wealthier neighborhoods.”
O’Malley has also faced criticism, however, for using the kind of aggressive policing that led to the arrest of one out of every six Baltimore residents in a single year. The NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit alleging police harassment on his watch, but he counters that Baltimore faced an emergency, and he still built a multiracial mandate for policing.
“In our city, when I was elected mayor, [we] had sadly allowed ourselves to become the most violent and addicted city in America,” O’Malley says. “I was elected on a campaign that promised that we would recover all of our neighborhoods from the 24/7 drug dealer occupation and appallingly high homicide rates. And so that’s what we set out to do. And in re-election – I was re-elected with 88% of the vote.
“All along the course of that – we had to keep a precious consensus together to save lives,” he continues. “And there is no issue more difficult to bring people together around over racial divides than the issue of law enforcement. But we managed to do it. We made our police force more diverse. We reduced, during my time in office, police-involved shootings. We also reduced violent crime, and the city is moving in a much better direction.”
It’s the kind of thoughtful, evidence-based answer that could appeal to Democratic voters concerned about racial divides and policing in America today – if there is room and time for that debate.
O’Malley’s greatest political vulnerability, however, may be the belief that voters will analyze their choices the way he does – methodically, rigorously, even dispassionately. Yet without a larger disruption in the Democratic primary, it’s not clear whether that debate will begin this year.
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