H4a news Clips [May 1, 2015] Summary of Today’s news


Why Bernie Sanders matters, even if he can’t win [Alex Seitz-Wald, MSNBC, April 30, 2015]



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Why Bernie Sanders matters, even if he can’t win [Alex Seitz-Wald, MSNBC, April 30, 2015]
In a year when few are willing to challenge Clinton, that could be enough to make Sanders an important force in determining the future of the Democratic Party, even if he has almost no chance of winning.
Sen. Bernie Sanders didn’t want to run for president. Or least he says he didn’t. But after months of waiting for a better candidate to step up and challenge Hillary Clinton from the left, Sanders believes the responsibility fell to him.
The Vermont senator’s presidential run, made official at a press conference in Washington, D.C. Thursday, will test the maxim that 90% of success is just showing up.

A white, 73-year-old self-described socialist is not exactly an ideal candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016 – in no small part because he’s still not even a Democrat.


But if the saying is true, Sanders has a distinct advantage – he showed up. And in a year when few are willing to challenge Clinton, that could be enough to make Sanders an important force in determining the future of the Democratic Party, even if he has almost no chance of winning.
While Sanders says he’s in this race to win it, he would be the first to admit he’s not exactly a model candidate. “You are looking at a guy who, indisputably, has the most unusual political history of anybody in the United States Congress,” he told reporters while announcing his run Thursday.
The son of Brooklyn paint salesman who moved to Vermont after graduating from the University of Chicago in 1964, Sanders won his first election as mayor of Burlington by just 10 votes.
Sanders won that first race, and every one since, by co-opting existing networks of radical activists, faith groups, college students, low-wage workers, and others. “Coalition politics,” he calls it. And that’s how he hopes to make an unlikely stand for the highest office in the land in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he’s spent plenty of time in recent months.
It’s a long shot, to say the least.
Former Secretary of State Clinton holds an unprecedented lead in every poll, will dramatically out-fundraise all opponents, already has dozens of veteran operatives on staff, and – most importantly, according to political scientists – has secured the endorsement of most of the party’s leaders.
But as NBC’s Perry Bacon notes, while Sanders is unlikely to win, his ideas might. His presence in the race will mean more discussion of progressive priorities like financial reform, Social Security expansion, and debt-free college.
It’s part of the reason he plans to run as a Democrat instead of an Independent – to get on a debate stage with Clinton. Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a longtime Clinton ally, said Thursday that Sanders “has clearly demonstrated his commitment to the values we all share as members of the Democratic Party.”

Meanwhile, Sanders will likely also have to compete with the younger and more polished Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, who is also seriously eyeing a run to Clinton’s left.


And there’s also former Sen. Jim Webb. At the same time Sanders announce his candidacy at the Capitol, the former Marine held his own event two miles down Constitution Avenue at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to mark the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. “He’ll give an interesting perspective, so he’ll liven things up,” Webb told a small group of reporters of Sanders.
But instead trying to run against Clinton or anyone else, Sanders will likely keep to his own lane. He has proudly never run a negative political ad and chafes at journalists’ attempts to get him to comment on the former secretary of state.
When the sometimes-grouchy Sanders does knock Clinton, it often seems more out of exasperation at reporters’ persistent questioning than anything Clinton did. “I’m known as a blunt guy, not a warm and fuzzy guy, but really a nice guy after all,” he said at Howard University this week.
On the stump, Sanders tends to give the same gloomy speech about how the billionaire class is hell-bent on destroying America and there’s little we can do to stop it. “My wife often tells me that after I speak, we have to pass out the anti-suicide kits. So I’m trying to be more hopeful,” he said at the Brookings Institution in February.
But while Sanders may not have concrete path to victory, he is tapping into a very real vein of populism and disillusionment in the country. “As a talk radio host reaching the progressive base every day, I have never seen the level of all-out excitement that I’ve heard from viewers and listeners in the last couple days about Bernie’s candidacy,” said Bill Press, a liberal talk radio host who is friendly with Sanders. “These are people who are now disillusioned with Obama because he kind of ignored them, and are less than enthusiastic about Hillary, who they consider a Wall Street Democrat,” Press continued.
The enthusiasm for his apocalyptic message is evident at the senator’s events in Iowa, New Hampshire, and elsewhere, where people pack into church basements and union halls to see him. Sander is in third place in New Hampshire and trails only Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vice President Joe Biden nationally; neither of whom are likely to run. O’Malley, Webb, and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee remain in the low single digits.
Press, a former chairman of the California Democratic Party, thinks Sanders’ image, dandruff and all, could actually be an advantage. “In an age of poll-tested, cautious politicians, Bernie comes across as a authentic. The rumpled, hair going 10 different ways at a time,” Press said,” I think that appeals to people”
For her part, Clinton said she welcomes Sanders to the race. “I agree with Bernie. Focus must be on helping America’s middle class. GOP would hold them back. I welcome him to the race,” she said in a tweet signed with an “H,” denoting she wrote it.
Looming over Sanders’ candidacy as much as Clinton is Warren. Many progressives would prefer for the Massachusetts Democrat to enter the race, and she would likely have a much better shot at actually winning. But she’s repeatedly ruled out a run.
Two liberal groups trying to draft Warren into the 2016 presidential race said they were excited for Sanders’ bid – but are still holding out for Warren. “Democracy for America members are excited to have progressive champion Senator Bernie Sanders join the 2016 presidential race,” the group’s executive director, Charles Chamberlain said in a statement. “We continue to encourage Senator Elizabeth Warren to join the race.”

Sanders’ team is confident they can pick up the bloc of voters currently saying they favor Warren, who currently polls in second place. “If they’re going to hold a lot of people in place for a while in free parking, and then Bernie can go collect the rent later, that’s fine with me,” Sanders’ top adviser, Tad Devine, told msnbc two months ago.


And shortly after Sanders’ announcement Thursday, a group of about 50 activists calling themselves People for Bernie made it clear that at least a chuck of the activist-left was ready for Sanders. The effort was organized by Charles Lenchner, who co-founded the draft Warren super PAC Ready for Warren, and list of signers is a who’s who of far left-wing activists. It includes many who were involved in the Occupy movement, activists with Democratic Socialists of America, and organizers involved in the insurgent campaigns of Zephyr Teachout in New York state and Chiu Garcia in Chicago.
Ultimately for Sanders, however, this latest phase of his unlikely political career is about much more than 2016. Sanders has been giving more or less that same gloomy stump speech since he was mayor of Burlington, just swapping out the name of the evil robber baron du jour. “He’s not afraid of being boring and making the same points for 20 years,” Sanders’ brother, himself a politician in the U.K., told the Boston Globe a few years ago.
Sanders and fellow travelers on the left have been trying to slowly but surely change the conversation. They’ve tried through the Reagan Revolution, Bill Clinton’s moderate liberalism, George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism, and through Barack Obama’s economic crisis recovery. But now – finally – the conversation has come on their terms. Politicians of all political stripes are talking about economic inequality and both parties have been infused with their own brand of populism.
Sanders may not be able to take that message to the White House himself, but if he has his way, whoever wins in 2016 will.
Hillary Clinton Expected to Treat Bernie Sanders Gingerly [Maggie Haberman, NYT First Draft, April 30, 3015]
The entry of another candidate into the Democratic primary provides Hillary Clinton a great opportunity — to show that she’s being tested and working for the nomination — and that given a choice, Democrats overwhelming chose her.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont says he is running for president to win. His campaign announcement — a short news conference outdoors in Washington before he darted back to work — was a study in contrast with Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has yet to greet the press since announcing her candidacy.
And his message — including the degree to which he described himself as a “leader” in the fight against the Iraq war, which Mrs. Clinton voted for — highlighted why she will most likely need to treat him with deference.
“She has to deal with him very respectfully, because otherwise she returns to this aura of giving off inevitability,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic consultant who was a top adviser to John Kerry in 2004.
To that end, the presence in the race of Mr. Sanders, who barely overlapped with Mrs. Clinton in the Senate, will make it all the harder for Mrs. Clinton to skip any Democratic debates.
“She, by the way, is a good debater,” Mr. Shrum said. “She’ll have to get ready for the debates, prepare for the debates.”
Her advisers have not said whether she’ll take part in any debates. But one of the signal moments in her political career was in 2000, when her opponent in the Senate race in New York, Rick A. Lazio, was criticized for approaching her podium and urging her to sign a ban on soft money, and Mrs. Clinton subsequently won by a strong margin in November. However, another big debating moment was in October 2007, at a Democratic presidential debate, in which Mrs. Clinton stumbled on a question about whether she supported drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants. That helped signal the slide of her candidacy against Senator Barack Obama.
Mr. Sanders, who is considered an agile debater, became Mrs. Clinton’s first official opponent on Thursday, positioning himself from the left as a vessel for liberal Democrats who are trying to steer Mrs. Clinton’s policy stances more toward their orbit.
Even if Mr. Sanders is able to grab some of the non-Clinton vote in places like New Hampshire and Iowa, some close to Mrs. Clinton see the senator as a potentially useful foil. Many of Mrs. Clinton’s allies believe she will benefit from some early competition.
What’s more, given that Mr. Sanders is a self-described “socialist,” some of her supporters believes she’ll appear more center-left by contrast, which could only benefit her in a general election, even as her language is increasingly being compared to that of Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.
Mr. Shrum disagreed that Mrs. Clinton could triangulate, or adopt Mr. Sanders’s positions to her political benefit.
“I don’t think” that’s possible, he said. Mr. Sanders, for instance, is strongly against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which has faced withering criticism from the left.
But Ben LaBolt, a former adviser to President Obama’s 2012 campaign, saw more pluses than minuses.
“The entry of another candidate into the Democratic primary actually provides Hillary Clinton a great opportunity — to show that she’s being tested and working for the nomination — and that given a choice, Democrats overwhelming chose her,” he said.
“This is a chance to prove the breadth of her coalition,” he said.
Bernie Sanders and Calvin Coolidge: A Vermont Tie But Not Much Else [Gerry Mullany, NYT First Draft, April 30, 2015]
The two politicians could not be more different.
The two politicians could not be more different. One was a famously taciturn northern New England Protestant, a Republican who fervently believed in tax cuts for the wealthy. The other is a Brooklyn-born Jewish politician, a self-declared socialist who believes the “billionaire class” is at the heart of society’s ills.
But Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, is vying to follow in the footsteps of another Vermonter, Calvin Coolidge, who along with Chester Alan Arthur went from a small farming community in the state to occupy the White House.
Coolidge, dubbed “silent Cal,” by the popular press, was known for his daily naps, and when his death was announced, Dorothy Parker reportedly said, “How could they tell?” He grew up in the unincorporated town of Plymouth Notch, and was a sickly child whose father was a farmer and part-time state lawmaker.
Mr. Sanders, on the other hand, wears his Brooklyn roots on his sleeve and is known for his borough bombast, spouting opinions to seemingly anyone who will listen. He grew up in what he called a “solidly lower-middle class family.” His father was a Polish immigrant who sold paint. Young Bernie went to James Madison High School in south Brooklyn, where the enrollment of more than 3,000 students is six times the population of Coolidge’s hometown.
Coolidge ascended to the White House upon the death of Warren Harding, and immediately set out to cut taxes by rolling back the progressive income tax imposed during World War I and to curtail government spending. He stridently opposed government regulation of Wall Street, and some historians blame his laissez-faire attitude toward the financial sector as having set the regulatory stage for the Great Depression, which began within a year of his leaving office.
Mr. Sanders, conversely, is convinced that the nation’s big banks and their highly-paid executives are a primary culprit of income inequality in the country, and he argues that they should be spurred to provide more affordable loans to small businesses to create jobs, “instead of parking money at the Fed and making risky bets on Wall Street.”
Mr. Sanders settled in Vermont in his early 20s, working odd jobs in carpentry, film making and writing before embarking on a political career that was propelled by his election as mayor in the Democratic stronghold of Burlington, where perhaps the most famous merchants of the time were Ben and Jerry, founders of the namesake of ice cream company.
Should Mr. Sanders somehow capture the nomination, his Vermont ties are unlikely to be a major plus for him. When Coolidge ran in 1924, the state was stalwartly Republican and gave him its four electoral college votes. This time, Vermont is reliably Democratic but offers just three votes.
National Coverage - GOP
National Stories
Jeb Bush would like to bring Pitbull to a baseball game, maybe [Nick Gass, POLITICO, April 30, 2015]
Asked by TMZ if he could take anyone — dead or alive — to a baseball game, the former Florida governor picked two men: a former Republican president and Mr. Worldwide.
In the all-important Pitbull presidential primary, Jeb Bush apparently is looking to make a move.
Asked by TMZ if he could take anyone — dead or alive — to a baseball game, the former Florida governor picked two men: a former Republican president and Mr. Worldwide.
“I’d bring Teddy Roosevelt because I’d love to talk to him about his …” said Bush before trailing off while signing autographs Thursday in downtown Washington.
“The reason you like baseball is that you can have a conversation with people,” Bush said. “Might want to have Pitbull, too.”
One of Bush’s likely opponents, Sen. Marco Rubio, is said to be tight with the 34-year-old, Miami-born rapper. Rubio, who, according to BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins, is “on a first-name basis” with Pitbull and has described him as a “friend” in interviews.
In November 2012, Rubio even tweeted some unsolicited advice for his pal:
“His songs are all party songs,” Rubio elaborated in a December 2012 interviewwith GQ, when asked whether Pitbull’s raps were “too cheesy.”
“There’s no message for him, compared to like an Eminem,” Rubio said. “But look, there’s always been a role for that in American music. There’s always been a party person, but he’s a young guy. You know, maybe as he gets older, he’ll reflect in his music more as time goes on. I mean, he’s not Tupac. He’s not gonna be writing poetry.”
For his part, Pitbull, whose real name is Armando Pérez, has not endorsed a candidate.
“I’m not here to be part of any political party,” Pitbull said in a statement to BuzzFeed in February. “I’m here to bring political parties to my party because they can’t, they won’t, they never will, stop the Pitbull party, Dale!”
Jeb Bush PAC to hire longtime Marco Rubio friend and aide for Hispanic outreach [Marc Caputo, POLITICO, May 1, 2015]
Marco Rubio’s longtime friend and 2010 Senate campaign manager is about to be hired as a Hispanic-outreach adviser for the senator’s likely Republican 2016 rival, Jeb Bush.

Marco Rubio’s longtime friend and 2010 Senate campaign manager is about to be hired as a Hispanic-outreach adviser for the senator’s likely Republican 2016 rival, Jeb Bush, sources familiar with the decision tell POLITICO.


Jose Mallea’s hiring by Bush’s Right to Rise political committee is a one-two punch for the former governor: It underscores the depth of loyalty Florida Republicans have for Bush and it shows his intense interest in turning out the Latino vote.
Though a Rubio friend, Mallea is loyal to the Bush family. From 2001-2005, Mallea worked in President George W. Bush’s administration in various appointed posts, including special assistant to White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. Mallea, who refused comment, plans Friday to resign his post as the national strategic director for the LIBRE Initiative, a Latino-outreach organization tied to the influential Koch brothers. He was hired after the initiative was founded nearly four years ago.
“Jose has a good body of experience from working at the White House to where he is today – he understands Hispanic voters, their behaviors and their beliefs,” said David Custin, a Florida political consultant and lobbyist from Miami-Dade, home to Rubio, Bush and Mallea. “He’s really competent,” Custin said before joking “but he ain’t as good as me.”
Custin said he’s staying neutral in the likely contest between Bush and Rubio, but he noted many won’t and that it’s agonizing for Republicans who like both men. In the end, though, many more Republican consultants, fundraisers and political operatives in Miami and Florida as a whole are likely to side with Bush, who built the GOP in their home county and made it a juggernaut in the state before he became governor from 1999-2007.
“You’re going to see a lot of this: guys going to work for Bush who worked for Marco or are even his friends. But Jose is a Jeb guy first, politically,” Custin said. “This race between Jeb and Marco is amicable right now – and we’ll see how long that lasts – but it will filter out who’s really a Marco person and who wasn’t really a part of Jeb World. It’s going to be very transparent.”
Two of Miami’s three Cuban-American Republican House members, Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, back Bush. The third representative of the group, Carlos Curbelo, is expected to endorse Bush after he officially announces his presidential campaign in the coming months. Major donors like Coral Gables healthcare billionaire Mike Fernandez, also a Cuban-American like Rubio, support the former governor over the sitting senator.
Bush’s leadership PAC refused to comment on Mallea’s hiring, though sources familiar with the talks said an official announcement is coming soon.
The source who told POLITICO of Mallea’s hire, a Cuban-American Republican from Miami who supports Rubio more than Bush, fretted that “this is going to advance the narrative that there is a division in Marco World. I believe both sides are going to do this. But look, it’s a good get for Bush. That’s just a fact.”
Mallea wasn’t just Rubio’s 2010 campaign manager. His time with Rubio stretches back to the 1996 Bob Dole presidential campaign where he worked for Rubio to drive Miami-area turnout. Mallea said in a previous interview that Rubio was more inspiring than the actual candidate. Two years later, Mallea worked on Rubio’s first successful political campaign, his West Miami city commission race. In his autobiography, “An American Son,” Rubio thanks Mallea, who has a cameo in the book’s photograph section.
Mallea’s hiring by Bush isn’t a complete surprise. During a two-day donor confab on Sunday and Monday in South Beach, Mallea sat on a panel with Jeb Bush Jr. and other Bush supporters to talk about “Jeb’s story” and Hispanic outreach.
One source said a few Rubio supporters – but not Rubio himself – gave Mallea a hard time about his attendance.
Beyond the public-relations coup for Bush, Mallea’s hiring shows how serious his campaign-in-waiting is about the Latino vote. After Republican Mitt Romney’s abysmal 2012 performance with Latinos – 71 percent of whom voted for President Obama – GOP strategists urged the party to improve its standing with this fast-growing segment of the national electorate. In Florida, Hispanics account for about 14 percent of registered voters. Except for Republican-leaning Cuban-Americans, Hispanics in the Sunshine State typically support Democrats statewide in presidential elections.
Though a potential plus in a general election, a Republican’s support for immigration reform can be troublesome in a primary. Rubio’s standing with conservatives briefly took a hit after he advocated for a 2013 bipartisan immigration reform bill, which the conservative House refused to take up. While Rubio has changed some of his tone and focus concerning immigration reform, Bush has appeared to be less inclined to back away from the issue as he courts Hispanics.
During Bush’s weekend meeting, he allowed the media to watch him talk with a supporter who won a lottery to dine with Bush, Zeus Rodriguez, president of Hispanics for School Choice in Wisconsin. On Tuesday, in both English and Spanish, Bush spoke in Puerto Rico about immigration reform and his support for Puerto Rican statehood. On Wednesday at the National Christian Hispanic Leadership Conference in Houston, Bush reiterated his support for immigration reform and giving a pathway to legal residency for illegal immigrants, as long as they pay back taxes, are crime free, employed and don’t receive government benefits.
“We’re a nation of immigrants,” Bush said in Houston, according to the Associated Press. “This is not the time to abandon something that makes us special and unique.”

Jeb Bush to National Review: 'I Love You,' But 'You’re Wrong on Immigration.' [Emma Roller, National Journal, April 30, 2015]
In the Republican presidential field, Jeb Bush appears more and more to be a moderate outlier—not necessarily because he is changing his views, but because so many of his potential competitors are racing each other to the right.
In the Republican presidential field, Jeb Bush appears more and more to be a moderate outlier—not necessarily because he is changing his views, but because so many of his potential competitors are racing each other to the right.
This dynamic was on full display on Thursday, when the former Florida governor spoke at a summit hosted by National Review, where Sen. Marco Rubio, Gov. Bobby Jindal, and Gov. John Kasich will speak on Friday. In an interview with Rich Lowry, Bush held fast on his immigration record, and argued that it is better to narrow access to citizenship to spouses and children and "expand based on need," rather than cutting off that pathway completely.
"That's how you're going to grow your economy, is bringing young, aspirational people in," Bush said. "I think I'm right about this, and if we're going to grow economically, then we better figure out how to fix this quick."
Bush said President Obama wants to see reform delayed, so he can continue to use it as a cudgel against Republicans.
"He uses this as a wedge issue, and we always lose," Bush said. "We're gonna turn people into Republicans if we're much more aspirational in our message, and I think our tone has to be more inclusive as well."
"I love you and I love National Review," he added. "I just think you're wrong on immigration, and you think I'm wrong."
Indeed, the conservative magazine has shown ample skepticism about Bush on his immigration record. One recent story was headlined, "Is Jeb Bush Too Enthusiastic about Immigration?" Another recent story called into question Bush's connection to American Action Forum, an outside group pushing for immigration reform.
In the interview, Lowry pushed back on Bush, saying that some would argue bringing in more low-wage workers is an issue of supply and demand that would disadvantage American job-seekers.
"Who's suggesting that?" Bush shot back. "That's a false argument."
There is a real fault line here between prominent conservative thinkers and the establishment Republicans who want to be their president. To a lesser extent, Rubio has felt the burn after putting forth his own immigration reform plan in 2013. Since then, he's been much more wary of hinting at any kind of P-A-T-H-W-A-Y.
Bush, meanwhile, continues to forge ahead with what he's believed since at least 2009: that the government should offer undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. a path to citizenship. Back in 2012, Bush told a reporter that he supported citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, otherwise known as Dreamers.
"Having a solution to the fact that we have all of these young people—many of whom are making great contributions, don't have a connection to their parents' former country—yeah, of course I'm for it," Bush said at the time. "But then again, I'm not running for anything, and I can speak my mind."
Now that he is (potentially) running for something, Bush's gamble is that he can continue to speak his mind without getting a swift smack upside the head.
What Brought Carly Fiorina Down at HP Is Her Greatest 2016 Asset [Melinda Henneberger, Bloomberg, April 30, 2015]
As she famously said about John McCain and Sarah Palin, running for president requires a different skill set than running a major corporation.
More than 30 years ago, on Carly Sneed’s third date with her co-worker, Frank Fiorina, he told his not-yet-30-year-old dinner companion that one day she would run AT&T, the company where he was at that point a rung ahead of her on the corporate ladder. “It was a good line; she loved it,” he says. He doesn’t recall much else about the evening. “I just remember making out in the car.”
But Frank’s view of Carly’s extra-large future wasn’t only a line; he meant it, and for Carly, it was a validation of her burgeoning ambition. “It was a startling thing,” Carly Fiorina says, when she sits down with me a few days later to talk about her intention, barring catastrophe, to run for president in 2016. “But you know, when you’re a woman growing up in a man’s world, when someone takes you seriously, it’s such a relief.”
Even Fiorina’s own father questioned Frank’s reason when he retired at only 48 to support and travel with her. “I think my dad had initially sort of a typical man’s reaction,’’ she said. “Which is, ‘How could you do this? Why would you do this?’ It was so outside of his experience.” He did come around, though: “As he got older and realized how important a role Frank played in my success—and my happiness, beyond that—he came to really appreciate him.” When I tell her she married a mensch, she laughs and says, “Not everybody knows that word, but yes, I did; I’m very lucky.”
Frank’s prediction proved almost right, too: Fiorina rose quickly at AT&T, becoming senior vice president for its hardware and systems division, then helping launch its spinoff, Lucent Technologies. By 1998, she’d been named by Fortune as the most powerful woman in business and the next year was tapped as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive officer—the first woman to run a Fortune 50 company. But then came voluntary pay cuts at HP, followed by layoffs of 30,000 people. Amid a controversial merger with computer maker Compaq in 2002, HP’s stock plummeted, and the big profits she’d so convincingly promised never arrived. In 2005 the board fired her, and sent her off with a $21 million severance package.
Fiorina reemerged in 2008 as an economic adviser and surrogate for John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, but she sometimes seemed to forget she wasn’t the principal—as when she noted that his running mate, Sarah Palin, wasn’t qualified to run a major corporation. Then, in attempting to walk back the remark, she said that McCain himself, among others, wasn’t qualified either. Afterward, CNN quoted a McCain campaign official as saying, “Carly will now disappear.”
The following year her troubles became more serious. She was diagnosed with breast cancer, and lost her 35-year-old stepdaughter, Lori Ann, to, as she puts it “the demons of addiction.” In 2010, immediately following chemotherapy, she ran her first political race, a bid to unseat California Senator Barbara Boxer, and lost by ten points—even though Boxer was considered beatable and 2010 was a Republican year.
Fred Davis, a friend and adviser in that campaign, wonders if Fiorina, 60, is looking for redemption with this presidential run. “She’s one of the most driven people I’ve ever met,” he says. “I’m not sure why she chose politics after HP, but her experience there was a devastating one. That was an inglorious end to a spectacular career, and maybe she’s looking to have one more high-water mark.”
It would be hard to find anyone not connected to her campaign who likes her odds of actually reaching the Oval Office. But there’s no mistaking her seriousness, and the campaign itself has been its own kind of success. She’s impressed audiences at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the Iowa Freedom Summit, and Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition with her unapologetic conservatism and gone after Hillary Clinton on everything from conflicts of interest to wearing her sunglasses inside that Chipotle. She’s also shown an appealing gameness on the campaign trail, a looseness and willingness to play along. At HP, a common critique was that her best event was marketing herself. In running for president, that’s a core skill.
“She’s gotten better,” says conservative writer Ed Morrissey. “I never count anybody out who’s got that kind of talent on the stump. The idea that the first office you hold shouldn’t be the presidency is going to kick in at some point, but she’s going to impress people all the way through.”
Fiorina has another advantage over the rest of the GOP field, particularly against the presumptive Democratic nominee. “Realistically,” she says, “everything about me is different than anybody else running. My experience is different, my resume is different, my perspective is different, my voice is different. Oh, by the way, my gender is different.”
In a hotel ballroom in downtown Tampa, about 300 people have come to hear Fiorina talk about “unlocking women’s potential”—and her own, of course. Fiorina speaks so softly that women in the audience really are leaning in, just to hear her. These aren’t the low tones of someone who lacks confidence, though, but of someone with plenty to spare.
Fiorina’s story begins in church, and the Sunday school class she attended as a child. Her mother, the teacher, gave her a plaque that read, “What you are is a gift from God; what you become is a gift to God.” That was a key insight, says the highly polished woman standing before them, for someone who “didn’t feel particularly gifted as a young girl.”
She perhaps undersells that girl, who was then known as Cara Carleton Sneed, dismissively describing her younger self as a “middle-child goody two-shoes, so not very exciting” kid who got into Stanford University and studied medieval history and philosophy there. The mention of those majors gets hoots from the audience. “You all laugh,” Fiorina says, “because you know I was all dressed up with nowhere to go.”
She went to law school but quit after a single, anxiety headache-filled semester. Then she went back to temping, as she’d done in college, and wound up typing and filing in a nine-person real estate firm. “I didn’t think the job was beneath me,” she says. “I was happy to have a job.” Employers who saw her potential taught her their business, and it was up, up, and up from there.
“That’s only possible here” in the U.S., she says—and only here that a law-school dropout with a liberal arts degree “could go on to lead a top tech company.” That's because this country, she says, was built on the notion expressed on that Sunday school plaque, that we all have God-given potential and the right to maximize it. What people fear most these days, Fiorina says, is that “we’re losing that sense of limitless potential.”
Why? Liberals and their bad ideas, mostly: “I remember being shocked” when Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said during a 2012 strike teachers “can’t be held accountable because so many students come from poor and broken homes.” Lewis was arguing that what’s expected of teachers in the lowest-income areas isn’t either fair or realistic, given all that they are up against. But Fiorina heard it this way: “What she meant is, if you are poor, you don’t have potential and you can’t learn. And that, ladies and gentlemen,” she says to great applause, “is not what America’s about.”
Women’s potential is particularly underestimated, she says. “So yes, I agree with Hillary that maybe it would be a good idea to have a woman in the White House.” The former secretary of state isn’t the only woman in the race who knows world leaders, Fiorina says. “I have sat across a table from Vladimir Putin … I know Angela Merkel … I know Bibi.”
In closing, Fiorina says that Americans should remember what Maya Angelou said—that “our deepest fear is not that we’re powerless, but that we’re powerful beyond measure.” The quote, frequently misattributed to Nelson Mandela, actually comes from Marianne Williamson’s woo-woo 1992 classic, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles.
Almost everyone present rises and cheers. And none of the potential voters I approach afterward mentions Bibi or Vlad. “Most inspiring was her humble beginning,” says Laura Crouch, an engineer. “From being a secretary to where she is now?” says Priya Bangarashettara, who works in financial services. “She’s right that can only happen in America.”
What Fiorina hadn’t told her audience is that her father, Joseph Tyree Sneed III, who died in 2008, was a law professor at the University of Texas, Stanford, and Cornell, the dean of Duke Law School, a deputy attorney general under President Richard Nixon, and a longtime senior judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Nor does she mention that she worked only briefly in that real estate office before heading off to Italy for a year with her first husband, Todd Bartlem, a Stanford classmate who’s told other reporters that in the years they were together, she had no political opinions and considered Dress for Success her bible. When reached by phone recently, Bartlem said only, “You’re wasting your time, and I don’t want you to waste mine. In the clown car that is the Republican Party, she’s the ultimate clown.” (Click.)
Fiorina is hardly the first seeker of high office to exaggerate the lowliness of her roots. But no one handed her the grades that would’ve gotten her into Stanford even without connections. Another graduate from a top school might not have taken that temp job, or worked around the clock ever since. Still, the faculty neighborhood where she grew up in Palo Alto wasn’t a particularly unlikely launching pad to tech stardom.
At a recent breakfast in Washington with political reporters, Fiorina is asked why she thinks she might succeed as a former executive trying to head the executive branch when Mitt Romney didn’t. She notes that Romney lost to President Obama by 62 points on the question of which candidate “cares about someone like me.” Policy is important, Fiorina says, “but I also think empathy and connection are hugely important. I think that people understanding where you come from, what your story is, what your background is, is as important to any leadership role, but particularly running for the president of the United States.”
And unlike Romney, she has no trouble connecting. After the event in Tampa, after she’s shaken every hand and posed for every picture, she apologizes profusely for having made me wait just a few minutes. Unlike many candidates, she’s not playing terribly coy about the campaign announcement she’s expected to make on May 4, just ahead of the May 5 launch of her campaign book, Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey. (Her earlier memoir, Tough Choices, which looks a lot like Clinton’s 2014 Hard Choices, came out in 2006.) This close to the official start of her campaign, Fiorina mocks the idea that anything would keep her out of the race: “I don’t foresee some huge shock that would force me to say, ‘Wow, I really miscalculated,’ or ‘I really haven’t built the kind of infrastructure that I think it’s going to take to make a real go of this.’”
As a woman running against Hillary Clinton, Fiorina will automatically avoid the optics that were so lethal to Rick Lazio, who lost to Clinton in the 2000 New York Senate race, when he appeared to charge her podium during a debate. Asked about the gender dynamic, however, Fiorina at first demurs. “What’s totally fair game always, regardless of gender, is to talk about someone’s accomplishments and to talk about someone’s ideas, so that’s all I ever do.”
But again, wouldn’t Fiorina be free to take Clinton on in a way men in her party simply can’t? “I think what it does is it renders the Democratic ‘war on women’ baloney sort of neutral,” Fiorina says. “It will be definitely harder for her to run against a woman. … because the political rhetoric that she talks about will be far more difficult for her to make credible.”
I ask Fiorina what she’s learned by watching Clinton, but she answers by saying instead what she’s learned to like about her. “Look, Hillary Clinton is a very hard-working, dedicated woman who loves her country. I think she believes public service is her calling, and I take her at her word. But I fundamentally disagree with her and her points of view, so I don’t think she would make a good president.”
Although Fiorina’s policy positions aren’t a departure from the standard Republican planks, they’re wrapped in more context. She tends to avoid questioning the motives of her Democratic adversaries, too.
But what’s most surprising about Fiorina, given her tech CEO background, is how deeply, convincingly conservative she seems. In GOP primary season, of course, right-of-center positioning is a requirement, and there’s nothing shocking about her promise to “reimagine government”—shrink it considerably, while taking a sickle to regulations that, as a former businesswoman, she abhors. Yet she’s not just a Chamber of Commerce conservative, but someone who says the business community was dead wrong to pressure Indiana to amend its Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It’s hard to say who might be to her right on the environment when she argues that since we can’t regulate our way out of climate change, we shouldn’t even try: Mitigating its effects “will take a global effort over decades costing trillions of dollars. So my question is, why would you be prepared to sacrifice people’s lives and jobs for a gesture?”
Fiorina also talks more about God than some might expect, though she hasn’t always been a regular churchgoer (or, for that matter, a regular voter). “I pray every day,” she says. “I read Scripture every day. I honestly have been saved, from”—she pauses, looking for the right word—“sort of desperate sadness by faith, so it’s just a part of my life.”
Fiorina often mentions her anti-abortion views, which were anything but politically expedient in the California Senate race. When Fiorina served as emcee at a gala for the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List organization in Washington earlier this month, the group’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, told the crowd that in 2010, while Fiorina was seeking their endorsement, she gave the best interview they’d ever had with any candidate.
“She’s actually that conservative,” says Davis, her former adviser. “I have a lot of clients, and some of them read polls and then tell you what they think. But Carly wouldn’t consider changing her opposition [to abortion]. That’s just not her.”
On that issue, her views were formed before she knew she had them. “I was sort of raised that way without thinking about it,” says Fiorina. “Then I met my husband, whose mother was told to abort him and she chose not to, and her life was utterly different because she had a son, and my life was utterly different because I have a husband, so I think about that a lot. And also when I was a young woman I accompanied a very good friend when she went to have an abortion, at her request, and I saw what that did to her—physically, emotionally, spiritually. I don’t think she ever got over it, honestly.”
A term increasingly in vogue on the right is “pro-life feminist,” and I ask Fiorina if that’s how she sees herself. “Maybe we’ve reclaimed” feminism, she says. “The word got captured by left-wing politics for a long time. Some of these left-leaning organizations have been hideous about women when they just didn’t agree with them; I don’t think that’s feminism. When Hillary Clinton says it’s not enough to be a woman; you have to be a woman who believes—and then she goes through the litany of liberal causes—that isn’t feminism. That’s ‘Think like I do, otherwise we don’t think you count.’ ”
That doesn’t mean she thinks the government should get into the child care business, and to her way of thinking, the way to equal pay isn’t passing new laws but abolishing seniority systems that disproportionately block women from moving up.
Meanwhile, nobody has to tell her that, as she says, “women get scrutinized differently, criticized differently, caricatured differently.” At the recent Washington breakfast with reporters, Paul Bedard, of the Washington Examiner prefaces a question with: “Ma’am, I’ve never met a presidential candidate with pink fingernail polish on.” Flashing a smile, Fiorina tells him, “There’s a first time for everything.”
On occasion, though, Fiorina herself has given as well as gotten that kind of treatment. During her Senate run, she was caught on an open microphone mocking Barbara Boxer’s hairstyle as “so yesterday.”
In that 2010 race, part of which she ran while bald, before her hair grew back in from chemo, she was hammered by Boxer commercials saying that even as Fiorina was laying off tens of thousands of employees, she was stocking up on and detailing corporate jets.
And as a candidate running on her business acumen, the major question Fiorina faces still is how she can talk about her record of accomplishment at HP when they ran her out of the job. Leaders make enemies, she says. She maintains that the company was on a good trajectory when she left. “First,” she says, “the story of my firing is not the story that a lot of people tell. My firing happened in two weeks because a couple of board members decided to leak confidential information to the Wall Street Journal, and then we had a boardroom brawl and a showdown over it.”
Looking back, she says, there isn’t anything major she’d do differently. “The big things I got right at HP, and I think the results demonstrate that. The strategy that we undertook was to be a force for consolidation in the industry and to have a diversified portfolio. That strategy was clearly vindicated in all kinds of ways.”
Clearly to her, maybe, but not to others. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the founder of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute and a senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management, summarizes her HP tenure as the “colossal failure” of someone who “managed to win a squeaker of a proxy war through a form of legal extortion” and then failed to learn from the mistakes she’s never acknowledged making.
At HP, Fiorina came to seem constitutionally incapable of asking for help. Small moves that suggested a big ego offended many workers—things like hanging her portrait in the lobby and passing out noisemakers that employees were supposed to use when she took the stage at a company rally.
As Fiorina herself observed, participating in the theater of politics is a different enterprise than being the CEO of a major corporation. Despite her faux pas as a McCain surrogate, she’s remembered fondly by campaign veterans. In the final months, “we kind of knew we weren’t going to win,” says longtime McCain adviser Mark Salter, “and it’s hard to go out there for seven rallies a day, and it’s hard to keep the surrogates fired up,” but Fiorina “did everything we asked of her” without complaint, even if “you could tell,” he adds, laughing, that “she was used to working on endeavors that were a little more efficient and practical.”
A quick and determined study, she appears to have come a long way as a candidate, her first-timer’s brittleness now leavened with biting humor. “I see momentum growing for her,” says Carol Crain, vice chair of the GOP in Scott County, Iowa. “She came in as a no-name, but with each appearance, people like her more.”
It’s testament to Fiorina’s toughness that the day she learned she had breast cancer, she drove straight from the doctor’s office to a GOP convention, says her longtime friend Deborah Bowker, who managed her 2010 campaign. “I said, ‘Let’s pause; you have cancer. Let’s put everything else aside,” Bowker says. But ultimately, “having something to focus on was a good thing,” Bowker says.
The person who believed in her first, her husband, Frank, is proud both of the career he gave up and of the one he has now, supporting her. With a license to carry, he has sometimes doubled as her bodyguard, and reminds me a bit of the he-man ballistics expert played by Gary Cole on “The Good Wife.” “I started at $99 a week and made it all the way to VP” at AT&T, he says. But he never regretted walking away: “If she was gone for more than a day or two, I’d travel with her—I’d be there with the spouses, and I loved it. I’d say, ‘Eat your heart out’ to any guy who didn’t see it that way.” During the six years she ran HP, he says, cracking his knuckles, she never wanted any extra attention as a female CEO, as if somehow “she was on a ladder for women, kind of like a woman golfer that starts at a different place on the golf course.”
And if he wound up in the position of First Gentleman? It turns out that Frank has given this some thought. “Like Carly, if I’m going to do something, I want to add value.” But he doesn’t want to say anything more than that. “Long way between here and there.” In the meantime, “I’m gonna do whatever they tell me to, including meeting you,” he says, grinning. Although he expects the campaign ahead to be punishing, “I’d never tell her not to do something she wanted to do.”
The Unpleasant Charisma of John Kasich [Molly Ball, The Atlantic, April 30, 2015]
John Kasich is considering a run for president as a Republican who can appeal to blue-collar voters as well as the GOP establishment and whose folksy demeanor and humble roots would contrast with Hillary Clinton’s impersonal, stiffly scripted juggernaut.
The last time John Kasich went to New Hampshire, the visit did not go well. It was 16 years ago, and Kasich, a 47-year-old Republican congressman who had made his name in D.C. as the budget-balancing enfant terrible of the Gingrich revolution, was running for president.
Just when Kasich thought he was really connecting with a voter in Lebanon, the woman looked at her watch and asked him when the candidate was going to arrive. A few months later, Kasich’s candidacy was over, a minor footnote to George W. Bush’s steamroll to the GOP nomination.
Kasich is now the two-term governor of Ohio, and he’s thinking about running for president again. He returned to New Hampshire a few weeks ago and was surprised to find that his reception was very different. A gathering at the Snow Shoe Club in Concord, for example, drew a standing-room-only crowd, and the audience members all seemed to know who he was. “Sixteen years ago, I would have been shoveling the driveway!” he told me afterward.
At 62, and having just been reelected by a 30-point margin, Kasich is both in the prime of his political career and facing what could be a now-or-never moment. He has been contemplating, he told me, “some things that are extremely personal—what is my purpose in life?” He also told me he was trying not to let all the attention he’d received in New Hampshire go to his head, but it sounded like he was having a hard time. “I just feel so liberated,” he said. “All the things I’ve done are finally paying off.”
Last week, Kasich announced the formation of a 527 fundraising committee, which will allow him to travel, raise money, and build a national political infrastructure as he explores a presidential run. Its board includes a top New Hampshire GOP name, former Senator John E. Sununu.
As the 2016 Republican primary has begun to take shape, it has attracted a madding crowd of colorful aspirants, from the White House legacy (Jeb Bush) to the Obama-bashing African American neurosurgeon (Ben Carson). Collectively, the contenders are far better credentialed than those of 2012, when the race for the nomination often seemed to pit the snow-white Mitt Romney against seven or more dwarves. (Remember Rick Santorum? He might be running again, on the rationale that he came in second last time.)
Yet they all seem to have weaknesses that could become fatal flaws, from Bush’s silver-spoon image to Carson’s total lack of political experience and penchant for comparing Obamacare to slavery. There’s Chris Christie’s scandal-tarnished reputation, and Scott Walker’s seeming unreadiness for the national spotlight. The three candidates who’ve now publicly declared—Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio—were all elected to the U.S. Senate in the last five years; they lack executive experience, and their records are thin. GOP voters have told pollsters they are wary of a candidate whose résumé resembles Barack Obama’s.
If only, Republican voters might be thinking, there were a candidate who could appeal to blue-collar voters but also mingle with the GOP establishment. A governor who’d proven he could run a large state but who also had national experience. Someone who’d won tough elections and maintained bipartisan popularity in an important swing state. A candidate whose folksy demeanor and humble roots would contrast nicely with Hillary Clinton’s impersonal, stiffly scripted juggernaut.
That’s Kasich’s pitch, in a nutshell.
He’s not well known among the national Republican base or conservative activists in Iowa and New Hampshire. Nor has he begun to do the sorts of things—hiring big-name national consultants, seeking commitments from donors—that would put him on the radar of the pundits tracking the race. But he has a large and loyal potential fundraising base (he raised nearly $30 million for his reelection campaign despite a weak opponent), a knack for commanding a room in an unorthodox manner, and credentials that demand to be taken seriously.
Kasich has managed a $72 billion state budget and served on the House Armed Services Committee. He won 86 of Ohio’s 88 counties in his reelection, including Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County—unheard-of for a Republican: In 2012, President Obama won Cuyahoga by a two-to-one margin. The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in January that Kasich was the most underrated potential Republican candidate, describing him as “fresh but seasoned and managerial.” If he does get in the race, says John Weaver, a Texas-based GOP consultant who was John McCain’s chief strategist, “he would absolutely be a threat for the nomination.”

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