Saturday, April 30, 2016

Something to Know - 30 April

Jim Morin

This is the 3rd installment  (promise of this being the last) on an issue before the Supreme Court. 
  Figuring that a SNL skit will cover it all, this is about as plain as it can get.  The worrisome point 
for me is that Justice Stephen Breyer is in favor of the defense at this point.   The final judgment
 should be coming in June:
APRIL 29, 2016

A "Wayne's World" Argument at the Supreme Court

BY 


A high-stakes corruption case at the Supreme Court will be determined partly by logic reminiscent of the nineties comedy—and offered on behalf of the former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell.A high-stakes corruption case at the Supreme Court will be determined partly by logic reminiscent of the nineties comedy—and offered on behalf of the

 I read the transcript of Wednesday's Supreme Court oral arguments in the corruption case of the former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, I thought of the movie "Wayne's World." There's a scene halfway through the film in which Wayne and Garth, the lovable public-access TV hosts, argue with Benjamin, the slick corporate producer, about giving their sponsor airtime. As they make their case against selling out, Wayne and Garth serve as pitchmen. "I will not bow to any sponsor," Wayne says, sticking his hand into a Pizza Hut box and pulling out a slice. Before the Court this week, McDonnell's lawyers made a similarly convincing claim that he couldn't be bought.

The facts of McDonnell's case aren't really in dispute: between 2011 and 2012, McDonnell and his wife accepted more than a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars' worth of gifts—including a fifty-thousand-dollar loan, a twenty-thousand-dollar shopping spree in Manhattan, free vacations, lavish meals, and fifteen thousand dollars in cash—from Jonnie Williams, a Virginia businessman who wanted McDonnell's help getting Virginia public universities to study his company's diet supplement, Anatabloc.


The question before the court this week was not whether McDonnell took the quid—but whether he delivered the quo. McDonnell was convicted, in 2014, on eleven federal corruption charges. The law required prosecutors to prove that McDonnell performed an "official action" in return for payment. While Williams never got the drug study he wanted, McDonnell did arrange meetings between Williams and state officials. McDonnell also hosted a launch party for Anatabloc at the governor's mansion, and once pulled out a bottle of Anatabloc during a meeting with the head of the state-employee health plan and suggested that state employees start taking the supplement. The legal issue from the start was whether those favors amounted to "official action."

On Wednesday, Noel Francisco, the lawyer representing McDonnell, argued that while the former governor may have given Williams access to officials, he never tried to influence those officials' decisions, and therefore hadn't crossed the line into official acts. Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben, meanwhile, representing the United States, maintained that exchanging meetings for cash, on its own, counts as bribery.

At least some of the Justices, most vocally Stephen Breyer, seemed clearly on McDonnell's side. And while McDonnell's particular case involved gifts and vacations, the underlying concern for the Court, for much of day, was campaign contributions. Because a donation to a campaign can count as a bribe, and because giving extra access to big donors is ubiquitous, finding McDonnell's favors to Williams to be "official acts" could threaten to criminalize a wide range of campaign fund-raising practices. This idea has been part of the case all along. In 2014, one of the juror instructions that McDonnell's lawyers proposed at trial was lifted from the Supreme Court's decree, in its 2010 decision in Citizens United, that "ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption."

The irony is that, as Dreeben pointed out to the Court, that phrase was actually meant to distinguish a politician's legitimate feelings of "general gratitude," as the Court put it in a 2013 case, from the impermissible act of swapping a political favor for money. In Citizens United, the Court itself noted that contributions like the two million dollars paid by the dairy industry to Richard Nixon's Presidential-campaign fund so that it could discuss price controls with Nixon would today be considered a bribe. And yet the Justices' chilly response to Dreeben's argument suggests that, at this point, they're not interested in policing the line between "general gratitude" and quid-pro-quo corruption.

The Justices worried that if they defined "official acts" too broadly, the difference between lawful and unlawful behavior would be left entirely to the judgment of federal prosecutors. Because every politician in the country would then be a potential target, the Justice Department would have too much discretion to pick and choose cases. As Jeffrey Toobin wrote last year about the former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, currently in prison for appointing a campaign donor to a regulatory board, "Thanks to the courts, the line between illegal bribery by campaign contribution and the ordinary business of politics has all but disappeared. Throwing a man in prison for activity at the murky barrier between the two is simply unjust."

The idea that American politics is pervasively corrupted by money is not a fringe position. That doesn't mean Breyer is wrong to fear that a victory for the government would give prosecutors too much power to select their targets. But there's an unstated premise at work here: even if some elected officials are charged for campaign-finance quid pro quo, no one will stop trading access for donations. You and I might violate federal copyright laws by illegally downloading a movie, but if we're unlucky enough to get charged we can't use "everybody does it" as a defense. The threat of harsh federal penalties is supposed to keep people from breaking the law, even if the chances of getting caught are slim. That logic evidently doesn't apply to politicians, in the Court's view, because the practice of selling access is so thickly embedded in American political culture that they simply can't stop doing it. As Benjamin tells Wayne and Garth, "I'm sorry you feel that way, but basically it's the nature of the beast."

--
****
Juan
 

Donald Trump aids and abets violence.

- An American Story



Friday, April 29, 2016

Something to Know - 29 April

Jeff Danziger

This is a repeat, after a fashion, from yesterday's LA Times to today's NY Times.   Never the less, it bears repeating, and we cannot over estimate the damage that will be inflicted if the Supreme Court rules that bribery is protected under the Constitution.   We have no room for it, and you need to know what is going on here:


There's No Such Thing as a Free Rolex
By ZEPHYR TEACHOUTAPRIL 29, 2016

THIS week, the Supreme Court heard McDonnell v. United States, the case of Bob McDonnell, the former governor of Virginia who is appealing his 2014 conviction for public corruption. Although the court's ruling is not expected until June, in Wednesday's hearing several justices seemed set on undermining a central, longstanding federal bribery principle: that officials should not accept cash or gifts in exchange for giving special treatment to a constituent.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer dismissed the idea that, in the absence of a strong limiting principle, federal law could criminalize a governor who accepted a private constituent's payment in exchange for intervening with a constituent problem. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. expressed disbelief that an official requesting agency action on behalf of a big donor would be a problem. A majority seemed ready to defend pay-to-play as a fundamental feature of our constitutional system of government.

In September 2014, after a six-week trial, a federal jury convicted Mr. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, on multiple counts of extortion under the Hobbs Act, a key statute against political corruption, and honest-services fraud. It was not a complicated case. Jonnie R. Williams Sr., the chief executive of a dietary supplement manufacturer, Star Scientific, had showered the governor and first lady with gifts in return for favors.

We're not talking about a few ham sandwiches. The McDonnells took expensive vacations, a Rolex, a $20,000 shopping spree, $15,000 in catering expenses for a daughter's wedding and tens of thousands of dollars in private loans. In exchange, the governor eagerly promoted Mr. Williams's product, a supplement called Anatabloc: hosting an event at the governor's mansion, passing out samples and encouraging universities to do research.

There was ample evidence of connection between the favors and the governor's actions. In one instance, Mr. McDonnell emailed Mr. Williams asking about a $50,000 loan, and six minutes later sent another email to his staff, requesting an update on Anatabloc scientific research. For the jury, that was more than enough to find Mr. McDonnell guilty.

The former governor has claimed on appeal that he had a First Amendment right to accept these gifts. He also disputed that holding meetings, hosting events at the governor's mansion and recommending research were "official acts." There were quids, he argued, but no quos.

And the justices seem poised to agree. Their main worry appeared to be that Mr. McDonnell's prosecution had criminalized what they perceived as normal, day-to-day political behavior — seemingly more concerned for the chilling effect of federal bribery law on an elected official who accepts a Rolex than for the citizens who are hurt by such self-serving behavior.

To overturn the McDonnells' convictions, however, would also overturn more than 700 years of history, make bad law and leave citizens facing a crisis of political corruption with even fewer tools to fight it.

The legal principles involved date from England's Statute of Westminster of 1275, which said that no officer of the king should take any payment for his public duties except what was owed by the monarch. In 1914, the United States Supreme Court held that official acts included situations "in which the advice or recommendation of a Government employee would be influential," even if the official did not "make a binding decision." In other words, an official may still be guilty of accepting a bribe even if he is not the final decider.

As modern corruption law developed, the axiom that an official shouldn't accept gifts for public duties, broadly understood, was a basic feature of American law. The Supreme Court has held that under the Hobbs Act, "the Government need only show that a public official has obtained a payment to which he was not entitled, knowing that the payment was made in return for official acts."

Otherwise, only the most unsophisticated criminal would ever get caught. A clumsy influence seeker might write an email offering "five diamonds for five votes in Congress," but the powerful corrupting forces in our society would avoid explicit deals and give lavish gifts tied to meetings and speeches, winking and nodding all the while.

In its Citizens United ruling, the court gutted campaign finance laws. It acknowledged that American politics faced the threat of gift-givers and donors trying to corrupt the system, but it held that campaign finance laws were the wrong way to deal with that problem; bribery laws were the better path. Now, though, the court seems ready to gut bribery laws, saying that campaign finance laws provide a better approach. But if both campaign finance laws and bribery laws are now regarded as problematic, what's left?

With the Supreme Court apparently imagining that there is some other, simple-to-enforce bribery law, we citizens are left empty-handed. This is the first case since Justice Antonin Scalia's passing to directly address what corruption is; the issue is a critical test of the court.

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the framers devoted themselves to building a system that would be safe from moneyed influence. "If we do not provide against corruption," argued the Virginia delegate George Mason, "our government will soon be at an end."

Today, Virginia's former governor proposes that there is a "fundamental constitutional right" to buy and sell access. If the court finds in his favor, it will have turned corruption from a wrong into a right.


Zephyr Teachout, an associate professor of law at Fordham and a candidate for New York's 19th congressional district, is the author of "Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United."


--
****
Juan
 

Donald Trump aids and abets violence.

- An American Story



Thursday, April 28, 2016

Something to Know - 28 April (Repeat of misdirected previous edition - as if that makes sense)

Stuart Carlson

The Supreme Court decision to let the unlimited money flow into our political process was a dark day in our democracy.  Now, read this.   The former Governor of Virginia, who was convicted of receiving money and gifts to give access and favors to a constituent, is now basing his appeal on that very decision by claiming that elected officials who give access by having people "pay to play" are actions protected by the 1st Amendment.  Are you serious?   Bribery is protected by the Constitution?:

In his bribery conviction appeal, the former governor says buying political access is protected speech.
BY DAVID G. SAVAGE
  
 WASHINGTON — Facing an uphill fight to avoid a prison term for bribery, former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell is making a bold argument in the Supreme Court this week that buying access and influence with public officials is protected by the 1st Amendment.
   And to back up his claim, his attorneys have pointed to passages in the court's controversial Citizens United decision.
   In that case, the conservative majority not only freed corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums on politics, but — in a less-noticed clause — described buying access with officials as a time-honored part of American democracy.
   "The possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner influence over or access to elected officials" is not evidence of bribery or corruption, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said two years ago in another decision on campaign spending, which struck down the limits on how much in total a single donor may give to a field of candidates. "Ingratiation and access ... are not corruption," he said, quoting from the 2010 Citizens United opinion.
   McDonnell's attorneys have latched on to that legal rationale to argue that elected officials doing small favors for big donors is protected under the 1st Amendment.
   "Paying for 'access' — the ability to get a call answered or a meeting scheduled — is constitutionally protected and an intrinsic part of our political system," they said in their appeal. "If Gov. McDonnell can be imprisoned for giving routine access to a gift-giver, an official could equally be imprisoned for agreeing to answer a donor's phone call about a policy issue."
   This 1st Amendment claim is a key part of their argument that the former governor, who faces two years in prison, should go free because he merely encouraged but did not order state officials to fund research on an untested dietary supplement promoted by a wealthy businessman who gave considerable financial assistance to McDonnell and his family.
   The justices will hear arguments Wednesday in McDonnell vs. United States.
   The Justice Department says McDonnell's claim, if accepted by the high court, would "radically restrict" bribery laws and "allow the purchase and sale of much of what government employees do."
   Defenders of the campaign funding laws say they were surprised to see them invoked in a case involving gifts and cash given secretly to a public official.
   "This is an apples-and-oranges comparison, and they are working with the wrong fruit," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a group that supports tighter limits on money in politics. "We think they are just wrong to say personal gifts are protected speech under the 1st Amendment."
   Forty years ago, in the Buckley vs. Valeo decision, the court said contributions to candidates could be limited as a way to avoid corruption or "the appearance of corruption." But more recently, the Roberts court has said that only bribes amount to corruption. "The government may not seek to limit the appearance of mere influence or access," Roberts wrote two years ago.
   McDonnell, a Republican and former state attorney general, was elected governor in 2009. He was seen then as a rising star and was talked about as a possible vice presidential running mate for Mitt Romney in 2012.
   But McDonnell and his wife were deeply in debt. Jonnie Williams, a free-spending Virginia businessman, offered to improve their "financial situation" if they helped promote his tobacco-based dietary supplement.
   Over two years, he secretly gave the couple more than $175,000 in loans, vacations and gifts, including a New York shopping spree by McDonnell's wife and an engraved Rolex watch for the governor.
   The trial also featured a photo of McDonnell proudly driving a Ferrari that Williams had lent him to use during a vacation.
   Prosecutors showed evidence that within minutes of speaking to Williams about personal loans, the governor called or emailed aides and state health officials, asking them to come to the governor's mansion to hear more about the dietary supplement. McDonnell used the governor's mansion for a product launch for the new supplement. And he carried a bottle of pills in his pocket and suggested state employees might want to try them.
   But the state's health advisors and researchers at state universities were unimpressed. In the end, the state did no testing or research on the supplement Williams was promoting.
   McDonnell was charged with bribery and corruption, and a jury convicted him in 2014 on 11 counts. A U.S. appeals court upheld the convictions and said the governor had taken bribes in exchange for "using the power of his office to influence governmental decisions."
   But last year, the Supreme Court shielded McDonnell from going to prison while his appeal was considered.
   McDonnell's lawyers contend that the governor took no "official action" to benefit Williams. In their view, meetings and phone calls did not count unless the state took a formal action, such as awarding a contract or funding a research study.
   The death of Justice Antonin Scalia has greatly diminished the chances that McDonnell will prevail because the liberal justices are not expected to support his legal position, particularly if it is based on the Citizens United decision.
   If the court splits 4-4 on the case — as has happened frequently since Scalia's death — the lower court ruling would stand, meaning McDonnell's conviction and prison term would be upheld.david.savage@latimes.com  


--
****
Juan
 

Donald Trump aids and abets violence.

- An American Story



Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Andy borowitz


BOROWITZ REPORT

APRIL 27, 2016
Cruz Hopes To Tap Into Immense Popularity of Carly Fiorina
BY ANDY BOROWITZ


INDIANAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—In choosing the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O. Carly Fiorina as his running mate, Senator Ted Cruz hopes to tap into the immense popularity of one of the most beloved public figures in America.

Minutes after the news of Cruz's selection leaked, political insiders called the choice of the wildly adored Fiorina a game-changer for the Cruz campaign.


"It's no secret that Ted Cruz has some trouble with likeability," the Republican strategist Harland Dorrinson said. "What better way to fix that than by choosing Carly Fiorina, a person everyone is absolutely crazy about?"

Fiorina's reputation for winning the hearts of everyone she comes in contact with dates back to her days as the incredibly well-liked C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard and, before that, Lucent Technologies.

"At Lucent, she could light up any room with her smile," former Lucent employee Tracy Klugian said. "If you had to say what people loved about working at Lucent Technologies, it all came down to two words: Carly Fiorina."


--
****
Juan
 

Donald Trump aids and abets violence.

- An American Story



Something to Know - 27 April (evening edition)

Stuart Carlson

The Supreme Court decision to let the unlimited money flow into our political process was a dark day in our democracy.  Now, read this.   The former Governor of Virginia, who was convicted of receiving money and gifts to give access and favors to a constituent, is now basing his appeal on that very decision by claiming that elected officials who give access by having people "pay to play" are actions protected by the 1st Amendment.  Are you serious?   Bribery is protected by the Constitution?:

In his bribery conviction appeal, the former governor says buying political access is protected speech.
BY DAVID G. SAVAGE
  
 WASHINGTON — Facing an uphill fight to avoid a prison term for bribery, former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell is making a bold argument in the Supreme Court this week that buying access and influence with public officials is protected by the 1st Amendment.
   And to back up his claim, his attorneys have pointed to passages in the court's controversial Citizens United decision.
   In that case, the conservative majority not only freed corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums on politics, but — in a less-noticed clause — described buying access with officials as a time-honored part of American democracy.
   "The possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner influence over or access to elected officials" is not evidence of bribery or corruption, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said two years ago in another decision on campaign spending, which struck down the limits on how much in total a single donor may give to a field of candidates. "Ingratiation and access ... are not corruption," he said, quoting from the 2010 Citizens United opinion.
   McDonnell's attorneys have latched on to that legal rationale to argue that elected officials doing small favors for big donors is protected under the 1st Amendment.
   "Paying for 'access' — the ability to get a call answered or a meeting scheduled — is constitutionally protected and an intrinsic part of our political system," they said in their appeal. "If Gov. McDonnell can be imprisoned for giving routine access to a gift-giver, an official could equally be imprisoned for agreeing to answer a donor's phone call about a policy issue."
   This 1st Amendment claim is a key part of their argument that the former governor, who faces two years in prison, should go free because he merely encouraged but did not order state officials to fund research on an untested dietary supplement promoted by a wealthy businessman who gave considerable financial assistance to McDonnell and his family.
   The justices will hear arguments Wednesday in McDonnell vs. United States.
   The Justice Department says McDonnell's claim, if accepted by the high court, would "radically restrict" bribery laws and "allow the purchase and sale of much of what government employees do."
   Defenders of the campaign funding laws say they were surprised to see them invoked in a case involving gifts and cash given secretly to a public official.
   "This is an apples-and-oranges comparison, and they are working with the wrong fruit," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a group that supports tighter limits on money in politics. "We think they are just wrong to say personal gifts are protected speech under the 1st Amendment."
   Forty years ago, in the Buckley vs. Valeo decision, the court said contributions to candidates could be limited as a way to avoid corruption or "the appearance of corruption." But more recently, the Roberts court has said that only bribes amount to corruption. "The government may not seek to limit the appearance of mere influence or access," Roberts wrote two years ago.
   McDonnell, a Republican and former state attorney general, was elected governor in 2009. He was seen then as a rising star and was talked about as a possible vice presidential running mate for Mitt Romney in 2012.
   But McDonnell and his wife were deeply in debt. Jonnie Williams, a free-spending Virginia businessman, offered to improve their "financial situation" if they helped promote his tobacco-based dietary supplement.
   Over two years, he secretly gave the couple more than $175,000 in loans, vacations and gifts, including a New York shopping spree by McDonnell's wife and an engraved Rolex watch for the governor.
   The trial also featured a photo of McDonnell proudly driving a Ferrari that Williams had lent him to use during a vacation.
   Prosecutors showed evidence that within minutes of speaking to Williams about personal loans, the governor called or emailed aides and state health officials, asking them to come to the governor's mansion to hear more about the dietary supplement. McDonnell used the governor's mansion for a product launch for the new supplement. And he carried a bottle of pills in his pocket and suggested state employees might want to try them.
   But the state's health advisors and researchers at state universities were unimpressed. In the end, the state did no testing or research on the supplement Williams was promoting.
   McDonnell was charged with bribery and corruption, and a jury convicted him in 2014 on 11 counts. A U.S. appeals court upheld the convictions and said the governor had taken bribes in exchange for "using the power of his office to influence governmental decisions."
   But last year, the Supreme Court shielded McDonnell from going to prison while his appeal was considered.
   McDonnell's lawyers contend that the governor took no "official action" to benefit Williams. In their view, meetings and phone calls did not count unless the state took a formal action, such as awarding a contract or funding a research study.
   The death of Justice Antonin Scalia has greatly diminished the chances that McDonnell will prevail because the liberal justices are not expected to support his legal position, particularly if it is based on the Citizens United decision.
   If the court splits 4-4 on the case — as has happened frequently since Scalia's death — the lower court ruling would stand, meaning McDonnell's conviction and prison term would be upheld. david.savage@latimes.com

.
--
****
Juan
 

Donald Trump aids and abets violence.

- An American Story



Re: Something to Know - 27 April

They will be ruluctant to relinquish their 15 minutes de fame....
 
Because when they are done -- they are DONE
 
F.
 
 
In a message dated 4/27/2016 9:43:18 A.M. Central Daylight Time, juanma2t@gmail.com writes:
This is the first attempt at using GoogleGroups.   I thought it was working 10 days ago, but realized yesterday that I had been sending this into the cloud of no destination.  Hopefully, things go better going forward.  Thanks for your patience:

http://www.gocomics.com/stuartcarlson#mutable_1433303

After the results from last night's voting, the final staging of who will be on the ballot in November is almost certain.   Oh, there will be a lot of fun and games between now and then - not so much on the Democrats side.  The Republican National Committee, rich donors, and the crazies on the extreme will be making it all very interesting.   Still, the die-hard also rans will be visible to all, and how and what they do will be another story, as this column by Frank Bruni suggests:


The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Cult of Sore Losers

Frank Bruni
i APRIL 26, 2016



Bernie Sanders isn't losing. Just ask many of his backers or listen to some of his own complaints. He's being robbed, a victim of antiquated rules, voter suppression, shady arithmetic and a corrupt Democratic establishment. The swindle includes the South's getting inordinate sway and the poor none at all. If Americans really had a voice, they would shout "Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!" until too hoarse to shout anymore.

Donald Trump isn't winning. Just ask Ted Cruz, by whose strange and self-serving logic it is "the will of the people" (his actual words) that he and John Kasich collude to prevent Trump from amassing a majority of delegates so that some runner-up with less demonstrable support can leapfrog past him to become the Republican presidential nominee. Democracy in action!

I agree that Trump's nomination would be frightening. I disagree that Cruz's would be better. It certainly wouldn't be more justified, but such rational thinking has gone missing in this year of losing gracelessly.

And in this era of irresolution. All too often, contests don't yield accepted conclusions and a grudging acquiescence by those who didn't get their way. They prompt accusations of thievery, cries of illegitimacy and a determination to neuter the victor, nullify the results or reverse them as soon as possible.

Elections don't settle disputes, not even for some fleeting honeymoon. They accelerate them, because there's a pernicious insistence that they're not referendums on the public mood but elaborate board games in which the triumphant player used the wickedest skulduggery.

When you honestly believe or disingenuously assert that you've been outmaneuvered rather than outvoted, why declare a truce, let alone cooperate, in the aftermath?

The process has never been smooth and the defeated seldom docile. To pluck just one example from the annals of acrimony, Teddy Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party in 1912 as a revolt against the Republicans' nomination of the incumbent president, William Howard Taft, rather than him.

But an epoch of unrelieved mutual suspicion between competitors — and especially between Republicans and Democrats — took hold somewhere on a timeline that runs through Watergate; the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas; the serial investigations into the Clintons; and Mitch McConnell's vow to thwart President Obama at every turn.

In the midst of that came Bush v. Gore, in which a majority of Republican appointees on the Supreme Court decided a presidential election in the Republican candidate's favor.

All trust, most etiquette and many rules went out the window. And while Republicans have been more audacious than Democrats, the manifold accusations made by Sanders supporters show that the effort to delegitimize winners is a pan-partisan tic.

The pro-Sanders actor Tim Robbins fired off a tweet this week with the charge that "this election is being stolen," the hashtag #VoterFraud and the insinuation that The Times and CNN were essentially conspiring with Hillary Clinton's campaign.

The Sanders camp is right to raise questions about voting irregularities in a few places, including New York, where there's an investigation underway, and about the odd patchwork of closed and open primaries across the country.

But all of the candidates knew about that patchwork going in, and Clinton's successful navigation of it — she has a multi-million-vote lead over Sanders — is more persuasive than any dark claims of dastardly tricks.

On the Republican side, Trump and Cruz have each bellowed about the other's supposedly unfair advantages at a volume that's hardly constructive. It's self-promotion with a side of cynicism.

The graceless losing of 2016 owes something to this election's particular characters. When you're not just a man but a revolution (Sanders), you can never quit the fight or flee the front.

When you're the Don Quixote of extreme conservatism (Cruz), you can never ditch your armor. And it's easy to tell yourself — because it's easy forall of us to tell ourselves — that surrendering to Trump is surrendering your patriotism.


But there's more at work. The refusal to grant victors legitimacy bundles together so much about America today: the coarseness of our discourse; the blind tribalism coloring our debates; the elevation of individualism far above common purpose; the ethos that everybody should and can feel like a winner on every day.

Our system for electing presidents is indeed a mess. It estranges voters and is ripe for reform. I explored that last week.

But pushing for change is different from rejecting any unwelcome outcome as the bastard fruit of a poisoned tree. If grievances are never retired, then progress has no chance. If everything is rigged, then all is fair, not just in love and war but on the banks of the Potomac, where we can look forward to four more years of inertia and ugliness.


--
****
Juan
 

Donald Trump aids and abets violence.

- An American Story



--
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Something to Know - 27 April

This is the first attempt at using GoogleGroups.   I thought it was working 10 days ago, but realized yesterday that I had been sending this into the cloud of no destination.  Hopefully, things go better going forward.  Thanks for your patience:

Stuart Carlson

After the results from last night's voting, the final staging of who will be on the ballot in November is almost certain.   Oh, there will be a lot of fun and games between now and then - not so much on the Democrats side.  The Republican National Committee, rich donors, and the crazies on the extreme will be making it all very interesting.   Still, the die-hard also rans will be visible to all, and how and what they do will be another story, as this column by Frank Bruni suggests:


The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Cult of Sore Losers

Frank Bruni
i APRIL 26, 2016



Bernie Sanders isn't losing. Just ask many of his backers or listen to some of his own complaints. He's being robbed, a victim of antiquated rules, voter suppression, shady arithmetic and a corrupt Democratic establishment. The swindle includes the South's getting inordinate sway and the poor none at all. If Americans really had a voice, they would shout "Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!" until too hoarse to shout anymore.

Donald Trump isn't winning. Just ask Ted Cruz, by whose strange and self-serving logic it is "the will of the people" (his actual words) that he and John Kasich collude to prevent Trump from amassing a majority of delegates so that some runner-up with less demonstrable support can leapfrog past him to become the Republican presidential nominee. Democracy in action!

I agree that Trump's nomination would be frightening. I disagree that Cruz's would be better. It certainly wouldn't be more justified, but such rational thinking has gone missing in this year of losing gracelessly.

And in this era of irresolution. All too often, contests don't yield accepted conclusions and a grudging acquiescence by those who didn't get their way. They prompt accusations of thievery, cries of illegitimacy and a determination to neuter the victor, nullify the results or reverse them as soon as possible.

Elections don't settle disputes, not even for some fleeting honeymoon. They accelerate them, because there's a pernicious insistence that they're not referendums on the public mood but elaborate board games in which the triumphant player used the wickedest skulduggery.

When you honestly believe or disingenuously assert that you've been outmaneuvered rather than outvoted, why declare a truce, let alone cooperate, in the aftermath?

The process has never been smooth and the defeated seldom docile. To pluck just one example from the annals of acrimony, Teddy Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party in 1912 as a revolt against the Republicans' nomination of the incumbent president, William Howard Taft, rather than him.

But an epoch of unrelieved mutual suspicion between competitors — and especially between Republicans and Democrats — took hold somewhere on a timeline that runs through Watergate; the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas; the serial investigations into the Clintons; and Mitch McConnell's vow to thwart President Obama at every turn.

In the midst of that came Bush v. Gore, in which a majority of Republican appointees on the Supreme Court decided a presidential election in the Republican candidate's favor.

All trust, most etiquette and many rules went out the window. And while Republicans have been more audacious than Democrats, the manifold accusations made by Sanders supporters show that the effort to delegitimize winners is a pan-partisan tic.

The pro-Sanders actor Tim Robbins fired off a tweet this week with the charge that "this election is being stolen," the hashtag #VoterFraud and the insinuation that The Times and CNN were essentially conspiring with Hillary Clinton's campaign.

The Sanders camp is right to raise questions about voting irregularities in a few places, including New York, where there's an investigation underway, and about the odd patchwork of closed and open primaries across the country.

But all of the candidates knew about that patchwork going in, and Clinton's successful navigation of it — she has a multi-million-vote lead over Sanders — is more persuasive than any dark claims of dastardly tricks.

On the Republican side, Trump and Cruz have each bellowed about the other's supposedly unfair advantages at a volume that's hardly constructive. It's self-promotion with a side of cynicism.

The graceless losing of 2016 owes something to this election's particular characters. When you're not just a man but a revolution (Sanders), you can never quit the fight or flee the front.

When you're the Don Quixote of extreme conservatism (Cruz), you can never ditch your armor. And it's easy to tell yourself — because it's easy forall of us to tell ourselves — that surrendering to Trump is surrendering your patriotism.


But there's more at work. The refusal to grant victors legitimacy bundles together so much about America today: the coarseness of our discourse; the blind tribalism coloring our debates; the elevation of individualism far above common purpose; the ethos that everybody should and can feel like a winner on every day.

Our system for electing presidents is indeed a mess. It estranges voters and is ripe for reform. I explored that last week.

But pushing for change is different from rejecting any unwelcome outcome as the bastard fruit of a poisoned tree. If grievances are never retired, then progress has no chance. If everything is rigged, then all is fair, not just in love and war but on the banks of the Potomac, where we can look forward to four more years of inertia and ugliness.


--
****
Juan
 

Donald Trump aids and abets violence.

- An American Story



Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Something to Know - 26 April (Testing Yahoo Mail)

Apparently none of you have been receiving anything since I switched over to GoogleGroups.com.   I will revert to Yahoo Mail until, or if ever, this is resolved:




Every presidential candidate has an angle on Wall Street

In consideration of the fact that Hillary Clinton just may be the nominee of the Democratic Party, many voters will be turning to closer examination of Hillary and her policies and where it may take the nation.   One YUGE factor is the buzz about Hillary's "hawkishness".  This well-written and plainly presented article helps in the process:


How Hillary Clinton
Became a Hawk

Throughout her career she has displayed instincts on foreign policy that are
more aggressive than those of President Obama — and most Democrats.
By MARK LANDLERAPRIL 21, 2016

Throughout her career she has displayed instincts on foreign policy that are
more aggressive than those of President Obama — and most Democrats.

By MARK LANDLER
APRIL 21, 2016
Hillary Clinton sat in the hideaway study off her ceremonial office in the State Department, sipping tea and taking stock of her first year on the job. The study was more like a den — cozy and wood-paneled, lined with bookshelves that displayed mementos from Clinton's three decades in the public eye: a statue of her heroine, Eleanor Roosevelt; a baseball signed by the Chicago Cubs star Ernie Banks; a carved wooden figure of a pregnant African woman. The intimate setting lent itself to a less-formal interview than the usual locale, her imposing outer office, with its marble fireplace, heavy drapes, crystal chandelier and ornate wall sconces. On the morning of Feb. 26, 2010, however, Clinton was talking about something more sensitive than mere foreign affairs: her relationship with Barack Obama. To say she chose her words carefully doesn't do justice to the delicacy of the exercise. She was like a bomb-squad technician, deciding which color wire to snip without blowing up her relationship with the White House.

"We've developed, I think, a very good rapport, really positive back-and-forth about everything you can imagine," Clinton said about the man she described during the 2008 campaign as naïve, irresponsible and hopelessly unprepared to be president. "And we've had some interesting and even unusual experiences along the way."

She leaned forward as she spoke, gesturing with her hands and laughing easily. In talking with reporters, Clinton displays more warmth than Obama does, though there's less of an expectation that she might say something revealing.

Clinton singled out, as she often would, the United Nations climate-change meeting in Copenhagen the previous December, where she and Obama worked together to save the meeting from collapse. She brought up the Middle East peace proc­ess, a signature project of the president's, which she had been tasked with reviving. But she was understandably wary of talking about areas in which she and Obama split — namely, on bedrock issues of war and peace, where Clinton's more activist philosophy had already collided in unpredictable ways with her boss's instincts toward restraint. She had backed Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendation to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, before endorsing a fallback proposal of 30,000 (Obama went along with that, though he stipulated that the soldiers would begin to pull out again in July 2011, which she viewed as problematic). She supported the Pentagon's plan to leave behind a residual force of 10,000 to 20,000 American troops in Iraq (Obama balked at this, largely because of his inability to win legal protections from the Iraqis, a failure that was to haunt him when the Islamic State overran much of the country). And she pressed for the United States to funnel arms to the rebels in Syria's civil war (an idea Obama initially rebuffed before later, halfheartedly, coming around to it).

That fundamental tension between Clinton and the president would continue to be a defining feature of her four-year tenure as secretary of state. In the administration's first high-level meeting on Russia in February 2009, aides to Obama proposed that the United States make some symbolic concessions to Russia as a gesture of its good will in resetting the relationship. Clinton, the last to speak, brusquely rejected the idea, saying, "I'm not giving up anything for nothing." Her hardheadedness made an impression on Robert Gates, the defense secretary and George W. Bush holdover who was wary of a changed Russia. He decided there and then that she was someone he could do business with.

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"I thought, This is a tough lady," he told me.

A few months after my interview in her office, another split emerged when Obama picked up a secure phone for a weekend conference call with Clinton, Gates and a handful of other advisers. It was July 2010, four months after the North Korean military torpedoed a South Korean Navy corvette, sinking it and killing 46 sailors. Now, after weeks of fierce debate between the Pentagon and the State Department, the United States was gearing up to respond to this brazen provocation. The tentative plan — developed by Clinton's deputy at State, James Steinberg — was to dispatch the aircraft carrier George Washington into coastal waters to the east of North Korea as an unusual show of force.

But Adm. Robert Willard, then the Pacific commander, wanted to send the carrier on a more aggressive course, into the Yellow Sea, between North Korea and China. The Chinese foreign ministry had warned the United States against the move, which for Willard was all the more reason to press forward. He pushed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, who in turn pushed his boss, the defense secretary, to reroute the George Washington. Gates agreed, but he needed the commander in chief to sign off on a decision that could have political as well as military repercussions.

Gates laid out the case for diverting the George Washington to the Yellow Sea: that the United States should not look as if it was yielding to China. Clinton strongly seconded it. "We've got to run it up the gut!" she had said to her aides a few days earlier. (The Vince Lombardi imitation drew giggles from her staff, who, even 18 months into her tenure, still marveled at her pugnacity.)

Obama, though, was not persuaded. The George Washington was already underway; changing its course was not a decision to make on the fly.

"I don't call audibles with aircraft carriers," he said — unwittingly one-upping Clinton on her football metaphor.

It wasn't the last debate in which she would side with Gates. The two quickly discovered that they shared a Midwestern upbringing, a taste for a stiff drink after a long day of work and a deep-seated skepticism about the intentions of America's foes. Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence analyst who conducted Obama's initial review on the Afghanistan war, says: "I think one of the surprises for Gates and the military was, here they come in expecting a very left-of-center administration, and they discover that they have a secretary of state who's a little bit right of them on these issues — a little more eager than they are, to a certain extent. Particularly on Afghanistan, where I think Gates knew more had to be done, knew more troops needed to be sent in, but had a lot of doubts about whether it would work."

As Hillary Clinton makes another run for president, it can be tempting to view her hard-edged rhetoric about the world less as deeply felt core principle than as calculated political maneuver. But Clinton's foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls "a textbook view of American exceptionalism." It set her apart from her rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama, who avoided military entanglements and tried to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. And it will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.

"Hillary is very much a member of the traditional American foreign-policy establishment," says Vali Nasr, a foreign-policy strategist who advised her on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the State Department. "She believes, like presidents going back to the Reagan or Kennedy years, in the importance of the military — in solving terrorism, in asserting American influence. The shift with Obama is that he went from reliance on the military to the intelligence agencies. Their position was, 'All you need to deal with terrorism is N.S.A. and C.I.A., drones and special ops.' So the C.I.A. gave Obama an angle, if you will, to be simultaneously hawkish and shun using the military."

Unlike other recent presidents — Obama, George W. Bush or her husband, Bill Clinton — Hillary Clinton would assume the office with a long record on national security. There are many ways to examine that record, but one of the most revealing is to explore her decades-long cultivation of the military — not just civilian leaders like Gates, but also its high-ranking commanders, the men with the medals. Her affinity for the armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as Bush once put it, into "any dark corner of the world." Unexpectedly, in the bombastic, testosterone-fueled presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk left in the race.

For those who know Clinton's biography, her embrace of the military should come as no surprise. She grew up in the buoyant aftermath of World War II, the daughter of a Navy petty officer who trained young sailors before they shipped out to the Pacific. Her father, Hugh Rodham, was a staunch Republican and an anticommunist, and she channeled his views. She talks often about her girlhood dream of becoming an astronaut, citing the rejection letter she got from NASA as the first time she encountered gender discrimination. Her real motive for volunteering, she has written, may have been because her father fretted that "America was lagging behind Russia."

Political conversion came later, after Vietnam and the '60s swept over Wellesley College, where she spoke out against the establishment at her graduation. But even in the tumultuous year of 1968, she was still making her transition from Republican to Democrat, managing to go to the conventions of both parties. As a Republican intern in Washington that summer, she questioned a Wisconsin congressman, Melvin Laird, about the wisdom of Lyndon B. Johnson's escalating involvement in Southeast Asia.

It was after law school that she had her most curious encounter with the military. In 1975, the year she married Bill Clinton, she stopped in at a Marine recruiting office in Arkansas to inquire about joining the active forces or reserves. She was a lawyer, she explained; maybe there was some way she could serve. The recruiter, she recalled two decades later, was a young man of about 21, in prime physical condition. Clinton was then 27, freshly transplanted from Washington, teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses. "You're too old, you can't see and you're a woman," he told her. "Maybe the dogs will take you," he added, in what she said was a pejorative reference to the Army.

Some reporters have cast doubt on the veracity of this story, which she repeated in the fall of 2015 over breakfast with voters in New Hampshire: certainly, there's no concrete evidence that it happened, and Bill gave a different account of it in 2008, substituting the Army for the Marines. Why would a professionally minded Yale Law graduate, on the cusp of marriage, suddenly want to put on a uniform? It's impossible to decipher her possible motives, but Ann Henry, an old friend who taught at the university after Clinton moved to Little Rock, offers a theory: During those days, she recalls, female faculty members, as an exercise, would test the boundaries of careers that appeared closed to women. "I don't think it's made up," she says. "It was consistent with something she would have done."

Clinton's next sustained exposure to the military did not come until she was first lady, almost two decades later. Living in the White House is, in many ways, like living in a military compound. A Marine stands guard in front of the West Wing when the president is in the Oval Office. The Mili­tary Office operates the medical center and the telecommunications system. The Navy runs the cafeteria, the Marines transport the president by helicopter, the Air Force by plane. Camp David is a naval facility. The daily contact with men and women in uniform, Clinton's friends say, deepened her feelings for them.

In March 1996, the first lady visited American troops stationed in Bosnia. The trip became notorious years later when she claimed, during the 2008 campaign, to have dodged sniper fire after her C-17 military plane landed at an American base in Tuzla. (Chris Hill, a diplomat who was onboard that day and later served as ambassador to Iraq under Clinton, didn't remember snipers at all, and indeed recalled children handing her bouquets of spring flowers.) But there was no faking the good vibes during her tour of the mess and rec halls. With her teenage daughter at her side, she bantered and joked with the young servicemen and women — an experience, she wrote, that "left lasting impressions on Chelsea and me."

When Clinton was elected to the Senate, she had strong political reasons to care about the mili­tary. The Pentagon was in the midst of a long, politically charged process of closing military bases; New York State had already been a victim, when Plattsburgh Air Force Base was closed in 1995, a loss of 352 civilian jobs for that hard-luck North Country town. New York's delegation was determined to protect its remaining bases, especially Fort Drum, home of the Army's 10th Mountain Division, which sprawls over a hundred thousand acres in rural Jefferson County. In October 2001, a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Clinton traveled to Fort Drum at the invitation of Gen. Buster Hagenbeck, who had just been named the division's commander and would be deployed to Afghanistan a month later. Like many of the officers I spoke with, he had preconceptions of Clinton from her years as first lady; the woman who showed up at his office around happy hour that afternoon did not fulfill them.

"She sat down," he recalls, "took her shoes off, put her feet up on the coffee table and said, 'General, do you know where a gal can get a cold beer around here?' "

It was the start of a dialogue that stretched over two wars. In the spring of 2002, Hagenbeck led Operation Anaconda, a 16-day assault on Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in the Shah-i-Kot Valley that was the largest combat engagement of the war to date. When the general came back to Washington to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Clinton took him out to dinner on Capitol Hill for her own briefing. They also spoke about the Bush administration's preparations for war in Iraq, something which Hagenbeck was following anxiously. The general, it turned out, was more of a dove than the senator. He warned her about the risks of an invasion, which was then being war-gamed inside the Pentagon. It would be like "kicking over a bee's nest," he said.

Hagenbeck excused Clinton's vote in 2002 to authorize military action in Iraq. "She made a considered call," he says. And "she was chagrined, much after the fact." For him, what mattered more than Clinton's voting record was her unstinting public support of the military, whether in protecting Fort Drum or backing him during a difficult first year in Afghanistan.

Clinton's education in military affairs began in earnest in 2002, after the Democratic Party's crushing defeat in midterm elections moved her up several rungs in Senate seniority. The party's congressional leaders offered her a seat on either the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the Senate Armed Services Committee. She chose Armed Services, spurning a long tradition of New York senators, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jacob Javits, who coveted the prestige of Foreign Relations. Armed Services deals with more earthbound issues, like benefits for veterans, and it had long been the preserve of Republican hawks like John McCain. But after 9/11, Clinton saw Armed Services as better preparation for her future. For a politician looking to hone hard-power credentials — a woman who aspired to be commander in chief — it was the perfect training ground. She dug in like a grunt at boot camp.

Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk left in the race.
Andrew Shapiro, then Senator Clinton's foreign-policy adviser, called upon 10 experts — including Bill Perry, who was defense secretary under her husband, and Ashton Carter, who would eventually become President Obama's fourth defense secretary — to tutor her on everything from grand strategy to defense procurement. She met quietly with Andrew Marshall, an octogenarian strategist at the Pentagon who labored for decades in the blandly named Office of Net Assessment, earning the nickname Yoda for his Delphic insights. She went to every committee meeting, no matter how mundane. Aides recall her on C-SPAN3, sitting alone in the chamber, patiently questioning a lieutenant colonel. She visited the troops in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day in 2003 and spoke at every significant military installation in New York State. By then — 30 years after she recalled being rejected by a Marine recruiter in Arkansas — Hillary Clinton had become a military wonk.

Jack Keane is one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq surge; he is also perhaps the greatest single influence on the way Hillary Clinton thinks about military issues. A bear of a man with a jowly, careworn face and Brylcreem-slicked hair, Keane exudes the supreme self-confidence you would expect of a retired four-star general. He speaks with a trace of a New York accent that gives his pronouncements a rat-a-tat urgency. He is also a well-compensated member of the military-industrial complex, sitting on the board of General Dynamics and serving as a strategic adviser to Academi, the private-security contractor once known as Blackwater. And he is the chairman of an aptly named think tank, the Institute for the Study of War. Though he is one of a parade of cable-TV generals, Keane is the resident hawk on Fox News, where he appears regularly to call for the United States to use greater military force in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He doesn't shrink from putting boots on the ground and has little use for civilian leaders, like Obama, who do.

Keane first got to know Clinton in the fall of 2001, when she was a freshman senator and he was the Army's second in command, with a distinguished combat and command record in Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. He had expected her to be intelligent, hard-working and politically astute, but he was not prepared for the respect she showed for the Army as an institution, or her sympathy for the sacrifices made by soldiers and their families. Keane was confident he could smell a phony politician a mile away, and he didn't get that whiff from her.

"I read people; that's one of my strengths," he told me. "It's not that I can't be fooled, but I'm not fooled often."

Clinton took an instant liking to Keane, too. "She loves that Irish gruff thing," says one of her Senate aides, Kris Balderston, who was in the room that day. When Keane got up after 45 minutes to leave for a meeting back at the Pentagon with a Polish general, she protested that she wasn't finished yet and asked for another appointment. "I said, 'O.K., but it took me three months to get this one,' " Keane told her dryly.

Clinton exploded into a raucous laugh. "I'll take care of that problem," she promised.

She was true to her word: The two would meet many times over the next decade, discussing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranian nu­clear threat and other flash points in the Middle East. Sometimes he dropped by her Senate office; other times they met for dinner or drinks. He escorted her on her first visit to Fort Drum and set up her first trip to Iraq.

They generally agreed to forgo talk of politics, but at a meeting in Clinton's Senate office in January 2007, Keane tried to sell her on the logic of a troop surge in Iraq. The previous month, he had met with President Bush in the Oval Office to recommend that the United States deploy five to eight Army and Marine brigades to wage an urban counterinsurgency campaign; only that, he argued, would stabilize a country being ripped apart by sectarian strife. His presentation angered some of Keane's fellow generals, who feared that such a strategy would deepen Iraq's dependency and prolong America's involvement. But it had a big impact on the commander in chief, who soon ordered more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.


Clinton touring an Army barrack in Baghdad in 2003, while still the junior senator from New York and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Credit Dusan Vranic/AFP/Getty Images
Clinton was another story. "I'm convinced it's not going to work, Jack," she told him. She predicted that the American soldiers patrolling in Iraqi cities and towns would be "blown up" by Sunni militias or Al Qaeda fighters. "She thought we would fail," Keane recalls, "and it was going to cause increased casualties."

Politics, of course, was also on her mind. Barack Obama was laying the groundwork for his candidacy in mid-January with a campaign that would emphasize his opposition to the Iraq War and her vote in favor of it — a vote that still shadows her in this year's Democratic primaries. Obama was setting off on a fund-raising drive that would net $25 million in three months, sending tremors through Clinton's political camp and establishing him as a formidable rival. Although she disagreed with Keane about Iraq, Clinton asked him to become a formal adviser. "As much as I respect you," he replied, "I can't do that." Keane's wife had health problems that had moved up his retirement from the Army, and he did not, as a policy, endorse candidates. Sometime during 2008 — he doesn't remember exactly when — Clinton told him she had erred in doubting the wisdom of the surge. "She said, 'You were right, this really did work,' " Keane recalls. "On issues of national security," he says, "I thought she was always intellectually honest with me."

He and Clinton continued to talk, even after Obama was elected and she became secretary of state. More often than not, they found themselves in sync. Keane, like Clinton, favored more robust intervention in Syria than Obama did. In April 2015, the week before she announced her candidacy, Clinton asked him for a briefing on military options for dealing with the fighters of the Islamic State. Bringing along three young female analysts from the Institute for the Study of War, Keane gave her a 2-hour-20-minute presentation. Among other steps, he advocated imposing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria that would neutralize the air power of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, with a goal of forcing him into a political settlement with opposition groups. Six months later, Clinton publicly adopted this position, further distancing herself from Obama.

"I'm convinced this president, no matter what the circumstances, will never put any boots on the ground to do anything, even when it's compelling," Keane told me. He was sitting in the library at his home in McLean, Va., which is lined with books on military history and strategy. His critique of Obama was hardly new or original, but much of it mirrors the thinking of Clinton and her policy advisers. "One of the problems the president has, which weakens his diplomatic efforts, is that leaders don't believe he would use military power. That's an issue that would separate the president from Hillary Clinton rather dramatically. She would look at military force as another realistic option, but only where there is no other option."

Befriending Keane wasn't just about cultivating a single adviser. It gave Clinton instant entree to his informal network of active-duty and retired generals. The most interesting by far was David Petraeus, a cerebral commander who shared Clinton's jet-fueled ambition and whose life stories would mix heady success with humbling setbacks. Both would be accused of mishandling classified information — Clinton because of her use of a private server and email address to conduct sensitive government business, a decision that erupted into a political scandal; Petraeus because he had given a diary containing classified information to his biographer and mistress (he was eventually charged with a misdemeanor for mishandling classified information).

On Clinton's first trip to Iraq in November 2003, Petraeus, then a two-star general commanding the 101st Airborne Division, flew from his field headquarters in Mosul to the relative safety of Kirkuk to brief her congressional delegation. "She was full of questions," he recalls. "It was the kind of gesture that means a lot to a battlefield commander." On subsequent trips, as he rose in rank, Petraeus walked her through his plans to train and equip Iraqi Army troops, a forerunner of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. It worked to their mutual benefit: Petraeus was building ties to a prominent Democratic voice in the Senate; Clinton was burnishing her image as a friend of the troops. "She did it the old-fashioned way," he says. "She did it by pursuing relationships." When Petraeus was sent back to Iraq as the top commander in early 2007, he gave every member of the Senate Armed Services Committee a copy of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which he edited during a tour at Fort Leavenworth. Clinton read hers from cover to cover.

Although Clinton's reservations about the surge were valid — the stability that the additional troops brought to Iraq didn't last — her opposition to it, like her vote for the war, came back to haunt her. This time, it was her ally Bob Gates who summoned the ghost. In his memoirs, Gates wrote that she confessed to him and the president that her position had been politically motivated, because she was then facing Obama in the Iowa caucuses. (Obama, he wrote, "vaguely" conceded that he, too, had opposed it for political reasons.) Clinton pushed back, telling Diane Sawyer of ABC News that Gates "perhaps either missed the context or the meaning, because I did oppose the surge." Her opposition, she told Sawyer, was driven by the fact that at that time, people were not going to accept any escalation of the war. "This is not politics in electoral, political terms," Clinton said. "This is politics in the sense of the American public has to support commitments like this."

'They knew that if they walked into the Situation Room and they had her, it made a huge difference.'
The next time she found herself in a debate over sending troops into harm's way, she voiced no such reservations.

"We need maps," Hillary Clinton told her aides.

It was early October 2009, and she had just returned from a meeting in the Situation Room. Obama's war cabinet was debating how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan, where the United States, preoccupied by Iraq, had allowed the Taliban to regroup. The Pentagon, she reported, had used impressive, color-coded maps to show its plans to deploy troops around the country. The attention to detail made Gates and his commanders look crisp and well prepared; the State Department, which was pushing a "civilian surge" to accompany the troops, looked wan by comparison. At the next meeting, on Oct. 14, the team from State unfurled its own maps to show the deployment of an army of aid workers, diplomats, legal experts and crop specialists who were supposed to follow the soldiers into Afghanistan.

Clinton's fixation with maps was typical of her mind-set in the first great war-and-peace debate of the Obama presidency. She wanted to be taken seriously, even if her department was less central than the Pentagon. One way to do that was by promoting the civilian surge, the pet project of her friend and special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke. "She was determined that her briefing books would be just as thick and just as meticulous as those of the Pentagon," a senior adviser recalls. She also didn't hesitate to get into the Pentagon's business, asking detailed questions about the training of Afghan troops and wading into the weeds of military planning.

She resolved not to miss out on anything — a determination that may have been rooted in a deeper insecurity about her role in what was to become the most White House-centric administration of the modern era. On the morning of June 8, 2009, she emailed two aides to say: "I heard on the radio that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are we sending?" On Feb. 10, 2010, she dialed the White House from her home, but couldn't get past the switchboard operator, who didn't believe she was really Hillary Clinton. Asked to provide her office number to prove her identity, she said she didn't know it. Finally, Clinton hung up in frustration and placed the call again through the State Department Operations Center — "like a proper and properly dependent secretary of state," as she later wrote to one aide in a mock-chastened tone. "No independent dialing allowed."

The Afghan troop debate, a three-month drama of dueling egos, leaked documents and endless deliberations, is typically framed as a test of wills between the Pentagon's wily military commanders and an inexperienced young president, with Joe Biden playing the role of devil's advocate for Obama. While that portrait is accurate, it neglects the role of Clinton. By siding with Gates and the generals, she gave political ballast to their proposals and provided a bullish counterpoint to Biden's skepticism. Her role should not be overstated: She did not turn the debate, nor did she bring to it any distinctive point of view. But her unstinting support of General McChrystal's maximalist recommendation made it harder for Obama to choose a lesser option. (McChrystal was later fired by Obama after his aides made derogatory remarks about almost every member of his war cabinet to Rolling Stone magazine; she was the exception. "Hillary had Stan's back," one of his aides told the reporter, Michael Hastings.)

"Hillary was adamant in her support for what Stan asked for," Gates says. "She made clear that she was ready to support his request for the full 40,000 troops. She then made clear that she was only willing to go with the 30,000 number because I proposed it. She was, in a way, tougher on the numbers in the surge than I was." Gates believed that if he could align Clinton; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen; the commander of Central Command, David Petraeus; and himself behind a common position, it would be hard for Obama to say no. "How could you ignore these Four Horsemen of national security?" says Geoff Morrell, who served as the Pentagon press secretary at the time.

Just as Clinton benefited from her alliance with the military commanders, she gave them political cover. "Here's the dirty little secret," says Tom Nides, her former deputy secretary of state for management and resources. "They all knew they wanted her on their side. They knew that if they walked into the Situation Room and they had her, it made a huge difference in the dynamics. When she opened her mouth, she could change the momentum in the room."


Clinton visiting the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea in 2010 as secretary of state. Credit Mark Wilson-Pool/Associated Press
David Axelrod recalls one meeting where Clinton "kicked the thing off and pretty much articulated their opinion; I'm sure that's one that they remember. There's no doubt that she wanted to give them every troop that McChrystal was asking for." Still, Clinton didn't prevail on every argument. After agreeing to send the troops, Obama added a condition of his own: that the soldiers be deployed as quickly as possible and pulled out again, starting in the summer of 2011 — a deadline that proved more fateful in the long run than a difference of 10,000 troops. Clinton opposed setting a public deadline for withdrawal, arguing that it would tip America's hand to the Taliban and encourage them to wait out the United States — which, in fact, was exactly what happened.

In the final days of the debate, Clinton also found herself at odds with her own ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry. He, too, held different views than she did on the wisdom of a surge, which he put into writing. On Nov. 6, 2009, in a long cable addressed to Clinton — and later leaked to The New York Times — he made a trenchant, convincing case for why the McChrystal proposal, which she endorsed two weeks earlier in a meeting with Obama, would saddle the United States with "vastly increased costs and an indefinite, large-scale military role in Afghanistan."

Much of Eikenberry's analysis proved prescient, particularly his warnings about the threadbare American partnership with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. It carried an extra sting because he was a retired three-star Army general who was the commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. Clinton, who had not asked for the cable, was furious, fearing it could upset a debate in which she and the Pentagon were about to prevail.

What the cable made clear was the degree to which the Afghanistan debate was dominated by military considerations. While Clinton did raise the need to deal with Afghanistan's neighbor, Pakistan, her reflexive support of Gates, Petraeus and McChrystal meant she was not a powerful voice for diplomatic alternatives. "She contributed to the overmilitarizing of the analysis of the problem," says Sarah Chayes, who was an adviser to McChrystal and later to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen.

In October 2015, the persistent violence in Afghanistan and the legacy of Karzai's misrule forced Obama to reverse his plan to withdraw the last American soldiers by the end of his presi­dency. A few thousand troops will stay there indefinitely. And for all of Clinton's talk about a civilian surge, it never really materialized.

For Clinton, the Afghanistan episode laid bare a vexed relationship between her and Eikenberry, one of the few generals with whom she didn't hit it off. A soldier-scholar with graduate degrees from Harvard and Stanford, Eikenberry was brilliant but had a reputation among his colleagues for being imperious. Clinton had a similarly chilly relationship with Douglas Lute, another Army lieutenant general with a graduate degree from Harvard, who also fought with Holbrooke. "She likes the nail-eaters — McChrystal, Petraeus, Keane," one of her aides observes. "Real military guys, not these retired three-stars who go into civilian jobs."

"There's no doubt that Hillary Clinton's more muscular brand of American foreign policy is better matched to 2016 than it was to 2008," said Jake Sullivan, her top policy adviser at the State Department, who plays the same role in her campaign.

'She wanted to give them every troop that McChrystal was asking for.'
It was De­cem­ber 2015, 53 days before the Iowa caucuses, and Sullivan was sitting down with me in Clinton's sprawling Brooklyn headquarters to explain how she was shaping her message for a campaign suddenly dominated by concerns about national security. Clinton's strategy, he said, was twofold: Explain to voters that she had a clear plan for confronting the threat posed by Islamic terrorism, and expose her Republican opponents as utterly lacking in experience or credibility on national security.

There were good reasons for Clinton to let her inner hawk fly. After the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., Americans' concern about a major attack on the nation spiked. A CNN/ORC poll taken after Paris showed that a majority, 53 percent, favored sending ground troops to Iraq or Syria, a remarkable shift from the war-weary sentiment that prevailed during most of Obama's presidency. The Republican candidates were reaching for apocalyptic metaphors to demonstrate their resolve. Ted Cruz threatened to carpet-bomb the Islamic State to test whether desert sand can glow; Donald Trump called for the United States to ban all Muslims from entering the country "until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses."

Yet such spikes in the public appetite for mili­tary action tend to be transitory. Three weeks later, the same poll showed an even split, at 49 percent, on whether to deploy troops. Neither Trump nor Cruz favors major new deployments of American soldiers to Iraq and Syria (nor, for that matter, does Clinton). If anything, both are more skeptical than Clinton about intervention and more circumspect than she about maintaining the nation's post-World War II military commitments. Trump loudly proclaims his opposition to the Iraq War. He wants the United States to spend less to underwrite NATO and has talked about withdrawing the American security umbrella from Asia, even if that means Japan and South Korea would acquire nuclear weapons to defend themselves. Cruz, unlike Clinton, opposed aiding the Syrian rebels in 2014. He once supported Pentagon budget constraints advocated by his isolationist colleague, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Thus might the gen­eral election present voters with an unfamiliar choice: a Democratic hawk versus a Republican reluctant warrior.

To thwart the progressive insurgency of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Clinton carefully calibrated her message during the Democratic primaries to align herself closely with Barack Obama and his racially diverse coalition. But as she pivots to the general election, that balancing act with Obama will become trickier. "There's going to be a huge amount of interest in the press to score-keep," Sullivan says. "It just so easily can become a sport that distracts from her ability to make an affirmative case."

In showing her stripes as a prospective commander in chief, Clinton will no doubt draw heavily upon her State Department experience — filtering the lessons she learned in Libya, Syria and Iraq into the sinewy worldview she has held since childhood. Last fall, in a series of policy speeches, Clinton began limning distinctions with the president on national security. She said the United States should consider sending more special-operations troops to Iraq than Obama had committed, to help the Iraqis and Kurds fight the Islamic State. She came out in favor of a partial no-fly zone over Syria. And she described the threat posed by ISIS to Americans in starker terms than he did. As is often the case with Clinton and Obama, the differences were less about direction than degree. She wasn't calling for ground troops in the Middle East, any more than he was. Clinton insisted her plan was not a break with his, merely an "intensification and acceleration" of it.

It's an open question how well Clinton's hawkish instincts match the country's mood. Americans are weary of war and remain suspicious of foreign entanglements. And yet, after the retrenchment of the Obama years, there is polling evidence that they are equally dissatisfied with a portrait of their country as a spent force, managing its decline amid a world of rising powers like China, resurgent empires like Vladimir Putin's Russia and lethal new forces like the Islamic State. If Obama's minimalist approach was a necessary reaction to the maximalist style of his predecessor, then perhaps what Americans yearn for is something in between — the kind of steel-belted pragmatism that Clinton has spent a lifetime honing.

"The president has made some tough decisions," says Leon Panetta, who served as Obama's defense secretary after Bob Gates, and as director of the C.I.A. before David Petraeus. "But it's been a mixed record, and the concern is, the president defining what America's role in the world is in the 21st century hasn't happened.

"Hopefully, he'll do it," he added, acknowledging the time Obama has left. "Certainly, she would."

This article is adapted from "Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power," published this month by Random House.

Juan Matute