Hillary Clinton: A Peacetime Presidential Candidate for a Wartime America
Hillary's announcement speech mentioned Russia twice. First was this generic "hurrah for us" comment: No other country is better equipped to meet traditional threats from countries like Russia, North Korea, and Iran -- and to deal with the rise of new powers like China. And then, a short while later, she made a reference to helping "pass a treaty to reduce the number of Russian nuclear warheads that could threaten our cities."
It's easy to understand why the Hillary Clinton of 2015–16 doesn't want to talk about Russia. We voters don't have to imagine how Hillary Clinton would treat a Russian government with aggressive ulterior motives; we've already seen it.
There was one reference to ISIS: No other country is better prepared to meet emerging threats from cyber attacks, transnational terror networks like ISIS, and diseases that spread across oceans and continents. It's particularly fascinating that she would claim that "no other country is better prepared to meet emerging threats from cyber attacks" just days after we learn that hackers stole sensitive information in the personnel files of as many as 14 million current and former government workers. This is not debatable. We weren't prepared. We're probably not going to be prepared for a long time, or ever. But she needs the applause line, so the line stays in there. The one reference to extremism was, "I want to help Washington catch up. To do that, we need a political system that produces results by solving problems that hold us back, not one overwhelmed by extreme partisanship and inflexibility." Her only reference to the national debt was this: Instead of a balanced budget with surpluses that could have eventually paid off our national debt, the Republicans twice cut taxes for the wealthiest, borrowed money from other countries to pay for two wars, and family incomes dropped. The debt the day President George W. Bush took office was $5.7 trillion. The revenue surplus under Clinton topped out at $236 billion, so we would have needed 24 years of that peak surplus, year after year, with no spending increases, to "have eventually paid off our national debt" as Hillary envisions. Of course, once the dot-com bubble burst and tax revenue plummeted, the surpluses were certain to disappear anyway, and it would have taken a lot longer than a quarter century to pay off the debt. Still, it's nice to see a Democrat acknowledging that we ought to want to reduce our debt. The next step would be to acknowledge that under President Bush, we added $4.9 trillion in new debt. Under President Obama, we have added $7.5 trillion. Russia, ISIS, hackers, home-grown extremists, the debt -- these just aren't really problems in the minds of the average Democratic voter. The real threat comes from, "the banks that are still too risky, courting future failures." Yes, the woman who speaks for $200,000 a pop to Goldman Sachs, KKR, and the Carlyle Group bashed Wall Street. She said: There are public officials who know Americans need a better deal. Business leaders who want higher pay for employees, equal pay for women and no discrimination against the LGBT community either. There are leaders of finance who want less short-term trading and more long-term investing. Who's stopping these people? Who are these business leaders who want higher pay for their employees, but somehow aren't giving them raises? Who are these financial leaders who want less short-term trading? Is someone holding a gun to their head? She made the typically toothless Democratic pledge about "cutting red tape." We've already seen how she runs a major government department -- it's remarkably politicized and secretive, with her personal staff blocking FOIA requests. If cutting red tape mattered to her, she could have done it at the State Department while she was running it. At one point, she declared: We Americans may differ, bicker, stumble, and fall; but we are at our best when we pick each other up, when we have each other's back. Ambassador Chris Stevens, who asked for additional security personnel in Libya on multiple occasions, could not be reached for comment on whether Hillary had his back. Lopez-Cantera on Why Florida GOP Must Win the 2016 Senate Race On Friday afternoon, I had the chance to speak to Florida lieutenant governor Carlos Lopez-Cantera, who's strongly considering running for the Senate seat that Marco Rubio will depart from, one way or another, in January 2017. How seriously is he considering it? Well, if he ends up deciding to not run, there wasn't much point in him talking to me, now was there? "We're still talking to grassroots folks, the donor class, and elected officials," he told me. "We've been getting positive feedback, and there could be an announcement soon." Several Republicans, including the state's chief financial officer, Jeff Atwater, state attorney general Pam Bondi, and representatives Vern Buchanan, Tom Rooney, and Daniel Webster considered a bid and decided against it. "Florida is a big state. Huge, 20 million people, and geographically, having run a statewide campaign, it's very daunting," Lopez-Cantera said. "That's part of why we're taking our time to determine if this is the right thing." He said he would not step down as lieutenant governor if he ran, and that he's been discussing his options with Governor Rick Scott. I asked him if it would be tougher running in a presidential year, particularly with Republicans focused on a presidential race, and Florida Republicans perhaps particularly focused on the bids of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. "Our donor class and our grassroots folks here in Florida recognize that keeping this seat Republican is just as important as winning the White House," Lopez-Cantera said. "I think there will be a lot of energy to just get a win for the team, rather than a particular candidate." Lopez-Cantera already endorsed Rubio's presidential bid; he first met Rubio in the Bob Dole presidential campaign's Miami office back in 1996. "We had a lot of fun that summer," Lopez-Cantera recalls. "Bob Dole spent a lot of time down here. We all went to the convention. Those friendships continue to today. Marco distinguished himself as a leader back then. We all recognized his talent and passion back then. We all said back then he would be president one day." I laid out the "Mission: Impossible" for Florida Republicans earlier this year: Florida has ten media markets, most of them expensive, including the 13th-largest in the nation (Tampa-St. Petersburg), the 16th (Miami-Fort Lauderdale), the 19th (Orlando-Daytona Beach), the 38th (West Palm Beach) and the 49th (Jacksonville). Each of those markets is home to at least nine television stations and network affiliates. An aspiring senator has to raise enough money to get television ads up on the air in most or all of those markets, because there simply aren't enough hours in a day to outpace the opposition through events and personal appearances alone. The primary will probably have more than a million voters. (More than 1.1 million Republicans voted in the GOP primary in 2012.) Florida is also more geographically vast than it seems -- it takes about seven hours to drive from Miami to Tallahassee. Raising the money to meet these organizational challenges won't be easy. The GOP donor class, of course, will be focused primarily on the presidential race, and Florida's donors will be particularly focused on the races of home-state candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. The presidential race will also dominate news coverage, suck up veteran political campaign staff, and absorb the energies of grassroots volunteers. The reward for the candidate who, in the face of these natural disadvantages, raises enough money to compete? He or she faces a state with extraordinarily complex demographics in both the primary and general electorates: Cuban Americans in Miami, a rapidly growing population of Puerto Ricans in the Orlando area, seniors all over central Florida, and socially conservative, rock-ribbed Republicans in the north. And after building a viable statewide organization, raising and spending a considerable sum of money, and navigating Florida's demographic minefield to win the primary, the candidate has to do it all over again in the general election, in a state that where Democrats enjoy a 400,000+ voter-registration advantage. The electorate will undoubtedly be bigger than in the midterm election that elected Rubio, and will likely include a lot more Democrats. What Parts of Identity Are Immutable? My pop-culture-podcast co-host Mickey contends that a lot of conservatives are making an unforced error by comparing Rachel Dolezal, -- the Spokane, Washington NAACP President who has, as far as anyone knows, no actual African-American ancestry -- to Caitlyn Jenner, a.k.a. The Cover Subject Formerly Known As Bruce Jenner. She contends that quite a few African-Americans -- a demographic less enamored of the brave new world of malleable gender identities than the media would have you think -- are mad as heck that Dolezal is claiming an identity that isn't hers. (In the process, she may have misrepresented herself on several official forms, which is a form of legal fraud.) Mickey sees a missed opportunity for conservatives to demonstrate some empathy for angered African-Americans, stand up against a form of ethnic identity theft, and wanted to see a lot fewer Jenner comparisons and a lot more Elizabeth Warren comparisons. But Dolezal's assertion that she's African-American -- despite the fact that both her parents are white -- represents an extension of the argument at the heart of my long list of questions during the height of the Jenner brouhaha. Identity, at least in the categories of gender and race, used to be a matter of biology. But if gender identity is now really just a matter of one's mindset, or how someone feels, then why would racial identity be less malleable? Maybe it's a bit more malleable than we thought, particularly in a more multi-racial America. Then there's this . . . The researchers, who included university and government population scientists, analyzed census forms for 168 million Americans, and found that more than 10 million of them checked different race or Hispanic-origin boxes in the 2010 census than they had in the 2000 count. Smaller-scale studies have shown that people sometimes change the way they describe their race or Hispanic identity, but the new research is the first to use data from the census of all Americans to look at how these selections may vary on a wide scale. "Do Americans change their race? Yes, millions do," said study co-author Carolyn A. Liebler, a University of Minnesota sociologist who worked with Census Bureau researchers. "And this varies by group." I jokingly called for a "National Gatsby Day" where every American can assume a new identity. Still, if there's any country where you can reinvent yourself, it's right here in America. You can change your name. You can move. You can change careers. You can alter your appearance, with few limitations. Divorce and remarry. Have children and sadly, in some cases, abandon them. Heck, in one key way, everyone's identity changes over time; you start out young, and grow older. F. Scott Fitzgerald's "There are no second acts in American lives" gets proven wrong every day. ADDENDA: A wise reader, with some thoughts on that ever-worsening OPM hack: You dealt with China's hack last week, but it's not clear to me many are putting all of this together. This administration, supposedly the tech-savviest of any, but granted truly the first to have to deal with the innovation of our generation, has been an unmitigated disaster on tech. They hire Google executives and think that will do it. Think about it. How many China hacks? Is anyone talking about how deeply compromised our networks are to the Russians? Nope. Then there is Obamacare's web disaster (anyone checked in on that lately?). And we haven't gotten to Snowden or the other hacks, leaks, etc. Granted this is part of a decade with unanticipated innovative leaps. But that's why we elect smart people, who hire and appoint smarter, strategic and tactical people, right? We have an administration that wants to regulate the Internet, but can't in any way keep its own secure networks secure. I would argue the Obama administration's network security failures in the long term should be viewed as potentially its second greatest failure among a string of failures. Obama, in an interview with Fast Company today: "You will have a more user-friendly government, a more responsive government. A government that can work with individuals on individual problems in a more tailored way, because the technology facilitates that the same way it increasingly does for private-sector companies." Well, the Russians and Chinese certainly think it's user-friendly! Lisa de Pasquale kindly mentions the book Cam and I are working on in her summer-reading roundup. | 
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