bill-clinton

Bush-Clinton Dynasty, only blocked by Obama

I didn’t vote for Clinton because of this.

In 1980 Poppy Bush became Vice President.

In 1988 Poppy became President

In 1992 Bill Clinton became President.

In 2000 George W Bush (junior) became President.

In 2008 Hillary ran for President.

If if she had won, we would have consolidated power into just two families hands for effectively 36 years. Only this Obama kid popped up and wrecked that plan with the help of the Democratic Base.

In 2016, the new Duopoly fixed the race by running both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Both announced as “front runner” before they had officially announced.

This time the Republicans stepped in and elected an orange game show host to ruin the plan. He was so bad by Election Day that I actually voted for Clinton, even though I said I wouldn’t.

We don’t have Royals in America. This is what hurt Romney too, he’s a legacy candidate as well but not a part of the Bush/Clinton dynamic.

The Clintons and Bushes have the same Trade policies, same monetary policies, similar regulatory goals. Bill and Poppy were even closer on economic policy, military policy, science policy and legislative agendas. Dubya was a deviation but in all of the worst directions.

Bill and Poppy were competent Presidents. Hillary would be profoundly competent and I suspect Jeb would too.

Heck Obama was fairly close to Poppy’s policy structures. Most competent Presidents will be.

This isn’t about policy, it’s about legacy and aristocracy.

Hillary is a brilliant policy wonk. A type A over achiever who is smart, responsive and hyper qualified. She’s also as slippery as her husband, inherently occluded in speech, perpetually on defense and 25 years of that coupled with operating at the height of political power has made her unapproachable . She’s a bad campaigner, who fails to connect at deeply emotional levels.

..

I am not being ageist. I’m being realistic. Bernie won’t run because he’s too old. Biden won’t run because he’s too old. McCain could’ve run but he knew he was too old. 75 is pushing the human bodies limits for taking on an office that visibly drains its occupants like there is a vampire in the Resolute Desk. Any 3 of these guys could’ve won but they had a legacy candidate in the way.

The Democrats need some new, out front faces. Pelosi, Feinstein, Shumer, Boxer and the Clinton’s have had their time in the sun.

.. The working class doesn’t like these entrenched politicians. Witness Trump. They pulled Obama ahead of Hillary in 08 because they want new and different.

.. Trump is a mess but he’s not such a mess that the working class is going to go back to the old aristocracy. Hillary looks better by comparison but that’s not the same as better.

If the Dems want a legacy, draft one of the Kennedy grandkids. It’s been satisfactorily long enough for them to run without the taint of legacy. The Republicans can maybe draft a Hoover. They’ve had enough lately.

Liberties; The Alpha-Beta Macarena

She has a point. Women are impressed by swagger and paternalism in presidential candidates, just as men are.

.. She devised the Good Father model for Bill Clinton. It was an obvious idea. But we live in a time when politicians don’t trust the contents of their own minds, when externalities are more important than internalities.

.. In the ’96 race, Harry Thomasson told Mr. Clinton to wear lighter suits. Then Mr. Morris told Mr. Clinton not to. Now Ms. Wolf approves of Mr. Gore’s switch from navy to tan.

It’s deliciously Byzantine. Mr. Gore, whose shot at the presidency is in jeopardy because Mr. Clinton had a preoccupation with sex, has turned to an author with a preoccupation with sex to save him.

And now, after turning Mr. Clinton, the predator, into the Good Father, Ms. Wolf will try to turn Mr. Gore, a good father, into more of a predator.

‘Riling Up the Crazies’

As long as I’ve covered politics, Republicans have been trying to scare me.

Sometimes, it has been about gays and transgender people and uppity women looming, but usually it has been about people with darker skin looming.

They’re coming, always coming, to take things and change things and hurt people.

A Democratic president coined the expression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But it was Republicans who flipped the sentiment and turned it into a powerful and remorseless campaign ethos: Make voters fear fear itself.

The president has, after all, put a tremendous effort into the sulfurous stew of lies, racially charged rhetoric and scaremongering that he has been serving up as an election closer. He has been inspired to new depths of delusion, tweeting that “Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican.”

He has been twinning the words “caravan” and “Kavanaugh” in a mellifluous poem to white male hegemony. Whites should be afraid of the migrant caravan traveling from Central America, especially since “unknown Middle Easterners” were hidden in its midst, an alternative fact that he cheerfully acknowledged was based on nothing.

The word “Kavanaugh” is meant to evoke the fear that aggrieved women will hurtle out of the past to tear down men from their rightful perches of privilege.

Naomi Wolf told Bill Clinton, and later Al Gore, they should present themselves as the Good Father, strong enough to protect the home (America) from invaders.

You’d think by now that Democrats would have learned to do that in a compassionate way, and that they would be ready to counteract Republican horror movies. It is always the same shameless playbook, replicated since Richard Nixon launched his racist Southern Strategy, stirring up fears on desegregation and busing. They merely reboot it to suit the times.

The only difference — and it is a shocking one — is that Donald Trump cuts out the middleman. He handles the dirty work himself — and revels in it. In the old days, presidents let their hatchet men stir up the racist skulduggery behind the scenes. So when Republican lawmakers complain about Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric, what they are really saying is that they prefer a more subtle racism.

When I covered the ’88 race, I watched Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes concoct the scheme to bring down Michael Dukakis by making “Willie Horton his running mate,” as Atwater put it. The ads made by the Bush campaign and outside groups centered on Horton, a black criminal who broke into a Maryland house, raped a white woman and stabbed her husband while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison.

“The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it,” Ailes told Time magazine.

During the 2000 South Carolina primary, W.’s backers tried to appeal to racist voters with a whispered lie that John McCain fathered an illegitimate black child.

In 2004, Dick Cheney bluntly warned Americans that if they elected John Kerry, terrorists would hit us with a “devastating” attack (even though the devastating Sept. 11 attack came on Cheney’s watch).

This season of ghouls is animated by the ghost of Roger Ailes, who — bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch — was the mastermind behind the hate-breeding technique he perfected on Fox News. It bore poison fruit with the Florida bomb suspect, whose Facebook page was littered with Fox News agitprop.

One Fox producer under Ailes said they called it “riling up the crazies.” For Ailes and now for his Frankenstein Trump — who has Ailes’s old lieutenant Bill Shine as his media czar — it’s all about picking and inventing the right battles, finding the lowest common denominator to boost ratings.

“Divide and Conquer,” an excellent new documentary produced by Alex Gibney and directed by Alexis Bloom, shows the divisive strategy Ailes used to help elect a succession of Republican presidents, even as he turned Fox News into a sexually transgressive cult where he and Bill O’Reilly and others could get away with any predation.

For Ailes, and later Trump, politics was a war to preserve a gauzy John Wayne throwback world, patriotic and traditional, to save it from a sneering, contemptuous elite and from the “Other.” Ailes was a student of Hitler propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Sometimes, as with Trump’s birther campaign, the Other needed to be made to seem even more Other. Michelle Obama segments were designed to scare.

In the documentary, those around Ailes marveled at his relentless talent for pouring gas on a fire, for stoking the paranoia and fear that would keep viewers on the hook.

Trump’s main training for politics was being a sparring star in the House That Roger Built. And Ailes taught Trump well.

The US-Saudi Relationship After Khashoggi

The US-Saudi relationship has been a rocky one, and its setbacks and scandals have mostly played out away from the public eye. This time, too, common interests and mutual dependence will almost certainly prevail over the desire to hold the Saudis to the standards expected of other close US allies.

.. But significant damage to bilateral ties, let alone a diplomatic rupture, is not in the cards, even if all the evidence points to a state-sanctioned assassination. Saudi Arabia is simply too crucial to US interests to allow the death of one man to affect the relationship. And with new allies working with old lobbyists to stem the damage, it is unlikely that the episode will lead to anything more than a lovers’ quarrel.

.. Saudi Arabia’s special role in American foreign policy is a lesson that US presidents learn only with experience. When Bill Clinton assumed the presidency, his advisers were bent on distancing the new administration from George H.W. Bush’s policies. Among the changes sought by Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, was an end to the unfettered White House access that Saudi Arabian Ambassador Bandar bin Sultan enjoyed during the Reagan and Bush presidencies. Bandar was to be treated like any other ambassador.

.. when Clinton needed a quote from the Koran to go alongside those from the Old and New Testament for a ceremony marking an Israeli-Palestinian accord, he turned to the Saudi ambassador.

.. Before Donald Trump assumed office, he frequently bashed the Saudis and threatened to cease oil purchases from the Kingdom, grouping them with freeloaders who had taken advantage of America. But after the Saudis feted him with sword dances and bestowed on him the highest civilian award when he visited the Kingdom on his first trip abroad as US president, he changed his tune.

.. Even the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, could not damage the relationship. Though al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi national, recruited 15 of the 19 hijackers from the Kingdom, senior Saudi officials dismissed the implications. In a November 2002 interview, the Saudi interior minister simply deemed it “impossible,” before attempting to redirect blame by accusing Jews of “exploiting” the attacks and accusing the Israeli intelligence services of having relationships with terrorist organizations.

.. Bandar provided key insights and advice as President George W. Bush planned the 2003 Iraq invasion.
.. But Saudi Arabia wears too many hats for America to abandon it easily. Though the US no longer needs Saudi oil, thanks to its shale reserves,

it does need the Kingdom to regulate production and thereby stabilize markets.

American defense contractors are dependent on the billions the Kingdom spends on military hardware.

Intelligence cooperation is crucial to ferreting out jihadists and thwarting their plots. But, most important,

Saudi Arabia is the leading Arab bulwark against Iranian expansionism. The Kingdom has supported proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen to contain Iran’s machinations. Any steps to hold the Saudis responsible for Khashoggi’s death would force the US to assume responsibilities it is far more comfortable outsourcing.

.. When the United Kingdom, the region’s colonial master and protector, decided that it could no longer afford such financial burdens, US leaders ruled out taking its place. Policymakers were too focused on Vietnam to contemplate action in another theater. Instead, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger conceived a policy whereby Iran and Saudi Arabia, backed by unlimited US military hardware, would police the Gulf. While Iran stopped playing its role following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Saudis still do.

.. It is not only defense contractors who are going to bat for the Saudis. Before Khashoggi became Washington’s topic du jour, the Saudis paid about ten lobbying firms no less than $759,000 a month to sing their praises in America’s halls of power.

.. Former Saudi bashers such as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s confidant Dore Gold now meet with the Kingdom’s officials. Following the 2013 military coup that toppled Egypt’s democratically elected government, Israeli leaders urged US officials to embrace the generals. They are likely to do the same today if US anti-Saudi sentiment imperils their Iran strategy.

.. in the wake of Khashoggi’s disappearance, common interests and mutual dependence will almost certainly prevail over the desire to hold the Saudis to the standards expected of other close US allies.