She is Scary

Clinton’s Iran Vote: The Fallout

By HELENE COOPER

SENATORS Joe Biden and Chris Dodd voted against it. Senator Barack Obama said he would have voted against it if he had voted. Former Senator John Edwards implied he would have voted against it if he could vote.
And Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton? She voted in favor of the measure in question, which asked the Bush administration to declare Iran’s 125,000-member Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. Such a move — more hawkish than even most of the Bush administration has been willing to venture so far — would intensify America’s continuing confrontation with Iran, many foreign policy experts say.
Part of the reason for Mrs. Clinton’s vote, some of her backers say privately, is that she has already shifted from primary mode, when she needs to guard against critics from the left, to general election mode, when she must guard against critics from the right. That means she is trying to shore up her national security credentials versus Republican candidates like Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney, and is trying to reassure voters that she would be a tough-minded commander in chief.
By supporting the bill — sponsored by Senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Jon Kyl of Arizona — Mrs. Clinton is also solidifying crucial support from the pro-Israel lobby.
Mrs. Clinton voted along with 75 other senators in favor of the bill “in order to apply greater diplomatic pressure on Iran,” according to a statement she put out after the vote. “The Revolutionary Guards are deeply involved in Iran’s nuclear program and have substantial links with Hezbollah,” the statement said.
But Mrs. Clinton has come under withering criticism for her vote from many Democrats, who say she is implicitly supporting what they see as an attempt by the administration to build a case for war with Iran. And her vote has also set off a debate among foreign policy experts about how best to put pressure on Iran, with some of them saying that Mrs. Clinton, along with a big majority of the Senate, has gone too far.
Think of it as Iran declaring that the United States military is a terrorist organization because it carries out President Bush’s orders. Such a move, say some Iran experts — including some advisers to the Clinton campaign who declined to publicly criticize their possible boss — runs the risk of further alienating the Iranian population, because many Iranians are tied to the Revolutionary Guard or its many offshoots and enterprises in some way.
“What Senator Clinton and the other legislators who voted for this bill don’t seem to realize is that the Revolutionary Guards are not Al Qaeda,” said Karim Sadjapour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They’re not a group of voluntary jihadists signing up to fight the United States. Many are conscripts taken from the regular army.”
Mr. Sadjapour, an Iranian-American, and some other experts argue that the rank and file of the Revolutionary Guard are far more representative of Iranian society than most Americans realize. So labeling Iran’s elite fighters as terrorists is a move that is more likely to drive the Iranian population closer to the hard-liners in Tehran.
Even within the Bush administration, there is debate about whether designating the entire Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization is a good idea. While some White House officials and some members of Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff have been pushing to blacklist the whole Revolutionary Guard, administration officials said, officials at the State and Treasury Departments have been pushing a narrower approach that would list only the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force and, perhaps, companies and organizations with financial ties to that group.
The designation would make it easier for the United States to block financial accounts and other assets controlled by the group. But most of America’s partners in a big diplomatic effort to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions don’t like the idea at all, arguing that it might hamstring any number of business ventures with Iran. In addition, some European diplomats argue that the move could further alienate the Iranian population.
Mrs. Clinton has come under attack from the antiwar flank of her party. Among their objections, her opponents say the vote could be used by the White House to justify a military strike on Iran. Mr. Obama, who did not vote, called Mrs. Clinton “the only Democratic presidential candidate to support this reckless amendment” in a column in the New Hampshire Union Leader.
Mr. Biden was milder, but still critical of the bill. “I do not think the suggestion that the President designate an arm of the government of Iran as a ‘terrorist’ entity provides any authority to do anything — after all, it is a nonbinding measure,” he said on the Senate floor before opposing the bill on Sept. 26. “But this administration has an unduly broad view of the scope of executive power, particularly in time of war.”
In the statement she released after the vote, Mrs. Clinton spoke of the need for “robust diplomacy” with Iran, and warned President Bush that he shouldn’t think that “the 2001 resolution authorizing force after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in any way, authorizes force against Iran. If the administration believes that any use of force against Iran is necessary, the President must come to Congress to seek that authority.”
Mrs. Clinton concluded: “Nothing in this resolution changes that.”
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Dave "Mudcat" Saunders

How Many Americans Understand Hillary?

A note of personal disgust to Hillary Clinton's remarks concerning NAFTA in the Boston Globe:
"With NAFTA, Bill and Hillary Clinton really stuck it to rural America, Mudcat told me, though in slightly more graphic terms. So when Clinton visited the Globe this week I asked her about that charge...Clinton, however, wasn't about to get into a hissing match with a Mudcat. 'I understand politics, so I understand making charges, but I don't think the evidence is there to support that,' she concluded." Scott Lehigh's column, Boston Globe, October 12, 2007
Is there anybody out there who would dare question that Hillary Clinton understands politics? I certainly do not. I have never, never heard, nor will I ever, ever say that the Clintons don't understand politics. Everybody on the planet knows they are the standard of measure in the practice of politics. So you just read her comment in the October 12 edition of The Boston Globe, "I don't think the evidence is there to support that." To highlight Hillary's impeccable understanding of politics, let's move back four days to her statement in USA Today for the supporting evidence (from the horse's mouth) on NAFTA's devastation to rural and blue-collar America.
"I think we do need to take a deep breath and figure out how we can make it (NAFTA) work for the greatest number of people," she told USA Today. Clinton said NAFTA's benefits have gone to the wealthy and cost jobs for working people. Susan Page, USA Today, October 8, 2007
First, it is callous and offensive to the many Americans who have been "sucking wind" due to Clinton trade policies for Hillary to tell them "to take a deep breath." Secondly, Hillary, you want more "supporting evidence" other than your own statement? Top-tier economists, many who were tricked on these ill-thought, ill-negotiated, ill-enforced, and erroneously presented to Congress trade treaties, are now taking a second look themselves. Former Clinton official and Berkeley economist Brad DeLong, Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers, Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson, and a former vice chair of the Fed, Princeton's Alan Blinder, have all voiced strong concerns. Blinder has gone so far as to argue that off shoring and outsourcing of American jobs could ship away as many as 40 million jobs in the next two decades.
The reason Hillary is distancing herself from the trade treaties, rather than continuing to talk about ridiculous "unintended consequences," is because she "understands politics" like nobody else. In the early primary states, Iowa and South Carolina have lost twice as many jobs to NAFTA than they gained, and in New Hampshire, they have lost two-and-a-half times more jobs than they gained. The bottom line is that the Clintons did a number on small-town rural America and blue-collared workers everywhere. To get in tight with the big boys, they brokered a deal to trade local economies, jobs, and benefits (code word: healthcare) for Wall Street dividends. I think the greatest verifier to the validity of that last statement is on the cover of Fortune back in July. The headline over a posed shot of Hillary says "BUSINESS LOVES HILLARY! WHO KNEW IT?" I'll tell you who knows it. Many, many rural and blue-collared Americans know it. That cover is a perfect illustration as to why Hillary can not win the general election and why the collateral damage to the down ticket of her toxic coat-tails could cost us Congress. The question is not whether Hillary "understands politics," but instead, how many of us understand Hillary.
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Edwards Wins more Labor Endoresments
More Edwards local SEIU endorsements
Posted: Monday, October 15, 2007 3:57 PM by Domenico MontanaroCategories: 2008, John Edwards
From NBC/NJ’s Tricia MillerIn addition to the local Iowa SEIU, nine other local chapters will endorse Edwards, including California, which has more than 600,000-members, at an event in Iowa City later today, according to Democratic sources with knowledge of the endorsements. The others will be Washington (103,000 members), Michigan (70,000 members), Idaho (400 members), Montana (500 members), Minnesota (28,000 members), Ohio (22,000 members), West Virginia (4,000 members) and Oregon (46,000 members)
Obama was endorsed by the Illinois and Indiana chapters, but those groups, unlike the ones supporting Edwards, cannot help organize for a candidate in a state outsider of their own.
More Edwards local SEIU endorsements
Posted: Monday, October 15, 2007 3:57 PM by Domenico MontanaroCategories: 2008, John Edwards
From NBC/NJ’s Tricia MillerIn addition to the local Iowa SEIU, nine other local chapters will endorse Edwards, including California, which has more than 600,000-members, at an event in Iowa City later today, according to Democratic sources with knowledge of the endorsements. The others will be Washington (103,000 members), Michigan (70,000 members), Idaho (400 members), Montana (500 members), Minnesota (28,000 members), Ohio (22,000 members), West Virginia (4,000 members) and Oregon (46,000 members)
Obama was endorsed by the Illinois and Indiana chapters, but those groups, unlike the ones supporting Edwards, cannot help organize for a candidate in a state outsider of their own.
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Democrats Undecided Still
Charlotte, NC. (To see all of our campaign monitor reports click here.)
Despite neighborhood and regional differences, and although the levels of sophistication and competency among the individual campaign events varied, our correspondents found several common themes, the most striking of which is to what degree Democrats still declare themselves undecided.
It's abundantly clear that, less than four months before the onslaught of decisive primaries and caucuses, many Democratic voters have just not made up their minds. "Of those that would speak to us, almost all were undecided," reports correspondent Phoebe Love who followed the Obama canvass through Ballard, Washington. She is echoed by contributor Ethan Hova in Studio City, a middle-class Democratic suburban stronghold in Los Angeles: "The vast majority of voters were very much undecided and expressed reluctance to engage in debate without conducting research on their own." Daniel Macht, following the Obama campaign in Brooklyn, New York noted the same hesitation: "They were all undecided, save one Edwards supporter." Perhaps most importantly, correspondent Beverly Davis reports from Des Moines, "Smith [ an Obama volunteer] knocks on Dan Arply's door and launches into his opening rap but Arply soon interrupts by saying, 'Thanks for stopping by, but I haven't decided on supporting anyone yet.' Arply is a typical Iowan."
It's difficult to draw hard and fast conclusions from such anecdotal material but it might suggest that the slew of recent polls giving Hillary Clinton a commanding lead in the race for the nomination may be of limited utility. Correspondent Hova found widespread indifference toward Clinton as he went door-to-door with the Obama canvassers: "This was a fairly affluent suburb north of Los Angeles and I was really surprised not to find a single Hillary supporter in the neighborhood."
It's possible that numerous Democrats who have declared for Clinton to a pollster are like the shopper who hoists a likely candidate from the pumpkin bin inside the supermarket door. Maybe a keeper, maybe not, for there's the possibility of a better find further along in produce
aisle.