Democrats shaken and angered by Brazile book
November 6, 2017 by admin
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Donna Brazile’s forthcoming memoir triggered renewed recriminations at the highest ranks of the Democratic Party this weekend over the topic that just won’t die: 2016.
The latest bombshell from the book came Saturday in a report that the former interim Democratic National Committee chair seriously considered replacing Hillary Clinton on the ticket with Vice President Joe Biden after Clinton collapsed at a 9/11 memorial service. Brazile also describes the Clinton campaign as badly mismanaged and spiritless, according to a copy of the memoir that The Washington Post acquired early.
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That came on the heels of an excerpt published by POLITICO Magazine about how Brazile said she discovered the Clinton campaign had essentially rigged the DNC — if not the primary itself — in Clinton’s favor long before she became the nominee, apparently confirming the worst suspicions of Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
“The timing couldn’t have been worse. It does us no good to hash out all this stuff. At this point, we should be looking to the future — what’s done is done,” said former DNC chairman and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, pointing to the financial arrangement at the center of Brazile’s account. “There was no crime committed, but it would’ve been easy to avoid. [So] I don’t think it was rigged, I think what the DNC did was just awful.”
“But we should stop talking about it; it’s passed. We can’t adjudicate it now, let’s focus on the elections Tuesday and on going forward,” Rendell added. “There can’t be any positive that comes from it.”
The backbiting commenced again after Brazile’s excerpt described how Clinton’s campaign had secretly formalized its control over the party apparatus during her primary contest with Sanders. That claim was soon muddied by the publication of the fundraising agreements in question — they revealed that many of the provisions Brazile wrote about pertained only to the general election — but the stage was set for another relitigation of the bruising primary.
Seizing the opportunity to inflame Democratic tensions, leading Republicans have jumped on the dispute.
“The real story on Collusion is in Donna B’s new book. Crooked Hillary bought the DNC then stole the Democratic Primary from Crazy Bernie!,” President Donald Trump tweeted on Friday.
Sanders responded: “We won’t be distracted from your efforts to give billionaires tax cuts, take health care from millions and deny climate change. Do your job.” But a number of his supporters and aides were more upset. Former campaign manager Jeff Weaver, for one, said on MSNBC that the DNC should apologize.
“Donna’s revelations, at least vis-a-vis the DNC and the primary, didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know,” said Mark Longabaugh, a senior Sanders campaign adviser. “We basically had a party chairwoman resign” because of her preference for Clinton during the primary, he said, referring to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was ousted in July 2016.
As Brazile’s excerpt circulated, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, the DNC deputy chair, who is closely aligned with Sanders, said “we can’t allow this idea to persist that any candidate has an inside track.”
“Donna Brazile’s account cannot simply be dismissed. We must heed the call for our party to enact real reforms that ensure a fair, open, and impartial nominating process in elections to come,” he added in a statement.
Nina Turner, the former Ohio state senator who now runs Our Revolution, the political group spawned from Sanders’ campaign, also chimed in: “It was rigged all along,” she wrote in a fundraising email to the organization’s supporters.
While Sanders himself has largely stayed out of the conversation about the primary, other leading members of the party have weighed in. Sen. Elizabeth Warren — a prominent progressive who stayed out of the 2016 primary ahead of a possible run of her own in 2020 — answered “Yes” when CNN asked her on Friday whether she believed the contest had been “rigged” for Clinton.
Appearing on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Brazile sought to contain her claims of unfair manipulation to the party apparatus, not voting itself. “I found no evidence, none whatsoever” that the primaries were rigged, said Brazile, who managed Al Gore’s campaign in 2000.
On Saturday, DNC Chairman Tom Perez issued a statement that was part apology, part pledge to do better. The uproar comes at a difficult time for the DNC, which has struggled to raise money and which last week abruptly fired its finance director.
“I am more committed than ever before to restoring voters’ faith in our democratic process because even the perception of impartiality or an unfair advantage undermines our ability to win. That is unacceptable,” he wrote on Medium, alluding to the 2016 process run by then-chair Wasserman Schultz.
Pledging to work with the “Unity Reform Commission” set up with Clinton and Sanders’ campaigns last year, Perez also promised “to ensure that no candidate participating in our presidential nominating process gains any unfair advantage — real or perceived — during our primary season. We will decide the debate schedule in advance, instead of negotiating it after all our candidates have entered the race.”
“I totally agree … with the notion that the DNC fell short during critical moments of the primary” in 2016, Perez said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“Everybody has a right to tell their stories,” DNC associate chairman Jaime Harrison told POLITICO on Sunday. But “there’s a lot of confusion about 2016, and the only thing we can do about it is make sure 2020 isn’t like that.”
Yet it was a note posted by over 100 former Clinton aides Saturday disavowing Brazile’s portrayal of the campaign that sent the biggest shock waves through the party. The letter — signed by a group that included campaign chairman John Podesta, campaign manager Robby Mook, and campaign vice-chair Huma Abedin — was especially noteworthy given that former campaign aides have issued no similar statement about other scathing portrayals of their effort.
“We are pretty tired of people who were not part of our campaign telling the world what it was like to be on the inside of our campaign and how we felt about it. We loved our candidate and each other and it remains our honor to have been part of the effort to make Hillary Clinton the 45th President of the United States,” they wrote in the note that also insisted: “We do not recognize the campaign she portrays in the book.”
The letter also criticized Brazile for “buy[ing] into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians and our opponent, about our candidate’s health,” referring to her musing about replacing Clinton when she fell ill in September 2016.
Perez echoed the sentiment on Sunday: “The charge that Hillary Clinton was somehow incapacitated is, quite frankly, ludicrous,” he said.
It was the kind of backward-looking argument that has dogged party leaders for months, but which could hardly come at a less opportune time. Democrats appear likely to win the gubernatorial race in New Jersey on Tuesday, but polls are tightening in Virginia’s gubernatorial contest, the most closely watched election this year.
“The timing is obviously not ideal,” said New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Raymond Buckley, whose state has over 200 local elections on Tuesday. But, he said, he had yet to hear about Brazile’s book from donors or volunteers. “This is a problem in the Beltway, and in certain state parties.”
The Clinton aides’ note ended with an entreaty to “all Democrats,” who, they wrote, “should be doing everything they can — canvassing, phone banking, etc. — to help our candidates for Governor of Virginia and New Jersey and other races around the country next Tuesday.”
Perez and other national party leaders were in the state campaigning for Democratic Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam over the weekend. And while Republicans — including Trump — were eager to use the Brazile fracas against Democrats, officials on the ground insisted voters were not following the storyline.
“Covered 300 miles of campaign trail in VA today,” tweeted Tom Perriello, the former congressman who lost Democrats’ gubernatorial primary and is now backing Northam. “If I got $1 for every voter who asked about Brazile book, my pockets would still be empty.”
Other party officials outside the Beltway were similarly determined to ignore the infighting.
“We made a decision long ago in Michigan to not relitigate the 2016 election; other folks can do that,” said Brandon Dillon, the state Democratic chairman, who spoke as he drove between party events. “We’ll let the circular firing squad go on in D.C.; we’ll keep our firing squad on Republicans.”
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What Trump, US Allies Can Do About North Korea: QuickTake Q&A
November 6, 2017 by admin
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North Korea continues to push toward its goal of possessing nuclear-tipped missiles that could reach as far as the U.S. mainland. Since mid-year, North Korea has test-fired two long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles, sent a couple of mid-range missiles flying over Japan and staged the country’s most powerful nuclear test. U.S. President Donald Trump, whose visit to Asia includes stops in Japan, South Korea and China, stoked a war of words when he labeled North Korean President Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man” and said that if the U.S. had to defend itself or its allies against North Korea it would “totally destroy” the country. Kim called Trump a “dotard” and warned of the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”
1. Who leads the world’s response to North Korea?
South Korea, the U.S. and Japan bear the brunt of Kim’s threats and constitute the front line of the international response. The alliances among them have been tested, as when Trump described South Korea’s approach toward its neighbor as “appeasement.” A greater challenge for the three nations is getting China, North Korea’s most important ally and biggest trading partner, and Russia to work with them. United Nations resolutions going back to 2006 demand that North Korea abandon all nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missiles programs.
2. What’s the climate for Trump’s trip?
His visit began during a relatively quiet period, following the series of North Korea tests that provoked Trump’s outbursts. China recently moved to end a yearlong spat with South Korea over its deployment of a U.S. missile defense system that Chinese leaders complained upset the strategic balance in the region. And South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, called on North Korea to take part in the Winter Olympics being held in his country early next year.
3. What has the U.S. done to punish North Korea?
Trump signed an executive order effectively allowing the U.S. to impose a full trade and financial embargo on North Korea through the use of secondary sanctions targeting non-U.S. banks, companies and people who do business with the country. Analysts say those sanctions, unlike the multitude of measures that came before, have real bite. The U.S. has also allowed South Korea, under a treaty with the U.S. originally aimed at preventing a regional arms race, to put more powerful payloads on its missiles. It also pledged to let Japan and South Korea buy more “highly sophisticated military equipment” from the U.S. Trump has threatened a trade embargo against countries that do business with North Korea.
4. Is a pre-emptive military attack an option?
Such a strike might take out North Korea’s known nuclear and missile sites but would potentially carry a huge cost, even if North Korea reacted only with conventional weapons. That’s because North Korea has too many facilities spread out over too much terrain to destroy simultaneously, and South Korea’s capital, Seoul (population: 10 million), is within artillery range of the border.
Ballistic missile launch, Feb 12.
5. What’s China’s position?
China says it wants a nuclear weapons-free Korean peninsula, and its leadership has urged the U.S. and North Korea to make conciliatory gestures as a way to revive negotiations. China’s ruling Communist Party wants to avoid military conflict, which could send North Korean refugees flooding over the border, threaten the party’s grip on power and bring U.S. troops to its doorstep. China supplies about 90 percent of North Korea’s energy and much of its food. It suspended coal imports from North Korea and collaborated with the U.S. to get the UN Security Council to expand sanctions.
6. So the U.S. and China are working together?
They’ve pledged to, but the two have quarreled over the value of China’s efforts. After U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson characterized China’s cooperation on North Korea as “uneven,” the U.S. took steps in June to penalize a Chinese bank, a Chinese shipping company and two Chinese citizens it claimed had worked to help North Korea evade sanctions. In July, following North Korean long-range missile tests, Trump tweeted, “China could easily solve this problem!”
7. What do South Korea and Japan say?
South Korea’s Moon came to office in May promising a new era of engagement with North Korea, but at the same time he’s pushing for a military overhaul to keep Kim’s regime at bay. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has strongly backed Trump’s line, repeatedly saying that he favors pressure over dialogue to resolve the issue.
8. What would be the point of talks?
Diplomats have long talked about seeking a grand bargain first suggested by retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Lloyd Vasey: In exchange for economic assistance and security guarantees, North Korea would agree to verifiable denuclearization. This may be unrealistic, since Kim is unlikely to agree to shed his arsenal. A senior North Korean defector said in December 2016 that as long as Kim is in power, the country won’t give up its nuclear weapons “even if it’s offered $1 trillion or $10 trillion in rewards.” U.S. officials are concerned that initiating talks would be seen as rewarding irresponsible behavior by North Korea. Others argue that talks could achieve a freeze on Kim’s program, which — left unchecked — would multiply the numbers of warheads and missiles at his disposal.
9. What are North Korea’s capabilities?
miniaturize warheads to fit on missiles, the Washington Post reported in August. The September nuclear test, of what North Korea claimed was a hydrogen bomb, was more than 10 times stronger than a test a year earlier. The explosion was big enough to “pretty much end an American city” if successfully delivered by an intercontinental ballistic missile, according to Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who focuses on nuclear issues. After North Korea’s ICBM test in July, the U.S. confirmed that the missile was capable of reaching at least some U.S. states. Kim claims the entire U.S. is now in range.
10. Is accepting North Korea’s nukes an option?
No major country has said yet that it will accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state. Some analysts have suggested that’s the best way to ease the current tensions. But accepting North Korea as a nuclear power could lead South Korea, Japan and perhaps Taiwan to seek their own nuclear arms — undermining, perhaps fatally, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. South Korean politicians are already discussing the redeployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, which were removed in the early 1990s.
The Reference Shelf
- A related QuickTake on North Korea’s nuclear program.
- A Bloomberg infographic on North Korea’s military buildup.
- Bloomberg News showed how money funneled through China makes it harder to apply sanctions to North Korea than to Iran in the past.
- Bloomberg explained why joining the nuclear club is an obsession of North Korea’s leaders.
- A research paper from the U.S.-Korea Institute outlines the expansion of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.
- Bloomberg View argues that Trump’s linking trade and security is a negotiating strategy that’s doomed to fail.