Tag Archives: clinton

Maryland, United States

The case for O’Malley in the 2016 presidential election

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o'malley

The most damning thing that you can say about former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley isn’t that he was underwhelming, either as governor or as Baltimore mayor.marylandUSflag

It’s that we were merely whelmed by him.

Even today, as O’Malley prepares to become the most serious challenger to former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, there’s not a whole lot you can pin on O’Malley, for good or for ill. He lacks the psychopolitical baggage of a Clinton candidacy, but he also doesn’t own any single issue or represent any broader movement. He’s a set of technocratic biceps with a penchant for data-driven policy and Celtic rock.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that, though. Formidable as Clinton is, O’Malley has all the tools to wage a compelling campaign for the US presidency.
Continue reading The case for O’Malley in the 2016 presidential election →

United States

2014 US midterms showcase rise of Asian Americans

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CIMG9933Flushing, in Queens, is one of the most Asian neighborhoods in the United States.

Apparently, the swing among Asian Americans between the 2012 general election in the United States and the 2014 midterm elections was a staggering 46%:asia iconUSflag

Note the big swing in the Asian voting bloc, too. In 2012, strong support for the president among Asian-American voters was a surprise. Asian voters preferred the president by 47 points. In 2014, the (low turnout) group split about evenly. It was a 46-point swing.

That still translates to a fairly robust tilt among Asian Americans toward Democrats — just not the overwhelming trend that we saw in 2012 and 2008 and, even to some degree, 2010. Other exit polling shows that Asian Americans still strongly supported Democrats — in Virginia, they favored incumbent Democratic senator Mark Warner over Republican challenger Ed Gillespie by a margin of 68% to 29%, for example.

But why should Asian Americans necessarily lean to the left? The Asian American experience in the United States is extremely varied, and it’s a growing bloc of disparate cultures and experiences. In that regard, Asian Americans are just like Latin Americans, who come from an equally broad range of national and ethnic background. Mexican Americans in California may have different political views that Mexican Americans in Texas, to say nothing of Salvadorans in Maryland, Cubans in New Jersey or Dominicans in Florida.

The same goes for Asian Americans.

So what are we talking about when we say, ‘Asian Americans?’ Continue reading 2014 US midterms showcase rise of Asian Americans →

Russia, United States

Putin tops world power rankings

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putinpower

It’s far from scientific, but less than 24 hours after Republicans appeared to defeat US president Barack Obama in midterm congressional and gubernatorial elections, Russian president Vladimir Putin defeated him to the top spot on Forbes‘s 72 Most Powerful People in the World.USflagRussia Flag Icon

The rankings don’t really mean that much in the grand scheme of things, of course.

The Forbes rationale?

We took some heat last year when we named the Russian President as the most powerful man in the world, but after a year when Putin annexed Crimea, staged a proxy war in the Ukraine and inked a deal to build a more than $70 billion gas pipeline with China (the planet’s largest construction project) our choice simply seems prescient. Russia looks more and more like an energy-rich, nuclear-tipped rogue state with an undisputed, unpredictable and unaccountable head unconstrained by world opinion in pursuit of its goals.

Hard to argue with that, I guess.

But the rankings represent a nice snapshot of what the US (and even international) media mainstream believe to be the hierarchy of global power. Though I’m not sure why Mitch McConnell, soon to become the U.S. senate majority leader, isn’t on the list.

So who else placed in the sphere of world politics this year?

  • Obama ranked at No. 2 (From the Forbes mystics: ‘One word sums up his second place finish: caution. He has the power but has been too cautious to fully exercise it.’).
  • Chinese president Xi Jinping, who took office in late 2012 and early 2013, ranked at No. 3. (Tough break for the leader of the world’s most populous country!)
  • Pope Francis, ranked at No. 4, even though Argentina lost this year’s World Cup finals to Germany.
  • Angela Merkel, ranked at No. 5, third-term chancellor of Germany and the queen of the European Union.
  • Janet Yellen, ranked at No. 6, the chair of the US Federal Reserve.
  • Mario Draghi, ranked at No. 8, the president of the European Central Bank.
  • David Cameron, ranked (appropriately enough) at No. 10, the Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom, who faces a tough reelection battle in May 2015.
  • Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, No. 11, the king of Saudi Arabia.
  • Narendra Modi, No. 15, India’s wildly popular new prime minister.
  • François Hollande, No. 17, France’s wildly unpopular president.
  • Ali Khamenei, No. 19, Iran’s supreme leader, especially as Iranian nuclear talks come to a crucial deadline this month.

Continue reading Putin tops world power rankings →

United States

What a Republican Senate means for world politics

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potomacview

On Tuesday, when tens of millions of US voters go to the polls, they are very likely to deliver a US Senate majority to the Republican Party.USflag

Six years into the administration of Democratic president Barack Obama and four years after the midterm elections that delivered control of the US House of Representatives to the Republicans and conservative speaker John Boehner, most polls and poll aggregate forecasts give the Republicans anywhere from a strong (70%) to moderate (74%) to an overwhelming (96%) chance to retake the Senate.

It’s not uncommon for the ‘six-year itch’ to reward the non-presidential party with gains in midterm elections. Throughout the post-war era, in every midterm election during the second term of a reelection president, the opposition party has made gains each time — with the exception of 1998, when the Democrats benefited from a strong economy and Republican overreach in pursuing  what would eventually become impeachment hearings against US president Bill Clinton over alleged perjury in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

It’s also not unheard of that foreign policy can drive larger narratives about presidencies.

Most recently, in 2006, Democrats recaptured both houses in midterm elections, forcing then-president George W. Bush to accept the resignation of his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in light of the war in Iraq’s unpopularity and the unfolding sectarian civil war taking place there despite US military occupation. As it turns out, the 2006 midterms paved the way for a much more moderate tone to the final two years of the Bush administration and a change in strategy under Robert Gates, Rumsfeld’s successor, who ultimately stayed on as defense secretary until 2011, lending a sense of continuity to the Obama administration’s approach to defense policy.

So what exactly would a Republican Senate mean for US foreign policy in the final two years of the Obama administration? Continue reading What a Republican Senate means for world politics →

United States

Six important points from Clinton’s foreign policy interview

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Hillary Clinton Speaks At USAID Launch Of U.S. Global Development

Over the weekend, US president Barack Obama gave a wide-ranging interview on foreign policy with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. USflag

But it’s the interview that The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg conducted with former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton that’s garnered much more attention. With Clinton leading polls for both the Democratic presidential nomination and general election in 2016, her interview was widely viewed as creating space between her own views on US foreign policy and those of the current president, who defeated her in 2008 for the Democratic nomination before appointing her as the top US diplomat in the first term of his presidential administration.

The most controversial comment seems to be Clinton’s criticism that the Obama administration’s mantra of ‘don’t do stupid shit‘ isn’t what Clinton calls an ‘organizing principle’ for the foreign policy of any country, let alone a country as important as the United States.

The headline in the The New York Times? ‘Attacking Obama policy, Hillary Clinton exposes different world views.’

Chris Cillizza at The Washington Post endeavored to explain ‘What Hillary Clinton was doing by slamming President Obama’s foreign policy.’

The Clinton ‘slam,’ though, is somewhat overrated. She admits in virtually the same breath that she believes Obama is thoughtful and incredibly smart, adding that ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is more of a political message than Obama’s worldview. For the record, Clinton claims that her own organizing principles are ‘peace, progress and prosperity,’ which might be even more maddeningly vague than ‘don’t do stupid stuff.’ After all, who’s against peace, progress or prosperity? Even if ‘don’t do stupid shit’ is political shorthand, and even if you don’t believe that the Obama administration’s foreign policy has been particularly successful, it’s political shorthand that  represents a sophisticated worldview about the respective strengths and limits of US foreign policy.

In any event, there’s an awful lot to unpack from the Clinton interview, both on the surface and from reading between the lines. You should read the whole thing, but in the meanwhile, here are six things that struck me from the interview about Clinton and what her presidential administration might mean for US foreign policy. Continue reading Six important points from Clinton’s foreign policy interview →

France, United Kingdom, United States

The future of political communication is the viral Internet meme

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If you woke up this morning to the ‘leader of the free world’ doing an interview with Zach Galifianakis, immediately scratched your head and wondered whether you could be trusted to read anything before coffee, you weren’t alone.France Flag IconUSflagUnited Kingdom Flag Icon

When I first saw it, I thought it was a joke — surely this was Galifianakis somehow video-shopping the president of the United States into a forum that’s otherwise reserved for the likes of spanking Justin Bieber.

But no — and after a couple of sober, caffeinated views, I realized that this was for real.  So no matter what else was going on with your day today, in world or US politics, it was The Day That Barack Obama Turned Up On ‘Between Two Ferns.’  It dominated the US news cycle — even Jonathan Chait wrote about it! Continue reading The future of political communication is the viral Internet meme →

Syria, United States

John McCain is the Jimmy Carter of the right: a free radical running his own shadow diplomacy

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If you thought the idea of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s op-ed in The New York Times was insufferable, don’t worry, comrades — US senator John McCain of Arizona is coming soon to a Pravda newsstand near you.freesyria Syria Flag IconUSflag

Typically, US foreign policy is conducted at a very concentrated level among a top coterie of constitutional officers and White House staffers.  The 535-member US Congress likes to get in on the act too, from time to time, just as it did when US president Barack Obama called for a congressional vote on potential military action against Bashar al-Assad in punishment for his regime’s use of chemical warfare on August 21.

But sometimes, there are free agents who, by benefit of their success in public life, can conduct a virtual shadow foreign policy.  For over three decades, the most exceptional example has been former president Jimmy Carter, whose post-presidential diplomacy has caused fits for many of his successors in the Oval Office, including Democrats like Obama and Bill Clinton as well as Republicans like George W. Bush.

But even before his failed 2008 presidential run, McCain has increasingly become another Jimmy Carter — in his willingness to engage in shadow diplomacy, often to the dismay of both the Bush and Obama administrations.  Except Carter is liberal and dovish and McCain is conservative and hawkish.

Carter honed his approach as a mercenary-for-peace in the 1990s, when he attempted to use his special status as a former US president to broker peace everywhere from Haiti to Sudan.  He visited Cuban president Fidel Castro in 2002, despite the fact that US-Cuban relations have been strained since the 1959 Cuban revolution and the 1963 missile crisis, and he endorsed the electoral process in Venezuela’s 2004 recall election that kept Hugo Chávez, another anti-American leader, in office.  Carter spoke out early and often against the Bush administration’s push to invade Iraq in 2003 to a rare degree among former US presidents, and he remained a critic of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy throughout the 2000s.  Carter, most recently, has criticized the Obama administration for the use of unmanned drones in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, and for keeping the Guantánamo Bay prison open for detainees suspected of terrorism.

You might think that Carter’s approach is a brilliant way to nudge US foreign policy toward more peaceful outcomes — he won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize largely on the basis of his post-presidential work.  But you might also think that Carter’s approach complicates often delicate situations by introducing another (unwelcome) cook to the kitchen, and Carter’s diplomacy typically causes more frustration than enthusiasm from within the White House.

Likewise, the Obama administration won’t welcome McCain’s latest move, which will raise the decibel level with what’s certainly likely to be a provocative Pravda piece.  It comes two days after McCain saw the need to release his own statement about Moscow’s mayoral elections.  (Isn’t that the U.S. state department’s job rather than the ranking member of the US Senate’s armed services committee?)

Neither Carter nor McCain would exactly welcome the comparison — Carter said during the 2008 election campaign that McCain was ‘milking every possible drop of advantage’ from his military record as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and McCain a year later called Carter the worst president of the 20th century.  Continue reading John McCain is the Jimmy Carter of the right: a free radical running his own shadow diplomacy →

Iran

As Rowhani takes power, U.S. must now move forward to improve U.S.-Iran relations

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khatamairowhani

In 1995, months before the administration of U.S. president Bill Clinton found a peaceful solution at the Dayton peace talks to end the ethnic cleansing that had plagued Bosnia-Herzegovina for the previous four years, it found itself in the rare position of colluding with Iran to save Bosnian lives. USflagIran Flag Icon

At the time, the United States was unable, under a United Nations arms embargo that prohibited the shipment of arms to any parties in the ongoing Bosnian civil war, to provide Bosnian Muslims with the arms necessary to protect themselves from Serbian aggression.  The U.S. government suddenly found the Islamic Republic a useful ally.  Iran, lacking the same qualms of violating the U.N. embargo as a permanent member of the U.S. Security Council, happily shipped clandestine weapons to Bosnian Muslims, a move that Clinton-era officials tacitly encouraged in public on the pages of The New York Times:

A senior Administration official insisted today that the White House neither approved nor endorsed the Iranians’ actions. But after months in which President Clinton and his aides have been unable to persuade American allies to allow arms to flow legally to the Bosnian Muslims, one adviser to Mr. Clinton called Teheran’s motivations in making the shipments “understandable.”

The new flow of arms and ammunition has not yet put Bosnian Muslim forces on the same plane as their better-armed Bosnian Serb rivals, Administration officials said. But with the shipments of small arms, ammunition and anti-tank weapons amounting to perhaps hundreds of tons, they said it had made the Bosnian Government a more formidable force as a four-month-old cease-fire is about to expire.

Two months after the Times reported the critical role Iran, then in the final years of the presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani, was playing to save Bosnian lives, Clinton signed an executive order banning U.S. businesses from trading with the Iranian government and implementing sanctions on oil and other trade with Iran.  It was a missed opportunity to thaw the 16-year diplomatic rupture with the United States.

Fast forward six years to the presidency of liberal reformer Mohammed Khatami shortly after the horrific al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001.  Within weeks, the United States pushed the radical Taliban from power, and it did so on the strength of the Northern Alliance, a group that had not only received material support from Tehran in the years leading up to 2001, but had also received Tehran’s tacit encouragement to work with the United States.  The Shiite government in Iran had much reason to be wary of both the radical Sunni, militant al-Qaeda, with its roots in the Arabian Peninsula to Iran’s west and the destabilizing Taliban to Iran’s east that had sent thousands of refugees into Iran by 2001.  But it was also another fertile opportunity for U.S.-Iranian relations, just months after Khatami secured an easy reelection.  As the Christian Science Monitor reported in October 2001:

Iran, which admitted last week that it has directed covert military and logistical support to the embattled Northern Alliance, also backs a transitional government that would give way to what one Foreign Ministry official has described as “a broad-based government set up under UN auspices.”

Iran’s reward at the time?  Bush included it in his three-country ‘axis of evil’ alongside North Korea and Iraq in January 2002.

Now fast-forward to last weekend.  During his inauguration on Sunday, Iran’s new president Hassan Rowhani urged a largely conciliatory and moderate course , contrasting sharply to the defiant, anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric of his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  But as Rowhani (pictured above, right, with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei) gets down to the business of governing Iran, U.S. officials should realize that Iranian leaders feel like they have been burned by the United States before. Continue reading As Rowhani takes power, U.S. must now move forward to improve U.S.-Iran relations →

United States

Photo of the day: Five presidents (or six?)

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fivepresidents

It’s not everyday that the gang of all of the living current and former (and possibly future) presidents of the United States gather in one place.USflag

But it happened today on the occasion of the opening of the presidential library of former president George W. Bush in Dallas, Texas — see above the ‘most exclusive club in the world,’ from left to right:

  • Jimmy Carter, Democratic president from 1977 to 1981;
  • Bill Clinton, Democratic president from 1993 to 2001;
  • George H.W. Bush, Republican president from 1989 to 1993;
  • George W. Bush, Republican president from 2001 to 2009; and
  • Barack Obama, the Democratic incumbent since 2009.

It’s essentially every president elected since 1976, with the single exception of Republican president Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004.  Carter’s predecessor, Republican president Gerald Ford, died in December 2006.

It’s notable that all of their spouses were well enough to attend as well, including Hillary Clinton, the former New York senator and until very recently, the U.S. secretary of state, who could well become the next president of the United States after the 2016 election:

sixpresidents

United States

Don’t rule out Joe Biden in 2016 U.S. presidential election

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biden

Although today’s been a big day for U.S. president Barack Obama, it’s been nearly as big a day for his vice president, Joseph Biden, who was also sworn in for a second term as vice president — and a vice president who’s had a very important role to play in the Obama administration with respect to foreign policy.USflag

Biden, who first ran for president in 1988, and who served in the Senate from Delaware from 1973 until becoming vice president in 2009, hasn’t exactly made it a secret that he harbors presidential ambitions in the future.

Even if Biden ultimately decides against a run, his ability to project a credible shot at a 2016 campaign means that he won’t descend into lame-duck status over the next four years, which means he’ll be as relevant as ever on international policymaking.

He’s had a few good news cycles recently, and as outgoing secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton starts to bid farewell to the limelight to consider the next stage of her own career, it’s worth noting that if Clinton and Biden both run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, Biden won’t be a pushover — though Clinton is currently very much the favorite.  Biden, who’s 70, isn’t so much older than Clinton, age 65 and recently subject to her own health scare (Ronald Reagan was the oldest person to be inaugurated, at age 69 when he took office in 1981).

Even The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein thinks Biden is a serious contender.

So in between bouncing around inaugural balls, here are five quick points on why you can’t dismiss Biden — and why he’ll continue to retain political currency on the U.S. foreign policy conversation as 2016 approaches: Continue reading Don’t rule out Joe Biden in 2016 U.S. presidential election →

United States

Final thoughts (and predictions) for the U.S. presidential election

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The state of the race

Of course, tomorrow’s election, in what’s still arguably the world’s most powerful country, will have huge implications for world politics — U.S. foreign policy obviously runs from the occupant of the Oval Office (more so than domestic policy), and with U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton stepping down in either case, the election result will determine the next top U.S. diplomat.  So it seemed natural to pull together some brief thoughts for Suffragio on election eve.

Nate Silver’s final post at FiveThirtyEight before tomorrow’s U.S. general election gives incumbent Barack Obama (pictured above, below with vice president Joe Biden at left) a 92.2% chance of winning.  I’m not so sure, but InTrade has Obama with 67.2% odds of winning.  National polls are essentially tied, with some giving either Obama a narrow edge or his challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (pictured below), a slight edge.  State polls in swing states give Obama slight edges — the winner must win 270 out of 528 electoral votes (i.e., the presidential election is essentially 50 separate state contests — each state has a number of electoral votes ranging from three (the smallest states) to 55 (California).

Most notably of all, go read Foreign Policy‘s compendium of its best 2012 U.S. presidential election coverage, which is stellar as usual.

In terms of coverage, I’ll list favorite / obligatory pundits below:

  • Follow Slate‘s Dave Weigel here.
  • Follow Time‘s Mark Halperin here.
  • Follow National Review‘s The Corner here.
  • Follow Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog here.
  • Follow Matt Drudge here.
  • Follow Chris Cillizza’s Washington Post blog here.
  • Follow Ezra Klein’s policy blog at the Washington Post here.
Polls close between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET in Ohio, Virginia, Florida and other key states in the Electoral College, so we should have a relatively good idea of who’s won the presidency Tuesday night — unless the contest comes down to one state, likely Ohio, and that state is as close as Florida was in 2000, when we might not know the winner for a month or longer!

Don’t forget Puerto Rico elections

Although it’s a U.S. commonwealth, Puerto Rico will also go to the polls to select a governor, where incumbent Luis Fortuño (a Republican supporter) of the pro-statehood Partido Nuevo Progresista de Puerto Rico (the PNP, New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico) narrowly leads Alejandro García Padilla of the pro-commonwealth/status quo Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico (the PPD, Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico).  Fortuño has cut Puerto Rico’s budget since taking office in 2009 and has nearly brought the island from deficit to surplus.  Nonetheless, economic growth has been elusive and while the unemployment rate has fallen, it’s still around 15%.  If Fortuño loses his race, but Romney wins, there’s a strong chance that Fortuño could be asked to take a position — or even a Cabinet-level post — in a Romney administration.

Puerto Rico will also hold yet another referendum on statehood in two parts: whether they are satisfied with Puerto Rico’s current status as a ‘commonwealth,’ and if not, whether they would prefer U.S. statehood, full independence or a confusing ‘sovereign associated state’ status.

With four million people, if Puerto Rico were independent, it would be the fourth-most populous country in the Caribbean, after Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Predictions

So now on to my own prediction.

We know the outcome of most states. Obama will almost certainly win California, New York (29 electoral votes), Illinois (20 electoral votes), New Jersey (14 electoral votes), Washington (12 electoral votes) and Romney’s Massachusetts (11 electoral votes), among others, and he is leading in Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) and Michigan (16 electoral votes), both of which voted for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, despite their loss in the wider Electoral College.

Romney will almost certainly win Texas (38 electoral votes), Georgia (16 electoral votes), and a swath of smaller states in the Old Confederacy South, the Great Plains states, and much of the Mountain West states.

The actual popular vote tally of all 50 states doesn’t matter, so I will whiff and say it’s too close to call — Hurricane Sandy may well depress voter turnout in Delaware, New Jersey and New York, but those states are solidly in favor of Obama.

For the electoral vote, my final prediction is Obama 276, Romney 262: Continue reading Final thoughts (and predictions) for the U.S. presidential election →

Germany

Merkel tops Forbes list of top 100 powerful women

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German chancellor Angela Merkel is the most powerful woman in the world in 2012, according to Forbes magazine.

It’s a bit whimsical, but that’s probably the right call, considering that no one person has more power, probably, to determine whether the eurozone sticks together or falls apart.

Also on the list are several women of important to world politics:

  • U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton (#2),
  • Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff (#3),
  • Indian National Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi (#6),
  • International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde (#8),
  • Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (#16),
  • Burmese National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (#19),
  • Australian prime minister Julia Gillard (#27),
  • Malawi president Joyce Banda (#71),
  • Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (#80),
  • Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (#81), and
  • UAE minister of foreign trade Shiekha Lubna Al Qasimi (#92)

Predictions, questions and thoughts:

  • Where is Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt? Robbed!
  • And where is Icelandic prime minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, the world’s first openly lesbian head of government? Also robbed!
  • Josefina never had a chance.
  • Too soon for Pussy Riot, I suppose.
  • Might Parti québécois leader Pauline Marois make it on next year’s list if she wins the Sept. 4 election in Québec and schedules a referendum on Québec’s independence?
  • Next year, Park Geun-hye could well be South Korea’s new president, which would make her automatically top 20, I presume.
  • Also next year, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Hannelore Kraft become Merkel’s chief opposition.
  • If Silvio Berlusconi makes a comeback in Italy, why not his favorite MP Michaela Biancofiore and the rest of Silvio’s angels?