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Russia, United States

Full investigation now the only way to clear Trump White House on Russia quid pro quo

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The now-famous mural of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius.

With national security advisor Michael Flynn’s resignation and new reporting from The New York Times that Trump campaign officials had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials, it is time to ask the fundamental question about this administration’s underlying weakness over Russia:

Was there a quid pro quo between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to help Trump win?

No one wants to believe this, of course, and it is an important moment to give Trump as many benefits of the doubt as possible. It is probably true that Trump would have defeated Hillary Clinton without any Russian cyber-shenanigans (though of course Richard Nixon would have easily defeated George McGovern in 1972 without ordering a break-in at the Watergate Hotel). It is also true that the leaks coming from the intelligence community could represent a serious threat to civil liberties, though it is not clear to me whether this information is coming directly from the intelligence community or secondhand from any number of potential investigations. There are many ‘known unknowns’ here, and there are potentially even more ‘unknown unknowns.’

But here is what we think that we know, as of February 15: Continue reading Full investigation now the only way to clear Trump White House on Russia quid pro quo →

United States

Tillerson’s not a bad choice for State; he’s just a bad choice for Trump’s administration.

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ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson is rumored to be Donald Trump’s pick to serve as Secretary of State.

In a ‘normal’ presidential administration, nominating the CEO of one of the world’s leading oil companies as the chief diplomatic officer of the United States would be a maverick, refreshing and, perhaps, inspiring choice.

After all, it takes some diplomatic skill to navigate the tangled shoals of doing business in some of the world’s leading oil producers, and foreign policy mandarins in Washington certainly have no monopoly on international affairs. As CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson has embraced the need for alternative energy sources, he has demonstrated that he understands the global challenges of climate change, and he has been a canny and creative executive. He’s obviously a very intelligent guy.

In Donald Trump’s administration, however, Tillerson would be a disastrous choice — for at least two reasons.

The first is the hulking brown bear in the room. Continue reading Tillerson’s not a bad choice for State; he’s just a bad choice for Trump’s administration. →

United States

Trump boosts Nehlen in August 9 primary vs Paul Ryan

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Paul Ryan, speaker of the House of Representatives, faces a unique primary challenge on August 9. (Facebook)
Paul Ryan, speaker of the House of Representatives, faces a unique primary challenge on August 9. (Facebook)

Don’t look now, but House speaker Paul Ryan may have just one week to salvage his career.USflag

OK, that might be hyperbole, but the longtime Wisconsin representative is facing perhaps the stiffest challenge of his nearly two-decade career in elective office.

For the better part of a decade, Ryan has been the face of movement conservatism in the United States. From the beginning of the Obama administration, Ryan quickly filled a role as something of the dean of conservative policymaking on Capitol Hill, earning for himself a reputation as a radical intellectual of the American right, who would routinely propose budgets that would so drastically reshape taxes and spending in the United States, even his predecessor as House speaker, Newt Gingrich — no shrinking violet on the American right — dismissed some of his ideas as ‘right-wing social engineering.’

Nevertheless, Ryan’s ascent in American politics is stunning. He served as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012; had the Romney-Ryan ticket won that election, Ryan would have played an important role in formulating economic policy for the Romney administration. Reluctantly — very reluctantly — Ryan agreed to run for House speaker last year after John Boehner stepped down and the frontrunner, House majority leader Kevin McCarthy, suddenly dropped out.

In many ways, Ryan’s has been a fairy-tale rise in American politics and, even today, he is a plausible future president in 2020 or beyond.

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RELATED: A brief history of Republican speakercide

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That may be changing, however, in the age of Trump.

By all appearances, Ryan was already facing an uncomfortably tough primary challenge from local businessman Paul Nehlen. But that challenge became a bit tougher on Sunday evening, when Republican presidential nominee nudged supporters toward Nehlen via Twitter:

On Monday, Trump refused to endorse Ryan in his primary, openly mocking the House speaker with the same kind of equivocating language that Ryan used in May when he refused to endorse Trump for the presidency:

Trump praised the House speaker’s underdog opponent, Paul Nehlen, for running “a very good campaign.” Trump said that Ryan has sought his endorsement, but that as of now he is only “giving it very serious consideration.”

“I like Paul, but these are horrible times for our country,” Trump said. “We need very strong leadership. We need very, very strong leadership. And I’m just not quite there yet. I’m not quite there yet.” Trump’s refusal to back Ryan represents an extraordinary breach of political decorum and signals that the Republican Party remains divided two weeks after a national convention in Cleveland staged to showcase party unity.
Continue reading Trump boosts Nehlen in August 9 primary vs Paul Ryan →

United States

Libertarians nominate party’s 1st viable presidential ticket in US history

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Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson looks on during National Convention held at the Rosen Center in Orlando, Florida, May 29, 2016. REUTERS/Kevin Kolczynski - RTX2EQ7N
Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson looks on during National Convention held at the Rosen Center in Orlando, Florida, May 29, 2016. (Reuters / Kevin Kolczynski)

Will it be ‘groovy Gary’ or ‘goofy Gary’?USflag

With over five months to go in what’s already become a nasty presidential election, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump hasn’t shied away from abusing his competitors, often giving them pejorative nicknames on Twitter and everywhere else on the campaign trail. Amused Americans might wonder whether Trump will welcome the Libertarian Party’s freshly minted 2016 presidential nominee, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, to the campaign with a similarly dismissive nickname as his other competitors — ‘low-energy’ Jeb Bush, ‘little’ Marco Rubio, ‘lyin” Ted Cruz and, most recently, ‘crooked’ Hillary Clinton.

The Libertarian Party nominated Johnson for a second consecutive time Sunday night at its national convention in Orlando, on a holiday weekend when most Americans were more concerned with summertime diversions than politics. But with Johnson leading the ticket, and with Libertarians, however reluctantly, nominating Johnson’s preferred running mate, former Massachusetts governor William Weld, as its vice presidential candidate, the party has for the first time since its inception in 1972, nominated a viable presidential ticket.

A ‘Never Trump, Never Clinton’ option in all 50 states

No one disputes that it will be an uphill fight, though the Libertarian Party will likely be the only third party to make the presidential ballot in all 50 states. But, at least on paper, the Libertarian ticket looks formidable. Johnson is enough of an ‘outsider’ to harness the same kind of energy as Trump and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side of the race. For now, the Libertarian ticket is the only one with experience in executive government (not counting, of course, Clinton’s eight years in the East Wing as first lady).

Republican-leaning voters who believe Trump lacks the maturity, temperament, tone or experience for the Oval Office will be cheered by the shared ideological values with Libertarians, such as fiscal restraint and limited government. Democratic-leaning voters who mistrust Clinton will prefer the traditional Libertarian social liberalism on many cultural issues, such as abortion, LGBT marriage and drug decriminalization. Sanders supporters, in particular, who credibly hope that Sanders can defeat Clinton in the June 7 Democratic primary in California and who less credibly hope that Sanders can wrest the nomination from Clinton at July’s Democratic convention in Philadelphia, will find in Johnson a kindred spirit. Johnson would be smart to target Millennial voters who overwhelmingly backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and who even more overwhelmingly back Sanders against Clinton.

The ticket includes two proven vote-winners who, in aggregate, won four gubernatorial elections in the 1990s and the 2000s as ‘small-l’ libertarian Republicans in Democratic-leaning states. Even before his formal nomination and his decision to name Weld as a running mate, some polls were already showing that Johnson could win up to 10% of the vote in November. The most important polling threshold, however, is 15%, which would entitle Johnson and Weld to participate in the formal series of presidential and vice-presidential debates later this autumn that millions of American voters will watch. That, alone, would be an impressive achievement for the Libertarian Party.

Red governors in blue and purple states

Johnson, who briefly ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination before winning the Libertarian nomination in the same election cycle, served as the governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003, coming to politics after a successful business career in construction. As governor, Johnson widely used veto powers to limit state spending and pushed for both marijuana decriminalization and education reform to introduce greater choice and competition among schools.

Johnson can point to his experience spent eight years governing a state with the most proportionally Latino/Hispanic population in the United States (47% as of the 2010 census). In 2016, Latino voters are expected to be crucial in determining the next president. It’s a group of voters than has grown from just 7.7 million in 1988 to 23.3 million in 2012 (and a projected 27.3 million in 2016). Johnson, an avid outdoorsman, Ironman enthusiast and mountain climber who has scaled Mt. Everest, can nevertheless be awkward and a bit wooden on the stump. But he radiates sincerity, and in a race against Trump and Clinton, neither of whom voters seem to like or to trust, his lack of bombast or glib soundbites could appeal broadly, especially among authenticity-craving Millennials.   Continue reading Libertarians nominate party’s 1st viable presidential ticket in US history →

Germany, United States

Can Hillary Clinton become America’s Mutti?

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Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton might find in German chancellor Angela Merkel a role model in the era of Trump (State Department)
Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton might find in German chancellor Angela Merkel a role model in the era of Trump (State Department)

In 2008, US president Barack Obama won the largest Democratic mandate in a generation, in part, by pledging to change the tone in Washington.USflag

But in 2016, after eight years of increasingly bitter and partisan posturing, it’s Obama’s one-time rival, Hillary Clinton, who now has the opportunity to transcend the hyper-partisanship that began with the divided government under her husband’s administration in the 1990s.

Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party laid bare the long-growing schism among various Republican constituencies. Currently, the two living former Republican presidents (George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush), the party’s most recent presidential nominee (former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney), its one-time 2016 frontrunners (former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, Texas senator Ted Cruz and Florida senator Marco Rubio) and the Republican in the highest-ranking elected official — speaker of the House (Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan) — have all refused to endorse Trump.

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RELATED: That transcending ideology thing from 2008?
Merkel did it. Obama hasn’t.

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Despite the promise that the coming general election will be nasty, even by the recent standards of American politics, Clinton, if she’s nimble enough, can become a unifying and moderate figure who can work with both Republicans and Democrats. If Trump loses as badly as polls suggest he might, the Republican Party will be a shambles on November 8. The fight for Senate control was always a toss-up, and a Trump debacle could endanger even Republican control of the House of Representatives.

Increasingly, the debate in world politics is tilting away from traditional left-right discourses, replaced by a much darker fight, for the first time since the 1930s, between populist nationalism and globalist internationalism — and not just in the United States, but everywhere from the Philippines to the United Kingdom. In that fight, Ryan (and Bush and moderate Republicans) have much more in common with Clinton and the officials who will lead a Clinton administration than with Trump.

Make no mistake, if Clinton wins the presidency in November, she’s not going to form a German-style ‘grand coalition’ with Ryan and leading Republicans. Postwar German politics operates largely on consensus to a degree unknown in American (or even much of European) politics. Still, German chancellor Angela Merkel has already paved the way for how a successful Clinton presidency might unfold, and Clinton advisers would be smart to figure out, as the campaign unfolds, how to position Clinton as a kind of American ‘Mutti.’ Clinton is already reaching out to moderate Republican donors, but the challenge goes much deeper — to become a kind of acceptable figure to both blue-state and red-state America.

It’s not clear that Clinton has the same political skill to pull off in the United States what Merkel has done in Germany.

But it’s a rare opportunity, nonetheless, if she can.  Continue reading Can Hillary Clinton become America’s Mutti? →

United States

How Bernie Sanders blew an opportunity on health care reform

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berniesanders
Though Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is surging in some polls, the response to his universal ‘Medicare for all’ health care plan was mixed. (Facebook)

Bernie Sanders might just be the American version of Jeremy Corbyn after all. USflag

On the eve of Sunday night’s Democratic presidential debate, Sanders, the Vermont senator with a self-proclaimed ‘democratic socialist’ charge to win the Democratic presidential nomination, released a more detailed plan for achieving universal health care. By its own terms, the Sanders plan would provide ‘Medicare for all,’ though it actually goes much further by eliminating co-pay and deductibles, adding to the sticker shock of a federal program that would cost $1.38 trillion annually. It also comes with huge tax increases that would give US citizens, in one fell swoop, higher tax rates than many ‘social welfare states’ in western Europe.

Many critics, including those on the left who should be sympathetic to achieving even more universal health care, have been skeptical.

Ezra Klein at Vox chides the Sanders plan for omitting details about how a single-payer system would be forced to deny many benefits and treatments, just as Medicare does today. Paul Krugman at The New York Times calls the Sanders plan an exercise in fantasy budgeting, arguing that it relies on wild assumptions about the savings it can achieve in health care spending through a single-payer system. Jonathan Chait at The New Yorker argues that the next president will invariably face a Republican-controlled House (if not Senate) and that introducing a single-payer system would be impossible.

All of these are valid, reasonable criticisms of the Sanders plan.

But if you really believe that president Barack Obama’s health care reforms are just one step on the way to universal health care and, like Sanders, you are committed to a single-payer system, there was always a much better policy plan:

Lower the eligibility age of Medicare from its current level (65 and older) to allow all Americans aged 55 or older to participate. 

It could have been, for Sanders, a beautiful political maneuver that would put both his rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, and congressional Republicans on the defensive, all while having the benefit of being generally great policy.  Continue reading How Bernie Sanders blew an opportunity on health care reform →

United States

How I expect the 2016 Republican nomination race to play out

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Donald Trump has dominated the imagination of the Republican contest in 2015, but can he turn enthusiasm into real votes in 2016? Maybe.
Donald Trump has dominated the imagination of the Republican contest in 2015, but can he turn enthusiasm into real votes in 2016? Maybe. (Facebook)

It’s not often that I write about American politics because there are already so many pundits doing it, and the comparative advantage of a website like Suffragio lies in deeper analysis of global electoral politics and foreign policy informed by that analysis. USflag

But we’re now just over three weeks away from the most competitive Republican presidential nomination contest in memory, and we’re six months into the era of Trumpismo. For what it’s worth, no one knows exactly how the spring nominating process will end because there are so many variables — and you shouldn’t trust anyone who says otherwise.

Still, we’re not on Mars and, while there are certainly new factors in 2016 that matter more than ever, there is deep precedential value from prior contests.

So here’s one perspective on how the race might ultimately turn out, based on observing primary contests for over 20 years. At the most basic level, the race for the Republican nomination is a race to win a majority of the 2,470 delegates that will meet between July 18 and 21 in Cleveland, Ohio.  Continue reading How I expect the 2016 Republican nomination race to play out →

United States

Why Marco Rubio is such a strong candidate for the Republican nomination

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rubio

…in 15 tweets.USflag

Step back from the horse race, step back from the scorecards of last night’s debate, step back from the peculiarities of Iowa and New Hampshire. Envision what the Republican general election campaign in November 2016 will have to offer to an electorate where young voters, women (possibly in historical numbers) and racial and ethnic minorities will still favor the Democratic ticket, barring a catastrophic turn in voting patterns or economic conditions.

Who, given the current 15-candidate field, will Republicans want running that campaign?

Puerto Rico, United States

Four reasons why Puerto Rico won’t become a state anytime soon

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51srars

For all the comparisons to Greece’s debt crisis, there’s one simple solution that many Puerto Ricans and mainland policymakers are prescribing to solve the commonwealth’s own financial crisis — and it’s not available to Greece or any other eurozone members. PR

Puerto Rico could simply become the 51st American state.

For the past 63 years, it’s been an estado libre asociado — a self-governing commonwealth that lies uncomfortably between a state and a territory, with bespoke elements unique to Puerto Rico, both good and bad.

Republican presidential contender and former Florida governor Jeb Bush supports statehood and in 2012, both US president Barack Obama and his rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said they would support it if a clear majority of Puerto Ricans want statehood — Puerto Rico held a status referendum in the same election year. Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico’s Democratic-affiliated non-voting delegate to the US  House of Representatives, made the case for it in an op-ed in The New York Times earlier this month.

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RELATED: The next debt crisis in the United States may
require a Puerto Rico bailout

RELATED: Could Puerto Rico really become the 51st US state?

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It’s true that both the Greek and Puerto Rican crises share much in common. Both governments are tethered to monetary policies that aren’t necessarily optimal. Functionally, that means neither Athens nor San Juan have a currency that they can depreciate to spur exports. Neither the European Central Bank nor the Federal Reserve can realistically be expected to tailor monetary policies to local needs. That, in turn, has exacerbated the effects from the economic forces of the past decade — the 2008-09 subprime crisis in the United States and the 2009-10 sovereign debt crisis in Europe, along with the economic pain of a nearly decade-long recession, rounds of tax increases and spending cuts, and accompanying rises in unemployment and downward pressure on wages. Lower growth, of course, means lower revenues and higher budget deficits — and more borrowing means higher yields that are now sucking Puerto Rico into a downward spiral. Alejandro García Padilla, its governor, made clear in late June that he believes the island’s $72 billion in debt is unsustainable.

In both scenarios, Greeks (through the Schengen zone) and Puerto Ricans (through the universal grant of US citizenship made in 1917 to allow Puerto Ricans to fight in World War I) can relocate to more economically prosperous European and American regions with ease. Migration means that fewer Puerto Ricans are left to service the growing debt — or build businesses and communities that can provide the revenues to fund schools and infrastructure. The island’s population is creeping downward; from a peak of 3.83 million in 2004, it was down to just 3.55 million last year. The pace of emigration is rising — to about 50,000 annually.

There are key differences as well between Greece and Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico’s status is a relic of the late colonial era, and the United States acquired the island in 1898 as a result of its war against Spain (in Cuba, the Philippines and elsewhere). From the beginning, full-fledged independence has never been a popular option among Puerto Ricans. But nationalist sentiment rose so strongly by 1950 that two pro-sovereignty activists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, attempted to assassinate US president Harry Truman.

The US policy response, Operation Bootstrap, adopted throughout the following decade to industrialize the island, transformed Puerto Rico into a more modern, urban place, even as American businesses consolidated the island’s farmland. But it never whisked Puerto Rico into a miraculous Caribbean Singapore, and it decimated small-scale agriculture.

Puerto Rico also suffers from the classic ‘island effect’ that economists sometimes describe of countries where dependence on imports and higher transport costs artificially increase the cost of living — a condition that’s often found throughout the Caribbean and islands, but that also affects Israel, a country surrounded by hostile Arab states with virtually no cross-border trade.

Most important of all, there’s no real talk of ‘PRexit,’ because no one believes that Puerto Rico could just abandon the ‘dollarzone.’ There’s no plan sitting in US treasury secretary Jack Lew’s desk that outlines the potential steps because it’s so much more implausible than a ‘Grexit.’

García Padilla is right that the crisis, decades in the making, is due to political factors as well as economic. Default may come soon — the Puerto Rican government says it doesn’t have enough cash to make a scheduled August 1 payment of nearly $170 million. That could launch a messy years-long default process, with the island trying to force haircuts on its bondholders. If San Juan can’t demand debt relief, protracted litigation might result in court rulings forcing Puerto Rico’s government to prioritize creditors over the salaries of public servants — galvanizing so much economic suffering that it would draw international condemnation over America’s neocolonial version of Greece.

There’s no effective Chapter 9 process for Puerto Rico, unlike for US municipalities, so the alternative of an orderly Detroit-style restructuring, isn’t available. The Obama administration, moreover, has made it clear that it doesn’t support a bailout — and it’s not clear that Republicans in Congress would be willing to provide the funds for any bailout.

So calls for statehood, in both Puerto Rico and on the mainland, and on the left and right, are on the rise, and predictably so. But as genuine as those calls might be, it’s a very, very unlikely result– and that will likely be true for a long time.

Here’s why. Continue reading Four reasons why Puerto Rico won’t become a state anytime soon →

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 →

United States

Love him or hate him, MITT is going to be an epic documentary

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It seems like in every US presidential election since Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960, there’s one ‘definitive’ piece of journalism that captures the essence of the election — and that demonstrates to the rest of the world the inner workings of politics in the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. USflag

In 1972, it could have been Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, an acid trip that revealed the emptiness of Republicans like Richard Nixon and Democrats like Hubert Humphrey.

In 1988, it was Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, a 1072-page sextuple biography of the leading presidential contenders, including the winner George H.W. Bush and future vice president Joe Biden.

In 1992, it was the documentary, The War Room, about the campaign team that propelled Arkansas governor Bill Clinton to the presidency.

In 2008, it was Game Change, the book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin that transformed Barack Obama’s legendary presidential victory into a thrilling page-turner.

But despite at least two major blockbuster books on the 2012 presidential race, including a second volume from Heilemann and Halperin, I haven’t seen anything that really captures the race in an extraordinarily compelling way.  Enter MITT, a documentary that Netflix will debut in January 2014.  If the trailer (embedded above) is any indication, it could become the definite media chronicle of 2012.  In the trailer alone, you can see Romney’s real-time reaction to the news that he’d lost the presidency.

Greg Whiteley followed Romney for six years in order to shoot the documentary — starting just after Romney left office as Massachusetts governor, through his unsuccessful primary campaign to become the 2008 Republican nominee and the grueling 2012 campaign.  Romney ultimately lost that race to Obama, the incumbent, by a margin of 51.1% to 47.2% (an electoral vote loss of 332 to 206).

Puerto Rico, United States

Could Puerto Rico really become the 51st U.S. state?

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In addition to the defeat of Puerto Rico’s budget-cutting governor Luis Fortuño in yesterday’s gubernatorial election, Puerto Ricans have also voted in a two-question referendum in opposition to its current commonwealth status, marking the worst result for the status quo in four such referenda in half a century. 

That doesn’t mean Puerto Rico is exactly on the fast track to become the 51st state of the United States.

There are reasons to believe that the path to statehood would encounter obstacles both from U.S. legislators in Washington, D.C. as well as difficulties in San Juan — not least of which due to the fact that Puerto Rico’s newly elected governor, Alejandro García Padilla, opposes Puerto Rican statehood and is likely to prioritize creating jobs and reducing crime over constitutional status issues.

The island is currently a U.S. territory, and since 1952, its constitutional status has been as a ‘commonwealth’ of the United States.  More on that below.

Tuesday’s referendum

First, let’s examine the actual referendum and the result.

The referendum itself was a complex two-question vote.  Puerto Ricans were first asked whether the commonwealth should continue to have its present form of territorial status.  Puerto Ricans were also asked which non-territorial option they prefer among three options: becoming a U.S. state, becoming independent, or becoming a ‘free associated state’ — think of the latter option as ‘independence light‘ akin to the relationship that Palau and the Marshall Islands have to the United States or like the relationship the Cook Islands have with New Zealand.

See the second prong of the ballot question:

Puerto Ricans could vote on the second question regardless of their position on the first question, so voters who support the current commonwealth status could nonetheless vote for their preferred non-commonwealth status as well.

Around 1.82 million voters participated in the referendum.  On the first question, 53.99% of voters voted that Puerto Rico should not continue to have its present form of territorial status, and 46.01% supported the current status.  In four referenda since 1967, that’s clearly the strongest vote against Puerto Rico’s commonwealth status.

On the second question, though, the headline statistic that most U.S. media are reporting is that 61.15% of Puerto Rican voters supported statehood (with 33.31% supporting a ‘free associated state’ and just 5.53% supporting full independence).

But that overstates the case, because over 486,000 voters cast either invalid or blank votes on the second question.  When you take those into consideration, statehood won just 44.62% of total votes, blank and invalid votes ‘won’ 27.04%, the ‘free associated state’ option won 24.31%, and full independence won 4.04%.

So while statehood seems to be the preferred alternative, not even a majority of the voters who took part in the referendum actually cast a vote for statehood.  Furthermore, we don’t know how ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters actually voted on the second question, so there’s no way to know, what the anti-commonwealth voters, as a group, actually prefer.

Accordingly, the result isn’t a clear victory for much of anything, let alone statehood.  That may be fine — it’s just a non-binding referendum anyway.  As noted above, García Padilla and his Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico (the PPD, Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico) is opposed to statehood, so it seems less likely that Puerto Rico will aggressively pursue statehood than if the incumbent, Luis Fortuño of the pro-statehood Partido Nuevo Progresista de Puerto Rico (the PNP, New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico) had won reelection.

Notably, however, Puerto Rico’s ‘resident commissioner,’ its non-voting representative to the U.S. House of Representatives, has the chief responsibility of introducing legislation to admit Puerto Rico as the 51st state. Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner, Pedro Pierluisi — who was only narrowly reelected on Tuesday with a 1% margin — belongs to the pro-statehood PNP.  Pierluisi, indeed, has indicated that he favors introducing such legislation.  We’ll find out, I guess.

Proponents of statehood chafe at the idea that Puerto Rico is somehow less equal, that it’s a colonial remnant from the imperial era.  Other supporters believe that full statehood would help lift Puerto Rico’s economic status by creating more links to the mainstream U.S. economy — the island’s GDP per capita of just $24,000 is almost half of GDP per capita on the mainland, the island has been stuck in a recession for the past six years and poverty, crime and unemployment are much higher there than on the mainland.

Opponents argue that statehood would not deliver many more benefits than Puerto Ricans currently enjoy, while subjecting it to less autonomy and more responsibility for U.S. federal taxes.  Furthermore, opponents worry that statehood could endanger the unique ‘boricua’ culture of the predominantly Spanish-speaking territory.  Needless to say, if you’ve ever been to San Juan, you realize quickly that it’s a world away from even heavily Latino U.S. cities like Miami, Los Angeles or New York. Nonetheless, Puerto Ricans are already well assimilated into U.S. culture and life — indeed, there are more mainland citizens of Puerto Rican descent in United States than on the island, and Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland share a rich cultural heritage, especially within the ‘Nuyorican’ diaspora that emerged in New York in the 20th century.

Since 1952, independence has remained a fairly unpopular option, although if Puerto Rico were a sovereign nation, it would be the Caribbean’s fourth most-populous country, after Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  Its $96.26 billion economy would become the largest economy in the Caribbean, dwarfing not just the Cuban ($60.8 billion) or Dominican ($55.6 billion) economies, but also Central American ones, such as Panamá’s ($30.7 billion) and Costa Rica’s ($41.0 billion).

Puerto Rico’s status in context

Tuesday’s vote was the just the most recent of four increasingly complex referenda on Puerto Rico’s status since becoming a commonwealth in 1952.  Continue reading Could Puerto Rico really become the 51st U.S. state? →

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Who is Alejandro García Padilla?

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Although voters in the United States chose to retain a Republican House of Representatives, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president in Barack Obama, it wasn’t as good a night for incumbents in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Alejandro García Padilla (pictured above), a Puerto Rican senator, narrowly defeated Puerto Rico’s governor Luis Fortuño in Tuesday’s Puerto Rican gubernatorial election and Fortuño conceded the race earlier this afternoon — with over 96% of the votes counted, García Padilla leads with 47.85% to just 47.04% for Fortuño.

The result will cap what was generally a good night for García Padilla’s Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico (the PPD, Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico), which also took back control of Puerto Rico’s Asamblea Legislativa (Legislative Assembly) from Fortuño’s Partido Nuevo Progresista de Puerto Rico (the PNP, New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico), and which also won the mayoral race in San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital and largest city.

So who is García Padilla? And how will García Padilla will his administration differ from Fortuño’s?

García Padilla, age 41, an attorney and former law professor, was elected to Puerto Rico’s Senate in 2008 as the PPD’s most popular vote-winner.  He previously served as the secretary of consumer affairs under former PPD governor Aníbal Acevedo Vilá from 2005 to 2008.

García Padilla’s victory first and foremost likely means an end to the austerity policies of his predecessor.

As governor, Fortuño has essentially eliminated Puerto Rico’s $2 billion budget deficit, but he’s done so by cutting public sector jobs and reducing spending on higher education, even while he reduced taxes 50% for individuals and 30% for business.  The implementation of his economic program has drawn considerable attention in the United States, and Fortuño himself is somewhat of a star within the Republican Party — he and his wife had primetime speaking roles during the Republican National Convention in August.  If Mitt Romney had won Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election, it seemed likely that Fortuño could even be elevated to a cabinet position in a Romney administration.

Fortuño, already on the ropes after losing two referenda earlier in the summer to reduce the number of legislators in Puerto Rico’s legislative assembly and to give judges the right to deny bail in certain murder cases (Puerto Rico, uniquely, entitles everyone to bail regardless of the crime), was never quite a favorite for reelection.

García Padilla ran a stinging campaign against the harshness of Fortuño’s austerity measures in the face of an economic climate even more troubling than on the U.S. mainland — the economy has been in recession for six years, unemployment remains relatively high at 13.6% and the poverty level has reached a staggering 45.6%.  Meanwhile, crime is rising steadily, with over 1,000 murders in 2011 alone.  Puerto Rico’s GDP per capita of just around $24,000, about half that of the United States, makes it already much less prosperous than the mainland.  Continue reading Who is Alejandro García Padilla? →

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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 →