Tag: Hillary Clinton

US-Cuba relations are not high on the roster of priorities for many Americans, and yet small moves in the terms of that relationship could have enormous political consequences. Recently, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did battle over what their policies would be towards Cuba if elected President.  That’s right — this was not a discussion of Israel/Palestine, or withdrawing from Iraq, or bombing Iran, or whether to talk to dictators without preconditions.  This was about Cuba. Chris Dodd started things off with an eloquent statement about US-Cuba relations released through my blog, The Washington Note as well as my perch at The Huffington Post.  Dodd set the gold standard in my view in articulating a policy that wasn’t all warm and fuzzy about Castro but that spoke to America’s 21st century economic and national security interests with Cuba in contrast to those who want to keep US-Cuba relations cocooned in an anachronistic Cold War era framework that has little relevancy today.  Dodd wants to end the many decades old embargo.  He wants to remove all travel restrictions — and he wants to see commerce and trade begin to flow.  He wants American people to meet Cubans and wants to trigger an arbitrage between the norms of our society and theirs.  That is the American way. That’s what we did with China. Now Hillary Clinton — who has visited China and who supports relations with Vietnam and who has praised Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill and Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns on what seems so far to be fairly successful nuclear deal-making with North Korea — has spoken out against change in America’s stance towards Cuba and in favor of George W. Bush’s position.

Clinton doesn’t support changing course in US-Cuba relations despite decades of failed results and seems to have no problem with something that Jeff Flake (R-AZ-6), the charismatic Republican Congressman from Arizona, does.  Flake has said:

If my travel which I think is my human right is going to be restricted, then it seems to me that a Communist government ought to be the one doing the restricting — not my own government of the United States of America.

Hillary Clinton has stated quite clearly that she is content to stick with past policies — those of President Bush — when it comes to Cuba. 

But Barack Obama has a completely different view.  While not quite up to the robustness of Chris Dodd’s proposal, Obama wrote an oped for the Miami Herald, "Our Main Goal:  Freedom in Cuba," calling for restrictions on family-related travel to end and increasing financial amounts that families could remit to loved ones inside Cuba. After he wrote the piece, Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chairman Joe Garcia — who is also the former Executive Director of the Jorge Mas Canosa-run Cuban-American National Foundation, organized a large gathering of Miami citizens, an overwhelming number of whom were Cuban Americans, to meet with Obama.  Most report that it was a super success.  There were some protests — but trivial compared to what one might have expected in Miami on this subject matter just a few years ago.

How could this be?  Hillary Clinton and those who want to keep US-Cuba relations in a cocooned, freeze-dried state have not looked at the recent polling data that show clearly that the Cuban-American voters in Florida are becoming divided over not only the family travel issue, but about the efficacy of the embargo itself.

Again to quote Republican Congressman Jeff Flake:

President Bush’s tightened restrictions on Cuban-American family travel is now forcing people to choose whether they are going to attend their father’s funeral or their mother’s.

Cuban-Americans from Miami have told me that the powerful triumvirate of Cuban-Americans from Miami — Ileana-Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, and Mario Diaz-Balart (the brothers are coincidentally the nephews by a failed marriage of their aunt to Fidel Castro) — are facing their most serious electoral challenges yet, as younger Cuban-Americans as well as older are shifting in their policy preferences when it comes to the Cuba travel ban and embargo.

Recently, I went to Havana along with former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson. Wilkerson is a blunt guy — a military guy — and doesn’t suffer fools.  He was Colin Powell’s aide for sixteen years and served as his aide when Powell was Commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also when Powell served as Secretary of the State.

Wilkerson has published two sets of "reflections" on Cuba and US-Cuba relations at the newly hatched, The Havana Note.  In the first, he starts with the admission that while Powell’s chief of staff, he gave an "off the record" interview to GQ Magazine in which he said that our "US-Cuba policy was the stupidest policy on earth." 

Wilkerson writes:

When I was Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State in 2004, I was exposed to some criticism within the Bush administration when I was quoted in GQ Magazine as saying that U.S. Cuba policy was the stupidest policy on earth. I deserved the criticism because my immediate boss, Colin Powell, had approved that policy. Not only that, he was co-chairman of the Committee set up to monitor implementation of it. Now I realize that I deserve far stronger criticism for not resigning my position in disgust over such policy. Let me tell you one of the most powerful reasons I feel that way.

There is a film by Lisandro Perez-Rey called "Those I Left Behind". The film documents the lives of several Cuban-American families against the backdrop of the Bush administration’s tightened rules on travel to Cuba. It is devastating in its condemnation of those rules. In the film, you see and hear from people whose lives are in turmoil because of these inane rules. You don’t need to understand how damaging the rules are to helping democracy come to Cuba. You don’t need to understand how dangerous the rules are with respect to U.S. national security. You don’t need to appreciate that Cuba is the only country in the world which U.S. citizens are prohibited to visit—a violation of their constitutional rights. And you don’t need to comprehend how much business America is losing because of the policies behind those rules—policies that have failed abjectly now for some 46 years. All you need to do is witness the devastation in the lives of these families to know that the rules must be changed and as swiftly as possible.

Central to the film is the testimony of an American citizen—an American soldier who has served in Iraq—who now finds it difficult if not impossible to visit his sons in Cuba. Sergeant Carlos Lazo, now somewhat famous for his advocacy for change, is shown talking to his two sons, Carlos Manuel and Carlos Raphael, who are in Cuba, via one of his many television appearances as he works for change. A resident of Seattle and a member of the Washington National Guard, Sergeant Lazo served as a combat medic in Iraq. Watching the scenes in the film of his sons in Cuba and the Sergeant in the United States, is wrenching. Particularly when Lazo talks of wanting to visit his sons prior to his departure for a year in Iraq—a year where he easily could have been wounded or killed—and then not being able to do so, you get the message he is trying to convey with a directness that is heartbreaking.

On another front, well before any of us had heard of Michael Moore’s Sicko, we became exposed to the new edge of Cuban power — soft power — in Latin America and elsewhere:  the training and export of doctors.  Say what you want about Castro, who has outlived an incredible number of US presidents and may be around a bit longer, but exporting doctors is wildly different than the export of guns and revolution, which was what Cuba was doing for decades.

Here is an intro to Wilkerson’s reflections of Cuba’s national health care and medicine infrastructure and the global public diplomacy that they connect to it:

With Steve Clemons and others, I recently visited Cuba (March 2007). One of the areas of Cuban activity on which we focused was what has been described as one of the world’s best systems for delivering healthcare to impoverished people—in Cuba, in Venezuela and elsewhere in South and Central America, and increasingly in sub-Saharan Africa. We visited Cuba’s medical "contingency brigade", for example, and talked with doctors and other healthcare personnel about the brigade’s recent, highly successful tenure in Pakistan following the devastating earthquakes there in 2006. The passion in the doctors’ eyes as they related their experiences in delivering basic healthcare in isolated, freezing regions of Pakistan was truly heartwarming. Some of the human interest stories the doctors related brought laughter to us all and served to demonstrate conclusively how deeply these medical personnel had been touched by their almost year-long experience in Pakistan. They were proud to announce that as a result of the good relations thus created, Cuba was asked to open its first-ever embassy in Islamabad. Talk about effective public diplomacy!

We also visited the Finlay Institute: Center for Research-Development and Production of Human Vaccines—incidentally, one of the places that the jacobin Undersecretary of State for International Security Affairs, John Bolton, alleged in 2002 was manufacturing biological weapons. We didn’t find any such activity (and we did discover that at best the Institute has a rudimentary Bio-Level III capability and no Bio-Level IV capability—the latter needed if one is to engage in sophisticated biological agent research and development). After the visit, we assumed that Bolton’s insights were right up there with the CIA’s in 2002-2003 with respect to Saddam Hussein’s mobile biological weapons labs. It’s safe to say we considered the assessment by the former commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Marine General Charles Wilhelm, as more definitive: "During my three year tenure, from September 1997 until September 2000 at Southern Command, I didn’t receive a single report or a single piece of evidence that would have led me to the conclusion that Cuba was in fact developing, producing or weaponizing biological or chemical agents."

Those interested in the realities of Cuba’s health care progress — and the many lessons we can learn — can skip the Michael Moore film and instead see Salud!

In foreign policy circles, most people consider me to be a "realist".  I consider myself a hybrid of a number of schools.  I don’t think that there are perfectly neat schools of thought any longer but whether I’m a 21st century evolved realist, an ethical realist, a progressive realist, or as Michael Lind would call me, a new American internationalist — when I see US-Cuba realities as a manifestation of our failure to move forward in ways consistent with global needs and American interests, then my realist DNA perks up.

Cuba and the Cuban population remember the fall of the Soviet Union and survived a devastating, tortuous shrinking of their economy (and their personal body weight).  After the Russians, Venezuela cuddled up to the Cubans and now they essentially barter doctors and medical support for oil between each other.  China is the second biggest economic partner of Cuba and has designs on developing the oil fields in Cuban waters estimated to be about 9-12 billion barrels.  Americans are not there — not involved.

Benetton has a store in old Havana.  British Petroleum — which controls the Alaskan pipeline — had a party on the roof of my hotel in Havana.  Israeli firms are managing large citrus groves there.  The Germans, Chinese, Australians, Canadians, Dutch, and Japanese are all visiting Havana and seeing the business opportunities.

But Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuiliani, Fred Thompson, and John McCain all want to keep the Bush administration’s restrictions on trade and travel in place.

Lifting the travel ban makes the United States a more whole nation — as travel is a natural right of ours, not to be taken away by our government.  This right should be restored to all Americans in my view.

But stepping away from the lofty for a moment, Hugo Chavez is not my favorite guy in Latin America. 

In my view, Chavez is a serious troublemaker made increasingly wealthy from high oil prices.  He is an increasingly significant constraint on America’s global options — and to knock him back a respectable bit would be a good thing.  Opening the travel pipe would steal from Chavez both the dependency and the affections of many Cubans and might send a very popular pro-American current through Cuba and much of Latin America.

More on this later — but Cuba does matter and is already a point of differentiation between Obama, Clinton, and Dodd.  Fidel will not be around long in my estimation, and we need our political and policy leaders to begin plotting a policy not riveted in the past and not dominated by a shrinking cartel in Miami. 

— Steve Clemons

He wants her as the nominee. He knows she can be beaten. Obama is a much more daunting and complicated foe. No proof, of course, just a theory in the LAT. But some history shows it’s a tactic Rove has used before:

"Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters’ minds. So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards," [Matthew] Dowd [former campaign staffer for Bush in 2006] said. "And we knew that if we focused on John Kerry, Democratic primary voters would sort of coalesce" around Kerry. "It wasn’t like we could tag [eliminate] somebody. Whomever we attacked was going to be helped," he said.

I wouldn’t put it past him. But then again, what wouldn’t you put past him?

Howard Wolfson reacts testily to a pretty banal Obama comment on Clinton. Jason Zengerle notes:

The sort of hair-trigger response demonstrated by Wolfson serves only to strengthen Obama’s original point about Clinton being something of a divisive figure. Indeed, Wolfson’s response even serves to make that point stronger than Obama did – since it shows that Clinton’s divisiveness is, sometimes, a problem of her own making.

You think?

Many readers are mad at me for this post, where I reiterate my issue with Senator Clinton. In expressing my aversion in emotional terms, I’m trying to be candid. But you’re right. In a serious election, it isn’t good enough to write sentences like "I’m sorry but she does that to me." I’ve written before that Clinton’s relentless sensibleness on many issues – including the war, where her own journey has been in the same direction as mine – makes her hard to oppose. So why my continued – almost violent – fear of her as president? The answer, I think, is about character. It’s not so much about policy any more. I’m resigned to the fact that conservatism has entered a wilderness for a while. Bush and Rove killed it, and it will take a period out of power to restore it. And if you’re going to have a big government philosophy you might as well have the government run by people who believe in it, rather than by those who think it’s just a useful vehicle to get their second cousin a job. And Hillary isn’t that left-wing. Yes, I’m worried about what she’d do to the American healthcare industry. But the purge of excellence is coming anyway. The character issue is really about having a president I can trust, whose words are connected to what he or she actually believes, and a president who can move us past the hideous and growing polarization of the past two decades. The words that come out of Clinton’s mouth are like round, honed pebbles on a beach of public relations and focus groups. She has got it down, and it’s smooth and round and aesthetically pleasing. But I don’t believe it or even hear it except as a series of ever shifting calculations. I know some of this is inevitable in politics. But it has come to drain our political discourse of real meaning and clarity. And the crafted populist soundbites of Clinton’s newest, Eva Peron-style campaign ad sound as empty as they may well be effective. She has taken professional politics to a newly homogenized blur of blather. We need plain English.

We may be stuck with her. There would be worse things right now than an extremely careful, cautious and prudent machine pol. A reader notes:

1) If things are bad, getting back to stability is a good idea. "Core competences" in MBA talk. "Stick to the knitting". Nostalgia? Well, duh, habeas corpus, non-interventionism, balanced budgets, respect for the law and the Constitution – sounds quaint, doesn’t it?

2) Every candidate hopes to lock things up quickly. Hillary at this point has gotten rid of all competitors but one. Including in both parties. Her steady growth of being accepted or even liked by people from both parties appears to have squashed any real "draft Gore" likelihood, something that wasn’t obvious 2 months ago. Compared to skeletons in Giuliani’s and Romney’s closets, Hillary looks pretty clean. Ron Paul infatuation is fizzling as people become real. Thompson? My bet is he’ll never officially announce. Perhaps the Republicans can draft someone who has a chance, but Arnie can’t and I don’t see anyone else who has any appeal. (Bloomberg is a tough sell).

3) Obama’s still in it, but he has a lot of catch up to do. Frum’s wrong – the election schedule is too tight – there’s no space for rebounds, no time to re-evaluate after start of primaries. Of course it’s up to the voters in the end, and it looks like only Hillary and Barack have a chance of drawing the numbers, but it still looks like a Hillary/Barack ticket in the end, rather than Barack/Hillary. Richardson is effectively killing himself off as possible VP, though can still be good again in the cabinet. Edwards? Was fairly useless last time, and not going very far this time.

Hard to disagree. But as long as there is a viable alternative – Obama – there’s still hope for something better.

(Photo: Mannie Garcia/Getty.)

Populist and anti-Bush. Marc’s take here. See what you think. It made me gag. Sorry, she just does it to me:

I will be on Tucker Carlson’s show this evening to discuss my Los Angeles Times article. I think it is interesting that no one at National Review has commented on it. It confirms an observation I’ve had that the right tends to deal with facts and arguments it doesn’t like by ignoring them; hoping they will go away. The left is more inclined to try and destroy them, often to the point of overkill. Neither strategy really works unless the facts and arguments they disagree with are wrong. In the end, the truth will out. I think it makes more sense to deal with these things in an upfront, straightforward manner, even if it means conceding that the other side may be right once in a while.

I have an article in this morning’s Los Angeles Times that elaborates on my earlier post about how Hillary is becoming more acceptable to at least a few opinionmakers on the right.

Let me anticipate one criticism I always get when I talk about how Bill Clinton’s administration ended up being pretty good on economic policy. I am told that is only because the Republicans got control of Congress in 1994 and thereafter checked his excesses, such as the effort to nationalize health care that was run by Hillary.

This is quite true. Left to his own devices with a Democratic Congress for 8 years, I have no doubt that Bill would have been a far worse president from a conservative viewpoint. This is why I have been harping on the dismal chances the Republicans have for keeping the White House. If they recognize that this just isn’t going to happen, then maybe the party can pour some extra resources into some congressional races and try to win seats that were lost in 2006.

Earlier, I quoted political scientist Larry Sabato as saying–correctly in my view–that the American people like gridlock. They don’t trust either party to run the whole show. And frankly, the 2000-2006 experience of a Republican Congress and a Republican president is strong evidence in favor of divided party control.

Therefore, if Republicans were to run a national campaign reminding voters that the best economic times we’ve had in living memory came when we had a Democratic president and a Republican Congress, I think it could persuade a lot of voters to split their votes. If, on the other hand, Republicans insist of believing that they can hold the White House and put all their eggs in that basket, then we could have a nightmare scenario where Democrats in Congress are free to enact bad legislation with no restraint.

A couple of months ago I came to the realization that no Republican can win the White House next year. It doesn’t matter who the party nominates; the deck is stacked so heavily against it that a Democratic victory is virtually inevitable. The way I see it, the Republicans won the last two elections by the skin of their teeth against lousy candidates who ran dreadful campaigns. Next year, without the advantage of incumbency, with severe voter fatigue, an unpopular war and other factors against them, the Republicans were going to have an uphill struggle even if they had a great candidate and a unified party, neither of which are likely. On the other hand, the Democrats only have to run a half-competent campaign. With perpetual loser Bob Shrum no longer running the Democratic campaign, I think this is likely.

Having come to this realization, it became necessary to judge the Democratic field to determine which candidate would be the least bad from my point of view. I concluded that Hillary Clinton was less objectionable than the others. She appeared to be a clone of her husband on economic policy–which is good as far as I am concerned–and a realist on foreign policy. Given the choices facing us, I concluded that conservatives ought to consider supporting Hillary in order to ensure that a more liberal candidate such as Barack Obama or John Edwards didn’t become our next president.

For daring to view Hillary as anything other than the Devil incarnate, I was lambasted by conservative columnists and bloggers. Pat Toomey of the Club for Growth said I was crazy. So I found it very interesting that Bill Kristol appears to be coming around to my point of view. In this morning’s Washington Post, he is quoted as saying, "Obama is becoming the antiwar candidate and Hillary Clinton is becoming the responsible Democrat who could become commander in chief in a post-9/11 world."

Now, I think Bill is completely wrong about the war–I’d pull out of Iraq today if it were possible–but he’s a pretty smart political handicapper. So if he’s saying nice things about Hillary it is because he has come to the same conclusion I have about the inevitability of a Democratic victory. Rich Lowry and Ross Douthat appear to have made similar calculations. I predict that when the time comes and Hillary becomes the Democratic nominee, which I expect, she will be endorsed by a fairly substantial number of prominent Republicans.

Note: Just today, Rich Lowry praises Hillary for refusing to demonize lobbyists the way John McCain does.

There’s not much reason to believe she’d be much less authoritarian in the White House than Bush and Cheney. Steve Chapman makes the libertarian non-interventionist case against another president Clinton:

When she ran for the Senate in 2000, she mocked Republicans (such as Caspar Weinberger and Colin Powell) who think "we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time." On the contrary, she said, we "should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one."

As Michael Crowley of The New Republic has noted, she had another reason for supporting Bush on Iraq. "I’m a strong believer in executive authority," she said in 2003. "I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority."

There you have it. A Hillary Clinton presidency promises to unite Madeleine Albright’s zeal for using bombs in pursuit of liberal ideals with Dick Cheney’s vision of the president as emperor. Won’t that be fun?

A reader writes:

Count me as another Republican who is starting to see her as an appealing candidate. I realize looking at the polls that Republicans that favor her are a rare breed, but I have to imagine that, if someone like ME can come around, anyone can.

I’m not entirely sure what has done it for me. I have a hard time really putting my finger on it, but I’ve grown increasingly comfortable with the concept of an HRC administration so much so that I’m actually looking forward to it as a possibility.

And it’s not just the absence of appealing Republican candidates, though that is a large part of it.

In part, it may be that after 6 years of defending to myself and others Bush’s record, I’ve realized that it’s easier to attack than defend a president and that some of my criticisms of Bill Clinton were unfair. He simply was not as liberal as I once believed him to be.

Related to that point, it doesn’t hurt that some of my more liberal friends don’t trust her. I like her for exactly the reason they don’t:  We all have a good feeling that she has learned Dick Morris’s lessons of triangulation well.

I’ve also been impressed with her during the debates. She does seem presidential to me.

Another dissents:

Hang on now. Your conservative reader is basically saying "Hillary’s so uber-cynical that she won’t do anything dumb." One, they might be right. Two, hell of an endorsement there, isn’t it? I’m inspired.

Fact is this:  Hillary, whether conservatives know it or not, is the safest, most comfortable choice for them (and everyone else). She’s familiar, experienced, etc. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what we need now. After the Bush-Clinton years., "comfortable" is not enough.

That’s the question. Do we need to manage the current mess or try and transform it? The former is a rationale for the Clinton candidacy; the latter is the rationale for Obama’s. Alas, no Republican so far appears capable of doing either.

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)