Mediaboss Marketing

Every leading contender to take over the Democratic National Committee believes Hillary Clinton focused too much on attacking Donald Trump at the expense of articulating an affirmative case for holding the White House. During their final showdown before the chairman's election in Atlanta on Feb. 25, there was consensus that the party's problems derive mainly from subpar organization and communication - not anything fundamental.

"We forgot to talk to people," said Tom Perez, who was secretary of labor until last month and a finalist to be Clinton's running-mate last summer. "I'm a big believer in data analytics, but data analytics cannot supplant good old fashioned door knocking. . . . We didn't communicate our values to people. When Donald Trump says, 'I'm going to bring the coal jobs back,' we know that's a lie. But people understand that he feels their pain. And our response was: 'Vote for us because he's crazy.' I'll stipulate to that, but that's not a message."

Many Democratic leaders remain in a state of denial about the lessons of the election. They have only been in the wilderness for a few weeks now, and Clinton won the popular vote. The mass protests of the past four weekends and Trump's sagging popularity have added to their overconfidence that they'll easily win again in 2020.

It was striking during a two-hour forum in Baltimore that not one of the 10 candidates for chair suggested the party should moderate in response to last year's losses. Indeed, there was no substantive discussion about policy at all during the Saturday evening event. It was taken as a given that all the aspirants are committed liberals. This is a stark contrast to the ideological debates that enveloped the party following similar setbacks in 2004, 1988 or 1972. It reflects the degree to which the Bernie Sanders wing is ascendant, and Blue Dogs have left the party.

Perez is the clear frontrunner, but he still does not have the votes locked up. With backing from key figures in Barack Obama's orbit (Joe Biden) and the Clinton machine (Terry McAuliffe), he is the establishment favorite. But his progressive bona fides are beyond question, from his tenure as a Montgomery County councilman to helming the Justice Department's civil rights division. That makes it hard for Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who won an early endorsement from Sanders and Chuck Schumer, to get too far to Perez's left. That is part of the explanation for why the chair's race lacks much ideological tension.

Pete Buttigieg, the 34-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has tried to position himself as a consensus candidate who is not part of the Clinton or Sanders wing. Because the winner must get support from a majority of the 447 eligible voters, the election may go into two, three or even four rounds.

Buttigieg's goal is to be the second choice for as many Perez and Ellison supporters as possible. But his diagnosis of what went wrong in 2016 sounds a lot like Perez's. "We spent so much time talking about the politicians, like that's what really matters," he said. "I was guilty of it. I had a button when we were campaigning for Hillary . . . that said 'I'm with her.' It was all about her. Then when we realized who the opponent was going to be, it was all about him. We said, 'I'm against him because he is terrible.' He is terrible. But the people at home were saying, 'Who is talking to me? Who is talking about me?' Everything we talk about has to be explained in terms of how it directly touches people's actual lives."

Ray Buckley, the longtime chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party,likened the DNC to a car that's broken down on the side of the road but really only needs a tune-up. He said he'd reallocate money from television advertising toward field organizing. "We need someone who can lift up the hood and fix the damn car," he said.

"While many of you know that I'm openly gay, many of you don't know . . . that I come from the lowest of the white working class," he added later. "We ran hundreds of millions of dollars of commercials telling the voters that, 'Oh, our opponent if offensive.' When you're worried about your damn paycheck, about your job, about where you're going to live and if your kids are going to go to school, you don't really give a crap if the president is insulting. The reality is we didn't have a positive message for anyone I'm related to. We didn't offer a message to my neighbors. We didn't offer a message to the people in Indiana or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Kentucky."

"The Clinton campaign treated this organization with disrespect," said Jehmu Greene, another long-shot candidate for chair and a regular liberal commentator on Fox News.

Ironically, every person who complained about how the party was too focused on attacking Trump in 2016 also tried to out-do the other candidates in promising to go after the new president. Ellison called Trump "the most misogynistic person to ever become president." Perez called him "the most dangerous and destructive person to ever hold the presidency." Buttigieg described the new commander-in-chief as "a chicken-hawk."

Because rural, red states have relatively outsized influence in the DNC voting process, all the candidates for chair are talking a great deal about re-embracing what Howard Dean called the 50 state strategy. "We got into this mess because we didn't win about a thousand elections," said Ellison. "I gave five grand to the Louisiana state party. I've been out to Nebraska. . . . You are where the votes are."

Perez called for more intensive candidate training and the creation of a Center for Best Practices: "So that we can go and say, 'Hey, Alaska, you flipped your House Democrat. How did you do it? Hey Kansas, you won 14 seats in the state House. How did you do it?' The answer is: Without any help from the DNC! We've got to change that."

None of the candidates for chair, however, wanted to argue that national Democrats have lurched too far to the left to consistently compete in these rural places. The closest anyone came was when Jaime Harrison, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, complained that the Democratic National Committee has increasingly become the Democratic Presidential Committee. "All we've focused on was the presidency and nothing else. We cannot leave any Democrat or Democratic Party behind," he said. "I got into a Twitter fight yesterday. Somebody said, 'Do you support (Joe) Manchin Democrats? I said, I support anybody who is a Democrat! . . . I support anyone who will give the gavel back to Nancy Pelosi."

Go here to see the original:
DNC leaders say Hillary Clinton lost because she talked too much about Trump - Chicago Tribune

Published February 13, 2017

By Michael Goodwin, The New York Post

Thank you, Hillary Clinton. Thank you for reminding America about the importance of Donald Trumps victory and of the awful consequences if you had won.

Clinton sent out a taunting tweet of 3-0 after the three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously slapped a halt on Trumps executive order on immigrants and refugees.

Her support for the ruling isnt surprising Clinton said she was for open borders at one point but the gutter sniping was telling. The activist judges who based their ruling on their liberal politics instead of the Constitution are the same kind she would appoint to the Supreme Court and all other federal courts if she were in the Oval Office.

Thankfully, she wont get the chance, a fact reinforced by Trump aide Kellyanne Conway. She fired back at Clinton with her version of 3-0, tweeting PA, WI, MI, a reference to three formerly blue states, worth 46 electoral votes, that Trump flipped to his column. Touch!

Read the original post:
Goodwin: Hillary Clinton Reminds Us Why We're Lucky She Lost the Election - Fox News

Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta criticized the FBI on Wednesday for how it responded to theDemocratic National Committees hacked emails, which U.S. intelligence agencies say Russia stole and gave to WikiLeaks in order to tip the election to President Donald Trump.

I think to this day its inexplicable that they were so casual about the investigation of the Russian penetration of the DNC emails, Podesta said during a cybersecurity panel at the NewCo Shift Forum in San Francisco, according to TechCrunch.Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias and CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry, whose firm investigated the DNC hacks, were also on the panel.

They didnt even bother to send an agent to the DNC, Podesta said. They left a couple of messages at the IT help desk saying, You might want to be careful.

There are at least forces within the FBI that wanted her to lose, he added.

Some FBI employees were reportedly incensed when Director James Comey decided not to recommend an indictment over the former secretary of states private email server. A current agent told The Guardian in November that the agency was Trumpland.

The FBI didnt notify the DNC in person about the hack until months after it had occurred, according to a deeply reported story fromThe New York Timeslast year. Agents contacted a low-level staffer at the DNCs IT desk who initially believed the phone call was a prank, according to the Times.

Hackers gained access to Podestas email account via a phishing scheme that was precipitated due to an aides unfortunate typo, the Times reports.The aide had meant to warn Podesta about theillegitimate email but instead wrote legitimate email.

Podesta disputed the notion that he fell victim to a phishing scheme in an interview with TechCrunch following the panel, however.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda, he said. I dont think it was an issue of what the strength of my password was. Although I now have stronger passwords.

Podesta also said the American public deserved to know more about Russias meddling in the election, and its motivation for doing so.

It wasnt just that they didnt like Hillary Clintons pantsuit, it was that Putin had a vendetta about her and her tenure as secretary of state, he told TechCrunch. But mostly it was about Trump having adopted positions that were extraordinarily friendly to Putin and strongly at odds with a bipartisan collection of national security officials and people overseas.

Read the original here:
John Podesta Says 'Forces Within The FBI' Wanted Hillary Clinton To Lose - Huffington Post

By Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images.

Hillary Clintons whereabouts and proclivities, down to her hikes in the woods and dinners at Raos, have been a source of profound interest since her shocking electoral college loss in last Novembers presidential election. (Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million ballots.) Would she attend Donald Trumps inauguration? Would she inexplicably run for mayor of New York? Was Chelsea moving in next door in order to start her own national political career from the family seat in Westchester County? Or would Clinton be jostling for influence over the future of the Democratic Party? And what exactly did it augur when Clinton tweeted "3-0" after a three-judge panel shot down Trumps travel ban?

In an essay for Politico, published over the weekend, Matt Latimer, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, persuasively articulates the case that Clintons political career may not be definitely over, as most presume. Latimer notes that Clintons decision not to re-open the Clinton Foundation, an organization rife with potential conflicts of interest, suggests that the former Senator and Secretary of State has not ruled out a run. He also points out that Clintons latest book deal would afford her the chance to travel around the country in an unofficial capacity, perhaps setting off a sort of trial balloon. (Her initial run for the Senate was presupposed by a famous listening tour around New York State.) Clinton has also been pretty active on social media, of course.

Perhaps most notably, Latimer, political wordsmith, claims that Clinton's concession speech sounded far from defeatist. I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but some day, someone will, she said, and hopefully sooner than we might think right now. Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season, we shall reap if we do not lose heart. She concluded by reminding her supporters that the work was far from over: So my friends, let us have faith in each other, let us not grow weary, let us not lose heart, for there are more seasons to come. And there is more work to do.

Latimer's argument may seem to cherry-pick particular details. Clinton wasn't the recipient of favors from James Comey and Vladimir Putin, but her loss can also be ascribed to her wide-spread unpopularity and personal weaknesses as a candidate. But as the Democratic party stumbles to recover from not only Trumps surprise victory, but its calamitous results in the House and Senate, a leadership void undeniably exists. As of this writing, the potential Democratic field for 2020 appears both wide open and largely uninspiring. And while Clinton would be 73 in 2020, Trump himself would be 74. Those who have watched the Clintons through four decades of public life are weary of ever counting them, or their ambition, out. As Latimer notes, politicians from Mitt Romney to Al Gore have struggled with resisting the urge to run one more time.

But the chance of a third defeat may be too cruel to bear for Clinton. In time, one suspects, she will re-emerge as a grand ambassador of her partya person who did not have to break the glass ceiling, herself, but instead ensured that others could.

This post has been updated.

Read the original here:
Is Hillary Clinton Eyeing a 2020 Run? - Vanity Fair

Thank you, Hillary Clinton. Thank you for reminding America about the importance of Donald Trumps victory and of the awful consequences if you had won.

Clinton sent out a taunting tweet of 3-0 after the three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously slapped a halt on Trumps executive order on immigrants and refugees.

Her support for the ruling isnt surprising Clinton said she was for open borders at one point but the gutter sniping was telling. The activist judges who based their ruling on their liberal politics instead of the Constitution are the same kind she would appoint to the Supreme Court and all other federal courts if she were in the Oval Office.

Thankfully, she wont get the chance, a fact reinforced by Trump aide Kellyanne Conway. She fired back at Clinton with her version of 3-0, tweeting PA, WI, MI, a reference to three formerly blue states, worth 46 electoral votes, that Trump flipped to his column. Touch!

And so it went in Week 3 of the Trump era, with Clintons taunt, the court ruling, nonstop demonstrations and congressional hijinks combining to illustrate why Trumps election was crucial. It was a necessary course correction and a dramatic rejection of an arrogant government that both overreaches and underperforms.

Put another way, the hysterical, hateful reaction in many quarters to everything Trump says and does is absolute proof that the ruling elite deserved a comeuppance. The establishment was drunk on power, political and cultural, and never yielded an inch voluntarily or had the decency to admit error. Its rage reflects its sense of entitlement.

I felt that rage when I got an e-mailed death threat serious enough to turn over to the police. An NYPD officer taking my complaint quickly understood the point: Oh, you must be pro-Trump, she said. I am, too, and I get into arguments all the time. At least we got a laugh out of it.

There was no humor for South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who felt the rage in the form of racist hate mail. A black conservative and Republican, Scott read aloud on the Senate floor messages he received after supporting Jeff Sessions for attorney general.

He was called a house Negro, a disgrace to the black race and an Uncle Tom, among other vile epithets that included the N-word, Scott said. He added, I just wish that my friends who call themselves liberals would want tolerance for all Americans, including conservative Americans.

Trumps education secretary, Betsy DeVos, also got a taste of liberal hate when Black Lives Matter protesters and teachers-union members blocked her entry into a Washington, DC, public school.

This unhinged rage is the new America only its not new. It was hiding in plain sight, hinted at by the contempt that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, tenured radicals, college snowflakes and the Democratic media openly held for those who dont share their worldview.

Trumps victory ripped open the vein, but it would have erupted at any Republican president. Modern liberals contempt for others is essential to their sense of superiority and justifies violence in the streets, threats and simple rudeness. Contempt for others lets mayors think they can disobey immigration laws and judges think there is no law but theirs.

Still, there are reasons why the Court of Appeals ruling could be a blessing in disguise for Trump. Here are the two biggest.

First, the jubilation among Democrats and their media handmaidens reveals how their hatred for Trump and his supporters overshadows any concern for national security. The ruling that the government showed no evidence that the travel ban would prevent terrorism is preposterous and should alarm every American.

Any such evidence would be classified and certainly wouldnt be produced in a hasty, one-hour hearing, which the judges conducted over the telephone. The Constitution and laws give the president wide authority to decide whether the entry of any class of alien would harm the United States.

Effectively claiming that authority for itself, the court grossly oversteps and obliterates the separation of powers. It also opens itself to public fury if the ruling opens the door to terrorists.

The second benefit is that the ruling offers Trump a sobering lesson about the difficult road ahead. Nothing can be taken for granted and every inch of progress will require intense preparation and a willingness to battle on multiple fronts.

The executive order, though sensible in its goals, was especially vulnerable because it was rushed before Trumps team was in place. The result was confusion about whether it applied to green-card holders and dual citizens, and that ruined implementation at airports here and abroad.

Those are rookie mistakes, driven in part by Democrats delaying tactics in confirming Attorney General Sessions and others. Yet that reality only underscores how deep the hostility is and how little room there is for error. The lynch mob can succeed only if the White House provides the rope.

As a candidate and president, Trump has endured slings and arrows unprecedented in modern times. The onslaught is also harming America, but the madness will be bearable if he finishes the revolution he started.

The rule of holes applies to Mayor de Blasio: When youre in one, drop the shovel.

Not Mayor Putz. He keeps digging.

Up to his eyeballs in criminal investigations over slush funds and favors to big donors, de Blasio is planning to raise even more money to pay his defense lawyers.

Get this his law firm is also a lobbyist that reportedly represents dozens of real-estate developers with business before City Hall.

The mayor says the firm, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, has been racking up costs for months but has not been paid a cent. That means he is deep in debt to a law-firm lobbyist.

There are other potential conflicts, too. Is the mayor getting a favorable fee rate? Why would anyone not a personal friend pay his legal bills?

Remember, too, that some fund-raising at the heart of the criminal probes allegedly took place in Kramer Levins office.

The mayor keeps digging just as he is about to meet with federal prosecutors. He calls the meeting voluntary, but thats probably only technically true.

The meeting could be a last chance to stave off criminal charges. Which is why it makes zero sense for him to add to the smell of corruption with his sketchy legal-bill scheme. Then again, he is who he is.

Responding to no demand, Ohio Gov. John Kasich has written a book. Its called Two Paths and, judging from the blurb, hes still running for president.

Ill wait for the movie.

Headline: Millions rally in Tehran, chant Death to America.

Translation: Bring back Barack Obama. He gave us everything we wanted.

Visit link:
Clinton reminds us why we're lucky she lost the election - New York Post