Just below that one four more .. The Pinocchio Test The Sanders campaign can certainly contrast the candidates’ votes on offshore drilling. But it cannot insinuate that Clinton’s vote in 2006 had anything to do with the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Indeed, as phrased, the Sanders campaign statement would make any reasonable person believe that if it weren’t for the bill that Clinton supported, BP would not have obtained a permit. But there is no cause-and-effect that can be found. We wavered between Three and Four Pinocchios. Given this was made in a prepared statement — and because of the Sanders campaign’s unwillingness to admit error — we tipped toward Four Pinocchios. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/14/did-hillary-clinton-cast-a-vote-that-led-to-the-bp-tragedy-in-the-gulf-of-mexico/
Down a bit farther another four .. The Pinocchio Test Plainly put, Sanders has not released his full federal tax return. The little he has released was the Form 1040 in 2014, which is a summary of his tax filing that gives a snapshot of his finances — not what is considered a full tax return. The Sanders campaign confirmed to The Washington Post that it has not released other tax returns prior to 2014, which is a sharp contrast to Clinton’s voluminous release of her complete tax returns.
Tapper correctly questioned Sanders, asking why “nobody has seen them [federal tax returns] at all.” Yet Sanders interrupted Tapper to reject the notion, insisting: “That is not true. Of course, we have released them in the past.” But this answer is nothing remotely close to the little federal tax records he has released to the public.
Sanders says there is nothing in his 2015 tax return that is different from what the public has “seen for the last many years.” This indicates he may have been referring to the information filed in his financial disclosures. But that’s not the same as a full federal tax return — and as a longtime member of Congress, Sanders should know that. Sanders is not required to release his tax filings, and he clearly decided to keep them confidential. That’s his choice. But it doesn’t excuse him from misleading the public to believe otherwise with this false claim. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/05/bernie-sanderss-false-claim-that-he-has-released-his-full-federal-tax-returns/
Three more - The Pinocchio Test Sanders is putting words in Clinton’s mouth. She never said “quote unquote” that he was not qualified to be president. In fact, she diplomatically went out of her way to avoid saying that, without at the same time saying he was qualified. The Washington Post article appropriately noted that she raised questions about his qualifications, but certainly never said or suggested she said Sanders was unqualified. Sanders would have been on safer ground if he had said Clinton is raising questions about his qualifications and now he would like to raise questions about her qualifications. But he can’t slam her for words she did not say. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/07/sanderss-incorrect-claim-that-clinton-called-him-not-qualified-for-the-presidency/
Three more for Bernie .. The Pinocchio Test Sanders has not demonstrated that the Panama free-trade agreement encouraged tax avoidance schemes in Panama. The trade deal did not cover tax issues and the section cited by his staff merely updated an existing investment agreement with Panama. The side agreements on taxes and bearer shares actually appear to have had an impact, even if Panama’s overall performance on stemming shady money continues to be poor.
We understand that Sanders is highly critical of free-trade agreements, but in this instance, his claims that provisions in the Panama deal fostered tax avoidance fall short. Perhaps he could make a case that the deal bolstered up an economy built in part on fraud, but that’s not the same thing as saying the deal itself promoted offshore accounts. In fact, U.S. officials tried to use the FTA as leverage to improve access to tax information about U.S. citizens using offshore accounts in Panama. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/09/sanderss-claim-that-panama-free-trade-deal-enabled-more-offshore-tax-scams/
The Brooklyn Democratic debate transcript, annotated
By Team Fix April 14, 2016
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) met Thursday night for their fifth one-on-one presidential debate, facing off in Brooklyn.
The full transcript is posted below, with annotations [viewable at the source].
BLITZER: Secretary Clinton and Senator Sanders, you can now move to your lecterns while I explain a few ground rules. As moderator, I'll guide the discussion, asking questions and follow-ups. You'll also get questions from Dana Bash and Errol Louis. You'll each have one minute and 15 seconds to answer questions, 30 seconds for follow- ups. Timing lights will signal when your time is up. Both candidates have agreed to these rules now. Opening statements, you'll each have two minutes.
Let's begin with Senator Sanders.
(APPLAUSE)
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (D-VT), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Wolf, thank you very much. CNN, thank you very much. Secretary Clinton, thank you very much.
When we began this campaign almost a year ago, we started off at 3 percent in the polls. We were about 70 points behind Secretary Clinton. In the last couple of weeks, there were two polls out there that had us ahead.
(APPLAUSE)
Of the last nine caucuses and primaries, we have won eight of them, many of them by landslide victories.
(APPLAUSE)
Over the last year, we have received almost 7 million individual campaign contributions, averaging -- guess what -- $27 apiece, more individual campaign contributions than any candidate in American history at this point in a campaign.
The reason that our campaign has done so well is because we're doing something very radical: We're telling the American people the truth. And the truth is that this country is not going to move forward in a significant way for working people unless we overturn this disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision...
(APPLAUSE)
... and unless we have real campaign reform so that billionaires and super PACs cannot buy elections.
(APPLAUSE)
This campaign is also determined to end a rigged economy where the rich get richer and everybody else get poorer, and create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.
Thank you.
BLITZER: Secretary Clinton?
HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY), FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, first of all, it's great to be here in New York, and I am delighted to...
(APPLAUSE)
... have this chance to discuss the issues that are important to our future. I was so honored to serve as a senator from New York for eight years...
(APPLAUSE)
... and to work to provide opportunity for all of our citizens to make it possible that we could knock down the barriers that stand in the way of people getting ahead and staying ahead.
And during those eight years, we faced some difficult challenges together. We faced 9/11. We worked hard to rebuild New York. I was particularly concerned about our first responders and others who'd been affected in their health by what they had experienced. We worked hard to bring jobs from Buffalo to Albany and all parts of New York to give more hard-working people a chance to really make the most out of their own talents.
And we worked hard to really keep New York values at the center of who we are and what we do together.
(APPLAUSE)
And that is -- that is exactly what I want to do as your president. We will celebrate our diversity. We will work together, bringing us back to being united, setting some big, bold, progressive goals for America. That's what I'm offering in this campaign, to build on the work, to build on the values that we share here in New York, to take those to Washington, and to knock down those barriers that in any way hold back not only individual Americans, bur our country from reaching our full potential. That is what my campaign is about.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary.
We are going to deal with many of the issues both of you just raised. I want to begin with a question that goes right to the heart of which one of you should be the Democratic presidential nominee.
Senator Sanders, in the last week, you've raised questions about Secretary Clinton's qualifications to be president. You said that something is clearly lacking in terms of her judgment and you accused her of having a credibility gap.
So let me ask you, do you believe that Secretary Clinton has the judgment to be president?
SANDERS: Well, I've known Secretary Clinton, how long, 25 years?
We worked together in the Senate. And I said that in response to the kind of attacks we were getting from the Clinton, uh, campaign. "Washington Post" headline says "Clinton Campaign says Sanders is Unqualified" and that's what the surrogates were saying.
Does Secretary Clinton have the experience and the intelligence to be a president?
Of course she does.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: But I do question...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: -- but I do question her judgment. I question a judgment which voted for the war in Iraq...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: -- the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of this country, voted for virtually every disastrous trade agreement which cost us millions of decent-paying jobs. And I question her judgment about running super PACs which are collecting tens of millions of dollars from special interests, including $15 million from Wall Street.
I don't believe that that is...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: -- the kind of judgment we need to be the kind of president we need.
BLITZER: Secretary Clinton?
CLINTON: Well, it is true that now that the spotlight is pretty bright here in New York, some things have been said and Senator Sanders did call me unqualified. I've been called a lot of things in my life. That was a first.
(LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: And then he did say that...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- he had to question my judgment. Well, the people of New York voted for me twice to be their senator from New York and...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- and...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- and President Obama trusted my judgment enough to ask me to be secretary of State for the United States.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: So, look, we have disagreements on policy. There's no doubt about it. But if you go and read, which I hope all of you will before Tuesday, Senator Sanders' long interview with the "New York Daily News," talk about judgment and talk about the kinds of problems he had answering questions about even his core issue, breaking up the banks.
When asked, he could not explain how...
(SANDERS LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: -- that would be done and...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- when asked...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- when asked about a number of foreign policy issues, he could not answer about Afghanistan, about Israel, about counterterrorism, except to say if he'd had some paper in front of him, maybe he could.
I think you need to have the judgment on day one to be both president and commander-in-chief.
BLITZER: Senator...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: And let's talk about judgment.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes!
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: And let us talk about the worst foreign policy blunder in the modern history of this country...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: I led the opposition to that war. Secretary Clinton voted for that. Well, let's talk about judgment. Let's talk about super PACs and 501(c)(4)s, money which is completely undisclosed.
Where does the money come from?
Do we really feel confident about a candidate saying that she's going to bring change in America when she is so dependent on big money interests?
I don't think so.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: Well, let me...
SANDERS: We have...
CLINTON: -- let me just say...
SANDERS: -- Hold up. Now hold up, hold, hold, hold...
CLINTON: -- let me -- let me say...
BLITZER: Madam Secretary, let him finish.
CLINTON: OK.
SANDERS: Thirdly, we have got to understand that in America, we should be thinking big, not small.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Thank you.
SANDERS: We need to join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all people. So I...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: -- my view, God help you.
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator.
Secretary?
CLINTON: Well, make -- make no mistake about it, this is not just an attack on me, it's an attack on President Obama. President Obama...
(BOOS)
CLINTON: You know, let me tell you why. You may not like the answer, but I'll tell you why. President Obama had a super PAC when he ran. President Obama took tens of millions of dollars from contributors. And President Obama was not at all influenced when he made the decision to pass and sign Dodd-Frank, the toughest regulations...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- on Wall Street in many a year.
CLINTON: So this is -- this is a phony -- this is a phony attack that is designed to raise questions when there is no evidence or support, to undergird the continuation that he is putting forward in these attacks.
BLITZER: Thank, Secretary. We're going to continue on this, but I want Dana Bash to continue with the questioning.
BASH: Secretary Clint, the government announced yesterday that five of the biggest banks on Wall Street have failed to develop plans to dismantle themselves in the event of another financial crisis. This is the second time in two years those banks neglected to come up with credible plans. So, as president, would you call on regulators to start the process of breaking up these banks? Something that the law not only allows, but actually explicitly encourages?
CLINTON: Absolutely. You know, this is what I've saying for the past year. No bank is too big to fail, no executive too powerful to jail.
I have been talking about what we should be doing under Dodd- Frank. I'm glad that Senator Sanders is now joining in talking about Dodd-Frank, because Dodd-Frank sets forth the approach that needs to be taken. I believe, and I will appoint regulators who are tough enough and ready enough to break up any bank that fails the test under Dodd-Frank.
There are two sections there. If they fail either one, that they're a systemic risk, a grave risk to our economy, or if they fail the other, that their living wills, which is what you're referring to, are inadequate.
Let's look at what is at stake here. We can never let Wall Street wreck Main street again. I spoke out against Wall Street when I was a Senator from New York. I have been standing up and saying continuously we have the law. We've got to execute under it. So, you're right. I will move immediately to break up any financial institution, but I go further because I want the law to extend to those that are part of the shadow banking industry. The big insurance companies, the hedge funds, something that I have been arguing for now a long time...
BASH: ... Thank you, Secretary. Senator Sanders, you were recently asked what you would replace the big Wall Street banks with if you could break them up. You said, quote, "That's their decision."
Why would you trust the banks to restructure themselves?
SANDERS: First, Dana...
BASH: when you said the whole business model was fraudulent?
SANDERS: That's right. So, let's start off with the basic premise. A few days ago Goldman Sachs formally reached a settlement with the United States government for $5 billion dollars. What Goldman Sachs acknowledged was, essentially, that they were selling fraudulent packages of subprime mortgage loans.
Goldman Sachs was not the only bank, other banks, of course, did the same. Now, I don't need Dodd-Frank now to tell me that we have got to break up these banks, A, because they're based on fraudulent principles, and B, because when you have six financial institutions that have assets equivalent to 58% of the GDP of this country, they are just too big, too much concentration of wealth and power.
BASH: But, Senator...
SANDERS: The point is we have got to break them up so that they do not pose a systemic risk and so that we have a vibrant economy with a competitive financial system.
BASH: But Senator, you didn't answer the specific question which is not just about breaking up the banks, but why allow the banks to do it themselves?
SANDERS: Because I'm not sure that the government should say is you are too big to fail. You've got to be a certain size. And, then the banks themselves can figure out what they want to sell off. I don't know that it's appropriate that the Department of Treasury to be making those decisions. What we need is to make sure that they are safe.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: Dana, you know -- I love being in Brooklyn. This is great.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
CLINTON: Dana, let me add here that there are two ways to at this under Dodd-Frank, which is after all the law we passed under President Obama, and I'm proud that Barney Frank, one of the authors, has endorsed me because what I have said continuously is, yes, sometimes the government may have to order certain actions. Sometime the government can permit the institution themselves to take those actions. That has to be the judgement of the regulators.
But, there's another element to this. I believe strongly that executives of any of these organizations should be financially penalized if there is a settlement.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: They should have to pay up through compensation or bonuses because we have to go after not just the big giant institution, we have got to go after the people who are making the decisions in the institutions.
BASH: Thank you, Madam Secretary.
CLINTON: And hold them accountable as well.
(APPLAUSE)
BASH: Senator Sanders, you have consistently criticized Secretary Clinton for accepting money from Wall Street. Can you name one decision that she made as senator that shows that he favored banks because of the money she received?
SANDERS: Sure. Sure. The obvious decision is when the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior of wall street brought this country into the worst economic downturn since the Great Recession -- the Great Depression of the '30s, when millions of people lost their jobs, and their homes, and their life savings, the obvious response to that is that you've got a bunch of fraudulent operators and that they have got to be broken up.
That was my view way back, and I introduced legislation to do that. Now, Secretary Clinton was busy giving speeches to Goldman Sachs for $225,000 a speech.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: So the problem response -- the proper response in my view is we should break them up. And that's what my legislation does.
CLINTON: Well, as you can tell, Dana, he cannot come up with any example, because there is no example.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: It is important -- it's always important. It may be inconvenient, but it's always important to get the facts straight. I stood up against the behaviors of the banks when I was a senator.
I called them out on their mortgage behavior. I also was very willing to speak out against some of the special privileges they had under the tax code. When I went to the secretary of state office, the president -- President Obama led the effort to pass the Dodd-Frank bill.
That is the law. Now, this is our ninth debate. In the prior eight debates, I have said, we have a law. You don't just say, we're upset about this. I'm upset about it. You don't just say, go break them up. You have a law, because we are a nation of laws.
BASH: Thank you, Madam Secretary.
CLINTON: So I support Dodd-Frank, but I have consistently said that's not enough. We've got to include the shadow banking sector.
BASH: Thank you. Senator Sanders.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: Secretary Clinton called them out. Oh my goodness, they must have been really crushed by this. And was that before or after you received huge sums of money by giving speaking engagements behind closed doors? So they must have been very, very upset by what you did.
Look, here is the difference and here is the clear difference. These banks, in my view, have too much power. They have shown themselves to be fraudulent organizations endangering the well-being of our economy.
If elected president, I will break them up. We have got legislation to do that, end of discussion.
(APPLAUSE)
BASH: Secretary Clinton, if I may, Senator Sanders keeping bringing up the speeches that you gave to Goldman Sachs. So I'd like to ask you, so you've said that you don't want to release the transcripts, until everybody does it, but if there's nothing in those speeches that you think would change voters' minds, why not just release the transcripts and put this whole issue to bed?
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: You know, first of all -- first of all, there isn't an issue. When I was in public service serving as the senator from New York, I did stand up to the banks. I did make it clear that their behavior would not be excused.
I'm the only one on this stage who did not vote to deregulate swaps and derivatives, as Senator Sanders did, which led to a lot of the problems that we had with Lehman Brothers.
Now, if you're going to look at the problems that actually caused the Great Recession, you've got to look at the whole picture. It was a giant insurance company, AIG. It was an investment bank, Lehman Brothers. It was mortgage companies like Countrywide.
I'm not saying that Senator Sanders did something untoward when he voted to deregulate swaps and derivatives...
BASH: Madam Secretary...
CLINTON: ... but the fact is he did.
CLINTON: And that contributed to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and started the cascade...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: Hold it.
(CROSSTALK)
SANDERS: Hold it. Hold it.
BASH: Senator Sanders, one second, please. Secretary Clinton, the question was about the transcripts of the speeches to Goldman Sachs.
(APPLAUSE)
Why not release them?
CLINTON: I have said, look, there are certain -- there are certain expectations when you run for president. This is a new one. And I've said, if everybody agrees to do it -- because there are speeches for money on the other side. I know that.
But I will tell you this, there is -- there is a long-standing expectation that everybody running release their tax returns, and you can go -- you can go to my website and see eight years of tax returns. And I've released 30 years of tax returns. And I think every candidate, including Senator Sanders and Donald Trump, should do the same.
(APPLAUSE)
BASH: Secretary Clinton, we're going to get to the tax returns later, but just to put a button on this, you're running now for the Democratic nomination.
CLINTON: Right.
BASH: And it is your Democratic opponent and many Democratic voters who want to see those transcripts. It's not about the Republicans...
(CROSSTALK)
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: You know, let's set the same standard for everybody. When everybody does it, OK, I will do it, but let's set and expect the same standard on tax returns. Everybody does it, and then we move forward.
BLITZER: Thank you.
SANDERS: Well, let me respond. Secretary Clinton, you just heard her, everybody else does it, she'll do it. I will do it.
(APPLAUSE)
I am going to release all of the transcripts of the speeches that I gave on Wall Street behind closed doors, not for $225,000, not for $2,000, not for two cents. There were no speeches.
(APPLAUSE)
And second of all, of course we will release our taxes. Jane does our taxes. We've been a little bit busy lately. You'll excuse us. But we will...
BLITZER: Senator...
SANDERS: We will get them out.
BLITZER: Senator...
CLINTON: Well, you know, there are a lot of copy machines around.
BLITZER: Senator, when are you -- when are you -- you've been asked for weeks and weeks to release your tax returns.
SANDERS: Well, I think we got one that's coming out tomorrow.
BLITZER: Which one?
SANDERS: Last year's.
BLITZER: 2014?
SANDERS: Yes.
BLITZER: What about 2013, all the other ones?
SANDERS: You'll get them, yes. Yeah, look, I don't want to get anybody very excited. They are very boring tax returns. No big money from speeches, no major investments. Unfortunately -- unfortunately, I remain one of the poorer members of the United States Senate. And that's what that will show.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: So, Senator, just to be clear, tomorrow you will release the 2014 tax returns from you and your family?
SANDERS: Yes.
BLITZER: And what about the earlier ones? What's the problem...
SANDERS: Yes.
BLITZER: What's taking so long? Because you just have to go to the filing cabinet, make a copy, and release them.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: Wolf, the answer is, you know, what we have always done in my family is, Jane does them. And she's been out on the campaign trail. We will get them out. We'll get them out very shortly. It's not a big deal.
BLITZER: Thank you. Senator, Senator, you've slammed companies like General Electric and Verizon for moving jobs outside of the United States. Yesterday, the CEO of Verizon called your views contemptable and said in your home state of Vermont Verizon has invested more than $16 million and pays millions of dollars a year to local businesses. He says you are, quote, "uninformed on this issue" and disconnected from reality. Given your obvious contempt for large American corporations, how would you as president of the United States be able to effectively promote American businesses around the world?
SANDERS: Well, for a start, I would tell the gentleman who's the CEO at Verizon to start negotiating with the Communication Workers of America.
(APPLAUSE)
And this is -- this is a perfect example, Wolf, of the kind of corporate greed which is destroying the middle class of this country. This gentleman makes $18 million a year in salary. That's his -- that's his compensation. This gentleman is now negotiating to take away health care benefits of Verizon workers, outsource call center jobs to the Philippines, and -- and trying to create a situation where workers will lose their jobs. He is not investing in the way he should in inner cities in America.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: All right. Senator, but the question was, the question was, given your contempt for large American corporations, as president, how would you be able to promote American business around the world?
SANDERS: First of all, the word contempt is not right. There are some great businesses who treat their workers and the environment with respect.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: Verizon happens not to be one of them.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: And what we need to do is to tell this guy Immelt, who's the head of General Electric, he doesn't like me, well, that's fine. He has outsourced hundreds of thousands of decent-paying jobs throughout the world...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: -- cut his workforce here substantially and in a given year, by the way, it turns out that both Verizon and General Electric, in a given year, pay nothing in federal income tax despite making billions in profits.
(BOOS)
BLITZER: But Senator, experts say that no matter the means to bring back these jobs to the United States, prices of goods for consumers in the United States would go up, which would disproportionately impact the poor and middle class.
So how do you bring back these jobs to the United States without affecting the cost of goods to America's middle class and poor?
SANDERS: Well, for a start, we're going to raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: And number two, while it is true we may end up paying a few cents more for a hamburger in McDonald's, at the end of the day, what this economy desperately needs is to rebuild our manufacturing sector with good-paying jobs.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: We cannot continue to sustain the loss of millions of decent-paying jobs that we have seen over the last 20, 30 years, based on trade agreements of which Secretary Clinton has voted for almost every one of those. That has got to change.
BLITZER: Thank you.
Secretary...
(CLINTON LAUGHTER)
BLITZER: -- Secretary Clinton?
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: Well, first of all, I do have a very comprehensive plan to create more jobs and I think that has to be at the center of our economic approach. And so I think it is important that we do more on manufacturing. I went to Syracuse and laid out a $10 billion plan that would, I believe, really jump-start advanced manufacturing.
I have seen the results of what can happen when we have the government cooperating with business. And that's exactly what I will do.
When I was Secretary of State, I helped to lead the way to increased exports of American goods around the world, which supports tens of thousands of jobs.
So I think you've got to go at this with a sense of how to accomplish the goal we are setting -- more good jobs with rising incomes for people everywhere from inner cities to rural areas to every distressed community in America. And that's exactly what my plan would bring about.
I think we have a pretty good record if we look at what happened...
BLITZER: Senator...
CLINTON: -- in the 1990s, we got 23 million new jobs and incomes went up for everybody.
BLITZER: Thank you.
CLINTON: Let's do that again in America.
BLITZER: Senator, how do you...
SANDERS: I'm going to respond...
BLITZER: I'll have you respond in a moment.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Stand by.
SANDERS: Well, look...
BLITZER: Secretary Clinton... (CROSSTALK)
BLITZER: You will respond in a moment, but I have to follow-up with Secretary Clinton.
You stood on the stage with Governor Cuomo in support of new legislation to raise New York's minimum wage to $15 an hour. But you do not support raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
As president...
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: -- if a Democratic Congress put a $15 minimum wage bill on your desk, would you sign it?
CLINTON: Well, of course I would. And I have supported...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- I have supported the fight for 15. I am proud to have the endorsement of most of the unions that have led the fight for 15. I was proud to stand on the stage with Governor Cuomo, with SEIU and others who have been leading this battle and I will work as hard as I can to raise the minimum wage. I always have. I supported that when I was in the Senate.
SANDERS: Well, look...
CLINTON: But what I have also said is that we've got to be smart about it, just the way Governor Cuomo was here in New York. If you look at it, we moved more quickly to $15 in New York City, more deliberately toward $12, $12.50 upstate then to $15. That is exactly my position. It's a model for the nation and that's what I will do as president.
BLITZER: Thank you.
CLINTON: Go as quickly as...
(CROSSTALK)
CLINTON: -- possible to get to $15.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: I am sure a lot of people are very surprised to learn that you supported raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: You know, wait a minute...
SANDERS: (INAUDIBLE).
CLINTON: -- wait a minute.
SANDERS: (INAUDIBLE).
CLINTON: -- wait, wait...
SANDERS: That's just not accurate. Well...
CLINTON: Come on, I have stood on the debate stage...
SANDERS: -- well and I...
CLINTON: -- with Senator Sanders eight...
(CROSSTALK)
CLINTON: -- times.
SANDERS: Excuse me.
CLINTON: I have said the...
SANDERS: Well...
CLINTON: Exact same thing.
BLITZER: Secretary, Senator, please.
CLINTON: If we can...
(CROSSTALK)
CLINTON: -- raise it to $15 in New York...
(CROSSTALK)
CLINTON: -- or Los Angeles or Seattle...
BLITZER: Secretary, the viewers...
CLINTON: -- let's do it.
BLITZER: If you're both screaming at each other, the viewers won't be able to hear either of you.
SANDERS: OK.
BLITZER: So please...
SANDERS: I will...
BLITZER: -- don't talk over each other.
SANDERS: I believe I was...
(CROSSTALK)
BLITZER: Go ahead.
SANDERS: -- responding.
All right? When this campaign began, I said that we got to end the starvation minimum wage of $7.25, raise it to $15. Secretary Clinton said let's raise it to $12. There's a difference. And, by the way, what has happened is history has outpaced Secretary Clinton, because all over this country, people are standing up and they're saying $12 is not good enough, we need $15 an hour.
CLINTON: OK.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Go ahead, Secretary. Secretary?
SANDERS: And suddenly...
BLITZER: Secretary, go ahead.
SANDERS: To suddenly...
CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you very much.
SANDERS: To suddenly announce now that you're for $15, I don't think is quite accurate.
BLITZER: All right. Secretary?
CLINTON: All right. I have said from the very beginning that I supported the fight for $15. I supported those on the front lines of the fight for -- it happens to be true. I also -- I supported the $15 effort in L.A. I supported in Seattle. I supported it for the fast food workers in New York.
The minimum wage at the national level right now is $7.25, right? We want to raise it higher than it ever has been, but we also have to recognize some states and some cities will go higher, and I support that. I have taken my cue from the Democrats in the Senate, led by Senator Patty Murray and others, like my good friend Kirsten Gillibrand, who has said we will set a national level of $12 and then urge any place that can go above it to go above it.
Going from $7.25 to $12 is a huge difference. Thirty-five million people will get a raise. One in four working mothers will get a raise. I want to get something done. And I think setting the goal to get to $12 is the way to go, encouraging others to get to $15. But, of course, if we have a Democratic Congress, we will go to $15.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Senator, go ahead.
SANDERS: Well, I think the secretary has confused a lot of people. I don't know how you're there for the fight for $15 when you say you want a $12-an-hour national minimum wage.
(APPLAUSE)
Now, in fact -- in fact, there is an effort, Patty Murray has introduced legislation for $12 minimum wage. That's good. I introduced legislation for $15 an hour minimum wage which is better.
(APPLAUSE)
And ultimately what we have got to determine is after massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 0.1 percent, when millions of our people are working longer hours for low wages...
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator.
SANDERS: I think we have got to be clear, not equivoquate, $15 in minimum wage in 50 states in this country as soon as possible.
BLITZER: Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
We're going to turn to another critically important issue right now, guns in America. Secretary Clinton, you've said that Vermont, Senator Sanders' home state, has, quote, "the highest per capita number of guns that end up committing crimes in New York." But only 1.2 percent of the guns recovered in New York in 2014 were from Vermont. Are you seriously blaming Vermont, and implicitly Senator Sanders, for New York's gun violence?
CLINTON: No, of course not. Of course not. This is -- this is a serious difference between us.
(SANDERS LAUGHTER)
And what I want to start by saying -- it's not a laughing matter -- 90 people on average a day are killed or commit suicide or die in accidents from guns, 33,000 people a year. I take it really seriously, because I have spent more time than I care to remember being with people who have lost their loved ones.
So, yes, we have a problem in America. We need a president who will stand up against the gun lobby. We need a president who will fight for commonsense gun safety reforms.
(APPLAUSE)
And what we have here is a big difference. Senator Sanders voted against the Brady Bill five times. He voted for the most important NRA priority, namely giving immunity from liability to gun-makers and dealers, something that is at the root of a lot of the problems that we are facing.
Then he doubled down on that in the New York Daily News interview, when asked whether he would support the Sandy Hook parents suing to try to do something to rein in the advertising of the AR-15, which is advertised to young people as being a combat weapon, killing on the battlefield. He said they didn't deserve their day in court.
CLINTON: I could not disagree more.
And, finally, this is the only industry in America, the only one.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: That has this kind of special protection. We hear a lot from Senator Sanders about the greed and recklessness of Wall Street, and I agree. We've got to hold Wall Street accountable...
BLITZER: ... Thank you...
CLINTON: ... Well, what about the greed and recklessness of the gun manufacturers and dealers in America?
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
BLITZER: Senator? Well, the only problem is, Wolf, she didn't answer your question.
You asked her whether she thought that Vermont was responsible. You asked her whether she thought that Vermont was responsible for a lot of the gun violence. You made the point what she said was totally absurd.
BLITZER: I asked her, are you seriously blaming Vermont and implicitly Senator Sanders for New York's gun violence. She said no. But, go ahead.
SANDERS: Then why did she put out that statement?
CLINTON: I put it out...
SANDERS: ... Excuse me, I think I'm responding now.
BLITZER: Please, go ahead sir.
SANDERS: A statement that was refuted by the governor of the state of Vermont, who was a supporter of hers, who said, yeah, in campaigns people tend to exaggerate.
Here is the fact on guns. Let's talk about guns. That horrible, horrible Sandy Hook -- what's the word we want to use, murder, assault, slaughter, unspeakable act.
Back in 1988, I ran for the United States Congress one seat in the state of Vermont. I probably lost that election, which I lost by three points, because I was the only candidate running who said, you know what? We should ban assault weapons, not seen them sold or distributed in the United States of America.
I've got a D-minus voting record from the NRA.
(APPLAUSE)
And, in fact, because I come from a state which has virtually no gun control, I believe that I am the best qualified candidate to bring back together that consensus that is desperately needed in this country.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator. Thank you.
(CHEERING)
BLITZER: Secretary Clinton, I want you to respond to that, but why did you put out that statement blaming Vermont and its gun policy for some of the death of -- by guns in New York?
CLINTON: Well, the facts are that most of the guns that end up committing crimes in New York come from out of state. They come from the states that don't have the kind of serious efforts to control guns that we do in New York.
But let me say this -- in 1988, as we've heard on every debate occasion, Senator Sanders did run for the Congress and he lost. He came back in 1990 and he won, and during that campaign he made a commitment to the NRA that he would be against waiting periods.
And, in fact, in his own book, he talks about his 1990 campaign, and here's what he said. He clearly was helped by the NRA, because they ran ads against his opponent. So, then he went to the Congress, where he has been a largely very reliable supporter of the NRA. Voting -- he kept his word to the NRA, he voted against the Brady Bill five times because it had waiting periods in it.
Thankfully, enough people finally voted for it to keep guns out of the hands of who should not have them.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Senator, I want you to respond, but I also want you to respond to this. You recently said you do not think crime victims should be able to sue gun makers for damages. The daughter of the Sandy Hook Elementary School who was killed back in the 2012 mass shooting, says you owe her and families an apology. Do you?
SANDERS: What we need to do is to do everything that we can to make certain that guns do not fall into the hands of people who do not have them.
Now, I voted against this gun liability law because I was concerned that in rural areas all over this country, if a gun shop owner sells a weapon legally to somebody, and that person then goes out and kills somebody, I don't believe it is appropriate that that gun shop owner who just sold a legal weapon to be held accountable and be sued.
But, what I do believe is when gun shop owners and others knowingly are selling weapons to people who should not have them -- somebody walks in.
SANDERS: They want thousands of rounds of ammunition, or they want a whole lot of guns, yes, that gun shop owner or that gun manufacturer should be held liable.
BLITZER: So, Senator, do you owe the Sandy Hook families an apology?
SANDERS: No, I don't think I owe them an apology. They are in court today, and actually they won a preliminary decision today. They have the right to sue, and I support them and anyone else who wants the right to sue.
CLINTON: Well, I believe that the law that Senator Sanders voted for that I voted against, giving this special protection to gun manufacturers and to dealers, is an absolute abdication of responsibility on the part of those who voted for it.
This is a -- this is a unique gift given to only one industry in the world by the United States Congress, as Senator Murphy from Connecticut said, we have tougher standards holding toy gun manufacturers and sellers to account than we do for real guns.
And the point that Senator Sanders keeps making about how he wouldn't want a mom and pop store -- that was not the point of this. And if he can point to any, any incident where that happened, I would love to hear about it.
What was really going on, I'll tell you, because it has a lot to do with New York City. New York City was on the brink of being able to hold manufacturers and dealers accountable through a very carefully crafted legal strategy.
BLITZER: Thank you.
CLINTON: The NRA came to their supporters in the Congress and said, stop it, stop it now, and Senator Sanders joined those who did.
BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary.
Senator, go ahead.
SANDERS: Let me just reiterate -- just reiterate so there is no confusion, decades ago, before it was popular, in a rural state with no gun control, Bernie Sanders said, let's ban assault weapons, not see them distributed in the United States of America.
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator.
Let's turn it over to Errol Lewis, of New York 1 Time Warner Cable News.
LOUIS: Secretary Clinton, the 1994 crime bill that you supported added 100,000 police officers across the country and banned certain assault weapons. It also imposed tougher prison sentences and eliminated federal funding for inmate education.
Looking at the bill as a whole, do you believe it was a net positive or do you think it was a mistake?
CLINTON: Well, I think that it had some positive aspects to it. And you mentioned some of them. The Violence Against Women Act, which has been a very important piece of legislation, in my opinion.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: And it also did some things which were to provide more opportunities for young people. So if we were to have the balance sheet on one side, there are some positive actions and changes.
On the other side, there were decisions that were made that now we must revisit and we have to correct. I think that sentences got much too long. The original idea was not that we would increase sentences for non-violent low-level offenders, but once the federal government did what it did, states piled on.
So we have a problem. And the very first speech I gave in this campaign was about what I will do to reform the criminal justice system and end the over-mass incarceration.
So I think that if all of us go and look back at where we were, Senator Sanders voted for the crime bill, and he says the same thing, there were some good things, and things that we have to change and learn from.
So that's how I see it. And I think we ought to be putting our attention on forging a consensus to make the changes that will divert more people from the criminal justice system to start.
LOUIS: Thank you, Secretary.
CLINTON: To tackle systemic racism and divert people in the beginning.
LOUIS: Now earlier this year, a South Carolina voter told your daughter Chelsea, quote, "I think a lot of African-Americans want to hear, you know what, we made a mistake." Chelsea said she has heard you apologize, but went on to say that if the voter hadn't heard it then, quote, "it's clearly insufficient."
Do you regret your advocacy for the crime bill?
CLINTON: Well, look, I supported the crime bill. My husband has apologized. He was the president who actually signed it, Senator Sanders...
LOUIS: But what about you, Senator?
CLINTON: ... voted for it. I'm sorry for the consequences that were unintended and that have had a very unfortunate impact on people's lives.
I've seen the results of what has happened in families and in communities.
CLINTON: That's why I chose to make my very first speech a year ago on this issue, Errol, because I want to focus the attention of our country and to make the changes we need to make. And I also want people...
(APPLAUSE)
... especially I want -- I want white people -- I want white people to recognize that there is systemic racism. It's also in employment, it's in housing, but it is in the criminal justice system, as well.
(APPLAUSE)
LOUIS: Senator Sanders, earlier this week at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, you called out President Clinton for defending Secretary Clinton's use of the term super-predator back in the '90s when she supported the crime bill. Why did you call him out?
SANDERS: Because it was a racist term, and everybody knew it was a racist term.
(APPLAUSE)
Look, much of what Secretary Clinton said was right. We had a crime bill. I voted for it. It had the Violence Against Women Act in it. When as mayor of Burlington, we worked very hard to try to eliminate domestic violence. This took us a good step forward. We're talking about the weapon that killed the children in Sandy Hook. This banned assault weapons, not insignificant.
But where we are today is we have a broken criminal justice system. We have more people in jail than any other country on Earth. And in my view, what we have got to do is rethink the system from the bottom on up. And that means, for a start -- and we don't talk about this. The media doesn't talk about it -- you got 51 percent of African-American kids today who graduated high school who are unemployed or underemployed. You know what I think? Maybe we invest in jobs and education for those kids, not jails and incarceration.
(APPLAUSE)
And I'll tell you what else. And I'll tell you what else I think. And that is, we have got -- and this is the difference between the secretary and myself as I understand it. We have got to have the guts to rethink the so-called war on drugs. Too many lives...
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator.
SANDERS: Too many lives have been destroyed because people possessed marijuana, millions over a 30-year period. And that is why I believe we should take marijuana out of the federal Controlled Substance Act.
CLINTON: Well, look, I think that, as Senator Sanders said about what I said, I will say about what he said. I think that we recognize that we have a set of problems that we cannot ignore and we must address. And that is why I have been promoting for my entire adult life, I think, the idea of investing early in kids, early childhood education, universal pre-K, like what Mayor de Blasio brought to New York. We have got to help more kids get off to a good start. That's why I want a good teacher in a good school for every child, regardless of the ZIP Code that child lives in...
LOUIS: Thank you. Thank you, Secretary Clinton.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: ... and to be really focused on how we build ladders of opportunity and tear down these barriers that stand in the way of people getting ahead.
LOUIS: Your time's up, Secretary Clinton.
Senator Sanders, I have a question for you related to this. So you've said that by the end of your first term as president, the U.S. will no longer lead the world in mass incarceration. To fulfill that promise, you'd have to release roughly half a million prisoners. How are you going to do that, since the vast majority of American prisoners are not under federal jurisdiction?
SANDERS: We're going to work with state governments all over this country. And you know what? In a very divided Congress, and a very divided politics in America, actually the one area where there is some common ground is conservatives understand that it's insane to be spending $80 billion a year locking up 2.2 million people.
With federal and presidential leadership, we will work with state governments to make sure that people are released from jail under strong supervision, that they get the kind of job training and education they need so they can return to their communities. On this one, Errol, actually I think you're going to see progressive and conservative support. We can do it, if we're prepared to be bold.
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator. Thank you, Secretary. We have to take a quick commercial break. We have a lot more questions for Secretary Clinton and Senator Sanders right after this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BLITZER: Welcome back.
Let's turn to another critically important issue.
Senator, Secretary, the issue of energy and the environment.
Secretary Clinton, Senator Sanders has said you are in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry. You say you're sick and tired of him lying about your record.
What are his lies?
CLINTON: Well, let me start by saying we need to talk about this issue and we should talk about it in terms of the extraordinary threats that climate change pose to our country and our world. And that's why for the last many years, both in the Senate and as secretary of State, it's been a big part of my commitment to see what could be done.
But there has never been any doubt that when I was a senator, I tried -- I joined with others to try to get rid of the subsidies for big oil. And I have proposed that again, because that's what I think needs to be done as we transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.
CLINTON: And everyone who's looked at this independently, The Washington Post and others, who give us both hard times when called for on facts, have said that this is absolutely an incorrect false charge.
So, we both have relatively small amounts of contributions from people who work for fossil fuel companies. Best we can tell from the reports that are done.
But, that is not being supported by big oil, and I think it's important to distinguish that. And, let's talk about what each of us has proposed to try to combat greenhouse gas emissions and put us on the fastest track possible to clean energy.
BLITZER: Thank you. We're going to get to that to, but I want you to respond, Senator.
SANDERS: It is one thing, as the Secretary indicated, to talk about workers. I'm sure I have contributions, you have contributions from workers in every industry in the country. But, as I understand it, 43 lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry maxed out, gave the maximum amount of money to Secretary Clinton's campaign.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: Now, that's not saying -- and, then some people say, well, given the hundreds of millions of dollars she raises it's a small amount. That's true. But, that does not mean to say that the lobbyists there thought she was a pretty good bet on this issue.
Now, what I think is when we look at climate change now, we have got to realize that this is a global environmental crisis of unprecedented urgency.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
And, it is not good enough. You know, if we, God forbid, were attacked tomorrow the whole country would rise up and say we got an enemy out there and we got to do something about it. That was what 9/11 was about.
We have an enemy out there, and that enemy is going to cause drought and floods and extreme weather disturbances. There's going to be international conflict.
(APPLAUSE) I am proud, Wolf, that I have introduced the most comprehensive climate change legislation...
BLITZER: .... Thank you...
SANDERS: ... Including a tax on carbon. Something I don't believe Secretary Clinton supports.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
BLITZER: Secretary Clinton, go ahead and respond.
CLINTON: Well, let's talk about the global environmental crisis. Starting in 2009 as your Secretary of State, I worked with President Obama to bring China and India to the table for the very first time, to get a commitment out of them that they would begin to address their own greenhouse gas emissions.
(APPLAUSE)
I continued to work on that throughout the four years as Secretary of State, and I was very proud that President Obama and America led the way to the agreement that was finally reached in Paris with 195 nations committing to take steps to actually make a difference in climate change.
(APPLAUSE)
And, I was surprised and disappointed when Senator Sanders attacked the agreement, said it was not enough, it didn't go far enough. You know, at some point putting together 195 countries, I know a little bit about that, was a major accomplishment...
BLITZER: ... Thank you...
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
CLINTON: ... And, our President led the effort to protect our world and he deserves, he deserves our appreciation, not our criticism.
BLITZER: ... Go ahead, Senator...
SANDERS: ... Let's talk about that. When you were Secretary of State, you also worked hard to expand fracking to countries all over the world.
(CHEERING)
SANDERS: The issue here -- of course the agreement is a step forward, but you know agreements and I know agreements, there's a lot of paper there. We've got to get beyond paper right now.
We have got to lead the world in transforming our energy system, not tomorrow, but yesterday.
(APPLAUSE)
And, what that means, Wolf, it means having the guts to take on the fossil fuel industry. Now, I am on board legislation that says, you know what, we ain't going to excavate for fossil fuel on public land. That's not Secretary Clinton's position.
BLITZER: Thank you.
Let us support a tax on carbon...
BLITZER: ... Secretary Clinton...
SANDERS: ... Not Secretary Clinton's position.
BLITZER: ... Go ahead and respond.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: Well, I'm a little bewildered about how to respond when you have an agreement which gives you the framework to actually take the action that would have only come about because under the Obama administration in the face of implacable hostility from the Republicans in Congress, President Obama moved forward on gas mileage, he moved forward on the clean power plan. He has moved forward on so many of the fronts that he could given the executive actions that he was able to take.
(APPLAUSE)
And, you know, I am getting a little bit -- I'm getting a little bit concerned here because, you know, I really believe that the President has done an incredible job against great odds and deserves to be supported.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
CLINTON: Now, it's easy -- it's easy to diagnose the problem. It's harder to do something about the problem. And...
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary. We'll continue on this.
SANDERS: All right, Wolf...
BLITZER: Errol --
SANDERS: Wolf. Wolf. No. No. No.
BLITZER: Errol Louis, go ahead with your question.
SANDERS: Wolf. Wolf.
BLITZER: We're going to continue on this. Errol, go ahead.
LOUIS: OK. Secretary Clinton, as secretary of state, you also pioneered a program to promote fracking around the world, as you described. Fracking, of course, a way of extracting natural gas. Now as a candidate for president, you say that by the time you're done with all your rules and regulations, fracking will be restricted in many places around the country. Why have you changed your view on fracking?
CLINTON: No, I well, I don't think I've changed my view on what we need to do to go from where we are, where the world is heavily dependent on coal and oil, but principally coal, to where we need to be, which is clean renewable energy, and one of the bridge fuels is natural gas.
And so for both economic and environmental and strategic reasons, it was American policy to try to help countries get out from under the constant use of coal, building coal plants all the time, also to get out from under, especially if they were in Europe, the pressure from Russia, which has been incredibly intense. So we did say natural gas is a bridge. We want to cross that bridge as quickly as possible, because in order to deal with climate change, we have got to move as rapidly as we can.
That's why I've set big goals. I want to see us deploy a half a billion more solar panels by the end of my first term and enough clean energy to provide electricity to every home in America within 10 years.
(APPLAUSE)
So I have big, bold goals, but I know in order to get from where we are, where the world is still burning way too much coal, where the world is still too intimidated by countries and providers like Russia, we have got to make a very firm but decisive move in the direction of clean energy.
LOUIS: Thank you, Secretary. All right, Senator?
SANDERS: All right, here is -- here is a real difference. This is a difference between understanding that we have a crisis of historical consequence here, and incrementalism and those little steps are not enough.
(APPLAUSE)
Not right now. Not on climate change. Now, the truth is, as secretary of state, Secretary Clinton actively supported fracking technology around the world. Second of all, right now, we have got to tell the fossil fuel industry that their short-term profits are not more important than the future of this planet.
(APPLAUSE)
And that means -- and I would ask you to respond. Are you in favor of a tax on carbon so that we can transit away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy at the level and speed we need to do?
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: You know, I have laid out a set of actions that build on what President Obama was able to accomplish, building on the clean power plan, which is currently under attack by fossil fuels and the right in the Supreme Court, which is one of the reasons why we need to get the Supreme Court justice that President Obama has nominated to be confirmed so that we can actually continue to make progress.
I don't take a back seat to your legislation that you've introduced that you haven't been able to get passed. I want to do what we can do to actually make progress in dealing with the crisis. That's exactly what I have proposed.
LOUIS: OK, thank you, Secretary Clinton.
CLINTON: And my approach I think is going to get us there faster without tying us up into political knots with a Congress that still would not support what you are proposing.
(CROSSTALK)
LOUIS: Senator Sanders, you've said that climate change is the greatest change to our nation's security.
SANDERS: Secretary Clinton did not answer one simple question.
LOUIS: I have a question for you. You've said that climate change is the greatest threat to our nation's security. You've called for a nationwide ban on fracking. You've also called for phasing out all nuclear power in the U.S. But wouldn't those proposals drive the country back to coal and oil, and actually undermine your fight against global warming?
SANDERS: No, they wouldn't. Look, here's where we are. Let me reiterate. We have a global crisis. Pope Francis reminded us that we are on a suicide course. Our legislation understands, Errol, that there will be economic dislocation. It is absolutely true. There will be some people who lose their job. And we build into our legislation an enormous amount of money to protect those workers. It is not their fault...
SANDERS: It is not their fault that fossil fuels are destroying our climate.
But we have got to stand up and say right now, as we would if we were attacked by some military force, we have got to move urgency -- urgently and boldly.
What does that mean?
LOUIS: Senator -- senator, jobs...
SANDERS: Yes?
LOUIS: -- jobs are one thing, but with less than 6 percent of all U.S. energy coming from solar, wind and geothermal, and 20 percent of U.S. power coming from nuclear, if you phase out all of that, how do you make up...
SANDERS: Well, you don't phase...
LOUIS: -- that difference?
SANDERS: -- it all out tomorrow. And you certainly don't phase nuclear out tomorrow. But this is what you do do.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: What you do do is say that we are going to have a massive program -- and I had introduced -- introduced legislation for 10 million solar rooftops. We can put probably millions of people to work retrofitting and weatherizing buildings all over this country.
(CHEERING)
SANDERS: Saving -- rebuilding our rail system.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: Our mass transit system.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: If we approach this, Errol, as if we were literally at a war -- you know, in 1941, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we moved within three years, within three more years to rebuild our economy to defeat Nazism and Japanese imperialism. That is exactly the kind of approach we need right now.
BLITZER: Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: Lead the world.
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Let's turn to another critically important issue...
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: -- the issue of national security and foreign policy.
Secretary Clinton, President Obama says the worst mistake in office that he made over these past seven and a half years was not preparing for Libya after Moammar Qadafi was removed. You were his Secretary of State.
Aren't you also responsible for that?
CLINTON: Well, let me say I think we did a great deal to help the Libyan people after Qadafi's demise. And here's what we did.
We helped them hold two successful elections, something that is not easy, which they did very well because they had a pent up desire to try to chart their own future after 42 years of dictatorship.
I was very proud of that.
We got rid of the chemical weapons stockpile that Qadafi had, getting it out of Libya, getting it away from militias or terrorist groups.
We also worked to help them set up their government. We sent a lot of American experts there. We offered to help them secure their borders, to train a new military.
They, at the end, when it came to security issues, Wolf, did not want troops from any other country, not just us, European or other countries, in Libya.
And so we were caught in a very difficult position. They could not provide security on their own, which we could see and we told them that, but they didn't want to have others helping to provide that security.
And the result has been a clash between different parts of the country, terrorists taking up some locations in the country.
And we can't walk away from that. We need to be working with European and Arab partners...
BLITZER: Thank you.
CLINTON: -- with the United Nations in order to continue to try to support them.
The Libyan people deserve a chance at democracy and self- government. And I, as president, will keep trying to give that to them
BLITZER: Senator, go ahead.
SANDERS: According to The New York Times..
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: -- for President Obama, this was a pretty tough call, like a 51-49 call, do you overthrow Qadafi, who, of course, was a horrific dictator?
The New York Times told us it was Secretary Clinton who led the effect for that regime change. And this is the same type of mentality that supported the war in Iraq.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: Look...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: -- Qadafi, Saddam Hussein are brutal, brutal murdering thugs. No debate about that.
But what we have got to do and what the president was saying is we didn't think thoroughly about what happens the day after you get rid of these dictators.
Regime change often has unintended consequences in Iraq and in Libya right now, where ISIS has a very dangerous foothold. And I think if you studied the whole history of...
BLITZER: Yes.
SANDERS: -- American involvement in regime change, you see that quite often.
BLITZER: Secretary, we're going to let you respond.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: Yes, well, I...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- I...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- I -- I would just point out that there was a vote in the Senate as to whether or not the United States should support the efforts by the Libyan people to protect themselves against the threats, the genocidal threats coming from Gadhafi, and whether we should go to the United Nations to seek Security Council support.
Senator Sanders voted for that, and that's exactly what we did.
SANDERS: No. Hang on a second.
(CROSSTALK)
CLINTON: We went to the United Nations -- yes, he did. We went to the United Nations Security Council. We got support from the Security Council. And we then supported the efforts of our European and Arab allies and partners.
This was a request made to our government by the Europeans and by the Arabs because of their great fear of what chaos in Syria [meant Libya] would do to them. And if you want to know what chaos does, not just to the people inside but the people on the borders, look at Syria.
Nobody stood up to Assad and removed him, and we have had a far greater disaster in Syria than we are currently dealing with right now in Libya.
(APPLAUSE)
(CROSSTALK)
BLITZER: Senator, go ahead.
SANDERS: Secretary Clinton made this charge in previous debates and just repeating it doesn't make it truer. What you are talking about is what I think was what they call the unanimous consent, you know what that is, where basically, do we support Libya moving to democracy?
Well, you know what, I surely have always supported Libya moving to democracy. But please do not confuse that with your active effort for regime change without contemplating what happened the day after. Totally different issue.
CLINTON: Well, that isn't...
SANDERS: Second of all -- second of all, if I might, in terms of Syria, in terms of Syria...
BLITZER: Senator, let her respond to that, then we'll get to that.
Go ahead, Secretary.
CLINTON: There was also in that a reference to the Security Council, and I know you're not shy when you oppose something, Senator. So, yes, it was unanimous. That's exactly right, including you.
And what we did was to try to provide support for our European and Arab allies and partners. The decision was the president's. Did I do the due diligence? Did I talk to everybody I could talk to? Did I visit every capital and then report back to the president? Yes, I did. That's what a secretary of state does.
But at the end of the day, those are the decisions that are made by the president to in any way use American military power. And the president made that decision. And, yes, we did try without success because of the Libyans' obstruction to our efforts, but we did try and we will continue to try to help the Libyan people.
BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary.
Go ahead, Senator.
SANDERS: If you listen, you know -- two points. Number one, yes, 100-0 in the Senate voted for democracy in Libya and I would vote for that again. But that is very different from getting actively involved to overthrow and bring about regime change without fully understanding what the consequence of that regime change would be.
Second of all, I know you keep referring to Barack Obama all night here, but you in Syria, you in Syria talked about a no-fly zone, which the president certainly does not support, nor do I support because, A, it will cost an enormous sum of money, second of all, it runs the risk of getting us sucked into perpetual warfare in that region.
Thirdly, when we talk about Syria right now, no debate, like Gadhafi, like Saddam Hussein, Assad is another brutal murdering dictator, but right now our fight is to destroy ISIS first, and to get rid of Assad second.
CLINTON: Well, I think Senator Sanders has just reinforced my point. Yes, when I was secretary of state I did urge, along with the Department of Defense and the CIA that we seek out, vet, and train, and arm Syrian opposition figures so that they could defend themselves against Assad.
The president said no. Now, that's how it works. People who work for the president make recommendations and then the president makes the decision. So I think it's only fair to look at where we are in Syria today.
And, yes, I do still support a no-fly zone because I think we need to put in safe havens for those poor Syrians who are fleeing both Assad and ISIS and have some place that they can be safe.
BLITZER: Staying on national security, Dana Bash has a question.
BASH: Senator Sanders, in 1997, you said this about NATO, you said, quote: "It is not the time to continue wasting tens of billions of dollars helping to defend Europe, let alone assuming more than our share of any cost associated with expanding NATO."
Do you still feel that way?
SANDERS: Well, what I believe, if my memory is correct here, we spend about 75 percent of the entire cost of the military aspect of NATO. Given the fact that France has a very good health care system and free public education, college education for their people, the U.K. has a good National Health Service and they also provide fairly reasonable higher education, you know what, yeah, I do believe that the countries of Europe should pick up more of the burden for their defense. Yes, I do.
(APPLAUSE)
BASH: And just following up, Senator Sanders, Donald Trump also argues that NATO is unfair economically to the U.S. because America pays a disproportionate share. So how is what you say about NATO and your proposal different than his?
SANDERS: Well, you got to ask -- you got to ask Trump. All I can tell you is, with a huge deficit, with 47 million people living in poverty, with our inner cities collapsing, yeah, I do think countries like Germany and U.K. and France and European countries whose economy, or at least its standard of living and health care and education, they're doing pretty well.
So I would not be embarrassed as president of the United States to stay to our European allies, you know what, the United States of America cannot just support your economies. You got to put up your own fair share of the defense burden. Nothing wrong with that.
(APPLAUSE)
BASH: Secretary Clinton?
CLINTON: I support our continuing involvement in NATO. And it is important to ask for our NATO allies to pay more of the cost. There is a requirement that they should be doing so, and I believe that needs to be enforced.
But there's a larger question here. NATO has been the most successful military alliance in probably human history. It has bound together across the Atlantic countries that are democracies, that have many of the same values and interests, and now we need to modernize it and move it into the 21st century to serve as that head of our defense operations in Europe when it comes to terrorism and other threats that we face. So...
BASH: But, Madam Secretary...
CLINTON: ... yes, of course they should be paying more, but that doesn't mean if they don't we leave, because I don't think that's in America's interests.
BASH: That's going to be part of my -- my question to you is, to that point, there are 28 countries in the alliance, and the United States gives more money to NATO's budget than 21 of those countries combined. If they don't agree to pay more, as you suggested, then what would you do as commander-in-chief?
CLINTON: I will stay in NATO. I will stay in NATO, and we will continue to look for missions and other kinds of programs that they will support. Remember, NATO was with us in Afghanistan. Most of the member countries also lost soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan. They came to our rallying defense after 9/11. That meant a lot.
And, yes, we have to work out the financial aspects of it, but let's not forget what's really happening. With Russia being more aggressive, making all kinds of intimidating moves toward the Baltic countries, we've seen what they've done in Eastern Ukraine, we know how they want to rewrite the map of Europe, it is not in our interests. Think of how much it would cost if Russia's aggression were not deterred because NATO was there on the front lines making it clear they could not move forward.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary.
Senator, let's talk about the U.S. relationship with Israel. Senator Sanders, you maintained that Israel's response in Gaza in 2014 was, quote, "disproportionate and led to the unnecessary loss of innocent life."
(APPLAUSE)
What do you say to those who believe that Israel has a right to defend itself as it sees fit?
SANDERS: Well, as somebody who spent many months of my life when I was a kid in Israel, who has family in Israel, of course Israel has a right not only to defend themselves, but to live in peace and security without fear of terrorist attack. That is not a debate.
(APPLAUSE)
But -- but what you just read, yeah, I do believe that. Israel was subjected to terrorist attacks, has every right in the world to destroy terrorism. But we had in the Gaza area -- not a very large area -- some 10,000 civilians who were wounded and some 1,500 who were killed.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Free Palestine!
SANDERS: Now, if you're asking not just me, but countries all over the world was that a disproportionate attack, the answer is that I believe it was, and let me say something else.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
SANDERS: And, let me say something else. As somebody who is 100% pro-Israel, in the long run -- and this is not going to be easy, God only knows, but in the long run if we are ever going to bring peace to that region which has seen so much hatred and so much war, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
SANDERS: So what is not to say -- to say that right now in Gaza, right now in Gaza unemployment is somewhere around 40%. You got a lot of that area continues, it hasn't been built, decimated, houses decimated, health care decimated, schools decimated. I believe the United States and the rest of the world have got to work together to help the Palestinian people.
That does not make me anti-Israel. That paves the way, I think...
BLITZER: ... Thank you, Senator...
SANDERS: ...for an approach that works in the Middle East.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
BLITZER: Thank you. Secretary Clinton, do you agree with Senator Sanders that Israel overreacts to Palestinians attacks, and that in order for there to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel must, quote, end its disproportionate responses?
CLINTON: I negotiated the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November of 2012. I did it in concert with...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: President Abbas of the Palestinian authority based in Ramallah, I did it with the then Muslim Brotherhood President, Morsi, based in Cairo, working closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli cabinet. I can tell you right now I have been there with Israeli officials going back more than 25 years that they do not seek this kind of attacks. They do not invite the rockets raining down on their towns and villages.
(APPLAUSE)
They do not believe that there should be a constant incitement by Hamas aided and abetted by Iran against Israel. And, so when it came time after they had taken the incoming rockets, taken the assaults and ambushes on their soldiers and they called and told me, I was in Cambodia, that they were getting ready to have to invade Gaza again because they couldn't find anybody to talk to tell them to stop it, I flew all night, I got there, I negotiated that.
So, I don't know how you run a country when you are under constant threat, terrorist attack, rockets coming at you. You have a right to defend yourself.
(APPLAUSE)
That does not mean -- that does not mean that you don't take appropriate precautions. And, I understand that there's always second guessing anytime there is a war. It also does not mean that we should not continue to do everything we can to try to reach a two-state solution, which would give the Palestinians the rights and...
BLITZER: ... Thank you...
CLINTON: ... just let me finish. The rights and the autonomy that they deserve. And, let me say this, if Yasser Arafat had agreed with my husband at Camp David in the Late 1990s to the offer then Prime Minister Barak put on the table, we would have had a Palestinian state for 15 years already.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator, go ahead -- go ahead, Senator.
SANDERS: I don't think that anybody would suggest that Israel invites and welcomes missiles flying into their country. That is not the issue.
And, you evaded the answer. You evaded the question. The question is not does Israel have a right to respond, nor does Israel have a right to go after terrorists and destroy terrorism. That's not the debate. Was their response disproportionate?
I believe that it was, you have not answered that.
(CHEERING)
CLINTON: Well, I will be... I will certainly be willing to answer it. I think I did answer it by saying that of course there have to be precautions taken but even the most independent analyst will say the way that Hamas places its weapons, the way that it often has its fighters in civilian garb, it is terrible.
(AUDIENCE REACTION)
I'm not saying it's anything other than terrible. It would be great -- remember, Israel left Gaza. They took out all the Israelis. They turned the keys over to the Palestinian people.
CLINTON: And what happened? Hamas took over Gaza.
So instead of having a thriving economy with the kind of opportunities that the children of the Palestinians deserve, we have a terrorist haven that is getting more and more rockets shipped in from Iran and elsewhere.
BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary.
Senator.
SANDERS: I read Secretary Clinton's statement speech before AIPAC. I heard virtually no discussion at all about the needs of the Palestinian people. Almost none in that speech.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: So here is the issue: of course Israel has a right to defend itself, but long term there will never be peace in that region unless the United States plays a role, an even-handed role trying to bring people together and recognizing the serious problems that exist among the Palestinian people.
That is what I believe the world wants to us do and that's the kind of leadership that we have got to exercise.
CLINTON: Well, if I -- I want to add, you know, again describing the problem is a lot easier than trying to solve it. And I have been involved, both as first lady with my husband's efforts, as a senator supporting the efforts that even the Bush administration was undertaking, and as secretary of state for President Obama, I'm the person who held the last three meetings between the president of the Palestinian Authority and the prime minister of Israel.
There were only four of us in the room, Netanyahu, Abbas, George Mitchell, and me. Three long meetings. And I was absolutely focused on what was fair and right for the Palestinians.
I was absolutely focused on what we needed to do to make sure that the Palestinian people had the right to self-government. And I believe that as president I will be able to continue to make progress and get an agreement that will be fair both to the Israelis and the Palestinians without ever, ever undermining Israel's security.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: A final word, Senator, go ahead.
SANDERS: There comes a time -- there comes a time when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: Well...
BLITZER: Secretary.
CLINTON: ... you know, I have spoken about and written at some length the very candid conversations I've had with him and other Israeli leaders. Nobody is saying that any individual leader is always right, but it is a difficult position.
If you are from whatever perspective trying to seek peace, trying to create the conditions for peace when there is a terrorist group embedded in Gaza that does not want to see you exist, that is a very difficult challenge.
BLITZER: Senator, go ahead.
SANDERS: You gave a major speech to AIPAC, which obviously deals with the Middle East crisis, and you barely mentioned the Palestinians. And I think, again, it is a complicated issue and God knows for decades presidents, including President Clinton and others, Jimmy Carter and others have tried to do the right thing.
All that I am saying is we cannot continue to be one-sided. There are two sides to the issue.
We have to take another quick, quick break. But much more on the CNN Democratic presidential debate live from Brooklyn, New York. That is coming up right after this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BLITZER: Welcome back to the CNN presidential debate. We're here in Brooklyn. Secretary, Senator, both of you talk about major reforms to college tuition, health care, and Social Security, all of which will take significant changes from Congress, currently controlled by Republicans.
Senator Sanders, you're promising health care and free college for all, and those plans would be met with both political and practical challenges. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says your initiatives would cost up to $28 trillion and, even after massive tax increases, that would add as much as $15 trillion to the national debt. How is this fiscally responsible?
SANDERS: Well, first of all, I disagree with that study. There are many economists who come up with very, very different numbers.
For example, we are the only country, major country on Earth, that does not guarantee health care to all people, and yet we end up spending almost three times what the British do, 50 percent more than the French. My proposal, a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program, will save...
(APPLAUSE)
... will save middle-class families many thousands of dollars a year in their health care costs. Public colleges and universities tuition free? Damn right. That is exactly what we should be doing.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: And I'd pay for that -- I'd pay for that by telling Wall Street that, yeah, we are going to have a tax on Wall Street speculation, which will bring in more than enough money to provide free tuition at public colleges and universities and lower the outrageous level of student debt.
Wolf, we have seen in the last 30 years a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 0.1 percent. The establishment does not like this idea, but, yes, I am determined to transfer that money back to the working families of this country.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator. Secretary, go ahead and respond.
CLINTON: Well, again -- again, I absolutely agree with the diagnosis, the diagnosis that we've got to do much more to finish the work of getting universal health care coverage, something that I've worked on for 25 years. Before there was something called Obamacare, there was something called Hillarycare. And we're now at 90 percent of coverage; I'm going to get us to 100 percent.
And with respect to college, I think we have to make college affordable. We are pricing out middle-class, working, and poor families. There's no doubt about that.
But I do think when you make proposals and you're running for president, you should be held accountable for whether or not the numbers add up and whether or not the plans...
(APPLAUSE)
... are actually going to work. And just very, very briefly, on health care, most of the people who have analyzed what Senator Sanders put out -- remember, he had a plan for about, I don't know, 18, 20 years. He changed in the middle of this campaign. He put out another plan. People have been analyzing the new plan. And there is no doubt by those who have analyzed it, progressive economists, health economists, and the like, that it would pose an incredible burden, not just on the budget, but on individuals. In fact, the Washington Post called it a train-wreck for the poor. A working woman on Medicaid who already has health insurance would be expected to pay about $2,300.
The same for free college. The free college offer -- you know, my late father said, if somebody promises you something for free, read the fine print. You read the fine print, and here's what it says.
BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary.
CLINTON: The fine print says this, that it will -- the federal government will cover two-thirds of the cost and require the states, even those led by Republican governors...
BLITZER: Senator, go ahead. Thank you.
CLINTON: ... to carry out with the remaining one-third of the cost.
SANDERS: I know what Secretary Clinton is saying.
BLITZER: Secretary please.
SANDERS: We are not a country that has the courage to stand up to big money and do what has to be done for the working families of the country.
(APPLAUSE)
Secretary Clinton will have to explain to the people of our country how it could be that every other major country on Earth manages to guarantee health care to all of their people, spending significantly less per capita than we can.
I live 50 miles away from Canada, you know? It's not some kind of communist authoritarian country. They're doing OK. They got a health care system that guarantees health care to all people. We can do the same.
In terms of public colleges and universities, please don't tell me that we cannot do what many other countries around the world are doing. Kids should not be punished and leave school deeply in debt, for what crime? For trying to get an education.
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator.
SANDERS: So, yes, we are going to pay for it...
CLINTON: Well...
BLITZER: Secretary Clinton -- Secretary Clinton, go ahead.
CLINTON: We have -- we have a difference of opinion. We both want to get to universal health care coverage. I did stand up to the special interests and the powerful forces, the health insurance companies and the drug companies.
(APPLAUSE)
And perhaps that's why I am so much in favor of supporting President Obama's signature accomplishment with the Affordable Care Act, because I know how hard it was to get that passed, even with a Democratic Congress. So rather than letting the Republicans repeal it or rather starting all over again, trying to throw the country into another really contentious debate, let's make the Affordable Care Act work for everybody...
BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary.
CLINTON: ... let's get to 100 percent coverage, let's get the cost down, and let's guarantee health care.
BLITZER: Secretary, let's talk about Social Security, another critically important issue. Senator Sanders has challenged you to give a clear answer when it comes to extending the life of Social Security and expanding benefits. Are you prepared to lift the cap on taxable income, which currently stands at $118,500? Yes or no, would you lift the cap?
CLINTON: I have said repeatedly, Wolf, I am going to make the wealthy pay into Social Security to extend the Social Security Trust Fund. That is one way. If that is the way that we pursue, I will follow that.
CLINTON: But there are other ways. We should be looking at taxing passive income by wealthy people. We should be looking at taxing all of their investment.
But here's the real issue, because I -- I've heard this, I've seen the reports of it. I have said from the very beginning, we are going to protect Social Security. I was one of the leaders in the fight against Bush when he was trying to privatize Social Security.
But we also, in addition to extending the Trust Fund, which I am absolutely determined to do, we've got to help people who are not being taken care of now. And because Social Security started in the 1930s, a lot of women have been left out and left behind.
And it's time that we provide more benefits for widows, divorcees, for caregivers, for women who deserve more from the Social Security...
BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary.
CLINTON: -- system and that will be my highest priority.
BLITZER: Senator?
Go ahead, Senator.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: An interesting comment, but you didn't answer the question.
CLINTON: I did. If that's the way we're...
SANDERS: No, you didn't. My legi...
CLINTON: -- yes, I did.
SANDERS: Can I answer...
CLINTON: I did answer the...
SANDERS: -- may I please...
CLINTON: Well, don't -- don't put words...
SANDERS: -- can I have... (CROSSTALK)
CLINTON: -- into my mouth and say something...
SANDERS: -- do I not?
CLINTON: -- that's not accurate.
BLITZER: Go ahead, Senator.
SANDERS: All right. Essentially what you described is my legislation, which includes passive income...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: Now, we've got -- here is the issue. Your answer has been the same year after year. In fact, the idea that I'm bringing forth, I have to admit it, you know, it wasn't my idea. It was Barack Obama's idea in 2008, the exact same idea.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: He called for lifting the cap, which is now higher -- it's at 118 -- and starting at 250 and going on up. If you do that, you're going to extend the life of Social Security for 58 years. You will significantly expand benefits by 1,300 bucks a year for seniors and disabled vets under $16,000 a year.
What's wrong with that?
Are you prepared to support it?
CLINTON: I have supported it. You know, we are in vigorous agreement here, Senator.
SANDERS: You have sup...
CLINTON: I think it's important...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- to point out that...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- you know, we're -- we're having a discussion about the best way to raise money from wealthy people to extend the Social Security Trust Fund. Think about what the other side wants to do. They're calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme. They still want to privatize it.
In fact, their whole idea is to turn over the Social Security Trust Fund to Wall Street, something you and I would never let happen.
SANDERS: All right, so...
CLINTON: So, yes, we both want to make sure...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: Look, Wolf...
CLINTON: -- Social Security is vibrant...
SANDERS: -- I am very glad that...
(CROSSTALK)
CLINTON: -- and well-funded...
SANDERS: I am very glad to...
CLINTON: -- and helping the people at the bottom.
BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary.
(CROSSTALK)
BLITZER: Senator, go ahead.
SANDERS: -- campaign of challenging, if I hear you correctly, Madam Secretary, you are now coming out finally in favor of lifting the cap on taxable income...
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: -- and extending and expanding Social Security. If that is the case, welcome on board. I'm glad you're here.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: No.
BLITZER: Thank you.
Errol -- Errol Louis, go ahead.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: We are going...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- we are...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- we are going...
LOUIS: Secretary...
CLINTON: I -- as he said, I've said the same thing for years. I didn't say anything different tonight. We are going to extend the Social Security Trust Fund. There is still something called Congress. Now, I happen to support Democrats and I want to get Democrats to take back the majority in the United States Senate...
BLITZER: Errol...
CLINTON: -- so a lot of -- a lot of what we're talking about can actually be implemented...
BLITZER: Errol, hold on a second.
CLINTON: -- when I am president.
LOUIS: Secretary...
BLITZER: Go ahead.
Hold on, Errol...
SANDERS: -- I'm still...
BLITZER: -- Errol. Hold on.
SANDERS: I've got to admit...
BLITZER: Go ahead, Senator.
SANDERS: -- maybe I'm a little bit confused.
Are you or are you not supporting legislation to lift the cap on taxable income and expand Social Security for 58 years and increase benefits...
CLINTON: I am...
SANDERS: -- yes or no?
CLINTON: I have said yes, we are going to pick the best way or combination...
SANDERS: Oh, you -- ah.
(APPLAUSE)
(BOOS)
SANDERS: OK.
CLINTON: -- or combination of ways...
(BOOS)
CLINTON: -- you know...
(BOOS)
CLINTON: -- it -- it's all -- it's always a little bit, uh, challenging because, you know, if Senator Sanders doesn't agree with how you are approaching something, then you are a member of the establishment.
Well, let me say this...
SANDERS: Well, look...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- let me say this...
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: -- we are going to extend the Social Security Trust Fund. We've got some good ideas to do it. Let's get a Congress elected...
BLITZER: Thank you.
CLINTON: -- that will actually agree...
BLITZER: Well, thank you...
CLINTON: -- with us in doing it.
BLITZER: Errol, go ahead.
LOUIS: OK, Secretary Clinton, I've got a question for you from a reader...
(CROSSTALK)
SANDERS: Errol, if you'll Let me interject here.
LOUIS: -- of the "New York Daily News."
SANDERS: Yes, Secretary Clinton...
(CROSSTALK)
SANDERS: -- you are a member of the establishment.
LOUIS: -- this was a reader...
SANDERS: Gotta say that.
LOUIS: -- of "The Daily News" who sent us a...
(CHEERING)
LOUIS: -- a question for you.
LOUIS: Just a second, Senator.
Hannah Green (ph) wants to know your position, Secretary Clinton, regarding President Obama's nomination of Merrick Gaarland to the Supreme Court. President Obama said earlier this week that he would not withdraw the nomination, even after the presidential election. If elected, would you ask the president to withdraw the nomination?
CLINTON: I am not going to contradict the president's strategy on this. And I'm not going to engage in hypotheticals. I fully support the president.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: And I believe that the president -- the president is on the right side of both the Constitution and history. And the Senate needs to immediately begin to respond. So I'm going to support the president. When I am president, I will take stock of where we are and move from there.
LOUIS: Senator Sanders.
SANDERS: Well, there is no question. I mean, it really is an outrage. And it just continues, the seven-and-a-half years of unbelievable obstructionism we have seen from these right-wing Republicans.
I mean, a third-grader in America understands the president of the United States has the right to nominate individuals to the U.S. Supreme Court. Apparently everybody understands that except the Republicans in Congress.
LOUIS: So, Senator Sanders, would you ask him to withdraw the nomination?
SANDERS: Yes, but here is the point, and obviously i will strongly support that nomination as a member of the Senate. But, if elected president, I would ask the president to withdraw that nomination because I think -- I think this.
I think that we need a Supreme Court justice who will make it crystal clear, and this nominee has not yet done that, crystal clear that he or she will vote to overturn Citizens United and make sure that American democracy is not undermined.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: You know, there is no doubt that the only people that I would ever appoint to the Supreme Court are people who believe that Roe V. Wade is settled law and Citizens United needs to be overturned.
And I want to say something about this since we're talking about the Supreme Court and what's at stake. We've had eight debates before, this is our ninth. We've not had one question about a woman's right to make her own decisions about reproductive health care, not one question.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: And in the meantime we have states, governors doing everything they can to restrict women's rights. We have a presidential candidate by the name of Donald Trump saying that women should be punished. And we are never asked about this.
And to be complete in my concern, Senator Sanders says with respect to Trump it was a distraction. I don't think it's a distraction. It goes to the heart of who we are as women, our rights, our autonomy, our ability to make our own decisions, and we need to be talking about that and defending Planned Parenthood from these outrageous attacks.
BASH: Senator Sanders, your response.
SANDERS: You're looking at a senator and former congressman who proudly has a 100 percent pro-choice voting record, who will take on those Republican governors who are trying to restrict a woman's right to choose, who will take on those governors right now who are discriminating outrageously against the LGBT community, who comes from a state which led the effort for gay marriage in this country, proudly so.
(APPLAUSE)
BASH: Thank you, Senator.
SANDERS: Who not only thinks we are not going to -- not defund Planned Parenthood, we've got to expand funding for Planned Parenthood.
(APPLAUSE)
BASH: Senator Sanders, you've spoken a lot tonight about your votes in Congress. You have been in Congress for over a quarter of the century, and there as an independent, not a Democrat.
Now you're seeking the Democratic nomination, but Secretary Clinton has suggested that she's not even sure you are a Democrat. Are you?
SANDERS: Well, why would I be running for the Democratic nomination to be president of the United States?
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: But here is a good point. You know, in virtually all of the general election match-up polls between Trump and Secretary Clinton and Trump and Bernie Sanders, in almost all of those polls, I do better than Secretary Clinton both in the CNN poll I was 20 points ahead of Trump.
I think Secretary Clinton was 12 points. And you know why? Because in fact a whole lot of people -- this may be a shock to the secretary, but there a whole lot of independents in this country.
(APPLAUSE)
BASH: Senator Sanders...
SANDERS: And we are not going to win the White House based on just long-term Democratic votes. We have got to reach out to independents and I think I am well qualified to do that.
BASH: Senator Sanders.
(APPLAUSE)
SANDERS: I am in this race as a Democrat. I have raised millions of dollars for my colleagues in the United States Senate to help them get elected. I will do everything I can to open the Democratic party to the young people who are flocking into our political campaign.
(CHEERING)
BASH: Senator Sanders, on that very subject, on that very subject, Secretary Clinton mentions electing a Democratic congress several times. She says that she raised $15 million for the Democratic party in the first three months of this year. You don't appear to have raised any money for the party. Yesterday you did announce that you will help three members of Congress who have endorsed you. Why aren't you doing more to help the party you say you want to lead?
SANDERS: The truth is, and you can speak to my colleagues, we have raised millions of dollars to the DSCC. I have written letter that have raised, if I may use the word, huge amount of money so that's just not accurate.
But, I will also say, and this is important and maybe the Secretary disagrees with me, but I am proud that millions of young people who previously were not involved in the political process are now coming into it, and I do believe, I do believe that we have got to open the door of the Democratic party to those people.
(APPLAUSE)
And, I think the future of the Democratic party is not simply by raising money from wealthy campaign contributors. I think that the way we are doing it in this campaign...
BASH: ... Thank you Senator.
SANDERS: $27 a contribution...
BASH: ... Senator, your time is up...
SANDERS; not being dependent on Wall Street, or big money, that is the future of the Democratic Party that I want to see.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
BASH: Thank you, Senator Sanders. Secretary Clinton.
CLINTON: Well, let us talk... Let us talk about... Let us talk about where we are in this race. I've gotten more votes than anybody running. 9.6 million at the last count.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
That is 2.3 million more than Senator Sanders.
(APPLAUSE)
And it is 1.4 million more than Donald Trump.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
I think you have to look at the facts. And, the facts are that I'm putting together a very broad-based, inclusive coalition from the South to the North, from the East to the West, with African-Americans, Latinos, women, union households, working people and I am very proud of the campaign we are running. It is a campaign that will not only capture the Democratic nomination, but a campaign that will defeat whoever the Republican end up nominating.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
BASH: Thank you, Madam Secretary. Senator Sanders.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)
CLINTON: And, I want to say -- I also want to say that I do -- I do think it is absolutely critical and incredible that we have so many young people involved in the political process. I applaud all of those who are applauding you, Senator Sanders. We're happy that they are supporting you, that they are passionately committed to you and to the issues.
But, let me also say it's going to be important that we unify the Democratic party when the nomination process has been completed...
BASH: ... Secretary Clinton, thank you.
CLINTON: And, I know something about that...
BASH: ... Secretary Clinton...
CLINTON: Thank you so much. Because, when I went to the very end of the 2008 campaign with then Senator Obama...
BASH: ...Secretary Clinton, you're out of time...
CLINTON: ... We did unify the party, and we did elect a Democratic president...
BASH: ...Senator Sanders, on that note....
SANDERS: ... Let me, if I may just briefly say something...
BASH: ... Senator Sanders, I want to ask you a question about this, and you can incorporate that into your response. Three months now between now and the Democratic convention. Your campaign manager says that you will absolutely take the fight to the floor if neither you nor Secretary Clinton clinches the nomination with pledged delegates alone.
(APPLAUSE)
BASH: Do you vow to take this fight to Philadelphia no matter what?
SANDERS: I think we're going to win this nomination to tell you the truth.
(CHEERING)
SANDERS: Look, let me acknowledge what is absolutely true. Secretary Clinton cleaned our clock in the Deep South. No question about it. We got murdered there. That is the most conservative part of this great country. That's the fact.
But you know what? We're out of the Deep South now. And we're moving up. We got here. We're going to California. We got a number of large states there. And having won seven out of the last eight caucuses and primaries, having a level of excitement and energy among working people and low-income people doing better against Donald Trump and the other Republicans in poll after poll than Secretary Clinton is, yeah, I believe that we're going to win this nomination, and I believe we're going to obliterate Donald Trump or whoever the Republican candidate is.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: Now, let me say this...
BLITZER: Secretary Clinton, go ahead.
CLINTON: I think it's -- I think it's important for people out there watching this tonight to know that I also have a considerable lead in pledged delegates. And my lead in pledged delegates is actually wider than Barack Obama's lead was over me.
And in addition to winning states in the Deep South, we won Florida, Texas, Arizona, Massachusetts, Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina, Missouri.
(APPLAUSE)
And so I think where we stand today is that we are in this campaign very confident and optimistic, but it all comes down to reaching every single voter. I'm not taking anything for granted or any voter or any place.
So I'm going to work my heart out here in New York until the polls close on Tuesday. I'm going to work in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland, all the way through California. And when we end up with the number of delegates we need, we will unite the party and have a unified convention...
SANDERS: Well I think...
BLITZER: Senator, go ahead.
SANDERS: I think...
CLINTON: ... that we'll go onto the general election with.
SANDERS: The reason -- the reason why in virtually every contest we are winning by very strong margins younger people -- and I'm not just talking about very young. You know, the older you get, the younger young gets -- 45 or younger -- is I think people are sensing that establishment politics and dependence on Wall Street and big money interest is really never going to address the crises that we face.
(APPLAUSE)
And people understand, you can't take money from powerful special interests into your PAC and then really expect the American people to believe you're going to stand up to these powerful special interests. So I am very proud of the fact that we have brought millions of new people into the political process...
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator.
SANDERS: ... many of whom previously had given up.
BLITZER: Thank you, Senator, very much. The candidates, they will make their final pitches to New York voters right after this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BLITZER: Welcome back to the CNN presidential debate. It's time for the candidates' closing statements. Each candidate will have two minutes. Senator Sanders, you're first.
SANDERS: I grew up in Brooklyn, New York...
(APPLAUSE)
... the son of an immigrant who came to this country from Poland at the age of 17 without a nickel in his pocket, never made a whole lot of money, but was a very proud American, because this country gave him and my mom the opportunity to send their kids to college.
I believe that this country has enormous potential if we have the guts to take on the big money interests who dominate our economic and political life. And I disagree with Secretary Clinton in the belief that you can get money from Wall Street, that you can get money for a super PAC from powerful special interests, and then at the end of the day do what has to be done for the working families of this country. I just don't accept that.
What I believe is that this country, if we stand together and not let the Trumps of the world divide us up, can guarantee health care to all people as a right, can have paid family and medical leave, can make public colleges and universities tuition-free, can lead the world in transforming our energy system and combatting climate change, can break up the large financial institutions, can demand that the wealthiest people in this country start paying their fair share of taxes.
And we can do that when millions of people stand up, fight back, and create a government that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.
(APPLAUSE)
That is what the political revolution is about. That is what this campaign is about. And with your help, we're going to win here in New York. Thank you.
CLINTON: Thank you. I am very grateful for the fact that the people of New York gave me the great honor of serving as your senator. You took a chance on me in 2000, and then you re-elected me with one of the biggest margins we've had in our state in 2006. During those years, we worked closely together. I tried to have your back, and time and time again, you had mine.
We took on the challenges of 9/11 together. We got the money to rebuild New York. We came to the aid of our brave first responders, construction workers, and others who endangered their own health by helping to save lives and search for survivors.
(APPLAUSE)
We worked to create jobs -- despite the disastrous policies of George W. Bush -- across New York. And we stood up time and time again against all kinds of vested powerful interests.
I'm asking for your support again in the primary on Tuesday to continue that work together, to take what we did in New York and to take those New York values to the White House, and put them to work on behalf of all of our people, to knock down the barriers that stand in the way.
You know, of course we have economic barriers. I've been fighting against those trying to even the odds most of my adult life. But we also have racial barriers, gender barriers, homophobic barriers, disability barriers.
(APPLAUSE)
We have a lot of barriers that stand in the way of people being treated as they should and having the chance to live up to their own God-given potential.
So I am humbly asking for your support on Tuesday. I'll work my heart out for you again. And together, we won't just make promises we can't keep. We'll deliver results that will improve the lives of the people in New York and America.
(APPLAUSE)
That's what we'll do together. Thank you, New York.
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary. Thank you very much, Senator.
I want to thank the candidates for a really terrific debate. Thanks also to Dana Bash and Errol Louis, as well as NY1, the Democratic National Committee, and everyone here at the Duggal Greenhouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Stay with CNN now for complete coverage of the New York primary next Tuesday.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/14/the-brooklyn-democratic-debate-transcript-annotated/ [with embedded debate highlights video, and comments; the annotations referenced in the title and introductory notes are viewable at the source; since this was a both critically important and extraordinarily revealing debate, as I found by doing so more than worth watching and following along through the transcript more than once, I have while doing so significantly further proofread, and in that process fixed typos and formatting glitches in and made corrections to, this transcript as presented here, which I can and do certify is complete and at least very close to completely accurate]
Bernie Sanders’s Campaign Past Reveals Willingness to Play Hardball
Bernie Sanders in 1990 after defeating Representative Peter Smith, who said Mr. Sanders used passion to create contrasts. Credit Rob Swanson/Associated Press
Senator Sanders at a rally outside his childhood home in Brooklyn on April 8. The critical New York primary is Tuesday. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
“She does very well on television,” he told one interviewer. “She has an excellent press secretary.”
But really, he said another time, the governor’s appeal came down to one trait.
“Many people are excited because she’s the first woman governor,” he said. “But after that, there ain’t much.”
Mr. Sanders has long presented himself as an issues-oriented, plain-speaking politician from rural New England, now seeking the presidency with promise of a political revolution. But his combative side has now emerged as the Democratic race has tightened and Hillary Clinton [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/hillary-clinton-on-the-issues.html ] has sharpened her own rhetoric.
The result is a far harsher tone in the Democratic campaign and a transformed Senator Sanders, who is now making the kinds of sharper-edged attacks that some of his advisers regretted he did not deploy sooner. But his aggressiveness also worries some supporters who were powerfully drawn to his positive persona that forswore politics as usual.
The senator’s assertiveness was on vivid display in Thursday’s debate with Mrs. Clinton [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/us/politics/democratic-debate.html ] ahead of the high-stakes New York primary on Tuesday, which Mr. Sanders must win big to dent Mrs. Clinton’s strong lead in the delegates needed for the nomination. But he is also seeking to match the vigorous jabs from her aides and allies, who ignored Mr. Sanders for much of last year and are now assailing his policy ideas and leadership abilities on a near-daily basis. His advisers say he is reacting to the New York political environment as well.
“Political combat is more restrained in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, but it’s completely different in New York, and Bernie has no problem defending his ideas in a tough way against Secretary Clinton’s,” said Tad Devine, a senior adviser for the Sanders campaign.
Mrs. Clinton is now trying to hold off Mr. Sanders while not alienating his supporters, whom she would need in the general election. But she is also refusing to back down, and their spiky clashes are suddenly making for a more explosive and unpredictable race.
More than anything, the recent Sanders broadsides reflect a political strategy he has carried out in previous campaigns: the use of blunt criticisms, sarcastic asides and a thundering style against his opponents.
In the 1986 race, Mr. Sanders argued that he would be a strong feminist and do more for women than Ms. Kunin had. While granting that Ms. Kunin was “not corrupt,” he questioned if she had the same “courage” that he had. He repeatedly challenged her credentials as a fellow progressive, using some of the same language he aims at Mrs. Clinton. In the end, he damaged Ms. Kunin politically, as some Clinton supporters and political analysts think he may do in the current race.
“In a tough fight, Bernie is hardly the all-positive, all-substance guy that he claims to be,” said Garrison Nelson, a longtime political science professor at the University of Vermont.
Ms. Kunin was not the only foe that Mr. Sanders attacked with insinuations, as opposed to the more overtly negative television ads that Mr. Sanders has forsworn. In his 1990 race for Congress, he frequently laid political bait for his Republican opponent and relished watching him stumble. And in his 2006 Senate campaign, Mr. Sanders relentlessly linked his moderate Republican opponent with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and accused him of running “the most negative, dishonest campaign in the history of the state of Vermont.”
While such tactics are not unusual in many campaigns, Mr. Sanders has long tried to claim the high road. Yet if his past opponents remember anything about him, it’s Bernie the brawler.
“The way he kept tagging me as a typical rich guy who only cared about rich Republicans — it was very tough, and very effective,” said Richard Tarrant, a software executive who was the Republican Senate nominee in 2006 and ran many aggressive television ads. “Bernie knew that I earned my money myself, that my wealth was first-generation. But that didn’t matter.”
Mr. Sanders has started running commercials in New York criticizing Mrs. Clinton for accepting six-figure speaking fees from Wall Street banks but not supporting a federal $15 minimum wage. And in Thursday’s debate, he suggested that Mrs. Clinton’s speaking fees had influenced her to be soft on Wall Street regulation. She quickly dismissed that, saying that she had called out bankers over business practices — drawing a sarcastic response from Mr. Sanders.
“Secretary Clinton called them out — oh my goodness, they must have been really crushed by this,” he said. “And was that before or after you received huge sums of money by giving speaking engagements? So they must have been very, very upset by what you did.”
While Mr. Sanders has not run ominous-sounding and highly personal ads against Mrs. Clinton — the sort that traditionally characterize a negative campaign — Mrs. Clinton’s advisers accused Mr. Sanders of breaking his word.
“At times he does it deftly, but make no mistake, every day Senator Sanders is launching another attack, and that’s not how he said he would run his campaign,” said Joel Benenson, Mr. Clinton’s campaign strategist.
Mr. Devine, a longtime strategist for Mr. Sanders, said his candidate’s quips and tone were a far cry from the insult-packed vitriol in the Republican race. He insisted that Mr. Sanders was seeking to reveal substantive differences with Mrs. Clinton, and denied that his candidate fears the Democratic nomination is slipping away.
“I think the race is just increasingly engaged,” Mr. Devine said.
In Vermont, however, Mr. Sanders was known for belittling opponents at times, rather than merely challenging their ideas. During one debate in the 1986 governor’s race, Mr. Sanders was asked if he viewed Governor Kunin as “the lesser of two evils,” given his descriptions of the Democratic and Republican parties as “Tweedledum” and “Tweedledee,” and if he thought he might contribute to her political “demise.”
Mr. Sanders chuckled and then looked at Ms. Kunin, seated a few feet away.
“Governor, how does it feel to be the lesser of two evils?” he asked. “I think that really is what this campaign is about.” Ms. Kunin was stone-faced.
Toward the end of that campaign, Ms. Kunin said, Mr. Sanders argued at a rally in Burlington, Vt., that he would do far more for women than Ms. Kunin.
“Bernie thought I was an empty suit, and insisted that he was the better feminist because he would solve income inequality and that would help women,” Ms. Kunin said in the interview. “He could be sarcastic, but also very subtle.”
A supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid, Ms. Kunin said she saw similarities between his treatment of the two women.
“He’s not going to say, ‘She’s a woman, she’s not qualified,’” said Ms. Kunin, who was re-elected with 47 percent of the vote after Mr. Sanders siphoned off some support. “But he can paint a very subtle illusion talking about qualifications and judgment.”
Mr. Devine, the adviser to Mr. Sanders, said the senator would never make gender-based attacks, in the 1980s or today. “His focus is on issues,” he said.
Peter Smith, the Republican candidate for governor in 1986 and the congressman Mr. Sanders ousted in 1990, said that Mr. Sanders used passion to create “a contrast between him and his opponent that may not, in fact, exist.” Mr. Sanders’s aides in the 1990 campaign said they would regularly taunt Mr. Smith about his positions on issues like the minimum wage, which the congressman would dispute, and then Mr. Sanders would come forward and accuse Mr. Smith of dishonesty. As a result, a running theme of that campaign was that Mr. Sanders had integrity and Mr. Smith lacked it.
“The tool he uses is his intensity and his belief that, on the major issues he cares about, there is only one right answer,” Mr. Smith said. “And it is his.”
The Challenges Hillary Clinton and I Face Every Day
Mike Segar / Reuters
By Chandralekha Singh Physics Professor at University of Pittsburgh, International Leader in Physics Education, Motto: Be the Change You Want to See in the World 04/15/2016 10:46 am ET | Updated Apr 15, 2016
I am a successful physicist — ambitious, passionate about my work, with an excellent academic pedigree at top institutions. And yet because I am a woman, I have faced hurdles that no male with my credentials must face.
In this election year, I identify deeply with Hillary Clinton. My identification stems not only because of her political views and positions (which I happen to agree with) but with the struggle she continually faces because of her gender. It is a struggle that women in many professions must contend with on a daily basis.
Physics continues to be regarded as a man’s domain by many even today. The percentage of female full professors like me across the US universities is still less than 10 percent and gender stereotypes and implicit biases often impact the advancement of female physicists.
Meg Urry, a professor of physics and astronomy and the director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics noted [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/01/opinion/urry-women-science/ ], “I also struggled to understand why I didn’t seem to belong in my field — why I was overlooked for leadership roles, why I was underpaid, why my suggestions were ignored until a male colleague proposed the same idea and why female scientists in general garnered a disproportionately small share of honors and awards.” Many of my female physics colleagues across the U.S. share similar experiences.
Several female physicists who have won major awards or obtained membership in the prestigious National Academy of Science have been told by male colleagues that they have been honored only because of their gender and not because of their talents and achievements!
Many female colleagues from around the U.S. have told me that not a day goes by when they have not experienced something in their interactions with colleagues that is due to gender bias, including jokes that are disrespectful to women.
While the climate in the physics departments at universities needs improvement and implicit gender bias must be explicitly addressed, the environment for female scientists in industries is hardly better.
One incidence I vividly recall is when I volunteered to be a physics judge at the Pittsburgh regional science fair. At the end of the judging period, the physics judges were asked to assemble in a room and come to a consensus about the winners. I was the only woman in the room and everybody else was a scientist from industries in the Pittsburgh area. I was taken aback at how every time I tried to give a suggestion, it was completely ignored as though nobody heard what I had to say. I have a voice that projects extremely well, but other judges behaved as though I was not there!
Teaching evaluations of male and female faculty members also show implicit bias against women. For example, research [ http://0-literature.proquest.com.fama.us.es/searchFulltext.do?id=R05075256&divLevel=0&area=abell&forward=critref_ft ] has been conducted in which students are asked to rate the teaching of hypothetical male or female teachers based upon identical information about their teaching philosophy and approaches with gender being the only difference in different versions of the teaching dossiers given to them.
The findings suggest that students are significantly more likely to rate the identical dossier with the male name higher in terms of teaching effectiveness than the female name. The male teachers are given benefit of doubt and considered smarter. The dossier of a strict teacher with a female name often evokes labels such as “mean” but that is not the case for an identical dossier with a male name.
What is noteworthy is that people are unaware of their negative gender bias even though such an implicit bias impacts their actual decision making processes.
One research study [ http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8782.abstract ] suggests that hurricanes labeled with female names cause twice as much damage than those labeled with male names because people do not take hurricanes with female names as seriously and prepare for them.
The fact that hurricanes with female names are automatically considered less powerful reflects implicit gender bias. Without people’s conscious awareness, this type of bias affects other types of decisions people make, including who employers hire and who people vote for.
In a research study [ http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf ] about implicit bias in hiring decisions, identical resumes were sent for a job application — one with a female name and another with a male name. The overwhelming majority preferred the male candidate.
To investigate whether scientists also have implicit gender bias, a research study [ http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract ] was conducted at Yale University in which scientists were asked to review hypothetical equivalent curriculum vitae of a male and a female undergraduate student in science applying for a lab technician’s position and asked how likely they were to hire them and how much they were willing to pay them if they hired them.
A female name caused backlash. Both men and women reviewing the curriculum vitae were less willing to hire the person and if they agreed to hire her, they offered her a lower salary. Consistent with this study, Carnegie Mellon University professor Linda Babcock’s research [ http://www.womendontask.com/ ] also shows that both men and women have similar gender bias against professional women.
Several research studies suggest that even letters of recommendation of a man and woman generally differ qualitatively in its content, which could cost women jobs and affect their promotion prospects. For example, in one research study [ http://www.academic.umn.edu/wfc/rec%20letter%20study%202009.pdf ], researchers discovered gender stereotypes in such letters and found that women were described in more communal terms while men were portrayed in more agentic or assertive terms such as “born leader” and “goal oriented” which often adversely affected the prospects of the female candidate.
In another study [ https://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/committees/womanadvocate/practice.html ], professional men and women were asked to rate the performance of chief executives who voiced their opinions more or less frequently about important issues. Male executives who voiced their opinion more than their peers received 10 percent higher rating but female executives who voiced their opinion more than their peers received 14 percent lower rating.
What these research studies and my own personal experiences suggest is that it is easy for people to interpret the same qualities in men and women differently and interact with them very differently due to their implicit bias.
Hillary Clinton in her run for the Oval Office faces a similar implicit bias. Derogatory terms such as “power hungry” have been used to describe Clinton, but an equivalent male candidate with her vision, talent and ambition to lead our nation will never be labeled in this manner. Although most voters if asked say that they would vote for the best candidate regardless of their gender, the truth is that their evaluation is often clouded by the gender of the candidate.
According to experiments by Cecilia Mo [ http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/what-me-sexist ] of Vanderbilt University, voters unconsciously prefer male leaders. Mo remarks that “There appears to be a gulf between our conscious ideals of equality and our unconscious tendency to discriminate at the ballot box.”
One of the most difficult aspects of implicit bias is the fact that those who are biased can be completely unaware, and even proud of their lack of bias. Here I give an example of a female physicist who was struggling to maintain an academic career in physics while her physicist husband worked in a tenure-track position. A colleague of her husband asked her why she was so concerned about having a tenure-track position, since her husband could support her financially. What if the gender roles were reversed? Would he have said the same thing to her husband? Ironically, this same implicitly-biased colleague was quoted in a newspaper as stating that physicists do not have any gender bias.
What is surprising is that even liberated people who are otherwise broad minded can harbor implicit gender bias when it comes to professional women like Clinton and me.
You can take tests at the website, implicit.harvard.edu [ https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ ], to check your implicit bias. The results of these tests suggest that even those who pride themselves as being objective have implicit bias against gender and race. Moreover, not only men, but even women are biased against professional women.
In order to elect the most qualified leader of our country, an immensely important job, we need to take gender completely out of the equation. Doing so requires unmasking and removing the implicit gender bias against Hillary Clinton and the built in male privilege that all the male presidential candidates have.
Since the biases against Hillary Clinton are implicit, it would be a worthwhile exercise for each of us who is voting to evaluate our thoughts about each candidate consciously reversing the gender of each candidate and keeping everything else about them the same.
Will our views about the candidates be different if Hillary Clinton were a male and all male candidates were females and everything else about them was exactly the same?
We should vote for the most deserving candidate who is ready to effectively embrace the opportunities and challenges that our great nation faces and who has the greatest ability and experience to push forward agenda and policies that empower all Americans and help them live better lives.
Shrunken Citigroup Illustrates a Trend in Big U.S. Banks
A Citibank branch in Caracas. Citi has shed retail branches from Boston to Pakistan. Credit Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters
By NATHANIEL POPPER and MICHAEL CORKERY APRIL 15, 2016
Citigroup [ http://www.nytimes.com/topic/company/citigroup-inc ] became the nation’s first megabank some two decades ago by expanding into new businesses while pushing to knock down barriers that limited its size.
A much different Citigroup was evident on Friday as it reported its quarterly results. Business lines like subprime lending, which used to define the company, have all but disappeared.
Over the last seven years, Citigroup has sold more than 60 businesses, shedding retail bank branches from Boston to Pakistan. In all, the bank’s holdings have shrunk by $700 billion — an amount roughly equivalent to Switzerland’s economic output. The bank’s chief executive said on Friday that since he took over in 2012, the company’s work force had declined by 40,000 jobs, through layoffs or selling businesses.
On the campaign trail, and in the Democratic debate Thursday, the conversation has often returned to an assumption that very little has changed in the nation’s banking system since the 2008 financial crisis. But Citigroup’s financial results were one of many reminders this week of just how much success the government has already had in pushing banks to become simpler and safer, if not always smaller.
Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, in their own earnings announcements this week, emphasized how much more of a financial cushion they had built up to protect themselves in a crisis, and how many risky businesses they had jettisoned.
The bank presentations this week also indicated that even if Senator Bernie Sanders, Democrat of Vermont, does not win the White House — and is thwarted in his wish to break up the big banks — the companies will still face intense pressure from their regulators and their shareholders to shed more employees and business lines.
On Thursday, Bank of America talked about the likelihood of further reductions, while Goldman Sachs is said to be embarking on its biggest cost-cutting campaign in years.
All of these moves are a testament to the power of the tools that the regulators have already used, and appear intent to continue using, to change the profile of the biggest American banks.
Rather than simply telling the banks to shrink, regulators have used a set of sometimes arcane instruments — like capital requirements — that have quietly but significantly penalized the banks for their size and complexity, and required them to find ways to shrink on their own.
Just this week, the top bank regulators wielded a relatively new tool when they told five of the eight largest banks that they needed to develop better plans for winding themselves down in case of a crisis. If the banks do not do so, the regulators threatened to force the banks to shrink even more.
Citigroup was the only one of the eight largest banks to have its plan, or so-called living will, approved by the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, in large part because of the steps the bank has already taken to slim down.
Like the other big banks, it is not yet out of the woods, however. Because of the regulatory penalties for being large, some on Wall Street are questioning whether even in its diminished state, Citigroup is still too large.
“You should be selling the silverware in the dining rooms or the paper clips from the desk or the desk chairs or the whole desk,” the banking analyst Mike Mayo told Citigroup’s top executives in a conference call Friday morning.
Mr. Mayo’s frustration is a response to the struggles of Citigroup and other banking giants to increase profits under the new regulatory burden they are facing. The results in the first quarter were among the weakest the big banks have reported since the financial crisis, as they struggled with a sluggish global economy and persistently low interest rates.
The challenges have pushed bank stocks down this year to their lowest level since 2012. That in turn, has forced bank executives to cut salaries and bonuses, and thousands of jobs, across their business lines.
Financial services nonetheless is still among the highest-paying sectors in the country. And more important, the big banks remain behemoths. JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo are bigger than they were before the financial crisis. At all the big banks, the risk-taking Wall Street operations still provide a major proportion of revenue and profit.
But all of that is being squeezed by the “vise that is the current regulatory environment,” said Brian Kleinhanzl, an analyst with Keefe Bruyette & Woods, an investment bank.
Mr. Kleinhanzl has said that Citigroup will probably have to eventually break into smaller pieces if it wants to increase growth under current regulations.
Until now, many of the assets that large banks like Citigroup have sold have included a hodgepodge of businesses — student loans, an insurance unit and retail operations in far-flung corners or the developing world.
Mr. Kleinhanzl says the bank needs to take more drastic steps, making the case for Citigroup to split its consumer and corporate businesses into two separate companies or sell parts of its profitable Mexican unit.
Still, the banks could get a reprieve from many of these pressures if a Republican wins the White House in November. All of the top Republican candidates have called for a reversal of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul that has guided many of the recent regulatory actions.
Citigroup and the other big banks continue to defend the economic importance of global banks with a wide array of business lines.
“We don’t think it’s the time to start selling the furniture,” Citigroup’s chief financial officer, John C. Gerspach, said in response to Mr. Mayo.
But at more than a few points, hints of resignation crept into the presentations of the top bank executives as they spoke of the need to submit to the tightening regulatory vise.
“We’re trying to meet all the regulations, all the rules and all the requirements,” JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, said on Thursday, after announcing one of the bank’s worst quarters in years.
“We’ve been doing that now for five or six years. It’s six years since Dodd-Frank was passed; they have their job to do, and we have to conform to it.”
How Regulators Mess With Bankers’ Minds, and Why That’s Good
Hyman Minsky, an economist who died almost 20 years ago, was prescient about the trends in the financial system and wider economy that contributed to the financial crisis of 2008. Credit Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
By Peter Eavis APRIL 14, 2016
Bank regulators on Wednesday sent a message that big banks are still too big and too complex. They rejected special plans, called living wills, that the banks have to submit to show they can go through an orderly bankruptcy.
The thinking behind the regulators’ call for living wills is that if a large bank crash is orderly, there will be no need to save it and no need for taxpayer bailouts.
Pretty straightforward, right? Not for the banks. The regulators deliberately did not communicate the exact things the banks needed to do for their plans to pass muster. In this way, they kept them on their toes — and treating powerful banks this way may end up playing a surprisingly important role in keeping the financial regulation [ http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/credit_crisis/financial_regulatory_reform/index.html ] effective over time.
Over the decades leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, banks learned how to sidestep and water down the relatively tough regulations introduced after the crash of 1929. This ability of the banks to get their way was spotted by Hyman Minsky [ http://www.levyinstitute.org/about/minsky/ ], a maverick economist who died 20 years ago. He was prophetic, too. He identified and warned about the sort of trends in the financial system and the wider economy that helped cause the last financial crisis. That is why when everything started falling apart in 2008, some commentators said [ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/04/the-minsky-moment ] a “Minsky moment” had arrived.
Mr. Minsky pithily observed that stability gives rise to instability. As the economy grows steadily, banks and companies start to overreach. Banks lend too much, and companies and consumers overborrow, which ultimately makes the system fragile. And while financial regulation was necessary to limit excessive behavior during those stable times, Mr. Minsky observed that bankers eventually found ways around the rules.
This part of Mr. Minsky’s thinking was on my mind this week at the annual Minsky conference at the Levy Economics Institute [ http://www.levyinstitute.org/ ] of Bard College. The focus of the gathering was the Dodd-Frank Act [ https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/4173 ], the sweeping overhaul of the financial system that Congress passed in 2010. Many of the speakers, being acolytes of Mr. Minsky, said they expected the bankers to find ways to dodge Dodd-Frank in the coming years.
But Dodd-Frank might have built-in self-protections. It seems to take into account Mr. Minsky’s warnings, with provisions that allow the law to be refreshed and changed as the financial system evolves. Regulators have already used those features to seize the initiative over bankers.
They have done so with so-called living wills. The regulators get to determine what needs to be in the living wills. One senior agency official told me on Wednesday that they try not to make the exercise so clear that the banks treat it just like any other compliance exercise.
Perhaps even more important are the annual regulatory stress tests that assess how large banks would bear up under theoretical crashes in the markets and global economy. Undertaken by the Federal Reserve, these tests have caused significant headaches for the banks, and some banks have failed them, mostly because their plans for handling the hypothetical stress were judged inadequate. This has caused unease among the banks’ senior managers. If the banks flunk the stress tests, they don’t get to distribute money to shareholders or buy back shares. The banks are kept on their toes because conditions assumed in the tests, and the things regulators look for, can change.
Dodd-Frank also set up something called the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a special regulatory body that sits above other regulators. One of its main jobs is to scour the financial system looking for new risks. If it can resist the influence of bank lawyers and lobbyists, the council could use this power to limit the growth of new financial products that are devised to avoid regulation.
The council also seeks to identify which large financial firms that are not banks — think, big insurance companies — should be subject to stricter regulation. It’s a duty that was devised in response to the huge buildup of risks at the American International Group, which received one of the biggest bailouts.
True, the financial industry has already won a substantial victory to limit regulation. A Federal District Court recently ruled that the council could not subject MetLife, a large insurance company, to stricter regulation. Still, many lawyers believe that the court’s ruling is shaky and will be overturned on appeal.
Mr. Minsky would be wary, however. These features of Dodd-Frank that allow regulators to stay ahead of the banks require independent-minded regulators to use them. The economy is strengthening, and banks are getting healthier. This is the period of stability that Mr. Minsky warns about, when the regulators start to believe that most risks have been constrained, causing them to miss new dangers. And the financial industry is likely to win important victories in Congress that roll back regulation, as it did at the end of 2014, when an important part of Dodd-Frank was gutted [ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/a-rule-with-few-friends-struggles-to-survive/ ].
But for now at least, banking regulators seem willing to use their freedom to mess with the banks.
Hard to resolve. Photographer: Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg
By Editorial Board April 14, 2016 5:09 PM EST
U.S. banks are safer today than they were in 2007, but not yet as safe as they should be. For the second time in two years, regulators have found [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-13/five-big-banks-living-wills-rejected-by-u-s-banking-agencies ] that some of the country's biggest banks can't adequately explain how they could go under -- should it come to that -- in an orderly fashion, at no cost to taxpayers, and without destabilizing the wider financial system.
The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 told large financial institutions to draw up "living wills" -- plans for dismantling the enterprises if they go bust. This was seen as an extra safeguard, beyond requiring banks to pass stress tests and finance their lending with adequate capital. Stress tests can't cover every possibility, the thinking went, and even a well-capitalized bank can fail. If that were to happen, its bankruptcy ought to cause as little damage as possible.
Banks have struggled to comply. In 2014, the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. sent the living wills back for more work. The regulators announced their judgment of that work this week. While noting some improvement, they found [ https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/bcreg/20160413a.htm ] faults in all of the revised plans that eight systemically important U.S. banks filed in mid-2015. (Citigroup's plan, despite "shortcomings," was provisionally approved.) Five of the wills were deemed "not credible," which allows the regulators to impose changes -- including requiring more capital and even forcibly shrinking the banks -- if the deficiencies are not made good.
In judging these plans, one issue is whether banks have sufficient cash and other liquid assets to keep their businesses running while they are wound down or sold. Some experts believe that the needed liquidity could amount [ https://www.bettermarkets.com/sites/default/files/Breathing%20Life%20Into%20Living%20Wills.pdf ] to hundreds of billions of dollars, as short-term creditors demand their money back and derivatives counterparties seek more collateral. Another question, even harder to judge, is whether the banks have staffed and organized themselves in such a way that this process would be well-managed, rather than causing panic.
Case by case, it's hard for investors to assess the plans, because only a small portion is made public. For the same reason, it's hard to know whether the regulators are being too demanding, as some banks argue, or not demanding enough. A valid complaint about Dodd-Frank is that it overcomplicated the regulatory system -- and one of the main reasons for demanding adequate capital is that other parts of the system could then be made simpler and less onerous.
Nonetheless, extra capital doesn't guarantee a bank against failure, and regulators need to consider what might happen in the worst and possibly unforeseen case. Ambitious, enterprising bankers want to concentrate on growing their businesses. They'd prefer not to think about winding them down. Bearing in mind the harm that a failing big bank can cause, regulators are right to insist.
To contact the senior editor responsible for Bloomberg View’s editorials: David Shipley at davidshipley@bloomberg.net.
Bernie’s Attack on the Billionaire Class; Is it Really That Simple?
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Monica Bauer 04/18/2016 12:13 pm ET
The simplistic way the Sanders campaign views money in politics has been driving me crazy, because it seems so clear, but it is so distorted as to mislead an entire generation of younger voters. The simple tale the Sanders campaign tells is that big money is always evil, small donations are always good, and that accepting campaign contributions from people who work in an industry such as finance or energy is a kind of legal bribery. This sounds absolutely true until you examine it with more care. The Sanders campaign is using this like a cudgel against Hillary Clinton, when I would argue that the big money interests that stand in the way of progressive causes have not bought Hillary Clinton, or the Democratic Party, and the evidence is on my side. Big Business has their champion in the Republican Party, and they are the ones Sanders should be attacking.
Some history: I spent many years writing about money in politics, going all the way back to the book I co-authored with the late Herbert Alexander, dean of campaign finance analysis, Financing the 1988 Election (Westview Press [ http://www.amazon.com/Financing-1988-Election-Herbert-Alexander/dp/0813382696 ]). I wrote articles on campaign finance and congressional elections, book chapters, and ran for Congress myself as a progressive Democrat endorsed by Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in my home state of Nebraska in 1984, where I was dutifully and expectedly clobbered by the incumbent Republican. I went to Washington as a Democratic nominee for Congress begging for PAC money from all the progressive PACs, and the only money I could get was from unions, and that was only because my family had a history with the UFCW, because my Dad was a packinghouse worker in Omaha. So I am hardly a corporate tool.
Some evidence: let’s look at the simple explanation Sanders is offering his followers. Ask yourself the “if-then” question researchers use. If it were true that our politics was completely decided by legalized bribery, then wouldn’t it be the case that both parties would be serving the biggest moneyed interests? Only die-hard socialists believe this, because for them it is a matter of faith that the “millionaire and billionaire classes” always work for their own advantages and against the interests of ordinary workers. The actual evidence is that the Democratic party supports environmentalism, unions, raising the minimum wage for workers, equal pay for women, and on and on. The Democratic party supports progressive taxation and fights like hell against efforts to give more tax breaks to the top one percent of the population. The Democratic party fights like hell against polluters. And yet, most Democratic members of the House and Senate have some portion of their campaign funds coming from “the millionaires and billionaires” that Sanders attacks every day with his broad, broad brush.
There are millionaires in Silicon Valley, in Hollywood, in the Upper West Side and elsewhere who are environmentalists and champions of the rights of workers. From where did we get the “Buffet rule,” the notion that a secretary should never pay at the same tax rate as the boss? From billionaire Warren Buffet, supporter of Democrats. And a mensch from my home town of Omaha.
But is Hillary Clinton some kind of stealth Republican, gaining most of her money from Goldman Sachs? No, in fact, it has been illegal for a long time for companies to donate directly to candidates. They can contribute only through corporate PACs. Hillary Clinton takes zero money from corporate PACs, and donations from an individual who works at Goldman Sachs are hardly the same as a corporate check. But you wouldn’t know this from Bernie’s hot and angry rhetoric. But why would Hillary get lots of donations from people who work on Wall Street, if not to buy her votes? Could it be possible that it has something to do with the fact that she represented New York in the Senate for eight years, and New York City is the national capital of banking and finance? Could it be likely that wealthy individuals are more able to give large campaign donations to their favorite candidates, and that these wealthy donors are Democrats who want a Democrat to win in November?
If Hillary Clinton had represented Iowa in the Senate for eight years, I’d expect to find checks from a lot of donors who work in Agribusiness. Because Bernie Sanders is a senator from a rural state with a lot of gun owners, I’d expect Bernie Sanders to get a lot of donations from people who own guns and belong to the NRA. But there’s no way to know that, because the Federal Election Commission only asks donors what industry they work in, not what other organizations they support.
Back to the “if-then” question. If you think Hillary Clinton has been bought and paid for by “the billionaire class,” then where is the proof of this in the actual actions, advocacy and voting record of Hillary Clinton? When asked about this in the Brooklyn debate by Dana Bash, who invited Bernie to point to a single vote that demonstrated this supposed truth, he could not offer an example, not one.
It would be great if all campaigns could be funded by massive amounts of money from small donors. But political science evidence tells us that most American voters are not ideologically committed enough to either party to send any party or candidate a dime. Only the most ideologically motivated give money, on both sides. If the average American voter would commit to sending $10 per month, month after month, to the party of her or his choice, there might be enough money to allow candidates to skip fundraising altogether and just concentrate on governing. Trust me, politicians would love this. They hate fundraising! Fundraising sucks! I know, I have done it.
But just having a base of small donors does nothing to prove that your campaign is all about justice and fairness. Sometimes small campaign contributions come from racists sending in their dimes to Donald Trump. Sometimes wealthy people support the environment and women’s rights and an end to mass incarceration. Sometimes things that seem to be true, just aren’t. So until Bernie’s campaign has evidence that Hillary is corrupt, from a 30-year record of public service including numerous votes in the Senate and years of advocacy for women’s rights, minority rights, children’s rights, the Sanders campaign should shut up. Put up or shut up, Bernie. It’s the Republican Party that’s been getting open support from big business for years, and the evidence in her voting records is clear as crystal that she’s been their Number One Enemy her whole career. So to Bernie and his supporters, I want to say this; cease and desist. You are aiming your fire at the wrong enemy.
Audio [embedded]: Candidate Confessional Richard Carmona On His 2012 Senate Campaign For years Richard Carmona resisted pleas from both parties to run for office. He was a former U.S. Surgeon General under George W. Bush, a one-time police officer and public health administrator. His reputation was sterling and he didn't want to muck it up. When he finally decided to run -- for the U.S. Senate in Arizona as a Democrat in 2012 -- he quickly realized why he had declined all those prior overtures. Simply put: he hated his campaign. https://soundcloud.com/candidate-confessional/richard-carmona [no comments yet]
The sound bites. The fundraising. The phony attacks. Richard Carmona despised all of it.
By Jason Cherkis and Sam Stein 03/25/2016 07:01 am ET
WASHINGTON — It took years to convince Richard Carmona to run for office.
As he tells it in the latest episode of “Candidate Confessional [ https://soundcloud.com/candidate-confessional ],” political leaders would often prod him to join their ranks. When he served as surgeon general under President George W. Bush, Republicans came calling to ask him to run for Congress and for governor of Arizona. He always turned them down.
“I had no political aspirations,” Carmona explained.
But when a Senate seat opened up in Arizona in 2012, Democrats started pressing. Carmona finally decided to listen more closely. Polling data showed a path to victory for him. Top operatives laid out a well-prepped game plan for the general election. President Barack Obama called to encourage him to explore a bid.
The recruitment worked. Carmona took the plunge, running against Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) for the seat being vacated by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and setting in motion one of the most embittering years of his adult life.
Of all the candidates we’ve interviewed, Carmona is easily the one most likely to never run for public office again. He’d come into the race an accomplished military veteran, deputy sheriff and surgeon general who was widely respected by both parties. He left the political world jaded and angry, his sterling reputation having endured a few dents along the way.
Carmona was both ill-suited to the role of candidate and also repulsed by the process itself.
He hated sound bites.
“Every time I did political speak, I always felt bad about it,” Carmona said. “I did it because my staff told me [to]. ... It was clear that I didn’t have the time to explain when you are given two minutes or five minutes or so on, and so I had to switch my approach. But I could tell you that after every one of those press conferences and discussions, I would always go in and say to them, ‘Goddamn, it is more complicated than that.’”
And Carmona was shocked that the very politicians who had praised him in his earlier career, and even encouraged him to run for office, turned on him once he chose a side.
“[John] McCain and Kyl lauded my background as a soldier, as a veteran, as a professor,” Carmona said. “But when I ran on the other ticket, they took out ads saying I was a terrible person and I couldn’t be trusted. And they knew better. But it shows how disingenuous the whole process is — the very people that supported me for national office, and helped me get a confirmation that was unanimous, for the first time in history, for surgeon general, are the ones that took me to task for being a terrible person because I didn’t run in their party.”
Despite how awful the experience felt, Carmona still performed pretty well. In a Republican-heavy state, he finished just 3 percentage points behind Flake. When it was all over, he had a strong sense of relief that the campaign was over.
“I felt both disappointed and elated not to have to go and pick up phones and ask people for money,” he said. “And not have to go and talk in sound bites anymore, OK? All of that was gone and I could be myself again.”
Lawmakers have to raise money to keep their jobs, but a surprising amount of their job now consists of raising money. John Oliver sits down with Congressman Steve Israel to discuss the costs of political spending.
Mother Of Slain Aurora Teen Calls Out Bernie Sanders On Gun Control
She accused the Democratic presidential candidate of laughing about gun violence and having no compassion for victims.
By Willa Frej 04/19/2016 01:19 pm ET | Updated Apr 20, 2016
The mother of a teenage girl who was killed in the Aurora, Colorado, massacre in 2012 wants to sit down with Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to get him to change his stance on gun control.
Sandy Phillips, who has become an advocate fighting gun violence in America after the death of her daughter, Jessica, shared her disappointment with Sanders Tuesday, saying he showed a “lack of compassion” during the CNN democratic debate last week.
Sanders laughed at Hillary Clinton when she defended her past comments about Vermont, Sanders’ home state, having “the highest per capita number of guns that end up committing crimes in New York.”
Victims of gun violence “have the right to sue, and I support them and anyone else who wants the right to sue,” Sanders said.
But he also said that “if a gun shop owner sells a weapon legally to somebody and that person then goes out and kills somebody, I don’t believe it is appropriate that that gun shop owner who just sold a legal weapon to be held accountable and be sued.”
Erica Lafferty Smegielski, the daughter of Sandy Hook School Principal Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, shared Phillips’ message.
Phillips “has been trying to set up [a meeting with Sanders] since late last year,” Smegielski told The Huffington Post.
Smegielski said that Sanders did call Phillips at the end of last year and agreed to sit down with her, but the meeting never got set up.
It’s “really telling that it hasn’t happened yet,” Smegielski said, “to really just blow off someone whose daughter was murdered because he’s being called out on a very unfortunate decision.”
If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, Smegielski said she doesn’t know what more she can do. “I feel like he has us backed into a corner right now. We’ve asked for meetings, we’ve asked for sit-downs, we’ve asked him to explain, and his response was nothing more than a political attack on Clinton.”
The Sanders campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Remarks on "Rejecting False Choices: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East" at the U.S. Naval Academy's Forrestal Lecture on Foreign Policy
Ambassador Samantha Power U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations U.S. Mission to the United Nations
April 13, 2016
AS DELIVERED
Thank all of you for coming out. Thanks to Admiral Carter for having me. It is a huge privilege to join you here at the great Naval Academy – especially during your celebration of 40 years of women. [Applause.] I am right now the only woman permanent representative serving on the 15-member UN Security Council. [Applause.] I guess it’s good there’s one [laughter] – but you all are doing a lot better, and I congratulate you on the fact that 25 percent of your remarkable student body is now women. [Applause.]
And I am so excited to be here and to be a part of this occasion that I brought my parents, who are here in the front row – my mother and my father. [Applause.] And, arguably even more dramatically, I brought my aunt and uncle from a very small village in County Kerry Ireland. So they are here at the Naval Academy, Patricia and Derry Gibson. [Applause.]
All right, to business.
In reflecting on the period immediately following the European revolutions of 1848, the historian A.J.P. Taylor once wrote: “History reached a turning point but failed to turn.” Looking at the Middle East and North Africa some five years after the onset of the Arab Spring, Taylor’s description can feel strikingly apt. Autocratic governments remain in place in much of the region, and a handful of countries are being roiled by some of the most hellish violence the world has seen in at least a generation. Meanwhile, as you all know, terrorist groups have exploited the growing instability and despair to seize large swaths of territory and to attract thousands of foreign fighters.
Because the United States is the most powerful country in the world – and given the state of the region – some have second-guessed the decisions that President Obama and his Administration have made on the Middle East.
We take very seriously the critiques of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy in the region. Some, citing Libya, have charged that we have mistakenly used military force when our vital national security interests were not at stake; others, citing Syria, have blamed us for failing to intervene militarily and suggested that, had we used force against the Assad regime, hundreds of thousands of lives could well have been saved. On the diplomatic front, some feel that our concerns about the absence of political reform in the region have caused us to be too critical of our friends, complicating – or even weakening – partnerships that have served our interests well over many decades. They say we’ve been too idealistic in believing that the mass uprisings of the Arab Spring could lead to more inclusive, accountable governments. At the same time, other critics have deemed us too quick to give up on political reform and the reformers, too quick to revert to allying with strongmen who offer no lasting hope of stability.
These critiques go to the heart of how America is engaging in the Middle East in the most tumultuous period the region has experienced in decades. And they raise a fundamental question that American leaders will continue to grapple with going forward: How do we deploy the foreign policy tools at our disposal – chief among them our military, our diplomacy, and our support for governments and citizens in the region? How do we deploy those tools to advance America’s vital national interests in a period of seismic upheaval? Tonight I would like to take each of these tools in turn.
First, how do we effectively deploy the U.S. military to advance our interests in the region?
We will not hesitate to use lawful and necessary force unilaterally to systematically degrade and destroy violent extremist groups. We – you – have aggressively hunted down terrorists across borders, killing Osama Bin Laden and decimating Al Qaeda’s senior leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have done the same with many of ISIL’s top leaders, as American fighters, bombers, drones, and artillery are routinely now pounding ISIL targets. The 66-member coalition that President Obama has marshaled has carried out more than 11,500 airstrikes to date, not only hitting ISIL fighting positions, bunkers, and staging areas, but also degrading ISIL’s ability to move fighters and materiel; and targeting the oil production, industrial base, and money-storing facilities that ISIL needs to finance its violence.
In Iraq, where we have a capable partner, we are working by, with, and through the Iraqi government. Iraqi forces have rolled back ISIL from nearly half of the populated areas that the group dominated at its peak in August 2014. American advisors are assisting Iraqi security forces as they retake territory from ISIL, including towns along the Euphrates River Valley. We have also deployed special operations forces to Iraq and Syria, where their unique capabilities in intelligence gathering, targeting, and training local forces have made them significant force multipliers on the ground. As a result, by any objective measure, ISIL is losing ground.
Put simply, we understand that our military can and often does play a decisive role in the region, and of course more broadly, in the world. Nobody needs to remind us how strong we are.
And we recognize that is true most of all because of the brave men and women who serve in our military’s ranks – individuals like you, who are taking tremendous risks to serve our nation, upon whose shoulders our security rests, and some of whom have made the ultimate sacrifice.
At the same time, we recognize that force cannot be the only – or even the primary – way we advance our interests. Nobody makes this argument more powerfully than our Secretary of Defense, our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and of course, than President Obama, who said at West Point, “Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.” This is not timidity. It is judiciousness. There is nothing weak about weighing carefully when and where we deploy our troops. You would expect nothing less, and you deserve nothing less.
This is one of the most important lessons of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As President Obama has said, Iraq shows that, “we can dedicate hundreds of thousands of brave, effective troops and trillions of dollars into building a more stable country, but any order we help achieve will only be fleeting unless leaders embrace a form of governance that defeats the ideas that led to strife in the first place.” Iraq also underscored the critical importance of weighing the consequences of military interventions before launching them, and of planning sufficiently for what will follow them; timeless lessons – lessons I’m sure that come up in much of your coursework – but lessons we need to relearn perpetually.
Some see the Administration’s military intervention in Libya as reflecting a similar lack of forethought. Let me take this argument head on. In March 2011, Qaddafi announced that his forces would go, as he put it, “house by house, room by room” to hunt down rebels in their stronghold, and that they would show, as he put it, “no mercy.” In response, after the UN Security Council took the very rare step of authorizing the use of force in Libya to protect civilians, an international coalition – including the United States – launched airstrikes to stop an impending massacre, which ended up helping turn the tide in the conflict against Qaddafi, who was eventually toppled. After Qaddafi’s fall, many of the militias who had come together to oust him turned on one another, undermining the efforts of successive governments to restore a sense of order and set up basic institutions, and fostering a climate of instability that extremist groups have exploited to gain a foothold in the country.
Now, there is an ongoing debate about whether the international community should have done more to prepare for the aftermath of the NATO air campaign. I believe that this question is very valid and very fair. Indeed, President Obama himself has expressed regret for, in his words, “failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.”
But I also think it is naïve to argue that, if we had failed to act back in 2011, we could have avoided violence and instability in Libya. It was not the United States or the coalition of which we were a part that shattered the tenuous stability of the Qaddafi’s tyrannical rule; it was the Libyan insurrection, which was a thoroughly Libyan-driven occurrence. Once the Libyan people had decided to contest Qaddafi’s rule, he would not have been able to restore order – whether by repression or even by brutal massacre. On the contrary, had Qaddafi gone forward and carried out his threats, it would almost certainly have galvanized more fighters to join the ranks fighting against him. So the increasingly common claim that our standing by would somehow have made for a more stable Libya just isn’t right.
The truth is that as Qaddafi’s regime crumbled, it was always going to be immensely challenging to prevent disagreements and power struggles from consuming the rival parties that toppled him. And even in the absence of fighting among militias and tribes, it was never going to be easy for the people of Libya – or successive transitional governments – to lay the foundation for a more pluralistic, inclusive society after four decades of tyrannical rule, during which Qaddafi had done everything in his power to quash the kinds of institutions that are the bedrock of good governance. Even more so because one of the points on which the vast majority of Libyan factions were united was in their opposition to any foreign troop presence, even international troops to assist in the delivery of humanitarian aid or to protect UN diplomats. In a context in which Qaddafi may have retained power but could not have achieved victory outright, one cannot credibly argue that the United States or NATO were what caused instability and violence in Libya.
As Libya continues to confront profound challenges today, the United States has worked extensively with the international community to try to help restore stability and functional governance. Just two weeks ago – in large part because of sustained mediation efforts led by the UN, with full U.S. support – a new unity government arrived in Tripoli. The new government brings together representatives of all of Libya’s regions and major parties, and it has committed to building institutions that serve all Libyans. Immense – daunting – as the obstacles are that Libyans face today, the new government is the best chance the country has had in years to take on the profoundly challenging work of confronting terrorist groups, reining in powerful militias, and rebuilding a country ravaged by war and ravaged by decades of dictatorial rule.
Now, if in Libya we are accused of using force where it was not merited, when it comes to Syria, we have received the opposite critique: that our unwillingness to use our military more extensively – whether by establishing a no-fly zone over part of the country or some other more robust military measure – that that was a mistake.
There is no way that one can look at Syria today and feel that the international community has delivered sufficiently for the Syrian people. You can’t. The scale and intensity of the violence that Syrians have been forced to endure? Incomprehensible. And we have seen the profoundly destabilizing effect that the ongoing violence in Syria has had on the region and on the world, from the spread of terrorist networks to the displacement of millions of refugees across the region and to Europe.
Nonetheless, the situation in Syria is very different from that of Libya in 2011, when we took part in an international military intervention. Neither the Arab League nor the Gulf Cooperation Council have called for creating a no-fly zone in Syria as they did in Libya; nor has the UN authorized the use of force against the Assad regime to protect civilians. On the contrary, one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – Russia – is openly fighting alongside the Syrian military. So is Iran, which has a deep stake in Assad maintaining his grip on power. Syria also has nearly four times the population of Libya, with a much more complex array of combatants than were present in Libya in 2011. Now these complexities do not in any way diminish the suffering of the Syrian people – they have endured a degree of pain and tragedy that is literally hard to wrap one’s mind around – nor does it in any way negate the additional harm and instability caused by Russia’s and Iran’s involvement. And that is why we are so invested in finding a solution. We are supporting the moderate opposition and building the multilateral pressure that we know will be needed to deescalate the violence in a durable way and to reach a political settlement. Secretary Kerry is working 24/7 because of the human stakes, because of the strategic stakes. We are also using our military to systematically degrade and destroy ISIL; and we are ensuring that humanitarian aid can reach the Syrians whose lives depend on it, despite the efforts of both the Assad regime and terrorist groups to block its delivery.
Now this brings me to the second question: How can we use the tool of diplomatic engagement to mitigate the threats posed by our adversaries to advance our vital interests? The most prominent example of our use of the diplomatic tool has been our engagement with Iran, engagement aimed at ensuring that Iran’s nuclear program is and remains exclusively peaceful.
There is consensus in the United States that we cannot and will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. In the words of President Obama, “Not only would it threaten Israel, our strongest ally in the region…but it would also create a possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists.” In addition, it would significantly undermine the non-proliferation regime that is itself a core national security interest.
And yet, when we proposed trying to use the tool of diplomatic engagement to try to get Iran to verifiably ensure that its nuclear program would be exclusively peaceful, many said it was a mistake even to sit down with the Iranian government, arguing that doing so would legitimize a regime that has been a leading sponsor of terrorism, and that any deal reached would be fatally flawed, because it would be predicated on trusting a government with a track record of deceit. But let’s look at what has happened since Iran began taking the steps necessary to implement its commitments under the deal.
Iran has gone from installing nearly 20,000 centrifuges capable of enriching uranium for a nuclear bomb, to removing two-thirds of those machines, including every single centrifuge used for nuclear enrichment at the Fordow facility. Before the deal, Iran possessed enough enriched uranium for up to 10 nuclear bombs. Since the deal was reached, more than 98 percent of that stockpile has been removed from the country, leaving Iran far short of the material needed for a single bomb. Before the deal, Iran was nearing completion of a new reactor at Arak capable of producing plutonium for a bomb. Today, the core of that reactor has been removed and filled with cement. All of this has quadrupled Iran’s “breakout” time from two to three months, to approximately a year. And unlike before the deal, we will know if Iran tries to break out and rush to a bomb, because the deal gives us comprehensive visibility and access to Iran’s nuclear program. Today, international inspectors are subjecting Iran to the most comprehensive, intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated to monitor a nuclear program – one that gives round-the-clock access to Iran’s key nuclear facilities and regular access to its entire nuclear supply chain. Many new transparency measures will stay in place for decades to come.
Our engagement has proven effective so far for four reasons, which apply not only to U.S. engagement with Iran but which would apply to any adversary – in the Middle East or elsewhere in the world.
First, our diplomatic engagement was backed by a broad coalition, whose collective pressure was crucial to getting Iran to change its calculus. Iran would never have come to the table in a serious manner, much less agreed to the rigorous deal we reached, had we not rallied the P5+1 – the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China – and the EU, to join us in applying hard-hitting sanctions and in pressing for a diplomatic resolution. That pressure came not only from the extremely tough unilateral sanctions put in place by President Obama, but also from the robust multilateral sanctions that the UN first imposed on Iran in 2006, and tightened incrementally and progressively in 2007, 2008, and 2010, largely thanks to American leadership. Tough as they were, unilateral sanctions levied by the United States alone would never have brought Iran to the table.
The second reason that our engagement produced this deal was that it was principled. We went into the negotiations clear-eyed, with the mindset that if Iran moved closer to achieving a nuclear weapon, we would walk away from the table. We did not and do not believe in engagement for engagement’s sake; we believe in engagement when it provides a way to advance our interests, chief among them keeping the American people safe.
The third reason our engagement has worked is that it holds Iran accountable, with serious consequences if it does not hold up its commitments. The entire deal is predicated not on what Iran says, but what it does. Not on trust, but on verification. Implementation is everything, which is why we built so many verification measures into the deal. And if Iran does not follow the terms of the deal, all sanctions that have been suspended can be snapped back into place – including where I work, at the UN, where we can unilaterally trigger a process to reinstate multilateral sanctions the moment we believe Iran is breaching the agreement.
The fourth and final reason our engagement has worked – and one of the reasons we were able to mobilize such broad international support – is that in addition to setting out a genuine diplomatic path, we offered Iran the credible incentive of relief from nuclear related sanctions. And we are determined to follow through on our commitments to provide this relief – both to preserve Iran’s long-term incentive to comply with the deal, and to maintain the credibility and effectiveness of U.S. sanctions going forward, which is in part predicated on holding up our end of the deal.
Now, some have faulted the deal for failing to halt Iran’s destabilizing actions in the region, or the widespread human rights violations the regime carries out against its own people. But that represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the deal itself, which had a single objective: to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
The deal does not prevent us from being any less vigilant, any less outspoken, or any less responsive when Iran pursues other forms of destabilizing behavior. And here let me just give you a few examples. Twice since the nuclear deal went into effect, Iran has staged ballistic missile tests in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions. And twice – in January, and then in March – we have imposed new U.S. sanctions on individuals and companies assisting the ballistic missile program. We continue to carry out also aggressive interdiction efforts to seize illegal Iranian arms shipments, as we did just a few weeks ago, on March 28. On that day, the USS Sirocco, assigned to the U.S. 5th Fleet, intercepted and seized a shipment in the Arabian Sea of some 1,500 AK-47s, 200 RPGs, and 21 fifty-caliber machine guns – a shipment that we assess came from Iran and was likely bound for Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Now it is worth noting that the channels of communication developed with Iran over the course of negotiations have proven useful to engaging in other areas of vital interests, including the welfare of our men and women in uniform. When, in January, 10 U.S. sailors were detained by Iran in the Persian Gulf, a series of calls between Secretary Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Zarif, helped us secure their release in less than a day. Those channels also proved useful in persuading Iran to play a more constructive role in pressing for a cessation of hostilities in Syria, which – while very tenuous – has helped to reduce violence in that country. These relationships simply did not exist before we negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran.
Now, having spoken to how we can use military force and diplomatic engagement to advance our interests in the Middle East, this brings me to the third foreign policy tool I’d like to discuss today – our relationships with governments and individuals in the region. So here’s the question: What is the U.S. role in promoting inclusive, accountable governments and robust civil societies that we know are so crucial to advancing our long-term interests in the region?
Now, this question rests on a premise that some in the region – and even in our own country, including a few prominent presidential candidates – might contest. That premise is that the way the countries of the Middle East will achieve greater stability and security over time is by moving toward governments that have to answer to their own people, and that respect human rights. People who challenge this premise tend to argue that strongmen are the only forces that can hold these societies together, and that it was the very collapse of the region’s strongmen that led to the rising violence and turmoil that harm U.S. interests today. One almost encounters a kind of nostalgia for the autocrats who are seen to have maintained order back in the day.
It is true that, for decades, undemocratic governments in the Middle East and North Africa – many of them in fact ruled by strongmen – offered a veneer of stability, particularly when compared to the current upheaval. But the leaders did not grow the political or economic institutions in their society, and, by refraining from pursuing political evolution, they set the stage for much more disruptive revolution. The wave of popular uprisings that spread across the region in 2011 represented a clear rejection of the corrupt, ineffective, and abusive machinery that had stifled people’s aspirations for so long.
Some have argued that the United States should have prevented the Arab Spring, or that different policy choices could have preserved the old order. But the truth is that once the citizens of the region lost their fear – and that was a big threshold they had to cross – once they lost their fear and took to the streets, the strongmen would have needed to use significant violence to try to put the genie back in the bottle – violence of a scale that the United States could not have aligned. Violence that would have never succeeded in the end in turning back the clock.
Let me be clear: the old system was not the source of stability – it was itself at the root of so much of the violence we see in the Middle East today. Autocratic rule is bad for the future of the region and it is bad for the interests of the United States.
Rather than invest in their people, strongmen use their nations to enrich themselves and to crush independent checks on their power. To give just one example, it is estimated that, at one point, approximately one in five people in Libya was on the payroll of Qaddafi’s Orwellian security apparatus. Just think about that: a fifth of a country paid to police itself. Imagine if those resources and that energy had been directed to Libyan schools or Libyan hospitals.
In addition, autocrats routinely stoke ethnic, tribal, and sectarian divisions that can quickly lead to explosive violence. They recognize that one of the most effective ways to entrench themselves in power is to persuade members of one group or another that their survival depends on patronage and protection. Similarly, they are also quick to repress the rights of minorities when they see such actions as a useful distraction, or as an opportunity to strengthen their own hand. In this way, the tension fueled by strongmen becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, igniting divisions between communities that have long lived together in relative stability. And the fiber that binds pluralistic societies together is much easier to tear apart than it is to sew back together.
Another reason we should be wary of supporting strongmen is that they foster a climate of fear and despair that can be exploited by terrorist groups to grab territory, as we have seen, and to attract new members. Extremist groups like ISIL and Al Qaeda have seized upon the frustration that builds up in places where people feel they have no agency to overcome the injustices they endure. These groups promise them a delusional but nominally righteous pathway in which to channel their resentment.
Now no suffering, no matter how profound, can justify terrorism. Nothing can justify a person violently attacking innocent human beings. ISIL is a monstrous, nihilistic movement that has inflicted immeasurable suffering that goes well beyond what its members themselves have experienced. My point is only that that the systematic repression and atrocities that despots rely upon to maintain their grip on power creates a climate of instability and despair that extremist groups have used to help recruit.
Consider Syria, again. No single factor has been a bigger boon for the recruitment of groups like ISIL than the horrors committed by the Assad regime. Each time the Syrian military has gassed a civilian neighborhood; or barrel-bombed a school, hospital, or bread line; or cut off another community from vital humanitarian aid, starving helpless men, women, and children to death – every time the Assad regime has not just succeeded in inflicting tremendous suffering on Syrian people, it has fueled the hatred that ISIL and extremist groups use to draw more fighters to their cause, including thousands of foreign fighters holding American and EU passports.
Thanks to the cessation of hostilities, some of these horrific practices have been reduced. But we still see persistent violations and indiscriminate regime attacks.
The Assad regime also provides an example of the fourth reason autocrats make for bad and unreliable partners: they often support terrorism when they see it as advancing their narrow self interests. During the war in Iraq, the Syrian government allowed its territory to become the main transit route for terrorists traveling to Iraq to fight the American-led coalition. The Syrian government also has sponsored the terrorist group Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon for decades. And while Assad presents himself as the only man standing in the way of ISIL overrunning Syria, he conveniently omits that it was his own government that released up to a thousand violent detainees, including many individuals who had been radicalized in his own appalling prisons, and he did that in order to justify his government’s crackdown on peaceful protesters. Just think about that for a moment: a dictator deliberately, cynically strengthens the hand of terrorists in order to try to gain Western support and create a pretext for crushing nonviolent dissent. Similarly, Qaddafi consistently sponsored terrorist groups and attacks during his reign, including the infamous Lockerbie bombing. Is it really credible to argue that partnering with leaders like these will help us fight terrorism over time?
By now, I suspect some of you are asking: If it really runs counter to U.S. interests in all these ways to prop up strongmen in the Middle East, how do we navigate a region where leaders are not often accountable to their people, and in some cases fiercely crack down on those who criticize them? Or, to put it another way: How do we reconcile what we believe is the path toward greater stability, human rights, and opportunity and prosperity in the region with governments that too often seem to be moving in the other direction?
While it is true that more inclusive, accountable, and rights-respecting governments have the potential to be more effective U.S. partners, we have other priorities in the here and now alongside political reform. The U.S. government is always weighing a complex set of goals – short-term and long-term – when shaping our policies toward other nations. And the balance of those interests demands that we cooperate with governments whose policies do not always reflect our values and governments that are not as committed to inclusive governance and respect for human rights as we would like.
But working with these governments on issues of mutual interest does not change our assessment of what we think will ultimately make their countries, and ours, more stable and more secure. Nor should it prevent us from calling out governments when we see alarming patterns of abuse, corruption, and impunity.
Take Egypt. As many of you know, the United States has a long-standing, important relationship with Egypt, grounded in a range of common security interests, such as preventing the influx of weapons into Gaza that Hamas will use to attack Israeli civilians and – starting more recently – neutralizing a savage ISIL presence that targets innocents within Egypt. Yet at the same time, successive Egyptian governments have cracked down on human rights, using force and mass arrests against peaceful protesters, and suppressing freedom of expression and of the press. While President Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was Egypt’s first democratically elected leader, he exploited that privilege and began to destroy the checks and balances necessary for democracy to function. It wasn’t clear whether there would be more elections or whether he himself would be held accountable through the same process that had brought him to power. The situation has continued to deteriorate and it has taken on new dimensions under the government now of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. His ascent to power inaugurated a wave of brutal violence – including the deaths of over 800 demonstrators on a single day in 2013. Egypt faces very real, very grave security threats, and the United States intends to work with Egypt in order to combat those threats. But at the same time, its crackdown on Islamists, on the independent media, and even on apolitical civil society reaches far beyond tackling these grave threats. These actions suggest a government deeply uncomfortable not just with dissent, but with any activity that is not directly controlled or monitored by the state.
In recent weeks, the government reopened an investigation into more than 150 Egyptian nongovernmental organizations and civil society activists, many of whom are dedicated to documenting human rights violations. Staff from these organizations have been interrogated and threatened, banned from traveling abroad, and smeared in the state-run media. These are not foreign-based organizations like Freedom House or Human Rights Watch, which were already expelled from Egypt by the Sisi government. These are Egyptian organizations, staffed by Egyptian citizens, working to improve the lives of Egyptians.
While the United States and Egypt have really important, common strategic interests, that should not prevent us from speaking up when we see a growing crackdown on the country’s civil society groups like this one, and an alarming pattern of abuse being carried out by security forces. That is why it was important that – days after the government reopened its sweeping investigation into Egyptian nongovernmental organizations in March – we publicly urged Egypt to ease restrictions on civil society groups and allow them to operate freely, saying that, “Restrictions on the space for civil society activity will produce neither stability nor security.”
So if we have such profound concerns about autocratic behaviors, who or what are we for? I’ll just lay that out here. We are for pluralistic, inclusive governments that empower all their people, regardless of their sect, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, rather than pitting them against one another. Governments that give a share of power to all groups through transparent, democratic processes, and give their citizens the tools to hold those in office and those in civil and public service accountable. We are for governments that give their people a chance to provide for their families through honest means, rather than creating a system where corruption and patronage is the only way to get by or to get ahead. We are for governments that empower women and girls, both because it is right thing to do and because countries where women enjoy equal rights and equal opportunities are, on average, more prosperous, healthier, more democratic, and more peaceful. We are for leaders who give people a path to participating in their societies without having to take to the streets in protest. We are for institutions that are built to empower their people, rather than to exploit them; to serve their people, rather than to repress them. We are for using political processes, institutions, and negotiations to resolve conflicts, rather than using violence. We are for rule of law, rather than rule by law.
Now, some may point out, that, for most of the Middle East, this is not what the world looks like when autocrats fall. How do we who believe in this model of more democratic and accountable government account for the terrible turmoil that has followed the collapse of strongmen in places like Libya and Yemen?
It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that when a mass of people suddenly comes together and manages to overthrow a repressive system that has ruled them for so long, splits are going to emerge in shaping a new order. History teaches us that it is much easier to find unity in bringing down a despotic system than it is to find unity in building one up in its place. Qaddafi, the Assad family, Yemeni President Saleh spent approximately four decades asphyxiating the kinds of institutions and empowered citizens that provide the foundation for a more open, pluralistic, and accountable form of government in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Mubarak did so for three decades in Egypt; Ben Ali did so for two decades in Tunisia. This is a long time. Overhauling institutions in countries like the ones they ruled, or standing them up for the very first time – and giving individuals in those nations the tools to build the societies they want – was never going to be a short-term proposition. And yet too often, people are quick to write off nations experiencing rocky transitions as governable only by dictators. That is a mistake. The Middle East doesn’t need more strongmen – it needs more strong institutions and strong civil societies.
It is the growth of such institutions that we are supporting in Tunisia, where we have been working with the coalition government and citizens as they try to do everything from overhauling abusive law enforcement institutions, to reforming the country’s broken justice system, to fostering opportunities for young Tunisians who might otherwise be drawn to violent extremist groups. The reform effort continues to face profound challenges, such as high unemployment and a series of ghastly terrorist attacks by ISIL, which are crippling the economy and creating divisions in a society that is working so hard to bridge them. Yet the Tunisian people have made genuine progress since toppling the country’s strongman – providing a living rebuttal to the axiom that people in the region are somehow incapable of creating pluralistic democracies.
There are some who look out on all the unfulfilled promises of the Arab Spring and see a litany of U.S. policy failures in the Middle East. If only the United States had used our military might more or less often; if only we had been less naïve, or more effective, in our diplomatic engagement; if only we had done a better job of supporting the emergence of pluralistic, inclusive governments, or standing by – by contrast – “our” strongmen – they argue – we would see a different Middle East today. More stable and more secure; with less conflict and a smaller foothold for terrorist groups.
Questioning U.S. decision-making is entirely fair. We who are within the Administration do it all the time. But the fundamental flaw in most of the critiques is that they leave out the central players in this drama – the people of the Middle East. People like the Tunisian fruit seller who, on December 17, 2010, set himself on fire, because he could no longer take the daily humiliation of being beaten and extorted by police for trying to earn a living, and who, in turn, catalyzed the mass protests that became the Arab Spring. People like the tens of thousands of Egyptians who filled Tahrir Square to call for an end to the corrupt and abusive government that they had endured for decades. And countless other individuals of all ages, religions, and ethnic groups who have risen up across the region to demand the most basic of rights.
Obvious as this point may seem, it is a crucial one, because it reminds us that the catalyst behind the upheaval that shook the region in 2011 came not from the United States, but from the people in the Middle East: individuals who share with each one of us an intrinsic human desire to be treated with dignity, and to have a say in the societies they live in. It is no coincidence that opponents of reform and terrorists both claim that these aspirations are manufactured from afar by the West – it saves them from having to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of people do not want to live under the tyranny they impose, and it provides a pretext for repressing them. I don’t believe we could have reversed the overwhelming sentiment that brought those people out into the streets. And I certainly don’t believe it would have been right to try.
It also reminds us that it is the people of the region who ultimately will determine whether the current moment represents a genuine turning point, or a moment when history fails to turn. The United States has an abiding stake in working to strengthen our partnerships and cooperation against threats to our vital interests, most especially and immediately from terrorist groups who threaten the United States, our allies, and the region. We also have a stake in encouraging governments to increasingly respect the rights of their people and allow for more inclusive governing arrangements that can better meet their peoples’ needs. We also have to learn from our mistakes and constantly evaluate, and re-evaluate, whether the combination of foreign policy tools we are using are being deployed to maximum effect. Yet at the same time, we have to be cognizant about the limits to our influence, and the need to support the partners in the Middle East who will play the greatest role in guiding their nations’ – and the region’s – trajectory.
Despite the devastating bloodshed and repression, the terrorists and the autocrats, and despite the overwhelming suffering and hardship that so many millions of people have suffered – amazingly, despite all of that, the vast majority of people in the region still want to live in more open, just societies, and they are still willing to make great sacrifices, and take huge risks, to help build those societies.
Look at Syria. After five years of being gassed, bombed, and starved by their government and attacked by extremist groups, what did Syrians across the country do when a cessation of hostilities began early last month? They staged more than a hundred peaceful rallies across the country, denouncing the atrocities committed by both the Assad government and by terrorists. In a recent rally in Aleppo, a young protester risked his life to carry a handwritten sign that read, “Islam arrived in Syria before the arrival of Al Qaeda. Thank God.”
Look at Mahmoud Mohammed Ahmed, an Egyptian student who was arrested in January 2014 when he was just 18 years old. Mahmoud’s crime was trying to walk to a peaceful rally marking the three-year anniversary of the uprising that toppled Mubarak, wearing a t-shirt that said, “A nation without torture.” Week after week, month after month, for that crime, Mahmoud’s family and human rights defenders fought for his release, denouncing his detention in the press, through social media, and even in Egypt’s courts. Yet despite routine threats and harassment, they did not give up. Neither did Mahmoud, who – despite deplorable conditions and abuse – wrote to his brother from prison, “I am positive that the day will come when we will do everything without fearing prison or oppression.” In large part thanks to his family’s efforts, Mahmoud was finally released just a few weeks ago, after being jailed – without charge – for more than two years.
Look at the Moroccan investigative journalists who continue to report on the taboo issues of corruption and abuse, in spite of being harassed and even prosecuted. Look at Saudi Arabia, where female law students led an effort to collect more than 3,000 signatures to allow women to register and work as lawyers for the first time – a power they have used to open legal clinics dedicated to educate women and girls about their rights, and defend them when they are violated. Look across the region, and you will find so many brave individuals and groups like these. We can’t lose sight of them.
Critics of our policy in the Middle East often frame our approach through a series of Manichean choices. Advance our security, or hold true to our values? Retrench from the world’s problems, or use military force to solve them? Support autocrats who ensure order, or accept the instability that comes with empowering the masses? But when we dig a little deeper, we see that all of these are false choices. We have the most powerful military in the history of the world, but we recognize it is only one of many tools in our toolkit, and that being judicious when it comes to deploying our troops is not weak, it is an essential part of staying strong. And we know that the path to long-term stability in the region is through encouraging development of stronger institutions. And we know that the path to long-term stability in the region is not through strongmen, but through strong institutions and strong civil societies, which lay the foundation for more open, accountable government.
If we continue to reject false choices; if we continue to engage in the Middle East following these principles; and if we are careful not to lose sight of the people in the region who have so many of the same aspirations that we do in our lives – including the right to be able to live with dignity and in security – and who will ultimately be the driving force behind the region’s trajectory, then we will help make this a genuine and positive turning point in the history of the Middle East. Thank you. [Applause.]
But creating a single-payer system here would be a herculean task [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-health-plan_us_569ff110e4b076aadcc50807 ] — difficult to impose on America’s existing health care infrastructure and probably impossible to get through Congress. Even many liberals sympathetic to the idea have said that Sanders’ scheme is simply not realistic. They worry that trying to push through another comprehensive health care package so soon after the Affordable Care Act’s tumultuous enactment would produce a major public backlash.
Clinton has made that argument before, and on Thursday she made it again. But during the debate she also made another claim: That under the Sanders plan, some low-income people now on Medicaid would be much worse off. “A working woman on Medicaid who already has health insurance would be expected to pay about $2,300,” Clinton said.
If you picked up on the claim, you might have thought it was absurd, given that a major goal of single-payer is to make the poor more financially secure. But Clinton was making a (mostly) valid point. If you do the math on the Sanders health plan, you’ll quickly discover that, as written, it’d be a lousy deal for a portion of low-income people who have jobs and, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, now have insurance.
Here’s why. If the federal government is going to provide everybody with health insurance, then it must raise enough money to pay for those benefits. To do this, Sanders has said he’d create a new tax on incomes, equal to 8.4 percent of payrolls. In theory, employees would pay only a portion of that, with employers covering the majority. In reality, most economists say [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-senator-bernie-sanderss-tax-proposals/full ], the employer share also comes out of workers’ paychecks, if not right away then over time.
So imagine a single mom of two, with a job that pays $26,000. That would qualify her for Medicaid [ http://data.huffingtonpost.com/2015/10/obamacares-medicaid-expansion-helps-uninsured-where-its-allowed ] if she lives in the District of Columbia or one of the 31 states that, in accordance with Obamacare, made the program available to anybody with income up to 133 percent of the poverty line. (For a family of three, that’s $26,813.)
The employer share of the woman’s payroll tax, under the Sanders plan, works out to $1,612. Clinton’s figure of $2,300 presumably included the employee share of the tax, but low-income workers wouldn’t pay much or any of that because of tax deductions those workers can claim.
Today, by contrast, this proverbial single mother would be getting Medicaid without her employer having to pay any new taxes. The money for the program comes out of general revenue, and if you’re one of the newly eligible folks, then the money is coming almost entirely from taxes that fall on the wealthy and on corporations in the health care industry.
Sanders never got around to addressing this issue in the debate. But when critics of the Sanders plan first pointed this out, his campaign noted, correctly, that the plan would have other benefits for low-income Americans. For one thing, it would reach more people because it would have automatic enrollment. Today, by contrast, millions of people eligible for Medicaid don’t sign up and remain uninsured.
In addition, other low-income people would clearly be better off under the Sanders plan. For example, some low-wage workers still get insurance from employers. The cost of that coverage, plus their out-of-pocket expenses, can eat up big chunks of income. They could easily pay less, maybe a lot less, under the Sanders plan. And that doesn’t account for the beneficial effects that other Sanders proposals, including a higher minimum wage, could have on the poor.
Still, reducing the compensation of some single moms making $26,000 — even indirectly — is not something Sanders, a longtime champion for the poor, would want to do. And while all policy changes have winners and losers, Sanders might try to modify his plan to further protect low-income Americans. (The Sanders campaign, for the record, disputes that employers would really pass along the costs of the new tax.)
But to change his plan, Sanders would have to find new money somewhere — by seeking higher taxes from everybody else, even though the proposed increases are already high, or by squeezing the health care industry even harder for savings, even though he’d already squeeze them pretty hard.
To address these issues, Sanders would have to make painful concessions. What came out of the other side of the legislative process would look very different, and less attractive, from what he’s proposing now, in much the same way that Obamacare looks very different, and less attractive, from what Obama sketched out as a candidate in 2008.
None of this is likely to register with Sanders supporters. They point out that Clinton has proposed only very modest improvements to Obamacare, even though millions still struggle with high premiums or out-of-pocket costs — and millions more still don’t have coverage at all. She’s said repeatedly that she wants to get to 100 percent coverage, without offering a hint of how she’d actually accomplish that.
More broadly, Sanders supporters argue, this is not the time and place to dwell on details. Campaigns, in this view, are for laying out broad themes and laying down markers for future negotiations. If Sanders became president, he could say that he’d campaigned on a promise to provide more seamless and generous coverage than the Affordable Care Act has — to create a system that would rely much more on government than the private sector. He might not get his plan through Congress, sure, but he could use his promise to extract other useful legislation from Congress. Maybe he could win approval for the “public option” insurance plan [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health-july-dec09-health_09-01/ ] that was originally part of Obamacare, or for allowing the non-elderly to buy into Medicare.
These are legitimate arguments. But liberal policy wonks [ http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1602009#t=article ] remember the struggle to enact and then implement Obamacare. They also also remember that universal health care was a progressive dream for nearly a century, one that proved impossible for presidents with names like Roosevelt and Truman (and Clinton!) to realize.
One reason reform took so long is that, for most of that period, activists and the wonks were pulling in different directions, with the activists pursuing single-payer and the wonks looking for compromises. The (mostly) unified front they showed in 2009 and 2010 was a big reason Obamacare became law. Now that unity is fading, creating a key divide in the Democratic campaign.
“Wall Street banks shower Washington politicians with campaign contributions and speaking fees,” the narrator says as the ad opens. “And what do they get for it? A rigged economy, tax breaks and bailouts.”
“$200,000 an hour for them, but not even 15 bucks an hour for all Americans. Enough is enough,” the ad concludes.
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New Sanders Ad on Big Speaking Fees for Politicians Who Won’t Support a $15 Minimum Wage
Press Release April 15, 2016
NEW YORK – Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign on Friday released a new television ad focusing on how some politicians believe it’s acceptable to take over $200,000 from Wall Street for an hour-long speech but don’t support a $15 an hour minimum wage.
“Wall Street banks shower Washington politicians with campaign contributions and speaking fees,” the narrator says as the ad opens. “And what do they get for it? A rigged economy, tax breaks and bailouts.”
“$200,000 an hour for them, but not even 15 bucks an hour for all Americans. Enough is enough” the ad concludes.
NEW YORK – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign on Monday questioned “serious apparent violations” of campaign finance laws under a joint fundraising deal between Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
The questionable dealings were detailed in a letter from Brad Deutsch, the attorney for Sanders’ campaign, to U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the DNC. The letter questioned whether the Clinton presidential campaign violated legal limits on donations by improperly subsidizing Clinton’s campaign bid by paying Clinton staffers with funds from the joint DNC-Clinton committee.
Unlike Clinton’s presidential campaign committee, Hillary for America, the joint committee may accept large donations of up to $356,100. The first $2,700 of this amount is eligible for transfer to the Clinton campaign, $33,400 can be transferred to the DNC, with any remaining amount, up to $10,000, to each participating state party. According to public disclosure reports, however, the joint Clinton-DNC fund, Hillary Victory Fund (HVF), appears to operate in a way that skirts legal limits on federal campaign donations and primarily benefits the Clinton presidential campaign.
The financial disclosure reports on file with the Federal Election Commission indicate that the joint committee invested millions in low-dollar, online fundraising and advertising that solely benefits the Clinton campaign. The Sanders campaign “is particularly concerned that these extremely large-dollar individual contributions have been used by the Hillary Victory Fund to pay for more than $7.8 million in direct mail efforts and over $8.6 million in online advertising” according to the letter to the DNC. Both outlays benefit the Clinton presidential campaign “by generating low-dollar contributions that flow only to HFA [Hillary for America] rather than to the DNC or any of the participating state party committees.”
The questionable outlays “have grown to staggering magnitudes” and “can no longer be ignored,” Deutsch added.
The expenditures on advertising and fundraising are at best “an impermissible in-kind contribution from the DNC and the participating state party committees” to Clinton’s presidential campaign, the letter said. “At worst, using funds received from large-dollar donors who have already contributed the $2,700 maximum to HFA [Hillary for America] may represent an excessive contribution to HFA from these individuals.”
In addition, the joint committee has paid the Clinton campaign committee $2.6 million ostensibly to “reimburse” the Clinton presidential campaign staff for time spent running the joint committee. The unusual arrangement, Deutsch said, “raises equally serious concerns that joint committee funds, which are meant to be allocated proportionally among the participating committees, are being used to impermissibly subsidize HFA through an over-reimbursement for campaign staffers and resources.”
“While the use of joint fundraising agreements has existed for some time — it is unprecedented for the DNC to allow a joint committee to be exploited to the benefit of one candidate in the midst of a contested nominating contest,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager.
Bernie’s latest attack is irresponsible and poisonous.
Robby Mook Campaign Manager, Hillary for America Apr 18, 2016
I want to let you know about a development that just occurred, because it matters. The tone of this primary matters, and the condition of our party at the end of it will matter as we prepare to face Donald Trump or Ted Cruz this fall.
Earlier today, the Sanders campaign wrote a letter to the Democratic National Committee, falsely accusing us of violating campaign finance law.
You won’t be surprised by what happened next: 26 minutes after the letter was sent, his campaign sent a fundraising email attempting to capitalize on the phony charges.
(Before you read any further, let’s get one thing straight: This accusation is false. They’re questioning our joint fundraising agreement with the DNC, which allows us to support Democrats running up and down the ticket?—?the same fundraising structure used by President Obama in 2008 and 2012.)
This latest incident is part of a troubling pattern of behavior?—?occurring just as Bernie’s mathematical odds of winning the nomination dwindle toward zero?—?in which Sanders and his team are not just debating us on issues (which we all agree is perfectly fair), but rather attacking Hillary Clinton’s character, integrity, and motivations.
The fact that they include the Democratic Party in these charges?—?an organization we want future generations of progressives to trust and support?—?further confirms that the Sanders campaign has let things get out of hand in its waning days. To wit:
• Over the weekend, they had protesters outside one of our fundraising events?—?one whose proceeds went not just to Hillary for America, but to the Democratic National Committee and 32 state Democratic Parties?—?throwing dollar bills at Hillary’s motorcade, as if they were at, shall we say, an adult entertainment venue. This was just days after someone introducing Bernie at a rally called Hillary a “Democratic whore.”
• In last week’s debate, Bernie questioned Hillary’s commitment to fighting climate change because a whopping 0.2% of the money given to our campaign has come from employees of oil and gas companies. Not even 2%, mind you: 0.2%.
• And of course, Sanders spent several days calling Hillary unqualified for the presidency, based on an entirely false claim that Hillary had said the same about him. She hadn’t (and still hasn’t, even after what he said).
To be clear, we welcome a debate on the important issues facing Americans, like how to prevent gun violence, encourage tolerance, and do more to level the playing field for Americans who are counting on us.
But it’s hard to see how anyone?—?other than Donald Trump and Ted Cruz?—?benefits from this downward spiral of irresponsible and baseless attacks. Right about now is when we ought to be talking about coming together as a progressive movement, not undermining a generation of voters’ faith in the Democratic Party and in the woman who is almost certain to be its nominee.
Thank you for everything you do to support our campaign.
Charges fly ahead of Democratic showdown in New York
The Rachel Maddow Show 4/18/16
Andrea Mitchell, NBC News correspondent, talks with Rachel Maddow about accusations by the Bernie Sanders campaign that Hillary Clinton is breaking fundraising rules with big money DNC events, raising already high tensions between the two camps ahead of Tuesday's New York primary. Duration: 10:13
A new NBC News/WSJ poll shows Bernie Sanders has tightened the race to a statistical tie with Hillary Clinton. She is at 50%, he is at 48%. Nina Turner and Barney Frank join Lawrence for “The Debate”. Duration: 15:07
Democrats Fear Bernie Sanders Is Turning Voters Against Them
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) campaign suggested the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign may have committed “serious apparent violations” of campaign finance law. Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Sanders’ campaign says a source of funds for state Democratic organizations is corrupt.
By Samantha Lachman 04/19/2016 06:26 pm ET | Updated Apr 20, 2016
WASHINGTON — State Democratic parties are ticked off that Bernie Sanders is characterizing fundraising arrangements they have with Hillary Clinton’s campaign as corrupt.
A joint fundraising committee set up by Clinton’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and 32 state Democratic parties is essential to the survival of state party organizations, said state leaders, including some who said Sanders’ complaints may be poisoning his supporters against Democrats.
State parties said joint fundraising agreements like the one Clinton’s campaign has with the DNC help them because the mega-donors Clinton’s campaign can draw are, as Buckley put it, “out of reach of the average state party.”
“Based upon past interviews and this new situation, I’ve become skeptical of Sen. Sanders’ willingness to invest in building the infrastructure that is needed to win down-ballot races,” Rick Palacio, chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, told The Huffington Post.
Palacio said the joint fundraising agreements have allowed his state party to hire organizers and staffers for voter registration and other outreach programs.
“Politics is a team sport and Democratic politics needs to be more of a team right now than ever before, considering we have a minority in both the U.S. House and the Senate and all these legislatures around the country,” Palacio said.
Democrats have complained that while Sanders has his own joint fundraising agreement with the DNC, he hasn’t used it, even though the “political revolution” he advocates could only happen if more Democrats were elected to state legislatures and Congress.
“We know all too well just having the White House isn’t enough to effect all of the change we need, especially here in Michigan, where the Republican Party holds unchecked power at the state level,” said Paul Kanan, the Michigan’s Democratic Party’s press secretary.
Some state party officials told HuffPost they fear Sanders’ supporters won’t be interested in voting for down-ballot Democratic candidates in November if he tarnishes their reputations.
“The victory fund arrangement is all standard procedure for modern campaigns — Bernie could (and should) be doing this too if he wants to lead Democrats to victory this year,” a spokesman for a battleground state Democratic Party told HuffPost. He asked for anonymity to speak frankly about Sanders’ allegations against Clinton’s campaign and the DNC. “The tone of these attacks is troubling for us long-term because he’s using his bully pulpit to turn his supporters against the Democratic Party.”
Both presidential campaigns have tried to capitalize on the scuffle. The Sanders campaign made a fundraising appeal off its letter to the DNC 26 minutes after making the accusations. Clinton’s campaign fired back with two separate fundraising emails, calling the claims “irresponsible and poisonous” and “completely false.”
LIVE STREAM: Hillary Clinton wins Democratic Primary in New York. Mayor Bill de Blasio, Gov. Andrew Cuomo join Hillary Clinton at NY Victory Night. Hillary Clinton Primary Night Speech Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke to supporters after the polls closed in the New York primary.
Bernie Sanders returns to VT after NY primary loss
[non-YouTube of this YouTube embedded] Bernie Sanders holds a news conference after stepping off a plane in Vermont fresh from New York primary loss to Hillary Clinton. But Sanders says the race is far from over.
SOUTH BURLINGTON - Bernie Sanders returned home to Vermont late Tuesday, leaving State College, Pennsylvania, before the polls closed in New York.
He was in the air when the media called the Democratic presidential primary for Hillary Clinton. A former U.S. senator from New York, Clinton was ahead of Sanders 53.7 to 42.3 percent with 85 percent of votes counted as of 11 p.m. Tuesday. New York has 247 delegates.
"We believe we have the momentum, and we believe we have a path of victory," Sanders told a small group of Vermont reporters a few minutes after he landed at the Burlington airport. Five states vote next week — Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island — and Sanders said he is looking forward to winning a number of those states.
He told reporters he had concerns about "voting irregularities" and issues with voter registration in New York.
"I am really concerned about the conduct of the voting process in New York state, and I hope that process will change in the future," he said.
Sanders said he has no plans to change campaign strategy after his loss to Clinton, and his message is resonating throughout the country. Grassroots efforts would be the key to winning upcoming states including Pennsylvania, he added.
He came back to Burlington because he has been away for several weeks, he said.
"I miss Vermont," Sanders said, "and we need to get recharged and take a day off."
Sanders campaign undaunted by NY loss, will fight to the end
The Rachel Maddow Show 4/19/16
Jeff Weaver, Sanders campaign manager, shows Steve Kornacki exactly where the campaign sees a path to winning the Democratic nomination, and how they hope to convert Democratic super-delegates to their side ahead of the party's national convention. Duration: 6:43
Why Republicans are eager to intervene in the Democratic race
Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders pose together onstage at the start of the U.S. Democratic presidential candidates' debate in Flint, Mich., March 6, 2016. Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters
By Steve Benen 04/19/16 12:47 PM—Updated 04/19/16 05:06 PM
When Bernie Sanders says current polling shows him as a strong general-election candidate, a point he emphasizes in nearly every speech, interview, and public appearance, he’s 100% correct. The polling data is readily available, and it says exactly what he claims it says. Political scientists are quick to point out that the evidence isn’t quite what it appears to be [ http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-missing-details-bernie-sanders-general-election-pitch ], but for Team Bernie, those details don’t negate the survey results themselves.
And yet, Republicans can see the same polling results as everyone else, and they appear to be convinced that Sanders would be vastly easier to defeat.
So, what explains the discrepancy? With so many polls showing Sanders faring better than Hillary Clinton in general-election match-ups, why would Republicans go out of their way to try to line up a race with the candidate who appears stronger?
“Republicans are being nice to Bernie Sanders because we like the thought of running against a socialist. But if he were to win the nomination the knives would come out for Bernie pretty quick,” said Ryan Williams, a former spokesman for 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign. “There’s no mystery what the attack on him would be. Bernie Sanders is literally a card carrying socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. There’d be hundreds of millions of dollars in Republican ads showing hammers and sickles and Soviet Union flags in front of Bernie Sanders.”
“Hillary Clinton is a much more centrist candidate in comparison,” Williams said, and she would have a better chance of winning over moderate and undecided voters, despite numerous polls showing that many Americans, even in the Democratic Party, don’t view her as honest and trustworthy. “Bernie’s numbers are better than hers right now because she’s been in the political arena for 30 years getting beat up,” he said.
Former RNC spokesperson Doug Heye added that Republicans look at some of Sanders’ success “with bemusement,” because they think it would be easy to define Sanders as “out of the mainstream.”
The Bloomberg Politics piece quoted a Sanders campaign official saying that Republicans are simply wrong – and that may very well be the case. The underlying question is inherently speculative and there’s no way to prove definitely who’s correct. It is, in fact, possible that Republicans underestimate Sanders’ appeal, just as it’s possible that Sanders could withstand the ferocity of the Republican Attack Machine, which the Vermont senator has never faced.
The fact remains that some of the more controversial aspects of Sanders’ record and platform are not widely known to the public at large – love her or hate her, Clinton is already a well established figure – and we don’t know for sure how the race to “define” the senator would unfold.
But while we can’t see the future, we can see the present, and right now, Republicans would look forward to a general election against Sanders – even if they shouldn’t.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders couldn't pull it off New York. How can he stay in the game? Senior advisor for the Bernie Sanders campaign Tad Devine joins MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell to discuss the campaign's strategy for closing the delegate gap. Duration: 5:44
Sanders committed to finishing primary race, sees winning path
The Rachel Maddow Show 4/20/16
Tad Devine, senior adviser to the Sanders campaign, talks with Rachel Maddow about the Sanders' campaign's expectations for the rest of the Democratic primary race, how their strategy is built around those expectations and Senator Sanders' determination to allow the process to play out in full. Duration: 8:39
Soon after Sen. Bernie Sanders was declared the loser in the New York Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday night, his campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, was on MSNBC ["Sanders campaign undaunted by NY loss, will fight to the end", above] explaining the path ahead for the independent socialist from Vermont. Weaver contended, optimistically, that Sanders could potentially win all the remaining contests. When pressed on what the campaign would do should Sanders end up second to Hillary Clinton in the delegate hunt, Weaver said the campaign would spend the weeks between the final primary in early June and the Democratic convention in late July trying to flip the superdelegates who have declared their loyalty to Clinton.
To some, this might seem fanciful. Would Democratic officials throw Clinton to the curb in favor of the second-place guy who has never been a member of the Democratic Party? And would Sanders, the champion of small-d democracy and the scourge of machine politics, really turn to the equivalent of party bosses to secure the nomination after losing the popular vote?
Weaver justified this possible strategy by insisting that Sanders is the Democratic candidate better situated to win in the November general election. Sanders, he argued, has more appeal with independents and younger voters and generates more enthusiasm. Polls, Weaver continued, show Sanders faring better in the fall face-off than Clinton. So Weaver indicated Sanders would slog on and put aside for now (and at least until the convention) any effort to unite the party.
Oh, the polls. Any conversation with a Sanders supporter inevitably turns to the polls. And indeed the polls do say what Weaver suggested. According to Real Clear Politics' average of recent polls [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/ ], Sanders performs better than Clinton in hypothetical general-election matchups. Against Donald Trump, Sanders leads by 15 points, Clinton by 9. Against Ted Cruz, Sanders wins by 11 points, Clinton by 2. Many Bernie-ites point to these numbers and confidently declare: Case closed!
Does that settle it? Is it reason enough for Weaver to say essentially that Sanders must win the nomination by any means necessary for the good of the party?
Maybe not. There is one missing factor in these polls, and it might be huge. Sanders has yet to face a true negative ad campaign aimed at destroying his public image. Were he to be the Democratic nominee, he would be confronted with hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads designed to rip him apart. And everyone knows what that pummeling would focus on: He's a self-proclaimed socialist.
Clinton has taken a few pokes at Sanders, claiming his policy proposals are pie in the sky and his numbers don't add up. She has depicted him as a rhetorician, not a doer, and contended (absurdly) that his push for a single-payer system would somehow cause millions of people to lose health care. But this is nothing compared with the onslaught that Sanders would be up against as the nominee. The ads write themselves: "Don't take our word for it, take his. He's a socialist!" Cut to a super-cut of Sanders proclaiming "I am a socialist" over and over.
Of course, almost all Americans are socialists to some extent. (You believe in Social Security and Medicare? Congratulations, you get your socialist card.) But the word still has the potential to frighten or put off voters in the crucial swing states. And there will be other lines of attack against Sanders: the usual tax-and-spend stuff Republicans always hurl at Democrats (but to a greater extent), the radical writings of his past, his unconventional personal life, and more. It's not difficult to imagine a veiled campaign that exploits the fact he's not a Christian.
Still, the overarching meme will probably be that he's a socialist. And how might that play out? A few months ago, I asked Weaver and Tad Devine, Sanders' top strategist, about how Sanders would counter such an assault. They claimed they were not worried in the least and mentioned no plan for dealing with such an inevitable attack. Voters won't "get hung up on this," Devine said, noting that Sanders' admission that he is a socialist bolsters his authenticity as candidate. Every voter will know by the fall election that Sanders is a socialist, he said, and thus it won't be a surprise.
Once, Devine continued, people said don't vote for a black man because he cannot win the presidency; now some say don't vote for a socialist because he cannot win. His implication was that such talk is nothing more than a self-limiting scare tactic among progressives. Moreover, Devine commented, Democrats have long been red-baited by Republicans merely for being liberals and have too often run away from their ideological leanings because of that. Wouldn't it be refreshing, he asked, to have a Democratic candidate who cannot be left-shamed?
Perhaps. These are all lovely assumptions, and they could prove true. Maybe the socialist charge will not have much firepower. But the point is that until Sanders is tested under such battlefield conditions, polls that compare his performance against Trump to Clinton's are meaningless. As the Clinton people will say—and they're not wrong on this—she has withstood decades of attacks, some real and fact-based, some phony and underhanded. In a way, she is already damaged goods. Voters know much about her—especially her negatives. Certainly, she, too, would meet a tsunami of mud in the general election. (Benghazi! Emails! And more!) Yet much of this has already been baked into the cake when a pollster asks a voter to choose between her and Trump or Cruz. Sanders would be virgin territory for the dirt-throwers of the right. A clean canvas.
This is not to say that Sanders and his populist crusade would not be able to prevail against a billion dollars in ads assailing him as a crazy socialist hell-bent on raising taxes and expanding government. But until he's the target of such a blitzkrieg, hypothetical comparisons have little currency. Any sophisticated political operative knows these particular poll numbers are no basis for picking a candidate. Nor are they a rationale for Sanders, should he finish in second place, to continue his campaign. There may well be other reasons for him and Weaver to fight Clinton all the way to the convention. And there are plenty of reasons for progressives and Democrats to support Sanders. Yet the unsullied Sanders is not the Sanders who would be on the ballot in November. So his campaign and his backers should dump these fantasy-league polls if they want to persuade others that they have a firm grasp on political reality.
UPDATE: A reader notes that last year Gallup released a poll [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/183713/socialist-presidential-candidates-least-appealing.aspx ] asking voters about their attitudes regarding political candidates of various races, religions, and beliefs. Over 90 percent said they would be willing to vote for a woman, a black person, a Hispanic, a Jew, or a Catholic. Over 70 percent said the same about a gay or lesbian candidate or an evangelical Christian. Only 60 percent said they would be willing to vote for a Muslim, and 58 percent said they could see themselves casting a ballot for an atheist. The label that fared the worst in this survey was socialist. Forty-seven percent said they would be willing to support a socialist candidate; 50 percent said they would not. Certainly, in the Democratic primary, Sanders has not been hindered by his identification with democratic socialism. But in this poll, only 49 percent of independents said they would not be willing to vote for a socialist. The poll was conducted last June, and it may well be that Sanders' performance in the months since has altered public attitudes toward a socialist candidate. Yet the survey's results do suggest the socialist tag could be a problem for Sanders in a general election.
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