If you made a movie about Obama and his lackeys you could not conjure up a script equal to what is happening with these buffoons.
The president's cynical disdain and his wife's boorish behaviour are difficult for many to comprehend.. Perhaps they need to open their eyes. (See 1a, 1b and 1c below.)
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Trinko offers some trinkets Black Americans should ponder. (See 2 below.)
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Clink, clink, clink. The Clinton's cash register! Buying power and soon the Presidency!!!
$3 billion and 41 years later. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)John Kerry Is a Disgrace
by CHARLES C. W. COOKE
Ladies and gentleman, your Secretary of State, Mr. John Kerry:
In the last days, obviously, that has been particularly put to the test. There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate.
When I first saw the key line here — “there was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale” — I thought that Kerry had likely been misquoted. Alas, he had not. In fact, his words are even worse in context.
There really is no way of reading these comments other than as a craven ranking of outrages. Forget Kerry’s brief flirtation with the word “legitimacy” and assume that he said “rationale” from the start. That changes precisely nothing. The top diplomat in the United States just publicly argued that because the victims at Charlie Hebdo had spoken risqué words but the victims at the Bataclan had not, the violence against the former was more comprehensible than the violence against the latter. Has he lost his mind?
Even if Kerry’s assumptions were all correct, the moral problem here would be obvious. We hear a great deal about “blaming the victim” in our domestic debates, especially as it relates to sexual assault. Does this not apply to other realms? In essence, the American Secretary of State just announced before the world that he could grasp why the woman in the short skirt was raped but that he had been left scratching his head by the attack on the woman in the pantsuit and the overcoat. “Sure,” he said, “I get why they knocked off the hate speakers, but why would they go after progressive kids at a concert? Now things are really serious.”
In and of itself, this assessment is abhorrent. But he also screwed up the facts. Implicit in Kerry’s reasoning is the assumption that the perpetrators of the attacks against Charlie Hebdo had a clear purpose whereas the perpetrators of last week’s abomination did not. Or, as he put it, that in one case the killers were “really angry because of this and that,” but that in the other they were not. But this isn’t true. In fact, both set of attackers gave reasons. With Charlie Hebdo, the killers’ purported motive was revenge against ”blasphemous” expression; in Paris last week, it was disgust at Paris’s reputation for “obscenity.” In consequence, there are only two choices here: Option 1) That John Kerry believes that killing people for speaking rudely is more understandable than killing them for being secular; or Option 2) That John Kerry doesn’t actually know what the most recent attackers used as their justification (and also doesn’t remember that at the same time as the Charlie Hebdo assassinations, associated gunmen targeted a market simply because its owners were Jews).
Despicable.
1a)Obama Really Doesn't Like People
A comment made by one of President Obama’s closest aides explains his blasé attitude toward the lives of Americans. In late 2012, Neera Tanden, who had been one of President Obama’s closest aides, observed:
Clinton, being Clinton, had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart it. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, the phone calls Clinton kept expecting rarely came. “People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people.
Barack Obama had been warned that leaving Iraq without a residual American force could lead to genocide. When questioned about this risk, he complacently answered that preventing genocide was not a good enough reason to have troops in Iraq .
Barack Obama’s coldness towards Americans -- and others, for that matter -- was obvious before 2012.
Barack Obama has long had an Empathy Deficit, as I wrote in 2010. He easily and coldly boasted he would destroy the coal industry and kill thousands of jobs with the aplomb of Chairman Mao and Josef Stalin reengineering their societies. The jobs that were promised after passage of the trillion-dollar stimulus plan never materialized because as Barack Obama jocularly put it two years later “shovel-ready was not as shovel ready as we expected.” When Texas was hit with devastating forest fires, Obama was cracking jokes at a California fundraiser, “You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.” He has articulated his contempt for so called everyday Americans many times (see my 2012 column, What Obama Thinks of Americans and my 2014 column, Obama Thinks You Are Stupid, That’s Why)
Barack Obama seems particularly complacent when it comes to Americans endangered and murdered by Islamic extremists.
Here are some examples (with more undoubtedly to come as President Obama oversees a massive influx of Muslims into America, hence fulfilling his promise to “fundamentally transform America”). Obama’s Syrian asylum policy continues apace, despite the role of at least one Syrian “refugee” in the massacres in Paris. Obama wants to welcome at least 10,000 more Syrians into America (Hillary wants 65,000). What could go wrong? Ben Rhodes, Obama’s chief liar now that Susan Rice has outlived her usefulness in that role, appeared on numerous broadcasts to assure us these “asylum seekers” will be thoroughly vetted to eliminate security risks -- contradicting the widely respected FBI chief, James Comey, who testified before Congress that vetting Syrian “refugees” will be challenging. Can’t we trust the competency of an administration who can handle the IRS, the VA, the stimulus program, green energy projects, and security of government employee records so well?
First of all, note the passivity: "The loss of Daniel Pearl." He wasn't "lost." He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his "loss" merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none. (snip)
Well, says the president, it was "one of those moments that captured the world's imagination." Really? Evidently it never captured Obama's imagination because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl's fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: "one of those moments" – you know, like Princess Di's wedding, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, whatever – "that captured the world's imagination."
After Barack Obama announced that American journalist James Foley had been beheaded by Islamic extremists he raced off to the links to yuck it up with NBA star Alanzo Mourning and others.
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George Bush gave up golf as president because he felt it unseemly for a commander-in-chief to be playing golf while Americans were serving overseas in the military. Clearly Obama has different seemliness standards (see his interview with the YouTube comedian GloZell who bathes in milk and cereal in a bathtub).
When Americans were killed in Benghazi the White House refused to give an honest accounting of who murdered them (it was an offshoot of Al Qaeda). Their deaths were, in Obama’s cold phrasing, were not “optimal.” Well, they certainly weren’t optimal for him and his re-election campaign, so he and his Praetorian guard lied about their murders. Who got the blame? An obscure Coptic Christian who had directed an equally obscure video that may have riled some Muslims -- had they seen it (which, basically, no one had). The spin was that Muslims had been (“legitimately”?) enraged by the video that mocked Mohammed. Survivors were lied to and are still awaiting a call from the President to honestly explain why their loved ones had been murdered. They will be waiting a long time.
At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Obama noted there was a time when people mass-murdered in the name of Christianity, too:
And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
As many were quick to point out, the Catholic Church's Crusades began more than 900 years ago, and the Inquisition began in the 13th century.
The comparison was absurd but part of a pattern of Obama being an apologist for Islamic terrorism. The violence perpetrated by Muslim terrorist never has anything to do with Islam in the rose-colored view of Barack Obama and his officials and they have all but covered up the role played by Islam in the murder of Americans.
John Kennedy wrote of Winston Churchill “he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” Barack Obama has thumbed through the thesaurus and mobilized the English language in ways that George Orwell had foreseen -- as a way for regimes to hide the truth from people. In this case, camouflaging an enemy.
The Muslim Brotherhood becomes a “mostly secular” group-this gem from Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. Islamic terrorist attacks become “man-caused disasters.” The 2009 Fort Hood massacre is described as a case of “workplace violence” despite the murderer, Nidal Hassan, having business cards describing him as a “soldier of Allah.” When a Chattanooga Navy recruitment center was attacked by Mohammad Abdulazeez, a Muslim who justified his attack because he was displeased by America’s war on terror (and therefore committed terror), the White House all but ignored the murder of our Navy personnel. Those murders merited almost zero notice. The White House has focused a lot of attention on violence on college campuses but was silent in the wake of the recent stabbing spree by Faisal Mohammed at a California university campus.
One wonders at what point, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, did American lives ever matter to Barack Obama? After all, his moral compass, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., celebrated 9/11 as America’s chickens having come to roost and routinely spouted anti-American diatribes as Barack Obama and his family stayed in the pews (Oprah Winfrey and others quit the church). Israel’s Ambassador to America, Michael Oren, read both of Obama’s books and what struck him the most was that Barack Obama never had one good thing to say about America. Not one. Is that what they teach at private prep and Ivy League schools or was that an ideology inherited from his parents?
Meanwhile, Barack Obama extolls the role of Islam in America and the world, fabricating history to do so. He also fabricates in real time, too: erasing the role as much as he can of Islamic radicalism in violence around the world. Indeed, “Islamic radicalism” and “Islamic terrorists” are banished from the lexicon of Obama and all his officials. If one cannot name an enemy it makes it harder to fight them.
Maybe that is the point.
Compare and contrast the treatment meted out to the Cambridge policemen who were merely doing their job when they merely arrested Barack Obama’s friend, Henry Louis Gates Jr., for apparent breaking and entering. From his perch in the White House Obama called the police “stupid” and indicted police nationwide for racism. One can do the same exercise regarding Obama’s complacency when Americans are killed by Muslims to his over the top reaction to the deaths of Trayvon Martin (“if I had a son he would have looked like Trayvon”) and Michael Brown -- both cases cleared the people who shot them as having done so in self-defense, despite the efforts of the federal government to coerce state governments to find otherwise.
Do some American lives matter more to Barack Obama than others? Given the disparate treatment shown one can speculate so.
Meanwhile, a Texas high-school boy whose feelings were hurt when a teacher confiscated what appeared to be a bomb but what he represented as being a clock he had built (and was probably just a disassembled Radio Shack clock) was acclaimed as a Muslim Rosa Parks and granted a White House visit. The whole affair now appears to have been a contrived effort by the his activist father to create a cause celebre and another Muslim martyr (though not in the most radical sense, though now that the family has moved to Qatar…that clock making may come in handy).
President Obama has an agenda that is becoming increasingly visible. Marc Thiessen recently wrote in the Washington Post of “Obama’s stubborn, willful complacency on terror”:
Somehow, to paraphrase President Obama, it has become routine — the president dismisses the terrorist threat, only to see terrorists carry out horrific attacks that give lie to his complacency.
On Sept. 6, 2012, Obama boasted at the Democratic National Convention that “al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat.” Five days later, al-Qaeda-linked terrorists attacked two U.S. diplomatic compounds in Benghazi, Libya, killing the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
On Jan. 7, 2014, Obama dismissed the Islamic State as the “JV” team in an interview with the New Yorker, adding that the rise of the Islamic State was not “a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.” That same month, the Islamic State began its march on Iraq, declaring a caliphate, burning people alive in cages and beheading Americans.
Then on Thursday, Obama did it again, telling ABC News, “I don’t think [the Islamic State is] gaining strength” and promising “we have contained them.” The very next day, the Islamic State launched the worst attack on Paris since World War II, killing at least 132 people and wounding more than 350 others.
How many times is this sad spectacle going to repeat itself?
Well, chronologically, for at least one more year. Barack Obama is not interested in pursuing a war against radical Islam -- he doesn’t think there is or should be a “war on terror” (another banished phrase) and seems more intent on burnishing Islam, even if it is at our expense and at the cost of our lives. Neera Tanden was right; he doesn’t like people and couldn’t care less what happens to (most) of us: our lives don’t matter.
1b)After ISIS's Dance of Death Michelle Does the Conga
The young people who went to Paris’s La Bataclan concert hall last week went to party and dance. The problem is that 89 of those that jammed into the Eagles of Death Metal concert ended up dead or missing.
A mere 72 hours later, in a stunning display of tactlessness and lack of decorum, at a White House hosted Broadway workshop Michelle Obama danced. Tearing up the carpet in the East Room, the FLOTUS danced the Conga with the same enthusiasm she exhibited when boogieing to the “Uptown Funk” and churning out Bollywood moves on Diwali.
Casting ‘Paris attack’ sackcloth and ashes aside, Michelle invited 40 performing arts high school students to a festive event entitled “Broadway” at the White House, which will air on TLC on November 26.
Joining the students were stage luminaries such as: "Glee" star Matthew Morrison, Latina “Conga” singing sensation Gloria Estefan, composer Andrew Lloyd Weber, Whoopi ‘The View’ Goldberg, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, and aging African American actress Cicely Tyson.
From the Broadway show based on the story of her and her husband Emilio’s life, Estefan sang “On Your Feet!” and "Glee"’s Matt Morrison belted out a number from Finding Neverland.
Meanwhile, in France, bouquets were being piled high where three days prior bloody bodies fell dead. Yet at the same time at the White House students were treated to rousing Broadway-style acts from shows like: Fun Home, An American in Paris, School of Rock, and Something Rotten.
Speaking of ‘something rotten,’ while 128 victims of ISIS were being identified by family, autopsied, prepared for burial, and tearfully eulogized, America’s empathetic First Lady chose to mark the occasion with an afternoon of acting, directing, singing, costume design, makeup, and music composition workshops.
Rather than honor France’s dead and inspire youth to understand the pressing issue of worldwide terrorism, Michelle ‘it’s all about you’ Obama told the performing artist wannabes: “These folks are here today to honor you and to hopefully inspire you.”
Mrs. Obama encouraged the schoolchildren by telling them; “They're also here with an important message for you about what it takes to succeed, not just on Broadway, but in life.”
It would have been more sincere if Michelle had warned the kiddies that because of her husband’s irresponsible policies, attaining success in America, on Broadway, or anywhere else on the planet, seems highly unlikely.
Moreover, shouldn’t the First Lady have also pointed out that if Barack Obama continues to ‘fundamentally transform’ America by accepting military-aged male ISIS fighters disguised as refugees into our nation it’s highly doubtful, despite their “passion and creativity,” that Broadway at the White House-attendees will have a shot at any kind of life at all?
Instead, Michelle, the woman whose husband Obama once called the U.S. Constitution “a deeply flawed document” chose to depict Broadway as a “cornerstone” of American heritage.
FLOTUS said, “Since America is such a big, bold, beautiful nation, that's how our stories are told on Broadway.” Furthermore, in an effort to advance academic excellence, the one woman Conga machine schooled the young learners by saying that in addition to entertaining and inspiring us, and in lieu of a public school system that teaches unrevised American history, it’s Broadway that “educates” us.
Then, in commemoration of the 128 people mercilessly slaughtered in the heart of Paris, Mrs. Obama cited her husband’s comments about the tragedy by telling her audience this:
As my husband said on Friday, this was an attack not just on France, our dear friend and ally, but on all of humanity and our shared values. And as we mourn, we know that we must continue to show the strength of those values and hopes that the President spoke about when he talked.
Pressing on, FLOTUS flattered her audience by stressing that “the beauty is that all of you here, our young people that are here, you all reflect that passion, that creativity. You all are a part of those values that the President talked about.”
“That's what we're protecting,” she said.
And even though thanks to Barack Obama’s reckless attitude toward homeland security, Americans are finding themselves more insecure than ever, according to his wife, “We're protecting what you all represent.”
And so, after ISIS’s dance of death in France, and judging from her lackadaisical party attitude, it appears as if the values Michelle wants protected includes her right to dance the Conga while the world grieves a terrorist attack.
1c) Vladimir Putin, Leader of the Free World
In 2008 I endorsed Putin for the American presidency, in jest, of course. Now he is leading America’s president by the nose and directing the anti-terror efforts of France and Germany. No-one could have anticipated Putin’s sudden ascent to global leadership during the past several weeks. Russia is in the position of a a vulture fund, buying the distressed assets of the Western alliance for pennies on the dollar. Faced with an American president who will not fight, and his European allies whose military capacity has shrunk to near insignificance, the Russian Federation seized the helm with the deployment of a mere three dozen war planes and an expeditionary force of 5,000 men. One searches in vain through diplomatic history to find another case where so much was done with so little. As an American, I feel a deep humiliation at this turn of events, assuaged only slightly by Schadenfreude at the even deeper humiliation of America’s foreign policy establishment.
The world runs by different rules than it did just a few weeks ago. Putin has answered the question I asked in September (“Vladimir Putin: Spoiler or Statesman?”). President Obama declared at the Nov. 17 Antalya summit, “From the start, I’ve also welcomed Moscow going after ISIL…We’re going to wait to see whether, in fact, Russia does end up devoting attention to targets that are ISIL targets, and if it does so, then that’s something we welcome.” After this week’s Russian and French airstrikes on ISIS’ stronghold in Raqqa, that is a moot point. It seems like another epoch when Mitt Romney declared that Russia was America’s greatest geopolitical threat. Russia, on the contrary, is pulling America’s chestnuts out of the fire. Obama is utterly feckless; by the time the next American president is sworn in, the world will be a difference place. Ukraine? Never heard of it.
Obama wants to follow, not lead, as he told reporters at Antalaya: “What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with that has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people and to protect the people in the region who are getting killed and to protect our allies and people like France.. I’m too busy for that.” Russia is happy to give him the opportunity to follow. Obama’s reluctance to put American forces on the ground took America out of contention, along with aerial rules of engagement so risk-averse that only one in four American sorties against ISIS released it bombs. The Russians are not squeamish about collateral damage and likely to be far more effective.
Putin meanwhile told his commanders, “A French naval battle group led by an aircraft carrier will arrive in your theatre of action soon. You must establish direct contact with the French and work with them as with allies.” Just what sort of alliance this will be is clear from raw numbers. The Russian air force has 67 squadrons flying modern fighters (against France’s 11), including 15 bomber squadrons (the French retired their Mirage VI bomber in 1996) and 14 assault squadrons. 25 squadrons fly ground-attack aircraft a bit lighter than America’s A-10 “Warthog,” namely the SU-24 and SU-25. Even allowing for poor Russian servicing, which leaves many planes unable to fly, Russia has vastly more air power than its French ally.
To make more than symbolic contribution to the Syria campaign, France will have to remove fighter aircraft now supporting its more than 5,000 military personnel in Africa. Germany’s air force, I am told, will assist by picking up the slack in Africa so that French aircraft can redeploy to the Levant. Although Germany is not officially part of the Syria campaign, Berlin appears to be coordinating closely with Russia and France, although its own military air fleet is in notoriously poor condition.
Russia’s willingness and ability to use force in Syria gives Putin considerable diplomatic flexibility. Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull suggested today that Russia might throw Syrian President Basher Assad under the bus and agree to a power-sharing agreement along ethnic and confessional lines on the Lebanese model. As the leader of a military coalition to reduce ISIS, Putin can afford to let Assad go, provided that the West agrees to preserve its naval station at Tartus. In the broader diplomatic context, Putin would expect the quiet expiration of economic sanctions against Russia directed at its seizure of Crimea as part of the overall bargain.
A very different sort of Middle East might emerge. Russia and China in the past have allied themselves with Iran against the Sunnis, largely because their own restive Muslim populations are entirely Sunni. If the Russian-led coalition succeeds in humiliating ISIS, the two Asian powers will have less use for their obstreperous Shi’ite allies of convenience. Although Russia and Iran are allied against ISIS, they have quite different objectives, according to Saheb Sadeghi, the editor of the Iranian foreign policy journal Diplomat. Writing in Al-Monitor, Sadeghi explais:
Russia is thus pursuing the revival of the Syrian military as its leverage in the country, with the belief that the only way to influence the future of Syria is through restoring the Syrian military to its condition before the eruption of the civil war in 2011 — in other words, a secular army that can easily be controlled.Iran, on the other hand, has chosen a completely different path. When Iran saw that the Syrian army was near collapse, it sought to strengthen irregular forces made up of volunteers. The Islamic Republic thus established a massive force composed of Alawites. The latter has now become the main force combating the different armed opposition groups and is more powerful than the Syrian army on the battlefield. These volunteer forces, which number about 200,000 men, take orders from Iran rather than the Syrian government. According to some reports, about 20,000 Shiites from Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan have also joined them. These forces may very well come to play an important role in the future of Syria. Moreover, the Islamic Republic hopes to use them as a viable alternative to the Assad government.
The Iranian-backed irregulars have been singularly ineffective in taking territory back from ISIS, however, compared for example to the Kurds, by far the most effective fighting force on the ground. Russia and its allies probably will solve the problem by sending in ground forces. ISIS cannot stand up to the combination of a modern ground army with close air support. That will devalue Iran’s contribution to the military effort and its ability to influence a future political outcome. Russia wants to win the war on the ground and control the terms of the peace without interference from the apocalyptic adventurers in Iran.
It is noteworthy that Russian officials and news media kept mum about Israel’s reported air strikesagainst a Hezbollah weapons depot at the Damascus airport last week. As usual, Israel’s defense ministry neither confirmed nor denied the reports in the Syrian media, but the working Israeli press reports reflect off-the-record confirmation. Israeli sources tell me that the attacks did indeed occur, and under the nose of the Russian air force. BBC’s Russian service notes that previous Israeli strikes drew official condemnation from Moscow. Russia’s silence on this occasion suggests that Moscow sanctioned the strikes. If so, Moscow will have sent a message to Hezbollah that it should avoid a fight with Israel and stick to killing Sunnis in Syria.
There have been reports in fringe media that China has gotten involved in the Syrian conflict, repeated by the hapless US presidential candidate Ben Carson. That is surely wrong; not only does China lack the intelligence and diplomatic resources to involve itself in the Syrian tangle, but its air force does not currently possess a single ground attack fighter like the American A-10 or Russian SU-24. The People’s Liberation Army is not equipped for foreign intervention, and China has neither the intent nor ability to intervene. Beijing is happy to stay in the background and quietly support Russia’s role in the region.
Beijing has enormous economic influence over Iran, though, and could use it to dissuade Tehran from stirring up trouble in the region. I speculated two years ago that China might preside over a “Pax Sinica” in the Middle East. Former Reagan National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane and Ilan Berman argue in the Nov. 18 Wall Street Journal that “pressing Beijing to exert its extensive influence over Tehran to force it to steer a more moderate course can and should be a top American priority.”
China has a great deal to worry about from its Sunni Muslim population, especially the 15 million Uyghurs in its westernmost province of Xinjiang. Hundreds of Uyghur separatists are fighting for ISIS in Syria, and the Chinese accuse Turkey of providing passports and safe passage for separatists leaving China for Turkey through Southeast Asia. A Chinese official told me that Turkish embassies in Southeast Asia have stockpiled 100,000 blank passports for the use of Uyghurs. Wealthy Saudis are funding Wahhabi madrassahs in China, and a large part of China’s Muslim population has become radicalized.
For all these reasons, China has a deep interest in the defeat of ISIS. It has as much reason to fear the metastasis of Sunni jihad as does Russia, as well as the quiet support for the jihadists coming from Istanbul and some elements in Saudi Arabia. A humiliation of the self-styled Islamist Caliphate would crush the morale of its emulators in China as well as Russia, and Beijing will find ways of supporting Putin’s efforts without any direct or visible commitment of military resources.
As for France: several days ago I wrote that France will do nothing in response to the Paris massacre. I may have been wrong. Russia will do a great deal, and in consequence, France will do more than round up the usual suspects.
The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the view of Asia Times.
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2) The Big Racist Lie
The Big Racist Lie is that Republican policies hurt blacks, and hence Republicans are racists, while Democrat policies help blacks. The reality is just the opposite.
Modern Democrat policies hurt blacks just as historical Democrat policies -- such as fighting the Civil War to defend slavery, founding the KKK, and passing all the segregation laws -- hurt Blacks. On the other hand, modern Republican policies help blacks just as historical Republican policies -- such as ending slavery, passing the 14th Amendment, and integrating the military and public schools -- helped Blacks.
Paradoxically, modern Democrat voters aren’t racists in general. Rather they are people who, due to MSM bias, lack facts and who tend to vote based on emotions, not analytical thought -- thanks in part to the Democrat corruption of modern public education.
In order to win elections, and black votes, Republicans have to get off the defensive and attack racist Democrat policies.
Here are a few examples of how rich White liberal Democrat policies hurt black Americans.
1) Black Lives Don’t Matter part 1: The leading cause of death for black Americans is abortion. Despite the fact that black women are five times as likely to abort their babies as white women, nearly 80% of Planned Parenthood (PP) abortion mills are in minority neighborhoods, and the founder of PP was a hardcore racist. Democrats still rally around PP. Clearly one could support abortion while working to end the huge disparity between black and white abortion rates, but Democrat politicians seem quite content with the status quo. Democrats such as Geraldine Ferraro have gone on record to say that abortion saves money by reducing the number of people on welfare. Given that blacks are disproportionately on welfare, Democrats are advocating killing blacks to reduce welfare costs.
Republicans oppose the killing of the unborn and are eager to end what Jesse Jackson called “genocide” against black people; namely abortion.
2) Black Lives Don’t Matter part 2: Every year thousands of blacks are murdered in the U.S., predominantly in Democrat-controlled cities like Chicago -- Chiraq -- and Baltimore. blacks are 4.3 times more likely to be murdered -- usually by other blacks -- than whites. Yet the Democrats’ only response is to call for laws that make it harder to convict criminals and for shorter sentences for violent offenders. They claim they’re combating racism that results in too many blacks being in jail, but the reality is that the real racism is releasing violent black criminals who will tend to prey on other blacks while leaving white folk alone.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr owned many guns because he couldn’t count on racist Southern Democrat police to protect him. Today Democrats are working hard to keep honest blacks from being able to defend themselves, a necessity because the police under attack by white Democrats can’t be everywhere, through gun control laws that whites can easily navigate but which are a huge impediment to poor blacks.
Republicans, on the other hand, want to make it easier to convict violent felons, work to keep violent criminals in jail longer, and work to make it easier for honest citizens to protect themselves from criminals.
3) You can’t be black unless you agree with Democrats: No Republican has attacked Obama as viciously as Democrats have attacked Justice Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, or Allen West. Democrats declare that blacks who don’t support White liberal Democrat policies are not really black. What could be more racist than declaring that all “real” blacks have to agree on politics? No one would think of saying Bernie Sanders is not white because he doesn’t agree with Republican policies yet we’re told that Justice Clarence Thomas is an “Uncle Tom” or an “Oreo” because he believes in interpreting the Constitution as it was intended to be interpreted by those who wrote it.
Republicans don’t say that blacks who disagree with Republican policies aren’t really black.
4) Black Families Don’t Matter: We have good reason to believe that LBJ started the “Great Society” to benefit Democrats and the reality is that Democrat welfare policies have destroyed the Black family in American and feminized black poverty. Prior to Democrat welfare programs, black families were more likely to be intact than white families. Now, after 50 years of Democrat welfare programs, 72% of blacks are born into single-parent families -- which studies have shown leads to poverty, crime, and drug use. If Democrats really cared about blacks they’d have tried to change welfare to end the destruction of black families, yet Democrats have steadfastly refused to try and change the system.
Republicans on the other hand have followed Pope Francis’s advice:
Helping the poor financially must always be a provisional solution in the face of pressing needs. The broader objective should always be to allow them a dignified life through work.
By trying to improve the economy rather than enlarge the government, Republicans have striven to get blacks off welfare. Republicans have advocated Enterprise Zones in inner cities where companies are given tax breaks in return for providing job opportunities for blacks. All this even though blacks hardly ever vote for Republicans.
5) Blacks don’t need education: in Democrat-run cities, black children receive a horrible education that prevents them from being able to get a job. In Detroit, for example, where Democrats have been in charge for decades, students have horrible test scores. Blacks who can manage to attend private schools on the other hand can get a good education. But Democrats are more loyal to the teacher’s unions than to blacks. That is why Democrats fight hard against school choice that would enable black parents to send their children to good schools.
Republicans have supported school choice for decades because Republicans care more about kids, including black kids, than paying off teacher’s unions with high salaries even when the teachers are failing at their jobs.
It’s time for Republicans to quit playing defense and take the fight to the racist Democrat policies that have created a new plantation for blacks.
Democrats keep blacks voting Democrat by making blacks think, with the help of the MSM, that blacks need Democrats to survive. Democrats do this by keeping crime rates high in black neighborhoods, by keeping drugs readily available in black neighborhoods, and by keeping blacks from getting an education all of which result in blacks being dependent on government and thinking that they can’t compete with whites.
The reality is that blacks are just as capable as whites and given an equal education and cultural basis they have demonstrated over and over the great benefit they are to America.
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3)A Washington Post investigation reveals how Bill and Hillary Clinton have methodically cultivated donors over 40 years, from Little Rock to Washington and then across the globe. Their fundraising methods have created a new blueprint for politicians and their donors.
LITTLE ROCK — Over four decades of public life, Bill and Hillary Clinton have built an unrivaled global network of donors while pioneering fundraising techniques that have transformed modern politics and paved the way for them to potentially become the first husband and wife to win the White House.
The grand total raised for all of their political campaigns and their family’s charitable foundation reaches at least $3 billion, according to a Washington Post investigation.
Their fundraising haul, which began with $178,000 that Bill Clinton raised for his long-shot 1974 congressional bid, is on track to expand substantially with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 White House run, which has already drawn $110 million in support.
The Post identified donations from roughly 336,000 individuals, corporations, unions and foreign governments in support of their political or philanthropic endeavors — a list that includes top patrons such asSteven Spielberg and George Soros, as well as lesser-known backers who have given smaller amounts dozens of times. Not included in the count are an untold number of small donors whose names are not identified in campaign finance reports but together have given millions to the Clintons over the years.
The majority of the money — $2 billion — has gone to the Clinton Foundation, one of the world’s fastest-growing charities, which supports health, education and economic development initiatives around the globe. A handful of elite givers have contributed more than $25 million to the foundation, including Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra,who is among the wealthy foreign donors who have given tens of millions.
A FUNDRAISING POWERHOUSE
Roughly two-thirds of the money given by Clinton donors has gone to support their charitable foundation.
Total amount
$3 billion
The Clinton
Foundation
$2 billion
Political support
$1 billion
Separately, donors have given $1 billion to support the Clintons’ political races and legal defense fund, making capped contributions to their campaigns and writing six-figure checks to the Democratic National Committee and allied super PACs.
The Post investigation found that many top Clinton patrons supported them in multiple ways, helping finance their political causes, their legal needs, their philanthropy and their personal bank accounts. In some cases, companies connected to their donors hired the Clintons as paid speakers, helping them collect more than $150 million on the lecture circuit in the past 15 years.
The couple’s biggest individual political benefactors are Univision chairman Haim Saban and his wife, Cheryl, who have made 39 contributions totaling $2.4 million to support the Clintons’ races since 1992. The Sabans have also donated at least $10 million to the foundation.
The Clintons kept big contributors in their orbit for decades by methodically wooing competing interest groups — toggling between their liberal base and powerful constituencies, according to donors, friends and aides who have known the couple since their Arkansas days.
They made historic inroads on Wall Street, pulling in at least $69 million in political contributions from the employees and PACs of banks, insurance companies, and securities and investment firms. Wealthy hedge fund managers S. Donald Sussman and David E. Shaware among their top campaign supporters, having given more than $1 million each.
The Clintons’ ties to the financial sector strained their bonds with the left, particularly organized labor. But unions repeatedly shook off their disappointment, giving at least $21 million to support their races. The public employees union AFSCME has been their top labor backer, giving nearly $1.7 million for their campaigns.
The Clintons’ fundraising operation — $3 billion amassed by one couple, working in tandem for more than four decades — has no equal.
By comparison, three generations of the Bush family, America’s other contemporaneous political dynasty, have raised about $2.4 billion for their state and federal campaigns and half a dozen charitable foundations, according to a Post tally of their fundraising from 1988 through 2015 — even though the family has collectively held the presidency longer than the Clintons.
THE $3 BILLION
The Clintons have raised $3 billion in support of their political and philanthropic efforts over four decades. Nearly all the funds went to support six federal campaigns and their family foundation.
NOTE: Bill Clinton’s totals include donations to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s totals include donations to allied PACs.
Both Clintons declined to be interviewed or comment for this article.
Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton, said campaign officials could not re-create The Post’s work to verify its findings.
“However, it should be noted that it would be misleading, at best, to conflate donations to a philanthropy with political giving,” Schwerin said in a statement. “And regarding the campaign contributions, the breadth and depth of their support is a testament to the fact that they have both dedicated their lives to public service and fighting to make this country stronger.”
The Clinton donor network is now serving as both a prime asset and liability for the former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state as she seeks the Democratic presidential nomination.
THE 2016 MONEY RACE
Money raised by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Ben Carson for their campaign committees this year.
= $10 million
Hillary Clinton $76.5m
Bernie Sanders $41.3m
Ben Carson $31.4m
Totals do not include funds raised for allied super PACs
Her imposing resources helped scare off would-be Democratic rivals, such as Vice President Biden, and have positioned her well against her main challenger for the party nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.). By the end of September, Clinton had raised $35 million more than Sanders, and she had pulled in more than double the total collected so far by the top campaign fundraiser in the GOP field, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
But in an election shaped by a mounting distaste for the influence of big money, Clinton’s long-standing ties to a cadre of wealthy patrons cuts against her efforts to cast herself as a champion of the middle class and a leader who will challenge the influence of large donors.
After Bill Clinton’s unsuccessful, labor-backed race for Congress, the couple hewed toward monied interests, courting banks and corporate leaders in Arkansas. It was a pattern that would repeat itself throughout their careers as they drew support from groups often in opposition: union leaders and corporate chiefs, trial lawyers and tech titans, top industrialists and liberal activists.
They have also been quick to seize on new sources of funds: Cuban Americans in Florida, Chinese immigrant communities in New York and wealthy figures around the world. And they have embraced bold new forms of fundraising, finding ways to inject corporate donations into political causes through nonprofit organizations in Arkansas and unregulated national party accounts.
Most of all, the Clintons have excelled at leveraging access to their power and celebrity. Following the advice of a young Democratic party finance chair named Terry McAuliffe, who is now governor of Virginia, the Clintons used the White House to entertain major donors. Perks included overnights in the Lincoln Bedroom. After leaving office, Bill Clinton headlined high-wattage gatherings for foundation donors around the globe. And supporters this year are jockeying to host intimate receptions at their homes during which they get a chance to mingle with Hillary Clinton.
The Clintons’ steady cultivation of financial benefactors — many of whom had interests before the government — has led to charges of conflicts of interest and impropriety, such as Bill Clinton’s end-of-term presidential pardons sought by donors. Among them was fugitive financierMarc Rich, whose wife, Denise, gave heavily to Democratic causes, including $450,000 for the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock.
The Post found that 2,700 loyal supporters — those who have given to both Clintons — have donated more than $129 million for their political races and legal needs. That is a fifth of the $600 million contributed by donors who gave more than $200.
ZOOMING INTO
THE POLITICAL MONEY
The graphic below focuses on the $1 billion
raised to support the Clintons’ political races
and legal needs.
Total amount
$3 billion
The Clinton
Foundation
$2 billion
Political support
$1 billion
HOW A SMALL CORE OF DONORS SUPPLIED A LARGE SHARE OF THE CLINTONS' POLITICAL SUPPORT
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The Washington Post found a small but influential group at the core of the Clintons’ fundraising network, which brought in $1 billion to support them politically, including $600 million from 290,000 known donors.
The Clintons raised the bulk of the $1 billion for six major campaigns: Bill’s two presidential races, Hillary’s two elections to the Senate and her two runs for president.
The Post identified 1 percent of donors who gave to support at least three of their political races. Donors who gave $200 or less are not required to be reported to the Federal Election Commission.
But that small percentage of loyal supporters gave a disproportionate share of the money raised, accounting for 22 percent of $600 million contributed by known donors.
Another way to see the impact of loyal contributors is to look at those who have donated to support both Bill and Hillary. The Post has identified around 1 percent of donors who have backed both of them.
That loyal group has provided an outsize share of their funds: more than $129 million, about 21 percent of the $600 million in itemized contributions.
$1 billion
290,000 donors
Bill runs for president
Hillary runs for Senate
Hillary runs for president
Among them are Elaine and Gerald Schuster, who made his fortune operating nursing homes and public housing developments, tangling with union leaders, government regulators and housing activists in the process. Together, the Boston-based couple have given 53 separate donations to support the Clintons since 1992, including $276,100 for their races and more than $500,000 to their foundation.
“When my father died, the first person I heard from was President Clinton,” said Elaine Schuster. “They have a following of people who would do absolutely anything for them.”
Building such a financial network — and nurturing it over four decades — is not easy, even with the perks of office.
Bill Clinton used his charisma and intellect to captivate new supporters. And Hillary applied her characteristic attentiveness — sending handwritten notes to celebrate engagements and new babies, and poetry books to comfort those in mourning — to win over lifelong allies.
“She remembers everything we ever talked about,” saidSusie Tompkins Buell, a close friend and co-founder of Esprit, who, with her husband, Mark, has given $420,000 to the Clintons’ campaigns and $11.25 million to their foundation.
“Hillary does not like to ask for money,” Buell added. “It’s not natural for her. But she’s got really good people who work for her who speak for her, and she’s very, very appreciative when she knows someone has done something for her. And you know it’s sincere.”
As she makes her second White House bid, Hillary Clinton is raising money in a dramatically different environment than her past campaigns. Since then, the Supreme Court has made it easier for wealthy individuals, corporations and unions to spend huge, unregulated sums on political activity.
TOP POLITICAL PATRONS OF BOTH BILL AND HILLARY
1. Haim and Cheryl Saban, media executive; women's advocate/author. $2.42 million.
2. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, public employees union. $1.684 million.
3. Communications Workers of America, labor union. $1.682 million.
4. Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, film director; actor. $1.5 million.
5. Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation chief executive; philanthropist. $1.35 million.
6. National Education Association, teachers' union. $1.31 million.
7. George Soros, hedge fund executive. $1.26 million.
8. Barbara F. Lee, women's advocate/philanthropist. $1.24 million.
9. S. Donald Sussman, hedge fund executive. $1.18 million.
10. Plumbers & Pipefitters Union, labor union. $1.16 million.
She has shown a willingness to embrace the new fundraising techniques. This fall, her campaign set up a joint fundraising committee with the Democratic National Committee and 32 state committees that can accept up to $366,000 per year from an individual donor — the first 2016 candidate to pursue such a tactic. And, unlike Sanders, she has sanctioned big-money super PACs working on her behalf, including onecoordinating directly with her campaign.
That has given the senator from Vermont an opening.
“I don’t think it’s good enough just to talk the talk on campaign finance reform. You’ve got to walk the walk,” he said to loud applause at a South Carolina forum hosted by MSNBC on Nov. 6, adding, “I am not asking millionaires and billionaires for large campaign contributions.”
Schwerin said that Clinton has fought for stricter campaign finance rules throughout her career and plans to make the issue a major part of her agenda as president.
“In the meantime, however, she will not unilaterally disarm, especially given how Republicans are promising to spend record amounts to tear her down,” he added.
If she secures the Democratic nomination, she is expected to bring in $1 billion during this election cycle — possibly matching what she and her husband collected for all their previous campaigns combined.
To do so, the former secretary of state is leaning on longtime Clinton patrons. Among the 264 individuals or couples who have already raised large sums for her campaign or hosted fundraising events through October are a core of loyal backers who personally contributed at least $73 million to support the Clintons over the years.
But her top fundraisers this year have included two dozen donors who had never before given money to either Clinton, according to The Post’s analysis.
More than two decades ago, one of the nation’s richest executives signed on early to support Bill Clinton’s move to the national stage.
IN a November 1991, Sam M. Walton, the conservative founder of Wal-Mart, sent an unlikely missive to all his corporate managers: He asked them to donate to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s presidential bid.
The billionaire retailer was a staunch Republican and fiercely anti-union. The young Democratic governor had entered state politics with the enthusiastic backing of organized labor. But Walton had come to respect Clinton and his wife, who had served on his company’s board for five years.
Walton said he still planned to vote for President George H.W. Bush but would do everything he could to help Clinton secure the Democratic nomination.
LETTER FROM SAM WALTON
When he was raising early money for his presidential campaign in 1991, Bill Clinton received a boost from the conservative founder of Wal-Mart, Sam Walton.
“I assure you the Walton family will join many others across the nation to provide Bill maximum financial assistance as well as other campaign support,” Walton wrote in a two-page memo obtained by The Post.
Walton’s relationship with the Clintons illustrated how the young couple won over the state’s business elite, often to the dismay of their union supporters.
Walton first got to know Hillary Clinton in 1983, when her husband tapped her to chair a state educational standards commission. Her panel rolled out a major reform proposal, one that eventually called for required teacher competency testing — an idea abhorrent to the teachers’ unions.
But the initiative was embraced by Arkansas’ corporate leaders, who hoped bolstering the state’s long-flagging school system would spur investment and economic expansion. Walton led an elite group of Arkansas executives — the “Good Suits Club” — who helped the Clintons sell the program.
THE CLINTONS’ JOURNEY: EARLY YEARS
Bill Clinton
Campaign
Term
1975
1980
1985
1990
1976
Attorney General
1978
Governor
1980
Governor
1982
Governor
1988
Governor
1991
Presidential
1974
Congress
Atty General
Ark. governor
Ark. governor
1983
1991
1992
Hillary chairs a state educational standards commission and ends up backing a major reform proposal opposed by teachers unions.
Bill begins to tap into Silicon Valley and Wall Street. At a brunch in San Jose and a dinner in New York, he connects with future donors.
Longtime friends Norman Lear, Harry Thomason and Mary Steenburgen help the Clintons form connections in Hollywood.
“It was one of Sam’s first forays into the policy world,” recalledThomas “Mack” McLarty, a close Clinton friend who was then chief executive of the leading gas utility in the state and one of the dozen business leaders who participated in the effort.
In a little-known episode, the Clintons and their business allies used a then-novel political tactic to build support for the initiative, financing two nonprofit organizations that touted the need for the education overhaul.
The measure was bitterly opposed by teachers’ unions. A leader of the Arkansas Education Association, Peggy Nabors, wrote in a November 1983 letter to teachers around the state that the Clintons’ proposal “had done inestimable damage to the teaching profession,” according to a copy obtained by The Post.
As Hillary Clinton toured Arkansas to promote the reform package, she encountered fierce opposition. “It’s hard. But someday they’ll understand,” her longtime friend Diane Blair recalled her saying, according to a Clinton biography by Carl Bernstein.
The hotly contested measure passed, and the initiative, which included more money for public schools, eventually yielded improvements in Arkansas’ educational system.
Just as Hillary Clinton predicted, the teachers’ unions came around.
Although other Arkansas labor leaders remained deeply disappointed by the Clinton record, Nabors had become an avid supporter by the time Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, joining the campaign to tout his education record.
“We disagreed strongly on that one issue but were in agreement on so many others,” she said in an interview. Nabors said she told the Clintons, “Everyone has the opportunity to be wrong at least once, and this was yours.”
Today, the two major national teachers’ unions rank among the Clintons’ biggest supporters. The National Education Association has contributed at least $1.3 million to bolster their races, while theAmerican Federation of Teachers has given more than $756,000 to support them politically and at least $1 million to their foundation.
In July, AFT endorsed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid — the first national union to do so.
TOP DONORS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION
Gave more than $25 million
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle-based international charity.
Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada), mining magnate-backed charity.
Frank Giustra, The Radcliffe Foundation, mining industry magnate.
Fred Eychaner and Applewood Foundation, Chicago media executive.
Nationale Postcode Loterij, Dutch charity.
The Children's Investment Fund Foundation, London-based charity.
UNITAID, international health organization.
The Clintons’ Arkansas experience would prove to be a template for their national approach. Time and again, they sided with business interests, infuriating their liberal allies. But the estrangement was rarely permanent.
“They made a very conscious move toward the center, in part probably because of fundraising demands and in part because of ideology,” said Andrew Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union. “They believe — as I do — that the Democratic Party has to be pro-growth.”
By the time the Clintons left Arkansas, they had forged strong relationships with the state’s power structure. Hillary Clinton was a corporate lawyer at the Rose Law Firm, the embodiment of the Little Rock establishment. She had become good friends withJames B. Blair, an early donor to Bill Clinton and counsel to Tyson Foods, who encouraged her to join him in investing in commodity futures, where she parlayed a $1,000 initial investment into a $100,000 profit. And she had served on several company boards, including Wal-Mart, which gave her more than $100,000 in stock options.
Walton and his wife, Helen, who both wrote $1,000 checks to Bill Clinton in 1991, did not donate to Clinton campaigns after that race. But their daughter, Alice Walton, has remained an ally, contributing $25,000 to Ready for Hillary, a super PAC that laid the groundwork for her 2016 bid. And Wal-Mart itself has been a big supporter of the Clinton Foundation, donating close to $1.2 million to finance student-run charitable projects and paying $370,000 in membership fees since 2008, according to a company spokesman.
Other key alliances took root in Arkansas. It was in Little Rock that Bill Clinton met Charlie Trie, the owner of a small restaurant who would laterplead guilty to a scheme to funnel illegal donations originating in China into Democratic Party coffers. Clinton’s friendships with Arkansans such as producer Harry Thomason and actor Mary Steenburgenhelped open doors in Hollywood, a key source of money for later campaigns. And his connections to the state’s banking families would later help him deftly navigate Wall Street.
As a young Democratic finance staffer, Matt Gorman was one of the first to get a look at the national fundraising network that then-Gov. Bill Clinton had started building from his base in Arkansas. It was a box crammed with business cards, Georgetown University alumni newsletters and cocktail napkins scrawled with notes such as, “Call me if you ever run for president.”
“I never saw anything like it,” said Gorman, who was handed the box when he arrived in Little Rock in August 1991.
THE CLINTONS’ LOYAL CORE
The Post identified 2,700 donors who made political contributions to support both Bill and HIllary Clinton. They make up less than 1 percent of donors who gave more than $200, but they gave 21 percent of the money.
All known donors
Their contribution
Nearly 1% of
the donors
21% of
the money
Gorman sorted the motley collection into 50 manila envelopes — one for each state other than Arkansas, as well as Puerto Rico — and began appealing to skeptical party financiers to back the little-known governor in his bid for the White House.
From those humble origins, the Clintons constructed an unsurpassed fundraising operation that soon reached into every major industry — from venerable Wall Street institutions to emerging powers in Silicon Valley.
It began with the sheer force of Bill Clinton, up close.
Ken Brody, a Goldman Sachs executive who had gotten to know the young governor through the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, brought Clinton to a small dinner party in Manhattan in 1991. There, he bowled over the group of 15 influential bankers and media executives, including then-Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin.
“It was a remarkable evening,” Rubin recounted in an oral history he gave for the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project. “It was about three hours or thereabouts, and he engaged with people in a way that nobody else I had seen in political life had, that sort of give and take. I left there thinking to myself, ‘This is a very impressive guy.’ ”
Rubin joined Clinton’s campaign as an economic adviser, and other Goldman Sachs partners mobilized their networks to raise money for the upstart candidate.
Across the country, Clinton had a similar impact on the conservative businessmen who then ran Silicon Valley.
At a brunch organized by Democratic fundraiser Gloria Rose Ott at the newly opened Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, the Arkansas governor dazzled the guests, including Apple chief executive John Sculley and Hewlett-Packard president John Young, both longtime Republicans.
“He had a stunning conversance about what we were doing here and why people should be paying attention to Silicon Valley,” said former California state controller Steve Westly, an early executive at eBay.
Sculley and Young helped draft the campaign’s high-tech policy. And in September 1992, they were among more than 20 top industry leaders — many of them lifelong GOP backers — who held a news conferenceendorsing Clinton.
That night, venture capitalist Sanford Robertson hosted a $5,000-a-couple fundraiser for Clinton at his historic San Francisco mansion with other industry leaders, helping raise more than $300,000 for the campaign.
Once in office, Clinton brought many of his new friends from Wall Street and the tech sector to Washington. Sculley had a seat next to Hillary Clinton at her husband’s first State of the Union address. Ott was appointed to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Brody was named the head of the Export-Import Bank. And Rubin was tapped to lead the National Economic Council, eventually becoming treasury secretary.
Like-minded Wall Streeters such as investment bankerRoger Altman joined him in the new administration, and early on they helped craft an economic policy — known as Rubinomics — that was applauded by Wall Street but viewed critically by many on the left.
When then-first lady Hillary Clinton decided to run for the Senate in New York in 2000, she turned to Rubin and Altman to introduce her to key players on Wall Street.
WAll Street’s influence prevailed during most of Bill Clinton’s presidency but ran into an unexpected hurdle late in his second term — thanks in part to his wife. At the time, big banks and allied businesses had formed a powerful lobbying coalition seeking more clout in recovering assets in the growing number of personal bankruptcies.
Labor leaders and Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren led opposition to the bill, arguing it would hurt debt-burdened families while enriching the banking sector. For help, Warren turned to the first lady, who came to her Harvard Law School office in 1998 and discussed the measure at length.
THE CLINTONS’ JOURNEY: RECENT DECADES
Campaign
Term
Bill Clinton
Hillary Clinton
1995
2000
2005
2010
2015
1996
Presidential
2000
Senate
2006
Senate
2016
Presidential
2008
Presidential
42th President of United States
Secretary of State
United States Senator from New York
1998
1998
2000
2001
Sept. 30, 2015
Hillary meets with Elizabeth Warren to discuss a pending bankruptcy bill.
Bill sets up a legal defense fund to help
pay for mounting
attorney fees.
At Hillary’s urging, Bill quietly vetoes the bankruptcy bill in the last days of his presidency.
As a senator, Hillary supports a bankruptcy bill similar to the one she urged Bill to veto.
Hillary has raised $76.5 million for her campaign.
Her allied super PACs have raised another $33.2 million.
After the meeting, Hillary Clinton vowed to fight against “that awful bill,” Warren wrote in her book, “A Fighting Chance.”
Hillary Clinton joined with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), writing letters and calling members of Congress to oppose the bank-sponsored legislation. But after a costly, intense lobbying campaign — during which President Clinton stayed silent — the bill passed Congress in 2000.
Then, in the waning days of his administration, the president disappointed the bankers and left the bill unsigned, effectively vetoing it. He did so after having been “urged on by his wife,” Warren wrote.
A year later, however, Hillary Clinton played a decidedly different role when she was faced with a similar bankruptcy bill as a freshman senator. She had just been elected with the strong support of the financial sector, which contributed $2.1 million of the $30 million she raised in 2000, one of the largest industries to back her, The Post’s analysis found
The measure her husband had vetoed was reintroduced in Congress, and Clinton switched sides — supporting it, along with 36 other Democrats.
She argued that the legislation had been improved since her earlier opposition. At her insistence, she said, sections were removed that would have ended special protection for child support payments. Even so, the bill — which failed — was vigorously opposed by consumer groups and unions that said it would harm the poor and vulnerable while giving huge advantages to banks, credit card companies and car dealers.
Warren, who declined to comment for this article, later recalled Clinton’s switch with some bitterness.
“The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not,” Warren wrote in her 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap,” published nine years before she was elected to the Senate. “Big banks were now part of Senator Clinton’s constituency,” she added.
Clinton has since said she regrets her 2001 stance and opposed a similar bankruptcy bill when it was passed in 2005. (She missed the vote because her husband was in surgery.)
Over her political career, she has maintained close relations with the financial sector, which tops the list of industries that have supported her, according to The Post’s analysis. Other major sectors that have backed her include the entertainment industry, health care and real estate.
Since 2000, Hillary Clinton has raised $29.2 million from the PACs and employees of banks, hedge funds, securities firms and insurance companies, according to The Post analysis. During his political career, Bill Clinton raised $39.7 million from the same sector.
In her current campaign, Clinton has pledged to rein in Wall Street. She has proposed higher taxes on high-frequency traders and an end to special tax breaks for hedge fund managers, and recently called for more aggressive enforcement of criminal statutes that govern the finance industry.
But her rhetoric has not alarmed her backers in the financial sector. So far, donors in the banking and insurance industries have given $6.4 million to her campaign and allied super PACs, behind only those in communications and technology, The Post found.
Hillary Clinton is drawing enthusiastic support from Silicon Valley, one of the first industries to rally around her husband nearly a quarter-century ago.
Marc Benioff, chief executive of the cloud computing company Salesforce.com, gave $50,000 with his wife, Lynne, to the Ready for Hillary super PAC in 2013. The next year, Salesforce.com paid Hillary Clinton $451,000 to deliver two speeches.
Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and one of the biggest players in the industry, has said he’s a fan of Clinton. And her campaign has hired a new start-up Schmidt helped bankroll called the Groundwork, which is developing cutting-edge technology to help engage supporters.
Other top tech executives and entrepreneurs are jockeying to host events for her campaign. Among them: Michael and Xochi Birch, founders of the social networking company Bebo, who crammed 145 people into their San Francisco mansion in September for a breakfast reception with the candidate.
“Hillary shows up with this great lineage and this incredible Rolodex she’s cultivated over the years,” Westly said. “She has built a very, very strong base.”
The power of Hillary Clinton’s donor base — and its steady expansion — was encapsulated by a 14-event cross-country fundraising sprint she did in late September, bringing in at least $4.4 million for her campaign in just six days.
Clinton started in New York, where John Zaccarro Jr., a real estate developer and son of the late Geraldine Ferraro, hosted 135 donors at his home. Zach Iscol, whose mother, Jill, is a close friend of Hillary Clinton, had another 100 contributors at his residence two days later.
In New Jersey, Clinton headlined a fundraiser at the estate of public-relations executive Michael Kempner. Among the guests was New Jersey Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, who told the crowd about how she met the then-first lady two decades earlier to discuss legislation that would guarantee that new mothers could have an overnight hospital stay.
A few days later, she was in California, mingling with Saban and other old Hollywood friends at the Brentwood home of studio chief Rob Friedman and his wife, Shari.
But she wasn’t just feted by longtime family loyalists. The network now has new players such as Tracey Turner, a microfinance entrepreneur who held an event for Clinton at her home in Belvedere, Calif.
“This is the first time I’ve done anything remotely like this,” Turner said. “I have a daughter who is 6, and I thought, ‘You know what, I want my daughter to be part of this moment in history.’ ”
She pitched the campaign on an unusual idea — a “bring your child to meet the first woman president” fundraiser.
And that’s how 150 supporters and just as many kids gathered in Turner’s yard on a Monday afternoon for a garden party that raised at least $400,000 for the campaign. Clinton ditched her stump speech and instead fielded questions from the kids.
“Everyone went wild,” recalled Turner, who said the former secretary of state fielded topics that ranged from the height of the Washington Monument to the plight of Syrian children.
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