US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3473

BURLINGTON, Vt. – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday challenged Hillary Clinton to debate him in New York before the state’s April 19 primary election.

“I would hope very much that as we go into New York state, Secretary Clinton’s home state, that we will have a debate – New York City or Upstate, wherever – on the important issues facing New York and, in fact, the country,” Sanders told Chuck Todd in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Fresh off sweeping victories on Saturday in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii, Sanders was looking ahead to upcoming primaries in Wisconsin and New York.

He told The Associated Press it was “really absurd” that Clinton so far has refused to agree to a debate with him in her home state.

Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, wrote a letter on Sunday to Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, underscoring the senator’s call for a New York debate.

“New York will play a critical role in determining the Democratic nominee. However, your campaign has consistently chosen to deny the people of New York the opportunity to see Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton debate in the Empire State,” Weaver wrote to Mook.

“It is difficult to understand your motivation,” Weaver added “Can you please explain why New York should not host the April debate?

Every Hillary supporter I ran across, I just simply asked them legitimate reasons (non-combatively) on why they support her. Only two responses I got: "I'm a woman, and I want a female president." Or ".........."

Yeah, that silence is real. They can't think of good reasons on why to support Hillary over Bernie.

Why Obama Got the Fundamentals of American Foreign Policy Right
There is one overriding task that has guided the exercise of American power abroad since 1945.
By Ankit Panda
March 12, 2016

Ronald Dworkin, the legal philosopher who died in 2013, famously used a metaphor once to explain the core of his thinking on the philosophy of law. In the context of American common law and constitutional interpretation, Dworkin analogized the role of judges as the writers of a “chain novel.” The law, per Dworkin, was a collective novel, composed by a sequence of jurists. In his words: “In this enterprise a group of novelists writes a novel seriatim; each novelist in the chain interprets the chapter he has been given in order to write a new chapter, which is then added to what the next novelist receives, and so on.”

When reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s new article in the April 2016 issue of the Atlantic, which seems to have opened the doors to a public debate measuring the legacy of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, I was reminded of Dworkin’s metaphor and wondered if it might be a useful way to think about assessing the foreign policy records of U.S. presidents. Critical to Dworkin’s metaphor wasn’t merely the idea of continuity in the “novel” of law, but jurists had to preserve what he called “narrative coherence” – the idea that law, as interpreted by contemporary judges, had to effectively make sense given what had come before it. The core narrative had to persist, binding judges to interpret and reason about the law within certain bounds, proscribed by their predecessors and, ultimately, the constitution.

American presidents have a similar task when it comes to foreign policy. Even though the challenges they’ll face will appear discrete and episodic, there is a fundamental task that has guided the exercise of American power abroad since 1945, which is making sure that the liberal international order that was set up after the Second World War persists unchanged. This is the “narrative” to the story of why American power has mattered.

Whatever a president’s failings and regrets regarding how specific crises were handled and mishandled, as long as this fundamental objective isn’t lost, we can say that their presidency wasn’t a “disaster.” In particular, with the prospect of an outsider like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, neither of whom has shown much interest in preserving the liberal international order, potentially on the doorstep of the White House, it may be an opportune moment to take stock of just how critical it has been to have U.S. presidents who recognize the fundamental importance of preserving that order.

To be sure, this mode of evaluation sees the forest for the trees. Like judges in the Dworkinian metaphor, every American president since Harry Truman has succeeded in exercising American power in a way that has, at a minimum, preserved the liberal international order. The better foreign policy presidents have left the world and the United States’ place in it better off than when they entered office. Obama, like his twelve predecessors going back to Truman, has accomplished the former with little difficulty. The latter is where, I suspect, there will – and should be – greater debate.

Goldberg notes that Obama is fundamentally an admirer of “the foreign-policy realism of President George H.W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft.” This assertion struck me as particularly noteworthy, given that the Bush saw the United States’ emergence out of the Cold War at a moment of triumphalism for the liberal order – what Charles Krauthammer called the “unipolar moment” for the United States. Francis Fukuyama, extrapolating on the consequences of American triumph in the Cold War for political order in the world at large, famously declared the “end of history.”

In the quarter century that has elapsed, unipolarity has given way to a fuzzy world of either U.S.-China bipolarity, “weak” unipolarity, or multipolarity, depending on who you ask. Reading Goldberg’s discussion of Obama’s realism, it’s clear that this president’s big takeaway from the Bush 41 years was to avoid over-extension and the over-commitment of U.S. assets to crises that wouldn’t matter in the big picture of world order. It’s tempting given present realities for the United States and Obama’s “Don’t do stupid shit” mantra to brand this president a realist with an instrumentalist understanding of U.S. power, divorced from values, but this only tells part of the story.

At the risk of getting mired in the discussion of what-is-or-isn’t-realist, I’d aver that Obama is better described as a liberal idealist keenly aware of his place in the broader “novel” of American foreign policy, to return to Dworkin’s metaphor. As he ascended to the presidency, Obama was reminded time and time again – indeed, even by some nice people in Norway who gave him a medal – that his presidency would follow that of George W. Bush’s and must avoid repeating that administration’s mistakes. Bush’s exercise of American power embodied over-extension, unilateralism, and a values-first, reason-second approach to the world.

The bet Obama campaigned on and then honed throughout his time in office was that a temporary period of military retrenchment, buttressed by diplomacy, would best position his successors to carry on with the central foreign policy project of sustaining the liberal international order that has been so good to American interests. The end of the war in Iraq and the almost irresponsible pace of withdrawal from Afghanistan, whatever their negative short-term effects may have been, were borne of this impulse. Similarly, the administration’s pursuit of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the nuclear deal with Iran, and diversification of partnerships in Asia speak to Obama’s belief in the value of diplomacy.

Obama’s record suggests that he’s firmly grounded in the liberal tradition in international affairs, favoring internationalism and outreach, but is a realist in his thinking about the exercise of material power, understanding the limits of what American power can accomplish. As a strategist, he is more keenly attuned to costs over strategic end states.

The ‘Pivot’

As someone who thinks and writes a lot about Asia, I also sense that the origins of the “pivot” to Asia revealed the administration’s long-term approach to U.S. foreign policy. Derailed though it was by unexpected crises in the Middle East and Europe, the pivot, in theory, showed a recognition by the president that the United States wasn’t ready to underwrite the international order where it would come under the most stress over the coming generation: in East Asia. Though China’s rise had largely been peaceful up to time the pivot was declared, the administration correctly bet that given China’s unsettled interests, in the South and East China Seas, and in Taiwan, for example, friction would soon emerge.

There’s much to take issue with in the execution of the pivot. The administration ended up preferring to describe the initiative as the “rebalance,” a less energetic descriptor, lacking the suddenness and energy of what the pivot had implied in 2011, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton introduced the initiative in Foreign Policy magazine. Clinton, at the time, wrote that the United States needs to be present in Asia as the future of international order is molded there, in a region encompassing half the world’s population:

At a time when the region is building a more mature security and economic architecture to promote stability and prosperity, U.S. commitment there is essential. It will help build that architecture and pay dividends for continued American leadership well into this century, just as our post-World War II commitment to building a comprehensive and lasting transatlantic network of institutions and relationships has paid off many times over — and continues to do so.

It’s interesting to note that Obama echoes some of this in his conversation with Goldberg on why it’s so important for the United States and China to get their bilateral relationship right. “If we get that right and China continues on a peaceful rise, then we have a partner that is growing in capability and sharing with us the burdens and responsibilities of maintaining an international order,” he says.

With months on the clock on the Obama presidency, it’s safe to say that the pivot has delivered modest dividends and challenges for U.S. leadership persist in the Asia-Pacific today. Nevertheless, the framing of the pivot as a grand strategic exercise showed that the administration recognized the fundamental task for American leadership and power. In Asia, Obama saw value in supporting old alliances, fostering new partnerships, and encouraging robust multilateralism all as net positives to buttressing the liberal international order. His successor will have much to be thankful for as he or she will face challenges in the region beyond 2016.

My chosen mode of assessing Obama’s success here may employ too generous a yardstick. After all, it basically gives every president for the last 70-some years a pass, with different degrees of success. Obama, I think, on balance has been more successful than the running average of presidents. Perhaps he hasn’t surpassed Bush 41, his supposed realist idol, but he certainly delivered on avoiding a repeat of Bush 43′s failings. Despite these assessments, Goldberg’s piece makes clear that the episodic successes and failures of the administration in Syria, Libya, Ukraine and elsewhere will likely capture a lot of the presidential foreign policy post mortem as we head toward the end of Obama’s eight years. Here, the Obama years come off worse.

In the grand strategic view, Obama’s foreign policy legacy is greater than the sum of its parts. In his eight years, American leadership has mostly muddled and moseyed its way through challenges and crises, suggesting, to the administration’s critics, that the president lacks vision or interest in the proper exercise of American power. But as his predecessors understood (or came to understand by the end of their terms) and as his successor will come to understand, the fundamental objective is supporting the international order that has enabled a period of unprecedented human prosperity, interconnectedness, and relative peace. As he tells Goldberg, “For all of our warts, the United States has clearly been a force for good in the world.”

On March 28 2016 04:04 Gorsameth wrote:
Just wondering where this 79% AZ votes is coming from?
I tried looking for the final results and the Guardian is giving me 99.5% counted
www.theguardian.com

On March 28 2016 04:08 farvacola wrote:
That's an excellent article, Tolkien, thanks for posting it.

On March 28 2016 04:09 GreenHorizons wrote:


CNN, MSNBC, Fox News.

The 99%+ counts are using "precincts reporting".

The big issue is that Maricopa county (home to Phoenix) in their counts suggests only 32k people voted the day of. Lines as long as 5+ hours across the city (still going after midnight local time), suggests otherwise.

The media immediately screwed the pooch when they said that they had 71% of the vote in and since has just been trying to hide it. They added 10's of thousands of votes to the totals without changing it and then they just bumped it up to 79% and let it hang.

Because I knew people would be skeptical I already showed evidence of it happening.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/general/383301-us-politics-mega-thread?page=3444#68866

On March 28 2016 04:37 Gorsameth wrote:

Maricopa, 724/724 precincts reported 218,587 votes as per the Guardian. (409k state wide)

The reason I'm asking is because I think its likely that wherever CNN, NBC ect got their numbers from just never updated (for whatever reason).

Yes it is possible a lot of votes have not been counted yet, and it wouldn't surprise me considering how bad the elections are run in general but I would like to rule out the obvious simple answers first.

On March 28 2016 04:47 GreenHorizons wrote:


They did update. They added 62 votes the day after. I'm not sure why you would even think this is a remotely feasible explanation...

There is no sensible explanation for giving play by play every time the %-in updates for every other state and ignore that they botched the AZ numbers so badly. As for Maricopa those are almost exclusively mail-ins and based on reports on how many of those there were, that would mean ~32k people voted the day of which is absurd to even suggest.

That the media hasn't even touched this story makes it blatantly obvious that it's not a coincidence.

On March 28 2016 04:59 Gorsameth wrote:

2008 primary had 450k votes. I really see no reason to believe that they are still actually missing 21% of votes.

PS.
why are you not complaining about Texas which CNN has at 68%?

On March 28 2016 05:05 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Report: California to raise minimum wage to $15 .

On March 28 2016 05:26 wei2coolman wrote:

What's the timeline for that?

On March 28 2016 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:


The detailed problems around Texas aren't clear (like long lines not matching suggested counts), I also don't have images that show them acting funny with the numbers, plus they have already moved on to their conventions. I also find that problematic though if you were wondering.

It's not just that they may or may not be missing 21% of the vote but you know that already.

On March 28 2016 05:57 oneofthem wrote:
all the sanders agitprop in caucus states must be a sight to behold. it is a full on revolution with revolutionary use of media, so voter manipulation charges always to craft narrative instead of raising genuine issues of concern.

im just curious about the mental state of people who get so attached to such a terrible candidate and platform. bird seems in the right ballpark

On March 28 2016 04:08 farvacola wrote:
That's an excellent article, [..].

On March 28 2016 07:09 Acrofales wrote:


I'm confused. Instead of blaming CNN for fucking up the numbers, getting their data from a shoddy place, you think there is a conspiracy to withhold the counting... for whatever strange reason.

Lets face it, if vote fraud is happening, this seems incredibly incompetent. So let's go with Hanlon's razor here? CNN, and NBC are incompetent.