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A
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B
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Thursday, November 13th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Hillary Clinton, with 2016 on her mind, has been sounding a populist. You should not have to be a grandchild of a governor, a senator, a secretary of state, or a president to have the same opportunity that we were given in previous years. Vote for somebody who will understand that and deliver for you. In that campaign ad, the former first lady senator and Secretary of state was speaking on behalf of Martha Coakley, who ended up losing her race for governor of Massachusetts last week. Ryan, Lissa and Evan Osnos join me today to talk about the challenges Clinton faces, both from within her party and from Republicans in the next couple of years. Also, one of the big issues will be foreign policy, obviously, and we're going to talk a little bit about how Obama's agreement this week with China on carbon emissions is going to play out. So, Ryan, you have a piece in this week's issue about Hillary and her pesky potential challengers none of them really seems like a plausible nominee, as you point out. And I think my, my favorite line in the piece is from a Democratic strategist saying if you get a deft insurgent, they may not win, but an insurgent could torture this poor woman. Talk a little bit about that.
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C
The conventional wisdom is that she is an inevitable nominee that will just march to the convention in the summer of 2016 with absolutely no competition. That's never happened before when the Democrats have had an open primary. And I think for a whole set of reasons, it's unlikely to happen this time as well. There is a growing anxiety on the left over her political positions. And you know, this is something that's been going on ever since Bill Clinton first came on the scene. Back when Bill Clinton came on the scene, the left was defeated and had just lost three presidential elections in a row. And the centrism of the Clintons looked like the way back to the White House. More recently, the Democrats have a sort of natural electoral advantage when it comes to winning the White House. And once you identify a candidate who's really making a case against Clinton, then interesting things can happen. Right. And you know, the history of these open primaries is that the dominant frontrunner always gets challenged.
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B
You ran through three potential challengers and.
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C
What, Pesky is a good word for them.
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B
Yeah. And they all seem to agree on her biggest political vulnerabilities. What did they say the history of these cases is?
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C
Obama had three reasons he was able to beat her last time he could attack her from the left on an issue that Democrats really cared a lot about and that was the war. So he had a message. He was able to steal a core Democratic constituency from her African American. So he had demographics on his side and then he had a really masterful organization that basically planned for a long fight to the convention and was organized in many states and none of the previous insurgents really had done that kind of organizing. So then you have to look around. All right, who has that, who has message, demographics and organization on their side? And the three candidates I focused on in the piece are Martin o', Malley, two term governor of Maryland, Jim Webb, a one term senator from Virginia, and Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont.
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B
Not to say socialist.
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C
Not to say, yeah, self described socialist. And it's look, it's really, it's hard to make the case for any of them pulling this off.
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B
And I want to ask you quickly because several people have asked me since your piece came out, why isn't Elizabeth Warren part of the picture? She was People on the left wing of the party had such a she.
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C
Says she's not running. So sort of my rule with this piece was look at the people who are actually willing to say or saying, I'm thinking about running.
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B
And has there been any pressure on her from the left press?
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C
Just like there's a Ready for Hillary pac, an organization, there's a Ready for Elizabeth organization, or Ready for Warren, I think it's called. And there's lots and lots of pressure from the left to get her into the race. The reason is looking at the criteria I laid out about how you could beat Hillary Warren's got message. She would be able to raise a hu amount of money and build that organization. But because she is a woman, that's where you get into the demographics. And just as Obama was able to take away African Americans from Hillary Clinton, perhaps Elizabeth Warren could take a big chunk of the female electorate. The sort of conventional wisdom is that a white guy can't beat Hillary Clinton because there's just no constituency that he's going to be able to steal from her.
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B
So, Evan, what about all this? What are your thoughts?
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D
Well, I think Ryan identified something really interesting in the piece, which is the possibility of having Hillary Clinton's foreign policy record on the ballot. And whether it's Jim Webb or somebody else, there really is an opportunity for somebody to create a conversation about what do Democrats envision for America's role in the world? You know, if we go back over the course of the last six years, she was in favor of the war in Iraq in 2003. She supported a second surge in Afghanistan that didn't work out the way the administration wanted. She pushed for action in Lib, which the president now describes as one of his regrets of his time in office is that the Libya intervention did not end up better.
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B
Hillary Clinton must regret to a certain extent some of this because she is now saddled with the Benghazi disaster forever.
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D
Absolutely. And she'll be hearing about Benghazi on the campaign trail. That's going to become an easy partisan point. But I think beyond even what in that case is going to be a reflexive kind of conversation, really about the Obama administration even more than about her.
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C
Remember Obama, it was all about the war in Iraq in 08. He wouldn't have won that primary unless he had that issue. And I think some people think that, oh, well, that's receded into the past. She sort of kind of apologized for it. But the war in Iraq has shaped everything that has subsequently happened in the Middle East. And depending, you know, how on fire the Middle east continues to be in a Democratic primary, she's still going to have to pay for that vote.
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B
Well, and also more recently, you know, she and I want to hear, Evan, what you have to say about this. She's come out a couple of times laying out her differences with Obama on some of these issues. So on Syria, she has said the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad, there were Islamists, there were secularists, and there was everything in the middle. The failure to do that left a big vacuum which the jihadists have now filled. That sounds almost indistinguishable from what John McCain has been saying.
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D
Yeah. She has had to move herself into the position that she does not want to be in, which is that she effectively has to distance herself from her own accomplishments in office because that's where the American mood is. You know, right now, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a list of achievements from its foreign policy that holds up. You know, every time it names a place, a couple of months later, it collides with reality. So, for instance, most recently when the president was trying to describe what he hopes to accomplish in Syria and Iraq, he could raise Yemen as an example of where counterterrorism operations have brought some kind of achievable objective. But then, of course, now Yemen has run into trouble as well. So it's a difficult position because a lot of the arguments that she will have to make in order to appeal to people ultimately are going to disparage the record that she was a part of and are also going to support the arguments of her eventual opponents in a general election.
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C
And just look at this week. The president's in Burma this week, Hillary Clinton has a whole chapter on the Burma success story. And you know, as a lot of people are pointing out, it's not a total success. I mean, there's essentially a genocide going on there right now.
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B
Yeah. And Evan, we were talking about that yesterday.
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D
Yeah, it's interesting because Ryan and you picked up on this. Jim Webb, I think, rightly takes credit for putting Burma on the radar screen in American foreign policy. He was talking about this almost 15 years ago. I remember he wrote a sort of prominent op ed calling for relaxing sanctions. And it's almost a perfect demonstration now of the problem of running on a foreign policy objective is that Burma has turned out to be a very complicated, very mixed bag. It's going to be difficult for Jim Webb for Hillary Clinton, for anybody else to be able to point to that as an uncomplicated success.
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C
Yeah, I don't think Jim Webb or any Democrat's going to beat Hillary Clinton, you know, on a campaign about Burma.
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B
This is a good segue into China, Evan. Yesterday, Obama announced that agreement with China to reduce carbon emissions over the next few decades. First of all, how important is the deal? China has been an impediment to climate change negotiations ever since Kyoto. Why is the country now coming around?
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D
By the way, speaking of a segue to China, I have to say I think Barack Obama has rarely been happier to get on a plane for 14 hours and leave Washington, D.C. than he was after these midterm election results and be able to be on the opposite side of the planet for a week. This is a big deal. You know, people in the climate community knew that there was a deal, something was happening, something was taking shape. But I don't think anybody anticipated that it would be the breakthrough which it is. I mean, without overstating the consequence, it does two important things. One is that China had never said before this that it would cut its carbon emissions. All it had said is that it would slow them down, slow down the rate of increase over time. Now it's fixed a point on the calendar and said that they will begin to fall after that point. And then the other big effect of this is a demonstration effect, in a sense. Since China and the United States account for almost half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, this now gives permission to other countries to be more ambitious in their own targets. And all of this is looking ahead to the big climate summit meeting that'll be in Paris in December of next year.
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B
So, Ryan, on the our domestic political side of this, it's interesting that the architect of the plan is Obama's senior counselor, John Podesta, who's likely to leave the White House next year to serve as the chairman of Hillary's campaign. So talk a little bit about that. This does seem like a major victory for the Democrats.
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C
Well, Podesta is the issue he probably cares more about than anything is the environment and specifically climate change. And he really did go into the White House to try it and reinvigorate both Obama's EPA regulations and make sure those had some teeth and the international climate agreement that Evan was talking about. Those are the two avenues that are going to decide Obama's legacy on this issue. And domestically, I think one thing it does, and I don't know exactly what the impact of this will be because Other arguments will crop up. But Republicans, of course, have long said, well, yeah, even if climate change is happening, the US should not act until China does, right? Yes, we're not going to do anything that hurts our economy while the other big emitter in the world is not doing anything. So this really takes that argument away from a lot of Republicans. But one other political consideration, climate change has been a terrible issue for Democrats since the economy has been struggling. And this is going to put a lot of pressure on Hillary Clinton to be bold on climate change. And it's not going to be easy.
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B
Well, and we've seen already that Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a big coal producing state who's the presumed major leader of the Senate, you know, he came out immediately to denounce the agreement.
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C
It's kind of amazing, actually. Evan, I'm curious, see if historically you can think of a time that's similar. You have Obama in serious negotiations with Iran over the nuclear program that are coming to a head and a major climate agreement. And you have Republicans in Congress on both fronts saying, we are going to roll back both of those things. So you have a real, you have Congress inserting itself in foreign policy in a way that is not, you know, I can't remember similar, you know, the other party, even before agreements, even before the ink has dried in one case and in the other case the agreement hasn't even been written yet, are saying they're going to roll them back.
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D
You know, if you're trying to decide, if you're President Obama trying to make a decision about what you can do in Syria, you're not just thinking about what you can accomplish tactically. You have to be thinking about what does this do to my negotiations with Iran over nuclear proliferation? What does that do to my relationship in Iraq, to Turkey, to Russ? All of these pieces are interconnected. And then all of them, of course, end up on the doorstep at Capitol Hill and they could be blown up no matter what kind of agreement he produces. So it's just a very paralyzing moment, I think.
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B
But Evan, just to get back to the Republicans for a minute, doesn't it pose major problems for them, too? You know, you described McConnell recently in a blog post as a pure political being, which he certainly is. And he said in an interview in Kentucky a week or two ago that his top priority is to get the EPA reined in. But isn't climate change a source of concern among a vast majority of vot, Republicans included? And isn't this going to be somewhat difficult for the Republican candidate to deal with. We're at a different point now than we were say, five years ago on climate change.
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D
I think that's right. If you look at the polls, they're very clear that climate change and making some kind of substantive move is popular among younger voters, among women, among Latino voters. The places where it's distinctly unpopular are places like Mitch McConnell's home state of Kentucky, West Virginia, these what have become completely unmovable red states. But it is going to be an uphill battle because it's facing. What I think is this is an issue that is a little bit like same sex marriage that is emerging in the substratum of American politics. And it can be easy to overlook it until it bursts into the open and all of a sudden it's just a fact of life and they can push against it. But it's going to be very hard to counteract how much people want to.
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C
See one thing on the, on how important climate change is to the American people. I hate to say it, but it ranks really, really low.
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B
What's the top, what's at the very top of the list of concerns?
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C
You know, exactly what you'd think, jobs, the economy, deficit reduction. But climate change, you know, it's one of these issues where you don't feel the impact, so it doesn't rise to the top of the list. And by the time you feel the impact, it's too late to do anything about it.
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B
So let's just talk very quickly at the end here about jobs and about the economy and how Hillary Clinton and whether she might be vulnerable on some of these issues. Jim Webb, as I recall, Ryan in your piece was quite critical of her on this point, that she just, you know, feeds some raw meat to the public on smaller issues like the minimum.
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C
Wage, you know, and he was talking, I think what's interesting about what he said about that, he was talking before the midterms and he was saying he was basically dismissing Democrats for their economic message in the midterms and really over the last two years, not being broad enough, focusing on things like the minimum wage which, you know, he agrees should be increased, but not having a sort of larger story to tell about where the economy is now and where Democrats want to take it. And he was talking about that before the sort of wipeout election. And that's sort of become a conventional argument among a lot of Democrats since the wipeout, that the messaging was really, really poor on the Democrats side. They just didn't have an overarching view of what's wrong with the economy. You know, I think for Obama, he's been trapped for years now between wanting to brag about incremental improvements while at the same time recognize that there are still a lot of problems. To me, that is the big crisis for the Democratic Party is after eight years of Obama, you know, even with positive growth and lower unemployment, median wages are going to be lower than when he started.
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B
So what about that, Evan? This is clearly something that Hillary is beginning to pick up on. But as we were discussing at the beginning of the program, it's somewhat problematic for her with her ties to Wall Street.
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D
Now this is going to be an obvious vulnerability for her. And the challenge, of course, is, and this is a question I would pose to Ryan too, I would be really interested in trying to game out how somebody can raise the money, raise the billion plus plus dollars to run for president against Hillary Clinton without having the associations with Wall street that somebody is going to be running against. I mean, it's you raise in the piece, I think a really fascinating problem which is it seems like there is a relatively small number of places that a person can turn for money that doesn't then expose them to the charge of hypocrisy if they're trying to challenge.
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C
Hillary Clinton on yeah, there's actually two sources to finance a campaign like this against her is if you tap in the way that sort of Ron Paul did in 2008 and 2012 into a national small donor network. That's one option. And then the other option is the super PAC option. You know, you've got your sugar daddy and he or she finances to the tune of probably more like we're talking more like tens of millions of dollars and keeps your campaign alive. And maybe it doesn't beat Hillary Clinton, but it tortures her for a while to that's the big unknown in 2016 because remember, the Democrats have not had an open primary since the post Citizens United world, since the emergence of super PACs and the ability of donors to spend unlimited amount of money on campaigns. The Republicans had that in 2012, but of course the Democrats didn't have an open primary. So that, I mean that is one big unknown going forward for them.
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B
Okay, thank you both.
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C
Thanks, Dorothy.
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D
Thanks, Dorothy.
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B
Ryan Lizza and Evan Osnos are staff writers and Evan is the author of Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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C
You can subscribe to this podcast and other free New Yorker podcasts in the iTunes store the weekly audio edition of the magazine is available@Audible.com New Yorker subscribers can access the digital edition for tablets and phones at no extra charge from the App Store or from Google Play.
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B
America is changing, and so is the world.
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C
But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
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D
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
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Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
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A
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story.
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From this intersection where the world and America meet.
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Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
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D
From.
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PRX.