Mediaboss Marketing

In recent years, there has been an interesting trend in international relations research: a renewed focus on the role that individual leaders play in foreign policy outcomes. This runs counter to traditional international relations scholarship, whichargues that the system imposes powerful structural constraints on individual leaderbehavior.Over the past decade, however, an increasing number of scholars have focused on the first image, suggesting multiple ways in which individual foreign policy leaders affect their countrys approach to international relations.

Donald Trumps electoral college victory in November has accelerated this research even further. At a minimum, he has sounded different from, say, a garden-variety Republican on a number of fronts. But if Hillary Clinton had won 100,000 more votes in the salient states, would things be all that different? This kind of counterfactual analysis is also a crucial part of political science and foreign policy analysis.

Over the weekend, the New York Posts John Podhoretz argued that neither American politics nor public policy would be all that different if Clinton had won:

The astonishing answer, if you really think it through, is: not all that different when it comes to policy.

Lets face it: With the exception of the Supreme Courtappointment and confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump has astoundingly little in the accomplishments column especially for a president whose party controls both houses of Congress.

What would the Republicans have done in the Hillary era so far? They would have sought to stymie her, or challenge her.

We would have been awash in a scandal narrative that would not be quite as breathless or bonkers as the Trump White House helps to generate but would have been disturbing and unpleasant.

Moreover, the questions raised about the unprecedented nature of the Trump presidency would have been raised by the dynastic Clinton White House, featuring a candidate who got elected despite her e-mail scandals and the spouse who was only the second president in history to have been impeached.

Read the whole thing. Podhoretz is not Clintons biggest fan, and yet almost everything in his column rings true. The thing is, whats not in the column matters as well.

He is largely correct about what President Hillary Clinton could have accomplished with a Republican Congress. Surely, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would have made his No. 1 goal similar to what it was in 2010: defeating Clinton in 2020. Indeed, in this scenario, there are ways in which the current moment would be more fraught with tension, as Clinton would have had to work hard to get Congress to pass a clean debt-ceiling increase and fund the government. We might still get that with Trump, but the probability would have been higher with Clinton.

And surely Podhoretz is also correct that Congress would have tried to hamstring Clinton with investigation after investigation. Remember this story from October 2016, in which Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) bragged about having two years of investigations prepped for Clinton?

Its a target-rich environment, the Republican said in an interview in Salt Lake Citys suburbs. Even before we get to Day One, weve got two years worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it aint good.

Even in this calendar year, Chaffetz seemed primed to go after Clinton.

So yes, there are a lot of ways in which 2017 wouldnt look all that different with Clinton in the White House. Podhoretz, however, omitted the most obvious areas where Clinton and Trump would differ: the areas of politics andpolicy where a president exerts the most unconstrained influence.

Focus on the rhetoric first. I seriously doubt that Clinton would publicly characterizethe mainstream media as the enemy of the American people or tweet insults directed at critical commentators or requestpublic effusions of praise from her cabinet or just generally act ridiculous in the public eye. To be fair, Podhoretz acknowledges this, noting that Hillary is many things, and many not good things, but she is not a sower of chaos or the subject of infighting so constant that no one can even catch a breath before one weird story is displaced by another. Shes far too boring for that. Still, this is not an insignificant difference.

The more important differences are in the policies where the executive ranch wields the greatest authority. I am pretty sure that a Justice Department under Clinton would not have taken a sledgehammer to Obamas legacyon incarceration, voting rights, and private prisons. AClinton administration would not engage in the kind of deregulation that, say, Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruittwould. A Clinton administration would not issue a dumb, self-defeating travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries. A Clinton administration would not solicit bids to build a wall along U.S.-Mexico.

More generally, however, Clinton would be conducting foreign policy rather differently. She would not have withdrawn from either the Paris climate accord or the Trans-Pacific Partnership (I know she opposed the latter during the campaign, but the far more likely option is that she would have sought to negotiate additional side deals akin to how her husband dealt with NAFTA). There would be no underhanded GCC effort to embargo Qatar, because Clinton would never have been so stupid as to have given the Saudis and Emiratis a blank check to do so.

The nation under Clinton would not be contemplating the start of the dumbest trade war in this century. European allies would not be talking about the need to go it alone.Asian allies would not talk about the need to cut the tag with the United States. The likelihood of a competent secretary of state doing his or her job seems much higher than odds of the current one doing anything constructive. There would be no ongoingbeclowning of the executive branch. And no one would be worried about the sudden collapse of American soft power, because it wouldnt be collapsing.

If Clinton were president right now, American foreign policy would not have deviated too much from the prior status quo. She would have made America Boring Again. And given how this year has actually gone, I would take that outcome every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Read the rest here:
Would 2017 look the same under President Hillary Clinton? - Washington Post

You wont find a bigger supporter of Hillary Clinton than me. Sure, I stumped for Barack Obama in 2008, and for Bernie Sanders during the 2016 primary, but I have always been steadfast in my belief that Hillary Rodham Clinton had the judgment and experience to be Commander-in-Chief of the United States (unless there were some technical way in which Bernie Sanders could still pull it off).

So it is as one of Clintons biggest supporters that I say to her now: your work here is done. It is time for Hillary Clinton to disappear from our magazine covers and our television screens, and gracefully retire from public life. Ideally, taking all other women with her.

This is about moving forward, and how are we supposed to do that when were hamstrung by symbols of past failures, like Hillary Clinton, or Geraldine from human resources, who makes a federal case out of every bad joke around the water cooler? Lets save the investigating for private e-mail servers, O.K., Geraldine? There are still a lot of unanswered questions there.

The Trump Presidency isnt a slow-motion car crash. Its happening at light speed, every day. How are we supposed to combat this existential threat when were constantly interrupted by the rejected message of a previous candidate? And how am I supposed to formulate my thoughts when my wife is constantly interrupting to ask what Im thinking? Its a political Catch-22 that can only be reconciled by Hillary returning to the Chappaqua woods, along with my wife, and her friend Sarah with the weird laugh, who apparently doesnt have her own apartment where she can watch The Good Fight.

And dont get me started on Chelsea. Yes, shes a highly educated, well-spoken young woman with a lifelong front-row seat to politics and governance. As a private citizen of this democracy, she has every right to run for office. But should she? The last thing we need is to keep the Clinton dynasty on life support. Like my grandmother, selfishly clinging to a fortune she cannot enjoy, with one foot in the grave and the other in a tub of Epsom salt. The Newport house should be mine, Nana. The Newport house belongs to America now.

I can hear you formulating your outrage. But, I assure you, this is not a gendered opinion. No recent failed Presidential candidate has ever had such a prominent public role post-election, with the possible exceptions of Al Gore, who produced and starred in an Oscar-winning documentary; Senator John McCain, who is a constant television presence; and Mitt Romney, whoyou gotta admitseemed like a pretty good dude in that Netflix movie. Just an awkward guy from a political family who had no logical career move other than President at that point in his life. Sure, he lacked charisma in public, but you saw the real him around his family. Unlike Hillary Clinton, a calculating technocrat, who, it must be admitted, selfishly plotted a takeover of the Presidency for decades.

I hate her.

And it is with deep admiration and respect for her decades of public service that I request that she, and all the other women, disappear from sight somewhere far away from me. But nowhere fun, like a screening of Wonder Woman. Im picturing someplace boring, like some kind of knitting camp, or a farm that makes kombucha and then keeps it there. (Elizabeth Warren, of course, can stay.)

The point is, well never move ahead as a nation if we keep following a failed candidate. Its time to think about Sanders 2020.

View post:
It's Time for Hillary Clinton to Gracefully Bow Out of Public Life, Along with All Other Women - The New Yorker

The Russian lawyer who landed a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. during last years presidential campaign with the promise of dirt on Hillary Clinton had one big thing in common with the Democratic candidate: Both had opposed Russia sanctions targeting human-rights abusers.

Further, former Secretary of State Clintons initial opposition coincided with a $500,000 speech her husband gave in Moscow a link her 2016 campaign fought to downplay in the press, according to WikiLeaks-released documents.

Trump White House officials now are trying to draw attention to that speech and the Clintons ties to Russia in a bid to counter criticism over Trump Jr.s now-infamous meeting.

If you want to talk about having relationships with Russia, I'd look no further than the Clintons, Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at a briefing last week. Bill Clinton was paid half a million dollars to give a speech to a Russian bank, personally thanked by President Putin.

With the help of the research team, we killed a Bloomberg story trying to link HRCs opposition to the Magnitsky bill a $500,000 speech that WJC gave in Moscow.

The former president indeed had received a personal call from then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin expressing his appreciation for the speech.According to Mrs. Clintons ethics disclosure form filed while she wassecretaryof State, Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 bytheRussia-based finance companyRenaissance Capitalfor hisJune 29, 2010, speech in Moscowto itsemployeesand guests attending the company's annualconference.

The speech is now coming back to haunt the Clintons, considering the company that cut the check was allegedly tied to the scandal that spurred theGlobal Magnitsky Act, a bill that imposed sanctions on Russians designated as human-rights abusers and eventually would become law in 2012.

Former President Bill Clinton with his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (AP)

This was the same law Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskayawas lobbying against during her sit-down with Trump Jr. last year. And back in 2010, it would have put the Clintons on her side.

Shortly before Bill Clintons speech in 2010,when members of Congress pushing the sanctions bill had asked Hillary Clintonto refuse visas to Russian officials implicated under the policy,the State Department denied the request. The Obama administration initially wasopposed to the Magnitsky Actbecausethen-President Barack Obama wasseeking a reset withRussiaand did not want to deepen the divide between the two countries.

Former President Bill Clintons speech to Renaissance just weeks later was all the more curious, considering Renaissances Russian investment bank executives would have been banned from the U.S. under the law.

Fast-forward to 2015, and the timeline apparently had caught the attention of Bloomberg News.

Portrait of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky held by his mother Nataliya Magnitskaya during 2009 press conference in Moscow. (The Associated Press)

According to a memo from Clintons presidential campaign team later published by WikiLeaks, however, the Clinton campaign was able to stop the presses.

With the help of the research team, we killed a Bloomberg story trying to link HRCs opposition to the Magnitsky bill a $500,000 speech that WJC gave in Moscow,Jesse Lehrich, on the Rapid Response Communications team for Hillary For America, boasted on May 21, 2015.

The Global Magnitsky Act was named for 36-year-old tax attorneySergei Magnitsky,who died in the custody of the Russian government after accusing the government and organized crime of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a foreign company, Hermitage Capital Management. Magnitsky, hired by foreign investor and Hermitage owner William Browder, had tracked what turned out to be hundreds of millions of dollars in tax fraud. He reportedthefraud to the Russianauthorities, but instead ofpursuing charges against the alleged offender, Russianauthorities jailedMagnitsky.

After Magnitsky died inNovember 2009, Browder said Magnitsky proved Renaissance officials were among thoseorchestrating the scheme.

The State Department finally reversed its position in 2011 and refused visas to someRussians purportedlyinvolvedinthe financialfraud seeking to enter the country.

TheMagnitsky Actpassed with bipartisan support in 2012.

Russia retaliated against the U.S., ending any possibility for Americans to adopt Russian orphans and also banning 18 U.S. officials from entering theircountry.

Malia Zimmerman is an award-winning investigative reporter focusing on crime, homeland security, illegal immigration crime, terrorism and political corruption. Follow her on twitter at @MaliaMZimmerman

Read the original:
Hillary Clinton sided with Russia on sanctions as Bill made $500G on Moscow speech - Fox News

In recent years, there has been an interesting trend in international relations research: a renewed focus on the role that individual leaders play in foreign policy outcomes. This runs counter to traditional international relations scholarship, which argues that the system imposes powerful structural constraints on individual leader behavior. Over the past decade, however, an increasing number of scholars have focused on the first image, suggesting multiple ways in which individual foreign policy leaders affect their country's approach to international relations.

Donald Trump's Electoral College victory in November has accelerated this research even further. At a minimum, he has sounded different from, say, a garden-variety Republican on a number of fronts. But if Hillary Clinton had won 100,000 more votes in the salient states, would things be all that different? This kind of counterfactual analysis is also a crucial part of political science and foreign policy analysis.

Over the weekend, the New York Post's John Podhoretz argued that neither American politics nor public policy would be all that different if Clinton had won:

"The astonishing answer, if you really think it through, is: not all that different when it comes to policy.

"Let's face it: With the exception of the Supreme Court appointment and confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump has astoundingly little in the accomplishments column especially for a president whose party controls both houses of Congress ...

"What would the Republicans have done in the Hillary era so far? They would have sought to stymie her, or challenge her...

"We would have been awash in a scandal narrative that would not be quite as breathless or bonkers as the Trump White House helps to generate but would have been disturbing and unpleasant.

"Moreover, the questions raised about the unprecedented nature of the Trump presidency would have been raised by the dynastic Clinton White House, featuring a candidate who got elected despite her e-mail scandals and the spouse who was only the second president in history to have been impeached."

Read the whole thing. Podhoretz is not Clinton's biggest fan, and yet almost everything in his column rings true. The thing is, what's not in the column matters as well.

He is largely correct about what President Hillary Clinton could have accomplished with a Republican Congress. Surely, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would have made his No. 1 goal similar to what it was in 2010: defeating Clinton in 2020. Indeed, in this scenario, there are ways in which the current moment would be more fraught with tension, as Clinton would have had to work hard to get Congress to pass a clean debt-ceiling increase and fund the government. We might still get that with Trump, but the probability would have been higher with Clinton.

And surely Podhoretz is also correct that Congress would have tried to hamstring Clinton with investigation after investigation. Remember this story from October 2016, in which Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, bragged about having two years of investigations prepped for Clinton?

"'It's a target-rich environment,'" the Republican said in an interview in Salt Lake City's suburbs. "'Even before we get to Day One, we've got two years' worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it ain't good.'"

Even in this calendar year, Chaffetz seemed primed to go after Clinton.

So yes, there are a lot of ways in which 2017 wouldn't look all that different with Clinton in the White House. Podhoretz, however, omitted the most obvious areas where Clinton and Trump would differ: the areas of politics and policy where a president exerts the most unconstrained influence.

Focus on the rhetoric first. I seriously doubt that Clinton would publicly characterize the mainstream media as "the enemy of the American people" or tweet insults directed at critical commentators or request public effusions of praise from her cabinet or just generally act ridiculous in the public eye. To be fair, Podhoretz acknowledges this, noting that "Hillary is many things, and many not good things, but she is not a sower of chaos or the subject of infighting so constant that no one can even catch a breath before one weird story is displaced by another. She's far too boring for that." Still, this is not an insignificant difference.

The more important differences are in the policies where the executive ranch wields the greatest authority. I am pretty sure that a Justice Department under Clinton would not have "taken a sledgehammer to Obama's legacy" on incarceration, voting rights, and private prisons. A Clinton administration would not engage in the kind of deregulation that, say, Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt would. A Clinton administration would not issue a dumb, self-defeating travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries. A Clinton administration would not solicit bids to build a wall along U.S.-Mexico.

More generally, however, Clinton would be conducting foreign policy rather differently. She would not have withdrawn from either the Paris climate accord or the Trans-Pacific Partnership (I know she opposed the latter during the campaign, but the far more likely option is that she would have sought to negotiate additional side deals akin to how her husband dealt with NAFTA). There would be no underhanded GCC effort to embargo Qatar, because Clinton would never have been so stupid as to have given the Saudis and Emiratis a blank check to do so.

The nation under Clinton would not be contemplating the start of the dumbest trade war in this century. European allies would not be talking about the need to go it alone. Asian allies would not talk about the need to "cut the tag" with the United States. The likelihood of a competent secretary of state doing his or her job seems much higher than odds of the current one doing anything constructive. There would be no ongoing beclowning of the executive branch. And no one would be worried about the sudden collapse of American soft power, because it wouldn't be collapsing.

If Clinton were president right now, American foreign policy would not have deviated too much from the prior status quo. She would have made America Boring Again. And given how this year has actually gone, I would take that outcome every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Washington Post

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor toPostEverything.

See the article here:
If Hillary Clinton were president instead - Chicago Tribune

Two unlikely individuals are working together on a bipartisan effort to fight cyberattacks and protect the integrity of U.S. elections. The former presidential campaign managers of Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Mitt Romneyare leading an initiative, launched Tuesday, called Defending Digital Democracy, specifically to prevent repeats and copycats of Russias 2016 election interference.

Related: Voters prefer President Trump to Hillary Clinton,a poll finds

Robby Mook, Clintons 2016 campaign chief, and Matt Rhoades, Romneys 2012 campaign manager, are co-leading the project. They will execute their endeavor at the Harvard Kennedy Schools Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Daily Emails and Alerts - Get the best of Newsweek delivered to your inbox

Robby Mook, thencampaign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, talks to reporters aboard the campaign plane en route to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on October 28, 2016. Mook and Matt Rhoades, the manager for Mitt Romneys 2012 presidential campaign, on Tuesday launched a new initiative to fight cyberattacks. Brian Snyder/Reuters

Experts from the national security and technology communities, including Facebook and Google employees, will join Mook and Rhoades. Among other things, the project aims to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks, according to a news release.Its the first major effort outside the government that specifically aims todeal with recent hacking operations,and it hopes to make progress on prevention techniques through being bipartisan but nongovernmental.

Foreign actors could target any political party at any time, and that means we all need to work together to address these vulnerabilities, Rhoades said in a statement.This project will bring together not just different parties and ideologies, but subject matter experts from cyber security, national security, technologyand election administration to make a difference.

The Belfer Center is the focal point of the Kennedy Schools research, teaching and training in international security and diplomacy, environmental and resource issues, and science and technology policies, as well as where those topics intersect.

In 2012, Chinese hackers targeted Romneys campaign against then-incumbent President Barack Obama. Then, during the 2016 election campaign,Russian-backed hackers stole information from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to assessments byU.S. intelligence agencies. In January, the office of the director of national intelligence released a report that said Russia had attempted to undermine Clinton and assist Republican candidate Donald Trump to win the presidency. Obama has faced criticism for not taking federal action to respond, after The Washington Post reported that he had found out about the Russia meddling in early August.

Russia is also believed to have attempted to influenceelections in other countries, including the French presidential election.

Last week, Donald Trump Jr.was forced to releasea controversial email exchange he had with a Russian lawyer during his fathers 2016 campaign. The emails revealed that the lawyer claimed to havedetails to share that would incriminate Clinton.

President Trumps lawyer has said there wasnt anything illegal about Trump Jr.s meeting.

Just a small number of Republicans in the U.S. believe Russia interfered in the election, with the majority outright denying Russian attempts to influence the result, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll.

More:
How Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney's Ex-Aides Are Coming Together to Fight Election Hacking - Newsweek