Preparing for the U.S. Presidency: Build a Resume

How should an aspiring candidate for President of the United States go about attaining that esteemed office?—an office whose occupant was regularly referred to as “the leader of the free world” when part of that world was behind an iron curtain. Mitt Romney spent six years of his life campaigning for the job only to lose it to an incumbent whose record on “pocket-book issues: was mixed at best. Perhaps it is possible to want something too much. Fortunately, a more substantive alternative is also possible.

Hillary Clinton as U.S. Secretary of State.           

                                                                                                           
As Hillary Clinton was nearing the end of her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State, Michael Bloomberg, who was nearing the end of his own mayoralty in New York City, encouraged her to run for his office. Being every bit “New York,” the New York Times refers to the option as “trading international diplomacy for municipal management on the grandest scale.” In case anyone misses my sarcasm here, I should add that being mayor of New York City is not merely executive experience on a grand scale. Being chief executive of The City could be comparable to being governor of some states. Accordingly, becoming mayor of the city that never sleeps could give the former legislator and chief diplomat significant experience as a chief executive. Ironically, the latter could be most essential to the presidency.

Alternatively, were Hillary Clinton really intent at the time on running for presidency, political consultants might have been whispering in her other ear, “you need to get up to New Hampshire and over to Iowa.” However, early and regular visits to those states do not, as the case of Mitt Romney suggests, necessarily translate into winning come election day. This is not to say that a third alternative, such as taking a well-deserved break—maybe writing a book—might not be preferable to being mayor of New York City. Nevertheless, in the choice between never-ending campaigning and governing, it would be nice to think that the American people would reward substance over excess eagerness. The people have not exactly demanded of a president that he (or she) be a senior statesman when it comes to governmental experience. John Adams had been U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain (besides having had a hand in the writing of the U.S. Constitution) before being elected president. Thomas Jefferson had been the U.S. Secretary of State (besides having had a hand in, well…you know). Had he lived, James Hamilton might have been president after having served as Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury. Experience can even be ex post facto, as when President Taft joined the U.S. Supreme Court after serving as president.

From the perspective of having several substantive governmental offices, an occupant of the office of U.S. president can have both wisdom and perspective. That is, such a person would be more likely to discern instinctively the forest from those particular trees that demand too much attention. Such a person would be more oriented to the system as a whole, as President Jackson was when he opposed funding the Second National Bank of the U.S. even as he opposed South Carolina’s nullification act (by which the state legislature could invalidate U.S. laws detrimental to the state’s interest). That is to say, the president was oriented to protecting what he saw as a balance in the federal system. His perspective was systemic and thus not primarily partisan or even bureaucratic in nature.

To be sure, putting someone in the office who might be suspected of sporting a suitable countenance is ultimately up to the American people—whether we value it enough. Lest it be pointed out that few candidates could be found, it is also up to the candidates themselves—whether they are willing to substitute more governmental experience for the seemingly endless parade of chicken dinners. To those candidates, I would say: focus on the knitting and the campaigning will take care of itself; focus on the campaigning, however, and the sweater could slowly unravel from all the waving and handshakes. In short: have faith that investing in governing now will pay off later. This could mean trusting in the judgment of the American electorate, or being a leader (hence gaining leadership experience!) by providing a higher example of real presidential material. Of course, the people may not be wise or virtuous enough of character to grasp such leadership, in which case the republic itself will decline even in spite of the suitable candidates.

Source:

Michael Barbaro, “Clinton for Mayor in ’13?Bloomberg Asked Her to Consider Succeeding Him,” The New York Times, December 4, 2012.

When the Cameras Are Off: Who Are the Politicians?

In Game Change, a journalist account of the 2008 U.S. Presidential race, the two political reporters conducted hundreds of interviews and had unusually close access to the campaigns. As a result, the reporters present some pretty interesting political morsels. For example, Hillary Clinton considered Bill’s administration to have been “a tactical and operational disaster” (p. 43). ouch! She would never have said such a thing in front of a microphone. This raises the question: do we, the voters, know candidates as well as we think we do? I contend that we do not, and, moreover, that this partially explains why we are so surprised when our elected representatives behave less than with maturity while in office.

The book’s overall theme calls attention to the magnitude of the difference between the actual candidates of president and vice president and the images of them that they efficaciously portrayed through an unwittingly complying media. In reading about what the candidates are like in person, I was particularly struck by their foul mouths and what their associated judgments intimate about their characters (or lack thereof). That we, the voters, are not privy to the candidates’ real personalities, characters and values is of great importance because we base our decisions at least in part on the fabricated images, or brands. We are situated too far removed from the actual candidates to be able to discover the people behind the curtain.

A candidate’s public image can differ radically from the actual person. When Hillary Clinton was a U.S. senator from New York, she portrayed herself as bipartisan and self-effacing in the Senate when in fact she was anything but—at least according to Game Change. On the evening of her win in New Hampshire, Hillary remarked privately, “I get really tough when people fuck with me” (p. 190). Referring to Barak Obama to her aides after one of the debates, she remarked, “What an asshole” (p. 145). We the People would never guess at such a remark from how chummy she would be with him in serving as his Secretary of State. Images can be deceiving.

As still another example, consider John Edwards, who said to Brumberger, one of his aides: “Why didn’t you come to me like a fucking man and tell me to stop fucking her?” (p. 134). On the republican side, McCain was “still prone to outbursts of profanity,” which have never been caught on tape during an interview (p. 274). On his first visit to his campaign headquarters, for instance, McCain blurted out, “What the fuck are all these people doing here? . . .  I am not fucking authorizing these fucking hires. Who are these fucking Bush people? Where is the fucking money?” (p. 278). In public, the candidate said, “I’m very happy with the campaign” (p. 285). It is no wonder we have so little actual basis on which to know what our representatives will actually do when in office.

Evidently, the candidates hire like-minded staff, which may mean that the political culture in Washington is saturated with a baseness that we, the People, never see. Harold Ickes of Hillary’s campaign, for example, said of Barak Obama after the Rev. Wright fiasco, “This guy has been sitting in the church for twenty fucking years. If you really want to take him down, let’s take him fucking down” (p. 238). This is not quite the separation of Church and state that we are used to. Ickes’ association of church and “fucking” is itself revealing. It is no wonder the real personalities are intentionally masked. How many candidates could win if they were simply themselves?

There are implications for how our system of government is structured and for its electoral processes. Even though we can’t be blamed for the fake images being fed to us if nothing else is available to us, we are to blame for acquiescing in the elongation of the election season—the 2012 presidential campaign “season,” for instance, began shortly after the 2010 midterm election. Such an elongation simply extends the run of the fake images, rather than making it more likely that we might glimpse the real persons behind the curtain. Furthermore, our ancestors are to blame for expanding popular election into larger and larger electoral districts in which there is more distance between the average voter and the candidates. On the number of electors per candidate, the delegates in the Constitutional Convention warned that in very large electoral districts the people would not be able to get to know their candidates. Contrary to American history from the USA-CSA war to today, we could demand more of our intra-state representatives and less of the elected officials in the U.S. Government. Members of Congress and candidates for president are too good at playing the image game . . . too fucking good . . . and the huge districts enable them to get away with it.

Source:

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).

Getting an Election So Wrong: The American Media and Pollsters in 2016

“After projecting a relatively easy victory for Hillary Clinton with all the certainty of a calculus solution, news outlets like The New York Times, The Huffington Post and the major networks scrambled to provide candid answers.”[1] The dynamics likely went beyond even candid answers from the media, with major implications for how much reliance Americans should place on their media-establishment for political information.

“You were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans,” filmmaker Michael Moore wrote.[2] To be sure, “all the number-crunching of state polls pointed to resounding success” for Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College.[3] The journalists could simply insist that they were reporting those polls. “Virtually all the major vote forecasters, including Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site, The New York Times Upshot and the Princeton Election Consortium, put [Hillary] Clinton’s chances of winning in the 70 to 99 percent range.”[4] Even so, Chris Wallace, an anchor at Fox News, make the following observation on election day. “A lot of media outlets made a decision sometime after the convention that Donald Trump was beyond the pale and they no longer had to observe the normal rules of journalism and objectivity.”[5] Clearly this was true of The Huffington Post, which declared Hillary Clinton “cleared” by the FBI on the Sunday before election day in spite of the fact that the agency was still investigating the Clinton Foundation, whose fundraising may have involved quid pro quos involving Hillary Clinton’s role as U.S. Secretary of State.

At the very least, groupthink was in the mix, meaning that the mainstream media was “on the same page” concerning assumptions regarding the upcoming election. Besides their being just plain wrong, their narrowness was such that society itself could hardly break free of the force of the narrative. Moreover, the narrowness suggests that the power of the American media was at the time too concentrated, such that alternative views, which can provide a check on groupthink, could not get through. In a representative democracy, a narrow conduit by which information is not only conveyed, but also interpreted and subject to ideology, represents a major flaw. Put another way, that the mainstream media outlets were all singing the same song suggests that societal debate on matters of public policy was also very likely too narrow, and subject to everybody being wrong in a major assumption.

Yet Wallace’s assumption that merely reporting the polls would be objective is vulnerable. Polls can only contribute so much. The “failed election predictions suggest that the rush to exploit data may have outstripped the ability to recognize its limits.”[6] Such limitations include “the potentially flawed assumptions of the people who build predictive models.”[7] Additionally, polling can offer only probabilities that cannot fully capture whether the motivation to vote will actualize at the proverbial ballot-box. For one thing, social desirability may spur poll respondents to say they will vote only because it is a societally recognized duty. Lastly, polls prior to an election cannot account for voters who change their decision at the time of voting.

So even the media’s common assumption that polls can and should receive such overwhelming emphasis was faulty, and the groupthink on this point left the electorate vulnerable to going to vote with a flawed understanding of how Americans had been reacting to the candidates. Just as political campaigns are not objective, journalists (and especially those who serve as commentators) are not merely conduits for facts. Given the subjectivity all around, a certain wideness of narrative (and assumptions) made more likely by a less concentrated mainstream media would enhance the American democracy.

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[1] Jim Rutenberg, “News Outlets Wonder Where the Predictions Went Wrong,” The New York Times, November 9, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Steve Lohr and Natasha Singer, “How Data Failed Us in Calling an Election,” The New York Times, November 10, 2016.

[5] Jim Rutenberg, “News Outlets Wonder Where the Predictions Went Wrong,” The New York Times, November 9, 2016.

[6] Steve Lohr and Natasha Singer, “How Data Failed Us in Calling an Election,” The New York Times, November 10, 2016.

[7] Ibid.

Organizational Conflicts of Interest and National Interest: The Case of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation

Organizational lapses, such as in non-profits or companies, regarding institutional conflicts of interest can extend in impact as far as distorting or impairing government policy and national interest if a principal of the organization also holds a high government office. Relying on whether a position in such a dual-role has scruples of character against exploiting conflicts of interest is vulnerable because people differ substantially in character. As a result, I contend that even the appearance of such conflicts should not be permitted. I use the case of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation to make my point.

In late 2011, “lawyers from Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett LLP, the firm contracted to run the internal Foundation audit, emailed a draft of a government memorandum and recommendations to Podesta, who was serving as a special advisor to the Foundation [and would be Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager], and Bruce Lindsey, then the Foundation’s CEO.”[1] The audit draft indicated that a conflict-of-interest policy had not been implemented. Conflicts were not disclosed in a timely fashion, and board members did not follow the policy when they became aware of conflicts of interest. “In addition, some interviewees reported conflicts of those raising funds or donors, some of whom may have an expectation of quid pro quo benefits in return for gifts,” according to the draft.[2] For example, a leaked email from Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff at the U.S. State Department indicates that Hillary Clinton arranged a $12 million donation from Moroccan King Mohammed VI to the Clinton Foundation in 2014 in return for the Clinton Global Initiative hosting its international meeting in Morocco.[3]

The broader question is whether Hillary Clinton exploited the conflict of interest between her discretion as Secretary of State—a public interest—and her private interest in the Clinton Foundation. After the government of Saudi Arabia had contributed at least $10 million to the Foundation and Boeing had contributed $900,000, Clinton cleared the sale to the Kingdom of $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets, including Boeing’s F-15.[4] That Israel was warning the Obama Administration that the sale would destabilize the Middle East suggests that the United States’ national interest was not being served. Perhaps the question for a person in such a dual-role is precisely, what is being served?

When Hillary Clinton was serving as the Secretary of State, “the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments [had] given money to the Clinton Foundation.”[5] The Department “also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation.”[6] Even if motive cannot be definitively ascribed, that the Secretary permitted the appearance of the conflict of interest may reflect an underlying problem of character, and perhaps even a general toleration societally of institutional conflicts of interest even at high levels. Clearly, the problem of conflicts of interest was not taken seriously within the Foundation. According to the audit memo, the lawyers found no evidence that the Foundation’s own written conflict-of-interest policy was enforced.[7] At the very least, this enabled the sort of conflict-of-interest that Hillary Clinton enabled the appearance of at the State Department.

Therefore, I contend that society should not allow even the appearance of institutional conflicts of interest. Of course, such a prohibition would itself require a societal sentiment of disapprobation regarding the institutional sort of conflict-of-interest, and, unfortunately, I suspect that at least as of November, 2016 too many Americans—even if for partisan reasons—were indifferent toward such conflicts of interest and the high-level people who have exploited them or at least have been fine with standing in the shadow of such conflicts.

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[1] “Clinton Aide Says Foundation Paid for Chelsea’s Wedding, WikiLeaks Emails Show,” FoxNews.com, November 6, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Richard Pollock, “WIKILEAKS: Hillary Got $12 Million for Clinton Charity As Quid Pro Quo For Morocco Meeting,” The Daily Caller, October 20, 2016.

[4] David Sirota and Andrew Perez, “Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department, International Business Times, May 26, 2015.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] “Clinton Aide Says Foundation Paid for Chelsea’s Wedding, WikiLeaks Emails Show,” FoxNews.com, November 6, 2016.

Hillary Clinton's Extreme Recklessness with National Security: A Rigged Justice Department or Failing Short of Gross Negligence?

In July, 2016, the FBI came to the conclusion that while Hillary Clinton was serving as U.S. Secretary of State, she risked classified information by using private computer servers for email and other purposes. The FBI’s director explicitly stated that she had been extremely reckless. In legal terms, that means gross negligence. At the time, a 99-year-old statute whereby gross negligence is sufficient for a fine or imprisonment of up to ten years was still on the books. Whether or not the person knew the actions were wrong is not relevant to the statute, and thus the enforcement.  So it was perplexing to a significant number of Americans—including prosecutors and other lawyers—that the FBI director did not recommend prosecution. Crucially, extremely reckless is the same as gross negligence in legal terms.

The FBI director pointed out that the statute had not been used as a basis for prosecution, and therefore it was not fitting to apply the statute in 2016. Does this reasoning mean that just because nobody has been prosecuted for lynching black Americans since, say, 1916, a person who lynches a black man in 2016 should not be prosecuted? I have simply increased the seriousness of the crime, but is being extremely reckless with national security not also a serious crime?  Is the American legal system prepared to say that any statute not used in a prosecution is therefore unenforceable?  Only statutes already utilized could be used to prosecute people. No legal basis exists for such a view, and yet the FBI director got away with it.

That Hillary Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, boarded the Attorney General’s jet on the tarmac at Phoenix’s airport to have a discussion with Loretta Lynch presumably about grandchildren just a week before the FBI director’s announcement opens the door to the possibility that the president who had appointed Lynch to a lower office made a deal so his wife—who was running for president at the time—would not be prosecuted. The FBI’s extremely reckless logic adds more support to that possibility. In short, where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.

At the very least, the appearance of corruption is noxious and thus unacceptable. CPA firms look not only at material conflicts of interest, but also the appearance thereof as being problematic. Such conflicts are rather obvious and they are avoidable. Perhaps Bill and Hillary Clinton were desperate to make a deal—appearance or not—because they knew she had been reckless in going against the State Department’s policy; even freshmen congressmen know not to put classified material on private email servers. Hillary engaged in such traffic even when she was on hostile soil, such as China and Russia.

What amazes me from this case is just how easy it was for the FBI recommend no prosecution—given the extremely bad rationale rationally speaking—and how easy had been for Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch to get away with the 30-minute discussion on her plane “on the grandchildren.” That the American people take all this at face value quivers my faith in American representative democracy. Put another way, if the players could get away with corruption and, at the very least, incompetence in such a blatant case, other players could get the message that the American system of justice is no match for corrupt deals made by powerful people. Are the people really so naïve, or are we simply apathetic? Either way, the message from this case is not good regarding accountability. 


Note: This essay is not meant to convey an opinion on the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and more specifically on Hillary Clinton as a candidate. Rather, the question is whether an inter-institutional conflict of interest exists between the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice (i.e., whether that department is immune from political pressure).