By Kenneth P. Vogel
Friday, October 21, 2016
LAS VEGAS — Donald Trump is pointing to a stream of
hacked emails as proof that Hillary Clinton would be a compromised president,
but a surprising number of progressives are drawing similar conclusions —
albeit for totally different reasons.
Some of the left’s most influential voices and groups are
taking offense at the way they and their causes were discussed behind their
backs by Clinton and some of her closest advisers in the emails, which swipe
liberal heroes and causes as “puritanical,” “pompous”, “naive”, “radical” and
“dumb,” calling some “freaks,” who need to “get a life.”
There are more than personal feelings and relationships
at stake, though.
If polls hold and Clinton wins the presidency, she will
need the support of the professional left to offset what’s expected to be
vociferous Republican opposition to her legislative proposals and appointments.
But among progressive operatives, goodwill for Clinton —
and confidence in key advisers featured in the emails including John Podesta,
Neera Tanden and Jake Sullivan — is eroding as WikiLeaks continues to release a
daily stream of thousands of emails hacked from Podesta’s Gmail account that is
expected to continue until Election Day.
Liberal groups and activists are assembling opposition
research-style dossiers of the most dismissive comments in the WikiLeaks emails
about icons of their movement like Clinton’s Democratic primary rival Bernie
Sanders, and their stances on trade, Wall Street reform, energy and climate
change. And some liberal activists are vowing to use the email fodder to oppose
Clinton policy proposals or appointments deemed insufficiently progressive.
“We were already kind of suspicious of where Hillary’s
instincts were, but now we see that she is who we thought she was,” said one
influential liberal Democratic operative. “The honeymoon is going to be tight
and small and maybe nonexistent,” the operative said.
The emails, which also show Clinton praising Wall Street
in a manner that’s discordant with her tough campaign rhetoric, have made many
progressives less inclined to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt on nominees
with more centrist backgrounds or ties to Wall Street, said the operative.
“Some of the first fights that she is going to be dealing with are going to be
personnel fights like about who she’s going to pick for Treasury, Securities
and Exchange Commission, Education and Labor, and for regulatory agencies like
the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.
Progressives are going to be on guard.”
The WikiLeaks revelations have not influenced the
hierarchy around Clinton or her feelings about trusted advisers like Podesta,
Sullivan and Tanden, according to a source close to the campaign. Podesta and
Sullivan helped Clinton prep for Wednesday’s debate here and traveled aboard
the campaign plane with her to the debate, while Tanden is still listed as a
co-chair of Clinton’s transition team.
But it could pose a major problem for Clinton’s efforts
to fill out a transition team and a prospective administration if Sullivan,
Tanden, Podesta or other close advisers became widely seen on the left as
unwilling to work in good faith with the Democratic Party’s left flank, which
largely aligned behind Sanders during his bitter Democratic primary campaign
against Clinton.
Sullivan, who was Clinton’s lead policy adviser at the
State Department, is believed to be a candidate to become her National Security
Adviser. And the WikiLeaks emails revealed that he also carried great influence
in domestic policy debates, often taking a centrist tack that concerned
liberals, including opining that Clinton’s “natural place is to the right” of
Obama on surveillance.
Tanden, the president of the Clinton-allied think tank
Center for American Progress, is one of four co-chairs of Clinton’s transition
team, and was expected to serve as a top outside advocate for a prospective
Clinton administration. In the emails, she describes herself as “a loyal
soldier” who “would do whatever Hillary needs always,” and her criticisms of
Clintons’ liberal critics are unsparing and occasionally intensely personal —
including once calling some of her own CAP employees “crazy leftists” after
they published a headline critical of Clinton.
And Podesta, the dean of Democratic presidential
staffers, helped Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama launch their
administrations, and now serves as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and
president of her transition team.
In the emails, he comes off as a pragmatist, pouring cold
water on the popular liberal proposal for a carbon tax, which Sanders embraced,
by saying that the polling on the idea “sucks.” But he also swipes Sanders as a
“doofus” for saying that the 2015 Paris climate accord, which Clinton
supported, “goes nowhere near far enough.”
Tanden declined to comment for this story, while the
campaign would not make Podesta or Sullivan available for interviews.
Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri dodged
a question on Tuesday about whether Podesta had apologized for calling Sanders
a “doofus.” Instead, she declared “we're really grateful for all the support
that Sen. Sanders has given us.”
Palmieri said the Clinton campaign has not asked to
review Podesta’s emails to determine what types of additional revelations might
be forthcoming in the tens of thousands of emails WikiLeaks says it has yet to
release. She suggested, though, that the campaign was not particularly worried.
“We’re not spending a lot of our own internal time doing
that,” she said, accusing Russian intelligence of perpetrating the hack “to
hurt her campaign.”
The U.S. intelligence community has not officially
declared the hack of Podesta to be the work of the Russian government, but it
did blame Russia for an earlier hack of the Democratic National Committee. And
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the FBI suspects Russian
intelligence agencies were behind the Podesta hack. The Russian government has
denied any role.
The Clinton campaign has declined to comment on specific
emails, saying it doesn’t want to authenticate them.
But spokesman Glen Caplin rejected any suggestion that
the Clinton team is dismissive of liberal leaders or positions.
"Hillary Clinton's policy proposals are the most
progressive of any Democratic Party nominee in history and she has continued to
champion them long after the primary ended,” he said. “From holding Wall Street
accountable, to ending mass incarceration, to raising the minimum wage, to
combating climate change, to making the wealthy pay their fair share, she's
worked with progressive allies to aggressively develop serious and thorough
plans to make real change."
For RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the National
Nurses Union, though, the emails reveal the true feelings of Clinton’s team
toward progressives and their causes, and suggest that if Clinton wins the
White House, she won’t be on their side.
“If the WikiLeaks are accurate, the issues closest to our
hearts are probably not ones she will embrace, like single payer,” said DeMoro,
whose union drew fire from Clinton’s team in the primary when it campaigned
aggressively for Sanders.
But DeMoro said Sanders, who has since endorsed Clinton,
and his supporters, won’t “be shut down easily,” by a Clinton team that she
said came across in the hacked emails as “a pretty imperial bunch. Vindictive.”
In one of the hacked emails, Randi Weingarten, the head
of a pro-Clinton teachers union, writes to Podesta that she will “go after NNU
and there [sic] high and mighty sanctimonious conduct.”
Weingarten told POLITICO that she regretted the email,
explaining “we were in a heated campaign and sometimes you say things that, in
retrospect, you wished you hadn’t have said.” But she pointed out that after
Sanders, who endorsed Clinton after dropping out, is campaigning aggressively
for her, and suggested that his supporters are on board, as well, having helped
shape the party’s platform.
“I was really pleased that Hillary Clinton, talking
directly to Bernie supporters at the convention, asked them to work with her
and 'Let’s make sure that we can win this election so that we can work together
on the platform that we drafted together,'” said Weingarten.
But liberal activists spent the week sharing WikiLeaks
links of hacked emails in which Clinton and her aides appeared to argue the
virtues of more centrist policy positions.
Tanden in one email warned against embracing a $15
federal minimum wage championed by Sanders, while Sullivan called supporters of
the proposal “the Red Army.”
In an email released Thursday, Sullivan argued that
Clinton should come out in support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP
trade deal, while another email indicated that both he and Podesta favored a
provision giving Obama authority to negotiate the TPP.
Clinton herself was revealed by WikiLeaks to have raved
privately about the TPP before eventually publicly opposing it under pressure
from Sanders and the liberal base.
Sullivan voiced concern on a different email chain about
having Clinton give support for a bill favored by the left to limit the
revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, admitting “I know I sound
like I am protecting the plutocrats, but there is a line here — if we go across
it we’re just demagoguing [sic].”
Jeff Hauser, a former union official who is executive
director of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research's Revolving
Door Project, singled out the wide influence of Sullivan, whose expertise is in
foreign policy, as an area of concern for liberals.
“I am a little surprised at just how prominent Jake
Sullivan seems to be on domestic policy issues, and how frequently he
represents the right flank of intrastaff disputes,” said Hauser. “I think
Sullivan didn't seem to understand — or agree with — the populist turn of the
electorate,” adding that “since Clinton has moved leftward, Sullivan's retro
1990s style brand of Clintonism seems out of place in the Democratic Party of
2016.”
While Hauser said “some activists who remained
dissatisfied with Clinton found evidence to confirm why they supported
Sanders,” he posited, “I don't think there's much new anger, if any. If
anything, it is has been encouraging to know Clinton almost embraced, say,
Glass-Steagall.”
Another veteran liberal organizer argued that Tanden, who
in one email mocked “the puritanical standards of the Bernistas,” was exposed by
WikiLeaks as someone about whom the liberal base should be wary.
“She backstabbed progressives, she backstabbed her
colleagues, and she even backstabbed Hillary,” the organizer said, pointing to
an email in which Tanden wrote that Clinton’s political “instincts are
suboptimal.”
The organizer expressed hope that, if Clinton wins,
Tanden “is not anywhere near the White House in the next term and is relegated
to the skeleton, hollowed out version of CAP. She’s toxic, and you can’t trust
her if she’s in the room, or on an email chain, in this case.”
But a congressional aide for a liberal senator defended
Tanden, as well as Podesta, pointing out that they argued for progressive
stances in some of the WikiLeaks emails.
“I thought it was heartening to see some stuff from Neera
and John that came from the other direction,” the aide said, pointing to
Tanden’s support for a financial transaction tax, and Podesta’s criticism of
former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who is derided by the left for his
role in financial deregulation during Bill Clinton's presidency.
When Summers reached out to top campaign staff and even
Bill Clinton himself to offer financial policy advice during the Democratic
primary, Podesta urged aides to reject it.
"Worst advice ever," Podesta wrote to Bill
Clinton chief of staff Tina Flournoy. "Wrong then, wrong now."
And Faiz Shakir, a former Podesta and Tanden protégé who
was criticized by his mentors in the hacked email after they learned he was
advising Sanders’ campaign, nonetheless praised Podesta as “a real straight
shooter.”
When Tanden learned that Shakir, who had worked at CAP,
was advising Sanders, Tanden emailed Podesta: “you know about this? Jesus,” and
she labeled as “freaks” a pair of bloggers trained by Shakir who had become
critical of Clinton.
Podesta acknowledged in response that Shakir’s
affiliation with Sanders “does not go down easy with me,” and said he gave
Shakir “a very hard time,” but that he “wish(es) him well in life.”
Shakir said that “of all the people in the WikiLeaks
emails, Podesta comes out looking like the most decent, straightforward honest
forthright individual. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with him,
you get the sense that he always tells you exactly how he feels and doesn’t
play games behind your back.”
And Shakir added, “There are a number of times where he
has been vindicated as being so much more progressive than where the campaign
ultimately ended up … where his own personal inclination is consistent with the
progressive base.”
The emails, from Shakir’s perspective, illustrate “the
various pressures that cause the debate not to be as progressive as we would
like it to be. And it’s uplifting that one of the most senior, well-respected
voices in the party is leading that cause."
Several liberal activists said they saw signs in the
emails that her team was susceptible to pressure from the left.
Adam Green, co-founder of a group called the Progressive
Change Campaign Committee, which has worked to boost liberal hero Elizabeth
Warren, said it was “gratifying to see that when nobody was looking, Clinton
insiders had immense respect for Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her bold progressive
ideas — a positive indicator of the strong voice the Warren wing will hopefully
have in a future Clinton administration.”
And Kelly Mitchell, Greenpeace's energy campaign director
— alluding to a hacked speech transcript in which Clinton called
environmentalists who want to end all fossil fuel extraction “the wildest” and
“the most radical” — said, “It’s probably a good thing if we’re getting under
the skin of the woman most likely to be the next president."
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