Tag Archives: democratic

Watch Elizabeth Warren Go After Paul Ryan for Blaming Unemployment on the Unemployed

by EddieBarnard Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

Last month, Paul Ryan generated a minor media storm for a racially tinged comment lamenting the supposedly weak “culture of work” among “inner city” men. “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” Ryan told conservative radio host Bill Bennett. “There is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.” Ryan later said that he had been “inarticulate” and forswore any racial meaning in his comments. He was, he promised, referring to our entire culture; not “the culture of one community.”

Now, you either buy that or you don’t. If you don’t think there is something racially loaded about decrying the lack of work ethic among inner city men, then I’m probably not going to be able to convince you that there is. (But there probably is.)

Either way, Ryan’s defense could be interpreted as amounting largely to, I was not saying black people are lazy. I was saying poor people are lazy. This is a myth about poverty. It is not true. (Really.)

Enter Elizabeth Warren. “Paul Ryan looks around, sees three unemployed workers for every job opening in America, and blames the people who can’t find a job,” the senior Senator from Massachusetts said in a speech at the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor’s Humphrey-Mondale Dinner on March 29th.

Paul Ryan says don’t blame Wall Street: the guys who made billions of dollars cheating American families. Don’t blame decades of deregulation that took the cops off the beat while the big banks looted the American economy. Don’t blame the Republican Secretary of the Treasury, and the Republican president who set in motion a no-strings-attached bailout for the biggest banks – Nope. Paul Ryan says keep the monies flowing to the powerful corporations, keep their huge tax breaks, keep the special deals for the too-big-to-fail banks and put the blame on hardworking, play-by-the-rules Americans who lost their jobs. That may be Paul Ryan’s vision of how America works, but that is not our vision of this great country.

Warren is an increasingly popular figure and is set to play a large role in the Democratic fight to maintain control of the Senate in November.

Here’s the whole speech:

(via The Huffington Post)

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Watch Elizabeth Warren Go After Paul Ryan for Blaming Unemployment on the Unemployed

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

by BettinaYLPM Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

How big is the midterm penalty for Democrats? Eric McGhee tells us in handy chart form. Given President Obama’s current approval rating, his model says Democrats would have a 75 percent chance of holding the Senate if this were a presidential election year. But in a midterm, Dems have only a 10 percent chance:

Ed Kilgore writes about this a lot, and warns Democrats not to get too mired in fruitless efforts to attack the “enthusiasm gap.” After all, the kind of people affected by enthusiasm are the kind of people who are likely to vote anyway. A loud populist message might thrill them, but it won’t do much to affect turnout among minorities and the young, who typically have more tenuous connections to politics. Instead, Democrats should focus on old-fashioned efforts to get out the vote. Or, more accurately, brand new rocket science efforts to get out the vote:

There’s plenty of evidence that turnout can be more reliably affected by direct efforts to identify favorable concentrations of voters and simply get them to the polls, with or without a great deal of “messaging” or for that matter enthusiasm (no one takes your temperature before you cast a ballot). Such get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are the meat-and-potatoes of American politics, even if they invariably get little attention from horse-race pundits. Neighborhood-intensive “knock-and-drag” GOTV campaigns used to be a Democratic speciality thanks to the superior concentration of Democratic (especially minority) voters, though geographical polarization has created more and more equally ripe Republican areas.

….If that’s accurate, then the most important news for Democrats going into November is that the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is planning to spend $60 million on data-driven GOTV efforts specially focused on reducing the “midterm falloff” factor. The extraordinary success of Terry McAuliffe’s 2013 Virginia gubernatorial campaign in boosting African-American turnout for an off-year election will likely be a model.

Messaging matters. But in midterm elections, shoe leather matters more, even if it’s mostly digital shoe leather these days.

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

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"Anchorman" Director Adam McKay Is Taking On The Financial Crisis. But What About His Lee Atwater Film?

by Andrianayhv Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Writer/director Adam McKay is signed on to helm a film adaptation of journalist Michael Lewis‘ book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine for Paramount Pictures. The nonfiction best-seller examines the housing and credit bubble of the 2000s. “Michael Lewis has the amazing ability to take complex formulas and concepts and turn them into page-turners,” McKay said in a statement.

The 45-year-old director is best known for directing comedies such as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and the Anchorman movies. The idea of him doing a housing bubble film might strike Ron Burgundy devotees as odd. But if you take more than just a quick glance at his career, it shouldn’t. “Adam McKay to Film ‘The Big Short,’ Which Makes More Sense Than You Think,” the Wire writes. Sure, his films have plenty of crude jokes and improvisational and (sometimes surreal) humor. But also he’s an intensely political person.

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"Anchorman" Director Adam McKay Is Taking On The Financial Crisis. But What About His Lee Atwater Film?

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People Who Know the Koch Brothers Sure Don’t Like Them Much

by Celestinej5a Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is apropos of nothing in particular, but Dave Weigel draws my attention today to a new GWU/Battleground poll that gives us approval/disapproval ratings for an eclectic bunch of people that happens to include the Koch brothers. It turns out that they’re more unpopular than anyone on the list. Weigel comments on what this means for the Democrats’ anti-Koch offensive:

I generally agree that the Koch focus (Kochus?) is a poor substitute for a positive Democratic agenda, if such a thing is possible, but I don’t see anything in the poll that contradicts the Democratic strategy. Charles and David Koch never, ever do TV interviews, choosing to exercise their influence behind the scenes of political groups, and they’re known by two out of five Americans?

Given their low profile, you’d hardly expect the Kochs to be a household name. And yet, nearly half of all American have heard of them, and among those who are in the know they’re very unpopular. So maybe the Democratic strategy of personalizing the robber-baron right by demonizing the Kochs is paying off. Give it another few months and maybe the Kochs will be a household name.

On the other hand, keep in mind how unreliable these polls are. It’s possible that half the people who claim to have heard of the Koch brothers think they’re the rap duo who performed at the Grammys a few weeks ago. Maybe if Macklemore and Ryan Lewis were less annoying, the Kochs would have done better in this poll.

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People Who Know the Koch Brothers Sure Don’t Like Them Much

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There’s a Reason that Right-Wing Crackpots are More Newsworthy Than Lefty Crackpots

by Amilianp2t Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

Dave Weigel is tired of the liberal press getting all hot and bothered every time some fringe Republican nutball says something stupid. Fair enough. But today he provides yet another example and then makes a problematic comparison:

To date, nearly 90,000 people have “liked” or “shared” a story tagged “Candidate Who Blames Gay Rights for Tornadoes Scores Big GOP Win.” The candidate is Susanne Atanus, “who believes that God dictates weather patterns and that tornadoes, autism and dementia are God’s punishments for marriage equality.”

What’s missing from the story? Atanus’ status as a fringe candidate. She’s running in Illinois’ 9th District, which covers the liberal northern suburbs of Chicago….Susanne Atanus will never, ever serve in Congress.

….Both parties are going to be cursed with a few idiot candidates this year….In 2012 the declining Tennessee Democratic Party accidentally nominated a conspiracy-minded flooring installer for U.S. Senate. The media did not hustle down to Nashville and Memphis to cover him. No Democrat in another state was asked whether they agreed with this candidate about the NAFTA superhighway or the “Godless new world order.”

Why didn’t the media hustle down to Nashville to interview Mark Clayton? Wikipedia does as good a job as anyone explaining it:

Tennessee’s Democratic Party disavowed the candidate over his active role in the Public Advocate of the United States, which they described as a “known hate group”. They blamed his victory among a slate of little-known candidates on the fact that his name appeared first on the ballot, and said they would do nothing to help his campaign, urging Democrats to vote for “the write-in candidate of their choice” in November.

In the case of Clayton, nobody thought he represented the secret id of the Democratic Party. And the local party went out of its way to make sure Clayton was well and truly shunned as a crackpot they wanted nothing to do with.

Has anything similar happened in Illinois? Has the Republican Party denounced Atanus and urged voters to cast their ballots for someone else? No they haven’t. Actually, yes they have. See update below. Do reporters believe that Atanus does indeed represent a significant segment of the modern Republican base? Yes they do. Is this fair? Well….yes. It kind of is fair, isn’t it?

As it happens, I think that fringey right-wing candidates get less attention than Weigel believes. Sure, HuffPo plays them up, for the same reason they have a whole staff devoted to finding and posting sideboobs. It’s clickbait for the online hordes. But does the rest of the media obsess about the Susanne Atanuses of the world? Not really. Not if you’re a normal, casual news consumer, rather than an omnivore like Weigel and all the rest of us bloggy denizens. And to the extent they do cover the right-wing crackpots more than the lefty variety, the truth is that it’s pretty justified. These folks represent a real constituency, and the mainstream of the Republican Party, far from disowning them, practically falls all over itself to insist that they have nothing but admiration and respect for their willingness to stand up and fight for traditional values without compromise. That makes them worth a story.

UPDATE: Hey, it turns out that the media did write about Mark Clayton. The liberal media, that is. Here is MoJo’s own Tim Murphy writing on the day after the primary.

UPDATE 2: Weigel points out that the chairman of the Illinois GOP did indeed denounce Atanus after her gaffe. Fair point. Still, she’s hardly the first conservative to blame our problems on God’s wrath against liberal hedonism. It’s not unreasonable to think she represents a persistent strain of conservative thought and therefore deserves a bit of attention.

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There’s a Reason that Right-Wing Crackpots are More Newsworthy Than Lefty Crackpots

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Progressive Groups Take Obama to Task for Violating Voting Rights Law

by JanisBurrell Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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After months of quiet lobbying, civil rights groups and progressive organizations are now coming out publicly against the Obama administration for failing to enforce a voting rights law that applies to the Obamacare health insurance exchanges.

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), commonly known as the “Motor Voter” law, requires DMVs and other state agencies that provide public assistance to also help voters register. The Obama administration has acknowledged that Obamacare exchanges are covered by the law. But the federally-run exchange, which serves residents of states whose Republican governors refused to establish their own insurance marketplaces, isn’t doing much to fulfill its Motor Voter obligations, beyond embedding a link to the federal voter registration site in the online insurance application.

The law requires covered agencies to go much further and treat voter registration the same as the application process for other services. In the case of Obamacare, this means the navigators hired by HHS to walk uninsured Americans through the insurance sign-up process should also offer to guide applicants through the voter registration process. But Republicans have decried plans to apply the Motor Voter law to exchanges, saying it would create a “permanent, undefeatable, always-funded Democrat majority,” since the uninsured are disproportionately low-income people and minorities—groups that tend to vote Democratic. Following the outcry by the GOP, the Obama administration decided last year to hold off on full implementation of the Motor Voter provision. But now 32 progressive organizations and unions—including the NAACP, United Auto Workers, and the National Council of La Raza—are calling on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to start requiring navigators to help register voters immediately.

“There is no question that the ACA the Affordable Care Act must meet the requirements of the NVRA, as your administration has acknowledged,” the groups said in a letter to the HHS last week. “As staunch supporters of voting rights, we believe that it is critical for the ACA to meet these legal requirements now and offer voter registration to the millions of Americans who will be shopping for insurance on the exchanges in the coming months and years.”

The letter comes on the heels of a public campaign in January led by the voting rights organizations Demos and Project Vote to get HHS to fall in line with Motor Voter.

The 24 million mostly low-income and minority Americans who are expected to buy insurance through the exchanges by 2017 are far less likely than other citizens to be registered to vote, although Motor Voter has helped lessen the disparity. Some 140 million people have registered to vote through the program since it was enacted. Lawrence Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota, told Mother Jones in January that the reason HHS “has really dropped the ball” on the Motor Voter issue is likely quite simple. “This looks like the administration is running from a political fight,” he says.

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Progressive Groups Take Obama to Task for Violating Voting Rights Law

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Reince Priebus is Playing Smart Politics. Maybe Democrats Should Try It Too.

by CharlenLowman Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest from Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus:

At a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast on Tuesday Priebus said Republicans would see massive gains in the 2014 election, especially in the Senate. “I think we’re in for a tsunami election,” Priebus said. “Especially at the Senate level.”

Ed Kilgore thinks Priebus should cut the crap. If Democrats lose five or six Senate seats, that won’t be a tsunami. It will be perfectly normal given the electoral map, the six-year itch, and the usual Democratic turnout problem in midterms.

Maybe so. But that’s pretty obviously not the game Priebus is playing. He’s not analyzing, he’s working the refs. He wants to build momentum and make Republicans look unbeatable. He wants to look like a winner. He wants to get Republicans to turn out in big numbers this November.

Democrats, by contrast, are already acting like whipped curs, moaning about the map and the itch and the turnout. They lose a special election by two percentage points and all is lost. Incumbents start dropping like flies. The press, smelling weakness, piles on. Democratic voters, acting like the normal human beings they are, get discouraged and figure that things are hopeless. So they don’t contribute, they don’t campaign, and they don’t bother voting on Election Day.

Priebus knows this very well. If he could think of a word even bigger than tsunami, he’d use it. He wants his voters to think of themselves as part of a decisive turning of the tide against dissolute liberalism, and if his party wins in November he wants the media to write about it as a historic victory that gives Republicans a conservative mandate. It’s just smart politics.

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Reince Priebus is Playing Smart Politics. Maybe Democrats Should Try It Too.

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Hostage Taking Is Back!

by AntonVaughan Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last month I passed along the news that, in a break with recent tradition, Congress might actually do something useful and pass a permanent fix to Medicare’s Sustainable Growth Rate, a well-meaning policy that turned out not to be sustainable at all when its formula started calling for actual cuts in payments to doctors. Every year Congress addresses this by passing a one-year “doc fix,” but recently a bipartisan effort finally came together to pass a permanent modification. Hooray!

But now it turns out that congressional Republicans enjoy the tradition of dysfunctional government too much to give it up. Sahil Kapur reports that hostage-taking is back:

House Republicans expect to vote this Friday on legislation that would risk steep, destabilizing Medicare cuts at the end of the month unless Democrats agree to a five-year delay of Obamacare’s individual mandate.

It mirrors some of the brinkmanship in the government shutdown fight last fall in that the GOP is using a must-pass bill as a vehicle to chop the Affordable Care Act. Democratic leaders have repeatedly rejected proposals to tinker with the mandate to buy insurance and have warned Republicans not to tie a physician payment fix to their partisan quest to unravel Obamacare.

Insurance companies oppose this. Doctors oppose this. The CBO says it would be a disaster. It obviously has no chance of passing. But it looks like Republicans are going right up to the brink once again. I guess that once you’ve tasted the thrill of threatening to shoot a hostage, nothing else quite compares.

Besides, there’s a midterm election coming up. Have I mentioned that before?

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Hostage Taking Is Back!

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This Texas Democrat Could Be the Future of Her Party—And Her Name Isn’t Wendy Davis

by AaronLampungmei Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Minutes before midnight last June 25, after state Sen. Wendy Davis concluded her 12-and-a-half-hour filibuster of a bill to severely limit abortion access in Texas, a colleague of Davis’ took the mike. Angered that the Republican leadership seemed to be ignoring female senators like herself, state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte asked, “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?” The Davis supporters who’d filled the gallery suddenly erupted in applause, a roar that only got louder as order turned to chaos, midnight came and went, and the infamous SB 5 legislation was, for the time being, defeated.

Today, 59-year-old Van de Putte once again finds herself alongside Davis, who’s running for governor. She is the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor of Texas and will face either incumbent David Dewhurst or hard-right conservative state Sen. Dan Patrick in November. (Dewhurst and Patrick will compete in a May 27 runoff to pick the GOP nominee.) Right now, Davis is the talk of Texas politics, grabbing all the headlines and raising eye-popping sums of money. But Van de Putte may figure larger in the future of her state. Latina, progressive, and a sixth-generation Texan, she has a serious chance of winning, especially if a fire-breather like Patrick wins the runoff, and she is the type of candidate Democrats need as they try to capitalize on the state’s growing Latino population and turn Texas blue.

Every schoolchild, the saying goes, learns that the most powerful politician in Texas is the lieutenant governor. If the governor of Texas dies, the lieutenant governor assumes the top spot. If the governor leaves the state even for a few days, the lieutenant governor becomes sitting governor. The lieutenant governor appoints the powerful committee chairmanships in the state Senate, picks which committee bills are sent to, and decides when a bill comes up for a vote and when someone is recognized on the floor of the state Senate.

In other words, if Van de Putte wins, instead of asking for permission to speak, as she did last June, she’d be giving it. While she may be an underdog—any Texas Democrat running for statewide office is—she’s no long shot. A recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll showed her trailing Patrick by 9 percentage points—2 less than Davis’ deficit against her Republican rival, Attorney General Greg Abbott—and Dewhurst by 12. If Van de Putte did pull off an upset—and Davis fell short—it would still be the biggest win for state Democrats since Ann Richards won the governorship in 1990.

Davis and Van de Putte share the top of the ballot, but in many ways they couldn’t be more different. Davis is composed, lawyerly, and on-message; Van de Putte (whose maiden name is San Miguel) practically preaches from the dais, her speeches peppered with one-liners and zingers and folksy wisdom. At one event last year, a copy of her prepared remarks given to reporters included the disclaimer: “**Please note that the Senator frequently diverges from her prepared remarks**”

On a recent Sunday morning, Van de Putte didn’t appear to have any prepared remarks as she addressed a Texas AFL-CIO convention at a downtown Austin hotel. “My journey here was not an easy one,” she said. In the past year, her six-month-old grandson, 82-year-old father, a beloved employee of her husband’s company, and her husband’s mother had all died. Grief stricken, Van de Putte said she wouldn’t have thought about running for lieutenant governor but for her friend Becky Moeller, the president of the Texas AFL-CIO. Moeller gently nagged her about running, and gave her polling data showing a narrow path to victory. Van de Putte and her family prayed on the decision. Ultimately, seeing the direction her state was headed, she couldn’t say no. She told the convention attendees, “You know, Mama ain’t happy. And if your family’s like my family, Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.'” Pause. “And if Grandma’s not happy, run! And so I am.”

Van de Putte’s 20-minute speech veered from the tragic (her family’s recent losses) to the euphoric to the hard-hitting. She singled out Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for “throwing a temper tantrum” that shut down the federal government. Yet as any politician worth her salt knows, Texans don’t take kindly to criticism of their beloved state, and Van de Putte’s speech deftly walked the line between touting the so-called Texas miracle (“It’s because of Texas families that we’re succeeding”) and slamming her Republican counterparts for not investing in public schools and infrastructure.

Throughout her speech, Van de Putte hit on a populist theme: “I know who you are. I know where you’ve been. I know where you’re going.” She used that line to appeal to the teachers, tradesmen, communication workers, and others gathered in the ballroom, and she urged them to remember the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?” That populist message could play well should the GOP nominee be Dewhurst, a wealthy businessman who spent about $25 million of his own money on a losing US Senate campaign in 2012. Dewhurst has said this will be his last run for office; Dewhurst, who was worth at least $200 million heading into his Senate run, recently told the Associated Press he needs to “go back to the private sector and earn some money.” Patrick, the other GOP hopeful, has come under fire for his overheated rhetoric, such as describing the flow of immigrants from Mexico to Texas as an “illegal invasion.”

Of course, Van de Putte will need a lot more than her friends in the labor movement to win in November. But as local and national Democrats pour money, manpower, and technology into their quest of turning Texas blue, Leticia Van de Putte is a name you can expect to hear a lot more often.

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This Texas Democrat Could Be the Future of Her Party—And Her Name Isn’t Wendy Davis

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The Clinton Memos: Advice on How Hillary Should Talk to a Single-Payer Advocate

by ClaribelKEL Posted on February 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Bill Clinton presidential library on Friday released thousands of pages of documents from the Clinton presidency, including a batch of nearly 300 pages related to the health care reform effort led by Hillary Clinton. This series of memos from 1993 offers a fascinating inside-baseball account of the White House’s legislative strategy for passing health insurance reform. Anyone who has watched House of Cards would recognize the techniques (though there are no murders) presented in these memos: composing files on the past and current health care positions of every member of the House and Senate, setting up a health care “university” to educate lawmakers on key policy components, mounting a “massive public communications campaign,” and coaxing—that is, ego-stroking—of individual lawmakers.

Much of this coaxing was to be done by the first lady. One memo noted that Rep. John Dingell, the powerful chair of the energy and commerce committee, was pessimistic about enacting comprehensive reform. “The best way to get Chairman Dingell back on board…is to make him feel that we need him (as we do),” an aide advised Hillary Clinton. Rep. Jack Brooks, who headed the House judiciary committee, was interested in limiting the antitrust exemption for the insurance industry. (“What he wants to hear is that you are aware of his legislation and that you and the President would like nothing less than to undercut his efforts in any way.”) New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had recently taken over the Senate finance committee, also was “nervous,” believing that “health care reform will be complex, controversial, and potentially expensive.” So Hillary was advised to focus on Sens. George Mitchell and Jay Rockefeller, other Democrats on the committee, who “have the potential to actually (although not visually) run the Committee on this issue.” One memo noted the “desire” of several moderate Republicans to work with the White House, but it reported that these members “fear about how it will be perceived by the rest of Republicans.” Prior to a meeting with several GOP senators, who were expected to complain about the lack of White House outreach, Hillary Clinton was advised to quickly push “for movement to ‘this is all water under a bridge’ language.” Another memo called for establishing a “time sensitive Mrs. Clinton thank you note system following important (does not have to be all) meetings with Members.” A memo laying out the grand political strategy for the Clintons’ health care reform project described an “essential” component: “Keep the health care industry divided, both in terms of whether they support or oppose us, and in terms of keeping them from ganging up on any single part of the overall package.”

One intriguing memo to Hillary Clinton prepping her for a meeting with Rep. Jim McDermott, a Washington Democrat who was a fierce advocate of a single-payer system. Though Clinton’s reps had been telling progressive groups and unions in private meetings that she believed a single-payer health insurance program made sense, she and her aides had ruled it out for her health care initiative (due to the political opposition such a proposal would draw) and had opted for a much more complicated overhaul based on a requirement that employers provide health insurance through HMOs. Still, as this memo noted, Clinton couldn’t afford to tick off the single-payer crusaders: “Cultivating a good and close relationship with the Congressman is becoming more and more important to us. Our House target list is filled with single-payer advocates, many of whom will look to him for a sign-off. Therefore, as difficult as it probably will be, we need to keep him happy and on our side.” The memo reported that at a recent meeting of House Democrats, McDermott had spoken “at some length about how the single payer system was so much easier to describe than the plan he thought the Administration would be proposing” and suggested that McDermott had a rather elevated view of his own role in the ongoing health care reform debate.

This was the “suggested approach” Clinton was to take with McDermott:

As with all Members, and particularly Congressman McDermott, the goal at this meeting is to make him feel we are listening to him and desirous of his guidance. In this vein, you should consider throwing anything he throws at you as a complication right back at him with a question. Then, if you have concerns about his suggested approach, you can address it with him directly. (This way, you don’t allow him the opportunity to pick apart anything before you have had a chance to hear and analyze his alternatives).

And Chris Jennings, the White House aide providing this advice, proposed a little trick for Hillary Clinton to pull:

Lastly, as staged and as presumptuous as this is, I might suggest that you consider throwing out all of the staff at the end of the meeting to hold a five minute private meeting with him. This will signal to him the closeness of your relationship with him, and the value you place on his confidential advice. (The subject could be on virtually anything.)

Frank Underwood could do no better. But making nice with single-payer advocates—and winning over many of them—was not sufficient. Not enough Democratic senators got behind the Clintons’ plan—”Anyone who thinks the Clinton health care plan can work in the real world as presently written isn’t living in it,” Moynihan declared—and the initiative crashed and burned. But perhaps Hillary learned a lesson or two about working with parochially minded members of the House and Senate that she later could apply during her time as a senator—and that may come in handy should she ever again be working in the White House.

Here’s the document:

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Hillary Clinton Talks to a Single-Payer Advocate (PDF)

Hillary Clinton Talks to a Single-Payer Advocate (Text)

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The Clinton Memos: Advice on How Hillary Should Talk to a Single-Payer Advocate

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