Saturday Morning Post: The Weekly View from Washington
Who could have guessed that Hillary Clinton would choose to draw the first blood from her Republican presidential rivals on an issue that casts her as a defender of Big Business? The putative Democratic nominee has spent her first official weeks on the trail zigging left, attempting to reassure a jumpy liberal base that she will keep faith as their standard-bearer. Yet there she was in Hampton, New Hampshire on Friday, zagging in the other direction, lacing into the GOP field for abandoning the Export-Import Bank.
The federal agency — used heavily by the likes of Boeing, Caterpillar and General Electric to finance their foreign sales — is on the verge of extinction, thanks to a push by conservative free-market ideologues to zero out what they call a bastion of crony capitalism. What began as a fringe rightwing protest gathered steam first on Capitol Hill and then, with an assist from the Koch brothers’ network, out on the Republican presidential trail. Now among the party’s 2016 hopefuls, only South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, representing a major Boeing commercial aircraft plant, remains an Ex-Im supporter. Clinton, in her sharpest partisan attack to date, on Friday blasted the rest for threatening jobs and livelihoods under pressure from “the tea party and talk radio.”
Strategically, it’s a smart gambit for the former Secretary of State. She’s sidelined herself from the wider trade debate roiling her party, watching as her former boss in the White House battles it out with liberals over a Pacific Rim pact she once advocated. But the fight over Ex-Im pitches trade politics through the looking glass: Democrats have largely closed ranks, with even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) backing an extension of the bank’s charter, set to expire at the end of June. And establishment GOP types have struggled to hold the line against a creeping conservative consensus that it’s time for the bank to go. Some Democrats, too wishfully, have seized on the debate’s potential to cleave corporate powers from their Republican loyalties. For Clinton, however, it’s a consequence-free opportunity to remind business leaders she won’t only be poking them in the eye.
| Tory Newmyer | |
| @torynewmyer | |
| tory_newmyer@fortune.com |
Top News
• Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi emails are a yawn
The State Department on Friday released nearly 300 emails that the then-Secretary of State sent to her top aides in the aftermath of the September 2012 attack on the American embassy in Benghazi. The attack — which claimed four American lives, including that of the American ambassador to Libya — has persisted as an object of obsession for some on the right, despite any evidence that the Clinton team sought to mischaracterize what happened. The emails released Friday don’t add much to the established history, though Congressional Republicans investigating the episode say that shouldn’t come as a surprise, since they only include correspondence that Clinton deputies didn’t previously delete from those stashed on her private email server. USA Today
• Karl Rove's king-making power is fading
After spending three election cycles and hundreds of millions of dollars dominating Republican politics, American Crossroads — a shadowy organization formed by Rove and others — is flirting with irrelevance. The group is getting squeezed from a Koch-funded network of groups on one side and the rise of candidate-linked super PACs on another. It has responded, so far, by publicly humbling its ambitions. New York Times
• Social liberals catch up to social conservatives
For the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 1999, those Americans describing themselves as social liberals now match the number who call themselves social conservatives. The 16-year history of the question shows a jagged but steady convergence toward parity. And it tracks with a broader trend toward increased liberal self-identification that the polling agency has identified in recent years. Gallup
• Harry Reid would rather “be taken to Singapore and caned” than become a lobbyist
That chestnut comes in an interview the retiring Senate Minority Leader gave Politico this week. He also reflected on what it’s been like lining up against President Obama, to whom he’s fiercely loyal, on his trade agenda. Reid opposes handing the president the fast-track authority he’s seeking to secure an up-or-down vote on the Trans Pacific Partnership. But the Nevada Democrat didn’t whip against the measure last week, and it cleared a key hurdle to passage. Politico
Around the Water Cooler
• Comcast’s clinic: How to lose friends and influence
The cable giant’s failed merger with Time Warner Cable provides plenty of grist for future business school courses — and this deep-dive from the current issue of Fortune — about what not to do. At its heart, its a story about how a toxic brew of arrogance, greed, and bad customer relations foiled the company’s ambitions, and how blunt-force lobbying can’t overcome those deficits. Fortune
• Millennials want a humbler foreign policy
Here’s a fascinating and consequential revelation: Millennials are less likely than older generations to characterize the United States as exceptional or indispensable on the world stage. Broadly, that is, the rising generation is far less invested in American leadership abroad — and therefore will head into the next presidential election with a starkly different view of American responsibilities in a time of global transition. The insight comes from a new Eurasia Group poll. And while its author counsels this is only one survey, it points to a sentiment that surely bears watching. Fortune
