​Correct The Record Friday March 13, 2015 Afternoon Roundup:
 
 
Tweets:
 
 
Correct The Record @CorrectRecord: Think a “champion" of transparency like @TGowdySC would publish his emails? Or confirm his double standard... http://treygowdys.email [3/13/15, 1:01 p.m. EDT]
 
 
Correct The Record @CorrectRecord: Will @TGowdySC meet his own double standard? Will he publish his emails?http://treygowdys.email [3/13/15, 12:48 p.m. EDT]
 
 
Correct The Record @CorrectRecord: #tbt to when @HillaryClinton gave her landmark speech on women's rights in Beijing in 1995#HRC365 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkyMggo9bOM … [3/12/15, 4:47 p.m. EDT]
 
 
 
 
Headlines:
 
 
National Journal: “Playing The Heavy”
 
“Clinton's defenders seem not worried at all. ‘In the past, Carly Fiorina has had good things to say about the work of the Clinton Foundation, and she seemed to enjoy speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative,’ says Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for Correct the Record, a group run by the Democratic super PAC American Bridge.”
 
 
Salon: “Trey Gowdy’s Hillary hypocrisy: Why he’s the last person who should be demanding Clinton’s private emails”
 
“We weren’t the only ones this week to ask Gowdy about his personal email address and fail to receive a response. Correct The Record’s David Brock sent an open letter with the same inquiry.”
 
 
Vox: “Hillary Clinton isn’t running unopposed. She’s just crushing the competition.”
 
“In this telling, Clinton isn't winning by default. She's winning by winning. The absence of competition is the product of Clinton's strong, successful campaign to win over Democratic Party elites.”
 
 
CBS News: “Voters ‘ready for Hillary’ unfazed by Clinton's email drama”
 
“While the public may never see some of the emails Clinton perused on that BlackBerry, her most strident supporters say it doesn't matter to them -- they're still ready for Hillary, and they're ready for whatever attacks Republicans will throw at her.”
 
 
New York Times blog: The Upshot: “Hillarynomics: Big Policy Questions for Clinton”
 
“In the coming months, Mrs. Clinton is likely to begin releasing her economic policy proposals. They will no doubt be devised to address the fact that, as she has said, ‘it feels harder and harder to get ahead.’”
 
 
CNN: “Rick Perry is tired of Clinton drama”
 
“‘Seeing two days of this being played out on our TVs and newspapers and radios, I'm reminded of the drama of the Clintons, whether it's Watergate or Travelgate or this issue or that issue,’ the former Texas governor told CNN in an interview in New Hampshire."
 
 
 
 
Articles:
 
 
National Journal: “Playing The Heavy”
 
By Emily Schultheis
March 14, 2015
 
[Subtitle:] Carly Fiorina plans to excoriate Hillary Clinton, and her competition is grateful for it.
 
Hundreds of conservative and evangelical activists had been listening politely and applauding on cue as Carly Fiorina talked about God, and opportunity, and work ethic. For many of those attending the Iowa Freedom Summit, it was the first time they'd heard her speak. For some, it was the first time they'd heard of her at all.
 
Then, more than 10 minutes into the speech, she mentioned Hillary Clinton.
 
"Like Hillary Clinton, I too have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe," said Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard. "But unlike her, I've actually accomplished something. You see, Mrs. Clinton, flying is not an accomplishment; it is an activity."
 
The audience roared and was suddenly engaged, hanging on her words as she criticized Clinton on one issue after another. And when she landed on Benghazi—"Unlike Hillary Clinton, I know what difference it makes that our American ambassador and three other brave Americans were killed in a deliberate terrorist attack"—the crowd surged to its feet with a standing ovation.
 
"That's the first time I've ever seen her in person, and, frankly, I was moved by the speech. That takes a lot," says Sam Clovis, a former conservative radio host and tea-party favorite in Iowa. "It was the perfect speech on the perfect topic at the perfect place at the perfect time given in the perfect manner."
 
Fiorina, the only Republican woman actively considering a run for the White House, is taking on Clinton more forcefully and directly than any other GOP contender. It's a deliberate strategy meant to make headlines, differentiate her from the pack, and elevate her position on the national stage. And in the process, it's winning her friends, as Fiorina assumes an attack role that many Republican strategists think male GOP candidates need to avoid.
 
Now, midterms behind her, Fiorina and her super PAC have shifted from defense to offense, assuming the role of chief Clinton antagonist.
 
"She is absolutely fearless," says Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List, a group that supports candidates who oppose abortion rights. "She doesn't shrink back."
 
It's not that Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, or other candidates are stepping lightly. Just last month, Clinton's name rang through the Conservative Political Action Conference dozens of times, as Republicans quipped about foreign donations to Clinton's foundation, tacked her name onto criticism of President Obama's policies, or, as Marco Rubio did, called her a candidate of "yesterday."
 
But Fiorina's offensive is in a class of its own, and for one reason: She's a woman, so she can.
 
"She tweets about women's rights in this country and takes money from governments that deny women the most basic human rights," Fiorina said at CPAC. "She tweets about equal pay for women, but won't answer basic questions about her own office's pay standards—and neither will our president. Hillary may like hashtags, but she doesn't know what leadership means."
 
These are not just convenient applause lines—they're part of a campaign plan Fiorina has been methodically preparing and road testing since the June 2014 launch of her super PAC, the Unlocking Potential Project. Her intention then was to become the chief GOP voice against the Democrats' "war on women" message, and to give her a reason to show up in Iowa and New Hampshire. "The 'war on women' is shameless, baseless propaganda—there is no fact to it," Fiorina told CNN after the PAC's launch. "But it's worked, because it's scared women to death. Enough." She followed that up with training for campaign operatives and volunteers in states that would determine Senate control to teach them how to talk about things like equal pay and women's health.
 
Now, midterms behind her, Fiorina and her super PAC have shifted from defense to offense, assuming the role of chief Clinton antagonist. "Republicans are looking for someone that can both present a positive optimistic vision for the future and act as an effective critic of Hillary Clinton," says Stephen DeMaura, a former aide at Unlocking Potential who now runs the super PAC supporting Fiorina, Carly for America. "So when people call Carly the anti-Hillary, we welcome that."
 
Indeed, this is the role Fiorina sought.
 
Clinton "will play the gender card over and over again, which is unfortunate but predictable," Fiorina told National Journal's Nancy Cook recently.
 
"Democrats play identity politics," she said. "It's dismissive of women; it's insulting to women. It's inaccurate in the supposed facts that it lays out. Democrats think identity politics has worked, and unfortunately, they have a lot of evidence to support that it works. So, we have to push back hard."
 
Not many male candidates will be so eager to take on gender politics this cycle. They are being advised to tread cautiously. "There's a natural hesitance from male candidates when they're running against a woman to be too aggressive, because if they've run against a woman, they've probably been burned by this before," says Katie Packer Gage, who was Mitt Romney's deputy campaign manager in 2012 and is now a partner at the GOP firm Burning Glass Consulting.
 
Gage and Burning Glass are working on Republican messaging strategies, drafting guidance on the best ways for the party to criticize Clinton in 2016. "I think the other candidates are going to have to figure out how they walk that line where they effectively go after Hillary on her legitimate weaknesses—without coming across like … some kind of bully," says Gage.
 
And this cycle wouldn't be the first time a male candidate faced that charge when competing against Clinton. In 2000, her opponent for the Senate, Rick Lazio, walked across the debate stage with a piece of paper in hand and tried to get her to sign a pledge against soft money. The move backfired, making Lazio look like a bully. "Some of these Republican men seem almost fearful of having their own Rick Lazio moment," says GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway.
 
But Fiorina's not just playing bad cop for the good of her team. She's purposely avoiding the intra-party sniping that voters so often find petty and instead gaining attention for saying things others won't. And through this, she aims to build a brand that will keep her in this contest a lot longer than most pundits predict.
 
"It's her strategy that she came up with. She thinks it's right, but it also gets her the attention," says GOP strategist Charlie Black. The aim, he adds, is to "get her enough coverage that, in the debates, people pay attention to her … because she will do extremely well in the debates."
 
If she gets to the debates. Certainly, gaining traction now could help Fiorina garner enough support to qualify, and that's something that even Republicans who are leaning toward or actively backing other candidates say they'd like to see.
 
"Carly is going to acquit herself well on a debate stage," says Ned Ryun, a board member of the American Conservative Union and founder of the group American Majority. "People are going to say, 'We want her to be in longer just to be part of a debate.' " (At CPAC, Fiorina also made reference to her debate chops, albeit in the general election: "If Hillary Clinton had to face me on a debate stage, at the very least she would have a hitch in her swing," she said.)
 
But getting even that far—the first Republican debates are scheduled for August—is a tall order for Fiorina. She's polling dismally, pulling just 1 percent in a February CNN/ORC national poll of Republican voters. And, as if it could be any worse, the cross-tabs show her performing more poorly with women than men.
 
Clinton's defenders seem not worried at all. "In the past, Carly Fiorina has had good things to say about the work of the Clinton Foundation, and she seemed to enjoy speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative," says Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for Correct the Record, a group run by the Democratic super PAC American Bridge. "Hillary Clinton's vast list of accomplishments for children and working families speak for themselves, and anyone trying to distort or detract from these facts is attempting to profit off the media attention and execute their own agenda."
 
Indeed, while taking aim at Clinton might elevate Fiorina in this phase of the contest, she will need to move beyond that to be viewed as anything but a long shot—or a hopeful for Commerce secretary in a Republican administration.
 
"It's important for her to also show that she's more than that—that she can be more than that," said Nick Ryan, founder of the American Future Fund, an Iowa-based conservative group. "And I think that's a natural next step for her to take. Frankly, for her to have staying power and be able to go through a caucus, she has to grow beyond that."
 
 
 
 
Salon: “Trey Gowdy’s Hillary hypocrisy: Why he’s the last person who should be demanding Clinton’s private emails”
 
By Zaid Jiliani
March 13, 2015, 4:30 a.m. EDT
 
[Subtitle:] The Benghazi committee chairman wants a full investigation, but his own email practices are far from transparent
 
Amid the press furor over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton opting to use private email, and not a government email address, some are now raising important questions about if those who are investigating her – such as the chairmen of congressional committees who deal with sensitive information during the course of investigations – are themselves using private email.
 
Take, for example, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who succeeded Rep .Darrell Issa (R-CA) to be head of the House’s Government Oversight committee. Chaffetz’s business card lists a Gmail address, as shown here by ABC News:
 
[IMAGE]
 
But Chaffetz may not be alone in doing official business with private email. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who heads the House’s Select Committee on Benghazi, is leading the charge in calling for investigations of Clinton’s email.
 
Yet it’s important to note that Gowdy maintains his own domain treygowdy.com. For example, one campaign contact email he used wasinfo@treygowdy.com. While it’s not unusual to maintain such a thing particularly for campaign work, it’s not clear that Gowdy utilizes this email solely for political campaign work and not congressional tasks. AlterNet asked Gowdy’s office through both a telephone inquiry followed up by an email communication to his press secretary about how he segregates work he conducts through his personal domain vs congressional work. We also inquired about where his personal email server is stored and how it is secured. We also attempted to contact Gowdy campaign manager George Ramsey, but he did not return our phone calls. In 48 hours, the deadline we set, we received no response.
 
We weren’t the only ones this week to ask Gowdy about his personal email address and fail to receive a response. Correct The Record’s David Brock sent an open letter with the same inquiry:
 
Dear Chairman Gowdy:
 
I noted with interest your public demand that Secretary Clinton turn over her personal email server, presumably so that the committee can access some 30,000 Clinton emails deemed to be strictly private and beyond the reach of the government.
 
This Orwellian demand has no basis in law or precedent. Every government employee decides for themselves what email is work-related and what is strictly private. There is no reason to   hold Secretary Clinton to a different standard— except partisan politics.
 
But since you insist that Clinton’s private email be accessed, I’m writing today to ask you and your staff to abide by the same standard you seek to hold the Secretary to by releasing your own work-related and private email and that of your staff to the public.
 
While I realize that Congress regularly exempts itself from laws that apply to the executive branch, I believe this action is necessary to ensure public confidence in the fairness and  impartiality of your investigation.
 
Thank you for your consideration.
 
Sincerely,
 
David Brock
Correct The Record
 
It’s true that there are legitimate issues with Clinton failing to segregate work and personal email.  But it’s troubling that Members of Congress handling sensitive investigations into national security matters such as the Benghazi incident don’t appear to be willing to be transparent about their own email practices.
 
 
 
 
Vox: “Hillary Clinton isn’t running unopposed. She’s just crushing the competition.”
 
By Ezra Klein
March 13, 2015 8:30 a.m. EST
 
Jonathan Bernstein and Reihan Salam have written two smart articles on the Democratic presidential primary — or lack thereof — that are best read in tandem. Bernstein's article is meant to explain why it looks like Democrats don't have a bench even though they do, and Salam's article is meant to show who's sitting on it.
 
Bernstein's argument is related to the "invisible primary" theory of presidential elections. Hillary Clinton, he says, "has earned the support of the bulk of Democratic party actors, and gained the acquiescence of other Democrats who aren’t as enthusiastic about her." The result is that the Democratic Party's "perfectly viable other candidates either dropped out or never seriously considered the race."
 
Perhaps a slightly clearer way to put it is this: in the invisible primary, when the contest is as much a draft as it is a campaign, Clinton is "opposed" by essentially every Democrat fit for the presidency. If the party's powerbrokers didn't want to support Clinton and instead really wanted Sen. Michael Bennet to run, or Gov. Andrew Cuomo to lead the field, they would be working toward that outcome. Instead, they're lining up behind Clinton. In this telling, Clinton isn't winning by default. She's winning by winning. The absence of competition is the product of Clinton's strong, successful campaign to win over Democratic Party elites.
 
Salam offers something different: a "wish list of Democratic presidential contenders." His list excludes possible candidates like ex-Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley or ex-Virginia Senator Jim Webb. Rather, it includes plausible candidates who seem to have no interest in becoming actual candidates.
 
"Any contest for the Democratic presidential nomination needs an earnest, nerdy liberal technocrat who appeals to the intelligentsia," writes Salam, and he nominates Sen. Ron Wyden, a favorite of wonks (and civil libertarians) everywhere:
 
His steadfast opposition to dragnet surveillance has won him many friends among civil libertarians, and that’s no small thing in a Democratic primary, particularly in dovish, independent-minded states like New Hampshire. A Pew survey from January found that 31 percent of Democrats hold an unfavorable view of the National Security Agency, which is not a bad little foundation for a Wyden campaign. Moreover, Wyden has proposed a universal health care plan more ambitious than Obamacare, and he’s championed the idea of allowing states like Vermont and Oregon to build their own single-payer health systems.
 
Salam goes on to push Sen. Sherrod Brown as a liberal champion, ex-Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick for his ability to speak to the post-Ferguson moment in the post-Obama Democratic Party, ex-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as the grave centrist, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar as a Midwest problem-solver.
 
The point isn't that any of these candidates will run. The point is that they could run, and they would be, in theory, at least as credible as a Scott Walker or a Jeb Bush. They may not seem like presidential contenders now, but as Bernstein writes, "the way those solid politicians become Serious Presidential Candidates and not just random governors and senators — I'm talking here about folks such as Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Bobby Jindal — is to start running, and visibly enough so the press notices. "
 
Which is all to say that Bernstein is right: the Democratic Party has a bench. It's just that Clinton is running so strongly in the invisible primary that no one on it thinks it's worth getting in the game.
 
The question for the Democratic Party is whether Clinton is going to be as strong in the visible primary — and the visible election — as she is in the invisible one. The skills necessary to win over Democratic Party elites may not be the skills necessary to win the election — and if Hillary doesn't face serious opposition in the visible primary, Democrats may not find that out until too late.
 
 
 
 
CBS News: “Voters ‘ready for Hillary’ unfazed by Clinton's email drama”
 
By Stephanie Condon
March 13, 2015, 6:00 a.m. EDT
 
Hundreds of die-hard Hillary Clinton fans gathered at a nightclub in Washington, D.C. on Thursday night, showing their support for her presumed presidential candidacy with a small donation of at least $20.16 to the "Ready for Hillary" PAC.
 
In return, supporters had the chance to grab some Hillary swag -- including a giant poster of the former secretary of state coolly peering down at her BlackBerry through her dark shades. Underneath the now-iconic image, the poster announced: #Ready.
 
While the public may never see some of the emails Clinton perused on that BlackBerry, her most strident supporters say it doesn't matter to them -- they're still ready for Hillary, and they're ready for whatever attacks Republicans will throw at her.
 
"Am I concerned about it? Not very," T.J. Clark, a sophomore at George Washington University who attended Thursday's fundraiser, told CBS News. "When it comes to emails, if it's against protocol, it's against protocol, but it's nothing that would change my support."
 
"If anything, it comments on how scared the other side is of Hillary Clinton [running] a presidential campaign," he continued. "They're going to try to latch onto anything to take her down. If Republicans are going to try to tear her down, it just makes me that much more supportive of her."
 
One new Gallup poll suggests that, so far at least, the email controversy isn't really hurting Clinton's public standing. She still has a notably higher favorable (50 percent) than unfavorable (39 percent) rating, while 89 percent of Americans are familiar enough with Clinton to have an opinion of her -- more than any other potential 2016 presidential candidate. The poll was conducted March 2-4, just as the email issue was coming to light.
 
Several of the attendees at Thursday's fundraiser, like Clark, told CBS News that they're convinced Clinton has acted transparently as a public servant. Furthermore, they argued that as a former first lady often at the center of GOP attacks, Clinton was uniquely justified in using a private server to store her emails while serving as secretary of state.
 
"Not everybody's married to a former president of the United States, or would have the security issues that she would, or would have Ken Starr in her background," Clinton supporter Michelle Loggins told CBS. "With those things in mind, I see no problem with it."
 
Loggins chided the politicians calling for further investigations into the private emails that Clinton deleted from her account. "Move on to something that really matters to me and my family," Loggins said.
 
Joan Fuchsman, who's been "ready for Hillary" since 2008, similarly said the email controversy was overblown.
 
"It doesn't concern me at all that she kept them in a private server," she said. "For all I know, that could be more secure. Everything is getting hacked these days -- if Sony was hacked, for all I know, the State Department could be hacked."
 
Clinton supporter Michael Grier said he expects the email controversy to "fade away," though he expects the harsh scrutiny of his preferred candidate to continue.
 
"There are going to be some people who ask some really tough questions, and I encourage them because I know she's ready for them."
 
 
 
 
New York Times blog: The Upshot: “Hillarynomics: Big Policy Questions for Clinton”
 
By David Leonhardt
March 13, 2015
 
Barring an unexpected economic boom over the next year and a half, the 2016 Democratic nominee for president will probably not base her campaign around being President Obama’s heir.
 
The economic picture remains too muddled and the country too polarized. A candidate who can claim to fix Washington will be in a better position than one who tries to explain or defend the last eight years.
 
Hillary Clinton — still the overwhelming favorite to be that nominee, in spite of the recent mess over her use of a private email account while she was secretary of state — will especially need to find ways to project freshness. And pundits will no doubt scour her remarks and campaign proposals looking for such differences.
 
So it’s worth acknowledging something now: Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have far more similarities than differences, especially on economic matters.
 
They both consider the stagnant incomes of recent decades to be a defining national issue. They both want to address the stagnation through a combination of government programs and middle-class tax cuts. They both see climate change as a serious threat. They both think workers have too little power and corporations too much.
 
They both are to the political left of every single Republican in Congress. They are also to the right of many liberals — friendlier to markets and global trade, more comfortable with incremental change.
 
Yet for all their similarities, Hillarynomics (the phrase “Clintonomics” is already taken) and Obamanomics will not be identical.
 
In the coming months, Mrs. Clinton is likely to begin releasing her economic policy proposals. They will no doubt be devised to address the fact that, as she has said, “it feels harder and harder to get ahead.”
 
Along the way, she will need to deal with some thorny policy questions that don’t have obvious answers for a Democrat. My goal here is to lay out the biggest of those questions. Mrs. Clinton’s answers to them will begin to define Hillarynomics.
 
Taxing the rich. For two decades, Democrats have been largely united on taxes. Bill Clinton raised the top marginal tax rate (which now applies to couples making more than $450,000) to 39.6 percent. Mr. Obama spent years fighting — and ultimately succeeding — to raise it back to that level, from a 35 percent rate.
 
But now the issue gets trickier for Democrats.
 
Total federal taxes on top earners are already near the top of their narrow range over the last 35 years. But pretax inequality has soared during that time. And federal tax rates are still much lower than they were in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
 
Have the politics of inequality changed to the point that Mrs. Clinton will propose a top marginal rate above 40 percent? Or will she instead propose more subtle tax increases, such as reducing tax breaks, as Mr. Obama recently has?
 
Either way, she seems likely to push for middle- and low-income tax cuts. As a result, she will need either to propose further tax increases on high earners — or to acknowledge that her plan would increase the budget deficit.
 
Bargaining power. Top Democrats spent much of the 1990s moving to the right on economics. They have spent the last decade inching back to the left. The move isn’t really about the personal views of Mr. Obama and the Clintons. Instead, it’s a reaction to the great wage slowdown of the last 15 years, which has left the party looking for more aggressive ways to address inequality.
 
Take the party’s stance toward labor unions. Democrats who previously were wary of aligning too closely with unions are now searching for ways to strengthen workers’ bargaining power. The Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, a group with close ties to Mrs. Clinton, recently made “expanding worker voice” one of its centerpiece recommendations. “If you made it less easy for employers to fire union organizers, you would meaningfully impact the amount of collective bargaining,” Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary, said.
 
Although labor leaders support many of Mr. Obama’s decisions, they also hope that the next Democratic nominee will go further — on enacting overtime-pay rules, on using the bully pulpit to criticize corporations and on appointing labor-friendly advisers. “We have learned through bitter experience that it really matters who makes up a president’s economic team,” said Damon Silvers, a top A.F.L.-C.I.O. official.
 
Schools and tests. Mr. Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have pursued a decidedly centrist course, pushing states to demand more accountability from schools. The approach can claim significant successes, including a rising high school graduation rate.
 
Yet many students, parents and teachers have also grown frustrated by the amount of standardized testing. Some of this frustration stems from the fact that accountability isn’t fun. Many school officials would rather be left alone to judge their own performance. Other aspects of the frustration, though, are more substantive.
 
A central challenge for the post-Obama Education Department will be finding a way to make accountability more popular. The obvious answer probably involves fewer, better tests — but creating such tests isn’t easy. The next president will have some big decisions to make.
 
Medical costs. The sharp slowdown in the growth rate of health spending — which has reduced the federal deficit — has been one of the happiest economic surprises of the Obama years. It stems in part from efforts within medicine that predated his presidency and in part from the 2010 health care bill. But the battle to reduce wasteful medical spending is still in its very early stages.
 
Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, has set a goal that at least 50 percent of Medicare payments be based on quality, not quantity, of care by 2018 — which is two years into the next administration.
 
Right now, many outcome-based payment systems are voluntary. To get to 50 percent, notes Peter Orszag, the former Obama budget director, Washington will probably need to force more hospitals and doctors into such systems. And because accountability isn’t fun, many are sure to squawk about it.
 
If you want to judge how serious Mrs. Clinton is about the long-term budget deficit, keep an eye on the signals she sends about health costs. Nothing affects the deficit more than health spending.
 
Style. This list obviously is not an exhaustive one. Ultimately, though, the biggest differences between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama may revolve around style.
 
In the 2008 campaign, she criticized him for his naïveté about the potential for major bipartisan compromises. “We’ve got to be really clear that this is a struggle, and this is just not a moment where everybody will see the world the way it should be seen and come together to solve these problems,” she told me then. “There are powerful forces at work in our society.”
 
Mr. Obama has since moved toward Mrs. Clinton’s view, more willing simply to defy Republicans when compromise isn’t an option. But many Democrats continue to believe that if the party holds the White House in 2016, it will be better served by a harder-edged approach to leadership and negotiation. (And many Obama advisers roll their eyes at such criticism as vague wishful thinking.)
 
Whatever the truth, Mrs. Clinton’s view about these questions now matters more than anyone else’s in the Democratic Party. The most influential critic of a president is the one who succeeds him, and she still seems to be the only Democrat with a good chance to do so.
 
 
 
 
CNN: “Rick Perry is tired of Clinton drama”
 
By Ashley Killough
March 13, 2015, 12:49 p.m. EDT

Rick Perry argued Thursday night that the controversy involving Hillary Clinton and her emails "was just a lot of drama" and reflects a broader problem with the former secretary of state and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
 
"Seeing two days of this being played out on our TVs and newspapers and radios, I'm reminded of the drama of the Clintons, whether it's Watergate or Travelgate or this issue or that issue," the former Texas governor told CNN in an interview in New Hampshire.
 
"Travelgate" is the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton's decision in the early '90s as first lady to fire members of the White House travel office. Regarding Watergate, Perry's spokesman said he misspoke and was referring to Whitewater, a scandal involving real estate investments by the Clintons, rather than Watergate, the controversy that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974.
 
Republicans of course have not been shy in their attacks against Clinton, who's considered the all-but-certain Democratic nominee should she pursue a likely presidential bid in 2016.
 
But Perry is one of the first prospective presidential contenders to blast Clinton following her blustery press conference on Tuesday, when she admitted it was a mistake to only use her personal email account for government business during her time at the State Department.
 
"I think Americans are looking for somebody to come into Washington D.C. and to get away from all of this drama that we've seen from Secretary Clinton over the course of the last few days," Perry said. "I think they're ready for someone who is not a Washington creation."
 
The former governor, who's on a two-day swing through the first-in-the-nation primary state, also weighed in on the recent shootings of police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, calling the incident an "awful tragedy."
 
Asked about the state of race relations in the United States, Perry hit the Obama administration for failing to use what he called constructive rhetoric.
 
"We need to be working together and bringing people together to heal these wounds and not to scratch the scabs open," he said. "Dealing with this issue, it's important for the president of the United States, or for that matter for the governors of the states, to have words that heal, not words that divide."
 
Pressed later for specifics on when the president has "scratched the scabs open" on racial issues, his spokesperson said the former governor was making a wider point about what he sees as the president's "divisiveness."
 
"The Governor was referencing President Obama's willingness to pit man against woman, old against young, and rich against poor which results in divisiveness," said Travis Considine in an email. "Gov. Perry believes Americans need to unite and overcome the great challenges facing our country on the economy and foreign policy."
 
The shootings in Ferguson came not long after a Justice Department report revealed accounts of racism among the city's police department and court officials, resulting in the resignation of the police chief less than a year after the shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.
 
Obama said last week he doesn't consider the problem in Ferguson "typical" but argued it's "not an isolated incident."
 
"I think there are circumstances in which trust between communities and law enforcement have broken down, and individuals or entire departments may not have the training or the accountability to make sure they are protecting serving all people, and not just some," he said in an interview that aired on SiriusXM's "Urban View" channel.
 
While holding four events in New Hampshire on Thursday, Perry largely focused on making his 14-year tenure as Texas governor a key selling point as he prepares for a likely presidential run, this time with a revamped and more disciplined style than his gaffe-prone campaign for the presidential nomination in 2012.
 
Like many of the other governors angling towards a bid at the White House, Perry is focusing on the need for a president with executive skills and drawing a sharp contrast with Obama, using his own handling of the Ebola cases in Texas last year as an example to illustrate executive prowess.
 
Perry also hit the Obama administration repeatedly on the economy, and, like he did in the 2012 cycle, pointed to job growth in Texas, which was largely immune to the most recent recession.
 
He has also been studying up on foreign policy and forcefully stood by the controversial letter Senate Republicans wrote to Iran warning that any nuclear agreement must be approved by Congress.
 
Related: Perry says next president not accountable to Obama on Iran
 
"I feel comfortable that we'll be able to sit or stand on the stage with the competition and have a really good back and forth," Perry told CNN, talking about his efforts to sharpen his knowledge of domestic and foreign policy. The former governor underwent an embarrassing moment in a 2011 debate--in which he forgot the third of three federal agencies he'd like to cut--that was widely viewed as the kiss of death of his unsuccessful campaign.
 
The governor continues with another busy day on Friday that will take him on five stops across New Hampshire. Perry, whose time as governor ended in January, said he plans on making his 2016 decision by late May or early June and dismissed his low single-digit standing in the polls.
 
"A year out from the New Hampshire primaries I'm not sure it means anything," he said.