Robin Wright:
Six months into the Trump era, foreign-policy officials from eight past Administrations told me they are aghast that the President is still so witless about the world. “He seems as clueless today as he was on January 20th,” Boot, who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. Trump’s painful public gaffes, they warn, indicate that he’s not reading, retaining, or listening to his Presidential briefings. And the newbie excuse no longer flies.
“Trump has an appalling ignorance of the current world, of history, of previous American engagement, of what former Presidents thought and did,” Geoffrey Kemp, who worked at the Pentagon during the Ford Administration and at the National Security Council during the Reagan Administration, reflected. “He has an almost studious rejection of the type of in-depth knowledge that virtually all of his predecessors eventually gained or had views on.”
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—Two Great Democrats: Bill Clinton and Jim McDermott:
On Monday night I had the opportunity to see two great Democrats on the same stage, at my Rep. Jim McDermott's "We the People" event. Clinton was in town to fundraise for Sen. Maria Cantwell's reelection campaign, as well as McDermott's ongoing legal battle in Boehner vs. McDermott, stemming from the Republican effort in 1997 to conspire to defy a mandate from the House Ethics panel to not conspire against any ruling regarding Newt Gingrich.[…]
The difficulty for me in listening to the speech was that it took me back, it took me back to January 1993, when I attended President Clinton's inauguration, when I heard him say "There's nothing wrong with this country that can't be fixed by what's right with it." That was an inspiring message then, and it's an inspiring message now. But Clinton is still working around the margins, still the wonk who loves to talk about energy policy, healthcare reform, and college loans. Like the DLC gang that helped bring Clinton to power, I'm not sure that he gets the new political world in which we live, that the landscape has been so altered that the politics of the 1990s aren't adequate to counter the threat this extreme Republican party poses to our public life.
It was fantastic to hear these themes again, but it harkened too much back to the Clinton formula of old, that formula that the DLC is still trying to push. The Clinton formula worked for Clinton, one of the most talented politicians of the last several decades. But it even had limits for Clinton. As a reminder: Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Ring a bell? When Clinton was fully under attack by the Republicans, as Democrats are now, he went to the mattresses. He didn't triangulate. He didn't look for a third way. Democrats are fighting for our lives here, we need to take that message from Clinton.
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