Iowa Presidential Debate Crucial As Caucuses Are Three Weeks From Today

3 comments on “Iowa Presidential Debate Crucial As Caucuses Are Three Weeks From Today”

1. 

   Jeffrey Moebus January 13, 2020 10:42 pm

   While it will be very interesting to hear what the candidates have to say about The Soleimani Hit, the future of US-Iranian relations, and the War Powers legislation floundering around in Congress, it would be even more interesting to hear what they have to say about this:

   “It’s official: the Trump administration spent $1 trillion more in 2019 than it raised in revenue. That deficit is 50% larger than the deficit in 2017, which was President Trump’s first year in office, and represents the first calendar-year deficit to top $1 trillion since 2012. Annual deficits will only grow worse in the coming decade, in large part thanks to the $2 trillion tax cut Trump signed into law in 2017 and a similarly-sized tax and spending deal he signed at the end of last year (over a quarter of which was added to the national debt).”

   And this: “Today, the federal government spends more money servicing our national debt than it spends on public investments in infrastructure, education, and scientific research combined.”

   And this: “With trillion-dollar annual deficits stretching into the future indefinitely, will Democrats address this generational challenge in their Presidential debate? Unfortunately, these issues haven’t been raised in any of the more than 500 questions asked throughout the last six presidential debates. The seventh debate on Tuesday night presents one last opportunity to change this dynamic before the Iowa Caucus.”
   …………………..

   “2019 Was Officially Trump’s First Trillion-Dollar Deficit. Will Democrats Debate It?” by Ben Ritz

   https://www.forbes.com/sites/benritz/2020/01/13/2019-was-officially-trumps-first-trillion-dollar-deficit-will-democrats-debate-it/#5b404f635c32

   It’s official: the Trump administration spent $1 trillion more in 2019 than it raised in revenue. That deficit is 50% larger than the deficit in 2017, which was President Trump’s first year in office, and represents the first calendar-year deficit to top $1 trillion since 2012. Annual deficits will only grow worse in the coming decade, in large part thanks to the $2 trillion tax cut Trump signed into law in 2017 and a similarly-sized tax and spending deal he signed at the end of last year (over a quarter of which was added to the national debt).

   With trillion-dollar annual deficits stretching into the future indefinitely, will Democrats address this generational challenge in their Presidential debate? There sure is an appetite for it: when I had the privilege of speaking with students at the New England College Convention in New Hampshire last week, they expressed deep concern about the rising national debt they’re poised to inherit and how the Democratic candidates would pay for their proposals.

   Unfortunately, these issues haven’t been raised in any of the more than 500 questions asked throughout the last six presidential debates. The seventh debate on Tuesday night presents one last opportunity to change this dynamic before the Iowa Caucus.

   As I wrote last month, at least one candidate thinks that’s a problem. Mayor Pete Buttigieg told the Washington Post’s editorial board in December why he thinks it’s time Democrats start talking about debt and deficits:

   “As we speak, we have a Republican presidency cheering a scenario where we’ve got a trillion-dollar deficit,” said Buttigieg. “But I find that our party doesn’t talk about it much. And in some corners of our party, it’s not fashionable to care about it. I think that we need to, first of all, because just generationally, I think that I may be here when some of these fiscal time bombs go off. I also think that we need to recognize that we’re approaching a point where you can’t ignore spending we need to do on infrastructure and safety net and health and education being crowded by debt service.”

   Buttigieg is exactly right. Today, the federal government spends more money servicing our national debt than it spends on public investments in infrastructure, education, and scientific research combined. It should therefore come as no surprise that some polls show rising deficits are becoming one of voters’ top concerns heading into 2020. Democrats could be making a strong case to these voters about why their party is best suited to tackle the challenge: over the past 40 years, Democratic presidents and Congresses both have had a stronger record of responsible fiscal stewardship than their Republican counterparts.

   Instead of seizing this opportunity, the presidential campaigns have largely avoided the discussion. Although most Democratic candidates for president — including Buttigieg — have offered some proposals to raise additional revenue throughout the course of the campaign, they commit nearly all of the savings to new spending. Several have proposed to expand benefits in programs such as Social Security and Medicare, but none have laid out a plan to close the massive financial shortfalls those programs currently face with the retirement of the Baby Boomers.

   When candidates keep the price tag of their promises reasonable, this lack of specificity isn’t necessarily a cause for concern. Former Vice President Joe Biden, for example, has proposed an agenda that would cost roughly $3 trillion over the next decade — less than the total cost of legislation enacted during the first three years of the Trump administration. By setting realistic goals, Biden can both tell voters now how he plans to pay for the entirety of his proposals and leave additional revenue options on the table for tackling pre-existing deficits once in office.

   Compare that to the approach of Sen. Bernie Sanders: he has proposed an agenda that experts estimate could cost anywhere between $30 and $50 trillion over the next ten years. But even as Sanders admits a willingness to raise almost every tax imaginable, he still falls short of paying for even half of his proposals. If Sanders can’t come up with a credible way to pay for new commitments, how could he (or others with similarly lofty ambitions) possibly hope to finance the promises our government has already made? Sanders’ agenda would bury the young Americans powering his campaign under even more crushing debt.

   The latest deficit figures further demonstrate that the Trump-Republican Party has neither the desire nor the ability to responsibly manage our nation’s finances. Tuesday night’s debate moderators should ask the Democratic candidates how they plan to tackle one of the Trump administration’s greatest intergenerational failures. The time has never been better for candidates to offer voters a progressive agenda that invests in our country without leaving the bill for future generations.

   ###

2. 

   D January 14, 2020 5:30 pm

   ‘Iraq Still Matters’

   By Sarah Jones (01.13.2020)
   http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/joe-biden-cant-outrun-his-vote-on-iraq.html

   By 2011, U.S. forces had occupied Iraq for eight years. But if the press remembered, it didn’t show. The war accounted for a mere 1 percent of all news coverage throughout all of 2010, the Pew Research Center reported. Nearly a decade later, little has changed. The U.S. is still in Iraq, a fact that remains almost entirely absent from the news. When the press does cover the aftermath of the invasion, its attention is fickle, moved only by events like the rise of ISIS or Donald Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. The architects of the war continue their careers undisrupted by consequence, ensconced in public office and think tanks and the odd university post. But the impunity that shields them doesn’t look quite as impenetrable as it once did. Iraq may be out of the news, but it’s haunting Joe Biden in ways the former vice-president did not appear to anticipate.

   Last week, Biden told an Iowa voter he didn’t support the invasion of Iraq at the time of its launch. He opposed it, he said, “from the very moment” George W. Bush announced it, and he told the president as much “right after” it began, CNN reported. But that’s not true, as CNN itself had previously documented. Biden not only voted for the war, in public he supported it with relative enthusiasm, telling an audience at the Brookings Institution in 2003 that “it was the right vote then and would be a correct vote today.”

   Biden has since admitted it was a “mistake” to trust the Bush administration to wage war. But as a candidate for president in 2020, he occupies a difficult position. His most threatening competitors for the nomination — Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg, depending on the poll of the day — either voted against the war, or weren’t in a position to do so. On Iraq, Biden stands alone, and the Sanders campaign is determined to make sure that history matters.

   In a statement quoted by Politico, senior Sanders campaign advisor Jeff Weaver said Biden, as a senator, “made explicitly clear” that he supported the war. Weaver added, “It is appalling that after 18 years, Joe Biden still refuses to admit he was dead wrong on the Iraq War, the worst foreign-policy blunder in modern American history.”

   The Sanders campaign is right on the substance of its accusation. On a moral basis, Biden’s early position on the war is of profound importance. Even the more hawkish pundits usually concede that the invasion of Iraq proved a catastrophe. But the war was doomed to fail; it was flawed, fatally, from its conception. Biden’s mistake and his subsequent failure to reckon with it should cast doubt on his foreign-policy judgment. Criticizing Biden for his vote suggests, rightly, that there ought to be some cost associated with support for war. On this point, there ought to be no argument. Years after the senators cast their fateful votes, it may not even be possible to accurately calculate the total number of Iraqis and Americans whose deaths can be blamed on the decision to invade. At a minimum, the total is in the tens of thousands, and Trump’s destabilizing foreign policy may lead to further bloodshed in the region. Biden’s support for the war wasn’t just a bloodless political miscalculation but a moral failure with fatal consequences.

   The war may have faded out of the public consciousness. In the aggregate, Americans appear divided on whether it was even a mistake: 48 percent told the Pew Research Center in 2018 that the invasion was wrong. Military veterans, meanwhile, are more likely to say the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t worth fighting. By contrast, health care is still a greater priority for most voters. A Quinnipiac University poll released Monday found that 27 percent of voters who are Democratic or lean Democratic rank the issue as their top concern when choosing a candidate to support.

   The public may not be calling for a reckoning on Iraq, but one is due nonetheless. The Trump presidency only amplifies a truth that should have been obvious to Democrats a long time ago: America’s foreign policy needs to be dramatically reset. If Biden won’t consistently tell the truth about his record, he undermines his own credibility on one of the most crucial issues a president can directly control. He promises inertia, not accountability and certainly not change. Biden clearly hopes his role in recent history makes the case for his presidency. His Iraq revisionism suggests his past should disqualify him instead.

   * * * * *

   ‘It Is Remarkable—and Dangerous—How Little Scrutiny Biden Has Received for Supporting Iraq War’

   By Sam Husseini (01.14.2020)
   https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/14/it-remarkable-and-dangerous-how-little-scrutiny-biden-has-received-supporting-iraq

   While Biden and his surrogates like John Kerry continue to falsely claim that the former vice president and U.S. senator was not for the Iraq invasion, the Bernie Sanders campaign has rightly highlighted more documentation—such as this video—of Biden’s support for the Iraq invasion both before and after it happened.

   Among the damning evidence is this statement about President George W. Bush that Biden made the Brookings Institution in July 2003, when he said, “The president of the United States is a bold leader and he is popular.”

   But that is only the tip of the iceberg. [Biden’s] full remarks to Brookings—which you can view here—contain numerous and brazen pro-war falsehoods, with Biden claiming that Saddam Hussein “violated every commitment that he made. He played cat and mouse with the weapons inspectors. He failed to account for the huge gaps in weapons declarations that were documented by U.N. weapons inspectors and submitted by them to the U.N. Security Council in 1998, and every nation in that Council believed he possessed those weapons at that time. He refused to abide by any conditions.”

   It’s a pack of lies. The Iraqi government released a massive amount of information in 2002, it agreed to allow the UN weapons inspectors in well before the Congressional vote that authorized war—a vote that Biden has claimed was justified in order to give Bush a stronger hand in getting inspectors into Iraq. Additionally, the prior weapons inspection regime, UNSCOM, was ended in 1998 not because Saddam Hussein kicked them out, but because Bill Clinton ordered them withdrawn on the eve of his scheduled impeachment vote to make way for the Desert Fox bombing campaign.

   It’s remarkably fitting that the Biden camp has put out Kerry on this issue since Kerry’s falsifications regarding Iraq are remarkably similar to Biden’s. Kerry might be the only Democratic senator whose record helped the Iraq war as much as Biden’s. This notably led to his contortions during the 2004 presidential campaign when he was the Democratic Party nominee ultimately defeated by Bush.

   When I questioned Kerry in 2011 about his vote for the Iraq invasion, he claimed that he “didn’t vote for the Iraq war.” Kerry said, “I voted to give the president authority that he misused and abused. And from the moment he used it, I opposed that.” That’s another lie.

   Kerry actually attacked the notion of a withdrawal from Iraq at that point, even saying in December of 2003: “I fear that in the run-up to the 2004 election the administration is considering what is tantamount to a cut-and-run strategy”—effectively taking a position even more militaristic than Bush. Also see a CNN headline from August 2004 titled: “Kerry stands by ‘yes’ vote on Iraq war.”

   Also remarkable is just how little scrutiny Biden has gotten for his role in the Iraq invasion. Sanders has mostly criticized Biden’s vote, but Biden was also chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has been criticized by leading analysts and weapons inspectors for the hearings he presided over that led to war. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard [D-Hawaii #02], viewed by many as an antiwar candidate, has outright let Biden off the hook.

   At a debate last year, Gabbard said of Biden: “He was wrong—he said he was wrong.” Thus, Biden may be positioned to become the Democratic nominee—and face Trump in the general election—with minimal scrutiny for his major role in the worst policy decision of our lifetimes.

   But let’s be clear, he will likely be in a worse position to take on Trump’s phony “America First” isolationism than even Hillary Clinton was in 2016.

3. 

   Former Republican January 15, 2020 12:15 pm

   I agree with this. Everyone else has been scrutinized. Bernie needs to be scrutinized as well.
   https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/15/opinions/bernie-sanders-2020-scrutiny-test-lockhart/index.html

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