Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Hillary Clinton

  • Trump Defeats Clinton in Unexpectedly Close Election

    • Americans have chosen Republican businessman Donald Trump to succeed Barack Obama as president. Trump won 306 electoral votes with 46 percent support against 232 electoral votes and 48 percent support for Democrat Hillary Clinton.
    • Clinton fell short in key states, including Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
    • Republicans also defended their majorities in Congress. They are projected to win 236 seats in the House of Representatives, where 218 are needed for a majority, and 51 seats in the Senate. (more…)

  • Electoral College Projections Favor Clinton

    Hillary Clinton
    Former American secretary of state Hillary Clinton gives a speech in Chicago, Illinois, March 14 (Hillary for America/Barbara Kinney)

    Hillary Clinton can afford to lose several of the states that are leaning her way and still prevail in America’s presidential election on Tuesday.

    By contrast, her rival, Donald Trump, must triumph in all states that have voted Republican in recent elections and then some.

    Barring an upset, the first results from the East Coast should tell us if Clinton is indeed likely to succeed Barack Obama in January. (more…)

  • Trump Closes In, But Clinton Has Four Structural Advantages

    Hillary Clinton Barack Obama
    American secretary of state Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama attend a summit of Pacific nations in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, November 20, 2012 (State Department/William Ng)

    The week before election day is always nerve-wracking, this year’s near-apocalyptic feel notwithstanding.

    So perhaps it’s fate that in the most contested election in decades, the gap between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is narrowing.

    According to FiveThirtyEight, the Democrat enjoyed a 6.8-percent lead in the popular vote projection on October 18. As of November 2, it’s a 3.5-percent lead. The race is tightening.

    Not that 3.5 percent is an insubstantial margin: FiveThirtyEight — the most Trump-favorable of the election models — projects that Clinton retains a seven-in-ten chance of victory. Those are solid (albeit not certain) betting odds.

    Even the “Dewey Defeats Truman” beat-the-polls trope rings hollow. Yes, Harry Truman won reelection by a margin of 4.5 percent despite trailing by 3.5 percent in the polls (an 8-point swing). But as FiveThirtyEight points out, the fact that there are now exponentially more polls in the field — and almost seventy years of methodology improvement since then — we can’t reasonably expect such a monumental error to take place. (more…)

  • Clinton’s Emails Crowd Out Trump Scandals for No Good Reason

    Hillary Clinton Barack Obama
    American secretary of state Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama attend a summit of Pacific nations in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, November 20, 2012 (State Department/William Ng)

    I thought we were done with this, but it’s one week out from the election and Hillary Clinton’s emails are a thing again.

    We still don’t know why exactly. In a letter to Congress on Friday that resurrected the issue, James Comey, the FBI director, wrote that more emails that “appear to be pertinent to the investigation” had been recovered.

    We have since learned that those emails were recovered from the laptop of former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner, who is under investigation for allegedly sexting a minor and whose estranged wife, Huma Abedin, is a top Clinton campaign staffer.

    Comey told Congress the FBI could not yet assess if the emails found on Weiner’s computer were relevant to its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state; an investigation that was closed earlier this year after the FBI found she had done nothing illegal.

    So what was the point of informing Congress? (more…)

  • Hillary Clinton Is the Only Serious Candidate in This Election

    Hillary Clinton
    Former American secretary of state Hillary Clinton campaigns in Elko, Nevada, February 15 (Hillary for America/Samuel Fisch)

    Four years ago, the Atlantic Sentinel was split on whether to endorse Barack Obama or Mitt Romney for president. We share the Democrats’ social liberalism and respected the president’s foreign policy, but we were drawn to the Republican’s energy and fiscal policies.

    This year, it’s no contest at all. Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, is totally unfit for the office he seeks. (more…)

  • Your Third-Party Statement Is Not Worth Trump

    Hillary Clinton
    Former American secretary of state Hillary Clinton gives a speech in Iowa, January 23 (Hillary for America/Barbara Kinney)

    Voting is an exercise in compromise. Any winner has to get the most votes — i.e., the “first past the post” system. I may believe my old professor, my local police captain, my boss or my well-read uncle would make the best officeholder in any particular election. But writing them in would be useless, since no one gets into office on the strength of one vote.

    First past the post means that in the majority of American elections, only two candidates stand a plausible chance of winning: the Democrat and the Republican.

    Does this limit our options? Of course. But a better system doesn’t (yet) exist, which means that when you vote for a third party, you abdicate your right to affect the outcome.

    Third parties will tell you that viability isn’t the point. Voting for them sends an unfiltered, uncompromised message that your views are not represented by Democrats or Republicans. Instinctively, that makes sense. Who’s to tell you to vote against your conscience? And if both candidates are equally objectionable, is there harm done if withholding your support from one helps elect the other? (more…)

  • Clinton-Trump Debates Unlikely to Change Many Voters’ Minds

    Saturday will see Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face off in the first of three planned televised debates between the presidential candidates.

    James Fallows, in a preview of the debates for The Atlantic, argues they are “must-watch TV” because they will see the most extreme contrast of personal, intellectual and political styles in American democratic history: “Right brain versus left brain; gut versus any portion of the brain at all; impulse versus calculation; id versus superego; and of course man versus woman.”

    No doubt, with Trump’s penchant for spectacle, the debates will be watched by many — tens, maybe hundreds of millions around the world.

    But will they matter? (more…)

  • Clinton’s Plan to Control Drug Prices Seems Like an Overreach

    Hillary Clinton
    Former American secretary of state Hillary Clinton gives a speech in Iowa, November 22, 2015 (Hillary for America/Adam Schultz)

    Hillary Clinton has a new plan to stop what she considers “unjustified” increases in drug prices.

    Slate reports that her plan comes down to European-style price control.

    As president, Clinton would create a task force of regulators with the power to decide whether price increases on old, essential medicines and devices were reasonable given product improvements and the amount of competition in the market. If not, the task force would have the power to mete out punishments to companies that were trying to profiteer, potentially with fines.

    Fines would still require an act of Congress, where market-friendly Republicans are likely to retain their majority in the House of Representatives and block such penalties.

    Nonetheless, as Slate puts it, “Clinton is subtly sending the message that she’s comfortable moving toward a more European system in which regulators have a direct say not just in what drug companies can charge the government, but what they can charge the rest of the public, too.”

    It may not happen in the first four years of a Hillary Clinton presidency, but price controls are becoming Democratic Party policy — which means they could happen eventually. (more…)

  • Trump Enabling Far-Right Takeover of Republican Party: Clinton

    Former American secretary of state Hillary Clinton warned on Thursday that her rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, is enabling a far-right takeover of the Republican Party.

    The Democrat argued in a speech delivered in Reno, Nevada that Trump is part of a wider “alternative right” movement that includes British Euroskeptics and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

    “The names may have changed,” she said.

    Racists now call themselves “racialists.” White supremacists now call themselves “white nationalists.” The paranoid fringe now calls itself “alt-right.” But the hate burns just as bright.

    Trump — “a man,” according to Clinton, “with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far, dark reaches of the Internet” — surrounds himself with these people.

    Only last week, he appointed Stephen Bannon of Breitbart, a far-right “news” site, as his campaign chief. (more…)

  • Unloved Clinton Would Defeat Despised Trump

    Whatever else can be said about the relative virtues of the two Democratic candidates running in the presidential primary election, the party should consider itself fortunate that the Republicans are about to nominate Donald Trump.

    HuffPost Pollster, which aggregates favorability polls to provide a more holistic outlook, has Clinton’s favorability rating at -12.7. Trump’s net favorability is at -29.5.

    Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders, by comparison, enjoys a net favorability of +11.1, alone among all candidates but John Kasich in being in positive territory.

    According to CBS, both Clinton and Trump are viewed more unfavorably than any major-party frontrunner in polling history. (more…)

  • China’s Shadow Looms Over Clinton’s Asian Trip

    Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in China on Tuesday for two days of meetings with top officials where she is expected to discuss a wide range of issues including the disputes between China and its neighbors over uninhabited islands in the South China Sea.

    Clinton is on an eleven day, six nation trip to Asia that could be her last if she steps down at the end of the Obama Administration’s first term.

    The visit is meant to convoy the United States’ commitment to the economic and security issues in Asia encapsulated in what the administration has dubbed the Asian “pivot.” The countries that Clinton visits highlight the strategic competition for influence that is underway between China and the United States in the region. (more…)

  • Clinton’s Apology Reopens NATO Supply Route

    Pakistan has agreed to reopen NATO supply routes into Afghanistan after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized for the deaths of Pakistani soldiers during an airstrike last November.

    The United States spent an additional $100 million per month to transport supplies to the NATO mission in Afghanistan through Central Asia while the route was shut. The Salala raid, as Pakistan refers to the incident which touched off the closure, topped off a bad year for American-Pakistani relations.

    “We are sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military,” Clinton said in a statement that was issued by her State Department. (more…)

  • Barack Obama’s Prime Minister

    While campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama was asked about his future administration and promised that he would form his own “team of rivals.”

    Team of Rivals was a 2005 volume by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin which described how President Abraham Lincoln included political adversaries in his cabinet and steered the union to victory in the Civil War.

    When Obama assumed the highest office, it wasn’t the best of times for the United States to lead in the world. In Lincoln’s spirit though, he kept on Republican Robert Gates as defense secretary and asked his primary rival Hillary Clinton to lead the State Department. With the president campaigning for reelection, it’s worth evaluating her tenure as the nation’s secretary of state. (more…)

  • The Eagle is Back in Asia

    In the gloomy days of December 1941, when Pearl Harbor had just been attacked by Japan and Nazi-Germany had conquered virtually all of Central and Western Europe, there was a American general in the Philippines bidding goodbye to his friends. “I shall return,” he promised them.

    Three years later, Douglas MacArthur did return. He reconquered the Philippines and went on to help the United States win the war in the Pacific in 1945.

    More than sixty years later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made a similar statement in Foreign Policy magazine where she writes about “America’s Pacific Century.” Even if she doesn’t articulate a policy yet, it’s clear that the United States are on the verge of abandoning Richard Nixon’s Guam Doctrine in Asia. (more…)

  • United States Hedging Rhetoric on Egypt Protests

    My television has been tuned to CNN for the past 24 hours, and the footage that the network has been broadcasting (thanks to Al Jazeera and those brave Egyptians with cell phones) is nothing short of extraordinary. Young and middle aged Egyptian citizens from all walks of life are holding hands and shouting in unison, “down down with Mubarak.” The Egyptian government has issued a citywide curfew for Cairo, Alexandria and Suez in an attempt to regain some hold over the situation. Yet the protesters have thus far been undeterred.

    As is expected, the situation inside Egypt is very fluid, a term that was used by the American State Department two nights ago during a press conference. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, through the Sunday talk show circuit, has urged the Egyptian government and the protesters to refrain from further violence, a standard neutral response from an administration that isn’t exactly sure how to proceed. (more…)