May 10, 2021
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Bill Clinton charms the DNC with story of Hillary's life-long commitment to social change
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Taking on the role of devoted political spouse, former President Bill Clinton declared his wife Hillary Clinton an impassioned “change-maker,” serving as character witness for her on the night she triumphantly became the first woman nominated for president.
“She’s been worth every single year she’s put into making people’s lives better,” he said of his partner of more than 40 years and the Democratic Party’s new standard-bearer in the race for the White House.
For a man more accustomed to delivering policy-packed stem-winders, Clinton’s deeply personal address underscored the historic night for Democrats, and the nation. If she wins in November, the Clintons would also be the first married couple to each serve as president.
She will take on Donald Trump, who won the Republican nomination a week ago. Trump, who campaigned Tuesday in North Carolina, mocked the former president’s speech in advance, calling him “over-rated.”
Referring to Trump, though not by name, Clinton said there are real and affordable solutions to problems facing the nation but “we won’t get to them if America makes the wrong choice.”
The former president traced his relationship with his wife back more than 40 years, recalling in great detail the first time he spotted her on campus and the impact she had on pushing him into politics.
“Hillary opened my eyes to a whole new world of public service by private citizens,” he said, addressing a convention hall packed to the rafters with delegates listening raptly.
He closed the second night of the Democratic convention, a jubilant celebration of Hillary Clinton’s formal nomination for president. In an important move for party unity, her primary rival Bernie Sanders helped make it official when the roll call got to his home state of Vermont, prompting delegates to erupt in cheers. It was a striking parallel to the role Clinton played eight years ago when she stepped to the microphone on the convention floor in Denver in support of her former rival, Barack Obama.
This time, Clinton shattered the glass ceiling she couldn’t crack in 2008.
She leads a party still grappling with divisions. Moments after Clinton claimed the nomination, a group of Sanders supporters left the convention and headed to a media tent to protest what they said was their being shut out of the party. At the same time, protesters who had spent the day marching in the hot sun began facing off with police.
Trump cheered the disruptions from the campaign trail. In North Carolina, he told a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that, “our politicians have totally failed you.”
Indeed, Clinton’s long political resume — secretary of state, senator, first lady — has sometimes seemed an odd fit for an electorate deeply frustrated with Washington and eager to rally around unconventional candidates like Trump and Sanders. Many voters have questions about her character and trustworthiness, suggesting her years in power give her the impression she can play by different rules.
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President Clinton spoke after three hours of testimonials from lawmakers, advocates, celebrities and citizens who argued otherwise. Each took the stage to vouch for Clinton’s commitment to working on health care, children’s issues and gun control.
“Hillary Clinton has the passion and understanding to support grieving mothers,” said Sybrina Fulton, whose son Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012. “She has the courage to lead the fight for commonsense gun legislation.”
The significant time devoted to the character testimonials underscored the campaign’s concerns about how voters view Clinton. Public polls consistently show that a majority of Americans don’t believe she is honest and trustworthy. That perception that was reinforced after the FBI director’s scathing assessment of her controversial email use as secretary of state, even though the Justice Department did not pursue charges.
President Clinton complicated the email controversy last month when he met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the midst of the FBI investigation. Republicans cast the meeting as a sign that the Clintons play by different rules, while Democrats bemoaned that at the very least, it left that impression.
The former president has campaigned frequently for his wife during the White House race, but mostly in smaller cities and towns, part of an effort by the campaign to keep him in a more behind-the-scenes role. His convention address was his highest profile appearance of the campaign.
Clinton’s landmark achievement saturated the roll call with emotion and symbols of women’s long struggle to break through political barriers. Jerry Emmett, a 102-year-old woman born before women had the right to vote, cast the ballots for Arizona.
Martha McKenna, a Clinton delegate from Maryland, said the night felt like a celebration for Sanders’ campaign as well as Clinton’s. She added, “The idea that I’m going to be here when the first woman president is nominated is overwhelming.”
The Democratic convention drew the party’s biggest stars to sweltering Philadelphia for the week-long event. On Monday night, first lady Michelle Obama made an impassioned case for Clinton as the only candidate in the presidential race worthy of being a role model for the nation’s children. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will speak Wednesday, along with Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, Clinton’s new running mate.
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AP writers Kathleen Hennessey, Kathleen Ronayne, Ken Thomas and Matthew Daly in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
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The servants behind Hillary's server: Meet the staffers tied up in the email debacle
Before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, an aide to Bill Clinton set up a private email server in a “telephone closet” in the basement of his and Hillary’s suburban New York home. Mrs. Clinton says she used email from that server out of “convenience,” as she wanted to use her personal BlackBerry smartphone for all messages. Some hypothesize that she did it to shield herself from Freedom of Information Act requests, which would only apply to emails sent to or from someone using a government email address.
Whatever the cause, Clinton used a risky private email server that an upper-level IT director allowed and a number of her staffers and aides interacted with. Sometimes Clinton’s messages to employees using government addresses were held up, or didn’t go through at all. The server had to be shut down several times because of hacking threats.
“If you don’t have to run an email server, don’t,” Brian Krebs, an investigative journalist and author focusing on computer and Internet security, told Salon. “They can be a challenge to secure, especially against a determined adversary…; Let someone who handles very sophisticated attacks every day do it. It’s a no-brainer.”
But Clinton and a top aide used the server for years, exchanging work-related messages with colleagues using State Department email addresses, something FBI Director James Comey deemed “extremely careless” in his briefing earlier this month.
To set up and maintain such a server, according to The Atlantic, you need to purchase a physical server, roughly the size of a desktop computer; an operating system; an email exchange program such as Microsoft Exchange Server; a digital certificate of encryption (in Clinton’s case, the certificate wasn’t established until two months after she began using the server); and a domain name. Next, you install the software, virus and spam filters and set up firewalls. Then you establish a business-class Internet connection and configure the devices that will use the server.
After doing all this, correspondence will enter the Internet, unlike in a closed government server such as the State Department’s special system for emailing classified information. So who were the people who participated in this reckless arrangement that put classified documents at risk?
A number of Clinton aides and staffers, some dating back to before her secretary of state tenure, used the private server or exchanged messages with Clinton, who used it exclusively. Other aides to the Clintons set up and maintained the server. These individuals may no longer be eligible for elite security clearances in the future, potentially hampering their chances for an ambassadorship or a job in the Clinton administration, should she win the November presidential election, The New York Times reported. And any current State Department employees who were involved may face administrative action.
The staunchly conservative watchdog Judicial Watch has attacked the Clintons for years, initially launching 18 lawsuits against Bill Clinton while he was president. More recently, the group filed Freedom of Information Act requests relating to the aftermath of the Benghazi killings and for records detailing the “special employment status” of Huma Abedin, one of Mrs. Clinton’s top aides at the Department of State.
After the private email server was revealed, a federal judge allowed Judicial Watch to interview seven Clinton associates under oath. The group is now asking for permission to depose Clinton as her lawyers fight the request.
Here are some of the characters who facilitated and/or interacted with Clinton’s email server:
Bryan Pagliano is the aide who reportedly set up the private server, initially for Mr. Clinton to use for personal and Clinton Foundation business. Before becoming a “Schedule C political appointee” as a senior advisor in the State Department’s Bureau of Information Resource Management (IRM), he was an IT director for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, according to the State Department Inspector General’s report. While under the employ of the State Department, Pagliano helped maintain the server. In his June 22 deposition with Judicial Watch, he answered only one question: “Can you please state your full name?” Pagliano also pled the 5th before the House Benghazi Committee and was granted immunity by the FBI before testifying with the bureau.
Justin Cooper, a close former aide to Mr. Clinton, registered the clintonemail.com domain name and set up Mrs. Clinton’s email address on the private server days before she became secretary of state. Cooper also helped maintain the server, shutting it down in January 2011 when a hacker attempted to access it. According to the Washington Post, Cooper had no security clearance or “particular expertise” in computer security.
John Bentel directed the State Department’s IRM division during Clinton’s tenure. After two staff members voiced concerns about the private server, Bentel said that “the Secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and approved by Department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further,” according to the inspector general’s report. However, the report found no evidence that the legal team had reviewed or approved Clinton’s server. Bentel communicated with Clinton over email as the secretary used her private email address. Judicial watch is trying to depose him.
Judicial Watch also wants to question Clarence Finney, another former State Department official, who directed the Correspondence and Records division, which manages records and FOIA responses.
Huma Abedin is well known for being a close confidant and “adopted daughter” of Mrs. Clinton. She served as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department before becoming a “special government employee,” allowing her to consult for outside clients while still advising Clinton at the State Department. She’s now vice chairwoman for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Prior to these posts, she has worked for Clinton in various roles since the mid-1990s.
At Abedin’s request, Cooper set up an account for her on the Clinton server around the same time he established Clinton’s address. Abedin was the second most frequent correspondent with Clinton and her private email address, according to the Washington Post. In her June 28 Judicial Watch deposition, she said she used her State Department email for the “vast majority” of her Department work but did use her clintonemail.com address at times for state-related matters. In the deposition, Abedin claimed not to have thought about the server until “all the press reports in the last year and a half came out.”
Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff during her time at the State Department, was the most frequent correspondent with Clinton and her private email address, per the Washington Post. She was deposed by Judicial Watch on May 27. Mills messaged other staffers, saying that Clinton wanted to use her BlackBerry for email because she didn’t know how to use email on a computer.
Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department and the third most frequent correspondent, according to the Washington Post, allegedly sent and received messages that are now considered “top secret” by the State Department, as well as many others deemed “confidential.” Sullivan is now a foreign policy advisor to Clinton’s presidential campaign.
In his position as executive director of the Executive Secretariat from 2008 to 2011, Lewis Lukens oversaw many employees, including those in the IRM division. In 2009, he emailed Abedin, Mills and Patrick F. Kennedy, suggesting Clinton be set up with a computer she could use in her State Department office to use the Internet — but not through the Department’s server — to access her private email account. The computer was never set up. Lukens’ May 18 deposition with Judicial Watch is here.
Patrick F. Kennedy, the undersecretary for management at the State Department, emailed with Abedin, Lukens and Mills about this potential computer, calling it a “great idea.” Kennedy, who still holds his post at the State Department, spoke with Judicial Watch on June 29.
Monica Hanley, who has worked for Clinton for years and was an aide in the State Department, corresponded with Clinton from her State Department email account and a personal account. Hanley sent Clinton two emails marked “confidential,” but she may have improperly marked them as such in the body of the messages, not in the header, which is standard practice.
Stephen Mull, executive secretary of the State Department from 2010 to 2012, wrote to Abedin, Hanley and Kennedy that “we are working to provide the Secretary per her request a Department issued Blackberry …; We will prepare two versions for her to use – one with an operating State Department email account (which would mask her identity, but which would also be subject to FOIA requests), and another which would just have phone and internet capability.” In his June 3 Judicial Watch deposition, he claimed not to remember anything regarding the communications or the topic. Mull is still with the State Department, now its lead implementation coordinator of the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal.
The fiery Philippe Reines is former deputy assistant secretary of state and senior communications advisor and spokesman for Clinton. He reportedly at times used a personal Gmail account for state business and lied about it, and he wrote once that he “want[ed] to avoid FOIA.”
Most of these individuals refused to meet with State Department investigators.
While some of these staffers may face disciplinary action and could be denied security clearances, it appears Clinton will escape punishment, as the Justice Department heeded the FBI Director’s advice not to criminally prosecute her. However, critical statements by the FBI director appear to have caused a dip in national polling in her presidential race against Donald Trump.
As president, Clinton would have access to virtually all classified and top-secret material. She will soon receive the Democratic Party’s nomination for that office.
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A trick Trump isn't using: How Hillary's campaign is (almost certainly) using big data
This article was originally published by Scientific American.
Analytics will win votes this year. Science, as it did in 2012, is playing an important role for mass voter persuasion in the U.S. presidential race. It’s a numbers game: Predictive analytics targets campaign activities, strengthening a campaign’s army of volunteers by driving its activities more optimally.
Of which presidential candidate do I speak? We have every reason to believe that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is leveraging predictive analytics — as Obama’s did in 2012. Donald Trump’s campaign appears to lag in such efforts.
Hillary for America is leveraging data science in a very particular way. The undertaking predicts each individual voter’s response to campaign contact in order to drive millions of decisions as to which voter receives a knock on the door or a phone call. It’s an innovative, data-driven process that has changed the game for political campaigns.
Nate Silver forecasts the future — but doesn’t change it
A campaign’s number crunching is an undercover enterprise — but another form of quantitative prognostication is right out in the open: campaign forecasting via poll aggregation. Here, the heavyweight champion is Nate Silver, the most celebrated statistician in the United States, who corrected forecasted the election outcome correctly for each and every state in 2012. See his current 2016 forecasts here.
But an election poll does not constitute prognostic technology — it does not endeavor to calculate insights that foresee human behavior. Rather, a poll is plainly the act of voters explicitly telling you what they’re going to do. It’s a mini-election dry run. There’s a craft to aggregating polls, as Silver has mastered so adeptly, but even he admits it’s no miracle of clairvoyance. “It’s not really that complicated,” he told late night talk show host Stephen Colbert the day before the 2012 election. “There are many things that are much more complicated than looking at the polls and taking an average …; right?”
Instead, true power comes in influencing the future rather than only speculating on it. Nate Silver publicly competes to win election forecasting, while Obama’s analytics team discreetly competed by way of predictive analytics to win the election itself — as Hillary for America is now doing. This is a form of of quantitative prediction that transcends forecasting the outcome to actually exert an effect on it.
The value proven in 2012 is too good to pass up for 2016. Obama for America showed that their analytics convinced more voters than traditional campaign targeting. The method also improved the campaign’s TV ad buying, making the TV ad buy 18 percent more effective — they could persuade 18 percent more voters with the same level of investment, which is a meaningful effect given their TV budget of $400 million.
The evidence: Hillary for America is using analytics for voter persuasion
The specifics are well-guarded secrets, but the evidence clearly indicates that Hillary for America is deploying predictive analytics — more specifically, an advanced flavor thereof called persuasion modeling (aka uplift modeling) — as Obama for America did. Here’s the data that supports this presumption:
1) Traction. Daniel Porter, one of three hands-on practitioners who executed the persuasion modeling for Obama for America, and who has since co-founded the analytics firm BlueLabs (see the Q-and-A below), stands by this technical approach. “It remains clear that persuasion modeling is extraordinarily valuable for political campaigns. In fact, after the experience accrued last time around, it’s sure to be done by 2016 campaigns even more effectively than in 2012,” he told me. He says there’s also going to be better data for this work, at least on the Democratic side. “The DNC is building out further its data infrastructure about voters in battleground states.”
2) Hires. As early as July 2015, the Hillary for America campaign posted that their “analytics team is looking for data nerds.” Shown as one of 11 campaign job categories on the campaign’s website, analytics included five types of open roles. More specifically, analytics job postings enlisted staff for persuasion modeling: “helping the campaign determine which voters to target for persuasion.” The campaign’s analytics director is Elan Kriegel, another co-founder of BlueLabs, who grew the campaign’s data team by pulling people from BlueLabs.
3) Contracts. Hillary for America has engaged BlueLabs for analytics services — at least $50,000 worth. And Civis Analytics, another analytics company, which employs at least 27 “data whiz kids” from Obama’s 2012 campaign (Eric Schmidt is the sole investor) has received more than $3.5 million in payments from Democratic campaigns in the last two cycles.
In anticipation of his keynote presentation at Predictive Analytics World (October 23-27 in New York), “Persuasion Modeling in Presidential Campaigns and How It Applies to Business,” I had the opportunity to ask Dan Porter a few questions about his work for Obama and what may currently be in play for the 2016 election.
Q: What was the most surprising discovery or insight you unearthed when applying uplift modeling for Obama for America 2012?
We discovered in 2012 that self-reported independents and non-partisans are not especially likely to be persuadable, and many voters that were affiliated with a political party actually were persuadable. However, in uplift modeling work we’ve undertaken at BlueLabs since 2013, this actually isn’t always the case. The lesson we’ve learned is that constant experimentation and uplift modeling is a worthwhile endeavor, since the types of people who are persuadable can vary widely based on the particular campaign, message, mode and timing.
Q: What are the biggest differences between applying uplift modeling for a commercial marketing campaign versus for a political campaign?
On the political side we are relying on survey as a proxy for a voter’s candidate preference. It’s the best proxy we have, but it still relies on self-reported intent, and requires innovative sampling design to ensure that the survey is unbiased and reaches a representative sample of the population. However, on the commercial side, in many cases, we can build and validate our uplift models off actual purchase data. This makes the problem more straightforward.
Q: What public evidence is there that Trump’s campaign is or is not using predictive analytics or even uplift modeling in particular?
We really have no idea what Trump is or isn’t doing. We are confident on where campaigns and organizations on the Democratic side of the spectrum are in terms of its analytics capabilities, but it’s important that we continue to innovate and that we can’t worry about what groups on the right are/aren’t doing.
Indeed, the Trump campaign is “spurning the kind of sophisticated data operation that was a centerpiece of Barack Obama’s winning White House runs.” There’s speculation this could not only hurt his chances in the election, but also deny the RNC — generally thought to already be behind the DNC in data and analytics — valuable data collection for future campaigns.
Advanced and analytical yet not arcane, predictive modeling for voter persuasion has launched a whole new chapter for politics.
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Hillary's GOP outreach: Could it do more harm than good for Democrats?
Could Hillary Clinton’s outreach to some traditional Republican constituencies cost the Democrats the House and Senate? That is the implication of a poll released on Thursday. Conducted by USA Today and Suffolk University, the poll suggests that a bare majority of Hillary voters – 52 percent – are very or somewhat likely to split the ticket when they vote, punching the ballot for Clinton for president but also a Republican for Congress. By contrast, a slight majority of Donald Trump supporters say they will vote straight Republican up and down the ballot.
The split-ticket numbers could be good news for Republicans hoping to hold onto their majorities in Congress, particularly in the Senate. (The House has always been a long shot to flip.) And that’s to say nothing of races at the state and local levels. And these numbers open up the Clinton campaign’s general-election strategy this summer to Monday-morning quarterbacking.
Has Clinton spent too much of her time reaching out to Republicans? That question has been asked almost from the minute she wrapped up the Democratic nomination early this summer. Reports immediately surfaced that her campaign had started talking to GOP donors and operatives, many of whom were appalled that their party had nominated Trump and thus possibly receptive to endorsing and supporting Clinton. There was immediate grumbling from the Democratic base, even though the candidate did not appear to be moderating any of her policy positions to attract those Republicans.
On the one hand, the strategy made some sense. A politician who wants to win will mine every corner for votes. At the very least, reminding Republicans that their choices for president are either their hated enemy of a quarter century, Hillary Clinton, or the racist scrap of aged cigar paper that their party had nominated might convince a significant number to stay home in November. Which would only help her and any down-ballot candidates in tight races.
On the other hand, why not try to hang Trump like a millstone around the collective neck of the Republican Party? Why not remind the public at every turn that this warped, deformed version of the party of Lincoln, the electoral equivalent of Quasimodo without the redeeming inner beauty, was fundamentally broken as a political institution and shouldn’t be trusted to run so much as an ice cream truck, let alone the massive apparatus of government? This strategy would, in theory, marginalize the GOP and make it toxic for generations.
The risk there would be in activating Republican voters’ “brand loyalty” to their party, pissing them off to the point that those who had been on the fence about bothering to vote might get angry and turn out in large numbers.
Clinton’s speech in Reno last week, where she excoriated Trump for appealing to what the media has politely referred to as the “alt-right” (but that most people describe as the “racist fringe of xenophobic white supremacists that should be drubbed out of society”) seemed to carry out both strategies at the same time. The speech tied Trump to the modern-day GOP and held it responsible for creating this monster but seemed to suggest that the party could still save itself by repudiating him.
But now it seems it may be time to pick one strategy and stick with it. For one thing, as Ed Kilgore notes, the strategy of picking up crossover votes isn’t doing much and might even be hurting the down-ballot races. When a strategy is actively harming your party, it’s time to set it aside.
For another, Trump’s immigration speech on Wednesday should have removed any doubt about him for even the most clueless, disengaged voter. If that 70 minutes of bombast and flat-out fascism didn’t convince the last few remaining GOP holdouts that he would be far and away the most dangerous president in the history of the republic, then nothing will. If any Republicans are still going to support him out of some twisted sense of party loyalty, then there is nothing to be done.
We’ll see after Labor Day, when the real campaign begins, what the Clinton campaign is thinking. For all I know, the strategy has long been to give the GOP a chance to save itself before going at it hard in the fall. But for the moment, to the extent that a presidential campaign can influence the balance of the Senate and House, the current strategy of reaching out isn’t helping Democrats. It’s time to move onto something else.
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