LiLSpeedy's Blog

 

Reuters/Brian Snyder) Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz. His wife may have worked at Goldman, but this is not Wall Street's guy.

For years, when it came to presidential candidates, Wall Street made huge compromises in order to support the Republican Party.

The money men in New York City set aside their socially liberal views in order to support fiscally conservative candidates because that was the only way to get on the same page as the GOP base.

The result has been a series of candidates Wall Street's big donors didn't really want. 

It seems those donors are getting tired of that outcome.

Hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman recently vented his frustration with this arrangement on an episode of  Wall Street Week.

"I tend to be more Republican in my views, but socially very liberal. I'm going to have trouble with any Republican that does not disavow a fixation with social issues," he said. 

"Republicans have to understand that because young people in our country are not grabbed by those issues."

 

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(Reuters/ Jeff Zelevansky ) Leon Cooperman.

Republican candidates are not getting the message.

In fact, some social conservatives are actually hardening their stances before a new wave of younger voters has the mass to make a difference at the polls.

A recent Pew Research poll found that Republican Conservatives are the only group in America who have become less accepting of homosexuality over the last two years.

This is not what Wall Street wants to see.

Wall Street's ideal candidate is Michael Bloomberg — a billionaire businessman who's into environmental sustainability, urban development, infrastructure investment, and gay rights.

These are all socially conservative no-nos.

During the last presidential election, it looked like Wall Street might finally get the kind of Republican they were looking for — Mitt Romney.

For most of his career, Romney was known as a moderate technocrat.

But when he ran for president,  Romney was forced to turn to entice the party base. He played up his conservative family values instead.

Many on Wall Street loved his private-equity/business background to be sure. They liked his ideas on foreign policy, even, but they weren't crazy about his sudden lurch to the right on issues like abortion.

From the way Cooperman talks about it, some on Wall Street are tired of compromise.

It would be one thing if the compromise was leading to wins.

But it's not. 

And in losing elections, Wall Street is also losing an investment. Each cycle, bundlers collect millions of dollars from Wall Street in increments of $2,700, of $5,000, and $34,800. They give to super PACs and party coffers; they give because they like a candidate or (more likely) because their boss or colleague loves a candidate.

This isn't a lot of money to Wall Street, but it is money wasted  on candidates they sometimes only half want.

Instead they're forced to wait for a candidate they'll never get.

Veterans of the Iraq War have been watching in frustration as Republican presidential contenders distance themselves from the decision their party enthusiastically supported to invade that country.

"Do-overs don't happen in real life," said Gregory Diacogiannis, 30, who served as an army sniper in Baghdad trying to spot militants laying roadside bombs and chased high-value targets in the city of Baqouba. "I have trouble with the question itself just because it lends itself to disregarding the sacrifices that have been made."

Diacogiannis left the army in 2008, but says even now he feels such a strong attachment to Iraq that he's thought about going back to fight as the country has plunged into chaos since U.S. troops left.

The war became a campaign issue when likely presidential contender Jeb Bush was asked about the invasion ordered by his brother, former President George W. Bush. After days of questioning, Jeb Bush said that in light of what's now known — that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD stockpiles — he would not have invaded.

Other possible Republican hopefuls including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich all later gave similar responses.

He's glad Republicans are being held accountable for the invasion, but says that answer's been known for a long time.

"It's a legitimate question to ask and a legitimate answer should be an unequivocal no," he said.

Marla Keown, who drove trucks in Iraq for a year during her time in the Army Reserve, said it's taken too long for politicians to admit the mistake of a war that killed 4,491 U.S. troops and left countless Iraqis dead.

"It's hard to see the good in war in general - let alone a war that everyone just now is realizing we shouldn't have done," said Keown, 34, who now works as a photographer in Denver.

He said he's proud of what he and his unit did in Iraq to make their area safer. He speaks fondly of Iraqi children he encountered and said he'd do it again in a "heartbeat." So many questions, he said, like whether to invade Iraq or not, are easier to answer in hindsight.

"I think it's naive to just assume that we can just wave this magic wand and know what we would do in that situation," Kriesel said.

The discussion comes at a particularly fraught time for veterans, who have watched Iraq steadily descend into chaos. In recent days, Islamic State militants routed Iraqi government troops to take control of the city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, despite American airstrikes designed to help the Iraqi forces.

Kevin McCulley, a former army medic, said Iraqis told him about their struggles under Saddam and he feels there were good reasons to get rid of the longtime dictator. He feels the emphasis really shouldn't be on the decision to invade but on whether the U.S. should have stayed past its 2011 departure date to secure the gains made. Many vets blame President Obama — not Bush — for the current state of affairs, saying he was in too much of a hurry to withdraw.

On Friday, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton said despite the militants' gains, U.S. ground forces should not be sent back to Iraq.

Clinton has previously called her support for the invasion a mistake.

"A mistake doesn't sum up the gravity of that decision," said Matt Howard, a Marine twice deployed to Iraq who now works with the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. He said many vets have been frustrated by the "flip-flopping," not just of the Republican candidates, but of Clinton as well.

Mike Barbero, a retired general who served three tours in Iraq, said he isn't sure the value of the hypothetical questions being asked of the candidates and would rather they be pressed on their criteria for sending troops into a potential future battle.

The “would you have invaded Iraq” saga continues. Sunday on Fox News, Chris Wallace tried again and again to get Marco Rubio to say whether, in hindsight, the Bush administration was right to invade a WMD-less Iraq. And again and again, Rubio answered a different, and politically safer, question: Was George W. Bush right given the information he had at the time? Rubio’s answer to that question was a resounding yes. Invading Iraq, he argued, was “not a mistake because the president was presented with intelligence that said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.”

Rubio’s answer shows how pathological the Republican foreign-policy debate has become. The Iraq War, which I wrongly supported, has cost the United States over $2 trillion. It has contributed to the deaths of an estimated half-million Iraqis and almost 4,500 Americans, one-third more than died on 9/11. Iraq has become a failed state, large parts of which are controlled by an organization whose savagery embarrasses al-Qaeda. (Yes, part of the blame for ISIS’s rise rests with President Obama’s policies in Iraq and Syria, but it was President Bush who bulldozed the Iraqi state.) And Saddam Hussein’s overthrow has allowed Iran—a regime Republicans depict as the world’s most dangerous—to extend its power in the region.

The GOP's Iraq War Amnesia

This is what the Iraq War has wrought. Yet for most Republican presidential candidates—starting with Jeb Bush, whose maladroit Iraq answers launched the current media saga—the hard question is whether George W. Bush should have invaded Iraq given what we know now: that Saddam had no chemical or biological weapons and no nuclear program. The easy question is whether Bush should have invaded given what he thought he knew then: that Iraq did have WMD. It’s easy because, with the exception of Rand Paul, virtually all the major Republican candidates claim Bush was right.

To understand how ludicrous that position is, it’s worth remembering a few things. First, the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was extremely weak. Yes, the U.S. government in October 2002 produced a National Intelligence Estimate that appeared to suggest Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and a nuclear-weapons program. But a 2004 Senate review concluded that “most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community’s October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) … either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting.” The NIE, which was produced under intense pressure from White House and Pentagon officials seeking a justification for war, painted a far more menacing picture of Iraq’s WMD programs than had previous U.S. assessments. As the head of British intelligence famously remarked, “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” The unclassified summary of the NIE was also far more categorical than the full, classified version, which, according to Florida Senator Bob Graham, was “pocked with dissent, conditions, [and] minority opinions on a variety of critical issues.” After reading the full NIE, Graham voted against authorizing war. Unfortunately, by one estimate, only a half-dozen other senators bothered to do so.

The point is that Rubio’s depiction of Bush as a guy forced to invade because he “was presented with intelligence that said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction” is absurd. “Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before,” wrote Bush counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz—with the encouragement of Dick Cheney and Bush himself—“had been pressing for a war with Iraq.” The day after the 9/11 attacks, according to Clarke, Bush instructed him to “See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.” When Clarke protested that “al-Qaeda did this,” Bush replied, “I know, I know, but … see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.”

George W. Bush was not forced to invade Iraq because of the weight of objective evidence about WMD. He and his top advisors shamelessly hyped that evidence to justify a war they were seeking an excuse to launch. And in the hysterical aftermath of September 11, Congress was too cowed to effectively challenge them.

But even this, in some ways, misses the point. Because even if the intelligence on Iraqi WMD had been stronger, the Iraq War would still have been a colossal mistake. Let’s imagine that Bush had possessed irrefutable proof that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. Those weapons would still have presented no grave threat to the United States. As Gregg Easterbrook has pointed out, chemical and biological weapons aren’t really weapons of mass destruction. “In actual use, chemical arms have proven less deadly than regular bombs, bullets, and artillery shells” while “biological weapons … have rarely done great harm.” Yes, Saddam had used chemical weapons against the defenseless Kurds and, with American assistance, to counter Tehran’s manpower advantage during the Iran-Iraq War. He had also used them to put down a Shiite rebellion in the aftermath of the Gulf War. But he had never used them against the United States, even during the Gulf War—probably because America’s response would have been ferocious. And the 9/11 Commission repudiated Bush administration claims that Saddam might have given unconventional weapons to al-Qaeda, an organization he feared and disdained.

The evidence of Saddam’s nuclear program was weakest of all. But even if that evidence had been stronger, there were still far less costly ways than invasion of responding to a country whose economic and military power had been ravaged by more than a decade of sanctions.

By implying that the only problem with the Iraq War was faulty intelligence, Marco Rubio implies that when the United States has compelling evidence that a hostile dictator is building “weapons of mass destruction,” the correct response is war. This represents a dramatic departure from historical American practice. In the 1940s, Harry Truman—a president Rubio admires—watched Joseph Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers in modern history, build not just chemical and biological weapons, but a nuclear bomb. And yet Truman did not attack the U.S.S.R. In the early 1960s, John F. Kennedy, another Rubio favorite, watched Mao Zedong build a nuclear weapon, and made the same decision.

Truman and Kennedy judged that, while nuclear proliferation was bad, attacking countries that posed no immediate threat to the United States was worse. They made that judgment, in part, because earlier generations of Americans, remembering Pearl Harbor, considered preventive war—an unprovoked attack against an adversary simply because it could become a threat one day—to be immoral and un-American. And they made it because they feared that the consequences of such wars would be devastating.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, experts in and outside the Bush administration expressed the same fears. A November 2002 National Defense University report argued that occupying Iraq “will be the most daunting and complex task the U.S. and the international community will have undertaken since the end of World War II.” A collection of experts at the Army War College warned that the “possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace is real and serious.” White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey publicly mused that rebuilding postwar Iraq might cost $200 billion. He was reprimanded, then fired. And yet the White House plunged ahead.

By claiming that the United States was right to invade Iraq given what its leaders thought they knew at the time, Rubio and his fellow GOP candidates are making George W. Bush’s radical departure from past American practice the new normal. They are enshrining the idea that the correct response to potential nuclear (and perhaps even chemical and biological) proliferation is preventive war. And, not coincidentally, they are doing so while trying to scuttle President Obama’s efforts to strike a diplomatic agreement with Iran over its nuclear program.

The chances of another Bush winning the presidency may be going down. But in foreign-policy terms, it hardly matters. The toxic spirit of the last Bush presidency still thoroughly infects today’s GOP.

During a focus group led by GOP pollster Frank Luntz at the South Carolina Freedom Summit, the mother-in-law of Citizens United president David Bossie compared immigrants to rats and roaches, to the delight of the audience. Bossie is the organizer of the summit, one in a series of cattle calls for GOP presidential hopefuls.

Asked by Luntz to give advice to the these candidates, she said:

One man, one vote. People are comin' in this country across the borders like rats and roaches in the wood pile. We've got a state like Minnesota that says it's not our business to check 'em out, we just register 'em. We've got to get control. That's what they need to know.

Her comments drew laughter, whistling, and applause. Afterwards, Luntz asked the audience if they would vote for Bossie's mother-in-law for president, which drew louder cheers and applause.

These sentiments were not outliers. No stranger to making controversial anti-immigration remarks himself, Congressman Steve King told the crowd that he would make a concession on the issue:  "every time we let an immigrant in, we'll deport a Leftist." King was also a co-host at the Iowa event of this series.

Immigration has become a thorny issue for the Republican Party ahead of a 2016 race that could hinge on the Latino vote. For that reason, many regard Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, as the GOP's best chance to win the presidency. Rubio also spoke at the South Carolina Freedom Summit, but he did not address the issue... Wonder why?

Watch video of the rats and roaches remarks here.