Presumptuous Politics

HILLARY CAN’T ESCAPE OBAMA ON ISIS
In a debate held one day after the worst terror attack in the West since 2004, the most noteworthy remarks presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton made about Islamist terrorism were to excuse ties to Wall St.

No, seriously.

Clinton said her close relationship with the financial sector grew out of her work to help them rebuild after 9/11. “It was good for the economy,” she said. “And it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.”

So, by that logic, her huge personal and political buckraking was kind of a rebuke to the terrorists, itself. Her status as a Wall St. favorite certainly predates 9/11, but she suggested that the relationship she forged in those dark days spurred an even greater outpouring of support and gratitude in the form of checks.

Now, this says a great deal about Clinton’s meagre gifts as a politician. But it also tells you something about where her party’s priorities are.

Invoking 9/11 is something that ought to be done only when relevant, which Clinton’s was not, and only when facing oblivion. In that case, Clinton was right. Her exposure on the issue of banker nuzzling is much higher in the Democratic primary than the issue of Islamist terrorism.

Republicans today can talk of little else than national security, Paris, refugees and ISIS. But Democrats, even a day after the attacks, were seemingly eager to get off the subjects. The campaign of also-ran Sen. Bernie Sanders was proud to have fought to have limited the amount of the discussion that would involve national security.

Woof.

But Sanders is probably right. There’s not a lot of sense in debating the issue among Democrats since they are in substantial agreement with President Obama. While both Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley tried to look for ways to draw decorous differences with Obama, they are in tune with his larger strategy of containing ISIS and waiting for the aspiring caliphate to die of asphyxiation or, perhaps, boredom.

Clinton has some differences of opinion with Obama, but she isn’t free to discuss them. Not only would she risk backlash from liberals and raise Obama’s ire, but, as moderator John Dickerson ably pointed out, the last foreign intervention Clinton encouraged, the regime change plan for Libya, is a thoroughgoing disaster.

So even as Clinton should be moving beyond Obama’s reach and into a no-contest Democratic nomination, he holds this power over her: If she gets too squirmy on his foreign policy, he will leave her to the foreign policy wolves on the right and left.

And on the issue that will dominate the coming week or more of the campaign – how many, if any Syrian refugees the U.S. should accept – Clinton will not be able to pioneer a position that might be attractive to voters. She will have to stand by Obama and say that she also thinks accepting tens of thousands of refugees from Syria is the right thing to do.

And you know the refugee issue is key to Obama. The only emotion beyond annoyance that he displayed in his first press conference after Paris was anger at Sen. Ted Cruz, who has suggested a religious test for the refugees in order to screen out Muslims, and Sen. Marco Rubio, who simply wants to stop the flow altogether.