Some Democrats are putting up caution signs for Hillary Clinton as she wades back into presidential politics by casting 2020 candidate Tulsi Gabbard as a "Russian asset," mocking President Donald Trump's dealings with a foreign leader and drawing counterattacks from both.
Bernie Sanders, who lost the 2016 nomination to Clinton and is running again in 2020, took to Twitter with implicit criticisms of his erstwhile rival. "People can disagree on issues," Sanders wrote Monday, "but it is outrageous for anyone to suggest that Tulsi is a foreign asset."
Larry Cohen, one of Sanders' top supporters, was more conciliatory but warned in an interview that Clinton could harm the eventual 2020 nominee by weighing in against specific candidates, even a longshot like Gabbard.
The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state has "put a lifetime into the Democratic Party. She deserves to be heard," said Cohen, a prominent member of the Democratic National Committee who also chairs Our Revolution, the spinoff of Sanders' last presidential campaign. But "in this senior leader role she has," Cohen said, "it's her job to embrace the range of politics within the party and not polarize within it."
Her scuffle with Gabbard and other recent headlines she's driven demonstrate that the 71-year-old remains a political lightning rod, just as she's been through much of the last three decades. The dynamics raise questions about how Clinton and her party can best leverage her strengths and navigate her weaknesses through next November.
For her part, aides say Clinton isn't attempting any calculated play.
"The short of it is that she's on a book tour and is feeling unconstrained about speaking her mind," said Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill. "It's easy to over-ascribe a strategy about every word she utters, but it's as simple as that. She's out there telling the truth."
Yet the results can frustrate those trying to win the office that Clinton twice lost, a reality presidential hopeful Cory Booker observed with a carefully calibrated critique while he campaigned Monday in New Hampshire. "We need to focus on winning this election ... talking about the urgencies that we have before us and not indulging in what I think is, for me, not a relevant story," Booker said, targeting the news media more than Clinton or Gabbard.
There's no settled playbook for former nominees — or former presidents — in party politics.
Sitting senators like Democrat John Kerry and Republican John McCain returned quietly to Capitol Hill. Democrat Al Gore became a leading advocate for climate action. McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, has made perhaps the biggest recent splash as a conservative media sensation who helped stoke a base that ultimately embraced Trump.
But Clinton "is in her own category," said Karen Finney, a top aide on her 2016 campaign.
The first woman to win a major party presidential nomination — and the national popular vote leader with almost 3 million more votes than Trump — Clinton remains a popular figure in her party, even after enduring criticism for losing key Midwestern states to Trump. For Republicans, she's an evergreen foil, used currently in the Mississippi governor's race, where Democratic nominee Jim Hood, a longtime attorney general, is being attacked for acknowledging he voted for her over Trump.
Finney said the 2016 circumstances, a continued focus on Russian interference and the ongoing House impeachment inquiry against Trump all add to the intensity of feelings for Democrats and Republicans alike: "That gives her a unique voice and perspective."
The latest fracas started last week when Clinton suggested on a podcast that Russians are "grooming (Gabbard) to be the third-party candidate."
Clinton produced no evidence that Moscow is directly backing Gabbard, but Russian state-owned media and a number of alt-right websites have promoted the congresswoman's Democratic campaign, and the Russian Embassy has defended her on Twitter. A military veteran, Gabbard has carved an unusual political profile with criticisms of long-held U.S. foreign policy and defenses of Trump.
Gabbard retorted by calling Clinton "the queen of warmongers ... and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long."
Trump piled on as well. "Anybody that is opposed to her is a Russian agent," Trump complained at the White House on Monday. "These people are sick. There's something wrong with them."
Separately, Clinton needled Trump in recent days by tweeting a parody letter in the voice of President John F. Kennedy to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the Cold War's Cuban Missile Crisis. The document, originally from comedian Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show, played off Trump's recent letter warning the Turkish president that history would judge him "forever as the devil" if he didn't "work out a good deal!" over Kurdish lands in northern Syria.
And amid all that, the State Department released its final report into Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state, an issue Trump seized upon in 2016 to paint Clinton as corrupt.
Illustrating the perpetual Clinton dichotomy, most mainstream media and Democratic partisans emphasized the report's core finding that there was "no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information," while conservative media and Republicans played up the determination that 38 current and former State Department officials violated protocol on handling sensitive information.
Cohen, the Sanders backer, said none of that means Clinton isn't in prime position to help Democrats in 2020. And Booker, even as he lamented the Gabbard kerfuffle, called Clinton an "extraordinary statesperson in our party."
Clinton has headlined at least two DNC fundraisers this cycle and more are expected. Merrill said she talks regularly to several Democratic presidential candidates. And Finney predicts Clinton "will be out on the trail in 2020," if not for the nominee, then for "any of the record number of women who will be running" for other offices.
And while Republicans, including Trump, continue aiming at a long-favored target, not everyone in the GOP thinks it will work as well as it has in the past.
"All the things that she warned us about in 2016 have come true," said GOP strategist Rick Tyler. "So she has the gravitas to weigh in. ... She's now a net positive for Democrats, not a negative."
Associated Press writers Kevin Freking in Washington and Hunter Woodall in Concord, N.H., contributed to this report.
Follow Barrow on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BillBarrowAP .
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Fresh from a day of delivering optimistic prognoses about how Ukraine would fare in the war with Russia despite gloomy news from the front lines, U.S. Secretary of State and amateur musician Antony Blinken may have thought he had the perfect upbeat song to perform with a Kyiv bar band on his fourth visit to the capital since the conflict began in 2022.
“I know this is a really, really difficult time,” Blinken told a packed crowd in the subterranean club Barman Dictat on Tuesday night.
“Your soldiers, your citizens, particularly in the northeast in Kharkiv, are suffering tremendously,” he said. “But they need to know, you need to know, the United States is with you, so much of the world is with you. And they’re fighting not just for a free Ukraine but for the free world, and the free world is with you, too.”
With those words and strumming a red guitar, Blinken and the local group 19.99 launched into Neil Young’s hit “Rockin’ in the Free World,” ostensibly to encourage Ukrainians to keep up the fight against Russia and hold to their Western aspirations, despite numerous battlefield setbacks that led President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a day later to cancel all his upcoming foreign trips.
With its refrain “Keep on rockin’ in the free world,” Young’s 1989 song sounds like it should be an homage to the glory of living in the West, uncompromised by communism or authoritarianism. In fact, as numerous social media critics noted, the tune is a lament about despair and misery caused by homelessness, drug addiction and poverty in the celebrated free world.
A charitable interpretation might be that Blinken chose to perform the song to underscore the importance of overcoming adversity by sticking to ones’ dreams of peace and freedom. After all, that had been the general theme of his remarks at events in Kyiv since his nearly pre-dawn arrival after an overnight train trip from Poland and it would continue to be on Wednesday.
“I’ve come to Ukraine with a message: You are not alone,” Blinken had told an audience of students and educators at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute shortly before taking to Barman Dictat’s basement stage.
“Never bet against Ukraine,” he said at a Wednesday news conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.
But as Blinken sang the “keep on rockin’ in the free world” chorus, which is repeated 12 times in the 4-minute 40-second song, Russian troops were advancing near and around Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, and Zelenskyy was in the process of deciding to put off a planned trip to Spain and Portugal later this week to deal with the crisis.
Thus, any intended musical encouragement — in both content and venue — left at least some observers scratching their heads.
Kyiv-based analyst Oleksandr Kraiev, director of the North America program at the Ukrainian Prism think tank, said Blinken’s visit was welcome but pointed out that he and many Ukrainians were puzzled by his two-day stay, including his stop at Barman Dictat, which was seen as inappropriate by some, given the current fraught wartime climate.
“From my point of view, and generally speaking from the point of view of common Ukrainians, it was not a very appropriate sign to go to the bar to have a small song with our band,” he said, noting that Ukrainian military recruitment officers are known to go to bars and nightclubs to check documents and catch draft dodgers.
“So (for the) secretary of state of the United States also to go to a bar, to have a small concert for people who are blamed for not enlisting in the Ukrainian army,” Kraiev said, "it's not, let’s say, a catastrophe, it’s not a faux pas, but it’s something that is not very desirable from the point of view of common Ukrainians.”
U.S. officials with Blinken shrugged at the online criticism the secretary was receiving about his song choice and decision to sing at a bar. They also said he wouldn’t have done the event if he had thought it was inappropriate.
More broadly, the possible disconnect between the week’s battlefield developments and Blinken’s optimism was reflected in his activities and the size of his delegation.
Unlike on all of his three previous wartime trips to Kyiv, Blinken brought a full complement of staff and press with him. And while security was tight, he spent a good deal of time away from meetings with government officials, engaging with university students, civic leaders, local businesspeople and, of course, bar-goers. And, unlike on all of his previous visits except his last visit in September, he chose to spend the night in the city.
Yet, it may be “Rockin’ in the Free World,” its chorus and opening stanza — “There’s colors on the street; Red, white and blue; People shufflin’ their feet; People sleepin’ in their shoes; But there’s a warnin’ sign; on the road ahead; There’s a lot of people sayin’; we’d be better off dead.” — that the visit is remembered for.
As the band hit the opening notes, Blinken commented wryly: “I don’t know if we can pull this off.” And, then, according to the official State Department transcript: “(Music was played.)”
Samya Kullab contributed.
From left, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, US Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Tom Sullivan and Spokesperson Matt Miller visit the Barman Dictat bar in Kyiv, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. Blinken sought Tuesday to rally the spirits of glum Ukrainians facing a fierce new Russian offensive, assuring them that they are not alone and that billions of dollars in American military aid on its way to the country would make a “real difference” on the battlefield. (Brendan Smialowski/Pool photo via AP)
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, performs "Rockin' in the Free World" with members of The 1999 band at the Barman Dictat bar in Kyiv, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. Blinken sought Tuesday to rally the spirits of glum Ukrainians facing a fierce new Russian offensive, assuring them that they are not alone and that billions of dollars in American military aid on its way to the country would make a “real difference” on the battlefield. (Brendan Smialowski/Pool photo via AP)
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken performs "Rockin' in the Free World" with members of The 1999 band at the Barman Dictat bar in Kyiv, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. Blinken sought Tuesday to rally the spirits of glum Ukrainians facing a fierce new Russian offensive, assuring them that they are not alone and that billions of dollars in American military aid on its way to the country would make a “real difference” on the battlefield. (Brendan Smialowski/Pool photo via AP)
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visits the Barman Dictat bar in Kyiv, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. Blinken sought Tuesday to rally the spirits of glum Ukrainians facing a fierce new Russian offensive, assuring them that they are not alone and that billions of dollars in American military aid on its way to the country would make a “real difference” on the battlefield. (Brendan Smialowski/Pool photo via AP)
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, center, performs "Rockin' in the Free World" with members of The 1999 band at the Barman Dictat bar in Kyiv, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. Blinken sought Tuesday to rally the spirits of glum Ukrainians facing a fierce new Russian offensive, assuring them that they are not alone and that billions of dollars in American military aid on its way to the country would make a “real difference” on the battlefield. (Brendan Smialowski/Pool photo via AP)
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken performs "Rockin' in the Free World" with members of The 1999 band at the Barman Dictat bar in Kyiv, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. Blinken sought Tuesday to rally the spirits of glum Ukrainians facing a fierce new Russian offensive, assuring them that they are not alone and that billions of dollars in American military aid on its way to the country would make a “real difference” on the battlefield. (Brendan Smialowski/Pool photo via AP)
