Russia's propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard.

Why does Warren get **** on and this woman gets a pass?

Hillary Clinton emerged from relative political obscurity last week to claim that Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic presidential candidate and member of Congress from Hawaii, was “the favorite of the Russians” prepping for a third-party spoiler run during a podcast interview. She went so far as to imply that the representative was “a Russian asset.”

Gabbard fired back by calling Clinton “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party.” In Gabbard’s telling, her party’s 2016 nominee was behind “a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation ... through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine.”
“It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me,” Gabbard, who is at 1.2 percent in the RealClearPolitics primary polling average, concluded. “Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.”

This is a bizarrely intense fight given that these two are members of the same party. Clinton suggesting Gabbard is the Kremlin’s chosen agent for destroying the Democrats in 2020? Gabbard accusing Clinton of being the puppet master behind a massive conspiracy against her? Are these people serious?

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is “yes” — in ways that reveal some troubling tendencies among American liberals and leftists today.

On Clinton’s part, the accusation reflects a remarkable overestimation of Russian influence on the part of certain Democratic Party loyalists — and a corresponding willingness to fling around baseless allegations of people they don’t like being aligned with the Kremlin agents. At bottom, it’s a conspiratorial way of viewing the world that disconnects Democrats from reality.

Gabbard’s bizarre counter-allegations of a Clinton conspiracy reflect the way in which her nominally anti-war politics are actually a kind of pro-authoritarian, conspiratorial worldview — particularly on Syria, an issue at the top of the political agenda right now. Her approach has a handful of fans on the party’s left flank but has really found its base on the pro-Trump right, real-life proof the horseshoe theory of the political spectrum has actual merit.

Fortunately, these tendencies do not seem to be afflicting any of the top contenders for the party’s nomination at the moment. Politicians closer to the center like former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg don’t sound like Clinton; left-wing candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders don’t sound like Gabbard. But this ugly fight exposes real internal problems on the (broadly construed) left half of the American political spectrum, ones that liberals and leftists cannot and should not ignore.

What Hillary Clinton gets wrong about Tulsi Gabbard and why it matters

To be fair to Clinton, one can see why she would think it’s plausible that Gabbard is Russia’s favorite candidate in the 2020 primary.

Gabbard is a combat veteran and US Army reservist who has made issues of war and peace the central plank of her campaign platform. She has sold herself as a non-interventionist, a critic of “regime change” and “endless war.” In practice, though, Gabbard’s record doesn’t fully bear this stance out. She has long spoken favorably about American use of force when it’s not directed at toppling dictators, arguing that the US needs to refocus on fighting Islamist terrorists.

As far back as 2015, she has been advocating that the US work with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — and his chief ally, Russia — in fighting ISIS and extremist factions among the Syrian rebels. This view has led her to take a remarkably pro-Russia stance on the Syria conflict, even when it clashes with the policies of her own party’s president and standard-bearer.

In January 2017, she traveled to Syria and met with Assad personally, catching the Democratic leadership in Congress off-guard. After returning to the US, she went on CNN and parroted the regime’s line that there was “no difference” between the mainstream anti-Assad rebels and ISIS. At last week’s Democratic debate, she described the Turkish invasion of northeastern Syria, which is controlled by America’s Kurdish allies, as “yet another negative consequence of the regime change war we’ve been waging in Syria” — a false description of what happened that seemed to let Trump’s troop withdrawal off the hook.

The Kremlin may be taking notice. One recent analysis from the Alliance for Securing Democracy (an electoral interference monitoring group) found that Russian state media has given Gabbard disproportionate coverage relative to her poll numbers. It also documented Twitter bots that appear to be of Russian origin being active on her behalf. That said, the extent to which Russian bots are working to promote Gabbard is contested, and it’s not clear that Clinton is justified in saying that Gabbard is Russia’s favorite.

But Clinton’s comment seems to go further than that. Take a look at the full context from an episode of Campaign HQ, former Obama aide David Plouffe’s podcast. It seems to suggest that Gabbard is not only Russia’s favorite but actually its agent in the Democratic Party:

PLOUFFE: [Trump is] going to try to drive people not to vote for him, but to say you can’t vote for them either...

CLINTON: They’re also going to do third party again. And I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody [Gabbard] who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. And that’s assuming [Green Party 2016 candidate] Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she’s also a Russian asset.

Now Clinton is not saying that Russia is “grooming” Gabbard as an agent — which many media outlets initially reported. Rather, she’s saying that Trump and the GOP are grooming Gabbard to be a third-party candidate, while she’s simultaneously getting outside support from the Russians.

But the use of the word “also” in that last line about Jill Stein seems to heavily imply that Gabbard is a Russian agent. While it’s not clear if that’s what Clinton meant to say, her phrasing was at best sloppy and at worst making an inflammatory accusation against Gabbard (and Stein) without real evidence.

It’s hard to overstate how serious it is to accuse a politician you don’t like of being an actual agent of a hostile power, of working to undermine the United States from within. The fact that Russian mouthpieces seem to approve of Gabbard and Stein is hardly sufficient to level such a grave charge.

Yet Clinton’s comments are not a one-off: they reflect a tendency among Democratic loyalists, both in the elite and rank and file, to throw around charges of Russian influence without much grounding in fact.

The most extreme manifestations of this are Twitter personalities like Louise Mensch and Claude Taylor, self-appointed Russia experts who built up a following among hardcore #resistance types by constantly predicting the reveal of proof that Trump is in Putin’s thrall — evidence that never seems to materialize. This strain of pure fantasy never became influential in the party, but there is a more attenuated version that did: Democratic politicians and liberal media outlets have frequently overhyped Trump-Russia connections or Russian penetration of the American political system, assigning it a degree of influence over American politicians and the voters’ minds that has not been supported by evidence.

Clinton’s comments are emblematic of this more subtle version of Russian overhype. It’s a worldview that conveniently exonerates Clinton for her 2016 defeat, suggesting that the Russians rather than Clinton’s own missteps decided the election. It’s a kind of epistemic poison, leading Democrats astray in a similar-but-much-smaller-scale way that Fox News narratives mislead Republicans. When you develop a vision of American electoral politics that overstates Russian power, you end up missing what actually matters.

Somewhat ironically, it’s also one that helps the Russians. The Kremlin’s email hacking and bot-tweeting campaigns were first and foremost designed to stoke divisions and inflame partisanship in the United States, turning up the heat on American partisan disputes and limiting the US government’s ability to coherently counter Russia’s aggressive foreign policy. Calling your political enemies Russian agents certainly helps this goal along.

“Putin can rejoice in the actions of the latter-day witch-hunters who are forever spying Russian influence,” Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at the Royal United Services Institute, writes in the Moscow Times. “By turning political debate into a hunt for traitors, it generates the very kind of toxic, suspicious political culture that undermines the bonds of solidarity and civility that underpin democratic societies.”

There are good reasons to be skeptical of Gabbard’s stances on foreign policy. But Clinton’s insinuations of dark connections between her and the Kremlin absent solid evidence help no one.

What Tulsi Gabbard gets wrong about Hillary Clinton and why it matters
Gabbard’s response to Clinton was, if anything, even worse than the original comments.

While Clinton never outright says that Gabbard is a Russian plant, merely heavily implying it, Gabbard accuses Clinton of masterminding a gigantic conspiracy against her without the slightest shred of evidence. She did so first in a series of tweets on Friday:

Tulsi Gabbard
@TulsiGabbard
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a ...

Tulsi Gabbard
@TulsiGabbard
. concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and ...

Tulsi Gabbard
@TulsiGabbard
... powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.

It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.

She continued to hammer home this theme in the days after. In an official video released on Sunday, she accuses an unspecified “they” (presumably Democratic elites) of organizing to “destroy” and “discredit” anyone who dissents from their official line. On Monday, she tweeted out a video of a friendly interview she did with Fox News host Tucker Carlson in which she accuses “Hillary Clinton, her proxies, [and] the warmongering establishment” of “conducting this coordinated smear campaign.”

The idea that Clinton is masterminding some kind of coordinated smear campaign in the media, that all of Gabbard’s critics are Clinton “proxies,” is the textbook definition of a conspiracy theory. But it’s hardly the first time Gabbard has embraced outlandish ideas that happen to flatter her worldview.

When Bashar al-Assad’s forces used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians in April 2017, Gabbard said she was “skeptical” that Assad was responsible, aligning herself with conspiracy theorists against both US intelligence and the overwhelming majority of independent experts.

Gabbard’s penchant for strangely reasoned defenses of militant foreign strongmen — she’s an avowed fan of India’s anti-Muslim, illiberal Prime Minister Narendra Modi — has contributed to her marginalization not only from both the Clintonite Democratic center but the also the Warren-Sanders left. Only a few on the so-called “anti-imperialist” left support her, a group made up of relatively obscure Twitter pundits with about as much influence on the actually existing Democratic Party as Louise Mensch and Claude Taylor. Her lack of a meaningful factional support base is a big reason why her poll numbers have been low for the entire primary.

But her appearance on Carlson’s show reveals how she’s succeeded in building a different fanbase: pro-Trump conservatives.

Gabbard has progressive views on domestic policy, despite some past stances to the contrary. But centering her political appeal on her foreign policy, where she’s honestly not very far from Donald Trump, has made her some fans in MAGA-world. Ben Domenech, the publisher of the devotedly pro-Trump website The Federalist, donated $250 to Gabbard’s campaign. Steve Bannon has expressed admiration for her; so too have leading figures in the alt-right.

What this points to is a certain commonality, at the very extreme ends of the spectrum, between left-wing critique of “American empire” and right-wing isolationism — a foreign policy variant of the “horseshoe theory” of political ideology, which posits some factions on the extremes are closer to each other than those on the center-left and center-right.

The left-wing variant starts from the idea that America has evil intentions for the rest of the world — that it is, in fact, the largest threat to global stability on the planet. The right-wing version argues that the United States has no obligation to the rest of the world; that the US needs to put “America First,” even when it means ignoring suffering abroad.

These doctrines converge on the idea that the United States needs to stay out of foreign conflicts and even sometimes cross the line into outright apologia for bad actors abroad. This is how Assad and his Russian backers get painted as potential allies against jihadism rather than the human rights abusers they are, both by Gabbard and by Trumpists.

I don’t mean to draw equivalences here. While Gabbard only has a handful of fans on the left, Donald Trump is the president of the United States. But Gabbard’s embrace of anti-Clinton conspiracies and foreign autocrats shows how a strain of left-wing analysis, applied sophomorically, can lead to pretty ugly places. She’s a useful cautionary tale at a time when the left’s stock is rising on the Democratic side of the aisle.

The ill will toward Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who announced Friday that she is running for president, goes a long way toward explaining the political psychosis that has gripped the Democratic Party since Russia intervened in 2016 to elect Donald Trump. In another timeline, Gabbard might be an ideal 2020 candidate: Samoan-American, Hindu, female, an Iraq War veteran, and environmentalist who broke with the D.N.C. to support Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the primary. But Democratic attitudes have changed since Trump took office. Liberals who once encouraged diverse primaries are now deeply suspicious of alleged spoilers like 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who has faced questions about her ties to Russia; a party that has traditionally prided itself on skepticism toward military adventurism has since embraced a more muscular, anti-Russia foreign policy. All of which makes Gabbard the odd woman out in a soon-to-be crowded field.

Perhaps the biggest red flag for the Russia-gate crowd is Gabbard’s perplexing coziness with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, with whom she met in 2017. Gabbard reportedly did not notify her Democratic peers before flying to Syria on the trip. Afterward, Gabbard said she was “skeptical” that Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people, calling the accusations just another round of “pointing fingers.” Critics have accused her of being an “Assad shill” and therefore also a “Putin puppet”—or, as Russian state television network RT put it, “daring to seek firsthand accounts rather than blindly trusting the MSM narrative.”

Gabbard’s foreign-policy heterodoxy might be surmountable if not for a multitude of other original sins. In late 2016, amid rumors that she was being considered for a Trump administration position, Gabbard took a Trump Tower meeting brokered by Steve Bannon, who praised the Democrat for embracing the term “radical Islamic terrorism.” Outside of U.S. politics, Gabbard has offered vociferous support for India’s staunchly nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, who, as chief minister of Gujarat, was accused of complicity in a 2002 religious riot against Muslims that killed more than 1,000 people. (Barack Obama, for what it’s worth, had an “unlikely friendship” with Modi, himself.)

Fears that Gabbard might play the Jill Stein–esque spoiler, then, are likely overblown—if only because Gabbard’s presidential aspirations are probably dead on arrival. Over the weekend, the photogenic 37-year-old congresswoman was forced to apologize for working for her father’s anti-gay organization in the early 2000s, which, per CNN, actively opposed same-sex marriage in Hawaii and supported conversion therapy. (As a state representative, Gabbard was not quiet about her beliefs, testifying on a committee in 2004 against “homosexual extremists” pushing for civil unions.) For today’s Democratic Party, no love of surfing, millennial élan, or fondness for leis will be enough to overcome past homophobia or a Trumpian foreign policy. As R.N.C. spokesman Michael Ahrens told Axios: “Liberals think she’s too conservative, conservatives think she’s too liberal, and just about everyone thinks her coziness with Bashar al-Assad is disturbing.” That doesn’t leave many constituents in Gabbard’s corner—except, perhaps, RT.

Published January 14, 2019

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard gifted her long-shot presidential campaign a burst of attention after casting a “present” vote on the House’s two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump.

But not all publicity is good publicity.

Democrats across the political spectrum continue to rip her decision not to vote “yes” or “no,” portraying the move as cowardly and emblematic of how out of touch she is with the Democratic Party she’s seeking to represent.

“Because she’s running for president of the United States, I think if yesterday was a test for who could be a good commander in chief, she got an F-plus,” said Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state legislator who supported California Sen. Kamala Harris’ campaign before she dropped out of the race earlier this month.

Gabbard became a trending topic in the U.S. — first by name, then by the hashtag “#TulsiCoward” — Thursday after becoming the lone member of Congress not to take a side on impeachment.

Gabbard is the only remaining Democratic House member running for president. The rest of the Democratic field voiced their support for the president’s impeachment.

Gabbard’s vote Wednesday was more in line with House Republicans, who voted “no” in a unified bloc. And her “present” vote also revived allegations that she’s a Russian asset who could play spoiler in the general election by running a third-party campaign, echoing criticism Hillary Clinton lobbed at the Hawaii congresswoman in October when she called Gabbard “the favorite of the Russians” in a podcast interview.

Gabbard is frequently mentioned in Russian propaganda and media, and her views on foreign policy have been criticized for aligning too closely with Russia and other foreign adversaries, such as Syria and its president, Bashar Assad.

Gabbard didn’t decide she would vote “present” until she got to the House floor on Wednesday, according to a source familiar with her thinking. But the campaign was at least somewhat prepared for it.

In a lengthy statement released by her campaign 15 minutes after the vote, she framed it as one that put the country first, explaining that while she believes “Trump is guilty of wrongdoing,” she “could not in good conscience” vote “yes” or “no” because the process was too partisan and “fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our country.”

Supporters received her explanation around midnight that evening, and Gabbard recorded a four-and-a-half-minute video delivering her earlier campaign statement after she finished voting. It was posted online to Twitter at 1:25 a.m. and has since been viewed more than 1.2 million times.

Just three Democrats voted “no” on impeachment articles: Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who plans to join the Republican Party in the coming days; Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, a powerful committee chairman who represents a district Trump won by 31 points in 2016; and Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, a freshman lawmaker who voted “yes” on the abuse-of-power charge but “no” on obstruction of Congress.

Gabbard addressed the barrage of backlash she’s faced in a selfie video posted Thursday afternoon.

“My stance yesterday, my vote, was opting out of this zero-sum game mindset and back into one of negotiation and compromise,” she said. “We’re stuck right now in this terrible scenario where everyone is trying to exact maximum hurt from their opponent for a ‘win.’ My present vote was not passive. It was an active protest against the terrible fallout of this zero-sum mindset that the two opposing political parties have trapped America in.”

Gabbard wasn’t on Thursday’s debate stage in Los Angeles because she failed to meet the Democratic National Committee’s qualifications. Instead, she was to be in New Hampshire, where she’s a top-five candidate, according to RealClearPolitics’ average of surveys in the Granite State. Her team believes she can break into the top four there.

Her campaign announced Thursday that she would hold a media availability ahead of her scheduled event in Manchester but canceled it 75 minutes later, citing votes in the House. After Christmas, she will hold a series of daily town halls across the state until Dec. 30 then resume campaigning on New Year’s Day with a town hall in Barrington.

In an interview Thursday morning on Rising with The Hill’s Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Gabbard estimated receiving just two questions about impeachment as she’s campaigned for president.

“A total of two questions,” she emphasized. “That in and of itself, I think, speaks volumes about what the American people are most concerned about.”

Indeed, voters are more concerned about issues such as health care than the president’s impeachment. But polls have shown that Democrats are largely supportive of impeachment, while nearly half of independents support it.

In Quinnipiac’s poll of New Hampshire last month, Gabbard was fifth among candidates with 6 percent support. The bulk of her supporters identify as moderate and conservative or independent.

In her interview with The Hill, Gabbard called rumors that she would mount a third-party bid “ridiculous” and cast her campaign as one that welcomes and respects Republicans and independents.

“I don’t call people names and deplorables,” she said, an unmistakable reference to Clinton.

Philippe Reines, a former senior adviser to Clinton at the State Department, tweeted that Gabbard’s vote was “about as pathetic as calling in sick.”

Kathy Sullivan, former chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said she didn’t agree with Gabbard’s vote — “You either think that Trump violated the Constitution or you don’t, right?” she said — but stressed that Gabbard shouldn’t be “tarred and feathered and run out of town for it, either.”

“The people who are today out there being very vociferous about Tulsi and her ‘present’ vote were never gonna vote for her anyway. They just weren’t going to,” Sullivan said. “So I don’t see it hurting her in that sense with that part of the voting base, and it may help her with the people that are already supporting her.”

In a sign of the swift blowback Gabbard faced — and the lack of attention Democrats are paying to her campaign — Matthew Miller, a former Department of Justice spokesman for ex-Attorney General Eric Holder, tweeted a link to Kai Kehele’s campaign website, mistakenly promoting him as Gabbard’s primary challenger.

Kehele, a Hawaii state senator, is running to succeed Gabbard, who is not seeking reelection.

Miller’s post was retweeted nearly 7,000 times and garnered more than 17,000 likes. His follow-up 15 minutes later acknowledging that Gabbard isn’t running for her seat in Congress again got significantly less engagement.

Kehele, for his part, also plugged his campaign, posting a link to ActBlue for donations.

“I am running to replace Tulsi Gabbard in Congress because our district deserves better than this,” he tweeted. “Unlike her, I will always put our country before politics.”

His post was similarly retweeted more than 7,000 times and liked more than 20,000 times.

He told POLITICO that Wednesday was a “good night” for his campaign and that he was “shocked” when he saw a House member voted “present.”

“I’m like, ‘Who has the hell voted — who’d do that?’ And then, of course, it quickly became apparent it was her,” he recalled. “It’s totally unacceptable.”

Kehele, accused Gabbard of abandoning her district and her duty in Congress by repeatedly missing votes and campaigning in New Hampshire instead of engaging with constituents in her district in Hawaii. He noted that she still collects a taxpayer salary while fellow House members Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Eric Swalwell of California abandoned their long-shot presidential bids earlier this year to represent their districts.

“Last night, the biggest vote that the House took this year, obviously one of the biggest votes in our nation’s history, and half of the state of Hawaii was left voiceless because, in my opinion, it was a political stunt,” said Kehele, who added that Gabbard’s campaign has “zero” chance of winning the nomination and that he would be ready to step in immediately if she resigned from her seat before the end of her term.

Democrats have speculated that Gabbard could become a talking head, perhaps on Fox News or another network, when her campaign ends. There’s little belief, if any, among mainstream Democrats that Gabbard could become the nominee.

In New Hampshire, where polls show Gabbard’s campaign has the most support, Sullivan — the former state Democratic Party chair — said she doesn’t hear people talking about Gabbard in her circles and could only recall her name being brought up when voters at a local event in Manchester cited her as a candidate they aren’t supporting in general conversations about the 2020 field.

“Other than that, no, I really don’t hear people talking about her campaign,” Sullivan said. “I think she’s drawing most of her support from people who aren’t Democrats, so the people who I talk politics with are not Tulsi people. There’s a reason why they hold the election and count the ballots, but at this point I would say no, I don’t think she’s got a good chance of being the nominee.”

Sellers, the former South Carolina legislator, was more explicit.

“Tulsi Gabbard stands the same chance of winning the Democratic nomination as I do of winning the NFL MVP. I mean, that ain’t happening,” he said.

“Her endgame is to be a famous Fox News commentator and go on there and bash Democrats all day.

She speaks more harshly about Hillary Clinton than Bashar al Assad and Donald Trump.”