raharris1973
Well-known member
The first two questions are based on her reputation for centrist establishment foreign policy hawkishness:
1. Would President Clinton have reversed President Obama's JCPOA policy with Iran and restarted a sanctions regime to get a better deal from the point of view of American desires?
2. Would tensions have worsened with Russia beyond the point of control, leading to pitched battles in Syria or world war 3? Generators of increased tension on the American side could have been a hawkish internationalist viewpoint from Clinton, and personal animus over the election. On Putin's side, fear/anger. If tensions are contained short of war, what would be the status of arms control agreements like START and INF?
3. On the third area, domestic affairs, including the economy, midterms, and covid, I have some additional theories.
Although swathes of the country supporting Trump will be deeply disappointed and angry, fewer people on both sides of the political divide, but especially in metro areas, will be surprised by the election 2016 outcome. The closeness of Trump will be a subject of some study and alarm in some metropolitan and liberal circles, but nowhere near the obsession his victory was.
Clinton winning the electoral vote narrowly will not, I think, flip either chamber of Congress to the Democrats.
The economy will be running strong for most of the years of Clinton's term, and she'll benefit from that, especially with minority voters, and the name Clinton will be reassociated with prosperity. Markets and growth will not get quite as hot in some sectors without the steroidal injections of the Trump tax cut.
Amid a bare majority answering yes to 'right direction' and even more positive numbers on the economy, there will be large and loud dissatisfied groups. The Republican opposition will be fierce, and I anticipate white nationalism will rise about as much over these years as they did in the Trump years. The typical pattern is for those groups, militias, and 2nd amendment groups to surge more under Democratic administrations and plateau in Republican ones. They kept rising in Trump's time as an exception, as the whole cultural swirl about Trump stoked it. In the ATL, he's at best a tweeting media mogul, but the presence of Hillary Clinton in the White House provides alternate fuel for right wing movements since symbolically it represents the nightmare of right-of-center Americans come to life.
Clinton won't have unity in her own caucus, either. The rightward fringes of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses will as usual play a triangulation game between pervasive local anti-Clintonism in their areas and still being Democrats and relying on Democratic voters, donors, etc. There will be a non-trivial number of highly suspicious younger and leftier Democratic legislators as well.
Without Trump backlash, I expect the Republicans to hold the House in 2018, and I would say probably say the Senate too, unless I am missing something about the math of where the elections were or the retirements that year.
It would be interesting to see how long into Hillary's term it takes for Merrick Garland to get onto the Supreme Court. I wouldn't put it beyond the realm of possibility for McConnell to start a new precedent of holding it up until after the 2018 midterms. There's a chance, not that great a chance, but a small one, that if he does that, it dampens GOP Senate prospects in 2018 a little. Also, it would be interesting to see if Ginsburg retires, or holds on till death out of vanity or hope for a more favorable Senate to get a more simpatico ideological tilt in her successor, because she's probably disappointed in who Clinton could get through a Republican Senate.
I'm going to presume COVID transmission to humans won't be butterflied away at around the same time as OTL. Presuming that, I think regardless of policy responses, COVID death counts in the US from February 2020 to Nov 2020 would only shift on the margins of multiple tens of thousands at most.
But here is where COVID would tank the Hillary Clinton Presidency in 2020.
COVID would tank the Hillary Clinton presidency by tanking the economy and outraging red and purple areas that were not effected until later with early lockdowns. This is even with White House messaging being seen as more steady by metro and suburban populations and being better received by the media. Hispanics, often disproportionately ESL speakers performing jobs that are not laptop & telework capable, would be wary of lockdowns, especially if the GOP messages to their communities well, and the Democrats flub their messaging badly.
But most important of all, without having an incumbent President to protect, the GOP in Congress wouldn't release spigots to flood the economy with relief spending and impose mandates on employers for paycheck protection and eviction moratoria, so the economy would be falling even harder in 2020.
Hillary Clinton would be on a double-edged sword, she couldn't fund anything requiring appropriations with Congress, so she won't get that. She can consider and try to maximize what her lawyers think she can do through Agency power and executive order, but will face criticism of overreach and tyranny, and legal challenges including up to the Supreme Court, every step of the way. I don't know how much she'd let the cries of her perennial opponents get to her and make her back off on executive actions, or the whispers of the faint-hearted in her own coalition. She might, out of caution. Or, she might tough it out. Even so, without appropriated funds to spend, her resources to mitigate economic free-fall are far less than what the Trump administration employed in fighting to survive.
So she's out in 2020 to pretty much whoever the Republicans put up.
1. Would President Clinton have reversed President Obama's JCPOA policy with Iran and restarted a sanctions regime to get a better deal from the point of view of American desires?
2. Would tensions have worsened with Russia beyond the point of control, leading to pitched battles in Syria or world war 3? Generators of increased tension on the American side could have been a hawkish internationalist viewpoint from Clinton, and personal animus over the election. On Putin's side, fear/anger. If tensions are contained short of war, what would be the status of arms control agreements like START and INF?
3. On the third area, domestic affairs, including the economy, midterms, and covid, I have some additional theories.
Although swathes of the country supporting Trump will be deeply disappointed and angry, fewer people on both sides of the political divide, but especially in metro areas, will be surprised by the election 2016 outcome. The closeness of Trump will be a subject of some study and alarm in some metropolitan and liberal circles, but nowhere near the obsession his victory was.
Clinton winning the electoral vote narrowly will not, I think, flip either chamber of Congress to the Democrats.
The economy will be running strong for most of the years of Clinton's term, and she'll benefit from that, especially with minority voters, and the name Clinton will be reassociated with prosperity. Markets and growth will not get quite as hot in some sectors without the steroidal injections of the Trump tax cut.
Amid a bare majority answering yes to 'right direction' and even more positive numbers on the economy, there will be large and loud dissatisfied groups. The Republican opposition will be fierce, and I anticipate white nationalism will rise about as much over these years as they did in the Trump years. The typical pattern is for those groups, militias, and 2nd amendment groups to surge more under Democratic administrations and plateau in Republican ones. They kept rising in Trump's time as an exception, as the whole cultural swirl about Trump stoked it. In the ATL, he's at best a tweeting media mogul, but the presence of Hillary Clinton in the White House provides alternate fuel for right wing movements since symbolically it represents the nightmare of right-of-center Americans come to life.
Clinton won't have unity in her own caucus, either. The rightward fringes of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses will as usual play a triangulation game between pervasive local anti-Clintonism in their areas and still being Democrats and relying on Democratic voters, donors, etc. There will be a non-trivial number of highly suspicious younger and leftier Democratic legislators as well.
Without Trump backlash, I expect the Republicans to hold the House in 2018, and I would say probably say the Senate too, unless I am missing something about the math of where the elections were or the retirements that year.
It would be interesting to see how long into Hillary's term it takes for Merrick Garland to get onto the Supreme Court. I wouldn't put it beyond the realm of possibility for McConnell to start a new precedent of holding it up until after the 2018 midterms. There's a chance, not that great a chance, but a small one, that if he does that, it dampens GOP Senate prospects in 2018 a little. Also, it would be interesting to see if Ginsburg retires, or holds on till death out of vanity or hope for a more favorable Senate to get a more simpatico ideological tilt in her successor, because she's probably disappointed in who Clinton could get through a Republican Senate.
I'm going to presume COVID transmission to humans won't be butterflied away at around the same time as OTL. Presuming that, I think regardless of policy responses, COVID death counts in the US from February 2020 to Nov 2020 would only shift on the margins of multiple tens of thousands at most.
But here is where COVID would tank the Hillary Clinton Presidency in 2020.
COVID would tank the Hillary Clinton presidency by tanking the economy and outraging red and purple areas that were not effected until later with early lockdowns. This is even with White House messaging being seen as more steady by metro and suburban populations and being better received by the media. Hispanics, often disproportionately ESL speakers performing jobs that are not laptop & telework capable, would be wary of lockdowns, especially if the GOP messages to their communities well, and the Democrats flub their messaging badly.
But most important of all, without having an incumbent President to protect, the GOP in Congress wouldn't release spigots to flood the economy with relief spending and impose mandates on employers for paycheck protection and eviction moratoria, so the economy would be falling even harder in 2020.
Hillary Clinton would be on a double-edged sword, she couldn't fund anything requiring appropriations with Congress, so she won't get that. She can consider and try to maximize what her lawyers think she can do through Agency power and executive order, but will face criticism of overreach and tyranny, and legal challenges including up to the Supreme Court, every step of the way. I don't know how much she'd let the cries of her perennial opponents get to her and make her back off on executive actions, or the whispers of the faint-hearted in her own coalition. She might, out of caution. Or, she might tough it out. Even so, without appropriated funds to spend, her resources to mitigate economic free-fall are far less than what the Trump administration employed in fighting to survive.
So she's out in 2020 to pretty much whoever the Republicans put up.
