Newenglanddeac
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Seth Moulton 2020
Ongoing Dem Debacle Thread: Commander will kill us all
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Newenglanddeac
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Generals Love Him. Top Democrats Despise Him. Can He Be President Anyway?
Seth Moulton, the junior congressman from Massachusetts, has a war record that appeals to voters and makes opponents nervous.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...congressman-run-president-2020-profile-215428
Seth Moulton, the junior congressman from Massachusetts, has a war record that appeals to voters and makes opponents nervous.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...congressman-run-president-2020-profile-215428
cville deac
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Moulton makes more sense this time around as a veep for Harris, Klobuchar or Gillibrand if 1 of those 3 is the nominee to bring balance to the ticket.
But yeah, I like any of the young guns who are advocating to dump Pelosi.
But yeah, I like any of the young guns who are advocating to dump Pelosi.
Newenglanddeac
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“I genuinely believe that Congress would be better and more effective if we had more service-oriented people in Congress, because I think that a lot of my colleagues—you know, many of whom I love and respect—make pretty self-interested, politically self-interested decisions, when they decide how to vote on things and what policies to support or whom to support in campaigns,” he said. “Anecdotally, I have found that newer members of Congress, younger members of Congress, and especially veterans in Congress, just tend to be more more bipartisan, tend to be willing to rise above the party rhetoric and say, ‘I don’t care what the Democratic position is or the Republican position is on this issue—like, I just want to do what’s right for the country.’
“Because there are a lot of members of Congress who know what the right thing to do is,” he said, “and yet they just get scared and vote the way that they are expected to vote politically.”
Moulton then told me a story about an experience at Officer Candidate School, in Quantico, Virginia. Before Moulton and the other aspiring Marine officers ran through mud and up and down hills with a long, heavy log on their shoulders, the platoon commander asked them about the first rule of this exercise. “Safety,” they said. Wrong. “If safety was the first rule,” the commander shot back, “we wouldn’t be running through a swamp with a log on our shoulders.” The first rule of the log run was teamwork. And the only objective was accomplishing the mission.
It should be the same way in Congress, Moulton said. “Self-preservation shouldn’t be the first instinct in politics. It should be doing the right thing for the country. That’s why you’re fucking there.”
“Because there are a lot of members of Congress who know what the right thing to do is,” he said, “and yet they just get scared and vote the way that they are expected to vote politically.”
Moulton then told me a story about an experience at Officer Candidate School, in Quantico, Virginia. Before Moulton and the other aspiring Marine officers ran through mud and up and down hills with a long, heavy log on their shoulders, the platoon commander asked them about the first rule of this exercise. “Safety,” they said. Wrong. “If safety was the first rule,” the commander shot back, “we wouldn’t be running through a swamp with a log on our shoulders.” The first rule of the log run was teamwork. And the only objective was accomplishing the mission.
It should be the same way in Congress, Moulton said. “Self-preservation shouldn’t be the first instinct in politics. It should be doing the right thing for the country. That’s why you’re fucking there.”
Newenglanddeac
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I disagree. Gotta strike when the timing is right and the timing is right for Moulton. Young, good looking, incredible resume, puts country over Party, educated....he is the anti trump.
Gillibrand will be Hillary 2.0 due to her relationships with the Clintons.
Newenglanddeac
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Another thought:
Biden/Moulton 2020
And Biden promises to step down after one term.
Biden/Moulton 2020
And Biden promises to step down after one term.
ImTheCaptain
I disagree with you
I’ll wait to see if he’s MDMH Approved
Newenglanddeac
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I wouldn't consider him a hawk or someone who would blindly follow the Pentagon by any means.
In Moulton’s third and fourth tours, he worked directly for Petraeus, who had first spotted Moulton at a briefing in Najaf. “I thought, ‘Man, this guy is sharp,’” said Petraeus, whose focus on counterinsurgency tactics is widely credited with stabilizing Iraq, when we talked this month. “And he was forthright. He wasn’t pulling any punches.” He worked for Petraeus in 2005 and then in 2007 and 2008—after he had been off active duty and could have stayed stateside. But he and two other handpicked Marines returned to a country that had become a hornet’s nest of sectarian strife. Living in remote, bare-bones buildings spray-painted with warnings of “Americans Go Home,” Moulton was tasked with getting different tribal heads to work together, to persuade Iraqis to fight rebels instead of joining them. Along with Alex Lemons and Ann Gildroy Fox, the other two members of Petraeus’ select “Team Phoenix,” Moulton’s efforts frequently consisted of day-and-night, door-to-door foot patrol—face-to-face diplomacy rather than sheer force. “You can’t kill or capture yourself out of an industrial-strength insurgency. You have to try to get them on your side. You have to serve where they live,” Petraeus explained to me. “And I needed him to show that was viable, and survivable.” How to earn their trust? “We traveled alone with Iraqis, sometimes in very soft vehicles, to demonstrate our willingness to lose our lives with them,” Fox said. “When you put yourself in these vulnerable positions, it shows people you believe in what you’re doing. And he did that all the time.”
“There was no career choice he could have made that would have made me more unhappy, except if he had chosen a life of crime,” Moulton's mother said about his decision to join the Marines. Above, Moulton is photographed on deployment in Najaf, Iraq.
Moulton had a way about him, though, that rankled “a lot of people with a lot of rank on the collar,” as Fox put it. “There were times,” Petraeus acknowledged, “when he got crosswise with people.” Years after the late nights in the office of the Phillipian at Andover, and years before he would ruffle feathers on Capitol Hill, Moulton in Iraq could present as confident or cocky, impressive or insufferable. “The Iraqis that we worked with, high-ranking, low-ranking, they absolutely loved Seth,” Fox said. “It was our own establishment that would stand in his way and work within the system to get accolades or credit for themselves to promote their careers. And Seth just blew right through them.”
Moulton became less and less hesitant about voicing his opinions, even if they were unpopular. While supporting the mission, he criticized the methods. And he questioned the commitment of the United States as a whole—of the majority of its citizens, who weren’t serving and sacrificing the way he was. By late August 2004, toward the end of the Battle of Najaf, he hinted at his dissatisfaction in an interview with a radio reporter. Back in the U.S., President Bush had stood in front of a banner that said “Mission Accomplished,” some 15 months before—and here was Moulton, in the midst of the most ferocious combat he had experienced. “We will do whatever our commander in chief tells us to do and will go to the ends of the earth for him,” Moulton said on NPR—before suggesting he wouldn’t be supporting Bush that November in his reelection campaign against John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran. “There’s one thing that he can’t order us to do, and that’s how to vote in November.”
In 2006, in between his third and fourth tours, Moulton wrote an op-ed in the New York Times. The situation in Iraq was deteriorating, and militias were spreading, because American troops were retreating—“as advocated by several members of Congress,” he said. And too many of the troops who were there, he argued, weren’t being used properly. “We can’t win this war from the Burger Kings and rec centers of our biggest bases,” he wrote.
And by 2007, in No End in Sight, the documentary by Ferguson, Moulton let loose.
He criticized the lack of planning and foresight of the politicians who used their power to put him there. “After the fall of Baghdad, we had no idea what really was going to happen, and there certainly didn’t seem to be much of a plan,” he said. “Personally, I feel the war would be going differently if you had, um, leadership that really understood, No. 1, what it’s like to be on the ground, had actually served in the armed forces—and, No. 2, really had a good managerial grasp of making this thing work.” He lambasted the dispiriting lack of armored Humvees and “short-sighted” civilian contractors—people who were there, after all, only because there weren’t enough actual troops.
Ferguson gave him the last word of the film.
“And are you telling me that’s the best America can do?” said a stern-faced Moulton. “No. Don’t tell me that. Don’t tell the Marines who fought for a month in Najaf that. Don’t tell the Marines who are still fighting every day in Fallujah that that’s the best America can do.” Moulton shook his head. His chin quivered. “That makes me angry,” he said. The screen went black.
The premiere of No End in Sight was at the Sundance festival in Park City, Utah, where a mostly liberal crowd of some 1,500 gave it a standing ovation. Ferguson walked to the front of the auditorium. He introduced the people from the film who were present. “And when I introduced Seth, there was just this thunderous applause. It was astounding,” Ferguson told me this month. “That’s the first time I thought, ‘Hmm, this is a guy who could end up going someplace in public office.’”
There is a story that has congealed around Moulton that goes like this: He was working as the managing director of the Texas Central Railway, trying to develop high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston, when Gergen mentioned him at a donor breakfast in Boston, and Cherniack and Ferson were there, and they were intrigued and called him and urged him to move back and run for Congress—and that this was the first time he had considered the idea. All of that is true—except the part about how he hadn’t thought about it before. In 2004, in Najaf, fighting in that cemetery, losing Marines, one of his men told him, “You know, Sir, you ought to run for Congress someday so that this shit doesn’t happen again,” Moulton would say more than a decade later. And in early 2008, Moulton and Lemons and some other Marines were making frozen hamburgers on the roof of their barracks in southern Iraq, talking about exit plans. Moulton was going back to Harvard, pursuing graduate degrees at the business school and the Kennedy School of Government. After that, though, he might run for Congress, he said.
“Seth said, ‘Guys, I don’t want this to happen to the next generation of guys in the Marine Corps,’” Lemons told me—sent to a war that shouldn’t have been started and wasn’t run right once it was. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I get this. I could see you doing this.’”
Lemons’ voice crackled with conviction. “Many people who had power to speak up didn’t,” he said. “And it led to disastrous consequences.”
In Moulton’s third and fourth tours, he worked directly for Petraeus, who had first spotted Moulton at a briefing in Najaf. “I thought, ‘Man, this guy is sharp,’” said Petraeus, whose focus on counterinsurgency tactics is widely credited with stabilizing Iraq, when we talked this month. “And he was forthright. He wasn’t pulling any punches.” He worked for Petraeus in 2005 and then in 2007 and 2008—after he had been off active duty and could have stayed stateside. But he and two other handpicked Marines returned to a country that had become a hornet’s nest of sectarian strife. Living in remote, bare-bones buildings spray-painted with warnings of “Americans Go Home,” Moulton was tasked with getting different tribal heads to work together, to persuade Iraqis to fight rebels instead of joining them. Along with Alex Lemons and Ann Gildroy Fox, the other two members of Petraeus’ select “Team Phoenix,” Moulton’s efforts frequently consisted of day-and-night, door-to-door foot patrol—face-to-face diplomacy rather than sheer force. “You can’t kill or capture yourself out of an industrial-strength insurgency. You have to try to get them on your side. You have to serve where they live,” Petraeus explained to me. “And I needed him to show that was viable, and survivable.” How to earn their trust? “We traveled alone with Iraqis, sometimes in very soft vehicles, to demonstrate our willingness to lose our lives with them,” Fox said. “When you put yourself in these vulnerable positions, it shows people you believe in what you’re doing. And he did that all the time.”
“There was no career choice he could have made that would have made me more unhappy, except if he had chosen a life of crime,” Moulton's mother said about his decision to join the Marines. Above, Moulton is photographed on deployment in Najaf, Iraq.
Moulton had a way about him, though, that rankled “a lot of people with a lot of rank on the collar,” as Fox put it. “There were times,” Petraeus acknowledged, “when he got crosswise with people.” Years after the late nights in the office of the Phillipian at Andover, and years before he would ruffle feathers on Capitol Hill, Moulton in Iraq could present as confident or cocky, impressive or insufferable. “The Iraqis that we worked with, high-ranking, low-ranking, they absolutely loved Seth,” Fox said. “It was our own establishment that would stand in his way and work within the system to get accolades or credit for themselves to promote their careers. And Seth just blew right through them.”
Moulton became less and less hesitant about voicing his opinions, even if they were unpopular. While supporting the mission, he criticized the methods. And he questioned the commitment of the United States as a whole—of the majority of its citizens, who weren’t serving and sacrificing the way he was. By late August 2004, toward the end of the Battle of Najaf, he hinted at his dissatisfaction in an interview with a radio reporter. Back in the U.S., President Bush had stood in front of a banner that said “Mission Accomplished,” some 15 months before—and here was Moulton, in the midst of the most ferocious combat he had experienced. “We will do whatever our commander in chief tells us to do and will go to the ends of the earth for him,” Moulton said on NPR—before suggesting he wouldn’t be supporting Bush that November in his reelection campaign against John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran. “There’s one thing that he can’t order us to do, and that’s how to vote in November.”
In 2006, in between his third and fourth tours, Moulton wrote an op-ed in the New York Times. The situation in Iraq was deteriorating, and militias were spreading, because American troops were retreating—“as advocated by several members of Congress,” he said. And too many of the troops who were there, he argued, weren’t being used properly. “We can’t win this war from the Burger Kings and rec centers of our biggest bases,” he wrote.
And by 2007, in No End in Sight, the documentary by Ferguson, Moulton let loose.
He criticized the lack of planning and foresight of the politicians who used their power to put him there. “After the fall of Baghdad, we had no idea what really was going to happen, and there certainly didn’t seem to be much of a plan,” he said. “Personally, I feel the war would be going differently if you had, um, leadership that really understood, No. 1, what it’s like to be on the ground, had actually served in the armed forces—and, No. 2, really had a good managerial grasp of making this thing work.” He lambasted the dispiriting lack of armored Humvees and “short-sighted” civilian contractors—people who were there, after all, only because there weren’t enough actual troops.
Ferguson gave him the last word of the film.
“And are you telling me that’s the best America can do?” said a stern-faced Moulton. “No. Don’t tell me that. Don’t tell the Marines who fought for a month in Najaf that. Don’t tell the Marines who are still fighting every day in Fallujah that that’s the best America can do.” Moulton shook his head. His chin quivered. “That makes me angry,” he said. The screen went black.
The premiere of No End in Sight was at the Sundance festival in Park City, Utah, where a mostly liberal crowd of some 1,500 gave it a standing ovation. Ferguson walked to the front of the auditorium. He introduced the people from the film who were present. “And when I introduced Seth, there was just this thunderous applause. It was astounding,” Ferguson told me this month. “That’s the first time I thought, ‘Hmm, this is a guy who could end up going someplace in public office.’”
There is a story that has congealed around Moulton that goes like this: He was working as the managing director of the Texas Central Railway, trying to develop high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston, when Gergen mentioned him at a donor breakfast in Boston, and Cherniack and Ferson were there, and they were intrigued and called him and urged him to move back and run for Congress—and that this was the first time he had considered the idea. All of that is true—except the part about how he hadn’t thought about it before. In 2004, in Najaf, fighting in that cemetery, losing Marines, one of his men told him, “You know, Sir, you ought to run for Congress someday so that this shit doesn’t happen again,” Moulton would say more than a decade later. And in early 2008, Moulton and Lemons and some other Marines were making frozen hamburgers on the roof of their barracks in southern Iraq, talking about exit plans. Moulton was going back to Harvard, pursuing graduate degrees at the business school and the Kennedy School of Government. After that, though, he might run for Congress, he said.
“Seth said, ‘Guys, I don’t want this to happen to the next generation of guys in the Marine Corps,’” Lemons told me—sent to a war that shouldn’t have been started and wasn’t run right once it was. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I get this. I could see you doing this.’”
Lemons’ voice crackled with conviction. “Many people who had power to speak up didn’t,” he said. “And it led to disastrous consequences.”
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ImTheCaptain
I disagree with you
i never said I was anti-war
cville deac
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I don't think Gillibrand's problem is her relationship with the Clintons, which has gotten icy of late with her calling Bubba out. I see her problem as being seen as too much of a 1 issue candidate. I don't see her that way and like her, but in making a name for herself, I think she is doing that. Add to that she doesn't ooze charisma, though she has more than Klubochar. The more I think about it, the more I think Harris is the strongest female candidate the Dems could field.
I also don't like your Biden suggestion. Not only age, but I gotta think he has some sexual baggage that has yet to be uncovered. The party needs to look younger. Dump Pelosi and just say no to Biden, Bernie and Warren as nominees. I like your Moulton suggestion, and like Numbers, I do like Booker. Gimme either of those 2, Harris or Hickenlooper. And if it is a male nominee, please thoroughly vet his sexual history.
avalon
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After complaints of king-making in the 2016 race, running a former VP with an appointed successor seems like a really awful idea.
Also, while I love Biden and think he would have won in 2016, he has the same baggage as Clinton regarding the war on drugs. Plus he was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when they grilled Anita Hill.
I'm gonna listen to the PSA interviews of Klobachur and Moulton
Newenglanddeac
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Yeah these are all really good points.
I agree Biden comes with some risks but I really think you need someone who can go toe to toe with Trump in the "putdown" department. If he's still around in 3 years, he's still going to be a complete attention whore and I think Democrats/Independents need someone who can clip his wings in a respectful (i.e. non-Trumpian) way. I think Cuban could play this role as well but I am strongly opposed to candidates without some form of public service experience.
Highland Deac
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I'd prefer somebody other than Biden as well as long as they've got a serious chance, but if the other candidates look weak I do think Biden could beat Trump. I think he would have beaten Trump in 2016. He's only four years older than Trump, so the age issue would be a hard one for the GOP to make. Biden also has a working-class, blue-collar background and feel that many other Democrats lack, which I think would be to his advantage against Trump, and so would the Obama connection with other Democrats. He could definitely go toe-to-toe with Trump in televised debates and probably more than hold his own, even in the quips and put-downs department. My problem with Biden, as others have mentioned, is that he's been around for a very long time, which means he certainly has skeletons in his closet (sexual, financial, or otherwise) that you know the GOP will discover and exploit to the fullest. Also, he's hardly a fresh face, which may hurt him, although given that Trump won't be a fresh face in 2020 either it probably won't be a real issue. Hopefully the Dems will do well in this year's elections and find some fresh, dynamic candidates, but if not Biden would probably do about as well as anybody against Trump.
PhDeac
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He's been around a long time and was VP for 8 years. If the GOP had skeletons, I think they would have found them.
sailordeac
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I still think that the inimitable Maxine or the whiny Elizabeth would be best. Indeed, they could form a dream team.
Newenglanddeac
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Just like his Dear Leader...so cute.