07/31/15 – Eli Clifton – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I got Eli Clifton on the line.
I admit I didn't really realize this article was more than a week old when I saw Gareth put it out there.
But it is a follow-up to our last interview anyway, and I had missed it.
So thanks to Gareth, and I don't care.
Anti-Iran deal groups backed by, get ready, everybody, $145 million.
Welcome back to the show, Eli.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here, as always.
Great work here.
Thank you.
So first of all, tell us the good news about who all in power, or with power, think tanks and whatever, interest groups, I don't know, moveon.org, anybody, is actually lining up to push for the deal in Washington, D.C.?
Well, I think you just actually hit on the follow-up article that I published at the beginning of this week, which does discuss the fact that there are a number of groups putting money in and actively lobbying to support the deal.
They would include the Ploughshares Fund, J Street, MoveOn, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Americans for Peace Now, the Arms Control Association, the National Iranian American Council.
And they are all actively fundraising.
They are all spending on ad buys.
They are all working the hill and working their contacts to promote the deal and to get Democrats to hold the line and to support the deal.
So that's the good news.
Now, as far as, well, just there, I'm sorry, I had missed that article, too, Eli, I'm just way behind this week.
But the groups that you just mentioned, the Friends Committee, of course, they do great work lobbying.
I don't know how much real money and ability, raw manpower they have for lobbying.
Maybe you could enlighten us on that a little bit.
J Street and MoveOn, I guess especially MoveOn.org, that sounds like the most promising one, just in the sense of because it's not really an Israel-oriented group.
It is a Democratic Party-oriented group, right?
So if they really push, they can mobilize real rank-and-file Democrats to do partisan work on this very important single issue.
Absolutely.
And I think you're hitting on what is the good news here, is that these are very much, a number of these groups, even J Street, I would say, are very much out of the Democratic Party machine.
They are very much plugged in to the party.
They have good access on the Hill.
Most of these groups have lobbyists who are certainly working overtime.
This is probably their number one issue right now over the summer.
But the bad news is, I think, something you just hit on there, which is that their budgets are just a lot less than on the other side.
The total budgets of these groups are $33 million in 2013.
Now, obviously, they don't use all of that money on Iran-related stuff, and on the flip side, they're also raising extra money to work on Iran stuff.
But just as a point of comparison, that's $33 million for all those groups together.
That's the Friends Committee, that's Plowshares, that's J Street, that's MoveOn.
All of them together is $33 million, whereas when you look at the biggest groups that are working to oppose the deal, they enjoy the combined $145 million in annual budgets in 2013.
So if you just look at the dollar figures, they are vastly outgunned.
All right.
Now, so, and we talked, the last time we talked, you profiled the millionaires bankrolling this thing, hardcore Likudniks who make no secret about what their agenda is, and that is trumping American foreign policy with Israeli foreign policy, basically.
But now, what's your measure of, and we can get to the votes in the House and that kind of thing in a minute, but just as far as the consensus of people with power, the New York, D.C. corridor, that kind of thing, does it look like this expensive push by them is really making a difference on the margin?
I mean, the people who already agree with their agenda already agree, but are they making a big difference with this money, do you think?
Well, I mean, the key thing for them would be to flip Democrats and to somehow get enough Democrats to flip in the House and Senate that they could somehow start to contemplate the possibility of overriding the president on this.
And I think the likelihood of that right now still seems rather dismal.
It's hard to imagine that occurring while they may lose a few Democrats here or there on the vote, which is now coming up in, what, 50 days or something.
It seems really unlikely that you're going to get enough to make the difference.
Now, we're still early in that process, and right now the focus seems to be on blanketing the airwaves, getting television commercials out there, doing promoted tweets, doing Google ads to try to get people to call their member of Congress, specifically Democrats, and tell them that it's a bad deal and get them to encourage them to vote against it.
The polling numbers so far suggest that Democrats, and especially Jewish Americans, are actually supportive of the deal, and that overall the deal is relatively popular.
Now, these numbers may have changed just with all the hype over the last couple of weeks, but I think right before the deal came out, there was a Washington Post poll that had, I think, 56 percent of Republicans supported the negotiations, and this is after the framework had been announced, you know, the outlines of the deal were known.
Right.
And so far, I think it's, depending on how you ask the questions, you get sometimes slightly different answers, but for the most part, it seems as if the numbers are holding.
I'm just looking here at, I think it was late last week, or it was on Monday, the Cato Institute and YouGov poll put 58 percent of Americans supporting the deal and 40 percent opposing it.
All right.
So now it really just comes down to, well, the Senate and the House, both, I guess, and just the Democrats on the margin, are they going to stand with their party and their president or are they going to bow to the will of the Israel lobby?
And it sounds like, you know, pretty easy argument that they better go along with the president.
But then again, you know, the president's going to be gone in a couple of years and the Israel lobby is going to be around.
And they even announced, I read a thing the other day where they said, hey, you Democrats, we know your names.
And if you think we'll ever forget this, you know, you just watch when we bankroll your primary challengers for the rest of your life, you know, this kind of thing.
That's real pressure.
I mean, these guys are not playing around.
Absolutely.
And that's definitely the threat that they're going to be making.
For what it's worth, I think the tone from the White House has changed.
I think it took this president six and a half years to realize that he was not going to make some sort of common cause with the other side and that over the course of his entire career, he had largely, you know, based his own successes off of, you know, reaching across and in any cooperation and in making deals.
It's, you know, in his tone over the past week, it's very clear that he doesn't expect the Republicans to back him on this, but that he's willing to put all the muscle that he can into getting Democrats to hold the line.
Yeah, well, and it's really now I was going to say now I was.
Yeah, well, see, I started to.
So now I have to say it's such a tragedy that Rand Paul rolled over on this when we could be having such fun watching a fight in the Senate among the Republicans about this issue right now.
Rand Paul seems to have largely dropped off the radar on this issue, which is something that I think surprised a lot of his supporters.
Yeah, he poked his head up just enough to say something horrible and dishonest and then go away again, which I can endorse the last part of that, at least.
But now and so am I is it fair for me to characterize this as simply, you know, just a Netanyahu, Bill Kristol joint going on here.
These are hardcore right wing nationalists, Likud, Nick Israelis and their counterparts here rather than I mean, I guess, you know, you have the broad Republican movement.
But when we're talking about the people who are there, the target, but the people running this thing, is that basically the only interest lining up to try to stop it?
Well, I would certainly encourage people to just examine who's the biggest donor right now to the Republican Party and to this House and Senate on the Republican side.
And that is definitively Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam Adelson.
And they are clearly very close to Benjamin Netanyahu.
They have assisted him in any number of ways, including running a free newspaper in Israel, which is largely seen to be sort of a mouthpiece for for Netanyahu and for the Likud party.
So I think it's pretty fair to say that at least one of the biggest donors behind all of this and who currently holds the most sway over Republican members of the House and Senate in as much as dollars gave gives you sway, which is probably quite a bit, is someone who is very clearly aligned with with Netanyahu and with the Likud party.
Now, there's the American Conservative magazine, but in D.C., there's really no voice of reason from the right on this at all.
Is there?
Well, I mean, every once in a while you get interesting stuff out of The Daily Caller.
I think some of the some of the more libertarians leaning think tanks such as Cato sometimes does some very good stuff.
But I think you're right that right now that sort of the in terms of the bandwidth, it's being dominated by groups that are really in opposition to this.
Yeah.
Well, and Cato doesn't count.
I mean, Doug Bandao, he's a libertarian.
And, you know, those guys, even even Chris Preble and those guys are sometimes a little wishy washy on these issues.
But I don't think they could be called the right necessarily.
And you certainly couldn't say that the Republican establishment.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
But in other words, though, but there's nobody at Heritage saying, I don't know, I like the deal, guys.
I mean, this is just it's a lock on the right.
Basically, it seems like that.
All right.
Hey, listen, you do such a great job doing journalism and coming on the show.
I sure appreciate it, Eli.
Thanks for having me.
All right, y'all.
That's Eli Clifton.
He's at Lobe log dot com.
Lobe log dot com.
Right back.
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