Barack Obama Says He Would Have Beaten Donald Trump

December 27, 2016

Washington, Dec 27: President Barack Obama said in an interview released Monday that he could have beaten Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump "if I had run again."

In his most pointed critique yet, Obama said Hillary Clinton's campaign acted too cautiously out of a mistaken belief that victory was all but certain.

"If you think you're winning, then you have a tendency, just like in sports, maybe to play it safer," Obama said in the interview with former adviser and longtime friend David Axelrod, a CNN analyst, for his "The Axe Files" podcast.

The president said Clinton "understandably . . . looked and said, well, given my opponent and the things he's saying and what he's doing, we should focus on that."

Trump took exception to this critique, tweeting out later in the day that "President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! - jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc."

Obama stressed his admiration for Clinton and said she had been the victim of unfair attacks. But, as he has in other exit interviews, Obama insisted that her defeat was not a rejection of the eight years of his presidency. To the contrary, he argued that he had put together a winning coalition that stretched across the country but that the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign had failed to follow through on it.

"I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I - if I had run again and articulated it - I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it," the president said.

"See, I think the issue was less that Democrats have somehow abandoned the white working class, I think that's nonsense," Obama said. "Look, the Affordable Care Act benefits a huge number of Trump voters. There are a lot of folks in places like West Virginia or Kentucky who didn't vote for Hillary, didn't vote for me, but are being helped by this . . . The problem is, is that we're not there on the ground communicating not only the dry policy aspects of this, but that we care about these communities, that we're bleeding for these communities."

Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said via email that the campaign declined to comment.

Axelrod, in an interview with The Washington Post, said he believed Obama went further than he had before in critiquing Clinton's campaign.

"This was all in service of making the point that he believes that his progressive vision and the vision he ran on is still a majority view in this country," Axelrod said. "He chooses to be hopeful about the future."

Obama could not have run again; the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution states that "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice."

Still, Obama's suggestion that he could have won if he ran stoked debate Monday among political observers.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican who has been an adviser to Trump, said in an interview that "Obama doesn't know and neither does anyone else. Obama would have increased the turnout in the African American community, but he also might have increased the repudiation of him among those who felt they were betrayed.

"All of the lies he told about Obamacare, 'keeping your doctor' . . . would have come back to haunt him. It would have been a totally different race."

Steve Hildebrand, a Democrat who oversaw Obama's 2008 campaign in battleground states, said the president had an ability to communicate with lower-income workers that Clinton lacked. He said he sent the Clinton campaign 15 emails in which he said he told them "you are not communicating with lower-income workers, you are not connecting with them."

In the podcast interview, Axelrod did not press Obama on many of the most controversial parts of his presidency, such as not taking action to prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Syria.

The president, who has done relatively few interviews with mainstream media organizations, repeated his long-stated complaint that the media has filtered his message and that he is subject to unfair criticism by outlets such as Fox News.

Obama also blamed some of his problems during his presidency on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a longtime adversary who famously said in 2010: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

McConnell failed in that goal, but Obama said the senator was successful in blocking many of his initiatives and setting the groundwork for Trump's victory.

McConnell's strategy from a "tactical perspective was pretty smart and well executed," the president said. The Republican leader found ways to "just throw sand in the gears" in a manner that fed into people's beliefs that things were going badly. Obama said that, as a result, Republicans blocked action that could have helped more people recover from the Great Recession.

The strategy, Obama maintained, was that "if we just say no, then that will puncture the balloon, that all this talk about hope and change and no red state and blue state is - is proven to be a mirage, a fantasy. And if we can - if we can puncture that vision, then we have a chance to win back seats in the House."

A McConnell spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Obama stressed that he doesn't plan to get involved in day-to-day responses to a Trump presidency, just as former president George W. Bush has remained mostly on the sidelines during the Obama years. But Obama made it clear that he will be more of an activist in the long run. He said he plans to help mobilize and train a younger generation of Democratic leaders and will speak out if his core beliefs are challenged. He also said he is working on writing a book.

His post-presidential "long-term interest," Obama said, is "to build that next generation of leadership; organizers, journalists, politicians. I see them in America, I see them around the world - 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds who are just full of talent, full of idealism. And the question is how do we link them up? How do we give them the tools for them to bring about progressive change? And I want to use my presidential center as a mechanism for developing that next generation of talent." He said he didn't want to be someone "who's just hanging around reliving old glories."

Obama in the interview also reflected on his years at college, particularly Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1983. He said he was rereading "old journals" and letters to girls that he was "courting," and found them unreadable. He found himself to be "wildly pretentious," recalling how he begged off going to parties so he could read the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The women on campus found him "too intense," he said.

Looking back, said the president of the United States, "I should've tried, like, you know, 'Wanna go to a movie?' "

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Vietnamese billionaire Truong My Lan sentenced to DEATH for $44bn fraud

News Network

April 11,2024

Real estate tycoon Truong My Lan was sentenced Thursday to death by a court in Ho Chi Minh city in southern Vietnam in the country's largest financial fraud case ever, state media Thanh Nien said.

It's a rare verdict - she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime, i.e. looting one of the country's largest banks over a period of 11 years.

The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court's way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.

The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.

The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five defendants were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges.

"There has never been a show trial like this, I think, in the communist era," says David Brown, a retired US state department official with long experience in Vietnam. "There has certainly been nothing on this scale."

The trial was the most dramatic chapter so far in the "Blazing Furnaces" anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.

A conservative ideologue steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.

The campaign has seen two presidents and two deputy prime ministers forced to resign, and hundreds of officials disciplined or jailed. Now one of the country's richest women has joined their ranks.

Truong My Lan comes from a Sino-Vietnamese family in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. It has long been the commercial engine of the Vietnamese economy, dating well back to its days as the anti-communist capital of South Vietnam, with a large, ethnic Chinese community.

She started as a market stall vendor, selling cosmetics with her mother, but began buying land and property after the Communist Party ushered in a period of economic reform, known as Doi Moi, in 1986. By the 1990s, she owned a large portfolio of hotels and restaurants.

Although Vietnam is best known outside the country for its fast-growing manufacturing sector, as an alternative supply chain to China, most wealthy Vietnamese made their money developing and speculating in property.

All land is officially state-owned. Getting access to it often relies on personal relationships with state officials. Corruption escalated as the economy grew, and became endemic.

By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.

Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.

They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.

The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank's lending.

According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.

That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.

She was also accused of bribing generously to ensure her loans were never scrutinised. One of those who was tried used to be a chief inspector at the central bank, who was accused of accepting a $5m bribe.

The mass of officially sanctioned publicity about the case channelled public anger over corruption against Truong My Lan, whose fatigued, unmade-up appearance in court was in stark contrast to the glamorous publicity photos people had seen of her in the past.

But questions are also being asked about why she was able to keep on with the alleged fraud for so long.

"I am puzzled," says Le Hong Hiep who runs the Vietnam Studies Programme at the ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

"Because it wasn't a secret. It was well known in the market that Truong My Lan and her Van Thinh Phat group were using SCB as their own piggy bank to fund the mass acquisition of real estate in the most prime locations.

"It was obvious that she had to get the money from somewhere. But then it is such a common practice. SCB is not the only bank that is used like this. So perhaps the government lost sight because there are so many similar cases in the market."

David Brown believes she was protected by powerful figures who have dominated business and politics in Ho Chi Minh City for decades. And he sees a bigger factor in play in the way this trial is being run: a bid to reassert the authority of the Communist Party over the free-wheeling business culture of the south.

"What Nguyen Phu Trong and his allies in the party are trying to do is to regain control of Saigon, or at least stop it from slipping away.

"Up until 2016 the party in Hanoi pretty much let this Sino-Vietnamese mafia run the place. They would make all the right noises that local communist leaders are supposed to make, but at the same time they were milking the city for a substantial cut of the money that was being made down there."

At 79 years old, party chief Nguyen Phu Trong is in shaky health, and will almost certainly have to retire at the next Communist Party Congress in 2026, when new leaders will be chosen.

He has been one of the longest-serving and most consequential secretary-generals, restoring the authority of the party's conservative wing to a level not seen since the reforms of the 1980s. He clearly does not want to risk permitting enough openness to undermine the party's hold on political power.

But he is trapped in a contradiction. Under his leadership the party has set an ambitious goal of reaching rich country status by 2045, with a technology and knowledge-based economy. This is what is driving the ever-closer partnership with the United States.

Yet faster growth in Vietnam almost inevitably means more corruption. Fight corruption too much, and you risk extinguishing a lot of economic activity. Already there are complaints that bureaucracy has slowed down, as officials shy away from decisions which might implicate them in a corruption case.

"That's the paradox," says Le Hong Hiep. "Their growth model has been reliant on corrupt practices for so long. Corruption has been the grease that that kept the machinery working. If they stop the grease, things may not work any more."

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