This page is an archive — and is not actively maintained — of coverage of the 2020 election, which was made possible in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. For CFR’s full coverage of President-Elect Joe Biden’s foreign policy, please visit the Transition 2021 page.
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  • Election 2020
    Meet Joe Walsh, Republican Presidential Candidate
    Buyer’s remorse. That is perhaps the best description of the situation that former Illinois Congressman and radio talk show host Joe Walsh finds himself in. Back in 2016, he championed Donald Trump’s presidential bid, going so far as to tweet that he would “grab his musket” if Trump wasn’t elected. But now he thinks the president is “a madman,” someone who is “completely unfit and unhinged.” The result is what Walsh admits is a longshot bid to win the Republican presidential nomination. Should he defy the odds, he would become the first graduate of a Big Ten university to be elected president, though not the first graduate of a Big Ten university to become president. The Basics Name: William Joseph “Joe” Walsh Date of Birth: December 27, 1961 Place of Birth: North Barrington, Illinois Religion: Roman Catholic Political Party: Republican Marital Status: Married (Helen Miller) Children: Three children and two step children Alma mater: University of Iowa (BA), University of Chicago (MPP) Career: Conservative talk show host (2013-2019), U.S. Representative (2011-2013) Campaign Website:  http://www.joewalsh.org/ Twitter Handle: @WalshFreedom Walsh’s Story Walsh was one of nine children born into a conservative Irish-Catholic family in a far northern suburb of Chicago. In 1980, he graduated from Barrington High School, where he was senior class president. He started his college career at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. In 1982, he transferred sixty-five miles down I-80 to the University of Iowa, where he eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in English. In 1991, he added a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago. In between degrees, he tried his hand at acting and studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York City. Walsh has also worked as a teacher, fundraiser, and financier. Walsh first ran for Congress in 1996. He positioned himself as “open and tolerant,” not “some right-wing conservative,” and he supported abortion rights and gun control. He lost by twenty-six points. Two years later, he set his eyes on a seat in the Illinois State Legislature. He lost again. The third time, however, was the charm. In 2010, Walsh rode the Tea Party wave to a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Unlike his two state races, in his congressional race he staked out hardline conservative views. Most notably, he abandoned his pro-life stance, saying that after seven years of prayer he had become pro-life without exception. Even then, he won by just 290 votes out of the more than 200,000 votes cast. Walsh’s stint in Washington was brief. He lost by ten percentage points to Tammy Duckworth, a double amputee veteran of the Iraq war who is now Illinois’s junior senator. Walsh lost in part because redistricting made his district friendlier to a Democratic candidate. But he was also hurt by his own behavior, which included failing to make his child support payments and shouting at his constituents. Democrats persuaded the rock guitarist Joe Walsh, who recorded the classic Rocky Mountain Way before joining the Eagles, to criticize his political namesake. With Washington in the rearview mirror, Walsh began a new career as a conservative radio talk show host. The Joe Walsh Show debuted on a local Chicago station in 2013. The show gradually added new markets and became syndicated in 2017. Walsh championed the “birther” conspiracy theory on his show and pushed the equally false claim that President Obama is secretly a Muslim. Once Walsh announced his presidential candidacy, his network canceled the show. Walsh cites Trump’s press conference in Helsinki in July 2018 as the breaking point for his support for the president. Walsh says that by siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the U.S. intelligence community, the president made it clear he did not care about the Constitution and wasn’t ready to defend U.S. interests. Walsh’s Announcement Walsh announced his candidacy during an interview on ABC’s This Week. He was blunt about why he entered the race: "I'm running against Trump because he's morally unfit. Period. It's about Trump. It's not about the issues. It's about Trump." Walsh also apologized for supporting Trump’s candidacy and for pushing the myth that Obama is secretly a Muslim. He admitted that he never believed the story he pushed so hard on his radio show. Walsh released an announcement video in conjunction with his appearance on This Week: Other than making a brief reference to Trump siding with Putin over the U.S. intelligence community, the video doesn’t discuss foreign policy—or any issues for that matter. Walsh’s Message Walsh’s campaign slogan is “Be Brave.” He sees the election as a referendum on Trump rather than a contest of policy ideas. Walsh’s Foreign Policy Views Unsurprisingly for a candidate who says the 2020 campaign is about Trump’s character rather than his policies, Walsh hasn’t said much about foreign policy. He is a fan of free trade and a critic of Trump’s trade policy. He argues that Trump has pursued an erratic policy that is triggering a slowdown in investment and hurting the American middle-class. Walsh has pledged to undo the tariffs Trump has imposed. Like most other presidential challengers, and the president himself, Walsh supports bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan. Walsh has vowed to be “more pro-Israel” than Trump. The former congressman opposes the two-state solution for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, dismissing the idea as “insanity.” He also supports Israel’s right to annex the West Bank, with the Palestinians living there given “limited voting power.” Walsh says that “humans have played a role in climate change and that the Republican Party needs to acknowledge that a warming planet is a problem." Before his personal epiphany on Trump, Walsh applauded the president’s decision to cut federal spending on climate change research. Walsh supports building a wall and tightening border security. He views asylum as an issue separate from the border wall and says he does not want to separate families at the border. He thinks that stronger border security is necessary to prevent “terrible diseases from overtaking” the United States. More on Walsh In 2018, Walsh appeared on Showtime’s “Who is America?” The political satire has Walsh endorsing an “intensive three-week Kinderguardian course” that “introduces specially selected children from 12 to 4 years old to pistols, rifles, semiautomatics, and a rudimentary knowledge of mortars. In less than a month—less than a month—a first-grader can become a first grenade-er.” The video ends with Walsh saying, “Happy shooting, kids." Walsh claims that the show’s star, Sacha Baron Cohen, tricked him into uttering those lines. Walsh wrote an op-ed for the New York Times back in August in which he made the “case for President Trump to face a Republican primary challenger.” New York magazine interviewed Walsh back in September. He admitted he was “stunned and disappointed that a bigger Republican isn’t challenging” Trump. The Center for Public Integrity compiled “9 Things to Know About Joe Walsh.” The Hill compiled “5 controversial things Joe Walsh has said.” Walsh answered eleven questions from the New York Times on executive power. In response to a question about the limits of any presidential war power, he answered: “On the matter of the military and use of force, our founders assigned to Congress the power to declare war and to support the military, as a means to ensure that the President could not abuse his role as Commander-in-Chief. This balance reflects very practical logic: Through our elected representatives, we, the people, should have a say before we use military force overseas, imperil the lives of our men and women in uniform, and spend taxpayer money on expensive wars.” Anna Shortridge and Caroline Kantis assisted in the preparation of this post.
  • Election 2020
    The President's Inbox: Should the United States Rethink Its Trade Policy?
    Each week between now and the Iowa caucuses, I’m talking with two experts with differing views on how the United States should handle a foreign policy challenge it faces. These special episodes are part of CFR’s Election 2020 activities, which are made possible in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
  • Election 2020
    Should the United States Rethink Its Trade Policy?
    Podcast
    In this episode of our special Election 2020 series of The President’s Inbox, Jennifer Hillman and Thea M. Lee join host James M. Lindsay to discuss past and current U.S. trade policy.
  • Election 2020
    Meet Deval Patrick, Democratic Presidential Candidate
    Update: Deval Patrick announced on February 12, 2020, that he was ending his campaign for president. Deval Patrick is testing the accuracy of the old saying, “Better late than never.” Last December the former Massachusetts governor announced he would not run for president in 2020. Among the reasons he gave for sitting out the race was the “cruelty of our elections process.” He now says a different reason kept him from running, namely, his wife had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. She is now cancer-free. Just as important, no Democrat is running away with the nomination. Patrick himself acknowledges that his late start means he faces long odds: “If running for president is a Hail Mary under any circumstances, this is like a Hail Mary from two stadiums over.” Should that Hail Mary connect, Patrick would become the second African-American president and the first president from the state of Massachusetts since John F. Kennedy. For his part, JFK didn’t announce his presidential candidacy until January 1960, just eleven months before Election Day. But that was a different time. The Basics Name:  Deval Laurdine Patrick Date of Birth:  July 31, 1956 Place of Birth:  Chicago, Illinois Religion: Presbyterian Political Party: Democrat Marital Status:  Diane Bemus (m. 1985) Children: Sarah and Katherine Alma Mater: Harvard University (BA, JD) Career: Managing director for Bain Capital (2015-2019), governor of Massachusetts (2007-2015), executive vice president and general counsel for Coca-Cola Company, general counsel for Texaco, assistant U.S. attorney for the Civil Rights Division (1994-1997), lawyer, Legal Defense Fund staffer (1983- 1986) Campaign Website: https://devalpatrick2020.com/ Twitter Handle: @DevalPatrick Patrick’s Announcement Patrick announced his presidential campaign on November 14 the way may of his Democratic rivals have; he released a video. The video tells the story of how Patrick rose from the hardscrabble south side of Chicago to the governorship of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He worries that while he has “had a chance to live my American dream,” he has “seen the path to that dream gradually closing off bit by bit” for other Americans. Patrick didn’t mention foreign policy in the video. Patrick’s Story Patrick was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. His father was a saxophone player who left the family when Patrick was young to join a jazz group in New York. One of Patrick’s middle school teachers recognized his intellectual talent and persuaded his mother to sign him up for a program that sends bright minority students to top high schools. Patrick went on to attend Milton Academy, a prestigious prep school just south of Boston. He later earned both a bachelor’s degree and a law degree from Harvard. In between college and law school he spent a year working on a United Nations youth training initiative in the Darfur region of Sudan. Patrick clerked for a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in  Los Angeles right after law school and then litigated voting-rights and death-penalty cases for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In 1986, he joined the Boston law firm of Hill & Barlow. Eight years later, he moved to the U.S. Department of Justice where he worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Civil Rights Division for three years. Upon returning to Boston, Patrick went to work in the private sector. He served first as Texaco’s general counsel and then as general counsel for Coca-Cola. But eventually he turned to politics. In 2005, he launched a race for the governorship. Most political experts at the time dismissed his chances. It is easy to understand why: he wasn’t a native of the state; he hadn’t held political office before; he didn’t have significant name recognition; a popular state attorney general seemingly had the Democratic nomination sewed up; and a Democrat hadn’t won the Massachusetts governorship in sixteen years. But by running an old-fashioned campaign that literally had him going door to door to meet voters, Patrick captured the Democratic nomination. He then won 55 percent of the vote in the general election, making him Massachusetts’s first black governor and the nation’s second. (Virginia’s Douglas Wilder was the first in 1989.) He was re-elected 2010, though he won 100,000 fewer votes and just 48 percent of the vote the second time around. After his governorship ended, Patrick joined Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm that was co-founded by his immediate predecessor as governor, Mitt Romney. Democrats and Republicans have been critical of the firm, accusing it of engaging in “vulture capitalism.” Patrick joined to kick start a “social impact investing” platform and raised $350 million for the first fund. In 2018, he described the fund as investing “in companies in order to drive social and environmental impact, and it's part of this impact investing industry or trend.” However, Patrick told potential investors he was not planning to run for president. It’s not clear what will happen to the fund given that he resigned from Bain Capital to pursue his presidential bid. Patrick is close friends with former President Barack Obama. Their friendship dates back to the 1990s, before either of them entered politics. They share more than Chicago and Harvard Law School ties. Obama’s two top political consultants in 2008, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, were Patrick’s top advisors in 2006. Rumors have long abounded that Obama wanted Patrick to run for the presidency. Patrick spoke to Obama the day before Patrick announced his campaign run. The former Massachusetts governor said of the former president: “We both agree he has to remain neutral and wait and see who the nominee is.” Patrick’s Message Patrick’s campaign slogan is “Deval for all.” It summarizes his goal of creating a "better, more sustainable, more inclusive American dream for the next generation.” Patrick’s Foreign Policy As is perhaps unsurprising for someone whose career has focused on domestic issues, Patrick hasn’t said much over the years about foreign policy. He did wade into immigration issues while he was governor. In 2012, he instituted a policy that entitled undocumented immigrants living in Massachusetts to qualify for in-state tuition. He also supported efforts to provide housing to unaccompanied minor migrant children. Patrick sought to tackle climate change during his time as governor. Under his leadership, Massachusetts joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which aims to use market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions. He doesn’t think, however, that cap-and-trade systems are sufficient to solve climate change. We sometimes make a mistake in government in arguing that there is only one solution," he said at a recent event at the University of Michigan. "When you consider a challenge as profound as climate change, it feels to me like we have to be doing a lot of different things simultaneously, and to try to get at the problem at a lot of different levels. Patrick also signed the Green Communities Act as governor, which aimed to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and promote renewable energy. More on Patrick Patrick wrote a memoir back in 2011 entitled A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life. Random House’s Broadway Books gave him a $1.35 million advance for the book. The Boston Globe assessed Patrick’s two terms as governor back in 2015 and concluded: “The picture of Patrick’s legacy that emerged would probably be much more complex than he envisioned that first day overlooking the Common, with some promises fulfilled but others slashed or reshaped by the recession and his rocky relationship with legislators.” Buzzfeed News profiled Patrick when he was considered a potential 2016 presidential candidate. He said “I didn’t have to think about it [a presidential campaign] very long. I never ran for governor to be something else.” Last November the New Yorker profiled Patrick’s presidential prospects, noting “he is a kind of political heir to Barack Obama, and enjoys broad support from people close to the former President.” The Center for Public wrote up “Nine Things to Know About Deval Patrick,” including how in 2007 he repaid the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for using public funds to remodel his office with such things as $10,000 damask drapes. MassLive recently detailed the ups and downs of Patrick’s time as Massachusetts governor. Earlier this month the Atlantic discussed Patrick’s late entry into the presidential race, noting that “with little time, little money, and many potential staff already working for other candidates, a successful Deval Patrick candidacy will require magic of Frank Capra–esque proportions.” During an interview with CBS This Morning, Deval explained why he was running for president. “I’m getting in because I think there’s an opportunity right now for big ideas for as big as the challenges we face and in the crafting and development of those ideas to bring us together.” In an interview with WGBH, Patrick emphasized the importance of having a leader who unites Americans instead of dividing them. “We need leadership not just that isn’t going to divide us the way the incumbent does, but isn’t about dividing us with just better policies attached to it.” Anna Shortridge and Caroline Kantis assisted in the preparation of this post.
  • Election 2020
    Campaign Foreign Policy Roundup: The Fifth Democratic Debate
    Each Friday, I look at what the presidential challengers are saying about foreign policy. This week: the Democratic debate, Israeli settlements, China's human rights abuses, and Bolivia.