Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 158

The Attacks Against Transgender Activists in Pakistan

A Pakistani transgender activist has died of her injuries three days after she was shot seven times.

Alisha, a 23-year-old who went by one name and was a leading voice for transgender rights in the conservative Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, died Wednesday. While details of Sunday’s shooting are still unclear, initial reports say she was shot by a member of a group known for making threats against transgender people. Alisha is one of five activists with Trans Action, an advocacy group for transgender rights, who have been attacked there in recent months.

Alisha’s friends told the Los Angeles Times she was mocked when she arrived at a hospital for treatment:

Staff dithered over whether to place her in the ward for male patients or female patients.

A friend and fellow activist, Farzana Jan, said men at the hospital taunted them outside the emergency room.

“Are your [breasts] real or fake?” some said. One asked if Alisha’s blood was HIV-positive; another asked for Farzana’s phone number and invited her to dance at a party.

Members of Trans Action told the Los Angeles Times that 45 transgender people have been killed in the province in the last two years. Transgender people in Pakistan continue to face discrimination, sometimes being denied education or health care, despite a guarantee for equal rights by the country’s Supreme Court. Same-sex marriage is illegal in Pakistan.

The Death-Penalty Charges Against the Charleston Church Shooter

Federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the man who killed nine people last year in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Dylann Roof, a 22-year-old who wrote about white supremacy on social media, opened fire on a bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last June. All the victims were black, including the church’s pastor, Clementa Pinckney.

The Post and Courier reported Tuesday:

With the decision by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Roof will face the ultimate penalty in two different courtrooms if he’s convicted. In state court, he is set to be tried in January, but his federal trial has not been scheduled.

Surviving victims of the June 17 attack, considered one of the most heinous hate crimes in recent memory, and family members of those who died had differing stances on whether Roof should face execution.

They learned of Lynch’s much-awaited decision during a conference call with federal authorities Tuesday afternoon, less than a month before the one-year anniversary of the shooting. The federal trial has been delayed four times as Lynch considered the case.

The attorney who represents the family members of the victims told The Post and Courier they will support the decision by federal prosecutors. Roof was charged last July with 33 counts of federal crimes, some of which included hate crimes.

The 'Turmoil and Confusion' in Portland's Police Department

The head of the police department in Portland, Oregon, has been placed on temporary leave for misleading authorities about an incident in which he shot one of his close friends while hunting on vacation.

Mayor Charlie Hales placed Police Chief Larry O’Dea on paid administrative leave, saying Tuesday that his actions have created “turmoil and confusion” in the police department. According to The Oregonian:

The move comes more than a month after O'Dea shot his friend in the lower left side of his back while camping and hunting with friends outside of Fields, Oregon, in eastern Oregon. Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said O'Dea and other witnesses to the shooting steered his deputy into thinking the wound was a self-inflicted accident. O'Dea never identified himself as a police officer and never told anyone from Harney County Sheriff's Office that he had accidentally fired the shot from his .22-caliber rifle, Ward said.

O'Dea told Hales on April 25, four days after the shooting, that he had accidentally shot his friend, according to the mayor's spokeswoman Sara Hottman. O'Dea never disclosed the shooting publicly, until reporters asked about it last Friday. Then, he said he negligently discharged his rifle.

Assistant Chief Donna Henderson will now serve as acting chief. The Oregon State Police and the Oregon Department of Justice are opening a criminal investigation into the incident, while the police department will conduct an independent investigation of its own.

Car Manufacturers and Ride-Sharing Apps Become Friends

Two automakers announced Tuesday they would partner and invest in ride-hailing companies––Volkswagen with Gett, an Israeli startup, and Toyota with U.S.-based Uber.

Volkswagen’s deal includes a $300 million investment in Gett, which operates in 60 cities worldwide. Toyota’s partnership with Uber creates a new leasing option for Toyota cars for people who want to drive for the company. Toyota said in a statement it will give Uber access to its fleets of Lexus and Toyota vehicles:

As part of today’s partnership, the companies will create new leasing options in which car purchasers can lease their vehicles from Toyota Financial Services and cover their payments through earnings generated as Uber drivers. The leasing period will be flexible and based on driver needs.

Partnerships with automakers and ride-hailing companies are becoming more common. In January, General Motors invested $500 million in Lyft, the second-largest ride-hailing company. That deal leases cars to the company’s drivers in Chicago.

How Twitter's New Reply System Will Work

At times, Twitter, the world’s third-largest social network, can resemble a religion.

It demands fealty to old and arbitrary rules. It forces followers to learn magic words and incantations. It harbors its own sects and schisms, most of which are poorly documented and little-known beyond the site. It is, in sum, as much a community of practice as a consumer product—and it can determine the shape of its most ardent acolytes’ lives.

Twitter’s cultish aura has long seemed to stymie new users from joining the network. Though its user base ticked up by 5 million during the first three months of 2016, Twitter has never been able to recreate the fast growth that it saw in its early years, especially among Americans. Investors have hoped that by culling some of its more arcane rituals, it might finally attract a wider set.

On Tuesday, Twitter announced steps that it hopes will do just that. The company adjusted and simplified how it handles replies, the main mechanism by which users comment on each others’ posts. But it debuted the changes in a blog post that was itself confusing, especially to users who understood how the old system worked.

After talking to a Twitter representative, I’ve now sorted out some of the confusion. Or, at least, I understand the changes myself.

Here is the biggest difference: When you reply to someone on Twitter, your tweet will no longer begin with an @-reply. Instead, the usernames of everyone you’re replying to will be embedded in the metadata of the tweet. Those usernames will also no longer now count against each tweet’s 140-character limit.

Here is the second biggest difference: If you start a tweet with someone’s username—a move that previously would have made your tweet function like an @-reply—all of your followers will be able to see the tweet. The person’s username will count against the 140-character limit.

Twitter will not change how replies are displayed. If you reply to someone in the new system, only people who follow both you and that person will be able to see your tweet.

This might confuse longtime Twitter users, who have been trained to expect @-mentions and replies to go hand in hand. That is, if someone was replying to one of your tweets, they mentioned your username by default. But Twitter is now effectively severing the connection between replies and @-mentions: If someone mentions your username on Twitter, you will still be shown that tweet in your notifications menu; but when someone replies to you, it will look less like an @-reply. As Twitter writes in their blog post, this change in the software retires the “.@” convention, where you had to put a period in front of someone’s username if you wanted all your followers to see your tweets.  

Twitter took two other steps toward simplifying its service, both less confusing. The first is that people may retweet or quote their own tweets. Previously, someone could only retweet other people’s tweets.

The second is that Twitter will no longer count multimedia—images and videos—against the 140-character limit. As Mike Isaac writes at The New York Times, this will likely make tweets more GIF, video, and image-heavy, pushing them to look more like Facebook posts. (This final change was previewed last week in a Bloomberg News report. Contrary to that report, however, links in tweets will still count against the 140-character limit.)

If this all seems a little handwave-y, it’s because Twitter doesn’t seem to have finished designing the product yet. We don’t know how these new replies will look in action. Its press release says that it is announcing the new features months early to give developers time to plan for them, but it’s also likely signaling to Wall Street that it is continuing to simplify things. Twitter revenue missed expectations during the first quarter of 2016, and the company’s stock has fallen $22 since this time last year. The company remains unprofitable.

Indeed, the most hopeful sign in its press release announcing the new reply system didn’t concern replies at all. The company has also changed its “on-boarding” process—that is, the interface that welcomes new users to the site and gets them set up—since the beginning of the year.

“This new on-boarding flow has resulted in dramatic increases in follows, up 48 percent, and mutual follows, up 56 percent, on average across both iOS and Android OS,” the company said. Mutual follows may be the most important metric on Twitter, since it determines how much a user has found their community on the site.

I still think Twitter has larger problems than its interface— but this isn’t a bad sign.

Why Obama Is Overlooking Human-Rights Worries in Vietnam

When President Obama stood beside Tran Dai Quang, the Vietnamese leader, on Monday and announced the end of America’s arms embargo on Vietnam, he did so despite pleas from human-rights groups to delay a decision until the Communist regime released political prisoners.

Obama portrayed the decision as one based on removing one of the last vestiges of the war, which ended in 1975 with the fall of Saigon. The U.S. would wait two more decades to restore diplomatic relations with its Cold War-era adversary, and it wasn’t until 2000 that an American president, Bill Clinton, visited Vietnam. Six years after that, President George W. Bush followed suit. And while the U.S. has engaged in trade with Vietnam, and has become, in fact, one of the country’s largest trading partners, it maintained the embargo for years, saying its removal depended on improvements in Vietnam’s human-rights record. In recent years, the country has imprisoned more than 100 political dissidents and has cracked down on dissenting speech online—though Human Rights Watch notes an “increasing numbers of bloggers and activists have called publicly for democracy and greater freedoms.”

Obama acknowledged the two countries “still have differences” on human rights. Indeed, as The New York Times reported Tuesday, some of those differences were grounded in the fact that while Obama met with six activists in Hanoi, several others who were scheduled to meet with him were prevented by Vietnamese authorities from doing so. Human Rights Watch, which regards Vietnam’s human-rights record as “dire in all areas,” identified them as Pham Doan Trang, Nguyen Quang, and Ha Huy Son. The organization has been especially critical of Obama’s visit, as is clear in this tweet by its executive director.

Sadly, this pretty much sums up Obama's lifting the Vietnam arms embargo for no real progress on human rights. pic.twitter.com/EmXTFZs3Vu

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) May 24, 2016

But human-rights concerns notwithstanding, Obama’s decision on the arms embargo may have to do as much with Vietnam’s strategic importance as its capacity to buy weapons, and the president’s famous pivot toward Asia.

“[T]he increasingly tense situation in the South China Sea, and Vietnam’s growing strategic and economic importance, outweigh U.S. concerns about Hanoi’s admittedly terrible human rights record,” writes Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. He adds: “The lifting of the embargo, and Vietnam’s increasing willingness to be seen, regionally, as a close partner of the United States, is a sign that Hanoi is abandoning its decades-old strategy of balancing relations between Beijing and Washington.”

Indeed, Vietnam and China have had a history of tensions and conflict. Both claim the Spratlys and Paracel island chains. China’s recent military activity in the South China Sea, where it has built artificial islands, has many of its neighbors worried; but Vietnam is especially so because those islands are only about 300 miles from the Vietnamese coast.

The U.S. has expressed concern over China’s actions in the South China Sea, and Monday’s announcement on the arms embargo may be tied to that concern. The fact that Vietnam is the world’s fifth-largest arms buyer probably didn’t hurt either. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute notes that Vietnam’s arms imports rose almost 700 percent from 2011 to 2015. The country buys most of its weapons from Russia, but has been considering diversifying its supply base, and has already bought some military equipment from Israel. Still, experts note that the lifting of the embargo is unlikely to benefit U.S. arms manufacturers, mainly because U.S. weapons, while more sophisticated, are also more expensive. And even when, in 2014, the U.S. eased the embargo to allow Vietnam to buy non-lethal maritime equipment, the country did not turn to American weapons suppliers.

Obama’s own view of Asia may also have informed his decision. As my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in April, Obama believes “America’s economic future lies in Asia.”

“From his earliest days in office, Obama has been focused on rebuilding the sometimes-threadbare ties between the U.S. and its Asian treaty partners, and he is perpetually on the hunt for opportunities to draw other Asian nations into the U.S. orbit,” Goldberg wrote. “His dramatic opening to Burma was one such opportunity; Vietnam and the entire constellation of Southeast Asian countries fearful of Chinese domination presented others.”

Trade is one part of that equation: Obama has engaged Vietnamese officials on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a key policy goal of the president. Vietnam agreed to recognize independent labor unions in the country as part of the massive agreement that involves 12 countries, including the U.S. and Vietnam. But, as Goldberg pointed out, U.S. strategic interests are another part:

Administration officials have repeatedly hinted to me that Vietnam may one day soon host a permanent U.S. military presence, to check the ambitions of the country it now fears most, China. The U.S. Navy’s return to Cam Ranh Bay would count as one of the more improbable developments in recent American history.

Still, Obama, in his remarks to reporters on Tuesday while meeting with some of the Vietnamese activists, did note that while the U.S. and Vietnam agreed on several things, disagreements remained.

“Vietnam has made remarkable strides, the economy is growing quickly, the Internet is booming, and there’s a growing confidence here,” he said. “But as I indicated yesterday, there’s still areas of significant concerns in terms of areas of free speech, freedom of assembly, accountability with respect to government.”

Soon, Bill Cosby Will Have His Day in Court

A judge ruled Tuesday that Bill Cosby’s trial on charges of sexual assault can go forward despite his lawyers’ attempts to have the charges against the entertainer dismissed.

The 78-year-old actor could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted in the case brought in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, by Andrea Constand, one of his many accusers. She says Cosby sexually assaulted her while she was unconscious.

The allegations stem from a 2005 police report by Constand, who at the time worked for Temple University and who Cosby mentored. The Associated Press reported that Constand told police Cosby violated her as she:

… drifted in and out of consciousness soon after he gave her three blue pills in 2004.

She said she had told Cosby she "trusted" him when he gave her the pills and told her it was herbal medication.

Cosby was charged in December with drugging and sexually assaulting the woman. Cosby’s lawyers have questioned why she continued to see Cosby even after the alleged assault, and why it took a year for her to file a report.

Cosby has been accused of sexual assault by dozens of women, but as of now, Constand’s is the only case in which he faces criminal charges. She was not in the court Tuesday. Instead, an officer read her 2005 statement to the judge. The report came from a civil suit brought by Constand in 2006, and Cosby’s lawyers have argued that he spoke with police at the time with the understanding that his testimony would not be used against him in a criminal case. The judge dismissed that argument in February.

That was the decision that led to Tuesday’s ruling. The judge set an arraignment date for July 20, but Cosby waived his right to appear, which sets the case on a path for trial.

The Rhino-Horn Trade Returns to South Africa

The South African government is considering a recent court ruling that would legalize the rhino-horn trade in the country for the first time in seven years, lifting a ban that had been imposed to reduce poaching.

The court announced the ruling last Friday, and on Tuesday the Minister of Environmental Affairs said it was “considering the implications of the judgment and will brief the public in due course."

South Africa outlawed its internal rhino-horn trade in 2009 in an attempt to stop poaching, saying that any legalized trade, even domestic, will open the black market to unscrupulous international traders. In 2012, a rhino rancher sued the government to drop the ban––and last year it was joined by a second rancher. A South African court ruled against the government in 2015, and the government later appealed. Last week, the Supreme Court of Appeal denied the appeal.

The ruling applies only to domestic trade. It is still illegal to export rhino horns internationally, something that the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora––signed by 181 countries––has outlawed since 1977. Under the regulations stipulated by the court ruling, private buyers and sellers would need a permit from the government to buy or sell rhino horns.

Rhino horns can sell for more than $60,000 per kilogram––more expensive than cocaine and gold––and is used mainly in China and Vietnam, where it’s ground into a powder and sold for its purported medicinal value, the merits of which have never been proven. Millionaire John Hume was one of the ranchers to sue the government, and he owns more than 1,200 rhinos on his ranch in the northwest province of Klerksdorp. In 2007, when a poacher killed one of his rhinos, Hume began cutting off their horns in an effort to prevent poachers from killing again. Since then, he has amassed five tons of horns, an enormous cache that if he were able to legally sell, Hume has said, could go toward rhino conservation.

But some worry that legalizing a domestic trade will only fuel poaching. National Geographic quoted a senior fellow at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Julian Rademeyer, as saying:

“Given the levels of corruption in some provincial permitting offices, there are certainly concerns that legal domestic sales could become a conduit for criminal networks to obtain horns which can be smuggled out of the country and sold on the black market. We saw as much prior to 2009 when middlemen for Vietnamese syndicates traveled the length and breadth of the country buying up ‘loose stock’ of horns from game farmers.”

The lawsuit was backed by members of South Africa’s Private Rhino Owners Association, which Reuters reported own 5,000 rhinos collectively.

The South African government also has a stockpile of rhino horns, collected from its operations that remove the horns in hopes of preventing poaching. The government’s collection is valued at $2 billion.

Sour Grapes: When California Beat France’s Vintners

Paris has lent its name to some of history’s important international moments. There was the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war between Great Britain and the United States, and, much more recently, the Paris agreement, which last year committed almost every country in the world to addressing climate change. In between those two, there was the so-called Judgment of Paris, the outcome of which was once described as a “vinous shot heard round the world.”

On May 24, 1976, a group of French wine experts gathered in the capital for a blind wine tasting. The event was organized by Steven Spurrier, a British sommelier who ran a wine school and shop in the center of town. American visitors had brought him wine from California, and Spurrier became curious to see how it would stand up to French wines, regarded as the best in the world. Spurrier and the judges, as well as other sommeliers and observers, went into the tasting thinking the California offerings didn’t stand a chance, and that the tasters would be able to discern the flavors even when their identities were hidden.

But that’s not what happened. Here is the dispatch from the only reporter present at the tasting, George Taber of TIME magazine:

As they swirled, sniffed, sipped and spat, some judges were instantly able to separate an imported upstart from an aristocrat. More often, the panel was confused. “Ah, back to France!” exclaimed Oliver after sipping a 1972 Chardonnay from the Napa Valley. “That is definitely California. It has no nose,” said another judge—after downing a Batard Montrachet ‘73. Other comments included such Gallic gems as “this is nervous and agreeable,” “a good nose but not too much in the mouth,” and “this soars out of the ordinary.”

When all that swirling, sniffing, and sipping was over, the judges had picked reds and whites from little-known wineries in California’s Napa Valley over ones from France’s renowned Burgundy region as the winners of the taste test. A 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon bested a 1970 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and three other Bordeauxes. A 1970 Chateau Montelena topped a Meursault Charmes Roulot of the same year. Two other California Chardonnays also ranked higher than their French counterparts.

“The irony for the French was the inability of the tasters—all of impeccable credentials—to distinguish the origins of the wines,” wrote Barbara Ensrud in The Wall Street Journal in 2001. “They picked the wines they liked best, certain that because they were judged the best they had to be French.”

The results baffled French winemakers and vindicated their Californian counterparts, who were not well-known even to wine-lovers in the United States. Here’s Ensrud:

Though it may seem improbable to young wine drinkers of today, at this time 25 years ago California wines—except for half-gallon jugs and a stray Cabernet or two from the demotic labels of Inglenook or Christian Brothers—were virtually unavailable outside the Golden State. California wines were so little known in New York—not to mention the rest of the world—that the Four Seasons Restaurant launched a spring gala in 1976 to introduce them to New York’s wine and food community.

California wines were suddenly in demand. Ensrud again:

Phones at Chateau Montelena and Stag’s Leap wineries rang nonstop for days. Only two weeks earlier, Warren Winiarski, proprietor of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, had tried to get a New York wine merchant to stock his wines, without success. “Why should I buy your wine when I can get Chateau Gloria for the same price (about $7)?” he was asked. The day after the news broke, the retailer called, avidly trying to get Mr. Winiarski to sell him everything he had.

The mythic tasting was such a dramatic milestone in the history of winemaking that Hollywood turned Taber’s book on the tasting into a movie starring Alan Rickman, Bill Pullman, and Chris Pine in 2008.

California wines won out in a rematch in 1978, and again in a tasting for the 10th anniversary of the Judgment of Paris. The same happened during a reenactment in 2006 in honor of the tasting’s 30th anniversary. The Times wrote back then:

Despite the French tasters, many of whom had taken part in the original tasting, “expecting the downfall” of the American vineyards, they had to admit that the harmony of the Californian cabernets had beaten them again. Judges on both continents gave top honours to a 1971 Ridge Monte Bello cabernet from Napa Valley. Four Californian reds occupied the next placings before the highest-ranked Bordeaux, a 1970 Château Mouton Rothschild, came in at sixth.

A delighted Paul Draper, the Monte Bello winemaker, said: “Maybe it is final justification that it held through all these years and did well.”

Today, California produces 90 percent of U.S. wine, according to the Wine Institute, an advocacy group for the state’s winemakers. The United States is the fourth-largest wine producer in the world, behind Italy, France, and Spain.

How Republican Governors Are Narrowing Clinton's Choices

As she turns her attention to selecting a running mate, Hillary Clinton has, in theory, a wide array of contenders from which to choose. There are up-and-coming Latino leaders like Julián Castro and Tom Perez from President Obama’s Cabinet; liberal favorites like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown; prominent African Americans such as Senator Cory Booker or Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor. Unlike Donald Trump, she has forged solid relationships with elected Democrats from across the country, and virtually the entire party establishment lined up behind her candidacy—either publicly or with a private wink and nod—early on.

Clinton really should have the pick of the political litter. But thanks to a handful of Republican governors, her options might be far more limited.

Democrats this fall are simultaneously trying to win the White House and wrest back control of the Senate from Republicans, who now have a 54-46 majority. If a Democratic senator wins the vice presidency, the governor of the state he or she represents would usually select a temporary replacement who would serve until a special election were held either in 2017 or 2018. (The precise rules vary by state.) Warren, Brown, and Booker all hail from states with Republican governors, which means that a President Clinton could lose a Democratic senator for the first crucial months of her term, at minimum.

Neither Clinton nor her campaign have said how the Senate implications would factor into her decision. But they matter a great deal to the party’s leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, who warned Clinton in no uncertain terms over the weekend that she should avoid picking any senator from a GOP-led state. “If we have a Republican governor in any of those states, the answer is not only no, but hell no,” Reid told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Sunday when asked about the prospect of Warren or Brown joining Clinton’s ticket. “I would yell and scream to stop that.” If Warren became vice president, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, would choose her interim replacement, while Ohio’s governor and former Republican presidential candidate John Kasich would do the same if it were Brown. (Chris Christie would make the selection in New Jersey if Clinton tapped Booker as her running mate.)

“If we have a Republican governor in any of those states, the answer is not only no, but hell no.”

Reid is still sore over the decision of the first President Clinton to name Texas Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen as his Treasury secretary in 1993. Although Governor Ann Richards picked a Democrat to succeed him, Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison soon won the seat, and Democrats haven’t come close to winning a Senate race in Texas ever since. (Whether Bentsen would have survived the GOP wave of 1994 is another question.) Reid is retiring at the end of the year, so his opinion might not carry quite the weight it once did. But he added that he believed most of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate would say the same thing.

Clinton can blame her predicament on the GOP’s remarkable success in winning gubernatorial races in the last eight years. In 2008, Obama not only chose a sitting senator as his running mate; he picked three for his Cabinet. But Joe Biden, Ken Salazar, and Clinton herself came from states with Democratic governors, and the party retains control of those Senate seats today.

The president wasn’t so fortunate with his pick of Democratic governors for his Cabinet, however. Both Janet Napolitano and Kathleen Sebelius saw conservative Republicans succeed them, as governors of Arizona and Kansas, respectively. And the messiest replacement process of all occurred in Illinois, where Governor Rod Blagojevich went to prison for trying to sell the Senate seat that Obama vacated. That may give Clinton pause as she considers choosing a governor to run with her this year.

Trump faces a much different problem in picking his running mate. His vitriolic primary campaign led several contenders to take themselves out of the running. The fire he traded with others over the past year would make it awkward to have them on the ticket. That list includes former Trump rivals Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz. Trump’s choice is less complicated by Senate considerations—Bob Corker of Tennessee, who met with Trump in New York on Monday, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, and Tom Cotton of Arkansas all hail from states with Republican governors.

Reid’s comments figure to be good news for Castro, the HUD secretary, and Perez, the Labor secretary, either of whom could energize Latino voters and make history in the process. (The fact that Castro does not speak fluent Spanish works against him, however.) And it could boost the prospects for Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who was on Obama’s short list eight years ago and who represents a key swing state governed by a Democrat, Terry McAuliffe.

Clinton could always just ignore Reid altogether and pick Warren, Brown, or Booker anyway, having determined that one of them is simply the best person to run alongside her and serve as president if needed. But it would be a political gamble that Democrats are on their way to a comfortable Senate majority, and for a candidate who has promised to help rebuild her party and forge a stronger bond with Democrats in Congress, that’s probably not a wise bet to make.