a distant third place, that he d be forced to make an embarrassing exit, an especially humbling way for a sitting vice president to exit the political stage probably for good. so there s that on the one hand. but then on the other hand there is another possibility. what if biden gets in? what if he pulls off a win in one of those first two states? what if he wins iowa? what if he wins new hampshire? what if he proves that he really is a viable candidate, that he actually can beat hillary, that he really does have a shot at the democratic nomination for president? what if he then takes that credibility and creates a one-on-one race with hillary in south carolina in think about this. the clinton team right now thinks of south carolina as their firewall state. they think of it right now because of their strong standing with african-american voters. african-american voters barely exist in new hampshire and iowa but they make up about half of south carolina s democratic primary electorate.
in some new hampshire and iowa surveys. even in the new nbc news/ wall street journal national poll, it s out today, sanders is giving her a real run for her money. hillary clinton now holds just a seven-point lead over bernie sanders, 42% to 35%. and that s with joe biden, who hasn t even decided whether he s going to run for president, pulling in 17% and siphoning votes away from clinton to do it. when the vice president s taken out of the mix, by the way, clinton s lead does go to 53% to 38% over sanders, a healthier margin for her although again, worth noting. that is still much closer than anyone thought things were going to be at any point in a clinton-sanders race. that s not the only way a potential joe biden candidacy is upsetting hillary clinton s standing in the polls. take a look at these head-to-head match-ups also from today s nbc news poll. hillary clinton beating donald trump by ten points, but joe biden beating him by more than 20 points. clinton just barely leading j
could lose not just to hillary clinton but also to bernie sanders in those early primary states, that biden would finish a distant third place, that he d be forced to make an embarrassing exit, an especially humbling way for a sitting vice president to exit the political stage probably for good. so there s that on the one hand. but then on the other hand there is another possibility. what if biden gets in? what if he pulls off a win in one of those first two states? what if he wins iowa? what if he wins new hampshire? what if he proves that he really is a viable candidate, that he actually can beat hillary, that he really does have a shot at the democratic nomination for president? what if he then takes that credibility and creates a one-on-one race with hillary in south carolina. think about this. the clinton team right now thinks of south carolina as their firewall state. they think of it right now
putin wants to support assad, doesn t think we should be actively trying to overthrow him. he wants to prop him up. and the united states says it s absolutely unacceptable for assad to remain in power. can you see any way to reconcile those two positions? i think we can reconcile because when the united states says it is unacceptable, it has been unacceptable for three years. so assad is still there. so it is acceptable then, so there must be some sort of condition for him not to stay as long as russia wants but stay for the time period to convince russia and the world and the middle east in general is that it s not going to go the libya way, it s not going into that whole disarray of the gadhafi way. so when barack obama says putin annexed crimea and shuns international law putin shoots back and says fine, we can support your strikes in iraq because iraq requested those air strikes but when you re striking syria it s against the law because they never accepted that. so i think somew
more often? so the gulf of mexico has been under exploration and under oil development for decades, since the 1950s. and by contrast, you know, the arctic does not have the u.s. arctic anyway doesn t have pipelines. it doesn t have production facilities. so any oil company doesn t just have to find the crude that they want to produce and sell. they need to find a way to get it to market. so they have to build all of those facilities. and that s an extraordinary undertaking. the amount of environmental analysis that would go into it is huge. it s quite costly. so is there a ripple effect to this? shell isn t going to do this. does this mean that no one is going to be drilling in the arctic or is somebody else going to take a shot at this? there are some drilling in other parts of the arctic, the russian arctic, for instance, and there s been some interest in the canadian arctic although that has diminished lately among low oil prices. but for the u.s. arctic it doesn t look like