Armageddon (13 page)

In addition to the $335,000 listed above, Roger also deposited $85,000 in cash in his personal bank account between January and November 1998. In December 1999, he deposited a $70,000 traveler's check from “Suk Eun Chang” as well as a $10,000 traveler's check from the same source. Clinton refused to disclose the source of these funds, saying only that he got some of the money for performing in foreign countries with his band. The Committee was unable to find Suk Eun Chang to get any further information.

Hugh Rodham was paid $204,000 by the father of Carlos Vignali, a predatory crack/cocaine kingpin who was convicted of transporting and distributing massive kilos of addictive drugs in poor neighborhoods in Minnesota. Both the pardon attorney at the Justice Department and the US Attorney in Minnesota who had prosecuted the case adamantly opposed the pardon.

But Vignali's father was a local politician in Los Angeles who began calling in his chits. Soon Vignali supporters were attending meetings and talking to key White House Staff—all arranged by Rodham. One of them was Alejandro Mayorkas, then US Attorney in Los Angeles. He later helped Tony Rodham in his own influence-peddling business. Bill Clinton granted a commutation of Vignali's remaining sentence.

When the House Government Operations Committee investigated the pardons, they interviewed Hugh Rodham. In meeting after meeting, Rodham repeatedly cited his sister's support for his activities. According to the committee report, he told the White House staff that Hillary was aware of and very concerned about the pardon.

Rodham was also able to get another pardon. This one was for Glenn Braswell, a convicted fraudster who paid Rodham $230,000 and purportedly “loaned” him an additional $79,000 after his success in getting the pardon. Hugh also represented Gene and Nora Lum, who were convicted of money laundering and making illegal campaign contributions to Democratic Party campaigns. Hugh failed on that one.
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Hillary's younger brother, Tony Rodham, got in on the gravy train. He was paid $244,758 for getting a pardon for Vann Jo and Edgar Gregory, carnival owners who had received suspended sentences for bank fraud. Tony also tried on several occasions to solicit money from the daughter of Fernando Fuentes-Coba, who had been convicted of
violating the Cuban embargo. When she declined to pay the $50,000 fee he quoted, he then offered a discounted price of $30,000.
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Roger Clinton tried unsuccessfully for several pardons, although he and the Clintons initially denied that he had lobbied his brother. The FBI found that Roger had been paid $50,000 by members of the Gambino crime family to get a pardon for mob lieutenant Rosario Gambino. He was also paid $43,500 by Garland Lincecum, who was told that he could purchase a presidential pardon for $30,000. None of Roger's pardon requests were granted, but Roger himself was given a pardon by his brother.

Throughout the FBI interviews, Roger insisted that Bill Clinton was aware of his pardon activities and made tactical suggestions.

Bill and Hillary have had more than ample evidence of their siblings' shenanigans over the past two decades. And by opening doors, making introductions, granting pardons, and the like, the former first couple are enablers, not bystanders. Look for much more of the same in a Hillary Clinton White House. They're all poised to move into their old rooms.

T
he key to defeating
Hillary is to run against her the way Bernie Sanders did. While he failed to win the nomination, Sanders defeated Hillary in state after state, scoring upsets where she least expected them. Bernie's appeal was so strong, and Hillary's so weak, that their battle came right down to the wire.

Sanders exposed all of Hillary's weaknesses.

• • She has to win Independents in November, but she lost them overwhelmingly in the primaries.
  
• • She needs to carry voters under 35 by top-heavy margins in the general election, but she lost them by 3:1 and 4:1 in the primaries.
  
• • Hillary has to carry the blue states to win the election, but in the primaries she lost a slew of states, including Michigan and Wisconsin—that she must carry in November.
  

Hillary's margin over Bernie came largely from states she has no chance of winning in November. Hillary carried South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and more than a dozen other red states. But although they sided with Hillary in the primaries, she has not a prayer of carrying them in November.

In order to exploit that vulnerability and to benefit from the Democratic Party's divisions, Republicans must run against Hillary the way Bernie did. We cannot embrace his left-wing agenda of tax increases, gun control, environmental extremism, and socialism. But we can make the same critique of the special interests that dominate the Democratic Party that Sanders did.

We can hammer away at the need to regulate Wall Street and say bluntly that we will not rescue any bank that is thought to be too big to fail. And we can draw the correlation between massive illegal immigration and job loss, unemployment, wage stagnation, and income inequality that animated and invigorated the Sanders campaign.

Hillary and Bill have successfully dodged scandals ever since they entered public life, not because they were innocent, but because a variety of circumstances made it impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they were guilty. Scandal follows them everywhere. They're still standing, but that doesn't mean they are unscathed. During Bill Clinton's presidency, Hillary had two narrow escapes from federal indictment, and Bill lost his law license and was fined close to a million dollars after a federal judge found him in civil contempt of court for lying in the Paula Jones deposition.

At this writing, the FBI is still investigating Hillary's handling of classified documents at the State Department and has apparently expanded that investigation to determine whether the overlapping activities of the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton's paid speaking clients, and State Department actions violated corruption
laws. The outcome of these serious, serious inquiries could derail Hillary's candidacy.

But what if this political Houdini escapes being held responsible for her crimes once again? What is the lasting impact of the scandals that have engulfed her?

The constant attacks on the integrity of the Clintons, especially Hillary, have left a deep legacy of distrust and dislike by American voters. A Quinnipiac poll in the summer of 2015 found that 61% of the respondents felt that Hillary was not “honest and trustworthy,” while only 34% felt these adjectives fit her.
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Hillary's favorability ratings have suffered and her vote share in a prospective general election seems to have fallen as a result. But she is not in jail or on her way. So will these attacks matter? Damn right they will. Each hit has taken a chink out of her armor and made her more vulnerable and less believable.

A candidate is like a gladiator with only one weapon in her arsenal: her own voice. If she is disbelieved on a fundamental level, she loses the ability to speak and ever be credited with telling the truth. A candidate who cannot be believed is one who cannot campaign effectively, who cannot give a speech with any credibility, who cannot take a position on an issue and be taken at her word. That's Hillary—stripped of maneuverability, unable to cope with changing events and situations. Naked in the face of attacks, she becomes a ship without a navigational system. Still afloat, but dead in the water.

But strategically, in order to defeat Hillary, we must go beyond her scandals and her character flaws. We have to come to grips with how Obama has changed America. He has not only transformed our economy and health care, but he has kept his most basic promise: to fundamentally change America. Just as he has changed our country, so we must change the way we plan to beat Hillary.

A self-defeating cycle has gripped the GOP. Many Republicans try to win elections by moving to the center, mimicking what Clinton did in 1996. They tone down their opposition to gun control, moderate their views on abortion, grudgingly accept same-sex marriage,
go along with the bulk of the Democratic spending programs, and promise to “fix” but not to “repeal” Obamacare. But the more Republicans move to the center, becoming the “pale pastel” shades Reagan condemned instead of the “bold colors” he proclaimed, the more the base stays home.
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They see no reason to elect go-along, get-along Republicans who will submit to the dictates of the liberal media and sell out their ideals once they take office. The base comes to see the candidates as the “Tweedledum” and “Tweedledee” of Alice in Wonderland, different only in their party labels. Hence the complaint one hears all over: “I have nobody to vote for!”

In 2008, Obama won by turning
his
voters on and, in the process, turning them out. But in 2012 he won by turning
our
voters off and keeping them at home. In 2008, his program of “hope and change” resonated with a broad spectrum of Americans. He got people of both races to come out to vote enthusiastically for his view of the political promised land. He got nine million new voters to the polls in 2008. (In 2004, 122 million Americans voted. In 2008, 131 million did, inspired by Barack Obama).

But as president, Obama turned out to be an old-fashioned African American liberal, backing more handouts, food stamps, welfare, and benefits of every description while raising taxes on everybody (not just the rich) and cutting defense to the danger point. He passed a modified version of socialized medicine and jammed through measures that doubled the national debt. His program appalled the moderates in the center, but his handouts bought him greater support from the “takers,” people who depended on the labor and taxes of others to make ends meet. Even as his policies expanded his base, they angered what had been the middle, driving them into the arms of the GOP, allowing the Republicans to win first the House and then the Senate. By the time he ran for reelection in 2012, it was not enough just to get his people out to vote. He needed to turn his base on—and the Republican
supporters off! He had to combine a big turnout from his voters with a low turnout of everyone else.

He kept his voters turning out by increasing handouts and goodies to bring the dependent population to the polls. And while he did that, he ran negative ads savaging Romney in order to turn off Romney's potential supporters and keep them home on Election Day. He bought the Left and so depressed the Middle and the Right that they wallowed in cynicism and didn't even vote.

In the election of 2012, voter turnout dropped after years of increasing. Only 129 million voted, two million fewer than in 2008, even though the US population had risen by 10 million in the interim. In 2008, 62.3% of eligible citizens voted, but in 2012, only 57.5% showed up. Ten million would-be voters stayed home. While Obama brought in millions of new black and Latino voters in 2008, the real swing in 2012 was that the white vote stayed home.

Between 2004 and 2012, white voter turnout dropped by 10 million and black and Hispanic turnout rose by four million. In fact, in 2012, blacks voted at a higher percentage of those eligible than whites did. Republicans carried the whites who did vote by 61 to 39, but 10 million stayed home and didn't show up at the polls. It wasn't that whites lost population; there were 10 million more white Americans in 2012 than in 2004. They just did not vote.

To understand the decrease in white turnout, we have to go back to the year 2000 when a tied election showed everybody the value of each single vote. Add to that the sense of urgency engendered by the 9/11 attacks and the result was a dramatic 10-million-vote surge in white turnout in just the four years between 2000 and 2004. Voters had something to believe in: George W. Bush's courageous stand against international terror. But then disillusionment and disenchantment set in. The Iraq War ground on with mounting body counts. The crash of 2008 wiped out more than a decade's economic gains. And under Obama, things just kept getting worse. Rather
than galvanize these absent voters into turning out, the depressing conditions left them feeling apathetic and passive. Hopeless. So they stayed home on Election Day. And most of the absentee voters were whites who would have voted for Romney. To win in 2016, we have got to get those voters back.

Voter Turnout by Ethnic Group, 2004–2012

Note, in this table, how white turnout surged in 2004 from 61.8% in 2000 to 67.2% in 2004. That reelected Bush. Then it dropped from 67.2% in 2004 to only 64.1% in 2012. That reelected Obama. Meanwhile, look at how black turnout soared from 56.8% in 2000 to 66.2% in 2012. Hispanic turnout rose as well, though by not as much, from 43.3% to 47.3%.
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To win, the Republican Party needs to appeal to all segments of the electorate, and the process has to start with an answer to the question, How do we get white turnout back up? The election of 2012 proved that these disenchanted voters won't show up to vote
against
something. To get them to come to the polls, they have to have something to vote
for.
The stay-at-home voters disliked Obama—his job approval was at record lows. But Obama had a secret weapon: Mitt Romney.

Obama drove a fissure into the white vote separating those who had graduated from college and had adequate income from those who did not. These downscale white voters wouldn't swallow Mitt Romney, even if the alternative was reelecting Obama by staying home and not voting. They understood that the American branch office of the global economy couldn't care less about them and left them behind at every turn. These voters got it that Romney was no businessman; he was a speculator. He was the poster boy for the
fabulous incomes of the richest 1%, while those whose votes they sought were just treading water, stagnating in income and wealth. But now we have a secret weapon of our own: Donald Trump.

Trump's campaign has energized the very voters we need to bring out in order to win. With Trump stimulating turnout, the Republican primaries generated vastly more voters than they did just four years ago. The Republican race drew 33 million voters, almost twice the 19 million who voted in 2012. Where did these extra 14 million come from? Likely many were from the ranks of those who stayed home in the general election of 2012.

It is Donald Trump who brought them out in the primaries, and it will be the Donald who brings them out in the general election. Indeed, exit polls by CBS suggest that half of the Republicans voting in the Michigan primary, which was typical of the other primaries, were first-time GOP primary voters.
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Trump's voters, in particular, were precisely the ones who sat out the 2012 election and led to Obama's victory: white voters who had not been to college. As they pump gas and look forlornly at the closed factory where they once had good jobs at good pay, their resentments fester. And when they see the Wall Street kids making money hand over fist, their anger explodes.

It is at that point that their resentments and opinions merge with the Bernie Sanders voters who decry that 95% of the income gains of the past eight years have gone to the top 1% of the population. These leftists once sought to “occupy Wall Street” and used their votes to give Hillary the scare of her life as they propelled Bernie to the verge of the Democratic nomination. Ultimately, the Left and the Right fuse in their outrage at income inequality. And they have a good case.

The fact is that the downscale, non-college-educated white voter is the one who has been left behind by the global economy. It's hard to believe, but white high school graduates with no college education get a median weekly paycheck of only $700! How can you support a family on that?

If they have completed a two-year associate degree or have some college, their weekly income goes up by all of $91 to the princely
sum of $791. It isn't until they get a four-year college degree that whites make any kind of decent money—$1,132 per week, or $59,000 a year Blacks and Hispanics do even worse. A four-year college degree still leaves blacks $12,000 below white income levels and Hispanics $10,000 behind.

Median Weekly Income
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