Read The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" Online

Authors: Hugh Hewitt

Tags: #Political Science / American Government / Executive Branch, #Political Science / Political Process / Campaigns & Elections

The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (10 page)

BOOK: The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era"
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“The soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines and their spouses, children and parents deserve more and the country requires more for its defense, more than the Republicans with their isolationist caucus strong and growing, will give them. Whenever you hear a Republican say, ‘The deficit is a national security threat,’ mark that man or woman as a threat to a fully funded Pentagon. They are. That’s code for ‘more cuts to the Defense budget,’ cuts that would be ruinous beyond reasoning. I did not agree with Defense budgets submitted by President Obama in his second term, and I did my best as a private citizen to urge their reconsideration, but I also know he was working against this ideological zeal deeply embedded in the Tea Party Republicans for a tiny American military force, and his spending plans had to meet them halfway.
“Enough. Of. That. Until the Republicans rid themselves of their extremists and isolationists, the internationalists among them must come and join us, even if that means hanging out with people who believe in global warming and the EPA. If, that is, they truly believe what they have been saying all these years.”

That way, Madame Secretary, lies victory. That speech would, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger’s famous quip, have the added benefit of being “almost true,” yet close enough to peel a few percent of the national security Republicans off of their party.

Think about it. Post-nomination, your people have nowhere to go, but the
Commentary
crowd, the Petraeus people, the career military: they pay attention. They are “high information voters,” and some of them can be flipped. Truth be told, they are desperate.

Call their thought leader,
The Weekly Standard’
s Bill Kristol. Invite him to a private lunch. Or two. Or five. Bring your Bill and have him “jaw, jaw” rather than “war war” with Bill. Plant the seed now. The neocons can come home, can have a role, can hope to influence you and your team.

But that won’t be possible if you won’t pick up the check on a refunding of the Pentagon. It has been gutted, and you know it. The Navy is scandalously low on ships, and worse, the industrial base to service those that still float. And you know it.

The Marines—our best hope for a quick reaction in strength to an incident that cannot be handled by Special Forces—are breathing hard and need fiscal oxygen. Give it to them and earn their trust. Convert a Marine to your cause and you have brought home a platoon. They talk and stay in touch like no other branch. Play on that loyalty. Use them for more than the Band at Christmas and Marine One. Identify with
the Marines, rebuild the Marines, and the country will think you are preparing not for withdrawal, but for highly lethal applications of force and not only very precise and deadly raids by Navy SEALs.

The popular imagination has been shaped, Madame Secretary. Take it as it is. Don’t try and persuade it. Ride it.

No memorable president has been shy about using American arms. The greatest presidents were the ones who employed the greatest force. You already suspect the resurrection of W’s reputation, and the recalibration of Bill’s to account for his awful disinterest in bin Laden. You know Obama will be ranked the worst president by the best historians, and that these calculations will not be long in coming.

Resolve then to be the lion and not the fox, at least in the eyes of the world. Find your Grenada early in your tenure and build from that.

Above all, make the Islamic State your mortal enemy, and pursue them in reality to the rhetorical “gates of Hell” that the addled Joe Biden mused about. (He really is off his rocker, and the American people must be winked at in such a way as to tell them you know and that everyone can breathe much easier when he is not “a heartbeat away.”)

You do not have to pick a fight with IS. They are coming for you. You know this now, perhaps in a way no other president has ever known. You have seen their message boards, and you have received their messages sent specifically to you.

Go Thatcher on them. They are your Argentinians, and the region of the now-erased border between Iraq and Syria is your Falklands. Say it. Out loud. As soon as the nomination is yours—and that will be quickly—before the GOP frontrunner can paint you in the indelible ink of Benghazi and the failure to reach a deal with Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Maliki on a Status of Forces Agreement.

You must be a hawk now, even though you have never been a hawk before. The new enemy wasn’t anticipated by Alinsky or any of your professors, or even by dear departed Holbrooke. No, these are the barbarians at the gate. Put on your fiercest Queen of the Picts and you will carry all before you. Dissemble as you have done to date, and you
will be dismissed. America has awoken again to 9/12, and the holiday for history is over as surely as the last frolic ended on 9/11. Understand that, or lose.

CHAPTER 10

“Energy is Freedom”: Talk Like a Conservative, Tax Like a Liberal, Build a Patronage Machine of Unprecedented Reach and Effectiveness

In Chapter 1, I laid out the trio of Amendments to the Constitution that you should propose, and in the first chapter I also outlined the two sets of policies you ought to pledge to pursue.

As only Congress, not you, can propose Amendments to the states, your rhetorical pushing of the three Amendments is the perfect framing of a political campaign that then requires little in the way of effort and time from the White House Office of Legislative Affairs as follow up when you win.

But they do provide the twin benefits of a powerful, framing narrative for your campaign, and an inevitably damning indictment of Congress to deploy in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections and beyond.

To hammer down the narrative, an early and full campaign day or perhaps even a weekend retreat to places connected to America’s founding—Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Annapolis—should be devoted to a conference on each of your Amendment proposals. At each meeting, you will sit and listen carefully to scholars and public intellectuals—and a handful of the highest campaign donors whose egos will be massively massaged and their wallets even more widely opened by inclusion in the “substance” of what you should refer to as a “Second Founding”—debate exactly how these “amending proposals” should be worded, thus showcasing your “listening tour” skills again, and reminding the older journalists of how Bill expertly used such day long “summits” to establish his reputation for an engaged, amiable—and
smart—wonk. He kept working on this image through the White House years with his long, rambling Roosevelt Room gabfests. That reputation for “smarts” helped him rebound from national disgrace. You very much need to refurbish your “whip smart” credentials that were badly damaged first by the mess of Hillarycare, then by your terrible record at State, and of course by your awful second memoir and the bungled book tour. People are talking in whispers, attributing your bumbling and stumbling to age, so you will need to demonstrate mental acuity and physical energy and capacity. “Early Gore,” not “Late Reagan” must be the genuine conclusion of onlookers.

The thinness of your actual record at State, in the Senate and as First Lady will not bear close scrutiny. You must divert attention from the facts of your record to the “received wisdom” of the Manhattan-Beltway media elite, the vast Mainstream Media or MSM, for whom the general assumption of intellectual capacity and actual achievement is far preferred over a real record of accomplishment that they neither know about nor understand in much detail, even when it exists. Thus, this appearance of studiousness and curiosity must be substituted for look-backs, allowing especially the younger scribblers to simply assume that what they think they know about your time in various jobs and positions is true. You can count on a great deal of ignorance and indifference from the press, but they need props on which to lean. Give them this parade of scholars and roundtables, and they won’t look back at your record too closely or for too long.

(Aside: Obama’s youth and alleged “law professor” credentials accomplished the same result for him on the issue of “intellect,” as did his “presidency” of the
Harvard Law Review
. We both know the real score on both of these accounts, and you and Bill already suspect an unflattering truth as well: that his academic performances at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law have never surfaced for a reason, nor has the question ever been asked how, in an era of affirmative action overreach, the young Obama—filling out his applications from the prestigious Punahou School—could not find a college in the mainland with
more cred than Occi, which he knew to be third-string then, and from which he had to transfer if he was going to ride the train of preferential admissions and ideological zeal? The MSM is estopped from even asking the questions now, so vast was the failure to investigate these basic questions in 2008, and so significant the consequences of that failure. But you may find it very useful to employ the team to distribute the real data and the real explanation early in your term, an explanation of the comprehensiveness of your failure being found in the revelation of his lack of intellectual abilities, curiosity and depth. “I tried, Lord how I tried, as did others. But Valerie fed his insecurity about his own abilities… it was how she controlled him, of course…” Better still if friends would risk all and put the details out now that have been so carefully packaged and stored at the four schools, but that would be a huge risk to them, as you are not a sure thing and won’t be until the day after you win. If even one thread in that large tapestry of “achievement” was well and truly revealed, exposing fraud in the first selling… )

At the conclusion of each weekend conference in your package of “Second Founding” amendments, you can task a smaller working group from among those assembled to come up with the final and exact draft of the amendments, which will create excitement about the subject and the exact language to be used. That drafting process will not culminate until your inauguration and your first State of the Union address, but publicly task them to work in utter and complete secrecy as the Framers did in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, thus inviting parallels and a subtext that you really are reaching for a legacy as bold as Reagan’s. In so doing, you will distance yourself from the failed small ball with a price of trillions pursued by Obama. Have members of the working groups swear an oath of secrecy, which will allow you to leak a draft here or there, and denounce leakers as Washington famously did in 1787, when he presided over the penultimate act at the First Founding.

If you take on the role, you have to play the role. No half measures. And thus the utility of your leaking some of the secret work product of your working groups.

It is a very good thing to early on establish that you will ruthlessly hunt down and exile leakers. Thus among the academics, intellectuals and hangers-on you will have assembled into the three working groups, you will have to exile a half-dozen innocent individuals to get this point across.

“I know at least a few of you are wholly innocent,” you should declare when exiling suspected offenders, “and even the leaker may have acted out of negligence, but when I say no leaks, I mean it.” The point must be made, so you must make it. Notice will be served, and the press will not only love it, but frenzy about the draft language itself will grow.

In your Inaugural Address, you can pledge that the proposed drafts will appear in your first State of the Union address. And on that occasion, you should indeed deliver your proposed exact texts of the three amendments, as well as “notes of the proceedings,” which hammered out the language, thus giving the law professoriate and the pundits enough material to fill their (unread) academic journals and more broadly consumed columns. You will urge the new Congress to act with the speed of the First Congress in referring the three amendments to the states, again linking your tenure in the public’s imagination to a “Second Founding.”

If Congress acts, you have already secured your place in history. If it does not, this demand for action is a demand you will repeat every year, piling up in the public’s mind your long record of demanding action and Congress’ adamant refusal to do so.

President Obama’s charge of a do-nothing Congress never grew roots in the public’s imagination, because he was himself a do-nothing, golfing president—a “lead-from-behind” president.

And because he never framed exactly what it was the Congress “didn’t do.”

He changed demands on Congress almost quarterly—sometimes monthly in fact—and ended up sounding petulant, rather than determined to lead. Your “Amendment Trio” will be the report card for the
Congress they will almost certainly fail at first, perhaps even for a few years, and every year you will remind the American people in the State of the Union that you campaigned on these Amendments, received a mandate for them, and Congress turned deaf ears to that appeal for the ‘Big Three.’ Every day that Congress does not move forward on the Amendments is a political victory for you.

But in addition to these huge goals, these keystones of the “Second Founding,” you of course must submit a budget, and you must also provide a legislative package. The outline of the latter is particularly crucial for the campaign, as it will again demonstrate your capacity to fix the mess which Obama has gotten us into. For the legislative agenda, I suggest two broad categories.

The first of the two sets of proposals I lay out for you taps into your need for revenue and provides a political advantage of appealing to consumers of gasoline and heating oil. The second seeks to bridge—to great political advantage—the immigration debate divide. Republicans cannot be counted on to forever cede control of the details of this legislative arena to John McCain, and thus guarantee stalemate, so take no time in introducing both packages of bills. (More on immigration in the next chapter.)

Now on energy, the summary from Chapter 1:

“An ironclad commitment to massive development of our own energy resources, via fracking onshore and development of select new offshore, out-of-sight platform drilling. Campaign on authorizing the Keystone XL Pipeline, once you have the nomination. What is Mr. Steyer going to do, disown you? The left will think you’re posturing. Some in the center will be seduced. Cite the statistic that for every energy job created, four are generated downstream. Sell the true statement that “energy is freedom,” and cite the knowledge you gained as secretary of state of the Third World’s desperate need for energy to alleviate poverty and power growth.”
BOOK: The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era"
11.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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