The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (15 page)

No Rick Fazio here. He would make no mistakes with you that way, no untoward approaches across the debate stage. If you get into the ring with him, your glass jaw will shatter. He will ask the question: “Why did you flee the State Department at 1 a.m. the night of Benghazi
with your ambassador dead and your second–in-command left hanging? Why didn’t you at least call Mr. Hicks back? How can you expect to lead the country in the future when you flunked that crisis so obviously and thoroughly?”

So best not to get into the ring to begin with. Take him out early. The GOP primary voters will finish off Jeb, but they may in fact be drawn to the combativeness of Christie, a long sought after genuine brawler. (The same deep desire will give Cruz a huge lift.)

“Take him out” means planting the same doubt about his electability that Rove so artfully planted about your health. It will take only one appearance, one “joke,” one mention that you’d enjoy facing an opponent that could be indicted the weekend before the election.

Oh, that will travel. It would endure. You can distance yourself immediately, fluff it off as a joke, but in giving voice to the collective fear of media-orchestrated sabotage that every GOP primary voter harbors, you will have pulled the pin on the grenade. Most serious Republican activists and voters over 30 recall the Bush DUI, and many even remember the Lawrence Walsh indictment issued days before your husband beat the first Bush, a blast that destroyed 41’s then-growing momentum. Remind my people that the MSM loves to at least try to sink GOP nominees in the last week (now month with early voting), and your work here will be done. There is a federal investigation underway into Christie’ dealings. There is almost certainly “no there there.” But oh, the risk of an unprincipled indictment. Rick Perry was indicted in Texas, but with enough time to fight it off. If Christie is indicted as the nominee in October of 2016…

Just to be sure, put a second torpedo in the water, just before Iowa and New Hampshire and the two Super Tuesdays in March. Remind everyone of the hug Christie gave President Obama just before the 2012 vote. Another joke will do. “Chris Christie looks like he is surging. Perhaps President Obama will return the favor the governor did the president in late October in 2012 by finding a reason to go to New Jersey for a visit to the towns destroyed by Sandy?” That’s enough. The
memories will flood back.

Not fair, of course, but effective. Effective is all that counts. You really can’t risk Christie in the general. Much better to retire him early, and with the lightest of touches in 2015.

CHAPTER 17

Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz can beat you. You can also thrash him and take 43 or 44 states. It could go either way.

His ambition matches yours, which makes him so formidable. He is much, much smarter than you, though, which of course rankles, but which you must overcome. If you underestimate him, it will be to your peril.

Cruz is hated by your friends in the MSM for the same reason you intuitively dislike him: That blistering intelligence and the verbal ability accompanying it. They—and you—are jealous. This is a sad failing in many politicians and you should work to overcome it. In this you have no guide as Bill clearly has never thought himself the second to anyone in ability or intelligence, and perhaps he is correct in that, as his failings in other areas are also second-to-none.

But whether Bill is Cruz’s equal, you most definitely are not. He will slice you up in debates, so begin to consider now the possibility of refusing to debate him. There would be some bad press for breaking precedent, but a flat statement of “his unpreparedness despite the GOP’s madness in nominating him does not compel me or the voters to endure his antics,” will do. He really would take you apart, muscle and joint.

Do not believe the echo chamber on this one. As Cruz himself likes to say to people, MSM has for years labeled any Republican president or nominee as either stupid or evil. Cruz tells small groups that MSM has created a third category for him: “crazy.”

Cruz often neglects to note that the MSM has used that category before—on Barry Goldwater and briefly, during the 1980 campaign, on Ronald Reagan. You will have to work hard to resurrect the memory of Goldwater and attach it to Cruz. If you could arrange for a Cow Palace-like howling at center-right Republicans during the Cleveland Convention in July 2016 when Cruz could be nominated, that will help you, just as Pat Buchanan’s rant in 1992 in Houston helped your husband by driving some key voters out of the GOP and into Perot’s or Bill’s waiting arms. Cruz needs every Republican and is working hard to cement over the cracks in the broad GOP coalition. Get out your jackhammer. Summon the prospect of a “3 a.m. phone call” that you used effectively, though too late, against then Senator Obama in 2008.

But not in a debate, because Cruz will strike you down and do so with a smile and a very light touch—the quickest of reminders that you went home on the night of Benghazi, and were not at State at 3 a.m. to make or receive calls that terrible night.

Cruz will crush you one-on-one, so attack him via your surrogates in the MSM. Let them do the work.

As I write he may be the favorite to be the nominee, with Scott Walker and Marco Rubio tied in a distant second, Kasich a struggling third, trying to get traction, deterred by Jeb until Jeb withdraws. Walker could take the nomination from Cruz, and Rubio is your biggest worry as a wild card catching fire, but Cruz is your likeliest opponent given the mechanics of the GOP calendar and rules, so begin now to plan on a long march from his nomination in July, 2016 through the election where every day you mention “temperament” at least ten times. Bill will do the heaviest lifting here, comparing Cruz unfavorably to “my Texas friends W and 41,” whom Bill will archly hint share his views that Cruz is simply not in the mainstream and not qualified to steward the globe. Your veep nominee will hammer this every day. But you must be regal—not hard, that. You must just refuse to walk on to the stage. Cruz, like Rubio and Walker, can make people believe. Don’t give him that chance.

Your “brain trust”—the same folks who gave you the wrongly translated “reset” button to give to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov—they will mock Cruz. Shut that down today. Underestimating an opponent has been the death of many a presidential campaign. Ask President Dewey. Ask President Gore.

Actually ask Jimmy Carter, and appear with him for an obligatory consultation at the conclusion of which he could helpfully say “I knew Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan beat me. Ted Cruz is no Ronald Reagan. He is Barry Goldwater, and Hillary is going to beat him soundly, and to the great relief of the country that cannot afford adventures as poorly thought out as many of Senator Cruz’s remarks.”

But don’t doubt the power of the age gap. I conducted a dozen mock Iowa caucuses for young conservatives on the campus of Colorado Christian College in the summer of 2014. There were six groups of between 20 and 40 students, and I polled each group twice, Iowa-style, first after just listing the candidates on a board and allowing the various supporter groups to organize and speak out, and then again after teaching them advocacy and argument in a studiously neutral fashion. (I have remained neutral throughout the 2016 run-up and will until the nominee raises his hands with his veep selection in Cleveland.)

Cruz won all twelve pseudo-caucus votes. Crucially, he won simple majorities in all six of the re-votes. This shocked me then and was inexplicable until I saw
Politico
’s research into online engagement by Cruz and his team, which is massively more than any of his GOP opponents. He has been living where the young voters live, and they will like him much, much more than a candidate their grandmother’s age. You will be able to scare them a bit, but not much. They are young.

You will have to scare the old folks, and thoroughly. They are the GOP’s bedrock, but Cruz can be made to frighten them. So do so.

And. Do. Not. Debate. Him.

CHAPTER 18

Mike Huckabee

“Will he or won’t he?” was a question that filled some airtime in 2014, with the “he” being Mike Huckabee. But early this year he left Fox News Channel, a lucrative, ego-boosting gig, and most accounts say it was his choice. Huck is in. Huck is back.

It doesn’t much matter to you, Madame Secretary. The former Governor of Arkansas, winner of the 2008 Iowa caucus, enabler of Senator McCain’s nomination, destroyer of the first Romney run, may or may not end up entering the lists in 2016. It already cost him his great gig at Fox for a season, and aging white males don’t give up television spots easily for fear they won’t be coming back, but he cannot win the GOP nomination. He might just love the trail for a bit to renew and rework his populist chops, and have a handshake deal with Roger Ailes to return.

So be very generous to him, and find an opportunity to talk in public of your shared Arkansas roots. He is a gentleman and a Baptist preacher. You can handle 30 minutes with Mike. Remind him and the audience—it has been so long that people forget—of all your time on the back roads of Arkansas, traveling on behalf of children’s health (and your then young husband’s career). You can chew through 30 minutes or an hour with Mike and bank the b-roll.

It is important, by the way, to have a sit down with each Fox host in the fall of ’15. Go one-on-one with O’Reilly, Sean, Greta and of course Megyn but be very careful of the last. O’Reilly and Van Susteren will
be aware that the windup of their careers will coincide with yours, and will be eager to preserve their access through the next Clinton era. Hannity will go for blood, but even if he draws it, you will benefit from having battled television’s most consistent conservative. Only Megyn, not really believing the succession theory of this book, will see she has decades beyond you in which to dominate news, and if getting to the network anchor means creating “a moment” with you, well, she will.

So would Bret Baier. So too will any younger cable anchor eager to put the “question” to you as Bernard Shaw did to Jimmy Carter in 1980. All media want to put that “question” to all nominees and you are the nominee even though not yet designated formally, so everyone is gunning for you as surely as every NFL team shoots for the Super Bowl champion from last year.

The trick will be to be comfortable and anticipate those moments and turn them back on the host, as George H.W. Bush so memorably did on Dan Rather, to the latter’s embarrassment and as Newt did so often in the debates of 2012, and as you can do.

Do it once, and hosts will be gun shy. Not with Gov. H though. Find a joint appearance opportunity and play memory lane, emphasizing how you were once a young mom in Arkansas, sympathizing with the young moms in near poverty. “You recall these folks, Mike, you cared for them too,” and he will be yours.

The governor is very much against same-sex marriage, and on this you ought to be on the offensive when you join him on air. Bring it up. Encourage him to repeat his declarations on abortion and gay marriage.

“I am utterly exasperated with Republicans and the so-called leadership of the Republicans, who have abdicated on this issue,” Huckabee told the Family Research Council’s “Values Voters Summit” annual gathering in 2014. “If the Republicans want to lose guys like me and a whole bunch of still God-fearing and Bible-believing people just go ahead and abdicate on this issue. And while you are at it, go ahead and say abortion doesn’t matter either because at that point you lose me.” He continued:

“If they continue this direction, they guarantee they are going to lose every election in the future. Guarantee it. And, I don’t understand why they want to lose because a lot of Republicans, particularly those that live on the left coast or those who live up in the bubbles of New York and Washington are convinced that if we don’t capitulate on the same-sex marriage issue, and if we don’t raise the white flag of surrender and just except the inevitable, then we are going to be losers. I tell you, it is the absolute opposite of that.”

It isn’t the “absolute opposite of that” of course, but that is what the governor’s audience that day wanted to hear and he let them it hear it, believing it sincerely to be right of course, but also confident that he had no general election campaign to run.

Your calculation should be very different. You should want to encourage Mike to split the party down these lines, to fan the fire within the base of religious conservatives upset by court-imposed decrees on same sex marriage and to bring up abortion again and again. He is a most useful wedge. Hit the road with him, once, in the late summer of 2015 and follow quickly with sit-downs with the rest of the Fox line up. Then rest and point to them through the entirety of 2016 as evidence of your willingness to go anywhere and debate anyone in right wing media.

This “illusion of availabilty” created by a round of Fox News interviews will be transparently thin, but it will also become a talking point among your MSM fans eager to diminish the Fox brand and immunize you into being a reliable guest on their reliably safe venues. After you have appeared on each Fox headliner’s show once—one and done—you are home free.

Three other media people to worry about: Neil Cavuto, Jake Tapper, and Chuck Todd. Be very, very careful around these pros. They won’t blink before putting in a shiv. The best laid media plans.…

CHAPTER 19

Bobby Jindal

I have watched the Louisiana governor work and from different perspectives. From the audience, from behind him at a Mitch McConnell event in late October 2015, beside him asking questions of him and Carly Fiorina at the same event, and via the phone on the radio again and again over the past many years.

Such an intellect, and he would be a very formidable general election candidate except that he will be a vice presidential nominee before he is a general election nominee, so not a concern of yours—yet.

But have the oppo done and track him everywhere. And begin to define him by his most exotic episode—the exorcism.