The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (2 page)

I miss our biennial conversations. Do you ever make it out to California? I am living in Berkeley and working in Oakland for the summer and would love to see you. Let me know if there is any chance of our getting together --2667 Derby #2, Berkeley 415-841-5330.

There were rumors of your going to SE Asia to recruit organizers. Is the lack of imagination among my peers really so rampant as that suggests or did you get yourself a CIA-sponsored junket to exotica?

I hope you are still well and fighting. Give my regards to Mrs. Harper. Hopefully we can have a good argument sometime in the near future.

Until then,

Hillary

PART I

YOUR STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES AND PLATFORM

CHAPTER 1

Setting the Bar High:

Questing For a New “Clinton Era”

At the end of his opening chapter, Machiavelli tells Lorenzo why a prince like Lorenzo ought to listen to a commoner like Machiavelli. This excerpt may explain why a senior Democratic stateswoman, former First Lady and recipient of the best advice from the most skilled advisors of the left ought to listen to a radio talk show host of the center-right:

“Nor do I hold with those who regard it as a presumption if a man of low and humble condition dare to discuss and settle the concerns of princes; because, just as those who draw landscapes place themselves below in the plain to contemplate the nature of the mountains and of lofty places, and in order to contemplate the plains place themselves upon high mountains, even so to understand the nature of the people it needs to be a prince, and to understand that of princes it needs to be of the people.”

The best-positioned person to advise you on how to win the presidency is probably Karl Rove, but he doesn’t dare help you openly (though whether he might help you quietly depends on the nominee of the GOP… more on this later.) Thus the very first transcript I include in Part IV is from Rove, and immediately after that, selections from conversations with Axelrod and Newt Gingrich, two other American political geniuses who, however flawed, won big when winning big was
necessary. Every word of all those transcripts was selected from millions of words in my archive of 25 years of interviews, for you and your team. Bring a highlighter to Section IV.

I think you are shrewd enough to accept help from anyone if the advice or observation is actually helpful and not a poison pill, regardless of who provides the insight or the nudge. Whether or not my suggestions are poison pills will be for you to decide, but very few people know the base of the GOP better than the ten talk show hosts with at least a decade of experience talking with that base, and I don’t see Rush, Sean, the Great One, Laura Ingraham, Glenn, Bill, Dennis, Michael or Mike stepping forward to help you. That leaves me, 15 years into the medium, 25 into broadcasting, and a veteran of the Reagan Era, even of his White House, a time long ago still fondly remembered as perhaps the last “great age” of America. It is the sort of era you would have named for you, I suspect.

There is no “first Clinton era” you care to recall, is there? Now the term “Clinton era” means that agonizing period of scandal and embarrassment, for which you have many paybacks to deliver. Oh, your husband amuses himself and the Democratic base by talking about the balanced budget, but we know the score. It was really about his pants and America’s defenses towards al Qaeda being down, and his concessions on welfare reform and the numbers of pardons delivered as he waved what he thought was a last goodbye to the Oval Office. Marc Rich, well, there is a problem for the campaign.

A sorry record for an eight-year presidency, and one that began with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. No “HillaryCare” from them, but your husband did sign the now-reviled “Freedom Restoration Act” in 1993, which birthed the much-beloved-on-the-right
Hobby Lobby
Supreme Court decision in 2014, just as Bill signed the “Defense of Marriage Act” in 1996. He was for the modern equivalent of segregation—according to your party—before he was against it. Some presidency. As George Will said at the time, “He may not have been the worst president, but
he was the worst man to ever hold the presidency.” Some era.

There could be a “Hillary Era,” however—a “second Clinton era,” that would stand in quite a distinctly different category than your husband’s puissant eight years of small beer, big headlines, and welfare reform. Oh, Bill is a gifted political act, like Neil Diamond is a gifted stage act, and like Diamond will always be welcome at Red Sox games. Bill can always get a labor crowd thumping.

But Reagan’s death prompted an outpouring of genuine sadness and a shudder through the world such as passes only when one of the great ones dies. Nixon got the same shake, and not because of love, though there was from some much of that, but because of genuine significance. 41 won’t. 43 will. 44 will get the respectful silence owed the office and an outpouring of affection from everyone who saw in his election the truth that in America anyone can become president. But achievements as president? Well, the eulogies will be short in that regard. One wonders if the Nobel Peace Prize will come up? The bottom line: If 45 wants to be the equal of 40, there are things that must be done.

To own “Clintonian” in the way Jackson owns “Jacksonian” and Jefferson owns “Jeffersonian,” you will have to do big things. Not talk of them as Obama has done again and again. Things no one dreams of doing, but which could be done. You can do them. They would not be good for the Republicans as it would permanently end their role in American politics, and it is possible they would not be good for the Americans over 50 alive today, because they would be unsettling. But they might be good for the country long-term. If you wish to dominate an era as Reagan did, you have to steal from the other party their best parts and people, as Reagan did, as Nixon did. You have to co-opt. Certainly you cannot stick with the disastrous ideological choices of the Obama-Jarrett years. (And yes, you should begin to use that phrase about as soon as the ballots are in, perhaps having Bill do it before the Inauguration, and you thereafter. Not often. Just here and there, always with a smile.)

We begin at the beginning: The oldest rule of politics: Unify your side. Divide your opponents.

A newer rule of politics: Tell everyone exactly what you intend to do. (See Part III on “Transparency” for more details.)

Here, in five ideas, is what you should do, and what the GOP ought to be preparing to see you do (but won’t, because they have never been much on the imagination front, have they?). And not just to win in 2016, but to establish a long, enduring—very, very, long enduring—second Clinton Era.

These five ideas/proposals would certainly form a core of your campaign that would make you unbeatable, so here are the five things I suggest you make central to your campaign:

1.    A constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College and substituting in its place a direct election of the president by popular vote.

2.    A constitutional amendment abolishing the two term limit on the presidency.

3.    A constitutional amendment mandating that 5% of GDP be spent on the Pentagon’s budget, with safeguards that the money actually be spent on soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines and the equipment they need, and not on absurd “tack-ons” like “green energy” production for military bases. Rebuild the military and detach it from the GOP, and do so before a coup becomes a reality in the next forty years.

4.    An ironclad commitment to massive development of our own energy resources, via fracking onshore and select development of new offshore resources, via 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 of it. 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.

This will be the hardest of all the backflips you must accomplish, a full-throated embrace of the fossil fuels you are on record as saying are destroying the planet. And like Canadian figure skater Kevin Reynolds’ first ever “double quad” on ice in a competitive event in 2010, it will be unprecedented and very difficult to seize a GOP core position and persuade your side it was necessary and indeed worth doing.

5.    A near-complete amnesty for all illegal immigrants coupled with an ironclad commitment to the immediate construction of a long, double-sided, high fence covering at least half the length of the 2,000-mile, Mexican-American border. The GOP has long failed to understand how to make this dual commitment work, to see in it the easiest way to hit the sweet spot. To your supporters on the left assure them the gate in the fence will be wide. Open it soon after construction is complete. Then close it prior to 2020. Then open again thereafter. With the majorities you build in your demographic surge you can put forward the Constitutional amendment removing term-limits on the presidency.

Now that is a Clinton Era with genuine historic significance.

These five proposals would energize the left beyond any measure we have seen in the past (including the Obama ’08 campaign), while peeling off the serious hawks and the biggest money interests of them all in the energy business. They would also effectively enlist nearly every Spanish-speaking American in your cause, yet give border-security conservatives the sole thing they have long asked for and been repeatedly denied by the establishment GOP, which fears building a long, strong, double-sided border fence because they believe it risks their being called racist. That fear of that branding is deeper within the GOP even than a fear of return to minority status in the House and Senate, which failure on border security will surely bring them.

To repeat: The oldest rule of politics: Unify your side. Divide your opponents.

A newer rule of politics: Tell everyone exactly what you intend to do.

I will come back to each of these five proposals in detail in a later chapter, but absorb them all in one big gulp for a moment and
see what your reaction might be.

The left hates the Electoral College and sees in it a deeply unfair exclusion of concentrated minority votes in large, urban settings. Campaign for the fulfillment of one-person, one-vote, via an amendment. Let the GOP defend the work of a few hundred white landowners of the late-18th century, half of whom owned slaves and thought nothing of it.

Take up the record of FDR in his third and fourth term. Ask why Reagan ought to have been denied a third term (his disease did not manifest until late 1992, and old Reaganauts will love you for saying so). And why not Bill in 2000, or Barack in 2016? The old retainers of them will think, if only for a moment, back to what might have been, enjoying the emotional jolt of thinking that you are saying they would have won, enjoying the prospect of a comeback in the implication, unstated, that you would like some veterans of past eras around you.

You can rhetorically disqualify yourself from a third term in a gentle way. But do not make the amendment applicable only to those who follow you. Bring up your age and candidly suggest that even though you feel better than you ever have, Karl Rove’s solicitous concerns aside, you won’t know until 2024 what you’d like to do or not do. It is an older, smarter, healthier America, and you are too old, too smart and too healthy to say that if a moment needed a third term, you would not try for it. Seniors will love the idea that you are explicitly stating that 78 years old is not too old to be president, much less 70. Young people will admire your candid ambition balanced by your candid assessment of the very low likelihood of such an event. But even if many object, stand on the principle, which ought to be applicable to you: If it is good for the country, it is good for everyone who might be touched by the return to the original design. (Throwing a bone to the Framers, whose electoral college you are trashing at the same time.)

As for point three, defense hawks are deeply worried, and rightly so. Truth be told, they are in genuine play if Senator Rand Paul is on the ticket, and perhaps even Senator Ted Cruz. The officer corps—present
and past—know how deep the president has cut. The folks who count nukes know what has happened to the deterrent. The folks who watch the PRC know what a regional hegemon is—a superpower about to push aside its old superior within four days sailing off its coast, and they know this is what the ChiComs have achieved on President Obama’s watch—your watch.

So take a large slice of them from the GOP by committing the country to Defense Department budget seriousness, and destroy the GOP’s hope to beat you with one stroke if Senaor Paul (and perhaps Senator Cruz) is the nominee or the Veep. (Senator Cruz appears to be moving to shield himself from this vulnerability even as Senator Rubio is being lifted on the public’s deep and growing concern over safety, but Senator Paul remains a unique and to no small number of conservatives uniquely appealing candidate who easily has the “highest floor” of all the GOP field. He will never be swept from the field, the convention, or the headlines of the fall of 2016.)

To your friends you can explain there is much that can be done from within the Pentagon’s budget that they would applaud, much that has been done for years. But if the cost of a huge majority is a few more aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines and a full complement of F-35s, then put them on the table. Secure the soccer moms, who are security moms first. Answer critics of Benghazi with an explanation they will accept and which will not injure you: That the military assets needed that night were not nearby and not available to come to the aid of the besieged.