The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (26 page)

BS
Yeah, even with my distrust of the administration, it would have sounded like science fiction, and here we are.

HH: And here we are. But at the time that it began, it wasn’t that way. Here’s Hillary from December 14th, 2009, cut number three:

HRC: Sometimes, we will have the most impact by publicly denouncing a government action, like the coup in Honduras or violence in Guinea. Other times, we will be more likely to help the oppressed by engaging in tough negotiations behind closed doors, like pressing China and Russia as part of our broader agenda. In every instance, our aim will be to make a difference, not to prove a point.

HH: Now Bret Stephens, I bring this up because it reminds us of the first ill-fated step of the Obama-Clinton years…

BS
Yeah, Honduras.

HH: Honduras.

BS
I mean, dreadful. What… the government of, the people of Honduras stood up against the possibility of a new Hugo Chavez and save themselves from a dictatorship, and the United States was simply in the wrong in not accepting that Honduras, for all of its problems, actually has a rule of law, that its then-Chavezista president was attempting to violate. I mean, it’s just a stunning, it’s just a stunning comment. And again, I get back to this conceit, Hugh, of smart power, you know, this self-belief that they are so smart. And yet on so many levels, not only are they not smart, they’re not even well-informed.

HH: Oh, she says she would press China and Russia behind closed doors to make a difference, not to prove a point. She gave them the reset button. They tried to get it back, it was revealed, in
HRC
, by Jon Allen and Amie Parnes. And in fact, it’s a total debacle what’s happened with Russia since then. And that’s smart power on display, where the really smart guy, unfortunately he’s evil, has eaten their lunch.

BS:
Well, and you know that that smart button literally had the word
reset
mistranslated in Russian. They used the wrong word. So from the get-go, the State Department didn’t even have the linguistic prowess to get the language right. And it was just a kind of a symbol of everything that came after it. This idea that you could charm a KGB agent like Vladimir Putin into being a cooperative member of an international community where as in fact he’s hell bent on restoring the glories of the Soviet Union.

HH: One more quote from, in the wayback machine, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is laying out the agenda ahead at the end of the first year of the Obama administration. And here’s what she says about what we’ll hear a lot about in the next two years as she runs for president—women. Cut number four:

HRC: On my visits to China, I have made a point of meeting with women activists. The UN Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 inspired a generation of women civil society leaders who have become rights defenders for today’s China. In 1998, I met with a small group of lawyers in a crowded apartment on the fifth floor of a walk-up building. They described for me their efforts to win rights for women to own property, have a say in marriage and divorce, and be treated as equal citizens. When I visited China again earlier this year, I met with some of the same women, but this group had grown and expanded its scope. Now there were women working not just for legal rights, but for environmental, health, and economic rights as well.

HH: Bret Stephens, I imagine we’ll hear a lot of this stuff, and we’ll hear a lot about the one Chinese dissident that she did indeed get sprung from China in the course of her four years as Secretary of State. But I don’t think we’ll be hearing much about what’s going on in Hong Kong, and I doubt really, I really doubt that these women that she met with in that dramatic moment in the 5th floor walk-up in the crowded room that was no doubt full of infiltrators and listened to every word by listening devices are actually making much of a difference at all in China.

BS:
It reminds me a little bit about her description in one of, during the 2008 campaign, of walking into a hail of gunfire when she landed in the
Balkans, I think in Sarajevo back in the mid-1990s. That should be checked. I would, my instinct as a journalist tells me I want to go back and check on that. Notice, by the way, what she omitted: the greatest human rights violations, or women’s rights violations in China, the one-child policy, the forced abortions that go into enforcing it.

HH: And the inability to religious, to worship religious…

BS:
Oh, the list is long, but I’m sticking to the women’s, you know, specifically the women’s agenda, and unbelievably cruel treatment of women who cannot afford to bribe their way out of the one-child policy.

HH: And you mentioned Turkey in the last segment. Women are being pushed back into the veil in Turkey at an alarming rate. They’ve never gotten rid of it in some places. And her great foreign policy push for Libya has left that country in utter chaos, Bret Stephens.

BS:
No, look, I mean, this is one of the hypocrisies that drives especially those of us who are concerned about Israel’s well-being and its security, the constant harping on alleged Israeli human rights violations, and the complete failure to take note of what is happening to women, to minorities, to gay people in Muslim societies, to Christians, to people with different religious beliefs all over the Muslim Middle East where this administration walks on eggshells.

HH: Yeah, ISIS threw a gay man from…

BS
I mean, it’s a disturbing double standard.

HH: Yeah, ISIS threw a gay man from a bridge yesterday and then stoned his broken body. That’s who we’re dealing with here, and I’m just curious, we have a minute left, Bret. Does the mainstream media indulge her in these fantasies of competence? Or do they attack the narrative as she’s attempting to construct it? Not you and me, but the mainstream media.

BS:
You know what? I don’t know if you saw that
Times
story based on her time in as First Lady. It was a remarkably harsh story. I was struck that on the front page of the
Times
, there was this really pretty dim view of her political savvy or lack thereof during her time as First Lady. I think there are a lot of people on the left who just as in 2008, so, too, going into 2016, are really sick of the Clinton brand of politics, which is about personal ambition above everything else, and all of the policies, all of the ideas, opportunistically
constructed to suit that vehicle of their ego and their interest. And I think a lot of, don’t be surprised, Hugh, don’t be surprised if one of the other candidates who throws his or her hat in the ring, maybe the governor of Maryland or even Joe Biden, might do surprisingly well.

CHAPTER 31

An Interview with
The New York Times’
Peter Baker, December 9, 2014

HH: Okay, second part of the conversation goes back to a story that you and Amy Chozick wrote on Sunday [in the
New York Times
].

PB:
Yeah.

HH: “Hillary Clinton’s History As First Lady Powerful, Not Always Deft.” Remarkable story, very interesting, and I want to begin with a lot of the source material, which is this oral history project. One of the critiques of that oral history project, it was paid for by Clintonworld. Did that bother you at all in using the sources?

PB:
Well,
National Review
made a point of that, and let’s just clarify. They didn’t pay for the oral history project. They did give some contributions to the Miller Center. That appears to be the case. That was not fully funded by them or something like that. And the Miller Center is an institution that’s affiliated with the University of Virginia, you know, a public institution, and they’ve done oral histories for every presidency going back to Jimmy Carter. So I think you know, it’s a relevant fact that we should know, I supposed, that the Clinton Foundation gave them money. Fair enough. It’s also relevant to know that the director of the Miller Center from 1998-2005, the one who did this oral history project, was Phil Zelikow, who was a well-known historian who worked for both Bush presidents in the White House and the State Department. So you know, I read the interviews. I don’t see anything in there that suggested to me that they were done in any different way than the ones I’ve read from the Reagan and the Bush 41 administrations. And they produced a lot of interesting material. And we looked through them. We were looking for quotes or stories or anecdotes that told us something from people who were inside the room. By definition, those are going to be Clinton people. But what was interesting about it is it wasn’t all, you know, like
flattering and you know, puffery. I mean, there were a lot of sort of sharp edges to the portrayal of Hillary Clinton as the First Lady.

HH: Oh, absolutely there were. And in fact, I want to talk about that. You referred to the health care debacle of Mrs. Clinton’s time as first lady, and those are the first two years of the Clinton administration. Is she going to be able to avoid in her presidential campaign, Peter Baker, being called Obamacare’s grandmother, because it really is her, not her baby, but her grandchild that we’re living with now.

PB:
Yeah, yeah. What’s really interesting is how much she has managed to evolve her political persona from that time as first lady, right? In the 90s, her identity and public perception was a very liberal figure, the liberal voice inside the White House, promoter of health care, government involvement in the economy, you know, a skeptic of welfare reform and so on and so forth. And in the years since then, really, you know, transformed herself into sort of this centrist figure, somebody who’s criticized on the left. Gosh, there’s the liberals who would like to get Elizabeth Warren out there, and she’s seen as a more hawkish figure even than President Obama when it comes to national security. So she’s done a remarkable job of sort of changing that perception over time. But any campaign, especially one that will be as hard fought as this one is going to revisit history. That’s why we thought it was worth going back, looking at that time that people have kind of forgotten about, and reminding us where she came from, how she got from there to here. And I think health care’s going to be a big issue, particularly if the administration can’t get it working right by then. It had some success lately, they would say, but there’s still two years to go. We’ll see what the perception of it is two years.

HH: What’s your understanding of Hillarycare compared to Obamacare? Wasn’t Hillarycare—it’s my understanding—I won’t put it in terms of a question. It was my understanding that it was even bigger and more intrusive than Obamacare.

PB:
Yeah, yeah, no, much more government-oriented. In fact, Obama’s is arguably closer to what the Republican alternative was at the time when Senator Dole and Senator Chafee were arguing for a little bit more of a market-oriented approach. That’s closer to what Obama ended up with. It’s still obviously perceived by a lot of people as too much government in their health care choices. But it does, you know, provide subsidies for people to buy private insurance, not government insurance. And Hillary Clinton’s version of it was much more government, much more bureaucracy. It was famously
lampooned on the floor of the Congress with a big chart showing all the boxes and everything. And I think that was one of the things that really brought it down, because the perception that it was going to be the big states coming into your health care choices.

HH: Now Peter Baker, you also noted in the December 5th piece in the
New York Times
that throughout the White House years and since she created her own team, her insiders, her Hillaryland, and that it’s insular. Does she take advice from anyone not in Hillaryland seriously?

PB:
Yeah, that’s a good question. You know, she’s suffered over the years sometimes from having advisors who led her in a direction she might not have wanted to have gone. Obviously, her 2008 campaign advisors overestimated their capacity to take down this young newcomer named Barack Obama, and they didn’t compete in a lot of the caucus states. They presented her as this, they were trying to address the issue of being a woman and whether she’s tough enough, when everybody pretty much thinks that Hillary Clinton’s tough enough, and they didn’t address the issues that they really had. She gets caught in, as any politician does, in the network of people you’ve got around you. The question is in 2016, is she going to have some of those same people, or is she branching out and bringing in a fresh crop? And we’ll see. I don’t know whether we really know the answer to that, yet…

HH: You know, you wrote in your piece that she was unsparing in her calculations about her husband’s political prospects, and you just mentioned the need to freshen herself. One of the big critiques is that she’s past her DC sell-by date. That she’s old and tired. Has she heard that? Is she aware of that?

PB:
Oh, I think she’s aware of it. She’s certainly heard it, yeah. I do think that’s an issue. You know, I went back and looked. With the exception of Ronald Reagan, we haven’t elected a president since James Buchanan who was ten years older than the outgoing president, right? We tend to move on from generations forward, not backwards. And so she’s going to have to address that. She’s going to have to make the case for why she’s not a retread. Having said that, as my wife reminds me, she has the advantage in some ways of seeming fresh because if she were to win, she’d be the first woman, and that is a barrier-breaking kind of thing. And that, to some extent, is different than if she were a 69 year old man running for president at this
point. She can argue that she is moving the country forward in a way that a younger person might. She’s got to explain what at 69 she’s offering. And I think that even young women who are excited about the idea of a woman being president are still asking the generational question is she somebody who understand where we’re coming from at this point. And she’s going to find it’s going to be a challenge for her.