The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (9 page)

The elites of both parties thus see below them groupings whose defining qualities will not shift over the next few election cycles, but whose interest in politics will wax and wane. Because political energy now resides in the components of the Democratic pyramid, the near term looks rosy for Al Gore. And given the disgust of the Party of Faith with Republican leadership, the prospects for Democratic gains in 1998 and 2000 are high.

Since 1980 the GOP leadership has held captive the Party of Faith with a threat: Imagine if the Democrats won everything. For a long while, this worked. But a sea change has occurred. The leadership of the people for whom God matters most is now asking, How could things get worse? The culture is completely eroticized, drug-drenched, and crude. Religious practice is marginalized. And kids routinely kill other kids. The country, in the eyes of the faithful, may be irretrievably diseased.

So James Dobson served up a warning in March, much as Jesse Jackson did back in 1987. The Party of Faith will not be lectured to any longer on the need for tolerance and compromise. It will bolt if it has to in order to demonstrate what it means to be the party’s base. Gary Bauer may launch an explicitly faith-based protest campaign that could lead to an independent candidacy for president in 2000.

Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senate majority leader Trent Lott, and a half-dozen presidential candidates need to stop trying to persuade the Party of Faith to pipe down for the good of the country. Rather, Republican leaders need to defend that group’s interests and proclaim its legitimacy over and over again. California’s Republican candidate for governor, attorney general Dan Lungren, has begun this process.

Lungren, a practicing Catholic, is firmly pro-life, pro-faith, and pro-church. It’s a powerful message, especially when combined with the promises Republican candidates must make to the Party of Wealth concerning taxes. Oklahoma governor Frank Keating is another politician who has managed to energize all the groupings within the Republican party. So it can be done. The question is whether anyone in Washington has sufficient credibility with the Party of Faith to give it assurances that won’t be dismissed as posturing.”

Though written in May of 1998, this basic cartography of American politics is still in place, but the risk of fracture on the GOP side has shifted.

As you know, as I know, as everyone knows, the “Party of Faith” within the GOP has nowhere to go. They lost the “culture war” over marriage and are barely holding on to religious-liberty tenets that were thought to be so deeply ingrained in the American civic religion as to be assumed in every debate, even in the radical reaches of the sexual frontier. They know that their only hope for defensible lines around their right to believe and practice their beliefs regarding traditional Christian norms of sexuality lies with restocking the federal bench, and especially the Supreme Court, with originalists who are especially strong on Free Exercise Clause issues and the First Amendment’s other provisions protecting the broad “right of conscience.”

Harry Reid’s trashing of the filibuster makes this restocking a possibility. Expect the GOP nominee to push the issue of the courts to the center of the campaign. The religious conservatives aren’t leaving the GOP, and they won’t be staying home in 2016. They are in the life raft, paddling furiously, even if Mitt Romney re-emerges from a dead-lock as the nominee as you fear.

No, the key crack in the GOP’s core constituencies is deep within the critical group delineated above as the “Party of Patriotism,” the national security conservatives, described above as “the nationalists, or American exceptionalists, and [they] include professional foreign-policy wonks, the remnants of anti-Communists, and nearly every member of the armed forces. They are secular defenders of the American ideal, and Reagan was their embodiment.”

Almost all of them believe you to have been a disaster at State, your national security skills
de minimus
, and your husband to have been only marginally better while residing at 1600 Pennsylvania. Neither of you seem to understand or care much about grand strategy or military matters.

Those who want to be president have to do more than fly around the globe, or the Kardashians would be senators or more, and FDR would have been a failure as Commander-in-Chief.

BUT—the biggest BUT of all—you aren’t Rand Paul, or more specifically anything remotely like what both his GOP opponents and his most ardent supporters believe him to be. I will discuss below the challenge Paul presents should the-hard-to-imagine-but-nevertheless-possible happen and he lands on the GOP ticket. But even if he is dispatched in the primaries fairly quickly, his brand is wider than his father’s, and his followers much more numerous and for the most part much better at message discipline than the “PaulBots” who roamed the nominating process of 2012, like wasps stirred daily from a nest under attack.

Paul the Younger is a thousand times more sophisticated than his amiable if idiosyncratic father and he represents a very old, pedigreed isolationism that had been banished from the GOP by Ike. But like the Shadow of Mordor I have often accused you in print of representing, it has returned to live again in the Party of Lincoln. “It isn’t evil,” you must say if you take up this analogy, “but it enables evil.” (LOTR junkies can employ a Saruman analogy here.)

“America cannot retreat from the world,” has become a favorite saying of yours. Good. So too was your declaration, during your book tour, on CSPAN on June 27, 2014:

“We have to learn to be agile and ready for the unexpected, while we try to build the world we want, especially for our children and now my future grandchild. We have got to be aware of the fact that all these other countries, all these billions of people, they are making hard choices every single day. We have to be ready for that. Because I am absolutely convinced we have to continue to lead the world into the kind of future we want. We can’t sit on the sidelines. We can’t retreat. We’re going to have setbacks. We are going to have disappointments. But over time, our story has become the dominant story. It represents the hopes and aspirations of people everywhere. That is what I want Americans to understand. And the main reason about why I wrote this book—I know there is a big debate going on about our role in the world, and there are some real unfortunate consequences still to deal with from prior decisions and the like. But we can’t abdicate our responsibility. How we decided, how we execute it will be the stuff of political debate. But the world needs us. America matters to the world, and yes, the world matters to America for our prosperity and our security and our democracy.”

This phrasing is almost wholly without content, but it serves notice that if push comes to shove, you would use American military forces to defend important American interests abroad, and that those occasions would be far more numerous than those which would trigger a President Rand Paul to ask, “Where are the carriers?”

Senator Paul is working hard to change his brand from “neo-isolationist” to “non-interventionist,” but that conservative influencers even claim Rand is an isolationist presents you with an enormous opening. The fear of the return of the isolationists is deep within most of the GOP, like the fear of the return of the White Walkers in the
Game of Thrones
fantasy epic, and its HBO series. (NOTE: You will have to be current with television pop culture hits such as
Game of Thrones
,
House of Cards, Breaking Bad, Homeland, True Detective
etc.) Getting caught clueless about some cultural campfire will reinforce the idea of your age being a huge obstacle to effective governance. Your pratfall about being “broke when you left the White House” reflected an out-of-touch moment, but not with popular culture but with the middle class, and that is to be expected of wealthy people, even wealthy Alinskyites. But you cannot be clueless about culture. Besides, Bill will love
Game of Thrones
, just as he did
House of Cards
, and for all the reasons we all know.

Many national security Republicans fear—really, really fear—a genuine inward turning, an exhaustion from the burdens and costs of the empire of reason and classical liberalism. They know the seeds are there and they know some of them will flower, first in a distancing of
America from Israel, even as your own party’s anti-Israel fringe forced the 2012 convention into a deeply embarrassing charade about Jerusalem. The fringe in both parties amplifies anti-Israel rhetoric far beyond its actual reach, but the party that can be most trusted on Israel picks up some loosely attached partisans, who are nevertheless strong supporters of Israel. Even a mainstream GOP national security conservative must hammer again and again on President Obama’s open hostility towards the Jewish state and your complicity in it. So you must continually restate your strong, unswerving support for Israel while hinting that the isolationists have already won within the GOP.

A few sample paragraphs for your stump speech can accomplish both goals. You have never been this explicit before, but allow me to replace your (obviously) less-than-talented scribbler again and offer you this draft:

“Many of you already know of my unwavering support for Israel. You know how hard, first Bill as president and then I as Secretary of State, worked for a comprehensive peace accord that would provide Israel with borders that reflect adjustments necessary to its defense, with an undivided Jerusalem that is recognized by the entire international community and not just America and a handful of democracies, and with a supply of the weaponry that allows Israel to stand against the existential threat of a near-nuclear Iran and its terrorist ally Hezbollah.

“Many of you know we cannot allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Thus did President Obama and I work to impose sanctions on the regime and for the same reason did Secretary Kerry and President Obama work to impose a veriable set of inspections and restraints on the regime in Tehran. But how many Republicans believe that keeping Iran a non-nuclear state is in the nation’s interest, really? Does Senator Paul really believe it is in America’s deepest national interest to deny the radical mullahs access to the most fearsome of weapons. If so, why did he sign Senator Cotton’s ‘open letter’ understood to be a sabotage of our efforts then and now? Why did Senator Cruz sign it? And Senator Rubio?

“Or, as I fear, do Senators Paul and Cruz and other Tea Party isolationists not really care if Iran goes its own way on nuclear weapons provided they get some headlines along the way and the contributions that come with those headlines? I don’t doubt Senator Paul’s sincerity on many issues, but I do doubt his wisdom and certainly his commitment to the defense of Israel. I think many in the Republican Party do as well. That’s why I am asking them to join with me in a bipartisan administration committed to the non-partisan ideals that drove every president during the Cold War, from Truman to George H.W. Bush, who, by the way, despite being my husband’s opponent was also his friend from the start. That’s as it should be in politics, and as it can be again.

“I pledge to you tonight, as I have from the very beginning of this campaign, to reclaim national security and national defense from the endless partisan trench warfare of Washington. I pledge a non-partisan or Republican leader for the Department of Defense. I pledge a budget, wherein every year 5% of our GDP goes to national security. I pledge not 11, not 12, not even 13 but 14 fully built-out carrier strike groups, which is what this world needs for stability. I pledge to you a budget that will put us back on a path to 350 ships in the world’s finest navy, and to do so by the end of my second term. I pledge a Marine Corps of at least 200,000 and a rebuilt if leaner army and air force.

“We know that some Republicans will make similar pledges—though none have yet—but we also know that the alliance among the libertarians, deficit hawks and isolationists within the GOP will never make such pledges or support them. We know their number is growing. We know they opposed the use of drones to kill terrorists even after the nation’s finest legal scholars approved of the necessity of such applications of lethal force. I wonder would Rand Paul have sent our special forces to kill bin Laden in 2011? I was in that room. I knew the risks we were taking with an ally. I approved of not notifying Pakistan in advance. I am a realist about our national security.

“Who in the GOP is not? And who in the GOP is willing to join me in the remaking of an old coalition that commits to ending politics at the water’s edge. My 5% of GDP proposal actually needs to go into the Constitution, as a floor that no future Congress can hold hostage as the Republicans did when they refused to negotiate on the sequester. That was the real GOP, the party of austerity, beginning with defense. We proposed modest hikes in both defense and social spending, but the ideologues would have none of it.

“Now they would like you to forget the sequester, forget the defense cuts, blame it all on President Obama, try to hypnotize you into forgetting who would not lift the caps imposed by the sequester.

“I think we can rebuild and renew our military. I have spent more time with our men and women in uniform than any other candidate and I have been, believe it or not, a military spouse, though not of the sort that make the so-very difficult sacrifices of watching their husbands or wives go off in deployment. No, my time as First Lady—when my husband was ordering troops into combat to stop the killing in Kosovo—impressed upon me deeply what it means to families to have their loved ones sent off to war. As Senator, as Secretary of State, all those years in the White House as well brought me again and again into the company of America’s finest and their families. I have glimpsed, but not shared those sacrifices of spouses at home, caring for the kids, fixing the blown water heater, worrying over every report of a terrible event. I have not shared that suffering, but I have seen it, and I will be a reliable commander-in-chief as well as a First Friend to the military spouse.