The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (17 page)

You will need a Puerto Rican Floridian to beat a Cuban-Floridian, one rhetorically as fluent in Spanish and as telegenic as is Rubio. You must deny him his natural Telemundo and Univision advantage as well as his Spanish radio edge. How Mitt Romney did not pick him remains the great unexplained question of 2012, so probe as well every detail of his story and his family’s story.

Recall season two of
House of Cards
when the opposition research team found the vulnerability even Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright had not imagined could be unearthed from Princess Buttercup’s past? That is the level digging we are talking about. There is no whisper among GOP circles of any impropriety except some charges on his GOP credit card, but dig away anyway.

The right has long suspected you have capabilities in this area of opposition research, which you could not actually have. How else could you have missed obvious things on President Obama that I and others found, like his audio book recording of
Dreams from My Father
, or Reverend Wright’s sermons, on sale in his church’s gift store?

In this respect, you are like the wizard in Oz, but only in this regard: the “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” line. Your opposition research team is horrible and has been since Bill ran in 1992. You have never trusted anyone to be your Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s most effective operative. But you need one, especially with regard to Rubio. But really for everyone in and out of your party.

This sort of sleuthing isn’t hard to buy, so buy it. And not just from one source. Bounty it and—see Part III—be transparent about it. Speak out loud about the need to be vetted and to vet. Revel in what you should call “the new scrutiny.” Go full Gary Hart, but when you challenge the press to follow you, be specific about those beside you “they” should be trailing:

I welcome scrutiny. As one of my predecessors said famously and to his misfortune, go ahead and follow me around. But do not put just me under that microscope as has so often been the case these past eight years, and even before my run for the Senate or Bill’s 1992 campaign. Follow us all. Follow Senator Rubio and Governor Walker. They won’t mind any more than I do. The
Washington Free Beacon
wants to plumb the depths of my two letters to Saul Alinsky in search of a secret code, or desires to send sleuths to the Clinton Library or the University of Virginia oral history project? Fine.

But let us have one standard for all candidates, one rule of thoroughness. Find all of Senator Rubio’s legislative correspondence from his decade of deal-making in the Florida state house. Dig into Governor Kasich’s Lehman Brothers tenure or Jeb Bush’s Barclay bank buddies’ best bets. Find out what the John Doe investigations in Wisconsin were really about and the extent of Governor Walker’s dark money ops.

One standard. One rule. We have heard so long about so-called MSM bias that we have begun to believe it while the media really looks only for dirty laundry in the pile marked ‘D’. Bill and I have lived so long under the kleig lights that we expect nothing less, are surprised by anything other than the lurid and the laughable.

But we will not accept a double standard and we will insist that one not be practiced. When we think there is a story worth pursuing, we will point to it and ask ‘Why is that dartboard not covered in feathered missiles?’ We won’t be patsies. I won’t be a victim of the vast right wing conspiracy which indeed does exist, has always existed, has grown stronger and stronger in the dark as this avalanche of dark money was called down by the Supreme Court on our politics.

There. Done. Pointers in bright red, hidden in broad sight.

Research and recruitment. Hand your hand-picked Senate candidate in Florida the weapons with which to bleed Rubio even though Rubio is not running for re-election, and build the best turnout machine of all your state operations in Florida. You are not playing for just one election but many, and you have to plan that way. If Rubio does indeed come straight at you, speaking Spanish and pointing to the chaos in the world you helped birth, he could easily carry the GOP with him and
every dollar you spend now in prepping to beat him in Florida will be repaid with interest.

This recruitment-of-candidates-in-Florida-and-elsewhere process must advance instantly by the way, and not just in Florida, but across the country if the larger project is to succeed. You will need to age out the relics in the Senate and recruit more young and loyal—and compliant—friends and allies of Rome. As you remake the Senate, look for candidates with military experience, keeping in mind how effective the GOP was in recruiting Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst and Dan Sullivan in Arkansas, Iowa and Alaska respectively in 2014. You cannot overestimate how important it will be to clothe your tenure in the approval of veterans of the wars you were for before you were against them, and of those that you helped launch as Secretary of State, in Libya and Syria, or re-launch in Iraq. You need these people. Chelsea will need these people. Go and find them. Befriend them. Make them indebted to you. The officer class is 90% against you, but the 10% is all you need to co-opt and display to accomplish your goals.

And as you do, make it your business to discredit and ultimately defeat these three senators and every other “fast burner” on the GOP’s bench in the Senate, like Colorado’s Cory Gardner, or in the House, like Kansas’ Mike Pompeo or Florida’s Ron DeSantis.

It is never too early to thin the ranks of your opponents and build the numbers of your allies.

Start with Rubio. Soon. The likeliest tickets you will face are Bush/Cruz or some combination of Rubio and Walker. The first ticket combines establishment and grassroots in a traditional marriage of the power and the passion. Either Walker/Rubio or Rubio/Walker presents two candidates that have straddled the establishment-grassroots divide artfully and could bring enormous energy to the campaign. More on Walker later, but you look at Rubio and you see a man the world would respect in the Oval Office, and whom some would instantly fear. So should you.

I proposed a “Putin Primary” a few months back, asking in a column whom the Russian tough guy would most fear as a replacement for President Obama. Goodness knows that’s a primary your and your “Reset Button” gang wouldn’t win. But Rubio might—indeed probably would. Think about that as you get ready for 2016.

CHAPTER 24

Rick Santorum

I know, I know. Why bother to read this chapter at all? You and all the other really smart people who couldn’t win Iowa in 2008 are saying that even though Santorum won Iowa in 2012 he really never had a chance then, and doesn’t have a chance now.

Roll your eyes if you must because everyone else in the room rolls their eyes when Santorum comes up. The sweater vest. The dog-man thing. “Discount the Bella effect and he wouldn’t even have finished third” you are all thinking. He is still the social warrior of old. He is so Jerry Falwell. So Pittsburgh. So last century.

Except he did win Iowa and you didn’t, and he does draw crowds and he does know his own mind and the minds of those “Blue Collar Conservatives” for whom he titled his generally well written book of 2014. Santorum knows a few things, and but for the epic undertow of the 2006 anti-Bush election and a legacy candidate with the famous last name, he’d still be in the Senate and very much a contender understood as legitimate even by the Beltway cognoscenti that despise him for his arch-Catholic values.

And those “arch-Catholic” values are widespread if not widely reported on, a semi-Silent Majority that slumbers but has not died, and which Cruz, Rubio, Ryan and Walker are all comfortable crooning to, though not nearly with as perfect a pitch as Santorum can summon. All those people kneeling in all those churches, crossing themselves, saying the Rosary. The Pope still has no divisions, but there are
millions of “arch-Catholic voters.”

No, study Santorum not because he is a lightning strike about to happen, but because of the light he supplies when he doesn’t hit you but strikes other Republicans instead. Watch his speeches and listen closely. Ask for delivery of the links to videos of his appearances taped by your legion of trackers. His indictment of the current GOP is detailed and nuanced, and much of it will travel to you and with you in the general if you have the ears to listen.

If was long ago when the first Bush damned President Reagan for his “voodoo economics,” and the phrase that is still attached to 41 and will forever be, a classic “admission against interest” if ever there was one, the killer condemnation from within the party’s own tent. You saddled yourself with such a Thor’s hammer of a phrase against President Obama when you warned the primary electorate in 2008 of a “phone ringing at 3 AM” that then-Senator Obama wouldn’t know how to handle. That line will never be forgotten. (And certainly not by Barack and Michelle. Whenever the president doesn’t help as you had hoped, or delivers a half or a third of what you need, recall you uttered that phrase that has stuck to him as surely as “voodoo economics” stuck to Reagan.)

Rick Santorum will be a fountain of such material in the months ahead, if you will only pay attention. He understands himself to be in competition with Cruz, Perry, Rubio and Walker for the same voters, but unlike them, he was there in DC in the Senate from 1993 through 2001, fighting for the legacy of the Reagan Revolution through your husband’s false “peace dividend” and extended holiday from history. He knows where all the GOP bodies are buried, and who was there and who genuinely fought through and who stood on the sidelines of the lost battles on marriage and the Supreme Court. His every speech is a code-breaker’s handbook to the GOP.

When 2008 came down to Romney and McCain, Santorum was for Romney because McCain hadn’t been there on the Senate floor fighting for Reagan’s legacy. Santorum was outspoken, detailed, precise in his blasts at McCain. He will be the same candidate in 2016 as he was
in 2012, and as specific in his critiques of the others in the GOP field as he was of McCain in 2008. Follow him and you will find much and more to use against whomever is the last man standing on the Republican side in 2016.

CHAPTER 25

Scott Walker

While the GOP faithful call him courageous, a “man of steel,” and the smiling assassin of public sector unions, you should brand Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as the “Republican Rasputin.” Like the mad Russian monk who survived countless plots and assassination attempts—the last one only successful after he was shot three times after being poisoned, then thrown into the river only to be found 140 feet from it—the amiable, likable, innovative and soft-spoken Cheesehead cannot be put down by your labor union allies, in Wisconsin of all places! On three different occasions! You and your team want to think “Walker is Pawlenty,” as flawed by good humor and good grace as the former Minnesota governor was in 2012; but unlike T-Paw, Walker has won not twice, but three times in progressive paradise, and he did so without the help of a third party spoiler on the ballot which Pawlenty had in both of his successful governor contests.

And Pawlenty might have gone the distance in ’12, but for Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s kamikaze run and the mistaken trust in consultants who spent all his money early. Pawlenty had the best staff except on budgeting. Walker will study the Pawlenty campaign as he studies everything and learn the lessons. He won’t spend his money early. He won’t rely on Beltway sharpies. He will play a longer game and understand that he need only hang around through the carnage, smiling and amiable, reminding people that he is, Thatcher-like, “not for turning.” He won the first big cattle call of Iowa,
Congressman Steve King’s Iowa Freedom Summit on January 24, 2015, with a straight-from-the-heart recounting of the battles of Wisconisn that raged over four years, a narrative that included threats to “gut your wife like a deer” and creeps stalking his kids to their schools. He laughed off the attempt to turn his CPAC speech into a gaffe. He has hired a superb Comms Team and some deeply experienced operatives, and his foreign policy bench is as deep—and very different—from Jeb Bush’s and Marco Rubio’s, the trio of top tier candidates on matters foreign and not just domestic. (Cruz is working hard to catch up here but hasn’t yet.) The GOP base knows it needs a strong man to stand up to your machine, rusty as it is, as old and worn down as you are, as desperate for Air Force One again as Bill sometimes lets on. Walker looks like that guy. He has already run the gantlet—three times!

Walker will use that enormous list of supporters generated during his reputation-making solo performance against organized labor and the left that, though not often brought up by conservatives, is remembered by them all.

And he will use that Harley-riding, pastor’s-kid innocence and ready smile to press on and on.

So, you have but one card to play. Play it early and often and use Bill:

“I don’t have anything against anyone who couldn’t finish college. I almost didn’t make it to Georgetown, Oxford or Yale Law School, and but for some saints along the way I wouldn’t have. Hillary of course had her mom and dad, and though they were, shucks, Goldwater people—Hillary was one of those kids running around as Goldwater girls ya’ll know—she wouldn’t have made it to Wellesley or Yale Law either. It took breaks in those days, great parents and teachers and a lot of luck, so I think the college degree thing leveled at Palin and Walker is just rubbish and unfair.”

See, a three-fer. Not only do you play to America’s love of credentials without exciting jealousy, you also cut Walker deep by noting his resume gap and, presto, by linking him to the most radioactive of names
in centrist America, Sarah Palin. No one divides a room as quickly or with as much clarity as Sarah Palin, and her negatives are as enormous as the state she governed. You can use her only against one target, so match her up with Walker and stand back. The atom is spilt.