The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (20 page)

SW:
Age of Twitter, right.

HH: But as I listened, yeah, you made a comment and I’m going to put it on the record. You said when we were talking about drug legalization…

SW:
Yeah.

HH: You’re against it. You said “my friend, John Hickenlooper, Democrat…”

SW:
Yeah.

HH:… and you said it casually. It wasn’t a point. I just picked up on it that you have friends who are Democrats. This is going to shock a lot of the public employee union activists out there.

SW:
Yeah, it doesn’t fit their narrative.

HH: That’s it. do you think you could go to D.C. as Reagan did and get the Democrats to reform the public sector?

SW:
Well, I think we’d certainly try. I mean, you mentioned Hickenlooper, Jack Markell, there’s others out there I’ve worked with, and you know, to me, I used to tell new lawmakers when I was first in the state assembly in state government at the most local levels in state government. I used to say for new
members don’t personalize your differences, because your opponent today may be your ally tomorrow. And so that doesn’t mean you should back away from policy. Obviously, if people watch me, I didn’t back away from the big challenges. I took on the big issues not just on public employee unions, but right to work, you name it. And voter ID just got upheld the other day. We’ve done all the big issues. But we don’t personalize it. The other side might, at least some of the activists might. But I still meet every week with the Democratic leadership in the state assembly and state senate.

HH: Something you pointed out the President has not made a habit of doing.

SW:
Yeah, just like I do with Republicans out there. And I don’t get why you wouldn’t. I mean, to me, that’s just a fundamental thing. If you’re talking every week, it’s hard to be nasty. You can have your disagreements, you can speak out. It doesn’t mean, sometimes I think there’s a mistake that it’s one extreme or the other. Working with people on the other side doesn’t mean caving. And that sometimes in the media it means, bipartisanship means just do what the Democrats want. On the other side of it, working, talking, actually communicating with the other party doesn’t mean you’re caving in, so that people who are strong conservatives think well, you can’t ever talk to them. Sure, there’s a lot of things you can do that when it comes to, for example, Iran, there’s a lot of Democrats out there, that like us, have some real serious concerns about a nuclear Iran, and we need to pull them into the mix.

HH: Back to defense, because I always ask everyone the same thing about the Ohio Class submarine and carrier groups. You’ve got one minute, Scott Walker, what do you think about our Navy?

SW:
Well, I think it’s dangerously low right now. Not only do we need to make sure that we invest in the Ohio Class submarines, nuclear, that gives us, that’s you know, one part of our nuclear triad, and it’s probably the most important part. We’ve got bombers that are getting old, we’ve got intercontinental ballistic missiles. But in the larger context, we’ve got a Navy that’s about, headed towards about half the size as it was under Reagan. We need to reinvest in that. And that’s why I push and support going forward the Gates level funding as a minimum, and we need to make sure that instead of heading down to 250 vessels, we probably need to be at 325 to maybe 340,
346 at some point in the future, under a new commander-in-chief.

HH: Governor Scott Walker, great to be with you twice today. Thanks for coming to KKNT.

SW:
Thank you, Hugh.

So be forewarned, Madame Secretary, even if your private intelligence service shenanigans stay as secret as your email and server, and even if Sid Blumenthal doesn’t unintentionally blow you up—Chuck Todd told me two days after I spoke with Walker when the “wiped clean” server story was breaking that nothing involving Sydney Blumenthal would surprise him. (See the transcript of this exchange later in the book.) Nothing will surprise Scott Walker either. Not about Sid. Not about your team’s dirtiest tricks. Not about the world and its bad actors. Nothing at all.

Scary, that, isn’t it? So unlike the people around you. So unlike you and your people the night the terrorists attacked in Benghazi.

PART III

TRUTH AND TRANSPARENCY

CHAPTER 26

The Truth about Mitt

When I wrote
A Mormon In The White House?
in 2007, I wanted a different title, one using something along the lines of “Reagan’s Heir”? The publisher insisted on using “Mormon” in the title for selling purposes and I conceded the point, trusting as I did then, but no longer do, to the occult powers of publishers when it comes to titles. (My biggest bestseller came with the title of my own invention—
If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat
—and I am now more convinced than ever that authors are as capable of choosing a title as publishers, though not publication dates. There is art, and there is science.)

My book was then and remains now the best guide to Romney, better than even his own memoir
Turnaround
or his 2010 campaign book, which I edited for him. I know him well enough, though not well, and know he could have beaten you soundly if he had entered the race, using mostly your many and obvious foreign policy failures as his frontal attack, and the picture of Ann and him and his family the silent rebuke to everything Clinton. He is also, as John McCain’s campaign manager said in 2008, a “scary learning machine,” and 2016 would have been his third round even as it is your fifth or sixth, depending on whether you count your stand-by role in the hapless Gore debacle as another lap around the track of presidential politics.

The 2008 primaries and internal GOP politics beat Romney then, but he studied and learned and beat them in turn in 2012. The general election peculiarities—plus Sandy, Candy and Orca—beat Romney in
2012, but he has been studying and learning and I have no doubt he would beat them or their surrogates, and you, in 2016 if he had run. (Or yet again, changes his mind after the field shatters itself, though the filing deadlines complicate late entries.)

There is simply nothing you can do about Mitt, either as a late entrant or as a vice presidential nominee should Cruz, Rubio, Walker or Jindal want to add heft and Establishment credibility to their first term. Romney is much smarter, much more able, much younger-looking, and more energetic in fact than you. He is healthier and smarter than you, has accomplished much more than you and is as scandal-free as you are scandal-plagued. He has studied his defeat thoroughly, and you should note that Romney has already stated he lost that race in Spanish-language media in 2012. This guy never repeats a mistake. No, a Rubio-Romney ticket (and an explicit promise of Speaker Ryan) teaming to restore America would be very formidable. A Romney-Patrick or Romney-Castro vice presidential debate would be a fun evening for the GOP, though such clashes mean little in the end game. What would matter is Romney on the stump every day, reminding the country that while he was warning the world about Putin and the Islamic State, you handed the former’s front man a reset button and fled Foggy Bottom at 1 a.m., when the Islamists stormed the Benghazi compound on 9/11. Romney as Veep nominee would be a huge problem for you. Pray that ego gets in the way, or ethnicity, as an Anglo nominee for the GOP cannot—simply cannot—select an Anglo running mate.

You are helpless against even Romney’s second-place position, because he is immunized, even as you are immunized against Bill’s many and well-known failings. Even as you are hoping you are immunized against Benghazi. There are no second acts in American politics because they bore the public, but that doesn’t mean no second chances. Or third. It just means no recycled storylines that fatigue a public that hates reruns but will watch many seasons of a well-written sitcom or drama. You can’t make the 47% barb stick a second time any more than the GOP can resurrect Monica.

“What have you scandalized me with lately?” is the murmur among the cable-channel-shocked-and-awed masses. Romney’s alleged plutocratic tendencies? Meh. The 47% spanner? Old news. “Severe conservative” and “self-deportation”? MSNBC fevers and tremors.

He was right about Putin, you see. You, by contrast, gave the dictator’s henchman a funny red button that didn’t even translate “reset” correctly.

He rushed out to speak to the press on the morning after Benghazi, yes. You fled the scene at State in the middle of the disaster. Which is worse? If the public gets to decide, you will lose.

He will, as the Looney Tunes characters say,
murderlize
your running mate in any debates.

He did not want to get down and dirty in the GOP primaries a third time. If he enters late, executing what his opponents will quickly call “his latest flip flop,” he ought to declare, “Been there and done that. The voters know me, so I let them see the new guys,” and await the primary results. Maybe mount a late-arriving front-porch campaign, above the fray, with no frayed nerves. Romney will truly not be sidelined until the filing deadlines for the March primaries come and go and he hasn’t entered. Like I said, no sweat for Romney who has seen it all at close range. No frayed nerves.

Except yours. Your greatest advantages all come from having been around five of these things at close range—1992, 1996, 2000, 2008 and 2012. Now your sixth run for the roses would make Romney’s third seem relatively fresh by comparison. You will both have that rarest of experiences, this time around the track won’t be your first. No surprises. No learning curve.

You know all this, but someone with as grand an ambition as yours also knows that there is nothing you can do except hope Romney doesn’t change his mind—so close to saying yes in January—and get in because Ann doesn’t want to go through it again. He genuinely loves her and genuinely will be guided by her wishes here. As people of genuine faith, they will pray and decide and that will be it. That’s what they did early this year, and they may yet feel the call to do it again.

There isn’t any dirt holding them back, only weariness of the absurdity of the media and the game even as the world burns.

Given the lessons he learned, there would be no more “47% moments,” either as a very late entrant to the lists or as a Veep nominee. Romney will assume every bartender is a tracker. Live and learn, and he does. This time I will suggest myself as the lead writer. No one will hold back their talents or their money. The country’s responsible people are more than a little desperate at the condition in which you and President Obama have left us.

Truth is, there would be no major mistakes from Romney this time, no “I’d like a lifeline” moments for Candy Crowley to act upon.

He won’t forget the military in his acceptance speech as Veep or in the keynote he will deliver flawlessly if he isn’t on the ticket, the keynote that skins your record as thoroughly as anyone in America can. He wouldn’t again allow any campaign of which he is a part to be outspent on Spanish media 7-to-1, and he won’t allow this nominee to be so outflanked either, even if he has to start his own SuperPac to accomplish that end. He won’t ease off the attack, even if he isn’t on the ticket. He is a patriot, and sees you and Bill as a genuine menace to the country’s survival. Perhaps alone among the GOP elites. he senses the scale of your ambitions.

Neither Romney nor any GOP nominee can control for the weather in ’16 any more than Romney did in ‘12, and even as hurricanes hurt him in Tampa Bay and in the closing days, so they might hurt any GOP nominee this time.

But storms won’t help you as they did President Obama in 2012, and your Benghazi cover-up is as threadbare now as it was fully knitted together then. Indeed, it is as full of holes as an Oscar night’s winner for most revealing dress, and the server scandal and the maybe-possibly-might-actually surface emails you deleted are an anchor around your party’s enthusiasm. The whole Clinton act is old and tired, and your new platform—if anticipated and answered—is as frail as Bill sometimes looks and you feel.

You just have to hope Romney isn’t on the ticket. And that’s the truth.

CHAPTER 27

The Truth About Transparency

The following section, Part IV, collects all the key excerpts of all the key interviews I have done about you for the last two years. It is a transparent laying out of my project, just as this book is a transparent attempt to hurt your chance of winning by appearing to help you design a winning strategy which, truth be told, could do either or both. That’s just the way it is as Uncle Walter used to say, transparently so. No sense in denying the obvious. It seems to me there just isn’t any margin left for spinning in America in 2015 and beyond. Every American is in on the joke. They all get it. They all get everything if they get anything at all.

But you are so buttoned up inside the Beltway in which you have lived so long, so weary and worn out, so out of touch with how the culture has changed, you are unlikely to read much less understand what all these people are saying about you. Has anyone even told you Harry Reid quit because he knew he couldn’t win in Nevada with you at the top of the ticket? Telling you true, hard things isn’t your inner circle’s gift, thus their decision to advise you first to get a private server for your emails and then to destroy them.

Apparently you live in a candor-free zone when it comes to staff. Thus these transcripts are gifts to the GOP which if you don’t ignore them completely—like you ignored Reverend Wright’s sermons until it was too late—you will discount as so much noise from the chattering class, and thus unaware of their potency to your GOP adversaries.

You of course will primarily be selling yourself to the 30% of the
electorate that genuinely “gets” little if anything but lottery tickets, and those aren’t called a “tax on stupidity” for no reason. You have zero chance of moving the 45% locked into the GOP’s corner either.