The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (21 page)

You—and the eventual GOP nominee—are playing for the 25% of voters who are genuinely up for grabs, the center and the center-right, and you have to win them through a very intentional “transparency” play as they know all of your many acts very well. You have to wink at them, let them know you know, and let them in on the big plan.

The Amendments, the amnesty, the defense spending, the tactics against the field forming up against you, indeed every hour of every day is an old, old play and the folks who write the reviews are weary to death of it. Another Clinton “revival” is like taking
Camelot
on the road to Pittsburgh and selling the Steelers fans on the idea that the 1960 Lerner and Loewe smash hit is as fresh and new as it was 55 years ago with Julie Andrews, Richard Burton, Roddy McDowall and Robert Goulet. The 25% isn’t easily fooled but it can be soothed and charmed and above all calmed and made to see self-interest since they won’t be feeling any passion.

“I’m all you have got,” is your basic pitch, and you have to promise them you will continue their deals and secure their fortunes and their children’s fortunes. We are all “security moms” now. We want the ’90s back. So promise the 25% that and more. Promise them the end of gridlock and the end of the drama. Give them an 18 game NFL schedule and the promise of a “Follow” on Twitter and a shout out at a presser. Promise to make ’em rich and make them forget their fears and the facts.

There have been no new discoveries in the art of governing since the man who wrote
The Prince
made his deadline 500 years ago. Now there are new tools, of course, lots more of those, and of wealth. But power is the same now as then, and theology hasn’t changed much in more than a millennium either. We are who we are, and the barbarians are very much at the gates both virtual and real. This is the truth about which you must be most transparent. The only truth really, and the means to that end, the language of communicating the real danger, is left for last.

First though, you need to study what people have been saying
about you
. You can win this against anyone except Romney and he isn’t running, and more than win, you can change the rules forever. But not if you are indifferent to what the “known knowns” are, to quote Donald Rumsfeld’s most famous and prophetic line. If you are the same Hillary as 2007-2008 or from Benghazi to the present, you could lose to Bush, Rubio or Walker and maybe even Cruz, Kasich or Perry.

You will be tempted to skip Part IV. Nixon used to tell me—this was in ’78-’80, after I had just graduated from college and was scribbling away for him at America’s Elba in San Clemente, after you helped force him from power, before his return—that he had never watched himself on television or read what people wrote about him. He insisted this was true. Often.

If it was true—he intended me to believe it certainly, and intended me to tell people that he said it just as certainly, and I have—it was a grievous fault, and grievously did he pay for it. Had he read—had he studied—what his enemies, opponents and especially his friends had said about his weaknesses, had he acted on those critiques, he might have avoided their culmination. “Had he” being the key phrase there. By his own admission he didn’t. His flaws grew and crippled him then killed his presidency though not his legacy.

Study what they say about you, Madame Secretary, if you want to have what you want to have.

My conservative friends who have read this say I am helping you too much with this project. They underestimate your vanity and the vanity of your husband, and the jealous infighting within your machine. Those who read the transcripts will dismiss their sources, or think they have double meanings, or waive away critiques as outdated, and problems noted as already fixed.

Mostly though, like everyone on the left, your and their arrogance will be your undoing. How could you and Reset Button gang get anything this important so wrong?

PART IV

WHAT YOUR FRIENDS, OPPONENTS AND ENEMIES ARE SAYING ABOUT YOU

You might be inclined to think it is just I, the GOP partisan and talk show host, who holds the concerns I have tried to help you address via this book. I assure you, it isn’t.

Many of your advisors will say they have “talked” with so-and-so who said thus-and-such, but I began talking to “opinion influencers” about your campaign way back in October of 2013, certain even then that you were going to run, and eager to use my platform to put as many small pebbles in your path as I could. I thought of a plan, and executed it, wherein I would ask key Beltway elites—and a couple of other folks—about you and your campaign, and especially about the themes of this book: your glass jaw, your age and obvious weariness, your evident fatigue, Bill, and especially your dismal record at State and all your other failures.

I began with one of your inner circle’s favorite reporters, Maggie Haberman (then of
Politico
, now of
The New York Times
), on October 28, 2013, and kept at it, finishing up on President’s Day, February 15, 2015, with a conversation with Karl Rove exclusively devoted to you, eventually doing interviews about these themes with operatives and MSMers, especially those among the latter group whose publications and platforms will certainly move to try and put Humpty Dumpty together again a fifth time—Hillarycare, Monica, 2008 and Benghazi being the first four—should you smash up early in the campaign.

Among my guests on the “Hillary” beat were
TheVox.com
’
s Jon Allen and
The Hill’
s Amie Parnes (your biographers in
HRC
),
The Daily Beast
’s Jonathan Alter, Haberman,
The New York Times
’ Nicholas Kristof
and Mark Leibovich,
The New Yorker
’s Ryan Lizza,
The Washington Post
’s Dana Milbank, MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid and NBC’s
Meet the Press
host Chuck Todd. These are ten MSM “voices” very representative of what the Manhattan-Beltway media elite are collectively thinking and murmuring about you.

Of course, I posed similar questions to folks like Senator Marco Rubio who, as I wrote in the main part of the book, would be your toughest opponent other than Romney, and even a “Bill question” for former President George W. Bush. Asking potential opponents about you allowed me to see if the critique I knew would be coming your way had begun to form among the right’s standard bearers.

Three revolutionary political operatives—Rove, David Axelrod and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich also stepped up to the plate for their swings against your candidacy. I begin these transcripts with them, because they have won big battles. They know winning, and of course they know losing as well, as do you.

My plan, hatched back in the fall of 2013, was to lay up acorns via interviews for this very book. I didn’t want anyone to notice what I was about for fear that guests from the MSM would stop agreeing to come on the show and talk about you—not behind your back, really, but right in front of your face—though perhaps they counted on the left’s general disdain for conservative media to cover their sins against you and yours.

Doggone it if then
Slate
’s and now
Bloomberg
’s Dave Weigel didn’t notice right away what I was up to. (He is a sharp one, young Mr. Weigel, and attentive to everything being said everywhere, and no ally of my party, or obviously of yours either, though, of course, he must be a man of the left working for
Slate
for a bit, or either the deepest of MSM moles.)

Weigel picked up on what I was doing immediately, and in a column titled, “The Hillary Clinton Knockout Game,” on December 10, 2013, Weigel referred to my Haberman interview of six weeks earlier and wrote, “I don’t see evidence that many reporters saw this interview,
but Hewitt did beat the trend and shape the narrative.”

“Damn,” I thought, “Weigel is going to ruin this plan.” Especially since he pointed out that I wouldn’t politely skip over the fact that Haberman didn’t have any answers for the hardest questions about you. “Hewitt wouldn’t let go,” Weigel wrote. (This is an indictment not of me but of most Beltway journalists, of course, who always “let go” when one of their lefty elected friends is on a particularly hot seat and facing an uncomfortable line of questioning.)

I didn’t see any evidence that many reporters read Weigel’s piece though they all ought to be reading everything that scamp writes as he and the “new breed” I wrote about earlier will be around for decades unless you take my advice. The MSMers thank goodness kept coming on the show throughout 2014, like the
Babes in Toyland
toy soldiers. (See, you got that reference to the 1961 Tommy Sands and Annette Funicello movie and most every other reader did not, another proof of just how many years have piled up since your freshman year in high school when that movie came out. Anyone born in 1947 and making their wonder-struck way through their first year in the hallways at Main East High School in Park Ridge would have loved that flick. But you cannot allow such trick questions and references to remind young voters of your actual age.)

So the MSMers kept coming, and I kept piling up the acorns, like Mark Leibovich’s interview in November of last year in which we pointed everyone—again!—to your college era letters to Professor Peavoy. Mark of course had a book to sell,
Citizens of the Green Room
, so of course he was going to come on to flog his book and once on, I could turn the focus wherever I wanted, which eventually, in the middle of the conversation, was to you and those letters, which reveal so very much.

“I read but few lives of great men because biographies do not, as a rule, tell enough about the formative period of life,” wrote Ulysses S. Grant. “What I want to know is what a man did as a boy.”

How 19th century, when boys and girls had to grow up quick. In the
middle of the 20th century they began “to grow up” in the college years. Nowadays they “grow up” in their early-to-mid 20s, if by “growing up” we mean to put on the identity they will wear their entire lives unless tragedy, addiction or religious conversion changes them completely and roughly.

Those Peavoy letters show you as you made that choice, show you in a very bright light, becoming the ambitious, oh so ambitious Hillary Clinton we see now. Comfort yourself with a bit of Alexander Hamilton who wrote that the “love of fame” is “the ruling passion of the noblest minds.” You can see in those letters that passion taking hold, and you were testing out themes on Professor Peavoy.

But how could he give all those letters—your letters!—to Mark Leibovich, whose scalpel is sharpest of all? Of course you know. You dropped him, didn’t you? Put him away like an old coat long out of fashion. Gave him to the thrift store where all your old friends pre-Bill went. Not even one or two invites to a White House event, one mention of “my old friend, now a professor…”? Had you really forgotten you poured your soul out to him?

So he got his revenge, just as you will get yours on all these folks who talked and talked and talked about you when they thought you were done, done, done or worse, not paying attention.

And all of these things were said about you just on my own show! When the speakers knew that they were talking to a center-right audience, aware that their words would carry farther because they were spoken outside of the sealed dome of the Beltway.

They didn’t care that they were trashing your record and your abilities. Careful in how they limned your failures and your political vulnerabilities, but certainly not rising to your defense. They couldn’t be bothered to.

This is, collectively, a foreshadowing. In many of their eyes, your DC “sell-by” date had passed and they figured you for finished. Or they just could not come up with answers to the obvious questions about you and your candidacy. There is an old saying:
“
Forewarned is forearmed.”

There is another old saying, this one Irish: “If everyone says you’re drunk, you’d better sit down.” Note the themes that emerge from all these conversations, and then consider sitting down. Consider getting out.

Because it is going to be brutal. Truth be told, you did fail at State, you are worn out and getting wearier and older by the day, there are abundant joys in being a grandmother and a revered, if somewhat dusty, elder statesman. (How often do we hear from Madeleine Albright after all? Out of the game is out of the game. Can you stand it? That’s the problem, isn’t it? Read
When The Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson
by Gene Smith, but don’t worry that the same silent days of the still-stroke impacted Wilson living out his days on S Street would be similar to your last decades. There are many more past times, many more joys. You just have to give up the need for power… )

Of course you won’t sit down. There is the dynasty. There is the legacy. There is that “first of firsts,” and the first woman in the Oval Office is actually going to seem far more remarkable after a century or two than the first African American because it had to be earned without an economic collapse wafting you up, and two wars weighing down your opponent. You will have to do what George H. W. Bush did, win a third term for a tired, talent-depleted party. Only you aren’t following the Gipper. You are following the worst president in American history,

So you will go forward and try to start the new age, a second “Clinton Era,” and if you go about it the right way, as advised above, you may pull it off. But read these interviews or snippets of interviews carefully. They are the best debate prep ever but also a window into the world of Manhattan-Beltway media elites in the post-modern era when the byline is the brand and the true believers of the left not credible enough to carry a campaign. The MSM are, God love them, vampires of a sort and they need people like you to feed on.

Unless, of course, you turn out to be a combination of Caesar Augustus and Abraham Van Helsing. A few will suspect the former, but only those who take this book seriously will anticipate the former.