The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (24 page)

DA:
I think she’s going to be able to, I think she’s going to be able to make a great accounting of her record in the State Department. What I’m telling you, Hugh, is that if that’s the fight that the Republican Party wants to fight, and I’m just telling you this as a clinical matter. I’m not saying this…

HH: I get it, I get it.

DA:
… for rhetorical purposes. I think that they’re going to be, they’re, it’s going to be a dry hole for them. And I think they know it, because when you see these Republican candidates, this isn’t what they’re talking about. What they’re talking about, you know, Jeb Bush is talking about the right to rise, Marco Rubio is talking about the middle class, Mitt Romney in his brief flirtation was talking about poverty. The Republican Party is talking about economics and middle class economics. And if they’re not, they’re not going to win this election.

HH: I think they’re going to be talking about Reagan’s peace through strength, because the President’s gutted the military. And we’ll come back to that in a second But let me go to the campaign itself.

DA:
So you must be for lifting the sequester levels.

HH: I am. Amen. On the Department of Defense only. I’ve been arguing that for a long time. David Axelrod, a couple of quick questions. Why didn’t you guys ever release the President’s transcripts from Harvard Law School and Columbia and Occidental?

DA:
You know [long pause] honestly, I’ve got to, I’m not fundamentally focused on that. It’s not something that I wrote about. And I’m not sure how relevant it is. What was it that you were looking for in there?

HH: Oh, I just wanted to know how he did. Like. I went to law school at Michigan, and I want to know how he did in Contracts, Crimes. I want to know how he got on the law review. At one point, you know, you’re so specific in your book that I notice little things. On one page, for example, you refer to the president as the first black editor of the
Harvard Law Review
. Of course, he wasn’t that, on page 118. But then on page 142, you correct it. You call him the first African-American president of the
Harvard Law Review
. So you got it wrong when you called him the first black editor. You got it right when you called him the first black president of the law review. So you’re very careful. So you had to have made a decision not to let those grades out, and I’m just curious why? It wouldn’t have mattered if he was a C or a D student.

DA:
You know, well, I’ll tell you something. First of all, the book is about my experiences. And so, you know, I wasn’t around when he was at Harvard. But I’ll tell you what, I did go and interview some of the people who were his professors at Harvard, and to a person, they said he was perhaps the best student that they had ever encountered there. So you know, I mean, if that’s what you’re going for.…

HH: No, I’m just curious as to why not?

DA:
I mean, because I don’t think they would, you know, like I don’t remember what all the discussions were around these things. But I didn’t feel any necessity to go back to law school, college, high school, grade school, because it was apparent that this guy was a bright, accomplished guy, and anybody you talk to or who had dealt with him over the course of his career would tell you that, including the people who I filmed for commercials who were professors of his at Harvard.

HH: Yeah, if you don’t remember that, that’s the only thing you don’t remember, David Axelrod, because you remember, I mean, I found the conversation that you had with Blair Hull, when he was thinking about running for Senate, and he says there’s no paper on that with regards to the allegations of domestic abuse. You’ve got one hell of a memory. There’s not much that you’ve forgotten…

With former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich:

HH: I was very surprised to hear Mrs. Gingrich say Hillary’s formidable, and maybe the party needs to move to the center. Do you agree with her?

NG:
Well, I think the point she’s making is you can’t just take for granted that women are automatically going to vote against Hillary Clinton. And I agree with that. I think Secretary/Senator/First Lady Clinton is formidable. If you look at her numbers in the Democratic primaries, they’re stunning. And I think we’ve got to be aware of that as we put together our ticket, and we’ve got to realize for a lot of women, particularly younger women, there is an attractiveness to the first woman president. I think anybody who thinks that’s not real is just out of touch with reality. So we’ve got to be careful not so much about right versus left, but we’ve got to find a ticket and a platform that says to younger professional women, who by the way, voted Republican in 2014 in much bigger numbers than anybody expected, a key part of our victory in 2014 is that we were doing very well with people between 18 and 35, much better than we have done in a decade. And I think we want to continue to appeal to those folks as the party of the future.

HH: What is Hillary’s greatest weakness, Mr. Speaker?

NG:
Boring! She’s just, you know, she’s a celebrity like Kim Kardashian. But I mean, tell me what she’s done, and tell me what she stands for. I mean, she currently stands for the idea that it’s time for her to be president because she’s been standing around waiting for the time for her to be president. So she’d like to be president, because after all, I mean, she and Bill think it would be good to be president, and why don’t we make her president. Well, that’s not a ticket. I mean, I have no idea is she going to be different than Obama, or if she’s going to be Obama’s third term. If she’s going to be different than Obama, can she take the heat of disagreeing with the incumbent Democratic president? And if she’s going to be his third term, do you really think the country’s going to vote for four more years of this mess? I mean, I just think her candidacy has some big internal contradictions.

HH: She sits down for like a quarterly interview with Thomas Friedman or Charlie Rose, or one of the reliables for the safe interviews. Can she keep that up? Will the American media allow her to waltz to the nomination without actually having to answer questions about Libya, about Egypt, about Russia and the reset button? Does she get a pass?

NG:
Oh, I think to some extent, she gets a pass, because the elite media’s giddy at the idea that there’s finally going to be a woman president. Don’t underestimate in these newsrooms among the elite media how many of them are not just liberal, but they think boy, wouldn’t this be just a wonderful moment in history? You know, we have our first African-American president, now we can have our first woman president. This will be just fabulous. And it’s almost like asking the question, so what kind of president would she be? And that seems to be for a lot of these folks irrelevant, because they’re voting symbolically in their brains. And that’s why you see the elite media pull so many punches with Secretary Clinton. I mean, your point, which is I think very funny, we did research on this. I mean, the reset button story is hysterical.

HH: Yes.

NG:
You know, they’re in Geneva, they want to do something fancy. They actually get a button from, apparently, a Jacuzzi. It’s a red button. They then paint in Russian what they think is the word
reset
, which turns out to be the word
overcharge
, because their translator got it wrong. The Russian foreign minister is standing here looking at a Jacuzzi button with the word
overcharge
on it, turns and says I don’t think so. I mean, that was the beginning that led to Crimea. That was a reset? No, that was a joke. That was Keystone Cops. It was the Three Stooges. And nobody holds her accountable and says gee, how can you run a State Department so incompetent that your translator doesn’t know the word in Russian for
reset
?

CHAPTER 29

Interview with Mark Steyn, December 11, 2014

HH: Mark Steyn, making news earlier this week, Hillary Clinton, who gave an address at Georgetown University, which includes this memorable paragraph.

HRC: This is what we call smart power, using every possible tool and partner to advance peace and security, leaving no one on the sidelines, showing respect even for one’s enemies, trying to understand and insofar as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view, helping to define the problems, determine the solutions. That is what we believe in the 21st Century will change, change the prospects for peace.

HH: Now Mark Steyn, I think you may be the most notably un-empathetic of all columnists when it comes to our enemies. What did you make of the former Secretary of State’s declaration of the need for a universal empathy?

MS:
Yeah, I think the first part of that—I’m with her up to a point when she says we should respect our enemies. We should respect our enemies, and we should take seriously their desire to kill us. And we should act accordingly. But the empathy business, I think, is what has led Hillary and this administration so badly astray. And I don’t really want to empathize with the head-hackers of ISIS, for example. Far too many young Western Muslims living in Dearborn, Michigan, and Toronto and London and Lyon and Rotterdam empathize and sympathize with them already. I’m far more interested in defeating them. And I think defeating your enemy requires a clear
understanding of what’s different, what differentiates you from them. And that’s where she and the whole smart power thing have completely failed. I’m a believer in smart power in part because we don’t do warmongering very well anymore. So you have to use the other levers of power. You have to use economic, cultural power and all the rest. This is what we have signally failed to do in Iraq, in Afghanistan, during the Arab Spring, in Syria, in Libya, in Russia and Ukraine. Where is the evidence for the smart power? For Hillary, smart power means racking up frequent flyer miles and standing there next to the Russia foreign minister with a reset button that some idiot, overpaid idiot at the State Department mistranslated, and turned out to mean something else entirely. That’s pretty stupid smart power. But smart power properly deployed is what means you don’t have to go to war all the time. And that’s what this administration has been so signally inept at.

HH: Bret Stephens, who will join me later in the program today, deputy editorial page editor at the
Wall Street Journal
, wrote about this Hillary Clinton passage that it shows that Mrs. Clinton is as tin-eared as she is ambitious. It cannot be used except as a GOP political attack ad if and when she runs for president. I’m beginning to really question, Mark Steyn, whether she’s viable. Everything she touches turns to stone in terms of appeal to the public.

MS:
I think that’s right. I think she’s one of these people you’re always having to explain. She’s also, she’s not just tin-eared. She’s also, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, thin-skinned, so that even friendly interviewers like Terry Gross at NPR, rub her up the wrong way. If you can’t handle Terry Gross at NPR, the idea that you’re going to be able to withstand a primary campaign and then a general election, I think is slightly dubious. But I think it’s actually a, this is a serious flaw. This is someone who has not thought about what’s gone wrong in the last four years. You know, Chris Stevens, who died in Benghazi, in part because of the negligence of Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, empathized with the Libyan people to an extraordinary degree, and he’s dead, and his body was dragged through the streets of Benghazi. In the streets of Cairo, in Tahrir Square, we called it the Facebook revolution, and thought that somehow they all wanted, all the big, bearded men wanted to be like nice, little Obama pajama boys, and all the covered women wanted to be like Sandra Fluke. And it turned out they wanted something entirely different. She’s got a tin ear when it comes to empathy. She doesn’t, she’s not actually capable of getting inside the head of
Iranian mullahs who seriously believe in Islamic imperialism, and exporting their nuclear technology around the world. She’s seriously incapable of getting inside the head of Czar Putin in the Kremlin who wants to reconstitute a Russian empire and a Russian protection umbrella over Eastern Europe. And you’d be surprised how far west his definition of Eastern Europe goes. She’s totally incapable of empathizing of any meaningful empathy with what is psychologically driving those guys.

HH: Could her presidency turn out to be even worse than Obama’s abroad?

MS:
Well, I think there’s a difference in that I don’t think she’s as ideological as he is. And in that sense, I don’t think she’s driven by the same antipathy toward American power. But the fact of the matter is she is largely, she is largely incompetent. And the idea that she has a problem in that she was basically some guy’s wife for most of her life, and then she parlayed that into a Senate seat. And then she got her first executive position in which American power drained in almost every corner of the world. And what is she going to say about that? Is she going to say oh, that was all Obama, that was nothing to do with me, I was flying around, I was eating the peanuts and pretzels in the executive jet, so I didn’t actually, I wasn’t involved with any of that? That’s all she’s got to run on. For the rest of the time, she’s just got this phony-baloney foundation that exists to principally to fly her and Bill and Chelsea to give six and seven figure speeches to bored Saudi princes. And that’s a resume for becoming president?

HH: Well, she’s got the family business to protect. It’s really about Bill’s third term and making the way for Chelsea in the world, isn’t it?