The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (3 page)

Put on the table the rejection of the anti-energy absolutism of the left as well. Tom Steyer is your Sister Souljah, and he does not have to live in the heat of Mumbai without air-conditioning, which requires electricity, which requires nukes or coal, and he does not cook on open stoves in huts across Africa. Invite him to recognize that the American economy needs its own and Canada’s oil and natural gas, the pipelines to bring it safely to refineries, new refinery capacity to make it useable, and new fields to exploit offshore before the PRC arrives with massive
platforms off our own coast. Be an energy realist, and in one paragraph of an acceptance speech slow if not halve the rush of money from energy interests to the GOP. Give them pause, turn a few. Make it impossible to compete with your dollars. If you must wink at the Greens, don’t let anyone see you do so, but in reality you will have to do this anyway. The only way to pay for the debt Barack ran up is with a severance tax on energy, and few will object when that is added to the package post-inauguration.

Now on the border fence you will find some loud opposition within your party, to which you reply “Hezbollah” with a knowing look. “We are not afraid of robust immigration from Mexico and Central and Southern America,” you exclaim, “but four years with access to the highest classified intelligence available in the world has persuaded me of the absolute need for airtight border protection. We must have control of the border in an era of the Islamic State longing for WMD that travel in small containers that can kill millions. We must be serious about traffickers in tunnels and terrorists entering via well-worn trails. Every passable mile of the 2,000-mile border must be addressed by using union labor to build a humane but effective, doubt-sided high fence, which does not end the threat but helps limit it. We must do other things as well, including freeing up ICE resources by regularizing the vast, vast majority of the 14 million here without documents. Those who do not step forward to accomplish regularization will be the few we want ICE to find and deport, and we will.”

Defense spending, energy development and border security provide you with a trio of “Nixon to China” initiatives that leave the GOP in shambles as it presses towards 2016, while your first two amendments give you the Clinton Era writ large. You will change the rules of the greatest game of all, the history of the Republic’s fundamental law, and for what you will say is a “high purpose,” which since you and Bill equate you and your family’s destiny as the highest purpose will not be insincere so much as it is purposefully misleading. “Go big or go home” is the cliché, but it is a cliché with special import here.

Not for the cautious, but what did caution get you in 2008? What caution will get you in 2016 is scrutiny. And that you cannot afford. Read closely what David Axelrod told me in February of this year. Read and reread that transcript excerpt in Part IV. Dwell on the fact that it was Axelrod who rightly warned you against the “milk and cookies” fiasco of 1992, when you offended every stay-at-home mom in America. Now Axelrod is warning you against the warm embrace of the “Hillaryworld” cocoon. You need diversion and enthusiasm: the former away from your largest ambitions, the latter for your already boring campaign.

And you have been running the worst campaign in history to date—the awful memoir, the even worse book tour, the stilted, wooden appearances even with patsies from the left side of the already left-wing MSM. Three and out. Three and out. Three and out. Dull, dull, dull. And then there are the whispers of Elizabeth Warren growing every day, of any alternative, because you are old and boring. Stale. Past your “sell-by” date. Your “server” presser was the worst of any major figure in memory since Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” and your semi-annual tweets are making you look as foolish as a ninety-year old trying to Skype.

So, change everything when you give a Fourth of July speech in 2015, and again as you approach Iowa, and again on the stage in Philadelphia. Again and again, shock the electorate, and get the journos back on their toes at your appearances and talking late into the night in the bars: “What will she say next?”

About the server, all you can say—in a variety of ways and often beginning immediately—is this:

“The public knows the difference between private and public and the public trusts me. The right wing nutters don’t, but the public does. I won’t be bullied, browbeaten or berated by every would be Javert on the Fox News Channel. Read my lips: It was fine to have the server. Fine to delete my own personal emails. Legal to act as I did and actually prudent to do so given the crazies who seem to breed in the dark corners of the world with increasingly sophisticated means of stealing everything online that isn’t deleted. The advantage of having been around the block in D.C. and around the world as Secretary of State is I know my opponents domestically and my enemies abroad, and I will not—will not—let them dictate my life, my campaign and certainly not the security of the United States.”

This rhetoric is playing a pair of fours as though they were a straight flush, but it is your only play. If sustained focus attaches to the peril in which you placed the country by running your “homebrew,” well then your goose is cooked. You know that the PRC, Putin, the mullahs and the nut in North Korea probably have every single email you sent or received from that server, but they will play a game of waiting until you are in 1600 to float them, and you won’t hesitate to send a message back, “big time” as Dick Cheney would say. That is actually your appeal to some on my side.

But if a conservative operative did the dirty deed and pilfered your private server’s files before you purged them? Well then W’s DUI in 2000 is going to seem like a very small speed bump compared to what you will hit when early voting begins in 2016 and the bad actors drop your private emails into the world wide inner tubes. You have no choice but to pretend this threat doesn’t exist and persuade everyone in Democrat land that it is a fantasy novel, an episode from
House of Cards
deemed too far out even for Netflix watchers.

In the meantime, the best defense is a hurry-up offense. Get going on the substance of your campaign, the really big ticket items, and go bold. And that begins by addressing your greatest known weakness. (The server and its ripple effects go into the category of what Rumsfeld would call “known unknowns.” Much as you might hate to do so, you really ought to read Rumsfeld’s Rules. The man knows his way around D.C. and his advice is non-partisan.)

CHAPTER 2

Your Greatest Weakness

You were a failure at the State Department, and you know this better than anyone else, save perhaps Bill. President Obama is nothing if not capable of hiding the truth from himself so he won’t bring this up as it implicates his abysmal record. And no senior Democrat will breathe a word of your failure within earshot of you or anyone with any conceivable access to you. You are surrounded by flatterers, who want position in your administration. No one, except perhaps Bill, will bluntly discuss with you just how bad a hash you made of it.

Benghazi was just the pinnacle of your incompetence, but it tops the mountain of mistakes you have made and draws attention to them all: Russia, China, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, but especially Iran. All a hashed-up series of improvisations based on a general theory that if you were not part of W’s gang of bullies, everyone would like you, that Putin and Medvedev just needed some attention, the PRC some charming, the Arab nations a dose of freedom to become mini-Israels. You believed that “Twitter Revolution” nonsense, even after the mullahs in Teheran sent their shock troops out in scooters to mow down the Green Revolution demonstrators.

You should have known early on that the president would mishandle every convulsion, ignore every ally, treat with every “new force” he could tell himself owed it all to him. The Nobel Peace Prize for a rank amateur who had never handled one crisis much less negotiated a successful end to a war served only to inflate an already dirigible-sized
ego and lead the amateur into catastrophe after catastrophe. How that medal must have galled Bill. How that record now burdens you.

Because you didn’t put up a fight. You went along for the ride. Racking up the miles, doing nice work for women and girls in most places and doing your best not to let Barack cut and run on the women and girls in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and especially Syria, where they are dead now by the tens of thousands.

What a mess.
Hard Choices
, indeed. Disastrous choices. Deadly choices that grow more obvious in their terrible consequences with every beheading and burning video from the Islamic State and every body bag in the Ukraine.

Then you compounded the problem with an insipid, cliché-filled pyramid of dense text, and made a screeching audiobook of it, a fountain of material for your enemies. If Webb runs against you (be very attentive to an attack from that quarter as he isn’t remotely like your ordinary politician) he will be giving out copies of your audiobook. I have been playing segments for months, like every talk show host plays your laugh track. You know how hideous your voice and your laugh is, but you know as well you cannot change your voice and your laugh. So you recognize it for one of the things that cannot be changed, and you blame it on genes and habit. But for God’s sake minimize it. Fire the audiobook genius.

Here is exactly what you must do with your record at State as soon as the field is cleared and Joe Biden dispatched and every other pretender—save Webb, who will have to be beaten thoroughly or perhaps promised the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense early on. You will have to blame it all—not what you inherited in the form of the Bush wars and the worldwide economic panic—but all that followed January 2009, the endless series of foreign policy fiascos, on the president’s epically incompetent staff, especially Valerie Jarrett.

About the Bush wars, these will have a political benefit for you still if you are accurate about the record. Know the numbers of troops deployed in each theater on day one of your tenure, the casualty count
when you took over (and since), the dollar cost, the loss of civilian life in Iraq, even the incipient rumbles of revolution in Syria as you took over Foggy Bottom. Many within the GOP will welcome the recounting of the failures of foreign adventures, and as the Rand Paul forces will almost certainly have been vanquished in the GOP primary, they will find much to cheer in your calibrated blasts at W’s invasions. If you have followed the advice in chapter one and adopted recommendation three, you will have nicely fed the hawks with promises of future resources, while stroking the feathers of the neo-isolationist doves with references to where “adventurism” leads and leaves the country.

So you “embraced the suck” while at State and did what you could. Yes, your own staff botched the reset button, but for everything else point to Jarrett’s insanely jealous and amateurish approach to Holbrooke and everyone else on your team that effectively neutered every one of your initiatives. You will have to hang her out to dry, a narrative the Democrats will want, but one that must be done ever so carefully as I discuss below. You cannot ever cut off the president as McCain did Bush in 2008. We know that W did not exactly suffer as McCain floundered in the last two months of the campaign. We both know W actually thought the country would be better served by the best possible Barack than by the almost certain McCain. I know because he told a group of talkers on the last Wednesday of his presidency to go easy on the new guy—that the new president would grow into the job. Like his initial assessment of Putin, W’s initial assessment of Obama was far, far off the mark. W’s greatest fault was his always generous assessment of people and motives. This won’t of course hobble you, but it hobbled him.

You can’t allow yourself to be blamed for President Obama’s utter lack of skills. Sarah Palin was better equipped to take on the management of the world than this bumbler, and you know that to be true. Increasingly, the country understands it as the position of the country slips further and further into chaos and irrelevance.

President Obama’s incompetence and the damage it has done to the country and indeed the world is the anvil around your neck. How
to break it, especially after that awful book you put your name on?

First, break it. Make a big speech detailing the failures of the past three years, contrasting them with the failures of the first four years, and urging people to do the math. If you and Gates and Jones hadn’t been there, if the D-Team had been in charge from day one, who knows what would be facing us now? You kept the sanctions on Iran as long as you could. You wanted a Status of Forces agreement with Iraq, a long term commitment to the Afghans, and would have supported striking Assad, but for Jarrett, Jarrett, Jarrett and her Rasputin-like hold on an insecure, in-over-his-head president. That’s the ticket. That’s the position you will have to take in the months after the nomination is secure and the foreign fires rage out of control.

And the memoir?
You will have to explain it succinctly. It was necessary to help minimize the damage and the danger. The world could not know with 30 months left on the ticker just how detached and incompetent this president is. You tried with the memoir—again—to buck him up. Again. You are hesitant to discuss it further even now for the transition to capable hands is still six months away. But help is on the way. The A-Team, the Kosovo/Balkans team,t is coming. Bill is coming. Holbrooke is dead but there are scores of competent foreign policy pros who were locked out by Valerie. This time there won’t be a hack in the West Wing pulling the strings and insisting on Secret Service protection. Jarrett drove out Rahm, then Pete Rouse, then Bill Daley, then Jack Lew, then Robert Gates. You and Panetta held out the longest, as long as you could, and tried to keep the curtain down with the heaviest of velvet folds with your memoir, but now the truth must be told.

You cannot completely turn on Obama until Obama is turned out. But you can let it be known that the truth is not flattering. Especially the truth about Benghazi, the truth you have never spoken, but which you have never have been asked to reveal either. Take credit for intimidating the GOP and the Manhattan-Beltway media elite, but set up your telling. You cannot dismount the campaign and stick the landing with a broken leg, no matter the miracle of the Japanese Olympian from 1992. You will have to deal with Benghazi. Here is how you do it: Blame the president. Tell everyone he and his team made every call that night.