The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (37 page)

HH: 956,733 miles traveled, 112 countries visited. You’re very careful to include the specifics of that. But you know, cruise directors go farther than that. Is that going to actually become a negative? We’ve got about a minute to the break Jon, for her to bring up the odometer diplomacy? Or is it going to remain a positive?

JA:
I think it’s a mistake to bring up the odometer diplomacy. It just invites the contrast of what she accomplished to how many miles she logged, and nobody really thinks that’s the measure of what a good Secretary of State is. You know, we make the point in the book that her aides are very quick to
point that out. They were very quick to keep a record of it and put it on the front page of the website. But you know, when you examine her record in deeper detail, it definitely invites comparison of what she actually got done to how many miles she went, and that’s not good for her.

HH: Jonathan, voice-challenged though he is, he sounds like those days when I would come in and put lemons on my desk and take steroid packs. And I sent him a note this morning when he was struggling to get ready for the interview. I said you know, Carville played hurt on a Dallas debate that I moderated with Mary Matalin the day after the Denver debate between Obama and Romney, and I complimented him on it. He said if you can’t play hurt, don’t get in the game in his typical Louisiana drawl. And then I noticed Jon Allen, that Carville’s not in this book. And I’m kind of amazed by that. The old team is sort of gone from Hillary’s new team.

JA:
Yeah, it’s really interesting. Carville and Begala win two elections for President Clinton, and they are not part of the inner circle of Hillary Clinton. That said, their voices are still influential. They still can get Bill Clinton on the phone when they want to. If they had some advice for her, I’m sure they could get it to her. But it’s not like they brought those guys back. And you know, I think both of them are pretty good political strategists. And the people that she had running her 2008 campaign were not particularly good political strategists as it turned out. So there may have been a mistake there.

HH: Here is Dana Milbank of the
Washington Post
talking with me about what Hillary got done, and I think he is just absolutely pin perfect on his assessment:

DM: Well, she, I suppose what she accomplished for her reputation was she increased her standing to the point of invincibility.

HH: But what did she actually do, Dana Milbank?

DM: Well, I don’t know. What did Lawrence Eagleburger do? You know, I don’t believe we had any major peace treaties under her. We had some brief military actions, but basically cleaning up the ones that were in play. So I don’t…

HH: You’re a columnist. I’m just asking. Do you think she accomplished anything? Or was she basically a non-entity at State?

DM: I think she was successful in the sense of projecting a strong American image abroad, and of restoring American standing and reputation in the world. But these are nebulous…

HH: Dana, how do you get there? How do you measure that? How do you, I mean, under that talking point, what are the data points?

DM: Well, right. What I was saying before you said that is these are, that’s sort of a nebulous notion of American standing. You know, and so whether we are more popular in European and foreign capitals, I’m not sure whether that particularly matters. But you know, I mean, I certainly didn’t come on this call to be a defender of Hillary Clinton.

HH: And he wasn’t Jon Allen.

JA:
No.…

HH: Jon, I want to talk just briefly about the people who aren’t there. Now did you watch
The Sopranos
?

JA:
I did.

HH: You know, Big Pussy was a big character in the first couple of seasons. Then he’s gone, right?

JA:
I don’t want to, I don’t want to know where this is going.

HH: Well, I’m just saying, people like Mark Penn, Patti Solis Doyle, Howard Wolfson—they’re like Big Pussy in
The Sopranos
. They’re gone. They’re put over the side.

JA:
Yeah, they didn’t do a very, well, let’s put it this way, they were unsuccessful in a campaign. And that usually means you didn’t do a good job, or at least you get blamed for not doing a good job. Hillary’s, some of her aides came to her after the campaign and tried to outline what had gone wrong. She had a bunch of one-on-one meetings in her Senate office and at home, and they told her what they thought she had done wrong, and what others had done wrong. And some of those big name people were considered to be toxic. Mark Penn was certainly considered that way. Patti Solis Doyle was considered to be less than able, less than up to the job, in over her head, if you will, and also, if you will, a bit arrogant. So some of these folks, you know, they’re not going to, they weren’t around for her time at State. They’re not going to be back around if she runs for president.

HH: And you know what’s fascinating about that…

JA:
And by the way, some of it’s by choice. Howard Wolfson, for instance, her communications director, became a deputy mayor of New York under Bloomberg, who I work for, full disclosure, Michael Bloomberg. But you know, so he had a second act in politics, just not with the Clintons.…

HH: Jon Allen, I want to go back to a couple of quotes about what she did and did not do before we turn to her substantive record at State. Let’s do E.J. Dionne, of course,
Washington Post
columnist, friend of the show, cut number 9:

EJD: I think there are, first of all, her accomplishments inevitably are going to be linked to what we see as Obama’s accomplishments. And if you see, as I do, ending the war in Iraq, knowing the place is a mess now in many ways, but getting our troops out of Iraq, that’s part of it. I think that for the period she was Secretary of State, opinion of the United States rose in the world. I think that she did a lot of work on human rights and women’s rights around the world. I think that you know, and you and I will just plain disagree on this, I think at the end of her four years, we were in a better position in the world than we were when she took the job. And that is the old Ronald Reagan question.

HH: And here is Lanny Davis on my show answering the same question, cut number 16:

LD: Well, the biggest thing of all is goodwill around the world, which is what secretaries of State do. I don’t know what any…

HH: Like in Syria and Egypt and Libya?

LD: I don’t know, well, Libya and certainly the intervention in Libya, getting rid of Qaddafi, you would say is a pretty good achievement for the President. But these are presidential achievements with a partnership with the secretary of State. What do secretaries of State do? For example, she was very instrumental in the details of the Iranian sanctions program, which has produced apparently some results. I’m very skeptical about this deal in Iran on the nuclear weaponry, but the credit she deserves on this sanctions program, which literally was her program in the State Department to enforce, but in partnership with Barack Obama.

HH: Let’s go right there, Jon Allen. You spend a lot of time on Iran sanctions in here, and you know it’s falling apart. I’m not sure she wants to run on this. But you write that she was caught in an administration that did not believe in the blunt force of sanctions, and that she also kind of botched the Green Revolution, because while Jared Cohen got the Twitter thing going, they didn’t really stand with the Green Revolution. How is Iran going to play when
HRC
gets evaluated for president?

JA:
That’s a great question, Hugh. I mean, I think there are a couple of things to look at here as far as the Green Revolution goes. I think it’s hard to step out from where the President is. If the President is saying we’re not going to interfere in their elections, and you’re the secretary of State, if you go out and talk about interfering in elections, if you talk about supporting the Green movement, you’re being disloyal to the president of the United States. And that could be a problem. What we saw in the book, and we go into this story in detail, is that one of her guys, Jared Cohen, who was actually a Condi Rice protégé, and is now at Google Innovation. He’s the head of Google Ideas. He had basically gotten in touch with Twitter, and tried to get them to help with the Iranian Green movement, revolutionaries being able to keep in touch with each other. And you know, we go through this sort of dramatic thing in the book where there’s a big question at the State Department over whether he should be fired for contravening what the President had said in terms of not interfering. He was supporting the Green movement. The President said we’re not going to do that. And ultimately, Hillary Clinton comes into the room the next morning after the New York Times has written a little bit about this, and plops the paper down on a table and says this is exactly what we should be doing.

HH: And that is, by the way, for people who want to know from the foreign policy specialist standpoint, the chapter on the Twitter revolution in foreign policy is worth the price of the book, because very few people understand how this has dramatically altered. You know, I got into this, Jon, working for Richard Nixon in San Clemente in exile writing the book,
The Real War
. And so I’ve been following foreign affairs for 30 plus years. And Twitter has changed everything, and Jared Cohen got that. And Hillary kind of gets that she needs to get it, and you illustrate that. I’m not sure she managed it very well, but on page 188, you summon up the final judgment. “She was always for turning up the heat on Iran. She just took a more nuanced view of it when she got to the Department of State.” You quote an unnamed State Department official, or a national security official saying this. It looks like a White House source. You know, whatever her nuance is, Iran’s going to be nuclear when she runs for president, and that’s going to have happened on her watch.

JA:
Yeah, I mean, so we don’t know obviously where this latest round of negotiations is going. And frankly when we wrote the book, we didn’t know that there were these back channel communications going on with the Iranians, which was reported I think either at the beginning of this year or very late last year. We’d already gone to print with the book at that point, or were about to go to… somebody did some good reporting on that. But there’s no doubt that the sanctions were aimed at dragging the Iranians to the table. And I think they were successful at that, but the question is, is it good to have them at the table. If they’re not good faith negotiators, if they’re stalling for time, if they are going to nuclearize while negotiating, then of course that’s a problem.

HH: Yeah, huge.

JA:
So they accomplished the goal, but the question is whether the goal was the right one.

HH: Yeah, it reminds me of the ’94 negotiations with North Korea led by Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright. They got the North Koreans to the table, and they got taken to the cleaners when they got to the table. So they managed to get the poker game going, and then they lost all of America’s chips. I mean, it’s going to be ugly when it’s over. Let me play for you one more cut, I’m trying to save the Allen voice here, Maggie Haberman, your old colleague from
Politico
, who came on the show and talked to me about Hillary’s accomplishments. Nere’s that cut, number 12:

HH: How long you been with
Politico
? Five years?

MH: Four years, three and a half years.

HH: Okay, so almost her entire tenure at State, and I’ve been on the air since
2000
. And I can’t think of anything, and I’m giving you the floor if you can come up with anything for her on her case, lay it out
there, just from the top of mind. It should be front shelf, right?

MH: It certainly is not, there is not a giant list that I think people can point to.

HH: There’s no list.

MH: And I think are a couple, and I think there is a couple of reasons for that, like I said. With the major issue of dealing with Israel, she was not front and center. And she certainly received some criticism early on in terms of how the US dealt with Russia. I think these are all going to be issues that she is going to have to address, and I suspect she is going to get asked about them repeatedly, and by many, many outlets.

HH: Well, we’re done, but go around the bullpen at
Politico
and ask them what did she do, and it’s going to be a giant whiteboard, and there’s not going to be anything on it, Maggie.

MH: I like the invocation of whiteboard, though.

HH: It is a whiteboard.

HH: Now Jon, I wasn’t very fair, because you can write on here Burma and Chen Guangcheng. So she’s got…

JA:
(laughing)

HH: You detail that, right? You give a lot of space to Burma and Chen Guangcheng. But what else is on the whiteboard?

JA:
Well, I mean, there are some smaller things. And in fact, it’s interesting in the Middle East…

HH: Smaller than Chen Guangcheng?

JA:
No, no, I meant smaller than the big things that you’re looking for. No, Chen Guangcheng is a very small thing compared to most countries. But I think if you look, for instance, the last temporary peace deal between the Palestinians and the Israelis was one that she went to the Middle East. She broke off of a trip with Obama, actually to Southeast Asia, and went and negotiated a temporary ceasefire that has held since the end of 2012. So I mean, there’s an example, but you’re right. If you’re looking for the big things, and
I know you’re probably going to play me as a cut for somebody else at some point, if you’re talking about the big things, they’re not there. One other measure, I know you’re asking for metrics, I think it was with Dana Milbank earlier, one of the clips you played, one metric is that when she took over, the United States approval rating in the world was 34%. When she left, it was in the 40s. I think it was 41% at the very end. There was an uptick. The United States regained the place of being the best approved of country in the world in terms of leadership role. And I think that matters. I think the public liking the United States in the country gives us leverage with their leadership. It matters. It doesn’t matter on the scale, it’s not a bumper sticker. It just took me five minutes to come up with an explanation. Certainly not the kind of thing you can campaign on, even competent leadership at the State Department—not a bumper sticker. The best thing that she did was spend four years at the State Department without, with the exception of Benghazi, without major disasters. And so Benghazi is the one thing…