The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (8 page)

People have forgotten the final two years of your last tenure at 1600. They have forgotten Marc Rich and the FLMN terrorists, the tawdriness, and of course, most of the impeachment narrative. They do know your husband had sex in the Oval Office with Monica and lied about it, but the new culture finds that almost charming and lying about it refreshingly honest. No, you can reinvent the history of then to suit now, and that reinvention should be that the 22nd Amendment stopped Bill’s recovery, the war on Al Qaeda before it got out of hand under Bush, and many other ills.

Blame all of W’s perceived faults and more on the 22nd, and pivot to the obvious injustice done to Obama by the same device. Push the repeal with a smile and a non-denial denial about your own ambitions: “I’ll be 69 when I am sworn in, so you won’t have to worry about me seeking a third term. But say circumstances were such that the people wanted me—ha, ha, ha, imagine that!—why shouldn’t the people decide? If I ran and got thumped, what a lesson on limiting ambition that would be. And why shouldn’t Barack be eligible to be reelected again to the office he ran so well?”

Every day this discussion will fuel the news cycle, pushing all of the “return” narratives of Bill and Barack. Even among GOPers, a sense
that if they get it right with Rubio or Cruz, why would they want to blow it? The illusion of permanence—Rove fell for it. I have fallen for it (see the subtitle of my 2006 book,
Painting the Map Red)
, it tempts all political pundits, strategists and historians. They want the grand plan for realignment so that a party dominates an era. But realignments are done, broken by the new realities and the new threats. In fact, only Julius and Augustus Caesar saw clearly the need to replace a broken system or change within the republic with an ordered succession, which they promptly set about doing while respecting the forms all along the way through the “Roman Revolution.”

You need the Amendment to order your succession, to prevent any more GOP comebacks and any more rank amateurs like Obama. What you will be about is organizing a third American century by providing it with a long run of prepared leaders, beginning with you and followed by Chelsea.

But all in the open and the golden apple of stability will be bordered by the silver frame of the people’s right to choose unfettered by the dead white legislators of the 1950s, who cooked up the 22nd. You will be on the side of the Framers as well as the people, except of course where the Framers defaulted to an Electoral College clearly born of a different age of travel and balancing of regional interests. Appropriate to an age of slavery, not rebirth, the College must be the principle target of your campaign and to that we turn next.

But remember, in every speech, demand repeal of the 22nd. Every speech. It must be a mandate, and if the GOP controls the House against you in 2017, campaign on it and only it through 2018. “Let the people decide” will rocket along for a decade to come until every check on the people’s majoritarian impulses is gone, and with them, the checks on you.

CHAPTER 8

“Let the People Decide”:
PART 2

Abolishing the Electoral College

You are about building a dynasty and a new way forward for the United States, Madame Secretary, and that cannot be done with the Electoral College in place. It was intended to buffer the young republic from the winds of powerful factions and would-be kings, and it has worked well—too well, in fact. Now it stands astride progress yelling, “Stop! Pay attention to Kansas and Colorado and New Hampshire and New Mexico,” and a host of lightly populated nowhere places, with almost no cultural treasures and hardly any of the elites, who in fact run the country from Washington, DC, San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and New York. It is time to cut the anchor and run with the wind. So you should say, and so you should campaign.

Having spent 30 years in various media outlets defending the Electoral College, let me confess that it is the hardest thing to do on my side of the aisle. Candor is almost always preferred to misdirection. But candor regarding the College is almost always ineffective and sometimes disastrous. The College protects small-town and rural America from the countries’ big cities. While true, that defense can easily be misunderstood as protecting the largely Anglo populations in small towns and rural America from the largely minority populations of the big cities.

You will want to pluck that chord—carefully. Most Americans, including most Americans of color, are worn out by the politics of race. And while every explosion of racial conflict, whether in Missouri with Michael Brown, Florida with Trayvon Martin, New York City with Eric
Garner or anywhere else, cause ratings to soar for the networks that heavily invest in breathless coverage, the fact is the spectacle attracts the aggrieved on all sides of the issues, not merely those who believe America “has a race problem.” We will return to your tricky triangulation on the issue, but know that it flows beneath the Electoral College conversation as well.

No, you must direct your ire and the campaign against the College towards the Red States and work to keep the small Purple or Blue States in the fold with a wink and a nod. Do so via a number of devices, but do not begin this phase of the campaign until after the nomination is secure. Iowa and New Hampshire especially will not cotton to anti-small state talk, but for them we have solutions once the caucuses and primary are behind us.

The College is so weird to most Americans that most of your argument is already made. Challenge defenders to answer “Why North Dakota with more cows than people and oil than common sense ought to be able to have three electoral votes when Washington State, home of so much that matters—and I don’t mean just the Seahawks—and the Buckeye State have thirty times the people and less than eight times the political punch of either of the Dakotas or Montana or Wyoming?” Feel free to throw in punches at Dick Cheney here, the all-purpose Beelzebub for campaign 2016, as Wyoming’s greatest contribution to the Union over the past two centuries and hardly justifying half the electoral power of New Hampshire.

The trick will be to pit the smallest, most deeply Red States, rhetorically, against the bluest, nearly-as-small states, thus framing the grievance as small state v. micro-state, not big cities against the small towns and farmers. Voters must understand you to be specifically for them, even though you are for yourself and the
familia
.

Now, envy is a useful thing to harness on your behalf, but envy never completely trumps self-interest. Recall the referendum on Scottish independence in September of 2014. Its rise to parity in the polls, to near victory until the last two weeks, was fueled by the envy of the small against the large.

Ultimately, however, the economic self-interest of the small ultimately trumped the envy and resentment Scots felt against the English. When banks and manufacturers threatened to bolt Scotland en masse, that self-interest—even among some previously independence-minded Scots—became of greater importance to voters there than the near certain-to-have-been-fleeting joy of punching John Bull in the snout. The hangover of the celebration, Scots concluded by a large margin, wasn’t worth the party.

Defenders of the College will attempt to paint its greatest virtue as stability and the risks of the popular vote election of the president as too great and too precarious by far to try. To which you must calmly and repeatedly reply: “I trust the people,” adding, “Communication in the new era of social media make all voters equally powerful in all places,” and “The amending process is slow and deliberate, and can be trusted to balance out all the pros and cons, and in the process, educate the world about governance and constitutionalism just when it needs it most.”

Add, “What critics of my proposal to abolish the College note how ‘Abolish the College’ flows off the tongue—I have reserved the domain name and Twitter handle, fail to grasp when they charge that instability will follow the success of the Amendment, is that a byproduct of the amendment process will be an increase in constitutionalism across the globe and a rise in international stability as countries see how change ought to be accomplished.”

CHAPTER 9

5%

Recall that in Chapter 1, I laid out your core, five-part platform. Now we must focus on part three of that platform which involves national security as expressed through the national defense:

“A constitutional amendment mandating that 5% of GDP be spent on the Pentagon’s budget, with safeguards that the money actually be spent on soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines and the equipment they need, not ‘green energy’ production for military bases. Rebuild the military and detach it from the GOP, and do so before a coup becomes a reality in the next forty years.”

“Another constitutional amendment,” some of your advisors will groan. But this is the GOP-splitting, election-guaranteeing bold stroke that can detach a significant part of the GOP from a party flirting with isolationism and alarming its previously most reliable voting bloc, the national security conservatives.

In case you doubt my bona fides in talking about this group of conservative voters, please know that I began my career as a ghostwriter for Richard Nixon during his exile in San Clemente, the Elba of America, as he worked on
The Real War,
which was a realpolitik manifesto published for the 1980 election, one which then-candidate Reagan found useful to be photographed carrying.

Eighteen years after scribbling away for RN, I penned an article for the then-young
Weekly Standard
, entitled “Our Six Party System,” which
I reproduce in part here 17 years later because it provided an accurate map to the parties in 1998. And while the names of key players have changed, the map of the parties is still the same… but you can permanently rearrange it:

“
EACH OF OUR MAJOR POLITICAL PARTIES
is really three smaller parties stacked in a pyramid. The chart below is a handy reference guide. The critical challenge for each party’s elite is to attend to its base. These days, the base of the Republican pyramid is cracked.

This base is what I call the Party of Faith, the legions of Americans who believe in “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The fact that they practice religion is what defines them. Overwhelmingly Christian, they go to church, read Scripture, and organize their social lives around interactions with other believers. Faith in God and the attempt to obey His will is at the center of their lives.

The Party of Faith has its own subculture. Its most prominent political leaders are Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, but there are numerous others, too, including Pat Robertson, Chuck Colson, and,

increasingly, the dozen or so pastors of the new mega-churches, like Southern California’s Chuck Smith, Greg Laurie, and Rick Warren. When and if these leaders serve notice on the GOP’s elite that the Republican party no longer represents them, the threat will be real. If the base’s support for the GOP collapses, the Republicans’ ability to contend with the Democratic party will be gone overnight.

But there’s another reason the Democrats would easily prevail if the GOP were separated from its base: In the middle tier of the party pyramids, the Democrats again have the advantage.

The Party of Wealth has traditionally made its home in the GOP. From mutual-fund managers and some big-business types to small entrepreneurs and anti-tax activists, these folks believe in the bottom line. “If GDP increases, all is well,” is their credo. They write checks to campaign coffers, and they vacation out of state. Net worth is the key to their hearts and minds.

There have been substantial defections from this group to the Democrats in recent years, especially from the higher income brackets, where laissez-faire lifestyle politics holds sway. Unfamiliar with the redistributionist zealotry of the old Left (or so rich they don’t much care what slice the government takes), these newly wealthy technocrats tend to discount the importance of politics. Their discomfort with the Party of Faith propels them into the arms of their natural enemies.

The irony, of course, is that the Democratic party’s middle tier, the Party of Government, would love nothing more than to empty the pockets of its counterparts in the GOP. The Party of Government comprises the labor unions, especially the newly dominant public-employee unions like teachers; the environmentalists, both nonprofit and bureaucratic; the consumer advocates; and all others who need government to keep them employed and powerful. This is the most rapidly growing sector of American politics today, as the administrative state continues to expand, especially at the local level. This sector demands new tax revenues, without which it cannot grow.

Just below the national leadership of both parties are two further groupings—the Party of Patriotism and the Party of License. Both carry influence disproportionate to their numbers.

The patriots are nationalists, or American exceptionalists, and include professional foreign-policy wonks, the remnants of the anti-Communists, and nearly every member of the armed forces. They are secular defenders of the American ideal, and Reagan was their embodiment. As Thomas Ricks points out in
Making the Corps
, the military is increasingly Republican even though its own unique culture breeds contempt for the wealthy and it remains at arm’s length from the Party of Faith.

Across the divide is the Party of License—the academic Left, the feminist cadre, and the gay community. They are everything the patriotic party is not, and they will never cross over.