The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" Read Free Page A

campaign), while peeling off the serious hawks and the biggest money interests of them all in the energy business. They would also effectively enlist nearly every Spanish-speaking American in your cause, yet give border-security conservatives the sole thing they have long asked for and been repeatedly denied by the establishment GOP, which fears building a long, strong, double-sided border fence because they believe it risks their being called racist. That fear of that branding is deeper within the GOP even than a fear of return to minority status in the House and Senate, which failure on border security will surely bring them.
    To repeat: The oldest rule of politics: Unify your side. Divide your opponents.
    A newer rule of politics: Tell everyone exactly what you intend to do.
    I will come back to each of these five proposals in detail in a later chapter, but absorb them all in one big gulp for a moment andsee what your reaction might be.
    The left hates the Electoral College and sees in it a deeply unfair exclusion of concentrated minority votes in large, urban settings. Campaign for the fulfillment of one-person, one-vote, via an amendment. Let the GOP defend the work of a few hundred white landowners of the late-18th century, half of whom owned slaves and thought nothing of it.
    Take up the record of FDR in his third and fourth term. Ask why Reagan ought to have been denied a third term (his disease did not manifest until late 1992, and old Reaganauts will love you for saying so). And why not Bill in 2000, or Barack in 2016? The old retainers of them will think, if only for a moment, back to what might have been, enjoying the emotional jolt of thinking that you are saying they would have won, enjoying the prospect of a comeback in the implication, unstated, that you would like some veterans of past eras around you.
    You can rhetorically disqualify yourself from a third term in a gentle way. But do not make the amendment applicable only to those who follow you. Bring up your age and candidly suggest that even though you feel better than you ever have, Karl Rove’s solicitous concerns aside, you won’t know until 2024 what you’d like to do or not do. It is an older, smarter, healthier America, and you are too old, too smart and too healthy to say that if a moment needed a third term, you would not try for it. Seniors will love the idea that you are explicitly stating that 78 years old is not too old to be president, much less 70. Young people will admire your candid ambition balanced by your candid assessment of the very low likelihood of such an event. But even if many object, stand on the principle, which ought to be applicable to you: If it is good for the country, it is good for everyone who might be touched by the return to the original design. (Throwing a bone to the Framers, whose electoral college you are trashing at the same time.)
    As for point three, defense hawks are deeply worried, and rightly so. Truth be told, they are in genuine play if Senator Rand Paul is on the ticket, and perhaps even Senator Ted Cruz. The officer corps—presentand past—know how deep the president has cut. The folks who count nukes know what has happened to the deterrent. The folks who watch the PRC know what a regional hegemon is—a superpower about to push aside its old superior within four days sailing off its coast, and they know this is what the ChiComs have achieved on President Obama’s watch—your watch.
    So take a large slice of them from the GOP by committing the country to Defense Department budget seriousness, and destroy the GOP’s hope to beat you with one stroke if Senaor Paul (and perhaps Senator Cruz) is the nominee or the Veep. (Senator Cruz appears to be moving to shield himself from this vulnerability even as Senator Rubio is being lifted on the public’s deep and growing concern over safety, but Senator Paul remains a unique and to no small number of conservatives uniquely appealing candidate who easily