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

has the “highest floor” of all the GOP field. He will never be swept from the field, the convention, or the headlines of the fall of 2016.)
    To your friends you can explain there is much that can be done from within the Pentagon’s budget that they would applaud, much that has been done for years. But if the cost of a huge majority is a few more aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines and a full complement of F-35s, then put them on the table. Secure the soccer moms, who are security moms first. Answer critics of Benghazi with an explanation they will accept and which will not injure you: That the military assets needed that night were not nearby and not available to come to the aid of the besieged.
    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 massiveplatforms 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