The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (30 page)

HH: Yeah, but being first lady of a state, it’s really ’91 that she becomes part of the public possession.

ML:
Yeah, right. And you know, 23, but not only just part of the public possession, but being arguably the most famous woman in the world. Now she was always saying I’m the most famous woman in the world, and nobody really knows. And I think that’s fairly common for a lot of politicians to think that they’re fundamentally misunderstood and shallowly drawn. And I think that it’s true to a point, but at the same time, it’s a familiar lament. I mean, I actually have a profile of Governor Christie that’s coming out this weekend,
and he says something similar about how he has been portrayed. But no, I think look, it is not an easy thing, I imagine, to be defined publicly in just sort of the shorthand of modern journalism and the internet and TV and so forth.

HH: Yeah, no know is ever known, but just a very few are studied. My question is they all choose it, right? It’s their choice. She could vanish tomorrow.

ML:
Sure.

HH: She could go Salinger if she wanted to.

ML:
Yeah, I don’t know if she could go Salinger, but she could certainly just, you know, make a definitive statement that she is done with public life and ask everyone to leave her alone, and I’m guessing that quite a few people would. So yeah, she can opt out.

HH: Would you have been up to the profile of Jackie O.? Do you think you could have cracked the code?

ML:
Oh, sure, I would have loved to have tried. I mean, you know, it doesn’t always, you don’t always… First of all, that would be a case where I doubt she would have let me in. I mean, it would probably been done despite her. But sure, I mean, there’s always someone else who can tell you something. And I think people give up too easily.

HH: Good note to young journalists. I agree with you a thousand percent.

ML:
Yeah.

HH: If you have editors who will let you hunt long enough, right?

ML:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, look, I am extremely lucky. I mean, I do have, in many cases, a lot of time and a lot of space to explore this stuff. But I think the principles are the same for everyone, whether you have a couple of days or a couple of hours to work on something, or a couple of weeks or a couple of months or whatever.

HH: Having studied so many adults who’ve lived in the spotlight, do you think this is why so many young stars go crazy, spin out, do stupid things, because they’re just, they have no maturity on which to handle this?

ML:
I think that’s a great, great question. I think yes, I think it’s absolutely
true. I can’t imagine a worse scenario in which to try to grow up and to try to learn about the world. I mean, I suppose it’s possible. I mean, always, I’m always amazed by the relative normalcy that a lot of presidents’ kids seem to sort of emerge from, whether it’s the Bush daughters or the Obama daughters or Chelsea Clinton or whoever. I mean, obviously, it’s not a picture book childhood that anyone would consider typical by any stretch. So yeah, no, it’s tough, and I think that’s why you see so many problems, especially out in Hollywood.

HH: Would you use the word
ruthless
in connection with Hillary?

ML:
Yeah, I think in some ways. I think they want to win. I think they’re willing to, you know, fight pretty hard to win. I don’t, I mean,
ruthless
is, maybe it’s a pretty strong word, but I think these are as competitive and combative a public, couple of public figures as you can imagine.

HH: See, I don’t, I just think it’s a descriptor, sort of like Margaret Thatcher, I think, was ruthless, and I think Golda Meir was ruthless. But I think women are afraid of that adjective more than men.

ML:
Yeah, I mean, Bill Clinton was ruthless. I think George W. Bush was ruthless. I mean, I think, you know, in order to be elected president, or even to be close, you have to, you’ve got to be a killer. I mean, Mitt Romney, I mean, these are very, very competitive people, and I think that that’s part of, you know, what gets people elevated to that level.

HH: Now I’m talking with Mark Leibovich. His brand new book,
Citizens Of The Green Room
, must reading for anyone who cares about 2016, if only because Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum and Chris Christie are all in here, and they’re all going to be part of that…

ML:
And Hillary, don’t forget Hillary.

HH: And Hillary, of course, and Hillary.

ML:
Yeah.

CHAPTER 38

Excerpt From An Extensive Interview with Chuck Todd, November 13, 2014

HH: Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s
Meet the Press
is with me. Chuck has just put out his brand new book,
The Stranger: Barack Obama In the White House.
It’s linked over at
HughHewitt.com.
It’s an incredible read. Chuck, welcome back to the
Hugh Hewitt Show
.

CT:
Thank you, sir.

HH: How many times did you sit down with Joe Biden to talk about
The Stranger
?

CT:
(laughing) I did not have any official book interview with him.

HH: (laughing)

CT:
So the answer is no.

HH: I tried my little
Meet the Press
trick there, Chuck.

CT:
Yeah, nice try. Neither the president nor the vice president ever did a book interview with me.…

HH: Hillary was badly banged up by the elections of 2014. She went to Kentucky and held a fundraiser for Alison Lundergan Grimes. She held a fundraiser for Mark Pryor, and Bill actually went to Arkansas three times for Mark Pryor, and Tom Cotton wins by 17, and Mitch McConnell wins by 15. Does [Hillary] have a glass jaw?

CT:
I don’t know. You know, look, I think that surrogates are always overrated in general, right? At the end of the day, are you going to tell me that all the work Rick Santorum did for Joni Ernst is the reason why Joni Ernst is the new seantor from Iowa? You know what I mean? So I do think that we take
the surrogate stuff, you know, we overrate it. But I think that she didn’t use, what I would say that Hillary Clinton didn’t do in 2014 that she should have used 2014 to do, I didn’t feel like she campaigned. I didn’t feel like she, you know, instead she was doing fundraisers. Instead, she was trying, you know, I didn’t see her doing retail politics. I didn’t see her sort of taking batting practice, essentially, when it comes to retail politicking, that you know, that has been a weakness of hers. It was a weakness of hers in ’07 and ’08. And so why not use 2014 to start honing a message, and more importantly, to also start doing some campaigning, doing some retail campaigning. So instead, she just simply was somebody to show up at a rally in order to get TV cameras to show up.

HH: Does she have a message? Does she have a platform?

CT:
Well, you know, that’s a great question. I don’t think she does, yet. Like what is, you know, she’s got to answer the why, right? She’s got to answer the whole Roger Mudd question. Why do you want to be president? And maybe it is to break the glass ceiling. That is a reason. And that’s going to be a reason for a lot of people. That’s going to matter to a lot of voters, which is you know, let’s, it’s time to have a woman president, and that is a reason. She needs another why.

HH: You know, a lot of people say she’s too old, and I don’t mean chronologically. I mean that everything has a sell-by date in DC when it gets stale.

CT:
You know who is a great, who sort of coined this in politics? Jonathan Rauch.

HH: Oh, sure, and one of the great proponents of same sex marriage.

CT:
He has said that there is a sell-by date for politicians, and he figured it out once. He said basically, it’s somewhere between, the sweet spot is something like eight to fourteen years on the national stage. And once you’ve been on the national stage more than fourteen years, then if you look back, you just have a higher hurdle in order to be seen as the future candidate, the change candidate.

HH: And was Rauch one of the big proponents of Obamacare as well, Chuck Todd?

CT:
I don’t remember on that.

HH: I can’t remember, either. I think he might be. He’s a Yalie, and I’ve been following his career for a long time. But I think he was also, which brings me to this question. Is Hillary the grandmother of Obamacare? Is she going to get tagged in 2016 for the ongoing collapse of this fiasco?

CT:
Well, and it’s funny, it’s like that’s, I think that’s something she’s got to get her arms around, because the irony is, of course, is candidate Obama campaigned against the [individual] mandate. Candidate Obama campaigned against taxing the big health [plans], you know, basically campaigned against two parts of Hillary Clinton’s health care plan in 2008, and a part of John McCain’s health care plan in 2008. And then he adopted both of them. I think she has to own it. I think she can’t run away from it. I think the lesson for Democrats in general in ’14 is if you try to run away from it, the voters are going to say well, you know, then what are you for? You know, I think that she’s going to have to own it, and I think in an interesting way that you’re going to call it grandmother, that’s going to, some people are going to take that the wrong way. But I do think that she’s going to have to own it and figure out how to be the person that says okay, this is how I would fix it. This is how… you know, Democrats have to stop saying they want to fix health care. They actually have to say what they want to fix.

HH: As she is to her granddaughter, so she is to Obamacare. I mean, she started it. And no Hillary, no Chelsea, no granddaughter. No Hillary, no Obama, no Obamacare. Let me ask you about State. What is she going to say about State, Chuck Todd? It was a fiasco?

CT:
Well, I had one former Democratic senator say to me, “You mean the Secretary of Myanmar,” that basically, that that’s her best…

HH: Yeah, we call that Burma Bingo.

CT:
Right.

HH: Whenever I ask this question, we wait for someone to bring up Burma, and then we yell Bingo.

CT:
And that’s the, and you know, that’s the best, that’s the best part of her record to tout. And I think that that’s, you know, at the end of the day, I think that the best thing going for her is that it’s Obama’s administration, it wasn’t hers. And I think one thing that I think I made clear in the book is that you know, he directed foreign policy, she represented it.

HH: You know what’s interesting, in
The Stranger
, Jon Allen’s been a guest for a lot of time as well when he wrote
HRC
. He had part of the Benghazi story. You’ve got another part of the Benghazi story. But you both put Hillary in the room with Cheryl Mills in the State Department Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. She was right in the middle of it, and then she goes home at some point, and she never calls back Greg Hicks. She called him once, but after they confirmed Stevens was dead, and the embassy burned, she never called back her number two in the country. Does she have explaining to do?

CT:
I don’t know if she thinks she does anymore. I think she feels like she did it during the book tour. I think it really, I think when it comes to Benghazi, I think that the bigger problem she has to answer for is the Libyan intervention, right, which was the decision to intervene without leaving a footprint, and was there a rush to intervene? Was it necessary? Should it have been done? And I think that that’s, you know, that to me is the larger question. That, to me, is the larger debate. And I’ve always thought, frankly, Republicans have spent too much time worried about Benghazi as an incident and not enough time asking larger questions about the decision to go in and not have a, if you’re going to go in, then you need to have some sort of footprint after the fact to stabilize the situation, because guess what we got?

HH: You know, Chuck, though, that always strikes me as like my saying I think Democrats have always spent too much time on the 17 minutes of tape that are missing, and you know, it was those 17 missing minutes of tape that cooked Richard Nixon’s tail, right?

CT:
Well, I’m not saying, but look, and I think it certainly shines a spotlight on a larger policy issue.

HH: Exactly, or a set of competencies.

CT:
Okay, which was intervening in Libya without a plan to win once you’ve toppled Qaddafi.

HH: Now I also want the audience to know, one of the reasons I think they need to read
The Stranger
is I think whoever it was that gave you the Thomas Donilon account of what happened that night, this is the first time I’ve seen anywhere an account of what the president was doing that night. And it’s not much of an account, but it’s more than we’ve got anywhere on page 418. Donilon says he kept the president informed throughout the evening, and that Martin Dempsey had ordered military units, and he had ordered Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs, to get military units into the area as fast as possible. It doesn’t really make sense to me, Chuck, because he’s not the combatant commander. I mean, you can call up your JCS chairman, but you should be calling the guy at CENTCOM, whoever it was at the time, I think it was Mattis, I’m not sure, and saying what have we got, what do we have, and that’s not happening here. And nevertheless, someone gave you an account that no one else has had, yet, of what was going on in the White House that night.