The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (12 page)

There will be some mistakes made, even as draft boards of the ’60s and ’70s made mistakes when it came to classifying draft-eligible, young men. But for the most part, the drywall contractor who has been at it for seven years or the maid who has been cleaning rooms at the Ramada Inn for ten, and all their children and elderly parents will be able to tell their stories to such boards and quickly get the purple card that allows them to enter the above-ground economy and start paying taxes. They should not be eligible to receive benefits other than primary and secondary education—this is the hard part, eligibility for benefits is reserved for US citizens and green-card holders—except for public schooling, of course.

If a bad guy gets a purple card, his or her first brush with police will mean forfeiture of it. If a good guy is denied a purple card, provide for an appeals process.

Establish a national database and hit employers, who hire people without their cards, with devastating fines. Simple. End of the regularization process. Why the GOP did not do this years ago… well, it did not do so because of the ambition of John McCain, who thought himself an expert on the border and the laws governing immigration because he lived in a state bordering Mexico, when in fact, any first year lawyer could have written better legislation than his two epic fails.

So your old pal—and he might even support you if the GOP doesn’t court him, again, if you dangle SecDef in front of him—left the door open to you. Mitch McConnell might be smart enough to slam it shut before the campaign gets going, but the screamers are loud in my party, and there is money to be made and books to sell and ratings to gain in stepping on this broken leg, but you can be the fixer.

Propose the fence, the cards and the boards. Scold the opponents. Play to the big hearts of most Americans even as you address their legitimate fears. Talk like a grandmother, but also talk as a mom worried about her school-aged children and unvaccinated immigrants, as well as the most notorious and violent cartel-backed gangs.

Here, the best politics is also the best policy. And the men to help you—and they are all men—are the Roman Catholic archbishops. Some are already cardinals, a few more of whom will soon be, such as Archbishop Chaput in Philadelphia, Archbishop Gomez in Los Angeles and Archbishop Cupich in Chicago. Soon after your nomination is secure, reach out to these men along with Cardinals Dolan of New York, O’Malley of Boston, and Wuerl of DC, and invite them to an all-day discussion of the plight of immigrants. Although they disagree with you on the rights of the not-yet-born, they will all back comprehensive and humane immigration reform, even the most conservative among them.

In your meeting with them you will have to endure some lecturing on religious liberty. Listen closely, for there is another area of campaigning on which you will have to thread a needle between people of faith and your LGBT supporters—and of course, an appeal to join in promoting a new culture of respect for life and family. The photo op will be magnificent and the political impact of their support for your proposals—though couched in a policy endorsement, not a political one—will be a meteor strike on the GOP. That is worth a few hours with these men, at least some of whom you loathe, isn’t it?

Of course it is. Your concern for the illegal population is of course a quarter-inch deep—really, hope that no one looks too carefully at your long silences on the subject when in power and especially as First Lady—but you can fake a deep, longstanding compassion for these millions and thus earn the Latino vote with one decent policy proposal and one day spent with the collars.

Your campaign pros cannot count on a replay of the GOP’s fumble of the Spanish-speaking media in 2012. Jonathan Alter’s book on that
campaign has an astonishing assertion in it: Obama ran seven spots on Spanish language media to every one put forward by the Romney media wizards. The rotten core of the GOP consulting class was outmaneuvered, but the massive fail of 2012 won’t be followed by a replay in 2016. Still, you can carry the Latino vote—even against a Marco Rubio–including ticket—if you get the policy right. To paraphrase Kissinger again, the proposals have the added advantage of being good policy as well as terrific politics. Take them away from the GOP, before someone with vision kicks McCain from the room and puts forward the same plan with an elephant logo on top.

The political effect of this proposal if passed and implemented will be real border security that, while not a guarantee against cross-border attacks, will at least be insurance from political damage in the aftermath of such a blow, and an enduring political realignment, a generational grip on Latino voters every bit as strong as your party had on Irish-Americans for a half-century or more after the great migrations. African Americans have nowhere else to go, but Latinos do. Put up signposts and markers and pay off the promise that President Obama made and broke, made and broke, made and broke.

Asian Americans will of course be watching and to them must go the promise of vast numbers of high-tech visas and continued expansion of visas-for-cash, which has made for quite the under-the-radar legal trade in people and money. Not many Americans know of the fast growth in the U.S. visa program that traded permanent residence to any foreigner who invested $500,000 in a US project that created at least ten jobs, but the EB-5 visa is well known among the voting groups whose extended families and communities have benefitted from it. Since the EB-5 program was created in 1992, around 30,000 immigrants have used it. While the government is quick to point to the alleged 500,000 jobs created, the annual limit of 10,000 such visas per year chafes at some, especially the new technocrats of China and India and all those voters, who see in their ethnicity a common bond if not actually common blood.

This is a sophisticated demographic, or actually many demographics, and driven primarily by economics and foreign policy, not racial identity except in a nationalist attachment to their various homelands, not in appeals to their racial classification and circumstances within the U.S. Voters whose families came from the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia—they will want to know where you stand on the security of their country of origin—in other words, where you stand on China. On China, you will have to bluntly state that it must be contained, and that the United States Navy, rebuilt and robust, will do the containing. Of course, you cozied up with the PRC throughout your tenure at Foggy Bottom. So terrible was your tenure at State, vis-à-vis the ChiComs, you will simply have to make up a new narrative of your time there, and count on the surpassing ignorance of the MSM to facilitate it. That narrative will bring along the Asian-American voters, even as your policy on neo-amnesty (or “regularization” as I have vainly tried for years to encourage sensible Republicans to call it) will cement Latinos to you and your family’s cause for decades to come.

PART II

YOUR OPPONENTS, NUMEROUS AND FEW, LARGE AND SMALL, IMMEDIATE AND LONG-TERM

CHAPTER 12

The Virtual Hive

Everybody “knows” that the rise of new media “changes everything” when it comes to electoral politics, but they don’t know how it has changed, or how fast the change will continue, or what to do about it except scramble to recruit to their campaigns “new leadership in the digital era.”

Those who profess to understand it are lying or at least fools. Even the president’s “A-Team” of techies barely understands the speed with which the billions of online interactions are bending politics and government here and around the globe. Admittedly, they were ahead of the curve in using the new tools to identify and bank data on millions of Americans who had been only crudely counted and categorized before 2008 and 2012, but a decade from now the president’s best will seem like three-year olds. There is no privacy anymore, and everyone’s behavior can be predicted with increasing accuracy, an accuracy that improves with every exponential expansion in the amount of data banked on them.

Your people will hire Obama’s people and try and supervise them, and you will try as well to understand what is going on but it is actually beyond your ability to do so. You will have to trust some people on the data side, and figuring out whom to trust with regards to the data will be an enormous challenge, one that only your most-trusted, longest-serving aides can be asked to advise upon. And their long service all but
guarantees that they too will be babes-in-the-techno-woods they are exploring.

You can control what you can control, however, and one of those things is the input machine into level one of the buzz machine that is the modern social media giant noise machine.

If you think about when Bill first ran in 1991 and 1992, it was a relatively simple time in media. There were the big networks, a handful of papers led by
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal
and the newsweeklies. Sure AP and UPI were in the mix, and a few key opinion outlets like
The New Republic
, but not much else concerned a Democratic campaign for the presidency. The nets and the key reporters and editors at the key publications—those were the gatekeepers.

In opposition were Rush Limbaugh and his very early stage colleagues on the radio. I was a young weekend radio host in LA in those days while also doing the television news for PBS each night as co-host of a precursor to the nightly gab-fests held round-the-clock now on a half dozen channels. Sean Hannity was laboring in Huntsville, Alabama about to head out to Atlanta, and The Fox News Channel would not even launch until October 7, 1996. Laura Ingraham was clerking for Justice Thomas and Mark Levin was leading the Landmark Legal Center. There was the editorial page of
The Wall Street Journal
and
National
Review
, but not much else on the right.
The Weekly Standard
would not launch until 1995. A much simpler time, even if you occasionally had to worry about
The Economist
or
Le Monde
or
Der Speigel
.

Then along came Drudge. Hard to believe it started up only in 1996, but that’s the date. Just in time for the second term. Just in time to change everything.

When I wrote
Blog: Understanding The Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World
eight years later, the world had indeed changed. That’s an ancient book now, a decade later, though you’d do well to read the chapter on the death of the gatekeepers like Dan Rather and to review the key sentence in the entire book: “The byline is the brand now.”

And that is the secret to the “buzz machine” of level one of the social media giant noise machine: The bylines that matter. Who feeds the beast now? Really feeds it. Who and how?

Ask your staff this day—recall Churchill would scrawl on his memos “Action This Day!” and you’d be well advised to emulate that, if only so people saw you emulating the great man—to prepare a list of the 200 most influential commentators when it comes to spreading political messages via social media including Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, Meerkat—the lot. When you get those 200, ask for 200 more, and then 200 more, then 200 more, then 200 more. You will end up with a thousand names, and every one of them will have a Twitter account that you should be following every day, all day. Yourself. With your own eyes.

Watching the buzz river run, on and on and on. That is step one. (Dress them down by the way if they neglect the “Mike and Mike” shows of the ESPN and Fox Sports world. Here are the vast audiences of younger men with whom you must simply connect via some bridge.)

Step two, ask for a binder with background on each of these 1,000, and insist on knowing their ages. Many of the youngest ones—like
Bloomberg
’s Dave Weigel,
Townhall
’s Guy Benson,
Hot Air
’s Mary Katharine Ham, Tommy Vietor,
Politico
’s James Hohmann, the
Arizona Republic
’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez—will be strangers to you unless you have worked with them like you have Vietor. But they are out there, in the new virtual hive which replaced the old one of Mark Halperin’s imagination, which he labeled the “Gang of 500” for ABC News’
The
Note
back in the day. If the “Gang of 500” ever existed, it is disbanded now, routed actually, by the virtual mob of thousands. Halperin imagined a world where only the Manhattan-Beltway chattering class mattered, and of course it still does, but far from exclusively. Joe Scarborough is on in the background when most East Coast people are shaving, and Jake Tapper while they have a tipple in their offices before heading home that night. Of course, the Manhattan-Beltway media elite matter, but they do not matter one-tenth or even one one-hundredth of what
they used to, because every day in every way the barbarians are climbing the virtual walls, and every day in some places they are getting in.

This new virtual hive buzzes 24/7, 365 days a year. You cannot hope to control it, or even move it much. But you can curry favor with its most important members until such time as you can in fact control it via the Federal Communications Commission and your own data collection operations. Only now, at the beginning of the dynasty’s second rise, do you need to pretend other than contempt for its members.

There are less than 500 days until the election. You need to personally reach out to three of these 1000 every day, beginning with the very youngest. Your staff must bring them to you. You must know their stories and give them a story. You must be the first major candidate every to figure out that press secretaries and communications directors are a relic, just like spin rooms after debates. Oh, someone will have those titles, but everyone on your campaign with an iPhone and a Twitter account is a press secretary, just as everyone you meet in every room is a reporter looking for a career-making moment like Joe the Plumber or the bartender who taped Mitt Romney’s 47% moment.