My new book, “The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second ‘Clinton Era,'” appears in bookstores this week, and so I am off on the obligatory book tour.
It began on “Meet The Press” Sunday and continues across “Fox & Friends,” “Morning Joe,” “The Mark Levin Show,” Jake Tapper’s “The Lead” and to a Saturday Newseum event in D.C. with the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, before heading off to parts west. (The Saturday afternoon gabfest with Chris is at 2:30 p.m. and open to the public.) All fun, and I will try to mention “The Queen” at least seven times in every segment, which is the “Luntz Law” of selling books.
An irony is that on the same trail is Evan Thomas, who has published a new book about Richard Nixon, “Being Nixon.” We have already crossed paths on Chuck Todd’s stage, and the irony is that I have written a book about Hillary — whom I have never met and whom he knows — and he has written about Richard Nixon — with whom I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours in conversation from 1978, when I first went to work for him as a fresh-out-of-college writer in San Clemente, through his death in 1994, but whom Thomas met just once.
The point is that proximity and agreement isn’t a necessary part of perspective. Indeed, being too close to a subject can be a handicap. That’s why I have never written at length about Nixon; that and the unspoken idea that staff ought not to be quick to comment on the men and women who have given them opportunity.
But having studied the former secretary of state from afar for 25 years, “The Queen” does not hesitate to offer candid advice to her.
“The Queen” is modeled on Machiavelli’s The Prince, published 500 years ago, give or take a year, and is built on the Florentine’s approach to his recent tormentors, the Medici, who had not only tossed him from power but had taken him prisoner and tortured him. My book is full of advice that, if taken, would make the former secretary of state’s status as the prohibitive favorite to be the next president to near invincibility (absent a health event). But of course by charting the steps she should take, I hope to make them less likely to be taken and even perhaps to toss a couple of pebbles in her path.
If “The Queen” can coax even one reporter within shouting distance to ask the future Democratic Party nominee if she would indeed consider New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand as a future Supreme Court appointee (under 50, female, prosecutor), then the prospect of Chelsea’s entry into the family business via Hillary’s old Senate seat becomes obvious — and a subject of conversation among the press. If I can get people talking about how Hillary slices up the GOP, perhaps my party won’t be so easily sliced.
“The Queen” is tough-minded — it argues that Hillary’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, simply must be exiled from the campaign — but it is also hard on the would-be GOP nominees.
On the Republican side, some review copies got a couple of folks, like this paper’s Paul Bedard, to note that I recommend a one-term vice presidency for Mitt Romney if the nominee is Sen. Marco Rubio or any of the other younger candidates who might need not only Romney’s experience but also his enormous Rolodex of donors, administered by the still uncommitted Spencer Zwick. “The Queen” is as full of the obvious as its predecessor “The Prince” was five centuries ago.
The former secretary of state’s greatest weakness is, of course, her years at state, and all the catastrophes of her tenure there are detailed in “The Queen,” and not just by me, but in the voices of the Manhattan-Beltway media elite who have appeared on my radio show over the past two years. I’ve asked them all — reporters and columnists from every platform from the New York Times, to the Washington Post, to Politico and beyond — to list her accomplishments as secretary of state. Their answers are compiled in “The Queen.” They are not ringing endorsements.
Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated talk radio host and law professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law. His new book is “The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second ‘Clinton Era.'” He posts daily at HughHewitt.com and is on Twitter @hughhewitt.
