Armageddon (11 page)

As First Lady, she left economic management to Bill and his advisors. As a candidate for president, she never spoke out about near-zero interest rates or the looming economic crash or the unsustainable housing bubble about to burst or the dangerous proliferation of subprime mortgages. She simply knows nothing about the economy and has no qualifications to lead us out of our stagnation and recession.

Bush-43, by contrast, had graduated from the Harvard Business School. Bill Clinton was well tutored on the economy, and Ronald Reagan's entire career was based on his economic views. But Hillary, like Obama before her, approaches the economy without any preparation or particular knowledge. The White House is a dangerous place to learn about our most important problem. Hillary's campaign rendition of her economic plan is little more than a repetition of Democratic Party dogma, doubtless drafted for her by others.

For example, her recipe for “boosting economic growth” includes “tax cuts to the middle class and small businesses.” The last Democratic presidential candidate to urge a middle class tax cut was husband Bill who not only failed to deliver the promised cut, but actually sharply increased taxes. She also calls for “an infrastructure bank” that will spend $27.5 billion on “roads, bridges, public transit, rail, airports, the Internet, and water systems.” If the trillion-dollar stimulus package proposed and passed by President Obama upon taking
office did little or nothing to stimulate growth, how will Hillary's public works program do any better? And as a throw in, she says, without specificity, that she will fund “more scientific research.”

Just in case her stimulus plans trigger any economic growth, she will see that it is extinguished by raising the minimum wage to $15, “increasing workers' benefits, expanding overtime, and encouraging businesses to share profits with employees.” Her proposed hike in the capital gains tax, requiring investments to be held for six years in order to qualify for the current 20% rate, will make capital for new inventions and processes harder and harder to get, stymieing economic expansion. It is the program of an economic ignoramus, copied from boiler-plate language in every past Democratic platform. Her own campaign website boasts of her “economic priorities as Secretary of State.” The list is pathetic and shows how little she focused on economic issues. The site says that she

• • “lobbied for American companies in foreign countries” (She did, as long as they gave generously to the Clinton Foundation and invited Bill to speak for a six-figure fee.)
  
• • “drafted the Trans-Pacific Partnership” (She now opposes it.)
  
• • “pried open Chinese markets to U.S. companies” (She was so effective in doing so that our trade deficit with China now exceeds $500 billion annually.)
  

Some record!

Hillary is not a creative thinker. She is accustomed to getting her talking points from Bill or some other key advisor and going out there and fighting for them. She is an advocate in the purist sense of the term, not an innovator. So, for her entire political career, she has always been in the thrall of some political guru or other. Under her gurus' influence, she adopts their priorities and programs, often hook, line, and sinker.

If we elect Hillary as our president, we can't be sure who the guru who guides her will be. Every president has advisors upon whom he relies. But Hillary takes it to an obsessive degree. She hangs on his or her every word as a lodestar. Dick knows. He served as her guru from 1995 to 1996. Hillary listened to his every word. Bill told Dick in 1995, “She reads your memo every day and is doing just what you suggest.”

In 1993, when Hillary took over the health care task force, she appointed Ira Magaziner, a protégé of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, to direct its efforts. Magaziner sold Hillary on the total overhaul of the entire system that she ultimately recommended. She followed his advice so literally that the final, unwieldy product went down in flames.

During her 2008 run for the White House, she put Mark Penn in as her chief strategist, giving him much of the guru role Dick had occupied in Bill's 1996 campaign. Penn's advice was ultimately so bad that the rest of the staff revolted and forced Hillary to sideline him. Many blame Penn for her disastrous defeat by Obama.

As secretary of state, Sidney Blumenthal was her guru. The revelation of her numerous e-mails back and forth to Sidney demonstrate the degree of her dependence on his input. Hillary tried to hire Blumenthal to her State Department staff, but Obama blocked the appointment, so she got him consulting deals with the Clinton Foundation and her puppet front group, Media Matters. With a cunning mix of half-baked intelligence and sound political advice, Sydney held Hillary almost hypnotized. In electing Hillary, we don't know whom we are getting. We don't know who will fill the space in her mind reserved for gurus.

Nobody is as pig-headed as Hillary Clinton. Once she gets an idea in her mind or decides on a course of action, she will doggedly pursue it regardless of its obvious limitations and political cost. Her rigidity stands in contrast to her willingness to flip-flop on issues. When a new political season is upon her, with new demands and political
needs, she unhesitatingly throws away her previous platform and takes whatever position will benefit her current needs. But on a tactical level, she is almost totally inflexible.

• • She insisted on keeping the proceedings and records of her health care task force secret until a federal judge ordered them opened and fined the federal government $285,864 for the damage caused by Hillary's secrecy fetish. The harm to the program that the task force ultimately produced was immeasurable.
  
• • Hillary insisted she had no role in firing the White House Travel Office Staff in 1993 despite extensive evidence—and staff memos—the proved otherwise. In the end, she was almost indicted for perjury for her stubbornness in swearing under oath that she was not involved. There was nothing illegal about the firings. The staff served at the president's pleasure. But Hillary didn't want her role out there in public. Her stubbornness almost led to her indictment.
  
• • When the
  Washington Post
  asked for the Clintons' tax returns in 1993, she refused to let Bill release them because they contained evidence of her futures market winnings. Her stubbornness this time led to the appointment of a special prosecutor who dogged the Clintons during Bill's entire presidency.
  
• • As noted, when Paula Jones sued the president for sexual harassment and was willing to drop her suit without requiring an admission of guilt or any money, Hillary refused to let Bill settle because Paula asked that he confirm that he sent a state trooper to fetch her. Hillary was afraid that this admission would reinforce a story that Bill used troopers to get women. Because Hillary wouldn't settle, the suit continued and eventually led to the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment.
  
• • Hillary insisted on using a private server while secretary of state despite the virtual certainty that she would be challenged for doing so. She stubbornly claimed that she never handled
  classified material on the server even after over a thousand e-mails confirmed that she did. Her constantly changing stories of what she used the server for caused a massive erosion in public trust, but she stood her ground.
  
• • While running against Bernie Sanders, she doggedly refused to release the texts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs that she delivered after leaving the State Department and for which she received six-figure fees. Her obstinate refusal gave Sanders a campaign issue he used to pummel her repeatedly.
  

Hillary sees flexibility as a sign of weakness and holds to her established position like Krazy Glue. Her macho insistence on never giving in denies her key tactical flexibility. Like German and Russian soldiers in World War II who were ordered to take “not one step back,” Hillary's stubbornness denies her the ability to execute tactical retreats or even to maneuver.

The practice of nepotism, giving special favors to family members and special friends, reached brand new levels in the Clinton White House. Every one of the Clinton siblings, Roger Clinton and Hugh and Tony Rodham, traded on their family names and were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure presidential pardons. Even after Bill Clinton left office, Roger Clinton and Tony Rodham have continued to trade on the family name and relationships. And especially since Bill Clinton became the virtual ruler of Haiti and Hillary was viewed as a likely next president, great opportunities for the family have continued to pour in. And now even Chelsea has joined the nepotistic team.

Chelsea is out there now, campaigning hard for Mom, attacking Sanders and Trump, and even fanning speculation that she might
become the third Clinton to launch her own political career. God help us. Chelsea Clinton has lived a life of privilege and entitlement, and her professional life has been entirely based on exploiting her family connections. Unlike the rest of the world, Chelsea has never had to look for a job. They've all been handed to her because her last name is Clinton, and not because of any special, or even not so special, talents. She's the Princess of Nepotism. Her first job was an entry-level position at McKinsey, where she certainly had to be viewed as an asset for attracting clients. Next, one of her mother's biggest donors hired her at Avenue Capital, where she didn't exactly wow the financial community. She left after three years, once she realized that she just “couldn't . . . care about money.”
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How touching and insightful. No need to care about money when it's just handed to you. No need to worry about student loans when you have degrees from Stanford, Columbia, and Oxford (2), and you didn't need any student loans. No need to worry about money when your parents help your husband's career and their donors invest in his hedge fund, even though it's not too successful. No need to worry about housing when you live in a $10 million apartment in New York. No need to worry about a job when you're given one, regardless of your qualifications (or lack of them). Really, who needs money?

Certainly not Chelsea. After she left Wall Street, she pursued an academic career, once again, using her family contacts. In 2010, NYU president John Sexton, friend of Bill, appointed her as assistant vice provost of the Global Network University at NYU, bringing together Muslims and Jews in New York and around the globe. Not clear what her qualifications were, other than daughter of Bill and Hillary, when asked about this role, she told
Time Magazine
that she was passionate about “trying to really figure out what the right pedagogy should be in multifaith and interfaith education and leadership.”
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Sounds fascinating. And typical Chelsea Clinton blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.

In 2013, she allegedly cofounded and chaired the NYU multifaith “Of Many Institute for Multifaith Leadership.” She insisted that her
interfaith marriage to a Jewish husband qualified her for this position. Of course. When evidence of brutal treatment of workers and violations of basic human rights were lodged against NYU's construction workers at the new campus of the Global Network University in Abu Dhabi, Ms. Clinton was silent about the abuses to her new Muslim constituency. Could her silence be related to Bill's fees for speaking at NYU graduations or to his trip to Abu Dhabi to speak to the first graduating class of the Global Network University, where he never mentioned the controversy? That's not her department.

Chelsea's next job was as a Special Correspondent for NBC TV. That was a bust, but a lucrative one. She had a contract for $600,000 a year, although in 2014 she only appeared on four very boring segments, including an interview with the Geico Gecko. So bad was she on camera that she usually did only voice over segments with very little actual live time, if any, on camera. Even NBC realized how bad she was and dumped her, but not before she collected over $1.5 million. Apparently, Ms. Clinton received very special treatment at NBC. Agents hired by her parents basically came in and convinced the idiots at the network that she would be an asset. They were dead wrong. And she insisted on being treated like a prima donna. NBC staff were told not to approach her but to go through her producers. The few interviews she did were painful to watch. Chelsea is not a natural.

She was also reportedly paid $300,000 for sitting on the board of a Barry Diller's company. No telling what that's about. Barry and his wife, Diane von Furstenberg, are big fans and supporters of Bill and Hillary. It's lucrative and prestigious to have the Clinton last name.

Now Chelsea is vice chairman of the Clinton Foundation, another position where she seems to be in over her head. She has six staffers at her disposal. Bill only has five. And although scarcely an inspiring speaker, she goes out to speak on behalf of the foundation—at least five organizations have actually been so shameless in courting her parents that they paid to hear her speak. Hard to believe. One Florida charity even paid $75,000. Embarrassingly awkward in front of
a microphone, even after years of practice, her speeches are littered with the same canned lines no matter who she is speaking to.

Apparently Chelsea's leadership and management talents are not really appreciated at the foundation. Since she has been involved, lots of folks have left, claiming she was “unpleasant” to deal with. Of course, she's had no management experience.

Chelsea also has no experience as an author. Yet the Clinton-friendly publishing house reached out to her to write a book about issues that are important to young adults. Anyway, she'll figure it out—with help from aides, ghosts, and so on. And once again, she'll trade on the Clinton name. That's what she does.