By Rick Wilson
Sunday, March 08, 2015
As the unfolding Clinton email story plays out, I have
some simple counsel for my friends in Congress, the conservative movement and
right-leaning opinion media: Stop talking unless and until you have a plan.
Better to go dark than play this game by the Clinton Rules.
Hillary really put a wrench in the media’s plans this
week. After eagerly cheerleading Barack Obama for eight years, they stood ready
to help break the ultimate glass ceiling and play their role as part of the
uncritical chorus of Hillary Clinton’s coronation, first as the Democratic
nominee then as President. It’s why they hate this story. It brings alive the
memories of thirty years of the slimy, predatory Clinton enterprise and how its
venal, sleazy, one-step-ahead-of-the-law hillbilly hustle stains everything it
touches.
Cursed with both arrogance and inertia, the Bill and
Hillary machine is stumbling toward political peril as the story of her
possibly illegal (and certainly dodgy and ill-advised) use of private email
servers consumes a Washington and New York press corps that for once can’t
easily look away. The Clintons know we’re only at the end of the beginning of
this story and the national security, legal and political implications for
Hillary will get worse. The Clintons are depending on their old skills at
manipulating the press and hoping the GOP and conservatives will save her by
mishandling their response as badly as she’s mishandling hers.
While the media’s passive “attention span” excuse du jour
is real, many in the press are possessed of a boundless ideological desire to
change the subject right now. That’s why the press is waiting breathlessly for
(and in some cases, actively trolling for) Republicans to blow it. An
intemperate remark from Congressman Jackass would fit the bill perfectly. Don’t
be the squirrel. Don’t give them a shiny object. Don’t give them an excuse to
turn this into “Krazee Republicans Sure Hate Hillary Because She’s a Woman.”
For God’s sake, candidates, take a deep breath and skip talking about your
favorite social issue for just a few days. The media is desperate for another
riff on evolution or vaccines or gay marriage or prison sex from a GOP
contender so they can turn their undivided attention to the Republicans.
Let’s try something new: maintain message discipline,
hold focus and keep an eye on a bigger objective than your daily press release,
social media hits or email fundraising drops. This is about her, not us, so
unless GOP elected and opinion leaders are smart and subtle, and execute with
the right timing and tone, she wins. Try for once to play the long game and
help Hillary Clinton take on water.
You can sense the Clintons are on the back foot; her
now-infamous tweet and promises of transparency last week were nothing more
than rehashed Clinton stalling tactics from the 1990s, when there were only a
handful of media outlets and a relatively hermetic press culture. It was as
stale as a faxed statement, three days late in the era of always-on social
media. That won’t work today, if we’re smart. She’s blowing this; let’s help.
It’s vital to have a plan, to execute it with discipline
and proceed against Clinton with a measured pace and tone. Speak more in sorrow
than in anger. Don’t make it all about Benghazi (they’re expecting that) or the
record-keeping laws (boring). Touch on those selectively, but focus instead on
the grave national security risks that her amateur-hour email server shenanigan
posed and more broadly what this says about the Clinton culture. Her team can
yammer on about the legality of it all, her motivations or the traffic content,
but the moment this becomes about the Chinese, Iranians, Russians or even just
random hackers reading the email (classified or not) of the Secretary of State,
it’s a new ballgame.
I encourage you to use the smarmy D.C. construction of “I
just want to work in a bipartisan way for good, transparent government and to
protect national security secrets from the Chinese, Russians, and other
threats” that the Acela Media claims to worship. Republicans have heard the
hard ideologues on the left use it a million times while grinding their teeth
in frustration. Avoid making wild claims about either the substance or
political outcomes of investigations. Reduce expectations, rather than raise
them. Don’t let one single member of Congress or leader be the only face in the
room; the Clintons love to demonize a single target, so vary your portfolio. Be
persistent. Be serious. Be smart.
Of course, Republicans should welcome the chance for Mrs.
Clinton to give her side of the story in press conferences and hearings (oh, so
many delicious, lovely, slow hearings) and we’re certain that Mrs. Clinton and
her staff want to be completely forthcoming. I mean, no one wants to subpoena Hillary
and every staffer from top to bottom and force so many people to lawyer up. On
that note, purely in the interests of good government, it’s time roll in the
rest of the Clinton clown show: the execrable Sid Blumenthal, Anger Management
Disorder poster-boy and email-incontinent Philippe Reines, the Machiavellian
enforcer Cheryl Mills, fixer and last-one-in-the-room Mrs. Anthony Weiner. Push
them. Get them under the spotlight. The Clinton claque would love to have this
be solely about Hillary’s email traffic, but as an intelligence official once
told me, “You learn a lot from generals, but everything from their colonels.”
None of them are as insulated as HDR22.
Press the sore spots subtly, but constantly. We’re not
the ones reminding the press and public of the Clinton family’s infamous
contempt for the law and reminding the public of their obsessive secrecy,
paranoia and habitual lawbreaking. We’re just here in the interests of
transparency. Wonder, in serious tones, how much of the email traffic has to do
with the other scandal that reporters have been desperately trying to cover up:
the Clinton Foundation’s scuzzy foreign-money vacuum and other parts of their
venal enterprise. They claim they weren’t accepting foreign contributions while
she was Secretary of State, but as with any Clinton statement the truth can
always be wildly at variance.
A calm, ethics-driven questioning of their finances makes
the Clintons lose their political minds. What drives their strange, jumpy
reactions to any discussion about money? My theory is they both feel like con
artists who keep getting away with bigger and bigger scams and can’t believe
they haven’t been caught.
Don’t rely on extracting meaning or data from what the
Clintons drip out in the alleged interests of transparency. They’ve had ages to
redact, and you should constantly remind the media how concerned you are about
what we’re not seeing. Even the most liberal reporters I know have a sense of
drive and curiosity about what the Clinton’s are hiding, because they know it’s
always something. If you’re a Member, candidate, organization or activist
group, resist the urge to have your organization dump out a dozen Hillary
fundraising emails a week, each increasingly lurid and dramatic, all chasing
that $25 click from the little old lady on your Patriotic Patriots for
Patriotism list.
This isn’t the kind of message battle the Republicans are
accustomed to. There’s a reason we lost so many skirmishes with Bill and
Hillary; we’d fight louder and they’d fight smarter. For almost 40 years, the
Clintons have used a media handling pattern that relies on their opponents to
fight the way they expect. They want you to jack the volume to 11, and go from
zero-to-blue dress in your messaging and presentation. If Republicans are playing
the Washington he-said, she-said talking head game, they’re losing. Far too
often, we cooperate and play to the stereotypes they’re hoping for, and that
the know the media will gleefully repeat, reinforce, and use as an excuse to
turn the focus to “Republican overreach” and other favorite tropes. The
Clintons are past masters of that game, and it’s a form that always devolves
into the media narrative of “Good, Smart Democrat” versus “Evil, Dumb
Republican.” Why would you fight a battle on their terms, their timing, and
their conditions?
It’s said scandals never bring down the Clintons, but
this story speaks to the entire pathology of the Arkansas Underwoods—and the
stakes have never been higher. The press may want to look away, and the
Clintons may want to make this go away, but this case is unspinnably bad. As
even the Clinton-friendly Acela Media are being forced to peer into the ugly,
seething mass of Bill and Hillary’s behavior, history and contempt for the law,
Republicans shouldn’t give them a reason to look away.
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