The Hillary 2016 Campaign, Focusing on Climate Change. Can’t Wait

Today on NRO

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: China and Russia are no more impressed with empty bluster today than Japan was in 1941. Loud + Weak = War.

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: "Everything not forbidden is compulsory," or will be soon enough under our "liberal" regime. The Right Not to Be Implicated.

RICH LOWRY: The Obama administration wants to win the Hobby Lobby case to prove a point. The War on Hobby Lobby.

JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: Examining the records on Obamacare navigators the Division of Insurance didn't want reviewed. Nevada's Criminal Navigators.

JACOB MCHANGAMA: The Arab League has drafted a blasphemy law that would likely be voted down at the U.N. No Blasphemous Miming Here.

SLIDESHOW: The Gadsden Flag.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

March 25, 2014

The Hillary 2016 Campaign, Focusing on Climate Change. Can't Wait

Oh, of course:

TEMPE, Ariz. – Hillary Rodham Clinton said here Saturday night that she is weighing another presidential campaign and is "very much concerned" about the direction of the country, citing climate change as a particular focus.

Mmm-hmm. Remember this Gallup poll on Americans' priorities from earlier this month?

Right down at the bottom on the list of priorities -- "the quality of the environment" and "climate change."

You know who cares about climate change? Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer. Of course, he's proving that his $100 million effort this year is more about partisanship than principles, since his team has announced they won't run ads or criticize Democrats who support building the Keystone Pipeline.

Perhaps Tom Steyer -- er, his fortune and his network of like-minded wealthy folks who prioritize climate-change rhetoric coming from Democrats -- is enough of a constituency to court at this early stage of the nascent campaign. But the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign is going to have to be about something besides the fact that she would be the first woman president and her own inevitability. That's more or less what she ran on in 2007 and 2008, and we remember where that left her. And remember, early 2008 was comparable peace and prosperity compared to now, and in all likelihood, the political environment of 2015 and 2016.

Remember, the first draft was that Hillary was going to run as an outsider who would reform Washington. I'm serious:

National Journal's Ron Fournier talks to Hillary Clinton's friends and supporters and writes a "memo" of advice to her, based upon their thoughts. His conclusion:

Pope Francis has reminded us of the power of small gestures. Without changing the Vatican's ideology one iota, he has transformed the way people think about the Catholic Church, one symbolic act at a time. And consider the parallels between your job and that of the pope — an old man running an ancient institution marred by scandal and incompetence. You can be just as transformative. Actually, if you run for president, you must be. That's what a few of us think.

Stop. Just stop.

Hillary Clinton is more inside Washington than the District of Columbia Sewer and Water Authority. She's lived and worked there since January 1993 — please, no more implausible spin that her heart is really in Chappaqua and that she's always been a Yankee fan. As first lady, then senator, then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton has probably ranked among the five most influential figures in Washington every year for the past two decades. Even during the Bush years, there were few figures in D.C. or the world that she couldn't get a meeting with and offer her views. She's never been shut out of the policy-making process. During most of her Senate years, particularly post-9/11, most Republicans respected her. Since then, she and her husband have turned the Clinton Foundation into an unparalleled institution for hobnobbing with the world's elites and the Davos set, with more than a few serious allegations of influence-peddling and favor-trading. "This Town" and its methods and culture have her fingerprints all over them. Since the moment her husband was sworn in, she has been at the top of Washington's food chain, with everyone beneath her flattering her, sucking up, hoping to win her favor and have a future friend in the Oval Office. ("Clinton has racked up at least 15 awards in the nine months since she left the State Department.")

Nothing in Hillary Clinton's past suggests she's ever been that dissatisfied with the way Washington and/or the country works. For pete's sake, while secretary of state, she had Huma Abedin under a "special contract" that allowed her to be a consultant for private clients while keeping her $135,000-per-year State Department job.

The status quo has been very, very, very good for the Clintons. They have a net worth estimated at $55 million; Hillary Clinton's speaking fee begins at $200,000, with Wall Street banks and private-equity firms most frequently picking up the tab: Goldman Sachs, KKR, the Carlyle Group. Far from an impassioned reformer, eager to overhaul a system of crony capitalism and back-scratching, Hillary Clinton is our political and economic status quo in human form.

Expecting Hillary Clinton to be a transformative reformer of Washington is like expecting Donald Trump to become a Bolshevik, Kim Jong Un to renounce power and become a monk, or the New York Yankees to push for the end of free agency in baseball. Powerful people rarely if ever decide to completely overhaul the system that made them powerful.

So they need a Plan B, a different theme to match the historical moment, but… climate change? Really? Look at that chart up there. Just about everybody is worried about the economy. Just about everybody is telling Gallup that they care about the debt, although it's fair to question how much those folks really mean it. Healthcare -- right up there. Unemployment -- right up there. "The size and power of the federal government" …

She's hinting that she's going to have to run away from the foreign policy of the Obama administration:

Hillary Rodham Clinton cast doubt on the interim nuclear agreement with Iran, saying in a muscular policy speech here Wednesday night that she is "personally skeptical" that Iran's leaders will follow through on a comprehensive agreement to end their march toward nuclear weapons.

Clinton said the United States should "give space for diplomacy to work" and avoid imposing new unilateral sanctions or any other actions that might lead any allies to back out of existing international sanctions against Iran.

"The odds of reaching that comprehensive agreement are not good," Clinton said. "I am also personally skeptical that the Iranians would follow through and deliver. I have seen their behavior over the years. But this is a development that is worth testing."

Both of those stories are from the Washington Post's Phil Rucker, who offers one more glimpse into the… unprecedented world of the Clintons.

Ronald Reagan National Airport in DC/Northern Virginia isn't named after Nancy, and George H. W. Bush International Airport in Houston isn't named after Barbara Bush. Nor are the first ladies co-honored at Jimmy Carter Regional Airport in Sumter County, Georgia, nor Gerald Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan, nor John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

When the World Demands a Higher Standard, Go Ahead and Meet It

Our Kevin Williamson: "There is a reason, I think, why successful conservative candidates such as Ted Cruz and Mike Lee always seem to me to be head-and-shoulders more impressive than their Democratic opposite numbers: because they are. The political headwinds being what they are, conservatives have to be twice as good to succeed. Our more energetic conservatives have no love for Speaker of the House John Boehner, but stand the man next to former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and he looks like Cincinnatus."

Yup. Look at the assembled menagerie currently leading the Democrats, and just think of their capacity to stay on message, avoid gaffes, and make a coherent argument: Pelosi. Vice President Joe Biden. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

And then, of course, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took to the Senate floor Monday to issue partial blame to Republican "obstructionism" for the Russian annexation of Crimea last week.

We've reached the point where if Harry Reid ever had a psychotic break or a nervous breakdown and began expressing paranoid delusions… no one would be able to tell the difference from his usual political rhetoric.

If you're looking for more of those twice as good conservatives Kevin mentions, my colleague Kathryn Lopez – a.k.a. K-Lo -- thinks she has found a few: "Mark Brnovich — like Adam Paul Laxalt, who is running for attorney general in Nevada, and sitting attorney general Scott Pruitt in Oklahoma — represents a pushback: a generation of leaders who feel a renewed responsibility to the law and to moral stewardship of laws that help the individual flourish in a healthy republic with a robust civil society. I mention these three men in particular because in recent months I've spent a little time with each one of them and am impressed by the depth of their knowledge, service, civic sensitivity, and rootedness."

Are Journalist Cameos in Movies and TV Series Really Such a Big Problem?

The Los Angeles Times'sMichael Hiltzik is up in arms about big-name journalists making cameos in movies and television series:

"House of Cards" has stepped up the self-whoring to a whole new level. Brian Rooney of The Rooney Report totes up the reputational wreckage:

"To name a few: CNN's John King, Soledad O'Brien, now with Al Jazeera America, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. Fox opinionator Sean Hannity made a brief splash. The venerable Morley Safer of '60 Minutes,' one of the greatest reporters in the history of television news, played himself in an interview scene with fictional Vice President Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey....CNN's Candy Crowley, an otherwise no-nonsense reporter, bowed to the gods of fame and made an appearance on House of Cards. ABC's George Stephanopoulos had a brief bit in season one and in so doing hit the Matt Drudge trifecta of politico, journalist, actor."

(I can hear everybody on the right who remembers Crowley's erroneous "correction" during the third debate scoffing at the "otherwise no-nonsense" label.)

He concludes:

Plainly this whole thing has gotten out of hand. Any self-respecting TV news operation would bar its onscreen staff from taking these fictional gigs; but it's quite possible that the news operations figure, hey, it's all in the name of "branding," so what could be bad?

But it's not about "branding." It's about vanity. Losing your credibility is a high price to pay just for the sake of swanking around as yourself for a Hollywood soap opera; the loss of credibility for the news shows that employ people willing to turn themselves into live-action cartoons is even worse.

Oh, come on, some of those folks lost their credibility long before the House of Cards cameo. We've been through this before:

Jodie Foster's 1997 alien hunter pic Contact lists 80 people in its cast on IMDB. Nearly a quarter of them were CNN employees. Warner Bros. cast them to help pimp the network, a fellow Time Warner entity, and add some realism to a plot that included such fantastical elements as aliens and Matthew McConaughey in a shirt. The result, at CNN at least, was abject horror. The news network's president Tom Johnson publicly declared his regret just four days after the movie came out. And in the San Francisco Chronicle Wolf Blitzer self-righteously said he but declined a part because he "just didn't think it was the right thing to do."

Or it wasn't the right thing until he had the chance to appear in a James Bond movie. (Sadly, he didn't play a shadowy, all-knowing, bearded intelligence source simply nicknamed, "The Wolf.") Like anybody can honestly begrudge him that. If you get a chance to appear in a James Bond movie, you appear in a James Bond movie!

Even if the director says, 'Well, Minnie Driver, the only part left is a Russian country-western singer."

Just to refresh, cable news is a field where MSNBC's obsessed over a bridge closing, CNN obsesses over a missing plane when there's no new information to report, and Fox News obsesses over Anna Nicole Smith's death, running an inordinate amount of B-roll footage of her bouncing around during the reports. Cable news is a world where Chris Matthews fumes, Ed Schultz bloviates, Bill O'Reilly pounds the table, Rachel Maddow smiles smugly, Piers Anderson shouts at us to get rid of the Second Amendment, and Anderson Cooper looks at us with concern from some god-forsaken hellhole that just endured a natural disaster. (I would make fun of Chris Hayes, but I honestly can't remember anything about him.)

Really, the movie cameos are some of the much smaller problems.

ADDENDUM: Jeryl Bier updates us on the first lady's trip to China:

Mrs. Obama and her entourage, which numbers seventy according to the Washington Times (including her two daughters and her mother), booked the Westin Chaoyang Hotel close to the U.S. embassy in Beijing for their first stop. According to USA Today, the presidential suite at the hotel is listed as $8,400 per night.

But when Vice President Joe Biden visited China in December 2013, he and his team stayed at the St. Regis Hotel after the contracting officer responsible for booking rooms determined that the Westin Chaoyang hotel "price was prohibitive when compared with St. Regis."

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