Free The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" by Hugh Hewitt

then to suit now, and that reinvention should be that the 22nd Amendment stopped Bill’s recovery, the war on Al Qaeda before it got out of hand under Bush, and many other ills.
    Blame all of W’s perceived faults and more on the 22nd, and pivot to the obvious injustice done to Obama by the same device. Push the repeal with a smile and a non-denial denial about your own ambitions: “I’ll be 69 when I am sworn in, so you won’t have to worry about me seeking a third term. But say circumstances were such that the people wanted me—ha, ha, ha, imagine that!—why shouldn’t the people decide? If I ran and got thumped, what a lesson on limiting ambition that would be. And why shouldn’t Barack be eligible to be reelected again to the office he ran so well?”
    Every day this discussion will fuel the news cycle, pushing all of the “return” narratives of Bill and Barack. Even among GOPers, a sensethat if they get it right with Rubio or Cruz, why would they want to blow it? The illusion of permanence—Rove fell for it. I have fallen for it (see the subtitle of my 2006 book, Painting the Map Red) , it tempts all political pundits, strategists and historians. They want the grand plan for realignment so that a party dominates an era. But realignments are done, broken by the new realities and the new threats. In fact, only Julius and Augustus Caesar saw clearly the need to replace a broken system or change within the republic with an ordered succession, which they promptly set about doing while respecting the forms all along the way through the “Roman Revolution.”
    You need the Amendment to order your succession, to prevent any more GOP comebacks and any more rank amateurs like Obama. What you will be about is organizing a third American century by providing it with a long run of prepared leaders, beginning with you and followed by Chelsea.
    But all in the open and the golden apple of stability will be bordered by the silver frame of the people’s right to choose unfettered by the dead white legislators of the 1950s, who cooked up the 22nd. You will be on the side of the Framers as well as the people, except of course where the Framers defaulted to an Electoral College clearly born of a different age of travel and balancing of regional interests. Appropriate to an age of slavery, not rebirth, the College must be the principle target of your campaign and to that we turn next.
    But remember, in every speech, demand repeal of the 22nd. Every speech. It must be a mandate, and if the GOP controls the House against you in 2017, campaign on it and only it through 2018. “Let the people decide” will rocket along for a decade to come until every check on the people’s majoritarian impulses is gone, and with them, the checks on you.

“Let the People Decide”: PART 2
    Abolishing the Electoral College
    You are about building a dynasty and a new way forward for the United States, Madame Secretary, and that cannot be done with the Electoral College in place. It was intended to buffer the young republic from the winds of powerful factions and would-be kings, and it has worked well—too well, in fact. Now it stands astride progress yelling, “Stop! Pay attention to Kansas and Colorado and New Hampshire and New Mexico,” and a host of lightly populated nowhere places, with almost no cultural treasures and hardly any of the elites, who in fact run the country from Washington, DC, San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and New York. It is time to cut the anchor and run with the wind. So you should say, and so you should campaign.
    Having spent 30 years in various media outlets defending the Electoral College, let me confess that it is the hardest thing to do on my side of the aisle. Candor is almost always preferred to misdirection. But candor regarding the College is almost always ineffective and sometimes disastrous. The College protects small-town and rural America from the countries’ big cities. While true, that