“Never Underestimate Hillary”

You think America is not going to elect Hillary Clinton president? Well, think again.

“Let me tell you, America will elect Hillary,” says Tony Fabrizio, a national GOP strategist and pollster. It’s hard to know whether his goal is merely fire up a group of gay Republicans whose heartthrob candidate is Rudy Giuliani, or designed to jab holes in the current mania over Barack Obama.

But Fabrizio’s argument is awfully fascinating.Hillary Clinton is more calculating, and in many ways more politically savvy than her husband – particularly in a technical sense, Fabrizio says. So does anyone really think she’s afraid that Obama will undermine her over the war in Iraq? Or anything else for that matter?

“Never underestimate Hillary,” said Fabrizio, who was Bob Dole’s chief strategist and has worked for numerous members of congress, among other cliients. “Obama is probably one of the most hyped candidates in history.”

To explore this notion, let’s go back to PoliSci 101. Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate just a little more than two years ago, Fabrizio noted, with the help of a high percentage of  African-American voters.

Relatively little is known about his record while serving in his only previously-held office, in the Illinois state senate.

And, his ascendancy to the U.S. Senate wasn’t exactly grueling, all things considered. Obama’s first Republican opponent was Jack Ryan, whose campaign flamed out after his divorce records were found to include such titillating claims that he had taken his ex-wife to sex clubs and begged her to perform sex acts with him in front of other patrons.

So the GOP recruited Alan Keyes to finish out the race against Obama. And Keyes, of course, is the former presidential candidate who was on record claiming, among other things, that sex outside of marriage is corrupt; that AIDS is a disease rooted in moral crisis; and homosexuality is “the unbridled sort of satisfaction of human passions [that] leads to totalitarianism, Nazism and communism.” 

“We take the gun, put it in our mouth, pull the trigger and blow the back of our brains out,” Fabrizio said of the GOP’s selection of Keyes in that race.

So, the pollster concludes, Obama may be a rock star now, but very little is known about his past – though he expects, and predicts Clinton suspects as well – that his record will show he is as liberal as liberal gets. He also predicted that Hillary Clinton well knows a cardinal rule for success: “Never interrupt your opponent when they’re in the middle of making a mistake.”

And when the implosion occurs, Fabrizio concludes, it will be “spectacular.”

This is the third and final installment of Tony Fabrizio’s freewheeling presentation at the national convention of the Log Cabin Republicans in Denver earlier this month. Click here to read the first segment, detailing the five blocs of the GOP and rewriting Ronald Reagan history. And click here for Fabrizio’s take on the 2008 GOP presidential primary showdown,.

Cara DeGette is a senior fellow at Colorado Confidential, and a columnist and contributing editor at the Colorado Springs Independent. E-mail her at cdegette@coloradoconfidential.com