Duncan Hunter interview 6/9/10: CA Elections, ‘Virtual Appearances’, Chicom Dangers, and more!

Duncan Hunter interview 6/9/10: CA Elections, ‘Virtual Appearances’, Our Friends the Chicoms, and more!

This interview is part of an ongoing 2010 series of conversations with former Congressman and conservative activist Duncan Hunter. The intent is to keep this rock ribbed conservative’s ideas in the public square which will hopefully help guide his former colleagues still in office, as well as inspire the American people to embrace his Reaganesque views on American life and politics. God willing, Hunter will seek the presidency again in 2012, but for now he is concentrating on helping the GOP regain the majority in the House by campaigning for conservatives across the West.

DH: Great, but I’m going down this canyon road so if I fall off, just give me a buzz back. So what’s happening?

DH: Both. As you know, we just had our primary elections yesterday. I also helped some friends…I had a meeting this morning with a young man who has come back from the Academy and is just getting ready to go to West Point. He was attending a pre-West Point Academy and he’s now moving on to the big one, so we had a meeting this morning. And I’ve done a few conciliatory discussions with some of my friends who were running for office here. As you know, we’ve had a few folks win and a few folks lose that I’ve been helping.

AJM: Yeah, that’s the way it goes. But I’ve got to ask you. What the hell is going on in the state of California where it refuses, especially in this year of anti-Democrat sentiment, to go the conservative route, but rather the supposed ‘safe’ route with more moderate candidates?

DH: That’s the biggest boulder to move in California. State wide offices seem to hinge upon name identification. I think that Meg Whitman paid about $40 million out of pocket. I could be wrong, but I think that’s what she spent. Unless you have a residual name ID from previous offices, it’s very, very difficult without an established reputation and name identification to overcome that kind of a media buy. And Meg Whitman also ran conservative commercials; talking about maintaining a strong border, cutting the budget, fiscal discipline, and that type of thing.

AJM: Yeah, well it seems California Republicans don’t bother to do any research beyond the commercials. Meg Whitman, at the same time she’s promising in her ads to crack down on the borders was crying about Arizona doing just that.

AJM: I don’t think she did. I think you are thinking of the other gal. I know Fiorina did, after initially saying it had a “racial tone” to it.

DH: Well, she went back and forth on it, so maybe I don’t know what Whitman’s final position was.

AJM: You couldn’t tell from her ads. But Poizner was all over it. He thought that might be his opportunity to get some credibility.

DH: The vast majority of Californians probably never heard that discussion. You have a vast, vast constituency to penetrate with your message and it’s extremely difficult. When you can buy the message and shape it the way you want it to be shaped, truthful or not, then you are far more likely to have success than those who have to rely on word of mouth and less effective means of communication. So conservatives in California, at this time, are at a serious disadvantage, trying to make their way into state wide office, in a party dominated by so-called moderates.

DH: OK. Did you get that last piece on the fact that you had a huge media buy. So I think in the absence of a counterbalance, that the election results were in some degree predictable. It’s kind of like asking the American people to render judgment on Iraq when the twin funnels through which they get their information is the New York Times and the Washington Post. In other words, you may not get the best results. The public sentiment on Iraq basically went up and down with the front page stories and the editorials that those two newspapers carried.

You’d like to have people do enough research to get independent reporting and come to independent conclusions, but that’s very difficult to do.

AJM: Yeah, I think for the big swath of - how should I say this - the politically less motivated folks, that that’s true. But in this day and age, more and more people are going to the internet and other outlets and picking and choosing the media that they trust more.

AJM: Do you want me just to call you back on your land line, to give you a call when you get in?

DH: Well, I just arrived home and my wife is on other line. But I think this is good, I’m in a pretty good place now. If we go out again, just wait about 20 minutes then give a call at the house. She should be off the phone by then.

AJM: OK. I see. OK. So the bottom line is though, in some areas of the country it seems the Tea Party activists were a little more influential, a little larger percentage of the population, where they were able to knock off the more moderate people running for office. Even in Nevada for example, which actually swung Blue last time, they chose the most conservative of the three running for the right to take out Harry Reid.

DH: Well, that’s good. But I think California is supposed to be leading, not lagging. (laughs).

DH: But again, I think that’s a function of the amount of money that Whitman and Fiorina, for example, spent on these races. An enormous amount of money. And in the absence of a well know candidate on the other side, that’s very difficult to surmount.

AJM: Yeah, and listening to Chuck DeVore as he went across the state and seeing the response to him, it all looked really good. But he was fortunate to get up to the 20 percent or so he got. Despite all his best efforts, he just didn’t have the money to advertise competitively.

DH: Well, I knew that going in. So I’ve got no complaints. But it’s a fact, you need some shekels to get that name ID out there. That’s the value of being in a statewide office before you run for governor or the Senate.

AJM: And of course, Carly Fiorina had a pretty high profile career. So she was kind of a household name to start with, in addition to her money.

DH: There it is. Anyway, we’re rocking along. I think there is a good chance that Meg Whitman will beat Jerry Brown.

AJM: I hope so. California really doesn’t need another Governor Moonbeam term.

AJM: He’s retired now. If you watch Fox news you’ll see him now and then. He’s been a contributor to Fox News. But he was in the military for 31 years and he’s still on a lot of think-tanks and what have you. But he’s come out and demanded – not that he’s going to get his wish – but he came out and demanded that Obama resign for myriad reasons of malfeasance, including not proving his eligibility to be President. So I was very proud of this guy, because he’s doing his homework, and I was just checking to see if you knew who he was.

DH: Yeah. No I don’t. But it sure sounds like he’s on the right track. (laughs)

DH: OK. I don’t know much about David or his opponent there. You were going to research that one for me.

AJM: There are two of them running. Castillo is probably about my age, mid to late forties. He’s former Navy. Then he got into working for the government, and he ended up working for Homeland Security for a number of years, under Chertoff. And he’s decided to run this race. Remember I told you it was Brian Baird’s seat?

AJM: I think I told you I thought he was still in it. So now we’ve got a really good shot at grabbing that seat. That’s one of the more conservative areas west of the Cascades in my state.

DH: I campaigned against Baird when he first ran, or maybe when he was the new incumbent making his first defense of his seat. There was a very good candidate up there running against him, though I can’t remember the guy’s name. It was many years ago.

AJM: Well, this is golden opportunity to pick up a seat because they don’t have the power of incumbency. David Castillo seems to be the more well rounded conservative. The other gal sounds pretty good too, but she’s only, I think, 31 years old. She was a staffer on Cathy McMorris-Rogers’ team.

DH: I don’t know her. I know Cathy McMorris Rodgers, but I don’t know the young lady that’s running.

AJM: Her name is Jaime Herrera. No one knows her. But because she’s good looking and she briefly had held a state seat, she’s got a fair number of the local politicians and some of the establishment behind her. It’s about split even with Castillo.

Anyway, that was the guy, Castillo’s friend, who was trying to get a hold of your wife and to get a hold of you, because they knew you, somehow. They are interested to see if you’d be interested in endorsing him.

DH: I’d probably have to know a little bit more about his opponent. You know, Cathy McMorris Rodgers was on my committee, a very good member of my committee. So that means something, if that’s her staff person running.

And you know old Chertoff managed to drag his feet on my fence. He carried out Bush’s directive not to build it or to build it as slowly as humanly possible and to put up his virtual fence instead.

DH: So maybe I’ll give Castillo a ‘virtual appearance’. (laughs loudly)

AJM: (laughing) Oh, that’s cruel. So anyway, I’ll email you his contact information and in that email I’ll put links to both his website and to Herrera’s website.

AJM: That way, you can look things over and see if you want to get involved or not.

AJM: See, I was hoping to get you up here though. I don’t know Castillo that well, but he seems like a solid guy, from the folks I talked to who know him.

AJM: Did you get a good download on the Israeli so called ‘raid’ last week on that ship?

DH: No. I haven’t received any classified briefing on it or any good briefing for that matter. And you have to know what really happened there to meaningfully comment. So no, I haven’t gotten that yet.

AJM: Yeah. I guess the only thing on the political side of it, without knowing all the details of the raid itself – they did show the video when the Israeli commandos were coming off the helicopter down a rope. They told the crew of the ship that they were going to board it. As soon as the first ones got down there, they got attacked with bars and clubs and bats, and the first two Israelis were thrown overboard, as you saw. So then they started shooting. But regardless of the particulars, the political angle is that the Obama Administration went along with the UN condemnation of Israel. So I think it’s just more ‘par for the course’ with this administration to go along with being disagreeable to Israel versus what traditional American foreign policy has been.

DH: No doubt. But I think there are a lot of things that the Obama Administration has done that is more reflective of their adversarial relationship with Israel than necessarily this incident. But again, I don’t have classified details on what really happened. I’m sure there is a deeper briefing that can be had on this thing then what I see in the media.

DH: But the bottom line is that Israel is not going to allow ships to dock at Gaza without them being inspected. That’s a threshold requirement. And these guys weren’t complying so they went out to sea to inspect it, from my understanding. And lo and behold, what they did find out when they arrested all the people on the boat was they had lots of people with terrorist ties.

AJM: Terrorist ties back to some radical group in Turkey. So it’s not just the humanitarian Cynthia McKinney type liberals that the apologists claimed . They had some radicals mixed in there. (phone drops out)

DH: OK Good. But thanks for giving me your update on the Israeli situation. (laughs)

DH: Yeah, well unless I have all the facts, I don’t think they’ve had any new revelations on it….

AJM: Are you telling me you don’t trust the San Diego Union Tribune to keep you up to speed?

DH: You mean the ‘Daily Shopper’? You know it’s interesting to watch the demise of these big newspapers. They’ve laid off a great deal of the editorial staff and their reporting staff. And their first obligation now is to keep their heads above water, so they do as much advertising as they can, but with much less substance now than what they’ve had in the past.

AJM: Yeah, and it seems they’ve laid off their conservative reporters first, because they keep getting more left wing as time goes on.

AJM: (laughs). You know, I think I told you this before, but back in the day, when I was researching you when you were running for President, I looked at a bunch of old articles from the 80s and 90s from the San Diego Union Tribune. They had some reporters that didn’t hate you or were at least not antagonistic to you.

DH: Actually, they have had a number of good reporters over the years. But the editorial board of the Union Tribune hated the border fence. As we worked on that and increased our border control, they became more antagonistic. And the Union Tribune changed, as you know. It was initially a conservative paper. In fact the San Diego Tribune was the flagship paper, but they had a fairly large presence in Illinois and other places. That was Copley Press. Jim Copley was a conservative. And he hired Herb Klein who was President Nixon’s press secretary, who ultimately became a managing principle of Copley Press. But Copley Press became increasingly liberal as time went by and that’s an evolution that some newspapers go through as the publishers change or as the editorial board changes. That’s life in the big city. These papers evolve and change and the UT went from being a fairly conservative paper to what I would call a liberal newspaper. Not a radically leftist newspaper, but a liberal newspaper.

AJM: Yeah. The movement in that direction might also help explains its demise to what they are today.

DH: Yeah. But the newspaper business across the board, liberal and conservative, has had a tough time, largely because of the internet and the direct connections between advertisers and consumers in this new age.

AJM: OK. Let me get one more question in. And that is China last week, we were scheduled to send Bob Gates over to meet with their officials in one of these muckety muck military exchanges that we’ve been doing for awhile. And they slammed the door in his face and said ‘no, the time is not good for that’.

DH: You’re coming in broken now. We are sending Secretary of Gates to China to do what?

AJM: To meet with their military on a peer to peer level. And China said no, they didn’t want to do it. Just cut them off with minimal explanation and it probably has something to do with Taiwan or North Korea. But I guess I really want your take on where we go with China? Because they obviously don’t like us, or our foreign policy.

DH: Yeah, I think what we have to remember is that China is still run by the tough old boys in the Politburo, who are fairly ruthless people. And they are still adherents to communism and communist ideology. And their industrial base is growing by leaps and bounds, fueled by American trade dollars. And that industrial base is turning out a fairly formidable military machine. They are out-producing us in submarines by more than 5 to 1, if you include the Russian purchases they are making of Kilo Class submarines. They are making a new multi-role fighter. They are making about 100 ballistic missiles per year, many of which are staged, incidentally, in the area around the Taiwan Straights.

And so China is stepping into the superpower shoes that the Soviet Union left, clearly. And our ‘optimists’, including those who have lots of commercial transactions with China, involve themselves in pollyannish discussions about how the Chinese are going to be a benign trading partner and will ultimately be a cooperative member of the Western economic community, and will not be a belligerent with respect to security issues. It’s rubbish.

The problem is neither one of those ‘hopes’ – and that’s all they are is ‘hopes’ – are being realized. The Red Chinese are hitting us with a sledge hammer in terms of taking our manufacturing base away from us. They are not interested in realistically valuating their currency. They are maintaining a major advantage in trade as a result of that. And they are maintaining their value added tax which they use to subsidize their own exports to us and to penalize our exports to them.

And with the new found cash which they are receiving from the United States, they’re purchasing sophisticated military equipment from the Russians and they are making lots of making lots of military equipment themselves.

Red China is fast becoming a military superpower and every now and then we get jolted back to reality as we did when that American aircraft was forced down and they pried open the cockpit with bayonets. These folks are tough. They’re brutal. They’re communists. They brutalize their own people. And they are not necessarily an extremely stable government.

We naively work through China to handle that crazy aunt in the attic - that is North Korea. And I think they’ve played that card intentionally against us, because they haven’t handled North Korea.

AJM: Yeah, and you probably have noticed that they are holding out on any condemnation of North Korea for sinking that South Korean ship a couple months ago…

DH: Yeah. China is flexing its economic muscles, and the Obama Administration is somewhat cowered by that. I think that China’s leaders despise the United States in the same way they despised the other western powers who in ancient times traded with them; in their eyes, exploited them.

You know one friend, who was on a CODEL to China gave me an example. While it simply was a small example, I think it is to some degree symbolic of their view of the US. He said that the congressional delegation was at some meeting, waiting to meet with a Chinese official, and the Chinese brought out a big stack of ties. Nice neckties, obviously made in their textile industry. They told the congressional delegation and the staff members of the delegation that they could have these ties. So the Americans were sorting through the ties, taking the ones they wanted, and this friend of mine said he looked over at the Chinese handler who was kind of in charge of them, and he said that the guy had a look of total disgust on his face as he watched the Americans frantically pawing through this stack of neckties to get the ones they liked best. So here in his eyes, were the western capitalists. And in his eyes, we are there solely for economic gain.

So I think this massive transfer of wealth and technology that we’ve made to China has not induced a benign attitude toward the United States. I think they look at us as greedy capitalists trying to exploit them, and that they are going to exploit us in return.

AJM: Well I think it would be fine if we looked out for our interests in the same manner that they looked out for theirs. But we don’t. In 25 years, we’ve taken a third world bass-akwards country and made them into a superpower and our banker, by transferring that wealth.

DH: Yeah. If Ronald Reagan came back today and we informed him that China was now our banker, and then with glazed eyes said to him “you believe in free trade, don’t ya?”, the President would go into shock. I mean they were literally gnawing the bark off of trees when he left.

This is a self inflicted wound by the United States. And it really is a tragedy and I think it’s going to be difficult for the United States to ensure that this century is another American Century.

The Chinese are very pragmatic. They do what they think is necessary to advance their interests. And they are very blunt. But our Administration and the State Department is full of foolish optimists who sit around hoping that things are going to get better.

But I think the possibilities, as time marches on and China becomes stronger and stronger militarily and economically, and as they move out to claim or develop more of the world’s resources and lock them in. For example, a Chinese consortium, after Americans won the war in Iraq with blood sweat and treasure, the Chinese moved in quickly and secured one of the major oil leases in Iraq. So there is a real chance, without an abrupt reversal in our China policy, at some point there might be a conflict in Africa or in Asia or other places where the Chinese are developing resources for movement back to the mainland, a conflict could very well develop in a way where the United States will be involved in a conflict with the Chinese. Perhaps not directly, but certainly in a proxy sense.

You know the Chinese and the Russians, when we abandoned Vietnam in 1974 and 75, the Chinese, together with the Russians poured 800 thousand tons of weapons and equipment into the North Vietnam, as they made their final assault on South Vietnam. We abandoned our allies, much to our disgrace, pursuant to the Fulbright and Kennedy Amendments. We cut off our allies to the point where the South Vietnamese soldiers were being rationed two bullets per day per soldier. And of course, they quickly fell.

But that tendency of the Chinese to seize openings, such as the opening that existed in 1974 and 75 in South Vietnam, is not necessarily extinct. In fact it is alive and well. And we might see a time not far in the future, when we get a call from a friendly nation, from another country, to come help them resist a Chinese occupation. That would be a very difficult thing for the United States, a very difficult problem. And with the current administration’s proclivities, it becomes more, rather than less likely.

AJM: You talk about optimists. I’m still and optimist, in the Reagan mold. That we can re-establish our pre-eminence thorough the right policies, both economic, constitutional, freedom embracing, as well as military; that we can re-establish ourselves as the preeminent power. We are on the wrong road right now.

DH: Yeah. I think we’ll do well in these next elections, the congressional elections, and hopefully get some direction back, then rediscover the Reagan doctrines in time for 2012.

And incidentally, I’m going in to get my directions from Mrs. Hunter. But hey listen, hope you’re doing well and hope your family is doing well.

AJM: They are both well, thank you. And if I send you these emails with these candidates’ attachments tonight, you’re actually going to see it?

AJM: Did you ever see that other stuff you asked me to send you. I sent it a couple weeks ago. I can’t remember what the hell it was now. Do you remember?

DH: No, but I’m going to go inside now so I can paw through my emails. (laughs)