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Hillary Rodham Clinton

Wednesday, Apr 22, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

The smearing of Judge Woods

How newspaper articles of questionable origin were used by Kenneth Starr to remove a federal jurist in a Whitewater case.

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Operatives of the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project mounted a campaign in the summer of 1995 to discredit a federal judge because they did not want him to preside over a criminal prosecution brought by the Whitewater independent counsel, documents obtained by Salon indicate.

Months after the campaign was launched, independent counsel Kenneth Starr prevailed in a highly unusual motion to remove the jurist, U.S. District Judge Henry Woods, from a case involving then-Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, a move that was questioned at the time by legal scholars.

“I can tell you that when the court recused Judge Woods, it raised a lot of eyebrows among legal ethicists,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University Law School, who labeled the court’s decision “unjustified and a wild stretch.” “I really can’t think of an incident in the recent past, by which I mean the last 20 years, in which there has been a formal motion by the government to recuse a district judge in a criminal case,” Gillers said.

Woods’ removal in March 1996 came several months after the judge had quashed Starr’s indictment of Tucker in a crucial pretrial motion. In his motion to remove Woods, Starr cited newspaper articles about Woods that contained questionable and erroneous information in part generated by individuals associated with the Arkansas Project, a four-year, $2.4 million campaign to investigate and discredit the president that was funded by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

There is no indication that Starr knew of the origin of the questionable information, but after examining papers belonging to one of the operatives of the Arkansas Project, Judge Woods demanded an official investigation of the apparent attempt to “successfully interfere with the proper workings of the judicial system.”

In a written statement issued April 10, Judge Woods said: “It is important to me, and I believe to the integrity of the judicial process to know whether any person in the justice system (including those in the Office of Independent Counsel) or in the legislative branch was aware of machinations to affect and determine what judge would preside over the Tucker case.”

The papers in question belong to Parker Dozhier, a Hot Springs, Ark., bait-shop owner and Arkansas Project employee. The papers and other notes and documents kept by Dozhier were provided to Salon by Caryn Mann, who lived with Dozhier from 1994 to 1996. Mann has told FBI agents and reporters that Dozhier made payments from Arkansas Project funds, funneled through a foundation that publishes the American Spectator magazine, to key Whitewater witness David Hale.

The Justice Department has requested an investigation of the alleged Hale payments, which Hale, Dozhier and other officials connected with the Arkansas Project and the American Spectator have denied happened.

According to documents obtained by Salon, materials used by Starr in his motion to disqualify Woods included newspaper articles that appear to have relied heavily on allegations circulated by Dozhier and others involved in the Arkansas Project. Asked about the use of news articles to make its case against Woods, Debbie Gershman, a spokeswoman for the Office of Independent Counsel, told Salon: “It is traditional for prosecutors to use information in whatever form it may take.” She declined any further comment.

Starr’s indictment of Tucker in June 1995 related to alleged bankruptcy fraud involving a Texas cable television firm. It was not related in any way to Whitewater, the Clintons or Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, and preceded the better-known Whitewater-related indictment of Tucker and James and Susan McDougal. Recently, Tucker pleaded guilty to a single count in the bankruptcy fraud, and the case awaits further disposition.

Woods had been assigned to the case by a computerized lottery after another federal judge declined to take it. The independent counsel initially voiced no objection to Woods hearing the case.

Shortly after the indictment, attorneys for Tucker (and two business associates in the cable firm who were charged with him) moved to strike the indictment on the grounds that Starr had exceeded his original mandate as Whitewater independent counsel. But well before any motions were entered, a public campaign against Woods had commenced.

The opening salvo came on June 23, 1995, in the form of a lengthy op-ed article in the conservative Washington Times by Jim Johnson, a former Arkansas Supreme Court justice and avowed segregationist who is a longtime adversary of Woods. In the article, Johnson described Woods, among other things, as a Clinton crony who was corrupt and had narrowly escaped indictment for misusing highway funds in the 1950s. Johnson wrote that the late Orval Faubus, the segregationist Arkansas governor, told him, “Henry was measured for prison stripes, and now he wears the purple.”

Johnson’s accusation of cronyism appeared to stem from the fact that Woods knew the Clintons socially and had appointed Hillary Clinton to a panel overseeing integration of the Little Rock public school system, which Johnson bitterly opposed. But there is no evidence that Woods ever used his position as a federal judge to favor the Clintons. In one major and highly politicized case involving a controversial nuclear power plant, Woods ruled against the wishes of then-Gov. Clinton’s administration and in favor of Arkansas Power & Light, the state’s electric utility.

Nor is there any basis for Johnson’s charge that Woods was involved with the misapplication of highway trust funds. In fact, there is no record that Woods faced any legal problems during his tenure as a judge.

Johnson also referred in the article to ties Woods allegedly had to Little Rock investment company Stephens Inc., which Johnson described as the largest commodities broker in the country. In fact, Stephens does not trade in commodities. Nor is there any record of a political relationship between the company, which openly supported the segregationist Faubus, and Woods, who supported school integration.

The article also claimed that Woods’ 1980 appointment to the federal bench was the result of an election-year bargain between Stephens Inc. and former Arkansas Sen. David Pryor. In fact, it was U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers who pushed for Woods’ appointment. Johnson went on to write that a “Stephens subsidiary” loaned Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign $3.5 million. In fact, the loan was made by Little Rock’s Worthen Bank, in which Stephens had divested its minority holding several years before the loan was made.

Despite these inaccuracies, Johnson’s claims were extensively quoted in a subsequent article in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, and echoed on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, notably in an article by Journal op-ed page writer Micah Morrison.

A page of contemporaneous notes from Dozhier’s files show numerous references to both Woods and Johnson, often known as “Justice Jim.” The notes say, “Woods’ charge is to protect the President by taking care of Tucker.” They refer to “JJJ papers,” an allusion to papers placed by “Justice Jim” Johnson in the archives of the Arkansas Historical Commission that contained derogatory material about Woods.

Another page shows Johnson’s telephone number along with the following notation: “Wesley Pruden [editor of the Washington Times, in which Johnson's story appeared] told me Wesley sent material to M.M.” It is not known whether the initials refer to the Journal’s Morrison, although according to Mann, Morrison spent many hours at the Dozhier bait shop.

Morrison did not return repeated phone calls requesting comment. Pruden acknowledged that he had met with Johnson on several occasions but denied passing on any material to Morrison and insisted, “I never talked to Parker Dozhier in my life.”

Pruden is a Little Rock native whose father served as chaplain to the racist White Citizens Council there during the 1950s and was closely associated with Johnson in resisting federal school desegregation orders.

In 1966, Johnson was the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, losing a close election to his Republican opponent, a loss he blamed in part on opposition from Woods. During the campaign, Johnson said that “the crime of desegregation” was worse than “the crime of rape” and “the crime of murder.” Dozhier, who, according to acquaintances, shared Johnson’s intense dislike of blacks, was an aide to Johnson during that campaign.

Two decades later, Judge Woods further infuriated Johnson. In 1989, in response to a lawsuit filed by black state legislators, Woods voided the notorious “Johnson Amendment” to the Arkansas state constitution. The 1956 measure, authored by Johnson, empowered the governor of Arkansas to resist what it called the U.S. Supreme Court’s “unconstitutional” 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision.

The Arkansas Project documents provided to Salon by Mann include a derogatory memo about Woods — authored by “pd,” as Dozhier was known to his associates — that was faxed to the office of Sen. Lauch Faircloth, R-N.C., Aug. 28, 1995. Markings on the fax indicate that it was routed to Faircloth’s office from the office of Stephen Boynton, the Virginia attorney who controlled the Arkansas Project money for the American Spectator foundation. Boynton frequently visited Dozhier’s bait shop along with Hale and others involved in the Arkansas Project.

The Dozhier fax, which was addressed to Faircloth aide Jim Highland, claims that Clinton and Woods plotted to fix the Tucker case in order to hamper Starr’s probe. “Now Judge Woods is considering a motion by Tucker’s defense team regarding the [independent counsel's] jurisdiction on the indictments against Tucker,” the memo says. “Tucker is in the position of offering testimony which would send the President to prison.” There is no indication that Tucker possessed any such information.

Around the same time, Woods was informed by federal judicial officials that Faircloth’s office had requested 15 years’ worth of the judge’s financial disclosure statements. The request came from David Bossie, a veteran anti-Clinton activist and researcher who then worked for Faircloth, the most implacable Clinton critic on the Senate Whitewater Committee.

According to Mann, Dozhier was, during that time, in constant contact with Bossie. Mann said that she saw at least six faxes from Dozhier to Bossie. Dozhier’s notes also show that he had been investigating the judge’s financial background and his business dealings. Bossie declined to comment. A source close to Bossie pointed out that a federal judge’s financial disclosure statements are a matter of public record; the source also said Bossie recalled speaking to Dozhier on a small number of occasions, which the source said was part of Bossie’s job as a congressional investigator.

In an interview with Salon, Highland denied knowing Dozhier and said he did not recall receiving the memo about Woods. Dozhier declined comment, saying, “You have told enough lies on me already.” Johnson told Salon, “I have no interview for you.”

In his April 10 statement on the matter, Woods recalls that Faircloth’s request for his financial records came “just days before oral arguments on a motion to dismiss the indictment in the Tucker case, scheduled for September 5, 1995.” After learning of the request, the judge called together the counsel for all parties in the case and told them he considered it “a crude attempt to intimidate me, since it was well known that Senator Faircloth had more than a passing interest in the Whitewater investigation. I assured counsel that such an attempt would in no way affect my handling of the Tucker case, one way or the other.

“No party requested that I remove myself from the Tucker case on the basis of the Faircloth contact, or on any other basis,” Woods said in his statement.

After Woods ruled in Tucker’s favor, Starr appealed to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the judge’s decision and to remove him for displaying “the unmistakable appearance of bias.” Starr argued that Woods’ friendship with Hillary Clinton should disqualify him from any further role in the Tucker case, even though Tucker was a longtime political rival of Bill Clinton and his indictment had nothing to do with any business dealings of the Clintons.

In oral argument before the appeals court, the independent counsel referred to newspaper and magazine articles about Woods and his connections with the Clintons. The appeals court then asked Starr to produce those articles in a supplemental brief. Among the clippings produced by Starr in response were the Wall Street Journal article by Morrison and articles from the Arkansas newspapers that quoted Johnson’s charges. In the articles, heavy emphasis was placed on Woods’ relationship with the Clintons, in particular his visit to the White House on the night Republicans captured the Congress in November 1994.

Gillers, the NYU legal ethicist, explained that in using press reports, Starr was trying to demonstrate how Woods was perceived by the public. “He was arguing that based on the press reports and perhaps other information, the public’s perception of the judge’s impartiality was compromised, not that the press reports were necessarily correct,” Gillers said.

The appeals court granted both of Starr’s requests March 11, 1996, without permitting Woods to answer any of the accusations about his alleged “bias.” In its opinion, the court cited both the articles quoting Johnson’s allegations, and the article written by Morrison in the Wall Street Journal, which the court characterized in its ruling as “a daily periodical with national — actually international — circulation.”

The judge’s removal was unprecedented, particularly because Starr had made no request for Woods to recuse himself prior to his ruling on Tucker’s motion to quash the indictment.

The appeals court said it had removed him “not because we believe Judge Woods would not handle the case in a fair and impartial manner, we have every confidence that he would, but only because we believe this step is necessary in order to preserve the appearance as well as the reality of impartial justice.”

In a dissenting opinion, two judges on the 8th Circuit panel warned of the dangers of permitting “the perceived impartiality of a judge to be held hostage by the writings or reporting of the media without concern for the accuracy of those reports or potential explanation … relying on newspaper and magazine reports as proof of substantive fact has no support in the rules of evidence.”

After the ruling that disqualified him, Woods remarked to the Los Angeles Times, “I have the distinction of being the only judge in Anglo-American history, as far as I can determine, who was removed from a case on the basis of newspaper accounts, magazine articles and television transcripts.”

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. More Gene Lyons.

Joe Conason blogs in Salon several times a week and writes a weekly column for the New York Observer. His latest book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush." More Joe Conason.

Murray Waas is a frequent contributor to Salon. More Murray Waas.

Tuesday, Apr 24, 2012 5:08 PM UTC

The politicization of the Secret Service scandal

What was once one of the right's favorite government agencies becomes a symbol of waste and moral degradation

By President Obama, surrounded by members of the Secret Service, upon his arrival in San Diego, Sept. 26, 2011. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

It’s hard to work up much outrage about the Secret Service prostitution scandal, in which 11 members of the president’s elite protective service and various military personnel were found to have picked up escorts in Colombia, where they were doing advance work for the president’s visit. I guess it is probably not a good idea for the people in charge of protecting the president to leave themselves vulnerable to sexual blackmail, but on the other hand we do not live in a John Le Carré novel or “24″ episode, and I don’t think the threat of a honey-trap assassination conspiracy plot is very credible. If members of the Secret Service want to get drunk and hire escorts after work, that is their business. (As Melissa Gira Grant says, the only actual scandal here — and the reason this became an international incident — is that all these guys tried to bilk one of the women out of the money she was owed.)

But the predictable Washington mixture of prurient interest and moral posturing has turned this incident into grist for the scandals-and-investigations mill. And now we have the attempts at somehow making this a winning partisan issue for Republicans. Chuck Grassley, the senator from Iowa who triumphed over adversity and became the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee despite being functionally illiterate, would like to know whether any White House staff also slept with escorts that evening. No one has made the claim, but Grassley’s asking just in case. (For a live peek at a future paranoid right-wing myth in its embryonic stage, read the comments on that Washington Times story: “I can just hear those paper shredders going a mile a minute in the white house, and the document forgers are being called in, you know the same ones that did the birth certificate.”) Grassley was on Fox last night to make sure viewers repeatedly heard baseless speculation as to the involvement of White House staff.

Rep. Pete King, Long Island Republican and stalwart publicity monger, has sent Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan a list of 50 questions about the scandal in order to make it appear that he is very seriously investigating this very serious incident.

For those outside Congress, for whom insinuating escort patronage by unnamed White House staff seems a bit of a reach, the game is to attempt to use the scandal to prove some point the fecklessness of Obama as a leader and his shameful failure to make everyone in Washington stop being so awful and wasteful all the time.

NRO’s Mark Steyn, after praising the fiscal discipline of the agent who attempted to bilk his escort (ugh), suggests that the moral of the story is that we pay too much for presidential security, and that all those agents and fancy bullet-proof Suburbans are wastes of taxpayer funds and evidence of broke post-Imperial America’s profligacy. Sarah Palin, who had every right to be personally aggrieved for once, after it was reported that the agent at the center of the scandal wrote gross sexist things about her on Facebook, was among the first to declare that the problem was with the “culture” Obama has created at the White House. (Karl Rove, smarter than most of these people, suggested that politicizing a Secret Service scandal was dumb and counterproductive. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, coincidentally, was elevated to his position under George W. Bush.)

The makeup of the Secret Service, obviously, has very little connection to the political party of the person occupying the White House. Like most American law enforcement agencies, it’s primarily white and overwhelmingly male, and, historically, the culture of the agency has had more than a whiff of machismo. These are not exactly the sort of public sector employees right-wingers get off on demonizing.

In fact, the right has had for years a sort of Clint Eastwood-inspired fantasy of the Secret Service agent as folk hero. Decent, hard-working men putting their lives on the line to protect a bunch of elitist ingrates. That ingratiating phony Bill Clinton and his frigid, hectoring monster of a wife weren’t deserving of such stolid, unflinching loyalty and service.

The fullest expression of this fantasy is in this classic chain email that made its way to every inbox in the nation during the second president Bush’s first term. According to this email, attributed to the unnamed author’s former neighbor, the president’s security detail was constantly disrespected by those awful Clintons and their terrible staff. Hillary Clinton was “arrogant and orally abusive.” “She forbade her daughter, Chelsea, from exchanging pleasantries with” agents. “Al Gore resented Bill Clinton and thought he was to centrist. He despised all republicans.” Agents prayed for Bush to win the election, and their reward was the joy they all felt in the presence of President Bush and his amazing, wonderful wife.

This nonsense has its roots in fake anti-Hillary attacks, attributed to imaginary Secret Service members, that Republican operatives spread to sympathetic media voices starting more or less the day Bill took office. Former Secret Service agents do plenty of gossiping and bitching, most frequently to Ronald Kessler, but their complaints don’t tend to track quite so directly to right-wing fantasy narratives.

But a popular trope is of the upstanding agents blanching at being asked to look the other way as libidinous Democratic presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton — womanized. (Clinton was said to have threatened to fire agents who stymied his attempts to have trysts with Monica Lewinsky, though the agent who made the claim admitted to having invented it.) The pat moralism of the conservative Secret Service fantasy makes the agency’s lurid misadventure a bit funnier. It also explains why various people have to somehow convince themselves that the Obama administration somehow degraded the agency, through a lack of “management skills” or the widespread embrace of sexual deviance that is the logical end result of repealing the military’s ban on out gays and lesbians.

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Monday, Mar 26, 2012 11:45 AM UTC

The silly 2016 speculation game

It may be impossible to make any serious predictions about a far-off race, but that has never stopped a pundit

By (Credit: AP/Shutterstock/Salon)

Being that it’s still March 2012 and we have no way of knowing who will actually be president by the end of January 2013 (besides “not Ron Paul,” obviously), it would seem to be a bit premature to speculate as to how the 2016 presidential race will shake out. And yet political reporters, finally bored perhaps with the inevitable Republican nomination of Mitt Romney, are already spewing forth predictions. Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post has even created a “Sweet 2016″ bracket. 

The most important lesson of terrible premature presidential-campaign speculation is that nearly everyone who engages in it will be terribly, hilariously wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re a complete buffoon, like Dick Morris, author of the 2007 classic “Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race,” or someone fairly serious and “savvy,” like New York Times politics reporter Matt Bai, who posited current nobody Mark Warner as the future of the party in a 2006 Times magazine cover story now best (if barely) remembered for its altered and unflattering photo of the subject.

There will be events no one could’ve predicted — like “obvious” future Republican presidential contender George Allen using an obscure racial slur on camera, or John Edwards being generally John Edwards — that destroy promising careers in an instant.

And there is also the plain fact that the sort of politicians that Washington-based reporters and pundits and political operatives like, and the sort of politicians they think “voters” would like, are often people who have no appeal for anyone outside of their districts or the Beltway. (Like Evan Bayh. Jon Huntsman. And Mitch Daniels, probably.)

Some people turn out to be awful at campaigning: Like Wesley Clark, the general who was going to sweep a troop-worshiping country off its feet and away from George W. Bush, until it turned out that he did not blink like a human. Or Rick Perry, who, it turned out, seems too dumb to dress himself when asked simple questions on television.

There are times when this sort of long-range forecasting is easy until you overthink it: John McCain was the logical 2008 front-runner the moment he addressed the 2004 Republican convention, until you started daydreaming about Fred Thompson’s seductive drawl. Al Gore was pretty obviously going to be the Democratic nominee in 2000, and boredom with his inevitability might’ve had a hand in how the political press helped destroy him that year.

A hell of a lot will obviously depend on whether or not Barack Obama wins reelection. If he loses, Democrats might suddenly find white candidates from the West or the South more attractive. If he wins, we might have to take Joe Biden semi-seriously for a few unlikely news cycles. If Obama ends a second term as popular as Clinton, someone associated with his administration is certainly more likely to be nominated than if Obama’s 2015 numbers look more like Bush’s in 2007.

So let’s get to the predictions, shall we? According to Cillizza, the “number one seed” for 2016 is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (Mark Warner is still on the shortlist, by the way. His time will come!)

Cuomo is the reasonably popular governor of a very populous state. He’s thus far managed to balance liberal base-pleasing deeds (gay marriage!) with “moderate” newspaper editorial-board pleasing things (going after the pensions of public employees!). But we’re still talking about a Northeast liberal (or “liberal”) — from New York! — who’s living with but not currently married to a celebrity television cook who makes awful-looking garbage food out of prepackaged garbage food. The Democratic Party might not want to chance another blatantly culturally urban candidate. (I mean urban in the literal sense, and not as weird racial code.) Plus he’s in the honeymoon portion of his governorship, and that job has utterly destroyed its last two holders.

Plus, Cuomo looks like he’s on pace to use up much of the goodwill he built up with liberals after signing gay marriage into law. (So far there’s been his apparent lack of interest in transit, signing awful gerrymandered legislative and congressional district lines, and his property tax cap.)

Joe Biden has run for president twice and never come remotely close to winning a single primary. He’ll be 74 in 2016. As Steve Kornacki already pointed out, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to nominate 70-somethings. He’s also a gaffe-prone goofball whose appeal is that he’s a ridiculous character. I would not put a lot of InTrade money on Joe Biden winning the Democratic nomination in 2016.

Hillary Clinton is a bit younger than Biden, and a lot more serious than Biden. But does she still want to be president? Who knows. (Anyone who says they know is lying.) And if she runs in 2016, does she hire the same asinine campaign team that lost her the nomination in 2008?

After those three, we’re already essentially in “who?” territory with the Democrats. Not to say that someone no one has heard of now won’t be the nominee — with Democrats, you may be more likely to get a relative unknown than with Republicans — but we can’t know which governors or senators will turn out to be Barack Obama (or even John Edwards) and which ones will turn out to be… well, Mark Warner.

And theoretically there would be more women vying for the nomination than just Hillary Clinton. Cillizza posits New York Sen. Kristen Gillibrand — a long shot, in my estimation — and senatorial hopeful Elizabeth Warren, who, if she loses her election, would surely be out of the running, and if she wins, would be … a liberal senator from Massachusetts. So, I dunno, Amy Klobuchar? Sadly, four of the current six female governors are Republicans. The two Democrats are North Carolina’s Bev Purdue, who is currently polling poorly enough that she’s announced that she won’t seek reelection, and Washington’s Christine Gregoire, who seems cool, so let’s just put her on the fantasy shortlist. (Oh, I guess the Times already did.)

But you see where we are, at this point: Randomly tossing out names. It’s like predicting the 2016 NFL Draft. Some of these kids are still in high school!

As for Republicans: If Mitt Romney wins the election, there’s the candidate, fun speculation time done. (Unless Newt and Ron Paul mount a primary challenge?!?) If he loses, the party likely learns the lesson it always learns and lurches to the right for a while, and your front-runner in that case (assuming he doesn’t blow up the party at the convention, I guess?) is Rick Santorum. I made this point already and Dave Weigel concurred. He’s a “true conservative” and he looks like he’ll “come in second” this year, which are both substantial advantages in the Republican race.

Maybe it’s Marco Rubio if Romney makes him the running mate, but the GOP does not often nominate losing running mates, because why would you?

Is Paul Ryan, who frantically introduces numbers-laden fake-serious budgets every year, the future of the party? I happen to think he’s basically a bland weenie who only excites people predisposed to thrill to rich-on-poor economic warefare, but a not insubstantial portion of the Republican Party “elite” seems to like that sort of thing. Mitch Daniels is somehow even less electrifying, but as a governor he has a better shot than Rep. Ryan. And Santorum still seems to have a massive advantage over them all.

(Oh, what about Chris Christie? Yes, well, he’d certainly be fun but he is pretty moderate for the national Republican Party, even if he masks it by being an obnoxious, belligerent bully. And he is woefully unprepared to protect us from CREEPING SHARIAH.)

One guy changes this calculus, obviously: Jeb Bush, because the Bush name exerts some sort of weird hypnotic power over the Republican Party, and they are often forced to do their bidding, even when, afterward, they all regret it. I like to imagine that the nation as a whole has decided that it’s done with Bushes forever, but that is pretty naive. I mean, Nixon got elected twice. Jeb Bush has not actually held office in a while — by 2016 he’ll have been a regular private citizen for nearly a decade — and it’s possible the family has decided to wait for George P. Bush to come of age before reasserting their claim over the White House (oh man, guys, he just turned 35).

The sick need to treat politics like it’s fantasy baseball ensures that there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to make people not wildly speculate as to what will happen years after an election that is still months away, so I just encourage you to be sensible and responsible about it. (Like, it won’t be Rand Paul.)

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Monday, Jan 9, 2012 5:59 PM UTC

Bill Keller writes newest, dumbest Biden-Clinton 2012 swap piece

Former New York Times editor combines hackneyed analysis with shopworn topic, with predictable results

By Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton (Credit: AP/Jason Reed)

Bill Keller, a bad opinion columnist, has written a bad opinion column. It is about how Barack Obama will replace Vice President Joe Biden on the 2012 ticket with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a thing that will not actually happen.

The former New York Times editor has lately been celebrating his return to writing by fearlessly tackling hacky column ideas already exhausted by everyone who was writing bad opinion columns during Keller’s tenure as a person with an actually important job. Having offered his own takes on classics like “The Huffington Post isn’t as good as a real newspaper” and “Twitter is dumb,” Keller today tries the old “running mate switcharoo” scenario.

John Heilemann made the case in August of 2010, but Bob Woodward really kicked it off by pretending a Biden-Clinton switch was “on the table” in October of 2010. That notion — supposedly — can be traced back to pollster grifter Mark Penn, which should have stopped anyone else from bringing it up ever again. But Jonathan Alter took another crack at it last October, and publishing speculation on the switch has become reliable Drudge-bait ever since.

Keller’s column frames the switch as something wished for, instead of predicting it based on the “chatter” of “insiders,” which helps make it merely stupid instead of inherently dishonest. But here are his arguments as to why it would be a good idea instead of a bizarre and desperate stunt:

One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.

One: What? Prove it, maybe? Two: Haha what, again? Congress will get ungridlocked if the president switches vice presidents? To a Clinton? Three: OK, but what if Obama/Clinton loses? And if Obama wins again wouldn’t any Democrat be at a disadvantage in 2016 due to historical trends anyway, making it a “safer” bet to not be his running mate, assuming she actually wants to be president still, which is not at all a given?

But we’re not dealing with observable reality here, as the bit about Clinton’s magical power to un-gridlock Congress demonstrates. We’re in the world of vague assertions about “warmth” and “voltage.” How many electoral votes would running mate Hillary Clinton be worth? Keller never bothers to attempt to make a quantitative guess. This is the closest we get:

Moreover, even if Obama can win without Hillary, there’s a lot to be said for running up the score. If she can do in 2012 what Obama did in 2008 — animate that feeling of historic possibility — the pair can lift some House and Senate candidates along with them. One reason Republicans did so well in the 2010 Congressional elections is that they overcame the gender gap and carried women voters 51 to 49. Those voters will flock back to Hillary, the more so if the Republican ticket is locked into a culture-war agenda. So, by the way, will Hispanic voters, securing such endangered states as Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.

Ooh, actual data! The Republicans won women in a midterm election. Hillary Clinton is a woman. So in a presidential general election, women will “flock back to Hillary.” Those women may be Republicans, voting in a Republican wave election, but they are women and so they will vote for Barack Obama if he is next to a woman on the ballot. (Though what about those Hispanics? Shouldn’t Obama replace Biden with a Hispanic woman, in this case? Or isn’t he in fact best off retaining Joe Biden, who is, after all, a white man? From Scranton? White men will “flock back” to Obama once they see that he is friends with a white person.)

The column isn’t just bad analysis — it’s also oddly condescending to Secretary Clinton! It complains that she owes “us” a vice-presidential run after she “raised our expectations” by running for president last time. It calls Clinton “the dutiful Methodist schoolgirl.”

Here’s the line that is secretly the worst:

But the idea that she should replace Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate in 2012 is something else. It has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction, mainly because it has been authoritatively, emphatically dismissed by Hillary, Biden and Team Obama.

Did you see that? “Kicking around on the blogs.” That’s Keller-speak for “not worth anyone’s time until a real journalist like New York Times opinion columnist Bill Keller brought it up.” The “bloggers” kicking this idea around, as I mentioned earlier, are New York magazine political writer John Heilemann, Washington Post living legend Bob Woodward, and former Newsweek senior editor and best-selling author Jonathan Alter. Those bloggers and their crazy notions!

As a blogger, I know that my silly opinion is not as carefully considered and well-informed as that of former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who is not at all simply talking out of his ass. But even if there were any hint at all that the switch was a possibility, which there isn’t, it would be a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton is already part of the president’s Cabinet, and she and her husband will already campaign for the president’s reelection. Running mates barely nudge the numbers in presidential elections, unless they’re historically awful, which Joe Biden isn’t. The Clintons are among the most divisive figures in American politics — Hillary Clinton’s recent high approval rating has come because she’s not running for anything — and relitigating every Clinton scandal would consume the national political press for weeks if she ended up on the ticket.

The running mate switch hasn’t been successful since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and the last time a president made a strategic switch to help win a tough reelection, it failed.

And I bet if Obama did make this stupid switch, Bill Keller would write some awful column about how desperate it made the president look. Unless he will have by then moved on to finally writing his “kids today sure are sexting each other a lot” piece.

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Monday, Nov 21, 2011 5:13 PM UTC

Fake Democratic pollsters have stupid idea

The Wall Street Journal publishes nonsense from Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell, because they think you're an idiot

By Hillary Clinton and President Obama (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak)

I think it’s best to understand the Wall Street Journal editorial board’s decision to publish any given column by con artist pollsters Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell as basically an expression of contempt for people who read the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Caddell and Schoen, two loser “Democratic” “pollsters,” regularly publish very lame link-bait columns about how if Democrats want to succeed electorally, they must immediately cease being Democrats, and become, instead, Republicans. This week’s variation on that theme: Barack Obama should step aside (already heard that one last year around this time) and allow himself to be replaced by Hillary Clinton, for the good of the party and the nation.

Even though Mrs. Clinton has expressed no interest in running, and we have no information to suggest that she is running any sort of stealth campaign, it is clear that she commands majority support throughout the country.

Because she’s not running for anything.

So Hillary Clinton should be president instead of Barack Obama, because Obama is too partisan and divisive. America needs a bipartisan plan to attack the deficit and also create jobs, and it is Obama’s fault that that is a vague, magical fairy tale. Hillary Clinton will make this fairy tale real, thanks to the fact that, as we all know, Republicans love cheerfully working with the Clintons for the good of the nation. When a Clinton’s in the White House, partisan politics are always put aside!

This is self-evidently dumb on about ten different levels — Clinton won’t run, President Clinton wouldn’t have any more success negotiating with Congressional Republicans than President Obama, Clinton’s popularity is a result of her not being a partisan candidate for office anymore, if there was such a thing as a “bipartisan” plan to reduce the deficit while also stimulating job growth (and protecting entitlements!) we’d presumably have already decided to act on this fantastical plan, everything resembling such a plan is explicitly supported by the White House and rejected by Republicans, Republicans would not endorse said plans if President Obama promised to go away because then they’d simply want to wait for a Republican to take over for him, and Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are not, as they claim to be, Democrats — but the Journal published this regardless, as they always do with fresh tripe from Schoen and Caddell.

Schoen — who works for hypothetical future independent presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, though that fact is never, ever disclosed — is a simple hack, precisely as dumb and unprincipled as you’d expect anyone who was once Mark Penn’s right-hand man to be. Caddell angrily left the Democratic party 20 years ago, which is seldom mentioned when he’s trotted out to trash the president on behalf of the right-wing media outlets that pay his rent. But the fact that they’re classic “Fox Democrats” matters much less than the fact that all of their editorials are predictable, wrong, and patently stupid.

As I said, printing their editorials is an implicit admission that you think your audience is credulous and moronic. The people in charge of the Wall Street Journal are savvy enough about politics to know that all of this is bilge and bullshit. They know both that this will never happen and that it’d be a stupid suggestion even if it were within the realm of possibility. They just don’t care. They don’t care that they’re printing garbage, because they figure garbage will get some traffic from those engaged in the same game.

If I were a conservative American I’d be less outraged at the specter of liberal elites hypothetically disrespecting me from their coastal enclaves and much more pissed off that the people on my side are constantly peddling this bullshit.

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Tuesday, Nov 1, 2011 10:32 PM UTC

Does Hillary Clinton get too much credit?

She's a huge foreign policy asset to the president but this week's hosannas feel like overkill

By Hillary Clinton (Credit: Reuters)

I’m on record as a great admirer of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, going back to her days as New York senator and certainly through her 2008 presidential campaign. But this week’s set of stories depicting the U.S. Libya intervention as “Hillary’s War” (The Washington Post) and an example of Clinton’s “smart power” doctrine (Time Magazine’s cover) go a little bit too far for me. They feel like someone’s effort to upstage or diminish President Obama. For the record, I don’t think the effort is Clinton’s. It may just reflect the mainstream media’s inability to give Obama his due.

Clearly Clinton’s competence is an asset to the president, and her power and credibility reflects well on his ability to work with a former rival. And the Time piece, in particular, makes clear, while praising Clinton, that ultimately Obama makes most of his decisions with a small team of confidantes, and she is not among them. He’s the commander in chief.

And there’s fine reporting in the two pieces. Certainly Clinton deserves credit for using her role to leverage support and resources from other agencies, getting greater control of foreign aid funding and even Defense Department funds to bolster her agenda at State. Elevating the role of the State Department took particular work after George W. Bush ignored and degraded so many American alliances.

But neither piece apportions any share of blame for the downside of Clinton’s expansive diplomacy – her role in pushing a bigger continued U.S. presence in and around Iraq, for instance, flagged Monday by Glenn Greenwald. The continued Iraq presence will also use more of the sometimes lawless private contractors whose role she opposed during the presidential campaign. It also seems a little early to be declaring Libya a decisive victory for American interests, or the cause of human freedom, as the nature of the government that will emerge there remains unclear.

Still, at a time when Obama struggles to get the kind of credit he deserves on the foreign policy and domestic security front – for killing Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaida leaders, winding down the military role in Iraq and toppling Muammar Gaddhafi without losing a single American life – it strikes me as a little unseemly that when credit is given, so much of it goes to Clinton. For her part, at least publicly, Clinton works to turn the spotlight on her boss, telling David Gregory on Meet the Press 10 days ago that “President Obama has passed with flying colors every leadership challenge.” And while she insisted, not convincingly, “I’m out of politics, as you know, David, I don’t comment on it,” she quickly boosted her boss against his potential 2012 rivals.  “I think Americans are going to want to know that they have a steady, experienced, smart hand on the tiller of the ship of state, and there’s no doubt that that’s Barack Obama.”

It feels a little mean-spirited to be raising these questions about Clinton’s coverage on the day she lost her mother, Dorothy Rodham, at 92, but this is the week of the adoring press coverage. Again, I’m a strong Clinton admirer. But there’s something a little odd about the worshipful tone of these pieces. I still see a faint echo of Maureen Dowd’s analysis propping up Clinton and other female administration “hawks” in her continued effort to diminish Obama’s leadership and masculinity.   Dowd seems to be on vacation, or else we might see her to use these two profiles as another reason to pit Clinton against her boss.

I spoke with a close Clinton friend last week who insists the Secretary of State has no interest in either the role of vice president in 2012, or a presidential run in 2016, so I don’t think there’s any crusade for either job behind these admiring stories. Maybe her allies are just trying to make sure she gets credit for the great work she did, against all odds, for a man she was once accused of trying to destroy.

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Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh.

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