Stalking Sidney Blumenthal

Is it possible Christopher Hitchens and his "former friend" are both telling the truth?

By Joshua Micah Marshall

Topics:Joe Conason, Christopher Hitchens

It started with a friend’s betrayal — Linda Tripp’s of Monica Lewinsky — and it may end with one. In what seem to be the waning days of the Clinton scandal, as senators look for a way to end the trial, Washington has been riveted by journalist (and sometime Salon contributor) Christopher Hitchens’ decision to submit an affidavit to Republican trial managers swearing that his old friend, presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal, described Lewinsky as a “stalker” over lunch last March, contrary to Blumenthal’s own sworn deposition in the trial last week.

Hitchens’ accusations have elicited bipartisan calls for a Justice Department investigation of Blumenthal. But the legal ramifications of his act may, in the end, be minor. What’s certain is that the topic has stunned liberal Washington, providing what writer Christopher Buckley has called “a Chambers vs. Hiss moment,” referring to the controversy that divided liberals in the 1950s. Buckley is certainly exaggerating — it’s unlikely anyone will be writing books about this decades from now — but the Hitchens-Blumenthal split has surprised people who know both men well. Their 15-year friendship was well known in Washington, despite Hitchens’ increasingly bitter antipathy toward Blumenthal’s boss. Their families regularly socialized, and Hitchens attended Blumenthal’s last birthday party and toasted his friend warmly.

One journalist who is friends with both men told Salon that Hitchens’ decision to attack Blumenthal publicly is due to his “extreme bitterness” over Clinton’s ability to slip the noose in the Lewinsky mess. Mutual friends within the liberal and left journalistic community have persistently resisted Hitchens’ often diabolical estimation of the president, this friend said, and Hitchens has grown increasingly strident, and vocal, in questioning their sanity and their integrity.

Hitchens himself has said that in the course of researching a Nation column on Blumenthal’s overzealous defense of Clinton, he mentioned their March lunch to some Republicans. Then he got a phone call from House Judiciary Committee counsel Susan Bogart, who — surprise, surprise — had heard of his claims. She asked him to make a sworn statement, which he did, though he has said repeatedly he will never testify against Blumenthal should he be charged with perjury.

And perjury is what Republicans have been trying to pin on Blumenthal. It is true that for many months the buzz within journalistic circles was that Blumenthal had peddled various disparaging stories about Lewinsky to the media. And Hitchens repeated that charge Sunday on “Meet the Press.” “I would say most of the people I know in the profession who heard that story,” Hitchens told host Tim Russert, “they knew it either directly or indirectly from Mr. Blumenthal.” But, to date, none but Hitchens have come forward. On Monday a friend of Hitchens’ submitted an affidavit swearing that Hitchens told him of his lunch with Blumenthal where the presidential aide smeared Lewinsky, but no journalists have joined Hitchens in revealing that Blumenthal was the source of such stories.

Blumenthal has not specifically denied that he discussed the Lewinsky-as-stalker theory in his March 17 lunch with Hitchens and his wife, Carol Blue. His statement over the weekend denied that he was a “source for any story about Monica Lewinsky’s personal life.” (Hitchens did not return phone calls.) The core of Blumenthal’s defense seems to be that literally hundreds of stories describing Lewinsky as a “stalker” had already run in the media before his lunch with Hitchens. Though Blumenthal has said he has no specific recollection of the lunch meeting, he says he would have considered such a lunch with his “then-friend” Hitchens a social event, not a professional meeting. This would mean that he was telling the truth when he said in his trial deposition that he had only talked about the Lewinsky mess “with friends and family.”

Several Blumenthal defenders have observed that if the presidential aide had wanted to plant the stalker story with a journalist, Hitchens would have been his last choice. The British journalist is open in his utter contempt for the president, and it would stand to reason that if Blumenthal were going to leak the story into the press he would leak it to reporters who have been more supportive of Clinton

Three such reporters contacted by Salon on Monday categorically deny that Blumenthal ever relayed any such story to them. Lars-Erik Nelson, the New York Daily News columnist who has been sympathetic to the White House through most of the last year, says Blumenthal never smeared Lewinsky. “I am baffled by it,” he told Salon late Monday afternoon when asked for his thoughts about Hitchens’ accusation. Though he had been talking with him “continually throughout the past year,” Nelson said, Blumenthal had never mentioned Clinton’s stalker story.

Veteran New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis said the same thing. Though he had spoken with Blumenthal on only a few occasions, he said, Blumenthal had “never” relayed the stalker story Clinton had told Blumenthal in January.

New York Observer and Salon columnist Joe Conason told Salon Monday afternoon that Blumenthal “never mentioned” the stalker story. Conason, who said that Blumenthal had last week “specifically released him” from any confidences related to their conversations, said that he had spoken to Blumenthal on numerous occasions regarding the Lewinsky scandal, and specifically asked him for any information that might lead him to believe that the president and not Lewinsky was telling the truth. But Blumenthal would say only that he “believed the president.” In his Salon column this week, Conason revealed that Republicans had contacted other journalists, including Arkansas writer Gene Lyons, to see if they had received any “stalker” stories from Blumenthal. Those efforts came up dry.

So what’s going on here? Are we apt to see a Kathleen Willey vs. Julie Hiatt Steele battle of wills over who’s telling the truth? Probably not. A close look at just what each man has said leads to the conclusion that the facts actually in dispute may be minimal or even non-existent. In fact, even Hitchens told Russert on “Meet the Press” that from what he saw on the deposition videotape, Blumenthal “has not lied to Congress.”

Blumenthal told the House managers at his deposition that he had never revealed to anyone — save his wife — his conversation with the president in which Clinton said that Monica was known as a stalker. He also said that he was not the source for any story that depicted Monica as a stalker. He did say, however, that he had spoken with “friends about what was in the news stories every day, just like everyone else, but when it came to talking about her personally, I drew a line.”

By March 17, when Hitchens says he discussed the matter with Blumenthal over lunch, more than 400 stories had been published that included some version of the Lewinsky-as-stalker story. So it seems conceivable that the two men discussed the issue of Lewinsky being described as a stalker — and both would still be telling the truth in their sworn statements of the last week.

Sources familiar with various aspects of the case, reached late Monday afternoon, expressed doubt whether the entire question would ever lead to an indictment of Blumenthal, or anything more than a perfunctory investigation of the matter by Justice Department lawyers. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr is known to loathe Blumenthal, and would no doubt love to get his prosecutorial powers around Blumenthal, but he has no jurisdiction in the matter.

One staffer from the office of a conservative Republican senator, who is no friend of the president, told Salon that there had as yet been little serious discussion among Republican senators of pressing the matter with the Justice department. “It’s up to the Justice Department,” the staffer told Salon. “There’s not much people on the Hill can do about it.” House manager Henry Hyde pushed to introduce the Hitchens affidavit into the record of the impeachment trial, but the move was blocked by the Senate.

Like so many peripheral developments in the course of the scandal, the Blumenthal-Hitchens episode seems — at least at this point — destined to live only briefly in bold headlines. But the underlying passions and bitterness the scandal has loosed, and the severed friendships and associations it has left in its wake, may turn out to be the most enduring consequences of the entire drama.

: Joshua Micah Marshall, a Salon contributing writer, writes Talking Points Memo. More Joshua Micah Marshall

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The Justice Department vs. Joe Conason

How Mark McKinnon helped the White House fight the Salon columnist's charges against Alberto Gonzales.

By Joan Walsh

Topics:Joe Conason

Some of the Justice Department documents dumped last night depict frantic efforts by administration underlings to wildly spin the firing of eight U.S. attorneys after aggressive reporters began poking holes in the explanation that they were let go for “performance” reasons. I particularly enjoyed a sequence in which the infamous Bush strategist Mark McKinnon asks for help combating Joe Conason’s Feb. 9 Salon column about the attorney purge, “Alberto Gonzales’ Coup d’état.”

When the ultimate Bush history is written, McKinnon himself will be an interesting footnote. A political strategist for Texas Gov. Ann Richards before he hooked up with Bush, McKinnon was crucial to the myth-making that Bush was a different kind of Republican, congenial to Democrats like McKinnon, determined to fight for the poor and minorities — a compassionate conservative. McKinnon now runs his own consulting business, Public Strategies, but in the e-mail dump last night, he’s found writing to Pete Wehner in the Office of Strategic Initiatives — yes, a White House think tank created by Karl Rove — about the Conason column. “Pete, I don’t think Conason is generally worth responding to, but do we have something off the shelf on this? Thanks, mck.” Wehner scrambles, asking Chris Oprison in the White House counsel’s office whether someone there would be able to send him “a response to the charges by Joe Conason, which I could pass along to Mark McKinnon?” The ever-obliging Monica Goodling comes up with a 13-page document, complete with “Fact Sheets,” “Talking Points” and “Examples of Difficult Transitions.” She assures Obrison he can share the document with McKinnon, because “it is all information we have given to friendlies on the Hill.” Goodling, remember, categorizes people as “loyal Bushies” and now “friendlies,” a sophisticated taxonomy that’s no doubt just another benefit of her rigorous education at Regent University.

I asked Conason what he thought about the spin job, and he shared with me an e-mail exchange he had with McKinnon. Once upon a time, back in 1999, McKinnon spun Conason on the wisdom and mercy of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, and Conason elaborated on that memory in his e-mail to McKinnon.

Dear Mark,

I see in the latest DOJ document dump that you asked the White House for a response to my column of last February 9. Believe me when I say how flattered I feel, even though you think I’m not “generally worth responding to.” I guess we’ll find out more when Monica testifies, eh? Your Monica, I mean.

I haven’t thought about you for a while. But seeing that little memo brought back fond memories of our breakfast in Austin back in 1999 with Stu Stevens, eating those tasty tortillas and listening to you wax on about all the great things Dubya was going to do for the poor folks, and how that made you well up a bit.

I sure hope he’s lived up to your expectations. The rest of us are somewhat disappointed. Very best regards,

Joe

Within an hour, McKinnon replied:

Touche Joe.

Maybe someday in the future, we can break tortillas in New York City somewhere and reflect about all this.

McK

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

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The Year of the Liar

From weapons of mass destruction to Jayson Blair, we trusted them -- and they punk'd us. Why do we keep coming back for more?

By Heather Havrilesky

Topics:Reality TV, Survivor, Al Franken, D-Minn., Joe Conason

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. — H.L. Mencken

At least he didn’t win. That was the attitude of “Survivor” fans who tuned in for Sunday’s finale to see if one of the most shameless liars ever to appear on television would leave with the million-dollar prize. Jon Dalton — or “Johnny Fairplay” as he preferred to be called — did make it to the final three after he hatched an elaborate plan to garner sympathy and gain an advantage over his fellow players. He told a friend that if the show brought him on for a visit, which he knew that it might, he should tell Jon — in front of the cameras, cast and crew — that his grandmother had died. The scheme worked; the other players were choked up and conspired to let Jon win the reward challenge. Later, when teammates questioned his loyalty, he was quick to swear to them, on his grandmother’s grave, that he was being true to his word. They didn’t find out about his lie until the show aired last week.

But on the reunion show, when host Jeff Probst tried to get the other players to express their horror over the lie, no one was taking the bait. In fact, by the end of the hour, outrage and anger at Jon seemed to transform into open admiration. With awe in her voice, one fellow player called Jon’s lie “brilliant,” another referred to his ability to lie as a “rare talent,” while a third, ironically dressed in a Boy Scout’s uniform, congratulated him on his powers of deception.

Maybe Jon’s talents aren’t as rare as they seem. Take a closer look at the headlines this year, and you’ll see that lying was all the rage. From the administration’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to the Jayson Blair fiasco, examples of lies and the lying liars who tell them were everywhere even before Al Franken’s book sold more than a million copies. Those who thought that corporate cheating would dry up and blow away as the Enron scandal petered out were sadly mistaken — 2003 brought another round of financial scandals as disconcerting as the last, from investigations into unethical practices at many top mutual funds to allegations of misconduct at Boeing. In entertainment, the deception behind “Joe Millionaire” sparked a competition between networks to see which could tell the biggest, most shocking lie for the amusement of millions. Thus, we were treated to “Boy Meets Boy,” the gay dating show on which many of the suitors turned out to be straight, or “The Joe Shmoe Show,” a fake reality show created just to get a rise out of one unsuspecting contestant, over and over again.

But maybe nothing signaled a sea change in our attitudes about lying quite like Howard Dean’s response to a debate question earlier this month about whether it would be OK for the president to lie to the American people. “I can’t think of any circumstances,” Dean said, “with the possible exception of some national security matter that would — if some piece of information were put out that would endanger American lives or circumstances under which people’s lives would be in danger or something of that sort.” Washington’s cherry tree be damned! While it seems obvious that a president can and will at times choose to withhold information that might endanger American lives, the unacceptability of making false statements to the American people should go without saying. Still, the response to Dean’s remark was surprisingly muted.

While the urge to deceive others may be an essential facet of human nature, our attitudes toward lying and cheating seem to change as our sociocultural climate and our values shift. In his book “The Cheating Culture,” author David Callahan suggests that the individualism and free-market ideals of our culture create conditions in which members of every economic strata of society find themselves tempted to cheat in order to get ahead. But the widespread, whispered acceptance of everything from the long-term use of unemployment benefits to inappropriate tax deductions surely doesn’t begin and end with the unfair distribution of wealth in this country. What’s perhaps more unsettling than the lies themselves or the conditions that create a culture in which lying is implicitly accepted is the way we treat the liar and how it has evolved over time. Once the obligatory period of shock and indignation is over, high-profile cheats are welcomed back into the fold with open arms, encouraged to tell their stories, in full makeup, while a sympathetic interviewer coos appreciatively. The book deals and the attention don’t falter for years; in fact, the greater the heat, the greater the potential payday.

Stephen Glass is still grilled and second-guessed openly, ImClone CEO Sam Waksal is pictured leaving the courthouse, looking pale and fearing his impending stay in prison, President Bush is interrogated about how he can support a war that was so firmly focused on the imminent threat of weapons that seem not to have existed at all. But eventually, these figures are folded back into the realm of the acceptable, as if lying is not only expected but the lies themselves are only relevant for a very short time, and once our interest in those lies (or the prison term) expires, then the liar is returned to the same position in society — or an even higher position — than he or she held before.

Is it just because fame — even if based on notoriety — is always celebrated? Or do Americans believe so firmly in upward mobility and the virtue of reinvention that we would rather allow the powerful to retain their position than admit to a scenario in which a real loss of money, power or status can occur? Maybe our grip on our own material and circumstantial successes is so fragile that it clouds our ability to take a firm stand against those who deceive and cheat the system, since their fall from grace might signal that our own demise could be next. As our personal sense of responsibility decays, we forgive those whose missteps strike us as utterly human, thereby ensuring that deceit and corruption will prosper while we avert our eyes.

Of course, it helps when our celebrated liars are, well, such good liars; the very same talents that were used to deceive others can be called up to add just the right spin to the crime. A few charmingly self-deprecating asides go a lot further than a convincing apology, and with them soon any memory of the original crime — now termed a “mistake” or “low period” — is erased. From Henry Blodget to Henry Kissinger, a myriad of liars invariably find ways to wriggle their way back into the public’s embrace, and dwell happily ever after in the spotlight. A key rule for rehabilitating your image seems to be that if it makes a good story, you’re already forgiven.

Our inconsistency and lack of principles as a culture becomes apparent upon reviewing some of the year’s most memorable spin jobs. Whether deceit was sanctioned by the networks or ignored by the voting public, those who lied this year seemed to have less and less to answer to.

Fictionalize, then apologize. Stephen Glass told monumental, audacious lies. He created characters and situations out of thin air and wrote elaborate features on them. Once his lies were discovered, Glass channeled his obvious skills as a storyteller into a novel about a liar just like himself, only different. When the movie about his life, “Shattered Glass,” came out this year, Glass humbly stepped into the spotlight again, describing the film as his own personal “horror movie.” He also apologized to those he hurt, spoke of regrets and analyzed his behavior from afar, all the while preparing to become — what else? — a lawyer. Journalists have rehashed the Glass story obsessively, tirelessly ruminating on the parable he presents. “How dare he be compensated for his lies!” they fumed, and then invited him to appear on their shows. And when Glass stuttered and turned pale and insulted himself on cue, they were still left wondering if he was really, truly sorry or not. After all, he seemed really sorry, but maybe that was just another act, one custom-made to sell his new novel! The real question is, why would we turn to this infamous storyteller for anything but stories?

That’s entertainment! This was the year that lies were told repeatedly and shamelessly, all for the sake of ratings. Tune in for the moment when he finds out his new boyfriend is actually straight! Watch, as the hot girl pulls off her fat-suit disguise and reveals that she heard what her would-be suitors said about her behind her heavily prostheticized back — it was all captured on a hidden camera! See the look on the chump’s face when he finds out the reality show he’s been a part of is entirely fake, and that his new friends, whom he’s been living with for weeks, are actually paid actors! While we’re quick to separate entertainment from real life — “It was just a game! It all turned out fine in the end!” — how much more effectively could the networks encourage lying than by letting us participate in the raw fun and excitement of telling lies? Still, reality TV has bloomed under the approving glow of audiences who accept that those who participate in such programs can and should be manipulated, shamed and lied to repeatedly. Just as our tolerance for one lie expires, producers dream up new lies, and soon we encounter so much deceit and manipulation that we begin to believe that entertainment and lies are necessary bedfellows — even when real human beings’ lives and reputations are toyed with.

Play the underdog What better way to spin your lies than by pretending that your deceptions were just another way of “sticking it to the man”? After he admitted to filing dozens of phony or plagiarized stories, Jayson Blair not only got a book deal, but chose a title for his memoir that only a deceiver could love: “Burning Down My Master’s House: My Life at the New York Times.” Wouldn’t you know it? Blair’s lies weren’t the missteps of a bumbling, blindly ambitious buffoon, but just one small part of an elaborate plan to bring disgrace on one of the most powerful voices of the white man! Only a master of duplicity could spin such a disgrace into an honorable struggle against the same institution that was his amiable benefactor just months earlier.

America, you’ve been Punk’d! Given how tough it is for celebrities to gain street cred with the cool kids, you have to hand it to Ashton Kutcher. Instead of getting schooled for being the host of some MTV show, Kutcher wisely positioned himself as a traitor to his class, a devil-may-care crusader out to embarrass and offend the stuck-up, spoiled inhabitants of tinseltown. Forget that Kutcher’s glee in tricking, manipulating and humiliating celebrities flies in the face of his celebrity-embracing lifestyle — Frankie Muniz looks so funny when he’s mad! And like any good lie, “Punk’d” fueled a wave of second-guessing. Why did the celebrities seem less and less surprised during the second season? Were they in on the joke? Is that why the show ended so quickly? Was the entire show a lie from the start? Is Kutcher punking America? Does it really matter either way?

Hush, now, don’t explain. The president’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was easily the biggest lie of the year. Strange, then, that months after his State of the Union statement that the administration’s evidence left “no doubt” that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, President Bush still hasn’t been forced to explain himself, nor has he apologized for duping the American people by allowing them to believe that the imminent threat of WMD in Iraq justified an immediate invasion. Even if WMD turn up now, the administration has failed to produce the preponderance of evidence that we were repeatedly led to believe existed. Bush pulled this off not only by refusing to admit guilt, but by sidestepping the entire question, continuing to distort the facts by discussing 9/11 and the need to “battle terrorism” in the same breath with Iraq. Sadly, the American public has the patience of a hyperactive squirrel, and the tough questions only come for so long. Eventually, the country seems to resign itself to never really knowing the truth, or never getting a reasonable response to a serious allegation. Just as our problems in Iraq seemed to be registering with the public, we capture Saddam — and Bush’s poll ratings soar. The second he seems to be winning, all previous trespasses are forgiven or forgotten.

Pride goeth before — and after — the fall When you’ve lied early and often, don’t be afraid to openly announce to the world that you’re a liar. If you make that twisted web of deceit sound like a nuanced plan of attack, they might just admire you for it. Sometimes the easiest way to win the public’s love and approval is by playing into their fear and loathing. Look how well it works for Dennis Rodman, Courtney Love, Eminem and any number of high-profile stars with apparent sociopathic tendencies. “Survivor’s” Jon Dalton has always been an outspoken fan of wrestling — so what better way to secure fame in a realm that glorifies infamy, than by inspiring an audience of millions to hate him? It’s only a matter of time before Dalton’s knack for proudly flaunting his lies wins him a permanent spot in this subculture’s limelight.

In formulating a plan of attack, some potential liars might be daunted by the countless books, many on the bestseller list, with titles about lies and lying: “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” by Al Franken; “The Lies of George W. Bush,” by David Corn; “The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq,” by Christopher Scheer; or “Big Lies,” by Salon’s own Joe Conason. Don’t let such strident language deter you! America may be outraged and titillated by people who lie, we may have a sense that there’s nothing worse than a liar, we may take pains to describe our shock and despair over the behavior of liars, but the more fire and brimstone we spout, the more callous the public becomes. “Everyone’s lying!” they figure, and then vote for the guy with the nicest haircut. Once you’re hosting a spot on the WWF or appearing on “60 Minutes” or signing books at Barnes and Noble, who’s going to care what got you there? Such tales of redemption and reinvention are just too tantalizing to ignore, aligned as they are with the American dream.

All of which makes captured Pvt. Jessica Lynch all the braver for stepping up and rebutting the Pentagon-produced story of her as a pocket-size Rambo, “fighting to the end” — instead of a deer caught in the enemy headlights whose gun jammed. But did the public embrace her for it? The TV movie on her tanked, and her own book (co-written by a writer who turned his own troubles with the truth into a fat book deal in a matter of months) was a sales disappointment. Poor Jessica. If she’d been paying attention, she would’ve ditched her quaint morals and gone with the flow. She would’ve understood that a lot of the time, Americans prefer to be lied to.

: Heather Havrilesky is Salon's TV critic and author of the rabbit blog. Her memoir, "Disaster Preparedness," published in 2010. More Heather Havrilesky

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Now what?

Roger Ebert, David Horowitz, Andrew Sullivan, Noam Chomsky, Bianca Jagger and other Salon panelists panelists look ahead to the Bush years.

Topics:George W. Bush, Al Franken, D-Minn., Al Gore, Joe Conason, Roger Ebert

Bianca Jagger is an internationally famous political activist.

I was born in Nicaragua, in a country where we had a dictatorship for 43 years. I grew up as a child not knowing what free elections meant. I longed through those years to be able to live in a country that abides by the principles of democracy. I used to think that America was a place where the will of the people elected a president. Having observed elections in third-world countries and having observed the irregularities that took place in the elections in America, I saw similarities. If a parallel situation had taken place in a third-world country, we would have called it fraud. We would have called for reelections or a recounting of the votes.

This is not a shining moment for American democracy because, in the end, Americans have opted to preserve the institutions rather than to preserve democracy. Vice President Gore was pushed into a wall. From every side they urged him to be gracious and to come out and concede defeat. But the truth, which we all know, was that this election was won by Gore, and that President-elect Bush is usurping the position of the presidency. He has stolen the presidency from Gore. I think a lot of people are frightened and too cautious of using plain English. The American media is afraid to use the word “fraud.” Why? It is important for Americans who believe in democracy, its principles and independent legal institutions to speak up.

Electoral reform is imperative, but that comes after. Why are we not talking about today? Why are Americans so willing to accept an election that is fraudulent?

George W. Bush will never have respect or legitimacy. I do hope that someone — a newspaper or institution — will under the Freedom of Information Act count the votes so that there will be no doubt that Gore was the winner, and that Gore’s victory was stolen from him and that a president who did not win the race is in place in America. America has to address and face up to that because the rest of the world is already speaking about it.

In America, people are using conciliatory language about how we need to unite the country. But no matter how conciliatory the language is, you cannot erase the fact that these elections were fraudulent, that there was intimidation and that the vote of minorities was constrained. In any other place where I have been an observer to the elections and have seen that, we have cried foul.

The time will come when this travesty will have to end and people will face up to the fact that the will of the people was not respected in America, and that the president-elect is not the president that the voters wanted in place.

Roger Ebert is a film critic.

For me the great symbol of the Florida recount does not involve Bush or Gore, Daley or Baker. It involves the three election commissioners of Palm Beach County, holding open meetings in the bright Florida sunshine. Their names were Judge Charles Burton, Carol Roberts and Theresa LePore.

It was possible, we thought at the time, that they held the outcome of the election in their hands. Yet the world could see them debating the issues and taking their votes, right there on live television. There were no commissars or dictators lurking in the shadows. No jail cells or exile in their future–not even for Ms. LePore, who designed the ill-fated ballot. Meanwhile, our current president, far from planning a coup, was on the other side of the world, visiting our former enemy Vietnam.

These three citizens, plucked from obscurity by the chance of a close vote, performed their civic duty as if they were born to it. Like all Americans, they were. They assumed they had the right to try their best to figure out this thing.

Later, we had the sight of hundreds of citizens performing the hand count. The sight of ordinary people, holding a ballot up to the light, trying to ascertain the will of every single individual voter, was a powerful image in the service of democracy. How much light is allowed to fall on the ballots in many of the world’s elections, and how much scrutiny does each one ever receive?

The Florida affair also dramatized the role that women play in our democracy. In many nations women do not have the vote, and in some they essentially have no rights as all, except to be property. At times during the Florida recount process the whole struggle seemed to come down to two women: Secretary of State Katherine Harris, hell-bent to stop the recount, and Election Commissioner Carol Roberts, steel-willed that it continue. Roberts told her fellow commissioners, “There are three remedies under the law for us to choose from,” and in her voice you heard democracy speaking from the people up, not from the top down. As the process entered its endgame, a third woman appeared: Judge Nikki Clark, calm, firm and sane as she guided two overheated legal teams through the Seminole County case.

There was a lot of talk among the pundits about how impatient the people were getting, questions about how long the process could or should be drawn out. I heard none of that talk. Did you? The average citizen, fascinated by the process, wanted it to continue until a winner was made clear.

Of course a winner was not made clear. One was selected by judicial default rather than elected. But to stubbornly look on the bright side, even this was done in the full light of day: Anyone who cared enough could figure out, in the words of the immortal limerick, who did what, and with which, and to whom. The Florida episode may have shaken my faith in a lot of things, but I still believe it concealed no conspiracies or plots: What was done, for good or ill, was seen to be done.

We should take that image of an election volunteer peering intently at a single ballot, and put it on a postage stamp. A stamp with the correct postage for international mail.

Todd Gitlin is professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University and the author of “The Sixties,” “The Twilight of Common Dreams” and a new novel, “Sacrifice.”

These felt to me like high-school-level consolation talks in which each tries to persuade the followers of the other that the result isn’t so bad. The term “presidentiality,” which has spread like an ooze to cover the emptiness of what mainstream politics has to offer, has deservedly been invoked to describe what these men had to offer, demonstrating nothing more than the reasons why so much of America was not ignited by either of them.

There’s not much that I have to say about these talks as such. They were written for the pundits as rituals to soothe, but I doubt that they will deliver much soothing — nor do they deserve to — to those who doubted the stature and merits of the candidates in the first place.

Once again we were treated to the spectacle of the commentary chorus heralding the forthcoming “bringing us together” theme. I thought the pundits outdid themselves in blather. Chris Matthews [of MSNBC] spoke of Al Gore’s “sublime masculinity.” I think we need more investigation of what that might have meant.

I heard that Al Gore made a beautiful speech. I don’t know where I was when that speech was delivered. I heard a labored and forced incantation, vastly less eloquent than the look on Joe Lieberman’s face, which in its gravity spoke of social consequences that will likely be considerable.

To me this was a grave anticlimax. The country has been subjected to an appalling abuse of democratic rights, in particular the right to vote. It’s a trauma that has to be faced squarely and not smothered in empty unity talk, and I profoundly hope that Democrats will not forget why they received 50 percent of the vote.

David Horowitz is a Salon columnist.

Gore’s concession was as good as it could be. I can’t say he redeemed himself, but he certainly positioned himself for the next run. I think it was what was needed. For the moment, he’s effectively isolated Jesse Jackson, which is a good thing.

Bush was a lot more relaxed than he has been. People are going to be very surprised. He has it in him to be a great president. It’s going to be hard to resist the charm. His agendas are very much where the American people are. He’s been tremendously underestimated, and I’m looking forward to this presidency.

Bush should take steps on Social Security, education and healthcare. He needs to do a few bipartisan things. This was a brutal campaign. He’s been attacked as a moron and a racist — both of which are ridiculous. He’s going to have to take some time to establish himself. In the sense that he’s a people person, he’s a true leader. He has the ability and the patience to bring people along with him.

He’s going to give the African-American community a chance to take a look at their absurd voting postures and their absurd attacks on him. For the African-Americans of the inner city, I sure hope that the leadership gives him a chance and reciprocates his gestures.

I’d like to see them reform the electoral system. I don’t care how much money they spend to get the decent machines. They need to ensure that people don’t vote two and three times and to make sure that the voting procedures are standardized and that the counting is more objective and not subjective.

Larry Flynt is the publisher of Hustler.

Bush is going to be a one-term president with a popularity rating that will fall below 30 percent. It’s going to be a disaster.

Arianna Huffington is a political columnist and the author of “How to Overthrow the Government”

The morning after Al Gore’s “perfect” concession and George W. Bush’s humble acceptance, I was flipping through a magazine when an ad for an investment company caught my eye. It featured a smiling, gray-haired couple playing on a swing. An equally toothy representative of the investment firm named Pamela was pictured glancing in the direction of the swinging seniors. The ad copy was a transcript of a conversation between an “Investor” and a Company “Rep” (the grinning oldsters and Pam, I assume). There is even a time and date: “August 17th, 2000, 1:21 p.m.” Here’s the exchange:

INVESTOR: We’re calling for no other reason than to say thank you.
COMPANY REP: That’s a wonderful reason to call. Thank you.
INVESTOR: My wife and I are truly enjoying our retirement and want to thank you for your wonderful assistance throughout the years.
REP: Well … that makes me feel great. And I’ll pass that message along to everyone here.
INVESTOR: Especially a Mr. David Coyne. Is he still with the company?
REP: Oh, yes David’s been with us for close to 30 years.
INVESTOR: Well, he’s a gem. He really is. He’s the one that got us started.
REP: He’s a very good man.
INVESTOR: Well, I just want to you to know that we feel very fortunate.
REP: Thank you.
INVESTOR: No. Thank you!
End of copy.
Sure, it’s a little mushy, I thought — but heartfelt. Then my eyes drifted down to the bottom of the ad. In the tiniest of print were the words: “Dramatization, may not be representative of the experience of actual customers.”
That’s how I felt listening to the speeches of Gore and Bush. I mean, there was Gore waxing poetic: “In the words of our great hymn ‘America, America’: ‘Let us crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea’.” When what he really wanted to say was: “I wuz robbed. I won the popular vote! Popular vote!!” Bush, meanwhile, praised Gore’s “distinguished record of service to our country as a congressman, a senator, and as vice president” — a radical departure from the Bush campaign’s familiar theme of “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”
Too bad the networks didn’t add a small print disclaimer: “May not be representative of the feelings of these two actual politicians.”
Diana Furchgott-Roth is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Insitute. She formerly served as the associate director of the White House Office of Policy Planning under the Bush administration.
Bush should step forward and name his Cabinet — the people who are going to be in power and create his policies. He’s had huge success bringing the parties together behind his Republican legislation [in Texas]. I think that economic circumstances, not love for Bush or love for a united United States, are going to require the Democrats to fall behind certain things that Gov. Bush wants to do.
The economy is slowing down. There’s already pressure for tax cuts from some Democrats. It’s clear that Social Security needs to be reformed. The idea of private accounts is popular — so popular that when Bush announced it, Gore, after attacking it for two weeks, felt a need to have his own private account program to match it. Many of the things Bush wants to do are so popular that the Democrats are going to be cutting their own noses off their own faces by opposing them.
Douglas Brinkley is director of the Eisenhower Center and professor of history at University of New Orleans; he is also the author of “The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House.”
Bush took the first step [toward conciliation] last evening by making the bipartisan gesture at the state Capitol of Texas in front of the bipartisan legislators. The problem is that Democrats in Texas are so conservative that they are essentially Republican. So he had an easier audience than when he is going to start having to listen to the shrill rantings of Rep. Barney Frank, [D-Mass.].
He is going to need to appoint a couple of leading Democrats in his Cabinet, but not necessarily at major posts. It could be the head of Veteran’s Affairs or the Department of Energy, but a couple of Democrats would show symbolism. Then I think he’s going to need to do a couple of what I would call celebrity Democrat appointments to ambassadorships — just like Ronald Reagan sent Walter Mondale to Japan.
My hunch is that you will see Bush doing a lot of consulting with Bill Clinton, who will be willing to mug for the cameras and do it. There will gestures of bringing Jimmy Carter and Clinton, the former Democratic presidents to the White House. Then he’ll do some highly visible things with Sens. Bob Graham of Florida and John Breaux of Louisiana, who are his friends. He needs to give the perception that he’s listening to what the Democrats think.
But mainly, he can no longer tackle any major issues that were on the campaign trail — be it Social Security or HMO reform or education. He’s going to need to do something like focus on election reform, which might be even too bitter right now — or start worrying about foreign affairs. The strength of Bush is that he has people like Powell and Cheney surrounding him, and that to suddenly talk about the U.S. military and take some trips abroad to Russia or China. He’s somebody who’s spent virtually no time outside of the United States. He’s got to break the provincial yoke that surrounds him, get out there and talk to some world leaders and start at least seeming presidential on the nightly news before he becomes a puppet of “Saturday Night Live.”
Linda Chavez is a syndicated columnist and former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1983-’85).
The first and most visible thing Bush is going to do is name a Cabinet, and I think you are going to see good nominees and people who have reputations for reaching across party lines and across ideological divides.
I would be very surprised if he doesn’t name a Democrat to a high-level post. I think he will do that, and I think that the convention that George W. Bush held was a bridge builder, an attempt to reach out. I suspect you will see brown and black faces in that Cabinet — more than what one normally associates with a Republican administration. He will do some things in education early on. He cares a lot about education for the disadvantaged and he might have a different set of policy prescriptions, but his focus is very much where a liberal focus is in trying to help the kids who are most disadvantaged. You are going to see a lot of that kind of outreach.
Bush is a really likable guy, and he is somebody who people are comfortable with. I think in that sense he’s going to be a lot like Reagan. As much as people disagreed with Reagan’s policies, at least liberal Democrats, from [Speaker of the House] Tip O’Neill on down, they found him somebody that they could talk to and who was warm. Bush has that going for him, as well. It’s not just rhetoric that he is a uniter. If you look at his history with the Legislature in Texas, particularly when it was controlled by the Democrats, you’ve got him reaching across party lines and working with the Democrats, and I think you are going to see that again.
Ralph Neas is president of People for the American Way.
I thought Gore’s was a classy performance, which is exactly what those who have supported him would have expected all along. He took the high road with considerable grace, dignity and humor.
That aside, I want everyone to know that the progressive community will remember November. There are still a lot of questions about this election that need to be answered, and we will not stop pursuing them.
Bush sounded fine, moderate and soothing. But it’s not the first time he’s sounded like that, and there’s often been this disconnect between how he sounds and what he stands for. I’m wary because he’s been totally dependent on the right wing to get him where he is, whether it’s Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in South Carolina, or Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
He will be the president, and we’re going to support him when he’s right, but we’ll correct him when he’s wrong.
Noam Chomsky is a professor at MIT.
To be frank, I find it hard to understand the attention given to this topic. The election was a statistical tie. Whatever the numbers are (if that’s even a meaningful question), the difference is surely overwhelmed by the inherent noise in the system. Since someone has to be picked, the sensible way would have been to flip a coin. There are interesting questions: e.g., why was the election a tie? There are also some plausible models that would yield that conclusion, and are probably close to accurate. But that’s another topic.
Robert George is a New York Post editorial page writer.
I have to admit, I was very impressed with Al Gore’s speech. I think he hit every graceful note that even some of his hardest critics on the conservative side were demanding or insisting on.
I thought it was particularly appropriate that he was the first American to call George W. Bush “president-elect,” which was a good, appropriate gesture. He used the word “concession.” There was a lot of talk about whether he would actually use that word, and he did.
One of the most interesting things is he was probably more relaxed and, I guess, human than in almost any speech that I’d ever seen before. It’s ironic that Al Gore, who at the Democratic Convention said he was his own man, didn’t become his own man until after the elction. The past 36 days is when he emerged from President Clinton’s shadow and finally, when he’s bowing out, he arguably gives the warmest speech of his career. It was self-deprecating in places but also statesmanlike as well.
I think we’ll see him in four years, but I don’t know if he’ll actually get the nomination in four years. There has not been a Democrat who has come back to get the party’s nomination after losing the presidency since Adlai Stevenson. Hubert Humphrey ran again in ’72 but he lost [the nomination] to George McGovern.
I thought Bush’s speech was good. I think rhetorically Gore’s speech was actually better, but Bush said what he had to say. The nicest thing about Bush’s speech was the setting. Having the Texas Democratic speaker of the House introduce him — I thought that was a good, atmospheric gesture. It was good for him to list the consensus agenda that was battled over in the campaign: drugs and education and defense and so forth.
I think there’s a lot of bipartisan stuff Bush can tackle that there’s already support for, whether it’s the marriage penalty or the death tax. There’s an agenda out there for him to pick up and run with that can go a long way to assuage some of the raw feelings that came out during this campaign. But I don’t think pardoning Clinton right off the bat would sit well with his base at all.
I think Bush can pick and choose who his friends are going to be in Congress. We saw during the campaign that he wasn’t too hesitant to stiff-arm the House Republicans when it served his purpose. I think, for one thing, Dennis Hastert is going to be more of his best friend than, say, Tom DeLay is going to be. I think just in terms of temperament, Hastert is more simpatico with Bush than DeLay is. In terms of Trent Lott, that’s kind of hard to say. In a certain way, you’ve almost got three majority leaders in the Senate. You’ve got Lott, you’ve got Tom Daschle and you’ve got Dick Cheney.
The Democrats are going to work with Bush until it’s no longer in their interest. That was the mistake that George Bush Sr. made.
Ward Connerly is the author of “Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences” and the founder and chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute. A member of the University of California Board of Regents, he headed the anti-affirmative action California Civil Rights Initiative, which campaigned for the passage of the state’s Proposition 209.
America is a deeply divided nation, with events of the past five weeks exposing and accentuating some of those divisions. Tonight’s speeches to the nation by Vice President Al Gore and President-elect George W. Bush must be viewed in the context of the divided nature of the American people and the national imperative for unity. By that standard, both Gore and Bush rose to the occasion.
Each speech was gracious and fit the role that was expected. Gore conceded unequivocally and offered the hand of cooperation to the victor, while Bush glided into the role of president-elect without appearing to gloat. America demonstrated its strength tonight, thanks to Gore and Bush.
Imagine! Five weeks of counting and recounting ballots with less than a few hundred votes out of 6 million separating the two contestants. And, at the end of the day no blood was shed and the two contestants appealed to their supporters to put the interests of the nation ahead of their self-interests. In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a Gore supporter. But tonight was his finest hour.
One should not become intoxicated, however, by one night of appeals to national unity. The real question is: Will you respect me in the morning? In this vein, will Jesse Jackson and other black “leaders,” for example, follow the leadership of Gore and accept this outcome without further inflammatory rhetoric? Will further attempts be made to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Bush presidency by Democratic partisans before Bush has any chance for a honeymoon? Will Republican ideologues demand that President Bush govern more as a prototypical Republican or will they give him sufficient wiggle room to govern from a centrist perspective?
Let us pray that tonight marked a new beginning to unite our nation.
Andrew Sullivan writes the TRB column for the New Republic, essays for the New York Times Magazine and daily commentary for www.andrewsullivan.com.
Was it just me or did Al Gore look liberated tonight? Part of me thinks he never wanted to be president — he just always thought he ought to want to be president. When he put his mind to it, he tried, but it was all perspiration and very little inspiration. I so desperately wanted him to give a good speech that maybe I’m biased, but I thought it was almost perfect. Crisp, eloquent, even moving. He’s a man, I think, who is always liberated by being told what to do. That’s why he was a good vice president, that’s why he gave a good concession speech — he had no credible alternative. But give him a multiplicity of choices and he freezes, loses confidence, turns to the slickest advisors out there and comes off as completely fake.
The speech tonight helped me come to terms with my mixed feelings about him. Finally St. Albans Al doing his duty, instead of that phony, grating populist claptrap we had to endure for months. He’s a nastily effective fighter, but he is never better than when losing. I am so relieved that he has finally given up that I’m almost prepared to forgive him the five weeks of insanity he put us through — for no good reason. In a race where the margin of error was always greater than the margin of victory, it was a horrible piece of narcissistic ambition, which has done nothing but tarnish our democratic institutions and the rule of law. Maybe that was why he kept going on about law and God in his speech. Maybe he was making amends to himself and the country. But, whatever the motivation, I am grateful that this lost and clueless soul will never be president of the United States.
As for Bush, someone needs to tell the guy how to use a teleprompter. He was effective nonetheless. The word that comes to mind is “mild.” He’s a mild and human man, almost kind, and the way he wrinkles his brow when he’s trying to say something important is almost affecting. It’s kind of a tic, like the way small children stick their tongues out when they’re writing. For the first time, he looked like a president. His priorities were those of a New Democrat (remember them?), which makes him almost designed for this moment, unless the Republican nutballs and Democratic whiners chew him apart. I have a feeling we may continue to underestimate him. Gore sure did. Gore’s supporters are still going around in their smug, self-serving way, talking about how dumb W. is. If he’s so dumb, how come he’s on the verge of becoming the most powerful man in the world, after Alan Greenspan? Oh, never mind.
As to what he needs to do, it’s pretty obvious: Stroke John McCain, kick Tom DeLay in the balls and appoint Condi Rice (National Security Council), Colin Powell (State), Frank Keating (Justice), Christie Whitman (Health and Human Services), Ward Connerly (Education) and Jim Kolbe (trade representative) to his Cabinet. He should make education reform his first priority, and get a whole bunch of easy bipartisan legislation passed soon — a ban on partial-birth abortion, the end of the marriage penalty, a reduction in the estate tax. The he needs to go after school vouchers and Social Security reform. Got that? Well, we can always dream.
Deirdre English is former editor of Mother Jones.
In retrospect, it’s clearer than ever that Clinton should have resigned back at the beginning of the Lewinsky scandal, that dog. He would have spared the nation that media nightmare, and the whole impeachment mess. Gore would have been made president, untainted by Billy’s moral turpitude, as it was gradually revealed, and would have had an unbeatable advantage (all other things being equal) in the current contest.
If Clinton had really sought to promote Democratic Party fortunes, rather than his own ego, that’s what he would have done. But no, he was willing to put a future Gore presidency at risk. People should think about that when they criticize Gore for not having unleashed Clinton in the campaign. Gore knows Clinton all too well.
Patricia Williams is a professor of law at Columbia University and columnist for the Nation.
I find the decision stunning. I hope it will come to be known as a departure in Supreme Court jurisprudence rather than a signal of things to come. Even Scalia’s history as a rather activist conservative did not prepare me for this bulldozing intervention. The morning after the decision, I was standing in the kitchen listening to the news on NPR, and my son came in and said, “Mummy, you look flabber-gassed.” That does just about sum it up.

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Bullies of the left

Joe Conason prefers personal attacks to political debate, just like his heroes Clinton and Gore.

By David Horowitz

Topics:Campaign Finance, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Conason

Recently I called the Clinton administration “the most criminal, the most corrupt, the most cynical administration in American history.” I also referred to Joe Conason as a columnist “well known for his unflagging loyalty to every Clinton claim.” Conason proved his loyalty immediately, by firing back a column attacking me politically and personally.

Of course I do not have “proof” for the assertion that Clinton surpasses all presidents in corruption, which Conason built a whole column around. Though many Clinton officials have been convicted, many more (including the culprit-in-chief) obviously have not.

Nonetheless, I believe the key charges in the Clinton scandals — including the Whitewater crookery, the abusive use of military force for domestic political agendas and the collusion with Chinese agents that led to the loss of America’s nuclear secrets and missile technologies — will be shown over time to be as firmly based in fact as the deposition of Monica Lewinsky. (Let us not forget, moreover, that if it weren’t for the preserved blue dress with its stain, people like Joe Conason would still be righteously insisting that she, and not he, was the liar.)

The basis for my belief in Clinton’s guilt on charges he has denied is the reckless determination that he and his closest associates have shown in their attempts to obstruct justice and the amazing energy they have been willing to put into these efforts. The Lewinsky affair should have convinced even the most reluctant observer that this president is a criminal who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.

He will perform Byzantine acts of prevarication before the entire world; he will drag his family through unimaginable torments on a global stage; he will paralyze the United States government for months on end; he will destroy the reputations of his political (and nonpolitical) opponents, especially vulnerable women he has wooed and abandoned; he will abuse his political intimates by involving them in humiliating lies; he will assault the innocence of the young, by forcing an issue which he knows (but no one else does) will cause his private mess to be projected onto their morning television shows; he will risk the electoral destruction of his own party (by not stepping down); he will mortgage the future of his party and his country by soliciting illegal campaign money from foreign dictatorships and by casually lobbing missiles into nations with whom America was otherwise at peace.

Of course, if, like Joe Conason, you can delude yourself into thinking that Clinton did all this to avoid embarrassment about sex, you will be able dismiss a lot of the evidence of his sociopathic dysfunction. But to the rest of us, the impeachment scandal was ultimately and obviously not about sex. It was about power. And President Clinton’s desire for power — his willingness to betray trusts and commit crimes to preserve and extend his power — far exceeds that of any president on record, including the only modern president forced to resign, Richard Nixon.

Nixon did resign, and that’s the operative fact. Although he could have fought the outcome (and was advised by friends to do so), he voluntarily gave up his power to avoid consequences to family, party and country that were unacceptable to him. In other words, in the end, there were considerations — family, party, country — that he considered more important, greater than himself. That is what ultimately redeems him.

What is so frightening about President Clinton, on the other hand — what leads people like me to believe that the main charges and suspicions against him are true — is that he does not have such concerns. He has shown he is willing to do anything to cover his tracks. In life, one is often forced to make judgments on the basis of behavior. Many people believe that even though O.J. Simpson was acquitted, he was obviously guilty. So are Bill and Hillary Clinton. So is Al Gore.

My recent clash with Conason was spurred by something I wrote about Gore — about the latest charges that he had not been truthful about his involvement in the Asian-American fundraising scandals that have rocked the administration.

It was pretty obvious to anyone who took the time to read the newly released transcripts that the vice president had lied under oath. From the left, James Ridgeway had this to say in the Village Voice last week: “A look at Al Gore’s just-released interview with the Justice Department’s campaign-finance task force director not only makes the Vice President look like a barefaced liar but also makes you wonder why Janet Reno has not prosecuted him and why this man is the certain nominee of the Democratic Party.”

In my short article for Salon, I focused on the Buddhist temple fundraiser, where Gore sat at the head table between two Chinese Communist agents, Ted Sieong and Maria Hsia. (Their Communist ties have been well-documented by the Washington Times). Between them, this pair was responsible for providing several million dollars in illegal contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign coffers. Hsia has since been convicted on five felony counts and Sieong — a Los Angeles businessman connected to a Macao prostitution ring — has fled the country to avoid prosecution. Gore pretended not to have realized that the event was a fundraiser.

Perhaps my Salon article would have been less inflammatory to Conason if I had not focused on the flamboyant Buddhist temple affair, but on the “White House coffees” — fundraisers that were illegally held in government buildings. At these gatherings the president and vice president met with campaign fat cats, who paid $50,000 a head for the privilege.

The Justice Department had obtained a note, written by Gore, in which he observed the following: “So we can raise the money — BUT ONLY IF — the president and I actually do the events, the calls, the coffees, etc.” (Emphasis in original.) Gore himself hosted 22 of these coffees and co-hosted another eight with the president. But when asked by Justice Department investigator Robert Conrad what went on, Gore pretended not to know what he was talking about.

Conrad: And how did the events, the calls and the coffees, factor into that ability to raise more money?

Gore: Well, this was not prepared by me. This was prepared by, apparently by Ron Klain. But, among the activities that were intended to help raise the funds were telephone calls to potential donors to ask if they could contribute to the DNC. And the coffees were in a somewhat different category, and I don’t — that was not an activity I — I may have attended one.

One? A few days later, Gore’s attorney, Jim Neal, sent a “clarifying” letter to Justice explaining that the coffees that Gore hosted were held in the Old Executive Office Building and he thought that the questions would only pertain to coffees in the White House, so Gore had not reviewed the records before testifying. But eight of the coffees were co-hosted by Gore in the White House. Moreover, the Old Executive Office Building, in which the vice president’s own staff is housed, is part of the White House compound. Besides, it’s a government building and fundraising on its premises is illegal.

These and other incriminating details made no impression on Joe Conason. In his Salon piece, he dismissed it all as “a tired rerun of an old flap” — further machinations of the right-wing conspirators against the Clinton-Gore administration. Conason even titled his piece “A Republican hatchet job,” because Conrad was formerly a federal prosecutor in North Carolina and had once contributed $250 to a Jesse Helms campaign. If you can’t refute the facts, impugn the motives.

“Without fresh proof of wrongdoing,” wrote Conason, ignoring the fresh proof in the previously unreleased transcript, “there is no more reason today than there was two years ago to believe that Vice President Gore raised funds illegally during the 1996 campaign — or that he lied about the controversy later.”

And later Conason came after me, when I dared to question his analysis. “Urging the hyperbolic Salon columnist David Horowitz to calm down and cite facts,” he wrote, “instead of spewing insults seems as pointless as asking a dog not to defecate on the sidewalk. In either instance, the result is always and predictably the same: Somebody has to clean up a stinking pile.”

This is really just a version of the Clinton attack mode. Commit an offense and then accuse the victim should he attempt to defend himself. Abuse your opponent and then call him a whiner — or worse — if he complains about the abuse. Insult him and — if he responds — call him a “spewer of insults.”

This is more than a Clinton or a Conason style, it is a trope of the broader left — though, to be fair, not all leftists are culpable and few are as adept or dependent on it as Conason himself. It is remarkable, in fact, how consistent the reflexes of this tradition have been over time.

Half a century ago, the formula for discrediting an opponent would have been to affix to them the label “fascist” or “lackey of the ruling class.” That way no decent person would consider the merits of what they had to say. Today the new term of choice is “racist”; ruling-class lackey (or some version of that slur) remains.

Thus Conason’s first attack on me in Salon two years ago included the charge that I was a “hired propagandist” (read: lackey) for wealthy donors. This, because my institutional base is an educational foundation that depends on contributions. My contributors are now more than 40,000 in number and support me with mainly $25 and $50 donations. No matter, I am a hireling of the rich. (Who does Joe think pays his salary at Salon and the New York Observer — the homeless?)

Conason embellished his smear on my foundation in his latest piece: “In case any readers aren’t aware,” he wrote, “the GOP also happens to be the party which Horowitz, through his various “non-partisan” tax-exempt fronts, serves as both a leading pamphleteer and a prodigious fundraiser, who organized $100,000 or more in contributions to George W. Bush.”

Well, I thought everyone knew I was a Republican and a supporter of George Bush. I certainly haven’t kept that any secret, writing articles in Salon about it. The way I read the syntax of this sentence, Conason has accused me of using a tax-exempt foundation to conduct partisan political activities and raise political campaign contributions for a federal candidate. These are not quite as serious as Al Gore’s offenses — which Conason apparently can’t be bothered with — but they are in the same category of breaking the law.

In fact, like many conservative foundations in the Clinton era, I have been thoroughly audited by the IRS — and given a clean bill of health. I did raise money for Bush, but as an individual. (I am entitled to do so under our still intact Constitution.) Insofar as I have pursued any political agendas, for example in the publication of my book, “War Room,”I have done so through appropriate entities that are not tax-exempt.

I am sure that when Kate Michelman, Patricia Ireland or Kweisi Mfume raise political money or pursue partisan activities, they do so not through their “tax-exempt fronts” — NARAL, NOW and the NAACP — but by utilizing appropriate alternatives as I do.

Philip Klinkner’s defense is entirely scholastic. His statement in the Nation — that “throughout American history, in nearly every instance in which they have been given a direct vote on the matter, the majority of white Americans have rejected any measure beneficial to the interests of blacks” — was technically about referenda, he writes, and not about mere sideshows like the acts of presidents or the Congress. The record of referenda, according to Klinkner, confirms his claim that white majorities have voted against black interests virtually every time.

Maybe one has to be a leftist to follow even this logic. I happen to think that Ward Connerly’s referendum against government race preferences, though it was passed by a white majority, serves the interests of blacks, even though a black majority voted against it. After all, by now South Africa’s Afrikaner minority understands that their affirmative action program (apartheid) served them badly. There is an analytic literature that shows quite clearly how racial preferences have worked against black interests.

But why bother Klinkner with complications like this?

The point at issue is obviously not referenda. Does Klinkner think there can be an “overwhelming pattern of white racism” that is restricted solely to ballot measures? Do whites vote down pro-black ballot measures and yet elect representatives and presidents who are sympathetic to blacks, who then pass pro-black legislation? If whites were overwhelmingly anti-black racists, would a Republican president like Richard Nixon have created much of the structure of affirmative action that now exists?

As if eager to prove that the technical issue is a mere smokescreen, Klinkner immediately shifts gears in order to rehearse the thesis of his book “The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America.” In this book Klinkner tries to prove the thesis that whenever the white devils did something right toward blacks in America’s past, they did it for the wrong reasons, i.e., only because they were coerced into doing so or had no other option (which is the same thing). This is a kind of academic Farrakhanism without the colorful theology.

It would be pointless for me to go over this history in an effort to pick out the slivers of fact in Klinkner’s overview from the woodpile of distortions and lies under which he has buried them. What would Klinkner think, for example, of a history of black America in which every progressive step of black Americans, every worthy achievement and advance, was attributed to external forces and influences, and to white influences in particular? He would say it was racist.

Finally, having been forced to half-heartedly admit that black Americans are “the freest, richest and most privileged community of blacks anywhere in the world,” Klinkner cannot resist concluding with the assertion that they are still oppressed by those racist whites who somehow let blacks get so far but not any farther. According to Klinkner, “It is indisputable that [blacks] remain, despite our nation’s ideology of equality and individual rights, less free, less rich and less privileged than white Americans.”

Well, I for one dispute it. Blacks are more privileged by law than white Americans; they are certainly no less free; and if they are less wealthy as a group this is in no small measure due to the dysfunctional behaviors and self-destructive mental attitudes (grievance-mongering, self-pity and an inability to take responsibility) that are encouraged by the arguments of “friends” like Klinkner.

: David Horowitz is a conservative writer and activist. More David Horowitz

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Smearing Hillary

The first lady's lost Whitewater billing records were supposed to be the smoking gun that would lead to her indictment. Instead, they corroborated her claims of innocence.

By Joe Conason and Gene Lyons

Topics:Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Clinton, Joe Conason

Almost from the outset of his presidency, the hunters of Bill Clinton were simultaneously in hot pursuit of his controversial wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. As a former partner in the Rose Law Firm and as the steward of her family’s tangled finances, the first lady drew fire not only from the Washington press corps but from Kenneth Starr’s chief deputy in Arkansas, W. Hickman Ewing Jr., a conservative Republican whose prosecutorial energy had always included a tinge of fundamentalist zeal.

Ewing’s moral certainty about Hillary Clinton’s guilt soon seeped into the media coverage of the Clinton “scandals.” With an unseemly eagerness, Clinton critics in the press began to trumpet rumors of her impending indictment. And when a set of long-misplaced billing records from the Rose firm were found in the White House, the crescendo of accusations reached a frenzied pitch.

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After a few years in solo law practice, Hickman Ewing Jr. got a call in late August 1994 from Kenneth Starr, who had just been appointed Whitewater independent counsel. They met at a McDonald’s restaurant in Brinkley, Arkansas, and Ewing quickly accepted the position as Starr’s senior deputy, even though it meant living in Little Rock during the week and commuting home to his family in suburban Memphis on weekends. He had the right attitude for the Office of Independent Counsel, guided always by his trained ability to sense guilt, as he told the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin years later.

As early as the spring of 1995, Ewing testified years later, he had drawn up a draft indictment against Hillary Rodham Clinton and circulated it to other lawyers in the OIC. He said the document was based upon a sworn statement she had given that April “about her representation of Madison Guaranty when she was at the Rose Law Firm: How the business came in, what work she performed, and how the retainer was returned.” During his testimony at Susan McDougal’s contempt trial in 1999, Ewing also admitted that he had taken to making quasi-public pronouncements about the first lady’s guilt. He recalled, “We were eating dinner one night, and somebody said, ‘How do you grade them?’ I think the President was about a ‘C’ and Mrs. Clinton was about an ‘F’.”

On December 19, 1995, the morning after the Wall Street Journal’s comprehensive news summary of the Pillsbury Report’s findings absolving the Clintons, a front-page article appeared in the New York Times indicating that the first lady was in serious trouble. Written by Stephen Labaton, the story appears likely to have relied upon Ewing or other Starr deputies as sources. It confidently laid out a case for two possible felony courts against Hillary: perjury and obstruction of justice. Labaton repeated Jim McDougal’s account of Bill Clinton jogging over to Madison Guaranty’s office in the summer of 1984 to solicit legal business for Hillary because the couple needed cash. But the real bombshell in the Times article was the supposed contradiction between Hillary’s account of how her law firm came to represent Madison Guaranty and that of a former colleague named Rick Massey.

“Mrs. Clinton said in a sworn statement this year,” wrote Labaton, “that Mr. Massey, then a first year associate at the Rose firm, had been contacted by a friend at Madison, John Latham, with a request for legal help … Mr. Massey, who is now a partner at the Rose firm, told Federal investigators he ‘does not know how or why Madison selected the Rose Law Firm,’ according to a summary of his October 1994 interview with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.”

Even more damning was a “Nightline” report broadcast that same evening. The segment came very close to branding Hillary Clinton a perjurer. In his introduction, host Ted Koppel spoke pointedly about “the reluctance of the Clinton White House to be as forthcoming with documents as it promised to be.” He then turned to correspondent Jeff Greenfield, who posed a rhetorical question: “Hillary Clinton did some legal work for Madison Guaranty at the Rose Law Firm, at a time when her husband was governor of Arkansas. How much work? Not much at all, she has said.”

Up came a video clip from Hillary’s April 22, 1994, Whitewater press conference. “The young attorney, the young bank officer, did all the work,” she said. “It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about.” Next the screen filled with handwritten notes taken by White House aide Susan Thomases during the 1992 campaign. “She [Hillary] did all the billing,” the notes said. Greenfield quipped that it was no wonder “the White House was so worried about what was in Vince Foster’s office when he killed himself.”

What the audience didn’t know was that the ABC videotape had been edited so as to create an inaccurate impression. At that press conference, Mrs. Clinton had been asked not how much work she had done for Madison Guaranty, but how her signature came to be on a letter dealing with Madison Guaranty’s 1985 proposal to issue preferred stock. ABC News had seamlessly omitted thirty-nine words from her actual answer, as well as the cut, by interposing a cutaway shot of reporters taking notes. The press conference transcript shows that she actually answered as follows: “The young attorney [and] the young bank officer did all the work and the letter was sent. But because I was what we called the billing attorney — in other words, I had to send the bill to get the payment sent — my name was put on the bottom of the letter. It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about.”

ABC News had taken a video clip out of context, and then accused the first lady of prevaricating about the very material it had removed. Within days, the doctored quotation popped up elsewhere. ABC used the identical clip on its evening news broadcast; so did CNN. The New York Times editorial page used it to scold Mrs. Clinton, as did columnist Maureen Dowd. Her colleague William Safire weighed in with an accusatory column of his own: “When you’re a lawyer who needs a cover story to conceal close connections to a crooked client,” he began, “you find some kid in your office willing to say he brought in the business and handled the client all by himself.” Safire predicted the first lady’s imminent indictment.

What really made the story take off, however, was White House aide Carolyn Huber’s belated discovery of missing Rose Law Firm billing records that had been under subpoena by the OIC. The time sheets had been used by the 1992 Clinton campaign to respond to reporters’ questions, and then disappeared. For weeks, Republicans on the Senate Whitewater committee had spoken darkly of obstruction of justice. On January 4, 1996, Huber found the missing documents in a box in her office at the Old Executive Office Building. She called the Clintons’ lawyer, David Kendall, who immediately made copies and sent the originals to Kenneth Starr. Actually, the documents Huber found weren’t themselves originals, but photocopies of computer printouts made in 1992. Nobody who wanted to hide them could have any way of knowing how many additional copies might be floating around. Nor was Mrs. Huber, an Arkansas loyalist who supervised the Clintons’ personal correspondence, certain where she had found the documents, at least according to Kendall.

In her subsequent Senate testimony, however, the former office manager at the Rose Law Firm was unequivocal. Huber recalled coming upon the time sheets in August 1995 in the “book room” on the third floor of the White House, inside the Clintons’ private quarters. Without looking to see what they were, she had stuck them in a box and taken them to her office for later filing. Then in January 1996, she had opened the box and gotten scared.

How she could be sure they were the same papers without having examined them in the first place was never clear. Putting the 1992 campaign records in order and storing them was one of Huber’s secondary tasks at the White House. Kendall later testified that when Huber first contacted him, “She said a number of different things that were inconsistent. She was flustered. She was upset. Her hands were shaking. She said that she had brought the documents over from the residence at some earlier point. She said she thought it was maybe three months ago. A little while later in the conversation, she referred to bringing them over ten months ago. She was very confused about the timing … She was unclear about where she had found them … Her stories were extremely vague.” Kendall’s co-counsel Jane Sherburne remembered the same thing. But the lawyers hadn’t pressed Huber on the issue because they didn’t want to be accused of trying to influence her testimony.

Here at last was a dramatic Whitewater event that even the dullest voter could grasp. Kenneth Starr lost no time hauling the first lady before a Washington grand jury in the most public manner possible, prompting press commentary about a “smoking gun.” The irrepressible Safire predictably saw Nixonian skullduggery: “Can you imagine the sinking feeling in the ‘Someone,’ when he or she came back to the Book Room and found the records gone?” Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff went further. “The printouts were covered with the late Vince Foster’s handwriting,” he wrote, continuing, “it is Foster’s suicide that lends Whitewater its aura of menace.”

Hillary Clinton emerged from Starr’s grand jury to say that she had no idea where the billing records had come from, but was glad they had turned up — perhaps because they provided only exculpatory evidence. Along with Vince Foster’s handwriting, FBI fingerprint analysts found his fingerprints, as well as those of the first lady. Hers were found only on those pages dealing with issues discussed during the 1992 campaign — but not on topics of more recent interest, such as the ill-fated McDougal real estate development and shopping center known as “Castle Grande.” All the forensic evidence suggested that the billing records had in fact been misplaced ever since the 1992 election.

The records’ contents also supported Hillary’s testimony and public statements in detail. In her sworn statements to RTC investigators, she had recalled only a single phone conversation with Securities Commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer regarding the Madison Guaranty preferred stock issue. The records showed exactly one, on April 29, 1985.

Asked whether she had done any work on McDougal’s “Castle Grande” development, she had replied no. Republicans charged that an unused 1985 real estate document she had prepared for Webb Hubbell’s father-in-law contradicted her. But the billing records, like all internal Rose Law Firm documents, referred to that transaction not as Castle Grande but as “the IDC matter.”

A small part of a large parcel of land Madison Guaranty bought from a company called the Industrial Development Corporation later became known as “Castle Grande” — but not the part described in the document Hillary Clinton had prepared. Her answer was accurate. After studying the newly found billing records, the investigators at Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro came back with an even stronger conclusion that nobody at the Rose Law Firm had done anything unethical or illegal in their representation of McDougal’s savings and loan. Regarding the unused real estate contract, the report stipulated that “while Mrs. Clinton drafted the May 1, 1986, option, nothing proves she did so knowing it to be wrong, the circumstances of the work point strongly toward innocent explanations, and the theories that tie this option to wrongdoing … are strained at best.”

Starr’s investigators would spend years seeking evidence to the contrary, with no success.

In January 1996, however, such exculpatory facts received no attention in the press. To hype their excerpt from James B. Stewart’s forthcoming Whitewater book “Blood Sport,” the editors of Time magazine ran a cover photo of the first lady that looked like a post office “Wanted” poster. Time columnist Richard Stengel opined that “Hillary Rodham Clinton now faces a crisis that even the most artful public relations may not be able to fix.” Stengel predicted that the stage was set for high drama at the Whitewater hearings. “Mrs. Clinton has stated that the lion’s share of the work on Madison was done by a ‘bright young associate’ named Richard Massey. Mrs. Clinton also implied in a sworn statement to the RTC in May 1995 that Massey brought Madison’s business to the firm. Committee sources tell Time that Massey will testify this week that he did not bring Madison in as a client, and that he assumed Mrs. Clinton was involved.”

And in the New York Times, William Safire advised the president that the time had come to hire himself a separate criminal defense lawyer, because his wife was going to jail.

All such expectations were dashed when the first lady’s soft-spoken, balding former partner Rick Massey appeared before the D’Amato committee on January 11. Not only did Massey fail to contradict Hillary’s testimony; any tighter fit between their recollections would have been suspect. As a twenty-six-year-old associate at the Rose Law Firm, Massey said, he had taught a night course in securities law at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. Among those enrolled was a Madison Guaranty officer named John Latham, whom Massey had known in college. During the semester, Latham began staying after class to ask Massey’s advice about raising new capital for the thrift.

“I should say for the record,” Massey testified, “that I asked him to lunch one day and I pitched the business, asked for their work. They were a growing S&L. We liked working for companies like that, so I pitched the work … I think the pitch was basically, ‘Gee, you’re asking me all these questions. Why don’t you hire us and put us to work on these things?’”

The only problem had been Jim McDougal’s tardiness in paying the bills for legal work that the Rose firm had done for him several years earlier. Certain partners objected to taking him on as a client again without a prepaid retainer. So the firm had sent Hillary Clinton to meet with McDougal on April 23, 1985, to see whether such an arrangement could be made. Madison Guaranty agreed to a $2,000 per month advance against billings, and the work arrived on Rick Massey’s desk the next day. What Massey had been unable to remember, eleven years after the fact, was whether he had first approached Hillary about taking up the payment issue with McDougal, or whether she had approached him — a question of no consequence. Such was the pretext upon which deputy independent counsel Ewing proposed to indict the first lady of the United States for perjury.

As to who had done all the work on the preferred stock matter, Massey was unequivocal. Based upon his review of the billing records, he told Senator Connie Mack of Florida that “these were primarily one-man jobs, and I did primarily all of the research, writing, drafting, and so forth. Mrs. Clinton had a role in these matters. I view it as a supervisory role. In terms of who was in the trenches and doing the work, Senator, it was me.”

Concerning the preferred stock deal itself, the allegedly illicit transaction the New York Times had placed at the center of the “scandal,” Massey’s explanation was simple. As Arkansas state officials had tried to show reporter Jeff Gerth four years earlier, the idea of selling stock in thrift institutions was first proposed by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. “Sir, there is no better form of capital than cash,” said Massey, “and we were trying to raise cash for the institution.”

Not much of this was conveyed by the same journalists who had failed to notice L. Jean Lewis’s fainting spell. “AT WHITEWATER SESSION, A STRUGGLE TO RECALL,” read the headline in the New York Times. “In five hours of testimony before the Senate Whitewater committee,” wrote Stephen Labaton, “a lawyer for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s law firm said today that he could not remember events of 11 years ago clearly enough to support the First Lady’s account of how the firm came to represent a troubled Arkansas savings and loan association.” The Times account did mention Massey’s luncheon pitch to his college friend, but concluded by pointing the finger of suspicion back at an implicitly corrupt bargain between Jim McDougal and Bill Clinton to funnel cash into Hillary’s pocket.

A similar account appeared in the Washington Post under the byline of Susan Schmidt. Massey, she wrote, testified “that he does not believe that he was responsible for signing up Madison as a client, as [Mrs. Clinton] has asserted … .She has said Massey came to her with a proposal for a stock plan to help Madison raise capital after meeting with Madison president John Latham. She said he asked her to work as the firm’s billing partner and work with James B. McDougal, the S&L’s owner, to resolve a past billing dispute Rose had with him. “I don’t believe it happened that way,” Massey said.

When investigators for Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro issued their final report on February 25, they concluded that the minor discrepancies between the recollections of Rick Massey and Hillary Clinton weren’t worth quibbling over. Moreover, “the purported recollections of Jim McDougal are inconsistent with those of the others and upon analysis make little sense.” Contrary to McDougal’s story, the retainer agreement didn’t begin until work on the preferred stock issue started — almost a year after the purported “jogging” incident. “Most significantly,” the report concluded, “the alleged economic motivation makes no sense … There is no evidence that the Clintons ever received anything like $2,000 a month from this engagement, and every reason to believe that they never received more than a trivial sum of money … Even if all the retainer had been earned in fees, Mrs. Clinton’s share would have been less than $20 a month.”

On the evening of Massey’s testimony, “Nightline” aired key portions that made its real import clear. This time Ted Koppel made a point of emphasizing that few, if any, of Senator D’Amato’s dire predictions had turned out to be accurate. On Saturday, January 13, the New York Times ran an “Editor’s Note” stipulating that Stephen Labaton’s story on Massey’s appearance “should have included testimony that seemed to support” Hillary Clinton — a halting clarification, but a clarification all the same.

The manifest failure of the monthlong assault on Hillary Clinton to yield evidence of wrongdoing was not ignored everywhere. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis became the first important voice at his newspaper to break ranks. “Three years and innumerable investigations later,” he wrote on January 15, “Mrs. Clinton has not been shown to have done anything wrong in Whitewater. One charge after another has evaporated.”

Lewis compared D’Amato’s performance to that of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy during the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the fifties. But Lewis noted one major difference. “On Whitewater, the press too often seems an eager accomplice of the accusers … Some of the coverage of Whitewater reads as if the reporters or editors were committed to finding something wrong — as if they had an investment in the story.”

: 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
: 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