Politics tends to cause even the most lofty principles to sink to their lowest level, and recently the historic contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- the first woman and black man to be serious contenders for the presidency -- is starting to resemble a compulsory oppressed minorities course taught by political consultants.
Until a week or so ago, neither Obama nor Clinton played up identity politics. But predictably, as soon as one candidate was threatened with defeat, the gender and race cards began to fly.After Obama won Iowa, the woman-victim vs. black-victim game was on.
It's a surreal and depressing spectacle. The opponents in the race find themselves hunkered down inside two clanking tanks, one marked "Black" and one marked "Woman." Since both the candidates and their supporters hold progressive views on these matters and know that a misstep would be fatal, the two tanks must fight each other according to Marquis of Queensbury rules, while still trying to blow each other up. Obama supporters accuse Clinton of racial insensitivity for saying that Martin Luther King Jr. needed LBJ to implement his policies, and blast Clinton mouthpieces for using the expression "shuck and jive." Women react to Obama and John Edwards ganging up on Clinton in a debate, or a few media loudmouths writing her off, as if an army of heavily armed male chauvinist pigs had stormed Wellesley. The fight resembles a dispute in a Subaltern Studies Department, one of those academic disputes of whom some wag once remarked that they were so vicious because the stakes were so small.
Except, of course, that here the stakes are huge. If things go on this way, the nomination could be determined by whether there are more white men drawn to Obama's racial get-out-of-jail-free card than women who will support Clinton because they share her gender. Which would be a shame. With our country disunited after seven years of Bush, facing a recession, and mired in a disastrous war, we need the Democratic Party to unite to elect the best candidate, not just the the Great Female Hope or the Great Black Hope.
The feminist icon Gloria Steinem fired an early salvo in the war, with a widely discussed Op-Ed in the New York Times. It's worth looking in some depth at Steinem's argument, because it epitomizes the mainstream feminist defense of Clinton. Asserting that what she called America's "sexual caste system" remains in place, Steinem argued that "[g]ender is probably the most restricting force in American life." To support that claim, she noted that black men were given the right to vote a half-century before women were, and asserted that black men "generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women." Moreover, she claimed that no woman with Obama's résumé could run for president.
Decrying the fact that "[Obama] is seen as unifying by his race while [Clinton] is seen as divisive by her sex," Steinem cited a number of examples of alleged sexism in the responses to Obama's and Clinton's candidacies. She said that Clinton was "accused of 'playing the gender card' when citing the old boys' club, while [Obama] is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations," and that "male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn't."
In effect, Steinem was arguing that sexism trumps racism as a national concern and backing that up by claiming that women in America have fewer options than black men. But this claim is flawed, as a simple thought experiment shows. Would you rather be born in the U.S. today as a white woman (to choose the most privileged subset of Steinem's "restricted" caste) or as a black man? Few would choose to be black. More white women are not in prison than in college, thousands of young white women are not shot down on inner-city streets every year, few if any white women have ever been arrested for driving while female, and so on. Steinem's historical arguments are unconvincing because they aren't up to date: She ignores the exponential advances made by white women and the failure of black men to keep pace. Leaving aside her omission of Jim Crow laws, and no matter how many black men may have made it into boardrooms before women (and there weren't too many), it was never better to be a black man than a white woman at any time in U.S. history.
If we compare only middle-class black men to middle-class white women, Steinem's thesis gets a little stronger -- but not much. There is no way to quantify these things, of course, but I would argue that middle-class black men still suffer from the legacy of slavery and racial bigotry far more than middle-class white women suffer from sexism. Only if we compare wealthy black men to poor white women does Steinem's argument ring true.
Some critics of Steinem's piece have argued that racism and sexism can't be compared because they're apples and oranges, and that she's inciting conflict between two victimized groups and two worthy candidates. But that's evasive. Steinem had every right to make the comparison -- she was just wrong.
This doesn't mean that Democrats should vote for Obama instead of Clinton, however. The presidential race should not be decided solely on the basis of competing victimhoods. But neither does it mean that the issues shouldn't be raised. Voters choosing between the two should look closely at the race-gender issue, examine how the candidates are dealing with it, and decide whether in their view it would be better for the country if Obama or Clinton became president. But their race or gender should only be one factor in their decision: A figurehead, albeit a powerful one, will not necessarily advance women's rights or race relations.
What this dust-up is really all about is politics -- in particular, Obama's racial teflon. It's hard to believe that Steinem really believes that women are worse off than black men (which is what saying they are more "restricted" really means). Her real animus seems to be the same thing that drives Clinton supporters crazy: that the black Obama is treated with reverence, while the female Clinton is fodder for gossip, penny-ante psychoanalyzing, schadenfreude, projection and every other high- and low-class reaction under the patriarchal sun. To Steinem, this proves that sexism is a more pernicious force in American society than racism.
Steinem's right that gender clichés and biases play a role in the criticism directed against Clinton. And she's also right that Obama has gotten a free pass because of his race. But she draws the wrong conclusions from these things.
First, she ignores the fact that the biggest problem many Democrats have with Clinton is not the fact that she's a woman, but that she voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Had Clinton not voted for the Iraq war (and let's be real, that's what that vote meant), she would be a shoo-in. In fact, it is widely believed that Clinton cast her fateful vote because she calculated that, being a woman, she needed to appear even more "tough on national security" than her male Democratic colleagues (most of whom, of course, also voted for the war).
This casts the whole gender-bias issue in a much more complex light. It isn't Democrats who are troubled by Clinton being a woman -- it was Clinton who was worried by what she perceived to be the political baggage that came with her gender. For those of us sympathetic to Clinton, this is painfully ironic. In fact, I suspect that many Democratic voters who are on the fence -- and I count myself in that camp, and haven't written Edwards off either -- are prepared to consider supporting Clinton despite her Iraq vote because they believe that didn't really support the war, but felt she had to make up for her perceived "weakness" as a woman by voting for it. These voters hope that if elected she will tear off the tough-guy mask and emerge as who she really is. In other words, the hope that Clinton is actually a stealth "woman" -- that is, not addicted to military solutions and favoring diplomacy -- is the best thing she has going for her now.
Of course, there's a reason Clinton felt she had to act tough (or "male"), and that reason is the sexist cliché that women are too soft to lead a nation, especially during a time of war. But that cliché may be less powerful than many think -- and in any case, Clinton didn't have to go along with it. By aiming at the general election, she played it unnecessarily safe. A 2007 Pew Poll found that although a significant gender gap in support for female candidates still exists, Democrats -- men and women alike -- are prepared to vote for qualified female candidates. Indeed, in 40 Senate and gubernatorial races since 1998, female Democrats got 4 percent more votes than male Democrats when both were running against male Republicans. And a 2007 Gallup poll found that 88 percent of Americans said they would vote for a well-qualified woman candidate for president. Clinton didn't need to tilt so far to the masculine right.
Steinem also draws the wrong conclusions from Obama's free pass by the media. The fact that Obama is being treated with kid gloves shows not that racism is less potent than sexism, but that racism remains a much more radioactive force in American society. Politeness is a sign of ignorance, distance and fear. The mostly white commentariat feels freer to attack Clinton, a white woman, than it does Obama in part because he doesn't have as long a track record, but mostly because most white people dread being perceived as racist. It's good that white people don't want to be seen as racist, but their wariness about criticizing him shows that America still has a long way to go.
Obama himself has avoided tangling with the media by running on an inspirational message of hope and unity. But that message, as his critics point out, can veer into the ethereal. Obama is caught in a dilemma similar to that Clinton faces, but he has even less room to maneuver. If he gets tough, he risks being seen as "too black," a perception that would doom his bid; if he floats above the fray, he invites criticism as being a fairy tale, all style and no substance.
Obama is not going to change his lofty message until he gets into the White House, if he does -- because doing so is too risky. But it would be healthier for race relations if he did. Symbolic absolution is good, but getting down and dirty is better. Indeed, one of the best things about an Obama presidency would be that it would usher in an era in which blacks and whites would be forced to drop the politeness act and get real. You don't have equality until everyone gets their fair share of abuse. One of Vince Lombardi's black players once said, "He treats us all alike -- like dogs." This is a desirable state.
It's easy to forget that one of the reasons Clinton is casually embraced and denounced, and kicked around like an old shoe over the water cooler, is because Americans feel comfortable enough with women to use the familiar mode of address with them. The powerful positive and negative reactions to Clinton are the result of a dozen different things -- personal antipathy or affection, anger over her vote for the war, belief that she's a more experienced candidate, celebrity fixation, weariness with the Clinton era, nostalgia for the Clinton era, the desire to elect a woman, and so on. Of course, sexism plays a role, too. There are plenty of social conservatives who are still fighting modernity, plenty of resentful reactionaries who find it improper or unseemly that any woman should run for president, or indeed hold any position of power, and who disguise their unreconstructed sexism by disingenuously claiming that they think it's only Clinton who is a castrating bitch, or whatever other ugly psychosexual epithet they pull out of the muck of their ids. But these troglodytes are a small minority.
And even when Clinton's "womanliness" or "authenticity" or "coldness" or "ambition" are dissected in the press, it's too facile to assume this scrutiny always reflects sexism. We live in a world of personal judgments on public figures, and gender is a deeply personal issue. We all psychoanalyze candidates all the time; from Nixon to Reagan to Carter to Bush, we tear presidents apart and put them back together like cheap toy cars. Nor do media pile-ons necessarily indicate sexism -- remember what happened to Al Gore? When you run for president, you're going to be judged by an audience of Jerry Springers. Clinton is not Everywoman: She is a unique individual, one who is married to a president irrationally despised by millions of people, and one who has been part of a long-running national soap opera. A different female candidate would not be subjected to the flak that she rightly or wrongly attracts.
Matthew Yglesias has argued that black candidates have an advantage over women candidates because "it's possible for any individual African-American to 'transcend' [negative] stereotypes by simply not living up to them," while women candidates are trapped in a can't-win situation: "A woman who's seen as possessing the stereotypical characteristics of femininity won't do well in presidential politics. But a woman who's seen as lacking those characteristics will be penalized as well." It's the familiar "damned if they do and damned if they don't" argument.
There's some truth to this, but I question whether the gender- codes line that women have to walk is really so impossibly narrow. For one thing, it's no longer quite so clear just what the "stereotypical characteristics of femininity" really are. Let's suppose that Hillary Clinton was running for president, with two things magically changed: She was married to some innocuous businessman named Bill Clinton, and had never voted for the war. I would argue that most of the criticism, psychosexual speculation, excessive animus and general weirdness that follows her around would simply not exist. Take away her familial and political baggage and Hillary Clinton would fall well within the range of electability: She wouldn't come across as too ambitious or too coldblooded, too butch or too femme. To appropriate Obama's ungracious words and use them in a more appropriate context, she's likable enough to be elected president. You don't have to be some paradoxical female Superwoman to be elected president of the United States.
But if Clinton is caught in the damned-if-she-does, damned-if-she-doesn't trap, Obama is caught in a similar, even more extreme one. He has a bigger head start because of racial guilt, but a bigger downside because of racial fear. His tightrope is higher up, but it's a longer fall. Since he cannot get too confrontational without triggering white racial guilt and fear, he has to remain somewhat amorphous. And to pull that off he has to be consistently inspiring -- not an easy task.
Moreover, Clinton also has her own potent gender cards to play. Just as Clinton supporters could only fume as the media anointed Obama as the new unifier after Iowa, Obama supporters could only curse as Clinton garnered massive publicity and female sympathy by showing a little emotion in New Hampshire. I'll see your beyond-race hoo-ha and raise you a moist-eyed moment, fairy-tale man!
In the end, the race and gender cards may cancel each other out, and voters may make their decision based on more than just the accidents of gender and race. But things could get a lot uglier before that happens. And if they do, the only one cheering will be John McCain.
It's nice of the State Department to provide the public with transcripts of all the public remarks made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It'd be even better if the transcripts gave any idea of what Clinton actually said.
That wasn't the case with one that State released earlier this week, of comments Clinton made at the Amsterdam News Educational Fund's 100th Anniversary Gala. And the result ended up -- unintentionally, no doubt -- being pretty funny.
Since the time when an alert reader sent me the transcript a couple days ago, someone at State evidently had the good sense to pull it down from the department's Web site. But through the magic of LexisNexis and Google's cache, it lives on. Here it is, unedited and in full:
Nick, thank you so much. Thank you (inaudible) to Michelle (ph) and everyone who could be gathered at this wonderful event. (Inaudible) I’m just happy to (inaudible). (Applause.) Being with so many friends, with so many people, (inaudible) so grateful. And this is why I am so grateful. I am delighted to have you with us (inaudible) in celebrating the Amsterdam News and helping it to raise money for digitizing its records. This is one of the great archives (inaudible). (Applause.)
(Inaudible) here as well. Susan and Bill Tataum, (inaudible) all these wonderful (inaudible) and in their home, visiting Bill (inaudible) and speak with him. And like everyone here tonight who (inaudible), I was a recipient of all the (inaudible) and I feel better for it. I also know (inaudible).
(Inaudible) one of the most thoughtful, provocative, (inaudible) experiences that I ever had. (Inaudible) and I will always remember Bill’s (inaudible) and energy (inaudible). I also want to just say I think I (inaudible) with a lot of my friends (inaudible) and especially (inaudible). (Applause.)
(Inaudible) be there for you when (inaudible) that you so well deserve because (inaudible). (Applause.) (Inaudible) to raise money for a worthy cause and it’s a night of (inaudible) of American history. (Inaudible) and it’s especially exciting to be here to celebrate the 100th anniversary. Now, recently in Russia where journalists are harassed and (inaudible), in China where bloggers and internet (inaudible) face evermore (inaudible) censorship. And I’ve met with writers who’ve been (inaudible). They (inaudible) sit up and take notice and change their ways forever. (Inaudible) proud.
Thanks (inaudible). (Applause.)
On Thursday, Time Magazine gave the world its first glimpse of "The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory," the forthcoming book written by David Plouffe, President Obama's campaign manager. The whole thing should be read with a somewhat skeptical eye -- this is no bitter tell-all, but the account of someone still very much on the inside. But Plouffe did let the mask slip a little when it came to discussing how Joe Biden was chosen as Obama's running mate:
What surprised me at [our first meeting to discuss the vice presidency] was that Obama was clearly thinking more seriously about picking Hillary Clinton than Ax and I had realized .... At our next meeting, we narrowed the list down to six. Barack continued to be intrigued by Hillary. "I still think Hillary has a lot of what I am looking for in a VP," he said to us. "Smarts, discipline, steadfastness. I think Bill may be too big a complication. If I picked her, my concern is that there would be more than two of us in the relationship." ....
Shortly before he took off for Hawaii and his much needed vacation, Obama asked Axelrod and me to meet with the three finalists. [We] pieced together a schedule that had us departing Chicago at 5:30 a.m. for Wilmington, Del., to meet with Biden; then on to West Virginia, where Bayh was vacationing with his family; and then to Virginia to meet with Kaine.
The [first] meeting started with Biden launching into a nearly 20-minute monologue that ranged from the strength of our campaign in Iowa ("I literally wouldn't have run if I knew the steamroller you guys would put together"); to his evolving views of Obama ("I wasn't sure about him in the beginning of the campaign, but I am now"); why he didn't want to be VP ("The last thing I should do is VP; after 36 years of being the top dog, it will be hard to be No. 2"); why he was a good choice ("But I would be a good soldier and could provide real value, domestically and internationally"); and everything else under the sun. Ax and I couldn't get a word in edgewise.
It confirmed what we suspected: this dog could not be taught new tricks. But the conversation also confirmed our positive assumptions: his firm grasp of issues, his blue collar sensibilities and the fact that while he would readily accept the VP slot if offered, he was not pining for it.
A car bomb tore through a market popular with women in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing 86 people hours after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in the country to show American support for its campaign against Islamist militants.
More than 200 people were wounded in the blast in the main northwestern city of Peshawar, the deadliest in a surge of attacks this month. The government blamed militants seeking to avenge an army offensive launched this month against al-Qaida and Taliban in their stronghold close to the Afghan border.
The blast hit a market selling bangles, dresses and toys in an old part of town crisscrossed with narrow alleys. It set scores of shops on fire, collapsed buildings, including a mosque, and sent a cloud of gray smoke over the city. TV footage showed wounded people sitting amid the debris as people grabbed at the wreckage, trying to pull out survivors before carrying them to a hospital.
One two-story building collapsed as firefighters doused it with water.
Clinton, on her first visit to Pakistan as secretary of state, was three hours' drive away in the capital, Islamabad, when the blast took place. Speaking to reporters, she praised the army's anti-Taliban offensive in South Waziristan and offered U.S. support.
"I want you to know that this fight is not Pakistan's alone," she said in remarks carried live on Pakistani news channels. "This is our struggle as well."
Sahib Gul, a doctor at a nearby hospital, said 86 people were killed and more than 200 injured. Many of the victims were women and children.
No group claimed responsibility for the bombing, but that is not unusual, especially when the victims are Pakistani civilians.
Three bombs have exploded in Peshawar this month, including another one that killed more than 50 people, part of a barrage of at least 10 major attacks across the country that have killed some 250 people. Most have targeted security forces, but some bombs have gone off in public places, apparently to sow fear and expose the weakness of the government.
The Taliban have warned Pakistan that they would stage more attacks if the army does not end a new ground offensive in the South Waziristan tribal region, where the military has dispatched some 30,000 troops to flush out insurgents. South Waziristan is a major base for the Pakistani Taliban and other foreign militants.
North West Frontier Province Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain blamed the militants for Wednesday's attack.
"We are hitting them at their center of terrorism, and they are hitting back targeting Peshawar," he said. "This is a tough time for us. We are picking up the bodies of our women and children, but we will follow these terrorists and eliminate them."
"Better late than never" isn't always true, but public candor from people and institutions that have misled us for many years can be refreshing -- and sometimes even liberating.
Prodded by recent events -- including publication of "The Clinton Tapes," historian Taylor Branch's fascinating account of his contemporaneous private conversations with President Bill Clinton; the unwholesome reappearance of healthcare reform nemesis Betsy McCaughey; and perhaps even the death of retired New York Times Op-Ed columnist William Safire -- certain media myth-makers of the Clinton era have suddenly uttered startling acknowledgments and even a grudging confession or two.
At this late date, it is scarcely radical to suggest that Whitewater and all the other "scandals" deployed by the Washington press corps to besiege the Clinton White House (before the Lewinsky affair) were without substance. In the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, which created and promoted those stories, even such media mandarins as Thomas Friedman and Evan Thomas now casually assure us that they were overblown, even "bogus." And former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan today admits that the famous takedown of the Clinton healthcare reforms he published in 1994, Betsy McCaughey's "No Exit," was essentially a fake too.
Belated as those affirmations are, by more than a decade, they may still matter -- if only because they arrive at a time when the mainstream media is just beginning to descend into some of the same bad habits that plagued us during the last Democratic presidency and the far right is already talking impeachment.
Let us start with Friedman, who wrote a column on Sept. 30 bemoaning the diseased condition of political discourse in America and tracing the dangerous pathology back to its origin. "The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater 'scandal,'" he wrote. Presumably he used those scare quotes to suggest just how fraudulent the whole business was, as if "bogus" didn't quite do it -- and true enough, as far as it goes.
But it doesn't go far enough, because as Friedman knows very well, the right was not alone in hounding the Clintons -- and wouldn't have achieved traction without the journalistic assistance and moral support provided by the Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, the New Republic and the rest of Washington's press establishment, followed slavishly by their intellectual imitators on network and cable television.
Back then Friedman's own Times Op-Ed column rarely mentioned Whitewater or the Clinton scandals, but he remained agreeably silent while the most avid perpetrators of scandal nonsense, such as the late Safire and Maureen Dowd, transformed the paper of record into a megaphone for the president's adversaries. Unlike Anthony Lewis, who bravely argued with the harshly negative Times party line on Clinton and the scandals, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent never wrote a word that could be construed as dissent. (Bob Somerby performed the Nexis search and offers much more on this subject in his trenchant Daily Howler commentaries.) Coming from him, "bogus" should be taken as a verdict not only on the scandals but on the scandal-mongering in the news, opinion and editorial columns of his newspaper -- and on his own failure to speak up when that might have made a difference.
Still, it is bracing to see that pithy epithet applied to the works of Kenneth Starr and the journalists who served as his lackeys in the Times' own pages. By comparison, Evan Thomas sounded squishy in his own recent belittling of the scandals, when he reviewed "The Clinton Tapes" for the Washington Post -- but then he has considerably more to answer for than Friedman.
Although he was trying no doubt to sound magisterial rather than mealy-mouthed, Thomas was unable to discuss past disgraces in any but the most indirect and evasive terms. Consider this passage, which follows a flip reference to Clinton's moaning and ranting in self-pity as he coped with the hostile press corps:
"Today, when the mainstream media seems so weakened, we forget how powerful -- and arrogant -- the New York Times and The Washington Post, along with the networks and news magazines, seemed to be in the early and mid-1990s. They were part of a giant scandal machine that dominated official Washington in the first few years after the Cold War. The endless string of special prosecutors and the media's obsession with Whitewater seem excessive in retrospect."
To some of us the obsession seemed excessive at the time, of course, which only enraged the likes of Thomas whenever we said so. (And isn't an obsession excessive by definition?) The true obsession among reporters was not the boring Whitewater land deal, as Thomas notes, but the "rumors of 'bimbo eruptions' floated by political enemies and less-than-reliable state troopers." Is he confessing his own fixation on Clinton's private life or merely recalling the unwholesome preoccupations of his colleagues?
Like all of them, Thomas certainly pretended to care about Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and all those other forgettable tall tales. What is remarkable now, however, is how smoothly he attempts to dissociate himself from the relentless scandal machine that he actually helped to operate. (Among his signed pieces, Thomas himself once wrote a fawning apology to Paula Jones that looks even sillier today than at the time he published it.) To put it bluntly, he served as a top editor at Newsweek when that periodical was Kenneth Starr's most favored outlet.
A low point was the magazine's December 1996 cover story, which dramatically featured the prosecutor's promise to "deliver" justice in five scandals supposedly percolating in the Clinton White House. With the "extraordinary access" provided by Starr, Newsweek declared breathlessly that within the coming months he would "decide whether to bring indictments that could very possibly alter the course of Bill Clinton's second term." A helpful sidebar on potential criminal acts attributed to the Clintons and their aides accompanied the exclusive Starr interview.
What Starr actually delivered, only eight weeks later, was his own resignation as special prosecutor -- to take a deanship at Pepperdine University (financed by Clinton nemesis Richard Mellon Scaife) in a deal that he had been negotiating for months. He had nothing, but he punked the Newsweek boys. (Under intense pressure from the right, notably the late William Safire writing in the New York Times, Starr quickly withdrew his resignation and continued as independent counsel until 1999.)
Finally there is Andrew Sullivan, whose disservices to journalism as editor of the New Republic were many and varied in the Clinton years, vicious in personal tone and ersatz in journalistic content. In April 1994, for instance, he published a highbrow version of "The Clinton Chronicles" titled "The Name of Rose," which portrayed Arkansas government as a third-world-style criminal enterprise directed by the Clintons with the connivance of the Rose Law Firm, Stephens Inc. and a supporting cast of shadowy, sinister Pakistanis and Indonesians. It was all nonsense but it played well in Washington's scandal culture -- and it gave respectable license to the Republican right's crusade to vilify the Clintons.
For Sullivan the high point of Clinton-bashing came with the publication of "No Exit," McCaughey's takedown of the new administration's healthcare reform proposals. Lately McCaughey has popped up again as the source of the fraudulent "death panel" allegations against President Obama's healthcare reform plan -- and that in turn has revived scrutiny of the myriad inaccuracies and blatant falsehoods in her 1994 New Republic article (which the magazine's editors have disowned).
Having boasted proudly that by publishing McCaughey he helped to destroy the Clinton plan, and having accepted a National Magazine Award for doing so, Sullivan now says he is sorry about all that. He professes to take "full responsibility" for publishing an article that he knew to be false in its particulars and its broader argument -- but, in fact, smarmily seeks to blame someone higher up (in addition to McCaughey herself) who supposedly forced him to run the piece. That would have to be Martin Peretz, who then owned the New Republic and advertised himself as "editor in chief."
If what Sullivan says is true, then the least he and Peretz should do is return the National Magazine Award, for the sake of the journalists and editors who have honestly earned that prize. That gesture might restore a semblance of sanity to the debate over healthcare.
As for the responsible parties at the Times, the Post, Newsweek and all the others, like Friedman and Thomas, who feel residual guilt over the Clinton scandals, there is still time to confront the past honestly. Fessing up is hard to do. But at a moment when the New York Times and the Washington Post again seem eager to grovel to the far right, it is worth recalling where that same impulse led during the Clinton years.
Wearily familiar as he is with the "vast right-wing conspiracy," Bill Clinton says the network that sought to destroy him and his wife, Hillary, remains malignant as ever, yet lacks the might of a decade ago. "It's not as strong as it was, because America's changed," he told David Gregory on "Meet the Press." "But it's as virulent as it was."
Whether Clinton is correct about the current condition of his old adversaries can best be measured by the passage or wreckage of healthcare reform and the outcome of next year's congressional midterm elections -- the same early milestones that marked the beginning of Clinton's tumultuous White House tenure. Perhaps Barack Obama will be saved by political demography and decent intentions, as the former president tried to assure Gregory; perhaps he and his administration will prove less vulnerable to intrigue and propaganda and less flawed than their predecessors.
What Obama should anticipate -- indeed, what he is already encountering -- is a cascade of slurs, threats and rhetorical violence that reanimates all of the worst themes of the bad old days. That wave will inevitably damage the president and his hopes for change, even if the majority of Americans is less receptive to right-wing messages than they once were. The greasy machinery once used to grind Clinton down has grown larger and more sophisticated by orders of magnitude, from Fox News Channel (which did not exist during his first term) to all of the conservative digital outlets that enable echoing and organizing on a truly vast scale.
The negative mythologizing of Obama bears a remarkable resemblance in tone and style if not precisely in content to the attacks on Clinton. "It's like when they accused me of murder, and all that stuff they did," said the former president -- presumably a reference to the wilder fantasies circulated in conservative publications about Obama, from the forged Kenyan birth certificates to the president's supposed plans to inflict corruption, homosexual radicals and Muslim jihad on innocent Americans. While some of the current themes mimic those deployed against Clinton, there are generational differences and the obvious fact that Obama is not just notionally "the first black president." That status evokes a special animus on the far right, of course -- although Clinton at least had earned the lifelong hatred of his most dedicated enemy, "Justice Jim" Johnson of Arkansas, for fighting segregation and racism in Arkansas.
Back when videotapes still had to be circulated by mail order, the Clinton-hunters did a brisk business with "The Clinton Chronicles," a "documentary" alleging that as governor of Arkansas he oversaw an enormous, unchecked racketeering enterprise that encompassed international bank fraud, cocaine smuggling and multiple murders, facilitated by a kind of backwoods dictatorship. Nothing resembling that remarkable work of extremist art, once promoted by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, has appeared so far in the crusade against Obama -- but that doesn't mean nothing is in the works. Many of the same organizations and operatives behind the original Clinton smears are still active and some have amassed considerable wealth and influence over the intervening decade.
The signs of a resurgent right-wing smear industry, and the role that would be played by the old VRWC in the Obama era, first became clear toward the end of last year's historic election. Suddenly in the final months of the campaign, long after conservatives had despaired of another Swift-boat triumph, a curious outfit called the National Republican Trust PAC emerged from the shadows with two exceptionally nasty independent commercials -- and millions of dollars to spend airing them. Between the end of September and Election Day, the mysterious NRT PAC raised and spent enough money to qualify as the single largest non-party purchaser of airtime in the 2008 election.
Using a photo of Mohammed Atta, the first NRT ad connected Obama to the 9/11 hijackers with the false claim that he wanted to permit illegal immigrants to get drivers licenses. FactCheck.org described that ad as "one of the sleaziest false TV ads of the campaign." The second ad attempted to remind voters about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor at the Chicago church where the Obama family worshiped, whose black nationalist sermons caused them to break with him during the presidential campaign. The script criticized Obama for failing to protest Wright's sermons sooner and warned that the Democrat was "too radical" and "too risky."
These blunt instruments of political warfare were less interesting than their creators. The executive director of NRT PAC, responsible for the production of those ads, was Scott Wheeler -- who had worked, years before, on the making of "The Clinton Chronicles," according to reporter Murray Waas. Behind Wheeler was the mastermind of the NRT PAC and one of the central figures in the anti-Clinton network of the '90s: Christopher Ruddy.
Now editor and publisher of Newsmax, the enormously successful right-wing magazine and Web site, Ruddy was the journalist who spun the most fanciful theories about the death of Clinton White House lawyer Vince Foster. Working at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, owned by billionaire and avowed Clinton foe Richard Mellon Scaife, Ruddy popularized the canard that Foster had not committed suicide, as determined by five official investigations, but more likely had been murdered -- possibly to cover up corruption in the Whitewater land deal or because of an illicit affair with Hillary Rodham Clinton or both.
Beyond spreading paranoia about the Foster tragedy, Ruddy and Scaife both played central roles in the distribution of nearly half a million copies of "The Clinton Chronicles" and other covert machinations against the Clinton White House –- most notably the "Arkansas Project," a $2.4 million scheme to dig up or invent crimes by the president and first lady, with assistance from several unsavory characters, including die-hard segregationist Jim Johnson, a couple of private detectives and a bait-shop owner.
Ten years later, life has changed for Ruddy and Scaife. They're partners in Newsmax, based in West Palm Beach, Fla., and now the largest conservative publication in the country, both online and off. With 130,000 print subscribers its circulation is nearly twice as large as the Weekly Standard, and with nearly 4 million unique monthly visitors to Newsmax.com, it is larger than the Drudge Report. According to Forbes, which profiled Newsmax last spring, the low-budget site and its affiliates brought in nearly $30 million last year. More important than its profits is its sway over conservative readers.
Newsmax is a muscular media presence with influence across the right from Rush Limbaugh and all his radio imitators to Fox News Channel and beyond. Ruddy was among the most insistent endorsers of the Obama birth certificate myth, playing much the same role he once did during the Vince Foster affair. He has assiduously promoted the "tea party" movement and the "socialism" meme. When Newsmax published an essay by an obscure former newsman that seemed to urge a military coup against Obama last week (and then removed it), the reverberations were felt across the political spectrum. Every day the site blasts forth a barrage of supposed Obama scandals and embarrassments to be amplified by Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the panoply of talk radio and cable megaphones, knowing that by sheer volume, some of it will stick.
Combining the propaganda power of Newsmax with the spending power of the NRT PAC, the once-laughable Ruddy could become a formidable player in the 2010 midterm elections -– and the fate of the Obama administration.
As Clinton himself pointed out, the same forces that wanted to defeat and destroy his administration have predictably mobilized against Obama. For the moment, however, those forces cannot muster the same kind of concerted attack that almost brought Clinton down. They may still have Scaife's money but they have no independent counsel, like the partisan zealot Kenneth Starr. They have no scandal-mongering allies in the mainstream media, like the late William Safire of the New York Times. They have no congressional majority, and nobody like Newt Gingrich to build and lead one -- at least not yet.
Yet while the Republican right struggles for credibility, leaving Obama with breathing space, he and his aides ought to reconsider their scornful and high-handed attitude toward the progressive wing of their own party. They might just lose the Democratic majority next year and find themselves facing the sharp end of a series of congressional investigations or worse. If and when that happens, as Clinton could remind them, the progressives will be their only reliable allies.
Matt Latimer, who served as a speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, is coming out with a book. With these kinds of books, a relative unknown like Latimer really has to make a splash if he wants people to buy his work -- Vice President Cheney's memoir will sell regardless, but few people are going to pick Latimer's up on the strength of his name alone. So he's included some dirt.
The New York Daily News got its hands on some bits of Latimer's book, specifically the parts in which Bush has some relatively unguarded moments in discussing his fellow politicians.
Of President Obama, then just a senator, Latimer writes that Bush said, "This is a dangerous world and this cat isn't remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you." Bush didn't think kindly of the man who'd become Obama's vice president, either, saying of Joe Biden, "If bull was currency, Joe Biden would be a billionaire." Their fellow Democrat, Hillary Clinton, didn't get off easy, either, as Bush remarked, "Wait 'til her fat keister is sitting at this desk."
Maybe the most embarrassing comment that Latimer reports, though, is one Bush made about then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin: "I'm trying to remember if I've met her before. What is she, the governor of Guam?"
(Hat-tip to Political Wire.)
