You can't teach an old attack dog new tricks

Partisan hack David Bossie raised political sliming to an art form against Bill Clinton. Now he's out to smear John Kerry and Michael Moore. Why does anyone in the media still take him seriously?

By Eric Boehlert

Jul 20, 2004 | For David Bossie, professional Clinton-era agitator and renowned Republican dirty trickster, these must seem like the good old days. During the 1990s Bossie, as a grass-roots activist and congressional staffer, was often at the epicenter of churning out stories about President Clinton, deftly feeding the press and Capitol Hill investigators outlandish -- and usually unsubstantiated -- assertions about White House wrongdoing. Once Clinton left the national stage, Bossie, a political hit man by trade, seemed adrift professionally.

But with the emergence of a new political campaign and a new Democratic presidential candidate, Bossie has returned to his partisan groove. This week sees the publication of his quickie attack biography, "The Many Faces of John Kerry," which is sure to garner him cable-TV face time during and after next week's Democratic Convention, as bookers seek out Kerry critics to liven up their coverage. This product comes on the heels of Bossie's May release, "Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11," in which Bossie reinvents himself as a national security expert and blames Clinton (of course) for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In June, Bossie hit a publicity -- and presumably fundraising -- geyser when the archconservative Citizens United group, of which he is president, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, insisting that TV ads for Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," if aired after July 31, would violate new campaign finance laws because they double as political advertising. The FEC has not ruled on the matter, but the complaint itself once again thrust Bossie into the media limelight.

Topping off Bossie's comeback was the recent release of Clinton's memoir, "My Life." Not only did that publishing phenomenon give Bossie yet more opportunities to spout off against Clinton in the media, including an anti-Clinton attack ad broadcast during the former president's "60 Minutes" interview, but the book also solidified the unusual status Bossie had achieved. Anyone who gave Clinton's hefty book the Washington read (that is, a quick skim of the index pages) quickly discovered that Clinton made several mentions of Bossie.

"How often does a president know the name of a Hill staffer?" asks Glenn Ivey, who battled Bossie during the congressional Whitewater investigation. Ivey served as Democratic Sen. Paul Sarbanes' counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee, while Bossie worked behind the scenes as a staffer for congressional Republicans. "That's a strong statement as to the level, the profile, Bossie has developed."

Ivey rarely, if ever, agreed with the relentlessly partisan Bossie during the investigation. Yet he did see something he admired: "I respected the energy David brought to the enterprise. He was their driving force." One of Ivey's former congressional colleagues, who was also immersed in the perpetual Whitewater investigation, is less generous, recalling Bossie as "a lunatic."

Bossie's style during the investigation was to lob scattershot allegations toward an appreciative press corps that rarely seemed upset when the charges he gave them to amplify -- that Whitewater was a criminal enterprise, for instance -- failed to pan out as factual. As Democratic strategist James Carville once put it, "He made collective fools out of about 80 percent of the national press corps." But none of this appears to have marred Bossie's reputation with reporters, even when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- no stranger to hardball partisan politics -- reportedly ordered Bossie fired from his congressional staff position in May 1998. Bossie had overseen the bungled release of supposedly incriminating recordings of Whitewater figure Webster Hubbell's jailhouse phone conversations about Hillary Rodham Clinton -- recordings that had been edited, deleting obvious exculpatory remarks.

Now some critics wonder how a political prankster like Bossie has managed to maintain respectability in Washington, particularly among the press. A Nexis search retrieves more than 100 press references to Bossie this year, with MSNBC proving to be especially accommodating toward him. "Pat Moynihan had that wonderful phrase about defining deviancy downward. Now we're defining credibility downward if we take David Bossie seriously," says former Clinton aide Paul Begala. "There are a lot of credible critics of Democrats. David Bossie is not one of them."

"We've evolved into celebrity journalists. We judge them by Hollywood standards; if you're big enough, it doesn't matter why or how you got big in the first place," says Gene Lyons, coauthor with Joe Conason of "The Hunting of the President," which details many of Bossie's misadventures. "Now the same is true with political operatives. The fact that Bossie's name is known and he's achieved a certain celebrity status trumps the fact that he achieved that celebrity status by making shit up and twisting evidence to vilify Democratic politicians. He's a modern-day Donald Segretti," says Lyons, referring to the young Republican attorney hired by Richard Nixon's 1968 election team to sabotage Democratic campaign events -- "rat fucking" is what Segretti and his buddies called the tactic.

Bossie, through his spokeswoman, declined to comment for this story. So did Citizens United's founder, Floyd Brown.

Bossie joined Citizens United in 1992 as its director of political affairs, which he quickly transformed into a full-time job of hounding the Clintons. The group was essentially a two-man operation. Four years earlier Citizens United had produced the infamous race-baiting Willie Horton ad. "That spot was, is, will ever after be a nightmare," GOP strategist Mary Matalin once told the Chicago Tribune.

In fact, in 1992, Bush's father condemned Bossie and Brown's gutter practices, telling reporters: "We will do whatever we can to stop any filthy campaign tactics." During that same campaign, George W. Bush, on his father's behalf, even sent out a letter to 85,000 Republican contributors encouraging them not to contribute to Brown and Bossie's effort.

"What does the RNC [Republican National Committee] say about Bossie today?" wonders Begala. Terry Holt, spokesman for the Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection campaign, did not return calls seeking comment regarding Bossie, whose group bankrolled an anti-Kerry ad earlier this year.

Next Page: "You'd expect viewers and readers to learn Bossie was fired for doctoring tapes"

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