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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
Yes, there is something disturbing about the way Brock writes of his consistently unheeded pangs of conscience -- which began plaguing him as early as his Troopergate story for the American Spectator in 1993, and which Bill Kristol, to his credit, was the only conservative to advise Brock not to publish. "Bill told me that conservatives should focus on substantive disagreements with the Clinton administration, and he warned that the piece would stigmatize me as a tabloid journalist." (Unfortunately, Kristol would abandon this principled position in the following years as the GOP escalated its personal assault on Clinton.) But if it took too long for the scales to fall from Brock's eyes, he is brutally honest about the reasons: An ambitious young journalist whose gay sexuality had estranged him from his conservative parents, he grew intoxicated with the sense of moral righteousness -- and the creature comforts (a sleek black Mercedes and a posh Georgetown address among them) -- that his role as the conservative movement's Bob Woodward afforded him. "I bought it all because I wanted to. War for war's sake was really the only way I knew since coming to Washington ... I also had career considerations."
What matters most is that in the end, Brock did the right thing, beginning with his refusal to smear Hillary Clinton in his 1996 book about her (which began to fracture his relationship with the conservative crusade) and continuing with his apologies to Anita Hill and others whose characters he had assassinated, all the way to "Blinded by the Right." His former comrades on the right accuse him of mercenary motives, but as Brock responded last Saturday on Tim Russert's CNBC show, it's certainly not a "clever career move to admit to everything I did. Most people in my profession are loath to admit their mistakes."
One of the most repellent aspects of Brock's book is his reminder of how the right-wing sleaze campaign eventually succeeded in dictating mainstream news coverage. The most avid bulldog on the Clinton sex beat was not an American Spectator hack, of course, but Newsweek's Michael Isikoff. Brock reports that while he was researching his book "The Seduction of Hillary Clinton," Isikoff passed on to him a number of Clinton sex tales that his Newsweek editors decided weren't up to their standards, in the apparent hope that they would meet Brock's less exacting ones (they didn't).
Even the New York Times played an instrumental role in the criminalizing of the Clinton administration, with Jeff Gerth's seminal -- and specious -- reports on Whitewater. Gerth's principal blunder was allowing himself to get taken in by the hucksters and con men who worked Arkansas' anti-Clinton carny show. Brock, himself a frequent visitor to these gaudy peddlers of political dirt, writes that it was Sheffield Nelson, the grandaddy of Clinton smear artists, who put Gerth in touch with his Whitewater source James McDougal. Speaking of being loath to admit their mistakes, a decade later Gerth and the Times' editorial mandarins have yet to concede the bankruptcy of their investment in the Whitewater story, even after two relentless and politically malicious special prosecutors failed to find any proof of crimes on the part of the Clintons. The Times' editorial excellence is matched only by its breathtaking arrogance. By now it's abundantly clear that it was the scrappy, independent reporting of dogged journalists like Murray Waas in Salon and Joe Conason in Salon and the New York Observer that had it right about Ken Starr and Whitewater -- not the Times or the Washington Post.
Sheffield Nelson, who had lost a bitter governor's race against Clinton in 1990, was also behind the peddling of the Juanita Broaddrick rape charge against Clinton. While researching his Hillary Clinton book, Brock worked tirelessly to corroborate the story. But even he had to finally conclude that "Juanita came up with the rape claim ... after having consensual sex with Clinton ... to get herself out of trouble with her boyfriend (and later husband) Dave Broaddrick." But in a familiar pattern, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page injected the poisonous story into the legitimate news stream and in the subsequent media feeding frenzy, NBC aired a Lisa Myers interview with Broaddrick that its producers had formerly considered too sketchy to broadcast.
No news organization sullied itself more during the Clinton years than the Wall Street Journal. The tabloidization of the Journal's editorial pages in the service of the get-Clinton propaganda campaign is one of the great scandals of American journalism. It was one thing for publisher Peter Kann, long before Clinton, to encourage editorial czar Robert Bartley to turn his pages into a forum for aggressive conservatism. It was quite another to allow Bartley and his fellow zealots to publish every crackpot defamation of the Clintons that excreted its way into the right's imagination. They loudly and repeatedly suggested that White House counsel Vincent Foster had been murdered (perhaps, Brock surmises, to deflect attention from their own role in his death; Foster, clearly ill equipped for Washington's increasingly savage climate, pointed to "WSJ editors [who] lie without consequence" in his suicide note). They brooded obsessively about "mysterious Mena," the Arkansas airport where Clinton and his cronies allegedly trafficked in drugs and where "Clinton death squads" murdered two teenagers to cover up their nefarious business. It is unclear whether Bartley, who emerges as one of the strangest fishes in Brock's weird aquarium, really believed any of this Clinton frothing or whether he had simply sold his journalistic soul to the far right. But the more important question is why the top editors and executives of the Journal allowed him to get away with it. Bartley no longer runs the Journal's opinion section; he's been kicked up the corporate stairs. But in his golden years he has been awarded his very own column, where recently he took a typically wild swipe at Brock as "the John Walker Lindh of contemporary conservatism." Like his fellow right-wing propagandists, Bartley could offer nothing of substance to rebut Brock.
At the White House reception I attended, Clinton remarked, "Maybe I'll be remembered as the president who took the poison out of American politics." This theory has since been embraced by a number of political commentators, including the New York Times' keen-eyed Frank Rich, who characterized Brock's memoir as a chronicle of a faded, pre-Sept. 11 era. But this, unfortunately, is wishful thinking. The Old Testament fervor that inflamed the GOP and the conservative movement throughout the Clinton era is still very much alive, from the attack ads on Tom Daschle comparing him to Saddam Hussein for his opposition to Alaska oil drilling to John Ashcroft's suggestion that anyone who opposed his attempts to shortcut the Constitution was on the side of terrorism. The excesses of the current conservative crusade may not match the outrages documented by Brock -- but only because Bill Clinton, or any other Democrat, does not occupy the White House. And it's not necessary for the GOP to go scorched-earth when, ever since Sept. 11, the Democrats have obligingly turned themselves into "war wimps," in Rich's phrase.
But now that even chronically cautious Al Gore has begun raising his voice against the Bush administration, it seems that political life might be coming back in America. This means the holy warriors of the right will once again be on the march, eager to put any moral or political enemy (generally one and the same) to the torch. With the Bush political operation run by the win-at-any-cost heirs of Lee Atwater, and the GOP ranks filled by passionate Christian activists, the Republican cause still carries the air of a religious war, even without revolutionary prophets like the disgraced Newt Gingrich (who undoutedly is plotting a Nixonian resurrection).
The question that arises for any liberal or moderate, especially after reading Brock's book, is how do you fight successfully against this kind of political ruthlessness -- without doing even more damage to democracy. Can you counter the GOP's ferocity by attacking opponents with equal ferocity on the issues and not on their human flaws?
Politics is a blood sport, but it doesn't have to be so savage that it subverts our political system, as Republican zealots like Bob Barr, Ted Olson and Robert Bork did when they began intriguing for Clinton's impeachment long before the nation heard of Monica Lewinsky. The problem for Democrats in recent decades is that the party's national standard bearers have often felt unsuited or uncomfortable at playing this sport, preferring governance over politics. But as John Kennedy observed, you can't have one without the other. When JFK was reminded of Eisenhower's disdain for the very word "politics," he responded, "I do have a great liking for the word 'politics.' It's the way a president gets things done." The Democratic candidates who obviously were more enamored of policy than politics proved to be losers -- Dukakis and Gore. The ones who thrived at the game of politics -- JFK, LBJ, Clinton -- have been the party's winners. And they knew how to play the game hard.
If John Ashcroft's team at the Justice Department can invoke the spirit of Bobby Kennedy in their war on terrorists (let's hope it's the spirit of Bobby's crackdown on organized crime, not his law-bending surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr.), Democrats should be calling on RFK's political fighting spirit. The feckless Gore recount battle in Florida cried out for the Kennedy brothers' brawling Irish machine. In fact, Democrats don't even have to conjure ghosts from as far back as Camelot. The party simply needs to clone a lot more Ragin' Cajuns. The single-minded commitment to framing the debate ("It's the economy, stupid") and the "instant response" counterpunching methods developed in James Carville's war room during the first Clinton campaign need to become part of the Democrats' DNA.
In their new book, "Buck Up, Suck Up ... And Come Back When You Foul Up," Carville and political partner Paul Begala argue that it's possible to employ "smash-mouth" tactics without resorting to the politics of personal destruction. Carville, who is married to Dick Cheney advisor Mary Matalin, must live out this "love your enemy, hate his (or her) ideas" sentiment every day of his life. But Republicans have long claimed it was the Democrats who kicked off the modern era of trash politics with their aggressive 1987 battle to block Robert Bork from the Supreme Court. So primal was this wound to the Republican psyche, that to this day whenever a conservative ideologue is rejected by the Senate, the GOP screams he's been "borked." The truth is, however, that while the liberal rhetoric against Bork sometimes grew inflamed, Bork was rejected on the basis of his legal record, which included opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Roe vs. Wade -- not because of any personal attacks. As the Washington Post's former Supreme Court correspondent John P. MacKenzie recently wrote, it was not "smear tactics or dirty tricks" that defeated Bork, it was his own "caustic writings and rigid philosophy." Bork's extremist pronouncements in recent years -- including his endorsement of a radical conservative call during the Clinton administration to reject the American "regime," including our system of government, as "morally illegitimate" -- demonstrate the wisdom of his rejection from the highest court. (Republicans have a better case for Democratic foul play in the Clarence Thomas hearings; Anita Hill undoubtedly told the truth, but Thomas' tacky personal behavior was irrelevant to the proceedings and should not have been used as a last-ditch gambit to derail him.)
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