‘90s Political Mob: La Cosa Gotcha

No president in a long time has been so puzzling, such a mixture of contradictions. Bill Clinton can charm the birds from the trees - and abandon friends without apology. He dazzles with his knowledge of issues - and then so often fudges them. He is a great talker - but has given Americans no vision of where the country ought to be going.

He gains strength, I have come to think, from his enemies. They are so hateful that they have created a certain public sympathy for him. And he has shown a winning equanimity in the face of their attacks.

Every president has critics. But Bill Clinton’s started in on him with extraordinary vitriol from the moment he was first elected.

Conservatives set out to deny his very legitimacy, and they have not stopped. Today, the voices of the extreme right are talking about impeaching Clinton and they are not joking. Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., introduced a resolution last month for an impeachment inquiry.

The most vicious attacks have of course been on Clinton’s personal character. He has been depicted as a drug smuggler, a murderer. The peddlers of hate, including such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell, have profited from videotapes, books and articles spinning out conspiracy theories.

The 1993 suicide of Vincent Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel, produced a conspiracy industry. The right-wing multimillionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife, used a newspaper he owns to promote the theory that Foster had been murdered and the killing covered up. Conservative radio talk show hosts took it up. Two independent counsels found after determined inquiries that Foster had committed suicide but that has not stopped the conspiracists.

One of the leading promoters of the notion that Foster was murdered is a reporter for the Scaife newspaper, Christopher Ruddy. He is now pushing a new conspiracy theory - that Ronald Brown, the secretary of commerce, was murdered.

Brown and 34 others on a trade mission with him were killed when their Air Force transport plane went off course and crashed in Croatia in 1996. The Ruddy charge is that he was actually shot and the plane sabotaged to cover up the killing. Air Force pathologists who examined Brown’s body found that he died from the impact of the crash.

In the old days, people who invented such tales were dismissed as the lunatic fringe. Nowadays, they have the power of money to circulate their lies. They have the motivation of extraordinary hatred for Bill Clinton. And they do not care about the pain they inflict on the families of Foster, Brown and the others who went down on the plane.

Then there is the Paula Jones lawsuit. Whatever happened in 1991 in a Little Rock hotel room, it is becoming ever clearer that Jones’ tardy legal action against Clinton is a political strike suit designed to hurt him.

A right-wing organization in Virginia called the Rutherford Institute is helping pay Jones’ expenses. A conservative legal group, Judicial Watch, has brought a lawsuit against an insurance company, State Farm, that covered some of Clinton’s legal expenses. Judicial Watch claims Clinton’s policy did not cover the issue and that other State Farm policyholders were injured.

Finally, there is Whitewater. To date no wrongdoing by the president has been shown in that long-ago Arkansas land deal. (Those interested in distinguishing facts from charges should read Gilbert Cranberg’s piece in the current Nieman Reports on how the press got one Whitewater fact wrong, finding incriminating evidence where there was none.)

Other presidents have reacted to critics in their own ways. Franklin Roosevelt joyously battled what he called the “malefactors of great wealth.” Richard Nixon shrank deeper into his paranoia. Bill Clinton brushes off the attacks, and most of the public seems to feel that that is what they deserve.

But there is still a cost, a heavy cost. The poison directed at Clinton goes along with the attacks on all of government as evil. The coin of our politics is being corrupted, and it is hard to see what will restore civic discourse and enable us to deal with the country’s real problems.

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