The Right-Wing Assult on Clinton -- and Democracy

There's no conspiracy, no shadowy cabal of conservatives secretly plotting new ways to go after President Clinton. No, it's all out in the open, and it's been going on ever since Clinton got elected president in 1992.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how conservatives have poured lots of money into creating media outlets, think tanks and political attack groups aimed at trying to advance the right-wing agenda and punish their enemies. What we have witnessed over the past few weeks is the culmination of over five years of relentless attacks on President Clinton.

Even though Clinton is at heart a country-club Republican who has acquiesced to the conservatives at virtually every turn, most conservatives still believe that Clinton must be discredited and run out of town because he's not one of them. The conservative dirty tricks started against Clinton even before he got elected. Investigative journalist Robert Parry outlined some of them in the Feb. 16 issue of his self-published magazine, The Consortium.

For instance, during the 1992 campaign, Parry notes the conservative media created a rumor that Clinton sought to renounce his U.S. citizenship during his years at Oxford. The Washington Times, the Moonie-subsidized paper, sought Clinton's FBI records regarding his anti-Vietnam War activities.

Then, at the insistence of James Baker, who was directing George Bush's re-election campaign, the State Department went through Clinton's passport application files in an effort to find something politically incriminating. Staple holes and a slight tear in the corner of the application were turned into evidence that Clinton's alleged renunciation of his citizenship was removed.

The story was leaked to Newsweek, which published it on Oct. 4, 1992. Instead of being an "October Surprise," a late piece of dirt or scandal that derails a campaign, the Bush team's attempts to smear Clinton backfired. Some quick investigative work by a Congressional staffer discovered how non-existent the staple-hole case really was. The clumsy dirty trick helped to defeat Bush.

But Parry points out that the worst for Clinton was yet to come. As soon as he took office, virtually every misstep was turned into a scandal through the steady drumbeat of the conservative attack machine. The White House's overreaction to missing money from the Travel Office, which resulted in the sacking of the entire staff, was turned into "Travelgate." A failed real-estate deal in Arkansas turned into "Whitewater-gate." The suicide of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster and the clumsy handling of its aftermath was turned into a murder conspiracy, "Fostergate." The misrouting of FBI files to the White House was turned into "Filegate."

And then there's the sex. The flimsy allegations of some Arkansas state troopers into the sex lives of Bill and Hillary were trumpeted (and wildly exaggerated) by The American Spectator, the magazine that also unleashed Paula Jones on the world.

And then there's special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, an activist conservative appointed by an activist conservative judge, David Sentelle, who was appointed to the Federal Appeals Court panel that oversees the independent counsel law with the help of ultra-conservative North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms.

Starr, who replaced Republican Robert Fiske in 1994 when Fiske didn't dig up enough dirt to satisfy the conservatives, has kept the post for nearly four years but has uncovered nothing of consequence. Starr's personal and professional ties to the Far Right are legion, and his Nixonian tactics of covert taping and assorted other dirty tricks mock the independent counsel law.

Now, there are plenty of reasons to bash Clinton. My short list: His gutting of civil liberties in the name of getting "tough" with terrorists and criminals; his slavish devotion to Alan Greenspan and his economic agenda; his signing of the 1996 welfare "reform" bill that ends the guarantee of federal assistance to families in need; his hypocritical pandering to conservatives on "family values;" his selling out the Democratic Party to big business interests, and the rest of his waffling and half-stepping on just about every thing.

But instead of honest policy disagreements, the conservatives have given us a steady stream of rumor and innuendo on Clinton's sex life and his other imaginary crimes. They've corrupted the independent counsel system, debased our political culture and may have done irreparable harm to our democratic institutions -- all to score a few partisan points and make it impossible for even a tepid challenge to the conservative power structure to go unpunished.

This is the real right-wing conspiracy.