Instead, with the goal of maintaining some bipartisan comity in Washington at the start of the Clinton administration, Hamilton's task force concealed much of the new evidence and issued a report asserting Republican innocence.
In a similar way, the new Clinton administration helped clean up for Reagan and his team on the continuing Iran-Contra investigation (which represented a sequel to the 1980 Republican-Iranian contacts) and on the Iraq-gate scandal regarding clandestine military assistance to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
High Hopes
As Bill Clinton became the first Democratic president in a dozen years, the governing Democrats had high hopes that they could make progress on some difficult issues that had been ignored under Republican rule, including health care and environmental initiatives. The Democrats also moved to get the nation's deficit under control, approving a modest rise in income tax rates.
Yet, for all the Clinton administration's hopes for bipartisanship, the Democrats instead encountered near unanimous Republican opposition to every major initiative. Not a single GOP vote was cast in favor of Clinton's budget in either the House or the Senate.
Instead, the Republicans relied on their expanding right-wing media, which had added powerful AM radio programming to an influential roster of newspapers, magazines and book publishing houses. Voices on the Right like Rush Limbaugh made every day a fiesta of Clinton bashing.
As the Democrats headed toward Election 1994, the Republicans and their right-wing media allies rallied the conservative base with wild stories about Bill and Hillary Clinton as a kind of Arkansas-based Bonnie and Clyde, leaving a string of death and corruption in their wake.
Though political pundits cite the collapse of health care reform as the key blow to the Democratic majorities, the media-driven hysteria about the Clintons also was a major factor in the right-wing tidal wave that was building. The failure of the American Left to invest in a media infrastructure to counter the Right was another little-noticed factor. A strategic media imbalance was forming.
Yet, even if the Left had worked on building a media infrastructure, it's not clear that progressive voices would have done much to protect the Clintons from the right-wing attacks. To many on the Left, the Clintons were a couple who had long since sold out their principles to corporate interests.
So, with both American progressives and mainstream Democrats discouraged and demoralized, the Republican tsunami in November 1994 wiped out not only the fragile Democratic Senate majority but ended the long-time Democratic control of the House.
Reagan Redux
The Republicans saw their resounding victory as a mandate to resume Reagan's assault on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Trying to assert his "relevance," Clinton conceded that "the era of big government is over."
For the next six years, the Republicans and the right-wing media derided government programs that tried to help the middle class and the poor, while pushing through more and more deregulation of corporations, including repeal of a New Deal law separating commercial and investment banks. The repeal passed with the support of the Clinton administration.
Besides trying to dismantle much of the federal government, the Republicans hounded Clinton, finally impeaching him in the House for lying about an extramarital affair. Though Clinton survived a humiliating Senate trial, the Republicans were optimistic about regaining total control of Washington in Election 2000.
The Republican presidential nominee, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, was a thinly qualified scion of a political royal family. Opposite him was Clinton's wonky Vice President Al Gore, who was an expert on the complex workings of government and who had a particular passion for the environment, alternative energy and the pressing need to address global warming.
In my view, Election 2000 may have represented the last real chance for the world to turn back from environmental devastation and from the dangerous political instability that will follow. In 2000, the future of the planet was truly in the balance and Gore, despite his lack of charisma, may have been the best person for the job, at least the best that modern U.S. politics could produce.
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