Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing talk show hosts regaled millions of listeners with tales of Clinton scandals; Jerry Falwell hawked a slickly produced video suggesting the Clintons were murderers; David Brock of the American Spectator wrote salacious stories about the Clintons’ personal lives in Arkansas; the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1994 was a virtual trade show for hate-Clinton paraphernalia.
Plus, given the mainstream news media’s sensitivity to the “liberal bias” label, editors and producers at major newspapers and TV networks joined in the “dump-on-the-Clintons” fun to show they could be tougher on a Democrat than any Republican.
During this period, I was working at PBS Frontline, which wanted to do its own story about the Clinton scandals (presumably to strengthen its flanks against right-wing criticism of PBS’s “liberal bias”). But I argued that the anti-Clinton attacks were essentially “oppo” – or opposition research – run wild.
However, when my senior producer left Frontline for a job at another network, my effort to put the Clinton stories into this broader context died – and so did hope for any future work for me at Frontline.
Silver Bullet
After I founded Consortiumnews.com in 1995, as a way to tell important stories that the U.S. press corps was ignoring, one of our earliest series (in 1996) examined how President Bush’s re-election campaign had sought a political “silver bullet” that would take out the young Arkansas governor.
That was what had led to State Department political appointees rifling through Clinton’s passport file in late September 1992, followed by the Bush campaign’s attempt to impugn Clinton’s patriotism over a student trip he had taken to Moscow.
Another of my stories exposed how U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist had engineered a key personnel shift in 1992 to put the panel that picked “independent counsels” under the control of a right-wing judge, David Sentelle.
A protégé of Sen. Jesse Helms, Sentelle then picked partisan Republicans to investigate Clinton and his administration. One of Sentelle’s choices was former Bush administration lawyer Kenneth Starr, who conducted a zealous investigation into the Clintons’ Whitewater real-estate deal.
That inquiry eventually morphed into a recommendation that Bill Clinton be impeached for lying about a sexual affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
At the time, while many Washington journalists mocked Hillary Clinton’s claim about a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” I wrote an article saying she had a legitimate point.
Our political correspondent Mollie Dickenson also described how – even after Bill Clinton survived an impeachment trial in the Senate in early 1999 – the right-wing and mainstream news media continued to smear Hillary Clinton by publishing false leaks predicting that Starr would incriminate her in another offshoot of the scandal.
Though there’s an old saying that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” sometimes what happens is that a person (or a political movement) becomes badly scarred by abuse or takes on the tendencies of the abuser.
As Bill and Hillary Clinton returned to the national political stage in Campaign 2008, they have personified both tendencies: they have displayed the thin skin of people who have been burned before and they have employed their own slash-and-burn tactics.
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