“Clinton Derangement Syndrome Will Soon Be Back”: It’s A Kind Of Political Crystal Meth That Makes Conservatives Get All Excited
There was a time when I thought that the heights of derangement to which Barack Obama drove his political opponents were even greater than what we saw during the Clinton years. The dark warnings of socialism, the inability to accept that he is actually a U.S. citizen, the musings from prominent Republican figures about his “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior,” the conspiracies sketched out on Glenn Beck’s chalkboard, the “unskewed” polls, the fifty Obamacare repeal votes (and counting), the tricorner hats, the whole mad chaotic mess of the last five years—surely these people were nuttier than they had ever been. But now, as the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and thus of a Hillary Clinton presidency, becomes real, I’m beginning to wonder.
There are some things you just can’t compare with any precision—what’s crazier, believing that Barack Obama’s parents planted a false birth announcement in Hawaii newspapers when he was born so that one day he could illegitimately run for president, or believing that Bill Clinton oversaw a drug-running operation out of a small Arkansas airport and had dozens of his political enemies murdered? There’s no way to answer that.
It isn’t so much that conservatives have already gone off the deep end about Clinton. But we’re starting to see the signs, the way that anything involving the former president and the former secretary of state acts like a kind of political crystal meth, making conservatives get all excited and depriving them of the ability to think rationally. Take, for instance, the reaction to the fact that Monica Lewinsky is writing an article for Vanity Fair, one that, from the looks of it, won’t be particularly interesting. To look at that and see the sinister hand of Hillary Clinton masterminding the release of the article, you’d have to believe some awfully strange things. You’d have to believe that Clinton can dictate editorial decisions to the magazine, and that she’d even want Lewinsky to be drawing a lot of attention, and most importantly, that Hillary Clinton would be able to convince Lewinsky herself to do it. Try to imagine that conversation. “Monica? Hi, it’s Hillary. How’s it going? Listen, I need a favor.” “Oh, anything for you, Hill. You know how much I value our friendship.”
But look here:
“I really wonder if this isn’t an effort on the Clintons’ part to get that story out of the way,” Cheney, wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney, said during a Tuesday night interview on Fox News. “Would Vanity Fair publish anything about Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton didn’t want in Vanity Fair?”
Lynn Cheney isn’t some fringe nutball. She’s been around politics for a long time. Her husband was White House Chief of Staff, then Secretary of Defense, then Vice President. She worked in government. She knows how things work. But she thinks not only that the Clintons have control of the magazine industry and of Lewinsky herself, but that anyone would believe that a Lewinsky-penned article would “get that story out of the way,” as if 1) there’s anything about that story that we as a nation don’t already know, and 2) once there’s an article about it in Vanity Fair, that means no one will talk about it anymore.
I don’t mean to make too much out of this one little thing, but I think it’s a harbinger of what’s to come. When it comes to the Clintons, conservatives are willing to believe just about anything, no matter how bizarre. If you said that Hillary Clinton was harvesting organs from American veterans in a secret lab underneath the State Department, a lot of them would say, “Yeah, I buy that.” They went through eight years of insanity, trying to pin one thing and another on the Clintons, never coming to grips with how the country increasingly saw them as having taken leave of their senses. And they’re ready to start it all over again.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 7, 2014
“Recycling For Fun And Profit”: The Imminent Return Of The ‘Clinton Scandals’
Hillary Clinton may well run for president in 2016. Or she may not. But while the nation awaits her decision, both jittery Republican politicians and titillated political journalists – often in concert – will seize upon any excuse to recycle those old “Clinton scandals.”
The latest trip around this endless loop began when Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican of extremist pedigree and nebulous appeal, deflected a question about his party’s “war on women” by yapping about Monica Lewinsky, former “inappropriate” playmate of Bill Clinton. Then the Free Beacon, a right-wing Washington tabloid, published some old papers about the “ruthless” Hillary and the “loony-toon Monica” from the archives of the late Diane Blair, a longtime and intimate Arkansas friend of the Clintons.
Suddenly the media frenzy of the Nineties resumed, as if there had never even been a pause.
What was truly bizarre in Senator Paul’s outburst was his suggestion that somehow Hillary Clinton is implicated in the Lewinsky affair (which he and others have wrongly characterized as “harassment” or victimization of the young White House intern). Most voters will consider that kind of insinuation more repulsive than persuasive.
Still, there were other long-running pseudo-scandals that featured Hillary. Are we doomed to revisit every crackpot allegation and conspiracy theory? Very likely so, if only because that brand of moonshine brought in wads and wads of money from the same credulous wingnuts who follow Fox News. Last week many of them surely sent money to Senator Paul or clicked on the Free Beacon.
The Clintons are still big box office in the mainstream media as well. Our historical amnesia will make the old charges against them sound new again. And if there’s a sucker born every minute, a lot of minutes have passed since they left the White House.
To prepare for the coming tsunami of bullbleep, a brief guide to past scandals may prove useful. Then when another lightweight politician or television personality starts spouting about Whitewater or Filegate or Travelgate – about which he or she actually knows approximately nothing – pertinent facts will be available. (For the longer version, with colorful narrative, consult The Hunting of the President.)
Whitewater: Kenneth Starr spent roughly millions of dollars trying to find evidence of chicanery in a land deal that lost money for the Clintons – and his probe ended up demonstrating their innocence, like several earlier investigations. Having whispered to gullible journalists that he was about to indict Hillary in December 1996, Starr instead abruptly resigned as independent counsel in February 1997, knowing he had no case against her.
Indeed, the Clintons have undergone more thorough and invasive financial vetting than any couple in American history, from the exhaustive Starr investigation through Hillary’s Senate financial disclosures to the Clinton Foundation donors disclosed before her nomination as Secretary of State.
Travelgate: Feverish coverage of Hillary Clinton’s firing of several White House employees who handled press travel arrangements neglected some salient facts –such as the suspicious absence of accounting records for millions of dollars expended by the White House Travel Office, the Travel Office director’s offer to plead guilty to embezzlement, and evidence that he had accepted lavish gifts from an air charter company. The First Lady and her staff didn’t handle the controversy skillfully, but she had plenty of reason to suspect chicanery. And again, exhaustive investigation found no intentional wrongdoing by her.
Filegate: Sensational accusations that Hillary Clinton had ordered up FBI background files to target political opponents soon became a Republican and media obsession, with respectable figures warning that Filegate would be the Clintons’ Watergate. “Where’s the outrage?” cried Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee. Starr investigated the matter and found no evidence of wrongdoing. Finally, in 2010, a Reagan-appointed federal judge mockingly dismissed a civil lawsuit based on the allegations, saying “there’s no there there.”
In truth, there never was.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, February 14, 2014
“Cultivating The Right Wing”: Rand Paul Woos The Base With Hot Monica Lewinsky Talk
What on earth is Rand Paul thinking, bringing up Monica Lewinsky? On cable TV, they shake their talking heads: ancient history, irrelevant, etc. Quite true, it’s all those things. But in terms of intra-GOP presidential-positioning politics, I think it’s actually quite shrewd, and another sign that he is not to be underestimated in terms of possibly nabbing the GOP nomination. Unfortunately for Paul—although fortunately for America—it’s only shrewd in terms of intra-GOP politics. Among the rest of the electorate, responses will range from indifference to hostility, and the “GOP War on Women” narrative won’t suffer a scratch.
Here’s what Paul is doing. First, he’s getting right with the base. As a devolutionist-libertarian, he takes some unorthodox positions from the conservative point of view—his neo-isolationist, anti-neocon foreign policy views, his comparatively soft-line views on same-sex marriage (he’s not for it, but he’d leave it to the states). There are reasons, in other words, for hard-shell conservatives to give him the gimlet eye.
Given that, what are some ways to make conservatives think you’re “one of us” without having to alter those positions, which he surely knows would be a disaster for him, destroying the very basis of his appeal as principled and so on? Find something conservatives hate and say you hate it too. What bigger something than the Clintons? Well, there’s Obama, but hating on him is old hat. Dredging up Lewinsky, on the other hand, shows that some care was taken to cultivate conservatives. As Paul knows, Clinton-hatred is still mother’s milk for that crowd.
He is also, as Peter Beinart noted, aiming specifically at the Christian Right. He’s been doing this for some time now, talking, for example, of the persecution of Christian minorities around the world. His father never bothered much with evangelicals, an error the son, recognizing their importance in the Iowa GOP caucuses, clearly hopes not to make.
I think there’s a final reason, which emotionally is the most important of all. When Muhammad Ali was Cassius Clay, when he was still months away from a title shot against champ Sonny Liston, he’d knock out the latest second-rater in three rounds and then, when they stepped into the ring to interview him, carry on about how all he wanted was a fight with Liston: “I want that big brown bear!” The more he talked, the more promoters and fans were able to visualize a Clay-Liston fight.
The more Paul talks about the Clintons, the more he sets up the mental picture in the brains of Republican primary voters of him being the logical guy to step into the ring with them. After all, they’ll think, he’s sure not afraid of them!
It’s very smart (all this assumes of course that Hillary Clinton runs and is the Democratic nominee). All the other Republican candidates laying into the Clintons will look like Johnny-come-latelys. Paul spoke up first.
But the good it does him ends there. Here we return to the age-old Republican blind spot on issues relating to groups that don’t vote for them. Republicans think they can make everything better with words and symbolism. Just get our candidates to stop saying these stupid things like Todd Akin did. Speak respectfully. Sensitively. Appoint more women to high-profile thingies. It’ll be fine.
That isn’t how politics works. How politics works is that people actually care about substance to a surprising degree, and they know which party is representing their interests and which party is not. And women, by 12 percentage points at last count, know that Republicans are not. All right, it’s slightly more complicated than that—married women vote Republican, as do white women. But last I checked, African American women and Latina women and single women are women, too, and each of them has the same one vote that a married white woman has.
And overall—don’t take it from me, take it from the numbers—the women of America have decided that the GOP isn’t on their side. And it’s not because of the offal that flows out of the mouths of Todd Akin and company, really. It’s because of policies. And Rand Paul supports every one of those party policies.
Funny, but his libertarianism does not extend to giving a woman the right to decide whether to have an abortion. It did, however, in March 2012, extend to the “freedom” of religious institutions that were fighting the expanded requirement for contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act. You may remember the Blunt Amendment, which sought vast conscience exemptions from the coverage requirement. Paul voted for it.
I could keep going and going. Just last month, Paul floated the idea of a federal cap on welfare benefits for women who have more children. It is true that 16 states have such caps, and it’s not necessarily an ill-intentioned thought that saying “no more money for another child” might produce the desired effect of women not having those children. The problem is that in real life there seems to be no correlation. So the net effect is really just to increase the number of women and children living in poverty.
Then there’s little gem of a quote: “The whole thing with the War on Women, I sort of laughingly say, ‘yeah there might have been,’ but the women are winning it.” He said this two weeks ago. Let’s just say I doubt many professional women would agree.
If Paul really thinks that he can get women to overlook this record (and there’s much more) and decide to vote for him because Bill Clinton made some yakahoola with an intern, he’s as clueless as Reince Priebus is with his Latino and gay outreach. This is a case where the better scenario is that he’s just being cynical for the sake of snagging GOP votes. If he actually believes what he’s saying—well, God help us, but it does make him a natural to become the nominee of that party.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 12, 2014
“The Death Of Dog-Whistle Politics”: Intramural Republican Party Competition And The GOP’s Inability To Learn From Its Mistakes
In today’s media environment, every message you send to your base gets heard by everyone. That’s a problem for the GOP.
If you go over to Politico right now, in the “Hot Topics” listed at the top of the page, along with Obamacare, immigration, and the Olympics, is the name Monica Lewinsky. Which might strike you as odd, given that Lewinsky has been rather quiet in the decade and a half since her affair with Bill Clinton became public and led to his impeachment. But aged though it may be, the Lewinsky scandal is back. This is a story about intramural Republican party competition, the GOP’s inability to learn from its mistakes, and the death of dog-whistle politics. The problem for the Republicans is that they don’t seem to have realized it’s dead.
The latest round of Lewinsky-mania started when the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication that defines its mission as “combat journalism” (“At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.”), went through the papers of Diane Blair, a longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and found notes that described Hillary’s words and feelings as the Lewinsky scandal was going on. The material is certainly interesting from a historical perspective, but there isn’t anything there that could possibly be politically damaging to Clinton’s 2016 political fortunes, if that’s what they were looking for.
But you can’t tell some conservatives that. Rand Paul has been talking about Lewinsky, and when RNC chair Reince Priebus got asked about how Lewinsky might figure in 2016, instead of saying the logical thing—we have plenty of things to criticize Hillary Clinton about without getting into that—he instead said, “I think everything is on the table.”
It seems pretty clear what Rand Paul has to gain by putting himself at the forefront of an effort to refight the Clinton impeachment. As Peter Beinart argued, as the libertarian 2016 candidate, Paul will have to convince social conservatives that he shares their values, and this is a handy way to do it. Among those values, hatred of the Clintons ranks awfully high, exceeded, perhaps, by that delicious combination of salacious titillation and moral condemnation over anything having to do with sex.
The trouble is that if Republicans are going to talk about Monica Lewinsky, they’re going to do it in front of everybody, which will reinforce a whole raft of negative impressions people have of them: that they’re stuck in the past, they’re consumed by anger, that they’re puritanical. To be clear, I’m not saying that condemnation of Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky is itself puritanical, because it isn’t. What was puritanical was their obsession with the sexual details of the affair, and their belief that Clinton’s obvious evil found no greater expression than in his sexual appetite., and that they are willing to do enormous damage to the country in order to destroy their enemies. These are the things the Lewinsky scandal represents for people who aren’t conservative Republicans. Which is why Karl Rove, who has a better grasp than most Republicans of the dangers of letting their instincts run wild, told Paul to put a sock in it.
Though a potential presidential candidate like Rand Paul might like to send a subtle message to primary voters—something along the lines of “I’m with you on the sex thing, and I think the Clintons are as monstrous as you do”—in this day and age, dog-whistle politics have become impossible. Every comment is noted, every speech is recorded, and it’s just no longer possible to send multiple messages without everybody noticing in a short space of time.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the term “dog-whistle politics,” it gained wide currency during the George W. Bush administration, when liberal bloggers began noticing the way Republicans skillfully crafted appeals that were meant to only be understood by the party’s base, while the rest of the electorate took no notice (Wikipedia dates the term as far back as the 1980s, but it was in the Bush years it came into common use in this country). One prime example came during a 2004 debate, when in answering a question about what sorts of Supreme Court justices he would appoint, Bush dropped in what sounded to most viewers like a non sequitur about the 1857 Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery. To Christian conservatives, however, Bush’s meaning was clear: without ever mentioning abortion, he was telling them he would appoint justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. To know that, you’d have to know that anti-abortion activists often compare Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott. If you didn’t know that, the message was as inaudible as a dog whistle.
To succeed, though, the dog whistle must have two characteristics. First, only your people are supposed to understand the hidden meaning, and that’s no longer possible, since there are armies of writers and analysts ready and able to translate anything you say, then feed it back to reporters so it can get discussed again and again. Second, the surface message has to itself be pleasing, or at least innocuous, to the larger audience. And talking about Monica Lewinsky as a way to indict Hillary Clinton is anything but.
Which leads me to a final question: Why don’t Democrats have any Lewinskys? By which I mean, issues that they talk about amongst themselves, and that Democratic presidential candidates might feel moved to echo in order to reassure them of their ideological bona fides, but which are absolutely disastrous when put before the broader public. Sure, there are positions that many liberals take that might be too extreme for a general electorate. But I can’t think of anything that a liberal might stand up and say at a town meeting, whereupon a smart Democratic operative would say in an urgent whisper, “For god’s sake, don’t bring that up! Do you want to ruin everything?”
Part of that is because, as the saying has it, Democrats hate their base and Republicans fear their base. But it’s mostly because the well of extremism just runs deeper and wider on the right. Which is why a Republican member of Congress can have a woman say to him that the President of the United States “should be executed as an enemy combatant,” in part because of “the Muslims that he is shipping into our country through Iowa in commercial jets,” and the congressman will respond not by saying, Pardon me ma’am, but you’re a nutball, but by nodding his head and responding, “Look, everybody knows the lawlessness of this president,” then going on to spout off a couple of bizarre conspiracy theories of his own.
The Republicans can’t send a dog whistle to that woman, and they can’t hide her either. Everything is exposed. And that’s why it’s going to be really tough for them to win in 2016. And don’t forget, they despise Hillary Clinton just as much as Barack Obama. Imagine if their own hatred of her is precisely the thing that gets her elected president.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 11, 2014
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