Everybody says American politics were dramatically
changed by the 9/11
attacks, bringing an era of accountability and
moral seriousness.
Sometimes I wonder what everybody’s been smoking.
In my travels to
promote "The Hunting of the President," the documentary
film based upon
Joe Conason’s and my book of the same name, people
ask the same two
questions: Did failing to remove President Bill
Clinton from office
teach Republicans anything about the "politics
of personal destruction,"
and how should Democrats respond? The short answer
is that the
operatives who put together the most successful
Republican dirty-tricks
campaign ever don’t think they failed. Who ended
up running the country?
If Clinton’s acquittal on impeachment charges
denied his antagonists the
joy of taking him down, it spared the GOP nominee’s
having to run in
2000 against an aroused electorate and an incumbent
President Al Gore.
Then there’s the press.
Seemingly frustrated by their inability to topple
Clinton, the same organizations
that promoted Kenneth Starr’s sham Whitewater
investigation spent 2000
publicizing nonsensical tales about Gore, like
the ridiculous claim that he
bragged about "inventing the Internet." Candidate
George W. Bush,
meanwhile, received a virtual free pass. His
preposterous budget numbers,
to cite only one example, went largely unexamined.
What the GOP learned from the anti-Clinton crusade
is that given a
compliant news media and an easily distracted
public, lowdown personal
attacks work. So far, Bush’s campaign against
Democratic Sen. John Kerry
has consisted of little else.
Bush has already spent $85 million on a series
of TV ads attacking Kerry’s
character. An incumbent president going negative
so early hints at desperation.
But what’s really noteworthy about the GOP ads
is their contempt for the truth,
not to mention for the gullible masses in TV
land to whom they’re addressed.
Bush approved the message that Kerry voted for
higher taxes more than
350 times. Bush’s spokesmen repeat the claim
incessantly. It’s pure hokum.
OK, maybe Kerry takes exaggerated credit for
his vote approving Clinton’s
budget-balancing 1993 tax bill. (All 51 Senate
votes were equally critical.)
But for sheer disingenuousness, the Bush ad takes
the prize.
According to Brooks Jackson of FactCheck. org,
among the 350 votes cited
were many in which Kerry merely voted against
repealing existing taxes.
In 1987, for example, he opposed dropping a "windfall
profits" tax on oil.
No increase. Seventy-one times, Kerry voted for
the smaller of two tax cuts.
"Thus," notes Jackson, "the Bush campaign counts
some votes for tax cuts as
votes for ‘higher taxes. ’"
The real question, of course, is how the government
pays for its obligations
not something Bush wants voters thinking about.
Then there’s Kerry’s supposedly "troubling" record
on national defense,
dramatized by another bogus ad about votes to
limit weapons funding. So
guess who sponsored the cuts Kerry backed. President
George H. W. Bush,
after the Soviet threat vanished. Poppy’s secretary
of defense was Dick Cheney.
According to The New York Times, in 1990, "Cheney’s
first budget canceled,
among other things, production of the M-1 tank
and the Bradley fighting vehicle,
and made big cuts in the F-18 fighter"—the very
weapons George W. Bush’s
ads chide Kerry about.
But just because the Republicans are dealing off
the bottom of the deck
in broad daylight doesn’t mean they’re neglecting
secretive smears.
Remember Alexandra Polier, the Associate Press"
intern" falsely labeled
Kerry’s mistress in the "Drudge Report"? Writing
in New York magazine,
Polier said the rumor originated with" a woman
whom Drudge had called my
‘ close friend’ [who] worked for a Republican
lobbyist—Bill Jarrell, who
runs a firm called Washington Strategies, gives
money to Bush and had
been a top aide to [House majority leader] Tom
DeLay. "
Then there’s the lowest blow of all: an outfit
called Swift Boat Veterans
for Truth. Backed by Merrie Spaeth, a Texas political
operative who,
among other duties, helped rehearse Starr for
his Clinton impeachment
testimony, its job is to discredit Kerry’s Vietnam
war record. Private eyes
have been trolling among his former shipmates
looking for dirt. Yesterday,
I talked to Fred Short of Little Rock, who served
under Kerry in Vietnam.
Short doesn’t recognize the individuals now questioning
his commander’s
valor. But he was there when Kerry plunged their
boat into a hail of enemy
fire and took shrapnel, using his uninjured arm
to haul a wounded soldier
aboard. The action earned Kerry one of his three
Purple Hearts and the
Bronze Star for valor. (He also earned the Silver
Star.) Short recalls the
boat deck slick with Kerry’s blood, and resents
bitterly those who
question his honor—less on Kerry’s behalf than
for" some very good
friends of ours whose names are on the [Vietnam
Memorial] wall who
can’t speak for themselves. " Short shows Democrats
how it’s done:
Speak the truth—hard.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient
of the National Magazine Award.
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