Killing the Messenger

by David Brock

  Of course the conservative base needs no prompt to hate Hillary, as she’s been the target of a deeply held personal enmity for years that goes far beyond ordinary partisanship (though the fact that she is the most formidable Democrat on the scene, the most admired woman in the country, married to an exceedingly popular ex-president, and leading every Republican in every poll adds a sense of urgency). Despite the conflicting negative stereotypes conservatives propagate (Hillary the dyed-in-the-wool Big Government liberal, or Hillary the ambitious power seeker in it for nothing but herself), what’s underneath their animosity can be traced to the simple fact that Hillary is a strong and accomplished woman rising in what in many ways is still a man’s world, so much so that she is poised to break the last glass ceiling. Her role as a trailblazer in every step of her career—from working woman to full political partner to senator to secretary of state and now front-running Presidential candidate—upends the traditionalists’ view of the way the world should be, as does the fact that both she and her husband represent American meritocracy at its best. Then, too, conservatives, particularly those still fighting the culture wars of the prior decades, fear the liberal social and culture changes they have long thought Hillary represented since she burst on the national scene as an inadvertent warrior in those wars years ago.

  The second audience consists of panicky Democrats who—while they support Hillary’s policies, admire her record for the most part, and long for the history that would be made with her election and the progress that would be preserved and extended under her leadership—are prone to the self-defeating angst that, as we saw in the first half of this book, often gets in the way of winning. As a committed Democrat now myself, I think I’ve observed the party long enough from the inside to say that there’s nothing worse than a “worried Democrat”—particularly one who leaks those worries anonymously to the press. For this species, the sky is always falling.

  By attempting to foment worries about the viability of Hillary’s candidacy—rational and irrational, substantive and silly—the right hopes to undermine the Democratic unity that is part of her formidable political standing. The right’s strategy is to split the party enough to create an opening for a primary challenge to Hillary so that she would presumably be a weakened general election candidate. In this, a natural audience for the right is a faction of Democrats who have never felt the Clintons were liberal enough to suit their tastes: They don’t like their pragmatic approach to problem solving at the expense of fixed ideology, and see their efforts to create a truly big tent in the party by including moderate interests as impure. Failing that, the right seeks to suppress the Democratic vote by spreading doubt and dampening enthusiasm for Hillary’s candidacy.

  And they aren’t hiding what they’re up to. Thus it was that throughout the spring of 2015, Matt Drudge endlessly hyped Martin O’Malley’s potential challenge to Hillary. In a column called MATT DRUDGE REALLY LIKES MARTIN O’MALLEY, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post observed, “Drudge has become an out-and-out advocate for O’Malley.” And in an editorial entitled QUID PRO CLINTON, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “The operating Clinton assumption is that the ‘progressives’… will fall meekly into line as they always have. Maybe they will, though the 2016 election risks of doing so are rising with each disclosure of Clinton sleaze.”

  Republican operative Ed Rogers came right out and said it in a Washington Post column: “Doesn’t the drip, drip, drip of damaging revelations deflate her supporters? Maybe the hope is that voters will become numb to it. But I don’t see how Clinton’s supporters can be both numb and enthusiastic at the same time. Enthusiasm drives out turnout. Numbness has got to suppress it.”

  For evidence that the strategy was working one needed to look no further then the op-ed page of the Washington Post, where anxious “liberal” columnist Richard Cohen opined, “I have grave doubts about Hillary Clinton’s viability,” citing her lack of a “resounding message” and even “her marriage to Bill” as flaws.

  In reaching the first two audiences, the right aims to enlist the press as a third. The press corps has always been obsessed with anything and everything Clinton. They’re covered them the way the British tabloids cover the royals. As we’ve already seen, there is no shortage of column inches or website pixels for Hillary news, because Hillary news sells—and as we shall see, there is no limit to how inflammatory, unsubstantiated, self-contradictory or downright false the right-wing bait can be while still being uncritically reported on by otherwise credible outlets as legitimate. The press knows, moreover, that an intramural Democratic fight would boost ratings and click-throughs.

  Aside from obvious commercial benefits, what explains the media’s fixation on all things Clinton, a fixation that routinely is so negative?

  Let’s remember that those who run the big, influential media outlets constitute a power center in their own right. Research shows that the elite media’s ideology skews a bit to the left socially, a bit to the right economically. By party affiliation, they’re probably mostly Democrats. More important, though, they see themselves as keepers of a kind of established pecking order in Washington and in certain elite sectors in New York. They set the rules; they set the parameters of the debate.

  In the beginning, the Clintons—a young, dynamic Democratic couple from Arkansas of all places—were seen as interlopers by certain elitists of the Washington village. To them, the Clintons were white trash who didn’t belong. And they were treated as such by the likes of Sally Quinn and David Broder of the Washington Post, who routinely wrote about the first couple with condescension and disdain. It was as if they would have been more comfortable—which is to say more powerful—as the keepers of order under a nice, moderate Republican president, say George H. W. Bush or Bob Dole. When the Clintons beat those entrenched Republicans and upended the order, the displaced establishment seethed. (As columnist Peggy Noonan put it, Hillary was nothing but a “highly credentialed rube.”)

  A second group of journalists and pundits appointed themselves as keepers of personal ethics and morality. They tend to caricature the Clintons as gamers and hypocrites, always falling short of their lofty ideals. These were the holier-than-thou people who back in the 1990s claimed Bill Clinton’s private affair was the public’s business even though the vast majority of the country disagreed, and who faulted Hillary as a “false feminist” for staying with her husband in the aftermath (as if it was a feminist principle to abandon your family in a time of personal difficulties).

  Today, their political voyeurism—even by a new crop of younger pundits—is focused on the long-running narrative that the Clintons are personally greedy. “You don’t have to be a political strategist to lament that the Clintonian approach to ethics seems always to err in favor of taking the check,” according to Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post. Marcus used the Yiddish word chazer to describe Hillary. “It means ‘pig,’” she explained, “but has a specific connotation of piggishness and gluttony. This is a chronic affliction of the Clintons.” So, the Clintons are barnyard animals.

  A third group is the guilty liberals—people who understand that real greed, corruption, and hypocrisy are institutionalized in today’s GOP but go harder on the Clintons regardless. Having been battered by the right for decades with allegations of “liberal bias,” they lean over so far in the other direction so as never to be seen as “soft” on or “in the tank” for the Clintons.

  Ever since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became famous for their reporting on Watergate, a fourth group are suckers for Republican payback schemes to scandalize Democrats. And during the 1990s, when the right-wing adopted a strategy of scandalizing the Clintons as the only means of defeating them, this is how the press corps got pulled in. By now you know the litany: Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Vincent Foster’s suicide, Hillary’s Rose Law Firm billing records, the Clinton body count, Hillary’s cattle futures trades, Pardongate, et cetera. All were subject to various and sundry official investigations,
countless column inches and cable TV segments, and deranged “reports” from the fringe right wing—all amounting to nothing in the end.

  Clearly, these four groups overlap with one another. They all know that the Clintons were innocent as charged and saw them withstand it all—a resilience that only produces a palpable and perverse sense of frustration that somehow they are getting away with something, and compounds the frantic effort, which is accelerated today in the ever more competitive news cycle, to “get” the Clintons. This syndrome is a product of an unholy alliance between their political enemies and much of the press corps—all of which serves to rile up the conservative base as nervous Democrats look on.

  Over the remaining chapters in this book, as we look at how conservatives plan to solve their Hillary problem (and, make no mistake—their bluster aside, they know she presents a huge problem), we’ll continue to see how conservatives play to these three audiences—the Republican base, the worried Democrats, and the political press corps.

  Some of their tactics have been part of the Republican playbook for years, proving powerful against even the strongest Democratic candidates. Indeed, one of the most effective involves turning their opponent’s greatest strength into a weakness, especially a weakness of character.

  Karl Rove built his reputation on running this play to perfection. In 2004, the war hero John Kerry was turned into a liar, a coward, and a traitor. In the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary, Bush allies spread rumors suggesting that John McCain’s time as a prisoner of the Viet Cong at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” had rendered him mentally incapable of being president.

  A decade later, Rove was still running the same play. Recall the ads run by his American Crossroads and other conservative groups attacking Democrats of “cutting Medicare.” In truth, of course, it was the Republican plan that would have eliminated traditional Medicare; Democrats, in the Affordable Care Act, had put the program on sounder footing. Recognizing their vulnerability among seniors, Republicans figured out how to flip the advantage, turning what should have been a Democratic strength into a weakness once again—and scaring flatfooted Democrats away from taking on an issue that should have worked to their benefit.

  Thus, in 2016, whatever Republicans fear most about Hillary, they will inevitably try to turn it against her.

  In chapter 7, we’ll take on the first of five central myths about Hillary—that she was a do-nothing secretary of state. We’ll see how the right has tried to rewrite Hillary’s record. Fearful that her service as America’s top diplomat will give her unique credibility to talk about foreign policy, while avoiding the age-old canard that Democrats are weak on defense, conservatives have tried to argue that her time in Foggy Bottom was devoid of accomplishments, a stream of self-promoting, sightseeing travel punctuated by a fecklessness that, in their contorted analysis, caused international crises years after she left office.

  A critical part of the attack on Hillary’s State Department legacy is the right’s calculated misrepresentation of the events that took place at the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012—a terrorist attack in which four Americans lost their lives. Chapter 8 explores how conservatives have shamelessly politicized that tragedy, hunting fruitlessly for scandal in the ashes and, when none could be found, manufacturing a myth that Hillary was somehow implicated in the attack and its aftermath—all so that they could harass her with endless partisan investigations designed to inflame her opponents, dismay her supporters, and entice the press.

  In chapter 9, we’ll debunk the myth that Hillary is a shady money-grubber by turning to the Clintons’ history of philanthropy that has saved and improved millions of lives. We’ll expose the right’s attempts to muddy the Clinton Foundation’s path-breaking charitable work on behalf of the neediest people around the world with the outrageously false suggestion that it illustrates not the Clintons’ outsized generosity, but rather their corruption.

  And in chapter 10, we’ll look at how, unable to compete with Hillary’s message for shared prosperity, Republicans are choosing instead to attack the messenger, using distorted personal caricatures and papering over her actual record in an attempt to undermine another one of Hillary’s strengths: her credibility on the most important issue of the election, the economy, by propagating the myth that Hillary is out of touch with the middle class.

  Of course, such tactics would be used against any Democrat. But the special dynamic that surrounds the Clintons—the passionate loathing from the right, the tendency toward panic on the left, and, most of all, the long history of antipathy from the putatively neutral press corps—offers special opportunities for the scandal launderers to ply their trade.

  In chapter 11, we’ll examine a case study of how a small nugget of information about Hillary’s e-mail habits can be misrepresented, inflated, and echoed until, for a brief moment, it looks like the magic bullet that will finally stop Hillary or, at least, scandalize the issue enough so that the myth that she’s devious and secretive takes hold.

  Finally, in chapter 12, we’ll see how the myth of Hillary as man-eater has evolved and endured over the years, examining how the blatant sexism that culminated in despicable attacks against Hillary in 2008 is likely to appear in more subtle forms in 2016.

  As we’ll see again and again throughout, the case against Hillary is often rich with irony.

  When it comes to her political prowess, are we supposed to think that Hillary is a cross between Nixon and Machiavelli, a paranoid manipulator who squashes dissent and hides from the press—or that she is really a hapless bumbler who can’t run a campaign, maintain message discipline, or control her own allies?

  And when it comes to analyzing the political landscape ahead of 2016, are we to conclude that Hillary is overexposed, that after a quarter century the nation is suffering from “Clinton fatigue”—or that she will suffer from “hiding” from the press, not spending enough time in the public eye? Is Hillary’s inevitable rise to the Democratic nomination a curse—or is it a mirage? And will America reject her because they’ve had enough of political dynasties—or are people ready for a third President Bush in a generation?

  When it comes to her tenure as secretary of state, are we to see Hillary as just a figurehead who rarely engaged in any actual diplomacy—or are we to hold her personally responsible for every major world crisis that has occurred since she took office (not to mention the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi)? And when it comes to her economic agenda, is she a closet socialist—or a crony capitalist in disguise?

  Even when it comes to the ugly sexism that continues to dance around the edges of their critique of Hillary, conservatives can’t keep their story straight: Is she a castrating bitch who crushes the testicles of anyone in her path—or is she only able to run for president because of her husband’s accomplishments? When she displays emotion, is that an example of Hillary cynically using her gender for political gain—or is it an example of why her gender is a political liability?

  The truth is that, for Hillary’s haters, it doesn’t matter. It never has. Ever since I was doing the Clinton haters’ dirty work, they’ve ultimately never been fueled by logic, moved by policy debates, or influenced by facts; it’s always been personal, and that’s what’s made it durable.

  Indeed, in a strange inversion of their own personal obsession with Hillary, by the time she declared her candidacy in April 2015, the right seemed to have settled on the line of attack that it was Hillary for whom everything was personal. It was all about her.

  Going forward, then, we can expect to see little debate about Hillary’s views on issues—convenient for Republicans trying to avoid those issues—because Hillary is said to have no actual beliefs. As right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens put it: “In other words, she’s singing a Song of Herself. She will say, do, and be pretty much anything to get elected.”

  The Republicans aim to make the 2016 race all about “character”—in a tired and ugly replay of
the 1990s. But in this, the last battle of the Clinton Wars, Hillary’s haters are more desperate than ever before—and nothing will diminish their drive to deny her the White House.

  They’ll impugn her political skills all the while portraying Hillary as more political than the average politician—more cautious, more calculated, more conniving, more ambitious, in it only for herself. And they’ll take what would be considered typical behavior by any other politician and sensationalize it.

  The Republicans will be shooting blanks. Hillary Clinton is already the most vetted candidate for the presidency in modern American history. The question is, if they shoot enough of them, what effect will it have? The more they attack Hillary personally, the more they expose their bankruptcy of ideas.

  Yet conservatives are banking on the notion of Clinton fatigue to serve their partisan interests. The idea is that through repetition of “scandal” after “scandal,” they can turn off enough undecideds and depress the Democratic base enough to win the election. “There’s Hillary fatigue already out there,” Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman, crowed in June 2014. “It’s setting in.”

  But the idea of Clinton fatigue is just more Republican wishful thinking: Clinton fatigue is itself a myth, albeit one that much of the media buys into.

  As early as her first run for the Senate back in 1999, it was a consensus among journalists that Clinton fatigue could hurt Hillary, though it clearly didn’t. “The Mayor [Giuliani] may also be helped by the so-called Clinton fatigue factor. A lot of voters have had their fill of Bill and Hillary and would like to move on. For those voters, almost any other candidate will do,” a New York Times columnist reported in June 1999. That same year, CNN reported, “From bimbo eruptions to draft dodging to pot smoking to Whitewater to the Lincoln Bedroom to Monica Lewinsky, Clinton’s personal life has drained the country…. Americans have long since tired of that soap opera. The message is, enough already, and it’s showing up politically in the form of Clinton fatigue.”