BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher
March 30, 2008
Why have Bill and Hillary Clinton spent the last 8 years sucking up to the vast right wing conspiracy (as evidenced in recent blogs that I have written)? Not to mention Bill Clinton's odd "friendship" and mutual admiration society with George Herbert Walker Bush. (Clinton a few months back said that if Hillary is elected that he and Poppy Bush might travel around the world as roving ambassadors to improve America's image. We are not making this up.)
Well, we are going to offer even more evidence of the right-wing conspiracy Clinton rapprochement in a glowing interview and tribute to Bill Clinton that appeared last fall in NewsMax, of which Richard Mellon Scaife is a main shareholder.
But we speculate that the Clintons -- while Hillary espouses increasingly populist working class themes to win economically dislocated white votes, even though she publicly supported NAFTA (as we now know from her White House schedule) in her husband's administration -- have two goals. One is that Bill needs to raise money for his gargantuan Clinton foundation efforts, and you can be sure that Richard Mellon Scaife (who he has been courting) and other right-wing media moguls are on that list of donors that he won't reveal because it would be mighty embarrassing to Hillary's campaign.
More importantly, the Clintons have been good and ruthless at running campaigns for themselves for the most part (although Bill lost a couple in Arkansas), but they have been dreadful at defining a vision and developing a power base to lead America away from the Reagan legacy. Most of Bill Clinton's legislative legacy as President is one of giving the Republicans basically what they want, with some DLC goals thrown into the mix. The NAFTA legislation is a key example.
Newt Gingrich ran with a strategically brilliant simple dumbed-down "Contract with America" and took the House back for the Republicans in 1994 after years of softening up the voters by getting Democratic House leadership tainted by blowing petty improprieties into major crimes. The Clintons still, to this day, think that "they" lost the House in 1994 because of Clinton's support for a now defunct assault weapons legislation. They were out-gunned, yes, but not because Clinton actually asserted leadership on gun control; it was because Gingrich had, like Reagan's packagers before him, a long-term strategy for achieving legislative power. He had a vision that he sold to the American public, after laying the groundwork for the sales job by softening up his "enemy."
The Clintons are not long-term strategists. They fight for the day. That is why Howard Wolfson, Harold Ickes, and Phil Singer end up piling on absurd, illogical statements in their daily press phone calls. Because the entire Clinton campaign is run now in six-hour news cycles. So Obama one day is declared not ready to be Commander-in-Chief, but the Clintons need votes in Mississippi so, as a tag team, they opportunistically suggest that Obama might be a good Vice President on a Clinton ticket, part of the now cliched "dream team." When the Clinton camp is then asked how he could be a heart beat away from the presidency if he has not crossed the "threshold" to be Commander-in-Chief, we believe it was Wolfson who said -- and we are paraphrasing but not by much: "Well, there's a long time between now and August, and he might be ready by the Convention."
Senator Hillary Clinton has a briefcase full of programs, that is true. But she and Bill have always lacked the ability to bring the electorate to a higher ground -- or vision -- to support an overall agenda. The irony is that the majority of the electorate agrees with a large chunk of progressive government initiatives, but the Clintons can't get them passed. Bill spent his elected years in Arkansas and as president in a near-permanent state of conceding the legislative agenda to the Republicans. In short, the Clintons campaign on the offense, but they govern on the defense.
Part of that problem is also that the Clintons run for themselves first, and they are not very good at helping Democrats win "downticket." This means you get the Clintons as president, but you don't get working majorities in Congress, because the Clintons are not really "Democratic Party First" people. They are Democratic Party last people, unless the Democratic Party is willing to become the Clinton Party, which is the Democratic half of the Republicrat Party.
I'll discuss more of this at another time (and remember I was a bona fide Clinton fanatic in the '90s and started BuzzFlash to counter the vast right-wing conspiracy that had run a think tank-media-legal hit job on the Clintons).
But onto the NewsMax interview with Bill Clinton. As I have noted in recent BuzzFlash Editor's Blogs, the Clintons have made it a priority to cultivate the vast right-wing conspiracy, and leave us who fought the conspiracy on their behalf high and dry.
A fellow right-wing site, World Net Daily, notes: "Scaife's NewsMax, a popular and once enthusiastically pro-Republican news website co-owned with Christopher Ruddy, who famously investigated the mysterious death of Clinton's deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster and the strange death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown" wrote a glowing tribute to the former president.
Media Matters notes something that puts the turnaround in historic perspective:
Scaife apparently withdrew his funding from The American Spectator's Arkansas Project -- a $2.4 million effort to dig up negative information about the Clintons -- in 1997 after the magazine printed a negative review of a book by NewsMax founder and editor Christopher Ruddy, a former reporter at the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, suggesting that former Clinton White House counsel Vincent Foster was murdered, despite numerous investigations concluding that his death was a suicide. Newsweek reported on May 18, 1998, that "Scaife no longer gives money to the Spectator. Sources at the magazine suggest that he was miffed when the Spectator panned a book written by his favorite conspiracist, reporter Christopher Ruddy." Even right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, in her book Slander, dismissed Ruddy's book: "Even if Christopher Ruddy's The Strange Death of Vince Foster was considered a conservative hoax book, it was also conservatives who discredited it."
But times change. Who conducted the "puff piece" NewsMax interview with Bill Clinton? Why Christopher "Vince Foster didn't commit suicide" Ruddy!
Newsweek had an informative November 19, 2007, article on the recent Bill Clinton/Richard Mellon Scaife "mutual admiration society."
But back to the flattering Bill Clinton NewsMax interview published on Halloween of 2007.
Ruddy's introduction to the interview sounds like Barbara Walters wrote it:
Bill Clinton remains more powerful than ever – despite having left the White House almost seven years ago.
In a recent interview with Newsmax, the former president tells of his new book, his global charity campaign, and his role if his wife becomes president next year.
His book “Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World” debuted at the top of the New York Times Best-Seller list when it was published in September, and has been called a “powerful, inspirational guide” for everyday citizens...
The Clinton Global Initiative boasts more than 570 commitments worth an astounding $10 billion, involving more than 1,000 organizations and targeting 100 countries.
There is no doubt Bill Clinton has broken the mold of what we expect from a former president.
And there is also no question that in the past Bill Clinton has engendered considerable controversy. But there should be little disagreement today that he is doing exemplary work and is acting as a positive force for the United States.
Dear me, has the vast right-wing conspiracy gone soft?
And in a promo for their print magazine profile of Bill Clinton, NewsMax teases:
Bill is back!
Nearly seven years after he left the White House, Bill Clinton is surprisingly more influential than ever.
He’s become a tireless pitchman for charitable causes globally, the undisputed king of the worldwide lecture circuit – and with wife Hillary the leading Democratic candidate for president, a potential queen maker in 2008.
NewsMax magazine’s special report "Bill Clinton Still (Very Much) in Power" takes an in-depth look at the controversial political and cultural powerhouse who is redefining what it means to be an ex-president.
But our favorite previewed bullet point highlights from the interview are:
Why President Bush calls Bill "my new brother"
Why Bill is proving to be Hillary’s "secret weapon"
Clinton’s surprising alliance with former President Bush
How Bill’s gift of gab rakes in millions
Clinton’s lucrative relationship with billionaire Ron Burkle
How Bill woos the African-American vote for Hillary
Yes, that last one certainly wins the irony of the year award for NewsMax predictions.
So just remember, folks, these are the Clintons who have cozied up to Richard Mellon Scaife. Senator Clinton read from a written script a response not-so-subtly attacking the Obama/Jeremiah Wright relationship while sitting next to Richard Mellon Scaife at an editorial board meeting of the Pittsburgh vanity paper that he loses millions of dollars a year subsidizing. Clinton had been asked about Obama and Wright for a week and demurred, but the Bosnia sniper fire lie had just been debunked by a CBS videotape the day before her Scaife rendezvous. So her campaign instructed her to take down Obama to divert attention. When the going gets rough, go the low road has been the campaign slogan of Clinton Inc. the last couple of months.
When the going gets rough, and you need to change the political story from your own personal lie that cuts to the core of whether you have any real foreign policy experience -- and told multiple times with growing embellishment -- there's no better friend than Richard Mellon Scaife. It's the next best thing to shouting it out on the Bill O'Reilly show we guess.
But you'll have to ask the Clinton campaign.
BuzzFlash isn't about to suck up to Richard Mellon Scaife. We're just wondering if James "Mary Matalin" Carville considers Bill and Hillary Clinton Judases for all of this.
Hey, James, want to comment on that?
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorblog/074
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