Dave Anderson -----------------------------------------
"Fire on the Right" by David Brock Appeared in the February 2001 edition of "Talk" Magazine
George W. Bush's "new" Republican Party presented itself to the national convention last summer with much talk of unity, consensus, bipartisanship--even compassion. Bush aides carefully prescreened all speeches, deftly removing the word *impeachment* from each; you had to strain to hear the word *conservative*. Bush lieutenants blocked the Reverend Pat Robertson from speaking, replacing him in the party pantheon with General Colin Powell, who is reviled by members of the extreme right. All in all it was an impressive show designed to win support from independent voters, like me, who had turned from the party during the fanatical Gingrich era. Still, I wanted to ask Bush, who did not acknowledge the role his own party's leaders had played in creating so much rancor, exactly what he thought was wrong with the old party. And also: Where did he think all those rancorous old Republicans would go? Having been in and around the conservative movement for 15 years, I knew how unlikely it was that the party could transform itself overnight.
It didn't take long for Republican loyalists to junk the pretty bipartisan rhetoric. In the hours and weeks following Election Day, a predictable cast of extreme right-wing players, many of them ex-associates and ex-friends of mine, emerged from the woodwork where they'd been hidden--or had hidden themselves--during the presidential campaign. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, for example, organized what conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot approvingly called "a bourgeois riot" in Miami. Rush Limbaugh exhorted millions of Dittoheads, "We're fighting for our lives!" Pundit Ann Coultier referred to the justices of the Florida Supreme Court as "aspiring Pol Pots." Former Newt Gingrich strategist Tony Blankley wrote of Gore supporters, "They are Americans by birth, but they might as well be Martian reptiles for all the moral kinship they have with us." Appellate superlawyer Ted Olson made sweetly reasoned arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court. (When I worked at The American Spectator he was involved with the magazine's Arkansas Project, a multimillion-dollar dirt-digging operation against the Clintons, the very hub of "the vast right-wing conspiracy.") All over the down-channel cable news shows, gray-suited Republican lawyers who had helped me attack Anita Hill a decade ago droned on about law and victory. Even Newt Gingrich, whose win-at-any-cost spirit seemed to animate the Republicans' invective, surfaced from seclusion and made righteous appearances on television in the days immediately following the election.
The Republicans' dramatic postelection display shows how deeply ingrained apocalyptic fervor, vitriolic rhetoric, and primal rage are in both GOP history and the psyche of its chief ideologists. In the aftermath of the election it is clear that fury--if not blind fury--will be shaping discourse in Washington for some time to come whether George W. Bush shares in the Republican hyperthyroidism or not.
The vein-popping conservative backlash Americans witnessed after the 2000 election is rooted in the war over judicial nominees that began in the late 1980s, when presidents Reagan and Bush, in an effort to roll back decades of socially progressive jurisprudence, endeavored to confirm conservative nominees to the nation's top courts. "There really is a line from Broward County that goes all the way back to what *they* did to [failed Supreme Court nominee Robert] Bork: the attacks, and lies, and misrepresentations," says former Delaware governor Pete DuPont. "Then they almost did the same thing to [Supreme Court justice] Clarence Thomas. I think this time conservatives finally decided to stand tall." Gingrich was in on the tone-setting war from the start. Writing shortly after Bork's defeat, he promised to fight the Democrats "with the scale and duration and savagery that is true only of civil wars."
It didn't take long to see that Gingrich and the people around him weren't conservatives in the original sense of the word; they were power-hungry radicals who consciously adopted the street-fighting political style of the '60s for their own ends. In the early '90s Gingrich's posse hung out at the Capitol Hill row house of Grover Norquist, an antitax lobbyist whom The New Republic once called the "Che [Guevara] of the Republican Revolution." At Norquist's parties, where conservatives convened to drink kegs and grouse about the latest liberal outrages, I ran into former Reagan and Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund, and many of the figures you saw kicking and screaming on TV about the "stolen" election. The integrity of ballots was the last thing I ever thought this crowd could get worked up over. Norquist kept a pet boa constrictor named Lysander Spooner, after a turn-of-the-century anarchist; a majestic portrait of Lenin graced Norquist's living room wall. Incongruously for such a hard-right crowd, Peter, Paul & Mary tunes played on the stereo. I asked Norquist about this deviation once, and he told me it was okay since the '60s left "is being destroyed."
After the Cold War, Republicans made the destruction of the left a central mission. Gingrich and company cannily recognized that the Cold War's demonizing "us versus them" paradigm had not outlived its usefulness, and they appropriated it for new use. The GOP promptly stigmatized its domestic political opposition as unprincipled, immoral, and un-American. The dramatic rhetorical shift from one enemy to another culminated at the divisive Republican National Convention in 1992 in Houston, where RNC chairman Rich Bond stood on the convention floor and said of the Clintons and their supporters, "We are America. Those other people are not." As Marshall Wittmann, the Christian Coalition's former chief congressional lobbyist, told me, "Conservatism only thrives when it has an enemy. Things really heated up in the movement in 1993 and 1994, because the Clintons came to power."
Republicans have never forgotten that in 1992 the ballots cast for Ross Perot combined with those cast for George Bush constituted a majority of the electorate; in their minds the will of the people clearly favored conservative leadership. On election night in 1992, then-Senate minority leader Bob Dole went on national television and denounced the Clinton-Gore ticket, which had won with 43 percent of the vote, as illegitimate. That made it possible to say and do anything to stop them. And boy, did we try. (As part of its $2.4 million investment in the Arkansas Project, for example, The American Spectator sent me to Arkansas to chase down outlandish stories linking Clinton to drug-running and murder.)
Riding a wave of anti-Clinton sentiment, the Gingrich Revolution swept into power in 1994. In came a generation of right-wing rabble-rousers whose politics seem based more on raw emotion and invective than conservative ideals. "A horny hick" and "creepier and slimier than Kennedy" were two of many phrases conservative pundit Ann Coulter used to describe Clinton. Beginning with a famous election night party that Laura Ingraham and I threw after George Bush senior was elected in 1988, my house in Georgetown became the center of social life for the revolution. The highlight of my dinner parties was always a dramatic reading from Gennifer Flowers's steamy book Passion & Betrayal.
When Gingrich's extreme antigovernment agenda fell flat--notably when Clinton outfoxed the GOP in the government shutdown fiasco of 1995 and then revived his fortunes by tracking to the center--furious Republicans fought back. They deployed the scandalmongering technique pioneered by Gingrich, who called politics "war without blood." GOP congressional investigation staffers, together with friends of mine who worked for Kenneth Starr, quickly generated charges, countercharges, conspiracy theories, and rumors designed to depict the Clintons as criminals. After I introduced Paula Jones to the world in the pages of The American Spectator, I was one of the right wing' golden boys, and I was in the thick of it all.
Among Clinton's foes tempers boiled over, as the promised indictments failed to materialize and Clinton won reelection handily. Tired of running down dead ends, I bailed out soon afterward, but the right--intellectually bankrupt and on the ropes politically--never stopped believing that the Clinton-Gore administration was a depraved criminal syndicate. In the fall of 1997, months before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, I attended a dinner given by The American Spectator. The subject of discussion that evening was how to build support for an impeachment resolution introduced by Representative Bob Barr of Georgia. Impeachment, said The Wall Street Journal's Fund, was "not a matter of law, but of political will."
The Republicans saw their subsequent failure to remove Clinton as a historic defeat. But they didn't blame themselves. As they had after the failure to get Bork's nomination through Congress, Republican stalwarts saw themselves as the beleaguered victims of a malevolent political force. In their minds they had simply been outmaneuvered by the oily Clinton-Gore spin machine, tricky lawyers, and the liberal-leaning media, and they would do everything they could to ensure that nothing like this ever happened again.
This is the untold political backdrop for Florida's recent drama. And it explains why Republicans so quickly concluded that Florida Democrats were colluding with Gore to steal the election and why they were so adamant about drawing their line in the sand. Speaking of the Republican fighting force that took to Florida's streets after the election, Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley offers a thorough assessment, "This all goes back to 1995," says Foley. "No matter what we did, we got punished in the court of public opinion. The Democrats kept beating us with their half-truths and inconsistencies. If they say it often enough and loud enough it's true, and the media lets them get away with it. That's how we got beat at impeachment. 'It's all about sex.' Give me a break. How about the rule of law? A lot of this is pent-up frustration over that... You don't know how crazy it makes us when time after time we just can't make people understand why we're doing what we're doing. I used to sit home quietly during these things. Then I hear *them*, of all people, talk about the rule of law in the Florida election, and I lost it. I said to myself, 'I'm not going to let them get away with their lies this time. I'm not going to take it anymore. I'm going to fight back. They're not gonna steal it from us.'"
Public opinion polls showed that while 75 percent of Democrats would have accepted Bush as president, barely 60 percent of Republicans would accept Gore, suggesting that the Republican base shares Foley's views. The numbers also suggest that for conservative Republicans something more was at stake than the election of Bush or Gore. I think that much of the hysteria sprang from the Republicans' sense that the right has lost ground in the culture wars. In an election in which the two most reliable indicators of a Republican vote were churchgoing and gun ownership, social conservatives responded to Bush's much-repeated promise to revive a tradition of moral leadership, "to renew our values and restore our country."
Traditionalist supporters seemed to think a Bush victory would provide a powerful cultural emetic. As The Weekly Standard's Kristol observed, for the right the election had always been about Bill Clinton, the man The Wall Street Journal announced on election day had "Caligulized modern American politics." Radio show host and columnist Dennis Prager put it differently. In his view, the "chad revolt" was fueled by conservative anger over "attempts to destroy the Boy Scouts," and "the war on the 'masculinist' culture of the military." In a Wall Street Journal piece under the headline GORE CARRIES PORN BELT, DuPont noted that "Gore carried the areas with the highest... percentage of sex movies in the home video market," suggesting a link between wayward Americans and the Democratic Party.
For a while, anyway, Bush seems likely to enjoy a honeymoon with the party's conservative base, which sees him as a conquering hero. But Marshall Wittmann sees "great irony" in the "full-throated anger on the right" regarding the election. "The right will not play a prominent role in the administration," says Wittmann. "The Republican right is going to be left out in the cold. [Bush] won't be able to nominate Marlo Thomas, much less Clarence Thomas. What Bush may not understand is that the Democrats don't want bipartisanship, they want to stuff their legislation down the administration's throat. I see Eisenhower, who accommodated all the demands of the New Deal, as the model." At a postelection briefing Michael Berman, a longtime Democratic activist, argued that Democrats may be pleasantly surprised by Bush. "The Bushes don't talk to the Tom DeLays or the Dick Armeys. They're good people."
Former GOP senator Warren Rudman, who chaired Senator John McCain's presidential campaign, raises the possibility of a kind of Clintonian triangulation, in which Bush uses the right wing as a foil. "Whatever his intentions were, he absolutely will have to govern as a centrist," says Rudman. "He'll have cover, because anything that comes out of the [more conservative] House is dead on arrival in the Senate, where moderates are going to coalesce around John [McCain]. Bush could build his governing coalition that way, with conservative Democrats and the mainstream Republicans." Such a scenario isn't likely to play with right-wingers, some of whom are already beating the drums. National Review has attacked the conservative bona fides of prospective White House chief of staff Andrew Card, and The Wall Street Journal has warned, "This would hardly seem the time to go all wobbly with gauzy visions of a bipartisan future." Wittmann thinks Bush can safely ignore such carping while holding the Republican right together, if only because their electoral fate is not intertwined. Yet given that conservatives are notorious for eating their young, Wittmann wouldn't rule out a "primary challenge from the right in 2004." So where will all that Republican road rage go in the meantime? Pretty much where we came in: "To Hillary Clinton," he says.
The preceding is a personal opinion. Try not to post more than daily.
____________________________________________________________ T O P I C A -- Learn More. Surf Less. Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Topics You Choose. http://www.topica.com/partner/tag01