As Clinton Runs, Some Old Foes Stay on Sideline By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 — Back when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was first lady, no one better embodied what she once called the "vast right-wing conspiracy" than Richard Mellon Scaife.
Mr. Scaife, reclusive heir to the Mellon banking fortune, spent more than $2 million investigating and publicizing accusations about the supposed involvement of Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton in corrupt land deals, sexual affairs, drug running and murder.
But now, as Mrs. Clinton is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Scaife's checkbook is staying in his pocket.
Christopher Ruddy, who once worked full-time for Mr. Scaife investigating the Clintons and now runs a conservative online publication he co-owns with Mr. Scaife, said, "Both of us have had a rethinking."
"Clinton wasn't such a bad president," Mr. Ruddy said. "In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick feels that way today."
As for the conservative response to Mrs. Clinton's campaign, Mr. Ruddy said, "The level of intensity and anger toward Hillary is not getting to the level that it was toward Bill Clinton when he was president." He added, "She has moderated and developed a separate image."
H. Yale Gutnick, a longtime lawyer for Mr. Scaife, said his client was unavailable for comment.
To judge by conservative talk radio, Mrs. Clinton appears to be the most reviled politician in the country. But others in the conservative movement say it is easy to be deceived by what is on the airwaves and by the marketing of anti-Clinton paraphernalia, books and movies. (Among items on sale at conservative Web sites: "No Way in Hellary" barbecue aprons; "Hillary Scares Me" baby onesies; and buttons that say simply "Hillary Hater.")
For every conservative who says Mrs. Clinton will feel the wrath of the movement's grass-roots organizers later in the campaign, particularly if she becomes her party's nominee, another expresses doubt that Clinton foes can ever be revved up as they once were.
Some of her former antagonists say that terrorism and war have made the political battles of her husband's administration — gay men and lesbians in the military, the White House travel office, Monica Lewinsky — seem remote, if not trivial.
"I think the country is burned out on it," said Cliff Jackson, a lawyer in Little Rock, Ark., who helped set in motion several scandals involving accusations of philandering by Mr. Clinton. Mr. Jackson said he had no plans to oppose Mrs. Clinton's candidacy, and in a personal blog he recently praised her husband's post- presidential efforts to fight AIDS in Africa.
The level of animosity that a Clinton candidacy could arouse is a pivotal question in the 2008 campaign.
Mrs. Clinton has made the anticipated attacks against her a staple of her fund-raising appeals, saying she will need money to fight back. But that expected onslaught is also a linchpin of other Democrats' arguments that she is too polarizing to win.
Many Republicans, meanwhile, say her candidacy is the best hope to reunify their party at a time when many conservatives are unhappy with the ideological credentials of the front-runners for the Republican nomination.
And for conservative organizers, publishers and merchandise-makers, her nomination would be an opportunity to revive what once seemed like the anti-Clinton industry.
"She is the designated devil," said David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, whose Conservative Political Action Conference next month in Washington will showcase assorted anti- Clinton T-shirts and gear.
But Mr. Keene and many other conservative fund-raisers and organizers acknowledge that the grass-roots hatred for Mrs. Clinton and her husband has subsided substantially since they left the White House.
National efforts to raise money to stop Mrs. Clinton's Senate campaigns in New York in 2000 and 2006 never got off the ground. Nor did plans to raise money for a "counter-Clinton" library in Little Rock. And conservatives note to their consternation that at the moment the woman they treat as the incarnation of 1960s liberalism appears to be campaigning as the least liberal of the Democratic front-runners.
Still, Mr. Keene said, "Her image as the wicked witch of the left was burned in the minds of conservatives and the larger public before she tried to moderate her image." He noted that polls consistently give her the highest unfavorable ratings among the front-runners, typically more than a third of the public. (Her favorable ratings are also unusually high.)
Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, said any nominee would face a barrage from the right. "I think that history demonstrates that whoever the nominee is is going to engender opposition from the right, and we will certainly be prepared," Mr. Wolfson said.
Mrs. Clinton's campaign has attracted some new enemies. John LeBoutillier, a former Republican congressman from New York and conservative commentator, said he started a Stop Hillary political action committee in part because he thought her opponents "gave her a free pass" in her two Senate races.
"I started by trying to figure out what it is about her that bugs the heck out of people," Mr. LeBoutillier said, mainly by looking at public polls. He said his organization recently spent $20,000 to run television commercials in Iowa featuring footage of a handful of potential Democratic caucus-goers saying that they distrusted Mrs. Clinton as a power-hungry opportunist.
Still, he acknowledged that his group had struggled for money.
Richard H. Collins, a Dallas investor, has taken over an unrelated group that was conceived by the Republican consultant Arthur J. Finkelstein to oppose Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Collins, who redirected the group toward the presidential race, said he had put in about $200,000 in "seed money" to start a Web site, www.stophernow.com. It plays cartoons of Mrs. Clinton as the host of a late-night talk show who is in the habit of batting guests over the head with a hammer.
"The idea is to present Hillary Clinton as she is and not as the person she is pretending to be," using humor, Mr. Collins said.
David N. Bossie, the president of the conservative group Citizens United who played a pivotal role in publicizing accusations about the Clintons during their White House years, has announced plans to collaborate on a documentary film attacking Mrs. Clinton with Dick Morris, the Clintons' estranged political adviser. Mr. Morris has made a career out of criticizing the Clintons in books and a syndicated column. Mr. Bossie has moved on to write books criticizing the last two Democratic presidential nominees and to produce four conservative political films.
Many conservatives still consider Mrs. Clinton the Helen of Troy of direct mail, the face who can launch a thousand donations. Richard Viguerie, a direct mail pioneer who worked on former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's short-lived Senate campaign against Mrs. Clinton in 1999, said he had not had such success in four decades of fund-raising.
"We couldn't mail enough," Mr. Viguerie said. "The money was just coming in in bucketloads from all over the country."
But by the time the Clintons had left the White House in 2000, Morton Blackwell, another veteran conservative, found mailings for his Emergency Committee to Stop Hillary Rodham Clinton had little success. "The experience with the initial solicitation persuaded me not to do any more," Mr. Blackwell said.
As a senator from New York, Mrs. Clinton has built an alliance with some former critics like Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation. He has raised money for her, and his New York Post has grown respectful in its coverage.
Still Mr. Viguerie, speaking by phone from a meeting at the office of a founding father of the conservative movement, Paul Weyrich, said they would attack Mrs. Clinton with everything they had. "The vast right-wing conspiracy lives," he said.