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The Worst U. S. President
Another annual tradition on MayerBlog is my mid-February “Presidents Day” essay discussing my rating of the U.S. presidents. As I explained in my original post (“Rating the U.S. Presidents,” February 13, 2004), my rating system differs from others in deemphasizing “leadership” per se and instead emphasizing fidelity to the Constitution. I do use the same six categories as other rating systems – “Great,” “Near-Great,” “Above-Average,” “Average,” “Below-Average,” and “Failures” – and then (with some exceptions) arrange the presidents chronologically within each category. I revised the ratings slightly in 2005 and 2006, as follows:
(For an explanation of each category, see “Rating the U.S. Presidents III” (Feb. 15, 2006), and for easier access to my individual summaries of each president, see “Rating the U.S. Presidents (Reprise) (Feb. 7, 2007).) My “Rating the U.S. Presidents” essays are also perhaps the most controversial pieces I post on this site. Everyone seems to have an opinion about the best – and the worst – presidents in American history, and many people (including some libertarian friends who generally see eye-to-eye with me on most political matters) are not shy about e-mailing me to express their disagreement with my ratings. My 2006 essay repeated my revised ratings from 2005 and focused on the two U.S. presidents whose ratings many of my libertarian friends seemed to disagree with the most, Abraham Lincoln (whom I consider one of the three “greats” but who some libertarians view as a “tyrant”) and George W. Bush (whom I consider to be not a “failure,” but merely “below average,” because I think his critics – of all political stripes – generally have given him too much credit). See “Rating the U.S. Presidents III” (Feb. 15, 2006), discussing “Abraham Lincoln: Why He’s Great” and “George W. Bush: A Great Disappointment, But Not a Failure”). This year I’m again leaving my ratings unchanged and instead focusing on the U.S. president whom I’ve put at the bottom of the list of “Failures,” the worst U.S. president ever, Bill Clinton. This is how I’ve summarized Clinton, explaining his low rating: Hands down (or perhaps I should say, “Pants down”), the worst president – and the worst man to hold the office of president. Before his first term ended, he already was presiding over the most corrupt and scandal-ridden presidency in American history (see my 1996 essay, “Clinton Presidency: The Most Corrupt”). With “Monica-gate,” the scandal that led to his impeachment and trial during his second term, he abused the powers of his office to cover up his use of the presidency for sexual gratification; and he personally committed the felonies of perjury and obstruction of justice to cover up that affair in order to avoid liability in a sexual-harassment suit brought against him because of his prior abuse of the office of Arkansas governor, also for sexual gratification. His legacy has been not only the growth and abuse of government power but also the virtual destruction of the rule of law in America. (See James Bovard’s “Feeling Your Pain”: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years and The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton, edited by Roger Pilon.)]
In this election year, with Clinton’s wife seeking the Democratic presidential nomination – lusting to wield the political power her husband formerly exercised – it’s especially apt to remember the disastrous Clinton presidency and the true legacy of “Slick Willy” (an apt nickname for Bill, because of his two most memorable attributes – his errant penis and his evasion of responsibility for his wrongdoing). Two terms of “Slick Willy” as president were bad enough; one or two additional terms of the Clintons back in the White House – with Hillary wielding power while Bill enjoys the perks of “First Husband” – will be far worse.
Clinton’s War on the Rule of Law
Bill Clinton’s presidency was one of the, if not the, most lawless administrations in American history. No other presidency did so much damage to the rule of law in the United States. The Rule of Law refers to the fundamental, meta-legal principle that people should be governed by generally applicable laws, not by the arbitrary dictates of rulers – "a government of laws, not of men," as it has been often formulated. As defined by University of Virginia law professor John Jeffries, “The rule of law signifies the constraint of arbitrariness in the exercise of governmental power. . . . It means that the agencies of official coercion should, to the extent feasible, be guided by rules -- that is, by openly acknowledged, relatively stable, and generally applicable statements [of proscribed conduct]. The evils to be retarded are caprice and whim, the misuse of government power for private ends, and the unacknowledged reliance on illegitimate criteria of selection. The goals to be advanced are regularity and even-handedness in the administration of justice and accountability in the use of government power.”
“In short,” Professor Jeffries concludes, “the `rule of law’ designates the cluster of values associated with conformity to law by government.” It also means a government that is limited, "not a government that may act as it pleases and simply deem its actions law." (Lillian R. BeVier, “Civilization, Progress, and the Rule of Law,” in Roger Pilon, ed., The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2000), 19-20.) The book The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton, published by the Cato Institute in 2000 and edited by Roger Pilon (Cato’s vice president for legal affairs), is a splendid collection of essays that show the many ways in which the Clinton presidency undermined the rule of law. James Bovard’s book “Feeling Your Pain”: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) is another excellent exposé of the many ways in which the Clinton-Gore administration abused power during its eight years in office (1993-2001). Following is a list of some of the more important ways in which Clinton’s presidency trashed the rule of law in the United States:
· Ignoring Constitutional Limits Like most modern presidents, Clinton violated his oath of office, “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” by ignoring its most fundamental feature, the doctrine of enumerated powers. As Roger Pilon observes, “in addition to proposing, promoting, and signing legislation that exceeds Congress’s authority,” Clinton also “repeatedly defended such legislation with his legal arguments in the courts” – for example, in United States v. Lopez (1995), where Clinton’s solicitor general argued that Congress had unlimited powers under the Commerce Clause – an argument that, thankfully, the Supreme Court rejected when it held that the federal “Gun-Free School Zones” law was unconstitutional. “Whether it concern[ed] taxing, spending, or regulating,” Clinton’s “very raison d’être appear[ed] to be to promise more and more from government and make more and more people dependent on government, not to restore government to its constitutional bounds, thus freeing people to plan and live their own lives.” Recalling Clinton’s State of the Union addresses and “the universal health care plan that he and his wife so assiduously promoted, which would have socialized one-seventh of the American economy if it had been enacted,” Pilon observes, “When you go down the list of the hundreds of policies and programs Mr. Clinton has proposed or helped bring into being over the years – from Americorps, to 100,000 new teachers, to family leave, to protection for tobacco farmers, to a patient’s bill of rights, to a Lands Legacy Initiative, to juvenile boot camps, to a flextime proposal, to extended hospital stays for mastectomy patients, to a program that helps schools make repairs, and on and on and on – you soon realize that there [was] indeed no problem too personal or too trivial for his, and the federal government’s attention. `Got a problem? We’ve got a program’ could truly serve as the slogan of this administration.”
Thus, the man who disingenuously proclaimed “The era of big government is over” – one of Clinton’s most infamous lies – presided over an era in which the power of the federal government creeped further and further into the daily lives of Americans, in almost all their aspects.
· Expanding Executive Power Doug Kmiec (a conservative scholar who generally takes a broad view of presidential powers) ably documents Clinton’s shockingly excessive use of executive orders and other presidential directives. For example, Clinton’s Executive Order 12954 blackballed businesses that hired permanent replacement workers during a labor strike, even though both established labor law and a Supreme Court decision secured employers this right – and thus was a blatant attempt to re-make labor law, contrary to both the letter of the law and to court decisions. By executive order, Clinton designated millions of acres of Western public lands as national “monuments,” used the EPA to rewrite environmental law, and added new categories of non-discrimination in the hiring of federal employees – thus bypassing Congress’s constitutional authority as the lawmaking branch of the government. The Clinton administration’s cavalier attitude about usurping the legislative power by abuse of executive orders was revealingly summed up by one-time Clinton advisor Paul Begala: “Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kind of cool.”
· Initiating War Abroad Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war. Nevertheless, without any prior congressional authorization – and relying solely on his supposed power as commander-in-chief – Clinton committed military forces to take part in a NATO operation to bomb Serbia, to force its withdrawal from Kosovo, in the former Yugoslavia. Without congressional authorization, Clinton also committed U.S. troops to “peace-keeping” operations in Somalia and in Haiti.
· Abridging Civil Liberties Nadine Strossen, president of the non-partisan (but generally left-leaning) ACLU maintains that the Clinton administration had a horrible record on civil liberties; indeed, she agrees with the assessments of New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who said that Bill Clinton had “the worst civil liberties record of any president in at least 60 years,” and libertarian columnist Nat Henthoff, who concluded that no other American president “has done so much damage to constitutional liberties as Bill Clinton.” The 1996 “Filegate” scandal – in which White House officials ordered and obtained from the FBI 900 confidential personnel files of Republican appointees – dramatically illustrates the Clinton administration’s blatant disregard for individuals’ privacy rights. Clinton pushed to expand the categories of personal information collected in government databases and to expand government surveillance of e-mails and other electronic communications. (Of course, the Bush administration-supported USA PATRIOT Act has received much criticism from Strossen and her fellow ACLU activists – with good reason – for violating Americans’ civil liberties in the name of fighting the “war against terrorism,” but virtually every kind of expanded government power found in the PATRIOT Act had precedents in Clinton administration initiatives, to help fight the federal “war on drugs” and white-collar crimes.) Two other essays published in the Pilon book emphasize other kinds of civil-liberties violations committed by the Clinton administration. Strossen noted that the Clinton administration waged the “War on Drugs” more intensely than its predecessors, and Cato scholar Tim Lynch discusses the many constitutional rights violated by Clinton’s “drug warriors,” including warrantless “national security” searches and warrantless searches of public housing (contrary to the Fourth Amendment) and asset forfeitures (violating property rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment due process clause). James Wootten’s essay discusses the many ways Clinton administration regulatory policies and agencies like the EPA and FDA during the Clinton years gutted Americans’ property rights and economic liberties.
· The War on the Second Amendment Perhaps the civil liberty damaged most by the Clinton administration was the Second Amendment-guaranteed right of Americans to “keep and bear arms.” As Bill Pryor, former attorney general of Alabama, notes, the Clinton administration’s “war on guns” – particularly in its promotion of lawsuits against gun manufacturers by big-city mayors – not only assaulted law-abiding citizens’ rights to firearms for their self-defense but also eroded both the separation of powers and federalism. Clinton’s policy of “gun control through litigation” also threatened to further erode individual responsibility (and indeed sought to blur the lines of responsibility, by making gun manufacturers the scapegoats for government’s failure to protect citizens from violent criminals), leading to another “vicious cycle of futile dependence on ever-expanding government power.” In documenting “Clinton’s War on the Second Amendment” in his book, James Bovard calls Bill Clinton “by far the most anti-gun president in American history.” Clinton’s policies to deny Americans their constitutionally-guaranteed right to firearms for their own defense – policies that revealed Clinton’s ultimate agenda “to leave private citizens in servile dependency on government employees for the preservation of their own lives” – included the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (which imposed a huge administrative burden on local law enforcement agencies to conduct background checks on persons before they could buy a handgun), the federal ban on so-called “assault weapons,” a ban on so-called “cop-killer bullets” as well as proposed legislation to severely restrict the types of ammunition Americans could buy.
· The “War on Tobacco” Although the Clinton administration did not begin the modern “war on tobacco,” Robert Levy observes in his excellent essay by this title, Clinton’s administration expanded anti-tobacco activism in new directions that significantly undermined the rule of law in various ways. The basic strategy, as Levy succinctly describes it, was “first, to vilify big tobacco, then to plunder its coffers – while keeping the industry alive for future plundering, of course.” After promoting this strategy by working with its friends in the plaintiffs bar and state attorneys general offices, the Clinton Justice Department in 1999 – some ten months after the states’ quarter-trillion dollar Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) in 1998—decided to join in the “plunder” and filed its own lawsuit against cigarette companies. The lawsuits were based on unprecedented theories of liability which overturned established common-law defenses like assumption of risk and proximate causation; they resulted in the MSA, “which effectively cartelized the tobacco industry,” enabling the tobacco giants “to monopolize cigarette sales and foist the cost onto luckless smokers.”
· The “War on Microsoft” Yet another “war” promoted by the Clinton administration’s Justice Department was its four-year assault on Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corporation for its supposed antitrust violations. Acting on complaints brought by one of Gates's chief competitors, Mark Anderson, co-founder of Netscape, the Clinton Justice Department launched an investigation of Gates's Microsoft for alleged "predatory" practices by, among other things, pricing too low its Internet Explorer Web-browser software. As distinguished Washington, D.C. attorney C. Boyden Gray (a former legal counsel to both Presidents Bush) notes in his essay by this title, the Microsoft case amounted to “nothing more than pure politics – the very antithesis of the rule of law. If one competitor can persuade the government to regulate the level of innovation by another competitor, without regard to a legislated set of guiding principles, we will have abandoned a thousand years of Anglo-American jurisprudence.”
· The Clinton-Reno In-Justice Department Under Bill Clinton and his incompetent attorney general, Janet Reno, the U.S. Justice Department truly became the “In-justice Department.” Using agents at the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI, it carried out a military-style assault on civilians living in David Koresh’s Branch Davidian religious commune outside of Waco, Texas – which resulted in the murder of 80 innocent men, women, and children. The Clinton-Reno Injustice Department also helped cover up FBI snipers’ murder of Randy Weaver’s wife, Vicki (while holding the couple’s 10-month-old baby) and wounding of Weaver’s 14-year-old son, Sammy, during a 1992 ATF raid on Weaver’s property at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. And, acting in the name of reuniting a boy with his father, Reno’s Injustice Department totally disregarded the best interests of young Elian Gonzalez, using armed federal agents to forcibly tear the terrified boy from the arms of his Cuban-American relatives – in order to return the boy to Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba. (Among its other deplorable attributes, the Clinton administration was blind to the evils of communism.) In chapter 17 of his book (“The Reno-Freeh Whitewash Team”), Bovard notes that Janet Reno’s main legacy was “to remind people of H. L. Mencken’s quip that the name `Justice Department’ is an oxymoron.” Reno was “the perfect attorney general for an administration that invoked `the children’ to stretch its power in almost every direction,” including not only the pretext for the fatal assault at Waco but also Reno’s call for government censorship of television violence – which resulted in the 1996 Communications Decency Act, greatly expanding the FCC’s censorship powers. Calling Reno the “whitewash queen,” Bovard also discusses how Clinton’s attorney general, often in collaboration with former FBI director Louis Freeh, practiced “selective justice,” by refusing to prosecute Clinton administration officials who violated federal law – including Reno’s refusal to appoint an independent counsel to investigate “the tidal wave of illegal foreign money that hit the 1996 Clinton reelection campaign, the use of White House bedrooms and coffee tables to shake down donors, etc.,” or to investigate Vice President Al Gore “for numerous stark violations of campaign finance law – such as shaking down Buddhist monks and using his White House office to raise hard cash for the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign – because Reno claimed that Gore had no intent to violate the law.”
· Politicizing the “Nanny State” The Clinton administration’s propensity to politicize not only the Justice Department but virtually all the executive agencies of government is starkly illustrated by the way Clinton politicized the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), called “Clinton’s Greatest Snow Job,” in chapter 5 of Bovard’s book. As Bovard explains, “Clinton’s presidency [was] based on establishing the personal of a Great Leader who cares – the father figure that citizens are encouraged to run to with almost any problem. There are few better ways for Clinton to show that he `feels your pain’ than by flying to a disaster area and having his lackeys throw federal checks at everything they see. FEMA is a prime example of the Nanny State – a government agency determined to spend tax dollars to rescue citizens, regardless of how irresponsible or negligent they have been and regardless of whether they have requested help. . . . FEMA has roughly ten times as many political appointees as other agencies its size – which might explain some of its contempt for safeguarding taxpayers’ money. FEMA symbolizes government workers as knights on white horses, riding to the rescue with leaf blowers scattering federal dollars in every direction. While the agency’s motto, `People Helping People,’ is plastered on its publications and headquarters, a more accurate slogan would be, `People Helping People to Other People’s Money.’”
During the eight years of the Clinton administration, FEMA became the epitome of government pork. Clinton declared a “major disaster” some place in the nation on average every week, doling out more than $50 billion in disaster relief – far more than any previous president. And the Clinton administration stretched the concept of “major disaster” to cover routine events rarely covered before – such as snow. Snow accounted for a large portion of the skyrocketing number of federal emergency proclamations, with FEMA routinely covering 75 percent of the overtime costs of labor, equipment, and supplies during any 48-hour period of a snowstorm subsequently designated a “major disaster.“ Bovard concludes, “FEMA under Clinton sought to maximize the number of people who hold out their hands for more benefits from Washington. Politicians have trained citizens to come running to the nearest federal agency even for routine problems like snow or flooded basements. . . . The political windfalls that follow a natural disaster epitomize how politicians’ and citizens’ interests are antithetical. The more citizens suffer, the more politicians profit by throwing money and promises in all directions. The only concept of `disaster’ guiding federal policy now is the horror that politicians may miss a chance to use tax dollars to buy themselves more votes. Rather than a triumph of good management, FEMA has simply been converted into a political cotton-candy machine. FEMA’s expansion symbolizes the proliferation of acceptable political pretexts for one citizen to stick his hand in another’s pocket. FEMA’s popularity is one more sign of the decline of individual responsibility – or even a semblance of respect for such responsibility – in American political culture.”
· “Clinton-gate,” including “Monica-gate” The various ways in which Clinton himself and high-level officers in his administration abused power for personal gain – the Whitewater affair, the FBI files scandal, the White House travel office scandal, the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, and, of course, Clinton’s efforts to cover up his sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky – are so serious and numerous that I collectively refer to them as “Clinton-gate,” implying of course comparison to the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency. As more fully discussed in the following section, corruption in the Clinton administration was far worse and far more pervasive than anything in the Nixon administration. The “Monica-gate” cover-up, although arguably the least egregious of the Clinton scandals, involved Clinton himself committing serious crimes (perjury and obstruction of justice), for which he was indicted in the House of Representatives’ articles of impeachment and tried in the Senate. As discussed more fully below, the real issue in the Clinton impeachment and trial – holding the president accountable for his violation of the law, just as his administration would hold accountable any private citizens for their violations of the law – involved one of the cardinal principles of the rule of law, the principle that no man – whether King or President – is “above the law.” Clinton, in defending his conduct in the impeachment proceedings and in his arguments to the Supreme Court in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, attempted to put himself above the law by making his actions immune from any sort of judicial inquiry, simply because he held the office of president. Clinton, in short, asserted the doctrine of “executive privilege,” or immunity, much further than Richard Nixon ever did in the Watergate case.
Both the Pilon and Bovard books were published in 2000, the last full year of the Clinton presidency, and thus omitted some additional egregious instances of abuse of power that occurred in the final months of Clinton’s tenure in office. Those abuses are ably documented in the late Barbara Olson’s last book, The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2001). (Just two days before the book was to be printed, Barbara Olson was killed in the hijacked plane that was flown into the Pentagon during the September 11, 2001 militant Islamic terrorist attack on America. The book was published in her memory.) Clinton “left office trailing an immense wake of bizarre, excessive, shameless, and self-indulgent actions,” she noted. Among the more interesting (though deplorable) abuses Olson reported was theft of property from the White House: Clinton shipped 70 museum pieces, donated to the White House by prominent American artists, to his presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas; both Bill and Hillary shipped furniture that was government property (donated as part of a $396,000 White House redecoration project in 1993) to their $1.7 million home in Chappaqua, New York. As Olson sums up Clinton’s final days in office, “He set aside eight new national monuments and signed new executive orders like a rock star at an autograph session. On a last-minute spree, he launched enough new pages of federal regulations to fill a law library [4,000 pages of new federal rules], dealing with everything from snowmobiles in national parks, to air conditioning, to the very definition of human existence [a federal rule defining a baby as a “fetus, after delivery, that has been determined to be viable”]. He also nominated nine new federal judges and packed every available board and commission with his pals, supporters, and contributors.” Perhaps the most flagrant abuses of power by Clinton during his final days in office were the large number of last-minute pardons that he issued. The Constitution gives presidents the power to issue pardons and commutations of sentences; it’s a broad, discretionary power that historically has been used by U.S. presidents often controversially, as Olson reports: “In 1794 George Washington pardoned two leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, Pennsylvanians who had risen up against the federal excise tax. After the War of 1812 James Madison pardoned the pirate Jean Lafitte. Andrew Johnson in 1865 issued amnesty for ex-Confederates willing to take an oath of loyalty to the Untied States. After Filipino nationalists had lost a guerilla war against American control of the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 issued amnesty for followers of their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo. In 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for crimes he may have committed in office. Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam draft evaders and deserters.”
But Clinton – who had issued few pardons during his early years in office – exceeded all his predecessors in both the scope and audacity of his use of the pardoning power at the end of his presidency, for purely political purposes. On his very last day in office, “hours before he handed over the keys to the White House, Bill Clinton issued a torrent of 140 pardons and thirty-six sentence commutations.” Television commentator John McLaughlin aptly characterized Clinton’s actions: “Not since the opening of the gates of the Bastille have so many criminals been liberated on a single day.” Among the criminals freed or exonerated by Clinton were Marc Rich, a financier who had been involved in a number of shady deals (including sugar-for-oil deals between Castro’s regime in Cuba and the former USSR) and who had been convicted of tax fraud; Harvey Weinig, a Manhattan lawyer who had been convicted of participating in one of the largest drug money-laundering cases in New York history (and who was related by marriage to a Clinton White House senior communications aide); and Bill’s half-brother, Roger, an aspiring musician and convicted drug dealer. Hillary’s brother, Hugh Rodham, who was involved in a number of shady financial dealings, sought and received money for obtaining pardons for business associates from his brother-in-law. Yet another beneficiary of Clinton’s last-minute pardons was his former Whitewater partner Susan McDougal (who in addition to her felony conviction for bank fraud was also jailed on contempt-of-court charges for refusing to answer the Whitewater grand jury’s question, "Did the president testify truthfully?"). Advance warning that Clinton might pardon his former partner in crime came just before the 1996 election: When asked by a reporter whether he might issue a presidential pardon to Susan McDougal, Clinton refused to rule out the possibility. And so, not surprisingly, at the very end of his presidency, he finally rewarded McDougal for her silence. Over two centuries ago, one of the leading Antifederalist opponents of ratification of the Constitution, George Mason of Virginia, warned that a future president might abuse his pardoning power, exercising it "to screen from Punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the Crime, and thereby prevent a Discovery of his own Guilt." For over two centuries, scholars have dismissed such Antifederalist warnings as the paranoid fears of "men of little faith" in the Constitution. With Bill Clinton in the White House, what was once considered ludicrous became a reality. As I concluded rhetorically in my 1996 op-ed "Clinton Presidency: The Most Corrupt in American History": It takes how much villainy to raze a presidency?
The Most Corrupt Presidential Administration in U.S. History
Bill Clinton’s sordid presidency – the shameful degree to which Slick Willy corrupted not only the presidency but American political culture, as well – has been ably summarized by Jason D. Fodeman, a remarkable young man who authored the book How To Destroy a Village: What the Clintons Taught a Seventeen-Year-Old (Baltimore: Publish America, 2002). Fodeman suggests the following thought experiment: “Name a recent, well-known CEO who ascended to the job despite a history of self-dealing which engulfed him in accusations of corruption, who from his first days of employment was surrounded by scandal, some old, some new, covering the gambit from sexual harassment in the workplace, suicide of an associate, felony convictions of colleagues, to lying under oath. He was indicted during his tenure but lacked the decency to step down. He is a man who had publicized liaisons at the office while enemies of his organization were planning its destruction; one who even stole the furniture when he finally left his position and for good measurer facilitated the release of some evil people from jail, arguably in exchange for donations to his private charity. Yet he maintains the confidence of those he served and even today is admired as a celebrity wherever he goes, commanding upwards of two hundred fifty thousand dollars for a speech and millions of dollars for his memoirs.”
He adds, “[o]f course it is the forty-second President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, the Teflon President” whose tenure he has just described (p. 201). In her book The Final Days, the late Barbara Olson observed that Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations selected three memorable statements from Bill Clinton: “I experimented with marijuana a time or two. And I didn’t like it, and didn’t inhale, and never tried it again.”
“I am going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
“It depends on what the meaning of the word `is’ is. If the – if he – if `is’ means is and never has been, that is not – that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.”
As Olson adds, “What a way to be remembered. Three of the most extravagant and laughable lies in political history” (pp. 212-13). Clinton's "legacy," such as it is, is that he has headed the most corrupt and scandal-ridden presidential administration in American history, one in which abuses of power and criminal acts have been performed not only by members of the Cabinet and other presidential subordinates (as they were in the Grant, Harding, and Nixon administrations) but also by the president himself (to a far greater extent than Nixon). And, ironically, Clinton has benefited from the very pervasiveness of his own wrongdoing: the public has become apathetic (as discussed below) because there have been so many scandals: Whitewater, "Travelgate," "Filegate," the deaths of Vince Foster and Ron Brown, the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit, the Democratic fundraising abuses generally and "China-gate" in particular, "Wampum-gate" – Ann Coulter's name for the Indian casino shakedown – and myriad other minor scandals involving the politicization of the Commerce Department, the Justice Department, the IRS, and other executive branch agencies. So many scandals, in fact, that it's easier to refer to them all collectively as simply "Clintongate." But the one scandal for which he will be remembered first in the history books – not the most egregious but the one that led to his impeachment and trial – will be Clinton's use of his office to obtain sexual favors from a young White House intern and employee named Monica Lewinsky, and his subsequent acts to cover up that affair to avoid liability in the Paula Jones case. And, of course, history will remember the famous blue dress that verified Ms. Lewinsky's story and blew (if you pardon the pun) Clinton's cover. The "Come-back Kid" has become the "Cum-stain Kid"! He's the "Oval Office O.J.," acquitted by a politicized "jury" in the Senate but adjudged guilty of his crimes by a large segment of the American people. And his legacy in history will be alongside Andrew Johnson's (the only other U.S. president to be impeached by the House and tried by the Senate) and Richard Nixon's (the only other U.S. president who was almost impeached), right where it belongs. (Of course, compared to Nixon – who resigned the presidency in order to spare the country the ordeal of a presidential impeachment trial in the Senate – Clinton was absolutely shameless. In his own narcissistic eyes – and in the eyes of his naïve supporters, the millions of Americans who for some reason have fell victim to Slick Willy’s celebrated charm – he did nothing wrong. Indeed, arguably, it’s Clinton’s own shamelessness that’s perhaps the greatest sign of his personal corruption and of the corrupting influence his administration has had on American culture.) Presidential corruption, or more generally abuse of power, has manifested itself in three ways throughout U.S. history. The first, and probably least dangerous (although it’s perhaps the most popularly deplored) form is for high-level government officials to profit, financially, from their offices. The second, and more dangerous, form of corruption involves the abuse of political power, the coercive power monopolized by the government; it’s more dangerous because the abuse of government power is not merely a violation of a “public trust,” but a harmful infringement of people’s rights. The third, and most egregious, form of corruption involves abuse of power as part of a criminal conspiracy. Not only does this violate the public trust and the people’s rights, but it also directly flouts the rule of law. Clinton’s presidency encompassed all three forms of corruption. As in the administrations of Warren G. Harding (whose secretary of the interior was convicted of taking bribes in the infamous "Teapot Dome" scandal) and Richard M. Nixon (whose Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resigned and subsequently pleaded no contest to charges that he had received kickbacks when he was Maryland governor), officials of the Clinton administration personally profited from their offices. Most notable was former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, who resigned in the face of allegations that he had taken illegal gifts from Tyson Foods and who, according to the findings of a federal jury, received illegal gifts from Sun-Diamond Growers, who apparently sought favors from his Department. The late Ron Brown, former Commerce Secretary, before his death in a tragic (and still mysterious) air crash in Bosnia, also was being investigated by a special prosecutor for various offenses, including receipt of bribes and falsification of his financial disclosure report. And Clinton’s Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary’s global junkets were treated so cavalierly within the administration that Energy staffers sport T-shirts with her "world tour" logo. During Clinton’s second term – after his successful campaign for reelection in 1996 – allegations of illegal campaign contributions by Indonesians to the Democratic Party (what some commentators have called "Indogate") raised serious questions that Attorney General Janet Reno failed to investigate, as noted in the discussion above of Clinton’s “whitewash queen.” Did the Clinton administration ignore Indonesian human rights abuses in return for the contributions – thus, in effect, putting American foreign policy up for sale? There was also the troubling issue of John Huang’s dual role as a Democratic fundraiser and an official in the Commerce Department. The underlying problem was not the campaign finance system, as some have erroneously asserted, but rather the Clinton administration’s disturbing propensity to use the power of the federal government for political aggrandizement. The Commerce Department is not the only federal agency that has been politicized by the Clinton administration: so too were the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as discussed in the previous section, and also the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which, in an election-year push to grant citizenship to 1.2 million immigrants, the Clinton White House pressured to speed up processing of forms, allowing tens of thousands to become Americans before criminal record checks were done. Clinton’s politicization of executive agencies extended, possibly, even to the Internal Revenue Service, which in Clinton’s second term used its powers to harass conservative nonprofit organizations such as the Western Journalism Center and the Heritage Foundation. Misuse of IRS audits and investigation powers against White House "enemies," it should be noted, were among the allegations raised in the articles of impeachment drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee against Richard Nixon in 1974. Like Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton also has abused the powers of his office, both by usurping powers that the Constitution assigns to Congress and by misusing legitimate presidential powers. Long before the Watergate scandal fully broke, Nixon’s unprecedented use of the powers of his office to create what critics described as an "imperial presidency" was roundly condemned by academics and Congressional leaders. As suggested in the previous section, Bill Clinton took the "imperial presidency" to new heights. He set new, dangerous precedents for presidential over-reaching of commander-in-chief powers with his use of American troops as "peacekeepers" – essentially, a Peace Corps with guns – in the military occupation of both Haiti and Bosnia, without the prior approval of Congress. Also as noted above, Clinton demonstrated a willingness to flout the law in order to further his policy objectives, by abuse of his authority to issue executive orders. More ominously, Clinton resurrected Nixon’s doctrine of executive privilege and extended it further than even President Nixon was willing to go. Not only did the Clinton administration invoke the doctrine to justify its failure to turn over documents subpoenaed by Congressional committees (for example, a memo from former FBI Director Louis Freeh that was said to be highly critical of the administration’s anti-drug policy), but also to claim immunity for Clinton himself from civil action lawsuits – such as Paula Jones’s sexual harassment suit – until his term as president expired. Clinton’s claim of presidential immunity was extraordinary and unprecedented; as noted above, it amounted to the claim that the president was above the law. The most egregious form of presidential corruption, however, involves presidential abuse of power as a part of a criminal conspiracy. This was the Watergate scandal that brought about the downfall of Richard Nixon’s presidency. This too was the form of corruption involved in the allegations raised about both Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in connection with the three major scandals that were investigated by independent prosecutors and Congressional committees: Whitewater, "Travelgate," and "Filegate." Unlike Watergate – the underlying crime of which was, as it has been aptly described, a "third-rate burglary" –Whitewater involved a far more serious underlying crime, the looting of a savings and loan association, that cost American taxpayers approximately $60 million. As in Watergate, however, in Whitewater the critical matter was not the underlying crime but the cover-up. Bill and Hillary Clinton, acting on their own and with their subordinates, were charged with, among other things, withholding relevant and material evidence; making false or misleading statements to the FBI and Congressional investigators; interfering with FBI and Justice Department investigations (including that of the death of White House counsel Vince Foster, who was deeply involved in the Whitewater fraud); obstructing justice by destroying documentary evidence that might be used against them; and willfully disobeying Congressional subpoenas. All of these allegations of wrongdoing were astonishingly similar to those specified in the articles of impeachment drawn up against Richard Nixon in 1974. Travelgate and Filegate involved allegations of still more serious wrongdoing: misuse of the FBI to bring fraudulent charges against the former employees of the White House Travel Office, in order to make room for Clinton cronies; and the collection and storage in the White House, in violation of the Privacy Act, of confidential FBI background files on hundreds of individuals no longer employed in the White House. Political columnist David Broder – hardly a conservative – condemned such misuse of the FBI as "one of the most flagrant abuses of constitutional authority any president can allow or commit." And, in the Nixon-era Watergate prosecutions, former Nixon White House staffer Charles Colson was convicted and sentenced to a two-year prison term, for misuse of just one raw FBI file! Yet no prosecutions were ever initiated against Clinton White House employees for either of these egregious abuses of power. Notwithstanding the propaganda of Clinton’s defenders – who tried to portray Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr as a "right-wing," Clinton-hating demon – Starr, ironically, did Clinton a great favor, by so conscientiously exercising his prosecutorial discretion. Politically, Starr is a moderate conservative, a man who, before his investigation of Clinton, was widely known for his integrity and caution, and was respected as a jurist by both Republicans and Democrats. If Starr is to be faulted for anything in his role as independent counsel, he should be faulted for being too cautious, for letting Clinton "off the hook" on Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate. In his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, Starr indicated the reasons why his referral to Congress for possibly impeachable offenses focused solely on the Monica Lewinsky matter. It wasn't – as Clinton apologists still gleefully assert – because he "found nothing" on the other matters; rather, it was because Starr had too narrow a view of what constitutes impeachable offenses. Laws indeed were broken in these other matters: in Whitewater, a fraudulent savings-and-loan was created and taxpayers were looted for some $40 million; in Travelgate, the powers of the FBI and Justice Department were used to bring false charges against White House employees to provide political cover for Clinton friends; and in Filegate, nearly 1000 raw FBI files were illegally kept in the White House for political purposes. The problem was that Starr's office found no evidence linking Clinton personally and directly to these violations of law (or, in the case of Whitewater, the link depended on the dubious testimony of Clinton's fellow conspirators). Had Starr followed the standards used by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 in its articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon – which charged Nixon with responsibility for acts committed by his subordinates – his referral to Congress could have charged Clinton with literally dozens of additional impeachable offenses. (One can only speculate how history would have turned out differently if Starr were really as rabid a prosecutor as his enemies asserted.) It was “Monica-gate” – the Lewinsky matter – that thus was the focus of the Starr report to Congress. Again contrary to the propaganda of the Clinton defenders, who asserted that the Lewinsky affair was only about sex (Clinton’s “private” life, they claimed), the articles of impeachment against Clinton focused solely on the criminal acts committed personally by Clinton in his attempt to cover up the sexual relationship he had with Lewinsky – not only because it was politically embarrassing but also because it could serve as evidence establishing a pattern of activity that might help Paula Jones in her sexual harassment civil suit against Clinton. (Parenthetically, I should note that I’m far from being a prude when sex is concerned. I think Americans generally hold far too repressive, and indeed unhealthy attitudes, about sexuality; and I do think that everyone – even someone who holds the office of President of the United States – is entitled to have a romantic relationship that’s personally satisfying to him, even if it’s not with his spouse. And particularly in Bill Clinton’s case, I certainly can understand how personally unsatisfying marriage to a cold, calculating, shrill, power-hungry bitch like Hillary could be. But Slick Willy’s sexual acts with Monica Lewinsky – committed not in the privacy of a hotel room but in the White House, in the Oval Office itself – had nothing to do with love or romance. Rather, it had everything to do with Clinton’s abuse of the power of his political office. Having sex with “that woman,” Monica Lewinsky, in the White House was part of a pattern of activity, stretching back to Clinton’s years as governor of Arkansas, that suggests Bill Clinton is a sexual predator whose modus operandi is to use the power and prestige of his political office to force himself sexually on women, for his own hedonistic gratification. Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones: the list goes on and on – or would have, had the Clintons and their minions not worked as hard as they did to cover up evidence of Clinton’s predatory behavior by, among other things, discrediting the reputation of the women he victimized. The “affair” with Monica wasn’t just about “sex,” or about Clinton’s “private life,” at all; rather, it demonstrated his blatant unfitness for the office of the presidency. It’s been reported that Ronald Reagan had such respect for the presidency that he did not take off his coat in the Oval Office; Clinton, in comparison, had such disrespect for the presidency that he could not keep his pants on while in the Oval Office.) Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on December 19, 1998; the two articles of impeachment approved by the House (two of the four charges that had been brought against Clinton) charged him with serious crimes: perjury and obstruction of justice, for the actions he personally took in trying to cover up the Lewinsky matter. (Just as in the Nixon near-impeachment, the crimes charged against the president related not to the underlying acts – the political “dirty tricks” that Nixon’s subordinates committed by breaking into the Democratic national headquarters on June 17, 1972 in order to plant eavesdropping devices, or Bill Clinton’s sexual “dirty tricks” with Ms. Lewinsky, as he abused the power of his office to foist himself on a White House employee, for mere sexual gratification. Rather, the offenses specified in the articles of impeachment – functionally, the equivalent of a criminal bill of indictment – related to the attempts to cover up the underlying chicanery. There are many close parallels between Clinton’s impeachment and Nixon’s near-impeachment; however, one critical difference is that, to this day, there’s no solid evidence that Nixon personally participated in the criminal acts charged in the 1974 articles, except for his participation in the cover up subsequent to the “smoking gun” conversation with his subordinates in the Oval Office, a few days after the break-in, as revealed in the notorious White House tape recordings. In contrast, there was solid evidence proving that Clinton himself personally committed the offenses charged in the 1998 articles – his own perjured testimony before a federal grand jury, denying the Lewinsky affair, as well as his own acts obstructing justice by, among other things, coaching his secretary to give false testimony, as well as other specifics remarkably similar to the “obstruction of justice” charges detailed in the 1974 articles against Nixon.) Clinton remained in office because of the dereliction of duty of the members of the Senate, who conducted a sham trial and then voted on February 12, 1999 to acquit him of both charges.
Why Congress Failed to Remove Clinton from Office
The essential issue in the Clinton case was the rule of law, notwithstanding the efforts of Clinton apologists to characterize it falsely as a case about "sex." The case concerned criminal conduct, the offenses of perjury and obstruction of justice alleged in the articles of impeachment. More fundamentally, the case concerned one essential aspect of the centuries-old principle of the rule of law: the concept of equality under the law, the principle that no one – whether king or president – is above the law. And it concerned essentially the acid test for that principle: whether the law applies equally to a king or president, no matter how popular or politically powerful he may be. In his excellent summation of the case against Clinton before the House Judiciary Committee, the Committee's chief investigative counsel, David P. Schippers, put the fundamental issue quite succinctly when he observed that Congress and the nation were "at a crossroad from which two paths branch off." One was the path of principle, maintaining the integrity of our Constitution and the judicial system by holding the president answerable to the rule of law and to his oath of office; the other was the path of political expediency, in which high public officials would be answerable only to "politics, polls, and propaganda." (For more on this and other details about the impeachment in the House and the subsequent trial in the Senate, see Schippers’ excellent book, Sell Out: The Inside Story of Clinton’s Impeachment (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2000.) The House of Representatives, by impeaching Clinton, passed the test; it ignored the polls and did its duty, under the law and the Constitution. Pursuant to its constitutional authority, the House impeached Clinton for offenses which clearly constituted "high crimes and misdemeanors." In particular, the thirteen House managers who prosecuted the Clinton case in the Senate are truly, in the words of William Bennett, "authentic profiles in political courage," men who were willing to risk their careers to stand up for principle and the rule of law. Equally courageous and admirable for their integrity were the five Democrats in the House who broke party ranks to vote in favor of the articles of impeachment, defying their party and even public opinion to do their duty under the Constitution. Unfortunately, the other house of Congress failed in its constitutional duty. The Senate, under the Constitution, has the "sole power to try" impeachments, which obliges the Senate to conduct a real, not a sham, trial – one in which the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court "shall preside," as the Constitution requires in the trial of a president. Clinton's trial, however, was a sham – a kind of "political show trial" in reverse, with the defendant's acquittal, rather than his conviction, pre-ordained. The late William Rehnquist, as author of the book Grand Inquests (a study of the impeachment and trials of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson in the 19th century), was arguably the Chief Justice best qualified to preside over an impeachment trial in the Senate; but he was reduced to a mere figurehead under the Senate rules. No live witnesses were called (in contrast, forty witnesses testified at the trial of Andrew Johnson in 1868, a trial in which no key facts were in dispute); and the House managers, who bore the burden of proof, were denied the opportunity to present a formal rebuttal. The 55 Senators who voted "Not Guilty" on the first article of impeachment (perjury) and the 50 Senators who voted "Not Guilty" on the second (obstruction of justice) succumbed to the strategy of Clinton's defenders, who blatantly called for the Senators to commit "jury nullification," to acquit Clinton because they argued that perjury and obstruction of justice did not "rise to the level" of impeachable offenses, warranting his removal from office. That argument was not only ludicrous (both offenses clearly are impeachable "high crimes and misdemeanors") but also unconstitutional, as it flies in the face of the Constitution's clear language giving the House of Representatives the "sole" power to impeach (which carries with it the exclusive power to determine what constitutes impeachable offenses). Senate Democrats voted to acquit a man who their own draft censure resolution asserted has "brought shame and dishonor to himself and to the Office of the President" and created "disrespect for the laws of the land." In a rare burst of honesty, one Democrat – Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia – in a well-publicized interview admitted that Clinton's offenses were indeed high crimes and misdemeanors warranting his removal – "no doubt about it," he said – but that he'd vote "Not Guilty" nevertheless because of Clinton's high poll numbers. The result was aptly characterized by the Wall Street Journal in its February 11, 1999 editorial as "poll-driven jury nullification, with Senate Democrats in the role of the O.J. jury." To Senate Democrats, Clinton's political survival had become symbolic of their party's survival. They saw Clinton's impeachment, conviction, and removal from office as a major loss to the Republicans, carrying with it not only Clinton himself but everything Democrats hold dear, such as affirmative action, the minimum wage, abortion rights, and of course, Social Security. Consider, for example, Alan Dershowitz's well-publicized rant on Geraldo's show ("A vote against impeachment is a vote against bigotry – it's a vote against fundamentalism – it's a vote against anti-environmentalism – it's a vote against the radical right – it's a vote against the pro-life movement.") Ideologically speaking, Democrats today are on the ropes. Thus, they've rallied to the credo that David Limbaugh (Rush's brother) has correctly identified as one of the ultimate reasons for Clinton's acquittal in the Senate: "Virtually no misconduct, regardless how odious, will justify impeachment and removal if it might appear to give Republicans a political victory." Politics also explain why Clinton’s acquittal was bipartisan. As for the five Republican Senators who voted "Not Guilty" on both articles of impeachment, it's interesting to note that three of them were so-called "moderates" from New England – Chafee of Rhode Island, Jeffords of Vermont, and Snowe of Maine – who were all up for re-election in 2000 in states that Clinton carried in 1996. That fact underscores the fundamental fact explaining the Senate's failure to convict Clinton despite the overwhelming evidence against him. Contrary to popular wisdom, the Senate isn't the wiser or more deliberate body; it's actually more amenable to public opinion-- more influenced by opinion polls to do what's popular rather than what's right--than is the House. The Senate today is far different from the body described in Federalist No. 65 by Alexander Hamilton, who argued that the Senate was a "well-constituted court" for the trial of impeachments because it was "sufficiently dignified" and "sufficiently independent" of public opinion, a tribunal "likely to feel confident enough in its own situation to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an individual accused and the representatives of the people, his accusers." Thanks to the 17th Amendment (which changed the method of choosing U.S. Senators from the original plan of the Constitution’s framers – which put the selection in the hands of state legislatures – replacing it with popular election), the Senate described by Hamilton ceased to exist in the 20th century. In many ways U.S. Senators today are more populist (in the worst sense of that term) than U.S. Representatives: consider, for example, the several members (or former members) of the Senate who’ve been presidential candidates this year. Contrary to what Clinton apologists have asserted, the exercise of the House's constitutional authority to impeach the president – for only the second time in the nation's history – did not weaken the institution of the presidency. That’s unfortunate, because the presidency in the 21st century is an institution which needs to be weakened, as its powers have dangerously expanded, far beyond anything intended by the Constitution's framers. To cite just two examples, modern presidents – both Democrat and Republican – have usurped from Congress the power to initiate war and, through excessive use of the veto (on political grounds, rather than the constitutional grounds intended by the framers), have wrestled away from Congress much of its legislative power, essentially raising the majority required for passage of laws from the simple majority stipulated by the Constitution to the two-thirds majority needed to override a presidential veto. (Clinton, incidentally, abused the veto power more than any other president since FDR; for more on this, see my 1996 op-ed, "Clinton Vetoes Undermine the Constitution.") Vigorous use of the impeachment power by the House of Representatives might yield a much-needed "ratcheting-down" of excessive presidential power. Regrettably, then, the Senate's acquittal of Clinton has raised the real danger that, from now on, Clinton’s successors in office –at least if they enjoy the same high poll numbers Clinton did – will be held less accountable for their abuses of power. In other words, an already dangerously powerful office may have become even more powerful – thereby negating whatever good that House impeachment accomplished. This realization underscores how truly stupid were those Republican Senators who voted to acquit Clinton, such as Susan Collins of Maine, who said she cast her vote "not for the current president but for the presidency." Clinton’s final “legacy,” as president – and perhaps the ultimate way in which he undermined the rule of law – is that he’s made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the Congress to exercise its constitutionally-authorized impeachment powers to remove from office presidents who abuse the powers of their office.
Hillary: Slick Willy’s Partner-in-Crime
As the late Barbara Olson noted in her book The Final Days, Clinton’s presidency was unique in another important aspect: “It was America’s first joint presidency, a phenomenon foretold by Clinton’s `two-for-one’ campaign rhetoric and welcomed by feminists, the prestige press, the liberal punditry, and, of course, co-president Hillary Rodham Clinton.” Hillary set up an office in the West Wing of the White House, the first First Lady ever to do so. Hillary was Bill’s partner-in-crime, quite literally, in several of the corruption scandals of his presidency – virtually all the important facets of “Clinton-gate” except, of course, the Monica Lewinsky affair and its cover-up. Hillary, along with Bill and their business partners, Susan and Jim McDougal, were the principal players in the Whitewater land fraud, and it’s likely that Hillary was responsible for successfully shielding herself and her husband from being prosecuted along with the McDougals. (Remember the billing records from Hillary’s former firm, the Rose law firm, which mysteriously appeared in the second-floor living quarters of the White House? And the files of the Clintons’ lawyer, Vince Foster, which disappeared from his office almost immediately after his mysterious death, supposedly a suicide?) No doubt Hillary also was a principal player in both “Travel-gate” and “File-gate,” and indeed may have been personally responsible for the firings of the Travel Office employees on false charges as well as for hiring Craig Livingston, the White House security head who procured the FBI files on hundreds of key Republicans, as well as the infamous White House database that combined official White House lists with Democratic party fundraising data. Hillary’s “co-presidency” extended to policy matters as well. She was placed in charge of the Clinton presidency’s “most ambitious signature project,” as Barbara Olson describes it – the Clinton health care plan that would have nationalized one-seventh of the national economy. (A plan that was wisely rejected by the American people – but which still threatens to socialize American medicine, under one or another of the various similar schemes for “universal” government health care being proposed by this year’s presidential candidates, including Hillary herself.) And it’s highly probable that Hillary advised Bill on other important administration policy matters as well – for after all, in her partnership with Bill, she seems to be the one with the brains (while he’s just the “bubba”). Whatever the reality of their marriage (whether they’re romantically as close as the Clintons and their friends claim or whether it’s a sham designed to cover a mutually convenient political partnership), it’s clear that Bill Clinton’s wife indeed was, essentially, a co-president during his two terms in office and therefore arguably ought to be precluded from being elected president in her own right under the Twenty-Second Amendment. (Indeed, if one takes the view – as I do – that power-limiting clauses of the Constitution ought to be interpreted liberally, or broadly, then the Amendment’s prohibition of anyone “who has served as president” from being elected to more than one term ought to apply to Hillary as much as it does apply to Bill.) Hillary’s dangerous hunger for power was ably chronicled in Barbara Olson’s next-to-last book, Hell To Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton (revised paperback edition, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2001). As Olson reveals, Hillary’s life was shaped by the ideas of her political mentor, Saul Alinksy, a left-wing political activist in the middle third of the 20th century, who was the author of the best-selling books Reveille for Radicals (1947) and Rules for Radicals (1971), which were handbooks for leftist political organizers. Among other rules Hillary learned from Alinsky was how to attack one’s political enemies: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” (One can see a tangible result of Hillary’s implementation of Alinksy’s strategy in her infamous attempt to portray herself and her husband as victims of an allegedly “vast right-wing conspiracy.”) Then, as Olson also chronicles, Hillary’s political education continued with her experience as a young lawyer on the staff of John Doar, special counsel in charge of the House Judiciary Committee investigations of President Richard Nixon. (Assigned to research the history of the law of impeachment, Hillary concluded in her report to Doar that “to limit impeachable conduct to criminal offenses would be incompatible with the evidence concerning the constitutional meaning of the phrase . . . and would frustrate the purpose that the framers intended for impeachment.” As Olson notes, those words “have an ironic ring later when her husband’s squadrons of lawyers would have to make – and sell – the opposite case to save him from impeachment.”) Olson concludes, “It is likely that Hillary’s Watergate experience, shaped directly by Doar and indirectly by Richard Nixon, influenced much of her future approach to politics.” What is truly dangerous – to limited, constitutional government in the United States and to the rights of all Americans – about Hillary Clinton isn’t just her insatiable hunger for power, or the Machiavellian power politics that are Hillary’s second nature – the “experience” that her supporters so naively like to tout. What’s truly dangerous is the substance of her ideas: her collectivist, socialist policies, illustrated not only by her plan to nationalize the American health care system but also by the other ideas advanced in her revealingly titled-book It Takes a Village, which offers a socialized view of how to raise children. Individual freedom and responsibility are anathema to Hillary’s collectivist vision, as one of the first speeches she made on economic policy during the present campaign revealed so starkly. Speaking in Manchester, New Hampshire in late May 2007, Hillary criticized President Bush’s concept of an “ownership society” – one of the few truly good ideas to come out of George W. Bush’s presidency (which included his proposal to begin privatizing Social Security). Ridiculing the idea of an “ownership society” – calling it an “on your own society” – Hillary proclaimed (in her annoyingly shrill voice), “I prefer a `we’re in it together’ society.” (“Clinton’s Vision: `We’re all in it together’,” AP wire, May 30, 2007.) “We’re all in it together” – with Hillary as our leader, a president who’s sort of a combination between empress, czarina, and social worker to the whole nation, a female Big Brother. Not a nation composed of individuals who own their own lives; rather, a collectivized nation in which everyone is dependent on government, a nanny state that controls everyone’s life, from cradle to grave. That’s Hillary Clinton’s fascist vision for the future of America – the end result of her insatiable hunger for power – the power to run other people’s lives. Be afraid – be very afraid. Yet another scary trait that Hillary shares with Bill is political resiliency. As Barbara Olson notes, “She shares with her husband a preternatural capacity to spring back from the most appalling and embarrassing – even seemingly fatal – revelations with newfound strength and with no apparent sense of shame, remorse, or even memory of her past missteps. She has performed more escapes from impossible situations than Houdini” (Hell To Pay, p. 320). Like her husband, Hillary will say and do anything in order to gain or increase her hold on political power. One example is the way that the Clintons and their political operatives have injected the issue of race into the presidential campaign against Barack Obama (most notoriously, in Bill Clinton’s shameless attempt to denigrate Obama’s victory in the South Carolina Democratic primary election by explaining it solely in terms of race). We can expect more race-baiting – and who knows what other forms of chicanery from the Clinton political machine – in the next several weeks, especially now that Obama has moved ahead of Hillary in the Democrat delegate count. (If, as projected by the political pundits, Obama’s lead in the elected convention delegates is statistically insurmountable, then we may expect to see the Clintons attempt to seize the Democratic Party’s nomination, ironically, by manipulating the votes of the undemocratic, unelected “super-delegates.”) Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is on the ropes – with Ohio’s March 4 primary rapidly emerging as the critical battleground for the Democratic presidential nomination – and the Clinton machine may be getting desperate. (I hope Barack Obama has a crack Secret Service detail protecting him, because history proves no kind of chicanery is beyond the pale for the Clintons, when it comes to eliminating anyone who stands between them and their goal of more political power.)
| Link to this Entry | Posted Friday, February 15, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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