By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, www.originalsources.com
October 27, 1998
Last Friday, within an hour or so of the announcement of some sort of agreement between Yassar Arafat and Benyamin Netanyahu, which was being hailed as a major foreign policy victory and status builder for President Clinton, one of his most ardent supporters, Geraldo Rivera, dragged the people's attention back to the seamy sex scandals plaguing the Clinton presidency.
It was a performance that must have been planned for quite awhile based on someone's notion that a show purporting to be "investigative journalism" that would "prove" Hillary's statement, released less than two weeks before the election would be the "bombshell" needed to get the American people to forget about Clinton's scandals. Remember what Hillary said, on the Today Show on NBC in January right after the Monica Lewinsky story broke?
"The great story here is the vast right-wing conspiracy - For anybody willing to find it, and write about it, and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President. A few journalists have kind of caught on to it and explained it, but it has not yet been fully revealed to the American public." (Hillary Clinton, January 27, 1998 - NBC Today Show.)
Guess who decided to "find it and write about it?" MSNBC's Geraldo Rivera. Apparently, Geraldo and his staff haven't surfed the web on this issue. There's already a HUGE number of websites about that "right wing conspiracy" that Hillary told us was behind the charges that her poor little misunderstood and mistreated husband had a sexual affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. Almost without exception they seem to be about 100 to 1 dedicated to the notion that Ms. Clinton's comment was hysterically funny. It has spawned whole new businesses for "conspiracy" jokes and tee shirts.
In fact, after searching through scores of them, I gave up finding any website or editorial comment that was taking the "right-wing conspiracy" seriously.
But, Geraldo Rivera did. And guess who heads the conspiracy? None other than Kenneth Starr. Rivera first showed a series of on-location spots narrating a truly comical series of "connections" which, he stoutly announced, proved there WAS a right wing conspiracy, headed, apparently, by none other than Kenneth Starr, who, as the First Lady claimed back in January, was trying to destroy her husband. That, of course, was some 8 months before the President admitted an "improper" affair with Monica Lewinsky,
Rivera's guests invited to discuss the "conspiracy" included New York Observer columnist Joe Conason and Constitutional Law Attorney Ann Coulter. Generally Rivera tries to have at least two to three liberals to provide him back up and one conservative, who is supposed to the be the fall guy. Ann Coulter is a pretty young woman with long blond hair who didn't play her part correctly. She was clearly as amused by the fake "proof" of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" as most of the self-proclaimed "right-wing conspirators" on the Internet and consistently demolished Rivera's carefully woven conspiracy theories with a few well chosen words.
The so-called "proof" was a series of linkages - some of them quite remote - which, Rivera kept repeating, "proved" that there must be a "plot" to bring down the President. To follow his rendition of a "plot" the viewer would have to be very familiar with who all the people were - David Hale, Ted Olson, Richard Mellon Scaife - and how they fit into Hillary's and Rivera's "plot scheme." Coulter pointed out that, using the "connection" ploy, Rivera had totally discounted all the obvious "connections" in Clinton's circle. "All the president's character witnesses are in jail," she said.
Rivera clearly was not expecting such pithy, articulate answers as Coulter was shooting back in response to his accusatory questions. Columnist Conason was totally outclassed and outsmarted by her.
Strangely, Rivera and other Clinton apologists keep telling their audiences that the public "doesn't want the president impeached" and are "tired of the story" and "want to end it and move on." Yet, I suspect, they are having the same experience as the rest of the media. Anything pertaining to the possible impeachment of Bill Clinton is the most popular story of the day.
So, they keep discussing it - to keep people watching. Yet, it is true that most people ARE saying they are tired of the story and many simply do not want to hear anymore lurid details. Those with children in their homes are especially annoyed with the story details that Rivera and other news-entertainers have repeatedly described in gory detail. Rivera was providing almost a minute by minute coverage of Monica Lewinsky's blue dress, for example, and whether or not it did, or did not have semen on it, and if so, whether it was the President's.
It did and it was, we learned, and he promptly dropped the subject. Now that the elections are near, what we are hearing from Rivera and others in the media who are desperately seeking to bolster Clinton's presidency that the Wye Summit with Netanyahu and Arafat shows "the President can still lead." He merely should be censured and then, we are told, that will end the matter.
The foreign policy "victories" which are supposed to be showing that Clinton "can still lead" keep coming apart, unfortunately, and the Wye Summit was a minor event on the road to the May 1999 deadline set by the Oslo Summit for permanent solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli situation. Furthermore, some of the most remarkable foreign policy "victories" of the Post World War era were foreign policy initiatives of Richard Nixon, shortly before the Democrat controlled House of Representatives voted in favor of articles of impeachment.
As James Reston described the year prior to Nixon's resignation, "1973 was the first year in more than a decade when no American troops were engaged in military action overseas, thus marking a new policy of limiting the nation's commitments abroad. It was the first year in more than a quarter of a century when American men were no long subject to compulsory military service. It was a year of reappraisal of the United States relations with Russia, China, Japan, the Middle East, and the countries of the European Community.
"Nixon interpreted his spectacular election victory as a mandate to fight crime and inflation, to modernize the armed services of the nation without military conscription, to strengthen the state and local governments by giving them more control over the federal money spent in their districts and work for a new era of responsibility and even morality."
Nixon's personal diplomacy had opened up dialogue with China. U.S. scholars, doctors, bankers, musicians and table tennis players traveled to China and in turn Chinese physicists, editors and jugglers toured the United States. For the first time since World War II, Chinese journalists had complimentary things to say about capitalist American on their return home. More than any other person, the Asian turn towards global markets and a move away from the hard line Communism of Mao Tse-tung can be credited to Richard Milhouse Nixon.
I can't remember anyone even bringing up the issue of Nixon being able to lead in world affairs. By 1973, he had proven repeatedly that he could lead and that he was the best person imaginable, because he was a conservative, to lead America out of the rancor of the Cold War and Nuclear confrontation.
Clinton, he who dismissed foreign policy in 1992 with, "It's the economy stupid!" now finds himself in the position of desperately clinging to foreign policy photo-ops and sending US troops TO foreign lands to prove his leadership ability, as the economy begins to slow down. Nixon was in the opposite situation - he was bringing the troops home and trying to cope with an economy hit by an energy crisis caused inflation that created a 15% cutback in home heating oil, a 25% cut to stores and other commercial customers and an enforced 55 mph speed limit to save gas, and gas rationing seemed a possibility. That caused a sharp drop in the stock market, and a suddenly irritated public began to listen to Democrats about Watergate. A third-rate burglary that Nixon didn't even know about became grounds for his impeachment.
Watergate has had a long and devastating impact on the U.S. political system. In fact, it became the grounds for a massive amount of new legislation - campaign finance reform (a Democrat plan which today the Democrats say MUST be changed), the creation of the Independent Counsel which was hailed as a great law by Democrats, as long as it was used by Democrat Congresses on Republican Presidents, and the Budget Impoundment and Control Act, passed in 1974. The Budget Impoundment and Control Act forced the president to spend ALL monies appropriated by Congress, whether they were in the treasury or not. That was the beginning of runaway budget deficits - causing a deficit of $3,496 billion in 1974 to jump to an annual deficit of $65,275 by 1976 - an 1800% increase.
This time, I suspect, there will not be a rash of vindictive laws passed or a media led devastation of the political system. This time I think it will be the media itself that may be devastated. The old media forms, like Rivera's show, look utterly ridiculous to web surfers who have read the self-proclaimed leaders of the "right wing conspiracy" websites on the Internet.
From a Democrat perspective, the CNN/Gallup poll reported today must be alarming. Following the release of a Gallup poll, taken after the completion of the Mid-East Wye Summit, the hoped for and expected "bounce" for President Clinton and the Democrats didn't happen. One of the outcomes of the coming election, depending of its results, the media, and news-entertainers like Geraldo Rivera, may find fewer and fewer people are taking them seriously. As I've said before in this spot, it doesn't appear that the poll-takers have really captured the mood of the American people and, therefore, are making predictions that are all over the map. Maybe they are just asking the wrong questions.
Or, perhaps, as it seems to me, there is a great deal of soul-searching and discussion going on among the people, and they just don't know yet what they are going to do next Tuesday in the polling booth - if they decide to go to the polling booth.
To Comment: mmostert@originalsources.com