The politics of blame

I was listening to David Brock at the Clinton School of Public Service. Suddenly I was reminded of a story from childhood.

As my kinfolks in Howard County told it more than a half-century ago, the most notorious drunken carouser in the region found the Lord. He became the best Church of Christ revival preacher you ever heard.

It was all owing to the special power of his dramatic conversion and personal experience. When he railed against wickedness, you see, he knew whereof he railed.

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Brock was in his late 20s in the early 1990s. He was a bright young Reaganite, drunk on tax cuts and military muscularity.

He had a talent for writing and he sought to fashion a career for himself in the national right-wing journalistic pantheon. There was money in that, it turned out.

Brock fell in with groups financed by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, an obsessed detractor of Bill Clinton who underwrote the so-called Arkansas Project to uncover, overstate and fabricate dirt on Clinton.

Brock broke the story in the American Spectator, a right-wing staple,about the Arkansas state troopers who alleged that they procured women, including one named Paula Jones, for then-Gov. Clinton. Without that story, picked up by the Los Angeles Times, Clinton might not have been impeached regardless of any subsequent physical entanglement in which he and that woman, Miss Lewinsky, wound up.

As a star of the right wing, Brock got some of that big conservative money to write a “hit book” on Hillary Clinton for strategically timed publication in the re-election season of 1996.

As he tells it: The more he got to know Hillary by reading everything he could about her and talking to hundreds of people who knew her, the more vividly he saw the light.

He came to understand that she was to be admired, not reviled.

He says he came to see that, in his youthful naivete and blind ambition, he had become a tool of right-wingers who, with the Cold War behind them, had nothing with which to beat Democrats other than a money-fueled politics of fear and shock and personal destruction.

So there Brock stood, nearly 20 years later, in the school named for Bill and connected to the Clinton Presidential Center. He held forth as the head of a pro-Clinton PAC, and founder of a pro-Clinton website offering Clinton-defending media critique, and creator of an organization devoted to “correcting the record” when Hillary gets attacked.

That is to say he was plugged into Democratic money in the way he once was plugged into Republican money.

And he was railing, perhaps not as colorfully as a converted rural revivalist, but surely every bit as forcefully and fervently.

Brock was telling a mostly Democratic audience that the Koch brothers have replaced Scaife in underwriting the right-wing conspiracy. And he was saying that the “Orwellian” Fox News has made the conspiracy all the more sinister by taking contrived scandal and varnishing it to look like actual journalism.

Left undeveloped in Brock’s presentation was whether Bill actually misbehaved and lied under oath about it; whether the troopers actually might have helped him get time alone with women.

Left undeveloped was whether Hillary should have done more as secretary of state to protect the consulate in Benghazi, even if we can surely agree that some on the right catapult themselves over the top, typically, by saying she’s responsible for the killings.

Brock’s point is that our political debate is poisoned by the kind of thing of which he once was a part. His point is that it’s a thing still going strong, aimed desperately at Hillary for 2016.

His point is that it’s a thing executed most excessively and cynically on the Republican right.

He wants us to be more outraged by a political culture that cynically exploits than by generally well-meaning politicians who bear a human frailty ripe for cynical exploiting.

Brock called on the audience to insist that both parties stop the poisoning, though he’d just finished ridiculing Rand Paul-for what the Libertarian thinks and proclaims, such as that Monica Lewinsky is an issue in 2016 for Hillary, not for exploitation of any personal peccadillo.

But neither side will stop as long as Democrats think only Republicans are to blame, and as long as Republicans think Democrats deploy the politics of personal destruction as frequently and as fervently as they. Neither is so.

So I asked Brock afterward: Might it be that he was overzealous before and is overzealous now the other way-that he’s just kind of an overzealous dude?

He said he is more comfortable with himself now, personally confident that he was extreme then and is mainstream now-that certitude in defense of the good guys against the bad guys is the noble place to be.

Alas, certitude may be the problem. But I don’t know if there’s any cottage-industry money available to promote ambivalence.

Who will sponsor me to form the Pox on Everyone PAC and go around saying the right-wing has been disgraceful, but that, at the same time, a president shouldn’t behave that way with an intern and then not tell the truth under oath about it?

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.