WASHINGTON -- A onetime Clinton opponent who has become a booster for former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential bid repeatedly invokes Arkansas and his connections to the state in a new book about the 2016 election.
Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary and Hijack Your Government by David Brock pulls from his experiences researching Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s to lay out how he expects Republicans to oppose Hillary Clinton's presidential bid in 2016.
The book starts with a story about Brock's return to Little Rock. He said he was drinking a Moscow Mule at Little Rock's Capital Hotel Bar and Grill, a popular watering hole for politicians and lobbyists.
"I spent a lot of time at that hotel bar as a young man in the 1990s. But I wasn't there to make laws. I was there to make trouble," Brock wrote. "And now, fifteen years after I'd last stepped foot in Arkansas, I was back to make amends."
Brock first drew public attention in 1993 as the author of the best-selling book The Real Anita Hill, which was used to discredit the woman who had accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Despite her testimony at Thomas' 1991 confirmation hearings, a majority of the Senate approved Thomas' U.S. Supreme Court nomination.
Brock later worked for The American Spectator and was sent to Arkansas in the 1990s to research a book titled The Seduction of Hillary Rodham.
"The right was determined to take down the Clintons. All they needed was an excuse. And I was sent to Arkansas to find one," Brock wrote.
He said his attitude toward the Clintons changed while he was researching the book. He later repudiated and apologized for his earlier writings and became a Clinton defender.
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, noted that Brock's two books about Hillary Clinton offer contradictory portrayals.
Reviewing The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, written in 1996: "He painted an unflattering portrait of the presidential candidate, calling her response to scandals 'Nixonian' and warning of her 'dangerous character flaws,'" the article states. "While the [1996] book paints a nuanced portrait of Clinton, it is hardly kind to her. Coming from one of the Democratic candidate's current top supporters, the allegations in it are striking."
At the prompting of Bill Clinton, Brock in 2004 founded Media Matters for America, which calls itself a "progressive research and information center."
He also founded two political action committees: American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC that researches Republican candidates; and Correct the Record, a spinoff super PAC to defend Democrats, particularly Clinton.
Brock was in Arkansas in March 2014 to speak at the University of Arkansas System's Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock. He wrote that the book was drawn in part from that speech, and he thanked Clinton School Dean Skip Rutherford for inviting him to appear.
"I didn't come back to Arkansas to settle some karmic debt, to find closure in a difficult, and at times ugly, chapter of my life, or to have one last Moscow Mule at the Capital Bar," Brock wrote. "The real reason I came back -- and the reason I wrote this book -- is that the Clinton Wars still aren't over."
Rutherford said by email that he hasn't read the book and that the 2014 trip was the first time he and Brock had met.
"It was his first time back to Little Rock in years ... A far different experience for both of us than in 1992," he said.
In the book's fifth chapter, "Getting Ready for Hillary," Brock compares investigations into the 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, to the 1990s Whitewater investigation, which began as an investigation into a failed Arkansas real estate deal involving the Clintons and expanded to include Monica Lewinsky and accusations of fraud, obstruction of justice and abuse of power.
"Republicans would never be able to point to actual evidence of wrongdoing on Hillary's part (and, despite a myriad of investigations, they haven't). But they wouldn't need to if they could create the appearance of scandal by confusing the public about what actually happened before, during, and after the attack," Brock wrote.
Later in the same chapter, he writes about how Correct the Record responded to an article in the Free Beacon based on tapes from the 1980s in which Clinton discussed her role defending a child rapist in Arkansas in the 1970s.
The organization found the original prosecutor in the case and had him explain that Clinton was appointed to the case by a judge over her objections.
"Without an early, aggressive, and comprehensive response, this story -- based on nothing -- could have become part of a larger, more damaging narrative," Brock wrote.
In another chapter, Brock writes about the assertion that Clinton didn't accomplish much as secretary of state.
"This is how false narratives are born -- how Al Gore becomes a serial liar and an elitist, how John Kerry turns from a hero into a coward and a traitor, how Mark Pryor becomes an enemy of Medicare instead of the one person in the Arkansas Senate race who wanted Medicare to continue to exist," he wrote.
"These baldly false assertions need to be contested whenever they're made -- loudly, consistently, and even repetitively."
Metro on 09/21/2015