Nov 3, 2000 7:03 PM "Pearl Harbor Politics-Who's behind the Bush DUI story?"
opinionjournal.com
JOHN FUND'S POLITICAL DIARY
'Pearl Harbor Politics'
Who's behind the Bush DUI story?
Friday, November 3, 2000 7:03 p.m. EST
"It's not dirty tricks to tell the truth," says Tom Connolly, the flamboyant Democratic lawyer who says he gave reporters the court file on George W. Bush 1976 drunk-driving conviction in Maine. Fair enough, but it's also appropriate to look into the timing and motivation of Mr. Connolly's stink bomb.
In August, while he was in Los Angeles as a Gore delegate to the Democratic convention, Mr. Connolly told the Bangor Daily News that during the coming campaign he was looking forward to "adding a little pepper to the stew, to flavor it or leaven it to make it rise unexpectedly." That he has succeeded in doing.
The incident began yesterday at the Maine District Court in Portland. William Childs, a probate judge elected on the Democratic ticket, walked up to lawyer John DeGrinney in the court officer's room and struck up a conversation.
"Do you think Bill Clinton could have been elected president if he had had a drunk driving conviction?," Mr. DeGrinney, a Republican, recalls the judge asking him. When Mr. DeGrinney asked what he meant, the judge replied: "Well, George W. Bush has one, and I think it's important." He proceeded to expand the circle of conversation to include other lawyers and court employees in the room, including Mr. Connolly.
"There was a high-profile arson case being heard in the court building that day, and lots of reporters were present," says Mr. DeGrinney. "Anyone would have known that if you create a buzz it would soon reach the right ears." Apparently, that's what happened. A policewoman heard the conversation between Judge Childs and Mr. Connolly and mentioned the subject to Erin Fehlau, a reporter for Fox affiliate WPXT. When she approached Mr. Connolly, he informed her that "he did have some docket information, a docket sheet, which indicated that he had pled guilty to this." Ms. Ferlau says that Mr. Connolly went back to his law office, retrieved the paperwork, said he had received it from a "public figure" and handed it to her. The news hit the wires soon afterwards. (I tried unsuccessfully to reach Judge Childs for comment.)
The Gore campaign has denied that anyone from the campaign "contacted the press about the operating-under-the-influence thing." Students of Clintonian language know that leaves a lot of wiggle room. National Review Online reports that several sources say Mr. Connolly probably knew Gore communications director Mark Fabiani as a college-student debater who attended the same tournaments in the late 1970s. Mr. Fabiani denies knowing Mr. Connolly.
Likewise, Mr. Connolly also claims not to know Chris Lehane, the Gore campaign's press secretary, who is from Maine and is a minicelebrity in the state's political circles. Mr. Lehane moved to Kennebunkport, the town where Mr. Bush was stopped for drunk driving, in his early teens, and he graduated from the local high school there in 1984. He returned to Maine in 1994 as campaign manager for Joe Brennan, an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for governor. Mr. Connolly was active in the Democratic Party at the time, and it would be passing strange for him not to have known Mr. Lehane. In 1998 Mr. Connolly himself became the party's nominee for governor. He received 12% of the vote in a four-way race that was won by the incumbent, Gov. Angus King, an independent.
Students of Maine politics tell us that the Bush DUI revelations include a lot of similarities to a 1996 incident in which the U.S. Senate campaign of businessman John Hathaway was destroyed. A week before the Republican primary, the Boston Globe and Portland Press-Herald approached Mr. Hathaway at the same time asking for comment on allegations that he had sex with his family's preteen baby sitter when he was living in Alabama. Mr. Hathaway strenuously denied the claim, but his momentum was stopped and he ended up losing the primary to Republican Susan Collins. No charges were ever filed against Mr. Hathaway.
It later turned out that another GOP candidate, Bob Monks, had retained the Washington-based investigative firm headed by Terry Lenzner--the same firm President Clinton hired during the Paula Jones lawsuit and the Monica Lewinsky scandal--to look into Mr. Hathaway's past. Mr. Monks, a renegade Republican, had endorsed Michael Dukakis over George Bush in the 1988 presidential race whereas many of Mr. Hathaway's advisers came out of the Bush White House. Nonetheless, Mr. Monks insisted his campaign didn't give any files on the sex charges to reporters.
But an investigative piece by John Day of the Bangor Daily News concluded that "some big-name Democrats were involved in circulating the baby sitter story. . . . Sources here believe Lenzner's Democratic links were critical to advancing the story. According to the New York Times, Lenzner's company was retained by New York Mayor David Dinkins in 1993 to discredit challenger Rudy Giuliani's record. The man who hired the private detective agency was Dinkins' counsel, Harold Ickes."
Mr. Ickes went on to become deputy White House chief of staff and was identified by Justice Department investigator Charles LaBella as the "Svengali" behind the infamous 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign fund-raising efforts. Mr. Ickes is now a top campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign. Another veteran of the unsuccessful 1993 Dinkins campaign was media strategist Robert Shrum, now a top advisor for the Gore campaign.
Mr. DeGrinney, the lawyer who was first told by Judge Childs of Mr. Bush's DUI conviction, says "Pearl Harbor politics" is fairly new to Maine. He agrees that it would have been better if Mr. Bush had discussed the incident months ago. But that doesn't mean that voters benefit from having this stink bomb dropped on them five days before an election.
"It's an eerie echo of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh indicting former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in violation of Justice Department guidelines on the Friday before the 1992 election," Mr. DeGrinney says. Voters are free to factor the news of the Bush DUi into their decision, but it would also be appropriate for the media to chase down exactly how this story got into the political bloodstream. |
