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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Lacelle who wrote (29917)	1/26/1999 11:10:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

Right, John. Clinton was hardly the first, though. That's the one thing I always liked about Clinton, actually. He has some modern political skills. After watching the punching bag campaigns run by Mondale and Dukakis, I was quite happy to see somebody able to match up with the Atwood/Ailes/Deaver school of political operations. From nytimes.com Many people are puzzled about how Clinton has been able to appease liberal constituencies while flouting their principles -- confronting unions with Nafta, poor blacks with welfare reform, teachers with charter schools and feminists with Paula Jones. The simplest explanation is that he has restored a model last seen among Democrats during the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, when those joining his coalition get to experience victory and taste power. Clinton has created a sense of partisan pride powerful enough to quell the narcissism of small differences. This thrill of putting up a good fight against a common enemy -- something Presidents as different as Reagan and F.D.R. have created and used -- has overcome ideological and sometimes moral scruples. Democratic activists have taken the advice he gave a group of them in 1981: "When someone is beating you over the head with a hammer ... take out a meat cleaver and cut off their hand." It hasn't always been pretty, or even, perhaps, ethical. Since 1992, Clinton's style has been to dispense with qualms and play politics in as ruthless and relentless a way as the G.O.P. In the 1980's, Reagan and Bush were charged with relying on polling to an unprecedented degree; Clinton has gone them one better, market-testing his rhetoric then deploying it with a numbing repetitive precision. He answered the slick fabrications of Michael Deaver with the more subtle and compelling mythography of Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. He dug deeper for dirt on his opponents, devised more effective 30-second attack ads and showed great ingenuity in exploiting loopholes in the campaign finance law. The biggest change is financial. In the 1980's, the G.O.P. advantage in fund-raising was as high as 5 to 1. In the 1992 election cycle, Clinton and Ron Brown, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, whittled it down to 3 to 2. In 1996, Clinton and Harold Ickes nearly caught up in the chief corporate category, so-called soft money, bringing in $123 million to the G.O.P.'s $138 million. They did this with willful blindness about the sources of these funds. Clinton's attitude is that because the rules aren't enforced and Republicans are preventing him from creating a level playing field he is free to fight as dirty as they do. And I'm all for cleaning up political fundraising too, but it's preposterous to suggest that only one side abuses the system. We had firsthand experience of that here in Wisconsin, where Russ Feingold, co-sponsor with the honorable John McCain of one of the big campaign reform bills, had unlimited money dumped into his opponent's coffers by some national Republican election thing, in an effort to "kill campaign finance reform once and for all". This was the explicitly stated goal, I'll dig up the stories if you want, I posted them here of course. Meanwhile, Fred Thompson can somehow only find abuse on one side of the aisle, the side that traditionally is way behind in money. It's all very curious.

To: John Lacelle who wrote (29917)	1/26/1999 11:23:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Starr wins again!!! We all knew this was coming. That Dem judge that let Hubbell off was totally partisan. Good to see them both slapped down: WASHINGTON (AP) -- Handing prosecutor Kenneth Starr a major victory, a divided federal appeals court today reinstated tax evasion charges against presidential friend and Whitewater figure Webster Hubbell, his wife and two friends. The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that a federal judge overstepped his authority when he threw out the tax charges against the four last year. ''The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Congress's independent counsel arrangements. ... It is not for lower court judges to undercut that decision by constructions of the Act that prevent this Independent Counsel from performing his duty in a manner reasonably approximating that of an ordinary prosecutor,'' the court held in two 2-1 ruling. The decision means that Hubbell, who already has served one prison sentence, now faces two additional criminal trials involving Starr's office, which alleges he cheated his on taxes and obstructed investigators in the Whitewater investigation. The obstruction case was brought by Starr late last year while the appeal was pending in the tax case. newsday.com