November 2014 Issue [Essay]

Stop Hillary!

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Vote no to a Clinton dynasty

by Doug Henwood,

“How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?” Sarah Palin asked American voters in a taunting 2010 speech. The answer: Not so well. We avoided a full-blown depression, but the job market remains deeply sick, and it’s become quite mainstream to talk about the U.S. economy having fallen into structural stagnation (though the rich are thriving). Barack Obama has, if anything, seemed more secretive than George W. Bush. He kills alleged terrorists whom his predecessor would merely have tortured. The climate crisis gets worse, and the political capacity even to talk about it, much less do anything about…

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November 2014 issue

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[Letter from Tennessee]

The Demon Slayers

The new age of American exorcisms

by Sam Kestenbaum,

[Folio]

Korean Hearts

At the DMZ

by William T. Vollmann,

[Letter from Vermont]

On Stones

Carving in the granite capital of the world

by Ellyn Gaydos,

Morris’s ties to the Clinton machine go back nearly four decades. That said, his pronouncements on both Bill and Hillary should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. Their mutual-admiration society collapsed in 1996, when media reports about Morris’s frolics with prostitutes caused his expulsion from Bill’s reelection campaign. Since then, the uber-consultant has turned on his old patrons, flaying them in such books as Rewriting History (2004) and Because He Could (2004), and founding, in September 2013, a PAC called Just Say No to Hillary. On the subject of Morris, Hillary has for years kept conspicuously mum. On the subject of Hillary, Morris was typically dismissive when we spoke in July. “She’s a trial lawyer who fights for a position,” he told me. “But she’s not creative and she’s not a broad strategic-policy thinker.” The gun-for-hire accusation was particularly poignant coming from Morris, who has worked for figures as diverse as Jesse Helms and Howard Metzenbaum, Trent Lott and Kenyan presidential contender Raila Odinga — and who, indeed, was advising House Republicans at the same time he was rescuing Bill’s imperiled presidency after the 1994 midterms.

Discussing her voluminous but minimally informative memoir Living History (2003), Carl Bernstein noted that it was mostly valuable for its “insight into how Hillary sees herself and wants the story of her life to be told. It is often at variance with my reporting, other books, and with newspapers and periodicals as well.”

Bill, another pragmatist to the core, hit a similarly emotional note during a 1993 speech to the National Realtors Association, in which he quoted some cherished lines by Carl Sandburg: “A tough will counts. So does desire. / So does a rich soft wanting. / Without rich wanting nothing arrives.” That’s right. Under all that duplicity and ambition, they’re just a pair of romantics.

Their escape from the Whitewater morass is all the more striking when you consider what happened to the other participants. Jim McDougal was convicted of eighteen counts of felony fraud and conspiracy in connection with rotten Madison Guaranty loans; his wife, Susan McDougal, served eighteen months in prison for refusing to testify about the scandal, before receiving a presidential pardon from Bill; and even Bill’s successor as Arkansas governor, Jim Guy Tucker, was sentenced to four years on Whitewater-related conspiracy and mail-fraud charges.

Longtime readers of this magazine may recall “Fool for Scandal,” a 1994 report in which Gene Lyons demolished much of the accepted wisdom about what he called the “Great Whitewater Political Scandal and Multimedia Extravaganza.” Lyons makes a convincing case that Bill did not lean on the Arkansas Securities Commission to treat his friend and business partner with kid gloves. But in discussing Hillary’s legal representation of McDougal’s enterprise, even Lyons grows uneasy: “For Hillary Rodham Clinton to have ventured anywhere near Madison in any capacity was a damn fool thing to do.”

What makes the book strange is its central (and now counterfactual) argument: The only thing that will stop Hillary’s inevitable march to the presidency in 2008 is a Condoleezza Rice candidacy. Morris assured me that I would find the list of Hillary’s accomplishments “adorable.”

Stop Hillary!

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