Opinion
The vast right-wing conspiracy is back in business
Those delightful people who brought you Paula Jones, Willie Horton and
Whitewater are back, and this time they've got John Kerry in their sights.

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By Joe Conason



March 9, 2004 | As strategists in both parties gird for what all
expect to be an unusually nasty presidential election, the stage has
been set by the revival of a conservative crew that might be called "the
usual suspects" -- including consultants Floyd Brown, Craig Shirley and
David Bossie. With new Web sites and fundraising vehicles already
running, these veterans of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" against the
Clintons are now launching the first wave of "independent" commercial
attacks on John Kerry, the Democratic nominee-to-be.

At Citizens United,( http://www.citizensunited.org/index.html) the
boisterous Brown and his sidekick Bossie are raising money to air their
latest video creation, which blasts Kerry for his expensive haircuts and
his wife's wealth, tagging him as a "rich elitist liberal from
Massachusetts who says he's a man of the people."

Meanwhile, Grassfire.com, a new "grass-roots" outfit overseen by Beltway
insider Shirley, has produced an ad that claims Kerry is "more liberal
than Ted Kennedy." Aside from "nonpartisan educational" groups like
Grassfire, his clients (http://www.sbpublicaffairs.com/clients.htm) have
included the Republican National Committee, the Republican Majority
Committee, the American Spectator, the Club for Growth, the Conservative
Political Action Committee, the Federalist Society, the National Rifle
Association, News World Communications and the Washington Times Foundation.

If the names of Brown and Bossie sound more familiar, they attained
notoriety together during the Clinton era as indefatigable promoters of
the bogus "Whitewater" scandal. They served as publicity agents for
David Hale, the crooked and discredited former Little Rock municipal
judge whose allegations against the Clintons forced the appointment of
an independent counsel. Among mainstream journalists panting for a
career-making Watergate-style scandal, Brown and Bossie found many a
gullible mark. For nearly a decade they churned out junk night and day.
For a while, Bossie went on the payroll of the Senate Whitewater
Committee; later he worked for Rep. Dan Burton's House Committee on
Government Operations investigating Clinton and Al Gore -- until he was
caught distributing doctored tapes to the media.
(http://www.salon.com/news/1998/05/07news.html)

Their scorched-earth campaign tactics were epitomized by Brown and
Bossie's 1992 paperback broadside "Slick Willie: Why America Can't Trust
Bill Clinton." Among the ugliest features of this little pamphlet was a
chapter of unsupported and anonymous insinuations about Clinton's role
in a female student's suicide. Their "investigation" was later called
"an unusually brazen dirty tricks operation" in a report on "CBS Evening
News." (In light of recent discussion of the president's National Guard
service, the authors may now regret at least one of "Slick Willie's"
chapter titles -- "Brave Men Died in Vietnam: Where Was Bill Clinton?")

Craig Shirley, who presides over a large, Virginia-based P.R. firm with
his wife, Diana Banister, played a less prominent but no less toxic role
during the Clinton years. Among Shirley's notable clients were Paula
Jones, the Clinton sexual harassment accuser who later modeled for
Penthouse; and Gary Aldrich, the retired White House FBI agent whose
fabricated tales of Clinton motel trysts and pornographic West Wing
Christmas trees made his book a bestseller.
(http://www.cnn.com/US/9606/28/fbi.book/)

Yet as Kerry has reason to know, these operatives didn't commence their
unsavory careers during the Clinton era. In 1988, they made political
history with their first intervention in a national campaign, the
so-called Willie Horton commercial. That was the racially inflammatory
ad that helped bury the presidential hopes of Democrat Michael Dukakis.

The Horton ad appeared not as part of the Bush-Quayle campaign, whose
strategists shied away from such obvious racism, but under the auspices
of a shadowy organization called "Americans for Bush." According to
testimony filed with the Federal Election Commission, which investigated
the financing and planning of the Horton ad in 1990, the ad's actual
creators included Brown and Shirley. Others involved included Republican
pollster Tony Fabrizio, and a young producer named Jesse Raiford who was
simultaneously working on TV commercials for Roger Ailes, then his boss
at the official Bush-Quayle campaign. (FEC commissioners and
investigators strongly suspected unlawful collusion between Bush-Quayle
and Americans for Bush, but Republican members of the commission quickly
killed the probe.)

The rather primitive commercial featured the scary mug shot of Horton --
a sullen, scruffy-looking, African-American murderer who got weekend
passes from prison while Dukakis was governor. Its provocative appeal to
white fear was so blatant that even the Bush campaign was embarrassed,
but Brown gleefully described it as the "silver bullet" that ruined the
Democratic nominee.

Brown hasn't entirely lost his taste for stoking racial animosities. He
currently works for the Young America's Foundation,(http://www.yaf.org/)
where he oversees the indoctrination of youthful conservatives at the
former Reagan Ranch. The YAF recently honored Rhode Island student Jason
Mattera as the "top conservative student activist in the country,"
apparently because he sponsored a "whites only" scholarship at his
school in protest of affirmative action.

But neither Brown nor his fellow hunters is likely to use racial
ammunition against John Kerry. They would be thrilled by a sex scandal,
real or faked, and they are eager to stoke resentments against gays and
lesbians, not to mention Frenchmen. And although they have so far
confined themselves to the tired "Ted Kennedy liberal" trope, that
doesn't mean they won't go much further during the eight months ahead.
They will do whatever the official Bush campaign can't or won't -- and
they have had more than 15 years of target practice.