From the WSJ Opinion Archives
The
Clinton Legacy
If the polls are to be believed, last week's late hit by the Los Angeles Times
has not hurt Arnold Schwarzenegger's chances at being elected governor tomorrow.
Indeed, his poll numbers actually improved slightly in some surveys. There's
always the chance that voters will deliver their own "October surprise"
and prove the polls wrong. But assuming the polls are right and tomorrow night
finds Schwarzenegger governor-elect, he will owe his office in significant part
to Bill Clinton.
Schwarzenegger's alleged history of boorish, even assaultive, conduct toward women is a legitimate topic of journalistic inquiry. It does tell us something about his character, and it's a perfectly respectable reason not to vote for the man. Clinton's defenders, however, argued otherwise when their man faced allegations of the same type. We all remember the litany: The conduct in question was "personal," it was in the past, his critics were partisan or hypocritical, and anyway what did it have to do with the job of being president?
Given that many of the same people had attacked Clarence Thomas a few years earlier for purportedly making ribald comments, it was hard to credit the Clinton defenders with making a principled argument. But polls at the time showed a substantial majority of Americans opposing impeachment, so not only partisan Democrats found this argument persuasive, whatever the motives of those who employed it.
Democratic partisans, having employed the groping-doesn't-matter defense with such great success in defending Bill Clinton, they can hardly expect people not to apply the same argument to the Schwarzenegger case. You pretty much have to be a partisan Democrat to think Clinton's behavior was none of anyone's business while Schwarzenegger's disqualifies him from holding office.
The New York Post's Jonathan Foreman visited MoveOn.org's anti-Schwarzenegger rally Friday and offers a quote that pretty much sums it up:
The most honest thing I heard came from film producer and Codepink activist Patricia Foulkrod. She admitted that Bill Clinton's sexual peccadilloes were as inexcusable as Arnold's. "The difference is that Clinton was so brilliant," she said. "If Arnold was a brilliant pol and had this thing about inappropriate behavior, we'd figure a way of getting around it. I think it's to our detriment to go on too much about the groping. But it's our way in. This is really about the GOP trying to take California in 2004 and our trying to stop it."
Such hypocrisy prompted a rare fit of cogency from Maureen Dowd:
Feminism died in 1998 when Hillary allowed henchlings and Democrats to demonize Monica as an unbalanced stalker, and when Gloria Steinem defended Mr. Clinton against Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones by saying he had merely made clumsy passes, then accepted rejection, so there was no sexual harassment involved. As to his dallying with an emotionally immature 21-year-old, Ms. Steinem noted, "Welcome sexual behavior is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one."
Surely what's good for the Comeback Kid is good for the Terminator.
And what's good for the L.A. Times is good for the L.A. Daily News, which over the weekend published an op-ed by Jill Stewart, who asks why the Times hasn't subjected the governor to a similar investigation: "Since at least 1997, the Times has been sitting on information that Gov. Gray Davis is an 'office batterer' who has attacked female members of his staff, thrown objects at subservients and launched into red-faced fits, screaming the f-word until staffers cower."
Stewart recounts her own reporting on Davis, which appeared in 1997 in the now-defunct New Times Los Angeles:
Davis flew into a rage one day because female staffers had rearranged framed artwork on the walls of his office. He so violently shoved his loyal, 62-year-old secretary out of a doorway that she suffered a breakdown and refused to ever work in the same room with him. She worked at home, in an arrangement with state officials, then worked in a separate area where she was promised Davis would not go. She finally transferred to another job, desperate to avoid him. . . .
Another woman, a policy analyst, had the unhappy chore in the mid-1990s of informing Davis that a fund-raising source had dried up. When she told Davis, she recounted, Davis began screaming the f-word at the top of his lungs. The woman stood to demand that he stop speaking that way, and, she says, Davis grabbed her by her shoulders and "shook me until my teeth rattled. I was so stunned I said, 'Good God, Gray! Stop and look at what you are doing. Think what you are doing to me!' "
Stewart writes that while she was researching the New Times story (which is reproduced here), she "crossed paths" with L.A. Times reporters looking into the same allegations. But the Old Times never published the story. "When I spoke to a reporter involved," Stewart recounts, "he said editors at the Times were against attacking a major political figure using anonymous sources. Just what they did last week to Schwarzenegger." The Times may turn out to have done more damage to its own reputation than to Schwarzenegger's.
Reliable
Sources?
There's a common thread between the kerfuffle over Arnold Schwarzenegger and
the one involving Valerie Plame: In both cases, the news media are central players
in the story. This is even more striking in the Plame kerfuffle, which is all
about leaks to reporters, and which has prompted considerable navel-gazing from
media pooh-bahs about Washington journalists' habitual reliance on anonymous
sources. Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, tells the
Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that "the 'underbelly of leaking' is not
pretty":
"Ninety-five percent of the time, people are basically dropping a dime on other people, dissing other people, leaking from base motives," Lemann said. "Let's not pretend all leaks consist of genuine whistle-blowers. Usually it's Campaign A telling you something sleazy about Campaign B that their candidate is afraid to say in public. But you have to honor the principle for the sake of the minority of cases that are really in the public interest."
One reason the Plame story has such a hall-of-mirrors quality is that it could easily be resolved if reporters simply told investigators everything they know. The Washington Post's Mike Allen and Dana Priest reported last week that a "senior administration official" told them that "two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists" and told them that Plame worked for the CIA. And of course Robert Novak put it into print, citing two "senior administration officials."
If reporters were to cooperate fully with the investigation, it would be easy for the FBI to get to the bottom of things. Here's what they'd have to do:
- Question Allen and Priest and establish the identity of the "senior
administration official" and, assuming they know, the "two top White
House officials" behind the alleged leak (he seems to have identified
them off the record).
- Question the SAO about the identities of both the "top White House
officials" and the six journalists.
- Question the six journalists (and Novak, if he isn't among them) as to who
their sources were and what they said.
- Question all named by the reporters and by the Allen/Priest source to find out what they knew about Plame and what they told the reporters.
If the investigators had all this information, they would have a pretty good idea of whether a crime occurred, and if so, who did it. Of course, this is unlikely to happen, because reporters generally do not reveal confidential sources. As Eugene Volokh notes, there is little legal basis for reporters to refuse to reveal their sources; some states have "shield" laws protecting journalistic sources, but there is no such protection in federal investigations. (There are Justice Department guidelines that counsel caution in issuing subpoenas to reporters and require authorization from the attorney general himself before such subpoenas may be issued.)
Glenn Reynolds argues that "the White House has a lot to gain by subpoenaing reporters who know about the Plame leaks":
First, once the press clams up and starts going on about protecting sources, it becomes extremely hard for it to claim that the White House is covering things up. "Who's stonewalling now?" can be the response.
Second, the press's complaints will look like special pleading (which they are). "If you leak this you're a traitor, but if we publish it, we're being great Americans," won't wash.
Third, subpoenaing reporters will likely reduce the number of leaks in the future. And that's a good thing, right? We keep hearing that these leaks were disastrous for national security. If that's true, we certainly want people to think twice before leaking in this fashion again, or publishing the results of such leaks.
Reynolds may be underestimating the political risk that such a move would entail. The reporters undoubtedly would refuse on principle to give up their sources, and although there's an element of special pleading there, Lemann is right that in some cases the use of anonymous sources serves the public interest. It's entirely possible that the public would sympathize with reporters' claims that subpoenaing them amounts to an assault on the First Amendment.
On the other hand, there's no getting around that the Plame kerfuffle puts the press in an awkward position. How can journalists pontificate about "the public's right to know" while defending their own right to keep the secrets that are at the center of this case? This is not Watergate, in which dogged investigative reporting exposed corruption in the White House. Here, there may or may not be a scandal, and reporters are withholding information that would establish the truth of the matter.
Justifiably or not, Watergate reinforced many conservatives' perceptions that the media are biased against them, and the Clinton scandals had the same effect on liberals. If the L.A. Times' revelations fail to sink Schwarzenegger, it will be an indication that the broader public sees journalists not as they see themselves--as seekers of truth who speak truth to power--but as part of a political culture that places far too much emphasis on scandal, real and imagined. Did the media learn the lessons of Watergate too well?
Was
She Covert?--II
The Washington Post, picking up a revelation by Robert Novak, reports that Valerie
Plame made a political contribution in 1999 in which she listed as her employer
an "obscure and possibly defunct firm" that "administration officials"
confirm is a CIA front:
The document establishes that Plame has worked undercover within the past five years. The time frame is one of the standards used in making determinations about whether a disclosure is a criminal violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
The New York Times reports, without citing a source, that "Ms. Plame, a specialist in nonconventional weapons who worked overseas, had 'nonofficial cover,' and was what in C.I.A. parlance is called a Noc, the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create":
While most undercover agency officers disguise their real profession by pretending to be American embassy diplomats or other United States government employees, Ms. Plame passed herself off as a private energy expert. Intelligence experts said that Nocs have especially dangerous jobs.
"Nocs are the holiest of holies," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former agency officer who is now director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "This is real James Bond stuff. You're going overseas posing as a businessman, and if the other government finds out about you, they're probably going to shoot you. The United States has basically no way to protect you."
Left unanswered is the question of when Plame has her last overseas assignment; if it was before July 1998, then by July 2003, when her identity was revealed, she would no longer have been a "covert agent" for the purposes of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. In any case, the Times' description of the danger of her work bolsters our supposition that Plame is unlikely to have worked overseas after 1999 or early 2000, when she was pregnant with the twins.
In order for the alleged leakers to have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, they would have to have known that she was covert and that the government was "taking affirmative measures to conceal" her relationship to the CIA. Novak's statement that the CIA made only "a very weak request" that he not use her name suggests the absence of such "affirmative measures," which would put the leakers in the clear legally if not politically.
So why did they do it? The New York Post's John Podhoretz offers one theory:
The leak was not to discredit Wilson in the eyes of those who might otherwise agree with him. It was to explain the administration's baffling use of a former Clinton administration official to take on this sensitive assignment--a decision that eventually led to the publication of Wilson's incredibly vain, incredibly partisan and incredibly damaging July 6 op-ed in the New York Times.
In other words, the leak was intended not as an attack on the left. It was intended as a defense against attacks from the right.
Podhoretz imagines a dialogue between a conservative journalist (which Novak is, though he opposed the liberation of Iraq) and an administration official, in which the latter tells the former: "Look, I hear his wife's in the CIA. He's got nothing to do. She wanted to throw him a bone."
The New Republic's Peter Beinart disputes our theorizing about the motive for the purported leak:
The first conservative response is that the leaks couldn't have been part of an orchestrated White House smear campaign because they served no political purpose. To Wilson, however, the purpose was clear. As he told the blogger Joshua Micah Marshall, "[T]hey thought that by coming after me they would discourage others from coming forward." James Taranto . . . claims, "This doesn't make sense. An ordinary reader of Novak's column had no way of grasping the purported significance of the revelation." But Wilson isn't referring to "ordinary readers." He is referring to the intelligence analysts whose work the White House distorted or ignored. Such people--who refer to CIA operatives by their aliases even in internal documents--would instantly grasp the significance of blowing an agent's cover. And seeing it happen to Plame might make them think twice before challenging White House statements on Iraq.
But this still doesn't make sense. How could the threat of exposure deter Bush critics in the CIA from exposing themselves?
Metaphor
Alert
"Word that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate the
White House, State Department and Pentagon for leakers threw the West Wing into
understandable confusion--not that it has been on its game lately. For
most of last week, Administration officials felt their way carefully,
hoping not to bump into anything sharp. Spokesman McClellan spent several
days back on his heels trying to rejigger his original sweeping
claims of innocence into more elastic arguments that left open the possibility
that this was all a big misunderstanding."--Time, Oct. 13 issue
What
We've Accomplished
Amid all the Beltway battling over the war and its aftermath, it's easy to lose
sight of just what a moral triumph the liberation of Iraq was. Here are a pair
of articles that help put things in perspective. The Washington Post has a chilling
report from Abu Ghraib, Iraq, on Saddam Hussein's brutality. Here's how it starts:
Prisoners were brought to Iraq's most feared prison in an ice-cream truck, a soft cone painted on its side. After sentencing at the nearby Revolutionary Court, following a perfunctory trial, the prisoners were hustled outside and loaded in the back.
"We were waddling like penguins because of the torture," recalled Ahmed Mohammed Baqer Attar, a 41-year-old Baghdad physician. "And then we saw an old ice-cream truck."
"It's hard to believe," he continued, a smoker's laugh rising from his chest. "But everything was hard to believe."
The Philadelphia Inquirer, meanwhile, reports that things are going well in the northern city of Kirkuk:
Today, while many once-looted police stations in Baghdad remain sparsely furnished shells, the ones in Kirkuk, which also were gutted, are freshly painted and sparkling with renovations--including air conditioners, exercise equipment and cafeterias. And while police in the capital struggle with shortages, Kirkuk's force is among the best equipped in the country.
"Security was our top priority, so we couldn't wait," said Col. William Mayville, commander of the 173d Airborne Brigade, the main ground force in Kirkuk. "We're a couple of chapters ahead of the rest of Iraq on a lot of this stuff."
If the Bush administration's opponents want to contend that Saddam wasn't as bad as the administration claimed, or that the American military isn't up to the task of rebuilding Iraq, we suspect they're going to lose the argument.
Massacre
in Haifa
Four children were among 19 people murdered by a female suicide bomber in Haifa,
Israel, Saturday. "Among the victims were three generations of the Zer-Aviv
family from Kibbutz Yagur, four members of the Almog family from Haifa, and
local television reporter Mark Biani and his wife, Naomi," Ha'aretz reports.
The target was Maxim restaurant, which the Jerusalem
Post calls a "symbol of Jewish-Arab cooperation": "For four
decades the business has been owned by two families--one Arab, one Jewish."
Palestinian Islamic Jihad confessed to the massacre, and in response Israel bombed a terrorist training camp--or, as the New York Times calls it in a headline, "What It Calls a Terrorist Camp"--in Syria. The Associated Press quotes a statement from the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah, which called the strike in Syria "a very grave violation of all red lines and the three-decades old rules of struggle." So hitting a terrorist camp violates "red lines" but murdering children in a restaurant doesn't?
President Bush says that in a conversation with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, "I made it very clear . . . that Israel has got a right to defend herself, that Israel must not feel constrained, in terms of defending the homeland." But he added the obligatory sop to "world opinion": "I said that it's very important that any action Israel take should avoid escalation and creating higher tensions."
What
Would Mideast 'Martyrs' Do Without Experts?
"Mideast 'Martyrs' Often Manipulated by Terror Masters, Expert Finds"--headline,
Ottawa Citizen, Oct. 6
Is
She Running?
We're skeptical of claims that Hillary Clinton is planning to run for president
in 2004, using Wesley Clark as a "stalking horse"; it just isn't clear
how she would insert herself into the campaign--and if Clark is doing well,
why in the world would he step aside? It does appear, though, that she has filed
a candidacy just in case; she is listed as a "challenger" at the Federal
Election Commission Web site. But it's probably just pro forma; the FEC site
doesn't list any contributions to her "campaign."
Who's
Missing?
The U.S. State Department Web site features a page linking to "famous speeches"
of American history, including Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give
me death," Washington's Farewell Address and Lincoln's Gettysburg address.
But the choice of more-recent orators is, shall we say, somewhat limited. It
includes two links to Martin Luther King speeches, including the "I have
a dream" speech, which is one of the great orations of the 20th century.
The list also includes FDR, JFK, LBJ, Carter and Clinton--five of the seven
Democrats who served in the White House during the 20th century--and even a
speech by Hillary Clinton.
But there's nothing from Eisenhower, Reagan, either Bush--or, for that matter, from any Republican other than Lincoln.
Great Orators of the Democratic Party
- "One man with courage makes a majority."--Andrew
Jackson
- "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."--Franklin
Roosevelt
- "The buck stops here."--Harry
Truman
- "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for
your country."--John
Kennedy
- "Five thousand years ago, Moses said, 'Hitch up your camel. Pick up your shovel. Mount your ass. I will lead you to the promised land.' Five thousand years later, Franklin Roosevelt said, 'Light up a Camel. Lay down your shovel. Sit on your ass. This is the promised land.' Today, George Bush will lay off your camel, tax your shovel, kick your ass and tell you there is no promised land."--John Kerry
Free
Sirhan Sirhan?
Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D., R.I.), son of Sen. Ted Kennedy, "scolded
Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean for his friendly relations with
the National Rifle Association during a Capitol Hill rally last week,"
the Washington Post reports:
"This is a personal issue with me, and I'm very disturbed at the fact that people are not paying attention to Dr. Dean's record" on guns, said Kennedy, nephew of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, both of whom were assassinated by guns.
"Assassinated by guns"? Is the Post suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were innocent?
You
Don't Say
"Young Democrats May Be Party's Future"--headline, Greenville (S.C.)
News, Oct. 5
What
Would We Do Without Dan Rather?
"It's Still Early in the Race for the '04 White House"--headline,
Dan Rather column, Houston Chronicle, Oct. 3
Why
Not Just Use a Paperweight?
"Council Puts Ten Commandments Monument on Agenda"--headline, Casper
(Wyo.) Star-Tribune, Oct. 6
Mystery
Man
In a column filed from Kwamhlanga, South Africa, the New York Times' Nicholas
Kristof writes: "One of the great mysteries to me about AIDS in Africa
has been this: Why do people not take precautions during sex even when they
see friends and relatives dying?"
Why don't people take precautions during sex? This is a mystery? We guess this just goes to show how much sex education in America improved during the 1970s. Kristof's bio says he was born in April 1959. We were born less than seven years later, but we learned enough in our high school "health" class to solve this mystery.
(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Barak Moore, Naomi Lopez Bauman, Nick Eckert, Chris Fehr, Mark Schulze, John Williamson, Edward Hildebrand, Matthew Noonan, Alicia Van Hecke, Nancy Gubka, Linda Cooke, Steven Platzer, Marvin Belsky, Paul LaVigne, S.E. Brenner, Ken Kovats, Raghu Desikan, Natalie Cohen, Carl Sherer, Monty Krieger, Darren Gold, Ruhama Shattan, Alan Jones, Paul Music, Andrea Woodmansee, Marji Meyer, Tim Graham, John Konakci, William Beutler, Henry Hanks, James Ogletree and Kerk Phillips. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: Rush Limbaugh's test is whether he'll face his problems like a man.
- Robert Bartley: Home-front guerrillas are a bigger threat than Iraqi ones.
- Kevin Hassett: Guess who's to blame for state budget problems? (Hint: It's not Bush.)
