[Read part 1of 2]

© Jack Cashill

WorldNetDaily.com
June 28, 2007 

Last week I documented some of the consequences of what Senator Fred Thompson called “the most corrupt political campaign in modern history,” namely the Clinton re-election campaign of 1996.

In 1997, Thompson chaired the Senate committee that investigated the campaign. Here is how that campaign began.

Following the Democratic electoral debacle in November 1994, President Clinton’s approval rating dipped to an unnervingly low 45 percent. The rating of his most likely Republican opponent, Senate majority leader Bob Dole, was cresting at 62 percent. Bill Clinton was staring down the barrel of a one-term presidency.

“I can tell you,” DNC finance chair Terry McAuliffe would later testify, “the political mood at the time clearly was that he had no chance of winning again.”

The Clintons had few options but to fight on. In early December 1994, in the White House treaty room, Bill and Hillary Clinton held a secret meeting with the one man who could possibly turn the tide of battle, political consultant Dick Morris.

More than a decade earlier, Morris had helped Clinton regain the governor’s office after an embarrassing post-first term defeat. In 1990, however, Morris and the Clintons split over an incident that reveals both Bill Clinton’s capacity for violence and Hillary’s for covering it up.

To date, Hillary Clinton has shown no inclination to share unpleasant truths. Living History, her autobiography, is almost as free of conflict as her book on Socks the Cat. She casually attributes Morris’s refusal to work on the disastrous 1994 congressional campaign to his problems with their staff.

In an open letter to Hillary Clinton in National Review Online, Morris offered a more vivid accounting of the events of 1990 that caused their split.

Worried he was falling behind his opponent in a primary campaign, Clinton “verbally assaulted” Morris for not giving the campaign more time. When the offended Morris turned and stalked out of the room, Clinton followed.

“Bill ran after me,” Morris writes, “tackled me, threw me to the floor of the kitchen in the mansion and cocked his fist back to punch me. You [Hillary] grabbed his arm and, yelling at him to stop and get control of himself, pulled him off me.”

Morris also volunteers that when the story threatened to surface again during the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary told him to “say it never happened.”

Desperate times, however, called for desperate measures, and so Morris was summoned once again, this time by Hillary herself. At their first get-together, Morris insisted on weekly meetings thereafter, and the president agreed. For the first month, Hillary attended the meetings and then strategically withdrew.

As Morris relates, Clinton would share Morris’s advice and the polling data with Hillary, and “she read every word.” When he encountered Hillary, Morris adds, “She showed familiarity with every bit of it.”

The rules of the game, which had been only loosely followed to this point, were about to be scrapped altogether. In a more disciplined fashion than they had done anything else since coming to town, the Clintons set about getting re-elected.

From the beginning, Morris insisted on one strategy above all others: filling the airwaves with TV ads early and relentlessly. “Week after week, month after month,” says Morris, “from early July 1995 more or less continually until election day in ‘96, sixteen months later, we bombarded the public with ads.”

In the 1992 campaign, the unknown Clinton spent roughly $40 million on advertising. In the 1996 campaign, the incumbent Clinton would spend $85 million. Morris also insisted on a “virtually unlimited budget” for polling, and he got that too.

With the DNC broke and demoralized after the 1994 rout, raising this much money was not easy. “For the Democrats,” McAuliffe noted, “it was not a very optimistic time.” The lack of enthusiasm for Clinton even within his own party put the onus for raising money on the White House itself.

“You don’t know, you don’t have any remote idea,” Clinton would tell Morris, “how hard I have to work, how hard Hillary has to work, how hard Al [Gore] has to work to raise this much money.”

The bulk of the money went to TV. An adept strategist, Morris understood the sympathies of the media and devised a strategy to accommodate their willful innocence. It was painfully simple, and it worked.

To achieve “relative secrecy” he chose not to advertise at all in New York City or Washington DC and only occasionally in Los Angeles. “If these cities remained dark,” recalls Morris, “the national press would not make an issue out of our ads—of this we felt sure.”

“No one in the media really caught on,” confirms Robert Woodward in his book on the election, The Choice. The reason they did not catch on, as Morris well knew, is because they did not want to.

The story the media chose not to watch unfold was an extraordinary one. The Thompson Committee does a concise job of summarizing what that story was:

The president and his top advisors decided to raise money early for his re-election campaign. To accomplish their goal, the president and his top advisors took control of the DNC and designed a plan to engage in a historically aggressive fund-raising effort, utilizing the DNC as a vehicle for getting around federal election laws. The DNC ran television advertisements, created under the direct supervision of the president, which were specifically designed to promote the president’s re-election.

In the afterword to the paperback edition of The Choice, Woodward had the grace to admit he “vastly underestimated the significance of money” in the campaign. He notes too that the Clinton ads themselves “were deceptive enough to be appalling.”

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, primary author of Back from the Dead, also admits that “one of the great underreported stories” of the campaign was how the Democrats, not the Republicans, engaged in “the really effective negative campaigning.”

Neither Thomas nor Woodward explains why, during the campaign itself, no one in the major media chose to tell the true story. An unprecedented series of untruthful, arguably illegal ads, which reached about 125 million Americans three times a week, should have been obvious to the media and scandalous from the outset.

The scandal would have exploded if the media had asked where the money was coming from to pay for the ads—Red China, for instance--and how it was being raised. They chose not to. They collectively shuddered at the thought of giving hated House speaker Newt Gingrich a Republican president.

Expect even less from the media in 2008—and even more of the same from Hillary.