Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.
—Author unknown
SCANDALS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A PART OF AMERICAN POLITICS. MOST have involved money, sex, or treason. Scandals are not the exclusive property of Republicans or Democrats, though each party tries to cast itself as more moral than the other. Following a scandal involving one party, the other party promises to usher in a “new era” of honesty and integrity. Somehow it never quite works out that way. Scandals have been as big as Watergate (Republican) and as small as a stripper jumping into the Reflecting Pool with a congressman (Democrat), though there have been bigger scandals involving Democrats (Abscam) and smaller ones involving Republicans (the late senator John Tower’s drinking and philandering).
Politicians in this era of polarization have little margin for error. With an aggressive and ever-expanding media pool including twenty-four-hour cable news, left-wing blogs like the Huffington Post, and right-wing bloggers like the Drudge Report, accompanied by permanent opposition research teams from both parties, politicians are under intense scrutiny.
Many of the tactics employed by polarizers against their opponents bear a striking resemblance to the methods used by the notorious Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. During the 1950s, McCarthy led a campaign that falsely accused many public figures of being communists or communist sympathizers. There probably were a few communists embedded in the United States government (e.g., former spy Whittaker Chambers fingered a midlevel State Department official, Alger Hiss, who became a stepping-stone for Richard Nixon’s rise to power).
But McCarthy’s scattershot approach, virtually accusing everyone who had as much as shaken hands with a communist of being afflicted with the “disease,” would lead to the senator’s political and, ultimately, personal destruction. Before McCarthy’s reign of terror ended, the reputations of many innocent men and women would be destroyed. The McCarthy era was one of the bleakest periods in American history.
To avoid the fate that ended McCarthy’s career, today’s members of Congress practice rules of etiquette that border on the pristine. They are forbidden to engage in personal attacks on one another, or on witnesses testifying before committees. Such behavior is also forbidden during floor debates.
By the mid-1980s, polarizers in Congress found plenty of outside groups to do their dirty work. For example, on the left, pro-choice groups, including NOW, eagerly took the lead in muddying Bob Bork. On the right, the National Rifle Association bashed liberal gun-control advocates in Congress as soft on crime. Both parties contributed to these most polarizing of tactics. Given the speed at which information flows today, inaccurate information moves too quickly to control, and corrections or retractions come too late to undo the damage. It is a cliché, but no less true, that “a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on.”
Both parties—and especially their interest-group allies—justify their contribution to the politics of personal destruction on pious ideological grounds. Polarizers argue that they undertake this wanton personal destruction to protect politics from ideological forces bent on imposing their extreme agendas on the “rest of us.” This allows the character assassins to portray themselves as defenders of the faith, raising the question (that should have been asked of Joe McCarthy when he used a similar argument): What and whose faith are they defending?
We would like to reintroduce the term McCarthyism in its proper context and apply it to every bottom-feeder and polarizer in Washington who has participated in this most cowardly form of personal destruction. To be specific: some allegations leveled at Bob Bork and Bill Clinton deserved to be heard and investigated. But those organizations that unfairly used unsubstantiated hearsay and manufactured “evidence” in an attempt to destroy the careers of these men were guilty of McCarthyism.
Many congressional observers believe four events set the table for the politics of personal destruction:
The Ethics in Government Act was passed by a Democratic Congress in 1978 following the Watergate scandal. Its purpose was to curb the powers of the president and other senior executive-branch officials. The law provided for a “special prosecutor,” later changed to “independent counsel.” This office had nearly unlimited powers and resources. It became the weapon of choice in the politics of personal destruction. Like many laws passed after a crisis in Washington, the Ethics in Government Act was well intentioned, but flawed.
Its first test came during the Carter administration. The issue was whether government officials had used cocaine at the Studio 54 nightclub in New York. No one was prosecuted, but the targets had their reputations sullied, and were forced to pay enormous legal fees out of their own pockets. The law has provisions for most, but not all, legal fees to be paid by the government, but only if the person charged is acquitted.
Many more government officials would suffer unnecessarily at the hands of overzealous independent counsels. Most were cleared of charges, but sometimes only after years of investigations, costing millions of dollars. The government can dip into a bottomless pit of money, giving it an unfair advantage over an individual with limited resources.
Two examples stand out. One is the case of the Clinton administration’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros. In 1995 Attorney General Janet Reno asked a three-judge panel to appoint an independent counsel to determine whether Cisneros criminally concealed information from the IRS or conspired with his mistress to do so. He later admitted to paying the mistress more than $250,000 in hush money and was forced to resign. What makes this case particularly egregious is that as of this writing in mid-2007, the independent counsel has not yet closed this investigation and issued a final report. What a waste of taxpayer dollars!
The other case involved Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of labor, Raymond Donovan. Prior to joining government, Donovan had been a successful contractor. One of his company’s projects was the construction of a new subway line for New York City. The construction contract required Donovan’s firm to subcontract part of the work to minority firms. Some of the minority contractors Donovan used were accused of being fronts for real owners who were not minorities. Donovan was charged with larceny and fraud. After a protracted, high-profile trial, he was acquitted. After his acquittal, he was famously quoted as asking, “Where do I go to get my reputation back?”
The law was allowed to lapse in 1992, but was reinstated two years later after Republicans, who had wanted the law to expire, suddenly began to consider the many potential scandals of Bill Clinton. Despite political advice to the contrary, President Clinton went along with the law’s reinstatement. It would later be used to investigate him and lead to his impeachment.
Democrats and Republicans often abused the intent of the law by using it to harass political opponents. The act ruined reputations and in one case may well have affected the outcome of a presidential election. George H. W. Bush believes to this day that Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel for Iran-Contra, contributed to his defeat by indicting Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on June 16, 1992, less than five months before the November election.
The second factor contributing to the politics of personal destruction was the Senate’s rejection of Robert Bork. Bork was not the first court nominee to be turned down, but the campaign against him was unusual. Most, though not all, nominees who had failed to win confirmation in the twentieth century were defeated for reasons unrelated to their judicial philosophy. Generally, conflicts of interest, financial improprieties, or personal misconduct were the reasons cited. The only reason a Senate majority rejected Bork was his conservative view of the law, especially his dislike of Roe v. Wade. The Bork case showed the pro-choice interest lobbies to be formidable (and polarizing) players in the confirmation battle.
The third factor contributing to the politics of personal destruction has been a generation of political consultants in both parties who have plied their trade almost exclusively in the genre of negative campaign ads. They have turned the process into the political equivalent of pornography. The 2006 campaign was the zenith in negative advertising in terms of record dollars spent to purchase TV, radio, and newspaper space for a slew of negative ads. A climate of polarization leads naturally to heavy reliance on negative campaign messages.
A fourth contribution emerged in the campaign cycles of 2004 and 2006 in which the Internet and individual “blogs” began to play important roles in the politics of personal destruction. Increasingly, what is carried on the blogs—from President George W. Bush’s alleged use of cocaine to the Swift boat veterans’ allegations against John Kerry—has had an impact on our political dialogue. Thus far the information (or should we say, “disinformation”) from these Internet sources probably has not had a direct impact on the outcome of an election. Nonetheless, if future presidential elections are as closely decided as those of 2000 and 2004 and the Internet continues to grow as it has in the last decade, a presidential election might well turn on just such inaccurate “facts.”