Bush Martial Art: Attack On Clarke Is 'Smear Rodeo'
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OBSERVER, L.P.
Bush Martial Art: Attack On Clarke Is 'Smear Rodeo'
by Michael Crowley
George W. Bush has been accused, in the words of his former
anti-terrorism czar, of doing "a terrible job" of fighting
terrorism—distracted by what Richard Clarke called a misadventure
in Iraq and a feckless defense of the homeland. But Mr. Bush has
done a fine task of fighting Mr. Clarke himself, the
pistol-packing, media-savvy, double-breasted spook who dared to
question Mr. Bush’s national-security credentials and has been
rewarded with the kind of bombardment usually saved for downtown
Baghdad.
The Brutalization of Richard Clarke is a reminder that, whatever
weak points Mr. Bush may be faulted for, putting out a hit is not
one. Not since Richard Nixon dispatched flying monkeys with names
like Colson and Liddy after his many enemies has a White House so
fully mastered the art of political kneecapping. Mr. Clarke has
joined a string of Bush administration critics to be mugged with
almost effortless precision.
Martin Amis wrote that "there is only one rule in street and bar
fights: maximum violence, instantly." It is a lesson the Bush
team has applied to politics, as Mr. Clarke has said he was
prepared to experience: "These are mean and nasty people," he
said on Nightline.
"If smear and slander can be an art form, they’ve perfected it,"
said John Weaver, the Republican-turned-Democratic adviser to
Senator John McCain, who saw the Bush team’s cool savagery
firsthand during the 2000 primaries, when Mr. McCain was suddenly
made out to be a half-cocked, corrupt Washington insider. "This
is not their first smear rodeo."
Certainly not.
A series of departed aides have had the temerity to tell what
they saw at the White House, only to be mowed down. Joseph
Wilson, the former ambassador who revealed the phoniness of Mr.
Bush’s uranium-yellowcake Niger claim, saw his wife’s C.I.A.
cover blown as punishment. Paul O’Neill, Mr. Bush’s first
Treasury Secretary, who cooperated with an unflattering book on
the administration, was rewarded with a government investigation.
And John DiIulio, the brilliant academic who weighed in on the
hollowness of the White House’s domestic-policy operation, wound
up issuing a humiliating, Maoist-style forced retraction.
We’ve seen this enough times, in fact, that it’s possible to draw
up a rough playbook based on the White House’s character-mauling
tactics as displayed over the past three years. Think of it as a
modern political version of The Art of War, in which Sun Tzu
advised fellow warriors, when confronting an enemy, to "rouse
him, discover the springs of his actions. Make his form visible."
Making the enemy’s form visible—that is the first rule of Karl
Rove warfare. Here are some of the Bush team’s preferred methods:
1) Ridicule the enemy: The day after his 60 Minutes interview,
White House officials were already sneering at "Dick Clarke’s
American Grandstand." Joe Wilson’s C.I.A.-backed mission to Niger
was quickly lampooned by influential Republicans as an amateurish
adventure. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Caspar Weinberger,
a former Defense Secretary under President Reagan, mocked this
"sloppy tea-drinking ‘investigation’ from … a retired ambassador
with a less than stellar record."
2) Make him look corrupt: White House allies—most notably Bill
Frist, the courtly Senate Republican leader—began threatening
last week that Mr. Clarke may be open to perjury charges if his
public testimony is found to clash with the private account he
gave the Congressional 9/11 commission in 2002. After Paul
O’Neill, the former Treasury Secretary, gave reams of notes and
papers to author Ron Suskind for his book The Price of Loyalty,
the Treasury Department ostentatiously opened an investigation
into whether Mr. O’Neill had divulged classified government
documents. The investigation found that the fault lay with the
department itself, not Mr. O’Neill.
3) Expose his "petty motives": The White House rushed to note
that Mr. Clarke’s "best buddy" is Rand Beers, another former
administration counterterror official who now advises John Kerry,
and suggested that Mr. Clarke is sucking up for a position in a
Kerry White House. Speaking on the Senate floor last week,
meanwhile, Mr. Frist, a close ally of the White House, called Mr.
Clarke’s book "an appalling act of profiteering." White House
officials also say that Mr. Clarke was resentful about his career
path. "Mr. Clarke has been out there talking about what title he
had," added White House spokesman Scott McClellan, as if that was
Mr. Clarke’s chief complaint. Likewise, Mr. O’Neill was derided
as a crotchety old grouch settling scores. "He was mad and quite
bitter … and, you know, bitter people tend to write books like
that," said Lawrence Lindsey, a former top economic adviser to
Mr. Bush, speaking to Fox News. After Mr. DiIulio, the former
director of the White House’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives,
aired his complaints about the shallowness of Mr. Bush’s
domestic-policy operation, the White House’s reliable
conservative columnist, Robert Novak, was quick to acid-dip him
in his column as "a registered Democrat who voted for Al Gore."
4) Get personal: Bush officials are trashing Mr. Clarke as a
phony who acted warmly toward Mr. Bush and his aides when he was
in government and now savages him when it’s convenient. Both Mr.
Limbaugh and Mr. Novak have subtly implied racism—suggesting, as
Mr. Novak put it on CNN, that Mr. Clarke has "a problem with this
African-American woman, Condoleezza Rice." There have also been
insinuations about the personal life of Mr. Clarke, who is
unmarried. The conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, for
instance, has taken to calling Mr. Clarke a "drama queen." Mr.
Wilson’s C.I.A.-backed mission to investigate claims of an Iraqi
effort to purchase uranium from Niger was also quickly lampooned.
Then someone in the White House went directly after his wife,
leaking her name to Mr. Novak and blowing her cover at the
C.I.A.; the leak is now the subject of a Justice Department
investigation. "Joe Wilson told the truth, and they took a
baseball bat to him and his wife," said John Podesta, a former
chief of staff to Bill Clinton and now president of the Center
for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington. "When
they can’t explain the facts, they beat you personally."
5) Make him an offer he can’t refuse: It’s still not clear just
what White House officials may have said to Mr. DiIulio, but the
conclusion to his saga had the feel of a Communist show trial.
Mere days after their White House press secretary Ari Fleischer
denounced Mr. DiIulio’s charges as "baseless and groundless," the
Philadelphia academic released a terse statement calling his own
highly detailed allegations about the White House, well,
"groundless and baseless …. I am deeply remorseful," Mr. DiIulio
added, sounding a bit like a purged Bolshevik headed off to the
firing squad.
6) Accuse him of opportunism: Of course, the White House
surrogates have suggested that Mr. Clarke wrote a
sensationalistic book to make a fortune, despite the fact that
departing members of every administration ever have attached
themselves to the biggest book advance they could find and
proceeded to unload. They also said that he timed the publication
of his book to match the 9/11 hearings. Nobody who knows the New
York publishing industry could have taken the notion of this kind
of precision planning seriously.
So far, these techniques have served Mr. Bush well. His various
critics have managed to blast his bunker, but suffered far more
damage to themselves in the effort. The efficacy of the Bush
White House impresses even veterans of the Clinton
administration, which, by the way, wasn’t averse to lethal hit
tactics itself against the President’s former and alleged
girlfriends—Juanita Brodderick, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky—when
they showed up ready to rock Mr. Clinton’s Presidency. (They
tended to appear in front of television cameras with lawyers and
were rewarded with brutal, immediate assaults on their very
personhood.) But the Clinton people say there’s a difference,
that the Bush targets are being punished for dissenting on
policy.
"If they can’t put duct tape over your mouth, they lower the
public boom on your head," said Mr. Podesta.
But it’s been Mr. Clarke who has felt Washington’s latest,
biggest boom, and with the trademark tactics of a
martial-arts-trained anti-P.R. crew. The retribution has been
fast and the wounds instant, partly because his charges uniquely
go to the vital organs of Mr. Bush’s political identity: that he
is the unquestioned defender of America from terrorists. When Mr.
Clarke suggested otherwise, the White House responded by turning
their turrets toward him and leaving a charred mass of
discredited ex-aide—it’s their trademark.
And it works. The debate surrounding Mr. Clarke has moved from
his contentions about anti-terror policy to the size of his book
advance—the subject of recent complaints by talk-radio host Don
Imus—and whether he resented working for Ms. Rice because she’s a
black woman.
"This was overwhelming and to the quick," said an admiring Grover
Norquist, the conservative activist closely allied with the White
House. Per Mr. Amis: "Maximum violence, instantly."
On Monday, a CNN–USA Today–Gallup poll affirmed the success of
the approach: More people said they trust Mr. Bush over Mr.
Clarke by a 46-44 margin—meaning that Mr. Clarke had failed to
break through the nation’s red-blue partisan divide and change
any minds. "I think his credibility is shot," said G.O.P.
consultant Charlie Black, who works with the current
administration. "The average voter never heard of Dick Clarke two
weeks ago. Then he comes up and says things that sound
sensational. But then you get people they know and trust—like
Rice, Powell and Rumsfeld—to say he’s wrong. They trust those
people. The best case for them is that it’s confusion."
For President Bush, confusion means victory. Confusion means that
Mr. Clarke’s most important charge—that the Iraq war and
patchwork homeland-security system leaves us vulnerable to
terrorism right now—has become shrouded by the fog of the
political war.
It’s not clear just who the author of this attack manual is. Mr.
Bush’s political adviser, Karl Rove, is typically assumed to be
the master orchestrator. In an odd bit of disclosure, Mr. Bush’s
officials revealed that the President himself had personally
approved the attacks on Mr. Clarke. Mr. Weaver, the former
adviser to John McCain, finds that entirely plausible. "Karl Rove
gets too much credit and too much blame for everything that
happens in this administration," he said. "Campaigns and
administrations take on the personality of the officeholder and
the candidate. Period."
You may reach Michael Crowley via email at:
mcro...@observer.com.
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This column ran on page 1 in the 4/5/2004 edition of The New York
Observer.
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