Undernews is the online report of the Progressive Review

UNDERNEWS

Undernews is the online report of the Progressive Review, edited by Sam Smith, who has covered Washington under nine presidents and edited alternative journals since 1964.

Monday, January 31, 2005
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By Sam Smith. The ... journalism. The following article, which appeared in the
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I was the son of a man who had worked for Franklin Roosevelt from within months of the beginning of the New Deal to the end. I stuffed my first political envelope as a 12-year-old in a successful campaign that would end 69 years of corrupt GOP rule in Philadelphia. As a Harvard student in 1960, I was co-chair of the first college Humphrey for President club. I covered the Cambridge city council for the college radio station. James Michael Curley died while I was there but his spirit still hovered over Massachusetts politics. Later I would spend two decades close to the story of Marion Barry, first as a friend and fellow activist, later as an observer and critic whom Barry described as "a cynical cat."

Initially I played a role with Barry not unlike many around Bill and Hillary Clinton. In fact, from the start I recognized something familiar about Bill Clinton. The soft southern voice unwavering in its glib assurance, the excuse for everything, the absence of inquiry, the cynical charm, a cause well used a quarter century ago and then forgotten, the adulterated intelligence, the inconsistency, the willingness to use anything or anyone, the undisciplined egocentrism, the populist rhetoric playing bumper tag with corporatist policies, the drugs, the women, the whiff of the underworld. It was not new; I had, after all, known Marion Barry for over 25 years.

There were other things that I recognized. For example, I knew enough political history to understand that modern corruption was largely a Democratic invention and that it had two primary branches: northern urban and southern ubiquitous. It wasn't that Republicans were more honest; perhaps they were just too greedy to share the wealth and thus seldom had time to build a good machine before getting caught. In any case, finding another corrupt Democrat was nothing new.

Then, some months before the 1992 campaign, I read Sally Denton's Bluegrass Conspiracy -- a stunning description of how illegal drugs corrupted Kentucky right up to the governor's office. The early tales from Arkansas contained eerie echoes of Kentucky. There were also new scents of old trails I had followed while writing about Reagan and Bush -- back when no one ever accused me of being a conspiracy theorist for just reporting what I had found. The droppings of BCCI and Iran-Contra, of S&L scandals and the CIA were in Arkansas as well.

Several months before the 1992 convention I compiled a list of troublesome things that had already surfaced in that state, drawing a flow chart to link the people and institutions involved. It was the first time any journalist had connected the dots. Some of the names would become much more familiar: Webster Hubbell, Seth Ward, Genifer Flowers, Dan Lasater, the Arkansas Development Finance Agency, Mena, Buddy Young, even the Indonesian multi-millionaire, Mochtar Riady. There were suggestions of illegal intelligence operations, illegal drug running, illegal financial manipulations, threats of violence, not to mention run-of-the-mill political corruption. It was a disturbing, but more disturbing was that no one seemed to care much about it. The Clinton juggernaut was already well under way.

o

My own problem with Clinton quickly became three-fold. I was convinced that he was one of the most corrupt politicians I had ever run across. I was equally certain that despite his idealistic rhetoric, the political Clinton was like the Raymond Chandler character: "smart, smooth and no good." In philosophy and practice, Clinton was a fraud.

My third problem was the reaction of others to my first two problems. A piece I wrote in May 1992 suggesting that the Democrats dump Clinton while there was still time was not well received by my liberal colleagues, especially those in Americans for Democratic Action where I was an executive vice president engaged with others in a quixotic effort to resuscitate the old war horse of liberalism. A few months earlier, Clinton had attracted only minimal support within the organization; now the leadership was pressing for an early endorsement on the grounds that it would endear Clinton to the liberal cause. This fantasy would only be the first in a long string of masochistic liberal delusions about Clinton, a failure to understand that, to their candidate, politics was the same to him as sex: a one-way street. You gave, he received.

Earlier that same spring I ran into Don Graham on 15th Street. He asked me whom I was supporting in the Democratic primaries. When I said Jerry Brown, the publisher of the Washington Post grabbed my arm and waved it in the air shouting to the cars and pedestrians, "I've found one! I've found a real live Brown supporter!"

o

Still, I couldn't bring myself to sit out the election as I had in 1968, and so I followed Mae West's dictum, namely that when faced with two evils, always pick the one you haven't tried before. I voted for Clinton.

Shortly after Clinton's inauguration, I was invited to a conference on third party politics sponsored by the Green Politics Network. I had arrived at Bowdoin College with caution but left realizing that my political discomfort was with far more than just one man -- I had developed an irreparable distrust and disgust with what the Democratic Party had become.

In April, I was asked to write a book about Clinton's first year for Indiana University Press. About the same time, the leadership of ADA decided to purge those of us they considered a problem. When I first heard of this -- shortly before entering the hospital for prostate cancer surgery -- I was stunned. For all previous executive vice presidents, the only grounds for termination had been death. Did the leadership of ADA know something that I didn't?

No, it was just that ADA had decided to end years of populist insurgency in its ranks, simulating the Democratic Leadership Council's successful efforts at quashing dissent within the Democratic Party. I and a number of other board members who had failed to hew to the party line were to be kicked out of our offices. Liberalism would once again be safe from the winds of change. Included in our number was a former national treasurer, the current chair of the Chicago chapter, and the former chair of Youth for Democratic Action.

About a year and a half earlier we had formed a "progressive caucus" within ADA. The paleo-liberals in the leadership -- some of whom had done battle against Henry Wallace's Progressive Party -- took kindly to neither the idea nor the irony of the name. We were not openly accused of political incorrectitude. At first we weren't accused of anything. Later -- and only after Washington's City Paper got wind of the purge -- we were charged with being "disruptive troublemakers." I was personally accused of acting like both John the Baptist and Svengali towards the younger members, a remarkable blend of virtues and vices. In fact, our trouble-making had consisted largely of writing letters and introducing resolutions the ADA leadership didn't like. Apparently in ADA, dissent was a political dirty trick.

I was initially quite aggravated at the purge until it occurred to me that being a certified ex-liberal had a certain appeal. The truth was that liberals weren't doing much at all. ADA's most notable achievements had become its annual rating of Congress and its Christmas time toy safety survey. Eugene McCarthy had described the group as having been formed to keep liberals safe from Communists but now dedicated to keeping liberals safe from dangerous toys.

To some of us in the organization, ADA's ineffectiveness was unfortunate and unnecessary. We naively assumed that the group would be open to new ideas and strategies. Nothing proved further than the truth. Even when an alternative drug policy was twice approved by a national convention over the almost apoplectic opposition of ADA's leadership, the matter was simply filed away so that no one outside the organization would ever hear about it. As the Texas politician said, I don't mind losing when I lose, but I hate losing when I win.

During one convention, the leadership became so concerned that they called in the titular leader of the organization, Rep. Charles Rangel, to debate drug and crime expert Eric Sterling. Sterling got things off to a rocky start by reminding Rangel that they had met in Bolivia while on a congressional fact-finding mission. In fact, Sterling pointed out, they had shared coca tea together with their hosts. Rangel almost turned white.

The ADA establishment - some of which went back to the organization's founding in the late 1940s -- was as adept at internal judo as it was lethargic in broader political action. An extraordinary amount of effort was spent maintaining political correctness within the group while the nation drifted undisputedly towards the right. Some of the organization's leaders brought to mind Charles Hodge, who taught at Princeton Seminary in the early 19th century. Hodge boasted that in his fifty years of teaching he had never broached a new or original idea.

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