It's About Coalitions Not Purity, Part Twenty-Six

"The Republicans Come Roaring Back-1994"

Republicans went after Bill and Hillary Clinton early on and sometimes the First Couple (or their appointees) provided them with ammunition and painted large targets on their own backs. I'm just going to touch briefly on a few so called "scandals" during the Clinton administration,* although some are highly complicated, but there are many sources you can check for further, more detailed information. Several employees in the White House Travel Office were fired not long after Clinton took office. The office managed travel and communications for the White House Press Corps. The very nature of the office made it close with the travel industry, and of course, also with the Press Corps.** Republicans charged the employees were fired so that Clinton friends could take the positions or get business through the office. The White House claimed the FBI had found some possible improprieties and so the White House fired the staff. The suspicious thing was, people from a company from Arkansas, with ties to the Clintons, were the replacements for the fired staffers, and an airline run by a strong Clinton supporter (used by the Clinton campaign during the election) wanted the business for transporting the Press. As with so many legal situations, the matter dragged on for years, but Independent Counsel Ken Starr later absolved President Clinton for any wrongdoing, and Hillary Clinton was found to have made incorrect/false statements relating to the firings, but there was insufficient evidence to prove that she knowingly lied. The whole matter was much more complicated than I have laid out, but the point is, the administration's judgment and ethics, early on, came under fire.

Vince Foster, a highly respected attorney, was a long time friend and associate of the Clintons. He became a member of the administration when Bill Clinton took office. His personality and temperament, however, were not suited to the public role and personal attacks so common in politics, particularly in Washington, and he became increasingly depressed. Some missteps in background checks for appointees to the administration,*** and then the Travel Office controversy, brought critical comments and articles from parts of the media. Foster's depression worsened until he went to a park and took his own life. With the strife surrounding the early months of the Clinton administration in full swing, and more developing almost every day, especially over the Whitewater Development Corporation (see below), conspiracy theorists, including right wingers and some Republicans, essentially put out the idea that one or both Clintons had somehow been involved in Foster's death to keep him quiet, since he had done legal work on their behalf, besides his work in the White House. While early investigations into Foster's death concluded he died by his own hand, the conspiracy mongers would not stop. So, you had the President of the United States being called a "murderer" by some, and not in the context of military actions. Later, Independent Counsels Ken Starr and Robert Fiske both investigated the matter and determined Foster's death to be a suicide.

Late in Clinton's first term, information surfaced about hundreds of FBI files on individuals having been delivered to the White House, without the consent of the individuals involved. Many of the files were about Republicans, some even dating back to Reagan administration personnel. The matter quickly heated to a boil as Republicans, eyeing the coming election, hoped to unseat Clinton, but also because it represented such a breech of privacy. Republicans speculated (or accused) the White House of putting together a Nixon-like list of enemies and then gathering FBI information on those individuals. Hillary Clinton's role also came into question again, as Republicans wondered if she had actually seen some of the files, as they believed Hillary to be responsible for the hiring of Craig Livingstone (who resigned over "Filegate," as it came to be known), the man who requested the files from the FBI. The matter was passed onto Independent Counsel Starr for further investigation, and later Starr cleared the Clintons from involvement in "Filegate," and also announced that there was no indication of any use, let alone misuse, of information contained in the files.

The "Whitewater" matter is highly complex and would require several articles to explain and to list the principle "players." For those interested there are many articles on the subject, so check online, or better yet, check your local library, but of course, opinions on the subject are colored by politics from both sides. The controversy centered around a land deal in the late 1970s and early 1980s involving the Clintons as investors. The deal failed and the Clintons suffered financial losses. One of their partners in the deal then went into the banking business and was subsequently investigated for another land deal, which then brought the Whitewater matter to attention, as he also helped raise money for Clinton's Arkansas political campaigns and Hillary Clinton, then a practicing attorney for a law firm, did legal work for him. Another banker alleged that then Governor Bill Clinton leaned on him to provide a loan to this Clinton supporter and business partner (in the original Whitewater deal) for the later land deal (the Clintons did not invest in this), which prompted the investigation. This investigation helped lead to the collapse of the man's bank and its takeover by the government to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Hey, I told you this stuff was complex AND I'm only scratching the surface. Anyway, a special prosecutor asked the Clintons for documents which they said they couldn't find, but which were later turned over. To be as concise as possible, the Clintons were cleared of wrongdoing, but several of their associates were prosecuted and convicted on various charges. The Clintons and their supporters more or less said that some involved were being targeted to implicate the Clintons and that the investigation was about more than a land deal and a failed bank, but was rather more political. The wife of the banker of the failed bank served time in prison for not cooperating with the investigation of the Clinton role (if indeed there was one). The whole matter became part of an American soap opera starring the Clintons, a soap opera which also involved sex (I'll cover this aspect later).

Meanwhile, crime was a major focus of the electorate and congressional Democrats proposed "midnight basketball" as one of its solutions. The country was not impressed, and the combination of the various scandals, the failure of the health care proposal, and what the public felt were ineffective measures to combat crime, led to a huge Republican election wave in the 1994 midterm election, and the GOP took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in decades. Now, could Republicans, Democrats and the White House work together to address the concerns of the American people?

Next... "The Government Shuts Down and Clinton Runs Again"

* I say "so called  scandals," because accusations against politicians in either party doesn't make the accusations true, and political affiliations often color the view about any such accusations.

** The employees technically served at the pleasure of whomever was President at the time, but in fact, the office was really staffed by people who had been there from previous administrations. The office was part of the federal budget, but the actual accommodations for the Press were billed to each separate news organization.

*** The Clinton administration had difficulties with several appointments, as opponents found openings to discredit the appointees, bringing some in the media to dub the White House, "the White House that can't shoot straight." Investigations into the backgrounds of the appointees was under Vince Foster's supervision.

WORD HISTORY:
Cleat-This is another word related to "clot, clod, cloud, clout, cloth, clothes, clothe, and clad." Like its relatives, it goes back to Indo European "gleuh," which had the notion of "stick together, adhere," with the further sense, "form into a ball, mass." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "klaut," with the same general meanings. The sense "form into a ball or mass" helped give Old English "cleat" (which was likely pronounced clee-aht), which meant "lump, mass," with that idea then progressing to "wedge," the meaning which lasted for centuries, until by the 1800s, it came to be used for a "wedge of wood or metal attached to a shoe for support on turf." The Old English form "cleat" later became "clete," with a likely pronunciation of "clee-tah/clee-teh," before the modern version.