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Anger and hate for Clinton was complex, intense

By DENNIS RODDY Pittsburgh Post-Gazette January 15, 2001

- Six years ago, on a rain-splattered night in Pittsburgh, Bill Clinton sat in the back of the presidential limousine and theorized on why his enemies hate him.

It had been a hard year that would end even harder. Republicans were about to take control of both Houses of Congress. Days earlier, a woman named Paula Jones filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment - a suit filed after she had been sought out by conservative operatives and urged to act days before the statute of limitations expired.

Earlier in the week, a man from Colorado, thinking he'd spotted Clinton leaving the White House, pulled out an automatic rifle and sprayed the place with gunfire.

The same month, a nationwide poll found that one in five people surveyed said they "hated" Clinton.

"The other guys have really cultivated that," he said. "From the day I got here ... they did everything they could to try to cultivate an intensely personal opposition. And no one in modern history's seen anything like it."

The hatred was real. The reason has proved amorphous.

That night, looking at a soaking wet landscape from the back of his car, Clinton attributed it to his success. "Everything I did that was important made people mad," he said.

As with so many things, Clinton was seeing one detail of a picture that required some distance to view it clearly. Yes, his enemies were angry that Clinton had pushed through parts of his agenda. But to most of them, it seemed like simple mockery added to the mix. Here was a man they believed capable of crimes that resembled nothing so much as the reign of Caligula, and still, somehow, he was president, and they couldn't seem to get rid of him.

Now Clinton, with the twin battle scars of impeachment and political triumph, is departing office, and his enemies still cannot rest.

"He's not gonna' leave. He just can't," said Larry Nichols, a onetime Clinton ally from Arkansas who became an early conduit for many of the conspiracy stories.

Nichols isn't alone in promoting the theory that Clinton will somehow seize power and try to stay in the White House after inauguration day. He spends hours on a shortwave radio station talk show advancing that theory.

"Just because nobody's ever done this before, don't count it out yet," Nichols said in an interview. "After all the crap he's pulled, he can't just walk away with all this stuff hanging over his head."

Slandering a president is a tradition as old as Thomas Jefferson. But in the case of Clinton, a strange convergence of angers, resentments and opportunities aligned in ways previously unimaginable.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell sold videotapes alleging, absent any credible evidence, that Clinton systematically had people murdered. It took no fewer than four investigations to conclude that White House Counsel Vincent Foster committed suicide, yet a small industry continues to thrive on the theory that the longtime Clinton aide's death was something else.

Clinton's enemies have accused him of everything from murder and espionage to drug abuse and fathering a child by an Atlanta prostitute.

Even Nichols, who believes many of the allegations against Clinton, wondered in amazement when a woman phoned in to say the president had been fitted with a prosthetic nose after his old one fell off because of cocaine abuse.

"There's something about the hatred that goes beyond the facts to the irrational," said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist and longtime scholar of presidential politics.

Clinton, Sabato said, "became the personification of the excesses of the baby boom generation. Even some of the baby boomers resented those excesses. Maybe it's a kind of self-hatred of a generation."

To some who have observed the anti-Clinton industry close-up, the broadening catalogue merely speaks to a business that has identified its core market.

"The Clinton-hating enterprise was very profitable," said David Brock, a onetime conservative journalist who became the toast of the right wing seven years ago when he wrote the "troopergate" stories for the American Spectator that ultimately led to the Paula Jones lawsuit which, in turn, set off the avalanche that became impeachment.

Brock, who later renounced his troopergate stories and became a pariah among conservatives, said the hatred he found toward Clinton grew on multiple levels. One, he said, was the uniquely angry political culture of Arkansas, where the president's enemies, long fixated on theories about him, spread stories that reached a nationwide audience. Brock said Clinton - his roots firmly in the leftish politics of the 1960s and 70s - promoted himself as a moderate, and the act, while successful politically, left his opponents convinced he was a political phony.

When Clinton's sexual escapades were thrown into the mix, the hard-to-follow details of the Whitewater land deal, the ostensible reason to investigate him, suddenly were supplanted by something easier to grasp.

"It was extremely accessible to people in a way a lot of the other allegations were not," Brock said. "It was easier to understand."

Hence, Brock's sudden fame when he published his stories in the American Spectator in which former Arkansas bodyguards recounted stories of Clinton on the prowl for women.

"There were traditional reasons to oppose Clinton on the basis of his politics, but the animosity transcended the partisan and became focused on the person," Brock said. "The Clintons were characterized as bad people as opposed to bad policy-makers."

Now, with Clinton about to recede from both national politics and national vitriol, it will be left for history to judge who was crazier - those who believed in him, or those who beleaguered him.

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-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), January 15, 2001