Do the Bush Family Pols Play Dirty?

“At the Republican convention in Houston, they spent two days attacking Hillary. . . . I expect them to come after Mother and Chelsea, but they must be saving that for later.” --Bill Clinton, 9/6/92

In early March, Senator John Kerry made perhaps the most surprising comment any presidential candidate has made this year—a blunt warning that the Bush machine “will attack my character and even my wife’s.” His remark did not receive the kind of coverage we would probably be seeing if, for example, George W. Bush had warned of a Democratic smear campaign against his wife Laura. In fact, it appears to have slipped by virtually unnoticed.

A look back at previous Bush family presidential campaigns—in 1988, 1992, and 2000—reveals a disturbing pattern of personal attacks on the families of their opponents, a variation on the larger theme of character assassination that also has included impugning the patriotism of opponents (Dukakis, Clinton, McCain, and Kerry) and questioning their mental health (Dukakis, McCain, Gore, and Dean). Perhaps at this point, in the middle of the fourth Bush presidential campaign, the increasingly docile media simply accepts this strategy as business as usual.

The smearing of Teresa Kerry by Bush surrogates was already under way as Kerry spoke, and has only increased in frequency and vitriol. Radio-show host Rush Limbaugh, who was praised by Bush as “a national treasure” when his drug habit got him in trouble with the law last year, has mocked Mrs. Kerry’s personal appearance and refers to the Kerrys as “Mrs. John Heinz and John F-ing Kerry” on his website. Fellow radio conservative and best-selling author Michael Savage, who has hosted Dick Cheney on his show, has spent hours fixated on the “wife who looks like a deranged lunatic,” describing Teresa Kerry as “sinister” and “spooky” because of her accent. “This is America—foreign accents don’t sell,” declared Savage, who also called the Kerry daughters “losers” and Elizabeth Edwards “a disaster” and “a deficit to the campaign.”

In what might be the first-ever racial attack on a presidential candidate’s wife, a radio ad directed at black voters denigrates the African-born Mrs. Kerry as “a white woman, raised in Africa, surrounded by servants”—essentially, a colonialist oppressor, although in reality she actively protested apartheid.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Dennis B. Roddy reported earlier this year that “an assemblage of right-wing groups is gearing up to target Teresa Heinz Kerry,” and quoted key Republican activists who were remarkably candid about their strategy of personal attack. David Bossie, head of Citizens United, declared, "I do believe she clearly will be an issue. Her and her financial resources and her corporate entities and donations – all those things need to be looked at real closely.” And Floyd Brown of the Young America's Foundation described his plans to dig for dirt in Mrs. Kerry’s past: “She's well known to be a difficult woman to deal with. I would encourage you to look up some old Heinz staffers. I think she'll undergo the same kind of scrutiny that Hillary did because she's been so active.”

The campaign of personal attacks is further fueled by extremist billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and financier of Newsmax.com, who once claimed that President Clinton “has people bumped off at will.” Then there's Matt Drudge, the influential channel for right-wing propaganda who called Mrs. Kerry “one whacked-out chick” on his radio show. Not surprisingly, Bush loyalist Sean Hannity warned on his popular show that Mrs. Kerry is “fair game.”

Coincidentally, “His wife’s now fair game” is what Bush adviser Karl Rove reportedly said to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews when Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV charged the administration with making false claims about Saddam Hussein seeking African uranium. Wilson’s account of how the White House punished his dissent by revealing his wife’s identity as an undercover CIA operative serves as disturbing evidence that wife-bashing is not a tactic the Bush team reserves strictly for presidential campaigns. Wilson wrote that “the administration’s attack on me deflected American public opinion from the chilling reality that this war was waged on false pretenses. And it changed my family’s lives forever. Our security is a real concern because of the bull’s-eye put on Valerie’s back by the White House, and her anonymity is forever lost.”

Wilson’s ominous picture of “a partisan Republican smear campaign” directed by an exceedingly vindictive White House is corroborated by the similar experience of Bush’s former anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, who in his book Against All Enemies accurately foresaw that he would be the target of retribution by an administration “adept at revenge.”

The accounts by Wilson and Clarke are remarkably similar to President Bill Clinton’s recent revelation of the threats he received when he was considering a presidential run. In My Life, Clinton describes a 1991 phone call from the Bush White House’s Roger Porter, threatening to destroy him if he runs: “We’ll spend whatever we have to spend to get whoever we have to get to say whatever they have to say to take you out.”

Looking at subsequent personal attacks by the Bush machine, it appears that Clinton was not exaggerating. Four years ago, after Senator John McCain defeated Governor George W. Bush by a shocking 19-point margin in New Hampshire primary, a follow-up victory in South Carolina might have propelled McCain all the way to the nomination had he not been stopped by an intense campaign of dirty tricks.

“They know no depths, do they? They know no depths,” McCain said at the time, reacting to the misleading ads being run against him. Yet the negative ads about his voting record were a minor matter compared with the smears of McCain’s family. In an article for the Boston Globe, McCain campaign manager Richard H. Davis recalled:

It didn't take much research to turn up a seemingly innocuous fact about the McCains: John and his wife, Cindy, have an adopted daughter named Bridget. Cindy found Bridget at Mother Theresa's orphanage in Bangladesh, brought her to the United States for medical treatment, and the family ultimately adopted her. Bridget has dark skin.

Anonymous opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi-born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster" determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.

Thus, the "pollsters" asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.

According to a report in Newsweek, the smears went even further, including attacks on McCain’s wife:

…Voters were told that McCain was a liar, a hypocrite, a philanderer and a jerk. They were told he was not a hero at all but a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed or broken in captivity and sent home to betray his comrades in arms. They were told he had had affairs, illegitimate children, that he infected his wife with a venereal disease and that he had sex with hookers. The Bush team protested that their hands were clean. The dirty tricks were all locally generated, the Bush camp said, and if anything they tried to discourage low-road attacks by independent groups. But McCain's advisers were sure that Bush and his men were hiding behind “plausible deniability”: they may not have wanted to know exactly what the assassins did, or even who they were, but they were satisfied with the outcome.

The negative attacks were also aimed at McCain's wife Cindy. Her addiction to prescription painkillers years earlier had been dug up during the campaign by dirty tricksters and the night before the South Carolina primary a man appeared outside a McCain event with a stack of leaflets calling her a drug addict and a “weirdo.” When Cindy and her husband sat watching the exit polls the next night, Cindy began weeping when it became evident McCain had lost, her loud sobs breaking the silence in the room. McCain tried to stop her tears, telling her it was part of the game. “Think of how the Bushes felt two weeks ago in New Hampshire.” Cindy turned to him sobbing. “We never called his wife a weirdo.”

McCain staffers pointed to Rove as the source of the ugly attacks, according to a report in the New Yorker { May 12, 2003). And in the recently released, Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn’t Tell You, author Paul Waldman recalls how Bush gave his blessing to the dirty tactics that eliminated his opposition: “At one event in South Carolina, a supporter came up to Bush and complained, ‘Y’all haven’t even hit his soft spots’ urging Bush to get vicious with McCain. ‘I know, and we’re going to’ Bush responded, but noted that the smear campaign would be below the radar: ‘I’m not going to do it on TV.’”

The smearing of Cindy McCain in 2000 was reminiscent of the strategy the elder Bush’s campaign employed at the 1992 Republican Convention, where speaker after speaker tore into Hillary Clinton. The following Sunday, the panelists on ABC’s "This Week" expressed surprise at the treatment of Governor Clinton’s wife, with all agreeing that this attack on a candidate’s wife during a presidential campaign was unprecedented.

But it was not unprecedented. The targeting of Mrs. Clinton was a continuation of a pattern, and clearly “business as usual” for a Bush presidential run. When George H.W. Bush was confronted with a formidable primary challenge from Senator Bob Dole in 1988, his campaign had raised ethical questions about Elizabeth Dole’s blind trust, prompting a furious Bob Dole to confront Bush on the Senate floor and demand an apology, which he never received.

Later that year, one day after Bush told a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that his running mate Dan Quayle was an excellent choice because he “damn sure didn’t burn the American flag,” a Bush campaign surrogate alleged that the same patriotic standard had not been met by the wife of Bush’s Democratic opponent. Senator Steve Symms of Idaho claimed to have been informed that there was a photograph of Kitty Dukakis burning an American flag at an antiwar rally in 1970—a false accusation that succeeded in engraving a powerful negative image in voters’ minds.

Bill Clinton’s reaction to the Hillary-bashing of the 1992 Republican Convention—“I expect them to come after Mother and Chelsea, but they must be saving that for later”—was surely intended as nothing more than wry hyperbole, but a month later it proved to be a stranger-than-fiction prophecy when Bush aides were caught searching for dirt in the passport files of Clinton’s mother. The response by Clinton’s communications director George Stephanopoulos serves as an eye-opening reminder of the “honor and dignity” to which the Junior Bush would later pledge to return us:

At long last, have they no shame?

Today's revelation that senior State Department officials personally searched the passport files not only of Governor Clinton but of his mother blows the lid off the Bush administration's dirty tricks and denials.

Make no mistake. This is a monumental abuse of power, an invasion of Mrs. Kelley's privacy, and clearly a willful violation of the Privacy Act and the State Departments’ own rules. There is no excuse for a U.S. government agency investigating a citizen who has done nothing wrong, solely for the purpose of assembling a political smear.

When caught red-handed in an abuse of power, Bush's aides have responded with a series of evasions and denials…

This is the smoking gun—proof of a taxpayer-funded dirty tricks campaign. Not since the Nixon campaign of 1972 has there been such a pattern of misuse of government agencies to smear an opponent.

Curiously, the media frequently used the term “character problem” during the 1992 campaign—but only in reference to Clinton.

Not long afterward, Bush White House sleepover guest Limbaugh showed Chelsea Clinton’s picture on television and called her the “White House dog,” fulfilling Bill Clinton’s prediction of personal attacks by the Bush Administration and its mouthpieces on three generations of Clinton women—“hitting the trifecta,” so to speak. Limbaugh would later be rewarded for his efforts when he was featured as keynote speaker at the 1994 “freshman orientation” for newly elected Republican representatives, who eagerly lined up to have their pictures taken with him. (Limbaugh was not the only prominent Bush loyalist who felt a need to attack Chelsea Clinton. Jerome R. Corsi, currently enjoying the spotlight as co-author of the anti-Kerry bestseller Unfit to Command, revealed a similar obsession when he posted catty remarks about “Chubbie Chelsea” on the Internet shortly after the 9/11 tragedy, at a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans, both Republican and Democratic, had more important matters on their minds.)

Although much of the public might have forgotten by now, it was Reform Party candidate Ross Perot, not Bill Clinton, who was originally the senior Bush’s most formidable challenger in 1992. At mid-year, Perot led Bush in the polls, with Clinton in third place. Vowing to “do whatever it takes” to be re-elected, President Bush desperately needed the Perot threat removed, and his wish was conveniently fulfilled when the Texas billionaire shocked the world by dropping out of the campaign. (He would later re-enter, but as a weakened candidate who trailed both his rivals.) Perot alleged that Bush operatives had threatened to besmirch the reputation of his family by disseminating a fake, computer-generated photograph of his daughter and even disrupting her wedding.

Perot claimed to have “received multiple reports,” while admitting he lacked solid evidence. But the alleged reports, combined with his belief that the Bush machine was indeed capable of dirty tricks, led Perot to conclude that staying in the race “was a risk I could not take.” It now appears that Perot was not alone in considering it a “risk” to cross the Bushes.

When he warned that the Bush team had threatened to “smear” and “sabotage” his family, Perot was widely derided as “kooky” and “delusional,” and the labels stuck, to the point where the Perot-as-lunatic storyline is now accepted history. Perot’s allegations were regarded as simply too outrageous to be true. Yet, was Perot’s “delusional” allegation of threats against his family any more outrageous than what was done in reality to Joe Wilson’s wife by a vindictive Bush White House? (And are Perot’s allegations of a threatened physical “disruption” still unthinkable, in light of the well-orchestrated Republican violence that shut down a lawful vote recount in a Florida precinct in 2000?)

Looking at the Wilson case and the history of Bush presidential campaigns, remembering the attacks on Kitty Dukakis and Elizabeth Dole, and focusing especially on all that transpired after a much-ridiculed Perot quit the 1992 race—the ruthless targeting of Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton’s mother, John McCain’s wife and adopted daughter, and John Kerry’s wife—perhaps there is justification for asking a question that challenges the conventional wisdom: Is it possible that Perot was telling the truth?