THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1994
November
Republican takeover of Congress; "Gingrich Revolution"
- November 1: The religious right takes the lead in Republican politics in a big way, spearheading the drive to tar the Clinton presidency that had begun from the moment Clinton took office, and more tangibly, winning a big victory in Congressional elections.
Congressional Republicans
Though Clinton always maintains a strong Baptist faith, his perception among conservative Christians as a moral relativist and a secular politician sparks a huge wave of moral indignation and anger among this faction, driving the huge gains by conservatives in both federal and state elections. Conversely, the Bush sons, George W. and Jeb, overtly embrace the Religious Right in their campaigns for governor. Jeb takes the harder line in Florida, publicly writing off the black vote and selecting an evangelical Christian as his running mate. He narrowly loses to moderate Democrat Lawton Chiles. George W. profits from a deeper base of conservative Christian voters in Texas, and his handlers, Karen Hughes and Karl Rove, ensure that he didn't present himself as such an overt fundamentalist as to scare more moderate voters. He wins an upset victory over incumbent Ann Richards, and forged a political coalition of religious fundamentalists and wealthy businessmen that would serve him in good stead in his 2000 bid for the presidency. The lesson of presenting a moderate face also sticks; in the national spotlight in 1998 and 1999, Bush becomes a "compassionate conservative," and relied on words like "education," "children," "reading," and "literacy," phraseologies that wouldn't alarm evangelicals and would entice moderate voters. Bush's presidential campaign will always keep the back door open for the emissaries of the religious right, who will be assured that once the campaign was over, their candidate would be freer to support their agenda. - Interestingly, the GOP freshman class, known as the "Gingrich class," will be decimated by its own moral shortcomings. After a single month in office, four of the GOP freshmen's marriages will have fallen apart due to charges of sexual infidelity, two more will be foundering, and the legislature will be abuzz with tales of Republican freshmen running as wild as college students on spring break. The most startling split will be between Jon and Meredith Christiansen, the "golden couple" of the Gingrich revolution. Winning a Nebraska seat as a staunchly right-wing evangelical, Jon Christiansen quickly wins the dubious reputation of being one of the most unintelligent members of the new Congress. Meanwhile, tales of Meredith's sexual improprieties with one or more of her husband's aides begin circulating, and the two eventually divorce in 1995. (Meredith agrees to keep quiet about the details of her affairs in an apparent attempt to help her former husband retain his office; the attempt does not work, as Christiansen is defeated in the 1996 elections.) The official excuse from the GOP is that so many of its newest members succumbed to temptation due to their heavy workload, and blame Democrats for spreading gossip. Gingrich himself, who thunderously denouces the improper behavior of Bill Clinton and trumpets himself and his party's moral superiority, manages to keep his own affair with intern Callista Bisek out of the newspapers until 1998. (Kevin Phillips, Joe Conason)
- As part of their systematic grab for power,
Congressional Republicans
once Republicans are in charge of the House of Representatives as well as the White House, they move to control the lobbying industry as well. Many prominent lobbying firms on Washington's K Street and others are told to hire only Republican applicants. In 1996, RNC chairman Haley Barbour gathjers a group of lobbying-firm CEOs and tells them to "purge" their companies of Democrats. As of Bush's first term, Republican senator Rick Santorum holds weekly meetings where conservatives pore over every job applicant to any Washington lobbying firm and ensure only Republicans are hired. - One effect of the "Gingrich revolution" is to cement the bond between Republicans, corporations, and lobbyists in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US protectorate, and particularly on the island of Saipan. US garment manufacturers like Liz Claiborne, JC Penney, the Gap, Wal-Mart, Old Navy, Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie and Fitch, Brooks Brothers, and Banana Republic are used to having their way in Saipan's sweatshops, where "special exemptions" to US labor laws ensure that Saipan garment workers, mostly poor laborers from China, the Philippines, and Indonesia, work 14-hour days for $1.35/hour while living in rat-infested barracks with non-functional toilets and contaminated drinking water. To preserve this workers' paradise from oversight by Congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration, Congressional Republicans turn to new majority whip Tom DeLay and lobbyist Jack Abramoff, best known for producing the 1989 action film Red Scorpion in South Africa-occupied Namibia while flaunting US sanctions against South Africa's apartheidist government. Abramoff has close ties to conservatives like the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed and GOP power broker Grover Norquist, along with his friend DeLay. (ABC/Al Franken, Paul Waldman)
- Incoming Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich publicly states that he intends to use his party's newfound subpoena power to wage war against the White House.
Congressional Republicans
In a private speech to business lobbyists at the Capital Hill Club, he tells his listeners that he looks forward to as many as twenty different Congressional committees investigating the Clinton administration, which he calls "the enemy of normal Americans." The new chairmen of the House and Senate Banking Committees, James Leach and Alfonse D'Amato, announce that they intend to open more investigations of the Clintons, using Whitewater as a springboard. The power shift benefits former fringe organizations like Citizens United. CU's two main operatives, Floyd Brown and David Bossie, which have been tirelessly smearing Clinton from the sidelines for years, find themselves with new access to the highest level of power. "People who answer our phone calls now have 'Chairman' before their names," Brown brags to The Nation magazine, which describes Brown as "elated by the prospect of a swarm of subpoenas flying off Capital Hill towards 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." Brown pressures his newly empowered Congressional contacts to reopen the investigation into the Vince Foster suicide, and to open an investigation into Clinton's supposed connections to the drug-smuggling ring formerly operating out of the Mena, Arkansas airport. Arkansas white supremacist Jim Johnson, a virulent Clinton opponent, tells an interviewer in February 1995 that there is "absolutely no doubt in my mind that the government of the United States was an active participant in one of the largest dope operations in the world, and that the [former] governor of Arkansas enjoyed a benefit from its success." Whereas rants by the likes of Brown and Johnson formerly fell upon skeptical ears in Congress, now these and other Clinton conspiracy theorists have an eager and powerful audience. - Leach, the new chair of the House Banking Committee, though widely viewed as a moderate and fair-minded Republican, bears a personal grudge against Clinton for defeating his close friend George Bush in the 1992 elections, and is determined to get revenge. For him, proving Clinton's malfeasance in Whitewater has become a crusade. He has already accused Clinton of "Machiavellian machinations of a single party government" and compared Clinton's Arkansas to Huey Long's Louisiana. Leach gets his information, and some of his sound bites, from Citizens United, with that material being funnelled through David Bossie to Leach's press secretary, Joe Pinder. (Pinder, worried that his relationship with Bossie would taint his own reputation, keeps his connection to Bossie secret, meeting with Bossie in obscure restaurants and exchanging phone messages.) Citizens United rhetoric appears almost word-for-word in Pinder's press releases, reviving old and discredited charges against not only Clinton, but Hillary Clinton, Arkansas securities commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer, and RTC attorney April Breslaw, who was claimed by RTC investigator L. Jean Lewis to have tried to squelch the RTC investigation into Whitewater, and whom Lewis "accidentally" taped during a meeting in Lewis's office. While Leach will call a number of witnesses hostile to the Clintons in his hearings, he refuses to call a single witness, particularly Bassett Schaffer or Breslaw, who can refute the tales of financial perfidy. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
George W. Bush becomes governor of Texas
- November 1: George W. Bush narrowly defeats popular incumbent Ann Richards for the governorship of Texas, running on a platform of "self-reliance and freedom from government dependence."
George W. Bush
His brother Jeb loses in his bid to become Florida's governor. When Bush agrees to run, at the behest of his friends in professional baseball who want to discourage him from pursuing the position of commissioner of baseball, he confides to business partner Roland Betts, "You know, I could run for governor but I'm basically a media creation. I've never done anything." Bush wins due to a carefully crafted campaign by political consultant Karl Rove, who manages to bring down Richards through a series of false attacks on Richards's record, and an ugly, baseless whispering campaign alleging that Richards was packing state government with homosexuals, a tactic that blossomed when Republican state senator Bill Ratliff publicly criticized Richards for "appointing avowed homosexual activists" to state jobs. (Rove released a statement praising Ratliff, but claimed that the Bush campaign did not wish to associate itself with the allegations of gays in office, an interesting statement considering that Rove engineered the entire whispering campaign.) Richards's campaign spokesman Chuck McDonald says that Bush political operatives, particularly Rove, are known for having supporters spread lies about their opponent while the candidate himself stays above the fray. James Moore and Wayne Slater write, "There actually were two campaigns against Richards, one in which Bush floated above the fray and another in which Rove targeted the Democrat's politics and gender. It was an arrangement that allowed Bush plausible deniability, no matter what. And it was a model of future Bush races. Bush traveling the high road, Rove pursuing the low. Bush's strategy in the Richards race was simple enough. Bush the candidate engages his Democratic opponent by respectfully challenging her record on improving public schools and fighting crime. Meanwhile, Bush surrogates, operating at arm's length, undermine Richards on the issues of guns and gays, including a vicious whisper campaign about lesbianism that ran with an evangelical fervor through the coffee shops and church parlors of East Texas." - In an effort to counter the Bush/Rove campaign's lockup of most Texas businesses, Richards founds the Governor's Business Council during the campaign, a group of the largest corporate names in Texas and led by Enron's Kenneth Lay. When told about the GRC, Rove dismisses it: "She's not going to get any votes there." What Rove knows, and Richards does not, is that most of the members of the GRC are firmly in the Bush camp despite their membership in Richards's group. Lay and Enron will give seven times as much money to the Bush campaign as they will give to Richards; however, Lay's post in the GRC will spawn George W. Bush's later lie that he first knew Lay as a Richards supporter.
- In Bush's four-year tenure, Texas will become the most polluted state in the country, ranking first in the amount of cancer-causing chemicals pumped annually into the air and water, first in the number of hazardous-waste incinerators, first in the total toxic releases to the environment, and first in carbon dioxide and mercury emissions from industry. Houston, the nation's oil- and petrochemical-industry headquarters, is an "ecological disaster zone." Chemical spills foul its coastal waters and its air quality has just earned the dubious honor of being the most polluted in the country, eclipsing Los Angeles in 1999. Over a third of Texas's rivers are considered unfishable, unswimmable, and largely undrinkable. Under Bush, Texas slashed its environmental cleanup outlays, plummeting to 49th in the US in environmental cleanup spending. However, Bush will prove a loyal friend to his colleagues in the oil and energy industries. He pushes a $45 million tax break through the Texas legislature for those industries, revamps the Texas Clean Air Act with legislation written by the oil industry, kills the "right to know" laws that informed citizens when their property was being sprayed with deadly toxins, and fills his administration with officials from the oil and energy companies. Craig McDonald, Director of Texans for Public Justice, a campaign finance group, will say in April 2000, "He's been friendly to that sector, policy-wise, and they've been good to him in return. He rewarded them with tax breaks when they cried that they weren't making enough money."
- Rove uses Bush's victory as the first step in his move towards winning the presidency, treating Bush's entire tenure as governor as part of the future presidential campaign. During the governor's race, Rove begins playing up Bush's supposed interest in books, ensuring that Bush is often seen in public with a well-chosen book under his arm, and releases to the press of Bush's "reading lists," made up of conservative treatises and weighty historical tomes -- books drawn from Rove's own reading, not Bush's. This is a tactic that Rove will repeat during the 2000 election.
- But hatred and divisiveness is Rove's hallmark during the campaign. Richards recalls the fractious, racially polarized Texas electorate during the 1960s (when highway billboards proclaimed Martin Luther King, Jr. a Communist). "The core of it was about race," Richards recalls. " But the question in my mind is whether race was just the thing used to hold together their troops. If they could scare people about blacks coming into public schools with their children, if they could make people feel uneasy about what blacks might do if they had the rights the liberals on the left want them to have, then they could control the power. They used race as an organizing and mobilizing tool. And I think we are seeing exactly the same thing today with gays and lesbians, homosexuals."
- Gay-bashing will become an increasingly prevalent theme in Rove's campaigns. During the 1994 Bush-Richards race, Rove once threatened to smear a reporter whose reporting he did not like, the Dallas Morning News's Anne Marie Kilday, with baseless allegations of homosexuality if she didn't start producing news reports more to his liking. In the 2004 re-election campaign for the presidency, Rove will refine the approach: in West Virginia and Arkansas, voters were treated to flyers from the Republican National Committee -- led by Rove's protege and hand-picked chairman, Ken Mehlman, himself a closeted gay -- showing a picture of one man on his knee in front of another man (a typical pose for a marriage proposal) was labeled "Approved," while a picture of a Bible was labeled "Banned." The text told voters that this would happen if they voted for Democrats. In both the 1994 and 2004 campaigns, Rove would disavow all knowledge of the slanderous flyers, but he was indeed behind their conception and distribution. "There's not a part of this campaign that Karl didn't touch in some way," says Rove's colleague from 2004, Mark McKinnon. "I'd get a call from Karl, often from Air Force One, saying, 'The television script is 87 words. It only needs to be 85. And by the way, you don't need that second comma.' And I'd think, are you kidding me?" (Consortium News, Bushwatch, Bush-Kerry Timeline, James Moore and Wayne Slater)
- One reason why Bush is elected is his refusal to take a clear stance on abortion, making him more palatable to moderate voters,
George W. Bush
a stance crafted by political consultant Karen Hughes. Once in office, Bush will defund public health clinics in favor of funding church-run establishments like Marvin Olansky's infamous "Austin Crisis Pregnancy Center," which does little for pregnant women besides harangue them with anti-abortion propaganda. Bush will shepherd the passage of a law allowing church-based establishments to "opt out" of state licensing requirements; when the law passes in 1997, a private, evangelical-run center for troubled teens called Rebekah House will reopen. Rebekah House had been shut down in 1985 after it was revealed that its rehabilation routine included beatings, isolation, and hours spent kneeling on hard floors with a Bible in each hand and pencils under each knee to ensure stillness. (Laura Flanders) - One of Bush's campaign themes is that former governor Ann Richards
George W. Bush
"refused to let Texans vote on whether citizens of our state should be allowed to carry concealed weapons. ...[A] 'concealed carry' law would make Texas a safer place." Bush promises to hold a public referendum on whether to end Texas's 125-year ban on concealed weapons. Yet once in the governor's office, Bush flip-flops and refuses to schedule the public vote, telling legislators "we [already] had a referendum on November 8th." Texas law enforcement officials fear that Bush will simply push a concealed-carry law into effect; Mark Clark, the spokesman for the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, says that "the level of violence on the streets right now is unacceptable. It makes no sense to me as a police officer...to say, 'Let's put more guns out there to try and solve the violence issue.'" Although Bush will not succeed in passing a concealed-carry law, in 1999 he will sign an NRA-backed bill that prohibits city, county, and local governments from suing firearm and ammunition manufacturers to recoup public money spent on combating gun violence, having his spokeswoman Karen Hughes claim that such a law would spark "frivolous lawsuits." Bush will toe the NRA line in refusing to back mandatory trigger locks, hidden serial numbers, or smart-gun technologies that would limit the use of guns in criminal activities and reduce the number of accidental shootings. And as president, he will back legislation granting gun manufacturers complete immunity from lawsuits. Bush ignores the statement of the Million Mom March organization: "Good gun dealers don't need immunity. Bad gun dealers don't deserve it." (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - Bush will name William Archer to head the Texas Health Commission, a favorite of anti-abortion groups.
George W. Bush
Archer is notorious for telling Hispanics that the high rate of pregnancies in their communities is due to their culture, and say they don't want family planning. Archer will try to close school-based health clinics because they discussed family planning and abortion as an option to pregnancy. He will publish a state government booklet for young women filled with false information about breast cancer's supposed relationship to abortion. Bush will back him through scandal after scandal, until an African-American woman doctor tape-records Archer telling her she was "too smart" in using her intellect to get ahead: "that's what Anglos do, that's what white people do," Archer tells her. (Laura Flanders) - Part of the wave that George W. Bush rides into office in 1994, and again in 2000, is a revamping of Republican core constituents.
George W. Bush
Gone is the predominance of old-money Northeasterners and Midwestern business magnates. Instead, the party is being taken over by hardline religious fundamentalists best personified by the Southern Baptist Convention. As historian Kevin Phillips writes, "...[T]he GOP would absorb from the SBC a doctrinal fervor that went well beyond mainstream white southern views, on issues that included the Bible as the literal word of God...the basic wrongness of premarital sex...and the invariable wrongness of homosexuality.... To this new GOP constituency, Clinton was anathema, and state and national Southern Baptist Conventions were soon humming with denunciatory resolutions." 80% of southern white evangelical Christians voted Republican in the 1994 elections, and the Texas Bush political machine, led by Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, was not slow to recognize the shift in constituency and adjust their campaign accordingly. - A large measure of Bush's success in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election was to label incumbent Ann Richards as a Clinton supporter, using her leadership of the 1992 Democratic National Convention that nominated Clinton as a major focus. But the Bush campaign going into the 2000 elections will understand that Bush could not be labeled as a "creature of the religious right;" the support he would lose among Northeast, Pacific, and Great Lakes Republicans would cost him any chance of defeating Al Gore. The Bush network of political leaders and financial backers, characterized by neoconservative William Kristol as "the only genuine establishment in the Republican Party," will craft a careful image of Bush as a genial "compassionate conservative" whose ties to religious fundamentalists will be emphasized in private meetings and closed-door rallies, but publicly downplayed. Visits from foreign financial backers from Saudi Arabia and Qatar will be played up as Bush initiating "foreign policy dialogue" -- while the Bush campaign will make tremendous hay over insignificant contributions from Buddhist temples to the Gore campaign, it will collect huge donations from oil sheikhs without public comment. Bush's biggest domestic contributions will come from his family's network, mostly from donors with long-time connections to his father, or to his brother in Florida.
- Much of Bush's support from Christian fundamentalists is furthered by the Bush campaign's emphasis on morality -- the 2000 campaign will insist that they would replace the "morally corrupt" Clinton administration with one that would, in Bush's speechwriters' words, "uphold the dignity and honor of the office." In 1995, televangelist Billy Graham, one of the prime connections between evangelical Christians and secular Republicans, touts George W. Bush as "the moral and spiritual example his mother and father set for us all." While Bush refrains from publicly embracing Christian fundamentalism, he continually makes an issue of his own religious awakening, and in private rallies with fundamentalist support groups, touts his support from Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other Christian political leaders of the hard right. Phillips writes that the 1980s image of Republicans as characters on a television show such as Dynasty was now to be superseded: the Bushes were no longer the Carrington family of television fame, but were to be portrayed as the Nelsons of Ozzy and Harriet. Ron Kaufman, Bush's former campaign director, later says, "When you're talking about Clinton fatigue, part of it is that we loved Ozzie and Harriet. We really did. People want Little House on the Prairie to be real, and the Bushes represent that." Bush, formerly labeled the wastrel son of a billionaire oligarchic family, is reinvented as the modern "prodigal son," transforming the baggage of his misspent youth and record of complete failure as a businessman into the story of a strayed young man who had regained Heaven by his acceptance of Christ. Fundamentalist voters love it. Bush cements the persona by public statements such as his claim during the 1999 Iowa caucus debates that his favorite political philosopher is Jesus Christ, "because he changed my heart."
- Phillips writes, "This vision of a preacher-assisted conquering of a man's demons was surely more appealing to believers than the metamorphosis of an Ivy League oilman who, some suspected, had turned to religion when the bottom fell out of the oil market. Besides, it kept the publicly renounced demons from rearing up again, midcampaign, with political pitchforks." This public transformation, beginning in the 1994 campaign for governor, shields Bush from criticisms over his alleged conviction of cocaine use as well as the 2000 election-eve revelation that his campaign had hidden a drunken driving conviction Bush received in his 20s. The prodigal son was expected to have had such "lapses." Allegations that Bush was still drinking after his touted 1986 reformation, including videos shot years afterwards showing an apparently inebriated Bush, were ignored by the mainstream media and did not impact the electorate. In March 1995, two months after he becomes governor, Bush's Texas handlers will engineer the issuance of a new driver's license for Bush, which effectively hide any earlier criminal charges from public view. And allegations that Bush had skipped out on his 1972 National Guard physical, and accepted his removal from flight status, because of his fear that he would test positive for cocaine, were never proven and were widely dismissed as Democratic spin, even though he consistently refused to deny that he had ever had a cocaine problem and famously declared that he had been drug-free "since 1974." The image of Bush as "prodigal son" covered many moral flaws, as did his campaign's relentless attack on the morals of Bill Clinton. One political scholar will tell a Texas forum that "the rejection of Gore was based on the belief of many voters that the White House had violated ethical and moral norms that had been based on Judeo-Christianmoral tradition. That was by far the most important religious factor in the 2000 elections." George W. Bush will become "a rare rallying point for notions of restoration, legitimacy, and personal responsibility." (Kevin Phillips)
- Historian Kevin Phillips adds on the theme of extremist policies cloaked in the mantle of "compassionate conservatism,"
Conservative hate speech and intolerance
"To cite the themes that have particularly roiled Congress under Clinton and Bush -- taxes, the federal budget, the environment, gun control, campaign finance, government support of religion, military readiness and pre-emptive attacks, homeland security, and unilateralist foreign policy -- is to illustrate that extreme thinking was no longer routinely the province of the old Dixiecrat states from South Carolina to Louisiana. On two-thirds of these subjects, the 'ultra' views now came from Texas think tanks, congressional delegations, and political rhetoric, including the Bush White House. The Texas origins of America's first serious presidential dynasty only underscored the salience of three of its distinguishing mindsets: Texanomics, crony capitalism, and the need of both Bush presidents to dress their Texas-rooted agendas in 'kinder, gentler' imagery and supposed 'compassionate conservatism.'" (Kevin Phillips) - During the gubernatorial campaign, George W. Bush asks Enron CEO Kenneth Lay to be his top Houston fundraiser for his gubernatorial campaign against Democrat Ann Richards.
George W. Bush
Lay turns the chore over to Enron's president and chief operations officer, Richard Kinder. Lay, Kinder, and other Enron executives ultimately donate $146,500 to the Bush campaign, over seven times what they donated to the Richards campaign. Once Bush is in office, Lay began lobbying him, with great success. In December 1994, he will ask Bush to name Patrick Wood, a supporter of energy deregulation, to head the Texas Public Utility Commission, a request Bush is happy to grant. Lay writes a note to Bush that reads, "The Public Utility Commission appointment is an extremely critical one. We believe that Pat Wood is best qualified.... Linda joins me in wishing you and Laura and the whole family a joyous holiday. Sincerely, Ken." Under Wood, Texas energy consumers will eventually pay out $9 billion in surcharges collected by the state's power companies as part of a number of "price hikes" engendered by Lay's scheme to deregulate Texas's power industry. (Wood will take a similar post in the Bush administration after Bush's election to the presidency, where he will wink at the market gaming of California's energy industry.) Lay also steers a number of visitors to Bush's office over his term of office, including a representative from Uzbekistan after Enron began negotiating with that country to develop energy interests there. Kinder, Bush's head of campaign fundraising, will serve on a commission that will recommend cutting $3 billion in state taxes on energy and other capital-intensive industries, and advocates shifting the revenue burden onto services and professionals. In 1995, Enron will spend $50,000 on the Bush inauguration, and $50,000 more for the 1999 follow-up. (Kevin Phillips. Greg Palast) - Under the Bush presidency in the early 90s, and the Bush governorship of Texas from 1995-98,
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
Enron is able to win dozens of global contracts for energy development, making it the world's first global utility and energy-trading firm. Historian Kevin Phillips explains Enron's global success in two words: "crony capitalism." During the '90s, US and foreign government agencies will give Enron $7.2 billion in publicly funded financing for 38 projects in 29 countries. The World Bank will pressure foreign countries to privatize their economies, often to Enron's benefit. Domestically, Enron is booming. In 1993, Enron was one of only 11 power-marketing companies in the United States; by 1997, it will be first among 284 such companies, such growth aided by pressure from GOP members of state governments to deregulate energy on a state and local level. In 1998, California will be the first to open its energy markets, and by early 2000, 24 states will open their markets to private energy merchants. Governor Bush will work diligently from his base in Texas to pressure other states to open their markets as well. In 1997, Bush will phone Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge to ask him to open Pennsylvania's energy markets; Ridge will comply. When Texas lawmakers balk at opening Texas to Enron and other private energy merchants, Kenneth Lay adds his own pressure, often using Governor Bush to exhort other governors to follow suit. In 1999, in the face of strong Democratic opposition, the Texas legislature will vote to open its energy markets. (Kevin Phillips) - George W. Bush's "education reforms" in Texas are predicated on the same kinds of falsification and deception that marks his business career.
George W. Bush
His education reforms focus on dropout rates and test scores by creating strong incentives to falsify dropout rates by mislabeling them as transferred or enrolled in GED programs, and by encouraging low-scoring students to take the alternative of GED tests. (Bush-Kerry Timeline) - November 1: Republican Katherine Harris wins a seat in Florida's state Senate.
Republican corruption
The politically ambitious daughter of a powerful family, whose fortunes were spurred by her grandfather, citrus and cattle tycoon Ben Hill Griffin (also a former state senator), Harris wins in part because of a timely $30,000 donation from Riscorp, an insurance company. In 1996, Harris will repay the favor by sponsoring a piece of legislation written entirely by Riscorp executives. Subsequently, Riscorp and its CEO, Bill Griffin, are found guilty of making $382,000 in illegal campaign contributions, including the Harris donation. A memo found by the FBI from a Riscorp executive secretary reads, "Katherine's office called and asked if we could give them different addresses to list for each of the checks. All the checks show the P.O. Box 1598 address and if we submit these, the newspaper will probably make the connection and track them all to Riscorp." Despite the obvious proof of complicity and campaign fraud, Harris manages to duck prosecution by paying the contributions back three years after the fact, though prosecutors name her campaign manager as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Riscorp case. In 1998 she will win the election for Florida Secretary of State after spending over $1 million of her own money; the secretary of state is, among other things, charged with ensuring fair and impartial elections. The head of Common Cause in Florida will muse on the Harris candidacy, "How can you come down on somebody else for violating something when you have a reputation for violating the law yourself?" (NNDB, Laura Flanders) - November 1: Utah senator Orrin Hatch solidly wins re-election to the Senate after an election-year scare.
Congressional Republicans
In 1993, he helped a business colleague get a loan from BCCI, the bank that is under investigation for international corruption. Hatch defended BCCI on the floor of the Senate even after BCCI officials admitted their guilt in laundering drug money, and for a time seemed vulnerable; however, after being cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee of wrongdoing, Utah Republican officials ensured that Hatch would run unopposed in the Republican primary, and, thus bolstered, regained his footing and easily defeated his Democratic opponent. (Hilton and Testa) - November 1: Former Oklahoma Sooner football player, corporate mogul, and black conservative J.C. Watts wins his first term as a Congressional representative from Oklahoma.
Congressional Republicans
Watts quickly becomes a familiar face for Republicans, allowing himself to be trotted out for the media time and again to put an African-American face on conservative policies. He refuses to join the Congressional Black Caucus, saying that it is "infested" with "Democratic liberals who betray black people in America." In 1997 he calls the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Washington DC mayor Marion Barry "race-hustling poverty pimps" and accuses them of "just wanting to move us to another plantation." In his successful campaign for re-election in 1996, news of Watts's fathering of two children out of wedlock twenty years before, a situation that does not seem to faze Watts's fellow family-values conservatives. Watts will leave Congress in 2004, publicly saying that he wants to spend more time with his family, but privately hinting that he is tired of being put on public display by his fellow conservatives while in private his concerns for African-Americans are routinely ignored. (Hilton and Testa) - Republican political manager Karl Rove has a near-clean sweep, winning an ugly campaign for his main client, George W. Bush, and victories for other, lesser candidates.
Karl Rove
His only loss is with an Alabama Supreme Court candidate, Harold See. Rove ran a breathtakingly vicious campaign for See against Democratic incumbent Mark Kennedy, a charismatic judge who for decades had been a staunch advocate for the rights of abused and neglected children. Kennedy, who co-founded the Children's Trust Fund of Alabama and began the Corporate Foundation for Children, and who had just completed a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, resonates with voters through the use of television advertisements hawking his lifelong commitment to children and his achievements on their behalf. Rove decides to use his favorite tactic of turning an opponent's strength into a weakness. Going from an image from one Kennedy ad showing Kennedy holding hands with a child, Rove decided that the See campaign would portray Kennedy as a closet pedophile. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," recalls a former Rove staffer from the campaign. - The actual mechanics of beginning such a gutter-level slander campaign without it being traced back to the See campaign was the easy part. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," says the staffer. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out -- he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state." It works quite well, to the horror of, among others, Kennedy's wife, who was physically sickened by the allegations against her husband. "What Rove does," says Kennedy's former campaign manager Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take." Kennedy wins by a razor-thin margin, but is so shaken by the ordeal -- including a Rove-planted article in Readers Digest -- that he will choose not to run for re-election. Kennedy later calls himself and his family "collateral damage" in Rove's whispering campaign.
- Besides the slanderous accusations of pedophilia leveled against Kennedy, the subtext of Rove's campaign is "tort reform" -- the long-term, double-bladed Republican goal of making it all but impossible for citizens to sue corporations, and to dry up the amount of money contributed to Democrats by trial lawyers. In 1993, the Alabama Supreme Court had struck down a package of bills passed in 1987 that capped jury awards against businesses. Rove associate Neal Cohen created a network of what he called "lawsuit abuse" groups funded with corporate dollars to combat the practice of actually holding corporations accountable through the courts. Rove and Cohen's solution in Alabama was to elect a judge to the Supreme Court who would vote for the corporations. The See campaign, in undercover collusion with the Alabama Voters Against Lawsuit Awards organization, mounted a campaign to paint Kennedy as a friend of "greedy trial lawyers," accusing Kennedy of helping to drive businesses out of Alabama. Though Rove does not succeed in getting See on the court, he represents a number of Supreme Court candidates from 1994 through 2000, in which time he helps transform the court from almost all Democrats to virtually all Republicans. In addition, Rove helps Republicans win state offices throughout Alabama, using tort reform, racist appeals, and hatred of gays to win one election after another. (Atlantic Monthly, James Moore and Wayne Slater)
Reagan announces he suffers from Alzheimer's
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Ronald Reagan
November 5: Former President Reagan discloses that he is suffering from advanced Alzheimer's disease. He will never make a public appearance again. (PBS) - November 8: Vancouver doctor Garson Romalis,
Domestic terrorism
a local abortion provider, is shot and wounded while eating breakfast. Romalis is shot by an unknown sniper, wielding an AK-47, who fires through the back window. Romalis and his family have been picketed and stalked by anti-abortion extremists for months. The incident gives traction to Canadian attempts to ban assault rifles in that country. (Washington Post, Washington Post) - November 22: On this anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy,
Conservative hate speech and intolerance
Republican senator Jesse Helms tells the press that if Clinton visits his home state of North Carolina, he had "better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard." Journalist Paul Waldman observes, "Although threatening the president is a federal crime, the Justice Department showed no interest in prosecuting Helms." (CNN/Paul Waldman) - November 24: The Starr commission leaks the news to the Los Angeles Times that former deputy attorney general Webster Hubbell would be indicted over allegations of federal irregularities.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
As part of a plea bargain, Hubbell will plead guilty to two such felonies; Starr officials excitedly inform the press that Hubbell will soon become "the John Dean of Whitewater;" the prediction, of course, is false, mostly because there is no information of a criminal nature for Hubbell or anyone else to reveal. The press also faithfully reprints a Starr commission outline of just how Hubbell's plea bargain helps the investigation. The conviction actually proves that Hubbell victimized his former law partner Hillary Clinton, along with his other law partners, by his overbilling and expense-account padding, not to mention accepting the high position at the Justice Department without admitting to his history. Worse, Hubbell had lied to Bill Clinton for months about his innocence, and solicited other White House officials like Erskine Bowles to find him legal work. Hubbell's crimes had nothing to do with the Clintons, but neither the OIC nor the national press acknowledge that fact. (Los Angeles Times/Washington Times/James Carville, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
