In an important detail, the 1996 welfare reform stripped benefits away from legal immigrants, a dramatic curtailment of rights. The provision reflected the ways in which hard-line opposition to immigration had been taking hold in the Republican Party over the previous decade. In 1994, Barbara Coe founded the California Coalition for Immigration Reform in her coastal community of Huntington Beach. A cantankerous nativist who called undocumented aliens “savages,” Coe credited her political awakening to a revelation she had had in 1991, when she walked into a social services center in Orange County. She saw “this monstrous room full of people, babies, and little children all over the place, and I realized nobody was speaking English. I was overwhelmed with this feeling: ‘Where am I? What’s happened here?’ ” Under Coe’s direction, her coalition worked to drum up resentment to “illegal immigrants” and resistance to their growing presence in California. At times, the work was low-level, as when she and allies dropped “only citizens can vote” flyers at polling places, largely to spite Latino citizens. More significantly, Coe led the drive for Proposition 187, a state ballot proposal in 1994 to prohibit undocumented immigrants from obtaining any basic social services.37
Governor Pete Wilson, running for reelection that year, made Proposition 187 the centerpiece of his campaign. As a California Republican, Wilson had been tagged as a potential presidential contender, one who could follow the path from the West Coast to Washington set by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But Wilson’s fortunes had taken a tumble with the economic downturn early in the decade, a development that forced him to cut government services drastically and raise taxes as well. The immigration issue provided him a chance to change the subject. Noting that there was “a real sense of rage” over immigration in California, the governor did his best to exploit the panic. His campaign produced slick TV ads with an ominous warning: “They keep coming.” Nationally, other Republicans recoiled from Wilson’s crude campaign, with former Bush administration officials Jack Kemp and William Bennett explicitly denouncing it. Wilson brushed off their criticism. “Those are two guys who have been in Washington too long,” he said. “They ought to come out to California and look at the real world.” That fall, Wilson rode the issue to reelection, taking 55 percent of the vote to his opponent’s 40 percent.38
While Republicans set the pace for national politics on immigration, welfare reform, and same-sex marriage, President Clinton seized the initiative on a seemingly unlikely topic: terrorism. On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb destroyed the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring 600 more. Although reporters first speculated that the deadly attack had been the result of Islamic terrorists, law enforcement agents quickly showed that it was the work of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, two men associated with white nationalist groups. The bombing drove home the fact that the mid-1990s had witnessed a sharp spike in white hate groups and radical antigovernment militias. Though not representative of the mainstream movement of conservatives, these self-styled “patriot” organizations tapped into the growing anger of whites on the right over taxation, immigration, and federal regulation of western lands. Committed to gun rights, these militias loaded up on high-powered weapons and trained in military fashion for an eventual showdown with the federal government.39
The Oklahoma City bombing forced the country to consider the impact of terrorists, both foreign and domestic. The president criticized extremists on the right who had filled the airwaves with hateful rhetoric for breeding a dangerous environment. “It is one thing to believe that the Federal Government has too much power and to work within the law to reduce it,” he said in a May 1995 commencement address at Michigan State. “It is quite another to break the law of the land and threaten to shoot officers of the law if all they do is their duty to uphold it.” Taking aim at the militia movement, the president dismissed their invocations of patriotism. “There is nothing patriotic about hating your country, or pretending that you can love your country but hate your government,” he said.40
Beyond such rhetoric about the far Right, the bombings also sparked significant action. Clinton pushed for a broad antiterrorism bill that would vastly increase the power of the federal government, authorizing “roving” wiretaps that would follow a suspect and no longer require individual warrants for each new phone used. The legislation, known as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, also prohibited certain kinds of firearms and gave the military the power to help combat the spread of some chemicals. House Republicans opposed the bill for granting too much power to government, and as a result, the legislation stalled until Gingrich brokered an agreement. The final legislation, signed into law in April 1996, one year after the Oklahoma City attacks, made terrorism a federal crime, empowered the government to crack down on fund-raising by groups associated with terrorists, and increased money for various agencies. It also allowed individuals who entered the country illegally to be deported without judicial review. The struggle over terrorism ultimately worked to Clinton’s political benefit. As one reporter noted: “Clinton has neutralized Republican efforts to paint him as a woolly liberal with his emphatic vow to crack down on terrorism with expanded F.B.I. surveillance powers, which have raised the hackles of civil liberties groups.” 41
In the end, Clinton’s efforts to “triangulate” the Republicans were successful. He shrewdly positioned himself in opposition to the Republicans in Congress, who were increasingly being seen as extremists. In the 1996 presidential campaign, he faced off against Republican senator Bob Dole, an older member of Congress who had served as Ford’s running mate back in the 1976 election. Dole now seemed out of step with his own party, as well as the general electorate. He struggled to survive the image of his party as one that was unable and uninterested in governance, an image that became especially pronounced after the GOP allowed the federal government to shut down not once, but twice. The Republican platform didn’t help either. It was, as Garry Wills observed, “an executioner’s platform for gays, abortionists and flag burners” drafted by the Pat Buchanan wing of the party. In the end, Clinton took in 46 percent of the vote, to Bob Dole’s 41 percent and Ross Perot’s 9 percent, becoming the first Democrat to win two terms since Franklin D. Roosevelt. With the president reelected and the ranks of House Republicans reduced, it was Newt Gingrich’s turn to promise that he would work to find “common ground” with the president.42
Bill Clinton’s triangulation had proved successful in the short term, saving his embattled presidency and securing his own reelection. It even created some political opportunities to move forward with domestic issues that had eluded him in the first term, such as the creation in 1997 of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which offered states matching funds to provide health insurance to children. The program wasn’t national health insurance, but it did constitute a historic expansion of coverage. Clinton’s move to the center on several issues—most notably NAFTA, welfare reform, and the crime bill—had helped the Democrats find their way back to the White House after three failed campaigns, but at the price of abandoning much of the progressive policy agenda that had long served as a core rationale for the party and a chief reason for much of its support. Increasingly, as the Democrats moved to the center, leftists and even liberals began to feel their connections to the party’s coalition loosening. Meanwhile, conservatives looked for new ways to distinguish the Republican Party from the new neoliberal orthodoxy by pushing even further to the right.
CHAPTER 11
Scandalized
DESPITE PROMISES TO FIND “COMMON GROUND,” REPUBlicans responded to Bill Clinton’s reelection by redoubling their efforts to bring his administration to an end. Doggedly pursuing every possible allegation of wrongdoing, they were aided once more by an increasingly partisan media.
With the advent of Fox News, conservatives found a channel for their political views on cable television, completing a long quest to overcome the perceived biases of the “mainstream med
ia” through new channels of their own. What had begun in the direct-mail innovations of the 1970s and 1980s, and then accelerated with the rise of conservative talk radio in the early 1990s, now reached its peak with a twenty-four-hour news network that would promote conservative interests to audiences across America and increasingly pressure the Republican Party to follow its lead. Meanwhile, new websites like the Drudge Report radically reshaped the national conversation, serving not just as another voice for conservative ideas but also, through its growing influence on journalists at more traditional outlets, a way to push the conservative agenda across the entire media.
Still, the conservatism in such news media coexisted uneasily with an increasingly liberalized popular culture around it. As the radio stardom of risqué “shock jock” Howard Stern showed, the social conservatism advanced on channels like Fox News was in many ways out of step with the relaxed attitudes to sexuality, obscenity, and lowbrow humor on the rise in popular culture. The result was a nation that seemed increasingly at odds with itself.
The Path to Impeachment
Roughly a month before the 1996 presidential election, the Fox News Channel made its debut. The brainchild of Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch, Fox News represented the culmination of conservatives’ decades-old dream to take control of a news network. “So long as there were just a handful of major networks, both cost and institutional inertia forestalled an ideological takeover,” historian Nicole Hemmer noted. “It simply required too much money to buy out shareholders at NBC or CBS, who at any rate were not interested in selling.” But the advent of cable news had broken the effective monopoly of the networks, with CNN pointing the way to a new path forward for media-minded conservatives. Murdoch had originally tried to buy Turner’s network; when he refused to sell, Murdoch resolved to exact revenge by creating a rival of his own.1
Starting from scratch, the Fox News Channel followed the lead of the Fox Broadcasting Company, a fourth television network that had emerged in the mid-1980s to challenge ABC, NBC, and CBS. The new network had distinguished itself from the “big three” with edgier programs like the animated hit The Simpsons and the often-vulgar sitcom Married . . . With Children. Likewise, Fox News sought to stand as a stark alternative to the existing cable news networks, but it faced a daunting challenge. Initially, the new cable channel was only available to 17 million households nationwide (and completely blocked out of major markets like New York City, thanks to a conflict with Time Warner Cable). In contrast, CNN was available to 66 million households, and the four-month-old MSNBC, a joint venture of NBC and Microsoft, was accessible to 25 million.2
While Murdoch provided the money for Fox News, his handpicked chairman Roger Ailes set the tone. A longtime Republican media consultant, Ailes made his fame during the Nixon years when he succeeded in remaking the dour politician and pitching him to a new generation. The media consultant frankly assessed the chasm between his client and the climate of the decade. “You put him on television, you’ve got a problem right away,” Ailes told the Washington Post in 1969. “He’s a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight, and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, ‘I want to be President.’ I mean this is how he strikes some people.” To fix the problem, Ailes worked hard to repackage Nixon, using new makeup and camera angles to polish his image and new slogans and catchphrases to sell his candidacy. At the same time he built up his client, Ailes worked to tear down the competition, famously reducing the 1972 Democratic nominee George McGovern to an imagined liberal platform of “abortion, amnesty and acid.” Famous from his successful image makeover of Nixon, Ailes went on to become a reliable tool of Republican candidates, working on races like George H. W. Bush’s negative campaign in 1988.3
Despite his partisan background, Ailes insisted that Fox News would be, as its motto stated, “fair and balanced.” Indeed, he promised, it would serve as a corrective to the pervasive “liberal bias” that he said dominated CNN and the networks by providing the only unbiased option. All reporting would be objective, Ailes insisted, and any opinion or analysis would be clearly labeled as such.4 Initially, though, Fox News was little more than a pale imitation of CNN. Its early staples seemed to be echoes of standard shows seen elsewhere: The O’Reilly Report, with host Bill O’Reilly, former anchor of the syndicated tabloid show Inside Edition, now discussing a range of issues; The Crier Report, with Catherine Crier, in a talk format that meant to echo Larry King Live; and Hannity and Colmes, an imitation of CNN’s Crossfire debate program that featured, in the words of one reviewer, “Sean Hannity as the conservative and Alan Colmes as his liberal sidekick.” The rest of the network likewise seemed to echo existing news formats, but with one minor innovation: on-screen graphics. “The Ken-and-Barbie anchor teams do a credible job of cruising through the headlines, but there’s no more depth than you’d see on your typical Action News,” media critic Howard Kurtz noted. “Brief snippets and factoids keep popping up onto the screen (‘Dole is a member of the Shriners and the Elks’) while they are talking, which can be EXTREMELY ANNOYING when you’re trying to listen.” 5
Fox News soon began to distinguish itself from the competition with its conservative slant, which became pronounced during its close attention to the scandals unfolding in the Clinton administration. When the US Senate held hearings on presidential fund-raisers in July 1997, for instance, Fox News was the only channel to broadcast them live.6 Though Clinton’s scandals proved to be a ratings draw, the highest-profile ones—a sexual harassment lawsuit from a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, and the Whitewater land deal investigation—both turned out to be dead ends. A US District Court dismissed the Jones lawsuit as a nuisance case, while Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr concluded, after spending four years and nearly $40 million investigating the Clintons’ real estate dealings, that he could find no evidence of their wrongdoing in Whitewater. But, importantly, both of those lines of inquiry gave Clinton’s enemies the authority and ability to look into every aspect of the president’s life, keeping the lines of investigation active for years. Now searching for evidence of any criminal activity, Starr eventually zeroed in on an affair the president had had with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
The president’s affair had been improbably exposed by the Drudge Report, a threadbare gossip website launched in 1997. Matt Drudge, a 30-year-old whose previous job had been managing a CBS gift shop in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles, began the Drudge Report out of his apartment. Originally, he sent off email newsletters that were simply a collection of links to other websites’ stories of Hollywood rumors. A conservative and self-described “Clinton crazy,” he soon began promoting political gossip as well. “I go where the stink is,” he noted. In January 1998, he learned that Newsweek had held back on a story about the president’s affair with a young intern, due to fears about fact checking. Drudge didn’t feel bound by the traditional rules of journalism, however, and gladly broke the story on his site. The news quickly spread across the internet, and then fully entered the mainstream media’s discussion when Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, mentioned it on ABC’s Sunday news show This Week.7
Now focused on the growing rumors about the affair, Independent Counsel Starr soon uncovered that the president had lied about it, while under oath, in a grand jury deposition that was ostensibly about the Paula Jones case. Videotape of the president’s testimony proved to be a sensation for network and cable news outlets alike, as more than 22.5 million people tuned in to watch when it was broadcast in September 1998. For Fox News, the experience was a revelation, as the channel experienced its best-ever ratings.8 Indeed, the Lewinsky scandal proved vitally important for all the cable news networks, providing a short-term ratings boom and, more significantly, helping to shape newer stations like MSNBC and Fox News that were still in their formative stages. As they launched new programs and hired new talent,
they did so with the president’s scandal in mind. In the words of John Gibson, an early MSNBC host who would soon join Fox News, “it has helped shape the definition of a big story in the absence of cold war.” The scandal proved a popular topic across the cable news networks, with frequent live coverage of breaking news. When House Republicans used the perjury charge to pass articles of impeachment against the president in late December 1998, Fox News once again set a new record for viewers.9
While polarization on the right helped fuel the campaign for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, similar forces on the left caused that drive to stall. Liberals, who had readily believed the charges Anita Hill leveled against Republican Clarence Thomas earlier in the decade, now dismissed similar accusations against a president of their own party. Because many of the charges, about Lewinsky and other women, too, had originated in right-wing media outlets, many liberals interpreted them as another round of baseless smears in a polarized environment. Even prominent feminists, who had rallied around Hill’s accusations to highlight the pernicious problems of sexual harassment, sided with the accused this time around. The president’s “enemies are attempting to bring him down through allegations about some dalliance with an intern,” Betty Friedan noted. “Whether it’s a fantasy, a set-up or true, I simply don’t care.” “If anything,” argued Susan Faludi, author of Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women (1991), “it sounds like she put the moves on him.” And so, just as reflexively as conservatives and Republicans rallied around the campaign to remove the president from office, so too did liberals and Democrats commit themselves to his defense. Ironically, the very polarization that prompted the endless scandals of the 1990s would, in many ways, prevent them from finding resolution.10
Fault Lines Page 28