In another chapter I’d argued that regarding the 5 Supreme Court Justices picked by GOP Presidents, four of them were chosen by illegitimate GOP ‘Presidents’-George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Regarding the 5th-Clarence Thomas, I was willing to accept that while his presence on the Court is yet another black mark in that he’s a credibly accused sexual assaulter you have to concede that Bush Sr. himself was legitimate. Even in conceding this I did point out that Reagan himself didn’t win legitimately in 1980-his campaign colluded with the Ayatollah to delay the release of the hostages until after the election. This stunning and outrageous piece of political treachery still not widely understood today, I cover in chapter-.
So in truth you could argue that Bush Sr was only able to win a legitimate -if very dirty-election in 1988 because the ‘President’ he served in 1980 had rigged that election to be in the WH in the first place. But for the sake of argument I had chosen to ignore that fact and concede that at least Bush Sr was legitimate.
But that’s not to say that he didn’t run a very nasty and dirty campaign-Willie Horton, etc. Indeed, regarding the debate over false equivalency vs. the argument of a respected political scientist like Norm Ornstein-who scandalized his Beltway brethren by arguing that in fact the GOP has been the great violator of norms and is responsible for the partisan impasse we’ve had in Washington over the last 25 years-rather than both sides being exactly equal as the Chuck Todds or Chris Cillizzas of the world presume, it’s interesting to remember what another respected political scientist like Kathleen Jamieson Bell was saying years ago about the 1988 election.
She admitted it made her feel ‘queasy’-to use James Comey’s word-but that the Democrats by in large were simply far more honest in the 1988 Presidential campaign than the GOP. The Republicans basically had no problem with blatant lies. This was 28 years before the ‘election’ of a pathological liar like GOPer Donald Trump.
Indeed, regarding my previous description of Bush Sr’s win of 1988 as ‘dirty but legitimate’-a big part of Sr’s dirty strategy was: Lee Atwater. But as it turns out Lee Atwater did a lot more than play very nasty on issues like race. He also rigged the 1988 election. As we detailed in chapter-find chapter-after Trump fired Comey, Roger Stone declared somewhere Dick Nixon is smiling. And I believe he was.
But with all the Watergate analogies-certainly all the analogies this book draws-in many ways it’s what Atwater on Bush Sr’s behalf did in 1988 most resembles the original Watergate-that Roger Stone was deeply involved in. If Stone is right that he’s going to jail now, that only makes up for the fact that he avoided it the first time.
As noted in previous chapters-find them-Watergate wasn’t only the break in to the Watergate hotel where the DNC was housed. It was a lot of other dirty tricks to-the break in to Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, etc. Watergate-the first one-was often dismissed with the saw that it didn’t change the result of the election-after all it was a 49 state landslide and the hotel burglary while very stupid and clownish or even wrong didn’t have the remotest effect on the result. This is true. Unlike the DNC break in-the hack-of Watergate 2.0 the first one was a clown show that in no way effected the result. But the break in wasn’t the decisive act of Watergate. It’s the dirty tricks of CREEP, of Don Segretti-and Roger Stone-that were decisive.
Indeed, when the 19 year old Stone hand delivered Segretti’s fraudulent Canucks letter to the Manchester Union-Leader-you can argue this was what decided the 1972 election as it knocked out Ed Muskie who Nixon believed was the most formidable Democratic opponent. So by his own assumption-remember in criminal investigations and trials what is decisive is intent-we don’t have to argue wether or not Muskie really could have beat Nixon, we know that Nixon himself believed he could.
It was this that makes it correct to argue that the 1972 election was rigged-as the 1968 election is now known to have undeniably been thanks to Nixon’s collusion with the South Vietnam government to throttle LBJ’s peace talks.
But the 1972 Canucks letter most closely resembles the way we now know conclusively that Lee Atwater and Bush Sr rigged the 1988 election. It’s quite amazing, really, but last night we learned some new history: that Gary Hart was set up.
“In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In a year he was dead.”
“Atwater put some of that year to use making amends. Throughout his meteoric political rise he had been known for both his effectiveness and his brutality. In South Carolina, where he grew up, he helped defeat a congressional candidate who had openly discussed his teenage struggles with depression by telling reporters that the man had once been “hooked up to jumper cables.” As the campaign manager for then–Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1988, when he defeated Michael Dukakis in the general election, Atwater leveraged the issue of race—a specialty for him—by means of the infamous “Willie Horton” TV ad. The explicit message of the commercial was that, as governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had been soft on crime by offering furloughs to convicted murderers; Horton ran away while on furlough and then committed new felonies, including rape. The implicit message was the menace posed by hulking, scowling black men—like the Willie Horton who was shown in the commercial.”
“In the last year of his life, Atwater publicly apologized for tactics like these. He told Tom Turnipseed, the object of his “jumper cables” attack, that he viewed the episode as “one of the low points” of his career. He apologized to Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of the Willie Horton ad.”
“And in a private act of repentance that has remained private for nearly three decades, he told Raymond Strother that he was sorry for how he had torpedoed Gary Hart’s chances of becoming president.”
Just like Nixon saw Muskie as his true threat, Bush Sr saw Gary Hart as his. In both cases rather than figuring a way to beat the big Democratic threat legitimately the GOP candidate figured out a way to simply take their opponent out of the race altogether. Though it’s so easy to go far afield here note that Nixon also found a way to bribe/threaten George Wallace to run on the Democratic ticket in 1972 rather than as an independent. So the GOP is practiced in selecting their opponents.
“In early 1987, the Hart campaign had an air of likelihood if not inevitability that is difficult to imagine in retrospect. After Mondale’s landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1984, Hart had become the heir apparent and best hope to lead the party back to the White House. The presumed Republican nominee was Bush, Reagan’s vice president, who was seen at the time, like many vice presidents before him, as a lackluster understudy. Since the FDR–Truman era, no party had won three straight presidential elections, which the Republicans would obviously have to do if Bush were to succeed Reagan.”
Gary Hart had a nationwide organization and had made himself a recognized expert on military and defense policy. I first met him in those days, and wrote about him in Atlantic articles that led to my 1981 book, National Defense. (I’ve stayed in touch with him since then and have respected his work and his views.) Early polls are notoriously unreliable, but after the 1986 midterms, and then–New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s announcement that he would not run, many national surveys showed Hart with a lead in the Democratic field and also over Bush. Hart’s principal vulnerability was the press’s suggestion that something about him was hidden, excessively private, or “unknowable.” Among other things, this was a way of alluding to suspicions of extramarital affairs—a theme in most accounts of that campaign, including Matt Bai’s 2014 All the Truth Is Out. Still, as Bai wrote in his book, “Everyone agreed: it was Hart’s race to lose.”
Like many Democratic candidates the MSM came up with some vague, totally trivial yet unfalsifiable narrative against Hart-like Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004, and Hillary in 2016. Often it seems that the same MSM narrative is applied to almost every frontrunning Presidential Democratic candidate-somehow ‘secretive’ not likeable, etc.
Regarding the sin of an extramarital affair you can’t help but note that when the Stormy Daniels story came out the media’s first instinct was to handwave it away and to wrongly assert it was a one day story as noted in chapter-find Ch Mike.
It led to Cohen’s conviction and sentencing and Trump’s being effectively an unindicted co-conspirator.
“Strother and Atwater had the mutually respectful camaraderie of highly skilled rivals. “Lee and I were friends,” Strother told me when I spoke with him by phone recently. “We’d meet after campaigns and have coffee, talk about why I did what I did and why he did what he did.” One of the campaigns they met to discuss afterward was that 1988 presidential race, which Atwater (with Bush) had of course ended up winning, and from which Hart had dropped out. But later, during what Atwater realized would be the final weeks of his life, Atwater phoned Strother to discuss one more detail of that campaign.”
Atwater had the strength to talk for only five minutes. “It wasn’t a ‘conversation,’ ” Strother said when I spoke with him recently. “There weren’t any pleasantries. It was like he was working down a checklist, and he had something he had to tell me before he died.”
What he wanted to say, according to Strother, was that the episode that had triggered Hart’s withdrawal from the race, which became known as the Monkey Business affair, had been not bad luck but a trap.”
Again-Nance’s Law: coincidences take a lot of planning. Just like I never believed that the hacked DNC emails being released at the optimal moment to force the DNC chairwoman to step down was ‘bad luck’-luck is simply never that bad.
“The sequence of events was confusing at the time and is widely misremembered now. But in brief:
“In late March 1987, Hart spent a weekend on a Miami-based yacht called Monkey Business. Two young women joined the boat when it sailed to Bimini. While the boat was docked there, one of the women took a picture of Hart sitting on the pier, with the other, Donna Rice, in his lap. A month after this trip, in early May, the man who had originally invited Hart onto the boat brought the same two women to Washington. The Miami Herald had received a tip about the upcoming visit and was staking out the front of Hart’s house. (A famous profile of Hart by E. J. Dionne in The New York Times Magazine, in which Hart invited the press to “follow me around,” came out after this stakeout—not before, contrary to common belief.) A Herald reporter saw Rice and Hart going into the house through the front door and, not realizing that there was a back door, assumed—when he didn’t see her again—that she had spent the night.””Amid the resulting flap about Hart’s “character” and honesty, he quickly suspended his campaign (within a week), which effectively ended it. Several weeks later came the part of the episode now best remembered: the photo of Hart and Rice together in Bimini, on the cover of the National Enquirer.”Again some irony that a consensual affair ended his campaign.
“Considering what American culture has swallowed as irrelevant or forgivable since then, it may be difficult to imagine that allegations of a consensual extramarital affair might really have caused an otherwise-favored presidential candidate to leave the race. Yet anyone who was following American politics at the time can tell you that this occurred. For anyone who wasn’t around, there is Bai’s book and an upcoming film based on it: The Front Runner, starring Hugh Jackman as Hart.”
So will they now adjust the script on The Front Runner? Regarding what has been accepted as irrelevant for forgivable it’s not at all clear that what the media accepts from Trump is acceptable from others-particularly the Democrats. Bill Clinton was impeached for an extramarital, consensual affair. As noted in chapter-members of the media are still demanding Clinton somehow retroactively resign over this consensual affair-while these same pundits would never in a million years dream of demanding the same for Trump and Kavanaugh.
Indeed, the MSM hot take on Kavanaugh has been that the Democrats ought to just get over it so ‘the nation can heal.’
It’s still pretty clear that the rules on this are applied very unfairly-liberal media indeed!
“But was the plotline of Hart’s self-destruction too perfect? Too convenient? Might the nascent Bush campaign, with Atwater as its manager, have been looking for a way to help a potentially strong opponent leave the field?”
“I thought there was something fishy about the whole thing from the very beginning,” Strother recalled. “Lee told me that he had set up the whole Monkey Business deal. ‘I did it!’ he told me. ‘I fixed Hart.’ After he called me that time, I thought, My God! It’s true!”Strother’s conversation with Atwater happened in 1991. He mainly kept the news to himself. As the years went by, he discreetly mentioned the conversation to some journalists and other colleagues, but not to Gary Hart. “I probably should have told him at the time,” he said recently. “It was a judgment call, and I didn’t see the point in involving him in another controversy.”
“Crucially, Strother realized, he had no proof, and probably never would.”
Which touches on another point regarding coincidences that are too convenient: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There was no proof that Vince Foster didn’t commit suicide and Ken Starr still investigated it, there was no proof Clinton did anything criminal with her email server and Trump’s Deplorables continue to chant ‘Lock her up!’Actual proof is only for allegations made against Republicans. In my own opinion it would have been better if Strother had said something-maybe the fact of GOP electoral treachery would have begun to seep in sooner. So he chose to let it go just like LBJ had on Nixon’s collusion with Thieu in sabotaging LBJ’s peace talks.So for all these years Strother hadn’t told Hart about the set up.
“Although Hart did not run in later elections, he was busy and productive: He had earned a doctorate in politics at Oxford, had published many books, and had co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Commission, which memorably warned the incoming president in 2001, George W. Bush, to prepare for a terrorist attack on American soil. Why, Strother asked himself, should he rake up an issue that could never be resolved and might cause Hart more stress than surcease?”
Because the truth matters and legitimacy matters. At least that’s my answer. There are people today as well telling us just to ‘get over it’-ok so Trump was elected via Russian interference and collusion but let’s just put it behind us and ‘win in 2020.’ But winning in 2020 while important isn’t sufficient if the Rule of Law is totally sullied and subverted in the mean time. Certainly future GOP cheaters, riggers, and colluders will have feel no deterrence in winning elections by such nefarious means again. Collude with a hostile foreign power-and rogue agents at the FBI-and maybe you only get one term.
“But late last year, Strother learned that the prostate cancer he had been treated for a dozen years ago had returned and spread, and that he might not have long to live. The cancer is now in remission, but after the diagnosis Strother began traveling to see people he had known and worked with, to say goodbye. One of his stops was Colorado, where he had a meal with Gary Hart.”
“Aware that this might be one of their final conversations, Hart asked Strother to think about the high points of the campaign, and its lows. Hart knew that Strother had been friends with Billy Broadhurst, the man who had taken Hart on the fateful Monkey Business cruise. According to Strother and others involved with the Hart campaign, Broadhurst was from that familiar political category, the campaign groupie and aspiring insider. Broadhurst kept trying to ingratiate himself with Hart, and kept being rebuffed. He was also a high-living, high-spending fixer and lobbyist with frequent money problems.”
Strother talked with Hart this spring; Broadhurst had died about a year earlier. In retrospect, Hart asked, what did Strother make of the whole imbroglio?
“Ray said, ‘Why do you ask?’ ” Hart told me, when I called to talk with him about the episode. “And I said there are a whole list of ‘coincidences’ that had been on my mind for 30 years, and that could lead a reasonable person to think none of it happened by accident.
“Ray replied, ‘It’s because you were set up. I know you were set up.’
“I asked him how he could be so certain,” Hart told me. Strother then recounted his long-ago talk with Atwater, and Atwater’s claim that the whole Monkey Business weekend had occurred at his direction. According to Hart, that plan would have involved: contriving an invitation from Broadhurst for Hart to come on a boat ride, when Hart intended to be working on a speech. Ensuring that young women would be invited aboard. Arranging for the Broadhurst boat Hart thought he would be boarding, with some unmemorable name, to be unavailable—so that the group would have to switch to another boat, Monkey Business. Persuading Broadhurst to “forget” to check in with customs clearance at Bimini before closing time, so that the boat “unexpectedly” had to stay overnight there. And, according to Hart, organizing an opportunistic photo-grab.”
“There were a lot of people on the dock, people getting off their boats and wandering up and down on the wharf,” Hart told me. “While I was waiting for Broadhurst and whatever he was working out with the customs people, I sat on this little piling on the pier.” Hart said that Donna Rice’s friend and companion on the boat, Lynn Armandt, was standing a short distance away. “Miss Armandt made a gesture to Miss Rice, and she immediately came over and sat on my lap. Miss Armandt took the picture. The whole thing took less than five seconds, with lots of other people around. It was clearly staged, but it was used after the fact to prove that some intimacy existed.”
Regarding my central thesis of this book-that the GOP is the party with the bad conscience has engaged in great political treachery over the last 48 years-the Party of Nixon-it’s important to remember the importance of pattern in terms of assessing guilt in a criminal trial. Think of the GOP itself as on trial. The allegation is they have engaged in election rigging as a matter of normal strategy. Trump 2016 wasn’t an aberration but actually the rule.One way to back up my thesis is to show pattern. Clearly this classic honey trap employed against Hart in 1987 is very similar to what was done in Weinergate as I documented in considerable detail in-Part X. The pattern couldn’t be clearer.In this vein, it’s hard not to think about Al Franken and ask very seriously if he wasn’t also set up? The first allegation from Leann Tweeden was basically a lie as it took a picture that she had agreed to do and tried to make it look as if she were really asleep when she was pretend sleeping for a skit.
Then the later Franken accusers were of the variety of having taken pictures with Franken and claiming his hand-which you can’t see in the picture was in an inappropriate place. We also know that Tweeden is a friend of Roger Stone and he seemed to telegraph this just like the Podesta emails.
At this point how can the chance he was setup be ruled out of hand? Because the GOP wouldn’t engage in such dirty tricks? Tell it to Gary Hart.
The pattern of the party of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell couldn’t be more clear: partisan and ideological victory by any means necessary.
Indeed, just as I pointed out in the chapter on Kavanaugh that his trafficking in stolen emails proves that the GOP didn’t need the Russians to teach them how to use hacked Dem emails, what was done to Hart proves yet again that they have known how to rig elections long before Donald Trump.