Potomac Watch
A Stolen Election
By PAUL A. GIGOT
Some of us owe Bob Dole an apology. Here we've been holding
the Kansan responsible for losing to President Clinton. But we now know
the election was lost even before Mr. Dole had entered the first
Republican primary.
This is what the Senate and media probes have taught us
about fund raising in the 1996 campaign. We now know why Mr. Clinton
was willing to risk breaking campaign laws in order to raise and spend
so much money. He was paying for an unprecedented barrage of early TV
attack ads that doomed Mr. Dole even before a single vote was cast.
Don't take my word for this. The proof comes from Mr.
Clinton himself as revealed by the latest batch of videotapes. "The
fact that we've been able to finance this long-running constant
television campaign," he told well-heeled donors at a May 21, 1996,
White House lunch, "has been central to the position I now enjoy in the
polls." To the extent those ads were financed with illegal money, Mr.
Clinton stole the election.
Mr. Clinton's words confirm the case already laid out by his
own campaign Rasputin, Dick Morris, both in his candid book and in his
Senate deposition. "In my opinion, the key to Clinton's victory was his
early television advertising," writes Mr. Morris in "Behind the Oval
Office." "There has never been anything even remotely like it in the
history of presidential elections."
Mr. Morris's Blitzkrieg
That's for sure. Mr. Morris describes a blitzkrieg that
began in July of 1995, ran mainly in swing-voter states where Mr.
Clinton was unpopular, and showed every TV viewer from "150 to 180
airings" or "about one every three days for a year and a half."
None of this came cheap, which is where the lawbreaking
comes in. Keep in mind that in return for accepting taxpayer campaign
funds, Mr. Clinton promised to limit his campaign spending before the
1996 political conventions to about $37 million. But this wasn't nearly
enough to pay for what Mr. Morris had in mind.
Which is why they conjured up the now-famous soft-money
loophole. Mr. Morris has told the Senate he paid for the first batch of
TV spots, on crime in July 1995, with $2.4 million in "hard money" that
everyone agrees was legal. But hard money is subject to strict limits
that make it difficult to raise.
"Soft money" is supposed to go only for political parties
and can be raised in more or less unlimited amounts. Mr. Clinton's
insight--and his lawbreaking--was that he could use soft money to
finance TV spots that were technically paid for by the Democratic
National Committee but in fact were masterminded by, and run on behalf
of, himself.
Such coordination is illegal, but Mr. Morris describes Mr.
Clinton's role on page 144 of his book: "Every line of every ad came
under his informed, critical, and often meddlesome gaze. Every ad was
his ad." (Mr. Morris's emphasis.)
Many readers will remember those ads, even Republicans
who've tried to forget them. They were often grainy black and white
jobs, linking Bob Dole to Newt Gingrich. They echoed the themes of the
Clinton campaign--that "DoleGingrich" was slashing Medicare and ruining
education. And they just happened to be produced by the same
consultants who wrote the hard-money Clinton campaign ads.
Former White House politico Harold Ickes has told the Senate
that Democrats spent between $40 million and $55 million on these
pro-Clinton soft-money spots. As much as $1.5 million a week was spent
in the fall of 1995 during the decisive battle of the budget.
A Morris memo to Mr. Clinton on Feb. 22, 1996, shows how,
week after week, the DNC spots dwarfed spending for official campaign
spots by two and three to one. "If Dole is nominated, we need no
additional CG [Clinton-Gore] money before May 28," the same memo says,
"since we can attack Dole with DNC money."
This voracious demand for cash helps explain why Mr. Clinton
was personally eager to place John Huang at the DNC. It explains why he
was willing to demean his office by appearing, as revealed in the
latest videotapes, next to Charlie Trie, Johnny Chung and James
Riady--all of whom have fled this country rather than explain
themselves to the Senate. These are the folks who were raising soft
money, much of it we now know by dubious means.
We also know that the DNC has returned some $3.1 million
raised by these and other upstanding fellows. But as they say on Wall
Street, Mr. Clinton still got the benefit of the "float." He received
interest on the ill-gotten cash but only had to repay it after he'd
won. And in political terms he got to spend it early, when it was most
helpful. More than one businessman has gone to jail for
misappropriating "float" like this.
As for the legality of misusing soft money, listen to Mr.
Clinton's own ideological friends. Common Cause has called use of the
soft-money loophole a "massive illegal" scheme. The president's own
former deputy attorney general, Philip Heymann, has assailed the
Justice Department as "flatly wrong in saying that there is no evidence
of massive violations" of the law.
These liberals assuage their Democratic loyalties by blaming
Republicans too. And Republicans eventually did exploit the soft-money
loophole. But they were third-rate perpetrators, copycat burglars. The
GOP's soft-money campaign only began in earnest in April, after Mr.
Dole had exhausted his own public campaign funds during the primaries.
All told the GOP spent less than half of what Democrats spent through
the soft-money backdoor.
But the Clinton-Morris ad onslaught had already beaten Bob
Dole by January. All throughout the government shutdown debate, Mr.
Clinton's soft-money ads thundered across the country without reply,
linking Mr. Dole indelibly to the unpopular Mr. Gingrich. Such
impressions are hard to shake. As Mr. Morris now puts it, "Negatives
which run so deep and have hardened for so long cannot be uprooted by
normal political means." In swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan
where the ads ran, Mr. Clinton led by more than he did in core
Democratic states like Rhode Island and New York.
As Democrats and liberal columnists kept telling us at the
time, the polls barely changed throughout 1996. While Mr. Dole
sometimes led Mr. Clinton in the summer of 1995, Mr. Morris reports
that the president emerged in January with a 47%-38% lead. With the
exception of his August convention "bounce," which quickly reversed,
Mr. Dole got no closer until Election Day, when he lost, 49%-41%.
Sly as a Ward Boss
I don't believe the ad campaign is the only reason Mr. Dole
lost. He also had to overcome a strong economy, a feckless campaign and
his own age and Senate tenure. But if you believe that TV ads are
decisive in politics--and Mr. Clinton says on tape he believes it--the
president stole his re-election as slyly as any Chicago ward boss ever
did. In this age of media politics, breaking campaign-finance laws to
run tens of millions of dollars in TV spots is the moral and practical
equivalent of stuffing ballot boxes.
In America, we don't rerun presidential elections. But how
an election is won should effect the respect with which a president is
held and is surely part of his legacy. The enduring legacy of Mr.
Clinton's re-election is that you can cheat and win. And if you're
going to cheat, do it first, and do it enough, so you are certain to
win. If all hell breaks loose later, you then control the Justice
Department, and you can even claim to favor "campaign finance reform."
This is a legacy of cynicism that will echo through our
politics for years.
Copyright © 1997 Dow Jones &
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