| People now forget how relatively calm American politics seemed in comparison to the years since. The budget showdown of '95 and the election of '96 had been decisive victories for Clinton , but the Republicans still controlled Congress, so there was a rough equilibrium between the two parties. The Cold War had been over for almost a decade and the Oslo accords had created new hope for Arab-Israeli peace. Al-Qaeda was a phrase unknown to most Americans. The federal budget was in surplus for the first time in decades, and poverty was in decline.
Then one morning the name Monica Lewinsky showed up on the front pages of American newspapers.
I ended up being in the middle of this fight. I had served in the 1992 Clinton campaign in Little Rock , and had gone on to serve as a Special Assistant to President Clinton. I had left the White House in 1995, but stayed close, helping raise money for the re-election campaign, and keeping in close touch with all my old friends inside. When the Lewinsky scandal hit, I was appalled at what Clinton had done, but I also thought the impeachment campaign the Republicans began to mount was an absurd mockery of the Constitution.
I was working at the time for People For the American Way, a group founded to fight the right and work on constitutional law issues. With a mission like that, PFAW was a natural group to wade into the impeachment fight, and the PFAW board and staff agreed to organize a major campaign to stop the Republicans in their efforts. But what I discovered is that, in spite of the momentous nature of this fight, both traditional progressive groups and much of the Democratic establishment was uninterested in fighting the right on this issue.
Part of the problem was single-issue miasma at its worst. The head of the country's biggest gay rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, actually said to me, "Gore is just as good on our issues as Clinton is, so why should we care whether he gets thrown out of office?" The sex-obsessed right-wing movement winning a massive political victory by twisting the Constitution into a pretzel didn't really concern her much.
Most of the rest of the single-issue progressive world similarly took themselves out of it. The honorable exceptions- the labor movement and the civil rights movement- are movements that value loyalty to friends and broader movement politics. But most other single-issue progressive groups and leaders were too narrowly focused on their own issue work to spend any political capital whatsoever on helping beat back the right-wing's attempt at overturning the election. I called enviro groups, choice groups, gun control groups, every manner of issue group on our side. None of them wanted to touch it. I pleaded, even if they couldn't officially take a stand, couldn't they help out in other ways- lend us staffers, help us raise money, anything? I got virtually nothing.
This lack of interest contrasted sharply with a completely united front on the part of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Right-wing interest groups and think tanks of all kinds, their radio talk show hosts and TV news pundits, their televangelists, their columnists, and their holier-than-thou political leaders all joined in a daily chorus demanding impeachment.
But with the acquiescence of progressive groups, at least Democratic politicians with their party's leader threatened were fighting back? Not so much.
One of the most defining characteristics of the Democratic Party since I've been involved in politics has been its reluctance to fight back when attacked. With the exception of the Bill Clinton/James Carville doctrine of rapid response- let no attack go unanswered before the end of the news cycle- most Democratic leaders in the last generation have been unwilling to fight back. Dukakis and Willie Horton, Gore letting Bush define him on character and the NRA define him in rural America on guns, Kerry and the Swift Boaters, congressional Democrats like Gephardt folding on the Iraq war. Add to that list the congressional Democratic leaders during the lead-up to impeachment in 1998. These Democrats argued that we should avoid talking about the issue attack giving us trouble so that we can focus on issues that play to our strengths. So while Republicans were attacking Democrats as the party of immorality and pushed hard for impeachment, Democratic congressional leaders in the summer and fall of '98 avoided any mention of the impeachment fight and talked about the prescription drug issue, hoping that if they didn't talk about it, voters would just forget about it.
I was concerned, along with my colleagues at PFAW and a few Clintonites like Carville and Stan Greenberg, that avoiding the issue was politically stupid, and that in fact, we would gain by taking the issue head-on. So we launched an ad campaign whose theme was "It's time to move on" that called for an end to the impeachment with hunt. The Democratic congressional establishment freaked out. I got angry calls from consultants and top party committee staffers demanding that we pull the ads, and threatening me and PFAW with all manners of retribution. Congressional leaders even publicly attacked the ads damaging to the Democratic Party, and called donors asking them not to give any money to PFAW, the same week that we launched our ad.
But there was another kind of reaction going on, coming from the grassroots. Unbeknownst to me, the same week we launched our ad, a couple of people on who had never been active in politics before had the same reaction to the impeachment fight that PFAW had, and launched an internet petition campaign with the same theme as our ad: MoveOn. Wes Boyd and Joan Blades sent their internet petition around to friends, who begun forwarding it on to their friends, who kept forwarding it on to others, and online political organizing was born. Within weeks, over 500,000 people had signed the MoveOn petition.
A young internet-savvy staffer at PFAW noticed the move on petition early on and we contacted Wes and Joan, and a partnership was born. PFAW helped them garner publicity for their petition drive, and together we mobilized grassroots activists- both their petition signers and the more traditional grassroots activists we had worked with for years- to organizer hundreds of congressional meetings, pickets, press conferences and rallies all over the country. We worked with Wes to organize a Capitol Hill press conference where he delivered his 500,000 petition signatures to members of Congress. We worked with people around the country to volunteer for campaigns, and PFAW kept running ads in swing districts around the country.
As our MoveOn movement spread, individual Democratic congressional candidates started realizing we were right, and started running ads saying it was time to move on, and Republicans were put on the defensive. At the end of the 1998 cycle, even the DCCC staffers who had called me to complain started running their own ads with an almost identical message. And on election night, all the pundits who were convinced that Monica Lewinsky was going to doom the Democratic Party in the elections, and had been predicting that we would lose 30 to 40 seats in the House, were shocked when Democrats actually picked up five seats. It was the first time in modern American political history that the party of a president in the 6th year of his term actually picked up congressional seats. I am still convinced that if Democrats had gone along with our move on theme earlier in the cycle, we would have won the House back that year.
The Republicans, driven by their right-wing base, went through with their impeachment vote in the House. But having defined the terms of the debate, and gotten the public on our side, the Republicans never had a chance of picking up Democratic support in the Senate, and in the end lost five of their own senators, falling a pathetic 17 votes short of conviction in the final Senate votes.
Even more important than the immediate results in the elections and the impeachment fight, the Open Left movement had been born. Wes and Joan taught us all the power of grassroots organizing over the internet, and politics has been changing ever since as result, giving a voice and power to people outside of establishment politics.
Finally, it taught an old insider like me: don't ever worry when the establishment Dems get too freaked out. Never hesitate to challenge the conventional wisdom and the passive, cautious politics of too many Democrats. It was a good lesson, one that has been proven right many times since. When warned by Dem insiders in the summer of 2002 that it was still too early to attack Bush because his approval ratings were too high (no one had yet run an ad going after him on any issue since 9-11), I said to hell with it and did an ad attacking him on corporate scandals and helped drop his approval ratings 15 points in a month. When told by a top party staffer in 2005 to stop getting people's hopes up about our ability to win back Congress, I said to hell with it and kept fanning the flames of hope. And when we as a progressive movement were told by establishment Dems to back off on an aggressive message on the war because it might hurt our candidates, we said to hell with it knowing that it was just such a message that would carry the day- and we were proven right.
The Democratic establishment has a culture of caution, a culture that has led to their defeat all too often. It is up to us in the progressive movement to save them from themselves. |
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