REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Politics of Demonization
Trying to smear Ted Olson, liberals attack the First Amendment.
Ted Olson is a distinguished lawyer who has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court, in whose chambers he would represent the government if confirmed as President Bush's nominee for Solicitor General. Unfortunately, because in private practice he successfully argued Bush v. Gore before the Court, finally ending the Florida Presidential contest, the still-embittered Beltway Democratic machine has decided to make a public spectacle of Mr. Olson and his nomination.
Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held up the nomination, following the placement in the Washington Post of a classic piece of journalistic insinuation without actually accusing Mr. Olson of anything real. Last week committee Democrats walked out rather than vote on him.
Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on Judiciary, claims to be worried that Mr. Olson wasn't forthright before the committee about his knowledge of the "Arkansas Project." This was the informal name that The American Spectator magazine gave to its own efforts to investigate and report on the political and financial history of Bill Clinton in his home state. Various Clinton acolytes from Geraldo Rivera to Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal spun the effort as something out of one of Robert Ludlum's paranoid political thrillers.
In fact, that characterization, like what is now being done to Ted Olson, is the demonization of perfectly innocent associations. The "Arkansas Project" was an exercise of The American Spectator's First Amendment rights, something much of the major media seems to think applies only to itself. Note, incidentally, that Sidney Blumenthal just called off a libel case he brought against cyber-columnist Matt Drudge, paying Mr. Drudge $2,500. The Blumenthal lawsuit was cut from the same cloth as the phony Arkansas Project flap--an attempt to intimidate media critical of the Clintons. Mr. Blumenthal subpoenaed numerous journalists from his redoubt in the White House. Back then the Post would report on a White House effort to undermine one of its own Whitewater reporters.
The American Spectator's reporting effort, much of it done in Arkansas, ran from 1993 to 1998. Mr. Olson said he was unaware of the Project until 1997, and that as a board member of the magazine he voted to shut the effort down.
None of this tale dropped from the sky this week. In 1999 Michael Shaheen, the widely respected former director of the Justice Department's office of professional responsibility, took closed grand-jury testimony on the Arkansas Project. He concluded that there wasn't anything illegal about the effort. Mr. Shaheen probed allegations that a key witness in Ken Starr's Whitewater probe had been paid by the Project. He found many of the allegations were "shown to be unsubstantiated or, in some cases, untrue." We understand much of this material has been made available to Senator Leahy.
In a letter to Senator Leahy Wednesday, Mr. Olson made the one point that really does deserve an answer from his opponents: "It seems important to emphasize again that the American Spectator magazine was engaged in journalistic endeavors protected under the First Amendment, and I am not aware of any law that was violated by the magazine."
Lists of lawyers with Federalist ties now circulate in liberal Washington circles, leading some White House lawyers to cheerfully hand the McCarthyite Trophy over to the Beltway Democrats by beginning their speeches, "I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Federalist Society." Of course it isn't very funny to see U.S. Senators harassing Viet Dinh, a Georgetown Law professor who arrived as a child from Vietnam, about his ties to the group now that he's been nominated as an Assistant Attorney General.
President Bush laid down an olive branch this week when two of his first 11 court nominees were candidates first named by President Clinton. The Patrick Leahys of the world couldn't care less about olive branches. The borking revels have resumed, as yesterday's Olson activities made clear. The White House instinct is to stay above it all. At some juncture, that just may no longer be possible.
