To hear the right wing tell it, Bill Clinton has been downstairs in his laboratory, piecing together his Frankenstein candidate, Wesley Clark. The erstwhile general has now arisen from the lab table, ready to obey Dr. Clinton's every command and utterly unaware of the mad doctor's ultimate scheme to use him as a stalking horse to somehow cripple the Democratic field and get wife Hillary into the race.
This is the line being trotted out -- by William Safire in a recent New York Times column, on all the right-wing Web sites, on the chat shows and thence out to an unsuspecting America. And there's a reason it's become the accepted line. Republicans and conservatives are terrified of Clark's potential -- he already beats George W. Bush in one poll, albeit by a statistically meaningless margin. Most frightening to Republicans in that poll, though, was the result that Clark led Bush among men (if a Republican candidate doesn't carry that demographic, he's vapor). They have to smear Clark, roughly and quickly. And so the collective knee jerks, and Republicans reach for what has been for a decade now their first line of offense. Link him to Clinton. Dirty him up. And the mainstream media, which loves this story line, will lap it up.
But there's one problem with the strategy, and it's the same old problem that you'd think they would have figured out by now: America doesn't hate Bill Clinton. The right wing and the major media just can't bring themselves to believe this. And so here they go, making the same old Clinton mistake.
You'd think they would have figured it out in 1998. The right wing and the media forced their great Clinton showdown that year. They said to America, "Choose: Clinton or us." And America, to the right's ceaseless consternation, chose Clinton by a 2-to-1 margin, consistently and every step of the way through the process. William Bennett mourned the death of outrage. The high media priesthood concluded that America had given up on morality and was greedily fixated on the stock market. They needed, in other words, some explanation of support for Clinton that comported with their worldview. They couldn't acknowledge that their worldview was a minority opinion.
You'd think they would have figured it out in 2000, when Hillary ran for Senate, or last spring, when her book came out. She'll never win that Senate seat, they said. (True, she ended up playing against the backup quarterback, but she mauled him by a large enough margin -- and Al Gore crushed Bush by a large enough margin in New York -- to suggest that she would have had a better-than-even shot at beating Rudy Giuliani, anyway.) Next, the argument was that she'll never earn back that book advance. Wrong, and wrong.
The Clintons are controversial. A chunk of this country hates them. But it's a relatively small chunk, maybe 27 percent, or 30. Granted, it's a vociferous 27 or 30, and Clinton hatred is vastly overrepresented among right-wing proselytizers and the mainstream media elite. But at least an equal percentage actually likes the Clintons (it wasn't millions of Hillary-haters who bought that book, was it?), and those who are somewhere in the middle at least recognize that he did considerably more for this country than the current incumbent. Those two groups, which constitute most of the country, tuned out the right-wing screamers and the media elite on this question ages ago. When they start talking about Clinton plots, it pretty much goes in one ear and out the other.
Clark is a Clinton plot? Well, possibly. Certainly it's a reasonable assumption that Bruce Lindsey, the longtime Clinton aide who goes back to the Arkansas years, wouldn't have leaped onto the first train to Clarksville without running it past the big guy. Well, fine. Clinton is entitled to his view that a particular candidate may be the most likely to defeat Bush, and he's entitled to help that candidate privately, or even publicly if he chooses.
To most of America, the tacit support of Bill Clinton, if indeed Wesley Clark has it, is a plus, not a minus. All but the most ideologically dyspeptic Americans understand that this country was in better shape under Clinton, and if a potential Clark administration looks to the country as if it will govern like Clinton did, well, that's not something that will scare America off from Clark. (The fact that he's a military man will help distance him from one of Clinton's downsides; assuming he has no personal skeletons, he can distance himself from another.)
It's been hilarious to read some conservatives bellyaching about liberal Bush hatred. It exists, but it doesn't come close to matching the right's Clinton hatred. But let them keep it up. They'll pat one another on the back. And three-quarters of America will ignore them.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
