I owe the Clintons a big personal thank-you.
During the 90s, I went to Arkansas on assignment for the New York Times Magazine to talk to the Clinton-haters, and decided the haters were on to something. I wrote a lot about the haters' charges about the Clintons, including suggestions that they had overlooked political murders perpetrated or covered up by the Arkansas machine. I credited reports that the machine had intimidated Clinton's women, to keep them from going public. I also wrote a lot about deputy W.H. counsel Vince Foster's death on 7/20/93, and my belief that whether or not he committed suicide, which I didn't feel sure about one way or the other, he was under incredible personal and political pressure to stanch the Clinton women stuff that was about to come out, and that he knew about, allegedly from preparing a divorce case for Hillary in 1988, after Bill decided not to run for president that year because of the bimbo stuff.
In short, I had a very gothic picture of how Clinton's people operated, in extremis, and of the sense of approbation they got for their methods from Bill and Hillary. I suffered some professional and social isolation for that. People said I was crazy; Joe Conason was a colleague, and serving as a kind of flak for the Clintons; he used to thunder at me. I wasn't trusted to write about politics around that time. "You're over-determined," one writer said with condescension. I thought I was just a reporter. And Joe Klein had said as much novelistically, in Primary Colors.
So I was grateful to Bill Clinton when he capped his Administration with an act of corruption, absolving Marc Rich, for all to see.
I was hugely grateful to both Clintons when they turned her campaign into an Ahabish pursuit of power, a race-a-thon, an impeachment-grudgematch, a mad grind for Bill's redemption, and showed that they would do anything. Again: for all to see.
And I am now personally grateful to Hillary for exposing the violence and thuggery that exists at the cold black bottom of her politics, for all to see. Her wish-fulfillment statement about assassination reminds me of the night I got back from my first trip to Little Rock in 1996. I sat on the couch with my wife, and I was
trembling as I told her what I had heard from Arkansans, the ordinary white working-class people who had had brushes with the Clintons or their machine, about how degraded the political culture was in Arkansas.
These are selfish thoughts. Today I'm praying for Barack Obama. To be president, to survive, to lift up our nation.
